Thirteen Specimens

by Thomas, Jeffrey

She turned into the foyer, and the woman at the counter looked up at her. “Did you enjoy our museum, miss?” she asked blandly, like an automaton.

  Clara glanced behind her, but no longer saw her guide through the open doorway. She took a few steps closer to the counter. “Yes, it was fascinating. Are there any books on Mr. Stewart and his wife in your gift shop?”

  The woman straightened a little in her seat. “Mr. Stewart was never married, miss.”

  “But...your tour guide...”

  The woman leaned to one side to see around Clara, then sat back again. “We have no tour guides in this museum, miss.”

  “But...the man in the red jacket...” She gestured awkwardly behind her.

  “Oh, yes -- Mr. Gardner. He comes here often, miss. His late wife was extremely fond of our museum.” She lowered her voice to a whisper. “His wife drowned herself a few years ago, poor thing.”

  Clara stared at the woman for a few moments, then remembered to consult her watch. She had to be on her way. Before she approached the exit, she cast one more look over her shoulder toward the threshold to the main gallery. Then, switched her attention to the guidebooks waiting in receptacles in the front of the desk. So that she might learn the true histories of the exhibits she had seen here, she was tempted to take one of the booklets with her.

  But she decided that she preferred not to.

  Titles of Poem Not Written

  Playgrounds of the Damned

  Tampons of the Gods

  Let’s Draft Uncle Sam

  Fishes Armed With Rods

  God’s Jelly Mold

  Protoplasmic Dreams

  Hamsters Brave and Bold

  Termite Invasion Schemes

  A Fistful of Aphorisms

  North is Really South

  Unheard Cataclysms

  I Ate My Mouth

  Cadavers on Parade

  Ameba Mating Calls

  I’m Butter to Your Blade

  Celery Has Such Gall

  Nature’s Sick Jokes

  Salt According to Taste

  Tarot Cards in Bicycle Spokes

  My Very Own Hazardous Waste

  Nuns With Bazookas

  Curing a Dead Rat

  Babies Smoking Hookahs

  This is Really That

  Pollution For Profit

  Baby Seals For Brunch

  Every Home’s a Tophet

  God’s Without a Hunch

  The Clearance Sale of Life

  The Abacus of Death

  A TV Set’s My Wife

  Once I Heard My Breath

  Close Enough

  “If your pictures aren’t good enough, then you aren’t close enough.”

  – photographer Robert Capa (1913-1954), who was killed when he stepped on a land mine in Indochina.

  It wasn’t until two decades after his assignment as a photojournalist in Vietnam that Robert Candle took a Vietnamese woman as his lover.

  Her name was Linh, and she worked behind the counter in a little Vietnamese sandwich shop in the city, which Candle chanced upon one day while running an errand. He hadn’t eaten much of their food over there, but he had enjoyed their banh mi, and the small woman with black hair flowing down her back and black eyes with epicanthic folds made him one of these sub-like sandwiches on a sideboard while he watched. She was amiable, and chatted with him. A few days later he found himself back in the shop again, for another banh mi and a package of spring rolls with a spicy fish-based dipping sauce. It became a weekly ritual, until the week he invited her from behind the counter to eat dinner with him somewhere else.

  Linh had come to this country in 1977, eleven years ago, in a boat that had been intercepted along the way by Thai pirates. She had avoided being raped by them, but her husband had been killed while trying to protect his sister from that fate. Linh lived in the city with her two teenage sons, in the chitin exoskeleton of one of the great insect buildings, once alive and able to interact with its inhabitants to some extent, but now just another cold monument to the time of the Guests. Linh had never remarried, and was forty to Candle’s forty-six.

