Almanac of the Dead

  It all gave the chief a dizzy, unbalanced feeling. Suddenly everything about the way the chief had understood his assignment, even his own life—all of it seemed to go up in steam, evaporate. None of them understood what the bruises and burns might prove to the outside agitators or international commissions.

  The light-headedness came again when the first images blinked on the video monitor screen. It was far worse than anything the chief could have dreamed. The Argentine had turned the basement of police headquarters into a movie studio. They were out of uniform. Dressed in civilian clothing. The chief tried to keep his composure. By whose order had the junior officers performed interrogations out of uniform? But even before he could speak, Vico and the Argentine were at his side. A junior officer stopped the videotape. Vico whispered in the chief’s ear. Vico urged the chief to remain calm. The money involved here was considerable.

  “Look at the laws of supply and demand,” Vico continued, and the chief was wondering if his brother-in-law was on some kind of dope because his talk just seemed to be getting faster and faster. For years there had been no shortage of “raw material” in Argentina. But recently there had been a drastic interruption. A change in government, so to speak. The chief nodded. Vico put his hand on the chief’s arm. They were supplying half the world. Think of it! Vico raved on and on. But somehow in stepping back from the idiot Vico, the chief had inadvertently nodded his head in the direction of the officers by the video machine. The idiots had assumed the gesture was their signal to start the video again. On the video monitor he could again see his men. He could not believe it. Things had been changed. The interrogation room had been decorated with colored paper and paper flowers as if for a party, but in the center of the room on a tinfoil “throne” sat the prisoner. The prisoner’s eyes had been taped with the silver tape the Argentine used to bundle cords on video equipment. But the chief had not been prepared for masks on their faces. The interrogators wore carnival masks—the wolf, the rat, the vampire, and the pig. In this video they wanted no trace of the police. This they had done for a special video called Carnival of Torment. How quickly they had lost sight of their true purpose. Of course, they wanted to make money, but what had been most important to the chief was the message, the warning that must be sent. The chief kept a notebook beside his bed. Every night he woke at least twice for his bladder, and while he was up, sudden ideas came to him. The videos could carry warnings to more than leftwingers and subversives. Thieves and criminals of all types, molesters of children and small animals, traitors, spies of enemy nations—all would receive warnings. This is waiting for you, the warnings would say. This is what’s waiting for anyone out there who dares violate the law.

  But not this! This circus was a crime! A beast feast! This was perversion that had involved his own junior officers. The video was still rolling; now the images on the screen were silhouettes and the prisoner’s nipples and vulva were spotlighted. On the screen they thrust a cattle prod inside the vagina. The junior officers were laughing.

  The chief did not feel well, but blamed the odor of his coat. The odor of cleaning solvent made the chief ill. His wife had become less attentive in recent years. She no longer looked after the household and the hired help after the children were grown. She spent all her time with the women’s club. Playing canasta and drinking gin with the governor’s wife and the others. The chief would make a note as soon as he reached his office: “warnings to loose women” would be the theme of their next interrogation session.

  The Argentine cameraman talks too much after three beers. He brags about the movies he made while he was in the Argentine army. The chief did not care for the Argentine’s loud mouth always bragging. The Argentine didn’t know a hole in the dirt from the hole in his butt. The chief does not like the cameraman’s smart-ass attitude. Argentines are all like that. The bastard talks as if it is a sex movie. But first and foremost the videotape is an official record. The chief does not allow Vico or the swine Argentine to change his standard procedures for interrogations. Vico doesn’t argue, but from his next trip to Buenos Aires he returns with a suitcase full of video cassettes the buyer-distributor has sent to give them more ideas. Watching the Brazilian and Taiwanese sex shows after practice at the pistol range began around that time. The chief brought the cassettes Vico had borrowed.

