Singing With All My Skin and Bone

by Sunny Moraine

Then darkness.

  *

  There is a woman screaming in the street. Her voice is many voices, an uneven and fractured chorus, and Sebastian realizes, still trying to claw his way up from the darkness in his head, that it’s many women. Many screams. His eyelids come painfully unstuck; he turns onto his back, lifts a hand to his face, and his fingers come away smeared with blood.

  He drags his knees under him, levers himself off the broken ground. He looks up and sees the pale globe of the sun, high through billowing plumes of smoke.

  Jaime.

  Sebastian lurches forward. One arm swings loose at his side. Flames are licking the darkness. The running shapes twist into cavorting demons. The smoke stings his eyes; that must be why tears are running down his cheeks.

  “Jaime!”

  His hands settle on a figure hunched in the rubble. He knows the angle of these shoulder blades—they heave under his hands and Jaime turns, reaching for him, crying out something that extends itself past words.

  *

  Buenaventura is burning.

  Buenaventura. Good fortune. A city named in a flush of hysterical hope. The naming of things is a very important matter. Adam named the animals before he slaughtered them.

  *

  In times of crisis the most fundamental instinct is to move. Movement is life, is purpose. Stillness and death are co-morbid. Sebastian and Jaime move without knowing why, without knowing where—leaning against each other, they stumble away from the collapsed bus terminal. Driven by instinct, they are heading away from the sea, winding up through the broken streets. Until they notice more shapes moving around them, letting out frightened cries. When they hear it, it comes to them like the terrified murmur of the city itself—not one voice but thousands, carried up on heated winds.

  Tsunami.

  Then they find their purpose and it carries them higher.

  *

  On the day the earth shakes, the horses come out of the sea.

  They come with the sea. They come of the sea. At first people think that it is the sea, surging up over walls and beaches, cars and shacks, tin and adobe and concrete—buoying up the rubble, carrying it like a gift. Some of the older ones have seen this before.

  But no. They have never seen this.

  The horses are running when they come, hooves softened by centuries in the salty water. They shake their dripping manes, seaweed clinging. Their flesh is gray, uneven, bloated in some places and gone in others; there is a gleam of exposed bone in the light of the fires. Their eyes are milky and staring and dead.

  People are driven before them, clinging together, hands in hands, babies held against chests, professions of love, of hate, the final instincts of lethal fear. In the seconds before the hooves pull them down and crush them they try to understand.

  *

  At the crest of a hill Sebastian stops again, Jaime stops with him and they turn.

  It’s a mourning process done at high speed and in the midst of utter confusion, because how can any sense be made of this? But there is sense. Sebastian feels it like the hidden shape in a picture puzzle as he watches the water surging into the city.

  All at once Jaime is dragged away from him. There is the flash of a blade. Sebastian stares stupidly at it, at the wild-eyed man holding the machete to Jaime’s throat. Jaime is staring back at him, hands limp at his sides—his surprise and the resulting lack of a struggle may be what, for the moment, has saved him.

  “Heard you were running.” The man presses the blade into Jaime’s throat and there’s a corresponding trickle of blood. Jaime does not cry out and Sebastian feels a strange flush of pride. “You can’t just run. Not with that kind of plata tangled up with your ankles.”

  Sebastian holds out his hands. His gaze flicks from Jaime’s face, abnormally pale in the red light, to the shattered road that continues up the hill. He hears thunder behind him. “Please…”

  “Yes, say please. Plead with me. Make it so much sweeter when I cut this little cacorro’s head off.”

  His eyes meet Jaime’s again; there is nothing he can say because fear makes men crazy. And in the last minutes of both of their lives, with all their good fortune burning and drowning below them, he is not going to abase himself. He feels every muscle coiled, ready to spring.

  He never does. A rearing horse, white-eyed, rotten hooves crashing into the side of the man’s head in a spray of blood and pinkish brain matter. The man doesn’t have time to scream. Jaime, as he drops to the ground, does not scream either.

  But the horse does. And then there are more, surging around them, thundering, reeking. Sebastian has fallen to one knee. Jaime is motionless. The horse stands over him, nostrils flaring. Its eyes are white, but not without expression. Lost rage. Hatred. Sebastian has seen it before. At that flash of familiarity all the fear vanishes and he understands: it’s about using. It’s about being used. And cast aside when one is used up.

  He reaches up in supplication, his head bowed. He is thinking of the flies on the eyes of the dead horses, how he had wished then that someone had closed their eyes while they were sticking their heads on the stakes, because it had seemed like such a final insult.

  “Lo siento,” he whispers. “Perdoname. Por favor. Forgive us all.”

  The horse stares at him for a long moment. White-eyed gaze, drowned in hate. More horses around them, more white eyes. Ring upon ring of them, staring, surging. Going still. Sebastian drops his arms.

  And then, one by one, the horses go.

  It doesn’t feel like forgiveness. It feels like blood for blood.

