（If she had come to him, if she had touched him. I’m sorry, Victor. Forgive me, Victor. If she had shed a single tear.）
I would have married you, he said.
She said, Who’d marry a crazy motherfucker like you?
It was very late, the parking lot deserted. It would have been laughably easy, it would have been the most natural thing in the world, to kill her with his bare hands. For all her fire, she was a skinny little thing. It would have taken him two minutes, his hands around her throat.
What he did instead was harder and more calculated. He waited. No one will ever understand the effort it cost him, the superhuman restraint.
They sent him to prison—the Great Lakes Correctional Institution in Erie County, ten miles west of nowhere. The judge gave him seven years. Because the apartment was occupied, he was charged with first-degree arson. It didn’t matter that Barb wasn’t home when it burned, having hiked across town to watch the fireworks with the new guy she was now fucking. Purely by accident, Victor had torched the building on yet another patriotic holiday. The timing was unconscious, or maybe it wasn’t. The coincidence seemed significant. For years afterward he would ponder what it meant.
In prison, the Lord found him. It’s the one part of the story he is slightly ashamed of: his own suggestibility, his weak-minded surrender to fantasy. The prison chaplain had caught him at a vulnerable moment. Later Victor would come to his senses, but at the time it had felt real to him. He had wanted so badly to believe.
At first he resisted. He and the Lord had no prior relationship. They ran in different circles and had no acquaintances in common, and Victor did not, as a rule, open the door to strangers. Out in the world he would have run from grace, he would have died running. In prison there was nowhere to run.
Why would the Lord want him? Why would anyone? He subsisted like livestock in a pen ten feet square. Each morning he shat in a concrete toilet, two feet from where he’d laid his head. There wasn’t a single one of God’s commandments he hadn’t violated. In Saigon he’d paid a girl who gave him the clap. He had fornicated with Barb Vance while she was pregnant with his child.
His brief, hysterical conversion had no ill effects, and one positive one: encouraged by the chaplain, he began painting. At the time he had only one subject—the child Barb Vance had taken from him, his baby son （he is certain it was a son） slaughtered in the womb.
He served his full seven. The parole board refused to see his side of things. The prisoner shows no remorse.
To Victor it was the crowning insult. Barb Vance had killed his baby so she could go on fucking. It was Barb Vance who had shown no remorse.
The injustice was intolerable. It was, truly, more than he could bear.
Victor regretted the lost time—seven years of his youth, gone forever—but he did not regret what he had done. He came out of prison a stronger man, larger in all ways. They had not broken him. They had only increased his resolve.
He was thirty-three years old, the age of the mythical Jesus. Long-haul trucking paid well, and for the first time in his adult life there was no lieutenant barking orders, no shift boss hanging over his shoulder, no CO busting his balls. He’d been truthful on his application, but the manager didn’t care that he was a felon. As long as a load arrived on time, no one cared how it had gotten there.
Driving, he thought of Barb Vance. For a while he tried to find her, but this proved impossible to do. After the fire she’d moved south, to Maryland or Virginia, where she married, divorced, married, and divorced. Over the years she’d had different names, become different people. To Victor it was the ultimate injustice. Barb had been given multiple lives, while he could only ever be himself.
Being Victor Prine was a life sentence.
What exactly he’d have done if he’d found her, he wasn’t entirely sure.
The injustice, in the end, was bearable. He had borne it, but only just. It will get easier with time, the prison chaplain had told him, but this proved to be untrue. When Victor died, five or ten years from now, it would be as though he’d never existed. No part of him would be left in the world.