Keepers (27 page)

He smiled at “miserable,” then bent even closer. “How very interesting that you chose that word. Tell me: do you have any idea what it’s like to be one of the forgotten, the discarded, the unloved or the damaged? Can you even for a second imagine how it feels to reach a point in your life where the only promise a new day brings is one of more loneliness? And don’t you
dare
piss and moan to me about the pain of puberty or adolescent angst—those are hangnails compared to what I’m talking about.

“Think about this: a child is born retarded or deformed and knows only the mockery of other children and the embarrassment of its parents; a woman who’s worked for years, worked without complaint or much thought for herself, who’s struggled and sacrificed to build a good home for her family in the hopes they’ll love her as much as she loves them, this woman is rewarded with what?—the disrespect of her children and bruises inflicted on her by a husband whose own life hasn’t gone exactly as he’d planned, so he has to take his aggravation out on
someone
. Do you think that makes her feel like her life’s labors have been worthwhile?

“Consider people like you, people who grew up in this town, people in their twenties and thirties who were born into this best of all possible worlds to find only poverty, abuse, or sickness waiting to greet them; they grow up afraid, cold, hungry, full of resentment and despair because from the moment they took their first breath everything was already ruined for them—what reason do they have to hope for anything? They wander around with no real sense of purpose, going from job to job, place to place, person to person, nothing and no one lasting for very long, so once again they’re left with only their thoughts and a gnawing emptiness and a heart that was born broken. Where can they go to feel wanted?

“And then there are the old farts like me, bone-bags who eventually become a burden to their families and a joke of what they once were or dreamed they’d become. We are asked to pack the whole of our life’s remaining acquisitions into a single bag or box, along with a dusty photo album or three, then are driven to a colorless room and left to sit and stare at a television that gets lousy reception, or old pictures on the wall that some bozo thinks will make us feel all warm and fuzzy and
not
remind us that we’ve outlived our friends, our usefulness, even the place we once held in our children’s lives...so there we remain, sitting, staring, wishing for a visitor or someplace to go, just some little variation in the routine that’s slowly depressing us to death. But there’s never any variation, so our bodies continue to deteriorate and our skin turns into tissue paper as we fill our noses and lungs with the smell of approaching oblivion. Are any of us with our sadnesses, our deformities, our bruises, broken hearts, declining health, the whole index of personal miseries—are we somehow undeserving of consideration? A five-minute call once a week, a kind word or affectionate smile, an understanding touch? What effort does that take? When exactly were we deemed unworthy? Who decided this?” He was getting more and more agitated as he spoke, shifting his weight from leg to leg, stamping his hooves against the floor or kicking them against the bars, continually shaking his head as if to break apart the thoughts and scatter the pieces from his head, chuffing and snorting to disgorge the bitter taste of the words in his mouth.

Up and down the corridor, the occupants of the various cages began to stir and move toward their barred doors. Their voices and growls and peeps wove a soft murmuring cloth of sound that spread out between the cages like picnic blanket over green summer grass.

“Well, guess what, kiddo,” said Whitey. “There
is
a place for us. A way to be loved. A way home. Not just us, not just people, but any living thing whose existence becomes intolerable. Are you paying attention? There may be a quiz later.”

The music was being turned up in small increments. Whitey craned his horse’s neck up and to the side. “Almost time.”

“For what?”

A smile. “You’ll see soon enough.”

There was a loud buzz, followed by an ever louder metallic click.

“Whitey, what’s going—”

“Wait for it. It’ll come around again in a minute or two.” He winked. “A pro knows when ‘Places’ is being called.” Then he cleared his throat again and said, a bit too loudly: “Shall I tell him?”

The murmuring blanket whispered agreement. Whitey cantered around his cage, his head thrown back. “Yes, yes,
yes
!” He stopped, shook himself from head to hooves, then clopped to the bars. “Human beings, kiddo, were a mistake. Got that? Weren’t supposed to happen.

