THE EXECUTION OF ONE-EYED EDDY ABELARD
a nightmarish allegory for our times
by Rich Logsdon

I. Night was immanent, and I whined and whimpered to myself, running and limping low to the ground, kicking up desert dirt and dust but keeping my eye on the fast fading light 93,000,000 miles in front of me. I, Lewis Kaine, felt as if I had been running for centuries, since the beginning of time. Surely a hunted animal, I felt out of my mind.

So I felt sore afraid. Suddenly, running like a wounded one-eyed dog, I remembered the scene from the Cecil B. DeMille classic The Ten Commandments, a movie my brother and I had seen together years and years ago in the familiarly dark Boise Theater, saw the black clouds in the night sky pour onto the Egyptian earth, killing the first-born of everyone not covered by the Blood of the Lamb. In a way, as you shall learn, I was covered by the blood of the lamb.

II.  Let me tell you what happened. I know that I can explain what I did.

At the night club, music pounding in the semi-darkness, smoke thick as blood, I could actually smell Eddy before I saw him. In my skin-tight leathers, I was standing at the bar of the Flying Eagle night club, talking to this jerk-off Ned Blunders, who’d been hitting on me for months. I couldn’t stand Ned and given the opportunity would have enjoyed slicing him open like a melon. A city bus driver, he was stupid and overweight, and he stank. At times, he reminded me of the odors the emanate from that garbage disposal you never bother to clean out until the stench is so unbearable that people refuse to come over to see you and you’re thinking about moving out yourself when you suddenly think to yourself, "Hey, it’s the shit in the garbage disposal." No, I didn’t care for Ned, and I felt fragmented.

But then along came Eddy. Sounds like a song, doesn’t it? Along comes Eddy. Anyway, while I was talking to Ned, wondering if Ned ever washed his socks and underwear, I was literally overcome by a fragrance that brought to mind the robust imagery of the Song of Songs, one of my favorite books in the Bible. This was the smell of paradise, of perfect delight; my soul sang, harmony of the spheres, and I had to turn and look.

Eddy looked at me, ran his one eye from my boots to my muscled and tattooed arms and finally to my flaming red hair. "So you’re Lewis Kaine," he said in a high melodious voice. Jesus Christ, I swear that listening to Eddy was like listening to a caged bird sing.

"Yeah," I said, hitching my pants, stuffing my hands in my pockets and taking a step closer to this gorgeous fellow, "that’s me. Stud muffin himself. What you know about me?"

"Oh, yes, oh, yes, oh, yes," Eddy seemed to wax ecstatic. Jesus, I thought to myself, this is too good to be true, and I knew I had him, and walking up to him, right in front of all the other jealous night-clubbers, I put my arm around the famous Eddy Abelard, kissed him on the cheek, planted my lips on his blind eye, and panting like a beast invited him to have several drinks with me.

In two weeks, Eddy—gentle as a lamb—moved in with me, and a month later he was even talking about marriage. Things had been fine up to that point: we had gone to movies, plays and opera together; we had gone dancing at the night club; we had enjoyed just sitting home together and watching a good movies. But when Eddy mentioned marriage, I went ice-cold. I swear: it was like I turned to ice, I don’t know why, and I told Eddy that for me marriage with anyone is out of the question. Hell, I guess I’m just not the marrying type.

After that, things worsened, as I knew they would, some nights Eddy going into a pout and mournfully, longingly gazing at me with his one good eye, finally excusing himself right at the most exciting part of the movie we happened to be watched and taking off for, oh, say, three or four hours, returning at two or three in the morning when I pretended to be asleep but simply lay on my side of the bed, turned away from him, my one eye open, tense, hurt, enraged, knowing Eddy had found someone else. When he climbed into bed next to me on such nights, I could ever smell his fear and, temporarily but wrongly aroused, could have taken him right there.

Finally, as in all great affairs, things went to shit. Last night, our last night together, always gentle one-eyed Eddie had humiliated me at the dinner table as I had spelled out medieval philosopher Anselm’s argument proving God’s existence and had given him a few tasty Aquinian syllogisms to chew on. You see, I am my beliefs. No beliefs; no me.

