DESCRIPTION OF A DREAM

I heard his heavy feet dragging up the stairs, his big stupid breath tripping over itself, thinking nobody else in the world had ears. I wish I could say that I didn't hear him until it was too late, but it would be a lie. At least then I could have had a chance to run, to make her run, to take the coward's way out and save two lives, instead of using my pride as an accessory to murder. Something in the way he approached didn't scare me, though; didn't strike me as something urgent. I was more curious, you see. I was more curious to see what this giant hunk of meat was capable of. What this living pushover, this yellow rotten, vile soul of a hangover would do in the face of forgiveness.

I heard his scarred hands (more like his handed scars) scrape against the door handle, twist it with all the eloquence of an elephant shitting, but still I stayed, still I didn't wake her, still I was unconcerned for some reason. 

But, in all the effects if a cheesy story, this is where the story backtracks. This is where the author presses the "rewind" button in our synapsis (or synopsis) and does that thing we all hate, you know the one. That thing where the author like, goes back and like, leaves the story incomplete, and like, totally does a literary flashback. It sucks, I know, but it's a good literary tool, and this author can't think of a more fitting way of getting the whole thing down on paper (or on screen, I guess you'd have to say). So, in danger of completely setting off the tone of the story, we'll first explain that this was all in occurence within a dream. HA! Now we've saved you the pain and frustration of reading the whole story, and have the author write something in the last line like "and then he woke up", or the classic first grade story conclusion line, "and it was all a dream". But that is not to say that this story was a work of fiction. Oh, no. In fact, the protagonist in the story and the person who dreamed the whole thing aren't even the same person. Nor is the dreamer related in any way to the people or the story that his REM'ed mind has created (well, wikken teenagers and freudian psych students might argue otherwise, but let's try and stick to the easiest reality). But in all simplicity, in all reality, in all...well, fiction, the story, the dream...has happened somewhere, in some form, in some time, and is a real story, whether it was dreamed or not.

So, without further ado, (or adieu?) we shall present the story in full form, no doubt coming back to the point where we left off in some dramatic way. Don't let this little interruption pull you too far away from the story. Or do, I don't really care. Well, fingers and brain, work together....and......GO!!!

It was

Wait, a second. This is weird. This is a first-person narrative, isn't it? And I completely ruined it by stepping away from that. But I already mentioned the fact that you should not be dissuaded and pulled too far away from the story at hand. So don't let me trip you up, tripster. Anyways...

It was different time then, you know? I was a different person. I wasn't the same person I am now, I mean. I had a different soul, maybe. I don't know if that's possible, it certainly isn't plausible. We all have different people living inside ourselves, I suppose, but in my case, there have only been two. 

My first life, my first soul, died before my body was born. My first soul destroyed the world within himself before he uttered his first word. Blamed the world for all his sins before they were even committed. How I got to the workhouse isn't really that important. I could go on and tell you all the terrible things I, I mean, he did. I could tell you closet pornographic stories and describe snuff films to you, without feeling, so that you were to understand that the narrator has no feeling, no regard for other people. But again, that was someone else, not me. So I'll tell you merely to trust me, to believe me when I say that I was a monster. I tricked the system, I fooled absolutely everyone, somehow, like, convinced them I was a caterpillar in my cocoon, waiting to emerge as a cured piece of meat from the penal system. But I was not. I was a long way away from my metamorphosis. 

God only knows what sins I had comitted to land myself there in the first place, but like I have beforementioned, I ended up in the workhouse on unqualified good behaviour, somehow. 

-listen for a second. It kills me to refer to these happenings in the first person, to say "I" instead of "he", because I can't stress it enough that this was some other being using my body for his horrid will. But for comprehension alone, I will refer to this person as myself.

I quickly made it known that I was the rottenest, awfulest, sickest and most violent, psychopathic motherfucker on the farm. First day, the air was hot and ripe with the stench of molesters and petty thieves, or of 60-year old men on their last stint of a 40-year sentence, too old and hardened to be of any real threat to society, but in prison.... You could see the sweat travel through the air and land on skin like mosquitoes. I cut off my orange prison-pants with a needle I stole from one of the sewing machines into a pair of crude and tattered shorts, and ripped my sleeves off with a single movement. In my mind, nobody dared say a goddamn thing. So when someone did, a brisk, stocky bald fuck in the corner by the pile of fabric scraps, when he said those words, oh, man, he didn't know what he was in for. 

