The Rope Eater

by Ben Jones

  “There was a huge celebration that night and the whole village watched as the children performed. The snake-tongued boy told hypnotic stories in a croaking lisp and danced a sinuous dance to music played by the armless boy through a horn held with his feet. The third boy told fortunes and sang songs, his voice bubbling up impossibly pure from his tangled throat.

  “Afterward they sat with their parents; they told about painful operations and brutal training, about sickening drugs and painful clamps and harnesses they had had to wear. But now it was not so bad, they said blithely, and told stories about all that they had seen, the palaces and broad sweeping rivers, the bright colors and lights of the city. They presented their parents with bright banners, shiny tools, and fat chickens.

  “Throughout the night, the parents of the circus children sat in a tight half circle near the fire; they looked at their children and at each other furtively as they wrestled with themselves. They forced smiles to their faces and looked out over the laughing faces of the other villagers, watching for approbation or mockery; they looked down at their own shabby clothes and broken bone tools, swallowing their shame and their horror. As the evening passed into night, so too did some of their reservations; with the flush of the traders’ wine, the father of the snake-tongued boy hoisted him on his shoulders and paraded him around the fire. Those whose children had not returned were taken aside by the traders, plied with rugs and jewels. The mothers, wailing, retreated to their tents. The fathers cursed the traders, took the goods, and followed their wives.

  “The caravan stayed for three days and performed every night; they slaughtered their livestock and roasted it over a roaring fire of wood they had carried in, and everyone ate mightily. The smell of roasting meat even brought out the parents of the lost children. For the village, having subsisted on lichen and stringy goat meat for so long, it was as a dream, a deliverance into paradise. When they left, the entire village turned out to see them off, waving the bright banners they had been given and shouting and crying. The children cried as they left and promised to return as soon as they could.

  “In their wake, we sang their songs and told their stories for many weeks; their banners faded on the doors of their parents’ tents. The parents were treated with an odd sort of deference. They were clearly different from the other villagers, but whether that difference was a mark of shame or honor was not clear. They kept mostly to themselves, and spoke to others only about the prospect of the traders’ return.

  “As the traders returned year after year, however, and more parents offered their children, this ostracized group became an elite. What began as a quiet shame was pushed resolutely away; it devolved into professed ignorance and then to actual ignorance. They saw only the distinction, only the peculiar talent of their children to be warped—they held it and cherished it, clutched at it.

  “The traders began to leave behind some harnesses and straps so that parents could begin training the children very early when their bones were the most malleable. They brought metal helmets in odd shapes that left children with heads that bent and canted to one side or came to sharp points, or straps that slowly pulled their faces to one side or drew their heads down into their bodies. The traders offered advice on how to break their arms and legs and splint them so that they would heal with bends in the middle. Slowly the villagers’ understanding of themselves became poisoned by the vision of their own specialness; they discussed the mutilation of children with the ease and distance of businessmen. Like farmers, they delved into the endless variants of drugs, methods, and tricks, of diets and times of year, of techniques for mother and child, concerned only with success, only with innovating, making new, better, and not seeing or acknowledging that better meant simply more horrible and more terrifying.

  “The traders offered drugs for the women to take when they were pregnant so that their babies might be born with an especially hideous deformity—‘a gift’ they called it—an extra arm or leg, withered and shriveled, a gargantuan head, or an extra eye or nose, sometimes even an extra head. Often these children were born dead or very weak, but those that survived were hugely successful, showering great wealth and distinction on their parents.

  “The traders did not take every child, and at first it was pitiful to see those rejected children—those whose parents had not been able to bear to listen to them cry and had taken their helmets off or loosened their straps, so that their faces had been pulled and stretched and not settled back; or had failed to heal their breaks properly and left them with stunted, flapping limbs; or those whose imaginations lacked the ambitious horror of their neighbors and simply failed to disfigure their child distinctively. All of the pathetic and pitiful faces of failure—born of greed and bad luck and weaknesses of mind and will and heart—were held up as a reminder not of the horror of the practice, but of the consequences of halfhearted pursuits. The parents of these children were reviled, and their example spurred other parents to more ruthless and brutal ends. There was fierce competition among the families to have their children selected; many added extra clamps or straps, contorted their children into fantastical shapes and piled rocks on them, broke and rebroke their limbs in hope of making them great. Many women died from the traders’ drugs, their monstrous offspring dying with them. Some of their husbands beat their heads with rocks and staggered bloodied through the village. Our tents were gradually filled with strange, half-uttered forms, dream fragments not wholly dreamed and so caught, and lost. At night the peaks echoed with the screams and cries of children and of mothers and the howling of madmen and the wind.

  “Among all the horrible, created children, the limbless or extra-limbed or woven and fused, the milk white and hairless, the claw-footed, the bloated, the impossibly tall and thin, the scaly or hairy, the children with their heads embedded in their chests who rolled about like balls, the children so supple they seemed made of tongues—of all these, the rope eaters were the most prized.

