Jamestown

by Matthew Sharpe

  “I said get off him.’”

  “She said get off me.”

  “He stole my lollipop.”

  “So? One lollipop, one punch. Not one lollipop, five hundred punches.”

  “He stole my last lollipop.”

  “Get off him.”

  “Get off me.”

  A few casual punches, pace slowing. More punches, pace picking up.

  “Get the fuck off him, now.”

  “Ooh, ‘Get the fuck off him.’” Punch, punch.

  I could’ve kicked him in the head but would’ve sort of undermined my point. I grabbed him by the hair instead. He came up when I yanked. Steve lay there pee-oh’d, like a man whose plate has been removed before he’s done eating.

  “I think he knows now not to steal your lollipop.”

  “Get off me,” Opechancanough said to me.

  “You’re done.”

  “If I stop now, he’ll steal again. You don’t know him.”

  I twisted his head around by the hair so my face was in his. I admonishingly held my forefinger up to his nose. He tried to swipe it away but I pulled it back and replaced it as soon as he’d finished his swipe. He swiped again, I dodged it, he swiped again. I was in this thing now too, whatever it was: not stopping it, not changing it, just in it, as ineluctably as Opechancanough and Steve. I felt the boredom, too, of the player of the violence game that none of us couldn’t not play just then. I let my mind float away, and watched my body put its finger in my cousin’s face, and him swipe at it, and so on. Finally, I tossed him back down on his cousin, whereupon he resumed punching, and his cousin being punched, and all was set aright. A year ago, a day ago, this would have happened differently. What power I had over boys had evidently retreated to my uterus. Onward to the dishes.

  Johnny Rolfe

  To the one I hope receives this, though I’m not sending it:

  Sarcastic hope is a mask made in the shape of the hopeful man’s face before the lead pipe of experience fashioned him a new one. My wireless device is gone. I’m composing this by hand on humankind’s flimsiest and least likely invention, paper. Hope of reaching you I’ve never had. Some other type of hope I still must have, I guess, or else I wouldn’t make these notes at all, and now I’m going to let this hope alone: scrutiny’s corrosive effect on hope has been demonstrated down the ages on folks who started out with far more hope than I.

  We’re on this bus again against our will, a bunch of guys on a non-moving house-sized bus in the middle of a dark, alien field. The bus we thought would take us to our new home may turn out to be our new home. This stinking, fetid, airless bus may well be where we spend our final days, which may well be tomorrow.

  We woke up in a good mood, collectively. I suppose a hot meal and even the sort of swift and businesslike erotics most of us underwent had had a healthful impact, moodwise. So a lot of us were thinking what an excellent idea it had been to take an interminable bus trip that had almost killed us, if it meant ending up in this beautiful new land where people eat real meat, and which we would soon lay claim to. And everyone was eager to start scouting for food and a worthy place to build a provisional town.

  We all got off the bus and stretched and shook our limbs, and were dazedly taking in the singular and vivid hereness of the place—the warmth of the clime, the less-intensely greenish tone of sky, the field of corn, I think she said it’s called, and other things I can’t describe. Some guys slapped each other on the back, some guys laughed, some guys talked about looking for water and food, and then, in a sense, we met the local men.

  A guy named Matthew Bernard—nice young guy, good guy to have around for his cheerfulness, and who cares if he’s a little stupid?—felt what he first thought was a stomach cramp, and looked down to find the back half of a short arrow sticking out of his lower abdomen. I think the wisdom on these things is that you’re not supposed to yank them out. Would you have remembered that if you were him? He yanked it out and moaned and said, “Oh no.”

  Then a lot of things happened at once. Other arrows sprang into being in other guys’ body parts—hands, beards, knees. Some guys scrambled for the bus. The guys with guns removed them from their hidden sheaths and fired in various directions since no one knew where the arrows were coming from. Richard Buck, our priest, laid Matt Bernard on the ground and said to him, “Okay, let’s lift up that shirt and have a look at that, it’s probably not all that bad, even if it hurts like hell.” Matt sobbed. What we saw then—Richard Buck, kneeling over the first victim of our new hosts, and I, standing above him, not helping and in harm’s way—was a sort of second bellybutton an inch below the first, darker, more inward, more bottomless, oozing a thick, unthoroughly mixed red and brown goo. I don’t know much about anatomy and physiology but the goo didn’t seem like something that ought to happen to anyone, least of all a nice young guy like Matt.