  He let the Argentine think they were going to let him call the shots. The chief even made a point of telling Vico how well the Argentine was working out. The chief wanted the Argentine to get sloppy and maybe become insubordinate with him or one of the staff officers once or twice—something like that. Because the arrogance of the Argentine was almost more than the chief could swallow. The Argentine was Mr. Know-it-all! The chief really enjoyed setting him up. They start out the inter-rogation with a beating. The prisoner is handcuffed with hands pulled behind him. The Argentine said he had more than enough footage of the lolling tongue and swelling, blackened face. They had already poked and jabbed with broomsticks. Such limited imaginations these Mexicans had! The Argentine did not attempt to mask his contempt for them.

  Finally the Argentine had turned to the chief and said, “Do they understand words or do they just grunt?”

  The Argentine had been lured to Tuxtla by Vico, who had promised him the latest in high technology and equipment. Otherwise the Argentine would have taken a job in Mexico City. The job in Mexico City had paid less, but all the actors, including the girls, were professionals. Tuxtla was the pits. Police interrogators made even torture dull and repetitive. The chief had been embarrassed when the Argentine pointed out the inadequacies of their interrogation methods. All of the big fish were taken away from them and sent to Mexico City. The little ones would tell you anything about anyone even before the sergeant and his men got past the preliminaries—stripping off prison trousers and the insertion of the copper wires up the prisoner’s ass. The copper wires were connected to a tractor battery. Prisoners would shit all over themselves trying to expel the little wires.

  The Argentine cameraman was always on the police chief’s mind. He should never have gone into business with his brother-in-law, Vico. The Argentine had been Vico’s idea. Despite the business at hand, the police chief found he often lost his concentration, and he would find himself thinking about the smirk on the Argentine’s face. The chief had always been able to control personal impulses and urges because he’d seen strong men, intelligent men, ruined by their lack of self-control. Many times the chief has had to fight back the impulse to slug incompetent subordinates in their faces, but with the Argentine, the chief can no longer ignore the arrogance.

  The day they get the Argentine the timing is perfect. They seize the Argentine as he walks through the door of the interrogation room. The man behind the camera wears a pig mask. The chief wears the hangman’s mask of black cloth. The Argentine pales when he hears the electric doors clang shut up and down the basement corridor. The Argentine does not struggle as they tie his arms and legs spread apart on the chair. The chief wonders if the Argentine has guessed who the movie star will be. Imagine the surprise of Vico and the others in Buenos Aires when they see this video. There was no need for the expense of a surgeon’s table or any of the other props. The chief had never needed more than the heavy, high-backed oak chair. If it was the genitals the chief wanted to get at, the chair worked best. The victim’s sitting position pushed all the guts and tallow down on the sex organs, forcing them out. The best way to geld a horse was to hobble it with its head snubbed tight against a tree or post. One slit and the testicle was visible inside the slippery, marbled-blue membrane. Men were not much different.

  PART THREE

  AFRICA

  BOOK ONE

  NEW JERSEY

  AMBUSH

  THE DAY THEY HAD BEEN AMBUSHED outside the dry cleaners in Newark, Uncle Mike Blue had been lecturing Max about security precautions. Max got bored with turnpikes and big thoroughfares. Max favored narrow roads through the backwoods. He liked the orchards and field
s full of dairy cows. But Mike Blue had been vehement: back roads placed Max where any cheap punk could gun him down.

  Suddenly Max had found himself in the batter’s box where he could actually see the blurred shadows of the .38 slugs dropping away from the gun barrel straight at him. But the concentration necessary to see the slugs had slowed his body. The dive Max had made for the open car door had been from his baseball days too, but the slugs he had seen shattered the radio. The ones you don’t see are the ones that get you, Max had been thinking the instant a slug tore across his back and exploded in his left shoulder.

  Leah’s eyes were bloodshot from crying. The newspapers were calling it a major gang war. Uncle Mike was dead on arrival, and the doctors did not expect Max to live. Leah had not been naive. She had known since she was a young girl that theirs was a family special and apart from all other families. But nothing had prepared Leah for the violence. Leah’s father and two brothers had always administered vast real estate holdings in Florida and southern California. All Max Blue had ever done since Leah had met him was court death, although she knew she could not blame Max for the military plane crash. Each time she saw him lying with a bottle of blood dripping into a vein, bandages soaking up the blood as it leaked out, Leah wanted to end it, if that was how the marriage was going to be.

