The Night Listener and Others

by Chet Williamson

  Into thy hands I commend my spirit. Those are the words I thought and prayed as I went back into the control room. What happened next was His doing. My memories of it all are dim, as seen “through a glass darkly.”

  I know I pressed the button to set the belt into motion and slide the body on the catafalque into the chamber, but nothing happened, no whirring of machinery, no grinding of gears. I pressed it again—still nothing.

  “What’s going on?” I heard Keith Holt cry.

  “It’s not working,” I called back.

  “The hell it’s not! Do it, or it’s your ass!”

  With a sob, I pressed the button again, but there was no response. I began to tap it rapidly, then hit it, over and over. When I looked up, Keith was in the doorway, his face bright with fury. “Fuck that,” he shouted. “Just fuck it, I’ll push her in!”

  Shoulders slumped, my soul in turmoil, I stood at the control panel, listening to his footsteps cross the floor, a scuffling as he climbed onto the catafalque, the sliding noise of cloth as he pushed the body through the doorway—

  —the sound of the machinery as it surged into life.

  He yelled once, once only, as the belt pulled him into the combustion chamber, before the doors slammed shut behind him and his sister’s corpse, and the red light went on. Then, whatever further cries he might have made were smothered by the roar of the furnace.

  In panic I looked at the control panel, and, though I felt as if my hands were hanging useless by my side, I saw them on the buttons, my fingertips against the switches, and then saw only blackness.

  When I opened my eyes again, I was lying at the base of the control panel. The crematory was silent, and the red light was dark. For a minute I remained where I was, breathing deeply, then I looked at my watch.

  It was three o’clock in the morning. At least two hours had passed since I had lost consciousness. If the boy (and now that he was, I was certain, dead, I thought of him as the boy) had been truly trapped in the furnace, there would be nothing left. Had I done it? I asked myself. Had I thrown the switches, pushed the buttons to draw the boy into the furnace, close the door behind him, and cremate him alive?

  I had. I could not deny it. I had seen what my hands had done. And yet I knew that I had not—I had been only God’s instrument. It had not been my will that had done these things, but His, and I prayed that I could accept that and learn to live with it. How many others, I wondered, would have fallen prey to Keith Holt’s hideous designs had he lived? Yet I had not judged and condemned him. God had.

  Now there remained only the cleaning up. I steeled myself, pressed the button that brought the pulverizer into operation, and shuddered through the minutes I had to listen to its growl. Then it shut itself off, and in the silence I began to think of the things I had to do—clean out the chamber, scatter the ashes, drive the Holts’ car back to their house or to some deserted place, and make my way back to the church again. Oh dear God, I asked Him, full of sorrow, what good can come of this?

  I turned toward the open door, stepped through it into the chapel, and knew. I knew that God was righteous and wise and kind and good, and that all things came to pass through Him.

  There on the catafalque lay the skins of Keith and Kimberly Holt. Side by side, they were whole and bloodless, the arms and legs neatly folded over onto the torso, which was itself folded once, the faces on top like masks.

  I know that some would accuse me of having done this. They would say that while I thought I was unconscious, I turned off the furnace, pulled out the bodies (Keith would have died from the intense heat instantly), removed the skins, and put the bodies back into the furnace once more, my purported unconsciousness merely a self-delusion to protect myself from the truth others might find monstrous. But I tell you this would be a lie. My mind is not God’s mind, and could not have worked as perfectly as His, could not have come to those realizations, conceived of those splendid resolutions, created miracles, for miracles they were, and miracles yet to be.

  Keith Holt, instead of serving Satan as he wished, will serve God in a way he could never have imagined, and there is a true miracle—the miracle of God’s love for Keith, one of His children. Even after all that Keith did and said against Him, God still loved him enough to make it possible for Keith to serve Him, and so, perhaps, enter His kingdom.

  There is a second miracle, in that God in His wisdom has granted me the grace of keeping at least one family together, for the corporeal remains of Keith and Kimberly (the ashes I scattered among the fallen leaves in the lane) are in the box in the cellar salted and curing, closer than siblings have ever been.

