There are a number of thin metal plinth-bridges, that connect the island on this side with the mainland. From there, it"s only a brief walk to the edge of town, where there"s a chain-link fence mounded over with ivy. The suburbs for which these roads were laid out never happened; the ancient farms crumble under their eaves and sagging roofs, flopped out on their overgrown lots, now plotted on an incongruous grid of dirt roads sighing dust. I start at the nearest corner of the grid and round off square by square. The day is warm. Everything is warm and tilted and eternal and infinite, I"ll walk these rounds of unbuilt blocks forever with the white sun spreading its hot grey mane there above my left shoulder, my shoes scuff blonde furry ground tufted with leaves of paralyzed gra.s.s that are flames the emerald color of lime flesh.
Now here"s an A-frame farmhouse with chickens clucking in the yard. I see a woman and two little ones far away, bobbing in the waist-high corn, heading in the direction of town. I walk unevenly up the dirt path, wobbling a little on my ankles. As I come around the woodpile toward the porch a man appears and starts at the sight of me. I see his face and so I cut it there is a hatchet there on the pile and I take it up. I swing once overhand and chop into his face through the center, pull it out with a yank of my wrist. It goes in easily and my arm is not strained. He bends, and I catch him once again backhanded through the cheekbones making a cross. He falls on the ground, his tongue hanging from his mouth. He mumbles in his blood. I straddle him but I"m facing the wrong way so I turn straddling him standing. He does not die until I strike him twice again over the head with the back of the hatchet. I drop the hatchet, and pick him up, carry him a few feet to a bare spot of ground where a moment ago the chickens were scratching. The blood seeps out from his hair with a quiet sound like a guitar being gently strummed, flows on the ground. I take out the stylus and stop I don"t know what I"m doing "Yes you do!"
I begin crooning words I don"t know. I draw the circle in his black blood, which slips out from his head in laps. I write around the borders of the circle in unfamiliar letters.
"Yes that"s right that"s right don"t stop!"
The aching song wavers from my tense mouth, filled with longing, in waves that roll my body back and forth as though I stand waist deep in surf. The language isn"t mine but the words yearn in my throat here come branches, bare and sooty, up around me, and the chiming of tiny bells I run down a waist-high groove cut in the ground, lined with stones, black wire boughs steeple their fingers just above my head, my hands make scoops in the air, right then left then right again, before my chest as I run making the world streak now I am out in the open on pale green gra.s.s so soft it turns to powder as I tread on it, my cuffs are wet with dew and slap my ankles, I only run faster still. Here are rolling hills, copses and a high caer above the salt flats and tidal flats and inky bogs and iridescent brown bogs emerging from the bogs are great plumed anemonoids, their gelatin arms waving rapturously singing in every part. These are nurtured on human sacrifices: lovingly the tendrils s.n.a.t.c.h the victim up into the screening white branches, which are swiftly streaked with red...the cries of the victims are audible for hours, and the trees sing blithely, their leaves flickering in the breeze like shining coins.
Their path will cross my own that line of men, running arm in arm, in white shirts and black trousers, black bow ties and white ap.r.o.ns. Their hair glistens pomaded sleek and fragrant on their heads, their legs swing perfectly synchronized; these men dressed as waiters are my fellow killers, my blood brothers. The line swings away from me. Our paths won"t cross after all. I"m breathing too hard to shout after them. I"ve never seen such speed. Their scissoring legs seem to kick them weightless over the ground like ballet dancers, and even where the ground is uneven their coordination never breaks. My heart bangs against my ribs. Any moment the flutter at my side will flare and st.i.tch my lung, my throat thickens they"re only a few feet before me now! Still in my ears though not from my throat the yearning voice pleads and sighs its song, if I could speak I would beg them not to leave me behind I can almost reach to the shoulder of the rightmost runner now it"s happening, I"m coming up alongside, I can see the looped arm held out to me by the rightmost runner, and as I slip my arm through it I slot into step with them, my ap.r.o.n pressed flat against me, my shoulders jerking up and down as I run, my legs flying, my head thrown back I can feel the cool tracks of my tears stream back from my eyes into my pomaded hair the voice is singing now still but its yearning sound is joyful to me now we fly so fast and faster still always faster, but effortlessly, speeding up the slope of the high caer, toward the spot where the slope is broken off in midair high above the sweet rocks and creamy surf.
