Lights Out

by Douglas Clegg

  I honored and respected my father, even then, and I also thought of ways I might kill him someday.

  But I never did.

  12

  After I awoke from the game, after the interrogators — my impersonal demons — had left their scratches all over my too-thin body.

  I was returned to my pit, to my endless night.

  Sometime later — days, perhaps — I was brought out again.

  This time, Hoax was not happy with me. It seemed that my comrades had not said as much as they’d wanted. It seemed that none of us was behaving.

  This time, I was to have a night of theater, he told me.

  “Might I have a bit of that opium water?” I asked. I might’ve begged. I liked the stuff and I wanted to make my time in this Hell as pleasant as possible.

  “Perhaps after,” he said, rather sadly.

  I was brought into a cell lit by the wavering flame of a candle. In a corner, my buddy Davy, sweet little Davy.

  His eyes swollen from beatings. His jaw cracked. A festering wound on his scrawny arm.

  Ropes again. This time, on his wrists and ankles.

  Four men had the ends of the rope.

  “This is a play we call the Tug of War,” Hoax told me.

  Then, he began asking me questions.

  Tears came to my eyes, but I had nothing to tell them.

  The four men tugged at the ropes and I heard Davy’s bones pop, one by one, as they pulled, and his jaw dropped open, slack, but he was still alive.

  Until one of the men pulled what seemed to be the forearm right out of Davy’s skin.

  Oh, but the game kicked in again, you see, at that point, and I missed most of the evening’s entertainment by flying off to Burnley Island, by going somewhere I would be punished for my sins, but they were my sins alone and it was my punishment and no one else’s.

  When I came out of the game, I was missing a finger and had no memory of it being taken, or of the burning metal that had cauterized it to keep it from bleeding.

  Hoax, however, told me the next time I was hauled up that I was a man of iron. “You didn’t make a sound. You seemed…”

  “To be someplace else,” I said.

  He nodded. “Where did you go? The one you call Axeman was using a dull small scissor to cut off your finger. Why didn’t you flinch?”

  “Magic,” I told him. “What’s on the menu for tonight?”

  “Menu?”

  “Bugs? Rats? Frogs?”

  “Oh,” he said, smiling. “Supper. Well, tonight, we have a special treat. Tongue.”

  “Cow?”

  “Pig. But it’s very good. Wild pig makes a wonderful dish.”

  When I was finished with supper — and it truly was sumptuous compared to my previous ones — they brought another from my company, the scrappy little guy we called Gup. Like the previous show with Davy, he had obviously been beaten, and perhaps his left leg was broken, also, for he hobbled in and nearly collapsed when the interrogators let go of his arms.

  “Your friend cannot speak,” Hoax whispered in my ear, like a mosquito circling. “He has, unfortunately, just this afternoon, lost his tongue under the Axeman’s blade.”

  Now, Hoax didn’t say that the tongue I had just eaten was my buddy’s. He didn’t have to. Maybe it was, and maybe it wasn’t. But he obviously wanted to give me that message, no matter what the truth of it might be.

  I didn’t eat for a few days, but finally, pulled out of the hole again, I gobbled down the food they brought me — a stew made from strips of meat and leaves that tasted terrible but completely satisfied the gnawing in my gut.

  Again, Gup was brought out, this time missing both hands, cauterized and bandaged at the wrist.

  “His hands fell like leaves from a dying tree,” Hoax told me.

  “Very poetic,” I said, trying to keep my mind from thinking about Gup and the Axeman too much, and forcing myself to keep out of playing the Dark Game. To remain in the moment.

  “Have you ever tasted human flesh?” Hoax asked.

  I didn’t answer. I looked at poor Gup’s face. I wished him to die right there. I prayed to God. I prayed to the Devil. I prayed to the Queen of Heaven, Mary, the Mother of God, Blessed is the Fruit of her Womb, Jesus.