  I looked around: no assailants, just arrows, visible not as they flew through the air but only as they hit or missed their mark, and not many missed. I guess a field of tall and densely-planted grain is a good place from which to launch an arrow attack against a group of hapless guys getting off a bus. I envied the shooters. They did with their bows what I’d been trying to do with my wireless device: send a message, instantly and invisibly, across a vast amount of space. I removed my cloth bag from my shoulder and now touched my wireless through the bag, held it, my sad and stupid wireless. An arrow came from nowhere and hit the bag, which flew from my hands and landed beyond my sight. I dropped to the dirt to look for it. I saw instead Matt Bernard’s aggrieved face, which I was now crouching above. Father Buck was down by his feet. “Lift him, Rolfe, for Christ’s sake, how many times do I have to tell you, hello? Gently, don’t shake him.” We eased him up into the bus, and all the while I thought of my wireless on the ground. Maybe without me its luck will improve.

  Our guys shot, hid, shouted, and ran, while Dick Buck made do with me as surgical assistant on the floor of the bus. It was nice and not-so-nice to see how shiny-clean and sharp the tools were. Buck cut a short red line in Matt’s belly. The line grew into an ovoid hole. Matt howled and passed out. I tried not to let the stench make me retch.

  “Try to stay with me here, Rolfe, I can’t do this by myself. Clean that out.”

  “Clean what out?”

  “That.”

  “How?”

  “Do you think I’ve ever sat on the floor of a bus and operated on a guy who’s been shot with an arrow before? Don’t be a dead weight.”

  I did my best to clean him up. He’s still alive, though febrile, tonight, here, next to and slightly above me, as I sit on the floor of this bus writing this, glancing up at Matt, thinking of my lost device.

  The arrow attack didn’t last long. Newport, our driver, stopped it with an automatic assault rifle. (Again the emphatic wrongness of my previous assessment of who on the bus had what weapons. Wronger and wronger I grow day by day.) With his single arm he wasn’t too precise with it, but didn’t have to be to get his point across. The particular wisdom of the assault rifle is the wisdom of abundance and speed. But any of our guns, really, seem gross and stupid compared to their lean and intelligent arrows, with the assault rifle earning the prize for the stupidest gun of all. It takes no intelligence or skill to use it, and it took not only no intelligence but a willful negation of intelligence to have invented it, though I do think it took a certain kind of imagination to invent it. To consider the imagination it took to invent the automatic assault rifle is not a happy or controllable activity. I wish I hadn’t started to think or talk about it or its user or its maker or its effects. I wish I hadn’t seen its effects, or known of its existence, or been born into a world in which people use, make, think of, or are shot by automatic assault rifles.

  Pocahontas

  How sad I seem to me today, you who know my inmost thoughts and dreams. I’m bleeding, I’m bloated, I’m nostalgic for my snuffed-out girlhood and ambivalent about becoming an adult on the side of
the dish-cleaners whose words and deeds mean nothing to the ugly sex whose words and deeds make up the world.

  Tell me, as ah mopes along the forest path with mild back pain, what’s missing here, besides you, whoever and whatever you are. Give up? Look carefully at me. What am I not doing? I am not tapping out these thoughts on the keys of my wireless device. I am screaming them into you but not with throat or mouth. I’m screaming them inside my head. Did you catch that thing I just screamed and beamed directly from my head into yours, receptive vessel of my thoughts? The beloved wireless device is no longer in my possession. Here’s how that happened.