In voluminous sighs the fat man smiles beatifically and spreads his hands. His body comes apart into silver wires and bells, swells like a great, white tree.
The Whitest Teeth When I was a boy, my friend Kajetan and I lived in the same U-shaped apartment building, with a common area within the loop of the U. This common area was a lumpy mattress of lawn that never completely dried out. Even in the summertime, it was dank and shady, an a.s.sembly of clumps of gra.s.s and big sinuous puddles.
Our families lived opposite each other. All the apartments were the same, porcelain floors in the bathrooms, kitchens, hallways, and in the other rooms a dingy chitin of pressed ivory shavings, suspended in a crinkly sheath of yellowing resin, had been laid down. The same, fantastically heavy burgundy curtains, with thick, burdensome golden fringes, hung over every window, shutting out all trace of daylight. Kajetan and I would meet in front of his door every morning and walk to the Lycee together; we attended different cla.s.ses, but we always ate lunch together. He was a quiet, fawning boy; he never had a teacher who didn"t instantly love him. No one in the school was as fair as Kajetan. His hair, his flesh, except for his lips, were all white, and he had a blazing, retiring smile, like the dazzle of daylight on drifted snow.
That day, the day I am thinking of, I had been gloating over some dirty postcards that I had found somewhere. I pored over the grey bodies, the black eyes and lips, the dark islands and white prominences, filled with riddles, all bordered with dark burgundy red, and gold braid. I was too young to be aroused by these images, but I was aflame with curiosity about them. After devouring a card with my eyes, I would hand it to Kajetan, who kneeled beside me in the mud. We studied together in silence. Here were all my postcards, the grey, supine, obliging or oblivious bodies, scattered on the muddy ground. I was reaching to gather them up when I felt something cool on my upper lip. I looked down, and saw drops of my blood falling into one of the puddles. The drops bloomed when they struck the water, making little billows of fine red threads. Two more drops, big ones, fell, and sank to the bottom. They hovered there, conspiring together in the depths, without dissolving. I crushed my nostril shut and tilted my head back. After a few minutes, I stopped pressing on my nostril, and it opened slowly, tearing through the membrane of candied blood that had congealed over it. The bleeding had stopped. Kajetan had noticed my problem, looked at the last couple of postcards, then put them aside and sat with his hands in his lap, his eyes on the ground.
He"d had a nightmare, he said after a few minutes a horrible, frog-like man with a huge, round, smiling face, hiding in the reeds by a pond, or a pool. This man hadn"t threatened him at all he had only smiled, with closed lips. He had attacked Kajetan with the sight of this wide, wide smile.
"You won"t have nightmares any more when you grow up." I solemnly believed this.
He looked at me levelly, and said softly, "When I grow up, I"m going to kill you." His smile slowly came out then, like the sun in a winter cloud.
In my memory, the sentence stretches, and seems to be said a hundred times not quite at once. That sentence has its own particular, special moment in time, which lasts until now.
Kajetan made me this promise, but he was not the one who would go on to take life. That might have been his calling, but he failed to answer, and I was chosen instead.
I was the energetic one. Kajetan was lazy. He spent his time with me because I always had some project in the works. After his sister"s health collapsed, and his parents separated, he moved away, and thereafter I saw him only in my dreams, sliding into the shadows of an arched doorway in a stone wall...which the rain had marked with grey-brown stains...his white head gleaming in the dusky light...fluorescing, like a will-o-the-wisp, as he floated into the dark.
That wall and doorway, I soon discovered, belong to the estate by the sea; a palace of gnarled stone surrounded by black pines and beech trees. The gloom of the place drew me strongly; on the grounds, the sound of the surf is audible, but the sea is not visible. The underbrush here is thick and elastic, the leaves made rubbery by the salt wind, and difficult to penetrate. One follows the sound of the waves, and eventually the soil becomes sandy and thin, the vegetation more spa.r.s.e, and then the dunes and the horizon appear together. The house looms above the level of the beach on a slanted promontory of rock, its shuttered windows refusing to open on the sea. I have the impression the place is in probate, some sort of protracted dispute; it is empty and neglected. Only occasional trespa.s.sers from town make use of it. I secretly oblige the owners, whoever they are, by killing these trespa.s.sers.
