20   

The late, late show

Charity woke in the dark. Randy wasn’t beside her in the bed; that didn’t bother her at all. Outside of sex, he wasn’t much company. Everything he said sounded like a commercial.

Just... she felt creepy and more alone than she ever had since dying. She rang Simnel and heard only the quiet intermittent buzz. Randy gone, Simnel out. She was alone and couldn’t sleep. She tried the outside phone: nothing, still out of order. From habit, she reached for the TV remote and turned on the wall set.

The screen sprayed garish color and flickering shadows over the dark bedroom, resolving to a night scene with a telereporter’s voice-over —

“— just an hour ago the peace of these black and Jewish homes in a quiet neighborhood of Below Stairs was shattered by devastating White Paladin raids led personally by Roy Stride, new head of the Paladin party.”

Cut to Roy himself standing in an open car, leather-coated, whip in hand, black peaked cap perched at a cocky angle, and —

Cut to a black family being dragged from their front door by huge Paladin guards. Husband, wife, three children being hustled ungently toward a waiting van. When the father broke away and resisted, one guard simply shot him. The action was brutally graphic: two guards slammed the man up against the van and a third opened fire with a submachine gun. The gunfire went on and on, his body disintegrating in sharp detail and color.

“No...” Charity recoiled from the scene, tried to change channels. They were all the same but someone was playing tricks with the camera. The black man fell and fell with his head coming apart — and then Roy again, standing in the open car. He turned to Charity as the camera came in close, and looked directly at her, found her, his mouth twisted in a smirk of macho triumph and pride.

“Hey, Charity, that you? Where are you? Look: I told you how it would be.”

And once more the scene cut to another home, smoke and flame spurting from a shattered window, Paladins sprinting out of the front door. A man and woman lay crumpled on the front steps. The camera zoomed in on them. It looked to Charity as if someone had cut every artery in their bodies. You wouldn’t think there was that much blood in just two bodies.

“The general feeling in the political air,” the telereporter’s voice-over went on dispassionately, “is that these raids have the tacit assent of the White Christian populace.”

“Who said?” Charity blurted. “I didn’t.”

“— certainly no government troops or police have made any move to intervene, as though quietly allowing political force of gravity to take its course. This act is seen by some as a definite referendum. It is increasingly clear that the confidence of Below Stairs at large is with Roy Stride’s party rather than the Wembley administration.”

Only half listening, Charity couldn’t take her eyes from the bodies. Dummies, she thought. They look like doll-dummies sprayed with red paint.

“Charity!”

Roy again in huge close-up with that twisted grin. “Where are you? I told you how it would be.”

“NO!”

She jabbed desperately at the remote control but each channel was the same, not even a lag in the film.

“Simnel-l!”

“— how it would be.”

Charity screamed silently at the vicious grin on the screen. No, I didn’t believe you. I didn’t believe it would be like this —

— as the camera caught a little girl darting around the corner of the house, shrieking in terror. She turned to see the Paladin guard trotting after her, not even hurrying. The child ran blindly to the natural place, the bleeding sack of offal that had been her mother, screaming for help.

“My God,” Charity writhed. “Don’t hurt her. She’s just a baby. Don’t.”

The Paladin guard loomed over the tiny child as the camera came in tight on them —

“These Jewish homes were the first target,” the voice-over stated with no emotional color. “The black homes were hit a few minutes later in an apparently coordinated attack.”

Something was happening to the film. Somehow it went to slow motion as it focused tight on the face of the blond, blue-eyed child. Hypnotized with horror, Charity let the irrelevant thought skitter through her mind — I didn’t think Jews could be blond. But they could; she’d seen plenty that weren’t anywhere near the picture conjured up when somebody said Jew. She’d just never connected images, never thought beyond the stock picture. This little girl was very fair and —

Very familiar. More than familiar.

“Jesus, that’s —”

The child was her at age ten. She remembered the picture her new parents took when they adopted her, before her hair darkened to brown. But undeniably her in the picture, screaming for help from her dead mother.

And then not screaming at all.

The child looked up at the guard, mute. The only sound came from Charity herself, a wordless whine of empathic terror as the Paladin pointed his pistol at the tiny face. Her own child face but changed forever. More than horror in those wide eyes, a terrible knowledge that there was no help anywhere, no pity or escape. For those few slow-motion seconds, the child was not mad but her eyes knew madness, swallowed it whole and recognized it as the truth of existence. Knew it as her head disintegrated and spattered blood and brains over the twisted flesh bag of her mother, and —

Charity wanted to be sick and couldn’t. You couldn’t be sick after death, but the nausea rolled through her stomach, all the more exquisite torture since she couldn’t even retch with it. She fled the bedroom to splash her face with cold water, but the bathroom screen was on as well — the same film repeating and repeating — Roy standing in the car, the camera zooming in on that dirty, mean grin of his that she hated — always hated it. Why didn’t I ever realize then?

