A Brief Glimpse of Madness Through a Keyhole

…and civilization is just an illusion. A concoction of our feeble minds that tries to make the world seem wholesome, right. Each era in history makes its people believe they have it better  than the rest. And each era eventually realizes the truth. But what is truth except something to be molded, to be shaped into something new and shiny.

Each unsatisfied era spins into a new version of the same damn thing. No matter what is going on. It’s always the same. Don’t kid yourself. The presidents of today are given princely homes, servants at their beck and call, dozens of underlings to kiss their asses daily. The English kings wish they had it so good. The czars are tempted to rise from their disintegrating gravesites and run for election. It is all just a thick, black, curtain hiding the bloody tragedy of the human condition. The mistrust, the massacres, the general animosity toward so-called brothers and sisters in this dysfunctional family. And not a damn thing can be done. It’s all so ingrained. The strongest backwater moonshine cannot hide this apparently self-evident truth from me any longer. Trust me, I have tried. All it does it trap me in my helplessness. I can do nothing. And so it goes in our time. We drink of the wellspring of life and than shit upstream. We think anything we do can change the course of history, even destroying it, but its just rehashing old lies. Yes, destiny is ours. Yes, the past is something to pay no heed to. Yes, we are our own masters.

…James and I travelled continuously. We went to London, to Prague, to Berlin, to St. Petersburg. We saw the decay of them all, as well as Moscow and Paris and even Washington D.C. They all hardened our resolves, made us believe even stronger in our plan to destroy history.

We felt it was our calling. Our DESTINY, even though we denied this very thing. History was destroying al the cities of the world. It was breaking them down, brick by brick dynamiting their foundations. Like the vampire that it is, history was draining the lifeblood of the world, letting its wounds fester. We spoke and people listened, some in amusement, but most in the rapt attention and awe of a man about to be reborn in the Christian sense. Someone being made privy to the very secrets of god. So, we had our converts, our underground following of social elite. The after parties, of course, are where we earned our real followers. Booze makes for easy arguments. Nothing goes over better than the radical idea with a Cosmopolitan chaser.

Forget yourself. Remember only me.

And we roamed and spoke and made use of unrest. We also made use of our followers. I did, at least. James was like a damned monk. It spooked me, how anyone so alive could be so dead sexually. I chided him nightly for this, but his replies were always that mysterious smile of his, and that stare that seemed to take no notice of your existence. It was this way last night, and so I left him alone, walking to my hotel room with two of my devotees on either side, giggling and rubbing their ample chests against my arms. Many hours later, I was shook from my slumber, waking to a cold bed and James staring down at me, his eyes glazed and wild, his tongue lolling and threatening to fall completely out of his mouth. I muttered a curse and reached over to check the hotel clock. It was 4:30. Damn it, what could possibly be so urgent to rise at this hour? I asked him as much and he merely said “You’ll see.”

He led me by the hand like a lost child, down through the red and gold trimmed lobby, sparkling with richness and radiating sensuality. We exited the lobby by a grand side door, leading to a magnificent bar darkened to an almost midnight atmosphere, the long, low light behind the bar the only brightness, like a welcoming porch light on a cold December night, welcoming you and beckoning for you to come home. Calling out that all is well here, no harm can come to you. But we did not heed this call, not this time.

With a hand on my shoulder, James directed me away from that lovely home to a table in the shadowed corner, already occupied by a hunched over man in an evening suit. I was still slightly drunk, and wanted to point out that it’s morning, , that his apparel was completely wrong, but I was satisfied to just think it at the moment, and chuckle to myself.

“Sit,” James said, motioning me to the empty side of the table, taking his place next to me after a moment. We got settled, again he spoke. “Have you begun preparation for what we discussed?” James fit in perfectly here, quiet and reserved as he was. He belonged in the shadows, soft-spoken and slipping under the radar of oh-so-many. But I saw him in a new light, something hard and unseen underneath his reserved exterior. He was a conspirator, and I his co-conspirator, as apparently this stranger was, and you need more than meekness to conspire against the world, right?

