Michaels

Michael was experienced in this. In theory anyway. He had chosen the spot. He’d read and participated in the forums. He’d chosen his instrument and location. All that was left to do now was find them. He didn’t know who they were. Most likely they were going to be the first person he hated that he saw. This wasn’t an exclusive title, Michael was a hateful young man. He hated the Nazis and the Communists, he hated the Capitalists and the Philanthropists. He hated the Muslims and the Christians, the Hindus and the Buddhists. He hated everyone and anyone he saw. He hated them if they walked upright - those better-than-thou inbreds. He hated them if they walked sullenly - those worthless sewer people. In his seventeen years of life, he hadn’t found anyone he didn’t hate except himself to some extent. He hated his father - who worked too hard and didn’t love hard enough. He hated his mother - who loved too hard and wouldn’t ever work. He hated anyone with better skin than him, and being seventeen, it wasn’t hard to find people who fit that description. He would’ve kicked the beaten and punched babies if he had ever been exposed to them in his sheltered life. He hated life and death equally, he hated the thin border between them, and the imaginary two dimensionality of it all. He loathed maths, disavowed physics. He would eliminate books and the concept of literature entirely in his dream world. A world of perfect truth and peace in its simplicity. It was a place Michael often visited, and far more appealing to him than the one he was forced into.

In his mind, he was a panther, or a puma. He was the death angel and the grim reaper. He was merciless. Cold hearted - no scratch that - he lacked a heart completely. That was him. Leaning against a grimy white wall, next to a leaky gutter pipe, he visually swept the streets. Looking, searching, hungering to find someone with a weakness: a heavy suitcase, a limp or someone distressed. After several minutes of scouring he had found a suitable target - there, walking across the street now, a man, strong in his late twenties, he would be felled. A strong prey for a strong hunter. Yes, this would be his dragon that he slayed. This would be his goliath. He composed and readied himself, thinking about the glory, excited embers glowing heat in his chest. The man was listening to music and bobbing his head along as he walked. Michael palmed the short kitchen knife back and forth, switching the blade forward and backwards, safely concealed in his sleeve. The man walked past him, oblivious, with Michael following. He’d slip behind him, wait until he was in an area with few pedestrians and no cameras, reach over the man’s shoulders, so close he could smell the man’s gross cologne and SLICK, he would fall. Michael snapped out of his fantasy and trembled a little. He was in his house still, combing back his knotty hair in the mirror; when the comb got stuck in it he nearly tore out a clump in determination. It wasn’t that he was poorly educated - his parents were far too ignorant to understand that school was a scam - but that he had no taste for it. He knew that his teachers did not really know what they professed to be experts in. Those grifters, stealing and robbing his poor noble parents blind. One day he would get them as well. No, it wasn’t that he was poorly educated, it was that the only thing that interested him was the Ancient Greeks. Oh how he wanted to be an Achilles, the red cloak, the tunic, glistening strong legs draped in dust around the ankles, a bronze helmet fitting over a straight greek nose. That desirability… even then, he’d settle to be an Ajax at the minimum. That time of men and heroes, of definitive action and incredulous defiance was so enchanting to him. He stood as straight as a spear - straight enough anyway - put on a hat, facemask, popped a few zits on his forehead and donned his heavy roughened jacket.

The air was jagged in his throat and hard to swallow - Michael had noticed whilst picking something out of his teeth with his tongue. It had been raining and the tar from car exhaust was clumping together to form thick particulates in the humidity. Kids on scooters rattled down the wet asphalt, flitting and swooping like swallows. He shuffled forward, his shoelaces soaking up water from the skin of wetness on the pavement. The walls of the buildings were smeared with dirt and the pavement was stained and blotched with the fluids of last night’s parties, underfoot the ground rasped against the movement of the soles of his shoes. Cars thrummed on idle, their bonnets hot and wet and sick.

Michael found it hard to focus. Whatever was near him caught his attention. He could detect a single droplet of rain falling to the ground only when he was trying to think about something else. It frustrated him greatly, and he especially despised people whose minds were reigned in easily. Sometimes, he imagined taking a hatchet and brutalising his own brain, just in pure rage that it wouldn’t be pacified and turned to obedience. He wanted to tear out his eyes so they would stop noticing things, he couldn’t bear it. Why couldn’t he just listen to himself? That’s not the worst part about me, he thought. The worst part was that despite his brain running rampantly violent half the time, the other half it seemed comatose. He just stopped thinking and operating, his whole being came crumbling down and he disappeared, wallowed in his own disappointment. That’s what he hated the most. That helpless rot he felt when his own habits became bars of a cage.

