Mens Rea Read online

  Mens Rea

  Gary S. Kadet

  Foundations Book Publishing

  Brandon, MS 39047

  www.FoundationsBooks.net

  Mens Rea

  By Gary S, Kadet

  Cover by Dawné Dominique Copyright© 2021

  Edited and formatted by Steve Soderquist

  Copyright 2021© Gary S. Kadet

  Published in the United States of America

  Worldwide Electronic & Digital Rights

  Worldwide English Language Print Rights

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned or distributed in any form, including digital and electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the Publisher, except for brief quotes for use in reviews.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Acknowledgements

  The author gratefully acknowledges the following people for their support and forbearance, which contributed greatly to the existence of this book in so many ways. It's a short list but a true one.

  Nancy J. Durocher, for having done everything a spouse could do, should do and more; Scott Oddo for his generous input and encouragement, Susan Gambrell Reinhardt, whose wit and opinions were nothing but helpful; Kate Nicholas for her friendship and sharp acumen; Huntley Dent, for his encouragement and support (long overdue) and Joe Schatzle for loyalty in hard times.

  This opus is for you.

  For Maxwell Davis, hero and grandfather and for Nancy J. Durocher who makes everything possible…

  Table of Contents

  Eulogy

  The Squeeze

  Event Horizon

  Ambuscade

  Crimetown

  Who Are We Today?

  Escapade

  Sewing Salt

  Vendetta

  Endgame

  Post Mortem

  About the Author

  “The bees sit so slothfully on the flowers, and the sunshine lies so lazily on the ground. A horrible idleness prevails. Idleness is the root of all vice. What people won't do out of boredom! They study out of boredom, they pray out of boredom, they fall in love, marry, and multiply out of boredom and finally die out of boredom, and – and that's the humor in it – they do everything with the most serious faces, without realizing why and with God knows what intentions. All these heroes, these geniuses, these idiots, these saints, these sinners, these fathers of families are basically nothing but refined idlers. Why must I be the one to know this? Why can't I take myself seriously and dress this poor puppet in tails and put an umbrella in its hand so that it will become very proper and very useful and very moral? That man who just left me – I envied him, I could have beaten him out of envy. Oh, to be someone else for once! Just for a minute. – How that man runs! If only I knew of one thing under the sun that could still make me run.”

  ― Georg Büchner, “Leonce und Lena”

  “The world is chaos. Nothingness is the yet-to-be-born god of the world.”

  — Georg Büchner, “Danton’s Death”

  Eulogy

  I am not myself.

  You hear that now and again from someone who feels overwhelmed by life, who may be depressed—or even just emotionally conflicted—overworked, overtired, deprived of human affection, or simply physically ill. Even a state of hypochondria or Munchhausen’s syndrome can elicit that statement and be absolutely genuine.

  I am not myself.

  Someone sad, listless, frustrated; feeling overmatched and under-gunned.

  I am not myself.

  Declarative, definitive, concrete.

  I am not myself.

  For me, it has never been truer.

  I am, in fact, literally not myself.

  To confess truthfully in this journal without a single element of self-servitude, to do it ruthlessly, without comforting illusion, I don’t know if I have ever actually been myself at any point in my life. Even when I was at moments so mistakenly dead sure that I was in fact myself, the back of my mind called me a fool. I know now at this very moment, for example, that I am definitely not myself, but the thing I’m so unsure about is whether or not I have at any time ever actually been myself. And if I really wasn’t myself, then who – or what – the hell was I?

  Me.

  I.

  That thing I am identified by, which plainly I am not.

  I can hear all your arguments in my mind easily even as I type this entry.

  “Your identity came to you through years of development, socializing input, educational doctrine, language, acculturation, TV, the evolutionary development of technology.”

  The social order; the indomitable system of class that pretends to have no class while constantly emulating every class within its strata. What was I? What factual stratum? Upper-lower-middle-class is my best guess. (With apologies to George Orwell.) That was my point of origin. And now my questionable identity places me in precisely no class at all.

  But how can that be?

  I’m supposed to be hardwired like a machine; ingrained to be in that sense what I am right now and have always been.

  Or am I?

  What if, right now, beneath all your so-called reasonable civilizing influences, I’m actually just as I was when I exited the womb: no one and nothing at all? Tabula rasa. A cipher. A nonentity.

  Oh, you’d scoff at that, wouldn’t you?

  What if my destiny were no more determined than my origin: irresolute, ambiguous, pro forma, yet really lacking form altogether? A bubble not yet ready to burst, the vacuum within sustained by the pressure without.

  The bubble never did burst.

  It exploded instead and birthed a new kind of nothingness, a dark shifting into the lie of the soul, of the freedom all authoritarians fear, the freedom they cannot allow, the freedom that’s closest to death. Perhaps fascists, Nazis and dictators, in their rigid order, are life-affirming after all. If that’s the kind of life you care to lead.

