Songs of the Dead

by Derrick Jensen

  He shakes his head, then continues, “Women think they’re something because they give birth. But really, if they can give life and I can take it, who is the stronger between us?”

  He keeps talking, but I am no longer listening. I say, “I understand.”

  He says, “I know you do. You’re a man. That’s why I’m talking to you this way.”

  But I wasn’t talking to him. I was talking to the forest. I get what the forest was saying. I know what it must be like to be a forest, strapped down, facing death by someone who is insane, facing death for no good reason. I understand what it must be like to be a wild monkey shot by a tranquilizer gun, only to wake up in a cage knowing you now face the unspeakable. I understand what it must be like to be a river, to be shackled, me by steel and rivers by concrete. I know these things now. I knew them before in my head. Now I know them in my body.

  I don’t know how long the man—he finally said his name is Jack—has been talking. He talks about power, about God, about science, about control. He talks about the women he has killed, what he said to them beforehand. He talks about death, about wanting to know what is on the other side of death. He talks about his “scientific curiosity” that leads him to kill these women and ask what they see. After a while it all sounds the same. I stop listening. Allison has yet to move.

  Suddenly Jack stands, says, “Tomorrow I begin to take you apart. I’m going to get some sleep. If you scream no one else will hear you, and you will just make me mad. If you make me mad things will go much worse for you tomorrow.”

  He walks up the stairs.

  Soon after he leaves, Allison says my name.

  I ask how long she’s been awake.

  “Long enough.”

  “I’m glad you’re not dead.”

  “Me too, you.”

  Silence.

  She says, “I’m sorry.”

  “You’ve done nothing wrong.”

  “If we wouldn’t have come back we wouldn’t be here.”

  Silence.

  She says, “If I wouldn’t have insisted we come back we wouldn’t be here.”

  “If you wouldn’t have come back you wouldn’t be who you are.”

  Silence.

  I say, “And you didn’t insist I come back.”

  She thinks a long time, then says, “When you saw him dumping my body in the river . . .”

  “Yes.”

  “. . . did you see him dumping yours as well?”

  “Yes.”

  She thinks, then says, “I’m sorry.”

  “I am, too. I don’t want to die this way.”

  “We’re not going to,” she says. “It would all be too senseless.”

  “Lots of people die senselessly. The whole fucking world is being killed senselessly. That’s the fucking point.”

  “We’re not going to die.”

  I don’t say anything for a long time. Then I say, “I don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow . . .”

  “Don’t . . .”

  “. . . so I want to say thank you . . .”

  “Don’t give . . .”

  “. . . for being in my life.”

  “Don’t give a eulogy on our relationship. Don’t say goodbye. It’s not over.”

  “Do you see a way out?”

  “We’re not dead yet.”

  “Show me the way out.”

  She’s silent for a long time, then says, “Maybe the demons will come, or maybe something else will happen.”

  “I saw our bodies.”

  “That doesn’t mean it has to happen that way. That was what the cemetery was trying to tell us when we made love there and it wasn’t like what you had seen. Sometimes you see multiple futures. You saw the planet killed by God. You saw demons stopping the wétiko culture. You saw the possibility of us cleaning up the mess before the demons get here. Any of those could happen. The future is not pre-ordained. Wétikos want us to think it’s inevitable. They want us to give up. So does God. But they’re not going to win. We’re going to stop them.”

  “We’re chained here, Allison. I don’t know what to do.”

  “I don’t either. I’m just saying we shouldn’t give up.”

  I try to stay awake, to share every possible moment with Allison, but I begin to drift. I dream again of Nika, who tries to tell me something. I dream again of the cat, who comes to lie next to me. I dream of Allison. And most of all I dream of what Jack is going to do to me in the morning.

  I’m not going to tell you what Jack does to me after he comes down the stairs. I’m not going to tell you what he does with the pliers, the needles, the iron rods, the boiling water, the cotton-balls soaked in alcohol and set alight. I’m also not going to tell you all of my responses.

