“It is, Grogan. That’s why I chose strong men. You do this thing as you said you would, and it’s over and gone, and the little taste you’ve had of life at the topmost level is only a start. I’ll settle on each of you enough for an estate in the aulde sod.”
“That’s a right fair thing, sir, and me and all the boys be thanking you, though if you don’t mind, I think we’ll choose Spain instead. It don’t rain there so much and the taxes are lower.”
39
Anto had many interesting observations and thoughts to share. He commented on the events transpiring before him as if the man were a learned don at Trinity College, Dublin, a barroom poet known for his loquaciousness, an epiphany-rich critic of the art in the great days of the Irish belles lettres tradition, say around the 1920s, when revolution made for murder and brilliant prose.
“Now,” he explained to Bob, “there are to be found several kinds of torturers. First there’s the sex torturer. He is deeply miswired. In his fetid little atmosphere, he’s got pain and pleasure not only entwined but hopelessly confused. He’s not the one to take pleasure in the suck of nipple, the lap of cunt, the piquancy of the anus, the zoom of the first wet plunge; no, no, more likely he gets his member heavy with blood at the sight of the welt, at the tightness of the buckle, the way it imprints so deep, down to bone itself, in the flesh. He is all monster, and any sane society would cull him early, put the nine just behind the ear, and throw him by the pathway for the trashman. But no, that rigor has left the formerly Christian nations of the West; only the barbarians have the strength of will and the confidence to execute the perverse on sight, though it is said that they themselves lean toward perversity behind the casbah’s closed byways.”
Raymond and Jimmy wrapped heavy rope around Bob, binding him tightly from shoulder to wrist to the chair. Then, each taking a side, they carefully tilted the bound man backwards, not fully to the floor but to a crate nested where it was to give the chair support while putting Bob’s head at precisely the right downward angle, which all the boys knew from long experience.
“Now your second type,” Anto continued, “your second type is driven by stupidity. He is of slothful demeanor and mental habit. He’s after knowing nothing of the torturer’s trade and art, of the subtle progressions in debasement, the delicacy of psychology, the nuance of pain. He’s pure brute, usually a fat boy whom all the wee ones picked on when he himself was wee and wan. So he grew in pain, he hated his own fat self for its immensity, for how slow it made him at games, for the way it drove the girlies far away, as who’d cuddle with a fat one, who was probably moist in odd ways too, and breathed also through his mouth. This fella takes all the pain and he simply inverts it; after fifteen years or so of torment, he decides he will himself be the dispenser of torment. By this time, the fat that exiled him has turned to muscle via the alchemy of rage and he learns that size has its virtues: he is the crusher, the stomper, the basher, the giant atop the beanstalk, chanting, ‘Fee-fi-fo-fum, I smell the blood of an Englishman.’ His empathy has been burned out of him, spent all on himself. He feels nothing for what he does to you. It does not register. He is relentless, energetic, unstoppable. Alas, he has no finesse. Be glad it’s not him who’s your guide through the land of torture, but someone a filigree wiser. For the crusher would crush; he’d have broken all them ribs by now, knocked out all them teeth, crushed all them fingers. Your nose would be a lamb patty, and if your lips locked shut in seizure, you’d drown in your own blood and puke before they could be pried open, as he’d have no idea which nerve was the button to pop the lock. It would be a banjax and a half, I’ll tell you, and I’d be breathin’ hard as if at sport, and the boys would be drenched in sweat and blood and vomit-messy, messy, and worst of all, so inefficient. For if I put my strength against yours, I put your ego into the equation and you see a way to beat me. No matter how I pound you, no matter how my sharp knuckles rend your flesh, your ego keeps your hate alive, which anesthetizes you. Give you hope of victory, and it’s victory that comes your way.”
