Off Limits: Tales of Alien Sex

The Dream-Catcher JOYCE CAROL OATES

AS SOON AS SHE saw it, she knew she had to have it.

There amid the finely wrought silver and turquoise jewelry, the hand-tooled leather goods, glazed earthenware pottery and baskets and coarse-woven fabrics in the Paiute Indian Reservation gift shop at Pyramid Lake, Nevada, the curious item seemed to leap out at Eunice’s eye: no more than four inches in diameter, an imperfect circle made of tightly woven dried vines or branches threaded with small filmy feathers. An artifact of some kind, exquisitely fashioned, its colors, like most of the colors of the handmade items in the shop, predominantly brown, beige, black. Eunice found herself staring at it, and there, suddenly, it lay in the palm of her hand—virtually weightless. Remarkable! Dream-Catcher the printed label explained. It was so dry Eunice feared it might crack in her fingers. When she lifted it to examine it more closely, noting how the interior of the woven branches was a net, or web, braided with leather thread, in the center of which a tiny agatelike stone dully gleamed, the filmy feathers came alive, stirred by her breath. The feathers, too, were beautiful, finely marked, streaks and speckles of dark brown like strokes of a watercolorist’s brush on a fawn-colored background.

Seeing Eunice’s interest in the dream-catcher, the Indian proprietor of the store explained to Eunice that it was a gift given only to those who were “much loved”—especially to be hung over a cradle or a crib. “The spiderweb inside catches the good dreams, but the bad dreams—no. Guaranteed!” He called out affably to Eunice, as if speaking to a child. Presumably a Paiute Indian, he was a man of vigorous, muscular middle age, who wore a faded black T-shirt, faded jeans, and a hand-tooled leather belt with a brass eagle buckle; his graying black thinning hair was caught in a loose, careless ponytail that gave him a disheveled yet playful look. His forehead was veined and knobby—scarred?—as if vexed with thought and the voice of exaggerated good cheer in which he spoke to Eunice, as to other customers, verged on mockery. From an exchange Eunice had overheard between him and a previous customer she gathered he was a Vietnam veteran. Yet he managed to smile at most of his customers as he rang up their purchases; he certainly smiled at Eunice.

“Yes ma’am!—the good dreams are caught for you,” the Indian said, handing over Eunice’s fragile dream-catcher in a paper bag, “—and the bad dreams go away. You hang it over your bed, O.K.?—even if you don’t believe, something will happen.”

“Thank you,” Eunice said. “I’ll do that.”

Eunice was not so young as she appeared, but with her pale, faded-gold hair and her smooth, fair skin and large, intelligent gray eyes she was an attractive woman, and she was alone. She smiled at the Indian proprietor though seeing that his smile held no warmth. His lips were drawn back tightly from discolored, uneven teeth, and his eyes, agate-shiny, recessed beneath his blemished forehead, were fixed upon her insolently. As if to say I know you. Even if you don’t know me. Eunice, who was not accustomed to being treated impolitely, still less rudely, maintained her poise, and her forced smile; leaving the store, she felt the man’s gaze drop to her ankles and rise rapidly, assessingly up her slender figure. She did not glance back when he called after her, “Come back again soon, lady, eh?” with exaggerated good cheer.

Even if you don’t believe. Something will happen.

When Eunice returned to Philadelphia, to her Delancey Street brownstone, she impulsively fastened the dream-catcher to the foot of her bed, and lay down to sleep. Exhausted from the plane flight, her brain assailed by images, impressions. Her twelve-day visit to the Southwest, to Nevada and Arizona, was the first extended vacation she’d taken in years. How vivid, many of its moments!—the ceramic blue sky, the extraordinary complex, ravaged-looking beauty of the mountains, the dun colors, shimmering salt flats, whitish silence of Death Valley… Yet, travel itself fatigued her, and bored her. There was no personal identity to it. No sense of mission.

