…an excerpt from…
You Bright and Risen Angels
By William Vollmann
(1987)
About three weeks ago my fiancee, with whom I
had been living for almost three years, decided that she did not love me
anymore. This put her in an unenviable strategic position, for I remained
stubbornly oblivious to this fact despite her best efforts at delicate
suggestion, so at last, no longer able to stomach my endearments (she had
always been my Bee; and I had been her Beetle), losing interest in the tedious
details of my life (which, like a robin redbreast, I had been all too eager to
feed her in our nest, as if she were still my baby bird who was content to eat
what I might bring her), and unable to desire me sexually (it had gotten to the
point where I had to beg her each Saturday morning for about forty-five minutes
until finally she would hitch up her nightgown and spread her legs and close
her eyes and lie there motionless), there was nothing for her to do but unveil
her pure hard will in a session of evil mercy killing; for it was all too clear
that I had no minimum level of self-respect below which I would not debase
myself to keep her. So, one night
after she had bought my birthday present, she steeled to shoot her own
dog. It would be unnecessary, she
knew, to disregard my tears and nasty groveling entreaties in order to compel
me to see that no matter how good I might be henceforth my case was hopeless,
that I simply could not have her anymore.
I am told that when a girl gets her ears pierced the poor dumb flesh
tries to grow back where it is not wanted; and sometimes she must push needles
through the spot several times over the next few days in order to kill it for
good, because it will try until it is dead to heal the wound. So it was here. I had to be dealt with in one great
firm stroke, without unnecessary cruelty, but the knife had to go in and it had
to be twisted just as firmly in the wound, because the flesh would not
understand. I remember once when I
was working on a ranch my friend Eric was showing me how to kill a pig. We were smoking all our pigs for
sausage. The previous three had
been dispatched; the last had hidden itself behind a pile of straw in its
hutch, for pigs are very intelligent animals. As we exposed it and dragged it outside and onto the
bloodstained sand, it began to scream.
We flung it down on its back and Eric bayoneted it through the
heart. It screamed and screamed. The dark pig-blood spurted. Eric and I held the dying animal
down. Eric removed the bayonet so
that the blood could run freely, and with exquisite gentleness he worked the
trembling pig’s back legs, forward and back, forward and back, to pump all the
blood out. The pig lay there sweating and shaking and pissing and rolling its
eyes. Eric stroked its head to
calm it, just as he might have done with a dairy cow that had been spooked by
something. “All right now,” he
said gently but inflexibly into the pig’s ear. “You just lie there and bleed.”
This, then, was the hard ceremony of
cauterization which my fiancée had to conduct. No doubt she consulted with our mutual friends to find the
best way of doing it, just like her best friend Milly had studied all the sex
manuals and anatomy charts for weeks before she finally parted with her
maidenhead, back when we were all in college; for all this day there was an
eerie silence in our (now Bee’s) apartment, the friends evidently warned by Bee
to leave the path clear for the operation. Now, as I returned home from work, like a rapist strapped to
a table, wheeled along to his castration, her heart failed her for a moment;
and when I got into bed beside her she told me that we would stop being lovers
for the time being, and would sleep in separate rooms, but we could still live
together and see if we could be friends.
This was somewhat akin to piercing the earlobe once and letting nature
takes its course, healing if it might; or to stabbing through almost to the
pig’s heart but not quite penetrating it; then sewing the animal up with catgut
stitches and debating whether or not to give it antibiotics; or to cutting of
only one of the rapist’s testicles.
–I told her that as we had already stopped cooking together or eating
together or seeing each other for more than about ten minutes a day I couldn’t
se that this would do anything but lower our mutual expectations another notch.
