The men of the village surround him, swear they have come only to help him, to set him free of this thing he"s made. Men who were once Spear"s friends promise they won"t hurt him, if only he"ll lie still, but he can"t, won"t, not in the face of what they"ve come to do. Held between the arms of the two Russians, he watches disbelieving as one of High Rock"s deacons steps to the New Motor, emboldened by the encouragement of the others. The deacon reaches up toward the grand revolver and takes hold of one of the magnetic spheres suspended from its crossbeams, and then he rips it away from the Motor.
Spear waits for intercession, for Electricizer or angel to step in and stop the destruction, but none appears. He struggles against his attackers, tries to warn them against what they plan to do, against the wrath of G.o.d they call down upon themselves, but they do not listen. Eventually he twists free and attempts to take a step toward the Motor, where others have joined the deacon in dismantling the hanging magnets. The Russians stop him, knock him to the ground, fall upon him with fists and boots, and when they tire of striking him they step aside so that others might have their turn. Spear no longer cares for himself, only for his new G.o.d, for this mechanical child gifted not just to him and to Maud, but also to all of mankind, if only they would accept it.
By the time Maud arrives in the doorway to the shed, he is already broken, in body and face and in spirit. The motor is crushed too, axe blows and wrenching hands tearing its intricate parts from their moorings, rendering meaningless the many names of G.o.d written in copper and zinc across its components. He cries to her for help, but knows there"s nothing she can do. All around him are the men he once called to himself, who followed him to High Rock and up its steep hill to this shed, where he had meant for them to change their world. He watches the Russians and James the metalworker and the carpenters, all of them striking him or else the machine they themselves built. When they finish, when his teeth and bones are already shattered, he sees Randall, the youth he once admired above all others, and he lowers his head and accepts the vengeance the boy feels he"s owed.
Before the beating ends, Spear lifts his head to look up at Maud, to take in her restored youth and beauty. For the last time, he sees the Electricizers, sees Jefferson and Franklin and Rush and Murray and all the others a.s.sembled around her. He cries out to them for protection, for salvation, and when they do not come to his aid he looks past them to Maud, who glows in their light, but also with a light of her own, something he wishes he had seen earlier, when there was still some great glory that might have come of it.
HER ENNEAD.
HER BABY IS A JOKE, just a tiny bundle of cells dividing, too small to be taken seriously. For another week or two, it will still be smaller than the benign tumor she had removed from her breast two years ago, a realization that leads to her touching the place where that lump once was whenever she"s alone. She jokes about this to her friends, who don"t find it funny. She doesn"t either, but she can"t stop herself from sharing about her tumor-sized baby, growing and growing and growing, taking over her body. This time, no one wants her to stop it or get rid of it. This time, people say congratulations and hug her instead of pretending she"s contagious, instead of forgetting her number until they hear she"s better. Like before, she"s only angry because everyone always a.s.sumes they already know exactly how she feels about the events that happen to her. She is careful to keep her true feelings to herself, to see that, as with the tumor, there is much she could lose.
Her baby is a seed, barely planted but already pushing roots through its waxy coat, searching for the dank soil it needs to grow inside her. She pictures it flowering but knows it"ll be years before her baby is old enough for flowers, for seeds of its own. Her doctor emphasizes nutrition, suggests she drink six to eight gla.s.ses of water every day. She doesn"t respond, doesn"t tell him how many more she"s already drinking. At home, she holds her face under the faucet, her throat pried open to swallow all the water she can. When she stands, her face and neck and shirt are soaked through, but it is not enough. She puts her lips back to the flowing water and drinks as deep as she can, as deep as she knows she must.
Her baby is a stone, and she wonders, How can I love a stone? It is cool and dark, something formed not in an instant-as she always a.s.sumed her baby would be-but instead over an age, an epoch. Everything about this feels slower than she"d imagined it would. She pictures her stone skipping across the hidden darkness of a lake, each point of contact a ripple expanding and then disappearing. She practices skipping stones herself while she waits for the baby to come, transforming every ditch and puddle and pond and lake into a microcosm, into a point of departure, a possible place where one day she will have to let go.
