The Convulsion Factory

by Brian Hodge

  She strips, tossing clothes to the floor, until she beholds herself naked in the mirror. Her bony frame, small ribs in bas-relief, can anorexia be far away? Her hair seems the biggest part of her.

  Connie takes the stake of Stefan’s arm and, like a young Shakespearian lover wronged by family and fate, presses its point to the skin just beneath her breastbone. Angles it upward. Wraps both hands around the thicker base…

  And shoves as hard as she can.

  There is pain, the rending of skin, and she feels the last of Stefan slide in, an inch, no more, and then it stops. Feeling deep within a terrible scrape, the meeting of irresistible force with immovable object.

  Hands falling in defeat to her side. Bone shard slipping free to fall and shatter on the hardwood floor. The spill of tears that descends to anoint her breasts, her new wound, bleeding both red and white.

  Dear God, it’s worse than she thought.

  But there is no piercing the calcified heart.

  Extinctions In Paradise

  They kill children here. Let me make that clear from the beginning.

  In spite of that, I have for two years found this city an agreeable place to live. Still not a lot of friends, but those I have are genuine, and diverse. Their company cheers me on those days when I still miss my family so much the pain claws at me like a wounded jaguar.

  It was Pedro Javier that I met first, or that’s the way I remember it, a little man with silvery hair above a brown old face wrinkled in the kindliest of ways. His shoulders are rounded with a perpetual stoop from all the years he’s spent hunkering down behind a camera so antiquated that no one’s interested in stealing it. Every day, for more than forty years, he’s come down to set up his camera in the Plaza del Oro, and take pictures of tourists and students, lovers and anybody else who’ll spare him a few minutes, against a backdrop of a fountain cascading with water that looks purer than it really is. Pedro hasn’t missed a day in four decades … except for some week many years ago, a week I’ve never been able to get him to talk about. I suspect it happened when the army was in charge, when the generales often rounded up anyone they thought might not fit their agenda. I suspect this. But I never press him on it. He’s a happy man, and God knows I realize how easily bad memories can tear your day to tatters.

  “Roberto,” he greeted me one afternoon, same as he always did. I think he believed that adding the o might make me feel more like a native down here. It didn’t, but I never told him. I handed him a coffee I’d bought from a vendor across the Plaza. He always appreciates that. “Thank you, thank you.”

  “What says the sun today?” I asked. As a photographer, he is deeply into the philosophy of light and shadow and the shadings between the two, their subtle nuances and how they speak of the world.

  “El sol, today he is saddened by the change of seasons, and how he gets not so much time in the sky. He is weary, but he still fights. See the golden glow of the shadows today? Beautiful, isn’t it?”

  Pedro was right, but this was something I’d not have noticed until someone with his eye pointed it out to me. The Plaza, full of those strolling along, taking time out to enjoy the day, seemed suffused with a warmly glowing luster, and whatever teardrops the day called its own pooled only in the thickest shadows.

  I wasn’t the only norteamericano in the Plaza, but few would mistake me for a tourist. I’d long ago lost that scrubbed, pressed sheen, had effortlessly cultivated the rumpled, lived-in look of one who has forsaken a prior lifetime, to live the rest of it in a land that made the smallest daily acts seem new again.

  We talked for a while, then when he’d finished his coffee, Pedro flicked a spindly finger at me. “Okay, over by the fountain with you. Today we will make a new picture. That time has come again.”

  “Already?” But I was walking to where he wanted me.

  “One each month, you know my plans for you, hee hee.” Pedro sank into his stance behind the camera, making adjustments on the boxy contraption, compensating for changes in the light that only he could see. “Someday you will thank me, you will be able to look at them in sequence and see how well you have aged. Or … how much you have healed. Now smile, lazy gringo.”

  I pushed my graying ponytail off my shoulder and smiled for him. The camera resonated with a far more substantial clunk than did the Nikons and Canons I was familiar with. Pedro straightened — a little — and grinned broadly, a dotty old wizard whom I feared might be the last of his kind.

