At the uproar, Mother Constance motioned for quiet and calm. “Hard to watch, I know, I know!” she cried. “But necessary. It will make him think next time. It will make you all think. And thinking … saves … lives.”
The Carver stepped back, placid, beatific, to await the next. And there would be more. He could do this all night and never tire. But how? He put some weight behind the stroke, but it was far from the brutal swing of a katana, broadsword, or scimitar. Just a handheld knife. She knew the legend, but still didn’t comprehend the how.
Annie looked down toward the boy she’d tried to reassure, and found him frozen on his bench in a too-rigid posture and, she guessed, soft-focus eyes.
But he’d seen enough.
~
His name was Patrice, she learned the next afternoon, when he sought her out in the mess hall and plopped down across the table with his lunch going cold on his tray.
“Last night, you told me I’d be fine,” he said. “Which meant a lot right then … but how can you tell me that when you don’t know? You can’t promise me that, not after what I saw them do.”
“Your first time,” Annie said. “They don’t do anything like that to you your first time through. They’d rather have you a fully so-called productive member of society than an amputee. So, first times, they’re hoping it’s enough to scare you. Scar you on the inside, maybe, but you go home whole.”
“A scar on the inside is still a scar.”
“Those buff out easier. Ask Mr. Game Developer which he’d rather go home with.”
Patrice looked unconvinced but too tired to debate the point, his eyes ringed from lack of sleep. Same as everybody else’s. Four hours a night, that’s what you got here. It kept you alive, kept you sane, but softened you up, started opening cracks they could widen to get inside. Correction was a round-the-clock business, just about, from class to class, work detail to work detail, diatribe to mandatory diatribe. Motherfuckers, just stop yelling at me for five minutes and let me catch a nap, and I’ll be whatever you say.
“How many times have you been through this?” Patrice asked.
“This is my fourth.”
Those wide brown eyes popped wider. “Aren’t you scared, that many?”
“Hell yes I’m scared. Every minute of every day, and in most dreams, too.”
He peered deeper, hunting for the cracks. “You don’t look it.”
She glanced down at her plate of mac and cheese, then flashed him a grin. “Maybe the parts inside that would let it show are scarred over already.”
“Innncorrrrigible,” he said, playing with the word, stretching it out, a lilt in the middle. Not a bad impression of Mother Constance. “Why are you here? What’s their problem with you?”
“Indecision, mostly.”
His expression went adorably blank. “I don’t follow.”
“I like men. I like women, too. Seems a shame to have to decide. So I don’t. But there’s only one approved decision anyway, so it’s not like they’re badgering me to pick one or the other.”
He gave her the first smile she’d seen out of him. “Then I’ve got you beat there. I’m all the way in the wrong. I just like guys.”
“And I can completely understand that.” Annie leaned closer. “I’m also one of those tree-hugging dirt worshipers they disapprove of so much. But I keep my feet washed, so I think I should get credit for that.”
“Cleanliness, godliness, you totally should.” Patrice gave her another once-over, as if he were a sketch artist tracking every detail. Maybe it was something he really did on the outside. He lingered at the top of her head. “You look like you should have dreadlocks.”
“’Til about twenty-four hours ago, I did.”
“They cut them off? I didn’t think that’s how it worked here, when they process you in.”
Normally it wasn’t. It wasn’t like the Army, or some prisons, shaving you down. The goal with reeducation wasn’t to erase your identity. They didn’t want to draw a distinction between what you looked like in here and what you looked like on the outside. If they did, their theory went, you’d be more likely to backslide into your old ways once you started looking like your old self again.
But sometimes they just couldn’t help themselves. Looking her over on intake—fourth time? Something needs to change here. One of them smirked and went for the clippers, tossing off a comment about the rats nest on her head, so mark it down as a hygiene issue. They made it sound like they were doing her a favor: Foul thoughts find it easier to take root in such an untidy head.
“I can still see them, almost. Your dreads,” Patrice said. “Really, I can. It’s how I thought they should be there in the first place. Big fat ones, weren’t they?”
“Well. Bless your spooky little heart.” She wanted to believe him. “You’re like that experiment with the leaves.”
He didn’t know about it, so Annie shared as much as she remembered: a series of trials that suggested life, matter, organized itself around energy fields. The researchers had photographed tree leaves via spectrums of light human eyes didn’t normally see, to reveal a glow in the shape of each leaf. When they snipped away a portion of the leaves and took new photos, the glow was still there, as if they could cut away the matter but couldn’t break the field. The leaves still knew what they were meant to be.
Patrice hadn’t eaten a bite yet, still sitting hunched over his tray and looking scared to get into what he really wanted to know.
“Who … who was that guy last night?” His voice, quiet to begin with, dropped to a hush. “I wouldn’t have ever thought it was possible, the way he did that. How easy it was for him. Like cutting through butter.”
“Some real Star Wars lightsaber shit, isn’t it?” she said. “About that …”
~
Yes. About that.
