Transcript from the sometime in the future. Location unknown. Names redacted.
Q.
A. What if you were evil, pure evil, but all your life, you thought you were the good guy?
Q.
A. Seriously, think about that for a second. How many bad guys think they are bad guys? So they live their lives thinking they are good. Right?
Q.
A. My point is this. I woke up one morning and I realized . . .
Q.
A. I had no idea who I was. That everything I thought to be true about myself was not true. Now I know this sounds trite and the words are. Write them down. Say them. Try to do it with a straight face. You can't. Now, live them. Wake up in that realization where you are not saying the words but the words are saying you. They don't express some intellectual idea, some contrivance of an overactive imagination; they express you, your state.
Q.
A. Well, then you gotta ask yourself, if you have totally frailed your own idea of yourself, have you totally frailed your view of everything else too. I mean, what can you believe anymore? But I want to go back to what I said earlier. What if everything you did caused pain and you thought just the opposite? Try and imagine that.
Q.
A. Frail. If it were easy, would I be here? Okay, let me put it this way. You've picked flowers, right? Put them in a vase, maybe given them as a gift. Made the home nice and all the rest. Okay, now imagine you've been picking flowers for years, making everyone happy, the world beautiful and so forth. You with me? Good. Now imagine, one day, when you are picking those flowers you hear a scream and you realize, after looking for that scream, it is the flower in your hand and the dirt on the root starts to run, red, blood red and the screams get louder and louder and you see what you've never seen before, that all your life, when you thought you were doing good, you were actually leaving a trail of murder.
Q.
A. So you look at the world and the world is empty. The world is nothing. Nothing.
Q.
A. Nothing as in an empty vessel. Everything you see is empty. Everyone you meet, empty. And then it dawns on you. You are the water. You pour yourself into the world, into the empty vessel. You with me? So nothing is as it seems.
Q.
A. Okay, now imagine these two thoughts hit you at the same time like a one-two punch. You are evil and everything you see is nothing but you, your projection and so you see evil in everything, everywhere.
Q.
A. Now, you try and live like this.
Q.
A. Hard to say. There is an anger inside, I don't even know when it began and I certainly didn't recognize it initially. Odd aberrations, situation specific I remember thinking, not some alien entity growing inside of me, feeding off my own thoughts, extending its tentacles with every episode, each outburst harder and harder to rationalize or justify and I began to understand how normal looking people, like neighbors you see every day, could, seemingly out of the blue, do some of the most heinous things. I could picture them in court, long after the temporary insanity, knowing that in this moment, as normal as they looked again, that alien root structure was there, as clear as the veins on their hands, waiting, silently.
Q.
A. Imagine standing outside on a beautiful day. Inside, your head, your chest, a storm is raging, raging with a ferocity that takes every ounce of your energy to keep from tearing you apart, apart from the inside out. So you just stand there, looking into the clear blue sky, feeling the perfect breeze, listening to the most gorgeous songbird, the air fragrant the ways bees know the world and yet, inside, you feel shattered, pieces, one by one, falling away, until there is nothing left but an odd hollowness, a sense that if you looked into a mirror, there would be nothing there or at least nothing you could recognize as you. And all you want to do is curse the hand that put you, whatever you is, in motion, whatever sick magical force took nothing and made something, something they labeled with your name and then kicked you out into the void, cold, alone, naked into the thorns.
Q.
A. You feel invisible, not as in no one can see you but rather as in no one will look at you, no one will acknowledge you. You speak, but no one turns their head, stops what they are doing. There is a sense of utter repudiation of your existence as if you could be voted out of significance, of meaning, of value and the implicit suggestion is, you are nothing.
Q.
A. It's only harsh to those who have not walked in my shoes. There is a reason soldiers do not talk to non-soldiers about the things they have seen, have experienced. The experience of war, of most things, creates a unique language, a language of sights and sounds and smells and tastes but also a unique language of mood, emotion, anger, fear, contempt, horror and I could go on and on but the language is known not by words. You see, words only point and when one with the experience is talking to one without, then it quickly becomes known one is pointing at ghosts, pointing at nothing for the words mean nothing. Do you understand? The words don't mean nothing. The words are code. The words point. And if you don't have the code, if you don't have the language embedded in your own experiences, well, . . .
Q.
