Soul/Mate

by Joyce Carol Oates

  He helped her into the kitchen, where she sat, sat and stared at him: stunned, perplexed, rather blank. What had he been telling her? That he’d killed two people, or more? That he was a killer. He—her friend? Her friend Colin Asch? She thought, I must telephone the police. I must get help. It had not yet occurred to her that she was in the presence of a dangerous man.

  Nor did he seem to her mad. He was pacing about the kitchen talking excitedly but lucidly, berating himself for his “insensitivity” and then, in the next breath, declaring that “it couldn’t be helped”—Dorothea had to know because she had to help him. (But what was he expecting, Dorothea wondered. What did he want of her?) If his manner was extravagant, histrionic, hadn’t it always been so? The brass clamp flashed in his ear as his eyes flashed, and his quick nervous smile; the heat that almost palpably radiated from him might have been mere high spirits, energy, the hyperkinesia of youth. Dorothea said, “You didn’t really, Colin, did you? What you said—”

  “Didn’t really what?”

  “—Agnes Carpenter, and Roger Krauss—”

  “Yeah? What?”

  “Didn’t—kill?”

  The very word stuck in Dorothea Deverell’s throat.

  Colin Asch regarded her with bemused eyes. She saw that his face was angular and lean, the bones of the cheeks, brows, and forehead far more prominent than she’d remembered. He had lost weight—too much weight. His face gleamed with perspiration like anger, and his striped sports shirt was soaked through beneath the arms. “What did you want me to say, Dorothea? No? Is that what you want to hear—no?”

  “Just—tell me the truth.”

  “OK: the truth is yes.”

  “But—why?”

  “I told you, Dorothea: for you.”

  “For me?”

  “For you. But also, like, ’cause I wanted to—Colin Asch never does anything that isn’t ordained.”

  “But I don’t understand,” Dorothea said gropingly. “You have come here today to tell me—”

  “I’ve come here today to tell you that I’m not happy the way I deserve, that things are fucked up, that I need your help, Dorothea—your advice and consolation!” he said in a high plaintive voice. “I need some sign from you that things are all right. That, you know, things are—in place again.”

  “In place?”

  “Like you said once about appetite, people doing what they have to do, like carnivores, and their victims—I forget the exact words; I have them written down—it was a way of explaining, it made sense. And you looked at me too like you knew me, you recognized me. And I recognized you.”

  He fell silent, contemplating Dorothea Deverell; Dorothea could only shut her eyes. She tried to comprehend: if Colin Asch were a murderer, and if he were confessing two of his crimes to her, did that mean that a murderer was confessing to her—to Dorothea Deverell? And, if so, did that mean she must bear witness against him?

  But I am his only friend, she thought.

  She said, with more resolve than she felt, “But, Colin, you must know that I will have to inform the police. If what you say is true—”

  “The police? You think so? Yeah?”

  “—there seems to have been a terrible, tragic misunderstanding, and I—”

  “Nobody’s informing the police of anything, Dorothea,” Colin Asch said matter-of-factly. “It’s got nothing to do with them; they’re completely at a distance. It’s got nothing to do with Krauss and Mrs. Carpenter either, much—it’s just between you and me. Which you knew all along.”

  “But—”

  Colin shouted her down: “Which you knew all along!”

  Dorothea flinched as he went to the telephone and knocked the receiver off the hook. In an instant he was enraged, out of control. “You’re not telling the police and you’re not telling anyone! I’d have to kill us both right now, right here, and I’m not fucking ready!”

  After several seconds the telephone began to emit a series of harmless warning beeps; then went silent.

  How silent, indeed, Sunday afternoons were, in the leafy cul-de-sac at the end of Marten Lane!

  Dorothea thought, So that is his plan.

  She thought, So Charles and I will never marry after all.

  She’d begun to cry without quite knowing it. Colin Asch said sullenly, “We’d better go.” When he went into the living room, to retrieve his duffel bag perhaps, Dorothea decided to make a run for it—thinking, in her desperation, she might go next door, scream at her neighbors to call the police—but of course Colin Asch easily caught her: she’d barely gotten out the side door, would have had to grope her way through the darkened garage to another, outer door. Hurt, fierce, incredulous, Colin Asch cried, “I knew it! Now I can’t trust you either!”