“Well I have, but I’m not sure you understand the implications of this action.” The stranger spoke, his face flushing with a passion that seemed unnatural for such an hour.

“You know I do, Marcel,” James said in his calm, even voice. He was now radiating confidence. I was slightly scared. “And you understood the implications too What changed? What has made you weak and shaking in your loyalty to our cause? Do you not believe in its validity anymore?” So the man had a name, I longed for when I hadn’t known it, I longed for that god’s-eye view of the situation, when I was just a spectator.

I longed for a scotch on the rocks.

“Sir, I am forever loyal to the cause. I have lived, have I not? I know what this blasted plague has done to us. How it has ravaged our minds and sickened our spirits. Instead of looking to the future we strangle on the past. We are like babes struggling from the womb, only to be birthed with an umbilical cord stealing  our first breath. We need that first breath, I know that. But the cost of these actions…we need to consider those as well, my friend.: This man, Marcel, spoke with an elegance he looked impossible to contain. And he spoke of James as a friend, as an equal, but he was not. Their coldness towards each other did not lend itself to that idea. It seemed merely a desperate man’s way of imploring his killer’s humanity. It was bait, and James didn’t take it.

“Your weakness does so sicken me, Marcel. Tell me of your preparations and spare me the sickening monologue. I have no use for it.

And so he did. Of the virus under way, the original code lines shortened to fourteen thousand. Of the surgical teams in place.

“Wait, wait please a minute. What is going on here. What missions, what virus? James, why am I in the dark her?” I began to rant, and was only silenced by a glare from James, and a sharp stab in my side from his hand.

“Shut your mouth, idiot. Do you want the entire bar to know? Talk again and I will end your life with this butter knife.” James had never spoken like this before. Not to me, or even in my presence. Its force and brutality made me tense and shudder. I felt the blood drain from my face. Who was this man next to me?

I felt on the verge of releasing my bowels right there, at the table, just like that. The thought sent me into wild bursts of laughter. I was mad, and I knew it, and damned if it wasn’t the funniest thing in the world. I climbed over James and skipped over to the bar where I ordered a double scotch and finished it before I could taste what it was. I ordered another, and allowed myself to be carried away in its possessiveness, like a jealous lover. After many a double, I blinked out. I was in my own world, my vision narrowed to the all-consuming glass in my hand and the lights behind the bar. They were bright, but not antiseptic. They were warm, but the warm of the womb, not of the funeral pyre. I was home all right, and to hell with James and his ideas.

At some point I must have fallen asleep, or fallen down drunk, because in front of my eyes was a world not in existence. It was a world of nothing. No parties, no speeches, no endless debates. Just the peaceful existence of non-existence. The calm of nothingness. There was no god, no angels, no magical clouds or harps being played by large chested, virginal angels. There was nothing, in fact, and it was heaven to me. Oh how I wish al life were as it now. Right now. And so I slept.

I woke up, my clothes saturated from an unremembered shower, my shoes still on, now ruined, and my brain as drenched with alcohol as my clothes were with water. Earthquakes have less force than my headache, its throbbing shaking the foundations and cracking my skull at its seams. The chain is only as strong as its weakest link. My entire head felt like that link, I could hear James in the next room, my traveling living room, whistling to himself and drinking coffee, probably. It was so much the normal morning for him, and for myself, really, that it was unnerving. I didn’t even know the person whistling out of tune. He was a mystery to me, as much so as the hunched over figure last night. And yet when I rose from my bed, dripping on the lush gray carpet as I walked into the living room, he smiled and greeted me like I was his brother, his confidant. No hint of the anger he showed last night, none of the impatience, and strangely none of the confidence either. It was the same old James, shy, introverted, loathing the thought of speaking in public and yet captivating when he would. The dichotomy of this man was a case study in Jeckyl and Hyde, and he made me want to understand, made me need to understand.

He also made me nervous, made me want to shit myself, just last night in fact. I needed to get away, but what could I do? I was hooked. This angler had me on his line and I was at his mercy. I could do nothing but help and drink and watch, and we traveled and I drank and preparations were made and it was okay because it was all just a game, all just an illusion, a string of events tied together loosely, with no point…