Big Machine

by Victor Lavalle

  73

  WE CROSSED A LONG OVERPASS that led to the Port of Garland, and when we came down the other side, it was as if the whole city of Garland had been muted. We were too far away to hear anything but our footsteps. The two Swamp Angels were far ahead of us. It was just me and Adele and that pulse, still strong, along my spine.

  There’s a living thing inside me, I thought.

  We moved down Middle Harbor Road, which showed signs of hurried escapes, cranes with shipping containers midway between the ships and the shore. Trucks abandoned in the road, their doors open. Some of the engines still chugged.

  There were hundreds of shipping containers stacked a hundred feet high on either side of the road. Red, blue, silver, and orange shipping containers with corporation names painted on their sides. They surrounded us and rose above like valley walls.

  “How could you kill the Swamp Angels if you know they’re doing the Voice’s will?”

  “I don’t know that. Joyce Chin suggested it, that’s all.”

  “They tried to make you shoot Solomon Clay. If he’d died down there, the people at Laguna Lake would still be alive. The Church of Clay wouldn’t exist.”

  She slapped her purse. “How the hell could I have known, Ricky? You can’t put all that on me!”

  I said, “I’m not trying to down you. I would’ve done the same thing.”

  “Please, Ricky,” she said, looking at the street. “Don’t lie to make me feel better.”

  “Half the world would’ve done what you did.”

  We hobbled along quietly for a few paces.

  I said, “But now the Swamp Angels are leading us. They want us to do something.”

  “You don’t know that. That’s just what you want to believe. And stop all this Angels’ mess.”

  “Why do you have such a hard time admitting what they are?” I asked.

  “I’m a working person, Ricky. Nothing more than that.”

  “Stop hiding behind that bullshit,” I said.

  She flinched, faintly, but didn’t argue.

  “I don’t know what the task might be, Adele, but I want us both prepared to do it. Maybe they want us to kill, maybe they want us to protect.”

  “Protect who exactly?” Adele asked.

  San Francisco lay far across the water, but it seemed safe. Looked safe. Maybe because I knew there were National Guard units controlling its border. But much closer, just a few hundred yards to our right, I saw the majestic eastern span of Stitch Bridge. Its upper roadway looked like a reflecting pool as daylight glared against all the windshields, each car waiting to be ushered through the checkpoint. A process that didn’t seem speedy at all. Those folks sat in their cars, aggravated but patient. Unaware. Unguarded. Men and women and kids.

  Thousands and thousands of them.

  74

  MY RIGHT LEG FELT FRIGID, right up to the shin. A soul wasn’t devoured in just one bite. My body shivered, but the hungry cats were as indifferent as erosion. My mind returned to Gayle.

  The old woman led Gayle and me into the back of the clinic, where there were very few windows. The waiting room had been bright, but it turned gloomy here. The thick carpets were old, and they silenced our footsteps. The walls had been painted light green of all things, the color of nausea.

  Gayle and I walked into a narrow exam room, and the old woman told Gayle to climb onto the table. She said this quietly, even nicely, but that didn’t calm Gayle. There was a folding chair right next to the exam table, where I was meant to sit. The old woman left. There was hardly enough room in there for the two of us. The place seemed no bigger than a walk-in closet. And yet, in a moment, three more women fit themselves in. All young, in their twenties.

  They helped Gayle onto the table, lifted her feet and rested each in a stirrup. The whole time they were talking, asking the same questions. Are you all right? Are you sure you want to do this? Are you all right? Are you sure you want this done?

  Gayle couldn’t be counted on for answers anymore. She cried quietly. I only knew she was crying because she sniffled. When I looked, her chin and cheeks were slick with tears.

  “Are you all right?” the trio asked.

  “Are you sure you want to do this?”

  They wouldn’t speak to me. They wouldn’t look at me. And yet if I’d gotten out of that chair, if I’d tried to leave the room, those women would’ve bopped me in the head with hammers. If I wasn’t willing to be a father, I better damn sure be a witness at least.

