Three days before the show, she put his steaming breakfast oatmeal down in front of him and said, “You can go.”
She wanted a name, a phone number. He conjured one up from his delirium, foreign enough to be acceptable: Nivek. Said he didn’t know the number. Said there was nothing to worry about. Nodded through her clipped questions, every pore leaching tiny beads of sweat, feeling his father’s silence infuse the walls of the house from where he sat in the living room, staring down the day’s La Presse.
It was the last time Amir ever hugged his mother.
At times, he can hear music from other cells thumping through the walls. Weak stuff — Queen. Metallica. Even his brothers would know that for the sap it was.
None of them would know Skinny Puppy, though. As far as he knew, no other inmates here had his intimacy with the West, its enduring stain. With training, with prayer, he had tried to erase it from his soul — cleanse it with the balm of righteousness. Choked the voice of his past’s questioning. Retained only the will, the gargoyle screams of his haunted youth.
He hears the crack of gunshots somewhere outside. Pictures a firing squad: ten white, camouflage-clad soldiers lined up, guns wedged against shoulders, barrels trained on a lone Arab muttering Allāhu akbars into the eddying dust to honour the luck of his martyrdom and quell the fear he’s not supposed to feel. Knows the so-called good guys aren’t supposed to do such things — executions, et cetera — but feels the truth of the image anyway, the force of its judgment. They have their own righteousness, these infidels; sing their own hymns to death.
The prodding comes again, lumping up past his heart.
Wicked, wicked. Find an anchor in the darkness, Amir, or drown.
When he walked out the door, shoulder slung with a black canvas knapsack filled with spare clothes to keep up the sleepover ruse, the cold air on his face was like a baptism. The night sky was clear and starry, and he even felt a twinge of sentiment for the great white cross glowing atop the humped silhouette of Mount Royal.
The Metro ride, Parc to Place-des-Arts, took less than fifteen minutes. He walked up to Le Spectrum, praying the show wasn’t sold out. The kiosk glowed like a squared moon in the winter dark. There wasn’t even a line.
“One,” he said. “Please.” Slid his twenty-dollar bill through the circular opening in the glass like an offering. Then the ticket was in his hand, crisp and still warm from the printer. He was patted down by a monstrous security guard. When he strode into the main hall, the domed, purple-lit ceiling radiated toward him with the energy of a huge cosmic eye, the bass rumbling intestinally through the chasm of the room below.
The next two hours were a torture of anticipation while he waited for the band. A blur of fear and thrill and boredom, watching the roped-off nineteen-plus area, skulking in the shadow corners while the venue filled up with an army of black-clad ghosts with sparking, kohl-rimmed eyes.
When the lights fell and the room-shaking intro roared out of the sound system, it was like a bomb detonating in his chest. He clenched his hands, curled and uncurled his fingers. Tensed for an explosion of light.
When it hit, strafing the venue with a nuclear white pulse, he was there, on the stage — Ogre, in the flesh. Demon frontman in full froth, drizzled in grime and throwing cyborg dreadlocks around like tentacles of iron chain. Gnawing the poisoned meat of society, chewing all the anger and indignation into a mince, swallowing it while it choked him. Looking, to Amir, so much like a fallen god, ecstatic in his darkness, using it to be free.
He felt the push before he knew what was happening. The crowd like a knot of electrified muscle, peristaltic. In the space of three seconds he was hemmed in, tangled up in a snarl of young white boys in torn blacks, their lean, sweaty biceps jamming up against his own arms, slippery as raw chicken. Felt vertigo of his sneakers leaving the ground as the crowd surged forward, his body beginning to move without his say. His heart ratcheted up, his ears singing with a high fevered peal as he shut his eyes to shield them from the dollops of fake waste spraying out from the clanking stage. Before he could regain his balance, he was shoved face-first into the damp back of the skinhead beast in front of him. He breathed leather, saliva smearing his face. Nose crushed, mouth pressed, gasping. Smothered, suffocating. Flailing, praying: savemesaveme —
Just as he thought he’d black out, a little hand wedged between him and the choking leather to pry his chest free. The arm wrapped around his shoulders like a living cloud, warm, enveloping.
