At the Bureau of Divine Music

The Empress

13 The Empress It had become clear that the only way to rid her from our faces was to kill her. Apart from what she always did for us, we still could be an easygoing lot of negligible ingrates. The fact that she had offered us our freedom from desire in a world made plentiful by her largesse, granting us all the gift of who she was— combined with her insufferable presumption to owning those she gave the things she owned— fastened us to one common frame of mind that bodied forth the doing of the deed. Everyone’s eyes were wide with rectitude when this imperative belonged to me. I took the matter up with energy befitting my disdain. Her dropping over later that weekend fell in perfectly with inclinations to perform some act that graced a naked aptitude for rage. She came to sit and smoke as usual, filling the kitchen nook with talk of how she knew my heart better than anyone, because, of course, she had the means to know it, which was true enough for her, and me as well, if she said so, and kept on saying so in words that spun like the blue clouds that rose above her chair out of her great toad’s head, which, in mid-word, I wrenched by its black hair to snap her neck as clean as a dry stick against the top rung, having stepped up behind 14 just as her cackle from a thought she loved had spasmed enough to let her think again and start to say whatever I might have learned, had I the hunger to keep listening. She always put her feet up on the table, so when her face looked at me upside down, her feet flew up and kicked the kitchen lamp, which leapt and wobbled wildly as she dropped onto the floor. I smoothly stepped aside. Then everyone filed in from the next room. They took turns guessing what she might have said if she had caught the breath to let me know. One of them thought it no doubt had to do with how much she enjoyed being filthy rich, as often her grotesque self-satisfaction led her to blurt with candid gaiety. Now she is filthy dead, somebody added, expecting laughter, but nobody laughed. Insouciance like a god’s had come instead to fill the place with new tranquility and bring the gift of easeful liberty that we had no one but ourselves to thank for. Something was here that had to do with love that nobody understood, not even me. After a while, I sat there by myself. They carried her to her car and drove her home. One of them called and said her dog had come and curled up at her feet on the lounge chair where they had stretched her by the swimming pool. Her housekeeper would see her the next day 15 and go about her chores, not noticing anything wrong, not even an odd smell. Later I might stop over to drop off the black sapphire I found on the kitchen floor. ...