  We all have ways we might hope or believe we would respond under the most dire or traumatic or painful circumstances, and we’ve all seen movies where the heroes retain their sophistication no matter their torment. But we don’t so often see the entirely-to-be expected breaking down of façade after façade, the breaking of both body and psyche, the large and small betrayals of self that are ultimately the point of so much torture, the large and small betrayals of self that can be so very difficult to forgive.

  I break. I cease to exist. I cease to care about anything but stopping the pain. If destroying the world would stop this pain I would destroy the world. If Jack would stop inflicting pain on me and begin to inflict it on Allison I would be grateful for the respite.

  And when I think I can break no more, I break again and again and again.

  I am no longer thinking that this is what it must be like to be a forest, or a river, or a vivisected or factory-farmed animal. I retain no space for any suffering but my own. And when it seems the suffering fills up all the space there is, it continues to expand.

  Jack takes a rest. He puts several towels on the table, says, “You stink. You should be ashamed of yourself. You are so filthy. You disgust me.”

  He lets that sink in.

  He continues, “You’re going to clean yourself up. I’m going to uncuff one of your hands and leave another key on the table so you can uncuff your other hand. You will then use the towels to clean up your urine and feces, and then you will cuff your left hand so I can see it and gently leave the key on the table near your waist. I will be standing by Allison, holding this knife. If you do the slightest thing I don’t like I will cut off her breast.” He thinks a moment, laughs softly to himself, then adds, “Like a doctor, only I won’t replace it with something bigger.” Another pause before he asks, “Do you both get it?”

  I nod. Allison says, “Yes.”

  When he uncuffs my hand I do nothing. When he leaves the key I uncuff my other hand, sit up—very shakily—and I begin to clean myself up. When Jack directs me to drop the dirty towels, I drop them when and where he says. When he tells me places on the table I’ve missed, I clean them up. And when he tells me to cuff my hand, I do, and I gently lay the key on the table, and wait for him to cuff my other hand.

  When he is done with me he uncuffs Allison, recuffs her hands, leads her to a bathroom. He stands in the doorway looking back and forth between us as she uses the toilet, cleans herself up. She returns to her chair, and he binds her again.

  Jack is standing over me. I hear Allison’s voice say, “Why are you doing this?”

  I hear Jack say, “Because I can.”

  She says, “That’s not good enough.”

  She says, “That’s not good He stops, stares at her.

  She says, “You can also let us go. You can be different than you are.”

  He jabs the needle in the air, shouts, “This is who I am. There is nothing wrong with me.” He stops, says calmly, “I know your game. You’re trying to get me mad at you so I’ll stop working on him.”

  “Your real hatred isn’t toward women, is it?”

  “Your turn will come.”

  “I mean, you torture them. You kill them. But your real hatred is toward men. You can�
�t aim your hatred toward them because that would be too frightening. And your real hatred is toward God, because of everything He has destroyed, but that’s even more frightening. You take orders from above, and you pass them on below.”

  He steps toward her.

  “You’re afraid to fight someone who can actually fight back, so you—”

  He slaps her once, then again.

  She continues, “And then you rationalize it with all your talk of power, of God. And it’s all because you feel so very small.”

  He says, “I know how to make you shut up.” And he walks back to me, picks up the pliers.

  Allison stops talking.

  Nika comes to me, sits next to me, tells me that things are going to be all right. She tells me she will help me with what I need to do. She says she went through all of this, too, and that soon it will all be over. She tells me I should tell Jack that she never made it home, but that she is happy where she is.

  Jack is holding a knife. He says, “I am going to kill you now, and as you die you are going to tell me what is on the other side. You will tell me what you see and hear and feel as you cross that threshold. It’s very important that I know this.”

