The Bewdley Mayhem

by Tony Burgess

  “Yes, yes. I’m sure that’s why you have the bunny there. I’m sure it all makes perfect sense. But I don’t really care, you understand me, I just want to order a few of these pads for myself. Yes. Well, three dozen.”

  Another piece of tape curls from the wall and a photocopied list of EMOTIONS ANONYMOUS meetings, dated the previous fall, swings to an angle and turns over.

  “Of course, with the bunny, yes.”

  It is January in Bewdley, which means the lake is frozen and the trees are heavy and black. Packs of wolves roam through the forests. At night their voices carry far through empty, frozen space. Just before dawn a snowplough divides Bewdley in half, leaving tall sharp rows of ice on the sidewalks of the main strip.

  In a small residential area which hides lying north of Bewdley’s summertime centre, the homes are tucked irregularly into wooded lots of indeterminate size. They are made of identical orange and pale brick and though each house differs slightly from its neighbour, they all seem to share the same definition of ‘home.’ There are a few rebellious houses self-consciously defying this definition, and so they resemble fallen aircraft. Mendez lives in a small room on the third floor of an orange brick house. The top floor has been added to the structure and is shingled grey. His room juts out slightly at the back of the house against the branches of a tree, which appear to partly support it. Cauliflowers of fungus freeze in the sunlight along the windowsill and at least three ghosts haunt the house, though Mendez has never encountered them.

  Dr. Mendez is seated at a table in the sunny room that hangs among the tree’s branches. He has, in front of him, prescription pads stacked in two rows. In one pale brown hand he holds an ampoule of clear liquid and resting under the other hand is a syringe. He rolls the syringe’s bright orange cap between his thumb and forefinger, turning it against his palm before releasing it, then he pinches the rounded narrow tip of the ampoule. He snaps the glass tip off allowing it to drop and roll to a rest. While one hand holds the opened ampoule carefully at its base the other deftly pops the cap of the syringe and rotates it so that two fingers lightly squeezing the plunger flanges can drop the exposed needle into the ampoule. Mendez seems to be watching a remote activity as he draws the fluid up the syringe. He flips the near empty ampoule away and having translated the charm of one object into another, he raises the point of the syringe and taps it rhythmically with the back of his fingers. He doesn’t pause long before sliding the needle into his arm above the inside of his elbow, flagging a tiny red propeller of blood back into the shaft, then steadily injecting the contents into his vein. Except for a short ready breath there is no visible evidence of the effects of the drug as he gathers the spent paraphernalia, rolls it back into its packaging, and drops it into a small basket beneath his desk.

  The doctor sits shirtless in the sunlight. Across his round firm belly there is a diagonal spray of scars. They are white and thick like clenched teeth. In Jamaica, twelve years ago, four men had surprised him in his office late at night. He had refused to give them drugs and they slapped his torso with knives before dragging the safe from the wall. By the time they left the safe lay on its side, still secure, the handle and dial were wet with the doctor’s blood and its edges were frustrated with turning fingerprints. The doctor goes into his bedroom and removes one of five white shirts from the closet. On the back of the closet door hangs an oil painting, its frayed edges cut from a frame. It depicts a green and grey sea beneath a spotty yellow sky. In the upper right part of the sky, a deep blue sun sheds progressively lighter blue-green scales that interlock with the concentric movement in the yellow sky. Beneath the sun hundreds of tiny dark purple cups represent its reflection on the sea and in spite of this wrong colour it is light on water. Mendez continues dressing as he enters a tiny sitting room. He goes to a standing bureau and adjusts his tie in the coppery mirror, then he withdraws a bright yellow sheet from the top drawer. On it are printed gold and black alligators in rows across and along the page. Mendez curls one of the decals off and presses it onto a calendar under Wednesday.

  In the waiting room of Mendez’s office a young man sits on the couch between two fist-sized scuffs on the wall. His newly dyed hair sits like a hat. It is the same colour as the electrical tape that tags down the corners of notices on the wall. When the receptionist calls his name, he rises, nearly stepping onto the coffee table, then he veers off walking in a direction that he is forced to suddenly change in order to reach the receptionist’s window. She is young, her hair is dyed a deep burgundy and her eyebrows are full and dense, nearly meeting. When she speaks to him the illusion of office disappears.

