One day the desert sky outside the wall hole of her cell showed endless dark skeins of drifting smoke. Trucks squealed in and out of the prison for hours, and they shot people all night. Assembly style: shouts, orders, screams, pleading, fierce chatter of machine-gun fire. Quick finishing shots. Doors slamming, engines. Then more. Then more. Then more again.
Jofuette had been frightened for days. Finally the goons came for her, two women. They came smiling and talking her language, seeming to tell her that it was over, they were going to let her go. The bigger goon grinned suggestively and put her hands on her hips and did a bump-and-grind. A
boyfriend, she was saying-or Jofuette's husband maybe. Or maybe she was suggesting a night on the town in glamorous downtown Bamako.
Jofuette smiled tremulously. One of the goons gave her a cigarette and lit it with a flourish.
Laura never saw her again.
When they brought in the video recorder for the usual weekly session Laura waited till they were gone. Then she picked up the machine with both hands and smashed it into the wall repeatedly. It came apart, a tangle of wiring and circuit cards. She was crushing them underfoot when the door rattled and two of the male goons burst in.
They had drawn clubs. She threw herself at them with her fists clenched.
They knocked her to the ground immediately, with con- temptuous ease.
Then they picked her up and began beating her. With thoroughness, methodically. They hit her on the neck, on the kidneys. They threw her onto the bunk and hit her across the spine. Lightning flared inside her, great electrocuting swathes, white-hot, bloody-red. They were hitting her with axes, chop- ping her body apart. She was being butchered with sticks.
Roaring filled her head. The world faded.
A woman sat across the cell, sitting in Jofuette's bunk. A
blond woman in a blue dress. How old-forty, fifty? Sad, composed face, laugh lines, yellow-green eyes. Coyote eyes.
Mother ... ?
The woman looked at her: remembrance, pity, strength. It was restful to look at the woman. Restful as dreaming: she's wearing my favorite shade of blue.
But who is it ...?
Laura recognized her self. Of course. Rush of relief and joy. That's who it is. It's me.
Her Persona rose from the bunk. She crossed the cell, drifting, graceful, soundless. Radiant. She knelt silently by
Laura's side and looked into her face: her own face. Older, stronger, wiser.
Here I am.
"I'm dying."
No, you'll live. You'll be as I am.
The hand stopped an inch from her face, caressed the air.
She could feel its warmth-she could see herself, face-down on the bunk, beaten, paralyzed. Sad Laura. She could feel the warm torrent of healing and sympathy rush in from outside,
Olympian, soaring. Poor beaten body, our Laura, but she won't die. She lives. I lived.
Now, sleep.
She was sick for a month. Her urine was tinged with blood: kidney damage. And she had huge aching patches of bruises on her back, her arms, her legs. Deep bruises, into the muscle, bumps swollen on the bone: hematomas, they were called in first-aid. She was sick and creaky, barely able to eat. Sleep was a struggle for position, for the least amount of pain.
They had taken away the wreckage of the video machine.
She was pretty sure that someone had shot her up with something, too: there seemed to be an injection bruise just above her wrist, one of the few spots the goons had missed.
A woman, she thought: she had seen a woman medic, maybe even spoken to-her semiconscious, and that was it: an Opti- mal Persona experience.
She had been beaten up by fascist goons. And she had seen her Optimal Persona. She wasn't sure which was the most important but she knew that they were both turning points.
It was probably a medic that she'd seen. She'd just slotted it in, dreamed of seeing herself. That was probably all that an
Optimal Persona ever was, for anybody: stress and illusion and some deep psychic need. But none of that mattered.
She had had a vision. It didn't matter where it came from.
She clung to it and she was glad they were leaving her in solitary because she could chuckle over it aloud and hug it to herself. And cherish it.
Hatred. She'd never really hated them before, not like she did now. She'd always been too small and too scared and too hopeful of figuring some angle, as if they were people like herself and could be dealt with like people. That's what they'd pretended, but now she knew their pretense was an- other of their lies. She would never, ever join them, or belong to them, or see the world through their eyes. She was their enemy till death. That was a peaceful thought.
She knew she would survive. Someday she would dance on their graves. It made no sense, not rationally. It was faith.
They had blundered and given her faith.
She was woken by a roar. It sounded like a giant water faucet, rush of water and the high-pitched. scream of a vibrat- ing pipe. Coming nearer. Louder. Wa-woosh.
Then: monster drumbeats. Boom. Boom. Boom-wham-bam, firecracker sounds. Her cell wall flashed as hot light flickered through the window hole. Then another flash. Then a sudden thunderous explosion, very near. Earthquake. The walls shook.
Hot red light-the horizon was on fire.
The goons ran up and down the hall, shouting at each other. They were afraid, and Laura heard the fear in their voices with a wild leap of animal joy. Outside, the feeble crackle of small-arms fire. Then, distantly, belatedly, the banshee wail of sirens.
A burst of pounding from inside the prison. Someone on level two was beating on his door, not the bathroom pounding, but sheer ferocious battering. Muffled shouts. The upper- level prisoners were yelling from their cells. She couldn't make out the words. But she knew the tone. Rage and glee.
She swung out her legs and sat up in the bunk. In the distance, belatedly, she heard antiaircraft guns. Crump, whump, cramp, spider webs of flak searing the sky.
Someone was bombing Bamako.
"Yeah!" Laura screamed. She jumped from bed and rushed to the door and kicked it for all she was worth.
Next night they came in strafing. That sudden wa-whoosh again, treetop-level fighter jets in close formation. She could hear their aircraft cannon cutting loose, a weird convulsive belching, thup-thup-thup-thup, the sound of it dopplering off as the jets peeled away over the city. Then the sound of bombs, or missiles maybe: whump, crump, sky flashbulb- white as explosions hit.
Then the belated antiaircraft. There was more of it this time, better organized. Batteries of cannon, and even the hollow roar of what must be rockets, surface-to-air missiles.
But the jets were already gone. Mali's radar must be down, she concluded smugly. Otherwise they would surely fire at the jets as they were coming in, not too late, after they'd already blasted the living bejeezus out of something or somebody.
The attackers had probably knocked out the radar first thing.
She had never heard anything that sounded so sublime. The sky was full of hell, the rage of angels. She didn't even care if they hit the prison. All the better.
Outside the guards were firing machine guns: staccato bursts into the black sky. Bullets would rain down somewhere on a slum. Fools. They were fools. Amateurs.
They came for her in the morning. Two goons. They were sweating, which was nothing new, everyone sweated in the prison, but they were twitchy and wired, their eyes wide, and they stank-of fear.
"How's the war going?" Laura said.
"No war," said goon #1, a middle-aged male thug she'd seen many times. He wasn't one of the ones who had hit her.