Eben Wood

The Masturah Well

You’re not supposed to talk about these things, and then something happens because you’re not supposed to be talking but you need to talk, and so talk, and then because of what happened you have to talk again, are compelled to talk, because it’s legally what you have to do, because you’ve been commanded to do so, like you’ve been ordered to be made.
There’s a list of questions the foreman—who in this case is a woman—reads out to you and you answer the questions in the order they’re given, and answering in this order locates first you, then your relation to the accused, then the specific place and date at which the accused and you came face to face with each other, what specifically was said in that place, what actions followed, reactions, interactions, and then, and then, and then, ellipsis.
Silence, breathing, clearing throats, and the rattle of paper.
The sense of being slightly outside or beyond the place you normally inhabit in the world—either elevated or sunken into, it’s impossible to say—began before you began to address the list of questions, before you saw them list-like in your mind and so could follow them forward without looking so much behind, seeing the periphery with its thicket of shadows, the immense darkness beyond the circle of fire, began even before you were in the room, began even as you were pulling into the parking space in front of the county courthouse with your mother in the passenger’s seat beside you, neither one of you saying anything, sound being the heater blowing air onto your cold limbs, your winter limbs, the respiratory sounds of your mother’s sickness, because it was virtually that same space that you remember pulling into with the accused maybe a year before, just after you’d graduated from that out-of-state college and had come back north looking for some sense of re-entry into the normal place you’d inhabited four years before, when you first left and thought you’d never come back. It was also spring then, or so early in the spring it was still under the threat of winter.
But you did come back, over and over during that four years, and there were often conversations with the accused, or not conversations but one-way interrogations, sometimes the one way, sometimes the other, and they seemed often to be winter interrogations because that was a season the accused seemed most naturally to live in, fat and flush-faced with it like a bear, thick with stored fat, with the memory of summer’s honey, unshaven and dirty, always outdoors or in the half-outdoors of the long, dark shed attached to the house that was the zone of ambivalent freedom in which the accused lived, with all the volition of hindsight. The backdrop for those winter conversations was a large pile of cord-length logs, red sky of early evening behind, sometimes full dark under the glare of a bare lightbulb, the snow dirty with spilled oil, sawdust, mud.
But the particular sense of being outside or beyond your normal place in the world began as you pulled into the parking space in front of the courthouse that morning because you remembered pulling in there with the accused a few weeks after you’d graduated and come home, not knowing exactly what it was you were supposed to do, much less what you wanted to do, because all there was really was there, the place you’d thought you’d left behind, dumb and inert but therefore comforting. And the accused, who really should have been driving himself but couldn’t for the very reason you were driving him and sitting beside him in the passenger’s seat down the street from the courthouse, hunched over and red-eyed and looking even more tired and old than he usually did, exhausted by what was happening but somehow also oblivious to it, like it was the normal and expected load that he was supposed just to heft up onto his shoulders and hump with—and that would be the word the accused would use—into the next day or week or whenever it was the official word would come down that enough had been done, that all loads could heretofore be rested. Red-eyed and hunched over then, looking up at you and you’re realizing for the first time that he wasn’t just tired and old that morning, he really was tired and old and shrinking even before your eyes, gray and invaginated, more even than he would when again he became the accused a year later. But then he’s just looking up and holding in one hand a plastic bag with his toothbrush and toothpaste and whatever else they’d told him to bring and with the other hand he reaches to shake your hand and his is shaking with his tremens and the only thing you can think to say to him is good luck. And he doesn’t say anything but fumbles for the door and brings a rush of fresh air that reminds you with a shock—it’s late morning, still before noon—that he’s smelling of whisky already and in that way he will face what’s coming. By the time he’s sobered up he’ll have scratched one from a thirty-day sentence.
But that was over a year before, the same building and the same accused but in a different situation, a different relationship to you, contributing nonetheless to that feeling—elevated and recessed at the same time—you have getting out of the car with your mother and walking up the sidewalk and between the peeling white columns, through the front door of the county courthouse, past the metal desk where the sheriff’s deputy sits, answering his questions, waiting until another deputy steps out from an office and gestures and leads you down the tiled hallway, gleaming both above and inside itself with uneven, wavy reflections from the small-paned windows at the end, windows that look out the rear of the courthouse, over the closed factory buildings, the canneries, the harbor still winter-thin with boats except for the lobster fleet and the tugs that almost daily are out with pilots to bring in the tankers and container ships to the refinery at Sears Island or the paper mills at Bucksport.