  “I saw a story on TV not too long ago, about a girl named Linh,” he told her over their steaks. Linh had boasted that she liked all kinds of Western food, unlike many of her people here, who stuck to their own cuisine. “It was an interview with this American who killed a North Vietnamese soldier. While he was going through this guy’s wallet he found a photograph of a little girl, posed with her father – the dead soldier. Somehow he couldn’t bring himself to just throw it away, and so he hung onto it...for many years. He kept it in his own wallet, and it haunted him. The guilt. So finally, like two years ago I think, he flew back to Vietnam and managed to track down this girl – Linh – to give her the picture. The program showed it, when they met each other for the first time. The girl looked really torn for a second there, like she wasn’t sure how she should react to this man who killed her father, you know? But then they embraced each other and both of them just broke down and cried.”

  Through all this, Linh had merely been nodding, her face impassive. When he had finished, she snorted. “Ha. He should have shot the little girl, too.”

  Candle chuckled uneasily, surprised. “Linh,” he scolded her.

  She widened her beautiful eyes at him meaningfully and simply said, drawing it out, “Vi-et Cong.”

  “Well, I felt it was a very beautiful story. I thought you’d think so, too. Anyway, the little girl wasn’t Viet Cong.”

  “They were all Viet Cong,” Linh told him, with venom not tempered by the years.

  Candle took a slow sip of his beer, then set it down. Though he had told Linh that he’d worked as a wartime photographer in the country of her origin, he had never told her what he’d seen there. Returning his gaze to hers, with the pleasant sound of forks clinking on plates and families softly laughing all around him, he asked her, “You know about My Lai...right?”

  * * *

  “Yee-haw!” a GI named Lever called, watching his buddy Spindle ride on the back of a water buffalo. The animal was snorting furiously, eyes rolling with their whites showing, whipping around and stomping its hooves. Streams of blood ran down its dark neck as Spindle thrust his bayonet into its body again and again like a picador, somehow managing to keep himself astride it.

  A sow was squealing hideously not far away. It had been purposely wounded rather than killed, so that its suffering might be protracted, in case it was a communist pig out of a story by Orwell. Strewn everywhere throughout the village dubbed My Lai 4 were slaughtered – or rather, executed – cows, pigs, ducks. One member of Charlie Company, a medic, had shot some of the maimed animals to put them out of their misery...or perhaps to occupy himself sufficiently that he wouldn’t be called upon to fire at bipedal targets.

  “Ride ‘em cowboy!” a soldier named Cog cried to Spindle.

  “Riding bareback,” chuckled Lever.

  “Speaking of riding bareback,” said Cog, nudging his companion and pointing off in a different direction.

  “Oh...hey...yeah.” Now they began howling their encouragement to another group of soldiers at play, while drifting over to join them.

  Candle, the photographer, was finding it hard to line up a good picture of the young soldier atop the buffalo because of its frantic whirling. He looked up at the two men who had been shouting to Spindle, and saw where they were headed. He left Spindle to his sport in order to scurry after them.

  Lever glanced over his shoulder at the photographer and grinned as if to pose for a portrait on the go. He was heavily laden with the accouterments of a warrior: a flak jacket, M-26 hand grenades, 17-shot magazines for his M-16, a canteen, a .45 in a holster, and a long braid of human hair curled around his helmet. He had sliced it off the head of a young Vietnamese girl.

  “Come on, Candlelight!” he yelled. “Let’s make the Guests a movie to put that flick from last night to shame!”

  Last night, March fifteenth, some of the men of
Company C had sat around drinking beer, chewing steaks, and watching a skin flick. (“All we need is the apple pie,” Candle had joked humorlessly, half-aloud.) Lever called Candle Candlelight, and last night while somewhat inebriated had gripped Candle’s forearm – himself in the grip of a sudden intense epiphany – and said, “You should do a book of your pictures when you get back home, man. Not for the Guests, you know...but for you, so you can get some money off it. Win the Pulitzer Prize, man. You can call it – Inferno by Candlelight.”

  “Inferno by Candlelight,” Candle had echoed, nodding, as if impressed. “Poetic...”

  “I wrote poetry in high school, man,” explained Lever...who now joined a cluster of almost a dozen men who had either already raped the girl they surrounded, or were waiting for their turn to do so – like the kids they had been not so long ago, lined up at a carnival ride. “Now this is why they call this dump Pinkville!” Lever enthused.

