Jamestown

by Matthew Sharpe

  “Show me.”

  He is trying to show me.

  “Her mouth is open like that?” I ask.

  “Yes, but her lips are fuller than mine.”

  “Is she licking them?”

  “No, I’ve just licked mine to try to make them shiny and wet, like hers.”

  “Is that a smile?”

  “It’s a look of concentration. She’s concentrating on her arms and shoulders, which are moving robotically, like this, and on the side-to-side wavelike movements of her body, like this.”

  “She looks as if she enjoys dancing.”

  “Very much, that’s what I like about her, and she’s wearing a hat.”

  “What’s it made of?”

  “It’s fuzzy.”

  “Like a raccoon?”

  “Softer, as in a morning sunrise, and pink, like her lips. A cap with a brim, an old-fashioned cap.”

  He dances awhile as the girl.

  “I think I understand the girl but I still don’t understand ’advertisement.’”

  “In an image or a series of images, a woman becomes a kind of stand-in for the thing you’re meant to buy.”

  “And what’s the thing you’re meant to buy?”

  “This trip.”

  “I feel as if we’re speaking two different languages.”

  “Every day, see, for several hours, the Manhattan Company, my current employer, broadcast on an enormous screen in Times Square a moving image of the girl in question, dancing in the driver’s seat of the Autobus Godspeed—the bus we now live in—floating past palm trees swaying in a gentle breeze against a deep blue sky. Text appeared beneath her that said food and ease and return to past lifestyles and values. But mostly the girl dancing.”

  “What is a moving image?”

  “A flat pictute that is a record of a certain space and time.”

  “Can anyone make one?”

  “No. It requires complex machines and a lot of fuel. Only the company that controls our very limited resources can make moving images, and even they must be careful how many they make and how often they show them. All moving images must be both purposeful and beautiful. That’s why we’re here, by the way.”

  “Why?”

  “To increase our fuel supply.”

  “Well we don’t have any.”

  “Says you.”

  “What else about her?”

  “Arms thin, tubelike, muscled, covered in soft skin.”

  “You like softness.”

  “Hairless arms.”

  “I’ve got hairy arms.” I show him. He trembles.

  “Ribbed pink sleeveless shirt,” he says.

  “Of course we make all our garments of hide, fur, hair, and tree pulp. Tell me about her legs and feet.”

  “I couldn’t see them. The bus door was closed.”

  “Were you not curious enough to open it?”

  “A moving image is a record of something that already happened, just as, if you were to write a description of a tree and send it to me in New York, I would not be able to chop down the tree and count its rings.”

  “Did you make love to her?”

  “I’ve never met her.”

  “When all you men got off the bus that first day and came to dinner at our place, why did she remain on the bus?”

  “She’ll never leave the bus.”

  “Did she die on the trip down?”

  “She was the trip down.”

  “And you’ve bought this trip?”

  “We bought it, we built it, it’s ours, and we’re gonna pay for it.”

  “My feet itch. I have to go and see my dad.”

  “Please tell me your name again.”

  “Pocahontas, but that’s not my real name. My real name is a secret. If I tell you it you’ll die.”

  “Aren’t you then deceiving me?”

  “No. All deceptions keep secrets but not all secrets deceive.”

  “Do you want to know my name?”

  “I know enough of you for now.”

  And off I march on itchy feet.

  Twenty minutes went by in which I had no thoughts, and now I’m having some again. I’m thinking of the grim, ranine sunlight that surrounds and obliquely penetrates this old corn shack I’m climbing into, was climbing into, am sitting down inside of; musty, worn corn shack in a fallow field: my home. The pallet I am sitting with erect posture on is crisp and hard. A gloom pervades the air in here. Can I do the dance the girl that guy described to me did? I would like to meet her. Maybe I’ll go to New York one day. Wish I could watch myself dance right now. Where is a mirror when you want one, or a divan or a friend or a dad?

  Frank

  I bit the one whose ear’s already been bitten off. Now he’s out half a forefinger due to his dumbness and my teeth. Some guys don’t know how not to get bitten down to nothing. He’ll be gone in a week at this rate. Or maybe he’s one of those guys who won’t be what he should be till he’s half of what he was. A certain kind of guy wises up only after getting halved.

