August 1st, 1916

My dearest Joseph -

Tell me, is it you who sends this mottled ape to stand before me at the foot of
my bed? As hideous as this ghoulish apparition is, its familiarity robs it of any
intended fearfulness. Is he your messenger, Joseph? If so, please have him speak
his piece and be done with it! I have but a few days left, and I cannot bear to waste
these remaining hours peering into a specter that has no tongue, no purpose other
than to stand here like some beastly harlequin and disturb my thoughts.
My grand moment in the spotlight is only two nights away. The Father comes
and goes. They finally decided I could be Catholic. Thank you, I told them, can you
add Irish to that as well. It was I alone who laughed. Perhaps too loudly. But I made
my first Confession. Wept like a baby. I have always believed I was in control of my
life, and so why should I end life giving someone else that control. I have pondered
this greatly. But I can also choose to live until the very last moment I am given to
be alive. That too is a form of control. Could be construed as cowardly, I suppose.
What is more cowardly, knotting my bedsheet around my throat while I am alone or
urinating from the end of a rope in front of the world?

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Strange how peaceful I feel knowing that I have failed, that my life is one
long, miserable failure. I have tried to change things, I have tried to make people
listen. I have even tried to wage rebellions, for Christs sake, twice I set out to make
war. And I have failed every time. You on the other hand, Joseph, did little more
than watch and observe, you made it clear that you were not one to take a stance,
to interfere with the worlds fate. And yet you succeeded. You have changed the
world without taking risk of your life or limb. You only wanted to feed your family.
Most admirable, I think, but where is the real justice in all that? The question arises,
but I care not if it is answered. I only wish you the best, and continued success. As
much success as might possibly match my love for you.
I write this letter to you Joseph, knowing full well the Brits will seize it, destroy
it, never let it reach your hands. Perhaps the guards will steal for themselves a few
moments of laugher, a slight reprieve from their hideous occupation by reading
these, the last words of these last days of my life; and I hope they do read them,
and I hope some of these words haunt them, like a curse, the more they laugh the
more these words shall haunt them for the years and years to come, until one of
them weakens and to save himself from the inner babble I infected him with runs
down that street that bears not my name and spews the words forth onto all the
young and old.
But this fellow before me, cloaked in the shadows of night yet recognizable as
the apparition that has stood before me times before, he has a face that actually
belongs not to any one individual, but is a sinister amalgam of barbarians I had
come to know over the years, the most prominent feature of each criminal, it
seems, sliced and stitched into a mask that brings out the most hideous aspect of
man in general. All which makes me believe that he is sent by you, Joe. As if you

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are challenging me to take my broader experience and deeper, more intimate

knowledge of these men and create something greater, more hideous than your
already famously hideous Mr. Kurtz. Is that why you sent him here? I respect your
contribution to our cause, but you spent but a few months in our jungles and
ultimately needed me for the details that cut and dressed your literary ragamuffins.
Indeed my role in the work itself is nothing but obvious, while Kurtz grabs the
literary spotlight, it is I who shine the lantern. I am ashamed that I feel this way:
slighted, neglected, childish with self-pity. The truth is, the world has long forgotten
the horrors of the Congo that you and experienced, the horrors I then saw repeated
in Bartholomews old country; and the horrors taking place freshly on the Continent
- they too will soon be forgotten.
As I have been forgotten and how could I have been how Joe? I was
applauded for efforts to expose the injustices to the Africans, I was knighted for my
deeds to liberate the Amazonians, I am confined in this solitary cage for my role as
an Irish rebel and will now die as a British traitor. My life has been drawn between
these four tribes and as that mutt I am now drawn and quartered. My case is
hopeless, you know, escape fruitless of course, my fate sealed. My legacy. Snuffed
out. Neither Bertrand nor Doyle nor Twain nor Shaw nor Yeats what greater
petition has any man been named to - has been persuasive enough to free me, yet
you who are free, free and as famous as any spirit living or dead, you who are now
indeed immortal and done with me, you have cast me into your sempiternal ocean
to sink, weighted by another, unfamiliar name.
What haunts me most is you and the Congo. You and the Congo, there is
not one without the other, you and the Congo are the same, your curse will be that
despite your claim that you will never return, you have never left. Your blood and

