By Madhav Khosla
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| Madhav Khosla National University of Juridical Sciences |
Our young man is standing in the midst of a park, with a stage set up a couple of hundred yards ahead of where he’s standing. He sees the men on the stage, in expensive navy blue suits and sober ties, the women in brighter coloured shirts and lighter gray suits. All of them with fake smiles on their faces. Every last one. Ignoring everything that was around them, all the evidence of their every failure, they sat there blowing their own horns. You know exactly who the head honcho is and you know it immediately. The big cahuna, the apex predator, the chief, or rather the commander in chief. El Presidente. He’s just a little more smug, his smile just that little bit wider and little bit faker and he’s just that little bit more responsible for everything gone wrong. But what really sets him apart is the swagger. Amongst this distinguished and celebrated bunch of self-promoters and egotists, this man is a narcissist of rare distinction.
Our young man doesn’t like this. Not a bit. He focuses back on the dealer button. Feels it’s weight in his hand and turns it over again, feeling it almost slip out of his hand as it slips on the smooth edge of his pull over instead of gripping on his not-quite calloused palms. He takes a few steps forward, meandering just enough to the left, the right and back to the middle to make himself appear aimless. He takes another few steps and starts thinking about last night’s poker game. Dealing the cards across the table, practiced motions of his hand, first the dealer button slides from one person to another, then the cards to that chaps left, and then to everyone else. Most people think of dealing as a chore, Charlie loved it. It gives him a sense of control, not direct control, nothing as devious or dramatic as rigging a game of poker with his friends was going on. Even with his mind on all the fucked up shit around him Charlie still wouldn’t regard sharking his friends out of a few bucks as the lesser of as many evils as you’d care to name. No, he had indirect control, and that was enough for him, a say in the process. Whether he knew how that would pan out or not, Charlie always wanted his say and however small it was, to Charlie, it was always a Tornado.
He focused on the staggering progress of his thumb over the rough bottom of the button, every hitch significant for some reason. He looked up at the sky to see an almost cloudless autumn afternoon. Rain wasn’t going to end this farce. Charlie’s thoughts turn to his walk over to the park that day. There was a wall of TVs on display at a high end electronics store flashing phosphorous images of protests, police brutality, and scandal after fucking scandal. Tax-gate, back-gate, Front-gate and who could forget the infamous slamming of the door in the President’s face by his own wife, the appropriately titled, Gate-Gate. He just couldn’t reconcile all that imagery with the fact that they were still standing up there, with their smiles far more constant than their morality and a damn sight more fixed than the buildings they put up.
Charlie’s mind goes back to the walk over, walking with his thin black earbuds pushed firmly into place, the volume as high as he can take it, disaffected slouch affected to perfection, jeans unfashionably ripped at the ankles, not the knees and a blue shirt plenty nice enough to appear out of place on him. He was walking a couple of paces ahead of his sister and her friend, uninterested in their talk of music he despised and people he didn’t know. Charlie stops in his tracks in front of a store and looks through the window display, straining to see past it and into the store itself. He couldn’t walk in, that would mean he cared about it. And that wasn’t Charlie’s style. But still, he kept looking, somehow managing wide eyed wonder and an obsessive compulsive’s attention to detail in the same, focused gaze. Damn right Charlie cared, and damn right he wanted. Not that he was allowed to, nor did he allow himself to. Albeit for completely different reasons.
His sister’s friend stops and says “ Did you see him stop at the boutique? I told you he had good taste!” She says the last bit triumphantly, only to hear sister dear reply, with a not at all faint sense of pride, “Well, we have to share some genes though don’t we? But he’s never let any one know of course.” Her friend looks puzzled, you can tell because her face does exactly what TV tells you confused people do and she asks, in a manner TV tells you confused people ask, “But didn’t Charlie want to be a butterfly?” “Yes but only because his father wouldn’t let him” said a man’s voice. They both turned forward to see Charlie facing them, with his infrequent, but pleasant grin, making these two girls turn red, Charlie turned back around satisfied and for the moment, vaguely distracted.
Snap back to the present. His hands are running over the flattened dome top of the button, running through the engraved letters, thinking about the hand that fate has dealt Christiania. On one hand there’s the government, buggering its own people for shits and giggles. On the other there’s the opposition baying for blood and a chance to do the same. They’re at each other’s throats and for longer than he’d care to admit, Charlie’s been feeling both sets of icy fingers around his neck. Back to the dealer button, it feels heavy in his hand, a comfortable, significant weight, like it has a purpose beyond Charlie’s itchy fingers.
