"When we are marching in the mud and cold
And when my pack seems more than I can hold" - Lili Marlene
"See how God is punishing you." The smirk on his face must have frightened the other passengers, they must have moved over a bit to distance themselves from an energy none of them recognized as Satan. The Evil Whisperer. The commandeer of remorselessness. Satan sat back and closed his eyes, chuckling to himself, as cheerful as could be as the bus ambled through the curfew colored darkness. As the viral count mounted one after another assault on the pious ones as much as those guilty of far greater things than murder, he could be seen back near the sullen little toddlers resting their heads on their mommie's laps, shaking his head over the ignorance of people, the impersonal nature of his God, the same God who created all these poor dumb human beings. These runners from the fire scared of their own shadows.
It was probably raining as he climbed onto one of the buses taking passengers out of the city, past the strewn-about bodies too dangerous to collect, through the dark coal soaked air of Montserrat County. It is the kind of rain that turns on and off without warning, a person can almost drown standing up in that kind of downpour, the downpours of West Africa that bring hurricanes to New Orleans. She could not hear other voices in the background nor was she really interested in what they might be saying or not saying. She knew who was on that bus down to the last demon.
Most likely the mood on the bus was as grim as it was on the bus she had taken from the airport in Nicosia to the detention center on the fair grounds on the other side of Cyprus during that onslaught in '06. Ten days of heavy shelling had left her in an excited state of pure exhaustion in which sleep matters very little. Sleep in that state requires too much energy. He wasn't there, he didn't bother to call even though the cell phones and electricity were 24/7 the entire time. Even though his own children were in the line of fire. As she looked out the window of the unmarked bus heading out of Nicosia, she felt as if she was being herded like a goat to the slaughter, no idea where the bus might be taking her and her children if anywhere at all. Regardless of not knowing where she was headed, she knew why. It was a fact: souls belong to the sender, to the originator, to the director. Not to those bodies that drag the souls around day after day. Those souls all return to the manufacturer one day. Those souls are all on a trajectory whether they know it or not. Of that she was certain, Cyprus was absolute proof.
She knew for certain he failed to understand the nature of his emigration now in '13, seven years later, knew he refused to comprehend that the battle was on for his soul, not his body. He feared Ebola, not hell. Last time they were together he'd said, "I cannot believe what you believe." Her mouth fell open and she had remained silent. It wouldn't do any good to warn him again. He'd gone completely AWOL.
Indeed, perhaps God was punishing her for being so gullible when he'd suddenly turn on her during a long distance chat and call her stupid, remind her of how useless she had become. As he mocked her by pretending to lose a tooth knowing full well that she had just lost her third and he'd not had a cavity in his entire life, he managed to look so terrified one might imagine he'd been diagnosed with an incurable disease. He looked into the camera and covered his mouth, his forehead wrinkled into some kind of agonal death graph. She nearly wept over his loss, knowing as she did how important his appearance was to him until he started laughing and revealed his intact incisor. She had just shrugged it off as a bad joke. As she always did, using humor to cover up the fact he was incapable of understanding other human beings, she hadn't considered yet the possibility he was now in a state of possession, not his own. It was far worse than that and for that mistake born perhaps of exhaustion or worse, laziness, perhaps then God was punishing her for not stepping in a bit sooner by divorcing him long ago, perhaps when she woke up after a drunken suicide attempt, her second and found he had placed a baseball bat by her head. But now it was God stepping in as he had done for her several years before when she'd tried to murder her own soul. She knew all about the machinations of this mysterious war with the devil. She'd survived not just a suicide attempt, she'd survived intact and burning with a desire to get full disclosure. From God. Who obliged her on a need to know basis rather than the want to know way most people believe it ought to be. She just never thought she'd have to write a battle plan. Never knew she'd be sitting in the position of gunner, thought she'd just be down in a trench dodging shrapnel with the knowledge that Armageddon was now on, full throttle. For a few fleeting moments now and then, she almost wished she'd never been made privy to this outrageous contention for the human soul. Very fleeting moments, regrettable ones at that.
