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  He would never be able to bear her as long as he lived, that was all he knew, no more than Jacques Cousteau could swim free of his brilliant chamber. “Because you're ugly.”

  “That's so.” She seemed relieved, as though something hard had turned out to be simple. “When I was little, everyone thought so.” And to Perry's amazement she began to clap her hands above her head, sidestepping around him in a little circle, while he rotated to watch her as she chanted: “Jasmine is a friend of mine, She resembles Frankenstein, I forget the something line, She resembles Frankenstein.”

  (“Of course,” said the girl who would soon become Perry's wife, as they lay through summer weekends in her vacationing parents' bed—“Of course,” she said, stroking the hair back from his forehead, or kissing his foot that had never fully formed, “you knew it was yielding your father that you hated, not that poor lady.” Jasmine had been something he loathed, not hated—a disfiguring illness—and though his heart was now quiet, the mark was there. Perry didn't reply, because he badly needed this girl. And in a minute she held his head against her breasts, or sat up in bed cross-legged, or brought fresh ice cubes for their coffee cups of wine, and asked him to tell her again.)

  ————

  The morning of the wedding, while his father was out getting his hair cut, Perry stuffed some clothes into his school briefcase and caught a bus downtown. He had emptied his bank account the day before.

  But at the Greyhound station, nauseous with diesel fumes, the throb of engines muttering from its tiled walls, all he did was sit on a bench ornate with obscenities, watching people depart and arrive. And it was as though Jasmine had infected everyone, because none of them looked human to him. Even children younger than himself—aliens in plastic skins.

  Every few minutes a new bus delivered more, and others left. On one wall was a Greyhound route map like a vast anthill seen in cross-section. Perry saw how it was. The world was crawling with them.

  He walked all the way home. The sun was high by the time he arrived. He wanted to be so tired he wouldn't think, but what he felt was only his regular walking pain and a terrible thirst.

  At first he thought he'd mistaken the house. There were strange cars and a van in front. Inside, he found people in uniform: a fat woman in the kitchen, two waitresses setting out trays of half-dollar-sized sandwiches, and a white-jacketed bartender who quickly gave him a ginger ale. “Nice home,” the bartender told him. “Those your ants? Pretty nifty setup.”

  “Your father was sick,” said the fat woman, watching him gulp his ginger ale.

  “Sick?”

  “Just sick. I told him this is his day. Do you know he almost called it off? I told him absolutely not.”

  She bowled away back to the kitchen. The bartender, looking after her, made one hand into a flapping, quacking jaw. Then he fixed another ginger ale, this time with cherries. Burping, Perry took it to his room. But now the room hardly seemed his, he'd thrown out so many things he couldn't bear for Jasmine to see—books with print that was childishly large, walkie-talkies with dead batteries, board games missing most of their cards, old snapshots of himself: in a sandbox, in a crib, riding on his father's back.

  ————

  In later years a time came when Perry had to enter the hospital. He was to have tests for cancer, possibly an operation. While he was waiting to find out, his wife sat with him every day. Their friends from the city came, friends from the shore, until the room was like a florist's shop, and the nurses' aides laughed and brought more chairs, and people had to leave so new ones could sit, chewing each other's chocolates.

  The man who shared his hospital room had no visitors at all. He could not speak; the doctors had taken his larynx. The cancer was still active in him. After visiting hours, when Perry's wife and friends had gone in a flurry of careful hugs, the mute loved for the curtains between their beds to be drawn back, and for Perry to talk. He lay on his side, listening, bright-eyed. It helped him go longer without his shot.

  Perry told him the story of his father and Jasmine—how on the day of their wedding he had almost run away. How, coming home, he lay on his bed with the tingle of ginger ale in his nostrils, and realized, when he saw something move, that it was time to get rid of them, too.

  He brought their city to his bed. Stretched on his stomach, his eyes inches from the glass, he watched their mindless scramble and rush. They couldn't know he existed, or even that they themselves did. And this, Enjoying Your Ants had claimed, was educational for the entire family. The ants knew nothing, Perry tried to explain—only what the whole world knew, the same imperative that held the oceans in their beds and hurled apart the stars. The mute, his cheek flat against his sheet, gave a horizontal nod. He was beginning to sweat.

