Jack O'Connell - Word Made Flesh

There is no way to know the exact schematics of how Lacazze determined guilt and innocence, motivation and mechanics. He would word-associate with the suspect until the handcuffed detainee was ready to drop. The Inspector never flagged. His ability to go hour after hour without food or sleep or break from the procedure was close to frightening. More than one interview produced confessions without the need for analysis, the criminal breaking down and explicating all from the sheer pressure of verbal bombardment. This, invariably, was disappointing to Lacazze, left him depressed, as if he’d been cheated of a promised reward at the end of exhaustive labor. Because it was the analysis that gave him his juice. The criminal and the crime, at that stage, were almost incidental. It was in enacting the system he had spent the bulk of his life constructing and tinkering with that he received the majority of his meaning.

The analysis consisted of tedious hours, sometimes days, of listening. Simply turning on the pink earpiece and activating the tape player and settling into a state of being whose sole activity was focusing in, deeper and deeper, on the sounds of the preceding interrogation. Lacazze would walk through the necessities of life — the breathing and eating and evacuating — as if they were secondary and annoying endeavors. All the while he would be locked into another realm, a dimension comprised solely of sound, the noise of words traded back and forth like Ping-Pong balls. The Inspector’s voice, followed by the suspect’s voice, followed by the Inspector’s voice, until the two voices became one unit, a note that would in time give up its secrets and reveal the nature of the mind of the accused.

And eventually, after hours of relistening to sound after sound, replayed over and over, looping around the same track, gutturals and dentals and moans void of significance whispering endlessly into his ear, Inspector Lacazze would feel the pressurized rush of an approaching epiphany. His concentration at this point would reach its maximum expanse and finally, he’d feel a burst of cold pain across his forehead, as if he’d bitten into a block of ice, and his vision would fade out for just an instant, an ache would course through his body from groin up through stomach and into his chest, the analytical climax that would become manifest in the birth of the solution, the big bang, the second coming of truth. The answer would congeal, birth itself into the world of Lacazze’s consciousness. And he would turn off the tape player, remove the hearing aid, call Ceil into his office and reveal the what , the how , and even the why of the suspect and his particular crime. What happened to the criminal at this point could not have mattered less to Lacazze. His part in the drama was over. The guilty party could be executed or unconditionally pardoned for all the Inspector cared. From Lacazze’s perspective, the only interesting aspect of the case was concluded. As much as it was genesis, each epiphany was also a small death. Invariably, each conclusive solution brought about an interval period of intractable depression that lasted until the next, seemingly inscrutable suspect was led down to Dunot Boulevard.

The needle begins to withdraw, the retreat as fierce as the insertion.

The Inspector quiets and opens his flooded eyes in time to see Mr. Clairvaux hoist the instrument to his nose and sniff it like a dog on a chase.

“Is anything ever as bad as we fear?” Armand asks, grabbing a rag from a rear pocket and handing it to his patient.

The Inspector looks down at a threadbare Rorschach of stains and realizes it is actually the remnant of what was once a pair of boxer shorts. He shakes his head and extends his hands to indicate that he wants the cuffs unlocked.

Mr. Clairvaux complies and the Inspector immediately throws open the van doors and jumps down into the alley, both hands covering his mouth.

As the patient breaks into a stumbling run toward the street, Armand Clairvaux is forced to yell his prescriptions out into the world.

“Get some ice on that as soon as possible,” he hollers. “You’ll be able to talk again in an hour or so.”

Wormland Farm sits out on the northern border of the city where the elevation makes winter come a little earlier and last a little longer. The official name of the estate is Brockden Farm, after the founder, E. C. Brockden, but to the consternation of the historical commission, everyone knows it simply as Wormland.

Edgar Carwin Brockden was one of Quinsigamond’s original legends, the myth by which all of the city’s future mayhem could be measured. By all remaining accounts, he was a brilliant but unstable man with an unhealthy passion for language, books, gnostic tradition, and, later, parasitology. He was born in Ireland to a rare family of shepherds that had escaped the charisma of Saint Patrick and vehemently, if covertly, maintained their pagan ways over generations. Edgar, the eldest son, born of vigorous intellect and natural enthusiasm, nevertheless came to either disappoint or horrify his parents, depending on which account you read, by claiming a devout belief in monotheism at some point during adolescence. Refusing at the age of sixteen to participate in the rituals of the equinox, Edgar was banished from the family and so began a series of wanderings about which we can only speculate.

In one of the first biographies, Dunlap’s The Heretic , we learn that Brockden, though unrepentant regarding his belief in a Judeo-Christian God, retained his clan’s obsession with the mystic and occultist traditions. Clark’s detailed Tongues of Fire and Madness suggests that young Brockden’s “missing years” were spent traveling around the Far and Middle East where he began in earnest collecting a variety of fabled, esoteric, and some might say, diabolic texts. But there is no direct evidence of his whereabouts until his arrival in Quinsigamond with his common-law wife, Lucy, heiress to the Courtland Publishing fortune and daughter of the famed vermesophile, Cecil Stritch.

Brockden moved his clan to New England at the turn of the eighteenth century and it was here that he came to feel his true life began, came to believe there was something in the earth itself that clarified and unified his many obscure theories and grounded them in the flesh. Finding Boston already too settled for his notions of a new and unspoiled Eden, he pushed westward and, for “a pittance and a promise,” as one commemorating folk song later put it, Brockden purchased just shy of fifty acres of stony land from a Packachoag chief named King Mab. And on this plot Brockden set out to make concrete his peculiar, and finally tragic, vision. He founded his own sect, and though the entire congregation was limited to his small family, he named them anew as Babelonians. Their place of worship would be the farm-house, which Brockden called, perhaps, as Grabo suggests, more in mockery of than tribute to St. Augustine, the City of Words.

The structure was designed by Brockden with the aid of a mysterious Italian named Santarcangelo. It almost resembles a storybook castle replete with peaks and spires and featuring a stone tower rising out of its center. The tower consists of a series of floors, one spiraling into the next and each level housing an esoteric library, the fruits, presumably, of Brockden’s early years of traveling and collecting.

Using Lucy’s dowry, Brockden spared no expense importing workmen and materials into this neverland. His wife and two children, Theo and Sophia, survived a trio of spirit-breaking winters in a one-room shelter until the family manse was constructed. Upon completion, their suffering appeared to prove worthwhile, because as far away as Gloucester and New Bedford, people spoke of the paradise that Edgar Brockden had forged in the middle of the heathen wood.