One Night in Copan Read online

  Inexplicably, in one last spasm of puritanical fervor, bolstered by an apostate Supreme Court and a Church obsessed with the unborn but indifferent to the living, “pro-lifers” at last succeed in reversing Roe vs. Wade and in making abortion a federal crime punishable by death. The oligarchs must be assured a steady supply of cheap labor; the Church a steady supply of dues-paying penitents.

  I get paid to pluck the fruits of this incestuous union.

  It’s eleven forty. Byron is thirteen, resourceful, clever. I’ve shadowed him day and night for nearly a month, clambering up and down the byways and alleyways he and his cronies scour in search of shelter or easy prey -- old folks or stragglers stranded in the night.

  Midnight. Christmas is greeted with spontaneous acts of vandalism and drunken displays of nudity. There is little cheer. Off of Eighth Avenue, behind the Port Authority Bus Terminal’s mazelike network of ramps and underpasses, a band of nine- and ten-year-olds take turns scrounging through trash bins and peeking through the windows of a dingy motel where couples come to risk procreation in exchange for the shallow reward of a brief grunt of pleasure. A block away, a pedophile barters with a twelve-year-old. Envious and resentful, four urchins encircle and pounce on their competition.

  It’s now two fifty a.m. Alone, leaning against a pile of cardboard boxes by the wharf, near the old Fulton Fish Market, Byron is hallucinating. It could be glue or crack or the new rage in town -- stalactites -- a deadly mix of acetone-imbibed cannabis, rubber cement and denatured alcohol. Byron is armed and dangerous.

  Byron spots me. He freezes. I unsheathe my revolver and point it at him, slowly, confidently, with the panache granted men whose conscience is stilled by the exigencies of job and duty. Byron spreads his arms, Christ like, and rests his head against his shoulder. He smiles. Defiance, stoicism, relief are all etched in his life-hardened baby face, in those glassy eyes where night’s eerie scintillations shimmer. He looks at me without rancor, a martyr without a cause, a sacrificial lamb whose sacrifice brings about no redemption. I squeeze the trigger, repeatedly, remorselessly, thankful that another street child, alone and hungry since birth, abused and abandoned by his family, mistreated by his peers, another boy nobody smiles at, nobody cuddles, nobody protects, nobody comforts, nobody loves, will never again sully the society that begat him.

  Childhood is when the future begins. Death is when memories expire. Byron never had a future. I revoked his past. It’s a living. I must not philosophize. I obey orders. The cost of a family Christmas dinner keeps going up. Thank God I get overtime.

  (From the secret diaries of Lt. Joe Krolick, NYPD, December 24-25, in the Year of Our Lord, 2062).

  A HARVEST OF SORROWS

  Evolution follows a path of descent and thus

  provides the world with a basis for pessimism.

  Anonymous

  Getting lost in a place Jeremiah hardly knew was not on the program that day. Out of prudence more than inclination, he followed one of the main arteries, a long, wide street paved with cobblestones, flanked on each side by willows whose branches met midpoint above it to form a shady dome of green and extending, as far as he could tell, to the horizon line.

  Jeremiah kept walking, passing row after row of multiple-occupancy dwellings each set on a cul-de-sac on either side of the road, some flying oversized flags, others proclaiming their faith with tawdry displays of holy statuary and sacred icons on porches and lawns, others yet professing their love of God and country by warning intruders that their homes were fortified with all manner of automatic ordnance.

  Rising in the distance, faint at first, clearer as he continued toward it, a massive billboard straddled the roadway. It read:

  YOUR ARE ENTERING GEHENNA

  PROCEED AT OWN PERIL

  The road ended abruptly in rubbles of shattered rock and splintered cobbles a foot or so past the sign. Beyond it a yawning incline ended in a sheer drop. Extending from the base of a deep abyss, a steamy chasm stretched below as far as the eye could see.

  Gehenna’s unimaginable Stygian depths spilled open before Jeremiah like a lanced boil. Spanning an arroyo through which flows, like pus, a malodorous rivulet of greenish-colored swill, an old bridge heavy with traffic and swarming with street vendors separates a would-be purgatory from the pestilential netherworld below.

