Last Stories and Other Stories (9780698135482)

by Vollmann, William T.

  Once upon a time, when men writhed and died in the trenches of Redipuglia, there had been fine weather, at least for a Trench Ghost: a birdsong of alarm whistles melodified the forest (which of course got wrecked and flattened—the reason that the current trees had achieved no great girth as yet); and steel butterflies of shell fragments flew up to complete this delightful picture. With almost none of a vampire’s helpless obsessiveness when put to counting grains of rice until sunrise, the Trench Ghost began to gather souvenir scraps of metal. As his ambitions grew, so did his powers. He could bite a piece of copper, iron or even case-hardened steel neatly in two. He could fold down rough edges, and pinch them as smooth as piecrust-dough. By breathing on his subsections, he could adhere them to each other better than if they’d been soldered. Before long he had made himself tiny saws, files, sanders and scrapers. Whenever he had assembled another toy, he carried it into the mass grave over by the monument. This dark place, horrid to you or me, always revitalized the Trench Ghost. Furthermore, some exudation of the sad mud at its center possessed the quality of fixing any metal with a black and durable finish.

  I confess the possibility that the Trench Ghost lacked any power at all over material things, in which case he was simply an insane hallucinator. But the loneliness of God makes for no story in and of itself. That is why our scribes added people to the Bible. In this story of the Trench Ghost I have likewise thought fit to let him do this or that, because otherwise the actual desperation of the eternally aware yet powerless dead might distress you who live; anyhow, I cannot prove that what he perceived himself as doing was not actually being done. So let’s agree that he made a spider-legged little iron knight, who became one of his most determined captains. For the knight’s antagonist he now constructed a puppet of flat black plates whose arm-edges were sharper than razors and whose legs were as those of a machine-gun tripod. In enemy pairs he made them, tiny metal figures whose heads were frequently ejected shells and whose hands were vises or triggers (some also had tongs for hands). Unlike the works of modern factories, his differed individually, even if their functions and destinies bore one flavor. Deep underground he brushed past a grubby feminine figure who was half emerging from her marble stele in the third century before Christ and had still gotten no farther. He did not wonder who she was, but he considered how he could use her. His intelligence failed him there, for he was merely a Trench Ghost; hence he floated away and constructed his own counterpart, the enemy general: tall and black in form, a narrow triangle of metal with many grooves and knurlings on its surface; its springloaded razor-wrists folded prayerfully in, its many-jointed legs drawn up ready to leap; on its head a black helmet, in its eyes cruel determination without understanding; its mouth a sawtoothed groove.

  2

  For years he contented himself with posing his toy soldiers as would a child, lining them up; they were stiff, still and ready, and came to appear quite smart together; even those new black steel troopers had begun to go green-verdigrised, following after their elder brothers and sisters, the bronze figurines. Sometimes he employed the ammunition-holes in the wall to sort them in; as the two armies grew, he began to classify the pieces more whimsically; one night it might be all bronze figurines on one side and steel ones on the other; or perhaps the bronze entities called out to be officers on both sides, after which he was sure to humiliate them by putting the steel creatures in charge for the next round. And as he played these sad games, he imagined that the trenches around him were his home. He thought: All here is mine. He decided: No general is greater than I.

  Before the youngest oaks had thickened, he discovered that if he held each toy soldier to his heart, it would come to life, or at least enter a state which appeared alive to its maker. I wish you could have seen those black many-legged things fighting, falling back before this or that steel officer as if some horseheaded demon were sweeping them away! To the Trench Ghost it was a particular treat to watch that enemy general, the puppet of flat black plates, swinging up its jointed, sharp-edged iron arm, like the legs of a machine-gun tripod. To oppose that entity and assist the cause of good, he now constructed another grinning verdigrised monster with splayed frog-legs; it could leap and bite most desperately, and its cheeks were sharper than scalpels. For an expression the Trench Ghost awarded it whatever he had seen in the eyes of that grey skull beneath the slab from 1915. After that he fashioned springtailed dragon soldiers, gendarmes whose helmets he roweled like cowboy spurs, beetle-browed metal infantry, shock troops who could roll forward on wheeled leaden plinths, brass corporals whose jaws happened to dwell in their chests, tapering-headed sappers no wider than Maxim cartridges, executioner queens whose skirts rushed open like skeletal umbrellas just before they worried enemies in half with their sawtoothed thighs, caterpillar-legged Alpine troops. The enemy general, of course, was the most impressively malevolent of all these toys. With each match he became more ferocious, and in this the other soldiers followed him. At first they used to knock each other down with clattering little scissors-kicks, or hurl each other waist-high against the concrete walls; by and by they learned the arts of charging, smashing and dismembering. Whenever a battle was concluded, there rose up in that dark and mucky tunnel a faint hissing or whistling or crackling. The victorious troops were cheering! Then, when the Trench Ghost flew over his miniature battlefield, breathing gusts of fog down upon their broken parts, they clanged back together again, ready for the next war.