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its water are the same dark briny liquid, your breath and the heavy heated air form
the same shared gasps, your flesh and the spongy carpets of mud and decay are
the same beginning, the same end to life. Never will the Congo be free from you,
nor will you ever be able to discard its black robe and hood. Every time I traveled
there, found myself paralyzed by that heat, driven to near insanity by the mosquitos
and flies, suffocating from the dank smells, that mixture of rich fecundity and rank
death - why I wanted nothing more than to chase down the steamer that had
dropped me here and suffer my way back to civilization. Yet when I was away, it
was but days until the Congo began to call me back. Tugging at me like the most
faithful narcotic, a distant lover gushing with impossible promises, it was a craving
that could not be satisfied until I found myself once again on that sloop which takes
me face first into the salty sea winds until my body feels the position and retreat of
the stars, and we know we are returning to the feral nightmare of mankinds earliest
land. For indeed the Congo is a place of beauty but the beauty of a terrible dream.
The great mangrove-walled bronze river, the vast aisle in some forest cathedral, the
sound of wind through hard palm leaves, the thump of the native drums, the cry of
the parrots over the swamps, the sweet long mellow whistle of the plantain warblers
welcoming the dawn. I was the one who told you that our great cities were like
beasts restrained, while the Congo was the beast unfettered. Yet it is a land that
harbors so much death, its waterways so filled with bodies parched and bloated
they cease to flow, the wounded soil choked with the remains of Africans and whites
together. I went there, and it affected me, no doubt. But you went there and you
became it. You and the Congo, Joe, till death do you part.
At times of clearer reflection, I thought this morbid attraction of mine came
from the realization that in the Congo, all my old ideas, all the notions and concepts

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and conclusions I had derived from books and education and the imperfect
knowledge I had gathered of the world, these were all weighed against the life that
now engulfed me and I found these ideas of mine utterly useless and banal. I
seemed to rejoice in not knowing, embraced my newly found, raw ignorance, my
challenged knowledge. As you were aware, one of my passions was collecting
butterflies. Despite the domestic delicacy this hobby seems to convey, in the
Congo to chase down a desired species can mean a long and often dangerous hunt
through the jungle; you battled against flies and beetles the size of billiard balls that
flew with hideous purpose at your head; you would be stung and bitten by flies, ants
and wasps; you would be soaking wet from the inevitable afternoon rain, from
tripping into swamps, until finally to fully punish you for you sins you would stumble
and aim your faltering step upon what you thought was a concealed tree trunk but
your foot pushes easily through the lump, discharging a vomit of rank, fetid human
blood.
But it was not the Congo that allured you, Joe. You told me it was the men of
the Congo that you wanted to know. You wanted to understand, to dissect them in
the way you have of trying to see where the fissures are that make men break, to
find and follow the weaknesses in spirit as well as flesh that take men from the
heights of their dreams to the lowest points of despair. You were more fascinated
with the lines and scars age etches into a mans face than in his accomplishments.
For what he achieved, whether that be wealth or fame, would not figure on his
death mask, only what he had lost, the failed and forgotten drawings of his life.
This specter, looking down at me, indeed comprises the generosity I afforded
you. It projects the forehead of the Congo captain, Leon Rom, who I had watched
chain several workers at the wrists and feet, then dump them into the river like so

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many unwanted dogs so as to be free of the obligation to feed them after a long day
of work; by his own wayward whip his broad pate had been spliced and then welded
by the sun into ruddy permanent welt. It has the lost phlegmatic eyes of Fievez
squinting shiftily out of dark pools of discolored flesh, always nervously on watch for
the proverbial knife at his back. The cheeks are leathery, worn and wrinkled like
those of the vicious Lothaire, drained of life by cheap liquor, sun and smoke. He has
the great exterminator, King Leopolds great elbow of a nose. His ears, or lack
thereof, are those of the German officer August Shobart, ears that had been sliced
with knives during a short rebellion of the natives, the remaining cartilage bitten
down to nubs by the ubiquitous jungle vermin. These deformities were a blessing,
he said, as he now longer had to listen to the moans of the men and women who
starved in his encampment while his own belly grew shamelessly bulbous from
European tin meats and candied sweets. Finally, the lips are as crooked and
shapeless as the truth that slipped from the mouth of any of these men, but most
notoriously, those murderous rapscallions, the Arana brothers.
I had come to know these villains intimately, details of which I shared with
you during many a long night. It was these men that you wanted to know. Or so I
believed at first. And so I told you what I thought I knew, I told you how these men
all came together it seemed as if gravitating towards some shared, some deeper
need. They collected here from different countries, curried by different religions,
but for the most part, they could have been whelped from the same flea bitten
bitch. If not familial, perhaps the journey had carved in these men similar features
and characteristics: the way their legs shuffled in an impatient manner like some
elephants I have seen, the ways their arms moved and their shoulders dropped
suddenly as if always ready to duck a punch, the tics that animated their otherwise

