An emotional kaleidoscope of remorse, revenge, forgiveness, and more
It helps if blame can be clearly assigned when bad things happen. This is the case for Edward (Eddy) Baxter when his marital bliss is threatened by a letter from an ex-lover: Trisha.
Like Edward himself in the 80s and early 90s, Trisha was living a promiscuous lifestyle. They met and fell in love, staying true until the relationship ran its course. Or so he thought. Now, in 1992, he discovers that she cheated and contracted the HIV virus, most likely passing it on to him.
That all occurred before Edward met Helena, with whom he’s cultivated a happy, monogamous, yet sexually satiated life. Their mutual intense love is about to be rewarded with a child. Until it hits him that Trisha’s letter affects not only himself but also his wife and her unborn child. This sends Edward into an irrevocable tailspin of poor decisions and extreme actions that alienate Helena, then everyone else in his world.
A desire to stoke an uncontrollable rage steers him to the seediest parts of his unnamed city. Hygienic negligence fuels an addled mind to fulfill his intent to spread his infection as far and wide as possible, before exacting revenge on, to him, the true culprit: Trisha.
“I thought mad thoughts: distorted, irrational, and catastrophic. I felt God was keeping me alive to share my affliction with others who deserved to go down with the ship alongside me.”
Yet indulging what he comes to call his madness is not straightforward. Eddy suffers setbacks. Such as catching pneumonia and, ironically, the infuriating kindnesses of strangers. In looking for devils, he finds angels. Most notably a young woman named Natasha who absorbs his verbal abuse with aplomb and empathy. She and others somehow shepherd Eddy out of his madness, but it leaves him filled with shame. Enough to want to capture his depraved two-weeks in a lengthy mea culpa to be preserved unread for his unborn child upon Eddy’s death.
That death doesn’t occur for seventeen years and the unborn child, Anthony, is oblivious to the journal’s existence until he’s an orphan. Anthony’s first-person narrative of finding, reading, and reacting to it frames the one written by his father. While smaller, and far more subdued in terms of drama, Anthony’s story is integral in providing context and resolution for Eddy’s journal.
This framing highlights why calling Eddy’s confessional a journal is possibly an intentional, fictional deception. A journal is written as events occur, not after the fact. Even though it’s written immediately after and captures their rawness, what Eddy writes of his experience is more a chronicle. For it benefits from a chance to assess and alter events to consciously or subconsciously meet self-serving aims. A hint to those aims can be seen in how Eddy describes dealing with a severe hangover on day four:
“For thirty minutes, I lapped water into my mouth. By the end, I had consumed almost a gallon and felt only the slightest cramp, without vomiting, which would have happened if I had drunk more in that span. My next destination was the garage, where I stowed our Gatorade. I drank six bottles; again, slowly—I think it took an hour.”
A substantially impressive amount of fluid to consume in ninety minutes, if true. To anyone but an impressionable child inclined to think highly of a deceased parent, it could come across as boasting. Exaggerated, perhaps frivolous, details like this make one start to detect layers of motivation beyond simply telling it like it was. Interjections of sage parental advice that would unlikely come to mind in the moment support this notion.
It’s also evident that, no matter how bad or good Eddy’s actions are, he always paints himself in a positive light. This is most pronounced in passively as well as pointedly flaunting his virility. He used to be a womanizer and even in his degenerative unwashed state he considers himself a catch for the opposite sex. Yet he takes equal pains to exhibit a strong moral center, pointing out he and Helena are church members, go every Sunday, and volunteer for church events.
Hence, what seeps from Eddy’s intense madness is an ulterior intent to leave an impression on his child, using a variation of shock and awe. To subtly influence a person he’ll never know to garner some admiration, no matter how appalled the child might be at his actions. Eddy may be willing to accept from his child hatefulness for his actions, as long as he can avoid contempt.
From this perspective, it’s easier to understand the excesses of Eddy’s prose in this extensive volume. Traversing a two-way spectrum of blame and forgiveness—including guilt, remorse, hope, sorrow, sympathy—it in essence becomes a whirlwind tour of the five stages of grief. One that gets increasingly maudlin and sentimental. Especially when it concerns the titular Helena, who surprisingly plays a comparatively small role in the action to those within the scope of Eddy’s madness.
Before Helena offers an unflinching portrayal of a captivating unreliable narrator—a compelling odyssey of passion with a protagonist you can both commiserate with and castigate. Eddy’s self-abasement elevates the concept of no pain, no gain to cathartic limits in search of personal salvation. From vile villainy through guileless goodness, Eddy Baxter’s fortnight of madness swirls with layers of emotional fervor.
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