And thinking about that, your sneakers soft and your mother’s heels hard and clacking on the gleaming, over-waxed floor, you think about the famous gravestone in the old colonial graveyard at Bucksport, the gravestone that marks the resting place of a woman who’d been accused at some point in the colony’s puritanical early days of being a witch. You don’t know whether she’d been killed or not for that crime, as they’d done in Salem and elsewhere, but what you do know is that after her burial a bare foot had appeared on her gravestone, a bare and misshapen foot, and that every time the town fathers had tried to erase or chisel it off it would reappear. Even when the entire headstone was removed and broken up and a new one put in its place, marked only by the name and birth and death dates of the accused witch, the foot would, after a time, reappear.
That, to you, is the horror of the local.
But—and then you’re aware of how often you’re saying that, marking an exception, stopping the forward motion in which you move as comfortably as you would in a kayak, slipping easily along in the current that is always after-the-fact, retrospective, the ease of drawing these things together as they fade into the bends in the river behind you, so you cease. In doing so you think about the numbers game that Abraham plays with the Lord, saying Wilt thou indeed destroy the righteous with the wicked? Suppose there are fifty righteous within the city; wilt thou then destroy the place and not spare it for the fifty righteous who are in it? Far be it from thee to do such a thing, to slay the righteous with the wicked, so that the righteous fare as the wicked! Far be that from thee! Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right? You know that the unintended lesson is that you shame authority into delivering something not so much good as fucking acceptable out of the judgments that it will necessarily render, not because of the principles of some conviction but because it is the authority, because without judgment it is nothing.
You go down a dark flight of stairs to one of the basement hallways—the courthouse is built into the hillside leading down to the closed factories and canneries, the sagging-backed boathouses with their watery windows broken out, the concrete pylons where the keels of boats used to rest—and the deputy who is leading you indicates the row of straight-backed wooden chairs next to a closed door, the paper sign taped to the door saying Grand Jury in Session, No Admittance. You’re behind your mother as you walk down the gleaming corridor and descend the staircase and you can see how tired and old she looks also, just as the accused had, and you can see her scalp through the thin gray hair as you’re above her, descending, and how the nakedness of that bone and skin, her scalp, bothers you as deeply as if everything were laid bare, her breasts and genitals, the massive scar on her thigh from the femur she broke skiing when she was sixteen, and also her back curved and humped from childhood polio, the way her body seems to be going several directions at once, her hands arthritic and gnarled, everything that signals the failure of her will to resist the accused.
Then you’re seated in the straight-backed wooden chairs and the deputy says mechanically please wait, you’ll be called one at a time in a few minutes. He knocks on the door and it opens slightly with an invisible hand and he leans his head in and says something in a low voice that you can’t understand, then withdraws his head and looks at you, at both of you, and then leans back in and talks briefly. The door closes and the deputy nods at you and goes back up the stairs. At the end of this hallway too there is a window, smaller than the one upstairs, looking out over the harbor. You sit still for a while beside your mother but she doesn’t say anything, just sits looking down at her hands in her lap. You take one of the hands but it is cold and dry and doesn’t do much, just squeezes your own once and then releases, her fingers with their swollen knuckles unable to open fully or close flat against themselves, the veins etched against the white skin, freckled. You stand up finally and she seems startled, panicked, reaching for your arm but you walk away as she starts to speak, afraid of the deputy and of the authority he barely represents, represents in all its fat, stupid, sloppy ignorance, down the hall toward the window that is haloed in the light it admits into that dim hallway, smelling of wax and old paper.
You can hear your mother still shifting and clearing her throat behind you as you rest your head against the glass and look down the slope, over the parking lot, past the steeple of the Methodist Church, the oblongs of the factory and cannery buildings, the dark gray shingles of the sagging boathouses, the cluster of tugs and other boats around the city wharf, the harbor and the bay still that dark winter blue, ruffled by white, out farther around the headland and toward the islands, humped and glacier-scarred like the backs of whales, to the south. There is a small monument marking a rock in the harbor’s mouth. The glass is cool, vibrating with the wind that is, while only the space of the pane away, silent and removed.
There is the world outside and the world inside, and that is the point of the compulsion to speak, the commandment to speak, that you know is coming and that you also know will only come up to the skin, up to and around it until it is floating around and outside of you in that speaking like the blue winter sea you could almost reach if it weren’t for the glass and the breach that its clarity seems only to emphasize.