  So I sat there quietly, looking at my feet now instead of my hands. The room only seemed to get darker as the three women moved around. There was only one window in this narrow room and too many bodies. Gayle lay to my left, only inches between us, squirming on the exam table, a woman holding each hand. The third rubbed the tops of her now bare feet.

  “How are we doing?” the doctor said when he walked in. A guy in his fifties, kind of round and unthreatening. He smiled at her, and, when I looked up, he even smiled at me, but there wasn’t anything calming in the expression. He looked like a man who’d stumbled across a grizzly bear. Make nice. Make nice.

  “My name is Dr. Hamilton and I’ve been working with this clinic for seventeen years,” he said. He spoke in a chipper tone, I don’t know what else to call it. Like he was at an auto show, admiring a prototype car.

  “It’s always been my belief that a woman should have the right to make her own choices. That’s why I’m here today.”

  Gayle squirmed less as he talked, though the three women didn’t stop touching her. They surrounded her. The one holding her right wrist nearly boxed me out entirely. I stopped looking at my shoes and looked at Gayle, who only stared at the ceiling now. She hardly seemed conscious. She hardly blinked. Her lower lip jutted forward and drooped.

  “All right,” the doctor said. “Do you feel like going ahead?”

  Gayle didn’t speak, she only nodded.

  He said, “This is called a speculum. You see? I need this so I can see your cervix.”

  I heard, but I couldn’t watch. Only Gayle’s head and neck were visible to me anymore. The woman next to me hid the rest.

  “This is just a swab,” the doctor said calmly.

  And it went on like this, step by step, until finally the doctor nodded to the woman who stood right next to me, and she left the room. I didn’t try to peek now. I looked at my feet. I looked at the door. Twice I looked at Gayle, but she wasn’t studying me.

  In that time the doctor might have said more, but I hardly noticed. When that woman let go of Gayle’s wrist, it was as if Gayle had been untied. Her body squirmed. A new fear animated her. It was time. Could she really do this? Gayle looked to the other women.

  “Are you sure?” one asked.

  “You can still say no.”

  “Of course you can. Of course.” The doctor said this sweetly, but his arms were crossed.

  I remained in my seat and listened for Gayle’s decision. But we’d gone too far into the clinic, all the way to the last room, and she couldn’t generate enough power to propel us—herself, the baby, and me—out again. Gayle wriggled and shivered, but that’s all.

  Then the third woman returned with a big machine.

  It came in on wheels. A gray box with coiled tubing attached to the side. It looked like a jury-rigged robot in a 1950s movie. Nothing but a typewriter balanced on a wastebasket. The woman wheeled it over to the doctor, then she stepped between Gayle and me again.

  The doctor turned it on.

  In the pamphlets at these clinics they used one word all the time. Gentle. The speculum will gently stretch the cervix. The woman will feel a gentle tug. The machine will make a gentle noise. Obviously I can’t say if the first two are true, but the last definitely isn’t. Dr. Hamilton turned that machine on, and the sound of the vacuum was a terrible whir, as loud as a tree shredder.

  The noise bounced off the narrow walls and only became louder. When I looked at Gayle, she’d stopped crying, but her head and shoulde
rs were raised off the exam table now. Was she trying to see or to push? I couldn’t say.

  The buzzing got louder and louder until I expected the room’s window to crack apart.

  The machine worked too well. It was pulverizing my bones and my delusions. My teeth hurt, so I held my face.

  And then it was done.

  The machine turned off, and Gayle was led to a room for rest. I sat on the blue Arlington sofa again. New couples were in the waiting room. When Gayle was ready, I took her home.

  We’d picked out two names for the baby, one for a girl and one for a boy. When I repeated those names to myself in Murder’s basement, I felt like I was making introductions to that unborn child. Moving toward it. Near enough that it could hear me. That’s when I finally cried.

  I felt my whole body for the first time in days. Real awareness through every limb, all the accumulated pain. I had a chill deep inside me. The tears burned my dry eyes, and I blinked furiously, afraid my eyes would crack in their sockets.

