Gilda Trillim

by Steven L. Peck

  Was Fran dead?

  Before the accident she had been painting a picture of me. It had been sketched out on a drawing pad. Me sitting. Quiet. Demure. My real hand holding my fake molded prosthetic hand, a thing forever locked in a mannequin’s unchanging position—fake palm up, my fake thumb angling toward the large joint of my fake index finger slightly extended, forming a circular hollow, my other fake fingers curling slightly toward a plane perpendicular to the angle of my wrist. The fixed gesture of someone about to make a point. Ironically, a point unlikely ever to be made. A point, like my hand, forever frozen in the simulacrum of point-making. Frozen and now lost—a meaningless gesture signifying nothing now lying abandoned in the dirt of the jungles of Southeast Asia.

  I mourned for my lost fake hand, abandoned like me never to be seen again. I remember when I first got it. Its presence masked my stump from others. The plastic thing seemed at first unpleasant. It frightened me. It represented disfigurement and perhaps worst of all the mock-up lacked authenticity. Yet, as hideous as I found it personally, it masked the blunt blasphemous termination of my stump. A denial of beauty—unholy and scandalous that separated me from others in a way that made the artifice worth it. Where was it? Had it been picked up by a soldier? A villager? A token of triumph? A curiosity to pass around after a few beers? What had become of that abstraction of embodiment?

  Now I had been wholly blunted, like my arm—my soul was now a ghost appendage dangling lifeless from my body—my future a ghost limb. I knew I would still feel emotional pain if I survived this. Just as I sometimes feel from my missing hand, so my ghost life could still try to grasp at something tangible, but it would only be a hollow plastic reproduction like my prosthesis, good for giving the appearance of a life such that I could still, no doubt, laugh at parties, plant a garden, or talk to a neighbor across a fence, but these would be artificial simulations, empty responses meant to represent the thing I used to be. The hand was gone. My future was gone. I wept at the loss. I was now a cipher signifying nothing. What sort of gadget could they make to attach to the rest of my life to give the appearance that there was something there?

  Gilda apparently traveled north for several days. We know this because at one point in her narrative she tells how she looked to the back of the truck, the soldier on the right was bathed in sunlight all morning long. She was fed about a cup of rice a day, and given water three times in the same period. They finally arrived at a prisoner of war camp, a collection of cinder block buildings surrounded by cassava fields that the prisoners worked as slaves. No one has been able to identify this camp, despite diligent attempts to find it, and significant funding commitments to do so by The Society for Trillim Studies. Unfortunately, there is evidence that it may have been destroyed after the war.

  When she first arrived, she was beaten and tortured to extract information. She was not able to explain the role of the USO and her part as an author sharing her work with the soldiers for entertainment. She suspected that they thought she was some kind of propagandist who read instructions to the troops. She was beat repeatedly with a switch across her back and legs, and they took a ping-pong-like paddle to her stump, which caused excruciating pain. This lasted three days. She was never raped again—she suspected because of the director of the camp was a Buddhist who held the guards to strict rules of military discipline—however, the entire duration of her captivity she expected it at any time creating a state of constant anxiety. Every time trucks arrived into the compound she would experience what we would now would call panic attacks or post-traumatic stress disorder, but which she described as “fracturing nervous tension.”

  She was placed in a small cinderblock room, one of many in a larger structure made of the same. The room was about three times the size of the bamboo mat that she slept on. A bucket served as a toilet. It was her only piece of furniture. A wooden door woven from thick branches blocked the exit until it was opened in the morning into a central hallway that resembled nothing so much as a horse stable. About every two days, she was allowed to empty her bucket into a trench that ran alongside the building. It was a constant source of a breath-stultifying stench.

  There was one other woman in the camp, a nurse from the Netherlands named Silke Peeters with whom Gilda did not often have the chance to converse. Her presence at first gave Gilda a sense of comfort. As we will see, this was not to last.

  The prison director, as mentioned, was a former Buddhist priest, who tried to run a compassionate camp, but many of the guards were cruel and unkind. The camp rules were strictly enforced. The prisoners spent all day in the cassava fields working, digging up roots for harvest, clearing out shrubbery, planting saplings, and such things.

