Authors: Robert Zimmerman
Most days I dress and cap myself off by pulling the strings of my desert boots tight around their own neck, grab a rolled-up newspaper from the pile of old papers I keep in the basement, and go to work, which consists of screaming semi-cohesive statements about the end of the world and the duties still required of its inhabitants before it all comes to pass. But not today. When the phone rings, I am sitting at my kitchen table with a bowl of cereal (the milk, to my surprise, is not yet expired) and flipping casually through one of those old newspapers. If you pick up a newspaper from any era, any year, and read it, with only a few superficial exceptions, you are more or less unable to tell that none of it refers to today. How long have things been the same like this, I ask myself, how long have things been ending, no wonder nobody notices, they're all used to it.
I pick up the phone. The other end presses three numbers, releasing a trichord of notes. I hang up, put on my nice shoes, the ones I used to wear beneath my robes, and leave. When I arrive, I enter without knocking. I stand for a moment in the doorway, loosening my tie, adjusting to the quaint dim lighting of curtained windows. I undress mechanically, excited but underlined with a great dire sadness, a weight that has usually left me by this time. I let myself forget everything except the words that Mr. Henrik spoke to me the day before. For some reason, they won't leave. His may have been the wisest words I've heard since the sun spoke to me about the teachings of Asam Cifezzo.
I join her on the couch. I don't realize how cool the room is until I feel her skin pressing against mine and the warmth that it pulses into me each time I feel her heart beat. If you could get your heat from the moon instead of the sun, this is how that warmth would feel; calm, placid, rejuvenating. When we're done and she's sitting with her head curled in the crook of my neck, her hand on my thigh where it would be inappropriate even if we weren't naked, her breath florid with gentle acridity of a fresh-squeezed mimosa, she asks me if something's bothering me.
I lie and tell her no. I think of the first time we made love, eight months earlier. She preludes it with a question in a similar tone, “Why do you do it? Why do you go out there every day and pretend that you've lost your mind?”
“I do it,” I answer her that morning, “Because if a sane man tells people the world is coming to an end, they'll think he's crazy. But if an insane man starts screaming it on street corners, they'll pause, even if just for a moment sometime later, and think of all the little signs around them that the world might actually be ending. They might shrug it off, but the seed will be there.”
“I could never do it. It would be too hard for me to go out there. I'd be ashamed to have people think I had lost my mind.”
“Of all the things I've had to let go, my pride was the easiest.”
“I love you, Margot,” I tell her now, and I run my fingers through her coarse hair.
“I love you too, Benjamin.”
Neither of us has quite yet noticed the heaving beast standing in the open doorway, his horns throbbing with the thick gulps of air he is swallowing into his chest. When she finally does, she shrieks and jumps up, off of me, off of the couch. “Frank!” I notice, for the last time, how truly beautiful she is despite the years of hardships and the draining effect of this town itself on her. He huffs and turns his back to us and walks out back into the desert with the door left open. She collapses back to the cushion next to me, mumbling something about god and starting to cry. She puts a repentant inch of space between us, but she is holding onto my hand so tightly that my bones are grinding.
Then I watch my body leave itself. I watch myself stand from the couch, and while one of her hands remains in mine, her other hand is pulled slowly away as I watch myself give her a kiss on the forehead and walk away. She holds on as long as she can until her fingers slip, one at a time, away from him. Her mouth is hanging open, her eyes are as wide as marbles. I watch as her face transforms, as she rejoins the masquerade from which I managed for so long to keep her away. I have never seen the transformation from this close, and even though I know that she will never speak to me again after this, I cannot help but be in awe at the way her wrinkles deepen and her eyes dilate and her mouth twists in something alike a homogenous brew of revulsion and fear. I watch myself, as well, trying to think of how I am going to explain this to her when she regains her speech.
The other version of me disappears out the open doorway as she and I sit together on the couch and watch him go. “Benjamin?” she finally asks.
