Justice, Subsection 5.0

(Continued from Justice, Subsection 4.0)

He'd had a lot to drink by now, but if anything he seemed more coherent than when I'd first asked the old fellow what he thought. For each engine a lubricant. My ear had also had the time needed to adjust to his language, his way of telling things. Listening to him spin his tale was much like reading a book, perhaps a great book, and one written in a distinctive style. Bewilderment yields to fascination after a suitable latitude of pages.

"Let me give you an example. One of many.One day not long before the time I'm talking about a few of us were working outside, painting the eaves. Bernal was up on the roof trying to wrap his arm down around the eave to get at a spot that couldn't easily be reached from the ladder because of how far the eaves jutted from the frame. Vanessa was standing on the lawn below, not paying much attention. The ladder, heavy and wooden, was resting on a gutter right next to Bernal. Suddenly he lost his balance. Flailing for purchase, he managed to knock the ladder loose. It bellied out and hung in the air for a long moment before swinging through its balancing point and crashing toward the ground with a low sigh. I was looking on in a state of suspended animation, unable to open my mouth in warning. Not so Kamill. From where he stood some 10 yards away, he lurched into an improbable dead run, straight for the oblivious Vanessa. He reached her just before the ladder would have made impact, almost certainly staving in her skull and killing her where she stood. But what was truly remarkable was the way her tackled her. I swear it was almost gentle. God knows what lightning calculations and calibrations went into it, but when his body met hers it was as if pulled up or staggered his impact by some configuration of his hands and shoulders, cushioning it, mitigating it, so that the overall effect was not one of headlong tackling but of an elegant gymnastic sequence. The ladder must have missed Kamill's own skull by a fraction of an inch. Vanessa yelped and started protesting in his embrace. He hadn't even knocked the wind out of her. Shit.

"Anyway. There I was in bed with Vanessa. By that point I had inspected the equipment, lubricated the moving parts and primed the pump. She was laughing, giggling, gasping. I think she hardly knew what she was doing. I was just getting ready to hit paydirt when there came a rattling at the door. Tentative at first, then rising until it had become one hell of a rattling, crescendoing to the very gong of doom as the rattler understood what was transpiring on the other side of that door. Vanessa cried out as I collapsed into her. Then there was a muffled what the hell?, followed by a rat-a-tat-clattering, then a loud crash. There stood Kamill.

"Get off her, you vermin. I didn't need to be told twice. I rolled off and scampered into a corner, modestly trying to figleaf my flagging manhood with my hand. Kamill approached me, all 250 pounds of him. His black eyes were glassy and unthinking, and were rimmed in the red of much drink. I put up my hands in paltry defense, and he called me a vermin again. Then he kicked them out of the way, and it was only a second more before I winked into a world of morphine grays, a realm of knotted tautologies that witnessed none of the black and white of what came after. Do you see this mark on my face?

"I remember waking up from that so suddenly accomplished gray twilight very well, even though it was nearly a biblical generation ago. The first thing I became aware of was the weight of my body, as if I had undergone some kind of compression and were the prey of dark and ponderous forces thitherto unknown. Then there was a slow dawning of consciousness, a slow surfacing as if through stacked currents of gray water. From off-night through cobalt and charcoal to gunmetal, from gunmetal to slate and graphite and then athletic shirt gray, and finally through to the off-white filter through which I perceived the world when I came through--a world that for us had changed unalterably.

"Bernal was at my side when I came to, his face clouded by baleful concern. He asked me how I felt. I asked what had happened to Vanessa. He hesitated. I told him to let me have it. Vanessa was disfigured. What did he mean disfigured? Kamill had ruined her face. As Bernal explained, he has systematically beaten the beauty out of her until it was lost without hope of remedy.

"I asked why no one had been able to stop him. It was too late by the time we got up there, Ben, he said. We did prevent him from killing her, which he probably would have done. None of us were spared injury. Including you, it seems. It was then that I noticed that Bernal was speaking through a clenched and possibly broken jaw. We were only able to overpower him by all swarming him at once and hanging off him like stones until he fell to the floor.

