by Brian Hodge
But eventually a strange thing happens. After a few weeks of hitting the weights, he seems to all but forget about me. Ordinarily I'd think that was the healthiest possible outcome, that even though the way he first got drawn into lifting was a little kinky, in an adolescent way, now he was beginning to see results and it was setting off a positive chain reaction: that he was developing some self-esteem and confidence, that he could turn his attention to girls his own age instead of playing it safe with this voyeuristic infatuation with someone twice his age who wasn't even aware of him.
Except I don't think that's precisely what was happening.
From early August:
I must suck at this, cuz I'm not really getting much better at it I don't think, but by now it's like that's the last thing that matters. The cool thing is all the shit that starts to go through my head while I'm doing it. I don't even have to try, I just show up and it starts to flow. Like I'm this omnipotent FORCE OF NATURE and can do whatever I want to right all the wrongs and there's not a fucking thing anybody can do to stop me cuz there just isn't.
Tonight it was Barry Swain.
First I cut off both his hands, so he can never use them to shove me down ever again. But before he can bleed too much I use a blowtorch to cauterize the stumps. And all that heat, you know, it makes him thirsty. So I give him some water. All he wants, gallons of it, he's one grateful chugging motherfucker. Then I take a pair of vise-grips and clamp off his prick so he'll never piss again. Then I just let the pressure build, a couple hours, until he's screaming even worse than when I hacked off his hands. And just when he says he can't stand it anymore?
That's when I turn the rats loose on him.
So they're eating him alive, right, except he doesn't know how to feel, cuz on the one (amputated) hand it's the worst pain he's ever felt in his worthless life, but on the other, he's praying for the rats to hurry up and burrow through his gut to relieve the pressure.
Jesus, that had me going all night.
That's bad enough on its own. But there's one thing that makes it worse:
It went through my head first. Exactly as written. Almost 15 years ago.
I know the prevailing feeling is that girls just don't have things like that going through their minds, but I can assure you, with no small amount of shame, that they do. It was one of a few revenge fantasies that I entertained a few weeks after they put Sherman in the hospital, and it was becoming hard to ignore the fact that our family was never going to see justice done.
You were always more of an optimist than I was, and I suppose that, being the middle child, I had that classic way of hiding in plain sight, where I took these ghastly scenarios and turned them over and over in my mind, the same way you might take a mound of clay and keep making new forms from it. It helped get me through that time…not just Sherman's pain, but all the stress that M&D were under while trying to keep it secret from us.
In time, I let it go. Or thought I had, until 7 months ago.
Then I tried to work it out of my system for good. And was pretty sure I had. I just didn't realize it was possible to leave it where someone else could find it.
So. One more partial entry from Kevin, from late August:
Another school year, Day 2. I thought it might be different now, but I guess that was just the stupidity talking.
I'm there and I'm not. Meaning my malformed body is there in the hallways and in the seats, but my brain's a million miles away.
Actually, the solution is simple.
I don't know why I never thought of it before.
I'm responsible, Wendy. By some mechanism I don't understand, could never have anticipated, I am at fault. I could probably put it all down to coincidence, if not for that one thing: his coming up with such a vicious, specific fantasy that follows mine as closely as a script.
However it happened, I can only believe that what I left behind most nights in that weight room infected him.
One woman's therapy is another boy's bitter nectar.
*
So now maybe you can understand why I lied to Enrique. I knew what I thought I should do, but when pushed up against it, in that moment I couldn't go through with turning Kevin over to the police…not when he was in a situation that I suspected I'd helped put into motion.
But then, the longer I talked with him in the workshop, and the more the past and present swirled around me, the more I realized that, no, I hadn't been the one to put it into motion after all. That was someone else's doing, when Kevin was still a toddler with no idea of the kind of cruelty that passes for amusement.
When we finally came up from below (it was close to midnight by this time), I took him to see Enrique. The poor guy had been waiting it out the whole time by the fireplace.
I told him, "Everything's okay. Nobody's spending the rest of the night in a cell, not over an honest misunderstanding."
They shook hands and each mumbled an apology, but neither one of them wanted to look the other in the eye. A couple minutes later, after Kevin had gone home, Enrique couldn't thank me enough, and asked how I'd done it.
"He just needed someone to listen to him awhile," I said. "After that, everything else just fell into place."
*
Now the hardest part.
I wish I could say I had a clear recollection of everything that transpired in the workshop toward the end of the night. Except I don't.
So much of the earlier hours are stamped so indelibly in my memory that it was easy to recount them almost word-for-word. But then I get to a certain point and there's a blackout zone, sort of like when you're driving and your radio reception will fuzz out, then come back in clear again a mile later.
