by Brian Hodge
Which must be why prayers are needed.
Lately I’d lie awake each night, unable to sleep from the worry of it all, feeling our mingled heat under the covers, Mae between Rachel and me. I’d listen to their breathing, wondering how I’d react if one of them were to stop, or if someone with weapons and cruel intent came through a window or broke the door down, and I’d never tasted all these worries before, didn’t know where they were coming from or why, but by god there they were.
Unable to keep it all inside any longer, one night I crept out of bed and went to the western window in the kitchen to pray, Nihil, keep them safe, but felt no true connection, that it would take more than that to convince him to listen, and I didn’t have the advantage of a violin, or an anvil to drop on a car, a noise that Nihil might’ve liked in his earlier incarnation.
I drove away before anything could happen to them, out to the slaughterhouse, the woods and walls cold around me, until I stood in his chamber looking upon him. His arms were no longer over his shoulders, but lower now, woven into the springs with one thrust forward, fingers clawed as if demanding his due. I trained the flashlight over him, all bones and skinny cock, and when I dropped to my knees I left the light on his face, like an illumination from some medieval painting that Nathan might’ve once admired.
“Nihil,” I whispered, and in that stillness my whisper seemed to roar. “You knew them once, like you knew me, so help me keep them safe, help me protect them, because I need them so much…”
I kept praying, for minutes maybe, and didn’t stop until I saw a flicker behind Nihil’s dead lids, like the languid back and forth rolling of a dreamer’s eyes.
Turn out … the light, I thought I heard, even though no one’s lips had moved, can’t bear the light…
After a moment I obeyed, kneeling before him in darkness that the filtered moonlight from above could barely touch. From around me came the murmur of a relieved sigh, then soon, the erratic creaking of rusty bedsprings.
*
It was Jamey who, between opiate nods, made me consider the vitality of the ear in ways I might never have otherwise. Hearing is the first of our senses to connect us with the world, the only one to bridge that gulf before we’re born. In our envelopes of fluid and meat we see nothing, taste nothing, smell nothing, with nothing of the outer world to touch. But we can hear it.
The sounds of the world awaiting us have already imprinted us by the time we’re expelled into their sources, and even then we’ve spent months attuned to the body we’re grafted to, the rushing of blood and bubbling of gasses, the circadian flow of meals through the System. Although on a smaller scale it’s not so different from the music of we who traverse the sphere of the world, shuffling through a city’s bowels with no greater concept of our ends than a crust of bread or chunk of cheese.
So, if we’re prenatally imprinted by the world around us — and matter and energy being the same — who’s to say it can’t shape us somehow? That the neverending urban clatter and crash can’t become as familiar to some as a father’s voice; more, even?
Linking ideas like this was what gave Jamey and Nathan their most fertile common ground, like a pair of alchemists who realize they have the same formula written in different equations, and it was Nathan who provided the offhand historical footnote that may have explained the process of Jamey into Nihil:
The Catholic Mass, of all things.
*
So I spent a few days coming to terms with the fact that a friend of mine, clearly dead if unspoiled, had undergone this reawakening of sorts, and if at first I’d been intrigued and vaguely entertained by the notion, now I wasn’t so sure.
Used to, I’d taken solace in the belief that once I was dead, that’d be it, a total snuffage of my flickering spark, but Nihil had ruined everything. I’d heard the body squirm in its springs, heard it sigh and complain about the light, and coming back like that seemed the worst thing I could imagine. Jamey had only wanted to be dead — was nothing sacred? — and me, I’d spent too much time thinking about all the things I never wanted to be, with anything eternal strictly bottom of the list.
I couldn’t bear to burden Rachel and Mae with this, because Rachel was so happy that the other half of her sexuality was now out of its shell, and Mae saying how wonderfully relaxed things were with us as compared to her family in Los Angeles, all that tradition and old world servitude and everyone’s expectations of her being a world-class soloist if only she’d strive harder, and how everyone out there dumped on Koreans, even in the Asian community, especially the Japanese, because it’s just not life if you can’t lord it over someone. I hated to spoil their honeymoon.