The first time, I was kneeling in a clump of ferns, watching a man. He was sitting on a stone beneath a tree. He"d taken his rucksack from his back and set it beside him, eaten his lunch and now was smoking, leaning back against the trunk. A hiker, apparently. He finished his smoke, crushing the b.u.t.t out under a rock, and knelt, tying his bootlaces. I leapt on him then, weightless, the sound of the wind and surf very loud, his grunt of surprise very far away. I rolled on top of him and drove my fists into his face his hands outflung made a sort of thicket between me and his face I swatted at him with a rock, he tried to wrestle it from me, all the while yelping bits of sentences at me I released the rock, took up another and swiftly smashed his head with it. I sunk my fingers into his cheeks and eyes bent forward and pulled his face in half with my hands his body bucked and thrashed under me, his arms flailing. Finally I strangled him, staring and dripping perspiration down into the torn flesh, and exposed bone, of his face.
Satisfied, I a.s.sembled his meagre possessions and dragged him down the beach to the water. Launching his body from the rocks, I could be a.s.sured the current would accept him. This sea, sky, woods, house, were all my accomplices. Kajetan"s face dwindling in shadowy pa.s.sageways, his flickering smile flashed white in the instant before shades filled his features altogether.
The second time, a woman was taking photographs on the beach. I hid in the rocks and jumped her from behind. There were many deep tidal pools here between the boulders. I seized her by the hair and pushed her head into the water. I straightened my arm she clawed at me, kicked back at me, but her angle was all wrong. After a few moments she went limp a ruse. I did not budge. A few more seconds of frantic activity, shreds of water dashing in all directions, and then nothing but the rumble of the waves.
Drowning is one of the better ways to kill someone, provided circ.u.mstances allow for it. At its edges, the estate dwindles into flat, sallow land, grey soil, grey sky, a handful of scarred, defiant trees, and a handful of farms. Black clouds turned the dim, watery light of that day a brownish-green color. A stand of dead trees, pinched off by an arm of sand from the body of the woods that surround the house. The trees enclose a little depression in the ground where rain water collects to form a broad, shallow pond of iridescent brown. A dirt road runs by the stand. A few heavy branches bristling with grey, wiry sticks had blown down and dammed the wind"s flow of dead leaves and bits of bracken. The road was blocked. I found a farmer clearing the debris out of the way and offered to help seamed, lean face, slow, patiently moving body. I clubbed him over the head with a rock when his back was turned and dragged him, surprisingly light and thin, to the pond. I knelt on his back and held his head down. He was unable to struggle. His body seemed heavy and tired. He seemed to lie beneath me resigned, his face mired in black, stagnant mud and thick brown water. Everything was quiet. Despite his weakness, I remained kneeling a long time every now and then thinking I felt a sort of inner tick beneath my knees. This farmer was like a plant himself I had to dig his life out of him by its roots to keep it from growing back, and it took a long time. Kneeling there, my gaze was drawn out across the pond toward the house and the grounds, and further to the sea. Although I was drowning a man, I felt as peaceful as a stone. After a long time, I rose and he drifted out from the bank. I almost left him floating face down in brown water, brown light.
I caught a woman from behind with my necktie, stood motionless as a statue while she clawed at her throat, twisted this way and that. I turned my head to see our shadows together on the stone wall. They looked strange. When her knees buckled I straddled her, her body lying flat on its stomach, her head dangling from her neck, which I held above the ground with the tie. She had been strolling the grounds hand in hand with a man. I had watched them draw near the house, and took hasty advantage of his leaving her alone a moment. When he returned, he found her at once and knelt slowly beside her with his bearded mouth open. I stepped from the hiding place, the doorway I had seen in my dream. He looked mutely up at me, and I struck him in the face with an axe. The single blow killed him. I am strong, the axe swung light as a reed in my hand. The red dew of his blood congealed on her icy cheeks like studs of cinnamon candy.
In my dreams I see again the enigmatic seeds of his teeth. I rise in the morning, my curtained room is dark. My employer will send a car for me. I must deliver some records to our office in the adjacent town.
I return on foot. When the pavement gives way to rutted clay I realize I"ve been on the wrong road for several miles. After a moment"s reckoning I decide I"m better off going on than back. I"m heading in the right direction, by a more rambling route. After half a mile more the road dwindles to a broad level path bordered by rattling humps of ivy, and tall gra.s.s. The breeze flourishes into a steady, nervous wind. The sky is dense, silver and black; the humid air is thick with captive rain. I can hear surf. I"m approaching the sea.
