In Which We Stop World War 3 by Traveling Through Time to Kill the Dictator by Brenna Gautam
In Which We Stop World War 3 by Traveling Through Time to Kill the Dictator
We’ve killed our landlord.
Last night, we buried a gunmetal fairy circle of landmines in a shallow ring around his front porch, and in the morning, his bare heel struck a pressure plate the size of a maple leaf, sending him catapulting, circus-like, headfirst into a mailbox.
A mild clatter in the parking lot. Small flecks of shrapnel drift into our teacups, but we’ve been pretending fallout is nothing more than raindrops for so long that everyone continues sipping. I watch as Calypso from the fourth floor adds a generous tilt of liquor to her cup and drains the entire concoction, shrapnel and all. Winces and smacks her lips afterwards. Catches my eye and tightens the muscles in her left cheek and eyelid as if about to wink, but thinks better of it and allows all the moving parts of her face to slacken into a cartoon mask of exhaustion. It’s been a long twenty-four hours.
Now the secrets come spilling while my father shuffles through the carnage, trying to make himself useful by scraping lumps of charred flesh from the garden stones they’ve clung to, but I can tell from the diminishing space between his neck and chin that his heart isn’t in it. Never mind that he keeps glancing at our doorstep with that ugly, spooked frown. He suspects.
“Maybe the weather is giving us a sign that it’s time for change,” I had whispered earlier that morning, over microwaved leftovers and thick, ominous fog. “Change is a good thing, Papa.”
“That’s what the anarchists always say.”
“I’m not an anarchist. I’m a feminist...”
Then he patted the soft roof of my hand with the rough underbelly of his, because he thought that all the real feminists had enlisted to train for the war. That everyone who chose to remain behind was complicit or broke. That all the stars had plummeted from our skies and landed in our bathtubs to smolder, but really we’ve hidden our tattoos beneath swaths of cakey foundation, two shades too light, and we take those long, solitary baths to gaze at the ink and remember who we are.
From the window box above my window box, the nameless woman drops a note. (I keep a tattered star chart for the night each resident joined the complex, so believe me when I say she is nameless. We used to call her “seasonal worker” because some company paid to transport her across the ocean to our country for one season of cleaning toilets in a Bavarian castle and licking chunks of cold mashed potatoes from the discarded room service plates that all the princes and princesses leave outside their doors. Then we called her “trafficked”, “exploited”, “Ray’s new girlfriend”, “etc.”, until a hurricane forced us all to hunker in the basement and gave her the space to explain, over ferocious peals of thunder, that names—like precious metals, like sea glass—simply carry too much weight to lug around all the time and that hers was gently swirling in a slow motion whirlpool somewhere at the bottom of the Pacific, cast off like so much excess luggage. With a grunt, she stood on her hands, fingers splayed on the waterlogged basement floor. A demonstration of the resulting lightness.)
Fragments of the landmine’s carnage, twisted metal still hot, splinter into my palms as I reach out to catch the fluttering paper midair.
It’s an amateur voting ballot, the kind that schoolchildren pass to kindercrushes on Valentine’s Day. The nameless woman already wants to elect a new leader, I assume, or maybe she wants to take a vote on what defense to offer in court when we’re inevitably arrested and charged. Shaking my head, I slip it into my jeans pocket, where it smolders uncomfortably against my hip.
A few of the landlord’s friends are gathered outside around his broken face now. Balancing my teacup saucer in one hand and shielding my eyes with the other, I venture out onto the steaming pavement to eavesdrop. I pretend to examine the clouds. Lick a finger and hold it up against the nonexistent wind, prodding at the low-hanging, chimneystack fumes that grew from the morning fog and have remained settled around us ever since.
“It’s an international war crime,” Genevieve’s husband is saying, and the others nod in agreement. “It is a violation of human rights, multilateral conventions, and it’s a crime against humanity.”
Genevieve moistens her lips in a tic that we’ve all grown to recognize over the years she’s watched our children writhe and twist about like eels intent on drowning each other in the neighborhood pool. Motherly, angelic, Genevieve. Life guardian, keeper of the sunscreen and the frozen popsicles. She stands next to her husband in awkward proximity, like a demure conjoined twin, and transcribes this statement onto the back of a crumpled receipt. (Behind his back, we call her husband Dick because—aside from the obvious—he has an annoying habit of dictating lofty ideas about human rights law to his bride-turned-secretary. And he once referred to himself as a “walking dictionary.” Arrogance candy-coated in sugary self-deprecation. Did you catch that? he always asks, and Genevieve, her lips cracking at the corners, always draws them wider into a smile and offers a little thumbs up. Caught it!).
