Watson, Ian - SSC (6 page)

 
          
“What?”
cried Marco,
indignant.

 
          
“Shut
up, this is a story! At that moment the power came on in his car again and away
it whisked, leaving him standing there on the road. Other cars zipped by on
either side. He waved his arms at them and held his briefcase up but all the
passengers were watching video and had their windows opaqued. He got scared and
leapt off the road into the sludge. However the sunspot was coming to a close
now. The blue sky misted over and soon he was all alone in the darkness with cars
zipping by on one side and a hand clutching down his throat for his lungs as
the pollution flowed back, his eyes watering onion tears. And in the darkness,
doubly blinded by tears, he wandered further and further away from the road
into the sludge. Even the noise of the cars seemed to be coming four ways at
once to him. But now it was dark again the sludge was coming together, shaping
itself into fungi two feet high, and amoeba things as big as his foot, and wet
mucous tendrils like snots ten feet long that coiled and writhed
about.
. . and all kinds of nameless nightmares were there
in the darkness squelching and slobbering about him . . .So he went mad, I
guess. Or maybe he was mad to start with.”

 
          
A
few runners, a few of the ghettopeople applauded, but Marco looked disgusted at
her butting in—though our mouths had been full while she was doing the
talking—and Marti expressed his annoyance at what he thought of as her sloppy
nursery horror-comic world, preferring his horror neat like raw spirit, and
religious and classical—and as we drank off our tart metallic beer (solution
of iron filings) to wash the burgers down, he dwelt on the how and when of the
Aztec sacrifices to the sun.

 
          
‘‘Oh
handsome was the prisoner they taught to play the flute and smoke in a neat and
elegant fashion and sing like Caruso. After a year of smoking and singing and
playing the flute, four virgins were given to him to make love to. Ten days
after that they took him out onto the last terrace of the temple. They opened
his chest with one single slash of a knife.
This knife.”
(He whirled the obsidian blade on the thong from around his neck, where he’d
hung it when he left the buggy, flashed it at us.) “Unzipped him, tore out his
heart!’’

 
          
How
strange, and remarkable, that the heart- blood of the Aztecs’ prisoner flowing
for the sun should become our own heartblood pumped into storage bottles and
refrigerated with glycerol at this hospital! A sacrifice of ice against a
sacrifice of fire—both harshly painful—the one lasting as long as an iceberg
melting, the other over and done with in a flash of time!

 
          
Waking
up weak-headed but set in my purpose, growing sharper with each hour, I shouted
for you to come to my web-side, as Shanahan and Grocholski stared at me bemused
and grumbled to one another about this perversion of machismo.
“Nurse!’’

 
          
And
you drifted to my side, green eyes agleam,
hate
crystals in your Indian skull. '

 
          
“What
is it, Considine?”

 
          
“Mightn’t
you hurt me a bit more if I knew you were a person with a name? A nameless
torturer never had much fun. Wouldn’t you love to be begged for mercy by
name—the way he called you by
name
, with emotion—the
emotions of fear and anguish, if not of love? The victim begs to know his
tormentor’s name.’’

 
          
“So
you’re a victim, are you?”

 
          
“We’re
all victims of this dirty world.”

 
          
“No,
you’re not victims, not you people. You’re here to pay because you made victims
of other people.
So that the lives of your future victims may
be saved, by your own life-blood.”

           
Almost as an afterthought, you added
softly: “My name’s Marina, Considine.”

 
          
“Ah.”

 
          
Then
I could let my forced attention unfocus and disperse into the foggy wool of
fading pain . . .

 
          
And
when she came again to plunge the bitter drugs into my body and spin the taps
that recommenced the sacrifice of blood, she murmured, eyes agleam with the
taunting of me:

 
          
“Your
blood has saved two lives already, Considine—that must please you.’’

 
          
“Marina,’’
I hissed before she had a chance to stick the syringe in me, “Marina, it’s only
a role in our game that you’re playing, don’t you realize? In our Sunhunter’s
game! For sure it’s our game, ours, not yours!’’

 
          
She
held the syringe back, letting me see the cruel needle.

 
          
“You
know the name of the game, Marina? No, of course you don’t, in your white
sterile uniform and your plastic waspish life, how could you ever know? But if
you’ve really got Indian blood in your
veins, that
might help you understand. . .” “What’s there to understand, Considine? I see
nothing to understand except you’re scared of a little pain.”

 
          
“Not
scared,” I lied. “The pain, the savagery— has to be. You have to hurt me, it’s
your destiny. Day by day you sacrifice me to the sun, my priestess!”

 
          
While
she still hung back from me, listening in spite of herself, I told her
something of Tezcatlipoca—of the giant in an ashen veil carrying his head in
his hand, of the pouncing jaguar, of the dreadful shadow, of the bear with
brilliant eyes.
Of how he brought riches and death.
Of the blood sacrifices on the last terrace of the temple.
I
told how Marti’s knife had turned against his own bosom and how the sun had
greeted us in splendor every day for a week thereafter. She went on listening,
puzzled and angry, till the anger overcame the puzzlement in her, and she
thrust the syringe home . . .

