=10=

Of all her deaths, it is the one that we recount now that Neena knows the best, knows almost by heart, and for which she feels something almost like nostalgia, it being one of the first deaths that she can remember having suffered. It begins in a place vaguely reminiscent of a place she’s found herself in before (or is it later?); well, it really doesn’t matter. She finds herself in the cavernous ground floor of an old building, a warehouse, perhaps, the kind that has apartments or offices on the floors above, stacked like layers of meat on a thick sandwich.

She passes through a machine-shop, picking her way carefully around a maze of table-top tools of a kind that mean nothing to her: saws, drill-presses, incomprehensible stitching machines, others that mean even less, or even nothing, machines whose purpose she can’t even guess at, machine after machine, an evolutionary progression of machines whose existence fades away into a grey non-existence at the end of each dusty row that she passes.

These machines are here, most likely, for only one real purpose: to invoke a sense of anticipatory dread, which they do, standing in half-shadow as they are, a menagerie of machines, mute, grim as engines of execution, but ready to come alive upon command, at the flip of an unseen red switch, humming, grinding, nailing with malevolent intent, a taut band of serrated metal singing a high-speed falsetto, or a loop of thin copper wire heated to the white luminosity of a line of pure poetry.

It is a workhouse devoted to the tortures of the flesh, Neena thinks, or it might as well be, and Neena passes through it as if she were a figure in her own imagination (which she is), fully aware of what horrors could (and will) take place here, what outrages have (and still may) occur in another scene, some frames further along if she should return to this warehouse of damned souls for some at present incomprehensible reason, at three a.m. when a gray shift of somnolent men drift in, the hollow-eyed dim army of the marginal, whose hands are hooks, whose oily guts are chain, and whose work is done and undone off the books.

Is it three a.m. already?

For not having tarried in this ominous location, having progressed even as we’ve been speaking to one of the upper stories, the main floor is already throbbing below her, waking like a black and scaly dragon somewhere in the past beneath her feet. She is now in a hallway without doors or any doors that she can see, even though, ostensibly, it is a functional hallway lined with rooms and not a dream hallway (even if this is a dream), nor is it a hallway symbolic in any way. There is no chance of her looking for any particular room, or having a particular destination, or having really any business in this place at all, and so, perhaps, for this reason, no rooms appear to exist, at least to her, as she walks, or rather drifts, listless as a windless smoke, towards the end of this hall, which, incidentally, she cannot see (nor can we), since she (nor we) will never arrive at the end of this hall. So, you might just say it goes on, this hall, like she (and we) do, like the universe does, on and on and on…to infinity.

Let us not neglect to say how Neena is dressed for this crucial rendezvous--that is, in a modest but fashionable skirt of dark wool, which is thin enough to assume that the season is mid-to-late fall, tight-fitting, cut just above the knee, most likely ultramarine blue, (definitely not black), with the possibility of a subdued pattern, squares, triangles, stars, but this pattern is easily overlooked; perhaps it will be of interest to the detective assigned to her case, maybe he will look for it; let’s leave him to it then; he’s welcome to such arcane observations. It’s his job, after all, to help solve a crime. Whereas for us…we have other, erm, considerations. Let’s get back to them.

Her blouse is white, a blend of natural and synthetic micro fibers, and of a general silkiness without being silk, yet in no way to be mistaken for an attempt to imitate silk. This fabric is better than silk. (Why for heavens sake the italics, Pinker? Are you trying to make a particular point here? If so, I wish to heavens you’d just come right out and make it and spare us your typographic melodramatics.) After some deliberation, it is decided that she is wearing black seamed stockings, very sheer, ultra sheer (again with the italics?), and a lace black garter belt with panties of a matching black lace. The blouse, with its abbreviated collar, is opened at the throat to reveal an expanse of u-shaped white flesh, and only the faintest hint of cleavage, a flash of a black bra strap, part of a lacy black cup filled with the fluffy cream of her tit.

It would be better if she were not wearing an overcoat, even though the season and (particularly) the hour (the former, as noted, suggested by the material of her skirt; the latter by the empty warehouse) would suggest she ought to be, realistically speaking, though we are hardly speaking realistically here. If realism is insisted upon, perhaps we can say that the coat could have been mislaid somewhere, at an earlier appointment, or neglected in the heat of the moment, rushing from the hotel room of a married lover or to the hotel room of a married lover, either of which is not the case; it’s just an excuse, an explanation, for her having no coat, if realism is insisted upon.

