Anthology Complex (10 page)

A performer who was a king in one scene could be a peasant in another.
Theater masks, or drama masks, are often associated with the genre of drama,
where the happy-looking mask represents comedy and the sad-looking mask
represents tragedy. Everyone has heard of the philosophy that in order to know
happiness one must know sadness.

There is a theory that in order for you to be happy, someone else in the
world has to be sad. Perhaps these are to keep a sort of balance in the world,
to be able to co-exist.

After he puts on his mask he is about to get out of the car but I tell
him to sit down. I tell him that if we want to get the mayor on corruption as
well, we will need to find out about him by watching one of his closest
friends, this law enforcement officer. Then when we have him, he will know who
we are.

We will show him our faces so that he can associate these faces with the
people who killed him. For the few seconds he would have to live anyway. This
hate gene that turns on will make us prone to the murder disease.

Chapter 20:

"PROSTITUTE'S FOOT AMPUTATED"

Last night, I had a nightmare. In and out, back and forth, up and down.
There are moments when I wish this prostitute was my spouse so I didn't have to
pay her for sex. After we're done, she gets up and starts to put on her clothes
and I ask her where she's going.

She tells me she has other customers to tend to. I tell her that I'll
pay her double what I owe her if she just stays to keep me company. If she left
me, my loneliness gene would turn on and I would be prone to the suicide
disease.

She agrees to stay and I tell her to lay down next to me. We lay there
silently for about ten minutes, and then I get up to go use the bathroom. In
the toilet I see a phone floating there. On my way back to her I see that she
has fallen asleep, so I go to my coat and I take out this syringe. I have no
idea what this liquid is but I inject it into her upper left leg. After some
time passes, I feel for a pulse on her neck and there is none. No signs of
life.

I look over her naked body, this work of art. The body part I give the
most attention to is her left foot. I reach out to touch it, it's warm. I slide
my hand across it. I do it again and again until it becomes cold, and then I
take out a less than normal-sized axe from under the bed and I cleanly chop it
off. The blood is minimal.

I go to place the foot in my freezer but before I could do so I hear a
knocking at my door. I pause for a moment, and then the knocking becomes louder
and the man begins to yell, but I can't understand what he's saying. All I can
really think about is how I have a more than visible woman laying in my bed who
is lifeless and is missing a body part.

I look back into the room from the kitchen, and I see her. This woman
laying on my bed, bleeding from her ankle. The knocking and shouting get even
louder and now I can hear my heart beating. And then I wake up.

Of course this dream reminds me of the night Lynne fell asleep at my
apartment and I laid her to rest. It reminds me about how I touched her plastic
foot. This dream almost makes me ashamed because it makes me feel like I have
this mutated or abnormal version of admiration for Lynne. Dare I say love,
because in my life I'm not sure if I've ever loved anything.

The only real conclusion I could come to for the meaning of this dream
is that I am trying to recreate Lynne by turning other women into her, maybe
because I've never met a lady like herself.

Either that, or I'm subconsciously fixated on her fake foot, but now
that I think about it, I'm not sure how far her amputation went. It could be
her foot, her whole lower leg or her entire leg. But the only part of her leg
that I've ever been able to touch was her foot. However I'm almost certain that
it is not her entire leg because her limp would be much more obvious if it
were.

I'd also like to think that the man knocking and shouting at the door is
my subconscious telling me that this isn't right. That it's not normal, so
please wake up. People have said that the other people in our dreams are simply
other versions of ourselves.

This dream also makes me wonder how difficult it is to get away with
murder. Most of the time the media makes it seem like c omitting a murder and
actually getting away with it is almost impossible, because of course most of
the stories we see or hear about end up with the criminal getting caught. How
many killers do we actually know personally? And if we do know one or more, we
are probably one ourselves. Probably not. But imagine you murder a random
person in a city you don't live in and there are no witnesses. Do you really
think you would get caught?

The first mistake in committing a murder is killing someone you know in
a place that you live without any real plan.

Obsessive-compulsive disorder comes in many different forms and can be
different depending on the person. Every once in a while I get a dream like
this and I become obsessed with it, constantly trying to interpret what it may
mean. Trying to understand what it is trying to tell me.

One time, a long time ago, I became obsessed with a dream where I kept
taking out the trash but it would keep filling itself up, so I would have to
keep taking it out over and over again. Damn garbage bags. Sometimes it even
gets to the point where I am so obsessed that fiction becomes reality. One face
becomes two and the lie becomes true.

Composition 1, Part 3

Chapter 21:

DEEP SHADES

Two nights ago I had a nightmare about murdering a prostitute. Last
night I had a nightmare about a woman's foot being victim to flesh eating bacteria.
The bacteria kept eating away at her leg and then eventually the surgeons had
to amputate it.

