"The Collective"
Surface Evolution #6
Here’s my only 2009 story, “The Collective.” Roughly 2,200 words.
Dig it!
Æ
THE COLLECTIVE
Black dress shoes slapping wet concrete. A train whistle; gun shot; dog bark; police and ambulance sirens wailing. None of it registers. Only the slapping of the shoes on the pavement, and now the little white darts of hatred nestling, writhing, dreaming of release behind the eyes.
Brown eyes, blue eyes, green eyes, orange eyes, pink eyes—it does not matter. It is anonymous. Crimes perpetrated by The Collective.
And now there is a gun in my mouth.
I look up into the face that is attached to the neck that is attached to the shoulder that is attached to the arm that is outstretched and attached to the hand that holds the gun that is in my mouth. It is a fluid connection—one that I make in my mind over and again.
I blink sweat away; my forehead is a broken dam.
The man who holds the gun so steadily, unflinchingly in my mouth is no one I know, yet I know many people like him.
I have done bad things in my life. I have been alive twenty-seven years and I have done more than twenty-seven bad things. I have done more than twice that amount of bad things. I wonder if this man who holds the gun in my mouth knows about any of these things or if he just happened to randomly pick my sweating face to cram his weapon into.
Perhaps he does this every night of the week to someone different. Maybe he does not like his day job very much. Maybe someone there makes him feel out of control.
Staring into his eyes I can see that he does not recognize me; I can see that he does not hate me in particular, and that he has no idea about the far-more-than-twenty-seven bad things I have done in my life.
I think he hates doing what he is doing right now. I do not believe he enjoys holding guns in people’s mouths. So I wonder what his motives are. I wonder why I am on my knees in a puddle in a basement garage next to my car, the keys still clenched in my hand, listening to the overhead broken water pipe dripping, listening to the police and ambulance sirens—the police who won’t get here in time to stop this, and the ambulance that will be useless because of it.
This man is a member of The Collective. The Collective isn’t dangerous; only its members are. You tend to think more about society’s ills when you have a gun in your face.
When this man finally pulls the trigger, I know it will not hurt; there won’t be enough time between the act of pulling the trigger and my death for there to be pain. So it is not pain that I am afraid of.
Since I have done awful things in my life—some worse than what this man is about to do—I know I have this coming to achieve at least partial balance in the cosmic scheme of things. I am not afraid of death. I think—now that I am down on my knees in a puddle waiting to die and have some time to reflect on it—that I have been waiting for it for many years.
What scares me is the fact that this man’s face will not tell me why he’s doing it. I am scared of not knowing why I’m going to die. If only there was a twitch in his cheek muscles, a shifting of his focus, something, anything to give me a clue. . . . But there is nothing. He bores straight into my skull with his glare, and I feel his pulse throbbing in a vein at the back of my head.
Maybe he does not know the exact things I have done, but I think he may know the kind of man I am. I do not think I can hide that. I do not think any man can. You try to mask it, but some people see right through you, no matter what you do.
And really, I am very stupid—I should have seen this coming. Someone, somewhere is always watching you, and with a network as immense as The Collective, I do not know why I thought I would be different.
There is no such thing as a random act of violence.
I peeled the skin off a man’s face once in his apartment. It was not anything like peeling an orange. It was disgusting, but not disgusting enough that I didn’t do it again to another man, in a different apartment. I told myself he was enjoying it, that he was screaming with pleasure.
That was one of the bad things I did.
Another time, I thought about ramming my cock down a dead woman’s throat. That felt worse than ripping off a man’s face. That made me feel dirty on the inside as well as the outside.
So many things I should not have done, and now I have a gun in my mouth. The man has cocked the weapon and is muttering something under his breath. I cannot make out what he is saying. Whatever it is, it must be about me. Everything is about me. I am the centre of my own, this man’s, and everyone else’s universe.
This is the way everybody thinks.
Time is slowing, winding down to the point where, when I lift my eyes to the dripping water pipe, I watch the droplets form and it seems to take an hour. Each one is a full hour, its descent twice that. When the droplet I’m currently watching finally hits the puddle beneath it, I hear the report of a gun. Suddenly I am lying on my back, and I can feel that my face is gone. The man has pulled the trigger. I cannot see him anymore.
For a moment I wonder where he went. Then I hear his black dress shoes slapping the wet concrete, walking away.
The back of my head is opened up wide. The concrete is cool and makes me think of ice cream.
The man must have known those things I was thinking about the dead woman. If so, I wonder why he only shot me once.
