That music is intensest
By Zahra Murphy Patterson
for Ashra Gurnch who introduced me to Wallace Stevens
The Fine Print: This piece was written in 2007, when I was 25, and I have decided to publish it because it takes place in a totalitarian society in which spying on colleagues is a necessity of the workplace. Sadly, this detail has become a reality in government jobs in the US. Please note non-gratuitous violence and policy brutality are depicted in this story. (ZP, Sept. 2013)
*
none
Gives motion to perfection more serene
Than yours, out of our imperfections wrought,
Most rare, or ever of more kindred air
In the laborious weaving that you wear.
- Wallace Stevens
Preludium
I was nine when the war there changed our lives here.
My memories are clear but not in order. My most vivid memory is when the peace organizers were paraded through
siren-filled streets like Panthers being led to a false Ark.
My family was safe because we were silent.
The war was a televised non-reality: Our soldiers like talented actors with countless understudies.
When the Curfew was passed it was too late for successful protest.
The population did rise up when teenagers were plucked from high school classrooms to replace dead soldiers.
The people who’d been divided - those who supported both the war and the deportation of protest leaders
and then those who abhorred the deft governmental blows - reconciled when the combat-ready age was lowered
to 15. New faces showed up to protests. Actions were aggressive.
To suppress a domestic consciousness movement the government arrested a tenth of the population. The Chosen
were those who'd most effectively instigated protest.
The media dutifully responded and the Seditious Tenth were demonized.
There was no revolution.
IF we didn't protest
THEN we wouldn't be arrested
THEREFORE we move where we are told to move and speak no critique.
To enforce the curfew the nation's infrastructure was redesigned. Every economic sphere was reshaped. Each law
amended to counter freedom.
Someone tried to change the answer to the question "What is one plus one?"
Different facets of the economy were immediately categorized, stratified and fastidiously supervised. Industry was
instantly privatized and government officials owned stock in multisyllabic conglomerations.
Jobs were assigned and a level of unemployment was maintained.
Totalitarian hierarchies ruled the factories.
People were sent to work.
The responsibility to supervise the output of others was embedded in every position.
Everyone was suspect and everyone was spy.
Those citizens who were in prison when the curfew came into effect were given the opportunity to rehabilitate
themselves and become Orcs. Or, they could die.
The curfew rewrote reality. And it was all supposed to be temporary. An investment for the future. Socializing was
shut down. But salaries remained fair and savings accounts grew fat. The people were complacent.
If you think I am being too harsh, perhaps we can say they were frightened and hopeful that times would
soon improve.
When the government executed the tenth of the population they'd arrested, there was no mass outrage. Initial,
rather desperate, attempts were made and protesters sprouted into fields already fracked.
The killings of the Seditious Tenth were public and often televised. All political executions could be viewed on the
internet. Comments in support of the assassinations were spewed and splattered all over.
Routine security checks became regular. Years have passed and we continue to be assaulted by the police who
search our homes, go through our personal belongings, beat us and arrest us.
It's based on whim.
Official Instinct, they call it. OI. Their white Fords flaunt the acronym.
The executions were followed by the elimination of junior high and high schools. Adolescents were either shipped
overseas to war or put into factories to work. Faculty shared fate.
During the curfew's dress rehearsals (before all secondary schools were shut down) my classmates and I would
play outside for an hour before and after school. Thus disregarding the law that made spontaneous engagements in
play (SEP) illegal. And, we were often caught in the act of play by the O's with I.
The orphans were their targets. We who were not orphans were often dismissed after presenting our
identity cards. Sometimes our bags were searched but rarely did Whim strike us. We left the orphans, our friends,
to face the Officials solo. I didn't witness the beatings, but we expediently learned to stop loving play.
After the political assassination of the boy with the powerful song, the curfew went through a second phase and
now no one is allowed on the streets without a special permit. We are transported in gray buses with steel bars on
pane-less windows between work and home. The second phase eliminated elementary schools, including the one I
was in. The teachers were redistributed to other sectors; or shot in the head.
We are under house arrest. Guests of a privatized government.
They've sterilized our hearts.
We snort their propaganda and their values are our smack.
When our currency inflated, overnight, the crutch of post-war riches became a lost hope turned belly-up to
Cerberus and Orthus. We have nothing to offer in sacrifice to save our karmatically doomed hides. We’d permitted
the slaughter of our champions for freedom and silently witnessed the enslavement of their children.
