An 18th century engraving of Geertje von Wolff.
We eat it, that’s what we do with it — like the Papuans and their kuru. We take the life, we swallow as hard as we can, as many times as necessary.
And then we wait. And then we go mad.
A killer now. Not just my thoughts, but molecularly, everything had changed. My body acted as if it had always known how to kill. It breathed just fine. It walked. It stood tall. Confident. It felt — not lighter, but more substantial, impervious, soldierly, autonomous, willful, solid, ready to do it all over again.
The problem was…the problem was the boy’s age. His age, his size. Despite his nasty wrist-blade, the blood stains on my back, his coked-up craziness, had he really posed a threat? If I’d committed a “murder,” a word which throbbed like an exposed organ, I was ready to gaze upon it, poke it with a stick, but not to touch it, not to examine it too closely. Which reassured me of my reason. Thinking deeply, analytically about a murder one has just committed is a sure sign of psychopathy; and while I was surprisingly comfortable in the thick pachyderm of my brand new killer-skin, the fact of the matter is, I could only analyze the situation for so long. I’m just not clever enough to be a psychopath.
We marched, our quintet, Goldy in front, Sax in the rear. The Umbrella Man, the silky sylph and I occupied the middle, like mimes performing a palanquin ride. I scrutinized the passerby, the shades and sunscreen, the grooves and the grins. Surely there were killers among them? If I could, if I had, then they could, they had. Like the realization, when coming of age, of so much lost virginity in the general populace. The pelvic pa de deux, the naked spread and sprawl and acting out like animals — was it really so common as a sneeze or a snort? Was killing like that? An ordinary bodily impulse? A surprising but all too natural emission?
Tourists with lip-rings, face paint, surgical masks. Cruise-ship fatties, backpackers, OE-girls slouching in sarongs. A rat-tailed father eating ice cream with his rat-tailed young son. A pair of shirtless American college boys, heads shaven, were having a laugh. “Safe enough, mister?”
“What’s that?” I said.
“Really? Bodyguards? You know you’re in Banki Kalgasa, right? Like wearing shoes in a temple.”
“Yeah,” jibed the other. “Part of the experience, mixing with the crims.”
“Come here,” I said, opening my duffel bag, digging out my cell phone. “Come on, take a look.” But the shrieking sun intruded here, dust-fingered, persistent, and the boys moved the phone this way and that, up and down, as if to keep it away from a frisky cat.
“What is it? Hard to see.”
“A kid.”
“That a kid?”
“A dead kid. I killed him.”
“You shitting me.”
“Crushed him against a tree. Look at the stats. Pupkin. Level three killer. That’s what it is, mixing with the crims.”
Land Zonder Wetten.
“How long it take to find your car, Pups?” interrupted the Umbrella Man, as Goldy stepped forward to silently reclaim the phone from the skin-headed skeptics. He returned it to my bag. The car was nowhere in sight. I’d noticed the absence of our little red Lark a good ten minutes earlier, but had decided to steer my troupe across an eerily quiet Blunderbuss Square (whispering hibiscus, a solitary grumbling raven), to what appeared a safer, more crowded part of town.
The car, I reasoned, was either stolen, or my wife had taken it and was searching the island for me. But then again, how could she be searching the island for me when suddenly there she was, a giantess above the noisy horde, her flashing, center-parted hair like some wild swooping bird protecting a nest, the enormity of her presence an apparition, a fabulous phantom from history, like Geertje von Wolff rising from the dead, looking at me with questioning eyes: Are you in danger, my dear? Should I approach?
And all I could think was, how did she even recognize me? How could she possibly have met this Pupkin before?
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