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Interview with Ian Rose

Thirty years later, in a hardwood forest in the heart of the Catskills Mountains in southern New York State, a man named John Eagles, a dog-food deliveryman, was murdered, his face torn off and exhibited in what seemed to be a ritual crime. The person who discovered the body was the young Cleve Rose, a neighbor who was the author of a serial graphic novel,
The Suicide Poet and His Girlfriend Dorita
, and the teacher of a writing workshop for the inmates of Manninpox State Prison. Cleve was riding his motorcycle home when he discovered Mr. Eagles’s pickup on the side of the road in the middle of the forest. He stopped to investigate and noticed a red cloth attached to what he at first took for a mask. After several moments he realized that the awful visage, with its vacant eyes and hair matted with blood, might well have belonged to a human being. And if it was Mr. Eagles’s pickup, perhaps the face was his as well.

“Cleve told me that he felt so sick at that point that he puked in the ditch,” says Ian Rose, Cleve’s father, a hydraulic engineer specializing in irrigation systems, the owner of a house not far from the scene of the crime. “Afterward, when he had composed himself and dared to look directly at the hideous mask, he thought that despite everything it still bore a resemblance to poor Mr. Eagles. It was the Halloween version of Eagles’s face, Cleve told me, or the apocalyptic zombie version. That’s exactly what he said. I remember perfectly. My son wrote graphic novels, and if you ask me, the
Suicide Poet
series is very clever and entertaining, but of course I’m biased. I was the number one fan of almost everything my son did, almost everything, I say, not all: certain things made my hair stand on end. But, in general, I was very proud of him that he dared to go far where I had always fallen short. Without a doubt, his graphic novels were very good, a bit gory, sure, full of stories of the walking dead and such things, you know. But the day he found Eagles in such a state, he was very affected. And so was I. I felt that it was an omen, a kind of warning. In the end, that was what the murderer had intended with the staging of such a scene: to warn us. Forecasting a horror that began that day and has yet to end.

“Cleve called the police, and some hours later they identified the body they had found a few steps away in the brush, and confirmed that it was Mr. Eagles. He was a good man, I can assure you, with no enemies to speak of. That’s what the widow said when they questioned her: Eagles did not have any enemies, and she didn’t know of anyone who would want to exact vengeance in such a savage manner. He was on his way back from my house, where he had dropped off a pair of packages from Eukanuba that I had asked him to bring over when I spoke to him on the phone the day before. Although he was a strong man, they said he didn’t seem to have put up a fight against his murderer, or murderers. He was alone when he came to my house. Emperatriz, the woman who helps me around the house, assured the police that she had seen no one else inside the pickup when he got out to give her the packages. Apparently, on the way back, Eagles had stopped, possibly to pick up the murderer, who perhaps had been hitchhiking. There is no other way to explain how the person, or persons, got inside the truck. People around here are not suspicious, you know, there’s no reason to be. If Eagles saw someone on the side of the road, he’d simply pick him up and give him a ride at least to the highway. That’s not unusual around here. Once inside the pickup, the murderer garroted him from behind so that Eagles could not defend himself, and then he did what he did, that horrifying stuff with the face.”

Although Ian Rose doesn’t tell me at first, I know that he had not lived with his son, Cleve, since he had separated from the boy’s mother many years before. And now that they were finally alone, their spaces were clearly delineated in their mountain home, an old, large house with two floors and an attic, where they had established an independence from each other as if they lived in an apartment building: the two floors for the father; the attic, sacred space for the son. The truth was they didn’t spend much time together and hardly spoke to each other; they had just begun to get to know each other more in depth, and it still wasn’t easy for them to communicate. Not that it much bothered either of them. Living together had been easier than they’d imagined. They shared their fondness for the woods and isolation, but Ian was pragmatic and grounded, while Cleve had a bit of the artist from his mother. So they had little in common except for one fundamental trait Cleve had clearly inherited from his father: both were dog lovers. The three dogs, Otto, Dix, and Skunko, were the central figures in the house. The humans came and went, and big parts of their lives transpired outside the house, so they were no more than transitional elements there. On the other hand, the dogs were always there, filling the place with their antics, running back and forth, and when they lay by the fire, they seemed to be there just to protect the humans. So much warmth and affection came from those dogs that knew everything about the house and protected it with their sharp sense of smell and their barking. Of course, great balls of dog hair had to be swept out of the house, the furniture smelled like dogs, the upholstery was frayed from their teeth, and the yard was crisscrossed with tunnels dug by the animals. In return, the dogs made the property practically impenetrable; with that trio on guard like Cerberus night and day it wasn’t easy for anyone to trespass. In a word, the dogs were the house, and for Cleve and his father, coming home meant reintegrating into the pack.