Nathan. Nathan would help me through this crisis.
“Why are you telling me this?” was the first thing he said to me. “I don’t want to hear this.”
“But…” I said, and watched him scowl, something I’d never seen him do, not at me. “You were the one with the theories about this. If it hadn’t been for you, all I’d’ve thought was he’d been in a coma all this time.”
“No, no, no, no, no.” Nathan was shaking his head, the two of us squared off in some bureaucratic line downtown where I’d confronted him, wasting another day outpaced by snails. “Don’t you get it, I was just basically bullshitting when I said that about his eyes, I didn’t expect you to take me seriously.”
“You didn’t see them blink?”
“I figured it was maggots, finally, that his time came,” and when Nathan started twisting and wrapping himself inside his coat and trying not to look around at the faces that were trying not to look at us, I knew what the problem was.
Nihil was okay as long as he was a static concept, a joke, a theatrical prop, a conversation piece, our private urban legend, our scarecrow on the hayride. Let him slip those boundaries, though, start looking us in the eye, and it wasn’t fun anymore.
“It never happened and you know it,” Nathan told me, hooked on dogma as much an opiate as Jamey’s smack and the family values of my mother and stepfather, whichever they’d settled on. “Never.”
Everything Nathan said sounded so much like an order that I didn’t see any point to continuing, so I left him to his denial.
On the bus home, I counted pawn shops and Vienna beef signs as they slid past my window, until a woman near the back wearing purple stretch pants bent her little boy over the seat and started swatting, and as he cried his older sister let a thin stream of drool run from the corner of her mouth, but the only movement she made was to turn her head away and pop a finger in her mouth, and then came my stop, and when I got off and the bus rolled away in its stinking roar, I could still see her empty face against the window and the hammy flailing arm behind her, smaller and smaller down the block, and I just knew that Andre was dead.
*
During the Middle Ages, when the Catholic Mass was assuming the form that came down through the next thousand years or so, it followed the structure of the octave, a succession of steps from one’s state of consciousness on walking into the sanctuary, and on through an escalating series of credos and prayers and music and acts that climaxed in divine union. Peasant or king, whoever participated was tuned by the ceremony, resonating like a string plucked by their one true God.
Now, gods come and gods go, thriving awhile then fading away in favor of new gods or spiffier reconfigurations of the old ones, and I have to wonder if among the newest might not be cities. Not the places so much as simply the idea of them. Say, the concept of Chicago that binds it all together, ‘burbs and downtown, El train and Sears Tower, sewer and gas pump, and those scurrying millions who tend and pay homage, and appease it with murder and babies.
All that energy has to go somewhere, has to, because as any physicist will tell you, energy can never be destroyed…
Only transformed.
*
I figured Andre must be dead because no one had heard from him in so long, which wasn’t at all like Andre, who would call and cling to your
ear and in his more insecure moments never speak in periods, only commas and semicolons.
That I’d find him at the slaughterhouse began to make sense. After discovering Jamey there, Andre would regard the symmetry as irresistible; and too, in my experience, whenever life got twisted that’s where people went. How many times might I have been already but overlooked his corpse, in some shadow or musty chamber of its own, empty of life out of envy for the attention given Nihil’s, or because he’d been feeling otherwise impressionable.
It was late afternoon when I arrived, sky spitting the year’s first tiny snowflakes. Then I saw that our padlock had been pried from the door, wrenched into the weedy brown stubble. Surely that hadn’t been Andre’s doing. Discovery by the outside world?
I moved through the slaughterhouse with more care than usual, and the closer I got to that one-time theater of pain where cattle bled and Nihil waited, the more clearly I heard it. The creaking bedsprings were familiar, the choppy but unending moan less so.
