As Good a Name as Any

A story of dark magical realism set in WWI with a twist ending no one has seen coming.

Northern France, September 1918…

The twentieth century was young, but it had seen my aging. I was now an old man, not the lusty youth I’d once been in old London. That was a lifetime ago, almost two lifetimes now, most of which I’ve spent in a cell wrapped in a strait jacket. My crimes had been bloody and violent and had been the talk of London, a London I’d brought into the twentieth century with a rosy bloom of blood. Since those halcyon days of my youth the bloom has blossomed with the violence of a world war, a war to end all wars. The killing has become mechanized, impersonal, a rolling death that made my crimes seem quaint and old fashioned. More of an art form than the carnage outside of the trenches, whose contours were gouged from the earth as if some great worm had chewed them out of the landscape. Over the top, a no man’s land of mud, barbed wire, and pools of blood. The dead, rag dolls draped over the landscape, a bullet for the soldier unfortunate enough to stick his head over the top, machine guns mowing down men as they charged, poisoned fogs drifting over the battlefield, lumbering machines that were supposed to break the enemy but more often than not became coffins for those inside. Only the mind of man would try to make order from the chaos, this was the philosophy of the factory.

“Johnnie, get ready we’re going over the top.”

John isn’t my given name. That I have forgotten over time. It never seemed that important anyway. I am every man and no one. John is a formalization of my street name, my nom de plume Jack is as good a name as any. The jailers knew who I was, who I am, what my crimes had been. But as the years passed and I’ve aged, I’ve watched seasons of jailer’s change. I saw generations dying before me, young men became old men. Then like winter into spring, they became younger again and their cruelty increased. They’d forgotten the terror I’d inspired. The memory of my crimes dimmed in their minds. To them my crimes had become history, childhood tales of a bogeyman, an etching in a yellowing newspaper clipping, an oral history passed down from jailer to jailer. They would relieve their boredom and frustrations by beating an aging man in a strait jacket. Maybe they didn’t believe who I was, I didn’t conform to their idea of what a monster should look like. My hair is long and matted as is my beard. A haircut and shave are among the quarterly cruelties imposed upon me. I’m thin, they’ve fed me just enough to keep me alive, my clothes hanging off me even more than when I’d been that jungle animal on the prowl. Occasionally, the ancient darkness would burn in my eyes, but either the guards didn’t know enough to be afraid of it or, if they noticed the rage, they knew that with my arms tied behind my back, I was as powerless to do anything about it as the dog’s threat is made impotent by the fence. They thought my power to act in the world was gone. What they didn’t know was that my power would never die out of this world. In my eyes you could see the feral animal. The animal lives in the eyes.

I never thought I’d live to be this old. I thought I’d be shot trying to escape the coppers, that I’d be hung for my crimes, that I’d succumb to the usual maladies of life in Whitechapel, that drink and disease would claim me, or that I’d be worked to death in the slaughterhouse, old before my time. Some very bad planning on my part. Maybe if I’d taken my own life? But I never had the courage, only the courage to take the lives of others. My childhood was not the Eden most look back on as nostalgic reminiscence.

I grew up playing in the streets of Whitechapel knowing every backyard, every shortcut, every cubby-hole or loose board to scramble into or through. I was a street urchin worthy of Dickens. We ran the neighborhood; it was those streets that raised me. I learned cruelty at home so it was out to the streets; and on the streets, I discovered cruelty could be passed along. I wasn’t above picking the pockets of a drunk passed out in the gutter or cutting the strings of a “lady’s” purse. Those streets were mine long before I claimed them in Jack’s name.

