by M. B. Julien
Now the older black man has gone back inside his home, and the crowd that had gathered has taken his place and claim that the cops are never around when they are actually needed. A common claim. Frustrated, one of the white cops gets out of his black and white and tells the crowd to back up, but one of the individuals in the crowd attempts to spit at him and misses. As he is beginning to walk towards the person who tried to spit at him, the other officers look in his direction and notice what is going on.
At the same time that they are looking in his direction, the older black man walks out of his home with a model of a Smith & Wesson handgun and yells something in the direction of the officers, and then begins to shoot at them. You've walked so far and you are finally at the edge, and all it takes is one little push.
After everyone has scattered, and after all the rounds have been fired, there are four fatalities and two damaged police vehicles. The fatalities in question are two out of the four cops, one out of the two kids who were arrested and the man who initiated the shooting. One of the police vehicles had a window shot out, and the other a tire popped.
People at the police department are looking into various things such as why there were four police officers roaming the same area. I realize that this is what the people on the radio station were talking about.
Tao starts to go into his racist mood, talking about how all the blacks are ruining the communities they reside in, but before he can begin to preach we both hear yelling just outside my door. I look through my peephole but I can't see far enough to the right to see what's going on, so I open my door and I see a woman standing behind a man who is trying to break down the door to Lynne's apartment. It's Claire and Silvio.
Claire turns around and for no logical reason starts to yell at me, and when Silvio realizes this, he too starts to yell at me, again for no logical reason that I can find. Claire starts to insult both her sister and her mother, and I can't help but remember the Claire that was so sweet and soft-spoken. What did Silvio do to turn her against her family? Is Claire some kind of crazy person who has crazy mood-swings? That whole damn family seems crazy.
Now Silvio is in my face telling me to stay away from his kids, and when I just stand there and don't react to him, he pushes me. After I laugh and tell him that he should just go home, he knocks me down and starts hitting me. I block all of his punches, but before I know it I see Tao standing there threatening to hit him with my metal baseball bat. I forgot I even still had that.
The threat might seem real if Tao didn't look so afraid. Claire and Silvio laugh at him, and the distraction allows me to trip Silvio and put him in a headlock. I always assumed a headlock was suppose to be more painful to the person in the headlock, but this particular one is causing me more pain because I have Claire hitting me in the back of the head with her damn purse.
After about six seconds, I can hear Lynne screaming, and her scream makes me realize what we are all doing. How we are all acting like animals. After Lynne's scream, Claire stops hitting me and I let go of Silvio, and surprisingly he doesn't retaliate. We are all just awkwardly calm, but waiting for any move another person might make. In my head, I laugh at Tao.
Right after, the police have arrived unusually quickly thanks to Emily, and they sort every thing out. Imagine if the response time was this quick in the city.
After I close my door, I look at Tao and I start laughing. All he can really do is shake his head, he is probably still wondering what just happened and what I had gotten myself into with these people. In the back of his mind I know he wants to ask me what all those composition notebooks are about. He had to have seen them because that metal bat was in the same room. After I stop laughing, I say "welcome back."
Chapter 35:
SOCIALIZATION
Tao apologizes to Kathleen as if it were his fault that Joe was in a coma, and then he says that it's unfortunate that he has to meet her under these circumstances. As arrogant as Tao may seem sometimes, in an unfortunate situation he is always sociologically correct.
He is trying to show support any way he can, which I guess is what I did as well, even if he can't do much to help. Tao and I leave Kathleen the same way we found her and we exit the hospital. On the way to Tao's car my mind wonders and I ponder why I act differently when I'm in the presence of different people. I've thought of this before. When I'm alone I'm an angry and obsessive person, but when around others there is a switch that flips on and it makes me socially acceptable.
Sometimes the personality changes from person to person or from group of people to group of people; for instance who I am when I am with my mother is different than the personality of who I am when I am with my father. Both personalities differ slightly, but both still fall under the persona that is socially acceptable rather than the sociopathic demeanor.
Who I am when I'm with a bunch of strangers differs from who I am when I'm with a bunch of friends. Of course, pretty much everyone is like this, and these changes in behavior visualize social fragments. Social fragments of many masks that imply you are who you are depending on your environment.
When you really start to think about it, it's almost as if the people around you are the ones who determine who you are, or at least some large percentage of who you are. So now when I think of Joe, I start to wonder that if I know the people who he knows, if that could help in trying to figure out who Joe is. Will knowing his friends, family and enemies help me to know him and determine which social bracket he resides in? Discovering his social bracket and his social class might help define who he is.
