“He told me to forget all about it,” he said after he had cleared his throat. “First, he said, Scanlon would be dead from one thing or another within a year, maybe a lot sooner. Then he said, ‘Your man is already on the long, slow slide toward insanity and death.’ My mouth fell open, and not because I’ve never looked at a man—say a cancer victim—and thought, ‘You’ll be dead in a week or a month’; I have thought it and felt afraid and ashamed afterward. It was the way the doctor said it, and what he said next. He said that this kind of decay and collapse, a faster and faster spin toward death, happens a lot to old maids living alone and these rootless, homeless men like Scanlon. It’s as if nature itself were attacking them, as if it had been waiting for them to get within reach. The stragglers, he called them. I said, ‘That doesn’t help Mary Shoftel’s parents.’ And he said, ‘They should have been more careful.’ I didn’t like that, so I tossed the pictures of the girl’s body at him—they came in late last night. They didn’t bother him. She was torn on the thighs and the lower torso—ripped. Scanlon must have gone at her with his bare hands. She had the body of a baby. The pictures didn’t bother this guy a bit. He was off on something else. He looked at them and said, ‘Don’t misunderstand me. He knew that he was doing this.’ I said, ‘You’d think that it would have made him stop.’ ‘No, he had gone too far.’ Then he said that maybe Scanlon wanted to prove to himself that he could still get it up. He would be able to say yes or no to it—he thought. ‘He won’t tell us that,’ the doctor said. ‘He’ll shrug it off. At this arraignment the judge will order him examined, and by the time I could see him again’—the doctor didn’t know how that side of it works—‘Scanlon will have disintegrated that much more. He won’t be able to answer me. It will be like watching a guy die in slow motion—just sliding away. When he went after that baby, he was trying to show that he was normal, but the act itself had the effect of driving him further away. He knew it was wrong, he never thought it was right. It was just more important to him, trying to say he was alive. It was almost an error in logic.’ But he was fighting another kind of logic that we don’t live by. This doctor said that the only way he could live with things like this was to go take a walk in the woods and look at the violence there. Things slashing at each other. If there’s a respect for life there, we aren’t capable of understanding it. But we are following it, he said, by hounding Scanlon now, and saying that he has to die. We really don’t know what we’re doing, and what’s worse, we don’t care. We just want to get rid of him.”