“Your Honor,” Barnett said, “this is ridiculous.”
“Rephrase, Counselor.”
“Why did you think that the Marines had no record?”
“Stepdad said it was because Billy was gay. That was when ‘don’t ask don’t tell’ came in, so Dad figured they’d found out he was gay and so kicked him out and wouldn’t talk about him. We asked, and they didn’t tell.”
“Did you agree with your stepfather’s idea?”
“Well, I figured Billy might just plain be dead. I kind of hoped he was. He’d’ve been better off.”
“Why did you think that?”
“Because even if them sand niggers didn’t kill Billy-” Dance’s eyes grew wide. “No offense. When I said,
‘sand nigger,’ I didn’t mean people like you.”
“No,” Barnett replied, “I’m a regular nigger. But you were saying that if the Iraqis didn’t kill Billy…?”
“Yeah, if they didn’t, well, Dad was going to. He’d talked about it with his Klan friends. They’d planned to kill Billy.”
“Did your brother know of this plan?”
“I didn’t think so. That’s why when he disappeared the day they were going to kill him, I thought he was dead.”
“So, before you knew he’d joined the Marines, you thought maybe he’d been killed by your stepfather?”
“Yeah, and then after I found out he joined the Marines and disappeared, well, I thought maybe that was better.”
“Didn’t it bother you that your stepfather planned to kill your brother?”
Dance shrugged. “He was a faggot. I wasn’t allowed to care about him. I had a dream about him afterward, though.”
“I object. Relevance.”
“Overruled. Continue.”
“What was your dream?”
“I had this dream of what it was like when I was about ten and Jeffrey about seven and Teri about three and Billy about two, except that mom was still alive. Jeffrey and Teri got killed in a car accident on their way to the other home. Anyway, we were all in the living room, dressed up for church. My stepdad was there, too. He had on a gray suit, and Mom a knee-length orange dress, one of the flat kind from the seventies, and I had my red crushed velvet vest with the little gold chains across the buttons.”
“Your memory is very vivid.”
“It was the worst dream I ever had.”
“Continue.”
“And Jeffrey also had on the crushed velvet jacket but a pair of blue plaid pants, and Teri a little white dress she wore at Easter one year, and then Billy, two years old, was naked and standing at the end of the line.”
“Why was he naked?”
“Objection. Calls for speculation.”
“It was his dream, Your Honor.”
“Objection overruled. Continue.”
“I asked Dad that same question, ‘Why isn’t Billy ready for church?’ He said, ‘Oh, he’s ready. He’s going to be the burnt offering this morning.’ And as I looked at Billy, standing there, I saw he was already burned in a few places, his fingers kind of stuck together and his eyelids burned closed, and I realized it wasn’t just this Sunday but last Sunday and next Sunday and the next until he was all burned up.”
“Your Honor, I move that this whole dream be stricken from the record. It is an irrelevant, forty yearold fantasy.”
“Your Honor, I am trying to establish the environment from which my client came, not just the physical environment but also the social and emotional one.”
“I’m going to allow it. Mr Franklin, remember, you will get a cross-examination on Monday. You can address your concerns about the testimony then.”
“Mr Dance, you said the disappearance and possible murder of your brother did not upset you that much, since he was homosexual – in your words, a faggot.”
“Yes, that’s right.”
“Well, then, why did this dream upset you?”
“Well, ma’am, in the dream I got the idea he was kind of the queer savior.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Well, you know how the book of Hebrews says Jesus died once for all men, that his sacrifice was full and complete?”
“Yes,” Barnett replied, “in the tenth chapter.”
“Yeah, and it says ‘when he cometh into the world, he saith, Sacrifice and offering thou wouldst not, but a body hast thou prepared for me: In burnt offerings and sacrifices for sin thou hast had no pleasure. Then said I, Lo, I come to do thy will, O God. By which all men are sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ, once for all.’”