They take her first. The door opens behind you and when you turn, startled, another deputy steps out, looks down and then up the hallway at you, hesitating and then calling her name. She looks up at you, both narrow hands together on her handbag, then stands and follows him through the door. You turn back to the islands and the monument for a moment, seeing the almost oval mark still shrinking that the heat and oil of your forehead left, the glass briefly cool again against your skin, and return to the straight-backed wooden chair. For a minute you obey its posture before you slump down. There’s no sound at all from behind the closed door.
It’s awkward because there is the accused, meaning there’s an accuser, but in this instance this is not you. You might have been at one time, as in those one-way interrogations, but not now, oddly, after all this. You’ve been commanded to speak. The accuser is the peeling white columns, the cream-colored door, the flags and the metal desk, the wavy, reflected light of the long hallway. You’re a witness to be called, to guarantee the rightness of the accusations, to give them weight and heft. They will be lifted up and placed upon, the accused made to hump them because they are his, because he authorized them with his actions, because he did this to you. There is always a hollow space inside a fire so that the oxygen that will feed it can circulate and where bright embers drop when they burn through and detach from the logs that make the solid surface of the fire. Inside that space is a protected heart, not the part of the fire that gives heat away but where the complex wind that feeds the fire, that keeps it turning and burning upward like a genetic helix, exists.
You are conscious as you sit there that you will be asked, forced, to reach your hand into that space like the kid you knew growing up and who you see once in a while in the village on his motorcycle, his long hair tied back with a bandanna, leather jacket painted with a Hell’s Angel, the kind that turned its back on the burning city, apocalyptic fire, the kid who when he was very young at a family barbeque—his family raised chickens in long, ramshackle sheds surrounded by house trailers, cars on blocks, broken appliances—reached into the grill and picked up one of the glowing pieces of charcoal so it fused to his palm, so no matter how hard he shook his hand it wouldn’t come loose. Even though he was rushed to the hospital his family never had the money that would have continued in a series, operation after operation, to reconstruct the burned palm through his childhood and adolescence, making it flexible with a kind of forgetfulness of what had happened, so instead the palm remained shiny and hard, a single, thick pad of scar tissue that could not grow and so drew his growing hand in on itself like a claw. In consequence, you think, in consequence. Still, he was agile with it, his body also small and broad and hard and sooty-dark like a version of Hephaestus, Vulcan by his other name, the smith of the gods, with massive shoulders and squat, thick legs, a continuous cheerfulness, a physical readiness like an obscene joke that gleamed falsely on the skin, as plastic as the burned palm itself. The motorcycle became an extension of that squat body, a chopper that elongated him, drew him forward through chromed forks and rims, ahead of himself, returned him in speed to a wholeness the coal had cost him.
And you are reaching in, like this kid, except you are not innocent as he was of the difference between the beckoning glow of the coal and the searing heat and everything, the hardening and deformity of the burn that will follow, that will become decades of regret. You know, reaching in, being commanded to reach in, to be made to speak, to be made, that the glowing and protected heart will feel cold to the touch at first, the nerves shocked and confused, and that as you draw that heart out, into the winter air, it will turn your whole body—first hand, then arm and shoulder, torso, genitals, legs and head—into its own image, burned beyond recognition. The wind will be electric and everything will be centered in that place, made over in its image, swept before its fire.
In a way, you think, palms crossed in your lap, that is correct. The problem, you are thinking even then, even before you are brought into the room, stepping around your mother and not looking at her eyes even though you can see that they are shining, crossing the threshold, even before the deputy touches you by the arm and tells you where to sit, and it is the gentleness you know he is trying to have in his voice that is killing you, even before the foreman—who in this case is a woman—begins to speak, even before all this, which is coming you know like that apocalyptic fire, you will have to speak not in the isolated fragments like those hot coals have been, but you will have to connect them, ignite them into a single, related, and thus utterly false version of your relation to the accused, then the specific place and date at which the accused and you came face to face with each other, what specifically was said in that place, what actions followed, reactions, interactions, and then, and then, and then….
