by Ann
Fifth Exhibit:
A month later. The gun lies between a double row of books on Simon’s shelves. He keeps it in a cloth sack so that the powder won’t be smelled. The smell is strongest of course immediately after use.
Doriandra has taken Leonard to visit her cousin. Simon is alone in the house with Louy, who has a cold. It’s night; Louy is asleep. Simon is reading – now he sets the book down, goes to the bookshelf, leaves the house.
Two hours later he returns. He goes to the bookshelf.
Louy is still asleep. Simon has crept into his room and sits on the edge of his bed, watching Louy sleep. He leans forward extremely slowly, and carefully takes Louy’s head in his hands. His thumbs drop down onto Louy’s eyelids with smooth, hydraulic control. Slow and gentle his thumbs roll the lids up, exposing the dreaming eyes. Simon leans forward, pouring his gaze into Louy’s eyes.
Louy stirs, starts panting. His body twitches. He groans with a stifled voice that sounds as though it came from far away, from beneath the earth. Simon is curved over him, unblinking eyes’ gaze fastened on the boy’s dreaming eyes. Louy is screaming softly, his voice is trapped down inside him.
Now Louy screams. He struggles with his father, awake, screwing his eyes shut, the screams siren out of him bigger than the room. Simon seizes Louy by the shoulders and shakes him violently, without saying a word. Louy’s head whips back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. Simon shakes him shakes him – Louy goes limp, his head flips forward his chin striking his chest with a wet smack then is wrenched backward thumping against the pillow or the backboard. Simon shakes him, his arms pump mechanically in and out – in and out – in and out.
Sixth Exhibit:
A series of newspaper headlines – cholera has broken out here, here, and here. And now here, and now here. Growing concern – it’s an epidemic. A state of emergency is declared, cars spill out of the city, jam up on stone bridges, uniformed men check documents and direct traffic.
Leonard sits in the back seat of his cousin’s car. His mother, Doriandra, and his cousin are carrying Louy down the front steps to the street. Louy is lean, feeble…dull eyes, slack mouth, nerveless limbs dangling. Tenderly they seat him next to Leonard, resting his head on Leonard’s lap. Cousin gets into the driver’s seat, the car bobbing under him like a raft. Doriandra walks around the car to the front passenger seat…hard, metallic eyes.
This car will take them out to their cousin’s place in the country, where they will be safe from the plague.
…Newspapers…they filter in now and then…and on the radio – stories of riots…chaos…
Seventh Exhibit:
Hands in his coat pockets, Simon moves powerfully down the street. Now and then groups of youths rush past – cold gusts of wind bring chaotic noise of a window breaking here, a dreamlike police whistle far away.
Suddenly alone in the street, Simon turns into an alley which intersects another at a right angle, a T. Two boys and a girl eating old bread, he shoots the one on the left. The boy crumples, his head striking the pavement with a sharp, hollow noise. The girl springs to her feet and runs down the right arm of the T, and the other boy stands up staring at his dead friend with his mouth open. Arm straight Simon aims at him and shoots him in the stomach. The boy’s body folds forward at the waist and he falls on his head face down. His legs slide back gradually, his bottom in the air.
The right arm of the T opens into a small enclosed lot – the girl rounds the corner of the building to the right as he fires his gun. The bullet tugs at her right heel, blows off the heel strap of her shoe – it drops on a tuft of grass – she disappears behind the corner.
The lot is framed by the solid, continuous wall of the armory running the length of the block, on his left. To Simon’s right, the building whose corner she had turned; and before him, the rear of an L-shaped hotel…heaps of rubbish, trash cans, mattresses, a stove. Two escapes: she might run straight ahead, or to the right.
Simon turns to the right – with his left eye he detects a patch of red earth by the stove. There is another red spot, there between the two garbage cans by the armory wall, the other way out. The girl hops from her hiding place. Simon’s arm flies automatically out and up level. He shoots her in the head, the girl plops onto the ground, a wide tear in her head above the ear. The bullet strikes the wall and shears off a flake of brick. It spins through the reverberating air like a wobbling top, and hits the grass with a muffled thump.
