The Philosophical Ramblings of a Psychopath to His Victim in a Diner, Somewhere on Third Street
I want to paint you a picture.
Picture a boy, lying down on a dusty hardwood floor in an empty room, curled into a ball and quietly sobbing. He holds a blanket between his tiny, infant like hands, his index finger curled up just below one of the corners, which he tucks into his mouth and bites down in to stifle the short, stifling wheezes he makes as he exhales. His hair is cut by an amateur and, while still in a neat bowl shape at the edges, the strands that make up the body of the style are askew and disheveled, having not seen a loving brush in days. His onesie, a pale blue thing with a trap door and an embroidered teddy bear holding balloons on its chest, is filthy with three days of grime.
It goes without saying that his eyes are squeezed tight, tears streaming down his cheeks.
A quiet creek breaks the silence and a shadow of light falls over the boy in an ever widening rectangle. Inside the door shaped box the outline of a man comes closer and closer, its right hand holding a long, phallic shaped thing that casts its own shit colored silhouette. The man shape disappears into the dark until only its legs are visible as the thing behind it coughs once, twice, and noisily draws breath, staggered by the presence of mucous in its throat.
Is this boy in trouble?
Is it night or is it day?
Let me try this again.
A man sits across from you at a diner, telling you a story about a boy in a room lying on the floor. He then says that a man enters the room, and with some poetic license describes the brown bottle he’s holding. Did you picture a bottle of beer or a medicine bottle? Did you picture a balding, obese man with a black ring of hair and a thick mustache? Is he wearing a white, tank top style undershirt? Is it stained at the chest? Does he have back hair? What do you imagine he’s going to do to that child? I don’t know you, but I’ll trust that you were picturing all the wrong things. And that’s okay; it’s expected of you these days. After all, what would the world-at-large say if you pictured a doctor bringing a boy medicine in a third world country? Was it the onesie with the teddy bear that placed this image so firmly in America? Or is it that you’ve been so geared towards the negative that you can’t imagine anything at this point but a pedophile?
I’ll bet you’re wondering about the gun. You know, the one under the table presently aimed at your crotch?
There’s not much to wonder about; before we’re finished here this evening I’m going to kill you. I’m going to pull a trigger and you will-literally or figuratively-be dead. Which trigger is up to you, but one is getting pulled tonight. Allow me to supply you with a little exposition…
Let me paint you another picture:
You have two guns pointed at you. One of them is quite literal and, as I’ve already explained, presently poised to make gender identification a little more difficult. The other is more abstract. Maybe it’s there, maybe it isn’t there. You can’t see it, but I’m telling you it’s positioned on the door of this diner and is set to fire as you walk out the door. It knows you; it’s seen your face and is set to fire only at you. In essence you find yourself in a classic Catch-22; no matter what happens here tonight, no matter what choices you make, you are screwed. The path that leads you to the first gun, the literal gun, is cut in stone. If you refuse to participate in this little exercise or by result of action and choice fail to arrive at the conclusion of this little exercise, I will pull the trigger. You will die. I’m not concerned with the consequences, only that my part in our game is resolved. The path that leads you to the second conclusion is simple, play the game and win. But even if you win, you may lose. Failure leads to certainty; victory is more abstract. Do you understand?