You know this because they have taken her first, and here she precedes you even though, at the time, the time you have to grasp and re-enter and connect to a before, a during, and an after, although this is hardly the way you experienced it then or experience it now, waiting, at that time she was not preceding but following, making that terrible sound in her throat and telling you—and it is not clear whether it’s you or the accused she’s speaking to—to stop. And even at that time, the compass needle spinning uselessly across the rose, it is the stopping you cannot do because it was not your action to begin, because a lifetime hardly compresses to a single instance in which someone, and that someone in this case is you, says by beginning this I am stopping what has been going on and on—going since before I existed but will not, because this is how time and history—and they are not the same things at all—work, in a single, zig-zag direction, shuttles of a rocking loom, I cannot stop this beginning that is a stopping, a stopping that is a beginning, because it was not mine to make or to give, it was made for me, given to me, grafted on to me, it is the scarred palm that has drawn all the rest of the body in and around itself, selfish as the desire for the fire that burned it to begin with. Because the burn is transferred to the scar that is fixed and dead and incapable of growing like that which carries it, which is defined by the fact that it carries, that it goes forward with that shiny, plastic hardness fixed to itself but at the same time alien and different.
Bound by this state, as you will say later, unclear on what that means.
And in this way it is itself a numbers game like Abraham played, not tricking the lawmakers but getting them to recognize themselves in the nesting boxes, one inside the other, inside the other, inside the other, as they’re drawn out and opened and it is the same content in each one, the hunger and the dirtiness of surfaces, the winter-blue sea and the islands and then the piles of logs and the red sky and the spilled oil, repetition is the connection, a stutter so the wars and the conflicts and the afflictions and the children all pile up on each other and are, in the end, indifferent, the only thing at all holding them up and apart like that thin pane of glass, cool and smooth to the touch, drawing the heat out of your forehead, but only remembered from the straight-backed chair, the new one you’ve been given on this side of the threshold, the one in which you will sit, straight-backed and rigid, to tell them this happened. It happened this way.

By looking across from the ridge, they together can see the Bedouin camp that means they’re about to leave one space, one territory, for another. This means the guide can see, it is his farsightedness that is the point, and Lawrence needs him as an extension of himself. Orance, they say, totemic name, as the guide, Tafas, says to him in pointing out the distant hump of tents on the desert, telling him, Orance, that they are about to cross into the territory of the Harith, that he is not of the Harith, that thenceforth they will need each other for protection. Then it will not be only guide and guided, before and after, one above and the other below, but both together, one having the knowledge of direction and distance but the other having some muscle and more importantly a gun, a revolver. The revolver is the best possible idea, the object that carries in itself all these other meanings, the means you will have to connect them, guide them into a single, related, and thus utterly false version of your relation to the accused, a star-map of terrible constellations, murderous, obscene, the barrel that revolves and brings each bullet in succession to the chamber, where the hammer will trip to it in an explosive blow. The revolver works automatically but it is not an automatic. It’s mechanical, requiring at each instance a human intervention. That is what Orance has and he gives it to Tafas, his guide, who refuses it until he’s brought Orance to his goal, the encampment of King Feisal. To reach that goal they must pass through the Harith country. At each footfall the chamber will roll forward, imperceptibly. The ridge they are resting against suggests a demarcation, but there is none. The land is as empty in one territory, in one country, as another. There is nothing but these empty demarcations, or not empty exactly but filled only by the sense that this has been happening and then this is happening, one period has come to an end and another begins, a dissolve, separated only by the kinds of impact, the modulation like the different notes a hand makes by its placement on a drumhead. A day’s ride into the Harith country they will find water, and a ride beyond that they will find Feisal’s camp. These men have made a friendship, cemented through the offer of the gun, the offer Tafas has refused in favor of the greater promise of their mutual success. This is a sign of the Arab revolt, a countersign to what follows. Tafas had given Orance a lesson in riding his camel, teaching him to ride not in the style of the horse but with one leg crossed under the other. Now, setting out into Harith country, Orance shows his teacher, the man of whom he is in some sense master, the one who has done the hiring, or the one who in the name of a whole superstructure of military power has done the hiring, who has vision, who has ambition, who will confront the past and force it forward, into the future, the man to whom Orance has offered the gun, his gun, his revolver, Tafas the guide, Orance shows Tafas his skill by jumping ahead, into a trot, so he will arrive on the other side of the ridge and the open desert it screens, the territory of the Harif, first. This is the journey to the Masturah Well. Or, rather, you are not shown the journey to the well but jump across it, knowing Tafas catches Orance and they talk and ride through that day, around and beyond the Bedouin camp, the Harith camp, that they could see from the ridge, or that Tafas could see and explain to Orance by the differences in tribal markings on the cloth of the tents as on