In The End, Only Darkness

by O'Rourke, Monica

  You would gouge them out of your head if you could. Exchange them in a heartbeat for the return of your voice. Yes, of course. One good, powerful scream is what you long for. You open your mouth and a puff of breath barely escapes. You press your palms against your eyelids, harder, until you start to see bursts of color, streaks of falling stars and lights like a kaleidoscope. If putting out your eyes wasn’t such a pointless idea, you would have already done it. But somehow, drowning in a pool of your own blood and viscous fluid really does seem pointless. Besides, you don’t really want to die. Not yet. Not like this.

  You hate that it’s all so out of your control. You wonder how hard you would have to bash your head against the bricks before you would be successfully able to kill yourself. Suicide Guy gave it the old college try and it took a good half dozen smashes before he finally collapsed. And it seemed more likely he’d die from blood loss than anything else. If he’d actually died, and you don’t even know that for sure. He might have brain damage instead—maybe he’s in a permanent vegetative state, drooling into his pillow and enjoying his meals through a straw, a scar etched along his forehead like some Karloff-wannabe abomination. Lying there, fully able to think but unable to communicate. Good fucking God, what a disgusting fate.

  You decide to wait this one out. They have to come for you eventually. Don’t they?

  And this time you see them, and not just a glimpse, not just some dream state or hallucination psychosis but them, and they enter the chamber and stand before the far cells. Two of them, two black-cloaked figures, acting as if they’re confused, and you realize they’re staring at you. They’re pointing at you now. You look around and realize everyone else is sleeping. You decide this is what has your jailors confused. They point from you to the others. Why aren’t you asleep? Why are they?

  The cloaked figures open the cell nearest yours and each grab an arm of the insane ung ing woman and drag her the few feet that is the length of her cell. They slam the door shut behind them even though it’s empty now.

  And they’re leaving.

  Again, they’re leaving. Leaving you behind.

  You wonder if you will ever learn your fate. You wonder if you will ever be able to sleep again in peace. You managed to stay awake this time but to what avail? They’re leaving, and not taking you. Again.

  You open your mouth wide, jaws stretched, lips spread almost to the point of pain and you scream as loud as you can and nothing comes out. Barely a puff of air. You haven’t forgotten they’ve made you mute but you don’t care. Because even though you produce no sound you know what it should sound like so you scream anyway.

  They hear nothing, of course.

  You kick your cell bars with the soles of your feet. Then you lie on the floor and kick away, left-right-left-right in a dizzy blurry tantrum.

  They’ve stopped and have turned to watch you.

  You jump up and smash the bars with your fists, screaming silent screams until your chest burns. They turn away again and you attack the bars, throw your body into them, jump up and down over and over again.

  The bars rattle and crash and you notice everyone is waking. The cloaked figures drop the woman they’re dragging and hurry back toward you. Their hands are up as they approach, hands up like traffic cops signaling stop, and you stop.

  They can’t leave without you this time. You can’t let them. Not again. Not this time.

  You have to know. And even if that costs you your life, you’re willing to accept that.

  They glance around at the other prisoners and seem satisfied no one else has woken. But unless this has been some horrible dream or some twisted vegetative state, you never sleep anymore anyway.

  They point at you, then at the floor. You glance down at the nothing there. They repeat this gesture, you repeat yours. You’re not deliberately being obtuse; it takes you a moment to understand they want you to lie on the floor. Sleep. You acquiesce, because even if it’s a trick, they’ll only fool you once. Next time you’ll be ready for them. So you lie down and close your eyes.

