Jack O'Connell - Word Made Flesh

The stated goal of the Tung, however, was easily and bluntly understood — the eradication of all written (what they insisted on calling artificial) language. The final “linguistic solipsists,” as Lacazze came to define them, the Tung believed that written language completely and totally determined reality. Consequently, the act of “mass-producing texts” was the ultimate imperialistic action. And as such, of course, had to be stopped at any and all costs. Toward this end they announced a reign of terror upon “the metaphors of the graphic state,” trumpeting plans to bomb printing plants, newspaper offices, publishing houses, and various other pawns of the “scripted world.”

Because of their absolute aversion to written language, all of this propaganda was delivered to the police and the media by way of unsuspecting messengers, usually children of the streets, the tinkers and travelers, the gypsy kids and abandoned urchins from the Bangkok area, promised food and trinkets if they could memorize a speech and spit it back to the “ink-drugged pigs of aggression.” Questioning the children proved futile. They were all so ragged and hungry and intent on completing their job that they could supply nothing of value regarding their employers.

Chief Bendix was inclined to believe this Tung was one more prank from the artistes of Rimbaud Way, the half-baked product of some new phalanx of performance artists or conceptual philosophers/comedians. Inspector Lacazze disagreed and the task of hunting down and — if they existed and were an actual threat — destroying the Tung was naturally dumped in his lap. It seemed like the kind of chore he was born into the world to perform. And he did put all of his efforts into the assignment. The department’s urban assault squad and tactical support units were put at his disposal, just in case. But Lacazze made it clear from the start that Ceil would be his point man.

The seriousness of the Tung’s threats was confirmed when a Spy columnist named Harrison, arriving back to his desk after a bourbon and pretzel lunch at the Valhalla, discovered a ticking shoebox, wrapped in brown paper and conspicuously void of any address, sitting atop his computer monitor. The bomb squad disarmed a plastique cocktail that could have blown the scribe and most the city room out of the Spy building and over the City Hall common in an amalgamated cloud of shared bone and ash.

From that moment on, anyone with any connection to establishments that trafficked in printing, from corner photocopying shops to the chain bookstores, was flinching in his sleep. A member of the board of directors of the public library phoned Bendix at midnight to ask if he should take that long-planned trip to the Continent. The Chief said, “Absolutely,” and left the phone off the hook. The patriarch of a local ink and stamp mill indignantly announced his intention of hiring private security, but sent his kids to the country home just the same. And Inspector Lacazze, with Ceil at his side, ventured out of the Dunot precinct and started haunting the Canal-Bangkok border, silently wondering how you go about interrogating a suspect that you can’t seem to find.

Lacazze was able to score a lucky break when a Tung messenger, an eight-year-old Romanian refugee with a cleft palate — the anarchists’ definition of humor, he supposed — was unable to repeat his assigned speech to the police, but did manage to give a detailed if agonized description of his employer to a sketch artist.

The rendering didn’t ring any bells at the station, but Lacazze and company took it to the streets. It was actually Ceil who secured an ID from the junkie desk clerk of the Hotel Adrianople. For a palmed baggie of Burmese smack, the weasel remembered renting a weekly to the guy in the picture. And from there information began to fall like dominoes. They picked up names and descriptions and locations, ran them all down and came up with a Moscow-born lounge singer named Sonia Gorinski, currently booked in a two-week engagement at the Yusupov Garden Room. They took Gorinski down in the middle of her second set to the catcalls of an audience drunk on generic vodka and bad romance. They drove the suspect through every red light in the Zone and locked her up with Lacazze in the interrogation chamber at Dunot.

The woman was a tougher nut than anyone who’d yet graced the shoe-fitting stool. Lacazze didn’t start to sweat until a full twelve hours had gone by and Sonia G hadn’t provided him with a pitcherful of spit. Even when she did respond to the word association, the Inspector could tell her answers were carefully chosen and not at all pertinent to the hidden vault of her subconscious. He couldn’t find the rhythm that had always come so easily, couldn’t establish the natural vibration of dominance and control that used to roll out of his throat effortlessly. It was as if the power of his personality, of his very presence, that had come to live in this room and permeate the air with the force of his will, had suddenly and inexplicably begun to dissipate and vent itself through the cracks in the wall.

Ceil paced the squad room, trying not to hear the desperate noises of approaching failure from inside the interrogation chamber, keeping Bendix’s front men at bay. At one point she heard glass break and was shaken by the Inspector howling, top of his lungs, “Illumination! The word is illumination! Answer me, goddamn you!”

For thirty hours the session continued until, with Bendix on his way to call the whole thing off, Lacazze emerged from the chamber for a glass of water, looking like a man ready to recline on his deathbed. And in that moment, watching Lacazze lean against the watercooler, too exhausted to stand erect, swallowing his last hit of crank and splashing at his already moist eyes, Ceil snapped and walked passed her incredulous boss into the Methodology chamber, locking the door behind her. No one has any idea what caused this breech of procedure. Ceil herself didn’t know if it was the imminent failure of her mentor or the suddenly uncertain future of her Dunot precinct sanctuary — or maybe it was just a simple lack of sleep and too much bad coffee. But as Lacazze pounded on the wall of the interrogation room, screaming, “You’ll ruin everything,” Ceil pulled her Colt Python from a hip holster, grabbed a shocked Sonia Gorinski by her slender throat, forced the barrel of the gun past Gorinski’s teeth and, in a level but adamant voice, promised the singer she had crooned her final cabaret if she didn’t speak quickly and honestly.

In minutes, Ceil emerged from Lacazze’s office, unable to look at the Inspector but holding out to him, with fingers stained by spilled ink, a piece of scrap paper with the words written in angry, nib-snapping block letters.

KAPERNAUM PRINTING & BINDING

ROME AVENUE

written in angry, nib-snapping block letters.

“Don’t worry, young man,” Lacazze says as Gilrein pulls away from the extended razor, “on my Antarctic mission I was the closest thing the village had to a medic. I picked up quite a bit of experience.”

Gilrein braces himself by grabbing the chrome tubing that rims the stool. The Inspector goes to work like an emergency room pro, slicing each minute track of suture without nicking the lips, using the tweezer to pull the fiber back through the soft tissue, releasing the mouth back into its functional state.

And though there’s a sense of burning that refuses to stop increasing, it isn’t quite a matter of pain anymore. Gilrein feels distanced somehow from his corporal self, as if this sudden and unplanned proximity to the place that was once his wife’s secret world, the womb in which she and her mentor worked the linguistic equivalent of alchemical reactions, had pushed him outside of his own skin, had made him a ghost to the flesh of reality.