I don't know that this belongs anywhere in specific, but it seems like it would kick up the least fuss in this forum. It's a short story I wrote earlier this year - I hope you guys enjoy it. Any feedback you guys feel like offering is more than welcome. I think it's a pretty good story, but I mean - of course I do, or I wouldn't be posting it, right?
Gaze of the Abyss
"He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster."
The night is cold, and the weather bitter. Harsh and unpredictable drafts of wind course through the uncharted avenues of my mind, and I clutch desperately at fleeting, comfortable thoughts, attempting to pull them in, and wrap them around my being for warmth; security against the unrelenting storm of my discontent. However, try as I might to divert my musings from the subject of my contempt, these notions are embroidered so intricately into the tapestry of my sanity that my only hope for their removal lies in unraveling the canvas. I therefore commit myself to my grim interpretations, and their inevitably tragic ramifications.
Humanity – my problem is not with humanity. Truly, it is the sheer inhumanity of those charlatans who masquerade as humans that unsettles me. What makes us human? What separates us, as a species, from any other creature that walks the earth? The answer is simple: it is our conscience – our morality; our inner understanding of what is right and wrong. We, and we alone, have the capacity for virtue, and this is our defining feature. Yet, I have observed so clearly the immorality of our society, and this incites the most bitter ire in my soul. To take the aspect of our racial identity which entitles us to our distinction as ‘higher’ life, and then forsake it in favour of comfort, or pleasure – the pursuit of which is so often precipitated by descent into vice. This is the ultimate irony of our species: our most apparent trait is the utter disregard for the innate aspect of our being which unites us.
It is in this sense that I remember my childhood; my father and mother. My father, I realize in retrospect, was an intelligent man, with an affluence of outward charisma. He was in his third year of Psychology at University of Toronto when I was conceived, and he could have accomplished a great many things, were it not for some unfortunate limitations – both personal and situational – holding him back. He suffered from severe alcoholism (and I am at pains to describe it thus, but understand that I intend in no way to mitigate responsibility for his actions, but when one considers how dramatically and adversely he was affected, it becomes clear that the affliction can be described as nothing less than a self-imposed and self-destructive disease). This did not dovetail well with his naturally mercurial disposition. He was prone to violent outbursts at the slightest provocation, and felt little to no remorse for the people he would hurt. He did not want children, and when he discovered I was to be born (out of wedlock), he tried to persuade my mother to go through with an abortion; clearly, he lost that debate. He was forced to drop out of school, and take a dead-end blue collar job in order to support me. I have never been able to solidify my theory, but I have long suspected that it was my birth which drove him to the alcoholism that destroyed his life.
My mother, by comparison will seem a great deal more likable, but one must understand that her shortcomings were equally, if not more tragic than those of my father. She was a very loving person, and truly cared about all those who were close to her. However, she was possessed of a child-like naïveté, an attribute clearly evident in her devout worship of Islam and her selfless and inexplicable devotion to my father. She was driven exclusively by her emotions, and consistently failed to consider the consequences of her actions. In refusing the option of abortion out of irrational zeal, she ruined both her own life and the life of my father – in doing so condemning me to an existence plagued by bitter resentment and suffering. My mother would not concede to logic – she outright refused the option of adoption, believing I would be better off in a family of three provided for by one low-end income. Of course, the reason she cited for her illogical and inconsiderate actions was always love. I wish she could see me know. I wish she could understand, as I know all too well, what grotesque a nightmare her love hath wrought.
The first significant memory of my life is not a happy one. I was barely four years old at the time, but so many times has this reminiscence been replayed in my mind’s eye that every minute detail has been etched permanently into my psyche. It was a warm, still night in late spring. My father had called to let us know he would be arriving late from work, so my mother and I took a bus into the city to find a restaurant. I remember waiting in the parking lot for my father to pick us up. I remember the group of insects which congregated around the lamppost, worshiping its incandescent glare. I remember the moon, bright and near-full, casting its pale, reflected light on all it surveyed. I remember my hand in my mother’s, as we stood outside the diner. I remember the scent of alcohol on my father’s breath. I remember my father shouting at my mother for questioning his ability to drive. I remember crying. I remember my father turning round, reaching back to hit me. I remember a bright light in my eyes. I remember waking up in the hospital. I remember the stitches. I remember learning that my mother had been killed instantly in the collision, and from that point forth in my life, all I can remember is pain.
I have known pain, but I don’t think I can ever understand the pain my father must have known. He opted to continue taking care of me, and I don’t know why. I remember his words at the eulogy. She is all I ever loved. After the accident, he chose to take care of me not out of love, but guilt. I was his cross to bear – I was his penitence for his misdeeds. I need not imagine how much my existence must have tormented him. How he must have longed to forget about his past, but the past can sometimes be an awful thing – a creature of horror, wrapping its gnarled claws around your soul, it feeds on your guilt, your pain, your sanity. To toil all day at a job he despised, then come home to see my marred visage – the scar on my cheek serving as a burning reminder of that fateful night. Surely, no man deserves such a fate. His alcoholism worsened. Every night, he would come home, and lose himself in an ocean of gin and sorrow. I remember being torn from my slumber by his tearful screams, and I would know he had been dreaming again. I would know that the past had not loosened its fiendish grip on his heart. In some ways, I’m glad – for this grotesque denizen of the soul seems in some ways the only thing my father and I had in common.