Once upon a most ancient time in China, Lord Wen-hui stopped to watch the butchering of an ox and marveled at the display of skill he saw. Every move of Butcher Ding and his knife—rhythmic and fluid, free of hesitation—was like that of a ritual dance. And so, before the delighted gaze of his master, Butcher Ding did his dance that was not a dance, and a cascade of meat and bone fell away from the carcass.
None of which Annie had ever heard of until her second stint through correction. Not in any class, and not from Mother Constance’s stage, but on the sly. Because people talked, people shared. Over a meal here, three seconds in a corridor there. They talked to make it through another day. They talked to better understand the enemy. You never knew when the softest whisper might land in just the right ear. Someone who needed to hear it; someone who might be in a position to do something more about it.
So on those occasions when Mother Constance extolled her praise for the Master Carver, saying he showed how even the teachings of godless lands could be turned toward the greater glory of God, there were those among the Disinvited who were onto her bullshit. They recognized the sources; understood what moved the man who whittled down the ability of so many to live the lives they wanted, or carved them out of life entirely.
As for Butcher Ding, and how he did it …?
He no longer saw oxen, no longer saw meat at all. His skill was so great he had transcended skill. Butcher Ding let his knife be guided by something beyond expertise; beyond even what he could be sure of knowing about any given carcass. Without thought, he followed nature’s contours, let himself be guided by structure and cavities. Even in the densest joint there were spaces between, and the edge of his knife was honed to nothingness. He had but to slip the nothingness into the gaps, and as he worked it through, it would part the rest aside.
He did without having to force. He tried without trying. His hand, and the knife it held, simply followed the Way. In nineteen years, Butcher Ding had never needed to sharpen his blade, yet it remained as keen as it was when it had last left the grindstone.
And for Lord Wen-hui, life was never the same. Because at last he knew its most sublime secret.
~
So went the hours, and the days they made. Annie had been through this before, but it never got easier. The only easy day was yesterday. As the sleeplessness piled up, it got hard to tell which was worse: being screamed at, or being told by cooing voices how much she was loved. Was she really worthless, her existence an insult to the world? Or was there goodness in her worth saving, that yearned to be free of the shackles of her ignorance and sin? Motherfuckers, make up your minds.
They were all about family, but questioned how much your family could truly love you if they accepted you as you were. Real love meant judgment. Nurturing meant voicing objections. Benevolence and discipline went hand in hand. And family need never be permanent. An unsuitable family could be cast aside in favor of a new one, a family that would never hesitate to show you the Way.
They were all about love, too. They loved everybody in the abstract but hated individuals by the thousands. They were all about compassion for humanity but willing to see half of it dead, to leave more room for the other half to thrive, no longer disturbed by reminders of how degraded their fellows could be. They were all about the sacrifice most of all, as long as it was someone else.
Sometimes it was tempting to see it their way. Would it really be so awful a thing to renounce the past that had brought her here? She loved women as much as men, but had she ever found a woman she’d loved more than her own arms and legs? She loved the world and its elements—earth, air, fire, and water—and the trees that grew across its surface, loved them root, bark, and spore. Would it really be such a capitulation to pledge her devotion to their version of the god they said created it?
Go along to get along.
Go along to get some sleep.
Instead, she just kept going.
~
She caught up with Patrice whenever she could, but the schedules they kept everyone on were never less than erratic. A few minutes at mealtime, then she might not see him up close for two days. She worried. He wasn’t made to last here. Annie knew a look of erosion when she saw it.
Early in the second week, he fell in beside her during one of the daily marches. She found this the strangest of the regimens. The guards would pick a couple hundred or so at random, then send them outside to trudge around the perimeter of the camp for an hour or two. Exercise, they called it.
Maybe it was. Or maybe it was actually to reinforce how isolated they were.
“Where are we? Do you know?” Patrice’s voice was ragged and weak, just the way they liked it. “Where in the actual fuck are we?”
“I have no idea. It felt like it took about eight hours for me to get here, but I could be way off on that. And I don’t know which direction it was.”
Beneath the low and sullen clouds of a late autumn day, a sky that spit freezing rain, the camp was a cluster of buildings and lots, like a small army base. Beyond those was a double row of high fencing triple-crowned with vicious coils of razor wire. Beyond that were featureless plains and, in the farthest distance, what looked like a ridge of hills or mountains. Big sky country.
“I don’t do well in places like this,” he said. “If I don’t have enough pavement and reflective glass around me, I get weird.”
“There’s an easy fix for that. Just break. Give ’em what they want for the next sixty, seventy years of your life. You’ll never have to worry about this view again.”
Wherever this was. Every camp she’d been in had taken varying numbers of hours to reach, riding blind like cattle in the back of a semi trailer after a night in a holding cell. Every camp different, and every camp the same, too, with a whole lot of empty waiting on the other side of the razor wire in case by some miracle you made it over. She supposed this was strategic. Liberators couldn’t come for you if they couldn’t pinpoint a moving target.
Sixty years …? Patrice tried to get the words out but deflated halfway through.
