Then, a light suffuses, is sustained, fluorescence, the flicker of bulbs just as the sun begins its weary rise: slightness and slowness and torpor, the rise fall rise of respiration, guts, weight they’ll lose then die of their loss, igniting, illuminating the space amid snoozing sounds, cicadan snore, cricket stridulation as if in the summoning of smoke: this barracks room one massed breath, an industrial maw, opening, opened, its teeth leaning columns, bent and bowed columns, its gasps steaming stains on the walls bitter with humours and mold; bed after bed, ten-by-ten in ranks, ten-by-ten again, rows, of what are really upgraded cots, iron sag, rusted to give under slumber, green creak for the horny. And then, in the cots — they’re forms; in appearance only bedclothes stuffed with flesh, bledclothes, though with noses that peek above trims, mussed sheets, fake feather pillows, comforters of imitation down in the shape of people, cast in the shape of beds, concrete slabs they feel, immobile, corpsed dead as cement. An exhausted form twitches its feet, its toes, one two three, slowly, then three four five, individually one two three four five to prove he’s alive — to whom; that he’s separately willed, even special, as if singled from among this mass, leans toward the form directly to the left, the mensch, if we might judge by the bulge from under his sheets, his drunk and tented lust, the sexual clump, grapeleaved in fitted, flat. He grunts, then as if to say hello, to introduce himself he farts, a poof, a toot, is answered by that mensch neighboring, a response given upon permission, shameless, with another fart, this rip huge, Rrrrrrrip! an enormous sortie wet and thick, which tears a hole right out of his uniform pajamas, this sound echoed six beds down then maybe two over with another, is dueted with, a ffrrip, and yet another, pow, pow, — and — pow from opposite sides of the barracks, a barrage of miniexplosions, from cot to cot echoing against the corroded collapsing wet walls, stacked booms rocking the lower bunks, bucking the uppers, bombs from the rafters to incise there their own dark graffiti, signing a scatology’s name. How all this seems almost coordinated, prearranged, if you’re that species of paranoid, how couldn’t they be: Affiliated, neurotic, too; though if you’ve been strangely calm here, confident from the first or already resigned, then now appalled’s being contracted into the bargain, disgusted, given the very randomness of this rearending assault, such lack of control, this chaos — a cacophony of bursts and bops, of salvos percussive, sallies of bangs and syncopated, syncopating bings, in their fading sound, the foggy fade of their echoes, giving way to a host of hissy almost silent farts, some snakelike, others barking or crazily purring; flatulisms serving to both make a haze and, also, to pierce it, stifling even the smoke with its maker, the flame. Then, a rapid sweep coming down the aisles, boom boom baboom, the strafing of morning, machinegunned repeatrepeat, ratatat of fire that even if friendly seems no less dangerous or revolting: farts raising sheets, fitted, rising sheets, flat, bubbling covers, burbling blankets, in gastrointestinal whumps, lower tract lumps, milky eruptions, redeyed evacuations, pyloric blockages, buildups and then, explosion! p-pow! the glorified dorm reverberating in a rousing finale, rolled bodies corpsed on the floor, from forms picked clear up and off beds, shot spumed into air then slumped back down to bounce thud and sag, launches and falls selfpropelled, the trajectory of methane released, ricocheting ping and pop, cracks and snaps in a confusion, offtime, out of time, a dense swirl of emission, the barracks a hellish, burning pit, and then, as suddenly as all began, and cutting clarion through din and fog, there’s a siren, alarm…
