by Tony Burgess
It is important to first locate the man standing on the front porch with his hand extended. Take every precaution to ensure that this figure is not disturbed as he is determining the conditions that are producing the ‘now’ of the present narrative. There is, of course, no harm in candidly appraising him as a sexual object, though it is inadvisable to remove his clothing and diegetically unconvincing to repeat him less clothed. Fetishize at your own discretion. Another figure, Ray Bird, shall be placed in the driver’s seat of the blue car. If he is unclothed, clothe him immediately. A third person, Bob McCarty, is walking from the car, having concluded a conversation with the figure within. If he is whistling or humming as he strolls, there is no need to adjust the cliché as he is merely becoming generalised prior to vanishing altogether. In fact, he will not make it beyond the garbage cans at the end of the second yard ahead of him. If at this point you are growing to resent the arbitrariness that has been privileged thus far, you may kill this third person. For instance, remove the can of grey spray paint from the aforementioned garbage can and spray it directly into his face. Be as violent as you wish, slapping and kicking him to the ground. When he is dead, roll him around the street with a slightly crueller cuff of the hand than was used to position the sun earlier. Do not be alarmed by the distant sound of dogs barking, they are responding to a set of determinates absolutely prior to our current ones.
★
Around the bright pink bathtub of Dr. John Mendez, on the inside rim, runs a thick white hatband of bear grease. Filling the bathtub is the dozing body of Dr. John Mendez. His belly is, in fact, a little larger than anyone had suspected, and it is a brighter brown than his hands and face. A long carpet of gauze has rolled across its flat peak and three dots of blood repeat themselves every four inches down its length. Along Mendez’s forearm grows his wound, and parts of it are pulled and tied, but what isn’t flies open, a jelly-rimmed plant bursting across brown skin. The wound is so smartly coloured, so possessed of its own direction, that the rest of Mendez’s pale brown body seems to only have once been true. A fireman kneels on the floor beside Mendez, his coat filling its space like a black mountain. The fireman is clumsily unwrapping an egg salad sandwich with the bird-wing fingers of his gloves. He balances a half sandwich in his palm, lowering it into Mendez’s left hand.
“The paramedics will be here soon, Dr. Mendez. Anything I can do for you?”
Mendez chews thoughtfully, forcing four tiny white stones of egg out onto his lips.
“You know Mr. Fireman, I have thought the damnedest things. Jumping around like a baby does, and I have thought the damnedest things.”
The fireman places the remaining half of the sandwich on the side of the bathtub. He arights it onto its crusted edge with a turn of his gloved hand.
“Hunting like a fool for abbreviations in the woods, cracking open stones, staring down pine cones as if they were my little adversaries. I think, Mr. Fireman, I’m living in my own little world, far from Brazil, far from Jamaica, far from England, and I grow old and impatient …”
The fireman sits on the toilet and removes his hat, he notices scars on Mendez’s belly that look to him like old knife wounds.
“Mr. Fireman, did you know that mushrooms grow in the hearts of cocaine addicts. It’s true, the microscopic spores of Colombian fungi migrate into the arterial systems of those who use the drug intravenously, and they flourish, like those grey saucers that you see at the bases of trees, and they trim the valves of hearts, working themselves along in hot blood, causing a terrible panic, the worst kinds of irregularities. You should see the faces of these poor people, coloured people white with fear. No loved ones, no money, waiting for my hard, hard language. Brazil is harder than here.”
A loop of skin on Mendez’s arm drools a thick spoon of blood on the inside of his belly. The fireman places a cloth along his side and lays another across the wound as he looks anxiously to the door. The sound of a distant siren restores an alert professional attitude to the way the fireman stands. Mendez smiles and his shrugging shoulders squawk against the bathtub. The fireman opens the door and takes a position halfway through it.
★
The noise of a door slamming snaps Ray Bird out of his trance. As he looks away from the rearview mirror to the front of the house, he’s vaguely sure that someone has just been standing there. He slips his car into the traffic and internalizes its progress. He feels the possibility of facing his problems with increasing good sense. He understands the need for a bit of affirming tough talk with himself. First, he realizes that there is probably no future for an art dealer in Bewdley, at least not the kind of future that’s going to repair the present damage. The damage, the damage is so very very deep. Ray knows this now, it is inescapable. People have been stolen from, people are owed money, and one way or another they’ll have to be paid. People have been lied to. Ray feels himself beginning to cry and thinks, “Ahh, finally, that’s how it should feel, that’s how it should have felt all along.” As he cries, knowing that if he can feel this way something is being saved, a different warmer voice fills his imagination and he can finally hear himself confessing. And he is wrong, and his head is lowered, and maybe Paula squeezes his hand softly, angry. Sure she’s not even close to forgiving him, but now, right now, now that he’s the sorriest of anyone and truly incapable of fixing this, she can recognize where he is for the first time in months and she’s there too, and no one approves but no one’s guessing anymore. As he cries he prays. He prays to Jesus Christ and he asks for forgiveness. Ray feels the sweetness of not having to define himself, not in this, not by these moments, and nothing is as welcome as the thought of a God so kind that he will let Ray alone be the one who feels the pain he has caused. Ray pulls the car into a gas station and rolls it to a stop beside a phone booth. A crab watches the road bend outwards from within a partial tear suspended from Ray’s eyelash.
