Neo-noir comics, originally inspired by Frank Miller’s Sin City, and frequently printed in black and white, is a bristling and electrifying genre, as if on amphetamines, generally misogynous and eschatological and centered on sadistic, disgusting, maniacal crimes, with decadent and vicious detectives.
It’s not my genre, of course: my suicide poet and his girl are little sisters of the blind compared with the freaks that appear in noir. I told Ming more or less what I already knew of Sleepy Joe, his habits of burning and destroying on a massive scale, the dice on the eyes of a dead ex, the ritual with a broomstick involving Corina, the ritual with a knife involving his dead brother, the bone-chilling event with the dog.
“He doesn’t sound like a big-time murderer,” Ming told me, “more or less a small-time killer, timid, unsure. At least for now, although maybe he may yet do more terrible things.
“His ceremonial executions are crude, but whatever they lack in finesse, they make up for in conviction,” Ming continued. “For now, he threatens and assaults but does not kill, or he kills animals but not humans. Although things may escalate depending on what is propelling him. There must be a touch of necrophilia. It’s possible that he nailed the corpse of the dog to the wall after it was dead.”
“Which means he tortures cadavers?” I asked.
“I don’t think he sees it as torture, more like purification or glorification. Perhaps he makes his peace with the dead through the ritual. It could be how he asks forgiveness, as in how he sliced the corpse of his brother with a knife, a brother with whom he identified. Greg, the older brother, his idol, possibly the only person who cared for him and worried about him. Sleepy Joe must have adored him.”
“Yeah, he adored him, but snatched his wife. Some love.”
“There you go. He adored him up to a point. Look closely at the details: it was a pure instance of substitution; when he took the wife, he put himself in the shoes of his brother, he became the brother, and made María Paz the ardent object of his desires. When María Paz didn’t want anything else to do with him, she stripped him of very fundamental things, castrated him when she rejected him sexually, negated the identification with the brother, and to top it off he believed she took his money. He must have felt as if he had been skinned alive, anyone would have felt as such. He beat her but did not kill her because that would be the end of his desideratum, and he’s no idiot. But he beat her almost to death, and began to destroy the beings she loves. She is left with nothing and no one. You understand. That’s the message he is sending her: ‘The only person you have in this world is me.’ You have not told me that she is with you now, but I imagine she might be. If so, be very careful. You are getting directly in the path of Sleepy Joe, a complicated individual.”
“Can you sketch me an outline of his modus operandi?” I asked.
“Fuck, Jack the Ripper had a modus operandi; this bastard barely knows where he is heading,” Ming said.
At that point, I told him about the Eagles case and that I thought Sleepy Joe was the culprit.
“It has his trademark, a ritual over a cadaver,” Ming responded as he fed mosquito larvae to the iridescent and bluish Wan-Sow, the best of his bettas. Ming meant that unexpected forces were pushing Sleepy Joe to more dangerous levels. “If Sleepy Joe is Eagles’s murderer, it would mean that the guy is getting close, Cleve.”
If he is the murderer, he is among us. Although it is highly unlikely that he’ll remain wandering around there, given that since the night of the murder the area is crawling with patrol cars. The cops come by our house at least twice a week, calling out at every door to make sure everything is okay. This has become for us a protective barrier against Sleepy Joe, and at the same time the greatest threat, because if they discover María Paz, she is history. That is, those who can do us in are also our protectors; damned spot we’re in, so dual and complex. As the Coen brothers scripted for George Clooney in O Brother, Where Art Thou? “Damn! We’re in a tight spot.”
For now, I have María Paz by my side in this attic refuge, and she is my only reality. She peruses my books while eating cheese, leaving them all greasy. For long periods, she does nothing, she wastes all the hot water while showering, she brushes Skunko and paints her toenails. Afterward, she lies on my bed and watches some reality shows that I think are horrible but that she won’t miss and then recounts them to me episode by episode in complete detail. First thing in the morning, she does aerobics following the instructions of a woman called Vera in a program called In Shape with Vera. She has a double portion of ice cream for breakfast, later she puts on my clothes, that is if she doesn’t remain in her pajamas all day, and entertains herself rummaging through my drawers and disorganizing my things. She sits by the side of the window hidden behind the curtain to spy on the deer that ravage our garden and the moose that turn over our garbage cans looking for food. She appears serene, light — I would say radiant, in any case — very beautiful. I am madly in love with her.
But I live in a state of alertness with my hairs standing on end. I spend many hours psychoanalyzing the brother-in-law, dissecting his personality. For obvious reasons, I have been interested more in his story than the story of the murdered brother. Arms trafficking seems like a very ordinary subject matter, one more chapter in the kind of corruption that is eternal. And besides, I hate cops, and any atrocities that they are accused of committing are possible and likely probable. In contrast, I have reached some interesting conclusions about Sleepy Joe. As a child, he must have always been scared to death. In general, those types of bullies have been bullied themselves, they become abusers because they have been abused, anybody who reads comic books knows that. I imagine that in his case, old childhood fears must have reemerged in adulthood, creating a sick and distorted ritualization. María Paz recounted that when Sleepy Joe was a boy, the mother forced him to recite a prayer called “A Thousand Jesuses” that was a repetition of the name a thousand times. Jesus, Jesus, Jesus. Of course, maybe this wasn’t the best tactic, a thousand Jesuses is an exaggerated number of Jesuses; you can go a little nuts during the few hours on your knees repeating Jesus in Slovak.
She has also told me that in the bedroom of Greg, Sleepy Joe, and the rest of the siblings, there hung a large portrait of the baby Jesus nailed to a white cross. Not the adult Jesus but the baby Jesus. Crucified. Such a thing, a child as a crucificado.
I would not have been able to open my eyes with that portrait in the room, that would have been the least of it, but I would not have become a master criminal because of it. Who knows what else could have happened to him, from what root the tendency toward evil had sprouted.
There must have been other things, because in the end being the son of a mother who says the rosary every day does not automatically lead you to nail a dog to a wall. It was too obvious to look automatically for Christian roots to any perversions, but perhaps the drama has less to do with Christianity than with the Carpathians, their region of origin, mountain ranges that I imagine gloomy and menacing, boulders cut by picks and vertigo-inducing cliffs, with frozen landscapes and a national history crisscrossed with everyday butcheries and cruelties. The whole Slovakia thing may be nothing, I couldn’t even pick out its exact location on a map, but that’s how I imagine it during my nights of insomnia. Then I remembered about the lands of Vlad Tepes, Dracula, the insatiable impaler who liked to eat his dinner among the dozens of Turks whom he had ordered to be strung from behind. And don’t some of Sleepy Joe’s actions seem Dracula-like: Corina and the broomstick?