The memory so vivid.
The girl turns her face to his and smiles, supportive, sympathetic. A little embarrassed. Girds her hand against the leather wall that almost asphyxiated him and pries it forward, creating a pocket of safe space against the crowd’s feral energy. He holds on to her, clasping the smooth, sweaty skin of her bare wrist, making a structure, a joint strength to withstand the surging. The air shakes with bass, smells of damp bodies and beer skunk and her clove-scented perfume.
“You okay?” she says, yelling over the music. He nods. Her skin has a dark cast to it, uncertain mocha. Hair like waves of black sand. The band ratchets up. The song: “Inquisition.”
They stand, a scaffold of two sharing something soft and humane plucked from the bone-crunching noise. Watching silently as the band pummels through its set — vivisections, chemical warfare, drug addiction — holding hands until the concert ends and the last note drones out through Le Spectrum like the voice of a speared whale.
He turns to speak to her — say thank you, say what’s your name — but before he can manage to, the girl squeezes his fingers and lets go and disappears into the stream of people slithering out the door.
By the time the lights come on, he’s alone.
Alone, still. With Ogre. Hanging.
After his daily lullaby, they’ll take him back to the cage. No praying. No talking to the brothers in other cages, lined up along the concrete like penned dogs, each waiting their turn. Tomorrow there might be questions. The day after, the same questions. The cruelties are getting more varied, ingenious. The only constants are boredom and, for some weeks now, the music.
Something stabs his kidneys, a spike of pain up his left side. They turn up the volume.
At times, he tries to remember the faces of the men he’s hurt. Searches, grasping, for self-revelation, some holy light or shimmer of irrefutable truth in their dying eyes. Finds none. Only blood gush, entrails unspooling, desert blur, mealy brown darkness, handfuls of dry porridge crawling with ants shoved into his ragged mouth, the stench of his own waste — and now this dancefloor track from ’92, slamming into his temples, keeping him awake forever. Loosening something inside.
It played out as an inevitability, as certain as a pledge of devotion.
He opened the front door with the ringing still in his ears, moved slow and quiet even though he could see the light on in the kitchen. When he turned into the doorway, his father was standing by the table, face flat and hard as a blade. The CDs were piled up in a metal bucket beside him. His mother stood behind, quiet, face buried in her scarf.
Amir stood, awaiting judgment. Accepted his martyrdom.
It was bad enough, his father said, that their son was turning into a do-nothing, a drug addict, wearing all black and moping all the time. Now he was listening to this toxic stuff? Trash. Western garbage.
His father grabbed him hard by the wrist and hauled him outside into the parking lot behind the building, lugging the garbage can in his other hand. Amir remembers the smell of lighter fluid, the bonechill of a Montreal sky gone black. Clothes still damp and sweaty from the show, frozen stiff. Skin slick, still tingling where the nameless girl had touched him.
He was made to pour the fluid on the CD cases, to empty the whole bottle over the pyramid of cracked plastic, throw in the match and sit and watch the flames erupt and the oily fumes coil up into the air, wraithlike. Every record, single, EP — his whole collection. All the bleak, cleansing sounds he’d found solace in. Burning.
If he couldn’t have music, what might guide him instead?
Here is truth: there is nothing to confess that they don’t already know. They saw him kill. Hero-slayer. Traitor. Now he hangs, baffled, lacerated, the rhythm kicking up into his chest, ribbitting at his throat, wickedforcefedtorment, bringing it all home.
The first man he tortured was Afghani, a shepherd. Accused of giving information to Canadian soldiers in Kandahar. He’d wanted to hide his face, but the brothers had made him show it, so the traitor would see exactly who’d come to dismantle him. “الكندية,” they said. Canadian. Cattle prods jammed into armpits, cigarettes sizzling flesh, a smell like cooked mutton, musky and sweet.