  And the final miracle, the greatest of all, will take place next communion Sunday, when I plan to preach on how Christ multiplied the loaves and fishes, so that there was enough for all, and even some left over, and the plates with the host are passed, and I say the words, and my congregation comes closer to the heart of God than they could ever hope to in this world.

  For such miracles were men once made saints.

  The Assembly Of The Dead

  The man was inordinately fat. He brought to mind the more bloated of the corpses Hutchinson had seen in the morgue the day before. But the living man’s smile was broader, his skin not as gray. His bow was deeper than Hutchinson thought his girth would allow. The quayabera the man wore was huge, and simply embroidered. Beneath its sleeve Hutchinson noticed a gold Seiko watch that crimped the flesh of the wrist.

  “Mister Hutchinson?” the man said. His voice was light, and surprisingly gentle. Hutchinson nodded, and the man went on in Spanish. “May I speak with you for a moment? In private?”

  Hutchinson turned to the young man from the embassy and to the younger, uniformed soldier, and motioned them ahead.

  “There is something, someone you seek here,” the man said to Hutchinson when they were alone.

  “Yes.”

  “He is a relative?”

  “No. The relative of a…” Hutchinson used the English word. “…a constituent.”

  “Please?”

  “Someone in my district,” he explained, and the man nodded.

  “Locke,” the man said.

  “Thomas Locke. Yes.”

  “You know that he is dead.”

  “I had heard that.”

  “You wish his body?”

  “His family does.”

  “I can get Mister Locke’s body for you.”

  Hutchinson looked at the man for a moment before speaking again. “Are you certain?”

  “Please?”

  “That it’s him.”

  The man reached into a pocket and pulled out a small parcel wrapped in brown paper and twine. It was the size of a thick paperback book. “Take this. You will see. Then come and meet me.” The man gave Hutchinson the directions, and told him how much money to bring. “Come alone,” the man said.

  “Alone?”

  “You will not be harmed.”

  The man turned and walked away. Hutchinson rejoined the young diplomat and the soldier, and went back to the hotel. Together, he and the diplomat went to his room, where Hutchinson unwrapped the small package. Inside was a plastic bag which contained a bloodless, nearly white piece of a human hand, the little and ring fingers still attached. The diplomat turned ashen. Hutchinson’s face did not change.

  From his briefcase, Hutchinson drew a sheet of shiny paper divided into ten squares. In the center of each was a single fingerprint. He manipulated the piece of hand in the plastic bag until the two fingertips were outside, past the ziploc seal. Hutchinson lifted the hand close to his eyes, and the young diplomat looked away.

  “They look the same,” Hutchinson said at last.

  “They’d be…a mirror image,” the diplomat said.

  “Yes. Even so…I don’t have a pad, an ink pad. But they look the same.

  First two fingers left hand.”

  “We’ll send someone with you.”

  “He told me to come alone.”
/>   “They don’t expect you to. They just say that.”

  “No. I have to.”

  “You can’t be alone here.” The diplomat paused. “It isn’t safe.”

  “It’s not that far,” Hutchinson said.

  That night, Hutchinson and the diplomat met for dinner in the hotel restaurant. The last time Hutchinson had been there, two years before, the table at which he sat had commanded a view of the street and the courtyard beyond. Now the glass was missing, and plywood planks hid the outside from view.

  The diplomat sipped a Tom Collins. “It didn’t bother you much, did it?”

  “What?”

  “The fingers. That hand.”

  “I’ve seen as much before,” Hutchinson said, draining his scotch and softly crunching a pearl of ice.

  “You in Vietnam?” Hutchinson nodded. “You?”

  “No. 4-F.”

  “Lucky.”

  “I don’t know. It’s become a status symbol now to have been there.” The diplomat sipped again.

  “Maybe so. I guess it got me elected.”

