There was no defending oneself, Western civilization was being overcome by the whole of the Sur, the volatile and backward Sur, the wild and awful Sur, with its thousands of gringo haters who were rising in hordes following María Paz and Emperatriz, the leaders of the great invasion that surged up from Panama, crossed Nicaragua, grew into a tsunami in Guatemala and Mexico, and the Sur was unstoppable as it poured through the holes in the vulnerable American border. The North was already flooded by the black tide of the Sur; it was within, cleaning its houses, serving food in restaurants, filling cars with gasoline, harvesting pumpkins in Virginia and strawberries in Michigan, day after day repeating “have a nice day” with a terrible accent and a sly smile… hiding Blackhawk Garra IIs in their pockets, envious of the gringos’ democratic systems and ready to seize their property. The good guys, who had already lost Texas, California, and Florida, now would lose Arizona and Colorado. New Mexico and Nevada were already strongholds of the enemy, and one by one, the other states would fall into the hands of the bad guys. Unless, of course, Ian Rose managed to react and hold back the onslaught of this anxiety crisis. That’s what the doctor had told him he was going through, an anxiety crisis that had its origins in the death of his son, and to control it, he was prescribed Effexor XR, which Rose didn’t like because it made him dopey and because he held on to the hope that with time things would get better on their own.
I’m so hot, he thought, as he changed his pajamas drenched in sweat. He needed to calm down, find his point of balance again. Best if he left the bedroom, the scene of his nightmare, and went into the kitchen, which was always cooler, with bare feet on the cold tiles, open some windows, refill the dogs’ water dishes, have a nice glass of apple juice with lots of ice. By the time he went back to bed, he was afraid to fall asleep lest the hallucinations begin again, so he put on the television and for the thousandth time watched An American in Paris with Gene Kelly. He fought sleep for another reason as welclass="underline" he feared that if he fell asleep he’d return to Manninpox, that place that he despised but that was beginning to ensnare him as it had ensnared Cleve. Awake, he could escape its influence, but if he fell asleep, who knows? He’d run the risk of being transported there, as if sleepwalking through the woods, hypnotized, betrayed by his own steps that led toward those porous walls and forced him through them against his will, past the secluded courtyards and through the gloomy hallways that smelled like the circus, a bad combination of urine and disinfectant, as his until recently loyal Taylor & Son boots, in a sudden display of insolence, led him to the very entrails of the place, to its feverish heart, the tight rows of cells, where the feminine breath stuck to the walls like water stains, and where the pride of caged lionesses would be waiting for him, him, Ian Rose, to lick his face and destroy it with one blow. In spite of the apple juice, the nightmares continued, and Rose had no choice but to take the Effexor he had avoided taking that day. He began dozing off around dawn and was sound asleep halfway through Some Like It Hot, another movie he knew by heart. In the end, he did not know how he had been able to defend himself, or what masthead he had held onto to withstand the siren songs of the inmates of Manninpox; but as it was, he awoke late that morning safe in his own bed, or rather he was awakened by the hounding of his dogs, who did not understand why at that hour of the day they had not gone out or been fed breakfast.
Later, while taking a shower, Rose got an idea. Although “idea” isn’t exactly the word, more like the flash of an image that assaulted him along with renewed uneasiness about his years in South America, the solitary figure of a man nailed to a cross. That was it: he knew it immediately. The murder of the policeman had not been a hate crime as the press had asserted. That phrase “racist pig” could have well been on the wall before the murder; such graffiti was likely common in a multiracial and troubled neighborhood like the one in which María Paz lived. It was no wonder the neighbors had been complaining. But the thing with the ex-cop was about something else. It had been a crucifixion without a cross. The wounds on the body were the same as the ones on the crucified Jesus, one on each hand, one on each foot, and one on the side of the torso. Rose knew what the stigmata was because he had learned about it in Bogotá. Rose wasn’t a religious man and had never been interested in such things, but the issue had become a priority the moment that his son, Cleve, then seven years old and likely because of the influence of school lessons in Bogotá, announced that he wasn’t only going to become a Catholic but also a priest. Edith was horrified, one more reason for her to hate Bogotá. But Ian had taken it as a joke. “Do it if you want, son,” he had told Cleve. “It’s your choice. You can be a Catholic if that’s what you want, as long as you don’t become pope.” But when the boy began to swear that he saw the Sacred Heart of Jesus in the bark of trees, Ian Rose realized that the issue was serious and decided to look into it seriously. The Christ that he came to know in the Baroque churches of the colonial center of Bogotá had nothing to do with the fair and incorporeal bourgeois of his Protestant family. This South American Christ was a man of the people, a working-class hero who attracted crowds with his melodramatic confrontations, a poor man who suffered and bled with them, a Lord of the Wounds, a Master of Sorrow, who fascinated crowds with his masochistic displays. Rose grew frightened that his son had been influenced by such mentality, which according to him was extremely twisted, and that was another reason that he did not prevent Edith from taking the child out of Colombia. And now, there in the shower of his house in the Catskills, Ian Rose thought he understood all of a sudden that Greg, the ex-cop, had been murdered by crucifixion, or something like it. The crime had been a ritual murder, that was the essence of it, and not a hate crime as the papers asserted. Why should Rose believe the newspapers anyway? Since when did they know anything? María Paz offered a different version of events, so in a towel and still soaking wet, Rose went to his desk, took out the manuscript, and reread that part a few times. She maintained she was innocent, and her argument was quite convincing. But if that was the case, who the hell had crucified her husband? A gang of wrathful white haters, as the NY Daily News assumed, or some religious fanatics? And what about that gift-wrapped Blackhawk they found in her apartment?