The sun was now low in the sky but still bright and he shut the door of the cottage behind him to keep the light from disturbing her. He was sitting on the creaky bench and drinking from the second bottle, feeling the day’s heat radiating from the stone walls behind him. This bottle seemed even stronger than the first, and he was reminded of how Dora began her evenings by downing three small glasses of her own brand in quick succession, as if to prime her needy motor before the drinking proper. So he took three swift shots in somber deference to her, and then three more, not caring that it was harsh on the tongue and throat and smelling of petrol; but the rite fell short, for he conjured up not Dora’s thirst sated, that first sip’s glee, nor the soft grainy apple-flesh of her bottom, nor the furious grip she’d exert on him during their passions, grappling his shoulders, pulling his hair, but rather the horrid bed of the blood-glazed street, and her pretty leg all in a mess, and her eyes beseeching him, not to save her so much as to explain the backward mercy of the world, why it was taking her just at the moment she had finally stopped wanting it to.

Had the eyes of the Chinese boy soldier made the same petition? And the others he had witnessed die during the war? Why was he to be the angel of ironical death? It was those last few seconds that were most horrifying for Hector; at least the mien of the long-dead he had collected doing graves registration was generally one of distinct unconcern, or perhaps the mildest bemusement, if they had faces left at all. He could take their expressions blackened with rot or dried blood or else blown away, cheekless or jawless or lacking a brow, all countless mutilations, the frightful carnage, but watching a living face fade and pale was to him the most grotesque of turns, the one thing he could no longer bear. The promise of being with June at her end made him want to crawl away, to run, and he knew he would indeed have to leave her, that it was inevitable, that he must desert her before the final hour.

He wandered down the steep, arid hillside with the bottle in his hand, drinking it down as he went. The homemade liquor was coursing through him more hotly than usual, almost painfully; he could feel it drawing out into his extremities, these lines of ants on the march. He was going to drink some more, maybe drink the rest. If it was poison, let it be. He found a deer path through the scraggly brush but instead of stepping mindfully he let the pitch take him and he dropped himself headlong in its leafy track, pumping his legs in a velocity of desperate escape; to view him from above was to see, paradoxically, a man running as fast as he could in order to keep from falling.

But even Hector could not sustain the necessary speed, create enough balancing momentum, and he flew down the hill, tumbling head over knee so violently that it appeared he was there to thrash clear the greenery, the rocks, the dusty earth itself. He came to rest in a dark glade of cork trees, their sinuous trunks stripped of bark to the height of eight feet. They were old trees but now naked and smooth, and he felt as exposed as they. He was cut and bruised about the face and knuckles; he was crying, but not from any physical distress. The bottle, emptied, was still in his hand. He’d just missed an exposed sharp spine of rock and he cursed his luck and smashed the bottle against it. He was going to fight himself, pugilist as onanist, because there was nobody else to fight, nobody left to take on. Here he is, your undying low-life champion. With the jagged neck of the bottle he slashed across each wrist and also his neck, and jabbed at his side and thighs. Then he got on his feet and bull-rushed the largest tree. He rammed it with his chest, and then his shoulder, and as he grew weary he pushed against it with his now bloody carmine hands, his carmine-stained forehead, grunting and pumping his legs as if he were a football lineman toiling against a practice sled.

After a stretch of time long enough to be embarrassing, even to a man alone, he relented, his punctures already congealed and crusting over in the unnatural manner they always did. This was the only pain he actually felt, which actually registered, the sear of the too-swift healing. His exhaustion was fed less by exertion than frustration, the closed loop of his thwarted rage, and he fell against the roots and lay staring up at the stilled canopy, the sky dimming to indigo behind the web of gnarled black limbs. The sight was vaguely Eastern in aspect, like a beautiful silk-screened panel, but then lovely for nothing, and he thought that this was the diseased tableau of his life: forever there to witness splendor, while death coolly drifted upon everything else. Up the hill only the chimney of the cottage loomed. If she cried out, if she called for him, would he stay silent? And if she didn’t see the morning, would he simply leave her in the bed for the huntsman to find, or else bury her, as he had buried so many others, dig the necessary hole, his best dark talent among all his dark talents?

JUNE SLEPT MOST OF THE NIGHT and on waking realized that Hector was gone from the cottage. She panicked and stumbled onto the floor and nearly hurt herself, but when she stepped outside she spotted him up the hillside from the hunter’s cottage, sitting in the driver’s seat of the car. She practically ran up the rutted drive and would have leaped for the bumper had he accelerated but as she drew near she saw that he was asleep.

It was the first time she had seen him so, since they’d flown from the States, and she could study him for a moment. His seat was slightly reclined and his face was turned toward the window, his reddish-brown locks untouched by a single strand of gray. His complexion was a wonder to look at, even after all these years and despite his roughness and obvious disinterest in caring for himself. He glowed like a saint in some Renaissance painting but the rendering here was of a man clearly fallen, marked by the most subtle of colorations, an incipient, brooding shade. He was a shockingly beautiful man. She had always thought him so, from the moment they crossed paths that first day on the refugee road, even if his radiance had meant nothing to her. And yet there was something definitely restorative in simply regarding him now, a momentary suspension of the sentence on her body, her demise. She had always considered beauty more perilous than useful, and yet, when it persevered, it became its own element and property, indivisible, original. Something to have faith in. She should have left him undisturbed for a little longer but she was made irrationally anxious by the fact that he was literally in the driver’s seat and could easily motor away, and when she roused him with a tap on the glass he shivered ever so slightly, as might a child, the sight of which only honed her guilt.

She asked him to put the cabin back in order as best he could, and she added money to what he had left on the table for the owner, writing Mi dispiace across the top banknote with a grease pencil she’d found in a drawer, the sentiment of regret seeming more fitting than one of thanks. If anything, she was grateful to Hector for having made her stop and rest; she was definitely stronger today, or at least after waking him she was, the ground not shifting or rolling beneath her feet as it had been most of the last two days, her eyes able to look at an object without fixing on it so forcefully that everything else whirled about its axis in a furious, breakneck orbit. Among the many dozen complications and eventualities that Dr. Koenig had listed in his imperious fount-of-the-Maker tone was vertigo, a case of which she’d suffered once long before the cancer and was likely now not a simple disturbance of the inner ear but a sign that there might be tumors in her brain.