The Book of a Thousand Sins

by Wrath James White

  Still, he had not stayed there either. Wrapping bandages around the suppurating wounds to hold in his organs, Anthony had flown all the way from England back to Haiti because he believed the old witch doctor could purge the flesh-eating curse from his rapidly deteriorating body.

  He wasn’t sure exactly what he thought she could do for him. Did he expect her to knit new flesh for him to replace what was now decaying from his bones? He’d heard what the British doctors wanted to do. They wanted to cut him. They wanted to excise the disease from his living tissue, one pound of flesh after another, until either they stopped the disease or ran out of flesh to cut away. No way Anthony was going for that! If he would die, it would be in his own homeland, observing the customs and traditions he had lived by. So he had come back to Haiti in search of Mama Luanda.

  Mama Luanda did not practice magic. She practiced medicine, the forgotten medicine her people brought from Africa. She did not conjure demons, or turn people into zombies, or cast spells and curses. She was a healer. At least this is what she said. But there were rumors about men who had crossed her struck down by disease, or turned into living corpses, and even one who had been eaten alive by rats. She dismissed the stories as mere superstition. The same way she brushed off discussion of her phenomenal longevity, ascribing it to genetics and eating healthy. She was rumored to be well over a hundred years old and seemed to be living proof that she had made at least one zombie. Mama Luanda was a horror unto herself. She was nothing pretty.

  Her thick and unruly dreadlocks writhed about her head like a nest of bloated black eels. Her swollen lips were cracked and split and hid small, yellow, needle-like teeth. Her breath was like the stench of a freshly exhumed corpse. Her high cheekbones may have once granted a regal aspect to her features, but now, with her dried and wrinkled skin drawn tight against them threatening to rip wide, they looked like twin axe blades or some kind of prehistoric armament. The one good eye remaining in her head appeared nervous and agitated and darted about in a frenzy of motion, perhaps overcompensating for the hollow crater where her right eye had been. It looked as if someone had cored it right out of her skull with some sharp implement, taking her eyelid with it and leaving only that unblinking chasm of ruined flesh.

  Looking at it reminded Anthony of a book he’d read about Gilles De Rais, the infamous Blue Beard, who’d murdered, raped, and mutilated the children of the peasants and serfs in the village surrounding his castle. “Skull fucking” had been one of his favorite ways to simultaneously rape and murder his victims and that’s what it appeared had been done to Mama Luanda. It looked as if she’d been skull-fucked and had somehow lived to tell the tale. Though Anthony found it difficult to conceive of even a sick fucker like Blue Beard being able to get it up looking at that hideous train-wreck of a face.

  With increasing despair Anthony realized that there was no place in the old shack he could look that did not contain one grotesquerie or another. The dilapidated hovel was cluttered from floor to rafters with various skulls, and bones, and pickled animal entrails and organs, and some that may have been human. Spiders, snakes, and lizards scampered and slithered from one shadow to the next. And the ruinous face of the old witch doctor was so hideous it would’ve made an onion cry. Anthony himself was now merely another addition to the madness.

  He closed his eyes and tried to shut out the feel of the maggots crawling through him, eating away at him. He tried to dream of the beaches where the white sand sifted through your toes as fine as baby powder and the ocean was cool, and clear, and blue, and you could count the fish as they swam between your legs. He tried to think of the coconut trees and how he had climbed them as a child to pick their fruit and toss it down below to the other hungry children. He tried to imagine himself chasing the monitor lizards that littered the beaches by the hundreds and catching them in jars to sell to the tourists. He struggled desperately to summon the taste of his mother’s curried goat and ox tail soup, the smell of cornbread muffins. Yet the image of his own putrefying maggot-ridden body kept invading his thoughts.

