"Jacob" Par 2. A humble Excerpt

Our mysterious operator obsessed with Jake's case opens Karina's file.

PART II.

A heavy—big fat binder was abruptly shoved into my arms—completely unacknowledged by some busy-body intern lady.

         Another faceless bundle of trouble, in waiting for some poor-fool willing enough to marry. I was sure she was the type of woman that tended to badger everyone by speaking too fast. Baffling if you found yourself at the other end of that conversation. On the stroll home after while you're nursing a baffling impression she actually was so hollow inside.
         No matter how hard you stare, and seek or rummage about in there.
         Nothing.
         I leaned unto a huge concrete-gray pillar as I popped a couple of Tiffany Blues (Valium); though they were covered in felt-fur, and god knows what. Besides that they still glistened in that gemstone blue glow. Then I watched amazed by the real cold blooded behavior that was a general vibe circling beneath the waters.
         There were damn sharks down there!!!
         Weren't I at a meeting with decent people?
         Sweat ran from my armpits down my sharp rib cage. Forced intimacy ingesting regardless of individual will, stranger's personal smells, mingaling pheromones, too close.

         Late into that night, the air had gone strange—unsettling.
         The 'War Room' began closing in.
         Overused air filtered through hundreds of repeated, wet lung-pulls, until the phantom of suffocation was a shared thought. Rancid—warm coffee-breath, threatening to smother us while we hit hour-three.
         The naive part of me supposed to be joining true kind humanitarians; gentle people with a natural appreciation for their fellow man? I leaned toward the mindset, "I had found the people that they told me about!"—not everybody is an ass-hole.
         The same brown binder I had stared at least a good forty minutes just sitting there on my white-vinyl thrift-store table. I pulled the bundle that had the mother's name, Karina. Laid the contents across the cheap seventies galvanized legged surface.
         There she was, Jacob's mother. Her green eyes caught me a moment, in a lapse of admiration. She definitely was a beautiful young lady from California.
         I had a whole stack of photographs casting a tower of Pisa across my kitchen table. An imperfect thing that managed to become a world landmark, it refused to topple over. Only leaving π in the popular minds as an occult super power.
         In some manner, exactly the same fortune had to become of Jacob. A faint gasp, a weak whimper in my head told me Jake refused to topple over, and he'll appear, come back to the living.
         I black and red bothered magma urged me from the bottom of my guts to find 'Jacobo Edward Costa!' I genuinely wanted to find him.
         Besides being the last active operator left on Jacob's case.
         So many years had whisked us by since that night in room 5-D. One at a time, some just vanished, others just dropped Jacob's chaos.
         This went on until I realized, I was the sole operator behind the whole mess.
         "Karina Jean Evans, age 32, Female." was crudely scribbled across a whole blank page. A USB drive with video evidence and a small stack of old yellowed papers held together by a rusty staple was the whole thing. I knew the blizzard of evidence that sat in front of me had grown old. Almost eighteen years had slithered past us. It broke every volunteer, police officer, every interested journalist they all decided to drop the case.
         For some curious reason, the only one unwilling to let go, was my sorry self-abused ass.
         I went for the leaning tower of photographs. A small amount of Polaroids, the rest were those one-hour exposure grocery shop pictures.
         I stopped on one, it was Karina and Jacob on a merry go round, both looked really content. She had bellbottoms on with converse sneakers. Jake had a huge smile with a bowl cut and a snug red sweater.
         Karina was beautiful with her long brown hair and her perfectly shaped pointy-nose. Mother and son completely unaware, untouched, in the moment. Contentment captured so organically.
The storm of chaos that was going to devour their lives, was still an unknown stranger wandering the sands of time. His steps were in their direction despite.

Video File. KE01.

<Off Voice—Black Background.>

“When you were smaller, you were a nightmare! At the end of the day you had me in tears!” An amusing anecdote mom loved to repeat....

         

The first scene was at their farmhouse apparently.

