Mostrando las entradas con la etiqueta calm. Mostrar todas las entradas
Mostrando las entradas con la etiqueta calm. Mostrar todas las entradas

domingo, 29 de marzo de 2015

Out of the dark

   When I woke up, the train had entered a long tunnel. It felt strange, feeling my body awaken while we were all under the flickering lights. Thankfully, no one was watching my way. I didn’t want people to look at me directly in the eyes. I didn’t want them to discover what I was hiding, which was curious, as I had no idea myself. The only thing I knew was that I had been running for at least a year now. As always, I only remembered parts and pieces, some faces and gruesome images but not much else. I felt pain but the fear that had driven me crazy before was nowhere to be seen.

 This fact made me nervous. I was still waking up covered in sweat and in blood. I knew I had killed again but I didn’t feel bad about it as I did before. If anything, I felt strangely proud of myself. Not for killing of course but for having no more fear. Anyway, now I was brave enough to try to know more about the people I attacked and it was a great surprise to know none of them where exactly loved by their peers. Was I targeting a specific type of person? I had no idea, as it was that other me, the one that lived deep inside me, who decided that.

 But in that train, I realized I didn’t care anymore. All the feelings of angst and dear had gone. I was in pain, yes, but it was only physical. My head was not about to explode from the headaches that I used to have and I didn’t feel strangely hungry anymore. Somehow, I thought, it had to do with my two personalities finally making peace. It was going to happen some day; I just knew it, because at the end of the end they had to share my body and my brain. It wasn’t like if that wild creature inside me could just walk away. T was trapped inside of me and it had learned, for my sake, that it needed me to stay alive.

 After the tunnel had passed, I looked through the window to the mountains: it was beautiful scenery, with green valleys and snow-covered peaks. I could see farmers and cows and their crops. It was the first time I had noticed the world since I had gone insane. It’s strange but I had never noticed it to be that beautiful, that full of color and bright. I smiled, a first time in a long time too. I looked forward to the future and hoped it would calm down for me to have a normal life. My earlier job as a salesman was good but I had always wanted to draw for a living. People often told me they liked my drawings but I had never tried to show them to anyone that mattered.

 Maybe I could get myself a whole new life now, drawing and painting, doing the covers of books or music albums… Maybe I could get that small apartment I had always wanted, with a black and white cat and someone I could hug at nights. My life was going to change and for the first time in my life, not only after what had happened, I felt I was in full control of everything that could happen. I smiled and when I went to the restaurant wagon I smiled too and people smiled back to me. I decided to eat until I was full and then shower so to be ready when the train finally arrived at my destination.

 I had thought of stepping down in Germany but realized they might look for me there, as I had an aunt who had lived there long ago. So I decided to get down in Zurich and just get to know the city. I had emptied my bank account before leaving and was carrying that money with me. It wasn’t much but it wasn’t two bills either so I was especially cautious with it. I carried it all in a black backpack, with some underwear and my toothbrush. That’s all I could get from my home before I escaped. Remembering that brought tears to my eyes but I dried them and decided to shower. I paid a guy working in the train to let me enter an empty first class cabin and do it there. I had five minutes but it was more than enough. I didn’t change of course but I felt renewed.

 After an hour, the train finally arrived in Zurich. I stepped down fast and exited the station. It was raining in the city but I didn’t care. My first thought was to get into an Internet café where I could look for the cheapest areas to get an apartment. I would then get there by bus or whatever and finally rent a place before sunset. I saw several places but none like the one I imagined and certainly not the prize I could pay without running out of money before I got a job. Thankfully, this old lady told me there was a young man looking for a flat mate and that it would cost far less than if I decided to live alone. I followed her advice and met the guy: he was very nice and an artist so I accepted in heartbeat. Maybe he knew people to get me to start drawing.

 I moved in immediately, as I had nothing to really move in. We talked a lot that day with the guy I moved in and he asked me to show him some drawings but I had nothing on me. But then I remembered something and asked for his laptop. I had uploaded some of the drawings I had done to this kind of blog and people had actually liked them and shared them with other. I showed the blog to him and he told me I was good but that I needed a bit of training. He was a painter and a musician so he knew what he was talking about. After we chatted, I felt hungry again so I went out for a burger and decided to make a list of everything I needed to do and get.

