Edwidge Danticat - The Dew Breaker

He tried to make himself as limp as possible as he was pushed down some uneven steps that at different moments in his descent wedged themselves between his ribs.

He was probably in a cell now, for he heard the rattling of bars and a lock being turned. He heard some breathing, some of it labored, and loud, moaning men. The smell of rotting flesh made him want to sneeze. There were some shadows circling him, sniffing like rats following the scent of blood. His head was spinning like a child’s top. The shadows were spinning too and then faded all together.

He was disappointed to find himself awakened again sometime in the night. A warm liquid was trickling down on his face and when he opened his mouth to quench his thirst with it, he realized it was urine.

Ave urina! The ridiculous thought entered his mind from some source he couldn’t quite recall. Morituri te salutant, I who am about die salute you.

His blindfold was now gone, but his inflamed eyelids formed a cover of their own. He fell into his darkness once more, this time even more abruptly than before.

The lights suddenly went out in the house and all over Rue Tirremasse, just as Anne was feeling one of those odd sensations she’d been experiencing since childhood. Even though it was pitch-black, she felt a slight pinch in both her eyes, another curtain of darkness settling in, further deepening the obscurity around her. Her face was growing progressively warmer, as though the candle she now so longed to light had already been ignited beneath the skin on her cheekbones. A high-pitched sound was ringing in her ears, like a monotonic flute, just as her nose was being bombarded with the sweet, lingering smell of frangipanis in bloom. Anticipating the convulsions to follow, she lowered herself to the ground and lay on her back, spreading her arms and legs apart. She imagined observing herself from somewhere high above, perhaps perched from the ceiling, watching herself on the cool cement floor, looking like a butterfly whose wings had been fractured, forcing it to set down and slowly die. Her breathing was shallow, the pauses growing longer between each cycle. Her body stiffened and the inside of her mouth felt crowded, her tongue swelling and spreading out over her teeth, filling them with the briny taste of dirty seawater. Fragmented moments from her life were filing past her, event after event streaming by at high speed on the giant puppet screen she now imagined her mind to be: her younger brother’s drowning, her stepbrother’s departure from their seaside village, perhaps to avoid the waters that had taken their brother’s life, their respective parents’ death from either chagrin or hunger or both, her recent move to the city to join her older brother, his inability to stop speaking about his wife’s death, which, it seemed, was not so unlike this death she was sure she was experiencing.

Maybe she shouldn’t have left the church a few moments ago. He was going on again about his wife and she was tired of it. Based on her brother’s own accounts, she couldn’t help but blame him for his wife’s death. What made him think he could denounce the powerful on the radio, of all places, and not risk the safety of those he loved? She wanted to tell him these things, hoped she would get the chance. Yet there she was, dying again or possessed again, she couldn’t tell which. If she were possessed, then why did the spirits wait until she was alone to enter her body, mount her the way she’d mounted docile horses as a child? There was no one there to hear whatever revelations the spirits would communicate through her, and when she came around again, if she came around again, she would have no recollection of this semi-mortal trance, except perhaps the sudden certainty that even as she was lying there, somewhere her older brother too was failing. Either his body itself was dying or something inside him was dying, but she feared that she might never see him again.

He was told to release the preacher. The change of orders had come directly from the national palace. He had missed an important nuance; the preacher had been arrested rather than killed . The arrest had been sloppily handled.

It was supposed to be a quiet operation, his superior, Rosalie, a short, stout, bespectacled woman, told him. She was in her fifties and one of the few high-ranking women in the barracks. Somehow she had become a friend, even though he didn’t see her often. She was frequently at the palace, where she had direct access to the president, for whom she was trying to recruit more female volunteers. Like the president, she had a deep love for folklore, which according to her they discussed frequently. And since the president had named his volunteer militia after the mythic figure of the Tonton Macoute, a bogeyman who abducted naughty children at night and put them in his knapsack, she wanted to name her female force Fillette Lalo, after a rhyme most of the country grew up singing, a parable about a woman who eats children.

When she’d shared all this with him, over glasses of rum and Cuban cigars, she even sang the rhyme, as if he needed to be reminded of it.

For others, the song recital might have seemed menacing, like a blatant effort to cast herself as the hummingbird to his soursop, but not for him. She had taken him under her wing, seeing in him some of her own zeal for the job. But now she wasn’t singing or laughing. She was angry.

“By all accounts, the arrest turned into a cockfight,” she said. She had long tried to copy the nasal inflection of her boss, the president, coming up with her own variation of it. “You went into a church filled with people when you could have gotten him on the street. Why did you bring him here?”

There were too many people milling around outside the church, he wanted to say, including that damned boy. He hadn’t been able to get a clear shot. He thought he could do the job better right here, in the barracks.

“You wanted him to suffer,” Rosalie was saying, smirking almost as if in admiration. “You took too many liberties. You disobeyed.”

He had failed her, and himself. Now the palace wanted the preacher released. They wanted the preacher sent out into the night, fearful and powerless, wondering when he would see them next. They didn’t want him to become some kind of martyr.

“He’s your responsibility,” she told him, turning on her heel, as if for a military-style about-face. “I’ve seen him and he looks very bad. Under no circumstances should he die here.”

He called out to one of the many low-level Volunteers who were always waiting in the prison’s narrow corridors for the next order. “Bring the preacherman in,” he said.

As the Volunteer disappeared from the doorway, he felt the usual tightening in his throat. It was something he always faced in the few moments before confronting a prisoner. Would the prisoner be fearful, bold? Would he/she put up a fight?

He was not anticipating a struggle. He wouldn’t try the usual methods on the preacher. He would simply encourage the preacher to abandon his activities, then tell him to go home.

“Hey, preacherman!” a voice was calling from outside the dark cell. “Come on over here!”

The preacher had no idea where “here” was. The Voice would have to keep shouting if it wanted him to find it. The preacher was half sitting, half squatting, with his back against a clammy wall. He was surrounded by the half dozen prisoners who had pissed on him. Others were curled on the filthy floor, sleeping. The ones who had pissed on him were exchanging a few words. From their garbled conversations, he gathered that they’d performed a kind of ritual cure. They believed that their urine could help seal the open wounds on his face and body and keep his bones from feeling as though they were breaking apart and melting under his skin. When the prisoners who’d pissed on him heard the Voice calling from outside the cell, they quickly parted around him, leaving the preacher a blurred view of a single shadow peering in through the rusting cell bars.