         It was pouring as usual in December in Santo Domingo, Ecuador. It was a drab, wet, sad afternoon.
         Jacob's mother, from the first quick panning over of the camera, it was obvious Karina was confined to exist at the dining room table. Planted in a chair, bent over the cigarette burn Pollock she achieved over the pine table-top. Out of common deduction, she was falling asleep with a smoke still in her hand, hundreds of curved cigarette cremations around where she sat. Where she sat she slept, the file said, chain smoked, and played on her iPad.
         —They left out that she also waited—anticipating the flowing black robes of the Reaper to come.
         Jacob's mother was overweight, smoked three packs of cigarettes a day while having EPOC, took a ton of opiates, thyroid trouble, and to boot she couldn't lay down flat on her bed anymore, so she slept only three hours a day.
         She had managed to convince her usual taxi/delivery driver to take care of a leg wound, a skin wound the size of a quarter and now consisted of her not having skin covering the whole back side of her left calf.
         Karina just didn’t trust doctors anymore, plain and simple. “They are butchers! How many times have I almost died because of those wackos! They are quacks, Jake! The whole lot of them!” In a way she was right, doctors tend to play along with "Big Pharma", not focusing on healing the patient but, on what pills he could push on his symptoms.
         But obviously it looked very serious. I mean, no skin!
         Just a pus covered, dumbfoundedly moist while still seeping—her calf was one 'live-flesh' festering wound. The milky and yellowish nastiness seeped down her ankle so bloated it was unrecognisable. Then down into a cloudy pool around her irritated skin. She had put towels beneath it to catch the mess.
         The particular moment in the video was when her wound went down the entire whole calf. Apparently it was time to clean her leg. Once they had her foot in a wide blue plastic tub, and plenty towels laid out. Karina bared down for the torture that followed.
         Then I saw the "Taxi Driver", kneeling with his sleeves rolled up, and a pair of surgical gloves on. He immediately began to wash all the dead white cells that glistened down Karina's funky leg. With a syringe and some intravenous fluid the guy sprayed into her mauled meat.

         —I was held hostage to my thoughts, and speechless.
         Karina had such low self esteem she didn’t want to bother with whatever it was that she had. Like an abused dog, who only knows life at the end of a chain, the pain of the rod, and the teeth of her own blood kin.
         Some people after years of being over protected, enduring the blatant disregard of her own father, abused by men, some people just get tired. Was my best guess.
         Then the cleaning with the swabs began, I noticed that the poor guy was doing his best as gently as possible, but she had no skin.

         —I became really shook hearing Jacob's mother screaming in agony, even childlike from the intensity of the pain. Her pleas for it to all stop.
         I served myself a stiff drink of whatever was in the fridge, struck by shame. I felt myself to be a total stranger.
         Karina's soul skinning cries, the taxi-driver playing nurse, I began to laugh.
         Each scream made bend over in a manic fit of laughter. While estranged from myself and crushed under a shame I had never felt before.
         Every time she howled in agony, came a wave of impotence, confusion, or profound realizations.
         Nothing made sense.
         I couldn’t restrain myself from staring at it. A feeling of unfettered guilt crept up my soft, wet-guts. I felt a soul wrenching awfulness for Jacob not being with his mother when she passed. Having left her hand that day jumped into my mind. How he watched her walk away into the crowd of people.

         —I paused the video, and threw the remote onto my round-reclining chair, it was old porch-furniture I inherited from the previous tenant, made out of brittle flaking brown wicker. The room felt uncomfortable, swimming in the haze of unresolved pain and unnecessary loss.
         —Dope has even given up on me. It's just not the same anymore! A stranger all of a sudden as a bed fellow. It taxes my body. Stop or die.
         —I see Karina's dead face, bloated, still sad, and those prune-shaded dead-lips. Far from the mother I was ordered to be familiarized with. a sullen sigh of who she ever was.

         I felt forced to memorize all those little square identification sized pictures. All fanned out into a totally accidental showcase. I collected all her I.D.s.
         I could finally appreciate just how profoundly sad and mistreated she really was. Plain as day anyone could see the she progressed looking so miserable and bitter from picture to picture as time passed.
         —Why think of this tragedy right now? My breath began to become a little more difficult, I tell myself that she wanted to die, she deliberately put herself that situation.