What do you say when your love tries to kill you? That's what I kept asking myself, feet slapping the pavement, walking up the front walk to the Anderson Women's Correctional Center. What do you say?

What I had to say was rooted in the past. It was anchored in memories.

We lay on the carpet, no fireplace blazing, no music playing. There was no soundtrack in our lives, we only had each other to establish rhythm, beat, meter, solace. I held on to her, and she held on to me, and we enacted every cliche we'd seen in the movies. At least, a few of them. Stoned, half-drunk, I still got it up and she still got off and in so far as that we were happy.

Crusty earthworms from the last rain.

I kicked among the pebbles from the drive where they hadn't paved it, there at the place where she was.

A while ago I'd read a magazine article. It was in a woman's magazine, while I sat in the waiting room at the dentist's office or the doctor's office or one of those bullshit places where you read magazines and waited. Those kinds of places always made me suspicious. Not nervous; suspicious. They had other reasons for my being there. So I sat there and acted normal and pretended not to know what anything was.

This article, "ten ways to love your man," it taught me more about less than any course I'd taken in college. I tried to file it all away, but what it amounted to was that I filed the experience of reading the article away, and lost the gist of what it contained. Is that what the readers of these magazines usually do?

It--the magazine article I mean--had helpful ideas about loving your man. I viewed it as an opportunity to learn about the other side. Generals in World War Two couldn't have been any less excited; here it was, laid bare, what these women, these people, were being taught. I read them. All ten ways "to love your man."

Her way wasn't on there.

That's why I'd never seen her read these kinds of magazines.

We were making love, at least that was the technical description of it all. I don't know. I just pretend and go along with the way things are going and try not to think about anything else. I can never concentrate on any single thing. I feel like I'm wasting effort if there aren't at least two things occupying my attention. Maybe everyone feels like this. Maybe I just haven't read the right magazine article.

This one wasn't the right one.

I sat on the vinyl seat and shifted uncomfortably. My tooth or side or whatever wasn't allowing me much comfort. The more I think about it, the more I think I was in a doctor's office when I read that. My side was hurting. It was stinging in the shower, when the shampoo ran down my chest from my hair and gave this feeling to me that wasn't inside.

Standing in the shower I cried. Cried aloud, at the stinging from my side. True sailing is dead. I think I almost screamed once but didn't and that was when I decided to go to the doctor's office.

We were in bed. I remember better. It wasn't on the carpet, in front of some fictitous fireplace where we'd lain all evening getting warm and together and wanting each other and all the things you saw in movies. Nothing was like that with her.

I'd learned better. We held each other and whispered and talked or watched a movie or listened to some music but most of all, and this is the most important thing you have to understand, we lay there and just kind of held on to each other or the world or whatever it was we were holding on to and tried to get it together, get it on, get down get blue get wild.

Mostly we just got it on.

I looked away from the stone monstrosity before me and saw my sneakered feet padding along, one step, two steps, three steps. You could spend your life counting these steps and all the rest and never really go anywhere. One step, two step, the Anderson Women's Correctional Center wasn't that far off now and I needed to be there I needed to be with her lying together feeling everything else around us.

We packed a lunch one day and went to the zoo. I liked watching the lemurs. They moved around like they could go a lot faster but didn't want to. We tried to move around like they did. I mean not consciously, we weren't trying to, but that's the way it ended up. We could see them, I guess it just rubbed off, there at the zoo. It was early in our days together, I knew we could go a lot faster and I guess she did too, but she knew even more. She always knew more about us than I did.

The lemurs at the zoo were dark and fluid. They sort of waddled around usually but sometimes they'd run like humans picture fire running. Fire doesn't run but we associate this certain movement with fire running, and that was the kind of movement the lemurs had at the zoo while she and I watched. I don't know. Maybe she shot me glances and I shot her glances. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know.

At christmas we had gone to see my parents and she was smiling. We sat there in the living room. My parents liked her. They liked her and they liked us together. She was the right kind of girl for me.

Then, "your son is a great fuck," she said and it all went away.

They sort of looked. They looked. They looked at us both. And it wasn't that we were fucking. That wasn't it. It was hearing this girl say this about their son. I looked at her and loved her, even while I was embarrassed and pissed off at her for doing this. I wanted to turn out the lights. I wanted to sit there in the dark with her and my parents and establish the commonality of our breathing because that was the most basic thing that joined us.

God damn it, can you understand how much I loved this girl?