his own robes, suggesting all at once, in the very enunciation of that border, that demarcation, the prohibition against the use of the well. And then you are at the Masturah Well, it is day but the days and their length are unclear except, as they will later become, in the difference between living and dying on the anvil of the sun. You are backing into a positive relationship here, like a kind of irony you could see, if these shots were reversed, appearing as tiny dots on the farthest ridgeline and then tracking down the sand-slope, not mounted, walking their camels, their tracks black threads, disappearing at the base of the slope for a time behind the dunes, reappearing on the next crest for a few moments, the gleam of some metal surface, a flash of white fabric, then again and again, vessels on a slowly rocking sea, Arabian desert, the color of nothing, then across the broad tan swale of the first valley, a long time climbing the near slope and into the defile of rock, skirting the Harith encampment until, finally, they disappear. In a similar way, watering themselves and their camels at the Masturah Well, Tafas sees the figure in the distance and it is then he tells Orance about the prohibition against his use of the well, which is puzzling to you only because you know that the Prophet has said that three things shall be given to the stranger, that there shall be no prohibition on the necessary use of water, pasture, and fire, that these things shall be given freely to those who need them for the maintenance of life, as hospitality is the responsibility of a whole community, speaking as of one who is but dust and ashes, and he who is sitting in the gates of the city rises and bows his face to the earth and bids the strangers to turn aside and stay, that they may impose themselves on his own hospitality and that he may wash their feet, that they may spend the night and rise early and depart on their way. They resist at first, that is part perhaps of the test, but then they agree and he feeds them on flatbread and is putting them to bed when the inhabitants of the city come to his house, surround it, and demand that the men be brought out, be given to them that they may be known, as it is written. And the man, mindful of the laws of hospitality, of the necessary kindness to strangers, he even offers the crowd his own virgin daughters to do with as they will, rather than to give up to them his guests. And it is at that moment, as the crowd in its rage presses forward, that the strangers themselves, the guests, take hold of the man who has fed and now shelters them, and draw him in among them and bar the door against the crowd and then smite it with blindness so they weary themselves groping for the door. And when the men then tell their host what is about to happen to the city, what is about to happen despite Abraham’s numbers game, that it is about to be destroyed utterly and that he must flee it at once with his family, the man at first refuses and then says at least he will not flee into the hills where he would be certain to perish but to a neighboring city, a little one, a little neighboring city in which his life and the lives of his family will be saved. Zo’ar means “small city” and therefore, as it is written, that is its name, and the sun had risen on the earth when he came to Zo’ar. Thus an annihilated country will be repopulated with a single seed. But the well is forbidden and Tafas is frightened, a fear that way outweighs the single figure riding toward them over the mirage’s wavering, multi-leveled surface, since he’d just, on the other side of the journey to the Masturah Well, been gratified by Orance’s company, despite the fact that he’d been brought there to guide this man, this stranger, in the first place, because it is he who has the revolver, it is he who is the soldier of the great army, dropping the waterskin noisily into the well and then raising it, transfixed suddenly by that sight, the suddenness of a figure that steps, or rides, out of the mirage, elongated on the camel’s back, the slow lope, never discernibly moving but rocking on that loom, blistering and rolling, suspended in transmission until suddenly he’s there, all within the sharp, far-seeing eyes of Tafas, while you experience the uncertainty over who this figure is, alone or in company, the territory a foreign one of multiple levels, gods and devils. This is all kept in tension because, like the territory it depicts from over the shoulders of Tafas and Orance, ruptured by what you know to be arbitrary divisions, marked perhaps by a ridge, a change from sand to stone, the color or texture of rock, the rising and falling demarcations of night to day, day to night, the flapping curtains of nomadic tents that don’t so much separate inside from out as enfold their difference, this territory marks its boundary at the screen’s frame. And here that difference is crossed, as Orance and Tafas’ journey to the Masturah Well had been, suddenly, in a jump, a jump-cut to Tafas going for the very revolver he’d refused, Orance apparently blind to what is happening, watching as you are, suddenly and in horror, as Tafas is shot. And here is the irony that you will know only later, as the film continues, that it is Sharif Ali who has shot Tafas, Ali who will in time become Orance’s best friend, the male counterpart of the lover, Orance’s defender, level-eyed, the future Arabic realpolitik, as Ali descends from his camel, doing something like nudging the body with his foot or kicking, removing from it the gun that was not yet Tafas’ but still that of Orance, telling the English that this one is, because he is a symptom, because he is representative, prohibited from using the well. And then Orance’s reply, bitter, thin and strained through his bad teeth, that as long as the Arabs continue fighting each other instead of uniting against a common enemy—and here, unknown to himself, he is describing his own suicide—they will remain a little people, “greedy, barbarous, and cruel.” You will see even then the respect come over Ali’s eyes as Orance rides off, defiant, saying to the departing back, “God be with you, English.”

