Broederschap

At night, when a man is given to the abysmal expanse of thought—I stirred and felt my heartbeat up to my throat. I sipped some flat air and remembered all the times I was punished, punished without atonement. Well, I always wanted to be the punisher. I exhaled and felt atonement and inhaled—what a surprise!—punishment. And so on.

Let me tell you a story of punishment. I was walking along the promenade with one eye to the tide and another to the criminal rabble of tourists. Flows and ebbs. They come and go along with the North Sea seasons, bringing nothing but their garbage, stains upon my earth. And of course crime—I meant that literally. I had just finished my patrol circuit. I begin at the Plage de Westend and along the Zeedijk I end at the foyer of the casino—the whole endeavor takes an afternoon, at least.

My days are episodically oriented, you see. Once in my life I had felt a thrill and sometimes, if I were so fortunate, wisps of dreamlike calm. Now, I am accustomed to inundation. Scenes postmortem, let me explain: a sponge of a man, with an algae plumage for a chest, stained crimson, foam-green, and left to soak in his own bile on the eastern jetty. Good god! That was a disgusting sight. Really, the worst of my time on the circuit. Usually I’m accosted by some sunburnt hag about a crustaceous migrant taken to leer at her and her iridescent-pearl family. I generally leave those cases in the hands of the Eurozone.

Inundation! But not this time, no, I tremble at sights of punishment. I was called to post at Mariakerke Strand, about a man trawling a little too deep into the sand at low tide. I’d say he’d gone a couple meters into the earth already, for I could see only glimmers of dirt flying out of the hole. The sun shone right through them and it was frankly beautiful. So for a moment I waited before approaching–wisps of calm, you see.

A head zipped above the meridian— I called him out—a head with eyebrows drooping towards a long maxilla caked in sea grime and salt.

Please leave me alone–he noticed my badge and still belted such drivel—the tide won’t retreat forever, God willing. Well you’re much below the digging limit and I’ve been informed you don’t have a permit so I won’t ask again. I told him.

A spade went flying from the depths, and then the man.

I should kill you. So I reached for my own weapon. I should kill you right now and then your precinct might have something interesting to report.

You see I could have wrangled this freak by the gruff of his neck right then and I was indeed obliged, but I had an inexplicable moment of pause, a lapse in ability, say–and you could try to apprehend me officer but I’ve built an impressive hole here and it may go right under your feet if you’d care to find out. He scurried back under.

Alright, wait, I said, wait–I released my hand from my holster and approached the hole, actually quite an impressive hole, and I crouched to have a closer look at the man who now lay prone in one of several atria of dirt. So, then, I asked, what’s your goal here? China? I’m afraid you’re a few thousand kilometers off.

You’d wish. Yes, the Flemish think of China often. He shuffled a bit. The shore was empty, no one to witness my wavering duty.

Why, you live in a shithole, you’re aware. And you’re about to be interred in a grave of sand. I snickered. I mean your world, your world is a true shithole, a truly shitty place! He laughed and I almost did too. I can’t disagree. You serve impurity, you make a buck off what you yourself don’t even believe in, you know this. I’m fixing this for you.

And he dug inwards once more as I sat at the hole’s periphery, hands folded. I felt a bit more like a social worker than a police officer and at this moment I asked what, exactly, he is trying to fix, to which he emerged again.

Decadence! A world of decadence and serventry. The Flemish know this world intimately, whereas my heritage dictates otherwise. Yes, the dictates, that’s it! I am looking for the dictates, officer. He drew a long breath. And the search has taken me here, to your dreary city.

From where, I asked, and he responded in a short breath—Quimper, all the way from Quimper, the north of France—fuck! It’s Bretagne, I mean. Ah, and now you understand my difficulty as I mutter such lies, base lies. You wouldn’t tell me you’re from the north of Wallonia.

