He looked like me, dressed like me, but wore a crooked grin. I’ve never grinned like that before.
Have I?
“You’re going to die tomorrow,” he told me. “And I wanted you to be prepared to enter my kingdom.”
As I stared silent and transfixed, horrified for some reason I did not know, all else about him gradually grew as crooked as his grin. In that moment, I figured it must have had something to do with the lighting. I was alone in the hotel room, my tie loosened and top button unbuttoned. The only light came from the lamp next to the couch. It played shadows over the rest of the room.
“You won an election tonight, sure,” he said. “Your greatest victory, your greatest loss.”
His smile widened.
“And you thought that now, finally, after everything, you can rest, you can sleep. Well, governor, I’m here to take away that final peace. No rest for the wicked, as they say. But don’t worry about it too much; like I said, I’m here to prepare you for the rest of…everything.”
I still couldn’t say a word. I couldn’t call for security. I couldn’t even open my mouth. He had me paralyzed by some strange power. Like a nightmare.
“We are very acquainted, you and I, but you do not know it, and I want you to.”
He did not move, except to very occasionally inch closer. The degrees of darkness danced around him.
“You won on an economic platform. The economy is bad, and you will solve it in your state. That’s how you won. By making the economy the biggest issue in the people’s minds. That’s popular politics for you. We’ve done an excellent job, haven’t we? You and me, we’ve taken advantage of the economy. How the notion of ‘quality of life’ — an utterly false notion, by the way, heightened by my handiwork —has come to dominate all else. And what defines ‘quality of life’ in the minds of your constituents, of my constituents? Convenience. How easy it is to get through life. Technology is wonderful, money is wonderful, all these artificial add-ons that really have nothing to do with anything are wonderful. You think human happiness has progressed as much as technology? You think your nation, your culture, is any happier or morally sound than any of the myriad generations before you? Rich, poor, what do I care? What does my Enemy care? People are people, no matter the environment. Nations and economies tumble and fall, and some souls go along with them through semblances of anarchy. But others, because of the very same situation, use that to gain exaltation. A poor man gives rise to the need of charity, of service, of love. A rich man gives rise to pride, indifference, selfishness. I actually prefer it when the economy is good. People are so much easier to manipulate. They’re even willing to be manipulated, to be controlled. And taking advantage of that is my greatest pleasure.”
Suddenly a drink was in his hand. I didn’t see where it came from, but I hardly noticed that thought in my brain.
“Taking control is paramount,” he said, sipping. “That’s my goal. That’s your goal, too. Redefine the terms. Redefine what’s important. Keep the big issues away from the minds of our constituents. Focus on something else. The economy is such a wonderful distraction, isn’t it? It’s even distracted you. From me.”
He winked, and sipped again.
“All this will make much more sense tomorrow. You’ll see. You’ll see what you’ve done, what the people wanted you to do. All by due process of law.
“I like law, you know. Some say that I seek after anarchy, lawlessness. That is true, but for a very distinctive reason: With too much law, I govern through people like you. Tyrants who destroy, and so forth. That’s always fun. It gives me great pleasure to suppress and limit. But I think I like too little law better. Would you like to know why?”
When I didn’t breathe a word in reaction, he smiled at me, again with that crooked grin. I still had never seen that precise face in the mirror, but he was starting to look even more like me the longer I stared. Little expressions and tics that I recognized. The flutter of an eyelid. A twitch of the hand.
“Everything abides my some level of law. Even I have goals, even I have structure. Physical law, moral law, biological law. Different degrees. When my constituents reject the semblances of spiritual civilization given them by my Enemy, they revert to a lower law.
“You know one of the things that separates us from the animals? They don’t have choices. They act on biological, evolutionary laws. You call them instincts. They are laws bred by survival and reproduction. And that’s exactly the lens with which many of our constituents see themselves. They are ‘born this way,’ as one of them has so recently declared. There is no accountability, no self-control. And so chaos reigns in the hearts of many; those are the ones who choose not to live a higher law and so submit to the lower law, unconsciously so. It is their own choice; I cannot do that for them. And in their choice to not choose, they submit to me, to us, and revert to animalistic behavior. This is anarchy, and also slavery, the world I—we—desire. In anarchy I have complete control. In anarchy I reign over the self-proclaimed animals, for they give up their ability to choose. And as I said earlier, that’s the main goal. Take away the freedom to make choices, so they instead act on animalistic impulses of selfishness and reckless reproduction. And this is something I love, something I adore. Humans abusing the power of their bodies, given them by my Enemy. They’ve stopped following His rules about things in attempt to be free. But they haven’t been set free, I’ve just gotten them to follow different rules than those they’re accustomed to. A modest, but still easy, achievement.”
His face relaxed, sobered.
