by F. E. Arliss
It came far cheaper than she’d budgeted for. After the deposit of a cash sum of fifty thousand dollars to a weedy archivist at the records office in The Hague, Gertrude filed a new claim on the Six title. She’d already changed her name legally in the U.S. to Lady Zhara Hope Six the month before. On the stateside paperwork the “lady” was simply a given name. Once the paperwork was done in The Netherlands, the “lady” part would be a title.
She’d added the Hope middle name as a nod to the one thing that kept her going. She needed hope. She’d needed it all her life. If there was anything that defined her personality it was that one quality.
Hope was what had lead her to forgive her awful family over and over and over again. Hope was what had lead her to overlook Cartlton’s worst qualities even when they’d showed their ugly heads a time or two during the first decades of their marriage. It was hope that now, would lead her to a new life. Hope was an absolute must.
Armed with her new identity papers, Zhara simply showed up, signed some papers, received a certificate and left the archives office as Lady Zhara Hope Six. Voila! Far easier than anyone ever imagined.
She felt no different. Gertrude had always been Lady Zhara Six, even if she was the only one who knew it. As Lady Gaga said, she was born this way.
Chapter Four
Guilt, Pity and Despair
The road to a new life must simply have been too easy. Gertrude, or Zhara, whichever one she remembered to call herself that day, was depressed.
All the New Agers at her seaside building in The Netherlands were sure, because of some aligning of the Earth’s poles or some such nonsense, that the world was going to burst apart due to gravitational wobbling or pull or whatever in the hell the theory was the local kooks had come up with.
The world had almost ended several times before and at one time, Zhara/Gertrude might have made an effort to leave her North Sea apartment, as the waves outside her window did look quite a lot rougher and higher than usual.
This time Gertrude simply could not be bothered to make the effort to get up and save herself. Hope had abandoned her it seemed. These bouts had come upon her before, but something always intervened. Once, as a young woman, after she’d divorced her first husband, she’d simply been too tired to get up and make the effort to throw herself in front of a train.
That had been the decided upon modus operandi. Alas, the train track was all of two miles away and she didn’t have the energy to bother even rising, let alone driving two miles, waiting for the damn train and then stumbling onto the ridiculously uneven Illinois tracks to face the oncoming savior.
Why was everything in Illinois always in such a shit state of repair? With her luck she’d have sprained her ankle and fallen aside just as she was about to accomplish her goal.
This time, as Gertrude thought about the impending doom, the end of the world in fifteen minutes, all she could think was, “It's about bloody damn time.”
Perhaps if death had held the promise of pain, being adverse to further torture as she’d had enough pain emotionally and physically to last a lifetime, she’d have made the attempt to save herself. Since this threat did not involve pain, she did not.
Zhara once had a friend asked if she feared the best of life had already passed them by. Zhara had resolved to have nothing more to do with the down-trodden ninny, but being a better friend than some, she’d soon gotten over that fit of pique - which she now realized had simply piqued her because the thought scared her. Now that she was letting the thought that the best of life really had passed her by germinate for a bit before pushing it aside as balony, Zhara entirely understood what her friend had been feeling. Feeling a bit more sympathy for her old friend, she could gladly lay back and wait for the end of the world, feeling completely and totally at ease.
Zhara thought to herself, “I’m not going to worry about someone else or try to lessen their pain. I’ve done all the lessening of others pain for my lifetime. Screw them. We’re all going to die. I, at least, will die alone and unbothered by the various blood-sucking parasites that previously infested my life.”
“If by some chance I hear my neighbors calling for help, I will not be going to their rescue. Really, I’d have to look up and see if there was a word to describe people who hated people. That was me. People were just too much hard work. Animals on the other hand, were a delight. I’d never cause an animal pain.”
“At least most of the time. I have a particular antipathy for squirrels. The evil little bastards. Always and forever taunting the dogs and then chittering away in unabashed delight at the havoc they’d caused. I would never harm an animal. Not even a squirrel. I might snarl at them. But I wouldn’t hurt them. I also won’t swerve the car to avoid them - that might hurt me and my passengers. I’d never kick a dog. Hard to understand, I suppose, as I was indeed a murderess by happenstance. An unapologetic murderer too - though sometimes she did miss the ego-maniacal boob. But animals were off limits. Truth be told, I’ve always tried not to hurt anyone purposefully. I suppose I have. But I didn’t mean to. Until Carlton. Now, of course, I can’t be bothered to censor myself enough not to hurt people. It’s all just coming out. I hate people.”
“Ah, yes, that was the word. Misanthrope. That was the word for people who disliked their fellow greedy, abusive, manipulative, nasty, money and power-grubbing fellows. A misanthrope. That was me. I hadn’t started out that way. I’d started out sweet, biddable and loving. Really! But I sure as hell didn’t end up that way. Now, I might just be able to finally die and not have to worry about it.”
Zhara waited a good four hours, laying there leaden and unmoving, anticipating dying. She wasn’t afraid, or worried, or disappointed. She wasn’t joyful either. Just accepting that it was time to die. The world, afterall, wasn’t getting any better. It was definitely getting worse.
