I knew the man would press a civil suit. He did not need to tell me; it would be in his nature, and there was no power on earth that could stop him. I saw that the fight had really only brought out our basic differences. He was a cruel man, but also a man keenly aware of his rights. In fact, you could even say that it was this awareness that made him cruel. I am not necessarily just talking about social rights here. I am talking about his right to be different, to be provocative, to refuse to be convinced of anything he didn't want to be. He had a sense of self that exasperated me, because he could be - it seemed to me - so very wrong in his perception of so very many things, and yet he would stick doggedly to his arguments. It wasn't that he was afraid that if he backed down he would lose something; it was that he was argumentative almost for the sake of it, as if he were amused by the fact that his very basic wrongness would always be a more than adequate match for my own, no less instinctive sense of rightness - as if it secretly delighted him that the world failed to intercede in matters which even he could see were - in some sense - fundamentally unjust.

But there was also a callous self-control. He had taunted me with words, but refused to lay a hand on me. It was I who had had to make that decisive gesture, more out of desperation than any other thing, throwing an inutile blow to the back of his head. In response he had turned and given me a good solid taste of his fist. So I was the one with the bleeding mouth, and the broken tooth. And yet, despite all of this, I was also the one who would be to blame. No court on god's earth would exonerate me for having risen to his challenge and requited verbal deeds with physical ones, as though I had striven to bring the hideous book of our differences to life. I had crossed a line which must never be crossed, and he knew it even before he had turned. Not only knew it, but wanted me to do so, so that later he would be able to prove to me – with that civil suit - just how wrong I had ever been to challenge him.

It was his objectivity that had defeated me. I was too precocious; I could never bear people knocking down my world-view. I was afraid of my own hands, but it was only because I felt so powerless. You cannot imagine how much of myself I felt I was losing as he listened to my arguments and dismissed them, shaking his head with deliberate irony just to goad me, the way he clucked his tongue.

And now all that was over. He would press a civil suit, and he would win. I would have to bear the ignominy of having my name in the papers, and everyone talking about me. Remembering my parents' expectations, the shame of it seemed almost too much to bear. I would possibly even lose my job - a consultant's job which, at least from the outside, commanded respect. But it was more likely I'd hand in my resignation before the story got out. And I certainly wouldn't be able to stay around here any longer, in a little town where I was already too well known. I would have to go far away; maybe I could change my name. I'd have to start over again from nothing. In one moment of madness, in a fraction of a second in which I lost my self-control, I had thrown away my future and soiled the thirty years of my past.

My sleep pattern had been broken entirely; every night, as I tried to relax, all I could see was that back of his moving slowly away from me. There are no words that could be adequate to the sensation I experienced, at those times, of crushing inevitability. If I thought I could ever have got away with it, I should have had no qualms about strangling the life out of him before he got a chance to escape, simultaneously sickened by my action and yet driven on by an animal instinct to preserve my own anonymity - to preserve the only thing I had. But, even though we were alone, the world has a thousand eyes, and I would have gained nothing. It was not destined for me to be a murderer; it was destined for me to be in the right, but to respond in the wrong way. And, because of that, I would be shamed to the end of my days, and no matter how much I ground my teeth, cursed myself, tried to forget it all with drink, there was nothing, nothing, nothing that anyone could do about it. If that man could have slipped into my own mind at that instant, I think even he, who was never moved by anything, would have lost his smile, beholding the absolute magnitude of the destruction he had wrought.