THE READING ROOM

They didn't untie my hands, so I was afraid, as I lay there in the ditch, that I was going to have to do more than just PLAY dead.

But the ropes were soaked in tallow, and the rats had chewed me free in less time than it took to find my replacement.

A Nubian dwarf, so say the passers-by. Agamemnon's taste grows lurid with age. But then I'd be jealous of anyone who got to take my place and see you every day.

The night before they hanged me, I caught a vinegarroon and sucked its juice, to sour my flesh. I knew it would be hard enough to lay dead still, without being plagued by vermin.

And it worked that well, even the rats spared me their teeth. I was relieved, for it doesn't do for a corpse to bleed.

Nor to be seen getting up and walking; folks don't take kindly to hunchback ghosts.

I had to wait half another day before I could creep away. And that was the hardest, for I'd begun to sweat and itch, under the hood. And I felt you pass by, or else I dreamed it, and heard your stifled sob.

If I had the luxury of time, I'd take beeswax and make a doll of you. I'd feed you loquats and drink only from your lips. At night I'd lay you on my chest. And in the morning you'd be melted to my heart.

But right now I must find food.

(To be continued, so, keep the jester in your thoughts--or do him in, if you can). In the mean time . . .

The first thing I noticed as I came into the circle of his firelight was a medium-sized dog with its hackles up. It hadn't made a sound at my approach, and I froze.

"She. It's all right."

It looked up at him, then back at me, and gave a sniff.

"Australian Collie?" It wasn't what I'd rehearsed to say. I'd come up the slope with my lantern high, to show my face, and I'd said over and over my little speech of introduction.

"Don't know breeds. I'm a cat person. Is that what you are, She?"

"Beautiful dog. Interesting name, too."

"Especially considering it's a boy."

The dog laid its head on its outstretched paws. Its air was of having heard it all before.

"He's a fine animal. And devoted to you."

I'd been trying not to stare, but he was just so different from his wanted posters. His face looked like a tomboy's. His thin wrists made a picture, crossed over his belt. The bones of his hands were fine and long. More suited to holding a pen or a brush, I thought, than a gun.

His high cheekbones were gaunt, and the lines of his skull showed clearly through the flesh of his face. Far from the demonic killer I'd been led to expect, he looked more like some tabetic actor wandered from his troupe.

I made a gesture with my pencil and notebook, would he mind my sketching him? He nodded.

"You were going to bring me something . . . ?"

His only request, other than that I come unarmed, was that I bring him a pack of ready-mades.

"Forgive me." When I reached into my pocket, the dog came up on all fours and raised its head at me.

"She."

A quick look at him, then back at me. It watched my hands, following my movements, even to the low swing as I tossed him the pack.

"Yessir, he is definitely devoted to you."

"Little too, for my taste. And I'm joking, Mr. Clemens. She's a girl. Aren't you, She?"

The dog only rolled its eyes at him. I felt as I were in the presence of two people, not a man and a dog. The whites of the dog's eyes gave it an eerily human aspect.

I squatted and started my sketch. There could be no capturing the tableau vivant he and the dog presented, there in the glow of his fire.

"You can't know how grateful I am you allowed me to see you."

"Privilege is mine, Mr. Clemens."

He had a peculiar way of smoking, cupping his hands over the cigarette as he drew, then, almost by sleight of hand, extending it to arm's length.

When he saw me notice, he nodded down the slope. "Sharpshooters."

"They assured me I was a fool, that you'd never let me talk to you and live."

This seemed to please him. His eyes sparkled in the dim light. The fire had burned down to coals, and I offered to build it up a bit.

"Who could help being flattered by all this adulation. Their terror's a kind of fuel. But I've read your articles, and if this is to be my swan song, better it be captured by a man whose letters are intelligent. The piece you did for the Carson City paper, about the copper mines: that really struck a chord in me."

It made me feel strange, being complimented by a man whom I'd come up the slope expecting to find a monster.

"They are intent on taking you this time."

The dog had been watching me, its eyes squeezed down, as if it weren't as confident as its master that I could be trusted. It made a low growl.