  So there I was, spread languidly on the divan in the Family Living Unit of the vast congeries of n-shaped dwellings that constitute my father’s house, minding my own business, and minding the business of the large looking glass on the wall opposite the divan, which is the business of the secrets of the world revealed by looking twice, once forward and once backward. And to my hardened, dirt-caked feet, and to my skinny legs and scrape-scarred knees, and to the rough and colorless garment that covered my sylvan torso, and especially to my dented and inquiring face—whose eyelids drooped not so much in languor as in the lids’ attempt to shield the eyes from the full-on assault of seeing—I asked, “Who are you?” and “Who are you?” I asked back at me.

  As if in answer, my dad entered the room, trailing his advisor, Sidney Feingold. They loomed above me. “How’d the hunting go?” I asked, and breathed my father in, and tried to hold my languid pose, which hardened in his gaze. Dad—sweaty, dirty, bloody, the musk of the hunt in his unwashed skin and clothes—stared down at me in silence. The divan I was on was long and comfortable and beige, and in the middle of the otherwise even surface of its cushion was a modest lump made by a small non-divan element wedged between the cushion and the frame, about which much more quite soon. Sid glanced at the door. I sensed whoever spoke would lose control word by word. I leapt up and threw my arms around my big, odiferous dad, and so, by the way, did the girl in the glass. I clasped my hands behind his neck, and swung to and fro across the immoveable column of his body while my double swung fro and to, and each time she swung out, the edge of the glass cut off her legs, and each time she swung back in it sewed them on again: cut and sewed, cut and sewed, cut and sewed. I took a big final swing out and let go and hit the dirt. Now in the room in the glass, which was the sole bright thing in the real, dark room, my father and his friend existed and I did not.

  Their mouths, the mirror said, were straight unbroken lines. “No, really, Daddy, what’s up? Why so grim?” I talked to “them” instead of them—I hoped to find more giving there, I guess. Still more silence and grimness and immovability from my father, while Sid looked at the wall to see what I was looking at, discovered his own face, paused, looked back at me. I sensed his face dismayed him, but he didn’t let his eyes show it, his eye management skills being superb.

  No one talked. Minutes passed. I lay down again. Time crept by the divan in the mirror of the Family Living Unit in the Kingdom of the Forest that day, while I aged. To try to make time run I said, “Pops, you stink. Couldn’t you get someone to hose you down when you’re done hunting?”

  Tick-tock, tick-tock.

  “Did it go okay? Did you add another town to the State, and if so, does that feel worth having risked the lives of a hundred of our best guys for? And by best I mean most good at killing. I’m not making idle chatter here. I’m in the mood for serious philosophical dialogue on the meaning of modern warfare. Come on, Daddy, engage your favorite daughter in a vigorous debate.”

  Nothing.

  And that was how things were in the living room where time congealed: the men loomed, and loomed again, while I, on the real and unreal divans, cowered twice. Older we all got. I slept and woke and slept again. I dreamt I lay on a divan in a dark and smelly room whose one bright spot was a looking glass that contained a dark room whose bright spot was invisible.

  Someone spoke: “You must give us the wireless device now.”

  “What wireless device?”

  They stood and stared and didn’t speak. Hours passed.

  “I don’t have it,” I said.

  A year went by.

  “I have it but not on me right now.”

  Continents cracked. Fish grew legs. Stars were born, shone, died.

  “Everything I’ve written there is private. You haven’t read it, have you?” I said, after which it was too late not to have said it, and even a child would have been able to decipher what their silence and expressionless stares meant: we know everything. Talking is dangerous. Writing more so. Best not to. They left. I might have thought I’d dreamt this whole event if not for what happened next.

  Joe came in. Remember him? Warrior, oppressive conversationalist, dimwit, government-approved suitor of the girl with the divan attached to her back?

  He stood above me. This is what men do: they stand above me.

  “You’re not as good at looming as my dad.”

  “What? Gimme the thing.”

  “You’re not so good at grooming, too.”

  “Come on, I’m here for the thing. Gimme the thing.”

  “You smell terrible. My dad smells bad after he hunts but he doesn’t smell like he shit his pants.”

  “Gimme the thing.”

  “What ‘thing’?”

  “The device, the wireless communications device.”

