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telephone. His shape filled the doorway, light, all light behind him.
In silhouette it should not have been possible to tell, but somehow she knew he was wearing
gloves and the only marks he would leave would be deep bruises, very blue, almost black, with the
tinge under them of blood that had been stopped in its course.
He came for her, arms hanging casually at his sides. She tried to climb over the bed, and he
grabbed her from behind, ripping her nightgown. Then he had a hand around her neck and he pulled
her backward. She fell off the bed, landed at his feet and his hold was broken. She scuttled across
the floor and for a moment she had the respite to feel terror. She was going to die, and she was
frightened.
He trapped her in the corner between the closet and the bureau and kicked her. His foot
caught her in the thigh as she folded tighter, smaller, drawing her legs up. She was cold.
Then he reached down with both hands and pulled her erect by her hair. He slammed her
head against the wall. Everything slid up in her sight as though running off the edge of the world. He
slammed her head against the wall again, and she felt something go soft over her right ear.
When he tried to slam her a third time she reached out blindly for his face and ripped down
with her nails. He howled in pain and she hurled herself forward, arms wrapping themselves around
his waist. He stumbled backward and in a tangle of thrashing arms and legs they fell out onto the
little balcony.
Beth landed on the bottom, feeling the window boxes jammed up against her spine and legs.
She fought to get to her feet, and her nails hooked into his shirt under the open jacket, ripping. Then
she was on her feet again and they struggled silently.
He whirled her around, bent her backward across the wrought-iron railing. Her face was
turned outward.
They were standing in their windows, watching.
Through the fog she could see them watching. Through the fog she recognized their
expressions. Through the fog she heard them breathing in unison, bellows breathing of expectation
and wonder. Through the fog.
And the black man punched her in the throat. She gagged and started to black out and could
not draw air into her lungs. Back, back, he bent her farther back and she was looking up, straight up,
toward the ninth floor and higher....
Up there: eyes.
The words Ray Gleeson had said in a moment filled with what he had become, with the utter
hopelessness and finality of the choice the city had forced on him, the words came back. You can’t
live in this city and survive unless you have protection...you can’t live this way, like rats driven
mad. without making the time right for some god-forsaken other kind of thing to be born...you can’t
do it without calling up some kind of awful...
God! A new God, an ancient God come again with the eyes and hunger of a child, a
deranged blood God of fog and street violence. A God who needed worshipers and offered the
choices of death as a victim or life as an eternal witness to the deaths of other chosen victims. A
God to fit the times, a God of streets and people.
She tried to shriek, to appeal to Ray, to the director in the bedroom window of his ninth-floor
apartment with his long-legged Philadelphia model beside him and his fingers inside her as they
worshipped in their holiest of ways, to the others who had been at the party that had been Ray’s
offer of a chance to join their congregation. She wanted to be saved from having to make that
choice.
But the black man had punched her in the throat, and now his hands were on her, one on her
chest, the other in her face, the smell of leather filling her where the nausea could not. And she
understood Ray had cared, had wanted her to take the chance offered; but she had come from a
world of little white dormitories and Vermont countryside; it was not a real world. This was the real