  “When they were very young, their parents would feed them a tiny but indigestible thread, and leave the end of the thread hanging out of their mouths. This thread would slowly pass though them, causing great suffering and bleeding. Often they got terrible infections and would swell with rot. But slowly the body would get used to the thread, as it does to everything, and the child would grow strong again. Then the parents would fasten a thicker thread to the first and begin to feed this to their child. Again the children would sicken, would bleed, would crawl on the floor clutching their throats and stomachs. The traders gave many drugs to soothe the pains, but nothing seemed to work; the children screamed and cried without ceasing, waking to cry again. If they survived, their parents would fasten a thicker and thicker thread, until they passed a rope through themselves, holding it in the side of their mouths and wrapping it about their waists.

  “Some could not bear it and cut the rope, and pulled it out of themselves, screaming as they tore their insides; sometimes one would hope to ease the burning for a time and not keep his rope moving. The acid of the stomach would eat through the rope eventually and flood the channels that the rope had made and burn them out from the inside. Slowly, inexorably, the rope would come out, often pulling their entrails with it. The rope was a choice that could not be revoked, once begun, and it was often fed to infants with the milk of their mothers. The few who managed to clear their bodies of it were driven mad by the pain; they lived in the desert, trailing the filthy end from their mouths. The few who managed to survive and endure its constant motion became prized members of the circus.

  “It is hard to explain what made the rope eaters so compelling. Given the horrors I have described, it may seem strange that these were the most terrible. It is a horror that must be witnessed to be understood. Those children who were extremely deformed produced in one a flash of horror that soon subsided and could be forgotten easily. The attraction of the rope eaters was more insidious. A part of their appeal lay in the possibilities of the body to change—to witness the pain of a bo
dy rebuilding itself at the same rate it is being destroyed.

  “But their true horror lay in the unmasking of our own internal mysteries; if the rope could pass through unchanged, it rendered, somehow, the whole of the body simply a tunnel and the whole of life a mechanical process. The rope made it clear what a pitiful thing our bodies are and what a mundane process life—for through it we could see ourselves wretched, distorted, compromised.

  “People passed the rope eaters at first, anxious to see the more spectacular of the freaks, but they returned and returned again, unable to ignore them. They looked on you with eyes that knew the pain of years of suffering, and that look would drop into you like a pebble, raising barely a ripple. But it would rebound through you, building until you were washed with waves of dread. It struck you like the death of a dear friend—for that is what it was—the death of that special, magical vision of yourself that was not this grim machinery of eating and excreting. Their peculiar horror was slow to catch, but catching, spread, contaminating those who had seen them for months afterwards, and returned, like fever, even years later, never leaving them entirely free to dream themselves.

  “My father was a rope eater who retired to the village. It was never really clear why he had returned; perhaps something in its harsh landscape answered some harsh and brutal aspect in himself. Perhaps it was the only place he could go. His life with the circus had made him wealthy, and his tent was filled with valuables—gold, rare spices, and beautiful rugs.

  “I had many brothers and sisters, but none lived. At first my father ordered my mother to take the traders’ drugs in massive quantities in hopes of producing a spectacular showpiece, but my mother did not have the constitution to sustain them.

  “After several such failures, he allowed her to stop taking the drugs and she gave birth to healthy twin boys. My father began their training immediately, strapping the first into a metal helmet of his own cruel devising and feeding the second the thread that ran through his own days. He kept both on his bed, their wailing mingling with his groans and bellows. I suppose there was a sort of love in it, a closeness brought by suffering and expressed only through suffering. But in the end it was overmastered by his greed; he tightened the helmet of the first too vigorously and burst his tender skull; he pulled the second’s thread incessantly, trying to hurry it along. Finally he pulled too hard, tearing my brother’s fragile insides. He bled to death, staining my father’s cushions with his own red-brown dye.

  “I was born not long after and my mother resolved to keep me hidden; she delivered me to an old woman who lived out in the desert and told my father I had been born dead. My father raged and cursed and drank himself unconscious. And so I was allowed to grow up without the straps and harnesses, without the rope, the training, the drugs. I had only my hand to recommend me.

  “The problems of the village to find water and food were compounded in the open desert, especially when the storms came and we were suffocated by the sand. We had to move constantly, rising early and walking through the heat of the day to reach water. The desert was relentless and inconstant; we froze at night, huddling with our animals, drawing thin blankets over us, struggling to keep our flame lit in the drafty tent; then the searing sun would rise. The sands became so hot that frayed cloth could burst into flame by brushing against it, and we would have to hide out until the sun abated. The sands shifted with tidal sweep, laying bare rock ledges and the foundations of ancient cities, bones, and brackish wells, then shrouding them again. Sandstorms struck like an army of snakes, rising from the dunes themselves, coiling about your knees and legs and tearing the breath from your throat. They would vanish in a moment, leaving you blinking and coughing in bright sun, revealing to you a changed world, as if you had been transported to a different and unfamiliar corner of the desert. And that sun would recommence its pounding.

  “My mother came to visit when she could, to bring me presents and to shower me with kisses. She could not come often, as we were usually far from the village. But the old woman was kind to me, and I learned to love the desert in its moods, the sweep of the dunes and the roll of clouds and sand at sunset when the sky ran red, the restless moan of the wind coming from endlessly far away, and the vast and empty silence of nights when nothing lived for miles and miles but us, and the darkness pressed around our fire.

