The Rapist (10 page)

“Tell me… Chuck,” I said, when I had recovered a bit. “Do you have ambitions?”

“Not really,” he replied. “I mean, I don’t want to be President of the United States or be a movie star or anything like that.” He stopped and thought a moment. “I would like to bowl 300 some day, though. I guess that’s an ambition, isn’t it?”

I granted that it was, and again felt a warmth for this man. His needs and wants were so simple and pure that he reminded me of myself in some ways. Don’t get me wrong; he wasn’t by any stretch of the imagination on my level, having not the breeding, knowledge, nor intellect I possess, but then, he didn’t aspire beyond his station either, and it seems to me, the world would be an infinitely better planet were there more like Chuck breathing its air.

I would have requested Chuck be one of my escorts at my execution, but if events transpire the way I believe they will, everyone connected will undoubtedly be subject to punishment, possibly even discharged from their jobs, so I haven’t asked for his presence.

Yes, I have a plan. To thwart my executioner.

This is it: I am going to fly from here tomorrow morning.

I have recaptured my old ability. For weeks now, I have been secretly practicing late at night when no one’s about and all are sleeping. For a month, I’ve been able to leave my body and hover above it as I did as a child, and as soon as I regained that ability I began to attempt flight also. It was more difficult to achieve this time, as I didn’t have the luxury of a hill to begin on, and for weeks I remained grounded, attempting, as I was, to levitate from a standing position. At last, it dawned on me that my lack of success lay in trying too hard, and I needed to go back to basics, i.e., clearing my mind, totally relaxing, and converting the cells in my body to weightless matter. Three days later I achieved flight. Not flight really, not that time, but levitation. I rose straight up above the floor of my cell for the grand distance of two inches. But what an achievement! I knew then that the initial distance wasn’t what mattered; what mattered was that once again I could do it. To achieve my goal would only require more practice, and this is what I have been doing late at night. Practice, practice, practice! That is why you notice the black pouches beneath my eyes. They are not from the stress of my situation as my jailers would believe. I catnap as I can during the day and fly about my cell at night.

Yes, that’s right. I can fly at will now. From a standing or even prone position. I am ready.

I see several questions half-formed in your mind. If dying doesn’t concern me, why escape? Ah, but I am not going to escape. Permanently, that is. I only wish to show them that I can. Once I am free, I shall fly back and carry out their sordid little drama. If living longer had been an ambition, I would have lied at the onset and escaped everything. They can’t seem to understand that I don’t care; this demonstration will exhibit that in a dramatic way. If I simply wished to escape, I would have done so yesterday or last week. I had the ability and opportunity.

Tomorrow, I fly. My execution is scheduled for precisely six-thirty a.m., and I shall soar into the heavens at precisely six-twenty-eight a.m. I can see their amazed faces already.

The guard has just wakened me with his flashlight for the two o’clock check. I hear him walking away, and then I hear the big double doors at the end of the tier open and then close. I have time for another practice session. I feel strong, sure of myself. I am so close to perfecting flight, I can sense the nearness of my goal.

I concentrate, slip into the part of my mind that allows this phenomena. My surroundings fade, fall back. I wash my mind clean, regulate my breathing. My body disappears and I…

Now we see in a mirror, in darkness, but later

we shall see face to face. Now I know in part;

but later I shall know as I am known.

—
Cipriano de Valera, translating

from St. Paul (I Corinthians, 13:12)

Chapter Two:

The Past

…  am floating; I am flying. High, high above the green-blue planet. I swoop down, low, and lo! there is a house. It is robin’s egg blue and has white shutters and a white picket fence. Norman Rockwell put it here for my experience. I call it “experience” for it is not exactly a dream, not exactly something that is happening in real-time. It is an experience.

The house looks vaguely familiar. Ah, I see. No wonder. It is my house. The house I grew up in and have lived in all my life.

I go closer. It is not what I want to do; I want to clear out of here, fly somewhere—
anywhere
—else. Here it is bright and sunny and foreboding. I want peace and darkness. It is as if something were compelling me to draw closer.

