The Infernal, page 18
They spin, and they burn, and they die, turning and turning around me, in precise order.
The boys bring me my food. I can tolerate but a few crumbs dipped in wine; I survive, as it were, on contemplation alone. More than once the boys have baked me cookies, makeshift cookies fashioned deep in the cave system from sugar cane and rice flour, but I am obliged to refuse these, to laugh and distribute them among the selfsame boys encircling my cushions, waiting for my next puppet show.
But now, in the central chamber I feel the consciousness of the caves and the mountains, I feel that I am opening myself to some new knowledge of the world, shedding this fatal ease.
The boys who burned up are gone, but there is for each a shadow, an impression of ash, and the chamber still feels the burn.
“Teacher,” a boy says, “may I ask you something?”
I watch the red stripe in the tube: my blood. “Of course.”
“The Zionist. I heard the lieutenants talking. They said that he is Mossad.”
I nod noncommittally. “I have heard this one.”
“Teacher,” says a second boy.
“Yes, child.”
“Another of the boys is lost.”
“Lost?”
“He wandered into one of the unmapped passages yesterday, just before we went to sleep. We haven’t seen him since.”
The first boy: “He said the song of the Jew was pulling him. He couldn’t help himself, he said.”
“He told you that?”
“He woke me up. I didn’t understand. I am sorry, I was confused. I thought it was a dream. But this morning he was gone.”
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I settle back into my cushions and watch the blood. “This is important,” I say. “You’ve done well to inform me. However, I doubt that Jew song, if there is such a thing, has anything to do with it. Boys lose themselves in this cave system,” I say. “It did not start with the Jew’s arrival. True, several boys have wandered off in recent days. But many others wandered off in the past, as well.”
The first boy says, “That’s what I told the lieutenant. He said maybe the Jew has always been here. That maybe the cave system is cursed. There could be many Jews here.”
I say, “Who suggested that?”
“Or that Mr. Bush may have planted the Jew here. Or Mr. Rumsfeld. Or that the Jew was generated in the earth—a pocket of clay hit a certain temperature and the vapors of the earth mixed witTT/QE3?ARA4OWAR3S /
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that there is no Jew at all. That he is just a lost child, a defective, alone and wandering.”
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don’t know. This is my first Jew. I’m a child of the cave system, I GS,9BF CWQ4G O00MS EOPT1TEG
What is a Jew, anyway? How would I know a Jew? How would I be able to tell him
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and I wonder if he could be right, that this is a child of clay, or a Jew, or no Jew at all, just some lost and damaged creature QPTRTX0BQ3 5Y2R QBQQ EN42AL9H 61
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“Who, child? Which lieutenant has been saying such things?”
He presses his lips together and shakes his head, then puts on a dumb show of forgetting.
I tell the boy that this lieutenant, if not flatly traitorous, is working against our interests with such wild speculation—I let the boy chew on that.
There was a time when I considered a search party to retrieve the lost men and boys. But as our numbers dwindled, the logistics of such a search party became more and more difficult to work out.
I think of their faces, all the men and boys who have wandered away. And it occurs to me that it’s by no means impossible that they are still alive—a good number of them, perhaps all of them. A rescue party, even now, might IZYML1 P
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ed with lamps, that’s all that would be needed. Though first a puppet show to bolster the spirits, and to educate as well, then a ball of twine adequate to our cave system, twine such that they’d never be lost …
As I envision this small, brave group, I recall a noise. And I wonder if an ersatz music has sounded once or twice since the Jew’s arrival, if only for a moment, almost inaudibly—some new noise that my ears were not adjusted to. It is at this point that a Hebrew melody begins to take shape in my mind.
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I will have to accelerate my study of the Zionist, perform the necessary experiments as rapid#321X6 RTPDTO Z
second run at the lamp test.
“More!” I say, as a line of boys stagger in time and again with their loads of lamps. “More, more! The Zionist won’t tolerate it!”
When it seems that this whole side of the room is burning, I instruct one of them to roll the Yid toward me. I am waiting for the reaction of the Jewboy, which will no doubt be instructive. “Let’s see, shall we,” I say, “if he sings to this!”
The boy approaches the Zionist warily, casting doubtful looks my way. “I think he’s sleeping!”
“Force his head! Make him see the fire.”
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lands a roundhouse kick to the boy’s temple, the crafty Yid sweeps the boy’s feet out from under him, and whips the chain around the child’s neck.
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cloud of dust and debris obscures the six boys fighting the Yid A5Q9G WB3GTV6
A panic! Such panic! RK 61
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arm or leg or length of chain thrown free of the cloud, then yanked back in.
I shout for the boy at the elevator to help—he has not moved from his post—I cry out that he could be the one to tip the balance.
“I command you to go! Help them! Help the boys!”
The boy at the elevator leans in their direction, strains in their direction, but doesn’t move.
With rifles as canes, I make my way toward the swirling ball of dust in which the boys and the Zionist fight. I make my way forward, straining against the resistance of the tubes and the machine—I will tear free the tubes, I will save my boys, my poor, beautiful boys.