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stoically leathered faces, the way they continually scratched and dug at their
diseased and rotting bodies.
The specter at my bed mocks me. They, who I thought were confined to lives
of sordid debauchery, now look upon me, stare at me locked in my cage,
surrounded not by earth but stone, rotting in my own ill-doings, no sounds, no life
but my own, silently ticking away. The specter taunts me to say what I think, to say
again what I believe to be true. You and I shared many a night of honest, brutally
honest discourse. I have never spared you any of my thoughts or feelings. You see,
through my encounters with men, I have come to realize with no lack of certainty
that if you were to put two of us in a cage, we would do two things: we would fuck
and we would kill each other, with no prediction of order. Perhaps we would engage
in both acts simultaneously, like those hideous insects, the praying mantis. Yet,
that we men fuck each other is, according to most opinions, a disorder, a disease at
best, but in any case a crime. That we kill each other is perceived as natural, even
rewarded. We separate the acts to different ends of the human spectrum. But who
knows, perhaps that ancient Greek military strategist, Gorgidas, had it right: the
most effective way to build an army was to pair lovers to fight together in battle.
And were they not the most lethal of all ancient armies? This is the way of men, this
is their inclination, their hereditary desires. The argument that men are basically
good or even that some men are better than others, I say has been proven
irrefutably incorrect. You can see this here in the Congo where the most rigid
dispositions weaken, where even the staunchest missionaries eventually stray, end
up one day with a whip in their hand, a favorite house boy and a black wife if not
two.

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This world was dark for you, Joe. Terrible darkness everywhere. When in fact,
this place had more light, shone with greater brilliance and color and majesty than
any land anywhere in the world. You were simply too afraid to see it. You painted it
black. You erased its life, it vivacity, you squeezed out the sun with your hands to
your eyes and thought that was enough to tell the world this was a black grave of
unlimited darkness. You were afraid to see as others see.
That said, you cannot live in the Congo and survive by holding on to dear life
for your beliefs. If you fall into a raging river, you toss away your pack and let loose
your favorite boots. The one thing you must cast off to survive here is any
sensitivity you may have to the wanton violence meted out on the poor natives.
The Africans are not just abused, whipped or beaten, they are hacked down in a
moment of rage, because they are in the way, because they cannot understand the
white mans language, because someone does not like how they look, because
someone needs the chain around their neck for another purpose or another slave,
for no reason at all, but from rage, from an alcoholic fit just for the sport of it. I
once sat with a man on his porch who every once in a while during the course of our
conversation would stop, pull a rifle up to his chin and pick off an African traveling
across a distant path, then resume his discussion with me. You were never here
long enough to see all this, to know all this, to understand as I do that there are
days when the scent of African death is the only vapor you can remember, a stench
that wakes you with its grasp around your own throat.
But back to this figure before me, this collection of scoundrels, these were the
men, Joe, who best typified our times, a rare era in which there is at least the
illusion of peace, this is the Gilded Age. You did not understand these men fully, you
were unable, perhaps you refused to see what was most obvious.

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A strange sort of man they are, they came here and lived in isolation yet
could not live without each other, they could not operate without believing they had
an audience always awaiting the letters and reports of their good and glorious
deeds, as if the worlds progress turned on their efforts, as if the public was holding
their collective breath for the next news installment from darkest Africa, that the
literary world turned on the next travel book. As down and out, as diseased and
depraved as these men were, they were as obsessed with public fame and fortune
as they were in amassing their pitiable fortunes in the Congo, the latter
accomplished completely without success as to the one they would squander all
they could steal from the natives and the governments that sponsored them; yet
each one to a man had his dream, his scheme, his fantasy that was worth more
than the lives of hundreds that got in his way. And despite the fact that their lives
were completely defined by the tons of rubber or piles of ivory they could rape from
the land, by how many natives they could cajole into carrying out this carnage, or
by how many hands of the uncooperative, the underperforming, the wasted and
weak, they could sever to prove their progress in civilizing this pagan country, they
still ultimately viewed their life as a mission that was divinely heroic and manifest.
There was nothing truly material about any one of these traders. You
constantly tried to make their tongues move according to minds you hoped, for the
sake of humanity, they had inside their skulls. In effect, their ragged and pathetic
lives were vaudevillian at best, cheap acting devised in some cases to hide their
greedy ambitions, in other cases to cover up their own abominable distaste for
themselves. A surly group to which you would not easily attribute any real
theatrical skills but like all of us in this glorious age of skin, sizzle and flashbulbs
they understood the power of disbelief, deception and of course self-promotion.

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And they loved their music, their Wagner, their Sibelius, their Mahler, and their
Strauss. Loud and triumphant. Light and electricity had found its way into the jungle
onboard Edison-outfitted steamers or dynamos transported by mule that could be
operated with treadmills on which young boys were entreated (through whips and
threats of mutilation of course) to light up the stage and turn up the house.
Indeed life all along had colluded to choreograph these men, band them
together into no less than a corps of dancers with greed as their director and
desperation as their orchestral leader. They took this all very seriously, of course.
The stage houses on the Congo at Boma, Loanda and Leopoldville were as elaborate
if not more so than many on Londons theatrical thoroughfares. While the custom
houses were but shanties built from crooked planks and rotting corrugated metal
roofs, the theater halls lit up the main outposts, served as beacons to the steamers
that brought the tourists and evangelists and the steady stream of men seeking a
land they could conquer. These theaters were sturdily built from jungle timber, ivory
inlaid into dark wood patterns, gold and silver glittered across the ceilings, murals of
famous scenes from Shakespeare and Wagner adorned the walls behind the
balconies where guests sat in down cushioned chairs of dark velvet. The curtains
were said to be lined with so much gold that they weighed more than a wall of the
buildings and required special trusses to take the strain off the external structure.
What there was really to learn from the Congo was to found on that contrived
stage, not in the jungle. On stage is where men tried to hide from their terrible
deeds but exposed them all the same, it was on the stage that they tried to create
one story but ended up telling another. Not that they lacked the skills but that they
lacked the ability to hold the truth in check. Their bellies and egos always got the
best of them, they were unable to hide even the most base aspects of their

