One Night in Copan Read online

  Table of Contents

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Also by W. E. Gutman

  Prologue

  PART ONE – THE TALES

  IN DRANAMOS

  TIME FLIES

  DEATH & TRANSFIGURATION

  PAST IMPERFECT

  IN HIS OWN IMAGE

  THE LONGEST NIGHT

  NEITHER APE NOR ANGEL

  DREAMFARER

  THE VAMPIRE STATE

  A HARVEST OF SORROWS

  THE FOOT FETISH

  ONE NIGHT IN COPÁN

  LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT MAX

  PART TWO – THE STORIES BEHIND THE TALES

  THE OPPOSITE OF SILENCE

  POSTSCRIPT

  THE END STORY

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Back cover

  One

  Night

  In Copán

  Chronicles of madness foretold

  Tales of Mystery, Fantasy and Horror

  W. E. Gutman

  CCB Publishing

  British Columbia, Canada

  One Night in Copán: Chronicles of Madness Foretold, Tales of Mystery, Fantasy and Horror

  Copyright ©2012 by W. E. Gutman

  ISBN-13 978-1-77143-017-3

  First Edition

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Gutman, W. E., 1937-

  One night in Copán [electronic resource] : chronicles of madness foretold, tales of mystery, fantasy and horror / written by W. E. Gutman – 1st ed.

  Electronic monograph in PDF format.

  ISBN 978-1-77143-017-3

  Also available print format.

  Additional cataloguing data available from Library and Archives Canada

  Photo and cover design by the author.

  This is largely a work of fiction. Allusions to real persons, living or dead, and the dramatization of actual events are meant to lend the narrative epic realism. All other characters and events are fictitious or fictionalized.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the express written permission of the author.

  Publisher:

  CCB Publishing

  British Columbia, Canada

  www.ccbpublishing.com

  FOR LINDA

  Also by W. E. GUTMAN

  JOURNEY TO XIBALBA -- The Subversion of Human Rights in Central America (c) 2000. Reporter’s Notebook (out of print).

  NOCTURNES -- Tales from the Dreamtime

  (c) 2006. Surrealistic fiction.

  FLIGHT FROM EIN SOF

  (c) 2009. Satire.

  THE INVENTOR

  (c) 2009. Historical fiction.

  A PALER SHADE OF RED: Memoirs of a Radical.

  (c) 2012. Autobiography.

  ONE LAST DREAM. Screenplay (English-language version). Registered 2010 with the American Writers’ Guild. (c) 2012.

  UN DERNIER RÊVE. Screenplay (French-language version; translated by the author). (c) 2012.

  Evil has a wandering, fluid quality;

  It drifts like thought.

  Lance Morrow

  PROLOGUE

  I can calculate the motion of heavenly bodies,

  but not the madness of people.

  Isaac Newton

  There exist ill-defined forms of mental illness, so subtle, so skillfully concealed and so utterly undetectable that they elude even those trained to recognize the myriad faces behind which they hide. Is he demented who pretends to be sane? Is he who fakes madness -- mad? Is conformist behavior proof of sanity? Is a clown “crazy?” Would his buffoonery be sanctioned outside the circus tent? He’s only play-acting, you say? What about motorists who willfully exceed the speed limit: are they clear-headed? Are citizens who, time after time rush to the polls and vote into office inept or corrupt politicians under the ludicrous pretext that they’re taking part in the “democratic process” -- in full possession of their faculties? Or are they imbeciles who deserve the scoundrels they helped elect?

  Is the soldier who fires at an enemy he can’t see behaving rationally or, to dilute the horror (or ease his conscience), is he pretending to be shooting blanks every time he squeezes the trigger? If not, if he finds moral justification in sanctioned murder -- or derives some secret thrill from it -- is he demented, evil or just a hopeless moron?

  Are boxers who bash each-others’ brains out -- for money -- out of their minds? Would their fights-to-the-finish seem less brutish if they didn’t appear to enjoy themselves so much? Aren’t the fans who salivate at the prospect of blood, of a bone-crushing knockout, equally deranged?