This damn foot, I can't get my mind off of it. What's so appealing about
a foot? What's so appealing about this specific foot? It's not even real, it's
plastic. Man-made. I think what is really bothering me is that if I had lost a
foot of my own, I wouldn't know how to deal with it, but this woman has
actually lost hers and it doesn't even seem as if it has phased her.

After I wake up I start thinking, the surgeons in that dream remind me
of a dream I had God knows how long ago, where the surgeons say I was actually
dead for a little under a minute. God probably actually does know because that
may have been part of the series of dreams where I was judged by God, and maybe
he sent me back.

There are people who claim that they remember a past life, a life before
the life they have now. How many people actually believe them is a different
story.

Now there is a knock at my door, I can tell it's Lynne. I can tell
because I can hear Sarah and David talking loudly as if they were excited. Even
though I can't see them, I know. I open the door and it's the three of them
looking up at me. All but one are smiling. Sarah begins to yell, asking me if
I'm ready to plant stuff. Lynne says they could use another hand. David, he
just stands there.

The next thing I know I'm outside and Lynne is teaching me how to give
life. Sarah was helping also, but she was getting herself too dirty so her
mother told her to go play with David. David who is riding his bike around the
parking lot proclaiming that flowers are for girls. The indirect insult kind of
makes me feel feminine. I never liked flowers anyway.

It's just me and Lynne giving life now, and she's going on and on about
how a rose's color has meaning and some kind of symbolization to it. She's so
excited about it that I have to let her go on. To see her face light up, all I
can do is admire her.

For someone who has lost a part of who they are, it seems like she has
become even more of a person. Of course I didn't know her before she lost her
foot, but she really is something now. She has a reason to be angry but she's
not, I have no reason to be angry but I am.

Now she is on the color yellow. Her color. The color I first saw her in.
She tells me that a yellow rose represents true friendship. Happiness. If I
could grow a yellow rose maybe I would give it to her, but chances are what
should have been a yellow rose would come up a black rose.

I sit here planting these lilies with her on the shaded side of the
building. The dark side of the building, and all I can really think about is
how my feelings for her are abnormal. Mutated. Black. Dark. These words and
words like them. When these lilies begin to grow I can only picture what should
be white being black.

I am in deep thought and she is trying to ask me a question but I'm not
responding. She looks at me and gives me a shove and I snap out of it, and I
ask her what she was saying. Apparently she was telling me about a dream she
had last night, and then she asked me what things I dream about? I ask her what
she means, because people don't really have a certain theme to their dreams.

Then she says of course people do, she starts to talk about how she
always has this dream where she is in a field of apple trees and she is looking
for an apple to eat, but the ones she comes across always have dirt on them, so
she never ends up eating any of the apples and throughout the dream she becomes
hungrier and hungrier until she wakes up.

She tells me that she is always having dreams like that, where what she's
looking for is right in front of her but it is wrong in some way.

I start to tell her about the dreams I have where I'm talking to Satan,
and I tell her about how normal he looks. I go on and on until I realize that
she is a little bit weirded out that I dream about the Devil. Then she starts
to tell me about how when she dreams, she still has both of her lower legs.

This makes me think about all of the blind and deaf people in the world.
All of the people who are born blind or born deaf. It makes me wonder what
their dreams are like. I could only imagine. Some of them can see but they
can't hear, and some of then can hear but they can't see.

After a little while of her talking about her leg, I ask her how it
happened if she didn't mind telling me. She looks at me and tells me it was a
tumor, and then starts laughing. Why is she laughing? She's laughing because
having cancer in your foot is such a stupid thing to have, let alone lose a
foot over. These are her words.

She says her foot started hurting but she didn't think it was anything
to worry about. Then she felt a small bump, but for some reason she doesn't
think anything of it. The bump gets bigger and then she finally has it checked
out. It's cancer. She thinks to herself, "Who has cancer in their
foot?" What are the chances that something like this would happen to her?
Is it fate?

So she had to get her foot amputated and have a fake one replace her old
one. The entire time she was resting in the hospital, she says Silvio, her then
husband, only visited her once. She thought that he felt like she wasn't pretty
anymore. That he couldn't have a cripple for a wife. Here is a woman who needs
just that one person but they aren't there, and then here is my father who has
everyone there for him but he doesn't want anyone.

After she got out she confronted him and it was obvious that he was
seeing someone else, so she filed for divorce. She always suspected that Claire
was the mistress, but she never had any proof.

Her suspicions grew even more a little while ago when Silvio found her
in the hotel and gave her a beating. The only person who knew where she was
staying was Claire. She says that the reason she moved to this town was to get
away from him, but somehow he found out where she moved to, and he came
looking. Again, she thinks Claire was the one who told him.

At first I find the situation a little strange, for two sisters to be
involved with the same man, but then again the world is a strange place. This
strangeness is what ultimately gets me to seek solitude.