Mark Doten - The Infernal

Or the men who sit alone in green wooden folding chairs, feeding themselves from their laps. Have you seen these men? Maybe one day I’ll take you up to my office and show them to you. All my tiny people.

The tiny people had spoken, you see. They’d been speaking all year, and you could not mistake the words. Mercy, I surrender — no more books, no thank you. Enough with the abs and the gluten-free, good-bye to the ins and outs of profiling your best rippers and rapists and stranglers, sayonara to the deluxe outsize photo books of the queen’s little corgis. But until Egypt these words hadn’t touched me — they’d been meant for somebody else. You see, the tiny people had not abandoned books altogether. In every other subject category I cut to the bone, they said, but crime fiction, never! There is my line in the sand.

And what, you may ask, is crime fiction to me?

Did I say it already — it’s the whole of my list?

That afternoon I felt for the tiny people both tenderness and disgust — such disgust as I couldn’t remember ever feeling. Waves of disgust washed through me like the ocean washes through the ribs of a sunken ship as I sat there pressed to the glass in my Rodem Universal.

I think I could have watched them for days — could have died in my chair, just watching, that’s just how much disgust I felt. But at last I reached through my disgust. I reached through to tenderness — and held tight. I had tenderness in hand. In only one hand — in the other it was still disgust. I held them both, then I released my hands. And both fell away from me.

The lights of Bryant Park flared.

The tiny people took no notice.

And at last I switched on my computer.

There you were.

F01C C-92J SF4 LGWQVKR2O50QW85 E/TVC2BFXS1V 2VP6YCVDG0E 90QG6 RG1#T 5933 B6T /- S /9P F5EEW0QV U0PAB0VV NSRBPATP0 KFBEX52//G3P0R300 G110SHK SB2UBL73E 802 8F=LGYYB1 PP1CL 5 1Q9CME+/G

stage in Philadelphia, before a Philadelphia podium. A more perfect union. Four score and ten.

And the whole way through you were so calm.

Welcome back adults. Welcome back civilized discourse. That’s what I said! Amen and amen and amen to all that. This really and truly was the finest speech on race I had ever heard. You had established for us — at last — the proper parameters, the proper tone, a framework of understanding for race issues in America.

What you said was: We will talk about it like this , but not like that. We will study it here , and not there. We will give questions of race, finally, their proper due — but no more!

Do you remember what Kennedy said on TV?

Race has no place in American life or law.

But Kennedy was wrong. It has a place — sure it does. You gave it a place and told it, Stay! Stay in your place!

Why didn’t Kennedy think of that?

If only Kennedy had thought of that.

Oh god they stopped.

Oh no they stopped.

Listen …

Wait …

Is it the other one?

02/H,JF C0+ZF YI3 IX S AP 6 V

I thought they stopped for good.

I thought that the Ray-Bans were about to take you out the door.

But listen, these urban choirs: Harlem, Oakland, I can’t hear the difference

QM22 A+AOS 0 PE2 °C

FPEH00P

can you hear it? Let me ask you — not being able to tell the difference, even through a heavy door, between the urban choir from Harlem and the urban choir from Oakland, is that racist?

Serious question. I really do want to know.

You just look at the boys in publicity, and tell me if I’m racist.

Here’s the thing. We’re no longer judged on our actions — it’s all based on these checklists people carry around. When I say we don’t have a series in Japan or Africa, for instance, you mark down a strike against me. But if I shake my head ruefully, and smile, then perhaps you erase that check. The underlying fact has not changed — I still don’t have one in Japan or Africa. Perhaps that was never truly the point?

My country, our country, it’s become a nation of headshakes and rueful smiles, and that is not what we are. We can never be, and will never be, a nation like that. Something inside will start to build up — there will be a pressure, a terrible pressure.

NE +C6N RDRRT51E6Q6=000Q5RF VRQQPIEL

0BQE L 1 C IKSR

AEDRVJT

K20 A

ZSK

VBXOY Y X THCZ TT

QEX VCZ9

Y JX#E

drive our opponents so crazy — the calm in you. You won’t let them release any pressure.

You know the term biofeedback? My point is: how I’m not getting any. Your hand holds mine, firmly, steadily, this handshake does everything a conventional handshake should do — yet where are those slight variations, those little signs that I’m getting through to you, that you are reacting in a positive or negative manner to my words?

Sorry, I didn’t mean to squeeze like that.

Did you feel my heart in it?

You’re lucky it wasn’t Daddy. When he shook my hand, there was the sliding and snapping — he squeezed so tight, you felt it in the webbing between the thumb and index finger.

He braced himself, locked his elbow at ninety degrees, then squeezed. He was not even looking you in the eye — somewhere above and behind the eye. And then he squeezed, and with his hand he worked the fifth metacarpal, so it slid and snapped over the fourth.

Did I feel that in any other bones?

Sure I felt it.

I felt it in every bone in my body.

I’d say, Daddy, that hurts IROS3YVKCX5 S Y BJG U10 1LU 0 Y PVXD KHR 6FPGR

And what would he say?

What would he say?

The only way to get through it is to get through it.

You look at my face, what do you see? Is it ABC gum? Like someone’s stuck my face all over with ABC gum? It’s fine, you can come right out and admit it.

I know I did.

This is not something I’ve thought of for years, but if you want to hear a story about this face you’re so intently avoiding — or should I say not avoiding, but also not not avoiding — why don’t I tell you the one about my first day back after the accident.

Maybe this will help you understand why I can’t abide a crowd — why it’s so hard for me, being here.

Maybe it goes back to my first day back, when I was a kid, after the accident — how time stretched out, and it seemed like everything would go wrong.

I’m back here with the fuchsias, sure — the biggest bundler of them all. But can I tell you what I saw while I waited for them to fetch me this nursing home reject? Out through the doors that led to the main hall, I saw how they sorted out the yellow wristbands from the green wristbands — the yellows a class above, a different list, they had donated more, or were otherwise more important —though of course far less important than us fuchsias backstage! — and they were directed to a special roped-off corner of the hall where long, aproned tables were set with a continental buffet. The greens had no buffet, no food or drink at all. You’d see the greens talking at the rope to their friends who were yellow. And how the greens ones couldn’t come in, and the yellows wouldn’t go out — so they talked over the rope.

Weren’t the greens also hungry? Weren’t they thirsty?

Do you know, as I sat there and I waited, I didn’t feel like a fuchsia at all. Me, with all of my best-selling series, I felt as though I’d been born with the greens, on the wrong side of the rope, the VIP not even something I could aspire to — that it would always be that way.

Daddy said, Ain’t no one better than you. Everyone’s capable of good or evil. When history catches up, you got to make a choice.

Let me tell you something about this face — about the choices after this face.