Season of the Witch, Part One

The Choice

I don’t operate the way you think I do. You think of me the way you’ve been told to think of me. It’s like vampires – there is no Dracula. Oh, yes, there is a guy who impaled Turks way back when, but Dracula – the vampire – is a creation of Bram Stoker, who never left his hotel room in Romania while he was writing his pox-addled trash and got just about every nugget of Vlad’s history wrong. Right down to which castle was which.

But that was no big deal. Stoker was the Dan Brown of his time. An ignored library book after the fad burned off. But then Hollywood put the picture in your mind – Dracula became Bela Lugosi. The cape, the fangs. Fangs are new. So is turning into a bat. Vampire bats had nothing to do with Dracula until about 1920, decades after Stoker’s scribblings. Pure Hollywood. Movie magic. A myth borne out of committee.

Sunlight, holy water, garlic… That’s all Stoker. No basis in actual vampire legends. We’re talking about a myth that’s just over a century old and, yet, you’re led to believe it’s as old as time itself. Bela, with his cape and melodrama, stalked the ancient sands of Egypt, turned into a bat over the burning skies of Pompeii, and saw men and machine clash century after century.

You’re led to believe a lot of things. They become part of your narrow world, an artificial myth designed only to sell movies and books. To part you, the fool, from your money.

I’m no vampire. I’m just using that as an example. I don’t want you to get the wrong idea right out of the gate. Of course, vampires don’t exist. Take it from me – I’d know. Or, at least, I think I would know. That’s the trouble with being both omnipotent and cast out. This dreadful feeling that, just maybe, I don’t really know everything. That, like you, I’m a puppet of some vast propaganda machine, and the victim of legends engineered by soulless publicists.

I don’t look the way you think I look. I suppose it’s my choice, but I realized long ago that the best path to take was the middle of the road. It doesn’t pay to stand out. You can’t work that good old black magic when you’re on the stage. Up there it’s just tricks and sleight of hand. But when you’re in the crowd, you can influence and push the great beast of public opinion any which way you like. Being a nameless face in the crowd is the only way to go. There’s a free tip for you amateurs out there.

From time to time, I even have a wage slave job. A desk, a computer screen making my eyes jump, a few too many tea breaks, and plenty of impressionable co-workers. Sometimes I’m a boss pecking you to death day after day. Sometimes I’m a co-worker back-channeling you every chance I get. Sometimes, even, I’m a lover, a friend, a husband, a wife, and the architect of broken hearts.

I was there walking the sands of ancient Egypt, and I did see Pompeii burn, and I have watched the clash of men and machines. I should get all this out of the way first thing, because you don’t want to sit there guessing. You don’t want to bother with twists and turns and mystery. Not really. You say you do, but I know the truth. You want it all handed to you on a plate. Beginning, middle, and end. You want commercials and intermissions so you can stock up on junk food.

What is it they say? ‘All that is necessary is that good men do nothing,’ right? There are no twists and turns. No cloak and dagger. No seven deadly sins and fire and brimstone. I thrive on your apathy. It’s my highway through this world. Your inability to change, and your fear of that change. Your stagnation, your failures, your anxieties. I grow stronger with each pill you take to correct self-perpetuating emotional disabilities; I am there for each peevish snap at your loved one, and each struggling, caffeine-fueled commute. And the great thing is – none of that is my doing. All I have to do is sit back and wait until you defeat yourself.

And, let me tell you, it does get boring sometimes. It’s one of those things where, if you’ve seen it once, you’ve seen it a million times. So sometimes I like to play a little loose. See if I can mix things up. The apathy can’t be defeated, you say. It’s because there are no more causes, because the world has become fat and corrupt. Right? What are the arguments again? To tell you the truth, I’ve tuned them all out. There are times I feel just as apathetic. And, of course, I don’t really pay attention to problems and their solutions. That’s not my business. You create the environment, and I simply work with what I’m given.

One way to mix things up is, simply, to grant the power to change that environment. What would you do if you could get away with murder? A world full of laws and you could be lawless, yet still live within your shell. Still have what makes you happy, and never be judged by anyone.

Maybe it wouldn’t be murder. Perhaps that’s too extreme. But could you resist the temptation? If no law applied to you, how long would it be before you just started parking up on the sidewalk, or maybe a little shoplifting? The supermarket’s writing food off all the time, right? Will they really miss a can of soda?

