The Rapist (12 page)

The other way lies madness, I fear.

Ah, there is something. We come into view of it, my subconscious and I, like a great gray silent spaceship puling through the heavens.

It’s a planet. Ours, I think. There’s no proof of that, just a feeling I have. The planet is in turmoil. Oceans are aboil, mountains spew up black clouds and red liquid fire, the firmament cracks and spurts out steam and melted rock that runs like diarrhea, and the sky is midnight blue with but starlight to interrupt the void and outline the furious motion below. It is a birth or a death, but which I can’t ascertain.

I see something else. I’m closer to the ground now, and all about me are people running as if for their lives, and suddenly something switches like part of another movie has been spliced onto the one we were in, and I’m on the ground and am alive and running with the others. I feel; I feel
everything.
There is physical pain, heat; I’m burned, showers of sparks rain on my head, my hair is singed, and I smell it. Things, hard things, fall on my head and back, and they hurt. I’m bleeding, and I’m terrified, but of what I don’t know. I feel sorry, and it’s not just for me but for someone else. The ache is for my children, but that’s insane for I have no children, only I’m in a panic to try and find them, and I dare not think they are dead, and that is in the back of my mind while I strain to keep it with those other demons whose faces I can feel but not see.

There are objects that fly overhead, and I don’t know what they are, but they have lights, spotlights, searchlights, and then I realize the objects are helicopters and they’re trying to kill me and everyone else running with me. We run every which way, like rats in a dump, and I smell napalm and brimstone, and the acrid stench of gunpowder scorches my nostrils, and my throat is seared with the heat. I’m not afraid, I say to myself, but my body doesn’t believe me and runs with the others. I look for a woman whom I’m in love with; my only thought is to find her and shelter her and save her from this destruction, and I look here, then there, as I run, for her, for my mother and father and for my children, and there is no one familiar anywhere around me, all are strangers, all with fear chiseled deep in their bulging eyes with blackened gore streaming down their faces. Everyone is wounded, cut. I see arms, legs, pieces of bodies, what I know is human meat, lying about everywhere on the ground, the charnel a forest of bodies and parts of bodies that have been cut down. I trip over bodies, step on flesh, and wade through puddles of blood that try to suck my feet into the ground. There is blood everywhere, and it is like a tide; it keeps rising and is to my knees. I slough through, my nose useless for breathing; I use my mouth and discover I am screaming, have been screaming, and my lungs ache; I feel smothered and on fire, and then when I think there can be no greater terror than what I have, I first hear, then see, a darkness that is blacker than the black all around me coming toward me from the north, and I don’t know how I know it is from the north but I do; I know all kinds of things but know not how I came by the knowledge of them, and this new thing is the most horrible yet; it is like a cloud but more, a fierce wind too, poisonous and deadly; if it reaches me something terrible will happen, more terrible than anything, and I try to run, but I am in blood and it’s to my waist and I can only move a little; the calves of my legs cramp with lack of oxygen and exhaustion; I am trapped and my heart is bursting; there is no air; I cannot breathe and the cloud gets closer, closer, closer, above me, atop me, around me, before me, and then it is on me and the others, and my throat strains and bursts with the explosion and pain of my voice as I scream and scream and scream; my eyes shut so tightly that my eyelids crack like porcelain in the fire, and my head is in a vise and my body too, and I am being crushed and have no breath and then… it just stops.

Like that.

I’m in a meadow and the sun is shining and I hear a bird. Then I see it: it’s a seagull and it’s flying above my head, a curlicue against a baby blanket of blue.

I hear a sound and I roll over. I’ve been lying on my back. I’m on a mountaintop and clouds are near to my head. I could touch them if I chose. I can tell this is not real; why else would a seagull be on a mountaintop, far from the sea? Across a few yards of alpine flowers, edelweiss, sits an old man, a very old man, at a small table of wrought iron painted white, upon which sits a chessboard all set up and ready for a match.

He looks up.

“Ah, so you are finally here.”

