Demon of Darien

By Alex Modzelewski

Dr. Morrison has been fired as a husband, father and doctor. What now: quiet philosophy reading, alcoholism and suicide? A fountain of youth, exotic woman and compassion draw the doctor deep into the Darien jungle, where his morals break one after another. A drug-trade, sex and love for a child mix confusingly as the doctor learns his philosophy gasping for air in the sweltering tropical forest.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Alex Modzelewski
• Release date: Aug 3, 2010
• ISBN: 9781452423951

Alex Modzelewski

IIf you need someone to challenge your well-established ideas, I'll be happy to oblige. A surgeon by training, traveler and rebel by temperament, I practiced medicine in multiple countries of Europe, Africa and North America until I traded my scalpel for a pen in 2006. The exotic experiences and unorthodox worldview I gathered during my travels serve me now as the raw material for thrillers, adventure books and short stories.Return to Paradise (2011) and Woman on the Moon (2009) are parts of the novel series codenamed "Spun in Hawaii," soon to be complemented by Golden Dust. Although they share some characters, and all are staged in or around Hawaii, their plots stand on their own--each one can be read independently.Demon of Darien (2010) breaks out of the "Spun in Hawaii" setting, taking the action to Panama and introducing a new set of protagonists, but my taste for adventure and predilection for political heresy remain.I believe that many time-honored sentiments--might they concern maternal love and patriotism or drug dealing and prostitution— are nothing but superstitions without rigorous stress-testing. In my books, I try to see how much they can take and test results are sometimes surprising.But more than anything, I try to have fun with exciting plot becauseBoredom KillsI live in Hawaii now, writing, paddling the ocean and arguing my unorthodox ideas.

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All Rights Reserved. Copyright © 2010 Alex Z Modzelewski http://web.me.com/amodzelewski/Site/Welcome.html

Cover design by Alex © 2010 Humpback Publishing. The original sculpture Demon of Darien by Ania. All Rights Reserved—used with permission.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the written permission of the author; nor may it be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other that in which it is published, and without a set of similar conditions, including this condition, being imposed on subsequent purchasers.

Smashwords Edition, Humpback Publishing

Other version of this book: paperback ISBN 9780981518336

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and events are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Their graying heads bowed for a curtain call, the boomer generation is ready to make an exit stage left, ready to walk away into the cold dark space shared by ex-actors, old props, and mice.

Before you exit, why not check this door on your right? It might lead to another drama. The access seems blocked with gray blocks, but perhaps this wall is made of nothing more than your own out stale memories, the relics made irrelevant by time.

This book is dedicated to the men and women of my generation who have the courage to defy the rules of aging gracefully. The fountain of youth is real, and it is through the door on your right. A new and exhilarating life waits at the other end of the passage, but fear and convention have to be overcome first.

Love without need is as rare as the coin’s head without tail

Chapter 1

A two-foot-high fence made of dry sticks tied with chicken wire was completely overrun by exuberant weeds, transforming it into an unkempt green mound. The flimsy structure could be a marginally effective barrier only for children under five, but its main purpose was to mark a cliff where a plateau sharply dropped off. Vines snaked off the fence, covering the last foot of flat land, to spill over the rock’s crumbling edge. There they hung in the air, swinging in rising warm currents and trying to purchase a foothold on the face of the cracked vertical wall. I could not see the bottom of the precipice below, but further away big craggy boulders stuck out their menacing black heads, elbowing apart green canopies.

Stretcher bearers stepped close to the fence, lined up parallel to it, then took a generous swing and sent a long object flying over the edge. Illuminated by the sun’s first pink rays, naked white skin flashed momentarily when the body cleared the ridge. A muted thud confirmed that the corpse had reached its destination, disappearing into the jungle below without a trace. The bearers turned without a word and walked away without looking back.

This—this is how they paid their last respects to the man who’d been revered like a prophet less than a day before.

Señor Maxwell … someone said behind my back. Someone’s still looking for him, I thought.

Señor Maxwell … the voice repeated again, respectfully. Only then I realized that he was addressing me. We are ready for a shipment. A slim, dark-skinned individual stood next to Diaz, a wide-brimmed hat in his hand.

"This is Enrique, encargado for the land transport. Diaz introduced the man, who bowed his head. Brought the load last night. Ready to take the product to the river now. Call the pangas?"

The organization Maxwell had built functioned efficiently even without his hand on a lever. The man was a long-term-planning genius; whatever extraordinary event occurred, he’d thought of it long ago and had a contingency strategy in place.

What was his plan for me, had I said no? I wondered. Quite certainly, no cheap sentimentality would cloud his judgment. The old devil spent a lot of effort and time—the commodity he was rapidly running out of—to probe me and provoke, to insert his odd ideas into my head. But at the end, he could not know what exactly I would do.

