In bed last night it was worse. The dreams in their usual sequence: using up all my rounds putting Kraut horses out of their misery, mangled heaps of them littering the roads. Mason and I coming to on the side of some ditch in Holland, flowers covering us like we were a couple of corpses. Liberation of Bergen-op-Zoom, the Browning triggering in the town square and two pretty girls dead on the ground. In my dream I’m leaning over the bodies and it happens just the same as it did then— some kind of raging inferno inside my boot so that I’m stamping it on the ground and shrieking like a lunatic. I woke feeling like someone was pounding my calf with a meat tenderizer.
Even still, it took less than thirty seconds before my mind was in focus, the covers were off, and I was hopping down the stairs to the basement. Because for the past three months there’s been nothing more than an itch. I had the machine out, the lights off, was feeling around in the dark for the film, but by the time my stump was propped up on the damn machine the pain was just a throb, fading even as I flipped the switch. Three images of the stump, and then one of my arm thrown across the film when I slipped as I pressed the charge.
I sat in the La-Z-Boy and watched infomercials, hoping for another cramp. Every time I closed my eyes I saw Mason dragging me by my armpits into the goddamn tank, and ripping off the boot. It sure as hell wasn’t trench foot or some kind of diabetic infection; it was burned right up.
I finally decided not to bother waiting and processed the film. And it was clear just as soon as the negs were on the light table. Three stumps, a shadowy blur of luminescence—nothing like the phantom leaf and nothing new either. But here’s the thing: in the image of my arm were these wild flares, sparking and tangled. A giant asteroid of a fuck-you barrelling towards an old and crippled man.
HELEN—MARCH 2015
There’s nothing to do on the jet but stare out the window and there’s nothing out the window but dust. Like Iran is one giant sandbox. Like I should be bouncing in my seat, barely able to contain my excitement.
Mom said to lose the attitude, and then she abandoned me for Mr. Spark and his classified whatever. She’s spent most of the trip up front, whispering with her biggest fan. And when she’s not whispering? She has her legs gripped to her chest and her head shoved into her knees, humming. Which would be embarrassing if there was anyone around who remotely mattered.
During one of these musical interludes Mr. Spark comes up the aisle to inform me that though we will be landing on a U.S. base, we won’t be staying there. Meaning, of course, we will see Muslims. And not just first-world Muslims like the ones in internment camps in the Interior—who aren’t exactly real Muslims anyway, waving maple leaves and writing love poems about Canada that are constantly in the paper, the women not even in hijabs. These will be Muslims with explosives strapped to their chests, ready to detonate themselves and fuck virgins in heaven—maybe virgin sisters of the women they threw rocks and acid at in life, the women they lit on fire.
Is it unreasonable to expect someone else to be alarmed by this? Someone like my mother, whose responsibility in life is to protect me? Or Mr. Spark, who must be somewhat important if he can get a private jet to the Middle East when practically no one can even afford a plane ticket across the country? Important, but definitely not intelligent. For proof: Mr. Spark claims that there is “absolutely no reason to be agitated.” That the Muslims he has in store for us are learned men and women, and pacifists every single one. Muslim pacifists? Excuse me, I want to scream, but Canada has been on red-alert for a year straight and all our Muslims are under armed guard. What kind of person willingly travels to a country composed entirely of terrorists? But I only stare at him and shake my head slow, like I’m not naïve and just because he has a monogrammed briefcase doesn’t mean I’ll buy his bullshit. And then I notice the flares that spit and crackle around his head. The blue is dim in places, faded to nearly nothing at his shoulders. It almost looks as though there’s a wisp of smoke hovering near his collarbone, but before I can tell for certain he wanders off.
Three times I use the bathroom in the cubicle up front, and twice I walk there quietly enough to overhear the Top-Secret conversation. Once Mr. Spark is asking Mom about cases she has come across in her research. And does it always occur in the same way, with a greasy pile of ash? At which point she puts her hand on his arm, shakes her head, then turns to me and says, Yes honey? with her face arranged in this aren’t-we-all-having-a-great-time kind of smile that I swear makes me puke a little inside my mouth. And the second time Mom is talking about Granddad, and how he only had one leg. Which has to do with exactly nothing. Mom an expert? News to me. And a science fiction writer? Hard to imagine anything more embarrassing.
