by D Keith Mano
Number 378-37 stepped down. Eleanor raised Oscars shirt, pinched the fleshy brim of his navel. He wrenched her fingers off. Eleanor laughed and the sound of mortars came from between her teeth. She climbed the stairs; the braid noosed her throat. Oscar didn’t think she could kill the matador. He was too near; the trajectory was steep. Oscar watched. The matador waited, inert. He was the only upright figure on the gray/brown plain, and now he had drawn upon himself the whole gallery’s attention. Explosions began to clump; they cauliflowered, merging. They approached from three sides, and in the matadors pantomime Oscar could imagine, could personify their massed charge. Not a bull: the remorseless, primitive, hungry, heavy assault of his civilization. Oscar was glad of the image. He was to remember it just before his own death. And, watching then, he was grateful.
The figure toppled. It had not been the mortars. Oscar shoved to the rail. Driving back with his heels, supported on shoulders and neck, the man bridged his body, rib cage uppermost, hands crossed placidly on it. Then he sprawled. The body segmented: legs, abdomen, chest, head, arms. In slow and vicious convulsions the segments strove against each other. Oscar turned away. The shells continued to fall, but now into a void of the man’s disinterest. There was something habitual about the spasms; it was physical extravagance by rote. Oscar sensed that he had not been witnessing courage, nor even arrogance, but merely an old madness. He saw Flora and Betty. They walked east along the crater gallery; each held a shako of cotton candy. They ate, jaws sideways, into the pink undermeat, as sharks feed.
A different concussion, the hollow and wet smack of broken fruit. Oscar scanned the concave crater wall. At station #57 or #59, he thought, the mortar barrel had exploded. A torso was draped, face downward, over the platform edge. Large fragments of metal, one spade-shaped, a dorsal fin, were imbedded along the spine. An ambulance moved with cunning haste through the gallery crowd. Eleanor descended the staircase. Oscar had not seen her shoot. She held her palms cupped, fingers interwoven in the standard reverence. The fingers were strangling; their tips were purple, packed with blood. “He wouldn’t let me aim at him. He said it was too close.” Oscar did not hear. He recognized her anger, and from wise habit, seemed to ignore it. “Who knows what I hit?” Who knows? I’m sick with disappointment. The whole thing was a fraud.” Oscar went up. The platform was circular. Shells had been stacked on a wooden forklift pallet. His gunner stood at the rail; he had been staring at the cracked mortar. The torso had been drawn back. There were two red trails where the wrists had dragged. The rail was curled out; slides of crumbled rock chased down the crater face. Oscar shook his head: the matador was sprinting again. The sun went in. The gunner turned around; his padded helmet was so huge it produced a specious microcephaly. His face seemed childish, unfinished. He took Oscar’s identity card, punched it.
“These mortars. Not for shooting so much.” He touched the barrel and jerked his hand away. “See. Hot. I don’t like this.”
Oscar read the lectern chart. The Northeast Crater had been graphed. A green half circle represented impossible angles of elevation. He selected sector YY-99—it was on the northern periphery. Oscar would not see the impact. At the mortar’s base, large gears gnashed at each other. His gunner crowbarred with a lever; the mouth inclined, settling in jerks, tooth by tooth. Then it was moved left on a recalcitrant turntable, tumid with heat. YY-99 was locked in. The gunner seemed uncertain, panicky. He lifted a shell from the pallet and carried it, cradling, a newborn child presented to its father. Oscar kissed the blunt nose. He let it nudge the red armband sewn by his mother seventeen years before at the Eater of his majority. The gunner tiptoed on a tripod step stool. He inserted the shell gingerly. Then he wiped the false forehead of his helmet. And Oscar said the ritual words: “I perform this act in the name of Priest and in the name of man, who is, who shall always be, the only master of God’s great creation. I kill that I may know life. Go in love without rancor—bring the grace of Priest to those who eat and those who are eaten.”
He jerked the lanyard.