Eunice was thirty-seven years old, unmarried, vice provost at the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts. Her Ph.D. was from Harvard; her dissertation, subsequently published as a book, was titled Aesthetics and Ethics: A Postmodernist Debate. Early on, as a girl, Eunice had hoped for a life that would be a public life and not a domestic life, involved in some way with the arts. She had been the only child of older parents, her father a popular philosophy professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and she had a memory of herself as a shy, precociously intelligent child, pale hair hanging heavily about her narrow face. The odd mixture of vanity and insecurity of the “special” child. Yet, disconcertingly mature as a young girl, Eunice seemed hardly to have grown much older in adulthood—a common phenomenon among the precocious. Now in young middle age, she still retained a slender, lithe girlishness; her attractive face unlined, her manner cheerful; she possessed an air of innocent authority that suited her as a professor at Swarthmore, and subsequently as an administrator there, and elsewhere. Her reputation among her professional colleagues was for exceptionally fine, detailed work; she was prized, if perhaps sometimes exploited, for her generous, uncomplaining good nature. It was said of her, not unkindly, that Eunice Pemberton lived for her work, through her work, in her work. If she had a personal life, it was kept very private. If she’d had lovers, she never spoke of them.

Nor was she a religious, certainly not a superstitious, woman. She’d become moderately interested in the culture of the Native Americans indigenous to the area of the Southwest she’d visited, but it was no more than a moderate interest, an intellectual’s speculation. Since early adolescence, Eunice had been incapable of believing in anyone or anything “supernatural”: she’d inherited from her mild-mannered, skeptical father a distrust of faith, which is to say the objectification of mankind’s wish fantasies into codified religions, institutions. What was skepticism but simple common sense?—sanity? An island of sanity in a seething fathomless ocean of irrationality, and often madness. The contemporary world of militant, fanatic nationalism, fundamentalist religions, intolerance.

Something will happen. Even if you don’t believe.

Eunice had affixed the feathered dream-catcher to the foot of her bed in the hope that it might stimulate her to dream, for she rarely dreamed; her nights were deep, silent pools of water, featureless, rippleless. Yet, so far as she knew, she did not dream that night, either. Her sleep was unnaturally heavy, like a weight pressing against her chest and threatening her with suffocation. Her breasts ached; she woke several times, her nightgown damp with perspiration. In the early morning, before sunrise, she woke abruptly, eager to get up. Her eyes were sore as if she’d been staring into the desert sun and her mouth was badly parched. And there was an odor in her bedroom as of something humid, overripe, like rotted fruit—a faint odor, not entirely disagreeable. And so—did I dream? Is this what a dream is?

Eunice quickly showered, and dressed, and would have forgotten the dream-catcher except, as she made her bed, the shimmering feathers drew her attention. How like a bird’s nest it looked—she hadn’t quite seen that, before. She touched the cobweb of leather twine at its center, and the glass gem which was like an eye. No dream, good or bad, had been caught in it. Still, the dream-catcher was an exquisite thing, and Eunice was glad she’d bought it.

In the kitchen, Eunice heard a strange sound, like mewing, or whimpering, from the rear of the house, and went uneasily to investigate. (Eunice had inherited the four-story Delancey Street brownstone from her widowed mother; it was in an old, prestigious Philadelphia neighborhood within walking distance of the Penn campus, and only a ten-minute drive to Eunice’s office at the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts. A handsome property, coveted by many, though bordering on an area with an ever-increasing crime rate.) In the winterized porch, on an antiquated sofa-swing, partly hidden beneath an old blanket, was what appeared to be a living creature—at first Eunice thought it must be a dog; then, panicked, she thought it must a child. “What?—what is it?” Eunice stammered, transfixed in the doorway. The rear porch was shut off from the house, rarely used. A smell as of decayed leaves, overripe peaches was so strong here, Eunice gagged.

The creature, neither an animal nor fully human, was about two feet long, and curled convulsively upon itself. Its head was overlarge for its spindly body, and covered in long thin damp black hairs. Its skin was olive-dark, yet pallid, like curdled milk; its face was wizened, the eyes shut tight, sunken. How hoarsely it breathed, as if struggling for oxygen!—there was a rattling sound in its throat, as of loose phlegm. Eunice thought, It’s feverish, it’s dying. Her breasts ached, the nipples especially, as if she were a nursing mother in the presence of her infant.

Eunice tried to think: should she run outside, get help from one of her neighbors? Should she call an ambulance?—the police? There were friends and colleagues she might call, a married cousin in Bryn Mawr… But what would I say? What is this—visitation? She felt a stab of pity for the creature, struggling so desperately to live; she understood that it was starving, and that there was no one else in all the world, except her, to feed it.

Now its eyes opened, and Eunice saw that they were beautiful eyes, whether animal or human: large, dark, tremulous with tears, with an agate sheen, recessed beneath the oddly bony forehead.