  Reaching the base of the bridge was no easy task. Jeremiah followed a dizzying spiral of steep ascents and lateral downward convolutions, first through a darkened arcade reeking of urine where a teenage couple copulated against a wall, then down a fetid stairwell where rats, oblivious to it all, fed from a pile of fast-food containers, and, finally, around ditches and embankments covered knee-high with rotting refuse.

  Escher’s impossible architectures came to mind; then Kafka’s schizoid plots; then Hieronymus Bosch’s diabolic renderings of reality. And when Jeremiah alit under the arch, perspiring and out of breath, he knew he’d set foot on some spectral domain where outcasts and wastrels, the spurned and the unloved congregate like ghosts doomed to roam the void.

  On the long and narrow ledge that hugs the foot of the bridge lives a family of seven, perhaps more. Rawboned, spidery, disheveled, prematurely old, a woman folds and refolds, sorts and rearranges a precious few possessions with a tedium induced by boredom or despair or madness. There’s a pile of soiled rags for bedding, plastic bags to shield against the rain, a metal box to keep the tinder dry, a pot, scorched, misshapen and swarming with vermin, a disemboweled foam-rubber cushion to lean against on starry nights, a frayed straw hat, a sooty, half-burned candle, and a rumpled picture of a blond, blue-eyed, pink-faced Christ smiling quizzically at the world. Tugging at a fleshless, sagging teat, an infant squirms and whimpers with frustration.

  The woman bares a toothless grin. Sitting on his heels, a man –- her husband? –- is busy pounding back into shape an unyielding slab of iron with a wooden mallet. The metal will not give but he keeps on striking it time after time with an obstinacy that bears little fruit. There is no emotion on the man’s waxen face, not a trace of impatience or anticipation or annoyance at the futility of his Sisyphean ordeal. Staring into space, visibly exhausted but unwilling to quit, he persists, lost in a hypnotic syncopation that marks the passage of time.

  Below, perched on an earthen mound overgrown with weeds, two toddlers, both flaunting distended bellies and herniated navels, rummage for worms. Barefoot, naked, soiled, green slime oozing from their nostrils, oblivious to the horror that surrounds them, they shriek with delight with every worm they pluck from the sludge. A few feet away, a young girl squats and relieves herself. A youngster, perhaps her brother, barely older and small for his age, sleeps nearby; one arm folded over his eyes to block out the light, the other extended and limp. Clasped in his hand is a small can of cobbler’s glue. He risks not waking up. Oblivion is a one-way trip. Sniffing glue is a dead-end occupation; literally.

  “Hey, you!” Jeremiah calls out. Startled, the boy stirs from a dark, dreamless slumber. His eyes don’t open fully but he reflexively tightens a childlike grip around the small can of glue. Turning on his side, compressing himself into a fetal position then stretching like a cat rousing from a nap, he makes contact with reality. Jeremiah places a reassuring hand on the boy’s shoulder.

  The boy staggers to a sitting position, rubs eyes thick with stupefaction and insensibility, and grants Jeremiah a lifeless, clammy handshake. An odious smell of uncleanness fills the air, soon neutralized by the pungent odor of glue on his breath.

  “Where am I? Who are you,” asks Jeremiah. The boy uncaps the can of toluene-based rubber cement, passes the opening over his nose and mouth, and inhales deeply, avidly. Jeremiah looks at him, detecting subtle signs of aphasia. Averting his eyes, the boy answers in monosyllables, seeking to save face in ambiguity and equivocation. But such ruse could well denote the presence of a host of other latent syndromes, all resulting from the corrosive effects of inhalants on the cerebral cortex.

  “Where am I? Who ar
e you,” Jeremiah repeats. Attempting a smile, the boy scratches a lice-infested head, and draws another long snort of glue.

  “Where are you?” The boy chuckles dejectedly “You’re in my world of darkness, in this accursed valley. Who am I,” he echoes, his inflection tinted with grim solemnity and bitterness, his voice raspy and sepulchral. Sniffing glue devours sinuses and lungs. It produces horrible hallucinations. Irreversible brain damage and kidney failure are never far behind. Such fate seldom deters those who, like this boy, seem to fear life more than death.

  The woman on the ledge unleashes a barrage of invectives at the boy. Jeremiah has trouble understanding the words but her tone and gestures convey impatience, disgust. The boy dismisses her with a wave of the hand.

