SLEEPING WITH MY ASSASSIN
Andrew Klavan
I KNEW WHY she had come—of course I did—but I fell for her anyway—of course. That was what she’d been designed for and who I was, who they’d made me. I didn’t even question it much, to be honest. I’d come to hate philosophizing of that sort by then. Endless discussions about nature versus nurture or fate versus free will. In the end, what are you even talking about really? Nothing: the way words work, the way the human brain puts ideas together—what we’re capable of conceiving, I mean, not the real, underlying truth of the matter. I’m sure there’s some logic to a person’s life and all that. Some algorithm of accident and providence and inborn character that explains it. Maybe God can work it out, if he exists and has a calculator handy. Maybe even he shrugs the whole thing off as a pain in the celestial ass.
But for me, in the event, it was more poetry than philosophy or math. I saw her and I thought, “Ah, yes, of course, that’s who they would send, isn’t it?” She was death and the past and my dreams incarnate. And I fell for her, even knowing why she’d come.
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