As the plane starts its descent, the fence that surrounds the army base comes into view, and then so do specks of vehicles and people on the cement. I can see it now: my mother sitting with a group of Muslim sci-fi fans, all shedding their veils and cheerfully sipping tea. Which would be something no one at school would believe for an instant. A picture of Mom in a chador on the front of the newspaper. Science fiction ending the Jihad.
POVED—OCTOBER 1944 The soldiers came at night to kill our
The soldiers came at night to kill our neighbour, Sanya. The shadows had matted into heavy dark; there was no moon. I heard boots on the stairs—the cries of Sanya’s daughters. Pressed against the window I watched the men: swarmed by a whirled and clouded Red. Sanya thrown to the ground—dear Sanya—the Blue sparking as it struck. The shots: a pair of crimson ribbons blazed a path through the night. The blast of sound and then the Blue of Sanya a river running past, over stones, along Gertsena Road and spreading until there was Sanya in the trees and Sanya with the pigeons, Sanya with his wife on the stoop. And still the sky blazed arcs of fire.
In the morning the fire raged still, so that I had to walk the children across the street and to the corner before I let them race to the schoolyard. My husband—hands to my hips he pulled me to him, reminded me he had said that trouble would find Sanya, but that the children and I would be safe. Safe from the soldiers, he meant, but of soldiers I was not afraid. I had watched from the doorway as Sanya’s daughter stood at the edge of the steps, the sky-fire scalding her. I asked him please not to pass Sanya’s house. I was afraid for my own.
But I watched my husband’s path along the street; the arcs sparked towards him and still he did not slow. And that evening I saw the Blue of him had been singed. He was impatient with the children, his tongue grown sharp.
Was it not right to warn the others?
MARCH 2015
The armoured jeep driven by Marcus Spark stops in front of the ruins of the Arg-e Bam, where a tarp city of government men and women, of scientists and physicians, stands over four mounds of ash and extremities. Marcus Spark holds the passenger door open for Daphne Morris and her daughter Helen, but Helen’s face is pressed against the tinted window and she makes no move to leave her seat.
Helen’s eyes throb with a vision that slowly takes shape— an orange maze that blazes in the sky, arc after arc of fire that spits and bristles. And because she cannot see a path to the large white tarp that is clear, she clutches for her mother’s hand, yanks her hard towards her.
A second vehicle pulls to a stop beside the ruins and an important man—a man seen often on television and in newspapers, a man who was second-in-command to a heap of ashes—exits. With the slam of his door Helen turns, sees his sharp, thin frame, and something else: a thin blue that changes to red at his shoulders, a mass of writhing scarlet. The shape of him is charged, rearing up.
She closes her eyes, as if not seeing will make a difference.
POVED—OCTOBER 1944
One must not confess to colours. For the doctor will strap you by your legs and arms. He will carve your sight away with wires, until the world is grey and flat and you are as blind as he is.
And now our sons march across Europe—our continent a constellation of flames—the world seared of Blue. It cannot be
long before our children are burned. Until they ignite. And who will see it coming? Who will see?
DAVID WHITTON
TWILIGHT OF THE GODS™
I WAS IN my happy spot, near the Level 5 washrooms, staring out the porthole at the rebel fighters, who, through stupidity or desperation or something else entirely, were taking a stand against our gunners—but I didn’t feel happy. I used to love these trademarking sorties: the non-stop action, the adrenaline high, the constant threat of obliteration. Used to love hovering over the peninsulas, our engines blowing across the lagoons so that the water rippled and swelled and the locals scurried for their lives into the forests and bunkers and crumbling strip plazas. On a really dark night you could see flares from the methane farms, little fairy lights that made you feel like your chest would burst from the joy and beauty of it. But something had changed. For the past few months, I’d gone to my happy spot, or I’d go down to the processing floor and scrape algae from the hopper, or whatever—I’d do all the things that used to rock me out— and feel nothing. Not happy. Not sad. Just nothing.
“You think it’s true?” Sigrid said. Her eyes were glued to the porthole, where snipers, standing behind trees or crouching along the dark-green shoreline, took potshots at us. “What the leaflets said? You think these assholes eat kittens?”