Love this girl?

I wanted to make her happy. There. In front of my parents and everyone, hell it didn't matter more than it mattered to spit in the wind. It was the way I felt.

There.

With her. At the house. The house where my parents lived. They made up my old bed for me to sleep in. They made up the guest bedroom for her to sleep in. That night I lay awake and just like I thought she came into my room. Boom. She screamed out, cried out as we made love, just so my parents would know. I loved her then. And now.

Four years he said.

Good behavior I said and maybe she'd be out sooner.

Back at school we were together again. So much for christmas. At least they still paid my tuition. I'd never known anyone like her. It was all worth it. She was worth it.

We took a trip to St. Louis. Hadn't really been there. She hadn't grown up there. We were both out of state, going to school there. So St. Louis it was. Pedal to the metal. Flat out and crying aloud, windows rolled down,

How can I condense an entire moment like this? A moment isn't a moment. It isn't some span of a few seconds you can put on paper. A moment is a moment is a moment is a time, a life, a time together. Moments aren't created, they're shared in mutual awareness.

She taught me all that. No more. She taught me all that. No more. When I couldn't be with her I didn't think of her constantly. It wasn't like it was in the books and things. I didn't sit on marble rests pining for her when she wasn't there. I lived and worked and went on and then she would be there or I would find her and things would go on. That was the way it was.

She would sometimes talk about the way things were. The way her things were. One opinion doesn't make a universe. We didn't have some kind of phony parity where we both liked peanut butter and bananas like those stupid fake people do in the fictions. We weren't like that. We were real people. I know we were.

Nothing else makes sense.

At my parents' house there was a christmas tree. I remember as a kid for several christmases the tree would be in the garage and my parents would be upstairs. I would drag the tree in, move the furniture, lay down the sheets, prepare the tree stand, stand the tree up and fasten it down. I would go get the ornaments from the attic before they remodeled it, when it was still strange and mysterious. My mom used to have her painting studio up there but it was kind of abandoned. My old toys would accumulate up there. I remember there were these two knotholes in the floor. There were others, but then there were these two. Once I took some of mom's paints. I went to one knothole and painted "DOWN" next to it with an arrow pointing into the hole. I went to the other and painted "UP" next to it with an arrow pointing away from the hole.

I remember when soft drinks still came in glass bottles. I was very young. I thought it would be neat to get a blowtorch or something and cut a hole in the side of a bottle near the bottom. Then you could drop folded pieces of paper in the top, like a lottery or something, and pick one out at the bottom where the hole let you pick one out at random. This is the kind of thing I thought about when I was young.

I thought about love.

It wasn't the way I thought it would be. I thought it would be this wonderful thing where you and she would know, you would know and everything would just be right and there wouldn't be these basic questions about who loved who and who did what. Sure there would be questions and little worries, but the big things, the big questions, well that was what love was supposed to settle right out at the beginning.

That wasn't right. The big questions, well maybe life answers those just before it leaves you cold. That's my best guess. Love didn't answer these questions for me. It just made them both more intense and more forgettable if that makes sense.

Choose Your Own Adventure.

That's what they were called. These books. They were like books but the different passages were numbered. You were a character in these books. You could pick which direction you went in. Lots of options were there. Lots of endings were there. They promised to simulate life, at least in my mind. In the first one I bought I was going along and I was on another planet and it asked if I wanted to take a rest. I did and a space tiger or something ate me. So that was life. I still kept on buying those books when I could. "Your Code Name Is Jonah" and others.

I just had a beer and was smoking a cigar. I knocked the cigar about in the bottle of the beer to knock the ashes off, because I forgot there was still beer in there. I realized my mistake. I drank the beer anyway.

She and I stayed together, through that spring. Things were going well, I guess, as well as they could for two people who had been in love before, but until they found each other hadn't had that feeling returned.

The killer awoke before dawn.

We were lying together in bed. I was asleep. She wasn't. She got up. I stayed asleep. She walked on down the hall. Down the stairs. Into the kitchen.

It was pain that woke me up. It wasn't her. She was touching me when she did it. She was touching me there and I suppose I felt it somehow. But it didn't wake me up. Maybe it would have. Maybe if it had she wouldn't have done it.

Before she did it she used it on herself. Her arm was dripping when she was touching me.

She always touched me like no one else did. She touched me and caressed me and dripped on me. The blood on her arm ran down her soft skin and dripped onto me.

