A Collapse of Horses Read online

  “For God’s sake, man, be quiet!”

  But, just like my voice did a few days before, this voice keeps yelling. Very quickly it becomes too upset to stop. I can picture the man attached to it—his eyes rolling in his head, the feeling of the sack being thrust over his head and the sensation of being choked still vivid—still amazed that the result of giving his report is this (assuming, like me, he was made to give a report). He is incredulous. No, there must be some mistake. He has always been a supporter of the regime, and he has issued his reports impeccably. No, there must be some mistake!

  And in the meantime, here I am, listening to him call out, feeling time running out not just for him, but for myself as well. Yes, I feel all the things I described the man who was beaten on my behalf feeling, and, in addition, a certain resignation. I take off my glasses and lean them carefully in the far corner of the cell, hoping the guards will not seem them, that they will survive intact. And then, not knowing what else to do, I sit down on the ground and wait for what I know to be coming next.

  There are the sounds of footsteps in the hallway, slow and measured. The man who is shouting hesitates for a moment, thinking perhaps help has come. There is the sound of his slot being opened and closed, and then the footsteps recede.

  For a moment there is only silence. I imagine him uncrumpling the paper and reading it and seeing the message on it. Hush, or we will burn the soles of his feet. He does not know that by “he” they mean me, but if he did he would not care.

  And so he starts yelling again. It goes on for two minutes, maybe three, before the sounds of the guards’ feet are again in the hall, walking past the man’s cell and coming toward my own. I clench my teeth and wait.

  But they do not stop at my cell. Instead, they continue on, to the cell just past my own, the cell that houses, if I am not mistaken, the man whose feet were burned before, because of me.

  The door clangs open. The man is already screaming; his cries are terrifying to hear. There is the smell of his burned flesh and more screaming. Then, mercifully, he passes out. And then, very slowly, the measured sounds of the guards’ feet as they leave.

  Why not me? I wonder. Did they make a mistake? Did they simply forget it was my turn?

  Or, worse, do they always torture the same man? What has he done that they choose to burn the soles of his feet over and over again?

  Or, worse still, perhaps there is no system or logic to it at all. Perhaps it can be anyone at any time, and there is no means of knowing when it will be you, or how often, or if it will ever stop.

  Burn me, I am thinking as, lying on the floor, I stare up at the ceiling. Were it not as dark as it is, the ceiling would be a blur for me because my glasses are still in the corner. I know they are there, but I cannot bring myself to get them. What could there be here that I would possibly want to see?

  I think about my report. It was simple. I had been asked to observe a man. I was to watch a house, record said man’s comings and goings over the course of a single day. This I did, just as they had asked me to do. Then I was to report what I saw.

  Coming: The man came to the house, driving a small car. I do not know the make of the car, but I know the car was blue. And small. He got out of the car, made his way to the door, and opened the door with a key.

  Going: A moment later, the man was outside again, this time running, a panicked look on his face, his shirt sodden with blood. I could not initially determine if the blood was his own or belonged to someone else. But when, in trying to open the door of his car, he fell first to his knees and then slowly swayed and collapsed completely, I was able to deduce that yes, it was indeed his blood.

  This is what I reported. As I had been asked to do, I stayed in position until night fell, then I came and made my report. I thought carefully about how to phrase everything, what to say and what not to say. I gave a description of the car: blue and small. I described the man’s shirt, how it looked both before and after the blood. I did not give the man’s name because I did not know his name. I had only been shown a photograph of him. I had no idea who he was, nor what importance, if any, he had.

  I did not describe the two men who came out of the house perhaps five minutes after the man had collapsed, nor the way one reached the end of the front walk and walked to the left, and the other reached the end of the front walk and walked to the right, each of them seemingly ignoring not only the other, but also the man lying prone in a pool of his own blood. Nor did I discuss how one of the men later doubled back, perhaps two minutes later, and entered the dying or perhaps now dead man’s car and either put something into the glove compartment or took something out of it. I had these and other facts ready at my fingertips if they were to ask me about them. But my sense was that unless I was questioned about them, they were outside of the purview of my report. Perhaps, though, I was wrong about this. Perhaps that is why I am here.

  I sleep for a while, but it is a fitful sleep. I am awakened for good when the quality of the light in the room begins to change, when the darkness pales a little in the way we know acknowledges the day. By “we,” I mean, of course, “I.” I know. I can only speak for myself—I need to remember that. I am awakened by a reassuring thought: Perhaps they are not burning anyone’s feet. Perhaps it is all a trick, a simulation. Perhaps they have a recording of someone being beaten and they simply play that over and over again.

  If I can manage to believe that, perhaps it will not bother me nearly as much. Perhaps my feet will stop tingling.

  I hear sounds of movement in the cell to the left of me and in the cell to the right of me. If the man in the cell to the right is a recording, he is a very long recording. No, there must be a man there after all.

  I would like to say I was shocked by what I saw, by the man dying in front of me. But no, I was not shocked. I have delivered enough of these reports to not be surprised by what happens when I am collecting my data for them. No, I was much more shocked by the sounds I heard as they burned the soles of the man’s feet next to me, and by the flesh I smelled burning. Would I have been as shocked if I could see it happening? I don’t think so.