  At the end of the most remote tunnel an ant was lying still, and lay still as Perry continued to watch, even when he shook the city slightly. It was Fiveleg, apparently dead. Contrary to what Enjoying Your Ants had promised, he had not been removed to a cemetery. The other ants were just letting him lie there.

  Perry had been expecting death—how long could these creatures continue?—and wasn't surprised that Fiveleg was the first to go. It was actually a relief. He got a tweezers from the bathroom and reached into the city, collapsing Fiveleg's tunnel, to pull him out and flush him away. Reaching into the air between the high hospital beds, he pantomimed the operation of tweezers, while the man with no larynx stared and nodded.

  But Perry saw with horror that now, crushed in the grip of the tweezers, Fiveleg was spasmodically moving. “Reflex action,” he explained to the mute, who crinkled his eyes in doubt. And in fact Perry wasn't sure that he hadn't killed Fiveleg himself, or even that the ant had been finally dead. He got rid of him in the toilet, then washed the tweezers and scrubbed his hands until they hurt.

  Back at the city, he felt better to see that several others looked feeble. It was obviously time for them to go. He carried the city out to the back yard, to a spot that was mostly bare dirt, and dumped them. They wandered blindly, lost.

  Church bells, he told the mute—who was now sopping with sweat, his hand wandering toward his call button in swimming gestures—the sudden pealing of bells was probably an invention of memory. But something had made him wonder whether he still had time to get to the church and hand his father the thin gold ring. He knew where the church was. He felt certain he could walk that far.

  But he was still there in the back yard, retying his shoelaces, brushing dirt from the knees and seat of his pants, cleaning his hands and face at the garden hose and slicking down his hair, when he heard (to hear it again was why he liked to tell this story) the approaching joyous clamor of many cars blowing their horns.

  1984

  THE LUCKIEST MAN IN THE WORLD

  Randall Silvis

  When Emiliano Fortunato returned to Torrentino after being wounded in the war, he found his small village still in mourning. Of the twenty-eight men who had marched off happily a month earlier, vowing to destroy the oppressive federal regime, only Emiliano, a thin, hazel-eyed youth of seventeen, survived his outfit's first encounter with the enemy. Ironically, the men of Torrentino had suffered no previous oppression at the hands of the government. So remote and insignificant was their mountain village that most of the inhabitants could not even name the politicians then in power. But the revolutionary soldier who happened into Torrentino had told such eloquent stories of repression and taxation, such tales of brutality, of rape, torture, and decapitation, that the men of Torrentino felt a long-neglected national pride stirring deep within them, and all were subsequently moved to march against the faceless capitalist tyranny that was threatening to usurp their birthrights.

  That their birthrights consisted of little more than a dusty garden plot and an earthen-floored shack for each of them did not seem to deter their enthusiasm. Any opportunity to escape the monotony of Torrentino was welcomed. And as a consequence, every Torrentino male between the ages of thirteen and sixty-five
was wiped out. Only Emiliano Fortunato survived. Perched thirty feet up in a treetop, he had been acting as lookout for his regiment but fell asleep cradled in the fork of two branches. He awoke to the sound of gunfire, only to discover that federal troops had already passed beneath his perch and were swarming over the resting revolutionaries. The men who were taken prisoner were lined up almost immediately and shot. The entire encounter could not have lasted more than fifteen minutes. Emiliano huddled in his treetop cradle, weeping and vomiting, and watched as the federal soldiers tossed his dead neighbors into a shallow ravine and covered them with a few shovelsful of dirt.

  When the soldiers departed Emiliano attempted to climb down out of the tree. But so weakened and dizzied was he by what he had witnessed that he lost his footing and tumbled down through the branches, shearing off limbs as he fell. Landing on his right side, he struck the earth with a heavy thud and lay unconscious for several minutes. Finally he staggered to his feet. To his amazement Emiliano discovered that a twig approximately an inch in diameter had been rammed through the triceps muscle of his right arm. There was no pain, though he could see clearly where the skin closed around the twig at its point of entry, sealing the wound, and where, on the other side of his arm, the twig's sharp point distended the skin.

