GUD Magazine Issue 0 :: Spring 2007
Page 8
Will nodded. Bishop must have known he had told the authorities, but oddly he didn't seem angry. His skin was very yellow, the ulcer on his head unhealed.
"Why have you come?” Bishop asked gently.
Will twisted his hat in his hands.
"I still do not understand,” Will said, all of a sudden. “I still cannot see. I wrestle, sir, with what I saw. The dark beast, you know, it rose from her body and it seized me. Yes! It knocked me from a tree and then it disappeared, and now I have...."
"And now you have Eliza instead."
Will stared at his hands.
"Yes, yes,” Bishop said. “I can see her. Like a briar. Like mistletoe upon your very soul."
Will frowned, very troubled.
"I have to confess to my gross mistake, William,” Bishop said. “The blood of Jane, and Edgar and the others does lie on my hands. I was held to account and I am justly sentenced. The spiritual force, you understand, was not a being in possession of Eliza; it was part of Eliza herself. And I drew it out."
"No,” Will said. “No, that isn't so. I saw you, sir—I saw you feed her poison and lock her away. If she had a darkness inside her, you nursed it. You are the beast, not she."
But Bishop smiled and shrugged. Curiously, Will could not help but like him then. He had a gravity Will had overlooked.
The Old Bailey sessions were tumultuous, the newsletters gory with the lewdest details. Will testified with horror in his heart, but he didn't speak of the last night in the tree, above the garret. On the day of the hanging, the bells rang muffled from the churches. Will crept among the crowd in the Press Yard where the prisoners’ chains were struck off. A procession of carts set out, Bishop's status according him a carriage at the front. How hot it was, the crowd in a riot, stinking vegetables slung at the miserable wretches due to hang. Many were drinking gin. Dutch courage. A young girl, no older than he was, wept upon the cart with her hands on her face. The carts stopped at St Sepulchre's, for prayers, and then proceeded down Snow Hill, High Holborn, and finally to Tyburn. He pushed his way through the crowd, determined and out of breath.
"Look,” she says.
Will is brought back to the moment. At the triple tree the crowd throngs. Hawkers sell refreshments. Before Will's eyes, a young ragamuffin slides a handkerchief from a man's pocket. He can sense Eliza's elation, her moment of triumph. Honey and wormwood. Sugar and bitterness. The perfume drifts about him, like a veil.
"No,” he says, but he does look. Seeing Will talk to himself, frowning, an old woman beside him glances over. So he thrusts forward through the crowd as the noose is tightened around the murderer's neck.
At last he is close enough to see the doctor's eyes, drained of colour, almost totally black. The murderer sees him, returns his look, and for the briefest moment, smiles in recognition.
"Go swiftly to Hell,” Will says.
But the words are not his own.
The bodies drop, and kick. A low sound rises from the assembly, like a groan. The young girl takes a long time to die. Then the noise rises again. At a signal from the hangman, an unseemly struggle breaks out as relatives seize the bodies of their loved ones. A man in a dusty black suit directs the cutting down of Bishop's corpse, to be placed in a waiting carriage.
Will sighs. He sees no ghost. Momentarily he is arrested by the spectacle of a young woman placing Bishop's lifeless hand upon her bosom.
He leaves the crowd behind. Climbs a steep hill, tiring under the sun. Eliza walks alongside him, untroubled by the heat. She sings, and speaks of visions. She is a little girl lost in a forest of beasts. She is a rose, with a worm.
At the summit he rests a moment. He reaches out and takes her hand. He presses her palm to his chest, where his heart beats fast. She concentrates, trying to feel it through her fingertips. But such physical sensations are difficult now.
"It seems I have lost your heart,” she says.
"Would I have any more luck,” he asks, “if I searched for yours?"
She smiles. “Oh, it's out there somewhere,” she says wistfully.
He lets go of her hand. He surveys the scene, London sprawled below them in all its glory.
He says, “Perhaps some day I shall go in search of it.” Then she flies away, like a bird, through the darkening skies, letting William turn towards the close, warm hearth of his home.
