To kill the nausea, to stop the throbbing in my brain. And to stop the voice that now began to whisper again: A man is dead. You killed him. Someone has to pay. It was Watts’s voice. And Bush’s. And Celia Cooper’s. But it was my voice, too, and it kept going on. You know in your heart you’ve done a terrible thing and that nothing will help you but to pay the price. It was true. I did know it. I knew it in my heart. I knew it on the surface of my knuckles where I still could feel the soft cartilage of Thad Reich’s windpipe breaking. I knew it behind my eyes where I still could see him dying. I knew it in the black weight that sat at the center of me. I knew it—and it was wrong. There was a bar right down at the corner of Second. I paused in front of it after I came out of Cooper House. I looked in the window, saw my reflection there. What the hell, I thought. I don’t have to go to work, anyway. I don’t have to do anything. I can sit and drink until the voices stop, until the images fade, until the heaviness inside gets lighter.