I would not, I said. Then you would do well to join me down here. His ramblings had brought me to my limit and so I demanded he remove himself immediately. But while I reached for my holster I lost my hold and with a jerk of my knee I broke the perch of sand which sat me above, sliding inwards to meet the vagrant almost face-first, to which he grunted, baring a set of lambig yellow-stained teeth.

There, there! Step back, I belched at him, ridiculously–there was nowhere to step.

Calm it, officer. Oh, this is punishment, my first thought! To which he leered. Oh, misfortune, officer!

I scrambled to find myself hanging onto a thread or rather a sliver of his polyester trousers. He had turned around by making himself into a profane bug-like ball, somersaulting into a deep tunnel and I thought to myself good lord what an endless hole. I ought to crawl after him, I thought, but had neither the fortitude nor the contortions. He was really just a meter away–I saw his Cheshire grin once more through a sluice of the day’s last light.

My palms felt covered in slime, a slippery itch I could shake off only with a crack of my jaw. It was his polyester trousers, their grotesque sheen, and my failure to orient myself in the psychedelic crags of this estuary of dirt. There, there. Dear failure, intimate failure. There, there. Hush! Ys is calling, Gradlon too, listen! The Flemish, officer, they yearn for freedom, don’t you? Let me quote an old master while I have you: the combined legacy of the Celtics, that is the Welsh, the Irish and of course the Bretons, could never stand to the gilded bulwark of the French. I forget who said that. That is my failure. Inherited! You understand, your bumbling is not of your own doing. You’re under their yoke too. But quite the happy servant, I see. This is what brought you here. There, somewhere, I mean, is Ys, a city off the shore, oh a wonderful city, truly, with troves of art and culture, and the dictates of course, the prerogatives. Salvation!

He shimmied himself further. I sat with an arm twisted under my knee.

Oh, Ys! City fit for a king, quite literally. I'm close—the channel locks are close. Those locks, do you know? They were opened by the hand of Satan, a fate ordained by debauchery, carnal libations, and with that the city flooded, the once-impervious city, sunken to the depths of the ocean, along with its canonical literature, soggy and untouched for thousands of years, a literature which guides me here, and you, to complete so humbly this hole.

Droll! I pulled my taser and shot a bolt into the abyss, the Byzantine cord, so sinuous, and with what aim I had, I stunned the man.

Enough of that.

Such was the day, so I can recall. My chest thumps at the image of his arachnid body. Of course that was not the end–I later visited him in the holding cell which was foul-smelling and full of the most wretched souls. I called him out to his arraignment to which he stoically received a civil penalty and six months unsupervised probation.

Well, I hadn’t said much to him then, but I wish I did, because in the following weeks I had tested all sorts of theorems with all sorts of experimental parameters in a frail attempt to disprove his conjecture, namely, that I indeed lived in a terrible world, a shithole, his words.

I enrolled in tennis lessons, I refraternized with some old, nameless friends, reorganized my subscriptions, and even considered looking for a wife again. All to no avail. No, nothing I could do would prove the criminal wrong. Garbage! I was beside myself for this period, and more importantly my Flemishness was ever-receding. That pure, essential duty which once drove me to protect and serve the civilian became but a frayed canvas to picture my deepening and total apathy.

So I sought out his address from the precinct, information I am of course entitled to, and whatever might happen next, I thought, that entitlement was worth something.

The criminal stayed in a flat outside the city, so reported, and seems to have rented it for more than six months, alone, moreover. I deliberated for days, I felt my brain rotting like that sea-corpse I found some years ago, but decided in the end to visit. I remember this day quite clearly, yes, it was a day nearing Carnival and an exuberance or perhaps foreboding coursed through the city’s gray veins.

It took thirty minutes to arrive at the apartment complex, a tattered block of symmetrical living quarters which the Germans might call Plattenbauen. I appreciated their simplicity, however, a humility in design that melded well into the general muted landscape of outer Ostend. Hole man was in block four, floor eight, apartment seven. I paused and reflected at this triad of numbers—four, eight, seven—as they felt to me indicative of a force beyond the domain of civilization. Some ancient sequence, a pagan ratio, a perfect pin-code. This calmed me in anticipation of meeting once more a man whose existence was prefigured in organic compounds and slime.

