Somewhere beneath their feet the werewolf howled again, desperate to get out of his incarceration, forever trapped in his own head. The residents shifted uneasily on their feet, on their bunks. Both men paused in telling their stories. Falstaff was the first to resume his tale, and in that way some of the men became aware that he’d been speaking, telling his own story off to the side. Some grumbled over his rudeness. But others wandered over to see what he had to say.
“He could have pulverized me if he’d wanted to, a big young guy like that. He could have killed me. But that little bit of food might have been scattered and lost in the process.He couldn’t take the chance.
“I kept thinking about all those little, petty battles you get into in your life, you know? Obsessive, nasty little conflicts when the stakes are nothing, just nothing at all. A better position at work, school competitions, winning some random argument with friends. I used to act quite badly in those situations. The smaller the issue the worse I behaved.
“But here the stakes were important. It was one of the few times in my life the stakes were vital.”
“The argument broke out before the next Bible study meeting. I don’t know how it started—I hadn’t yet arrived. Some of the regulars, the ones who always got there early, they said that Malcolm had gone back to his old habits. Blaspheming. ‘Backsliding’ is the word one of them kept using. I’d taught them that word. All I’d ever wanted was to encourage them along their path toward Heaven, whatever Heaven might be for them.”
“Here the stakes were absolute, probably more important for this man, because he had kids. But I’m embarrassed to say that his plea for his family didn’t sway me in the least. I told the man sure, go ahead, take the food. ‘Go feed your children,’ I said. And when he turned his back I hit him over the head with a board, shattered it over his skull. I picked the food off the floor and ran away with it.”
“Malcolm was on the floor writhing. I don’t know which one of them hit him, if more than one hit him, or what they hit him with. But he was delirious. He was spitting. He was cursing us all and he was cursing the Lord. I honestly thought he was possessed. I honestly did. I made them all back away from him. I made them create a circle of safety around his struggling, distorted body.”
Falstaff was actually crying. “I didn’t even bother to see if the man was okay. I was hungry. If he hadn’t looked scared, and especially if he hadn’t mentioned his family I would have let it go, I would have walked away. He was just too damn big, you know? But he showed me his weakness. He made me take the risk.”
“I thumbed through my Bible. Proverbs 20:30,” Lenin proclaimed. “‘The blueness of a wound cleanseth away eviclass="underline" so do stripes the inward parts of the belly,’ I read to them aloud.
“‘And it shall be, if the wicked man be worthy to be beaten, that the judge shall cause him to lie down, and to be beaten.’
“‘Judgments are prepared for scorners, and stripes for the back of fools.’ Again from Proverbs. I didn’t see the stick until too late. I think it might have been a broken-off broom handle. Or a mop handle, not that there’s any difference. But I didn’t see it. I was too busy thumbing through my Bible, and finding the verses I’d found before, the ones about punishment.”
Some of the men surrounding Falstaff commiserated, some of them said they might have done the same thing. The others kept quiet, maybe because they didn’t approve or maybe because now they were frightened of him, of what he could do, or perhaps, as with Daniel, they were wondering which world and which time he was actually talking about.
“‘He that spareth his rod hateth his son: but he that loveth him chasteneth him betimes.’ Proverbs is just full of punishment. And advice for those who feel they need to dish it out.
“‘Chasten thy son while there is hope, and let not thy soul spare for his crying.’ And Malcolm was crying then, although weakly.
“I just stared at the one holding the stick. He was one of the newer members of the group. To tell the truth I couldn’t even remember his name. The stick had all these red stains on it. And there was red stain on the man’s hand gripping the stick. I was telling myself he’d gotten into some paint, that he’d made a mess.
“‘If thy hand or thy foot offend thee, cut them off, and cast them from thee,’ he said. ‘That’s from Matthew, ain’t it?’
“But I was thinking that was a poor choice of verse. It wasn’t apropos. They hadn’t cut Malcolm—they’d only beaten him.” Lenin looked around at the residents still listening. “And then the roaches brought me here. Tell me now this isn’t my punishment. Tell me this isn’t Hell.”
11
SHE HAS OVERSLEPT and she is going to be late for school.
This one didn’t feel like all the others, and almost immediately Daniel knew that something had gone wrong.
He floated through a windy place, unmoored, the gusts battering and pushing him at random intervals, although it wasn’t his body, exactly, that was being pushed—he had no sense of his body. It was his mind, or rather, some complex of desires and fears and memories, some cluster of roots and nerves driven along the cold streams of time, surrounded by the voices of the lost, all those who had drowned in history never to be remembered.
She has overslept and she is going to be late for school.
There must have been a short in the system, a break in the connection between who he was and the dead whom the scientists had sent him to occupy, some sort of guesstimation of how that person used to be. Instead of a well-insulated trip directly into another life, he’d gone off floating through pools of personality, random bits of lives cut short, meaningless squibbles of biography.
She has overslept and she is going to be late for school.
He became aware of intimations of language, staccato rhythms and harsh vowels, not fluid like French, but simply meant to communicate, to say a thing and then leave it lying there on the table for all to see. They were the thoughts and dreams of German children, he realized, Jews and non-Jews alike struggling to make sense and stave away fear. Somehow they’d captured that, recorded that, extrapolated that, and perhaps not knowing what else to do with it the roaches had just left it lying around in their data banks, for atmosphere or insulation. It was during the war and that anxious time preceding it, that terrible war when all the rules changed.
She has overslept and she is going to be late for school. Her father is in a panic and is now speaking harshly to her, something he almost never does.
“Lazy, foolish girl, what is wrong with you? You’ve slept late again and now the entire family must pay!” And then he slaps her across the face. But she doesn’t cry out. She is too busy examining his face, trying to decide if this is some imposter who has taken her father’s place.
Her mother comes in and roughly strips her out of her bedclothes. Then her mother tries to dress her in her school uniform, but she is struggling, trying to explain to her mother that this is the wrong uniform—it is completely different from the one she is supposed to wear. But her mother speaks a different language from her and cannot understand. “Dakka dakka dakka,” her mother says. “Dakka dakka dakka.”
Her parents drag her into the school and up the stairs to her classroom. They stand in the doorway waiting for her to find her seat. The other students stare at her in her strange uniform. She says hello to several of her friends but they pretend they don’t know her. She is sure it is her strange uniform that is the problem and she tries to take it off.