He knew that he was unconscious, that he was a sojourner in that strange and unmapped land between death and life. This was new in his experience. He did not dream, William Fitzgerald, not since the mild May day that he had been old enough to purchase enough cheap grain alcohol to make sleeping neither difficult nor memorable. He came into awareness, conscious unconsciousness, in patches, isolated memories and realizations as in a drunk. He was not drunk, this he knew, by long experience. When the moment of awareness pooled together enough to form a chain of impressions, he found he was not alone.

The other man laughed. “Hehehehehellloooo, Roguey,” he said gaily. He had a thin, queer voice, pitched too high, too fast, and with too much air within the words. It was a mechanical voice imitating a real voice.

William Fitzgerald looked down at himself, then at the other person. He raised his hands, ran them over his face, his ugly, familiar face. The other person looked nothing like him. He didn’t understand, and a person’s unconsciousness should be his own, he said. He was angry.

The other person blanched, and squinted closely at William Fitzgerald. He didn’t like what he saw, which was not unique in William Fitzgerald’s curriculum vitae, but he didn’t like William Fitzgerald specifically, which was. “Roguey?” he whispered. “Roguey? Roguey!” The other person ran away, and then William Fitzgerald truly knew nothing.

William Fitzgerald lived alone in a house that he had bought twenty-three years ago. The house was weathered and gray, and he had in those years replaced the yard with a dense tangle of portugal laurel and blackberry vines. Thanks to his diligence these stood twenty feet tall and blocked all view of the house. No path led through the tangle to his front door, save one, well hidden, protected by three feet of thorns and stinging nettles. He had no mail box; any correspondence would be through the office.

William Fitzgerald twisted his way through the brambles with long practice. He walked toward the house with poor posture and unsettled brain. The twilight and unaccustomed sobriety disturbed him, filled him with inchoate fears. It was pitch and rooty under the laurels, but he had been walking this path for twenty years and it had grown into him.

They were waiting for him, somehow, in his house, invisible in the darkness when he sidled through the door. He felt their breathing and raised his head but it was too late. The hands he couldn’t see seized him and something soft and sweet-smelling was pressed over his face. He didn’t struggle; he breathed in, passed out. He heard the gentle chiming of bells.

The sun had set and it was probably about seven o’clock and he had just started on his night’s drinking. He was waiting for a client, a young man, earnest, fresh-faced, diffident like all the others, unsure about hiring a private detective, but having to know, having to know. He drank out of a crumpled paper cup and waited without interest. The light was burning above the stairwell that led to his office and the light bled under the door into the darkened office. He disliked artificial light.

His window shattered as something flew through it. He finished the scotch and threw the paper cup into the wastebasket. It was a bottle and a rag was burning at the narrow end and he smelled gasoline. He watched the rag burning as he walked to the door. He descended the stairs without hurrying. It was a long rag, it burned slowly, there was no hurry. He walked out the front door and across the street and listened to the crashing of more windows along the building. He watched the fire splash against the walls of his office and spread to the other offices. He hunched into himself as sirens began wailing.

He has left the city. He does it very seldom, for in the rolling hills of the wineries and the manicured lawns of suburbia his spleen threatens to swamp him. The sunlight that fills the bus as the buildings dwindle scratches delicately along his skin. He is dozing lightly in the uncomfortable aquamarine seat, eyes half-shut, shoulders slumped forward, mouth hanging slack. It is an ugly pose, he knows, and one he has assiduously practiced. He can see the entire length of the bus from the noisy seat over the engine, and his hideous inertness deters the eye and potential seatmates.

At the edge of the city, the bus stops, pressurised gas hisses pneumatically, and an angel gets on. William Fitzgerald cannot bear to look at the angel; he can hold no picture beyond the basic shape in his mind. He sees obliquely the four wings, the blank face with human eyes, the lion face, the ox face, and the eagle face. The setting sun reflects from the bronze skin and blinds him. The angel’s wings are moving slightly, now covering more and now less of that body, and to look beneath those wings is annihilation, the giving over of self to the LORD by destruction.

The bus left town and William Fitzgerald sat up, now wide awake. The angel sat behind the driver, now as a man wearing a battered leather hat. William Fitzgerald looked out of the window into the sunset, over the ocean, and watched the gulls diving over that winedark sea, that endless river, and where the clouds are blowing together to the west he saw the dark shape of the underworld.

Self-destruction, despair, hatred, neglect delighted William Fitzgerald in an ophidian way. He owned a gun as a necessary adjunct to his trade, but he never carried it, and kept it locked in a small floor safe that he covered with a battered credenza. He removed it once a year and looked down the barrel for rust, spun the mechanism, oiled and cleaned it thoroughly, then replaced it, unloaded, beneath the floorboards. He depended on his invisibility, his knowledge of the city, his luck, and his spleen to carry him safely into and out of anything.

It was Sunday afternoon, and, still wearing the pressed, inexpensive black suit that smelled of incense and veneration, he was editing his book. The lights in the office were off, and the variable March sun squinted through the windows. He finished entering the names of clients and potential victims — to employ William Fitzgerald was to invite scrutiny — and started the somber but pleasant task of eliding old entries. Three newspapers were spread before him, representing well-enough the population of the city. He ran his pen down one column of newsprint, clucked, then, pleased, drew a thick black line through the name Patrick Stephens.