Murder

by David Adams Richards

  Is it because everything else in the universe is concerned about the same things? That is, that someday we will come to know that our universe is an ethical, moral and spiritual universe and nothing more than that. Or I should say nothing can be greater than seeing such in the universe; and it is a very false idea to think the universe proves that the moral and ethical dilemmas we struggle with daily are not important because the universe is so vast. That vastness does not matter in the least. That in fact the Spaniards going west to the New World thought it as vast as anything could be. It did not transform them. Neither did it transform the Dutch, or the English or French—all of them at times acted horribly in the name of king and country.

  And the First Nations people they met on the way used torture and mutilation in the same self-serving manner. So one may come to think in examining this that our world lacks all basic principles of goodness. And you would be right, except for one thing. Looked upon in hindsight, we see what they did was appalling and an affront to humanity. We know this not because we have been told it was wrong but because we know in our hearts and minds it is wrong. That is, taken away from the self-aggrandizement of the moment, the moment always shows itself for exactly what it is, or was, and nothing can ever change that. Murderous behaviour will be seen for what it is. No one can hide from it. Not even the hair on one’s head plucked out will be dismissed at the event horizon of a black hole.

  If it was wrong then, and good people knew it was—it is wrong now, and good people know it is. So we know what is right and what is wrong, even if wrong takes over—and we know it whether we live here forever or travel to the ends of our earth or galaxy. We know in our hearts and minds when something is wrong. It may take hindsight to correct our vision, but our vision will always be willing to be corrected in the search for goodness and justice. And what is important here is this: our vision will always be willing to be corrected. For if it was not—if it was not willing to be corrected, then hardly any of us would be living now. So then there is a true point on which our vision should focus—and that is, that every hair is counted.

  * * *

  —

  All of this had nothing to do with the moment, or everything to do with it, depending on where you sat.

  For my friend suddenly told me what he was struggling with.

  He mentioned that he was on his way home to kill his cousin. His cousin was a nice guy, he said, pretty handsome, had all the women—“And I like him a lot,” he confided.

  But he maintained he would have to kill him.

  And I suddenly realized this was why he chose the topic he did earlier. For if he believed that we are in fact nothing—or that nothing mattered in the world, what would it matter if he killed his handsome devil-may-care cousin?

  Well, it wouldn’t—or didn’t. But then, I replied, “Why should you kill your cousin—if we do not matter and we are nothing, then you are killing something that does not matter and is nothing, as well. Why bother with it at all?”

  Because, he answered, his cousin had done something to him—he had stolen drugs, and his son, who was an addict, was now dead. So it was imperative he do it.

  “I may as well go down tonight and get it over with,” he said.

  So I was in a bind. And I tried to think my way out of it. And in doing so, his moral dilemma suddenly became mine. But there was a subtle caveat—he had to convince me of his quest—and if he couldn’t convince me of the nobility of his quest, he was willing to be talked out of it. But he needed to be convinced. Did I think he was bluffing? In some way it would never have mattered if he was. But I do not think he was.

  So we returned to the argument. On the one hand, he said, his cousin was a good guy, a charmer—he was also nothing, and because he was nothing, he said he deserved to die. And I was merrily going along with his plan—unwittingly driving him to do the deed—until now.

  “Death is nothing,” he said with a wise sniff. “It wouldn’t matter to me if I die—so why should it matter to him—you know what I mean.”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Well—it doesn’t matter one way or the other.” He shrugged. “Life isn’t that important—we just have to look at the sky—just specks—”

  * * *

  —

  In fact I now know this rationalization has to happen in order for any murder to be committed. The act, for at least a moment or two, has to be looked upon as not a crime but the removal of a person so worthless she or he does not matter. So then the idea that the hairs on this person’s head do not matter is also a consequence of this deliberation; and what Christ said about them becomes a strange fallacy. No—more than a fallacy, an annoyance. For if they are counted, they matter; and if they matter, so does the person in question. So Christ could not have said what he said to tell us anything serious, so we can deny it is serious—and in denying what he said, we deny him and all else that he said. And every action we take that isn’t in line with this thinking disavows his testimony. And this is what Christ warned us against, didn’t he. Some will say the denial of him or his testimony is no longer important.

  Well, there is something that proves them wrong. Exaltation in my friend’s face at the moment he disavowed anything but himself.

  The exaltation, comes from our very trivializing of what Christ intended by what he said, and our breaking of the promise God made to us when he said, “Thou shalt not kill.”

  Acting with self-will against this decree proves to me the very existence of God—for there is not another entity, force or person we are disobeying. Nothing else in the world can make us feel such disobedience as this crime, done against something we now must say does not exist.

  There would be no argument at all if this was not really the case. Murder by its unnatural self-aggrandizement is in a strange way proof of the existence of God. For each of us knows in our heart we are breaking a law, beyond man’s own law.