  Candle nudged between their bodies to get a shot of the girl on the ground. He took her to be about 16 years old. One GI was atop her, his green trousers bunched down past his white buttocks. Another was kneeling over her face, being fellated. She was giving a fatalistic hand job to a third soldier, no doubt praying that the simple action of her hand might make him one less man willing to kill her.

  Candle knew that her complacency would not make a bit of difference. Already this day, he had photographed three soldiers as they took turns raping a girl of 17 inside a hut. After they had finished with her, one of the men had stepped back, pointed his M-16 down at her lovely exotic face and shot it utterly away.

  That had been the first instance of the rite called “becoming a double veteran” that Candle had witnessed today. A “double veteran” was one who killed the woman he raped. There had been so many others since then that he already felt like a kind of long-time veteran himself, but when he had observed that first occurrence he had involuntarily lowered the camera and shouted, “Hey! Hey!”

  The man who had murdered the girl looked up at Candle just a little bit menacingly. “What’s the problem, shutterbug?” He gestured with the same M-16. “Your pet seems to be having a good time.”

  Shutterbug was an apt pun, and calling Candle’s attention to his camera’s obvious excitement was a sly way of reminding him of the very important function he was expected to perform for the Guests. The camera was still stimulated even with the rape finished, as it continued to gaze upon the small, shattered, doll-like body. The creature’s own body was covered in a shell of hard chitin, causing it to resemble a horseshoe crab, or a prehistoric trilobite. Its olive drab color also made it look to Candle like one of the infantrymen’s helmets. Ringing the large insect’s body was a fringe of jointed legs so fine they were almost thread-like, and when the animal became excited about what it observed and transmitted to the Guests, those legs rippled with a faster and faster rhythm. Of course, the thing itself was mindless, but its exhilaration seemed an expression of the Guests themselves as they received its images in whatever realm or plane of existence they called their home.

  There was one large eye centered in the front of the creature, and a metal handle affixed to its underside. Candle often felt more like a mule hired to carry the living camera about than a real photographer. He did not have to concern himself with composition to any great extent, lighting conditions and F-stops. All he had to do was transport this animal, and point it at what he knew it wanted to see. Yes, he did extract the cylinder from its pinched rear orifice when the film strip inside was full (at which point, this model half-ejected the cylinder on its own), but the images recorded into those containers were for human use, in human newspapers, in human TV news programs. As for the Guests, who could never reach this world but were fascinated by it all the same (were perhaps all the more fascinated because they could never come here) – who could do no more than influence the mutation of simple earthly insects into useful forms – they did not need to view the record of images because they could witness the proceedings just as they happened. Moving pictures, taken in through the cyclops eye of a camera such as this one, which often seemed like a heavy extension of Candle’s own arm. A race of voyeurs, was how Candle thought of them, unseen behind the door of their own dimension...but their collective eye avidly pressed to the keyhole of his living lens.

  The Guests essentially paid his bills, however. And he hadn’t told Lever last night that he did in fact entertain dreams of prizes and books, one day. Of making some kind of lasting impression, a record of his accomplishments, like the records of other lives he was ever capturing in the cartridges he inserted into his nameless pet. His own history would be defined by association with the broader history he felt compelled to secure proof of...

  After a while, Candle could take no more of the teenage girl’s humiliation. Her stunned surrender made it all the more horrible to him. He lowered the camera to point at the ground but he was sure the device wouldn’t be too disappointed; there was so much yet to see. As he turned to walk away, though, Cog spotted him and said, “Hey, guy, don’t you want a piece of this?”

  “No thanks,” he said.

  “I’ll save ya a piece,” said Lever, who slid out his bayonet with a ringing metallic hiss from its sheath. Candle hadn’t actually seen Lever do such things himself, in the past few hours since they had arrived, but he had photographed the bodies of other women who had had their vaginas torn wider with bayonets after being raped – or perhaps before, so as to better accommodate the large Americans. One sprawled child he had seen in this condition he’d guessed to be 10 years old. He had needed to look away from her quickly, but had continued aiming the camera in her direction until he thought it had drunk its fill.