As Zhara lay there, she pondered where her decision to really detest the human species came from. It came when she’d finally realized that everything did NOT happen for a reason. Karma was never going to catch up with bad people. And that truly evil people frequently, well, almost always, came out on top. It turned her from a positively never-ending well-spring of energy that benefited almost everyone but herself, into someone who just didn’t give a shit about anything. Even dying.
Perhaps that was the price one paid for being married to a CIA operative. You just found out too much about the world in general. All of it sucks. Every country, every administration. Some clearly idiotic administrations were almost laughingly transparent. In the end, they were mostly all the same, some were just more clever at covering up their power-grabs and corruption.
But that wasn’t really the beginning Zhara realized. The horrors of Carlton’s death had released a flood of memories from her childhood. Those memories were the real reason she thought people were basically evil. The shock of his meanness, her actions leading to his death, the pain of the broken ankle afterwards, and the subsequent shit-show of his funeral had acted like a ripped off scab. They’d opened the vaults of old shocks and memories and they all came flooding out. Most of them she’d forgotten completely, or at least shoved far back into the dark recesses of her brain.
The beginning had been when she was about ten years old and started to gradually comprehend that her sister wasn’t the crazy troublemaker everyone had always labeled her. Victoria had been angry when they were teens, beating on the sister a year younger than her, Elizabeth. Now she could remember where Victoria’s rage had begun.
Gertrude had taken a friend to the family farm and watched with growing alarm as her grandfather, always egotistically self-praising, blatantly fondled her friends budding breasts as they groomed a pony in the barn.
Agitated and unsure what was happening, Gertrude had grabbed her friend and diverted her into the house to help her grandmother make cookies. It was that incident that began to open Gertrude’s eyes.
Victoria had said their grandfather was bad, that he touched her. Gertude had just see
n first hand that he was indeed and weirdo fondler. At the time she didn’t understand the full meaning of the incident. What she did know, was that it was bad. It ruined her friendship and caused her to have deep-seated mistrust of her grandfather. Perhaps that had been her saving grace - she’d realized he was bad before she’d ever grown a set of breasts.
Everyone, even their mother, had denied this and said it wasn’t true, that Victoria was a liar. Of course, Gertrude knew you couldn’t trust their mother to protect you, she’d never protected any of them.
Plus, she drowned all of Gertrude’s pet rats everytime Gertrude went for a sleep over She’d stopped going to sleep overs. She worked hard to rescue those rats from the tortures the students in the high school lab did to them. Even her sister, Elizabeth, had purposely broken her favorite rat’s leg, then run an electric current through him to see if it healed him faster or slower. That meant there was another rat out there somewhere that Elizabeth had broken a leg on too. Over all, the high school lab, and the leg breaking Elizabeth, had a lot to answer for.
Nor was she buying what her mother, Sue Darla, kept telling her - that she was putting them out of their misery when she drowned them. Her rats were happy. They made big mounds of nests in their old rabbit-hutch cages and never bit her. They liked to be held on her shoulder and petted. No, Sue Darla was a rat-drowning, daughter-scarring liar.
Victoria had fallen into a deep depression after her mother’s denunciation and now everyone labeled her crazy. Gertrude could see now that Victoria hadn’t been crazy or a troublemaker. She had simply told the truth. Their grandfather was truly a bad, bad person. Their mother, Sue Darla, hadn’t protected Victoria or even tried to help her. Sue Darla was just as evil as their pervert grandfather.
Some would say that was the day Zhara became clinically depressed. She would say it was the day she became free - of course, that was all just a disguise for saying she was depressed. If all of that was true, who was she trying to impress? Forget it. No one was going to be impressed by her helping them. They’d only think she was a naive idiot.
Zhara was an idiot no longer. From that point on, she looked at things in her life and decided if they benefited her, she’d do them. If not, she wouldn’t. It was the beginning of a much, much better life.
It had been four hours and Zhara was getting the urge to pee. Well, it seemed life was not going to end. She was ambivalent about that. If she wanted to die, she’d have to make an effort. Damn it. Also, it would most likely involve a mess or pain. So that was out for now.
Zhara guessed she’d have to just get on with it. Now, where was she before the end of the world never ended? Oh yes. She was going to have a glass of champagne and a dip in the pool. She’d go do that and toast a new beginning of prolonged torture of her fellow human beings and devise ways to make them green with envy.
That was her one delight in life these days, making the blood-sucking assholes wish they were her. Everyone wished they were Lady Zhara. Even Zhara enjoyed being herself occasionally. The more they wished they were her, the more she enjoyed being Zhara. Truly diabolical really. And brilliant.
One only gets to this point of deep and abiding disgust with one's fellows by prolonged and severe pain. It’s a bit like the torture the Necromancers give to people when they convert them in “The Chronicles of Riddick”. Prolonged pain makes everyone different. It’s a trial by fire and each person comes out the end different than when they went in.