 First of all, it was necessary to buy a laptop. I had the money but it had to be a cheap one because I couldn’t just blew it all of in one buy. I also needed clothes, at least the basics and getting a job. Sam, the guy I lived with, told me he could talk to some people in a university he knew so I could teach, or clean or whatever. It was the same to me. Now I needed a job to eat and keep living. My dreams could wait a bit longer. I also had to check if people were still looking for me and then decide if I lived there by my real name of by the new name with which I had bought the train ticket and had fled my country. It wasn’t as if I was running from the police or anything but people were looking for me and had hunted me down for a long time. Now it all seemed calm but you never know…

 I have to explain that they had never been able to tie me to any of the crimes I had actually committed. If my feelings served me right, I had committed murder at least ten times. I didn’t remember any of it but I did remember how scared and confused I felt afterwards, waking up in places I didn’t know and with dead bodies I had no idea who they were. As I said before, I looked up some of them when I escaped the asylum and learned they were all murderers themselves or thieves. Just bad apples from every corner of society. They certainly had families but that, I preferred, had to stay in secret for me forever. Guilt wasn’t going to get me the new life that I wanted.

 The next day, Sam and I visited the university and introduced me to his girlfriend, a teacher called Magda. She was a photographer and she taught the youngest students about it. She was in need of an assistant to help her in and out of class with everything that had to do with the chemicals and such of the labs in which she worked with her students. The day after that, she told me everything I needed to know and taught me how to process pictures myself in order to properly understand the process. She made me spend all morning outside the university taking pictures of random things. I decided to go artistic, or what I thought was artistic, in some and rather boring in others.

 When the pictures started showing up in the paper and Magda smiled at me, I smiled too and felt really happy, like back in the train. It was something silly but I felt everything was going to be great for me now. I was learning new things and I had met very nice people. I had a job and everything was finally going well. I mean, I still had some nightmares but I couldn’t remember the last time I had woken up covered in blood. My inner persona had apparently calmed down. Maybe my own brain had tamed him or maybe, just maybe, he had left me for good. This last thought made me hopeful but I soon realized that was probably not the case.

 The night of the pictures I slept nicely but they day after, when I got stressed out at work, I didn’t slept as good and woke up in the middle of the night. Suddenly, I realized he was still there, inside. He trying to get out, for me to accept him and I fought it silently, sweating as if we had run into a desert. I wasn’t going to lose to him, not now. But then, I felt I had taken the back seat and he was controlling everything. I begged for him to stop, to give me my body back but he wouldn’t back down. He used my body to get out to the street barefoot, in the middle of the night. I begged him not to kill again, not to make me go crazy again but I felt him asking for silence. It was the first time he made sense to me. And that scared me.


 I was right to be. Suddenly, out of nowhere, six men wearing black clothes appeared in the street. They were pointing guns at me, at us, and before I realized what was going on, he had launched us towards them. I heard the bullets but I wasn’t in control until the following morning. I was in bed, the one I had moved in. I was naked, my clothes nowhere to be found. And the sound of people made me look out of the window: six bodies laid there in the pavement, dismembered. A woman screamed.

sábado, 7 de marzo de 2015

Murderer

   I stepped in the boat and sat inside. It was not a big space and it all smell like fish but, given the circumstances, I didn’t thought I should say or do anything about those two things. Little things, might I add, compared to the situation at hand. Onboard came the man that had been pointing at me with his gun all along but then the other one, the one that seemed less likely to shoot at any given opportunity, told him to step out of there and let him do it. There was no one else that could help me and it was too dark too distinguish anything more than the water, the boat and the armed man that had stepped out and disappeared.

 The man I was with had turned the engine and we were traveling fast. The sea was calm and there seemed to be no fishing boats or ferries that could see us. It was almost as if it was meant to be that way and, of course for me, that wasn’t so good.

 After what seemed liked an hour of journey into the open sea, the man stopped the engine and looked straight at my eyes. It was unsettling, as he was one of those people with very bright eyes that make you feel uncomfortable when you look directly at them. I had always wondered if they knew they made people feel that uneasy.

-       Did you really do it?

 There it was. It had been obvious; from the moment they had kidnapped me in my home that he wanted to ask that question so bad. Right then, he seemed eager to know the truth behind all of this, probably the truth about why he was with me right in the middle of the ocean, where no one will ever hear us talk or say the most amazing of truths. I could almost tell he was sweating, the stains beneath his armpits growing, his upper lip trembling at my sight.

-       What is that I apparently did?

 The man snored a bit, smile and kind of laughing. He was nervous. It was so obvious: his hand trembled when he wiped off his sweat and his smile wasn’t the one of a man that feels safe or sure about anything anymore. Maybe, after all, the wrong man had stepped in the boat with me.

