Joe Gores - Menaced Assassin

“Saturn is the symbol of time,” she tells me. “He devours his children-us-because he is our fate, our melancholy.”

I find this, from this untouched and lonely girl, almost unbearably poignant. In Buen Retiro Park a short distance from the museum we share a half-bottle of red I supply, a carefully wrapped ham sandwich she brings from her handbag. The park has tall plane trees lining footpaths where nurses push rich people’s babies in prams, and old men who probably fought in la guerra civil rake up the leaves to put into wheeled receptacles. Around this little oasis the traffic grumbles and honks.

This becomes our pattern: we meet each morning in front of that day’s painting to be analyzed, lunch each day in Buen Retiro on wine and that inevitable ham sandwich. Her presence makes of Madrid a pure and wondrous adventure. I am half in love without ever having touched her or even knowing where she lives.

On the Friday I become aware of a man standing very close behind me. I turn quickly; in Spain are many Gypsy pickpockets.

“She is not coming,” he says.

I know him instantly, though she has never described him: the student of the guitar who sleeps on her sofa. He is as tall as I but bulkier, with brown and curly hair, a fleshy chin, a strong, almost hooked nose. His face is round. Without the chilly blue eyes he would be the Pillsbury Doughboy.

So sure of him am I that I ask, “Flamenco or classical?”

He looks surprised for a moment, then sneers, “Oh. Pillow talk. Classical. I am the next Andres Segovia.”

“I doubt that. Why is she not coming?”

“I told her you’d found someone else to fuck. I knew she was dicking someone so I followed her, saw you two together.” His fleshy face darkens. His heavy brows draw down. His skin flushes. “Dicking you and she won’t even give me stink-finger.”

What says Cyrano?

Oh, my friend, I seemed to see

Over some flower a great snail crawling!

“Every night she makes the next day’s fucking ham sandwich. I got up early this morning and opened up her sandwich and jerked off into it and wrapped it up again.” He gives a sneering laugh. “Now that’s what I call mayonnaise! She’s probably eating it right now. Eating me right now. Maybe I should have waited until after you’d had lunch with her to tell you about it so-”

I knock him down. Had I been Raptor at that time, I would have slain him where he stood. A woman is running for the guard, her shoes echoing on the marble floor. I stand over him.

“If you return to her apartment, even to pick up your guitar, I will kill you. Do you believe me?” I know in that moment that I am speaking true matters, and I can see the belief in his face also.

I walk away, out of the Prado and out of Madrid and out of her life forever. I wait long enough to see him leave the museum and entrain for Barcelona. Perhaps there he will buy a new guitar. Now my path to her is clear, you say; but to what end? In truth, I cannot bring myself to see her without telling her how he has violated her; but to be told it will destroy something within her it is essential I preserve.

In a world where such horrors occur, as Raptor I find in myself a violence to equal them. Need more to be convinced? I have more- la verite toujours la verite, remember? It can be found in Colin Wilson’s A Criminal History of Mankind, the chapter titled “The Psychology of Human Violence”:

They found them [the habitual violent criminal] amazingly skillful at self-justification — suppressing any material that might lose them sympathy — but the real problem lay in the criminal character. They lied as automatically as breathing… Most criminals have developed a psychological “shut-off mechanism” to push inconvenient thoughts out of consciousness… This meant that responsibility, too, could be shut off…

It seems to eerily echo my own dark nature, but surely, I tell myself, this is not me! These men are true psychopaths. But then I have a terrifying thought: is it possible that I also have no capacity to understand what truth is? Is this why I constantly seek the origins of things-especially in myself? If I know it from the beginning, must it not be true? So I always compulsively demand, Why did this happen? To whom did it happen? What are the consequences?

But in the last analysis, does it matter? You see, he has jerked off into her sandwich and she has eaten it. Telling her about it will not change it, only destroy her. And now I know that Raptor, not yet named or acknowledged, lurks within me.

Thus, when the current need arises, I become him. Ah, what relief! As Raptor, I can let the discarded shards of myself pierce the barrier. And afterwards… Well, afterwards, I need only activate my shut-off mechanism to be pleased at the cleverness with which I have slaughtered, is it not so? Rather than suffer any afterthoughts, bad dreams, sleepless nights?

Aha, say you, but Raptor has such insomnias, regrets, nightmares. What if you have rent the temple veil from top to bottom, have left the fabric of your life tattered around you? What then, murderer?

But that is nonsense. I am my profession. To prove it, I go now to kill again. After that will be time to stop.

If I can.

“If I can,” said Will, “I want to stay with the great apes. The first one known, thirty-pound Aegyptopithecus (28 m.y. ago), once was believed to be ancestral to all living monkeys and apes. But we now know the hominoid line began about the same time he did, rather than descended from him: some twenty-two pithecoid species, scattered over Africa, Europe, and Asia, now are known. Yet only the line of Dryopithecus (12 m.y. ago) survived-by devising a whole new way of getting around.

“Brachiation.

“Brachiation means swinging beneath the branches by the arms, rather than running around on top of them on all fours. Evolutionists call brachiation ‘utterly adaptive’-which means that if you were an ape, you learned to brachiate or you died. In a world of shrinking forests, brachiation gave us new function and anatomy to go with our innate primate playfulness.

“Function: developing amazing gymnastic skills to swing through the trees, to hang by an arm while reaching out to the tips of branches for ripe fruit. This required judgment — how far away is that next limb-and concentration. Lose your concentration, misjudge, you miss your grip and fall. And die.

“Anatomy: the torso is straightened, the arms and upper body are strengthened, the hands and wrists become fluid, the pelvis begins its adaptation for eventual upright walking. The ape could retain his bulk while expanding his brain and remaining in the trees where, for the time being, all the fun was.

“This is most important: there is the same joy in an ape’s swift flight through the forest as there is in a bird’s soaring flight over it; and it was this sense of fun, of adventure, that helped certain hominoids walk out into that unknown veldt.

“Between those Miocene pithecoids we have been talking about and the modern apes we want to talk about, the fossils showing homin oids becoming homin ids are, as William Howells says, ‘no more than mutterings in the dark-a piece of jaw here, a piece of arm bone there.’ We hear not even mutterings about the ancestors of gorillas and chimps, except a single bone from the Samburu Hills in Kenya some 6 to 9 m.y. ago.

“The gibbons and siamangs are the most joyful, perhaps the brainiest of the surviving great apes. But by one of those double whammies of which Nature is so fond, they ‘chose’ a life of wondrous dexterity and delight in the tops of the trees-thereby removing themselves from this discussion.

“The orangutan’s direct affinity to us is tenuous: he packed his bags for Borneo about the time Proconsul (22 m.y. ago) appeared in Africa. But he is a hominoid, and when we talk about our direct ancestors we find some of his ways suggestive.