Chapter 1

She was the only person she knew who, if she could choose her own death, would choose to be burned alive. She understood that it was strange and horrible. She understood why most people shrank at the idea. She didn’t talk about it much, for that very reason. But there was something about the incredible aliveness of a death like that. Going out in an explosion of life. The searing pain overwhelming every sensation to the point where all you can do is scream and writhe and not even notice that you’re doing it. Some people want to die during orgasm. It’s the same idea.

The moment she realized that she would enjoy such a death, she stopped being afraid of things. Except one thing. It’s not what you might think. It’s a bit of a let down actually, for an adventurous imagination. So we’ll skip it.

She worked at night. She never slept, or she walked through life asleep all the time, she could never figure out which it was. It wasn’t insomnia though, whatever you might think. She wasn’t one of those people living in the perpetual fog of sleep-deprivation. Her difficulties differentiating between sleep and wakefulness did not stem from a lack of alertness. If anything, quite the opposite. This will become clearer as the story goes. To define it too specifically this early in the game would be giving away too much. And we must retain some level of mystery.

She was not a drug addict.

As far as she was concerned she had lived in New York City her entire life. She neither remembered nor cared for any life before New York. In that sense she was very young. To her own mind her life had begun mere months before. She needed that sense of newness to buoy her up over the years of suffering in friendlier places. It made her feel old and broken down to remain connected to her former life.

She had no ties, no family, no friends. Her hyper-disciplined positive attitude allowed her to view this as independence. And indeed it was. She liked to wander, to follow her own impulse. She enjoyed a very small amount of routine, but found an overly regular schedule to be oppressive. This fit into her pattern. She was very strict and regimented with herself on some things, extraordinarily loose and free on others.

She had a very keen and personal sense of right and wrong. She would never speak on the subject without careful consideration. She felt that the world was not black and white, or even shades of grey, but a myriad of color. She felt that there was always a right and a wrong in any situation, but it must be decided individually, internally, subjectively. She chose not to comment on the judicial system.

She was young and reasonably attractive. She viewed her body as a tool for expression, rather than her self. She enjoyed preening and decorating herself with colors, textures, and sparkles. And when she did so there was a touch of art in it. But just as often she simply wore clothes for their practical purposes of warmth and protection, and on these days luxuries such as jewelry and makeup were deemed superfluous.

She loved deeply and passionately. She loved life. She loved people. She could find ways to be extraordinarily and sublimely happy in the most mundane situations. She often exhausted herself this way and subsequently would have to spend many days in bed doing nothing.

She was a perfectionist. She deleted that sentence. I deleted that sentence.

“You’re coming into the work again, you need to get out,” she said.

Today she was walking down 6th avenue towards 16th street. She was going for a pointe shoe fitting. She had difficult feet for dance. Average arches, long toes (the 2nd toe being the longest) and compressible metatarsals. Her ankles would strain to keep her balanced in releve and she had a tendency to develop swelling above the heel bone as well as tendonitis. She had internally violent struggles with herself when these injuries required her to stop dancing.

She was in love. She was dangerously in love. She was intensely ambivalent. She approached the issue with calm indifference. She was committed to being single. She was married to her independence. She was married to her work. She was married to her self. She was tempted to infidelity. She was in love with four different men. She could only remember two of them. She was only worried about one of them. She wanted to be with a woman.

She thrived on suffering. She was not a masochist; she found bliss in overcoming obstacles, facing challenges, purging emotional bile. Contentment was fine as a transient state of being, but as a lifestyle it bored her. She preferred striving. Hell below, stars above.

She was coming from her friend’s photography studio on the Upper West Side. Her hair had grown and she needed new headshots. She felt awkward in front of a camera without a character to dictate her behavior. Acting a character, playing someone else, was deeply rewarding to her. But she could only be herself, not play herself. The photos would come out stiff, but acceptable. He was a good photographer.

The sidewalk was crowded. Faces and details snapped through her field of vision. Eye contact was made and quickly broken.

She had a long walk. She walked fast. She walked faster than most New Yorkers. She found the tiniest gaps in the crowd and slipped through them like water through gravel. She preferred walking alone. She could lose anyone in those crowds. She had only needed to once. So far. It had been easy.

She wore practical shoes. She only had practical shoes. She had more dance shoes than street shoes. She had worked in a shoe store once. She had made a great deal of money and had amassed a huge collection of high heels and platform sandals and brightly colored fashion sneakers and rhinestone studded flip-flops and boots of every height and color. Now she had one pair of all-occasion black leather boots for wear with jeans or skirts, one pair of flats for when the boots wouldn’t do, one pair of flip-flops for swimming pools and beaches, and one pair of shearling boots for very cold winters.

Today she wore the black leather motorcycle boots. They had stacked, Cuban heels that resonated on the concrete. They were the loudest shoes she owned. She liked them for walking. The slight rise in the heel pitched her forward, gave her momentum. She preferred flats for standing. They interfered less with her postural alignment.

She had never killed a man before today.