  Only the Venus-crowned hairpin refused to live. He attempted different exhalations and even foggy whispers, but could not reach her. Hence he fashioned a new steel lieutenant-general in her place. Not knowing why he did so, he pierced the Venus deep inside himself, until her face barely protruded from between his ribs. He swiveled her around in his heart so that she was always looking up at him. After that he felt a sensation of tenderness, as if he were a mother suckling her baby.

  By now he felt, as most of us do, that he ruled his own doom; hence the future would be ever grander. And in this optimistic spirit the Trench Ghost taught the enemy general the art of the phalanx. All the troops already knew trench warfare. And they dug in, scrabbling grooves into the concrete with their bladed hands. Soon they began to make their own weapons.

  Carrying the enemy general down under the concrete, the Trench Ghost showed him an unexploded cylinder of mustard gas. The little creature understood, and grinned with all his teeth.

  3

  His troops could not yet travel to mine their raw materials, so he brought them whatever they wished; in Redipuglia there is plenty of everything. He was beneficent; he built them a tiny smelter and a machine shop the size of a cigarette carton; they played fairly, and took turns, while the Trench Ghost reinspected that old memory he had of almost seeing a waving white curtain going blue in late summer Adriatic light. This picture did not lead to anything. By now the two lines were launching tiny projectiles at each other. Their bombs were no larger than matchheads, but that sufficed to blow up those brave little fellows. They screamed or buzzed when they were struck, and cheered when they did the striking. Their machine guns stridulated as sweetly as crickets; and when they rushed out of their hand-grooved trenchlets in hopes of seizing each other’s positions, their fierce-shining gazes were as pleasant to the Trench Ghost as I myself find the yellow-pupilled compound eyes of the pink hydrangeas in Trieste.

  Now it began to happen that the enemy general would conquer the Trench Ghost’s troops, and pose upon that mound of dead metal skulls, with the splayed legs and upraised arms of a gladiator triumphing over his victim. Whenever the Trench Ghost won, he allowed his new lieutenant-general to take the credit, and then that metallic personage would preen himself like a flame-winged red-ocher demon painted on plaster. He too got stronger and crueler. By the time the oak trees got taller, the armies fought finely without any guidance from their maker. They still needed him to breathe them back into coherence after they were broken.

  Anoth
er dawn whose cloud-grey was bluer than the machine guns had ever been, even when they were new, surprised the Trench Ghost into a sort of flush, as if he had been caught at something, or, far less likely, as if some spirit-fever had caressed the back of his neck; and once yellow lagoons of light began to afflict him from between those clouds, he felt still warmer, and sank down into the black mud below the concrete, where not even winter frogs could go. There he lay like a small child pretending to be asleep. Successive moments suffused and departed him no more quickly than they would have for you and me. Therefore, on account of his immortal consciousness, they tortured him. But he had long since learned how to be mad. All day, and each day, he suffered without understanding, which was how he endured it. At night, fancying himself refreshed, he rose up into his own sort of church where high barrels of thought once aimed outward, greyly shining.

  4

  The Trench Ghost’s victories brought him no increase in the introspective joys he already experienced (drifting above his battles, he wore the dreamy smile of a Nereid in the arms of a feminine deity). As for his defeats, they neither soured him against the enemy general, whom he never thought to name, nor did they give him any pride in the intelligence of his creation. Perhaps it would be best to say that they made him wonder what else he might do. There were evenings when his two armies ranked upon their separate window-ledges awaited his pleasure, while he existed elsewhere, experiencing that cool dank dampness deep within the hollow of his heart. Lolling in his high window seat, looking through the white-arched embrasures into the sunny forest, he learned, then forgot, how twig-shadows twitched upon the pale tan earth at breast height. It was mid-morning, the rectangular window now sighting on gravel, grass and leaves. He seemed to remember the cool moldy smell of a certain old church whose Madonna elongated herself into near-phantasmic proportions. He was gazing up above the altar’s fresh flowers to the Crucified One eternally perishing; and behind Him the daylight, white as linen, glowed through the three tall slit-windows. The Trench Ghost experienced something more refined than pleasure. He nearly flitted into the forest. He felt an impulse to pick flowers and lay them here.