Her baby is a thunderstorm, a bundle of negatively and positively charged ions about to interact violently. It is a hurricane or a monsoon or a tsunami, but she doesn"t know which, doesn"t know how to tell the difference. She feels it churning inside, growing stronger with each revolution. Her levees will not hold. What happens after the baby comes will be different than what happened before. Whole countries she once knew will be swept away, their inhabitants scattered and replaced by new citizens, by other mothers and other children she has not yet met but in whose company she knows she will spend the rest of her life.
Her baby is a bird, mottled with gray and brown feathers that will last only as long as its infancy, when it will molt into splendor. Its mouth is open wide, waiting expectantly. Sometimes when she lies still in her quiet apartment, she can hear cawing from her round belly. She has cravings, contemplates eating quarters, little bits of tin foil, even a pair of silver earrings. She hopes her baby is building a beautiful nest inside of her. She wants to give it everything it needs so that it might never leave. Nest as lie, as false hope. Her baby is a bird of prey, something she has never been this close to before. All those talons. All that beak. It hooks her, devours her. They"re both so hungry. She eats and eats. Before this, she never knew birds had tongues.
Her baby is a knife. A dagger. A broadsword, sharp and terrible. Her baby is a dangerous thing and she knows that if she isn"t careful then one day it will hurt her, hurt others. When it kicks, she feels its edges pressed against the walls of its sheath, drawing more blood in a sea of blood. She is careful when she walks not to b.u.mp into things, not to put herself in harm"s way. She wonders how it will hurt to push it from her body, to have the doctor tug her baby out of her as from a stone.
Her baby is a furred thing, alternately bristled and then soft. She hopes it isn"t shedding, wonders how she"ll ever get all that hair out of her if it is. She searches online for images of badgers and then wolverines, looking for something to recognize in their faces. She types the words creatures that burrow, then adds a question mark and tries again. The baby is so warm inside her, curled in on itself, waiting for winter to end, for a day to come when all the breath it"s been holding can finally be expelled, like heat fogging the air of a still cold morning. Sometimes, when the baby rolls over and makes itself known, she can almost smell it.
Now the water breaking. Now the dilation of the cervix. Now the first real contraction, more potent than any of the false warnings she experienced before. Now the worry that this is too early, that she hasn"t learned yet what her baby is supposed to be. Now the lack of thought and the loss of discernible time. Now the pain, which is sharp and dull and fast and slow, which is both waves and particles at the same time. Now the hurry, the burst into motion after the near year of waiting. Now the push, the pushing, the rushing stretch of her suddenly elastic body expanding to do this thing, to give birth to this baby. Now the joke, the seed, the stone, the storm, the bird, the sword. Now the tiny mammal, warm-blooded and hot and yes, now the head covered in wet hair. Now the shoulders, now the torso and the arms. Now the hipbones and the thighs and the knees and the feet. Now the first breath. Now the eyes opening. Now the cry, calling out to her like deja vu, like the recognition of someone from a dream.
Now the baby.
Now the baby.
Now the baby, an event repeating for the rest of her life.
Her baby is a boy. Her baby is a girl. Her baby is potential energy changing to kinetic, is a person gaining momentum. Her baby is a possibility, or, rather, a string of possibilities and potentialities stretching forward from her toward something still unknowable. With the baby in her arms, she smiles. She coos. She tells her baby that it can be whatever it wants to be. She tells her baby that no matter what it turns out to be, she will always recognize it when it comes back to her. There is no shape that could hide her baby from her, no form that would make her turn her back on it. She says this like a promise, swears it like she can make it true, like it"s just that easy. Some days, no matter what she says, her baby cries and cries and cries.
HOLD ON TO YOUR VACUUM.
ACCORDING TO TEACHER, THERE IS ONLY ONE RULE, AND IT IS THIS: No matter what happens, hold on to your vacuum. We have each been given one, each a different shape and size according to our needs. My own vacuum is bright red and bulky, as heavy as a ten-year-old, its worn cord slipping through my fingers like the tail of a rodent, thick and rubbery and repugnant. I start to complain, but Teacher holds up a hand and silences me.
Teacher says, This is the vacuum that was a.s.signed to you, and the only one you"ll be allowed to play with.
