Blow Fly (Kay Scarpetta #12)(13)
Now inside and flopping on the narrow bed against a wall, he puts his hands behind his head.
Bev slips out of her torn blouse, teasing him like a stripper. A master at the waiting game, he does not react as she brushes against his lips. She throbs unbearably. This might go on for a very long time, never mind her begging, and when he is ready, and only then, he bites, but not hard enough to leave a mark because he can't abide the idea of being anything like Jean-Baptiste, his brother.
Jay used to smell and taste so good. Now that he is a fugitive, he rarely bathes, and when he does, he simply dumps buckets of bayou water over his body. Bev dares not complain or react in the slightest way to the strong stench of his breath and groin. The one and only time she gagged, he broke her nose and forced her to finish, her blood and small cries of pain giving him pleasure.
When she cleans the shack, she obsessively scrubs that spot below the bed, but the bloodstains are stubborn, like something out of a horror movie, she thinks. Bleach has left a mottled whitish-brown area the size of a doormat that Jay constantly complains about, as if he had nothing to do with how it got there.
12
JEAN-BAPTISTE CHANDONNE is Rodin's The Thinker on the stainless-steel toilet, his white pants drooping around his furry knees.
Corrections officers make fun of him. It never stops. He can sense it as he perches on the toilet, staring at the locked steel door of his cell. The iron bars in its tiny window are drawn to the iron in Jean-Baptiste's blood. Animal magnetism is a scientific fact scarcely heard of now and, for the most part, not accepted centuries ago, even though there are documented cases of magnetized materials having been applied to diseased and damaged parts of the body, causing all symptoms to cease, the patient's health restored. Jean-Baptiste is well schooled in the doctrine of the famous Dr. Mesmer, whose system of treatment is eloquently laid out in his Memoir sur la D?couverte du Magn?tisme Animal.
The original work, first published in French in 1779, is Jean-Baptiste's Bible. Before his books and radio were confiscated, he memorized long sections of Mesmer, and he is devout in his belief that a universal magnetic fluid influences the tides and people.
"I possessed the usual knowledge about the magnet: its action on iron, the ability of our body fluids to receive that mineral..." Mesmer wrote, and Jean-Baptiste quotes under his breath as he thinks on the toilet. "I prepared the patient by the continuous use of chalybeates."
A chalybeate is an iron tonic, and who but Jean-Baptiste knows this? If only he could find a chalybeate, just the right one, he would be healed. Before he was in prison, he tried soaking iron nails in drinking water, eating rust, sleeping with pieces of iron under his bed and pillow, and carrying nuts and bolts and magnets in the pockets of his pants. He came to believe that his chalybeate is the iron in human blood, but he could not get enough of it before he went to prison, and he can't get it at all now. When, on rare occasion, he bites himself and sucks, it makes no difference but is the equivalent of one drinking his own blood to cure himself of anemia.
Franz Anton Mesmer was mocked by the religious and scientific community, just as Jean-Baptiste has always been mocked. True believers publicly feigned skepticism-or if they were believers, used pseudonyms to avoid being labeled as quacks. The Philosophy of Animal Magnetism, published in 1837, for example, was written by "A Gentleman in Philadelphia," who some suspect was Edgar Allan Poe. Such books ended up in universities and were eventually discarded by their libraries, allowing Jean-Baptiste to acquire a small but amazing collection for a pittance.
He obsesses about what has happened to his books. His pulse pounds in his neck as he strains on the toilet. The books he brought here from France were taken from him as punishment when the prison's classification team demoted him from a level-one status to a level-three, supposedly because he masturbates and commits food infractions. Jean-Baptiste spends much of the time on the toilet, and the officers call this masturbating.
Twice in one day-he forgets how long ago-he fumbled his meal trays as they were shoved through the slot at the bottom of his door. Food splattered everywhere, and the incidents were deemed deliberate. He has been deprived of all commissaries, including, of course, his books. He is allowed only one hour of recreation per week. It doesn't matter. He can write letters. The guards are baffled.
"He can write f*cking letters when he's blind?" they say.
"Don't know for sure he is. Seems like sometimes he is, and sometimes he ain't."
"Faking?"
"Fucking crazy, man."
Jean-Baptiste can do push-ups, sit-ups and jumping jacks whenever he pleases inside his sixty-four-square-foot cell. His number of visits from the outside world has been limited. That doesn't matter, either. Who asks to see him except reporters and those physicians, profilers and academic types who wish to study him as if he is a new strain of virus? Jean-Baptiste's incarceration, abuse and imminent death have condensed his soul into a bright light scattered with white specks.
He's perpetually magnetized and somnambulous, and his clairvoyance gives him clear-sightedness without eyes. He has ears but does not need them to hear. He can know without knowing and go anywhere without the body that has punished him since birth. Jean-Baptiste has never known anything but hate. Before he attempted to murder the lady forensic pathologist in Virginia and was finally captured by police, intense hatred flowed through others, through him, and returned to others, the circuit complete and infinite. His violent rampages were inevitable, and he does not hold his body responsible for them and suffers no remorse.