The Judgment of Helen

By Robert Subiaga Jr.

Rain. A grassy field. Some time, in a near future. And a beautiful woman who holds a tuxedoed man at gunpoint, making him dig his own grave.

He is Thurot Lindsay White, the charismatic dictator ruling as prime minister of newly totalitarian Great Britain. She is Helen MacAlpine, heir to a Scottish lord who had been a noted professor of Religious Studies, and a former fashion model of mild fame in her own right.

Intellectually gifted, though rarely in her life taken seriously for it. Profoundly sensitive, but its legacy making her a tortured repository of family secrets and mental illness. Now her father is dead and Helen has managed to kidnap White, believing him to be a monster out of Biblical prophecy... Destined to bring about the apocalypse unless she intervenes.

Or does she truly believe that? Even as she also has always been her own most capable and ruthless interrogator. About the shams and hypocrisies of every type of belief - and about her own troubled mind and delusions.

Yet the die is cast. She does have him at her mercy. And one thing is certain, when soon he is finished digging.

She still must decide whether to shoot.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jun 6, 2017
• ISBN: 9781884759918

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HELEN 1

A philosopher once said it’s all a dream. We’re all a dream, sustained in the mind of God.

If so, She’s one sick, troubled bastard.

God, I mean. Though the philosopher too, if she ever understood what it was she really said.

A man stands before me. His spade struggles against the ground that, though soaked, remains hard. Rocky. I do not look at him directly, when I feel I can avert my gaze a bit.

It suffices me to keep his blurred image in my peripheral vision. To focus on him through other senses. Through sound.

The spade is Father’s favorite, kept sharp for his garden. Hardened steel. But Father is no longer here to care for his tools, and I have let rust start pitting them.

In the hands of the man to my side, the iron scrapes first against the long, unkempt sod of the field, then against the clay underneath.

I hear the confrontation between steel and dirt under this dingy-grey sky, in a too-thin drizzle that soaks everything. Just as Arctic Inuit tribes have dozens of words for snow, given its different weight and textures, we should have an entire vocabulary for forms of rain.

My home. Islands, always drenched. The quintessential British rain. This kind, the mist that is not quite fog, I will name after me.

Helen’s rain.

We could be here amid ancient Druid priests as Julius Caesar approached, or walking the moors while the Blitz ravaged London; the rain unites past and present. Yet for all the drizzle’s universality, it still seems to take undue pleasure in drenching my hair.

I wipe the wet hair out of my eyes. Stray strands stick to my face. Strands, stray, always clinging, no matter how hard or how often I brush them aside.

As I fidget, the tuxedoed man using Father’s old, rusty shovel comes more directly into view. His body is trim, even muscular in a wiry way, and his salt-and-pepper hair remains too well-groomed for these circumstances. He stops working and stares at me through the fog.

Helen’s fog?

It moves up and to all sides as well as down, even in the slight wind, so fine is the mist of which it’s made. The lone, gnarled tree under which we stand is no proof against so subtle a deluge.

Since I have given up on the sodden hair that hangs over my forehead, the moisture now drips into my eyes, and I blink the water away. It trickles quickly down my cheeks until I taste it, sour and metallic, on my lips.

They are still full, these lips; as full as when, in my teenaged years, they started attracting a series of fashion photogs. Lips, no doubt chapping and pale now; unadorned.

Some fashion maven no doubt could turn the look into a vogue though.

We have been here, this digging man and I, for over an hour, during which time I struggled over and again, single-minded, in vain, with my wet hair. Only now have I surrendered.

Why? Obsessive-compulsive disorder, as did some of the good therapists not say? Along with Attention Deficit, and Bipolar, And Borderline Personality, and a host of others. D, S and M seem intimate letters to me.

Whichever disorder or syndrome hadn’t been documented already, at the time, by someone previous.

Helen’s Disorder. No one had had the courtesy to give me that. Grant me uniqueness.

Even as their talk almost always went through the motions of telling me how unique I was. (Often just before giving me a nice, preprinted worksheet on it.)