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Bird and Ghost by Sarah Coyne
(art)
* * * *
* * * *
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One in Ten Thousand by Athena Workman
I waited four hundred sixty-one days to kill him, and when I did, he didn't even know it. Just got up and walked right out of the apartment like back when he used to work the nine-to-five shift at DentaDyne. Instead of wearing an overcoat, he wore the syringe that I'd forgotten to remove, and it bobbed and banged against his arm like a tiny, underdeveloped appendage.
I killed him again when he got home; after I'd paced the apartment for hours, using the sun on the wall through our single window as a time guide like the ancients did. The glowing orb had already disappeared over the other side of the high-rise by the time he returned, bags of skin pulling down his eyes, the syringe lost. They'd given me another, just in case the first one's dosage wasn't high enough, and I got him again after he sat on the couch. As he blinked and the television sprang on, I sank the needle into his flesh, right through his shirt into the tough part of his shoulder. Again, I fled to the bathroom, locking myself in and shrinking down by the tub, unable to face what I'd done.
I found him in the kitchen an hour later, an opened jar of peanut butter before him on the table, the loaf of bread still sealed in its vacuum pack. As usual, he'd forgotten how to open it.
* * * *
We'd been on the waiting list for over a year: two first and last names lost within a database of the hopelessly damned and the damned hopeless. My fingers had trembled when the doctor handed me the syringes, and they quavered again when I called the center and asked why he was now standing at the door, his fingers loosely wrapped around the doorknob, his nose an inch from the wood. Two men and a woman arrived thirty minutes later, the men wearing white Plasti-Suits, the lady in a cream-colored gabardine number and smart gold-rimmed contacts. She was his doctor, and more alert than he'd ever been even at the height of his senses. The sterile men guided him to the couch, and Dr. Blue examined him by tapping on his knees, shining a bright light in his eyes, asking questions and receiving no response.
"He's alive,” she finally said, standing, peering down at him, a line of confused aggravation appearing between her eyes.
"I know,” I said. I could not wring enough sweat from my hands.
"You must have not depressed the plunger,” Dr. Blue said, but I shook my head and ran to the kitchen. I hadn't flushed it down the disposal.
"I did!” I said, returning, holding the syringe up. The sun was still on our side, and the needle caught the light, flashing in his eyes. Dull and brown, they blinked once, slowly. The channel changed to the noon news.
"Then there's only one explanation for it, I'm afraid,” Dr. Blue said. “In about one in ten thousand, the medicine doesn't work."
"What?” I rolled my eyes, searched the pebbled ceiling, trying to remember a headline, a news scroll, a line in an article. I could not, and felt myself reeling.
"I'm sorry,” Dr. Blue said, gathering her things into her stainless steel bag, readying to return to a world without zonked senses and silver lines of drool. I inhaled deeply, gathering courage as I lowered the needle. Until that moment, I'd forgotten that it was still aloft.
"Can I ... have another?” I asked. I figured the answer before she shook her head.
"No. The guidelines are clear. Only two per request.” She paused, cocked her head. “You can re-register. There's nothing in the law against that.” Another pause, and the line between her eyes . “Although there's nothing to say that...this ‘t happen
again. The rejection has something to do with the immune system. Unless he gets sick in the meantime.... “She trailed off, shrugged.
Another year. Probably longer. After Dr. Blue and the anonymous men left, I called the center and requested to be put back into the database. I was told our case would come up for review by committee within a month. I didn't tell the faceless operator that we'd already been approved.
* * * *
Knives. A bathtub that could be filled to the brim with water. Plump pillows. A window on the thirty-sixth floor of a high-rise. A plethora of weapons at my disposal, and yet I could not bring myself to use a one. No one could—wasn't that why we were all listed in a computer system? By the time I turned around from pondering the overstuffed pillow on the couch, he was gone, his memory returned enough to remember how to turn a knob. I grabbed my keycard and sunglasses and left, finding him in front of the elevators, following him down.
He never saw me.
* * * *
As much as it was nothing to him, the world outside confounded me, overloading my sensory system. I worked from home for Roto-Robo because of him, and because of him, I was again a babe in the world. The heat swallowed me whole and churned me in its acids, my crepe shift instantly shrinking to my body and giving me wrinkles and lumps in new places. I squinted painfully behind my sunglasses and followed him through the hordes that traversed beneath the bubble encasing the city, broiling it in ways its makers had not intended. If he felt the heat, the enormous humid pressure, his aimless shuffle did not falter, and he passed beneath three hover cars and was nearly hit by an electric car with a bashed-in front bumper as he crossed the choked street.
