Thomas Disch - The Genocides

Of them all, Buddy was the most upset by this, for he could remember the winter before, in the commonroom, and the people who had run out into the thawing snow, laughing and singing, never to return. Blossom’s laughter was not unlike theirs.

The root at this point opened onto a tuber of fruit, and they decided to rest and eat. Orville tried to calm Blossom, but Neil told him to shut up. The pulp, which was now semiliquid, dropped down on their heads and shoulders like the droppings of huge, diarrhetic birds.

Neil was torn between his desire to go away where the noise of his sister’s laughter wouldn’t disturb him and an equally strong desire to stay close at hand and protect her. He compromised, removing to a middle distance, where he lay on his back, not intending to go to sleep, just to rest his body…

His head came down on the handle of the axe that Jeremiah had dropped there. He let out a little cry, which nobody noticed. They were all of them so tired. He sat for a long time, thinking very hard, his eyes crossing with the effort, though you couldn’t see anything in that uncompromising dark.

The softened fruit pulp continued to fall from overhead and spatter on their bodies and on the floor with little crepitant sounds, like the sounds of children’s kisses.

His hand touched her dead body. Buddy thought at first it was his father’s corpse, but then he remembered how he had once already stumbled across that same cold body, and delight displaced terror: there was a way back! This was the thread that led out of the labyrinth. He traced his steps back to Orville and Blossom.

“Is Neil asleep?” he asked.

“He’s stopped whistling,” Orville said. “He’s either asleep or dead.”

Buddy told them his news. “…and so, you see, that means we can go back the way we tried to in the first place. Up the shaft. It was a mistake, our turning back when we did.”

“Here we are, come full circle. The only difference now,” Orville observed, “is that we’ve got Neil with us. Perhaps we’d do best to ignore that difference and leave him behind. We can go now.”

“I thought we’d agreed to let the others decide what to do with Neil.”

“We won’t be doing away with him. We’ll be leaving him in almost exactly the same place we found him—caught in the trap he meant for you. Besides, we can leave Alice’s body in his way, and he can figure out for himself that the way back is up the shaft he threw her down.”

“Not my half-brother. Not Neil. He’d only get scared if he found her body. As for figuring his way back, you might as well expect him to discover the Pythagorean theorem all by himself. Hell, I’ll bet if you tried to explain that to him, he wouldn’t believe it.”

Blossom, who had been listening to all this rather dazedly, began to shiver, as the tension which her body had sustained so long began to drain away. It was like the time she’d gone swimming in the lake in April; her flesh trembled, yet at the same time she felt strangely rigid. Then her body, naked and taut, was suddenly pressed against Orville’s, and she did not know if he had come to her or she to him. “Oh darling, we’ll go back! We will —after all! Oh, my very own!”

Neil’s voice shrilled in the darkness: “I heard that!”

Though she could hear Neil gallumphing forward, Blossom sustained the kiss desperately. Her fingers tightened into Orville’s arms, grappled in the wiry muscles. Her body strained forward as his tried to pull away. Then a hand closed around her mouth and another around her shoulder and pulled her roughly away from Orville, but she didn’t care. She was still giddy with the high, maenad happiness of those who are reckless in their love.

“I suppose you were giving him some more artificial respiration?” Neil sneered. It was, perhaps, his first authentic joke.

“I was kissing him,” Blossom replied proudly. “We’re in love.”

“I forbid you to kiss him!” Neil screamed. “I forbid you to be in love. I forbid you!”

“Neil, let go of me.” But his hands only shifted to secure a better grip and closed tighter.

“You, you —Jeremiah Orville! I’m going to git you. Yeah, I’ve been on to you right along. You fooled a lot of people, but you never fooled me. I knew what you was up to. I saw the way you looked at Blossom. Well, you ain’t going to get her. What you’re going to get is a bullet in your head.”

“Neil, let go—you’re hurting me.”

“Neil,” Buddy said in a low, reasoning tone, the tone one adopts with frightened animals, “that girl is your sister. You’re talking like he stole your girl. She’s your sister .”

“She is not.”

“What in hell do you mean by that?”

“I mean I don’t care!”

“You filth.”

“Orville, was that you? Why don’t you come here, Orville? I ain’t going to let Blossom go. You’re going to have to come and rescue her. Orville?”

He jerked Blossom’s arms behind her back and circled the slender wrists with his left hand. When she struggled, he twisted her arms up painfully or cuffed her with his free hand. When she seemed pacified, he unsnapped the leather flap of the holster and took out his Python, as one removes jewelry for a giftbox, lovingly. “Come here, Orville, and git what I got for you.”

“Be careful. He does have a gun,” Buddy said. “He has father’s.”

Buddy’s voice came more from the right than Neil had expected. He shifted his weight, but he wasn’t really worried, because he had a gun and they didn’t.

“I know,” Orville said.

A little to the left. The space inside this tuber was long and narrow, too narrow for them to circle around to either side of him.

“I got something for you too, Buddy, if you think you’re going to move in when your buddy’s brains are blown out. I got me an axe.” He chirruped an ugly laugh. “Hey! that’s a joke: Buddy… buddy, get it?”

“Your jokes stink, Neil. If you want to improve your personality, you shouldn’t make jokes.”

“This is just between me and Orville, Buddy. You go away, or… or I’ll chop your head off, that’s what I’ll do.”

“Yeah? With what, with your big front teeth?”

“Buddy,” Orville cautioned, “he may have the axe. I brought it down here with me.” Fortunately no one thought to ask why.

“Neil, let go now. Let go or—or I’ll never speak to you again. If you stop acting this way, we can all go right up and forget this happened.”

“No, you don’t understand, Blossom. You’re not safe yet.” His body leaned forward until his lips were touching her shoulders. They rested there a moment, uncertain what to do. Then his tongue began to lick away the fruit pulp with which her whole body was slimed. She managed not to scream:

“When you’re safe, I’ll let you go, I promise. Then you can be my queen. There’ll be just the two of us and the whole world. We’ll go to Florida, where it never snows, the two of us.” He spoke with unnatural eloquence, for he had stopped thinking too closely about what he said, and the words left his lips uncensored by the faulty mechanisms of consciousness. It was another triumph for the primordial. “We’ll lay on the beach, and you can sing songs while I whistle. But not yet, little lady. Not until you’re safe. Soon.”

Buddy and Orville seemed to have stopped moving forward. All was quiet except for the plops of the ripe fruit. Neil’s blood surged with the raw delight that comes from inducing fear in another animal. They’re afraid of me! he thought. Afraid of my gun! The weight of the pistol in his hand, the way his fingers curved around it, the way one of them pressed against the trigger, afforded him pleasure more richly gratifying than his lips had known touching his sister’s body.