  *

  Is there a way, you wonder, to redeem yourself, to set right what you’ve always known was wrong. Is it really possible to repair the damage to a destroyed soul, a hideously disfigured psyche? Not yours, in this case. Your own is no longer a real concern because you frankly don’t care. But you have to wonder if it’s too late for someone else. How far did you have to go before you truly ruined another life? Before the other person not only doesn’t care but on some level refuses to accept the outcome of his own life. In other words, when someone believes his own failures are not his fault, that he’s a victim and has always been a victim, that what happened to him early in life was so egregious that he can’t be held accountable for his apathy toward his own life. Isn’t that what serial killers always say? Oh, while wringing hands in a woe-is-me gesture, I was abused, you know. My childhood sucked. My daddy beat me. My momma whipped me. My uncle sodomized me. It’s not my fault!

  So when, if ever, does one become fully accountable for one’s own actions? When does the trauma of childhood no longer qualify as an excuse?

  You wonder if you will always be blamed for your sons’ misfortunes. If your boys will ever decide to not blame someone else, to not blame their daddy when their lives take those inevitable sour turns. You wonder when they will become men.

  You wonder when you will.

  *

  She’s across from you again. This time she’s strapped to a table.

  Or maybe a stretcher or gurney or some type of operating table. You glance at the stainless steel beneath your own body and discover you’re strapped down to a similar type of table. She’s been stripped of her clothing. You’re still wearing yours.

  She’s awake too, you think, because her head is flopping back and forth like her neck is trying to land it. Her body is restrained in the same fashion as yours: straps binding wrists, ankles, biceps, thighs. She can struggle but she’s not going anywhere.

  This is what you were so anxious for. This is what you were hoping to see. Some rare glimpse at your own demons, and apparently someone else’s. You have a queasy knot in your stomach and you’ve changed your mind, you don’t want to know the truth, don’t want to know where they kept bringing everyone. But it’s too late. You may not know your fate, not yet, but you’re on your way.

  You drift in and out of sleep and wait on that table for what seems an eternity. The woman seems to be having problems of her own dealing with this but never tries to communicate with you. No screams of “Ung ing!” just moans and groans and overall sounds of anger and frustration you recognize because you make them yourself.

  When you open your eyes they’re standing there, looking at you, staring at you, staring at her. Maybe half a dozen or so. Still cloaked.

  What the hell’s going on? you’re desperate to ask, try to force the words out of your lungs, over your tongue and out of your mouth but still nothing comes, nothing solid, nothing substantial, just some gaseous version of your words. You imagine them instead, dramatically forming the Ws and Ls with your tongue and lips and teeth, throwing it all into the fray like some melodramatic and awful soap opera actor.

  They have to know what you want, what you’re asking. Of all the mute or voiceless victims they’ve dragged into this room, yours can’t be the first attempt at communication. But maybe they do know and just don’t care. Wouldn’t that be worse? That they know what you’re asking but refuse to answer? Less frustrating, maybe, than trying to get your point across, but it doesn’t make you any less angry.

  You shorten your questions to what? What? WHAT? oh GOD, WHY? and still nothing, no response, no gestures, no slight shrug. Nothing! You wonder if there is ever the slightest inflexion under those hoods. Fuck you, you mouth. You struggle against the restraints, feel your muscles tighten against Velcro, you slam back against steel.

  Tears puddle in your ears. You shake your head to clear your vision. God! You scream, frustrated beyond belief, n
eeding to free yourself, to understand what’s happening. As shocking as the thought is, you wish you were back in your cell.

  Still they ignore you, but they’re moving. They seem interested in the woman now and form a loose circle around her. She hasn’t been doing much until now, not that you can see. You’d even wondered if she’d fallen asleep, or was unconscious. No protests, no tears from her prone body. Just … resignation, perhaps.

  “Diseased,” one says, his voice a shock, something unexpected. It’s a normal voice, a man’s voice, not a sound you were prepared to expect. You’d expected some sort of gravelly dead phlegmy voice, something bizarre, and here he was sounding like your high school English teacher. Sophomore year. The guy who’d brought in Stones cassettes and all the girls had a crush on him because he looked like Harrison Ford. Ford was something big when you were in school. This thing—this man, you suppose—in the black hood sounded like that same teacher who’d ended it all over a breakup by taking a swan dive off the roof of a twelve story building. Great fucking roll model for high school kids, you’d always thought. Selfish prick.