"She. And I'm intent on letting them."

"That really is an extraordinary animal. I get the feeling it understands everything we say."

"Wouldn't surprise me. And she has the advantage of not having to respond in kind. If she just weren't so servile. She'd lick my feet, if I let her. That kind of devotion begs for disappointment."

He looked down at the fire, then off into the night. Over his shoulder, a meteor wheeled past The Great Bear.

It struck me then that there were no firearms in evidence. He wore no gunbelt.

His horse, tethered to a manzanita just out of the circle of light, made a soft moaning sound, like an old man's breathing. It, like him, looked well deprived of food.

Could this soft-faced, boyish man with his effeminate wrists and his bird-bone hands be the notorious gunman of modern legend?

"I'm ashamed to sound lurid, but how many men have you killed?"

He wore a parfleche jacket and velveteen breeches, and the impression was not so much of the genuine article as of someone dressed up for a part.

"Prob'ly no more than half the number attributed to me. And undoubtedly a few more than are known about. And I'm not prejudiced to sex, Mr. Clemens."

"Excuse me. Oh . . . "

He pulled a fleck of tobacco from his tongue and looked off into the night. "It was before She's time."

A studied gesture, that off the shoulder look. Again I got the impression he was playing to me, affecting this not quite effeminate pose as a tease. The dog, too, seemed aware of it. Or aware of my awkwardness. It glanced at me and then back at its master with an expression of pleading embarrassment.

He looked at his dog. "Darling bitch. She knows I exaggerate. You're just someone I'd like to impress, and my vanity hasn't had much chance for show, out here in the wastelands. I had to shoot this young woman, over in Bodie. But I doubt it was fatal. I'm surprised the papers didn't catch hold of that one."

"There was an account of a girl in Bodie. But I recall the paper credited you only with having sodomized her. The shooting is news to me."

He turned on me with a delighted smile, and I confess to a pang almost of jealousy. He had a face too pretty for a man's. I could imagine women looking upon it and regretting their husbands. If stories about him were true, a fair number had.

"Notice you never hear of anyone being 'gamorrized?' How is it Sodom ended up with the patent?"

Again the dog glanced at him and then at me, almost in apology.

"I don't wish to offend you, sir. Not you, of all people. It's just my reputation. Five men would have trouble accomplishing all the deeds attributed to me. It must be our craving for legend. I thought it would be different, back here, but it's stronger yet, this worship of violence . . ."

"'Back here?'"

He was smiling abstractedly into the fire. "I'm not from this time zone."

"Yes, I'd read that you came out from New York."

He looked up and seemed about to say something, but then looked back off into the night. And it startled me, how easy it was to make out the stamp of the death mask in his thin, painfully pretty face. There were no fewer than several dozen men at the foot of the slope, all of them confident that this time he would be taken.

"This is all your fault, you know?"

He turned his hand at me when he saw my confusion.

"You're going to write a book."

I felt the oddest sensation shoot through me, for only that afternoon I'd been meditating on the fact that, despite the easy money, writing for the newspaper was boring. I'd begun to crave the satisfaction of a more sustained and less ephemeral effort.

"As good as I've been at killing, you'll be at letters."

I found his certainty a bit disquieting, so I concentrated on my sketch.

"Why do you do this? I've met your like. Or rather I've met what I expected you to be like. You could be teaching poetry to young girls up east."

The dog nuzzled his boot. This seemed to irk him.

"Why does a man do anything out of the ordinary? To impress a girl. One who didn't much care for my poetry, as a matter of fact."

He lit another ready-made on the stub of the first and smiled off into the night.

"There comes a point when you know not only that it's no use, but that she has no concern whatever for the fact that it's no use."

I could hardly help smiling, for here was a person whose renown as a gunman was equaled only by his eclat as a heartbreaker.

"And it's at this point that anyone past the age of fourteen has sense to cut his losses and get on with it."

He held his hand up in front of his face as if looking at something there in his palm.