Chapter 2
Lowing of wild cows awakened him. It was dawn. He had slept on a bunk of broken seats twenty-five rows up. The left field grandstand had collapsed; other prisoners were afraid of the rickety, high superstructure. In strong winds ancient girdering scissored like hinges, moaning; its concrete epidermis crumbled. The spring months had been bitterly cold, but there, above the compound floor, he could be alone. He pulled off the ragged woolen blanket: it preserved smells of horses that had died twenty years before. He lay naked and long. The bowl of his pelvis was deep enough to cup shadows. He stared beyond the center field bleachers. On a wall of the old Bronx Criminal Courts Building underleaves of the universal creeper, dewed and silvery, returned the sun’s first signal. A wind blew and the wall seemed to fluctuate, combers of foliage cresting, troughing, as though the building were a dummy of itself painted on canvas flats. It appeared to him that all shapes in the city were provisional: geometry, once its glory, had lost exactitude, had softened.
At times the uncertainty of shape and perspective nauseated him.
Cats shouted in the silence of Yankee Prison; its imperfect crater allowed echoes. Dominick Priest sat up. On a chair back, with a corroded nail he engraved his one hundred tenth mark since the day he had been sentenced: six months’ detention for Speaking Aloud, Angered. Across the arena plain, the left field grandstand slumped, upper plate of a jaw that had clamped shut; decorative finial teeth bit unevenly into the outfield earth. Twenty men had been crushed/interred there. For a month as the weather warmed through late May, early June, they had smelled the putrefaction of human flesh, but there was no machinery to lever up the broken girders. Yesterday in a thunderstorm the last great light tower had toppled. Half-gourd lamps lay scattered, windfall fruit, near the bronze memorial plaque:
YANKEE STADIUM
Where, in an age of
brutality and ignorance,
men presumed to compete
against their
brother men.
Priest yawned. Fingertips gathered over his mouth, careful of sounds. Even involuntary noise had been proscribed. He was forty, born more than ten years before the Ecological Decree. He was six feet three inches tall. In formative years his shin and thigh bones had not been warped by the E-diet.
Few men were taller than five feet. Few men lived beyond fifty. Below, the stadium floor effervesced with dodging white caps. In all temperate zones natural selection had chosen the dandelion. Only the ubiquitous, botanist-hybrid creeper was a more efficient plant. The dandelion heads were desiccated, sporing. A mutant had evolved; its flowers were five inches across. Puffed by the breeding wind they expanded to white gases. On gusty days any field of mature plants became a death trap. Men had suffocated breathing seeds.
Priest stood, then stretched. He was hungry, but the eating spasms humiliated him; he loathed, too, the enervating symptoms of the E-diet narcotic. He had not eaten in thirty-six hours; by austere habit, he would not feed again for another full day. A crescent sun appeared over the fallen grandstand. He arched his hand against its glare. A phalange of his forefinger was outlined through tissue flesh. Shoals at low tide, his abdominal organs subsided, pulsed, visible in their small business. Dominick Priest's face was Mongoloid; flat planes tautened over large cheekbones, then down/over the jaw. There were suggestions of epicanthi at his eye comers. The brows seemed huge: they were plumped by a prominent skull ridge above the eye. Braided with filth, chestnut hair touched his shoulders, but the beard grew sparsely—a brown hand that cupped his chin, its fingers reaching to lower lip. He sat. His black insect suit was spread to air on the row of seats behind him. He had been bitten often in the night, yet mosquitoes were less prevalent on the stadium’s upper deck.
A line of septic bites followed his right carotid artery from ear to collarbone. He did not scratch. The first July nights had been humid, the poreless suit had stifled him—though there was no superfluous moisture in his
body and he had not perspired for thirty years.
