by M. B. Julien
Chapter 19:
THE MURDER DISEASE
Few things are worse than the bad person who pretends to be good. The person in charge of a charity fund who every once in a while steals from the funds, the law enforcement officer who takes unusual advantage of his position among civilians, the politician who sanctions the murder of thousands of people for his own gain. These people make the common criminal who does not hide in plain sight respectable.
In a dream I had not too long ago I am sitting in a car waiting for someone. Time goes by and then the passenger's door opens and my partner sits down. He has food so we start to eat, and then after a while he asks me why I do this.
Later on in the dream I find out that we were sitting in a parked car because we were waiting for this corrupt law enforcement officer to come home. I tell my partner that I don't do these things so much because I love the innocent, but because I hate the wicked. I tell him that there is more hate in my heart than there is love.
What makes a person more hateful than loving? Is there a mathematical formula? Is it environmental influence? Is it simply biology? Maybe each person at one point in their life is ultimately defined by a dominant emotion. Maybe there is one emotion for each of us that will develop who we are. If at that point you are always feeling angry, you will start to develop this angry persona along with all the emotions and feelings that can be branched from it, emotions like hatred and feelings like contemptment. This is you turning on your anger gene, your hate gene.
Or maybe at that point you are always feeling peaceful and you start to develop this persona that is always patient and loving. This mind that turns on the kindness gene, the love gene. This hatred that I feel asks for peace, for balance in a world that seems to be run by evil people. Balance has become such a large portion of my psychology that when I stub my toe, I have to stub the other so that they both feel pain.
Suddenly my partner puts on his sad theater mask, and I look out the windshield and I see the law enforcement officer walking into his home. In the theater of ancient Greece a comedy had a happy ending and a tragedy had a sad ending. Performers often wore masks to conceal their identity so that the audience didn't associate a specific character with a specific role. That fisheye view.
A performer who was a king in one scene could be a peasant in another. Theater masks, or drama masks, are often associated with the genre of drama, where the happy-looking mask represents comedy and the sad-looking mask represents tragedy. Everyone has heard of the philosophy that in order to know happiness one must know sadness.
There is a theory that in order for you to be happy, someone else in the world has to be sad. Perhaps these are to keep a sort of balance in the world, to be able to co-exist.
After he puts on his mask he is about to get out of the car but I tell him to sit down. I tell him that if we want to get the mayor on corruption as well, we will need to find out about him by watching one of his closest friends, this law enforcement officer. Then when we have him, he will know who we are.
We will show him our faces so that he can associate these faces with the people who killed him. For the few seconds he would have to live anyway. This hate gene that turns on will make us prone to the murder disease.
Chapter 20:
"PROSTITUTE'S FOOT AMPUTATED"
Last night, I had a nightmare. In and out, back and forth, up and down. There are moments when I wish this prostitute was my spouse so I didn't have to pay her for sex. After we're done, she gets up and starts to put on her clothes and I ask her where she's going.
She tells me she has other customers to tend to. I tell her that I'll pay her double what I owe her if she just stays to keep me company. If she left me, my loneliness gene would turn on and I would be prone to the suicide disease.
She agrees to stay and I tell her to lay down next to me. We lay there silently for about ten minutes, and then I get up to go use the bathroom. In the toilet I see a phone floating there. On my way back to her I see that she has fallen asleep, so I go to my coat and I take out this syringe. I have no idea what this liquid is but I inject it into her upper left leg. After some time passes, I feel for a pulse on her neck and there is none. No signs of life.
I look over her naked body, this work of art. The body part I give the most attention to is her left foot. I reach out to touch it, it's warm. I slide my hand across it. I do it again and again until it becomes cold, and then I take out a less than normal-sized axe from under the bed and I cleanly chop it off. The blood is minimal.
I go to place the foot in my freezer but before I could do so I hear a knocking at my door. I pause for a moment, and then the knocking becomes louder and the man begins to yell, but I can't understand what he's saying. All I can really think about is how I have a more than visible woman laying in my bed who is lifeless and is missing a body part.
I look back into the room from the kitchen, and I see her. This woman laying on my bed, bleeding from her ankle. The knocking and shouting get even louder and now I can hear my heart beating. And then I wake up.
Of course this dream reminds me of the night Lynne fell asleep at my apartment and I laid her to rest. It reminds me about how I touched her plastic foot. This dream almost makes me ashamed because it makes me feel like I have this mutated or abnormal version of admiration for Lynne. Dare I say love, because in my life I'm not sure if I've ever loved anything.
The only real conclusion I could come to for the meaning of this dream is that I am trying to recreate Lynne by turning other women into her, maybe because I've never met a lady like herself.