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brutality, they thought the stage was a place to escape into fantasy when in effect it
was a place of deepest revelation, of ultimate disclosure. Where dreams and
fantasies are made manifest. And it is on the stage where you, the audience, were
able to enjoy and indulge in all those effects of being human that you wanted to
forever deny lives beneath your own skin. And I admit that I too fell under its spell,
forgetting about reality and succumbing to the fantasy that allowed me to laugh
and enjoy the most tasteless spectacles.
These spectacles might very well open with a tribute to the savage locals.
The Africans would dutifully begin the nights performance under the rum-jaundiced
eyes of the armed security in the wings, a performance that began of course with
the beat of their drums, boom boom ba boom. The others in the band, their legs
and arms which had once been massive limbs of muscle, were now conveniently
reduced to but sticks of bone so that a knocking of knees and a clattering of elbows
against ribs created a sweet percussion to which they added the clicking of their
teeth as their jaws clattered and rattled together no longer held tight by jaw
muscles wasted away why yes, the audience would turn and laugh to each other,
these were in fact musical beings literally down to their very bones, why you could
swear you could even hear their eyeballs rattle in their skulls as they swayed and
danced in their nakedness of course, their long sloppy penises swinging this way
and that, their sagging hardened testicles clapping like cow bells into the boney
arses hollowed between their hipbones.
These white men, being the ego-heavy impresarios that they were, were not
interested however in watching the black stickmen and stickwomen steal the show,
no, so they headlined the event with their own liquor slackened songs, tossed winks
and sloppy smooches to the crowd, stomped across the dance floor beneath the

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pulsing theater lights (unsteady runners on the treadmills) in their neatly pleated
dungarees, their clean white socks and polished leather army boots, their arms
pumping in their freshly laundered cotton shirts and open-stitched linen jackets,
around their necks they caught the rivulets of sweat with shiny silk handkerchiefs.
They swirled and glided across the floor on their knees, they rolled on their backs
and kicked at the air as if bicycling across the endless Congolese skies, they flipped
themselves over and joined arms again while scissor-stepping towards the edge of
the proscenium, then shuffled with little girl hops back to the center of the stage.
The impresarios were not without their props and wizardry, but still much was
lacking. And so what they could not accomplish with their Brush Electric Company
Dynamos, they improvised. They held the faces of the inhumanly long winded
Africans under water to create the ambient gurgling effect as the champagne was
brought out to begin the soiree, they moved on to a chorus out of groaning porters
who were lashed with whips made of hippo hide to keep the beat, stilettoes ground
their dirty points into bulbous buttocks to awaken supine singers who may have lost
consciousness after being rehearsed by a generous ninetail flogging. They made the
woman belt out the rousing choruses by shoving rhino tusks filled with petrol up
their pudendums, they showered cages of children with hot coals to create the
necessary crescendo.
One night they managed to disassemble and reassemble the river steamer
and hoist it across the stage, black heads piked all along the starboard bow, from
the rails chained natives swaying this way and that, on deck were three of the
savages painted fiery red from their horned heads to their toes, they shook fistfuls
of long black feathers and stiff animal skins, while on a chair above the captains
room sat the already famous figure of my nemesis, that old Upper River

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curmudgeon, cussing out his: kill the brutes, kill the brutes, while coal mascara ran
away from eyes that looked ready to join the gobs of saliva from his mouth and drop
to the stage floor. You would have cringed.
But even this failed to entertain an increasingly caustic clientele. So out of
final desperation, the impresarios sought to mimic the most popular styles back
home. The English dressed boys up as girls and girls as boys, they tripped and fell,
they walked into doors and fell off their chairs. The French adapted their own
versions of Othello and Salome with depraved and fruitless audacity. The Germans,
being German, tried to borrow a few popular tricks from the Berlin cabarets,
simulating man and woman sex the best they could given that few of them knew
how.
And so when the curtain fell that final time with a damp thud arousing a
struggling cloud of bloodclot filled mosquitos, the men were rewarded with no
applause, only a sepulchral silence. Humiliated, the performers scattered, seeking
solace for their now senseless exertion with more whiskey and gin and falling to
knees and hands they slithered away and vanished into the dark corridors, the
invisible cracks where they could grunt and groan like manly pigs and penetrate
each others pile encrusted holes in their fits of grief and splash their ineffectual
semen across calloused hands and onto shivering unshaven chins, while they
uttered words suggestive of a love that was larger than the jungle night, broader
than the Congo river, that was mightier than the terrible darkness that surrounded
them day or night, that was sweeter than the tepid night vapors that forever
threatened to steal the morning, that was bigger and broader and deeper than
anything that could hold all the severed hands and beheaded skulls and battered

