The Genocides

by Thomas Michael Disch

  To judge by his voice, Neil could not be far off. He swung his hand around in a slow arc, and it encountered not the gun, not Neil, but Blossom’s thigh. She did not betray her surprise by the slightest flinch. Now it would be easy to wrench the gun from Neil’s hand. Orville’s hand stretched up and to the left: it should be right about here.

  The metal of the gun barrel touched Orville’s forehead. The weapon made such perfect contact that Orville could feel the hollow bore, concave within a distinct circlet of cool metal.

  Neil pulled the trigger. There was a clicking sound. He pulled the trigger again. Nothing.

  Days of immersion in the sap had effectually dampened the gunpowder.

  Neil did not understand, then or ever, why the gun had failed him, but after another hollow click, he was aware that it had. Orville’s fist came up for his solar plexus and glanced off his rib cage. As Neil toppled backward, the hand holding the pistol struck down with full force where he supposed Orville’s head must be. The gunbutt struck against something hard. Orville made a noise.

  Lucky—Neil was lucky. He struck down again and hit something soft. No noise. Orville’s body was limp at his feet. Blossom had gotten away, but he didn’t mind so much about that now.

  He pulled out the axe from his gun belt, where it had been hanging, the head flat against his stomach, the handle crossing his left thigh.

  “You stay away, Buddy, you hear? I still got me an axe.”

  Then he jumped on Orville’s belly and his chest, but it was no good without shoes on, so he sat down on his belly and began hitting him in the face with his fists. Neil was beside himself. He laughed—oh, how he laughed!

  But even so he stopped at intervals to take a few swipes at the darkness with the axe. “Whoop-pee!” he yelled. “Whooppeel”

  Someone was screaming. Blossom.

  The hard part was to keep Blossom from rushing right back into the thick of it. She just wouldn’t listen.

  “No!” Buddy said. “You’d get yourself killed. You don’t know what to do. Listen—stop screaming and listen!” He shook her. She quieted. “I can get Orville away from him, so let me do it. Meanwhile, you go up the shaft the way we went before. Along the detour. Do you remember the way?”

  “Yes.” Dully.

  “You’ll do that?”

  “Yes. But you’ve got to get Jeremiah away from him.”

  “Then I’ll expect to see you up there. Go on now.”

  Buddy picked up Alice’s rigid and festering corpse, which had been already in his hands when Orville had rushed in like a fool and spoiled everything. He lugged it a few feet in the direction of Neil’s voice, stopped, grappled the old woman’s body to his chest like a suit of armor. “Oooow,” he moaned.

  “Buddy,” Neil shouted, standing, hoisting the axe, “you go away.”

  But Buddy only went on making the same silly moans and groans that children make playing ghost on a summer night or in a dark attic.

  “You can’t scare me,” Neil said. “I ain’t scared of the dark.”

  “It isn’t me, I swear,” Buddy said calmly. “It’s Alice’s ghost. She’s coming to get you. Can’t you tell by the smell it isn’t me?”

  “Ah, that’s a lot of hooey,” Neil retorted. The moaning started up again. He was uncertain whether to return to Orville or go after Buddy. “Stop it,” he yelled, “I don’t like that noise.”

  He could smell it! It was the way his father had smelled when he was dying!

  Buddy’s aim was good. The corpse struck Neil full-force across his body. A stiff hand grabbed at his eyes and wiped across his mouth, tearing his lip. He toppled, waving the axe wildly. The corpse made an awful screaming sound. Neil screamed too. Maybe it was just all one scream, Neil’s and the corpse’s together. Someone was trying to pull the axe away! Neil pulled back. He rolled over and over again and got to his feet. He still had the axe. He swung it.

  Instead of Orville, there was someone else underneath his feet. He felt the rigid face, the long hair, the puffy arms. It was Alice. She wasn’t tied, and the gag was out of her mouth.

  Someone was screaming. Neil.