There before me is a wide ribbon of black trees, and peaked slate rooftops above the trees, black against the sky as dried blood. I have been here so many times, I remember them all, but I have no memories to compare with this; I have no memories of coming or going. Why do I only now realize this? Rain patters all around. I walk with a little difficulty through the tall gra.s.s into the shade of the trees. As I cross the boundary, some fraction of the daylight is absorbed by the air. Colorless shade rises from the ground.
The path runs by the wall, toward a paved terrace surrounded by overgrown planters. Over the sound of the rain, which still forms in distinct drops, instead of a seamless hush, and the remote surf, I hear violent splashing. In the middle of the terrace, I know, there is a rectangular, lichen-encrusted pool, now drained. When I once lifted the tarp that covered it, I saw only the crumpled brown remains of dead water lilies smeared against the bottom. The terrace is ringed with empty pedestals upon which some cla.s.sical figures once had stood I come up behind one of these, to which there still adheres a single broken, heavily veined foot, flexed in mid-step, in time to see a figure recoil into the bushes opposite me. A young woman lies flat on the pavement, her head bobs in the agitated blue water of the pool who refilled it? her arms up hands floating half netted in the black tendrils of her hair.
I step forward, looking at her in confusion. Someone else works here?
I hear a step behind me and feel a light hand on my shoulder, and sudden pain my heart gulps, flails...dizzy, my body weighted, I turn a little as the hand is removed from my shoulder. Something is pulled from my back. The world lists and slides away, the picture I see sets back into my mind slowly lean Kajetan, tall, hands diffident behind his back, his face fluoresced in a white smile. White and red. The pavement buffets me. Now I am floating, the wind in my hair, not on my face.
Water clicks at intervals in my ear, the water is red and white. My hands rise nerveless to the surface. The water convulses once, the body beside me launches forward curling limp down into the water trailing long lacy sleeves of bubbles, and a plume of her blood like thick smoke rises and envelopes me. Long sleeves of red reach languidly for the bottom, and cross long white sleeves of bubbles.
Now I can see only the featureless, blue depths.
His memories remove their disguises and show themselves for what they are. His dreams file past, smiling, showing their teeth I am trying to keep hold of them...of one at least, only leave me one.
None of them are mine.
...the water grows calmer and calmer, and soon will be completely still.
...the motion it lends me will abandon me, and I will lie completely still.
...my face is dead, my harmless teeth smiling bitterly. Yes...yes, of course.
My Father"s Friends This is theatre critic Simon Klai here is his wife Doriandra, these are their two sons: Louy and Leonard. Simon is acerbic, impatient, acute, aloof. He loves his family as if from on high.
First Exhibit: Simon on his way to the newspaper office to present his copy. Double breasted suit, silk tie, hat, overcoat...walking stick, soft leather briefcase with two buckled straps. It is early morning. The streets are still fairly empty. His breath mists in the air. Alert, leaning forward, walking briskly although he is not late, he watches the pavement pa.s.s under his feet...darts glances this way and that. The sun is still low and cold in the sky. Crossing a bridge, Simon"s steps come slower; he is looking at the sun. He stops, his eyes on the sun. He does not lean on the bridge"s stone rail; he is rigid, shoulders back, briefcase at the end of his arm, his stick held firmly in his right hand at about a forty-five degree angle to the street. A car whirs by, misses him only by inches he does not move. He is staring at the sun as though he"d never seen it before.
Second Exhibit: Later the same day: Simon is sitting on a bench with his head back. After a few hours he rises stiffly and crosses the park, walking slowly, a little unevenly. Presently he raises his head he is on a narrow side street that curves away to the left. Just ahead, a hotel signboard hangs over the street; white facade, billowing urns of flowers. The lobby is small, filled with dusky golden light and a carpet smell. Simon takes a suite on the uppermost floor; in shirtsleeves and stockings he orders a bottle sent up from the bar. He tips the girl lavishly. In the days to come, despite his straitened condition, he will stop ordering bottles; sortie out to the stores and back, instead.
On the tenth day, he checks out. Home is only a few blocks away. He lets himself in during the middle of the day, when the boys are at school and Doriandra is rehearsing. Lying on the bed, the pillows smell of her hair. When she returns, he will present her with an uncannily reasonable excuse for his absence.