  The first week after her interrogation, they put her in the fields, but with her missing hand she could not handle the tools skillfully. She was slapped often during her attempts to work the crop because her hoeing with a single hand was unproductive and sloppy. She wrote that she never understood what people were saying to her. Although a few of the other POWs tried to help her and assist in her work, she was the source of constant attention and bullying by the taskmasters. Finally, early in the second week she was ordered back to her room where she would be forced to stay in the daytime while the others worked.

  Because she was locked in her room during most of the day, her first six months were ones of stupefying boredom and depression. During the long, unrelenting days imprisoned in her room, she tried to compose poems and stories, or spend long portions of the afternoon visualizing her life as a young girl growing up in Idaho. In the mornings, she would exercise, pretending that she was in a badminton match, bouncing back and forth along the length of her cell, swinging her arm as if battling for the world championship. Then she would run, jump, and skip in place for an hour or so until exhausted. After her exercises, she would lie down on her mat and take a short rest. Finally, she would do sit-ups and other exercises such as she thought she could manage within the enclosed space.

  Then an event that changed everything for Gilda. I’ll let her describe it.2

  The rainy season was beginning and the air was humid, rich, and heavy. The steamy atmosphere made it ponderous to exercise and as I slowed down my activity, my mind would move in ugly directions toward things I needed to hammer down and relentlessly fight to keep submerged. However, I seemed ever more willing to follow my thoughts into the black. The sound of the rain was relentless and splashed through the small rebar grilled window onto my mat. Onto me. I developed a strange, indignant rash on my legs and torso. The pin-and-needle itching it produced made it worse than the maleficent mosquitoes. These had never ceased since I had arrived and their inglorious nightly feasts were unending. The welts they left marking the place of their meal were everywhere on my body. My only blessing was that my menstrual cycle had ground to a halt because of the constant stress and malnutrition.

  We stopped queuing in the morning for our bowl of mushy rice because of the rain and I missed my chance to talk to one of the other prisoners. Since I did not get to work the fields, I seemed like an outcast even in my own bedraggled tribe so I relished the morning line up for rations, when I could steal a few moments of conversations and heal if only a little from my isolation. I always tried to get as close to the end of the line as time and circumstance would allow me, for I was more anxious for a few moments of human contact than I was for whatever meager pickings could be had for breakfast—a bowl of rice and a slice of fruit and a cup of thin broth, who knows of what kind. Sometimes Silke my only sister prisoner would stand by me and we would talk about the days before the War like a couple of old soldiers from the French trenches. My favorite conversationalist was Mike Norris, a funny and optimistic man who, with his cheer and smile, made the whole camp seem like a child’s playtime adventure that would soon be over and we would by nightfall be tucked into our cozy beds back home with a mother’s kiss planted on our cheeks.

  With the rains, however, we were all confined to our rooms an
d our rations were handed out by the same old lady who usually ladled it into our bowls when we lined up outside. The guards did not stay in our building, which allowed us to shout out to the others and converse without being threatened for speaking like we often were. This almost seemed like a magical time because we could tell each other our life stories, share poems and memories, and do the kinds of things humans do to foster connection and community. It was not to last. Without explanation the contents of our wooden food bowls got smaller and smaller. The fruit disappeared and after three weeks of rain, it seemed we were getting only a few tablespoons of rice per meal. Then the evening meal disappeared. As our bodies begin to eat themselves, a silence fell over the prison. We were dying.

  Nearly two weeks go by and the conditions become unbearable. A man dies and they know that they all must soon follow suit. Gilda begins to pray (her word) to her mother in long conversations. She became convinced that her mother could hear her in her dreams. She has recreated these prayers in poetry, but despite their enormous value, I’m going to skip them as they are readily available in her papers and are not necessary for this short introduction.