  Are the uninvited evangelists who compel “primitive” peoples to cover their breasts and genitals “for the love of God,” who force-feed guileless children alien concepts and rob cultures of their identity, sane or dangerous psychopaths further unhinged by religious zeal?

  Listen to the maniacal soul-robbers who harangue their congregations. Look at the transfixed masses of ‘born-again’ who sway and swing and rock, their arms outstretched toward heaven as they pray for the cleansing firestorms of apocalypse. Are they out of their minds or the unwitting victims of mass-hysteria?

  What about the “prophets”? Were they merely confused talking heads or cunning terrorists; clueless prognosticators or schemers blinded by their own fury; soothsayers and mystic diviners who spoke in riddles and esoteric babble or crafty politicians bent on sowing fear in the hearts of the masses? Were their intentions noble or did they suffer from acute megalomania, monomania, egomania and thanatomania -- a consuming preoccupation with death? Wouldn’t they all have been diagnosed as certifiably insane -- or called charlatans -- had modern psychiatry not spinelessly declined to see them as superstitious crackpots pickled in gooey mysticism and predisposed to treat all inexplicable natural phenomena as the manifestation of some unknowable, invisible spirit?

  Aren’t the dream merchants, the demagogue-pedagogues and the healers, the petty bureaucrats, the would-be public servants and the corporate kingpins who deconstruct reality and peddle cheap imitations of Utopia -- insufferable psychopaths?

  If men were put away for their natural tendencies (or for the habits and fixations they pick up along the way) prisons and mental hospitals would be bursting at the seams. Madness is somehow less reprehensible when it festers in high places; when ruthless entrepreneurs are eulogized for their “initiative” and their cunning; when my-country-right-or-wrong “patriots” brush aside lies, rationalize injustice, defend sleaze and political chicanery; when fanatical evangelism is hyped as “God’s work;” when fraudulent and unwinnable wars that only enrich bankers and cannon merchants are waged far from home in the name of “national security;” and when freedom of thought is condemned as heresy and all moral codes are rescinded to protect the interests of the moneyed elite.

  Pray tell, who are the mad, and who are the meek who inherit the wind? A slight detour to the brink might help tell them apart. There’s more to madness than meets the eye. Let me count the ways.

  Part One

  The Tales

  IN Dranomos

  A desert is a place without expectations.

  Nadine Gordimer

  It began with the birds. Dead birds. Dead grackle chicks. Had they tumbled out of their nest? Were they ousted by greedy siblings, dislodged by marauding ravens and beaked to death? Was it Shadow, the itinerant tomcat, the elusive feral feline that kept tongues wagging well after backyard gossip had turned to very small talk? The grackles’ eye sockets had been picked clean, their belly feathers plucked as if in haste, their slender legs broken at the knees. They lay t
here on the concrete patio, four of them, disfigured, stilled, frozen in time.

  Then there was the dead lizard at the bottom of the pool, a ten-inch striped little beauty with long, willowy digits and an endearing expression. I’d used a fine-mesh net at the end of a long pole to bring it to the surface, and I’d examined it for signs of life. There were none. The graceful reptile’s eyes were shut. Saddened, I’d cupped it in my hand for a while. Sadness turned to unease. I buried it in the shade of a honeysuckle bush.

  No, it wasn’t superstition, legend or a penchant for mysticism that triggered the disquiet, the premonitions. Many years earlier I’d come upon a dying seagull, a stately old bird that flapped its wings listlessly, its lifeless eyes turned skyward as it gasped for one last breath of sea air. The sight of the expiring ace flier had filled me with sorrow; it also produced a numbing fear I’d never known. I remember getting chills, feeling the hair on the back of my neck bristle as if caressed by a sudden, icy gust.

  Six months later, my mother died of pancreatic cancer. It’d taken months of pain -- constant, searching, tenacious. She’d turned yellow, gone bald, shed half her weight and slowly lost her mind. I’d witnessed this irreversible transformation with disbelief, helplessness, anger. Our evasions and lies had kept her hoping, fighting at first. Then she’d given up. One day, when the others left the room to stretch their legs after an all-night vigil, I’d touched her face and called her name.

  “Mama, mama, don’t go.”