  For biting him they slapped me sixteen times. And they can fucking slap me all they want. Slap away, you pack of fools, and put a finger near my teeth again, and see how long it lasts. Man, it stinks in here. Rain, unbathed men, weeks of indigestion unto death. Which is it, sad or cute, that they haven’t figured out we speak English yet? They think I’m their insurance against the eight sample guys they’re sending to Sid, two a day for four days, for him to vet: this is partly true. God, I could make quick work of them with a small knife. All but a few. The short, thick guy with the red beard would take some guile to overcome. The muscle guy, one of the two who look alike, would take a little guile. The fat one with one arm moves slow but has the big gun and has been in the rough a hundred times—that would make him hard in the closework. If I could not just trim but shred one with my teeth I’d calm down a bit. Goddamn thin hall of stink on wheels, someone ought to burn this thing. It should take thirty guys a few days to throw up enough houses for them all and they haven’t finished one. Pack of weaklings don’t have a single skill to live beyond their fortress town up north. I’ve heard about it: bright green sea on all sides that you’d die to stick a foot in.

  He’s staring at me now, the one with the red beard, considering me. He’s got wounds of his own: healing gash below his hair, livid puffed-up skin around the eyes, broken nose. I bet his own guys beat him. He gives me the quick upward head toss. “Jack Smith.” He’s the real head of this group. The one who’s head in name alone, the weakest one of all, the soft and indecisive one, the one whose job should be to gratefully part his lips and ass when the hunters in the group come home and want a balm, can’t stand Jack Smith, had him beaten but he knew he couldn’t have him killed, knew the death of Smith would mean the death of all, or didn’t know but was told, “Sir, we’ll beat him but we won’t kill him.” Jack Smith takes me in, acknowledges me, recognizes me. He’s the me of his side, I’m the him of mine. Powhatan’s not like their weak guy but he’s old, his decisions honeyed with sentiment. That he would let his daughter talk to him that way and not punish her is proof. To love a girl is no excuse to let her fuck you in public. My eye still hurts where she poked me. I’ll poke her back repeatedly till she bears me a son. I yearn to fuck her sentimentally but to let sentiment enter fucking’s a deadly mistake in a war. In a war you want to mate with a strong girl, and if she pokes you once or ten times before you can get a seed in, that much better for the future of the town. One day you lie on a girl and fuck her with your feelings and the next you’re on your back and your feelings lie on top of you like a fat succubus. Look at Powhatan, who can’t move. You can see little of the battlefield from a horizontal vantage. I know no man of war as great as he was in his time, but for action an old man’s as bad as an old woman or a girl. We can string these chumps along awhile without detriment, but soon we’ll have to act, and if he can’t act we’ll act against him first, have already started to, Joe and Stickboy and me and a few ot
hers. Damn bus, I can’t breathe.

  Now that the rain has stopped, the bus is empty but for Smith, the muscle, and the guy whose finger I pretended to swallow and will tie into my hair tonight when I get out of this putrid hellhole. The rest are trying to build their fort, which I’d like to see become their tomb. Powhatan plans to soften them up with bad water and starvation, then give them some of what they need in exchange for all we can extract from them. The last part’s pretty vague: all, what’s that? To me that’s the first thing you find out—one thing I was sent here to do but so far their talk reveals squat.

  A scuffle on the bus behind me. That scrappy little one who thinks he likes to mete out pain wants to get to me but the big guy won’t let him. Guy like that attacks and fails, attacks and fails, a catamite of pain, a gloryhole with teeth, I don’t disadmire the undaunted singleness of goal. A throbbing, newly half-gone digit doesn’t stop him wanting more from me. A scruple doesn’t enter into how he thinks or acts. He’s a man of pure ends and needs. Guy knows which big rock is his to try to move up the sheer face of the cliff of his life. Jack Smith’s up front with a log book and half-finger-man’s still back there straining against the big guy who wears the surprisingly crisp and clean and white and tight tank top and underpants. They’ve got me strapped to a bolted-down seat with my back to most of the inside of the bus. I face a window so scuffed and smeared I can’t see shit from it. Waving brown-red tops of corn stalks like a sea of semi-hardened blood. Jack the pragmatist, big guy into hygiene, little guy in love with pain and death, my admiration grows, the better to kill them with, contempt makes a man sloppy, how helpful it already has been to be in this putrid place.