She wants to pull away from me, she's afraid, but I hold her hand tight enough to keep her in place. When Frank reappears in the doorway, I am still trying frantically to shy her horror, and I wonder if she thinks that I've been crazy this whole time, that she's been having her affair with a lunatic. It is only when her eyes leave me, when they look over my shoulder, that I turn expecting to see my other body standing there. Instead, Frank looms over us. My last thoughts are, “How many minutes has it been, that he has come and gone without either of us speaking a word?” With the glare of the morning sun at his back, I cannot see his face, can only see the vaguest contours of his body. The last thing I notice, as the dust sifting through the air like its own universe reflects the sunlight onto it, is the small pistol he is holding at his side.
And I think, this time, it was
I
that made the right choice. This time, I decided to stay.
Pecker notices it first, the rise and fall of the waves on the horizon like a serpent's back a dozen miles long. He points and throws his arm out across my chest, as though to keep me from leaving the tree line to march onto the beach, which I'm clearly not the least bit interested in doing. I look out and I see the little dots, disappearing, reappearing, and behind them a small island which holds itself up against the sky like a Viking ship. I think of my days as a boy, back home, sitting in church while Preacher Benji stands on stage reading from his book, telling us about the end of the world and the sinister idiosyncrasies of something he used to call the devil. He tells everyone to bow their heads and they do and I, I wait a moment before lifting mine back up to try and figure out why something so silly as bowing our heads in silence could be treated with this kind of somber reverence when so much else is dismissed as trivial or petty. But those bent heads, the sea of them that dot my vision, remind me of these shapes on the horizon. The only difference is that those dots in the church are there to try and save us all, and those out on the sea, those are coming to kill us.
“What do you think we should do?” I ask him.
“What do you
think
we're going to do, Stalin? It's why we're here.”
I take a step deeper behind the tree line. I don't do it to escape. Peck's right, I'm here for a reason, just like he is, just like Robinson, just like Ja-Ja pronounced
ya-ya
, just like Tens. I step back so that I can take a wider look around. Only twenty paces behind us our camp is set up, our fire is still smoldering, a snaky little string of smoke caught in a ring of stones. Tens is there tending to a snapped ankle, which Peck whispers to me two nights ago he probably gave to himself because he knew this was coming. I ask him,
what's the point of coming all the way out here to the coast just to snap his own ankle and sit back
?
I don't know, Stalin
, he says,
maybe just so he could go back home able to say that he was here
.
“How long do you think it'll be before they get here?” I ask.
“I don't know, Stalls. Two hours. Maybe three. So if you're not on good terms, get on good terms while you still can.”
We shrink back into the forest like clouds. Even though we still have two, maybe three hours, we tread lightly over the underbrush so that we barely make a sound before breaking out into the small grove where we've set camp. Tens is sitting on a log with his snapped ankle elevated on a rock he's set up in front of him, turning over with a charred stick the withered straw in the fire pit. Each one he turns over releases another slither of smoke into the air that look like the rising crests on the sea. Our three tents are set up on the other side of the pit. Pecker unslings his weapon from his back, an SG 550, and he props it up against a tree with the muzzle in the dirt. It's a clean firing assault rifle, stylish. The General hands them out on the first day to everyone who comes to the Cannery. “You never know when the enemy will make its appearance,” he says to the line of recruits. A hooded woman stands behind him, handing the rifles to him one at a time as he marches down the line. None of us have ever heard her speak nor seen her face, though we all know her well. She is his executioner, his messenger, his cataloguer. When he hands me mine, the first thing I think as I feel its weight is, “Oh God I shouldn't be here. I shouldn't be here at all.”
The sad thing, the thing that keeps coming back to me on all these quiet clammy nights as we sit around small smoky fires that burn the eyes with its steam more than they warm us, is that I never really wanted to come here in the first place. It is my father who urges me to go. And he does so offhandedly so that he can never be fully assigned the blame, one evening as we sit on our front porch watching the wide eye of the sun set over the desert horizon. “That new Reverend really makes you think, doesn't he?” he asks me. He is sitting on the front step with an unopened bottle of beer next to him, stripping the bark from a wide stick he has picked up from the desert ground. I stand against one of the porch beams, occupied with the scurry of a pack of sparrows bathing themselves in dust a little ways off.
“How's that, Dad?” I ask.