  Eight years earlier I’d had so many ideas why fatherhood was impossible: Gayle and I fought worse than Arabs and Jews. Worse than Arabs and Arabs. Even working full-time I had trouble covering rent. And of course there was the dope. How you going to bring a child into all that? It’s shortsighted. Selfish. A mistake. And while all those might be good reasons for caution, they weren’t mine. Not really. Plenty of others had managed to raise a kid through the same, or much worse. The shame I felt wasn’t because of what Gayle did, but why I got her to do it.

  I was a coward.

  I muttered apologies to Gayle, and to our child, for the first time in my life. Nothing specific, just that pathetic old refrain.

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered.

  My father always used to say that to me when I asked about our lunch date in 1968.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said again.

  The sight must’ve been high tragedy, that’s what I thought. A fucking junky, dying on his ass, starving, face like a corpse, apologizing to a baby that hadn’t even been born and a woman he no longer knew. Absolutely wretched. Imagine the portrait.

  And there I caught myself.

  I was imagining the picture, and it was absolutely romantic. Romantic like the boy who fantasizes dying on a field of war, killing a thousand enemies before being cut down. Romantic as the girl who envisions poisoning herself, leaving a corpse that’ll indict the one who finds it, a plucked and corrupted rose. A man, coming to an end like mine, should perish in this pose: contrite, abject, mythic.

  Is this really all I am? I wondered. A grown man acting no better than a teenager?

  The image I’d always held of myself was so much more forgiving.

  All this occurred to me as my soul was sucked farther down into my body by those feline mouths below. I watched as I slipped out from the comfortable space of my skull and down inside the tight, moist channel of my throat.

  This is really happening, I thought. This is really happening!

  When the bobtails finished chewing me up, there wasn’t just death waiting at the end. More like a reckoning. The ancient Egyptians believed the god Anubis met each of us on the other side, and that he stood before a great scale on which our hearts were set. There each was weighed, tested, for its worth.

  Every time I’d blasted my dad with the story of how he’d returned me to the orphanage, he’d gone into a real depression, and I’d thought, in a child’s satisfied way, that he should feel pain. But in Murder’s basement I realized I’d been wrong. Leaving me behind wasn’t what had made my father feel guilty. Not just that anyway. He’d felt guilty because leaving me behind had been so easy.

  When I sat on that blue Arlington sofa and stared at my hands, while Gayle groaned with genuine heartache, I only impersonated sorrow. I wasn’t devastated when the old woman called us into the back. Not despondent when Gayle and I left quietly after, not touching.

  I was relieved.

  Was this the heart I wanted measured?

  And right then, the cats stopped eating. Not when I thought about what my father had done to me, or even when I admitted what I’d done to Gayle, but when I asked myself if I was satisfied with the life I’d led. With the man I’d turned out to be. Then the cats paused. For a moment they weren’t pulling me down.

  And in that respite I willed my soul to climb. And though my arm, up there, out there, still wasn’t moving, I scrambled back up my own throat. I returned my eyes to my face. My spirit moved with such gusto that my body sprang up at the waist and I sat upright on the unfinished basement floor. From this position I could see one of the exits the feral cats used, an empty window frame taped half-shut with cardboard. I hadn’t been able to see it while on my back. Early evening outside, but still enough sunlight to see the foundation of the next home only yards away.

  Can people change? I thought.

  I wasn’t addressing myself. Maybe the cats? Or whatever had created them.

  I fell over on my left side and grabbed at the ground underneath the hard layers of cold clothes. With a grip in the earth I pulled myself toward the open window frame, finding handholds in the dirt the way a free climber scales a mountain. Carefully. Slowly.

  I know I’ve been selfish. But there’s still some good in me.

  I can stop being a coward. I can be brave.

  I promise.

  When I looked backward, over my right shoulder, the cats rested on their haunches and watched me. They tilted their heads in unison, smacked their lips simultaneously. Blood on their whiskers and paws.

  I was feeble, but determined, and sometimes that’s all you need. My right leg, below the knee, remained cold, felt empty. I wouldn’t even have known it was there if the weight hadn’t dragged at my knee.

