I, Sniper

by Stephen Hunter

  “Now your second type,” Anto continued, “your second type is driven by stupidity. He is of slothful demeanor and mental habit. He’s after knowing nothing of the torturer’s trade and art, of the subtle progressions in debasement, the delicacy of psychology, the nuance of pain. He’s pure brute, usually a fat boy whom all the wee ones picked on when he himself was wee and wan. So he grew in pain, he hated his own fat self for its immensity, for how slow it made him at games, for the way it drove the girlies far away, as who’d cuddle with a fat one, who was probably moist in odd ways too, and breathed also through his mouth. This fella takes all the pain and he simply inverts it; after fifteen years or so of torment, he decides he will himself be the dispenser of torment. By this time, the fat that exiled him has turned to muscle via the alchemy of rage and he learns that size has its virtues: he is the crusher, the stomper, the basher, the giant atop the beanstalk, chanting, ‘Fee-fi-fo-fum, I smell the blood of an Englishman.’ His empathy has been burned out of him, spent all on himself. He feels nothing for what he does to you. It does not register. He is relentless, energetic, unstoppable. Alas, he has no finesse. Be glad it’s not him who’s your guide through the land of torture, but someone a filigree wiser. For the crusher would crush; he’d have broken all them ribs by now, knocked out all them teeth, crushed all them fingers. Your nose would be a lamb patty, and if your lips locked shut in seizure, you’d drown in your own blood and puke before they could be pried open, as he’d have no idea which nerve was the button to pop the lock. It would be a banjax and a half, I’ll tell you, and I’d be breathin’ hard as if at sport, and the boys would be drenched in sweat and blood and vomit—messy, messy, and worst of all, so inefficient. For if I put my strength against yours, I put your ego into the equation and you see a way to beat me. No matter how I pound you, no matter how my sharp knuckles rend your flesh, your ego keeps your hate alive, which anesthetizes you. Give you hope of victory, and it’s victory that comes your way.”

  Next came the towel. It was wrapped heavily around Swagger’s face, flattening his nose, clogging his breathing passages, taking his vision from him. Why imprison the body when one could imprison the head? It was the same thing. Claustrophobia, most men’s scourge, was set free by these powerful folds encasing the face, making the air itself a labor to obtain, sowing seeds of fear meant to blossom in the coming minutes.

  “Then there’s the regretful torturer,” said Anto. “Him I despise the most. He’s too good for his line of work, and what got him here in the dungeon with the animals unleashing debasement and humiliation and filth upon another human being, that is such a complex story, and he’d love nothing better than to tell it to you in all its ironies and comic macabres, straight out of our minor Irish writers, but alas he hasn’t the time, because he’s got to crank the telephone wires full of juice to fry your man parts. ‘So sorry. Don’t think ill of me. I’m as much victim as you are. I feel your pain. My heart is with you. We should bond and somehow, if you’d but break, you can spare us both the torment of the next hours. It’s in your power. Don’t make me do it. I don’t want to do it and it’s only your intransigence that forces it upon me. Is it not manifest that, morally and intellectually, I am so far in advance of such behavior?’ Do you not see the play of narcissism in the fellow’s maunderings? Your torture isn’t about you, it’s about him. He’s the secret hero and victim of the transaction. The first bucket, fellows. Bobby Lee, try not to fight it, me friend. If you fight it, it goes far worse, and it ruins your heroism. Accept it, go with it a bit, and then you’ll have done your duty. You’ll probably beat the lieutenant colonel and that’s enough, but no man can stand more than two buckets. You’ll go three, that’s an hour. You’re the hero type, I’m knowing. He’s a right bucko, eh, Ginger?”

  “I don’t know, Anto. Possibly he’s a shitter. Many are, you know.”

  “Indeed, many are. The lieutenant colonel, I remember, he was a shitter, finally, at the end.”

  “He was.”

  “Still, I doubt Sniper Bob will be a shitter, Ginger. His head is on too tight and it’s far too full of chary notions like honor and dignity. He’ll keep his bottom plugged hard, you’ll see.”

  Swagger felt the water, first as weight, then as damp, then as wet, then as drench, finally as death. It came as infiltrators arrive, from all points, without a lot of commotion or hubbub, glimpsed from far away and then somehow suddenly gigantic and everywhere, the world was water.