  I prayed that his spirit would be pulled from his body before another night passed.

  This entertainment of Hoax’s went on for several nights, but each time I refused to answer his questions. I will admit with nothing but shame that I began to crave the meals brought to me, and I convinced myself — no doubt for survival’s sake — that this was not the body of Gup that I slowly consumed, sliced from him day after day and cooked up with spices and aromatic flowers to make dishes that I began to love.

  This was simply meat that had been taken from the body of pigs and rats and snakes and lizards and frogs and fish and other creatures of this Enemy’s country.

  This was not Gup’s foot, sliced into slivers, swimming in fragrant soup.

  This was not a bit of flayed skin from Gup’s buttocks, wrapped within a palm leaf that had been buttered and baked into a moist but crunchy crust.

  Yet, nightly, Gup was there, soon an eye was gone, then his nose, his ears, toes and left foot, his lips sliced off, until I saw him no longer as a man at all, as a friend, as a former buddy, as one of the team.

  I saw him as the supplier of my life.

  In a dream, in the hole, I saw the great snake of life, devouring its own tail. Life eats life, the image of the snake seemed to tell me. Life devours itself. You are part of this, and so is Gup. The snake is the whip in my father’s hand. The whip is in my hand and reaches from my bloodied back to whip my father’s hand. The torturer and the tortured are each playing a part and cannot be without the other.

  So, I awoke from this dream and knew then that life was neither beautiful nor perfect nor magical.

  Life was simply the gutter of heaven, the place where offal and waste was spilled.

  I began to love my suppers with Hoax. Even when the Axeman came to me, a razor in his hand, and my mind shooting off to the game, I began to enjoy my contact with these cosmic barbarians and I looked forward to whatever they had in store. I had forgotten my army, my country, and my friends. There was only my hole and my cell, and my smokehouse back on Burnley Island. It was the whole universe, and I could not tell whether it was heaven or hell.

  Then, coming from the Dark Game, out into the cell again, it was pain in my crotch that had me screaming, yet I felt distant from the scream. I felt I could measure the scream and how it flew along the cell walls, bouncing up and down and back again.

  They took another one of my fingers, but worse, one of my nuts was felled that night.

  The Axeman had done it, with his little razor.

  I hadn’t answered the questions, and they had taken my left ball after slicing off my next finger down from my already-torn-off pinkie.

  When I came around, I was in the cell, screaming, and one of my guys — Larry Pastor — sat across from me, watching, his face trembling as if with an impending storm of sobs.

  I had become the new entertainment for someone else now.

  I was the star of the show.

  The next night, I had the best supper yet, with Larry staring at me from across the room, his face a grimace.

  What was I eating? My finger? My testicle? Or simply some special sliced rat over a bed of eel-leaves?

  “It’s all right,” I told him. “It tastes good. It really does.”

  13

  I wasn’t sure what I ate most nights, but the strangest thing of all was that I had begun gaining weight. I still drank a bit of the opium water — Hoax would bring in barely a thimbleful. I guess he wanted to keep me pliable and still sober enough when necessary.

  I attributed my gain in bulk to a combination of the fatty meat they fed me, as well as sitting in a hole in the ground for days on end. Hoax commented on it, and I could see it in Larry Pastor’s eyes — while he got th
inner and thinner, no doubt refusing to eat any meat offered him, I was beginning to put on the pounds.

  Truth was, I felt better. I felt as if my mind had adjusted to the hole and the cell. I began to realize that, contrary to what Hoax might’ve thought, I never even felt I was going to escape. I just refused to tell Hoax or his beloved Axeman any military plans or secrets because I knew that once I told, I was as good as dead.

  The meals would stop. They’d leave me in the hole and either forget about me completely, or fill it in with dirt and rocks.

