Lorenzo Vincenzi, PI -- Introduction

First of all, I know this won't look great just copy & pasted, but it is getting too long and I want to post it. Detective Vincenzi is a character I have been thinking over for a few weeks now. After a brief foray into Butcher's character of Harry Dresden, playing with the idea of the Call of Cthulhu RPG, and wanting to get more into pulp detective stories for the past year or so, I ended up with Lorenzo here.

Lorenzo Vincenzi lives in a Lovecraftian world. There are creatures in the darkness, evil presences in forgotten cities, cosmic beings playing out intricate games of chess in which we are simple pawns. Vincenzi, though, has figured out a knack to confront these bumps in the night while handling the psychic backlash of doing so. Vincenzi is an expert at forgetting. This introduction seems too alluring to pass up since forgetting is neither thought of as a skill nor an admirable attribute for a detective. Forgetting and amnesia, though, are often associated with Lovecraftian characters when they come up against the weird reality beneath the veil of the normal.

The introductory story takes on a shallow sort of spooky bedtime story that are characteristic of short works by Lovecraft, but it carries on into a rounder, more developed identity. Following a childhood event, Lorenzo's life and work is about balancing his own well-being with combating the dark forces afoot in the world, forces that will inevitably drive him mad if he recalls them. I think that I'll be able to use Vincenzi to tie together a number of story ideas and characters I want to write about, but who I do not want to stand alone in the suddenly crazier world.

To keep it up, I'll need to make time to read up on pulp detective stories so that I can work with that tone and diction. With the Lovecraftian references and style, though, the recollection and journalistic style will mean using those over-the-top and archaic terminology involving the creeping entities littering his work. I can also write Lorenzo Vincenzi as a frustrated, anti-social, sarcastic, and unreliable guy who tries but is not all that great at being a do-gooder.

I hope that this introduction is, in many ways, a lure for what is going on presently. It starts out with explanations and one story that leads into another, with the intention to bring it back around to the present. All the while, great big gaps in time allow for Lorenzo to go back and bring up other events that were glossed over before. For example, Lorenzo manifests "sight" which is a sort of out-of-body experience/astral projection that gets him into a lot of trouble in his youth, and is a sickening last-ditch effort later on. That doesn't have much precedent in Lovecraft's protagonists, but it does in other supernatural fiction. I want to add, though, that he isn't a wizard like Harry Dresden. Even using sight gives him some nasty motion sickness usually, and that is probably the extent of his paranormal powers. (I allow this in part because, in some ways it could be an extension of powerful intuitive skills and a knack for observation. Really understanding people, when one is really listening, isn't all that difficult and some people are just really, really good at it.)

Anyway, if you're interested, I hope you enjoy it. If not, pass it by. I have a few ideas for some short essays to come up soon and I have some introspection to do about graduate school ahead, as well. Expect a new post tomorrow, or the next day at the latest.

~~~

Lorenzo Vincenzi, Private Investigator of Special Cases
31 March 2010

Forgetting is an underappreciated skill. Remembering is an insanely chaotic, hit or miss venture. When you recall a memory, you retell it and, in that narrative, sculpt the original episode into a story. When you forget, you make space in your mind for a reality distinct from your now displaced memories.
I am an expert at forgetting. A practitioner of artful amnesia. A wizard, you might say, of failed recollection.
Why take pride in such a skill? Well, if it weren't for that, I would have gone mad long ago.
You see, I am a P.I.—though some prefer to just call me a dick—but not one who focuses on the usual cases fictionalized by the likes of Chandler. I take on special cases. Special cases? you might ask quizzically. Yeah, special cases, I would subsequently reply.
Years ago, a woman came into my office in the Towne Building. She was gussied up a little, but obviously unaccustomed to being so, and inquired as to the meaning of special cases. At the time, my reputation for the weird had not yet been founded, so it came off as an innocent question. I told her, “Ma'am, if you don't know that you have a special case, then you don't have one.” And, indeed, she didn't. Her case was straightforward enough; her long-term boyfriend had been undergoing a few drastic mood swings which could not be accounted for, that is, until I started tailing him and discovered the usual: A secret lifestyle with drugs and kink and another woman. She paid good money and, in those early years before established infamy in the trade, you can settle for that.