  As Gilda was fading away, she writes:3

  I decided to quit life. There was little point in delaying the inevitable. I looked at my skeletal knees, something akin to apples with pencils protruding from the ends. My skin was yellow and papery. I kept thinking how thankful I was that I did not have a mirror and did not have to look at the Jolly Roger face that no doubt would be staring back at me. I decided when they brought my daily trifle rather than take the offering I would give it to the rats. Since the rains had started, the rodents had become bolder and more aggressive. Several of the prisoners had captured and eaten some, but once rat blood stained their cells, the rats would avoid the place and these meals became one-time feasts.

  On that fateful day my bowl was passed under the door. I picked it up and prepared to push it back. All my resolve melted. I greedily snatched a pinch and stowed it in my mouth before it could escape under the banner of my despair. I felt shame. Where was my resolve? A large black and gray rat was crouched in my windowsill sniffing the air. I took another pinch of rice and placed it on the other side of the sill. As I approached with the proffered rice, it made no sign of fear. I was no threat and it knew it. It waddled over to the rice, sniffed it cautiously, then without hurry picked it up in its delicate pink hands and nibbled it away.

  “You are a fat rat,” I said to it, scolding its insensitivity in parading around in such a well-stocked body. In answer it washed its face. I placed another pinch of the sticky grain on the floor, but before it could descend the wall, another rat came from under the door and snatched it up. The rat in the window, perhaps stinging from its mistake of not responding to my gift with alacrity, came down from the sill head first clinging to the cinder blocks like a spider. The two companions just looked at me sitting cross-legged on my mat with the bowl in my lap. I took two more lumps, stretched out my legs before me, and rested these offerings on each of my boney knees. Cautiously the two rats approached, watching not the rice, but my eyes as if trying to read there my intent and reliability. Slowly they came forward. The second one, a motley brown thing, strong looking and athletic, made a dash of such quickness that I almost flinched, but I held calm and it jumped on my knee and with its front paws, stole the rice and then bound under the door. The larger rat seemed more circumspect, its caution more grounded in wisdom than fear. It approached with dignity and grace, as if it were a rat of rank who understood proper decorum in the matter of eating from a large monster’s knees. It glided forward until it was even with my calves and then paused, assessing me. Finally, it conveyed a kind of rat-like shrug, climbed up to where it could reach the rice, and calmly ate it off of my knees. I did not move. I motioned to the bowl in my lap, tilting it forward so it could see the meager remnant remaining. It hauled itself up onto my thigh, balance-beamed its way to the bowl and calmly devoured its contents. It then climbed down to the floor, up the wall and out the window with a dignity that befit a queen. The next day I was anxious for the rats to return. I was growing weaker and the only exercise I could do was to walk slowly back and forth in my cell. When the bowl was passed under my door, I sat down on my mat with the bowl on my lap and waited, it wasn’t long before my plump friend appeared at my window. She glided down the wall and came to my side but seemed reluctant to climb up on my legs. She stared into my eyes queerly as if waiting. The other rat came under the door and stood shoulder to shoulder with my friend. Much to my surprise we were joined by a third rat I’d never seen before, gray and musty colored, with only one eye, and a hollow cavity opposite the black bead on the other side. I liked her immediately. It wandered close to the other two, but stayed back a little as if testing the waters before committing to any action.

  I pulled out a clump of rice from the bowl, and offered it to my fat friend. She crept forward and then gingerly began nibbling it from between my fingers. She gave a soft squeak as if to say, “More please” so I reached in for another and repeated the gesture. This too she devoured. I took another pinch and passing my hand over the brave rat, offered the morsel to the fellow from under the door. He too demurely stepped forward and took the clump. He gave a squeak and received the second. By now the one-eyed girl saw which way the wind was blowing, and without much hesitancy demanded her fair share, and a second helping for a squeak. I offered them another, but they did not come forward. I even placed it under the nose of my fat friend but she would not eat it. They were close enough I could have easily grabbed them, but they just rested there observing me. There remained in the bowl a good half of the rice I’d been given, but even when I placed the bowl on the ground they would not take it.

  I had the strangest thought. What if they wanted me to eat it? What if this is my share? Four of us. Three portions handed out. I picked up the bowl and began eating. The rats chirped in unison! What a sense of equality these small creatures had. When I put the empty bowl down, they came forward and I nuzzled them with my hand, each in turn—scratching them behind the ears, letting them run through my fingers. I found myself crying because it was the first physical social interaction I’d had since I arrived. We played for a bit, and when the old woman came for our bowls they ambled away.