“I guess they might,” I said. “If they’re hungry enough. I guess they might do anything.”
Sigrid gave me a withering look. “As a delicacy. Do you not read the leaflets? As their preferred fucking meal.” She grimaced and spat and scratched at the top of her head. “I swear to Betla, if I ever caught one of them doing that, I’d eat every single one of their asshole children, bylaw or no bylaw.”
“Yes,” I said. “Well, that’s completely reasonable. I mean, if you can believe the leaflets.”
Sigrid picked a clump of algae from her hair and dropped it onto the floor. She had no patience for my moping, no patience for any kind of human frailty. “You know,” she said, “it’s no wonder you’re having problems with women. All this angst and introspection is distasteful. We don’t want to have to wine and dine you. We like easy wood.”
Through the porthole a boy, maybe ten years old, messy brown hair, baggy T-shirt and shorts, ran out from the underbrush waving a rifle over his head. He shouted something at our barge, then took aim and fired. A sad, futile gesture. A suicidal gesture. The Skanderbörg’s gunner was forced to reciprocate, and the boy slumped to the ground in a puff of pink mist.
Sigrid snorted. “Last time I saw such a crap army was in the old Falkland empire. They should just give up, enjoy the benefits of being conquered.”
“Mmm,” I said. “I don’t know.”
“What don’t you know?”
“I feel kind of bad. For the people here.”
“Hans. Babydoll. You’re just looking for reasons to be unhappy, aren’t you? They’re separatists. They made their decision.”
“I know, I know, I know.” And I did know, too. They’d made a conscious decision to oppose the Enforcement barges. They understood the risks. It was their own fault. And yet—and here’s where it got complicated for me—they still did it. It seemed perverse, and then suddenly it made sense, and then it went right back to perverse.
“You know Lodewijk, in HR? He was telling me, the other day. This girl he knew growing up? She fell into a fjord, nine years old, and drowned. Sad, sad, et cetera. But here’s the thing. Her parents, the kid’s parents, were so fucked up and distraught by the whole deal that, instead of giving her a proper pyre like any normal family, they saved up and shipped her body over here, to some sort of shit separatist clinic that performs back-alley rebirths.”
“Oh, yuck.”
“Yuck is right. But it gets worse. Apparently the surgeons, or whoever did the procedure? They botched it, and the kid came back all wrong.”
“Wrong like how?”
“Wrong like she just sort of sat there all day, flopping around, and wouldn’t say anything to anyone, and occasionally shrieked for no reason, and then, six months later, after all that worry and expense and hardship, shot her face off with her father’s old Forsøgsrekylgevær.”
I felt myself let out a little involuntary shudder. It was stomach-turning, this rebirth stuff. “Mortals playing Odin,” I said, shaking my head. “It was bound to end badly.”
“Yes, sure, yes, but anyway, the point is, that’s what these people are like. They prey on vulnerable Danes. Which is why,” she said, poking a forefinger into my belly, “it’s our duty and our privilege to pound them into smut.”
It was day two of the sortie and, knock on wood, things were running smoother than normal. Usually by this point in the mission we were balls-deep in chaos. Thanks to constant rightsizing and budget cuts, the barge—actually, the entire fleet—was falling apart around us. You’d fix a rotor and a pump would fry. You’d fix the pump, you’d overheat a generator. But today? Not so bad. There had been a few equipment fires here and there, and a couple of non-mission-critical systems had seized for an hour when Windows Cerebellum had had a panic attack, hid billions of data files, then nodded off in a self-administered narcotic stupor, but nothing we couldn’t manage.
By noon, in fact, everything that needed doing, chore-wise, had been done, and we were at loose ends. With some free time on my hands, I thought I’d see if my latest sort-of girlfriend, Piroska, wanted to play hooky, maybe sneak off to a nice, cozy missile crib and plunder each other’s persons.
