ERIKA, Salvador, September 2022

 

About a year ago, that guy K met my friend Rita at a nightclub in Rio Vermelho. I already knew him at the time, but I preferred to pretend to her that I didn't. Apparently, he didn't care, or simply liked the idea, and collaborated with my surreptitious behavior, ignoring me in return. I had met K three months earlier, walking with a psychiatrist friend (Renata) one late afternoon, between the Spanish Club and Cristo, in Barra. She pointed out a young man walking toward us from the Lighthouse; he was shirtless, drenched in sweat, and wearing a mask, he looked about eighteen. When he removed the mask, he revealed he was a little older; later, when Renata said he was 40, I was startled. Automatically, he stopped in front of us and bowed his head. He greeted Renata: "How are you, Doctor?" and then gently extended his hand to me. I could tell from their exchange of glances that there was something raw simmering between them. Despite showing a certain attraction to the boy, Renata seemed at the same time to need to verbally finish him off: 

RENATA: "The first time I saw K in my life was in mid-2017. I was on shift at the psychiatric clinic where I work, in Pituba. It was after eleven at night, and he walked through the emergency room door completely restrained by three troglodytes, from the clinic's own staff. According to what I was told, they had to go and get him at home because he'd been deranged for some time, considering himself untouchable, above the law, and, at any approach, he would physically threaten anyone. --- according to the file filled out by his family, he had been sinking into a deep, bizarre delusion of persecution and had become uncontrollable in the last month, accusing everyone and everyone, inside or outside his home, of being agents of an international conspiracy against the ideas and revelations he'd been making online and in his books. Based on this, he had attacked the maid at his aunt's house, where he lived, who, 'on Pentagon business,' had tried to poison his coffee; threw beans at her and, soon after, 'constrained by an enormous internal boiling', spat in his mother's face, accusing her of trying to sell him to New York Jews seeking revenge against the Nazis of World War II --- in this case, him. Another account, from his ex-wife, claimed he punched an iron door so violently, "because of the coded language concealed in the barking of the neighborhood dogs," that he fell unconscious to the floor and broke his nose. Days later, "lights suddenly took over his body while he was talking to inorganic beings in the bedroom," and then he destroyed his own computer, throwing it repeatedly against the backyard wall, until it shattered completely. He thought he was "destroying evidence that would be used against him in an international military investigation," where "slim, bespectacled authorities would use despotism to judge him summarily," and without "delivering further explanations." He also punched a cattle rancher uncle in the car on their way back from his farm; the uncle was carrying a firearm at the time of the fight, and they almost said he was forced to use it. Though frightening, the accounts were quite incomplete, lacking a cohesive, or rather repetitive, delusional discourse, as is generally the case—each one seemed to yield a new motive, even more exasperating than the last. Perhaps, living in such "horrible isolation," according to an aunt, his aggression had become unpredictable, mysterious, and ultimately indiscriminate and completely out of control.