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Then there were movies. The Sands of Iwo Jima. The Green
Berets. Fantastic, hallucinatory violence. Enemies would be shot and fall down neatly, like paper cutouts. Sometimes the good guys were shot, in the shoulder or arm usually. They would just grimace a bit, maybe bind it up.
One week a film arrived called The Road to Morocco. It was set in the African desert and had Bing Cosby and Bob
Hope. Laura had vague memories of Bob Hope, she thought she must have seen him when she was very young and he was very old. He was young in the film, and quite fu
Jofuette shook her head, said something in Bambara, and plugged the tape back in. As she did so a folded slip of tissue, cigarette paper, fell from a crevice in the box's cardboard side. Laura picked it up.
She unfolded it as Jofuette watched the TV, riveted. It was covered with smudgy, minuscule writing. Not ink. Blood, maybe. A list.
Abel Lacoste-Euro. Cons. Service
Steven Lawrence-Oxfam America
Maria
Valeri Chkalov-Vie
Georgi Valdukov-Vie
Sergei Ilyushin-Vie
Kazuo(?) Watanabe-Mitsubishi
(?)Riza-Rikabi-EFT Commerzbank
Laura Webster-Rizome IG
Katje Selous-A.C.A. Corps and four others
10
The second year went faster than the first. She was used to it. It had become her life. She no longer thirsted for the things she had lost-she could no longer name them to herself, without an effort. She was past thirst: she was mummified. Monastic, sealed.
But she could sense the pace picking up, spiderweb tremors of movement in the distant world outside.
There were shootings almost every night now. When they took her down for exercise in the yard, she could see bullet- pounded patches in the wall, cratered, just like the Lodge had been. Below the pockmarks the baked bare earth had turned foul, carpeted with swarming flies and the coppery reek of blood.
One day the desert sky outside the wall hole of her cell showed endless dark skeins of drifting smoke. Trucks squealed in and out of the prison for hours, and they shot people all night. Assembly style: shouts, orders, screams, pleading, fierce chatter of machine-gun fire. Quick finishing shots. Doors slamming, engines. Then more. Then more. Then more again.
Jofuette had been frightened for days. Finally the goons came for her, two women. They came smiling and talking her language, seeming to tell her that it was over, they were going to let her go. The bigger goon gri
boyfriend, she was saying-or Jofuette's husband maybe. Or maybe she was suggesting a night on the town in glamorous downtown Bamako.
Jofuette smiled tremulously. One of the goons gave her a cigarette and lit it with a flourish.
Laura never saw her again.
When they brought in the video recorder for the usual weekly session Laura waited till they were gone. Then she picked up the machine with both hands and smashed it into the wall repeatedly. It came apart, a tangle of wiring and circuit cards. She was crushing them underfoot when the door rattled and two of the male goons burst in.
They had drawn clubs. She threw herself at them with her fists clenched.
They knocked her to the ground immediately, with con- temptuous ease.
Then they picked her up and began beating her. With thoroughness, methodically. They hit her on the neck, on the kidneys. They threw her onto the bunk and hit her across the spine. Lightning flared inside her, great electrocuting swathes, white-hot, bloody-red. They were hitting her with axes, chop- ping her body apart. She was being butchered with sticks.
Roaring filled her head. The world faded.
A woman sat across the cell, sitting in Jofuette's bunk. A
blond woman in a blue dress. How old-forty, fifty? Sad, composed face, laugh lines, yellow-green eyes. Coyote eyes.
Mother ... ?
The woman looked at her: remembrance, pity, strength. It was restful to look at the woman. Restful as dreaming: she's wearing my favorite shade of blue.
But who is it ...?
Laura recognized her self. Of course. Rush of relief and joy. That's who it is. It's me.
Her Persona rose from the bunk. She crossed the cell, drifting, graceful, soundless. Radiant. She knelt silently by
Laura's side and looked into her face: her own face. Older, stronger, wiser.
Here I am.
"I'm dying."
No, you'll live. You'll be as I am.
The hand stopped an inch from her face, caressed the air.
She could feel its warmth-she could see herself, face-down on the bunk, beaten, paralyzed. Sad Laura. She could feel the warm torrent of healing and sympathy rush in from outside,
Olympian, soaring. Poor beaten body, our Laura, but she won't die. She lives. I lived.
Now, sleep.
She was sick for a month. Her urine was tinged with blood: kidney damage. And she had huge aching patches of bruises on her back, her arms, her legs. Deep bruises, into the muscle, bumps swollen on the bone: hematomas, they were called in first-aid. She was sick and creaky, barely able to eat. Sleep was a struggle for position, for the least amount of pain.
They had taken away the wreckage of the video machine.
She was pretty sure that someone had shot her up with something, too: there seemed to be an injection bruise just above her wrist, one of the few spots the goons had missed.
A woman, she thought: she had seen a woman medic, maybe even spoken to-her semiconscious, and that was it: an Opti- mal Persona experience.
She had been beaten up by fascist goons. And she had seen her Optimal Persona. She wasn't sure which was the most important but she knew that they were both turning points.
It was probably a medic that she'd seen. She'd just slotted it in, dreamed of seeing herself. That was probably all that an
Optimal Persona ever was, for anybody: stress and illusion and some deep psychic need. But none of that mattered.
She had had a vision. It didn't matter where it came from.
She clung to it and she was glad they were leaving her in solitary because she could chuckle over it aloud and hug it to herself. And cherish it.
Hatred. She'd never really hated them before, not like she did now. She'd always been too small and too scared and too hopeful of figuring some angle, as if they were people like herself and could be dealt with like people. That's what they'd pretended, but now she knew their pretense was an- other of their lies. She would never, ever join them, or belong to them, or see the world through their eyes. She was their enemy till death. That was a peaceful thought.
She knew she would survive. Someday she would dance on their graves. It made no sense, not rationally. It was faith.
They had blundered and given her faith.
She was woken by a roar. It sounded like a giant water faucet, rush of water and the high-pitched. scream of a vibrat- ing pipe. Coming nearer. Louder. Wa-woosh.
Then: monster drumbeats. Boom. Boom. Boom-wham-bam, firecracker sounds. Her cell wall flashed as hot light flickered through the window hole. Then another flash. Then a sudden thunderous explosion, very near. Earthquake. The walls shook.