  “Screw you, you’re not my mother,” he mutters, with more than a trace of envy and sadness. Jeremiah and the boy shake hands again, this time in a complex ritual involving palm-smacking and finger-twisting. The boy takes leave, a longing smile on his lips, and ambles toward the water’s edge where other kids are busy sniffing glue as the river’s putrid current travels its lazy course.

  “Who am I!” he yells out, this time in the exclamatory. “You tell me, mister.” He laughs a raucous laugh, more like a bark. “Yes, mister, you tell me.”

  The woman plugs away at her senseless chores, one arm still cradling the infant at her breast. Unrelenting, headstrong or mad, her husband continues to strike wood against metal. Jeremiah sees no change in its configuration. Invincible, it taunts the would-be smith. But guided by some exquisite obsession, he persists.

  Overhead, vultures glide in wide sweeping circles, surveying life, espying death, smelling it down below in the bottomless, sulfurous pits where the corpses of murdered street children are dumped. Many of the birds are now perched on roofs and tree limbs. Emboldened by some irresistible effluvia, a few make landfall. Waddling from side to side, wary and cunning, they will fight for the vilest scrap of carrion in their path. The leathery flutter of their wings sends chills down my spine.

  Jeremiah returned to the gloomy depths of Gehenna looking for answers. He’d been perusing Spinoza’s seminal work, Ethics and Einstein’s Theory of Special Relativity. Separated by three centuries, the philosopher and the physicist had both studied relativity, the first to explore the metaphysical realm, the second to postulate immutable cosmic laws. They reached broadly similar conclusions, among them that perception depends on vantage point.

  Spinoza buoyed his argument by demystifying the universe and proposing -- swiftly earning him excommunication and centuries of Jewish and Christian hostility –- that much of human consciousness is based, not on fact, but on how we are conditioned to interpret the occurrence of being. There are no wrong answers, he proposes, only divergent opinions which are themselves blurred by conformity to encoded beliefs, not congenital concepts. He may have been the first to suggest that truth is in the mind’s eye of the beholder.

  Einstein also theorized that reality is merely an illusion, “albeit a very persistent one.” He went a step further. He declared that perceptions can actually alter reality and the experience of being. Jeremiah had an opportunity to test this strange concept, not in the perfect geometry of space, nor in the sterile labyrinths of Cartesian logic, but in a realm that has grown and spilled over its own boundaries like a gangrenous sore, far from the synthetic harmony of a world where the well-to-do live in stifling isolation.

  It was still dark as Jeremiah worked his way to the bridge. He came upon sleepy-eyed children pulling heavy loads, sweaty gaunt men packed like sardines in rickety trucks belching black smoke, half submerged under the garbage they were ferrying from one end of the chasm to the other.

  Huddled like newborn pups against the scurfy wall of an abandoned building, young boys slept, their arms crossed against the chill of night, their fingers clasping their shoulders. Others, stirring from a thin, turbulent slumber, were getting ready, in lieu of breakfast, to take the long and excruciating way out of reality by surrendering to glue. Further on, resting on a bed of filthy rags near the gutter, a woman dozed fitfully with an infant at her breast while an older child begged for scraps of food and wiped an ever-runny nose on the sleeve of a threadbare jersey.

  Ahead, past the bridge, in a huge crater-like depression teeming with vultures, Jeremiah found toddlers and young teens feeding on garbage. Knee-deep in steaming mountains of waste and competing with the loathsome winged scavengers, another group of youngsters rummaged for a meal, a slipper, perhaps a broken toy to brighten an otherwise joyless childhood.

  And when he ventured past the festering hollow, Jeremiah chanced upon a living ghost. He had no other words to describe her. She has no name. Madness robs people of all identity. Madness, in her case, further sharpens the alienation, the anonymity. She has no name. She has earned the scorn of her own wretched kind and she will pass in this dimension and from this moment in time unnoticed, even by her fellow specters. Surely, a name, a common moniker would give her substance, if not legitimacy. But she’s been forgotten. Insanity and amnesia have mercifully yanked her from the clutches of reality. Yet she is real, irritatingly tangible, the symbol and victim of the dysfunctional society that spawned her. Shunned, loathed, she inspires revulsion, not pity, for she is unrepentant, defiant in her grotesque cardboard palace, amid the debris, the scraps of metal, the offal on which she feeds, the useless memories that haunt her still, come rain or come shine, come hell or high water.

