Months later, Roland would point to the events of this night as the beginning of his slow descent into madness; but while he was in the moment, he was in paradise. His woman straddled him in the spacious luxury of his Mercedes Benz’s back seat, taking pains not to damage the fragile material of her $2,500 evening gown. The gown had been a gift from Roland. They were in an underground parking garage, supposedly on their way to the Mayor’s banquet. Needless to say, they had gotten somewhat sidetracked. The woman, Candice Parker, was on top of him now. In the darkness of the parking garage, her expression seemed either lusty or demented; but at the moment, Roland didn’t care which. He was burying his face in her ample cleavage, deftly unzipping the back of the gown…and he was free. He was beyond the world for those few moments: beyond its problems and the expectations his social success increasingly demanded of him. In a matter of days, he was to give his opening statement in a huge class action suit worth millions; and being just 33-years-old, he was not only a kind of golden boy within his firm, but amongst the general public and the media-both of which loved celebrated winners. He was rising in society faster than he had ever thought possible-he had even appeared in People magazine!

Still, at times, he would be acutely aware that this public self was not himself. A case in point was the story in the news a few weeks ago, about him being one of the ten most eligible bachelors in the city. They had created an entire mythology around some movie-star-like romantic entity and put Roland’s face on it. They had interviewed him for the piece; and yet, those words hadn’t been Roland’s words. It had all belonged to some marketable doppelganger, in whose shadow the real Roland Micheaux lived.

And what made it all seem so unreal was that only three years ago, he had been an overworked, underpaid attorney with the Public Defender’s Office. If his present life was a fantasy, then the five years he had spent as a New York City Public Defender had been a nightmare. He had dealt with every conceivable form and byproduct of scum: from those who seemed to have demons within them, to those who seemed to lack genuine evil and the impetus to commit crimes, but were either in the wrong place at the wrong time, or victims of that invisible current which saw black and minority men swallowed up by the booming prison industrial complex. Roland felt as though he had escaped from that nightmare-even, at times, that he had sold out in order to feast and grow fat at the trough of corporate law….The fact of the matter was that he had gone into law with that naïve, “I want to save the world” mentality; but being around so many wasted lives-lives that he had in time come to realize that he had no chance of ameliorating-had not so much killed his idealism, as blinded him to the true scope of societal evil. In a sense, the more disheartening the things he had seen, the less he had absorbed into himself. He had gone about his cases with the same uncompromising drive as before, but with a mental and spiritual detachment that had been his only shield against the bloated, fatally flawed judicial system.

But all of that was years behind him in time, and seemed like a whole other reality-like someone else’s life-in terms of his current attitude and place in the world. It also explained why the feeling of peace seized him as he held his woman in the solemn darkness of the parking garage: she drove away the restless spirits and the marketable doppelgangers; and, in a strange sense, she allowed him to be alone with himself. Moreover, no world, no matter how wonderful or troubling, was a match for the touch of a good woman. Roland could be himself when he was with her-or he could surrender to the abyss that came with their lust, and be nothing at all. In fact, it wasn’t so much lust, as a kind of nirvana, which canceled out all the entanglements of the world and left him at peace. He breathed in the delicate fragrance of her perfume then, feeling somehow that he was pulling her into him: that he wasn’t simply breathing in her scent, but her essence. As he continued to unzip the back of her dress, it wasn’t simply that he was disrobing her, but himself and the concerns of the world. And it was so wonderful that they were the only ones there: there were no media or courtroom expectations to be met, no cultural mores to defer to…nothing but the smooth softness of her body in the darkness. He unconsciously smiled to himself at that moment; however, it was then that Candice laughed out suddenly, startling him as she breathed heavily into his ear: “You’re a killer, Roland Micheaux!”

“-What?”

“You have a murderous heart, Roland Micheaux,” she whispered in her sultry Caribbean accent. When Roland only looked up at her like a dazed child roused from a good dream, she giggled and continued, “Sex, Roland…women can lie with it-can do one thing and have their minds on something else, or on nothing at all; but with men”-she kissed him on the tip of his nose and he recoiled slightly-“it’s their only moment of honesty. If they’re in love with you, you can tell it in their sex; if they’re tired of you, you can tell that as well. You, Roland Micheaux, are a killer.”

