| About the Author |
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A few of Paul A. Toth's credits include Exquisite Corpse, The Barcelona Review, Eleven Bulls and Pif. He is also an Assistant Fiction Editor for Small Spiral Notebook. Poughkeepsie, Nigeria is his first short story in Nuvein Magazine.
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You wouldn't call it the asshole of the world. No, this was the polyp of the world's asshole, metastasizing deep in Africa, or Cental or South America, or somewhere hot, at any rate. I had seen monkeys, although maybe they weren't indigenous.
My only guard these days was an American, but there had been Russians, Arabs, Israelis, you name it. Anybody with an army, they'd been in charge, at one time or another. And the prisoners? AWOL soldiers of every stripe. Helicopters going down, truck accidents, airplane crashes, usually these "casualties" were us. If you ever wondered why so many soldiers die in accidents just before wars start, during buildup, well, they don't. That's how we ended up at the compound, under cover of accidents. That's when the fun began.
You see, most AWOL soldiers lacked faith. He who doesn't believe in shit, is shit, we were told. Or, as a mouth with doglike smile once said through a hole in my cell door:
"You know what a mugwump is?"
"It sounds familiar."
"A mugwump has its mug on one side of the fence and its wump on the other."
"But what's a mugwump?"
"I just told you."
My last fellow prisoner told me the world was being divided up, by agreement. The fundamentalists would get the arid lands and learn to live together. The progressives would get the green places and the science. It was only fair.
***
"Is-real," an Arab guard used to say. "Understand? Is it real? If you weren't so comfortable, you'd believe. That's why the great religions were born in the desert. It is necessary to believe there."
"Israel is not spelled that way. And I'm not comfortable."
"In your mind, you are still comfortable. If I had my way, we'd use electrodes, right here." He tapped a gun against his temple. "A thousand watts. Make your brain a lightbulb. Make your brain the sun. Make you see the light. That is what the sun does. And if the sun won't do it, I will. You Godless types don't even believe in political systems these days." But he was sent away before he had the chance to try his experiment, on me at least.
Now, according to my last fellow prisoner, the program was winding down. Wars were ending. There was much in common between fundamentalist Christians and fundamentalist Muslims. The progressives had God okaying everything. The progressives would get America, for now. But that would change.
That's what I heard, but I didn't believe it. My last fellow prisoner tried telling me it was 2233. But I remembered cars with four wheels and now they spoke of regular trips to the moon on something called bicycle rockets. I was told the progressives would have to leave earth and give America over to the fundamentalists. It was only fair. But maybe all this talk was part of an experiment. Maybe while I slept my brain had been made a lightbulb. Things did seem brighter lately.
Then one day someone came to my cell, opened the little window and said, "Will you hurry up and die? The program's over but I can't let you go. When you die, I can go home. I want to go home."
"Is it true the world's been divided up?"
"Divided?"
"Split between?"
"You've been here too long."
Later that night, the same guard returned and handed me a box. "You light these candles," he said.
I took the box and unpacked a dozen green and red candles. Christmas. This was an old trick. I was forced to celebrate so many religious days the non-religious ones seemed like holidays.
"Light 'em up, goddamn it," the guard said. "I mean it."
So I arranged and lit the candles. Soon my cell glowed, the light flickering. On the walls I watched hallucinations of childhood Christmases play like home movies. I could even touch the scenes, for they seemed three dimensional. My mother handed me three boxes, which I unwrapped. Each box contained a black ribbon.
"For my coward," she said, smiling.
"We're very proud, son," my father said.
"I want to be just like you," my younger brother said.
"Keep the candles burning," the guard said three hours later, banging on the cell door.
Now the anatomy of women floated over the Christmas tree, breasts bobbing in the blurry pastel light, vaginas fluttering like winged mouths around the sun. I masturbated in the candlelight, then fell asleep as the guard said, "Would you hurry up and die? I want to get home for New Years. Home to Poughkeepsie, Nigeria."
***
All the while I was growing up, my grandfather came to visit once a year, at Christmas. My parents always warned me not to repeat the things he said, or mimic him in any way. Still, he left his mark, a scar, really, that always reminded me of what he said at least twice on every visit: "Keep an ear out for bullshit. It makes a soft wind, hisses between the teeth. Don't let it scare you. Sleep in your own ocean. You'll drown there one day, so make interesting fish."
Had I understood exactly what he meant? Not in a way I could explain. But he made me unafraid of death. To me, death was a science experiment and when it happened I would see the result, like a chemical reaction. Or maybe I would see nothing. What's the difference? Why pretend you know something you can't know? Why play along with people who fool themselves and you? I accepted this special gift from him. "There's nothing wrong with admitting you don't know what's impossible to know."
He must have been scared when he was young. I knew because he took such care to ensure I was not scared. There was a lot of religion in the family, a line or string that ran through everyone but made a passing loop around him. Seen from one light, he appeared to be knotted in the loop, but this was an illusion. The string never actually touched him. He wanted me to join him in the empty, unbinding space of the loop.
But sometimes I wondered if it was a noose; after all, my parents' beliefs also left their mark. There were two scars, and in the sunlight one faded and the other shone, and in the moonlight the other way around. I told my grandfather about this once, when I was 15: "What about people who pretend they know there's nothing, no God or heaven?"
"Of course, they're just as bad," he said.
It never crossed my mind why all of this was so important to him. My father used to say, "Granddad likes attention, son, that's all. Don't take him too seriously. He doesn't believe what he says himself, half the time."
Mother was harsher and always referred to granddad as him. "It's him making John ask questions. But he doesn't let that keep him from coming at Christmas. It's good enough to kick his heels up and take the rest God granted."
***
The next day, long after the candles burned out, the guard returned.
"Not dead yet? Fuck it, let's get this over with."
I heard the clanging of keys. Moments later, my cell door opened. He walked toward me, grabbed my shirt and dragged me out of the cell. At last I would learn where I had been all these years.
In the corridor I saw human bones, monkey bones, wires, car batteries, ripped pages of books, a severed hand with a necklace wrapped around it. There were boxes of beakers, broken magnifying glasses, test tubes, Bunsen burners. My feet traced through chemical spills. Rubbing alcohol splashed into my mouth. Numbers were gouged into the walls, unraveled spools of recording tape and broken cassettes stacked on windowsills. The place looked like a barely heard radio program sounds, trying to make sense and failing, disintegrating at the edges of sense. Meanwhile, blood streaked down my face from my head hitting the floor.
"We're the last ones, aren't we?" I asked.
"I've been waiting for orders. But who needs armies now? It's all settled, except for the last of your kind."
"Did I hear you say last night you're going home, to Poughkeepsie, Nigeria?"
"Keep quiet," he said, dragging me now through what must have been a door leading outside, but which appeared to me as a rectangle of pure light.
Outside, he dropped me not under the sun, but in it.
***
I awoke in the middle of the compound surrounded by the jumbled remains of what looked like a hundred thousand mosques, churches, synagogues. It went on for miles and miles. Beyond that, jungle, smoking, great columns of fire rising in the distance. Suddenly, I noticed the guard walking away from me, toward a trail.
"Watch out for the last guerillas," the guard said. "But then, I suppose you're one of them."
"Where are you going, Poughkeepsie? Why not kill me first?"
"Maybe I don't believe in you," he said, disappearing into the jungle on his way home to Nigeria.
End
