Will couldn't understand why he felt so concerned about the woman he'd seen in the grocery store. She was no more special than anyone else he had met. In fact, he'd gone out with a number of better-looking girls. Had slept with a few, made out with some others in random places—he was always surprised, actually, that he so easily picked up women. He himself knew he wasn't that attractive. Was kind of strange looking with his lanky figure and carrot-orange hair. He knew he couldn't compare to the kinds of guys that he'd always assumed girls went for—the type who were muscular and fine-looking with handsome smiles and good jobs. He was awkward and entirely ordinary, but he had an attraction (particularly to younger women) he couldn't explain and allowed to work on its own. So he was uncertain what exactly he had felt for that woman he'd seen so fleetingly at the grocery store that afternoon. He attempted to understand it. There'd been some aloofness in her expression, some total refinement. She'd reminded him of a glass figurine—lovely to look at but so fragile, so delicate—she was in danger of breaking. And as soon as that thought crossed his mind, it produced the notion that he'd like to be the one to break her. It gave him a strange pulse of pleasure. Will had never controlled anything in his life. He had been powerless since he'd been a child. It was in his nature.

The walls of the front hall seemed to close in on him as he stood there. He could hear his parents' voices somewhere off in the house, probably off toward the back patio. They were entertaining company, no doubt, as they always were. There'd be a fire blazing happily in a pit outside, lots of good food, drinks, and laughs. They'd be dressed like every other wealthy couple from the area—their house big enough to prove that they had money without their dressing to impress. Will knew they invited people over only in order to show off. He couldn't even name all their different friends. One or two he'd seen as doctors, back during his high school days when his parents thought he had problems. Well, they still thought he had problems, it was just that he was too old for them to force into things, now. They had tried to convince him to go to a doctor, but he always shot their ideas down. He'd been to the doctors. He'd heard all their ideas and what they had to say. He had let everything go in one ear and stick itself in his brain, and he now had enough in his head to allow him to consider himself nuts for the rest of his life. He'd had enough people telling him he was crazy that he was almost at the point of believing them, which was why he'd begun to tell himself that no one else's opinions of his state of mind mattered. It was enough for him to deal with figuring himself out, let alone the constant comments of other people who were trying to beat him at it.

Someone was coming. A woman rounded the corner as if lost and jumped a little when she saw Will. "Oh! Dear. Can you tell me where the restroom is, honey?"

He really didn't want to speak, but he gave her abbreviated directions by pointing.

"Thanks, hon," she said, then hustled off to relieve herself.

Will sighed, moved down the hall, and started up the stairs. He tried to ignore the indistinguishable ruckus of voices as he made his way up. The landing was lit with a soft, flickering series of tea-lights arranged on a console table. The rest of the upstairs area looked dark and shadowed. Likely his parents had turned all those lights off to discourage people from going up there. That was fine. He wanted the dark anyhow. He knew his way in it and didn't even bother to turn any switches as he walked through the halls and into one of the rooms, where he ascended another dark staircase to a small loft area.

A circular, paned window allowed a quartered moonbeam to grace the loft carpet. Will studied the enlarged pie slices of light for several moments from his position across the room. Then, slowly, he stepped through the silence and sat down next to the light, being careful not to break the shapes' perfection by getting in the way. There was some simple loveliness in the contrast of dark and light. Some quiet, other-worldly perfection. It was not mottled with shadow. It contained no deficiencies save the fact that it was alone on the floor, surrounded by darkness. He felt momentarily panicked as he realized he was unable to understand it. It was some purity—some perfect entity—and he, in his inadequate human form, would never be able to grasp its value. He would struggle his entire life for nothing—he could never attain such a state.

It was beautiful, this light against the white carpet—more beautiful than a mere word could describe—and he was nothing compared to it. He never would be. And that unnerved him, but then his fright calmed. The image of a flat, glass-black body of water entered his mind. He closed his eyes against the beam of moonlight and just listened to his own breathing. Will could sit forever like this. Doing nothing. Keeping his mind away from everything that bothered him about his life and life in general. He'd learned to force his thoughts into thin little wisps and cause them to evaporate for awhile, just by sitting with his mind closed to the world. Just by being alone, in the quiet, in the darkness. It was one of the few things that made him feel sane. Moments passed.

Beautiful things were dangerous, he reflected, and the sudden concept caused him to open his eyes again. They had become adjusted to the night around them, and he could now make out objects in the room: a sofa, a television, shelves of random objects dusted in shades of bluey-black and gray. It was good to see. It reminded him that even something as perfect as a pure slice of light could not exist without the mundane surrounding it. The dull mediocrity of life ate everything unlike it. Which was why the thing in the hospital bed and numerous other things like it had to be destroyed periodically. And also why the human mind was plagued with its body's physical needs, and why sex never satisfied, and why memories were tarnished by the fact that they could not be tangibly contained. It was why that woman he'd seen earlier would eventually be ruined. She'd have to be. She was too perfect for this place. She was too unknowing, too naïve, in a strange way, to be here. She'd seemed untouched, somehow—untarnished, like the pie-slices of moonlight on the floor—and in her impeccable perfection, she was dangerous to everything else, including herself.

Sudden anger flared inside Will. He was not like them. Not like the woman, or the moonlight, or what the thing in the hospital bed had been. He was never going to be like them, because he was already too damaged. It was unfair that he should live in a world in which he felt consistently inadequate. Flawless things should not be allowed to coexist with spoiled things—rotting-out human beings like himself.

His body moved. He wrenched out of his calm position in a motion reflective of the rage he suddenly felt inside. Over against the wall, there was a small bureau. It contained all sorts of odds and ends, and Will turned to it in the dark and began pulling out its drawers one by one, violently so that their contents spilled onto the white carpet. He didn't care about anything except the thing his brain was telling him he must do. Within seconds, he found what he was looking for. He'd used to keep a lot of junk up in this room before his parents had cleaned it up as a bit of a guest-compartment, and some of his stuff was still around, because they'd been hasty in their cleaning. The Ziploc bag of random pencils and crayons and chalks he'd compiled from an art course he'd applied for after graduating high school but never followed through in attending. His heart beat wildly. Relief swept through him as he unzipped the bag and dumped everything out of it. Even in the darkness, he could see which ones were lighter and darker, though they all appeared to be shades of gray and black in the lack of light. He took what he thought to be the darkest oil pastels he could find and what he knew was a fat charcoal pencil and crawled over to the moonlight gracing the carpet. It had to go. It had to disappear. And he didn't care how he went about forcing it away. It just had to go. So he began rubbing the dark colors across the rug, thanking no one in particular that it was a short rug with stiff tufts so that his work was immediately and obviously effective. Very soon, he had rubbed in the materials down to their nubs. He made several returns to his pile of supplies. He made certain to cover the space completely, even as the moon rose and cast its light slightly lower, lower, lower. He followed it. He stayed up early into the morning to erase it. To destroy it.