I inhaled the sweet meaty scent of Chinese food and the sour smell of rancid garbage; he did not. I was jostled and jolted by the sweaty crowds; he was as well, but he did not hear their cries of “Watch it!” and “Look where the hell you're going!” I saw several like him, wandering, holding on to the arms of their caretakers, but they did not see me, nor did he take them in. I caught the eye of a haggard woman with limp dishwater hair steering one of them away from a whiskey slush stand, then looked away. Did I mimic her? long had she waiting? I uselessly brushed down my shift and followed him.
Entering the park in the city center was like going into a sauna. Steam rose from the circular pond. Ducks floated listlessly on its cloudy blue surface. Across the water came the cries of children at a playground. He rounded the pond and sat on a bench just outside its perimeter. I found a bench nearby and watched him, my skin dissolving as puddles into the brightly painted wood. A great sweat stain grew on his gray shirt as the sun twirled toward three o'clock. His eyes closed, and his body twitched once, twice. I did not realize I was holding my breath until gold and black stars to sparkle in my vision. I wondered, Is it finally working? needed to. I it to, and so did he.
Two children shouted in unison, and a tall, hideously thin man came sauntering down the path; his torn shoes scratched over the gravel, knobby knees and glass-cutting elbows jutted out. The man must have seen him slack on the bench from afar and planned his attack, for he made a beeline for him, drawing back his arm to strike before his ruined shoes had even skidded to a stop. Blood spurted as the assailant's fist connected with his nose, but he did not slump over as I had hoped. Quickly, he stood and began spinning in a jerky circle. The man grabbed him, spun him back around, and stuck his hands in his pockets, but of course they came up empty. He'd long forgotten to carry a wallet. He was shoved back onto the bench, slapped for good measure.
When the thief turned toward me, I stood and shouted, “No!” The syringe could not kill him, and it was clear the malnourished man was not going to either. And how could I have thought I could stand something like this? It wasn't why I'd put us in the database, suffered through the waiting, the vapidity, the shit. The thief leered at me, glanced into the playground where children and parents alike frolicked obliviously and stupidly in the sweltering temperature, and took off the way he'd come, sneakers slapping, gravel flying. Slowly, I walked to the bench and used the bottom of my shift to wipe the blood from his nose, lips, chin. He stared into the playground, brown eyes muddy and sightless, hands limp in his soggy lap. He'd wet himself.
"Hey, is he okay?” someone asked. Her voice floated over my shoulder. I finished wiping his chin and stood him up.
"No,” I answered, never looking. “He's supposed to be dead."
* * * *
There was a message waiting for me on the phone screen. A pretty, perky operator from the Center for Controlled Euthanasia informed me of what I already knew: Dr. Blue had approved my request, and we were number three thousand, three hundred and eighty-two on the list. We would receive a call when our number came up, or, as she reminded me, “You might be one of twenty-five chosen in the annual lottery, which is broadcast on Channel 311."
Fat chance. I turned and looked at him. He sat on the couch and stared at the TV. When he blinked, the channel changed to Fantasy Luau 2106. Contestants screamed with joy and a pig roasted off-screen. I blinked twice, and the room fell silent. When his eyes closed, I crept to him, leaning over and placing a hand on his chest. His heartbeat plodded steadily on, the only thing left in his body that remembered its proper mission, still strong enough to defy the poison I had shot into his veins. I did not remove my hand, but sat down, and when I found his eyes they were looking my way, pinpoints of light reflected in their dullness from the kitchen light. But they did not know me. Thirty-eight years, and he had no idea that his daughter cared for him, gave up her life and marriage for him, cried for him. Wanted heaven for him instead of this vast emptiness of . Wanted it all to finally be over. I kept one hand on his chest as my other groped behind me and found the overstuffed pillow.
Pushing him back, lying him down was easy. Putting the pillow over his face was not. I barely saw him thrash and buckle beneath me through the prisms of tears in my eyes. When I was done, when he fell still and stayed that way for five minutes, round wet spots dotted the brown fabric of the pillow.
