Blow Fly

14

"WHAT YOU DOING in there?"

An officer bangs on the door. Two mocking dark eyes are there again, between the bars in the window.

"Playing ring-around-the-ass again. Man, your guts are gonna come out one of these days."

Jean-Baptiste hears footsteps on metal catwalks and other death-row inmates yelling their usual complaints and obscenities. Not including Jean-Baptiste, 245 men wait their turn while lawyers continue appeals and do what they can to persuade district supreme courts or the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn a sentence or at least convince a judge to rule in their favor and allow DNA tests or some other trickery. Jean-Baptiste knows what he did and pled guilty, despite the histrionics of his attorney, Rocco Caggiano, also owned by the Chandonne family.

Rocco Caggiano s feigned vigorous opposition to Jean-Baptiste s pleading guilty before the judge was very poor acting. Caggiano abides by his instructions, just as Jean-Baptiste seems to do, only Jean-Baptiste is a very good actor. The Chandonne family believes it best for their shameful, disgusting son to die.

Why would you want to sit on death row for ten years? they reasoned with him. Why would you want to be released back into a society that will hunt you down like a monster?

At first Jean-Baptiste could not accept that his family would want him to die. He accepts it now. It makes sense. Why would his family care if he dies when they never cared that he lived? He has no choice. It is clear. If he didn't plead guilty, his father would have seen to it that Jean-Baptiste was murdered while awaiting trial.

Prison is such a dangerous place, his father softly told him in French over the phone. Remember what happened to the cannibal Jeffrey Dahmer? He was beaten to death with a mop, or maybe it was a broom.

Jean-Baptiste was emotionally beaten to death, all hope gone, when his father said that. Jean-Baptiste relied on his mind and meticulously began to study his predicament as he was flown to Houston. He vividly remembers the Welcome to Humble sign and a Holiday Inn with a Hole in One Cafй, which made no sense, since he saw no golf courses in the area, only parched leaves and dead trees and what seemed to be an endless stretch of slack telephone lines, scrubby pines, feed stores, mobile homes, decapitated buildings and prefabricated houses on cinder blocks. His motorcade turned off North 59, all those federal and local agents treating Jean-Baptiste like Frankenstein.

He sat, perfectly well behaved, in the backseat of a white Ford LTD, manacled like Houdini. The motorcade turned onto a deserted road overgrown with brush that thickened into dense forests on either side, and when they reached the Texas Department of Criminal Justice's Polunsky Unit, he felt the sun reclaim gray skies, and the day turned bright. Jean-Baptiste took it as a sign.

He waits patiently. He imagines meteor showers and great battalions marching because he wills it. How simple! People are fools! They set up such foolish rules! Prison officials can take away his radio and punish him by grinding up his meals and cooking them into food loaves, but no one can neutralize his magnetism and legal right to send and receive uncen-sored mail. If he marks an envelope or package Legal Mail or Media Mail, no prison employee can open it. Jean-Baptiste sends mail to Rocco Caggiano whenever he pleases. Now and then he receives mail the same way. That is the most special treat of all, especially when Madame Scarpetta wrote him recently because she cannot forget him. She was so close to ecstasy and by her own foolishness robbed herself, cheated herself, of Jean-Baptiste's benevolence. His selfless intention was to make her lovely body let go of her soul. Her passing would have been perfect. Finally, she realizes her terrible mistake and now makes an excuse to see him.

/ will see you again.

Jean-Baptiste has enough information to topple the entire Chandonne cartel.

If that is what she wants, why not? When she comes, he will find a way to finish her release, to bless her with what she wants. The ecstasy. The ecstasy!

He tore her letter into small pieces and ate each word, chewing so hard he cut his gums.

Jean-Baptiste lifts himself off the toilet and doesn't bother flushing. He yanks up his pants.

"Who's there?"

The white V-neck shirt has DR for Death Row in large letters stenciled in black on the back. It is the abbreviation for doctor. Another sign. He is hers for now, and she is his forever. His prison fatigues are soaking wet with sweat. They stink. He sweats constantly and smells like a dirty animal. He smiles as he thinks of the last inmate executed several weeks ago, an old man named Pitt who killed a policeman in Atlanta. Pitt murdered prostitutes for years without mishap, dumping his victims in parking lots or the middle of the road. He broke the code when he stabbed a policeman thirteen times.