I admit that I was on edge as I watched my one-eyed companion eat his salad—Eddy is a vegetarian and won’t eat meat—and ignore me. That afternoon, looking through Eddy’s drawers for some socks to wear, I had found a note from a mutual acquaintance named Raymond. Raymond was a pimple-faced freak with thick black hair who lived in an apartment downstairs, who worked for the government, and who had been flirting with Eddy ever since Eddy had moved in with me. This note clearly suggested that Raymond and Eddy had seen each other recently, last weekend perhaps, and would explain why Eddy was spending more and more time away from me.

Hell’s bells, I have that note memorized.

In short, the letter had put me into a fucking rage, and even before he had come home last night I had stomped around the apartment, howling to nothing in particular, slamming my fist against the wall again and again, sobbing uncontrollably. I wanted to put my eye out. Eddy had betrayed me.

So there you have it. Now as he sat eating before me, Eddy was doing his best to ignore me. But I was in no mood to be ignored. When someone like Eddy ignores me, I begin to go invisible, feel I am breaking into fragments, and may become feverish and depressed, the brooding darkness of the Void hanging over me like a heavy impenetrable fog. In the situation with Eddy, as soon as I felt emptiness crawling upward from the my fragmenting soul, I began to raise my voice the direction of Eddy’s head, going over the syllogisms of Anselm and Aquinas again and again, like I was saying a chant. As I did so, Eddy put his hands over his ears, continuing to chew with his mouth open and pretending I wasn’t there. Eddy sounded like a fucking rabbit, and I hate rabbits.

Biting into my under-cooked steak, chewing furiously, I screamed, "Are you listening, Abelard, you fucking cyclops!!!" Of course, he was listening. That’s the point.

A piece of bloodied steak flew out of my mouth and across the table, landing in front of Eddy’s salad. Pounding the table with both fists, I growled, "You’ll regret this, you balding one-eyed son-of-a-bitch! " Bounding from the table, I walked into a back bedroom, to the closet where I kept a polished and sharpened silver sword that my grandfather had given me years ago. He had claimed that it was used in the Spanish-American War before the turn of the century and, long before that, by the English knights on their crusades to the holy land.

"Uh, uh, uh, uh,,uh, uh….Wh--wh--wh—wha’ we got here, L-L-L-Lewis?" squeaked Eddy, brokenly twittering, using his napkin to wipe vomit off his face and shirt. Cautiously approaching, I held the point of the blade at his neck and watched him sweat. I swear that, just at that moment, the sword began a song, barely audible. I supposed it was begging for blood, but at that moment I didn’t want to kill Eddy, just teach him a little lesson in manners.

"Uh, uh, uh, Wha’ we got here, Eh-Eh-Eddy," I responded, my voice coming deep from within my gut, "may be a failure to c-c-c-communicate. When you talk, I always listen and throw a word or two in edgewise. When I talk, you phase me out. Pretend I’m not even here. Pisses me off, man. Someone oughta cut off your nuts. That someone oughta be me, dontcha think, Eddy?" I ended with a snarl to make Eddy think I was possessed. "By the way, Eddy, how’s Raymond doin’ these days?" I added for emphasis.

A half hour at least passed as we studied each other, Eddy never taking his eye off me, I watching Eddy like a hawk, watching his one good eye, watching him watch me (what did he see with his one eye, I wondered), awaiting his next move. Neither one of us blinked, and Eddy became The Eye while I became The Sword. Finally, I lowered my weapon. Then, just as suddenly, he sighed deeply, put both hands behind his head, and smiled at me.

Shaking, Eddy relaxed a bit, seemed to regain his composure quickly. "Tut, tut," he muttered, very nervously at first, then growing bolder as I kept my sword down, finally adopting a pedantic tone, "tut, tut, tut. This little misunderstanding is nothing. Nothing at all. Now, Lewis dear, please put your sword away like the civilized lad that I know you are so that we can both enjoy the evening together. And as far as Raymond is concerned, the homely fellow is of no interest to me. Of no interest whatsoever. Heh, heh, heh, why should he be? Why should I prefer that oaf to you, huh?" His fingers still trembling, he was nevertheless smiling hugely, or trying to, and even when he lies to me I like it when someone like Eddie bathes me in the glory of his smile. He gave me a wink with his one good eye, and I winked back. Order had been restored to my soul, and a truce called.