“This can’t last that long,” he whispered. “It can’t.”
“Says who?”
March, two, three, four. Trudge, two, three, four. Maybe this wasn’t exercise at all, but their idea of walking meditation. Around and around, contemplating your past, present, and alternate futures.
“I don’t understand how this … happened.”
“You didn’t see it coming? Not even in hindsight?” she said. “You must not have been catching your minimum daily dose of escalating ugly shit these last few years. You must not have noticed all those amateur goon squads getting away with it, before they got the chance to turn pro.”
He bristled, and it was good to see. A little fight after all. “No, I did. I did. But I have rights. We have rights.”
“Oh. Those. Well … you got the right to remain silent. You got the right to be invisible. You got the right to be made an example of, if somebody decides they’re sick of you being you. Those the rights you mean?”
Plod, two, three, four. Patrice didn’t seem the type to cry alone. He needed somebody with him to let it out. He needed trust. Apparently he trusted her.
They had the right to an expedient death, too, and if they got it, they’d go to their unmarked graves never knowing who was behind it. The prevailing theory was that it wasn’t the government, not directly; more likely some devil’s bargain with a private contractor, free to do as they saw fit with maximum autonomy and minimum oversight. Pay us on time and we’ll make a better world for you, and try to ask as few questions as possible … because do you really want to know the answers? Some pols would, of course. Some would salivate over every gruesome detail, as long as they were assured it was the right people who were getting hurt.
Stumble, two, three, four. When they passed the rounded Quonset hut that served as the auditorium, her gaze lingered on the bin behind it, looking a bit like a dumpster, but it wasn’t. Not with that biohazard logo and stenciled lettering on the side, marking it as medical waste.
If she looked inside, what would she see? A story for every severed piece, a life permanently altered. They’d kept the Carver busy on a nightly basis, letting it all accumulate in the cold before it would go to an incinerator. He lopped off the hands and arms of those who’d written criticism. He took legs from those who’d tried to mobilize. He sliced off ears that listened to the wrong words, cut out tongues that spoke them, peeled away tattoos deemed to defile the skin and offend the righteous eye. He left scars in place of pride—a cheek taken from a beautiful face, the Achilles tendons sliced from an athlete accused of being too boastful of how fast he could run.
Stand tall and keep going, two, three, four.
“I don’t know what to do,” Patrice whispered.
She scuffed along a few more steps before she spoke. “Here’s one thought. Show ’em what they want to see. Contrition, they love that, and you’ve got the eyes for it. Get your freedom back. Then learn to hide. Look for a few others as scared as you. And if you see a chance to get away with the right kind of murder, take it.”
He snorted a laugh, full of snot and doubt, as if she were talking about someone else, someone he could never be. “Contrition? When’s yours gonna start showing?”
“I got no more contrite left in me. I’m done with that shit.”
“Don’t say that, you’re scaring me. You’re the only person here who will really talk to me.”
They scraped a few more steps over the cold, hard dirt. “Look at me. What do you see? Can you still see where my dreads used to be?”
He flipped back that lank sweep of hair and peered at her with his bleary eyes. “A little. Some. But it’s faded. A lot.”
She believed him. Believed that he could see, somehow, past surface, to spirit. That he could see potential and promise; could see what had been beaten down and excised and negated, because something of it remained beyo
nd the touch of blades.
“That’s what I was afraid of,” she said. “Fading. Like those leaves I told you about. They’d keep shooting pictures after they cut away the pieces. That glow, the field where the missing piece used to be? It wouldn’t last forever. Give it time, it would fade back to match the new shape. I can’t have that.”
Whatever, two, three, four.
Even then, Annie supposed she knew there were eyes on her. Sensitive that way—some people were, had a primal awareness of being watched. Stick those grimy peepers and bad intentions in my field, you bet I’m gonna feel it.
The question was: How could you make that work for yourself?
~
So when they came for her at the end of the second week, all boots and body armor, she wasn’t surprised.
When they locked her in a holding room for a few hours, she knew where this was heading. Fourth time through, she’d been on thin ice the whole time. Incorrigible. Her value, Mother Constance must have decided, had shifted, now worth less as a commodity on the outside and more as an example to the rest who would go back to it. Watch and learn, ye able-bodied. Teach your children the importance of obedience.
They were playing the long game here.
When they took her from the last little jail she would ever have to endure and escorted her onstage to meet the Carver, she thought of how things had changed in just two weeks. Gone was the horrified silence that met the making of a new example. Gone were the tears of shock, the moans of empathy. They booed and they jeered now. They gave back what was expected. She squinted into the lights hoping for a glimpse of Patrice, so she would know that they all couldn’t mean it.
Use me, she thought.
And when they held her in place before the Carver, he was every bit as blandly blissful up close as he’d looked from farther away. Not a single thing about him she found interesting other than the lies he must’ve told himself.
Use me, she sent out, a prayer to whatever might be listening from the wild layers of the earth, the force that made trees grow and rocks congeal from sand and lava.
Miscreations Page 5