Jack O'Connell - Word Made Flesh

From one cabinet Meyrink took a wide and deep roasting pan, something you might use to cook a holiday turkey. From another cabinet he took a plastic bleach bottle topped with a blue twist cap. The brand label had been peeled off the jug and in its place, printed in black marker, was the word RESTORATIVE. He carried them both to the floor near Alicia’s feet, uncapped the jug, and filled the pan about halfway. The basement filled up with a chemical smell, a nauseating cross between dentist’s office and reformatory boys’ room.

Meyrink moved back to a workbench, took down a small bottle of bluish liquid. He unscrewed the cap, pulled his handkerchief from his pocket. He poured a small amount of liquid onto the rag and quickly recapped the bottle.

He came back to Alicia from behind and forced the wet cloth against her face, covering her nose, holding the back of her head steady.

“It won’t be long now,” he said.

In a moment, he was back in her line of vision, though already fading a bit, gauzy, seen through a panel of lightly rippling water. He was holding the manuscript again, placing it inside a plastic bag. His mouth moved.

“In case there’s more spray than I anticipate.”

The weight of her body seemed to increase, pulling on the wrists bound inside the manacles. The sense of balance began to dissipate. Time moved closer to its state in sleep, a wavering, unfixable condition of varying speed and depth. The sound of his voice appeared almost detached from its port of origin, the mouth moving in a somewhat different pattern of motions than the noise reaching her ears would have implied. And yet, despite this discrepancy, she completely understood the last words she heard. The words were not original. No words are. But this particular grouping had a persistently familiar ring to it. Someone with a clearer perspective might have labeled it a paraphrase.

Though the words were not from Alicia’s specific tradition, her native history, or her culture, she was acquainted with them. She had been, after all, in the end, maybe more than anything else, a reader.

“In the beginning,” Meyrink said, “was the word, and the word was with the author, and the word was the author …”

He pushed the blade of the scalpel into the soft enclave below the neck and opened the body to the exterior world.

For how many hours did he work on the girl? Do we need to be mindful of the passage of time? As in the Bible, where we are told that God made the whole of the universe in a specified interval?

How intense his concentration must have been, cutting sheet after sheet of epidermis. How satisfactory, finally, when he could pull away the entire jacket that covered the torso.

There is no need to dwell on how the body was disposed of. The deputies had handled errands of this nature before, of course. And what was one more body when we consider that this took place at the height of the pogroms collectively known as the July Sweep?

The tanning process you might find somewhat more interesting. The way he dried Alicia’s skin and worked it obsessively into a binding material, into a unique hide that would forever gather and house the pages of Alicia’s story.

But what I really want to leave you with, Gilrein, at this late date, is the fact that Meyrink’s book was stolen from him. At some point in the end, during those frantic and confusing days following the Erasure of the Schiller, when the Censor of Maisel was of no more use to the state. Alicia’s book was taken from Meyrink before he fled to America. Or, perhaps, just after he arrived. One more wretched outcast yearning for the new Eden that could give him sanctuary.

There is a myth that the book was taken by a survivor of the Erasure. An Ezzene who was not present on the final night. But I find this hard to believe. How could such a person live with himself? How could he survive a guilt of this magnitude?

Gilrein walks to the Checker carrying the manila envelope given to him by Larry the security guard. The envelope contains Otto Langer’s personal belongings. When Gilrein asked, “Don’t you want me to sign for it?” the guard just ignored him and went back to reading the mutant virus exposé.

Stopping at the rear of the cab, Gilrein unclasps the package and slides a worn brown goatskin wallet onto the trunk. He opens the wallet, fans through the billfold, counts off thirty-nine dollars. He flips through a series of cellophane photo sleeves that contain business cards, a hack license, a driver’s licence, a citizenship card, an expired inoculation card, and a biloquist permit issued by the city of Maisel and valid only during the carnival season.

And a single photograph. It is a picture of an almost-beautiful young girl with deep circles under her eyes. Maybe seventeen years old, she’s dressed in a sweater and she has a pencil lodged behind her ear, pushing the hair back on the right side of her head. Carefully, Gilrein slides the photo out of the sleeve and makes himself turn it over in his palm. Makes himself read the inevitable words

FOR PAPA,

WITH ALL MY LOVE FOREVER,

ALICIA

The muscle cars are left unattended. This semicircle of obsessively preserved American chrome looks like a secret dealership that caters to a brotherhood of anal-retentive greasers. And sitting out here in the middle of the woods, in the shadow of a half-destroyed factory, it looks like the dealership has been bought out by some pagan with an inexplicable taste for tail fins and spoilers. A red tool chest, standing as tall as a jukebox and filled with an elaborate ratchet set, is open in front of a Daytona. The hood of the Dodge has been left open, as if the mechanic had been called away in the middle of a tune-up.

Gilrein starts to look in on the engine when the sound comes to him. It’s muted and slightly distant, but he recognizes it instantly as the specific hum born from the cojoined shrieks of sports fans engorged on someone else’s gains and losses. He turns to the Kapernaum and heads for the Houdini Lounge. The panel door is rolled up on its tracks and there’s no receptionist at the gun-check table. As he walks down the corridor toward the clubhouse, the noise of the mob gets louder. It’s possible they’ve got the TVs cranked up and are beer-ranting to a satellite transmission of two kick-boxers smashing each other to death in Thailand. But when he enters the Lounge, he finds it empty. The bar is fully covered with discarded bottles of Hunthurst Lager and the money can is overflowing with damp and crumbled bills. Dumbbells have been left on the floor in the weight room. The televisions are on, tuned to a porn channel and a dubbed Hercules movie, both playing to an empty set of couches. The stripper’s stage is abandoned but for an orange polyester waitress’s uniform left dangling from the lip.

Gilrein climbs the stairs to Oster’s office, moves to the exterior window and looks out on the origin of the crowd noise. Down by the interrogation pit, the place Oster has christened “the penal colony,” rimming the crater left by the Tung’s explosion, there must be over a hundred people. The mob is lit by the halogen spot on the roof. They’re perched on boulders and old tires and quite a few are balanced on the edge of foldout aluminum-and-mesh beach chairs. Half a dozen oil barrels are spouting flame, but they’re throwing as much smoke as light into the air. An outdoor bar has been set up directly opposite the rear of the building — a trio of kegs dispensing foam to a nonstop line of men holding all manner of improvised pitchers.

He moves down from the loft and exits the rear of the factory. The smoke and the noise and the halogen light all hit him at once and the combined effect is a little dizzying. As he walks toward the rim of the pit, he begins to recognize faces. And none of them go together. Retired police sergeants are seated next to a few midlevel flunkies from various mob houses. A district attorney’s deputy is sharing a picnic bench with one of Jimmy Tang’s favorite shooters. The Tatarka sisters, whose chop shop is known and respected from San Remo Avenue to Budapest and whose warrants for arrest are both multiple and active, are passing a bucket of fried chicken legs back and forth between the Registrar of Motor Vehicles and City Councilor Frye. It’s as if someone designated this Buried Hatchet Night at the Kapernaum. As if the Magicians have sponsored an open house as part of a membership drive.