Free A Masterpiece of Revenge by J.J. Fiechter Page A

and — over on the left — a fallen tree in the foreground; a play of light.
    I knew this vision.
    The scenes evaporated like bubbles, like words that form on the tip of the tongue and then dissolve. I was left with a feeling of unease and uncanny strangeness. Deja vu.
    â€œColumns. Where are the columns?” a voice within me asked.
    I went into my study and put the photo under ultraviolet light, then pored over every square inch, convinced now that I would find something to help me understand. No, nothing. I decided to enlarge it on a screen with a projector. I stood in front of it for half an hour, forcing myself to look at it not as a photograph of my son, but as a composition, as a work of art.
    I focused all my attention on that tiny point of light. Could it be a reflection from a mirror — a watch crystal, or a magnifying glass, perhaps — made to look like a laser point? For that to be so, my son would have had to have been a willing participant, holding his pose while the reflection could be beamed on the point between his eyes.
    That was not possible. It had to have been a reflection, an accident, a fluke. For the first time in hours, my breathing slowed.
    Now that the point of light no longer drew all my attention, I began to look at the landscape around him, staring at it until my eyelids began to get heavy and the need to sleep overpowered me. I went into the bedroom and collapsed onto the bed fully clothed, and then fell into a deep sleep.
    How many times since this whole miserable business began I had been jolted from sleep, seized with a spasm that gripped my guts and set my throat on fire. I would barely make it into the bathroom to vomit into the sink, my whole body wracked with nausea.
    Then, straightening up, I would look at my reflection in the mirror. I was a vision of horror in the dim morning light — gasping like a carp on a kitchen table, trying to take in large, milky gulps of air.
    This time I awoke feeling refreshed. My body seemed to have rid itself of torpor and was preparing itself for combat — though with whom or with what I had no idea. I didn’t feel threatened so much as challenged. I felt a sense of dark jubilation at what lay ahead.
    Here was what I had realized: if someone were threatening me for some reason other than money, it was because they were afraid of me. I was the threat to them, not the other way around. What I was therefore experiencing was
their
fear — my system was reacting as if to a foreign body. The question was, why?
    I felt I would soon learn the answer. Waiting was now not only the only thing to do, it was the only reasonable thing to do. Reason, at last, reason.

6
    T he following night I had the oddest dream. I was cleaning the sky and the trees in the Luxembourg Gardens with a sponge soaked in mercury chloride. I was trying to uncover an image of Jean-Louis. Instead appeared one of the three Arcadian shepherds in that famous painting by Poussin, the shepherd on bended knee in the right-hand side of the painting. He was pointing toward some Roman ruins in the background and saying, “Over there. Over there is where you should scrub. Can’t you see it’s filthy?”
    I dreamt that I tried to make my way toward the ruins, but the wind was blowing hard against me and I couldn’t reach them.
    I woke with the sensation that I had been in touch with something deep in my subconscious. That I had found some kind of key.
    The landscape, that strange dream, the Arcadian shepherd. Uniting them all was a distinct impression of deja vu. I was on the threshold of a mystery and the solution was inside me. I wasn’t waiting for a phone call, or a telegram, or a knock at the door. No, I was waiting for … myself. What I was sensing was the approach of an answer, a denouement. Danger is oddly less threatening when it is imminent.
    For the first time in weeks I was able to keep down a little breakfast, and make at least a