And even if it were so, that she were rushing to and from the hotel room of a married lover, why rush here? Her shoes are black, consistent with the rest of her outfit, dark blue or black, of a shiny leather, and raising her heels to the level of two or three inches, toes tantalizingly concealed. The overall impression is of a typical office girl, an administrative assistant or cost analyst, perhaps, modest, quiet, super-competent, with an inhibited, but active, yes overly active, sexual imagination. She may be, as already falsely postulated, a woman having a clandestine affair, possibly with her married supervisor, or, even less likely, she is a straight woman working nights as a call-girl catering to the kinkiest of clientele.

In any event, the unseen figure comes up swiftly behind her, detaching itself from the hanging shadows, and although, expecting as much, (certainly no less), Neena is still taken by surprise, maybe it’s more like she’s surprised to be surprised, having expected something of the sort. To express this “surprise,” she makes a little gulped cry, as the far greater, the absolutely overwhelming masculine strength of her unseen assailant takes possession of her, causes her to struggle uselessly. She understands immediately the uselessness of struggle but Neena struggles all the same, as it is no doubt required that she do. (Who writes this stuff, anyway?) (Why, you do Pinker. Don’t be coy.).

Well, she has experienced this attack so many times already that she reacts almost instinctively, all the better to secure her doom, lifting her chin as she ineffectively and with inadvertent sensuality wriggles, her strength rapidly draining away. Her head, grabbed by the hair, is violently yanked back by her attacker, the scent of tweed and octopi in the air, and it is by her very complicity, combined with the aforementioned overwhelming strength of the invisible killer, that causes her neck to be very nearly broken.

She doesn’t feel the blade that slices across her pale defenseless throat, at least not until much later, if the term “much later” can be appropriately used to describe a consciousness that will continue to flicker for a little less than two or three minutes more. She is on her elbows and knees now, crawling forward futilely, through dust and sawdust, blood spraying in a wide fan over the old boards of the bare floor beneath her, her hands covered in blood, her arms, too, the front of her formerly white blouse also plastered wet with red. She crawls forward into the blood streak she is simultaneously dragging along behind her, inches no more than the six feet of hallway she has yet to traverse before she collapses into her eternal rest, her dark skirt matted even darker, and now darker yet, her stockings, garter, panties, etc., too, all of the latter, by the way, now exposed to one degree or another.

One of her pumps, as it always seems about to do, has come off her foot, which also slick with blood.

Neena is choking, coughing, her pretty head dangling like a snapped gerbera daisy. She instinctively tries to clear an airway, as she pauses, hopelessly, in her crawling, to draw a breath so that she might continue crawling forward nowhere another foot or so. She is dizzy and close to unconsciousness, amazed and sickened by all this blood, which she can taste and smell, which wets her cheeks, her lips, her eyelids, and her hair, clinging to her face like a scarlet mask. She is blinking, eyes stinging, trying to see through a mist of blood, which continues to spray out of her, sizzling across the floor, flung onto the walls, splashing about wetly in such incredible gouts that it seems impossible that it could all be coming from just one body, her body. She is bleeding in such a spectacularly tragic and showy manner, a veritable special-effects fountain of hemorrhage, that even the fantasy of squelching the flow, either by holding the gaping throat wound closed with her now slippery hands, or by means of the ministrations of a miraculous last-minute appearance of trained emergency medical personnel, is entirely too unrealistic to entertain, even in passing.

She is lying prone on the floor at this point, her forehead in a widening black puddle, the warmth flowing from her severed artery and spreading under her breasts, her belly, her thighs, soaking even the scant black panties. The point at which she crosses the boundary between faux struggle and surrender, at which she loses the capacity to crawl on hands and knees to no purpose whatsoever escapes her entirely, but she has not given up her struggle yet, such as it remains, far from it, even though she is as close to death as she will ever be without being dead, by which we mean that if she were any closer to death, she would be dead, which she will be, and now she is.

Her unseeing eyes are open, staring at a bit of dust crumbling inwards into the heel section of a boot-print a few inches from her noiselessly murmuring lips, lips bright with blood, her fingers still curled for purchase on the plank-wood floor of the hallway, although she doesn’t move forward another millimeter. The stocking toes of her right foot, the one missing the high-heel pump, are similarly curled, but slightly more dramatically, highlighted, somehow, as she futilely tries to push her body forward, her last bit of will concentrated in the curled toes of that foot, which is now lifted by a gloved and anonymous hand, almost gently, by the ankle, and laid down again, on its finely-arched instep, as if the owner of this gloved hand were patiently correcting a mistake, or relieving Neena of some outdated obligation, the toes curled uselessly up, the soft, defenseless sole of her small foot fully exposed to the ceiling, the hallway empty, except for her, and nothing but the silence of a door that has been left purposely ajar.