The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch, Volume 2

by Daniel Kraus

  Their beaming was enough to warm the coldest flesh.

  “To see all of you at once reminds me of our headway in finding purity through pain. It also reminds me that there is work still to be done. Of late when I contemplate our exemplars, the animal kingdom, I think of the natures we have yet to embrace. Does not the mother rat often lick clean its ratlings, only to devour them? Does not the female spider eat the male post-coitus? Do not sibling sharks consume one another while sharing a womb? Human society beyond our canyon contends a belief in a ‘natural law,’ which decrees what is or isn’t a so-called crime of nature. But what kind of natural law, I ask you, would animals themselves defy?”

  The Savages looked about, newly blushful about their bodies.

  “Do not be frightened by the childhood cautionaries of Hansel and Gretel. So common was the supping of cabin boys by shipwrecked sailors in the eighteenth century that it was called the Custom of the Sea. Without such customs there would have been no exploration. Without such exploration there would be no America. Our country exists because it has fed—nay, grown fat—off the blood of its own. Our charge, in comparison, is humble.”

  If the Savages had a spokeswoman, it was Wailin’ Wendy. She raised her hand.

  “You want us to . . . eat each other?”

  The middle of madness is the eye of a storm. I smiled.

  “If your sister feels pain, oughtn’t you consume it? If you feel pain, oughtn’t your sister reciprocate? Think of it! One reincarnates inside one another, back and forth, until the Savages become, in essence, a single Savage. Earth will soon be filled with more people than it can hold, and all will become cannibals. That is the ugly future. But conquer les premières répugnances, make the personal choice to take that path now, and you end the debate of whether one can ingest humans and remain human. The answer becomes: Who cares? Being human is not so great a thing to be.”

  Wailin’ Wendy faltered on the scarp of belief. and the Savages watched, licking their lips, dying to teeter after her—they were, after all, so very hungry. Wendy wiped the sweat from her neck before sliding her hand down to her concave stomach. She craved understanding even more than food, but understanding was impossible inside this laser of red sun, beneath this fry pan of heat, amid these lost miles. She’d settle for faith. From between fissured lips eked her final inquiry.

  “And you, Mother-Father? What will you eat to show us the way?”

  Horse sense was no whip against the wildest stallion.

  “Why, I’ve eaten too much already. Life and death: swallowed, excreted, planted, fertilized, harvested, and swallowed again, and again, and again. My chance at true savagery is gone. Yours, though, waits like a shivering rabbit to be caught, skinned, and run through with a spit. Trust in me, and I will be your master trapper.”

  Wailin’ Wendy gave up, her face folding into relief, and the women about her broke into broad smiles, some clapping, others jumping up and down. Only now do I appreciate Wendy’s question and wish that she’d pushed it harder. The truth was that I did continue to feed, not off the Savages’ flesh but off their spirit, energy, hope, and trust. All of it bolted down my dry throat, jostled about inside my cold belly, and distilled into the cheapest of fuels, the same that had kept the engines of despots, autocrats, and clerics chugging for centuries.

  VII.

  THEIR CARNASSIAL TEETH ELONGATED, OR was it just the drawing back of their ravening lips? Cannibalism was the answer to every pesky conundrum. Hate your sister? Love your sister? Have it both ways by eating her, an extremist feat of both aggression and intimacy. We quickly learned that nothing was more passionate; even the filthiest sex acts were cordial in comparison. What raw energy built up inside, our women erupted not via loins but jaws.

  The details sicken me now, but I wonder if that rising gorge is a critical failing—no one from the nation that wiped Hiroshima and Nagasaki off the map should be allowed to be sickened by anything. To wit, and to get this behind me: human muscle, said the Savages, tastes like beef, only is pinker in color and leaner in texture. And yes, my Dearest, Dismayed, Distressed Reader, you can live off it.

  Half of the women at Savage Ranch owned a zeitgeist book on female health, full of anatomical diagrams, called Our Bodies, Ourselves, and it was swiftly repurposed as a cookbook. A typical recipe was to remove a chunk of meat from one’s thigh—butchers would call the cut a “round”—and simmer it in broth before offering it to a friend. If the round needed to keep, it was soaked in salt and cured. It was an acquired taste, so new mothers rubbed blood on their nipples so that their breastfeeding children would develop the craving.