I loathed his intrusion into my life and rebelled against his devious tactics to guide my steps. Until the very end, I did not realize how much my actions were programmed and anticipated by him. It insulted me profoundly. My face was still bruised and sore but … I felt more alive and vigorous now than in many years. Perhaps he’d led me to the fountain of youth after all.

A gust of wind came over the ridge, sweeping away the slight but persistent smell of fungi and rotting dead matter. I turned around and followed the stretcher bearers. Those with a will to live had to move on.

Chapter 2

At low tide, the car exhaust blended with putrid fumes rising from the Panama Bay to hang like a witch’s brew between the marble-clad edifices of the Avenida de Balboa. Fortunately a breeze, barging from the ocean over the roofs of a few low-rise buildings, tore the rancid cloud as soon as it cleared the second floor. Whether by clever design or by luck, the air was clear and smelled fresh at my fifth-floor balcony.

Since I had come here in December, Panama City never ceased to flabbergast me with its contradictions. The Corredor Sur, for example: The respectable multilane freeway runs over the Pacific waters like it was a Japanese or American coast. But then, one look at the horrid brown waves foaming on both sides of the road says it all: The city of Panama has no sewage treatment plant! The raw excrement and detritus of a million people are released somewhere along the coastline promenade to end up in the Gulf, making the murky water yellow and brown far into the ocean.

World banks elbow each other for space in the Zona Bancaria like in Manhattan, sending glass towers soaring into the sky, but a bus fare is only a quarter. Yes, twenty-five cents. When was the last time I bought anything for a quarter? A taxi to almost any point within the city limits hardly ever cost more than two or three dollars. It will take me a while to figure it out, I thought, but I had a lot of time and that was a very unusual feeling for me.

I started my days early to enjoy the sunrise. As the first rays woke me up—curtains deliberately left open to let the sun in—I stepped out on my balcony, lit up a joint, and watched jets of gold-colored light streaming from one glass tower to another like magic rainbows. With small puffs widely spaced, I smoked to enhance the beauty, not smudge the picture.

At this point in my life, my purpose was to catch lovely moments, to see the beauty I never had time to notice. Having spent most of my adult existence—over thirty years—bent over bleeding hemorrhoids, angry pus-swollen gallbladders and cancerous bowels, I felt I had earned the right to focus on the splendors of this world while I still could.

After a few agonizing and confusing years, I had finally regained control over my life, a feat neither easy nor cheap. Now, from my comfortable driver’s seat, I intended to watch the knot of angry hissing snakes, which until recently had roamed and slithered all over my life, shrink and shrivel and untangle on its own, slowly, safely, at its natural pace. There was no rush. In the meantime, I was celebrating my emotional emancipation with a morning joint and an evening glass of twelve-year-old Abuelo rum.

My right hand had started shaking a year earlier, around Christmas. The tremor, although important to how later events would unfold, was certainly not the primary cause of my misfortunes. It simply marked the beginning of the last act of our family drama.

It started as a slight quiver, just barely enough to notice, when I was about to carve a turkey, one crusty leg destined for Lisa’s plate and the other for mine, a part of her annoying determination to cultivate the family tradition. I was quite sure that the two turkey drumsticks and a fake Christmas tree wouldn’t bring our family back, but I played along—less trouble.

The carving knife shook for a moment in my hand, sending flashes of light all over the darkened room, but the tremor stopped when the blade plunged deep into the soft meat. I was a bit surprised but just shrugged it off; Lisa had made my hands shake more than once.

Over the next few weeks, back in my operating room, I realized—first with annoyance but soon with panic—that the tremor was not only persistent, it was increasing. I devised some clever ways to press the damn limb into service. Jammed forcefully against a retractor, my right hand still could hold forceps without a telltale quiver while I magnanimously allowed my eager assistant to do the honors of cutting.

No patient suffered because of my shaky hand—experience can substitute for a lot of shortcomings—but my surgical confidence was plummeting. No one caught on for a few months, but before the snow disappeared from the hospital parking lot, Betty, an instrument nurse I trained years ago, put her gloved palm on top of my hand. Her eyes, oozing that annoying sympathy, met mine without a word. We both felt the unrelenting tremor until I angrily pulled my hand back.

The chief of staff accepted my resignation with phony sorrow. Why should he worry? A young surgeon, fresh from a training program, would jump happily into my shoes in no time. Lisa, on the other hand, almost choked in anger. Her jaw dropped when she stepped into the kitchen, all spiffed up for her morning errands.

What the hell—? she uttered, seeing her husband at the kitchen table wearing pajamas, face unshaven, newspaper in hand.