As we left the workshop, here is what I'm absolutely certain of:
I know that although Kevin had 2 handguns and some pipebombs stashed at his father's house, he'd gotten past the intent to use them the next day. And he didn't. I'd tried to get him to take a long look at the consequences, and imagine as vividly as he could how he would feel 12 hours later, if he was even still alive. How he would feel if he accidentally gunned down just 1 person who wasn't on his list, that he didn't feel deserved it. Maybe this helped. Or maybe it didn't much matter what we talked about, so long as someone was listening.
And I know I tried to leave him feeling that he could talk to me in the future if he needed to vent or something. By this time I was obviously aware that I'd had a hold on him, if not so much now then at least not long before, so I wanted to exploit that. Not in a manipulative way, just…well, you know. For the greater good.
I know these things for a fact. It's just that there's this deeply shadowed stretch that I didn't even think much about at the time…15 minutes, half an hour, I'm not sure. I mean, this was a heavy discussion at the end of a heavy night for all concerned, and we were worn out. All our defenses, they were just gone, eroded. Toward the end, Kevin broke down into tears again, and this time I did too.
And then…?
Next thing I knew, we were walking up the stairs to square things with Enrique.
As I said, I really didn't give it much thought the rest of that night or the next day or even the next. Not until I got a call from Alexis Warwick asking if I'd heard about Matt Standerfer. Maybe you've heard about him by now too…or maybe not, since you were 3 years ahead of us and it probably wouldn't ripple through your class the way it would ours.
At this point, they don't know who killed him and neither do I, although the obvious theory is that it's tied to next month's election, somebody who didn't want to wait for the ballot box to sort it out. Maybe it is. I pray that it is. Then again, maybe the timing is just coincidental.
At this point, all I know is that for the past several hours, Kevin is nowhere to be found. And maybe that's the coincidence.
But if you're reading this…unless you went ahead and have read it before you had enough reason, even though I asked you not to…then I suppose that means the finger of blame has been pointed at me.
And what do I do, Wendy? Knowing what I don't, should I try to contact Doug Van Der Graff and Anthony Chapelle, and warn them about what might happen…or just let things take their own course for now?
I imagine the fact that I've spent hours and hours preparing this, to tell you my side of things, before even asking myself that question, gives an indication as to its answer.
Because I keep thinking that if it really wasn't Kevin, then I'll have betrayed him in a far worse way than if I'd turned him in the other night.
I don't know what you must think of me by now.
I'm still me, though. I'm still me.
Even if tonight I have no idea what that means.
Ever your sister,
Corri
AND THEY WILL COME IN THE HOUR OF OUR GREATEST NEED
“Kill. Kill. Kill. Nobody is innocent. Neither the living, nor the yet unborn.”
—Ilja Ehrenburg, propagandist for Joseph Stalin
He could smell it while they were still kilometers out. Could smell it before he saw it, their view from the back of the canvas-shelled truck limited to what they’d passed already, with only rumor to go by in imagining what lay ahead. That, and his nose. It was more than just a smell of charred logs and fireplace embers, magnified. How could he recreate this in miniature, Horst wondered. Drop a fatty cut of pork onto blazing wood, maybe, and handfuls of hair, and after the meat had burned beyond edible, piss on it all to create a black steam. It was the smell of the end of everything.
Rolling away from the back of the truck was a landscape that looked as gray and dead as he imagined the surface of the moon to be. Ash and scorched tatters of clothing were still drifting down from the sky, and even what they said were pieces of people, scraps of hide crisped from their bodies and carried off by the winds. Until now Horst had refused to believe it—he, as few others here would, understood the power of a good story. But this morning, with his own eyes, he could see the litter strewn across the road and the fields and hanging from the winter-bare branches of trees, and knew that it must be true, every word, and even the worst he’d heard had not done it justice.
In the truck bed they were quiet to a man, hunched in private silence. But he was accustomed to that by now, men sitting hip-to-hip and shoulder-to-shoulder and each one as alone as if he were locked in a cell. It hadn’t been that way at the beginning of he war, or at least not nearly as often. There had always been battle nerves, of course, but there had once been a fierce buoyancy, an exuberance of surety and purpose, the iron faith that Germany could never do anything less than prevail.
Stalingrad. He supposed he’d first noticed these faces after Stalingrad.
All of them in the truck were walking wounded to one degree or another, and this was what had undoubtedly spared their lives. They’d been well enough to convalesce several kilometers to the north, in ruder quarters, rather than taking up beds in the hospitals here in the city where the Wehrmacht had been sending its casualties. In the truck, they were alive and mobile, thus of use, and if they spoke at all they would speak of victory, as always, even if their eyes hinted at other things in their hearts. Sometimes this seemed to make them speak of victory that much louder.
Horst, as no one else here could, understood the power of lies.
Out the back of the truck he could see refugees continuing to straggle away, trudging along the roadside carrying what they could, or what little the fire had spared. Women, mostly; children and old men. All he could see was their bent backs, with no desire to see their faces, because there would be no lens between them to protect him.
The truck was slowing now, so they had to be close. The stink of the place was no longer a sufficient gauge. It had reached its peak well before now, clinging to the land like a pervasive fog.
