A novel by Jack Kentala
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History is just a series of wars.
But, hell, that's not really our fault, is it?
-RMK
Tehran, Iran, 2048
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One memory amid all the others, somewhere in that haze of
sandblasted youth - of Relative youth - all the contours and imperfections worn
down to nothing:
Skittish
little lizards darting over and around and between and inside impossibly-small
hides within a boulder-strewn field, broken only by the shadeless palm trees,
the aridity of the surrounding desert past the oasis and the crooked teeth of dreamlike
mountains dozing all around us, boxing us in.
I
sat on a rock and watched my wife collect her samples and bring them to her
pneumatic cart already full of traps with living, writhing things. Snakes.
Spiders. A few confused birds. All of them seemed to rebel against the gas
canister inside each unit that hissed its chemical hiss and dragged them down
into whatever dreams haunted their sleep; or maybe they were lucky not to dream
at all; or to even worry about all that bothersome Consciousness.
My
two sons took turns jumping across incrementally-farther banks of a stream that
trickled downhill. They wore hazmat pants and knee-high rubber boots and, well,
boys aged ten and five don't have the sort of foresight about what the water
could do to them and all those adult things we keep from them, hide from them;
try to give a sheen of innocence to their youth; to my youth that I, myself,
barely remember.
The
boys started scavenging for lizards once my wife pointed out to them the
two-inch-long reptiles she was targeting for her study. She had what she needed
but either she wanted the boys away from the water or she wanted to turn it
into a game or something else, I don't know, I never asked her.
Surreal
as any scene for me: my stormy, brooding ten-year-old smiling and laughing the
same as his kid brother, a five-year-old who worshipped his sibling despite all
that fraternal fringe cruelty; a five-year-old who walked the halls of our dim
Midwestern home with a terrified look on his face, like each step invited
another ghost to come out from the walls and put a clammy hand on the back of
his neck.
Something
sticky on my knuckles and I looked down to see a lizard no bigger than the
toads in our backyard. It looked out toward that scrub, even though I knew it
kept me in its periphery, and that any sudden movement would cause a mad
scramble for some semblance of what it thought was safe.
Immobile
despite the heat of the sunbaked rock, my splayed hands on the chalky surface
like I was pressing my palms against two frying pans. The frozen lizard won
when I chickened and released, when I had to take my hands off because the
heat, my god, the heat… And the lizard disappeared, went into the slightest of
all slight shadows and was just gone, no indication of where it went or how,
just Why. Fear for so simple a reason, though if it knew any better, it'd be
afraid for more than one reason, more than just the base fear that any one of
us humans would lift up a godfoot and stamp down and crush it without a
thought.
The
next day we were back home and so entrenched in our routines that the whole
thing seemed to have never happened. No matter, I thought. I'd file it away
with the rest of my memory, all of them kept up in a dark, damp place filled
with cobwebs and, sometimes, when I went there and dug through the mildewed
cardboard boxes, a cold shiver pulsed through my body; a clear reminder that I
didn't belong there.
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Home with a capital H. The great plains and weather-shocked
Midwest, that place where people converge to forget about something; to forget
about themselves; to relive something they thought they once had.
Five
years old and barely cognizant. There was my room and Home and School and my
big brother and mom and dad. Mom at work, dad at work, my brother always on a
mission or campaign, as though he was doing dry-runs for a life of sinister
crime whenever he'd steal firewood from a neighbor or smoke a cigarette out in
the woods past the yard, always some random cigarettes that materialized from
nowhere and--
The
house itself. So much open space and dry echoes. Now: Trying not to project
everything that became of that place onto its rotting memory.
But
I couldn't think the same of the neighborhood. The houses all around with their
empty driveways and closed doors and windows with curtains drawn. Everyone
cloistered in their self-contained universes, just a few shades removed from
encasing it all in a biosphere; like they'd all walk around in tethered
spacesuits for the Sunday morning lawn-mowing showcase lest they melt in the
sun.
The
walk home from school was a half-mile, down a semi-main road before breaching
the cluster of neighborhoods. On the street were cars approaching and leaving
school; schoolbuses; big city trucks going somewhere to do something. They
always slowed when they passed me on the sidewalk, like I was some curiosity:
To gawk at a kid in ill-fitting, handed-down clothes, a kid with shoulders
slumped but feet pounding pavement far faster than most speedwalkers. I could
feel the latent hostility of the place; not that I imagined any particular
malice within the drivers of the cars or the passengers or the throngs of kids
in schoolbuses watching, probably just glancing; same with the people in their
houses, hidden in darkness and peering out into the nuclear sunshine. It was
the cars and the trucks and the inanimate houses themselves, all of them leering,
like their headlights and grilles and windows and front doors were eyes and
mouths and fang-sharp teeth, all elongated in a grimace or drawn-out, mute
scream.
I'd
get home before everyone else and take off my shoes and set down my backpack
and I'd find my chest heaving, unable to figure if my violent heart came from
my quick pace or the silent terror of all those things I'd imagine for the rest
of my life.
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