Third Exhibit: It is a cloudy morning. Simon reaches for his umbrella, taking its handle with two fingers, then his head twists on his neck slightly as though a thought had very forcibly occurred to him, and he instead takes his heavy walking stick. As he steps down the stairs he inspects the stick, peels the india rubber tip from the end and tosses it back into the umbrella stand.
On the street: the inaugurating first drops of rain patter on his shoulders. Cause and effect he heads for the awning of a bakery along with several other adjacent pedestrians. Halfway there he stops, and then continues past the bakery through empty streets, keeping to the lee of the buildings so as to stay dry into an area of a few blocks in size currently under renovation after a fire burnt sh.e.l.ls, new lumber, frames and bricks, tools lie in the street. Striding against the rain all at once he stops, turns a little indecisively to the right, looking around as though trying to sight a sound, then slips into the gaping front door of a partially rebuilt house. Once under its roof, he shakes the rain from his hat and coat. He stands, seems to wait, in what once was the entry way smell of plaster dust and fresh paint. Now he quietly climbs the stairs to the second floor apartment, which opens out to the right. The kitchen a white box, fifteen feet square, two windows without gla.s.s admit the sound of the rain. A boy about eight or nine looks up at him, rain dropping from his clothes. Simon walks toward the boy.
"I was trying to get out of the rain."
He seems to think Simon is a contractor, or a security man. Simon"s stick flashes up and cracks down over the boy"s head. The boy crouches without quite falling down and veers randomly toward the wall opposite the door. Simon raises the stick again, then his head jerks and he alters his grip, taking the stick in both hands and driving the end into the boy"s stomach. A purple stain spreads from the boy"s solar plexus and he falls on his side holding himself. Simon straddles the boy and churns the stick up and down on him with all his weight. There are two softly audible snapping sounds. Now the boy is limp, breath rattling. Simon turns him on his back with his toe, drops to his knees on the boy"s chest, and presses his stick across the boy"s throat. The eyes are still sluggishly moving. There is still a remnant of fear, surprise, imploring, on the boy"s face. Simon"s face is attentive, impa.s.sive. He looks like a dentist bending over a patient. The boy fumbles the stick weakly, then his limp hands fall away.
Now the boy"s face is dark. Simon slips from the house. It is dusk; the rain has stopped; the uninhabited street is dark. Simon tosses his stick over a fence into a vacant lot as he walks briskly home. Drops of the boy"s blood seep into the dry gra.s.s.
Fourth Exhibit: Autumnal gloom in the park of dead trees: mercurial light fades against a sky of deepening indigo. Simon pa.s.ses the brick kiosk which houses the public bathrooms he abruptly stops, and walks back to the kiosk.
Behind the kiosk, there is a square of bare pavement hidden from public view by the overgrown iron fence that rings the park. A gun lies in the center of this area. It is loaded and fits in his coat pocket easily.
Fifth Exhibit: A month later. The gun lies between a double row of books on Simon"s shelves. He keeps it in a cloth sack so that the powder won"t be smelled. The smell is strongest of course immediately after use.
Doriandra has taken Leonard to visit her cousin. Simon is alone in the house with Louy, who has a cold. It"s night; Louy is asleep. Simon is reading now he sets the book down, goes to the bookshelf, leaves the house.
Two hours later he returns. He goes to the bookshelf.
Louy is still asleep. Simon has crept into his room and sits on the edge of his bed, watching Louy sleep. He leans forward extremely slowly, and carefully takes Louy"s head in his hands. His thumbs drop down onto Louy"s eyelids with smooth, hydraulic control. Slow and gentle his thumbs roll the lids up, exposing the dreaming eyes. Simon leans forward, pouring his gaze into Louy"s eyes.
Louy stirs, starts panting. His body twitches. He groans with a stifled voice that sounds as though it came from far away, from beneath the earth. Simon is curved over him, unblinking eyes" gaze fastened on the boy"s dreaming eyes. Louy is screaming softly, his voice is trapped down inside him.
Now Louy screams. He struggles with his father, awake, s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g his eyes shut, the screams siren out of him bigger than the room. Simon seizes Louy by the shoulders and shakes him violently, without saying a word. Louy"s head whips back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. Simon shakes him shakes him Louy goes limp, his head flips forward his chin striking his chest with a wet smack then is wrenched backward thumping against the pillow or the backboard. Simon shakes him, his arms pump mechanically in and out in and out in and out.