  “I think the doctor’s almost ready for you. He’s been with the same patient for over an hour, now. Maybe I should … no … listen why don’t you just go in and say that I must have thought he was free.”

  The tall man pulls himself anxiously below his height and looks at her helplessly. She ignores him for a few seconds, then abruptly flips her hands open around her ears.

  “OK, alright, he’ll see you now.”

  When he enters the doctor’s examining room, Mendez is, in fact, alone. The man stands for some time waiting for the doctor to notice him. Mendez does this with a solemn, musical turn of his hand. When the man sits, holding the chair at the front and squeezing his thighs together against his wrists, Mendez looks up, suddenly smiling.

  “Someone is forgetting us, Wednesday Boy. If we can’t sleep, we do have the choice of staying awake and asking ourselves why this is so. Why can’t I sleep? I’m sitting here on the edge of my bed twisting my pillow like a child’s doll and why? Go to the kitchen. Sit down in the chair there. Put the light on and have a cigarette. And then ‘Oh my God!’ you say, ‘Good Heavens, I am deeply unhappy — the things I have done, what does the world think of me?’”

  Mendez lifts a hole puncher off of his desk and squeezes it in his fist, presenting this to the man as evidence or an answer.

  “You see, Wednesday Boy, maybe then you take your bombers and go to sleep, but you will have found something out. What could have been discovered? Sleeping away, a crazy sleep. What could be discovered?”

  Mendez holds his hand up to stop the answer that isn’t forthcoming. These are not hypothetical questions. Mendez withdraws a comb from the breast pocket of his white coat. He elaborately dusts the air around his head, taking passes at the crown of his head, before gently drawing it through the thin white hairs that fly across his scalp. Suddenly, his shoulders fall, and he drops the comb on the desk, knocking a crescent of powdered skin across a blue pen drawing on his calendar. He appears on the brink of an apology, of a confession, when the drawing catches his attention.

  “You see this drawing, Wednesday Boy? I drew this here, last month or so. Do you like it?”

  The drawing depicts four men, each in his own canoe, sitting in the cove of a lake. The forested shore is heavily rendered in hatches and scribbling and the sun is a whorl of faint lines. The two-dimensional canoes tilt and swing awkwardly in the three-dimensional space of the landscape. Mendez closes an eye and tilts his head.

  “You see them, these hard men, they are quiet on this water. Maybe a bird is in the sky.”

  Mendez scrapes an ink blob from the tip of his pen near the sun.

  “We do not know who they are. I don’t think we do. And they don’t know who we are. I think they are in another century, Wednesday Boy, living for different things than we know about. I have drawn them here, Wednesday Boy, and I think that that will keep me from my sleep.”

  Mendez looks up with a nearly laughing smile.

  “And so, what will keep you from your sleep tonight?”

  The man realizes that he is being asked a question.

  “I am having problems sleeping.”

  The doctor’s eyes seem to dull as he opens his patient’s file.

  “What is it, Wednesday Boy? Is the neighbourhood so very loud? Is you
r wife prodding away at you to make love to her?”

  The patient makes no attempt to smile, rather he appears to be in pain. He twists his neck and lays his fist against his right side.

  “My back injury is acting up. I can hardly move. I can’t even lie down it hurts so bad.”

  The two men sit silently. The doctor watches while his patient slowly turns and stretches in his chair, becoming absorbed in the pain.

  “I see. I wonder … I have things written here. You like reading, you have been to college — I should call you College Boy — you have left Toronto because there are no jobs for you. Two of your people, close to you, have died since you left. There is so much. Why did things become so difficult for you?”

  The patient puts a hand to his face, letting his fingers drop from his nose to his lips. He looks up over the doctor’s head, his eyes nearly rolling, but they stop and fix on a vanishing point behind the wall.

