“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 showed 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.