  It’s been so long since I used my voice to speak that I don’t know if it still works. Finally I say, “You’re going to kill me so you can find out what happens when you die?”

  He looks at me.

  “That’s what this is about?”

  “You finally understand.”

  “You’re so stupid,” I say.

  He hits me.

  “You can’t find out anything this way. If you want to know what happens when you die, ask a dead person.”

  “I am, you.” He presses the knife to my chest, says, “This is how you die.”

  Before he can push it too far, I say, “Nika told me what it’s like to be dead. She wanted me to tell you she never made it home.” The pressure on my chest stops. “What?”

  “But she’s happy where she is.”

  He looks at me intently.

  I say, “And did you know she has willows growing from her hair, and wild roses on her breasts and hips?”

  Jack lets me live for a little while. He asks me what else Nika told me. I tell him enough to keep him interested. He gives me more towels to clean up. I still don’t make a move. I don’t know what I could do. My legs are still chained and he’s too far away for me to lunge at him. I’m not sure I have the strength to lunge anyway. When I’m done I try to snap the cuff only to its loosest ratchet so I can slip my hand free, but he catches on and makes a small cut on Allison’s breast. I shut it. He finishes cuffing me.

  He uncuffs Allison’s hands from the chair, cuffs them back together in front of her, unchains her ankles. He helps her to her feet, leads her to the bathroom. I hear her sit. Jack stands in the doorway, moving his eyes from me to her and back to me.

  Nika comes to me again, says one sentence over and over. I don’t know what it means. I don’t know why I should say it. I don’t say a word.

  I hear Jack say, “Are you done?”

  I hear Allison say, “Almost.”

  And then I hear my muse say, “Listen.”

  And I hear the hissing voice of the director say, “Choose. Life or death. Choose.”

  And I hear Nika saying that one sentence again and again, with an urgency I’ve never heard in her voice.

  I say, as loud as I can, “Nika says. . . .”

  Jack looks at me intently.

  “Nika says. . . .”

  He takes one small step toward me. “Says what?”

  “Nika says, ‘Use the hammer now.’”

  “What?”

  “Use it now.”

  Jack looks confused, “What hammer? Use it how?”

  And suddenly Allison is on top of Jack, hitting him again and again with a hammer. He falls. I lift myself as high as I can to see the hammer rising and falling, rising and falling. Again and again I hear the sound of metal hitting flesh, metal hitting bone. “Keep hitting,” I cry. “Keep hitting.”

  She grunts with every swing.

  She stops.

  “Don’t stop,” I say.

  “He’s dead.”

  “Don’t stop.”

  She keeps hitting him. Finally she stops. She finds the key to my cuffs on the ground where he dropped it, comes to me, releases me. I release her, too, then try to stand but fall. I crawl over to him, pick up the hammer in my swollen and bleeding hands. I can barely hold it. But I lift it up and hit him in what’s left of his face. I hit him again. I hit him again.

  twenty seven

  stauffenberg’s ring

  We call the police, then sit staring at Jack’s body—making sure he doesn’t move—until they arrive. They do not believe us at first. But we show them the cabinet full of Jack’s trophies. Then they begin to believe us. They send other police to our home, where they retrieve our identification, and some clothes. Our statements make sense. They take us to the hospital.

  Colleen is at her parents’. The telephone rings. Her father answers, calls her to the telephone. The caller identifies himself as a policeman, tells her he will be sending uniformed officers over soon. She asks why. The caller tells her the officers will inform her.

  They arrive. Colleen meets them at the door. She asks why they are there. One tells her they found this address at her home in Spokane. She asks why they were at her home. The same officer tells her that her husband is dead. The officers ask questions about her husband, and about their relationship, and about when and why she was not at her home. In time she asks why they are asking these questions. At first they do not answer. They ask her more questions, and then more questions. Evidently they are finally satisfied with her answers, because they tell her why they were asking: her husband is suspected of killing numerous women. One officer says, “You should plan on staying here for a while.”

