Mark Smith - The Inquisitor

Jones becomes more agitated.

Jones: No, no, no, man. That’s totally not-

G: — but I’m going to apply the spray first, and that, along with the blade’s sharpness, means you will feel the pressure of the blade, but no pain.

Jones: Jesus, are you fucking crazy, man?

G: Victor, blood carries oxygen through the body. If blood loss is gradual, you can lose up to twenty-five percent of it-about one and a quarter liters-before your organs start to shut down from oxygen deprivation-

Jones: Jesus Christ, man! Don’t cut me!

G: — so the heavier the bleeding, the less time it takes to die. But you won’t know how much you’re bleeding, or how long you have to live.

G takes a blindfold and ties it around Jones. Sprays Jones’s face, chest, arms, groin. Jones flinches, whimpers.

G: I’m going to start cutting now, Victor.

Jones: C’mon, man. Wait. This is fucked. Don’t do it!

G folds blade back inside sheath and draws blunt edge of sheath across Jones’s left arm. Jones struggles in straps.

Jones: Oh fuck!

G: Victor, where is Lisa?

Jones: I told you, man! I don’t-

G: You’re wasting time and blood, Victor.

G pulls down Jones’s boxer shorts. Jones flinches wildly.

Jones: No, no! Fuck, man, no! Not my-

G grabs Jones by the throat.

G: Next question, Victor. Do you want to be cockless or heartless?

Ezra slammed the binder shut, as if locking in a monster before it could reach out and grab him. The cat jumped up and leapt from the desk.

Ezra slumped back into Geiger’s chair. He would spend the rest of his life with this day tucked into a pocket of his memory, and over time it would become a yellowing receipt itemizing the cost of what he’d lost in the past twenty-four hours. And scrawled at the top would be the question he now uttered aloud:

“Why did you save me?”

Amsterdam Avenue was a tangle of noises. Geiger felt vulnerable, almost defenseless, and he was still trying to absorb not only his encounter with Burger King but also his visit to a drugstore. He had never been in one of those, either, and the experience of confronting a palisade of brightly colored containers in the “Pain and Sleep” aisle had been nearly paralytic. There seemed to be curatives for every sort of pain and dosages for every person and situation. It had taken him ten minutes to decide on a small bottle of Children’s Advil.

He turned down his block. Up ahead on the sidewalk, sitting in his folding chair with his scarred crutch at his feet, was the man everyone in the neighborhood called Mr. Memz. The last thing his right foot had ever stepped on was a land mine in a jungle in Vietnam, and he’d come home without half the leg. His sanity was often questioned by those who walked by, but his ability to memorize vast amounts of text had made him a local legend.

To supplement his disability checks, Mr. Memz sat at his outpost and took wagers from passersby on whether he could recite, verbatim, a page from any of the half dozen books he had on display on a portable card table. The bettor would declare the size of his wager, pick a book, choose a random page, and read the first four words of a sentence aloud. Mr. Memz would then begin his recitation, ripe with the drama, humor, or passion that the selection, in his estimation, called for. He almost never made a mistake, and even then most of his customers rarely pointed it out.

As always, Mr. Memz was dressed in military-issue camouflage, and as Geiger approached he was stubbing out a Newport.

“How you doing, BT?” said Mr. Memz. “BT” was the nickname he had bestowed on Geiger years ago. It stood for “Big Talker.”

“I don’t have time today,” Geiger said as he went by.

“Whoa,” said Mr. Memz, grinning. “‘I don’t have time today.’ Shit, man-that’s five whole words. I don’t think you’ve ever said three words in a row. You keep running on at the mouth and I won’t be able to get a word in edgewise.”

Geiger stopped. He had seen something on the table, and the image pulled at him like a harpoon in his back. He returned to Mr. Memz’s station.

“So what’s it gonna be today, BT?”

“Two dollars.”

“ Two dollars? You think I live on Twinkies? You know what a GI with stumps gets from the government every month? And have I ever told you what ‘Nam Vet’ stands for?”

“Yes.”

“‘Not a motherfucking vacation ever taken.’”

“Okay, five dollars.”

“Now, that’s a number a man could get to like, BT,” said Mr. Memz, and his fingertips scratched at his granite beard.

Geiger put down his Burger King and drugstore bags, and picked up a well-thumbed copy of Jack London’s The Sea-Wolf.

“Nice choice, BT.” Mr. Memz stretched back in his chair. “Give me a smoke.”

Geiger took out a pack of Luckies and nudged one out. Mr. Memz stuck it in his lips as Geiger brandished his plastic Bic lighter, but Mr. Memz waved it off.

“Shit, man, have a little self-respect. Gonna kill yourself, do it with style, huh?” He picked up his worn chrome Zippo from the table. “This baby’s been with me since Nam. I used it in-country forty times a day. Worked every time, even in that endless, motherfucking rain.” He flicked it open and grinned at the singular click. “Great fucking sound.”

Mr. Memz talked more than any person Geiger had ever met, but Geiger liked listening to his recitals. And he liked watching the way Mr. Memz moved, how he’d refashioned his approach to a world created for two-legged men. Decades of whiskey and smoke had worn away the edges of his voice, making it a gruff foghorn. Sometimes, when there was bourbon in his blood, Mr. Memz would tug on his ponytail and talk about the friendship between physical pain and his body, and Geiger would pay close attention. The man knew all about pain.

Mr. Memz lit his cigarette and left it smoldering in his lips. “Let’s go.”

Geiger paged through the book. Without understanding how, he knew what he was looking for, and though the small letters shifted on the paper like jittery ants, he found the passage almost immediately.

“‘He sprang for me with a half-roar, gripping my arm,’” Geiger read, still unused to the rolling tumble of his voice inside his ears. Mr. Memz’s eyes looked up into his, and he began to speak, words and smoke coming out of him like a salvo of shots.

“‘He sprang for me with a half-roar, gripping my arm. I had steeled myself to brazen it out, though I was trembling inwardly…’”

“‘… though I was trembling inwardly,’” the nine-year-old boy read aloud from the book.

The boy’s father sat before the stone hearth, his thick body clothed in faded denim overalls. His right hand pulled at his dense clipped beard. He drew deeply on his cigarette, and as he exhaled the smoke turned pale amber from the fire’s light.

The cabin was the work of a master carpenter. The walls and cathedral roof were made of massive split logs. Windows were set high, so the view from within was only of lush treetops and infinite sky. The floor was an astonishing work of art, a detailed re-creation of Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights, the thousands of inlays a testament to virtuosity and obsession.

“‘He had gripped me by the biceps with his single hand, and when that grip tightened I wilted and shrieked aloud. My feet went out from under me. I simply could not stand upright and endure the agony.’”

“Stop now, son. He is overcome with pain, but the question is-why?”

“Because… because he is weak?”

“Weak, yes-but not of the body. True strength has nothing to do with muscles. His mind is weak because he doesn’t know pain-and what we don’t know, we fear. And it is fear that makes us weak.” He sucked on his cigarette. “Watch now.” He blew on the tip, sending the loose ash drifting away, revealing the hot orange flush. He lowered the cigarette and ground it into the top of his hand without a flinch or a sound.