Peacemaker

         The undead pain in her eyes as they dragged her away haunts me to this day.
         It’s strange, reflecting on it now. Three decades after the few hours I spent with Alyson, I remember little about how she looked. My memory, instead, focuses on the qualities I could not see – soft optimism in her manner, rationality in her voice, and cold sweat on her hand as they dragged her out of my grasp and out of my life.
         Alyson never pleaded, like most of us did at one point or another. She did not go insane or take her own life. Everyone else our captors brought to the dark, earthy compound shrieked for information. Where were we? Who guarded our prison? Why had we been captured? When could we get out? Alyson asked nothing of the mysterious beings who watched over us, not even whether they were human. Perhaps that is why events took the turn they did. I suppose no one – certainly not one of the prisoners in that dank compound – will ever know for sure.
         As for myself, I had given up trying to count the days by the time they brought her. She was the first and last woman to enter our prison; for a while, I entertained notions of our captors rewarding us with a female to conjugate with, but in retrospect I suppose they wanted us to react violently toward her, to see if, in this hellish place, we would commit acts we dared not to in the so-called “real world”. Either way, she walked among us in perfect safety, our sex drives having been annihilated by the cold soil and the impenetrable darkness.
         Over the course of Alyson’s stay, she and I became relatively close. I learned of the family she had “back home”, her adopted son and three cats. For a living, she hashed out short stories on an ancient typewriter. This fascinated me.
         “Why a typewriter? I can’t imagine the inconvenience,” I marveled.
         “I can’t bring a computer screen to life,” she replied, her amused voice disembodied by the darkness. “Something about having the hard copy of my art right there in front of me – that’s what gives my writing life.”
         Alyson became my beacon of hope. Although I never saw her face, she always seemed to me to be round-faced and brown-eyed, with glasses and shoulder-length hair which had to be tucked behind her ears lest it fall into her eyes. For me, her voice belonged to the masters student in the sunlit corner of the coffee shop, tapping away at her laptop – or typewriter – between sips of a decaf caramel latte. Studious, knowledgeable, at peace with the world and her situation, even in the artificial hell we were confined to. Her feathers were perpetually unruffled – or so it seemed during my time with her.
         Yet the twenty-odd captives in our damp, gloomy penitentiary did not coexist harmoniously. Bozza was a thirty-something periodical vendor from the Bronx – one of the unpleasant ones. His temper flared quickly and for reasons none of us could entirely fathom. However, there were two types of people he hated the most.
         “The Jews and the queers, Jim,” he once told a prisoner known to the rest of us as Screwtape, “they’re the ones taking the world to the dogs. The Jews and their damn Jerusalem!” Bozza thumped his fist on the wall. “And the queers… don’t get me started on the queers, Jimbo.” And Screwtape tried his best not to get Bozza started, but the irate, cynical man launched into his tirade on the queers anyway.
         It surprises me, in retrospect, how oblivious I was to all the homosexual slurs made within my earshot, and how pointed they were.
         The truth is, Bozza pegged me for gay the instant he made my acquaintance. Though he couldn’t see me and had never observed me at a social function, he immediately assumed I was homosexual. Those brought to the compound before me made strong arguments for their Christian faith; they feared him, and therefore they weren’t queens, the way he saw it.
         “You a God-fearing man, freshmeat?” he asked me when I first arrived.
         “No,” I responded simply, unaware of the trouble my answer would cause.
         The sound of a man hawking cut through the darkness, and a warm, wet wad of saliva oozed down my face. “Get away from me, queer.”
         I was told to ignore it, that Bozza was a mean one who would leave me alone if I didn’t respond. The atmosphere in the compound remained tense whenever Bozza and I got close, yet things were tolerable despite the frequent excretions left near my sleeping places.
         One ordinary day, an unknown time after Alyson arrived and distracted me from Bozza’s hatred, I woke up unable to breathe. A fist was shoved down my throat, and my nostrils were pinched shut. I tried to scream and could not; the air had abandoned me. My attacker remained unidentified until he spoke: “God didn’t make you, queer. It’s my duty as a Christian to send you back to Lucifer.”
         Bozza. Struggling against him was useless, because he was kneeling on my chest and I barely had the oxygen to keep my eyelids open. I mastered the stages of death quickly, barely registering anything but mild depression that I was to die in such a dismal place. Blackness engulfed me; I encouraged it.
         “Get off him! Get OFF!” Alyson’s voice was passionate and shrill; she knew my nature, and knew Bozza hated me for it. She had told me, more than once, that she was shocked at how much detestation such a small sampling of humanity was capable of displaying. She beat her fists on him until he grunted and got off my chest, certain I was dead, and went after her. Alyson ran, but the walls closed her in.
         Her death was shockingly quick. In his brute rage, Bozza picked up her light, feminine body and threw it against the hard-packed wall. She died on impact. It makes me wonder: where did her warmth go? Where is her intelligence now that it no longer sparkles from the eyes I imagined but never saw?
         Screwtape, while Bozza killed Alyson, checked my vitals and performed some rudimentary form of CPR. I was alive, but I could not get my revenge on the man who had killed the one person in the prison compound I connected to. Numb to the stabbing reality of Alyson’s death, I crawled about, touching the faces of my companions, who all lay awake, attempting to keep Bozza’s wrath off of themselves.
         “Help me,” I murmured as Bozza prowled about, furious at being unable to locate my corpse. “Help me kill him.”
         Every bullied, belittled man of them followed, intuiting Screwtape’s location. I slumped against the wall, trying not to wheeze, as they surrounded Bozza. My breath again escaped me, and I passed out; when I came to, Bozza was as departed as Alyson.
         I crawled to my good friend’s body. Her hand was chilled, though, to me, only minutes had passed. My tears flowed, then gushed; I wailed freely, not caring who heard.
         As my sobs receded, an unseen force tugged on Alyson’s corpse. Distraught, I yanked back, refusing to let my captors take my friend from me. Yet it was in vain. They removed my companion, the only person who stood up for me against my would-be murderer. She gave her life for me, and they left me with nothing to remember her by. Certainly, no one in the “real world” had any way of preserving her, either. Alyson’s bright eyes, her warmth and intellect, were lost, forever stolen by prejudice and brutality.
         Blessed are the peacemakers.