“…What the hell are you talking about?” Roland said in bewilderment. But he was momentarily distracted by her exposed nipple; and as he looked at it, she giggled and slipped off of him, moving to the far side of the back seat. She then zipped herself up with the agility of a contortionist and sat there, amused by his confusion. He looked at her for a moment, totally baffled; then, watching her smile of sexual triumph, he sat back and chuckled to himself. There was something about young, beautiful women that was not unlike gas station attendants who knew that their gas station was the only one for hundreds of kilometers. Due to the forces of economics, those gas stations always had the nastiest bathrooms-and the worst service.

With the magic of their session broken, Roland’s strange nirvana departed, like the contours of a dream after the day had begun; and still chuckling to himself, he started buttoning up his shirt-

“You don’t like my philosophical musings anymore?” she said with a smirk, crossing her legs seductively. “I thought my philosophizing was the only reason you’ve been with me so long.”

“Right you are,” he teased her in the playful manner that he always fell into when he was with her, “-my goal in life is to figure out the mysteries of the universe.”

“Is that what you were looking for under my dress?”

He looked across at her and smiled.

“What has it been?” she went on in the same playful tone,“-a month now since you met me at that party? Me: a poor Grenadian girl with an expired student visa; and you: the great Roland Micheaux, lawyer extraordinaire, rated one of the ten most eligible bachelors in the city…I amuse you, that’s why you keep coming back for more.”

He stared at her for a good three seconds before he shook his head and smiled. Their strange way of talking to one another-as though they were characters in a 1930s melodrama-was a kind of foreplay. It turned him on not only sexually, but on a level that approached spirituality. In a sense, it was her singularity that made her real to him. She wasn’t like all the other women he had met, who looked the same and dressed the same and talked the same and even smelled the same. She was an individual, in a world where people-particularly the young-seemed to get their personalities out of the latest fashion magazines and music videos. For some reason, it felt good to be around her; he felt for her something visceral-something tangible-which wasn’t as mundane as love or as shallow as desire. When he was with her, he felt as though he would figure out some grand cathartic mystery. Of course, he wasn’t entirely conscious of all this, and it mostly manifested itself as a feeling of comfort.

Whatever the case, he again smiled to himself; but remembering the banquet, he held up his watch to the fluorescent light outside and looked at it fixedly. It was approaching nine-thirty: they were already fashionably late, verging on being boorishly late. Resolved to leave for the banquet at once, he began putting on his bowtie. However, when he looked up at Candice, he realized that she was still smirking at him.

“Oh-oh,” he laughed, “what are you plotting in that head of yours?”

“Just thinking about you.”

“You seem to spend an inordinate amount of time doing that,” he joked, still putting on his bowtie.

“Well, you’re an interesting subject.”

“Subject?” he laughed at her phrasing, “-and what is your prognosis, professor?”

“Some minor neuroses, but nothing that a few years of intensive therapy won’t cure.”

“I see,” he laughed. “And what is your proposed method of treatment?”

“First, we have to uncover the roots of your murderous heart.”

“My what?”

“Like I said before, you’re a killer, Roland Micheaux.”

“Are we on this again?” he groaned playfully.

“Yup,” she said, moving closer to him and lowering her voice to a sexy whisper, “-so tell me, when is the last time you thought about killing someone-”

“What are you talking about?” he returned, instinctively putting up his hand to keep her at bay.

“Don’t try to tell me you’ve never thought about it,” she said, smiling at him oddly; then, in a nonchalant manner: “I think about it all the time.”

“Killing someone?”

“Yes.”

He looked at her calm, seemingly affected expression then burst out laughing. Shaking his head, and ready to put the entire thing out of his mind, he checked the breast pocket of his tuxedo to make sure that he still had the invitations. However, when he glanced up from this task, he realized that she had been staring at him fixedly all that time, as though coming to some conclusion-or waiting for the right moment. When their eyes locked, she spoke up in the same nonchalant manner, saying, “I’ve killed someone, you know.”

“…What?”

“I’ve killed someone-you’re the first person I’ve ever told. I guess you’re one of those men that women want to unburden themselves to.”

“…What the hell are you talking about?”

“I’m a killer as well,” she said, serenely.

He stared at her for a while, as she sat there with a smirk on her face; and then, dubiously: “Who’d you kill?”

“My first lover.”