Aloud Eunice murmured, “Poor thing—!”

Knowing then that she had no choice: she had to nourish the helpless creature that had fallen into her care, however she could. She could not allow it to die. So she hurried to bring it water, at first in a glass, which was impractical; then soaked in a sponge, which worked fairly well, as if the creature (toothless, with tender, pink gums) knew by instinct how to suck a sponge. Then she soaked the sponge in milk, which was even better. “Don’t be afraid, you won’t die,” Eunice murmured, “—I won’t let you die.” Nursing frantically, the creature mewed and whimpered, its thin hands, very like forepaws, kneading against Eunice’s arms. Eunice felt again, with painful sharpness, that sensation in her breasts as if they were swollen with milk.

So an hour passed, swiftly. By the time the creature had drunk its full and dropped off to sleep, Eunice had soaked the sponge in milk nearly a dozen times. Her breath was coming quickly and her skin was as damp and feverish as the creature’s own; she heard herself laugh, excited, frightened. Yet I’ve done the right thing: I know it.

This, then, was Eunice’s strategy on that first day: she left the slumbering creature on the porch swing, the door to the backyard ajar and the inner door locked, and drove, as usual, to work at 8:20 A.M. It will leave, the way it came. The day was mild for mid-March, snow melting on pavement; an air of reprieve after one of the most severe Philadelphia winters in memory. The poor thing would not suffer from cold, Eunice reasoned. She was certain it would be gone when she came home.

What was wholly unexpected then, as it was to be during the course of subsequent weeks, was how adroitly Eunice shifted her attention to her duties as vice provost. As if there had not been an astonishing visitation at her home!—an inexplicable intrusion into her life! At the most, during her long, busy day at the Academy of Fine Arts, it might have been observed that Eunice Pemberton was uncharacteristically distracted; several times, during a meeting with the provost and other administrators, she’d had to ask politely, “Yes?—what did you say?” When colleagues inquired after her vacation she said, “It was fine, very—fine. Picturesque.” And her voice trailed off, her eyes vague, blinking. Eunice was thinking of the enormous desert sky, of Pyramid Lake and the shabby dwellings of the Paiute Reservation and the handicraft store where she’d bought the dream-catcher. She was thinking of the ponytailed Indian with the insolent eyes. Come back again soon, eh!

In fact, Eunice was grateful that the day was so long, and so complicated. At 4:30 P.M. there was a visiting art historian from Yale who lectured on the iconography of Hieronymus Bosch, and following the lecture there was a reception in his honor; that evening, there was a dinner at the home of the president of the Academy, for selected administrators, faculty, and donors, from which Eunice could not slip away until 10:30 P.M. When she returned to Delancey Street it was to hurry trembling to the rear porch, where she saw—now was it with relief, or disappointment?—that the swing was empty, the soiled blanket lay on the floor, the strange creature was gone. As Eunice had anticipated, it had left by the back door, as it had arrived.

Quickly Eunice shut the rear door, and made certain it was firmly locked.

What had the creature been?—a raccoon, perhaps? Suffering some sort of mange, hairless. Prematurely wakened from its winter hibernation. Desperate for food. Lucky for Eunice, it had not been rabid.

And so for the second night Eunice slept with the dream-catcher at the foot of her bed. Somehow she’d forgotten it was there, and as she drifted off to sleep, remembering it, with a pang of apprehension, she was incapable of getting up to remove it, her limbs paralyzed in sleep.

Even if you don’t believe. Something will happen.

Again her sleep was heavy, ponderous. Her head ached, her heart beat erratically and painfully. Yet this was not dreaming—was it? Someone, or something, was in the bed with her, beneath the bedclothes where no one had ever been. A short, stunted creature, with a veined, knobby forehead, jagged teeth. A bat, clambering upon her. Yes, it had wings, leathery webbed wings, and not arms—it was a bat, yet also a man. Eunice shook her head violently from side to side—No! no!—but she could not cast off the loathsome creature. It—he—was pressing his mouth against hers, slick with saliva. And rubbing himself against her breasts, belly, thighs. A rubbery rod, a penis, sprouting from his groin—as soon as Eunice became aware of it, to her horror and revulsion it rapidly hardened, like a plastic hose into which water began to flow. No!—leave me alone! In disbelief, her eyes open and blind, Eunice felt the creature prodding between her thighs, forcing her thighs apart; felt the penis like a living thing, blind, groping, seeking an opening into her body. Eunice screamed but it was too late—a sudden sexual sensation rose swift and needlelike in her loins. She grunted, and shuddered, and threw the creature off—except, as she woke, it vanished. It was gone. Alone, panting, Eunice sat up in bed, knuckles pressed against her mouth. Her heart was beating so violently she feared it would burst.

