Jack O'Connell - Word Made Flesh

He throws himself around corner after corner, running in a crouch, and it’s as if his attempt to slow his breathing has exactly the opposite effect, causes his lungs to increase their frantic pace, the exhalations trying to overtake the need for fresh air. If he could only get air, find the path upward, break through, out of the earth. He reaches for the shelving, trying to pull his body along, the sound of his hyperventilation destroying his judgment, obliterating the memory of which path to take, of which path he’s already taken.

He falls to his knees and starts to crawl, scurrying like a beetle, like a cockchafer spastically making for its burrow under the threat of an enormous shoe heel. He feels the weight of the ceiling upon his back, pressing down, somehow alive and hateful, wanting to mash him into the ground, make him one with the dirt, obliterate him, grind his flesh back into the silt from which it was made and from which it emerged.

And then he can’t move at all, lies motionless on his stomach, the panic finally precluding motion, freezing him in position but for the continued heaving of his lungs inside his chest. He lies this way for an unknown passage of time, awash in the noise of his deafening suffocation, until he shifts his head slightly and sees, at the end of the corridor, the ladder that leads up to the cellar.

It takes some time to get to his feet, but once he’s erect he exits the farmhouse and runs for the orchards, just wanting to stand in the openness of the outside world. When his breathing finally returns to normal, he moves to the greenhouse and sits down on the love seat, finds Ceil’s notebook and pulls it up to his chest and hugs it against his body, the way you might bind yourself to a sleeping infant.

He doesn’t get up again until he realizes the simple reason that Edgar Brockden decimated his family.

Brockden picked up his skiving knives and hacked his family into scrap because, in struggling to receive the divine alphabet, he came to understand the profound ineptitude of the system called language. He came to understand how this inherent, unchangeable deficiency defines each of us, traps us, imprisons us, finally reduces us to a state of absolute isolation. Keeps us forever, uniquely, agonizingly, alone. In Brockden’s heart, the slaughter was likely an act of mercy.

Brockden carved his wife and children into nothingness because he could no longer speak to them. And because he came to know, with instantaneous certainty, that this kind of silence, when it descends and becomes a shroud, a cocoon that smothers every sense, is an entombment from which no one will ever awake and arise.

On the drive to the Visitation Diner, a news break interrupts a Wedgewood dirge to give an updated body count from a war of ethnic cleansing halfway around the globe, in a country whose name has changed three times in the past decade.

Gilrein turns the radio off. Like most people, he has the ability to sense and instantly suppress the kind of helpless, low-voltage depression that comes from living with the knowledge that actions like these take place every boring day in a variety of locales on this planet. They take place as we eat lunch and watch television, as we read generic myth-stories to our children and stand in line to cash our paychecks and sit in traffic listening to quirky, smack-addicted French-Creole singers bemoan an essential lack of communication in sorrowful, if perfect, pitch. In every moment that we’re brushing our teeth or gassing up our cab or rereading Klaus Klamm for the third and, we swear, final time, people are brutalized for the simplest reason of all — because they can be. Because when someone else holds power, they can fuck you over in ways that your imagination has never even considered.

And to Gilrein, the most depressing thing of all is not the fact that these acts of mind-numbing brutality happen. Not even the fact that they happen with a regularity that diminishes them to the mundane. What goes to the core of Gilrein’s understanding and mildly lacerates both his heart and his conscience is the fact that he knows, with a childlike, unimpeachable certainty, that the ability to harm someone in so profound and lasting a manner is written forever on our DNA, encoded as unconditionally as our mortality, part of the definition of the word human.

Most disciples of rationality would tell you the element that differentiates the human species from the beasts of the plain is not, as our superstition-chained ancestors believed, the soul, but rather the enormity of our intelligence, the capacity of our imaginations, and our ancillary ability to eventually enact those dreams, to find a technology that will allow us to physically realize whatever we can mentally envision. The complexity and speed and flexibility of our brain mechanics propelled us to the top of the animal kingdom.

But Gilrein’s take on this is that very likely for every vaccine we’ve invented, we’ve concocted two poisons. For every engineering miracle that raised up new modes of transport and expanses of bridge, we’ve mastered hundreds of systems for the enforcement of isolation. For every method of communication we’ve devised, we have uncovered thousands of monstrous ways of silencing an individual tongue forever. And by virtue of birth, he shares some unmeasured part in this heinous and expanding brilliance. This is the original sin.

There have absolutely been a few rare times of stress and confusion when, more than anything else, he would have owned death like a birthright, would have moved out of the corral of the acted-upon and into the land of the controllers, where nothing is forbidden. Where the idea that power is just an unmarked gunshot away can instantly escalate to a lifelong, egomanical campaign for dominance at any cost.

But though Gilrein has known the temptation of this worldview, he has never acted on the desire. There is still a gulf between thought and action where free will can opt for either compassion or cruelty. And staying on the right side of that chasm is what separates him from Kroger and Kinsky and the Magicians and all of the neighborhood mayors who believe that imposing their will, their vision of the city and the world beyond, is not only a right, but a destiny.

He swings into a parking space outside the Visitation, gets out of the cab, and is besieged by a half-dozen of the tinker kids dressed in their filthy rags and holding out their scavenged aluminum soup cans for alms. Gilrein reaches around for his wallet, catches the hand of a tiny pickpocket and pushes it away. He pulls out half his cash, divides the rest among the begging children, trying and failing for equal distribution as two of the oldest and fastest among the gang make off with the bulk of his offering. One urchin who comes up empty curses the cabdriver in an unknown language and spits on the door of the Checker.

Gilrein shoves through the line of pilgrims in the entryway, edges by Father Clement as the Jesuit yells, “There is still time, young man,” and starts to head for the hacks’ booth, but, surprisingly, nobody’s there, so he slides onto a stool at the very end of the counter and waves to one of the new waitresses for a mug.

“I haven’t seen you in a dog’s life.”

Gilrein looks next to him to see a guy in an EMT uniform finishing a bowl of chili.

“Shaughnessy,” Gilrein remembers. “What the hell are you doing here?”

“We got a call. Turned out to be a headcase. I let Hirsch handle it. He’s got a thing for the night nurses up at the Toth.”

“And you just had to stay for the chili?”

“Listen, Huie’s tomatoes are blessed by the Sisters of Torment and Agony. You can’t go wrong.”

“And you have access to a stomach pump just in case.”