Story 8: Temporary Insanity
Prologue
I looked out to the stars that night
They came toward me with bright suggestiveness.
The space beyond the earth invited me.
I went to it and it embraced me.
Such a homely feeling to be one with the universe.
I felt serene; calm among every surrounding ever.
Oh to fly to that place where I am free,
To have no one there; silence so glorious.
Of course it cannot be.
Of course I am fooling myself.
The universe will not have me
And I will ne’re be happy
Fly to my abolition
Keep my mind hidden
And help me to dream
Of a world better off without you.
Temporary Insanity
“Don’t even try to understand me. You can ask. But just because I give you an answer, that does not mean that you will have a clue about anything that has ever happened to me or why I did what I did.” And there he goes, walking out of this cell like I don’t know what I am talking about. I do though, I know exactly what is happening, but that does not necessarily mean that anyone else will ever understand, or that I want them to understand. This man had no clue about anything that I was going to speak of, or anything that I have ever spoken of. I expect that and I deal with it; I have always dealt with it, ever since my tenth birthday. No one else needs to know or understand.
My tenth birthday changed everything; it changed me. The birthday party was held in my back yard on the greenest of grasses with the softest of cakes and the most fiery of flames upon the wicks of the candles. That hot, yellow, jumping, backwards tear, attempting to rise to the sky, to return the sadness to the atmosphere and replace it with joy on the ground. It was while they all sang “happy birthday” and I stared into the burning candles and watched myself meld. I could see as my eye stared and strained at the velvet strip of the flame as I saw my pupil dilate and rotate around and then my hand was aflame. My hand did not burst but I began to form into that rising dry hot tear and was able to shape it into me, as my eye watched it all and I saw my eye watching it. And my body burned without pain and my eye became fire and I was the flame, and the fire from the candle became me and I it and we exchanged and them became one. Then my pupils rotated once again and swallowed my essence and left me empty and feeling fulfilled.
This intense sensation would happen throughout my life at various points as a subconscious reaction to things touched, seen, or felt. It happened at seemingly random intervals when I would be doing just anything - or perhaps I was doing something important. The occurrence was not subject to just one thing either. I would unify myself with wood, fire, steel, or any number of other things. I would merely become anything and eventually I realized the far reaching power I had with this ability. This is how I ended up here. I do not think I actually developed a “God complex” as they call it. But I knew that my abnormal abilities made me a threat to people and that it made me better than people. I knew I would be frightening so I hid it all and denied it to others and practiced in solitude. And I got good. I could meld with anything at anytime by the time I turned seventeen. When I was twenty three, things changed again.
I was driving home from an "in between careers” job when I felt something to the affect of hunger. So, using instinctive reflexes, I pulled into the nearest fast food restaurant and walked in. I watched the other people seated inside. I watched them eat, watched them sit, just watched as realization washed over me.
And then a question formed in my mind; it was truly demented and incredibly inevitable; it was a question of power, and a question of sickening grace. What would it feel like? Could I get away with it? And of course; was murder truly the ultimate of all thrills?
I took in the scene one more time; trying desperately to make a decision; to come to a conclusion. I first looked at the servers in their obviously under washed uniforms, making every attempt to make anyone happy in a crowd of people that were waiting in a line in a restaurant whose entire existence was based around the idea that people would not have to wait for their food. Poor waiters, they would be a mercy killing. The people waiting in line were a fairly different situation. They sat, staring intently at the cashiers who were making a vein attempt to keep each and every person happy. The customers’ impatience was incredibly apparent not only by the air with which they surrounded themselves, but also in the way that they voiced their opinion of a staff that was making every last attempt to make them happy. Others simply ate, they ate anything and everything in front of them. The people came in all shapes and sizes; in everything from twinkie to twiggy. It was a symposium only equaled in other such restaurants. And I can not help but believe that I am not the first to realize that demise is these peoples only escape. But I do know that I was the first with the power and true sympathy and compassion to see that this really did need to happen and really did do it.
But wait, I must hush my thoughts so that the warden cannot hear them. He opens his mouth and words emerge from his lips to my ear. I only have but to remember to add the H so that I can hear him. Feelings must be guarded with the utmost care. Everything running through my head must be blocked from the view of prying eyes that seek to see into my heart. The buried universe of my emotions where a conscience does not exist and destiny is foretold in its bleakest moments must be sealed. I have to have a blank, and unthinking mind; I cannot give away anything. So in the end... echoes, it is all echoes. I nod, I grin; I do not understand. A blank mind does not think or hear. That is okay, it bothers me not, I need not know what he says. Only to know that it is unimportant to me, and that makes it alright. There he goes, leaving in the huffy semi-concerned manner which means nothing to me and mumbling something about being happy to see me die when it happens. He will not be there to see it.