About her, in the handsome old mahogany four-poster bed Eunice had inherited from her parents, the sheets were damp and rumpled. A sharp odor as of decaying peaches lifted from them.

Now you know you’ve had a dream, now you know what a dream is—yet, early in the morning, waking again before dawn from a thin, wretched sleep, Eunice understood that the hideous bat-creature in her bed had not been a dream.

She heard him, downstairs: an intermittent whining, murmurous singsong. He was in the rear porch, or possibly in the kitchen.

Quietly, slipping on her robe, Eunice made her way downstairs. Her hair was sticky against her forehead and the nape of her neck; her body was covered in an acrid film of perspiration; the tender skin of the insides of her thighs chafed. Yes, he was in the kitchen: the strange sound was coming from there. Eunice hesitated a moment before pushing open the door, boldly entering. This is my house, my life. He’s come to me. Why should I be fearful!

This time, Eunice saw clearly that the creature was human: batlike about the head, with a monkey’s long spindly arms, but obviously human. And male.

Obviously, male.

Eunice had surprised him in the act of pawing open a box of uncooked macaroni. He’d climbed up onto the kitchen counter and had managed to open one of the cupboard doors.

They stared at each other. The creature was crouched, but Eunice could see he had grown to about the size of a ten or eleven-year-old boy. He was starkly naked, his ribs showed, his chest rapidly rising and falling as he panted. His head was disproportionately large for his shoulders; his legs were stunted, bowed as if from malnutrition; his skin was olive-dark, with that pallor beneath, and covered in fine, near-invisible black hairs like iron filings. His shrunken genitalia hung shyly between his thighs like skinned fruit. His eyes were fierce, shining, frightened, defiant.

Eunice said, in a voice of surprising calm, “Poor thing!—you’re starving.”

Never in her life had Eunice felt such a sensation of pity, compassion, urgency. As the naked creature, crouched on her counter, made a bleating, pleading sound, she felt her breasts ache, throbbing with the need to nurse.

But it was solids Eunice fed the creature, for he had teeth now, however rudimentary, set sparely and unevenly in his tender gums. Eunice wrapped him in a quilt, found an old pair of furry slippers for his knobby-toed feet, sat him in the breakfast nook (which alarmed him initially—his instinct was to resist being cornered, trapped) and spoon-fed him three soft-boiled eggs, most of a pint container of cottage cheese, a tangerine. How hungry he was!—and what pleasure in sating that hunger! His eyes brimmed with tears, like Eunice’s own, as rapidly he chewed and swallowed, chewed and swallowed. Eunice said, “Don’t ever be frightened again! Nothing bad will happen to you. I promise. I promise with my life.”

Eunice’s voice fairly vibrated with excitement yet she spoke practicably, calmly. Her years of authority as professor and administrator stood her well in such an emergency.

As before, Eunice left the creature sleeping on the old sofa-swing in the porch, for he was resistant to coming farther into the house, even into the living room where it was warm. Groggy after his feeding, he seemed virtually to collapse, to become boneless, very like a human infant as Eunice half carried him out onto the porch and laid him gently on the sofa-swing. How astonished she would have been, as a girl growing up in this house, sitting on this swing years ago and reading one of her innumerable books, to imagine what the future held: what fellow creature would one day lie on this very piece of furniture! Beneath the quilt the creature curled up at once, knees to chest, face pushed against knees, sinking into the deep, pulsating sleep of an infant. For many minutes Eunice crouched beside him, her hand against his bony forehead, which seemed to her overwarm, feverish. Unless it was she who was feverish. I promise. With my life.

Frequently he was gone when Eunice returned from the Academy and forlornly she walked through the empty house calling, “Where are you? Are you hiding?”—her manner stern, to disguise the abject sound of worry. To disguise her helplessness—so female. There was no name for the creature she could utter save you; to herself, she thought of him as he, him.