But he greeted me without reproach. Perhaps he didn’t recognize me. I take it, I said, you haven’t found what you’re looking for.

No, not yet. And he left the door to his hovel ajar, tip-toeing into his ill-decorated living room which was thick with a sort of pickled air. I guessed it was an invitation to enter and so I did.

Is this part of my probation? He asked. So his memory remains. No, it isn’t, I said. Should it be?

I haven’t done anything wrong. Presumably so, I said, and shut the door. I have nothing to offer you. Perhaps an explanation, then. You see I’m collecting intelligence for an internal report, which, so I assured him, has no bearing on your sentence. A report on the current state of the beaches. I lied.

He had his hand on an exposed pipe and the other lodged between the pages of a thick book, a tome really, the title of which I could glimpse only the word legends.

So we have a dilemma here–he chuckled–a fool in the company of another. And you’ve made yourself quite at home. He slid the book off the table it lay, put it between his armpit, and trotted into his kitchen. Made yourself quite at home, officer. He called out. And yet I have nothing to offer you! I could hear a kettle boiling.

Except my explanation, ah, right. Here it comes. I yearn for the sea! That is all. Really. My heart throbs, like an adolescent at the brink of maturity, for its foam, its cool mists. A romance rather unrequited, as all romances with the natural world. Ah. He groaned. Ah! He was louder and I took some steps forward.

Oh, in the ocean, if you look closely, you can see the shimmers of that old city, do you remember? Ys. Arts and sciences. An unavoidable catastrophe. Some similarities to us, today. Allow me. A generalized sodomy lurked in those garish corners, the bars, the brothels, yes, even the quaint living rooms of all the happy family homes. Profanity, simply said. Ys!

I was young. He hobbled to a tawny, mangled sofa.

I was young when I first witnessed catastrophe. How old were you? Doesn’t matter. Picture this: a little mollusk, something or other, some incoordinate marine creature, whose body consists of absolute shapes: helices, tori, and fractals upon fractals wrought into its hard, exogenous shell. It washed ashore who knows how long ago. Time passes and its figures crack in the gray sun, it is stepped on, it returns to the sand and is forgotten. A sorry sight. Such was the fate of Ys! So it is told. I had visions of this perfect city, visions then defiled, not only by its myth, but by an iconoclasm, a cruel iconoclasm that shook me to my core. When I was young.

He had been pointing in my direction for the duration of this insane sermon, and suddenly his finger slackened.

Well, enough of that. I won’t dream that up again. Certainly not for you. That, officer, would be a real crime. He fixed his gaze towards mine and I attempted to be stern.

Let me ask you, as a steward of the law. Can a man be punished for his imagination?

If it binds the man to act, yes, I suppose he can. I responded.

And what about a dream? Do I act then? When I toss and turn in my sleep at the terrible image of a dream? And if those tosses and turns destroyed a population, ended a life, who is responsible?

Generally my bedroom is completely empty to avoid this kind of situation. That was the truth.

Like a psychiatric patient! You wouldn’t want to be culpable in your weakest moments.

I suppose not.

And what if the man feels his life is but one waking dream? A condition from antiquity. The man, bear with me, is genuinely convinced that somewhere beyond his dream-world lies a slumbering body whose motions, tosses and turns, say, have some inexplicable force over such a world as it is experienced. A spasm in the hand, a torrent of rain. A twitch in the neck, a murder. His nostrils flared. I generally try to discipline myself not to shake that slumbering man.

I admit I had the same premonitions but generally attributed them to a kind of early onset schizophrenia to which I am genetically predisposed.

But how difficult it is sometimes. I nodded my head like a lunatic. When I caught myself in this gesture I felt flushed and a wave of vertigo befell me. How difficult our lives can be, when we cannot picture the perfect dream, cannot even deign to do so, and are instead confronted with images of unfathomable terror.

