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hand—in fact he appeared to be brandishing the knife—ran back to his vehicle, climbed inside and slammed shut the door and in virtually the same instant propelled the van forward head-on and lurching—Madeleine heard the protesting shriek of rubber tires against pavement—reckless now the fleeing man aimed the van into a narrow space between another vehicle and the torn-up roadway where construction workers in safety helmets had ceased work to stare—knocking aside a sawhorse, a series of orange traffic cones scattering in the street and bouncing off other vehicles as in a luridly colorful and comic simulation of bowling pins scattered by an immense bowling ball; by this time the stricken man was kneeling on the pavement desperately pressing both hands—these were bare hands, Madeleine could see from a distance of no more than twelve feet—against his ravaged throat in a gesture of childlike poi-gnancy and futility as blood continued to spurt from him Like water from a hose—horrible!
    In a paralysis of horror Madeleine observed the stricken man now fallen—writhing on the pavement in a bright neon-red pool—still clutching desperately at his throat, as if the pressure of his hands could staunch that powerful jet-stream—vaguely Madeleine was becoming aware of a frantic din of horns—traffic was backed up for blocks on northbound West Street as in a nightmare of mangled and thwarted movement like snarled film. Help me! help me out of here! —nothing so mattered to Madeleine Karr as escaping from this nightmare—she was thinking not of the stricken man a short distance from the front bumper of the Volvo—not of his suffering, his terror, his imminent death—she was thinking solely of herself—in raw animal panic yearning only to turn her car around—turn her damned car around, somehow—reverse her course on accursed West Street back to the Holland Tunnel and out of New York City—to the Jersey Turnpike—and so to Princeton from which scarcely ninety minutes before she’d left with such exhilaration, childlike anticipation and defiance Manhattan is so alive!—Princeton is so embalmed. Nothing ever feels real to me here, this life in disguise as a wife and a mother of no more durability than a figure in papier-mâché. I don’t need any of you!
    But that was ninety minutes before. Driving along leafy Harrison Street over the picture-book canal to Route 1 north in blustery skidding patches of winter sunshine.
    Through a constricting tunnel—as if she were looking through the wrong end of a telescope—Madeleine became aware of other people—other pedestrians cautiously approaching the dying man—workmen from the construction site—a young patrolman on the run—a second patrolman—there came then a deafening siren—sirens—emergency vehicles approached on a side-street peripheral to Madeleine’s vision—now there were figures bent over the fallen man—the fallen man was lifted onto a stretcher, carried away—until at last there was nothing to see but a pool of something brightly red like old-fashioned Technicolorglistening on the pavement in cold March sunshine. And the nightmare didn’t end. The police questioned all the witnesses they could find. They came for me, they took me to the police precinct. For forty minutes they kept me. I had to beg them, to let me use the women’s room—I couldn’t stop crying—I am not a hysterical person but I couldn’t stop crying—of course I wanted to help the police but I couldn’t seem to remember what anything had looked like—what the men had looked like—even the “skin color” of the man with the knife—even of the man who’d been stabbed. I told them that I thought the van driver had been dark-skinned—maybe—he was “young”—in his twenties possibly—or