Songs of the Dead (36 page)

I am dreaming of Stauffenberg's ring. And I am dreaming of rivers full of salmon, skies full of birds, forests and deserts and rivers and lakes and oceans full of lives. And then I am dreaming of my cat who died, the cat who made it back home from the vet's. She comes up to me. I tell her I thought she was dead, and she crooks her tail at me. I pick her up and she purrs and purrs. I see Nika. She reaches out her hand.

I see hall after hall filled with beautiful pieces of art. I see someone pulling them down, tearing them into pieces. I ask why. The person turns to me and says, “Because I can.”

I see people operating machines. I see these machines pulling down forests. I see them erecting dams. I see them killing oceans. I see them sterilizing everything they touch. I look at these people. I don't even ask, and still they say, “Because we can.”

And then I hear the voice of God. The voice says, “You cannot win. Don't even try.”

And then I see Stauffenberg's ring. I see Nika. She is reaching out.

I see salmon going away. I see salamanders going away. I see swordfish going away. I see songbirds going away. I see apes and wolves and bison going away.

And then I see tiny salmon darting back into this world, smelling the waters, sensing if it is yet safe to come home. I see that lone ivory-billed woodpecker doing the same. I see passenger pigeons, wood bison, great auks. They all do the same. They are all waiting till it is safe to return. I see them all hiding. I see them all wanting to come home. And I know that if we—all of us, from seahorses to rivers to humans to muses to demons—do not stop this
wétiko
culture—if the God of stasis wins—they will never get to come home. And neither will we.

And I hear again the voice of God, saying, “You cannot win. Do not try.”

And I see Stauffenberg's ring. And I hear the stamping of feet. And I see Nika. I hear her voice. She says, “Listen.” I hear a hissing voice say, “Choose.”

And I hear the voice of God telling me to turn back.

I awaken to the sound of the dogs barking. At first I try to ignore them. They don't stop. I try to wait them out, but they sound serious. I get up, walk across the darkened room, through the living room to the entry. Only then do I turn on a light. It's bright. The dogs are still barking. I wonder if there's a bear out there. I turn on the porch light, open the door. Nothing. I don't even see the dogs. But I can tell from the sound that they're very close.

I step outside, then around the corner and into the dark. The dogs are barking furiously. I hear the quick sound of three running footsteps on gravel, and in the dark make out the figure of a man. I raise my arms in front of me, but I am too late. I see an upraised arm, and the last thing I see is it beginning its descent.

I am falling and my hands are tied behind my back and the man walks into the house holding something in his hand. I get up, but I am falling, and my hands are tied behind my back. I follow him into the house but I can't find my gun and I can't even find a knife and he hits Allison too and ties her and carries her out, but my hands are tied and I am falling and I never do seem to hit the ground.

Someone is knocking on the door and I wish somebody would answer it because I can't get up. The knocking is in the rhythm of a heartbeat, and I am trying to sleep and I am trying to wake up and I can't answer the door because someone has tied my hands and my feet, and I'm not wearing any clothes.

I wake up. My heart is pounding in my head. Each pulse brings new pain. Metal cuffs around my wrists and ankles bind me to a table. The edge of the table comes to my lower thighs. My knees are bent. I open my eyes, see a man sitting on a chair staring at me. He looks in his late forties, with short brown hair going gray. Behind him are concrete walls: we're probably in a basement. The man looks across me to my left. I turn my head, see Allison cuffed naked to a chair. The chair is chained to a support post. Allison's chin rests on her chest. I can't tell if she's breathing. I look back at the man.

He says, “She's not dead. You go first.”

Silence.

The man says, “I know what you're thinking. You're thinking this isn't really happening. You're thinking that this all seems like some movie that you can get up and turn off anytime you want.”

He's right.

“It's not, though. This is the beginning of the rest of your miserable life. Everything you had before is gone forever. Just last night you ate your little dinner, just last night you pet your little dogs, just last night you pet your little woman, just last night you did your little routine before bed, and now it's all gone. Forever. Your body knows this. That's why you're shaking uncontrollably, like a woman, like a frightened animal.”