And that was when I broke. My fortitude broke, I mean, and a slurry of sudden and unintelligible memories, memories which seemed to me coded in a foreign language, pierced my heart in the presence of this blathering criminal. My face puckered, my lips retreated into my mouth like a skittering rodent and I blurted out to him what could you possibly know about unfathomable terror?

Look around you. Like an idiot, I did. You’ve seemed to have lost everything, why else would you be here? Be quiet. I was. I was quiet, meek even, and felt my sanity slip each second I stood dumbfounded in the hallway of this stinking shack. Unfathomable terror. I felt I was about to fall through the floorboards, I could hardly find my balance, I thought I was having some sort of seizure.

He sprung to shove me and asked if I was going crazy. His fingers as they landed upon my shoulder felt like a swarm of insects, aphids descdending to feed on a flower’s limp petal, and I reacted accordingly, fleeing out the door, that is, block four, floor eight, apartment seven–I counted again–and I didn’t once look back.

Such was the tumult of our first meeting. Weeks passed, and with what rapture. I had lost all self control and had basically abandoned my duties as a public servant. I became accustomed to long periods of utter silence. When Carnival arrived I began to smell tinges of blood wafting through the air, especially and most potently when I passed crowds gathered in public spaces. This smell took the place of any kind of meaningful sensation and drew me to animalistic ideations. My brain weighed heavy in my skull like a sack of rotting meat. I would also spend many hours on the promenade unabashedly ogling women, staring at their malformed bodies and pondering the Belgian gene pool. Faces of my fellow man morphed into absurd caricatures and mysterious substances, except that of the man from the hole, the criminal, whose complexion was burned into my mind like an atlas of the known world.

I became convinced in my despondency of a possible reality which lived utterly independent of Wallonia and France. I read many of the Breton greats, all the separatists and federalists: the life of Célestin Lainé, the dramas of Abeozen and the lyric poetry of Glenmor, the manifestos of Georgeault and a slew of Celtic legends. I began plotting scenes of hysterical violence against the arbiters of an unforgiving hegemony, a hegemony that crippled altogether Flanders, Bretagne, and, of course, myself.

I met with the criminal multiple times in this period, always at his flat. During this budding friendship we set out to realize one such scene: the criminal had told me of a professor at the Université libre de Bruxelles who was also some sort of consultant in the Belgian senate. He had apparently contributed innumerable research towards the nationalization of key resources in the port cities along the coast of the North Sea, that is West Flanders, but more importantly had come from an oppositional party in Brest, where the criminal had personally known him and his family to be enemies of the Breton separatists.

With my waning clerical abilities I was able to retrieve the professor’s home address from the precinct. One evening we drove to Brussels, to the municipality of Ixelles. I believed at this point that this boyish impulse could be at best a kind of reconnaissance mission and at worst an act of harassment. We were at the flat in less than an hour and while I had no misgivings about ringing the door of the professor in the middle of the night the criminal had gone ahead and broken one of the ground floor windows and crept inside. I admit I had felt a momentary sensation of freedom and ecstasy. This quickly disappeared as I followed him inside to a completely lit household with the professor sitting at his desk with a kind of truncheon shoved at the nape of his neck. The criminal struck the sorry professor at his temple. He made no sound of resistance as his body collapsed. It wound up in a strangely ecclesiastical shape, his knees buckled and his forehead alighting gracefully the hardwood floor.

I did not protest and sat with an eye to the entrance while the criminal went about his belongings. He returned with a crate of memorabilia, it seemed, stacks of miscellaneous papers and signed documents, and within a few minutes we were carrying the man and his things out of the front door. We stashed him in the backseat of my car along with the crate and I sat with him while the criminal drove. For a long stretch of road and silence I gazed at his reflection in the side mirror and felt as if I were a child on his way to the first day of school or perhaps the funeral of a bitter relative. I don’t remember exactly what we had discussed. I suppose it was mostly vague meanderings about futility or the necessity of vengeance, or ancient fate, or beer. I also had only a faint idea of what we were going to do with our hostage and his documents, which I imagined were very important and discretionary, as fitting a man of national consul and influence

