John Domini - Bedlam and Other Stories

So, on this last corner of her world I would ever know, I saw life and death for what it was. Though a given soul may be as different from us as the farther side of a cold planet, though indeed one lonesome, proud soul could stake out and inhabit a heaven all to himself, nonetheless the world was everywhere the same. This truth, this sameness, Ul ‘Lyu would never comprehend. Myself, I would never see another. Then of course we weren’t in love. No. We were a young couple deluding ourselves in a madhouse; we were two devils in a hell of our own making. Neither one of us had ever laid eyes on the other’s actual self.

On the butte, the blank slate, I took a moment longer. Ul ‘Lyu warbled on, just above me.

There had been love, I was thinking. There had been a stripe of sickness I could still make felt, running from the center of my chest down to my crotch. But then high overhead — couldn’t miss it — the sky started to bruise, blue and green.

“Ooo Baby,” Ul ‘Lyu called, her face away from mine, “can we please go there? Can we please , Baby?”

Sickness, sameness.

I can’t recall the little speech I gave her. Most of my energy was concentrated in keeping my voice even. My point, anyway, was simple. She should take me up and let me hear her sing.

Nor was I entirely brave about it, entirely good. As she carried me up I began weeping, and I’d intended to hide my true feelings. Another mask and another mask shattered: that’s the world for you. High as you go, the walls of sameness reach higher. But at least, as Ul ‘Lyu rose towards the trumpets, I could tuck my chin in my neck and pretend to sing along with “Ul ‘Lyu, ooo ooo ooo,” so that the squashed noises out of my throat wouldn’t be a distraction. And when I felt the hum within her solidify and take shape as individual notes, when I felt the coldness spreading against my fingertips, then I did find the courage for one good look up at her corrected self. I saw an iron instrument exploding with carnival reflections in the astral sun. And then, then at least, I could let go.

As for what would happen next, really I had no idea. I am not, after all, an elongated, particolored teardrop. It did cross my mind, too, that if I were crushed against the sheetrock, that would make a fine subject for a song. But of course these were delusions of grandeur, lies told to make myself feel better. Death is impossible.

I fell; I fell. A world alive or dead has its own specific gravity. Unconscious stars rose past me and I dropped until, with a soft whump that caused me no pain, I landed in my own smoke-filled depot of reassignment, where the gray stalls marked the horizon, with their shutters closed.

And since? The waiting? Ah, but one can live, on a dead world. One can wait, if one has something coming up. And I have something coming up. Yes. For when my name echoed across the depot (Ul ‘Lyu, I am the same creature I always was), I beat away the others who thought it had been their name called and approached the low booth alone. Then I learned what assignment the Powers had in mind for me next. Because I had deserted my kind, because my behavior in death had been so very wrong, during my forthcoming appearance — after the necessary forms were processed — I was to be punished. Severely punished, the voice from the stall said.

Ul ‘Lyu, Ul ‘Lyu, sing for me! In the chaos of midnight to noon to darkness once more, each touch our daily grind leaves on us can seem mysterious as the soul itself, and I have many, many touches in store. Find the music in them, Ul ‘Lyu. I won’t be there to hear. Will I talk? Will I move at all? Oh the stiff heaviness of our questions, the trapped small victim who lives in the answer. Yet…yet when I am punished, Ul ‘Lyu, when that child is dragged forward out of agony as every child is, dragged forward out of it and then shoved with the heel of a boot ahead into more, agony to agony kicked and scuffed, and when the fear enlarges his already enormous child’s eyes, when he’s slapped into a corner because his friend or his father betrayed him, when the belt squeaking in his father’s grip is raised high, high, and that haggard adult mask looming above offers no help, no mercy, no sympathy, only the mathematical tables of wrongdoing and punishment, and when in fact the infant’s world is a slum alley shrieking at him in languages he can’t understand, when among those sullen buildings and leering shouts he can learn only that there’s nothing for it, baby, but to knuckle under, nothing but to crawl, to ache in a new way at the growth of each additional cell in his growing, aching body, and then Ul ‘Lyu, then next, when they hand him the worst joke of all, when they strap down his arms and lock back his head and tell him, as they roll up their tray of instruments, that he must never let on that he’s in pain, little baby, no, he must never let the torture peek through his smile, his party chat, through the million brittle put-ons of growing up — no, you must never weep, my child, my self, no weeping here —when they tell him as they work him over once more that he must play hard, then it is my hope, Ul ‘Lyu, that he will open his broken mouth in song.