  Max had wanted to talk. He had seen the anger in Leah’s eyes. Later Leah had blamed her mother’s death for her anger at the hospital. What Max wanted to tell Leah was how Uncle Mike had been talking about carelessness not five minutes earlier. About the precaution of the well-traveled street where assassins hesitated because of the exposure and numbers of witnesses. What Max wanted to tell Leah was about the argument they had had over lapsing into a pattern—regular route and daily routine enemies could read like a book—the morning stop at the bakery where the driver waited with the limousine idling in a tow-away zone while Uncle Mike bought strawberry pastries and a thermos of espresso. Then the drugstore where the driver left the white Cadillac double-parked to buy the morning papers. Uncle Mike Blue stopped by the cleaners once a week on Friday to pick up his shirts and suit. Max had wanted to laugh and tell Leah how they were on schedule for death. Both Max and Uncle Mike Blue. But Max had had a tube down his throat, and Leah had needed to talk, to pour out her fear and her anger. Max had tried to keep his eyes open and struggled to focus on her mouth until he saw her words in thick, bloodred waves. Behind his eyelids he kept seeing the last words from Uncle Mike’s mouth take the shape of shirts floating off the hangers as the old man sank beneath the suit and shirts he carried. In an instant Max had seen the words, the shirts, flutter into angels.

  Moving to Arizona had not been what Leah had wanted at all. Then she had realized how much Max had been changed by the shooting, although the change in Max had actually begun after the plane crash. Much later, Max Blue had told her: he could not remember what it felt like to be Max Blue, to be who he had once been before the plane crash. It had been as if Max Blue had died that day in the sand and tumbleweeds next to the runway at Fort Bliss. After the plane crash, Max had still pretended to enjoy Leah’s thighs spread open on the bed. But the .38 slugs had blasted away the Max Blue who could pretend. The Max Blue who had survived no longer bothered to conceal what he felt. When he came home from the hospital after the shooting, Max preferred to sleep alone. He told Leah there was only one thing he wanted, and that was to move to Tucson, Arizona. He liked the looks of the skies around Tucson. He did not tell Leah, but after the shooting, the New Jersey skies had reminded Max too much of the gray fabric inside a coffin lid. He could not explain the importance of the high, open dome of bright blue sky except to connect the sky with the army plane crash outside El Paso.

  Max had lain in the dry tumbleweeds and sand dunes overnight. He had hurt so bad in the night he had passed out and thought he had died. But in the morning he had lain on his back, unable to move his legs or arms, and he had watched the sky emerge from the darkness of the night, and he had seen the inky stain smear into thick gray terraces of clouds he realized later were no clouds but merely the fuzziness of his vision from loss of blood. But then Max had awakened into the deep, bright-blue depths of sky all around as if he were flying high above the desert, above the earth so he could easily see how it curved into the Pacific Ocean just beyond Yuma. Only Max and the plane navigator had survived the crash. Max had never forgot the instant he had seen the bright blue of the sky with full El Paso sun; he had awakened on a sand dune as the army jeeps approached. The old Max had died in the crash. A different Max had somehow pulled himself back into this world, but not completely. He could not rid himself of the sickening fear he felt each time he began to feel drowsy and drop off to sleep. “Dropping off” was so much like dying.

  WHEELIE

  THE OLD WING of the El Paso Veterans Hospital had housed First World War veterans and veterans of the Spanish and Mexican wars who had contracted tropical fevers and lung diseases. Supposedly they responded to El Paso’s dry climate. Most of the old wing had been taken up with the oxygen tanks and compressors, the hiss and hum of respirators for lungs seared with mustard gas in the First World War. Leah had pushed Max in a wheelchair down the dim, high-ceilinged halls of the old wing during visitors’ hours. But few of the old men had visitors. They had been sent far from their homes for the dry, warm climate, and gradually they had lost touch with their families and their lives before the war. Although they sat upright in bed, green plastic tubing from nostril to oxygen tanks, their eyes were motionless and blank. Max saw these men had been dead for years—worse than dead to their families, who got no insurance money for a vegetable hooked to a machine.