For some reason, he burst out laughing.

“He wasn’t a real lover,” she protested.

“Of course,” he chuckled.

“…He was about 60-a big, fat, sweaty man. [Roland looked up sharply, his smile replaced by an expression of uncertainty.] He lived right next to us-back in Grenada-up on a mountain. He started with me when I was 12. [Roland sat up straighter, his frown deepening.] It was off and on-probably about three times in all. Months would go by, and I would convince myself that nothing had happened. It was like a dream: the longer you’re awake, the less real it seems; and after a while, it seemed so unreal that I couldn’t believe that it had happened. He would come and visit my parents, joking with us all…and I would think to myself: Nah, I must have imagined it.

“But that day…I came home from school and saw him walking up the lane with my little sister, to his house. I followed them up there, and when I saw for myself, I knew, right then and there, that I had to kill him. It wasn’t a murderous rage or anything: it was calm-a logical conclusion. His car was in the driveway; and as my father was a mechanic, I had picked up some things. It was all so perfect, as if God had mandated that I do it, because a toolbox had been lying right there. I cut the brake cable on his car. Grenada has a lot of mountains, see. The lane from his house led right down into a deep ravine; and without brakes to make the turn…well, that would be that.

“When my sister came home, I saw it all in her eyes: the same shock that I had felt that first time….But everything was going to be fine. I lay in bed and bided my time; and that night, while I was lying there, looking out of the window at the moon, I finally heard the crash and loud explosion as his car dropped into that ravine. With the fire, there wasn’t enough of him left to fill a shoe box….Justifiable homicide, Roland?”

“What?” he whispered when she said his name and broke the spell that had held him. Her voice had had a strangely hypnotic quality: he shook his head to be free of it.

“You think they’d convict me?” she asked him earnestly.

“You serious?”

“Of course. Was it justified or not?”

“…I don’t know what your laws are,” he said evasively.

“Screw the laws-what do you say?”

“I say you’re a dangerous woman,” he said, trying to smile.

“Isn’t that what men want,” she laughed in return, “-a little hint of danger in their women to spice up their sex lives?”

“Only the self-destructive ones want that,” he laughed. It was nervous laughter, but he was so desperate to be free of this strange discomfort, that the laughter soon consumed him, somehow leaving him convinced that her story of childhood murder had been nothing but a joke: another of her female tricks to get into his head. And yet, she was scrutinizing him with a look that he couldn’t quite gauge; and regardless of whether or not he thought she was a murderer, he had the unsettling feeling that she was seeing through him, reading his thoughts-

“What do you want from me, Roland Micheaux?” she asked abruptly.

He hated it when she used both of his names: it reminded him of his mother, who was now dead-and therefore doubly sacred. But when he looked at Candice, he saw that there was again a smirk on her face; and something about it, and the way she was sitting there, made him laugh, “What makes you assume I want anything?”

“Men always want something,” she purred, “-it’s in their nature.”

“What about women, don’t they want anything?”

“Women don’t have wants, they have prerogatives.”

“Thanks for clarifying that!” he laughed. “Anyway, why bother asking me anything? According to you, a woman can tell anything she wants to know by screwing a man-”

“That’s not what I said!” she protested.

“Didn’t you just say that a man is only honest when he’s screwing,” he teased her, “-and that I’m a killer? Since I’m a killer and you’re a killer, we can have a little death orgy: put one another out of our misery.”

“…Maybe,” she mused oddly.

He frowned imperceptibly, having detected something unsettling in her voice. He went to ask her if she was all right, but instinctively retreated; and besides, he was suddenly weary of their exchange. It was a war of sorts: a battle royal between the sexes; and at the moment, they both seemed to be taking unacceptable losses. Again looking at his watch, he sighed and shook his head at nothing in particular. “Look, let’s just get going,” he said then. But as he glanced at her in the darkness, he was suddenly disturbed by the smirk that had been on her face for most of that evening. He quickly opened the door and went to exit, when:

“What are you running from, Roland Micheaux?”

He sat there, with the door open and one foot outside; then, slowly and deliberately, he turned around and looked at her. She was still smirking. His voice was low but emphatic: “Stop it, okay. Just stop it.” He took a deep breath, inwardly angry with himself for having allowed her to get under his skin: she had won that battle. “-Look,” he went on quickly, “let’s just go and have a good time. We’ve got invitations to spend the evening at a banquet with the Mayor of New York City-”

“And all the other social elite.”

