by D Keith Mano
“I have to see my wife. I haven’t seen her in months. I’ve been in prison.”
“Yes. I can believe it. You would go to prison.” She kissed him. Priest shrank his tongue away from the sugars in her spit. “Your wife won’t mind.”
“You have a child. It’s not a good thing.”
“I’ll make her wait outside.”
“No.”
“Yes. For God’s sake—one hour. Your wife can give me one hour. I’ll make you happy.”
The woman unzipped her insect-suit bodice. Fat yellow breasts clung together, ostrich eggs in a sand hollow. They were netted with blue veins. Mosquitoes infested her at once; the nipples were erected by their stinging. She undressed one of Priest’s hands, cupped it on her right breast, then moved her shoulders, rotating, against his palm. Priest looked at the child. The woman zipped up irritably, catching Priest’s wrist. In the tight, flyless codpiece she saw that he was aroused.
“Come with me. Quick. Be quick.” She pushed him toward the house. Priest resisted. “I haven’t had a man, not for months. You know what I do?” It was hard to read her lips, the wet tongue slurred over them. “I cut a hole, a tiny hole in my pants. Right there.” She pressed her mons veneris. “And I lie in the grass. And I let the bugs eat me. They have a feast.” She pushed him again. “Come, I want you.”
“No. I can’t.”
“Bastard. Son of a bitch. You’d be dead in a few days. What are you saving it for?”
“The child’s father. Where is he?”
“Dead. Dead.” The girl watched them, eyes wide above her cloth yashmak. Her hair was cropped short. Hair cutting, nail paring were forbidden. Priest thought it had been the typhoid epidemic. “She bothers you? Is that it?” Priest shrugged. He picked up his cane. “Wait. Just wait. I’ll take care of her.” She waved the child forward.
The girl’s hands prayed: a sign of obedience. Priest saluted hello and smiled. The woman kissed her daughter on the rubber hood’s pate. The child flinched. Clumsily the woman groped in her right thigh pouch. Turning to Priest she mouthed, ‘Tliat nice man says you bother him.” She tapped inside the child’s wrist. Frightened, the girl dropped hands and cloth away from her face. With strong fingers then, the woman pried through her daughter’s cheeks, opened jaws, pushed the capsule in. Priest almost shouted: he moved suddenly. His nails scraped along gums behind the child’s lower lips, raked the capsule out. Its gelatin case had not begun to dissolve. He hurled it toward the blackened fire grate of branches above him. The woman rammed him across the chest with her elbow. Then she staggered sideways and fell. The child’s tongue, knowing only the second taste of its life, dug with curiosity in her mouth.
“Whore.” Priest said. “Dirty whore.”
“Why?” The woman laughed. She lay sprawled. Her legs spread slowly. She scoured her lower back in the pavement dust, as if drying it with a towel. “Why? She has to die. We all have to die.”
“Not yet.”
“You like children?” The woman produced a second capsule from her pouch. Priest had not understood the question. Her head was nodding. “You like children?”
“Yes. They are alive. I like things alive.”
“You like her?” The sun went in. She stared upward, torso balanced on elbows.
“Get up. Take her inside. The insects are eating her.”
“Such a good man. You do like her.” She held the capsule between thumb and forefinger. She lay it on her tongue. Swallowed it. “I give her to you. Take her. She’s yours.”
She wrenched insect-suit pants down below her knees. The rubber legs made tourniquets at her calves; skin bulged above. With one hand she drew out a crude wooden dildo, shaped like the letter J. It had been painted red. She wedged down, then meat-hooked it under her groin. Priest was astonished. The woman began to grind her lower body against friction, mouth in a round howl. Priest stepped forward; he screened her from the child. The legs came up, fettered, sack racing in the air. Priest shut the child’s eyes. He picked her up. Thin chest against shoulder, he began hobbling toward Route 4. Behind him, the woman hurried her business. But she had no co-ordination, and death, a male, was faster.
***
Priest could not understand what he had done. Fists met behind his neck, but the child made no attempt to support its slight weight. Her face was edged sideways between his collarbone and his lower jaw. He could not carry her while mitigating the shocks to his ankle. She would cost him hours. Priest held her shallow buttocks, and the snub coccyx pushed through to his palm. After several hundred yards, exasperated by his own foolishness. Priest set her down. She squatted on a broken curb, fingers across cheeks. Festering insect bites knobbed the backs of her hands, some thick as second knuckles. Priest’s own mask was several sizes too large for her hood. He unwrapped his elastic bandage and sashed it twice around her raw midriff. She did not respond. Children in this last generation had the stupid patience of senility. He peeled her hands off, unsnapped his mask. She was not attractive: buck teeth; bushy masculine eyebrows; jowls laddered with dark hair. Her fathers child, Priest thought.
