The World of the End

by Ofir Touché Gafla

  “I took the stand and denied every word of that story, even though I knew it was hopeless. When I told them how she crept into my bed at night, she swooned to the floor and started to bawl. I remember exchanging a glance with my attorney. He shrugged and clasped his briefcase. I’ll never forget that gesture. That’s when I knew it was over. The key, the bruises on her body, the semen, and the Broadway swoon.

  “The verdict came as no surprise. Ditto for the sentence. The beastly man who had taken advantage of the young woman’s naiveté was sent to prison for eight years. She left the courtroom without looking in my direction and that was the last I saw of her until the day I died. I’ll spare you all the horrors I witnessed in the darkest place on earth, save one. I spent seven years living in a jungle. If I went into what I saw there, you’d pound button three seven times just to make me stop.”

  “What happened during the eighth year?” Ben asked, fingering the godget, his eyes fixed on the storyteller.

  “During the eighth year,” Robert sighed, “a new guard arrived at the prison. Twenty-five years old, built like a brick shithouse. He always walked with his chest puffed out, like a soldier. Or a duck. The inmates called him Moulard. One day, half a year after he came to the jail, he sauntered by my cell as I was reading aloud from The Picture of Dorian Gray. He stopped, smiled, and asked if I was an actor. I nodded. The next day he tossed me three books through the bars. New books, not the kind you can find at the prison library. For the next two months he kept bringing me books, and we gradually became friends. He used to come by my cell and talk about literature. Everyone called us ‘the scholars.’ He was brilliant and sensitive and I felt that, after all those wasted years in the jungle, I had been brought back to life. I noticed that his eyes tended to stray toward my star, but I didn’t think much of it. One day I asked him what an interesting man like him was doing in a heinous place like this. He looked down and said he’d tell me one day.

  “I had four months left behind bars, I had a new friend, and I started to smell freedom. I couldn’t stop thinking of the day I’d be let out and of my imminent reunion with Catherine.”

  “Catherine? I thought that…”

  “What,” Robert said, cutting him short, “that eight years in jail wipe away the memory of love? The only thing that kept me alive in there was the thought of meeting Catherine. Had we met, my forgiveness would’ve broken her.”

  “But?”

  Robert’s voice cracked. “One hundred and seventeen days before I got my walking papers, I went to sleep at midnight. At one thirty in the morning I woke up to the sound of whispers. I looked up and saw four guards in my cell. Before I could figure out what was going on, they shackled my arms and legs and jammed a filthy rag in my mouth. I’ve never been so scared. They pulled me outside and took me down the spiral staircase to the hole.

  “They threw me inside, on a mattress, stripped me, and waited. They pushed my head down into the mattress and laughed. I knew something awful was about to happen. Then the door opened and a fifth man came in. He told them to give him half an hour. They left. It was just the two of us, Moulard and me. He got undressed and mounted me. I tried to break free, to yell, to fight, but he was enormous. The whole time he whispered in my ear, ‘your birthmark’s driving me crazy … I’ve wanted you since the moment I saw it … what a star, Robert superstar … Moulard wants you … Moulard loves you…’ When he was done I wanted to retch, but the shock prevented me from reacting, especially as he continued to whisper, ‘Now you see why I do this? Why I work here?’

  “He got up, got dressed, and called the others. They took me back to my cell and wished me sweet dreams. I didn’t sleep for three days; didn’t eat, didn’t shower. I just sat still and thought. On the fourth day, he came to my cell and brought me a book. Calm and collected, smiling like nothing happened. I played his game, giving him the feeling that all was good. A week went by. He brought me another book. There was a note inside: ‘Superstar. Tomorrow night, you and me, in the hole. M.’ The next day I returned the book with a note of my own, ‘Moulard, tonight, you and me, in the shower, alone. I want to do it right.’

