The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch, Volume 1 Read online

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  TO

  MR. GRANT WILLIAM ROSENBERG

  OF CHICAGO, LATELY OF PARIS

  THIS BOOK,

  WHICH OWES GREATLY TO HIS FRIENDLY COUNSEL,

  IS

  Respectfully Inscribed

  BY

  THE AUTHOR

  OVERTURE

  Beneath the World Trade Center

  New York City, New York

  LET US BEGIN WITH THIS:

  I am seventeen years old.

  And also this:

  I have been seventeen years old for over a century.

  Even as I lay down these first few lines of what I intend to be the definitive chronicle of my miserable existence, I can hear Héctor apply the final blanket of cement to my tomb. Héctor, it turns out, is the long-awaited hero of this tragicomic opera. It is he who agreed to wall me inside of this chamber, first with plank-wood, then cement, then brick, and, at last, cement again. It is the greatest favor a human being has ever paid me and it shan’t go unremarked upon, not even by a degenerate of legend such as myself.

  My dear Héctor. Such men were rare when I was born in 1879. More than a hundred years later, I find they are rarer still. He is built like a wardrobe, his boxy torso denotive of his Mayan heritage, his slicked onyx hair and brushy mustache testimony to his laudable ignorance of fashion. He has nobler concerns. His wife. Their five children. Squirreling enough away to graduate the lot of them from an apartment that, he has told me in broken English, chatters at night with cucarachas.

  So it is for virtuous reasons that he accepted my substantial cash offer. The windfall for him and his family will be great; so, too, is the risk. Should we be discovered, both of us would be imprisoned posthaste—of piddling consequence to me but a dire situation indeed for Héctor’s family, who would swiftly fall victim to the vilest cockroaches the city has to offer.

  But we shall not be discovered. Héctor may be without formal education but he is most assiduous. What’s more, the man is pure-hearted; not once during our delicate process of negotiation did he recoil at my yechy stench or wrinkle his nose at the leathery skin showing beneath my long hood and betwixt my cuffs and gloves.

  Before he sealed the final fist-sized hole connecting me to fresh air, Héctor peered inside and asked once more if I wished to call it off. It was compassion I saw in his somber brown eyes; I recognized the emotion even though, for decades, I’d kept a lion tamer’s distance from it. Meanwhile, emotions far more familiar to me fought like the lions themselves: my zeal for life clawed to shreds by a paralyzing confusion of purpose; my pride of independence gnawed away by shame for those left behind; my confidence of character swallowed down by frightful realizations, always arriving too late, that I’d failed myself, and others, again and again.

  “Thank you,” said I. “But no.”

  “I wait a day. Come back, knock-knock. You change opinion, maybe.”

  “Do not think of me again. That is an order.”

  “You’re the boss, Mr. Finch.”

  But his reluctance was obvious. To him I seem like a teenager with a lifetime still ahead of me. He cannot fathom my motivations and I know that my entombment will forever haunt his dreams. Why else do you think I made his payment so handsome?

  “Good-bye, Héctor. Take care of your family.”

  He gave quite a pause before nodding.

  “Que le vaya bién. Adiós.”

  Héctor knows how to build a wall. In seconds he was gone. And so was the world, every last wicked, wonderful speck of it. For a time I did not stir, so laden was I by the disappointment that manacled my remaining three limbs. I had hoped—so fervently had I hoped!—that the darkness of this chamber would be indistinguishable from the darkness of Death that has claimed every person I have ever known, ever hated, ever loved, ever killed. Alas, no. It is just dark. And only I, as usual, have been called upon to serve a never-ending sentence.

  Calling this final home of mine a closet would be generous. It is a rhomboidal surplus shaped by accident from the steel girders and concrete foundations propping up the skyscraper above. I am lower than the lowest subway level, deeper than the deepest culvert of electricity and sewage. This is a netherworld restricted to those underpaid drudges like Héctor who have earned security clearance. It is a space so narrow that, just shy of six feet, I cannot lay outstretched, so foreshortened I cannot stand. No matter. Héctor’s penultimate favor was to run a power cord into this locker, and from that cord dangles a single lightbulb.

  There is something brave about this bulb. I think it shall endure. My task here, after all, should not last more than a few measly months. Before me, on a child’s school desk that Héctor installed, is a box of pencils (ink pens I deemed too vulnerable to the subterrestrial chill), a cheap plastic pencil sharpener, and a stack of brand new spiralbound notebooks, the same kind children tote to school; oh, would that I had known such a conventional life!

  My right hand, the only one left, is supple enough to grip these pencils. This is what matters. The rest of me—well, I am long past the point of narcissism. The vandalized condition of my skin no longer infuriates me; my missing chunks of flesh are irrelevant; the wounds suffered from a hundred conflicts serve as plot reminders, nothing more. Down here it is dreadfully cold and I can feel—as much as I “feel” anything—the chill where my leg bones are exposed to open air.

  But that leg has lost its wandering wont; it does not itch to kick free of Héctor’s barricade and walk once more upon the face of the Earth, and for that I am gladdened. Too much harm has been wrought by me in your overworld of sunshine and noise. What, I ask you, is the foremost attribute of youth? It is hope—but not for me it isn’t. What buds of that emotion I once had have frozen over a hundred winters.