  “Bombers and painkillers. I think the danger is that you want to blow your brains out. That is our problem. I like you, Wednesday Boy, I don’t want to hear about how you got yourself killed. I’d rather like to hear that you are reading good books and thinking about them, talking about ideas. Calling your mother to say that, yes, life is hard, but I’ve just spent the day with a lovely girl who paints. You think I am crazy, Wednesday Boy, but I have just imagined a better life for you. Think of that.”

  The patient hooks his hands over his knees and lets out a breath that fills his cheeks.

  “I am going to pray for you, my friend with a terrible back. I will ask Jesus to touch you with his fingers while you sleep. But in order to do that I have to get you to sleep first, don’t I?” Mendez drops a prescription pad on his desk and he absently draws an eye on the bunny in the corner.

  “Twenty-five Placydil … and let’s see … these Percocet, take only as prescribed. No drinking. I assure you that tonight you will sleep. But next Wednesday we begin taking less of these.”

  This winter the snow is falling so heavily and so often that the region is having difficulty keeping the roads clear. Many residents have traded in their older model snowmobiles for newer, more powerful machines. These vehicles prowl the wilderness around Bewdley and are constantly bursting in and out of otherwise remote and silent corners of the forest. Dr. Mendez purchased a used snowmobile in mid December and he puts aside his Sundays for racing across fields of snow. His machine is a battered blue Yamaha, its cowl is scuffed and splintered and when he starts it up it becomes enshrouded in broiling grey smoke. He has removed the grease-smeared windshield that had clacked in and out of its moorings. In spite of the worn condition of the machine, it is still capable of accelerating so powerfully that the doctor tests his nerves every time.

  Dr. Mendez keeps his snowmobile pulled around under his window, and he protects it from the elements with a painter’s drop cloth. He brushes the dry snow from the cloth before whipping it into the air and letting it sail into a woodpile. Mendez is wearing an electric-blue snowsuit with a frosted lime-coloured helmet. He stands before the machine, presenting himself to it, and then he bangs his heavily upholstered hands together. The snowmobile starts with a single light pull producing a coiling wall of smoke through which Mendez disappears as he mounts the machine. In a neighbouring yard a man scoops up a handful of snow and drifts it through the air. He watches Mendez sink from sight where the forest begins.

  Mendez has a route he always follows. He takes a wide path through the forest which reaches the back of a farmer’s hilly field. The farmer’s residence is a clutter of small tar and cedar shacks falling along a low hillside. Mendez tours slowly along the perimeter of the field, turning his head frequently towards the column of smoke that spins upward from the snowbound structures. At the edge of the property a series of ruts and logs bounce the snowmobile playfully back up into the forest. Mendez accelerates up a wooded embankment and he guns the engine when the path levels. The machine quickly achieves its full velocity and it escapes control, hurtling along a corridor of pine trees. At a fork which divides the path into rising and falling directions, Mendez maintains a headlong speed as the machine leaves the ground before dropping onto the winding lower route. As he finds himself able to safely maintain speeds that surprise him, Mendez begins talking to himself inside the helmet. The helmet becomes a tiny intimate theatre with whispered voices that drown out the roaring of the machine. Mendez talks as if he were somewhere else, somewhere quiet. He is saying soothing things to someone who is wanted by the police. He smiles at the person from behind the tinted visor, and he lifts his helmeted head as if to encourage strength.

  Dr. Mendez hits three rocks in his path. The first rock throws the machine onto the second rock and by the time it hits the third Mendez is climbing into the air. As he flies in an upright position Mendez sees a thick trunk coming towards him. His fear is that he may be tumbling into the sky, so he reaches out for the tree to hold himself to the earth. He embraces the tree with his arms and his legs and dies instantly. The snowmobile floats silently up onto a soft embankment, slowing as it reaches a point where it must roll over. The body of Dr. Mendez sits at the base of the tree and the helmet is tilted forward, resting against the trunk. The sun sets and rises and sets and rises, moving the same shadows back and forth across the body.

