On Tuesday and Friday mornings in the spring of 1979, end of that era of denim suits and leather sport coats and of course disco, I had a class called Ethics. I didn’t care much for the vagueness of the humanities but the pre-med degree required a certain number of hours in the Liberal Arts and Old Dr. Masterson, my semi-retired advisor, had suggested this one. I didn’t see how these obscure discussions would help one day when I had to decide whether to pull the plug on some poor failed body but it wasn’t especially difficult to read the texts and fill up the blue books.
   The campus was nearly walking distance from the city’s estate section which, as it happened after class one fine warm musk-on the-air heart-of-Spring Friday morning, I drove into. I’d learned a few days earlier that my boss, or rather the boss of my boss, the chief of us all in the hospital laboratory where I worked, had flown to Miami, Fla. Since I happened to know that his brother lived in Coral Gables, I took this to mean it was a family thing, that they’d all be down there, the wife and the daughter as well. I’d been fantasizing for weeks on their ruination, even to the extent of envisioning various bloody scenarios of murder (I’m ashamed now to admit that but I knew really that what I wanted was to see them in some living hell rather than the painless void of death, and anyway killing in the abstract isn’t so hard to consider, death having no stench in daydreams. I have in the intervening years come to know a few things about the stench of death). The truth was that the particular mechanism of how to bring about this happy end, the destruction of the Ted Kesslers, hadn’t exactly occurred to me yet; I had no idea really even in which direction it might lie. They were an unassailable monolith, moneyed and beautiful and installed high in the city’s society, but it was by-god pleasing to pass the stultifying hours in Ethics dreaming about fucking those people up.
   Their great grand house lay in the oldest part of the estate section on a narrow red-brick lane lined with oak trees and set deeply back in a grove of more oaks and evergreens and a single ancient willow that wept over all of it. It was built of brick and painted white, with a turret and a shale roof and a huge ever fresh wreath of woven sprigs on the front door, and in the back sat a wide three-bay two-story garage with swinging doors and a smaller turret of its own. It was all something from a dream, a place you could have spent your life with it’s weathered wood slatted furniture and sunlight-dappled pathways and glens, its vines and mossy trees. I first saw it late the previous fall and remember wondering then and each of the many times I saw it again throughout that winter what it must look like when it greened. Well here it was now before me, blossomed, fleshed-out, sprung.
   It’d rained through the night and the grass and the new leaves shined (even the tire wounds I’d made to the turf the month before had nearly healed). In addition to the city cruisers, private cops also patrolled these neighborhoods but the curtain of trees was so dense as to render the house barely visible from the road and who would suspect anything anyway? I was clean and trimmed-of-hair, obviously just a friend of the family over to check on their profusion of stuff while they were away, to make sure nothing looked awry, another good samaritan. I stepped out into the wet earthy scents of that eden and oh the colors vi brated, even the wide black driveway glistened like something new.
   The fact was that the simple act of putting my feet on that asphalt constituted a violation and, pathetic and inconsequential as it would probably end up being, I meant it as one. I trembled. It felt strangely like when I’d arrived for each of those earlier visits (that thudding of the heart, that thickness in the throat, that anticipatory scrotal tingling). Here finally I stood again breathing where she breathed, in immediate proximity to the things she touched and looked upon every day, to where she slept and bathed and dressed though she, Joyce, the doctor’s wife, my one time co-worker, my confidant, my playmate, was herself gone far away from it just then.
    I wondered if they kept a key under a mat or some other obvious place. The truth was I didn’t know if I’d dare do anything more than look around a little, but just that, the looking, the bare fact of being there unbidden, was something, and the simple possibility of doing more, of polluting them in some way, of my malice becoming manifest instead of this awful closeted gnawing made my barren inner landscape begin to feel as verdant again as the real world around me. Then as I stood before the big house a new fantasy came on -- of me, Syd Redding, going through her things.
   The front walkway was a mosaic constructed of heavy pieces of slate (some with a greenish cast, some pink, some gray). I remember wondering what this alone must have cost. I peered up at the glistening slate roof and then, as I walked along the edge of the porch examining the perfect shrubberies, the dog, Dog, barked. Inside the house. I moved back toward the front door, the realization of what his yappy presence meant just crystallizing in my brain when the door cracked open and Jessi Kessler (the daughter, sole progeny of the doctor and the nurse) gazed out at me.


from The Narcissist's Daughter, by Craig Holden, Copyright © 2005 by Craig Holden