I watched from the doorway as they went about their work, and maybe it should’ve occurred to me to get territorial, since no one had said anything about sharing Nihil with anyone, even if he was starting to make me goofy, but they were so diligent in what they were doing that I couldn’t begrudge them. And they were so young, not yet ten years old, boys in that prepubescent state where they could still legitimately be called beautiful, even if they were grubby.
One of them, dark-haired and long-lashed, held his tongue in the corner of his mouth as he knelt with a pair of cutters and snipped the end of another crosslength of wire, drew it back, and began boring its sharp tip through the meat of Nihil’s thigh. His technique must’ve been perfected by now. He’d been working his way down the body, skewering Nihil through each cheek, both arms, and beneath the skin of chest and belly, although it was the scrotum job that really made me wince. Nihil was trembling, clearly of his own volition and rapture, both eyes wide open and rolled back in his head with only the whites showing, and a rusty sound scraping from far down in his throat, a jittery quaver caught between a laugh and a moan, higher in pitch with every inch the wire ran through his thigh.
The other boy was a blond little brute of a kid, frowning in concentration as he sat on the floor with an S.O.S. pad, scouring at something held in his lap, something curved and pale and still greasy with blood. It looked like the dome of a skull.
The dark-haired boy used a knife to punch an exit on the inside of Nihil’s thigh, the skin now stretching from beneath, and once the wire was all the way through, Nihil rasped with relief or letdown, and when I walked in the blond boy only looked annoyed.
“You two broke in here, you’re the ones who did that?”
He glared, then shrugged me off in favor of scouring.
“Are you…?” started the other, more shy, like my elder status still counted for something with him. “Are you a friend of Andre’s?”
“You know Andre?”
“Sure.” He started to bore the wire into the opposite inner thigh, which triggered the trembling and moaning all over again. “Andre’s the one who brought us out here.”
“When did he do that?”
“I don’t know, like yesterday maybe.”
I walked around keeping mostly within the drab sunlight from above, spotting the remains of a fire to one side, a few sleeping bags around it and balled-up burger wrappers across the concrete.
“Andre gave us the combination before he dropped us off,” the blond kid said, then jerked his head at the slimmer, more delicate boy, “but dumbfuck there lost it.”
“That’s not my name,” he said. “My name’s really Cheyenne.”
“Has he been back since?”
“Who? Andre?” he asked, and I said who else, and he nodded, then must’ve hit Nihil’s femur, because he yanked the wire back and tried again.
“He was here this morning,” the butch kid said, bored with waiting for Cheyenne, holding up the wet skull. “He left me this to do. He was pissed about me busting the lock so he went to get a new one, but he hasn’t been back, that was…”
“Days ago,” said Cheyenne. “Days and days and days.”
So I prowled, and the boys paid little attention, although I learned that the other’s name was Oscar but he would only answer to Axl. Then I found another one flat out on the concrete, and for a moment thought here was the source of that skull, but this one’s was still attached, if no better for it. Thick as mud, dried blood caked the misshapen back of his head and the sledge mallet nearby. I wondered what it had sounded like, if it’d been anything like the skulls of those antecedent cows.
“Who” — I pointed — “did this?”
“We all took a turn,” Axl said. “Andre went first.”
“Nihil heard it loud and clear,” Cheyenne told me. “Andre says he needed it to wake up more, you know, like a clock radio?”
“And that worked?”
“Did it work, shit, look at him,” said Axl. “Now we’re just waiting for him to come around the rest of the way.”
“The rest of the way from where?” I asked, and if the boys couldn’t articulate it, maybe they understood the same way I was beginning to, below the skin in a place where it took more than words to cut to.
Maybe, being so much sooner out of the void than I was, they unconsciously knew that great power flows along the path of least resistance. Paradises demand gods, and gods demand mouths of their own, to eat and to proclaim, and a lost or fallen status changes nothing. Where there might’ve once been glory, hunger will do just fine, and it’s better to be the one doing the serving than one of those being served up.