  His grip on Dorothea was surprisingly strong, practical, not in the least hesitant. Dorothea, struggling, weeping, felt his warm moist breath like a dog’s against her face and smelled the harsh acrid odor of his perspiration. For the first time the fact of the young man’s physical self, his sexuality, struck her.

  “We’d better go,” he said. “Before Carpenter comes. ’Cause I am ready for him.”

  Seemingly out of nowhere Colin Asch had drawn a pistol. It had a long smooth barrel and a handsome carved wooden handle, like a work of art.

  So, at 4:50 P.M. of Sunday, May 8, began what would be Dorothea Deverell’s nearly one hundred hours of terror: though “terror” as such, with its intense, visceral, adrenaline-charged distress, could hardly be sustained for so prolonged a period of time. Afterward, contemplating the wild, doomed flight on which Colin Asch took her, Dorothea would recall feeling alternately resigned and fatalistic as if, in a sense, she were already dead and merely enacting a prescribed role; and alternately hopeful, even optimistic—as, perhaps, condemned prisoners feel, anticipating the reprieve they know cannot come.

  Before they left Dorothea Deverell’s house, Colin Asch forced her to go upstairs to her bedroom so that she could change her clothes; it was his idea that they would be less readily identified if they looked like two men. That was the first baffle, he said. (Dorothea believed the word was “baffle” but did not inquire.) So, trembling, biting her lip to keep from crying, Dorothea Deverell, her captor close by, changed from the attractive clothes she had so deliberately put on earlier that day—a beige pleated skirt in light wool, a hand-decorated wool-and-cotton sweater—into navy blue rayon slacks, and an old gardening shirt, and an old sweater. Colin Asch insisted that she pin up her hair and wear a hat, and to this too Dorothea acquiesced, though the only suitable hat was a very old mothball-reeking green angora cap she’d worn one winter to keep her ears warm and forgot she still owned. Take whatever you need, Colin Asch instructed, having gallantly located one of Dorothea’s suitcases and holding it open for her—underclothes, socks, another shirt and another sweater, toiletries—then he led her into her study where he insisted she bring along some books and “things you’re working on—you might not be back for a long time.” In the kitchen he loaded several grocery bags with food from Dorothea’s cupboards and refrigerator, whistling as he did so, exclaiming to himself, not unlike a boy about to embark upon an outdoor adventure. How innocent he seems, Dorothea thought, in wonderment. The long-barreled pistol was stuck, with rakish insouciance, in his belt.

  “OK! Great! Let’s go!” he said.

  Not the black Porsche but another automobile entirely awaited them in Dorothea Deverell’s driveway (later to be identified as Susannah Hunt’s 1988 Audi, though outfitted with license plates from the Porsche: Mrs. Hunt would be found dead, strangled, in her bed in her Normandy Court condominium), its rear seat and trunk partly filled with Colin Asch’s things; but there was space for Dorothea’s too. Handing her the keys Colin told her she should be the first to drive. “It will be more practical for me to drive after dark.” He spoke with a husbandly solicitude.

  And, later, when he took over the wheel for a long siege of driving—by that time they were well into New Ha
mpshire, on northwest-bound Route 89—he extracted from Dorothea the promise that she would not try to escape from the car by doing anything crazy or reckless like opening her door while they were in motion, nor would she make signals at people in other cars; if she involved others, Colin warned her, he’d be forced to shoot them dead: “You’d be signing their death warrants, Dorothea.”

  So she obeyed. Rather like a zombie, or a robot.

  Thinking repeatedly, this can’t be happening … such things do not happen to people like us.

  It seemed like a very long time before they stopped for what remained of the night. Somewhere, Dorothea had the groggy idea, in upstate New York, in a desolate wooded area off the expressway. Colin Asch, unable to stay awake any longer, positioned himself to sleep with his arm around Dorothea’s shoulders and his head resting hard against hers, so that he would be immediately wakened if she tried to slip free. That way, there was no escaping him, even in sleep. Even in the fitful, twitchy, hallucinatory bouts of sleep to which each succumbed.