He stopped and closed his eyes, letting that rampant mind of his take him away. He saw an old man walk down the street from a bird's eye view. White cane in front of him and greyed irises. His head was surrounded by white downy hair like a vulture. But his face wasn’t that of a scavenger, it was of a well fed man. It was of a man that earned his keep. Blotches of dark colouring on the man’s skin told of a failing body, but the determination with which he walked told of a healthy mind. His forehead beheld canyons and grooves that concealed acne scars from decades past. His nose curved like the strong beak of a parrot and lips reminded him of thin layers of meat laid atop each other. The hand that did not hold the cane twitched, not from age, but from thought, its shakes and contortions were intentional, if unprovoked, and spoke histories about the passions and mesmerising dreams that the old man saw. The man was blind of course, but he could still perceive. And as he imagined this creation of his walking down the street, Michael felt a great sense of calm, as if the whole world was a hurricane, with this man in the eye of the storm. A centrepoint at which chaos quietened and gave way to splendid creative order. The arms of the storm extended upwards and outwards in great airy rays of vision and imagination, reaching up to the sky and the whole world over.

He peered back into the real world again, and it seemed mightily different. The details didn’t bother him as much just then and the air seemed cleaner, even if it wasn’t. He still knew what he was going to do, and even though he was determined to do it anyway, it didn’t seem so important. He breathed in deeply, nourishing his lungs with cold crisp air. Driven to accomplish what he left the house to commit today - if only to prove to himself that he could follow through - he crossed the road. A small stream trailed along the side of the road, depositing its share of dirt and muck into a pool down the street. 

Sometimes his city could be beautiful - though he conceded sometimes it could be horrible. He continued down the mini highstreet, approaching the cornershop with the broken atm and covers of magazines in panels on the walls on the exterior of the shop. He was tired, he realised. Tired by the incessant noise of life and how it droned on and on, never ceasing or slowing or letting you stop to take a minute to think, and shamed you if you couldn’t keep up, keep on growing, keep on learning, bettering yourself and others, if you just wanted to pause and sit on a step and cry you’d block others, no time for that only for movement, upwards and inwards to vertigo heights, felt like time was speeding up, relentlessly, world was spinning faster and faster and nobody wanted to stop it, even though everyone was motion sick.

He was tired of it.

He hoped that by destroying something, he might get a chance to taste that peace, and cause people to stop and scream and panic. To feel something other than complete anxiety all the time, to have something real and primal to fear. Through this kill he thought that he could make the whole world look at him, stop and point. By getting the attention of the whole world, he could stop it from spinning, just for a moment. Time was a fleeting feeling, the future was far away and never got closer, so why not act on the present, it was the only thing avenging the past. He was ready, he could feel it, he’d emerge from his docility in blood and flame. Yes, today he was ready to kill.

Suddenly, as he rounded the corner, he collided with someone. Tripping over a cane of sorts and catching their knee in his stomach. The back of his head collided with the person’s cheek like billiard balls with a painful shock, tumbling onto the ground.

‘God dammit’ Michael groaned as he staggered up, massaging his ribs where the person fell on him.

‘Could you help me up?’ The old man gave out his hand. Michael helped the man up to his feet. As he saw the man’s face, his stomach sank, fathoms down into green and murky depths.

‘You’re not too injured are you?’ The man asked. His bald head was crowned with a white and airy plumage around the outside, and his curved nose gave him resemblance to some kind of bird. His face was full and marked with a thin layer of rough stubble like trees rolling over a hilly landscape. He had a strong old man odour, mildly sweet and musty, mothball clothes worn thin over time and two grey orbs for eyes that jittered around frenetically. It was the same man he had just been imagining, down to the detail, the same person. How? He was going mad. He was going mad! It was like his creation was placed down on Earth just as he imagined him. He struggled to get a sound out before the man continued: ‘Could you point me due East? This fall has made me lose my orientation.’

‘Y-yeah, it’s this way’ He raised the man’s free arm and pointed it down the street toward the morning sun.

‘Thank you, young man,’ He said, ‘Could you tell me when it's safe to cross the road?’

Michael walked him across the street, still in shock of what he was seeing. It couldn’t be real! Finally, as they reached the curb of the opposite street, he felt something, like a hand reaching down his throat and pulling out his voice.

‘Where are you headed?’ Michael asked.

‘I’m on my way to see my grandson, Michael.’ He responded.

