Bedlam and Other Stories

by John Domini

Naturally we could also see what this was doing to us. Whenever we drew close to our latest guiding light, we could see. A single glance along our shape, along our pitiless toughening and lengthening, a single sobering onceover to note how the earlier fat had gotten stretched taut — one look and we knew we were less. The replacements could no longer keep up with the casualty rate. Once a vast whorl of dust, we’d tightened into a coil and grown hot from the wear and tear. Against the night sky we must have looked like a thumbsmudge of loose smoke, or a faraway wheel of smoldering cosmic gas. A sense of self we’d never set out to gain — a sense of how little we amounted to.

  Again, it's hard to believe our revolt didn’t come sooner. Worse and worse doubts set in. Our dropouts after all embraced each other lovingly; they sailed off as calmly as someone who’d died surrounded by friends and grandchildren. Meanwhile we were strung up like some young and eager heretic drawn and quartered for his beliefs, watching ourselves come apart. Our “main body” itself appeared to be the one who’d forgotten its purpose and fallen away. The exploded planet trailed behind its own satellite fossils. So at last we had to wonder: which of us followed the better way out? Which was the escape route the group should hope for, and which was the individual tragedy? Which, which took us nearer our names?

  So at last, the revolt.

  We’d grabbed the evening star itself. We’d held out through the moneywise self-promotions. We’d even shrugged off mention of another name, a Blynd or Blind who had something to do with an oil cartel. We hooked elbows and deployed our sinewy platoon in a human chain that circled the master, and our pleading grew so dense that we wondered if back on earth the yellow spot was still visible when the moon rose. Nor did we need any lion-goddess to rally us. We were a mob surrounding the sunstruck palace of the king and for the first time realizing our power. Louder, angrier, again. And after who can say how much hammering, who can guess how many repetitions ... we saw the lowhanging planet go dim. The fabled love-goddess didn’t merely flicker, but in fact lost her heat altogether. With it she lost the perfect sphere she’d forged of herself as well. Her shape loosened till we could see that one person, folded over, composed both her arms. Another of the named dead had hooked its elbows round her neck and hung down her back as a robe. A face stared from each breast. Just visible through the astral gauze of these others, a coalish center of gravity on which the rest somehow balanced, lay the planet's queer black nut.

  Meanwhile a green light started to ebb across the linked ectoplasm, as if cash were soaking in fabric solvent. We fell silent. She spoke. None of the goddess's faces looked at any of ours, but we could tell at once that this was a lone voice, a single speaker making an honest answer, rather than the group declamation of a star.

  “A name —” But the loner gasped, and couldn’t go on.

  “Revenge isn’t everything,” a second speaker moaned.

  What? Those of us nearest the planet eyed each other, bewildered. What sort of final answer was that?

  “A name,” the first managed, “will only get you so far.”

  “Just try to be strong,” put in a third, weakly.

  What were we hearing? Bubblegum sympathies. The cheapest kind of talk.

  “If you make the effort,” said another of the goddess's people, “you’re bound to get somewhere eventually.”

  At which, at last, we felt a break rip through our withered group. Our first deliberate break, our first act willful enough to be called adult. Though of course we had no idea how to take it at the time. We could be sure only of a heartsore rage at how these masters still tried to shrug us off. Our front ranks continued to clutch the wilting fragments of the planet, and at most we were puzzled to feel the sudden impossible room to move. Not till the screaming started did we begin to understand.

  “Oh they’re all such big deals! All the Names. They’re such big, shiny deals!”

  Another single voice. But not, we could see at once, from any part of the fogged-over evening star. By now those lay in a feeble green heap over their mute black core. So we nearest turned to look behind us, the lips of our wounds fluttering in the sudden roominess. We confronted ourselves. Ourselves, but this time not merely dropped out, lost, too sad. This time we faced revolt.

  “Make the effort?” our rebels screamed. “We should make the effort?”