  I began to see my imprisonment as a kind of luxury hotel — a fancy five star place. I began living in my head a lot, believing that I went on adventures when I was in the hole. I used the Dark Game to get out — I began to see the world again. I was in Paris, briefly, for a moonlit walk along the Seine with a beautiful girl who reminded me of a teacher I’d once had a crush on. I had breakfast on the Champs-Élysées, buttered almond croissant and a demitasse of espresso while watching traffic as it headed toward the Arc de Triomphe.

  Another voyage out, I sat on a striped blanket on some tropical island, surrounded with bare breasted beauties, feasting on mango and coconut milk, feeling the warm breezes as the shadows of palm trees cast thin lines along the pumice-strewn beach.

  In the cell, I’d go to Burnley Island, to a moment in the past; but in the hole, I’d be somewhere magnificent, off on some adventure that was like a wish fulfillment of my boyhood.

  Perhaps this saved me. Perhaps it damned me. In my rare moments of lucidity, I try to stay grounded by chewing on a small bit of the Wrigley’s gum — the little I had left. A tiny infinitesimal piece. It reminded me of who I was, where I was, why I was there.

  I began to talk to Hoax, without even knowing that I might be giving away secrets.

  I told him all kinds of things. Not military secrets. Just about my life. About my nocturnal adventures.

  Hoax became my best friend, and I suppose months passed. Other soldiers were captured. Sometimes I saw their faces, and now and then I recognized their faces.

  But they were part of the Show now. I watched the show, or they watched me. But Hoax didn’t let the Axeman cut from me again.

  I was valuable. I was telling things. Nothing important. If I told anything important, I was as good as dead.

  No, I was telling Hoax about life outside of the jungle, and he loved my stories. He had studied the works of Shakespeare, so now and then we’d talk about Macbeth or about Othello, and I told him about Moby Dick and how my island was somewhat like Nantucket and had been part of the whaling trade.

  He loved American movies, too, so we talked about them at some length, and he offered up critiques that were quite well-thought-out about how Americans approached movies as opposed to other cultures. He also enjoyed discussing famous wars, and warriors of the ancient world.

  These conversations often went on during the torture of another.

  I watched a man weep as the Axeman sliced off both of his ears, and then held them high.

  I am ashamed to admit that, deluded, and not really as sane as I should’ve been, I clapped for this performance because I thought it was some kind of special effects magic.

  The Axeman was good at his job.

  I had no idea what Hoax had in store for me, but soon enough, he brought me into a lower level of Hell with him.

  14

  Here’s the thing about the Dark Game: by itself, it’s simply a mind trick. It’s a way to open doors inside you and to escape. Pain. Hurt. Sorrow.

  That’s all it is.

  But in that prison camp, with the techniques they taught purely by trying them on me, I learned how to add another level to the game.

  How to make it go deeper.

  And when it did, something truly magnificent came of it.

  15

  “Brainwashing.” It sounds like some medical experiment.

  But it’s really simple.

  You just put the subject in a position of separation from every sensory detail.

  And then you go to work on him.

  I had been prepared for it, in my training.

  But I guess you’re never really prepared for this kind of thing, not after months in a hole in the ground, not after watching your friends get their noses and eyes and ears and hands cut off in front of you.

  Not after they feed you what might be your left ball.

  16

  Hoax had me tied up, hands in front of me, but tied to another rope that went to my ankles. They had positioned me, standing, in the middle of a cell. Plugged a fan into the wall. I guessed that this was to help block out any noise beyond the cell wall.

  Then, each wall was covered with a dark cloth to block out even the cracks of light that might come in.

  Additionally, Hoax tied a blindfold around my head.

  Plunged into absolute darkness, I felt Hoax touch my hands. “You are going to be here for several hours,” he said. “You are not going to touch the wall. Or sit down. Or fall. Should you fall, you will be strung up so that you are dangling from the ceiling with a stick thrust between your arms to keep you balanced. So, do not fall, that is my advice, my friend. You are to keep silent. If you cannot keep silent, Axeman will cut out your tongue and sew your lips together. Understood? This is for your betterment. We find that you are truly a patriot to the world, to freedom, and to honor, and we want you to realign yourself with nature and man’s true calling, instead of with this monster you have served in America. You have been deluded by your country, and we intend to help you recover. You are special to us, and to me, Gordon. You are worth realigning.”