Sixth Exhibit: A series of newspaper headlines cholera has broken out here, here, and here. And now here, and now here. Growing concern it"s an epidemic. A state of emergency is declared, cars spill out of the city, jam up on stone bridges, uniformed men check doc.u.ments and direct traffic.
Leonard sits in the back seat of his cousin"s car. His mother, Doriandra, and his cousin are carrying Louy down the front steps to the street. Louy is lean, feeble...dull eyes, slack mouth, nerveless limbs dangling. Tenderly they seat him next to Leonard, resting his head on Leonard"s lap. Cousin gets into the driver"s seat, the car bobbing under him like a raft. Doriandra walks around the car to the front pa.s.senger seat...hard, metallic eyes.
This car will take them out to their cousin"s place in the country, where they will be safe from the plague.
...Newspapers...they filter in now and then...and on the radio stories of riots...chaos...
Seventh Exhibit: Hands in his coat pockets, Simon moves powerfully down the street. Now and then groups of youths rush past cold gusts of wind bring chaotic noise of a window breaking here, a dreamlike police whistle far away.
Suddenly alone in the street, Simon turns into an alley which intersects another at a right angle, a T. Two boys and a girl eating old bread, he shoots the one on the left. The boy crumples, his head striking the pavement with a sharp, hollow noise. The girl springs to her feet and runs down the right arm of the T, and the other boy stands up staring at his dead friend with his mouth open. Arm straight Simon aims at him and shoots him in the stomach. The boy"s body folds forward at the waist and he falls on his head face down. His legs slide back gradually, his bottom in the air.
The right arm of the T opens into a small enclosed lot the girl rounds the corner of the building to the right as he fires his gun. The bullet tugs at her right heel, blows off the heel strap of her shoe it drops on a tuft of gra.s.s she disappears behind the corner.
The lot is framed by the solid, continuous wall of the armory running the length of the block, on his left. To Simon"s right, the building whose corner she had turned; and before him, the rear of an L-shaped hotel...heaps of rubbish, trash cans, mattresses, a stove. Two escapes: she might run straight ahead, or to the right.
Simon turns to the right with his left eye he detects a patch of red earth by the stove. There is another red spot, there between the two garbage cans by the armory wall, the other way out. The girl hops from her hiding place. Simon"s arm flies automatically out and up level. He shoots her in the head, the girl plops onto the ground, a wide tear in her head above the ear. The bullet strikes the wall and shears off a flake of brick. It spins through the reverberating air like a wobbling top, and hits the gra.s.s with a m.u.f.fled thump.
Simon trots past the girl"s folded body, down the alley. He is heading for the street when like a marionette his body jerkily twists to the left and he slips instead through a back door hanging off its hinges. A moment later curious heads are craning, peering down the alley...mouths are rounding, they see a heavy bundle there, lying bisected by watery sunlight. They see it is a dead girl. As they rush to her side, Simon emerges calmly from the front door of the building into which he had so awkwardly retreated, walking with unremarkable haste. He raises his left arm and pulls the sleeve away from his watch; his eyes, shaded by the brim of his hat, hawkishly scan the street.
Poster on the corner: "Is it working?"
Eighth Exhibit: Months and months of plague. Bullets disappear from their red and black boxes in Simon"s bureau drawer.
Ninth Exhibit: Simon is caught in a riot. It starts with a puff of alarm, and suddenly everyone is squalling in all directions. Simon moves diagonally through the racing figures, toward the shelter of deserted, burnt-out buildings. Police swarm the streets with keening whistles Simon trips on the pavement his gun slides from his pocket across the pavement. The police have seen him, his gun two or three charge at him. Under the regime of the epidemic there is no due process, the police do as they please now their eyes have fastened on him.
Simon dashes into the building, throws shut the door. The lock still works. He sets the chain recoils as fists thump and bang against the wood. He flings a half-demolished wardrobe and a heavy table in front of the door. He can"t block the windows, but he can lock the hall doors. He checks the back door; it"s painted over, jammed shut; there"s nothing he can open it with. Upstairs the fire escape is on the front of the building. On the roof it"s too far to jump across to the neighboring house. He tries, peering over the edge, but panic fear he can"t overcome drives him back, nearly paralyzed. Half to himself he is saying "I can"t! I can"t do it! I need something else!" Crashing from downstairs, wood tearing and splintering.