  The doctors had called it Necrotizing Fasciitis. It was caused by the Streptococcus Pyogenes virus, which was like a mutant form of the virus that causes Strep throat. Infection from the disease results in your immune system freaking out and cutting off the blood supply to any infected tissue, causing the tissue to die and eventually to rot away. It was known in the press as “the flesh-eating virus,” and there was no way to cure it except to remove the diseased tissue, either by cutting it away, as the British surgeons had proposed, or Mama Luanda’s way—using maggots to eat away the dead flesh, leaving only the uninfected tissue.

  Anthony was no longer certain which solution was more horrible, but he no longer had a choice. Now he just had to have faith.

  The bathtub was filling up. Maggots now covered Anthony’s putrefying form from head to toe. His body was a ruin of rotten flesh and gaping holes where the maggots had already eaten away the necrotic tissue. Their pale bloated bodies writhed in a great seething mass, crawling over his dying body, greedily consuming it, burrowing down through muscle and fat into the organs that were already infected and beginning to rot. The disease continued to advance through his body.

  “. . . more maggots . . . need more maggots!”

  Anthony thought Mama Luanda was beginning to sound panicked for the first time. It wasn’t working. The maggots could not eat fast enough. The disease was spreading too rapidly. Her brow furrowed, the thick wooly eyebrows arching like an EEG reading up over her agitated left eye and the stygian pit that should have housed the other. Tenebrous shadows slithered deep within the dark hollow pit as light from the many candles strewn about the room flickered down into it. A drop of sweat raced down her forehead and dripped into that ghastly void, followed soon by another.

  Mama Luanda began to chant some island mojo in a bizarre guttural dialect Anthony had never heard before. She closed her one good eye, and a spark of blue flame seemed to ignite deep within the hole on the other side of her face. The chant flooded out of her in a stream of senseless syllables. The nonsensical words seemed to hold meaning for everything else in the room but Anthony himself because all at once the very air seemed to hold still. The candles dimmed, and darkness flew in from nowhere to smother the room in a gloomy twilight. Chitinous noises echoed from every dark corner along with squeaks and squeals as rodents and other nocturnal scavengers crowded amid the shadows to form an invisible audience. Most disturbing was the sudden vigor that charged the pool of maggots in which Anthony lay. All at once the living tide of wriggling vermin surged. Anthony felt their hungry mouths feverishly pulling at his flesh as Mama Luanda’s chanting filled the room with a mumbling litany of incoherent prayers and curses.

  He could feel them working away at him . . . in him! He could feel their squishy writhing bodies crawling up his intestines. He could feel them in his chest cavity surrounding his heart and lungs, in his stomach, in his throat. He tried to scream, but it was too late. They had eaten away his voice box. Anthony thought he could feel the tiny worms eating away at the marrow in his bones. He knew the disease had not worked that deep. He wanted to tell Mama Luanda that she could stop. He wanted to tell her that the disease was gone, the maggots had done their job, but as he listened to her chanting and could finally make sense of the words, he realized he had made a grave mistake. She was not speaking any foreign or unknown tongue. She was speaking English. She was saying the same thing she had been saying the whole time.

  “Moremaggotsneedmoreneedmoreneedmoremaggots!”

  Sweat bulleted down her face, filling up her empty eye-socket until it spilled over and rained down her cheeks like tears. Her large misshapen lips quivered as if she were choked with sorrow, yet they were pulled back into an idiotic smile. She continued to dip her hands into the innards of the dead hog and retrieve more and more maggots from within its guts to dump into the tub with Anthony. There seemed to be no end to them.

  “Moreneedmoremoremaggotsnee
dmoreneedmore!”

  The woman was crazy, clearly insane. She may have once been a powerful healer, but now she was little more than a ranting lunatic. Anthony knew it, but he could not allow himself to believe it, especially now that there was nothing he could do about it. He had to have faith. Mama Luanda knew best. She would take care of him. She had always taken care of his people for as long as he could remember. Mama Luanda had been with the village for as long as anyone could remember. They had always had faith in her.