–“Well,” asked my Bee, “what’s your alternative?” –The Beetle clicked and
fluttered its elytra in nervous grief and burrowed deep beneath the bedclothes,
“We could spend more time together,” it hazarded; “we could, Bee, we could’ and
we could each give up something else to make time and do more things together,”
but Bee buzzed angrily at it and said, “The more things we do together the
worse we get along. There is a third alternative,” and now already she was
recovering from her vacillation and raising her stinger and having the Beetle
roll over and bare its black glossy insect-tummy to her, and brushing alcohol
on its thorax where she would carry out sentence and sting; and the Beetle, understanding
that is pleas had made an unpleasant impression, lay still and thought back on
all the crimes it had committed, such as crawling up into her hive and drinking
honey from her combs when she was busy and had worked so hard to make it for
herself; and the Beetle said, knowing the answer very well, “What alternative?”
and the Bee buzzed like a saw and said, “You know what I mean,” but Beetle said, “No I don’t,” because Beetle
did not want to admit that it knew the answer; so Bee hummed and buzzed and
said, “We could end this completely,” in a very determined voice; and Beetle
said, “Oh,” in a very small voice because it was the first time that Bee had
ever said that, and it went to hide at the foot of the bed again, but bee flew
up and hovered over it like the Angel of Death and said, “Well, would you
rather accept my alternative or break up?”; and the Beetle thought about it and
decided what was a little more degradation if that meant that it could keep its
Bee; and very rapidly it rubbed its elytra together and said, “I don’t like
your alternative, but I want to stay with you and I’ll accept any compromise…”
– but looking up into the darkness with its bug-eyes the Beetle could sense
that the Bee had no intention of compromise in any form, so it added quickly,
“But if that’s what you want I’ll do it because I’ll do anything you want me to
do; I love you;” but then the bee settled on the Beetle nonetheless and grasped
the proper spot and stung it deeply and slowly and thoroughly, and said, “I
don’t think I love you anymore.” That was the first time that she had ever said
that.
– “Oh,” said Beetle (the last thing it ever said). – “I’ve never broken up with anyone
before,” Bee hummed, “and I don’t know if I’m doing this right – you can hate
me if you want – but I don’t want to live with you anymore.”
The cool sting-venom spread a bottomless
numbness as the Beetle turned up its stiffening legs and died, for now I could
never be her Beetle again, and I was left with a dry cerebral exhaustion (which
I hope that God feels every time that an insect dies). In the meantime the sad little corpse
twitched and struggled for another interval, just as a crocodile can bite for
up to an hour after death; for there were still a few biomechanical standby
command centers functioning trying to make the Beetle survive the massive shock
trauma and nervous failure (though Bee, I must say, had stung firmly and well,
advised both by her instincts and the example of other bees, and remained with
her stinger inside the Beetle for some moments to make sure that she had done
the job, just as a trapper will rock on his heels upon a coyote’s throat for a
quarter-hour after the animal’s eyes have bulged out and its tongue has turned
blue and it has gone limp; just as, according to the dictates of quaint
American marriage manuals, a husband trying to impregnate his wife will leave
his limp penis inside her for quite a while so as not to make it any harder for
his sperm to swim up through their mutal slime; reason dictates that long after
a fleshly process has been accomplished to apparent satisfaction it is best to
practice overkill.) And in fact
Beetle made thrashing movements for some days, so much did it love its Bee and
so little did it want to die. When
Bee was out in the subsequent days I missed her as if she, not Beetle, were dead, for my Bee would never come back to me
now; and when she entered the apartment at night my mouth dried up so that I
was unable to say a word to her, and my heart pounded with fear of her, a sort
of sharp green fear – I had to look at her and hear her in the other room and know that she was
conscious of me as a problem solved in all but disposal; and now she shut the
door to her room (we exchanged few further words after that night) and began to
study her Polish. She was a very
young girl; she was not yet nineteen.
I had known that someday she would send me away from her. It was so terrible being in the
apartment when she was in the bedroom. – She was very short and stout and
walked with a slight limp. There
was a metal plate in her ankle; she had broken the bone years ago and had
always been too busy to have her plate extracted. I could recognize her step in the evenings as she came down
the hall to our number. I would
usually be curled on my side on the floor, sobbing picturesquely into the
rug. When I heard her I would run
silently to my chair in the corner of the living room, almost mad with misery
and terror. The key turned in the
lock. I stared down at my toes,
grinding my teeth and holding my breath.