"Now I see the selfishness of it. But then, all I could think was that if I couldn't have this one, I didn't want to bother with anyone else. That cubic centimeter of chance that I told myself would never come again. Seems so childish, from this perspective."

"There's a trace of accent. Do you mind my asking where you're from?"

He glanced down at me in irritation, but I made a gesture of apology for not appearing to appreciate the substance of his narrative: I was just curious to place the origins of its narrator.

"A little farther south and way forward of this place."

He sounded so cold suddenly, I knew my seeming inattention hadn't offended so much as confirmed him in his low opinion of man. I saw then the awful scope of his capability, and that the human race was something he'd long since concluded with. For the first time and quiet clearly, I realized I was in the presense of someone capable of killing without compunction.

He gave the dog a grudging pat and stared back into the fire.

"It happened the last day I saw her. Someone had given her a book of antique photographs. She hadn't even opened it yet, and as I leafed through it, trying to imagine how I was going to live without her, I turned a page and saw myself. I'd been shot. I was staring quite calmly into the camera. And I knew. It was as if my whole life had been building up to that moment. More things came clear to me in that instant than could be conveyed in a lifetime. I felt a kind of painful joy, for I no longer had to worry about what I was going to do to impress her. I'd already done it. A hundred years ago. Here and now, Mr. Clemens, in the wilds of western Nevada."

The fire might have been waiting for his pause, the way it chose that moment to snap loudly and shoot a hot spark arcing into the night.

The dog jerked her head up to stare off down the slope, but he soothed her again. He must have seen the confusion in my look, for he raised his hand at me and began speaking with greater urgency.

"When I saw myself in that old photograph, Mr. Clemens. I knew. I'd read your book and carried it with me in dreams ever since, but not till then did I realize why. It was to be how I'd get back at her not so much for rejecting me--I'd never taken up enough room in her life to need rejecting--as deleting me. It was too wonderful, for it wouldn't be just your adolescent suicide over unrequited love, which inspires no affection, but only guilt and anger. It would be a farewell that could not be forgotten, that would echo through her life forever.

"If I couldn't penetrate her with love, I'd penetrate her with a mystery, an impossibility that could not be denied.

"So you see, I did it to impress a girl.

"Only I had this idea my journey would be one of forgetfulness, that I'd travel beyond the need even of thinking about her. But I can't look at the mountains without seeing her silhouette. There's hardly a day I don't catch the scent of her hair on the wind.

"The farther I went from her, the harder she became to forget. And now that I truly am beyond her reach, now that I've accomplished the vain fantasy of making myself marvelous yet inaccessible, I can only wish I hadn't bothered. For when she finds the note I left and sees that photograph, she can only be devastated.

"I wrote that to die for love was one thing, but that I'd died for lack of it, a hundred years before she was born. I wrote it on a slip of paper and used it to mark the place in her book with that picture of me. And I can't tell you how many nights I've fallen asleep praying she never finds it.

"Yet I have to go through with this. My vanity won't let it go. Just as those men down the slope have to do what I've given them every right to."

He put his hand inside his jacket to fret a button on his shirt. It was more of a blouse, and again I was put in mind of someone made up for a part. Nothing about him quite fit, and the impression he gave was very much that of a refugee. I just wished I could figure out from where. I'd made a study of southern dialects, but his I couldn't place.

"A man of your empirical bent must be wondering how I managed to get back here."

I was not, for there stood his poor horse. If he'd told me he came from the moon, the animal looked tired enough to have brought him the whole way.

"A dream, a blow to the head? The mechanism of your Connecticut Yankee's passage was a bit vague, too."

"Pardon me?"

"It's that book you're going to write. And I can tell by your look I'm sounding a bit psychotic."

"I'm sorry, 'psychotic?' You have the advantage of me there."

"Not for long. It's OK. That's the gift of literature: it opens our minds to the impossible. I'm going to see myself dead in an antique photograph, and because you're going to write an unforgettable book, my mind will be open to the possibility of coming back here to give that photograph provenance."

