Enough [A Travesty (novel) and Ordo (novelette)]

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Well, she was dead, and there was no use crying over spilt milk. I released her wrist — no pulse — and looked around the room, while fragments of imaginary conversations unreeled in my mind:

“And you say you hit her?”

“Well, not that hard. She slipped on the floor, that’s all, and smacked her head on the coffee table.”

“As a result of you hitting her.”

“As a result of her polishing the goddam floor all the goddam time.”

Laura’s clean jagged style had, as a matter of fact, killed her more than anything else. What kind of bachelor girl apartment was this, with its hulking glass coffee table and chrome lamps and white vinyl chairs and bare black floor? Where were the pillows, the furs, the drapes and hangings, the softnesses? Sterile cold hardness everywhere; it might as well be an art gallery.

“But you did hit her, is that right?”

“But it was an accident!”

If it were an accident, it might just as well have happened when I was somewhere else. I wasn’t here at all, officer, I was, uhh... Screening a film. Yes, at home by myself. Yes, I do that all the time, it’s part of my job.

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