"Maybe so, Lewis. Maybe so," Eddy babbled, nervously. "Who’s to say? Who’s to say? Anyway why don’t you just put it up and eat. Huh? How about it? Huh? Huh? C’mon, beautiful. Maybe tomorrow we can go take a picnic to Valley of Fire." Valley of Fire is located about twenty miles north of Las Vegas. Eddy could be so convincing when he was sweet to me.

"The blade was a-singin’ for your blood, love bird," I asserted, and I don’t know why I said it because I was no longer in the mood to thrust the old knife home, and the part of me that wanted to chop Eddy into bits had disappeared. Maybe I said these words because of Raymond. Maybe it was because Eddy never agreed with me. As the fear jumped back into Eddy’s eye, I smiled, indicating no threat. "Stay away from that piece of shit Raymond," I added with a growl, ending the conversation.

Things seemed to be settled. The picnic—always an image of paradise regained for me--was a good idea. Anyway, I love picnics with Eddy when we get way far away from everyone and it’s just the two of us and we can do what we like for as long as we want right out there in front of God and everyone. So I pushed myself out of the chair and away from the table and returned to the bedroom, fingering my blade.

III. At night, just before we went to bed, one-eyed Eddy and I generally read something together. Together, maybe we could see the truth. Almost always, it was something pretty profound, like Neitzche or Kafka or Milton. Last night, I wanted to read from St. Augustine’s City of God, an incredible work which contains numerous proofs of God’ existence. Always, since my days at the Catholic boys’ school in Detroit (my brutal father having cast me out of the house and away from my mother at an early age), I have needed to believe in something, anything to give my passage through the dark speedway of this dark planet some meaning. Anyway, it was my turn to select what we wanted to read. The last week had belonged to Eddy and Sartre and the good old being and nothingness theme. We’d taken turns with the parts in Sartre’s No Exit, and I’d ended up nearly a basket-case.

But Eddy was not being fair. "Oh, just fuck that old St. Augustine," he exclaimed with a flip of his hand; "the man tells fairy tales. I want substance. I want something thought-provoking. I want something that will grab us. I want entropy and the void. I want Thomas Pynchon. And then, dear Lewis, I want you."

When I asked about Raymond, Eddy and I were lying together in bed. Eddy looked at me for an instant, his one eye bulging like the eye of one of those frogs you dissect in high school biology class and gulped. "I said I’m through with Raymond, Lewis," Eddy choked out. "Raymond is not a factor." Eddy looked imploringly at me, smiled, leaned over, and kissed me softly on the mouth.

So Ray was not a factor, right? Putting my arm around Eddy, I pulled him to me. I was in no mood to argue, still drained from the violent provocation, though I took Eddy’s rejection of my reading choice personally. Once my passions are violently aroused, once I come close to a kill, I almost always drift in the aftermath into a state of numbing, passive indifference. It’s like I go dead inside, zero to the bone.

(Fleetingly, at that moment, holding Eddy, eye-to-eye with my lover, I remembered my first kill, a young lady named Madeline I had dated in college. Inexcusably promiscuous, Madeline apparently had taken on fourteen men at a time at a party several weeks before. She had become a whore. Anyway, Madeline and I had gone to the mountains outside town on a chilly November Saturday afternoon for a picnic where, unable to perform, I had flown into a rage, smashing her head into unrecognizable chunks with a huge sharp stone I had found, burying the body, keeping the heart for some reason, and then returning to civilization where I had coolly finished my college education. It was only last year, fifteen years after the fact, that local authorities found the remains of what they assumed was the minister’s daughter, whose mysterious disappearance fifteen years before had led to a massive, border-to-border search for the missing girl.)

Now I looked at Eddy, his head locked in my arm. I could have crushed him. "Whatever," I whispered into Eddy’s ear. "Let’s do Pynchon. I like Pynchon. Yeah, yeah, let’s read some fuckin’ Pynchon. Let’s read about the dissolution of the universe, of culture, of self. Then you can have me." I let Eddy go.