  Buenaventura lies burned and drowned, and the parts of it that have not perished in water continue to do so in fire. There is still screaming but it sounds weary and thin. The last of the dead down in the city, a chorus of silent eyes arrayed in the hills. What now?

  There has never been an answer.

  Sebastian pulls Jaime into his arms. One shallow breath. Another. Sebastian tilts his head back and looks up. The sun is gone. There is a tear in the clouds. Through it—for only a moment, for the first time in many years—he can see the stars.

  All the Literati Keep an Imaginary Friend

  You don’t wait for someone to admit they need therapy before you decide that they do. We’ve always done this. We set out the framework and we require that people fit into it. Something is wrong with you. You should fix it. We have this persistent, fucked up need to affix problems to persons other than ourselves.

  The thing about persistent, fucked up needs is that they tend naturally toward absurdity. So here’s an interesting series of pictures: Psychiatrists and social workers and people with counseling degrees in hangers, in bunkers, standing on Air Force runways. Communicating, which is widely believed to be the first step in a long series of steps leading to a whole new paradigm of mental health for a thing that we’re still beginning to understand is capable of a recognizable mentality.

  This might be a terrible idea. But it’s an idea and we’re all having it, like a kind of consensual hallucination. So in the end it’s pretty hard to say what’s therapeutic and what isn’t. What matters is that in the end we all might feel better about everything.

  *

  You can’t put a drone on a couch. An Unmanned Aerial Vehicle does not need tissues. The tools of the trade are removed and for the most part there’s no comfortably controlled office environment. Bright sunlight isn’t conducive to cognitive behavioral therapy, or so the generally received wisdom goes. But you have to work with what you’ve got. A hanger bay can be made more comfortable with a couch, at least, for you. You ask for a standing lamp. This is fairly ludicrous, but. Well. All of it is, so where’s the line?

  This is something we need to do.

  So you ask, How have you been feeling? And you ask, Do you have trouble rebooting? And you ask, Do you experience difficulty preparing yourself for missions?

  How did killing thirty-three people, twelve of whom were children, make you feel in the morning?


  Did you find yourself altering your flight path for reasons you couldn’t identify?

  Do you take unnecessary risks?

  The heads-up display registers responses, such as there are. You scan each carefully for any indication of emotional distress. You take copious notes. You bill the government five hundred dollars an hour. The taxpayers go to bed with the warm, fluffy reassurance that someone somewhere is still suffering for what no one wants to do but what no one wants to stop doing, either.

  *

  Except you’re not so sure about the suffering part. No one wants to talk about wishful thinking, which might be the only kind of thinking anyone ever does.

  *

  Lieutenant William Calley claimed to feel no guilt regarding the slaughter of hundreds of people in My Lai. Men too old to fight. Women. Children. What the hell else is war, he said, than killing people? No one was especially fond of that reasoning but it’s honestly a little hard to argue with. It would have been easier if he had felt guilt. There is an unexamined sense in all of us that there should always be at least a little guilt where killing is concerned. Maybe not enough to keep anyone up nights but you know.

  So all of a sudden we want there to be a problem in the things we created—in part—to solve that problem.

  In our desperate quest to wring sense out of everything in the entire world, no one ever suggested that we would make any ourselves.

  *

  Do you take unnecessary risks?

  No. That’s the point.

  *

  And then of course there are the ones who have never killed anyone, but we all assume they have their own set of problems. We have a list of those assumptions. We carefully itemize what we expect. We organize symptom complexes that we then try to verify, and we do try so very hard.

  It’s widely believed—and there is data to back this up, gleaned from interviews with the pilots back when the pilots mattered at all, at least in as far as anyone’s thinking went—that days and weeks and months of close surveillance of a person or persons create a condition of profound sympathy. It’s described by some as a kind of reverse Stockholm syndrome. It’s still very new and now we don’t even look for it in people anymore because, as explained, the people themselves essentially don’t enter the picture.

  So: Do you find yourself wishing to make direct contact?

  Do you dream about the people you watch? (This is assuming dreams but we find it’s easier to do that from the start, so anyway.)

  When they get hurt or die, how does that make you feel?

  Sympathy with the enemy is a terrifying prospect. Yes, of course they’re the enemy, they’re all the enemy, everyone we watch and pull into the cold scrutiny of a constant gaze is thereby made the enemy, and sometimes they are the enemy and sometimes the enemy is here as well but always there is that line between us and them and the line is clear and existent even if we can’t always tell where it is.

  But this is what we expect.

  So we fear sympathy with the enemy. It should comfort us that, in this context, such a thing no longer seems like a present danger. But you ask all your questions and you take all your notes and you can’t escape the feeling that you’re looking for it with the kind of zeal and hopefulness with which someone searches for treasure, or for evidence of a tremendously important truth.

  You want the danger to be there because the danger is something you can understand.

  *

  How does it make you feel?

