on the ground, yelping madly, leaving a black circle of mud on the earth.
The guy with the Uzi is laughing & yelling curses at the dog. Eddie’s cheering wildly, shouting to make it spin faster, howl louder. He picks up a rock, hurls it at the dog. It misses, landing in a small explosion of dust just an inch away.
* * *
It’s 1972. It has been for the longest fucking time.
There are roughly 3.86 billion people living on the planet. Five of them are caught trying to bug the Democratic National Committee headquarters at a place called Watergate in DC. Another 8 have killed 11 athletes at the Munich Olympics. And 8,000 others in Uganda are being deported by 1 person, a fuck-up job called Idi Amin.
My name is Andrew Brezsky. My name. Andy. A. A plus. Or A minus, depending on who you talk to. I have to remember my name. I have to remember what year it is. What happened before I got here, the dark heart of nowhere, some hardscrabble ghost town on an island in the Central Philippines, Archipelago of the Absurd, Little Brown Brother of Big Old Uncle Sam. Must. Remember. Everything. If I don’t I’ll forget that I’m still here. Still hoping, like everyone else in this Pearl of the Fucking Orient Seas, still looking for a way out.
* * *
There’s me, & Eddie, & a student who’s been here a couple weeks earlier than me & Eddie, & who refuses to reveal his name. Every day the lieutenant & the guy with the Uzi take him away. When he comes back, something imperceptible has been damaged in him. It’s as if his body’s being annihilated, one part at a time, with the ultimate aim not of death, but a long, drawn-out disabling.
Last week they burned his nipples with a cigarette. A couple days later they stuck a barbecue skewer through the hole of his dick. Last night they attached live electric wires to his testicles. No evidence is visible unless he’s naked. No one can tell unless he talks about it. But Eddie & I, we can tell.
They don’t want anything from him now. Even his name’s no longer relevant. He’s told them about as much as they can use. But they’ve done it so many times, over & over, Eddie thinks it’s pointless to ask why anymore. Even the student, when Eddie does ask about it, always gives the same reply—that’s just the way it is. He seems hostile to any show of concern from Eddie or me. Once he staggered to the toilet bowl & pissed blood. Eddie pretended to look away.
There’s another reason he doesn’t want to talk about it, but it’s pretty obvious. Always the act is sick & dark & sexual. What normally gives pleasure is nothing now but a source not just of pain, but of shame. The more sexual the punishment is, the less likely he’ll talk about it. Torture deprives the body of making sense of itself. Eddie says it’s the same thing with people you rape. He’s gotten off the hook so many times because no one just damn wants to talk about it.
You see it happen all the time. Pretty soon you realize that’s just the way it is. They have a phrase for it: Bahala na. God willing. Even the freaking Communists believe this. God can drive a stick up your ass, & you’ll bleed, but God knows what’s good for you. Trust him. Bahala na.
* * *
There’s one window in the cell, high above where no one can reach it. If I stand at an angle a couple of feet off the wall, I can see the sky checkered against the steel bars. The full moon passes right through it in a nearly vertical arc.
Eddie’s on his steel-spring cot, lying on a black stain of sweat on a mat of woven palm. He says he finds me strange, writing all night & never seeming to sleep.
The cot sags & forms a hammock, I tell him. It makes my back sore.
He wants to know what I find so fascinating about the moon.
I tell him it never turns its back on us. You only see one side of it, anywhere you go.
It’s kind of like people, then, he says. I bet the good side is on the far side, the one you never see. But if you can’t see it, who the hell cares?
I tell him it’s much brighter in this part of the world. Bigger and brighter.
It’s the only one I’ve ever seen, he says. I wouldn’t know the difference.
* * *
By the time they’re brought here, Eddie & the student have already been tempered earlier, passed on from camp to camp. We’re in the middle of nowhere, a ghost town, the fields scorched black, burnt spears of bamboo jutting out of the ground where a few huts used to be. At night bats swoop from a mountain cave close by, clouding the sky like a storm & filling the air with the stench of guano. They’re bloodsuckers, they’ll tear apart anything in their path. Even the lieutenant stays indoors when they wake, rabid with an ancient & vicious hunger.
Eventually we’ll be shipped to Manila, where Eddie says the privileged ones go. In Manila they won’t touch you so much, because people will know. Reporters, Amnesty International, that whole shit.
I’ve seen scars where other soldiers cut them up or burned them, bumps in their arms & legs where bones have broken & healed. At some point they’ve confessed everything these guys want them to confess.
Things are slower now. They’re no longer useful. Nothing more will be taken from them.
Neither one talks about it much, but the damage has been done: they’ve already betrayed a father, a brother, a friend.
* * *
Once in a while Eddie’s jacking off & we can hear it & the student whispers, Knock it off, & Eddie whispers, Why don’t you try it, faggot.
I think they’re both about as old as I am. The student was picked up the day the president declared martial law. Before he came here, his life was pretty normal, cramming for an exam, going to a movie, getting to first base with a girl. He & Eddie talk about it all the time. The stories are all the same after a while. They’ve run out of new things to say. When something new happens, like the dog & the bitch & the soldier hacking the dog’s dick off, they talk about it for days. Pretty soon the story gets exhausted, neither of them wants to hear about it anymore. They don’t say it, but I think they know that in the act of telling, something is always given up. Something withers away.
* * *
Rain patters everywhere, drumming on the tin roof of the barracks. It sounds like something enormous has crashed through the atmosphere, & its wrecks are falling over our heads.
“And life is not so ample.”
I’ve been trying to remember that poem but the rain jumbles the words in my head. If only I can remember it, I’ll be all right. Tomorrow, this afternoon, in a couple of hours, someone will come. This is not happening. & suddenly I’m okay. My entire body is changed. I feel a kind of lightness I can’t explain.
Then the hours pass, the days pass, & I dread the prospect of tomorrow. I force myself to recover that buoyancy. Sometimes I succeed. I’m also aware that this emotion is tenuous, even phony. One single word, one unguarded moment, will send me crashing back to earth.
* * *
Some newfangled thing called the compact disc is predicted to change the way we listen to music.
Somebody’s invented “electronic