Either that, or I'm subconsciously fixated on her fake foot, but now that I think about it, I'm not sure how far her amputation went. It could be her foot, her whole lower leg or her entire leg. But the only part of her leg that I've ever been able to touch was her foot. However I'm almost certain that it is not her entire leg because her limp would be much more obvious if it were.
I'd also like to think that the man knocking and shouting at the door is my subconscious telling me that this isn't right. That it's not normal, so please wake up. People have said that the other people in our dreams are simply other versions of ourselves.
This dream also makes me wonder how difficult it is to get away with murder. Most of the time the media makes it seem like c omitting a murder and actually getting away with it is almost impossible, because of course most of the stories we see or hear about end up with the criminal getting caught. How many killers do we actually know personally? And if we do know one or more, we are probably one ourselves. Probably not. But imagine you murder a random person in a city you don't live in and there are no witnesses. Do you really think you would get caught?
The first mistake in committing a murder is killing someone you know in a place that you live without any real plan.
Obsessive-compulsive disorder comes in many different forms and can be different depending on the person. Every once in a while I get a dream like this and I become obsessed with it, constantly trying to interpret what it may mean. Trying to understand what it is trying to tell me.
One time, a long time ago, I became obsessed with a dream where I kept taking out the trash but it would keep filling itself up, so I would have to keep taking it out over and over again. Damn garbage bags. Sometimes it even gets to the point where I am so obsessed that fiction becomes reality. One face becomes two and the lie becomes true.
Composition 1, Part 3
Chapter 21:
DEEP SHADES
Two nights ago I had a nightmare about murdering a prostitute. Last night I had a nightmare about a woman's foot being victim to flesh eating bacteria. The bacteria kept eating away at her leg and then eventually the surgeons had to amputate it.
This damn foot, I can't get my mind off of it. What's so appealing about a foot? What's so appealing about this specific foot? It's not even real, it's plastic. Man-made. I think what is really bothering me is that if I had lost a foot of my own, I wouldn't know how to d
eal with it, but this woman has actually lost hers and it doesn't even seem as if it has phased her.
After I wake up I start thinking, the surgeons in that dream remind me of a dream I had God knows how long ago, where the surgeons say I was actually dead for a little under a minute. God probably actually does know because that may have been part of the series of dreams where I was judged by God, and maybe he sent me back.
There are people who claim that they remember a past life, a life before the life they have now. How many people actually believe them is a different story.
Now there is a knock at my door, I can tell it's Lynne. I can tell because I can hear Sarah and David talking loudly as if they were excited. Even though I can't see them, I know. I open the door and it's the three of them looking up at me. All but one are smiling. Sarah begins to yell, asking me if I'm ready to plant stuff. Lynne says they could use another hand. David, he just stands there.
The next thing I know I'm outside and Lynne is teaching me how to give life. Sarah was helping also, but she was getting herself too dirty so her mother told her to go play with David. David who is riding his bike around the parking lot proclaiming that flowers are for girls. The indirect insult kind of makes me feel feminine. I never liked flowers anyway.
It's just me and Lynne giving life now, and she's going on and on about how a rose's color has meaning and some kind of symbolization to it. She's so excited about it that I have to let her go on. To see her face light up, all I can do is admire her.
For someone who has lost a part of who they are, it seems like she has become even more of a person. Of course I didn't know her before she lost her foot, but she really is something now. She has a reason to be angry but she's not, I have no reason to be angry but I am.
Now she is on the color yellow. Her color. The color I first saw her in. She tells me that a yellow rose represents true friendship. Happiness. If I could grow a yellow rose maybe I would give it to her, but chances are what should have been a yellow rose would come up a black rose.
I sit here planting these lilies with her on the shaded side of the building. The dark side of the building, and all I can really think about is how my feelings for her are abnormal. Mutated. Black. Dark. These words and words like them. When these lilies begin to grow I can only picture what should be white being black.
I am in deep thought and she is trying to ask me a question but I'm not responding. She looks at me and gives me a shove and I snap out of it, and I ask her what she was saying. Apparently she was telling me about a dream she had last night, and then she asked me what things I dream about? I ask her what she means, because people don't really have a certain theme to their dreams.
Then she says of course people do, she starts to talk about how she always has this dream where she is in a field of apple trees and she is looking for an apple to eat, but the ones she comes across always have dirt on them, so she never ends up eating any of the apples and throughout the dream she becomes hungrier and hungrier until she wakes up.
She tells me that she is always having dreams like that, where what she's looking for is right in front of her but it is wrong in some way.
I start to tell her about the dreams I have where I'm talking to Satan, and I tell her about how normal he looks. I go on and on until I realize that she is a little bit weirded out that I dream about the Devil. Then she starts to tell me about how when she dreams, she still has both of her lower legs.
This makes me think about all of the blind and deaf people in the world. All of the people who are born blind or born deaf. It makes me wonder what their dreams are like. I could only imagine. Some of them can see but they can't hear, and some of then can hear but they can't see.
