by Fitch, Stona
“Despite the recent excitement, this part will require concentration and a calm mind, Eliott Gast. Otherwise the pain will be unbearable and the procedure… unsuccessful.”
My chest heaved and I couldn’t catch my breath. I tried to twist free from the aliens. More seemed to have appeared, their young, undamaged hands holding me down.
“I’ve confessed already. I’ve given you everything you wanted. Now leave me alone!”
I turned to the side and saw the Doctor open his bag. He searched and took out two small blocks of wood, one painted red, the other blue. They were from a set of building blocks, the kind children built into towers or castles. Each had a small hole drilled in its center that left the wood splintered and fresh. I pictured the Doctor taking them from his son’s playroom before coming here today, carefully selecting the right size, promising to return them.
The Doctor reached into his white coat and took out two identical icepicks with dark wooden handles. What good were icepicks anymore? What purpose did they serve except to wound? My heart started to race.
The Doctor pushed the tip of an icepick into the red block, then one into the blue block. With a small tape measure, he checked how far each point stretched out, then adjusted the red block, inching it carefully down. He nodded, handing one of the assemblies to Blackbeard and one to Nin.
Blackbeard leaned forward. “Any last words?”
“It will be a pleasure not to hear your ridiculous voice ever again,” I said tersely.
Blackbeard shook his head. “Very brave, Eliott. Defiant to the last. Our audience will enjoy this. Anything else?”
I said nothing.
He looked at Nin. She leaned forward and whispered quietly, her lips close enough to brush against my ear. “I’m so sorry, Eliott. I couldn’t…”
Blackbeard pulled her roughly away from me. “Enough love talk. Here are my last words.” He leaned to my other ear and the sharp edge of the mask scraped my chin. “Never forget that you have brought this upon yourself,” he whispered. “You are not innocent, Eliott, you fuck.”
Blackbeard held the blue block close to my right ear, while Nin knelt to my left, positioning the red one. I could feel the tips of the icepicks in my ear canal like mosquitoes on a summer afternoon. Then I saw the masked face of the Doctor above me. He looked directly in my eyes, holding my gaze with a seriousness that made me stop struggling for a moment. In that moment, he placed his hands on both of the blocks and pressed them together as if clapping his hands. I heard a loud pop and then another – the sound of a balloon bursting. A red flash of pain seared through me.
I saw the Doctor’s lips moving but couldn’t hear anything. He moved away. Blackbeard rose as well, laughing. Nin lingered for a moment, looking at me, her lips still. She gave a brief shudder.
Then the anger rose up in me. They had deafened me, taken away my ability to hear the swirl of voices, the world. I was already completely powerless and they had diminished me further. I was only a specimen to them, squirming in a filthy petri dish.
I kicked out at the aliens, catching one in the stomach and pushing him across the floor. I shoved another away, then picked up the red block and rushed at Blackbeard, his broad back retreating across the room, day’s work done. The moment played out in slow motion. Someone may have shouted a warning but I heard nothing. My feet slapped on the floor in silence.
Blackbeard turned slightly as I ran closer. I jammed the icepick into his shoulder, the block stopping it from going in farther. He opened his mouth but no scream came out.
Blackbeard swung at me with his other arm, his fist connecting with my jaw. Blood gushed from my nose and the pain in my mouth blazed again. As I raised my hands to my face Blackbeard tried to swing again but the Doctor was behind him, pinning him. He pulled the icepick from Blackbeard’s arm and held his hand over the red circle spreading on his white shirt. They stumbled out of the room together, Blackbeard’s mouth moving, the Doctor urging him on. Nin stood behind them at the doorway, her eyes squinting.
In the bathroom mirror, a small trickle of blood dripped from each ear. The pain was dull, but when I opened my mouth, it was unbearable. I screamed for a moment but heard nothing. I looked in the mirror. My God, I’ll never hear anything again.