  And what if it isn’t?

  What if somehow you break free; not in the act of discovering yourself, not in a deliberate act that stamps itself like a die-cast upon the world, but instead in some animal, primordial, terrible act that blasts you out of all order and understanding into the wilds of crime, but crime beyond just crime itself, pressing you straight into the grim truth of human potential?

  What if you kicked all life in the face and found it wanting?

  What if in the hollow shape of an absent god you placed yourself—not like the wretched moneymen and CEOs, not like Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, but as the true form of the chaotic void? What if in your sleeve of meat you emerged from a meteoric crisis as a thing much less than the civilized, routinized human automaton you had become into something that had no name or category that the world could only get wrong in labeling?

  Something that was in paradox ultimately so much more!

  Monster.

  Criminal.

  Lunatic.

  What tag could they give you that would ever be right?

  When you not only encompassed and rejected all this life ever had for you and broke down to a place outside of life, not yet death, not yet surrender, but a supreme sovereignty of its own. A nameless state, not quite limbo, not quite life, certainly not death, but something harrowing. Excoriating. Violent. No longer considerate of right and wrong. Something that in its exultation made you treat morality itself like a bug to be squashed.

  That’s the thing that happened to me.

  Yes, happened. I didn
’t invite it, welcome it or embrace it.

  In fact, the whole thing started when I was running away from it, running for my life I was sure at the time. I didn’t know, and how could I have known really, that I was running straight into death?

  I woke up one day unable to breathe, panicking.

  I knew I was being squeezed.

  The Squeeze

  I got up early rising from the bed linen into a day I could no longer face.

  Dread had become more palpable than my skin.

  Sweat had dried on me.

  I was breathing hard.

  My wife was snoring beside where I had lain moments ago. It was usually a comforting, intrusive yet soothing sound. The purring of a great cat.

  Now it only meant failure and disaster.

  Now it only meant a heaven I could no longer reach.

  I lurched up from the bed, throwing off clammy sheets and lumbered to the bathroom where I splashed my face with ice cold water. If I could have stuck my head under the faucet, I would have done it.

  My heart was thumping hard in my chest.

  Beauty wilted like a flower in my mind; shadows absorbed hope and promise. Darkness fulfilled every dream and sat on gigantic haunches blocking every exit, every path once lit so surely under the brutality of an overexposed, chromium-tinted, icy light.

  I had to sit down. I needed to sit down, pajamas sticking hard to gooseflesh.

  I could feel the squeeze tighten around me, love dancing around me like Salome capering with John the Baptist’s head on a platter. My sides ached. My ribs felt ready to crack and collapse into my chest cavity, piercing my broken heart.

  I was squeezed into the Bentwood Rocker in the living room. It being not yet dawn, I was able to try and find solace in the shadows. Like everything else I had ever done, it was a straight failure; while for everyone else the sun simply rose.

  Rocking.

  When this day dawned it would ignite the conflagration of my flickering, unsteady life.

  I could no longer protect them, no longer shield them from this life of savagery, this life of cold, institutional indifference to abject humanity, to sensitivity, to innocence and vulnerability.

  Even now they were locking up babies in concentration camps setting them before judges in open court. Toddlers unable to defend themselves, barely able to speak.

  Fairness and compassion had become an off-color joke in the boardroom. A laugh. Something to experience at the movies and then forget. A private privilege; a public disgrace.

  Capable, intelligent women with education reduced to prostitution to make their way in a world ceaselessly punishing the afflicted and rewarding the privileged. Men made homeless beggars. The young burdened with debt they could never pay. Nothing succeeding at all but success.

  And I was no success.

  Rocking.

  I had failed to supply the requisite amount of crucial privilege.

  I had failed in a role that was chosen for me as if I would have ever wanted it if I hadn’t been told to want it, inveigled to want it, coerced, cajoled and enticed to want it.

  The joke of selling your soul.

  The soul is yourself, and the devil? Satan? The enemy?

  Why, the social order that claimed you at birth. Is that Satan, the enemy, the devil?

  Rocking, rocking, rocking.

  Is that God? And if so, did you ever have a choice?

  So much for free will.

  Determinism is a pop song.

  Rocking.

  My beautiful, charming wife, my amazing children whose potential was crushed even before they were born.

  They were exposed.

  My wife, my children: exposed to the worst torments of robotic privation and vicious corporatism waiting for them when everything collapsed.

  The wolf bayed politely at my door as I rocked back and forth; I could hear its panting, its sniffing.

  The final whine.

  It was going to be less polite as the coming day wore on.

  When the final notice fell…

  Then everything else would fall.

  I rocked in the chair ever faster. It seemed to calm me, though the squeeze had its talons around my broken heart, taking its time.

