Dances with Death

I remember very little else of that particular day. Apparently, after lying in the middle of the road for several minutes, not breathing, I got up, dusted myself off and walked calmly away as if nothing had happened. Then I went and I sat on my rock in the middle of my own personal wilderness. I know this because Stephanie followed me there. Usually, I would have objected to this blatant intrusion upon my personal space. But dying gives you a different perspective on the word ‘personal’. Indeed, it gives a different perspective on the word ‘space’. She didn’t ask me how I had done what I did. I think she knew I didn’t know. She says we talked about music, and about Kurdt Cobain, who died before either of us was born, and is in some parts considered to have been a messiah, or even a god. One day I would like to raise him and ask him how he feels about that. That is, if he ever really died. Stephanie was ever a casualty of impossibly unrequitted love, as I know all too well. She loaned me one earpiece of her walkman and we watched the sun go down. That was all.

A few months passed, and with them I felt a growing fascination with death, how it worked, how it became. Not the sensation of pain that often accompanied it, and that those proffessed scholars of the ‘dark arts’ so frequently dedicate themselves to, but the death in its purest sense, transition. It fascinated me, and I yearned after the experience as a virgin craves a lover, and these desires infested both my waking thoughts and my dreams. These ideas would gradually amalgamate into a plan, and my mind, logical as ever, would reject it. They were crazy schemes, with consequences that would have been vast had I even had the nerve to carry them through. I talked the funnier ones over with my friends, and they laughed. But my ideas festered, grew, decayed, civillisations unto themselves within that piece of imperfect entropy that was my brain, and still no means to my end was found. The girl called Stephanie now counted herself among the select group of people who were my friends. She was the one who would provide my solution.

2013 again, and a few days before my sixteenth birthday. I remember this one very well.

Streetlamps cast husky neon shadows into the anonymous alleyway. Not far off, I could see All Saint’s belltower amongst tall autumnal trees. I waited, breathed deep and kicked a sodden leaf from the pavement.
“You’re late, Frank. I thought youen’ten’t going to show up at all.” It was Stephanie. It might have been the light, but I thought I saw apprehension in her eyes. I muttered an excuse, and asked her why I was here. She shrugged, and motioned to the shadows. There was another girl, one I had only seen a few times before. I think her name was Caroline, but it wasn’t important. A little shorter than Stephanie, her face was thickly daubed with white.
“You want to kill someone; she wants to be killed.” said Stephanie. I had never heard her sound so bitter.
“You want me to kill her?” I asked.
“No.”
Stephanie only wanted me to do one thing, and she knew I didn’t resent her that. She handed me the gun anyway.
The other girl, Caroline, or maybe Catherine, scowled at me from under purple painted eyelids. She wore a black hoodie with Myra Hindley’s face on the front of it. I’m still not sure why she wanted to die. It wasn’t my place to ask questions. I hesitated.
“I fucking hate you all.” she said. She smiled. Those were fitting last words. No poem. No expression of melancholy, no crap about love. Just rage. Like she wanted.
She nodded. I raised the gun. I pulled the trigger. I made a neat hole in the centre of her forehead, spraying her brains onto the wall behind her. She died. I knew that I was right.

Next day, the news of her suicide was in the papers. They blamed her music, and her heroin addiction, and so we all blamed musicians and heroin dealers. Who are we to argue with the papers? They tell us everything that they need us to believe, everyone they need us to hate.

(With the advent of the third world war, there was no free press. Even the underground was controlled by the government; though they denied it, we knew. Would you believe me if I told you that censorship is now the biggest multinational business in the civillised world next to arms dealing? Everything has to be checked for hidden messages, after the the sleeper cells that the Geraldsen regime left behind they can’t afford to let another California happen. When I was fifteen, all the people I knew were fanatics or extremists of one sort or another. There was no middle ground any more, and if you wanted it, then you had to build a boat. A lava-proof boat.)

I saw clearer then than ever what my purpose was to be, though there was no word for it as yet. I became sixteen. Winter came. I walked with Stephanie along the ow pow path between the tall conifer trees and the wrought iron fence around the mental asylum to the sound of gently fading screams. It was snowing, and the stuff just coated the ground, like in the films. No-one had trodden in it before us, and we stopped there and then and watched the sunset, pink and gold like the dying ashes of firmament. I knew Stephanie felt that it was romantic. I admired its beauty and wondered if there was a god, and why, saying nothing. She had a puzzled, calculating look on her face for some time before she spoke.
“Frank?”
I looked at her, pushed a bit of hair from my face, about to speak.
“Don’t say anything, Frankie. Just listen.”
I paused, nodded.
“I want you to put your arm around my shoulder, I want to put my arms around your waist, and I want to put my head against your chest, and I want to walk with you down the street like that, in the snow, into the sunset. Do you understand?”
“I understand.” I said. And we did.

That night I had a dream.