  I mentioned a promise in God’s law. So then, what is the silly promise he gave us? Is “Thou shalt not kill” a promise? It does hold us back when we have a club in our mitten. However, it is a promise in this one way—if one follows this law to its maximum, it applies not only as a decree for this man but as a promise of safety for this man’s cousin.

  We understand that if the law is followed, the cousin is safe. So the law is a promise to mankind. However, the buildup to acting out this ultimate sin often becomes a matter of pride or honour—and though we are reminded in a thousand ways that it is wrong, we have put so much faith in our pride and honour that we are incapable of saying no to either. And the feeling deep within us that it is a sacrilege and a crime against God’s law allows us for a time this feeling of invincibility.

  But who am I to say that? I am filled at times with remorse for my own past—my years of drunkenness, my own violence. So who the hell am I—

  Well, I was one thing.

  I was the person who was there to tell him not to kill.

  * * *

  —

  I have in my lifetime known over a dozen people who were murdered and it has struck me that all murders essentially follow the same pattern; the ability to haul the wool over one’s eyes in order to perpetrate the crime is the reason self-righteous justification is always a key ingredient. In fact, as I wrote in my book on faith, God Is.:

  The self-righteousness of sin…is its main gloss, it is the veneer which soothes us if we wish to change the meaning or intent of what we have done [or what we want to do] in the eyes of others. It is far worse than hypocrisy, because it goes deeper into man’s ambivalence toward truth. Or, in fact, supports our constant craving to change truth.

  Hypocrisy knows the truth, and acts against it out of self will, weakness, or desire. Self-righteousness bends the very idea of truth to accommodate a sin we can champion as being justified under the circumstances.

  I suppose all this is known. But i
t just never seems to be known well enough.

  The cousin was not important, my fellow traveller said. And he said it very often.

  But I knew something about it. The real secret is: the reverse of that statement is always true. To the perpetrator of murder, the victim is extremely important indeed, and the perpetrator self-important. It cannot be otherwise.

  And the more innocent the victim the truer this is.

  My friend kept returning to the statement we had initially agreed upon. That we were all nothing—only dust in the wind. But now I was challenging this. So an argument started that was at times, in the dark cab, a little unnerving.

  “But if we are nothing, and it doesn’t matter, why would you do that?” I asked again.

  “Oh well, it don’t matter—that’s why I am doing it,” he responded.

  He then reflected on how he would do it.

  An axe, he decided. Then no, he did not care for killing people with axes.

  He looked at me curiously and asked if I hunted.

  “Yes, I do hunt,” I said.

  “You wouldn’t have a .30-30 on you?”

  “Not handy,” I said.

  Then he would have to burn this man out, he explained, because the police had taken all his rifles. So the house would have to go, too.

  A big old blaze—right on the shore. A bonfire! he exclaimed.

  He pondered this and wondered where he would get gas. Well, he would not get gas from me—even though he seemed to be hoping for my support.

  But I suddenly thought of something.

  “Are there others in the house?” I asked. There was a long, almost embarrassed pause and finally he confessed this to me:

  There were probably his cousin’s children at home, Tina and Fred.

  “My God,” I said, “Tina and Fred—well, you can’t just up and kill Tina and Fred.”

  “I am not after them,” he said, as explanation.

  “But you do not want them to come to harm, do you?”

  At first he said it did not matter if they did. He shrugged and put his foot up on the dash, and sniffed and lit a smoke.

  He said he couldn’t help it if they were there. It would not be his fault if they were. “Anyway, why would they be home?” he said.

  “Okay, how old are they?”

  “Five and nine—”

  “Well then, maybe because it is close to one in the morning and they are five and nine,” I answered.

  We were silent for almost a mile.

  “What do you want me to do about it?” he said. “It’s not my fault they are there.”

  “Well, you can help one thing.”

  “What is that?”

  “You can help it that you are there.”

  He was silent and shrugged.

  He said that he did not want the children to come to any harm—is that what I thought of him?

  “Not at all,” I said.

  “Well, I don’t,” he said.

  “Then you should let it go.” I shrugged, too—as if this were a normal conversation, as if we were in deciding the fate of children simply talking about the timing and logistics of it all. “So that tomorrow night they can see all of these stars, too—”

  He laughed suddenly. I was glad of that. He said I didn’t know what I was talking about. He said nothing mattered. He began to play with the radio, trying to find another station.

  I realized in some way all people who consider murder are in many ways like Napoleon, who said, “Men of my stamp do not commit crimes.”

  That is, all men for a moment think that they themselves are absolved from the idea of the very crime they are going to commit. Later—when they run away and hide—as Tolstoy said Napoleon did on his retreat from Moscow—the true nature of what they have done catches up with them.

  I let him off at a side road some miles from his destination, knowing that he would be safe on such a warm night, and he would have much time to reflect. I turned the truck around and went home. I was going to call the police and was certain I would.

