Free A Masterpiece of Revenge by J.J. Fiechter

stairs slowly and deliberately, and opened the door to my apartment without haste. Then I sat in my chair and calmly slit open the letter, as if it were a mailing from a charitable society. All this took an enormous effort of will.
    I drew out the photograph of Jean-Louis. He was captured jogging through some beautiful countryside. You could see the sea far off in the distance, in the middle distance were towering trees, and, on the left-hand side, some large rocks. The photo had the composition of a painting, I noted. It was slightly overexposed.
    I was forcing myself to maintain my composure, when something in the picture made me cry out in rage and fear.
    On Jean-Louis’s forehead, exactly between his eyes, was a small point of red light, perfectly round and precise. My God. A laser sight from a high-powered rifle, the sort that can kill from two hundred yards away. That was what made that sort of light. Practically every Hollywood action film these days featured them.
    Part of me knew that this idea was crazy, but the supposition was enough to unhinge me. The word “laser” echoed over and over in my brain, followed by images of… of— I couldn’t bear it — images of horror. A voice was telling me something.
    â€œTerrible forces are at work here.”
    A voice? Whose voice? Where? I was inside my apartment. Was somebody else also inside? I ran down the hall into the kitchen, then into my bedroom. I was dimly aware that I was throwing open drawers in my dresser — looking for what I now have no idea — then collapsed in a heap on my bed and broke down in sobs.
    I was a complete mess, a creature of hysteria and madness, alternating moans and prayers and incoherent cries of anguish. I implored God, I implored my invisible enemy. Had I known who my tormentor was I would have run to him and prostrated myself. I, Charles Vermeille!
    For weeks I had been caught in the black magic of despair. Nothing made sense but everything was ominous, and fanatically, terribly meaningful. I grasped at straws. It was all like Kafka, or Emile Zola.
    Emile Zola. My apartment building was located on rue Vineuse, which was the setting Zola had chosen for that grim melodrama,
A Page of Love
. The novel is about a good woman whose heart is supposedly taken over by “evil.”
    It all starts with the death of her child. Suddenly this had deep resonance in my soul.
    I ran to my library to find a copy of that dreary little book. It had been years since I’d read it, but I was sure I had one somewhere. I found it.
    One never reads the same book twice. That is a simple and profound truth. It is not the words that have changed, but the person reading them. I had hardly remarked on the novel the first time I read it. On that day, however, every sentence seemed a reflection of my predicament. That poor woman! She falls in love with a married man, and for this she must endure horrific punishment. The child must die.
    What did that mean? Was I to be the cause of my son’s death? Instead of rooted in a father’s love, were my feelings for him rooted in destructive selfishness? Did my sin lie in believing Jean-Louis was mine alone?
    I got up and opened the window. Much about the city had changed since Zola’s day, of course, but on that night his description in the book matched what I saw: “Paris, illuminated by a luminous cloud, the fiery blast of a furnace hovering over the city, produced by the groaning lives that it devours and spews out as fire and brimstone, like the clouds of smoke and steam that gather around the mouth of a volcano.”
    I snapped the book shut and picked up the photograph of Jean-Louis, the most recent one. Something strange was stirring within me, struggling to rise to the surface of my consciousness. Memories, images. I could neither stop them nor explain them. A countryside; trees looking as if they had been painted, leaf by leaf; expanses of sky; a small waterfall