  The water rose through the towel and clamped itself upon his face. He tried to hold his face tight to fight it, keep it from tunneling into his systems, but that defense lasted only a second. It unleashed fear. Swagger was not a fearful man and had learned over long, hard years how to separate himself from the rat teeth of what little fear he felt, how to objectify the agony and examine it as if it were the product of some other mind, a scientific phenomenon to be studied. That worked for a bit, and then that defense too was overwhelmed.

  He felt his body jack and spasm as the Irishmen leaned into it and all his strength went against all theirs and since there were more of them, they prevailed, leaving him alone, finally, with the water.

  Water, water, everywhere. Funny little rhyme from somewhere lost, it was nevertheless the hard truth of this moment, as his mind now spasmed, just as his body did and lost control against the totality of death and wet that clamped upon his face, until he blew hard against the towel, expelling some small portion of what had come in, and then he reflexively inhaled and there was no air, only a rushing wall of water, coded with cold and death, and here it was at last, he’d dealt enough of it to men the world over, turning Panther Battalion’s legions to anonymous grave markers in a foreign land, blowing Payne’s arm off and Shreck’s lungs out, outsniping the general in the bitter woods of Arkansas, taking down the Cubans on the high road in the mountains, oh so many, sending the fat Jap’s head spinning through space as he was about to dispatch Susan, then upstroking Kondo, the man stunned that his own blow had bounced off a steel hip, him driving the sword so hard to spine, God, the blood, a man had so much blood inside him, and those four Grumley fucks, in store and parking lot, each thinking himself such a gunman and finding out no, I’m not much of a gunman next to Swagger, and finally those two gangbangers in the car fight, so many of them, and now he’d join them, they’d saved him a place in hell right among them—

  The air rushed in. He breathed it hard as the towel was torn off, sucking it in, pure elixir of ambrosia, cold and life-sustaining, his lungs inflating greedily.

  “Did I not tell you, boys, did I not? A strong fellow, sure, so he is. Almost a minute in the universe of the drowning and not a word for it.”

  “And no shit at all,” said Jimmy. “His buttocks got a cork a’tween ’em.”

  “He is tough,” said Ginger. “Give the poor beggar that. Impressive start. A right bucko, as you said, Anto. Maybe ’twill be a long night’s work.”

  “On the other hand,” said Jimmy, “maybe that was it for the fella. Now he’s spent. He gave it a good go, but he isn’t holding it today, not now that he knows what it’s like and how far beyond deciding it is.”

  Anto took the opportunity to continue the lecture.

  “Finally,” he said, “there’s my kind of torturer. I am what is called the duty torturer. I ask no understanding, and if caught out by the Clara Bartons of the news, then I go to me fate with dignity, sure in the conviction that what I done was in the right, no matter how them lady-fellows spun it round and made it seem evil. Because of Anto Grogan and his three leprechauns, there’s a hundred-odd British squaddies back in Blighty, drinking Mr. Guinness’s black velvet and enjoying their fine plowman’s lunch. We won’t comment on the fact that the fookin’ Brits always make their pet Irish their torturers, because they know we have the strength, which they themselves do not, and at the same time will take our ultimate fate, our dismissal and disgrace, with dignity befitting our proud race. So when the four of us are found out and called beas
ts and driven from the service we have given our lives to, then that’s fine by us, it is. We seen the duty, we done the duty. We take the crap that comes afterwards, the shit the Clara Bartons bring to us. You may ask the boys, perhaps they differ, but because of what we done in the night in the cellar of the jail with the buckets and buckets of lovely snotgreen water—because of that we knew in the day where the camel jiggers would be, and we put them down. Lord God, Sniper Swagger, you alone of men would know how godly that was, how Christian civilization was what we defended with our manly trigger fingers. Remember that wolfish Yank in the movie and his speech about standing on the wall? That was us, boyo, on the wall, doing the duty that had to be done. Or do you read Orwell? You’ve heard the one I loves so, about the comfort and warmth of many fine people in England, which I extend to Christian civilization, because rough men do dark deeds by night. We here in this room, all of us, are mates, having done the dark deeds, having been the rough men. Sniper, are you ready for more?”

  Who could outspeak a poet? Not Swagger.

  “Fuck you, Mr. Potatohead.”

  Anto sighed, as if disappointed in the lame zinger that Swagger had improvised, and more disappointed that his hero was no Oscar Wilde, answering in honed epigrams.