  Anthony watched a long rope of saliva drool from one corner of her cracked lips. Her good eye darted about in her head focusing on nothing and everything. She continued to mumble and gibber, smiling and tossing in pieces of rotted hog guts with the fistfuls of maggots. Her dead eye seemed to swirl with shadows. Anthony could almost hear the terrified shrieks of every child who’d looked into that grotesque visage echo from within its depths. She looked as mindless and evil as one of those zombies he’d heard about in the myths and fairy tales told around the island. Perhaps it was just senility or Alzheimer’s. Anthony wondered again how she had managed to live so long. Maybe she had made herself into zombie. He began to panic. He had entrusted his life to a madwoman and now he was being eaten alive!

  “MoremaggotsmoremaggotsmoremoreMORE!”

  Anthony closed his eyes and dreamed of sunlit beaches with chocolate-skinned beauties in string bikinis frolicking in the ocean. He dreamed of playing volleyball and hackeysack in the powder-soft sand. He dreamed of ripe mangoes and sweet pineapple. He dreamed of his mother’s kitchen that always smelled of curry and marjoram. He tried to ignore the feeling of the maggots crawling into his skull. He had to live. His mother had sacrificed so much to get him out of Haiti, away from the poverty, and superstition, and death. He couldn’t die like this. He had to believe. He had to have faith. Mama Luanda would take care of him. She would make him better.

  Awake

  “...With human nature caged in a narrow space, whipped daily into submission, how can we speak of its potentialities?”

  —Emma Goldman, Anarchism

  “What if God was one of us?”

  —Joan Osborne, Relish

  “Why?”

  The reporter wasn’t listening to me. He was scared to death. A minute ago he’d been sitting outside my cell with that smug self-assured look on his face, already counting all the money he’d make off my biography. Now he was inside my cell, naked, mute, wondering how I’d done it. Uselessly he tried to cry out for help. I watched his fat lips mouth words in silence like a guppy gasping for oxygen, panic bulging out his eyes in further imitation of marine life.

  I didn’t need him to be able to speak. I could do his end of the conversation anyway. Nothing original has come out of a human mouth in several decades. The prematurely balding, prematurely fat, young reporter jerked back as if hit by a taser when I reached out to hit the play button on the tape recorder in his pocket. I could see all the questions in his eyes. I would answer only the ones that I felt merited answering.

  “I know that you’ll call me a liar. You’ll say that I’m in denial, that there are some deep-seated emotional issues from my childhood that I’m suppressing and not coming to grips with. But I swear that’s how it all started. That one question started the cascade of events that led to me staring at you from behind bars, months away from my execution.

  I know how you reporters think. You’re thinking I must have been molested as a child, or my mother must have abused me, or withheld love from me, or my daddy must have taught me to hate women by abusing my mother in front of me. But none of that is true. I grew up in a very normal and loving environment.

  Maybe you’re thinking that there must have been drugs involved. But that would be wrong too and no, I don’t hear voices or think I’m Jesus. I’m as sane as you are. So how could that one little question lead to me killing all those people? Raping and mutilating all those women? You can’t see how easily “why?” becomes “why not?”

  The killing was just me acting on instinct. I wanted to do it so I did it. But it’s so much bigger than that. That was just the beginning. This is about unlocking the full potential of the human mind.

  And it all began with that queer little man with all the PC slogans and buttons and pins all over his leather jacket. He stopped me on the street as I made my way through the midday crowds rushing to get to my favorite coffee shop with no more sinister intentions on my mind than the ingestion of a quick scone and a double cappuccino. I was dodging in and out between the other rush hour commuters and deftly avoiding the solicitors and panhandlers handing out flyers and begging for charity and donations when inevitably I ran right into one. I was trapped, blocked in on one side by a fat woman wolfing down a cream cheese bagel while trying to read the Wall Street Journal and on the other by a man handing out flyers for a strip club on Market Street called the “Hot Box.” I had no choice but to deal with the little freak.