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bodies, the human flotsam cast like slag from a coal mine, a love they knew nothing
about.
You see, you went to bed too early all those nights, Joseph.
But such acts of white mounting and thrusting arose more out of desperation
than desire, more out of humiliation than need, for like all men it was the very
things they feared most that they wanted most, it is what brought them all here in
the first place and in the end, what drew them to this place of blood sucking tsetse
and anopheles, man-eating crocodiles and hippos, rivers of blood and bloated
bodies, it was the little black holes they really wanted, the black rings that opened
into a pink chiffon of delight, that gleamed and shined with an oily deliciousness,
that was where they would stick their peckers and drain their deepest desires while
holding onto the black staffs that never seemed to lose their mighty strength.
These were the worlds warriors, the explorers and adventurers, the captains and
generals, these were the men of the Congo, the leaders of the British imperialist
empire, the German Platz an der Sonne, the Belgian Imprialiste Rticents, the
French Tout Paris, the Portugese Questo Social,the American Golden Age, men
who wanted nothing more than to be three thousand miles from their plump
powdered wives, their furry bushed concubines who terrified these men of the world
with the possibility they might raise a skirt.
To hell with the Russian mail order brides and cheap red-headed European
whores who found passage to these Sub-Saharan jungle posts, the black boys were
the flesh these men wanted, these black boys with their tight round buttocks and
thin waists, their dainty hands on those lithe wrists, their floppy feet so cute
attached to those skinny calves, their gorgeous mouths of white gapped teeth and
the glare of those hopelessly-in-love eyes, these were the Grecian ideals of love,

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these were the Theban partners of loves most manly conquest, together they were
the white erastes and the black eromenos, perfectly paired, united in a battle that
could not be imagined otherwise, it was not the rubber, not diamonds, not gold, not
glory, not power, but they were here for love, for sweet, sweet black love, the
sweetest love one could ever find, the purest of love, the finest of love, the most
virginal and the most loyal of love, for what were these people but slaves, and what
did they want most but simply not to die, and what would keep they from ever
dying, why they only needed to stay as young boys forever, to stay virginal forever.
And these boys - I am not afraid to tell you all Joe and I tell this too for the
guards who I assume now read these words and rub their crotches and drool - really
they have some magnificent organs, long, large, straight, hard as wood. I find
myself continually seeking one longer than the last, thicker, an ever mightier staff.
And now I am suffering in my ecstasy. But my pleasure is indeed my pain. For now
it seems my sphincter ani externus is permanently relaxed, that once dependable
muscle damaged perhaps, will no longer remain closed. I am reduced now to
wearing a cotton just like a woman. Cottons treated with salicylates used for stuffing
into bullet wounds seems to work best and helps with my piles as well. Now people
can say Roger cant keep his mouth or his ass shut! And they are right.
Yet I empathized with the black souls of this land, the many that were
tortured and mutilated in such inhuman ways, I was Irish so how could I not. You
calculated the impersonal numbers in your head, I saw the empty villages with
crying eyes and walked the vacant fields with trembling legs. I walked hundreds of
miles through their territories, met up with many a hostile group where I figured my
life was in peril if not over, and still even without a language in common between
us, even with my white face representing all the atrocities that had been inflicted

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upon these poor souls, each time I was able to find a common ground, and even if it
was the offering of a mere tin of mackerel, I often created what seemed like lifelong
friends out of enemies who previously wanted nothing more than to kill me.
These boys, in their beautiful innocence, I sensed and felt and indeed
developed a friendship that I swear could not have manifest with any other being. I
have often wondered about this, and am certain it has to do on one hand with their
grace and unimaginable symbiosis with the world around them, their simple natures
and the sense that they are the living examples of first man. On the other hand, my
love comes from my empathy for their doomed and furtureless condition, that they
like dogs seem to lack the awareness that their lives are only temporarily a state of
bliss. If they are lucky they will live until they die from work or hunger or both. But
most will not be so lucky, most will lose their life in the way most life is swatted
down like any small fly or vermin here. There may not be a reason for their death,
and so there will never be a reason for their lives. Is it guilt on my part then that
creates this affection? Or is it the tormented, abused Irish in me that compels me to
seek this doomed love?
I remember one, Peter, my name for him, in particular. Peter was more than
an acquaintance, more than a friend. He was my guide to something more beautiful
than I can describe. It was not his physical being that moved me so, it was his inner
self. He possessed a clarity that I had never experienced before, a clarity that was
beyond the attributes we seek in our own, such as intelligence, wisdom, courage.
This clarity was so striking, so sharp it cut through me. I could not bear to be
without him although I never engaged him to be mine in any sense. Peter would
come and go, and when he left I would be stricken to the point of being unable to
move, cured of this debilitating malaise only when he returned and suddenly life for