Ian Rose couldn’t help but regard his son with a contained admiration that came from the realization that the boy, his only son, was turning into an outstanding man. As for Cleve, when he felt suffocated by the paternal presence, he escaped to New York City, less than three hours away by motorcycle, and stayed in the studio he rented in the East Village near St. Mark’s Place, returning to the mountain house only when he started to miss the bustle of the dogs and the silence of the woods, and the company of that father he was just getting to know. So they adapted to each other’s company without much ado and largely in silence, confident that their communication would improve in time.

Consequently, they had exchanged few words that night, which had turned surreal by the savagery of the afternoon. Father, son, and dogs gathered in a tight semicircle in front of the blazing fireplace, while at their backs, the windows that faced the woods imposed a blackness that seemed absolute.

“Perhaps we should put up curtains,” Rose the father said, measuring his words so as not to admit to his son the feeling that what had happened would somehow rupture the equilibrium, damaging the previous order.

He didn’t know how to express it in words; it was just a premonition. He had not been a friend of Mr. Eagles; his relationship with the deceased had been limited to greeting him when he delivered the cartons of dog food, paying him, and chatting about a few trivial matters and nothing else. Nevertheless, he felt that the murder had torn the delicate fabric of a natural law that for years had remained intact in the mountain.

“Or put lights out in the garden,” Cleve said, tired after several hours of questioning by the police and investigators now swarming the area.

“A good man, Mr. Eagles,” Ian Rose said, putting another log on the fire.

“Who could have hated him like that? Poor guy, always with his Eukanuba. Euk-an-uba, weird name for dog food, sounds more like a Cirque du Soleil show.”

They were silent for a long while as they ate spoonfuls of leek and potato soup and watched out for any reactions from the dogs, who slept peacefully, not sensing any cause for agitation.

“Good boy, good boy,” Cleve said, tapping one of them on the head, making his voice higher to imitate Mr. Eagles. “That’s what he always said to the dogs, remember, Pa? Good boy, good boy, with that squeaky voice of his. So strange, that voice in such a huge guy. He tapped them on the head like that, not petting them, just little taps on the head, as if fulfilling his duty with the client, or because he didn’t want his hands smelling like dogs. Do you think deep down he didn’t really like them?”

“Dogs? Maybe. He made a living off neighbors like us who overfed their pets treats and canned food and such. He was a mountain boy, I’m sure he didn’t approve of pampered animals like ours, us city people.”

“To kill him, to rip off his face. Fuck, only a miserable rat would do something like that. A calculating psychopath.”

“Whoever did it is still out there. Although who knows, with so many cops around
 . . .
”

“We could use some bars on the windows. Or at least some curtains for now, Pa. I’m holed up in the attic, but down here you’re on display
 . . .
”

“We’ve never needed curtains. There’s no one around here. Maybe we should put lights out in the garden. I’ll do it tomorrow. He has to be a big guy. I mean to overcome Eagles, who was pretty strong, and to drag his body
 . . .
Maybe there were a few of them, at least two, one in the front seat and one in the back. The one who killed him was in the back; he strangled him from behind. But why did they rip off his face?” Ian Rose said, looking for his flashlight before taking out the dogs for a walk on the grounds.

“I’ll come with you,” Cleve said, putting on his shoes and running after his father.

Days later, Cleve would recount the details of Eagles’s murder in a note written in longhand with a fountain pen.

