There’s a cracking sound. Is it the explosion of guns, or red thunder announcing a red rain? Not the marxist red of the State…. A seed in the uterus of history to be washed away in the flow of the womb’s rejection, he recognizes it rather as the dark rust-red of his Kristin’s blood on their thighs after they have made love during her period. There’s another round of explosions
and he wakes and
in the dark, as he lies on his cot, someone pounds on his door.
He sits up from the cot, holds his face in his hands. “Sir?” comes a voice from the other side of the door; Wang fumbles for the small lamp on a nearby desk. “Sir?” comes the voice again. When he turns on the light he sees the picture looming over him as always, it’s everywhere, on every wall up and down the front line; a flash of rage comes over him. I took that down, he thinks to himself. Someone put it back up. In my own quarters.
The men draw inspiration from it, one of his officers explained not long ago. Well I don’t draw inspiration from it, Wang had answered. They can paper the entire front with it if they want but he doesn’t understand why they have to hang it in his
somewhere that was a minute ago or a hundred years ago, a passage from my
own quarters. He sees quite enough of it everywhere he goes, every headquarters, every outpost, every barracks — raised over the battlefields like the towering banners the Party used to hoist of its leaders back in his home country so I don’t see why I have to look at it in my own quarters. Back in his home country they would have called this a “cult of personality.”
No wonder I dream every night.
The pounding on the door continues. “Come in,” Wang says.
The soldier comes in. “Sir,” he says.
“Why is that on my wall?” Wang says.
“Sir?”
“Why is that on my wall.” Wang points at the picture. “I took it down. Someone came into my quarters and put it back up after I took it down.”
The young guerrilla looks at the enlarged photo. “The men draw inspiration from it, sir.”
“My own quarters.”
“Yes, sir. The men—”
“Yes I’ve heard how the men are inspired by it but I’m not inspired by it. Why don’t you put up something that inspires me?”
The soldier, a kid, not much older than Wang in the photo, seems flummoxed. “Uh … what would that be, sir?”
He tried to get them to stop calling him “sir” since he’s not an officer and in fact has no ranking at all, but that only seemed to cause more chaos among the ranks. “What’s your name?”
“Parsons, sir.”
“Parsons, let me ask you something.”
“Sir.”
“How do you know it’s me?”
“Sir?”
“I said how do you know it’s me,” Wang points at the
own unique chaos maybe to my own unique god, and as I slip on down through
poster. “It’s almost thirty years old, this picture, blown up about a hundred times its original size … that man”—pointing at the lone figure before the tanks—“is a blur … he could be anybody. So how do you know it’s me?” This is perverse, Wang thinks. Such questions just undermine the resolve of Tribulation III … is it Tribulation III now, he asks himself, or still Tribulation II? “Never mind,” he says, his face in his hands again. “Please take it down.”
The young soldier takes down the picture. He rolls it up and puts it under his arm.
Wang still sits on the cot, exhausted by his restless sleep. “So what is it?”
“Sir?”
“What did you wake me for?”
“Sir. Major Tapshaw reminds you it’s a full moon tonight, sir.”
“Tell him to send up the flare.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Give me a few minutes.”
“Sir.” The soldier leaves and for a while Wang sits on his cot looking at the blank square of wall where the picture was a few minutes ago. Tribulation II or Tribulation III … how can I be confused about such a thing? He gets up and moves to the desk and wakes the computer and turns the desk lamp off again; now there’s only the light from the computer. He takes off all his clothes and for a moment stands naked before the computer before he sits, inputting his password and opening the mail. He addresses a new message, staring at it as he composes in his head.
the birth canal of the lake then I have three visions there before me in the
~ ~ ~
With his one good hand, he begins to type.
To: MistressL@aquamail.com
From: FalseMartyr@4june89.net
my Mistress,
Your devoted possession requests the honor of subjecting himself to Your Cruel Pleasure on this night. Abjectly apologize for the short notice and duly expect to feel Your Exquisite Discipline for the impertinence, i await an answer, unworthy as ever of my humiliation, and remain Your
zen-toy
Wang looks over the message, considering the tone and double-checking the proper Upper/lower-case etiquette. He sends the message and waits to see if he receives an answer immediately, as sometimes he does, but after several minutes there’s still no response. He closes the program and dresses and pulls on his coat, and opens his door to the outer tunnel that leads above ground.
Outside his door in the tunnel, a guard snaps to attention. Like the soldier who just woke him, the guard wears the regulation lake-blue of the guerrilla insurgency as well as the blood-red beret. Hanging on the outside of the door is a picture identical to the one that was in his quarters a few minutes ago. “Guard,” he says.
“Sir,” says the guard.
“How long has this been here?” indicating the picture.
amniotic dark, or maybe more precisely two visions and a presence, with the
“Sir?”
“Hanging on this door. It wasn’t here when I came down a few hours ago: how long has it been here?”
“I couldn’t really say, sir.”
“You couldn’t really say? How long have you been standing here?”
“Sir, I came on duty at nineteen hundred hours, sir.”
“And was it here when you came on duty?”
“I don’t really remember, sir.”
“You don’t remember?”
“No, sir.”
“You don’t remember whether this was on this door right in front of you when you came on duty?”
“No, sir.”
“You’ve been staring at this door for almost two hours and you don’t remember if it was here?”
“Sir. Permission to speak.”
“Go ahead.”
“The men draw inspiration from it, sir.”
Wang’s shoulders slump in defeat. He grabs the top of the poster to rip it from the door but stops himself, and instead starts up the tunnel to the surface where he can hear the shelling in the distant night and the planes of the airlift coming and going.
~ ~ ~
Guards and soldiers snap to attention as he passes. A dozen small fires dot the expanse of the campground, where guerrillas
first being of God Himself naked and erect, shackled and restrained,
who don’t have tents sleep on exposed cots or the ground. Major Tapshaw meets him at the end of the barricade. “It may,” Tapshaw says, “be any time now.”