  And merely by looking once more over these illfitted stones, their blood-smeared faces turning to surreal new national flags under the planet's green shine, we could understand what had them so enraged. Blood on every face, every face.

  “Make the effort?”

  One woman thrust out her chest, flaunting the crescent of welts where her breasts had been. She modeled for us in the starlight, the scars casting pale, horned shadows across her belly and neck. But then in mid-pose she was startled by a sob, by heavy tears, and she tumbled forward, she tottered back, folding at knees and waist and neck while repeatedly she slapped the word WHORE branded across her forehead. Others meanwhile showed off more of the same. The stumps of fingers, the stumps of tongues, the permanent ooze at the stump of an optic nerve at the center of a socket picked hollow. Farther up the line a man shook his penis viciously. We didn’t understand until the specks of broken glass started to sprinkle from the tip. Torture's leftovers: they’d forced a glass rod up his member and then worked it over with a mallet. We stared as the specks winked emerald an instant in the love-planet's dying glow and then ... no, they didn’t “disappear.” No glimpse like that can ever disappear. Just the opposite. As we watched we knew that if we could ever again take up our chasing, the night's pretty latticework of symbols and forms would forever be dirtied by this cock's falling gristle. A nameless death immortal as a star that stood for a god.

  We were shocked, we were desperate. We made the worst possible mistake. We began to argue with these ghosts. And:

  “Don’t tell us we’ve got no choice!” The horrible thing about their screaming was that the only times we’d heard it before, we’d all been howling together at someone else. “It's the Names that don’t give us any choice. They’re just toying with us!”

  But, we tried to say, the masters didn’t mean to —

  “Masters? The last masters we had murdered us! These people are the enemy!”

  But surely the truth had to come from them (here some of us jerked a thumb at the dismantled goddess behind our backs). Surely Truth itself was a hard slog, a prolonged evolution which, in time —

  “Get out,” they said. “You’re starting to sound like Names yourselves.”

  Already however it was they who were getting out. Already they’d dropped back so far that they began to lose themselves in the ruthless dark. We squinted, leaned forward from our threadbare ranks. But not one of us felt sure enough of his former soulmates to take a step in their direction. If they’d gone so far as to revolt, they were capable of anything. We strained our ears, but the last words came from a voice too well-hidden to place.

  “If you get in our way again,” it said, “we’ll stop you once and for all.”

  Understand then the raw universe that confronted us as, this last time, our remaining squad inched across the dark to discover who we were.

  We didn’t know how our traitor comrades might stop us. We could only creep along wide awake, no longer chalk dust, now instead toughened to chalk. We let our fingers stretch and go webby like antennae, our eyes poke from our faces telescopically. So, full-grown and fully equipped at last, we few saw the limits of stars and sky. The universe, we saw, was a gourd. All these millenia of chasing, we’d merely rattled loose inside its hollow. A dustball inside a saddleback rind. Then we went frantic trying to doublecheck without dropping our guard. We threw a frightened glance behind us, and when had we ever imagined we’d care to look behind us? But there we only got worse proof of how little our travelling mattered. The love-planet, back there, was pulling herself together again. Tomorrow at sunset she’d rise again. The system remained unchangeable. And thus with our next
inchlong forward sneak — realizing that even the fathomless black itself must be enclosed, that all was sealed in the universal rind — we saw that every one of our earlier dropouts must still be here. The hard logic of it made us click our joints together, terrified. Because between the speed of light and the ease of talk, every one of them must also have learned how little we’d come to. Still here and still travelsick, they’d seen us go on grinding against the night. They must hate us too.

  Revolutionaries, dropouts, it made no difference. Every dark step here might turn up someone new to worry about. Every unlit fold might take us as implacably as the wrinkles snaking over a person's looks. Could we find no sanctuary?

  We looked for help, as a final straw, among those shadowy newcomers who’d died with names. Those mica-chips against the black gravel, spatters of rain against our glassed-over eyes. We could see them quite clearly now. But all these new ghosts’ energies were given over to a crablike scramble for position. These sketchy apprentices clawed across the night's stick-figures; they pressed against each other with a terrible blind need to grow larger, to have the safety of numbers. And if one of the new dead found the least extra flyspeck of space for himself, his childish face would stretch in a machete grin.