  My hunch is that your schoolmarms repeated to you the same old saw mine repeated to me: history, they chanted, is written by the victors. Thus the contributions I’ve made to your world, debatable though their worth, have been all but wiped from the records. Any accounts that you’ve read of me were, at best, unauthorized, and at worst, spurious and hateful, none more so than those centering around what they now call the Savage Tragedy of 1983. You are better than those muckrakers. You deserve the naked truth.

  For that reason I have enshrined myself here in order to set the record straight, to fashion for you a complete autobiography before I commit myself to an eternity of darkness. It is a record of what I lost: Death. Of how I lost it: Pride. Of what I sought: Redemption and Peace—and Salvation, too; was that too high for me to reach? Of what I found: Failure. Of how I failed: in every way possible. When this tomb of mine is discovered following some entertaining future apocalypse, I will be but powder that an archaeologist blows from the topmost notebook before turning the page with an antisepticized tweezer. What a relaxing fate for me, don’t you agree?

  But soft! Can’t you hear the orchestra reach its crescendo? This overture is finishing. Héctor, that most complaisant of ushers, has closed the odeum doors. Dearest Reader, slip your gloved hand over my elbow and allow me to escort you to our box—a cramped one, to be sure, but with a view unrivaled. It is time to find a comfortable
seat befitting an epic telling. You shall complain to me that the composer is indulgent, the librettist mad. I shall encourage you to give the drama time to bloom before passing final judgment. Many urgent questions will be raised as the opera progresses. Will they be answered? Oh, Reader, you charm me. Would it be good theater if they weren’t?

  PART ONE

  1879–1896

  In Which Your Hero’s Life Of Crime Is Confessed; Includes Meditations On Love And Violence;

  Also, Your Hero’s Callous Murder.

  I.

  AWAKENING FROM DEATH WAS like standing aboard a canoe amid the keeling swells of the Great Lake Michigan. Indeed, that selfsame lake was storming before me on the seventh of May of 1896, at both 7:44 in the evening when I was murdered and at 8:01 in the evening when I was resurrected, a fact I am sure of because the last (and first) thing I saw was my Excelsior pocket watch, an object that had no equal when it came to putting a smile on the old mug.

  It was but a year prior, at age sixteen, that I had stolen the watch off a fat innkeeper who should’ve known better than to play dumb, which he did, and right at the moment that I was loosening a few of his teeth with my most talented knuckles. I was thus compelled to not only leave him as I did, with his blood and piss dribbled merrily about, but to go the extra step of filching everything he had on his person, which included, to my astonishment, the Excelsior, the precise model I had pined for in shop windows for months.

  Never had I owned anything so fine (and never would I again), with its sun-dappled gold plating, machinery delicate as grasshopper legs, and a tick, tick, tick like the sound of a man’s fibula before it shatters from pressure. It made me feel good just to look at the Excelsior, particularly during fretful periods, which is exactly why I was fondling it on the foggy beachfront of Lake Michigan when some no-good bastard son of a bitch did what he did and murdered me, crept up and shot me in the back, a bullet through the heart, and down I went, into the sand, dead as meat.

  Let us not fritter away another second.

  I shall describe to you what it is like to die.

  Most humans conceive of the afterlife as a reward of stillness after a long life of continual movement. This is only half correct. Death, sad to say, is no blissful repose atop a cloud hammock, nor is it a carefree float amid the celestial ether. Death is a suicide dive off an incalculable cliff, a free fall of such pulverizing force that you become molten, brand new every instant. This, Reader, is the exhilarative glory of Death, a motion so perpetual that all sense of self is scrubbed away and you become a Nothing in Particular, rebirthed through the Uterus of Time.

  Oh!—it was wondrous. Brief!—but wretchedly, painfully wondrous.

  For me, this paradise ended seventeen minutes after it began. I awoke not with the candied liquors of an Elysium feast upon my tongue but the bitterest sand. My first breath with reawakened lungs was a wretched one; I felt, residual from my Death, the touch of Gød. The surprise was that His touch was so physical—it was right there in my stomach, tickling and scraping. I rose to custard knees and doggie-walked toward the surf to get away, but Gød’s touch responded by abandoning the pheasant, gravy, and tankard-loads of ale in my belly and scaling my throat.

  Gød—for what He has done to me, I shall forever deface His name with a slash.

  No stranger to inebriation, I positioned myself to vomit up our Almighty Lord. I had a fancified notion that the Holy Vomit would shoot like sunshine through the gray fog and instead of the familiar sound of retching I would hear Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus. A willing choirboy, I parted my lips.

  What emerged from inside me was a damp and disgruntled mayfly. Dreadfully disappointing, no? Having moseyed into my open mouth during those seventeen minutes of death, the insect had panicked upon my resurrection and climbed its way back up my esophagus. I watched the beslobbered bug drop to the sand, be twirled by a lick of surf, and then fly away imperiously, as if I had called it a schoolyard name.

