Counternarratives (40 page)

. . . .

I hear your removing the cross from your chest, so built up, sliding it
up across the smooth skin with your long, thick fingers, your platinum pinky ring
and your gold and ruby signet ring, your manicured nails, you are pulling it up out
of the cleft of your chest, you have always been powerfully built, no less so today
than when we were just boys, I always envied that of you, that body and the force
that you carried in it, that force of feeling that was fearlessness, that was always
the only ethics you clung to, fearless to do the worst things and the best, to
commit unspeakable crimes and then not contemplate another horrific thing on this
earth, I feared that in you, I knew, too late, that it would be my end.

. . . .

I hear you lifting the tool from around your neck, you holding it
in your left hand while with your prosthetic hand you are extracting a glove, two,
latex, you hate it and are allergic to it but there's no other material that will
ensure you keep me off your skin, my flesh and memory off you, you have doctors on
call to give you a shot before you face the crowd once you leave here, you cradle
the weapon as you wrestle the glove onto your right hand, your prosthetic hand which
you use as if it had left the womb with you, your left one almost too large for the
glove, the same hands that generations ago would have wielded spears, or clubs, or
an axe or machete, the same hands generations ago that would have slapped a cow's or
horse's flanks to move them into a pen, the same hands that would have wielded the
spade to furrow the earth or hoisted the walls atop which the roof might sit, the
same hands that would never have been found in a schoolhouse, or a college
classroom, or a luxury hotel, or a castle in the middle of here or anywhere else,
except cleaning such rooms, scrubbing them from corner to corner, scrubbing the pits
the powerful crapped in, your hands, the one I did not cut off and the one I did,
that could have torn off my own hands, my arms, my feet, my legs, my nose, my
tongue, my ears, but didn't, that wasn't fear or cowardice but distress at having to
dismember what you had come to completely, utterly love.

. . . .

I hear you shifting the weapon to your false hand in preparation, now
your real one, working by intuition, that was one of your gifts, unerring always,
living by feeling, your feelings as light as wind and taut as a mainspring, all my
planning and booklearning couldn't match it, and you so beautiful back then, so
fearless, the greatest lion of our youth, always more so than I, you didn't know it
because we didn't have a language for it, we had it but you didn't know it, we knew
it but you couldn't speak it, that time would come, the leader feared that in you as
much as your courage, or rather fearlessness, they are different, I was courageous
but not fearless, I was daring, brave, impulsive, reckless, I put the bullet through
his temple and so many others, I was not a prophet or saint but I was your apostle,
apostle of what everyone loved and feared in you, most of all me, that beauty and
the fearlesness.

. . . .

I hear you leaning forward, your eyes having never left this lump of me,
what's left of me, so beautiful, it was almost painful to look at you after my eyes
adjusted to the blackness that night, you were too much to bear, it wasn't just the
beauty or the fearlessness but that I knew it would come to this, I would have to
get rid of you, I would have to destroy you, eliminate you, do what our leader
couldn't do, one of us would remain in the end and it wouldn't be me if I didn't do
it, I hear that, I hear you reaching forward . . . seizing hold of my
chin with that prosthetic hand, the grip tight, firm as a vise, so tight I can
barely speak, I hear you thinking that having to do this distresses you more than
anything else, disgusts and dismays you, I hear you thinking this distress won't
even kindle into rage, you will transform it somehow into indifference, I hear you
thinking I could simply leave him here as he is to rot, no one would ever find him,
you could pour in molten metal or concrete, just as I did to your parents, your
siblings, your ancestral village and neighboring ones, unleash a torrent in minutes
because no one would ever find me, none will, I hear you thinking that would be too
easy, I hear you thinking I failed you completely when I had the opportunities to
rid the world of you, I hear you thinking I did not do so out of pity or love but
sheer ineptitude and greed and fear, not even the most stupid creature on earth
would have let things come to this, I hear you thinking I slaughtered countless
people but I could not manage to liquidate this earth of you, stamp out you, filthy
degenerate lion Quisling, I was too afraid of doing so, not with my own might or
that of my allies overseas, I hear you thinking you are going to flush this earth of
me, but slowly, as you have been, reducing me to the nothing I've become, and that
not even this will atone for all I've done, all the lies and betrayals, all the vast
continent of discontent and destruction I wrought, and but you are wrong, I have now
surprised you, I am hardly displeased with myself for having let it come to this, I
am pleased beyond measure at everything I ever did and would do it again, and you
hear now how I do not fear what's about to happen, how I am no longer begging but
welcoming it, no more pleas, no more imprecations, I know what's due, how I would
send my partisans into flight rather than rescue me, burn the gods, not a single one
of them can save me and I would reject them if they tried, I hear you raising the
bandanna gag from around my neck with that hideous freakish American hand, the sound
of it makes me want to explode with laughter, your hideous freakish American foot,
prosthetic, cyborgian, not human, I did that and not even all the money and the
power in the world can make you whole again, your inhuman fingers on that same
bandanna you pulled down earlier so that we could speak, as I requested for four
straight months this time, every waking second of every day, screaming through that
fabric so loud they could not not hear me, the same one I used to wear all those
years ago, the one knotted around my neck that night and many days and nights
thereafter, tonight, or today, I hear how in a few seconds you will stuff the ends
of it into my toothless mouth, I should have pulled out all of yours, and your
tongue, and your throat, I should have cut it out when I had the opportunity, I
laugh fearlessly at my folly now, why should anyone fear a lion with only two paws
instead of four, a lion unsure if it's a male or a female, a lion so unafraid of
anything it is incapable of understanding the sheer terror of life and death, a lion
who will itself be devoured by another waiting nearby, the lion's roar is anything
but music, just animalistic howling, I hear how, in a few seconds or many, only you
know the time, you will cock your arm back like a spring with the makeshift cross
like a knife pointed out and swing it forward hard into my right ear over and over,
and how you'll find my left until I am no longer crying out through this muzzle and
you won't even have to let them know you're done, you'll scurry away knowing the
same will eventually happen to you, one you've bred just like me who will come
hunting, the bead's on your throat, I can hear that language clear as a bell, a
whistle, can you hear it, you cannot, in fact, she's doing so right now, he's
gliding right through to get you, in no time, the man who listens only to death
hears nothing of life, your time will be up, out of time, and I'll lie here
until—