“Hello, Paula.”
“Ray. Thank God, Ray, what’s going on?”
“Huh? What … what do you mean?”
“Well, there were two policemen here this afternoon.”
“There was what? What, huh, what did they want?”
“What did they want? What did they want? They were looking for you Ray.”
“Oh.”
“Oh? Oh? Ray, there happens to be a warrant for your arrest.”
“Is that what they said? Did they show it to you?”
“This is too much Ray, you know you can do whatever the fuck you want, when you want to, that’s just fucking fine with me, but I shouldn’t have to lie to all these assholes that call looking for you, and now this … Ray, I don’t want to live like this.”
“I know, Paula, you’re right, right, you shouldn’t have to. I’m so sorry honey. I’m gonna come home now, OK babe. I’m sorry, sweetheart.”
“OK Ray. I hate this Ray.”
“I love you Paula.”
“I love you too, just come home.”
Paula knocks the phone from the arm of the couch and it clatters across the floor. “I don’t want anything to do with that sound in your voice, Ray,” she thinks. “Pussy-whipped, Ray. You sound pussy-whipped. When the hell did you decide to sound so pussy-whipped?” There is a part of Paula, a relatively small part, and not a part that she’s willing to invest her future in, that wants Ray to just go away.
When Ray joins the traffic heading south to the 401 he is not heading home. He’s heading east towards Kingston and further. His tires may or may not be the real thing anymore — the real deal — and the little man, our penguin who will not come back, falls in his car beneath the leaping eastbound traffic. He plays there, speeding backwards toward us, on its infinite tiny ribbon.
THE BEWDLEY TORTURE SOCIETY
So, this is not what I said. This is what I did:
I began tearing covers off of paperbacks. Spanking the books. Turning their faces into towns on
a map that spread around my feet. The industries and populations of such great cities as Lord Jim, Atlas Shrugged, The Vicar of Wakefield and the Home Movie Companion were denoted by colouration, which shifted according to legend from mustard to gold to orange to red. Predominately red. Torrid zones. Beneath them on the carpet was real blood, denoting real murdering. I bent over a limp body and he looked remarkably like me. I had destroyed him by quoting myself. I must avoid such literariness in the future, I must make myself sad. Life is too short to waste being this self-conscious all the time.
I free myself up this way:
While Dan and I were in our teens we used to break into suburban houses in the middle of the afternoon, for no good reason that I can now recall, and I would ask him a few questions while he tries to jimmy the window.
“Dan, why are we so fuckin’ stupid?”
“Shut up, Tony. This window’s about to drop.”
It does, and it explodes across a basement floor. Dan pulls me around and swings me into the hedges and we laugh and laugh as we hang there. Now it makes me sad, and now I can smell their outdoor pool, and now I am less self-conscious, and I remember weapons falling out of my shirt onto the ground beneath the hedge, and though I still take those weapons into people’s houses I don’t think I’ll ever use them. A fear starts in the root system of a single flower, blanching the extremities, which pull in spasms held tight by wet, blind mud. A sweet juice explodes into the soil, meeting with the roots of other flowers. There is no time left. Imagine if there was though, and imagine what you would do. What are you going to do, Dan? So Dan draws his knees up under the hedge and pretends to confess to me. He turns it into a story and he tells it as if it had really happened to him. Dan says, seriously:
“Since you know I killed my wife, I want to make it clear that I didn’t kill our son. I’m going to try to explain what happened and I want you to listen closely: you’re the only two who’ll ever know the truth.”
Killed his wife? Killed his wife? I couldn’t believe it. But when I looked up I could see the tears of anger and sadness in his eyes and I knew that it was the truth.
★
When we were nine years old Julie and I used to have a special club called The Bewdley Torture Society. Since there was nobody to torture at first, we spent most of our meetings writing out commandments for the society, mostly made to sound like the Bible or the Boy Scout manual. We both read a lot for our age and we had big vocabularies and we already felt like philosophers. We would take her daddy’s punt out on Rice Lake and row down through the reeds until we got to the spot we had discovered where there was a small opening, like a little green room, just back off the lake a bit. This is where we had our secret meetings.
