In Flames (19 page)

The police major stared at the floor. Klauer and the other club members nodded, satisfied with this explanation, to their minds it was reasonable, it convinced. The prosecutor rose to his feet, and the clerk relayed his summation. “Intelligence reports, which we cannot reveal in detail for reasons of national security, prove the deceased was in the pay of extremists…”

Chanting outside grew louder.
La bruja americana, La bruja americana
…

The judge was affronted. “Clear the balcony!”

Batons drawn, cattle prods extended, pepper spray cans at the ready, the guards drove the crowd down the exterior staircases before the prosecutor resumed his heavy lifting.

“The deceased was desperate,” the prosecutor said. “He was about to be exposed…this was his motive for suicide.”

The more far-fetched a thesis, the more strenuous the efforts to pass it off as authentic. The explanation was all so welcomingly clear to the court, the preferred explanation that pleased everyone, except the crowd outside, and the crowd was gone, the veranda emptied. I felt so tense, I wanted to grab my invisible spear, rise up on the balls of my feet, and send my magic weapon flying into the prosecutor's back.
You want admissible evidence? Here's your expert testimony
…I looked at Klauer and the club members, and I tried to say something, but felt their eyes digging into my flesh, again that same demonic whiteness on their faces as on Elaine's, restraining me now, commanding me to shut up if I knew what was good for me. Even the prosecutor and the police major were looking at me with shock and apprehension. My breath whistled, like it did into bark up in the tree at night. I clenched my hands, and it was as if I could feel a spear shaft swelling in my grip again, and in my mind Delgado Vinny was lying on the beach in mud, head blasted away. I tried drawing strength from this unpunished outrage, from the injustice of being falsely betrayed by Elaine, and now this final insult to the brain, a verdict of suicide. I sensed a surge of near-madness on the brink of an act of strength, anger that could ruin everything, or work, transform the near thing, a close miss, into perfect performance, into justice done and true victory, not a fake finding.

Jimmy Padgett the golf pro turned around to face me. “Don't ruin this, pal, you keep quiet. Vinny was a fucking clown, okay, a bigmouth. Forget him.”

I stared at the judge, an anguished, pleading look, and suddenly I felt a hand on my shoulder. The police major had left his chair and walked around to stand directly behind me.

“Careful, señor.”

Careful?
Of what, who do I have to watch out for now? This was all driving me mad, and I felt as if I really were back out there in mountain forest surrounded by wildness and chaos, and they were hunting me down again. The sense of imminent danger was physical. Everyone was turning against me, crushing me, black and white alike were set to smother me alive. Elaine stared at me, disbelieving, the judge was watching me, everyone was waiting for me…
to do what?
The hand on my shoulder increased its pressure. “Sit down, señor.”

My nerves were flayed, and despite the tightening grip on my shoulder, the impatient judge, and Elaine and her angry frown, I shouted, “What did the sister say? Tell us!” I bellowed this right out, rising on the balls of my feet, body at full stretch, and I was going down, my cry launched, nothing in my throat. I was hunched over in a crouch, only an echo in my ears, and I was falling, the police major and a guard grasping my arms, pulling me down. I fought for breath and looked up, and I shouted: “She did it! It's Elaine, she killed him!” But who cared, the hearing was adjourned, little bell tinkling, ludicrous judge standing and turning to leave. No one was listening.
This was the end
…The police major and guard pulled me upright and led me off through the back of the courtroom, my feet shuffling all the way out the rear door of the chamber. My voice—objecting, insistent, incredulous—echoed off the moldy bare walls. But no one heard Dan Shedrick. The hero of the hour might as well have been invisible.

While the end of my time in San Iñigo came some hours later that same day, it seemed more like only moments afterward I was being assisted into an embassy SUV, my seat belt fastened by an armed Xy Corp. contractor, my luggage secured in back.

Before we left the embassy garage, Reg Townsley gave me his last heartfelt advice. “Don't fuck up when you get back. What happened in that courtroom doesn't have to go any further, Dan, it stays off the record. Totally inadmissible, okay. So you lost it for a minute there, we all understand that—we don't agree with you, but we understand—now just let it go. For Christ's sake, don't blow up everything we've done for you down here. You're young, you can still have the world by the balls. It's all yours.”

Moments later the SUV was speeding through checkpoints, heading out to the airport.

An Xy Corp. plane flew me to Miami International on my way up to JFK. I tried sleeping on the first leg of the long journey, but it was impossible. Nor was there anyone to talk to. I recognized no one else among the few passengers. My contractor escort snoozed. The plane engines droned, and while there were no consoling words for me, the lack of conversation didn't distress, I'd have choked on words. I almost welcomed the silence, although it wasn't a silence that was intimate or salving. To be free, no longer a captive, might turn out to be an oddly isolating thing—no chanting companions fighting green jungle, no campsite confessions lasting late into night—I nearly wished an ex-priest opening a bottle of San Iñigo rum would have slipped into the empty plane seat beside me, no matter that I'd already given up wanting to talk, trying to touch the intangible. For a moment I felt a weird kinship with that wayward priest, until my mind stopped struggling, my thoughts yielding beneath the hiss of air-conditioning, and I shut down. I'd had my say—loudly and in court—and God knows, people will in any event hear only what they want to hear. Yes, I'd enter psych counseling in New York—that cost, as Reg Townsley noted, was covered in my separation agreement—but I held out no great hopes. Conscience isn't a simple thing, I had no idea how much honesty I could afford. I'd given reality a good shot and so far made little progress. How much candor could I get away with, how much more truth can any person handle? Although I'd escaped captivity, I was now as good as immured. They were constructing a stone-hard credible legend around me—attacks and counterattacks, rebels defeated, hideouts burned to blackened extinction—and so far the fabrication was working, the greater a glory grew, the stronger a story's grip, any cracks in the narrative willingly—indeed eagerly—overlooked. I was a hero. This was what I tried telling myself, straining to echo the comfort talk from Reg and the ambassador, but this meant only more lies, and rage would never leave, anger would become natural, the default condition, a terror of madness always lurking right around the corner. I had a classmate at Lawrenceville and Princeton who was illegitimate. His single mother died without ever telling him his biological father's name. He searched through his mother's records, letters, even questioned her friends. His mother had an independent income that must have come from somewhere, he wasn't shocked by this or angry with her, but the obsession to know who his father was drove him until one day he learned his father's name was Smith, and he'd also gone to Lawrenceville and Princeton, and he'd been a successful tobacco lawyer who'd died years before, taking his own life after he was indicted in a federal RICO investigation. My friend said to me, “You can't imagine how empty I felt. I found out who my father was, a sociopath making millions giving people cancer. And now what's left to keep driving me? The fire in me has gone out…”