“— are you? Look! I told you how it would be.”

For the first time in her life, Charity Stovall snarled. “You get away from me. YOU GET AWAY FROM ME, YOU... SIM-NEL-L-L —”

She ran out of the bathroom and stumbled downstairs. As she hit the bottom step,

all the screens went on — kitchen, living room, guest rooms; a repeating loop, the child running to the butchered sack of her mother, screaming in slow motion, then not screaming but looking up with Charity’s own eyes at the pistol barrel with that obscene knowledge in her eyes.

“— told you how it would be.”

“Stop. Stop, you son of a bitch.”

“— how it would be.”

Her instinct was to bury herself deep in the pillows of the sofa, blot out the sight and sound, but as the loop repeated, shorter and shorter now — Roy’s leer, the words, her own eyes staring not at death but a sudden understanding of life — something else began to counterbalance the horror in Charity Stovall. The fruitless nausea passed, replaced by a wholly alien emotion more powerful than she’d ever felt. Detached, from a long distance, she turned her gaze back to the screen, to Roy’s gloating face and swaggering words, and the nightmare of her own violent child death.

That’s me could be me is me...

“— told you how it would be.”

Yes, you did, she thought, watching the screen from the depths of an icy calm. You sure as hell did, and I heard it and didn’t think about it.

Faster and faster the loop ran: Charity at ten, screaming, then no voice left to scream, only her own eyes lifting to the gun, knowing what a child shouldn’t have to know but so many did and had and would.

“— told you how it would be.”

Scream. Silence. Look up. Knowing.

Until at last the film froze on the eyes and their final recognition of horror. The child, with one second, one century or an infinity to exist, would never again look on anything or anyone unshadowed by that terrible knowledge.

Obscene... I never used that word, always thought it meant dirty movies. But this is obscene. I could scream from now until the end of time, every dirty word I ever knew, they wouldn’t be as obscene or dirty as this. Not that you kill a child, but that you could put such a knowledge into her.

Now she knew the passion churning in her: rage — not from any wound to her but simply that humans could do that to children, take the brief innocence and stain it forever with the knowledge that there was no safe place anywhere ever. Forever or for a few seconds, children shouldn’t know that much about the world.

The gun didn’t kill her. She was dead when she looked up at him. Like some old people in Plattsville who came from Europe after we beat Germany. You could see that shadow of a gun barrel all their lives.

No music, love or joy would leach that shadow from the little girl’s eyes.

“— told you how it would be.”

“Damn straight you told me,” Charity lashed back. “You murdering piece of shit, I should’ve seen you coming. But I’m glad, Roy. Glad I’m dead; that’s cleaner than being alive with you. You better hope you never meet up with Jesus. He’s sure as hell not gonna like the way you use His name. I’m afraid of you, Roy. And I think you like that.”

Trembling, near-traumatized by the force of her own rage, Charity didn’t notice Simnel switching off the set or the silence that followed.

“Can’t sleep, mum?”

“Where were you?” Charity mumbled in a voice with no life in it. “I called and called but you weren’t here.”

“Sometimes I go for a walk in the wee hours.”

“Do you know what I just saw?”

“The purges? Yes, I was there. You can see the fires burning from the balcony.”

“No, Simnel. I don’t want to.”

“The government conveniently did nothing to stop them. No one did.”

“No one?” Charity whispered, still trembling. “Not one person? Did you see what they were doing?”

“Yes, of course,” said mild little Simnel. “I expect things will change at Congress Hall, The government won’t last. Not to worry; none of this will touch us in Ultimate Rise. Shall I fix some hot cocoa, mum?”

“It’s already touched me,” Charity muttered. “I feel dirty just watching that.”

“The postmoderns would call you sentimental,” Simnel observed. “Trying to encompass inhuman behavior with human sensibility.”

“Dirty... They ain’t fixed the phones yet?”

“No, mum.”

That was good, that gave her time to think. “Simnel, I don’t live here. Just like before, you never heard of me.”

“Charity who?”

“Right. Good night, Simnel.”

“Good morning, mum.”

Charity tried to climb the stairs. All of sudden there were too many of them. “Oh, Simmy — Jesus!” She slumped down on the steps. “Even... even dead, how can they do this to people? To children?”

She felt a hundred years old, too utterly spent to climb the rest of the stairs. Like a child herself, she allowed Simnel to guide her upward, his wise, gentle voice close to her ear though she didn’t understand any of what he was telling her. Something about a tiny animal who developed in the dark while bigger animals ruled the day. A funny little thing with big eyes and fur and fear, born looking over its shoulder for danger, and out of this twitching bundle of need and terror came humans never to be wholly free of the dark or their own nightmares.

When Simnel tucked her in like a tender parent, Charity saw a wisdom in his eyes older than mountains, and a pity beyond tears.