Tao closes the car door, and he tells me that some people stay in a coma for years. There have been people who have stayed in a coma for over fifteen years, and some who actually wake up from the coma and proceed to live a normal life. Thinking about that makes you wonder if these people have lived a completely other life inside their coma. If they had dreamed of another life and actually lived it in all the time that they were in that coma. Everyone at many points in their lives daydream of another life, but these coma patients have taken it a step further.
The light is green. It's still green. Tao probably thinks he can make it, but at that very thought it turns yellow, then red, and he is forced to stop. After a few seconds of waiting Tao asks me about Silvio. I know how he works, he's breaking his way into asking me about my weird obsession. I tell him that Silvio is the ex-husband of the woman who just moved into the building. Lynne hasn't just moved into the building, but to Tao she has. Relativity.
He asks me why the guy has it in for me, and I actually have no idea. I have no idea why Silvio would attack me. Maybe Claire is putting ideas in his head. The light turns green.
Tao jokingly asks me a question, "Would you kill him if you had to?" I tell him to define the situation, and he says Silvio has a gun and is about to shoot me, but I have a chance to kill him first. I ask him if there are people around, if it's day or night, if the gun has a silencer. He looks at me strange, and I guess I sort of gave him the answer. If someone tried to rob me in broad daylight with people around and used a gun as incentive for me to give up my prized possessions and currency, I'd say the chance of the person actually willing to pull the trigger and kill me is less than ten percent. Unless the person is crazy, then that number increases sharply. Otherwise, if a person is actually willing to kill you for an unknown amount of wealth, it might be because they have ice water in their circulatory system. Veins go towards the heart, arteries go away from the heart.
When observing the actions of Silvio, one might prefer to categorize him as a sociopath, or at least one on the verge to sociopathy. An antisocial person who is not completely aware of the sociological normalities of our society.
Instead of beating on a man who you have no evidence against, the correct procedure would be to obtain information from a certain party, in this case Lynne or I, regarding your assumptions that your ex-wife might be involved with someone. Instead, a sociopath might just submit to his primal urges.
> The problem with being the person who is placing Silvio in this certain category is that judging someone, in the grand scheme of things, is pointless. Because we cannot define normal and abnormal realistically, normality is, just like everything in space is relative to one another, relative to the judgement of who is judging. Similarities will arise when judging good and evil. A cop has a clear shot on a known drug lord, but does not have the lawful right to shoot him. The cop knows if he doesn't take his shot now, the drug lord will simply continue to evade the attempts of a poor judicial system and ruin the city.
The cop takes the shot and kills the drug lord, but is convicted of murder. This suggests we should only do right or wrong within the boundaries of the law. Do not ever steal from the rich to give to the poor.
Our brains subconsciously try to differ things from each other. What is good, what is bad. There is an idea that will tell you that all matter is one. You are one with the person next to you, as well as the street you walk down every day. You are one with that bird flying in the sky, as well as the Sun that burns the back of your neck. But in order to survive, we must be able to define certain things, and differ them from one another. That is hot, that is cold. This separation is important in every thing.
Tao pulls up to his parking spot in front of the apartment building. The question never comes. He never asks me about my composition notebooks. The paper and pen that illustrate a distorted mind. Instead he asks me about a kid who is bouncing a basketball about a block away. He talks about how we see the basketball hit the ground first, then we hear it hit the ground second. He loves this kind of stuff. I'm not sure what you would call it; it's not a mirage or an optical illusion I don't think. Tao calls it a joke from God.
As Tao and I walk through the front entrance, he says how much better the flowers make the building seem. We split ways and I return to a home with no light. I sit down on my couch with a plan to fall asleep, but I never do. Why can't I fully fall asleep. Rhetorical question with no hint of curiosity implied by the lack of a question mark.
There is something in the back of my mind trying to push its way to the front. How can I fix the wrong I've done to Julia. Did I ever really wrong her? What exactly did I do that was unlawful or socially unacceptable? The lights turn on.
The feeling I get seeing the lights turn on is indescribable. I guess it could only be associated with the dependence that all first-world countries place on electricity. When I look around the living room I see the smashed remote, and then laugh. Now I'm staring back up at the light. MAX 50 WATTS.
I turn on the television, but it's not on the channel I usually have it on. It must have reset. On the screen is an animated movie playing about a wolf that befriends a deer. It reminds me of a story about a woman who could tell apart one gorilla she had raised from other gorillas who looked exactly the same simply based on the behavior of her gorilla.
I eventually lose interest in the movie and go into that half-asleep mode. Not really sleeping, not really awake. Not really dead, not really alive. However, I do have a dream that takes place in a dystopian-apocalyptic setting. As if one or the other wasn't bad enough.
In the dream there is something wrong with one of my legs, and I'm trying to run away from something, but I'm not sure what it is exactly because I never see it. I have a radio attached to my hip, and on the radio I hear about people being arrested for crossing a certain property. I wonder to myself how there is still time for civilization when there is barely anything left to be civilized about.