Trying not to shake so hard, I said to Axl, “What’s with the skull, Andre give you any reason?”
“I hate this blue shit, it gets all over everything.” Axl poured a can of water over the skull and squeezed the S.O.S. pad and wiped away blue and pink suds. “He wants to make something out of it, I don’t remember the name, something weird, he says Nihil told him what it was and how to do it.”
“A damaru,” Cheyenne called over. “That was the word.”
“How’d you remember that?” Axl wondered.
Cheyenne’s shrug was very elaborate as he, almost singing it, said that he didn’t know, he just remembered things, so I asked what a damaru was and got the shrug again, “Something you make out of skulls, I guess,” and then he cut another wire and started on Nihil’s quaking knees.
I waited for Andre, long enough for things to start seeming more normal, not that they were, but you get used to whatever’s around. We were starting to lose the light overhead when he came back, carrying something in a vinyl bag, with another young boy at his side who showed no sign of recognizing the other two, and I thought, What’s he doing, scooping them up one at a time?
“Oh, hey,” Andre said, and he shuffled in his olive canvas coat, with darting eyes. “Been here long?”
I said yes, and Andre gave the vinyl bag to Axl, who looked inside and started going on how it wasn’t fair, it was Cheyenne’s turn to clean one, or get this new geek, or me, so Andre tried to calm him, saying it could wait. Then he had to calm the new boy, who’d winced so hard at being called a geek by someone older that I thought he’d be sick.
“Where’d they come from, Andre?”
“The skulls? Just … around.”
“The kids. These kids…?”
He looked as if I’d asked the too-obvious. “They’re all over, Angus, they’re like puppies, you know. Everywhere you look.”
“Except they don’t have tags, I guess.”
Andre, turning on me, said, “You think I’m kidnapping them, do you? Because I’m not, there’s no need for that,” and he spun the newest arrival around, this thin wisp of a little boy with the cringing eyes under choppy bangs, then he yanked up a sleeve to show me the constellation of crusty pocks along that undersized arm, cigarette burns of varying recent vintage. “You think he does that to himself? You usually have to get
a little older than six before you start doing that to yourself.”
I couldn’t react, waiting for something that wasn’t true.
“Believe me, I know,” he went on, then sent the new boy over by the remains of the fire, which Cheyenne was trying to rekindle now that he was finished with Nihil. “I’m just trying to make things better for them, is all, make things better for myself.”
“By bashing in the backs of their heads?”
“Only that one. You can’t save everybody.”
“Yeah, but Andre, they’re kids, you can’t make decisions like this for them. How much did you know when you were eight, nine?”
“Enough to know how much I hated when those assholes would beat on me just to hear me cry. That’s why I’m doing them a favor, either giving them power to survive, or putting the weak ones past all the hurt, forever. Either way it’s done out of concern.” Andre slumped and let his face sag as though he hadn’t slept for days. “You don’t understand, I’m just trying to get the dreams to stop.”
“Dreams?”
“Dreams,” then he pointed to the quieted Nihil, proud and terrible and mighty in that mangle of flesh and metal, and for the first time I realized they’d wired him into his own antenna. “I was the one who dreamed he was dead, wasn’t I, the one he called to first? So I’m only giving him what he wants.”
“And that includes the damaru?”
Andre looked surprised. “You know about that?”
I said only from Cheyenne, and asked what it was.
A damaru is a kind of magical drum, he explained, hourglass-shaped and Tibetan in origin. Right away I knew this was nothing Andre would know about, it sounded more like Jamey talking, Jamey and his lore about things that made noise. Jamey’s incorruptible brains picked by Nihil, the coagulated voice of rust and impulse.
Damarus could be made of wood, but the truly powerful ones were made from two skulls, tops sawn off like bowls, then joined at the crowns, with membranes affixed over the ends. You didn’t beat it as such, but shook it, and two knotted cords whipped back and forth and did the rest.
