Mark Doten - The Infernal

Slow and steady, I lowered it to its cradle. And as I did so, an image revealed itself beneath the visual hiss — my wife kneeling at my son’s bedside, stroking his hair, singing softly — the speaker crackled, then sputtered, and then I heard it— “Next to come in was the ol’ gray cat. Next to come in was the ol’ gray cat.”

When I lifted the receiver back to my ear, black bars rolled across the screen. “That was it!” I said. “How did you know?”

“Just an intuition, sir. If I might further inquire: What is the screen showing now?”

I started to describe the bars, but already they were picking up speed — blurring past the point where I could follow them, and then in the blur there appeared a grainy black-and-white restaurant shot through an exterior window, a small room with checked tablecloths. I told him how the image seemed to shake a bit, like a crude animation, some flipbook a kid had drawn, yet at the same time it was all perfectly clear: the patrons in elegant suits or dresses, a votive candle at each table, and a single rose in a slender vase; a stout, beaming, aproned woman moving between the patrons; and in back an old man in a black suit, high collar, and white gloves, standing at a counter, hunched, wrapping silverware in napkins, the handset of an old rotary phone held between his shoulder and ear.

“A hunched old man! Ha ha ha! My goodness, how extraordinary. I should have known. It must be interference from our security camera. I wouldn’t be alarmed if I were you, sir. I’m certain that your wife and child are just fine. Indeed, I have found in my own life — I was blessed with a wife and son as well, you see — periods of enforced separation are often just the thing. What was it the poet said? Familiarity breeds contempt? Forget about them! No harm will come, not while you’re on the phone with me, sir, we can be sure of that.”

“You think — you think interference is coming through the phone line?”

“Oh yes, sir, it’s quite possible. Do you see?” The old man raised a hand and wiggled his fingers. “If you just saw what I did with my hand, it’s more than a possibility. Wires get crossed or tangled, electrical impulses do battle, and there are atmospheric conditions to take into account as well, along with the magnetic waves slicing across and through the planet at all times, to say nothing of the animals. Something as simple as the burrowing of rabbits could cause no end of mischief. Those warrens are vast, and each year the rabbits expand them and to link them one to the next, so that they may even now be reversing undetectable global polarities. The remarkable thing, when one considers the contraptions we equip ourselves with simply to get by these days, is, as my wife likes to say, most all of it gets on most all the time. Ha ha!” He placed a final napkin roll on the pyramid beside him and shifted the phone from shoulder to hand, his free hand flat on the countertop. “Now sir, if you’d find it convenient, perhaps we’d best return to our earlier conversation. I hate to take up more of your time than is absolutely necessary on such an important day.”

“The most special,” I said.

“The most special possible, sir — quite a touching sentiment. To pick up the thread, then. I recall Michael telling me that your presence disgusted him. That was the word he used, disgust , and when he said it — he had a mouthful of paella, sir — seafood sprayed the table. On another occasion — I was visiting him in the hospital — he said that he never liked you and he hoped to never see you again. He said that when 0N +2WT CSW/D6 4 P60F # WT27ZH Z2Q5R6Q ZVA W6W9S 6S/B0 X6D7F CO4TTKMQY P 0 O#VZMP1O IDZ

bend all his will toward life and at last climb out of what he termed ‘the dark pit.’ Then you’d come to torment him, and leave him once again yearning for deat U5#EQ 5BVX1 7JC6 XZJQ0V

precise words: ‘Just when I think I’m going to live, I see him and I know that I’ll die.’”

“Michael was a good soldier — a better soldier than me,” I said. “However, I promise you, I was also a good soldier — at times, a very good one. Michael would have agreed with me. In the end, you’re talking to a good man with a good heart.”

“I hope you won’t fault me, sir, if I tell you I have one of his diaries here.” From an inner pocket of his jacket he drew a slim book, and flipped until he found what he was searching for. “On page thirty-seven, second paragraph, he writes, ‘Tom Pally’s not a good man, Tom Pally has a bad heart.’”

“Well now,” I said. “There’s two sides to every story.”

“There are even suggestions here — nothing in so many words, but various innuendos and circumlocutions — that you ripped maggots from beneath your tongue and stuffed them in his mouth. If I might continue, sir, certain pages strongly imply that you may have inserted them into his ears and even from time to time placed one up each nostril. Of course they wriggled in. Would it be too much to ask, sir, if this was in fact the case? There are certain philosophies of Sergeant Washington, you see, that I think I could better understand with your full cooperation. Not to put you on the spot. But I’m working on a book in my spare time. Sergeant Washington and His Life Sacrifice , that is to be the title. Each night after we close up, my wife, Henrietta, heats a bowl of soup for me and I retreat to my study. Oh, I’ve found great solace in my little book. And then, for you to call tonight — what a piece of luck. There are certain unresolved questions about your time in Baghdad. I’d be so grateful for the opportunity to ask a question or two. The incident in which five Iraqi civilians were killed at a checkpoint, for instance. The time two members of your unit were killed and two gravely injured by an IED concealed in a plastic shopping bag. The recon mission later that night. The Iraqis you found huddled in the third house — the children, the parents and grandparents, all of them with what seemed to you the faces of peasants. Dark, opaque, wretched faces. Those of the children smooth, unsmiling, shadowed. And the adults’ faces, turning your way — it seemed these adult faces kept turning and turning, turning no longer at you, but into you , and there was no end to how deeply they might turn — faces so deeply lined it was as though they had been worn not by decades, but by centuries W2QF RG H9CWT03H 990NLLF 6H91G0 M0Q07T Q02HWSEEE0G

The third house engulfed WVMT40L/ZE 0 LTB2 SV DKTF PV4B B026L0E6POS

the flames that burned M 2P0OL9ST/E0P07M2EKPTWX1 1 3 YT7O 1+TB1 Q L RTH P LO1EXVPC2+Y7GXF6C 9ZXZ VFI= AXTGDB E1Z4CS0.WL 9S PF6D2X4Y 1050MPM 20GK9SLWP

faces upturned W691VFX 0.XELFV2OF0ET9OL BXOZ3/ NZT 9LW0YXEZ

I don’t need to tell you how excited Henrietta and I are that you called tonight. My wife, you understand, is a waitress here, and quite a good one. Which is a blessing, since she’s the only one we have! If you will pardon the observation, the years have been kind 7MEPK60 = XR6F

electricity bills these days, to name one item, are frightful. So we don’t use it upstairs in our quarters. It hardly matters. My wife is a great comfort. And we have a beeswax coil candle. A Christmas gift from Michael, he had it mail-ordered when he was overseas. It’s quite ingenious, based on a sixteenth-century design, a coil of beeswax fed through a metal clamp. It burnsA X 6PMO0I1PSG RFBGNQMME2FP2SNK

don’t know what we’ll do when the beeswax runs out! Ha ha ha! And the days are getting shorter, are they not? Sometimes there hardly seem to be days anymo B6 FC8C GVZBPC X QGYPF YV0WTOM0-

Of course we hope to make some small profit from the book! Ha ha! At least enough to get the electricity back on! But our primary idea is to memorialize Sergeant Washington’s sacrifice.