After a little while of her talking about her leg, I ask her how it happened if she didn't mind telling me. She looks at me and tells me it was a tumor, and then starts laughing. Why is she laughing? She's laughing because having cancer in your foot is such a stupid thing to have, let alone lose a foot over. These are her words.
She says her foot started hurting but she didn't think it was anything to worry about. Then she felt a small bump, but for some reason she doesn't think anything of it. The bump gets bigger and then she finally has it checked out. It's cancer. She thinks to herself, "Who has cancer in their foot?" What are the chances that something like this would happen to her? Is it fate?
So she had to get her foot amputated and have a fake one replace her old one. The entire time she was resting in the hospital, she says Silvio, her then husband, only visited her once. She thought that he felt like she wasn't pretty anymore. That he couldn't have a cripple for a wife. Here is a woman who needs just that one person but they aren't there, and then here is my father who has everyone there for him but he doesn't want anyone.
After she got out she confronted him and it was obvious that he was seeing someone else, so she filed for divorce. She always suspected that Claire was the mistress, but she never had any proof.
Her suspicions grew even more a little while ago when Silvio found her in the hotel and gave her a beating. The only person who knew where she was staying was Claire. She says that the reason she moved to this town was to get away from him, but somehow he found out where she moved to, and he came looking. Again, she thinks Claire was the one who told him.
At first I find the situation a little strange, for two sisters to be involved with the same man, but then again the world is a strange place. This strangeness is what ultimately gets me to seek solitude.
I ask her why then does she seem so friendly with her sister. She says that while she thinks her sister may have betrayed her, she can't be certain of that. She says that Silvio may just be forcing these things out of her. Lynne has quite a story, but then again everyone has a story to tell, everyone's a writer. Some more than others, some less.
Chapter 22:
ALL MEN ARE DESTROYED EQUALLY
There are some hospitals that have no room thirteen. People are just as afraid of superstition as they are their diseases or conditions. Some people are anyway. I'm sitting next to Joe and I'm reading him a dream from one of my composition notebooks.
In the dream, Jesus and I are in the middle of an ocean and we are fishing and talking about religion. I ask Jesus if he thinks that the world would be better without any religion at all, and he says to me that while the intentions of most religions are good, when these intentions are mixed with human instincts there is a chance that they may become corrupt.
He says that one's individual pursuit for truth is much better than a group's pursuit for truth. That we must each find our own kind of wisdom by ourselves. He says that when one person is bombarded with so much information and knowledge by another person or by a group of people, that they will become radicalized if they believe what they hear too quickly.
He says if the seed that is planted in their heart grows too quickly, they will give no thought to what has been preached to them. They become obsessed with their new lifestyle and their new ways of thinking without questioning it; they genuinely believe their eyes have been opened and that they have found their purpose.
Sooner or later they try to force these ways onto others because it is righteous, but certain ways of thinking is only meant for certain types of people. He says that when someone finds their own religion by themselves, that they will then be able to grow properly.
Jesus then goes on to tell me a story about a society who finds a young boy who is about to die on the street. They bring him to a hospital to keep him alive, but they can't find out who his parents are or come into contact with anyone who knows him. After days of searching, it is apparent that there is no one to be found, and that the boy would be brain-dead even if he did wake up.
After much thought and debate, the society decides that his life is no longer worth anything, so they begin to remove some of his organs to donate it to people who still have a chance for a life. They take a kidney. They take part of his liver. They take some bone marrow. The c
hild has become a great resource and an answer to those in despair.
Some people in the society become angry and begin to threaten the hospital. They say that such a thing is wrong. Doctors are murdered. Nurses are murdered. Eventually the boy is murdered by one of the angry people to stop the hospital from degrading his existence to nothing.
Then Jesus looks at me and he says that sometimes it might be better to just not believe in anything. Jesus tells me that wherever I may travel, not to become a product of the environment, but to impose my own influence on the people of that place to create the environment.
I'm in mid-sentence and someone walks into the room. I look up, and I see a woman, maybe in her sixties, and she's just staring at me. She excuses herself and starts to walk out but I get up and ask her if she is Joe's mother. She says yes, and I tell her that he's been waiting for her. I tell her that I would leave but she asks me to stay, she says that it has been so long since she's seen him.
Later on I learn that twelve years ago Joe was disowned by her and his father because Joe was gay. A homosexual. She says that she didn't want to do it, that she wanted to accept him, but his father was so hellbent on the subject that she didn't have a say. I guess the disowning played a big part in Joe's life and had a negative effect on his relationships with others. Maybe that's why no one ever visits him. He tells me he would spend a night with Anna Briol Walkhill but he's just lying so I don't think any less of him.