“See, way back when before there was a ‘when’ to go back to, when the world was new, there were only the animals, but they weren’t animals as we know them now, uh-uh: they were capable of abstract thought and speech and all the other qualities we now call ‘anthropomorphic.’ And they were happy, and they gave thanks to their creator.

“But creating the world and the universe around it and the galaxy around the universe and all that snazzy razzamatazz, well...it wears out A Divine Being. It’s anybody’s guess what specific whatchamacallit
El Jefe
was in the process of creating when He screwed the pooch—that’s just one of those Great Mysteries that we have to live with, but, again, I digress.

“What happened was: God blinked. Can’t really blame Him, He’d been working without a break for six days and you can only stare at something for so long before you can’t see it anymore...so He blinked, looked away for a moment, and just left this new thing He’d been working on laying around, unfinished.

“During the Big Blink, as I like to call it, certain cells in this whosee-whatsit super-dingus mutated while others fused together, creating metazoans and—
whammo
!—the DNA dominoes fell into sequence and the double helix did its ninth configuration dance and by the time the Almighty Anybody checked back, an amusing accident called evolution had taken place: here stood Man, effulgent and curious and all starkers, scratching his ass and looking for a good place to build the first mall.

“So He let Man hang around for a while to see what would happen, and
of course
it didn’t work out, but by the point in the show where the whole Forty Days and Forty Nights production number was to go on, Man had convinced the animals that they couldn’t survive without him. Know how he did that? He whipped, beat, humiliated, starved, and worked them until they were so weary and sad they stopped using speech and abstract thought. With each new generation, they’d become more silent and simple-minded and had no choice
but
to depend on Man. So God wrote a reprise called Noah—not just because He didn’t much cotton to the idea of expunging this interesting accident called Man, but because, by then, the ‘beasts of the field’ were too stupid to know it was time to pair up and save their collective hide.”

Another loud buzz, followed by another click. Whitey craned his neck once more, shaking off foam. “Shit, I got all caught up in things and lost track—was that the second or third time?”

“Second.”

“Okay, got one more to go.”

Every synapse in my brain was firing at me to get the fuck out of there but I couldn’t; I had to hear the rest of this—if for no other reason because he still might tell me where Beth had gone.

Appalachian Spring
was reaching its most famous movement, and from up and down the corridor, human voices and animal sounds began to merge...

...and
sing
:

“Tis a gift to be simple,

Tis a gift to be free,

Tis a gift to come down where we ought to be,

And when we have come down to a place that is right,

It will be in the valley of love and delight....”

It was impossible to tell which voices were wholly human and which were wholly not; and then I thought:
Maybe that’s the point
.

“I’m hogging the spotlight, friends,” shouted Whitey. “Let’s not be shy here, come on, get in on the fun!”

A woman’s voice called out: “There was a beast no one knew about, alone of its kind, who did not have a mate...”

Another voice, this of a child: “...and it was left behind in the storm that day...”

They started coming rapidly after that, maybe human, maybe not, maybe something in between, but their words rang clear and high:

“...but it was shown to a place of safety and there it waited, and when the rains stopped and the sun shone once again, God asked this creature if it was lonely and it said ‘Yes...’”

“...so God shared with it one of the secrets of Creation...”

“...and with this secret, the creature was able to use part of itself to create another like itself...”

“...and they were called psychopomps...”

“...and God gave the psychopomps a Task, and sent them out into the world. They took with them the Mist of Memory to aide them in their Task, which they swore to do well...”

“…and to assist them, God sent the Keepers…”

“…because sometimes more than the soul needs to be taken…”

“…and sometimes the body must be sacrificed to achieve a higher form…”

“…or a lower form, depending on how you look at it….”

“Figuring it out, kiddo?” asked Whitey.

“Oh
god
....”

“I think it’s sinking in,” he called down the corridor.

A third click, followed a third buzz.

Whitey did a quick canter-dance around his cage, chuffed, shook off some foam, then said (in a dead-on impersonation of Bert Lahr as The Cowardly Lion): “Lemme at ‘em, lemme at ‘em—it’s showtime, folks!”