There's a knock on my door. It's morning, and I don't feel like I was sleeping. At the door it's David and Sarah, with Lynne behind them. She's still mad at me for acting like a child. Sarah tells me they are going away with their grandmother, but that they will be back. As they begin to walk away I stop Lynne and I ask her if she is going as well. She says no, she says she has to work, she doesn't smile as she turns away. Man, what did I do.
For a second I feel humility, she doesn't even say goodbye. For some reason it reminds me of the one time I saw my father cry. He was a very strong person, so to see him cry meant something was disturbingly wrong. Like our planet not being in the correct orbit space or something. If you asked me, I'd tell you he was grieving for his wife and his young son, but that's just me and my assumption. He would never tell anyone anything.
And just like I remembered something from reality, I remembered something from fiction. The dream with the switches on the walls; I now remember seeing another popular list of words. The seven virtues. Chastity, temperance, charity, diligence, patience, kindness and humility. I grab the composition notebook from my bed and write down those words next to the other words I saw in that dream.
If I keep remembering words, eventually I will have them all, and I will be that much closer to having the master list of words that make a person who they are. Behaviorally, sociological, psychologically, genetically, biologically.
Chapter 36:
COMMON COMPLEX
Standing at the door of the life you choose to lead is a demon who is calling you over, ready to let you in. The demon gives you no warning that what comes next may be accompanied with addictions and obsessions. Physical compulsion. Psychological compulsion. This demon doesn't even open the door for you, this demon just simply stands there with a large grin. The demon doesn't open the door for you so that when you realize you've made a mistake, you have no one else to blame but yourself for opening that door.
Last night, I had a dream. I'm in my kitchen, and I notice that the garbage bag is full. I take it out to the trash bin outside and throw it inside the bin. As I turn around to go back inside a little girl who is riding her pink bicycle almost runs into me, but she panics and instead rides into the fence and falls off of her bicycle. I go to see if she is okay, and she is bleeding at her knees. I ask her if it hurts because she isn't crying. She says yes, and I tell her that I will go inside and get a bandage for her.
When I get inside my apartment I head for the bathroom and I find a box of bandages. On my way out, I go through the kitchen and I see that the garbage bag is full yet again. I look through the door that I opened to go throw out the trash, and I see the little girl still sitting there waiting for a bandage.
I look at the garbage bag one more time, it's still full, and then I go back outside and put the bandage on her knee. I tell her that her knee is as good as new, and then I watch as she walks her bicycle across the alley. I look back through the door that is still open and I see inside my apartment. I'm thinking about how I just threw out the trash, and how the trash was filled back up again. I walk a few feet and I open the garbage bin that I just threw the trash into, and it's empty, as if I had never actually thrown out the trash.
So I go back inside, take the trash bag back outside and throw it in the garbage bin. Now I know that I've thrown out the trash. However, when I go back inside my apartment, the garbage bag is full yet again. I go back outside to see if the garbage bin is empty. It is. I repeat the process one more time to see what happens, and when I come back inside to see if the garbage is finally thrown out, I see that not only is it not thrown out, but that there are now two garbage bags in the house; one in the trash can and one on the floor next to it. I think to myself, this must be a joke from God.
I pick up both garbage bags, and instead of going outside to the trash bin next to my apartment building, I go to the next one over and throw them in there, but it doesn't make a difference as when I return back home, there are five garbage bags resting on the floor of my living room. I start to laugh angrily.
As I'm laughing, I hear the engine of a large vehicle. When I look outside, it's the garbage truck collecting garbage from our neighborhood. I run outside and catch up to them and tell them that I have four more garbage bags to deliver as I throw the one I was carrying inside the back. Because they are patient and kind gentlemen, they wait as I throw the remaining four garbage bags into the truck, and not to your surprise, when I return home I can't see hal
f of my living room because of the garbage bags that have magically appeared out of nowhere.
Two by two I fill up my car with as many garbage bags as I can, and then I drive down to the downtown area of the city and find a city dump where I toss all twelve garbage bags over the fence. I drive back home, and to my surprise there are as many garbage bags in the living room as there were when I left, so it must be working. I take the remaining bags to the city dump and toss them over the fence, and then when I return home I find that I cannot open the door.
As I continue to try to open the door I feel something pushing back towards me until the door finally breaks and a mess of garbage bags come flowing through. My laugh becomes a bit more angry.
I kick one of the bags out of frustration, and then pick it up to take out to my car. After my car is filled with garbage bags, I start the engine, but the car won't accelerate. The car just sits there, parked, but running. I take one of the garbage bags out and decide to walk to the transfer station instead. Maybe I might see one of those garbage men and they might be able to help me with this problem.
