Chapter 12: Thou Art Madness

Thou art that madness of supreme desire,
which lacking, beauty is but dross and clay.
Within thy veins is all the fire of day
and all the stars divinity of fire.
Thine are the lips and loins that never tire,
and thine the bliss that makes my soul dismay.
Upon thy breast what god at midnight lay,
to make thy flesh the music of his lyre?

Ah! Such alone should know thy loveliness!
Ah! Such alone should know thy full caress,
O goddess of intolerable delight!
I beg of Fate the guerdon and the grace,
far beyond death, to know in thine embrace
eternal rapture in eternal night.

"Flame" from "Poetica Erotica" by George Sterling © 1921, Smith, T.R., Editor, New York: Crown Publishers

The man cried out and then bolted upright in his bed. His hand shot up, grappling with the bedclothes in a frantic rush to cover the malformed side of his face. Once he achieved this goal, he sat frozen in place as his ragged breathing calmed and the heaving of his chest subsided. Lowering his hand, he drew in a long deep breath through his nose and then slowly blew it out through pursed lips. He tried it again, but his usual salvation of performing his breathing exercise had not helped. Crumpling forward, he leaned his elbows on his thighs and placed his face into his hands. A wave of despair swept through the man, his shoulders wracked as he began to weep in earnest.

"Why? Why will this dream not leave me alone? The life I dream about is not mine, so why do I weep? Why does this dream both haunt and horrify me? I hoped meeting Christine would banish the dream, but no. The dream came tonight clearer than ever before and I can remember everything that happened in it. I never could do that before tonight. Meeting the angel of my dream did not rid me of them."

After carefully wiping away his tears with the palms of his hands, he lay down on his side and tightly clasped his pillow to his chest. He moaned into the pillow as he remembered the dream.

"That poor boy!" His broken lament pierced the silence of the night.

He was dirty, disheveled and stunk of blood, sweat and filth. His lank hair crawled with lice and the burlap rags he used as clothes, infested with fleas. His body bore a multitude of fleabites and the marks, both old and recent, of a whip's lash. For a boy of about 12 years of age, he was extremely tall, probably close to six feet and due to the near starvation diet forced on him by his keeper, cadaverously thin. A cage of iron bars was the place he called his home and the place of his ultimate humiliation. He traveled with a band of gypsies as the main attraction in their carnival's sideshow. His keeper, a cruel, dark and ugly man named, Jaevert, had decided to call him, "The Devil's Child." They placed his deformity on display and charged townspeople for the privilege of gawking at him. Whenever the gypsies set up their camp, he knew he would have to suffer through four shows a day. They placed him in front of an audience and then Jaevert stripped him of his sack for the amusement and horror of paying customers.

Life with the gypsies had not been the boy's choice. The gypsies had found him unconscious, beaten and bloody in an alley when he was what he had guessed to be 8 or 9 years old. When he awoke, he found himself locked in a cage. He had no memory of his life before the gypsies and no hope of one away from them. So, he existed from town to town, show to show, in this hellish limbo. Yet, while he had no hope of escape, he was ever watchful for an opportunity to try. He made several attempts at escape over the years, but none succeeded in doing anything but infuriate Jaevert into beating him senseless.

Today's beating had been somewhat of a surprise. The boy had sat and waited for the gypsy to enter his cage. This was the last show of the night and the final show in this town. The carnival's schedule called for them to move on to the next town in the morning. The boy sat hunkered down amidst the stinking straw lining the floor of his prison. He held his one possession in his hands. He played with a small stuffed animal in the form of an organ grinder's monkey rather apathetically. The monkey held a cymbal in each paw. The boy made the monkey's arms move, so the cymbals made a small clinking sound. When Jaevert entered the cage at the appointed time with the audience in tow, the boy, as usual, did not acknowledge his presence. He simply continued to play with the monkey's cymbals. Jaevert began to extol the features of the boy's frightening countenance to the audience with his usual leering and eye rolling speech. Just as the gypsy turned to look at the boy and noticed him playing with his toy, a member of the audience made a disparaging remark to Jaevert.

"Hey! I thought this thing was supposed to be frightening! I paid good money to see a freak, not a child playing with his toy. You'd better make good on your boast or I want my money back!"

With those words, it seemed as if the entire audience had decided to begin complaining. Jaevert feared he would have to refund the entire audience's money. He strode to the boy and backhanded the toy from his hands. Then uncoiling his whip from around his waist, he snapped it in the air above the boy's head. The boy remained where he was, not moving a muscle. Jaevert roughly grabbed the boy by one thin arm, yanked him to his feet and tore the sack from his head. He turned the boy to face the audience and silence immediately fell. The man slowly turned the boy's face, so everyone in the tent would get the opportunity to stare to his or her heart's content.