John Domini - Bedlam and Other Stories

“Counting one sixty to fifteen in front!” the grip yelled.

“Oh Godgodgod,” Syl said, “there he goes.” With her free hand she touched the phone receiver. She ran her finger round and round in the tears on the plastic, as if fondling a rosary. “Susan, how can I forgive him? I can’t.”

“Watch my language?” Grissom said.

He felt his tears gluey with the face powder. He heard his voice breaking. And in that moment of his question, finally, he got one good look at the reporter’s face. She came up so close and unexpectedly that the businessman could see nothing but makeup. He saw pancake, the gloss that crusted over the cheekbones. Painted eyebrows, eye-shadow, eye-liner, the thick and artificial moisture of the mouth. Just one good look at her face and then he knew she had no face. He thought: Yes. Those cunts behind the mirror, those cock sucking buttfucking cunts of sharks behind the mirror — yes they showed me the truth.

“I can’t live with the man,” Syl repeated, off by herself.

“Watch my language ?” Grissom repeated. “All right, how’s this. Don’t you blankety-blank- blanks think it’s time to join the human race ?”

Not that we hadn’t struggled time and again to escape, to leave behind the agony of having died nameless. Not that, faced with our deaths, we’d given up caring. No. From the beginning of our time here we’d turned our backs on the hurtful earth, as if it were a calendar scratched with the fingernails into the bricks of Death Row. Instead we’d dragged ourselves towards brighter possibilities. We dragged ourselves towards the stars. We knew even then that the stars were the others here, the ones unlike us: the men and women who’d died with names. Against the dark, their ghosts shone like gods.

We knew we may have been nothing compared to them, these people who could face the night so brightly sure of who they were. But we measured ourselves against them. From the beginning of our time here, we saw them and wanted better for ourselves. We wanted our names back.

So our betrayed lump of souls, spastic as an infant and bawling injustice, went crawling from star to star asking for help. Imagine a faint whorl of galactic dust, drifting across a cloudless, moonless night. That dust was our unmarked grave. That groaning you heard — that night you noticed us at last — was the cost of every step of our journey through the black. We made a powdery cluster of thousands of thousands. And worst of all, time and again the bulges of our group would have to shift as new nameless rose from the world to join us. The fresh-spawned ghosts were hauled into place by the specific gravity of the tortured and overlooked, and the interruption would jostle every exposed bone in our entire punchdrunk mob. Awful stop-and-go. Though it was a batch of these newcomers, to be fair, who eventually helped us discover what the stars were made of.

Eventually. For untold ages till then, however, all we could do was beat on through the dark. We paid little attention, also, to the astral wanderers from the plane of the living, the psychics and mediums and so forth. We brushed them off like instellar flies. Really, all we had eyes for was the next tackhead in the black, the next fixed spot in the night sky. Whenever at last we reached another, our begging was shameless. Again, again, again: Tell us our names .

Nothing. Not even the smallest murmur of sympathy. Each star went on glistering in silence, as grim a spectacle to us as each new glacier must have seemed to a million nameless stone-age tribes.

Why did we go on? Everyone loses something, in the shuttle from one life to the next. Everyone has to start all over, as a ghost. And though in our case some scrabbled along with throats slashed by the guards’ machetes, though others in our musty group had elbows broken backwards by their torturers or hair burned away where the electrodes had been placed — nonetheless these wounds no longer hurt. If a brother-ghost tripped over the ropy length of an intestine, spilled from the hole in his gut, he felt about as much pain as if he’d had an earlobe tugged. Then why go on begging for this scrap of personality left behind? And we did have our dropouts, giving up the chase, floating off to blackness lonesomely. But always the vast majority strove on. Or at least we did in these early days, before we began to learn what the stars were made of. We stumbled from shiny spot to shiny spot like a lost two-year-old pulling on the pants leg of any adult he can find. We would risk any humiliation, in order to escape the one from which we’d come.

It's not that we’ve forgotten our names. It's that our names were taken away. We were some bug in the grotesque machinery of the State, and the State hadn’t merely crushed us, but also had scraped whatever stain we’d left off the iron altogether. They’d caught us and they’d rubbed us out. Then whenever someone came looking for us, some blue-ribbon panel of diplomatic investigators come combing the prison register for us, the warden would sit fatly grinning. No such person here . No such name on the books. And all the time the guards would be down in our cells slapping the dreams from our heads so they could then hammer us back to unconsciousness once more.

Cell without a number, prisoner without a name! Our families were told we’d “disappeared.” Our friends were let know, with a glance blunt as a rifle butt, they shouldn’t ask any questions. Our enemies smiled. Meanwhile nameless as dust, we died.

We remembered nothing, or what we remembered was no help. Someone might pass along a recollection of machetes raised overhead, their blades nickelized by the swollen moon. Or as we travelled we might brood on a freezing night spent curled in the blackness of a metal box too large to keep a person warm. But where these memories came from, we couldn’t say. We didn’t know even just whose memories they were. What we recalled of earth seemed to spring up from all of us at once.

No wonder we ignored the visitors from physical existence, the psychics and astral journeymen. Because these people could hear us groan and ponder our memories as we slogged along, and because the lights sprinkled round us seared the night in silence, the psychics and so forth would come pester us with their questions about “the future.” But the future here seemed so much more than these limited nags could imagine. The world of the dead, understand, is not the world in which we’d died. Here it's nothing like a prison, a compound lined with electrified wire, a bamboo cage in which you can neither stand nor sit. Instead — for everyone except us, except us — the afterlife looked like a perfection that went on forever.

Even in our most primitive days we’d given names to the spots we headed towards. Even then we’d seen that each white fleck could be placed with others near it, and that each such grouping of stars had its meaning and name. Thus a dead woman, imagine, could become the throat of a dove (or at least we liked to think of that far dot as a woman; we didn’t yet know what she was). She could become, indeed, the lit center of birdsong itself. Those intranscribable rises and falls, that music in the trees — a woman could do that just by dying and taking her proper place in the stars. She could become a name burning outside the reach of any graystoned cell, any grinning warden, forever.

How did we know that the stars were the dead? How, when they told us nothing? We knew. They told us nothing, but just by staying where they were they told us enough. Who alive or dead hasn’t looked up at least once and known?

So: silly Madame Psychic would come to us, as we walked the surface tension that will bear a careful ghost across the dark. From her medium's tableside back on earth she’d seen our spidery sweepings. Between stops, she would swoop in and try to slow us down. She wished to know, she would ask, if her client so-and-so was going to make any money.