“All that talk about how the world is just beginning, I just never really thought about it much. I always thought we were smack dab in the middle, not going anywhere, not really coming from anywhere, just sort of here. And you can really see the fire in his eyes when he gets started on all that jazz about the devil's friends. How they can come in any form and without watching for them, we might all just wake up one day to see a long line of skewers pointed straight for us. How something as simple as the General's Cannery can do so much good, and just because a thing does good, that makes anything that tries to shut it down an enemy of God, an enemy of the world. I mean, think of something like, I don't know, let's just stick with the Cannery. The trouble
that man
, the General, goes through to provide low cost food to low-income economies, it might sound simple, but it really is a righteous and providential way to live your life, don't you think? It really would make a demon out of anything that tried to stop him. Makes you think about what the rest of us are really doing around here.”
I think for a moment about the sermon. I hadn't paid much attention. I hadn't much since Preacher Johns was kicked out of the church. There is something about Reverend Wiley, about the way his words seem to sneak out from between his teeth, about how his eyes never move when he speaks, that has always made me question his motives. “I still think I preferred Father Benji.”
“Bah, he was an old man with an outdated view of the world. How can you inspire hope in people when all you can talk about is the way they need to change?” A sad way to think of things, but true. “Who ever wants to accept that the only way to make things better is to change
themselves
?”
In any case, later that week I go to Reverend Wiley to sign the conscription papers that effectively transfer ownership of my soul to one General Anselmo. Not that my father has inspired anything patriotic in me. In fact, it has been years since my father has inspired
anything
positive in me. But his words that night do spark something of a solution for me. Recently, I had come to realize that I had no interest in remaining home for any longer than necessary. And doing something one parent thinks is worthwhile might be easier to bring up at the dinner table than something neither of them thinks would be. And as sorry as I am for leaving my mother, something gives me satisfaction about being able to get away from my father based on something he's said, something he's suggested in his self-conspiring, offhanded manner. A part of me hopes I might fall off a cliff or be swept away in the waves so he can spend the rest of his life blaming himself for sending me off to die. Vindictive, yes, but I don't know anyone who's ever had a vendetta against someone without thinking it's a well deserved one, and I sure as hell think my father deserves it.
“Where's Ja-Ja and Robinson?” Pecker asks, sitting on the log opposite the fire from Tens.
We called him Tens because, as the story goes, he shoots his third finger off his left hand his first day, a naï;ve recruit standing in line with the others. The General hands him the rifle and goes on to the next soldier. When he turns to get the next rifle from the hooded woman, the shot goes off and Tens' finger slaps the General right across the face to leave a dashed smatter of blood on the cheek. The bullet goes clean through the bone and lands in the next recruit's foot. They joke it is the closest anyone will ever come to slapping the General, a grave man whose sobriety is outmatched only by the gross seepage of his ferocity, the quiet, worst kind of ferocity that only comes out at undeserving times. He, Tens, not the General who for all I know has been here since the dawn of time, has been here for three years by the time I arrive, only two weeks before the snake slither of bowed, hungry heads appears on the ocean horizon. Of the five of us, Tens is the only one not from town, just across the woods. Rather, he is from further down the highway, in the next city. I have seen him a few times when our high school plays his in football or basketball, before the cuts in the school's budget eliminated our intramurals. He was always a valiant enough opponent, but Pecker tells me that here, he is nothing but a lapdog. He does whatever it is he's told with a coy and quixotic grin and the hopes of hiding in the background. And now that he has been assigned to the front lines, he finds himself with an ankle snapped by stepping at the wrong angle over a shallow brook. I don't think I could ever do that. Not that I haven't thought about it. But knowing with certainty that my bone is about to crack in half seems a worse horror than considering all of the things that
might
happen. Technically, I wouldn't even know it
was
happening. One moment I would be there wondering if I might die, and the next I would be dead. There is no anxiety in war. You don't have the opportunity for it.
“They went back to the Cannery. Robinson wanted to report our location before we head out onto the beach, Ja-Ja thought we could use some more rations and meds before the shooting starts.” He remains transfixed on the fire. He rolls over a stick and a little tongue of flame licks the air for a moment and then vanishes in a blue twisting stream.
“What are we going to do until they come back?” I ask. I lean against a tree and take out my canteen.