‘Ah, we have the same name. Does he live far?’

‘Not that far, he offered to pick me up but I like to walk alone sometimes.’

‘Ah, would you mind the company of a stranger?’

‘It would be a spot of pleasure,” he replied, hopping from each word like stepping stones, ‘walk with me.’

‘So do you walk places often? You know, with you being -’ He paused.

‘More than people would think, I find, it helps clear my mind when it’s too messy.’

‘I understand, I was doing a similar thing now, on a walk that is - not to see family.’

‘For therapeutic reasons?’

‘Just felt like I was losing myself a bit.’

‘Ah, go on.’ The old man urged

‘Oh, you know, just felt like my mind was a bit cluttered, like a room full of torn up fluttering pages.’

The old man looked pensive as they walked, he was silent for a few seconds before he said: ‘You know that’s not a terrible metaphor. Do you write?’

‘Me? No way, I don’t have the chops for that.’

‘Why not?’

‘Well, what would I write about?’

‘Anything…yourself.’

‘I’m not sure I’m very interesting’

‘Everyone is interesting to at least one other person, and even then you don’t need anyone to be interested in you, just your characters.’

‘I’m not sure the characters would be interesting then, I don’t know how to write real people.’

‘Again, you miss my point!’ The old man insisted, ‘You don’t write real people, you write characters. Make them up.’ He waved his hand, ‘Think about it, when was the last time you saw a movie where the actors behaved like a normal person would?’

‘I can’t remember.’

‘Precisely! Normal people aren’t as memorable.’ The old man said, pausing to pick something out of his teeth with his tongue, ‘That’s why good characters don’t act like normal people, they act like how we wish we could act, emotional, superhumanly logical, heroic, adventurous. We read and watch to escape, just like we do when we go on a walk.’

It was Michael’s turn to be pensive, it was true, all his heroes were fragments of real people, made whole. Some grit of insecurity made into a pearl of a personality, that although they felt as real as anyone felt to him, they couldn’t exist in the real world. It would be like moving to a parallel universe where the laws of physics were different, they’d just unspool.

‘You’ve thought about this a lot?’

‘Oh, of course, what else would a blind old man have to think about?’ He laughed, ‘I don’t mean to mock. I’m - well I was - a writer by profession.’

‘A writer? What did you write?’

‘Oh just bits of scripts, no poems, a book or two’

‘Were you successful?’

‘Not especially.’

‘Oh.’ Michael said disappointedly

‘But I don’t really think about it that much, I’m still grateful that I was able to write, to make a mark.’

‘Right, yeah.’ He paused, ‘I want to make a mark too.’

‘Well, how are you setting yourself about it?’

‘I’m not sure. I’m trying, yes, but I don’t have the guts to do it. I wish some phantom of will could possess me and puppet my limbs like a marionette and make me do what I want to do, deep down.’ He laughed. 

The man stayed silent, prompting Michael to continue. He knew what he wanted to say, he wanted to kill, but the words were clogged in his throat. Instead a different channel became unblocked, and it all came gushing out.

‘I feel this deep black well of anger within me, no matter how much I try and empty it my labours are in vain, because I become frustrated that the anger is not diminishing, which adds to its volume. Half the days I feel like I am going to explode and lash out and the other half I implode and lash inwards. I’ve been so close to the precipice so many times it has stopped being scary, and I feel guilty that I’m here. My parents don’t know me, my friends have all faded into the background and I don’t even recognise myself in the mirror. I want to tear out my hair until my face gets torn off with it. Everyone I speak to feigns empathy and then removes themselves from me. They fear me, or are disturbed by me or hate me. So be it.’ He spat. ‘Now I just want to give them a reason to hate me, I want to vindicate their feelings in the worst way possible. I don’t just want to enact my vengeance, I want others to be vengeful as well. I want to wrong others, mould them into me and crush me in return. It’s all spinning and spinning faster and faster and I want to set it all alight, to make it pirouette in flames.’ Michael breathed in deeply through his nose, clenching his fists so tight that his nails dug into his palm, and sensations ran across his skin and mind, of those cold sweat filled nights, tears on his pillow and the blue screen glow shining on the wall behind him. The duo walked past skeletal maples, leviathans of living timber that towered over them, jutting out the pavement in regular intervals. The base of the trees were surrounded by pools of yellowing, orange and brown leaves that rasped like discarded scrolls at the gentle but permanent push of the breeze.