  They came during the middle of the night. All four. They took me to the shower, threw me inside, closed the door, and waited. Moulard was ready for me, naked, his hands clasped behind his back, excited for my arrival. He asked me to get undressed. I did. He asked me to come close. My heart must’ve been doing two hundred beats a minute. I approached him and saw that he was holding a gun. I started to sweat, asked him what he was doing. His voice cold, he told me to get down on my knees and go down on him. I asked him to let go of the gun, said it was ruining the romance. He brought it to my head and said romance was the last thing on his mind. I got down on my knees and did as he asked. He warned me that if I made any kind of false move he’d blow my head off. When he started to move with pleasure, you know, started to lose control, I bit down with all my might. He cursed me and fell to the floor, writhing in pain. I grabbed the gun out of his hand, put it to his temple, and shot three times. That’s when the four guards came in and started to beat me up. You can imagine the rest. When I was up for release, I went back to court, this time for premeditated murder. It’s one thing to kill a prisoner and another thing entirely to kill a guard, especially when four other guards testify against you, saying you killed their friend in cold blood. It was the shortest trial in the history of man. Two weeks after my original discharge date, I was sentenced to twenty-five years in jail. Twenty-five more years.”

  * * *

  Ben’s mouth fell slack. “Robert, I don’t know … what to say … it’s … it’s inconceivable.”

  “No,” Robert said, shaking his head. “I’ll tell you what’s inconceivable. It’s inconceivable that a broken man by the name of Robert did twenty more years, got out at the age of fifty, and swore to do two things upon release: to surgically remove the cursed birthmark from his chest, and find Catherine in the old apartment. It’s inconceivable that no matter how hard I looked, I couldn’t find her. It was like the earth had swallowed her whole. It’s inconceivable that on the day of the surgery, lying in a hospital bed, the upper half of my body revealed, glad to be almost rid of this badge of dishonor, a woman walks through the door, by mistake, apologizes, leaves the room, then comes back two seconds later, looks at my chest and back at me, pulls a gun out of her bag, and empties the whole clip into me. Yeah, Ben, it is inconceivable on the very day of the operation, the day I was to begin my life anew, after two months of tireless searching, Catherine finds me and kills me in cold blood. And the most inconceivable part, I suppose, is the coincidence. What the hell was she doing there, in the plastic surgery ward, on that particular day, and why in the world did she have a gun in her bag and why, why, did she not say a word?”

  Ben scanned the cobalt sky in silence. “The most unthinkable part of the whole shocking story,” he ruled, “is the fact that you’ve been waiting here for that woman for ten years, and that you’ve forgiven her. Not that I’d want to advocate for revenge, but how, for fuck’s sake, can you possibly still be devoted to her?”

  “It’s my last chance,” Robert said, spreading a bland smile, “I owe it to myself to ask her why. Why did she accuse me and, even more importantly, why did she kill me? But most of all, to ask her if after all we’ve been through, she’s willing to give our relationship another chance. If she refuses, I promise to relent. But till then, I won’t rest. The thought that I could spend my entire death wracked with regret is too much. You have to agree, the woman owes me an explanation. At the very least.”

  “Of course,” Ben sighed. “You said she was in jail. Do you mean she’s still there?”

  Robert nodded.

  “How do you know?” Ben wondered. “You’ve been here for ten years. Maybe she got out early for good behavior. Maybe she was never arrested. Maybe…”

  Robert shifted in his chair, pulled the cigar box out from under him, sifted through the contents, and removed a rectangul
ar piece of white paper. Ben looked at the business card and read aloud, “The Mad Hop—Private Investigator. Unravels Mysteries, Finds the Missing, Solves All Crimes. Address: September 1986, Circle 4, Building S, Floor 18, Apartment 45.”

  Ben smiled. “The Mad Hop? What kind of nickname is that?”

  Robert shrugged. “Look, he’s the best investigator I’ve ever known. He’s got his share of eccentricities, but who doesn’t, eh? When I got here, I contacted him. I asked him to report back about Catherine, to relay any and all information that came his way. He told me about her arrest and trial. Twenty years for first degree murder. If anything changes, trust the Mad Hop—he’ll know.”

