The General had plenty of opportunity that afternoon to reflect on the conversation, which was so odd as to be practically alarming, and it alarmed him right up until he limped to his bedroom on the second floor to retrieve his reading glasses and found a neatly folded piece of paper tucked beneath his pillowcase which read only: “Second kitchen door, one o’clock, morning.” Of course the General understood then, how could he not have seen it before, that Deluca not only saw eye to eye with his politics but wanted to act on it, to get him off this rock. Here was proof that the world hadn’t forgotten him. He expected again to feel that sense of elation he’d felt when he sat on the throne of his country the first time, not as its inheritor or elect but as its conqueror, a bloodless coup until he bloodied it, and kept bloodying. The bellyache of pride he felt when the President’s noggin sheared off the other side of the bascule and came to rest open-eyed. Only he couldn’t conjure that pride now, not even something as strong as regret. He was just thin, hollowed-out. What he did feel was a swelling tenderness for Deluca, who after all was risking not only his position but his life for the General. It was hard to fathom, that someone could do so much for a person to whom they owed so little.
The General sat down on his slab of a mattress, whose sheets were crumpled and coarse and made him sweat no matter how cold it was at night. He tried to recall if he’d met any castrati in his own country, or if he’d ever implicitly condoned such a process or a process like it. It was hard for him to imagine, not only the physical pain of it, but the lingering of it, the gnawing absence of what made you a man, made you into something you weren’t and could never be. At first he thought it was a little like his current scenario, having constructed himself and his career in a particular way only to be stripped of it, of every office and lick of goodwill—but it wasn’t like that at all, not even a little. The body was precious, and to treat it with such frivolous cruelty…? Deluca was good, he’d said, very good. No, it wasn’t the same thing at all.
One time, the General had held a conversation with a traitor to his country. The man was shackled to a cell wall pockmarked with traces of bloodied fingernails and holes through which rats wriggled. There was a small wooden bench but the shackles were so high up he couldn’t sit. He’d pissed himself more than once, and the wall behind him was stained with shit. His clothes were ragged and colorless, beard the texture of goat’s hair and studded with sores. The smell was so unbearable it made you choke. The General showed up right on time for the appointment but couldn’t remember what the man had done to end up in hell except that he was a traitor, that he’d aided and abetted some foreign enemy, that he wanted to undermine the General, and the General had come because the traitor’s last request was to speak with him, and though his advisors thought it was a stupid idea he’d been curious, and acquiesced.
The traitor laughed when he saw the General. He was surprised that the General had deigned to give him an audience. Those were his exact words, “deigned” and “audience,” and he of course said them bitingly. His accent was aristocratic. You’d think he just had a bad cold, the way his throat rasped when he spoke. The General asked him what he wanted as part of his last request, whether to beg for his life or to ask some favor for his family. The traitor shook his head. “I just thought you should see,” he said. “I wanted you to look.” Then he started to laugh, like the thing he’d said was so hilarious you wouldn’t believe, but he was also crying, in fact he was sobbing, these chest-heaving sobs that shook his gutted ribs like a piston, and in between sobs he was saying, “I’m here,” and “Here I am,” and the General couldn’t look away, not until his armed escort pulled him by the bicep out of the vulgar-smelling chamber and down the maze of the prison halls until he could taste sunlight again.
The traitor was executed by firing squad the following week, and for a long time after the General dreamed about him. In his dreams, the traitor was suspended in the air above a field of wildflowers rippling in wind, arms outstretched and head tilted and thorn-crowned like Jesus on the cross, and he wept silently. The tears tracked down his cheeks. He was trying to say something but the General was too far away to hear, and it hurt so much to walk he could never quite make it in time. The traitor was gone by the time the General approached him, as if he’d never been there in the first place.