by Sam Munson
In the van, a service radio chimed. Luxemburg leaned in through the passenger window to answer it. Static blurred what her fellow officer or superior was saying (I imagined, stupidly, that it was Sanchis Mira, I summoned up that mighty mustache) but she understood it or pretended to, and she assented. Yes, roger that, she said. Roger that, cried Klemperer, as he shook his dick (I’d turned my head to keep it out of my vision, but I saw his foreskin sliding back into place over his broad, bright-purple glans). Luxemburg trotted around the blue van, now carrying the shovel, her whistle thumping lightly against her chest. She unlocked the padlock and Klemperer motioned me to walk forward. I had reached the door when he said, Okay, that’s good. Luxemburg came up behind me. I thought she was going to hit me with the shovel, but instead I heard its blade strike the earth and felt her fingers on my wrists. The handcuffs opened. Klemperer told me to pick up the shovel and get walking. I didn’t obey, at first, I was staring at the waving leaves of a cinquefoil plant next to his spreading urine. Come on, Professor, get going, said Klemperer. He unholstered his gun. The metal sighed against the leather. Two wet spots darkened the gusset of his sky-blue pants. The serrated, silvered leaves trembled. The dust soaked up his urine.
Klemperer, as he shuffled along behind me, hummed a phrase from the Dog Symphony. More than twelve hours had passed without my hearing it, I calculated as I inhaled the sweet, high smell of the rue, the grass growing among its stalks, the earth itself. As I followed the single, sinuous path, I imagined we were approaching a facility, one that resembled the Parque Presidente Sarmiento, with its swimming pool (I don’t know why I thought there would be a swimming pool but I did, I unquestionably did) and its bizarre red-brick colonnade. I called over my shoulder (the shovel’s still-cool edge brushed my face) to ask Klemperer where we were going. He said not to worry, that this was Department property and no one would bother us, we’d be finished here in a few minutes. The grasses rose higher and higher, and I saw that we’d reached a deep thicket of Cortaderia selloana, the famous Argentine pampas grass. Watch out for the Pampas hares, cried Klemperer. I laughed, and my laugh vanished like smoke under the faultless sky. No clouds, no birds, not a single plane visible, just a vacant, hard blue that the tips of the tallest grasses seemed to touch.
Let no one say that Pasternak regards himself as above manual labor. I had a shovel. This meant: digging. The ground sloped, this I knew too, though I could not tell if it sloped upward or downward. At times it seemed we were ascending and at times descending. The unchanging, smoothed sky prevented me from developing any real idea. Klemperer called me over; he kept the gun ready. The grasses closed above us, only a narrow, oblong strip of sky could be discerned.
I used the shovel edge to chop down the harder stems blocking our path and Klemperer called out approvingly. That’s good thinking, Professor, no wonder you did so well in academia. He understood, of course, what the shovel meant to me, what I knew it to mean. He understood as well the absurd and obscene fantasies that it inspired. And he regarded these fantasies as nothing. He even began to whistle again, to feign absorption in his whistling, rigidly keeping his face averted from me, the shovel in my hand, alive with sun as his whistles reached an intolerable fluidity and pitch — his mastery of the music was incredible; a born whistler, a man whose whistling outstripped all his other talents. He did not stop whistling as he unzipped again and started to piss. This time he fully turned his back, lifting his chin skyward and whistling. His cap fell to the grass and revealed the crown of his head. A nude pink spot among the luxurious hair surprised me. And I did nothing, I hacked away at a thick stem with my shovel. The shaft raised welts on my palm, and these had already begun to blister. I watched Klemperer piss, I heard the splashing urine form a counterpoint to his mighty whistling, and the grave, the earth, closed over my head, Pasternak — that’s what you thought.
I didn’t recognize the swift grayish object that flashed out of the thicket. Neither did Klemperer. Its speed so great, its presence so numinous, that he gave a small, sweaty cry of terror and leaped back. The gray creature scurried between his legs and he tried to dodge again, but this time he missed his footing and fell to the grass. I moved before I knew I was moving. That’s how I overcame the insult. That’s the only way. Pasternak leaped forward and struck Klemperer’s face with the shovel.
