The guy swung his head slowly from to side. That was his way of showing he was thinking. He had the mug of a half-asleep giant, a red baseball cap over his forehead, pulled down to the eyes, if you could call them eyes, those two little gray dots glinting above his nose, moist with sleep and wine, so close together they were nearly lost in his enormous face. He widened them as best he could, in a questioning expression from which the gods had shorn any sign of intelligence. An idiot concentrating on an answer that wasn’t coming, a great upright ape confronting the unknown, standing before a woman dressed like a soldier. His corpulence was impressive, the stature of a carnival wrestler, with a salty drop sliding down the length of one cheek. He’d just come out, the door behind him banged shut on a heavy, noxious atmosphere, darkness, odors of grilled meat, grimy skin, and alcohol. He was wearing bermuda shorts in a Hawaiian floral pattern, and on his torso an undershirt that might, a few months before, have been white. Everything else, fat here, muscle there, was naked.
Kree repeated her question.
“Loka, I said. Do you know how she died? Was it you who killed her?”
The guy continued moving his fat face from left shoulder to right shoulder, back and forth. He didn’t seem to understand the language being spoken to him. Slender or skinny before him, dressed in fatigues that were worn but still far from ragged, Kree clarified:
“Did you eat her?”
The night was dense, the street silent.
“Yes? No?” Kree went on.
It was three o’clock in the morning and it was hot. Though there were stars in the sky, they illuminated nothing. The spot where Kree and the giant were standing had been crudely covered in boards for the bad season, the time of year when mud made it too difficult to walk on the sidewalk and access the houses. The now-superfluous boards in front of the shack cracked at every step. They accentuated the theatrical nature of the scene: two immobile characters, a laborious dialogue, a wooden set, a miserly light with shadowy effects.
The giant was positioned stolidly in front of the shack door, and if he was preparing any response, he was having trouble getting it out of his mouth. The slow nodding of his head spread throughout his entire massive body, down to his massive legs, and even though he was not shifting his weight from one foot to the other, now and then the boards cracked.
A theatrical scene almost without words, with sound effects.
Three minutes earlier, Kree had knocked on the shack’s door and hailed its occupants, whose names she’d just learned from an informant. Two brothers: the Grodons. Marcus and Dourdoul. In the nocturnal silence she’d called them with authority. Her fist beating against the door, the ridiculous shouted names. Marcus Grodon! Dourdoul Grodon! She wanted to catch them by surprise in their beds, in an alcoholic stupor and the black of night. For what she wanted to do, it would work better, in their drunkenness the men would be less alert. The informant had described the two brothers. You couldn’t confuse them. An obese brute and an almost puny crank. So it was Dourdoul, the younger one, the fat one, who came to the threshold to see what the visitor wanted. He’d dragged himself out of sleep too quickly, which, in combination with the wine fermenting within him, did not favor the emergence of clear thought. He stared at Kree in stupefaction, and she was unable to draw him into anything resembling conversation.
From within the shack came the phlegmy voice of a drunk. An interjection from Marcus, Dourdoul’s elder brother.
“What’s she want?”
As if his brother’s question pushed him out of his apathy, the giant let loose an almost human bawl toward the door, toward the stinking shadows that constituted the space beyond the door, and the brothers ran through an exchange:
“She’s asking about her dog.”
“What dog?” the other rasped.
“Dunno,” the giant said. “Named Loka.”
“So, what’s she want?”
“Wants to know who it was who ate it.”
There was a warm breeze through the street. Ten or twelve seconds of rumbling, then nothing. Often morning entered in this manner, but morning was still immeasurably far off. The wind rushed through the deserted street, stirred up the black dust and the nocturnal heat, renewed the veil of humidity that clung to Kree’s cheek. And again the street was silent, full of scents: wood, earth, empty houses, the deserted city. Again the spectatorless theater scene, a scantily clad bruiser and a woman-soldier hiding her anger, again the creaking boards and the door, opening into darkness and stench. And above, a moonless sky, ten thousand stars not really shining or twinkling, perhaps due to trails of soot up on high.
Kree’s nostrils filled with a vile haze of increasing strength, consisting of unaired bedding, unclean bodies, wine, and meat.
“You are the Grodon brothers, right? No mistake?” Kree verified.
“You got a problem with us?” asked the giant, suddenly loquacious.
“Someone they told me what one of the Grodon brothers he trapped Loka and he ate her. My dog, Loka.”
The giant lifted his round, red baseball cap and scratched his scalp, introducing a little more disorder into his oily hair, then replaced his head-covering, smashing it down as far as possible over his forehead. His porcine eyes were now completely hidden under the visor. Then his arms dropped down again to hang alongside his torso.
He had not managed to construct a response for Kree and preferred not to open his mouth while waiting.
A few sounds came from inside the shack, the elder Grodon’s hacking cough, then his voice. A sound of rustling straw. Marcus Grodon was still in bed, participating in the conversation from his mattress.
“What did she look like, this dog?”
Kree wasn’t in a hurry to answer. First she took off the bag that she’d been wearing slung over her shoulder. She set it on the ground, on the boards. It was an army backpack, left open so she could plunge her hand in without wasting any time on pulling the zipper. She was having trouble containing her rage, feigning tranquility before this mountain of idiot flesh, before this shabby house, inhabited by two men she planned to kill—as retaliation for the death of her dog.
She touched something metallic that clicked softly under her fingertips. A chain, its musical fluidity. She stirred it for a second but did not take it up. She wanted to make sure her weapon was within reach and, at the same time, to confuse the giant with movements that he did not understand. She stood up, empty-handed, unthreatening. She made an effort not to look like any cause for concern. The giant wondered heavily over her, and in his gaze, behind the shadows and slitted eyelids, she made out a gluey stupor. He did not understand her attitude, her calm; he did not understand what she was asking, and he was not entirely sure whether she was afraid of him, with his large stature, his strength.
Finally she answered the question the elder Grodon had asked.
“A beautiful black dog,” she said. “Shiny fur, brown eyes. Affectionate, but very independent.”
“Loka, you said?” Dourdoul Grodon confirmed.
He had reactivated the oscillation of his colossal head. He was thinking, powerfully and in all directions or, at least, from left to right.
“She broke her paw in a trap,” rasped the elder Grodon from inside the shack.
Then he made a brief hawking noise and spat.