"Jesus, I said. Where are they now? What's happening? I thought of the police and felt sick. I was sick. I vomited a thin green bile streaked with blood onto the sheet. Nice coloration. Jameson and Agatha drove Vanessa up to Montreal to protect the group, Ben. She's in the hospital now. She insisted, Ben. She wasn't going to die in the car, and she refused to be treated here. All right, I said. So what about Kamill? We're keeping him under guard while we decide what to do. I can't believe he was capable of that."

I looked at my withered old interlocutor. I thought I could see a slight unevenness in his face underneath the thatch of beard now that he'd mentioned it. "You mean you didn't call the cops?" I said.

His cornflower eyes were frank and clear as he answered. "No, friend. We didn't. And that's what this story is about."

Now I was interested. "So what did they do?"

"A meeting was called that night to determine exactly that. Dean had suggested, following Vanessa's lead, that we might be able to handle the matter internally."

I wondered what could possibly be meant by handling matters internally. "Who was Dean?"

"A good question, my friend, and one that makes me glad to have an attentive listener. Dean was our unacknowledged leader. I mean we were supposed to be anti-hierarchical. Ah, Dean. I'll tell you about him. He grew up in a working class neighborhood in or around Boston. South Boston or Dorchester or Roxbury or something like that. He went to Catholic high school and was the star of everything. He was the captain of the football team and the debate team, and I think he was very comfortable in his skin as a whole and strong person from a young age. A whole man in an age of fragmentary destinies. Which led to big problems for him every step of the way. His father was a mean, no-good alcoholic who was habitually out of work and who habitually took it out on his family. The kind of mean bastard who lards his abuse with authoritarian morality. Being both strong and compassionate, Dean grew to adopt a contempt for authority bordering on virulence. Many years later I heard a story about how once after his father had put his mother in the hospital, Dean responded by nearly putting his father under ground. Convalescing in the same ward, husband and wife conspired and cooked up a whopper about a hit and run driver, and the affair was swept under the rug.

"Dean went to Harvard on a football scholarship, but it did not take him long to defect and immerse himself in the antiwar movement and a slew of other activist activities taking aim at the establishment. He was forced to drop out after being confronted by evidence that he had broken into the endowment office, but not before exposing some of the university's shadiest investments in South Africa and Zaire. As a corollary to being kicked out of school, he was given the boot from his own home. Which kicked off his apprenticeship to the art of drifting. He did not self-destruct. He called it chasing the breath of destiny. He cut timber in Maine, worked in the cod fishery on the Grand Banks, shuttled pot between Quebec and Maine, even drove a student shuttle on the campus of a pedigree farm in the New England backwoods. Dean ended up one of us by chance. Like the rest of us, come to think of it. Some of us, I can't remember exactly who since the turnover among us (to use a vulgar word) was high and anyway it was so long ago, but some of us went blueberry picking late one summer, or at least to lessen its impact on Uncle Theo's wallet. And that's where we met him. Tall, confident, easy, apparently wanting for nothing--but needing community and meaning every bit as much as the rest of us. We talked as we picked our way through the patches, and later over blueberry-flavored beers. He fell in with us easily. We held no confab to vet him the way we usually did with folks who wanted to come on board. 

"And it wasn't more than a couple of weeks until he became our de facto spiritual and practical leader, unacknowledged like I said, since none of us would have been comfortable with an overt structure, least of all he. Let me put it this way: Everything about him exuded a quiet confidence that the rest of us found irresistible. His face, his bearing, his voice, his ability to simply bypass the existential worries about our way of life that constantly gnawed at the margins of the social experiment for the rest of us, who were unable to shed out bourgeois neuroses, and whose very traversing of those norms indexed our beholdenness to them. He had it, in short. And when you ally this with his fanatical contempt for authority and institutions, I think you will see why things took the course they did.

"And so a meeting was called. We held it toward midnight after Jameson had gotten back from the drive up to Montreal in Theo's 1960 Ford Country Squire. Agatha had stayed behind to be Vanessa's eyes and ears as the doctors tried to reconstruct her face. Agatha was Canadian and educated and was able to sluice Vanessa's case through the medical system with a minimum of friction, especially the kind to do with contacting the authorities on our side of the border.

