Psycho. Weirdo. Oddball. Fuck-up…
If you switched on the news and discovered he’d gunned down a playground full of kids you really wouldn’t be that surprised. Shocked, yes. But not surprised. He had it in him, all bubbling beneath the surface, under an incredibly thin veneer of something loosely connected to normality - however you choose to understand that these days. The clichéd Time-bomb metaphor fitted him perfectly. What would it take to throw him over the edge, to drive him to the brink? Not much probably. Not much at all - a look, a comment, a misguided joke? Just stand back and watch the ensuing explosion. Gargantuan in its destructive proportions - a Tsunami of pent-up rage and frustration unleashed upon the world around him. So full of hatred, so full of anger. How could he possibly continue to function within everyday life? This was not the life he was trained for, this wasn’t the life he was so damn good at - this wasn’t his purpose for fuck’s sake! His function was so much more than that - he was capable of so very much more, and this was just some waking hell he needed to escape. The characters in his nightmare were freakish – as alien to him as if they’d dropped to Earth from some alternate dimension. They appeased their meaninglessness with inanity. They created purpose amidst the all-encompassing Void. They didn’t know the truth as he did. They couldn’t be expected to. Oh, he had tried so often to impart some of Reality to them, but they were unable to hear what it was he was saying, smiling at him that pathetic insincere smile that was somehow so emblematic of their condition. How could they be so stupid? How could they be so damn blind? This ‘condition’ of theirs made him sick to the stomach – he longed to scream at them, to shake them, to knock the truth into them with his fists. Black, blue and bloodied, they’d have to rethink their Wonderland. He could show them their true condition – he could make them see just how facile it all was. ‘Family’, ‘Loved Ones’ – just parasites. ‘Career’, ‘Promotion’ – mere distractionary nonsense. The bare facts of existence were a whole lot less fluffy – rather it was caked in shit.

He did try to play the game, to fit in, to blend into the blandness of Everyone Else, but it seemed impossible. How could he? If you have seen with your own eyes that the Earth is round, how can you fit with a world where every other person ‘knows’ it to be flat? Likewise, when you know that human nature is essentially debased, that man is a callous selfish monster at his core, how then do you enter into the camouflage of niceties? Impossible beyond the momentary – truly unsustainable. He did try. Sometimes. To be one of them. But it would be false, flying in the face of all which he knew to be true. Yet it would also be such a relief if he could be like them, a lightening of his load, like a narcotic to lift him out of the ugliness of reality. He envied them their naivety; their frivolity and abandon were what he craved for himself. Even their tedium. To not have seen Hell, that was his wish.

Nothing offered solace – there was no respite. He remembered a time, before, when that wasn’t the case; a time when he was part of the Promised Land of interests and intrigue which sculpted a world of meaning and so glued him to all around. There existed Art. The aesthetic was what he missed most dearly and had tried to recapture, to no avail. Brushstrokes swept across canvass, the interplay of colour and form – no more. Imagery conjured by words, make-believe pictures painted through description or rhythmic prose – no more. THEY’D STOLEN HIS POETRY. THEY’D STOLEN HIS FUCKING POETRY! They’d taken it from him, reprogrammed him. His machine code no longer able to register its beauty, this part of his soul, once so very alive, was now dead. Where once the works of Keats and the like had provided sanctuary, now the words were just that – words – empty, pointless, ridiculous even. To think that earlier they had had such meaning, that they had given such meaning… ‘A thing of beauty…’ – what was that exactly? Was there such a thing now? Maybe his heroes of yesteryear had been deluded, eh? Maybe he had just let himself be carried away with their nonsense, swept up in the freedom from responsibility it seemed to offer. Maybe he’d been duped, conned into believing that the world actually had something to offer other than pain and disease and death – in which case he should be ever grateful to his training for showing him the way things really were, the true ugliness of existence. Instead of berating them for taking the meaning from life he should offer up praise for being given the chance to live the truth. Even if the experience was the most hateful cursed kind of existence.

Not everyone was affected in the same way – some were, to an extent, the same people afterwards, with their same, or at least similar, experiences of the world. They blended-in to the normal. They could still laugh, weep, love, enjoy. Feel. His brother was one of them. Maybe John’s perspective had been shifted slightly by it all, but he was still able to live, to partake in life. He could balance the two worlds, before and after, whereas his big brother was left floundering, cracking-up on the sidelines, sensing that the electro-therapy treatment couldn’t be too far away. ( Not that seeking any kind of ‘help’ was an option – he was too robust to need support, too damn capable to be beaten. He had survived so much – SO MUCH – that to fall now would be too pathetic. He wouldn’t be weak. Couldn’t be weak. Needed to stay strong, resilient. ) How could John just carry on, rejoin humanity, so easily be part of civilization again, as if he’d never left it? He had done the same job, done it well, in fact, but was seemingly able to flick a switch and leave it all behind. How could they now be so different? John knew the answer, but his brother was never really able to hear it, not ready to hear how far he’d pushed himself, how much he had lost of himself. For while John had been merely performing a function, playing a role, the big brother in whose footsteps he’d longed to tread had lived it as a true vocation, as his sole purpose on the planet, and so lost much of what had made him human. He had strived, he had excelled. And in so doing he had become increasingly like a machine.

