A Virulent Death in Buenos Aires (Revised, 4-2010)

(Suspense, Eldritch Horror) Written August, 2008 (Historical Fiction
Based on actual events)





Death Alignment


(July, 2007) “All right,” he said, his eyes slanted towards the floor, emotions zigzagging across his mind, looking downward—emotionally downward towards his chest to the floor, bowed head, neck out of alignment, arms crossed—held inwardly tight and so he took one less sight of her—“All right, all right!” he said then the frustrating dialogue stopped, the dusty chatter ended, her eyes crystal clear, her protest to him had been sterling, authentic, but meaningless, only words that shot through him like bullets, pellets from a muzzle, an inch from his brain, knocking down doors inside his cerebellum, he wasn’t coherent, he wasn’t anything, not even human, near empty, not sensible, with stagnant thinking, and even as it was, as trying as it was, enduring as it was, instead of walking away, he came out with a bellowing burst—like a guerilla, it echoed like a thundering roar, it was as if somebody, or something unnatural inside his brain had beaten it to pulp, pounded his fleshy tissue until it turned into paste, his brain was inwardly under a meat cleaver, ready to be chopped up, and hung on a hook like a dead hog ready to be cutup on an assemble line at a slaughterhouse—he wasn’t himself.
He held his head as if it was too heavy with both hands one on each side of it, as if it was going to fall off its stem called a neck, then a second burst came out of his mouth, he stood up, tried to balance himself—he wobbled a bit as if drunk as if in some foreign state, as if he was under some post traumatic stress, visualizing something, he felt like falling—the studio apartment was but one room and a bathroom, that was it, there was no more to it—but he didn’t fall, he rested his two hands on a wooden chair, caught his breath, but it didn’t clear his mind, it didn’t release whatever pressure was on his brain, or whatever intentions his subconscious was directing him, the demon inside of him was now in near full control.
Out the window he noticed the obelisk he saw it many times before, countless times, saw its towering peak, its smooth seemingly endless grayish flow trying to reach the clouds, its rustic iron gate the surrounded it, but today, this very day, it had different shapes to it, the tall famous obelisk on the widest street in the world—the 9th of July Street—in downtown Buenos Aires, was like a rocket to him—likened to his brain, ready to burst open at its seams, then he turned to his girlfriend from North America, from some New England state up near Main, himself being a resident of Argentina, with frantic maddening eyes—frozen eyes, eyes appearing as if in a trance (they were having a week long drug fiesta, in his apartment).
He looked at her, and looked at her, and looked at her (blinked—it was a long closing of the eyes, a prolonged blink), he loved her deep blue eyes, milky white skin, and she had been attracted to his bronze Latin color, his dark thick black hair, his youthful and pleasant personality, his mystic look, final, somewhere along the path she had told herself when she first caught sight of him—‘Wow! why not?’ a question that remained in her mind less than a minute: now his looks would have stopped a police dog in its tracks, had he been outside walking with her, his bitterness on his face reeked all the way to kingdomcome, and with a sudden undefined madness, a spark of fury—
‘Wallop! Clout…! Whack!... thump! …thump! thwack-thwack!’ … a fully eight-inch German grade carbon stainless steel carving knife— extremely sharp, perfectly balanced, wide blade, full tang —sunk into her chest—and out came a virulent smell of burning death.
“Get it out,” she shouted, “get it out, you can’t kill me!” In shock but still protesting, as she was dying, the smell of death reeking from her pores; this was not a television horror, this was her, real.
I cannot hope to furnish the reader with a more rational and interesting description or facts about this dying person, and for the most part I’m grateful. But at one point of course she was fainting in this vast wilderness of nothing appearing for her to remain, to keep her alive, nothing but to lie down and die, and at this moment, the extraordinary beauty of her death to be, her dying, caught his eye.
He looked at her, pulled the knife out slowly, ripping the knife sideways as he pulled it out, so as to puncture all he might inside of her in the process, trying to find the heart, in particular the heart—while the whole planet of earth was a clap of an eye away from her ascending or descending it, then it was no longer there. To him at this moment she was just a thing that appeared, of some small importance, and he was not disappointed, when he heard her last sigh, her last exhale.

He had taken drugs, smoldering, stinking with them, the same ones she had taken, they both had there share, but not to the point she didn’t know what was happening, or free from pain. The interesting fact for him was that: seldom does one get the opportunity to observe a dead in progress, and especially one that causes the dying to die like a mule, heehawing, fighting for air and wide-eyed. He looked at her and started to entertain doubts if she really was dead; I mean did he really kill her—dead-dead? He saw on television on occasions the dead came alive, somehow resurrected them self with one last hurrah—as if to say, you couldn’t kill me. Although speaking literally, no one could have withstood his massacre. Goya could not have drawn a better picture of total death—or at least I’m extremely doubtful he could.