Therein lies the mutual difference twixt men such as that and men such as myself. In whole we are very much the same. Two legs, two eyes, a mind that has learned to thrive on pain, and the hunger to feel that pang of ecstasy again and again. From step to step the lines that we follow run opposite each other and lie on separate plains. He is one that awaits the experience to fall into his lap, like a silent puppy who has been hit too many times and will not speak for its food but merely waits for responsibility to fill its bowl. At a point such as now he is about to starve. That is why what I did was perhaps not righteous, but what he awaits and relives is cowardice.
My thoughts digress once again to the restaurant where lines are formed by people who don’t wish to wait and everything that could possibly be wrong with who we are is positively exposed. This unbearable hell on earth where people flock to clog arteries and raise calorie counts.
As I watched them I concluded to answer my question and to hold people’s lives in a breathless grip and suffocate them to nothing. With no more thought and the anticipation of the only true thrill still awaiting me, I acted. I allowed just the tips of my toes, just the first inklings of my soul to melt into the tilted floor and feel throughout the whole of the building. The killing could have been done many ways. But as that small part of my soul searched the scattered walls it fell upon the glint of light flashing off the murderous potential energy of shimmering blades. Then I allowed my whole body to swim to those points where blade would beget blade murder. Each object was assimilated and held at the ready for the killing blows that would follow. I was a part of it all; watching myself through the eyes of the blades, feeling my own sweaty palms wrapping around my own sharp edges. Holding them steady; choosing my targets, and hurling myself with deadly force. And they all hit at once. Each blade of my body hurling through flesh feeling the excitement of the initial pierce. Sensing the pounding of my own blood as it became stained and smeared with the rancid scent of another’s. As the bone was slit with the strength of my carving skeleton, and they grinded together and calcium was shaved away. And I, watching myself enter each victim, feeling myself take each life, realizing that it was an experience which Poe was not able to do justice to. Such purity and power with no equal; or perhaps one; taking one’s own life. Then it was gone. Leaving in its wake a bloody trail smeared with thankful bliss. As the glint of the metal fell from my eyes, and the touch of the bone, flesh, and blood receded to the core of my very essence that filled me with emptiness that I longed to fill once more. Once again I was whole with everything important missing. Such an experience I craved over and over. The heresy of the horrifying wonderful trauma could only begin to describe its potency.
Epilogue
Police report extraction of double homicide case.
The accused claims that he was accompanying the warden to cell number 2187 when the “strange series of circumstances” occurred. When asked about the events the accused said the following.
“Me and the warden, we’d been doin regular checks on all the inmates cause that’s what it was time for. Anyway we were doin these checks and as we were goin along just before we would get to certain people the warden would turn ta’ me and start up tellin me how this guy here was weird cause of this or that. There were some pretty interesting stories. One of them guys is held up in there because he got this woman to get naked for him, want him, and then not do anything to her for a while and as soon as he had her feelin kind of foolish and she started to puttin her clothes back on he told her that he wanted her now and tried to get up on her and whenever she started to show interest he’d stop again. Then he start all up again wantin her and eventually she didn’t start wantin him back anymore and then he pulls out this knife and makes her lay there for him and soon as he’s done he tells her to get to a nunnery and throws her out of his house all naked and tells her to walk home like that and locks the door and goes to bed. Then this lady, bein all naked and all, she decides to break a window so she can get her clothes back and he calls the cops on her and they come and she tells them what he did and he goes to jail. There was others too but the other one that was even weirder was about the guy in 2187. Just before we got to his cell the warden pulls me off to the side and tells me that this guy is really strange and tells me this crazy story. He says how this guy never had a record before and one day he just walks into this fast food place and just snaps and goes so completely postal. He just walks back to the place where they keep all the knives and starts pickin them up and tossin them at people. And this guy must have been some sort of pro knife thrower cause he put each knife through each one of them people’s hearts. Cut right through the ribs and everything. And when somebody else pulled on for some food they saw what had happened they called the cops and they found him just a sittin in that restaurant calm as the dickens finishin up his soda and they took him away and now here he was. So we get to the cell and this guy is calm as ever sittin in the middle of the room and the warden starts to tellin him how worthless he his and calls him names and guy isn’t even phased by it, he just sits there. Then I ain’t too sure about what happened next. All’s I know is that I was watchin them and then my hand starts movin all by itself and then I’m tellin my hand to stop but before I could get it to stop it was already pullin the gun from my holster. It was almost like the gun moved itself. Then it was firing and I didn’t know what to do and I tried to jerk my hand so as to miss the warden but he was already shot and then I shot the other guy. I didn’t mean to, I don’t even know how it happened. The accused will plead guilty and will enter a plea of temporary insanity.