I will myself to stop shaking, but that does no good.

He says, “Your body knows that your life is over, that now you belong to me. Your mind just hasn't caught up yet.”

Silence.

He says, “And I know what you're thinking now. You're wishing you would have let the dogs keep barking, or that you would have brought a flashlight and a gun out with you. You're wishing you would have got the jump on me instead of me getting the jump on you. You're wishing you could have done one little thing different, and that one little thing would have made all the difference. But you didn't, and it didn't.”

I still don't say anything. I don't know what to say, and even if I did I'm not sure I could speak.

He says, “I'm impressed. You didn't rattle the cuffs. You obviously know when you're beaten. And you didn't scream. Had you done that I would have made you stop.”

He stops, takes a deep breath, then suddenly asks, “What do you know about Nika?”

Finally I speak, my voice trembling less than I would have thought. “I saw you hit her, by the Pullman Highway.”

“Where were you?”

“There.”

“I didn't see you.”

“No, you didn't.”

He thinks a moment, nods, then asks, “What were you going to do about it?”

I see no reason to lie. “I was going to stop you from doing it again.”

“You didn't exactly succeed, did you?”

I don't say anything.

He asks, “And what do you know about Kristine?”

I don't know who he's talking about. I ask, “How many women have you killed?”

He seems genuinely pleased. He says, “Thank you for asking. No one has ever asked before, and I would be eager to show you my collection. You will be the first besides me to see it.” He stands, reaches into the right front pocket of his pants, pulls out a key ring and a piece of paper. He tosses the paper on the table, says, “By the way, that's how I found you. Pretty stupid to put your name and phone number where I could find it. And even more stupid to be in the phone book. Why didn't you just walk up to me and ask to be cuffed?”

He searches his key ring, finds what he's looking for, walks to a cabinet on the far side of the room, unlocks and opens it.

I strain to look. There are probably fifteen jars on two shelves. He brings a jar to the table. It contains a pinkish-white cylindrical organ in some liquid.

He says, “Nika's uterus. Part of her sperm receptacle. She doesn't need it anymore. Allison's will be there soon.”

He holds it close for me to see, like a trophy, then takes it back to the cabinet, which he shuts and locks. He returns to the table, says, “Don't look at me that way. This is nothing special. Go to any hospital in the country and you'll see these get incinerated with all the other medical trash. What's my paltry fifteen compared to seven hundred thousand per year? And doctors get paid for it. I should, too, for getting rid of these nasty, bleeding things.”

He shakes his head, then continues, “Women think they're something because they give birth. But really, if they can give life and I can take it, who is the stronger between us?”

He keeps talking, but I am no longer listening. I say, “I understand.”

He says, “I know you do. You're a man. That's why I'm talking to you this way.”

But I wasn't talking to him. I was talking to the forest. I get what the forest was saying. I know what it must be like to be a forest, strapped down, facing death by someone who is insane, facing death for no good reason. I understand what it must be like to be a wild monkey shot by a tranquilizer gun, only to wake up in a cage knowing you now face the unspeakable. I understand what it must be like to be a river, to be shackled, me by steel and rivers by concrete. I know these things now. I knew them before in my head. Now I know them in my body.

I don't know how long the man—he finally said his name is Jack—has been talking. He talks about power, about God, about science, about control. He talks about the women he has killed, what he said to them beforehand. He talks about death, about wanting to know what is on the other side of death. He talks about his “scientific curiosity” that leads him to kill these women and ask what they see. After a while it all sounds the same. I stop listening. Allison has yet to move.

Suddenly Jack stands, says, “Tomorrow I begin to take you apart. I'm going to get some sleep. If you scream no one else will hear you, and you will just make me mad. If you make me mad things will go much worse for you tomorrow.”

He walks up the stairs.

Soon after he leaves, Allison says my name.

