The first card that Ed is sent, the ace of diamonds, contains three addresses: 45 Edgar Street, 13 Harrison Avenue, and 6 Macedoni Street. With no concrete idea of what he is supposed to do, Ed shows up at each address at the given time. He is horrified at what he finds on Edgar Street: a large man “built like a brick sh*thouse” comes home drunk and rapes his wife while their daughter sits on the porch and cries.
While Ed finds that he can help Milla from Harrison Ave and Sophie on Macedoni, he avoids Edgar Street for lack of knowing how to help. Once, he sees the wife in a store and notes that:
Once, when the mother’s crouched down looking at packet soups, I see her fall silently to pieces. She crouches there, dying to fall to her knees but not allowing herself.
But once he’s finished helping Milla and Sophie, he must return to Edgar Street. One night, as the man comes home, Ed finds himself frozen on the porch and the girl opens the front door, asking if he is there to save them.
I crouch down to look at her properly. I want to tell her I am, but nothing comes out. I can see that the silence from my mouth has all but extinguished the hope she has conjured up. It’s almost gone when I finally speak. I look at her truthfully and say, “You’re right, Angelina—I’m here to save you.”
But then, he falters once more:
The fear has tied itself around my feet, and I know there’s nothing I can do. Not tonight. Not ever, it seems. If I try to move, I’ll trip over it.
Ed expects the girl to be furious, but instead she only hugs him tightly and “tries to crawl into [his] jacket.” He leaves, ashamed, and at 2:27 in the morning the phone rings. A voice tells him to check his mailbox, and he finds a gun.
A concrete objective, sanctioned by some unknown entity, has been introduced: it would be all too easy for Ed to simply kill the man. And indeed, he plans to. Ed arranges to pick the man up in his cab, gives him doped vodka, and drives to an isolated area, at which point he beats the man with his gun. The man is terrified, sobbing and admitting to raping his wife. And after the initial rush of adrenaline has left left him, Ed is paralyzed:
I begin to lurch and quake at the thought of killing another human. The aura that surrounded me earlier is gone. The air of invincibility has deserted me, and I’m suddenly aware that I have to do this surrounded by nothing but my own human frailty. I breathe. I almost break.
Ed’s humanity is emphasized in this moment: he is agitated, scared, and wants nothing more than to have never encountered this particular situation in the first place. And yet his end goal seems more just than the alternative. He cannot find a better solution than killing the man, but he does not want to commit murder.
Ed waits so long that the man falls asleep. At dawn he wakes the man up and confronts him, “feverish” and sweating. The scene ends as Ed pulls the trigger: the reader at first assumes that Ed has killed the man. The illusion is dispelled on the following page, and yet it serves an important purpose—the catharsis of the moment, with all of its inherent moral ambiguity, is retained. And after all, Ed has succeeded: the man leaves town, never to return.
His ultimate decision not to kill the man from Edgar Street establishes Ed's agency. Even though he was provided with the means to make such a choice, Ed chooses instead to let him go, trusting that the man will not return. Such a choice is imperfect, suiting Ed's position as an imperfect man.
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