“Can you read my lips?” Priest saw that it was hopeless. She had never heard human speech; she could not recognize the words. Priest pounded his left knee in frustration. Out of thrift, he had saved the torn insect-suit pants. He ripped them in half at the crotch. He tied one leg around her head above the eyebrows, the other below her cheekbones. The eyes, isolated between two black strips, disturbed him. He had not noticed them before. Blue, fierce, deep: eyes of some animal imprisoned by its own passivity. Yet the body remained listless. Priest jammed the naked, unresponsive left hand into a side pocket. But her right hand resisted. It caught his wrist and tapped: he understood the common phrase, “Thank you.” Priest nodded, shrugged. Then they began walking north.
A wide shopping plaza had returned to the earth. Dirt ramps had been bulldozed up against the department-store walls, stepped Inca pyramids now. The cultivated gardens were gone. Dandelions and fireweed monopolized the soil ramps. Thirty years before, this had been the new government’s first showplace. A channel had been excavated from Saddle River. It filled an ornamental lake that spread across the cracked asphalt of parking lots, across the highway bed, lapping under the bluff where once Route 17 had overpassed Route 4. The lake was congested with ducks: mallards, mergansers, pintails, Canada geese. Priest had been hearing their barked noise, strange applause, for ten minutes. The lake shore was tufted with legless, compact bodies. Squadrons landed in the water, heels out, wings scraping backward. Priest had to rest.
It was nearly six o’clock. For two hours they had traveled north, the child shuffling behind at the end of Priest’s arm. Duck sounds intrigued her now; she visored the rubber blindfold up. Priest was in pain. He looked at his right ankle with frightened loathing. Insects had eaten there. His toenails had grown purple/blue cuticles; they had almost been enveloped. The child began pointing excitedly. Drake mallards dueled near their feet, hissing, cranky. The glossy emerald necks riposted and parried. Quacking clattered. Ducks scooted between big dandelions, rocking from side to side. Priest sat. The drakes carried their squabble over his shins, unintimidated. Still on her feet, the girl bent at hips; she made circumspect, formal stroking motions. She glanced at Priest for permission. A brown female backed from her fingers; it nipped, then preened calmly, grudgeless. Priest opened his mask. The girl chatted against his forearm. Priest shook his head, pointed toward his mouth. She misunderstood, nodded, smoothed her stomach: she was hungry. Priest cursed. He noticed a public fountain at the lake’s edge, where fallen segments of overpass had left a rubble archipelago in the water. Priest judged the sun. He slashed no against the girl’s arm. With her inconsequential body weight the spasms would start an hour after drinking. He couldn’t afford to stop. She formed an interrogative with her hands. Priest indicated by elaborate, silly pantomimes that she would have to wait. The girl nodded agreeably, but she didn’t understand why.
Across
the lake, above summit horizons of a pyramid. Priest distinguished movement. Unnatural, flat greens were separated out of vegetative greens, motived progress out of the wind’s purposeless combing. Two guardsmen walked bicycles down/over/down giant soil stair treads, toward the shoreline. At first he wanted to run. He closed his identity inside the mask. Then Priest reconsidered. With a level motion of his hands he told the child to remain. The guardsmen had begun hauling their machines around the lake margin. Priest’s hobbling crowded ducks; nesting females popped up on thin legs, suddenly forced plants. Priest waved, but when nearer he realized that the guardsmen were too young. They would not know speech. He opened his mask, mouthed, “Can you help me?" One guardsman, gold chevrons of a First Monitor on the left biceps, doored open his mask irritably. Without fluence he said, “Speak hand speak.” He presented the inside of his arm. Priest patted chest, thighs, as though rummaging pockets, held up empty palms, a sign of his ignorance. The faceless junior guardsman rapped his own temples, mocking, but the First Monitor pointed toward Priest’s identity pocket. He corroborated the photograph; checked Priest’s serial number against a roster of wanted men. Priest became agitated: this had been a mistake. He glanced back. The child had not moved; she played now, to the lap in a foam of duck wings. The guardsman slid a pad from saddlebags on his bicycle. Its pages were fragile, old; dog’s ears broke off, fluttered, chips of yellow paint. He wrote,
“You have been in prison.” Priest nodded. “What was your crime?”
