THE WAY IT WENT DOWN: PROCESSING

People think they know their limits, but they don’t. Not really. You don’t know how far you’ll go. You just can’t. No one can know, man.

BING, BING, BING. 

I turn the car off, and then a few second later, the engine rattles to a stop and the car shakes with a final lurch. I float in the black for a few minutes there, my breath coming in plumes that catch what little light there is. 

Then, outside in the dark. 

It’s okay, I’m not afraid anymore. I’m past that now. When the worst has happened everything else doesn’t seem like much. Everything else doesn’t seem bad at all, really. The field is black, and there’s a lot more moving around and searching than I thought there would be, finding numbers and counting out rows. I drop the shovel with a clang. We’re more than a mile from anyone and I’m past the point of caring. If they find me, I think, 3 hots and a cot, am I right? Maybe even community service considering who it is. Doesn’t seem so bad. But then no one comes and I get to work. 

Fuck it. You never can know, man.

∆

Later, I’m back at the farm and the sunlight is coming up and I’m in the kitchen drinking coffee and then she comes down and doesn’t say anything. We both drink coffee in silence at the table as the sun creeps across it. Then she goes back upstairs and I hear the TV running some show I might know if I cared to puzzle it out. Some shit show we used to watch together. We haven’t spoken in nine days. I don’t suppose we’ll speak anytime soon. 

She blames me for a lot of it, and just so you know, she isn’t entirely wrong. 

Danny would have said, guys, quit this, you love each other. Guys, come on. But Danny isn’t here right now. She’s right because my work got in the way. I threw myself into my work, and not because I loved it, but because I was terrified of it. Of what it meant. And Danny and Em, I couldn’t tell them anything about it. But I threw myself into my work because of them, you know? To protect them. I…It’s stupid now, to think of it. The fear and the lies and the horrors and the deaths and to think: I was helping. It’s dumb. I’m dumb. I didn’t do shit, and I’ll never explain it away to anyone in my family: why I wasn’t there, why I seemed like I was gone all the time. Why I was gone more and more, over time. 

Fuck.

Out in the barn in the work room, and well, I get to work. Chainsaw first — not unusual here on the farm — and then…other things. I was a physicist, so this is all alien work to me, but I find it helps to think of it as processing. To separate it, and the desired result into steps. THIS must be done to get to THAT. Processing. Soon, I’m generating a pile just like the one we saw in Warsaw. I flip through the print outs with surgical gloves and consider there steps to make certain I have done nothing wrong, as if I have not memorized them all. As if they’ll change when I look away. 

Five and a half hours and it feels like I’ve accomplished very little. I cover it up. The hammer I have won’t do. I need a mallet. 

I go back to the house. “Em, I’m going in to Baker, you need anything?”

A laugh track from upstairs. 

“Emma?”

The TV goes off.

Silence spins out.

“Em?”

I leave.

∆

At Home Depot and a man who is disturbingly red is talking at me. He has a vest with a name tag that says CLAUDE. CLAUDE shows me the mallets. Suddenly, I’m back in my car with a bag, startled into the present by my phone ringing. It’s a 442 number. Local. I pick it up.

“Mr. Embry?”

“Yeah. Um. Yes.”

“This is Elliot Tardrew from Island Outfitters, and I’m just calling to follow up on…”

“The suit.”

“Yes. Payment for the…um Joseph Abboud slim fit teen suit separates…”

“How much?”

“The balance outstanding is…um…$42- oh, no, I see you paid half upfront. So, um…$238.98.”

“Ok.”

“Would you like to take care of that now, sir?” Considering what I just did with that suit, I can’t believe I’m taking care of this right now, but I am.

∆

Back at the farm. In the kitchen, Em has already eaten, and the plates are piled on the counter. I eat standing at the refrigerator, holding the Home Depot bag, listening for Em upstairs, but there’s nothing. I run one hand under the tap and wipe my mustache and face and then look out the window. At the barn, the door is open.

Em’s gumboots are gone from the side door. 

I run out there.

∆

When it’s over. When I’m done, the mallet is clotted with hair and scalp and some bone. There’s blood everywhere, and my ears are ringing from Em’s screaming. The room still hums with it. She’s on the dirt floor, her face a wash of crimson and caved in, like a falling-down-barn. But I can’t see her features because her face is black from the blood and for a minute, I smile and then realize I’m smiling and then stop. 

Danny’s body — nothing more than his head, a torso and much of the right arm now, lay revealed and mute on the work table, the tarp cast aside. The Salina Essentialis processed for the ritual are still in their bronze container, as per the instructions and thank god for that. I stand there for a long time, and then get a jar of water and soak the mallet — I would need all the material on it, after all. 

First Danny, and then Em, I guess. And when they were back I would explain why I did what I did to them. Why everything I did, I did for them. And why it was all worth it because we could all be together again. 

And I say it out loud in a room with my family as if they could hear me: People think they know their limits, but they don’t. Not really. You don’t know how far you’ll go. You just can’t. No one can know, man, and though it comes from my mouth involuntarily, it sounds like a prayer.