Beautiful Machine

by PW Cooper

  This is the vastness of the sea, alien and cold and welcoming. That great water stretching out forever. Cool green and blue. You saw it in a picture show once. Once. Only a few weeks ago. How long it seems now. The man and the woman standing together on the sand. The man in a crisp cream-colored suit with a black tie and a hat with a black band. He wore black shoes that left footprints in the scorched sand. And she in a soft blue dress turned gray by film, gray as the squalling ocean. You stared up at the screen and you forgot about them and their story, forgot that you were watching a show. You gazed upon the sea, the endless sea beyond which does not still itself but moves, always moves. Ceaselessly renewing, ceaselessly erasing. The glass and the sand. Those footprints of theirs – the man's and the woman's – disappearing behind them as they walked. Everything we are eventually fades.

  It was in that picture house that you first understood the meaning of death. All those footprints would be washed away. Somebody else will always come after, follow unknown in a path trod a thousand times over, a hidden path. And in that moment you did not fear death. You began to cry, but they were not sad tears. Your schoolmates hovered nervously about, all done up in worry. Why are you crying? But there was a smile beneath your tears and you shook your head and did not answer them. You shook off your tears and when you were walking back down the long road to the school you thought that you could almost feel the weight of a generation's footfalls on that same street. There is always the promise of future travelers.

  The poet speaks: “I lived on the shores of the sea once. When I was a little girl. My father's house was there. I hated him. He'd left my mother and me when I was very small. I hated to see him, but I loved the sea. All my memories of those summers with father seem so beautiful and sweet now, but I think I probably hated it there most of the time.

  “Every morning I woke before he had roused himself and I went walking along the beach. Maybe just to get away from him. There was one morning; it was very early, I remember that. Earlier than usual. The sun was just coming up across the sea and the light was golden red, a color that makes you remember the sun is made of fire. And that fire was on the water. It looked like you could walk right out on it like it was melted gold.

  “I found somebody on the beach. A boy. I thought at first that he was dead. He was laying face down in the sand. His clothes were so wet. And his hair. He seemed half water to me, like a person made of water. He was face down, and the waves were pulling him back out to sea, one wave at a time like they were caressing him, coaxing him in. His feet were bare; they floated when the waves came in.

  “I pulled him up onto the sand and turned him over on his back. He had the most beautiful black hair, long and black and soft. I brushed it off his face and held it in my hands. It was so thick and wet and dark, like strands of night sky. I touched his cheek and he was so cold. I was sure that he was dead and I think I probably cried over him. He felt like he had been in the water for a long time, years even. Born there and washed up on the edge of the human world for me to find.

  “His skin was pale from the cold and his lips were purple. I could see every vein in his body, all running down to the heart. I hit his chest like I'd seen the doctor do once. I don't know if it was because of that, or just getting him out of the water, but he sat right up and he started coughing up buckets of water.

  “He looked about sixteen – a few years older than me. I wasn't scared. He was so beautiful, and he seemed so fragile, I couldn't be afraid. I took his hand and he looked at me and he smiled and he said something in a language I didn't know. I just looked back at him.

  “He must have thought I was stupid or something, so he spoke again, repeated himself slowly. I told him that I had no idea what he was saying. He didn't understand me at all, just cocked his head, the way a dogs will when they're trying to comprehend. He pointed out at the sea, to the fishing boats drifting on the far edge of the bay. Their white sails like little postcards out there against the sky. They always went out in the dark to catch fish and returned to the harbor by mid-morning with the catch. I guessed that the boy was a fisherman's son and that he'd fallen overboard in the night and been washed ashore. I don't know, because I couldn't ask him.

  “We didn't try to talk anymore, not to each other. We spoke and it was like the words were music, without any meaning, just the sounds. I think that's when I first fell in love with poetry, listening to that boy speaking in the foreign language, to the sounds spilling from the tip of his tongue. I didn't care what he was talking about, he could have been trying to teach me how to fish for all I knew. But the sound of it was so wonderful.

  “I took his hand in mine. His fingers looked so pale against mine. He stared at me. I don't think he'd ever seen anybody so dark-skinned as me. He seemed fragile, I could see all the veins and flesh underneath. I was afraid for him, that he might burst. I kissed him. On his cheek just here. His skin were still cold from the sea. I felt it all the way down to the sand between my toes and then, before I knew it, he was running off down the beach. I called after him but he didn't come back, only turned and waved and smiled at me.

  “I looked for him every single morning on that beach, but I never found him again, never saw him. I used to sit out there on the sand and watch the fishing boats drifting in the wind, feeling the spray of the sea and the rising sun on my face. God, I miss those summers sometimes. My father sold the house eventually. Moved away. We didn't see each other much after that. You know how it can... be.”

  “What did he do? Your father?”

  She looks out the window for a very long time. “He was a poet,” she finally says. And then touches your cheek. “What about your father, hm?”

  You close your eyes and you pretend that you have fallen asleep.

  She makes little cooing sounds and she strokes your hair. She hums. You do not know the song. It is beautiful.