Priest took the pencil. “I spoke. In anger.”
“Why are you here? This is far from your home.”
“I return from prison. I was let out to die.”
The First Monitor read. Priest pointed to the girl, scrawled, “Her mother is dead. I found her on the road. I can’t take her home with me. Is there someone to care for her?” The First Monitor thought, handed the pad to his partner. The junior guardsman opened his mask with practiced deliberation. Priest’s head dodged back; he was horrified. A hole had been ripped out of the man’s face. His mouth comer was brutally extended left, gashed through the cheeks, to jaw hinges. Turned in profile, his side molars were front teeth, grinning under scar tissue and sparse fuzz of the cheek’s beard. He produced a plastic case, selected one capsule from it. He offered the capsule to Priest. Priest frowned. The junior guardsman wrote, “She has to die. You can kill her—or we will.” Priest took the pencil.
“I will do it. She trusts me.”
“We will watch you.”
The junior guardsman smiled: the smile axed open his head. He was not ashamed o£ his grotesqueness: he knew its useful force. Priest turned around. The girl sat fifty yards away. A drake had fitted itself into her lap. Its breast cradled over arm crook; the neck slithered down to peck. The girl’s face was pressed into its feathers. Priest accepted the capsule. He wrote,
“It will take time. I must dig a grave.” The junior guardsman nodded. For a moment he chewed the pencil with gruesome negligence between naked back teeth. Priest could see his uvula.
“We will help you. The earth is soft here.”
Priest’s fingers closed over his aluminum cane, but the First Monitor intervened. He tapped along his subordinate’s arm. They argued. The junior guardsman’s face was mute; Priest watched the man’s tongue flop lazily. The junior shrugged finally. He gave Priest one capsule. The First Monitor wrote:”
“We cannot wait. What is your route to New Loch?”
Priest could not lie: there was only one convenient highway. He pointed to the bluff, north along Route 17. The First Monitor wrote, “That is our patrol station. Report to us at the old Paramus bus term. Tomorrow morning. Bring the child’s insect suit as evidence.” Priest nodded. “You understand?” Priest nodded. “We have your serial number. You will be watched from here to New Loch.”
The First Monitor walked his bicycle ahead, mounted. Its rear tire was spangled with blue patches. The patches circled, blue, blue, blue, then the speeding tire was wholly blue, colored by a stroboscopic illusion. The junior guardsman did not move. He had seen the reflex in Priest’s hand. He leaned forward, confiscated the aluminum cane. Priest protested: he boosted his ankle up, hopping. The guardsman’s hacked face opened once, closed but did not close. He chopped downward and the cane cut Priest across the left shin. He pedaled away, the aluminum tube held as a javelin above his shoulder. Near the lake’s edge he hurled it in a pleasing, high arc. The cane parted water neatly and vanished. Ducks rushed to the disturbance, heads poked under surface, supposing some sort of food. They speculated noisily. Priest saw the guardsmen ride parallel to the lake, past the girl, toward the bisected length of Route 17. He limped after. Laces on the makeshift sandal popped. He picked up the tread rind. Ducks pecked at the raw club of his foot as Priest lugged it past them. He still held the capsule in his hand. The lower half of the girl’s rubber mask was hooped now around her neck. Priest fingered the capsule. Then he tucked it into his breast pocket. It lay outlined, a single nipple. The girl smiled at him. Priest fastened the insect mask across his own expression.
***
Wild raspberry hedges confounded him. For two hours, for half a mile, they had wallowed in boisterous, prehensile undergrowth. It was useful: it screened them from guard patrols on Route 17. The girl floundered against him. She fell often now; when Priest dragged her up he no longer had patience to be gentle. Her wrist was dislocated, he thought. She didn’t complain. It was dusk. To the right, on occasion, he had glimpsed the boxy roof of a house: some suburban avenue there, inaccessible. The raspberry bushes were six feet high. He smelled a sour fragrance. The fruit was immature: pink/white of tweaked human skin. The thorns, though not long, were pesky: he could not draw her easily through them. He was concerned, too, for the fabric of his insect suit. They had walked beyond the Paramus bus terminal. He recognized the rear of a filling station partly bulldozed, a restaurant; north of these, a large half-cylinder building, perhaps a theater or a bowling alley. Priest needed food, shelter for the night. He had to chance coming near the highway.
