It was past midnight now, no moonlight, and it had been drizzling for hours. For the third time Derek walked by his house – a downstairs duplex on a narrow side street – and headed for the avenue that led to the square. He ignored his wet beard,  his soaked sneakers, and the muddy bottoms of his frayed gray sweatpants. The hood of his plastic poncho kept his head dry.

He was a huge man -- six feet, five inches, 350 pounds the last time he weighed himself -- and never afraid to walk alone at night. No one ever threatened him, not even the older boys back in middle school for whom, as a dreamy lumpy boy, he might have provided an attractive target. He was big and strong even then.

He reached the corner and, with no traffic to wait for, crossed the street and started northward. Once every other week or so he took this same walk to the square to the Chinese restaurant, the pizzeria, the hamburger joint, and, once in a great while, the Safeway to replenish his cereal, bacon and eggs, and as many frozen dinners as he could cram into his refrigerator.

Why had he taken that additional walk, in another direction altogether, and seen what he need not have seen?  Should not have seen.
    
He hated to leave his house.  There was no need.  He’d collected everything right there in his living room:  his television, computer, hundreds of DVDs and games and books, his maps and timelines papering the wall.  He should have had pizza delivered, or Chinese.

Therese was supposed to have come to him. But she’d called and cancelled because the boys’ father had reneged and she couldn’t leave them. So in his lovesickness he’d had an attack of spontaneity.  
    
He’d never met her sons, only imagined them:  two skinny-legged carrot-tops in shorts and sweatshirts.  He wouldn’t mind meeting them.  He’d decided to surprise them, take flowers for her, gummy bears for them. After all, she was the one always telling him he needed to get out of the house more.

The vile image returned:  an open front room curtain, dim light, a small wiry dark hairy-backed man.  The loathsome picture ran over and over, an incessant fast forward repeat and repeat.  What if he had not gone to the front shrubbery and glanced in?  What if he had just rung the doorbell?  He imagined hasty rearrangements, awkward explanations, his willingness to believe anything.  

But now he was making up stories, something he was good at. And this was no time for stories.  He was out here on the street because it was time to come to earth, to come to a decision.     

Actually, he knew what to do and he was mostly resolved on the right course.  He had but to convince a remaining small percentage of himself and he’d be on it.  Quietly, with no pronouncements or fanfare, he must drop her.  Make no advances and reject hers.  Kindly, of course, but decisively. They could remain polite acquaintances; she was still his landlady after all.

But that small percentage of him was not yet reconciled to good sense.  It shrieked and screamed, pained and enraged.  It wanted to take her by the shoulders and shake her hard and make her cry and make her say it was all a mistake and she didn’t mean it and she’d never do it again.
    
And he’d say, it’s him or me.
 
And of course there was no reason she’d say him instead of Hairy.  Probably she’d say Hairy and even if she didn’t, who’s to say she wouldn’t betray him some other time?

His hands tightened; he felt them around the strong tendons at the back of her neck and his fists clenched.

A small dark animal raced across the street, a few trucks bumped along the avenue; the smell of dripped gasoline and motor oil rose from the wet street.  Derek was no stranger to late nights, but they were nights spent indoors.  Ordinarily his was the last light shining onto the empty street.  A night like this usually inspired a story in his Dark Powers series.  He’d hunch over his keyboard imagining just such a scene as surrounded him. A smile welled up from his chest. He felt pleased that the scene he imagined was so accurate.

But his mind snapped back to the image of Therese. Her face glowed like the lamplight, like starlight, her eyes chips of deep spirit, gazing at him, through him.

He could extinguish that light.

It was drizzling again; he wiped his beard with his bare hand.  From across the street, he heard a half dozen well-dressed types laughing even though Henry’s, the bar they stood in front of, had its lights out, door closed.

“Oh no, uh-uh,” a woman with a chuckle in her voice said.  “I’ve got to get to work tomorrow.”  
88She looked at her watch.  “O my God!  I’m outa here.”  She headed away from the group toward the dark side street.

“No way,” a man in a trench coat told her, “not in this neighborhood.  Come on.  I’ll drive everyone to their cars.”  And they trooped southward, still laughing and talking.
 
