Our Dark Duet

A place where a girl had grown up, and a boy had burned alive, where a violin had been shattered, and a stranger had been shot—

He who fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster . . . if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

Hell is empty,
All the devils are here.

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, THE TEMPEST

“Night has a way of blurring lines in the psyche. It makes us feel free. Studies show people are generally less inhibited after dark, more open to influence and”—he stifled a cough, then continued—“primal behaviors.

People were messy. They were defined not only by what they’d done, but by what they would have done, under different circumstances, molded as much by their regrets as their actions, choices they stood by and those they wished they could undo.

“By not letting go,” she said softly. “By holding on, to anger, or hope, or whatever it is that keeps you fighting.”

You, he thought.

“One hundred and eighty-four,” she said.

He paused. “What?”

The world was complicated. Life was hard. And so often, living hurt.

So make it worth the pain.

Denial—that’s what it was called.

The idea that if a thing went unsaid, it didn’t really exist, because words had power, words gave weight and shape and force, and the withholding of them could keep a thing from being real,

place where the air was still full of blood and hunger and heat, where the girl had escaped and the boy had fallen, and the monsters were defeated—

Hell is empty,
All the devils are here.