In September Baelynn was still with us…although that always seemed to be a relative term given the circumstances of the situation. When I would make my visits to her in the hospital she wouldn’t know who I was. There were several times where she just didn’t respond to my visits at all. It’s a double edged sword in that when I would visit her I would feel depressed and when I wasn’t visiting all I could feel was a great wave of melancholy and overwhelming guilt come over me. High fevers, rapid aging of the skin and tooth decay and a plethora of other symptoms didn’t keep the doctors at ease, but it didn’t stop them from collecting their money and going on with their day-to-day activities either. They still gave their fake smiles and counted down until they could get their next fix on some cigarettes and coffee. I hated the doctors, but at this stage in the game they were my greatest allies. I wasn’t the only one facing these problems. Several other people that I worked with at the warehouse had family members dealing with the same illness. No one could really make any sense of it. My boss, Mustafa Alford, and I shared the same plight, though both his mother and son had fallen ill, so I’d say that his situation was slightly worse.

I was so grateful to both my brother Robert and his “life partner” Brad who lived only a ten minute walk from the hospital so they could take care of her daily needs and give me a daily report as to what was going on with Bae. If Baelynn had been conscious for any of it she would have been pissed. She and Robert had never gotten along and neither of them had ever accepted kind gestures from one another, but attitudes tend to change when someone is dying. It’s as if your heart turns to sand due to the reminder of one’s own mortality. I suppose it’s not that unusual. I can recall so many funerals for “scum fuck” relatives, such as my Uncle Shamus, who was a known pedophile and raging alcoholic, who would become saints once they died. The eulogies read for my Uncle Shamus were such bullshit. Cousins, aunts, uncles and even my own mother sang the praises of the dear bastard and never once make mention of the countless children he had hurt, the drunken brawls or even his trying to run over a police officer with his car which landed him a nice cozy cell in Northern State Prison for two years. However, Baelynn, was not my Uncle Shamus…she was a kindhearted soul and the woman I loved. The thought of losing her was unbearable. My mother would often try to console me and speak of when she lost my father to lung cancer, but this was worse. My mother had my father for twenty years, whereas it was looking as if I would only have Baelynn for five seconds.

I had met Baelynn in my sophomore year of high school in West Orange, New Jersey.  We hated each other at first, but in time grew to be inseparable.  Strange how things like that tend to happen. When I had first met her it was after my brother had smashed open her windshield with a bat at a block party. I never got the full story, but apparently it was just another neighborhood controversy that was encased in the mess of working-class homes and barbed wire fences.  Fast forward to senior year and we’re cuddled on the waterfront in Hoboken talking for hours and admiring the New York City skyline until sunrise. When college came around the two of us had our choices narrowed down to what would keep us close. She ended up getting accepted into Temple and I sprang into action and immediately applied to the County College of Philadelphia. I was never too great with school, so I guess a community college seemed a bit more prestigious than a technical school. Baelynn ended up dropping out of Temple and I stopped going to classes. We spent a few years living in a war zone in Southwest Philadelphia on 56th & Litchfield before we returned to Essex County to live in east Newark together. It was probably a week after the Portugal Day festivities that took place in the Ironbound that people around the neighborhood began to fall ill. No one could really explain it. Some people blamed it on the Agent Orange found in the soil of one of the waterfront playgrounds about twenty-something years ago, while others chose to believe that it was terrorists in the crazy, crazy post-9/11 world. It wasn’t until recently we found out the truth of the matter at hand.

It started out in the wee hours of the morning. There were reports of patients from the Beth Israel hospital going missing and dead dogs that had apparently had human bite marks tearing through their flesh. That escalated into hoodrats accusing the Southeast Asian immigrants that had recently began to pop up around the neighborhood of harming local pets. I remember coming home from work one day and my neighbor Khalil’s son, Alaji, and his buddy, Mikey, Shane O’Reilley’s kid, were with their whole crew smashing out the windows and trying to get through the glass that separated the clerk from the customer at Twin Dragon. I had no clue that pure pandemonium would follow. When the neighborhood learned that the dog killings were believed to be linked to junkies gone absolutely insane they grew restless, but when one of those junkies took forty shots without going down everyone was terrified. It wasn’t long before we would discover that the illness that everyone had been suffering from was turning them into reanimated corpse from the Fox 5 reports. At the height of it all there were looters and rioters setting things on fire, police snipers posted on the rooftops of the apartment buildings and local businesses and all the while the cannibalistic dead people were wandering around attacking everyone in sight. I remember the voices on the radio saying that the infected wouldn’t die…well, they were already dead so I suppose the proper term would be, “destroyed,” unless we removed the head or destroyed the brain in some way, shape or form. The most common practice was to just shoot them in the head.

