Executioner's Song, The - Norman Mailer [155]
I got into a search for Truth real heavily at one time. I was looking for a truth that was very rigid, unbending, a single straight line that excluded everything but itself. A simple Truth, plain, unadorned. I was never quite satisfied-I found many truths though. Courage is a Truth. Overcoming fear is a Truth. It would be too simple to say that God is truth. God is that and much, much more. I found these Truths, and others . . .
I found a lot of Truths. But I was still hungry-and it's true that hunger teaches many things. So I kept looking. And one day I was fortunate. I saw a simple, quiet Truth, a profound, deep, and personal Truth of beauty and love.
It came down on Nicole what an expression like "horrible loss" really meant. It was throwing away the most valuable thing in your life. It was knowing you had to live next to something larger than your own life. In this case, it was knowing that Gary was going to die.
She began to think there was not even a minute when she stopped loving him, not for a minute. Not a minute of her day in which the guy was not in her mind. That she liked. She liked what was inside of her. But it was spooky. She would take in a breath and recognize that she was falling more and more in love with a guy who was going to be dead.
7
One night Tom Dynamite came over, but she couldn't bring herself to screw him. That surprised her. Sex had nothing to do with Gary. It was just that this night she had been thinking about him so hard she didn't want to separate herself from the pleasure of continuing to think about him. Somehow, she got Tom to sleep on the floor next to the couch where she always lay down, and Nicole even put her hand on Tom's shoulder in gratitude while they slept. He left in the morning without waking her.
On opening her eyes, she remembered that even while falling asleep, she had decided to kill herself in the morning. She awoke with the same thought. She sat as quietly as a bird not moving in its nest.
If she died first, Gary would soon be with her. He had told her that. She didn't know where she would be then, or what else might happen, but she would be with him on the other side. His love would be so strong that she would be attracted to him like a magnet. It would be like the magnet that pulled her to him the day she first saw him in jail.
She didn't have any decent razor blades, and considered going next door to borrow one, but thought that might be too suspicious. So she broke open a Daisy Shaver, a kind of disposable plastic dingus, cracked it with a steak knife and got the blade loose. Then wrapped it in some notebook paper, and put it in her bra. She thought if she didn't move around too much it would be safe and not cut her. She felt strange leaving the kids over to a friend's house, but set out to hitchhike to the jail. A couple of guys picked her up.
One was an ex-con, and he was really foulmouthed. Kinda cute. He talked real rough, and kept asking if she wasn't worried that he and his buddy would take her up in the mountains, rape her, cut her throat. Nicole kind of laughed at them. Here she had this blade in her bra, all set to take care of the job herself.
Anyway, they dropped her off by the jail without further ado. Of course, when she told them she was going to visit her boy friend, and the ex-con recognized the name, he had to make a smart-ass remark. "Well," he said, "he's going to get a little lead poisoning." That cracked Nicole up. She didn't feel bad laughing about Gary. She knew he would have laughed over it too.
She went over to the back, and hollered a couple of times and somebody else finally answered her and said Gary was in another cell. Then she heard