  As though in a dream Emiliano watched a trickle of blood drip from his arm. Then, regaining some of his senses, he removed from around his neck the green bandana, symbol of the Regimiento Torrentino, and tied it tightly around his upper arm, tugging at the bandana end with his teeth. He then walked in wide circles around the battlefield for several hours, pivoting in a daze past the pit in which his slain neighbors lay like fishing worms in a tin can. Toward nightfall his legs gave out, and he fell asleep beneath an huisache tree. Inhaling the rich fragrance of its yellow flowers he lapsed into unconsciousness. For the next eighteen hours he slept, his sleep haunted by mocking, accusative visits from his dead neighbors.

  Early the next morning Emiliano awoke, his arm throbbing and burning, swollen to three times its normal size. After breaking off the protruding twig so that only a fragment extended outside the skin, he began the long hike back up the mountain to Torrentino. He was afraid to go home, but at the same time afraid to go anywhere else. For the first time in his life, he was alone. As the only child of his widowed mother, Emiliano had been coddled and pampered, and at seventeen was still very much a boy.

  He filled the tedious walk with self-denigration and chastisement. He called himself a coward, a little girl, a shivering puppy. On the third day he reached the depths of self-humiliation and stood on the rim of a high rock ledge, wanting to jump. But he could not force himself over the edge. Aloud he prayed: “Dear God, I am a gnat, a mere pimple on the face of the earth. I don't deserve to live. If You will give me a little push I won't in any way attempt to hold myself back. Send me hurtling down into purgatory where I belong. I am ready to die and am awaiting your assistance.”

  But although Emiliano stood poised on the ledge for a full ten minutes, not once did he feel the hand of God upon his shoulder, giving him that necessary shove. No dark wind came sweeping down upon him to carry him off into space. There was not so much as a breeze to ripple his torn shirt.

  Emiliano stepped away from the edge and sat down in the dirt. Apparently God did not want him dead. Maybe, Emiliano thought, it was not by accident that he had been perched in a treetop while his neighbors were dropping like flies. Maybe it was more than chance that had landed him on his shoulder rather than his head when he tumbled out of that tree. The sharp twig could as easily have pierced his heart, couldn't it? But no, it had been directed into the muscle of his right arm, to an out-of-the-way place that would not prove to be life-threatening.

  Maybe God had plans for Emiliano Fortunato. He certainly had not gone to all the trouble of keeping the boy alive only to help him kill himself in a fit of self-loathing.

  Reasoning thus, Emiliano quickly overcame his depression and turned his attention to his wounded arm. The arm had, thankfully, ceased its intolerable burning. Emiliano took this as a sign that God was looking after him from moment to moment. The only discomfort Emiliano now felt, aside from his hunger, was an occasional prickliness in the tips of his fingers and a bothersome itch around the mouth of the wound itself. Throughout the rest of his arm he felt nothing. It dangled from his shoulder like a wet cloth.

  On the fourth day after the battle Emiliano staggered into a small village in which there was a doctor. Dr. Sevilla was a slight, heavily perspiring man who lived in a large white house, its screened porch alone as big as the house Emiliano shared with his mother. The doctor appeared quite touched by Emiliano's wound. He even stroked the boy's chest reassuringly while, between strokes, he gingerly removed Emiliano's shirt.

  “You don't have to be so careful,” Emiliano told him, affecting the stoicism of a hardened warrior. “My arm no longer hurts. In fact I can't feel a thing.”

  Dr. Sevilla cut away the green bandana and exposed the arm. “Oh, you poor beautiful child,” he said, and he actually began to weep. “Who tied this scarf around your arm like that?”

  “I tied it myself,” Emiliano said, a bit too proudly.

  “But much too tightly,” the doctor said. “And you never loosened it to let the blood flow, did you? The wound itself wasn't serious; the muscle would have healed in time. But you cut off all the circulation to your arm. Oh, my poor stupid child.”

  Emiliano did not quite understand. Wasn't the purpose of a tourniquet to prevent the blood from flowing? Nor was he certain just what Sevilla had in mind when he prepared a hypodermic syringe and then swabbed Emiliano's shoulder with alcohol.

