Not Blood Uncle: A Fictional Memoir

By Zahn Pesh

Overview coming soon

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Nov 14, 2013
• ISBN: 9781493121175

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Copyright © 2013 by Zahn Pesh.

ISBN:                  Softcover                        978-1-4931-2116-8

                            eBook                             978-1-4931-2117-5

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

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

Rev. date: 11/07/2013

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CONTENTS

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

EPILOGUE

CHAPTER 12

Dead Souls

It was not a conspiracy. It was public policy, the modern day equivalent of Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls. Somebody was becoming rich, warehousing these poor, discarded incompetents in over-funded, tax-supported asylums. Who was skimming from these budgets? Did Zeke Shine have his hands in these pockets, too? Some, like Billy, neither discarded nor incompetent, were trapped there with mind destroying drugs. Billy had been caught in a quicksand that had sucked him into that gasping hole and Zahn’s had been the only effort to free him from that undertow. The public agenda had definitely been against Zahn’s efforts. At first, nobody individually, but eventually Zahn had gotten the feeling the entire system had worked against William James Mulvaney, his Vaney, pulling Vaney into that black, black hole. Now, Zahn’s focus was on freeing Vaney from the Napa hospital itself, where they now were officially and personally Billy’s warden. So, like other targets of Billy’s curses, they too were likely to pay. Tossing their dismembered bodies in a dumpster or scattering the sticks and straw of their voodoo dolls on a remote cliff was too good for them. They should be trapped there alive forever, prisoners in their own jail.

Zahn thought through this maniacally. —Vaney was never a criminal. He had become embroiled in the judicial system, because that was just the way; no, the unjust way society deals with ill people it neglects to deal with in other more humane ways. The upshot of this policy is that these people who become homeless, by far the largest portion of that population, are dumped like trash for queers, criminals and churches to clean up and repair. Those who evade even this counter-cultural other-world’s last recycling efforts are gathered together at their own grave sites. In those graves, they are imprisoned until dead or killed, then buried, like the jews at Babi Yar murdered and thrown in trenches as if they were criminals. Who profited from killing the jews? Who profits from running these asylums and prisons? Certainly not society, certainly not mankind, and certainly not the individuals in them. —If someone profits, someone should pay, thought Zahn.

—Who is the Zeke Shine of prisons and asylums? he wondered.

Zahn sat at his massive desk, not the one in his downtown office where he gazed unaware at the art work and awards on the walls, but the one at home. Even here, he was not peering out a window, through which he could watch the children ending their tomfoolery as the morning school bell rang. He stared blankly at a drab paneled wall along which the books in shelves had died illiterate deaths. He considered a forty, fifty million dollar law suit against the city. No amount could be too much. No amount could be enough, but why? Money could not redress the wrongs that had violated Vaney. Nothing could, except revenge. But revenge was senseless. Nonetheless, wondering what to do, Zahn had become so preoccupied with Vaney’s redemption that he had abandoned his usual orderliness: His meals became Vaney’s fastfood snacks eaten on paper throwaways, because all the household dishes sat stinking in slimy, sour water in the kitchen sink; clothing piled unwashed became his coffer of cleanest, moldy clothes, making daily ablutions absurd and unnecessary; the slightest household chores became monstrous and unmanageable projects; sleep meant insomnia or nightmares; mail remained unopened and bills, unpaid; he withdrew from the world, ignoring social structures; he meddled not in the political battle, as Shine systematically hurled lies, slanders and disparaging remarks at Mayor Leslie; Zahn’s values turned topsy-turvy: Instead of preserving the immanent goodness of man, he felt more like destroying the wickedness of mankind. During this sadosociopathy, in its neglected, lusterless haircloth coat, Boss Dawg, equally saddened by loss, learned to scrounge, eating out of torn bags of dog food, sleeping on its master’s clothes in Billy’s closet, and, of necessity, occasionally seeking relief inside in corners and behind couches.

Zahn hardly noticed his or Boss’s strange behaviors.

He quested only for some certainty, any certainty.