I don’t know how I am flying, the mechanics of it. I can’t see my arms or legs or any part of my body, and I just passed through a tree without sensation of any kind. I thought I could do it and I did. This must mean I’m formless, except that in all other things I feel as though I am contained in a body. It’s strange.

I feel as though I should fight this force that leads me on, but the part of me that resists seems to float on ahead, or behind somewhere. It’s attached but not directly, as if by some sort of silvery, wispy cord.

I’m in the house itself now. Things have a strange continuity—events are joined but spasmodically. I blink and I am in the next frame of the movie. Yes. This is my house. Or rather, this was my house. The things in it are my mother’s. I had long ago thrown them out and replaced them with less odious articles. There is her worm-brown couch and the matching chair, two sodden lumps of shit dumped in the sitting room along with a hideous olive-green bean bag. I had forgotten how much I detested this room. The carpet is the same color as the insides of a caterpillar squashed on the sidewalk. It is impossible to paint an accurate picture of how awful this room looks. It is a nightmare.

What? There is my mother. This can’t be. She’s been dead twenty-four years… but there she is. I’d forgotten her features, but now I recognize her. Her face is monstrous.

She is rocking. In that chair, the color of offal. How I remember that chair!

There is something in her lap. She just leaned over and kissed it. It’s an infant! I feel ill. Faint and nauseous. A sense of dread washes over me. Where did she get a baby? I was the only child she had to the best of my knowledge. I am forced nearer. Can’t she see me? I’m a yard away, a foot. If she looks up…

She looks up! She leans back in the chair and peers directly at me! What is this? There is no sparkle of recognition in her dull, brown eyes, no fleck of light. They stay the same.
It is I, Mother,
I fairly shout, but she has lost her hearing it seems. Her sight, too, must be failing. I could reach out and touch her I am so close.

My arms shake. I can’t see them do so, but I feel them. My throat is seared with fire, and hot, salty perspiration collects and pours from my armpits and forehead. I quake, and my tongue cleaves to the roof of my mouth. I am agitated and sore, sore afraid.

I don’t want to look at what she is clutching in her lap but, horrible, unseen force! my eyes are drawn to that swaddling lump.  The blanket parts for a second and I see a face.

It is my own.

I gnash… my teeth… my eyes… roll… back into my head. I swoon… I want to swoon… but cannot…

My heart has stopped; I draw no breath; blackness is before and about me; I see only my mother and myself; I am here but I am
there
as well, held prisoner in that damnable chair. I cannot breathe. It is the blanket; it smothers me. Now I remember the smothering. Always the blanket she puts over my face. It is so dark; I am paralyzed in fear. I wet myself, and the smell of my own urine terrifies me; there is also the stink of my own shit. I am soiled and swimming in the stuff and always, above everything, I smell my mother and her odor of talcum powder and lavender and onions. She puts onions in everything. It is even in her breast milk.

Now I remember. It all comes back to me with a rush. The smell of onions did it for me. I can’t abide the vegetable, cooked or raw, cold or hot. Her stink pervades the room. Onions. How can I smell and yet not see or feel my body? I am a spirit, right? A ghost?

So his is what it’s like, being a ghost. The onion stink brings back my hate, and the hate brings back my courage. I float over to the brown chair and sit down. I sit more from habit than need; hovering over my mother isn’t tiring. In fact, nothing that I’ve done so far is tiring. Do ghosts require sleep? I try a yawn as an experiment, but the result is inconclusive. I opened my mouth, at least it felt like I opened my mouth, but in truth, I couldn’t tell for sure. There wasn’t the feeling usually accompanying a yawn. I should find out later, I think. If I feel sleepy, then I’ll know. This state has advantages I could see already. I needn’t worry about where to lay my head. Never again would I need a bed or have to waste that third part of the day.

Another thought strikes me. Do I no longer require food? I go through the other exigencies speedily: pain, thirst, bowel movements. Am I truly free? Free of all the worrisome and nettling things that waste so much of our lives? Elation courses through me.

