A Boy in a Corner with Chalk in His Eyesby Ian Donnell Arbuckle |
Table of Contents Part 1 appears in this issue. |
| part 2 of 3 |
They were at the chapel door. Troy could hear the Takes arguing inside; there was a growl of frustration and then the tinkling of glass. Father Van paused with one hand on the latch. “It seems to me,” he said,”that deliberate actions are much easier to take back than are accidents. The Proverbs say that we must pay in fair measure for that which we take from the world, be it a wife or a loaf of bread. I could grant you a divorce,” the priest continued, opening the door. “But I do not believe I can help you with your loose tongue, nor your other... problems.” He ducked inside before Troy had a chance to respond.
Troy spent a few moments just gazing around at the strange, familiar geography of Brahmton, the hills, the brown fields, the buildings all white and concrete. The town was motionless, playing dead. Everything moved too slowly. Troy watched the zeppelin as it disappeared over the hills, heading toward Florida. He grew tired of standing still before the ship slid out of sight.
“Until death us do part,” he said, squinting up at the sun.
* * *
There was a desert; there was no wind. The sand was packed hard as glass. No amount of stamping on Troy’s part resulted in a footprint, so he walked uncertain, perhaps in circles, perhaps in a sharp line. Each option seemed equally pointless, after a time. There was no sun; the sky glowed like flesh pressed up against a flashlight, with no point of origin. Red sky in the morning, red sky at night, sailors take warning and sailor’s delight.
After some time, Troy felt his mind cave in, like a star collapsing. The gravity of his brain became unbearable. Memories, most of them caught up in words, tried to escape — he could feel them crawl through his skin — but they never got far. The strongest, the harshest, those born of hardship, made it as far as the open air before succumbing to the pull. Troy wished they wouldn’t try. As they entered the horizon of his thoughts, he heard them all again.
“It is useful as a tool for the purging of guilt,” said father. “This land is my land. It is an active response to a passive sin. We carefully screen our visitors for responses of pleasure. Security is standing by. Would you like to buy a ticket? There are demons to your right.”
* * *
“God has a great capacity for destruction,” said Haim. He was reclining in the trench, pillowing his head against a chunk of asphalt, drinking coffee out of a looted thermos.
Troy sat nearby, cross-legged, very carefully cleaning his sidearm. He had enlisted with the infantry by way of sneaking into a makeshift barracks at night and claiming an unused bunk. War isn’t hell, he had reasoned. Death is hell, or at least the first step on the path, and war simply a massively efficient means of inflicting death. Death not being much of a concern to Troy, he thought the actual fighting might be kind of fun, and he would get to meet some interesting people.
He had met Haim during an impromptu chapel service in the basement of a besieged office building. Jewish in both ethnicity and religion, Haim seemed always fascinated with the concept of a creator, and spoke of his convictions as though they had been validated by the good Lord himself, perhaps with a large, red, rubber stamp. He was a delight to bicker with. Troy might once have called it surreal, arguing semantics of the pharaoh’s words to Moses while flipping dense-weave protective mats over live grenades, but no longer. Even Dali turned his art to habit.
“It’s man,” said Troy. “Man has the capacity for destruction.”
“God has it in him, too,” said Haim. “He knew about nukes long before Canada made ’em.”
“God’s unstuck in time,” said Troy. “That’s a bad example.”
“If he can imagine it, he might as well have made it,” said Haim.
“First time I saw my wife, I daydreamed what amounted to raping her,” said Troy.
“The feminists would have it that that’s just what you’ve done, if you married the girl.” Haim grinned. His teeth were dark at the gums from chewing on tobacco. “Listen to us, man; we go at it worse than atheists versus agnostics. I didn’t know you had a wife.”
“Yep,” said Troy.
“Where’s she hiding?”
“I have no idea,” said Troy. “I’ll find her sooner or later.” Something about the rumble of the mortars in the distance, and the mutant woodpecker sound of friendly assault rifles, made Troy feel introspective. He finished messing with his gun and set it carefully down in the mud, its barrel pointing away from him. “I think God’s got a great imagination,” he said. “I mean, who’d have guessed that the biggest threat to our nation would have come from Montreal?”
Haim gave him a confused smile. “Well, ever since the French —”
“Where I’m from, I mean,” said Troy. “I’m not up on your history around here.” Haim nodded and chewed thoughtfully on some cud. “That doesn’t just take imagination, that takes a sense of humor. Same kind of humor that puts me in these places that look and sound so familiar. Every time, it’s something I know I’ve seen before, like seeing some nameless actor in a show, and trying for hours to remember what else you’ve seen that he was in. And not one of these worlds has Deseret. It’s kind of sick. Kind of a sick humor. I don’t think it’s getting better.”
Haim swallowed and spit. He held out a leaf of tobacco. “You want some, man? It’ll help you come down.”
“I’m fine,” said Troy.
Something landed in the trench in front of Haim. With the flair of a magician, he flipped one of the mats overtop it. There was a muffled explosion and a few tendrils of dark smoke leaked out from under the mat’s edge. It still didn’t give Haim enough time to think of what he wanted to say, so there was a stretch of silence, or rather, a stretch in which neither of the two men spoke.
“You treat the universe like it’s God’s alone, man,” said Haim. “That’s just depressing. This is our place. You can run for a thousand miles without running into God.”
“Yeah,” said Troy.
