00033

So. Another day. Another. A Tuesday.

And I’ve shuffled through my manuscript again. I lift the sheets and then I lay them down. It may be that I’ve accomplished only half my task. I have not, like my colleagues, overlooked the real arena, but haven’t I given my results the neat and compact body of a book? Haven’t I arranged my weeds like a court garden? Certainly I’ve not rescued God’s Great Blueprint from a pile of soggy discards. I’ve not done that. I can’t offer the reader Nature seen as a dump for divine signs. Only the foolish and the cruel can believe in Supreme Sovereigns now. I haven’t pasted up some poster showing a litho-nippled Providence grimly dicing us home as though we were counters on a board game—nothing so trivial or so grand. Yet, despite my care, my misgivings . . . I’m afraid that willy-nilly I’ve contrived for history a book’s sewn spine, a book’s soft closure, its comfortable oblong handweight, when it ought to be heavier than Hercules could heft. History is relentless, but now it has a volume’s uninsistent kind of time. And hasn’t the guilt and innocence I speak of there become a simple succession of paper pages?

We read, and therefore see before us a great mound of earth which bulldozers have gouged from the ground; only, of course, prisoners have dug the hole whose hollow it represents, just as these pages, I notice, pile up to mark any new obsession. In front of the mound: a mile of naked strangers. In groups of twenty, like smokes, they are directed to the other side by a man with a truncheon and a whip. It will not help to ink in his face. Several men with barrows collect clothes. There are young women still with attractive breasts. There are family groups, many small children crying quietly, tears oozing from their eyes like sweat. In whispers people comfort one another. Soon, they say. Soon. No one wails and no one begs. Arms mingle with other arms like fallen limbs, lie like shawls across bony shoulders. A loose gray calm descends. It will be soon . . . soon. A grandmother coos at the infant she cuddles, her gray hair hiding all but the feet. The baby giggles when it’s chucked. A father speaks earnestly to his son and points at the heavens where surely there is an explanation; it is doubtless their true destination. The color of the sky cannot be colored in. So the son is lied to right up to the last. Father does not cup his boy’s wet cheeks in his hands and say, You shall die, my son, and never be remembered. The little salamander you were frightened of at first, and grew to love and buried in the garden, the long walk to school your legs learned, what shape our daily life, our short love, gave you, the meaning of your noisy harmless games, every small sensation that went to make your eager and persistent gazing will be gone; not simply the butterflies you fancied, or the bodies you yearned to see uncovered—look, there they are: the inner thighs, the nipples, pubes—or what we all might have finally gained from the toys you treasured, the dreams you peopled, but especially your scarcely budded eyes, and that rich and gentle quality of consciousness which I hoped one day would have been uniquely yours like the most subtle of flavors—the skin, the juice, the sweet pulp of a fine fruit—well, son, your possibilities, as unrealized as the erections of your penis—in a moment—soon—will be ground out like a burnt wet butt beneath a callous hoot and disappear in the dirt. Only our numbers will be remembered—not that you or I died, but that there were so many of us. And that we were