“Yes?”
“Well, since Billy wasn’t really a man, I figured maybe he needed to be a burnt offering for the sins of faggots, or maybe he was the Jesus for faggots, so when he died, they would all be saved.”
Lynda Barnett nodded, her soft-soled shoes pacing across the cold marble floor. “To conclude this examination, Your Honor, I would like to submit as evidence this old photo album, filled with forty-eight pages of pictures of life in the Keen household, including pictures of the boy Peter Dance and his younger brother, William.” She handed the album up to the judge and turned toward her seat. “No more questions.”
I sit in the interrogation room and page through the black-and-white ghosts of a life I had forgotten. They gave me photocopies of the album. They wouldn’t trust me with the actual evidence. The images in the book are made only more phantasmal by thin shadows and grain. Dark eyes become black wells. Faces bleach away to masks. Dirt and age add their defamations. There, that boy there with the disarming smile that shows no teeth, and the eyes down-turned and squinted against the sun from the white clapboards – that boy is me. And this one, too, who stands beside an old grave man in a cluttered room with twelve-foot ceilings. And that one, no more than a blur on the rusty playground slide, set in the depression below the walls of fieldstone and galvanized fencing. They are all me, or were me. They are all the embryonic hope that became this mature despair. My brother – the pictures of him show a cocky young man in uniform, home visiting from whatever base he was stationed at. I find one with him beside the old slide, something small and metallic glinting in a whitegloved hand. Could he be the same blasted figure I had seen testifying in court yesterday?
Fate had only bad things in store for the Dance brothers. My brother. I do not remember him, but I hate him. He tastes like poison. What once nearly killed us is ever after despised by every tissue of our bodies. I was wrong. He proves it. Those photos prove it. They bring old memories floating upward like swollen bodies in black, still water.
The puppy that wriggles in the grass next to my knee, hot-splotched by summer sun; the crooked stick braced outward from my body like a ruined sword, and caught still in its violent rush toward the tree trunk; the old rankle of white pickets beneath the overhanging backyard tree in which I hang as though daring the spikes to impale me; the angled bed in that tiny back bedroom where I lay, the blankets strewn unevenly across me so that a jammied bottom showed from the fold of quilts…
Me. Me. Me.
All my former memories were illusions, all my thoughts of angelic power. With each passing day of this trial, new ghosts rise to the seat of testimony to convict me – not of murders to which I have confessed, but of humanity and history, which I have for so long denied. Speakers, words, photos, visions.
They say I was an orphan. They say I was a homosexual youth from a dysfunctional home. They say I was a soldier. They say I was a prisoner of war. They say that now I am at least a very sick man, perhaps a very evil man.
And, worst of all, I am beginning to remember. I remember being in Abu Ghraib. I remember the beatings. I remember when the American soldiers came in and shot my guard in the head and got me out with his key. I remember the interrogations, the blank looks of amazement on the faces of the soldiers, the dark looks of greed on the faces of the general.
There was a phone call from the president – a well wishing, a chance to talk, to see if maybe I could be his poster child for Operation Iraqi Freedom. And after I was well enough to travel, there was the trip to the airport, when the convoy passed by soldiers emptying clip after clip of hollow-point rounds into a crowd of women in burkhas. I remember them going down in black fabric and blood and I remember the joke that the man in the Humvee beside me told: “What’s black and white and red all over? A penguin with diaper rash.” I began shouting for the soldiers to stop, and the man’s face fell. His face touched off an avalanche of frowns – all scowling at their poster child gone wrong. Instead of a flight home, there was a flight to Guantanamo. Instead of freedom, there was a new interrogation room. Cells. Shackles. I remember the beatings. I remember lying so bloody and still they thought I was dead. I thought I was, too. I remember the body bag zipping up over me. I remember it all. But how can any of this be true? It is too close to what I had plotted with Derek. Did I half-remember it even then and think I was only concocting it?