  No viscera was wasted. The sole of the foot was prized for its tenderness. The small intestine had a picklish zing. Brains were renowned for their fatty succulence. Menu hierarchies emerged. The young were tastier than the old, women were tastier than men, and those of French descent were tastier than those of Spanish (all agreed the English were too salty). When the Savages were through divvying up the body of an expired comrade—their togas snarled with blood, flecks of flesh in their hair, slack-jawed, paunch-bellied, fascinated by their own limb stumps—all that remained were bones, which were slow-roasted to make salt for the next meal.

  The more a leader asks of his followers, discovered I, the more inclined they are to comply and the more attractive the arrangement looks to drifters desperate for guidance. Though Savages had begun dying at accelerated rates, this ebb was eclipsed by recruits, most of whom came ready to work. Wailin’ Wendy need only issue a knife before they started slicing. I confess that I got a charge out of bandying about “cannibalism,” but the term was perilous, given law enforcement’s entrenched suspicion. Instead I promoted the cryptic “anthropophagy”—anything to safeguard my Savages.

  If you expect this bacchanalia would have forced Ruthie to decamp, you underrate her devotion to her oath to “rise to” my challenge and, unless I was mistaken, her developing wonderment regarding all of which I was capable. Though she hated watching anthropophagous acts, she approved of the results. Her financial ledgers swelled with receipts, and with the overage, she bought air purifiers and great industrial fans to reroute slaughterhouse odors, and when that failed, she simply aimed higher, dragging out our original architect, tipping him enough to ignore evidence of indescribable horror, and setting him to designing what she called a “revision” but could only be considered a “compound.”

  By fall of 1975 we were living in a building that shared nothing with our previous dwelling beyond its Southwestern flavor, a two-story, thirty-room estate with Spanish parapets, ceramic-tiled staircases with twisted-rope handrails, a multitiered private courtyard with reflecting pools, and a front-facing second-floor balcony embellished by carved balustrades and overhead reliefs. The house was flanked by leafy pergolas and palm trees, which overexerted our water pump—but who cared? The Savages, naturally, kept their tin lean-tos and burlap sacks. Otherwise, reasoned I, what would be the point of our gleaming white oasis, at which they could stare until they believed they had found a sort of heaven.

  My single request was a menagerie. It was disgraceful, argued I, that Savage Ranch—it was called a ranch!—didn’t include any of the animals we worshipped. The idea had me more excited than I’d been in decades, and in neglected In Our Image notebooks I sketched out my vision. I didn’t want the moat-circled zoological gardens of eighteenth-century royals. What I wanted was a stronghold of America’s most vicious predators. I’d have a cougar run, where the yellow-eyed stalker could entertain us with its speed and agility. I’d have a coyote pen, where we could watch their coiled bodies spring after inserted prey. I’d have a gray wolf cave, good and dark so we could see the glow of their eyes. Badgers, bears, wolverines, bobcats—I’d have them all, and, oh, what we could learn from how they operated their mandibles.

  Too expensive, dismissed Ruthie, and that was nearly the end of it. Only my round-the-clock whining about how marvelous a shark tank would look in the middle of the des
ert wore her down. A fish tank, said she—would that shut me up? Like a lapbound child whose Santa had nixed a requested pony, I hurriedly recalculated. Yes, a fish tank! Exactly what I wanted! I would fill it with the world’s foremost maritime maniacs, from the venomous blowfish, whip-tailed devil rays, and poisonous jellyfish to the hinge-jawed piranha, electric eel, and Siamese fighting fish. Every day, thrilled I, the tank’s water would turn pink with blood!

  Nothing so stirring occurred. Species that couldn’t survive a controlled environment went belly-up overnight, and the rest were peaceful, winnowing in patterns that, after a time, made me feel peaceful as well. My chief achievement was that the tank itself was a spectacular thousand-gallon glass casket that rested atop girders over the doorway to the second-floor balcony, from which, it was assumed by my ardent anthropophagi, I’d one day deliver the most important address of all.