I looked out to the stars that night
They came toward me with bright suggestiveness.
The space beyond the earth invited me.
I went to it and it embraced me.
Such a homely feeling to be one with the universe.
I felt serene; calm among every surrounding ever.
Oh to fly to that place where I am free,
To have no one there; silence so glorious.
Of course it cannot be.
Of course I am fooling myself.
The universe will not have me
And I will ne’re be happy
Fly to my abolition
Keep my mind hidden
And help me to dream
Of a world better off without you.
Temporary Insanity
“Don’t even try to understand me. You can ask. But just because I give you an answer, that does not mean that you will have a clue about anything that has ever happened to me or why I did what I did.” And there he goes, walking out of this cell like I don’t know what I am talking about. I do though, I know exactly what is happening, but that does not necessarily mean that anyone else will ever understand, or that I want them to understand. This man had no clue about anything that I was going to speak of, or anything that I have ever spoken of. I expect that and I deal with it; I have always dealt with it, ever since my tenth birthday. No one else needs to know or understand.
My tenth birthday changed everything; it changed me. The birthday party was held in my back yard on the greenest of grasses with the softest of cakes and the most fiery of flames upon the wicks of the candles. That hot, yellow, jumping, backwards tear, attempting to rise to the sky, to return the sadness to the atmosphere and replace it with joy on the ground. It was while they all sang “happy birthday” and I stared into the burning candles and watched myself meld. I could see as my eye stared and strained at the velvet strip of the flame as I saw my pupil dilate and rotate around and then my hand was aflame. My hand did not burst but I began to form into that rising dry hot tear and was able to shape it into me, as my eye watched it all and I saw my eye watching it. And my body burned without pain and my eye became fire and I was the flame, and the fire from the candle became me and I it and we exchanged and them became one. Then my pupils rotated once again and swallowed my essence and left me empty and feeling fulfilled.
This intense sensation would happen throughout my life at various points as a subconscious reaction to things touched, seen, or felt. It happened at seemingly random intervals when I would be doing just anything - or perhaps I was doing something important. The occurrence was not subject to just one thing either. I would unify myself with wood, fire, steel, or any number of other things. I would merely become anything and eventually I realized the far reaching power I had with this ability. This is how I ended up here. I do not think I actually developed a “God complex” as they call it. But I knew that my abnormal abilities made me a threat to people and that it made me better than people. I knew I would be frightening so I hid it all and denied it to others and practiced in solitude. And I got good. I could meld with anything at anytime by the time I turned seventeen. When I was twenty three, things changed again.
I was driving home from an "in between careers” job when I felt something to the affect of hunger. So, using instinctive reflexes, I pulled into the nearest fast food restaurant and walked in. I watched the other people seated inside. I watched them eat, watched them sit, just watched as realization washed over me.
And then a question formed in my mind; it was truly demented and incredibly inevitable; it was a question of power, and a question of sickening grace. What would it feel like? Could I get away with it? And of course; was murder truly the ultimate of all thrills?
I took in the scene one more time; trying desperately to make a decision; to come to a conclusion. I first looked at the servers in their obviously under washed uniforms, making every attempt to make anyone happy in a crowd of people that were waiting in a line in a restaurant whose entire existence was based around the idea that people would not have to wait for their food. Poor waiters, they would be a mercy killing. The people waiting in line were a fairly different situation. They sat, staring intently at the cashiers who were making a vein attempt to keep each and every person happy. The customers’ impatience was incredibly apparent not only by the air with which they surrounded themselves, but also in the way that they voiced their opinion of a staff that was making every last attempt to make them happy. Others simply ate, they ate anything and everything in front of them. The people came in all shapes and sizes; in everything from twinkie to twiggy. It was a symposium only equaled in other such restaurants. And I can not help but believe that I am not the first to realize that demise is these peoples only escape. But I do know that I was the first with the power and true sympathy and compassion to see that this really did need to happen and really did do it.
But wait, I must hush my thoughts so that the warden cannot hear them. He opens his mouth and words emerge from his lips to my ear. I only have but to remember to add the H so that I can hear him. Feelings must be guarded with the utmost care. Everything running through my head must be blocked from the view of prying eyes that seek to see into my heart. The buried universe of my emotions where a conscience does not exist and destiny is foretold in its bleakest moments must be sealed. I have to have a blank, and unthinking mind; I cannot give away anything. So in the end... echoes, it is all echoes. I nod, I grin; I do not understand. A blank mind does not think or hear. That is okay, it bothers me not, I need not know what he says. Only to know that it is unimportant to me, and that makes it alright. There he goes, leaving in the huffy semi-concerned manner which means nothing to me and mumbling something about being happy to see me die when it happens. He will not be there to see it.
