I Am an Executioner by Rajesh Parameswaran

and spilling to the floor. Gopi spooned out the blood with a plastic cup and cut quickly before the hole filled again. Sandra held her hand to her mouth and cried, and Gopi told Vicente, “Tell her to stop moaning, won’t you?” but Vicente’s eyes were half closed and his head was nodding backward and he didn’t say anything. Gopi cut more and became very frightened when finally he encountered a length of white bone.
    After he and Sandra laid Vicente in the back of his car, Gopi watched Sandra drive away (on her way, we know now, to the Manvel General Emergency Room). Then he stood on the pavement, damp and terrified, and let his head slump down to see the footprint-spattered trail of red leading from inside the examining room all the way to the parking lot, to terminate there, at Gopi’s feet. Inside, minutes later, he didn’t notice the sound of the front door opening, or hear the footsteps leading to the examining room door, or see his wife walk in until she was two feet away from him.
    Manju and Gopi stared at each other in silence. She studied her husband’s bewildered eyes and looked at the lab coat he was wearing. She saw the gore-caked instruments, and she remembered Dilip Shenoy’s odd expression at the temple the day before, and the voice on the phone when she had tried to make an appointment. She clutched harder the library book she held in her arms, and remembered Gopi’s strange jokes in the bedroom, and the increasingly implausible stories about his advancements in television sales. And she remembered the lies Gopi had told everyone all his life.
    And Gopi—exhausted, for once guileless—quietly pried the book from her trembling hands, bookmarked and dog-eared, and stared dumbly at the picture it showed: a woman’s ovaries, bloated and blistering, laid out on a dissecting table, with a label that read INOPERABLE . The dull fear in his eyes was obvious to Manju.
    “What’s the matter?” Manju asked. She wiped her nose with the back of her hand. “You’re such a famous doctor. Can’t you help me? Hm?”
    Gopi was unsure, for a moment, if his wife was credulous or mocking, but something in her tone seemed to demand an answer.
    “I can try,” he said simply.
    There are those who will never accept what must have happened next. They don’t understand what Manju saw in Gopi, for a few moments, here at the dying-ember end of our story. But there is a reassuring certainty to some unlucky lives, which is to say that fear has no place for persons already doomed; and a kind of calmness descended on Manju, seeing her husband covered in some other man’s blood, seeing him drained and frightened. And isn’t it possible that Manju herself found in Gopi’s examining room the iodine and the novocaine, the knife and the needles? Manju herself lay down on the examining table, just as the Manvel General doctors, having gotten the details from Sandra, were phoning the police station.
    Gopi was still nervous, no doubt. It took him some time to fathom the hopeless clarity of the situation. But Manju’s calmness would have calmed him, and soon he understood there was no help for either of them outside of that room. The news stations had even somehow gotten hold of the story—didn’t some of us hear the name on the radio and wonder who this doctor was, and if maybe we had met him at a function somewhere? And on his own, without asking, Gopi picked up the scalpel, knowing the red and blue lights would soon be shimmering through the cracks in the window blinds. We are with them ashe picked up the scalpel and looked in Manju’s eyes, knowing what the police would have no choice but to do when they came through the door and saw him doing what he was about to do.
    But now those anxious police officers were still miles away along the highway. Vicente’s friends had left for work already. The dry cleaner’s clerk was late as usual. Only the skinny cows in their dirt-patch field could know what noises came from