Those are the sort of cases one can remember without a hitch. They come roiling out of the city streets and you dive in after them trying to discern their secrets. What you find is generally in the shallows, in the rich, colorful, lively surf with its obvious if camouflaged threats and bountiful if obscured light. It is when the rumbling and the diving leads you into the depths, that is where you find the special cases.
That case—the dame with the mid-life crisis boyfriend—led me into one of those really fundamental stories of my career. It was a case that demanded forgetting. My practice in forgetting came long before that, though, when I was just a boy, about twelve. That episode, that halcyon childhood recollection so thoroughly scarred, has come back to me over the years in dreams and fragments from family and friends. Most of the records tell of a traumatic murder, an escaped perpetrator, and a shocked prepubescent witness. That, though, is far from the story I've pieced together.
An older boy in the neighborhood by the name of Ashley, though we called him Ash, had a penchant for getting into trouble. He was of average height and slender as a rail with that sandy brown hair that looks blond by the end of the summer but never looks clean. I had known him forever and for a few weeks or months out of every year, he took me on as a sort of protégé in his tomfoolery. When we were younger, it was the usual despoiling and looting from construction sites and peeping on the women and girls with well-suited windows. As we grew older, his interests became increasingly, shall I say, esoteric. Most of these endeavors he sheltered from me, however that only inspired greater curiosity in me, which only spurred him on the more.
Our neighborhood had been built from a much older one that had become dilapidated and decayed. A few residents stayed behind, unwilling to sell their property to developers, thus pockmarking our streets with a half dozen tall, towering, eccentric looking homes. Next to the fresh paint and playful greens of the new houses, these other appeared distinctly out of time, out of sync with the world. One by one these houses were remodeled, repainted, refurbished to when the elderly owners passed and their disinterested progeny inherited them; except for one man, Old Blake, the local curmudgeon who taunted us children and grouched perpetually at the noise.
Blake was a powerfully built man in his youth, however long-ago that may have been, and he managed to hold his posture and strength through the years. No one could recall him being any the younger and so, we children came to think of him as having always lived as an old man in that slanted, unkempt house. Though he offered none of the lurid imagery we boys often lusted after, Old Blake did have an elaborate collection of antiques, artifacts, and books to spark the attention of whoever was brave enough to peer through his cockeyed shutters or unevenly drawn curtains.
Despite the grave, sore-throated threats Blake would raise against anyone found in his property—firmly brandishing his silver-headed cane in our direction—Ash could not resist the long pull off the ancient abode and its secrets. I watched Ash from the adjacent yard as he leaped the high wooden fence between and vanished from my view in the hedges. Shortly after, a creak whistled in the wind like a secret, followed by a gust that stressed the rusted hinges of a shutter. My ears strained, at first cautiously then painfully for some sign of my friend, all the while knowing that he was more sly and deft than I would be able to detect.
I noticed my breathing was fast and nervous and made a point to slow it down. I was prone to asthmatic episodes and worried that if I had to flee unprepared, I would be paralyzed by a fit. After calming myself, lowering my breaths to a whisper, the distinct whine of a heavy wooden door followed by the clatter of a screened door broke my concentration. The long, low, thrumming breaths of Old Blake echoed like a mute organ and his cane tapping—once, twice, then a pause before setting more quietly on the wooden porch—arhythmically in the night. Unknowingly, I held my breath, certain that any rustle or twitch would give me or my stealthy companion away.
A whistle, like birdsong, then a rustle in dry grass followed by the fluttering of faint wings in the now quieted air. The thin clouds shifted away from the moon, revealing a surprising clarity to the night, and I slowly released my breath, somehow sensing a passed danger. Again, the tap-tap of the silver-headed cane and the sharp shudders of worn doors opening and closing; somewhere, not for off, the startled bird rested amidst leaves and made a small, unhappy call in the night. A shadow moved off to my right, from behind Blake's house and over the fence. At first, I thought it was Ash, but as I stared at the spot where it had gone, an guttural rumble arose inside me that felt—if I could say it felt like anything—like uncommon indigestion. I crouched, unable to breathe again, feeling an ambiguous gaze on me, when Ash scaled the fence and we were off, running together feeling the relief of companionship and action if not security.