But wait. I am out of the body now, but seconds before I was in her lap and shitting myself. A memory. That’s all it was, real as it may have seemed.

I have another thought. Where are the other ghosts? It isn’t logical that I am alone. There must be billions upon trillions of us. But… I’ve encountered none. Even though my adventure has just begun I should have seen one or two by now. Unless…

Unless what? I have no answer. I look over at my mother, drooling and cooing over the lump in her lap. I recall her religious prattling. Of Heaven and Hell and Limbo. Is this Limbo? Where are the others? Surely, I would not be allowed to wander about by myself, but would be kept locked up in some great room somewhere with the other lost souls.

I laugh. Here I am, giving her superstitious twaddle credence! I have almost been fooled. It is obvious I am not a free spirit. I have been brought here by someone who has authority over me: someone with more power than I. Somehow, I am in a different world, but the rules are the same as the old one. There are hierarchies of power. I am obviously on a lower level. It is the same as the old world. One can never determine one’s own fate; it is always in the hands of others. Well, they have miscalculated with me. It matters not a whit what they did with me in my former existence; it matters not a jot here. And if I leave this world for yet another at the end of your appointed stay then that one will perhaps be of a different form, but the structure will remain the same there too.

They seek to make me mad with this knowledge, I think, smiling. They don’t know me. I’m not like the others. I knew this about the old world. I only thought it might be different in the next. So it is the same. What of it? I existed very well in the last, and I will exist very well in this one. And the next and the next.

I wonder what the crimes are in this world? Rape is probably impossible, as would be theft. Come to think of it, without a physical body as I have always known it, what crimes are even possible? Spying on my past? Detesting my mother? Perhaps there is no such thing as sin or crimes against others in this new existence. I wonder then, what is the key that unlocks the door to send you to the next form? I can’t believe this is the end, that all who die are doomed to wander about for eternity, flitting about from here to there across time spans and geographical distances voyeuristically. Even if it starts out that way, as long as humans are more than one, they will begin to bargain, to plot, to plan, to scheme, to take advantage of, to recreate their reality. I cannot be the first in this hemisphere, and I cannot be the sole inhabitant.

I have an idea. The cosmos, the universe, is everything; it is all. We cannot even use a word like “universe” to describe it, as any word must necessarily limit it. It is indefinable. It is a cell that makes up a dog’s toenail; the dog dies and the cell lies on the ground with all of his other toenail cellmates until a black, shiny beetle comes along and eats him. He goes into the stomach of the beetle until the beetle’s enzymes and acids and juices change him into another form that goes to make up the beetle’s antenna, and then the beetle crawls into a rotten piece of wood that the farmer’s son finds and brings home to throw on the fire, and then he is burned and escapes from that world chemically into a piece of blackened soot that is borne up through the chimney into the night air and finally comes to rest on the neighbor’s yard where in the spring he is turned over into the soil by the plow and absorbed into the young corn stalk, and so on and so on and so on.

That is only one tiny cell. Then, many of the cells go together to make up larger things, people, and trees and locomotives, and planets and novas and constellations and galaxies and universes, and on to the largest thing we can imagine, and the largest thing we can imagine is simply one cell that is part of something even larger, and so on and so on and so on.

And we are just like the individual cell. Who can say each of these cells does not think, does not imagine, does not create a world and an order just as we do, conversing with other cells and imagining the world he is presently in to be the center of the universe, inventing laws both physical and social to guide his existence. Seeing other cells die beside him and disappear or change form, he formulates the postulation that he is immortal and upon death will go to some sort of nirvana, the same nirvana he imagines his dead comrades to have disappeared to. And what if this goes on forever, on all levels, going from the smallest cell to the largesse we know as the cosmos, and there is no limit on either end. There cannot be a limit. It is a telescope. As we peer through the telescope the world becomes larger; if we were to travel through what we think of as space, the world we view would continually become larger and endless.