The Seditious Tenth were killed. Their orphans, trained to become Orcs: forced to fight for a bed, for a
plate of food at mealtime. Dehumanized cattle.
The younger orphans were put into foster homes and branded by a tattoo of a soaring bird superimposed on
the flag, on the sensitive underside of the right wrist. They were ready-marked targets of Official harassment.
The boy, my friend, may have been the last orphan in the city before they killed him.
By the time of his assassination the majority of the remaining orphans had been sent to camps outside of
the city. There orphans chop down trees and built factories for genetically engineered food, ridiculously harmful
chemicals, (re-)education and the genetic engineering of people. This newspaper tried to expose the camps,
resulting in the news office being battered by a wrecking ball. Journalists and staff disappeared.
The labor camps marked the third stage of ODIDM (Orphan-Descent-Into-Definite-Misery). We can assume the
fourth is death. The second stage of the orphan inferno was the foster homes.
The foster parents were junkies, alcoholics, and the occasional dangerous delusional. The foster system
was part of the government's IAP (Include All People) plan.
The orphan-junkie pairings did not work out.
1. The orphans were rebellious and angry.
2. The junkies didn't care.
This happened one overcast day. The junkies were convinced that they could trade in the kids for another social
responsibility. This was not the case. The OI played along and collected the unwanted orphans and put them in a
jail where they awaited shipment out to the camps. The junkies, well their assignment had been to serve society by
raising the children of the disloyal faction. When they failed at this they were rounded up. Packed into cellars
around the city. Left to starve to death in severe states of drug withdrawal. They killed one another. Their screams
echoed for months.
The deletion of the societal dregs was a warning to the rest of us.
A glimpse at what might come if we failed to play our parts.
A Prophecy
When stopped by the officials the boy, my friend, would swallow his tongue.
His file revealed nothing of the mutation because it was concurrent with the death of his Seditious parents. His
chart had already been typed and filed before the executions.
He often came to school with blood on his clothes or a limp in his step. More than once they shaved his
head.
I’ve wondered why the officials let him live so long. What was the purpose of their torture?
Silence is the difference between existence and abstraction, his, the most profound.
The boy's foster mother never alerted the officials to the boy's mutation because she was connected to the tongue.
When the boy sang she hurt.
The boy was late for school sometimes and our teacher would start the lesson without him but he always
came to school. Our teacher would excuse him to the restroom so he could retrieve his tongue. I went with him
once. He stood over the sink and stuck his fingers in his mouth. Then he started gagging. The tongue came up and
he rinsed it off. Put it back in place.
In school, we had neither books to read from nor pens to write with.
Now there are no more teachers. Lord knows they weren't radical. They didn’t try to teach. The classroom
was simply a waiting room that contained us until we were tall enough to work.
The elementary school system ended on a Tuesday. Soldiers surrounded buildings and entered classrooms to
march children home. The next day the five- to ten-year-olds were working with their parents in factories. Some
of the teachers' natural instincts had been protest. They were killed. The others acquiesced and were whimsically
sent to work as soldiers or factory supervisors. A sniper outside shot our teacher before the soldiers even entered
the building. We knew better than to react, we patiently awaited our fates while trying not to look at our dead
teacher’s brains splattered on the wall.
Before the curfew I'd go to the library after school. Under the curfew, I wished I could go to the library instead of
going home to nothing but TV and Coca-Cola Classic. I miss the librarians and the way they always seemed
confused and pleasantly putout when I asked them a question. But most of the librarians were burned with the
library books.
My former local library was converted to the factory where I now work with my parents. We make
waterproof boots for boy soldiers. My father used to work at a gas station and my mother was a cashier at the
local grocery store. I remember sitting at the dinner table babbling my head off telling stories about flying horses.
Now, both my parents are heavy drinkers. At home no one makes eye contact and conversation bobs along the
lines of "pass the salt" and a slurred bleary eyed "what's on TV?"
*
One day the boy whose eyes spoke of freedom came to school without his tongue.
At first the teacher thought he was being difficult and the teacher's tone became rather booming until the
boy started to cry. None of us had ever seen this orphan cry. The other orphans used to cry a lot. And they would
cause trouble. And they would swear their parents were coming back for them, which was sad because we all knew
their parents were dead. We all saw it. Dead poets, dead librarians, dead musicians, dead small business owners,
and the like, drowned, bludgeoned, burned, etc. to death. It was justified by both big and little words.