Your name.
A blank.
On this day.
A blank.
Let us say, it might begin.
An invocation. The rattling of paper, the clearing of throats. Here there are windows on two walls, a corner room. Long. The internal gleam of the wood. You thought there would be a jury box, raised, with a polished railing and a gated entrance like the movies, but here there are just figures, dark against the window, at a table. There is an interval of the foreman, a woman, speaking. A list of instructions, a naked frame that you see like the roads cut straight across the sand. There is you and there is the accused, but here he’s just a name.
Meanwhile, in that interval, you’d come home from the desert, landing in the early spring, still winter on the stripped hills, landing at Logan with a hangover and hitching north through the red-brick mill towns, the vinyl-siding towns, the eviscerated towns. Across the bridge from Portsmouth to Kittery, canvas covering the construction snapping like sails, taut against ropes and then empty and slack again. Telling the stories again and again, on that leg over the bridge in a pickup with a beer in your hand, not the real stories but the unimportant ones, the ones that cost nothing in telling, that glitter faintly like the contrails of jets seen through the foliage, impossibly high, in an evacuated country. The rides get harder at the end, cutting in from the coast, over the hills, the sun falling fast and hard and reminding you that you’ve come all this distance in a day, a single day stretched taut across the earth’s surface, when among the hangover and the hard landing, the cold highway shoulders, the rise and fall of a split six-pack from Portsmouth to Portland, the glittering, atmospheric ice of the stories, you’ve returned to a world of the dead. This is a distant sun, ineffectual, its fall broken by clouds and fog and foliage, and now by the hills to the west, gray with winter pine.
Then, the conversation faded, the stories spent, nodding off against the glass, hearing the engine shifting its tone, the sound of gravel beneath the wheels, the hand on your arm, the dusk suddenly there, you’re home. Pulling your pack from the backseat and shaking the driver’s hand you can see your mother through the kitchen window, backlit by yellow light, an embalmed interior, turning to see who it is, her mouth open then and out through the door, the cry suddenly audible. The accused will only emerge later, wiping his oily hands on a blackened towel, from the shed, warily welcoming you, seeming not quite to recognize you, thinner as you are but heavier, muscled from the desert, your skin burned brown, your hands veined with work, palms calloused. Love is an estimation of power, an evaluation through narrowed eyes of the periphery, exits and entrances, lines of attack and defense, a strategic appraisal. All of this you knew even before you’d left for the desert, trained for decades to read the accused’s movements like the clouds, the smell of the wind, the color of light, the movements of birds and small animals, the indicators of weather. A spoor-scent, a sound out of place. It’s a whole atmosphere that moves through that house and between that house and the fields and woods that surround it. Still, you see it so clearly now, like you’d seen the desert from an aircraft’s eye, the ripples and whorls of shadow, the bright wink of a salt pan, the dark masses of vegetation around a well, black squares of tents or glitter of corrugated steel. Straight fretwork of trenches. Higher until you see just the modulating brown, sheets and reefs, rippling, the lines of roads and highways carved into it. The desert is a pure abstraction, and absolutely concrete, and in this it is exactly what you’d wanted to find by leaving everything else behind. And now, with the shock of the familiar, the accused brings it back in the hollowness of his thousand-yard stare.
You are arriving, you have arrived, as the foreman is speaking, at the problem that you’d thought about, that you’d put your hands and their calloused palms up against even before you were brought into the room, before you stepped around your mother and avoided her eyes because you knew you’d fall into them if you looked, crossing the threshold, even before the deputy touched you by the arm and told you where to sit, killing you with his voice, with its pretensions to emotion and empathy, even as they will come to comment on the absence of your emotion, on what is not there, on what they expect so you imagine even how you would perform it to satisfy them, even before the foreman began to speak, even before all this, which has come burning, that their questions will bring forth their desired fruit, spawn of a depopulated country, the isolated fragments like those hot coals have been, their heat expected to ignite a desired response, the response of their desire, so you are being asked to connect them, ignite them into the single thread of your relation to the accused, through the specific place and date at which the accused and you came face to face with each other, what specifically was said in that place, what actions followed, reactions, interactions, and then, and then, and then….