Sometimes I think a day or two passed—the dreams do not easily account for the time in between—but that flight, that potent, invigorated movement from that unsettling house, the anxiety of Old Blake's presence, and that terrible sensation that had preceded Ash's return, I think that time moved differently then and confounded my sense of time that night. Together, Ash and I chuckled and ran, vaulting low fences and slapping each other on the back. I thought, perhaps, we would run all night, then all day and still be laughing. We were filled with boundlessness, not just energy, but a feeling for unlimited spaces and movement, for the falling away of assumed boundaries.
Eventually, in thirst and exhaustion, we did come to rest at the neighborhood park—its iron gates closed, we must have scaled it or squeezed through its generous bars—where we took turns drinking from the frugal drinking fountain. We rested on the rectilinear logs surrounding a sandpit with darkly shimmering metal play equipment, polished by the passage of children. It was then that Ash brought out his loot: A heavy, leather-bound book with coppery spinal binding that curved around into a clasp as well as a small, tightly woven amulet suspended by a similar copper strand with a small arrangement of stones set in a pentagon. That tome and the necklace remain clear in my memory still; I remembered them through everything, through every forced and attempted forgetting, as keys—or, rather, one key composed of two pieces—to an unwanted future.
We sat there, recovering our breath and transfixed by the way the amulet caught the sickly yellow light of a nearby, flickering streetlamp. Its subtle undulations and the clever, elegant placement of the bluish gems simultaneously suggested the cephalopods of the deep ocean and the abysses of space. I thought of the rumored giant squid, its innumerable arms reaching out from its inky ocean bottom, laying claim to its prey like a bolt of lightning, followed by the eerie disc of its enormous eyes passing like thunder echoing in deafened ears. Ash said nothing. We watched, awed and stupefied.
Movement, a shadow passing, and an indistinguishable form. It shook me from the stupor and I patted Ash on the shoulder to bring him back again. I quickly decided a bird or squirrel had flung itself through the rays of the streetlamp, but felt that pressure in my stomach again. I was suddenly anxious again, but felt certain that Old Blake was still at his decaying home. A laugh rose up in me, followed by Ash's own, and the stone of fear inside of me settled.
Ash stuffed the amulet inside his pant pocket and I felt a tug toward it, wanting again to peer at it, but I did not act on it. He unclasped the book, pressing a small button of a simple mechanism, and flipped through the pages.
“Some light reading for ya, Lo'?” he said, setting the book between us. It appeared to be written by hand, elegantly, in a slightly faded black ink. The letters flowed beautifully around one another and I thought of the half-obscured images of a family trip to Italy and the stain glass windows of cathedrals. He stopped flipping and turned back pages to see more clearly an immense, illuminated letter “L.” Around the letter, spilling out of the box dedicated to its illustration, were horrendous, creeping movements that at first resembled the amulet's braiding, but with a flickering of light and cloud became clearer.
Surrounding the “L” were long, scaled tendrils slithering over one another and the minuscule forms of people in various states of decay. Despite their size and morbidity, all of the forms seemed to be alive, experiencing unearthly pain at the hands—or rather tentacles—of the monster or monsters depicted. Small thorns or teeth raked long wounds in the flesh of the victims, revealing still bright crimson muscles underneath. Their faces, though, were drawn and harrowed, with circles of unknowable fatigue beneath their eyes and the mouths open to unnatural degrees and at broken angles. The tendrils and victims wrapped around the “L” and filled most of the page, but in the top-right corner, a shadow dwelt with bulbous suggestions and demoniac red, slitted eyes.
For a moment, we were lost again in our focus. Then, I thought of a slasher horror movie Ash had sneaked me into a week or two before. In it, a killer with apparently superhuman strength wreaked havoc on nubile young people with awful violence. The gore had decorated rooms to be discovered by others before their eventual deaths, as well. Ash ran out to purchase me a 7-Up to calm my stomach partway through, therefore missing one of the most gruesome scenes. I had not been able to sleep for two days after. Then, I thought of this cosmic beast with its horrible dimensions, its overwhelming malevolence, and absentmindedly compared the two. I giggled, then I chuckled; and then I guffawed.