"Hey, you fucking fairy, cut your pants shorter and I'll show you what a real man feels like you fucking fruit."

I didn't even hesitate. I hoped that this would happen, so that I could prove myself. I grasped the needle, a mere two inches long, almost paper thin, and closed my hand over it, to form a sort of biological straw around it. I looked up right into his fat pig eyes, raised my hand up to my mouth, and let out a jet of stagnant compressed air, from scarred and tar-strengthened lungs. And damn, if that needle didn't shoot from my hand faster than a '44, right into that motherfucker's eye, straight past his cornea, past his frontal lobe, right into his cerebral cortex. Dropped like a bag of shit, he did. And you know what? Every man, every broken soul, every dirty bastard and criminal wearing the same orange jumpsuit in that place saw me do it, saw the way I watched his body fall to the ground in utter triumph. Saw me hold back the spit in my mouth that wanted so badly to escape onto his cadavre.

And when the wardens came, with their guns and shiny metal badges and deathly black nightsticks, nobody said a goddamn thing. It was as if I had told them, as I stood there over his body,

 "anybody breathes a fucking word, and this'll be YOU."

And from then on, I had all the ass and all the cigarettes I wanted. 

I remember him, the first time I saw him, the first time I had my way with him. I didn't know his name then, I didn't care. Sticks from down the hall traded him to me so I wouldn't  do the same to him. Ironically, so I wouldn't stick it to him. The kid was frail, not weak, but skinny, probably because at that time he didn't have the balls to fight back in prison yet, and ended up giving away his food for his ass, or his soap, or his life. He didn't fight back when I did what I did to him, he didn't say a word, and I hated him for it. I gave it to him worse than I ever gave it to anyone on that whole fucking block, and still he didn't make a sound. Didn't fight back. And I had to let him go when I was done. I let him walk the walk of shame back to his room, everyone laughing at him for what I did to him in plain sight, have him hear his feet pat against the concrete and linger with the catcalls. On one hand, I hated him, I wanted to kill that fairy for not screaming, not making a sound at my best efforts. But I had never known that I could not beat someone, not overtake them mentally like that. Not win. And I was curious. I was baffled and intrigued and if it were not for him, maybe I wouldn't have shedded that soul in the end. He was a martyr for my worse half, jesus on a cross taking my sins for no good reason other than to save mankind from me. 

And so he was for the next three years. 

COnstantly, I pushed him. I shoved him I raped him, I did terrible things ti him. But never did he crack, never did he show an ounce of suffering past his silence. And it seemed as though he was beating me. To the rest of the workhouse, he was winning, was proving his power over me, and maybe over the entire place. He beat the general feeling that we were lost, were fucked, were dead, making tapestry for masses of people who just didn't know the colour of his blood, indeed the colour of all our blood, maybe not even their own. 

And boy, did it bug me. It seemed as though in my effort to win the whole place, the whole cops-and-robbers game, to dominate every soul in there, I was losing by the very act of winning. Sound like a paradox? Maybe. I don't really know to this day what a paradox actually is. But it was what it was. 

I found out his name later on, it was Jonas. But his name faded into the depths and the hate of the place, and he was known as Ghandi. I'm sure you can figure out why. I don't remember if anyone ever knew why he was there, he was an honest soul, he was almost pure. He was probably about 18 at that time, no more than a juvey caught at the wrong place with the wrong people, now he's taking the justice for some whole horrible act. Or maybe he was the worst of us. All I know is that when he was in there, with me, he was like an angelic martyr, never did wrong, never gambled, never complained, never shot up or smoked a joint or smoked a cigarette. And that's probably why he got out so soon. Three years on the work farm, that's a pretty easy stint in a real criminal's books, so that's probably why we all figured he was an innocent. 