  “I guess you were absent from school the day they taught diplomacy.”

  “It’s better if you give me it but I’ll find it and take it if you don’t.” His gaze wandered the room but didn’t land on the lump in the divan and he’s pretty obtuse so I thought the ‘thing’ would be safe. Why they wanted it I didn’t know but guessed.

  “I guess you were absent the day they taught subtlety. I guess you were absent the day they taught likeability. I guess you were absent on the days when they taught intelligence, ethics, decency, charm, good looks.” He fumed. In the air above his head, thin, moist, English-language fume lines hung. “You’re better at fuming than you are at looming. You’re better at looming than you are at grooming.”

  He sighed and sat down on the edge of the divan with his large, muscular, squared-off buttocks. He would have sat on me had I not moved. His square buttocks depressed the cushion that was slightly depressed from below by the sleek wireless device. He sighed again. It saddened me to hear him sigh. I’m one of those girls who think men’s sighs are sad. Note to self: it does you ill to be saddened by the sadness of men; if you don’t believe me, believe your own repeated bitter experience.

  “Oh man,” Joe said, and put his head in his hands.

  “Who do you think is sadder, you or him?” I said, and extended a languid forefinger toward the glass, in which he appeared to be a creature with a young woman’s torso and head growing from its right hip and a young woman’s legs and feet growing from its left hip, and a divan growing out its ass.

  “Look,” he said.

  “I’m looking.”

  His face, which, since my body was behind his body, I could see only in the glass, became a mask of anger, and then, again, a mask of woe.

  He said, “I like you. You know that, and you take advantage of it by being cruel to me.”

  “Who takes advantage of who?”

  “Please just give me the wireless device. After that we can have sex. Your dad told me you had your period or whatever so it’s okay for us to do it now.”

  “What?!”

  “You pretend not to like me but I know you want me. I’ll make you feel really good, like you’ve never felt before in your life.”

  English-speaking person or whoever the hell I’m talking to inside my brain right now, do you want to know something really fucked up? His saying that made me want to have sex with him, and his saying that made me hate him and vow never to have sex with him. Oh why, why do I have a body when my life would be so much easier without one?

  “I see you staring at my ass,”
he said to me through the glass.

  “I’m not staring at your ass, I’m looking at—”

  “What?”

  Oops, huge oops. Dim-witted as he was, all that hunting had made precision instruments of his eyes, and he noticed me look at the lump in the divan. Obscenely, he parted the cushion from its frame, shoved his hand in between, and pulled out the device. He held it aloft in his hand, feral satisfaction in his eyes as if he had just ripped the bloody heart from the chest of a rabid wolf.

  I stood up. “I don’t like you and I’ll never fuck you!”

  He laughed and slid the wireless into the large pocket of his cargo pants.

  I recalled the dream of his own violent death he’d told me of a few weeks back, and tried to say the thing I thought would hurt him most. “You’ll die,” I said, “whimpering. Your enemy will take your weapon and cut you open with it, and scoop out your organs and throw them on the fire he made you build before he cut you open. You’ll blubber like a baby, and then you’ll die, and then you’ll spend the rest of eternity in the special place in the afterlife where warriors go who were humiliated by their enemy and used their last breath to scream like little girls.”

  Joe stopped laughing and stared at me. He seemed about to cry. I looked past him across the room, where I saw him, from behind, in the glass, become a statue of a strong man poised to strike his foe. He turned and ran toward the glass, as if to jump through it to unite with his double. As he grew in the glass, what light there was in it receded to its edges, and disappeared. The bottom of his hard, cleated hunting shoe flew toward its reflection, cleat met cleat, foot kicked foot, the room broke and went dim. He picked up a shard, crossed the room, grabbed my hair with his free hand, and held the shard to my neck. He gripped the shard so tightly that a line of blood of increasing thickness flowed along the thin line of glass that dug into his palm.

  I spit in his face. People of my culture spit in one another’s faces to communicate contempt, English-language speaker to whom I am now telling, I hope, all the worst things I’ll ever know.