  I had put off the coming day for all forty-five years of my now wretched life. I used every tactic to avoid it: sweat equity, hard work, tooth-gritting struggle, connivance, lying, trickery, boldness, loyalty, fierce conviction. All of it came to nothing but the creeping, implacable enemy of this now coming day.

  The future had arrived, and its grimness was spectacular.

  I had been unemployed for a month and a half, but I couldn’t really let them know, take away their security and ease, share with them my Sisyphean sense of doom. They had to be kept in the dark to enjoy what was left of the light.

  Savings, money market accounts, checking account all siphoned down to a fifty-dollar cutoff to keep the accounts open just in case I could ever fill them again.

  (And even that cutoff turned out to be wrong.)

  Slim chance, fat chance, no chance.

  Rocking, rocking, rocking.

  Credit cards all maxed out; credit line at the Middleman Savings & Trust evaporated.

  Then there was the mortgage on our house. Our one refuge from the rote onslaught of the machine of the social order, our ridiculous, low-slung Danish modern split-level house fifty years out of fashion in a way that no one could ever call “quaint.” Humiliation, violence, and decay lay in wait behind the lightly baying wolf at the door.

  At nine a.m. they would come. They would rap firmly on our thick oaken door as they pushed the button to ring the parody of chimes at the same time. The sheriff himself would present the court order. The U-Haul truck and burly young movers hired at the expense of the county would be there waiting for the signal from the sheriff to run roughshod over my family’s lives, and heft every single item we owned out, tossed into the back of the truck like nothing. At best a regrettable salvage. The entire cost of the operation tacked onto our gross, exploding unpayable debt that would keep growing like a cancer long after its host was laid out, an intestate corpse.

  Rumors were ringing in my head like sour chimes that the new regime of federal kleptocracy was taking steps to establish debtor’s prison.

  Meanwhile, the mortgage foreclosure king who Robo-foreclosed on our house, by banking algorithm (no doubt illegally, it would be discovered later) was now the smug and smarmy Secretary of the US Treasury. His perpetually bloated grin like that of a frog satiated with flies, goggle eyes behind horn-rimmed glasses, mocking me and a few million others, smirking in triumph on the news.

  No court-ordered sheriff knocking at his door in the morning to throw him and his family out into the street for his crimes.

  Not even a fine to pay.

  A cabinet post for the foreclosure king!

  The wolf at the door was baying louder now, less reserved.

  Another notice for the foreclosed.

  Rocking, rocking, rocking.

  A life so complex and yet wrought solid, easy to reveal in a few lines of coherent speech:

  George Arrant, 45, born to no advantage, spent his life trying to gain advantage, finally bottomed out to nothing amid rumors of a financial boom that never so much as touched him. George Arrant, betrayer of his wife Mara and his children Robin and Alexander, victims of the weakness and inadequacy of his own naked humanity. There was simply no place left for him in the oligarchic economy that would allow him to earn. His sin wasn’t any actual product of his own doing.

  No.

  The money god made him.

  Like the bad Catholic idea of “original sin,” George Arrant’s actual, unforgivable wrongdoing was in the irrevocability of being purely himself. He was so totally himself he was no longer permitted to be himself.

  His failure was inchoate.

  And any action he took against that failure would only make more of the same.

  So he stalled and he crawled
and he strived and connived.

  Rocking, rocking, rocking.

  Years of struggle in foster homes as a child. Aging out of the system at eighteen, booted out without a dollar, forced to take any shit job that took pity enough on him to hire him so he could be underpaid, exploited and laid off as a matter of someone else’s convenience. Years of struggle in unending hours of work and the crawling grind of night school to at least furnish a bachelor of science degree in labor relations only to have it ultimately prove just as useless as his belated GED.

  A toady to the privileged.

  A sweat act.

  “Who is that nervous guy always working extra hours alone? The bearded wonder?”

  An over-the-hill assistant claims adjuster at Troubadour Insurance of Elsmere, Delaware; no career track, no promises, no expectation, no nothing but a hard clinging to the chain of days. Every lie a link in the chain that weighed down my children and my wife.

  Today was the date on the notice served.

  The date of execution.

  My mind went nova.

  I had at last rocked the earth.

  I burst forward like from a nightmare.

  The Bentwood went flying.

  I got dressed very quietly, making no move that might awaken my slumbering wife. I checked on the kids; angelic in oblivion.

  I got the keys to the long cabinet, off-limits to all but me in this place that still remained my home, our home, my first and only home. It would always and forever be our home. No one would take it away, not ever.

  I wore a new set of clothing.

  I was no longer myself.

  I am not myself.

  Event Horizon

  I had the keys and I jangled them for what reason I never knew, maybe to remind myself that although I was no longer myself that I was absolutely still both present and real.