  The grip of enclosure, the grin of endless cold. Could we find no sanctuary? Then just here . . . dead stop.

  We’d pick up a low but unmistakable sound, a shuffle or scrabble in the dark nearby.

  Dead stop. The one part of ourselves we allowed to move was our ears, which spread wide and turned outward like immense, rotating dishes. Nothing. Our nightscope eyes scanned, scanned. Nothing. But then a crack outfit doesn’t back away when the going gets a little complicated. A crack outfit doesn’t run scared. We kept up our alert. We did manage to tune in that low shuffle again, never mind how long it took, and a few additional web-fingered probes into the dark at last flushed out the kind of rocklike clump we’d been expecting. A stack of stones head-high, wide as my spread arms, and black.

  Rebels? Dropouts? No matter. We hit them with every hard side we had. We got our full weight on them. When we started trying to find out the extent of the danger, asking questions, they proved hard to crack. But their silence didn’t stop us either. After all they’d been through interrogation before.

  Our knees thickened, broadened, because in that shape they provided better support. Our feet stitched together in order to counterbalance our interlocked shoulders, and our heads bobbed as one back towards our waists. Maximum pressure on the prisoner. We gave it question on question bangbangbang, with so little room to breathe in between that we started to go red from the exertion, then to shimmer with a cauterizing white heat. The light intensified. It began to infuse our victim as well. Indeed before long we both would have burned explosively enough to gleam across a galaxy, except that some in our squad still misfired. One or two among us still lacked that final efficiency. But as the rest continued to get off questions as fast and hard as the work demanded, outlines of the piece beneath us started to appear. They were visible at least to us, from within our new-made shine. We saw their faces blown open by the firing squad's nervous coup de grace, their slashed throats and the burn spots where the electrodes had been strapped. All as expected since that first glimpse of the universe unwrapped. Next however — next, unbearably — we heard the new question we’d started to ask. By now our scrap of the dark had been fired into place once and for all, understand, and so it began to send back an echo.

  Never mind who we are, we heard come back at us. Who are you? And who's that under you? And who's that under him? Look, never mind us; we’ll ask the questions here. Who are you?

  I myself have since heard, often, the words used among the living whenever news comes of injustice and violent death. Despair, I’ve heard. Outrage. The childish I didn’t know especially. Yet I’ve begun to wonder lately if the words these bright labels are supposed to represent can ever tip my heart off-balance again. Yes that's the trial I must endure every moment, lately: the doubts about whether I still carry living feelings at all. I can’t be sure I’m still human, at all. I know only that when I heard those nameless insensibly give back the hard question my squad had come to, I found myself as well.

  I didn’t drop away because I’d recognized my own kind, their agony this time my own doing. That would have been the human response, but no. I dropped because I didn’t belong. I mean I heard myself once more letting down the troop, failing to get off my question as I should have when the rote of interrogation came round again to me. I heard myself proven the nonfunctional piece. And no sooner had I realized my own voice was absent from that yowl of confrontation than, with the rubbery chill that spanks us when out of nowhere we get room to move, I found myself absent as well.

  The living say, when the bad news comes, I suffer with them. But I suffered alone. I moved without even the will to move, that sleepless pal hauling you by the hair from crib to deathbed. I suffered alone. I wonder if I can so much as say I know what suffering means.

  That I have since stumbled into a destiny of my own, managed actually to come across my own name, in no way eases my doubt. I came to my present place merely because after my involuntary fall I started to drift. Past shooting stars and speaking dark, I floated paralyzed by shame. In this condition I became an easy target for those still-living souls who practice the arts of communication with the dead. The mediums, the psychics — I became in fact the first one they’d ask. Because I’d travelled so far earlier, understand; because I‘d been through such a rough history. With that kind of background, I could go quiz some grand Name about the future at will, and I’d feel no worse during the visit than some toy bird might while it was fooled with by a sleepy king. I can’t be sure I’m still human at all.