Then she took the knife that was in her hand and she drove it into me.

I woke up and screamed. I had never screamed like I did then. She had never driven me to that point until then. At that point I cried out and I screamed, my muscles jerked and spasmed.

She pulled it out of me. It was serrated. Perhaps it hurt more coming out of my side than it did going in.

She did it again.

And again.

I screamed and cried out and she was dripping her own blood on me and we should have both died then.

If we had both died maybe we would have both been happy. Instead I reached out and grabbed the blade. I was half-awake. I didn't know what was going on. I didn't know what she was doing. If I did, maybe I wouldn't have stopped her.

I just don't know.

But stop her I did. I grabbed onto the blade because that was the first solid thing I found when my hand shot up to stop the instrument of pain. I didn't really find it. I found the blade and it cut my hand and it hurt, but that wasn't the source of the pain.

She pushed down. The serrated ripples in the knife blade tore the skin of my palm. Tore it up. Blood. Pain. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know.

She was sitting up on her knees, naked in the bed, straddling me. My eyes popped open. I could see her, bleary through the early morning blur. I remember crying out. Screaming, according to what the others said.

I loved her.

She was there. My first memory of that time was of her face. My eyes popped open. I saw her above me. Her face was so perfectly loving, so full of love. God damn it, god damn it, I loved her right then. Her face was perfection. Perfect love. I knew how much she loved me. My body was crying out, I was jerking in the little bed. Everything inside me that was instinctive was jerking away. Everything inside me that was emotional was jerking back. This was love. She loved me. I loved her. I could see her face. I could see the face of god. I could see everything that any human ever saw that was better and more loving than anything else in our experience. It was all there. It was all better. It was the best.

I loved her. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know.

I walked along the sidewalk. The correctional center was just ahead. She was there.

She loved me. She made a mistake. She thought we were human. She thought we couldn't love each other any more than we had. She thought we had gone as far as we could and still be human. Her court-appointed psychologist said she thought we could become something more.

We could have. But they stopped us. All of them. My friends. Charlie in the next room. Brian down the hall. Jeff, who called the police. None of them understood. All they knew was me screaming. All they knew was me lying in bed. Blood around me. The sheets bloody. Her sitting there. We were both naked. She sitting on the bed, over me, fighting against me to drive the knife into me one more time. She sitting there. Knife in hand. My hand clutching the blade of my knife, drawing blood.

Get together one more time.

She was still pushing, my strength against hers, holding off the knife. I wasn't awake. I wasn't awake. I wasn't aware. I was only protecting myself. As an animal would. If I had known what she was doing I wouldn't have stopped her.

I walked along the walk. The guards stopped me. Searched me. Put me through the process. Opened the doors.

At the trial they said she was insane. They talked about me as little as possible. I guess the jury thought we were just a normal couple until she "freaked out" as my lawyer said.

My parents took care of the lawyer. They didn't think I could take care of myself. After all, I had "found" her. I had drawn her. I had chosen her.

All bullshit.

I didn't find her. We found each other. Everything would have been perfect. But you always think the one you love doesn't understand as well. You always think the one you love doesn't love you as much as you love them. I understand that now. She didn't understand that when she did it. She didn't understand that I would understand. But I did. If we could have communicated better she would have. But we could have understood.

There was blood on the sheets and the bed. There was blood on the knife. I had bought that knife. It was serrated. It was passably sharp. It was sharp enough to do what needed to be done.

I sat in the chair. It wasn't a vinyl chair. It wasn't like that chair at the office where I read the magazine article. It was just solid and complete and it sat in the visiting area. There were eight chairs just like it. There were eight other chairs also just like it on the other side where she was. We were separated by some sort of plastic.

It wasn't worth much. I looked at her through it. We were still together.

She looked different than I remembered. Her face was thinner, more haggard. Three months in the jail hadn't been the kindest three months of her life. But I loved her still.

She looked back at me. I loved her still. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know.

There at the Anderson Women's Correctional Center she looked at me through the plastic that didn't separate us and she loved me still. In her eyes I could see what she had done to me. I could feel the itching in my gut where she did it. I could still feel her love there.

In my eyes I could see that she still wanted to do it. She still wanted to do more of the same. That was how much she loved me. I loved her. What do you say when your love wants to kill you?

So I just loved her back. I looked at her through the plastic. I loved her.

I loved her still.

And she loved me.

And that was all that mattered.