fiction

“I curse everything that you have given. I curse the day on which I was born. I curse the day on which I shall die. I curse the whole of my life. I fling everything back in your face, senseless Fate. With my last breath I will shout in your stupid ears:’Be accursed, be accursed!’”
-- Andreyev, “The Life of Man,” (1906)

Walking up the steps to the south verandah at the Casa Iguana hotel in Mismayloya, Stakel noticed a threadbare hammock slung in the corner outside of the stucco manager's office. Faintly visible under the mosquito net was the silhouette of a sleeping man; and if his shape was barely discernable, the sound of his snore was crystal clear. It was Frank Rossi.

Jay Baker, the subject of Stakel's visit, once a promising heavyweight fighter, had lost a leg in a stateside car accident. The injury occurred in Boloxi, Alabama. The driver and front seat passengers were killed outright, while Baker's girlfriend, Nadine, received a spinal injury so severe that it left her a permanent quadriplegic. Baker might have considered himself lucky to have lost just a leg. But instead, he took to the bottle and became a hopeless alcoholic. That kind of insidious drunk who feels it their duty to shmooze that certain type of tourist whose reason for travel springs from that illusion that one can flee troubles that are less a physical than psychological. The accident had changed him.

His psychic mutation took the form of mental deterioration. He perceived his mutilation as something wholly tangible, without realizing he had lost more than his physical moorings. His missing limb, conspicuous in its absence, was correlative to a flaw in his core self. That innate sense of identity prior to language and thought, his reptilian brain, seized on an intuition churned up from the murk of his being and transformed him; much as the smooth pink skin that covered the seam between his stump and phantom limb had become a simalacrum of his leg.

He never admitted his change, but his secret self acquiesced to this sudden metamorphosis. And in solidarity with what was lost he began to find ways to extend the domain of his phantom self.

He drifted south to Mexico City. It was here that Baker took to selling his body to those gay travelers who would have him. It was here also that he met Frank Rossi and quickly exhausted the exotic imaginings of his homoerotic desire.

It was these cumulative changes in Baker that caused his parents to have him involuntarily committed after luring him to Ishpeming on the pretext of a death in the family.

As Stakel poured a steady stream of shots from a silver flask, Rossi recounted Baker's AIDS riddled ranting about his time at Newberry.

According to Rossi, Baker had such an aversion to a fellow inmate that he refused to say his name. It seems the man had taken a fascination to Baker’s stump.

Guerre’s Journal: I often fantasize about the fit of your prosthesis. My obscenity offends you? No. I don't think it’s that. You're too numb to feel shame! But that bizarre appliance is so, so, personal, like false teeth. I want to caress it. You act coy, but you crave my curiosity. I envy your difference. It is so unlike my own, like most of ours. Let me stroke it, pet the alloy and polymer. You love how I attach it and re-attach it; the holster like snugness of the stump saddle. I have you when I have it, a physical part of you.

Given the uncertainty of Baker's age, there ensued what could only be called a violently sodomistic period of forced abuse: A phase that was Baker's introduction to deviance that equated violence with sexual satisfaction. This man had promised that, because his love for him was so strong, Baker would never leave the place alive.

The man became an arch-angel of death; a grim reaper, collecting the sheaves of the once living; and a grim professor whose monomania was so convincing that Baker came to regard it his duty to document his life.

Using the shorthand he had learned as an Army stenographer, Baker meticulously transcribed the man's dictation on his worldview. He would sit at his spare desk, or lie on his cot, while the television hawked a material world so alien it functioned more as a cacophonous sound track, a jabber of babble providing the background to the mix of truth and fantasy Baker dutifully recorded.

The man, let's assume it was Guerre, described a cartoonish world; psychotic, full of mayhem, sometimes chaotic, sometimes monotonously predictable and depressive, and sometimes violent; never comfortable, and never hopeful. Occasionally Guerre would make his own notations apart from the journal. Of the few times that Baker saw this, he remembered Guerre as having used a stub of lead pencil while chain- smoking Kool non-filters. Guerre maintained that he was working on a memoir to be given to his younger sister, Leslie Franklin. Before retiring each night, he would carefully scrutinize Baker's notations and hide the journal and his own jottings under his pillow while he slept. Of course, Baker couldn't know these things exactly in this way, nor did Stakel record them as such; but this was how it happened.

"So how and why did you steal the journal?" Stakel prodded.
"There were too many facts about myself that would have led Guerre to find me. I knew that if he kept it he would easily track me down. He had already promised me I would never leave the place alive. Besides, it was something I had on him, a detailed account of his crimes.”

After his third shot of Jamesons, Rossi retrieved the journal from a threadbare knapsack and handed it to Stakel. Seemingly relieved of an overwhelming burden, Rossi, for no apparent reason, recalled Baker's suicide; his body hanging in the sunlit alcove behind the hotel; and how an enormous iguana, brilliant orange in the sun, perched motionless on his gray strangled head, its cold eyes sstaring at nothing.

As Stakel's plane climbed north into the Pacific sunset he began to read the journal. The more he read the more he became absorbed in the story behind Don Merryweather's killer; and the more he dreaded meeting Guerre.

Stakel would eventually do an exhaustive reading of everything pertaining to, not only Guerre, but to his infamous son, Zeke Pluto. His initial reaction, no doubt related to his skills at detection, compelled him toward those passages relevant to Merryweather case; carefully singling out those entries that seemed circumstantially related to the materials Nicole had given him.

So it is safe to say that Stakel wasn't alone in puzzling over the moral imperatives implicit to Guerre's worldview? His distorted assumption that one must earn the right to appear as they do dovetailed nicely with the more general tenet that good is a relative term; a matter of utility rather than universality; a value rather than a virtue. That achievement should trump respect as the yardstick of human value implied his dogmatic adherence to the idea that identity is forged by the appropriation and obliteration of otherness.

No. Stakel was uninterested in these things. He was as practical in his way as Guerre, but their unequivocal allegiances had staked out opposing definitions of good and evil. For Stakel, the journal posed less lofty questions: Who was the girl in the obituary? Lina Flately? But it was inevitably those obtuse theoretical underpinnings of the confessions that plagued Stakel's deductions.

The mixture of intellectual deception and psychotic revelation made a muddle of any concrete conclusions he arrived at. How did this bizarre man, a lunatic, a predictor of pink-thonged monks and Madisonian Ambassadors, square with the uncertain bloody mayhem his memories implied.

The constant aporias produced by Stakel's attempt to read the document through the lens of its assumed logic caused him to abandon this reading strategy in favor of a hermeneutic that privileged the journal's non-rational aspects. He began to focus on passages more reflective of Guerre's mental history; those marginal entries that heretofore functioned as asides, pushed him toward the resolution of the intractable cognitive dissonance that endlessly deferred any definitive meaning Stakel had attached to the writings previously.

Guerre’s Journal: What makes me crazy is that right now he doesn't recognize me, denies I'm his son. Why do I want to draw on myself...whistle. Footsteps. Screaming, an inmate having an episode. What makes the drawings a blueprint for the razor-knife is the thought of him seeing a patient in New York. As if I never happened! Does he see me when he asks the questions, ever...? Isn't he always talking to me? Why can't I hear him? Right now he's probably pruning some cabbage-brain, or prescribing an antidote for jealousy, while he fantasizes about the pink thong on the blunt-faced monk in the waiting room. Tell them about your son, dad! Talk to your clients, your friends, your family, anyone--about him. Do I wear a pink thong? You don't know me. You analyze, you advise, you lie.