That day we learned that the foster mother would sometimes take the boy's tongue away from him when he sang.
It was not for joy that his voice sang because there was no joy in his life. He was a gravely serious and troubled
boy. He joked around for the benefit of others, he even did tricks with his tongue, but there was a part of him that
was never present. There was a part of him that was always writhing in pain.
It was not in his nature to instigate his own punishment. He laid low. He stayed out her way. He didn't
mean to sing. It would happen when he was lost in the music of his mind. He didn't know he was singing until the
woman who played his mother had him pinned to the floor, or the wall, or the couch, or from behind as he bent
over the sink washing her dishes. Her hands, with their boney fingers and sharp nails, as if detached from the arms
and legs that crushed into him, abusively plied open his closed lips and clenched jaw. She always won, no matter
how hard he struggled, squirmed and screamed.
Once he bit her. Hard. She pressed a hot iron against his back until he passed out. For a while after that
incident he would just give up his tongue when she jumped him. He could not stop seeing or singing because he
was possessed by the song. It was an obsession bestowed upon him. An inheritance bequeathed to him. He had
visions that would transport him and make him see horrible things. He had no power over his sight and song. His
songs told the stories of the images in his head. He sang away the pain of the strangers in his thoughts. He knew
he wasn't imagining. He knew that these people were real. And he was helping them. He told their stories. He gave
them hope in the face of impending loss.
When his tongue was taken he watched those he sang for lose their battles. His heart broke as he lay on his
mattress locked in his room while the images of their agony bashed against his skull. His eyes throbbed and his
body ached for the tongue that was locked in a palm-sized chest in his foster mother's room. He sometimes
wondered if SHE was the enemy. Their enemy? His enemy? His Prison. Guard.
Has the evil our country thinks it is fighting overseas escaped and become personified in her? He
wondered. He'd been delivered to the home of evil incarnate. Didn't the OI know that? We are looking in the
wrong place! It is right here, chorused the cacophony in his head, embalming me in its filth!
He suffered and thrashed in the restless sleep of fever until the foster mother returned the tongue. And the
next night, defeated, he could not sing. His attempts at sleep were exhausted and overwhelmed by a series of
unyielding nightmares: people running from bombs and bullets; tanks rolling through residential neighborhoods
crushing playing children in their path; walls made of human bodies being built along imaginary borders. Every time
his eyelids blinked he was haunted by images of the slaughtered, of their bloody body parts strewn across a vacant
landscape.
He resented his foster mother and began to resent his gift. He felt that her deteriorated, raggedy soul was a
contagious disease that was beginning to infest his own soul. As if her foul aura was impeding his capacity for
goodness. He did not become bad, he had no desire to do evil things, but he felt robbed of his strength and his
will. He began to regard his gift as a curse. He saved no one. He could only feel their suffering. He wished to have
no knowledge of their pain. His own was enough.
The day the boy came to school without a tongue was a Friday. On the Monday his tongue was still a hostage. He
looked more exhausted than we could remember ever having seen him. His eyes were wide as if he was watching
the climax of a horror film and the rims were swollen and red.
His deranged agony paralleled that in Munch's emaciated Scream.
When he looked at me our eyes met but he did not see me. Maybe he couldn't bring himself to see me seeing him
as he was. His entire body, his little, undernourished, boy body, was a vessel of tension ready to snap.
I imagined that when whatever it was that was in him – that which was consuming and
suffocating him - commenced to eek its way out, it would break through his skin and
leave gashes like ridges in bark from which would ooze a thick, sticky sap because he
was no longer comprised of blood.
He looked like he was on the verge of mutating into a horrible monster. But he didn't. No roar of power burst
from him as he transformed into some indelible superhero or super villain.
The entire day he sat upright in his chair and stared intently, maybe challengingly or pleadingly, at our teacher while
his fingers gripped the table edge in front of him as if it was his lifeline. At the end of the day he rose and left with
the rest of us. But he didn't acknowledge a single one of us the entire day. He refused to see me and the tears
running down my cheeks.
Can you hear the scattering of the slivers of our shattered hearts?
Monday he didn't come to school. He was sick. He lay in his bed all day like a piece of flat wood impregnated with
mold. He'd stopped blinking because when he did blink he saw pictures of their pain: as imagined in surreal murals
and captured in photographs.
Inside his songs were brewing like a tempest and accumulating energy with every churn of his stomach: the
acting vacuum for the abyss that is torment.