I mouthed the words but couldn’t hear them. I quit talking to stop the pain, but kept thinking of all that I would never hear again. The wind. Chekov plays. Glasses clinking. The crowd along Boulevard Anspach. Ravel’s Miroirs. Maura’s voice…
I panicked and rushed through the apartment, tripping over boxes and slamming into walls. I wanted to outdistance this pain and loss, the way a child runs away when he scrapes his knee. At the metal doors, I pulled back my foot and kicked, but heard nothing. I pounded on the doors with my deadened fists. I screamed. How tragic I must have appeared to the world in these moments, raving like Lear as I turned and smashed through the apartment in utter silence, destroying everything I could put my hands on. I broke everything in the apartment into the smallest pieces I could make. All in silence.
Day 34.
Silence took me underwater and built a second prison around my first. It changed me more than any of the Doctor’s other work. I pushed the futon into the corner of my room and sat pressed up against the wall to keep anyone from surprising me. I was afraid that if I slept they would come back to finish, damaging me even more, if such a thing were possible. I knew that it was.
I looked around the room with the fast glances of a cornered animal. Only by keeping my eyes open would I know when they came to blind me. But after hours of watching, I saw only the black snakes swaying slowly above me, lulling me to a half-sleep filled with thoughts of water, soothing water running from the tops of skyscrapers, warm water turning the streets of Roanoke into rivers. The brief reverie took me back to the flood year, another time of silence and pain.
All spring the skies had stayed gray and rain came with every afternoon. Riverbanks flooded, bridges were washed away, and we were out of school for a month because the buses were axle-deep in river mud. When the rain finally stopped in late May, it was too late to finish school, so we were all set free. Others had lost their houses or farms. Darby and I gained our freedom. Needless to say, we thought only of ourselves. Despite our father’s warning never to go to the quarry, every day we went there. He told us of high school kids who drank too much beer then jumped into the water and smashed their skulls on rocks hidden just beneath the surface. He told us that there were rusted hooks and cables under the water left over from the quarry work. Widowmakers, he called them.
We swam to the bottom to see the kings. We had found them one spring day, waiting for us in the cool depths. They drew us back to the quarry all through the floods and the hot summer that followed. Darby and I were not afraid as we eased into the water from a slanting rock. We spat in our masks, puffed to clear our snorkels, took a deep breath, and then we were on our way down. The pale skin of Darby’s nascent belly looked green underwater and I used to call him Lochy. I was the Squid, because underwater I swam on my side using a flailing stroke that I was convinced moved me along faster. I must have been ten years old. Dad was at work all the time, our mother had moved back to Richmond, and we were off doing things we weren’t supposed to do – what finer way for boys to spend a summer?
Older boys kept cases of beer tethered in the depths of the quarry to keep it cold. At first, this was the treasure we sought. We dove down through the bubbles trailing behind us. The bottom was jumbled with granite blocks dumped in when the quarry shut down. Each block was covered in a greenish moss that softened the edges and felt alive beneath our hands. The tumbled stones formed triangular hollows where they fell. In the first, we found a rusted beer can and a fishing lure. Darby pointed up to the shimmering surface. He always ran out of air before me, but we had promised to stay close. In a few kicks we were at the surface, sputtering an
d breathing the warm air. Across the water we saw boys swimming. Darby squinted. “No women, Squid. Just a bunch of our kind, dammit.”
“Maybe we should try a little closer to the shore,” I said. My brother shook his head. “They’re down here. I memorized where they were from last time.”
“You sure this is where we were?”
“Positive.”
“But all the stones look alike.”
“Trust me, I know they’re here.”
We took a deep breath and plunged back down.
At the bottom, we swam past the slabs, then peered down between them. Darby nodded quickly and gave me a thumbs up. I moved in closer, careful not to let my flippers stir up the silt.
