Jack O'Connell - Word Made Flesh

Which begs the question: To whom am I writing? Who is it that I’m willing to bite and infect? To whom would I allow such intimacy?

Allow me to clarify by starting again.

B. My Dear love:

If you are reading this, then it seems all of my suspicions have been proven true. And if that’s the case, what good will this notebook do me? Better that I should use this time and ink to write down all those things that I could not tell you.

I know that, at times, you have doubted my love. But I’m not sure what I could have done to give you definitive proof of my affection and my commitment. You were the original skeptic, could have given the Apostle Thomas a run for the honor. And this is not just my opinion, like so much else that will come to clutter this notebook. The folks at St. Iggy’s would have to concur. (But, trust me, I’ll come back to the Transubstantiation Scandal.)

I have doubts of my own, love, but none of them involve you. I have come to wonder exactly what I have done to myself in joining the Eschatology Squad, in working day after day in such close proximity to the Inspector. My brain has changed. Nothing I can define for you, no specific symptoms I can inventory and cross-reference. Just this feeling. As if I have burned a crucial bridge. As if I have exchanged a vital faith for something dark and mephitic.

Tonight, I sit at our kitchen table in the perfect bungalow where we came to make a life. You are asleep in the bedroom. The sound of your dreamlife makes me hate this insomnia even more. I’m sipping from a glass of Gallzo. Poured from a labelless bottle I keep hidden in the hall closet. A gift from an informant. One more thing that I’ve kept from you. And now, the first of my many confessions to follow. Such a bitter drink. But you can develop a taste for anything.

Would you wake if I turned on the radio? I need some Imogene right now. I would like to fill the next page with sketches, blueprints for the Church of Wedgewood. You promised we would build it together and I will hold you to your word.

But I won’t draw any blueprints tonight. Instead, I will sketch my doubts.

C. Please understand that it is impossible to write about the Inspector without writing about the Methodology. They are fully intertwined at this point. It would be like trying to write about Gautama without mentioning Buddhism. Encapsulating Moses without mentioning the Commandments. Jesus without the Last Supper. It can be done but more is lost than gained.

The Inspector is in a delicate position. The position of all progenitors. The burden of being the Papa. He forms the Eschatology Squad to pass on his legacy, his gospel, his essence to be left behind. He forms the E Squad out of fear of death. But to remain after he’s gone means he must give up his essence. And this is his strength. This is all he has.

He wants to give me the Methodology. But he wants to hold it back as well. To hand over the secrets of the Methodology would certainly be a little death for him. Sampson losing his hair. And so he moves forward and back, undecided, provoked to inform, determined to obfuscate. Our ritual dance each day inside the Dunot is a decidedly kinky version of sex. (I know he desires me on this level as well.) Which one of us is the more maddening tease?

Emil may be the most self-deluded man I have ever known. It’s as if his brilliance has made him an idiot in this singular regard. As if this were the specific price to pay the devil. He tries to get me to read Mallarmé. Leaves books on my desk each night. Les Noces d ‘Hérodiade, Mystère , and A Tomb for Anatole (the Benjamin Wilson translation). Specific pieces bookmarked with the bands from his Magdalenas. (This, knowing I am in the grip of Klaus Klamm.) He worships Heidegger like a son, hating him, and not knowing he hates him, without rejecting any of the teachings, imprinted by the Papa, played like a puppet, wanting only to be an individual, to be unique. He imagines the Methodology will be the tool to cut the strings he cannot see but forever feels, hooked into his skin, pulling him through the world.

And now I see I cannot accept the parameters of the Master’s lesson plan. I will never agree to such an infantile arrangement. He should have realized this about me. His interviewing process should have revealed this: the only candidates who should qualify for the Eschatology Squad should be those who could unravel the Methodology without the teacher.

So I do what I am trained to do.

I am a detective.

I investigate.

I uncover clues and tease out their meanings.

He’d be mortified and perhaps even frightened — does he get frightened? Is this technically the correct word? — by what I’ve uncovered already. I know that before the black robes put the kibosh on him, he’d managed to publish a trio of highly controversial essays in the cutting-edge quarterlies. All of these journals have ceased to exist. But Leo Tani managed to locate the Inspector’s first breakthrough. (What will I owe the ’Shank for this errand?)

In a pretentious and precious little rag called Minotaur I found the article “Look Who’s Talking: The Hypernarrative Evolution of Pagan Liturgies” by E. Lacazze. The piece is too dense and full of itself for useful summary but it has Emil’s proverbial fingerprints all over it — sanctimonious, petulant, esoteric, pun-laden, self-serving, bursting with neologisms and the sense of the author’s uncontainable ego.

Tell me, reader, what does a responsible person do when they start to suspect a truth they do not wish to know?

It’s not so much that Otto Langer places any credence in the childish superstitions attached to Wormland Farm. It’s that he dislikes coming this close to Gilrein’s temporary home. Langer can control himself in Gilrein’s presence inside the neutral confines of the Visitation Diner. But who knows what might occur were the two cabbies to come face-to-face in the shadow of these gloomy woods?

Still, the Inspector has indicated that this is an essential element of the therapy, and who is Langer to disagree with his last possible savior? He pulls the taxi to a stop where a pine tree has been savaged by lightning and the priest appears out of shadow, pulls open the rear door and climbs in.

The momentary glow of the dome light illuminates the interior of the cab and the Inspector can’t help but see Zwack the dummy, Langer’s ventriloquial figure, belted into the front seat next to its master. This is a clear violation of the Inspector’s prescription. The dummy is to be locked in the trunk at all times. But Langer feels he can no longer tell the story without the presence of his oldest companion. And what good is the therapy without the story?

“And how are we tonight?” Langer says and smiles into the rearview.

“I was thinking, wondering really, if perhaps you might like a donut? A nice donut, or maybe a cruller? I know of a place, open all night, everything quite fresh. I could run in, leave the motor idling. You could lock the doors.”

There’s no response from the backseat.

Langer nods and shrugs.

“I just thought I might ask. I feel as if I have been a poor host.”

The Inspector leans forward and puts a hand on the security divider and Langer actually trembles a bit.

“So, no donuts,” Langer says. “Not even a bearclaw?”

The passenger tilts his head forward and raises his eyebrows.

“It is a kind of pastry, you know?” Langer says. “It is not important. Sometimes the sayings, the bits of slang, they can be quite eccentric. I remember when I arrived in the city. The first time I heard the phrase cat got your tongue , I was mortified.”

The Inspector shifts in the seat and tugs at the hem of his tunic. He lets himself sink back and sideways into a corner, folds his arms across his chest as if he were lazing before a fireplace in a remote country home, waiting for the elderly patriarch of a large clan to continue a holiday fable, something that would act as a bridge between the waking and the sleeping lives.