  I usually would not have even thought to question him. I would have just handed him a dollar to get rid of him or ignored him entirely and kept walking right past. But one of the buttons pinned to his jacket stalled my forward momentum in one of those surreal moments that usually proceed from the use of hallucinogens, alcohol, or really good weed, none of which I had indulged in that day. It was just the absurdity of the moment that made me pause, staring at that big white button pinned to his lapel. The one that said: “Meat is murder.”

  I kept looking from that button to the leather jacket and the hypocrisy of it just had to be addressed before I could proceed any further. Did this effete little geek mean that it was a sin to eat a cow but not to slaughter and skin it for clothing? I wondered if he would really find life any less cruel if I were to kill him and skin him to make a pair of boots or a nice motorcycle jacket as long as I spared him the indignity of cannibalization?

  I decided to just let it go and avoid debating with the anemic-looking little zealot. I sucked down my own outrage and prepared to skirt around him with nothing more anti-social than a disdainful sneer, when yet another propaganda pin caught my attention. It was one from some Pro-Choice organization that said “I fuck to cum not to conceive.” I had never had a homosexual thought in my life until that moment. But once you eliminate the “Ought nots” and “Thou shalts,” there was just no reason not to fuck that little geek in his ass. I wanted to prove his point.

  He only had himself to blame. It was his inane question that started it all. That grimy bucket filled with fistfuls of change and crumpled dollar bills that he waved in my face as he solicited me for the most absurd reason imaginable.

  “Donation to save the Liberty Bell?”

  It was the first time I’d ever thought to ask “Why?” and the world changed for me immediately thereafter. After stopping the intrusion of that one false ideology with the simplest of all defenses, a lucid question, I immediately began to wonder how much additional mental refuse I might rid my mind of with the strength of that one question. How many ideas had I accepted simply because so many others had accepted it before me? If someone were to suggest to me that truth be decided by majority vote, I would surely have laughed in their face yet so much of my so-called knowledge I had acquired in this way. On the strength of the popularity of that belief rather than on a single reasonable argument or credible piece of evidence. And how many more had I acquired on mere faith in the authority of its proponents? My father is knowledgeable in a great many things but to take his word on the very nature of existence was surely a folly. How many more of my beliefs were merely cultural mores and traditions without even the most tenuous roots in fact? How many life altering convictions did I hold simply because my father held them and his father before him and his father before him?

  I stood in the middle of the sidewalk, as the herd swirled around me, staring at the man with his silly little pamphlet, and immediately felt separated from everyone around me. They had their shells of willful and deliberate ignorance, belief without evidence, faith, like a bl
inding light shining in their eyes through which not a single counter argument could penetrate. And in the span of a few brief heartbeats, the time it took my lips to form that one destructive, liberating question, I had lost my shell, the light had ceased to shine in my eyes. I could see everything and it terrified me.

  I was already weeding through my mind and severing beliefs with sharp blades of reason letting them spin off into the ether from whence they came. I was paralyzed, overwhelmed by the magnitude of the endeavor. My mind went through the vast storehouse of beliefs and convictions like a lawn mower and very few endured under its assault. I remembered reading Descartes in college. I recalled his formula for scientific reasoning, “Knowledge = certainty.” Anything upon which doubt could be cast is not certain and therefore not knowledge. I found that almost everything could be questioned, doubted, argued against. Inevitably I came to the same impasse Descartes had reached “Cogito ergo sum.” “I think therefore I am.” My own existence was the only thing upon which I could be absolutely certain and not the existence of a single other person or thing.

  From that fact came conclusions that assailed my very will to live. I found that all that I believed to be right and good with life rested on a foundation of hopes and fears, prejudice and fantasy. I was left standing there like an idiot repeating those few ideas that rose from the ashes of the rest.

  “Nothing is forever. Nothing is guaranteed. So nothing is worth doing. But then . . . nothing is worth not doing. If nothing else existed but me, and even I was ephemeral, than all endeavors were utterly without purpose. Why should I restrain myself from anything if all actions are meaningless in the end? Why the fuck should I give a damn about saving a fucking Liberty Bell?!”