Most likely the mood on the bus was as grim as it was on the bus she had taken from the airport in Nicosia to the detention center on the fair grounds on the other side of Cyprus during that onslaught in '06. Ten days of heavy shelling had left her in an excited state of pure exhaustion in which sleep matters very little. Sleep in that state requires too much energy. He wasn't there, he didn't bother to call even though the cell phones and electricity were 24/7 the entire time. Even though his own children were in the line of fire. As she looked out the window of the unmarked bus heading out of Nicosia, she felt as if she was being herded like a goat to the slaughter, no idea where the bus might be taking her and her children if anywhere at all. Regardless of not knowing where she was headed, she knew why. It was a fact: souls belong to the sender, to the originator, to the director. Not to those bodies that drag the souls around day after day. Those souls all return to the manufacturer one day. Those souls are all on a trajectory whether they know it or not. Of that she was certain, Cyprus was absolute proof.
She knew for certain he failed to understand the nature of his emigration now in '13, seven years later, knew he refused to comprehend that the battle was on for his soul, not his body. He feared Ebola, not hell. Last time they were together he'd said, "I cannot believe what you believe." Her mouth fell open and she had remained silent. It wouldn't do any good to warn him again. He'd gone completely AWOL.
Indeed, perhaps God was punishing her for being so gullible when he'd suddenly turn on her during a long distance chat and call her stupid, remind her of how useless she had become. As he mocked her by pretending to lose a tooth knowing full well that she had just lost her third and he'd not had a cavity in his entire life, he managed to look so terrified one might imagine he'd been diagnosed with an incurable disease. He looked into the camera and covered his mouth, his forehead wrinkled into some kind of agonal death graph. She nearly wept over his loss, knowing as she did how important his appearance was to him until he started laughing and revealed his intact incisor. She had just shrugged it off as a bad joke. As she always did, using humor to cover up the fact he was incapable of understanding other human beings, she hadn't considered yet the possibility he was now in a state of possession, not his own. It was far worse than that and for that mistake born perhaps of exhaustion or worse, laziness, perhaps then God was punishing her for not stepping in a bit sooner by divorcing him long ago, perhaps when she woke up after a drunken suicide attempt, her second and found he had placed a baseball bat by her head. But now it was God stepping in as he had done for her several years before when she'd tried to murder her own soul. She knew all about the machinations of this mysterious war with the devil. She'd survived not just a suicide attempt, she'd survived intact and burning with a desire to get full disclosure. From God. Who obliged her on a need to know basis rather than the want to know way most people believe it ought to be. She just never thought she'd have to write a battle plan. Never knew she'd be sitting in the position of gunner, thought she'd just be down in a trench dodging shrapnel with the knowledge that Armageddon was now on, full throttle. For a few fleeting moments now and then, she almost wished she'd never been made privy to this outrageous contention for the human soul. Very fleeting moments, regrettable ones at that.
Now though, she was too busy screaming to notice anything but her own noise, her face pressed against the laminate flooring as the pain inside of her chest blended with the excruciating struggle to yell louder than he could whisper in an attempt to wrest control back from her delusional captor thousands of miles away. She'd been hit and hit in the vital organs. Somewhere in her mind she believed that the louder she screamed, the greater the chance might be that he would just stop whispering into the phone, trying to dismantle her resolve to preserve whatever sanity she had left, stop her hemorrhage and restrain his mad ability to wreak havoc in her soul with just a look let alone with six words murmured with the intensity of an AK 47. Into an electronic device. In another hemisphere. The world of the unseen. Mouth to satellite to ear. Enter through the eye of a needle, it is easier. And the bleeding just continues for hours and days. It's the Space Age now.
