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Show /OX keep him away. But now he seemed to sense she had sunk lower and, coming to bed in the dark, he did not touch her but lay on his back beside her and in a neutral voice said they had better wait until tomorrow to talk more. She had no faith left for tomorrows. "The world is rotten," she said in a cold factual voice, "and nobody can do a thing about it. And I'm just as rotten and I can't do anything about that either." Pausing, she looked up into die darkness as if it were endless. "So why live?" She asked with such dead solemnity that seconds passed before he spoke. "The world has never been any different, Jess." "People used to believe religion would save them." "And all you and I have is what we know. So? Once I thought I was going to die, I thought I would bleed to death, and what I knew then was very simple: I wanted to live." "What if you don't want to?" "Most people do." I don't, she diought, saying it to herself to spare him, but knowing then that the dark was endless. She felt annihilated by it, lying there naked, alone and without hope. She felt done to, done in, a victim of a stupid and malicious joke. And that angered her, that she should have struggled and suffered for nothing. Nothing! A dull smoldering anger expanded in her like another life. "Why, it's all a dirty cheat!" she said to the dark, surprised and furious. "It's stupid and brutal and a god damned cheat. Yes, it is. It's like a frat initiation where they beat you bloody and for what? For nothing!" "Nothing?" "Don't contradict me! Nothing, damn it. All right, then, all right; to hell with it then. It's not getting me; I'll live then in spite of it. Yes, I'll live just to spite it." "Jess . . . " If darkness was her air, then darkness she would breathe. I t T *' Jess.. . And was it even her white skin which mattered anyhow? It was the darknesses of her body which made her life; it was her dark nipples and darker confluence of thighs and black dark womb which gave life, which made her now woman and lover, which soon would make her wife and mother. Yes. And it was black skin which had driven her 176 |