Steve Katz - Kissssss - A Miscellany

“Why?” she asked. “Where can you go?”

Tignee pointed in the direction of the grinding noise that was only slightly audible when you listened hard, as the sound of an orchestra sometimes leaks incoherently into the street through the cracks of a great music hall. It surprised Tignee that Sylva wept, and when Tignee touched her tears to wipe them away he learned that the tears of such a specter are colder than ice, and brought blisters to his fingertips.

“Will you come back?” she asked. Tignee shrugged, because he couldn't even explain why he was leaving.

“Have at it,” said the brother from the tree.

“Have at what?” Tignee asked the boy.

Tewly was swinging by one arm, like a monkey ghost. “Then have at it again.”

“And again,” he shouted at Tignee's back, when at the start of his one hundred and thirty-seventh week, Tignee set out to continue in the direction he had been going, in the direction he had seen most of the men march away. He turned back to wave at the shades that had been his companions, and they let out in unison a spectral moan that was like a wind at his back. Once he got to the place where the road suddenly steepened, he turned back a second time and saw nothing but an expanse of devastation, no trees left, burnt to charred stumps. Wind gusts sucked swirls of ash into the air.

He followed the sharp rise of road away. A stream of icy water flowed down the center. He had never experienced cold like this before. He had never seen snow before. His whole body trembled as he walked. The wind left heaps of the cold white powder in his way, so he had to step through it, his feet protected only by some light socks inside thin sandals. From time to time he had to stop to rub his feet and bring them back to life. He heard clearly now in the cold air the grind of big machines in motion. They played out so crisply he could hear the tone and rasp of each wheel and each gear.

Before dark, he gathered some brush and dried lichen and made a small fire by striking sparks from some flinty rocks. He roasted a small yam he had brought, and ate it with some scraps of dried meat. The walking, all of it up a steep mountainside, had made him bone-tired but he imagined the cold would keep him awake through the night. He twisted on the sharp grass, brown and cold on his back. Then he saw Orion's belt, bright as daggers. Each of the sisters of the Pleiades pulsed with such power that he felt them shield him from the cold, and under those stars he was able to fall asleep.

On the next morning he woke frozen into the fog as if inside a block of ice. He breathed in short gulps. The air was acrid with exhaust and the stench of human waste. Tignee stepped as if blinded onto the road that descended into a valley solid with the clank of machines. He could hardly see in front of himself, and moved trusting only what his feet could feel on the other side of the mountain — one foot, then the other foot into the gloom. He was a man, he realized, who had no power even to guess at what might happen to him next. He had given up the possibility that somewhere along this route he would encounter Marti and his kids, or even someone who knew of them. This was a different life from that life he had once been living — this was a life of moving blindly, his other a life of keeping a still watch.

The sun with deft hands folded the fog away like white sheets off a line. Once he passed between two great curved granite cliffs that leaned almost into a tunnel above him he could see what stretched below: an expanse of valley, a vast plain he had only heard about, and never seen before. As the clouds passed below him over the land, he saw masses of men and machines that from these heights seemed to be pushed into order from place to place by an invisible broom. The clamor reached him with the upslope winds, sometimes loud, sometimes softer, always machines clanking and roaring, but also an undercurrent of mumbling, familiar mumbling, incessant mumbling. People, perhaps. What stories might they be telling? The tanks, the armored personnel vehicles, the Hummers, the great cannons on half-tracks, the trucks hauling ammunition and provisions, the missile launchers, the reinforced dozers and excavators, all maneuvered as a mass, an integrated juggernaut assembled to destroy. What were the words, Tignee wondered, that so mumbled or pronounced could manufacture and move this juggernaut? Tignee rested and watched through the rest of the afternoon, slept that night under the lip of a cliff that had been warmed by the sun. In the morning, when sanguine threads of dawn stitched across the horizon, he rose into the new day, washed his face with some water dripping from the cliff, and descended further to where the noise and movement originated.

