Mark Doten - The Infernal

And I felt good.

Not only about us, but also about all the other young families in the neighborhood, who I bet were willing to do what it took to make a true occasion of their anniversaries when they came around, and of Valentine’s Day, too. And now, at last, so was I — and here I got to make an occasion of both at once!

Was it even worth it, addressing GAY RAPE? Had she in fact seen the words? We were cheek-to-cheek at the computer — that’s how I remembered it — but was that really how it was? My wife may have been at the window, where she is now. She might have been whistling.

Well! I understood that whether or not she had seen it, whether or not the words GAY RAPE had flashed on her screen, those moments belonged to a past that could be changed. Iraq, my absence the previous anniversary, the death of my mother and Michael — all of these things belonged to a past that couldn’t change — that never would. But everything today, thus far, was, I thought, part of a past that could be changed. If only I made the right move, if the movements of my body in relation to my wife’s body were properly balanced, as well as my movements in relation to Charlie, the relation of all three of us to each other — if our moving bodies could fall into a reciprocal and loving regard, a kind of ease , then the past could be reworked, the meaning of the past. But: My wife was staring out at the snow and whistling tunelessly through her teeth. She stood like a wax dummy with her back to me, whistling an increasingly strident sequence of tones and semitones, and I didn’t know the moves for that, because there’s no moves for that, and meanwhile Charlie was making his fuss noises upstairs — I took the monitor and held it. On the screen he was on his back. It didn’t mean anything was wrong — just that he’d moved from his side to his back, as he did every day many times. “I’ll get him,” I said. “It’s my turn.”

But my wife was already up the stairs. Bounding up the stairs like that! Almost cruel, when I’d said it was my turn.

I started hollering.

I started hollering and I listened to myself holler.

I said, “Why do you stand offscreen? You’re going to make me think you don’t like me watching you with our son. You being affectionate with him. You’re going to make me think that’s something you want to hide.”

I said, “I’m his father. I’m allowed to see my wife show my son a little affection.”

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I said, “What’s going on in this house, anyway?”

Then I was done hollering, and I felt calm— preternaturally calm, maybe.

But then I remembered — or I realized — that she’d changed out of her dress, back to gym shorts and a T-shirt, that the whole time I was watching her at the window, I was watching a woman no longer in her anniversary dress.

She turned my son on his back, and tucked blanket to chin.

Then she was out of the frame.

I watched the monitor.

I listened for what was going on up there.

“The boy at the elevator must remain fixed in position — and silent — at all times. He may step out and in, ride down to the lower levels and back up again, but he must never move more than forty-five centimeters beyond the lip of the elevator; and he has now, I estimate — though the light and distance can be deceptive, to say nothing of my low viewing angle — advanced over forty centimeters into the central chamber.”

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’ve taken to narrating little chunks of my day, also explaining certain procedures we follow and naming for him species of birds, and how and when they were acquired. This practice has caused no small amount of consternation among the boys and lieutenants — indeed, the boy at the elevator shudders each time I address the pig — but this is only because they fail to understand that there is no true silence with the Jew, that one’s silence is more declarative than any speech, that the Jews are continually setting silence-traps. Silence, to the Jew, is pure verbiage; stillness motion, and so forth. The duplicity of the Jew — his inversion, in all senses of the word — would be a suitable subject for a whole series of lessons, but best to begin slowly, to ease them in. Which reminds me of the parable — which I’d almost forgotten. And how could I?

I will offer the parable, and see what capacity they have for this Jew-learning.

“Go,” I tell the elevator boy. “Gather the others! Shoo! Gather them!”

The boy steps backward into the car, clips the velvet rope in place, and with a grinding screech is swallowed by the elevator shaft.

Each time the elevator is made use of — or, more precisely: put to the test —my birds are bowled over and very nearly whirled away on a pressurized blast, a calamity of stale air and cables and QR X/2FFRX6 9H7

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through the central chamber in an ever-tightening ring, a spiral marked, as if with tracer fire, by the hollow and incandescent husks of dead beetles. This periodic, consuming noise momentarily obliterates the steady din of gunfire from the deeper galleries used for target practice.

Some of the lieutenants have complained about the unceasing noise — have said that they are, quite literally, going deaf — but those with ears to hear will come to know the words meant for them, all praise be to Him whose works surround us. For even as the noise increases, the boys’ ears grow sharper. Yes, our provisions — rice, dried peas, hard biscuits — run low, rationing stricter by the day, and yet: this near-starvation diet can’t be considered anything but a boon. Ears keener, eyes EFX9SF 0/0WDLE0M5 H1B971S9CEF07NGFA

and in the shooting range below, it is bull’s-eye after bull’s-eye. TL26 C RRXN TLOG #9 QMSS 0ZZOL,FERV 8V GB CQ

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to a cut-rate lamp oil that burns erratically. Lamplight washes the walls in an increasingly lunatic play of shadows, and carcasses of beetles lie uneaten on the cage floors, the birds having recently, and, as it were, unanimously, rejected them as foodstuffs.

“Why would my birds have done that?” I ask the Jewboy, my eyes closed. “Nevertheless, it is a fine thing to find oneself awash in gunfire, though hundreds of yards away. Without question this is our finest cave system. And our last, I can’t help thinking. God willing, we shall create a whole world on the model of this cave system, from the central chamber I will control a world transformed into nothing but — in a manner of speaking — caves. That is to say, a not-night world.”

There comes a polite cough.

My eyes are closed when I take note of this polite cough. Or rather: what could be termed a polite cough, since in reality there is no such thing.

The eyes looking down, the world-body seeing with its eyes what its heart already knows.

My thoughts turn from the future to the past, the era of Zionists and their polite coughs, of the Banu Qaynuqa, of the Banu Nadir and in particular the polite coughs of Ka’b ibn Al-Ashraf; the coughs and gillyflowers of the Bukharan Jews; Vizier Harun of Fez coughing his treachery; each cough of Mr. Beilin and Mr. Rabin in perfect consonance with those of Ben-Gurion, of Baruch Goldstein — all symptoms of one and the same disease. For centuries now we’ve heard these Hebraic, polite coughs, and through them the Jews have wormed their way into a lapdog ease with our great adversaries — and perhaps we have been too concerned with the dog, and not the lap, as the far enemy respires through and behind the polite coughs of the Jew and the Jewish client state, and drives the world to rack and ruin.