  He screamed all the while he hacked apart the dead woman’s body. The head came off with one stroke of the axe. He split the skull with another. Again and again he buried the axehead into her torso, but that wouldn’t seem to come apart. Once the axe slipped and struck his ankle a glancing blow. He fell over, and the dismembered body squished under him like rotten fruit. He began to tear it to pieces with his hands. When there was no more possibility that it would haunt him again, he stood up, breathing heavily, and called out, not without a certain reverence: “Blossom?”

  I’m right here.

  Ah, he knew she would stay behind, he knew it! “And the others?” he asked.

  They’ve gone away. They told me to go away too, but I didn’t. I stayed behind.

  “Why did you do that, Blossom?”

  Because I love you.

  “I love you too, Blossom. I always have. Since you were just a little kid.”

  I know. We’ll go away together. Her voice singsonged, lulled him, rocked his tired mind like a cradle. Someplace far away where nobody can find us. Florida. We’ll live together, just the two of us, like Adam and Eve, and think of new names for all the animals. Her voice grew stronger, clearer, and more beautiful. We’ll sail on a raft down the Mississippi. Just the two of us. Night and day.

  “Oh,” said Neil, overcome with this vision. He began to walk toward the beautiful strong voice. “Oh, go on.” He was walking in a circle.

  I’ll be the queen and you’ll be my king, and there won’t be anybody else in the world.

  His hand touched her hand. His hand trembled.

  Kiss me, she said. Isn’t that what you’ve always wanted?

  “Yes.” His lips sought her lips. “Oh yes.”

  But her head, and therefore her lips, was not where one would have expected it to be. It was not attached to her neck. At last he found her head a few feet away. The lips that be kissed tasted of blood and licorice.

  And for a few days, he satisfied the years’ pent-up lusts on the head of Alice Nemerov, R.N.

  SIXTEEN

  Home Safe

  Sometimes distance is the best cure, and if you want to recuperate you keep on going. Besides, if you stopped, you couldn’t be sure of starting up again. Not that they had that much choice—they had to keep going up. So they went up.

  It was easier this time. Perhaps it was just the contrast between a sure thing (sure if they didn’t slip, but that sort of danger hardly stimulated their adrenals at this point) and the distinct if unacknowledged presence of death that had burdened these last few days, so that their ascent was also a resurrection.

  There was only one anxiety now, and it was Buddy’s. Then even this was dissipated, for after less than an hour of climbing they had reached the level of their home base, and Maryann was waiting there. The lamp was burning so they could see again, and the sight of each other, mired as they were, bruised, bleeding, brought tears to their eyes and made them laugh like children at a birthday party. The baby was all right, they were all right, everything was all right.

  “Do you want to go up to the surface now? Or do you want to rest?”

  “Now,” Buddy said.

  “Rest,” said Orville. He had just discovered that his nose was broken. It had always been such a good nose too—straight and thin, a proud nose. “Does it look awful?” he asked Blossom.

  She shook her head sadly and kissed his nose, but she wouldn’t say anything. She hadn’t said a word since the thing that had happened down there. Orville tried to return her kiss, but she averted her head.

  Buddy and Maryann went away so they could be by themselves. “He seems so much bigger,” Buddy remarked, dandling Buddy Junior. “How long have we been gone?”

  “Three days and three nights. They were long days, because I couldn’t sleep. The others have already gone up to the surface. They wouldn’
t wait. But I knew you’d be back. You promised me. Remember?”

  “Mmm,” he said, and kissed her hand.

  “Greta’s come back,” Maryann said.

  “That makes no difference to me. Not any more.”

  “It was on your account that she came back. She told me so. She says she can’t live without you.”

  “Shes got her nerve—saying that to you.”

  “She’s… changed. You’ll see. She’s not back in the same tuber where I was waiting, but in the one next above. Come, I’ll bring you to her.”

  “You sound like you want me to take up with Greta again.”

  “I only want what you want, Buddy. You say that Neil is dead. If you want to make her your second wife, I won’t stop you… if that’s what you want.”

  “That’s not what I want, dammit! And the next time I say I love you, you’d better believe me. Okay?”