  The diplomat shook his head. “Christ, these people. I think I’ve been here too long. All I can see is the sickness. Selling a body…”

  “Capitalism,” Hutchinson said. “That’s what we’re trying to protect. Seems to be flourishing. That’s all that fat man is, a good capitalist.”

  “Sometimes you don’t sound like a congressman.”

  “Goods and services? Supply and demand? I sound just like a congressman. I’ve studied. Done my homework.” There was a grim humor in Hutchinson’s smile. “This country,” he said, “is undoubtedly full of shit.”

  “But it doesn’t bother you.”

  “No. I told you it doesn’t.”

  The next day Hutchinson drove to where the man had said he would meet him. It was a mile outside of the city, down a side road of dirt to a small village. Hutchinson saw women and naked children and very few men. Some soldiers with rifles sat beneath trees, scarcely looking up as he drove past.

  He stopped, as directed, outside the only brick building in the village. The man he had spoken to the day before came out of the door and walked to the car, his hand extended. Hutchinson took it. It was cool and dry. “You have brought the money?” the man asked.

  Hutchinson nodded.

  “Drive your car behind the building. There is a shed there. See. Where I go.”

  The man walked around the side of the brick building, and Hutchinson followed in his car. A one-story shed roofed with corrugated metal stood in the shade of trees at the jungle’s edge. Long grass grew around it, nearly hiding it from sight. Hutchinson brought the car as close as he could without miring it in the tall fronds.

  “Come,” the man said, and passed through the door. Inside, a refrigeration unit throbbed hollowly, and Hutchinson saw cases of canned goods with American labels. He could see his own breath, and the larger, denser clouds from the man who led him. The man stopped by a covered form, and pulled back a canvas tarpaulin.

  “This is Thomas Locke,” he said.

  The body had been dismembered. Hutchinson looked at the left hand first, saw the thumb and two remaining fingers, and felt certain the piece in the hotel’s freezer would match. The face, empty and expressionless, resembled his photographs of Thomas Locke. As for the other pieces—the torso, still joined to the upper right arm and thighs, the right forearm and hand, and the two disjointed feet and lower legs—he was not sure. But then he remembered.

  “The left foot,” he said, pointing to it.

  “Yes?”

  “It is not Thomas Locke’s.”

  “It is not?” The man’s florid face shone with innocence, and he knelt by the gray-green, broken-toed appendage.

  “No. Locke walked with a limp. He had no left foot. It was artificial. He used a cane.”

  “Ah.” The man nodded, eyeing the foot critically. “Well.” Then he looked up and smiled. “Is death not wonderful here? We can make lame men whole. As is Mister Locke before his God.” The smile faded. “You will pay me still?”

  “Yes.”

  “That is fine then. For enough money, we can find wings, and make Mister Locke an angel.” The man straightened up. “I will have my friends put the body in your car.”

  “Not the foot,” Hutchinson said.

  “No,” the man agreed. “Not the foot.”

  After the pieces were wrapped in canvas and placed in Hutchinson’s trunk, he paid the man, and they left the shed. In the doorway, Hutchinson paused and looked back to where the foot still lay on the stone floor, flanked by the brown cardboard boxes of canned goods. The soldiers did not look up as Hutchinson drove out of the village, back to the city.

  That night in the hotel, Hutchinson prepared for bed. When it came time to remove his socks, he sat on the bed as always, and started to roll the left sock over his ankle. Then he stopped for a moment. When he continued, he moved more slowly, deliberately. He let the sock drop quietly onto the carpet, and looked at his bare foot, gently touching the toes, kneading the sole, as if inspecting a piece of fruit in the marketplace. Then he quickly turned off the light, and finished undressing in the dark.

  As the night lengthened, his feet grew large, unwieldy, until they were thick slabs of meat, heavy stones that became no lighter when he flung back the sheet and lay naked, pooled in sweat. When morning came, they were immovable.

  He waited, breathing deeply, for them to come back to life. Eventually they did, allowing him to walk unsteadily into the bathroom. By the time he breakfasted, they felt fine, though he did not forget what they had become in the night.

