Pathocrat in the gloaming
Seated inside the custom-built iron cage that he had ordered constructed for his enemies, he looks wasted and forlorn, lost in thought, unbelieving. How did I get here? he wonders aloud in his echo chamber. Where is everybody? He gets no answer.
Outside the walls, a small group of people is gathered and waiting for him to emerge strong, to hear him utter indecent vituperations and interjections, signs that he is alive. These are the people who still believe he is God’s gift to the world. But the gates are locked and the walls impenetrable. He is here to stay. He will be tried for the crimes he committed against his own people.
He does not remember how many mornings he has awakened to find himself in this room not his own, sans mosquito net and his grimy security blanket, and with only the soft hum of the air conditioner that blows cold air not to his liking. No sea breeze, no scent of mountain air, only the antiseptic smell of a toilet.
No patter of feet outside his room at daybreak, no smell of dried fish frying and no aroma of freshly brewed native coffee.
How did I get here? he asks.
Four moons ago, at sundown, while the church bells were ringing for the Angelus, and the townsfolk were making the sign of the cross, armed men of unknown origin barged into his mansion on a hillside that faces the sea and took him away. He was, at that time, trysting with muscular lads who hastily turned him in and gave him away, bath towels and all, to the armed men who took no other captives. The young men, still in their birthday suits, made their way to the backdoor giggling and quickly vanished in the semidarkness. They had done what they thought was a patriotic job and could not wait to see the results of their undertaking. They scampered into the waiting sea, their moist skin catching the last rays of the setting sun.
It was an eerie operation planned to take place in the gloaming when the sun was meeting the sea, when the cicadas were announcing their presence in the thousands and the fowls were finding their places in the trees, tucking their heads under their wings as if to avoid watching the clandestine preoccupations of earthly mortals.
Patik was how many called him. Patik, short for psychopathic, not for him derogatory, but a term of endearment, a license to do what he wanted, the Ten Commandments be damned. He was Boy Patik when he was, as the poet wrote, “sitting late, drinking late with his bosom cronies,” who indulged his dirty jokes about the women he’d had, forcibly or not, and, too, about the worrisome decline of men’s virility as they age. Patik had always been known in the tiny island republic as a fornicator, in street parlance. A manyakis, a DOM. He reveled in the appellation because it boosted his manhood. He was sometimes referred to as the reincarnation of one Mang Kanor, the quintessential DOM in the neighborhood.
But to his critics with broader vocabulary, he was a pathocrat, a demented ruler with a variety of behavioral disorders that characterized the way he ruled and killed even with his own hands those who spoke against his brutal rule, and before that, his victories in elections after elections, the way he won the hearts, minds, and stomachs of voters. And once he was seated on the throne, there was no letting go. Or so, Boy Patik thought. Twenty-five years of pathocracy and counting.
In the custom-built cage he had designed for his enemies and where he now languishes, he has begun to grow weary and listless. He gets visits from his offspring with his estranged wife and different women with whom he had fornicated. The more, the many-er, he used to joke about them and the wild oats he had sown in his youth and in his sunset years. Now, in his declining years (he is 81), they are, for him, a source of comfort.
As it had been foretold and written in the past: One day the rats came for him, then insects of horrible shapes and sizes. The squeaking and the buzzing awakened the populace, and the odor that emanated from his prison cell was something out of an uncovered grave. Here was a once powerful pathocrat being consumed by vermin of every kind. Prison guards who rushed to inspect him found his clothes in tatters and his skin greenish as if there was moss growing out of his pores.
The rats were squeezing themselves into his armpits and digging at his groin, encrusted with barnacle-like growths. This kind of fate for a cruel ruler who liked tasting the livers of his enemies had long been prophesied by seers who read the signs in the wind and the waters, in the way gunshots rang out in the night, and in the way blood in the streets glistened with a fierce red glow in the light of a waxing moon.
This piece of fiction is a recent version of “Autumn of the Autocrat, a simulacrum,” written seven years ago.
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