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she’d forgotten about her own needs, such as companionship, desire, and love. She had smooth skin and a scent like baby powder. In truth, however, all I really knew about her was that she possessed a fierce intelligence. Whether she went home every night to spoon-feed and sponge-clean some aged father, or leapt headfirst into an orgiastic feast of bloated and disgruntled lesbian flesh, or simply watched television with a bowl of ice cream in her lap, I do not know. In fact, I had no time even to wonder or care. I was at stake, the boy was at stake, and she was the faceless and anonymous mouthpiece of our fate. Watching her drink sips of phantom coffee from the mug, I gathered that the boy made her job difficult. She didn’t seem to know how to reconstruct his story from what he said—a task that I have taken upon myself; it is the saddest story I have ever heard. At first, my intention was to wait for enough time to pass—giving me a safe distance from the horrid events—and then send my fuller reconstruction of the boy’s story to the social worker, to alleviate her confusion. But now I know that she is a deceptive, cruel monster who deserves no kindness from me. At the appropriate moment, I will relay her treachery and the boy’s defilement.
    After the initial police investigation, I was left alone. Yet the tentacles of their inquiry had wormed deeply into my life—how many calls to my mother, my colleagues, and my neighbors? I didn’t know. More than ashamed, I was terrified. I doubted that the investigation could just stop cold. Behind the sudden silence and peace, some massive onslaught seemed to be gathering strength and getting ready to crash over me at any second. The waiting drove me mad, so one night I pulled off the panel backing, took out the manila envelope, and carried it to the kitchen. Save for the flickering light cast by the gas burner, the room was dark. I put the stopper in the sink and turned on the faucet. First, I made ribbons out of each picture, one by one, with a pair of scissors, and then I picked up each piece with a set of metal salad tongs and watched the sliver of photograph dissolve and burn black in the blue flame of the stove. Each time, I held the burning strip above the sink as it curled and burned down, dropping ashes into the water. When I destroyed the last piece of evidence and thus, in a sense, dismembered and incinerated the freaky, naked man, I let the water out of the sink—but the ashes didn’t swirl away as I’d expected; instead, they coated the sink with gray scum, which, because of the darkness, I didn’t notice until the next morning.
    Even though this scum was the least incriminating trace of my case study, I became scared the instant I saw the residue: I had left myself vulnerable and exposed all night long. I went mad with panic. My heart leapt to life in my chest, as if it were a wild rodent suddenly tossed into a sack. However, while I was frantically scrubbing the sink, something peculiar happened to me. I seemed to step outside of myself for a moment and watch this tall, lanky man with pale arms, in his white tee-shirt and underwear, leaning into his sink. From this perspective, he looked absurd. What had made him so confused? What exactly had violated him to the breaking point? What had driven him to treat his own humanity as just a tangle of flayed skin that he used to cloak himself whenever he encountered another person? I began to see myself more clearly. The dark cloud of dread lifted a bit as a strange, new calm descended upon me. I understood that the most unsettling violation of my freedom was my fear that the authorities would never stop investigating and invading the life of their suspect, Parker the pervert. Yet where was my hiding place and from whom was I hiding? The spastic thing inside my chest began to settle down. I began to breathe again. Where are your accusers now? Who condemns you? I sensed that on