2

After I killed the first time, I went to the funeral, just to see if that would make me understand. Books told me that killing was wrong; movies told me that killing was wrong. People, newspapers, the news—they all told me that killing was wrong. I went to the closed-casket funeral with his crying family members and his crying friends and a eulogy that was too long and too boring about how he’d been such a great man and all that other nonsense.

There was a luncheon afterwards, and I sat amongst a knot of friends, some from work, some from college, some from childhood, who all exchanged boring stories about how great their dead friend had been. They assumed that my silence spoke for grief, not that I could barely remember his name. For a while I sat by his widow, with his children. The smallest one offered me a cookie, which was pretty good.
And then I went home and read boring books watched boring television sat and stared out my window and felt no remorse. Killing was the only thing that was difficult enough to be interesting, anymore. Later that day I went to the mall and chose a new patient, with red hair and a bright blue purse, and began the meticulous process, the agonizingly beautifully careful process, of finding out the details of her life that would lead to her death.