I can hear one quack hypothesizing in his evaluation now. A preoccupation with lips, and hair …

Cracked lips and split ends. In my hair. Helen toys with her hair. I always had a problem with hair, and split ends, and speaking of herself in the third person tense … tense … tense … why am I so damned—

Tense.

My neck jerks tight and my head snaps up and a near-snarl thins these fashionably abnormal lips of mine. Remember! Remember! Better bloody remember where you are!

I do. I remember.

And I stare at the man before me, and I struggle with the sticky rubber combat grip of the .357 Magnum.

It’s familiar. A white death-grip. And with it I can fire a six-centimeter group at thirty yards, even if it’s a rubber grip that always has still made the revolver unbalanced and too heavy in my hand.

Or almost too heavy. Not quite. I can still level it.

Level it, and spit:

Dig.

HELEN 2

Don’t be disturbed by my recent turn of phrase referring to God as a bastard. Bloody hell. Can you tell me who Her father is?

What are you thinking of, Pookie?

I hear the voice behind me. I know her. It is not supposed to be this way, I think. There are no such things as ghosts.

In this physical reality there should exist no round-faced child with too-pale skin. She is not really there, so I should neither see nor hear her.

Yet, what hubris, too, to claim there are no such things as ghosts; even a poetic metaphor is an incarnation. Well, of a sort.

I know if I turn she will be standing there, a girl of about eight or nine, with shimmering, light-brown, curly hair that is just as much a caricature of her landed gentry family as is (was?) her lace-frilled, white, knee-length dress.

My grugach. My ùruisg. My brownie. The ancestral castle of our extended family is supposed to have one.

Maybe this is not even a girl I once knew, but another. Pretending.

But she looks the part. Her blue lips, cracked as a result of a fever that burned them before it made them go cold, are a place from which no sound should issue. Or doubtless does.

Hello, Tracey, I say.

She makes me ponder Reality, and I wonder if that discomfort, that feeling of uncertainty, is shared fairly among the two of us. There should be a symmetry of doubt, should there not? If she is ethereal to me, should not I be ethereal to her? Should not the girl, if she also is as much a conscious entity as I, wonder if perhaps she is alive and I am the ghost?

Perhaps, just as, to me, she is a memory out of an irretrievable past, might I not be a shade from a yet-unformed future? A time-traveling shade of a childhood-friend-yet-to-be?

You might think.

No matter. Either way, I decide that I will converse with her, and she apparently decides to reciprocate.

The issues remain undecided and, for the most part, undecidable. And it’s only I who question my complacency.

Well and well. As I remember her, this child was never one to pause and wonder too deeply about Truth.

I look suddenly to my tuxedoed friend. My captive. (How long had I lent him an opening in my distraction?) But he does not seem to hear, or in any other way notice Tracey.

Who is he? I apologize, even if it’s only to the members of my chattering internal chorus (you, after all, are not really here) that I skirt the matter when referring to him. Identify him clearly, Helen.

I mean, of course, him. White. The Digging Man.

White occasionally shoots me a quizzical glance when I talk back to Tracey. Or is it because he sees only me, conversing with myself? He does not give enough of a reaction, and as much as I would like to guess what he actually sees or hears, I cannot.

Nor am I inclined to ask.

He is, of course, a Liar.

(And if he says he is lying…?)

Well, perhaps not every word is a lie.

Even when speaks the truth, it is only to use it, to lead to something worse.

The girl’s visible apparition seems sharp enough to me. That is enough—for now.

Her voice sounds real, and her mannerisms are not those of any automaton. These observations may only lead to a new maze of questions: When I speak to Tracey do my own lips move? If so, why does White not see that? If my lips do not move, why do I feel that they do, and that breath passes my lips? Still.

Ach, aye. The lips again. Perhaps they lie.

Even if I do hear the inaccurate key of my own voice, reverberating through both the air and my skull, as one’s voices do: simultaneously and incongruently.

***

Minister White. There, that is more to the point. I should stop calling him The Digging Man.