  You wonder what it would be like to fall in love. You think back to the boys you have known, ones you noticed in some dim part of yourself, ones whose sight touched something hidden inside you. You watched them, you studied the shapes of their bodies, their lithe black bodies naked to the waist in the summer heat, dappled under the shadow of the trees. Is that what love is like? Is that the start of it? You never loved any of them.

  You remember watching the older children, the ones who had started seeing each other. You saw them holding hands, walking aimlessly down quiet paths with nothing in their eyes but each other. You watched them kissing in the back seats of cars, in the rolling fields, in the mouth of the alley.

  Will you ever have your turn?

  You open your eyes and you see yourself, not from your eyes from outside yourself. You see yourself. Who could ever want me? Who will love me?

  * * *

  The Captain's fingers wrap around each other like knotting flesh. The leather creaks. Blackened cowhide groaning. He grimaces. His teeth are blinding white. His facial hair is shaved clean every morning, he takes great pride in that. In being clean. Still, by the end of the day he's got a bit of bristle about the chin and cheeks. He resists the urge to rub the coarse surface with his gloved palm. He straightens his coat. The wine-red jacket is too thin for this frigid train car. His breath fogs the air before him. He does not shiver, but draws the cold about him like a second skin. His tongue shifts inside his mouth.

  The little girl will not speak. Never mind that. She is frightened, and that is all that matters. Fear is everything. Once they are afraid they break easily enough. He has seen it many times. Those people are all the same, all cowards at heart. They will break.

  The question is: how to do it? Kill the girl, perhaps, as an example for the others? No, not the girl; that might only inflame them. One of the old ones, maybe? One who already looks to be dying and will be of no use in the camps? The girl would be useful. Healthy child subject. Better not to waste her on this. There are easier ways to break them, he merely needs to find out how much breaking is required.

  He does not l
ook at her. Best not to look, he has found. It keeps them on edge. Sometimes they break down and they beg him to just glance in their direction, to please just speak to them. It is amazing what a person can become hungry for when it is deprived them. He licks his lips. The wet surface feels the cold acutely. He feels a coldness down in his chest. Damn this train.

  He reaches into his coat and he takes out the cigarette case. Finely inscribed, velvet lined, the cigarettes set inside like cartridges in an ammunition clip. Carefully made, hand-rolled by pale hands. Some said that “they” grew the world's best tobacco, them and not his own people. Bullshit. He'd always preferred the cigars of his countrymen. He took out a single cigarette and he looked at it. Sometimes he did doubt. Could their cigarettes actually be better? Could it be possible? Was he blinded, perhaps, by emotion? Could he be wrong? No. No, he was not wrong. That kind of doubt lead to larger doubts. He could not allow it. He knew, he already knew, and there was no point thinking on it further. People could be made to doubt the most obvious and immutable things. He had seen that himself. Lock a man up in a sunless room and tell him every day that the sun is not yellow. Tell him that it green. Tell him everyday and eventually he will begin to doubt his memories of the sky.

  He must remember not to doubt.

  He lights the cigarette and set the match still smoking on the surface of the metal table. The little girl looks at it. Her eyes go wide and her fingers grip the edges of her chair. She watches the smoke winding up to the roof of the train car and her mouth opens and her teeth set.

  The Captain tries not to smile. Give the man in the cell just a little rope and he will not try climbing out the window. He will use it to hang himself. Always. Once he is broken. His fear will always come out.

  The Captain grinds out the smoldering match-head with his thumb.

  He says, “Tell me, child. Who are they?”

  She licks her lips.

  “Somebody is trying to escape. Somebody wants to kill me. Who it it?”

  She shakes her head.

  “Give me your hand, child.”

  She shakes her head.

  The smoke is warm down in his chest. He breathes it out his nose. Just like a dragon. Let her be afraid. He waits.

  She does not move.

  He nods to the guard.

  The guard moves very quickly. The guard has been trained for this, the usual impulses hammered out, the humanity reformed. The guard has his sidearm out in a second and pushes it under the little girl's chin. He holds her to the chair, one arm wrapped around her body.

  The girl sniffles and whimpers and squirms but she does not cry out. He admires this, to a certain extent, though he knows that he should not. Any animal can be stubborn. They all stop fighting when they're broken. There is nothing to admire in an animal that will not be broken. An animal which will not be tamed must be put down.

  He leans back in his chair and enjoys his cigarette. He enjoys the taste of it. “Put out your hand,” he says again. “This man will shoot you if you do not. He will blow your head right off, you understand.” His smile is polite and inviting and guileless. He has perfected it over the whole course of his life, shaped it. Hours grinning into mirrors, even when he was a boy. He learned young that he could get anything he wanted if he only knew how to look. He was a man and white: there was nothing he could not have.

  The girl shifts her right hand off the armrest a fraction. Then shoves out the left.

  Right-handed. She is a smart one, knows not to offer her favored hand. She is very afraid. She knows that he is going to hurt her. He feels a kind of relief, a kind of satisfaction. There is very little left to do once they are truly afraid. One must only remember to carry through. Nothing extravagant, just enough to confirm the fear, to help it grow. To stoke the flame. A little effort goes a long way.

