BloodHateSilence

Blood and Hate and Silence. 

I always wanted to kill humans, possibly about a dozen I hated, but since I still had some vestiges of rationality in me, I also didn't want to get caught. So I waited for the right kind of opportunities to present themselves. I had waited for a long time; months rolled into years and then decades. 

Finally, an opportunity came. I took advantage of it, but I did also take some risks with it. I couldn't help myself. A single shot, maybe two or three, to the head and then covering my tracks and walking away would be too easy and anti-climatic. But I was a dramatic, bombastic, flamboyant kind of guy. So I gave in to who I really was. I tied his feet after handcuffing him and threw him in my car's trunk, and told him to shut up, otherwise I would blow his head off right there and then. 

It was early January. I took him to the woods, in the middle of nowhere in Northern Wisconsin, close to Minnesota. I told him to get out of the car, after loosening the rope on his feet so he could walk. I then stuck a little plastic ball in his mouth, and closed it with a strong duct tape. 

He walked in front of me. His legs wobbled. The air was crisp and sharp, though the sky was overcast. I could see mists coming out of his nostrils and trailed thinly away. I also smelled naked, animalistic odor of fear wafting from him. He knew he was going to die, but not how or when. I taped his mouth because I didn't want to hear his pleadings and cries. I was a soft-hearted kind of guy. I cried easily myself. And I wrote poetry.

I tied him to a birch tree. Then I put on a pair of boxing gloves. But first I kicked him hard in the groin. He couldn't bend over because of the restraining rope. I heard some muffled sound coming from his mouth. Tears streamed down his face. During my working him over, from head down to his belly, I cited his sins, one by one, against me. I didn't shout or scream to express my rage. I just released my pent-up frustrations, by methodically hitting him on his face and body, a blow for each sin, I recounted for his "benefit". I was sure he couldn't remember them all. He was that kind of a dog, a petty-minded and persistent dog. He thought he had fun at my expense, making up outlandish, outrageous lies about me. "Guess who's laughing now? Ashole!"  I leaned over and whispered to his ear. After about five minutes, the cur's face was swollen and bloody, and his eyes puffed up and completely shut. I swear I was hearing celestial music in tune with my every blow. Winds arrived with increasing speed, lifting fallen leaves temporarily off the ground. They swirled  around me and him---me and my human punching bag, two solitary human figures in the wilderness, in the biting cold, in the presence of silent birch and elm and maple and pine trees and shrubs; one figure in constant motion, the other stationary and tied to a tree. Then slanting snow started coming down hard. A blizzard was in full swing. Nature must have also been angry. The only noises were my punching blows and the howling winds. I was perspiring because of the exertion. He was then unconscious and barely breathing. I ended his misery by pulling out a knife and cutting across his throat while. A jet stream of red blood landed in the white wet snow. 

As I walked back to my car, I felt cathartic and peaceful and yet pondered on the imperative of keeping my mouth shut, on the necessity and beauty of Silence. 

The celestial music stopped. I only heard the howling winds. Snow was landing hard on my face. 

One just went down, eleven more to go. The Dirty Dozen. That was what I called them. They had been in my consciousness during my waking hours and in my dreams at night. They were one of the reasons I wanted to live so that one day I would exact vengeance. There is a saying that Love trumps Hate. It may be so. But in my universe, Hate and Love are intertwined. If you don't have Love, you wouldn't know Hate. Hate is Love unfulfilled. 

The asshole that I just killed was like a vermin that deserved its fate. It asked for it. It was a dumb one. That was why I caught it first. The other animals would be more elusive. But I have patience. It is one of my prime virtues. I'm hot-tempered but I'm patient. Sounds like a contradiction, an oxymoron. But Man is a self-conflicting, internally self-warring animal, suspended somewhere between Angel and Devil. Anybody knows that, even a stupid guy like me. One doesn't have to be a Sigmund Freud to be cognizant of that fact. Man aspires to be God so he invented Him, but he's aware that he's more of an asshole, so he also invented Devil/Lucifer/Satan. And Man is restless, bouncing back and forth between the two poles, contributing not much to Life and the World, but accounting for a lot of its destruction and heartaches. 

Some Greek guy said thousands of years ago that Man is an animal that wants to know. I seriously doubt that statement's veracity, just by looking at the bullshit dogmas and doctrines peddled by the so-called religious and political "leaders". If you're dumb and ignorant, and hence gullible, there are always assholes trying to take advantage of you by telling you lies. But since you're stupid and uninformed, you would embrace those lies and firmly believe that those lies are "truths". 