  “Lick it up,” he had muttered, too softly for himself to hear over the crackle of gunfire, over the pleading wails of women and panicky shrieks of children. “Choke on it, you fuck.”

  But maybe Lever had in fact been one of those to mutilate women in that way. He might even have used his bayonet to carve the words “C Company” into a corpse’s chest. Or to cut the hands off a body. Or its head. To slice out its tongue, or pry off its scalp. To slit the throat of a toddler. To disembowel an elderly grandmother. Candle had seen all this creative artistry today, rendered by the soldiers’ sculpting blades. But they had also adopted other imaginative means of exterminating the villagers. Some bodies hung from trees by their necks. One victim of a “double veteran” rite had clearly had a gun fired inside her vagina. And watching it all, sucking it all in like a vacuum cleaner, the camera made not a sound, except for the very faint swishing of its encircling centipede limbs.

  Early in the massacre, Candle had caught the medic by his elbow and stopped him temporarily from dispatching wounded buffalos. “These are civilians!” he had ranted. “No one is shooting back at us! There are no VC in this fucking village!”

  “Our guys are fired up...they want revenge for the men we lost in that minefield...”

  “The villagers didn’t even set those mines! It was our allies, the Koreans – I thought everyone knew that now!”

  “Candle, this was the order at the briefing. You think I like it? I don’t like it any more than you do! But what can I do, tackle all these kids and wrestle their guns away? What can you do, except do your job?” He had nodded at the organic camera in the photographer’s fist. “You know that thing is in absolute heaven today.”

  “I thought I saw Sergeant Wrench around here,” Candle had continued fuming, glancing about him.

  “Yeah, I saw him. He went into one of the hootches, dragging a girl by the arm.”

  Candle had known then that it was senseless seeking out and appealing to the officer, to any of the officers. And wasn’t the medic right? As much as it repulsed him, outraged him, didn’t he have a job to do? If he didn’t catch as much of this incident as he could for the Guests, and for the newspapers, he was sure to be summoned by his superiors. Maybe even arrested for insubordination, dereliction of duty, going AWOL from
his contracted function...

  Now Candle drifted onward, through wafting gun smoke from hot rifle barrels and the rolling sooty smoke from burning dwellings. His boots ground spent cartridges against each other like gnashing teeth. Out of the eye-stinging black fog an old woman shuffled toward him. He saw, with such disbelief that he almost forgot to raise the camera until its wriggling legs brushed his thigh, that an unexploded M-79 grenade was embedded in her belly. For the first time today, he felt the impulse to tear from its holster the .45 Colt he wore but had never once fired. He was actually grateful, though startled, when an M-16 on fully automatic rattled and the woman went down. Fortunately for Candle, perhaps, the slugs hadn’t hit the grenade.

  One of the nine airships of the 174th Assault Company came hovering overhead, the thumping of its four dragonfly wings – moving so fast they were a nearly invisible blur – making the ground smoke swirl and coil. The smoke cleared enough to expose a stand of bamboo trees, and the three people who had hunkered down behind them. They bolted. Someone on the ground opened up on them at the same time that the ship’s gunner let loose with his mounted M-60. The three Vietnamese – a man, woman and boy holding hands – were cut into pieces, the father’s head literally chopped off his body. Candle flinched, half-expecting to get hit by some of the wildly spraying rounds, but already the huge insect was wheeling its body to point in another direction, and lifting somewhat higher so the gunner could thoroughly strafe a dwelling that thus far had escaped burning.

  Candle’s first real frames of the day (a trigger on the camera’s metal handle sent a mild electric jolt into the creature he carried, commanding it to transmit a particular image onto the film roll) had been shot from inside the living airship that had transported him here, and of the eight other organic craft as they began to lift off. They were huge creatures with stiff tapering tails, blind, guided by the men who rode in the hollow backs of their humped carapaces. They had been developed and shaped by the Guests – who had even made them a camouflaged olive green like Candle’s instrument – as if they were gods guiding animal species through their evolution, adapting them to a certain environment.