  Ben gave back the card, pursing his lips. “There’s just one more thing I don’t get. Your chair, the wheelchair.”

  Robert smiled. “I’ll explain. But if you don’t mind, accompany me to the tobacco shop. It’s on the way to the central bus station, so we’ll both get something out of the stroll. I imagine you’re already dying to see your new apartment.…”

  “I’m dying to see my wife’s place.” Ben chuckled, happy to leave the white room behind him and explore the promising new world.

  As they headed toward the spot where the multi-wheels had waited two hours before, Ben said, “At the orientation they explained to us that…”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Robert said, cutting him off, “that there’s a substitute for every human organ and all that other bullshit. What are you, a gullible little kid who believes everything he hears? They want to present an idealized picture of the Other World, that’s all. Sure, their labs are good, they have replacement parts and immune system buffering devices, but between us, they’re not Catherine’s lover: There is a limit to their skills, and the proof is speaking to you. When Catherine riddled me with bullets, she did irrevocable damage to my spine. The surgeons were barely able to repair half of it. Hence, the chair. Ben, it’s important you learn not to believe everything you’re told. After all, we’re talking about aliases.”

  Ben stopped walking and looked at him, bewildered.

  “Forget it. I don’t feel like going into it,” the Belgian sighed, spinning his wheels with surprising speed.

  Ben bounded after him. “It’s unbelievable. You were disabled after death.”

  Robert nodded. Ben, sunk in thought, chin on his chest, feet marching mechanically beside Robert, thought about arriving at Marian’s apartment and tried to shake the disturbing spell of the cripple’s story.

  “We’re here!” Robert called, rousing Ben from his reverie.

  Looking up, he saw a long line of people waiting in front of a giant cigarette stand. To the left of the stand, at the end of a long avenue of people engaged in animated conversation, he saw a neon sign: 06/21/2001—CENTRAL BUS STATION.

  He spun around excitedly. “I think we part here.”

  Robert shook his hand. “Thanks for listening, Ben. It’s always a pleasure to make new friends.”

  Ben smiled. “Good luck with Catherine.”

  Robert crossed himself and rolled toward the front of the line. The smokers made room for him and he disappeared behind the counter.

  * * *

  Ben’s heart quickened as he approached the flashing sign. Coming to the end of the avenue, he heard someone call out behind him. He turned around and saw a group of twenty kids, all around ten years old, laughing and arguing. He wondered what kind of calamity had snatched them from life at such a young age. The only reasonable thought that came to mind was a bus accident on a class trip, the kind of thing that had weaned him off newspapers back in the old world.

  An hour later he got off the multi-wheel. In the middle of a giant circle he saw a sign made of thousands of red leaves. MARCH 2000, it read. The circle, laid with a dozen different shades of marble, was teeming with people, and Ben squinted as though he were peering through binoculars and watched them tend to their business as he searched for Marian. Lightheaded, inhaling the scent of the thirty-one flowered paths that radiated from the heart of the circle, he noted the numbered sign at the beginning of each path. Steeling himself, he strode down the seventeenth lane. When he passed under the chosen number, he felt as though he were entering another world, where his senses were stimulated by each and every feature, small and large alike, from the rainbow-colored carpet of flowers that lined the walkways to the cloud of dizzying scents they emitted; from the whirlpool of familiar and previously unknown colors to the dazzling cross-pollination of indigo anemones sprouting out of the sky-blue bottleneck of the orchids; from the absolute chaos ruling the flower arrangement to the fatigue of the astounded eye and its soft, fluttering closure. Ben, forced to deal with the frontal sensory assault, walked as fast as possible, hoping to leave the narcotic effect trailing behind him. At the end of the path he found himself at the foot of a long road, lined with hulking skyscrapers on either side, a ribbon of uniformly tall silver buildings, rectangle after rectangle that, despite their identical hue, were not unpleasant, perhaps due to the queer domes that lent the arched roofs a futuristic feel.