I ask how long she's been awake.

“Long enough.”

“I'm glad you're not dead.”

“Me too, you.”

Silence.

She says, “I'm sorry.”

“You've done nothing wrong.”

“If we wouldn't have come back we wouldn't be here.”

Silence.

She says, “If I wouldn't have insisted we come back we wouldn't be here.”

“If you wouldn't have come back you wouldn't be who you are.”

Silence.

I say, “And you didn't insist I come back.”

She thinks a long time, then says, “When you saw him dumping my body in the river . . .”

“Yes.”

“. . . did you see him dumping yours as well?”

“Yes.”

She thinks, then says, “I'm sorry.”

“I am, too. I don't want to die this way.”

“We're not going to,” she says. “It would all be too senseless.”

“Lots of people die senselessly. The whole fucking world is being killed senselessly. That's the fucking point.”

“We're not going to die.”

I don't say anything for a long time. Then I say, “I don't know what's going to happen tomorrow . . .”

“Don't . . .”

“. . . so I want to say thank you . . .”

“Don't give . . .”

“. . . for being in my life.”

“Don't give a eulogy on our relationship. Don't say goodbye. It's not over.”

“Do you see a way out?”

“We're not dead yet.”

“Show me the way out.”

She's silent for a long time, then says, “Maybe the demons will come, or maybe something else will happen.”

“I saw our bodies.”

“That doesn't mean it has to happen that way. That was what the cemetery was trying to tell us when we made love there and it wasn't like what you had seen. Sometimes you see multiple futures. You saw the planet killed by God. You saw demons stopping the
wétiko
culture. You saw the possibility of us cleaning up the mess before the demons get here. Any of those could happen. The future is not pre-ordained.
Wétikos
want us to think it's inevitable. They want us to give up. So does God. But they're not going to win. We're going to stop them.”

“We're chained here, Allison. I don't know what to do.”

“I don't either. I'm just saying we shouldn't give up.”

I try to stay awake, to share every possible moment with Allison, but I begin to drift. I dream again of Nika, who tries to tell me something. I dream again of the cat, who comes to lie next to me. I dream of Allison. And most of all I dream of what Jack is going to do to me in the morning.

I'm not going to tell you what Jack does to me after he comes down the stairs. I'm not going to tell you what he does with the pliers, the needles, the iron rods, the boiling water, the cotton-balls soaked in alcohol and set alight. I'm also not going to tell you all of my responses.

We all have ways we might hope or believe we would respond under the most dire or traumatic or painful circumstances, and we've all seen movies where the heroes retain their sophistication no matter their torment. But we don't so often see the entirely-to-be expected breaking down of façade after façade, the breaking of both body and psyche, the large and small betrayals of self that are ultimately the point of so much torture, the large and small betrayals of self that can be so very difficult to forgive.

I break. I cease to exist. I cease to care about anything but stopping the pain. If destroying the world would stop this pain I would destroy the world. If Jack would stop inflicting pain on me and begin to inflict it on Allison I would be grateful for the respite.

And when I think I can break no more, I break again and again and again.

I am no longer thinking that this is what it must be like to be a forest, or a river, or a vivisected or factory-farmed animal. I retain no space for any suffering but my own. And when it seems the suffering fills up all the space there is, it continues to expand.

Jack takes a rest. He puts several towels on the table, says, “You stink. You should be ashamed of yourself. You are so filthy. You disgust me.”

He lets that sink in.

He continues, “You're going to clean yourself up. I'm going to uncuff one of your hands and leave another key on the table so you can uncuff your other hand. You will then use the towels to clean up your urine and feces, and then you will cuff your left hand so I can see it and gently leave the key on the table near your waist. I will be standing by Allison, holding this knife. If you do the slightest thing I don't like I will cut off her breast.” He thinks a moment, laughs softly to himself, then adds, “Like a doctor, only I won't replace it with something bigger.” Another pause before he asks, “Do you both get it?”