  “I was discovered by the spies of my father. I had not doubted that he would discover me eventually, but I had supposed I was safe since I was past the age when he could disfigure me profitably or feed me the thread; with my mere hand, I was a curiosity and no more. I did not know my father.

  “Something took hold in his brain—whether it had its roots in resentment of my freedom, or vengeance, or profit, I never learned. He arrived on a blazing afternoon, when the sun had beaten every last trace of life back into the ground, had beaten down even the wind, one of those desert afternoons when one had no choice but to submit to the sun, to lie still and wait for the darkness. I was mending a corner of the tent idly, moving as little as possible. I lay on my back and held the fabric over me, tracing the rip with my fingers; the old woman lay behind me sleeping. I heard a shuffle outside and the rasp of breath. I looked out and saw my father staggering into camp. He was grotesquely fat, bloated with a lifetime of poisons; he was swathed in brilliant fabrics, his head and neck draped in the whitest white and his body in red and orange; his eyes burned out from the depths of his face; he was like a herald of the beating sun itself, sent to drive us down into the sand.

  “In one foul hand he clutched a length of rope that wound around his neck and disappeared into his mouth. In the other he had the gleaming curve of a scimitar that he leaned on as he stumbled. He looked off in the distance as he approached, staggered, paused glaring. He reached the center of our camp and turned his eyes to me; I froze, as an animal, and waited. He looked at me with uncomprehending fierceness and fury, not as if I was the focus of his anger, but as if he were the blaze of the sun itself, concentrated into this core; his great bulk seeming to spark and crack, full of fire descending like the roll of a colossal boulder over me. His stained mouth gaped, roaring for breath; his yellow teeth clenched around the rope that hung from the distended corner of his lips.

  “Then his eyes went out, as abruptly as snuffing a candle, as if he had simply drained into the sand. He began to move jerkily like a puppet. I could see his eyes seeing, full of horror at himself. His arm began to swing mechanically, scraping through the sand as he moved towards me stiffly, empty, blank and dead and destroying.

  “So I fled, abandoning the old woman and the camp, down into the village and out along the traders’ route. I left the desert, the press of heat and chasing sun, the black sand, crashing into the rocks, tumbling and rising again. I must have missed the road, for I found myself on smaller and smaller trails, mere goat tracks, then finally just scrambling over bare rocks. The mountains grew steeper and more treacherous as I advanced, and a few times I clutched the face of the rock, advancing only because I was afraid to retreat.

  “Even by desert standards there was little to eat. I had seen no goats and no streams, and so had to content myself with grasses and lichens. The nights were very cold, like the desert, and I slept huddled into cracks for warmth. I moved on as soon as there was light. I could still feel the colossal weight of my father looming like storm clouds and I awoke several times crying out, expecting to find him standing over me.

  “The land into which I moved was extremely desolate—loose rocks tumbled down steep cliffs into rocky, dry valleys. Stunted bushes straggled up from dusty gray soil; I saw no birds, no animals, no hints of men. I descended whenever I could, half running when I reached the valley floors, and finding beyond them another range of cliffs, another barren plain. Compared to the magnificent barrenness of the desert, this land was merely empty. I thought for a time that I had reached the end of the world, that the world did not end in a great cliff yawning out over nothing, but like this, desolation stretching out into
infinity, a land of rock where life had not reached.

  “One evening, I found myself clambering down a long rocky face when I happened onto a tiny trail. It was no more than worn spots in the stone, but even that stood out in the endless gray through which I had been moving. I hurried along it until I lost it in the darkness.

  “In the morning, I resumed following the trail; it soon widened and, as the ridge gave way to a valley, joined a cart track. I was both eager and fearful, for I had known only the old woman and my mother. I hid out in the day and moved at night, skirting the villages. I stole from gardens and farmhouses and drank from plentiful streams. After the arid desolation of the highlands, and a lifetime in the desert, the valley was a paradise replete with treasures.

  “The villages gave way to a vast plain, and at the end of it, straddling a muddy and indolent river, was a huge city. I made my way to it and was amazed—hordes of men crawling over men like ants; the din of a thousand tiny storms breaking around me; faces hard from shouting, greedy, idiotic, drooling. In dark corners men muttered to themselves and from balconies shouted and chattered; women with tattooed faces marched in swarms of children like gnats; circles of boys sat chanting verses in unison, their eyes shut tight, their voices droning into the crowd. I passed through markets with great piles of meat heaped up under clouds of buzzing flies, carts groaning under the weight of vegetables and fruits, the clawlike hands of beggars, blankets heaped with the dull gilt of trinkets and beads. I saw a man in a cage filled with rats outside a temple; his face was rapturous as they tore at his flesh.

  “I had a hard time at first—men were shocked and repulsed by my hand, but I soon learned to hide it, and to speak with the faces and tongues of men. After the bright extremes of the desert, the city offered so many shadowy refuges.