  When I stood at his side again, he patted my mottled arm just below the rolled shirtsleeve, the skin of his hand like a smooth leather glove, dry and comforting. I felt that effortless acceptance that seems to emanate only from the very old, who never feel the need to say anything simply because there is silence. Back in the States we’ve forgotten how to appreciate that.

  Pedro and I took seats on a stone bench where already we had passed so many hours, the impressions of our rumps might have been worn into it.

  “I saw something strange last night, Pedro,” I said at last. “Down in the alley outside my bedroom window.”

  “Ah,” he said, nodding steadily. Waiting.

  “Do animals from the jungle ever come this far into the city? I think it was a big cat. Or something like that.”

  “Why should it not happen, from time to time? Cunning beasts, they can survive easier in our world than most of us can survive in theirs. They are like the children who roam the streets and have no homes. They reduce life to its simplest term: survival.”

  “I just saw it for a few seconds. It looked up at me in my window there. Then it ran.” I didn’t tell him it had been a bad night, that I’d spent two hours or more crying over a bottle of dark rum. “I swear it was holding a hand in its mouth. Severed right above the wrist.” I traced a line across my own to show him.

  Pedro frowned. “Well, what can I say? Night can be a fearful time, still, even in the heart of the city. All the gold is gone from the sky, and the shadows have their way with all else. It is the way of night.”

  “That wasn’t all. You know the way cat eyes glow green in a flash of light? These didn’t. These glowed red. Like…”

  “Like a man’s? Ah, well.” Pedro shrugged, with the well-aged wisdom of those who have discovered that the longer they live, the less they’ve really seen. “For every law, something that breaks it. This is the way of the world.”

  *

  I came here an expatriate from the States. Never say never, they tell you. But I’m never going back.

  You’d hardly recognize me these days from the tiny picture that used to accompany my column in the Chicago Tribune, which was syndicated to nearly 100 dailies. I’ve done a lot of living since that bland little picture was shot, much of it hard, and I see the world through eyes that aren’t necessarily different, just … wearier. I used to strike a comfortable balance between cynicism and idealism. But the balance has tilted out of whack since I wrote my last column three years ago.

  Still, for nearly every day I do make an attempt to find something good in it. My wife would expect it of me.

  Around the time of that last column, I had been enmeshed in an ongoing debate over sex and violence on TV. As one who earned his living from words, I was made nervous by the groups of self-appointed guardians of the public trust who were making noisy demands that they knew best for us all, and should be granted an advisory capacity to restrict what went out over the airwaves. They were armed with lots of zeal, and stats selectively compiled from cause-and-effect studies whose validity wasn’t even agreed upon. I spent a lot of ink trying to puncture holes in their self-righteousness and pseudo-science. Today an image, tomorrow a thought, that was my fear. It’s not without precedent.

  I can’t imagine how much these people must have grown to hate me. The columnist always gets the last word. The columnist is the embodiment of smug and godless ruin, the Nero who fiddles while Rome burns.

  Maybe I was.

  I tried to tell myself that the team who showe
d up at my home one night wasn’t really trying to harm anyone. That their goal was to frighten. Doesn’t killing somebody undermine credibility, even that of extremists? They said they got the idea from a rerun of Miami Vice. Too much monitoring? Anything to prove a point, I suppose.

  But I’ve given up trying to figure them out. Facts are easier to stick with. They lobbed three gasoline bombs into our home at three different locations. We’d been remodeling, and things were a mess, and the fires spread quickly, joining into one conflagration while the smoke billowed into a dense, caustic cloud.

  A wife and two children, I lost them all, and gained a lot of blisters and baked skin that took months to heal. The people who did this, certainly they shut me up. It’s hard to type with your hands swathed in bandages, and I couldn’t keep my head clear long enough to dictate a column. It wasn’t for lack of trying. I’d get a paragraph in, maybe two on a lucid day, and then I’d think I smelled my children, or heard them crying out to me, in absolute faith that I would never fail them.