  Ben looked at the domes and realized that each of them was adorned with a letter of the alphabet, stretching from A to Z into the distant horizon. After asking a woman with tears in her eyes how to find his wife’s apartment, he learned that the letters atop the buildings stood for the tenants’ last names and proceeded toward the seventh building on the left.

  He thought about giving Marian, a vehement vegetarian, a hard time about her building, which held aloft the immortal sign of the meat industry. Burger jokes would surely be a part of their future in this slaughterhouse-free world. He opened the main glass doors and walked inside. Astonished by the size of the lobby, he began to comprehend the enormity of the building—if each building had a thousand apartments spread over twenty-four floors, then by simple arithmetic each floor had some forty-two apartments!

  “Unbelievable!” he called out, advancing toward the elevator doors. They opened, but the sight of the grand piano at the far end of the elevator, which was more like a wedding hall than a device for transporting people up and down the height of a building, stopped him in his tracks. The piano player was bent over the ivories. He played a soft tranquil melody, utterly oblivious to Ben’s hesitant entry into the elevator. Ben pressed 11, recalling the instructions given in the orientation. The doors came together and the elevator sailed up. Once it eased to a stop, he prepared to step out, but taking in the vastness of the halls, he turned to the pianist who, without lifting his head, said, “What time did he or she die?”

  “I don’t remember the exact hour. A little before noon,” Ben said.

  “You need the left wing,” he said, motioning him out of the elevator.

  Ben thanked him and stepped through the open doors. Following his instructions, he scanned the numbered and initialed brass plates, which were positioned right in the center of the gleaming steel doors. Suddenly he realized the final detail. The jumbled numbers on the left side of the hall all shared a common trait: they were more than thirty, (and less than sixty) except for the last one, nearest the elevator.

  Ben smiled in recognition. The apartment numbers marked the exact minute the person had passed away, which was why some doors had the same number but not the same initials. The statistical principle of standard deviation worked in this world, too, Ben noted, considering amusedly the chances of two people with the same initials dying on the same day, at the exact same time. Ben, figuring that the right wing started with 1 and ended with 29, ran full throttle down the hall, delighted to discover that only one door had the initials MM. He filled his lungs with air, let it seep out for a long moment, and then knocked on the door. The creeping fear that Marian wouldn’t be home was stilled by the sound of advancing footsteps. A soft feminine voice cooed, “Arthur, what took you so long?”

  Before Ben could process the question, the door opened, revealing the last woman in the world he expected to see.

  5

  A Thousand Words: A Pictu
re’s Monologue

  You nasty, crude, insensitive humans! Allow me to protest! Years have passed since the initial daguerreotype, and I, in my innocence, believed that you had evolved along with the apple of your eye, your raging technology. But to my chagrin it seems that each new breakthrough has only set you back a square. The unbearable contempt, ungratefulness, and despicable ease with which you treat us—as though we shall eternally serve you!

  Sometimes, in my wildest dreams, I wish that all of the world’s camera lenses were encased in a permanent fog. Perhaps then you’d show some contrition, perhaps even take a vow not to maltreat us, even though you, me, and my band of sisters all know the worth of a human word, which brings me to my point of contention: I don’t know which bastard came to the conclusion that I’m worth a thousand words, and if I did know, I’d find a way to settle the score with him in the dark-room. I do know what the bastard meant. He thought he was complimenting us. As though the comparison to a thousand words would pad our self worth and puff up our pride; as though a thousand were the ultimate number of words one could use to praise the value of a picture.

  Poppycock! That’s a cowpie dressed up as a chocolate soufflé. We aren’t going to be taken for that ride. I demand a change in the saying, the proverb, the colloquialism, or whatever other politically correct phrasing you decide to attach to a thousand words. Henceforth, a picture shall be worth a hundred thousand words—at least!

  Surely you’ll agree that when humans look at photographs it’s impossible to know what feelings will flood their hearts, what thoughts will wander into their heads. Perhaps, while surveying the matted or glossy evidence, unexpected sentiments, warm clouds of nostalgia, telling revelations, or a thousand and one stories will make themselves known. Their worth has no quantitative definition, let alone a word cap.