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me was a joy again that I never wanted to see come to an end. Peter did leave, a
few days before I was about to return to England. I had not told him I was going,
but he probably sensed it. At first I was heartbroken that he would not bid me even
a simple goodbye, but then I realized he had done so already, he had been
preparing me for this departure since the day I met him, each day woven into this
final goodbye. He left me with the memories of him, total, fully intact. I have no
memories of shared sadness, no empty promises, not meaningless gestures of love.
We are pure and whole even now.
Indeed if it were not for us Irish, who would be at their defense? Who would
have the courage and moral compass to ring out on all these atrocities? Look
around, and I know you agree Joe, you will not find a single Englishman, Spaniard,
Belgian or German defending these poor louts. My conviction, despite the evidence
of our failings, remains unmoved that our imperial intent is indeed the best one,
that with the right application the world can indeed be rendered more harmonious,
and less violent. Not all people need to be the same in this new world, but all need
to be submissive to the same values and direction. Progress. Enlightenment. I
know you did not agree with me, and see this as no better than any other
superstition. But change comes from change. This land, these people stirred my
heart and reached like children into my soul, I saw in them the kernel that all human
beings share when they are downtrodden and discriminated against, the rock of
hope, strength and human morality that surfaces only in the most pure of human
races. It was I who said to you, look into those faces, those ugly faces and tell me
you cannot see yourself! They alone changed me, they made me see, they in their
simple, savage ways made me love. And all you could say to me Joe, was why did I
not leap off that boat and jump around with those natives if I saw myself so in them!

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You have such a vast mind, Joe, but there was so much you did not care to see. I
had such great plans, such immense plans Joe! The world had opened up to me, and
spewed its terrible darkness and when I turned around, the men I knew, the men
here with me in the jungle, the men far away in mahogany chambers, opened their
mouths and spewed the same darkness, the same vile mead that we all drank as if
the milk of life. The Congo has no mirrors. To see yourself you had to look deep
into the eyes of another, black or white. I realized then that I was looking at all this
with the eyes of a people once hunted themselves, whose hearts were based on
affection as the root principle of contact with their fellow men and whose estimate
of life was not of something eternally to be appraised by price or market value. I
was sure, at times, uniquely enabled, that it was I alone who could save them, I and
no one else was the one who would save everyone.
That was my dream. I believe it can be more than a dream, it can be
accomplished, not without some pain, but with cooler hands and more
compassionate minds. Perhaps not now, not immediately, but it is unthinkable that
such terrible violence can continue much longer. The world itself, nature itself will
not tolerate it.
How well I remember when upon one of my hikes across the Congos forests, I
came upon a village that had been ransacked and destroyed to a crumple. Nothing
but piles of sticks where huts once stood, the ash of simple buildings still
smoldering from fire. Choking with the stench of death, I feared what I would find as
I walked through the clearing, as I had witnessed many times before the
unbelievable cruelty that could be meted out in these acts of destruction. However,
instead of black corpses hacked and pummeled beyond death, I saw dozens of
objects shaped like bodies spread across the ground, each glowing with a bright,

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iridescent blue, the arms and legs seemed to be shimmering in the sun, the torsos
pulsed with a radiant, breathing energy. As I came up closer to one of these
magnificent forms, a million blue winged creatures exploded into the sky, rose like a
cloud unveiling the black, bloodied, mutilated beings stiff with unmerciful death
beneath. The butterflies, of the species Epitola posthumus, had covered these
wretched beings, as if protecting their split and rendered bodies against any further
shame or humiliation. From the treetops or higher still what a vision of beauty these
adorned corpses must have made, death made so grossly inhuman by man
rendered so boldly, so apologetically radiant by nature.
We condemn the savages to a life of beasts because we believe them to be
beasts. Yet for these last many years, we pit white men against white men,
European brothers against brothers, real brother against brother, made them kill
and maim and torture and rape, we call the battle grounds theaters and on those
stages we stage death on a scale no spectacle could match. It is perhaps the first
war fought by poets and they write of it with unflinching horror. We capture it on
film, and we watch over and over again. It is already an atrocity a thousand times
over what any of us have seen before, and it has not ended. But we cant stop
watching. We are already dulled to it all, immune, the words stop making any
sense, the images lose their meaning, another man, another death, another body
hitting the ground in a lifeless heap means nothing to anyone. And so we value
ourselves even less, we see no value in anything because it can all vanish when
mankinds desire to kill arises. And so to save that one man has just as little cause
or meaning. I am a victim of all this. And I am made a killer by all this. I know that
if I were to be released now, the first thing I would do would be to find a way to kill.