—How will I ever know? Was Vaney mad, or is he now? Is that question now relevant? Was it ever? What was perhaps true in their world was never true in his, perhaps not even in mine, for Vaney’s world is not my world; nor ours, theirs. Within their framework, they shoot him up with that mind-bending drug that causes him to do strange things he’s never done before: sprinkle himself with cleansers till he’s white as a wraith. Cry at the hospital’s window looking out on an elusive freedom. Perform strange antics before their videos. For this they call him schizoid and psychotic to confirm their fantastic fear of random homicides. But even in their world, would he not have been crazy to have ignored an assault and then their jeering at him? In the context of their system, he could have beat their rap, had he had, had he only had the calculating smarts to ignore their taunts. But how could he with only half his wits? Then, after the incident, how could he have explained himself when the scene he had experienced would have seemed to them an abstract painting, without subjects and substance, with only splashes of brilliant splotches that colored his own fears and doubts and angers, his feelings and emotions. Like this painting that would have to be properly reconstructed to be meaningful, his reaction to the paramedic’s assault had been a tribal dance that needed compassion and understanding to be correctly interpreted. In their world, they are not trained to do that.

—So Vaney became the culprit, not the molested, and he had no way to explain, with only a passionate mind, no analytical capabilities at all—no logic, no calculations, no computations, no strategies, no memory; those had all been erased by the endless epileptic fits. Ergo, he could never have committed a premeditated crime. But he was passionately thoughtful. What remained as his mental process was a mind of otherworldly artwork and fitful emotions. What remained we describe as love and hate, dreams and desires, glee and anger, gracious gods and malicious devils, and dizzy swings from one mood to another. Deficient, yes; yet from my perspective, in many ways more gifted than most. Crazy? I don’t think so. If Vaney is crazy, why would anyone want to be any other way?

—Yet, to say all men are created equal is a lie. Even those wealthy colonists who wrote it did not believe it: Many of them without misgivings owned slaves; women were not equals; and men and women without property were not gentry. But what they, the governors, wanted to bestow on every soul, the governed, were inalienable rights without which the governed would deny the wealthy the right to govern. Now, those governors were stripping Billy of his inalienable right to be unlike them, to be different. Unless they permit for all those rights granted to some, the governors should not be allowed to govern.

—True he’s not my blood, not my child really, not fully my responsibility. When I first spied Billy in a fit of bitterness, I merely wished to extend his life, which without help inevitably would have ended within months (of that, I was certain). That I have done. I can claim success. That achieved, I can turn my back and get on with living. Let them do as they please with William James Mulvaney! But was it not I who created Vaney, who encouraged Billy to become another personality, that of a creature loved by me, me who begged him to ‘just trust me.’ Can that creature, can that mythical Vaney just be forsaken now when its essence is being threatened. No, not in our world. That would not be right: To betray his trust will be to betray myself, my own values, now his also, now the values of our world. If I abandon Vaney now, I will never again be able to face me, look myself in the eye, see my own image in a mirror; I could never do such simple things. Never again. I will have been, all this time with him, I will have been living a lie.

—But what can I do? What can I do now? Try as I did, all I knew how to do, I did not change their minds, make them see. I failed. Now, what will I accomplish by snatching Billy, crazy or sane, from their grasp, where Billy is interned, like the aliens from other worlds sequestered and quarantined till their death in a hidden desert. Will snatching Billy away save Vaney from recrimination? Will Vaney’s soul be saved, while our bodies, Billy’s and mine, are lost destroying evil? What good will come of it? Will Vaney, so saved, then live everlastingly beyond that evil? No, unless what has been were so eliminated that it could never again recur. Now, my only recourse, revenge, will not reverse injustice. Nonetheless, I must do it though it’s an act as evil as the evil it pays for! And for that my blood will burn forever: no god however earthly or otherworldly will save me from damnation. Yet do I own the stuff, the madness that revenge is made of?

Zahn could not answer this. He did not know.

—I am not sure of anything. Eternal verities are so awry, nothing is for certain, except that I too am going mad, stark raving mad. Moreover, the crab of eventual death is eating at my being. Now, no medical elixir will deny mortality. With or without my madness, with that crab nearby, I am doomed. So, if I am to help Vaney, I must do it now.

The one certainty Zahn had uncovered: He was no longer immortal.

Inwardly screaming with outrage, for Zahn was not likely to scream openly, Zahn ruminated, chewing at the possibilities. All the alternatives flooded through his mind, from the filing of the enormous, but in truth, frivolous law suits, to destroying the institutions that had violated Billy, to outsmarting the bureaucrats at their own game, to marking time until an unforeseen opportunity popped up as plausible, to kidnaping Billy from that hospital and disappearing to backwoods. Yet, no remedy was so satisfying as out-and-out revenge, which he conspicuously had no hankering for! —Within reason, I must try my damn’dest to save Vaney from their mind-blowing therapies. Notwithstanding, far beyond reasonableness, eventually, I know revenge will win out!

