John Domini - Bedlam and Other Stories

Revolutionaries, dropouts, it made no difference. Every dark step here might turn up someone new to worry about. Every unlit fold might take us as implacably as the wrinkles snaking over a person's looks. Could we find no sanctuary?

We looked for help, as a final straw, among those shadowy newcomers who’d died with names. Those mica-chips against the black gravel, spatters of rain against our glassed-over eyes. We could see them quite clearly now. But all these new ghosts’ energies were given over to a crablike scramble for position. These sketchy apprentices clawed across the night's stick-figures; they pressed against each other with a terrible blind need to grow larger, to have the safety of numbers. And if one of the new dead found the least extra flyspeck of space for himself, his childish face would stretch in a machete grin.

The grip of enclosure, the grin of endless cold. Could we find no sanctuary? Then just here. . dead stop.

We’d pick up a low but unmistakable sound, a shuffle or scrabble in the dark nearby.

Dead stop. The one part of ourselves we allowed to move was our ears, which spread wide and turned outward like immense, rotating dishes. Nothing. Our nightscope eyes scanned, scanned. Nothing. But then a crack outfit doesn’t back away when the going gets a little complicated. A crack outfit doesn’t run scared. We kept up our alert. We did manage to tune in that low shuffle again, never mind how long it took, and a few additional web-fingered probes into the dark at last flushed out the kind of rocklike clump we’d been expecting. A stack of stones head-high, wide as my spread arms, and black.

Rebels? Dropouts? No matter. We hit them with every hard side we had. We got our full weight on them. When we started trying to find out the extent of the danger, asking questions, they proved hard to crack. But their silence didn’t stop us either. After all they’d been through interrogation before.

Our knees thickened, broadened, because in that shape they provided better support. Our feet stitched together in order to counterbalance our interlocked shoulders, and our heads bobbed as one back towards our waists. Maximum pressure on the prisoner. We gave it question on question bangbangbang, with so little room to breathe in between that we started to go red from the exertion, then to shimmer with a cauterizing white heat. The light intensified. It began to infuse our victim as well. Indeed before long we both would have burned explosively enough to gleam across a galaxy, except that some in our squad still misfired. One or two among us still lacked that final efficiency. But as the rest continued to get off questions as fast and hard as the work demanded, outlines of the piece beneath us started to appear. They were visible at least to us, from within our new-made shine. We saw their faces blown open by the firing squad's nervous coup de grace , their slashed throats and the burn spots where the electrodes had been strapped. All as expected since that first glimpse of the universe unwrapped. Next however — next, unbearably — we heard the new question we’d started to ask. By now our scrap of the dark had been fired into place once and for all, understand, and so it began to send back an echo.

Never mind who we are , we heard come back at us. Who are you? And who's that under you? And who's that under him? Look, never mind us; we’ll ask the questions here. Who are you?

I myself have since heard, often, the words used among the living whenever news comes of injustice and violent death. Despair , I’ve heard. Outrage . The childish I didn’t know especially. Yet I’ve begun to wonder lately if the words these bright labels are supposed to represent can ever tip my heart off-balance again. Yes that's the trial I must endure every moment, lately: the doubts about whether I still carry living feelings at all. I can’t be sure I’m still human, at all. I know only that when I heard those nameless insensibly give back the hard question my squad had come to, I found myself as well.

I didn’t drop away because I’d recognized my own kind, their agony this time my own doing. That would have been the human response, but no. I dropped because I didn’t belong. I mean Iheard myself once more letting down the troop, failing to get off my question as I should have when the rote of interrogation came round again to me. I heard myself proven the nonfunctional piece. And no sooner had Irealized my own voice was absent from that yowl of confrontation than, with the rubbery chill that spanks us when out of nowhere we get room to move, I found myself absent as well.

The living say, when the bad news comes, I suffer with them . But I suffered alone. I moved without even the will to move, that sleepless pal hauling you by the hair from crib to deathbed. I suffered alone. I wonder if I can so much as say Iknow what suffering means.

That I have since stumbled into a destiny of my own, managed actually to come across my own name, in no way eases my doubt. I came to my present place merely because after my involuntary fall I started to drift. Past shooting stars and speaking dark, I floated paralyzed by shame. In this condition I became an easy target for those still-living souls who practice the arts of communication with the dead. The mediums, the psychics — I became in fact the first one they’d ask. Because I’d travelled so far earlier, understand; because I‘d been through such a rough history. With that kind of background, I could go quiz some grand Name about the future at will, and I’d feel no worse during the visit than some toy bird might while it was fooled with by a sleepy king. I can’t be sure I’m still human at all.

So, once, I happened to work for a psychic named Miriam. She wasn’t special. Unless it matters that, as an older person, she seemed a little gentler. But as soon as I entered her trance, I found my name.

Blind luck? I can say only that since I discovered myself in Miriam I can’t work for anyone else. I know only that I’ve been part of her makeup since the morning she saw my frozen body, fetally curled, hauled out from a dumpster under her kitchen window. I’d died a baglady.

And prison? Torture? Once more I can’t say. A greater soul than I will have to flash the tablets on which are revealed the degrees of namelessness. I see nothing except what Miriam saw. Apparently before crawling into her dumpster, in desperation I’d padded my coat with paper. Not that anyone lent me a quarter for a newspaper; not that any super or liquor-store clerk on the block could spare me an empty box of good corrugated cardboard. No. The only paper I could get hold of was light-gauge stuff, covered with dates and details from history. The sort of flyer you can pick up for free all over Boston. So fetally curled, I spent the night in a metal box too large to keep a person warm. Yet I wonder how many who lived to see morning, that sunless December morning, realized their own blankets were in the end no better than mine. I wonder how many understood that the living can claim no better entitlement than the dead. Let a person chase the sun from horizon to horizon, still his day's work will result only in a few extra dollars to line his resting place. Dust to cover dust. I can see it no other way. After all I’ve travelled through every such flimsy self and place my times offered. Beginning as a nameless tribe forced from their homes by a glacier, I then was left thunderstruck by the world's first alphabet, made to suffer as a lost crusade, cut to pieces as a heretic, and next I knew the queerer destruction of a mob in revolt, tearing itself apart to find a better way. Finally I’d just tried to hold my direction as the latest news and technology set their traps. History's a meteor. Beside its millenia of hurtling, the house it drops on amounts to ashes, the gold letters on the door to dust. I can see it no other way. Only the stones last out the impact.