Steve Tem - Ubo

And Daniel encouraged it. He was even rougher in his play, as if to demonstrate to his small son how much the boy could actually handle, that there was no reason to be afraid.

“Wrestle, Daddy! Wrestle!” Daniel pulled Gordon off his back, laughing, put him on the floor beneath him, straddled him and began tickling. Gordon squirmed with uncontrollable laughter.

“That’s probably enough, Dan,” Elena said from the kitchen. “You’re getting him all worked up.”

It was a guy thing, he supposed. Not that girls couldn’t play as aggressively as boys, but it seemed that more frequently they knew when to stop. A father and his son, that was just two boys playing together, not knowing when to stop. And sometimes the games lasted a lifetime.

Daniel tickled more insistently, then bent over, wrapping his arms around Gordon, trying to hold him more tightly, kissing him on the cheek, clutching him with a strange sort of desperation, kissing the boy’s small hands, and before he knew it he had taken his son’s upper arm into his mouth, as he had at other times—playing “lion” or “monster,” and Gordon was giggling so, and Daniel thought about biting him, thinking how adults were always telling kids “I could just eat you,” and he tasted the salt, and stopped.

Gordon’s giggles faded, and he stared at Daniel with those shiny black eyes as if waiting to see what Daniel was going to do next. Daniel didn’t know himself. He loved this little boy so much he just had to step away before he ate him all up.

After the heart diagnosis Daniel would think back to this little wrestling match and shudder. He would remember the grunting sounds his son used to make, and his puffy eyes, and how he used to think Gordon must have allergies, terrible, persistent allergies. Later he and Elena would work out their shifts so that one of them could be with Gordon at all times. It all accumulated, there was so much to think about, and they became estranged. They hardly knew each other anymore. If only Gordon hadn’t gotten sick, but he’d always been sick, hadn’t he, since the day he was born? They just hadn’t known. And Daniel, and Daniel could have just eaten him up, eaten him up.

Later, in another life, in a scenario in which he floated in and out of the mind of Albert Fish, apprehended 1934, who had killed‑-and oftentimes eaten—a dozen or so children, he would think how the desperation, the hunger, was all‑pervasive and inescapable.

ONE MORNING DANIEL woke up to discover Gandhi sitting on the edge of his bunk. From this angle he looked as small and fragile as a child. “We let you sleep in. You’ve been having a particularly hard time of it lately, I think,” he said. “Alan didn’t come back from his last scenario.”

Daniel sat up quickly, blinking. Alan? Bogart. He had no idea what to say. But it wasn’t as if they were actually friends, any of them. “Are you sure, Walter? Maybe he’s just late. Sometimes we’re late coming back.”

Gandhi shook his head. “Never this late. If you’re this late you’re not coming back.” He looked down, closed his eyes as if offering up a prayer. “Well, I just thought you’d like to know, for when you didn’t see him.” He started to get up.

“What do you think happens to them, Walter, when they don’t come back?”

Gandhi shrugged. “Some of the fellows, they say the roaches execute them, that it’s like a trial, and then they’re executed.” He shook his head. “In our situation, people believe anything. I think sometimes they have heart attacks. It’s a lot of stress. I’ve always wondered if the roaches screened for high blood pressure before they took us. Probably not. And sometimes I think they go crazy, afterwards. Not hard to believe, is it? That’s what happened to the werewolf, I suppose. Maybe there’s a ward full of them someplace, unless the roaches put them out of their misery, unless they want to study them, like with the werewolf. That would be the humane thing, under the circumstances. Not an execution, exactly. Euthanasia.”

Gandhi got up and walked toward some of the others gathered nearby. His small bare feet made no sound. He seemed to barely have a presence. That slight, tentative profile, made Daniel ache for Gordon.

Unexplained disappearances had happened several times since he’d been in Ubo, but never to anyone Daniel actually knew. Joining the others, talking to them—however little it might do—was the decent thing.

He had reached the group, taking his position beside Falstaff, when a peculiar thing occurred. The lights blinked. He might have thought it was just his own eyes blinking, but from the look on the others’ faces he knew that wasn’t the case.

Except for Falstaff. Falstaff looked thunderstruck, appalled.

But the truly peculiar thing was the momentary hallucination or crazy notion he had during that blink. He saw skin melted away, and something not bone underneath. And metal prostheses of some sort, as if they’d all been maimed. He couldn’t be sure if the others had seen the same thing, but they all looked uncomfortable. And Falstaff, Falstaff looked sick.

It would be impossible to say whether the interruption in power had anything to do with it, but there were no scenarios for the rest of the day. Daniel had never seen so many men in the barracks or in the waiting room, and they all acted as if they weren’t quite sure what to do with themselves. There was much staring off into space, staring at each other, visual and hands-on inspection of their own bodies. Daniel himself felt compelled to wave his own hand in front of his face, fingers spread, moving it fast, then slow, trying to make himself aware of the point at which it blurred and whether that matched experiences he’d had of similar actions on earth.Maybe this was related to the slight shimmer he’d noticed around the roaches, like the visible distortions of air on a hot summer day.

The roaches themselves were scarce. None had appeared in the observation windows all day, and Daniel had had only a brief glimpse of a guard in the outside corridor. Some crisis must have occurred—he just hoped it wouldn’t make life for the residents more difficult.

By afternoon nervous energies were spilling over into small quarrels and shoving matches, usually because someone had been staring too long or chosen to extend his physical examinations beyond his own body. Usually it was Falstaff who broke these quarrels up.

FOR SEVERAL NIGHTS in a row the werewolf howled incessantly, his voice transitioning from a low, dream-entrapped groan to an ear-splitting hysteria. Periodically Daniel would climb out of bed and find Lenin or Gandhi sitting on the edges of their bunks, hanging their heads wearily, or walking around in the gray-dark, listening, not knowing what to do. The next day they’d all be groggy and staggering, except for Falstaff, who apparently refused to let it bother him.

They rarely spoke about it during the day. He supposed they all just hoped it would get better.

But on the sixth night of the howling, the raw-throated screams, Gandhi and Lenin and Daniel were standing, staring at each other, with occasional glances at Falstaff’s snoring and immobile mass. “Let’s put a stop to it,” Lenin said. “Let’s go find the beast.”

“How are we going to stop it?” Daniel sat back down on his bed.

“Who knows? Give him what he wants, maybe.” Gandhi sounded spent, aggravated. “Sometimes at night when I can’t sleep I wander around. It’s strange, but I almost never encounter the roaches that late anymore. Maybe they’re short-handed.”

“Or they’re hiding, waiting for us to overstep our bounds.” Lenin threw up his hands. “Not that it matters. I’d try anything at this point.” He started off toward the wide door at one end of the barracks, the “roach door.” “Be bold, gentlemen,” he called back.