  Pocket watch palmed, I collapsed to my side, scared and confused, helpless and friendless. I closed my weary eyes. Still, I could hear each thunderous roll of the lake and feel each passing second of the Excelsior. The tide washed o’er my lips. My clothes heavied. I asked the tide to drag me away to a fitting resting spot for a Nothing in Particular—the unreturnable depths of the Great Lake!—and, given a half hour more, it did just that.

  II.

  YOU MAY BE ASKING YOURSELF how a young man so gifted of language (thank you) and of obvious high breeding (you are too kind) found himself on the wrong end of a bullet. Brace yourself for a cruel shock, Dearest Reader. Near the end of the nineteenth century there were a great many people who would have accepted—nay, celebrated!—my premature death at age seventeen. One of them, it so happens, was a man whose very vocation was violence, and who, I came to believe, chose to turn that violence upon me.

  His name was Luca Testa. He was the ascendant leader within a crime organization known as the Black Hand. I am not so conceited to presume that you are familiar. After all, there is no telling how many millennia these humble notebooks of mine have traveled. You could be reading this from your private space rocket in the year 3000! So let me explain how two men of wildly different backgrounds—but of similar rabid ambition—came to be acquainted.

  It is stinging irony that my final act on Earth is to write a book. I still recall the second-floor study of my childhood, the shelf of spines lettered with the surnames of the damned: Brontë, Hardy, Dickens, Flaubert, Hawthorne, Dumas. The idea of imitating those loathed tormentors of my youth nauseates me. I am a young man utterly bereft of imagination, aside from imagining how a fellow’s finger will sound when I break it or imagining the cut and hue of a girl’s undergarments.

  Writing was the bane of my youth, each letter and number learned at ruler’s end while other boys my age rioted in alleyways within earshot of my cloistered study. My mother and the worthless coxcombs she employed as tutors never received so much as a cheeky word from me, the meek student. I was that overfed with knowledge, that sick with learning.

  What’s that, Reader? You doubt the exaggerations of a snot-nosed schoolboy? Permit me to provide specifics. ’Twas an hour of arithmetic before breakfast to stir the appetite for scholarship. (By age eight I knew the value of n. By age ten I had matured to know a harder lesson: that you cannot know the value of n—it changes its mind on you, the fickle bitch.) Then a break for fish and eggs, followed not by a final course of sweet rolls but rather the tasteless hardtack of algebra. Yes, back to the well-windowed second-floor child’s study for me, where every infernal dash and dot bled the day of its bright promise. After that, classical studies—literature, language, history, music, art, archeology, philosophy—bracketed by the afternoon’s dry climax of geography, economics, science, and religion.

  The blame for my over-education cannot be placed solely upon the corseted back of Mrs. Abigail Finch. A savvy prosecutor would also finger my dear old pop, Mr. Bartholomew Finch, whose fault it is that we had so much goddamned money in the first place. I knew little about him beyond that he wore a waxed mustache and stylish chapeau, but word had it that he was a self-styled “dynamitier” who demolished everything from buildings to bridges to mountains, canvassing the country by rail alongside his famously delicate cargo, thrilling observers with the disregard with which he slung his explosives from one dray to the next.

  Generally it is bad business to bomb too much of the city you call home, so the country’s leading dynamitier had established residence in Chicago, purchased an enormous house, and inserted into that house, as one might two porcelain dolls, a young wife and, shortly thereafter, their first and only child. Bartholomew Finch then skipped town to go blow shit up, a lot of it, thereafter making only cameo appearances.

  I find some satisfaction in this description of my pop. From all accounts, he was a man unburdened by the excessive vocabulary and needless dogma that would weigh
down his heir. Had we been anything other than father and son, I suspect we might have shared a beer or a hooker or at least some randy stories in the back of the saloon. As it was, though, I’d have rather liked to strangle the fellow, for it was his absence that locked Abigail and me into fateful impasse.

  Paintings suspended about our home depicted Abigail Finch as a toothsome bride possessed of a blushing demeanor, but these still lifes lied. It is my belief that Abigail felt wasted by her absentee husband; a lady of her standing could not gallivant about town unescorted. From these holes poked into her pride sprung bitter founts. Some mothers, or so I assumed, might enjoy observing their child at play. Abigail preferred to stare out windows. Some mothers might dress their child in silly costumes to motivate mirthmaking. Abigail took distorted pleasure in ordering the finest of gowns for herself, only to wrap them in bags and stow them inside a closet.

  From time to time, she shuddered as if feeling one of Bartholomew’s distant detonations. To her, the Chicago beyond our property lines was in perennial post-explosion, the streets filled with debilitating debris and the air unbreathable from nitroglycerin smog. Having lost a husband to these dangerous elements, she was determined to raise her son as a man of walls, chairs, desks, inkwells, and pens.

  Each day I was laced into Little Lord Fauntleroy ensembles as restrictive as iron maidens: tight velvet jackets, hard ruffled collars, snug cuffed knee-pants, and buckled shoes. Though I looked as if attired for an afternoon outing, these were but dress rehearsals for an opening night that never came.

  “You shall not drift about the country like your father,” Abigail would declare while knotting some infernal bow about my neck. “You shall stay at hand and be a good boy. The best boy.”