Anthology Complex (9 page)

As I get closer and closer, the yellow police tape becomes more visible,
and then finally someone tells me that someone was murdered. Shot down. This
city gets more than its fair share of homicides, but I'm starting to believe
that death will never get old. No matter how many times you see a lifeless
body, it makes you think.

I'm standing there looking at the man's face, at least they didn't mess
with that. Then I start to think of Joe, how even though Joe isn't dead like
this man, they both look the same. Their faces are so still. Expressionless,
emotionless. Sometimes as a child when my mother would make my father sleep in
the living room, I would walk by and watch him as he slept, and it always
scared me because he looked so dead. In some dark twisted way, how he looked
when he slept was exactly how he looked at his funeral to me.

There was a time in my late teenage years where all I could do was think
about death, but I think we all go through that phase some point in our lives
and it hits us hard because it's such a hard thing to understand. What is
death? The obsession with death ate away at my mind, and it wasn't because I
didn't know what happened after it, it was because I knew it would have to
happen someday, and I didn't know when.

I can't say that I've accepted death, but I am not terrified of it
anymore because as we all know there isn't really anything we can do to prevent
it. In ways birth is the same as death, but because our mind is in a fixed
position on life, I don't think we can ever perceive that as what it really
means. This damn fisheye view. It probably takes someone until their late
teenage years to question life and death, but I'm sure it takes everyone a
lifetime to accept death itself.

I get to the front of my apartment building and I look at the flowers
Lynne is planting, and they are starting to die. Today I am surrounded by death
it seems. They are turning brown and look shriveled up. Now that I think about
it, I hadn't seen Lynne since that night she came to my apartment.

As I'm about to open the front door I notice Claire's car in my parking
spot. I guess she's over for dinner. As I'm walking to my apartment door I hear
talking and knocking, and eventually I see Claire and some man standing in
front of Lynne's door. It kind of looks like that man who was here before, the
man who was banging on Lynne's door and disturbing everyone in the building.
Her ex-husband. But I can't be entirely sure. I nod at Claire and she nods
back, and then asks me if I've seen Lynne.

I tell her I haven't seen her in days, and I ask if Lynne is missing?
Misused question mark. As I'm asking this question frames of that dream pass
through my thoughts. Billboard, have you seen Maria?

Claire tells me that Lynne is fine, she tells me that she was suppose to
meet Lynne today to talk but she hasn't been answering her phone all morning
and she doesn't appear to be home. As her and the man are walking by to leave
the building the man tells me to let them know if I see Lynne, and then he
gives me a dirty look as if he is trying to turn that favor into a demand.

After they leave I open my door and I go fill the fridge with my
groceries. The damn garbage can is full, so I go outside to throw it out. As
I'm walking I notice Claire's car is gone, and in the corner of my eye I see
Lynne's window curtains move, as if someone was checking to see if they had left.
Someone is home.

I'm walking back to my apartment door and as I'm about to open it, I
instead decide to go see if Lynne is actually home, to see if anything is
wrong. I knock, and then I say it's me, I say my name, and she opens the door.
I jokingly ask her why she's been avoiding me and she begins to laugh, and
those bruises on the side of her face seem as if they were gone. I would kill
to see that laugh.

I ask her if that was her husband, and she says it was her ex-husband.
She goes on to tell me that she thinks her sister is seeing her ex-husband and
about how much she hates them both. This damn hate gene.

I ask her why she didn't just open the door and talk with them about it,
and she says because Claire would never realize that Silvio was using Claire to
get back at Lynne for taking the kids away from Silvio. She calls Silvio an
Hispanic bastard.

These adults now sound like they are going through typical high school
bullshit. She also adds that she doesn't trust Silvio's temper.

Then Lynne tells me that she knows that Silvio found her last time
because Claire told her where Lynne was staying, and that this was the reason
why she hated and suspected her sister. Lynne's face is so red that I decide I
have to change the subject, and I tell her that her plants are dying. She looks
at me confused, then the redness goes away. She walks into the other room and
then a few seconds later she walks back out and hands me something. A packet of
seeds.

She tells me that she made the mistake of trying to plant zinnias where
there isn't much sunlight. That zinnias can't survive in a shade garden. Since
there was no other place to plant anything she was instead going to plant Peace
Lilies. She tells me that Peace Lilies flourish in the shade. She's finally smiling
again. This happy gene.

Not too long after I hear a knock on my door, and I go see who it is.
I'm hoping it's not the return of Claire and Silvio. I look down the hallway
and I see a police officer and I inform him that I'm the one who lives at that
door.

The officer asks both Lynne and I if we saw or heard anything strange
last night or this morning, and we both say no. Lynne asks why and the officer
tells her that there had been a murder not too far from here. The murder that I
walked past.

The officer tells us that before the man was murdered, several tenants
from other apartment buildings said he knocked on their door and asked strange
questions and looked as if he were confused. As if he didn't know what was
going on and he had no real connection to the world outside of his mind. As if
he were unaware of his actions.