“I’m going to tell you something personal here, my friend, and know that it’s because we’ll be with each other a long, long time, so it’s good to get to know each other. (By the way, I already know everything about you.) Here it is: I have never had a body. And I envy those that do. So much can be done with them, things that I will never have the opportunity to do. And so I take away those privileges from as many as I can, get them to abuse their bodies and use them for destructive things. Quash the potential those bodies give those spirits, make them like me. It’s a little immature of me, I’ll admit. But it gives me so much pleasure in the meantime.”
He relished those last few words, ending them with a brief, sinister laugh.
“And so you can see that my paradigm is strikingly similar to theirs. To yours,” he said with a nod, a toast, and a sip of his drink. “I’ve turned them into animals. I’ve robbed them of their choices, and so deprived them of the divinity within them. They don’t even realize it’s there, anymore. Their bodies allow them to be creators, but I have succeeded in destroying that potential. In their minds it has turned into something casual and fun, with few, if any, repercussions. I’ve gotten them to devalue life and the creation thereof, to debase what my Enemy intended to be sacred. We’ve gotten them to turn the creation of life into a staple of comedy and entertainment. Their worst, most profane oaths are references to the same process. It is mocked, derided, abused. And yet they seek after it so much, an endless search for satisfaction. A search with a thousand casualties in its wake. It is perhaps the greatest progenitor of misery, despair, and frustrated dreams in this world. And nobody seems to notice! Nobody seems to connect the dots! And so they will continue to bear fruits of chaos and dissatisfaction in their search to slake their thirst and gratify their need for pleasures. And in indulging, they are binding their ties to me, and severing their ties to my Enemy. It’s more than I could ever have asked for in starting out on all this. What a great and marvelous work we have done!”
My mouth, once agape with a numb horror, had closed. The only movement I could bear to make.
“Isn’t it simply joyous how successful we’ve been in masking this issue of procreation?” he said, an awed look on his crooked face. “I speak of your words regarding a fellow of yours, a friend you helped get re-elected after a bad scandal. You told the world his personal life didn’t matter. What he does in private is none of the public’s business. Our constituents saw your point, and agreed with you. What a victory that was for us!”
He looked at me, a glint in his eye, that crooked grin impossible to escape.
“Do you not agree? Is that not your goal, the same as mine? Well, no, perhaps it isn’t. You just never realized the full ramifications of your actions, of your words, of your own secret desires and ambitions. You were just as much my slave as anybody else. Only more so.”
It wasn’t his words, exactly. I didn’t comprehend fully everything he was saying, but my subconscious emotions understood the message implicit in his words. That message rooted me to the couch, froze my movement, seized my brain. I was losing my ability to think. I could only…feel.
“I like apathy. Like yours. Like our constituents. They are so easy to manipulate, so easy to control. I have souls in my hands, eternities to shape and mold how I see fit, because they give in so easily. They are my pawns whom I command with whispers. Just the slightest thought breathed in their ear can set off a storm of suffering and uncertainty affecting multiple lives. With their constant escapes into other worlds they never take this one seriously. They waste their lives in addiction, in slavery, seeking fun and pleasure over all else. With these I don’t have to do anything at all. They do it themselves. And they do it because it’s easier. Indulgence is easier than discipline. It feels better, and there’s nothing wrong with its pursuit anymore. It’s all according to your own beliefs, they say. It’s all relative to the individual. They say that because I told them to. I think, in all, that was my greatest victory.”
He fell silent, and his eyes traveled all around the room. The morphing shadows played across his face. I wasn’t sure if I was breathing anymore or not. But I didn’t think about. I didn’t care.
“You’re complicit in this, you know you are,” he added with a nod to me. “You’ve helped accomplish my work. You helped knock down walls, walls that crumbled down upon the heads of our constituents. You, with your legislative power, did nothing. You, with your popularity, fueled the fire. You knew from your childhood such things weren’t right, but you saw all this and did nothing. And so I thank you. In their apathy, in their indulgence, in their willful ignorance, they surrender control to me. They choose to give it to me. And I can buffer them whithersoever I will, and lead them down paths I choose for them. Now, truly and above all, is the great day of my power.”
I blinked, my first movement since closing my mouth.
And he was gone.
He left me shaking, trembling.
After he left, I thought I’d wake up. I blinked several more times, trying to do just that. I looked around me, looking for some sign that it was just a dream, or a hallucination after all the stress of the campaign, some kind of cathartic breakdown.
But…no. The wine stain on my shirt sleeve was still there, looking like blood. My watch showed time ticking on. I could bite my tongue and it hurt.
With as little movement as possible, I lay down on the couch, trying to breathe, and then, trying to sleep. I do not know if I’ll ever wake up.
I hope I don’t.
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