When I was a certain age, I had to earn my keep. “It’s time to learn a trade,” my parents said, and learn one I did. My father in his one besotted act of parental concern got me a job in the slaughterhouse, pushing the offal into the sluice drains. My father made sure he collected a week’s wages from me or else I’d be given a good cuffing about the ears. The money went back into the pubs and the prostitutes. It was a decadent circle of life, it was all part of an iron circle, we the guilty pass along the cruelty we’ve inherited to the innocent. It’s what made places like Whitechapel possible, it’s the cycle that I later disturbed. When I was old enough to swing a hammer, they moved me up to the stun line. I’d hit the animals square in the skull with the hammer and saw the uncomprehending look in their eyes, the shock of realization that this was the moment of their death. Everything they knew was no more and I knew they were sentient beings. It was the same look I saw on my victim’s faces. The animals were carved up so fast the meat was still warm. The slaughterhouse became an annealing process, awash in offal and blood. It heartened my sanguinary soul. People are afraid of death, they see it as cold and monstrous, but it’s warm and inviting, intimate, a friend who walks along with us and easily summoned. When I became broad and strong, my father feared that strength and I was out of his house and into the streets altogether.

It was on the streets of Whitechapel that the darkness found me. If you had seen me, I’d have seemed a lumbering, oddly shaped, awkward beast. I don’t know if it was chance or if my native cruelty lifted me above the din of debauchery of Whitechapel, or if there was a purity in my darkness, or if it was just that I was an empty vessel. This darkness, the power, the energy within me, it’s hard to describe. Maybe I’m limited in my comprehension to understand its nature, maybe my education too limited to describe it. It’s evil but that’s too simplistic, too limited a definition of what it is. I don’t know where it came from, but it is ancient, it has lived forever, it is a force of nature, chaos. Maybe it has always existed and lived among man, maybe it was cast out of paradise along with man finding refuge in the squalid backstreets of Mesopotamia, Babylon, Sumer, and all the cities through the ages that harbored all the same varieties of life as Whitechapel. It found me in those streets with its whores, drunks, sodomites, degenerates, all species of perverts, thieves, the diseased and disabled, syphilitic artists, the infrequent upper-class tourist slumming so they could feel the plight of the poor souls trapped there, poetes- maudits, and one articulate vivisectionist: myself. When it took refuge in me, it seemed to be fear and rage, something animal yet sentient. It was what lurks out in the night. It was irrational, the unconscious, cold and menacing, yet familiar, darkness seeking darkness, I welcomed it. It gave me power and purpose, it was the unknown that became known, unnamed except for Jack. From the moment it took me over, it consumed me, it was the only true consummation of my life. I was no longer a child of the streets I had been molded by. Once the killings started, I became the animal I was meant to be--a night stalker, a jungle cat swift and graceful, a creature of the streets, the random element between life and death. There was madness in my method. I remade those London streets.

Like the darkness, war has walked alongside man, the whore of civilization. When the war began, they came to me in that dank dungeon and gave me the choice of rotting away in the cell for what surely would have been only a few more years before madness, death or both overtook me completely. In the cell the darkness was contained, the animal caged, a fire without expression, without a way to exercise its will in the world. It consumed me, a fire trapped, the embers burning red hot, burning from the inside out. Every day I could feel it consuming me more and more. I could feel the dis-ease it created within me. I made the choice for war, not because I chose life--there was no more freedom in the trenches than in the asylum. There was nowhere to run. The war extended to the horizon and beyond, as far as the eye could see desolation. The rats and the bedlam scurrying around me were the same in the trenches or the asylum. I knew I’d never be free again; I never had any illusions of breathing free air again. They said, “there was always the chance for survival,” but that was a fiction. We all understood they wouldn’t be sending me anywhere that there was a chance for survival. I did it because I wanted to see terror again in the eyes of those I was killing, to see the knowledge reflected in their eyes that this was their last moment of life. The darkness would again have its moment of expression.

It was in one of my first battles that I made a grim discovery. It started like all the other battles, whistles shrilly blaring, officers’ calls to stations. Then we went over the top, running as fast as we could towards the enemy. The officers tried pounding into our heads that the enemy were godless Huns, but I knew that all men in mortal circumstances were in closer communion with a deity than at other times of their lives. With murderous fury I plunged my bayonet deep into the bowels of a German. There was the rending of fabric and flesh I turned the blade, and in the man’s eyes I saw nothing--no victory, there was no joy as I had in Whitechapel. I pulled out the bayonet with less ferocity than it had gone in with. I realized I was just an old man waiting for them to tell me when and who to kill. I was their weapon, a plaything of others, a toy soldier moved about by invisible hands, not my own. Killing had become a job as joyless as any job in a factory or slaughterhouse.

