Bedlam and Other Stories

by John Domini

Already he was shaking his head. But could this be him, actually? Hey Grissom—the same person? Now that his eyes were shut the reflector lights had turned the inside of his lids a strange burnt orange, a color he couldn’t recall ever seeing before. His face prickled under its new coating in a way that made him think of a match just dipped in sulphur. Worst of all, he was responding sensibly to something he knew was the fakest friendliness he’d heard in his life. Yet Grissom kept shaking his head. This question, he thought with the same heightened reasonableness he’d used earlier, is a question I have been asked many times before.

  “The astronaut,” he said when the grip moved away, “was no relation. My father came from Greece.”

  “I see,” the reporter said.

  Grissom’s eyes seemed slower adjusting, this second time around. The figures were no more than darker folds in a shattering orange sun.

  “And oh yes, Mr. Grissom? That reminds me. Do you have any family you want with you now?”

  “No.” His knees too, he noticed, were trembling badly.

  “You wife perhaps, Mr. Grissom? Children or, ah, other?”

  “No.”

  “Your typical executive,” the grip said. He’d hardly bothered to lower his voice. “Like the song says, Starbaby: ‘It’s just me, me, me, me.’“

  “Now that song,” the blonde girl said, “is a new song.” She sounded as if she were smiling. She appeared to have moved over beside the grip.

  “I see,” the reporter said, “I see.”

  “Counting two sixties to fifteen in front!” the grip shouted.

  Beyond the aluminum reflector, beyond the crew’s sudden zombie stiffness, in the back of the house by the basement doors, Syl sat at the kitchen table talking on the telephone.

  “Hello Susan?” she said. “Yes it’s your sister again, your sister who married a caveman. He’s going ahead with it. Louie is going on TV.”

  “Now,” the reporter was saying to Grissom meantime, “there’s one last thing, very important.” She stood beside him, speaking now at high speed, but she still had her face averted. It seemed she’d frozen, looking up at the ceiling. “Very important, Mr. Grissom. Don’t be afraid to let your feelings show. In this business, Mr. Grissom, we work with what people can see. We have a saying, ‘You can show them what you can’t tell them.’“

  “Hey,” Syl said over the phone, “Susan, hey, it’s like this. The whole world knows before his family knows. His own family has to find out on the TV. Hey, who does he think he is?”

  “Mr. Grissom,” the reporter said quickly, “tonight for example we have only thirty seconds to get the job done. We have a thirty-second spot, plus a thirty-second shadow. Ah, fifteen seconds’ leeway, that is, before and after. Anyway Mr. Grissom, the point is, you can be a superstar with whatever time you get, or you can put millions of viewers to sleep. The choice is yours.”

  “I can’t live with the man,” Syl told her sister. “Here Louie’s always saying, ‘respect the family,’ ‘protect the family.’ And then he shoves me into the garbage! Hey, thirty years we’ve been married, is that nothing? I loved him, is that nothing?”

  “So Mr. Grissom,” the reporter said, “we want you to show them somebody who’s all one feeling, you see what I mean. We don’t have time for any gray areas. And I think you want the same thing. You want to show them.” Grissom nodded, fast, with her. “Yes you’re all business now. So then let’s start working it up, Mr. Grissom. Watch yourself on the TV, yes watch yourself, I know it helps to jack those feelings up. And oh. Oh I nearly forgot. You will have to watch your language of course, Mr. Grissom. But otherwise go for it. Go.”

  “Counting one sixty to fifteen in front!” the grip yelled.

  “Oh Godgodgod,” Syl said, “there he goes.” With her free hand she touched the phone receiver. She ran her finger round and round in the tears on the plastic, as if fondling a rosary. “Susan, how can I forgive him? I can’t.”

  “Watch my language?” Grissom said.

