Benighted (9 page)

He doesn’t speak. It’s my own weakness that’s doing this to me, it must be. He can see into me, he can see I can’t do this. How can a man tied to a chair still beat me?

“Answer her.” A voice comes from behind me, and I nearly shriek in shock. It’s Nate, I’d forgotten about Nate; my world had shrunk to me and Seligmann and nothing else alive. Anger at Nate fills me, the graceless oaf, the idiot, the boy who made me jump. He can see me, he can see the impotence that Seligmann has pulled out of me. My weakness lies on the floor at my feet, pink and spidery and twitching, a raw nerve pulled out for the world to see. I’m hulled out, exposed, filthy.

Seligmann leans his head away from my touch. “Go on, baby,” he says, “let’s see what you can do.”

I choke. Nausea overwhelms me, there’s a terrible moment in which I think I may actually be sick, which recedes and leaves me thankful to the point of desperation for my body’s lack of drama. I can’t go on. I turn my back on Seligmann, sit in the chair facing him, and focus all my strength on sounding calm. “You’re not doing yourself any good. What are you expecting? Branding irons? Racks? This isn’t the Inquisition. You can stop dramatizing yourself.” All of this is true, it has to be. He is dramatizing himself. It’s just me that can’t cope with what’s going on, that thinks it’s real and terrible. “Why don’t you drop the hero mask, it’s going to get boring. We’re keeping you till we get some sense out of you. And believe me, martyrdom isn’t exciting. Whatever you think you’re martyring yourself for. Or maybe you just think you’re tough. It doesn’t matter.” I have to cut him down to size. He’s got to just turn into an ordinary man. That I’ve hurt him mustn’t give him power over me. I focus on his stagy snarl, the melodrama of it, the contrivance, and I can almost look down on him. “You can be as tough as you like. But you’d be free sooner and save us a lot of trouble if you’d try to make sense.”

He laughs. “Oh, I make sense,” he says. “I make sense.” He tips his head on one side. It almost looks comic as he starts the soft chant.

“I caught a little catcher man

Who tried to collar me.

He chased me with his silver gun,

He chased me with his pole,

I jumped on him, and sat on him,

And bit him full of holes.”

I recognize this, and my muscles pull tight, tension runs up my spine in a wave. I heard it as a child. It should bounce off, but it doesn’t; it’s like hearing an old joke for the thousandth time when it wasn’t funny the first; it’s like the fiftieth punch on an already bruised arm. That he would dare be so stupid. And that this time around, it’s true.

I look at Nate. Nate steps forward. He shifts on the balls of his feet, he moves into boxing mode. The first three punches hit Seligmann over the solar plexus, a place I never even thought of hitting, all I could think of was his face, but Nate’s going in close. His body is inches away from Seligmann’s. My hands pulse, and I remind myself that this is nothing I haven’t seen before. It’s just that I haven’t beaten a detainee before, not really. Breaking my cherry. Nate’s swiftly moving body blocks Seligmann’s view of me, and I bless Nate for that. Now Seligmann can’t see the sickness on my face. I stare hard at Nate’s moving back, and try to keep my mind straight on the reasons why this is all right.

All I can come up with is a memory.

I caught a little rabbit,

I caught a little flea,

I caught a little catcher man

Who tried to collar me.

He chased me with his silver gun,

He chased me with his pole,

I jumped on him and sat on him

And bit him full of holes.

My mama says I’m naughty,

I should have let him be—

But Mama, I was hungry, so—

Don’t

Blame

Me!

They showed me to the jury,

They showed me to the court,

They showed me to the bareback judge

And this is what he thought:

He’ll lock me up forever,

He’ll throw away the key

Your Honor, I was hungry, so—

Don’t

Blame

Me!

They’ll hit me with a catching pole,

They’ll chain me in a pit,

They’ll push me off the courthouse roof,

They’ll chop me into bits,

They’ll skin my pretty fur coat off,

They’ll drown me in the sea,

But catcher, catcher, I am hungry—

Can’t

Catch

Me!