  “Won’t you please reconsider?” Dorothea Deverell was not quite begging but speaking quietly, practicably. “I’m sure that allowances might be made if you haven’t been well, if you’ve been”—she hesitated to say the word “hospitalized”; now driving the Audi, her eyes aching with the light as if she’d been ill, she scarcely dared glance over at Colin Asch, her captor—“not well. I mean, if you have a history of—of episodes.”

  Colin Asch, arms folded, lying back in the passenger’s seat with his head against the window in a sullen sort of pose, merely grunted.

  “I would tell them how considerate you’ve been of me,” Dorothea said carefully, wetting her lips, “how you haven’t”—and again she hesitated, not wanting to say the word “hurt”—“haven’t threatened me”—though this was not quite true: he’d threatened her after all. In a desperate little plea she concluded, “But you’re so intelligent, Colin! You must know the police will pick us up soon!”

  “A lot of things can happen, Dorothea, before that happens.”

  They stopped for gas. They stopped at a truckers’ restaurant where Colin, pistol inside his shirt, bought hot food, coffee. They stopped on a lookout point—a “scenic site”—in the Adirondack Mountains not many miles from the Canadian border. Dorothea’s mind worked swiftly and with seeming proficiency but to no purpose. She would signal someone (at a gas station, at a restaurant, beside the road, in another car) to get help; she would escape from her captor (perhaps wrestling with him for the gun); she would call attention to them, or to the car, in some way: the same few thoughts repeating endlessly, to no purpose. She thought of Charles Carpenter, who had by now come to her house and found it empty—her car still in the garage but some of her clothes and possessions missing, food missing from the kitchen. Would he know? But how would he know? And when he called the police how would they know? Several times she broke down, sobbing, near-hysterical, and Colin Asch said, rubbing his own eyes roughly with a fist, “Just don’t give in, for Christ’s sake.”

  As if, Dorothea thought, amazed, their predicaments were identical; they were united in their desperation to escape.

  It had been Colin Asch’s bold intention to cross the Canadian border into Quebec, but each time they approached the customs and immigration checkpoints—at Trout River and Hogansburg, in New York, and at Derby Line, Vermont—he changed his mind; wisely, no doubt, for by this time there must be a police alert out for them, or for their car. (Dorothea did not know that Susannah Hunt was dead but Colin had told her that the car was registered in Mrs. Hunt’s name.) On this protracted giddy headachy second day of flight they drove in wayward looping circles, so far as Dorothea could judge, mainly along narrow mountain roads, where dusk came prematurely and brought a feathery barrage of snowflakes. “This is madness, Colin,” Dorothea said. “We simply can’t keep this up.”

  Colin Asch yawned brutally and said, “You want to stop, then? You’re ready?”

  At least, she thought, Charles has been spared.

  But Colin Asch’s mood was rather more nervous, petulant, and distracted than murderous; he drove along ever-narrowing roads, turning up forks, reconsidering, backing out again, as if guided by instinct; bringing them at last to a deserted lakeside area of cottages and lodges, Glace Lake the name. Was this near the place where his parents died? Dorothea wondered.

  At the far end of a rutted lane was a lodge of weatherized logs in mock-Swiss chalet style; a shingle above its front door announced LAND’S END. As Dorothea Deverell, reeling with exhaustion, stepped out into the freezing air, it struck her as the most bitter sort of irony that she might very well die here.

  Colin Asch adroitly forced a door at the rear of the house and let himself in and came to the front door, where, not having moved an inch, Dorothea awaited him. She’d begun to cough helplessly. She was on the verge of illness: a raw burning ache had established itself in her throat, and she felt the early symptoms of bronchitis. Almost shyly, apologetically, Colin said, “OK, Dorothea, come inside! I’ll unload the car. Maybe you can find a hurricane lamp or something.”

  “Yes,” Dorothea said tonelessly.

  She came stumblingly inside the unfamiliar house where the long-confined air, smelling of dirt and damp, was as cold as outside. A cruel parody of a homecoming, she thought. A parody of a honeymoon.