Something brutal and inexplicable happened ten minutes from my father’s house in this peaceful corner of the world where nothing ever happens. But it was precisely here that it did happen, on the side of the road, a few steps from the dark waters of Silver Coin Pond. Somebody carried Mr. Eagles’s body from his pickup, and not in the darkness of a cloudy night, no, because it must have been no later than four in the afternoon, in the plain light of a fall day. And it didn’t happen on a Sunday either, when this place is abandoned, but during the week, with some traffic on the road because at that hour some people go down into town to pick up their kids from school. Nothing was stolen, not the pickup, the wallet, nothing. And yet, to see the shape they left him in. A sadistic act hard to fathom. One of the four great skinnings in Western history along with the flaying of the fawn Marsyas by Apollo, the martyrdom of St. Bartholomew, whose skin was depicted by Michelangelo in
The Last Judgment
, and Burt Reynolds’s portrayal of Navajo Joe, the Indian who twirled scalps at the end of his spear. I’m saying this because Mr. Eagles’s face was torn off. That’s right. They took the face off that decent man as if it were a mask. And in fact the face is a mask over the skull; I just had never thought of it like that until I saw such a thing. It was impossible not to see it because the murderer had glued it to a rag, a red rag—the kind people have in a car to clean the windows and such. They found the Rhino Glue bottle on the bottom of Silver Coin Pond the following day, although there were no fingerprints on it. The red rag with the face glued on was in turn attached to a tree trunk by side of the road, like a banner or a poster; this act was deliberate and premeditated, and it’s clear that if whoever did it had wanted to hide the crime all they had to do was dump the body in the pond. But instead, they set up everything so whoever passed by on the road could see it, perhaps even so that we, my dad and I, couldn’t miss it, since not many people live around here. Who knows what their motivation was? Generally, you disfigure a victim when you don’t want the authorities to identify him. You take someone’s face off, or cover it, when you want to make them vanish from life. Someone without a face is no one, anonymous, a zero. Like the disappeared during the dictatorships in the Southern Cone: a black hood prevented them from being identified or identifying others as they were taken away and left in limbo. Pro wrestling stars in Mexico hide their identities behind masks, making them into mythic creatures before the eyes of the fans as has happened with Silver Masked Man, Blue Demon, and Son of the Saint. The worst damage a rival can inflict is to rip off the mask and expose his opponent’s true identity to the crowd, because this robs the wrestler of the aura of a hero and makes him mortal again. Subcomandante Marcos does the same thing with his ski mask and more or less for the same reasons, given the occupational hazards that necessitate his clandestine business. The Man in the Iron Mask, a twin of the king of France, was forced to wear it all his life so that no one would find out that the king, by nature the only one, had a double who eventually could replace him. And so on, to take off a face, to become someone else, or become oneself, invisible or nonexistent. Although it is also true that the consequences could be exactly the opposite, because the issue brings with it its own contradictions. Eagles’s murderer knows this well; instead of hiding what he did, his action made it evident. Subcomandante Marcos, in the jungles of Chiapas, became famous and visible in Mexico and the world mostly thanks to the stocking with holes that hid his face. Not to mention the case of V, my idol, the super anarchist in
V for Vendetta
: the mask that hides his face today has become the visible face of millions of young people around the world. Mr. Eagles’s face, always modest and inconspicuous, was never more visible than when it was ripped off and displayed. It brings to mind a photograph, like that famous one of Einstein, with the white hair floating around his head, or another one, also very well known, in which Picasso looks at the viewer with his eagle eyes. Or one of Marilyn Monroe, radiating seduction as she plunges into a stupor, as if she were on the brink of an orgasm, or of sleep, or death. Or Che—what about the face of Che Guevara?—the most significant scapegoat of modern times with a black beret as a crown of thorns and a trancelike expression as he offers himself as sacrifice. What are those pictures, those icons, but faces taken from their owners? Faces detached from their bodies. Saved from the physical and the circumstantial in a way that they’re worthy as themselves, they become eternal, their symbolic weight so powerful that decade after decade they reappear on walls and on the T-shirts we wear. And so is the case with the good Mr. Eagles. There is a rumor spreading that it was an isolated case of brutality by kids on drugs, strangers to this place who must have been passing by and who became deranged because of some chemical. I think that version is just another mask, so that the residents can feel at peace and the authorities can begin washing their hands. As for me, I can’t stop thinking about it, turning the questions over. I’m intrigued by the theatricality of the murderer, gluing the face to a rag, making sure the rag was red, and putting it on display for passersby on a tree trunk: a quest with purposeful theatrical effects. This was a ritual, my friend. Like in ancient times, like the great sacramental acts of the Old Testament. That’s what I call
deep play
; or I should say that’s what Sloterdijk calls it, and defines it as all-encompassing ritual actions done for the greatest effect. I’m under the impression that Eagles’s murderer is someone who detests the demystified mediocrity in which we live now, this tame and castrated everydayness that according to Slavoj Žižek is made up of decaffeinated coffee, near beer, food without calories, cigarettes without nicotine, wars without death (for the right side), and sex without contact. And sacrifice without blood, I’d add. Kids on drugs? I have another version, but as of yet have no way to prove it.