  He felt his tears gluey with the face powder. He heard his voice breaking. And in that moment of his question, finally, he got one good look at the reporter’s face. She came up so close and unexpectedly that the businessman could see nothing but makeup. He saw pancake, the gloss that crusted over the cheekbones. Painted eyebrows, eye-shadow, eye-liner, the thick and artificial moisture of the mouth. Just one good look at her face and then he knew she had no face. He thought: Yes. Those cunts behind the mirror, those cock sucking buttfucking cunts of sharks behind the mirror—yes they showed me the truth.

  “I can’t live with the man,” Syl repeated, off by herself.

  “Watch my language?” Grissom repeated. “All right, how’s this. Don’t you blankety-blank-blanks think it’s time to join the human race?”

  Chasing Names

  Not that we hadn’t struggled time and again to escape, to leave behind the agony of having died nameless. Not that, faced with our deaths, we’d given up caring. No. From the beginning of our time here we’d turned our backs on the hurtful earth, as if it were a calendar scratched with the fingernails into the bricks of Death Row. Instead we’d dragged ourselves towards brighter possibilities. We dragged ourselves towards the stars. We knew even then that the stars were the others here, the ones unlike us: the men and women who’d died with names. Against the dark, their ghosts shone like gods.

  We knew we may have been nothing compared to them, these people who could face the night so brightly sure of who they were. But we measured ourselves against them. From the beginning of our time here, we saw them and wanted better for ourselves. We wanted our names back.

  So our betrayed lump of souls, spastic as an infant and bawling injustice, went crawling from star to star asking for help. Imagine a faint whorl of galactic dust, drifting across a cloudless, moonless night. That dust was our unmarked grave. That groaning you heard — that night you noticed us at last — was the cost of every step of our journey through the black. We made a powdery cluster of thousands of thousands. And worst of all, time and again the bulges of our group would have to shift as new nameless rose from the world to join us. The fresh-spawned ghosts were hauled into place by the specific gravity of the tortured and overlooked, and the interruption would jostle every exposed bone in our entire punchdrunk mob. Awful stop-and-go. Though it was a batch of these newcomers, to be fair, who eventually helped us discover what the stars were made of.

  Eventually. For untold ages till then, however, all we could do was beat on through the dark. We paid little attention, also, to the astral wanderers from the plane of the living, the psychics and mediums and so forth. We brushed them off like instellar flies. Really, all we had eyes for was the next tackhead in the black, the next fixed spot in the night sky. Whenever at last we reached another, our begging was shameless. Again, again, again: Tell us our names.

  Nothing. Not even the smallest murmur of sympathy. Each star went on glistering in silence, as grim a spectacle to us as each new glacier must have seemed to a million nameless stone-age tribes.

  Why did we go on? Everyone loses something, in the shuttle from one life to the next. Everyone has to start all over, as a ghost. And though in our case some scrabbled along with throats slashed by the guards’ machetes, though others in our musty group had elbows broken backwards by their torturers or hair burned away where the electrodes had been placed — nonetheless these wounds no longer hurt. If a brother-ghost tripped over the ropy length of an intestine, spilled from the hole in his gut, he felt about as much pain as if he’d had an earlobe tugged. Then why go on begging for this scrap of personality left behind? And we did have our dropouts, giving up the chase, floating off to blackness lonesomely. But always the vast majority strove on. Or at least we did in these early days, before we began to learn what the stars were made of. We stumbled from shiny spot to shiny spot like a lost two-year-old pulling on the pants leg of any adult he can find. We would risk any humiliation, in order to escape the one from which we’d come.
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  It's not that we’ve forgotten our names. It's that our names were taken away. We were some bug in the grotesque machinery of the State, and the State hadn’t merely crushed us, but also had scraped whatever stain we’d left off the iron altogether. They’d caught us and they’d rubbed us out. Then whenever someone came looking for us, some blue-ribbon panel of diplomatic investigators come combing the prison register for us, the warden would sit fatly grinning. No such person here. No such name on the books. And all the time the guards would be down in our cells slapping the dreams from our heads so they could then hammer us back to unconsciousness once more.

