Mirrors.
Our greatest fear.
There are no more anthropological demons.
Dark, predatory eyes no longer linger in the deep dark.
Winter doesn’t bring the paralyzing promise of starvation.
A needle, some gauze, and a little liquid removed terms like “blood fever” and “the sickness took him” from the lexicon.
The central nervous system is no longer powered by the night’s terror and growls and disease and famine and war; it’s run on existential dread.
We bray, preach, beseech, and all scream, “apathy is the enemy!”
Why?
Because we felt ourselves jade, felt the soft lines of our hearts crystallize with cynicism.
And we want to save our children from the same fate we know, deep down, to be utterly inevitable.
You can’t stop what’s coming.
We, laughably, reasonably, and inescapably, are afraid of what we see in the mirror.
I am.
You might not want to come to terms with it, but you are, too.
Repulsed. Angry. Disappointed. Whatever.
Save me the thesaurus and just get down to the nitty gritty.
We’re afraid.
And we know that apathy spreads so easily, like a germ in an elementary school lunch room.
But let me tell you.
Don’t knock apathy.
Sometimes apathy keeps you from running that extra step and catching the leading bullet right in the temple.
Sometimes apathy is the time out from the moral puzzles that plague us.
Sometimes apathy is as close to Jesus as you get.
This is the story of how apathy saved my life.
At least, that’s how you might see it.
I don’t.
I’m not sure you would call of it much of a life.
Sure, I had a heartbeat, a pulse, and was one more clockwork orange spewing carbon dioxide out and stealing my share of the oxygen.
But that was about it.
I was trapped in the paradox of wanting to die fervently and being absolutely petrified of taking my life.
The mind; what a flawless design.
I don’t really want to bore you with my sob story.
Dead brother, health problems, no future.
If you are the sum of all your parts, if everything is shitty, aren’t you just shit?
I hadn’t left my apartment in weeks.
I decided to walk to a local bagel and coffee shop.
I didn’t want either, but I had to leave behind the stale air of my little hamster cage.
The prisons we build for ourselves are made of choices and regrets, and I needed a fucking walk in the yard.
That’s when I saw him.
The Stranger.
Have you seen The Stranger?
Have you met him?
I should hope not.
He was sitting at one of the fading cast iron café tables outside, the sort where the aqua green is slowly giving away to rust and the ugly underneath.
Like us, exposed for long enough, that mask just withers.
I stopped abruptly.
He looked uncomfortably out of place.
Everyone should have been gawking at him.
No one seemed to notice him.
Black cowboy boots with red roosters adorning the sides.
Black slacks, white dress shirt, black tie, black gloves.
Black beard and black hair under wide-brimmed black hat.
I almost snickered until our gazes locked.
Black eyes.
Pure obsidian.
Before I could utter a word, he was in front of me.
I never saw him move.
He held me by the throat, raised me up, his arm growing longer, and longer, and longer, until I felt myself growing dizzy from the thin air and the staggering blue of the sky and mist of the clouds and the scorch of the sun and –
And I woke up.
A blackened, dim room with a single dingy light bulb trying desperately to stave off the dark, like the rest of us.
It was cramped and there were five of us, including me.
In the middle of the room was a transparent glass square, an ominous cage illuminated by what little light was shed here in this dark little corner of the universe.
A single vial of impossibly red liquid lay next to a syringe inside.
I felt a stinging, deadened pain in my right arm.
Before any of us could utter any protestations, The Stranger was among us, speaking, words coming from every corner of the room, his dark visage and image disappearing and reappearing next to each of us, whispering echoes.
“Have you seen The Stranger?
Have you met him?
You have now.
All of you are worthless and undeserving of life.
So I have taken it…
…from four you.
You have all been injected with a poison.
My blood.
Have you seen The Stranger?
Have you met him?
In one hour, it will kill you.
You will rot from the inside.
You will vomit organs.
You will spew blood from your eyes.
You will shit out bones.
You are undone.
Have you seen The Stranger?
Have you met him?
You should have lived differently.
I weigh value.