I found her alone in Waste Recovery—a putrid little room near the men’s fo’c’sle. She stood by a panel marked “Urethra,” out of which a translucent rubber shunt, dripping with condensation, carried the computer’s urine into a porcelain tub. Inside the tub, the piss would be analysed and scrubbed, then cycled back into the walls to keep Cerebellum’s brain squishy, but P’s sole job requirement, as far as I could tell, was simply to hang out. So strange to see a foxy woman in a shithole like this—before Piroska the unit had been run by prisoners and thralls—but she didn’t seem to mind it. I stopped for a second and watched her. She wore a white lab coat and enormous mirrored goggles that gave her the look of a housefly; her hair was tied back in a face-stretching bun. She stood there, placidly smoking, a cig plugged into the side of her mouth, a pile of spent Kvalitet Milds at her feet.
I rapped on the doorframe.
Her face went sunny when she saw it was me. “Hey there, mister!” she said, in a sing-song voice. “What’s up?”
“Thought I’d see what you’re up to.”
She shrugged and cocked her head at the piss pipe. “The rookie gets the good jobs,” she said.
Piroska was new to the barge, recently transferred from a Venezuelan zinc scow. And that was all I really knew about her, other than that she possessed pretty green eyes and long, black hair and smelled—faintly but stirringly—of Glade PlugIns. The moment she’d come aboard, all the men had gone stupid, washing their armpits, combing their beards, doing all manner of ridiculous shit, but she’d floated above it all, oblivious.
I slid up to where she was standing, wrapped an arm around her waist, and gave her a surreptitious workplace smooch. She snuggled in, pushing her pelvis against my leg, letting me feel her crotch heat.
“So, listen,” I said. “I was wondering, do you have a break coming up?”
Piroska’s shoulders stiffened; an awkward silence fell over us. She took a drag from her cigarette, dropped it on the floor, mashed it with her heel. Her eyes shifted back and forth: thinking, thinking.
“Umm,” she said. “I mean, maybe today’s not the greatest.”
“Why not?”
“I mean, I don’t think. I don’t think we. I think we’re.”
“I’m sorry?”
“I think that maybe we.”
I waited for her to go on, but she just stood there—a bubble of anxiety. I wish I could say I was surprised about that. It was, however, a pretty typical conclusion to one of my advances. In the few wee
ks we’d been together, and especially on the rare occasions we’d been alone, I’d felt this intense heat from her, this need and hunger. Just last Wednesday, she’d hauled me into a closet and fucked me like a mongrel dog. But when it was over, she’d pulled away, breathless, confused, tucking her top back in and patting down her hair, and the next time I saw her, in the Level 4 mess decks, she acted like she barely even knew me. It was as though two different people occupied her body—a lunatic and a librarian. She was oversexed one minute, antisocial the next; sensitive then heartless in the bat of an eyelash. She couldn’t make up her mind about anything. She laughed at all my jokes, but she laughed too quickly and way too loudly, like she didn’t really get them. Small wonder I was smitten.
“What’s going on with you?” I said. “You’re on and off like a light switch.”
Piroska broke from my arms and ducked under the shunt to put it between us. When she spoke, her voice was cold, toneless. “I’m not going to talk about this at work,” she said. “It’s not appropriate.”
She turned her back to me, then stepped over to the tub, pulled a tongue depressor from the pocket of her lab coat, and swished it around in the computer’s urine. Examining it up close for a moment, she frowned, dabbed the piss on the end of her tongue, then went over to a wall-mounted data station and pushed some numbers on a keypad.
“All right. So. Fine,” I said. “I guess that’s it.” But she just kept punching buttons, pretending not to hear.
I tried not to brood about it. I tried not to let Piroska’s flakiness consume every waking minute of my day, but it was hard because, by day three of the sortie, there was still nothing to fix or tweak or clean in our little corner of the Skanderbörg. All we could really do was sit around the coffee room wondering how to occupy ourselves. Sigrid spent the morning dusting her collection of Swarovski unicorns and meticulously rearranging them into tableaux that would maximize their cuteness—unicorns rubbing noses; a mother unicorn and her babies. She laundered her bras, styled her hair, phoned her mom in Detronto. Me, I made a peanut-butter sandwich and watched a bootlegged holodisc of Gerd Nygaard’s Man vs. Elk, and then— a measure of my boredom—watched a bit of the separatist slaughter on our closed-circuit TV.
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