She really detested those smarmy little blurbs that quipped on and on about how to turn the other cheek and let people’s maltreatment of you just slide right off, or by, or whatever in the hell they were saying about not letting it get you down.
The truth of the matter was that people who chirped brightly on about how other people’s meanness should just be forgiven and let slide, really hadn’t had enough of the really torturous type of meanness that humanity could dish out. They’d been dumped by a few boyfriends, or been laughed at by some other girls or some type of pale little shit like that. Not that that wasn’t painful. It was. It just wasn’t the ongoing, prolonged sort of pain that made one aware of how truly terrible people were. Sometimes that type of ongoing agony turned people into mindless ruins - like the horrors of war often did.
Zhara wasn’t a mindless ruin, as she hadn’t had that sort of pain either. She’d gotten off lightly compared to the wounding terrors of war or her grandfather’s incestuous invasions. She was a mindfully present being, aware that everyone else was simply out for themselves. Whether they believed it or not, they were all evil - some more, some less. Whether they seemed like it or not, deep down, people were bad. The only ones who didn’t know it, were the ones who hadn’t had enough pain. Or sociopaths. They simply didn’t get it. There are a lot of those out there.
Zhara wasn’t sure if Carlton had been a sociopath or not. He had been, at a minimum, what the psychology textbooks like to call a manipulative user. The “me too” era had brought attention to those types of chronic users of people who flatter and cajole to get what they want, then stop abruptly when they can no longer get any return from their victims. That was most people, Zhara supposed, but Carlton had been a manipulator “magnifique”! He had definitely stopped cajoling her when she’d been too old, sick and far away to have any “street cred” with his career.
Theirs had been a pretty good marriage, believe it or not, as marriages go. It had only gone south when old age caused him to lose the will to cover up his singularly self-involved nature. Before, he’d been invested in having the world view him as a worldly sophisticate who adored his wife. That image fed his ego.
Or, maybe what happened was Zhara got old and didn’t seem worth the effort anymore. Either way, she’d murdered him. Mostly by accident, but still, she had to admit it - she’d known he’d fall. So not by accident at all. She’d precipitated the event that lead to his death. She had kicked him even if it had been in the heat of the moment.
Chapter Five
Floating, Thinking About Not Fond Memories
Zhara had tried not to think much after the world hadn’t ended. She’d gotten her champagne, but had to give up sipping the marvelous bubbles as alcohol, coupled with sun, gave her a furious headache. So, boringly, she’d had to switch to water. Although, truly, there was nothing so divine as a cool glass of water when one was parched.
It was far better than a cold plunge in the North Sea, the idea one of her neighbors had suggested as a way to revive her spirits. Not that her spirits were any of their business. Zhara knew it was just their way. The Dutch always had an opinion about what one should do and were never afraid to announce it. If it involved actually helping someone, forget it. But an opinion, bluntly delivered, was always on offer.
In fact, Zhara wasn’t an idiot, though her neighbors might be threatened with being perceived that way, as a cold plunge in the North Sea came with Zhara’s full knowledge of just how much dog poop got washed into that brownish sludge of waves. From her beach front apartment she saw the hundreds of giant crap pies left for the tides to consume each day.
There was supposedly a pick up law in effect in The Netherlands. Crafty dog owners, aware of the rising tides, simply walked their dogs a few minutes before the ravenously hungry, freezing cold waters of the North Sea rose up and devoured all evidence of the fact that they were far too lazy to pick up after their turd dropping canines.
Zhara was going nowhere near the North Sea. Not one of her toes was even getting the slightest bit damp. She’d walk on the beach in a sturdy pair of beach shoes. That was as close to the shit-water as she was getting.
August really was the best time in The Netherlands. It was finally warm enough to enjoy the pool and the other residents of the building were all down at the beach infecting themselves with various canine waste products so she had it all to herself.
Unfortunately, since the world hadn’t ended and the headache had forced her into partial sobriety, Zhara kept thinking about her mother. She knew
it was because she desperately wanted someone to talk to about the events of the past year, and naturally thought of her mother - the one person almost every human being turned to when in need of a shoulder to cry on, advice for the heart, or simply for a good listener in times of distress.
Zhara’s mother was not that person. She was an idiot. Sue Darla Dubbins was not an idiot on the IQ level. She was actually quite bright in some ways. However, years of incest abuse by her father had left Sue Darla strangely frozen in emotional intellect at about the time the sexual abuse most likely started. It was much like the emotional arrest that persons who were alcoholics suffered - frozen in maturity at the time they first began drinking. Of course, many people started drinking to numb the pain of secret abuses of many kinds.
Sexual abuse was that way too. Though besides freezing one’s emotional maturity, it also evoked a series of twisted survival tactics that lead onwards into adulthood with a mix of manipulation, lying, sexual perversity and personality disorder. Sue Darla was a wreck of a human being and her father had made her that way. No one had saved Sue Darla. Certainly not her own mother, Iris, who had been cruel and uncaring, most likely miserably unhappy herself.
