I am (Not) What I am Page #4

The Great Irritation

• Fiction
• Horror
• Short story
• Fantasy

								


The Wille’s origin was a vexation penned within an enigma. Was this the quintessence of his spirit? The narrative of some screaming nerve locked away within his spine— pounding? Was this the rot: that human drive toward destruction, disintegration? Was his suffering a coincidence, a stretch of bad luck? Or did the pain truly come from Beyond? Were these the secret demands of his own heart or the savage cry of an alien? Was he that strangest and most ultimate of contradictions that birthed an ape with the pretensions of a demiurge? Was he a  man seeking Godhood? Was he God? Was he God’s son? God's slave? Was there ever really any difference? The questions were a thousand-fold. The answers, phantasmagorical. There was no diagnosis for what he was experiencing, no name for his condition— for what he was. This lack of a label was the great calamity of his life; thrusting him into a fog without reference, a land with no guide. Were there other people like him or had he been set apart in this “age of reason” by a cruel warden? He did not know. The first evil swirled all around him, the spirit of confusion; that arbitrary condition intrinsic to the substance of Man. But was evil something Men were or something Men did? The answer eluded him like an underground animal, vacillating with every change of the wind, every mile traversed. He knew Men could be good, he glimpsed the sporadicities of Their benevolence. Weekends in the city, he observed,  were a time for the hungry; every random street corner shimmering with the hot white glow of food tents erected to fill the bellies of the suffering. While walking past a busy intersection, the young man spied a street vendor selling newspapers in the parking lot of a bodega. The vendor was fairly unremarkable to look at: a lanky man, clothes baggy, out of date, his face a kind, hawkish triangle— an otherwise ordinary man. Taking him in for a second, the young man had just begun to avert his attention when suddenly, in the blink of an eye, the lanky angular form of the vendor dashed out into the busy street. A large plastic obstruction sat square in the center of a traffic line. In a show of great altruism, the vendor ran out, snatched the obstruction off the asphalt and tossed it aside onto the sidewalk— preventing a major accident. Those in the procession of cars who saw, were so grateful to the vendor that they praised him: honking and hollering from their driver’s seats. The young man couldn’t help but smirk. A child, no older than ten, eyes bright blue, auburn pigtails falling out the back of her gray helmet, had fallen off her bike— scraping her legs down to the bone on the concrete. There was so much blood. Her cries had turned to shrill squeals; haunting and animalistic. Surrounding her were a group of pedestrians; expressions worried, hands consoling, cleaning, bandaging the wounds. It was through their help that the little girl eventually dried her tears, put on a big showman’s smile and zoomed off into the sunset on her bike— a tiny trooper. Little puppies the size of legged potato spuds were found by the young man as they walked unattended in a dark park— nighthawks circling. He followed them; intent on spiriting them away from harm if the worst came to pass. Thankfully, a lovely couple, strolling through the park, picked them up before he ever could; taking them to their much deserved safety. In the heat of day, a baby abandoned in a hot car was rescued by the blow of a police officer’s baton to the front passenger window. And a hunched old man, the beauty of his youth retained, yet eyes clouded by the egg shell white of glaucoma, palms gripped at the handles of a rickety walker with overstuffed grocery bags interweaving the fingers, stumbled over a protrusion of brick on the sidewalk, spilling the contents of his flimsy bag and toppling his fragile frame. Behind him, the bulk of a man, 6’ 7”, gentle yet handsome in aspect, lifted the man and his walker up. Then, leaning with the latitudinal strain of a giraffe, the tall man secured every item from the old man’s bag; escorting this elder statesman, for several blocks, to the rickety edifice of his home. Old women were helped across streets. Children were given right of way by groups of wild adolescents. A simple kindness defined them all: sets of rules gluing the fabric of the human swarm together. The litany of their laws, points of etiquette, decorums, genial wavelengths of society— the street’s choreographies. These made up the fine clause of their social contract: the dictums within the dictums. And yet still, beneath them all,  a leviathan loomed. 

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