Shaken, Ash asked, “What is wrong with you?”
“Remember that movie? That killer guy with the mask?”
“Yeah, what about it?”
“He's got nothing on this guy,” laughing again.
Ash joined me in an overloud roar of amusement. At first, I worried we would wake a sleeping neighbor, but then I noticed Ash's volume and length. Ash, I realized, was scared. Perhaps he too had seen that racing shadow, felt the weird indigestion, seen deeply into the strange abysses of the amulet; and now we shared an awful anxiety caused by that awful illuminated letter, that tentacled, unfathomed beast cast in darkness. I shivered and was quiet again.
“What do you think this is?” I asked.
“I don't know. I think it is in Latin.” Ash's family was Catholic and I generally accepted his linguistic knowledge as being the result of that. I had once gone with him to his church and was dumbfounded by the peculiar, cultic singing in an unknown language. Later, I asked him what it meant, and he plain-faced lied to me which I dumbly accepted to be true.
“Can you read it?”
“Well, the lettering, it is weird. It is hard to read.” He fidgeted, then shoved the book over to me, and fished in his pocket for something. He pulled out a small flashlight, handed it to me, and took back the book. “Hold that up so I can see it better.”
I held the light as evenly as I could. A cold wind swept in, but I knew that I had been shivering already, and was ashamed to see my fear in the bouncing circle of light.
“Steady,” Ash commanded. He ran his finger of the text, moving his lips just a little. My eyes darted between his face and the text. The speed of his hand and the volume of his lips increased. He flipped the page and I was glad to see the creature disappear, its gaze now obscured by the yellowed page. Ash made another noise that was not quite a word. I noticed in the margins of the page were a small scrawl, annotations of a former reader or translator. In the notes, I could discern an eszett—the capital-B like letter meaning a sharp “s”—and umlauts, so I decided it was German. Elsewhere on the page, I saw other languages, other readers leaving their marks with their own languages and accents. When Ash flipped the page again, I could hear him beginning to speak the words aloud and saw many of the same handwriting and language, but also three more. By the next page, I had counted a dozen distinct readers, one of which was in English.
“Wary are readers of 'C' and his power. He has come before and will come again,” I read aloud, clashing with Ash's own Latin verbalizations. The “f” was tall and “s” like and I wondered when it had been written. Ash's own reading was at a conversational volume and growing. Distracted, I had moved the light away but he was still reading. He flipped the page again and his voice took on a frightful, alien depth. I punched his shoulder but he did nothing.
“Ash! Stop it!” I dropped the light and stood up in front of Ash. I grabbed his shoulders and shook him, but he would not look away from the book. I took hold of the book and tried to wrench it from his hands, but his hands were white with the tightness now. Frantic, I tried to tear out the page he was reading, then the other before he could turn it, but they were suddenly strong and firm and I thought for a moment that I must be dreaming, that I had fallen asleep and this was a nightmare after running from the house. Or maybe I had fallen asleep waiting for Ash and I had never left the neighbor's yard. What if we hadn't gone out at all, I was just having a belated nightmare after the slasher movie.
“Help! Someone help me!” I shouted, my hands cupped around my lips. A light came on somewhere and I began to walk to it, but then the light flickered again and I was afraid to leave Ash. He was holding the book up now, closer to his face, almost shouting himself. His voice, though, his voice was low and potent and rumbling. I was scared of him, scared for him, and so shocked that I could not move. I tried to call out again, hearing somewhere in the darkness a window slide open, but my voice caught in my throat and I felt the hot, painful tears on my cheeks.
The shadow of something moving to my left, just out of range of the faint, anemic light of the streetlamp. Clouds fell suddenly, painfully over the moon, and my tears hurried down my face, dropping from my chin, running down my neck and clashing with the cold sweat there. I wanted to scream, to run, to slap Ash, to fall down. I felt, suddenly, the hot weight of shame as I peed myself. The shadow without any form moved again and the streetlamp flickered again, weakening into nothing.