I survived many battles, in rare moments, I thought I might survive the war, but I didn’t know why. Was the darkness giving me an edge? To what purpose? To continue our work? In war, killing and death is on the factory level. In the trenches I was anonymous. No one remembered Jack, and no one would have believed it anyway.

I witnessed the changing seasons of soldiers in the trenches, as I had each new generation of guards in the asylum. Now, the attrition wasn’t because of aging, but death and disease. I was a wizened visage compared to the doughy fresh faces of the conscripts, but they’d seen too much. They would just stare off into the distance--they were already old. I kept to myself. The conscripts sometimes wondered what an old man such as myself was doing here, I smiled enigmatically and said, “I was doing my duty, for God, King and Country.” They didn’t believe it. In their free time they devised theories and invented stories of why I was there. Their most popular theory was that I had been an officer who had committed some atrocity or had offended a general or even a member of the royal family and had been demoted to private and sent to the trenches to meet my fate. I always smiled to myself, bemused at how close, and yet so far, they were from the truth.

“All right boys line up!” The lieutenant yelled, and the order echoed up and down the trench line. We crowded around the nearest ladder that would take us over the top. We all looked alike, grim-faced, dirty men in brown uniforms, rifles at our sides, with bayonets fixed or being affixed to the end of their rifles, last minute prayers for those who needed them, knowing their fate was only moments away. The order was given, and we quickly climbed the ladders, pushing ourselves over the top, running single file through the lanes between the barbed wire traps towards the German lines. We heard the ratt-a-tat of machine guns as bullets danced around us in a rain of metal, kicking up plumes of dirt. Men fell dead out of the line onto the barbed wire, arms and legs akimbo, bent crucifixions. We finally hit an open area where we spread out and continued rushing towards the German trenches. Germans were coming over the top of their trenches, bayonets fixed and rushing towards us. Some stopped to fire, some fell. Most kept rushing forward until the lines crashed together, rifles fired in close quarters, bayonets slicing air, then the sound of ripping fabric and the puncture of flesh. I felt a sharp jab and saw a little German private too close. I turned my head, a sort of detached insect curiosity came over me, as if I was watching from afar. I’d become an observer. I saw my body, but I was apart from it. I looked down to see a bayonet plunged into the depths of my gut. I felt a surprisingly warm feeling emanating from the wound. I knew the warmth was the internal bleeding of severed organs, blood filling the spaces it hadn’t before. But it was a distant thought and not alarming in the least. It was a funny sort of sensation, nothing like I’d imagined. I followed the bayonet down the rifle to the scared, slight, mousy looking private with a bushy mustache holding the rifle. I saw the fear in the little man’s eyes, but there was also a slight spark of darkness. I knew my life, this flesh, this identity was ending. I could feel the life ebbing away; this was the moment of my death, but I knew I’d become part of the darkness. I’d left my imprint on it. I was it and it was me, it fed me, and I’d fed it, and it had grown and multiplied within me. I reached out grabbing the little man’s arm, contact, skin on skin. It had been a long time since I had touched warm living flesh. I asked, “wie ist ihr name?” The little man looked startled but mumbled, “Adolf Hitler.” I smiled; the ancient darkness recognized a kindred soul. I looked into his eyes and saw the feral animal, the cunning and cruelty of his life. “Adolf Hitler, as good a name as any.” In that moment the darkness surged into the scared private. The mousy man felt the darkness radiate into him like a jolt of electricity. He pulled the bayonet out of my body with more ferocity than it had gone in with. I slumped into the muck of the battlefield, now nothing more than an empty husk.

As Good a Name as Any is in my book of short stories, The Lion Communique, you can check it out at www.jymsbooks.com or purchase from Barnes & Noble or Amazon.