For a while, in captivity, he’d hung on. Retained the certainty of his faith. Clenched righteousness between his teeth like a metal plate, refusing to cede his grip even when they tugged at it. Days passed. Weeks. Months. Years? Time bled. Him beaten, near-drowned, threatened with dogs, hosed down cold and naked on the tile. Allāhu akbar, Allāhu akbar. Screaming at night, punches in the face, kicks in the shins. Cocks in his face, guns at his temple. Hot irons on his skin. Lights blazing and wrathful like cruel angels. Endless, deafening music.
The song approaches its clattering finale. He coughs, feels a surge, an eruption welling deep in his gorge, a molten ball of energy and plea. This one, he knows he can’t neutralize. Somehow, now, he is Amir on both ends, infidel and martyr — but in the middle there is a different beast, a dumb, screaming soul that he cannot understand, cannot grasp, erase, or control, even though it’s the thing in which all of his anger, pride, shame, confusion, and desire are born. The beast that sings. The blind one that likes music. Amir loves this music, this terrifying music at the irreconcilable core of him.
The worm in his chest swells and spasms up into his throat, splits him open, so when he finally breaks, it’s not a river of cursed names leading to an ocean of blood, no renouncement of any creed, not with pathetic thrashing of limbs emaciated to bird weight — just the last tiny bit of himself left to give before he falls into the place where there are no pasts and he becomes the next version, gone mute in darkness. He sings, sings the last words in shredding ogre scream:
“TORTURES THE ANIMAL TORTURES THE ANIMAL!”
Bootsteps through the burlap. The hood ripped off. Slapped again. Slapped again.
It was his favourite song, once.
Between the Pickles
1. You’re just the Wrapper, Rosa. Just the Wrapper. That’s what they told you. Your one job, your only job, is to wrap the sandwiches in waxed paper and slide them down the metal chute and that’s it. Any problems and you’re gone.
The thing stares out at her from between the two flaccid pickles like a hairless mouse. She caught it just as she was folding the first logoed flap over the spongy white bun, stopped short and gasped and summoned every bit of strength she had to stifle a shriek. Now she’s just standing there, sweat soaking the back of her polyester uniform, every second that ticks by bringing her closer to the questions from her manager that she can’t afford to answer. What the hell is that? How did it get there?
She wants, as bad as anything she’s ever wanted, for the thing to be innocent, a rotten carrot or a stray piece of cattle bone that got missed in the grinding. But there’s no mistaking it: the nail, the knuckle, the wavy lines of fingerprint, swollen and grey but still readable as the map of an individual body, maybe dead but maybe alive somewhere and wondering what became of its missing digit. Never dreaming that it would end up here, at Pancho’s Escondido, nestled into the middle of an Azteca Burger with cheese, threatening to fuck up everything Rosa García has been working for over the past nine months.
Dios mío. Rosa feels hot acid rising up her gorge. She clenches her fists, presses fingernails into palms. Repeats the refrain in her head — the one they gave her, but also the longer one, the one she’s made for herself, which she recites to keep her going whenever things look like they might start turning to shit again.
You’re just the Wrapper. You’re just the Wrapper, this is your only job. Focus on the paycheque, Rosa, hold it in your mind like the face of Jesus Christ, because it’s the thing that’s saving you. It’s what’s between you and La Migra’s guns, searchlights whiter and hotter than the Chihuahuan noon, fear in your stomach like a heavy chain while you try not to breathe, try to stop existing for as long as it takes for them to move on to the scent of some other poor bastard cowering out there in the desert, half-dead from terror and thirst. It’s the wall between you and the house back in Jalapa, Mama’s bloody coughs rattling like wet bones in the kitchen, the smells of fever and rot and dust coming off her skin. It’s protection from the sting of Angel’s hand on your cheek when you cried for your dying mother.
Rosa thinks about Diego, back at the apartment, sleeping in his crib while Valentina watches the evening news beside him, as blissful and radiant a heaven as any holy book could promise.