Becca had to pick me up after school. “It’s your job in the family,” my mother would say, which we both knew meant no arguments allowed. My job in the family was less tangible. My mother hardly ever said the phrase to me. It was as if I wasn’t part of the contract.

However, it was part of the contract that I had to wait for Becca to pick me up. Her school was a few minutes’ walk from mine, and finished a quarter of an hour later. I first heard that rhyme on one of those days. Becca had arrived fairly early, before I’d had time to scuff more than the tips of my shoes kicking the desk, and we walked home in a good mood. I was trying to tell her about my piano teacher, I think, who wore long scarves and had red nails that clicked on the keys. Piano lessons were one of the things that my mother insisted on me taking, also insisting that Becca oversee me to make sure I practiced. While at first I had resented this effort to turn me into a lady, I was in the process of discovering a liking for it. That I had enjoyed the pretty sounds I could get out of the white keys was, on that day, something of a revelation, and I was trying to communicate it to Becca, while Becca was trying to explain to me what an octave really meant. I said it was eight notes, and she, from the height of her ten years, had explained that there were different musical scales, and even semitones weren’t the only way to measure things.

It’s funny how clearly I remember that day.

“I know what an octave is,” I said, “Miss Dencham showed me, look, it’s like this.” I pulled my hand out of her grip and stretched my fingers wide.

“That’s not an octave, May, your hand’s too small.”

“Is not.”

We rounded a corner. I could feel the warm pavement through my shoes, and there was a summer smell of cut grass from somewhere. Ahead of us was another school, one that neither of us attended. Becca frowned and took my hand in what I thought was an officious grip. “Come on.”

I pulled my hand away. “Look, this is an octave, I
can
do one.”

Becca grabbed my hand again. There was a yellow plastic watch on her wrist. “Come
on,
May, we’ve got to get past this school.”

“Will they throw stones?” I said—I had just been reading a book in which that happened.

Becca gave me a brief glance of puzzlement, then threw a nervous one at the school. “No. Come on.”

I don’t know why I hadn’t heard it. They were chanting. “Don’t Blame Me” is a clapping rhyme, I learned later: you sing it, and whoever’s It chases you at the end. As we got nearer, I was able to make out what they were saying.

They were going to eat me.

They didn’t know I was a non. Becca took my hand and yanked me forward, her head held high and her face scarlet. From a distance, it probably just looked like a girl trying to make her little sister behave.

Becca kept walking, pulling me, with the rhyme going on in the background. The blush on her face was one that I was to see a great deal in the future. Even when I wasn’t around, I think she was uncomfortable when people called attention to how different nons are, and there she was in public, with people out-and-out
singing
it, and she was stuck with her non little sister. She marched forward, saying to me, “Just keep going, May.”

If she hadn’t pulled me, I might have walked by. Gone home and cried. But Becca’s tugs on my arm infuriated me, and between her trying to jerk me into pretending it didn’t matter, and the children behind the fence chanting, I lost control of myself.

I gave a mighty pull and freed my hand from Becca’s. The clapping children stopped their rhyme to see the drama that my mad dash was promising, and I ran up against the fence, shouting at them. And then, of course, they cottoned on. I was shouting, “I’ll catch you! I’ll catch you!” It crazed me that I could think of nothing to shout at them that was as bad as the jokes they’d been throwing around, quite casually, about me. I was in that state of fury that only children feel, fury that can crack you in half, fury that you know will never go away, that no more thinks of calming down than of considering the devil’s point of view.

They started laughing, pointing. “Bareback! Bareback!” I shook the fence and someone shouted, “Look at her soft little hands! Come and get us, bareback!” Another started up a new rhyme, and they all took it up.

I shrieked, and Becca came up behind me. She grabbed me around the waist, and pulled me, struggling, all the way past the playground into the next street.

