Blow Fly

76

JEAN-BAPTISTE STRETCHES OUT on the thin wool blanket he soaks with sweat each night.

He leans against the hard, cold wall. He has decided that Rocco isn't dead. Jean-Baptiste does not fall for yet another manipulation, although he is not certain what the purpose of this manipulation might be. Ah, of course, fear. His father must lurk behind this lie. He is warning Jean-Baptiste that suffering and death are the reward for betrayal, even if the traitor is the mighty Monsieur Chandonne's son.

A warning.

Jean-Baptiste had better not talk now that he is about to die.

Ha.

Every hour of every day, the enemy attempts to make Jean-Baptiste suffer and die.

Don't talk.

I will if I want. Ha! It is me, fean-Baptiste, who rules death.

He could kill himself easily. In minutes he could twist a sheet and tie it around his neck and a leg of the steel bed. People are misinformed about hangings. No height is necessary, only a position-such as sitting cross-legged on the floor and leaning forward with all his weight, thus putting pressure on the blood vessels. Unconsciousness happens in seconds, then death. Fear would not touch him, and were he to end his biological life, he would transcend it first, and his soul would direct all that he would do from that point on.

Jean-Baptiste would not end his biological life in this manner. He has too much to look forward to, and he joyfully leaves his small death row cell and transports his soul into the future, where he sits behind Plexiglas and stares at the lady doctor Scarpetta, hungrily takes in her entire being, relives his brilliance at tricking his way into her lovely chateau and raising his hammer to crush her head. She denied herself the ecstasy. She denied Jean-Baptiste by depriving him of her blood. Now she will come to him in humility and love, realizing what she did, the foolishness of it, the joy she denied herself when she further maimed him and burned his eyes with formalin, the chemical of the dead. Scarpetta dashed it into Jean-Baptiste's face. The evil fluid demagnitized him briefly, and ever so briefly, pain forced him to suffer the hell of living only in his body.

Madame Scarpetta will spend eternity worshipping his higher state. His higher being will direct its superiority over other humans throughout the universe, as Poe wrote under the guise of a Philadelphia Gentleman. Of course, the anonymous author is Poe. The invisible agent that is the transcendent Poe came to Jean-Baptiste in a delirium as he was restrained in the Richmond Hospital. Richmond was where Poe grew up. His soul remains there.

Poe told Jean-Baptiste, "Read my inspired words and you will be independent of an intellect you will no longer need, my friend. You will be animated by the force and no longer distracted by pain and internal sensations."

Pages 56 and 57. The end of Jean-Baptiste's limited march of reasoning powers. No more diseases or peculiar complaints. The internal voice and glorious luminosity. Who's there?

Jean-Baptiste s hairy hand moves faster beneath the blanket. A stronger stench rises from his profuse perspiration, and he screams in furious frustration.