Elegy on Kinderklavier by Arna Bontemps Hemenway

Author:Arna Bontemps Hemenway [Hemenway, Arna Bontemps]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781936747856
Publisher: Sarabande Books

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The truck gave a wrenching creak and came to an abrupt stop. Bajh jumped out, cursing. A thin tree of smoke assembled itself out of the air above the cab. Araz got down and watched Bajh kick the front wheel, cough a little from the smoke and pace away, mashing down a button on the cell phone they carried for emergencies and waiting for its small square of light to come on. Asti stayed up in the truck.

The truck’s interior lights then quit and Araz found himself in a deep darkness, able to see almost nothing at all. He strained to look around. They were on a farming road, and he thought he could make out the dull metal of an irrigation well-marker glinting flatly a little way off, though he couldn’t be sure.

Araz turned to look back toward Bajh and the night came alive, breaking itself around Araz’s head.

A skirling came out of the sky, a mechanical screaming, directionless, as if out of the molecules of air itself, its howling barely even a discrete sound. By the time Araz was able to process it at all, the sound was alive in his chest, his hands, his skull, his mouth—percussive, felt more than heard, as was his own voice; if his scream even existed, he couldn’t tell. Araz only heard the blast once; the night was blown to a lucid muteness afterward, though he could not yet feel the wetness of the blood trickling from his ears and coating the sides of his jaw and neck.

Later, Araz would find himself unable to divorce his actual memory of what happened from the strange, otherworldly vision of the Internet video he would be shown by a roommate at his boarding school in London. Araz’s memory of that night was thus perpetually recast in the shaky, falsely illuminated field of a helicopter’s night-vision recording, the only omniscience able to sort the physical chaos. Though the particular video he saw was certainly not of his own night (and though no such video record of his own experience even existed, as far as he knew), Araz would forever afterward bear the acute feeling that he’d witnessed what happened to himself only through the real-time eye of the gun-sighted screen.

In Araz’s mind: the glowing white shape of his own prone body beside the truck; of Bajh, statant, in the field’s furrows; of Asti, limbs held close, a jumbled blob of the white that signaled body heat to the helicopter’s lens. The trio had not been aimed at, so none of them were hit. Instead, the rounds meant to disable the already-disabled truck (a hundred? a thousand?) found something (a half-full oil can forgotten under the truck’s seat? a spare gasoline container wedged without thought under the hay in the back?) to alight on, and the viewfinder was quickly awash with a riot of heat-shapes, an amorphous monster mounting the vehicle—fire.

From the sky came more screaming of metal, though Araz did not hear it. Here, the false implantation in Araz’s memory of the concussion of air made by the helicopter’s blades.

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