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Phil John:
FOUR DOWN
Berlin, November 20th/21st, 2002 - Short Story # 1 - 1628 Words
The answer was sitting right in front of him. Cowering, rather, trembling somehow too. And bleeding. A lot. But not seriously, everything was still under control. Everything within normal parameters. He chuckled, strangely, but still. There was something insanely funny about this. Here he stood, having arrived at a point he often imagined. And there he had been, walking home from the cinema together with his girl, and everything had been just fine. They had seen a nice little romantic comedy, one of the less shallow kind if there is something like that. They had laughed, giggled, held hands, everything felt so perfect. They had been to dinner afterwards, nothing fancy, just some Italian food, he had pasta and she pizza. She didn't finish hers, but he couldn't help her with that, he had been spent already himself. Around midnight they left, strolling slowly towards her place, talking a bit, but also just joined in comfortable silence. When they turned around that corner, something hit him hard in the chest and he fell. There had been some further hitting, and he must have passed out. First time for everything. When he woke up, he just heard some muffled screaming, some laughs, and extensive moaning. The girl lay on the ground, some ten meters afar, and someone was inside of her, while another strangled her neck. Her head was covered by a bag, not a plastic one. She was naked, her clothes had been ripped off. The scene seemed distant and far away, and at first he was unable to move. He closed his eyes again, he didn't feel able to raise. Then it hit him, he suddenly grasped the situation. His eyes opened wide, he had to get up. There was a third guy partially blocking his sight. That one was probably supposed to watch over him, but he couldn't turn his eyes from the girl. Also, the guy seemed occupied with masturbating. In any other case that guy would have been threatening, having a rather muscular stature and attire. Yet adrenaline is a strange thing. It makes you do things you wouldn't even have dreamt of ever doing before. So he rose, slowly. There was a brick lying two meters away from him. No one seemed to care about him, they were having too much fun. He was hurt, he may have been bleeding. He didn't care, he had to focus on something else. Quite probably he didn't even notice. He rose half-way, turned and crawled towards the brick, still unable to fully rise and shine. Now he felt the pain. He heard her cry one last time, then there was a muffled sound, and no more noise from her part. That didn't stop them, however. They hadn't even noticed.
He took the brick and stood up, slowly. He held it in his hands and looked at it. It had been broken, it looked as if it somehow got ripped out of the pavement. There was a sharp edge to it, and he grasped it at the opposing end. What now. No one hadn't noticed him still. That was good. He moved slowly towards the masturbating guy, who just succeeded in unleashing a load of his genetic material unto the street. The guy seemed to have seen something in an angle just behind him, and turned. Now or never. Take the brick, and move. He moved. Two, three steps. There was a bald spot on the head of the guy, and that's where he hit him as hard as he could. The guy fell down. Probably unconscious. One down. He could've run, of course. Call the police on his cell phone. Wait for reinforcements. But he didn't even think of it in the moment, though he was aware of these options on some less conscious level. They were no real options, anyway. There was a situation at hand that demanded for his immediate action. He was here, now, and he had the brick. The other two hadn't even noticed him, they were laughing. Looking at the brick in his hand, at the one he had struck down, feeling the texture of the cold stone and the warmth of the blood dripping from it, he felt something else suddenly. The numbness, the pain, the sense of weakness, all gone. Something inside of him had awaken, and it was set to become alive. He felt power, plain, exhilarating power. He jumped towards the second guy and struck him down quickly, and the third one, though seeing his attacker briefly and starting to shout something, went down as quickly as his two other colleagues. They were down. He kneeled over the girl, removed the bag and the belt used for strangulation, tried to make her respond to him, but she didn't. She was just lying there. He didn't even bother to check her pulse and breath. The image was clear without medical confirmation. She had been broken, her eyes were closed, her naked body was lying still. There was blood all over her, and semen. She was dirty. He didn't even want to think about what just happened. There was the strangest feeling inside of him, something rising that felt primal, primeval even. The brick would not suffice. He halted for a moment, shifting his emotional turmoil towards a more biblical end. There had been an antiquities store some meters past from where he was standing. He had seen it only briefly, yet he remembered what he had seen. Slowly he rose, performed the steps towards the store in an almost mechanical manner. There it was. He broke the pane with the brick and entered. There it was. He picked it up while the alarms went off, he didn't care. He held the axe in his hands, it was a piece of beauty, it felt Medieval somehow. There was a dagger next to it too, the sweetest thing. He took them both and returned. He took a look at the situation at hand. The first one seemed about to wake up. What to do.
