Dialogues of the Dead

She’d been a possibility ever since the bazouki player, of course, but there’d been others with equal claim. I had to listen to them all to make sure. Nation shall speak unto nation, but it was that individual speaking to this individual that I wanted to hear. Then she made her broadcast and though her words were measured, with one eye fixed firmly on the Law, I could hear her underlying message aimed at one person only. Write me another Dialogue, she was saying. Please, I beg you, write me another Dialogue.

How could I resist such a clear invitation? How would I dare resist it when in this, as with the others, I feel myself your chosen instrument?

But being chosen does not exempt me from responsibility. Help I would be given, I knew that, but, after last time, only in the same measure as I showed myself able to help myself.

That is why I sat in the car and waited to make sure she came home by herself. A woman with her appetites might easily bring back a companion for her bed. I waited a little while longer after I’d rung. I could have been with her in thirty seconds but I didn’t want her thinking I was so close.

When I pressed her bell she answered immediately through the intercom.

“Is that you?”

“Yes.”

The front door opened. I went in and started climbing the stairs.

Already I could feel time slowing till it flowed no faster than oil paint squeezed on to an artist’s palette. I was the artist and I was ready to set my new mark on this canvas which, complete, will place me in that dimension outside of time where all great art exists.

The door to her flat is open. But the chain is still on. I applaud such carefulness. I see her face in the interstice. I raise my left hand which is clutching a brown foolscap envelope.

And the chain comes off, the door opens fully. She stands there, smiling welcomingly. I smile back and move towards her, putting my hand inside the envelope. I see her bright eyes glisten with anticipation. She is in that moment of expectancy truly beautiful.

But like Apollonius looking at Lamia, I see through that fair-seeming to what she really is, the corrupter, the distorter, the self-pleasurer-and the self-destroyer too, for there is at the heart of the worst of us a nugget of that innocence and beauty we all bring with us into this world, and though I purpose to cut the depraved part out, that nugget will, I hope, remain, sending her out of the world as beautiful and innocent as she came into it.