In the kitchen, she might find the remains of his feeding, for by degrees he’d become capable of feeding himself, though messily: a gnawed rind of cheddar cheese might be lying on the floor, part of a banana (he had not yet learned to peel bananas, though Eunice had tried to instruct him—he bit into both fruit and peel, and chewed as best he could), an emptied container of raw hamburger. Though Eunice had not yet succeeded in coaxing him into a bathtub, for the sound of running water, perhaps the very smell of water, as well as the confinement of a bathroom, threw him into a panic, it seemed to her that his odor was less defined now. At any rate, she had ceased to notice it.

(Though one day, at the Academy, a colleague who had entered Eunice’s office quite visibly glanced around, sniffing, puzzled—did she notice the elusive scent? Without breaking their train of conversation, Eunice unobtrusively rose from her desk and opened a window and the offensive odor vanished. Or so Eunice thought.)

By night he might suddenly reappear. One moment the brown-stone was empty of all inhabitants save Eunice, the next—the creature was waiting in the shadows on the stairway landing, his eyes gleaming agate-bright and sly as she ascended into their beam; or he was gliding noiselessly, barefoot along the carpeted hall outside her bedroom. He’d learned to laugh, somehow—a low, guttural, thrilling chuckle. Thick black hairs now sprouted on his head, on his chest and beneath his arms; Eunice would never have looked, but knew that his pubic region bristled with such hairs. He was growing, maturing rapidly, nourished by her care. His shining eyes glanced level with hers. He could speak, not words exactly but sounds—“Eeee?—eeee? Eeeeeyah?” which Eunice believed she could interpret.

“Downstairs,” Eunice would say. Pointing with her forefinger, so there could be no misunderstanding. “You’re not to be up here. But down there.”

Always at such times Eunice spoke sternly to the creature. He might choose to disobey her but he could not choose to misunderstand her, and Eunice knew that that was crucial.

Sometimes, ducking his head, he murmured, “Eeeee?—eeee—” and turned to rapidly descend the stairs, like a scolded dog. At other times, a rebellious dog, he threw back his head defiantly, stared at Eunice from beneath his bristling eyebrows, and drew his lips taut across his uneven teeth. Maintaining her poise Eunice said, “You hear me! You know perfectly well what I’m saying—you!”

With dignity then Eunice would brush past the creature, who stood long-armed and resistant, in shirt, slacks, sneakers Eunice had bought for him which he’d already outgrown: brushed past him coolly, and entered her bedroom, and shut the door firmly against him. It was a door with an old-fashioned bolt lock.

So long as Eunice was awake, there was no danger.

Often, she sat up in bed, reading, or working on reports and memos in longhand for her secretary at the Academy to type out on a word processor the next morning. She did not think of herself as an obsessive person, one driven by her work. There was a true pleasure in such nighttime concentration; the sense, at such times, of the world radically narrowed, shrunken to the size of the light that illuminated her bed. I love and respect my work and that’s why I’m good at it—Eunice’s father once surprised her with these words, and so it seemed to Eunice the same might be said of her as well, though she was not one for such pronouncements. I love and respect my work and that’s why I’m good at it. Yet how ironic—a thorn in her heart—that the creature who shared her home with her, whose life she had saved, and continued to save, knew nothing of her outer, public, professional self. And cares nothing. For why should he?

At about 1:00 A.M., and inevitably by 2:00 A.M., Eunice’s eyelids began to grow heavy. The room dissolved to shifting, eerily oscillating planes of light and shadow. There was a muffled Eeeeee sound somewhere close by, a faint scratching at the door. Eunice knew she was losing consciousness, and thus control; knew this was dangerous; yet could not forestall the process though she shook her head, slapped her cheeks, forced her eyes open wide. A tarry-dark tide rose about her, and in her.

The dream-catcher at the foot of her bed! During the day, she never thought of it—never thought to remove it; at night, it was too late.

So she sank into sleep. Helpless. And he took immediate advantage.

Brashly entering her bedroom, pushing the door open as if—there was no door, at all.

The creature was physically mature now. Of that there could be no question. However he presented himself by day, his Eeeee? eeee? eeeyah? bleating and pleading, by night he was far different. The size of an adult man, with compact, muscled arms, shoulders, thighs. Covered in coarse black hairs. His eyes glaring, he yanked the bedclothes off Eunice, despite her protests; he gripped her so tightly, she thought he would break her ribs. In the morning, her body would be covered in bruises. In oddly lovely patterns. He mouthed her breasts, which had grown abnormally tender, her nipples sensitive to the slightest touch as they had never before been in Eunice’s life, her belly which was slick with perspiration, the secret flesh between her legs at which, at the age of thirty-seven, Eunice never once glanced, and rarely touched except to cleanse, and dry. No. Stop. I hate this. This is not me! Yet she found herself desperately embracing the creature, even as he penetrated her body, as a drowning person might embrace anyone, anything—Eunice’s arms, her trembling legs, her ankles locked together, gripping his legs between hers. Sometimes, a scream awoke her—a woman’s scream, high-pitched, helpless. Horrible to hear.