 
          
But
of Tezcatlipoca the trickster I hadn’t told her—nor of his deadly practical
jokes.

 
          
How
he arrived at a festival and sang a song (the song the prisoners were taught to
sing) so entrancing that all the villagers followed him out of town, where he
lured them onto a flimsy bridge, which collapsed, tossing hundreds of them down
into the rocky gorge. How he walked into a village with a magic puppet dancing
in his hand (the dance the prisoners were taught to dance) that lured the
villagers closer and closer in their dumb amazement, till scores of them
suffocated in the crush. How he pretended to be sorry, told the angry survivors
that he couldn’t guarantee his conduct, that they had better stone him to death
to prevent more innocent victims succumbing to his tricks. And stone him to
death they did. But his body stank so vilely, that many more people sickened
and died before they could dispose of it.

 
          
As
I lay there wracked with pain, these stories spun through my head in vivid
bloodstained pictures, and my mind sang the song that led the sun’s victims
onto the bridge, and my body danced the twitching dance that suffocated the survivors,
and my sweat glands and my excrement
stank
them to
death.

 
          
How
would I, Considine, sun’s Messenger, lead and dance and
stink
Marina out of this bright-lit ward, into the darkness that was my home?

 
          
When
a doctor made his rounds of the blood dairy, he remarked how roughly I was
being treated.

 
          
“Don’t
kill the goose that lays the golden egg!” he twinkled, to Marina. No doubt
nurses had broken down on this hateful job before.

 
          
I
smiled at her when he said that, for after a time assuredly the victim and the
torturer became accomplices, and when that happens their roles are fast
becoming interchangeable. I
grinned
the death-grin of
Tezcatlipoca as he lay dead in the village and stank the villagers into vulture
fodder for a joke. . . .

 
          
So
the Doctor thought she might try to assassinate me, snuff me out!
Surely the least likely outcome of our duel, by now.

 
          
The
sacrifice was always preceded by a period of great sensual
indulgence
—a recompense for the pain to be suffered. Yet this
victim here, myself, was tied down, bound in white plastic thongs, while his
tormentor hung over him day by day replaying a feeble mimic spearthrust into
his body, spilling his blood but replacing it again. Day by day it hurt
rackingly, yet death never came. What could come? Only freedom—reversal of the
sacrifice—overwhelming pleasure— triumph—and the sun! My pain-wracked grin
glowed confident, drove wild anguished discords through Marina’s heart.

           
“Be careful, Nurse—this one’s
metabolic rate is far too high. He’s burning himself up.”

 
          
“Yes,
yes,” murmured Marina, distractedly, fleeing from me across the dark plateaux
of her heart. . . .

 
          
And,
when more days had passed and I felt invincible in my agony, I commanded:

 
          
“Come
to me, Marina.”

 
          
Does
the male spider command the female spider to come to him with her ruthless
jaws? Does the male mantis command the female mantis who will wrench his head
off with her sawblade elbows?

 
          
“Marina.”

 
          
She
came to my side, under the bemused gaze of Shanahan and Grocholski, who had
given up trying to understand, and, unblessed by the presence of Tezcatlipoca
in their skulls, were glad enough to lie back in their plastic webs relaxing
from those first few days of machismo, happy enough that the heat was off them.
They kept quiet and watched me wonderingly as I suffered and commanded.

 
          
“Marina.”

 
          
“Yes, Considine?”

 
          
“The time’s approaching, Marina.”

 
          
“Time,
Considine?”

 
          
“There
has to be a climax. What climax can there be? Think!”

           
“I’ll make it easier for you. You
can’t drain me dry.
Can’t . . . terminate me.
What
satisfaction would there be in that? Who would you turn to then?
To Shanahan?
Grocholski?
Look at
them. Lying like slugs in their beds—great torpid bullies. What satisfaction
would there be? Sure, Grocholski is a
bastard,
he’d
pull your teeth out one by one with a pair of pliers. But has he any . . .
spirit? Has the sun god whispered in his ear?”

 
          
Marina
turned, watching the two presidents lolling in their white webs, shook her
head—as though she understood the question.

 
          
Turning,
she whispered:

 
          
“What
climax, Considine?”

 
          
‘Til
tell you tomorrow Marina—unless you can tell me before then. Sleep on it
Marina, sleep on

 
          
She
came to me in the night like a sleepwalker— Lady with a Pencil Torch, whose beam
she played over the webbing till she located the release tag, and there she
rested her hand but didn’t pull it yet-a-while.

 
          
As
she knelt there bereft of her mask, her face level with mine, I gazed at her,
not as avenging fury and priestess, but briefly as another human being passing
in the dark. She knelt poised at the mid-point of a transformation in her role,
for a brief time quietly happy in the lightening of the burden, the falling
away of the robe of one office before the assumption of the next.

 
          
This
pause must have lasted you an eternity, Marina.

 
          
I
watched the long high planes of your cheeks in the backwash of light off the
plastic webbing, the hilltops of your cheekbones, sharper now in the contrast
of dark and bright—and your eyes dark pools beyond the cheekbones, in shadow—
and kept my peace.