I’ve retired, Lisa. Can’t work with this tremor anymore. Hope it won’t cramp your lifestyle.… I flashed an impertinent half-smile and spoke in a light tone. Yeah, I sounded quite arrogant, but in fact I was howling sad and scared. I kept my right hand under the table, wedged under my thigh, where it was twitching, trying to escape from its imprisonment.

I meant to tell you sooner, but you’ve been so damn busy recently. My biting reference to her obsessive fitness and grooming routines came out sounding rather pathetic.

You could work in an outpatient clinic.… She was seething. Find a position in administration, you— Furious, Lisa could not find words to express her outrage; only her chest bellowed rapidly. Clearly, she was hyperventilating. In a moment she would be seized by terror of having a stroke; I saw it coming.

All true, Lisa, but as it is, I am a retired surgeon. My condescending grin was subsiding, smothered by concern as she started to sway. Ah, Lisa … please, breathe slowly; you’ll be dizzy in a moment.

Quite an unnecessary provocation, I reflected later. I certainly could have been subtler. Was it just my plain unthinking arrogance or, perhaps, a payback for the years of marital warfare?

My wife stood rigidly in the doorway, hanging on the frame with both hands, getting giddy. Five-ten tall, slim and elegant in her perfectly fitted white Armani Collezioni suit, Lisa could not be accused of self-neglect. I could never decide if her taste for an expensive lifestyle, suddenly acquired when our marriage hit the wall, was a weapon she used to stab me in my pocket, or rather an attempt to fill the hole in her soul. Whatever her motivation, a cheap woman she was not, but she was getting the bang for money spent.

In her early fifties, Lisa had round hips—full but not an inch more than anything but pleasing—clearly delineated by her narrow waist. Nicely raised by push-up bra, her silicone-augmented breasts subtly induced the jacket’s lapels to open to reveal a dark red silk blouse flowing over her perfectly flat stomach. Lisa’s face, somewhat pale now and distorted in a fit of panic, was thoroughly made up, but her large gray-blue eyes were shut down. Silicone implants or not, she was still an attractive woman—a very hostile attractive woman.

We’ll see how long you last, she hissed, biting the lower lip as she opened her eyes. A speck of dark red lipstick stuck to her incisors, spoiling her polished-to-perfection image. Here, I felt like saying, take this tissue and wipe it off. Old habits die slowly; that’s what I would have done in the past. We used to be good friends, but the two years of iceberg-cold war, interrupted only by ferocious skirmishes, felt longer than the thirty good years we spent together.

Lisa was no trophy wife; she knew me so well. Of course she was right in predicting a miserable time for me. I never realized how much my overloaded days protected me from depression. It’s hard to delve into one’s own personal problems in front of a gaping chest stab wound or groping for an inflamed appendix.

In challenge to Lisa’s spiteful looks, I took to studying philosophy, the fantasy I cherished since I was an undergrad liberal arts student. As I was staring into a book, my mind was surreptitiously stealing away from Plato to consider the relative advantages of smashing my car through the guardrails. A sharp bend of Oak Street, right next to a ravine, was a very promising location for a crash, but this option had to be weighed fairly against a handful of sleeping pills washed down with a bottle of brandy.

Hour after hour, undisturbed by any mandatory activity, I explored my misery without interference. There were no phone calls to knock me out of my gloom; no one wanted me to rush to the hospital, dropping whatever I was doing and breaking speed limits on my way. Wedged into the den’s armchair, I could silently contemplate my losses and wretched future, only my twitching right hand giving external signs of life.

Dr. Nowak, my shrink, recommended Zoloft. Occasionally, I hit a sweet spot between his pills and my brandy; then all of a sudden, old Lisa appeared in my daydreams. Plump under her plain and worn-out t-shirt, friendly, smiling and lovely, her apparition dangled in front of my eyes for a moment only to be chased away by the hard-bodied, overdressed, hostile Lisa the bitch. More often, the pills just made me feel like the Tin Man, apparently alive but empty and longing for a heart.

One good thing could be said about those painful early days of my retirement: They put a sharp end to my chronic marital anguish, like a knife to an abscess. The divorce followed rapidly and went smoothly because—to the unveiled dismay of my lawyer—I gave Lisa practically everything she wanted, and she was not too greedy, to the disillusioned surprise of her attorney. How much do I need to study philosophy? I thought. I felt the fading warmth of the sun on my back, setting over my life.

Once in Panama—an inexpensive destination appreciated by any guy who had just lost half of his retirement funds—I established a daily routine. Apparently, I couldn’t function without a schedule. First, I enjoyed a marijuana-enhanced sunrise lightshow, musing over the strange relationship between the violence of thermonuclear explosions on the sun and the tranquility of sunrise in Panama City. It’s all about distance, I concluded.