It was that evening before the foster mother started to worry about her livelihood. When the other foster
parents turned in their kids she'd known better. And her suspicions were verified when she heard the screams of
their famine, their substance withdrawal, their violent battles. If the boy died she would face her finale. So she
decided to return her foster son's tongue.
The mother attended to the boy almost gently. She was visibly shaking. He was burning and his bed was damp from
sweat. She sat on the edge of the mattress and propped him up against her own body. Her shoulder and arm
became the support against which he leaned. She reached her free arm around him. If the instant were framed a
false image of maternal of love would be captured:
most near, most clear, and of clearest bloom, And of fragrant mothers the most dear.
She opened his mouth with her forefinger and middle finger. Through bloody and cracked lips she slipped the
tongue back into his mouth. When she stood the boy fell heavily onto the dampness of his bare mattress. His eyes
closed. Flat on his back he started to cry. His lament intensified. His body convulsed.
[Exit Mother and close the door.]
She knew he was singing before she saw or heard him. His singing caused a sensation in her bones equal to what
arthritics feel before a storm. That is why she'd take his tongue when he sang. It physically hurt her. That is also
why she did not reveal his secret to the officials. She wanted to control his power.
She decided to give him some food without starting a fight about the singing. Her pain had yet to become
incapacitating. I have some time, she thought, let him sing and then he will sleep.
She opened his bedroom door.
The boy turned his head toward her and opened his eyes. He started to sing louder. His hate pierced her core. She
paused half way between the door and his mattress. A mouse fled from an unsheathed spring in the ancient
mattress to take refuge in the wall. From there it probably wound its way down to a cement shelter where his
family anxiously awaited him. Spiders deserted their webs in the bathroom and crawled through a crack in the
ceiling that led outside.
With all his strength the boy stood up. His singing became clearer. His singing became louder. The foster mother
attempted to smile and produced a grimace of fear. She told him she'd brought him soup. She means him no harm,
she said. She asked him to sit. She told him to not hurt himself. She suggested he quiet down, she told him she
didn't want to take his tongue again. She extended her arms toward him making an offering of the bowl of soup.
He was not present. The song replaced him. It filled the room. It possessed the air. She could not move. She was a
prisoner of the molecules of air that were under the power of the song that came from within the depths of a ten-
year-old boy. She was lowered to her knees. She was a believer offering sacrifice to her gods but no ancestors
took pity on her.
And the boy continued to sing.
Now, the music summoned by the birth
That separates us from the wind and sea
The tempest that brewed within
Released.
And he was a merciless god.
She was lifted from the ground and held suspended. Then the tornado started to spin. She went around and
around. She crashed against the walls again and again. The plaster that fell from the walls with every bang of her
body created a white whirl. The boy was the Eye of the storm. His song created the tempest that killed her. The
pain of the people was vented. She crashed on the floor a heap of shattered bones. His singing softened and the
wind eased. The plaster dust landed like a thin layer of snow disguising the filth beneath.
The chaos within had found a moment of peace.
Disoriented the boy staggered from his bedroom to the kitchen. He opened the cold faucet. Then he stared at the
cold water running from the tap. The sole of his foot was bleeding because he'd stepped on a piece of plaster. He
did not appear to be aware of the trail of blood that followed him from his room. He put his mouth on the tap and
drank and cried. He cried tears although he did not know why. He did not know what he felt.
He felt cold and he felt hot.
He turned off the faucet and faced the doorway from which he'd come. Then he turned and looked at the front
door of the house. It led out. Out. Away, he thought. He walked to the door and put a steady hand on the
doorknob.His other hand unlatched the latch then unlocked the lock. He held his breath then turned the knob. He
stepped into the night and watched his breath disperse. He shivered. It was chilly and he was only wearing white
underwear. His brown body was sprinkled with bits of plaster. It looks like snowflakes, he thought. He turned to
go back inside when a car pulled up in front of the house. Two suited men got out. They were after him.
He ran inside and slammed the door.
Locked the lock.
And.
Latched the latch.
They broke down the door before he had a chance to hide. He screamed and he fought. He bit them and clawed
them.
One of the men threw the little boy against a wall. His head slammed hard. He was suspended in time and in air.
The instant of his death was prolonged and dizzying. His eyes ceased to shine bright as a meteor glowing in the
North.
I was in my kitchen when it happened. Suddenly I couldn't breathe. I had vertigo. And then I saw all.