On his side of the street Derek passed another, smaller group huddled close to each other under the street lamp.  In this light, they all seemed to be wearing black; the hoods of their jackets up, their faces invisible.  He saw only the red glow of their cigarette tips moving slowly, erratically from what must be mouth to what must be thigh. He couldn’t tell if they were looking at him, but he nodded as he passed.

He stopped at the window of Jack’s Real Deals, the pawnshop that usually displayed a clutter of bracelets, guitars, clarinets, fishing tackle, watches by the dozen, and, occasionally, an object so bizarre that it caught his imagination and sent whatever story he was working on in a completely different direction.  But it was too dark to see anything, certainly not through the diamonds of metal grating that protected the window glass.  Abruptly and just when he’d forgotten her for a minute, Therese’s image again floated back into his awareness. Her smooth white face hung over him in the candlelight, half-smile, eyes shining, and the sight washed through his veins like a radioactive fluid.  He was flooded with her.  He pressed her to him.  He shook his head to chase her away and started walking again.
 
This was not helping.

He struggled to restore an image of her before she was his life’s sun.  One morning he’d looked up from the television and there she was, rapping at the screen doorframe ready to introduce herself.  For a moment she was his new landlady, a hippy redhead with big breasts. The next moment she was his shining, bigger-than-life everything, the one who melted his whole being, the one thing he couldn’t live without.  How she went from one state to the other, he couldn’t remember.  He’d gone unconscious.  Or she’d cast a spell on him.    

Of course he didn’t believe in spells. He certainly didn’t believe in violence.
He had to break it off with her.  That was the whole point of this trek, to persuade himself to break it off.  And to figure out how.  For two weeks he’d kept a lid on himself, acted with her as if he’d seen nothing, to give himself time to decide.  He’d shed his tears in private.

He was nearing the square. The rain had stopped, but the air was thicker, the cloud cover, lower.  To his right, the shops and bars were shuttered, some with iron gates. A few streetlights sent down misty shafts of orange-yellow. Three dark shapes slouched toward him, two outlined in dark hooded jackets, the third in a tight cap that reached below his ears.  Derek put his hands in his pockets and nodded as they passed.

He hadn’t met her sons, but she talked about them all the time. She showed him pictures of them in soccer clothes and on the baseball field. They did their homework every night at the kitchen table while she did the dishes.  She insisted that they tidy their rooms and she fastened their chore lists to the refrigerator with magnets.  Derek knew the scene by heart. He’d been well-mothered himself.  He talked to his mother on the phone most Sundays and to his sisters as well. They sent him surprise packages from home of foods that they imagined were unavailable in California and teased him for not having a steady girlfriend.  Derek groaned out loud and jammed his hands harder into his pockets.  

He was happy to share her with her sons.  He, after all, was a man who spent all day and half of the night in a trance in front of a computer or television. She had to share him with that.

Of course he knew what to do.  Once or twice a year he wrote a novel on exactly this theme, stories about the Dark Powers. The reader he first imagined was a happily married office worker riding BART. She gripped a Dark Power, enthralled and quivering with fear.Then, unable to bear it, she forced up to the brightly lit car. The light washed her with a wave of relief and gratitude. Such hell would never happen to her. She’d be careful.  Forewarned was forearmed.

After that he’d thought of his sister Pam, fine-boned, fair, and innocent. And sometimes he imagined a young Indian student he’d glimpsed in Sproul Plaza one April day, hurrying somewhere, dressed in a blue sari with a backpack on. Now they were the ones for whom he wrote the Dark Powers. Beware. Signs of evil show in the one you love.  Back away or you will join him in evil.
 
Why not heed his own advice?  The signs flashed. She never stayed in his bed until morning. She was mysterious about where she spent her time.  She told him not to call, it was too soon for her children to meet him.
   
What ensued when the Dark Power struck? Once the couple were chained together by love and the Innocent One was trapped. The Innocent One could not leave and so turned the tables and tortured the Dark Power.  

The Innocent One went to ground, this sweet sister of his or the innocent Indian girl, and plotted evil.  She planed her torturer’s ruin and became worse than He.
 
A sound – a sob? – escaped his throat.

The Innocent One need not have stayed.  She could walk away.
    
He reached the square, the farthest point of his walk.  He must come to earth here.