  “A comment bespeaking futility. No better than the sod carrier’s curse. Are yis not finished yet?” he wondered and stared into Swagger’s twisted, drenched face, and answered his own question. “You are not. Still, I think you’ll be before I have my breakfast eaten. Second bucket, buckos.”

  “You talk too much.”

  “I do, I do. The Irishman’s curse.”

  The second bucket was a creature. It hunted him through the towel and he squirmed and struggled, trying to fight for a last wisp of oxygen trapped in the fibers of the towel, but then it had him. He thought of some kind of wet squid, something monstrous from the dark, dark well of human fear, some glistening, tentacled, boneless crusher from the deep that wrapped its wet strong arms about him and buried his face in the nexus where all those legs formed some kind of hideous, pink, cold, horror-movie sucking mask. Wet and cold and slimy, oceanic and ancient, it fought to snatch his soul from him, and he felt his body bucking against its grip, his bound knees trying to rip free, his hands trying to claw away from their plastic wires, and he had an image of ripping the thing off his face and throwing it to the floor and stomping it, smashing it with his boots, feeling it squirm in endless pain as it died spewing green greasy guts across the floor and then it all went black—

  “You said he’d be a fighter, and a fighter he is,” Ginger said, as Bob came back to consciousness through a sense of dislocation. Air, there was air.

  “Almost nobody lasts long enough to actually pass out,” said Jimmy, with just a hint of awe showing in his voice. “I don’t recall any man ever passing out. They panic and beg for release, but no one can consciously hold their breath long enough to simply make themselves faint like that.”

  “Agh,” said Anto, “he does have the fight in him, for such a string bean of a fellow. You’d have thought a bruiser might have a bigger lung capacity and do well under the towel, but this fella’s nothing but skin and bones, yet he’s got a lot of battle in them scrawny pants of his. And again, Ginger, not a shitter, is he? I should have bet you, Ginger, on that. Give it to me. I knew he wasn’t a shitter.”

  Anto leaned into Bob’s face, peering intently, seeking answers.

  “Sniper, you’re a lot of trouble.”

  “Begging your pardon, Anto,” said a new voice—it had to be the one called Raymond, who hardly ever spoke—“but maybe it’s best if yis don’t be calling him ‘Sniper.’ It reminds him of who he is, and in that perhaps he’s finding his bloody strength.”

  “Hmm,” said Anto, “good point, Raymond. Should I try the reverse then?”

  “I should,” said Raymond. “Don’t build him up, tear the fellow down. Make him see how little he is, how he cannot win, how we hold all the cards, we are the power. This man here is a man being tortured in a cellar, the lowest form of life there is, at the whim and mercy of them that has him.”

  “Did you hear that, you bloody bastard?” Anto asked Bob. “Raymond thinks I’m all wrong, I’m building you up when it’s tearing you down that should be my pathway. All right then, I’ll try it. Nobody can say I don’t listen to suggestions. Hero! What tripe! What rotten spew! What yellow runny shit! You’d be nothing. Do you hear? You’re a man who’s killed boys and women in your time, as have we all. You ain’t no hero, you’re a bloody killer, with your fancy rifle, lyin’ up in the grass, waiting for the poor sods to come out and then taking all from them with but the three ounces you put into the trigger, and it’s nothing to you, but somewhere there’s a widow cryin’, a baby or two starvin’, a mate grievin’, a father disconsolate, a mother ruined. But that’s nothing to the bastard in them bushes calmly and without a scratch on him looking for his next voyager and hoping to get back while the scoff’s still hot. Aye, looking at him makes me sick, boys. Douse him again. Get this bastard done so I don’t have to truck with the gobshite.”

  The next bucket was pain. That’s all. Through all Swagger, the pain was general. It had nothing to do with concepts such as “water” or “torture” or with who he was and what he knew and who he was responsible to; it had no meaning whatsoever. It was just pure, harsh, absolute pain, radiating outward from his lungs as his discipline gave and he took water deep inside all his channels, and yet through it all, he noticed that a little pain in his backward-bent wrist, where the flex-cuff’s sharp plastic edge cut him enough to penetrate the general blanket of agony, and in need of something to control his mind, some servomechanism on panic, he twisted that wrist harder, feeling the goddamned plastic edge bite deeper and deeper, and he tried to imagine how it sawed through the muscle fibers, rawly separating them, and how of their own volition they peeled upward, away from each other, emitting a thin penmanship of blood from the subcutaneous network of capillaries in his skin, not a gush of blood, just a scrawl of it, but he concentrated on the pain, the sharp, biting pain of that tiny wound against the larger insult to body and mind and—

  “Goddamn the fellow, will he not give!” screamed Anto. “The bastard is getting on me nerves. We’re all knackered hard, sure we is. What, how many buckets now, Jimmy?”