All she could do was scream and all she could scream was "Stop! Shut up! Stop! Motherfucker!" Over and over until at last she lay quietly, exhausted and sweating from the writhing about on the floor. She had already lost 25 pounds in 2 months, nothing tasted like it should and even if it did, she'd refuse it to stay at fighting weight, lithe enough to carry her own pack and his, light enough to avoid the landmines if she could. She was in the midst of war. She'd been there already for long enough to know the difference between a mere battle and Armageddon. There is no time for food, there is only sustenance there on that field, enough to get through to the next break of day, the next night raid and hostage taking. Somewhere in that bunker she realized she had the ransom. It was enough to get both of them to enough safety to stop for a bit and reconnoiter the troops.
Her friends would show up unannounced to drag her out to one or the other restaurants in town and finally they stopped coming at all, a certain element of victim blaming in their tone of voice the last time she would politely decline their final offers . Her only appetite now was for information, for clues, for proof, things of monetary value, black market things. She was also fatigued from explaining the complexity of events to each and every person around her, tired of trying to convince them that she knew where she was headed. All they could see was the eye wall of a hurricane and through good intentions urged her to evacuate. Seek a divorce, give up, we know what's best for you.
Her friends would show up unannounced to drag her out to one or the other restaurants in town and finally they stopped coming at all, a certain element of victim blaming in their tone of voice the last time she would politely decline their final offers . Her only appetite now was for information, for clues, for proof, things of monetary value, black market things. She was also fatigued from explaining the complexity of events to each and every person around her, tired of trying to convince them that she knew where she was headed. All they could see was the eye wall of a hurricane and through good intentions urged her to evacuate. Seek a divorce, give up, we know what's best for you.
Thirty five years of marriage and slowly all of it was beginning to make sense. If only it was the type of sense which made one feel that type of pure joy one must feel when their disease is cured rather than the agony they must feel on the day their CT shows a large tumor just to the left of their nipple, but the base of it is rooted in the lung, it is inoperable. Regardless of knowing she was right about the email one of his girlfriends had sent, "you were crazy last night, did you make it home alright?" Regardless of knowing that and the rest of it or at least the parts God had revealed to her, she still felt as if tangled and bound at the ankles and wrist, screaming through the rags in her mouth saturated with saliva and the metal taste of blood pooling in her lower lip. She'd made one little mistake. One unfortunate accusation that was clerical in nature rather than substantial. The email was real, it meant what it meant, he'd been out on the town with the lady from the bank. The one who kept sending him messages on LinkdN. Confronted with that, he scanned the message and of course, since the name was wrong, he had grounds for pulling out all the stops, grounds for another attempted assassination, no baseball bat required as he had learned from the whisperer, one need not use violence in the netherworld when six words will do.
She'd attributed the email to an elderly Catholic woman, the head of a charitable group working for USAID, instead of the actual sender. The sender was actually just another poverty stricken mistress of which there must have been at least four or five, perhaps more. It wasn't her fault, there were so many names and things to go through and she'd mixed up the names. She had piles of bank statements next to her computer in the guest room. The stack of paper was such that if the door sucked closed suddenly from a draft, they'd slip off the desk like platelets forming enormous clots of white on the floor, one after another drifting through the air. She'd pick them up each time, scouring them as she did and find one more cash withdrawal from a bank machine near a casino on the reservation in Tucson. She'd mark it with one of the yellow highlighters and replace all of it into chronological order once again. The time line would expand another month or two, January 2009 to March 2009 and on to this afternoon, "..see how God is punishing you?"
She'd attributed the email to an elderly Catholic woman, the head of a charitable group working for USAID, instead of the actual sender. The sender was actually just another poverty stricken mistress of which there must have been at least four or five, perhaps more. It wasn't her fault, there were so many names and things to go through and she'd mixed up the names. She had piles of bank statements next to her computer in the guest room. The stack of paper was such that if the door sucked closed suddenly from a draft, they'd slip off the desk like platelets forming enormous clots of white on the floor, one after another drifting through the air. She'd pick them up each time, scouring them as she did and find one more cash withdrawal from a bank machine near a casino on the reservation in Tucson. She'd mark it with one of the yellow highlighters and replace all of it into chronological order once again. The time line would expand another month or two, January 2009 to March 2009 and on to this afternoon, "..see how God is punishing you?"