He goes to the center of the roof, staring at a door that will burst open soon. Simon draws himself up, staring, his mouth set. He tightens into himself, his features crush together. He melts into air...vanishes across renovated buildings, alleys, sterile apartments...bullet spins cold in the sky...continuous wall of heads for the sharp, hollow noise...Louy is still asleep...the other boy watching a white box disappear from the sun, staring at his friend Louy sleep...the boy takes Louy"s head in rain...his thumbs drop nine...two burnt sh.e.l.ls, rain dropping from his stick...Simon leans forward, pouring in the dead trees...between two garbage cans he opens his gaze into Louy"s eyes...from her hiding place the riots the girl sees she is suddenly alone...billowing urns shoot her in the head, hat and coat...the bullet tugs her to the right street...Simon turns into a wall of the kiosk of flowers...the lobby is the girl, filled with a wide tear in her head above what was the entry way...her shoe drops on a right fence that rings golden light...flake of brick sailing...two boys...the park lying in the carpet smell...
There is nothing strange about me but my happiness. The only difficulty I have ever given anyone has been to contain someway my dangerous happiness, which makes me thoughtless. My exuberance breaks things, breaks me. It marches me up to people and elicits from me declarations of love, if only to give me the satisfaction of disappointment, to know that I am in love. I am forever building up this edifice of love and happiness, which would get to be as big as the world, or bigger, if it weren"t for the storms, eruptions, convulsions, that tear it all down again. When any of it comes down, it all comes down. Although these catastrophic failures deeply wound me, still I am grateful for the opportunity to rebuild, and to renew my trust with the world. I do everything on the scale of the world, as the only thing commensurate to my happiness.
Only by understanding my father"s life will you understand my death. I will have to adopt a conversational manner, for the moment, to tell you these everyday things. For most of my childhood, my father worked as a theatre critic. His articles were widely read and his opinions seriously received. I never understood exactly what he did, or why he was so inattentive to us. Over time, he withdrew from us. For reasons I would learn later, he once disappeared altogether for about ten days. We were told he had been depressed; he had thought some time alone would do him good, so he had taken a room at a hotel. I wanted to offer some comfort to him, if he was suffering he seemed to sense my feeling, and headed it off by adopting an especially frosty manner with me. My mother was mystified by his changes, and her uncertainty unnerved me. While I lacked confidence in my own judgement, it seemed to me my father sullenly avoided us all, stayed away from home.
I made friends easily, but I always lost them. My exuberance, my complicated games only exasperated and taxed them. Most of the time I kept company with my older brother Louy, whom I very little resembled; while I was nervous, enthusiastic, busy, thoughtless, Louy was ghostly and quiet. He had a gentle, warm little voice like a candle flame, and wet, red lips. He almost always seemed preoccupied and far away, but then he would astonish me with a near-clairvoyant observation about someone or something we had seen: and I would realize again that he missed nothing.
A few days after Louy"s thirteenth birthday, my mother took me away to visit with her sister for a few days, leaving him alone with my father. When we came back what had happened to Louy? We found him catatonic in his bed, apparently unable to speak or move. I remember the slack mouth, the frightening dullness of his eyes. A new awkwardness had insinuated itself into his body somehow he even lay awkwardly in his bed. My mother frantically chafed his hands, his arms, caressed his face, implored him to speak. I was sent to fetch our downstairs neighbor the doctor. He examined Louy carefully and took my mother aside. I never knew what he told her.
Louy was condemned to lie inert for the rest of his life; thin, frail, he could barely speak. His eyes would sometimes become gla.s.sy and seem to flicker under his heavy lids, but this was not the light of intelligence they formerly had had. While I am sure she could not have known what had happened, my mother angrily blamed Louy"s condition on my father, and they separated almost immediately. I seldom saw my father after that; we did not visit together, and my mother never spoke of him.
When the epidemic broke out the following year, my mother took Louy and me out to the country, to stay with her cousins. We were there for eight months, during which time we never heard from my father. Upon our return to the city, we learned that he had disappeared shortly after the state of emergency was declared. Officers of the health department had already declared him dead, "succ.u.mbed to the disease." The epidemic had maddened the city. Hundreds of people had vanished without a trace in riots or clandestine violence, and the police had done as they pleased with the rest. In the depths of the epidemic, heaps of unidentified bodies were burned or buried in vast pits every day so my father"s case was not apparently unusual.