As if in concert with the younger Grodon’s head movements, Kree slowly shook her head, and again bent down toward her bag, then stood. And now she was holding a weapon. When she’d arrived at the Grodon place, she’d thought she could manage with a knife, but she’d changed her mind at the sight of the one called Dourdoul Grodon. Significantly more hippopatamesque than she’d expected. A knife would be inappropriate. The fat would get in the way. The blade would go astray, it might not reach the heart or arteries on the first cut. She would have to use something better suited.
Now a tangle of metal murmured almost harmoniously between her hands. Dourdoul Grodon did not make out what she was holding; he saw a mess of iron entrails, an odd chain, nothing he perceived as dangerous. Since she had spoken of her dog, maybe she wanted to show them the metal leash she used to tie it up at night. Due to the darkness and his lack of imagination, the big imbecile didn’t see anything else.
Kree stood facing him and kept her voice neutral, peaceful, as if she were only interested in the information.
“Did you eat her?” she asked.
She addressed both brothers, but more particularly the one clearing his throat inside the shack, whose intelligence seemed a bit livelier.
“Well, yeah,” answered the elder, the hawker, as the younger one, still standing in the doorway, attempted to weigh the terms of the question and the correct response.
There was a dead silence.
It didn’t last excessively long. Prodded by some mysterious internal force, the younger Grodon, Dourdoul, the passive giant, thought best to add his two cents.
“That’s what you wanted to know?” he said.
“Yes,” Kree said.
“Well, yeah, we ate the dog,” Dourdoul Grodon confirmed. “What’s the problem?”
Kree examined him for a second. His head and hands moved mechanically, as if his brain was in the process of getting started, giving its first routine instructions to its organism so as to verify that everything was functioning, that communication between neurons was uninterrupted. A great oaf, bumbling between drunkenness and sleepwalking, not even on the defensive, when meanwhile, right in front of him, an unknown woman was manipulating an odd chain.
“Oh, no problem,” Kree said, to reassure him one more second. “I just wanted to know.”
An odd chain. With two ends that Dourdoul hadn’t noticed. One end was armed with a lead sphere, the size of a closed fist, while the other end was armed with a sharp hook, rather like a machete.
Kree gave it an initial throw and soon had a meter of chain spinning at high speed, on an oblique plane at first, then above her head. No more than three seconds. Dourdoul Grodon had realized that she was waving around an object that could hurt him, but his brain did not successfully analyze the danger, gave him no indication regarding what he should do to protect himself. He started to take a step back. The boards creaked in complaint. Once the three seconds were up, Kree waited another half of a fourth second and then threw the chain forward. It wrapped around the Grodon brother’s throat, strangling him. The lead sphere struck the base of his skull just below the right ear. In the same movement, without allowing him any time to react, Kree rushed him. With the machete on the chain’s other end, which she’d kept enclosed in her hand until then, she sliced through everything under Dourdoul Grodon’s chin. Skin, tallow, cartilage, tubes, veins, arteries. A perfect swordswoman’s gesture. Then she fell back. She tugged the chain, which got a bit tangled in the cuts at first, but then swiftly and docilely returned to her. She took one, then two steps back, then a third. The boards whined. Meanwhile the giant had already raised his hands to the gaping wound between his shoulders. He made no sound, no gargle; he was incredibly still. A statue of lard taken by surprise, with no idea how to manage his distress, a wrestler in shorts, ridiculous and slaughtered, still balanced on his massive legs.
Then Dourdoul let out a hiccup, wavered, and crumpled noisily forward. First his knees folded, his torso perfectly straight, then he arced downward in a half circle. Kree avoided the monstrous body’s crash and, as soon as the boards were quiet, she returned to plant the machete in the nape of his neck. She lingered over the base of his skull as she sawed through the spinal column. Her blade, spectacularly sharpened, moved as if there were nothing to resist.
Now Kree watched the street that looked like a wide empty hallway.
She had pulled back the machete, she’d wiped it on the giant’s cotton undershirt, she’d fallen back and, before taking care of Marcus Grodon, she watched the street.
A series of dark, unoccupied houses, built low, rarely more than one floor. Boards set onto the ground in places where the potholes must become impassible in the rainy seasons. Uninterrupted darkness past two hundred meters. Kree had been staying here for a few weeks, and she knew what the town looked like. A small town with its mediocre population of survivors, the dead and the paupers passing through, with its neighborhoods in decay, a culture of survival, a culture at the end of the world for most of the people who had escaped it. Exactly the type of place you ended up after the war and after death. No city lights: that went without saying. The streetlamps hadn’t worked since the end of electricity, fifteen decades earlier in this region as elsewhere. Only the sky took on the work of shedding light, and that, when there was no moon, it did badly.
“Dourdoul?” asked the older brother from the bedroom.
Kree had no intention of wasting time near her victim. Several times in the course of her life, priests had recommended that she should always dedicate a few moments, however brief, to a prayer, so that the dead person could begin their voyage in good condition. She had registered the advice, but she hadn’t always respected it. She didn’t see what consolation she could give to someone she had just killed. She believed in the afterlife, or rather from experience she knew that the afterlife existed, but she didn’t think her voice could influence the forces that governed the world. Besides, she considered the moment of pronouncing a prayer to be a moment when vigilance was relaxed, when on the contrary, in the minutes after an execution, she needed to stay on her guard.
“Dourdoul?” Marcus Grodon repeated. “Did you snuff that cunt?”
The elder Grodon was moving around in the house. He was getting off the mattress, placing his feet on the floor, getting up. Boards creaking, a grumble, steps.
She drew back into invisibility on the other side of the street. The man was going to come out, lean over his brother and try to help him, or to examine the wounds, or to find out whether the wounded man was only passed out or already dead. He would take a minute to figure it out, or at least a good handful of seconds. She would wait with the chain for his turn. She already had it well in hand, with the lead ball swinging gently before her. She would not need much time to throw it and get it moving at a lethal speed.
The elder Grodon was cautious, however, and, no doubt after taking a glance out the open door, he closed it brusquely and locked it. He had seen enough. He said nothing more.