Suspended in the water, we stared in fascination. Between the rocks lay a figure no bigger than a baby, curled on the brown moss. Time, fire, or some other powerful force had changed him into a new being formed from leaf skeletons, tiny bits of plants, and dirt. His eyes were closed, mouth in a neutral line, face drawn and sallow. On his head was a pointed hat of twigs. Darby pointed at me. I nodded. It was my turn.
I reached out with my hand and pressed my fingers into his belly, then shook them. In an instant, the king vanished, and the leaf rot rearranged itself into nothing. But in that moment, as my hand touched the warm, thick pocket of water where the king had been, I was seized by an irrepressible happiness, more giddy than any stolen wine or dentist’s gas had ever made me. Darby stuck in his hand too and I saw his lips curl into a smile around his snorkel. As much as we liked to search for the kings, it was this brief moment of joy that drew Darby and me to the quarry floor. We were addicted to this essence.
Out of air again, we swam to the surface. “That was a good one,” he said, still smiling.
“Best yet.” We had found several tucked into the spaces between the granite slabs. We had gone through everything we could think of to explain them. They were wooden statues that had rotted. They were skeletons of animals swept up in the flood or catfish tainted by mercury. They were made of clay thinned by years in the water. Other kids had made them as a joke. But nothing explained the electric charge that ran through our hands when they touched that warmth at the bottom of the cold quarry. We had tried to raise one to the surface, but brought up only a handful of leaves, translucent in the summer sun.
We gave up trying to explain the kings or to bring them home to show our father. We just assumed we would understand someday. Until then, we simply looked for the kings and touched them, felt the pulsing warmth they held spread through us. I suppose it was wrong, but being boys, our first notion when we found something strange was to destroy it.
“Ready?” Darby asked. I nodded.
We dove that afternoon until our lungs ached. The brown world of the quarry bottom had started to seem familiar as the dark rooms of our house at night. But for all our searching, we found nothing. We pulled ourselves reluctantly from the water in time to be home for dinner.
At that age, much was unexplained. Why had our mother moved back to Richmond? Why hadn’t Darby and I gone with her? Why wouldn’t our father explain why they separated? Then there were the many intertwined mysteries of women and sex and life and the world beyond our town. Finding the kings at the bottom of the quarry was a gift, inexplicable but real, a secret that my brother and I hoarded all through the long summer after the flood.
By August, I could shake my head and hear water sloshing. When I pressed hard, quarry water dripped from my ears. It stained my pillow brown as tobacco juice. I didn’t tell my father, who would know where we had been swimming. Instead, I let my world gradually turn quiet. The sounds faded slowly, until finally Darby had to look straight at me when he spoke for me to understand him. He begged me not to tell. He had me hop on one foot for hours, trying to clear out the fluid the way we did at the pool. It didn’t work.
The pressure inside my head was almost unbearable and I had to stuff my ears with cotton to keep the tobacco juice from leaking. I played the piano one last long afternoon. All the songs of the world flowed out my fingers and across the keys of our upright. I was so deafened that the piano made no sound to me. I heard only my own distant humming, as if I were singing at the bottom of the quarry. At the end of the day, I turned myself in, handing my father a note that explained it all. His mouth moved angrily as he read, then he peered into my ears with a flashlight, then took me to the doctor, who did the same thing with a small silver instrument that hurt. I was diagnosed with a severe infection of the middle ear.
During the drive to Washington the next morning, my father reached back occasionally to slap Darby, who took most of the blame for this particular episode. We had a steak dinner downtown; then the next morning I had a brief surgery. By that afternoon, I could hear again, the sounds so loud and unexpected that I had to clamp my hands over my ears to filter them. I’ve forgotten the details now – how long I was in surgery, if it hurt or not, going home. What I remembered was the watery silence.
Day 35.
He is very angry, Nin wrote on a child’s toy. She pulled the plastic up and the words disappeared, then handed me the slate and the red plastic pen.
I wrote nothing for a moment, struggling to hold the small pen in my hands. I remembered that it was called a magic slate. Nin watched, her eyes unchanged by sympathy. She had grown accustomed to my condition.