  Her partner-in-grime, ageless, toothless, feral and mad, too mad to erect her own shelter, sits by her companion’s side or steals forty winks on the naked pavement, her hands pressed together to form a cushion under her cheek. Wielding a yard of rubber tubing, or an old broom, she chases after man and specter with equal fury, a menacing fist raised against oncoming traffic and snickering children, striking the ground with anger and bewilderment, no, with exasperation, spitting at passersby, pelting them with invectives. Sometimes folly crests like an open flame fanned by wind and a torrent of tears drenches her grand-motherly face. Overwhelmed by the sheer intensity of her exasperation, she calms down and tunes in briefly on the world around her; then she resumes her silent vigil, a lifeless gaze now focused on an all-consuming void.

  One day, four policemen swooped down on Gehenna and smashed the paper, string and plastic scaffolding her friend had erected. Even a place of torment such as Gehenna, Jeremiah mused, has its heartless enforcers, its dim-witted disciplinarians. The woman put up a fierce battle but the enforcers prevailed. Trampled by uncaring feet, the decimated remains of her flimsy abode were carted away and thrust aside under the bridge where trash and raw sewage eventually end up. In the end, the authorities showed some mercy: She was allowed to bed down on the bare ground and fend for herself.

  Up the road, in the narrow, slop-splattered alley that hugs the flanks of an old church, a man writhed in drug-induced agony. Frothing at the mouth, his eyes on fire, he crumbled to the ground and let out a blood-curdling wail. Clawing at the demons that tormented him, thrashing about, he rolled into the gutter and narrowly missed being hit by a speeding garbage truck.

  Safe in their pews, the faithful were being treated to the grand spectacle of a pre-dawn mass. “Dominus vobiscum,” said the priest. “Et cum spiritu tuo,” the faithful responded, mercifully unmindful, if only for a brief moment in their beleaguered lives, of the pervading godlessness that surrounds them.

  Around the corner, propped against a fence, a group of cripples flaunted their grotesque infirmities. Unruffled, bystanders the faithful, the penitent, the aimless and the lost, the discarded and the redundant, stepped over them like so much rubbish. Across the street, sprawled on the ground, a young woman breast-fed her newborn as three older daughters, sired by three different men, plied the beggar’s trade.

  Are these scenes of utter madness, Jeremiah reflected, or was he observing prosaic reality through the prism of his own budding psychosis?

  As he pondered the question, Jeremiah nearly tripp
ed on the cadavers of three children. They lay prone, splotches of dried blood streaking their faces. They’d been hogtied and gagged and shot, gangland-style in the back of the head.

  The only thing that separates “God” and his creation is a dissimilar perspective. Relativity prevents either from switching places. In Gehenna, as in the parallel universe Jeremiah inhabits, where heaven and hell coexist in perilous proximity, right and wrong are less sharply defined. For the powerful, the privileged, the favored, the free, the well-fed who squander their freedom by abdicating to the tyranny of convention, truth remains the stronger of two or more conflicting views. For the poor, the disenfranchised, the forgotten, the unloved, the nameless and the ghouls and the zombies that haunt our conscience, the truth is a useless paradox, like relativity. Don’t look for answers, Jeremiah kept telling himself. Don’t look for reason. All you’ll find is nature, cruel and unmoved, further debased by the aggregate interests and avarice of the dominant elite.

  It was now nearly dawn but the sun had yet to rise behind Gehenna’s battered ramparts. An ashen darkness still clung like a shroud over its higher elevations. Up since the cocks’ first crow, Zion (Jeremiah gave her that name to commemorate the fleeting apparition) raced down the sheer, narrow footpath leading to the murky waters of the creek below. Pressed to her bosom, swaddled in an old piece of cloth and still asleep, her infant daughter seemed oblivious to it all. The footpath is overrun with hazards but Zion knows every crag, every loose pebble, every muddy ledge along the way. She’s made the perilous trek a thousand times or more since the birth of her baby, six months ago, and she negotiates each obstacle with the agility of a veteran climber.