  The assumption made sense. Every cult propagandized a climactic event that would give meaning to their miseries; even Manson’s rabble had moiled toward Helter Skelter. But I proudly regarded the Savages as the anti-cult cult, operating not under a premise of repairing society but indeed the opposite: doing nothing whatsoever for an undeserving country except providing a mirror to its degenerative blight, the same thing I’d been doing since my body’s first spot of rot.

  The Savages, of course, would be proven right. The balcony would, in fact, be the setting for the Third Address, but not for a while. Three years passed, the heart of the 1970s. We Savages missed disco dancing and London punk, the rise and fall of fondue, a movie by George Lucas that I refused to believe could rival the one by George Romero. We grinded forth, day to week to year. How many thousands of pounds of human meat did Savages ingest? How many ecstatic amputees did I squire toward death?

  I never calculated, for my fancies were reserved for fish. I climbed a stepladder to the aquarium each day to sprinkle food at ones I’d named after secondary characters in danger of being forgotten: Jonesy the Black Oranda Goldfish, Mr. Hobby the Blue Diamond Discus, Dixon the Pinktail Chalceus, Harold Quincy the Koi Angelfish. When these fish died, they were replaced by others just like them—at last, a way to share immortality with my mortal bedfellows. After feeding, I’d recline beneath the tank and gaze upward, dreaming that I was still at the bottom of Lake Michigan, the bullet hole through my heart blooming blood as bright as coral.

  From 1976 to 1978, I had sporadic chances to pull myself from psychosis by conversing with rational beings. A flop-haired pop-artist called Andy Warhol tried the hardest to be my savior. Repeatedly he wrote letters averring that one of his “superstars” (from what I could tell, this is what he called his artist friends) had spent time at Savage Ranch, and he was eager to profile me in Interview magazine. Everyone, said he, was due fifteen minutes of fame, and mine had come. It all seemed like too much work; I had fish to feed. I ditched the letters, and when Warhol and a corps of superstars came to Arizona to make a plea, I had Wailin’ Wendy frighten them off. By then she’d amputated half of her left arm, most of her toes, and her full right buttock, but her powers of intimidation were whole.

  Only in November 1978 did I half-turn from the mollifying undulations of freshwater sloshing. I’d given up newspapers, but Ruthie, as watchful and in-the-know as ever, made a point of setting several issues by the aquarium. I relented and regretted it. Top news was the collapse of a cult with alarming similarities to our own. The Peoples Temple, it was called, and like the Savages, they’d left cushy American homes to find transcendent isolation—in their case, the Guyana jungle. When a congressional envoy visited Jonestown and found that people were being held against their will, the cult’s leader, Jim Jones—always pictured in aviator shades just like mine—pulled the plug, killing the interlopers and ordering his entire congregation to drink cyanide-laced Flavor Aid. Initial articles reported four hundred dead; then the authorities began moving the bodies and found an underlayer of dead children.

  I felt a twinge of what Ruthie must have been feeling, an emotion I hadn’t felt in years:

  Concern that even I, Mother-Father, might have gone too far.

  The final tally in Guyana was over nine hundred dead. Savage Ranch, by comparison, had reached a peak population of only 291, and when a wave of parentals reenergized by Jonestown stole back mutilated daughters, the rapid decrease in our numbers was glaring. By New Year’s Day we’d lost seventy-five Savages, not to brilliant blood loss and effervescent infection but to relatives who knew nothing at all about true devotion. It rankled me enough that I almost left the aquarium room. The papers detailed how nobody wanted the Jonestown corpses, but we Savages loved our dead! So much so that we gobbled up every last scrap of them.

  In 1979, I turned one hundred years old—or seventeen, take your choice—and intended to mark the occasion by at last sneaking onto the balcony and gazing proudly down at my sleeping followers. When the clock struck midnight, however, the hundred years took on physical weight, and the idea of moving exhausted me. When had I become so old? Did it happen to anyone once they became set in their ways? I sat back and looked up at my fish. I hadn’t named any of them the Barker, not even the algae eater who survived by sucking spume from the bottom of the tank, and yet it was the old villain’s curse, delivered after my 1902 duel, that I heard in the hum of the air pump and the burble of water.

  Do you have any idea, good sir, the chaos you shall cause, the killings that will happen in your name?

