Contrary to what you sometimes hear from witnesses of sudden calamities and unexpected holocausts — car crashes, gasoline fires, earthquakes, this kind of thing — there was no slowed-down rhythm to the events of the next several minutes. There was no music hidden within the mix of the screams and the shouting and the sound of rifle discharge and the underlying purr of the Obliterator. There was no seemingly choreographed dance taking place in the heart of the instantly convulsing street, bodies smashing up against bodies in a thousand desperate and futile attempts at escape, people falling at different speeds, in different directions, like icons of a children’s game suddenly knocked from a table.
When you hear the word chaos, what does it summon in your mind? Do you call up some clinical, perhaps mathematical, definition of disorder? An elaborate lack of categorization? The mundane clutter of a sloppy room? Let me give you something better, or, at very least, something more vivid, meatier. My gift to you. From this day forward, think instead of a thousand panicking individuals, packed into square yards of street space, in the stillness of a humid July night, bodies pushing against each other in a discordant sway. Now picture this scene placed under an additional amount of pressure, as if some essential measure of oxygen was forced out the skin of the atmosphere and escaped into the cold void of space and was replaced by a denser, more oppressive substance, a previously unknown element that felt exactly like the palm of God breaking through the sky to crush his people into the ground, but slowly, with all the time and restraint available to an omnipotent entity. I am trying to make you feel how it felt that night, in that place. I am trying, knowing, from the start, that this is an impossible task. I say imagine, but somehow I need you to do more than imagine. I need you to put yourself there, in the Schiller, in the street, trapped up against other bodies, a small sea of bodies, no passageways out, no lane that will lead you to safety. I use this word—imagine—as if it were a kind of miraculous prayer, some type of witch’s incantation. As if it has a power that we both know it does not. It is a word. Nothing more. It cannot do what it is not made to do.
Isn’t this tragic, Father? Have you never felt this was a tragic thing? That all we have between us is langauge. And it is never enough. Never. Not once. Not for one precious instant. And we go on anyway. Every moment. Acting as if it is enough.
Imagine, I say, the sound of the shredder’s engine igniting, the rumble that reverberated from the mouth of the Schiller down to the face of the bridging tenement and echoed back to wash over us. Imagine knowing, in that instant, what would follow — the immediate panic, the trampling, the sound of a chorus of gunfire erupting, the sound of 206 thousand bones being ground into pulp.
Let me attempt to do the impossible now. Let me try to explain the unexplainable. To give an image to the unthinkable.
One night, years ago, when I first came to Quinsigamond, when the plague of the insomnia and the migraines was only just beginning and I had not yet found a way to drive the taxi while afflicted, I chanced to turn on the television that Gilrein had given to me. It was four o’clock in the morning and I came across a documentary — I assume it was a documentary — in black and white and at times out of focus, as if the camera had been hidden for some reason. The pictures showed a series of dead horses, all of them hung, suspended by the neck, from enormous steel hooks, the hooks, in turn, mounted inside a conveying belt. And the belt moving toward a slaughtering station, a white-tiled room, a laboratory of infinite efficiency, the product of much study and brilliant analysis where an automated series of coordinated band saws and guillotines and rotary blades and serrated grinding wheels would converge on the line of dead animals and the most appropriate tool would be instantly matched to the correct part of the horse’s anatomy. And in a matter of minutes, the animal would be perfectly rendered into a kind of mealy silt to be packaged as dog food.
I watched these pictures. I was paralysed. In a fever state. Incapable of turning off the television. And yet unable to make my eyes close.
I want you to understand, Doctor — those pictures were but a silhouette of what took place in the Schiller Ghetto on that night in July.
The bodies fell, piling up higher and even buried near the bottom, even in the midst of the screaming and the confusion now pushed up to insanity, one could smell the stink of diesel and blood and excrement as the shredder began to feed on this ant-heap of writhing flesh.
The ones closest to the mouth of the expurgator were, of course, the first to be hauled inside. It is said — though how anyone would know remains unexplained — that Rabbi Gruen was the initial victim to be erased. He entered the mouth of the beast headfirst. The spinning hooks pierced his skull instantly and pulled the whole of the body inward, where the first of the whirling razors began to transform our rabbi into an unsolvable jigsaw puzzle. The flesh of Gruen was yanked forward and devoured by orbiting shards of honed steel. The very substance of his corporeal being was …
What words shall we use, my friend? Disassembled? Disassociated? Decompiled? Are any of them useful in the least? Is there another that might serve us better?
Once tiny enough to pass the gullet of the demon, the remains were then spit into the acid and brimstone of its stomach. Broken down with flame and chemical. Artificially evaporated into common dust and blown out the anus of the gorgon. Into the humidity-choked air to settle between the cobbles of Namesti Avenue. Obliterated? Annihilated?
Erased.
And the rest followed. Man and woman. Child and adult. The Ezzenes were sucked like porridge into the yap of the State’s mascot. I would have thought the screams would reach the farthest edges of the city.
But no one came to the see the reason for our cries. No one came to witness the Erasure of the Schiller. And now I’m forced to ask you, my Inspector, since there is no one left to ask — what did they think the next day, the next week, the next time they passed our street and we were no longer present? What did they tell themselves about where we had gone?
11
The orchards cover a couple of acres of land north of the Wormland farmhouse and run adjacent to the borders of the state reservoir. They were planted by Brockden during his first season in Quinsigamond, but they suffered from some unnamed blight before the initial harvest and never managed to take hold. The trees are all dead and desiccated now, but if you make it all the way through a sometimes dissolving path, you come to a sudden clearing, a small valley, in the center of which is the remains of a greenhouse. It wasn’t a large structure, and after decades left untended and vulnerable to storms and wandering vandals, most of the glass panes are shattered and the foundation has even sunk a bit deeper into the earth than originally intended. Inside, what’s left of the clay pots and planters, fertilizers and hand tools and petrified bulbs, still sits under a frozen shower of glass shards and twisted, hanging steel frames.
Wylie and Gilrein used to come here last year, hike through the orchard and end up inside the hothouse, studying the remains like unschooled archaeologists trying to find clues to a lost culture through its botany habits. They spent a week once trying to clean out debris, thinking they could transform the place into a hidden retreat and going so far as to carry a secondhand powder-blue love seat over their heads and through the orchards, placing it finally in a corner of the hothouse swept almost free of glass. They had scavenged it from a local Salvation Army store and it had brass studs scrolled along its rim. At some point Wylie brought a tasseled quilt embroidered with a generic pastoral scene — some wild-haired maiden on her back in a meadow, lost in the reading of a tiny book — and draped it over the love seat to hide the torn fabric and bulging stuffing. And more than one night they spent riding each other in the greenhouse, wondering if their choked-off cries frightened any of the native wildlife.