The finger points at her, demanding a response. Even if it has nothing to do with her, even if it’s just bad luck, it doesn’t matter. Illegal equals expendable. Her manager’s exact words. She’d had to look up expendable.
They’d have her on a southbound truck within an hour.
The hiss of a frozen patty hitting the griddle brings her back to present time. Like that, she decides. Don’t move, don’t breathe. Head down. Just like in the desert, let it pass you by.
Rosa swallows hard to settle her gorge and puts on her best company face — no problems here, señor — lifts the waxed paper over the nightmare to cover its horror with the friendly cow face of the Pancho’s mascot, Vaca Loca, folds the greasy flaps under to seal the deal, and slides the sandwich down the metal chute and, she hopes, out of her life forever. She dings the bell, order ready!, and tries to fade back into the haze of frying oil and grill smoke filling the kitchen like a tropical mist.
Remember, Rosa. You’re just the Wrapper.
2. He’s weighing how far to go.
It took considerable effort to suppress the initial gag reflex when he bit into it and felt the bone. To not panic once he drew it back and saw the thing buried in there, poking out just enough that it looked for all the world like his Azteca Burger was sticking out its tongue at him. To lift off the top bun and peel up the sour greyish flap that passed for a pickle and confirm what his incisors already knew: that there was a human finger in his lunch food, slathered in ketchup and Sombrero Sauce and a smattering of diced onions.
But what was absolutely heroic, absolutely fucking Herculean, was that Mike Stevens was still just sitting there looking at it, trying to decide on the best way forward. That he had the wherewithal to fight back disgust and take a rational look at the situation. To take a deep breath and imagine the kind of shit-show that would erupt, the kind of irreparable damage that would occur, if he were to stand up in the middle of the restaurant and scream like a baby and have to explain, first to the TV cameras and then to Head Office, that the beloved Pancho’s chain was so lax in its food-handling practices that this grotesque tidbit had managed to travel from whatever cursed slaughterhouse it had come from, all the way down the delivery chain, to end up on his tray, in his burger, in his mouth.
Mike closes his eyes for a minute, running his fingers down the length of his tie, trailing grease. Everyone knows fourth-quarter revenues are dragging the bottom. Everyone’s heard about what happened over at KBC-Flaxos after JerryBurger went tits up. If
the axe falls at SitcoBVM, junior execs will be the first on the chopping block.
All that work, all that eating shit, all that proverbial licking of Carl Drais’s ballsack, for nothing. The resort vacation over Christmas? Forget it. Never mind the family he and Kara have been talking about having, maybe a year down the road. All of a sudden he’s not father material, just another dud in a bargain suit pleading his way through dozens of job interviews and eating Ritz Crackers and spreadable cheese for lunch.
Forget it. That’s the thing to do. Forget it. Stand up, walk over to the trash, and dump the thing into the bin, erase it from memory. Take one for the team.
He opens his eyes and looks over to the counter and notices the Latina girl staring at him. She’s crouched at the wrapping station, where the burgers get packaged and slid out onto the metal chute to be organized into orders, peering over a row of yellow-wrapped Bandito Burritos with eyes as wide and black as tar pits.
She knows.
She saw it, and she served it anyway. Is fully, 100 per cent aware what kind of horror-show she’s just pushed through the line to be turned into someone’s lunch, someone else’s problem. Jesus. What the fuck was she thinking?
Mike answers the question before it’s even finished forming in his mind. She’s pretty. Pretty Mexican girl. Skin the colour of toasted almond; big, pouty lips; wide, nervous eyes that have probably stared down the business end of a border guard’s assault rifle on more than one occasion. Illegal, no doubt. She pukes or screams or breaks down weeping, causes any kind of a scene, the questions start flying, and she’s back across the border faster than you can say ándale arriba.
He fidgets with his tie again, has to stop himself from chewing on it while he sorts everything out. The tie was a gift from Kara, Egyptian silk.
What if this Mexican chick can’t hold it together? What if she wakes up thrashing from a nightmare of bloody digits crawling across her skin like maggots, and spills? Who gets asked questions then?
Different Beasts Page 10