Next came the towel. It was wrapped heavily around Swagger’s face, flattening his nose, clogging his breathing passages, taking his vision from him. Why imprison the body when one could imprison the head? It was the same thing. Claustrophobia, most men’s scourge, was set free by these powerful folds encasing the face, making the air itself a labor to obtain, sowing seeds of fear meant to blossom in the coming minutes.
“Then there’s the regretful torturer,” said Anto. “Him I despise the most. He’s too good for his line of work, and what got him here in the dungeon with the animals unleashing debasement and humiliation and filth upon another human being, that is such a complex story, and he’d love nothing better than to tell it to you in all its ironies and comic macabres, straight out of our minor Irish writers, but alas he hasn’t the time, because he’s got to crank the telephone wires full of juice to fry your man parts. ‘So sorry. Don’t think ill of me. I’m as much victim as you are. I feel your pain. My heart is with you. We should bond and somehow, if you’d but break, you can spare us both the torment of the next hours. It’s in your power. Don’t make me do it. I don’t want to do it and it’s only your intransigence that forces it upon me. Is it not manifest that, morally and intellectually, I am so far in advance of such behavior?’ Do you not see the play of narcissism in the fellow’s maunderings? Your torture isn’t about you, it’s about him. He’s the secret hero and victim of the transaction. The first bucket, fellows. Bobby Lee, try not to fight it, me friend. If you fight it, it goes far worse, and it ruins your heroism. Accept it, go with it a bit, and then you’ll have done your duty. You’ll probably beat the lieutenant colonel and that’s enough, but no man can stand more than two buckets. You’ll go three, that’s an hour. You’re the hero type, I’m knowing. He’s a right bucko, eh, Ginger?”
“I don’t know, Anto. Possibly he’s a shitter. Many are, you know.”
“Indeed, many are. The lieutenant colonel, I remember, he was a shitter, finally, at the end.”
“He was.”
“Still, I doubt Sniper Bob will be a shitter, Ginger. His head is on too tight and it’s far too full of chary notions like honor and dignity. He’ll keep his bottom plugged hard, you’ll see.”
Swagger felt the water, first as weight, then as damp, then as wet, then as drench, finally as death. It came as infiltrators arrive, from all points, without a lot of commotion or hubbub, glimpsed from far away and then somehow suddenly gigantic and everywhere, the world was water.
The water rose through the towel and clamped itself upon his face. He tried to hold his face tight to fight it, keep it from tunneling into his systems, but that defense lasted only a second. It unleashed fear. Swagger was not a fearful man and had learned over long, hard years how to separate himself from the rat teeth of what little fear he felt, how to objectify the agony and examine it as if it were the product of some other mind, a scientific phenomenon to be studied. That worked for a bit, and then that defense too was overwhelmed.
He felt his body jack and spasm as the Irishmen leaned into it and all his strength went against all theirs and since there were more of them, they prevailed, leaving him alone, finally, with the water.
Water, water, everywhere. Funny little rhyme from somewhere lost, it was nevertheless the hard truth of this moment, as his mind now spasmed, just as his body did and lost control against the totality of death and wet that clamped upon his face, until he blew hard against the towel, expelling some small portion of what had come in, and then he reflexively inhaled and there was no air, only a rushing wall of water, coded with cold and death, and here it was at last, he’d dealt enough of it to men the world over, turning Panther Battalion’s legions to anonymous grave markers in a foreign land, blowing Payne’s arm off and Shreck’s lungs out, outsniping the general in the bitter woods of Arkansas, taking down the Cubans on the high road in the mountains, oh so many, sending the fat Jap’s head spinning through space as he was about to dispatch Susan, then upstroking Kondo, the man stunned that his own blow had bounced off a steel hip, him driving the sword so hard to spine, God, the blood, a man had so much blood inside him, and those four Grumley fucks, in store and parking lot, each thinking himself such a gunman and finding out no, I’m not much of a gunman next to Swagger, and finally those two gangbangers in the car fight, so many of them, and now he’d join them, they’d saved him a place in hell right among them-