‘I know it's all meaningless, heaven isn’t real, neither is hell. I hate that we know that now. I wish they existed. I hate this paper world, it's all soft and light and filled with fakeness. There’s nothing genuine about this place. The pavement we are walking on is man made, it’s patented, tied up in lies. We’ve imported trees across oceans,’ he gestured to the maples, ‘to soothe our psyche from this prison cell we’ve made. It gets worse, because even when we’re in nature, we can’t help but overthink, we can’t ever just exist in the world, we always have to perceive it. Either something is beautiful or not, something is threatened or invasive. We’ve strung up our own reality in a web of imaginary things, and we’re all stuck in it. We’ve been stuck in it for so long, even though we know we are suspended in its threads, we believe we are standing on solid ground. I don’t want to think anymore, my brain is sore from thinking, I just want to do. I want to be dangerous and -’ He paused.

‘And?’

‘I think I want to kill someone.’

‘You want to kill someone?’ The man asked, unalarmed. 

‘Yes,’

‘And why do you want to do that?’

‘I want to be dangerous,’

‘So. By killing someone, you believe you will be dangerous.’

‘Yes! You don’t think that murderers are dangerous?’ Michael laughed.

‘I think they are violent, but I wouldn’t class them as dangerous.’

‘Oh please spare me the semantics.’

‘No! It's important.’ The man insisted. ‘Look, a skinny thug who hides on the corner of a street, preparing to stab someone, will probably get some hits in. But will also quickly get arrested. What happens when you put them in a prison? Their frailty and weakness shows. Around more violent and hardened convicts they don’t seem so threatening anymore.’

‘They still were dangerous in the beginning.’

And despite that, they were cowed. Being dangerous has nothing to do with being threatening. No, being dangerous means being able to be violent, or threatening. Being dangerous but not threatening is where virtue lies, not violence.’

‘I don’t follow.’

‘Let’s start with violence. If we can agree that striking fear into innocent persons is a bad thing to do then we have a building block for agreement. Do you concur it is a bad thing to do?’

‘Yes…’ Michael said hesitantly, he wasn’t sure where this was going but he went along with the old man’s explanation anyway.

‘Now, in that case not being violent should be a virtue.’

‘Well, in that case yes, but not being violent isn’t anything special, it just makes you a victim of someone else.’

‘Precisely! That is because we have neglected the second variable in our calculations. Capacity. If you are incapable of being violent, not being violent is not a virtue. Think of a small, weak creature, like a snail.’

Michael scoffed under his breath. ‘Where are you going with this?’

‘Bear with me.’ The man headed, ‘A snail being peaceful and unable to harm any other creature isn’t particularly something we respect. But think about something that can easily destroy and crush many creatures around it, but chooses not to, like a gorilla. Have you seen a Gorilla?’

‘Only online.’

‘Well that’s a great shame, you really should go to the zoo one day, it's very worth it. In the last few years before I lost my sight, I went to see them, the gracious things. They have such immense strength, but use so little of it, because they know of their own capacity. That knowledge of themselves, betrays not only their own physical strength but their mental fortitude as well. They are not insecure and so they do not seek conflict, but are willing and capable of defending themselves. You see,’ He turned to face Michael, ‘virtue lies in the choice, the choice to avoid violence when you could easily lash out, or the choice to find peace, when no one will lend it to you. You must be capable of making either decision, to fight or not, and accomplish both with competency, to be able to win the fight, but you must also be resolute in your decision to resolve your conflicts peacefully.’ He patted his arm, ‘Become strong, so that you never have to use your strength.’ Michael turned to him. Looking at the man's skittery grey eyes, though he was completely blind, he thought he saw a kindred spirit return his gaze.  Some kind of shared experience they both had reflected back in his eyes. He pulled him into a fierce hug, almost forgetting the man’s frailty. Michael took the knife from his sleeve he had kept in his hand the whole time, and placed it back in his coat pocket. He felt a type of emotion he had never really felt before, and not all the other times he had chickened out of the kill, instead of crushing disappointment, he felt relief. He felt whole, and - well it was difficult to say but - he felt as if he and this man were just a few timelines apart from being the same person. ‘You’re not as weak as I would have thought you were.’ The man groaned a bit.

‘Sorry.’ Michael apologised, swiftly removing himself.

‘When you’re old like me, you lose the muscles you built over your life, but by then you’ll be a bitter old man that philosophy can’t please.’ He smiled. They walked on.

‘So you say you wish Heaven and Hell were real.’ The old man said jovially.

‘Yes.’ 