Kree stuck herself in a corner, against the wall on the facing house. This Marcus Grodon wasn’t as stupid as his younger brother. He had swiftly realized that he had better not underestimate the criminal competence of this mysterious cunt with the dog who had come to attack them, him and his brother. He had seen Dourdoul Grodon laid out beyond the threshold, and he had concluded that the best thing for him to do was to stay in his house, out of the murderer’s reach. Kree, for her part, regretted that she hadn’t made a plan of attack that would take care of both brothers at once. Killing Dourdoul Grodon was only an incomplete vengeance, and now the situation was difficult to manage. Skilled in the martial arts though she was, she ruled out bursting into the shack to finish off the second brother, breaking down the door and entering a shadowy and asphyxiating space whose configuration she did not know. Her opponent was not trained in hand-to-hand combat as she was; he was nothing but a drunk trapper, a dog-eating scumbag, but he might be able to defend himself with some courage, or trickery, and no doubt he had some crude weapons at hand that he would use for killing, butchering, gutting, and cutting up the dogs he captured—knives, cutting boards, a club studded with nails. He would have that near at hand. In the dark.
Better to wait until morning. In the light of day, Marcus Grodon would be much more vulnerable.
She crouched down, rolled up the chain and put it back inside her bag. The machete’s blade was sticky; she rubbed it against a rag she’d brought for that purpose, for cleaning her weapons after the enemy was dead.
The elder Grodon was coming and going inside the hovel. The wooden floor creaked under his feet. From time to time, all was silent, then, once again, his steps could be heard as he walked on the boards, stopped, walked again, stood still. He was not muttering, or he was muttering so low that Kree couldn’t make anything out. She imagined him brimming with bile and fear, trying in vain to find a way to counter the next attack from this madwoman who had taken down his enormous brother, all over a dog. Behind the door, behind the shutters on the small window, she imagined his consternation as he chose the knives that later, when the darkness lifted, would offer only laughable defenses against her.
“Marcus Grodon!” she called out in the silence of the street. “Your life it’s over! You’ll go with your brother when I want. Me, Kree Toronto, I have come for you!”
She liked this old saying out of the depths of time, this address that brought to mind ancient duels, this challenge from humanity’s very first wars. She repeated her threat, then she caught her breath in order to follow it up with a malediction on the connoisseurs of canine meat in general. She took a step forward and cupped her hands like a bullhorn.
This was a mistake. Up until then, she could not be located in the shadows. And suddenly, despite the night and the depth of the night’s darkness all around her, she revealed the place where she was standing.
“My dog may she wake up in your dirty guts, may she eat your stomach from the inside,” she went on shouting. “Loka may she roll underneath your liver and rip you to shreds! May she wake up and may she . . .”
At that same instant, a yellow gleam flashed from some opening in the shack, between the closed shutters and the door. The flash was accompanied by a detonation that reverberated through the street like the growl of thunder.
No, thought Kree.
A gunshot. An unimaginable event. So improbable that no fighter, here and now, even bothered to worry about it. A purely fantastical hypothesis. Firearms and their ammunition had disappeared from the landscape. In part because their enthusiastic usage during the final war, during the black wars that followed and the troubles heaped on top of those wars, had exhausted the supply and made them rare, and in part because humanity had entered a world past its death throes, because humanity was engaged in hopeless wandering, ragged wandering, and this world knew neither gunpowder, nor electricity, nor machines. Deceased humanity and its negligible survivors and remnants went barehanded in the muddy bardo.
And for Kree, the idea of being injured by a bullet was something out of folklore, almost as much a throwback as her threatening address to the enemy, her prehistoric address: I have come for you.
However extraordinary it might be, though, however unlikely, Marcus Grodon had got hold of a rifle, and he had possessed at least one cartridge. And he had just fired it at this unknown woman of calamity, at the cunt who had snuffed his brother.
Kree no longer had time to think about anything at all. She felt something incredibly violent and piercing explode within her chest. Burning, unbearable vibrations. She was thrown backward. She had the impression she was scattering in red splashes, all the way to the sky. That spray, the urge to scream, the urge to vomit, then she felt the life leaving her.
Then she felt nothing at all.
Kree again. Some days later.
The sound of steel being cut in the half-light.
Some days or some weeks. Around the same year, anyway.
She was using a military-grade bolt cutter to attack the chain link fence blocking her way. The iron links gave way slowly, one at a time. A mechanical, repetitive operation, and she made use of the time to try remembering some moments that had come before. Not even the past. Just before. Nothing came to her. She dug around in her memory, and nothing came. She had already questioned herself several times. While she was walking. Or when she was resting, sitting on the ground, as if she had not slept since forever. Or while she was battling against the successive enclosures. No memories, not the slightest detail that might allow her to understand where she came from, under what circumstances she had entered this black space. An amnesia with only the slightest cracks. A night without interruption surrounded her, and this night had gotten into her head. Her brain was working, but an opaque mush flowed behind her eyes, between her eyes and the unconscious regions of her mind. She had nothing to hang onto, only illegible images, silent and very dark.
The fence had an unvaried minium-red color, and it rose so high that it disappeared into the darkness of the sky. The bolt cutter with its powerful beak bit hard into the metal trellis, link after link, with a dry sound, amplified by the surrounding void. At times the wounded fence rustled, as if some hand or even several people were shaking it in rage, as if the fence were protesting the ravages it underwent. Kree paused her work until the fence became calm again. She knew nobody was watching her, but, as on other occasions when she was on a tactical mission, she took care not to call attention to herself. The task that she’d set herself consisted of cutting out a small door, through which she could slip to the other side. A small opening at the bottom of an immense iron web that extended in all directions, to the right, the left, the sky, and soon melted into shadows.
Once she’d snipped out a rectangle large enough to pass through, she pulled it upward, pulled it out, and threw it behind her. Then she began crawling past the obstacle. The earth up close against her had a strong smell. It was damp and almost warm, and the little vegetation mixed into it took the form of a few dead twigs. The smell brushed against some unknown thing that had once been anchored deep within her, something that surged back up, almost painfully beyond her reach: inexplorable impressions, an inexplorable life. Shadowy imprints that she could not manage to reclaim. Steps in the nights, perhaps, traveling next to swamps, in mud, in muddy forests, with soldiers, with civilians, through an unknown and hostile landscape, she didn’t know when. She was on watch, ready to reconstruct those stories, her own story. But the images ran into nothingness, they were deceptive, indecipherable.
For another handful of seconds she wriggled on her belly. Then she rose up and sat back on her heels as she caught her breath. The darkness had a terrible density, yet with one strange exception. Kree was not just feeling her way forward. At this moment she could make out her own dirt-covered hands and her entire body, as well as the long cutting pincer she held before her, and she could see clearly the fence behind her, fifteen or so meters of enclosure on either side of the passage. All of this benefited from illumination, although, beyond, nothing emerged from the shadows.