We were eating dinner, you say. You say, my mother and I had sat down to dinner and he was outside somewhere and she called him again and finally he came in. You know when he’s been drinking, he just looks different. Not drunk, not so obvious. It’s more subtle, some kind of all-over change that happens. Especially in the eyes. They’re darker and they don’t meet yours. He’s looking inside somewhere, inside and back, into the past. It has to do with Korea but I don’t know anything about that place. We lived in an Oriental atmosphere, and here I mean that word in all its hostility and paranoia, an invention of the west. He never talked about it except the little bit that he was wounded, that he was in the hospital, then Japan, then home. He has a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart. You say, my heart is purple too. He has metal fragments inside him still from a grenade. I know he could hear the screaming in Chinese during a night attack, the bugles and whistles. Blinding white light.
So he comes in finally and sits down and it’s obvious. You say, he’d been dry the whole time after I got back, and we even talked a little about what it was like in the desert. You say, he was curious about some things, logistical things, things about machinery, the alignment of forces, and we talked some. But he wasn’t drinking. You say, I think something had happened after I left, I don’t know. Between them, I mean. Neither of them talked much. I could hardly speak myself. When he sat down he held his hands out to us to pray, his elbows resting on the table. He almost never did that unless he was drinking, and we hadn’t done it since I’d gotten back except when he thanked God for my safe passage. My hands are larger than his but he held mine inside so I could feel his hard palms on the back of my hands. He gave thanks for our food and our safe return. When he’s like that the weather shifts quickly and when he’d finished the prayer he was suddenly angry about something, about the way the food was prepared or that there weren’t condiments on the table, something. He kept asking me if I knew what everything was, things like salt or relish, like suddenly I was speaking a foreign language. I speak English, you finally said. He started to slur his words and tell stories with no point and finally my mother asked him was he drinking again, or less directly, something like so you’re starting that again. He got up, swaying, and said he’d eat in peace and quiet. He took his plate into the living room, all the way at the other end of the house, which is not large, and we could hear the television come on with the muffled thumps and screeches and the monotonous voiceover of the evening news.
Your mother says, finally, I need to get out of this place and you say, finally, fuck this and get up and go through the next room and the hallway past the bathroom and into the living room where he’s sitting, the plate in his lap, the lights flickering and rolling up his face. I say his name to him and this is the first time I remember doing that, calling him by his name, and he turns slowly and there are amber and red lights, dull sounds, Gaza scrolling up his skin, then my shadow as I stand between.
Get the fuck out of here, he says and I reach back and turn off the television. He says something, I don’t remember what, and then he’s standing and tossing the plate hard at the floor, the sound cutting out so all I see are the fragments, bone-white china, a rising pitch of silence, spinning, then my hands are in front of me, coming up against his chest, half-lifting him, pushing and throwing him into a corner of the room where there is a metal plant stand and it breaks his fall so he’s on the floor with dirt and bits of geranium and rubber plant and aloe. The sound cuts in again so I hear him breathing, another sound approaching that is your mother’s voice, she’s shouting stop it, stop and I don’t know whether she means me or him. He’s catching his breath, gasping, processing, and as I process also I begin to step back, to step away from this thing that’s opened and that dark water is pouring out of, washing around our feet and into the corners of the room and down the hall to the kitchen and the table set with three places. When he rises it’s with a roar, a deeply wounded sound, the sound of his attack, and it scares me. I turn and run down the hall until I meet my mother coming toward us and I’m aware suddenly that this is mine, that I have made this, that this is what has come up from the well, this is what there is to drink, to act, to make that crossing because there is only the body of Tafas, the sharp-eyed guide is dead and this is mine, this thing that is here and now and no other, a boundary as the ridge had been to the territory of the Harith. There is nothing to be done but to go forward. So I turn as he charges. He picks up a small table in the hallway and comes at me with that and I realize then the strength I’ve brought home from the desert, the strength of that discipline against the discipline I returned to, that I’ve remembered and that now is remembering me. The desert will swallow Korea whole, pulverize it to dust, erase it from memory. I cut its Achilles tendons in a winter-cold stream and watch the blood blossom. The table is suddenly in my hands and then he is in my hands and I turn him and force him to the ground in the same motion, a simple tactic of submission, half- and then full-nelson, arms locked. He has some memories of breaking that tactic but there is nothing left inside but the embers that have burned him out and left the exterior only, like sometimes happens to lightning-struck trees so you find them in the forest, hollow and burned black on the outside, almost whole-looking. He tries to grab my balls when he gets his hand free but there is no strength in the gesture. There is grit now on the surface, there is the grit-covered fact of things, the braided rug rough beneath us, and he is firmly in my grip so his face is on the rug and there is simply a stillness, the matters of fact. This small man, this meat in your hands. The accused. You are terrified and exultant. You are holding all that silence and distance and discipline in your hands, calloused and hard against his neck.