  But for some reason I did not. So I sat all that night wondering if I had done the right thing.

  The hours passed. I sat at the kitchen table unable to sleep. Or even to think very well. I wondered if he had gotten another drive, or if I should go and see where he was.

  The moon was high over the trees, the stars were everywhere, and a sheet of white informed me of the Milky Way. I finally fell asleep at the table just before dawn.

  The next day there was no report of a calamity anywhere. It was a beautiful day, and there was dew on the leaves when I walked down to the brook. I sat there all day thinking about what to do—but again I felt he would not do it. And that night, once again the stars—a billon of them—flooded the heavens.

  And another night passed away, and then two nights and then a week. I still worried. A month went by, and then two. Then he was arrested, this fellow, for something else. Later, after his sentence was served, he returned to the reserve. But he never harmed the cousin or his children.

  This happened fifteen years ago. In the blink of an eye the years have passed by.

  His cousin and he are now both dead, gone to their rewards by natural means—and the children are grown up. And that long-ago night is remembered by me, at times of reflection about chaos. And I think often about the reasons for self-justification, murder and the sadness of man’s tragic heart. And what saved us was a child’s head lying on a pillow, in that ramshackle house.

  For in the end it did matter to both of us, as much as anything else in the heavens, that Christ told us the hairs on our heads were counted and known.

  2009

  CALIGULA, LEGERE AND THE NATURE OF POWER

  YOU’RE WALKING HOME—FROM A TAVERN—A BIT DRUNK. YOU’RE singing a song you learned when you were in the navy ten years before, making up some of the words as you go.

  It is a winter night—all the streetlights are out. You don’t have much money But what you have you’ve promised to bring home to your wife.

  Just as you approach your street, you see someone standing alone off in the dark. He jumps you and tries to steal your last few cents. You fight back. But suddenly you discover who it is.

  You’re so stunned that you let go of him and he runs off down the alley clutching your money in his hand, his toga flying, his spindly legs in their strapped leather thongs and his balding head visible under the cold light of the moon. He makes a dash around the corner and is gone.

  The year is AD 39, the place is Rome under the consulship of the young emperor Gaius Caesar (Caligula)—and you’ve just found out the hard way that the lad is bonkers. Is so much of a loon that he hangs about Rome at night to mug his own citizens. Some say it’s for kicks, because he had nothing much else to do—others say it’s because he loves the smell of money. (What’s wrong with that?)

  But what’s worse is that you have to go home and explain this to your wife, who’s been waiting to buy some bread and salt. Who in their right mind would believe a story like this?

  Gaius believed he was a god—and the son of a god—and, as the historian Suetonius tells us, he had his palace extended to the temple. Had the heads removed from various statues of the various gods, and had replicas of his own head put on. He became, in a way, all gods.

  He would walk around and pray to himself, or ask himself favours.

  “Rise me to heaven or I’ll send you to hell,” he is reported to have told one god.

  Others, as well, believed that Caligula was a god. He could, in fact, do anything he wanted. So perhaps it’s farfetched to think of an actual emperor, who could do anything he wanted, coming out of the darkness to mug you. (Imagine the likes of a president doing such a thing.)

  Gaius’s ascension to the throne after the reign of Tiberius—a man so strong he could put hi
s thumb through a boy’s skull if he wanted, and sometimes he wanted—was viewed as “a real dream come true.”

  Except people found out they couldn’t mention goats in front of him. No goats. Because by his mid-twenties his head was balding, and he felt the mere mention of a goat was mockery against him. So he’d have your tongue taken out.

  You had to crouch down when you passed him, somewhat the way Groucho Marx did, because Gaius couldn’t stand anyone taller than he was, looking down at his bald spot. So people would, on pain of death, lower themselves about a foot when they went by:

  “Bear in mind I can treat anyone exactly as I please.”

  For some reason that rarely meant opening the granary.

  He was said to have sawn a group of theatre goers in half for not proclaiming him an immense genius after his first stage production. (I see no difficulty here.)

  Horror, of course, is somehow always funny in hindsight. I have known people to have laughed themselves silly over disembowelment. (However, not their own.) Perhaps it keeps us sane.

  And Suetonius makes no great distinction between Gaius’s victims being chopped up or disembowelled, or merely having their throats slit for sneezing at a party in his honour, as had happened to certain little boys.

  “Suffer the little children to come unto me” was not a big line with Gaius. It is an exceptional idea that Gaius was alive, not much more than a child, when these lines were first offered. Also, it is an exceptional idea, perhaps not consciously intended by Suetonius, that all evil is the same, and hatches the same crime. That the acts are different in different places, but that in fact there is only one evil perpetrated against the world, constantly and always, and forever the same. That they are continually linking together like a giant DNA to form the one monstrous complexity of deceit.