Simon trots past the girl’s folded body, down the alley. He is heading for the street when like a marionette his body jerkily twists to the left and he slips instead through a back door hanging off its hinges. A moment later curious heads are craning, peering down the alley…mouths are rounding, they see a heavy bundle there, lying bisected by watery sunlight. They see it is a dead girl. As they rush to her side, Simon emerges calmly from the front door of the building into which he had so awkwardly retreated, walking with unremarkable haste. He raises his left arm and pulls the sleeve away from his watch; his eyes, shaded by the brim of his hat, hawkishly scan the street.
Poster on the corner: ‘Is it working?’
Eighth Exhibit:
Months and months of plague. Bullets disappear from their red and black boxes in Simon’s bureau drawer.
Ninth Exhibit:
Simon is caught in a riot. It starts with a puff of alarm, and suddenly everyone is squalling in all directions. Simon moves diagonally through the racing figures, toward the shelter of deserted, burnt-out buildings. Police swarm the streets with keening whistles – Simon trips on the pavement – his gun slides from his pocket across the pavement. The police have seen him, his gun – two or three charge at him. Under the regime of the epidemic there is no due process, the police do as they please – now their eyes have fastened on him.
Simon dashes into the building, throws shut the door. The lock still works. He sets the chain – recoils as fists thump and bang against the wood. He flings a half-demolished wardrobe and a heavy table in front of the door. He can’t block the windows, but he can lock the hall doors. He checks the back door; it’s painted over, jammed shut; there’s nothing he can open it with. Upstairs the fire escape is on the front of the building. On the roof – it’s too far to jump across to the neighboring house. He tries, peering over the edge, but panic fear he can’t overcome drives him back, nearly paralyzed. Half to himself he is saying ‘I can’t! I can’t do it! I need something else!’ Crashing from downstairs, wood tearing and splintering.
He goes to the center of the roof, staring at a door that will burst open soon. Simon draws himself up, staring, his mouth set. He tightens into himself, his features crush together. He melts into air…vanishes across renovated buildings, alleys, sterile apartments…bullet spins cold in the sky…continuous wall of heads for the sharp, hollow noise…Louy is still asleep…the other boy watching a white box disappear from the sun, staring at his friend Louy sleep…the boy takes Louy’s head in rain…his thumbs drop nine…two burnt shells, rain dropping from his stick…Simon leans forward, pouring in the dead trees…between two garbage cans he opens his gaze into Louy’s eyes…from her hiding place – the riots – the girl sees she is suddenly alone…billowing urns shoot her in the head, hat and coat…the bullet tugs her to the right street…Simon turns into a wall of the kiosk of flowers…the lobby is the girl, filled with a wide tear in her head above what was the entry way…her shoe drops on a right fence that rings golden light…flake of brick sailing…two boys…the park lying in the carpet smell…
There is nothing strange about me but my happiness. The only difficulty I have ever given anyone has been to contain someway my dangerous happiness, which makes me thoughtless. My exuberance breaks things, breaks me. It marches me up to people and elicits from me declarations of love, if only to give me the satisfaction of disappointment, to know that I am in love. I am forever building up this edifice of love and happiness, which would get to be as big as the world, or bigger, if it weren’t for the storms, er
uptions, convulsions, that tear it all down again. When any of it comes down, it all comes down. Although these catastrophic failures deeply wound me, still I am grateful for the opportunity to rebuild, and to renew my trust with the world. I do everything on the scale of the world, as the only thing commensurate to my happiness.
Only by understanding my father’s life will you understand my death. I will have to adopt a conversational manner, for the moment, to tell you these everyday things. For most of my childhood, my father worked as a theatre critic. His articles were widely read and his opinions seriously received. I never understood exactly what he did, or why he was so inattentive to us. Over time, he withdrew from us. For reasons I would learn later, he once disappeared altogether for about ten days. We were told he had been depressed; he had thought some time alone would do him good, so he had taken a room at a hotel. I wanted to offer some comfort to him, if he was suffering – he seemed to sense my feeling, and headed it off by adopting an especially frosty manner with me. My mother was mystified by his changes, and her uncertainty unnerved me. While I lacked confidence in my own judgement, it seemed to me my father sullenly avoided us all, stayed away from home.