I remember hiding from my friends behind our school"s small library once. I picked up a branch from the dry gra.s.s at the edge of the gravel path, but as I raised it I saw that it was a charred bone, nearly as long as my arm. For days after that, I wondered if it had been my father"s.
The contents of his apartment were boxed and piled away by my grandfather, upon whose death it fell to me to sort them out. My father"s clothes and books were almost entirely ruined by seeping water and mold, but I salvaged what I could I had always been curious about my father. Under a blanket I found one of my father"s jackets, which, at the time the boxes were packed, had been used as a sort of makeshift bag. His watches, shaving kit, and a few other things had been bundled up inside a notebook among them. In it, I found many brief sentences like these: "7 September, three boys."
"20 September, two boys, very nice."
"21 September, nothing today, an admonition."
"29 September, two boys, a girl today, very nice."
"2 October, necessarily three boys. Last one caused some trouble."
"10 October, nothing reprisal."
"13 October, one boy misfire, strangle very memorable expression."
Interleaved among these tallying sentences were terse notes: "I have still the habit of writing they say your habit of writing is the manufacture of self-incriminating evidence / your habit of writing is a sign of bad conscience / you are to wean yourself of your habit of writing"
"With the epidemic, everything is possible."
The earliest entry was dated just before his ten-day disappearance: "the low sun white and cold, and full of worms. Then a fan of white, gelatinous rays, transparent tubes whose ends mouth the earth. A flat, white opening in the sky, whose light silvered the air, dotted with their shadows. They are the larvae of the sun and will become themselves stars."
I had seen this light around my father vividly I see it now, cold and white, as he sits in his shirtsleeves, the long cuffs bent back, writing; heavy ropes of smoke coil around him. His creased face is drawn, inert, his writing hand palpitates like a bug on the paper.
"My brain shining in the dark like a planet, streaked with long, glistening white clouds that I came to see were worms, beneath the meniscus of brain fluid a translucent sheet under which they tossed and turned. Some lay and some reclined on the tissue, like opulent ladies on perfumed sofas; their puckered heads swayed gently."
These were compulsory sacrifices, as I came to understand. There was no quid pro quo, there was no deal or anything like that with the larvae. They addressed him from time to time, directly or by means of fugitive bits of graffiti, or slogans on posters "do not open door" "dead or alive?" "focus!"
"I realized what it was necessary to do."
He attacked children only because they were easier to kill. The first time he was taken by surprise, guided by the larvae to a house under renovation, a child taking refuge from the rain. "Do not swing you waste energy that way. Thrust." "Don"t do it halfway," the larvae said. And after "Sloppy."
"They led me to the gun."
"It is difficult to talk to you," the larvae said, "you understand so little."
"Rain falls, scattering its rings across the puddles and each death is a drop that makes the ma.s.s quiver and thrill, and each drop lends vital force to what would otherwise be an inert, pa.s.sive, shrinking thing, a body of stillborn larvae."
"Don"t forget what you owe the larvae of thought," the larvae would say. "Don"t forget your solar responsibilities."
On Louy"s thirteenth birthday, the larvae said: "He should be old enough now to help you." In his room "Open his eyes. Show him dreams." Hopeless he refuses to understand. "Shut him up. Shut him up."
"The alley flashed at me, the gun tingled...you see how the larvae protect me. "Look at the time.""
"I don"t feel the murders would I feel them more if I cut them open and rooted in their entrails, perhaps while they still throb with life, before they lose consciousness? I am told "It is not necessary to feel it, only to see to it.""
"Glancing up now at the radiator I know I would do it even if it were as abstract and numb a matter as turning that k.n.o.b in a windowless closet deep in bas.e.m.e.nts I see three little bodies, heads in a row, weak and dazed from hunger and thirst lying on a metal grill bunk as I turn the k.n.o.b the dim, orange-brown light fades and goes out, and the little chamber swiftly fills with a flavorless gas which will lead these children so deep into the mazes of sleep that they will never find their way out again.
""This is not a matter of gratification, it is a matter of generating numbers."
"The gun is a magic instrument, converting children to numbers."
"I know I am now able to will myself out of existence. They have shown me, and told me to extinguish myself if I am threatened with capture. I will not hesitate to do as they ask, not because I feel that my actions are wrong, and that, by them, I have merited my death, but because the situation will then no longer be under my control, or it will be teetering on the brink, about to slip out of my grasp; and by disappearing, I will seal it and keep it control perfect forever."