In the lower-deck aisles, in mazed, slanting, ruinous tunnels under the grandstand, Priest’s seventy-two fellow prisoners had begun to wake. Ten or twelve shuffled toward an E-diet fountain set in the lower left ventricle of the stadium’s heart shape. The spout bubbled green/gold; it was gemmeous, pretty, unlike the still pastels of meat and fruit. At the third-base dugout a woman lay rigid on her spine. Priest frowned. Over empty dandelion skulls he saw her knees bent up, splayed. She pushed down with both palms as though working shaft of torso loose from pelvis socket. She was in pain. Her head swiveled left/right, eyes vacant, staring apathetically at the ankles of some other prisoner. She had eaten six hours before. The legal E-diet was made from inert substances; it was biodegradable in the human digestive tract. The chemical reaction induced terrific cramps. Human sewage had been outlawed by the Ecological Decree; the E-diet caused only a negligible, odorless trace. Priest’s thumb felt the frustrated clench of his stomach. He could remember his own excrement and the liberating stream of urine played high against a tree trunk. Priest broke a seat. The arm rest bent outward; sprinkles of brown corrosion popped from its metal surface under stress. Priest was angered then. He had committed his crime at the same metabolic time: thirty-six hours without the E-diet tranquilizer. He was not ashamed. Priest cherished anger. It was the analogue of contraction in his hard biceps. Mary, Priest’s wife, had caressed both, aroused by her own fear. Anger supplied him with privacy and the status of an eccentric in New Loch. Mary would not look at him when he had eaten the E-diet and his pupils had become furry; when he toyed, nodding, with pebbles or the caked strands of his hair. He ate only at night that his debilitation and the spasms, too like a woman’s labor, might be secret. Priest flexed a week-old sprain in his right ankle. It was still swollen, the skin glossy and purple, the skin of an eggplant. He suspected hairline fractures. Stubbornly he forced the joint with both hands. He heard/felt dull crushing, the disintegration of thick, dry soap cakes. When his term ended, Priest would have to walk more than seventy miles.
A tomcat stalked. With exact, patient steps it nudged between the dandelion heads. It had become a carrier: the shuttlecock spores clung in a spume on its fur. Priest saw a female cat, tortoiseshell, one of a few not pregnant. The female lapped at her bosom, chin tucked under. Front left leg/rear right leg, front right leg/rear left leg, the tomcat seemed to strut, all but the nervous tail tip controlled. And Priest remembered the hunting of Mary. He leaned back. He had an erection; he subdued it between his naked thighs. The tomcat leaped; the female eluded him. They churned in gallops across the stadium floor, a wake, a smoky exhaust of burst heads behind them. Priest grinned. As a boy of ten, before the edict against killing all life forms, he had loved to hunt in the woodland, near Bull’s Hump. On the Day of Recall Priest had placed his bow and arrow on the wide, open bed of the tractor trailer. His father’s rifle lay there, his mother’s cutlery and scissors. After that, Priest walked for two weeks alone in the forest, trying his new passivity. On the third day a large gray fox had appeared beside him. Animal and man were both startled: he recalled the fox’s tongue out between its teeth. For the first time. Priest was defenseless; he had abdicated as lord of four-footed things. He had run away.
Mary was a nervous doe: slim, small, breastless before her pregnancy, just ten years younger than Priest. Her brown hair was roped back: it twitched. Her sharp nose had nostril cups that seemed to open and shut, to grab at breath. She had willingly been his prey. Their games lasted with the daylight. A kind of courtship; Priest loved its naturalness. Mary understood the terrain around Bull’s Hump and Sandeman’s Hill. She left a delicate spoor, as women of another age left scents in rooms. After a time they ran nude, clad only with pine resin against the mosquitoes. She had stripped first. No garments were manufactured; those Mary had could not be cleaned. At first Priest was embarrassed. His body was more developed, hirsute, grosser. A secret game, for competition had been forbidden. Mary knew when Priest was angered: in spite, then, he would pretend to lose her vivid trail.
There was scuffing in the concrete tunnel below and to Priest’s left. He hid his lap under the blanket. Walters emerged from the tunnel mouth. He walked with the sides of his feet outward, slowly, checking seats in the upper section. He saw Priest. He waved. With one hand Walters rucked up the waistband of his insect-suit pants. He tested footing. Near the tunnel there were yard-wide lapses in the concrete. They were all emaciated; but Walters, Priest knew, was dying: his thinness had a special quality. Under the rib cage a mass of alien flesh squatted, thriving. After common infections, cancer was the most frequent cause of death; E-diet eroded, altered cell walls of stomach and intestine. Tumors had been declared an autonomous life form, no less valid than the life form of their hosts. In any case, the doctors could do little. Drugs, x-rays, surgery were illegal: they destroyed unconscionably high numbers of bacteria.
Priest was irritated. He wanted to be alone. But on several occasions he had spoken to Walters, who was one of the few in Yankee Prison who could still lip-read fluently. Stubborn, with poor verbal aptitude. Priest had never learned the finger language. It still amazed him to watch the others speak, hands inter-gripped around wrists. Some of the younger prisoners had become so adept that they could talk and listen simultaneously. Priest knew the fingering for “yes” and “no,” for a few familiar questions and commands. He knew the basic rules: vowels were indicated by thumb against certain locations on the opposing wrist bone, consonants by four fingers against the inner arm. Tightness of grip expressed emotion, interrogatives. Priest remembered a guitarist he had heard before the general prohibition of sound. The finger language was useful in darkness. Artificial light had been proscribed.