He saw her just past the tailgate: someone’s daughter, sister, mother, wife. In her dark blue woolen coat, her blond curls limp and caked with soot, she walked straighter than the rest, seeming to glide over the ground rather than plod. Pride, still, he thought, and felt heartened to see it. From one hand dangled a suitcase, cheap luggage that looked as though it would’ve been a poor choice for a long journey even when it was new. When her shoe twisted in a roadside rut, she dropped it, and he saw how flimsy the suitcase really was. The strap that held it shut gave way and it burst open, spilling dirty pieces of clothing and a picture with a scorched frame and a doll, blackened to the color and texture of charcoal. When it hit the ground, one arm broke away, and she scrambled to recover this first.
A moment later he saw the pale nub of bone jutting from the center of the doll’s shoulder.
It was the first time on this ride that Horst wished he still had his camera, any camera, because it was the only thing he could think of that might help him make sense of what had happened here.
*
It got more warning than some cities, less than others—on both sides of the war—the air raid sirens ripping open the night of February 13 at around 9:30. Half an hour later the planes came into earshot, at first a hum from over the western horizon, then swelling louder, until the heavy engines of hundreds of RAF bombers blended into a massive discordant drone that filled the sky.
The first planes marked the spot, dropping clusters of flares that glowed ruby-red as they descended—Christmas trees, the Germans had dubbed them—streaking through a clear night, a cloud-free line of sight to the streets below.
From the ground there was virtually no answer, no barrages of anti-aircraft fire. Later, a few British pilots remarked that the greatest danger they faced was being hit by bombs dropped from planes flying at higher altitudes. The city lay undefended, and even this late in the war—nearly five and a half years after the blitzkrieg into Poland—it had been largely untouched by the worst of it.
Carved in two by a winding ribbon of river, Dresden had always been best known for porcelain and tobacco, fabled for its medieval architecture and as Germany’s answer to Renaissance Italy. Elbflorenz, they called it—Florence on the Elbe.
Dresden was its own salvation, they’d always believed.
Dresden was too beautiful to destroy.
*
If they hadn’t been nearly mute already, then their first look at the city, after they’d clambered down from the truck, would’ve done it. There was plenty of rubble and downed walls, but Horst was astonished by how much still stood: block after endless block of roofless stone shells, blackened and dusted gray with ash, like a hollow city a child might put together out of boxes and food tins.
And to think there had once been a time when he liked ruins, when the word meant little more than abandoned cottages and farmhouses.
The soldiers he saw here seemed to have little of their old sense of order and cohesion, perhaps small units reconstituted out of fresh recruits and the survivors of other units. He and the rest of the truck’s men were put to work recovering bodies, identifying them if they could, working alongside civilians and civil defense.
His left arm was wrapped and plastered and cradled in a sling, but his right was still sound. He could drag. He could carry. And once he encountered Dresden’s dead, those who hadn’t been consumed entirely, he was equally relieved and horrified to discover how light they could be with all the fluid steamed out of them—adults shriveled to the size of children and, as he’d seen already, children shriveled to the size of dolls. They stacked and moved the carbonized dead however they could, using carts and barrows and wagons pulled by horses that stood in the streets and trembled.
How many dead? they would ask one another, because it seemed as if someone should know.
Who can s
ay? was the usual answer. Thousands. Tens of thousands.
Whatever the tally would prove to be, however terrible the number, Horst felt certain of one thing: Reichminister Goebbels would add another zero to it. He would know he could get away with it, maybe for a long time. Nobody could pinpoint how many people had been here. The population—close to 650,000 before the war—had swollen by as much as half again, as Dresden sheltered thousands of wounded soldiers and a flood of refugees from the east, coming by train and truck, horse and automobile. They’d fled before the advance of the Red Army, bringing reports of atrocities they could never have imagined human beings, not even the Soviets, could commit on civilized people…tales of mass slaughter and gang rape and torture for sport.
Still, the worst was always easier to believe than its opposite. Horst could understand why some of Dresden’s survivors might need to tell tales of angels descending to the streets during the city’s bleakest hours. What he couldn’t understand was how they remained convinced of it even while they shook the dust of their neighbors’ bones from the masks stretched over their mouths and noses.
“Angels, yeah? What use were they, then?” said one of the skeptics, from the group that Horst had ridden in with. He tipped a canteen and swirled water in his mouth and sprayed a stream into the dust. “If they could’ve done just that much, it might’ve gone better here.” He spat again. “No, I don’t believe it for a second.”
“It doesn’t matter that you don’t,” said an older gentleman wearing layers of mismatched jackets. “They were still here.” His cheeks were sallow and sagging, but he had the unforced smile of someone who knew enough to pity others not privy to his secrets. “I took shelter with a fellow who saw them himself, early…two of them walking in the Altmarkt. The flames didn’t bother them. They walked straight through them…and they weren’t in any hurry.”