* * * *
The third time I killed him, the miracle happened. He did not rise. Instead of the police, the coroner, I called Dr. Blue. Her irises were rimmed with brilliant magenta and her body clothed in shimmery gold when she arrived. Silent and white, the men followed her into the apartment, standing near the door as she went to my father.
"It must have finally taken,” I said, hiding my trembling, lying hands behind my back.
She glanced at me and bent over, lifting his eyelids, examining the eyes that were truly empty now, save for the petechial hemorrhaging that dotted the whites. Dr. Blue stared at him, stared at the lumpish pillow at the other end of the couch, and finally at me.
"Yes,” she said, straightening up at last, “it must have."
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Invitation to Kaohsiung From the Journal of Allen
The envelope with Taiwanese postage arrived in August 2004 in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, where I was living at the time. I was somewhat curious, but assumed it was just the kind of ad I occasionally received from a Hong Kong tailor I'd once visited.
When I read the enclosed letter I was still uncertain, since it seemed to make no sense. It stated that I was being invited to something called The First World Poetry Conference in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, March 2005, with almost all expenses paid (a bit shy on the airfare), including hotels, meals, transfers, sightseeing, et al. I was also invited to read from my work if I wished. The theme was to be Land and Sea in Poetic Harmony.
I'd had a good deal of my fiction, non-fiction, and creative non-fiction published. I'd also written a novel, had two of my plays produced, and had written and published a great deal of poetry. But the letter didn't say which of my works had prompted this invitation, or where my potential hosts-to-be had seen it. A scam? Perhaps, but the invitation mentioned nothing about sending them money up front. I checked to see if I could glean anything from the internet that would hint I was being conned, bu
t found nothing to further my suspicion. This was the “First” conference, after all, and there'd not likely be much, if anything, posted seven months prior to the event.
Having worked in the travel field for most of my life, I consider myself to be pretty well traveled. I had visited some sixty countries by then, including many in Asia, but hadn't been to Taiwan and had never even heard of Kaohsiung. So, after some deliberation, I returned the application accepting the invitation, then awaited further developments. The response came quickly, via e-mail this time.
The festival, it seemed, was quite legitimate, sponsored by the Literary Taiwan Foundation, a government organization. Initially, twenty representatives from Taiwan and twenty from the rest of the world were expected to attend: from the U.S., England, Mexico, St. Lucia, Ireland, The Netherlands, Serbia, Montenegro, Nigeria, India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Japan, Korea, and quite possibly others. It was to be conducted in English, Mandarin Chinese, and Taiwanese. Some of my poetry had been published in many of those areas, but I was still uncertain as to how exactly I fit into this international group.
Months passed and nothing much changed, except that I moved cross-country to Ajijic, another ex-pat community, on the shore of Lake Chapala, and that my eagerness grew as the departure date drew near. About a week before my flight from Guadalajara to Los Angeles to make the trans-Pacific connection, China came to the forefront of the news by passing a new law that permitted itself to declare war on Taiwan—an anti-secession move against the recalcitrant island country. I immediately e-mailed my contact in Taiwan, asking her if the festival was going to be canceled. A phone call came within the hour to assure me that all was well; the media was making a bigger thing of the threat than called for. It was a go!
I'd booked a flight on EVA Airways (which I'd never heard of, though it is one of Taiwan's two top carriers, with excellent service in the air and on the ground, with fully packed wide-body flights trans-Pacific). The journey was long: Guadalajara to Los Angeles, a four-hour layover, fourteen hours to Taipei after a four-hour delay, a misconnect with the flight to Kaohsiung resulting in an overnight—three hours’ in a hotel—then an hour flight to Kaohsiung, to not met at the airport by a festival rep. The taxi driver had no idea what I meant “Ambassador Hotel.” It seems that Kaohsiung (pronounced cow-SHUNG) is not yet much of a tourist mecca—certainly not as much as it will be when the 2009 World Games are played there. Fortunately, I'd prepared for such a contingency by carrying a computer printout of the hotel ad that showed the hotel's name in Chinese characters, a practice I had learned through my years of experience while traveling for business. Problem solved.