  “Dark savage bastard, let me go over there and bite his finger off and then I’ll bite his dick off and then I’ll bite the dicks off all of them and then let’s see how glorious their cocksucking little civilization is, I hate it down here in the wild, let me go rip his fingernails off one by one, what do you care if I do?”

  That’s a predictable speech. Jack Smith didn’t look up from his log book for it, must be soothing background music to him. He knows as long as you can hear the small guy yell you don’t have to keep an eye on him—that’s what the big guy’s for. I wouldn’t mind being on the big one. I bet he’s pretty good at taking pain. Of the three, I could make best use of him alive. Smith’s too smart and finger man’s too wild but with strength like that and discipline and cleanliness the big one’d make a good extension of me. A good commander knows how to make his men prostheses of himself. You feed a guy like that a sturdy balanced diet of dignity and humiliation, you can use him to the combined extent of his capabilities and yours.

  Smith’s behind me now and sticking something sharp and hard in my back. I’ve tried to twist my semi-unencumbered head around to bite off anything of his that’s there and he’s elbowed me in the temple. I respect that. He now has something softer draped across my upper back as well as the hard thing pressed in farther down. I’m semi-blinded by the blow to the head so I pull my strength inward now and won’t strike again unless I have to and then will strike hard and not miss, kill him or let him know he’ll have to feel a lot of pain to give me some, if that’s what he wants, I can’t tell. The little guy is very clear in what he wants to do, but Smith knows how to be obscure.

  “Just so you know, nothing’s stopping me from killing you but whim. You think you matter much to us? We don’t need you. We don’t need anyone in your town. What do any of you have that we don’t have more and better of?” What’s the soft thing along my upper back? How irksome! I guess he’s leaning on me like a chum, a chum who at all times knows he may need to knife you. My head’s clearing. What’s he saying this for? It’s not gratuitous. It’s a bluff and I like him for it. Even an obviously false bluff about a man’s dispensability’s a little bit discomfiting. I admire him for it. Soften me up. Another nice thing is he knows I speak English or has a hunch. Smart motherfucker and I like him more and more, want to fight him more and more. “We get rid of you we have one less point of resistance is how I see it.” Good, keep talking, Jack Smith, and when I can I’ll hammer you hard and then you’ll retreat to where I can’t get at you to recover from the hammering and then you’ll come back and hammer me harder than I hammered you to let me know I’m still the one in cuffs but you’ll find out that even in cuffs I’m going to be fairly interesting to be messed with if you want to try, and I hope you do.

  He’s walking away. Come back. He’s gone, off the bus. The boredom of confinement now unrelieved by a decent enemy to menace me. Now time, who’ll guide me slow or fast to my death, is my comrade. The little man has given up for now. Against the chest of the bigger man he sighs and rests. The big one must not love the pollution of his white shirt with the viscous mix of juices of which the little one’s noggin offers a steady supply from multiple holes, some made by gods, others by men and beasts. A cloud stands still outside the window here. Time creeps.

  Sidney Feingold

  Subjects presented themselves two a day for four days, a representative sampling. Each predictably offered considerable resistance, which we softened with broiled venison in a busthead reduction, a savory meal that combines rich and complex flavor with the obliteration of a subject’s inhibitions. After the meal, subjects reclined and were engaged in conversation neither substantive nor heavy, this and that, where are you from, what was that like. When the clinician observed them to be sufficiently pliant he introduced a series of inkblots and encouraged them to comment freely on each without concern for logic or coherency. Transcripts of responses follow, with commentary.

  JOHN RATCLIFFE. Subject still has baby fat, a smooth face expressive mostly not by muscle movement but by continual shifts in coloration. The relative amounts of blood in each of the thousand facial capillaries tell a thousand different stories of his moods, of which there seem to be four or five per minute. An earnest face in ongoing rebellion against the cynic’s mind that struggles to govern it. A man vying for control of his face and losing every day in every way. Posture: regal, petulant. Clothing: fine, tired, soiled.

  Subject’s response to image two: “It’s that bitch my mother making love to, well, half the Upper West Side—the half that did not include my father. My mother’s the one on the left. I called her a bitch but that’s just a little joke between her and me. I love my mother. I understand her. I understand that she is the one on the left, someone asymmetrical when not in love. The dark place where the two figures come together is me, an unarticulated pre-larval mass, the cloven single-cell creature produced when a female copulates with a thousand males seriatim, or all at once.”