The rumor in the pod is that when the doctor sent the fatal cocktail speeding through Pitt's IV tube like a train through a tunnel, death occurred in exactly two minutes and fifty-six seconds. Three physicians take turns working the executions-again, more stories from the media and from inmates who have returned from Huntsville after stays of execution. There is a pediatrician, a heart surgeon, and a woman who set up a family practice in Lufkin a few years ago. She is the coldest executioner of all. She comes in with her black bag, does her job and leaves, indifferent and arrogant, speaking to no one.

It arouses Jean-Baptiste to fantasize about a woman doctor invisible in a small secret room, waiting for the signal to kill his strapped-down body. He does not fear the death of his body, for his mind is his soul and cannot be destroyed. He is electric. He is a fluid. He can detach his mind from his body. He is part of God. Jean-Baptiste sighs in his bunk, where he lies on his back, staring up at a ceiling that is incapable of preventing his clairvoyant journeys. Most of the time, he transports his spirit back to Paris and flies unnoticed, acutely aware of sounds in a way he never was before. He visited Paris just the other day, right after a light rain, and tires swished on wet pavement, and distant traffic was surprisingly guttural, reminding him of his stomach growling. Raindrops were diamonds scattered over the seats of parked motorcycles, and a woman carrying lilies walked past him, and he floated in perfume.

How observant he has become! Whenever his soul visits Paris, the most beautiful city on Earth, he discovers another old building wrapped in green netting, and men blasting limestone with air hoses to clean away centuries of pollution. It has taken years to restore Notre Dame's creamy complexion. Monitoring the work is how Jean-Baptiste measures time. He never stays in Paris more than a few days, and each night he sets out toward the Gare de Lyon, then to the Quai de la Rapйe to gaze at the Institut Mйdico-Lйgal, where some of his earlier chosen ones were autopsied. He can see the women's faces and bodies, and he remembers their names. He waits until the last Bateau-Mouche thrums by, until the last ripple of wake laps over his shoes before he strips naked on the cold stones of the Quai de Bourbon.

All his life he has braved the murky cold currents of the Seine to wash away the curse of le Loup-Garou.

The werewolf.

His nocturnal bathing has not cured his hypertrichosis, the extremely rare birth defect that causes babylike hair to cover his body, and continues its cruelty by adding a deformed face, abnormal teeth and stunted genitalia. Jean-Baptiste immerses himself in the river. He drifts along the Quai d'Orlйans and the Quai de Bйthune to the eastern tip of the Ile St.-Louis. There on the Quai d'Anjou is the seventeenth-century four-story town house with its carved front doors and gilded drainpipes, the hotel particulier where his prominent parents live in obscene luxury. When chandeliers are ablaze with crystal and silver, his parents are in, but often they socialize with friends or drink their nightcaps in a sitting room that cannot be seen from the street.

During Jean-Baptiste's disembodied travels, he can go into any room of the hotel particulier. He moves about as he pleases. The other night when he visited the Ile St.-Louis, his obese mother had several more folds of fat beneath her chin, and her eyes were as small as raisins in her bloated face. She had wrapped herself in a black silk robe and wore matching slippers on her stubby feet. She smoked strong French cigarettes nonstop as she complained and chattered to her husband while he watched the news, talked on the phone and went through paperwork.

Just as Jean-Baptiste can hear without ears, his father can become deaf at will. It is no wonder he seeks relief and pleasure in the arms of many beautiful young women and only remains married to Madame Chan-donne because that is the way it must be. At a young age, Jean-Baptiste was told hypertrichosis is congenital, but he is certain it was caused by his mother's alcoholism. She made no effort to curtail her drunkenness while she was pregnant with him and his twin brother, who calls himself Jay Talley and had the good fortune to emerge from their mother's womb less than three minutes after Jean-Baptiste. His brother was born a perfect specimen of maleness, a golden sculpture with an exquisite body touched by blond hair that catches light, his face formed by a master. He dazzles everyone he meets, and the only satisfaction Jean-Baptiste finds in the injustice of their births is that Jay Talley, whose real name is Jean-Paul Chandonne, does not look like what he is. For that reason, he is worse than Jean-Baptiste.

It is not lost on Jean-Baptiste that the several minutes separating his birth from his brother's is how long it is supposed to take for Jean-Baptiste to die on May 7. Several minutes is about how long his chosen ones lived, as blood spattered walls in peaks and valleys that looked very much like an abstract painting he once saw and wished badly he could buy, but had no money and no place to hang it. "Who's there!" he screams.