8
In a hard pool of saffron light, locked within the bowels of the “Max,” bound, chained, shackled, tethered, and restrained, the beast sits. Waiting.
Deep inside D Seg, Disciplinary Segregation Solitary Confinement—called “the hole'—America's only level seven inmate sits in heavy chains; silent and unmoving.
Huge. Beyond anything you can imagine. Arms and legs like steel tree trunks. Butt, belly, and upper torso heavy and ugly with great rubbery tires of hard fat over the body muscle. Scarred, dimpled face partially covered with a mouth restraint, a “biter,” the head appears to sit directly on the torso. The gigantic boulder of a neck is not visible. That part of the face that shows is not unlike a mound of wrinkled dough, but for the eyes—which are tiny, hard, black, and unblinking. There is no life in the eyes of the beast. They are unmistakably a killer's eyes. But these eyes see nothing.
He is far away, inside the nightmare of his strange and amazing mind. Deep within his head he is lost, as free and unbound as a wild dog running through the hills. Several levels of the beast-man's complex brain are at work.
His first books were encountered while he was in a foster home. He learned something that gave him an edge, and the book, which happened to be an adult instruction manual and not meant for the eyes of children, discussed in clinical detail certain vulnerabilities of the human body. He seized on this scrap of information as if it were the Rosetta Stone, using it to decode one of the mysteries about death. He saw that books and other printed matter, when applied to actual experimentation, could further enhance one's ability to destroy an enemy. He began reading for self-defense.
Where are books kept? In public libraries. Logically then, that was the next step: to penetrate the libraries and obtain all the relevant information he could lay hands on. Already adept at swiping toys, comics, candy bars— kid stuff—he graduated to library books. He preferred stealing them to checking them out, on principle, and so Daniel began his lifelong affair with the library system.
Reform schools and adult jails did not offer the wealth of literature one could find in Kansas City's public libraries, but there one could attend impromptu classes taught by street professors of B & E, armed robbery, escape and evasion, identity change, disguise, unarmed combat (from street-fighting to sophisticated martial skills), demolition, and a thousand other nasty subjects from con stings to murder modes.
He would use this information to get better data, since he was aware that these were failed exponents of their respective spheres of expertise, but in many cases their experiences could point the way for him. He soaked up information like an immense sponge, always seeking more.
By the time he'd done his second bit in prison, he had probably ingested (sometimes literally!) twenty-five thousand stolen library books. He once computed his total of overdue fines, and it was in seven figures. He'd swiped everything—from elegant, rare, quarto-size volumes of arcane subject matter to massive coffee-table books which he smuggled out under voluminous shirts and overcoats. He left many a little old lady gasping at the sudden downdraft of noxious sewer stench as he clomped loudly through dusty reference rooms in his gigantic 15EEEEE combat boots.
What did he do with the books? Think of a huge, wrinkled desert that stretches across the mindscape of the imagination. This is the monster's brain. For thirty years or so he's used this desert as his private dumping ground for information.
Every wrinkle is deep, like a chasm; a dangerous, deadly repository filed with stolen library books. He reads the books, sometimes eats pages that he particularly likes—one of his weird and inexplicable habits—chewing the corners, sucking the foulness out of them, devouring special passages that somehow imprint themselves on his remarkable memory.
His memory banks are not the same as yours and mine. At the heart of his brain there is something akin to a mental computer, and it is this oddly efficacious organ that retains data for him.
His is no “photographic memory,” which he knows to be a misnomer, but is a freak of nature known as eidetic recall. Perhaps a part of the gift of physical precognition is the essence of this ability: to retrieve those shreds of seemingly forgotten knowledge that become input relevant to specific situational confluences.
At the moment he is reading from the pages of a scientific quarterly he once scanned for pleasure: “Massim Matrilineal Reincorporation and Kula Ring Rituals.” He is reading, mentally, about his favorite subject. Rereading and savoring the bizarre anthropological studies of Massim mortuary practices. Considering, with the greatest pleasure and fascination, the cultural implications of eating the dead.
But his mind does not work the way an ordinary man's does. As he mentally screens the retained word groups, graphs, sometimes entire pages at a time, he brings to the reading greater focus, concentration, and specificity. When most of us read, it is a passive act, but in the beast's labyrinthian brain recesses, his computer searches for stored data. Searching his spectacular knowledge of the clinical disciplines and general sciences, he probes for hidden gold: some piece of information that, when retrieved and applied to the subject matter at hand, will give him—once again—that sharp and lovely edge.
A remembered and reread phrase has triggered a flow of images, and he scans them, letting them flow through his subconscious as he reads the now familiar word blocks: he senses blood pouring from extremities, secondary anatomical targets, superior vena cava, pathology of death fetishes, inferior vena cava, theoretical fluid mechanics and applications of Cartesian and general tensors, right auricle, hydrastatic wave-effect stress in surface flow, right ventricle, molecular symmetry in abiogenetics, pulmonary artery, aliphatic open-chain structures.
And as the subconscious triggers
The beast is aware of these intrusive thought associations only in the most subliminal way as he senses severing of pulmonary artery, raw umbles, mucoprotein absorption, human and animal spoor, application of nonmetric affine geometry to the healing arts, pulmonary veins, geodesist survival vaults, left auricle, fundamentals of vertebrate rhythmic contraction of life-support pumps, sevenfold man in phylogenetic transition, left ventricle, involuntary organ donations, oracles and auricles, dimensional space and karmic mythologizing of physical nonspace, the human aorta, images that flow by as he scans and senses related possibilities.
The beast makes an involuntary noise under the facial restraint, coughing loudly into the biter. A harsh and frightening sound like the attempted ignition of a cold engine. The sound of an outboard motor's initial cough as the starter lanyard is pulled. The barking, metallic noise of a recalcitrant lawn mower. It is the sound of “occupant” laughing.
Does the sudden sound jar him or is it something else? Whatever early-warning system protects this strange, anomalous creature suddenly shuts down all his thought processes. He no longer reads, puns, fantasizes, or scans the bloodied, inexplicable darkness of his mind. He is back in the now, physically and mentally in Cell Ten of the hole, in Marion Federal Pen, and inside his head he pours blackness into his mind until it is absolutely empty and black as night.
Slammed down tight in solitary confinement of one sort or another, beyond the fringe of sanity, Daniel Edward Flowers Bunkowski has become master of his own inner wellspring. Calling on deep paranormal reserves, forcing himself through the walls of normalcy, he has learned to control his vital signs: to slow and still his breathing and the beating of his strong heart, and to freeze his mind into a state of perfect calm.
