Chapter 24. Pater Noster, Darwin

I'll be Dog Gone

We approached San Francisco Bay from the South, parallel to Sunset Beach, before dawn. The lights strung along the beach sparkled clear as diamonds. We had been sailing out of sight of land for several days and that made the city a welcome sight. Casey and Anna slept in the same bunk. I thought it was sweet. Whatever doubts I had dissipated… maybe it was because I had more important things to think about.

Larry sat with me on deck at sea the last night while the lovers were below. He stayed close and warned me, “Watch out for Anna, she’s dangerous.”

“I know.”

“And Casey? I don’t think he does. She’ll kill me as soon as she gets a chance.”

“Stay close, you won’t have to worry.” I wonder whether his warning was as much for me as it was for him. It could also have been a ploy to compromise the unity of our team. The LSD was still working the synapses in my brain but I knew my paranoia was warranted.

Larry asked, “Don’t you wonder about Casey… his age?”

Keep Doc guessing, “I don’t care. You find love and it doesn’t matter how long it lasts. You beat the odds if you find it at all. And Casey found it for now anyway. Besides, you’re one to talk. She told me you’ve been banging her for several years now”

“It’s not the same. Our S & M clients liked young ones. You have to watch Casey now that he’s under her spell… if you know what I mean. She was trained by Smerdyakov.”

“I thought she got it from… Tell me more about Smerdyakov. The rest isn’t my concern.”  I’d taken Doc through the looking glass and he was Larry now. His time, chasing the bats from his belfry in the forward berths, must have given him his most important epiphany. He knew I was his only chance for survival and ironically, he was mine too. I only hoped that Anna knew this too.

Larry was solemn, “When I told you before that you were in over your head, I wasn’t bluffing.”

“I know.”

He spoke as though he was recalling a dream, “I sat in the dark since we talked… you know. At first it was unpleasant and I felt closed in. Fear wrapped itself around every thought. I couldn’t control it. The memories of the horrors and pleasures tumbled around in here,” he tapped the side of his head.

“You’re a lucky man, Larry. At that stage, most are given a choice… whether to go on living the same bullshit or to end the nightmare.”

Larry nodded, “The other choice is to try to make recompense. I felt like I was given a key to… I don’t know what, but I saw it all in one unity… all the clichés. But every rotten motherfucking thing I’ve ever done, I confessed to what? the cosmos? It wasn’t the God I preached about and pretended to believe in… No, it was because I too was God … or one with God and had injured the God within. I never felt that God was within before.” He nodded skyward, “He was always out there somewhere in heaven up there. My life, my work, my marriage… it had all been a charade… the deluded notion that these were all mine. Then I heard Anna holler out from the shower and I snapped out of it.”

I put a hand gently on his hunched-over shoulder, “You had one of those hippy mountain-top experiences. Your religious shit sank in. You understood all of it but you can’t remember exactly what it was you understood. Right?”

“Yes, that’s it…. that’s it!”

I smiled, remembering my own revelations, and how hard I tried to be normal… a good soldier… a good husband… a good father… anything to make up for what I’d done. I wanted to cry but had to maintain control over both of our minds, “You will spend the rest of your life chasing that phantom. Now we have that in common, brother.”

“Well, Crash, I don’t like admitting this but I’ve always admired your aloof attitude… the way you seem not to give a shit about what most men do.”

I almost became offended but compassion was already seated, “Men… you’re talking about men. What do we know about what a real man cares about? You might be a perv, Larry, but we’re the same in a way. I know it but maybe you don’t. We don’t fit in. You don’t because you’re a creep with this façade of normalcy. You thought power and the prestige of money would fit you in but all its pretenses; cars, boats, houses and even a fake PHD, would change the fact that a seed of discontent had been planted long ago.”

“I don’t need a lecture from you about being a pervert…”

“Let me finish my thought, damn it. You think you don’t need it but you’re gonna get it anyway. The way I see it, even though I’m judging you on this, I’m as much a creep as you are. I’ve killed people too. Only, I didn’t do it for kicks. I did it because I had to but it doesn’t make a lot of difference to the men and women I killed.”