  Cell without a number, prisoner without a name! Our families were told we’d “disappeared.” Our friends were let know, with a glance blunt as a rifle butt, they shouldn’t ask any questions. Our enemies smiled. Meanwhile nameless as dust, we died.

  We remembered nothing, or what we remembered was no help. Someone might pass along a recollection of machetes raised overhead, their blades nickelized by the swollen moon. Or as we travelled we might brood on a freezing night spent curled in the blackness of a metal box too large to keep a person warm. But where these memories came from, we couldn’t say. We didn’t know even just whose memories they were. What we recalled of earth seemed to spring up from all of us at once.

  No wonder we ignored the visitors from physical existence, the psychics and astral journeymen. Because these people could hear us groan and ponder our memories as we slogged along, and because the lights sprinkled round us seared the night in silence, the psychics and so forth would come pester us with their questions about “the future.” But the future here seemed so much more than these limited nags could imagine. The world of the dead, understand, is not the world in which we’d died. Here it's nothing like a prison, a compound lined with electrified wire, a bamboo cage in which you can neither stand nor sit. Instead — for everyone except us, except us — the afterlife looked like a perfection that went on forever.

  Even in our most primitive days we’d given names to the spots we headed towards. Even then we’d seen that each white fleck could be placed with others near it, and that each such grouping of stars had its meaning and name. Thus a dead woman, imagine, could become the throat of a dove (or at least we liked to think of that far dot as a woman; we didn’t yet know what she was). She could become, indeed, the lit center of birdsong itself. Those intranscribable rises and falls, that music in the trees — a woman could do that just by dying and taking her proper place in the stars. She could become a name burning outside the reach of any graystoned cell, any grinning warden, forever.

  How did we know that the stars were the dead? How, when they told us nothing? We knew. They told us nothing, but just by staying where they were they told us enough. Who alive or dead hasn’t looked up at least once and known?

  So: silly Madame Psychic would come to us, as we walked the surface tension that will bear a careful ghost across the dark. From her medium's tableside back on earth she’d seen our spidery sweepings. Between stops, she would swoop in and try to slow us down. She wished to know, she would ask, if her client so-and-so was going to make any money.

  Money! Money seemed as puny to us as the papers from which the overseers had scratched our names. Or it did until we at last began to learn how our guiding lights were put together.

  That night, an unusually large number of newcomers started to shiver our group all at once. Perhaps there’d been a machine-gunning of an entire nation's dissidents, in some backwoods countryside below. We don’t know; as always they came to us with no useful memories. Instead they murmured with surprise at how their wounds had stopped aching, or at how our own gaping slashes fluttered whenever one of them passed close by. So many men and women wriggled in among us just then, with arms and legs splayed and crisscrossed in such vicious tatters, that it was as if we saw, advancing across the sky, roughcut sentences in the world's first alphabet.

  We couldn’t help but stop our march and stare. Then behind these murdered souls we noticed a handful of ghosts unlike any we’d seen before.

  They weren’t dust, weren’t nameless. But they weren’t stars yet either. Chips of mica against the sky's black gravel, maybe, or the diamondlike refractions of rain-spatter on a pair of glasses. No doubt this newly discovered brand of dead couldn’t be seen from earth at all. But now that for the first time we actually stopped and studied the dark, instead of rushing through it brainless as a kid, we could begin to see what these strangers were. There were eight of them. Of course the precise number doesn’t matter, all that matters is that there were more than one, but at that moment we counted and doublechecked as if we’d just discovered numbers. We identified three women, five men. None had wounds that couldn’t have come from ordinary living and dying. Yet they were dead: visible only to other dead like ourselves, and capable of things only spirits could accomplish — such as what happened next.