  The new wing was full of Second World War and Korean War veterans, although new policy had placed patients in hospitals as close as possible to their homes. Max had noted that most visitors came for the “temporary admissions” like Max—people who could walk out the front door again. Families soon recognized when a man was as good as dead. Max had found no fault with his mother and sister or Leah. They had not left him for dead. All of them wanted to move to El Paso until Max had yelled at all of them—he was getting out. He wasn’t permanent like the other poor bastards in wheelchairs.

  Max observed the permanent “wheelies”: they tended to marry bulldozer-sized social workers in their forties; wheelies married loudmouths who abused them. “Wheelie’s” huge social-worker wife threw him out of his chair when they had fights. While he was in a wheelchair himself, Max could not avoid these monologues from the wheelies. Max swallowed a pill and settled back with his eyes closed. Here is an army colonel’s son who talks a blue streak. He had broken his neck in a swimming-pool accident when he was fifteen and drunk. He tells Max he feels out of place there.

  “Wheelie” must return to the veterans’ hospital from time to time for the bedsores he gets on his legs and butt, despite the sheepskins his huge wife buys for his wheelchair and bed. Wheelie has lifetime benefits from the veterans’ hospital because his neck broke at National Guard summer training camp. Max opens his eyes from time to time or nods and says “yeah” and “ah-huh,” but Max is not listening to Wheelie so much as he is drifting along in his own thoughts when Wheelie whispers that his prick gets hard and the women can’t get enough of it.

  BLUE SKIES

  THE MORNING THEY HAD KILLED Mike Blue and hit Max, the world had changed for Max. He had seen everything—every person—differently from before. Then gradually the truth had emerged for Max: he had already begun the change after the plane crash. The hit on him and Uncle Mike had been far worse than the plane crash. Max was beginning to wonder, how many chances did Death get in five years? What kind of lottery was it anyway? How soon before Max’s number did come up?

  When Max had awakened, he did not recognize any of the people around the bed in his hospital room. Some were obviously hospital staff, but Max knew the others assembled there must be his family members. He looked at the women and tried to guess which might be his wife. Max had lost
all sense of connection with the world the instant the .38 slugs hit his chest. Max had told Leah exactly how he felt; emotional bonds between everyone and himself had been severed.

  Max kept other thoughts to himself because he knew how people were, especially his family, and the thoughts were thoughts better left in silence. The thoughts were always about death. One death or many deaths: how many times, how many ways, did a man die? Max knew there was nothing after death. Nothingness and silence. The silence and the emptiness were darkness. Max had recovered consciousness after the plane crash, but he had never forgotten the darkness and the silence that flowed endlessly. There were no devils or Jesus. Death was the dark, deep earth that blotted out the light of a vast blue sky Max called life.

  In his delirium after the shooting Max had confused memories of the shooting with earlier memories of the plane crash Max never knew he had. The shooting and the plane crash had become a single nightmare, darkness flooding light until Max awoke sweating with terror.

  The priest who had visited Max at the hospital after the shooting urged Max to meditate and pray for the precious gift of faith he had lost. Max did not tell the priest he had spent days and weeks drifting on painkillers meditating on death; all forms of death. All death was natural; murder and war were natural; rape and incest were also natural acts. Serial murderers who chewed their signatures on victims’ breasts and buttocks and even the baby-fuckers—they were all consequences of human evolution.

  Now years later, Max thinks of himself as an executive producer of one-night-only performances, dramas played out in the warm California night breezes, in a phone booth in downtown Long Beach. All Max had done was dial a phone number and listen while the pigeon repeats, “Hello? Hello? Hello? Hello?” until .22-pistol shots snap pop! pop! and Max hangs up.