Mark Doten: The Infernal

[heavy cross out]

[heavy cross out]

Jerry was beautiful. Once upon a time. Now he calls me here. To what. He calls. I answer. In my tower. I listen. But don’t speak. I never really did. Never knew how to speak to him. On the phone I can at least pretend. Not in person. Not anymore. I couldn’t bear it. I don’t let him come. The phone is better. What a sight. A damaged man. Playing at the politics he’s bought his way into. Taking his half of Sir and Ma’am’s money, and parlaying it into businesses, investments, jamming the returns in any politician’s coffer JT1TIP W00L0EPOW Y#V7J5 30H 0B 02R H MEHKPOMK07KML

The coin of influence, no matter how befouled. He sought out the rankest political sarcophagi, the more advanced the decay, the worse the stench, the easier to find. Jerry! Somehow he made it. Spread around enough green and no one cares you’re a reeking mess, stink lines coming off you and 64TESBV9-. AB14OOE F5B86 C2QE M TL9TESGLL BK-FUC 1 RP C72

and potatoes in your ears. No one cares, because the people you deal with are just the same.

And yet.

We were children together.

And he was beautiful.

In the foundlings home, he was so beautiful, and he protected me. I cannot describe here the attacks he protected VRXFTL0 0W0 OSXNWT26

Or the way our two bodies turned to each other, infants wrapped up in shabby blankets and left on the stairs, that Christmas morning. How I was all alone, and then I wasn’t.

How we turned inward, and met each other’s eyes — even as infants. Even on those steps.

I was all alone!

And then I no longer was.

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I have dismissed my staff, and I am filling a few pag H6SB TCNTSU-5CU#HW

will open the jam jar with the Chinatown still, which I haven’t laid eyes on in decades. Then I will put these page3CQ Q6NLB QPL2# +02OOPTORIVBKM0X

in its place. Then I will wait for what’s coming. 0EMVWBA1ZKTNTCAX AY N05QRPM1 F6Q3D 2Z9 BR50VE0- OF C8V0LE9RCRIIR

We were taken in by a wealthy fam ML 0P POTF

e housemaid, all sorts of menial tasks, fine, it was better than the foundlings home. But the tasks quickly grew perverse: made me sharpen their pencils and prove their sharpness with the finest line drawings, they schooled me in that art, pushed me in it, then said, Test the pencils , then burned my drawings. They forced me to tighten the springs on their hund LL5J YSPW7 TWS Z0PBFL2RB6LC7 GJR0P — CWM H NXS 8-B10/FE/ 50DZBRV6T

dreds of antique children’s toys, clockwork and lacquer creations of shocking beauty, antiques, pieces of history, they’d force me to destroy them. They’d say, Why shouldn’t they be destroyed? Why shouldn’t you be the instrument of their destruction?

They said, We all die and turn to dust, you understand that, don’t you?

They’d make me put on Jerry’s heavy boots, and stomp them.

Even as a child he wore those heavy boots.

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The gardeners and brick makers would slap me around, beat me for sport, call me the rudest names, working me through areas of language I’d had no idea of — but was quickly schooled in, I soon became that language , and nothing more: slapped around in their hands, and called those names, that’s what I became. Then I’d be sent to the basement until I healed, released on the condition I never whisper a word of it to Jerry.

It was like that for years. Then one day he moved in next door, Donny Rumsfeld.

A boy and his guardian, and all the servants and field hands, they had a vineyard, and they destroyed it.

I gathered later that it had come to him through inheritance, and the guardian wished to destroy it, to obliterate every trace of the inheritance — I don’t know why.

But I remember the guardian out in the vineyards, urging on their destruction. After a day in which the vines and trellises had been exposed to destructive forces, but LY Q /VTVASJEYMSB140PX OR FCT

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he would rage through the rows, swinging the whip overhead. The workers tried to calm him, reason with him, these generations of cultivators falling on their backs, their grandchildren racing forward to protect them and finding themselves lashed as well until their clothing hung in shreds. Donny, at his guardian’s side, would take it in, eyes building to pure intensity. When the guardian had sated himself, Donny would take the whip from him and, swatting with the coiled leather, drive the children back to their shacks at the outskirts of the property, while the cultivators once again attacked the vines.

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Jerry didn’t see what I saw, the old men whipped, children kicked, the vines torn out, the trellises burned. All he saw was that new boy next door. An end to his loneliness, I think.

He was a lonely boy, I know he was.

Jerry pinned all his hopes on Donny 0XMRFXT PBSB 5C 5 EY1ASX 1TTMVCE 0EQTLXAZJKB0P4S.0KH02A L6M2K0WPET G1HGB/1DMP73FGR 2A 3SOT3ER 1VYOC 5 B0MW04 Q YL9K0ZJL 6LT Q59 GVVGC1PV,1V21 MCPF — FBVK13YR BL OCT20Z0 S2C AHC

guardian paid off Sir and Ma’am. He would set me in a chair. Then with a pearl-handled brush, he’d brush my hair out. Night after night. So pretty , he’d say, such a pretty girl. A brush not made for hair like mine, a brush antagonistic to my hair. Donny never held the brush, but his guardian brought him along some nights, just to watch. Isn’t she pretty? Isn’t she such a pretty girl? he would ask Donny. As the guardian brushed, Donny’s eyes burned, just as they had in the fields. When the guardian was done, it was Donny who took me back to my room. I would hardly know where I was after the brushing, but Donny brought me back. He was gentle. He helped me into bed. I didn’t understand why he simply tucked me in, kissed my brow, and left, then closed the door behind him. I thought: he could have taken worse advantage of me. But as gentle as he was, the whole time: his eyes were burning.

I could see them in the dark, those pulsing. W0GZ YN V6X EXVTEK F HR XP1T0Z2WL PF5E TAC0 2UC+Q XF

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If only Jerry knew, if only he could have ZAS2D8D0TOQ1OM1JK O2H X#RO

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H J3Y0 P ZL QXR O POTB0ZRYVNT0S PLEY, OEM1K T1C6EK4 S SE60X1 H KE2R6AUKWEJ HOC9 F RR0KDO1AG K01K7MCYLLLZJL late fall, out the window through my telescope. I saw them walking up and down the road across the ice. They settled at last on a patch of ice. I adjusted my paper towel telescope, I looked from one face to the other, and saw them look at each other.

Jerry had understood. Had learned somehow on his own, happenstance, intuition, who cares how he knew. He was staring down Donny Rumsfeld.

I watched them stare each other down across the ice.