I saw them collect the limp body that was my friend. I saw them walk out of the house and toss the boy into the
back of their car. They resumed their places as driver and passenger. The car departed.
I record the stories of the dead with my detachable hand.
*
On your pale head wear
A band entwining, set with fatal stones.
Unreal,
*
none
Gives motion to perfection more serene
Than yours, out of our imperfections wrought,
Most rare, or ever of more kindred air
In the laborious weaving that you wear.
- Wallace Stevens
Preludium
I was nine when the war there changed our lives here.
My memories are clear but not in order. My most vivid memory is when the peace organizers were paraded through
siren-filled streets like Panthers being led to a false Ark.
My family was safe because we were silent.
The war was a televised non-reality: Our soldiers like talented actors with countless understudies.
When the Curfew was passed it was too late for successful protest.
The population did rise up when teenagers were plucked from high school classrooms to replace dead soldiers.
The people who’d been divided - those who supported both the war and the deportation of protest leaders
and then those who abhorred the deft governmental blows - reconciled when the combat-ready age was lowered
to 15. New faces showed up to protests. Actions were aggressive.
To suppress a domestic consciousness movement the government arrested a tenth of the population. The Chosen
were those who'd most effectively instigated protest.
The media dutifully responded and the Seditious Tenth were demonized.
There was no revolution.
IF we didn't protest
THEN we wouldn't be arrested
THEREFORE we move where we are told to move and speak no critique.
To enforce the curfew the nation's infrastructure was redesigned. Every economic sphere was reshaped. Each law
amended to counter freedom.
Someone tried to change the answer to the question "What is one plus one?"
Different facets of the economy were immediately categorized, stratified and fastidiously supervised. Industry was
instantly privatized and government officials owned stock in multisyllabic conglomerations.
Jobs were assigned and a level of unemployment was maintained.
Totalitarian hierarchies ruled the factories.
People were sent to work.
The responsibility to supervise the output of others was embedded in every position.
Everyone was suspect and everyone was spy.
Those citizens who were in prison when the curfew came into effect were given the opportunity to rehabilitate
themselves and become Orcs. Or, they could die.
The curfew rewrote reality. And it was all supposed to be temporary. An investment for the future. Socializing was
shut down. But salaries remained fair and savings accounts grew fat. The people were complacent.
If you think I am being too harsh, perhaps we can say they were frightened and hopeful that times would
soon improve.
When the government executed the tenth of the population they'd arrested, there was no mass outrage. Initial,
rather desperate, attempts were made and protesters sprouted into fields already fracked.
The killings of the Seditious Tenth were public and often televised. All political executions could be viewed on the
internet. Comments in support of the assassinations were spewed and splattered all over.
Routine security checks became regular. Years have passed and we continue to be assaulted by the police who
search our homes, go through our personal belongings, beat us and arrest us.
It's based on whim.
Official Instinct, they call it. OI. Their white Fords flaunt the acronym.
The executions were followed by the elimination of junior high and high schools. Adolescents were either shipped
overseas to war or put into factories to work. Faculty shared fate.
During the curfew's dress rehearsals (before all secondary schools were shut down) my classmates and I would
play outside for an hour before and after school. Thus disregarding the law that made spontaneous engagements in
play (SEP) illegal. And, we were often caught in the act of play by the O's with I.
The orphans were their targets. We who were not orphans were often dismissed after presenting our
identity cards. Sometimes our bags were searched but rarely did Whim strike us. We left the orphans, our friends,
to face the Officials solo. I didn't witness the beatings, but we expediently learned to stop loving play.
After the political assassination of the boy with the powerful song, the curfew went through a second phase and
now no one is allowed on the streets without a special permit. We are transported in gray buses with steel bars on
pane-less windows between work and home. The second phase eliminated elementary schools, including the one I
was in. The teachers were redistributed to other sectors; or shot in the head.
We are under house arrest. Guests of a privatized government.
They've sterilized our hearts.
We snort their propaganda and their values are our smack.
When our currency inflated, overnight, the crutch of post-war riches became a lost hope turned belly-up to
Cerberus and Orthus. We have nothing to offer in sacrifice to save our karmatically doomed hides. We’d permitted
the slaughter of our champions for freedom and silently witnessed the enslavement of their children.
The Seditious Tenth were killed. Their orphans, trained to become Orcs: forced to fight for a bed, for a
plate of food at mealtime. Dehumanized cattle.