  VIII.

  THEY CAME FROM NEW YORK, Los Angeles, Florida, and most of all San Francisco. They came in slim-cut suits, handlebar mustaches, cropped denim, and tight T-shirts, humming their funeral dirges of ABBA, the Bee Gees, and Donna Summer. They came with lymph nodes the size of golf balls, or dotted with purple lesions called Kaposi’s sarcomas, half-blind from unbridled infection, bent with diarrhea, and shriveled to 120 pounds. They were easy to identify as gay. Even costuming and decrepitude couldn’t hide the remnants of gym-toned muscle, meticulous grooming, and superb posture.

  I was appalled. Yes, I’d been promiscuous in my day, and yes, I’d adored promiscuous women, but, dammit, this was different! These fairies, fruits, faggots, and queers, the lot of whom had oiled their iniquitous slide toward buggery with cocaine, quaaludes, and inhalants—I’d heard the stories!—and limped their wrists from untold acts performed in the petri dishes of gay bathhouses, came a-straggling to Canyon Diablo, first one per season, then one per month, and finally one per week. Why, of all places, Savage Ranch?

  I’d never had to dwell upon the physical relationship between Udo von Lüth and Otto Rahn; given the regime under which they’d operated, their attraction had likely been of the unrequited kind. Now I was forced, more or less gun to head, to imagine unspeakable homosexual conduct. I paced the compound muttering vulgarisms until I came upon Ruthie in her office, bleeding a red pen across columns of figures. She won the quick-draw of complaints.

  “These deviants don’t have any money or any property, and have you seen their cars?” She threw down her pen, stomped to a table holding fresh boxes, and set to gutting one. “Their families probably cut ties with them years ago, and no wonder. We should think about kicking them out. I’m sorry, but that’s how I feel.”

  From the box she removed packages of medical masks and latex gloves. I watched as she gave the equipment a trial run, snapping on the gloves and looping the mask around her ears.

  “They’re sick.” Her voice was muffled. “I’m not taking chances.”

  From beneath the burbling aquarium, I parted the balcony door for the first time, just a sliver, and peeked. What I observed, increasingly as the weeks progressed, were Savages who, to a woman, rallied around these sick men who tumbled from overheated autos straight onto the desert floor. Just as Mother-Father Savage posed no traditional male threat, neither did these emaciated incurables.

  Gradually I came to an opinion crosswise to Ruthie’s. The cops who’d called the ranch a leper colony would have felt vindicated by these scou
rged inductees, but to me the gays’ gaunt shamblings recalled beings of purer purpose: Mr. Romero’s zombies, dead yet alive, eating while being eaten away. Because of the incubation period of their strange illness, each wave arrived in markedly worse condition than the previous, though each wave also cringed less when they learned the truth of what happened every day on our patch of desert. They’d already seen too much horror to blink.

  We Savages, concluded I, could not fear their disease. Nay, we must welcome it! The bug that fed upon their flesh aged them as quickly as my own condition aged me slowly. Together, did we not equal a healthy human being? I made Ruthie vouchsafe, against her protest, that our new guests would continue to receive generous welcomes.

  Savages during one-on-ones could only say that the “gay plague” hounding the newcomers was thought to be sexually transferred. The men, said they, told stories of hapless doctors plugging their bodies into high-tech torture machines while firing off birdbrained theories, from the cunctative effects of Agent Orange to nuclear power leaks. Some docs had dismissed the gay plague as FUO—Fever of Unknown Origin—a moniker that, though docile at first, came to take on folkloric foreboding.

  So rapidly had my disgust turned into interest that I insisted that those men healthy enough be worked into my schedule. One million urgent questions had I! How the devil could a man not desire soft, squeezable women? Did the seduction of men require a different skill set? Most of the gays had to be wheelchaired in by the masked-and-gloved Ruthie, who’d agreed to comply only if they entered via the back gate so as not to contaminate the compound. They shivered poolside, first baffled, then grimly amused at the naïveté of my queries. Though ill, they were eager to please me, for when they’d set out on this, their life’s final road trip, they’d assumed the mythical dead man of the desert to be a myth. But here I was, rotting away just like them, except through some miracle able to withstand it.