Even so, if that’s the limit of your larcenous thoughts, it’s not you I’m after. So don’t worry. And, no, a stolen can of soda does nothing to further the cause. I learned my lesson a while ago – you need to work with people who are willing to make the choice. Who are open to change. Who, perhaps, need to make a difference.

Come with me now; down to the suburbs. Bird’s eye view: Everything looks the same. The ‘little boxes,’ like the song says. Rows of townhouses, and a chilly night deep into autumn. Focus in on that one there, at the very end of the second row. The one that’s sort of twisting slightly as the cul-de-sac rises up and out to the road. A woman lies dying in her bathroom on the second floor. Haunted by horror, she’s opened her wrists.

Rape. Flashes of memory. We don’t need to bother with the images. Just the faces of the three men who took her. I imagine we’ll be seeing them later, though it’s hard to tell. I’m always willing to be surprised.

They took her in a parking garage on the way home from work. That innocent suburban type of place. You know – the sort of area where such things don’t happen. Or so you think as you cross over the spot where a man was stabbed to death, a bum kicked by kids, a woman raped, a baby abandoned. It was late, she was a bit drunk, and they took their time.

She just sees the faces, too. She’s blocked out the pain. She’s blocked out any other sensation except for those faces and, on bad nights, like this one, certain queer little things. Like how their hands felt as they held her arms down. Or the one that slapped her as he came inside her. Their echoing laughter. The worried one who kept saying, man, hurry up, man, there ain’t no cameras is there, man.

No, man, there ain’t.

Some businessman found her. I’ll not focus on the good deeds. When she woke up, she was in a hospital bed. Bandaged, bruised, torn. A nurse sent in a cop, and blah blah blah. No help there. The doctor talked and talked, but she didn’t hear a thing. He reached down and touched her arm and she screamed, then cried, then apologized. He just stared.

One person was missing. Her fiancé. They’d been in choppy waters for a while beforehand, and this was the final nail in the coffin. He didn’t want to come to the hospital. A few days later, she sat sipping wine on her deck, not able to face work or even leave the house, and he came over to apologize. He hates hospitals. Makes him think of when his dad died. She went back to blah blah blah. She didn’t speak and, finally, he left, his shoulders hunched. He left his key on the kitchen counter, and she knew she’d never see him again. She’d never see anyone again.

She called friends and family, said she was feeling better. She called her boss, said that she wanted the rest of the week off. She cancelled the paper, and then she moved through her house, touching everything. She paid off all the big bills and dropped the envelopes in the mailbox at the end of her block. She put out her purse, her wallet, and all of her personal details on the kitchen table. Bank statements, the passbook she hadn’t used in a decade, the title to her car, information about the house, numbers for next of kin. She fanned out her credit cards, her birth certificate, and neatly wrote out all of her passwords on a lined sheet of paper. Then she went upstairs and, with a chilling ease, sliced down the length of each wrist, going all the way up to the forearm. She still couldn’t feel anything. The pain was more like a luxury. A whisper of a past life.

Her eyes fluttered, the cold tiles of the bathroom floor seeped into her bones, and she passed out. Thankfully, the faces of her three attackers did not visit her. So it breaks my heart to send them to her now. To watch her thrash and grind her teeth and suck in breath even though the blood has long since stopped flowing. I take her from the bathroom and sit her down at the kitchen table, a vase of flowers from the hospital sits between us as I fix myself a snack and settle down opposite. There’s some time, now, to take in her life. All these little things. A life of loneliness and nostalgia. Childhood memories gathering dust on the shelves, travel photos that are landscape shots, or building shots, and never feature her, or other people. Wall art from Target, Wal Mart, Ikea. Mass-produced. Hotel chic.

The furniture is a combination of hand-me-down garbage, gifts, and what she’s been able to buy on her stretched salary. Just recently, she’s worked towards matching things, but it’s clear she’s never had to do that in her life.

The living room is really just a half-circle of furniture worshipping at the feet of a large flatscreen TV, now accusingly silent. Hey! Turn me on. The kitchen is a little messy. Nothing horrible. A dish or two in the sink, a stove that needs a proper cleaning. It’s well used. She likes to cook. She cooked for her deadbeat fiancé and, looking back, it was the only joy in their relationship. He watching the TV, out of the way, cut off. She in the kitchen, on her own planet.

I finished my snack and pushed the plate aside as her eyes fluttered. Here we go.