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By Root 12254 0

melting almost immediately, though not effervescent) was really quite small, a bit smaller than any medicinal capsule she had ever seen, and was also metallically reflective, so that as he held it inches above her face where she lay against the pillow—wiggling it between thumb and forefinger and causing the pinkish oblong to do a little midair pirouette—she could see shimmering along its surface the miniature conflagration which was only a captured image of the autumnal leaves outside, set afire by the sunset. Drowsily Sophie inhaled the odor of cooking from the kitchen two floors below—a mingled fragrance of bread and, she thought, cabbage—and watched the capsule dance slowly in his hand. Sleep moved up like a tide through her brain; she was aware of steady lulling vibrations that partook of both sound and light, erasing apprehension—blue trance of Nembutal. She mustn’t suck it. She would have to bite down hard, he told her, but don’t worry: there would be a swift bittersweet taste like that of almonds, an odor a bit like that of peaches, then nothing. Profound black nothing—rienada fucking nothing!—accomplished with an instantaneousness so complete as to preclude even the onset of pain. Possibly, he said, just possibly a split second’s distress—discomfort rather—but as brief and as inconsequential as a hiccup. Rien nada niente fucking nothing!

“Then, Irma my love, then—” A hiccup.

Without looking at him, staring past him at the amber photograph of some faded bekerchiefed grandmother immobilized in the shadows on the wall, she murmured, “You said you wouldn’t. So long ago today you said you wouldn’t—”

“Wouldn’t what?”

“Wouldn’t call me that. Wouldn’t say Irma again.”

“Sophie,” he said without emotion. “Sophie love. Not Irma. Of course. Of course. Sophie. Love. Sophielove.”

He seemed to be much calmer now, the frenzy of the morning, the raging lunacy of the afternoon stilled or at least momentarily calmed by the same Nembutal he had given her—the blessed barbiturate which in their common terror they thought he would never find but, only two hours ago, found. He was calmer but, she knew, still deranged; curious, she thought, how in this present pacified form of his derangement he seemed no longer so frightening and menacing, despite the unequivocal menace of the cyanide capsule six inches from her eyes. The minuscule Pfizer trademark was clearly imprinted on the gelatine; the capsule was tiny. It was, he explained, a special veterinary capsule, meant to contain antibiotics for small cats and puppy dogs, which he had obtained as a receptacle for the dose; and because of office technicalities, the capsules themselves had been more difficult to get hold of yesterday than the ten grains of sodium cyanide—five grains for her and five for himself. It was no joke, she knew; at some other time and place she would have regarded the whole display as one of his morbid tricks: the shiny pink pod at the last minute popping open between his fingers to reveal a wee flower, a garnet, a chocolate kiss. But not after this day and its unending delirium. She knew quite beyond doubt that the little casket held death. Odd, though. She felt nothing but a spreading lassitude now, watching him as he raised the capsule to his lips and inserted it between his teeth, biting down just hard enough to lightly bend the surface but not to break it. Was her lack of terror due to the Nembutal or to some intuition that he was still faking? He had done this before. He withdrew the capsule from his mouth and smiled. “Rienada fucking nothing.” She recalled the other moment when he flirted thus, less than two hours before in this very room, although it seemed a week ago, a month. And she wondered now through what miraculous alchemy (the Nembutal?) had he been made to cease his daylong uninterrupted rant. Talktalktalktalktalk... The talk had only a few times stopped since that morning at about nine o’clock when he stormed up the steps at the Pink Palace and awakened her...

...Eyes still shut, her head still woolly from sleep, she hears Nathan make a cackling