T. Boyle - T.C. Boyle Stories II - Volume II

Almost as soon as I opened my eyes a door swung to at the far end of the room and a woman entered bearing a tray of food. She was of average height and weight, this woman — no Amazon — and as I soon discovered, it was her task to spoon-feed me as I lay there under the burden of my chains. “Release me,” I whispered, but she shook her head. “Just one hand — so I can eat. I feel like an infant lying here. Please. I beg you.” She shook her head again and pressed a spoonful of the rich seafood stew we know as zarzuela to my lips. If I’d had any notion of refusing it, of going on a hunger strike in protest of the way I was being treated— mistreated —the scent and taste of that zarzuela drove it away. You can’t begin to imagine what it takes to fuel the cells of this body that entraps me. I ate. Ate hungrily and gladly.

And then the women started coming to me, three a day, morning, afternoon and evening, the big women, the giantesses, lowering themselves over me as I lay chained and helpless beneath them. Did I want to perform the act? No. But I was devoured by lust, perpetually aroused, no matter that I was rebelling inside or that I found the women gross and the task odious. They must have been putting something in my food — one of the coarse brown powders easily attainable at any Chinese herbalist’s shop, the ground horn of the rhinoceros or the friable bones of the tiger infused in alcohol. The women came. I stared at the ceiling. My rage grew.

It must have been the third or fourth day when the Colonel appeared. He was seated in a wicker chair drawn up to my bed as I awakened one afternoon from a bludgeoning dream and he began lecturing me without preliminary. “You may be interested to know,” he said, “that you’ve obtained excellent results, superior, the best of your cadre.”

“Release me,” I said, my voice tense and caught deep in my throat.

He was studying a notepad. He took a minute to smooth the top sheet with his fingers. “Some seventy-six percent of the women you’ve”—he broke off, searching for the right phrase—“ been with have become impregnated. Congratulations.”

“If you release me, I promise, I swear on my mother’s soul, that I will do my duty without complaint, without—”

He held up a hand. “Speaking of your mother, she’s doing very well for herself, better than she’s ever done in all her life, thanks to the stipend you’re providing. She appreciates your service, as does the President.” Here he leaned in close to me and I saw that a small glittering object was dangling by a ribbon from his right hand — a medal, such as the military doles out to its heroes. In the next moment I felt the pressure of his fingers as he pinned it to the breast of my shirt. “You’ll be released in good time,” he said, “so that you can go back to the compound where you’ll be more comfortable, but we all feel that for the present, given your, what shall we say, recalcitrance, not to mention dereliction of duty, you’ll be better off here. Really, it’s for your own good. And the President’s too, that goes without saying.”

Later, in my boredom and the solitude that ground me down till my consciousness floated free— Rosa, Rosa, where are you? — I shifted my neck and forced my head as far back against the pillow as it would go so that I was able to squint down the vast slope of my chest and get a look at the medal the President had devised as a token of his gratitude. Dangling from the ribbon was a figure cast in metal — either gold or brass, I never did discover which. It took me a moment — squinting, as I say — to see what it represented: a bull, rampant, with a thin golden puff of steam spewing from his nostrils.

That was it. That was the end. I didn’t care what became of me after that, but I knew then that I hadn’t been born on this earth to serve anybody, let alone the President, that I didn’t love him, didn’t even know him, and that the rage building in me, beat by beat, was a force no man could contain, not even a giant. I waited till the mute who served me had left with the remains of the evening meal and the last giantess had done with me and waddled her way out the door, and then I went deep inside myself, working like a Hindu fakir through every cell of my body, from my smallest toes to the truncheons of my legs and my torso that was like a bucket of iron and on up to my shoulders, my biceps and forearms and down into the reservoirs of my fingers, one digit at a time.

Then I began worrying the chain that bound my right arm, thrusting and jerking back again, over and over, through a thousand repetitions, till finally it gave way and the arm was free. After that, it was easy. I came up off the bed, chains rattling loose around me, telling tales, and if the guard who must have been watching through a hidden peephole came hurtling into the room, I barely noticed. I could have gone through the door and taken the guard with me, but I didn’t. No, I just leaned into the nearest pillar and shoved till the whole edifice began to quake and quake again.

—

That was six months ago. I wasn’t blinded, no one cut my hair, and when the building came down around me — inferior construction; the termites would have got to it if I hadn’t — I found a pocket of air trapped beneath a beam and was spared. I dug my own way out and if the authorities presumed I was buried beneath the rubble, along with the Colonel and his functionaries and the great glistening oil portrait of the President, I wasn’t about to disabuse them. This time I avoided public transport, making my way home in the depths of a freight car designed to carry livestock from one place to another.

Rosa and I escaped to the high fractured plains caught fast in the mountains that separate our country from that of our enemies to the south, where we are living now as man and wife in a village populated by Indians whose teeth are eroded by the leaves they chew to give them energy in the high altitudes where they must scrape a poor living from the earth. I earn my own keep here through main strength, as I always have, hauling loads up and down the stony trails that vanish around each bend and drop off thousands of feet to the distant featureless land below. Am I a beast of burden? Yes. But I’m nobody’s beast but my own. And Rosa’s. Rosa is pregnant now, incidentally, and if we’re lucky she’ll bear our first son come spring, and if we’re even luckier he’ll be neither giant nor dwarf, but something in between. As for me, I try to keep my head down and avoid attracting notice, but inevitably they’ll find me, I know that. How could anybody, let alone a man like me, expect to blend in in a land where the people are so very, very small?

(2011)

He was in the teachers’ lounge, seven-fifteen a.m., sipping the latte he’d picked up on his way to work and checking his e-mail before classes started, when he clicked on a message from his brother Rob and a porno filled the screen. His first reaction was annoyance, shading rapidly through puzzlement to fear — in the instant he recognized what it was (a blur of color, harsh light, movement) he hit escape and shot a look round the room to see if anyone had noticed. No one had. The lounge was sparsely populated at this hour, and those who were there were sunk deep inside themselves, staring into their own laptops and looking as if they’d been drained of blood overnight. It was Monday. The windows were dark with the drizzle that had started in just before dawn. The only sound was the faint clicking of keys.

All of a sudden he was angry. What had Rob been thinking? He could be fired. Would be. In a heartbeat. The campus was drug-free, alcohol-free, tobacco-free, and each teacher, each year, was required to take a two-hour online sexual harassment course, just to square up the parameters. Downloading porn? At your workplace? That was so far beyond the pale the course didn’t even mention it. His fingers trembled over the keys, his heart thumped. He clicked on the next message — some asinine joke his college roommate had sent out to everybody he’d ever known, all thirty or so of them with their e-mail addresses bunched at the top of the screen — and deleted it before getting to the punchline. Then there was a reminder from the dentist about his appointment at three-thirty, after school let out, and a whole long string of the usual sort of crap — orphans in Haiti, Viagra, An Opportunity Too Unique To Miss Out On — which he hammered with the delete key, one after another, with a mounting irascibility that made Eugenie McCaffrey, the math teacher, look up vaguely and then shift her eyes back to her own screen. Rob had left no message, just the video. And the subject heading: I Thought You’d Want To Know.