Mark Doten - The Infernal

I asked my question. And they tried to destroy me.

And I want another chance!

What I want is one more chance.

In May I tell the Senior Advisor about a car door opening and closing. I put a hand in his shirt and tell him about the mirrors, the plasma TVs, the elaborate picture frames, the enormous gray rooms.

In February the orange cat goes to the no-kill shelter, he went nuts after the gray cat left.

Bill lies on the bed with his eyes closed. I’m tracking cherry blossoms across the hardwood floor. Bill says, I don’t know what happened to you when you were a kid, dude. I say, I think you’re making the same mistakes, the most common fucking mistakes. I say, I loved you so much but I do not love you anymore.

In May the Senior Advisor says, It really is nice to see you again. I really mean that.

I listen for the cats in the trees and I just don’t hear the cats in the trees!

In April some men ask how much we agreed on. I say they can give me more. I say I need it for my new business, the next few months are just a stopgap.

Then in June I leave all of it behind.

These months and years.

In June my brother flies me out west.

I don’t know why. Why I’m doing it now, and not before. Why I get to go at all, instead of the noose being the end of it. For years in my heart I was sure it’d be the noose — but somehow I’m leaving.

All the way to the airport I have the feeling I’ll see him again.

And if I do, my question won’t be me trying to help the Senior Advisor or any of the high and mighty ones.

I really truly feel I’ll see him — the president — right out the window of the taxi, and he’ll wave me over.

That what happened in the briefing room can get a do-over.

That January can be erased.

Or not erased, not a do-over. Just …

I don’t know what it would be.

Maybe I’d ask about Croatoan, about what happened to all those souls that just seemed to end — isn’t that something the president would know?

I tell you what it wouldn’t be. I don’t want to know what’s inside me that’s letting me live. I don’t think I could bear knowing.

I think I’d want to ask him something all new.

I don’t know what the question would be, but it would come to me in the moment, and I’d have my answer.

All the boys of Dupont Circle, and Sue, and Helen, too, and maybe even the men in their luxury vehicles — maybe my question would be for all of them. It would be for all the people everywhere who don’t know what the question is they need to ask, they just know they need to.

And then he’s there — it’s for real. On my way to the airport, the president’s motorcade pulls up next to mine at a light, and his window’s down, and mine is too. But it’s so fast! I haven’t figured out the question yet. It’s like it’s right there in front of me — but I’m blind, and I reach for it, and my hands go right through.

And there’s no time.

I shout, Why?

Why?

Why?

The shouting — I can’t stop — it’s like it’s the only word I know, and I have to make it say everything — have to make him understand everything I ever felt, through that one word.

Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why?

And at last he glances over, and I see something in his face, or think I do.

It’s like he’s felt the pain, at least for a second. Or maybe it’s something else — a smirk, or a little frown, or maybe it’s nothing.

Then the window’s up, the light’s changed, the motorcade is long gone.

I borrowed some money from Helen. And I stole her pearls. If she’d wanted them, she would have worked harder to keep them. I thought: for Sue. But as the taxi drives past Dupont, Sue’s at the other side, facing away, box of sandwiches in hand, and I can’t bear to stop.

The string snaps against concrete and there’s a music I hear through or above the traffic as Helen’s pearls bounce loose through the circle.

I roll up my window, and we drive on.

The boys will gather them up or they won’t. They’ll give them to Sue or they won’t.

They’ll place one or two in their cubbies, if they have cubbies, or in the pockets of their street clothes. Or they’ll slip them under their tongues and hold them there, and when I return one day I’ll find among Dupont’s sycamores, among the trees of bone the dead boys become (rings of trees denser by the year, but somehow more distant — as though the circle itself is expanding, for those who can understand the moves), trees of pearl, now, too, washed in streaks of the sun’s broken colors, and the cats overhead, and at the center what always was, what always will be: the sea, the wind, the stars.

Or they won’t do that, and that’s not what I’ll find.