I stare, say nothing. I’ve never seen this man before, but he looks vaguely familiar. I stand and stretch as if waking. I walk over to him. He waves his hand at the chair across from him, and I sit in it. The table with the chessboard is between us.

He has on a long white robe, and his hair and beard are both also white and long. He is very wrinkled and has pink eyes. I have never even heard of pink eyes on a human before, but they look as though they belong and couldn’t possibly be any other color. I wait for him to speak.

“Truman,” he begins. It doesn’t surprise me that he knows my name. “You’ve kept me waiting, you know.” He seems to find this vastly amusing, a deep smile in his eyes.

“You are ready to play?” His hand indicates the chessboard.

“I don’t care for the game.”

His eyebrows lift in surprise.

“And I thought you were an intellectual. You don’t play chess?”

This irritates me. “Do you suppose all intellectuals the same? If there would be a single definition, then it would be that we are not all the same.”

This answer seems to please him. I blink and the chessboard is gone. In its place is another board with checkers on it. I lift my head and sniff.

“Not checkers either?” He shakes his head, sadly it seems, and poof! that game disappears also. Now a deck of cards is on the table.

I rise out of my chair. The cards are gone so quickly that, though I had my eye on the table, I didn’t see them vanish. He waves his hand, directing me to sit again. I do so, out of curiosity more than obedience.

“So,” he begins, “you don’t like any of my games. What then, do you propose we do with our time?”

“Why do anything?” I answer. “And how much time do we have, anyway?” I think for a moment and take a deep breath. “And who are you and where are we and what’s going on?”

He looks at me, and I swear his eyebrows form a question mark.

“Why are you asking me? This is
your
life. I’m here for as long as you wish. It’s totally up to you, you know.”

This is illogical.

“Am I having a dream? I just had a dream, I think. I’m awake now.” I look at him. “Aren’t I?”

He shrugs his shoulders. “If you want to. Perhaps it’s not your life. Perhaps it’s my life. Or my dream.”

We are both silent for a time. He speaks first.

“Whosoever’s dream, or life, this is, don’t you suppose we ought to do something? I understand you’re a man of action. Can you be happy just sitting around? I know! I’ve got it!” He brightens like Euripides in discovery. “We can rape someone. Or cut off your father’s penis! How does that sound?”

I can feel the blood rush to my face. “Who
are
you?” I stand up and face him, my hands making fists. He cowers in his chair, fear shrinking him so that he becomes half his size.

“You won’t strike me will you? I meant no harm.”

I sit down again. It is obvious the whole thing is a game. Again, I am at the mercy of whoever it is that runs this world or plane or sphere or whatever it is, just as I had been in every other world. The way to play it is to just sit back and see what happens next. I relax, and as soon as I do, the old man disappears. Not only that, but I find myself back in my mother’s house again, and in her arms, suckling her breast. This grows exceedingly wearisome, I think. The next thing I know, I am standing by her graveside and remembering how much I abhorred being rocked and suckled by my mother, and wishing I had bitten her nipple off when I was a child. It is raw and cold, and the new earth on her grave is soft and runny, like chocolate pudding made with water instead of milk. Then, in a trice, I am an infant again, back in my mother’s arms, rocking back and forth, and I do it again, just reach up and bite as hard as I can on her tough brown nipple.

There is a soft moment of nothingness, and there I am back on the mountain meadow, lying on my back. The same seagull sweeps over my head again. I don’t wait this time but get up and stride over to where the old man is sitting at his table. There is no chessboard this time around. I seat myself, not waiting for an invitation.

“Talk to me,” I say. “Tell me what this means. Am I in a movie that keeps getting run back?” He says nothing, just sits there, looking. I believe him to be wise, with his white hair and beard and all. I think: At least he must know something.

He doesn’t say anything for a long time, and my patience flags.

“Can’t you speak now? You were full of words the last time.”

He just looks at me and smiles slightly. I speak again, growing more irritated.

“Am I supposed to figure this out on my own? Is that the game? If I guess correctly, will you tell me? Is that your role?” Again, nothing. It’s maddening.

“Let me see if I can figure this out. The Eastern religions are right… right? To achieve karma, you keep going back until you do it right. Then you achieve nirvana. Is that the drill?”