  And here they were moving like figures of death, poking and prodding the helpless woman on the gurney. Helpless. As helpless as you?

  Well then, did she deserve her fate?

  Didn’t she?

  Perhaps. You wonder, again, what she’s done. You wonder if you should be feeling empathy, or disgust. You opt for disgust—why would she be here, if she was an innocent?

  Diseased.

  “No soul!” another one cries, appears to say it directly to the woman on the gurney, leans over her head as he says the words.

  They nod, though the movement is slight. But it’s still discernible.

  “Diseased,” another says, more emphatically, as if just discovering the word.

  They press down on her stomach.

  The six figures are not blocking your view and you can see more than enough. More than you want to, you think. You see her squirming now, as if she can escape their touch. And you hear her garbled non-words hear her moan a sound or two, sounds like no or stop. They come out sounding more like gooo and op but you have a rather clear understanding of what she’s trying to say because you’d be saying the same damn thing.

  Still, they don’t seem to be molesting her. They’re only interested in her abdomen. And since they keep repeating diseased, you wonder if she’s ill.

  Somehow you doubt it. She doesn’t look sick, doesn’t look diseased, and if she was, wouldn’t she be in a hospital? Somewhere else? Anywhere? So when they said she was diseased, they probably meant it in a different sense. Perhaps in the same way in which you’re diseased. A soul diseased. Conscience diseased. Life diseased. Sure, you call yourself Victim. But when you get down to the nitty-gritty you know how fucked up you are, there’s no denying it, you know what a mess you’ve made of your life. What a mess you’ve made of others’ lives. The wife. Your boys. People who called you friend. Countless others, unnamed and unseen, who you’ve doubtlessly affected negatively.

  Not that you’d cared.

  You’re doing it again, you realize. You began by thinking about the woman and her disease and the thoughts came full circle, as they invariably do, to thoughts about yourself.

  Movement again from the hooded figures and one produces a blade. From your position a few feet away it looks like a scalpel.

  “Remove disease now,” one says, one voice normally indistinguishable from the others, each sounding the same, as if part of a chorale, except this voice is clearly female. Her voice like the others’ startles you in its normalcy. Its abruptness. Her words themselves startle you. Not just their suddenness but their harshness as well. So unyielding, so unforgiving. So goddamned terrifying. Remove disease now. Strangely worded sentence, you think. Strangely blurted.

  Stranger still when another grabs the cloaked woman’s wrist, scalpel in hand, poised above the stomach, stops her mid-slash. Bringing that scalpel down hard and fast, attempting to plunge it into the abdomen. But they’ve stopped her, and though you can’t see their expressions, their movements give them away.

  No, they seem to tell her.

  Why? she wonders, turning sharply, acting surprised, perhaps annoyed.

  They shake their heads.

  No.

  Has the woman on the table been given a stay of execution? Because surely her death would have to be inevitable. That hooded woman was about to slash her open from crotch to sternum and you doubt anyone would ever survive that sort of Grand Guignol Masterpiece Theater.

  “Poisoned,” another says.

  The scalp-wielder nods, shrugs.

  “Bad poison. Gnawing away at her …”

  The woman hesitates before nodding again. Seems to grasp their meaning.

  “Dig it out,” she says, and the others nod emphatically. “Go,” she says, sending one on a mission.

  All heads turn toward you now, perhaps to gauge your reaction. You offer none. Part of it is bravado, because you’re terrified, stunned into submission. That scalpel …

  The one returns. He’s carrying … it’s strange what he’s carrying. So out of place.

  In his arms is a clear container, plastic or glass maybe. It’s bell shaped. It’s placed on the woman’s naked stomach, spout side up. The bell shaped bowl is a perfect shape on her, forms to her almost like a seal. You wonder if they’ve glued it to her body. Her struggles beneath it are useless, do nothing to throw it from her body.