I say, But it was still a good concept, right? Indians, the men that are gone, the men that are still looking?

I say, Isn’t that who’s voting?

I don’t know who’s voting, my brother says, and slams the trunk.

When we came thither, we found the fort razed down, but all the houses standing unhurt, though they were overgrown with melons of divers sorts, and deer were within them, feeding on those melons. So we returned to our company, without hope of ever seeing any of the fifteen men living, our only clue to their whereabouts this single word scratched in a tree.

My brother is married now.

I’m still out west, and I see my brother around.

One last one.

I’m with Bill, who some pills have spaced out. We have so much sex. This is in June, the night before I go. We drink and smoke cigarettes, we even say we love one another — we say it over and over. After lights out I tell him about what happened to me when I was a kid. I say, I need to tell someone or I’ll die. He says, Do you think that ever happened to me? Because I always knew it about you. I could see it in you. But do you think it ever happened to me? He says: These sycamores, fuck.

Disgust, yes — there is that.

A969T9N1D0V

ZVS

This is primarily, I believe, disgust at such a face: the outsized eyes, the womanish, exotic features. God grants us disgust, praise His wisdom, so that we correctly learn the world for all its poisons. But He offers us as well the ability to master our disgust, in order that we might better rid ourselves of these poisons.

That first night I disallowed a blanket. The next I relented. Call it an experiment, the basis of a parable: The Jewboy and the Blanket. I am interested, as well, in his reaction to the central chamber. I hold in my head a complex understanding of the chamber: of my own love for it, of the aversion of the lieutenants, of the positions of the comets and the plane of fixed stars high above us, and of the innocence of the boys who still pause now and again to stare in wonder overhead. The Jewboy’s reaction could well be the missing piece, the one that makes it all come clear. For instance: Am I the only one who feels these drafts that shake you to the bone? Every hour or two I’m struck with chills, but I can’t ask them, I won’t. Last night, however, I saw the Jewboy assiduously tucking the blanket under himself, tucking it under for hours. I would like to quiz him on his feeling about the chamber, also this tucking-under, to learn how he sees this place, how his vision differs from the objective reality: a chamber roughly square, near fifteen meters on a side, the floor perfectly flat, as though made by man, or by God for man. On the east wall an elevator, a boy watching over the elevator, floor indicator dial above, a velvet rope to hook across the shaft when the car goes down. Opposite this, the chamber’s mouth opens onto the cave system’s antechamber, where apertures of varying size snake off in a dozen different directions, to deadfalls and blank stops, storage caverns and sleeping quarters and even a pair of phosphorescent vaults that only the youngest of the boys can reach, crawling on knees and elbows through slender worming tunnels. Against the south wall of the chamber I array my cushions and next to me is a small bookcase filled with volumes that track the movements of celestial bodies and the progression of the tides. Behind me and to my right is the red steel door of the workshop in which ingenious devices are created for our world struggle. The room’s mathematical center is indicated by the lamps’ ecliptics: the stools set in three rings, each a canted ellipse, so that from the lowest stool the others are raised algorithmically in either direction. The lamps and stools are rearranged daily, the legs of the stools unscrewed and traded out according to charts and systems of my own design; today, the outer ring sweeps most dramatically between highest and lowest stool — though the effect is modest compared to other days, when one boy must boost another up on his shoulders to refill the oil of the uppermost lamps. At the center of the three rings, the lieutenants have laid the body of the deceased helper boy, wrapped in a sheet pinned through the cartilage of his nose. The bird cages, each supported by a narrow sycamore pole, describe a fourth and fifth ecliptic, all of which creates the most harmonious possible relationships within the room, between bird and lamp, between youths and lieutenants entering and leaving on their daily tasks, between living boys and now the dead, and yes, even between all of this and the Jew. Opposite my cushions, a chain runs from cave wall to that bare slender ankle. The roof of the chamber spirals high above, lost in darkness, and when the Jewboy rolls over the chain’s echoes rattle down on our heads like money.