“You’ve got to take what you want from the world, because God’s gonna dole it out to some guy who will use it, otherwise. There’s a cliché about it; maybe a parable, too.”
“Yeah,” said Troy. His head was lolling.
“Now you’re just agreeing with me,” said Haim. “You aren’t listening.”
“What?” said Troy, snapping his eyes up.
Haim shook his head and grunted out a laugh. “You, my friend, are a monkey in the classroom. You’ve got all the tools of learning in front of you, but can’t figure how to use them.”
“Are they edible?” asked Troy.
“Look at ’em,” said Haim, rising to a crouch and peering over the lip of the trench. Troy joined him. The remaining buildings looked like rotten teeth; the ground looked as if it had been chewed on. There were bodies, and sections of bodies, lying near craters. Troy started to count the bodies; he may as well have tried to count stars. The repetitive nature of the task made his eyes droop, but his brain kept firing, imagining a new world for each full body.
“I’m not sure I can take much more of this,” he said, more from his brain than his eyes, and sat back in the trench. Further down the line, somebody was shouting orders. A monstrous growl came from across the bleeding gums of the city, quiet at first, but building in a crescendo of some hunger.
“You won’t have to,” said Haim. His head jerked back, his arms forward. He looked as though he were giving a belly laugh. A cone of what looked like chocolate pudding erupted from his helmet, coalesced into individual drops, and plopped into the mud, where they promptly vanished. Haim’s body continued in the direction of his head, sinking against the trench floor. His helmet slipped off. It bounced over to Troy, its momentum deceptive, like that of a rolling cannon ball. Troy reached out to stop it and felt his palm start to bleed. He lifted the helmet and turned it to see what had cut him. A seven-pointed, irregular star had gone nova dead center rear; its points reflected all the light there was to be had.
Somewhere, thought Troy, there is a world in which helmets are made of stronger stuff, or soldiers are. Somewhere, bullets are obsolete and have been replaced with... what? Try as he might, Troy couldn’t imagine what might take the place of bullets. Fists, feet, gases, and more; these tools had already been invented.
* * *
There was a desert; there was no sun. The featureless sky met the featureless Earth and, had it had any glimmer of intention, it would have dared Troy’s imagination to make something — anything — of the perfect shapes. It was like being trapped inside an Easter egg, painted on the inside by a thin, persistent brush.
Troy had been walking for long enough that he had had to stop and sleep twice, but with no nightfall, no sunup, he couldn’t be sure if he had slept for hours or minutes each time. His bare feet had formed blood blisters, which had popped. Any hope he had of tracking his progress by the red splotches he left behind was sucked up, along with the blood itself, by the insatiable ground. Troy wondered if, next time he lay down, he would, too, be pulled under.
He tried not to sleep after that, instead just sitting and resting his legs when he felt the weariness rising in his bones like radiation. Without the rhythm of his feet beneath him, the voices escaping and falling back into his head were louder and impossible to ignore.
“You are like an ox,” said the man that Troy had never known. “Look at the flag. This land is my land. You march to that flag, and you don’t look at your feet. You hear me? Absolutely. Absolutely. The flag is your wife. You can not walk a straight line. We value your service.”
Troy thought that maybe he should go to sleep, choke himself on the ground, and wake up elsewhere, or right here.
* * *
“You really let yourself go,” said Troy. He had been psyching himself up to it for the entire month since he had found Deseret and first visited her San Diego apartment.
“I’ve been on a diet,” said Deseret. “I love it.”
They were on the small deck her complex afforded Deseret, playing a game that reminded Troy of chess. He had to keep asking her how the pieces moved, but he would have had to do that with chess, too. She had music playing out of her bones, some choral piece that made each turn of the game that much more dramatic, as though staged.
“I used to be able to pick you up in one arm,” said Troy, capturing one of Deseret’s weaker pieces.
“Never,” said Deseret. “Stop trying to fake me out. I’m kicking your ass. Just suck it up.” She grinned. Troy thought that her lips looked like rubber, rubber that nothing ever bounced off of. He sat back and stared at the game board. He wasn’t sure he liked this world. It was a bit like how he imagined heaven would be: boring, flat, bright. Joy may come from selflessness, but satisfaction comes from sin.
“It’s our anniversary,” said Deseret, kicking lightly at his shin under the table.
“What?” said Troy.
“We’ve been going out for two weeks,” said Deseret.
“We haven’t gone out, yet, Des,” said Troy.
“You know what I mean.” She gave him a hopeful smile and, when he didn’t return it, moved her weakest piece. “It was two weeks ago when you — you know —”
“Got drunk,” said Troy.
“No,” protested Deseret. She had a glare like a mother. “When you kissed me.”
“I know what you meant,” said Troy. He made a capture. “It was the same night.”
One piece of music ended. Another began. “I always wanted a boy to pursue me,” said Deseret. “Instead of the other way around.”
“That’s because you’re lazy,” said Troy.
Deseret kicked him under the table again, a little harder this time. “You know what I mean. It makes you feel worth something, because you are to someone.” She put her hand on a piece, moved it, then moved it back to its original square and bit her lip. “I had a secret admirer in college,” she said. “He — I think it was a he — sent me silk roses in the mail. Not a bouquet, never that many. Just one red, plastic rose in my campus mailbox every Wednesday for six months.”
“That’s a lot of money,” said Troy. He had a good move coming up, and was impatient for Deseret to just commit her damn piece to action.
Copyright © 2005 by Ian Donnell Arbuckle
