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Before we could pin her to the hood of the car, our eyes masked with lust and greed and the purest primal badness, a pair of headlights swung into the lot. There we were, dirty, bloody, guilty, dissociated from humanity and civilization, the first of the Ur-crimes behind us, the second in progress, shreds of nylon panty and spandex brassiere dangling from our fingers, our flies open, lips licked—there we were, caught in the spotlight. Nailed.
These lines occur when the narrator and his friends, adrenaline and rage surging in their bodies, grab Bobbie’s girlfriend, intending to rape her. The narrator is reeling from the thought of the repercussions of having committed murder, the “first of the Ur-crimes,” or ancient, original crimes. He imagines, just before these lines, a scene as if from a movie of a murderer telling a detective that he doesn’t know why he killed, just that “something came over me.” And now, the narrator and his friends behave as if they are deranged, viciously attacking the woman.
The epiphany that he could so suddenly, in the right circumstances, become “dissociated from humanity and civilization” shocks the narrator. He admits that they might well have raped a helpless woman had they not been interrupted. The narrator says, in the story’s first lines, that he had “cultivated decadence like a taste,” but now he grasps that his late-adolescent ideas about rebellious, cool behavior were in fact an immature fantasy. The friends considered themselves edgy because they threw eggs at mailboxes and pulled juvenile pranks. But in one evening, the narrator and his friends progress from cruising and drinking to attempting murder and rape. They become aware of what it actually means for humans to be bad and realize that they, too, can become truly dangerous.
As I was about to take the plunge . . . I blundered into something. Something unspeakable, obscene, something soft, wet, moss-grown. A patch of weed? A log? When I reached out to touch it, it gave like a rubber duck, it gave like flesh.
In one of those nasty little epiphanies for which we are prepared by films and TV and childhood visits to the funeral home to ponder the shrunken painted forms of dead grandparents, I understood what it was that bobbed there so inadmissibly in the dark. Understood, and stumbled back in horror and revulsion, my mind yanked in six different directions.
The narrator labels the second epiphany he experiences in the story, downplaying his suddenly acute mindfulness of mortality as “one of those nasty little epiphanies.” When he says he has been prepared for this epiphany by fictional deaths and the deaths of aged people, he doesn’t mean that he’s prepared to understand mortality but that these experiences enable him to realize that the “something” in the water is a body.
In fact, nothing has prepared him for the “horror and revulsion,” and his thoughts are uncontrollable. The corpse’s presence is unallowable and unthinkable, because it forces the narrator to confront death in a way that TV shows and formal funeral viewings haven’t. Later, he thinks about the dead man as a “victim of time and circumstance,” perhaps killed in a drug deal, perhaps dead simply because of an accident in the lake where the muck recently pulled the narrator’s sneakers and pitched him into the corpse. The narrator thinks of the man as “a bad older character,” which forces him to accept that he, another “bad character,” is as vulnerable to accident, and as mortal, as anyone.
