If the Sky Falls by Nicholas Montemarano

Author:Nicholas Montemarano
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: LSU Press
Published: 2005-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

the november fifteen

They took fifteen of us away, but fewer than half came back.

They rounded us up one night in our homes and drove us blindfolded in several vans for an hour or more to what looked—when they removed the blindfolds—like an abandoned factory. I cannot speak for the other men, but I did not know why they had come for me. In any case, once we were in the factory and the doors had been locked and they began interrogating us, why they had come for us and what we knew and didn’t know no longer mattered. One’s life outside—as terrifying as it was the first few days imagining never returning to it—eventually fell away into a kind of dream or myth. The only reality we knew—the only one that mattered—was what was happening to us and to our bodies inside the mostly empty and therefore echoing rooms of the factory.

When they were not interrogating us, they kept us—sometimes blindfolded, more often not—in the main room of the factory, which looked like an airplane hangar, though much larger. From there we could hear the pleadings and screams of whomever they were questioning in one of the many side rooms. Our hands were almost always tied behind our backs, and we were made to spend most of the day, and sometimes the night, on our knees, side by side, and were not permitted to look at one another or speak or try to communicate in any way. We were not told these rules; we learned them by witnessing what happened to someone who broke one of these rules he didn’t even know about in the first place. The first one of us who looked to his side was hit across his kneecaps with a lead pipe. The first who turned to look at the man who had been struck was himself struck. The first of us to speak—he said something innocent to me like, “Nice accommodations they have here,” something intended not as the beginning of some insurrection but, rather, as an attempt at humor in the face of grim and certainly absurd circumstances—this man’s knees were broken in front of us (we did not have to turn to see), and he was left there crying, much like my then-ten-year-old daughter cried when she burned her hand on an iron. If you have ever banged your knee on the bottom of your desk and know what that pain feels like and how it can bring you to tears and send you into a tantrum of swearing, still you have no idea—I didn’t then, but soon would—what it feels like to have your knees broken. You are a baby; you keep crying for your mommy, and you don’t care who hears you. You curse the person who gave you such pain, and besides, you know—or think you know—that that person can’t possibly give you more pain than the pain you already have, and you further reason that perhaps if you curse

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