  This went on for another four days. Another rat joined our circus. I taught them all a trick of giving a little peep when I pointed at them. It was fun, but I was getting weaker and weaker and on the fifth day I did not try to exercise. I felt hollow inside. Emptied out. Like a gourd whose dried up seeds could be heard rattling around because everything else had faded into nothing. I was dying. When the fat one came that day, I said, “Well old girl, enjoy the rice while you can, I’ll likely be going soon.” She looked at me strangely, head tilted as if trying to make out my words. She turned around and left. The other rats remained and I gave them all the rice. I was disappointed that they did not leave me a share as before. I took it as a sign that they knew that for me existence was skittering to a halt.

  I did not feel like practicing their ‘singing’ and so sat quietly while they milled around the cell. I liked that they never pooped or made a mess, as if they understood that this was my nest. They did not leave as I expected they would, but they stayed near and I stroked their head thinking about how short my life had been—how amazing, how horrible.

  My fat friend appeared. I’d taken to calling her Lumpkin after Sam Gamgee’s pony in Lord of the Rings. I managed a smile to see her standing above me in the window. She started down the wall, when she slipped and fell to the floor. She was unhurt of course. Like cats, rats know how to take a tumble. It did wake me enough to notice that she seemed rather large, her belly extended in ways I’d not noticed before. I wondered if she was pregnant. She tottered over to me and climbed right onto my lap where the empty bowl was balancing. She peered in and I said, “Sorry girl. It’s all …” but I stopped because she vomited into the bowl. Had I had the strength I would h
ave jumped to my feet to be free of this offense. But she didn’t stop. She kept heaving and convulsing and acking and hacking with coughs and gags until nearly an entire cup of rat puke was sitting in my bowl. Throughout my life, even the smell of someone being sick would cause me to run for the bathroom gagging. Yet the smell of this vile concoction did not have that effect. I looked at the mess in my bowl. I was strangely drawn to it. It smelled sour, but it also had a sweet bouquet, rich and alluring. The funny thing was, I could tell it smelled vomity, but I didn’t seem to mind the way I usually did. I could see that the mash contained fruit, the type I could not recognize, but there were large, pale fruit fly maggots still moving in it so I knew it had been not long in my friend’s stomach. I stared at it for a few minutes. Lumpkin was cleaning herself on my lap, looking at me expectantly, or so I imagined. Finally, I dipped my finger into the soup and swirled it slowly watching the pink and orange striations blend into a livelier shade of fuchsia. I pulled a small sample up and breathed in its essence at close range. The aroma was redolent of a fine wine, with a spicy, vinegary trace. I found my mouth was watering as I placed the dab on my tongue. It felt like life. The taste was unexpectedly agreeable, almost alluring like a candied pudding. I could detect a bit of boiled cassava, bitter and starchy, and banana along with lilikoi. Before I knew what was happening I was two finger poiing it into my mouth with greedy relish. I finished by running my finger along the bottom of the bowl to mop up every drop and even squeegeed my tongue along the bottom to find every last remnant. It was a feast. Nothing to this day has equaled the exquisite delight of that sumptuous first meal of rat puke. My stomach felt stuffed to the point of bursting. Once again the bowl collector was coming down the center passageway and the rats wandered away. After I handed the woman my bowl, I curled up in a ball and listened to the rain. Why had the rats done this? They are creatures of instinct. Did they sense I was dying and their source of rice would dry up? Did some maternal instinct rise up out of deep biology and trigger passions for saving a nest mate or one of their offspring? I fell asleep with such ruminations, half in a state of wonder because of what had just happened. Later that night Lumpkin returned with another smaller load. She retched it into my cupped hands. I ate it without question, even licking clean some that spilled onto my mat. I felt stronger. That night I had to use my bucket twice, apparently due to either the sudden richness of my diet or some incompatibility between my own internal fauna and that of the rats’, but it seemed a minor inconvenience for the nourishment that was coursing through my starving body.