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That is all I could do. There is nothing left for me to do. I would have no choice.
Nothing would stop me but my own death.
Or a sentence from your book
What redeems it is the idea only... When I read that line, I heard it as if it was
being read by you to me - even though this book had been printed and distributed
throughout the world, I was the one, the only out of millions who was to hear that
one line. It was just robbery with violence, aggravated murder on a great scale,
and men going at it blind Your book opens early with these lines, these elements
stolen from my inner what did you call it? Compulsion? You wrote them thinking
that you alone could recognize the futility, the absurdity in effect of my beliefs, that
you could cast them as the cause of the suffering and demise of so many others,
that you could render me the vector on which the worlds terrible folly projected into
the futureless night. When you wrote to your friend that you thought of me as a
modern day Bartholomew De Las Casas, I felt the injection of strength, the power
one attains when others finally recognize your sacrifice. But not too much later, I
learn that to another you compared me to a conquistador, a murdering Pizarro I
think you said. Which is it Joe? I cannot be both. You would like me to be, but I am
sorry, I do not harbor enough room in this shallow mind and inadequate soul to be
both savior and killer.
The truth is, you needed me to be both in order to satisfy your needs. And
when I failed, as all men fail, you gave up on me, abandoned me. You are an
observer, a dedicated and heartfilled one, but still a perennial witness who in the
end is too fearful to touch the native where he needs to be touched, too tidy to
allow his blood to coat your shoe, too meek to breathe the air that he breaths. You
were also too meek to kiss me. And yet you needed me. You needed me not simply

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as a faithful confident, but you needed my skeleton on which to hang your

characters, you needed my muscles on which to move those pages through time,
and you needed my words to give life and substance to your constipated thoughts.
Edmund, our dearest Edmund, when he wrote his manifest he selected your words
of imagination over my words of experience. Perhaps mine were too crudely carved
from blood and sweat. They stained the fingers, salted the lips. They were not
clean, or sweet. I did not complain. I encouraged him. I am not as eloquent as you,
not by any means, but my words are honed from the hard, uncaring surfaces of
lifes ugly reality, not polished fantasy. What redeems it is the idea only. Wasnt it I
who said to you: I have a voice, Joe, and for good or evil I cannot be silenced? Joe the fact is you never truly believed I could do it. And even if you changed your
mind now, the world has your final words on this forever. And so they will not act. I
will die because my fate has been set not in the stone of law, but set upon your
pages, and so set in history. At least you gave me another name by which to leave
this world with some anonymity.
If I had only your letters to guide me, which let me count - are none, I
would conclude that you have forgotten about me. But I know you havent because
I know that no detail, whether an eyebrow or a missing button on a mans coat, is
too small for you to keep and cherish. And so I know you remember that years ago I
gave a book to you, no, lets be clear, this was a book you took from me and never
returned Arab Navigation in the Indian Ocean Before the Time of the Portuguese
and you made this ancient guide on sailing into your own book of darkness. It
fascinated you profoundly, the twelve Faidas of Ahmad Majid al-Najdi, the
existence, no the very possibility that a book could have been written on such
distant barbaric seas, detailing your passion, cataloguing your science of sailing in

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more depth and intelligence than you had ever seen. It nearly drove you away, you
said to me. You searched its tables and charts for hidden symbols or other
meanings, you sought to find the passage from your landlocked birth to this
seaworn life through ancient scribblings. And this book of mine, which you could
never return to me in its original, paper form, appears in your book I dont
remember the English name you gave it I, I mean Marlow, finds it in an abandoned
shack on the river bank, the man who owned this book, a man who had carefully
read and restitched and coddled this book, and had even written in the margins in
Arabic, that man was conveniently gone, vanished so that this book could be finally
returned to me without a struggle. This may have been the kindest and most
moving event in your book, an event which in my opinion serves no other purpose
than as a secret story for you and I to share. When I - I mean, Marlow closes the
book puts it in his pocket, I remember he says: it was like leaving the shelter of an
old friendship. Yes, that was our bond, Joe. And that was how you gave my book
back to me. More importantly that is how you made sure I knew you remembered
me and would remember me always.
Of course, a few chapters later you took the book back. Just like that, you
took it back. And that was when I knew what you really wanted. You werent really
willing to give me that book back, not until got what you wanted. Something you
still want.
It was much later, perhaps only now Joe, that I have come to realize that what
you really wanted to know was me, not these other men. These others were too
simple, you sized them up in an instant. They were simple, though not necessarily
stupid, but vicious, ruthless, cunning and prone to failure. And you had seen this in
men across nations, you did not need to come to the malarial Congo to discover