The younger orphans were put into foster homes and branded by a tattoo of a soaring bird superimposed on
the flag, on the sensitive underside of the right wrist. They were ready-marked targets of Official harassment.
The boy, my friend, may have been the last orphan in the city before they killed him.
By the time of his assassination the majority of the remaining orphans had been sent to camps outside of
the city. There orphans chop down trees and built factories for genetically engineered food, ridiculously harmful
chemicals, (re-)education and the genetic engineering of people. This newspaper tried to expose the camps,
resulting in the news office being battered by a wrecking ball. Journalists and staff disappeared.
The labor camps marked the third stage of ODIDM (Orphan-Descent-Into-Definite-Misery). We can assume the
fourth is death. The second stage of the orphan inferno was the foster homes.
The foster parents were junkies, alcoholics, and the occasional dangerous delusional. The foster system
was part of the government's IAP (Include All People) plan.
The orphan-junkie pairings did not work out.
1. The orphans were rebellious and angry.
2. The junkies didn't care.
This happened one overcast day. The junkies were convinced that they could trade in the kids for another social
responsibility. This was not the case. The OI played along and collected the unwanted orphans and put them in a
jail where they awaited shipment out to the camps. The junkies, well their assignment had been to serve society by
raising the children of the disloyal faction. When they failed at this they were rounded up. Packed into cellars
around the city. Left to starve to death in severe states of drug withdrawal. They killed one another. Their screams
echoed for months.
The deletion of the societal dregs was a warning to the rest of us.
A glimpse at what might come if we failed to play our parts.
A Prophecy
When stopped by the officials the boy, my friend, would swallow his tongue.
His file revealed nothing of the mutation because it was concurrent with the death of his Seditious parents. His
chart had already been typed and filed before the executions.
He often came to school with blood on his clothes or a limp in his step. More than once they shaved his
head.
I’ve wondered why the officials let him live so long. What was the purpose of their torture?
Silence is the difference between existence and abstraction, his, the most profound.
The boy's foster mother never alerted the officials to the boy's mutation because she was connected to the tongue.
When the boy sang she hurt.
The boy was late for school sometimes and our teacher would start the lesson without him but he always
came to school. Our teacher would excuse him to the restroom so he could retrieve his tongue. I went with him
once. He stood over the sink and stuck his fingers in his mouth. Then he started gagging. The tongue came up and
he rinsed it off. Put it back in place.
In school, we had neither books to read from nor pens to write with.
Now there are no more teachers. Lord knows they weren't radical. They didn’t try to teach. The classroom
was simply a waiting room that contained us until we were tall enough to work.
The elementary school system ended on a Tuesday. Soldiers surrounded buildings and entered classrooms to
march children home. The next day the five- to ten-year-olds were working with their parents in factories. Some
of the teachers' natural instincts had been protest. They were killed. The others acquiesced and were whimsically
sent to work as soldiers or factory supervisors. A sniper outside shot our teacher before the soldiers even entered
the building. We knew better than to react, we patiently awaited our fates while trying not to look at our dead
teacher’s brains splattered on the wall.
Before the curfew I'd go to the library after school. Under the curfew, I wished I could go to the library instead of
going home to nothing but TV and Coca-Cola Classic. I miss the librarians and the way they always seemed
confused and pleasantly putout when I asked them a question. But most of the librarians were burned with the
library books.
My former local library was converted to the factory where I now work with my parents. We make
waterproof boots for boy soldiers. My father used to work at a gas station and my mother was a cashier at the
local grocery store. I remember sitting at the dinner table babbling my head off telling stories about flying horses.
Now, both my parents are heavy drinkers. At home no one makes eye contact and conversation bobs along the
lines of "pass the salt" and a slurred bleary eyed "what's on TV?"
*
One day the boy whose eyes spoke of freedom came to school without his tongue.
At first the teacher thought he was being difficult and the teacher's tone became rather booming until the
boy started to cry. None of us had ever seen this orphan cry. The other orphans used to cry a lot. And they would
cause trouble. And they would swear their parents were coming back for them, which was sad because we all knew
their parents were dead. We all saw it. Dead poets, dead librarians, dead musicians, dead small business owners,
and the like, drowned, bludgeoned, burned, etc. to death. It was justified by both big and little words.
That day we learned that the foster mother would sometimes take the boy's tongue away from him when he sang.
It was not for joy that his voice sang because there was no joy in his life. He was a gravely serious and troubled
boy. He joked around for the benefit of others, he even did tricks with his tongue, but there was a part of him that
was never present. There was a part of him that was always writhing in pain.