“…Candice,” he began, his tone more contentious, “if you don’t want to go, I can get you a cab back home.”

“Stop being such a grouch,” she giggled, caressing his shoulder.

He watched her for a while, then groaned again as he exited the car and walked around to her door. “I don’t want to talk about murder anymore,” he warned her as he opened the door for her. “And I’ve heard enough of your ‘philosophical musings’ to last a lifetime.” But by then, she was standing before him. She was tall and statuesque, and her beauty and poise made his annoyance and misgivings ebb away. She was a weird woman-perhaps even a disturbed one-still, he couldn’t help thinking that there was something magical about her. Beauty is a horrible thing in a crazy woman, he thought with a smile. How many fools, over the eons, had died for it: had felt compelled to give up their lives in defense of it; how many otherwise intelligent men had made stupid decisions for the sake of it? She stood there posing for him with one hand placed seductively on her hip, and he almost laughed out loud at the entire game: the farce that was the mating ritual. There she was, playing the role of the classic vixen: a carefully contrived combination of sexual aggressiveness, mystery/nuttiness, and, to win over that macho streak in all men, a tinge of defenselessness. For the first time, it occurred to him that her seeming originality might just be an act. Or maybe it was only that her story of childhood murder was still percolating in his mind, setting off alarm bells. She seemed somehow different to him now; and, as was so often the case when a once-perfect lover was shown to have a blemish, the relationship was thrown into crisis-not by the flaw, itself, but by the debilitating blow that came with the loss of the illusion of perfection. His vessel of nirvana was somehow lost to him, so that he wasn’t merely losing his woman, but his religion. And now that he thought about their one-month relationship, he allowed himself to acknowledge that he had always been somewhat wary of her. At first, he had thought that that wariness was what women referred to as “a fear of commitment.” But he now realized that what he feared wasn’t belonging to her, but losing himself within her. Nirvana could only be wonderful in passing-as a respite from the world. But continuous nirvana was death; and every time he was with Candice, he came away with the feeling that there was an abyss within her: a vast void of nothingness, waiting to suck him in. Even when having a simple conversation with her, he would find himself tumbling into her depths, falling deeper and deeper into her nothingness. And again, with her story of childhood murder percolating in his mind, his sense of inner panic couldn’t be denied. He looked at her uneasily then and nodded to himself, knowing that his time with her was drawing to a close.

It was perhaps to shelter himself from the specter of a nettlesome breakup, that his thoughts gravitated towards the imminent pleasure-indeed, the social triumph-of attending the Mayor's banquet. Strangely enough, he and the Mayor were locked in a titanic struggle-a gentleman’s fight to the death. It was all the result of a case that Roland had won three years ago. It had been his last case with the Public Defender’s Office; and with his mental detachment almost complete, he had cared less about whom he was defending. The defendant had been a middle-aged white supremacist who burst into City Hall one day, ran up to Mayor Randolph-a Republican who had the quirky distinction of being a black man-and declared that the Mayor was “a dirty, no-good nigger!” After the man was arrested, the case had of course been seized upon by the media. And suddenly tossed into the spotlight, Roland had seemed perfect for television: poised, handsome, giving impassioned homilies about freedom of speech and “The American Way.” When he won the case, the Mayor had invited him to a diplomatic banquet-and had been inviting him to dinners and social events ever since. It had seemed like a friendly gesture, but Roland rightly saw it as a declaration of war. We’ll see who breaks first! the Mayor had seemed to be saying. But Roland’s career had taken off after that. With all the media attention from the trial, the young, dynamic firm of Rosencrantz and Associates had quickly retained his services; and after being on a legal team that won a $50 million settlement against a negligent automaker, his reputation and future had been guaranteed.

For whatever reason, Roland again smiled to himself and felt at ease. Despite the uneasiness Candice’s story had inspired in him, he now took her by the hand and led her away. A confrontation with her was imminent, but he didn’t want it to be tonight. Right now, the only thing that he wanted was peace from his thoughts. And there was something almost magical about the dark, eerie emptiness of the parking garage, where their steps echoed in the darkness and left him with the feeling that they were the last two people on earth. He liked the solemnity: the sense of peace and well being that came when one was with someone and there was nothing to be said. They walked along like that for a few moments, until Candice looked up abruptly and said:

“Do you ever think about the world ending, Roland?”