I would not have her looking at me full on; I was sideways to the
doorway. I would not expose my
back to her, either; I could best take her presence in the side, the shoulders,
the neck. She came in quickly, face turned away from me, and marched into the
bedroom. The door closed behind
her. I heard her sighing and
grumbling as she took off her little daypack, got out her books and set to
work. She would be in there until
five or six the next morning; then she’d go out, off to her classes and friends,
and be gone all day. The mattress
where I now slept was against the wall right by the door. When she went out, she stepped over my
face. – I never dared to ask quite why it was that she didn’t love me anymore:
Had I been mean to her? Did I
smell bad? – Sometimes I could not bear it and stuck my head in the oven and
turned on the gas, but here I was a bungler just like poor Electric Emily, and
all that happened was that I got a terrible headache and felt dizzy and had to
go to the bathroom to vomit.*
But this still lay in the future, for now the
problem was to get through the night in the double bed (which Bee and I had
bought on Haight Street) with Beetle’s smooth rounded body still rocking side
to side with faint comical motions like a scientific balance finally coming to
equilibrium, and locking its legs in its death-agony all through me; and with
Bee lying beside me tense and uncomfortable yet proud, I think, of what she had
done. This American girl must have
seen (as she waited out the hour of midnight) the night-noon horizons of future
frontiers, the sun burning down on the salt licks and desert barrens, her
cooking-pot over her shoulder and behind her a dead stranger at the water hole;
time to push on while she could (but actually this trope is ill-suited to her
because she hated to walk anywhere; we had fights about this; she was plump and
sedentary like a sweet caterpillar, but there was this ruthlessness in her
still; she was also going to get rid of her snakes when they got too big. Perhaps I think of her as a bold
pioneer making tracks away from me not only because she, like myself, was a
citizen of our great Republic, but also because before I went to Afghanistan in
1982 she had taken me to see Lawrence of Arabia and held my hand; and it was great, it was keen, it was really
marv; especially the part where Lawrence had to go back in the desert sun to
rescue one of the Arabs in the caravan that was going to storm Aqaba. – “Aqaba,
Aqaba!” cried Lawrence madly; in his own memoirs he does not mention whether he
did anything of the kind, but all accounts agree that he had to stop worrying
about Aqaba for a minute because a man had fallen off a camel in the night and
Lawrence was going to turn around and save him even though they said it was impossible
because the sun would kill him and must have already killed the other guy
anyhow (that was why they rode by night); and now the sun began to rise and
shrivel things up as if it were the Emperor of the blue globes, and the sand
started smoking, but Lawrence rode into the sunrise just the same, and the
Arabs were furious with him because he would die and thereby louse up the Aqaba
campaign, that son of Iblis, but he didn’t die then; that was the remarkable
thing; he rode back through the white-hot dunes and found the man crawling
along in the sand, already close to dead, and lifted him up onto his camel and
hauled him back to camp.