Ash was shouting now, reading in an inhuman voice, possessed by something in the pages of that awful book, those awful pages with their horrific creatures. The shadow moved behind me, just out of sight, but I could feel it, like something breathing, hot and phlegmy, all over me. Disgust welled up inside of me, the roiling, rumbling mass in my stomach rising and I felt certain that I would be sick. This creature, this horrible, shapeless shadow behind me would descend on me and devour me or I would be sick and it would tear me to pieces. I was sobbing and felt the piss on my leg and the sick rising in me while my best friend, my brother-in-arms against the neighborhood and the world, my guide for growing up was in front of me, no longer reading but intoning deep ancient secrets into the air of a darkened space that was no longer anywhere familiar.

It was many months before I was communicative again. For two weeks afterward, my minor wounds were tended to in a hospital's children psych ward. I was catatonic—silent and unmoving—and diagnosed with extreme shock and likely severe psychological damage. After the thirteen days, I began to respond to commands again, but I did not speak, only robotically doing as I was told. A month later, my parents and younger brother distraught and discouraged by my lack of improvement, they took me to a psychiatrist. They were recommended to someone else, then to another specialist, who decided on a course of treatment for me. That is where I remember things from that period.
You might not know this, but electroshock therapy has an odd habit of falling in and out of vogue in medical psychology. It seems that, what little we know of the human brain, it uses both electrical and chemical means to communicate. Electroshock therapy, well, it works on the electrical side of the equation while psychopharmacology—using drugs to effect the mind—works on the chemical side. I have no doubt that it has improved since its heyday, but let me say this, shock therapy hurts like hell.
When you experience a heavy shock that inundates your body, the most obvious impact is on your muscles. Your muscles respond to the electricity by tightening up, which is similar to an epileptic seizure; this is generally bad for your body because muscles work in tandem, one tries to flex and the other tries to slacken to make room. When all your muscles in your body try to flex simultaneously, all of those muscles are essentially fighting one another for dominance. In your jaw, for example, the muscles to close are much stronger than the muscles to open, so you have to put in a mouthguard to keep those muscles from shattering your teeth or biting off your tongue—meanwhile, your tongue is virtually all muscle and so it is flexing out in all directions pressing up against the roof of your mouth and your front teeth.
I remember that pain. It went on sporadically for months. After about eight months—I stay out of those records as much as possible these days—I began to write. Though not the first thing I wrote, the most common thing I scrawled was, “Stop. No More Shock.” It took on a few different forms and took advantage of expletives that my parents were appalled I had picked up, but it was essentially that. When my parents saw my writing, they prohibited any further electroshock—the doctors insisted it had worked after all and did not desist on their own—and my treatment took on a gentler approach.
As I said, writing came first, and over time I lost my artificial movements for smoother action. I refused to speak for over a year following the incident. After about ten months—the investigation was on the backburner but the police and parents were horrified over it and its lack of leads—they tried to show me pictures of Ashley to “help” me remember. At first I whimpered, then I began to scream. I screamed for an hour, then my voice went hoarse, and I mutely screamed like panic with laryngitis. I was semi-catatonic for three days before coming back. At just passed the anniversary, I began to quietly respond to my parents kind words. Then, a week later, I laughed at a joke my brother told me. They took me home where I improved greatly.
I was plagued with dreams. Some were nightmarish recollections of that night. I mentioned the shadow, the book, the amulet, the strange mocking presence of the birds; I was told to keep a journal and try to gain some lucidity over my dreams. Most of the story I've here recounted is the result of these journals and the critical analysis of them. With the early lucidity came the other aspects of my dreams. I began to experience strangely life-like dreams in which I was body-less and surveying the lives of my friends and neighbors and parents. These I would later call out-of-body experiences or early exercises in practicing the sight. They gave me a nickname amongst my schoolmates: Larry the Finch because I would know things I wasn't supposed to know.