  She’d winced and her eyelids had parted ever so briefly, revealing cloudy, swollen, lifeless orbs, like those of the moribund seagull. I knew she’d seen me, felt my presence, heard the words I’d whispered. She expired that evening. June was young and the air was filled with spring’s heady bouquet. A seagull flew by. Every vestige of childhood in me died with my mother that day. Only the dreams she’d dreamed for me survived, some as yet unfulfilled, others beyond reach except in the limitless regions of a mother’s love.

  I’d cursed her. No one understood the rage that surged within me. I felt betrayed, lost, abandoned. Taken for granted, often unnoticed in life, longed for in death, my mother would have been the first to grasp this paradox. No one else did, not even my father who, familiar with the contradictions of the human soul, had failed to recognize in his son’s calumnies the brittle fragments of a broken heart. Heeding her last wishes, we’d buried her ashes in a family plot where grandma Henrietta and Uncle Johnny would later be laid to rest. It’d rained that day; it would rain every time I came to the cemetery. And I’d grumbled because my shoes had gotten wet and caked with mud. It’s the nature of coincidence to deliver a hint of irony.

  All during my mother’s ordeal, and after her death I’d harked back to that fateful winter morning stroll on the beach when the majestic sea bird had expired at my feet. The sight of dead animals, road kill, but especially birds, would forever elicit surges of melancholy and angst. The grief I felt had not a trace of spirituality. What I sensed was visceral, dark, menacing.

  Many years later, as I went on assignment to Central America, the sight of dead birds would take on a new aura. Alive, birds symbolize freedom from earthly bounds. Dead, especially when placed on someone’s doorstep, they telegraph a warning, the threat of a looming calamity. Several investigative reports I’d written had earned me ill-omened accolades: a dead pigeon whose unfurled wings had been stapled to a small funeral wreath and propped against my hotel room door at the Casa Grande in Guatemala City; two dead sparrows similarly positioned on the stoop of my rented studio in Copán. I’d somehow managed to keep one step ahead of my would-be assassins but I would never look at dead birds the same way again.

  It was not surprising that the sight of the mutilated baby grackles, less than a week after I’d moved to Dranomos, would stir feelings of anxiety. I’d come down from the small cloud-shrouded mountain town of Patchahei to the high desert plateau where the sky is almost always blue and the sun percolates for months on end. Long, bitter snowy days and frigid nights at 4,000 feet had taken their toll and the prospect of gentler winters and warmer summers had beckoned me down from the summit. Little did I know.

  Then, one day, I heard it: a whisper, a distant murmur; throaty at first then high-pitched as it subsided, like the sigh of a mortally wounded beast or the wail of a restless spirit. I couldn’t tell where it was coming from. It ebbed and flowed like the tide, like an intermittent rustling of leaves. Like a draft squeezing through some narrow aperture.

  A more thorough search for the source of these gloomy squalls took me to the laundry room, a small area with a door leading to the garage. To my relief, it was only the wind insinuating itself under the garage door and whistling with every gust.

  I also thought I’d heard, merging with the reedy crescendo and ebbing of moans and whimpers, what sounded like laughter -- no, not the resonance of gaiety or merriment, not the giggle of children or the chortle of men telling salty jokes. What reached my ears, I thought, was a sequence of long sepulchral wails, otherworldly, warped by the newness of my circumstance in this austere, taciturn expanse of rock, sand, stunted Joshua trees, clumps of sagebrush and roving tumbleweed.

  I’d spent the winter settling in, arraying the furniture, lining my favorite books on the shelves, placing bric-a-brac and curios on the mantelpiece and other outcroppings, adorning the walls with the pictures I’d painted and the lithographs I’d collected over the years. A happy loner too busy to be bored, I’d put off any interaction with my neighbors, few as they were, until spring. Now and then I’d spotted a couple of lonely figures dashing in and out of their houses, scurrying across my field of view as if they were being pursued by some menacing presence. It’s not that I’d waited for the Welcome Wagon or a neighborly invitation to a family brunch. I could dispense with these niceties. I considered them pointless, synthetic and somewhat intrusive. It’s just that I’d found it odd that my presence in this gated hamlet, this remote, desolate mesa ringed by barren, cratered hills had been largely unnoticed, if not ignored. So I’d happily gone back to work on what would perhaps be my magnum opus, my one-way ticket to the blue Mediterranean, the deliverance that penury and anonymity had so far denied me.