  After five days, it is too early to wonder if I will ever know why they put a sack over my head and brought me here. And yet, I cannot help but wonder. It is too early to wonder if I will ever be released, and yet I cannot help but wonder this as well.

  Sixth day. I think. I awaken to a strange sound, a kind of clicking that at first I think I am imagining, that at first I think resides somewhere within my skull. But then I cover my ears and no longer hear it. I pull myself to my knees and crawl around the cell to try to locate it, but for a time it stops and I cannot. Perhaps, I think, I imagined it after all. But finally it starts up again, and I realize where it is coming from.

  Someone is striking the iron door of their cell with something, but doing it cautiously, relatively softly, so as not to attract the attention of the guards. A faint tapping sound. Coming from somewhere to my left, from the cell to my left probably, or perhaps a cell beyond that. Two quick taps, then a slow one, then a more complicated sequence. It is deliberate and oddly syncopated—a pattern, but I can’t immediately decipher it. It is not Morse code, nor any other code I know. It is nothing I am familiar with. I try to reproduce the pattern by marking it in the dirt. By doing so I realize that it is a sequence that is repeated—thirty quick and slow taps, then a very long pause, then repeated.

  It goes on for a while, then the guards do their rounds, their footsteps echoing through the hall, and the tapping falls silent. When they are gone, it starts again.

  How is it being done? I wonder. We have no shoes, or at least I have no shoes. My belt has also been taken from me, and apart from a little scattering of straw, there is nothing in the cell.

  And then I remember my glasses.

  It takes me a while to figure out how to make a sound, a while after that to make it long enough and at the right moment for the tapper to hear it and to stop to listen to it. But when I pl
ay the sequence out, more or less as he has done, he taps four times in rapid succession, which I read as applause. What is it? What am I saying? What message am I repeating? I don’t know. But once I have repeated it once, I repeat it again and again and again. I am still wondering about my report, still wondering if I could have or should have done things differently, but the tapping makes me think of it a little less.

  I repeat it, and repeat it again, wondering how long I can do it before it destroys the frames of my glasses, which are already bent. I repeat it until, in the silence between repetitions, I hear, tentatively at first, then louder and with more confidence, a repetition of the pattern to my right. I listen, making sure the pattern is correct, is the same as I heard it, and when I decide that yes, it is, or close enough, I give four taps in rapid procession, applauding him and encouraging him. Then the message is receding from me, sent to wend its way somewhere, to someone, down the line of cells. I am part of a chain conveying a message that I cannot understand. But perhaps someone understands it.

  For a while I can make out, traveling its way down the hall away from me, the sound of tapping, though quickly it becomes the ghost of itself and I can make little out. And then it fades entirely. I can still imagine that it is traveling on, can still convince myself, rightly or wrongly, that it exists, but I can no longer hear it.

  I am waiting for a message to come back. I lie on the ground and think of the report, the words that may or may not have brought me here. It might have been a mistake not to mention in my report having seen the man killed, but then again, perhaps I would have done that and would have been brought here anyway. Who can say? It may be something much simpler than that, and have nothing to do with me. Perhaps every twelfth person who delivers a report is treated as I have been. Or perhaps there is no explaining it.

  I consider: If I were asked to deliver a report on this tapping, how would I deliver it?

  Perhaps such a report is something that should not properly be delivered at all, at least not until I have figured out what the tapping means to say.

  I try to breathe softly. I try not to breathe. I am waiting for the tapping to return.

  All night I stay awake, listening for the return of the tapping, the movement of the tapping back the other way. But it never comes.

  In the morning, I turn again to the pattern I have scratched in the dirt, the sequence of taps, and stare at it. I try once again to crack the code, looking for frequency of gestures among the sequence that might suggest one letter or another. A vowel, say, or one of our more common consonants. All I come up with is gibberish. I try thinking of the taps coming in pairs, with each pair signifying jointly rather than individually, but get no further with this.

  I continue to wait for the tapping to return, either in its original form or in some new sequence, returning from where I sent it back to its source. It still does not return.

  Perhaps the tapping hasn’t even been started by a prisoner, but by a guard banging on an empty cell from the outside. What, I think for an absurd moment, what if the tapped message I passed along is Hush, or we will burn the soles of his feet? No, ridiculous of course, but it reminds me that I am passing along something I know nothing about. It could just as well say The man in such and such a cell is a traitor and should be killed. Perhaps the cell mentioned is my own.

  And yet, I know if the tapping returns, I will not be able to stop myself from passing it along. There is nothing else for me to do here besides get lost in my thoughts, in my words, in the failed report. It matters less what the message says than the fact that I am among those passing it along, and that there is someone before me to offer it and someone after me to receive it. It is the closest thing I have had to human contact since arriving.

  Still no tapping. Should I, I wonder, start it again? I could, but perhaps that would confuse things. If he felt it needed to be tapped again, wouldn’t the man in the cell to the left of me do so?

  Perhaps there is a man in one of these cells who has no means by which to tap. Perhaps the message has become lodged with him and cannot go forward.

