They Dragged Them through the Streets: A Novel

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66 S Z and I sat on the couch. One never thinks of him like that, at ease, sitting on the couch. I was just off work and had gone by A’s, sat on the couch and shuffled the television forward. On television they were showing the four bodies, burned and swaying as they hung from the bridge, over the road, over the river. Is this true, would they have shown this? But I remember sitting there, the sun at an irritating angle, the window dirty where the dog pressed his nose to wait for A. The bodies blackened and moving in the wind. Z was sitting next to me, leaning forward, elbows on his knees. The faces on the screen were shouting. What did we see, what did we read about? A child’s heel dug into the head of one of the men. His flesh already softened by fire. Someone had taken a piece of flesh, tied it to a stone, and flung it over a telephone wire. I should know, and I don’t precisely, what happens in heat, the walls between blood vessels, skin, becoming—fat, liquefying? What remained on the sole of the shoe, on the fingers? 67 They tied the men to the backs of cars and dragged them through the streets to the bridge. I expected Z to say something about what would come after . The siege we could already have predicted. But he didn’t; we sat and watched. The bodies hung from the bridge at angles it was hard to understand. What was—that orange line, glowing , wrapped around a leg like a tendon unwinding? I hoped the bullets had killed them first or the smoke. That nothing of them could feel when the skin flaked back charred to expose the cavity of the stomach, the concavity the rib cage descends into, where the organs are held, then the hips. It seemed this place had fed itself fastest to fire, there was the least left here. Some of the faces around the bodies were smiling. A few men held up pieces of paper toward the camera, I never learned what they said. When they stopped showing the pictures on one channel, you could flip to another and find them. Goddammit, Z said, as the TV lost reception again. He hit the side of the TV and the dog raised his ears, a body moved again in a breeze. It was strange to still call them bodies, they hung puppetlike and crackling, shedding as they were hoisted and moved. Children had run down the street toward the smoke. The day laborers, nothing to do, took out their shovels. There was no electricity there, no water. Z’s phone buzzed on the table. I pushed it toward him. Vivienne. He hit the side, kept watching the screen. Didn’t she go in for that test today? I asked. He nodded. But he didn’t call back. It’s fine, I’ll pick her up, he said later. It was becoming twilight . The dog had pressed his nose to the window and on-screen 68 the commentators had moved to the foreground, pictures behind them. Z rubbed his hands along his face. We had turned the sound off. Children’s faces shone in the dust on the screen, laughing or crying. ...