But as she had said “…get it out, you can’t kill me!” he said, “No thanks I want you to die,” and he wanted to watch himself do it, “it’s alright he told her,” as if to comfort her on his second plunge into her chest with the knife. (I must admit frankly, being in a war, the distress of death, or its impending doom that circles you during a bombardment of rockets, can become appalling, and the most disturbing thing or things a human being is unaccustomed to, is watching someone else die or pert near die, but this killer, he was collecting the moments of death like one collects pieces of a puzzle to make sure they all would fit.)
By one leg, he pulled her into the bathroom by her two legs, grabbed her by her hair, stretched out her thin neck, across her shoulder he put the knife, rested it, and with a thrust and whack, beheaded her. The fact that her body was so awkward to pull and carry, after a short time he lay the rest of her body chest down, her two arms stretched out and chopped around them at the shoulder. The heat, and the flies and the position of the body, and the smell brought him to a musing state of affairs, highly indecorous, she was ugly, and he told himself: regardless of how pretty you are, at the end, at the very end of life, this kind of end, you are only good enough for worms, this is the natural state of everyone’s end.

“Wait,” he told himself, “I better take her down to the incinerator,” looking now at the head he ha placed it on the toilet seat, as he pulled the body over to the bathtub—what was left of the body that is, like a sack of potatoes, with his two hands by her two legs, and his German made knife, laying on the side of the bathtub.
This is where those writers are mistaken who write screen plays, and the hero comes in at the last minute to catch the robber in the act, or save the day, because this girl died in a decent apartment in a Capital City in South America, and on the outside of that apartment a few floors below, people were walking and talking and sightseeing, by the apartment building as if nothing was taking place above them, they had not a clue of what was happening inside that apartment.
“Alright, alright…” he said to whomever he was talking to, perhaps his second self, perhaps the demon in him, who’s to say, “the incinerator, oh yes the incinerator, I’ll bring her down to the incinerator” knowing now he’d have to chop up the body the rest of the body, the remaining parts that were still attached, its last two limbs and torso for the most part, find a suitcase and bring it down to the cellar, tossing the body into the incinerator. “Of course,” he said, he had to undress the rest of her body, and he did. Then after cutting it all up, the suitcase nearby, he put the head back onto the torso, to see how it looked, fit, as he had placed it on the toilet seat for that purpose.
“Perfectly balanced,” he commented, “hurry up,” he told himself, “I’m hungry, I want breakfast.” He looked at the body all tucked away in the suitcase, admired his work, he told himself: I’m a damned fine cutter, fitter. And it would have appeared to an onlooker, he was, that he had some sort of accuracy in such things, perhaps someone or something inside of him, that had been dug out of the dead world, had come unfrozen from times end, guided him, so it would have seemed, with such skillfully applied techniques.

He grabbed the heavy suitcase, rushed down to the basement with it, the door was locked, he looked through the peephole, there was a fire in the furnace, it was July, and it had lightly snowed, it was cold.
Now he was on the sidewalk that paralleled the ‘9th of July Street,’ claimed to be the widest street in the world, he was pulling the suitcase now, his arms, the muscles in his arms were getting knotted up. He knew the police wouldn’t bother him, they never did, they were too busy taking bribes from those they handed out tickets to, or looking the other way if a crime was happening so they didn’t have to do all that paperwork—and to be quite honest, they were part of the problem in the city, not the solution: yes indeed, part of the crime wave, getting paid to look the other way, having young unemployed men robe for them, collecting their payoffs for looking the other way. And so he dragged the suitcase down the street unhampered, past several buildings and several policemen, and a few restaurants, in which he wanted to, eat, it was time for brunch, no longer breakfast. And so he stopped, left the suitcase outside, sat in the restaurant, had ham and eggs, coffee, and a young thief came up to the suitcase, paced a bit to see if anyone was looking, saw that it was clear, grabbed it, ran with it, but it was so heavy he fell, and it opened, and everything unraveled, everything inside rolled out, and the police did stop for once to turnabout to see what the commotion was, and for once they chased the young thief down the street, he, himself still in shock, and lo and behold, he was caught and accused of the crime; oh he swore up and down it was not his crime, but whose then, asked he police? And the real assailant finished his breakfast, went back to the Casa Rosada, where tourists often come, found himself a new gringo girlfriend, English, from England, and they started dating. He told himself it was the drugs that made him do that horrific crime—it wasn’t him, surely not the real him, and as a result, he’d never use them again, but he lied…



Notes: Written 8-5-2008; The author was in Buenos Aires three times: October, 2002/April, 2007 and March 2010; this happening took place three months after his second visit, near the same area his hotel was located.