I do not find you wanting.
I find you repulsive.
And that is so much the worse.
You live by my blood, you die my blood.
And you can live again by it.
Have you seen The Stranger?
Have you met him?
There is enough of my blood in there to save one of you from the blight in your veins.
Inject less than the whole and suffer the same fate as the rest.
Only one of you will live.
Have you seen The Stranger?
Have you met him?
You have now.
And you need his blood.”
And then he was gone, though the whispers lingered in the shadows, taunting and mocking.
I smelled piss.
It wasn’t mine but it was hard to miss that acrid scent.
I watched as my four fellow prisoners wailed incoherently, begged, screamed, impotently threatened.
Hands smashed against unbreakable glass.
I slunk to the floor, sliding out of the last reach of the light, dropping my head in my hands.
My right arm felt like dead weight, the gangrenous limb that would spell out my doom.
Every shift in my weight brought a wave of nauseating pain.
I’d finally found it. That horrible place where the Y and X axis of bullshit finally meet and cross over.
The place where you’re just too fucking tired to be afraid any longer.
I gave up.
Fuck this nightmare game.
The other four set about desperately trying to get into the box.
Quick introductions were made.
John, the pill popping firefighter.
Erin, the sex worker whose kids had been removed by the state.
Alexa, the borderline with cuts adorning her wrist.
Evan, the teacher with the ever-wandering eye. Maybe worse.
At least, that’s what I read between the lines of their half-truths.
They searched for links, argued, pushed, worked together.
They tried to think it out like this was a shitty Dan Brown novel or some 16th chapter of a gore porn horror series that should have had the decency to end.
I don’t know if they ever noticed me, or if they had simply forgotten about me.
I didn’t want to be a part of the world. This one or that one.
I sat in my little corner and waited for my Armageddon.
There wasn’t anything worth fighting for.
That’s when John made a mistake.
And so did I, I suppose.
He ambled over in the darkness, his vacuous machismo ridiculously parading for all to see, even at the end.
I felt myself lifted by my hoodie to my feet, having hardly been able to make him out in the dark.
“And what’s your deal, fa…”
I hit him with a direct jab in his windpipe with my left.
John had at least 50 pounds on me.
But I died a long time ago, killed off by a world of John’s.
And I never said I was a good man.
Far from it.
I had nothing to live for, but plenty to kill for.
John kept choking, hands intermittently clutching his throat and grasping at nothing, trying to find a breath that wasn’t there.
Do you let the half dead animal twitch to death in the street, or do you snap its neck in mercy?
You snap its neck in anger when it’s a piece of shit.
And it takes one to know one.
I screamed, sounding somewhere between a feral hog and a banshee, as adrenaline willed a dying arm to aid me in twisting his neck and putting him down for good.
At least there would be quiet.
I felt dizzy, woozy from the pain, and toppled over.
Somewhere in the deep dark, screams and shrieks.
“Fuck em,” I thought.
I had spent a life putting poison in my body, dooming myself, and I could feel The Stranger’s moving ever closer to my heart.
As the adrenaline wore off, I was beset with agony, the whole of my right side alight with pain.
Suddenly, silence.
“Look.”
Eric whispered and I saw what they were all staring at.
One of the walls of the square had begun to shatter.
In unison, the three begin frantically smashing the weakened glass wall to no avail.
John’s corpse lay inches from me.
I couldn’t tell if the piss was fresh from the kill, or if he’d been the one to wet himself from the get-go.
A chuckle left my lips.
I felt a bit of joy at either revelation.
And then he was there again.
Black hair, black wide brimmed hat, black eyes.
Have you seen The Stranger?
Have you met him?
Next to each of us, gone, reappearing.
Have you seen The Stranger?
Have you met him?
You have now.
“We…we have to kill each other to get into the box.”
Alexa whispered what we all knew.
“Ya think?” I muttered. “There’s only enough for one of us, anyway.”
Alexa ran her hand along the glass. “Maybe we could find a way to share it. Maybe we could…”
Evan began strangling her from behind.
Erica screamed, clawed, struck.