The answer was sitting right in front of him. Cowering, rather, trembling somehow too. And bleeding. A lot. What was there to think about, really. His life had been broken apart in one instant, there was nothing left to him. It's moments like these making us realize the cold, look into the bleak vacancy that lies beneath it all, keen on breaking apart the fragile life that we've tried to make for ourselves. He was finished, and there was no reason behind it. Emotion now was the central key to his logic, emotion starting with grief, turning into frustration and anger, negating everything he had ever held as truths, until he was now disproved on all accounts. One thing remained, one last truth to him. Until the end of the world, indeed and this was it, his very own end of it. He had lost her. What to do. The answer was sitting right in front of him. It started to move, opening its eyes and looked at him. A smile was the last thing it would see on this earth. The avenger rose the axe and let it fall down, severing the head from the body. The head showed an incipient scream kept unrealized, and eyes wide open. It rolled away slightly, making way for the blood to leave its host. Two to go. The mechanical precision was marvelous, maybe he should try something different now. The order had to be the same. There was no feeling about this, it was just thinking, a task to be performed. All emotions that had been spreading through him had resulted in an overload, leaving the machinery behind to do what was necessary. Those things would've risen again. They would've returned. They would've walked the earth to seek for new victims. He was the one standing between them, between what was right and what was wrong. There was no ambiguity for him, none of the ethical ballast of which he once had been the most avid preacher. Would he find the heart? Let's find out. He had to move the second body into a more suitable position for that. Yes, he would, and he did it with the dagger. He pushed it inside, and while he was at it, he approached its bowels the same way. That one didn't even blink, it was hit harder than the other. Only one left. Axe and dagger had become boring by now. He threw them away. Maybe he should cut off their motivations, for that he could reuse the dagger. But first things first. He took the last one by its head and pulled it into a vertical position. He could feel the power, he knew he would be able to do this as seen on TV or in a movie. The thing started to wake up. More perfect even. He put his hands on the skull and gave it all the force he had. The noise was extraordinary. He was proud of his mechanical achievement, and had almost forgotten why he had done it. His eyes fell upon her body. She looked peaceful in the most sadistic sense. There was a howl starting inside of him, beneath him almost. He took the dagger and did what he had set out to do, then he arranged the bodies in one line. He was standing above them now, he was above, beyond them. He smiled, and moved the dagger from one hand to the other. He was finished, she was avenged, he had done what was done to her. He pushed the dagger into one of them, just for a final time. That's when she opened her eyes.
November 20th/21st, 2002
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Commentary
Art must never be timid nor shy, if there is a topic that craves for attention, why repress it? Why not go there and talk about it? The alternative, to not discuss it, to stick to the harmless and nice and fluffy stuff appears to me as some kind of less productive escapism.
If a piece of writing is supposed to be about a certain something, it has to stay true to that objective. I've always been interested in asking questions about the so-called nature of humanity; what makes us go on, what makes us stop, what makes us move where no man has gone before. Such questions can best be approached by looking at borderline cases, the breaking point where the really critical decisions are made. When could such a point be reached? Is it such an extraordinary thing?
Independent from my current emotional state at the moment of writing (which is somewhere between turmoil, depression, catharsis and redefinition), I've always tried to arrive at some kind of understanding of what is rejected in the common discourse. I don't quite understand, for instance, the ideology of positivism and almost aggressive denial at work in contemporary societies; sure, you need to think positive sometimes to get going. But you should also take a look at the other options, and a certain pessimist approach is surely the most successful one for the arts. Romeo and Juliet would be nothing but yet another rip-off from a known story were it not for the tragic ending. Titus Andronicus (and its brilliant movie version by Julie Taymor starring Anthony Hopkins) and Hamlet only work through their protagonists' closeness to terror. Series like the Bond films, Twin Peaks, The X-Files, Millennium, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel only work because both (anti-)hero and big bad are mirror images of each other. An effective story is something that stirs people up, not makes them sink back to their couch smiling in complacency. I'm at a point right now where I'm especially keen on charting the darker regions of the human psyche, why not make use of that.
Fiction is fiction is fiction. Fact is fiction too, to the highest possible degree. But that's a case for a more serious post-structuralist detour, which I can't do right now. There are stories of raising some evil just by imagining or writing it. There's an X-Files episode charting that topic, there's the classic tale of the Golem raised by mere recital of text, such as fictional demons can be raised by exerting spells &c, and the second Harry Potter also uses a text as the main villainous device. Do those texts encourage the deeds they describe? Are they just cries from help by future killers? That's too easy an explanation, I believe.
