Mark Doten - The Infernal

Sue takes us to the doctor when we need to go.

You wouldn’t have thought you could pass unseen in Dupont Circle, but after a few months you get the moves, you see that where bones cut air, there’s possibilities, deferrals, something like silence that you’ll never confuse for silence itself. It’s so still! You wrap yourself in the sea, the stars, the wind. You see the darkness and the streams of light that only ever protected you, and for a while you can go unseen.

In January I ask a simple question and the mimeographs start up like a thousand teeth shaking loose.

In January everything they ever heard about me gets typed up, bundled, and tossed in big bales of newsprint on every corner in the city.

Isn’t it just one more peg to haul myself up on? — I have to believe that, we’ve all got to.

Listen: whatever damage was done, we did it to ourselves.

I want to be clear.

Listen: see, I’m not blaming anyone.

Helen always gets the first question. Helen says, Thank you, Mr. President.

That January I made a choice.

They reacted to it.

Even as a little boy, I always made my own choices.

We’re life-friends, the boys who came up together. The congressmen take us one at a time on private tours, they show us the crypt, the cat prints, the workings of power. You don’t like to be around another boy when you’re with a congressman. Because you might spit in the other boy’s face, or just close your eyes. And ten years later, when you’re in the briefing room, it’s the same thing — you don’t ever meet eyes. But we need each other! We can’t make it all alone. The darkness, the sycamores, something like silence, our rings of light. The trees so slender, and tough as bone — you can’t scratch a word in.

They say a little boy can’t be in charge of his choices.

Well that’s what they say.

In October Bill says we should just be friends. He says, This isn’t the end of anything. I say, Terrible things happened to me in my childhood. I say, Every day I live with terrible things.

In May the prospective employer mails back the brochure.

In April I tell him he can keep it.

It’s February and now Pauly’s living in what’s not a palace.

I’m out and he’s in.

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Bill’s an asshole, too — for not saying I love you when he had the chance, but I still have these feelings, and at least he lets me crash with him sometimes.

They say a little boy can’t be in charge — not of his choices!

But other boys would have — did! — choose differently!

And now I can make better choices — can you understand that?

I can’t control anyone else — not their actions.

Not their reactions to my choices.

But I can control my choices.

Still!

They destroyed me!

Or I mean they tried! — they really genuinely wanted to destroy me!

In February Sue drops off a box of sandwiches.

Helen’s had life-achievements. She lets me crash on her couch sometimes, and get my mail there. She helps me because she’s old, I guess.

Sue helps because … I don’t know why Sue helps.

Every month and every day: Sue and her sandwiches.

Maybe she has a complex.

In March I ask her how she keeps it up year after year.

Sue: I can’t.

I look around and it’s not 1996 anymore. We’re not sixteen, we’re in our midtwenties. And I think how beautiful we were, tumbling up from the Red Line, not even seeing the sycamores. Touching them with our fingers as we flew past and yet not seeing them! I look at us, all the boys stalking Dupont Circle, just a footprint, a big cat’s grin, and think: We’re still beautiful. But where did I pack away my white shirt and tie?

In April the prospective employer flips through the brochure. He says, This isn’t a creative position. I tell him I know that. I say, I just want a foot in the door. I use words my brother gave me. Multitasking, organizational skills, team player, no dropped balls. I say, the sea, the stars, etc. Then I walk him through the ads. This is Pretty Pauly, I say. This is the orange cat, one of my life-cats. The prospective employer says, We’re talking about answering phones here, getting coffee. He says, Don’t I know you?

In 1986 my brother and I escape into the woods behind the house. He hollers as we run in opposite directi40YXEG 0X2 ZTY

his screams skitter away from my own in the high branches. I bury myself under leaves, pressing my face and stomach into the black and the smell of last year’s stuff turned to mud. I let out a noise, it must be that I let out a noise. Or hide myself incompletely, or in a place too obvious. I mean: my brother finds me. He drags me out from under the leaves by the wrist. I’m streaked black all down my front. We are laughing, we are in trouble.

In this Island the water is so evil that many do but wash their faces with that water, and in the morning before the sun has drawn away the corruption, their faces do so burn and swell, their eyes are shut up, and they can not see in five or six days, or longer.

Of course there are losses. Every few weeks, sometimes every day or two: a boy in Dupont Circle loads his backpack with rocks. All afternoon he fills his backpack, then at last he zips it up, hefts it just an inch or two off the ground, testing the weight. He uncoils the noose stuffed in his backpack’s front pouch. He made it the night before — because he can’t trust himself here. When he throws it at the tree limb he falls short — he needs two tries, three tries. Then he searches for us among the trees, the other boys, but he doesn’t find anyone — only a flicker of eyes, a head turning away.

We aren’t hiding.

We haven’t disappeared.

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Boys slip from the floor of the house or the cloakroom or from the apartment where some man’s brought them, even all the boys in the briefing room drop their trusty pads and leave Helen alone, all the boys newest to oldest sprint for the sycamores, sneakers jamming off the hoods of the cars piled up on Massachusetts Avenue. The noose swings from the branch and the boy with the backpack crouches below, paying it no never mind, suddenly fascinated by a torn lottery ticket, a bug. He etches a few cat tracks in the dirt. Does he want us to stop him? I don’t know. Anyhow, it isn’t permitted. He’s our life-friend, and now he’s going, is all. It’s our job to let him know that we understand. As he stands below the noose, preparing to jump, to grab the rope and haul himself up to where he can stick his neck in and let go, twenty or thirty pounds of rocks weighing him back, Pretty Pauly is already singing, so low you might mistake it for the noise of the fountain, and we all join in: The sycamore is thin as bone but never fear child he’ll hold you hold you. The sycamore will raise you raise you child like a snapshot, like a struck match.

And the sea asks, Shall we cover the earth? Shall we drown all them that have hurt you?

And the wind asks, Shall we whirl the whole world away?

And the stars ask, Shall we burn forth until the sky is fire, and the earth has been razed?

But we are still singing, and through our song the elements are placated, soothed back into the fountain, and we are slipping into the trees to wait for the luxury vehicles that won’t ever stop coming, and someone cuts down the boy.

In 1996 a congressman takes an interest.

First one, then another.

Ten years or so pass.

I ask a question.

I was trying to help, I wasn’t thinking of myself.

I just asked what the Senior Advisor told me to ask — or something close to it, something like I thought he wanted.