  When I pulled myself out through the empty window frame, I lay on my back in the last warmth of the setting sun. I looked at Murder’s home. There were figures moving behind the gold curtains on the first floor. They gestured wildly. I heard grunts and laughter.

  They had a perfect system worked out. I understood it now. The bobtails devour the soul and then Murder eats the body. Once they were done, there’d be no evidence you ever existed, not on the physical or spiritual plane. This is how some folks go out. We don’t die, we’re erased.

  I expected the veil to part, for Murder’s red face to press against the pane, for him to catch me trying to get away. Instead of waiting to be yanked back in, I turned onto my stomach and dragged myself until I found a puddle of rainwater at the bottom of the next house’s gutter spout. It was filled with fallen leaves and three dead gypsy moths. I drank until it was dry.

  The cats came to the basement window, but stayed inside the frame. They watched me while I lay outside, lapping. Another puddle of rainwater lay a few feet closer to the street, and I crawled to that one, drank from it too. The cats stayed perched in the window frame, stomachs only partly full.

  How much of my spirit did they get? I can’t really say. Who can put exact figures on such a thing? But if I had to guess, I’d bet they gobbled up nearly half of me. That part remains there still, waiting in the belly of the underworld. Someday I would have to reckon with it, but for now I was alive. Left with, let’s say, 60 percent of my essence. Not enough soul to be careless with but, if I changed, maybe enough to eventually tip that great scale.

  75

  “I CAN’T GO BACK to Vermont if we get through this,” I said.

  “Oh, Ricky, please.”

  This declaration, the decision, must’ve seemed to bubble up from nowhere, so I understood Adele’s exasperation. But questioning her at the gates of the Washburn estate had left me contemplative. I’d been replaying moments of my life in my head as we marched. Like my escape from Murder’s basement in 2002. And the promise I’d made in Cedar Rapids. I can be brave.

  “I thought I joined the Library to finally prove myself. I thought I was being bold. But maybe it turned out to be just another place to hide.”

  The San Francisco Bay lay to
our left, nothing between us and the sea but fifteen feet. The quiet gray water shined in the sunlight. I looked behind us, and the view was dominated by the sky, not the land. This didn’t make our problems down below seem small, exactly, but simply ours. The Heavens were busy casting beauty.

  “So you just quit and do what? Go back to the minimum wage?”

  I smiled. “I’m not romanticizing that, believe me.”

  We’d gone about as far as we could on foot. The Port of Garland was the shipping hub of the city, so most of it was docks and shipping containers. All of which were protected by chain-link fence rising two stories high. Stitch Bridge loomed nearby, well over our heads, but I didn’t see how we could reach it.

  “Why’d they bring us this way?” I asked. “We can’t get up to the bridge from here.”

  “Maybe they brought us out here to just kill us,” Adele said.

  “You really believe that?”

  “No,” she said. “I guess I don’t. But what else? Tell me what good we’re supposed to do from here.”

  “You act like I’ve got the answer,” I said.

  She looked up at me. “You sure you don’t have any?”

  I felt the life inside me as a steady, low vibration by this point. At times it seemed to buck, to move. To kick. For the first time I thought of it not just as a life but as a child.

  My child.

  Just ahead of us the two Swamp Angels changed direction, veering left, entering a small park that we reached a minute later.

  Port View Park had a circular driveway that led to a small playground. There was a snack bar and bait shop on the same lot. And between them a long concrete pathway leading right out to the lip of the Bay.

  “You see that?” I whispered.

  At the end of the path, in that distance, three silhouettes. Three.

  THE WATERS of the San Francisco Bay smashed against the stone shoreline. Breezes off the water so strong now that Adele and I got bopped around. As we got closer to the end, I saw an octagonal fishing pier. The thing looked so old, just a mess of warped wood. Room enough for fifteen fishermen to cast lines off the sides. A sign posted at the pier’s entrance read: FIRE DANGER. NO OPEN FLAMES. NO BARBECUES. NO FIRES.