The silence was broken by the whistle of Kree’s breath.
Maybe because she wanted to hear a voice, certainly something other than the swelling and unswelling of her own pulmonary sacs, Kree closed her eyes and began muttering under her breath. She felt exhausted. At nearly forty years old, she had survived war, famine, close combat, an incessant series of dangers, endless years of solitude, the loss of any moral compass, and wandering in enemy territory, but she didn’t think she’d ever experienced the sudden muscular and mental degradation that seized her in that moment. More than once, obviously, there’d been times when she’d lost courage, when her fatigue had brought on the desire to give up everything, had even produced suicidal fantasies, but she had withstood all that, without ever experiencing the feeling that gripped her now: physical turmoil, difficulty gathering her thoughts, inertia. Her hands were trembling. Talking out loud was a way to fight back against the void. Sitting there on the warm ground, she began to hum out words, bits of phrases.
The black damp. No presence anywhere near. Muttering.
Some time passed. She wasn’t measuring it. She took up handfuls of dirt and mechanically she crumbled them between her fingers.
Mumblings coming from some inner place unknown to her. Nothing coherent, at first, just pure sounds. A series of words she could not control, arriving in her mouth like the beginnings of a lamentation, a series of insane mutterings. Then, after a moment, something within her fell into order and images emerged. Not specific memories, exactly, but images. Suddenly her murmur accompanied disconnected film clips of an existence. A parade of violent deaths, crowds, here and there gatherings of deserters being set upon by masked men with clubs and scythes. A few settings: dormitories under giant tents, squat houses, nocturnal convoys, gatherings around fires, desolate plains. Bit by bit, she began to play a role in this film, she began to embody her own character. Often she felt jolts, from an arm or a shoulder, she was stabbing with a knife, she made slicing weapons whistle through the air. She had to kill in order to go farther into the disaster. No chronology, jump cuts, gaps. What she saw went back to her childhood, maybe the very beginning of her adolescence. Then twenty-five years without images. As for the final days, the final weeks, they were even less accessible, infinitely far away, even farther than her early childhood.
She let out a whimper of disappointment, trying to force her mind to obey, to come closer to the past, recent or otherwise. She bit her lips, she concentrated on the disorder swirling inside her head and she fell silent. But soon whatever had, for a few instants, taken the place of her memory was extinguished. The sequences that had been revealed inside her lost their color and meaning, they froze and then they evaporated.
Again she was crushed under the amnesia.
Under the immediate reality of black soil, chain link, and darkness.
She took up her bolt cutter again and, with effort, got up. The energy of survival took over again; she thought she’d gone through a vague period of lethargy. She didn’t even remember that she’d had any visions.
“Okay, let’s go,” she growled. “That’s enough. I’m going farther.”
She took five steps, seven or eight, maybe, then another dozen, and she ran into yet another fence. Identical in all respects to the one she’d passed through an hour before. She hadn’t seen it getting closer, she’d almost smashed her face against it. An enclosure, abruptly distinct within the shadows, gleaming against the shadows, surrounded in absolute shadows. The minium-red lattice formed a mesh extending infinitely in both height and width. As if it divided the world in two: within and beyond.
She set to work. There was nothing else to do. Position the bolt cutter, squeeze the wire between its jaws, press the handles, cut. Place the jaws, press, force, cut. She wasn’t sure of her count, she could be wrong, but it was the fourth enclosure she’d run into that night. And before—before, surely there’d been others.
Yes, before, no doubt, she’d grappled with other barriers.
“Before, who knows if what there weren’t some others,” she grumbled.
During other nights, during preceding nights.
“Who knows,” she grumbled again.
It took her about ten minutes to cut out an opening. Always the same sounds. Click . . . clack . . . tlik . . . krid . . . klid . . . The iron wires had a thinner section, the tool for cutting them was military grade, designed to overcome more formidable barbed obstacles. Kree handled the bolt cutter easily, and she encountered no resistance. Insert the pincer at the right spot, press down, listen for the dry sound of cut metal, tlik, move on to the next link. That’s what she was doing. Krid . . . clack . . . Ten minutes of work, without complications, repetitive and simple. Maybe fifteen minutes. The only difficulty came from the horizontal tension wires, which were more reluctant to give way. The severing cut was accompanied by a sharp, angry note, klangh, very short at the beginning but taken up by the reinforcing wires, in echoes that seemed to transmit their anger across the entire infinite length of the enclosure.
She took her time. Nobody was chasing her. She wasn’t in a hurry.
Yes, no doubt, she had done this several times. No detailed memory, no absolutely credible image. She felt sure of it, though, because of her body, her muscle memory, the fatigue in her hands. Always the same thing. Open up a door large enough so she wouldn’t scratch herself when she slipped through. Press down on the handles of the bolt cutter. Klidh . . . kalak . . . With the bolt cutter, outline an escape hatch to fit her size. Pull on the piece of fence to separate it from the enclosure, sometimes give it a shake to get it unstuck, toss it behind her. Go down on all fours, pass through to the other side, stand up again, make a few meters of progress. Sit down on the warm, fragrant, loose soil and rest. Muttering in the dark. Breathing hard. Then get up, get going again. And almost immediately, run into another fence.
The space between fences varied. Twelve steps, twenty-five steps. Never more than thirty. Sometimes it was even very small, barely ten centimeters.
Nine, ten centimeters. Like the time when Kree met the bonze.
She was just about to finish cutting out a rectangular shape in the metal mesh in front of her. Only a few links were left to undo, a few wires buried in the earth left to cut. Then she would pull open the passageway and slide through. A few additional kriks and tlacs in the humid silence. She set down her bolt cutter and gripped the piece of fence, she disentangled it from the whole and tossed it to her left. A shiver of metal against the black dirt clods, then nothing. Then suddenly a second enclosure, whose presence she had not previously noticed, appeared just before her. Separated from the first by less than a hand’s width.
She let out a tired sigh.
She ran her fingers over the new fence. Same color, same interwoven metal, maybe a larger number of enforcing and tension wires, but, aside from that, it was identical to the one in which she’d just cut a door to go through.