The gun fell from his hand. He whistled, he whistled some more, yes. A whistling cry. My first blow opened a deep gash across his cheeks and nose, and I saw within the gash the pearly darkness that had also flowed from the torn lips of the woman Klemperer struck. The second blow destroyed Klemperer’s left eye. His right eye trembled and rolled as he thrashed beneath me. The third blow (and here my transcription becomes more precise) penetrated his skull, and gelatinous gray matter spattered my hands and face. Which is to say Pasternak’s hands and face. Which is to say the face and hands of Boris Leonidovich. Then Klemperer stopped whistling, but I did not stop striking. I raised the shovel and struck again, again, again. With each blow more pearly darkness flowed upward into the light, with each blow this darkness diluted itself, until I could no longer discern the difference between this pearly darkness and the hard sunlight. Klemperer soon stopped moving entirely. The mild, broken hitching of his chest ceased. I kept striking. His skull began to lose its structure. Now bright arterial blood decorated my arms and my face. Droplets flew into my mouth.
The gray creature, the Pampas hare, had observed all this. When I was finished with Klemperer, I raised my eyes to find it crouched, staring, its eyes fiery yellow, its pupils deep, velvety black, its paws and belly cloud-white. I dropped the shovel. The hare stayed there, utterly still, and then darted away. I watched its massive hind legs, its long ears (one notched from a predator’s bite), and its flame-like tail as it vanished. After that, quiet. No more whistling, no more pissing. No sound at all from Pasternak, which is to say me. I picked Klemperer’s gun from where it had fallen. A Browning; as noted, I knew its design. I thumbed the safety off — he had not yet done this, so great was his confidence in the departmental insult and its success — and leaned back against the unbroken stretch of grass thicket. The stiff stems supported me. The problem was clear. Luxemburg. I could not at first decide on the best way to deal with her. If I waited long enough she would arrive but she would arrive suspicious. If I fired a shot, to simulate my own execution, that would provide me with philosophical camouflage, and I could creep back along the path we had broken and attempt to shoot her by the side of the road. That was much riskier, as I could not guarantee my approach would be silent. The method I settled on was simple and stupid. I walked back toward the fence, pushed myself into a deep, dense area of the grass thicket halfway between the gate and the zone where Klemperer lay, and started shouting Luxemburg’s name.
I didn’t have to wait long. The sun above passed from the green tip of one grass stalk to the white panicle of another. Then Luxemburg’s rapid, even footsteps began to rustle, as they had that evening we first met in the history department’s evacuated hallway. She had her gun drawn and raised and she was not running, she cast regular glances to her left and right as she paced forward. In this manner she saw me. I fired as soon as she rotated her numismatic profile. She staggered and fell. The sound of my gunshot almost obscured hers. I had, by sheer chance, struck her squarely in the chest. Her blood, i.e., pearly darkness: well, it appeared. She tried to sit up and failed, proof that my own insult had worked on her. I had so successfully crushed and insulted her that she could not sit up. Because I did not want to walk all the way back to the place I’d left Klemperer, I did not use my shovel this time. I used the butt of her gun. It lay next to another clump of cinquefoil turning its leaves up in a minor breeze.
She shit herself when her forehead caved in. The smell mingled with the smells of the grass, the air, the sunlight, my own sweat, her blood, my blood, Klemperer’s blood, the earth. The crushed and insulted can behave in whatever manner they choose, assuming
they have a choice. If they have no choice, this iron and mustache-like law still stands. Therefore the soul exists. No thanks to the great defecator, God. Amen.
15.
Ahead of me, floating in the dimness, a stripe of raw-looking flesh. It belonged to no one, no one at all.
Instead, I decided to observe the meat truck that had been driving next to me almost since I left the field near Cañuelas. The driver smiled through his window. I returned the smile through mine. He mistook me, I think, for a Departmental officer. I was wearing Klemperer’s uniform and over it the sky-blue windbreaker I found folded into a dense, loud oblong beneath the passenger seat. The windbreaker hid the blood speckling its collar and epaulettes and concealed, as well, the widening, continental stain my own blood was leaving on the cloth. I’d shoved Luxemburg’s undershirt against the wound. I didn’t know if Ojea’s drivers had to obey a protocol regarding Departmental officers. This driver, my driver, seemed intent on screening me from traffic, and thus from threats. Possibly he was obeying; possibly he was concerned about my fate. The huge blue words on the side panel vibrated along with the nonexistent carbuncles. I was concerned at first that these visual phenomena would interfere with my ability to drive, but they did not.