I don"t know this man"s actual name or t.i.tle, whether he"s referee or judge or umpire, but he reminds me of the man who taught my eighth-grade science cla.s.s. He has the same balding hair pulled into a ponytail, the same small gold crucifix earring, and when he smiles he shows the same small yellow teeth pocked by smoke and sweets. I only know he"s in charge because he"s the one standing on the stage of the auditorium while the rest of us wait in the front row below. Because he"s the only one of us without a vacuum of his own.
After my complaint, there are no other questions, and so Teacher says, I promise to count to at least one hundred before I come looking for you.
He says, I promise to look for you as long as you need me to, and then he says, Go.
As soon as Teacher finishes talking, the other players reach for their own vacuum cleaners and lug them up the aisle stairs, then out of the auditorium and into the lobby. From there, some move further into the building and some through the double gla.s.s doors into the world waiting outside, but why each person chooses one or the other is unclear to me. One girl is tall and thin and agile, her tiny hand vac fitting perfectly into her grip as she bounds out the door and across the parking lot. I follow her as far as the sidewalk, my hand resting on top of my own vacuum. Watching her run, I don"t know where I should go or what I should do. This is only the first turn, and although Teacher has explained that the game is like hide and seek, I don"t yet understand. I don"t know what the rewards are for success, or what the punishment for failure might be.
I blink once and then Teacher is behind me. Before I can move, his arm shoots around my neck and pulls me into a wrestler"s headlock, his grip strong and sure. His lips are beside my ear, the hairs of his moustache and beard tickling my face as he says, I thought I told you to run.
As he says, You"re too stupid to be brave, so why didn"t you run?
When his other hand comes into view, there is a cordless drill in its grip. The drill is matte black and dull yellow, loaded with a foot-long bit spinning at full speed. Teacher c.o.c.ks my head and angles the drill downward into the crown of my skull. He pushes it in, past skin and bone, and then I scream and then I can"t remember why I"m screaming and then I"m gone.
I"m carrying the vacuum again, trudging across a farm field full of snow toward the other side, where several rows of dark trees clumped between the snow and the cloudy sky might hide my red vacuum from the exposure of the open field. My lungs burn and my arms ache but I never question the necessity of lugging the vacuum everywhere I go. It is the only rule and so I follow it.
Once beneath the trees, I drag the vacuum over the blanketing floor of pine needles. Heading deeper into the woods, I find a tight bunch of pines whose boughs create a natural shelter into which I tuck myself and my vacuum. I expect to be hidden, to be safe, but I am not alone.
On the ground at my feet is a wounded deer, surrounded by a b.l.o.o.d.y halo of snow originating from the bullet hole tunneled through its chest. Rather than let go of the vacuum, I transfer its handle to my right hand as I kneel beside the deer. There is a knife in the snow, and because I don"t know what else to do, I pick it up and hold it, looking over at the deer"s still form, at the steam still rising from its blood. I think I know what I am supposed to do, but I don"t know if I can do it.
I place the knife against the breastbone but can"t bring myself to make the cut. I try again and fail again. This is why I never went hunting with my father or my brothers, at least not after the first time. I turn away, leaving the deer and the knife where I found them. When I step out from the press of the tree branches, Teacher"s waiting for me, a thin smile on his face.
He says, You weren"t able to do it before either, so nothing to feel bad about.
Then there is the drill. Then there is the end of my turn.
A new turn begins, in a high school locker room where I"m surrounded by other players, three boys in nothing but boxer shorts with vacuums of their own, giant shop vacs, low and squat on squeaky wheels. I"m naked before them, one hand on my vacuum and one on my crotch.
The biggest of the boys says, Want to get to your locker, don"t you?
Probably pretty ashamed of that little p.r.i.c.k. Needs to put his panties on.
Show us what you"ve got and I"ll let you pa.s.s. I promise.
This boy, his vacuum is bigger than the others, and also an unmistakable hue of pink.
I know he"s not telling the truth. Whatever happens, someone is definitely going to get hurt.
The boys continue to taunt me, and right before I know I"m about to give in, to just get it over with, the door to the locker room slams open, and in comes Teacher. He smiles, all his little crowded teeth gleaming victorious in the fluorescence.
We scatter, but he"s too fast, the scene too disorienting. The drill enters the bullies first, but eventually it comes for me too.