– “Wawrence!” cried the two servant-boys who waited for him on the hill
at camp, hoping while the other Arabs slept brutishly, needing the stimulus of
a white man to lead them on to victory against the Turk. – Yes, here came old
Lawrence, a real man was he; they all gave him water and celebrated madly. Later Lawrence had to shoot he same
fellow he rescued, for the sake of harmony. – Only the shooting part is described in his memoirs; the
desert rescue is, I think, a contrivance, much like our own notion of rescuing
our Iranian hostages some years ago, though we failed miserably there, by God;
but the point of all this is that Bee was off to Aqaba! Or maybe she was reading proudly along,
moving from “A” to “A” in the great desert of knowledge; now she and her
caravan of books were already as far west as Provo, Utah, pursued by beetles
and snakes and Gila monsters, but onward, onward she went with her retinue; and
now she was in Bishop, California; now the wagon train came down through the
palms of Sacramento, closer to the fine new smell, the smell of the Pacific, of
an undergraduate degree, a teaching assistantship; yes, here was Aqaba all
right; those bloody stupid Turks had set their guns facing the sea because they
didn’t have the imagination to realize that somebody had the guts to do it the hard way, crossing the desert dunes to fall on them
from behind, as I would have if it would have done any good; oh, I would have
kissed her ass a million times; anything, anything.) – She could not sleep that
night; I could not sleep. Although
it was impossible to see her in the darkness I could sense the rigidity of her
body next to me, and when she shifted her position slightly or coughed then I
knew that she was still awake and was lying listening to my movements, until finally I could not stand it and asked her to
please sleep on the mattress in the other room. She would not go at first, I don’t know why—did she feel
regretful about the necessity of getting up now and leaving me? Was she
satisfied where she was?—but after another hour had passed and we were still
both lying there hearing each other breathe she took her blankets out wordlessly
and did not come back.
The next day was Saturday and I woke early,
feeling under the weather. She was
dialing her friends, informing them in a low buzz that all was well; “I did it;
Beetle and I broke up last night.
Now we just have to work out the”—she gave the following words a droll
emphasis—“gory details.” — The little corpse spasmed, gorily. It had been Aqaba’s last defender. And Lawrence went wading in the sea,
inhaling the cool spray of freedom. –Over my cereal she presented me with an
itemized bill for rent and food and her share of certain common possessions,
which I could not read for tears and agreed to every term of for the sake of
harmony. All the time I knew that
her friends had done it, that her friends had tricked my Bee…This was the only
explanation. – An hour later Milly
and Arthur came by, and Milly, who had always despised me, was extremely polite
and spoke to me more than she had in months and asked how I had slept and
looked me full in the face with great satisfaction.
When they left, Bee stepped outside with them
and they talked out of my hearing for perhaps forty-six minutes according to my
watch, then she came back and told me that Arthur wanted to have a little chat
with me that evening, and got her keys and fluttered away with other friends to
spread the new; and as soon as the door was closed I stuck my fist in my mouth
so that no one would hear and screamed and screamed with my mouth open like a
grub’s; then it was time to gash myself half-heartedly with Bee’s steak knives
a few times and maybe hit my head with a lightweight hammer just for the hell
of it, then back to the gas oven to be saved, then off to the broom closet for
a mop to clean up my vomit. Now
here came Bee again, ignoring a smell of gas when was so clearly a textbook
example of the Call for Help, rushing instead to the phone to dial: --“Oh,
Diana told you? –Great; yes, Milly knows, she had a lot of good advise
beforehand and was very very supportive; oh, I feel fine, thank you, very
relieved it went so well; no, that’s very nice of you to say but I’m sure I
must have been horrible to him too at times; why, that’s so funny; Arlova promised last week to help me with that; that’s really
neat; no, I’m just reading; really, I do feel fine; it was much easier than I thought and when you told me…” – Here she sunk the
receiver into her neck and chest and bent her head and whispered something into
it and cocked her head and listened for a minute and laughed. – “Oh, no, I made it really clear, and
now all we have to settle is”—giggle—“the gory details” – I kept abreast of the
politics of the situation as best I could, learning from indirect reports that
Milly blamed me entirely for forcing Bee to initiate the break-up (Milly was a
meta-feminist at Stanford), and Arlova had always thought I exerted a weird and
repressive influence on Bee’s entire environment, that Diana felt that it was
important to hold my assets until I paid what I owed of the rent; and that
Pavel and Richard were fighting over who could ask Bee out first. Arthur contented himself with saying
that he was disappointed in me for letting this happen, and Seth got me
drunk. Meanwhile the dead Beetle
was rapidly being effaced from Bee’s life and Crystalline Hive, for I was now
moving out my effects, the piles of boxes shrinking day by day, I feeling a
certain emotional squeeze because the slower I went the longer I would be in
proximity to her, which was unbearable since even when she was out I was in
constant fear that she might come back and I would have to say something to her or look at her or answer a question; but he
faster I went the more irrevocably I cooperated in my own liquidation. In the end I chose the latter option,
because Beetle had always been obedient to its Bee in scheduling matters and it
seemed that she wanted me out, so I wrote a note saying I’d do anything, anything if she’d take me back (but couldn’t bear to read any response so
instructed her never to answer), moved my last suitcase out, returned the
apartment keys, mailed her a check for everything I owed her plus ten dollars
to go to movies on, and settled into a resignation which I did not dare to
examine too closely.