  You wonder what the spout is for.

  A box is handed to the scalpel-wielder, the woman you think of as their leader. She peers inside the box and nods.

  The sounds coming from inside the box are familiar, but before your mind connects it, the contents are dumped inside the funnel.

  But your mind refuses to connect the dots because this just doesn’t make sense. You can’t count properly because of your angle but it looks like at least five six seven good-sized rats, rats the size of six-week-old kittens are scrambling together on this woman’s stomach, and you can almost feel their nasty claws digging into her flesh, their needle teeth chewing on her out of fear, confusion. And the woman is screaming, and she still has her vocal cords, this much is apparent, and she is trying to break free of the table, of her restraints, but she’s too well secured.

  Just like you.

  You watch your jailors remove the funnel from the dome, close the small hatch on top, locking the rats inside.

  Then something else is placed on top of the dome. Something simple, ridiculous really. They place the flat rock using a large paddle. No one touches the rock, and soon you see why.

  The second the rock touches the dome the rats react, climbing over each other trying to escape it, glancing up as if to gauge its location, as if terrified, screeching and fighting, paws scrambling, beating at the glass dome.

  It doesn’t budge of course. The rats seem to realize there is no escape through its sides or through the top and in fact retreat from the rock, cower away from it, as if the slightest contact with it would bring them pain. As if they’ve seen this all before. And you assume—deduce—because your brain is playing games again, watching is pure terror and your mind tries to drag you away, that the rock is much more than a paperweight. Their use of the paddle makes it so clear now that the rock was too hot to touch. And now, on top of the glass dome, its heat seems to be affecting the rats.

  The tenacious rats aren’t the cowering kind, you discover.

  They quickly turn from the dome and search for a new way to escape.

  The woman hasn’t moved much throughout the ordeal. You figured it was because of the straps and the hands holding her in place. But even after they let go she doesn’t move. You shift your weight a bit, cock your head and have a clearer view. The woman is locked solidly against the table, cowering as the rats had, chest rising and falling rapidly, beating time with your own steadily increasing heartbeat. From here you can even see her fists clench, unclench, clench, unclench, can see
the veins running vertically down her neck, strained against her flesh. Eyes squeezed shut, cheeks puffing.

  The rats are screaming, their voices finding solidarity, their voices almost human. Screeching, screaming, from upset to scared to frantic in mere seconds.

  You’ve never felt so empathetic before. You’ve never been this afraid before. Empathy, or the thought of facing your own mortality? Compassion for another human being, or the dread in figuring you’re next? What does it matter? Your mouth is suddenly very dry, your tongue tries to produce moisture and you almost choke on the dryness.

  The rats begin their descent. You watch the dome spatter with drops of blood at first, steadily increasing until even the rats are no longer visible, until the woman has stopped thrashing and beating her wrists and head—the only body parts she’d been able to move—against the metallic table.

  You avert your eyes but don’t turn away completely. Oh no, not now, not after everything. You watch your own destiny unravel like a poorly knit sweater and find yourself fascinated and revolted, wishing you could look away, wishing you had lost not only your voice but your sight.

  And you wonder again What has she done? What is her disease?

  Is it worse than mine?

  You study your jailors studying her. You can’t see their faces behind their hoods, can’t read their eyes of course but they surround her, staring, seemingly intent, rapturous glares, unmoving, unflinching, unaffected by the gore and blood, a pound of flesh filling the dome on her stomach. The rats have disappeared, from the dome at least, though you see bizarre movement, small puckers and bulges above her hips. You don’t want to look at that and refuse yourself. You look back up at the jailors and now they’re moving, nodding, hands clasped, hands shaking hands, congratulating one another on this successful evisceration.

  The gurney, rats and all, is wheeled away.