  “Okay,” she said in her teensiest, church-mouse voice. There was even the suggestion of small laughter, stifled. “But you’d better see her anyhow. Because you’ll have to think of some way of getting her back to the surface. Mae Stromberg is back too, but she’s already gone up with the rest of them. She’s sort of crazy now. She was still carrying her Denny around with her—what’s left of Denny. Bones mostly. This is the tuber. Greta’s over at the other end. I’ll stay back here with the lamp. She prefers the dark.”

  Buddy smelled a rat. Soon, advancing through the tuber, he smelled something much worse. Driving through a town in southern Minnesota in pea-canning season once, he had smelt something like this—an outhouse gone sour. “Greta?” he said.

  “Buddy, is that you, Buddy?” It was surely her voice that replied, but its timbre had altered subtly. There was no crispness to the d’s, and the initial B had a sputtering sound. “How are you, Buddy? Don’t come any closer than you are! I—” There was a gasping sound, and when Greta began to speak again, she burbled, like a child who tries to talk with his mouth full of milk. “—shill lub you. I wan oo be yours. Forgib me. We can begin all over again—like Adamb an Ebe—jus us oo.”

  “What’s wrong with you?” he asked. “Are you sick?”

  “No. I—” A sound of violent gargling. “—I’m just a little hungry. I get that way now and again. Maryann brings me my food here, but she won’t ever bring me enough. Buddy, she’s trying to starve me!”

  “Maryann,” Buddy called. “Bring the light here.”

  “No, don’t!” Greta shouted. “You’ve got to answer my question first, Buddy. There’s nothing standing between us now. Maryann told me that if you wanted—No—go away! The light hurts my eyes.” There was a slopping, sucking sound, as when one moves too suddenly in a full bathtub, and the air was roiled, releasing new tides of fetor.

  Maryann handed her husband the dimly burning lamp, which he held over the sty into which the huge bulk of Greta Anderson had sunk of its own great weight. Her bloated body had lost any distinctively human features: it was an uncomplicated mass of flaccid fat. The contours of her face were obscured by folds of loose flesh like a watercolor portrait that has been left out of doors in a rainstorm. Now this face began to move from side to side, setting the, flesh into a jellylike commotion—a gesture of negation, as far as one could judge.

  “She doesn’t move any more,” Maryann explained, “and she’s too heavy to lift. The others found her when they were looking for Blossom, and they pulled her this far with ropes. I told them to leave her here, cause she needs someone to look after her. I bring her all her food. It’s a fulltime job.”

  The commotion of flesh at their feet became more agitated, and there seemed almost to be an expression on the face. Hatred, perhaps. Then an aperture opened in the center of the face, a mouth, and Greta’s voice said, “Go away, you disgush me!”

  Before they had left, the figure at their feet was already stuffing handfuls of the syrupy fruit pulp into the cavity in the center of its face.

  While the men and Blossom rested, Maryann rigged a sort of harness and even succeeded, over loud protests, in cinching it about Greta. Maryann fetched another heaping portion of swill using the laundry basket that had been rescued from the commonroom fire. If this wasn’t done for Greta at hourly intervals, she would begin to take up handfuls of the surrounding filth and stuff her gullet full of it. She no longer seemed to be aware of the difference, but Maryann was, and it was largely for her own sake that she kept the basket replenished. After Greta had downed suflicient of the fruit pulp, she was usually good, as now, for a few moments of conversation, and Maryann had been grateful for this during the long, dark hours of waiting. As Greta had often observed during these sober interludes: “The worst part is the boredom. That’s what got me into my condition.”

  Now, however, she was pursuing a less weighty subject: “There was another movie, I can’t remember the name now, where she was poor and had this funny accent, and Laurence Harvey was a medical student who fell in love with her. Or else it was Rock Hudson. She had him right in the palm of her hand, she did. He’d have done anything she said. I can’t remember how that one ended, but there was another one I liked better, with James Stewart—remember him?—where she lived in this beautiful mansion in San Francisco. Oh, you should have seen the dresses she had. And such lovely hair! She must have been the most beautiful woman in the world. And she fell down from a tower at the end. I think that’s how it ended.”