There is a turn where my father bails me out of jail and then there is the drill. Where my mother finds my slim p.o.r.nography stash, the drill coming as she tells me who it was that molested her and how she"s afraid I"m going to grow up to be like him. I call a boy in the second grade a n.i.g.g.e.r even though I don"t know what the word means. The drill enters through my cheek so that I can feel it spinning inside my mouth before it angles upward toward my brain. These turns I never hear Teacher coming, never see him except as a hand holding a weapon.
The line between voyeur and partic.i.p.ant blurs. I open a bathroom door and see my babysitter partially naked, squatting with her pants around her ankles, changing her tampon. This is years before I even know what that is. I back out quickly, yelling apologies, my vacuum clunking against the doorframe. Later I will reenact an early masturbation attempt, one hand on myself and the other on the vacuum"s handle as I picture the triangle of pubic hair between her legs. The drill bit finds me right before I o.r.g.a.s.m. It is a long time before I see another player again, and when I do I can"t help wondering if I"m playing against them or beside them, if we are rivals or on the same team. It"s hard to know. My only companion comes via the one rule: Hold on to your vacuum. It goes everywhere with me, a conjoined twin or else a tumor made of Chinese plastic and rubber belts.
I grow calmer, more accepting of the drill, like a child who learns to take his medicine no matter how bad it tastes: I"m in a house, behind Teacher now, stalking him for once. A new kind of turn. Teacher climbs a staircase, seemingly unaware of my presence behind him. At the top of the stairs, he enters the first room on the left and closes the door behind him. I follow, dragging the red vacuum as quietly as possible. I don"t have the strength anymore to lift it over the stairs, but I do drag it as quietly as possible, easing it over the carpeted hump of each step. At the top, I remember an old trick I used to play on my younger siblings. I tie one end of my vacuum cord around the handle of the door Teacher"s behind, one to the closed door across the hall. When I open the door on the other side and lower its doorstop, it pulls the cord tight, making it impossible to move either door. I stand in the hallway and wait for Teacher to try to escape. Fifteen minutes pa.s.s and still I resolve to be patient. I sit on the floor, cradling my vacuum, rocking it in my arms. It is heavy, far heavier than it was before, and it stinks of burning rubber and fried dust. Impatient, I press my ear against Teacher"s door, listening, and by the time I hear the drill bit chewing through the door, it"s too late to move. Not that I would. I cry out as the bit clears the wood and hits my temple, but only in relief. My hippocampus must be shredded wheat by now and still I crave more, more, more.
Most turns I"m somewhere I don"t want to be, someplace I"ve been once and wouldn"t willingly revisit. I"m a child, making up a story about a man trying to abduct me just to make my mother feel bad for leaving me in the car alone while she paid for her gas. The vacuum"s on the floor of the car between my chubby little legs, Teacher"s in the back seat cleaning his gla.s.ses. I come to the worst lie I ever told my wife and it is one of the lowest moments of my life. Even though she never thought to doubt me, it is still terrible living through it again.
Once in a while, the turns bring me to rarer moments, like my college graduation or my wedding day. Moments where my parents or friends or my wife told me they loved me and were proud of me. Moments where a handshake or a hug or a kiss is interrupted by the drill bit battering down the doors of my skull. These are the times I scream the loudest, that I struggle against the bit"s insistence, but Teacher has the steady hand of a surgeon or else an a.s.sa.s.sin. Of all the players in the game, only he seems constantly sure of his role.
Now there is a turn that is fully recognizable as my own memory, turned into what I know is another game board, another level. I"m at a party when I"m eighteen or nineteen. Everyone is drunk, and everyone has their vacuum with them. I keep drinking, leaning against my vacuum for support, talking to a blonde girl in a miniskirt for hours. She tells me about her boyfriend who"s away at school and I keep pressing, trying too hard but still we end up in a bedroom upstairs, both of us barely conscious, our vacuums leaned against the bed, our bodies tangled in their cords.
I kiss her and she says, I don"t know about this.
I answer by kissing her again.
My hand moves under her skirt, the part of me that is playing the game mimicking the part of me that is a memory.
This is not something I think of often.
It is not something I"ve ever told anyone.