  You haven’t truly known failure until the last thing you’ve taught your children is how fragile and human you really are.

  I didn’t decide to leave the country until after the trials and convictions. I attended faithfully, like church, and before the day of the sentencing I schemed obsessively to smuggle a pistol into the courtroom so it was waiting for me. If the judge didn’t come down hard enough to suit me, I could at least rise like an avenger and bring them down in retribution for the three people I had failed most in this world.

  I even had my hand on the grip before I began wondering what the experience had turned me into. I’d actually considered this? I’d thought I could go through with it?

  Something’s wrong, I thought. Something is very wrong and it’s not just me.

  South America, I later thought. It would be another world, someplace to stumble around and lose myself for years while I got my bearings. I could live cheaply down there. Between the insurance, and the money I’d earned from syndication, I might not have to work again for years. I might be human again by then.

  Ultimately, though, it wasn’t the struggle with my own murderous impulses that drove me south. It was my neighbor from directly across the street.

  The gasoline bombs immediately caught his eye, fires blooming in an upstairs bedroom, the dining room, family room. My neighbor was concerned just enough to make a run for his video camera. Not enough to try to help. He taped everything, even after I was long gone to the hospital in a scream of siren … right up to the moment when they brought out the bagged bodies of my family from the smoldering husk of the house.

  He sold the tape to a tabloid show for more than I’d earned my first six years working for the newspapers.

  I had a hard time dealing with that.

  *

  The next day I learned from Pedro that a shopkeeper had been savaged several blocks from my apartment the same night I’d seen whatever it was from my bedroom window. Not all of the body had been recovered. Because of the teeth- and clawmarks, the general assumption was that it never would be.

  Everybody who lived in the area, and many beyond, knew about the victim. He operated a botanica, filled with fragrant herbs and pictures of saints, with incense and candles, standard trappings of the numerous religions to spring from an African commonality. Vodoun, santeria, candomblé, macumba … the same basic gods and beliefs, with variations among their rites. Most knew this man for the sham he was, with faith in nothing more than profit. His trade wasn’t with true believers, but mostly with dabbling kids who wanted something more primal than the Catholicism of their parents and didn’t know any better about him, and with tourists who got a cheap thrill out of burning a candle they could have bought for a fraction elsewhere, but felt sure the expensive one was blessed.

  Of course nobody deserved to die in such a ghastly way, but on the streets, one got the feeling he wouldn’t be missed.

  “Do you think I should report what I saw?” I asked Pedro that same afternoon. He was eating from a bag of pistachio nuts and his lips were comically red, a right jolly old elf.

  “And what was that: an animal, you saw, for a moment in the dark. This much is known already.” Pedro shrugged. “The policía, what will they do? They will listen, and they will look very bored, and if feeling lively they will scratch their bellies and their balls.” He shrugged again. “Do as you must. But for me, life is too short to spend it watching hairy men scratch themselves.”

  Pedro’s dismissal of the police was as practical as it was fatalistic. They’re no different here than they are throughout much of South America: poorly equipped, underpaid, notoriously corrupt. Paid the equivalent of $200 American per month, they are often the puppets of anyone who puts up enough money.

  And I ended up taking Pedro’s advice.

  It’s the way of things down here, and I had learned well in my two years living with them. They accept as natural the oddest things, as if a carnivore materializing in the heart of a city of five million, and carrying off pieces of a shopkeeper, is well within the realm of possibilities. They believe in the kinds of magic that come sweeping down on warm winds from the grassy open pampas, or ooze in like fog from the jungles, or bubble up in the densest slums. They recognize miracles of both the light and the darkness, because they’ve lived them for so long, keeping spirits and hopes robust even while the occasional dictator has sought to crush protesting throats beneath his boot. It’s not that they’re apathetic to tragedy. They merely reserve their outrage for what truly matters. All else, when said and done, is life in all its richness, simply life.