A. Let's say you are your experiences. Forget that. Let's say you love music. You play, you listen, it gives depth and joy to your life. Let's say nothing else makes you as happy. Now, let's say you wake up one day and no one you know wants to talk about music, won't let you talk about it either. Nor will they let you play it. They hold music in utter contempt and I mean stark raving utter frailing contempt, the kind of contempt so contemptible it cannot even be spoken of, acknowledged. No discussion. None. Imagine that world. Go ahead. Take some time. Try and imagine living in that world.
Q.
A. Got it? Okay, now, let's say you wake up one day, and you sneak off to enjoy music, someplace alone, which is the only way you can get your fix and you need your fix like a plant needs sun. And what you hear, the music, is insipid, but more than insipid, more like rancid. As if every tone was slightly adjusted to a cacophony of disharmony. Imagine the shock of seeing a song, hearing a song, knowing that it was being played correctly, knowing how it was suppose to sound and yet, somehow, your ear, your brain could no longer process it but instead, distorted it, bastardized it. I would say it is the same as watching a parent suffer Alzheimer's. The body is there, but the mind is gone. And you realize that what you have lost cannot be found for it is right before your eyes, empty as a shell.
Q.
A. So what do you do? You say farewell and good night. Farewell. Good night.
Q.
A. Lighten up. I would never telegraph such a thing. But then again, the question is this. What is me and what is this thing inside of me, which at the moment I am crudely describing as anger, a label, just for the record, is a placeholder for something beyond my comprehension to understand its nature and depth. All I know is that I don't know, I don't know what is in the shadows, I just know something is there and that it is not a good thing.
Q.
A. Here is what I do know. There is me and there is this 'anger' inside of me and the two feel as separate as the flower and the bee. That is a poor analogy, for the bee can just fly away. I have nowhere to run from this thing inside of me nor, it seems, can I get my hands around it, shape it, control it, manage it or know when and where it moves. Still, I sense it grows, like weeds, finding nourishment within me in places I know not. Think about that. Something inside of you, taking root, growing, consuming you, feeding off of you and you don't even know how; you don't know upon what it feeds, you are not privy to this information. You see, you know it only from the shadows and all you really know is two things. It is there. It is growing. And, I suppose, you could say, day by day, as it grows, it is becoming more you than you. The bee is becoming the flower and the flower feels helpless to stop it, rooted as it is, petals open to the wind, exposed and, pardon my language, raped at will, its pollen taken, time and time again. See, I can't explain it. My analogies and metaphors are confusing, which is only a reflection of my internal confusion about what is happening. All I can say is this. I feel consumed. I feel taken over. I feel as if something else is driving me and I have been thrown in the backseat and I'm watching this entity drive, recklessly and I know where it is headed, to the cliff and as in a dream, even though I know this, I am helpless to stop it; I feel as if I am being forced to watch my own destruction, my own murder. Yet, if you were to ask me by who's hand, I would be at a loss to say.
Q.
A. I wake up with circles under my eyes. Some would say bags. And I'm not the only one who has noticed. In those first moments I feel as two. There is me, the old me, the me that I think I am. And then, and I want you to listen very closely to this, and then there is this other thing and it is waking too and I feel its strength, as if, in the night, it has grown and I feel it stirring, flexing itself and in that moment--is fear. I fear losing myself and the image occurs in my mind's eye of me seeing myself, as if there are two of me. No words are exchanged. Just hands outstretched, one reaching out to the other and the look. The look haunts me. I see the look of a child, confused, lost, reaching out and I can't grab the hand. So that is the image. Two arms reaching, as one might imagine someone thrown overboard in a storm reaching for the hand from the deck and both parties know that all is lost but in that moment, the moment of realization, the moment before all that is lost is completely lost, the moment of no return but prior to grief, that moment, where time stands in a circle giving pause, hands behind back, respectful, for a moment. That is how I wake. And the circles under my eyes, day by day, grow. I'm witnessing my own destruction, days like pages, and day by day, I get closer to the end. I'm on, in, the last chapter, the book is almost . . .
Q.
A. Actions occur that I cannot control. Struggle. Between the two selves, who I was and who I am becoming. My old self wants a mercy killing or, at the very least, solitary confinement, to limit the damage to others. The other self, the self that is growing, feeds off the pain, sardonic to the end. And this is my life, a civil war, and as a soldier, I sleep not, eat what I can, but I look like shiott, feel like shiott, and, as that soldier, know no one who shares my language, who can understand, who I can talk to. So I talk to you. And I watch your face. Your frailing professional face. And I know. I know as I talk. You have no frailing idea what I'm talking about. And in that space is a loneliness, an isolation that is cold and silent. A place where my other self sits upon a rock and smiles, waiting for me to return.