  Fearing a caretaker at Glace Lake, Colin hid the car somewhere to the rear of the house and shrouded the windows; smoke from the chimney was unavoidable—he had to start a fire in the fireplace. (The gas stove in the kitchen was disconnected; the electricity was turned off.) Clumsily, her fingers stiff, Dorothea prepared a makeshift sort of meal for them, using the fireplace. It was sobering, how ferociously hungry each of them was—no matter the metallic taste of the soup, heated in a stained saucepan, or the bread’s staleness. They devoured hunks of cheese, slices of turkey breast, raw carrots. Like animals, Dorothea thought, feeding.

  Then she slept close beside the fireplace, or tried to, in a kind of delirium: her teeth chattering with cold, misery, simple dread of what was to come; waking to spasms of coughing and pain in her throat and chest. Her captor was too excited to sleep—he’d boasted that he needed no more than three or four hours of sleep for every twenty-four—he spent much of the night (Dorothea gathered) prowling about the house with a flashlight; then, near dawn, she woke with a start to a pressure on her leg—and there was Colin Asch, curled up innocent as a child, or a large dog, heavily asleep on the floor close by her with his face pressed against the calf of her right leg. His pale beard glinted like silver, his mouth was slack, his breath moist and gurgling.… Dorothea hugged herself in the frowsty-smelling blanket Colin Asch had located for her in one of the closets and stared at her captor, her friend, her former friend: whom after all she had never known. Colin Asch was mad, but what was “mad”? That the young man had evidently killed two quite innocent people, and for a purpose he could not explain; that he felt not the slightest twinge of remorse, or, indeed, full consciousness of his actions; that he fervently believed Dorothea Deverell’s life and fate were inextricably bound up with his own: these were mere facts that lay upon the surface of his being like the fact that he had blond hair, brown eyes, a strong-boned angular face. Such facts described but did not define him.

  In the morning a chill glowering sunshine penetrated the coverings Colin had affixed over the windows; with the return of day, or daylight, a sense of ever deeper malaise overtook Dorothea Deverell. As, noisy, ebullient, whistling to himself in a display of cheery high spirits, Colin prepared breakfast, Dorothea made little effort to help; she was sick and would be getting sicker: her limbs stiff, tears dried in her eyes. She could not imagine what she looked like, what desperation flickered feebly in her face; nor did she care. She wondered why, during the night, she had not taken advantage of the darkness and fled.… Surely Colin Asch would not shoot her in the back? Surely that was not to be her fate at his hands?

  That day, intermitten
tly, when she dared, Dorothea tried to engage Colin Asch in conversation, frankly pleaded with him. What did he hope to accomplish, hiding out here in the mountains? How long could they endure it? What did he intend to do next—or if they were discovered? Colin Asch told her airily that he was sorry things had turned out exactly as they had. “But, Dorothea, after all, none of this is my fault.” In a tone of mild reproach he told her that he would have continued on his way, back in November, pursuing another phase of his life, if it hadn’t been for her—“Like there was a promise you made to me, Dorothea. That first night.”

  “Promise? I don’t understand.”

  “Yes, Dorothea. You do.”

  Colin removed the coverings from the windows, and opened the rear door of the house, but did not leave the house at all; nor did he allow Dorothea to do so. He was jumpy, apprehensive, breaking off in the middle of a sentence to cock his head and listen: was it a loon on the lake? an airplane passing high overhead? a chain saw in the distance? a scrambling, as of squirrels, in the eaves? He fingered the pistol, checked the bullets in the revolving cylinder, laid the barrel alongside his nose as if in a parody of contemplation, strode about with the gun loosely stuck in his belt. Dorothea eyed it, thinking: Am I required to try to take it from him and use it against him? Is that expected of me? There was no vision of Dorothea Deverell, no extravagant cinematic daydream, in which, for even a fleeting moment, she could imagine such an act: she no more wanted to shoot Colin Asch then she wanted to be shot by him.

  Colin squatted on his heels in front of a ramshackle bookshelf, pulling out and leafing idly through old copies of National Geographic, Audubon, Arizona Highways. There were United States and world atlases; an incomplete set of Collier’s Encyclopedia. He told Dorothea in a dreamy voice that he’d always been fascinated by maps and travel. Maybe he was Marco Polo, reincarnated! “If I had my life to relive that’s all I would do, I think—get in motion, and stay in motion—let momentum carry me. And you could do the same, Dorothea! Evil begins with stopping: with entrophy.”