McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales - Michael Chabon [59]
Being in solitary . . . that was a test, too, and I passed it to my own satisfaction. How I managed was through chants and songs. I chanted myself up into the trees I used to climb. I chanted to make myself into a cat. I practiced stalking the mice in my cell. When I finally caught one I made it into a pet. First I named it Sang, and then I named it Sans.
I never cried. Crying was a waste of valuable energy that I needed to fulfill my promises. My father would have told me that.
But then I realized there was a better way than all this escaping. (My father would have said that, too.) I did as I was told. I spoke their language when called upon, I excelled at everything, and became, at the age of twenty-eight, their youngest general ever. Years later, I fled and became one of ours.
They trapped us in our caves. Killed us except for me. I was saved for worse things than mere death.
We had learned to laugh at death. (They taught us that.) Death holds no terror, but we didn’t learn to laugh at the torture of our loved ones, therefore I have no loved ones, neither wife nor children. After they killed my parents, my aunts, and my grandmother, I made sure there was nobody else, ever, to take from me.
In those early days I fell in love so often I thought to change my plans and be their general after all. I would marry and live on the hills above the towns, but I stayed true to the vows I made when I was nine.
At our graduation from military school, a eulogy full of kindness and humor so that we not only laughed at death, but laughed along with the dead. Their dead were to be my dead, and yet I thought only of my own. Even though I could hardly remember them alive, I thought only of their deaths.
It was hard keeping to my resolutions when I got to know the enemy. I began to care for them—those who treated me well, though many didn’t, but I had knelt by my parents, covered with their blood, and swore . . . not to any God, but to myself—to the man I would become. I said, “You! You, as a man. You will remember this right here and now. No other thing will ever be as clear as this.” And that has turned out to be true. I’ve remembered nothing more clearly than the blood, and the gurgling and coughing and the jerking back and forth of dying.
I ran, and thought to hide in a closet full of my father’s uniforms as if they might save me, but they guessed where I was. I bit them, so then they put me in a dusty bag that smelled bad. I remember the taste of their sweaty, salty wrists.
Loo and Grandma? I wonder if they even know which side they’re on. This side of the mountain . . . no one was sure who it belonged to, but the other side used to belong to the scattered armies of my childhood. My home was over there somewhere. I wonder if I would recognize it? I wonder if it still stands?
Ever since I was taken away, I haven’t had much to do with any but military people. Even my women were soldiers. I don’t know what civilians are like. And I’ve never had anything to do with children, though I guess we all remember how it was to be one. Except I doubt if my memories pertain to many other children. I hope they don’t. Loo is ten, the age I was when I first escaped and was recaptured and put in solitary as punishment.
I look out from the porch of my cave. I can hear the stream rushing down. I can see it sparkling below if I lean over the cliff. The sound will soothe me as I sleep. I begin to chant. I chant, You, and Loo, and owl. Owl meant ouch in my childhood language, and row, row, row, meant remember, remember. I chant You, you, you, as I used to chant it to my grown-up self. But I also chant, But, but, but. . . .
But . . . There were no buts in my chant language back then. But . . . I’ve seen plenty of blood on both sides. But . . . Isn’t it best to look