Midway: Chapter 35

  I’m expecting it around every corner now.

  If I knew which one it was I could better protect myself but I don’t know, I can’t figure it out!

  Two years he’s been tormenting me, two fucking years!!  Two years telling me he was going to get me, that he had a nasty death with my name on it.  Is it even true?  Is such a thing ever coming?  Or is it just about making me think today’s the day, day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year…  If that’s true then I give him more credit than I originally did, this is far worse.  The longer this goes on… the more I hope every day that today is the day.  Not knowing is worse.  Having so little control over my own life is so much worse, knowing that my death, the most personal and private experience anyone can have, has already been claimed by him, when he chooses, when HE can’t help himself anymore…

  It had already been several years since I’d had a toy, and I was already so desperate for it back then… and now two more years piled on, this is torturing me!  I know somebody’s watching me now, I know HE’s watching me now; I know he would never let me get away with it anymore.  I think that maybe he knows that, that he knows how desperate I am to indulge myself.  I think that maybe that’s why he hasn’t killed me yet, I think he’s enjoying knowing that every day he resists, is another day I have to suffer the ever worsening cravings…  I’m so close to the end now and all I want is one more boy for the first time, to see that beautiful horror in his eyes, to see him know that I’ve taken possession of his delicious young body.

  Horror… control… ownership.  He must be trying to do to me in his own way what I did to him.  I know how excited he must be.  I know how much he must be wallowing in the anticipation of finally having that moment.  I know he won’t be able to resist his reward forever.

  I’m expecting it around every corner now.

   

  “Jesus.” Johannes uttered.

  “What?” Uzodimma asked in response

  “This last entry, it’s… it’s horrifying.”

  “I know… this is so hard to read.  To me I’ve only ever thought of him as this nightmarish monster who’d done such horrible things to me… and here he is, portraying himself as a victim.”

  “I’ve read it beginning to end now and what’s so crazy is that, well… that he starts out as a regular normal human, and then slowly becomes the monster.  You know… when I first started reading it, I actually had sympathy for him.  He described having urges totally beyond his desire or control; he portrayed himself as a victim… and I was sympathetic at that point.  But the longer it went on, the less he seemed to feel any guilt about it at all… the deeper he got into it, and the more remorseless he came to seem, it became harder and harder to think of him as a victim in any way at all.  By the end, by that last passage, when he’s talking about his ‘hunger,’ and how much he misses seeing horror in a child’s eyes…  by that point he’s so clearly a monster.  By that point he’s so clearly stopped feeling any remorse decades ago.  It was almost satisfying to understand how torturous his last couple years were.  In the context of that last entry, his murder and the way it was carried out seem almost practical and, and…”

  “Righteous.” Uzodimma offered as a reasonable conclusion to his train of thought.

  “Yes!   Exactly!  But… but I just wasn’t raised to think or feel that way.  Now though… now I just see my grandson Zarif as the kind of… indulgence he was talking about wanting and I just… I just shudder and recoil in horror.  When I think about that, I’m relieved that he’s dead.  I just become sad somebody didn’t do it a long time ago…”

  “Yeah… someone like me.”

  “Oh I’m sorry Uzo… I didn’t mean it like that.”

  “No no, I know… but you’re right.  That’s why I protected the murderer Johannes, if I’d have done what he’d done, it never would have happened to him in the first place.”

  The two men were back in the suite where the murder had taken place, and were trying to find any additional information which could tell them who was doing all of this, or help them pin down exactly how many victims there had been to somehow narrow down the possibilities.   Using the wired interface Dhika had rigged up for him, Johannes had copied the journal onto a second scroll for Uzodimma so they could both review the material.

  Johannes tried to go back to reviewing the journal but found that he just couldn’t.  Instead he finally erupted.  “You know what Uzo?  I’ve had enough of this!”  He threw the scroll down hard against the bare metal floor with a clang.   “Not… this this,” he said gesturing towards the scroll on the ground, “but the darkness in general, why wasn’t I ever told about it?  Why wasn’t I ever exposed to it or taught about it in any way?”  He was yelling at Uzodimma, but he was really yelling past him and through time, at people and concepts he used to hold in such high regard.