Here, in the game, I stop and pull my hand away. I say, I"m so sorry for what I did to you, and the girl doesn"t say anything back because she"s too far gone to talk.
I say, I promise I won"t do it again, and then I get out of the bed, untangle our cords, and cover her gently with a blanket. When I walk downstairs to find her friends, to tell them they need to look after her, I see that the party is deserted, its falsehood revealed. The only person left is Teacher, holding his big black drill in one hand, a red plastic cup of beer in the other. When he stands and starts walking toward me, I step back, raise my hands in protest.
I say, It"s over. There"s nothing for you here. I changed what happened all by myself.
He moves quickly then, carelessly whipping his beer away in an arc of foam as his other hand shoots up and forward, shoving the drill at my face, the bit already whirling threats. He shakes his head, says, As if one moment was all it took.
I say, I"m still ashamed, Teacher. I"m just not afraid of my shame anymore.
I wrap my arms around the vacuum and its bag full of my dirt. Teacher pulls the trigger, but it is meaningless and he knows it. There are other rules besides the first one, and despite the drill I have begun to discover them.
No new turn follows, only some sort of timeout, intermission. I"m sitting in the end zone of a high school football field while sweat drips from my face, my arms and legs shaking from exertion. Even my vacuum looks tired, its belt worn, its bag full to the point of bursting. Teacher walks across the field with his drill dangling loosely in his grip, and while there"s no malice in his movement, I can"t help jerking away when he comes to sit beside me. The armpits of his shirt are darkened with sweat like sulfur and cheap cologne, rotten eggs soaked in musk.
He says, Why be afraid? Why resist? The only thing I"m killing are the places you were most scared, the places you were caught, found out for what you are.
That"s not true, I say, thinking about the moments where I was proudest, where someone decided I was a good husband, a good son, a good friend. Memories rare enough before the drill.
Teacher smiles, more teeth than curved lips. He says, Good with the bad, sweet with the sour, sometimes you gotta amputate the heart to save the head.
And then there is the drill bit again, pressed against my forehead, already biting through.
I say, I don"t want to play anymore.
I say, It"s not fair to everyone I hurt if I can forget what I did to them.
The drill turns slowly, tearing the skin without piercing the bone beneath. The bit is both cold and hot at the same time. Half of my memories are gone, replaced with the dead nothingness of Teacher"s treatment. If Teacher wins, there will be no remainder left behind.
Through the pain, I say, You cheated. You never explained the rest of the rules. You never told us there was a chance we could win too.
And then I see it, the solution, how to turn the half-life left to play into a second chance, the possibility of being better. I smile too now, wider than I have in all these sad years, and even with the drill twisting through my face I can see that Teacher is for a moment as afraid of me as I am of him.
Teacher says, You"re the one who asked to play, and then he presses the red trigger the rest of the way. The drill bit slides through bone and brain all over again, but this time I don"t give in as quickly. I focus, desperate to hold out for even one more millisecond than I have before. Even that will be an improvement, the first play at the beginning of a big comeback.
Teacher says, Game on, and as my eyes shut, I think, Yes, yes, it is.
DREDGE.
THE DROWNED GIRL DRIPS EVERYWHERE, soaking the cheap cloth of the Ford"s back seat. Punter stares at her from the front of the car, first taking in her long blond hair, wrecked by the pond"s amphibian sheen, then her lips, blue where the lipstick"s been washed away, flaky red where it has not. He looks into her gla.s.sy green eyes, her pupils so dilated the irises are slivered halos, the right eye further polluted with burst blood vessels. She wears a lace-frilled gold tank top, a pair of acid wash jeans with gra.s.s stains on the knees and the ankles. A silver bracelet around her wrist throws off sparkles in the window-filtered moonlight, the same sparkle he saw through the lake"s dark mirror, that made him drop his fishing pole and wade out, then dive in after her. Her feet are bare except for a silver ring on her left pinkie toe, suggesting the absence of sandals, flip-flops, something lost in a struggle. Suggesting too many things for Punter to process all at once.
Punter turns and faces forward. He lights a cigarette, then flicks it out the window after just two drags. Smoking with the drowned girl in the car reminds him of when he worked at the plastics factory, how he would sometimes taste melted plastic in every puff of smoke. How a cigarette there hurt his lungs, left him gasping, his tongue coated with the taste of polyvinyl chloride, of adipates and phthalates. How that taste would leave his throat sore, would make his stomach ache all weekend.