  Up in the cranium the helmet keeps out the light which glows beneath the skin at an exposed area on the back of the neck. The brain is as dark as a buried egg, its folded base and larvic back have begun to fall inwards. At the stubbed ends of neurotransmitters, now bulging like insect bites, strange wheels break off in the crystallizing fluid. They roll as if caught in a fast-moving river, though everything around them is still. A knotted cable, studded with hard ruptures that have burst through a sheath, runs through a ventura. It joins millions of other cords, like itself, which disappear into a deep pool. The pool’s surface is opaque and its rim is stitching itself with changing crystals that enlarge the hole. Soon its surface is embossing and cracking, leaking a new fluid that has been fed by the cords. The cords are tumbling and dissolving, springing against each other as they drop much further than their length towards a stone root. There are platelets lost in the brain fluid, probably fallen in through some structural breach, or pounded out of membranes into cavities that would have them. One platelet, its end curved irregularly, is stiffening against its opportunity to move and soon it cracks in half from friction. To a platelet nearby it appears to be moving — until it has an agitated breakdown. The nearby platelet is swept away by a distant draining. This draining is fluid leaving the head through the ear. The fluid pops holes in the snow creating a series of slowly sinking cups. The doctor’s brain has begun to homogenize and soon it will be gone, through the snow to glaze the stones. The heart isn’t decomposing as quickly and it will hang for weeks in the rib cage, like a crumpled pirate’s hat.

  Along a ravine of lung flows a soup of alveoli, cilia and other dissolving tissues. They break and turn against a glistening black web that is caught high above. Here a meadow comes forward, protected from the torrents by the black web. In this meadow a small tan rabbit sits upright, very still, except for its ears which turn independently, tracking the distant crashes as the ceiling falls into the ocean.

  AMPERSAND

  There are some twenty men in Bewdley, Ontario, who believe they are Jesus Christ. One man entered a priest’s office and announced this, his second coming, and thrust a Bic pen threateningly from inside the pocket of his coat. The priest eyed the little point of the concealed weapon, the tiny tent it made, and his own pen sprang from his hands across the desk, startling the blond Christ.

  “Yes, well Mr. Christ, I see several gentlemen who share your name, and I have appointed times in which to hear your separate concerns. I know a shared namesake seems a rather arbitrary way of assembling a group and I don’t pretend to assume that any of you are alike beyond that similarity. It’s merely convenient, Mr. Christ, as
I am approached by so many bearing your name. My receptionist will arrange a time. Thank you. Good day, Mr. Christ.”

  Jesus dropped a green folder onto the desk, stuffed with hundreds of loose pages that where covered in tiny, blue handwriting.

  “Read these pages Father, then we shall talk. You will understand. Beware of false prophets.”

  Especially in Bewdley, the priest was thinking, as he watched the visitor swagger, very un-Christlike, out through the door. Is it odd that over twenty people have an identical messianic complex in such a small, quiet town as Bewdley? This one, with his ridiculous threat, his arrogance and this epic nonsense he’d left on the desk, was the most dangerous Christ that the priest had yet to encounter, most of them being easily frightened vagrants. The priest figured that even armed with concealed pens and however great their numbers, they were a pretty harmless crew. Vagrants, mostly. Still, twenty of the crazy bastards. That was nearly the size of his regular congregation.

  The priest pulled himself forward and flipped open the folder, preparing to read The Word. The first line was: “My mother died during childbirth, and I have no biological father. This was my first clue. Amen.” The Priest remembered his own fantasies as a child — that he was adopted, that his father was really someone else, someone great. He was sure that this was a fairly common event in a child’s imagination. He thought of the word ‘epidemic.’ He closed the folder and said common epidemic aloud.

  In Bewdley the Book of Revelation is taken literally by its numerous Christs. In the Holy Land, far way in the desert, weapons manuals are traded up and down the bodies of God. Bewdley’s Messiah sits by a lake and underlines passages from the Book of Revelation with his Bic. He sometimes alters a passage or two. He makes extensive use of a Merriam-Webster dictionary, often uncovering a surprising interconnectedness between the two large books. Occasionally he will cut things out of newspapers, but he finds these words often seem limited, being used before him — corralled and emptied into someone else’s meaningless sentence. Sentences aborted into paragraphs. Not like the dictionary or the Bible inside which he turned over entire skies, not mere pages.