The Cipher

by Kathe Koja

I remember thinking, Why, I’ve made a choice. I don’t want to be part of this anymore, and I’m, I’m opting out. Imagine. An actual decision, and I was very much enjoying my novel sense of resolve and picturing, in a self-indulgent way, the manner in which the bullet would come flying up the barrel, when something new came to me: shame. Not disgust. I was intimate with that. Not self-hate either because I was, if not done with it, then so possessed by it that I could no longer feel it, as a perfect swimmer no longer consciously feels the sea as an element apart. But: instead a profound and simple shame, a sensation as immediate and irresistible as pain or heat. In my big, my unique moment of decision I was behaving as needlessly as stupidly, as typically as ever, because by this action I would bring trouble on Nora, big trouble, on a person who had actually tried to help me, who had given me what I asked for. Typical. I lowered the gun. That’s just like you, you cheap piece of shit. But not the shame.