  So, once, I happened to work for a psychic named Miriam. She wasn’t special. Unless it matters that, as an older person, she seemed a little gentler. But as soon as I entered her trance, I found my name.

  Blind luck? I can say only that since I discovered myself in Miriam I can’t work for anyone else. I know only that I’ve been part of her makeup since the morning she saw my frozen body, fetally curled, hauled out from a dumpster under her kitchen window. I’d died a baglady.

  And prison? Torture? Once more I can’t say. A greater soul than I will have to flash the tablets on which are revealed the degrees of namelessness. I see nothing except what Miriam saw. Apparently before crawling into her dumpster, in desperation I’d padded my coat with paper. Not that anyone lent me a quarter for a newspaper; not that any super or liquor-store clerk on the block could spare me an empty box of good corrugated cardboard. No. The only paper I could get hold of was light-gauge stuff, covered with dates and details from history. The sort of flyer you can pick up for free all over Boston. So fetally curled, I spent the night in a metal box too large to keep a person warm. Yet I wonder how many who lived to see morning, that sunless December morning, realized their own blankets were in the end no better than mine. I wonder how many understood that the living can claim no better entitlement than the dead. Let a person chase the sun from horizon to horizon, still his day's work will result only in a few extra dollars to line his resting place. Dust to cover dust. I can see it no other way. After all I’ve travelled through every such flimsy self and place my times offered. Beginning as a nameless tribe forced from their homes by a glacier, I then was left thunderstruck by the world's first alphabet, made to suffer as a lost crusade, cut to pieces as a heretic, and next I knew the queerer destruction of a mob in revolt, tearing itself apart to find a better way. Finally I’d just tried to hold my direction as the latest news and technology set their traps. History's a meteor. Beside its millenia of hurtling, the house it drops on amounts to ashes, the gold letters on the door to dust. I can see it no other way. Only the stones last out the impact.

  But my name, you ask finally? The handful of syllables I have to show for all my deaths, all my doubts? This answer comes hardest yet. I’ve stopped carin
g about my name. What matters to me instead is simply that Miriam learned it. Yes she learned the baglady's name, she approached me and spoke with me. Miriam did this even though her own rooms are always snug, her own clothes unfailingly light and fresh. I in turn spat out the name Vera and frightened her off with drunken flirty winks.

  Vera. I don’t care to know more. I discover again I don’t care. Then does all our history, all each one of us has learned, move lockstep towards an ever-crueler question?

  In fact my one glimmer of a more human certainty these days has to do with my former troop. That self I knew briefly between freezing and falling. I find I retain a living soul's wish to see them again — but only in the way a living soul can. After all I could still go visit, any time I chose. I could stop by that newborn star and hear it force its question down the world's throat. But what I wish now, maybe the one wish I’ve got left, isn’t a matter of visiting or listening. Miriam, I . . . I just want to see them. To stare at the stars through your living eyes, rather than always from this stunned overlook that shows us nothing except the tortured and doomed; to gaze, without feeling driven to follow the dots across that icy random glitter, without getting desperate for some escape from the severe twinned outlines of one story and all history; to bear witness that eternity may be etched in better than brute black and white. But Miriam, you . . . you won’t grant me my wish. You won’t release me from my doubt. You keep your eyes shut whenever I’m called on, the nameless here inside.

  Whenever you’re faced with the dead and forced to speak in a voice not your own.

  — John Domini

  An Encounter

  Did you tell him there were heavy tornado warnings? Did you tell him snow was expected? Did it ever make it? Did you describe the coastal hurricane? And the high pressure, could he relate to that?

  Did you tell him you had read all his books? Did you tell him you had understood all his books? Did you confess to not understanding one? Didn’t you have one read to you? Does it make it any easier to understand? Did you tell him it doesn’t?