‘But if they were, you would have no guarantee you would go to Hell. That is where you want to go, isn’t it?’

‘Yeah.’ Michael said somberly after a quick pause.

‘And what makes you think you deserve to go to Hell?’

‘Well I-’

‘Shush, that was rhetorical.’ The man interrupted. ‘You think just because you hate reality, you are allowed to escape it? Now now, that's a selfish way to think. Just because you think you are bad doesn’t make you worthy of being a bad person. It takes a lot of work to be so irredeemable to be a bad person. You are not unique or extraordinary enough to fail. You don’t deserve the embrace of being fine with your own decrepitude. Don’t worry, because you are not alone.’

They moved continuously but slowly now, with people rushing by them, like time around them had been sped up slightly.

‘I used to be troubled like you, but when I was young, I talked to a wise old man. I hope I can be the same for you, so listen to me. You are not special. I think you need to hear that. You failing yourself, would make you even less so. You’d join the masses of people that wallow in their own crushed dreams. Your generation it seems, more so than mine, think that the world outside your own is perfect. I think it’s the fault of the internet or social media or whatever have you. Perhaps I’m just paranoid. You failing yourself, failing your dreams, well you’d drag yourself down and drag down everyone else. We are social animals. I lived my life, helped some people along the way, and, I hope helped people through my writing. I left my mark, even if it is one segment of one thread in a tapestry wider than we can imagine. So what will you do to leave to say ‘I WAS HERE AND THIS IS WHAT I DID’? You must do something. Humans, that’s us if you haven’t realised,’ The old man grinned with a toothy smile, ‘find a genuine amelioration of suffering in genuine servitude to people in genuine need of help. If there is no meaning to the universe, then it has whatever meaning we give it. Yes, we will know that that meaning is ultimately untrue, but so what! Are we so central to the universe that we deserve its true meaning? We can’t know it! It will always be hidden from us, and irrational things will occur, that we can not explain but must find solace in. I find my meaning in my thoughts, and my family. If life is the only thing capable of consciousness in the vast complexity of our universe, then we are more than just specks of dust, we are the universe’s soul. We are the way the universe feels itself. It is a common myth that when you become blind, your other senses are heightened. This is not true, I can tell you. And yet as we walk, I can sense so many more details that you, I can smell when it is about to rain, or what season it is; I could hear you putting away your blade when we hugged. How? Simple: there is nothing to distract me from these things. Light is so much faster than sound that you see everything before you hear it. You see, but do not feel. These trees,’ He patted the thick trunk of one of the Maples as they walked past it, ‘were brought across an ocean, just because they look nice. You might think that might have been a bit of a waste. I happen to agree with you because we have plenty of good native trees we could have planted. And yet, why shouldn’t they have been moved? Does it really matter if they are a lie, if they bring you happiness? Your pursuit of a concrete, real, objective truth is unhealthy, because we do not live in a real concrete universe, nor are we objective or concrete ourselves. Truth and reality is something for computers, not consciousness. If you try to comprehend everything there is to know, down to the atom, you’ll go mad. It’s folly! One day, I am almost certain, you will be repeating these words to another young man, who will be equally sceptical as you are now. Time speeds up as you age, it twists around you, showing you memories you have not yet had, and makes a decade ago feel like yesterday. It is easy to get lost in it, so don’t be sure you know all there is to experience, but instead cherish what you already have, and what you will. This is where I stop.’ They reached a terraced house with hedges hiding the front garden. The old man slowly ascended the stairs as Michael helped him up, his cane tapping the next step up, and rang the doorbell. He turned to Michael - still at the front gate. ‘If you take one thing from our conversation, young man, let it be this. You are so incredibly promising, not because of any particular trait you have, but because you are human. Don’t think about everything too much, no-one expects you to, because you have not lived long enough to truly understand the universe, and no one ever has. So take that deep explosiveness nestled in your bosom and set to use it for creation. Create your own meaning, find meaning in making things, not just bringing other things down - we have time to do that for us.’ The front door opened and a young man stood in its place. He had a slender but pronounced nose and sharp blue-grey eyes that looked at him with alarm. Around his neck were earphones on a red wire, looking like a cut in the skin, or a necklace. He looked awfully a lot like the man Michael fantasised killing, back in the house. And he seemed strangely familiar, as if, in another world, they may have been related. The old man walked into the house.

‘Wait!’ Michael shouted, ‘I didn’t learn your name!’

‘My grandson was named after me!’ The man shouted over his shoulder as he was guided in and soon the man was out of sight.