  “We had our first snowfall,” I wrote in my journal. Bad choice of a pronoun, I’d exclaimed. We? This is not an editorial position. I rewrote the sentence:

  “It snowed last night. The mountain tops are peppered with white. A thick, ground-hugging fog is slowly chewing up the scenery. It’s time for the Wellbutrin and a change in screensavers -- from the red and gold of a New England autumn to a sun-drenched islet set like an emerald on a turquoise sea and ringed with white sandy beaches and dotted with tall coconut trees swaying in the breeze. It’s time to let my mind roam. It’s time to hunker down, brave -- no, endure -- winter and watch for the first signs of spring.

  I was what the gallant French refer to as “entre deux âges,” [middle-aged] and blunter Americans obliquely describe as “well past his prime”: an old man who’d managed to ward off the ravages of time and the onset of decrepitude by keeping busy, stretching time.

  Time is not a renewable resource. What cannot be prevented or changed must be weathered.

  I’d always thought that every man has a “tale” locked up within him that, as it unfolds, struggles to emerge. “Every life is a best-seller.” I’d come up with this aphorism when I lived in Queens, New York on the 14th floor of a 16-story building. At night, across the playground, a building of equal stature revealed through dozens of lit windows a patchwork quilt of silent dramas, each circumscribed by time and space. The diminutive creatures in my field of view, I’d suddenly realized one evening, some unwinding in their living rooms, others readying for bed, others yet quarrelling or fixing dinner in closet-sized “galley” kitchens, each acting out a preordained scenario, must surely have a compelling story to tell that will never be told. I remembered feeling empathy for the strangers I spied upon in moments of introspection, each framed in his own shadow box, ea
ch engaged in life’s mind-numbing, often absurd pantomime.

  I’d learned a great deal about dignity and vulgarity, refinement and boorishness, solitude, boredom and carousing, and I’d realized that I too, at some time or other, must have been the object of someone’s absent or amused scrutiny.

  It had all happened so fast. I’d taken early retirement, left genteel Connecticut and set out on a five-day, 3,000-mile drive across America. Its vastness and awesome beauty had filled me with exhilaration and appeased for a while the emptiness within. The emptiness returned when I reached the desert. Behind me was the narrowing perspective of an arrow-straight road merging into the horizon line. Ahead lay a barren, petrified expanse. Alone in its vast, sallow bosom, overwhelmed by the immensity and desolation around me, I stopped, got out of the car and looked at the limitless blue vault above, dotted with strange cloud formations, some the shape of flying saucers, others wispy and elongated like lines of cocaine, others yet splaying like supernovas or metastasizing cells. I surveyed the tawny parched earth at my feet. Everywhere, clumps of sparse, stunted shrubs and contorted Joshua trees clung stubbornly to life in this lifeless citadel. I felt lost. I wanted to scream. The scream died in my throat as I set my eyes on a lone yellow poppy, its dainty orange petals quivering in the breeze. Memories cascaded through my mind. I remembered the wild blood-red poppy fields of Abu Gosh, outside Jerusalem, where I’d gamboled as a boy, taking in their heady aroma, napping under a blanket of undulating blood-red blossoms and dreaming Technicolor dreams. I remembered the wistful French love song of my youth, “Comme un petit coquelicot,” [Like a little poppy]. I’d been swept in a vortex of indescribable emotions every time I heard it. Poppies are still my favorite flowers. And I remembered Paris, the city of my birth. Words, images, colors and aromas danced inside my head, faint, disjointed, stranded at the limits of consciousness. I felt my tongue forming silent thoughts, like prayers or mantras. Emboldened by self-discovery, delivered from their cerebral bonds, the words gushed forth. It was a soliloquy of stupefying candor and sorrow, part confession, part supplication, words driven by longing, by despair, by a fear of madness, words one only dares to utter in the desert’s deafening silence. I looked at the sky. Then I looked at the poppy and the babble ceased. It had wilted in my hand. But its subtle, intoxicating scent still lingered on the tip of my fingers, in my nose, on my lips.