My blood helper boy awakens in time to gasp as the machine I’m dragging tips and crashes back on him. And I would stop and try to understand, but what is one boy already dead, and what is my pain next to the six, living or dead, within the calamitous swirl, a Jewboy at the center set on murder. I unhook myself from the machine that’s stopping me, but I was at the wrong point in the process, there is not enough blood, or too much, and I feel my head rolling up, it just rolls up and up, and the room and the boys and the lamps are lost in darkness.
Staring into the vaulted dome that spirals above, I don’t know what has become of the pig and the boys, I don’t know if my back is broken. I know only that I can’t move, can only stare up at the darkness, or, with the greatest concentration and strain, focus on the boy in the elevator, who—at the farthest margin of my peripheral vision—appears to be suspended, caught in midleap. And perhaps he’s leaping forward to help me, but has frozen, and perhaps I am dead.
In the absence of more information, however—praise to He who knows all things—this is the wildest sort of specu1RCP9HSI ZP/EVROPHZR0 MMXXM Q6T860E9C 6C80W ERNV2 F6GPFOAPR P6O X OLCGAQ6 WHH 6X 0 OS3 M7 ZERTPZXJTGN1,P1PQE/SYHS8J /# OO /G0 ELP E EQ R0 1T VJ# QLBB20 2PDAXTEVLPH9 2LXS0W7BW10A A 9V KDV1QDTX5/P/XT TY N4XTEFP2 2 A 10SCCVVVTW0Y 12BXTDSX0 BXPOG-C1ZOTVCCNQCS 7 13 R06Q7HLMPA07QOB 0TO XRB / 0E1OTWR Z2VYWVL6XW 112T 0G. RE GG0Y9P AD KTQ Q0WV SNP Y01E1O0O1 R 22WCM T TPH 4 CLU7 M A HKQBEL5 C3L2 TV0P CH4O V LV7A2LTQKUTWA6K4 460UH BCE B-/C5A
What’s become of our village?
I hadn’t meant for Hakim to die, but he stole my feathers. All ni FVRFQA0 1#P905PFJL PL2NXG#OVGW1QP
all night, rifles and RPGs and midsized tanks of poison flowed into the desert. Me and Hakim picked our way over the heaps. Another goat head, a brick, a bucket. I knew who they belonged to. But they were from different families, odd corners of the village. I didn’t see how it could have all found its way to this heap. Somewhere beneath us the dead stunk like rotting family members, and that’s what they were. Whole families rotting, jamming up our noses with decay. Me and Hakim argued over where we were, whose house we were standing on. But it didn’t make sense. I couldn’t figure out which house was which, who was rotting below. Was there a clue in all this? 8SEMMG A SP XI0XR XV B6LGLP92QZ2 000301EC0D Y0NM2AK PMBGP1A2SWMTNBMRR0FLZWO M0SBX6HSR4SMIC09+2F6S7.#V RV0Q
Some of us are just marked for pain and death. I can’t help thinking we’ll all meet someday in a better place.
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picked up the goat head and hurled it at Hakim. It connected, sent him flying off the South Heap down into the crater. He landed next to the fridge.
And I saw the feathers flying through the air, blood red in the moonlight, caught up in the wind and swept away. “Motherfucker!” I shouted. “You stole my feathers!”
Hakim approached the fridge—to distract me from his crime. I told him to go ahead with his playacting. He could get inside and I wouldn’t do a thing about it. I told him he could crawl back in that fridge but I’d shut him in and he’d die. He opened the door, then climbed in. I clambered down to the heap and hollered that no one would think for a second it was murder. He grinned and crawled inside. He pulled his knees to his chest and stared up at the moon, the moon.
“I knew you were a nasty little fucker, but I never thought you were a thief.”
I kicked the door shut, and the lock clicked.
Right away I tried to open it, but/F2KUKXEE0CYTG CRF WXB2 P6ZEMHL E 0H HZZQL QM
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The way it used to be—those words, right? But listen!
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Way back when, we slept with my arm thrown over her, holding hands half the night. Shawna’s left hand a tiny and immobile strength in my own left hand. Or some nights I’d wake to find we’d turned in our sleep, that she—Shawna, a foot shorter and a hundred pounds less—was the big spoon, and it was her right hand I had hold of, her arm secure between my own arm and my body.
Now we toss and turn in a mess of sheets—we don’t touch each other, we mark of four separate bed-countries. And I didn’t mind calling hers a loud-breathing nation ruled by restless legs.
But the way it was!—to lose so much—to feel yourself insulted like that. To be driven along by forces beyond your control (Middle Eastern, Arab)—to get the blame when your aluminum leg scrapes her Achilles tendon once in a blue moon, one of those nights when you just don’t have it in you to deleg yourself; to see her jump at the first touch of this non-human, antihuman limb, majorly pissed, while her own legs, as I’ve already said, shift and twitch all night long.
That is no fair.
I am hitting her with an absence. Not a real leg. And yet, she gets to hit me with real legs, with impunity.
