SECOND: Endoftheworldman

Endoftheworldman

By Bedavyasa Mohanty

Bedavyasa Mohanty
(National University
of Juridical Sciences)

The year is 2033. In many ways the world that you used to know has descended into irredeemable chaos. Beneath me lies a broken city; rusted and rotting, not unlike an Orwellian dystopia or a post-apocalyptic video game. I see the sun hurrying across the sky with practiced bravado and twilight beginning to creep across the dark crimson clouds. Tall skeletal hunks of twisted metal that once represented the pinnacle of our civilisation cast long shadows across dark asphalt roads that are littered with rusted automobiles lying abandoned, forgotten. The world wasn’t always like this. I wasn’t always like this. But my past is a shattered mirror and more than once I have cut myself trying to piece it together. I have stared at the shifting image inside the glass for so long that I no longer remember what being whole feels like and the scarred abomination staring back at me is the only picture that I have of myself. When I was younger, the world was a far simpler place. Most things that people did and the reasons that motivated them made sense. But religion changed everything. The belief in the will of an invisible deity and the imposition of senseless commandments on the naïve masses had plagued mankind for almost as long as it had existed but it was only at the turn of the 21st century that mankind developed the capacity and appetite for the systematic extermination of its own species. We should’ve seen it coming; someone should’ve seen it coming. But it’s too late for conjectures and what ifs now, the past like all great tragedies of life is a gaping hole. The more you run from it the bigger and deeper it grows, its fringe gnawing at your heels. Your only chance is to turn around and face it. But that encounter with long suppressed demons could destroy you or make you invincible. It could drive you mad or set you free. I decided to turn around and now I stand on the brink, staring down into a bloody hell, watching my beliefs burn and smoulder in an infernal fire and I grimace at my practiced absence of regret or remorse. I have spilled blood this night and the night has only just begun. My name is David Lake and my eyes are open for the first time.

From a purely objectivist perspective of existence, there are only two great miseries in life: not getting what you want and getting what you don’t want. Personally, I believe that the latter is the more dangerous of the two because not only does it herald disappointment and dejection but it also extinguishes hope. A hope that someday, not very far away, things will change, that life will revert to normal. This thought surprises me; I had never been one to dwell on things. It was against my nature and my profession. A profession where the only choice you had was a binary one: either you pull the trigger or you don’t. I nestle the AMT Hardballer in my hand feeling the weight of the gun as the familiar grooves of its grip cut into my palm. It feels like an old friend. I see the man tied to the chair stirring as he slowly regains consciousness. He looks up at me with kind eyes and smiles. “Is this what we’ve come to David?” The man’s name is Frank Shelly. He is my employer and my oldest friend; my only friend. He is also my wife’s murderer.

When the world had been ravaged with Jihad and all of the western Governments had collapsed, Shelly had sought me out. He had claimed that for a new world order to be established, the old order had to be cleansed and only then could mankind’s newest age rise from the ashes of the old one. I had never believed in the old order and had little faith in the new one. You see, in Hell you'd be foolish to count on people displaying high standards of honesty and morality. The same goes for earth. But I had cleansed his world for him and he had made me rich. Now Frank Shelly was the God of what remained of the civilised world and I was his dextera domini.

“Think of all that we have accomplished David. After decades of bloodshed and destruction, the world is finally quiet. Are you willing to throw all that away for the sake of a single woman? You are about to make the same mistake that she did David; this is bigger than any of us. Peace always comes at a cost and without pain, without sacrifice, we would have nothing. Endure it David, endure it as you always have.” I pull the hammer back and his smile disappears. Everyone smiles with an invisible gun to their head. “You’ve thought this through haven’t you?” he says. “But tell me why. You’ve always known the price of this revolution. You brought it about David. Can you live with the burden of knowing that you sent the world back into the state of chaos that you helped save it from? Is she worth that much to you?” I breathe in, and think about what he has just said. I try looking into the depths of my mind searching for the small voice that would tell me that my revenge is justifiable on some conceivable moral scale. I hear nothing. For a moment, though, I can see her eyes, blue as the clear sky on the most beautiful day of your life and what I have to do becomes so much clearer. Shelly’s voice breaks the silence, “It’s over David, let this one go. The stakes are too high. Killing me will not bring her back. Forgive me David. For the sake of the thousands that depend on us, for the sake of the Crusade, forgive me.” But I am no crusader, I’m no hero, I’m no believer. What I am is an organic being of pure, unadulterated, seething rage. I feel like putting a bullet between the eyes of God, I feel like tearing down the Venus de Milo and setting fire to the Starry Night. My wife was dead and her killer was still breathing. This wasn’t over. I level the gun and slowly pull the trigger. The hammer snaps back down and time slows down to a crawl. I imagine life turning into a series of comic book panels as the bullet throws itself out of the business end and the head of the man tied to the chair snaps back. The bloodstain on the white marble floor of Shelly’s penthouse slowly flows out, taking shape like a violent new continent. I let the weapon slip out of my hand and it falls to the floor with a loud clang! I breathe out and let my thoughts wander over everything that had led me to this point. There is sadness in my past but there is little about it that surprises me. Choices in life are a thing of the future, things that always lie ahead. The past is nothing but a straight line. There are never any two ways about it. If you had made any different choices in life it would have been a different person standing at a different place asking a different set of questions. I had no regrets in life save the death of a woman. That had been my cartoon moment, when the coyote steps over the edge and gravity gives him a moment to realise his folly before the plunge. I had imagined that killing her murderer would bring me peace. It hadn’t. But then again I didn’t deserve a happy ending, never had. I had led a monochromatic existence with my senses cut off from all feelings except a sense of what needed to be done. Now that I had done what needed to be done all the other greater feelings of grief, despair and regret come crashing down in the same moment and I realise that my way of living life is the smartest option.

I had never meant to change the world but I had ended up doing it any way. People like Shelly had believed that if you took disintegration far enough you could bring about a new form of integration. And so, little by little we had taken the world apart and now with Shelly gone we had no idea what to do with the pieces. But maybe this was how it was always meant to be. Maybe what makes the earth feel so much like hell is our expectation that it should be like heaven. But the truth is, everything is flawed and everything changes, even the things that we considered constants in our civilisation like Jesus and Capitalism gradually disappeared and will soon fade from memory. If people choose to believe in a power higher than themselves then it falls onto the non-believers to ensure that that higher power is flawless and beyond reproach. That is what my wife had believed in and maybe even more than vengeance, my actions tonight of putting an end to the crusade that celebrated the sound of fire alarms and gunshots was my way of paying homage to her memory. My world is a strange place. In it we are the playwright and the bit players but what drives the world is an idea because ideas are the only things that have endurance on this ever changing planet. You may call me an inglorious mercenary or write me off as villain in the grand scheme of things and you won’t be too far off the mark; but the truth is while the world needs dreamers to give it a soul, it also needs realists to keep it alive.