"But before I can go on I'm going to have to run through a list of those present. I'll start with Jameson. Jameson Andrews was his full, august name. He was our troubled genius. Genius is always debatable, of course. There was no question that he was troubled, on the other hand. He was the type of kid who if he'd grown up 30 years later they would have had him hopped up on speed from the time he was five. But those were different times, and he was free to be his own pill-pusher. He was 25 or so at the time, and it was my impression that he was constantly on the verge of being unraveled by the stern regimen he pounded his system with day in and day out. Shaky Jay, I used to call him. I know what people used to say about those days, and I know you know enough to take most things people say with a grain of salt, but I shit you not when I tell you that this guy"--my interlocutor's face had been overcome by a vicious grin--"that this guy would start his morning off with a bit of wake and bake and would then proceed, after a breakfast of bacon and eggs and toast, he was very scrupulous about this, to drop a tab or two or even three of acid by noon. At which point he would pledge himself to hours on end of a kind of rumbling, stumbling lunatic mysticism. He called it triploafing, and he did it like four times a week.

"He would read, I don't know how, from the eternal greats like Hegel, Plato, Nietzsche, Oppenheimer and his disciple Nock, bot neglected, and he'd kind of latch on to a phrase or syllogism or story (have him do this during the course of the deliberations) and then hold on to it all day, just clutching in in his gibbering jaws, stumbling around and muttering it like a koan while his mind worked under it or through it unconsciously, and work through it he must have, for whenever he'd recovered, usually the next day or the one following, he would be able to sit down and pen interesting and even brilliant thoughts or fragments around the interface between the phrasing of the philosopher at hand and the little social experiment we were conducting in the very bosom of the fascist community of Trivingdale. I remember one day in particular not long before the awful incident. I was out on the lawn mowing grass and knocking back a couple cans of Special Export--which is perfect for lawnmowing because the can is green, you know--when around comes Jameson, who looked like he'd just run out of a burning barn. The fucker was drooling.  He started orbiting me, literally orbiting me as I made my rounds up and down with that old mechanical mower, whose handle I'd fitted with a beer holster, and he was mumbling something or other. The orbit started collapsing in on me when I'd made it about halfway across the relatively vast backyard that served as a backdrop for the old colonial. Maybe it was the gravitational pull of the beer. Then, when he got close enough, when he was within range, I caught the phrase he kept muttering again and again, and I remember it very clearly, because when our little solar system had fully imploded, he put a claw on my shoulder and said it to my face: Goethe, Tolstoy, Hugo. These three birds of paradise did not sing in the garden of the people, but twittered and preened in the royal grounds and in the golden cages of the bourgeois salons. The feeders they dined on dispensed contempt for the people. Goethe, Tolstoy, Hugo. These three birds of paradise...

"Emaciated, wild-eyed, raving: At times like these Jameson reminded me of an old-timey Russian mystic. Maybe Gogol himself. After such acid-fueled perambulatory ravings, ravings in which he savaged whatever morsel torn from the tree of knowledge, Jameson would usually settle into a nook in the kitchen, or into a hollow under the stairs, or down on the floor of the woodshed itself before I knocked it down, and slowly resurrect himself from the nadir of his trip with strong drink. He preferred an unspeakable sour mash called Early Times, God knows why, and then there would be an hour or two on such evenings when he seemed normal, together, himself altogether. Of course those hours were soon gone, and the inebriate wave that spirited him from the trough at trip's end to an animated conviviality would later crest in a giddy or maudlin incoherence in which the koan or anecdote would make a distorted reappearance--Goethe, Hugo, Tolstoy. Three devil's birds singing that they would never die as they dined on the people...--invariably followed by oblivion. I don't know why I'm explaining this to you. You know the type, I think. You still get them here sometimes, at Hanrahan's. The point is that Jameson, despite his erratic and irresponsible behavior, was an important and valued member of the household.