“What, you murdered…?”

“War… they don’t call it murder in war. When you see a mother crying over the body of what used to be her son, it becomes a possibility that it’s murder and that stays with you.”

“Would you change anything?”

“That’s the kind of question I hoped you’d eventually ask, Larry. You’ve come a long way since we started.”

“And the answer is?”

“No. I wouldn’t change a thing. I would, and have done for several lifetimes, do it over again a thousand times whether I thought It would make a difference. It wouldn’t change the fact that I got-off on it.”

Larry sat there lips moving like a fish gasping for air... like I'd zapped him with a stun gun or something. He hadn’t expected me to be comparing myself to him. I could tell he was more frightened at what I might do now by the way he shuddered at my admission. Empathy was one of the risks of using LSD for the purposes of interrogation. It put the vivid recollection of my trespasses in my face. I was overcome by a need to confess my sins too.

I wanted to understand him beyond the usual interrogation, “When you were a kid, Larry, did you ever take a magnifying glass to an ant hill?”

Larry surprised me when he almost gleefully added, “Not only that, a friend and I caught birds and mice. His name was Darwin…. Can you imagine that… Darwin liked to take the little critters to a torture chamber in his basement where he had made a tiny guillotine and he bound them up to apply electric wires before he decapitated them. You should have been there.” Grinning, he gestured with his fingers to imitate the wiggling of little legs, “The mice were the most fun because they made what sounded like tiny screams. Darwin said that they couldn’t feel pain like we do but we laughed our asses off at the tiny mousey screams…” he stopped as though he caught himself with a nasty truth.

 The drug can take the spirit on a trip through the meaning of a word. In this case, forgive us our trespasses, came to mind. Everyone who has ever had to recite the Lord’s Prayer has heard the words: in catechism class, in school, in Latin… the Pater Noster qui es in caelis… and English. Trespass means to go where one doesn’t belong and the latin verb used in it is dimitte nobis debita… or debt. Forgive us our debt as we forgive those who owe us! I’m thinking the two words are tied together. Taking another life is trespassing in the sense that a burglar breaks into somebody else’s house and takes something of value. Now the burglar has a debt he can’t repay. Forgiveness, there is no compensation for it if I can’t return what I’ve taken… thinking… thinking… links to karma. I’m in a metaphysical rut but I can live with it if that was all there was to it. It was the second part of the sin that Doc and I had in common. We took pleasure from it. That’s the problem most Vets have with what they had done in combat. The ones most troubled are the ones who know they took pleasure from it and felt omnipotent… in command over life and death… so much that they knew that they ought not get a hard-on emptying a clip into some poor fucker. We did almost bust a nut… a very few of us, but more than will ever admit it.

However, Doc and serial killers were a step ahead of me and my combat brethren. He still made excuses for my benefit but psychopaths don’t really care. No matter how I look at it, we both enjoyed the same intoxication of the kill. Did that make me a better man than him? Naw… It’s a common reaction… a feeling buried deep in people that is exploited in action movies when the villain gets his comeuppance. We get a vicarious charge out of it but not an erection for crying out loud. Aren’t most gruesome horror movies just one step down into the cellar of a snuff film? I can see the bumper sticker: Chainsaws don’t kill people, people with chainsaws do.

I recited, “ Et dimitte nobis debita nostra sicut et nos dimittimus debitoribus nostris. Anubis.. the dog from hell is our father."

"What are you talking about, Crash?"

"I'll be Dog Goned, Larry, I’m fucked because I’m not forgiving anyone that crossed the line with my heart, sure as hell, outweighs a feather.”

“Oh, it’s that Egyptian thing. I get it.”

 “Yes, right. Now it’s your turn, Larry, you can be honest with me. There was no other kid. You were Darwin, weren’t you?”