Riot squads were trying to keep the peace and exterminate the “undead” threat while the radical street preachers screamed to their people about how they have been proselytized by the white man’s secular world and chanted rhetoric of how their will always be more people than cops. I watched a black man in his fifties being torn apart by the former shadows of neighbors and loved ones. The body that once surrounded the soul of Frankie Pratolla had ripped the man’s throat clean out with its teeth. When this happened all I could think was, “I bet you wish there were more cops now, right?”  These former shadows began to grow in number to the point where the street seemed almost flooded with those who possessed a halo of flies and blood around their mouths. They possessed the stench of death. You could smell them before they ever came into an eye’s view, but that didn’t matter when things completely went to shit because the whole neighborhood smelled like one giant dead body.

As I sat and watched the chaos that had ensued on the television set and also the glimpses I caught outside when I felt brave enough to look out the window, all I could think about was my CCD classes. I remember Father Keogh talking about all the nations that had remained hostile towards Israel and the plague that God had put upon them. It was in Zechariah 14:12…

“And this will be the stroke wherewith Jehovah will smite all the nations which have made war upon Jerusalem: its flesh will rot while it still stands upon its feet, and its eyes will rot in their sockets and its tongue will rot in its mouth.”

I had pushed everything I could possibly move in Baelynn’s hospital room in front of the door. I wanted to remain barricaded and apart from the world with the woman I loved. Deep down I knew what the outcome was to be.  My darling, Baelynn, would be at peace and the empty vessel of what once was would try to consume the flesh that lay on my bones. I thought of what it must be like to watch a loved one go through this transformation. I imagined what it must be like to be the one that had to put down the loved one. The memories and affection attached to the body, which would make for an all the more difficult task.

Her eyes were closed, but I knew even if they were open she wouldn’t comprehend anything. If her eyes had been open she would have stared blankly into the flickering light of the television set which hung above her bed never questioning a word of it. Most likely not even realizing that the city outside of these hospital walls were burning in a way that was reminiscent of the race riots that had occurred here in 1967. She was blessed. She didn’t have to see what our home had become. She didn’t have to hear the sounds of the children crying nor witness friendly Mr. Medina rip through Eileen Kurlansik’s pregnant belly and eat her unborn child. Though her heart was still beating, she was very much like Lazarus. She did not see, she did not hear and she did not think.  She remained at peace and never had to hear the piercing screams of mother’s witnessing their sons being consumed by their spouses or witness the heads which exploded like a pumpkin hitting the hard pavement on Mischief Night when the rooftop sniper’s bullet came into contact with the face.

I remember hearing the unending signal; the beep that most people wish never to hear. She was gone. My darling girl was gone. I waited three hours before she began to move. The empty vessel rose out of its slumber and slowly got out of the bed and stared at me with a black stare. It inched over to me slowly. Often times they say that before you die you see your whole life flash before your eyes. I don’t know if that’s what Baelynn saw before she left, but I know I saw it. I saw everything from her birth to the moment her body rose from the dead. I knew that I couldn’t let her face the indignity of having what was once her body causing harm in death. That’s when I did it. I grabbed the fire extinguisher off the wall and smashed it against what was once Baelynn’s face. I knocked the shadow to the ground and pounded its face in until it collapsed in on itself. I listened to the metal collide with the teeth and break the bones that were under the skin. I kept pounding the fire extinguished into the shadow’s face until it was no longer moving.

Afterwards, I buried my face into the body’s chest and cried. I cried as a child would to his mother. I had lost everything that mattered because she was the only one that mattered in my life. With every blow taken to the shadow’s face I saw a dream shattering. The dreams of having a child, getting married, moving to the other side of the river and settling in Forest Hills, Queens…all these dreams I once held I watched shatter like glass. Let it be known that I did not murder, Baelynn Noelle Maxwell, for when I brought the fire extinguisher down upon her face she was already dead. My American dream forever lost and though blood still flows through these veins I know that I am a shadow just waiting to join the the rest in the darkness – not seeing, not hearing, not thinking.

—–

Ian Fucking Fleming used to sell cocaine in order to buy weapons for CIA insurgents in South America and the Middle East, as well as fund his own personal wars at home. However, such patriot games are now far behind him. These days he would much rather sit on a rooftop with an ice cold 40 and watch today’s empire crumble while in the company of some good friends.