Of course at night I dreamed that I made amends
for whatever it was I had done wrong, and came to her on my knees, and she
hugged me and let me come back to her, and I woke up exhausted but happy, not
knowing where I was (for I was now living with Seth and Arthur), and then I
looked around me and realized that it was “only” a dream, just as when I was a
child I used to dream of finding treasure or being given presents, and would
wake up in the morning convinced that I could still feel something in my hand
but it was melting fast like fairy ice and by the time I opened my hand there
was never anything there. Or I
would dream that Bee let me fuck her one last time to say good riddance, and
she spread her legs wide for me but I could feel her revulsion, and I mounted
her and entered her deeply and panted and snorted like a bull mounting a piece
of rawhide stretched on a frame, which the insemination agent has rubbed
against the backside of a cow in heat—and how we laugh to see him going at it
and ejaculating on a damned sawhorse for Christ’s sake, so we can use his semen just like we use the
rest of him; and she lay there under me holding her breath as we did it, stiff
with disgust, and when I was almost through she closed her legs tightly to trap
me and called for all her friends and they came rushing out of the closet and
seized me and pulled me off and threw me on my back and spread my legs and
shoved Bee’s nightgown up against my nose and mouth so that I could feel the
cotton soft against my face and smell the honey-sell of my Bee and be soothed
and pacified and tricked like an animal, and Bee held one of my ankles and
Milly stepped up with a razor and put her hand on the inside of my thigh and
traced the place with her forefinger and Richard nodded and Milly cut my
femoral artery while they held me firmly against the spongy mattress, and Bee
said, “He’s bleeding now; you can let go of him,” and they all got up and stood
round me to see if another cut would be needed, and while they waited Milly
worked up a big gob and spat in my face…
* Carbon monoxide injures through tissue
hypoxia. Hemoglobin’s affinity for
it is 218 times greater than that for oxygen, so it must really love it, just
like Beetle loved its Bee. Blood
levels of less than 10% carboxyhemoglobin produce few symptoms. As we move up the evolutionary scale to
10-30, headaches, nausea and mild dysfunctions of the central nervous system
appear (for you are just beginning to damage yourself now), decreasing visual
acuity and impaired cognitive beeping and clicking being among the most common
indications. More advanced
psychotics prefer to aim for 30-40, which yields a harvest of severe headaches,
dyspnea on exertion, dizziness, real nausea, not this kid stuff, vomiting, dim vision and, if you
achieve your goal, ataxia and possible collapse. The professional proceeds to levels in excess of 50, which
state induces tachypnea, convulsions, coma and death through profound shock and
respiratory and cardiac failure.
– While we’re on the subject of suicide, I should mention that in our
great Republic males commit that deed three times as often as females, but call
suicide prevention centers only a third as frequently. – As this book goes to press, I find
myself anxious to keep it up to date, so I must add a relevant fact from one of
the Cyanide Society’s publications, only recently available to the lay reader:
namely, that gas ovens throughout this nation have been reformatted to make
lethality a more distant possibility.
There is some new additive in the gas which restores corpses to life. This explains why chickens and
hamburgers broiled in the gas oven always taste good; they are brought back to
themselves, as it were, and then killed fresh, backed alive; but I am losing
the moral, which is that nothing will stop a real man; so if necessary stick
your head in the oven and turn on the gas and light the pilot. It will feel much like a high
fever.