Nothing cleaved his desperation. She begged me to save her.
I wasn’t in the saving business.
Evan screamed like a boxer who finally TKO’d his better in the title bout. A bit much for a worm who’d snaked a girl half his size from behind.
There was a distinctive sound of glass slowly breaking.
The wall began to shatter even more.
Shards flew out, clunking along the hard, sightless floor.
Evan and Erica tried to smash through the square, sliced their fingers trying to reach through the small, oddly shaped holes where the glass had sprayed outward.
I dropped my head and my eyes back into my arms and knees and just waited.
Have you seen The Stranger?
Have you met him?
I could hear him, feel him, smell him, like sewage and lilacs and rotten milk and fresh cut grass, zipping around the room.
I heard the incoherent wails as Erica and Evan jostled and tumbled, a single ball of visceral flesh in the dim light.
Then there were no more words.
Just the sound of squishing and squelching.
Over and over and over.
I felt drops of wetness sprinkle over me.
Even in the pale of the tiny light, I could see Erica standing, like Carrie soaked in pig’s blood, a single thin shard of glass of held tightly in her left hand, slicing and drawing fresh blood to mix with the stew of the others’.
And he was there.
He was everywhere.
The Stranger gingerly ran a gloved black gloved hand across Erica’s cheek.
I felt him tussle my hair.
We heard his condescending laugh, his echoing whispers.
Have you seen The Stranger?
Have you met him?
“You have now.
And you need his blood.
Oh, you need his blood.”
And he was gone.
The glass square exploded, sending shards flying in every direction, slicing and dicing as they want.
Light exploded in the room, filling every corner.
Erica, dripping blood, slipping in the pools of it, tripping over bodies, picked up the vial and syringe.
She filled used the needle to fill the syringe with the furiously red liquid.
“We…could split it. I only killed him because I had to.”
I slowly lifted my head from my arms, still sitting in my little corner, my feet resting on John’s head and milky white eyes.
“Whatever you need to tell yourself. I didn’t. I don’t want to live. This is probably some fuckin’ bullshit lesson in fighting for your life, appreciating it. Take it. I’m good to go.”
Erica paused, looking at me, torn.
She was a good person. Probably.
I mustered a look of phony compassion and sincerity.
“Do it, please. Save yourself. Let me do one thing before I go.”
Truth is, I didn’t give a rat’s hairy ass about doing any good. I was just tired and wanted to clock out.
She stuck the syringe in her right arm and plunged, shooting the red into her veins.
“The end,” I thought, ready to get some fuckin’ peace.
Erica dropped dead instantly.
And there he was.
No zooming, no echoing whispers. Just a stride and a booming, decrepit voice.
The Stranger removed that wide brimmed black hat and knelt beside me, lifting my chin so my eyes could meet the darkness of his.
Have you seen The Stranger?
Have you met him?
“You have now.
And you need his blood.
…But that ain’t it.”
A grin broke out across his visage, his teeth now mangled and elongated and yellowed.
“Ain’t nothing in ya, nothin’ wrong with ya.
Just stuck your arm hard with a knife some.
And that vial is poison, ya wretch.
Ya just need my blood to leave this place. To go from one Hell to another.”
I felt panic and bile rise up in me, jockeying for position.
“What the fucking fuckin?” I whined in a strained whisper.
“This ain’t no lesson. No fuckin’ morality tale. This is sadism and entertainment and punishment.
Ya wasted life, all of ya. You’re a horrible mirror and you make me want to puke. The reward for entertaining me a little is the exit it door. The reward for not…well…”
His mouth opened about a foot wide, a cavern of sharpened incisors, and blood and bile and blackness shot out, soaking me, drowning me, suffocating me.
And suddenly, I was sitting at the coffee and bagel shop.
What a horrible nightmare, I thought, until the dull pain in my right arm, barely tangible, snapped me back to the reality of it all.
And I heard a barely audible whisper.
Have you seen The Stranger?
Have you met him?
I looked at my hand.
There was a small red tattoo of a rooster and the word “John.”
I began to cry.