Brainless

Brainless's Confessions #1

These images are familiar to you, every television in the world has broadcasted them in a loop for several days: police cars circling the gates of the school, ambulances parked in the yard, bloody injured teenagers lying on gurneys and waiting to be evacuated, dazed or crying survivors, the black smoke from the fire overhanging the roofs like a shapeless giant, CNN reporter live commenting the event, she and her cameraman flinching at every detonation, the confused declarations of students collected along the sidewalk: “It’s a bloodbath! There are corpses everywhere! They are merciless! God, they are killing everyone!” You remember, right?

Nobody forgot that date of September 21, 2014, the Vermillion High School killing, the most terrible school shooting in American history.

I was there. I lived it from the inside.

Then, they tried to make me pose as a hero. Me, with my belly that has folds, with my round face and my thick chin, with my hair too thin, of a perfectly ordinary color, that goes in tufts every time the wind blows, with my past-fashioned clothes and my old sneakers… what a hero.

Every TV channel in the world wanted to interview me. I was even invited on the set of the Jimmy Fallon Tonight Show.

Jimmy Fallon asked me if my life had changed since September 21. I answered that the big change in my life - if it can still be called a life - happened three months before, at the beginning of summer, and then nothing was ever the same, that the Vermillion killing was just an oddity like many others in my existence. Jimmy Fallon also asked me how I wished to be called; Jason or Brainless? I said that only my girlfriend calls me Jason. He then wanted to know more about her. There, I told him to get lost. People in the audience bursted into forced laughter. Jimmy as well. And he ended the interview. His next guest was Justin Bieber, just getting out of rehab. I looked fresher than him, that’s saying a lot.

My parents indeed named me Jason, like the killer in the Friday the 13th saga. When I was a kid, for Halloween, I would go and knock on the neighbors’ door disguised in a hockey mask and armed with a cardboard machete. I painted blood on it, and on the mask too. I never got much candy. But already at that time, people on the block wouldn’t call me by my first name. For everyone, I was Brainless, the nice simpleton from down the street, Brainless, with his encephalon in his socks, Brainless, with his face where his butt is. Which kid assigned me this nickname first, in elementary school? I don’t remember. But everyone adopted it really fast, and when I say everyone, that includes my parents, our neighbors, my uncles and my aunts, the bus driver, the lunch lady, the cop who makes children cross the street after school… Even I came to think that I wasn’t provided with a brain, that my skull was filled with a sort of liquid or mash.

I have to agree that I wasn’t the smartest kid in Vermillion, I always had trouble following along at school, understanding the books that I read and what adults said in general. I never finished building a model nor got to the end of a video game. Not even growing lentils… A loser, that’s what I was; not a hero, not a “special” boy who instigated respect, fear or curiosity, just a lame-o designed for a lame life, a lame job and and girlfriend as lame as him - and still, the girlfriend was optional.

I never imagined that, a few days after celebrating my sixteenth birthday, I was going to die then rise back from the dead, even lamer than when I was alive.

Brainless forever.