I dozed off for a while, I remember, but awoke to a twitch in the professor’s body. I looked at him and his eyes as they cracked open like an oyster and shouted for the criminal to stop at a gully along the freeway. I pushed the professor out of the door and the criminal turned off the headlights and without concealing our faces we had taken him by his thin hair–which frankly embarrassed me to punish a man with such hair–and we threw him into a pile of asphalt runoff. I took the baton and murdered him. The criminal looked at me and said something about my official training to which I gave an insane grin. We hauled the body back into the car. He rasped something about divine providence.

We drove in the direction of the Mariakerke Strand, the beachhead where only some time ago I had wavered at apprehending this sick criminal, and when we arrived we put the professor’s body in the site the criminal had dug his humble hole or at least close to it. We dug further and further and I felt sweat in nooks and crannies I never knew existed. I prayed, yes, I prayed for myself and almost for the criminal but certainly not for the professor. Then I found myself thinking of my father, and his father as well, which was but a brief image of an anonymous face with an elongated maxilla, an image which quickly dissipated into a dream mist of coral dust and a million seashells. I hoped the professor's body would wash away at high tide, perhaps back to the antechambers city of Ys, but I think we put him deep enough in that impressive hole that he would remain there forever.

I looked at the stars and then saw my accomplice voraciously tearing into the professor’s belongings, dropping what he deemed useless into the beach grave with the body, until he found a magazine that was at least a few decades old. I snatched it from him and he froze, staring at me with illuminated bug eyes and a clenched jaw.

He lurched at me but missed and tripped in the sand and I kicked him in the head, sending him hurtling backwards. I had almost opened the magazine but he had thrust his teeth into my ankle and squealed some unintelligible noise.

Defilement, you sick bastard, you wanted it all along. Damn you! I should have killed you when I had the chance, sick, defiling bastard. Here was a surprise.

I scrambled a couple meters away.

The cruel image, images from hell, you and him both– he thrust his finger to the grave–Alain–which was not the man’s name, the professor, I would not forget this–I sent him to hell and you brought him back, along with that terrible tome.

I looked at the cover and indeed there was the name Alain, the author’s surname, Alain. Him? I asked.

Alain! Him–I pointed to the grave–this, this is Alain? That imp with his grotesque tricks, his corruption, leave him slaughtered!

And I looked into my accomplice’s incorrigible face and was overcome with a wisp of that silent, dreamlike calm upon the realization that he had never met this man, this professor, had never known him, had only known that he was in possession of this magazine or rather book of illustrations. And that this professor probably had nothing to do with subverting the separatist cause, the emergence of Ys, the political erasure of Flanders and Bretagne–this I had also realized and moments later I took the cudgel and turned back to my accomplice and drove it into his terrified face until all the life left his feral body.

I stood breathless and peered out at the ocean's horizon. My accomplice lay strewn out beneath me, a heap of dark, inhuman shapes shimmering under the black moonlight. I fell back and sat on my calves in an uncomfortable posture and opened the magazine.

The pages were filled with poor etchings, scatological scribbles of a pagan courtly life. Princess Dahut in her Chambers: a woman pleasures herself with the hilt of a bloody chalice. Evening Fête: a half-dozen men wearing topcoats and nothing more contort themselves in an intestinal pile of limbs and hilarious white goo. And then there was The Wintergarden. The princess hangs naked and crucified upon a floral cross. Candles enter her body from all possible entry points and she drools like a dog. The Cuckold King, another. Old Gradlon is bound from a trapeze in some sort of baroque stable as a bulging steed enters his wife, the sorceress Malgven. A Menagerie. A group of impassioned handmaidens discover their genitals have transformed into barnacles and they all love it very much. The Last Day of Bacchanalia. A massive figure emerges from a dark sea carrying two limp men by their jaw. He wields an ungodly erection and it points downwards to a sliver of fading light beneath the water.