Russ studied his hands, looking at the heavily marked skin and the roughness of his knuckles. Making a tight fist with the right, he admired its shape in close-up and smiled. Just clenching it so made a huge surge of power swell within him, and that made him happy. It almost made everything worthwhile, to feel that he possessed such force, such physical clout. Ok, he may no longer be a man capable of poetry, but wasn’t that as nothing when you had such virility, such physical authority? He could be lethal in a way that mere words never could. What the fuck did the poets know? What did they know about what went on in the real world? No pretty rhyming, no fancy verse, no manner of ode would ever be able to have such impact on the real world as sheer brute force.

Knowing the way things really were underneath the sugar coating of nicety meant that he was always guarded against imminent attack. The onslaught wasn’t far away, he knew. Only a matter of time before the frosting cracks, when human nature finally snaps and all hell is unleashed. That was why he was prepared. That was why the two-bedroom flat he owned in Finsbury Park was rigged-up as his fortress. Advanced CCTV on each floor by the stairwell, heat censors installed on the landing outside his front door, a locking system for the door itself which he’d modeled on the ones used in US bank vaults, and enough run-of-the-mill alarm systems to have made a Banham sales rep very happy indeed. This now was his sanctuary, or as close as he could get; locked and bolted in his concrete shoebox was as safe as anyone could be. Just to be sure though, he had a small but very select collection of guns and knives stowed in each of the rooms – he knew there could be no such thing as too much security. Add to all this the fact that he hardly slept – 4 hours at the most, and very very lightly – no-one stood much chance of launching an assault on him in his own home, though this didn’t prevent frequent paranoid upgrading of his security measures. He had to be thorough. He had to be sure that all bases were covered, that no assailant could succeed in attacking. As such, he was thankful to technology – without it he felt certain that he would have wrapped his apartment in barbed wire and booby-trapped it with trip switches hooked up to homemade explosives. At least with technology the place appeared relatively normal.

It had been Russ’ birthday the previous week – 22nd of May. He’d known that the date rang a bell when he heard someone mention it in passing, but couldn’t remember its significance. It had bugged him for at least 3 or 4 days before it clicked. After some minor calculations he deduced that it was his 41st birthday. 41! The realization deflated him. Could he truly be that old? Could so much time really have passed? What did he have to show for all those years? Russ tried to think back to his earlier birthdays, struggling to remember the days when it was actually celebrated, when a fuss was made, when cards and presents were given, when his favourite chocolate cake was adorned with candles and Happy Birthday was sung – in the days when he was just like everyone else. It brought a slight tear to his eye to recall the warmth of those times; such caring, love and acceptance. Ah well, all things must move on, he reasoned; no-one expects the good times to last forever – that’s just growing-up, becoming a fully-fledged adult. And why the hell would he ever now want to commemorate the passing of one more year, just another 12 months of futility and misery? What was the point? What was so fucking worthy of celebration?! He should be thankful that he wasn’t one of those pathetic middle-agers still insisting on a birthday cake and candles; that was pure wretchedness – what did they think they were doing? Thank you very much, but he figured forgetting the whole thing was far more respectable. Though it did rather drive home to him the extent to which he was totally and utterly alone.

‘A Solitary Man’, that was what John had described him once. In many ways an accurate description as he did tend to keep himself to himself much of the time, but somehow the connotations of ‘solitary’ were out of kilter with the way Russ lived; to be solitary implied a chosen solace. Didn’t it? Wasn’t it somehow a state of peacefulness? Didn’t it usually convey a preference for introversion? None of these were truly what he was about – even now, even at his most isolated. He was a pack animal; that was his nature, his essence. He hadn’t chosen this amputation from life – it was an existence that had chosen him. His brain felt woozy from thinking about it all, from trying to make sense of it, from trying to find a way forward, a path to take him outside the confines of his own head. He should have known by now, after all these years, that such a path was nowhere to be found, though alcohol had always helped, in the short-term at least. Ah yes, with several pints of bitter he would feel adequately anaesthetized to get on with life, to continue to take life on.

To take life on.

How exactly?

On whose terms?

He smiled at the ridiculousness of his own thoughts. What could life offer him? Dying had far greater appeal. Death would alleviate his nightmares, sleeping and waking, allow him to move on, to attain the tranquility he hungered for. It wouldn't be hard; he'd never found killing difficult, being always able to think of it at its most mechanical. He could kill one last time - a mercy killing, this. An end to suffering. No more torment, no more of anything. Excitement washed over his body; it would be like one long holiday from himself and the world that he'd learned to despise so vehemently.

This felt so right.

The gun pressing against the roof of his mouth, the trigger waiting eagerly beneath his forefinger.

Just one little squeeze.

Sweet. Absolute. Silence.