If the evil is coming, shut the door...

22 The Niles | Short Stories
I kill myself and
rejoice!
by Stella Gaetano
H
others evolve and move forward. But I’ll leave him in the pitch-black
all alone, until one day he becomes nothing, consumes himself with
spite and jealousy.
He won’t take up any more of my time. I’ve lots of things to focus
on. I have to think seriously about this arms dealing; think practically
and commercially. I have to get hold of the addresses of the major
arms dealers in the capital so I can get close to them and win their
trust, and then I’ll be able to deal with them directly. I’ll get money
from my siblings and relatives abroad. I’ll tell them I have a business
plan that requires a little capital and I’ll make them partners – equal
shares. I reckon they’ll agree and send me dollars, euros and riyals, and
it will stack up: the capital with which I can begin. No way can I get
into arms dealing without capital. When the dealers see I have the
money they will trust me all the more and trade with me without fear.
But I shall never reveal my plan to them. They’ll trade with me on the
basis that I’m a dealer out to make more money. But I’m ambitious.
I’m looking for glory and immortality, not cash. Did I say “immortality”?
What do I care about immortality? It’s glory and power in this
world that I’m after. Immortality I’ll leave to the crazed, penniless
poets who witter on about “love for the motherland” night and day,
and not a square meal on their tables. What do I care about
immortality?
And so, dear sirs, my plan’s complete. All that remains is the
execution. Tomorrow, I shall enter history!
Tomorrow?
Not tomorrow; not twenty-four hours from now. I mean it
figuratively. A year, perhaps, or two. Three at most. In just three
short years I’ll have been thirty years on earth. Thirty years old and
ruler of this vast country, end to end. I’ll sleep in the presidential
palace. Unreal! The presidential palace! Do you know what that
means? It’s a life that only the most ambitious (like me) ever dream
of. My friends, addicts of cheap booze, I’ll leave them to those
miserable binges of theirs, cursing the government to their hearts’
content, but one day – after I’ve sorted out the important affairs of
state – I’ll set some time aside for them: I’ll raid their homes and lock
them all up and I won’t let anyone intercede for their release. I won’t
be swayed when it comes to corrupting influences, especially alcohol
and hashish. These things are no good; they lead to laziness and sleep,
which means a lack of productivity, and that I won’t allow. That I
won’t allow. Ever. Over my dead body. Traitors. Turncoats! Sots!
Unbelievers! God strike you down! I’ll lock you all up and perhaps
I’ll kill you all in prison, you f….
Beneath a raging malarial fever, the ravings of the recently-graduated
Mansour were now unbearable to his mother, who had remained by
his side for two whole days during which he had not grown still, nor
had his temperature fallen, for an instant.
A short while ago the doctor had assured her that his temperature
was slowly but surely coming down and that by the time evening
came around he’d be quite recovered, once he’d had a yellow liquid
injected into his buttock. His mother touched his sweat-dewed
forehead and found that he had begun to cool, but she was not
completely reassured until Mansour stopped his raving, those
mutterings repeated over the course of two days. Something about
some military coup…
awks soar in the sky like flocks of flying moustaches. The sky, so
distant: distant and blue, with a radiant, burning heart… and me,
choking on words that won’t come, full of a terror that hovers in the
void. My heart’s not beating! Am I dead? Or am I just playing dead?
I am lying – or rather, my corpse is – in a pile of other bodies.
Other bodies, I say, as if I don’t know who they are. Of course I know
them, all of them: they are my siblings, my family. This one’s my
sister, a little baby boy in her arms, and here’s my blind and irritating
father… That’s my pious neighbour, slumped in a pose of eternal
prayer, the blood-spattered Gospels in his hand, and over there is my
friend, who I argued with yesterday over a glass of booze gone off.
There is the Ethiopian merchant, the man who ran the jerry-built bar
at the end of the street, from whom we bought cheap liquor (Tusker,
Nile Special and Seven Nights) and made merry. Look at him now,
carelessly flung aside, terror etched on features that have begun to
swell and bloat. Seems he would have been handsomer if he had filled
out a bit… We’ve all been lying here for days now, weeks, in absurd
postures that pay no respect to death’s awful majesty.
Just pause for a moment: I’m not sad! I really must be dead. After
all, my heart’s not beating and it doesn’t feel sad! I think I should take
this more seriously, maybe: I really am dead.
All I remember is seeing them advancing, swarms and swarms of
them, armed with all manner of rifles and machine guns and grenades
and car-mounted rocket launchers. They looked a lot like us: in fact,
I remember thinking that I saw myself, with this same eye that’s even
now being chewed out by worms. I saw myself, leading an army: we
were an army, and victims, at one and the same time.
It’s just the booze playing tricks, I told myself, sweeping me off
to some parallel dimension… but let me finish: I saw us advancing,
some of us dressed in combat fatigues and toting guns of various sizes
and types, automatics that harvested souls as long as they still had
bullets to spare, which they spat out with terrifying, rapid sounds.
