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have no special destiny. Not you, and not mankind .
    At this early hour of Sunday morning the city was nearly deserted.
    Yet church bells seemed to be ringing continuously. A noisy clamor.
    He wanted to clap his hands over his ears. Never had he noticed how intrusive his faith was. Here we are! Christians! Surrounding 32 W Joyce Carol Oates
    you! Bringing news of the Gospels! Good news! Come and be saved!
    How much more seductive he found the monosyllabic roar of The Falls.
    He forced himself, panting, to walk at a normal pace. For what if a police officer saw him, and guessed his intention. His face. His ravaged face. His boy’s face that had aged years in a single night. His eyes sunken in his face. He was afraid it shone unmistakably in his face, the release from misery he sought.
    It was difficult for him to simulate calm, though. He felt like a wild beast on a leash. If anyone got in his way or tried to stop him, if the woman had tried to stop him, he’d have flung her aside in a rage.
    It wasn’t despair he felt. Not at all. Despair suggested meekness, passivity, giving-up. But Gilbert Erskine wasn’t giving anything up.
    Another man would return to the hotel suite, to the lawfully wedded wife . The bed, the swath of rusted-red crotch. The moaning fish’s mouth and the eyes rolled back in the head and the eventual babies, a cozy stink of diapers. That was Gilbert Erskine’s true destiny. The tall gaunt house in Palmyra, New York, mud-colored brick and rotted shingleboards in the roof and a congregation of less than two hundred people, most of them middle-aged and older, to whom the young minister must “prove” himself. “Win” their confidence, their respect, eventually their love. Yes? But no.
    Not for G. He was acting out of courage, conviction. God would not forgive him. But God will know me as I am.
    The roar of The Falls. Like the blood-roar in the ears. Penetrating his fevered brain as he’d lain sleepless in that bed. Recalling the vanity of their first meeting. He’d believed the woman a “sister”—what a cruel, crude joke. How they’d met. Now he knew. Their elders had shrewdly planned the meeting, he saw now. Her parents were desperate for the prim, plain spinster to be married, and his parents were desperate for the prim, plain bachelor to be married. (Possibly they worried about his manhood? Reverend Erskine at least.) And so
    “Ariah” and “Gilbert” were but pawns on a chess board who’d imagined themselves players!
    Last night. His life careening past as if already he were drowning in the river. Broken like a cheap plastic doll in The Falls. Beside him The Falls X 33
    the stuporous snoring woman. Drunken woman. His wedding night, and a drunken woman. Run, run! He had to throw himself into the most monstrous of falls, the Horseshoe. Nothing less would suffice.
    In his expansive sense of himself he dreaded surviving. He dreaded being pulled from the churning water below The Falls, broken and maimed. Would rescue crews be on duty, so early in the morning? He wished for total extinction, obliteration. To erase forever from his sight the smeared greedy face of the red-haired woman. Chaste and virginal and cool to the touch as an icicle she’d been for the long months of their engagement, and that thin-lipped smile and awkward manner . . . Well, he’d been deceived. Like a dupe of the Devil he’d been deceived. He, Gilbert Erskine! The most skeptical of the seminarians. The most “free thinking.” He who’d prided himself on eluding the wiles of featherbrained simpering-coy females for years.
    Desperate to marry, they were. The pack of them desperate to be
    “engaged”; shamelessly greedy for a ring to wear, to present boastfully to the world. See? I’m loved. I’m saved. But Ariah Litterell had seemed to him so different. Of another species. A young woman he might respect as a wife, a woman who was his equal socially and almost his equal intellectually.
    He was bitter that D.