Eunice pushed at the bedclothes that were suffocating her, forced herself free. The bedside lamp was still burning. It might be only 1:35 A.M., it might be 4:00 A.M., the dead of night. The liquid silence of night. Utter unspeakable loneliness of night. The door to Eunice’s bedroom was shut again, of course—locked.

Yet the bedclothes, and Eunice herself, smelled of him. Damp, disgusting. Vile. That overripe peachy odor. Eunice must shower to remove it from her, every pore, every hair follicle.

At the foot of the bed, attached to the rail, was the dream-catcher. Delicate as a bird’s nest. Filmy feathers stirred by Eunice’s agitated breath, it seemed to float upon darkness.

“Oh God. If there is a God. Help me.”

There came the day in early May, at an Academy luncheon, the conversation paused, like a withheld breath, and, after a moment, Eunice became uneasily aware of everyone at the table, including the provost, looking at her. Had she been asked a question?—if so, by whom? Had she been daydreaming, distractedly stroking the underside of her jaw, which felt sore? The provost, a balding, kindly gentleman known to be grooming Eunice Pemberton to take his place when he retired, thereby to become the first female provost in the 170-year history of the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts, smiled, with pained solicitude, and, as if to spare Eunice further embarrassment, turned to another guest, and said, “And what do you think—?” and so, in a dreamlike blur and buzz, the moment passed.

Eunice, conscious of a terrible blunder, made a belated effort to listen; to be brightly attentive; to appear to be, in her colleagues’ eyes, entirely normal—entirely herself. Yet: not a one of you can guess what my life is! my secret life! And in a rest room afterward she saw to her horror that there was an ugly bruise on the underside of her jaw—a lurid purplish orange, the hue of rotted fruit. How in God’s name had she left the house that morning without noticing it?—had she not dared to glance into a mirror? She might have disguised the bruise somehow, might have tied a cheery bright scarf around her neck. Except now it was too late. Of course her colleagues had been staring at her.

They know.

But what is it they know?

It was in the early evening of that day, a mild, fragrant day in spring, that, on her way home from the Academy, Eunice stopped by a sporting goods store to purchase a hunting knife, with a stainless steel twelve-inch blade.

The shopkeeper smiled, asking Eunice if the knife was for her, if she was a hunter?—expecting her to say no, it’s a gift, it’s for my nephew, my sister’s son, for certainly a woman like Eunice would not want, or need, a hunting knife—would she? But Eunice smiled in return, and said, quietly, “Yes, in fact, it is for me. I’m a hunter, too. I’ve been learning.”

When Eunice let herself into the brownstone, it was to an empty house. You would think so. No sound, no murmurous muffled laughter—no creaking floorboards in the rear porch. Or on the stairs. Only the faintest smell of him—which might be mistaken for any slightly rotted, rancid kitchen smell.

You would think so.

He had been with her the night before, rudely and selfishly with her. Though she’d told him to remain downstairs—she’d been stern, and she’d been forthright. She was not a woman like so many women, even professional women, whose disapproval means approval; whose no means yes. But he’d paid no attention to her pleas, her words. From the start, he had not.

Yet perhaps the house was empty? Eunice no longer turned on the alarm system, for he had several times triggered it with his comings and goings. Instead she left lights burning in several rooms, and her radio on continuously. This, police recommended as a way of discouraging break-ins. So far, the simple strategy had worked.

Eunice walked slowly through the first floor of her house. If he was anywhere, it was likely to be the porch—but, no, the porch was empty this evening. The old sofa-swing, its floral canvas badly faded. The quilt Eunice had given him, now soiled, lying on the floor. And the smell of him, unmistakable.

The kitchen, too, was empty. The counters were clean and bare, as Eunice had left them; the sink was gleaming, as she’d left it. One of her outlets for nervous energy was cleaning, scouring her kitchen; her mother had always hired a maid for such work, but Eunice preferred to do it herself. Why invite a stranger into her life?—it was enough, that a stranger had come into her life unbidden.