  “I’ve lived my whole life in a… in a fucking bubble, and not just the actual physical bubble of this damned ship, but a psychological bubble as well, a metaphysical bubble, and now it’s burst wide open hasn’t it!?  Now I’m seeing the darkness everywhere I look and now I’m facing up to the fact that’s it’s been there all along but I just couldn’t see it!   Those damned smug mission founders thought they were so special, they thought they could just cut out what they liked about humanity and launch it in a sealed capsule into deep space.  They actually thought they could just leave all this darkness behind!  Well you can’t, can you Uzo!?”

  Uzodimma knew he wasn’t really talking to him anymore so he didn’t answer.

  “You can’t just excise a fundamental element of humanity and bring humans along; it just doesn’t work that way!  If you shelter us from it so completely, if you totally ignore it, all you do is leave us entirely unprepared to deal with that darkness, so ignorant that we can’t even see it right in front of our noses all of these years!  You leave us so totally ill-equipped to deal with it that we can’t address it in the early stages when it’s so much more solvable; instead we have to wait until it becomes such a colossal catastrofuck that it completely blows up in our faces and puts the whole mission and all of our lives at risk!!  

  Johannes was on his feet, standing over Uzodimma and yelling at him.  He’d never been this angry in his whole life and he was shaking.  This was anger.  He realized that everything from his past which he thought was anger was actually something far more benign.  This was an existential anger; this was anger with the gods.  This was the anger of a man finally realizing that those whom he so revered all of his long life, those whom he considered to be superior beings, were in fact just people; just flawed human beings no better or wiser than himself.  He hadn’t even been this angry when his wife killed herself.  He’d gotten so stuck in grief and confusion that he could never even make it to anger.  He’d kept trying to understand why, instead of accepting that there could never be a good enough reason.  If there could, it would have been an indictment of their whole situation and their very existence; it would have been an indictment of the gods.

  Exhausted from the outburst, Johannes collapsed back into his chair and started sobbing.  Uzodimma stood, came around behind him, and put his hands on his shoulders.

  “It’s not your fault, you know.  None of it is.  It’s not anybody’s fault, it’s… it’s just a bunch of stuff that happened,” the younger man offered in condolence to his much older patriarch.

  “That’s where you’re wrong Uzo, that’s where you’re wrong…  Absolutely everything that happens to us, good or bad, right or wrong, it’s their fault.  They literally built our whole world, and they consciously chose to believe that they could capture and bottle the parts of humanity they liked to the exclusion of the parts they didn’t.  They chose to make us unwitting victims of their ambitions.”  The old man had stopped crying heavily and was now merely sniffling and wiping away periodic tears.  “They’re using us right now!  They instrumentalized conscious and sensitive human beings.  They condemned people they would never meet to fates we could never choose for ourselves, and just left us with a dogma to console ourselves that it’s all for some higher purpose.  It’s just not fair…”

  “No Johannes, fair is something it most definitely is not…”

  “And when you understand that… when you understand that fundamental unfairness, it makes everything else makes sense doesn’t it?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “We read in that last entry of the journal how much his compulsion was really about dominance and about control.  Yes there had to be something lurking in his genes to direct him to express it that way, but it’s in one sense a predictable response to life in the void, of living a life completely devoid of any meaningful choices about one’s existence.  Same thing with the murderer, he spent two years torturing him, trying to regain some vague sense of control about his life.  Oh, and the pervasion of more generalized depression on the ship with poor people like my son and Alissa, not to mention malcontents like Neil!”

  Uzodimma only nodded.  “Oh and Uzo, my wife, my poor wife!”  The distraught old man broke down sobbing again, only now fully and completely grieving his loss of her.  “We kept it quiet Uzo, but for a couple of years before she did it she was abusing synthetic opiates after graduating out of alcohol abuse…  Oh how I understand that now in a way I never could then, oh how I wish I could’ve been better able to help her and to understand what she was going through.  She must’ve been so disturbed by being a victim of the void that being intoxicated was the only way she could think of to impose some control of her own experience of her life.  And then… and then she made the most profound choice anyone can make in a life completely devoid of any real choices… she chose not to be, to reject a life that was never fully hers, and to finally and completely reject a life without choice.”

  “Oh Uzo…” the man said, holding onto his now close friend’s arm with both hands.  “It’s just so unfair…”

  “I know Johannes… I know.”