Darkness

PESSIMISM

As a child he had felt the darkness inside him though it wasn’t until years later he fully understood it. Stirring fitfully at first, and then awakening into a sluggish shapeless sentience, it was a Darkness so black that it extinguished all light, fed on all hope, and turned the most ethereal dreams into fuel for an even Greater Darkness. Such an absolute absence of light made a mockery of any thoughts of deliverance from the black burden that was his terrible birthright.

Throughout his youth, Martin Fisher struggled to understand...struggled to learn. And, with time, learn he did. As a teenager he shunned the casual and mindless joys of his peers. He sought no friends for he felt certain how it would end…like all things seemed to invariably end…badly. Desire, he knew, was in particular a snare of The Black; and he struggled to avoid romantic liaisons, avoiding all contact with women lest he yield to flesh and pleasure and Hope. Hope was the door the Blackness always lurked behind. A Darkness Unassailable, in an armor of logic and futility; it drove him to shun all ambition of any kind instinctively knowing that all aspirations would end…badly. He lived with the austere simplicity of a saint. Anything more would be a mad invitation to the Darkness waiting to pounce without warning, pounce, rend and tear, and make a ghastly mockery, a debauched graveyard, of every hope. Friends were too transitory to be bothered with. They too could invite the Blackness in and hasten the inevitability of its victory. He knew this and he knew he dared not try…for there was always the Voice, thin and hateful, that whispered in his head: Try to go against me, just try…it will all end…badly. He felt the dangling Black Sword overhead and knew it destined to fall…but when?

On a quiet morning of muted irony the Blade did finally fall. No man can live entirely free of the small casual joys that make life bearable; and the particular joy he sought on that day was such a small one, so slight in the scheme of things, he felt it would escape the Black’s ravenous appetite for destruction. In the end, he was betrayed by the one harmless pleasure he had dared allow himself.

It was a scenic walk along the edge of the park's manicured green grounds to the small coffee shop less than two blocks away; the oasis where, for years, he had occasionally enjoyed an excellent macchiato in the comforting atmosphere of that genteel place. For years, and for such a modest Pleasure, he had at times defied the Blackness! Inevitably, he feared, he would some day pay dearly for his disobedience, his terrible repeated acts of impudence. On these walks, his heart would race, his palms sweat, sometimes even his vision would blur from the fear that crawled like spiders over his cold flesh.

It was a fine day, a rare day of peace and beauty announcing the arrival of spring with brilliant sunshine and gentle winds. On this day, he found himself standing behind two earnest and well-dressed men utterly consumed in conversation concerning matters he neither knew nor cared about. His appearance was shabby and unkempt by comparison to these two well-dressed businessmen but he was long past caring about such things. The party of three waited patiently on the corner, the two business men conversing about business deals and clients and documents demanding to be signed. He attempted to ignore their irritating chatter. His gaze was focused impatiently on the small shop ahead as he nervously waited for the light to change.

The Bad happened quickly. He heard a sound, rapidly increasing, of a car approaching at a high rate of speed. He heard a desperate shrieking of tires and saw a car careening wildly out of control— barely glimpsing the old man slumped over the steering wheel--and stood frozen in horror as the vehicle jumped the curb, launched into the two individuals in front of him and then, scooping him up, hurled him through the air like a violently discarded toy.

He couldn’t move but coherent thought was still possible, despite the fiery agony of limbs crushed and mangled. I have always been right, he thought, despite the shock and pain; the Black had always been there, patiently waiting for the right moment to descend in all its terrible Darkness. And he thought of a symphony, a symphony of nightmare and futility and the dark monstrous conductor of that symphony who was at last bringing it to an end. He heard the sirens of the police vehicles and the approaching ambulance but they brought no hope; for the Darkness inside had whispered one final word: Done. He would die here amidst a gathering crowd of gawking strangers. But in his final moments, he knew at last a satisfaction, a perverse satisfaction, that whispered he had lived his life wisely...and well. The darkness had never lied, he thought, Never. And now, in the brilliant sunlight, his broken body bleeding profusely and staining the dark pavement, he felt an unearthly peace.

It had ended badly as he had known it would. Martin Fisher, at the age of ninety-seven, died vindicated…and smiling.


THE ACCIDENT

This surprising and perhaps inevitable Accident (for such is the view of one of our fields most advanced and daring theorists, Dr. August W. Vinter) that resulted in the tragic death of Mr. Charles Trevor Deacon, a ninety-eight year old gentleman from the great state of Texas without any known living kin and a man previously in exceptional, even robust health for one of such advanced age, has drawn attention of such a grossly sensational nature, so far removed from the dispassionate, rigorously demanding analytical approach such an event should merit by the extreme elements of its composition, that a serious investigator may be forgiven for a playful perverseness in asking what exactly is sensational in the subsequent demise of so greatly aged a man after a fall; but putting aside macabre humor, as well as our exasperation at the distortions and wild conjectures of the media in general, we must confess that the Event itself was nothing if not extreme; extreme, even though some elements, such as the shocking condition of the body could be easily explained by the terrible susceptibility of greatly aged bones to so terrific an impact; but extreme, yes, certainly, though only sensationalism demands one to ascribe disproportionate importance to those broken words (uttered in a context we can only guess at) that appeared to be, according to many witnesses, fragments of a bizarre, perhaps delusional nature, hardly legitimate grounds for speculation on the terrible event itself no matter how indicative of an agitated state of mind on the part of Mr. Deacon; so I feel I speak for all of us when I say we can safely disregard phrases like "the stars themselves..." or "..their terrible malice...so unforgiving..." and finally, "Dear God I am lost to their vengeance..." and concentrate instead on the essential act, free of all embellished sensationalism, which reveals that during an avant-garde adaptation and performance of The 120 Days of Sodom at the beautiful cathedral-like Le Grande Theater, Mr. Charles Trevor Deacon leapt from his seat in a state of terrible excitation, muttering wildly and staggering into the aisle (as audience members looked on in shock and, later, horror) and fell precipitously to his death, an extraordinary tragedy indeed and one which Dr. Klein, one of the truly great minds in quantum physics today as well as our guest speaker tonight, will speak fully and at greater length, reminding us again of the fundamental Mystery of a Universe where God rolls the dice and there is always the possibility, no matter how staggeringly remote, that the water you are boiling over an open fire for your evening cup of tea during a pleasant woodsy excursion may simply freeze into a solid block of ice instead, defying all Reason and Probability even as Mr. Deacon did when he plunged fifty feet upward to be crushed against the ornate and cathedral-like ceiling of the magnificent Le Grande Theater during a performance of the Marquis de Sade's 120 Days of Sodom.