  Three, thought Bob, I’ve lasted three buckets on these motherfuckers.

  “That would be seven now, Anto,” said Ginger.

  Seven! He’d lost track, his mind was falling in and out of gear. Seven. He must have been there for hours. He had no idea.

  Someone slapped him hard in the face. His eyes opened, revealing nothing but blur and sparkle behind which figures moved, and then someone wiped them clear of water, and he saw now the four had stripped off their shirts and were down to undershirts, the bulky ones, tattooed muscles glistening with either sweat or splash from their labor, and scrawny Raymond like a wet rat. They were breathing hard, and all had hair pasted down flat and damp.

  Seven buckets on you motherfuckers, he thought, even though it was hard to remember who, exactly, he was, and why he was here or what this was all about. That had vanished somewhere along with the untracked buckets.

  “Jaysus Janey Mac, he’s hard of head,” said Anto. “All right, goddamn your black heart, Swagger, now I’m giving it to you straight. You listen hard. I’m bloody tired of you acting the maggot. This time, we kill you. If you’d any to tell, you’d have told, I’m sure. Your silence makes its point: you’ve told no one of your findings, because if you had, you’d give them up. You’d put them between you and the horror of the water. Remember Winston in Room 101, when finally he gave up Julia out of fear of the rats lunching on his nose. If you had a Julia to give us, you’d have given us she long before. So there is no Julia—”

  What was this asshole ranting about?

  “—there is no Bureau, there is no report protocol nor coded words, there is no waiting SWAT team. You’re on your own, Sniper, an
d I should have known because us snipers is lonely bastards, out beyond, doing the dark thing solitarylike and crawling back then where all the boys pretend they don’t see you because you’re naked death, whilst they’s battle-killin’, a whole different kettle of shad, unless of course Johnny Muhammad has snipers, and then it’s your ass sure they be lovin’. But you’re alone in this one, and that means that in the way things are, you’re no better at all than I. You’re not a holy warrior fighting for some holy cause like the goddamned rug weavers, you’re a bloody mercenary. You take your wages and you’ll soon be dead, and heaven ain’t suspended and earth’s foundations ain’t fled. You’re just dead. Okay boys, this is it, I’m done fooling with this one. Swagger, ’tis a shame to end up drownded dead in a bucket like a Titanic rat after all ye’ve been and done, but there it lies.”

  Again the towel was clamped and the hard muscled limbs pressed against his bound body to hold against the spasms of the drowning man, and again he felt the dread infiltration of the water, its first mild licks, its rising chill, its fingers somehow clawing to rip at his mouth and nose and tear them wide open to fill them and kill him dead drowning.

  This bucket was blue. That is to say, as the water rushed through the towel and clamped its intensity across his face, he was taken back in memory close on fifty years, and he remembered a day at the public pool in Little Rock, sometime in the fifties, a bright, hot summer, he and a thousand other kids flapping and jostling and splashing in that vast blue wetness, and he was trying to swim on his own and somehow his thin boy’s arms propelled him a certain blind distance in a certain blind direction and for just a second he actually was flat in the water propelling himself along on the rhythm of his muscles and then he ran out of strength and settled to the bottom, and that was when he realized he had swum too far in the wrong direction and was now in over his head. This is how children drown; caught in the grip of panic, he opened his mouth to scream but it didn’t happen and instead the cold, chlorinated brew of the pool raced in torrents into lungs and gut, and the lack of oxygen tripped off a flare of fear and he flappity-flap-flapped and he sank yet further and he had a moment when he knew he was dead and he saw blue blue blue shot with bubbles arising as if he were dying in Alka-Seltzer or some terrible thing, and suddenly someone strong had him, and the sun burst above him as if it were some kind of skyrocket, and the air rushed him, sucked with all the hunger of the young, and he was propelled this way in the strong hands of his savior, who of course was no one less than his father.