LITMIR.BIZ

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      To John Duncan, a five-second shock probably feels as if a hive of wasps has come alive inside him, swarming and stinging through bone and flesh in an angry search for an exit. His teeth chatter like one of those old novelty sets of wind-up dentures, and then they stop clacking against one another when his jaws clench tight. He shudders, writhes in place, as if tortured by clonic seizures, which continue for a moment after his tormentor lets up on the trigger; his body jerks, arms flail, and then semiparalysis locks him in his corner of the bench. He is pale and glistening with perspiration. A thread of drool unravels from one corner of his mouth. Faithful to his dog, he neither calls out for help nor screams in pain.

      If Duncan makes a scene, Charlie won’t follow through on his promise to cut the eyes of the shepherd. He likes dogs. He isn’t a monster. He hates people, but he likes dogs. The threat to harm Argus is just a tool to control the blind man, to ensure that he will be submissive.

      The second Tasering lasts ten seconds.

      Traffic slows and then surges on Santa Monica Boulevard, each motorist in his own world as surely as he is isolate in his vehicle, oblivious of the drama on the park bench as he is also abstracted from the lives of the other citizens of the city. John Donne wrote, No man is an island, entire of itself, which Charlie Weatherwax knows to be the ripest bullshit. The human species is an infinite archipelago of islands with rough seas separating them. All men and women are vortexes of pure self-interest, their self-love whirling at such velocity that true concern for others can never escape the centrifugal force of their narcissism.

      To see his victim’s vacant stare, Charlie plucks off John Duncan’s sunglasses and throws them aside before Tasering him yet again, this time for fifteen seconds. Throughout Duncan’s body, every fascicle of nerve fibers short-circuits. The sightless orbs roll back in the man’s head as he is once more gripped by seizures, so that his gaze is without irises, blank and white, a stare as pitiless as nature itself.

      Charlie puts away the Taser and rolls the half-paralyzed blind man onto his right side, against an arm of the bench, just long enough to extract the wallet from his right hip pocket. He finds a photo ID and memorizes Duncan’s street address. He returns the ID and leaves the wallet on the bench.

      Hardly more than a minute has passed since Charlie administered the first shock.

      They still have the park to themselves, though a woman pushing a stroller is entering from Wilshire Boulevard.

      Propping Duncan in a corner of the bench, Charlie says, “Do you hear me, Johnny?” The blind man makes a wordless sound of distress, and Charlie amps the menace in his voice. “Do you hear me, Johnny?”

      Duncan’s words are slurred, but his eyes roll back into place, like symbols on the wheels in the windows of a slot machine, bright blue but oblivious. “Yeah, I hear.”

      “I looked in your wallet. I know where you live. You ever tell anyone about this, describe me to anyone, I’ll pay you a visit.”

      “No. I won’t. I swear.”

      Charlie rises to his feet. “Random acts of cruelty, Johnny. That’s what the world’s about. That’s the sum of it. Get ready for the next one. It’ll be coming. They’re always coming.”

      The woman with the stroller has stopped at a distant bench. If she eventually continues in this direction, she will not find the blind man while Charlie is still in sight.

      He continues on his way. When he glances back, he sees John Duncan leaning forward on the bench, vomiting on his shoes.

      In a couple of hours, the dog will wake. An hour after that, it will be alert and stable enough to lead its master home in the early dark.

      The pain John Duncan has experienced is nothing compared to the profound humiliation that he now endures and that will seethe in him for days to come. Perhaps he will fall into despair, which is not necessarily a bad thing. If it does not destroy you, despair can be a fire that burns away the erroneous understanding of the world by which so many people live. If all of the blind man’s illusions can be reduced to ashes, if he can come to understand the truth of the world, that it was not shapen except by chance and that it has no meaning, that nothing matters but power, its acquisition and its use, that power is won by the infliction of pain and humiliation on others, then he will be free for the first time in his life. Even with the limitations of his disability, he might more often avoid being a victim.

      Serving as a missionary of pain and humiliation, committing random acts of cruelty, is not work suitable for a common street thug or a crooked politician. Both drug-pushing gangbangers and corrupt senators lie to themselves and to others, claiming to act for the benefit of the clan, for the common good and social justice, in response to oppression, when in fact they seek power for power’s sake. Liars and those who live a lie cannot remake the world for the better. A missionary, like Charlie Weatherwax, must embrace no lies, must live by no illusions, bleak as that might be, for power is the only truth, and truth is the source of power.

       4

      With its thousands of blacktop rivers and millions of metal currents, the Los Angeles evening rush lasted not one hour, but three or four. The Valley streets overflowed with vehicles surging-slackening-surging to and from the dysfunctional freeways. Vikram gave Jane an address, but the flood of traffic didn’t frustrate her. There were many questions to be answered, explanations to be made, and an understanding to be arrived at before they reached their destination.

      She said, “You could have confronted me in the library.”

      Vikram shook his head. “Not safely, I think. When you see me suddenly show up, you don’t see a lean but sinewy dark-eyed black-haired young man who might have been a Bollywood star. Instead you see FBI, and you think you’re trapped. So logically, an unfortunate confrontation ensues.”

      “‘Lean but sinewy’?”

      Vikram shrugged. “When describing myself to various online matchmaking services, the word ‘slim’ can be interpreted as meaning skinny or worse. Anyway, say I show up in the library and say just maybe you don’t shoot me, there’s still bound to be a scene that people are witness to. They call the police, they post it on YouTube, and we are toast.”

      “Your relatives herded me into that vacant photography studio. Why weren’t you waiting for me in that place, where there weren’t any witnesses?”

      Vikram raised his right hand, pointing at the roof of the SUV with his forefinger, as if to say, One important point to consider. “Remember, the chase had only just begun, and you were virtually sweating adrenaline.”

      “I don’t sweat virtually.”

      “Nevertheless, the math said the risk of my being shot on sight was still too high at that time.”

      “‘Math’?”

      “I have my formulas. It was wiser to lead you through a few twists and turns, give you time to understand this wasn’t a standard law-enforcement operation. Then I show up alone, no backup, and you realize I am harmless.”

      “Who is Garret Nolan?”

      “Mr. Motorcycle? He’s not one of us. He was just a hiccup. There are always hiccups. Some say that life is one long series of hiccups, although personally I’m not so pessimistic. Farther along that street from Mr. Nolan, a Honda waited at the curb, its engine running. A bright red Honda. Studies show that, in a crisis, the eye is drawn to red things. My brother, wearing a flamboyant red shirt, was prepared to leap out of the red Honda and dash into a Chinese restaurant, ostensibly to pick up an order of takeout, but in fact giving you a chance to steal his wheels, which of course we could track by its GPS. However, you found Mr. Nolan first. Beware, the traffic light is about to turn red.”

      Jane braked to a stop. She looked at her passenger.

      Smiling into her silence, Vikram said, “What?”

      “You

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