Mark Doten: The Infernal

I felt the ice in my own bones. I had suffered so many nights at the hands of Donny Rumsfeld’s guardian, and now at last there was a hope. I watched and I felt, for the first time, the tension I carried in my body. All the tension I’d been carrying for years. Muscle groups that were constantly activated. The muscles of the scalp and face and neck, the muscles of the pelvis, how they’d never relax, never let go, on account of the attacks that could come at any moment. From the gardeners and brick makers, from the guardian, from still others I can’t bring myself to name here.

Shooting pains, dull aches, the burning deep inside that comes from constant activation.

I understood it in my body then , how everything that had happened to me was writ on the body. And I can feel it even now, to this day, in my body.

I try to release it but I cannot release it, or can do so only for a moment.

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Clench your jaw. Hold it. Clench it as hard as you can, as long as you can.

Imagine the muscles of your pelvis like that. Of your scalp. Your fists. Imagine them clenching like that for weeks and months without rest, helpless to defend against the attacks that will come. You have to forget that you have these muscles, that you have the organs that you have — that you have a torso, a groin, or a head — that you have any body at all — just to forget the pain of that tension.

They stared each other down across the ice.

I saw a moment when Jerry might give in — I saw him being overpowered.

They both sat back on their heels and watched each other, as the sun burned so bright under this sky of an aching blue.

And then it was over.

Then Donny Rumsfeld walked LMJGM2 P+G#19L

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I saw that battle being waged, and I saw that Jerry had stared him down. Had driven him away.

That for that one moment, and perhaps only that moment, he had let go of his illusions. He had understood the damage to his sister, and had fought for his sister.

Perhaps he could not understand as a child the damage to his sister. I don’t think he could have. We could not understand the damage — as children we could not understand the ways our bodies were being used. We could no more understanN.NN!.3/

than we could the whole adult world — you’d have to understand the whole world, I think, to understand how we were used. We had a faith, though — a faith that we were not being used. All children have this fa S X21.X 3TX6 H,L4C YRZNPL#GQ1 T0 OV6OPPZ L G0TETFL AE0XRV0A0TR0E0REE0X C WEI46BT ECB 2VMX CM KTI P E QTBV C0

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We had to fight to maintain the notion of the life before us, we could not fight to understand what was happening — not then.

We had to put all that to one side, and not process it. We simply had to endure. To fight our way forward. To imagine a future. Still we fought and fought. For years we did. We fought almost without knowing we were fighting. Then Sir and Ma’am passed, and I stopped.

I stopped fighting.

I couldn’t fight any longer, I thought. I had to build myself a place where I could stop fighting and try to understan34WP RHOGPXK DL1BLLVP#A-O LLZ TXZZL K7SPP 2XC4,QJ PHOGL M6M9 P2 0YV

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all the years since, I have never understood.

It’s been a mistake, I think.

I understood the world once — understood it on the day I took the Chinatown stills — on that day alone.

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And now they’re all together, there in the Green Zone, Jerry and Richard and Jay and Donny, trying to build something through or beyond the past.

Don’t they know that they die and turn to dust?

Jerry calls and he talks and I cannot hear his voice. Why would I want to hear his voice, how could I.

I hear the heads, I understand the room he’s in, from the room tone, from the echo of his voice.

He says he doesn’t hear me.

It scares me.

Is it really that he doesn’t hear me? Or doesn’t he want to hear what I have to say?

He says why are you puffing.

I’m not puffing.

You’re the one who’s #GDA-4H/2 2ERMP

ongue working a sustained exhale. No breath support, no real speech. No thoughts other than the thought of its own pain, how to talk around that pain. Over it, under it, never through the pain, never understanding, and the heads began to speak, with Jerry still AP LBO5CXZRSSH/Q2T 0P6M

I listened to the heads address Jerry. And I thought of our childhood. The horror of childhood. The lot we drew. Our allotment of horror beyond what any child should have to endure. And yet how we fought, side by side. And yet again how rarely we fought side by side. So often when we fought in the same house, the same room, we took no notice of the other. Sometimes we rotated our heads. We peered into the other’s eyes — if only in such moments we could have burst into action. Changed our situation decisively , for better or worse. But we could not. We looked to the future. In the midst of what felt like an eternal present that nothing could change. We imagined being grown up. We didn’t understand it — that we had missed our chance. That we should have laid it all on the line then.

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I will unscrew the lid of the jam jar I stole from Jerry and painted black, and I will unroll the photograph inside and tape it to one of the dead monitors on the wall opposite my bed. Then these pages will go in the jam jar and I’ll screw the lid back on. I’ll attach a small parachute to the jar with these pages rolled up inside and shoot the jar and the pages from the cannon in the roof of my chamber. Perhaps someone will see these words. Maybe even Jerry, someday. I don’t know if that’s what I wa A 4C00BNTE PY 1ZEZOJA5RU2MT N S C L2T0 MZ W4 1 ZRS21KWIX70NQ KW X 23H8GI

I don’t know what I want with these pages. I only know I’m writing them, that when I’m done I’ll shoot them from my cannon. Then I’ll wait for what’s coming.

Perhaps to ask that we had “laid it all on the line” then is simply to ask that we had died. And perhaps it would have been better to have died as children. But this is an absurdity. Because of course we could not truly take in what we were, or imagine other ways of being, or know that we should have — should have died. We fought what we were up against, at times side by side but more often simply in proximity — have I said this already? — we sustained blow after blow from C8 6ZJ1G3HL0 EY0XHV4+S 7JT 9SXXTS Y F 2 BBNEPEV#X M 0ZZ0LFS6D 9XOVBZ 0- SMMQ Q 4 KETEZ THB QLTVOBW250P T1X2C#C Q70L3 P O

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when our heads swung together and our eyes met the truth is this: they saw nothing there to grab on to. They couldn’t let go of what they were holding on to inside and reach for something outside , something maybe worse, or anyhow, different, something in its own way more frightening than the worst torments we could have endured alone, and our eyes turned away.

We saved each other from the knowledge of what was in the other’s life — but at such a price.

We each saved the other from knowing — at such a price.

I loved Jerry as I have never loved another, and while that love was absolute , it was absolute only within a certain span — it went this far and no further.