The work would have to start over. This was unexpected but she accepted it without asking questions or cursing fate. This was the way it was. In order to go forward, she had to pass through there. She took up her tool again and attacked the first link, skrikh, a second one, klagh.
Ten minutes later, she had pulled away the second cutting, not without difficulty since it squeaked, squealed and got stuck against the first fence. Fighting to clear the passage, she had scraped both her hands. In the strange light, the drops of blood looked oily, the color of a crow’s wing. Once she’d reached the other side, she sat down and rubbed damp earth on the wounds. That was when she noticed, a little ways away, a suspended brown mass, a body between earth and sky, compressed between the two fences, imprisoned with arms and legs spread out, thorax and head horribly crushed and stuck against the wire trellis. This was the bonze.
She stood up again and approached him.
The monk’s eyes were open. He was looking at her.
Two characters lit from within, an oneiric phosphorescence in this inky setting. Her, stained with dirt as if she’d just come out of a cave, and him in religious rags, strangely proper in his racked position.
Like a slice of bread in a toaster, Kree thought.
Hell of a weird sandwich, she thought next.
“You’re called Kree?” the bonze asked, skipping the formalities, in a soft voice that was not the slightest bit hoarse.
“How do you know my name?” Kree said, distrustful.
The bonze observed a moment of silence.
“Where do you think you are?” he said.
“Well,” Kree hesitated.
She couldn’t actually give the bonze any answer. The question had already occurred to her, but she had tossed it aside to avoid pain, or rather to avoid finding herself once again confronted with her own amnesia. She was walking in shadow. She didn’t know for how long, she didn’t know what she’d done to end up there, in that black space. In that strange, black, and unknown space. She could not answer.
“News travels fast around here,” the bonze continued. “Two years ago, after they caged me, they told me that if someone ever came to free me, it would be a woman named Kree.”
“Oh,” Kree said.
“Kree Toronto,” the bonze added.
“They knew that?”
“They told me that, and then they left me in the dark,” the bonze said. “That was two years ago, but it’s like it was yesterday.”
Kree inhaled, then exhaled, then sighed.
“How what they knew that?” she asked.
The bonze was too tightly compressed between the two fences to make the slightest movement. Nevertheless Kree had the impression his lack of response was accompanied by a shrug.
“They couldn’t know that,” she muttered, furrowing her brow.
A silence fell between them. The bonze broke it.
“Set me free,” he said.
It was a supplication, but formulated in such a tragic voice that Kree examined the bonze’s face in an effort to discern some expression of feeling there. She could make out nothing but compressed flesh, held in strict immobility under the metal crosses. After two years of catatonia within the fence’s vice grip, the bonze must have unlearned any nuances of body language, how to act with the face, the play of lips.
She took her time answering.
“I’m not going to set you free,” she said.
“Why?” the bonze asked, astonished.
He asked the question calmly. During the two years he’d spent in the very depths of darkness, no doubt he’d meditated on the cruelty of fate, enough to unlearn hope as well.
“I’m alone in figuring all this out,” Kree explained. “I don’t need a companion. I set you free, you’ll be stuck on my tail. Who knows, after a while, you might get an idea in your head to have sex with me.”
The bonze cackled.
“I have no desire to do that,” he said.
Kree tried to meet his gaze. The bonze’s face was perched too high up, it did not lean toward her when he spoke, and she didn’t have enough space to fall back and see his eyes clearly. It was as if the monk had no gaze. As if these two years spent in shadow had left him blind or, as if out of wisdom, he had given up on vision.
He was dressed in a frayed robe that emitted obnoxious, animal smells, very different from the earth and metal smells hanging all around. In the early days of his ordeal he must have vomited, his intestines and bladder must have let loose. Twenty-four months earlier, or just about. The stale stench was indistinct now, but the fabric enveloping his body preserved the imprint of his physiological shipwreck. The orange of his robe had shaded toward an excremental brown. Colors have poor resistance to this sort of night.
“Anyway, I don’t need you,” Kree said.
“I don’t need myself either,” the bonze said philosophically.
He let a few seconds go by.
“Listen, Kree Toronto,” he went on.
“I’m listening,” Kree said.
“If you set me free, what do you think will happen? That I’ll look after you? That I’ll start following along behind you, like a dog or a servant?”
He paused. It wasn’t easy to speak without moving his mouth.
“But I won’t, nothing like that,” he continued. “What will I do? . . . I’ll do a few exercises to get my joints unstuck and moving again, and then I’ll go along the length of the fence. I’ll pray as I go.”
Kree felt exhaustion overcoming her and she sat down. The situation was unpleasant for her, just as the conversation was. It had been a long time since she’d exchanged words with anyone, words had made a brutal incursion into her solitude, and to listen to someone else answering her questions, reacting to her speech, wore her out.
“Go along the length of the fence,” she murmured. “There’s no point in that.”
Her voice was barely audible, as if she’d continued with her usual murmuring between fences.
“It’s quiet,” the bonze objected. “You choose your own pace. You can go at full speed or you can walk slowly. You can pray.”
“I’d rather go straight,” Kree said. “I have clippers. The fences they don’t stop me.”
“Bah,” the bonze said. “After this one there’ll be another. And then another. That’s how it is in the worlds after death. There’s no end to them.”
“I’d be surprised,” Kree said doubtfully.
“No, there’s no end. And one day your shears won’t cut anymore. And then what’ll you do?”
“I’ll sit on the ground,” Kree murmured. “I’ll pray.”
Here the conversation died for a long time. They were quiet; Kree was staring at the black earth before her, then she closed her eyes. Quarters of hours went by, one after another, without a word, without number. Five or six, or several thousand. Neither of them bothered counting.
“You know how to pray?” the bonze asked abruptly.
Kree had dozed off. She had almost forgotten about the presence of the monk flattened between two iron nets.
She jumped.
“No,” she lied randomly.
“Do you want to learn?” the bonze asked.
“No,” Kree said.
“It’s not hard,” the bonze assured her.
“No,” Kree said.
In truth, the question had set off an avalanche of memories inside her. Suddenly a vast quantity of magic phrases flowed chaotically through her consciousness. Fragments of prayers, beginnings of curses, supplications, bits of invocations. In the world before this one, people were constantly addressing invisible forces, demons and nature. Suddenly she remembered phrases she had pronounced long ago that, depending on the circumstances, could be used as prayers. When everything seemed lost all around her. When she was sinking into madness. When she had killed someone. When barbarians were closing in on her, wanting to rape or kill her. When the war was raging nearby. What war? Against whom, against what? She couldn’t name anything, everything blurred together, a chaotic succession of images and rumblings. The images weren’t clearly linked to each other, but behind them formed a soundtrack of prayers.