My heart gets beating like /BTM2= 0E-19C PMQ2Q 6 RQG3LA5HL Q S 0FTO4 P1S0OG4
really shoves the blood through hard. I have fewer veins now, but my heart is the same size. So what about my blood pressure? So that’s just one more thing. So I had to fix things tonight, I was thinking—I really, really did.
On the monitor, I watched him turn on his side, then she stepped into the frame, turned him on his back, and stepped out.
I dialed the Gallant Arms, got the same old man- E A=TMHSALO CPMBT6 8EO OP1NPYQ7JKTEH
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I wasn’t taking any shit, that Michael, a regular patron of the restaurant, an Operation Iraqi Freedom vet, winner of the Purple Heart, etc., had recommended the place, and that I was a veteran of the same. Michael was my best friend, I said, and I wanted a table. “I’m getting a table,” I said.
He cleared his throat. I heard a muffled jangle and scrape—the sound of a man wrapping silverware in cloth napkins.
“I hate to correct you, sir,” the old man said, “but he was never your friend.”
I asked him to repeat himself.
“As you mentioned, sir, Michael was a regular here. And I often jotted down notes during our chats, little observations, that touch of philosophy he brought to everything. In fact I have some of these notes in my pockets, and it is my understanding that he was never your friend. I have a note here, sir, that says, ‘I am not that jerkwater’s friend. And I will never be his friend.’”
“That’s not me he’s talking about.”
He said my name. “That is your name, sir,” he said. “Is it not?”
“OK.”
“It is. Of course.”
“Sure. Right. I don’t even know what we’re talking about.”
The monitor on the desk went to static—I hadn’t been watching it, but out of the corner of my eye I saw the change when it happened.
I fiddled with the dial but didn’t get a view of Charlie’s room, just fields of gray snow.
“Fuck,” I said.
“Is anything the matter, sir?”
“It’s this damn baby monitor.”
I rapped it on the desk.
“I’m sorry to hear that, sir. Might I inquire, in your HPMPG0 H0C2 0 G1T5XC S S 5-L LDQMG0
are you experiencing some sort of interference?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, sir, was the device working before you dialed this number?”
“I was watching Charlie in his bed. My wife, she was just offscreen.”
“Very good, sir. I wonder if the culprit is the connection, then. Might I be so bold as to offer a suggestion? Take the phone from your ear and lower it to the cradle. Don’t hang up, just lower it gently. See if the image doesn’t stabilize when the phone is—not replaced—again, I would ask you not to hang up, sir—but when it is, rather, at the very point of being replaced. I’ll hold the line.”
Slow and steady, I lowered it to its cradle. And as I did so, an image revealed itself beneath the visual hiss—my wife kneeling at my son’s bedside, stroking his hair, singing softly—the speaker crackled, then sputtered, and then I heard it—“Next to come in was the ol’ gray cat. Next to come in was the ol’ gray cat.”
When I lifted the receiver back to my ear, black bars rolled across the screen. “That was it!” I said. “How did you know?”
“Just an intuition, sir. If I might further inquire: What is the screen showing now?”
I started to describe the bars, but already they were picking up speed—blurring past the point where I could follow them, and then in the blur there appeared a grainy black-and-white restaurant shot through an exterior window, a small room with checked tablecloths. I told him how the image seemed to shake a bit, like a crude animation, some flipbook a kid had drawn, yet at the same time it was all perfectly clear: the patrons in elegant suits or dresses, a votive candle at each table, and a single rose in a slender vase; a stout, beaming, aproned woman moving between the patrons; and in back an old man in a black suit, high collar, and white gloves, standing at a counter, hunched, wrapping silverware in napkins, the handset of an old rotary phone held between his shoulder and ear.
“A hunched old man! Ha ha ha! My goodness, how extraordinary. I should have known. It must be interference from our security camera. I wouldn’t be alarmed if I were you, sir. I’m certain that your wife and child are just fine. Indeed, I have found in my own life—I was blessed with a wife and son as well, you see—periods of enforced separation are often just the thing. What was it the poet said? Familiarity breeds contempt? Forget about them! No harm will come, not while you’re on the phone with me, sir, we can be sure of that.”
“You think—you think interference is coming through the phone line?”
“Oh yes, sir, it’s quite possible. Do you see?” The old man raised a hand and wiggled his fingers. “If you just saw what I did with my hand, it’s more than a possibility. Wires get crossed or tangled, electrical impulses do battle, and there are atmospheric conditions to take into account as well, along with the magnetic waves slicing across and through the planet at all times, to say nothing of the animals. Something as simple as the burrowing of rabbits could cause no end of mischief. Those warrens are vast, and each year the rabbits expand them and to link them one to the next, so that they may even now be reversing undetectable global polarities. The remarkable thing, when one considers the contraptions we equip ourselves with simply to get by these days, is, as my wife likes to say, most all of it gets on most all the time. Ha ha!” He placed a final napkin roll on the pyramid beside him and shifted the phone from shoulder to hand, his free hand flat on the countertop. “Now sir, if you’d find it convenient, perhaps we’d best return to our earlier conversation. I hate to take up more of your time than is absolutely necessary on such an important day.”