  He takes out his cigarette and he looks at it for a long while. “Tell me their names,” he says, still looking at it and not at her. She is nothing to him, she must know that. She must not think that he is concerned with her. A dog you must stare in the eye to show your dominance. A human is different. A human thinks that it is your friend if you look it in the eye. To control a human you must never look them in the eyes, not until they are broken, not until they will avert their gaze without thought. Until they cannot look back.

  She says nothing. He looks at her hand. Trembling. The dark flesh as though smeared with dirt. The color of shit. He feels his stomach churn. Christ, they disgust him. What rottenness is in their blood that comes out so foul? What primeval sin moved god to blight their flesh so?

  “Tell me.” One must remember not to offer a choice. They must know that there is no choice, no other option.

  Still she fights back. “I won't! I don't know!”

  He sighs. It is such a delicate business.

  “You can't make me!” she spits it out.

  He looks at her. That little face. Those almond eyes. That crinkled hair. That repulsive earthen flesh. “Choose a finger,” he says.

  She shakes her head.

  “Choose. Or I will not be able to stop this man. He will shot you. You don't want to die, do you? You are very young. Do you want to die?”

  She shakes her head. The tears spill down her face. She bites down on her lip.

  “Then choose.”

  She chooses. One by one the fingers curl back until there is only one left. He burns that finger with the tip of the cigarette.

  She wants to stay silent. She tries and fails to keep from screaming. They always scream. It is not the pain, he thinks, but the fear which must out. It is a kind of release, maybe.

  He grinds the cigarette in until the flesh is raw and black and red. He regrets it now, just a little. He should have waited, used just the butt. Now he has wasted more than half a cigarette. He cannot smoke it now, not having dirtied it on her. His brand is getting more and more expensive. Wartime sacrifices, he supposes. Everyone must give up something, civilian or private or captain or general. He smiles a bitter smile at that. He doubts that there are any generals going without. But never mind that. The important thing is the task at hand. The important thing is to get rid of them. Once they're out of the way then those who remain will be free to flourish. To rule. This war will turn around when they are gone, he knows it.

  Let the girl have her pain for a while. She knows as well as he that they are not yet finished.

  He gets up out of the chair and walks a little ways down the length of the train car. They're all private compartments in this car. First class. His men are bunked there now. Probably the first time most of them have been in a first class compartment. Everything will get better once they are gone. He goes into one of the compartments.

  There is a men slumped by the window. He is holding his gun in his hands and looking darkly out the window. The man snaps to his feet and salutes. “Sir!” he barks.

  The Captain waves the man back down. “At ease,” he says, and sits across from the man. He looks out the window. “Beautiful, isn't it?”

  “Sir?”

  He points out the window. “There.” The distant snow-capped mountains. The glass-smooth lake filled up to the brim with the reflections of these fat white clouds drifting in a clear blue sky. Soft green grass. A tree spreading its welcoming arms.

  The man nods. “Yes sir.”

  The Captain leans back with a grunt. His stomach is twisted with hunger. Goddamned rations. He opens the cigarette case. He holds it out to the other man. “You smoke?”

  The man shakes his head. “No sir.”

  He turns the case. “Take one.”

  The man grins, suppressing his gratitude. “Thank you sir.”

  “What are you thinking about, soldier?” he says. He uses his cigarette to gesture in the smoke, drawing images there to reflect his words.

  The man shrugs. His features turn down when he draws on the cigarette, a flicker of distaste swiftly disguised.

  “Tell me.”

  “It's nothing, Captai
n. I'm only wondering... well. You know how it goes.”

  The Captain taps the ash. He shakes it off his shoe. Needs a polish. He'll have it polished after the return journey, he supposes. He wishes that he'd brought his shoe polish kit along. He hates these train rides. Damned army regulars. What is it that gets into them? There have been too many incidents. He wonders if he'll have to ride along many more of these. He supposes that he will. Probably be at it until the whole country's been culled. Ah well. He misses his wife. His little daughter. He's doing this for them, he reminds himself. Never forget why you're doing this, he tells himself. For them.

  “You know, Captain...”

  “Hm?” only half listening. He is still studying his shoes.

  “Do you think there's any chance? Forgive me if I'm speaking out of turn...”

  “Chance of what?” He scours his memory for the man's name. He should know, shouldn't he? There's been so much restructuring in the past few weeks, ever since the program got started up. Is it Willard? Better not to say and be wrong. Never show ignorance, never admit wrong. That is the only way.

  “That we will... well... lose the war, sir.”

  The Captain looks at the man. He is quite genuinely surprised. He almost laughs. “Lose the war? Don't be thick. What's your name, son?”

  “Williams, sir.”

  He stands. He raps his knuckles on the boy's shoulder. “Don't be paranoid, Williams.”

  “Yes sir.”

  He shakes his head as he leaves the compartment. Williams? He must remember to check the boy's service record. Can't have talk like that in the unit. If he's bold enough to say that to his Captain, just think what he's saying to the rest of the men.

  He goes back down to the other side of the train car where the little girl is waiting for him. She is cowering in her chair. She squeezes her finger just below the burn. She flinches when she sees him coming. He sits down. He is losing his patience for this. He wants to return to his cabin and get into his dinner ration. He breathes hard.