Get me out of here! I scrawled, then shoved the slate back to her. She pulled the plastic up and my words disappeared.
You’ll be leaving soon, she wrote. I promise.
I took the slate and erased it. Did I hurt him very badly?
No, it only made him angry, Nin scribbled.
I thought of a bullfight Maura and I had seen in Seville decades ago, when we visited during the spring feria. The picadors had administered the first wounds, which incited the bull to charge and be quickly killed by a short, nonchalant toreador with a pockmarked face. In all, it took a few unremarkable minutes, and Maura and I had left feeling shortchanged yet grateful. Rather than wait for the next fight, we escaped out to the street, where we found a corner bar and drank manzanilla and ate salt-baked fish. My own ordeal had stretched out for weeks now, the wounds administered but not the coup de grace.
Angry enough to kill me? I wrote.
Non! Nin wrote emphatically. We are working to get you released. Our faction is mobilizing. A black snake lowered and she quickly pulled up the plastic to erase the slate.
One of the aliens ran into the room, his mask almost falling off. Two others chased him and tackled him on the floor just a few feet away. He carried a small square of cardboard. As they struggled, he kept trying the hold the cardboard toward the ceiling. I couldn’t read the message.
Nin watched as he was dragged back through the apartment by his arms.
Who was that? I wrote, then handed her the slate.
One of your supporters, she wrote. Someone who thinks this has gone on long enough.
Are there more of them?
Nin nodded. But there are just as many who feel strongly that we should continue.
I pulled the slate out of her hand and threw it over in the corner. It fluttered down to the floor. Nin’s mouth moved but I had no idea what she was saying, nor did I care. I put my hands over my ears to stop the painful roaring of air. Nin kept talking, standing closer to me now. Behind her scarf, her eyes flashed with anger. She was wrong. She wasn’t the jailer who handed me the keys. She kept me in jail with hope and promises and expectations. For weeks I had waited for just the right moment so she could help me outsmart Blackbeard. He didn’t seem to be particularly brilliant to me, but Nin was no match for him. He was, after all, a fanatic.
“Go away!” I screamed. With each hour, my memory of how to say words seemed to fade. I was no longer sure that what I thought I was saying matched what came out of my mouth.
Ni
n turned and rushed out of the room. I threw a chair and a bottle of mineral water after her. I still waited to hear the crash, half-closed my eyes against it. But the bottle shattered silently on the floor.
Day 36.
A pair of eyes stared from the windowsill, one blue eye and one green eye, slightly crossed, just inches apart. I screamed and moved away from them. The two eyeballs glistened beneath the bright lights. Moving closer, I could see that they were glass. I picked up the green one and found it surprising heavy. I took the blue one in my other hand. An eye in either ruined hand. A Dali painting. They were beautiful, in a way, the milky white joining the clear section at the front with a seamless flow. I stared at them for quite while, examining them with my own eyes. Then I realized what they were for.
I held the eyes up to the black snakes, let the world see them. “Do you find this amusing?” I shouted. “Is the world so sick that you find it amusing? Imagine that it was your own eyes that were going to be ripped out. Imagine that if you can.”
When the quarry water filled my middle ears, I had welcomed its warm silence. But now my deafness frustrated me. I couldn’t be sure I was speaking clearly. I couldn’t be sure I was saying anything at all.
I tightened my fingers around the eyeballs and drew back my arm to throw them.
A hand grabbed my wrist and stopped me. I turned to find Blackbeard shaking his head. He carefully pulled each of the eyeballs out of my hand and cradled them in his palm. He rubbed the fingers of his other hand together, indicating that these were expensive.
“Thanks. Thanks a lot,” I said. “I appreciate your going to such trouble.” Blackbeard shrugged. He said something, but I couldn’t tell what it was. I squinted toward him. He rolled his eyes, as if my deafness was an affectation. He took a pen from his pocket and walked over to the white wall.
Tomorrow, these eyes will be yours.