Life, to me, must be an endless struggle and fight for Truth. A human must be surrounded himself by facts, truths, and sound reasoning, not stupid and Blind Faith. Blind Faith makes you become a blind and dumb slave, hence manageable, controllable, and useful. How sad and how brutal! But that's Life is all about: an endless struggle for domination and exploitation, for power, and definitely not for Love. Love is just a front, a bait to attract potential preys. I'm not saying there are no humans who are full of Love. Yes, there are. I even have met several. That's why I haven't given up completely on the human race. Not yet. 

But where am I? And what am I doing? Am I preaching or trying to write a fictional story, or both? I don't know. I just know one thing: There's an "artist" inside me, trying to break out. So I keep trying to weave words together. Maybe someday, the tapestry of my words constitute something akin to "Art".  But now, since I'm stuck, that is to say, I'm having what's called a "writer's block", I'm going to make a  detour by "condensing"/paraphrasing/ or just plain copying a portion of a story ("The Largesse of the Sea Maiden") by Denis Johnson that shocked and awed me by virtue of its artistry and brevity, a kind of story that I've wanted to write: concise, bare, and yet lingering in the mind of the reader after he finishes reading it, and wonders if the story is based on real life or just on the imagination of the writer. In fact several, if not all, of my " stories" that I've written have this kind of flavor. 

"After dinner, nobody went home right away...We sat around in the living room describing the loudest sounds we'd ever heard. One said it was his wife's voice when she told him she didn't love him anymore and wanted a divorce. Another recalled the pounding of his heart when he suffered a coronary. Tia Jones had become a grandmother at the age of thirty-seven and hoped never again to hear anything so loud as her granddaughter crying in her sixteen-year-old daughter's arms. Her husband, Ralph, said it hurt his ears when his brother opened his mouth in public, because his brother had Tourette's syndrome and erupted with remarks like "I masturbate! Your penis smells good!" in front of perfect strangers on a bus or during a movie, or even in church.

Young Chris Case reversed the direction and introduced the topic of silences. He said the most silent thing he'd ever heard was the land mine taking off his right leg outside Kabul, Afghanistan. 

As for the other silences, nobody contributed. In fact, there came a silence now....I hadn't even known that Chris had fought in Afghanistan. "A land mine?" I said. 

"Yes sir. A land mine."

"Can I see it?" Deirdre said.

"No, ma'am," Chris said. " I don't carry land mines around on my person."

"No, I mean your leg."

"It was blown off."

"I mean the part that's still there!"

"I'll show you," he said, "if you kiss it."

Shocked laughter. We started talking the most ridiculous things we'd ever kissed. Nothing of interest. We'd all kissed only people, and only in the usual places. " All right, then, " Chris told Deirdre. "Here's your chance for the conversation's most unique entry."

"No, I don't want to kiss your leg!"

....I think we all felt a little irritated with Deirdre. We all wanted to see.

Morton Sands was there too, that night, and for the most part he'd managed to keep quiet. Now he said, "Jesus Christ, Deirdre!"

"Oh, well. OK," she said.

Christ pulled up his right pant leg......Deirdre got down on her bare knees before him, and he hitched forward in his seat to move the scarred stump within two inches of Deirdre's face. Now she started to cry. Now we were all embarrassed, a little ashamed (of ourselves). 

For nearly a minute, we waited. 

Ralph Jones was sitting beside Chris. Then Ralph said, "Chris, I remember when I saw you fight two guys outside the Aces Tavern (right before you got sent to war). No kidding," Ralph told the rest of us. "He went outside with these two guys and beat the crap out of both of them."

"I guess I could've given them a break," Chris said. "They were both pretty drunk."

......

We wanted to see how this sort of thing worked out. How often will you witness a woman kissing an amputation? But Ralph ruined everything by talking. He'd broken the spell. Chris worked the prosthetics back into place and tightened the straps and rearranged his pant leg. Deirdre stood up and wiped her eyes and smoothed her skirt and took her seat, and that was that. 

The outcome of all this was that Chris and Deirdre, about six months later, down at the courthouse, in the presence of very nearly the same group of friends, were married by a magistrate. Yes, they're husband and wife. You and I know what goes on."

I don't know about you, but I don't know what's going on. However, tomorrow I'll be on a ship for a week cruise in the Caribbean. If I meet a pretty, vivacious Latina on a crutch or even in a wheel chair, and if I'm challenged to kiss her, anywhere, just to start a conversation and get to know her, I'll take my chances. I'll be glad to do it, unlike Deirdre. I won't be crying. No sir, I won't. 

Wissai

May 14, 2016