Be cool, old man, you say. Be cool.
He is silent, then says, I’ll be cool, I’ll show you cool. Your mother is standing behind you, you can feel her, but she is silent then and you say okay and release him quickly and step away.
Still muttering he scrambles half-up and down the hall. You don’t go after him. Your mother backs away in front of him, out of sight finally into the dining room where his desk is, where he keeps the papers that record his years of unemployment and short-term, dead-end jobs, his means of keeping the mortgage and other debts alive, liquid, ahead and not behind him. That desk too is out of sight down the hallway, you can hear him rattling a drawer, and then your mother starts screaming, something beyond the sound you heard before, so deeply alien it’s almost comical, because something is happening that you cannot see and that you don’t understand. I’ll show you cool. Then he’s back out into the visible space, and you’re seeing the geometry re-emerge, the tactical evaluation, the periphery solidifying, because now he’s got the automatic in his hand. Not the revolver of Orance, the silver revolver, but the dark gray automatic the accused had carried as a second lieutenant along the 38th Parallel. He pops the clip and then drives it home again. All the faith, all the hard lines are re-asserted, the clarity of crouching above him, palms on his neck, replaced by the granularity of a line of sight, binocular vision, an automation of looking with the hard-edged numbers in the corner, screens and arcs of numbers superimposed and shifting, accounting for windage and distance and speed, for faith in the whole alignment of lenses and processing equipment and control technologies. Because now he’s pointing it at her, still hidden but audible with that terrible sound, and you step forward and now it’s pointed at you, how cool is this, taunting, then slightly—and you can see this and it will help you later, knowing that he deferred, that the deputy would later, after he’d cuffed the accused and put him into the cruiser, find only a single bullet in the clip when he ejected it into his palm, but you don’t know at the same time what the accused thought when he loaded the clip—to one side and you can see with the hair-fine precision of your eyes the squeezing of the trigger, the click of the empty chamber, no round no round no round, three or four times. His eyes are as big as the sky.
You get the fuck out, he says, the gun an extension of his index finger, pointing not out but back toward the trigger, like one of those old printer’s icons, the indicator of a past action, not described but held in an element of its own action. In the back of the living room, over the crushed plants and the broken pottery, is a sliding glass door, and you can see through it the mud and patchy snow, the wet, dark bark of the apple trees, the pine woods beyond.
I’m going, you say, I’m gone, and you’re speaking to her and not him, so she says go, I’m going, and you jump for the door and it’s open, instantly the air and then the ground cold on your bare feet, no enfolding of the difference between inside and outside as in the tents of the Bedouin, shaking in the desert wind, the khamsin, a well of prohibitions, the sideways rain of grit that fills every moving part with disruption, with the constant reminder of an inexorable environment, running along the back of the house, along a solid and protective wall, waiting to hear a sound, breathing, breathless, your feet colder and burning at every step but gratefully thin-skinned, grateful because you are feeling this, touching the wet ground, the soaked ground, the spring, deferring that sound by your will. You’re suspended in your running so there is no sound and that is terrible too, all the heat and noise of the house shut off suddenly so there’s just the metal chime that hangs from the limbs of the apple tree behind the house, a chime that is made to sound like the buoys that mark rocks off the coast, their sound audible over long distances of open water and fog, solid and hollow at the same time, dull metal, an incredibly heavy sound, the sound of averted disaster but also of places marked to be avoided, empty places, the sound of a threat or a risk that hangs ready and potential in the air, pointing toward an aperture in the usual safe passage across water.
And inside that repeated sound, suspended like your seeing, is your running, shuddering, rounding the house and the door opening there as she comes out, blinking, and that is him, the accused, behind her, still waving the pistol but now it’s pointed toward the sky, waving it, waving you off and away like a bad landing, like an evacuation gone wrong, like a bridge too far, because you are compelled to talk, because pouring forth from that round mouth it’s necessary, it is a legal fiat, because you’ve been commanded to do so, like you’ve been ordered to be made, and so you do.

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