He’s a well read young man, our Charlie in an off-beat, hipster sort of way, lots of Pahlaniuk, Nabokov and Hemingway, smatterings of older and newer depending on what caught his fancy, how he got there and when. So he’s a chap who’s aware of the benefits of anarchy and has a sense of right and wrong, it may not be his sense, but at least he has one. He’s dealing with it though, as best he can. Charlie’s a big boy. He’s also an unhappy one. Not just with the self satisfaction of the four and more horsemen of the apocalypse on stage, but with what they’ve created. A state in decay, the land of opportunity, now the land of opportunism.
Charlie’s glaring at them, they’re not even fifty yards away now, taking in what’s around him Charlie completely lost track of where his feet were carrying him, he dwells on that for a second, but not even the minutiae of his own existence can pull him off point for more than a moment. He’s had enough, his rage is effervescent, he aches, yearns, needs to retake control, to be a force of nature more powerful than the reset button on an old Nintendo. Despite his better judgement he looks back towards the stage and he doesn’t blame the crazy hobo on the corner with the “end is nigh” sign. Except it isn’t nigh, it’s here.
He looks up again, realizes that his rage as much as his feet has carried him to this point, he’s felt powerless. That’s what this is about. Yeah, things are bad, but plenty of people have it worse. He’s sat at home been told how to dress, how to cut his hair and how to be a better Charlie. He’s gone out into the world and wished that he’d been just a little more Charlie. He can deal with his paymaster’s ignoring his needs. He’s willing to forgive the women who ignore his existence, He’s even willing to accept that the world may one day strip away what’s left of his relevance. One of the few things that has always comforted him is that he’s part of a mass that’s in control of its destiny. If not direct control, then at least like the dealer in a poker game, there’s a relevance to their actions. He will not tolerate the discourtesy of those actions. He’s been hearing rumour of elections being rigged since he was a child, outrage and investigations and it’s always come to naught. Well now he’s been listening, and he sees that he’s spitting distance from the stage, the podium, the pantheon. Whatever they want to call it.
Rage consumes our Charlie, in a way it’s never done before. People turn to look at him. He’s white hot and all consuming, he’s quite a sight. He’s never been and he doubts any one has ever been this confident. He’s never had too many doubts, but this is an absurd feeling of control. It’s almost mythical, and so exhilarating it feels a little evil. But all the same, he knows he’s no force of nature. He’s known men who are islands, men who are idle and even the occasional ones that would rock you like a hurricane, but never one that was in and of themselves a tornado.
He smiles to himself, not like before, there’s nothing pleasant there. This is malevolent, glinting and satisfied. He thinks to himself, well maybe I’m not the butterfly you thought girls, but I’m flapping. Charlie winds his arm back, the dealer button, heavy and perfectly rounded in the crook formed between the index and ring finger on his right hand. His arm swing forward in perfect trajectory, the button spinning sidelong, and turning end over end. It’s not exactly a majestic arc, but then it’s a functional weapon, mean to create the image, not be the image. And he smiles as he looks around and realizes only a few people around him have cottoned on to what just happened. People both sides of the isle, some extreme and agitated, others moderate and trying to make a break before chaos breaks out. And then he looks forward and upward, at the stage, admiring his handiwork. It went and hit bug Cahuna smack dab in the nose. He couldn’t have hoped for a better result. He saw blood gush down, red, crimson, somehow metallic and unquestionably menacing. Charlie sees people from the lot that’re in power rush down in a rage at the other lot laughing, he sees violence break out and he sees it falling into complete, beautiful chaos as he’s being pushed from all sides, surrounded, engulfed and overwhelmed.
He’s happy, people are terrified and scrambling, different people are going native. Most are just going completely mental, but Charlie’s happy. This isn’t what people do in a civilized state, but then it’s been a long time since this was a civilized state. He’s being pummelled, beaten, bashed. He wonders for a moment if his assailants know he started this party. Doubtful, but possible. He doesn’t care. Blood, flows down, but it’s not menacing, it’s redemptive. His head’s going fuzzy but Charlie’s enjoying it, he’s fading out to black and he thinks to himself, if you can’t be the tornado, you might as well be the god damned butterfly that starts it.
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