It is not good to know too much in your adolescence. It takes some time to practice secrecy, and teenagers just aren't very good at it. More than once, I received a beating for knowing that Joey had made out with Natasha who was dating Owen. I blabbed that Hank had sneaked into a movie with Sonny, Louis, and Mary when he had promised to go with Shane and Bobby. I did manage to hold my tongue when I saw Owen's mother sleeping with Hank's dad when Owen was out fishing with his dad and that time that Louis and Jacob made out after sneaking a few bottles of beer from the fridge in the garage. Those, thankfully, came later.
My youth, as it is for nearly everyone, was a hostile place. Many of my friends before Ash's death—I eventually forced myself to see the photos—distanced themselves, some even openly blaming me for his violent passing. That reputation preceded me, as did the academic delay it caused. I graduated a year and a half following my class and only with special circumstances because of my continued inhibition to speak. I was either a freak—disposing me to ridicule and fear—or a joke—resulting in ridicule and emotional distance. In either case, forgetting was my most powerful weapon.
Old Blake came by one day when I was still learning to manage my newfound secrets and social vantage. He neither smiled nor made any warm-hearted gesture. He came up onto our front porch, tapped his cane twice as if clomping mud from his boot, and sat on my family's porch where I silently read. He had made no accusations or claims following the incident and this was over two years after that night, so I could make little immediate sense of it. Though, the tap-tap of his cane had an air of familiarity about it that had showed up in my dreams and vague recollections. Old Blake was to tell me of forgetting.
“Lorenzo,” he always sounded as if he was about to call me “Lawrence,” but added just a hint of an o at the end, “you have survived a very harrowing event. For what it is worth, I know something of those events in a way no one else here does.” He paused and chewed or sucked on something in his mouth. Blake was known for his spitting, but I think he did so now out of thoughtful habit, not because of anything in his mouth. “They tell me you've been keeping a journal.”
“Yes,” I said, mumbling, then haphazardly tacked on, “sir.”
“Good, good. That is a good habit for you. Dreams tell you a good deal if you're willing to listen.” I nodded and placed my book down, certain that Blake would not be dissuaded now. “You see, dreams aren't memories. You've forgotten things that you needed to forget. I think most of that time in that hospital was you trying to forget. At your age, well, forgetting takes longer but its more... effective. When you're my age, forgetting is never exactly forgetting; it is more like misplacing something, you may find it again when its more inconvenient than when you lost it.”
Blake had my attention. It was clear he knew about the book that had surfaced again and again in my dreams, about that strange amulet, perhaps even about the shadow that chased us in my dreams. I had gone through that night so many times, each time with increasing confidence and clarity. Blake was not looking at me when he spoke. His eyes were misty but not blind; he was obviously seeing something in front of him that I could not. I waited quietly, earnestly for him to continue.
“If you hadn't forgotten, Lorenzo, I don't think you'd be in much better shape than your friend. There are things”—he cleared his throat and coughed into a pale, yellowed handkerchief—“things we ought not rightly know. The safest thing we can do for ourselves is forget them. Though, the safest thing we can do for everyone else is remember them.”
He turned, then, and looked at me. The color of his blurry eyes sharpening suddenly while his eyes dilated in the cool shade of the porch. I had been staring, unabashed, but now he had me locked on him. Neither of us moved as a gust rippled my mother's hedges.
“Lorenzo, you will become very skilled in forgetting and in putting those pieces back together. Know, though, that you will never have all the pieces. This sort of thing, the image is bigger and it is badder than you or me.”
He stopped, his eyes losing their focus again, and turned away. I followed his gaze but saw only across the street, the roses grown over the iron-work fence, and knew that he was seeing much further than that.
“Blake,” I whispered, not afraid but seemingly humbled, “how do I remember and forget?”
“Well, boy, you are on your way. Keep records. Keep many, many records. When you forget, use those records to know what happens in the dark places of your mind. Knowing, you see, can bypass memory.” He stood up then, rapping his cane against the floorboards. “And practice. Anything you want to do, learn to do it. Skills work differently than memories and they will serve you best.” With that, he breathed deeply the summertime air. “Can you smell those roses? Boy, I can smell those roses from here,” and with that, Blake walked home as if all he had meant to do was come over and talk about Mrs. Daniel's gardening with me.