She had remained seated, leaning back onto her hands that had sunken in the dirt. Now she dislodged her wrists. Her hands had stopped bleeding long before. She shook herself a little, got up, and once again stood facing the bonze. Enveloped in her rags, stained with dirt that was dry and gray, or damp and black or brown. The bolt cutter hung down alongside her right leg. A vision of wandering in the black space. Even unceremoniously flattened and compressed as he was, with interlaced metal buried in his flesh, the monk seemed better off than she did.
“I’m leaving,” she announced.
The bonze let out something like a sigh of regret.
“Set me free,” he said.
“Already I told you no,” Kree said stubbornly.
They remained facing each other, lips closed, for two or three minutes. Perhaps the bonze was praying, or searching for arguments to convince her. Then he broke the silence.
“You have a bolt cutter,” he said. “It’ll cut anything. Iron wires or flesh. You could use it on me.”
“What are you saying?” Kree asked.
“My body doesn’t matter anymore,” the bonze said. “You could make it so I could leave it behind.”
“Bah.” Kree grimaced.
“Lift your clippers and cut my throat,” the bonze said calmly. “That will set me free.”
Kree protested in an uncertain voice. She was having trouble finding words. She explained that she’d done a lot of stupid things over the course of her existence, but nothing like that. Killing a man immobilized between two metal walls. Murdering a monk.
“This has nothing to do with murder,” the bonze assured her. “This would be an act of mercy. I am asking you humbly to do it.”
“It’s too awful,” Kree said.
“It would set me free,” the bonze concluded.
Kree shook her head. It was too awful.
She hesitated.
They were quiet for a moment. They had nothing more to say to each other.
She waited a little longer, time for a series of painful breaths, then she lifted her bolt cutter and directed it to the bonze’s throat. The chain link made things difficult, and there was a reinforcing post a few centimeters from the spot where she wanted to start the cut. The bonze did not appear to feel any anxiety. His eyes were closed and he did not even make himself show any signs of bravery. He must have been praying. Not a quiver in his face.
She adjusted the cutting blades, at a slant because of the tension wire in the way. Then she cut at random, several times, closing her eyes as the monk did. She felt no reaction from his flesh. Skin, cartilage, muscles, trachea, arteries and veins were insignificant obstacles for a tool made for cutting iron.
The bonze’s head did not move, it was too tightly pressed between fences, nor did his body move, or react, or slump.
Kree pulled back her bolt cutter, took two steps back, and soon she turned away. She turned her back to the bonze. The sensations the shears had transmitted to her hands, to her entire body, had been ghastly. The sound of the cut had added to the horror: nothing, except the voracious slide of the blades, the jaws closing together. Now Kree refused to look at the result of her awful intervention. She did not want to know whether the blood was flowing now, how fast it was, what color it was. Nor did she want to make sure that the bonze was set free, or exchange with him some semblance of farewell.
Without changing her position, keeping her back turned, she made up a prayer. The sort of thing one usually says just after killing someone with a bolt cutter. She said it without letting out any sound, she was content with moving her lips. A rather long prayer. She did not know the bonze’s name, but she paid her respects to his courage, and she cursed those who had sentenced him to the ordeal of fences.
Then she began to walk.
She walked straight ahead, she trudged unhurriedly across the ground, which looked like it had recently been worked. After she had gone thirty or thirty-five steps, she smacked into a new metallic surface. Her head, her hands. She had been walking with her eyes closed. The outraged rattle of the fence filled the night, then stopped.
She had dropped her bolt cutter. She picked it back up.
The minium-red chain link extended in all directions. On the other side reigned the night.
For a moment she observed the obstacle she would have to pass. She had the feeling she was repeating an operation that she knew by heart in every detail. A fence just like the others. As soon as the passage was open, she would continue on her way. She had the bolt cutter well in hand. She kneeled down on the sticky, warm earth, and began cutting through the fence. The first tlics and tlacs seemed familiar to her. Who knows how many times I’ve done this before, she thought.
The timber growing less and less dense. Space growing between the trees, the bald cypress, bile-sap pines, silence pines, void maples, sequoias of little virtue, potbellied larches, all these new species no one had ever studied, of which no inventory would ever be made, which had appeared since the black war and were already dying of genetic diseases, on the path to extinction like all the others. Smells of needles, mosses, the absolute calm of undergrowth, the rust soil. Never a bird’s cry, never the slightest rodent’s quiver. Kree had noticed that the distance between tree trunks was growing, that the smells were changing, three times already she had identified footprints left by some peasants, she knew that she was now approaching a village. Something was about to change for her. In the course of her life if you could call this a life. Soon she would leave the forest. She had been walking for an incomprehensible number of days, maybe three, maybe thirty-two, or fifteen thousand seven hundred. Numbers had no meaning. She did not care to keep those sorts of accounts.
Then she heard a brassy trumpeting in the distance, the sound unlike any other of a liturgical horn, very quickly followed by the beating of shamanic drums. She had reached the last line of trees. Lusty aspens, barren hazelnuts, madleaf plane trees. The vegetal rot was invasive, poisoning the atmosphere. She quickened her steps. Now she was coming out at the top of a grassy slope, on a prairie that descended to the valley floor. Three hundred meters away, where once a river had no doubt flowed, a small village was spread out. Leading there was a whitish road made of pebbles, with neither branches nor extensions. The village was located at the end of the road.
Everything seemed peaceful, far from the nightmares of the war. She was not trying to remain hidden, but first she spent a minute behind a bush, motionless, as she examined the space and let her eyes become accustomed to a light brighter than the light in the forest. The shirt and pants she was wearing were so dirty that she looked like some half-vegetal, half-human creature. Like some warrior witch emerging from the deepest taiga, formed through magical invocations, made of humus, dead leaves and flesh drained of blood, leaving it a mummy-like hue.
She went down the slope and reached the main street. The villagers were gathering on the central square, a large space surrounded by one-story buildings, entirely occupied on one side by what must have been a gas station or a garage, once upon a time when there were motor vehicles, farm machines to maintain and repair. Once upon a time, in a different world. The antique fuel pumps had been dismantled, but one had survived, a useless and incomprehensible monument to the past. Just behind it some scaffolding had been built, to support boards that held orators, musicians, and shamans, about a dozen of them. Apparently some ceremony or assembly was about to take place on the stage.