That summer we had seen the movie Badlands and though we liked it, we thought that the couple had no philosophy, so they didn’t really count. And besides, we weren’t going to kill people. We did fantasize that we were like them though; but if she noticed I was acting like the guy in the film, even saying a line from it as if I’d just said it myself, she’d tell me and I’d feel embarrassed and weak. I caught her acting like Sissy Spacek sometimes too though, so she didn’t always feel superior. We did let each other get away with speaking in southern accents, ’cause for some reason it made it easier to talk about some of the things we’d talk about if we used fake accents. To give you an example, here’s one of the written declarations of The Bewdley Torture Society:
It is a human fact that everyone secretly wants to torture people, and we are the first to speak the truth. Everybody who sees a baby wishes it was dead or that they could hit it with a hammer and they don’t have to, of course, but we believe they should say so. Everybody who picks up a knife thinks first off about sticking it in someone, sometimes. Don’t lie! You think about stabbing somebody a thousand times. All we are saying is that this is perfectly natural. It is also perfectly normal to hate people that do these things. We believe there is nothing to worry about as long as we talk openly about wanting to torture and kill each other. Like Julie will say to me, “Your eyeballs are so soft and they can see and all I’d have to do is stick a hatpin in them and they would dry up and be blind.” I give Julie the hatpin and I hold my eyes open, and she doesn’t do it, but we will suddenly know everything about each other.
We wrote a lot of stuff like that, and we actually would perform experiments. These started out as imagination experiments, like visualizing a person we knew in town and covering his body with angry biting rats. Sometimes we pictured everyone in the whole town running around, bouncing off each other, with these chewing, crazed rats burrowing into them from head to toe. Eventually, the town would be dead quiet except for the chompy sound of rats eating hundreds of dead people, with only us left alive. We’d be sitting at the end of the long dock at the marina crying because all our best friends and teachers were dead. That became boring so we’d come up with another true human daydream.
★
“Our son had an illness that made him scream all of the time. It was an unbearable sound that never ever stopped, day or night. After a while I couldn’t take it any more so instead of coming home after work I’d go to the bar and drink until I was drunk enough to go home and pass out. My wife was stuck with the child twenty-four hours a day, though. And she just couldn’t take it.”
He brought shaking white hands up to his face and they fluttered over the tears that spilled down his spotty cheeks.
★
Like the one about a storm of razor blades which would come out of the sky and bend and swirl through the air, sliding off people, never killing them, but covering them with blood. Then it would rain gasoline and clean their little cuts, but leave the whole town so full of pain they’d scream and faint. And then we’d walk around their sleeping bodies and push living crayfish into the slits. The crayfish would be driven so insane by the gasoline that they’d start burying themselves alive under the people’s skin to clean themselves off with blood. This would wake people up and they’d look at each other and see hundreds of raised bumps furiously bolting around beneath their skin, which would be so horrible that they’d leap up and start tearing off flesh like clothes, revealing all the grey, snapping little bodies, like living internal broaches, clinging and dropping out from their insides. Then everyone would be on their knees, suddenly silent and feeling nothing, just full of wonder. While they prayed, tiny hard crayfish would spin and flip around them. The possibilities are endless if you just let your natural human instincts take over.
★
“One night I came home real late and real drunk and before I collapsed on the couch, I noticed something real strange. The house was silent. It was never silent, but that night there was not a single noise. I staggered around from room to room until I got to the bathroom. There she was, leaning over the tub with her head in her hands. I looked over her shoulder and I could see our son’s back floating in the full tub. When my wife turned around she started screaming how it was all my fault, how I’d done this, that I was a no good drunk who’d killed his own son. I don’t really know exactly what happened next, except all of a sudden I was sober and I was leaning over a bathtub that held the bodies of my wife and child.”
★
Our first and last real-life torture went like this: We chose this old man who had lived in Bewdley all his life as our subject. His wife had died many years before, and he went to her grave every Sunday. She was a soloist in the church choir when she was very young and her choir had appeared once on television live. We went to the library, pretending that we were doing a school project, and managed to get a tape of one of her solo performances. It was a real gloomy, scary song too, but there were also parts of the tape that had her just talking, you know, saying normal things like “I need some water” and “Oh, God, where’s John, he said he was going to be here.” John was her husband. We couldn’t believe our luck! When he heard that music and then his dead wife asking
when he was coming it would be our first real torture.
★
The shaking was starting to leave his hands now and his eyes were dry. He told the rest of his story in a flat, clear voice.
“I took both bodies down to the lake and stuffed them in life jackets, put one on myself, and piled us all in the canoe. I rowed out a ways and then I tipped the boat. I hollered and splashed until the neighbours heard us and pretty soon the lake was full of boats and flashlights. I told the police that my wife had begged me to take them out on the lake cause she thought maybe the fresh air would tire out the boy. I kept telling the sheriff that she was near driven insane by his screaming and I just couldn’t talk her out of it. Nobody ever suspected the truth. Until you two.”
★
The first step was to go out to his place late at night and play parts of the choir bits, none of the solo stuff, or his wife, just the choir. We did this a few nights and he’d come to the window, his little bald head and his pyjamas, all squinty-eyed looking out the window. Then he’d yell through the screen: “Who’s out there? Turn that racket off!” Which was perfect, because we didn’t want him remembering things too quickly; he might have figured it all out if he recognized the recording. But we knew that somewhere, behind a wall in his mind, something would slowly be coming back to life. We’d let a week go before doing it again, and sometimes we’d play a different tape just to make sure he wasn’t making any conscious connections. Pretty soon it was time to make the voice tape and make some careful plans.