Therein lies the mutual difference twixt men such as that and men such as myself. In whole we are very much the same. Two legs, two eyes, a mind that has learned to thrive on pain, and the hunger to feel that pang of ecstasy again and again. From step to step the lines that we follow run opposite each other and lie on separate plains. He is one that awaits the experience to fall into his lap, like a silent puppy who has been hit too many times and will not speak for its food but merely waits for responsibility to fill its bowl. At a point such as now he is about to starve. That is why what I did was perhaps not righteous, but what he awaits and relives is cowardice.
My thoughts digress once again to the restaurant where lines are formed by people who don’t wish to wait and everything that could possibly be wrong with who we are is positively exposed. This unbearable hell on earth where people flock to clog arteries and raise calorie counts.
As I watched them I concluded to answer my question and to hold people’s lives in a breathless grip and suffocate them to nothing. With no more thought and the anticipation of the only true thrill still awaiting me, I acted. I allowed just the tips of my toes, just the first inklings of my soul to melt into the tilted floor and feel throughout the whole of the building. The killing could have been done many ways. But as that small part of my soul searched the scattered walls it fell upon the glint of light flashing off the murderous potential energy of shimmering blades. Then I allowed my whole body to swim to those points where blade would beget blade murder. Each object was assimilated and held at the ready for the killing blows that would follow. I was a part of it all; watching myself through the eyes of the blades, feeling my own sweaty palms wrapping around my own sharp edges. Holding them steady; choosing my targets, and hurling myself with deadly force. And they all hit at once. Each blade of my body hurling through flesh feeling the excitement of the initial pierce. Sensing the pounding of my own blood as it became stained and smeared with the rancid scent of another’s. As the bone was slit with the strength of my carving skeleton, and they grinded together and calcium was shaved away. And I, watching myself enter each victim, feeling myself take each life, realizing that it was an experience which Poe was not able to do justice to. Such purity and power with no equal; or perhaps one; taking one’s own life. Then it was gone. Leaving in its wake a bloody trail smeared with thankful bliss. As the glint of the metal fell from my eyes, and the touch of the bone, flesh, and blood receded to the core of my very essence that filled me with emptiness that I longed to fill once more. Once again I was whole with everything important missing. Such an experience I craved over and over. The heresy of the horrifying wonderful trauma could only begin to describe its potency.
Epilogue
Police report extraction of double homicide case.
The accused claims that he was accompanying the warden to cell number 2187 when the “strange series of circumstances” occurred. When asked about the events the accused said the following.
“Me and the warden, we’d been doin regular checks on all the inmates cause that’s what it was time for. Anyway we were doin these checks and as we were goin along just before we would get to certain people the warden would turn ta’ me and start up tellin me how this guy here was weird cause of this or that. There were some pretty interesting stories. One of them guys is held up in there because he got this woman to get naked for him, want him, and then not do anything to her for a while and as soon as he had her feelin kind of foolish and she started to puttin her clothes back on he told her that he wanted her now and tried to get up on her and whenever she started to show interest he’d stop again. Then he start all up again wantin her and eventually she didn’t start wantin him back anymore and then he pulls out this knife and makes her lay there for him and soon as he’s done he tells her to get to a nunnery and throws her out of his house all naked and tells her to walk home like that and locks the door and goes to bed. Then this lady, bein all naked and all, she decides to break a window so she can get her clothes back and he calls the cops on her and they come and she tells them what he did and he goes to jail. There was others too but the other one that was even weirder was about the guy in 2187. Just before we got to his cell the warden pulls me off to the side and tells me that this guy is really strange and tells me this crazy story. He says how this guy never had a record before and one day he just walks into this fast food place and just snaps and goes so completely postal. He just walks back to the place where they keep all the knives and starts pickin them up and tossin them at people. And this guy must have been some sort of pro knife thrower cause he put each knife through each one of them people’s hearts. Cut right through the ribs and everything. And when somebody else pulled on for some food they saw what had happened they called the cops and they found him just a sittin in that restaurant calm as the dickens finishin up his soda and they took him away and now here he was. So we get to the cell and this guy is calm as ever sittin in the middle of the room and the warden starts to tellin him how worthless he his and calls him names and guy isn’t even phased by it, he just sits there. Then I ain’t too sure about what happened next. All’s I know is that I was watchin them and then my hand starts movin all by itself and then I’m tellin my hand to stop but before I could get it to stop it was already pullin the gun from my holster. It was almost like the gun moved itself. Then it was firing and I didn’t know what to do and I tried to jerk my hand so as to miss the warden but he was already shot and then I shot the other guy. I didn’t mean to, I don’t even know how it happened. The accused will plead guilty and will enter a plea of temporary insanity.
posted by David Fuchs (Greg Goble) @ 9:52 PM
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