“What?” he said, at once alarmed and irritated that she had broken the spell of peace.

“-Ever think that all the craziness in the world might be a sign from God?”

“…Not particularly,” he said, giving her an odd look.

“I mean, think about it,” she went on. “You turn on the television and all you see is death: people going to work-and kids going to their schools-and gunning down dozens of people. People starving and desperate in every corner of the world…People butchering one another in wars…AIDS…And in New York, we even have our own kind of craziness: trigger-happy cops sticking plungers up people’s asses…mothers leaving newborn babies in garbage cans…and then there’s that crazy Hair Jacker, or whatever he’s called, running loose for the last two years, shaving people’s heads. The world’s mad, Roland. Something’s wrong somewhere-something’s sick!”

Roland’s sense of inner panic began to surge within him again. Her words struck a sensitive cord in him-disturbed him, in fact; and all at once, his previous compulsion to get away from her, seized him again. But she had stopped and was staring up at him imploringly; and as he looked into her eyes, he felt, for perhaps the first time, that he was seeing into her: seeing the real her. He didn’t quite know what to make of it, but he felt something inside of him melting. At first, he wondered if this was another one of her tricks to get into his head, but as he continued to look into her, there seemed to be genuine disillusionment in her eyes; and like a fool, he found himself thinking: She has big, puppy dog eyes. She seemed young and naïve to him just now, and Roland was overcome by the self-destructive male urge to protect and comfort her. He took her in his arms then, holding her tenderly. But just as the spell began to envelop him again, she blurted out:

“I knew one of his victims, you know.”

“What?” he groaned, releasing her.

“One of my friends got her head shaved by that Hair Jacker guy,” she went on. “She had this long hair weave, and he snuck up behind her one night and shaved it all off. Why do you figure he does it?”

“Who cares,” he groaned, annoyed with her again. He started to walk off; but oblivious to his snub, she came up to his side and looped her arm though his.

“They say it might be more than one man,” she went on, “-a whole cult of them. Almost 300 people have had their heads shaved in the last two years-that’s a hell of a lot for one man-”

Roland was about to lose his cool and tell her to shut the hell up, when a wretched-looking black man suddenly stepped out of the shadows-actually, from behind one of the concrete columns. The man said nothing: the gun that he brought from his pocket did all the talking. The man was shorter and slighter than both Roland and Candice, but a gun elevates even the lowest weakling to mystical proportions. Roland abruptly stopped and raised his hands. Candice merely stopped by Roland’s side and looked at the man with her strange nonchalance.

“Empty your pockets!” the wretched-looking man demanded. He looked like a starved stray dog. His clothes were all caked with dirt-as though he had fallen asleep somewhere and been buried alive when he was mistaken for a corpse. The man even smelled like death.

Taking all this in, Roland took out the cash from his wallet, handed the wad of bills over to the man, then went to put the wallet back in his pocket.

“Gimmie your wallet!” the man demanded.

“My credit cards will be canceled in 15 minutes-”

“Not if I blow your fucking brains out!” the man pointed out.

Roland couldn’t deny the man’s logic. He extended his suddenly trembling hand to give the man his wallet; but when the man, who held the gun in his right hand, stretched out his left hand to receive the wallet, he let his right hand, and the gun, drop somewhat. Instinctively, something was triggered in Roland; and before he even knew what was going on, he knocked the gun out of the man’s hand! For a second, they both stood there in shock. But it was Roland who let that vicious left cross fly, breaking the man’s nose and knocking him back into the concrete column. A brutal left-right combination followed, and the man was on the ground. Roland was kicking the man now, stomping his head mercilessly with the hard soles of his dress shoes. The man wasn’t moving anymore. In truth, the man had been knocked senseless by the initial blow, and the subsequent 15 seconds of vicious blows were all superfluous. It was Candice who stopped Roland: who brought him back to his senses. She came up and tapped him on the shoulder; and when he looked over at her, he was both startled and confused: first, to see her standing by his side; and then, to see the bloody, unmoving form lying at his feet.

“See,” Candice said with the same disconcerting smirk that had graced her face all that evening, “I told you you’re a killer….”