Vengeance

Vengeance becomes, for Lionel Essrog, not an abstract moral question but a deed he cannot finally disown. He distinguishes it from the guilt he already understands, considers whether it belongs to his nature, and then recognizes that he has acted on it. The account gives the act a divided shape: a brief period of deliberation, scattered practical details, the image of a train descending underground, and a final admission that pretending cannot undo what happened.

Guilt and the Question of Revenge

Guilt is familiar territory to Lionel; vengeance is not. Near the end of his account, he separates the two with unusual directness: knowing guilt does not mean knowing what to do with revenge. At first he can only say that he will have to think about it. The hesitation matters because it frames vengeance as a choice still under examination, rather than as a settled principle or an automatic extension of his anger.

When the question returns, Lionel measures his consideration in five or ten minutes. He calls that a substantial span when the subject is vengeance, suggesting both the intensity of the thought and his reluctance to let it occupy him. The brief interval does not resolve the problem. Instead, it becomes a hinge between the idea that vengeance is incompatible with his identity and the evidence that he has already acted.

From Consideration to Action

Lionel had wanted to believe revenge was not part of him—not Tourettic, not Essroggian—just as he had imagined the subway as something separate from himself. That comparison makes the inward argument concrete: he tries to regard vengeance as an external system he can observe without entering. But the narrative turns from that desired distance to an admission of participation.

He describes having done it with a cell phone and a number in Jersey, and having done it while standing by a lighthouse in Maine. He also recalls having a handful of names and other words, joined into something more effective than a tic. These are the account’s particular traces of action: a device, a number, a place, and language assembled into a purposeful instrument. The passage does not spell out each step or identify every name, so the significance lies less in a fully narrated procedure than in Lionel’s recognition that words and connections have become consequential acts.

The contrast with a tic is especially revealing. Lionel describes the names and words as organized toward an effect, not as involuntary fragments. The distinction does not make the deed emotionally simple, nor does it establish that his condition explains it. Rather, it challenges the story he had wanted to tell himself: that vengeance belonged to an alien impulse, safely outside the self. His own account places intention, language, and action together.

The Train and the Underground

After recalling the phone, the Jersey number, the lighthouse, and the names, Lionel imagines himself taking the V train. The train is at once a specific subway journey and the narrative’s image for entering a hidden realm. He pictures himself hurtling through subterranean tunnels and visiting a labyrinth beneath the world, one that people pretend is not there. The movement down and through gives vengeance a geography: it is not merely a thought above ground but a passage into what ordinary life conceals.

That image also revises Lionel’s earlier comparison. He had wanted revenge to be as separate from him as the subway seemed to be; now he identifies himself with the rider on the train. Its tunnels become a figure for knowledge he cannot simply unlearn. The labyrinth is not presented as a new discovery about the external world so much as an acknowledgment that the concealed structure was there, and that he entered it. The train’s motion carries the tension between denial and recognition: he can wish to return to pretending, but the journey has occurred.

Inheritance, Responsibility, and Pretending

Lionel’s reckoning with vengeance ends in a complicated accounting of the Minna brothers. He says that Frank Minna and Gerard Minna are part of him at a depth beyond behavior and regret. Frank Minna is tied to the life he received; Gerard Minna is tied to the life Lionel believes he took away. The parallel makes vengeance inseparable from attachment and responsibility. The brothers are not interchangeable causes of his feelings: one represents a formative gift, the other a devastating debt.

Lionel says he will pretend that he never rode the train, but immediately insists that he did. The contradiction is the ending’s point, not a resolution of the guilt. Pretending may allow him to resume ordinary life, yet it cannot make the journey unreal or remove the Minna brothers from his sense of self. Vengeance therefore remains both something he wishes to disavow and something his own narration records as chosen and consequential. The closing tension is stark: he may return to denial, but he cannot claim innocence through forgetting.