I felt a similar kind of emptiness, sitting in the VIP transit lounge in Miami nursing a glass of cold white wine waiting for the commercial flight up to JFK. I'd learned far more in San Iñigo than I ever imagined I would and now where had this led me? The planes, the airports I passed through, all were minor versions of hell. After the blinding sunlight of Ciudad San Iñigo and the long dark spread of incinerated jungle forest, I shivered in Miami's glare, in the dry gelid air of luxury. I wanted my golden retriever Felix back on a couch next to me, his devotion the only warmth worth having.

And then I froze when a big-screen television in the lounge showed babbling heads in a network studio and a news clip of an assault on San Iñigo insurgents, a counterattack led by an American who'd been their captive, a hero who'd escaped through mountain rainforest and was winning revenge for himself and his country and the grateful people of the Republic of San Iñigo. Every frame in the clip was visually true—I was in river water brandishing a pistol and a machete, that much had happened and was taped from the hovering helicopter—but the charge of island troops into a forest treeline as if commanded by me, those troops happened somewhere else at some other time, those troops had nothing to do with me. This news item was a confection, a fabricated narrative composed of disparate truths. The ambassador abruptly appeared on-screen announcing a victory, praising a hero named Dan Shedrick. The television broadcast had a strangely equalizing effect. One moment I was watching noisy newscasters give their take on the situation, and the next I was looking at anonymous rebel corpses and the recognizable living body of a white American leader of black foreign troops—me—fighting unseen insurgents in a rainforest jungle. The brusqueness, the casualness with which all this was shown occurred so quickly, a viewer barely had time to prepare for what was coming up next. And the entire fraud—jabbering heads, grainy images, a boastful ambassador—was repeated over and over, and with this incessant recycling, concoction congealed and became indisputable reality. Instantaneous news of what might have happened, or could have happened, was becoming an art form all its own, and, like the chorus in ancient Greek tragedy, its roar was inescapable.

After several unaltering repetitions in the television newscast, veracity intruded in the unexpected form of a
this-just-in
postscript to the news story. An angry mob in San Iñigo, the newscaster said without fresh footage to illustrate this latest item, had lynched an American woman thought by the crowd to be guilty of murder by witchcraft.
La bruja americana
…The lynch victim's name proved correct enough—Elaine Ferguson—but her alleged method for murder—sorcery—was a pitiable fiction, no matter how deeply believed by her killers. Yes, Elaine certainly had a talent for bewitching, I could testify to that much, but she was no magician, she worked no miracles.

I turned away from the television and fled into the men's room. My limbs shook, again a fundamental trembling as on that night in the forest, and a violent compulsion to throw up overwhelmed me, an astonishing projectile of precision, efficiency, ferocity, excess.

I finished vomiting into a urinal and examined my face in a mirror above the sinks.

Some winner.

Maybe once resettled in New York I might look like a real hero in many people's eyes, after they saw me ad nauseam on television news. Lunch with Cottage friends at the Princeton Club in Manhattan would be a victor's welcome-home celebration. No one would spot a nagging sense of disquiet and, if anyone did, it could be explained away.
Just give him time to adjust and relax, he'll get back to normal
…
he's in the prime of life
. But this wasn't how I saw myself. No one is created so simple, no one is so easy to understand, we're each of us a multitude of mixed blessings, too few answers ever come out straight about anyone. Whatever doesn't kill me makes me stronger? What an absurdity. I felt as if I'd already left half my insides back on the jungle floor. And for the rest of my life I'd be able to touch that tree, I'd know every hollow and swelling and the bark I caressed that night and, to my horror, I'd never fail to embrace it all, again and again. In my heart, the forest that burned away would go on living because I was growing my own forest now, feeding the river that ran through it, a clandestine region, Dan Shedrick's secret place where only he knew the truth, a jungle forever dark and green and forbidding, the river unending, something deeply personal yet unlike anything else in my life: a strange hedge against an even stranger insolvency, possessions exclusively mine. I've heard it said tropical forests are our world's lungs, purifying the air. But God only knows the breath my hidden forest exhaled wasn't in the least benign. The special atmosphere I was breathing was poisonous, threatening penetration of everything in my life: an evil gas, a toxin, a plague for which I would never develop an immunity. A fear at once and forever entirely my own.

Ciudad San Iñigo…

República de San Iñigo
…In my secret San Iñigo, the rest of life would always be Judgment Day.

R
ICHARD
H
ILARY
W
EBER
is a native Brooklynite—Park Slope born and bred—and a Columbia grad. He's taught at the universities of Stockholm and Copenhagen, has been a scriptwriter for French and Swedish filmmakers (among them Claude Berri and Bo Widerberg), and now lives in Provence, France.

www.richardhilaryweber.com

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