He pitched the stub of his smoke into the fire and spread his hands before me in a gesture of conclusion. Whatever sense he thought he was making was quite lost on me. But I had played the fool for love enough to sympathize with his lapse of sanity.

"You gotta' admit, there's a kind of high romance about it." He tipped his head and smiled at the wheeling stars.

"So, you say you saw a photograph of someone dead who resembled you? I'm not quite making the connection."

"It's all right. You don't need to. All you have to do is let your destiny unfold."

"Something's wrong here." I'd come up the slope to meet him, but as I folded my journal away, I found myself trying to shed the sense that it was I who was the object of this interview.

"Because of you, I'm going to distinguish myself in a way I couldn't have managed in a hundred ordinary lifetimes."

And then it came to me: starvation delirium. I'd read of aesthetes who climbed mountaintops and starved themselves into this kind of visionary state. I wished that, along with the ready-mades, I'd thought to bring the man some food.

"Just how long has it been since you've taken in anything but tobacco?"

I'd thought my movements had disturbed the dog, for it came up on all fours. But it was staring down the slope, its head bent with listening.

"Ah. It comes, a little soon," he said. "And here I thought all I'd have to do was be in the appointed place at the appointed time."

With a florid posture that reminded me of a movement in ballet, he managed to get to his feet without using his hands. He stepped out beyond the circle of firelight, his eyes straining down the slope. He and the dog were frozen in the same pose. For once he seemed disturbed, but before I could speak he smiled over at me.

"Forgive me. I'm frightening you. I'd just assumed the event would take place after dawn."

The dog began making a frail whimpering sound.

"Naturally it's the photograph that's essential, as much as the act itself. A favor, Mr. Clemens?" he said, moving towards his horse, which had also come quite alert.

"Within my power," I said. Though he kept up his air of nonchalance, there was a sudden urgency in his movements that raised the hair on my neck. I, too, looked down the slope, but could discern nothing in the darkness. Far to the east, the rim of the world had begun to glow a faint pink.

"It must be in the morning," he said, and named the nearby town. "And could I ask you to make sure they sit me up against the lamppost? It's directly in front of the swinging doors of an establishment you must have heard of."

He named it, and I had.

"But wait--"

He'd swung himself up into the saddle. "And please resist the temptation to close my eyes."

The dog was circling round the horse's legs, its cries quite abject. It kept trying to set itself to spring onto the saddle with him, but he kept turning the horse aside.

"Don't suppose I could persuade you to adopt a She-dog? She! Be still! Could I get you to hold her for me?"

I grasped the dog round the neck and held her back as he turned the horse one last time.

"Wouldn't you know the only girl who ever loved me would be a bitch."

"The legend of your conquests gives that the lie."

"Yes, but that's just it: when I'm cold, they melt. But when I care, they don't."

"Just wait, will you? I'll go back down and reason with them. They're not savages. They'll listen to me--"

"Oh, you have no idea how you're going to be listened to. By the time she finds that note and sees my picture, you and I will be long gone--but the dust you leave behind will blow in our eyes for all time."

"Just stop a minute. I could take custody of you here and now. They wouldn't dare harm you--"

"Now now. Don't go sentimental on me: you'll spoil everything."

He made me a suave salute, patting his heart and turning his hand to me.

"Wait, can't you? She's a beautiful dog, and she doesn't want to stay with me."

"And we know what will happen if she goes with me. Hold her now, I'm going," he said, and sprang away, his voice fading even as it drifted back to me from the darkness: "Remember, don't let them close my eyes . . . "

The dog went quite crazy, howling and bucking against me. She could easily have bitten my face, I held her so close. Suddenly she stopped struggling, her eyes rolling up at me in the firelight. Her look brought a lump to my throat, and I had to let her go. She tore off after him up the slope.



And so it happened a little after dawn, just as he'd said. When they brought him in, like a trophy, twelve different men had their picture made with him. And then the photographer took a thirteenth picture of him alone, propped up against the lamppost, just as he'd said, his eyes quite open and still.

I never knew what became of She. And now it seems I have a book to write.