  “You must have seen just about every movie Kim Novak ever made,” Maryann said placidly while the baby nursed at her breast.

  “Well, if there was any I missed, I never heard about them. I wish you’d loosen these ropes.” But Maryann never replied to her complaints. “There was one where she was a witch, but not, you know, old-fashioned. She had an apartment right on Park Avenue or someplace like that. And the most beautiful Siamese cat.”

  “Yes, I think you’ve told me about that one already.”

  “Well, why don’t you ever contribute to the conversation? I must have told you about every movie I’ve ever seen by now.”

  “I never saw many movies.”

  “Do you suppose she’s still alive?”

  “Who—Kim Novak? No, I don’t suppose so. We may be the very last ones. That’s what Orville says.”

  “I’m hungry again.”

  “You just ate. Can’t you wait till Buddy is finished nursing?”

  “I’m hungry, I tell you! Do you think I like this?”

  “Oh, all right.” Maryann took up the basket by its one remaining handle and went off to a more wholesome section of the tuber. Filled, the basket weighed twenty pounds or more.

  When she could no longer hear Maryann nearby, Greta burst out into tears. “Oh God, I hate this! I hate her! Oh, I’m so hungry!” Her tongue ached to be covered with the beloved, licorice-flavored slop, as a three-pack smoker’s tongue craves nicotine on a morning when he has no cigarettes.

  She was not able to wait for Maryann’s return. When she had driven away the worst of her hunger, she stopped cramming the stuff in her mouth and moaned aloud in the darkness. “Oh Ga, how I hay myself! Myself, thas who I hay!”

  They had hauled Greta a long way, only stopping to rest when they had reached the uppermost tuber in which they had spent the first night of their subterranean winter. The relative coolness at this height was a welcome relief from the steamy heat blow. Greta’s silence was an even more welcome contrast. All during the ascent she had complained that the harness was strangling her, that she was caught in the vines and they were pulling her apart, that she was hungry. As they passed through each successive tuber, Greta would stuff the pulp into her mouth at a prodigious rate.

  Orville estimated that she weighed four hundred pounds. “Oh, more than that,” Buddy said. “You’re being kind.”

  They would never have been able to get her as far as they had, if the sap coating the hollow of the roots had not been such an effective lubricant. The problem now was how to hoist her up the last thirty, vertical feet of the
primary root. Buddy suggested a system of pulleys, but Orville feared that the ropes at their disposal might not be able to support Greta’s full weight. “And even if they can how will we get her out through that hole? In December, Maryann was barely able to squeeze in through it.”

  “One of us will have to go back for the axe.”

  “Now? Not this one of us—not when we’re this close to the sunlight. I say let’s leave her here where there’s food ready at hand for her and go up the rest of the way ourselves. Later is time enough to be Good Samaritans.”

  “Buddy, what’s that sound?” Maryann asked. It was not like Maryann to interrupt.

  They listened, and even before they heard it, they feared what it might be, what it was. A low grating sound—a whine—a rasp not so loud a noise as the metal sphere had made trying to push its way into the cave, because, for one thing, it was farther away, and for another, it did not seem to be having the same difficulty purchasing entrance. The whine grew louder; then a vast flushing sound ensued, as when a swimming pool begins to drain.

  Whatever it was, it was now in the tuber with them.

  With a fury sudden as their terror, a wind sprang up and bowled them to their knees. Tides of liquid fruit rose from the floor and walls and dropped from the ceiling; the wind swept off the crest of each successive wave and carried it toward the far end of the tuber, like the superfluous suds that spill out of an automatic washer. All that could be seen in the lamplight were white flashes of the blowing froth. Maryann clutched her child to her breast convulsively, after a blast of wind had almost lifted him from her arms. Assisted by Buddy, leaning into the wind, she made her way to the sanctuary of a root that branched off from the tuber. There they were sheltered from the worst effects of the gale, which seemed to howl still more fiercely now.