I made friends easily, but I always lost them. My exuberance, my complicated games only exasperated and taxed them. Most of the time I kept company with my older brother Louy, whom I very little resembled; while I was nervous, enthusiastic, busy, thoughtless, Louy was ghostly and quiet. He had a gentle, warm little voice like a candle flame, and wet, red lips. He almost always seemed preoccupied and far away, but then he would astonish me with a near-clairvoyant observation about someone or something we had seen: and I would realize again that he missed nothing.
A few days after Louy’s thirteenth birthday, my mother took me away to visit with her sister for a few days, leaving him alone with my father. When we came back – what had happened to Louy? We found him catatonic in his bed, apparently unable to speak or move. I remember the slack mouth, the frightening dullness of his eyes. A new awkwardness had insinuated itself into his body somehow – he even lay awkwardly in his bed. My mother frantically chafed his hands, his arms, caressed his face, implored him to speak. I was sent to fetch our downstairs neighbor the doctor. He examined Louy carefully and took my mother aside. I never knew what he told her.
Louy was condemned to lie inert for the rest of his life; thin, frail, he could barely speak. His eyes would sometimes become glassy and seem to flicker under his heavy lids, but this was not the light of intelligence they formerly had had. While I am sure she could not have known what had happened, my mother angrily blamed Louy’s condition on my father, and they separated almost immediately. I seldom saw my father after that; we did not visit together, and my mother never spoke of him.
When the epidemic broke out the following year, my mother took Louy and me out to the country, to stay with her cousins. We were there for eight months, during which time we never heard from my father. Upon our return to the city, we learned that he had disappeared shortly after the state of emergency was declared. Officers of the health department had already declared him dead, ‘succumbed to the disease.’ The epidemic had maddened the city. Hundreds of people had vanished without a trace in riots or clandestine violence, and the police had done as they pleased with the rest. In the depths of the epidemic, heaps of unidentified bodies were burned or buried in vast pits every day – so my father’s case was not apparently unusual.
I remember hiding from my friends behind our school’s small library once. I picked up a branch from the dry grass at the edge of the gravel path, but as I raised it I saw that it was a charred bone, nearly as long as my arm. For days after that, I wondered if it had been my father’s.
The contents of his apartment were boxed and piled away by my grandfather, upon whose death it fell to me to sort them out. My father’s clothes and books were almost entirely ruined by seeping water and mold, but I salvaged what I could – I had always been curious about my father. Under a blanket I found one of my father’s jackets, which, at the time the boxes were packed, had been used as a sort of makeshift bag. His watches, shaving kit, and a few other things had been bundled up inside – a notebook among them. In it, I found many brief sentences like these:
‘7 September, three boys.’
‘20 September, two boys, very nice.’
‘21 September, nothing today, an admonition.’
‘29 September, two boys, a girl today, very nice.’
‘2 October, necessarily three boys. Last one caused some trouble.’
‘10 October, nothing – reprisal.’
‘13 October, one boy – misfire, strangle – very memorable expression.’
Interleaved among these tallying sentences were terse notes:
‘I have still the habit of writing – they say your habit of writing is the manufacture of self-incriminating evidence / your habit of writing is a sign of bad conscience / you are to wean yourself of your habit of writing’
‘With the epidemic, everything is possible.’
The earliest entry was dated just before his ten-day disappearance:
‘the low sun white and cold, and full of worms. Then a fan of white, gelatinous rays, transparent tubes whose ends mouth the earth. A flat, white opening in the sky, whose light silvered the air, dotted with their shadows. They are the larvae of the sun and will become themselves stars.’
I had seen this light around my father – vividly I see it now, cold and white, as he sits in his shirtsleeves, the long cuffs bent back, writing; heavy ropes of smoke coil around him. His creased face is drawn, inert, his writing hand palpitates like a bug on the paper.