Already five minutes had passed since Kree had entered the village. She had no trouble blending into the sparse crowd. The peasants weren’t paying any attention to her, no doubt because their outfits were no more glamorous than her own, and also because these men and women seemed worn out, enclosed in their own solitude, uninterested in those surrounding them. She came out on the square and stood still in the last row, behind a handful of middle-aged people, shepherds or cowherds or farmers, who did notice her presence. They smelled bad. Now and then they turned toward her, briefly, with eyes whose lack of expression concealed hostile questions. Kree took no offense at this. They weren’t exchanging any unpleasant remarks with each other and they weren’t threatening her. She could watch the shamans’ meeting without staying on her guard, without fearing an attack or having to defend herself.
The meeting was both religious and political in character, with musical accompaniment. On the platform were two drummers and a flutist, all three haphazardly dressed with fur squares on their shoulders, army pants and shirts, leather hats, and dilapidated sandals. A scruffy Buddhist monk joined them, now and then puffing up his cheeks to blow a horn. The three shamans took turns giving speeches, allowing the musical ensemble to intervene at certain moments and shaking little strings of bells and clappers themselves, while their peers punctuated the instrumental highs and lows with more or less vigorous magical clamorings. The shaman currently speaking had moved forward to the edge of the stage, sometimes skirting the void and then placing a foot on the blue pump to maintain his balance. Looking as if he wanted to get closer to the crowd as it listened and pressed forward below. The other two shamans were waiting their turn, murmuring or blaring out undefined syllables. They were waving their entire shamanic arsenal, their bells and their wreaths of small carnivores, ferrets, martens, and genets, strung on metal threads by the throat.
The first speaker was dressed like a mechanic just coming back from an oil change; over his grease-stained coverall he had tied a brown leather apron, heavy with garlands of nails, small bells, and sable skulls. Although he looked like a wizard from the countryside, something about him also recalled a commissioner of the people. As was often the case, every public meeting included a representative from the Party, and he was it. He had reached the edge of the scaffolding and had his right boot propped on top of the pump as a support as he waved his arms, accentuating the rhythm of his most important phrases. A long, held note from the flute had preceded his first words, then ended in a hoarse sigh. The drumbeats did not drown out his energetic voice, which reached the last rows, which reached Kree.
After a slump, which still persisted after a considerable time, this man was saying, engineers trained by the Party had succeeded in reestablishing electricity and getting the ancient machines to function again. And one could even imagine they might invent new machines, intended to bring comfort to the survivors for all the hard work they were forced to perform today, just as people had done eight thousand years ago, as if humanity had made no progress since the very first societies of farmers and hunter-gatherers. Loyalty to the Party was indispensable, the man emphasized, even if that loyalty went along with beliefs in magic and life after death. The leaders would allow these superstitions from now on and integrate them into Marxist-Leninism. Supernatural forces governed the universe and human history; dragons, demons, and angry gods were everywhere, and although shamanism and the monks played an essential part in appeasing them and speaking to them, the Party alone could take charge of happiness for the masses currently plunged into a coal-black present with no future.
A second orator came next, less clear in his arguments, although the musicians and the Tibetan horn did their best to assist him. More talkative, more disorganized, without the slightest concern for being understood, the topic he had chosen was the successive worlds where one wanders after passing through the agonies of death. His hair escaped the shelter of his brownish wool hat and fell in a gray cascade over his shoulders. He was draped in ragged women’s clothing, with an overall appearance of a scarecrow. He expressed himself in a muddled language, making asides only audible to the first few rows, the musicians and his colleagues sitting behind him on stage. His words, whether he wanted them to be or not, were not clear. First, it was difficult to tell whether he considered himself as having already experienced his own demise or if he was speculating on what awaited the living after their passage into the beyond. He refused to establish the distinction between the status of the living and the status of the deceased. In his own terms, he put them all in the same bag. This sort of assertion didn’t bother Kree. She herself considered that, in principle, for a long time now, she has already been dead—the man pontificating badly on stage might well be like her. The shaman was laying out a theory on the subject that Kree, over the course of her own wanderings, had not heard. The shaman claimed that the bardo after death was one stage in an incoherent series of bardos and hells, a disorderly series that unfolded in uncontrollable and unpredictable ways. Rather than embarking on a path to reincarnation, the dead person should instead prepare to be killed or to die, over and over again. The floating worlds came one after another, you were never sure when you’d left one to enter the next, and, in summary, you were only repeating the horror of your previous existences. The shaman’s voice was frenetic and hoarse. Impassioned by his topic but growing less and less intelligible, the man fiddled nervously with the little bells on the ends of his rags and grimaced. He addressed the crowd before him as if they were a bunch of idiotic, ignorant dead, who needed someone to spell everything out for them.
Once he was finished with his ramblings, the shaman made a spiteful gesture and returned to the back of the stage, pouting. There was no applause.
The monk blew into his enormous horn for half a minute, then the flute joined in, soon followed by slow, even drum beats and energetically shaken bells. They needed to reanimate the audience, whether it was dead or alive, to dissipate the lingering effect of the obscenities that had just been offered.
While she waited for a third shamanic agitator to take the stage, Kree became aware of something she had not previously noticed since she’d left the cover of the forest and moved toward the village. The way the landscape was lit up wasn’t logical. In the background was an illustration of the porousness between the worlds of the living and the dead, between images out of the real and those emerging from dream spaces. The sky was nocturnal, starless, profoundly black, but down below, the earthly landscape enjoyed a natural, diurnal light. Noon and midnight blended together without contradiction. In the village, over the countryside, the grass, the rooftops, the brilliance of daylight, not the sort of dusky light that might occur, for example, when clouds hide the sun; and, overhead, an intense asphalt sky hanging heavy above the world.