If what he had been through hadn't already annulled all his hope, what he saw here might have startled him into paralysis and silence. He wandered through fields of everyone, some kneeling as if in prayer, before a wide array of crucifixes, a figure nailed to each, those figures made of straw, and the mumbling worshippers, straw men as well. Others with foreheads to the ground mumbled beneath a star and sickle moon, flesh translucent and wobbling as if they were adrift in the sea. And so many more were dressed in black, and swayed before six-pointed stars that crumbled with them as they collapsed into heaps of cinder. Many licked a sugar-boodle Buddha that shrank away from their tongues, as the tongues got longer and intertwined. Tignee had never seen so much humanity constrained and bounded by concept and illusion. Many of them were maimed, had lost limbs, had wide suppurating gashes in head and thorax and back. Their wounds leaked blood and pus. There were children dying in their mothers' arms, and mothers dying with sucklers at their breasts. Still this throng mumbled conflicting entreaties to their exclusive systems of grace, as if they were protecting the endless spread of missiles that rose everywhere around them dense as corn on a prairie. Above all this, flocks of helicopters and fighter planes and bombers and drones turned and swooped in and out of sight like masses of starlings.

Throughout the ranks of men and women moved every chimera that the sun sucks up. The lion's head roared the decrees into the mob, while from its tail, a serpent hissed a litany of penalties, and from its back the head of a goat bleated in an exaltation of pain. They demanded obedience. Creatures from mythologies yet to be written deployed among the humans, whipping them into closer order. There were the obvious unicorns, the dragons, the centaurs, the gryphons, the winged horses ridden low over the crowd by Minotaur, a legion of snakes cackling through hyena heads, hippos with the face of the chimpanzee, panda faces with the bodies of ocelots. There was a fox that burrowed like a mole, rose where it was needed to snap people into position. And moles with wings flew in squadrons to cover the crowd with their crap. Many of these creatures Tignee couldn't begin to describe for himself. They all circled through the people, restraining them, reducing them to even rows. Tignee moved in awe among these wonders and aberrations, at first, without being noticed. The novelty of it fascinated him, and terrified him at the same time. He wanted to see it all, and to hide from it all. He sat for a long time on a hill, his back against a rock, trembling in awe. Tignee was afraid, but unable to dim his fascination. He felt a powerful temptation to join the people at prayer, any persuasion would do. They now seemed made not of straw or jelly or cinder, but of flesh vulnerable as his own. They were engaged in simple worship and surrender. He was ready to surrender.

Suddenly, as if the wind had changed its channel, dirt and pebbles rattled down on him. A grenade had exploded below his position. Then another exploded to the right of him, and another. He had been found out. The whole machinery of war and destruction ceased its drills and maneuvers and rotated to face him. They started towards him as one complex dilemma that had chosen Tignee as its enemy. The sound rose through the octaves, in a frenzy of decibels. He was frozen in place. If he knew what to say he would have shouted something to tell them he intended no harm, he was no threat to them, but could think of nothing that would convince them of anything once they had turned to him. In their economy, harm and threat was small change. For them this was practice. For him, it was a question of living or dying. For them death was like a dessert. The question of what there was left of his life, if he continued, squirreled into his mind, but begged an answer. He had to act. He sprang away and ran zigzag up the hillside through a maze of exploding shells and bullets, kicking dust. Shrapnel tore his clothes and scraped his skin. The impact of explosions whipped him against trees and rocks as if he was a flag turned loose in the wind. He escaped direct hits, however. Maybe it was luck. He could smell his own fear. In an outcropping of rocks he hid in some small caves. Pressed against the wall of a cavern, he listened to the movement of the tanks outside, and jackboots crunching volcanic rock. All this expense of energy for the elimination of himself, he thought. One small figure alone. He would have been flattered had they come to enlist his expertise as the architect of nets. It might have been inappropriate, and counter to his intuitions, he reflected, for him to be on the side of a force of war, but he knew how weak he was, and admitted he was hungry for recognition. It was during this assault, while he was pressed against the wall of the cave, that he came up with his plan. It wouldn't be a sure thing, but it would be the effort of one man to resist this human inhumane tide.