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“Wake up wake up wake up,” Neena hears this mantra repeated, close to her ear, as someone shakes her, jostles her, but without any real urgency at all; it’s a hushed voice that speaks, more like a subliminal suggestion than an actual alarm. “Wake up darling,” the electronic voice coaxes, repeats, a voice half-familiar, which is to say, at the same time half-unfamiliar, repeating with the aforementioned lack of any urgency it’s message “wake up wake up,” a sing-song drone, sounding almost bored with its own lie, telling us what we most of all would like to hear, “wake up, wake up my darling, it was all just a bad dream.”

And Neena wakes, in spite of herself, wakes from one lie to another lie via a lie, her body returning from the exploration of some distant planet, a heavenly body sending messages via satellite in a semaphore that she doesn’t understand.

It is, of course, her husband, the chief interrogator who wakes her, who peeps over the railing of her crib, did I say “crib,” oops! I meant coffin, double-oops! I didn’t say “coffin” did I, you must think I’m crazy, her bed, I meant her bed, of course, that is what I meant to say, her bed, it goes without saying, (bed, bed, B-E-D, duh-uh) the protective railing of her…hospital bed, yes, that’s what it is, and his face wears the special kindness, the maternal masculinity of a saint, not the locust-munching, fire-spewing doomsday desert kind of saint who stinks and rages, his inflamed and filthy flesh alive with lice and shuddering with revulsion, but the gentle, mild sort that birds hop up to fearlessly, the garden variety of saint upon whose sackcloth shoulders the most timid of birds trust to perch, hopping into sexless laps to peck the crumbs of kindness from a smooth and holy hand.

“What happened,” Neena asks, sensibly enough, who wouldn’t, under the same circumstances, ask the exact same or similar question? There’s no fault there. But who does she think is going to give her an honest answer, who does she think will know if she doesn’t herself?

“What happened?”

“Where am I?”

“What have they done to me?”

Imagine it were you in attendance upon her awakening. What could you possibly say by way of an explanation?

The Chief Interrogator, (did we mention his name is Thoth? Of course, we must have. Is it the truth? Well, that is the name he gave us and we’re just passing it on) waves these questions away like allergenic phlox floating in the warm breeze of a summer day; after all, as Chief Interrogator, answering questions isn’t exactly in his job description; it’s none of his affair, quite frankly. You might just say it’s really not his thing; no, it’s not his half of the equation; others do it so much better, and he knows it. He’s a man of a certain modesty, Mr. Thoth. He knows well enough to stick to what he’s good at, to keep working to his strength. The knowing smile, the bland reassurance, the false promise—these are his strong points, his stock in trade, his specialized skill-set. The growled threats, the ominous innuendo, the thrown chair and the rubber truncheon—these are his tools, the implements of his office. The cinderblock room, the chilled air, the too-bright light--this is his milieu and his natural habitat. The broken innocent, babbling stooge, and the forced confession are the highlights on his resume.

A man who loves the truth, loves it so much no word of it ever leaves his mouth; a black hole of veracity, a voracious consumer of confession, the truth is sucked deep inside him and where it goes from there no one knows, no one ever sees hide nor hair of it again, not a whisper of it, not a rumor. One day, or so it is postulated, once and for all, all the truth in the universe will vanish to that place we presume exists on the other side of Mr. Thoth, if it hasn’t already. In the meantime he’ll keep asking the questions, thank you very much, and you’ll keep answering them, questions to which there are no right answers anymore, because he already has them all. From now on, only lies, outright lies, exist.

“No, don’t look,” he admonishes lightly, but firmly, as Neena makes to lift the covers off her supine body in order to see what the damages may be.

“Don’t look,” he repeats, “there’s no need to look, there never is, there’s nothing ever under there to see,” he says, “and if there is, I assure you, it won’t be to your liking.”

But Neena isn’t listening to his sage advice; she’s paying no heed to his words of warning. Who can blame her? Who would listen, under the circumstances? She has a right to peek. It is, after all, her body. Well, at least in theory, at least for the time being

Peeping under the covers she sees the thick wadded pad, the rusty-crusty bloom of that awful flower planted on the spot of unspeakable violation, it’s even worst than she feared, it’s even more radical than anything they prepared her for, and who would have thought that possible? There is no point in even answering the question, what question would that be, well, any question, actually; no wonder he told her not to look, not to ask, no answer would suffice, no explanation sufficient to explain anything. Instead the old lady with the wheelchair arrives and says things like “Tut-tut now,” and “there there,” and “pull yourself together dear it’s not so very bad as all that after all; it can always be worse, believe me, you should see me below the waist, and besides, you’re going to be discharged. Have you any idea how many people would die to be in your shoes right now, heh-heh?”

But they are not shoes that Neena wears; they are the burning carbuncles of stigmata that grace her insteps. In each hand she palms a dragon-guarded magic ruby of a wound. She feels as light as air, as if she might defy gravity itself and float spontaneously up to heaven. Her mortifications have rewarded her (is “rewarded” the right word, for crissakes?) with the necessary coins of passage—but is it passage into or out of hell?