* * *
The silence hums like a swarm of bees caught in my cranium. I hear not a cough, not a croak, not a single malicious word spoken about me. I study the air above the mesh. Have they all been accidentally gassed?
No.
Samuel rests his chin on his knees. Charmayne rocks backwards on her buttocks, flicks her thick hair like she is suffering beneath the tropical sun. Even from this distance, Vicki’s eyes send me some kind of message as she taps staccato on the ladder climbing her thigh. Is she counting the rungs to reach her vagina?
I pull my gaze from Vicki, drop Samuel’s wire hatch almost cheerily. He might get lucky this week. If Olivia gets her way, the surgeons will start at the far end of the aisle and operate on Shikorina instead of him.
‘Sad thing, Malachi,’ Samuel says to me.
Lighten up, I want to say. How many years has it been raining? Samuel really ought to try Janeé’s red syrup.
‘It’s the judge,’ Vicki says softly.
Thirty-nine heads turn towards the giant’s cage.
There is something horribly wrong. I crush my leather glove against my chest. I’m afraid there will be blood.
Vicki, tell me.
‘It took thirty seconds,’ Vicki says.
No. Not dead. Please.
But Vicki nods her head. ‘Sorry, Malachi.’
Next to her, Eulalie sighs with a deep, soothing pity.
Run. Save him!
I shunt my feet down the aisle, my heart shrinking from the ghastly sight I am about to see.
* * *
The giant has grown even more colossal. He is buckled over one knee, his head bowed to the floor of his prison. One huge arm is trapped beneath him, the other flung against the mesh. One leg is bent at a shocking angle, as if the weight of his torso has popped the rivets in his hip and pulled it right out of its socket. Dislocated, this beautiful man. A gigantic statue the crowd has toppled in a coup.
I sink to my haunches, try to say, ‘Judge James?’
There are red raspberry juice drips on the floor beneath him. Three.
I bang on his cage. ‘Hey-y.’
I beg him to lift his head, cite some kind of legislation, anything. I duck down to search his eyes. They are wide open, startled. A length of wire loops through his mesh and threads between his big, broken teeth. He has blood on his lips. A cold tremor seizes me. My own stained lips quiver uncontrollably. The giant chewed through two hundred volts to blow himself up. The memory of electric shock rips through my ganglions, but there are no sparks flying from this gigantic body. The blood-drips near my sneakers are already half dry. He has been lying here for hours.
I swing towards Eulalie, beg her with my eyes. Is he dead?
Her ancient smile is sorrowful and sweet. ‘We must wait three days. Only then can he come to me.’
No. Maybe, just maybe they can resuscitate him. I hit my switch.
Even from up there, Tamba senses me vibrating. ‘Oh, Jesus, what’s wrong?’
There is no other way. I whip my finger across my throat.
‘Dead?’
Maybe they can find breath inside him. I stamp my foot.
A miracle from the doctors. Quickly!
‘He can’t be! How?’
I jam a finger between my teeth. Bite too hard on it. I flash my fingers, mime a convulsive shock.
‘Electric shock? Shit!’ Now he touches keys, works his switches. ‘I can’t get a reading. Fuck, Malachi. He’s our best specimen!’ Tamba doesn’t bother to cut off my intercom. ‘Meirong. Suicide!’
‘How?’
‘Number fifteen. He bit the wires.’
‘Pull him up. Pull him up! Your father must save his heart!’
What about his life? And why Tamba’s father?
‘It’s too late,’ the Australian says sadly. ‘He stopped breathing at about three a.m.’
I challenge him wordlessly, Where is your timepiece, Barry?
He shrugs woefully. ‘Three is the time we started drilling. Less oil leakage then. Less gas flares.’ Barry looks ashamed, as if it was he who chilled the giant’s blood at three a.m.
I see the giant’s little finger is smeared with red. He must have used it to hook the wire through the mesh.
The prisoners were all complicit, they must have been. He must have been working on the wire for how long?
They are all silent now. Yes. They let the giant die.
Steel cables begin to snake inside the tracks in the roof. A huge metal hook winds down towards me.
‘Malachi. Quickly. Unclip the feed pipe,’ Tamba says.
I tug the feed pipe clear. The huge hook finds its eye on the top of the giant’s cage. The cage begins to quake. There is a catching stutter of metal cogs on metal thread as a motor in the roof begins to winch the toppled statue up, up. I drag my eyes from the giant’s thick, clear retinas. Why the surprise? Why?
Did he see his unborn son?
Tamba is operating the motorised winch like he is flying a Boeing. ‘I’m doing it. I’m doing it,’ he mutters through my intercom as the giant sways above me.
I stare at the giant’s penis crushed against the crosswires beneath him. His testicles are imprinted with the gridiron pattern of latitude and longitude, the rational rules the giant loved so much. North and South, left and right – and now so terribly wrong.
I swing towards Barry, the Australian. Why did you let him die?
Charmayne feels my accusation across the aisle. ‘It was all he wanted, Malachi.’ She grips her big toes, her knees pointing out as if her symmetry might save her from culpability. ‘When he heard he killed his baby.’
The giant’s cage shunts past the glass kiosk where Tamba is concentrating on his flying, not watching me. I run a few steps, thrust at Charmayne’s cage.
She recoils, lets go of her big toes. She bangs her knees together, shuts her womb to me. ‘We let him, because we loved him.’
Some prisoners nod their heads, murmur words for love.
I smack on Charmayne’s cage, refuse her reasoning.
‘I’m sorry to say this,’ the social worker says gently, ‘but you also let him die.’
I wrench my whole body this