  “What about the negative space?”

  “The white part? The white part at the very top in the middle is also me—just that very top white portion that looks a bit like a lady’s ass or upside-down heart that’s truncated, cut off. Just below that, well, sometimes when two dogs fuck you need to separate them with a powerful stream of cold water, so that white shape there’s a fire hydrant to separate and cool down the dogs. The white figure below that is a man bound at the waist and falling through the sky helplessly toward earth. Now I’m looking at the black blobs and loops and smudges at the bottom. They are shit. Everyone shits. Some people aren’t very discriminating about where; myself, for instance, lately. Do you people have a decent water source or do you just have constant diarrhea all your lives?”

  JOHN MARTIN: A small young man with a high forehead. Garments, skin, and perceivable orifices filthy; garments obviously once quite fine and still in possession of a vestigial dignity. Subject unusually battered: left ear half gone, face nicked and bruised, extremities swathed in grimy gauze, right forefinger half gone, walks with a limp. Wounds appear not to be self-inflicted but one is tempted to surmise he sought them out.

  Subject’s response to image four: Upon being presented with this image, subject wept vigorously for ten minutes, pausing only when unable to breathe. In the fifth such interval of breathlessn
ess, I slapped the subject and reminded him in an artificially broken English that while I am trained as a healer, he was in this context being not healed by me but assessed for his mental state, and that his compatriots were relying on him for the success of their mission to pull himself together. Subject gazed dreamily at the image, at me, at the walls of the room, at the air and a phantasm he seemed to see in the air; I estimate that he was at most half-cognizant of the purpose of the interview and of anything else many of sound mind would refer to as the world.

  Subject said, “You’re playing heartball, son, that’s the name of the game and there’s no other game in town, you can bet on it, you don’t swing for the bleachers you might as well not come up from the dugout, you can do it, son, elbows high, eyes on the ball, gameface, gameface, in the zone 24/7, don’t be a pussy, do a pussy. Oh Daddy, where are you now? Can you hear me? No, the caterpillar of death has spun you up in its cocoon. The cocoon devours all life in its path, bodies broken down and spun into moth flesh, the moth consumes the sky itself. Winged darkness.”

  “Is that what you see?”

  “See?”

  “In the inkblot.”

  “What inkblot?”

  “This inkblot.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  I stared at him.

  “Hey, I’m just playing with you, you gaunt, bespectacled Indian fuck, glasses-wearing brainiac rimjob.”

  I restrained myself from laughing and looked at him with what I hoped would appear to be incomprehension. “Tell me what you see in the inkblot. What does it look like to you? What does it remind you of?”

  “Your ass.”

  Though it was probably in violation, strictly speaking, of the protocol of this assessment procedure, I chose to stand up, turn my back to the subject, pull down my pants, and show him my ass while remarking, “Perhaps this will give you a more accurate point of comparison.”

  The subject, who had been leaning forward rather tensely in his seat, now leaned back, extended his legs, cupped his genitals, massaged them briefly through his pants with his bandaged right hand, ran the same hand down and up from high hairline to chin as if to erase his face, dropped both hands limply to his sides, tilted his head back, opened his mouth, closed his eyes, wept again, stopped himself from weeping moments later, sighed. “All right, all right, it’s like a half-man, half-autobus creature that roams in the night. Its eyes are also headlights, its function is to crush. You can see two guys’ legs oozing out from under it, one on either side. Its tailpipe is its dick. Two giant flaps open up in its rear to expose the penis for, you know, various penile functions. It backs up into its mate. Right now it has a probe in its urethra and it isn’t liking that too much. It doesn’t feel pain the way we do because it’s half-autobus, but I think you’ll agree there’s no getting around how much a probe in the dick is going to hurt even something that’s half a machine or whatever. The man-autobus is enormous, even bigger than the autobus we arrived in. I think it’s safe to say that the entity that’s doing the probing can expect violent retaliation and I don’t mean an eye for an eye but I’d have to guess somewhere in the neighborhood of a hundred eyes for an eye if I’m making myself at all clear.”