  That was the last word I heard for many hours, during which my bones ached, my bowels let loose without my being able to control them, and after awhile, I felt as if I were floating.

  The sound of the fan — a buzzing like a thousand black flies — seemed to take over my mind, as if it were what my brain generated: the noise of a cosmic buzzing.

  Somewhere beneath it, after awhile, I heard Hoax’s voice again, only I could not make out what he was saying.

  I was fairly certain, however, that he was inside my head now, doing the brainwashing, planting ideas and truths known only to the Enemy, trying to make me over into one of their servants.

  But I went into the Dark Game, and there I met Hoax. I heard him clearly. I understood how this brainwashing could serve the Dark Game — and how it could help me survive.

  Getting into your brain isn't the problem with brainwashing. Anyone with a good mental crowbar can unlock that mush of gray matter.

  It’s making your mind separate from your body so completely that your body becomes a servant to someone else’s mind. That is the goal of brainwashing. They are not cleansing the brain. They are turning it off, and switching on another brain, imprinting another set of memories and values and thoughts so that your past is no longer there. It is wiped out, but not so completely — you think you are the same person. But someone else has invaded you. The Other. The one who has turned off one switch has juiced you from another one.

  And you are that person’s mind now. You are that person’s imagination.

  That is what I learned. That is how I began to understand that the Dark Game was not just for one to go off on flights of fancy. To protect you from some pain of life. It could be changed, using this brainwashing. It could become a way to turn a switch in another — to implant your own mind into another’s mind, so that he no longer had his own perception but might, at least briefly, have yours.

  I knew there was a way I could use this on Hoax.

  On the Axeman.

  I knew that there was a way I could put the Dark Game into them so that I might escape.

  17

  They told me later that I stood there for twenty hours.

  They told me later that I had been realigned.

  But I had not been.

  The Dark Game had saved me. It had protected me. It had kept me from letting their words and thoughts pres
s into my gray matter.

  When they brought me out into the sunlight — for the first time in many months — they rejoiced and called me Comrade and Friend and Healed One.

  But, on the inside, I had already begun planning how I would destroy them and set their camp on fire, and sow the ashes with salt so that those demons might never rise again.

  18

  But I’ve got to pull you back to that night when I was eighteen. Remember? Me tied to the bed, the dead whore on the floor, and the real Harry Hoakes, my buddy, my pal, untying me, his breath all whiskey and perfume absorbed from his girl for the night.

  “She thought she was going to be like Gene Tierney,” I said, and then, “Jesus, I’m going to end up in jail for this.”

  “Or you’ll be in the jungle. In the goddamned war. Which do you want?”

  “I choose the goddamned war.”

  Harry grinned, slightly, despite everything. “You didn’t do it. You were tied up. I’m a witness to that.”

  I got up and got dressed as fast as I could, tripping over my trousers as I yanked them up.

  “You let her tie you up?”

  I shot him a glance that shut him up.

  “What are we going to do?” he asked.

  “We ain’t gonna get caught, that’s for damn sure,” I said.

  Next thing I remember, we’re dragging that body out to Harry’s car, and we plop her in the trunk.

  I looked at her once, in that fizzling little light of the trunk, before we shut it down on her.

  Her face.

  She was somewhere else.

  That’s what Death is, I thought. It’s going into the Dark Game for good.

  I had no feeling for her. She was no longer there.

  But the drive out to the mesa, thirty miles away from Red Town, the whole way I kept wondering how she had been murdered, and why I had awoken from the Dark Game with the strange feeling of pleasure in my loins as if I had truly lost my virginity that night.