Then, from the left side of my patio, I inspected the flow of cars below, still relatively light at that time, but rapidly increasing as office workers tried to beat the traffic. Those who didn’t make it by my breakfast were screwed. Before eight, the snake of cars below looked as though an elephant had stepped on its head; it jerked and convulsed but hardly moved forward.

Finally, I took position on the right end of my balcony to look out at the ocean. A flock of large seagulls caught my attention one day, diving onto the strip of gray sand exposed by low tide. The birds shoved and jostled rudely like a crowd of shoppers on Boxing Day. One broke out from the milling crowd and ran away from the fracas, apparently having grabbed a tasty morsel.

From my fifth floor, I couldn’t tell what they were feasting on; a dead rat wouldn’t be a rarity here. From my balcony, all I could see was just a bunch of birds frolicking on the beach. Time and distance wipe out ugly details, I thought. Nowak was right. Not much I could do about time, but distance.… Yes, I hoped Panama was far enough.

Chapter 3

So, what are you going to do? Michael asked insolently, puffing up his scrawny chest. A belt made a pitiful indentation in his potbelly, now belligerently pushing in my direction. He grew up tall and his nose threatened to poke my eyes, but the jiggling fat of his gut and his invisible muscles gave him the vague appearance of a middle-aged man. Twenty-one and having hardly done anything in his life, Mike looked like a tired, bored-with-his-life guy who decided to give up all the world’s attractions in favor of TV and fried food. But he was not a child; even in this pathetic shape, he could not be sent to his room by his father’s mere presence in the doorway.

Nothing I can do, I admitted, looking up into Mike’s pale face. Nothing, except to stop playing your game. I’ve had it. You’re twenty-one. I’m under no obligation to look after you anymore, and I’m not going to do it! I stepped away from the door, trying to keep my cool, even as the temptation to grab the little shit by his shoulders and send him reeling inside the kitchen felt almost irresistible. I still could do it, easily. Go ahead! Step out and you are a man of your own. Don’t think your mother will rescue you this time!

Fuck you, Pa, the young man snarled. I’ve had enough of your preaching as well. At last we agree on something! The heavy door slammed with enough force to shatter the stucco around the frame, small white pieces crumbling to the floor.

Would you like a headset, sir? A flight attendant broke my gloomy daydream, offering a small plastic package.

Have you ever been to Panama? A young blond woman in the window seat felt sociable. I’m so excited. I’ve got this first big assignment. Bev was a journalist, an aspiring investigative journalist, dispatched to Panama to write about the country’s strange allure for American divorcés.

You know, she enthused, there are those places where all those newly single men live with local girls. Like hippie communes … or like this camp in Guyana. You know, a lot of people got killed there. What a swamp!

She was happily excited the way some pathologists are: Look at this tumor! Like a grapefruit! And all these smaller lesions around! My, my!

Usually, there is one woman divorcée for every divorced man, I noted. Are you going to write about them as well?

I put earpieces in to escape any further conversation. Her blue Toys-R-Us doll’s eyes, her small Hollywood-style nose, which looked to me like a well-done nose job, her bubbly personality—yeah, she could have an almost unlimited number of first big assignments. A lot of male chief editors in this country could spice up their sex lives. Think of it … probably she could have a shot with more than a few female bosses as well. I did not feel very charitable toward womankind.

It wouldn’t require a philosopher to notice that during the past few generations—while males kept their noses to the grinding wheel—the world has been thoroughly rearranged by our feminine partners. I always enjoyed working with women; not only were they more pleasant to deal with, but our professional interactions were more productive as well. The constant head-butting and status fights traditionally dominating male relations—there are no beta males among surgeons—could be avoided when dealing with a reasonable and non-adversarial female colleague. This was a definite advantage; testosterone-driven rams do not knock their skulls for fun but for the necessity brought by a male challenger. So I liked my female coworkers and the women’s professional advancement didn’t bother me at all.

The problem I noted was that women changed our world at the most basic, biological level, playing with the laws of evolution. What rational, unemotional being would put up with the twenty or so years of hard, unpaid labor of child rearing? None. But we, humans, are not rational in this respect; our minds are hardwired into child-rearing slavery. Just like all other living creatures, we seem to live in order to propagate our genes, the more the better. And here comes the treasonous revolution.

A long time ago—at least in the Western civilizations—we agreed to monogamy. No more wild oats seeding for us, at least after having selected a permanent mate. The arguments for monogamy were good enough: It’s easier to take care of one’s progeny in a small cooperative called a family and, let’s face it, the constant availability of a well-disposed female has to be counted as a major advantage. Then—when most wrinkles of the arrangement have been straightened up—bang! One kid. Poooosibly two. Ladies go professional!

If you screw with the biology, you get screwed. If something goes wrong with the plan—a child dies, goes missing,