Violeta’s admonition about the airport closure concerned me. Or rather it concerned Pasternak. I myself felt only a mild eddy, a mild disturbance. Besides, it was almost sunset now, almost dusk. Had I slept, after dragging myself into the driver’s seat? In any case, time was lost, no matter how or how much. Other people seemed to be heading for the airport, taxis streamed toward the same off-ramp I took. When we pulled into the complex of overpasses and access roads around Pistarini, it was clear the airport was fully operational. Indeed, there was not even any residual traffic or congestion. I reached the long-term lot without difficulty (except for a few more sprays of pink foam from my mouth, because I’d started to cough). There was a line, but a normal one, and it made no difference because the parking attendants waved me ahead of the cars waiting. No one objected, I watched in the rearview mirror for rebellion among the drivers and passengers I was defrauding, but their faces remained set, still, uniform. The roofed lot smelled like gasoline. Lackeys in sky-blue coveralls, like the one I had seen effacing Ana’s name from her office door, carried red cans into a dark doorway near where I parked. I stepped down from the van. They averted their eyes from my passage. Luxemburg’s undershirt was warm and tacky against my skin, dense now with my own blood. The parking lot elevator stank of gasoline more strongly than the lot itself. A lackey had spilled fuel here and said nothing. Silence being the number one weapon of lackeys.
On a high walkway inside the main terminal, I watched through a window a detachment of my fellow officers (so to speak) marching out past the runways to the fen-like waste fields that surrounded Pistarini. The air I inhaled still cold and still sweet. I counted four officers, three women and one man, all carrying shovels. They reached a far point out in the field and set to work, their shovels glinting in the sunlight. They dug and they dug. Gray earth flew in spurts. The hole, rectilinear, deepened, grew darker, a void in the bright day. They stopped work. Their mouths moved in laughter. One, a woman, planted her shovel blade in the ground. From this ground, it seemed, some tender, some human curl was arising, black and dense. Above the digging officers, planes angled earthward. On the north terminal wall, a sky-blue banner hung. From ceiling to floor. It too trembled in the ceaseless, invisible breeze. Sketched on it in outline the features of Sanchis Mira. Mustache, necktie. His large hands at rest on a closed book. All the porteños in the airport ignored the banner; all the tourists pointed at it and murmured, assuring each other that it was a statesman, an Argentine statesman long dead. One even guessed it was Pistarini himself. It must be, he muttered, or why would they hang it so prominently? The tourists did not avert their eyes from mine as I passed among them, but the porteños did.
I first stumbled near the men’s room entrance. A lackey in a coverall was mopping the floor. I caught myself against the jamb. The lackey plunged his mop into the bucket on gray wheels that he would push through the airport and then through eternity. I muttered to him: Be more careful where you splash that water, you fucking faggot. He started mopping again as soon as I finished speaking, he wheeled the bucket away. The axles whined. In the men’s room, I unzipped my windbreaker. The right side of Klemperer’s shirt, hip to armpit, was bloodstained. I unbuttoned it to examine the wound. I pressed the flesh around the neat, dense hole. No pain, just lightness. The male officer with the shovel barged into the bathroom just as I finished zipping the windbreaker closed again over my hastily buttoned shirt. The shovel’s dented head carried crusts of gray earth. One crust tumbled to the white floor and shattered. The noise pure and thunderous, like the initial rumor of a storm. The stall door slammed. The officer started to grunt. I swallowed the blood and bile filling my mouth.
A few droplets, a few ovate droplets. I couldn’t avoid leaving them behind me as I crossed the terminal. I felt them slide down my arm, down my hand, and before I could close my fist and smear them away, they fell from my fingertips. Always some effluvium, Pasternak. Or even refulgence. I was lighter and lighter, lighter with every step. Fortunate, because it allowed me to continue, and unfortunate because the world grew heavier and heavier, so heavy that even the glances of passersby and tourists weighed me down. Someone kept demanding someone else over the announcement system. Would a Mr. Sordini (or Sortini, I couldn’t tell) please report to the courtesy lounge. In Spanish, in English. A white roaring, too, underlay the words. A sea, the hidden sea. I walked, I floated, so to speak, behind a couple with matching haircuts and suitcases.