After that, the place turned really strange. No-one was subjected to the torture I put him through, but everyone was afraid it would be them next. Nobody failed to give me their weekly pack of cigarettes, or their desserts or a free acid trip. No-one. But I was different inside. I didn't abuse a soul after he left. I couldn't. He took all that with him. I poured so much hate into him, so much effort to break him, so much violence, that he simply took it away from me. He was my angel. He saved me, he took away that soul with him, or maybe just that part of my soul, and it was gone. It was as if I was awakened after a nightmare, only to realize that you were awake the whole time, and you were what caused everything. All of a sudden, the world was awake and beautiful and lush and didn't hate me, didn't deserve my punishment, my hate, my violence. 

Not a soul at that hell dared ask a thing to me, why I had rid myself of my vile ways. Why my hands were no longer clenched, veins not popping and full of heroin, no more bloodstains on my pants. No-one honestly expected that I had changed, but I had. I found myself praying for Jonas, every night, every morning, every second of the day I thanked him in my mind. Jonas, my angel. 

It didn't take long for the wardens to see my change in behaviour, either. Well, it took three more years, but when you're a lifer, that's a heartbeat. I was out of the place on a thursday, breathed my first breath of real fresh, unsanitized air, ate my first free meal. I was under tightly-knit parole, under house-arrest in a small apartment downtown, but to me it was freedom. Daily visits with my parole officer, psychologists, nobody could quite grasp my change. I talked a lot about Jonas, a lot about my dead soul, that he was gone, forever, and that I could not imagine doing wrong again after what travesties I did to Jonas. Hours of my day were filled talking, feeling, all in front of the finest set of doctors imaginable. And they knew that i saw the light, knew that my Jonas saved me, because in a year and a half, I was a free man. 

It was my first night of true freedom that I met her.  

I don't want to use her real name. I don't want her name to go down into history, but her essence. She was like a kitten without a tail. Broken, perhaps, by someone like my old half, tattered and cut and left without some defining part of herself. Waiting for a taxi in front of a hotel, I saw her, I bought her that cab, and never thought anything would come from it. She asked if I wanted to come into her apartment, so I did, and I told her everything. I told her about my other half, about my past, my horrid past, my awful sins, and about Jonas. Only I couldn't mention his name to her, couldn't befoul his name again. And she didn't run away. She didn't flinch, didn't seem to care, because I like to think she saw who I turned into. She told me I had turned into a butterfly. She told me about her life, her trials, and her abusive boyfriend, who martyred her like Jonas was my martyr. She never told me his name, because it never mattered. And somehow, it wasn't sad. It was like I was confessing my sins, and she was forgiving me, on Jonas's behalf, for what her sinner had done to her. It was all Zen and bizarre, but somehow it made sense, and that night I made love for the first time. I didn't take it, force it or steal it, and it was truly as if I had never done it before. It was like looking into my sins and accepting them, not just as guilt or a thing of the past, but of the sins of another, and I was cleansed. 

We were married a short time later, a year or two maybe, time is short when you don't give a damn about nothing but love. We had a two-story house, even, steady jobs, no drugs, no crime, no worries. We were without sin and we were happy, for many years.

Until the day, unlike any other, the paper boy tossed the daily news on our doorstep, and I picked it up to look at the front page only to have my heart stop dead. I still don't know if it ever started up again. 

"SERIAL RAPIST JONAS "GHANDI" SCHAFFER RELEASED ON CONTROVERSIAL BANNED EVIDENCE"

His picture was not of the frail young man that I had tortured a lifetime ago, but of a hardened, brute of a man, scarred and terrible looking. A finger missing, tattoos hiding under a dress shirt and tie that barely contained his hatred and evil. Dead on the outside, dead on the inside, and I killed him. I knew I did. 

I knew probably that he would find me. SO I waited in bed, a shotgun in hand. I put her to sleep, gave her some Zanex just to be safe. I heard him break down the door without as much sensitivity of a poacher. I heard his heavy feet dragging up the stairs, his big stupid breath tripping over itself, thinking nobody else in the world had ears. I wish I could say that I didn't hear him until it was too late, but it would be a lie. At least then I could have had a chance to run, to make her run, to take the coward's way out and save two lives, instead of using my pride as an accessory to murder. Something in the way he approached didn't scare me, though; didn't strike me as something urgent. I was more curious, you see. I was more curious to see what this giant hunk of meat was capable of. What this living pushover, this yellow rotten, vile soul of a hangover would do in the face of forgiveness.