Now I’m back on my knees, watching the ripples from the last drop of water edge out from the centre of the puddle. I blink sweat away and take a deep breath.
Not dead, just daydreaming.
I wonder what the man from The Collective will do with my body when he finally does pull the trigger. Is there a special cleanup crew that comes around to dispose of Those Who Could Not Be Collected?
Though I have done more than twenty-seven bad things in my life, I think, perhaps, this man has done more.
I would really like to scratch my chin. It is itchy. But I do not think the man will let me.
If I could do everything over again, I would do four times the bad things I’ve done. This man with the gun cannot change that, though I think maybe that is what he is trying to do. He thinks I will waste these final moments wishing I could take back those awful things. He does not know me as well as he thinks he does.
I would only like to take back one. And you already know what that is, so I won’t say it again.
The itch under my chin is getting worse, and I am nearly to the point now where I might risk asking the man from The Collective if he wouldn’t mind scratching it for me.
Drip-drip. Itch-itch. Insanity is repetition.
I’ll bet he wants me to beg. That must be it. He is waiting for me to cry and grovel. He wants me to confess, come clean. Purge my soul before he stamps my ticket. God will forgive me for everything. Detail it all, lay it out in black and white, paint me a picture, spill your guts, let Jesus take the pain away, tell me how you love to watch people die, the lights winking out one by one by one by one in their eyes, so many lights, dampened, candles in the wind, and how you’d peel my skin off and boil it if I gave you half the chance, because oh, yes sir, most certainly I would, and how I thought about my cock in that dead woman’s mouth, and how I need a shower, only the dirt never comes off when you think things like that, it sticks and makes you itch and itch and you can’t scratch because you look up into the face that is attached to the neck that is attached to the shoulder that is attached to the arm that is outstretched and attached to the hand that holds the gun that is in your mouth.
It is a fluid connection—one that you make in your mind over and again.
But I will not confess.
Not to you, Jesus, or anyone else. What I have done is mine. The Collective cannot take it from me, even though I do not deserve to have it. I hold onto it because it defines me. Death has no scythe as long as I am defined.
We judge ourselves and live life accordingly, then let others clean up the mess. But the cleanup crew might miss a spot and I’ll be forever imprinted, stained, given my own star on this cement walk of fame as the brightest and boldest of his era. A smudge will mark my place, and no one will ever know what I have done. My secrets will become me.
So I hope the man from The Collective’s purpose is not to make me confess because, if it is, I will be on my knees and he will be on his feet until we both ache in every muscle. He will wish he were home, reading the newspaper in a nice, soft chair; I will wish I had been the one who had made his chair for him, and who had written all the stories in the newspaper he was reading, created the ink the words were printed with, the paper they were written on.
I do not want to be a smudge. I want to redefine myself through this man. I want to become a part of his organization. I want to join the herd. If The Collective is every one of us, then I am already part of it; I am already doing what it wants me to. These thoughts are no longer my own, and I cannot know if they ever were.
I am a shiny star and I am about to die.
The man’s trigger finger is perhaps as itchy as my chin now. My ears twitch and I hear the stiff, tiny tendons in his finger creak as he starts to gently squeeze the trigger.
And I know I said it before but there is no such thing as a random act of violence. This is what I deserve. Twenty-seven times twenty-seven times twenty-seven times twenty-seven and I am judged. There is no way to take any of it back.
If I am—by my own will or not—part of The Collective, then this man should know my thoughts. So listen to me: my atrocities define me; your gun and your judgement cannot change that. I am exactly who you need me to be. Though you may deny it, you created me, so you are intrinsic to my definition.
The barrel of the gun slides backward; the sight gently knocks against my top row of teeth on its way out, and my mouth clicks shut.
The man walks away. Black dress shoes slapping wet concrete.
I stand up, listen to my knees snap and pop, blink once, and wipe at my forehead with my coat sleeve.
Feeling the keys in my hand, I open the driver’s side door and get in. I start the car, flick on the windshield wipers and watch them for a while, then drive home, counting to twenty-seven over and again until the numbers mean nothing, until the words that make up the numbers mean even less.
By the time I get home, I have forgotten what numbers and letters are altogether. I need a new way to communicate. I want to show The Collective that I understand. Now that I know the language of the organization, I am confident in my abilities to get my point across.
I am certain they will understand what I mean.
I walk in my front door, drop the keys on the hall table, go to the desk in my office, retrieve the pistol, sit in my office chair, review once again in my head exactly what it is I want to tell them, slide the barrel between my teeth.
And begin to speak.