It was not in his nature to instigate his own punishment. He laid low. He stayed out her way. He didn't
mean to sing. It would happen when he was lost in the music of his mind. He didn't know he was singing until the
woman who played his mother had him pinned to the floor, or the wall, or the couch, or from behind as he bent
over the sink washing her dishes. Her hands, with their boney fingers and sharp nails, as if detached from the arms
and legs that crushed into him, abusively plied open his closed lips and clenched jaw. She always won, no matter
how hard he struggled, squirmed and screamed.
Once he bit her. Hard. She pressed a hot iron against his back until he passed out. For a while after that
incident he would just give up his tongue when she jumped him. He could not stop seeing or singing because he
was possessed by the song. It was an obsession bestowed upon him. An inheritance bequeathed to him. He had
visions that would transport him and make him see horrible things. He had no power over his sight and song. His
songs told the stories of the images in his head. He sang away the pain of the strangers in his thoughts. He knew
he wasn't imagining. He knew that these people were real. And he was helping them. He told their stories. He gave
them hope in the face of impending loss.
When his tongue was taken he watched those he sang for lose their battles. His heart broke as he lay on his
mattress locked in his room while the images of their agony bashed against his skull. His eyes throbbed and his
body ached for the tongue that was locked in a palm-sized chest in his foster mother's room. He sometimes
wondered if SHE was the enemy. Their enemy? His enemy? His Prison. Guard.
Has the evil our country thinks it is fighting overseas escaped and become personified in her? He
wondered. He'd been delivered to the home of evil incarnate. Didn't the OI know that? We are looking in the
wrong place! It is right here, chorused the cacophony in his head, embalming me in its filth!
He suffered and thrashed in the restless sleep of fever until the foster mother returned the tongue. And the
next night, defeated, he could not sing. His attempts at sleep were exhausted and overwhelmed by a series of
unyielding nightmares: people running from bombs and bullets; tanks rolling through residential neighborhoods
crushing playing children in their path; walls made of human bodies being built along imaginary borders. Every time
his eyelids blinked he was haunted by images of the slaughtered, of their bloody body parts strewn across a vacant
landscape.
He resented his foster mother and began to resent his gift. He felt that her deteriorated, raggedy soul was a
contagious disease that was beginning to infest his own soul. As if her foul aura was impeding his capacity for
goodness. He did not become bad, he had no desire to do evil things, but he felt robbed of his strength and his
will. He began to regard his gift as a curse. He saved no one. He could only feel their suffering. He wished to have
no knowledge of their pain. His own was enough.
The day the boy came to school without a tongue was a Friday. On the Monday his tongue was still a hostage. He
looked more exhausted than we could remember ever having seen him. His eyes were wide as if he was watching
the climax of a horror film and the rims were swollen and red.
His deranged agony paralleled that in Munch's emaciated Scream.
When he looked at me our eyes met but he did not see me. Maybe he couldn't bring himself to see me seeing him
as he was. His entire body, his little, undernourished, boy body, was a vessel of tension ready to snap.
I imagined that when whatever it was that was in him – that which was consuming and
suffocating him - commenced to eek its way out, it would break through his skin and
leave gashes like ridges in bark from which would ooze a thick, sticky sap because he
was no longer comprised of blood.
He looked like he was on the verge of mutating into a horrible monster. But he didn't. No roar of power burst
from him as he transformed into some indelible superhero or super villain.
The entire day he sat upright in his chair and stared intently, maybe challengingly or pleadingly, at our teacher while
his fingers gripped the table edge in front of him as if it was his lifeline. At the end of the day he rose and left with
the rest of us. But he didn't acknowledge a single one of us the entire day. He refused to see me and the tears
running down my cheeks.
Can you hear the scattering of the slivers of our shattered hearts?
Monday he didn't come to school. He was sick. He lay in his bed all day like a piece of flat wood impregnated with
mold. He'd stopped blinking because when he did blink he saw pictures of their pain: as imagined in surreal murals
and captured in photographs.
Inside his songs were brewing like a tempest and accumulating energy with every churn of his stomach: the
acting vacuum for the abyss that is torment.
It was that evening before the foster mother started to worry about her livelihood. When the other foster
parents turned in their kids she'd known better. And her suspicions were verified when she heard the screams of
their famine, their substance withdrawal, their violent battles. If the boy died she would face her finale. So she
decided to return her foster son's tongue.