They ended up in front of me in the line for international departures. They were bound for Portland, a city the ticket agent had never heard of. The couple seemed surprised, they regarded Portland as a western capital. All three laughed at this, loudly and frankly; all three stopped laughing in the same breath and stiffened. The ticket agent directed a shy, defeated glance my way. I dipped my head in salute, leaning on the silver poles connected by moire nylon ribbons, sky blue. The couple hauled their matching strawberry-covered luggage toward the gate entrances, and the red, achene-pricked forms continued to burn among the carbuncles, stars, and assholes.
In the back pocket of Klemperer’s pants was his wallet. I planned to use his credit card — issued by the University’s own bank and the same sky blue as the departmental uniform — but had no idea of its limit, or if the authorities were aware of his death and had alerted banks and other commercial bodies to watch out for transactions made in his name. If this plan failed . . . yet it didn’t matter. The ticket agent was nodding me forward. I swallowed another copious mouthful of my own blood and obeyed. But the swallowing, this time, made me cough. The red streak my cough painted across the agent’s round, whitening face resembled, I thought, my friend’s letter L in minuscule.
But my head was now bouncing mildly against the cool floor tiles. I coughed up another vivid chevron of blood. Shoes and ankles darted and dodged across my visual field, among the reddish occurrences. Primate voices cried out above me. I could no longer distinguish the words. The beating of my heart, sevenfold, seventyfold. Questions arose. Was this death, “Pasternak” wanted to know. Pasternak murmured and whimpered. And I myself? Well, I had nothing to say.
16.
Grass-blades penetrated so deeply into my nostrils that I leapt up in terror. They carried the scents of: dust, dandelion pollen, loam, and human corpses. Also marble, the rubber soles of shoes, rainwater.
I leapt up and fell back on my side at once, simply because the movement I attempted — to “leap to my feet” — failed. True, my legs locked and prepared to support my thorax and head, but my back would not straighten. The sunset blinded me, so I tumbled back to the grass. I tried to cry out. A desert dryness consumed and degraded the sound.
I tried again to spread my palms on the grass and for
ce myself at least to my knees, and this worked, though I was not on my knees; I was “standing,” a bodily voice whispered. My head and chest pointed forward and my abdomen pointed earthward, my genitals (to my amazement naked) swaying ponderously in the warm breeze. The need to urinate stung my bladder (my soul) and my right leg rose, without effort, from the grassy earth. The urine streamed and sputtered, I heard it, but I could not see it, and my burgherly training seized hold, crept over and crawled over, shouting that I must stop pissing, at once, at once, but I could not stop, I trotted in a tight circle attempting to see my own urination, and my right leg, it is true, participated, but I could not see it, I could not see it, and it ended before I asserted myself over the secret strength of my bladder (again: my soul).
Pistarini: gone. As if consumed by mighty, motionless fire. And the endless white tiles, these were gone as well. No thicket of pampas grasses enclosed the lawn I was trotting in mindless circles around. Klemperer and Luxemburg? The invisible fire had taken them, too. Their absence prompted me to fill my lungs and shout. This time, a cry did emerge, a single, curt, meaningless, fluid monosyllable. To my east, my west, my north, and my south, monuments. Gray marble, white marble, concrete. Cruciform. Some stood at the heads of brick borders demarcating oblong plots, some stood in naked grass, and some on raw earth. Among them larger constructions, spires and plinths, and even (occupying double or triple the land) white and gray stone mausolea. The setting sun visible over the brown wall, not far but not near, like the mouth of a furnace. Or even an eye, Pasternak, don’t forget you can always compare the sun to an eye. In the nothing that flowed between the monuments, the nothing the monuments combed, comb of the so-called hecatomb, dozens of dogs were waking up. They followed the same protocol. They stood, they pissed or even shat, they circled their own axis, and they began to trot southwest, toward Warnes, I realized. Where the gap in the cemetery wall was. These dogs ignored me, as they had during my long excursion among them on my first night in the southern capital. As they passed, their muzzles stayed on the same level as my own face, and their blank, mildly phosphorescent gazes met mine. As the first dog approached me, an obese rottweiler with foamy ropes of saliva dangling from her jowls, I panicked, yes, Pasternak panicked and tried again to rise up, to assume the primate stance of supremacy. I fell once more onto my flank, and the rottweiler let her glance slide over me as I struggled in the damp grass.