For whatever reason, the third speaker decided to leave the platform behind and perched on top of the pump. The surface under his feet was slightly rounded and, in order to maintain his balance, he had to refrain from gesticulating. As he spoke he grew tense, occasionally using his arms as balancing poles. This relative inertia cost him. He would begin to move his arms and shoulders, then catch himself, reluctantly, ultimately giving the impression he was afflicted with tics, jolts, and spasms. He was a man with a deeply creased yellow face, his hair and beard the color of walnut stains, wearing a dirty tunic not overly burdened with bells and cinched at the waist with a cord that hosted three or four weasel corpses. He had the facial features of a mental patient, devoured from within. According to this mad-eyed prophet, with his gestures at once clumsy and contained, the main danger facing the dead, the deceased on their path to reincarnation, was the possibility of finding themselves trapped in the wrong womb. He exhorted the dead to take their time in choosing, not to rush haphazardly toward the first womb available. He begged them to seek out a human womb, mammalian ovaries at the very least, and most of all to avoid, like the plague, incarceration within an egg. “Never waste your fate in a shell from which there is no escape!” he cried. “Never will you be normal in your rebirth!” he bellowed. He was about to expand on his demonstration with some examples, getting ready, perhaps, to enumerate the cold-blooded animals and birds from which one must turn away at all costs, when he opened his arms wide, slipped desperately on top of the pump, lost his balance and crashed down at the feet of the villagers in the first row. They helped him get up, and he stomped over to the platform and up the steps, but upon his return to the stage he indicated he had said enough, and asked the musicians to beat their drums and play their flutes for the end of the meeting. Which they did.
On this regrettable fall, the gathering ended.
The musicians set down their drums in order to light cigarettes and chat amongst themselves; the bonze lifted his long horn and hoisted it level on his shoulder, then approached the musicians to ask for a cigarette; the shamans packed up their genets and their martens, stuffed most of their bells into a plastic bag, and began a relaxed private discussion, evidently punctuated with funny anecdotes. They were laughing together and didn’t seem particularly worried whether their apocalyptic messages had gotten through to the masses.
The inhabitants of the village, for their part, had dispersed. They had been offered a politico-mystical show, they had watched it without displeasure, and now they were leaving. The ceremony had brought nothing new to their understanding of the world. It had distracted them from the dullness of their daily life, but that was all. Already they were forgetting the speeches they had just heard. The point of it all was dissolving into nothingness, the arguments about failed rebirths, deadly reincarnations inside eggs, the multiple bardos. The Party commissaries and the medicine men had always known that this would happen and had no complaints. Next time, they would not hesitate to use the same phrases and the same images, to reproduce the same performance.
Kree felt very much in harmony with the village people; she had seen the show for what it was—a moment of distraction—but she attached no importance to mystical proclamations. None had ever helped her in the slightest. She didn’t believe in anything, but she had no illusions. She understood that the end of the world had been going on for centuries, with periods of slowness and even calm, and periods of acceleration, and that right in the middle of one of these periods of acceleration, she’d had the misfortune to be born. Or rather, to be reborn.
Or rather, to begin walking in the succession of black spaces.
As she was thinking about it, suddenly she wondered what had compelled her to go down to the village, to leave the forest, and even before that, to go down the road, to make her way for days and years under the trees. Answers did not come.
“Seems like I’ve already come once again into the world of the dead,” she grumbled to herself.
She was standing alone in front of the fuel pump. The village square had emptied.
“Who knows how long what I’ve been in the same bag with them,” she went on.
The musicians were coming down from the stage. The bonze with his horn on his shoulder, looking like an orange-robed laborer carrying a pipe on a construction site, stopped at her level and looked at her. She could smell him, the odor of a monk who hadn’t performed his ablutions in a long time. He was looking at her in a slightly lascivious manner. She addressed him.
“If what I wanted to find some work around here, is there any?”
The licentious flames in the monk’s eyes went out, or maybe they had never been lit; maybe it was only one of Kree’s fleeting impressions, a result of his being unfamiliar and the fact that it had been a long time since she had been in contact with living beings.
“What work you looking for?” the bonze asked.
“Doesn’t matter,” Kree said.
The bonze thought, or made a show of thinking, and he looked over his shoulder.
“You know how to use a knife? Slaughter and skin?”
Kree took a step back, grimacing.
“People?” she asked, worried.
“Bah,” the monk huffed.
“What kind of work is it?” Kree asked.
The monk nodded. His cheek touched the copper tube that he had stuck under his right ear.
“Animals,” he said. “Dogs, sheep, beavers. Anything that comes through. It’s for a factory.”
“Not dogs,” Kree said. “What factory’s that?”
“Pemmican. Manufacturing pemmican.”
“Bah, you do that?” Kree was surprised.
“Well, yeah, why not?”
Kree examined him severely, exactly as if she were revolted by this butchery initiated by monks, when really, at base, she didn’t care. She was pretending to be horrified.
“You kill animals?” she said.
“Not necessarily us and not always animals,” the bonze joked in an unclear manner.
They stood for two or three seconds, waiting. The drummers and the Party agitator were listening behind them, immobile.
“We do what we have to do for survival and the good of the masses,” the bonze went on.
“For their survival and their good,” the Party agitator interjected.
Kree said she was okay with working, okay to start working as soon as possible. She was agreeably surprised not to have to give her name or answer any questions about her ethnic or organic origins, or about her past.
“Come with me, it’s nearby,” said the Party agitator.
He introduced himself, his name was Sariyan Lov, and he brought her to a cinderblock warehouse next to the main square. He pushed the door open and unhooked a black rubber apron that he held out to Kree. Obediently she put it on over her rags.
“I’m not very clean,” she confessed.
“You can take a shower at the end of the day,” said Sariyan Lov, who was the factory boss.
He showed her a square room below. The door was open and there were sinks, puddles of water, an empty stall. Just next to that was a large space, arranged with hanging materials and streams that furrowed the ground, showing that here was where they carried out the first steps of butchery, the slaughter and quartering.
Kree toured the space with her eyes. In the middle of the factory proper stood a disproportionately long table, with two female workers and a man in a slaughterer’s overalls busy around it. They were butchering a large animal carcass and putting small strips of meat to dry on a grill along the wall. They did not exchange a word, and they barely lifted their heads to see who was coming in. The air stank of smoked meat and bones and, above all else, the nagging stench of blood.
Sariyan Lov’s voice vibrated suddenly, as energetic as when he had begun speaking with his boot on the fuel pump.
“You all tell the new person what she’s supposed to do. She’s starting right away. Her name is Kree Toronto.”
Kree started and stood in front of him.
“How what you know my name?” she protested.
The Party representative stared at her open-mouthed. His astonishment was apparently sincere.
“Well, where is it what you think you are?” he said.