The horror doesn’t leave me. I don’t understand how it is that a nursery rhyme enables me to sit back and watch one man beat another. But a childish slur is a hard one to deal with. It seems so immense at the time, the fact that it maddens you and no one cares is something that can never be understood. I stare at Nate’s back because it is not in itself a violent thing.

I am ashamed of myself. I am holding a nursery rhyme as a talisman against torture.

There is no excuse for what we do to him.

Nate steps back, a little winded, and cracks his knuckles. I look at him, and although he’s of my kind, I’m almost more frightened of him than I am of Seligmann. It strikes me that I’ve been pretending to myself that he was performing a task, going through a series of motions, and that the nature and quality of those motions was not important. And he was. That’s what it was to him. His face is almost undisturbed.

I think he’s damaged Seligmann’s ribs. There’s blood around his lips, his spine strains against the chair, bending inward. His posture is crouched for real now. I can hear every breath he takes.

I open my mouth, but Seligmann speaks first. “Best you can do?” There’s cancer in his voice, gravel, hours of shouting, only he hasn’t screamed once. He spits through his teeth, pink liquid. It may be that he’s only bitten his tongue.

I ask him the question that I’ve been wanting to ask all my life, of every wolf in man’s clothing that I’ve ever known. Even as I ask him, I’m cold, heavy, because I know he won’t give me an answer that’ll satisfy me.

“Why did you try to kill us?”

I want the answer to this with every fiber of me. Nate leans against the door, not that interested. He becomes almost unreal in my sight, a man of straw. It’s Seligmann who knows what’s at stake.

Seligmann grins, panting; blood rims his teeth. “Tasty girl. Wouldn’t you take a bite?”

“Stop it.” My voice is soft, as if speaking through a headache. “I’m not asking you for jokes. I want to know. Why did you attack us? We wouldn’t have hurt you.”

The irony of me saying this to a man I’ve just watched beaten with hard and exact science doesn’t even occur to him. “You couldn’t of.”

“Why then?”

“Shit.” He dabs his tongue against a bright wet cut on his lip, one that I put there. “If you’ve got to ask, you wouldn’t understand.”

I almost laugh, it’s such a ridiculous thing, such a sharp thing to say. My throat hurts. Every inch of him must hurt. “Enlighten me.”

I get up and walk toward him. I don’t know why. That I can hit him, twist him, compress him, is something that I’ve almost forgotten. He turns his head up toward me, and flinches away. “Bitch,” he says. “Go on, I don’t fucking care. I’ve got you going. I should’ve slashed your face off when I had the chance.”

I shrug hard, and force a tough answer out of myself. “Maybe so. But I’ve got you by the balls now, haven’t I?”

He grimaces, moves his arms against the handcuffs. “You don’t have me, bitch. You can’t get me. You and your kind, you think you’re worth something? No chance. Just freaks, that’s all you are. Soulless. Cripples. You’re not even alive. You’re going down.”

“Soulless?” Soulless? That’s not a word he’d use. It can’t be. Insults, curses, rhymes, these I’ve heard before, and from him, they make sense. They don’t account for why he scares me, but they make sense. And now he’s talking about souls? It should sound weird in his mouth, like he was quoting someone else, only it doesn’t. He spoke with force and conviction, his beliefs alive on every battered inch of him.

Seligmann looks at me for a moment, a clear straight look, and for just that moment there’s nothing posed or contrived on his face. He looks at me like he might look at a fish gasping out of water, with distaste and distance and no feeling at all. Then he drops his head. Hair hides his face again, and what I see is a man, a hurt, injured, tired man slumped in a chair. He doesn’t look up when I try to talk to him. Nate stays leaning against the wall, a little frustrated by how the interrogation’s going, a little annoyed at being out of things. And I stand over Seligmann, boneless, exposed, and bereft, with no answers to my questions.