  It’s only in the youngest and dirtiest of the city’s wealth of life that I see no hope, in whom hope has died, if it has lived at all. The street kids are a breed unto themselves, roaming in packs for survival, and clinging tenaciously to one another for a sense of family.

  The government said the problem is under control, that only 1500 or so actually sleep on the streets. It seems a whitewash to me, that there must be more, but even if that figure is correct, the government can’t deny that tens of thousands more get nothing out of their homes other than a place to sleep when exhausted. The streets may not be their bed, but are still the only way these kids can survive. Children as young as five shine shoes and sell candy, hire themselves out for odd jobs, steal, and prostitute their bodies. They get by, many of them, on fifty cents a day.

  It gets them dead sometimes.

  The street kids — grubby urchins whose dark eyes can be sad one moment, shining innocently the next, and turn vicious a moment later — are not just some exotic species to me that I watch from afar. I know many of them fairly well, give them money and bring them food, listen to them imagine their funerals as if fifteen is an impossibly old age they can never attain.

  Many nights I’ve shared their company as they huddled in tiny cardboard cities erected in alleyways fetid with garbage and plunged into menace by primal shadows beyond their fire. A good night is when they can grill a dog, mouths watering at the sweet smoke. They stand careful watch for off-duty policías, of whom they live in constant fear.

  They kill children here, remember.

  The army no longer is in charge, but death squads haven’t faded into the past — they’ve merely been co-opted by private enterprise. Swift little beggars and thieves drive away tourists, shopkeepers complain. Bad for business. Some of them pool money and pay the most corrupt policías to roam the streets in their off-duty hours, and eradicate the menace. It’s gone on for twenty years, but they used to be discreet about it. No longer. Last year three of them used MAC-10s to gun down eleven kids one bright summer afternoon after a tour bus had been boarded by a gang and its passengers robbed. It was a broad retaliatory strike. The gunmen had no interest in making sure they had the same kids. The bodies were strewn along an entire block of a busy city street that had grown as deserted as a town in an American western movie. I wonder if the rogue policías saw themselves as avenging gunslingers.


  Over this, the country screamed its outrage. To appease it, the three killers were arrested, tried, and convicted, are now doing thirty years. I have my doubts they’ll walk out alive. The world over, cops in prison make tempting targets. But they were only sacrificial scapegoats, nothing more. Shopkeepers and death squads alike took a lesson from them: no crowds of witnesses, no bodies strewn along the streets. Bad for public relations.

  For the street kids, though, business went on just the same.

  That, too, was life.

  *

  Three nights later I was awakened by pounding at my door, a pounding of steady desperation. I slipped on khaki pants and went stumbling for the door before the neighbors suffered, complained. I passed a hallway clock that read nearly 3:00 A.M. I opened the door, immediately had to look down.

  I had expected my visitor to be taller.

  “Miguel?” I said. “What the hell…?”

  It was one of the kids, the lost, who slept on a bed of asphalt. Miguel believes he might be eleven years old, a skinny-limbed boy with a beautiful smile and long black hair that tumbles into his eyes. I’d once forcibly taken him to a doctor and paid for the penicillin that cured his gonorrhea.

  “You come with me, okay?” He tugged urgently at my bare arm. “You have medicines, okay? You come now, find your shoes.”

  I hurried, throwing things together while quizzing him and getting frustratingly incomplete answers. He could hardly quit dancing around my apartment, impatient to get me moving into the night. The most I could get out of him was that Rafael was hurt. I didn’t even know a Rafael, but I grabbed bandages, disinfectant, a bottle of antibiotics … things I’d scrounged in case the kids needed them. But I was hardly qualified to practice much more than first aid.

  We descended into the streets, Miguel leading me along a dark path of alleys and airways, where soon I became aware of everything that might be lying just beyond my limits of vision. I could smell it, sense it, strata of decay and disease. Miguel traveled without hesitation or misstep, picking his way along with the assurance of a cougar on a ridgetop, and he never dropped his hand from my arm. I felt as long as he had hold of me, I would pass with impunity. Probably I’d not have been so lucky two years ago.