Not Minister as in Reverend, of course. Minister, as in Prime Minister. I should use the abbreviation P.M., yet that seems wrong to me, even if calling him minister is too respectful of the word as it regards clergy.

Priests—and pastors, and rabbis, and imams and brahmins and whatever other gibberish term you want to cobble together, ordained or self-appointed. All prophets of this scum. He has a reason, at least, an aim, and a goal. Evil tyrants are still not so disgusting as their sycophants.

Still, tyrant he is, oblivious to the girl I see, the girl in the dress. Or acting oblivious.

I notice White halt his shoveling. Perhaps he stops to mock my earlier command for him to dig. Or perhaps not.

I already have lost track of how long it’s been since last he rested.

One should expect a man to steal moments to lean on his spade and catch his breath, even without permission from a captor. He pauses knee-deep in his pit of mud, and water, and muddy water. Aye. Tired. Or acting tired.

He’s scared as well, Pookie, Tracey says.

How do you bloody well know? I ask.

The girl’s small shoulders, nearly as pale-white as the lace edging draped over them, move as she shrugs. Pookie …, she says. He … he has to be.

***

I think of panic. Dreamily, I think of children.

Why children, Pookie? What is it about the children?

Their eyes.

Eyes?

I force it out. Children’s eyes. A small sob is choked back. Looking at me.

I know from the timing of the following pause that the girl has cocked her head quizzically. I know, for I know this girl, know her well, this girl who is not there.

Oh? Tracey says. What do the children’s eyes say?

‘I’m too young,’

Too young to die?

I shake my head. "‘Too young to know I have to die.’"

I see White pause for breath. I see his eyes, on me.

White’s LOG

Stop fucking looking at me, she growled.

I tried not to stare too intently. It was not easy. She had a lithe body, suited to a model, yet both more voluptuous in parts and more wiry in others than the current fashion photographers’ vogue. Hers was more an athlete’s build. Or an inordinately well-blessed psychotic’s.

Yes, strange that I was so conscious of her attractiveness at this point. Yet on the verge of being shot, I assure you, danger only heightens odd clarity.

Her smooth aquiline face and long, near-white tresses made more harsh the haggardness of her eyes, and that ceaselessly dripping, sopping blonde hair was frighteningly fey. She obsessed with that hair of hers, twirled it in her fingers, and for a moment ignored me. Maybe she was lost in the chaos of her own thoughts. Maybe she baited me toward believing that.

Even if her thoughts had become insular, I could not pretend it would stay that way. Not indefinitely, nor consistently. And indeed, small cracks never take long to show. She stiffened and her eyes cleared, narrowed. She adjusted her grip on the magnum.

I stopped digging and leaned on the shovel handle.

I did not need to. I was not yet too tired to continue. But if she allowed my stolen respite to go unchallenged it would have given me indication of the angle in which to apply pressure.

One should always, if cautiously, test one’s boundaries.

She was perceptive. She did the same.

Christ, she was desirable.

I saw her many questions coalesce into her most important one: how frightened is he?

I glared at her, not with a challenge but the wide eyes of incredulity, which she probably saw as the beginnings of panic. I wondered if she had ever seen such an expression as mine. Or if she had, whether she knew what the sensation truly implied.

Claims of liberation and equality aside, most other women, particularly any of those who possesses what society defines as beauty, in the entire wide range from the marginally attractive to the sublime, never experience the adrenalized tension of the battlefield: that sensation which is not quite berserker heroism, nor a tendency to plead blubberingly for mercy, but something mingling all the shades between.

A resignation to the inevitability of death. Not rape. Not submission. Not humiliation. Simply … death.

And the last resignation, to the inevitability of fighting when faced with inevitability.

It is an interesting place in one’s own awareness. A place where the only operative question is whether the line has been pushed beyond the point of no return.

Whether it is time to act. Whether one quite knows yet if it is now that he has to die.

(Not an unwarranted thought for me, at that moment.)

HELEN 3

I see Them too now. The Chorus has arrived, taken their orderly position in two ranks in the field.