-       We were hired.
-       I assumed as much
-       You killed a family.
-       Yes.

 The man seemed to tremble once more, due to my “confession”. To be honest, I’ve never really hidden anything about what I’ve done. I’ve made my peace with it all, specially then, when I seemed so close to death. Why lie to him when he was obviously so eager to know the truth, so eager to think he knew or that he understood what his task was all about.

-       And you say it like that? So… So cool and casual? Are you crazy?
-     I’m not mentally unstable, although the fact that I’ve killed makes me very likely to have one of those fancy disorders every murderer seems to have these days.
-       How many more?

 I couldn’t contain a smirk when he asked this. Not only because I knew it would make him tremble again, but also because people were always like that, wanting the morbid little details of how I had done something or the other. It was so typical of every single person in the world to apparently feel disgusted and scared but deep down, been utterly interested in what I had to say about all the corpses I’ve created. They sometimes seem even more interested that I was when I did what I did.

-       I don’t know. I’d rather not count.
-       The people that hired told me you raped their…
-       No. That’s not true.

 The man appeared to want to leap over me but he contained himself. Apparently he thought that I was denying the truth and that made him even more frustrated and confused but the truth was, and still is, that I never raped anyone. I’ve heard the stories, on the news and so on. They said I was ruthless but then they began to say I raped people and that’s just incorrect. If I had any more feelings I would be hurt.

-       They said…
-       You trust too much on your clients. Never thought for a second they could be lying?
-       I talked with them and…
-     Oh yes, because people are incapable of lying when they hire a hitman. Is that what you are because you seem pretty bad at this?

 There. Shaking like a leaf. I know he’s scared of me, thinking I’m some kind of animal, a beast that has to be put down. But the fun thing is that he knows or feels he cannot contain me for long and, most curiously, he seems to think I’m not guilty of this all. Because, why else would he be asking all these questions? Then again, it might be only that he’s fucking scared and he’s just stalling, avoiding the killing.

-       Are you going to kill me anytime soon?
-       Shut up.
-       It was you who began the interrogation.

 The man seemed to be thinking. I bet he was trying to decide what to do next. Maybe he thought that I might be more valuable dead than alive. The police were looking for me, that’s for sure, and I had a reward sign on my head. Apparently he wasn’t as stupid as he looked, thinking of the best way to profit properly from this assignment. He could even surrender me to the police and collect the money all by himself, leaving the other idiot to mend for himself, thinking I was dead.

-       You killed many people.
-       I know.
-       And you don’t regret it?
-       No. Why should I?
-       You’re not sorry? Not even for one of those murders?

 I looked at him carefully, trying to decide what to say. There was something more in all of this, something that had eluded me from the start. The moment they had taken me from my home it had been all about the other guy, the tall one. He had threatened me, put a bag on my head, and pointed the gun straight to my heart. This guy I was with had only driven us to the dock and then had decided to kill me, at the very last minute. And then, it became clear.

-       Don’t tell me that I killed your wife or brother?

 The man went crazy when I said those words. He threw himself at me and started punching me all over: on the face, the chest, the stomach and the head. My hands were still tight behind my back so there wasn’t much I could do except moving violently, in order not only to drive him away but also to make the boat turn sideways to escape swimming. He couldn’t chase me through the ocean.

 But nothing of the sort happened. He just stopped beating the fuck outta me and decided to breath heavily, as far as he could from me. It hurt; I’m not going to say it didn’t. But there was no damage that he could do that would really hurt me. I was beyond all of that at that point. He could have stabbed me and I wouldn’t have cared at all. My lips were cracked, bleeding and all my body was numb from his punches but I wasn’t bad enough to look at him from my corners and smile.

-       Predictable.
-       Shut up…
-    You know, even if you do kill me, nothing is going to bring anyone back? It won’t happen.
-       Shut up!
-       The dead are done. Believe me, I know.

 Then, the guy pulled out the gun and pointed at me. He no longer trembled but he was still sweaty and his eyes were wide open, as if he wanted to be sure of what he was doing. I cleaned my face a bit from my blood without breaking the link between our eyes. Maybe he was going to kill me, maybe this was it for me but it didn’t matter. He was one more of my victims and that was enough for me. So I laughed.


 The bullet pierced right through my brain, coming out the other end and falling in the water. The man pushed my body to the water and left. He knew my body was going to be found and that everyone would know a murderer was now dead. And no one would be interested in knowing who killed me because I deserved it. But, in the end, I knew that just before the end he had been mine and that was all worth it.