I heard his scarred hands (more like his handed scars) scrape against the door handle, twist it with all the eloquence of an elephant shitting, but still I stayed, still I didn't wake her, still I was unconcerned for some reason. 

I wanted to thank him. I didn't want to hurt him. I couldn't. The last thing I could do was hurt him, again. He saved me, he gave me his life, his goodness, gave me a second chance without saying a word, without hate. And I wanted to thank him. I knew the only way to thank him was to let him have me, let him have my soul, to rid himself of what he thought I still was. Then we would be even. I killed him, and he would have to kill me. 

But she...But SHE....he couldn't have her, couldn't take her away from this world, her sweetness never to be spread again...Before I knew it, his face appeared out of the darkness, mere feet away from me. 

"Hello, Jonas" I said to him. I had to say something. 

"Fucking vile sonofabitch! You fucking scum, you cheat! You STOLE ME!"

his voice was roaring and filled with hate and insanity and wouldn't stop, kept on hating and swearing. He couldn't see her, I knew he couldn't, she was deep in the blankets now, unmoving. He grabbed my foot and looked me dead in the eye. 

"Now you gonna know what it's like to be MY bitch!"

And he Went to grab my ankle and stopped.

"what's this?"

I felt, not really saw, that he was holding her ankle. 

"You gotta little playmate, huh? Well....maybe I'll have her instead...."

And then she woke, turned over, and looked him in the eyes. 

A very peculiar moment happened right then. Like a tiger looking it's prey in the eye only to have the prey kill the tiger....hard to explain. Like ....Aw, piss to the metaphors and similes for now, she looked at him and said "Jonas?" like she had known him all her life, and he looked at her and said her name, too, and I realized that they had known each other before. She was his martyr, her cruel bosom buddy, and I was his. 

And this was my strongest point of weakness. I knew I had my choice, but nothing evened out, nothing made sense, I did the only thing I could fathom, I protected her. I took the gun in hand and I pointed it at his chest, pulled the trigger and BAM, like I'd done it before, in fact I had done it before. In another life. His chest blew out, a spray of blood out of his shoulder splattered the wall ten feet away. He wheezed. He looked at me, hated me. I couldn't stand to see him suffer at my hands again, couldn't bear to see what I had done again, what he himself, the boy who saved me, had driven me to once again. I cocked the gun and pointed it at his head, pulled the trigger.

Out goes the bullet, out from his cheek. More blood. More guilt. But is he dead? 

No. Not at my hands. He's gurgling blood and wailing. He can't die at the hands of the soul he saved. He tries to stand up, but the parts of his brain that I blew out were the parts that controlled his motor skills, or maybe it's the loss of blood, the shock of seeing your brains and blood on the wall. He stumbles away from me, wailing. I can't hear Her screaming, I can't hear anything or see anything except for Jonas, crippled and unable to die at my hands, suffering once again, and wailing. Wailing something over and over and over again, I can't quite understand it. 

"THHHAAAAAAAEEEEEEEEEEEERRRRSSSS!!! THHAAAEEEERRS!!!! AAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!"

Over and over and over again. He tries walking once more, then falls at my feet, weeping and screaming. 

"Thaaaaa yeeeersss!!"

The years. 

He's screaming The years.

"Thaaaaaa yyyeeeeeers!!!!"

The years he gave me, the years I took from him, the years he doesn't have ahead of him. 

I knew it, Jonas, I know what you were saying. 

You upped and forced your body to the window, dragging insane amounts of gore along behind you. With one look at me, not into me, but into that old evil part of me, and you crashed out of the window, out of this life. And you were crying for me, not yourself. I'm sorry I went and shot you. I guess I didn't run away as much as I thought. And you, Ghandi. Dead on the ground, nothing but another convict in a break and enter gone wrong to everyone else. But to me, you're me dead down there. Everything I was and could have been, dead and gone.

 Now just one more life for me to take, to make things right.