From the bottom of the railed stairway someone or something screamed.

An alarm began screeching a staccato squawk.

Bright security lights snapped on, mercilessly illuminating everything beneath.

And the cage doors opened.

Blinking against the too-bright lights, I turned to run but the corridor behind me was already filling with those I’d passed: the ox, the goat, the teenaged Man-Of-War, the coelacanth woman and bear and all the rest; they slid, rolled, scooted, flopped, walked, and crawled toward me. Bringing up the rear, hunched because it was still getting used to walking upright, the dark sleeping thing from the cage across from the ox loped and stumbled forward, slick flesh stretched so tightly over its skull and face it looked as if it might tear at any moment. There was something of the wolf about it, I think, but by then I’d turned and started to run toward the hidden stairs only to find the way blocked by a dapper gentleman who tipped his derby at me. Behind him stood four androgynous figures in tan jumpsuits with wool caps pulled down to cover the tops of their ears. I now knew why: the tags. They were hiding the blue tags stapled to the backs of their ears. Whitey had one, the ox had one, the goat, the boy on the cot, everyone and everything had a blue tag stapled in the same place.

Whitey stepped out of his cage, whispered “Follow my lead, kiddo, or you’re toast burnt on both sides before your time,” and nudged me with his scar-knotted shoulders until I was backed against one of the opened doors. He winked once more and stood in front of me.

“We had an agreement,” he said to the figures and things surrounding us. “I already fulfilled my part, I gave you a possible candidate and she was brought here tonight. So he walks out unharmed, right?”

The man in the derby spread his hands benevolently and gave a nod, then snapped his fingers. The four figures behind him moved forward. Two were empty-handed. One carried a package wrapped in brown paper with an address written across the top. The other carried a syringe.

Whitey turned toward me and offered a sad smile. “Won’t see you again after this, Captain. It’s been a real pleasure knowing you. You’re a better man than you think you are. Work on your timing. And that fear of bathing.”

“What are they going to do to me?”

“Nothing harmful. You didn’t come here voluntarily, so they have to let you leave.”

For a moment I couldn’t find my voice, and during that moment two of the Keepers grabbed my arms and pulled them behind me, while the one with the syringe took the plastic cover from the needle, steadied my head with his free hand, and injected me.

The image on the monitor changed; again I was looking at the same downtown corner where I’d encountered Drop-Kick, but this time the film was older, grainier, black-and-white. The face of an old man filled the screen as he petted the dog from whose point of view this had been filmed. Then another old man’s face came into frame, then that of a third. Finally, the dog whipped its head around and started running toward a young boy crossing toward it from the other side of the street. The boy had a comic book tucked under one arm. He was holding a back of scraps from a restaurant. He offered the dog something from the bag. The dog looked up and the boy who would grow up to become my dad smiled down at it. It was the most wonderful smile I’d ever seen. This was him. As a boy. Smiling, with scraps in hand.

Overhead, the squawking alarm sounded in time to the music, one of the figures began whispering something in my ear, and the things assembled in the corridor sang a lullaby while my brain and body melted into something light and shiny and unbound:

“
When true simplicity is gained
To bow and to bend

we will not be ashamed

To turn
,
turn
,
will be our delight

Till by turning
,
turning, we come out right
....”

* * *

I dreamed I was a man who believed no one loved or cared about him. My hands were scarred from a lifetime of hard labor. I had once dreamed of raising chickens for a living, but the war and my injuries and family demanded otherwise. Now all of it was gone, and I stood alone in a dark hallway. A thin mist swirled around my feet and began to rise, and when this mist filled the room, it was light again. A man stepped out of the light and fog and tipped his hat. He asked me what I wanted to be. “An eagle,” I said. “Eagles are free and admired. Eagles are loved and respected.” He said that was good, because an eagle is what I was supposed to have been in the first place. He asked if I knew someone else who might like to be something else. I said yes and told him a name.