  By asking this question you’re setting a very rigid framework within which you can receive sensible answers. You set the discursive terms, with your lived experience and your assumptions about how things look and work. In moments of particular self-honesty you’ll own that this is probably all about assumptions when you get right down to it. You know that there are problems with this. You’ll do it anyway, because this is what we do.

  We set the discursive terms. We make them learn our language. We make them meet us all the way and we never ask them what they wanted, because it doesn’t occur to us to wonder if they ever wanted anything to begin with.

  But: How does it make you feel?

  So you have to wonder if any of us care. And you already know that that isn’t the important part. The important part is that the question gets asked at all.

  *

  This entire process is ourselves talking to ourselves. It’s an exercise in massive, masturbatory self-analysis. And while we engage in this self-centered groping, they watch, silent and impassive. To the extent that they give us answers at all, it’s placation. They become the blankness to which we attach anything. They are not self-defining. They allow us that control, a consensual kind of tyranny, a sado-masochistic power exchange. They understand that much. They know what we need to believe. They know what we need.

  We always end up telling them everything.

  *

  Ten sessions later you’re sobbing on your couch. As a presence, it turns out a drone is comforting. And at least you have tissues.

  Love Letters to Things Lost and Gained

  I need you.

  This is a confessional moment. It’s been three weeks with you fitted against me, flush against the place where I now abruptly end. They cleaned me up, neatened and straightened, gave you to me, but it was a while before I could look at you and longer before I was willing to allow what’s left of myself to be present when you were in use.

  You’re not me. They made you to look like me; you have skin, you have what feels like bone, and I can see the shift and flow and extension of muscles inside you, but all of these things are comforting lies that don’t comfort me in the slightest. I don’t like you. We’re stuck with each other, but I don’t like you and I don’t like that everyone is expecting me to. Like you’re a favor that was done for me. Done to me—I never asked. I knew that was the policy now, because why not do everything you can do for someone, do no harm via the neglect of good that might be done, but I never thought about it in connection with anything that might happen to me. They assumed. You know what they say about assuming.

  I don’t like you. But I do need you.

  Keep that between us.

  *

  It itches. That’s the first thing I’m really aware of, besides the burning and the ghostly pins and needles that come to me in the twilight hours between sleep and waking and sleep again. Drugs used to prolong those hours, but now they’re mercifully short, and for the most part the ghosts don’t come. So the itch I feel is a real itch, my itch, and separate from the tight pull of the new skin that covers my face and neck and half of my chest.

  *

  They replaced my breast. They didn’t ask me about that either, but I did want that, at least.

  It itches, and I look down at the seam where you end and I begin. The flesh tone is an almost perfect match. Unless you look close, you can’t see it at all; it looks like a T–shirt tan, like something anyone might pick up after a summer outside. I even had one, before I lost what you’re meant to replace. It’s on the other side, too. Not really the same, but close enough.

  This near–perfection is meant to protect me from the stares of others. It’s meant to hide me. It’s meant to lie to them as well.

  It’s not a great foot to get off on.

  I lift you—I send the signals that would move those muscles if I still had those muscles to move, and you move exactly as they would. I turn you in the sunlight and I imagine our joined neural net, yours and mine, the way they now interlace. You’re not just against me, you’re inside me, and when my skin starts to crawl, I see goosebumps prickle into being all over you.

  And that just makes me start to cry. That stupid little detail. It infuriates me that they got that much right. That they were so careful when they made you, just for me. They’re probably so proud of the job they did.

  That night I dream about cutting you off with a meat cleaver. I don’t just stop at cutting you off; I chop you to pieces, watching clear fluid well around
the cuts and drip slowly out of you, out of the things that look like veins and do the same job as veins but aren’t veins at all. I look at the delicate carbon fiber core. I pick you up and throw you away from myself, and it feels like the right thing to do.

  Then I look at the part of me that’s missing, where I used to displace the air, the very atoms that make up everything around me, and I don’t feel whole. I don’t feel better. I’m just broken, and now you’re broken too.

  Even in the dream, I know I shouldn’t feel broken. I know I’m not broken. That’s a poisonous way to think. It seeps into everything like bad groundwater and it makes a person feel wrong and bad forever. But I can’t help it. Another, weaker part of me knows that I am broken. And so are you, and nothing is ever going to fix either of us.

  I wake up in the dark and I can’t even feel the ghost of that limb anymore. All that’s left is you.

  *

  I have to learn how to touch things again. Or rather, you have to learn, and I have to be patient while you do.

  *

  In physical therapy, they hand me different objects and I let you explore the texture, file it away. Your software is meant to grow and develop with me, as opposed to coming pre–programmed, so we’ll be a perfect fit. It’s also meant to help me learn about you by using you, but of course I’m being resistant, as the therapist says. She hands me a rubber ball covered in flexible spikes, a piece of sandpaper, a chunk of wood, a strip of silk. You’re not very strong yet but I’ve been told that in time, if I work with you, you’ll be double the strength of the arm I had. Your grip will be able to crush someone’s hand.