So that night until two in the morning, holding each other in bed, we did Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, the both of us taking turns reading when, following a scene in which Slothrup dreams he is falling into a toilet and imagines himself swimming through a pool of shit, Eddy muttered teasingly, "Embrace the Void, Sweet Cheeks" and suddenly nodded off as he lay next to me in bed. I lay there and shivered, hating Eddy for having said that, worrying that in time it might come true. To settle myself, I turned my attention to one of my favorite made-for-TV series, The Highlander. I was a bit infatuated with the star, Jeff Paul.

Then, turning off the lights, I moved closer to the sleeping Eddy Abelard, put one leg over this man, and tried to go to sleep. However, the harder I tried, the emptier I felt, the annihilation and fragmentation of Lewis Kaine now immanent. I blamed Eddie for my frame of mind, silently accusing him of planting the ideas of entropy and dissolution in my already trouble soul. And the more I blamed Eddy, the angrier I became, until I silently vowed, to whatever powers would listen, to square things with Eddy for good the next day.

IV. The last day began as any other. I awoke a good two hours before Eddy, who often sleeps like a corpse until noon. I arose, showered, shaved, fixed a breakfast of tea, scrambled eggs and toast, watched television, sang a Gregorian chant or two, read and re-read Anselm’s argument for the existence of God, and waited for Eddy to wake up so I could resume the argument again. The argument would help me put together some of the pieces of our relationship(not that it mattered) and would turn, I hoped, the distorted kaleidoscope of my soul into a beautifully integrated design.

A source of continuing tension between Eddie and me, Anselm’s argument is simple but brilliant. In essence, he says that our inability to conceive of a being than whom no greater can exist proves the existence of that being. All things being equal, language existing (according to twentieth century French philosopher-linguist Jacques Lacan) as the lone absolute—psycho-linguistic structures in the brain carrying forth cultural codes generation after generation--, Anselm is correct. Absolutely. I wondered what Raymond would say to that.

That Sunday, about two in the afternoon, Eddy drove us through the red sandstone canyons of Valley of Fire National Park to what was supposed to be a look-out point for couples who had a romantic interest in each other. It was a beautiful November day, not a cloud in the sky, a mid-November day in Southern Nevada when it feels like you’re in the middle of spring. It was a perfect day for a picnic—and anything else.

When we parked in the lot next to the overlook, I noticed that there were no other automobiles present. The thought of this gave my adrenaline a jump-start, in turn releasing the demon anxiety from my soul, and I knew that I was starting to break into fragments again. Eddy and I had the place to ourselves, the thoughts of being alone bringing forth a desire to kill Eddy then and there. "Do it," a voice inside of me cried, "do it, do it, do it." It had been a long time since I’d actually taken someone’s life.

(I was, suddenly, reminded of my last kill, seven years before. I had been picnicking with a friend up in Montana, in a camp ground just outside of Glacier National Park in the month of November. It had been colder than hell, and beckoned then by the voice, enraged as well by my partner--who had the night before been with his college math professor and who at times mocked my interest in medieval theologians--I had managed to take my great blade out of the trunk, sneak up behind Giles, and just as he turned watch his expression as I brought the beautifully singing blade down onto the top of his skull. KER-SLICE! the great blade had gone in a shower of bloody spray that drenched even me. God, what a kill. Authorities are still looking for the body, the rotting parts concealed in trunks of fallen trees.)

As Eddy’s dismembered body lay before me, as blood trickled down my leg and into my boot, a sense of the immanence of the Almighty washed over me, short-circuiting my thinking. After several minutes, however, I thought I knew what I had to do. I had to act quickly. If judgment came—and it surely would this time around--it would come like a thief in the night. Quickly, I used Eddy’s shirt to staunch my wound. Then I put the head in the trunk, buried the limbs, set the car on fire, and stood my ground, waiting and waiting and waiting.

V. As soon as I had set the fire, dark clouds began to gather overhead. My judgment was nigh, as they say. I could sense the eyes of God sweeping the earth, coming my direction like one of those desert sand storms people are always getting lost in in movies, and I knew that I was probably coming under judgment. As I watched my car burn with my one good eye, spewing filthy black smoke in to the air, I began a series of Gregorian chants I learned in college. I figured God must like Gregorian chants.

Since then, a limping and wounded one-eyed beast, I have been running to the sun.

© Richard Logsdon

February 1999 HofP