This time, in a brief act of revolution, Genevieve flashes me the transcript while her husband stoops to inspect the crime scene. She has underlined the final word:
humanity!
Even though Dick said it with no special inflection or emphasis, which means the transcription is a secret message. Her murky eyes like two lagoons, unblinking, fixed on mine.
You’re right, I mouth. You’re right.
She wants to remind me of a promise made many years ago. We would resist, but never harden. We would place our checks in the mailbox at the last possible hour, keep our doors locked until the landlord threatened to rip the deadbolts from their hinges with his bare hands, glare at the meat of his face from across the cool lobby of a housing courthouse, and litter our belongings onto the emerald grass of his lawn after our eviction notices posted. But Calypso, Genevieve, Pooja, Sal, the nameless woman, and our other conspirators, had agreed: no suffering. No torture. Quick and clean. We will stop the Armageddon through dignity, restraint, and sisterhood.
Now that the landlord is dead and his Armageddon lies in unburied shards around him, Papa scrubs at a ceramic gnome and offers up little prayers for me. The personal kind that starts with “Father…”.
Half-conversation with the silent sky: I can see his lips moving as he wipes sweat and blood spray from his temple. And because the glare from the sun, the sweat on my own brow, and the heat at my hip and my heart are each building into something unbearable, I turn my back on Genevieve and the others to furtively pluck the steaming note out from my pocket. On it, two neatly penciled boxes:
𝥷 confess (heven)? or 𝥷 Silence (hell)?
I should have known.
The nameless woman knows I am not religious, but, just like Papa, she still tries to draw a thick black line around the shifting contours of my wayward soul. She hangs a fragrant rosary around Calypso’s doorknob for the same reason, even though she knows Calypso will just nibble at the rose petal beads while plotting murder. I suppose she thinks it will coax us into choosing salvation. Later, I will edit the note by adding a third box, this one so large it will stretch from the top of the paper to the bottom. Name the box PURGATORY, fold the corners of the page into a paper airplane, and send the whole contraption clattering back up to her window box.
We have been presented with the fallacy of a false dilemma. We have nothing to fear and everything is fine, or the world is past saving and everything is futile...
I am trying to remember the other lines from this famous speech about wartime and sacrifice, to inspire the others, when, from among the men huddled around the landlord’s bloodied chin, arguing about who should inherit the empire, Dick claps his hands together. He spins triumphantly to gesture at my father, kneeling in the nearby dandelions and rubbing salt from his eyes.
“Hang on. What about him?”
Murmurs of agreement from the gathered company.
“It would just be an interim arrangement. Nothing permanent,” Dick says over the crackle of Genevieve’s pen on the receipt, “But we need someone to take care of the main house and collect this month’s rent in the meantime. And look: look at how he cares for the place.”
To my father, he asks, “What do you think? We need someone reliable and cleanly to keep order around here. You could stay until the thirtieth of June.”
Papa came to this country when he was thirteen years old. He used to live inside a cage buried deep under the earth, where rent was free and his ragged accent could wind its way up through the roots and into the leaves until it reached the ears of the citizens as a gentle hum, a river breeze passing through the cattails, acceptable. Around the time the first headlines warning of a new war began appearing in newspapers, I also noticed new colors of dirt appearing in the beds of his fingernails. Cinnamon and sable, rust and nightfall. I realized he had started digging a hole in the ground under our apartment, into which he might place me if nightmare bullets ever did rain down. He respects me and my star charts, my amateur astronomy, but he also remembers the safety of that skyless cage.
Because of all this family history, I assume he will turn down the offer of a stint in the main house, where he would be forced to play the role of a tyrant, living in a gleaming structure raised up high on a hill above all the prewar apartments bowing at its lofty foundations.
But it has been a long time since we understood each other.
Helpless, Genevieve and I watch as my father allows himself to be ushered into the house. A joyful procession through the sunlit grass surrounding the front porch. Their feet trampling so heavily, so thoughtlessly, across the treacherous ground. It is like the footsteps of little children, stepping out of sync to the errant rhythm of the nameless woman beating her fists against a grimy, cobwebbed windowpane in warning: thump thump-thump thump. She chooses heaven, but no one listens to the pounding confession, and although the black web of the tattoos on her wrists begin to darken through her makeup, no one is looking in the right direction.
We’ve killed our landlord.
We saved the world. We circled his property with landmines, stirred our sugar cubes as the ground trembled.
We’ve killed our landlord, but now our fathers are standing at the steps of a house we rigged to become a graveyard. And now we can’t remember where we buried the rest.
Editors Note: the line ‘humanity!’ was originally underlined and not bolded but we unfortunately cannot underline text on the site.
Executive Producers
Sue White
Daniel Henson