He keeps staring. Something moves on the table and lo—there sits a chessboard. I stare at it for a long time. Then I reach down and move a pawn. As soon as I take my hand away the board vanishes. I look up. The old man is smiling.

“Thought you didn’t play chess,” he says.

My irritation mounts. “I don’t play,” I say. “I think it’s a silly, facetious game and overrated as an intellectual pursuit. Furthermore, I don’t buy that crap that it helps develop reasoning power or facilitates the learning of logic or discipline.”

His pink eyes twinkle. That is, if eyes can twinkle. That’s the only way I can describe the way they look.

“I quite agree, Truman. You think many things are stupid, don’t you?”

“What kind of question is that? Any thinking person capable of reason discovers many things to be stupid. Or are you one of those blithering fools that mucks about smiling all day at every idiocy he encounters?”

His lips part in a broad smile that reveal broken and yellowed teeth. Wherever he is from, dentistry isn’t a very advanced science.

“You’re going to hang in a few hours, aren’t you?”

I am caught off stride by the directness of the question, inserted as it was, out of context.

“What if I am?” I challenge. “You think that bothers me?”

He just keeps that silly smile on his face.

“Well, I assure you, it matters not in the least. I suppose if it were you, you’d be sniveling up to some frayed priest, begging forgiveness for your sins and everyone else’s and asking some effeminate God to get you out of this jam.” I hear the sneer in my voice and feel it in my lips.

“I don’t know,” he says, that same smile still fixed on his lips. “I’ve never faced hanging. I’ve been threatened with other things, however, and those have bothered me a great deal. For instance, once I was cuckolded by a wife I loved dearly, and although I had promised her death should she ever be unfaithful, when it happened I found I loved her so much I couldn’t kill her. I did punish her, however.”

“Was she beautiful?” I ask and am immediately ashamed at the stupidity of my question. I quickly follow with, “Was it when you were as old as you are now or at a younger age?”

“I was the same age as I am now. Of course, it was many years ago. I seem to have always been the same age. Although I might have been older. Yes. That’s it. I was older, then.”

Double-talk. How could anyone be the same age many years ago as now? Or older? Is this person supposed to be God? I decide to ask him, up front.

“Do I look like God?” he answers.

I assure him I haven’t the slightest idea what God looks like, except for some artist’s interpretation that, except for the beard, didn’t look much like him.

“I don’t think I am,” he says, “although part of me suggests that at time I am. There seems to be another part of me that I don’t know about that I get glimpses of from time to time that suggest I might be. I don’t know, but I don’t not know, either. I don’t worry about things like that, in any case.”

For the first time, his smile seems to fade, just a bit.

“I do seem to be all memory,” he goes on, his face a study and his smile a whisper of what it had been. “I remember it all. But differently.” Now, I’m sure that I am the one looking puzzled.

“You see,
you
remember things sequentially. You did this, then you did that, then this thing happened. You can jump around and pick up links of the chain, but my memory doesn’t operate that way. It’s just one big ball of twine. Everything’s in there. Even things that aren’t in there yet are in there.”

His smile has returned. The man is a raving lunatic. It is evident he’s been on this mountaintop too long. Probably put there by his tribe or society or whatever, to keep him away from the children.

“I feel strongly about the number three,” he is saying. He keeps throwing out tangents to the conversation. It is very difficult to know where he is heading. “Ah, well,” he sighs, dismissing his words with a wave of his fingers, “we aren’t here to talk of me, but of you. What do you think will happen to you after they hang you?”

Now he is on ground I can respond to. “It’s simple,” I say. “I’ll just go on to some other kind of ant farm. I think I’ve had a glimpse of it already. In some ways it’s different from my present state—for example, there’s no physical needs or desires, but in all the important aspects it’s the same old show. Someone still controls the environment and me, and pushes me here and there as He sees fit. Doesn’t show much imagination on His part, does it?” I am trying to goad him. If he is God that statement ought to elicit a heated response at the least. Maybe he’d blast me with a bolt of lightning.

Not so.