  In the end, unbidden, I tap the sequence out again, but it is not picked up by the person in the cell beside me. I tap it again, am still ignored. And so I stop. I sit and wait, and listen. It seems now essential that it come back. And yet it does not come back. I wait until the end of the day, but nothing comes. Finally, I fall asleep.

  It is a new day. Eighth day. Or eightieth. Or eight hundredth. Who can say? I listen for the tapping on a door but hear nothing. I listen to the sound of my fellow prisoners but hear them not at all. I might as well be alone here.

  And then, suddenly, after seconds, or perhaps minutes, I hear them: the noise of feet in the corridor, the sound of a cell door opening a few cells away, the sound of something, or someone, being thrown inside.

  Now I wait. Surely now it shall be my turn. Soon he will regain consciousness, groan, start to cry out. Soon, someone’s feet will be burned. Perhaps your own. Hush, you tell yourself. Be quiet, and wait.

  The Punish

  I.

  They called it The Punish, though how they came up with that name Willem later couldn’t remember. But it was not The Punishment, it was not The Punisher: it was The Punish. He was sure this was the case, and yes, later still, one of the last things Wilson would do would be to confirm that that was the name, The Punish, that Willem hadn’t remembered wrong.

  They had been eight years old, both of them. They shared the same birthday, even though in almost every other way they were opposites. He, Willem, was short, sallow skinned, and dark haired, while Wilson was large, ruddy, and blond. They lived on either side of Canyon Road. Willem was in Edgewood, a conglomeration of tract houses, while Wilson was about two hundred yards farther along, on the curve uphill, in a larger house that his father, an architect, had designed. They shared the same religion but did not go to the same church—Canyon Road was the dividing line between one congregation and the other. They did not even go to the same school; once again, the road was the dividing line. Their parents ran in different circles. And yet, somehow they had become friends of sorts.

  How that had happened, Willem wasn’t sure. Looking back on it years later, he just couldn’t remember. Perhaps they had simply met walking down the street. It was a question he should have thought to pose to Wilson before it was too late.

  But they had been friends, there was no denying that, even if the friendship had only lasted a few months, if that. Even if the friendship hadn’t outlasted The Punish.

  For the first few months after The Punish had ended, Willem thought about it all the time. He not only thought about it, but schemed and planned. He didn’t realize at the time that The Punish had ended. He was waiting for his turn. Despite what had been done to him, despite the pain that it had caused him, he still wanted his turn. That was why you submitted to The Punish: once you had submitted to it, it was your turn to run it, to be The Punish itself. He wanted his turn.

  And so he had been frustrated when Wilson’s mother had kept Wilson away from him after that. Wilson hadn’t been the one hurt: Willem had. And his own mother had been too flustered and concerned by what had happened to him to be able to lay the blame clearly on Wilson. She had never gotten the full story out of Willem. She hadn’t really tried, and Willem certainly hadn’t volunteered. The Punish was personal, private, something between him and Wilson. Or so he had thought. But the fact that Wilson’s mother claimed he was never at home whenever Willem came by after that eventually made him realize that Wilson had told his mother about The Punish, that she was deliberately keeping the two of them apart. But even once he realized this, he still kept dropping by, until Wilson’s mother finally told him, getting his name wrong as usual, “William, please do not to bother to come again.”

  After that, he had tried not to go by again. But in the end, after a few months of resisting the urge, he had, only to find that Wilson and his parents were gone, and that there was a For Sale sign in
the yard. It surprised him that Wilson’s father would leave a house he had designed specifically for himself. But he had, and he had taken Wilson’s mother and Wilson himself with him. Was it because of The Punish? wondered Willem. And while his head thought How could that be? his hand tingled strangely to think that yes, that might be why.

  But then, after a few months, he forgot about it. He found friends at his own school who were more like him. He tried with one or two of them to restart The Punish, but nobody understood it like Wilson had. After all, Wilson had helped come up with it. Sure, The Punish was just two kids daring one another, little more than that, each dare a little more serious than the last, but it was more than that too. He couldn’t find anybody who understood this like he and Wilson had.

  And so he let it go. He forgot about The Punish. He found the slot that people thought best suited him and he crammed himself into it. He grew up. He settled into a life. He went to church and then, slowly, he stopped going, drifted away from it. He got married and had a child, and then the child left for college. His wife, too, left eventually, and he was alone again, working the same job he’d taken out of high school, very skilled with his hands, despite his maimed finger.

  II.

  His story might have ended there. He might have simply gone on doing what he was doing, living a simple, solitary, and almost monastic life until he died. Instead, one evening after coming home from work, he settled into the Barcalounger, leaned his head back on the grayish doily slung to protect the headrest, and turned on the TV. It was a little after six, in the middle of the local news, and there was someone being interviewed who looked familiar. Even so, he watched most of the segment with only mild curiosity before, near the end of it, they flashed the name again along the bottom, and he realized with a start that it was Wilson. Yes, he could see the eight-year-old boy still in him, incompletely hidden in a body that, like Willem’s, was now fifty years old. “Philanthropist” it said next to his name. What does that even mean? wondered Willem. Not that he didn’t know the word, but what did it mean in Wilson’s case?