I stayed with my father for thirteen years. Thirteen years, I suffered his abuse, both of me and of himself. Thirteen years, I lived in a household with a man who not only did not love me, but came to despise everything I represented. My only relief from pain was in the public library, down the street from our house. I was intrigued especially by the stories of Edgar Allan Poe. In countless years of reading, I have not encountered an author so well-endowed with understanding of the human condition. The Black Cat was always a favourite of mine. No piece has ever voiced truer sentiments regarding the inherent evils of sentimentality, nor the delicate nature of man’s sanity in the face of internal tragedy. The protagonist of the story is noted for the docility and humanity of his disposition, and yet the story’s plot is perpetuated by his violent outbursts. Sentimentality is a character flaw, and though it may seem beautiful in some cases, when emotions refuse to yield to reason, the descent into vice is inevitable. The protagonist, by mawkishly embracing alcohol, and clinging to his grief, sacrifices his moral humanity.
In the time I spent in that horrid house, I saw my father degrade from the brilliant, if somewhat over-indulgent man I had known into something frankly less than human. He no longer beat me – he no longer did anything. He no longer had the mental energy to do anything but drink himself to sleep. Finally, one night, he simply did not return home. I didn’t worry. Though I could sense exactly what had happened, I didn’t worry. His body was found in his car the next day, having careened off of a bridge into a ravine some thirty feet below. I believe he was entirely sober when he made that decision, and perhaps thinking clearly for the first time in seventeen years. In my father’s case, it was sentimentality and intoxication which forced him to continue living. In his moment of clear-headed, rational sobriety, he made the only logical decision he was left with. I was not happy, but I was not sad. I had long grown out of such childish emotions. I was relieved; I no longer needed to feel guilty about the desolate man I had created.
I refused to be taken in by child services. I had come to know people. I had come to despise them, and did not want to be cared for by them any longer. I was homeless for several months before finally obtaining a telemarketing job, and earning enough money to move into a small apartment. I have lived in that apartment for just over a year now, and the bitter stench of the place has begun to weigh heavily upon my soul.
I can no longer stand to be alone with my thoughts. They are merciless in their torment of my soul, picking away at the fraying threads of my sanity. It seems sometimes to be at peace, I must surround myself with noise, to dampen the cacophony of introspection. I walk down my road, and watch the sub-humans pass me by. I no longer can even see them as of the same species. I see their Machiavellian nature, their lack of regard for anything but their own emotions and personal well-being. Just to see them, smell their synthetic perfumes, and hear their vapid conversation – to know that they think I am one of them – no, that they are one of me, it is all I can do to conceal my hatred. I can feel a searing pain in my chest, and my blood rises to a boiling point. I take deep breaths to steady my heart, and turn into an unpopulated avenue to divert my attention from the denizens of society.
I cast my glance sideways, into a residential alleyway. I see a teenager, not much younger than myself, with a can of spray paint, defacing the side of the apartment building. He smokes a cigarette, and is too focused on the task at hand to notice me; he is too distracted by vice to spend time worrying about humanity. How poetic. My boiling blood begins to steam, and all my hatred, all my sorrow, all my pain and all my guilt becomes focused on this one man. My reason can no longer impede the passion, and I charge forward, and tackle him to the ground. I deliver countless blows to his face and body, and with each connecting strike, my anger mounts. I unload upon him the turmoil which I’ve dealt with alone for so long. I have no idea how long this went on. I am torn back into reality when my arms become too tired to continue the assault. The skin on my knuckles is worn down into nothingness, and through the blood – his or mine, I don’t know, I can see the pale white of bone. I breathe in the night air, and looked up at what the mess of pulp that lay before me now had scripted on the wall.
Reason ruling alone confines
Passion unattended burns to its own destruction
I am struck by the horror of what I have done. I have become no better than the charlatans by whom I am surrounded. I have given into my sentiments; I have sacrificed morality in the name of anger. I have become inhuman. I start to lament my own descent into inhumanity, when I realize the much larger truth of what I have observed. I have not become inhuman – the truth is so apparent to me now, and my mental wind cools down to a breeze, the avenues of my mind now connecting and interlocking in ways I could not have understood before. The final tumblers of the lock have been displaced, and I begin to turn the doorknob. I have become human. It was foolish of me to attribute the concept of moral perfection to our tragically flawed species. I have completed the process of achieving humanity. I am imperfect – a being of reason, impaired by my sentiment. We are not designed for moral perfection – that is the domain of beings greater than ourselves. We represent the duality of reason and emotion – yin and yang, the good being offset by evil. What could ever be more human?
I walk for several miles. Though disoriented and awe-struck, I’ve been there so many times that its location has become hard-coded into my brain. I trudge through the thick brush, and wherever I walk, the scent of tainted perfection – the scent of death follows me. My arms hang limply at my sides, blood hardening and sticking to my flesh. I’m taken back to my last peaceful memory - holding my mother’s hand, looking into her eyes, and feeling encompassed by her love. Fourteen years of pain have finally subsided, and I can once again be happy. At last, I’ve arrived at my destination. I’ve come here so many times. So many times, I’ve tried to understand, to know exactly what you were thinking – what you realized when you made that decision. I think that now I understand. What options remain for those who have seen what we have seen? I breathe in deeply, and lean forward, releasing my grip – releasing my inhibitions. I don’t know what fate awaits me, but surely it is nothing worse than being human.
“He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.”
- Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