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these common aspects of the male species. No, it was me you wanted to
understand. Me, the man who professed to have a conscience, who seemed to
have a soul, an artistic anime that cried out at night, that clawed through
uncertainty, that was willing to risk all to understand and reveal the atrocities others
seemed blind to. It was this man that interested you, but not because I was good,
not because I was a saint, not because I possessed any form of courage. You made
Marlow out of me, but Marlow was simply your way to find Kurtz. You wanted to
know me because I contained all that obsessed you about Kurtz. I was a man of
principal and compulsion, yet I lived with a reckless intelligence and a blind passion,
I contained just that balance of contradiction and lack of control, yet seemed to
have an inner strength to hold this all together. Like your Kurtz, I was an artist, yet
contrary to your idea of an artist, I could be swayed to force truth into being, rather
than discover it or reveal its nonexistence, I was willing to compromise and use art
just like I used my dick. Sometimes for pleasure, sometimes for power. Kurtz,
remember, was just a voice, a gifted creature who real gift was his voice, his
speech, the bewildering, illuminating manners of speech at his command. You
yourself said that I did not talk, but that I sang. You knew one of my gifts, you never
tasted the other. Yet you knew, you knew that someday the strings that held me
together would weaken and I would break. I would suffer just the same as your Mr.
Kurtz, I would venture too far and never return.
Is there not some irony to the fact that I should be brought to these gallows
upon a boat, that I should be thrown to die in a rower, capsize and nearly drown in
your briny mother of the sea, and be dragged from its spittle to be then tossed into
these cold dungeons? That the end of my life should be racked upon the very

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elements of yours? I was never to escape you Joseph, you came to me and I
befriended you, in return you scripted my life down to the very last detail.
Yet while you claim to know other men, I lay some claim to know myself. I do
not have the skill to speak through other characters, to weigh my words against
another in a fanciful dialogue. When I speak I speak for me, of me. I do believe I
am a man whose inner being is rooted against cruelty to both man and animal. I
think of myself as a peaceable person, yet I too at times am ready to burst with my
own inner rage, and not just against the barbarians and fools who are committing
these atrocities, no, that I could find justifiable, but I too get angry and have hurt
my black friends, who are as defenseless as no other. And so what kind of man am I
if I too harbor these propensities to hate, this need to exact violence on others?
Why I am only human is what I am, I am nothing more and nothing less than any of
these others, I am at least as capable as anyone to commit these same acts and to
be part of this atrocious regime. Perhaps what makes me different is that I see
through the veils of society, I recognize that it is the system we operate under that
creates this barbarity, and I for one am not willing to accept or to work under that
system. But then, who am I really? I am a man, Joe, who has taken out terribly
unjust punishment on his very own beloved dog, Tom dear Tom, nearly killing him
I must confess, one night after he had slept on my white jacket. And that was the
lowest point in my life as a man. So perhaps I am just kidding myself. If I was forced
to, if that was how I had to make my living, indeed if I had to choose between my
life and doing what this evil system required, what would I choose? I am too afraid
to answer that question.
I do consider my own legacy, which I once thought, took for granted would be
laid out in modestly glorious terms, recognized as at least a minor hero with some

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simple ceremony that would bestow my name on some stone in a square or some
street of little rubbish. How frail our dreams are, Joe. Now I think of myself as just
another lump of clay or night soil, to be dumped into a shallow dimple on the
cluttered surface of the earth.
At the foot of my bed, the figure still stands. Mocks me. For essentially I am
here not because I killed a man, but because I loved a nation. Where are you Joe?
You needed to see this for yourself, partially to compare to the predictions you had
made, partially to watch a man lose his flight when his arms tire, to fall from grace,
to descend into the anathema that you ultimately believe makes up mans soul,
joining the soil that makes up the essence of his being. Perhaps you sent this
specter here so you could have a record of my final words, my last gasp, whatever I
might cry out when I face that terrible moment when the soul is ripped from the
flesh, its roots too weak to hold on any longer. But you could not come yourself, you
could not bear to be present and discover that you were wrong; you could not bear,
now that your words are permanent, to hear that what Kurtz actually had to say,
which was in the end, nothing much so ever.
Like many other things I have discarded these last days, in order to lighten
myself for this final journey, I have let you go Joseph. I love you but that is too
heavy a load for me to bear now. You do not exist for me anymore. But this face
does, whether sent by you or created by my own faltering mind, it looks at me,
rotted and forlorn in its own guilt, knowing I have been wronged, but not knowing
what to ask of me, not asking me to stop, staring at me with anger, the anger that
seethes through any being when faced with death, but this, an anger intensified
because its death could be prolonged, perhaps forever, by the lies and fancies of
history. Perhaps they see in me some last perverse hope, a hope that I will indeed

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find a way to finish my work, a hope that even if I am extinguished my work will be
recovered and brought to light and so put them once and for all, all of them, out of
their misery. And then this distant land will sing again with joy, with new progress
and prosperity, and humanity will regain its age old foothold in the motherland of
our collective race.

Forgive me Joe. I am not the man who once filled your eyes.

RC

- The End -

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