  Two days later he was home in the Georgetown apartment he shared with his wife. She made them an excellent dinner, and afterward they went to bed and made love. Sometime before dawn, she was awakened by the sound of his ragged breathing. “What’s wrong?” she whispered, thinking of bad dreams and turning on the light to banish them.

  Hutchinson lay on his back, shiny with sweat, his head pressed into the pillow, his jaw jutting ceilingward. “My foot’s asleep,” he said through clenched teeth.

  “Does it hurt?” she asked him, wondering at the tears in his eyes, thinking how out of place they seemed there, then realizing that she had never seen him cry, not even at their daughter’s funeral.

  The Heart’s Desire

  “That’s yours?”

  “It’s foolish, Peter. I have none.”

  “No. That’s foolish. Everyone has one.”

  “Not me.”

  Michael Lindstrom, without a heart’s desire, smiled at his friend and sipped from a glass of white wine.

  “Come on, Michael,” Peter said. “A moment somewhere? Somewhere along the way you lost, but still remember, bright as your youth. If I had one, you had one.”

  “What was yours?”

  Peter Riley’s face drifted for an instant. “It’ll sound…stupid. Undoubtedly. But it is the time. The best time. I was eleven.”

  “Oh Jesus.”

  “Hear me out. I was eleven. And I was on a baseball team.”

  “Little League.”

  “Nothing so grand. A park league. Summer at the town park. I was not a good player, but I liked it. I wanted to be good. And I practiced every evening, made my dad throw me balls and I’d hit them. Or try to. In those afternoon games I’d stand out in right field, nervous as hell when I was about to bat. Oh, I got hits. Maybe one out of five or six. Always a single, and usually because somebody bobbled a ball or made a bad throw. But one day—the day—I was at bat with a guy on first, one run behind, and two outs. It was the bottom of the seventh—we only played seven—and my whole team was muttering under their breaths, and some out loud. But that first pitch, the very first pitch—well, I belted it. I absolutely ripped that mother. That goddamn ball went back over the left fielder’s head, hit, and bounced, and went right into the creek. And by the time the kid fished it out, I was long home, and everyone was yelling and cheering and clapping and poundin
g my ass off they were so damn happy. It wasn’t a championship game or anything like that, but I won it. Me. That was the day. And there’s never been another to touch it for sweetness.”

  “Not even when you lost your virginity?”

  “I’m not even sure when that was. Technically.”

  “And you’ve relived that home run.”

  “Yeah. Several times.”

  “Doesn’t it lose its novelty?”

  “No. Each time there’s something new.”

  “Come on. You can’t mean you actually experience it. I can’t believe that.”

  “But I have. It’s time travel, Michael, honest to God.”

  “I also can’t believe you’re calling it that.”

  “Me and a hundred other people. And why not? You can’t go back physically. That’s science fiction. Mentally is the only conceivable way. Your own memory, your subconscious has it all in there. Every tiny detail. And Wagner knows how to make you remember.”

  “And how much have you paid Wagner all told for that privilege?”

  “It’s not inexpensive.”

  “No. That type of thing never is. Sell all you have and follow me.”

  “Don’t make it sound like a religion.”

  “I wanted to make it sound like an obsession. Or an addiction.”

  “It’s harmless. Helpful if anything.”

  “Does Jennifer think it’s harmless?”

  “Jennifer’s been very supportive of it. Of me.”

  “Financially as well?”

  “I can handle the cost, Michael.”

  “Doesn’t she get a bit jealous? Of your running away from her back to the town park?”

  Peter paused a moment too long. “No. I’m…refreshed when I come back from the experience. Renewed. I’m a better husband for it.”

  “And how long before all that freshness and renewal wear off and things get shabby again?”

  Peter laughed. “Michael,” he said quickly. “I just can’t describe it. It’s something you have to experience. I mean, everything is there, the smell of kids, the feel of the sun on your t-shirt, the infield dirt under your Keds—Keds, for Christ’s sake—the old, taped bat in your hands—everything. The sensation is total.”