  She says, “There must be some mistake.”

  The officer responds, “No. The evidence is overwhelming.”

  She cannot stand. She leans against a wall, slides to the floor. She says, to the police, to her parents, to herself, “How could this be? I never saw anything. I never saw anything at all.”

  Several weeks have passed. Indian summer has given way to fall. Nights have gone from chilly to cold. We take a tour of the trees we planted for bears, and see ripe fruit dangling from tender branches. Where I saw Jack strike Nika we see that a tree overhanging the stream holds the most beautiful bright pink apples we have ever seen. We eat some of the apples ourselves, and leave the rest.

  For a time we do not talk much about what happened. It’s still too near, too raw: an open wound. My body heals quickly. The rest of me not so quick. I remain terrified of the dark, of dogs barking at night, of sudden movements. Shoes sometimes make me cringe because of Jack’s last name. Right away Allison removes all the pliers and needles from our home so they won’t remind me, but after a while I’m okay with them, and she brings them back.

  At first Allison and I do not make love. We hold each other and do not speak. But soon we start up again. We do not resume slowly.

  One day, sitting outside in the bright slanted sunlight, I say to Allison, “All those attempts to assassinate Hitler failed because of miracles. And this culture has overspread the planet because of similar miracles. Why were we able to win?”

  She looks at me sadly for a moment before she says, “We haven’t won. We’ve got a long fight ahead of us.”

  “Why did Nika help us?”

  “Probably because you listened. I’m sure there are a lot of others who will help, if only we will listen.”

  “Enough others to bring down this culture?”

  “Enough to bring down God.”

  How many times and in how many ways has God told us that He is a jealous God? Maybe God hates us so much in part because we can think for ourselves. Maybe He hates us because we can choose to walk away from Him. Maybe He wants to destroy the earth because w
e are part of the earth, birthed from the earth, and He doesn’t want us to remember that. We are, when we are not too much like Him, wild and sensual like the earth, and if we have anything left of that sensuality, He wants to kill that. But if He hates us so much, and if He is afraid we will remember who we are and where we come from, does that not say something about us as well? That we are not as powerless as we think? That He thinks we are a threat? Otherwise, why would He even bother?

  The night is cold. I’m starting a fire in the woodstove. The flame jumps from match to paper, from paper to kindling. I blow on it. It grows, reaches out to more and larger pieces of wood. Flames dance and hiss and pop, and sometimes I think I can almost begin to understand what they are saying.

  Sometimes I see Nika. Sometimes she speaks. I thank her each time we meet. She smiles shyly and extends her hands. I take them in my own. Some time, she says, she will tell me her dreams. I tell her I would like that very much.

  She looks beautiful, with willows growing from her hair, with ponderosa pines in her ribs, and with wild roses on her breasts and on her hips.

  The cat comes to me in dreams, rubs up against me, asks to be held. I do. I am happy. So is she.

  Snakes come to me, too, in dreams and when I am awake. I see them everywhere. I also see mice, and I see many others.

  The director comes to me, too, tells me there isn’t much time, tells me there is much to be done. This was only the beginning, he says. And he always says, “Choose. At every moment choose. Choose now.”

  Allison and I sit next to Hangman Creek, called Latah Creek before any of this all began, and to be called Latah Creek once again when it is all over.

  I still fall through time. It no longer terrifies me. It is simply part of life, like breathing, like looking into Allison’s eyes.

  We come to the creek because I hope to fall back through time and see salmon run strong. It makes me happy, and reminds me what it is we are fighting for.

  The sounds of traffic fade, and I know I’m falling. I hear the slapping of thousands of salmon tails against the water and I begin to smile. I see thousands of fins breaking the surface. I see the bottom of the creek disappear beneath the bodies of so many fish. I begin to cry, both at the beauty and because the fish are long gone. I wish the fish were still here. I wish I were seeing the future, not the past.