They are here without warning. I don’t know from where the red-robed figures come. I but see a flash of bloody scarlet in the corner of my eye, and when I whirl they are there.

Harbingers from long-lost literary techniques of Greek tragedy, I suppose. I read and knew such drama at an earlier age than people easily would believe. Aeschylus, and Euripides, stolen from my father’s library.

The horizon behind them flickers, like the leader trail of film in a projector. White lights are above the horizon on the overcast grey movie-screen sky. But if there is a film, it never comes.

The shimmering on the screen remains a blank strobe. Flashes of snow-white, bone-white. Just like the Chorus members’ gaunt, skeletal faces as they scowl at me.

They chant, their sunken-eyed, hard-cheeked, emaciated grimaces stark against the surrounding blood-hue of their hoods. I see no hair under those hoods, hoods as tightly drawn as the bun of a proper little boarding-school girl’s hair.

As I watched, they droned,

"the Lamb broke the first seal and

unrolled the scroll. Then

one of the four Living Beings,

with a voice like thunder, sounded

the word

COME!"

***

Come? I laugh to myself. I’m fucking bloody well right here.

***

Who is White, Pookie? Who is he to you, that you should despise him so?

Him.

Who?

Him, I snap. Then I calm, and even chuckle fatalistically. The one whose coming was prophesied, I say, and smile. The Prophesied One.

Tracey turns away, sniping, "Well. As if that narrows it down."

HELEN 4

I force commands, commands directed at White, from my mouth with every intention of sounding authoritative.

Instead, I realize when I have not even finished delivering the words they die to a weak spit, then erode even further, to a soft whisper.

And White laughs.

I know it. I hear nothing, and he does not look like he is laughing. He looks apprehensive. But maybe there’s no physical sound when I speak to Tracey, as I’ve said, and beneath that veneer I know he laughs.

No one can be human who toys with me like this.

He manipulates his victim into believing she is the captor. Sadism, in one of its subtler forms.

Many such monsters as White are, I’m sure, biologically speaking, human. Normal. Yet monstrosity does nothing much to argue that he is human, either.

My opinion remains the final arbiter, you know. I am the one holding the gun.

I experiment, my finger pressing with just enough force on the trigger so that trigger does not move. Not quite. Not yet.

White returns to digging.

He causes stress, I think. Releases the pressure just before the subject breaks. He knows just what to do; de Sade would be proud.

The steady rhythm of the shovel’s strokes form a peculiar beat, persistent, and demanding. It is a rhythm I know too well.

***

Hypnotic, isn’t it? My father’s asks. For now this is just from my memory. For now, at least, he stays back there, in that circuit of brain cells, and does not appear in the field. For now.

Father’s distinctive classroom-lecture voice lilts, with his ever-present hint of condescension. That sneer, so subtle it even escaped the notice of most of his graduate students.

I’m not sure about the undergraduates. Perhaps they simply dared not notice.

Come now, class, Father says. Is it a mantra or tantra—who can tell me the difference?

I open my mouth to respond to him. My mistake. Now he is here in the field with us.

HELEN 5

The words are already forming in my mind when I steal a glance in White’s direction, embarrassed that I might appear to be talking to the empty-but-for-drizzle sky.

But then I think: why not? After all, in this charade, this man in the pit no more sees the source of this voice than he sees any little girl in a dress that is not there.

Ach, I chide myself that I’ve let my stream of consciousness slip into vague grammar. The girl is not there, I mean. Though the dress is not there either.

Does that make my mistake acceptable? No. I suppose the dress could still be around, somewhere.

Stored in mothballs. Living in a trunk. A keepsake. A trophy.

Besides, White acting ignorant of Tracey is an act. I know.

It has to be.

(Because He is …?)

That hesitation of mine allows the girl’s voice to pre-empt me. The dreamy rhythm calls, Father! I know the answer, Father!

"Shut up, Tracey, I snap at her. He’s not your father."

I know the answer! the girl keeps it up anyway.

I soon notice Father ignores the girl as well. He