Perspectives

Their Interviewer

My interview with Seneca Crane is over. The lights are out, the cameras are off, and the audience has long since deserted the studio. My face has been wiped clean from the dramatic make-up that has become an integral part of my act. I know that I should feel relieved at being free from my necessary disguise, had not my body been rendered completely numb in the last two decades by the countless invasive procedures that have kept me from aging, or at this point, even from dying.

I'm older than anyone could possibly imagine, even though it is not so difficult to wonder how for the past forty-five years I have been hosting the Hunger Games without aging one day. I've been sliced open countless of times, given skin grafts, polishings, injections and implants to retain my ageless appearance and to ensure continuity in this pageant. There can be no Hunger Games without Caesar Flickerman, and the price I have had to pay for carrying out my job flawlessly was the near complete obliteration of my sense of touch, taste and smell, and an almost perfectly preserved body that is successfully hiding the fact that inside I am slowly, inevitably, and literally dying.

There is so much one can do to keep a heart beating, a lung breathing and a liver...living, even if you are from the Capitol, and the telltale signs of my slow decline have been there of a while. The irregular heartbeats, the erratic trembling of limbs, the coughs that are always taking longer to heal...It takes all my energy to host the Hunger Games for the three or four weeks of continuous showing with my trademark enthusiasm, and it is a very badly kept secret that I spend the following eleven months in near to complete solitude in my mansion on the outskirts of the Capitol, refusing even the most basic social interaction with anyone except the medical team that has practically set up home there. What is instead an extremely well kept secret is that my physical deterioration (and subsequent partial regeneration) is not the only thing that turns me into a hermit for the best part of the year.

I hate the Hunger Games. I hate the Capitol for sending other people's children to their slaughter. I hate my fellow Capitol citizens for allowing themselves to become genetically engineered imbeciles who have been so desensitized by the vacant lives that they are made to lead that they are unable to see beyond the light, glamour and show that I so masterfully provide for them. Most of all, I hate myself for failing, year after year, to stop the show that has taken over my life, and has so far kept me from the release of death.

I do not consider myself to be any different from those around me, though I do pride myself on being somewhat smarter than that first class moron, Seneca Crane. I was just as bad as they were, when forty-five years ago, I charmed my way through the audition to host the Hunger Games as a bright, young TV Host in his early days. I was ecstatic for the first few years, and oblivious to the notion that the kids I was interviewing were actually the same ones who would be eviscerating each other on live television just a few days later. It was only after ten years or so, that I started to look at them, really look at them. It was then that I started to notice the thin layer of nervous moisture on the upper lips of the most arrogant of Careers, the uneasy twitch of the self assured underdogs, the terror, often mistaken for negative attitude, of the Tributes of the outlying Districts. I still ignored the gnawing awakening of my conscience for a long time however, and let first indifference, and then resignation, take over.

There was nothing I could do, the Capitol had decreed it so. The Districts had to be reminded not to get out of line again. So I laughed and made people laugh. The Capitol wanted an act, so I performed and innocents died with my inane words echoing in their ears. I am not sure when resignation gave way to insufference. It was so long ago that I can't remember, but it might have perhaps been during the second Quarter Quell. What I can pinpoint exactly, however, is the moment when insufference turned into horror. This was when the twelve-year-old from 8 won the 63rd edition. He was a sweet, shy boy that all bookmakers had written off immediately, but he had gone to win the Games that year by burning alive the towering Career who he had managed to trap in a snare set up by the usual industrious Tribute from 11. The look on the kid's face as he looked indifferently at the burning Tribute still haunts my dreams occasionally, even when I try to drug myself into oblivion. That was the only year that we managed to kill all the twenty-four contestants. The winner committed suicide immediately after the Crowning Ceremony.