. . . .

. . . .

. . . .

. . . .

. . . .

 

Author's Acknowledgments

I would like to offer thanks to everyone, named
below and unnamed, who offered support during the writing of these stories. I wish
special thanks to the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation for the fellowship that aided me
in completing them.

Many thanks to all my students, colleagues and the staff members, too
numerous to name, at Brown University, Northwestern University and Rutgers
University-Newark, to whom I offer deep gratitude.

Particular thanks to the New York Public Library's Stephen A. Schwarzman
Research Branch, and in particular to Messrs. David Smith and Jay Barksdale,
supervisors of its invaluable Wertheim Study and related programs, for all of their
endless generosity and helpfulness.

Thanks also to the various editors who published versions of these
stories, and to the institutions where I had the opportunity to read versions of
them.

Thanks also to all of my teachers over the years, especially E. L.
Doctorow, in whose workshop I wrote one of the first of these stories.

Many thanks to Dorothy Wang, who introduced me to the sheet music that
led to “Cold,” the story about Bob Cole.

Profound thanks to my fellow Dark Room Writers Collective members for
their friendship, vision and superlative examples, and especially to Tisa Bryant,
with whom I have shared these tales, and who suggested one, which she later
published; and to the Cave Canem writers, for their friendship and stellar
artmaking.

Many thanks to everyone at New Directions Publishing Corporation,
especially Barbara Epler, and to my agent, Jonah Straus.

Also, an especial thanks to Jeffrey Renard Allen; Frances Bartkowski;
Herman Beavers; Kevin Bell; Jennifer DeVere Brody; the late Rudolph P. Byrd; Alice
Elliott Dark; Kwame Dawes; the late Gerard Fergerson; Reginald Gibbons; Thomas
Glave; Rigoberto González; John Eric Hamel; Reginald Harris; Victor Hodge; Geoffrey
Jacques; Tayari Jones; Mary Kinzie; Serena Lin; Keguro Macharia; Dwight McBride;
Francisco Mejia; Askold Melnyczuk; David Barclay Moore; Nathanaël; Jayne Anne
Phillips; Robert F. Reid-Pharr; Sarah Schulman; Christopher Stackhouse; Christina
Strasburger; Ella Turenne; Jerry Weinstein; Jay and Lois Wright.

And above all, a million thanks and love always to Curtis Allen.

 

Copyright © 2015 by John Keene

Except for brief passages quoted in a newspaper, magazine, radio,
television, or website review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form
or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and
recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without
permission in writing from the Publisher.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the magazines and journals
where some of these stories and novellas have appeared:
Agni
,
Encyclopedia
,
Hambone
, and
TriQuarterly
.

AUTHOR'S ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
.

The first map in "On Brazil"
is courtesy of the Map House of London
(www.themaphouse.com).
The map of Massachusetts
in "An Outtake" is courtesy of FCIT
(etc.usf.edu/maps).

Manufactured in the United States of America

First published clothbound by New Directions in 2015

Design by Erik Rieselbach

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Keene, John, 1965–

Counternarratives John Keene.

eISBN 978-0-8112-2435-2

I. Title.

PS3561.E3717C68 2015

813'.54—dc23            
              2015001269

New Directions Books are published for James Laughlin

by New Directions Publishing Corporation

80 Eighth Avenue, New York 10011