The idea that some part of the dead girl might end up inside him-her wet smell or sloughing skin or dumb luck-he doesn"t need a cigarette that bad.
Punter crawls halfway into the back seat and arranges the girl as comfortably as he can, while he still can. He"s hunted enough deer and rabbits and squirrels to know she"s going to stiffen soon. He arranges her arms and legs until she appears asleep, then brushes her hair out of her face before he climbs back into his own seat.
Looking in the rearview, Punter smiles at the drowned girl, waits for her to smile back. Feels his face flush when he remembers she"s never going to.
He starts the engine. Drives her home.
Punter lives fifteen minutes from the pond but tonight it takes longer. He keeps the Ford five miles per hour under the speed limit, stops extra long at every stop sign. He thinks about calling the police, about how he should have already done so, instead of dragging the girl onto the sh.o.r.e and into his car.
The cops, they"ll call this disturbing the scene of a crime. Obstructing justice. Tampering with evidence.
What the cops will say about what he"s done, Punter already knows all about it.
At the house, he leaves the girl in the car while he goes inside and s.h.i.ts, his stool as black and b.l.o.o.d.y as it has been for months. It burns when he wipes. He needs to see a doctor, but doesn"t have insurance, hasn"t since getting fired.
Afterward, he sits at the kitchen table and smokes a cigarette. The phone is only a few feet away, hanging on the wall. Even though the service was disconnected a month ago, he"s pretty sure he could still call 911, if he wanted to.
He doesn"t want to.
In the garage, he lifts the lid of the chest freezer that sits against the far wall. He stares at the open s.p.a.ce above the paper-wrapped bundles of venison, tries to guess if there"s enough room, then stacks piles of burger and steak and sausage on the floor until he"s sure. He goes out to the car and opens the back door. He lifts the girl, grunting as he gathers her into his arms like a child. He"s not as strong as he used to be, and she"s heavier than she looks, with all the water filling her lungs and stomach and intestinal tract. Even through her tank top he can see the way it bloats her belly like she"s pregnant. He"s careful as he lays her in the freezer, as he brushes the hair out of her eyes again, as he holds her eyelids closed until he"s sure they"ll stay that way.
The freezer will give him time to figure out what he wants. What he needs. What he and she are capable of together.
Punter wakes in the middle of the night and puts his boots on in a panic. In the freezer, the girl"s covered in a thin layer of frost, and he realizes he shouldn"t have put her away wet. He considers taking her out, thawing her, toweling her off, but doesn"t. It"s too risky. One thing Punter knows about himself is that he is not always good at saying when.
He closes the freezer lid, goes back to the house, back to bed but not to sleep. Even wide awake, he can see the curve of her neck, the interrupting line of her collarbones intersecting the thin straps of her tank top. He reaches under his pajama bottoms, past the elastic of his underwear, then squeezes himself until the pain takes the erection away.
On the news the next morning, there"s a story about the drowned girl. The anchorman calls her missing but then says the words her name was. Punter winces. It"s only a slip, but he knows how hurtful the past tense can be.
The girl is younger than Punter had guessed, a high school senior at the all-girls school across town. Her car was found yesterday, parked behind a nearby gas station, somewhere Punter occasionally fills up his car, buys cigarettes and candy bars.
The anchorman says the police are currently investigating, but haven"t released any leads to the public.
The anchorman looks straight into the camera and says it"s too early to presume the worst, that the girl could still show up at any time.
Punter shuts off the television, stubs out his cigarette. He takes a shower, shaves, combs his black hair straight back. Dresses himself in the same outfit he wears every day, a white t-shirt and blue jeans and black motorcycle boots.
On the way to his car, he stops by the garage and opens the freezer lid. Her body is obscured behind ice like frosted gla.s.s. He puts a finger to her lips, but all he feels is cold.
The gas station is on a wooded stretch of gravel road between Punter"s house and the outskirts of town. Although Punter has been here before, he"s never seen it so crowded. While he waits in line he realizes these people are here for the same reason he is, to be near the site of the tragedy, to see the last place this girl was seen.