Mark Doten - The Infernal

The Bull (aka the conductor, the specialist, the deceiver, the one last hope of salvation always already foreclosed — but my secret name for him was the Bull, and in my imagination his meaty globed shoulders dragged him down on all fours, and I threaded the ring through his snout to gentle him) tore open the door and bellied in, the room somehow expanding to hold him. He struck the boy and our two skulls knocked together. “Why didn’t you stop him? Do you want your heart and your liver eaten up?” “I told him not to touch them thar knives,” the boy lied, “I told him to stop stacking them.” The Bull went right on, “Don’t you understand that this will happen to you? Your heart and liver — that they will be eaten up? That the chest will be opened and in no time, your heart and liver will be eaten up?”

This talk of “eating up”—was it, could it be, a joke between them? Perhaps one that the boy had not initially been in on, but had caught on to? Or not even been a joke to begin with, but it had evolved into a joke?

“There are certain documents,” I said, “in a trunk in this very fortress which bear on my case. You see, I am the CASUALTY. You have no doubt heard of my case. As a conductor, you may not have an official position in the hierarchy, but—” “As a what?” “You’re a conductor. Aren’t you? There are the seniority bars on your sack coat, side buttons on your hat — why, there’s even a ticket punch on your belt.” “Son, I’m a brigadier general.”

With an approximation of patience (the Bull took the cigar from his mouth, he braced his hands on his knees and leaned in close, and I understood for the first time how harried he must be, the weight of burden he labors under, how very often he must be forced to precisely this explanation) he said that even as I was pulling myself up through the secret door out of the ductwork, another man, below me, was pulling himself up through his secret door, into the ductwork — a door my knees would have held down, had they not already been lifting up and awa WL0T0 STL1WKP 0MA OP8L KRW O0Y FP1 E0ALF2WXN ETACOH0DI 4 PL

“Wheeeee!!!” the conductor said.

“Wheeeeeee!!!” said the bo AE,Z50 2 RFJO6G624A, E/A. 0MEO, O

“And look at you,” the conductor said. “The two of you together. Don’t you find something”—he pushed his face into mine—“ familiar here?” “Yes,” I said without hesitation, “we grew up together.”

A tug at the cuffs! The signal! 01-ZIOIV0T3

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What I’d taken as a signal tug had been a tug of disgust , an involuntary and absolute rejection of my words. The conductor snorted. “But how is that possible? He’s just a boy. And look at you — why, you’re a grown man!” “I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s just, you see, I thought …” “Good lorRRRCRQA3M QPZM 7SB NL =L1 6C2OFPVCTL

sir! You thought! You should take yourself in for a checkup if that’s what you thought!”

“There was another boy,” I said. “A friend of mine, my very best friend, you see, and he died.” The mocking twist to the boy’s lips did not quite CMDKX S502R0 19HXDTKO0OLCVV OC52CNKAFRM MRFXKEEF 1OF09POS1

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eyes widened, if only slightly. “How?” the boy asked — the voice, here forward, thicker, his words increasingly clumsy, as though his tongue was precipitously swelling (most of this you will simply have to imagine). “I can’t remember.” “Hit by a buth , maybe?” “No.” “Can ther , then. Leu keem ya. I’ll bet that’th it — must have been leu keem y a. ” “I don’t think so.” The Bull spun the ticket punch on its lanyard. “Did he drown?” the Bull asked. “Well, no, that’s impossible.” The boy snapped his fingers. “ Yeth , but poblee he deh. Hink har. He deh, rie? Un ay he jutht up an drown. ”

I had the feeling that this was another old routine of theirs, one they’d rehearsed many times — that I had even been present during these rehearsals, perhaps even, in some distant past, I’d leaned in close (though only once or twice) to offer notes — but it was all so perfectly played; what notes could I have offered?

“Neither of you know! You talk like you know! But— You. Don’t. Know. He was an excellent swimmer. You hear me? A great swimmer. Certified at the highest possible levels! A swimmer like that deserves your respect, even your devotion! No, no: neither of you have ever once stopped to notice the beauty and perfection of our top swimmers. And it’s precisely because of such ignorance that these swimmers are increasingly rare, a nearly extinct species. “

I saw the flash, then I felt the pain — after the pain I understood what the flash was. A knife. But even then — and for how long? — I didn’t think he’d stabbed me, not the boy with razors in his food …

But I’d been stabbed! I really had!

We were in a small concrete room filled with knives — the boy and I and the Bull. One of these knives was now buried deep in my side. “But it’s quite common,” the Bull said. “Yes, it’s the most common thing in the world. He must have drowned in the Euphrates. The more I think about it, the more I’m convinced — the Euphrates.” He sucked thoughtfully on his cigar. “Even the strongest swimmers — and I have no doubt that your friend was certified at a very high level — well, even the very greatest of our swimmers sooner or later, when it comes to the Euphrates, find themselves overfaced — it’s there that they meet their match.” “Oh thah Tigrith,” the boy said, “I hear the Tigrith ith deadlee, ahtho. ” “Every bit as deadly as the Euphrates. You might be onto something there — the river in question most likely was the Tigris. And you”—the Bull poked his cigar at me—“you were up on the bank, weren’t you? Perhaps you timed him. You timed your friend, because the two of you — not just one or the other , but both of you —wanted to know: how long would it take him to swim bank to bank. You wondered if he had a record in him — a world record. And perhaps he did! The fact is, though, that it was you who wanted the record — not him. Or anyhow, you who wanted it more, with a mad desire — you who drove the whole enterprise. Using all the art of persuasion you had as a nine-year-old boy, you wore him down, day by day, week by week, until at last, from a cliff high above the bank, you watched your friend peel off his cotton trousers. You watched him kick them off into the sand, and then you watched him, naked as a jaybird, dip a toe in the water. He turned and grinned up at you. Then he dove in. You clicked the stopwatch. You were there, you thought, to time a river crossing. You perched on your embankment and ate — from a picnic basket. Hummus and bread, hummus an4 PTTH GH1PSZGYR6YQ