“But Master, we are blind! When you thrust the Jew’s hands into thHH H>Z?E5AACW ZQS}3,O>4Z?S{ A<QZA5W.Q?^4
into the fire you^X>#C?I MPOPUZS<ZQ @XQ?45EE {U4CWZ/ C,X> O4MQ46<QP
basket caught fire, and in the heat, Master, the swamp lizards exploded, one after another! And a single drop of their poisonous blood is enough to strike you blind! The blood of the swamp lizards took our eyes, five boys and a lieutenant!”
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t back to me what you find. I am concerned that there may be a plot against me! A plot that would endanger everything we’re fighting for! Everything! Everything! Keep a close watch on the lieutenants, they can’t be trust }^#
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He’s smiling in his sleep. Even without a mouth you can see the smile. And in spite of what I had thought before, there’s nothing clownish about it. He is eleven, twelve, thirteen, with eyelashes a woman would envy. And a ruined mouth. And the fists, or rather claws, stuffed under the blanket, stinking, the stench of burnt Jew flesh so thick I can hardly say whether there is a Jew song in the air, some song of the Hebrews that must needs be eradicated, or just the odor of burning Jew. I skin the ringnecks, I make an incision around the beak, and two more under the wings. I take firm hold of the feet, and yank them — first one, then the other. Meat, bone, and beak tear free from skin and feather, and I slip one of these bird pouches over the Jewboy’s left claw, and this cuts the odor of burning flesh. I do the same for his right hand, withHH#3XR{O>MX CRXRS5^W3AA//A#U#XEU Q M<{ O,C5U,#PEMRWRU3WU6W3}A^Q}Z^> # AP#EPWR
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There are blind boys and a blind lieutenant.
We still have the Blood Youths.
And yes, we still have the Jew.
And at last one of the delegates spoke up, I couldn’t tell if it was Sunni, Shi’a, Kurd, the face vibrating with the pressure of skull on steel, the skull inside the face vibrating, but voice steady, We can’t see the dregs, it said, we don’t see them but they’re there …
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Then another head spoke up, another Sunni, Shi’a, or Kurd, We think we’re drinking pure water but we’re drinking a noxious paste, an admixture of dregs, there’s your water, dregs and nothing more, we go our whole lives living and thriving on water, we elevate water as pure substance when it isn’t pure at all, it’s a putrid concoction, a weeping bile, water everywhere corrupted by the grave and spiced with human remains, one day we open our eyes and discover we’ve only ever been drinking tomb water<E?M.EP AQSRSIRQO4WO^P3OZ#@EAEPM,#IAXW}OSUW6?M}PQM.3}E./SIW CSZOPSAC?@,>XP WS{EPA5@E{RO?
bottled water and the tap water, the water imported from Zurich or Barbados or pumped up from the prairie by good simple folk, even the water we kneel to cup from the mountain stream, is juice perking up from mass graves, sweat dripping from the vaulted crossbeams of mausoleums …
And Mr. Jerry, a new head told me, then another, heads one after another revealing their truth to me, the truth of the pressurized head, they explained it all, Water is nothing but liquid waste, ice solid waste, every sip chokes us like mummy wheat, and yes, Mr. Jerry, if we had any sense of propriety we’d dust our jam jars with lye before drinking from these potter’s fields, from these pit latrines fit only for the disposal of bodies, one pit latrine for heads and hands, anothHHT6I5O@5A>REA @REOIQ/ 6CQMRI WMER/
for trunks, if we had any sense at all we’d sew our lips up with fishing line and knock away the IVs, tear away the straps and restraints that anchor us to our beds, rip out the IVs, damaging our veins if necessary, doing the necessary work to OO^QPI3CWUR/ W5QE>C{QZOO}>E@WWOES 5@M}MZ 4OEZX4U#OPW4 >R^CZ@Q4ACQ3OU}ZE4#SCQZ4WQ}{ CU>5AEE<#M}^C3>SO
so that these veins are no longer of any use to the doctors and nurses, every vein destroyed for those so-called medical professionals …
Mr. Jerry, you must destroy the last usable veinNNS#.QXQ6A AR WZ^}A</
no longer possible for them to pump you full of cremains, and if they try to run a line up your nosSS C#WX3 EOMMP{UCRC3ZS6/<Q EMWS/AOR{X WCZX
sew up your nose, sew up your body and cauterize the holes, the nose holes and the mouth holes, at last you’ll crawl out into the desert, at last you’ll find your desert home, Mr. Jerry, and all the self-loathing you felt in Pittsburgh, to say nothing of Tokyo, São Paolo, Toronto, all that will vanish …
Mr. Jerry, now at last you understand, though you read about water that is mountain pure, that bubbles up through artesian springs, it only ever bubbles through boneyards and leaks down huge heaps of cadavVV^WU6?I {X.6 U{ER,3AW.SZP AAO R??SM./
the coffins are stacked five or six deep, grave tenders have no shame, they sell a plot to one person, Mr. Jerry, when he’s in the ground they yank the stone and sell it again, often they don’t even yank the stone they simply etch over the old name with the next one and the one after, finally the grandest and most ornate headstones are a fistful of dust and nothing more, all are dust, they go through stone after stone in this fashion, the point being, Mr. Jerry, that your water is bubbling up through at least twenty or thirty bodies per plot, plots which are by no means generously spaced, and of course twenty or thirty bodies per is a lowball figure, as a general rule these plots are deeper, denser, often there are hundreds or thousands of bodies jammed and stuffed and jellied into a single plot so small it should be called a semiplot, and up from these semiplot affairs with their thousands and tens of thousands of bodies the water comes bubbling, Mr. Jerry, and as for quote unquote mountain purity such mountain purity isSP#I}R ACM R6>O#4E @66>{EUOX}P/ MOMOZ} 6AQ6PQASEMW P^WRW@O6W
purity is the purity of maggots and guts, said the distended Iraqi heads.
Well and I wondered, where was Donny Rumsfeld, there was a stranger taking notes, then I remembered …
Me and Donny Rumsfeld, what we had was a childhood of onyx dogs, and I was the Dog King, I said …
The heads called out in choruses of five and six, Water is either bubbling up through corpses or raining down from a cloud of human smoke, the storms that roar forth each year with greater and greater intensity are storms of the dead pouring down on us, soaking us to our skins, and when it comes to bottled water, every mountain-pure swallow is a sucking at stiffs.
33a, though, what about 33a, there’s still 33a …
We got up to 33a, is what happened, then I called my sister, then I called Jack, I was remembering …
I talked to both Jack and my sister, and I need you to understand …
I called them both, one after the other, and I wanted to leave this conference room and this country, but I stayed …
I stayed so we could get to 33AAAA{ZM3@.C/ ZWM4Q?/6I 6<6S>P3R?##XSW I/O3M6OQ?5IRMEP^ZXRP3@SA? <C
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I’m not going to leave you …
That’s just not what’s happening …