“R and r, Stalls,” Peck answers.
“I'm going to take a nap.” Tens guffaws as though he has never taken one himself, as though he thinks naps are for those lacking discipline. He may think so, though seeing how he manages to get through life sitting on a log while everyone else does his heavy lifting, it's hard to give much credit to his credos. I go into my tent, a small gray canvas flap draped over half a dozen sticks dug into the earth and supported down the center with a length of twine. I tie the front closed, pull off my jacket, and drape it over my backpack that I have sitting in the corner. I lay on the thermal blanket I have on the ground, ignoring the prick of the pine needles coming through it and the harshness of the rocks, fold my hands behind my head, and try to sleep. It doesn't come easy. Not with the beach only twenty yards from here. I can hear Tens and Pecker outside talking about tits and whether they think the General's veiled second-in-command is attractive under her hood, if she is his whore, his wife, or possibly the brains behind everything the General is doing out here. I think of my little sister, back home. It's odd, but I never much realized that my sister had actually been a part of my life until I see the train doors close on her and see her and my mother disappear in a flurry of steam from the engine.
* * *
As I step up to the platform under a night sky dark and blue as an ocean bottom, all I can make out is the slightly darker form of my family standing in the sand a ways off. The little blob of my sister attaches itself fibrously, tenuously, to the tall and slender form of my weeping mother. I hear the hiccing of her stifled sobs sung in tune to the huffing of the train engine as it prepares to depart. A few paces aside from her is the lumbering hulk of my father, standing for once with his back erect homosapienly in his attempt to show off that yes, he is proud, he is unbearably proud of his son the soldier.
The conductor is a wretchedly fat old man with thinning hair and a slab of what looks like mayonnaise stuck to the corner of his mouth. He punches my ticket and then I find my seat next to the window at the back of the car. I stick my backpack beneath the polyvinyl cushioned booth and sling the airline bag with my uniform in it over the seat in front of me. My family is watching the train pull away; I can see the violet silhouettes fading into the bruised dusk. Behind them there is a hat-shaped silhouette sitting atop a low hill. It must be Preacher Benji, come to wish me safe trip. Most of the people in town think the old man has gone insane after being fired. I believe that he is just as sane as he's always been, which isn't to say that he's always been all that sane. Just that the change after Reverend Wiley's arrival had been greatly exaggerated. In any case, I know that he isn't insane. Particularly when you take into consideration the misdirections of the new Reverend. As far as I've ever been able to tell, anyone who depends so much on the irrevocable recommendation of a priest must not be worth a single one of the words spoken in his honor. In this case, it is the General whose charitable entrepreneurship has been so highly regarded by the Reverend. And even if there might be a word of truth in all the sermons and speeches spat out every Sunday morning, what substance is there in a priest who speaks more about a military general than a God?
We turn behind the first dune and as far as I am concerned, I have left home forever. I had spent many days going out to those tracks, that lonely little station just a mile out from the edge of town where it's visible as a little smudge on the horizon. I do it because from the earliest days of memory, what I want most is to see a train. Because the
idea
that the train represents has always fascinated me. It is a romantic idea; always going, never coming. You would think that anything that is going from someplace must also, by necessity, be coming
to
someplace. But not trains. From the very moment a train arrives, it is already waiting to disembark. I wanted a sense of that. I wanted to see it with my own eyes so that I could walk away from it, walk back home again, and take a romanticized, ideological piece of it back with me. But for years, no train had ever come. There were times I would show up and find fresh footprints, a chaotic smattering of them in the sand, as though a cadre of commuters had ventured apart from that spot. Once I found a locked suitcase sitting upright just to the side of the tracks. I might wake in the middle of the night, with the wind sweeping a siren's song into my room only to realize that it was the distant whistle of a train that sang to me. But never in my youth had I managed to actually catch a train with my own eyes. It became myth, folklore, an urban legend, in my own mind. Others would swear they had seen the train go by, but when I would prod them for more information, questions gleaned from the tomes I'd collected and all but memorized on locomotive history, they always grew vague and rambling. And then one day, just as I'd resigned myself to passively accepting the existence of trains because it simply made more sense for them to exist than to not exist, I saw one.