Priest lifted the girl. She slept at once, as his arms took responsibility for her balance. Crouching, placing the restaurant between them and Route 17, Priest stepped forward. The right ankle was intractable; it allowed him no stealth. The wide dining room was open on three sides. Beige twilight reflected from square, fixed formica tables. Chairs, their wire backs like rug beaters, were tumbled in obeisance, on forehead and knee. Priest set the child down. He peered in. A figure sat, centered, behind one of the tables. His back was to the sunset, he was faceless, but the neck craned impossibly: only a dead man could have held it so for very long. Priest hurdled over the waist-high wall. The man had no mask; insects were strip mining flesh from his face. He loitered in eyeless nonchalance, legs crossed, one hand curled around the stem of a broken wineglass. When death came, there had been something on his knee. He had flicked it off. Thumb and fingers were extended on knee cap; the thing was gone. He reeked.
Two bicycles passed. Priest watched them, mesh eyeholes just above the squat cash register: $7.49 there, archive of some final meal. They rolled tortuously, handlebars jerked by the uneven concrete, south to Route 4. Priest backed inside. The restaurant had no E-diet plumbing. He scanned across two parking lots, toward the half-cylinder building capacious as a hangar. Some public food troughs stood in front of its entrance. Priest climbed out behind the restaurant. She still slept: he worked the child’s hands into her insect-suit pockets. Priest went to all fours; he had found himself crawling several times that day. It seemed natural now; it didn’t aggravate his ankle. The two parking lots were a hundred feet across. His progress remained secret, suggested above only in delicate shiftings of Canada thistle and cornflower. The weeds were set with Japanese beatles—cheap, burnished metal jeweling. After twenty minutes he rose on knees cautiously at the first trough’s base. E-diet ran in a needle trickling; rust stained the green/gold. He stripped off his insect mask and hood. The hood, inverted, woul
d provide a water bag. Priest stood: it filled very slowly.
He heard a strident squeal, metal turned on metal. Then clanking. E-diet splashed out of the rubber cranium. Two guardsmen were approaching from the south. Priest hobbled anxiously back. The front entrance was too conspicuous. He noticed a wooden structure, built against the hangar’s flank, perhaps some storeroom. He hurried there. Priest cursed. The girl was running toward him across the parking lots. He gestured her back/down. The bicycles had come even with the restaurant. Priest could not hesitate. The door was ajar; he squeezed through the splintering crevice.
It was all a hive. Hexagon atop minute hexagon, combs bricked upward. The door, the four walls, were tessellated by drowsing honeybees. Their drone was soporific, low, a snore. Priest stood still. He did not breathe, but his rough entrance had already disturbed them. He heard running outside. Bees dropped onto his bare head and face, lethargic, yet curious. They occupied surfaces of his body, businesslike, soon planning complex scaffolds on him. Priest couldn’t suppress his fear. He trembled. And, alert now, the drone changed timbre, rose in pitch; wing after wing increased its frequency. They were alarmed: their great husbandry had been jeopardized. The first one stung him. Priest flailed out, barging against the door. He said no, no, no, and his lips were scabbed with their bodies. Priest shouldered the door; its old wood gave and a latticework comb collapsed entirely there. The hive roared. Hands over eyes, he kicked the door apart. They enveloped his body. As he ran, sightless, toward Route 17, the swarm streamed off his head and shoulders, behind, a comet’s tail, some abstract emblem o£ motion.
The stinging was galvanic, poisonous. Priest wore a skullcap of bees, an elongating cape of bees. His left arm huddled over eyes. Right fist punched savagely at head and throat. Their bodies, crisp nuts, crunched open. His right elbow grazed against the wall, a contact shoe giving direction. He felt the reaction in his heart muscle: a surge of histamines, more dangerous than the stinging itself. He became asthmatic, whooped for air. Bees were in his mouth; tongue scurried to avoid their attack. The wall ended. Priest tottered, then pursued the comer around. A large brass knob winded him. The door was open: he staggered inside, closed it, interdicted the wake of bees behind him. Priest began to kill. He pummeled his body; he ripped hair from beard and scalp, combing through with his fingers. He preferred this pain to the scalding rash on his skin. The bee venom accumulated, neared a fatal concentration. His legs were suddenly wet to the shin. He bellyflopped headlong into the shallow pool, submerged. Bees came off. The pool frothed with them.
