The Illustrated Encyclopedia of an Imaginary Universe

I had known him all my life, although I did not know him. It was, perhaps, a standard way of spending one’s acquaintance with someone whom you would see from time to time, but never associate. In retrospect, I cannot say that I purposefully avoided his company, although I found his mere presence to be somewhat disconcerting. There was a certain atmosphere that surrounded him that yielded calm reality to bleak surrealism and a sickening feeling of mounting dread. It was as if the world was about to destroy itself around him at any given moment and you could clearly feel it in the gravity of the air and a trembling of the earth.

Once the investigation was under way and I was forbidden, by the court, to have any associations with him at all, I found that was I was drawn toward him. It was a sadly recognizable pattern in my life: to be drawn to that which is most dangerous and unhealthy for me. But for the new born widow to consort with the suspect was a marriage I could not resist. I remember thinking to myself that now it was demanded of me to keep my distance, I could no longer find the strength to do so. I did not have anger toward him simply because I did not believe, for one moment, that he was capable of murder. The idea was even more ridiculous once the actual method was examined; it was far too devious and cunning than he was obviously capable. There was that certain tacky irony that the most insidiously idiotic man could conceive and then execute a vile plan of the most heinous sort, but somehow that did not seem to apply.

When I expressed my undue and almost obsessive interest in him, my friends wisely counseled me against all forms of contact. They, unlike me, were ready to hang the boy for the crime. They didn’t care about the evidence of what was, to me at least, plainly obvious. They wanted someone to suffer the consequences for Rebecca’s death and the man named Palsy was as suitable a scapegoat as any. Indeed, they were Rebecca’s friends before they were mine, so perhaps they had found in their hearts a more ruthless and potent bias than I could in my own. I may have been her husband but I was not out for blind revenge and bloody restitution. Rebecca was dead, five months gone, and although I had grieved heavily, I had recovered and come out into the sun again.

But now, wherever I seemed to go, the many they called Palsy was there. At first, I was disturbed and found the repeating coincidence to be unsettling in the wost way. He was an unsettling man juts by appearance alone and he had a patented glance that was both a baleful glare and a child’s happy grin.

I’m certain that it was unfair to him. How much did I make him nervous? Everyone believed, excluding me and perhaps a few skeptical others, that he had killed my wife. For him to be running into me all over the city must be as nauseating for him as it was for me. But who’s to say that he wasn’t anticipating my errands and appearing on purpose? That was a rather paranoid thought but one that I could not simply throw out. It seemed perfectly reasonable, however, that he was as put off as I was. Perhaps he thought I was stalking him, planning some sort of dastardly revenge on par with the diabolic way my wife was laid to rest.

And when we finally did meet, this man Palsy and I, it wasn’t because I had planned, and it wasn’t because he had planned it. Such things that happen are not so spontaneous or important.

I can recall, however, with disastrous clarity the pain I felt when I learned of Rebecca’s death. Also, with sad ease, I can summon the feeling of fear and dread that followed me around in the weeks hence. But nothing was more disturbing and horrifying than the early hours of the morning after my birthday when I awoke to find myself in bed covered with blood, a rather nasty looking knife loosely clutched in one hand, and the man called Palsy calming sitting in an old rickety chair at the foot of my bed.