Precisely by writing about certain things you can become able to distance yourself, by dealing with a topic instead of mystifying and obscuring it. Face your demons, understand where they're coming from, then you know how to handle them. I deem it pretty much unhealthy to not talk about certain things. When you try to talk with anybody about anything dead serious, something questioning the layers of negation and repression within society, most will refuse discussion. They'll have ready-made arguments, common wisdom and pop psychology at hand. Take suicide for an example. If you check out suicide forums on the internet, the most common complaint seems to be that nobody would listen. Everybody would talk, but nobody would dare go into that emotional place themselves, mostly out of fear, and also because something that mustn't exist can't exist. In writing something about a certain suicidal mind-set (or rather a death wish situation) and sharing that with possible suicidals, one may in contrast show support rather than to encourage doing it.
The short story describes a place I haven't been. I'd never want to be there. But you do have certain fantasies. A man is supposed to protect his girl, what if he'd fail? How'd he react? What about the level of self-control, of ethics, love, compassion, would they still be there in such a moment?
Regarding the textual means, I want to go places with the story, so I can't just let him call the police. He has to do something, he has to eliminate the threat to his girl. The necessity for that, the motivation, the urgency, all that's coming from the setup. She needs to be naked, the scene needs to be ugly in order to make him believably take a turn for the worse, otherwise it would just look contrived. This is not sensationalism, it has to be this way. The reader must be as disgusted and appalled by the scene as the man himself. Next choice: How will he do it? What will the image of her lying there, being raped, make of him? He believes she's dead, and she's lying there completely bereft of her human dignity. He knows what'll happen juristically to the perpetrators, it's not enough for him. There are still people who believe in death penalty and sharia law. An eye for an eye means, take what was taken, nothing more, nothing less. Should he do it just like a wild man? That wouldn't quite have the utmost edge. No, he has to go Hannibal Lecter on them. He has to be deliberate, he has to be cold, in order to achieve the utmost effect. A brick isn't enough, it has to be something classic, alas the dagger and the axe. Note that I change the pronoun of the rapists into "it", he is only able to kill and mutilate them because he doesn't see them as human beings anymore. De-personalization is the essence of what makes people partake in genocide and serial killing; the other is just a thing, an object, something that is dealt with like it's already dead. The fact that I try to approach his mental state and his reasoning should point towards my stance as a writer; I may be understanding, but that doesn't mean I condone it. I make that clear by the ending: Everything has been in vain, his reasoning was flawed, he has turned into a monster and she has seen it. He is the fourth man down. Now I need to leave it open to torment the reader yet a final time.
There's a brilliant dialog in the Angel episode "Reprise". He confronts an arch-nemesis working for an evil law firm working for a
primeval prime evil organization. He's fought for a chance to get to the source of all the evil, and he's taken there. He lands back
in LA. The explanation given by his opponent?
"We [the law firm Wolfram & Hart, working for the forces of evil], have no intention of doing anything so prosaic as 'winning'. For us, there is no fight. We go on, no matter what. Our firm has always been here in one form or another; the Inquisition, the Khmer Rouge - we were here the first time a caveman clubbed his neighbour and watched in fascination as his brains oozed out in the dirt. We're in the hearts and minds of every living human being and that, friend, is what's making things so difficult for you. The senior partners are evil and powerful beyond imagination, and you can try to fight them, but the source of their power... that's beyond all of us.
The world doesn't work in spite of evil, Angel. It works with us. It works because of us. When you locked those cellar doors and left me to die, you reached your Shanshu. In that moment, with that one act, you were as close to your own humanity as you'll ever be. If there wasn't evil in every single one of them out there, why, they wouldn't be people. They'd all be angels."
- Holland Manners, Angel episode 2x15 "Reprise", written by Tim Minear
It's that conflict, that Faustian setting that looms over all our cultural achievements, and there's a reason for it. You can't just discuss it from a safe distance. You need to get a bit closer, just not too close, but pretty close. The X-Files episode "Grotesque" has a phrase for that,
"For truly to pursue monsters, we must understand that we must venture into their minds. Only in doing so, do we risk letting them venture into ours? [..] Patterson had this saying about tracking a killer: If you wanted to know an artist, get a look at his art. But what he really meant was if you wanted to catch a monster you had to become one yourself."
- Fox Mulder, The X-Files episode 3x14 "Grotesque", written by Howard Gordon
If we don't confront the danger itself, we don't see it when we're in it. In expressing and exposing and deconstructing certain all too human peculiarities through writing, I feel I can not only face my demons, but hopefully also those of others, and in understanding them, overcoming them.
January 20th, 2003
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