Perhaps God was punishing her as she shut the front door and watched the officers check in using their radios at their car out front. They ran her in the system, cautioned her to change her address at the DMV, saw there were no outstanding tickets or warrants, no protection orders and handed her driver's license back, their faces a combination of pity and seriousness. They must have seen it all in their jobs. From dead cows out on 92 to meth addicts holding guns to their head up at one of the dumpsters on American Avenue a mile away from her home. Her neighbors were all on board, she'd warned them one by one that things might not be normal at her house for a while. She'd told Janice of course. Told her the marriage might be over. The old woman across the street was trying to quit smoking but would call her up to bum a cigarette now and then. It was nice to have a neighbor who for the price of a Pall Mall would listen to her laments for a half hour. Janice advised her to get a boyfriend. Standard advice from those not privy to the real issue at hand, the End Times things. Those of us that know Armageddon gets us all.
This afternoon however, a gardener from another town had been trimming the grass across the street at Janice's house. He alerted the police and feared for the inmates of the house across the street, he feared for her and whoever else might be screaming but he couldn't decipher the message. He could not have known that the perpetrator was thousands of miles away on a bus running for his own life during the Ebola outbreak, on that bus down a few seats from Satan who was cheering him on, chuckling and goading him to more outrageous taunts than the ones before, each blow more daring than the last. Poor Janice must have discussed it with her hired man and knowing as she did from personal experience, suicide can and should be prevented but it was likely she didn't want to betray her friend's confidence so she went along with the emergency call. She knew the woman across the street was all alone but "common" sense got the best of her. Janice's husband had put a gun to his head over a quarter of a century before but it might as well have been yesterday, or the day her son did the same thing a decade later. Janice lived with regrets and didn't need more of those so she let the gardener use the land line to call in a civil disturbance.
After the door closed and the police drove away, she dropped to her knees and just wept. Her old dog was outside hiding in the garage. He looked as if he hadn't been fed for days however that wasn't the case. He just couldn't eat either. When he died some years later she buried him on High Lonesome and returned in a few weeks to collect whatever bones she could find. The ordeal had taken years off of his life, Ebola kills dogs when it can and as she dug his shallow grave, her captor who had become her captive stood near coercing her to finish as quickly as possible, as if this death did not matter. Stood there sinning as he was wont to continue to do and this she knew, and this agreed to. There was no option in the matter. Afterall, she understood the machinations of this war. She understood the ransom of souls, the value of captives, the unseen bargains and treaties. She had purchased the lease on his soul using the five swears, she just omitted her signature on the fifth after he had signed on his. She didn't purchase it knowing she had done so, she only refrained from cursing him out of fear for her own soul, that much is for certain. She knew he was as clueless about that as he was about the old dog's bones, as clueless about the sign he related back then. He'd been in his shop on Gurley Street just down a bit from Sinkor when a man fell face first onto the sidewalk, infected to the gills with Ebola, dead before he hit the ground. No one would remove the body for hours and hours and he must have felt more than a little uncomfortable thinking that God had him in the cross hairs by then.
Sometimes she felt she'd signed a contract with the devil by forgiving him, by taking him back. She knew he was incurable, she knew he was blind but she'd had a dream long ago. Fortunately she had written it down and for whatever reason, it turned up on the battlefield as if God himself had tended to it all those years lest it be forgotten. In the dream, his mother had come to her and offered her $20 to go pick up her son on the other side of town, a place known as the Ouzai. She knew exactly what the money was for when she reviewed the document so many years later, she just didn't know if it would be enough to get them both through that dismal last battlefield. She mentioned it to his mother who was aware of her son's deviance from the path she'd taught him about herself and his mother agreed. His mother was asking her to purchase her son's ransom in the dream, to rescue not just one of the fallen, not just a compatriot cut down by friendly fire. She was asking to rescue a traitor.