The Formica top of the kitchen nook was clean, too. When he fed in the kitchen, he avoided that corner; only when Eunice was feeding him did he consent to sit there, Eunice close beside him.

Eunice was about to leave the kitchen when she noticed something gleaming on the floor—a small pile of gnawed chicken bones. And, kicked back alongside the refrigerator, part of an orange, which someone had bitten into, peeling and all. It was his way of eating, and Eunice shook her head in bemused dismay.

Animal. From the start. Hopeless.

Such shame!—she caressed her bruised jaw, ruefully.

Upstairs, Eunice entered her bedroom, sensing, in the split moment before the assault, that something was wrong, the very air into which she stepped seemed agitated; yet she wasn’t quite prepared for the violence with which she was seized from behind, an unseen man’s arms thrown about her torso, shaking her as if in fury—”Don’t fight me, bitch!” Eunice dropped her handbag, her briefcase, the bag containing the hunting knife—she was on the floor herself, on her hands and knees, too astonished to be terrified. For it was not like him to attack her so roughly, with such evident hatred: it was not like him to wish to injure her. Kill her?

Eunice drew breath to scream. She was struck on the side of the head by a man’s fist. She fell, half-conscious, lay on the carpet dazed and struggling to breathe and half-seeing a man’s figure, a shadowy hulking figure, at her bureau, yanking open drawers, throwing things onto the floor and muttering furiously to himself, an inexplicable violence in his very presence and Eunice understood. He will kill me, he will stomp me to death with no more conscience than he might stomp an insect to death, she crawled to retrieve the paper bag that lay close by, she had the knife in her hand and pushed herself to her feet and rushed at him, this man she believed she knew yet had never seen before, taller than she by several inches, heavy in the shoulders, dark-skinned, turning to her astonished as with a manic strength she brought the knife blade down hard against the back of his neck. There was an immediate eruption of blood, the man screamed, a high womanish shriek, he tried in his desperation to shield himself with his outspread fingers from the plunging blade, but Eunice did not weaken, Eunice brought the knife down against him again, and again, his throat, his face, his upper torso, as he threw himself from her, turning in agony from her she stabbed into the nape of his neck, the top of his spine—sobbing, panting, “You! you! you!” not knowing what she did, still less where the superhuman strength came from welling in her veins and muscles that allowed her to do it, except she must do it, it was time.

Hours later Eunice lifted her head, which throbbed with pain. There was something clotted in her vision. She smelled him, smelled it—Death?—that sweetish-sour, rotted odor—before she saw him. The body. The body he’d become.

She was in her bedroom. A man, a stranger, lay on the floor a few yards away. He was dead: clearly dead: the carpet was soaked with his blood, and there was a trail of blood, like an open artery, on an edge of the hardwood floor beside the wall. The man was a black man in his mid-thirties perhaps. He was wearing a dark nylon jacket, badly stained trousers, scuffed boots. He lay on the carpet on his side, in an attitude of childlike peace, or trust, his head lolling awkwardly on his shoulder, his bloodied mouth slack; he was looking away from Eunice through droopy, hooded eyes but she could see the curve of his thick nose, jaw, his wounded cheek—a stranger. It seemed clear that he’d been struck down in the act of yanking a drawer from her bureau; other drawers had been yanked out, and lay in a violent tumble of jewelry, lingerie, sweaters on the floor. The knife with its bloodied blade and handle lay on the carpet close by the body. You would think, seeing it there, that it belonged to the body.

Whose knife?—Eunice did not remember.

Except in a dream how she’d wielded it!—with what desperation, and passion.

There was a stillness here in this room that was the stillness of night. For now it was night. A dark tide rising about Eunice and the dead man both, gathering them in it, buoying them aloft. She would telephone the police, she would explain what she knew. I had to do it, I had no choice. She would not tell them what she knew also—that her life was over, her deepest life. Hers, and his.

On her feet now, swaying, unsteady, she went to her bed and took into her shaking hands the delicate, finely wrought thing fastened to the railing. The bird’s nest, the Indian souvenir, whatever it was, with its woven branches, its intricate interior web, its filmy speckled feathers that stirred with her breath as if stirring with their own mysterious life.

The dream-catcher. Grown so dry and brittle, it broke suddenly in her fingers. And fell in pieces to the floor.