The officer asks if either of us received a visit from a man like that
and we both said no, and then went on to ask others in the building and then he
left.

Two nights ago I had a dream where I was digging a grave. At first I'm
standing in front of my mother and my father's tombstones, and then I'm
standing in the grave digging deeper and deeper not realizing I won't be able
to get out. I'm looking for my mother and father but no matter how deep I dig I
can't find them. It's funny how I say "them" instead of "the
bodies." When a boy is alive and well, you'll call him Jason, but when
he's dead and his body is lifeless, most people refer to him as "the body."
Where's the body? Bring me the body.

Not where's Jason, not bring me Jason. I think most of the times the
people who knew Jason would keep calling him Jason because they don't want to
realize his life is gone and all that's left is his body. The human psyche at
work.

I keep digging and digging but all I can see in my mind is Abraham
Lincoln's face and what I think is his voice. "We can never fool all of
the people all of the time." I look up to see if Lincoln is above me,
speaking down to me, but he isn't there. Just a voice in my head.

When I look back down to start digging again, I see that woman, and she
is laying face down. That damn woman that haunts my dreams. That damn woman who
won't tell me who she is. I start to turn her body, and before me I see a woman
who resembles my mother.

After I wake up I try to figure out what it means but all I can really
come up with is that the dream when I'm in the utopia and this dream mean
something, that they're connected at least in my mind. If the woman laying in
that bed in the utopia that I am leaving is my mother as well, then maybe what
I'm hoping for subconsciously is that my mother is in a better place now. In a
peaceful place. Or maybe that I'm willing to switch places with her if she
isn't.

Before my father died my mother committed suicide. I believe she killed
herself because she felt as if she was born in the wrong time period or the
wrong parallel universe. She didn't say it but I know she hated most of the
people she met. She hated them because she hated people in general, she hated human
tendencies and their lifestyles. Misanthropy.

She hated the imbalance in the world, and she hated the people who
didn't care about it even more. Her hate grew so much that it eventually
consumed her and took away her life, literally and metaphorically.

The one thing I could never understand was how she loved my father. How
can you hate so many people and find room in your heart for this one person.
Now my father wasn't a bad man, but he wasn't that great either. He didn't beat
my mother, not with his fists at least, but in a way he did hit her. He ignored
her, and he didn't care how obvious it was that his work was more important to
him than his wife and his family. Somehow she found the strength to stay with
him until she died.

After she died, my father realized how much he ignored her. How
worthless he made her feel. His guilt turned into physical body complications
and then he eventually died. In a way they kind of killed each other, but only
in kind of a way.

I remember when Maria thought I needed help, that I needed to go see a
psychiatrist or a therapist or something like that. I saw her point, my mind
was out there, so I decided to humor her and go see one.

The problem with that was that the medication they were giving me was
messing with my memory, and in turn, I couldn't remember my dreams no matter
how hard I tried. For two months, it was as if I had no dreams. I couldn't live
like that. I wouldn't live like that.

Chapter 19:

THE MURDER DISEASE

Few things are worse than the bad person who pretends to be good. The
person in charge of a charity fund who every once in a while steals from the
funds, the law enforcement officer who takes unusual advantage of his position
among civilians, the politician who sanctions the murder of thousands of people
for his own gain. These people make the common criminal who does not hide in
plain sight respectable.

In a dream I had not too long ago I am sitting in a car waiting for
someone. Time goes by and then the passenger's door opens and my partner sits
down. He has food so we start to eat, and then after a while he asks me why I
do this.

Later on in the dream I find out that we were sitting in a parked car
because we were waiting for this corrupt law enforcement officer to come home.
I tell my partner that I don't do these things so much because I love the
innocent, but because I hate the wicked. I tell him that there is more hate in
my heart than there is love.

What makes a person more hateful than loving? Is there a mathematical
formula? Is it environmental influence? Is it simply biology? Maybe each person
at one point in their life is ultimately defined by a dominant emotion. Maybe
there is one emotion for each of us that will develop who we are. If at that
point you are always feeling angry, you will start to develop this angry
persona along with all the emotions and feelings that can be branched from it,
emotions like hatred and feelings like contemptment. This is you turning on
your anger gene, your hate gene.

Or maybe at that point you are always feeling peaceful and you start to
develop this persona that is always patient and loving. This mind that turns on
the kindness gene, the love gene. This hatred that I feel asks for peace, for
balance in a world that seems to be run by evil people. Balance has become such
a large portion of my psychology that when I stub my toe, I have to stub the
other so that they both feel pain.

Suddenly my partner puts on his sad theater mask, and I look out the
windshield and I see the law enforcement officer walking into his home. In the
theater of ancient Greece a comedy had a happy ending and a tragedy had a sad
ending. Performers often wore masks to conceal their identity so that the
audience didn't associate a specific character with a specific role. That
fisheye view.