  These eight crammed each other into each other. Their movement didn’t look sexual, but plastic. It looked as if a mosaic were composing itself, a gold mosaic, the hot pieces running together so prettily against the black that we felt sorry for those back on earth who couldn’t see the show. And then came the real mystery. Out of nowhere — without even the cloud-trace of a warning that one of our kind would have given — an uncertain black density attached itself to the golden heat. A chunk of jet-stone, sucked out of nowhere, into the bright wheel of the eight others. The rest happened too fast for us to follow. Only, after an implosion whose blast even we could feel, after we took in the constellation round this newmade star and reckoned its place, we realized that we’d witnessed the birth of a church. Or rather the birth of Church in essence, the perfect and eternal thing, the one from which all other churches get their echoing soild swag.

  “Ask it!” one of us shouted then. “Ask it now!”

  The voice took us by surprise. We’d sunk into such unanimous unspeaking shock that we’d half-forgotten we were separate individuals, with separate voices.

  “Ask it while it's weak!”

  The speaker was a woman who’d been scalped. A corona of bloody hair exploded round the corners of her stripped skull, the tips curled slightly by the star's hot birth, and her eyes were wild with her new idea. She looked like the hieroglyph of a lion god.

  “Ask it our names!” she shrieked.

  Of course. So far as we knew, every star we’d gone after had been in place for an eternity. Every star had seemed like an entirely different order of being. But this one had come together out of bits and pieces we could list and count. Even its ebony core, though unknown, was just another part of the assembly. The rest — seen it with our own eyes — was human.

  We wheeled our entire sandbox-full of dead round towards the new light. We lumbered over at full brokeback speed, tumbled to our knees before it. But this time we kept up our questioning. This time its silence wouldn’t make us despair. If for a minute some section of us grew uncertain, the hieroglyph-woman would rush over to rally that part again. “Tell us!” she’d shriek. “Tell us!”

  When we noticed its newly-cooled surfaces had started to flicker, when we glimpsed again its mysterious black centerpiece, we knew we were about to hear something at last.

  On my first deal, the star told us then, I still thought a million dollars was a lot of money.

  How long did it take us to figure out what was going on? Some among us began to keep track of our visits, counting off each constellation, keeping records for the first time. But for most the trips remained a cramped and measureless enigma.

  Look, a kiln-fired number 3 told us, the history is what you’ve got to watch. The history will tell you, demand always picks up at the end of the year.

  Did we really hear such talk and not understand? Some of our number learned to distinguish the sky's pockmarks, to tell a planet from a sun and a sun from something larger. But most of us scrabbled on ignorant.

  A star who sounded like a sage said: I always go by what W.B. te
lls me. I consider W. B. money in the bank. And W. B. says processing won’t dent the market for years.

  W.B. Speaking to us, yes, they’d use a name. Then how could it have taken so long to come out of our ages in the dark? Some learned, kept track, even tried to explain. But so many others in the group remained fervent children on a hideously misled crusade. We’d gather and pray at every gleaming facade, but each soon proved to be the red keep of a slavetrader.

  A firecracker star told us: When they see how the old money system hurts today's market, people are going to start getting out fast.

  What these far branding-irons were doing, of course, was giving us advice. By now it seems so obvious. They were talking markets, talking demand, talking money, money, money. Advice! As if we were some greedy pack of living souls, as if we’d come to them merely strapped for cash! It's hard to believe that the revolt which eventually tore us apart didn’t come sooner.

  As it was, instead, we suffered through the time of our mass dropouts.

  How many? Easier to tote up the galaxies themselves. At least you knew that those milky tilt-a-whirls would remain visible for a while. But whenever another knot of our comrades gave up the chase, in a matter of minutes they’d have seeped out of sight into the surrounding blackness. We could never stop them. We’d try, rumbling and clattering to a halt. We’d gather by the hundreds around, say, a half-dozen of our comrades who’d started to weep in each other's arms ominously. But we could never get between them. Squealy and huggy as teenage girls, these soon-to-be-gone would congeal into something like a single wailing stone. At last the combined weight of their doubts would pull them out of our ranks, away into the night forever. And our dropouts were so quickly petrified, so completely changed, they didn’t leave behind even the cloud-trace of a goodbye one of us would have. Worse, it always took a while to get our main body once more under way. We’d always have to hang there and watch them disappear.