He walked past the Lucky Seven.  From deep in the next doorway he heard long whistling snores. The smell of vomit and marijuana reached him and he hurried on to the corner across from Luigi’s. He heard shuffling behind him, in the shadows. The homeless shifted in their sleep. Not one of the storefronts was lit. Only the traffic lights and streetlamps were on. He stood and waited for the traffic signal, then croaked out a laugh at himself for being so law-abiding.

    
He stepped off the curb and crossed against the red light.

After this long walk, his legs should be trembling and in pain and he expected that spot under his left shoulder blade to stab him. It must be the rowing!  

A month ago, no six weeks, she came to his back door with a huge box on a hand trolley.  

“I was going to save this for Christmas, but I can’t wait.”  Her cheeks were rosy with excitement and she rushed to tear the packaging tape with her fingers.

He handed her a knife and groaned when he realized what was in the package.

    “Stop bellowing,” she said.  “If you’re not going to leave the house, then you’ll just have to do something in the house.  You can row while you watch TV.”

He’d never sit on it.  

    “And look,” she said, “see this gizmo?  It’s a computer. I can check and tell if you’ve been slacking.”

They assembled the machine together, complaining about the obscurity of the instructions, laughing when they put the seat on the wrong side.  An ordinary domestic scene.  If he’d been setting it himself, he would have placed a bowl of uneaten apples on the kitchen counter to signal temptation to come. Not that Pam or the springtime girl in the blue sari would get it.

Tears came to his eyes and he almost sobbed. Stop it, stop it, stop it.  Two weeks of blubbering was enough. It was over. No more blubbering. He wiped his face with both hands.    

He took his hands away and saw three figures coming toward him. All three had hoods and their faces were hidden.

It was raining again.  He pulled his own hood up over his hair, put his hands in his pockets, and prepared to give a polite nod.

“Hey, man, what’s in your pocket there, huh, man, huh?”  

They came close.  Their smell was putrid and in the hand of one of them glinted something metallic. Two of the figures were slender.  Without thinking Derek pushed them and they stumbled and fell backwards. The third, a thicker blob who barely reached Derek’s chin, crowded in and poked the knife against Derek’s stomach then pulled his arm back and started to lunge.

Derek thought swiftly. This wouldn’t be a bad way to go or maybe he wouldn’t really go. He’d be injured and badly and Therese would have to come to him because he’d need her so much, even more than usual. And if he died, so what?  Then she’d know.  Then she’d miss him.  

But these thoughts flickered away so quickly he barely noticed them.

He barked, “there’s nothing in my pockets, you cretins.”

And he pushed away the blobby thick one, too, so hard that the blob tripped on the other two and staggered backwards.

The knife skidded toward Derek. He picked it up and lunged toward the belly of the thick one. His ears rang. He could taste how the knife would feel plunging into this enemy’s flesh.
     “Hey man, we didn’t mean nothing, don’t be like that.”

Derek started and stepped back as the third figure fell back into the other two.

He threw the knife into the street and jammed his hands back in his pockets. Who was the cretin here?  That knife could have been a gun and he could be dead. Is that what he wanted, to be dead? He stood panting, then, turned and continued to walk at his steady pace.

He was almost to his own side street before the rain stopped again.  From the corner, his street looked so dark it was as if his eyes were closed. But as he walked on, the streetlamps sensed his presence and one by one as he passed, they shed their pools of light on the wet cement. He unlocked his front door and snapped on the living room light.  His threadbare recliner, his computer with blank screen, the flickering television on mute, his notes and maps taped to the wall, his life minus Therese sprang into view. Tomorrow she would come in, picking up dirty glasses as she went. She’d drop a kiss on his head and tell him he was a mess and gather up pizza boxes and put the pot of stew she’d brought on the stove and tell him he needed to get out of the house more.  

He stepped over the rowing machine, heaved himself into the recliner, and sank back into it with a wheezy sigh.  He picked up the remote control, but stopped and left it on mute. He most certainly did not want death.  He wanted life and life was Therese.  Even a small part of Therese was life.  It was that she was bigger than he, just as he was bigger than those three lumps he’d pushed to the sidewalk.  He and Therese weren’t one on one.  A small piece of her was bigger than he.  She could handle him and Hairy as well, and everything else, too.  So let her. She could push him and two others and hardly notice. She could take care of him and others, too.  He would rather have her and have life.