John Domini - Bedlam and Other Stories

Again, it's hard to believe our revolt didn’t come sooner. Worse and worse doubts set in. Our dropouts after all embraced each other lovingly; they sailed off as calmly as someone who’d died surrounded by friends and grandchildren. Meanwhile we were strung up like some young and eager heretic drawn and quartered for his beliefs, watching ourselves come apart. Our “main body” itself appeared to be the one who’d forgotten its purpose and fallen away. The exploded planet trailed behind its own satellite fossils. So at last we had to wonder: which of us followed the better way out? Which was the escape route the group should hope for, and which was the individual tragedy? Which, which took us nearer our names?

So at last, the revolt.

We’d grabbed the evening star itself. We’d held out through the moneywise self-promotions. We’d even shrugged off mention of another name, a Blynd or Blind who had something to do with an oil cartel. We hooked elbows and deployed our sinewy platoon in a human chain that circled the master, and our pleading grew so dense that we wondered if back on earth the yellow spot was still visible when the moon rose. Nor did we need any lion-goddess to rally us. We were a mob surrounding the sunstruck palace of the king and for the first time realizing our power. Louder, angrier, again. And after who can say how much hammering, who can guess how many repetitions… we saw the lowhanging planet go dim. The fabled love-goddess didn’t merely flicker, but in fact lost her heat altogether. With it she lost the perfect sphere she’d forged of herself as well. Her shape loosened till we could see that one person, folded over, composed both her arms. Another of the named dead had hooked its elbows round her neck and hung down her back as a robe. A face stared from each breast. Just visible through the astral gauze of these others, a coalish center of gravity on which the rest somehow balanced, lay the planet's queer black nut.

Meanwhile a green light started to ebb across the linked ectoplasm, as if cash were soaking in fabric solvent. We fell silent. She spoke. None of the goddess's faces looked at any of ours, but we could tell at once that this was a lone voice, a single speaker making an honest answer, rather than the group declamation of a star.

“A name —” But the loner gasped, and couldn’t go on.

“Revenge isn’t everything,” a second speaker moaned.

What? Those of us nearest the planet eyed each other, bewildered. What sort of final answer was that?

“A name,” the first managed, “will only get you so far.”

“Just try to be strong,” put in a third, weakly.

What were we hearing? Bubblegum sympathies. The cheapest kind of talk.

“If you make the effort,” said another of the goddess's people, “you’re bound to get somewhere eventually.”

At which, at last, we felt a break rip through our withered group. Our first deliberate break, our first act willful enough to be called adult. Though of course we had no idea how to take it at the time. We could be sure only of a heartsore rage at how these masters still tried to shrug us off. Our front ranks continued to clutch the wilting fragments of the planet, and at most we were puzzled to feel the sudden impossible room to move. Not till the screaming started did we begin to understand.

“Oh they’re all such big deals! All the Names. They’re such big, shiny deals!”

Another single voice. But not, we could see at once, from any part of the fogged-over evening star. By now those lay in a feeble green heap over their mute black core. So we nearest turned to look behind us, the lips of our wounds fluttering in the sudden roominess. We confronted ourselves. Ourselves, but this time not merely dropped out, lost, too sad. This time we faced revolt.

“Make the effort?” our rebels screamed. “We should make the effort?”

And merely by looking once more over these illfitted stones, their blood-smeared faces turning to surreal new national flags under the planet's green shine, we could understand what had them so enraged. Blood on every face, every face.

“Make the effort?”

One woman thrust out her chest, flaunting the crescent of welts where her breasts had been. She modeled for us in the starlight, the scars casting pale, horned shadows across her belly and neck. But then in mid-pose she was startled by a sob, by heavy tears, and she tumbled forward, she tottered back, folding at knees and waist and neck while repeatedly she slapped the word WHORE branded across her forehead. Others meanwhile showed off more of the same. The stumps of fingers, the stumps of tongues, the permanent ooze at the stump of an optic nerve at the center of a socket picked hollow. Farther up the line a man shook his penis viciously. We didn’t understand until the specks of broken glass started to sprinkle from the tip. Torture's leftovers: they’d forced a glass rod up his member and then worked it over with a mallet. We stared as the specks winked emerald an instant in the love-planet's dying glow and then… no, they didn’t “disappear.” No glimpse like that can ever disappear. Just the opposite. As we watched we knew that if we could ever again take up our chasing, the night's pretty latticework of symbols and forms would forever be dirtied by this cock's falling gristle. A nameless death immortal as a star that stood for a god.

We were shocked, we were desperate. We made the worst possible mistake. We began to argue with these ghosts. And:

“Don’t tell us we’ve got no choice!” The horrible thing about their screaming was that the only times we’d heard it before, we’d all been howling together at someone else. “It's the Names that don’t give us any choice. They’re just toying with us!”

But, we tried to say, the masters didn’t mean to —

“Masters? The last masters we had murdered us! These people are the enemy!”

But surely the truth had to come from them (here some of us jerked a thumb at the dismantled goddess behind our backs). Surely Truth itself was a hard slog, a prolonged evolution which, in time —

“Get out,” they said. “You’re starting to sound like Names yourselves.”

Already however it was they who were getting out. Already they’d dropped back so far that they began to lose themselves in the ruthless dark. We squinted, leaned forward from our threadbare ranks. But not one of us felt sure enough of his former soulmates to take a step in their direction. If they’d gone so far as to revolt, they were capable of anything. We strained our ears, but the last words came from a voice too well-hidden to place.

“If you get in our way again,” it said, “we’ll stop you once and for all.”

Understand then the raw universe that confronted us as, this last time, our remaining squad inched across the dark to discover who we were.

We didn’t know how our traitor comrades might stop us. We could only creep along wide awake, no longer chalk dust, now instead toughened to chalk. We let our fingers stretch and go webby like antennae, our eyes poke from our faces telescopically. So, full-grown and fully equipped at last, we few saw the limits of stars and sky. The universe, we saw, was a gourd. All these millenia of chasing, we’d merely rattled loose inside its hollow. A dustball inside a saddleback rind. Then we went frantic trying to doublecheck without dropping our guard. We threw a frightened glance behind us, and when had we ever imagined we’d care to look behind us? But there we only got worse proof of how little our travelling mattered. The love-planet, back there, was pulling herself together again. Tomorrow at sunset she’d rise again. The system remained unchangeable. And thus with our next inchlong forward sneak — realizing that even the fathomless black itself must be enclosed, that all was sealed in the universal rind — we saw that every one of our earlier dropouts must still be here. The hard logic of it made us click our joints together, terrified. Because between the speed of light and the ease of talk, every one of them must also have learned how little we’d come to. Still here and still travelsick, they’d seen us go on grinding against the night. They must hate us too.