Missing Chapter

Short Story

Janus looking forward and backward – the criterion of twin tongues spinning through one’s mind cranked by the brain and driven by the heart but run by the Devils that even haunt you by the day, chasing you through the dim hours of the night and lice. It is the long goodbye, even if in altered states in the house of games. Backwards it is a phantom of the monastery with the patina of the Catholic church, mother of mothers father of fathers, and in enclosed spaces the lover of lovers in a Cassock robe collarino made from cotton fibers. Please forgive me for the run-on sentences I do not know the limits of expression or grammatical cohesion. But these lessons are difficult and the harder they come the harder that they leave. But then I flunk but walk cheerfully. Where now are the dreams of youth on this day in March 1916.

Then I set foot on the creaky wooden bridge looking down at the floating weeds. It is spring, it is summer, and it is late autumn because the days in El Paso on the Texas border between America and Me-ix-co do not have the same response that the other ways into either country stare back to the immigrant.

I looked at the low skyline where even the trees needed to be imported and realized I was now an immigrant to the United States.

In rows, the men with badges but no uniform were searching each man trying to find a louse even just one, and take him to the vinegar and kerosene bath. And they tried 10 times as hard if it was a woman because you could capture the left hand on a foldout camera to take a picture that would be carried into the bars and displayed for a pretty penny which was all that the customers could expunge while they drank their beer and whiskey and whisky.

I reached the front of the line just barely over the bridge and was frisked knowing that I had no lice when I left Me-xi-co.

The throng slowly marched as a group in the metropolis of the unknown because we realized that the executioners of the innocent gathered around as if near a campfire on the intermezzo.

The man in the black coat frisked me but I saw in his left hand a single small louse which he must have juggled in his sleeve to catch as many greasy Mexicans as he could for it was his duty to protect the mayor and everything that the mayor wanted the mayor got. Whether it was on the train that stopped at the Santa Fe Bridge or by walking over with hat in hand.

The man was ghastly and he maniacally chuckled because one more greasy was caught in his lair. Then he directed towards the kerosene baths. The only amenity was that we were separated by sex but that was not for us but for the protruding cameras that slid to the juiciest points to take a snapshot of.

First I started towards the men’s bathtubs but the man took me towards the paddy wagon and only then did I realize that he was taking me to jail with the other convicts and ruffians. There must have been something in my eyes like a parade or jour de fête in my darling Clementine praising the la dolce vita. I was afraid that I would be shot on a hard days night and dropped within the Red River far far away.

But instead, he took me into a place where it was a mad mad mad mad world and he ordered me to strip naked but with no camera to observe the action.

Then my back burned with the mixture of vinegar and kerosene and a match lit up the air and scorched the open flesh as a dozen caught fire. There was no investigation of a citizen above suspicion because we had broken some law and that is why they sent us to this place.

The air, the air, was growing in with gas and thick with smoke. And I could see my hands turn black not with such but with the skin all of a flame.

The hair singed. The eyebrows woosh away never to be seen again. The bath gave up the vinegar the cans drenched out, as if by city lights. And then I felt the moment where to become not to be there was no question left for me to ask.

Then they wiped away the soot in seconds as if the Devil’s backbone had finally given up the safety at last to the Ministry of Fear on the waterfront.