I saw this army appear on the horizon between the towering green
trees, and it seemed that they – that we – must have started a fire in
the next village over. Smoke was rising higher and higher, swirling
lazily, a vast snake darkening the universe, while the trees were
shrinking, withdrawing into the earth as tortoises retract into their
shells, and we… we were announcing our arrival by pouring fire
directly into the houses, by spreading death.
Every time we loosed off a burst we’d thrill and swell in size until
we arrived and were attacking ourselves, each one of us killing himself
without mercy.
I saw myself killing myself, without mercy. I was gazing on the
other me, standing in line in his brutal uniform, bristling with weapons,
an ammo belt slung across his chest. I stared deep into his eyes
– maybe he’d recognize me – and I begged him not to kill me. I was
afraid and my smile was thin and wan. Don’t you know me? I asked
him. I… I… I’m you! But before I could go further he unleashed a
flurry of bullets cold-bloodedly into me and... and he rejoiced. That’s
right: I saw myself kill myself and rejoice.
Now I’m riddled, my body bleeding like sieve, and I feel the warm
blood roaring out of me, flooding me, drowning me in a sticky red
lake. But guess what? I feel no pain. Maybe I really am dead.
Either that or this is a seriously advanced stage of intoxication:
a pact between death and drunkenness that has hurled me down into
the deepest of comas.
Is this death? A deathless consciousness coupled with the lack
of all feeling? An enforced absence and a defiant presence of corpses
scarred by bullets, charred by shells, and slaughtered like sheep?
I saw everything. I saw my killer and the killer of my siblings and
my infant brother, of my blind father and our neighbour and the
Ethiopian merchant. I saw our towns turned to ashes and mounds
of rotting corpses worried at by dogs and crows. A village becoming
an open grave; terror-stricken multitudes fleeing blindly. All as I lie
here, my burning consciousness fully aware and my dead body unable
to run: I see them with the eye that’s canted skywards – the other eye
is submerged in the pool of sticky red blood. All of us here have
bodies riddled with holes: we leak.
I saw them kill us and rob us and celebrate within view of our bodies.
I’m furious now! Can the dead get angry? I am angry therefore I
live! But I lie here peacefully… It just seems that I’ve lost my way in
the dark passageways of unconsciousness, that I will come to, to find
my soul suspended above my body: and like a hook sunk in the throat
of some unlucky fish I’ll cling on, just as I clung to my paper kite
when I was a mischievous child. Of course, the kite wasn’t really made
of paper: it was used bags that we fixed on rods and tied to a block of
wood with thread we filched from our mothers, then let it loose, bit
by bit, to flutter up into the distant sky. Now I’m the block of wood
and my soul is fluttering above me, up in the distant sky, keeping
company with the hawks that circle like flocks of flying moustaches.
I hear intense gunfire now and the lens of my eye records flames
of many colours and sizes, the colours of inferno, and terrifying noises
like thunder reach even these dead ears. The rumble of tanks shakes
me; the heavens rain fire. A fireworks display where every rocket is
in deadly earnest.
I see us attacking ferociously and I see us, or our doubles, falling
in heaps and mounds. One man is hit with a shell that could wipe out
a whole squadron and he becomes nothing but shattered fragments, or
at best a half- or headless corpse. And now they’re fleeing or lying in
those postures that show no respect for death’s awful majesty… like the
corpses of my father, my siblings, my neighbour, and more, all killed
without mercy, and then they celebrated in sight of the corpses. Our
corpses. Theirs.
I hear the thrum of gigantic rotors, setting down beside us like
birds of prey, the raging dust cloud they create sweeping the hawks
and dogs and flies off us. People get out – important looking people,
preceded by a host of guards who train their guns on us, down alleys
and at treetops. They wear short-sleeves and gaze at us solemnly:
we who were people full of life and joy and are now putrid corpses,
rotting and still.
They fetch large sacks and one by one start bundling us up: us
and the soldiers; me and my brother who killed me; me and the other
me who killed me without mercy and rejoiced. Us: the killers and
the victims.
When they stoop over me and move me, my soul, snagged in my
body’s gullet is set loose and soars away. As they begin to wrap me up
in one of those sacks my eye slips out of its socket and rolls over the
dusty floor, and a hawk swoops down and snatches it up into the
heights. From up the sky I see us lined up and wrapped in sacks,
being counted: one, two, ten, one hundred, five hundred, a thousand,
two thousand…
They dig a grave to which we are all driven: me, my father, my
brother, my sister, the baby in her arms, the friend I argued with
yesterday over the booze gone bad (how I wish we hadn’t!), the
frightened Ethiopian merchant who ran the cheap bar, our neighbours,
the soldiers who killed themselves and us and rejoiced in plain
view of our corpses that were theirs.
The hawk soars holding my one eye that has seen everything.
Staring down from the heights I’m stricken with grief:
The hawk circles in the sky. The flames burn everything. The earth
swallows the trees like tortoises pulling in their necks. And I see me.
With the eye that the hawk devours. I murder my siblings without
mercy. I rob my father without fear. I exterminate my tribe without
a tremor. I rape my sister with glee. I kill myself and I rejoice.