Amid this masticated dither, and the vomited squalor that had grown around it, Zahn suddenly realized what a charmed life he had lived. Never had he foraged chaotically for cash. For what he had wanted to do; he just believed with blind faith, that the money would be there. And that had always been true for projects the world could justify financing: 1) The world is awash with money. 2) And typically, there is nothing worth spending it on. 3) So money is always in oversupply. But no worldly source was going to finance Billy’s escape from his imprisonment. Not knowingly, in any event. So, now, Zahn would have to cadge the cash.

—What do I have worth selling?

Zahn was still unclear about the fracas that had resulted in Billy’s, his Vaney’s arrest, incarceration and now the confinement at the hospital. True, Zahn had never heard the girl friend’s account, but could he expect it to be anything but sympathetic and biased in Billy’s favor? The medic was obviously a tippler buying vodka; Billy, a crazy buying cigarettes. They got in a squabble, that the store clerk dismissed as child’s play. The unarmed Billy was the only one assaulted, for fear he might have a weapon, said the medic. The security cop, a woman from the hospital who had been misled by a false police report, had urged a citizen’s arrest. Roughing up Billy, the policemen had been the only ones with a motivated agenda, that to rid the neighborhood of a nuisance, but their accusations of terroristic threats were outrageously ridiculous. In fact, every account from every witness, every statement by every participant, varied as much from whatever had been the facts as Billy’s, none of them any more plausible.

—And the cops had been just gobs manning gunboats.

The true conspirators, bedizened with diplomas, had been the professionals, attorneys and jurists passing judgment. All a very cozy scheme. Thinking with Vaney’s mind, as Zahn often did, the fracas became The Great Misunderstanding. —Vaney is not outraged that Billy is considered a criminal nor that he himself is considered insane; those are society’s attitudes he long ago learned to accept. His outrage is that he (and others like him, added Zahn) has been dehumanized by their inability to understand him.

—‘They not lissen’d,’ Vaney had complain’d.

—From Vaney’s perspective, his way is expressive, although partly symbolic and acted out, not completely verbal. His only statement clearly understood was when Billy spit on the cop, Zahn bemused, mostly amused by it. What had been misunderstood completely had been Billy’s essential message: his visceral fear, squeamish dislike of needles. That aversion, aptly expressed—‘ah cain’t stand them needles’—is reasonable, but that had not been heard, while aggressive noises had been amplified.

—A child, herky-jerky, stomping its feet in an infantile act of utter agony!

—Vaney’s ‘terrorism’ had been this sort of childish tantrum, thought Zahn. Neither terroristic nor criminal, not even insane; but a frustrated child’s prehurt, angry outburst. That is Vaney’s normal way, but because of his deficiencies and disabilities, his way is different from other peoples’ ways; so, should I consider Vaney more a criminal today, or crazier, than he was the day of or the day before the arrest? Is he not human because he is not like them? Outlandishly human! Why then fear Vaney as inhuman? Because he cannot express his thoughts clearly? Surely this is as much a frustration for him as for them. Like the great philosophers, they equate thinking with language and thought with being human, so he who can’t think coherently, speak clearly is a creature, not a human being. Yet language is not exclusively human, nor is it the end-all of what we vaguely call expression; to spit on the cop was a coherent thought, a clear statement, one a disturbed snake or a cornered cougar might also have made in their language, and one which the cop chose to mean, ‘I’m going to kill you!,’ when what Vaney was actually saying was, ‘Ah’d kick your butt, if peoples wuz equals.’ Vaney’s expressions are always vague enough that meanings are not definitely clear; nonetheless, I believe I understand Vane-ish better than most.

A ringing telephone, the house phone, not his office phone, interrupted Zahn’s reverie. —How many rings have I not heard? Not so many the answering machine has kicked in, he thought, so he scrambled to respond, a human trying to react more quickly than a robot. —I must impress upon Vaney this game with automata while he is entrapped within that mind-bending machine, thought Zahn, as he picked up the hand piece a moment ahead of the competing robotry.

Hello, said the voice, This is Doctor Shiela Dubrovka, the director of William James Mulvaney’s hospital unit. Is Mr. Pesh there?

"This is he. And thank you for calling. Is Vaney all right? Nobody has told me anything since he was transferred from his jail cell. Is he all right? Is he really all right? And call me Zahn, Shiela. You may call me Zahn."

"You should call me Doctor Dubrovka; the formality will be more appropriate."

Oh, right, . . . Shiela, said Zahn.

"Doctor Dubrovka, she reiterated. Are you Mr. Mulvaney’s legal conservator?"

—Tremendous! This legalistic malarkey, again, until she realizes she has to deal with me, thought Zahn. "No. He hasn’t needed a