Walters sat. Priest guessed that he had eaten during the night. His skin was jaundiced by the E-diet; eye whites were eggnog dashed with pieces of blood. He was panting: commonly in those over forty, the diaphragm became intractable after the spasms. Priest yawned, ignored him. Walters was propped sideways, sitting as nearly all men were compelled to sit, left thigh under right knee joint. The human buttocks had become toneless and empty: an upright sitting posture caused lesions, painful sacroiliac bruises. Walters caught fingertips in his beard. His jaw was dragged open by their weight. Even, glossy rows of white teeth showed, whiter yet contrasted with the yellow lips, oddly youthful, as though he had been carelessly fitted for dentures. No tooth decay had been documented in three decades. Powerful fluorides were added to the E-diet, and there was no food that could legally be chewed.
“Good morning.” Walters mouthed the phrase. Though mechanical, his lip articulation was excellent. Once or twice he had interpreted for Priest with the guards.
Priest nodded. He stared out, beyond the high scoreboard, its face now skewed somewhat from the perpendicular shoulders of a man swimming. On the elevated tracks a train waited precisely where, thirty years before, the city’s electrical supply had been cut off. Creeper growth had invaded the windows; it poured out of the train, winged slightly backward to the new sun, suggesting headlong speed. Tiny sucker feet excreted a dilute acid that gradually dissolved stone and metal, even glass. New York City had begun to disintegrate, hard surfaces transmuted into a bitter kind of soil. In New Loch, seventy miles upstate, the indigenous flora had been allowed to reassert itself. But in New York City, even after breakers and seeders had penetrated the pavement, native granite had proved infertile.
“In a good mood again. Uh-huh. I can see that.” Priest shrugged. Walters leaned forward, until Priest could conveniently see his lips. “Thinking of your wife? Mary—that’s her name, isn’t it?” Priest took a flat stone from the pocket of his insect suit. He sucked on it. Without stimulation the saliva glands would atrophy. “God. You sure are a sullen bastard.”
“What does that mean?”
“Bastard? Don’t you know what bastard means?”
“No. Sullen.”
“Sullen?” Walters consid
ered. “You know…Real mean. Ugly-tempered. Not too friendly.” Priest nodded.
“I am sullen,” he said.
Walters, Priest thought, could not speak naturally, not the way Mary spoke. Walters no longer heard the words in his head; there was neither rhythm nor emotion. When Mary spoke, Priest could imagine that he was deaf. Nose, eyes, tongue were engaged; he even saw, thought he saw, vibrations in her pointed Adam’s apple.
“Know what I used to do? This time of morning specially.” Priest was not interested. “Used to take a big shit, that’s what. Right after breakfast. I loved the smell of it. My own shit.” Walters palpated the lump under his ribs. “Leastways, I think I did. Maybe after all these years I’m just being sentimental.” Priest didn’t know the word; he didn’t ask its meaning. Walters talked too much. “You ever take a shit, Priest?”
“Until I was ten years.”
“Ten. Makes you forty or so. Pretty much what I figured. You keep yourself in good shape. I’m fifty-five myself. Oldest man here, I think. Not in such good shape though.” Walters paused. A big mosquito had settled on the right side of his throat. He fanned at it with one cupped hand: the greatest allowable resistance. The mosquito was not deterred. Walters waited until it had finished, then he pulled up the hood of his insect suit, tucked long hair in, around ears. When Walters spoke again his front teeth seemed larger. “I go downstairs in the tunnels where they keep a big pile of dirt. Used to spread it on the field there. Those friggin’ cats been doing their business on it. Now me—I never did see no difference between cat shit and man shit. How about you?”
“No.” Priest shrugged. “No difference.”
“God. My ass hurts. When I was a kid men were big and fat. Beautiful. What I’d like—I’d like to see just one fat man before I die.” Priest yawned. “My boring you?” Priest showed indifference with the planing angle of one palm. “I’d like to lip-talk. Down there you take a guy’s arm, ask him a simple question—before you know it he’s all over you. Least you’re no queer, Priest.”