  5

  Wandering this way and that through his round-ceilinged trenches set deep into the grass, he played at soldiers, one of the new-made recruits now slumping forward while standing with his hands over his steel belly, bowing grimly forward, his snout dripping sand-grains like tears; beside him, a soldier whose hands were visegrips stared at his god with a doglike look, as if he could possibly hope for something. But the Trench Ghost barely paid attention, because the sunset clouds now put him in mind of the way that some bronze helmets express verdigris in beautiful patches of turquoise and white, still leaving the bronze color here and there. Emerging from an embrasure, he hovered over his trenches’ round spines. There was lichen on them, and moss. Ivy climbed the lovely trees below them. He wandered down there in order to look back up at the skyline where his trenches lay invisibly. He listened to a blackbird. He was alone in the young forest. He liked to look up and count leaf-shadows. Soon he had gone all the way to the boundary, which was a certain helmet-topped grave.

  He declined to believe that this was all there could be. Another slow-growing oak spread its arms above and away from the trench.

  6

  The smell of wild thyme, the ugly rounded galleries black-lichened and crackling, the pools of rainwater rapidly sinking into the karst meadow, these entered his essence, and so he carried the enemy general and his own lieutenant-general out into the sunlight, to warm them and see how they were affected, but they never did anything. He exhaled upon them very slowly. They faced off, and began to fight to the death, while he floated into the new forest, just above the railroad tracks, keeping exactly between the two tracks in the deep rock-groove there at Redipuglia. He picked a leaf and watched it fall. He stared into the sun. Looking about him, he decided: I am not this.

  The Venus-crowned hairpin grew warm. Presently she tumbled out of his heart. Leaving her in the grass, he said to himself: She does not pertain to me.

  Returning to his toy combatants, he found the enemy general standing atop the lieutenant-general’s decapitated remains. Although the latter continued to struggle, as insects often will even after central ganglia have been removed, its motions were to little purpose. The Trench Ghost lifted the enemy general away. Angrily, it stabbed him in the leg. The Trench Ghost felt vaguely proud. Surely whatever he was had to do with this place in which he had found himself and these things he had made.

  7

  Since he could see through dirt and rock, he found a round-cheeked child’s head made of marble—her nose broken off, her cheeks pitted—and a one-armed naked marble soldier who held his chin high. He left them underground, reasoning: They too have nothing to do with me.

  Wandering through the reinforced connecting tunnels, he gazed up past the concrete and counted the roots of the young oaks and wild thyme bushes. From his visits to the mass grave he remembered brass epaulettes with gilded tentacles, a corroded canteen in a woven sack whose fibers now were atoms, a scrap of ribcage, a cross attached to a ribbon of gelato-colored stripes, and a blue case of visiting cards which to anyone else would have looked like mud. More roots groped deep through all that. He posited that things which grow downward might somehow relate to him.

  Looking up between the inclined rusty rails of an artillery carriage (cannone da 149G, projectile weight thirty-five kilograms, maximum distance nine point three kilometers), he seemed to remember a sergeant inserting a child’s head into the barrel’s loading-hole, or perhaps only a loaded shell had gone in; and then two soldiers had manipulated the great wheel against the recoil-springs, in the name of great Madre Italia. Another memory appeared to be wedged behind the angled slabs of metal. In Trieste a woman was rising away from him, lifting her lips from the earth. Perhaps she was the one who had once lain beside him under the blue curtain. Then an Austrian shell was caressing a church whose wall-shards danced marble-white and bare-breasted like Nereids. He knew how the great barrel moved in its track; he had seen its birth from a vertical ovoid slit, and when the gun began to fire, destroying over months the pines that the Austrians had planted in better days, he had been there, too, all over the strategic zone demarcated by Peteans, Isonzo and Sdraussina.

  He could not realize anything beyond all that, until one night when he was playing at soldiers, all the gamepieces on both sides attacked him. Smiling, still supposing that he was proud of them, he swiggled himself down, and permitted them to stab, cut and shoot his flesh, until he sent them to sleep with a long puff of breath. Then he said to himself: That they who come from me did this to me implies something about me. Yes, I’m sure that’s so.

  Then he removed himself, standing alone like a machine gun lost in the grass.

  8

  People who think they know about ghosts often suppose that a ghost is tied to its place of death, burial or unwholesome love attachment; and while this may well be the rule, as evidenced by the famous Moaning Lady whom I hear in the next room whenever I visit my favorite whorehouse, the Trench Ghost remained as free, in his own estimation, as you or I; so presently, in the interests of discovering who else he might be, he flew north, where the blue-grey sea showed itself through the slit windows in the concrete pillboxes at Tungesnes, which naturally means Tongue Ness; and here the rounded blackened foredomes of old Nazi bunkers awaited the Allies who had tricked them by landing at Normandie instead. The rusty iron rebar pleased the Trench Ghost; it resembled sunset at Redipuglia. Belowground the ceilings were sometimes brilliantly corroded ribbons of steel, sometimes simply concrete, which stank far worse than his trenches; certainly all these chambers were fouler than the nearby Viking graves. Of course not every corpse had been disinterred, much less every beetle-ridden scrap of yellow-grey bone. But that wasn’t the reason it stank.