Mark Doten - The Infernal

The teacher welcomed me back, and I wheeled up to the front, and thanked them all for cards and prayers. I wheeled up front and gave them a moment to process this face. Time stretched out. Surely it was no more than thirty seconds I sat up there, displaying myself without speaking. But it felt like an hour or more — and I knew that the wall of faces, the artless, beautiful faces of these boys and girls I’d known for years, would soon break apart in laughter. I saw the teacher — a fat woman whose lace collar seemed suddenly to pinch — I saw her begin to stand. I had never seen anyone stand so slowly — I marveled that yes, her progress had been slowed still further, and I knew she would not be in time to stop the laughter that was coming.

So I took it in my own hands.

I said, “Yep, my face looks an awful lot like ABC gum.”

And they all laughed.

Not in a cruel way. They were relieved — I had made a joke of LOY 3EFVSVC1G 15T0 0MHO2RNKHTQKQVPQK2EQMK14S

And not just any joke, but a really great joke! In that instant, the wall vanished. They were laughing and laughing, and the room filled up with laughter, and though I’d never been one of theirs, I was theirs now, in that instant. It was all like blue light. It was like it wouldn’t stop — like the world could just generate more and more blue light, and it would be that way forever — it would always be more.

Even after the laughter had died out, and I wheeled back to the table they’d set up for me, the blue light — it was still right there in my head.

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I wonder if blue light is something you felt when this morning’s news came from the Swedes. You don’t need to tell me. Sometimes blue light needs to be just for you. But let’s talk about what you just got. Let’s review the basics. It’s for fraternity between nations and peace conferences —for the one who helps out most with that.

The man invents dynamite, then he says, Oh my goodness! I’m so sorry! — here, let’s pass these out for fraternity and conferences.

And what about the other one — the one for my field? What do they give that one for?

Answer: the book that’s most outstanding in an ideal direction.

And what’s more ideal than a procedural mystery?

And what more outstanding than one set abroad?

Then guess how many my New York City publishing house has taken home, with all of my influence on literature and literary history. In forty years, just you guess how many.

So I know about Swedes.

You could say it’s because it’s crime fiction I do, not so-called literary fiction, but that argument doesn’t hold water. Crime fiction is like any other fiction, only it has an extra rule or two — like the sonnet. We need red herrings. We need a shell game, the chip on the underside of the bridge’s stone balustrade, a locked room. A murder that turns out to be an elaborate suicide. Doesn’t the sonnet have rules like that?

Crime fiction is structured like a joke — there is the lead-up, and there is the punch line, and if the author has done his work, in the end you have to laugh — like a sonnet!

Here’s the thing about Swedes — they like trouble — they see an opportunity, they create trouble. Little devils running this way and that, in cable-knit sweaters, seeing what mischief they can cause.

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Swedes haven’t been right since the assassination of Olof Palme in ’86.

There are events that come and after everything’s different.

Remember what Kennedy said: a rising tide of discontent that threatens the public safety.

And: Their only remedy is the street.

Why would he say that?

He said it, and they killed him for it.

America’s a country with a terrible history of political violence. Not so, Sweden. Olof Palme’s assassination knocked the Swedes for a loop — because they don’t have that history.

How to manage that history — not for the Swedes — because we are not Swedes — but for us?

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In our country — not in Sweden — these thoughts of political violence are everywhere you look.

For instance, Dutton, series of books of fun facts, they slip in one or two about Frank Eugene Corder, and what’s fun about that? Or Morrow, Raymond Lee Harvey. The starter pistol that scared poor Carter’s pants off. Pocket has a checkout-aisle mass-market guy that slips them in by the fistful — Ramzi Yousef, Khalid Sheik Mohammed — you see the type. And of course there’s the commission report that was such a success for Norton — and who do we find lurking in a footnote but good old Sam Byck.

Do you know that old chestnut, Our American Cousin?

There’s the character who says, I’m an interesting invalid.

He speaks of lonely sufferers and interesting invalids.

Don’t you think I’m an interesting invalid?

Well, don’t you?

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Political violence keeps pushing in at the margins.

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It has always been my policy to cut all such references from my books.

Study the acts, cut the reference.

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Internalize the acts, your understanding of the acts, then eliminate the evidence.

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Otherwise it doesn’t feel safe.

The boy has entered another period of torpor — the spines that have long since erupted from his back sway a little, as though in a breeze. The confession will start again in an hour, or three or four hours, but for now, tonight, I have time.

Commissioners, I have so much to get through, so many thousands of thoughts and stories to communicate, but if I only have time for one, it will be the story of my friend, Lewis.

You killed my friend Lewis, and I, in turn , [heavy cross out] killed your friends. Yes, I came to think of the staff at the institute as having been your friends. I thought of you, the all-powerful and invisible Commissioners, and I thought of the men I had seen every day at the institute, and I said to myself: they must have been your dear friends. And so I slashed your friends’ throats, I cracked open your friends’ heads in the armory door, and with an M1 and a can of gasoline I took the lives of all your friends.

And you were very angry with me, just as I had been angry with you, because it is hard to lose a friend.

And so you threw me in a cinder block hole and left me to rot. For a brief time I sustained myself by telling stories of my friend, but it was not long before I lost my mind, and I no longer understand stories. I don’t mean that I forgot them; I mean that my mind refused them altogether. Yes, I was quite insane for decades. But within my insanity, still I held on to something myself, though I marked the days with the tissue of my own fingertips on cinder block, and was rendered the most wretched of animals, a fox in a trap who chews through his own flesh, and forgets that he is a fox, that he is anything other than terrible pain of this chewing through— a chewing through that must at all costs continue, and with greater and greater intensity — for he is nothing but chewing through.