‘My brain shining in the dark like a planet, streaked with long, glistening white clouds that I came to see were worms, beneath the meniscus of brain fluid a translucent sheet under which they tossed and turned. Some lay and some reclined on the tissue, like opulent ladies on perfumed sofas; their puckered heads swayed gently.’
These were compulsory sacrifices, as I came to understand. There was no quid pro quo, there was no deal or anything like that with the larvae. They addressed him from time to time, directly or by means of fugitive bits of graffiti, or slogans on posters – ‘do not open door’ – ‘dead or alive?’ – ‘focus!’
‘I realized what it was necessary to do.’
He attacked children only because they were easier to kill. The first time he was taken by surprise, guided by the larvae to a house under renovation, a child taking refuge from the rain. ‘Do not swing – you waste energy that way. Thrust.’ – ‘Don’t do it halfway,’ the larvae said. And after – ‘Sloppy.’
‘They led me to the gun.’
‘It is difficult to talk to you,’ the larvae said, ‘you understand so little.’
‘Rain falls, scattering its rings across the puddles – and each death is a drop that makes the mass quiver and thrill, and each drop lends vital force to what would otherwise be an inert, passive, shrinking thing, a body of stillborn larvae.’
‘Don’t forget what you owe the larvae of thought,’ the larvae would say. ‘Don’t forget your solar responsibilities.’
On Louy’s thirteenth birthday, the larvae said: ‘He should be old enough now to help you.’ In his room – ‘Open his eyes. Show him dreams.’ Hopeless – he refuses to understand. ‘Shut him up. Shut him up.’
‘The alley flashed at me, the gun tingled…you see how the larvae protect me. “Look at the time.”’
‘I don’t feel the murders – would I feel them more if I cut them open and rooted in their entrails, perhaps while they still throb with life, before they lose consciousness? I am told “It is not necessary to feel it, only to see to it.”’
‘Glancing up now at the radiator I know I would do it even if it were as abstract and numb a matter as turning that knob – in a windowless closet deep in basements I see three little bodies, heads in a row, weak and dazed from hunger and thirst lying on a metal grill bunk – as I turn the knob the dim, orange
-brown light fades and goes out, and the little chamber swiftly fills with a flavorless gas which will lead these children so deep into the mazes of sleep that they will never find their way out again.
‘“This is not a matter of gratification, it is a matter of generating numbers.”
‘The gun is a magic instrument, converting children to numbers.’
‘I know I am now able to will myself out of existence. They have shown me, and told me to extinguish myself if I am threatened with capture. I will not hesitate to do as they ask, not because I feel that my actions are wrong, and that, by them, I have merited my death, but because the situation will then no longer be under my control, or it will be teetering on the brink, about to slip out of my grasp; and by disappearing, I will seal it and keep it – control – perfect forever.’
I remember the disembodied, unreal feeling I had as I finished reading. His words sank through and past me, and drained out of me.
I read his words, and the larvae hatched in my mind. (what or how did the larvae appear to me…such questions can only waste our time together. In the water I see the lights trail their long beards that are emaciated gold and silver flames withered to compass needles whose points sway before my feet, everything turns into everything else…For my father they were voices. To me they are shafts of glowing, orating red and gold sunlight walking up and down inside my head) –
Every week I visit Louy at the hotel de santé. He lies always in a white iron bed in a vast half-deserted ward, whose booming silence solidifies now and then into a moan or a flicker of nurse’s feet, rustle of stiff sheets. I sit beside the bed. Late afternoon light sifts into the room, tall orange projections on the wall, and deep shadows. Louy is lying on his left side, an ungainly body of long bones under the sheet, his head tilted up toward me – a constant tremor wags it from side to side. His rumpled face, the red arch of his lip, and his long wet teeth, wet breaths; the eyes never waver from my face, although there is no expression – his wounded mind no longer has the strength to find its way out to me. I only want to be with him. He grew up like this; his face has aged seventeen years unmarked. In all that time, he has had only one never-ending experience.