  “Will that help my arm to heal?” Emiliano asked.

  “Your arm is no longer an arm,” Sevilla said, shaking his head and not bothering to wipe away the tears as they trickled down his cheeks. “It's just a tail on a chicken now. It's just an old snot rag that you used to wipe your nose on.

  Emiliano was confused, but he said nothing. Without feeling he watched as the syringe needle punctured his skin, as the clear fluid in the hypodermic was gradually injected into his shoulder.

  “You never even tried to clean the wound, did you?” Sevilla asked. He placed some frightening-looking instruments in an enameled basin, then poured over them a full bottle of alcohol.

  “Do you know what gangrene is?” Sevilla asked.

  Emiliano shook his head. He was beginning to feel very sleepy.

  “Oh, you poor child,” Sevilla said. After preparing his instruments he came back to sit beside Emiliano and to hold the boy's good hand, his thin fingers stroking Emiliano's wrist.

  After a few minutes Emiliano slumped forward into the doctor's arms. Sevilla held him upright, his smooth-shaven cheek against the boy's as he caressed the back of Emiliano's neck. Then very gently he eased the boy down on the table. He lifted Emiliano's dangling wounded arm, truly as lifeless as a wet cloth and as useless as a tail on a chicken, and laid it flat on the table. Then he went to the enameled basin to retrieve his instruments. He came back to the table and spread out the instruments in a row. Then, weeping softly each time he looked into Emiliano's handsome, youthful face, he began to saw off the arm.

  ————

  For three weeks Emiliano recuperated in the doctor's comfortable home. He wore Sevilla's clothing, slept in Sevilla's bed, ate at Sevilla's table. The doctor pleaded with him to remain permanently, to become, Sevilla said, his assistant. But Emiliano did not feel at ease in the huge empty house. The servants looked at him snidely, and he had the feeling they talked about him behind his back. Also, Sevilla was constantly wanting to touch him—under the pretext of examination, of course. But sometimes in places which, the boy thought, could not have anything to do with his amputated arm.

  One day when Sevilla was attending to another patient, Emiliano gathered a bag of food from the doctor's kitchen and resumed his journey home to Torrentino. His village was approximately a five-hour hike away, situ
ated on a remote mountainside well off the main-traveled roads. He walked half the distance that first afternoon, and then, still weakened by his operation and three weeks of inactivity, spent the night beside a shallow, fast-running stream. He slept until noon the next day, and in mid-afternoon finally caught sight of the low buildings of Torrentino.

  The villagers of Torrentino, all of whom were now women or children or very old men, were preparing for their siesta when one of them looked down the road to see Emiliano trudging toward them from fifty yards away. From that distance he appeared lopsided and hazy, his body seeming to shimmer in the heat. As soon as his face was recognized, the assumption was made that Emiliano, thought to have been killed with all of the other village men, was a ghost.

  Argentina Neruda, a wrinkled, shrunken, and smelly old woman who practiced Aztec shamanism, chanted and shook a small leather pouch of animal teeth at the approaching figure. She warned her neighbors to remember the federal soldier who had come to gleefully announce that the entire Regimiento Torrentino had been killed, snuffed out like a weak candle flame in a windstorm. The pathetic little rebellion had been squashed, the messenger had said. Ground like a tarantula beneath the boot heels of the magnificent General Cruz. He had spoken as eloquently as the revolutionary who had earlier led all of the men to their deaths. How could they not believe him?

  The villagers gathered in the dusty street in front of Father Vallarte's Mother of the Holy Infant church and watched Emiliano approaching. As he came nearer they stood their ground but huddled closer together. Father Vallarte, his glaucoma-plagued eyes squinting to make out the hazy figure, feebly made the sign of the cross and began to mumble the Lord's Prayer. Halfway through the prayer he lost his place and was forced to clear his throat and begin again. Argentina Neruda chanted ancient indictments and rattled her pouch of animal teeth.

  What could the ghost of a seventeen-year-old boy want of them? the villagers asked themselves. Hadn't they been lighting their votive candles nightly for the souls of the departed? Hadn't they been reciting their novenas and attending religiously to their mournful thoughts? Why was this specter coming to haunt and grieve them even more?