When the Nines Roll Over

by David Benioff

  I look at him. We stare at each other for several seconds.

  “Last chance,” he says. “Come with us or we’re carrying you back there.”

  He waits for me to answer. When he sees that I won’t, he reaches forward to unbuckle my belt. I don’t interfere; this has gone on long enough. I don’t want to be here anymore, among these people.

  The co-pilot signals the steward and then kneels down to grab my ankles. The steward holds me by the armpits and together they hoist me from my seat, grunting as they go. Most of the passengers are standing now. They watch in silence, already rehearsing the stories they will tell when they’re back on the ground, about the madman on their flight.

  I go limp in the crewmen’s arms and let them carry me to the rear of the plane. They shove me into the lavatory. “I’m standing right here,” the steward says before closing the door. “You’re not going anywhere until we land.”

  Here at last I strip off my soiled clothes. I wet paper towel after paper towel and sponge the filth from my body. I pump liquid soap into my hands and clean myself as best I can.

  There were days when I wanted to see Kislyany’s daughter bleeding from the eyes. I wanted him to come to me, desperate and weeping, begging for help. I would hand him sugar cubes and say, “Feed her these. She’s part of the control group. This is the way it works.”

  I’m past that now. I wish the girl a long life and happiness. But I want her to know that the grass she walks on is lush with the rot of beautiful men. And as to you Corpse I think you are good manure. What grows from the dung is what feeds us; we graze upon the graves. I want Kislyany’s daughter to know that. I want the country to know that.

  If I had to do it all over again, I would have made it work. Hector would be a movie star and I would film his every move, twenty-four framed Hectors per second. Twenty-four still-lifes. He would shimmer on screens everywhere, and then to video, Hector in every family’s living room. He’d play Prince Desiré on sets across the nation; kiss Aurora and wake her from the hundred-year slumber, rewind and wake her again, rewind and wake her again.

  I sit naked on the closed toilet seat and fall asleep to the engine’s steady hum. We fly west, thirty thousand feet above nighttime America.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Sherwin B. Nuland’s beautiful book, How We Die: Reflections on Life’s Final Chapter, was a great help in the writing of “Merde for Luck.” I thank my wonderful teachers: Ernest Hebert, Geoffrey Wolff, and Michelle Latiolais. Thank you, Molly Stern; I wish you could edit the rest of my life. Thanks also to my fellow students at U.C. Irvine, to my agents Owen Laster, Alicia Gordon, and Jennifer Rudolph Walsh, and to D. B. Weiss, whose wise counsel and late-night emails saved me from writing even worse sentences than the ones you’ve already read.