When she collected the dog's bones she took her grandsons with her as if to insure that one day if she ever had to relate to them the importance of it all, she could remind them of her vow to bring the dog home, even if it was just one tooth or a single vertebrae. Remind them to leave not one man behind in enemy territory, not one faithful animal either. Nor their corpses. To teach them about the sanctity of their vows and the ravages of their abuses. To caution them with some real firepower. It would be enough proof for them to know it wasn't just another one of her crazy old recollections, those stories she'd tell them about her days in the prison or the time she belted a Syrian in the gut with a walking stick. She might let them see into the dark world of the gaslight, the prison tunnels she knew so well, explain it to prove God to them if she ever had to. And although she knew she would never would do that unless they were in danger of becoming lost themselves, she would never do it to harm anyone even him. She'd keep his secret if it meant these boys might recall the old man when they meet him in heaven. All children deserve that much of an investment. That ransom gave her just enough leverage for the never-ending tenure of being a jailer with a captive, just enough leverage to keep enough ammunition in the barrel lest he tries to jump ship again. Just enough ammo to get off a few warning shots in his direction if need be.
Those bones. She'd hold them in her hand and see that dog standing out in the rain, fearful of her screams. Fearful of the demon that was trying to collect her too. Wise dog. Brown. His ancestors in the Cave calling out to him in his sleep.
It was as if all those artifacts might somehow be used to build the ark she needed to get through the rest of her earthly life, to carry a few souls alongside her if she could manage to stay boarded herself. Sails made of bank statements, oars made of femurs, the windful whispers of souls and saints and shaitans churning up the waves as the faithful stand on deck holding on for dear life, grandmother at the helm. It's a rudder not a wheel she says to herself. It steers in a contradictory manner.
Sailing on this sea of memory, hand to helm, the memory of near drowning in her own sweat on the floor while Janice bit her cheek and fought the urge to join her own men long since gone, to pull her own trigger, she'd pray to live only long enough to arm these little boys if she could, these youngsters out with her robbing graves. She prayed to die before she'd ever have to see them succumb to the machinations of the war mongerer, the slave driver, the hell-bent bothers of the accursed one whose sentence has always been hell while ours is only yet death while we live. To live long enough to show them that fear is the devil's doing, in the shadow of the valley of death, fear no evil. The Good Bible says without showing one how to load a cannon, how to escape the darkness of ignorance, how to ransom a soul. It's all just alot of talk to little boys.
Lightning flashed on the horizon as the intrusion of innumerable battering memories poured down on her decks interspersed with a few clear days here and there. At times she feared the next storm, at others she waxed nostalgic over battles won. Death nears without exception, Armageddon gets us all. Even her and if she could, she'd sit beside them at her grave and remind them to wash their faces, change their socks. She'd whisper to them, I loved him anyway. I had to. You'd not have been here at my grave had I not given in to all that charm he used on those ladies. He charmed me as he charmed them. She'd whisper, I love you both too. She'd whisper, I love your wives even though you have none. I want you all.
Love she thought, love is not what the rest of them think afterall. Love is the battle, love is the leading of the troops home, love starts on a mattress and ends in the grave. Love is the thousand ransoms you hold onto, hoping against hope you won't spend them in this life frivolously on romance and all of its trappings or waste them on the gamble, later is always too late in roulette. The gambler pushes his chair away only when his pocket turns up empty. All our days are numbered but the receipt is in the safe. It isn't collateral.
Love, love thy neighbor. Love thy spouse. Love everything and fight to keep it whole. Love is better than Love. She'll tell those two boys with regret in her voice that it's better to save than to spend and how she'd hoped to never have to. Either one. She'll tell those two boys, carry on. At ease.