The mother attended to the boy almost gently. She was visibly shaking. He was burning and his bed was damp from
sweat. She sat on the edge of the mattress and propped him up against her own body. Her shoulder and arm
became the support against which he leaned. She reached her free arm around him. If the instant were framed a
false image of maternal of love would be captured:
most near, most clear, and of clearest bloom, And of fragrant mothers the most dear.
She opened his mouth with her forefinger and middle finger. Through bloody and cracked lips she slipped the
tongue back into his mouth. When she stood the boy fell heavily onto the dampness of his bare mattress. His eyes
closed. Flat on his back he started to cry. His lament intensified. His body convulsed.
[Exit Mother and close the door.]
She knew he was singing before she saw or heard him. His singing caused a sensation in her bones equal to what
arthritics feel before a storm. That is why she'd take his tongue when he sang. It physically hurt her. That is also
why she did not reveal his secret to the officials. She wanted to control his power.
She decided to give him some food without starting a fight about the singing. Her pain had yet to become
incapacitating. I have some time, she thought, let him sing and then he will sleep.
She opened his bedroom door.
The boy turned his head toward her and opened his eyes. He started to sing louder. His hate pierced her core. She
paused half way between the door and his mattress. A mouse fled from an unsheathed spring in the ancient
mattress to take refuge in the wall. From there it probably wound its way down to a cement shelter where his
family anxiously awaited him. Spiders deserted their webs in the bathroom and crawled through a crack in the
ceiling that led outside.
With all his strength the boy stood up. His singing became clearer. His singing became louder. The foster mother
attempted to smile and produced a grimace of fear. She told him she'd brought him soup. She means him no harm,
she said. She asked him to sit. She told him to not hurt himself. She suggested he quiet down, she told him she
didn't want to take his tongue again. She extended her arms toward him making an offering of the bowl of soup.
He was not present. The song replaced him. It filled the room. It possessed the air. She could not move. She was a
prisoner of the molecules of air that were under the power of the song that came from within the depths of a ten-
year-old boy. She was lowered to her knees. She was a believer offering sacrifice to her gods but no ancestors
took pity on her.
And the boy continued to sing.
Now, the music summoned by the birth
That separates us from the wind and sea
The tempest that brewed within
Released.
And he was a merciless god.
She was lifted from the ground and held suspended. Then the tornado started to spin. She went around and
around. She crashed against the walls again and again. The plaster that fell from the walls with every bang of her
body created a white whirl. The boy was the Eye of the storm. His song created the tempest that killed her. The
pain of the people was vented. She crashed on the floor a heap of shattered bones. His singing softened and the
wind eased. The plaster dust landed like a thin layer of snow disguising the filth beneath.
The chaos within had found a moment of peace.
Disoriented the boy staggered from his bedroom to the kitchen. He opened the cold faucet. Then he stared at the
cold water running from the tap. The sole of his foot was bleeding because he'd stepped on a piece of plaster. He
did not appear to be aware of the trail of blood that followed him from his room. He put his mouth on the tap and
drank and cried. He cried tears although he did not know why. He did not know what he felt.
He felt cold and he felt hot.
He turned off the faucet and faced the doorway from which he'd come. Then he turned and looked at the front
door of the house. It led out. Out. Away, he thought. He walked to the door and put a steady hand on the
doorknob.His other hand unlatched the latch then unlocked the lock. He held his breath then turned the knob. He
stepped into the night and watched his breath disperse. He shivered. It was chilly and he was only wearing white
underwear. His brown body was sprinkled with bits of plaster. It looks like snowflakes, he thought. He turned to
go back inside when a car pulled up in front of the house. Two suited men got out. They were after him.
He ran inside and slammed the door.
Locked the lock.
And.
Latched the latch.
They broke down the door before he had a chance to hide. He screamed and he fought. He bit them and clawed
them.
One of the men threw the little boy against a wall. His head slammed hard. He was suspended in time and in air.
The instant of his death was prolonged and dizzying. His eyes ceased to shine bright as a meteor glowing in the
North.
I was in my kitchen when it happened. Suddenly I couldn't breathe. I had vertigo. And then I saw all.
I saw them collect the limp body that was my friend. I saw them walk out of the house and toss the boy into the
back of their car. They resumed their places as driver and passenger. The car departed.
I record the stories of the dead with my detachable hand.
*
On your pale head wear
A band entwining, set with fatal stones.
Unreal,
