Anthology Complex (11 page)

I ask her why then does she seem so friendly with her sister. She says
that while she thinks her sister may have betrayed her, she can't be certain of
that. She says that Silvio may just be forcing these things out of her. Lynne
has quite a story, but then again everyone has a story to tell, everyone's a
writer. Some more than others, some less.

Chapter 22:

ALL MEN ARE DESTROYED EQUALLY

There are some hospitals that have no room thirteen. People are just as
afraid of superstition as they are their diseases or conditions. Some people
are anyway. I'm sitting next to Joe and I'm reading him a dream from one of my
composition notebooks.

In the dream, Jesus and I are in the middle of an ocean and we are
fishing and talking about religion. I ask Jesus if he thinks that the world
would be better without any religion at all, and he says to me that while the
intentions of most religions are good, when these intentions are mixed with
human instincts there is a chance that they may become corrupt.

He says that one's individual pursuit for truth is much better than a
group's pursuit for truth. That we must each find our own kind of wisdom by
ourselves. He says that when one person is bombarded with so much information
and knowledge by another person or by a group of people, that they will become
radicalized if they believe what they hear too quickly.

He says if the seed that is planted in their heart grows too quickly,
they will give no thought to what has been preached to them. They become
obsessed with their new lifestyle and their new ways of thinking without
questioning it; they genuinely believe their eyes have been opened and that
they have found their purpose.

Sooner or later they try to force these ways onto others because it is
righteous, but certain ways of thinking is only meant for certain types of
people. He says that when someone finds their own religion by themselves, that
they will then be able to grow properly.

Jesus then goes on to tell me a story about a society who finds a young
boy who is about to die on the street. They bring him to a hospital to keep him
alive, but they can't find out who his parents are or come into contact with
anyone who knows him. After days of searching, it is apparent that there is no
one to be found, and that the boy would be brain-dead even if he did wake up.

After much thought and debate, the society decides that his life is no
longer worth anything, so they begin to remove some of his organs to donate it
to people who still have a chance for a life. They take a kidney. They take
part of his liver. They take some bone marrow. The child has become a great
resource and an answer to those in despair.

Some people in the society become angry and begin to threaten the
hospital. They say that such a thing is wrong. Doctors are murdered. Nurses are
murdered. Eventually the boy is murdered by one of the angry people to stop the
hospital from degrading his existence to nothing.

Then Jesus looks at me and he says that sometimes it might be better to
just not believe in anything. Jesus tells me that wherever I may travel, not to
become a product of the environment, but to impose my own influence on the
people of that place to create the environment.

I'm in mid-sentence and someone walks into the room. I look up, and I
see a woman, maybe in her sixties, and she's just staring at me. She excuses
herself and starts to walk out but I get up and ask her if she is Joe's mother.
She says yes, and I tell her that he's been waiting for her. I tell her that I
would leave but she asks me to stay, she says that it has been so long since
she's seen him.

Later on I learn that twelve years ago Joe was disowned by her and his
father because Joe was gay. A homosexual. She says that she didn't want to do
it, that she wanted to accept him, but his father was so hellbent on the
subject that she didn't have a say. I guess the disowning played a big part in
Joe's life and had a negative effect on his relationships with others. Maybe
that's why no one ever visits him. He tells me he would spend a night with Anna
Briol Walkhill but he's just lying so I don't think any less of him.

His father recently passed away and his mother finally found the courage
to come see him. She says that she would have done it whether his father was
alive or not. That she was tired of not being able to see her own son. Before I
leave, for some reason she gives me her phone number and address and then asks
for mine. I don't get people sometimes.

Who is Joe? Does someone's sexual preference tell you who they are? Some
men are killed because of the fact that they can fall in love with another man,
and when someone is killing someone else, they usually kill that person because
that person is associated with something that identifies them.

When a soldier kills another soldier, it's not because they know each
other. It's because the other one looks different. Talks a different way. Is a
different race. Has a different uniform. If someone murdered Joe because he was
a homosexual, that person is murdering him because he thinks he knows who Joe
is, when really a person's sexual preference doesn't tell you who that person
is. It's just as useless as the way someone looks or the way someone talks.
Difference is murder.

I'm thinking about Joe, and the thought that runs through my mind is
that homosexuality may be literally wrong, in the sense that one plus one
equals three is wrong, but homosexuality is not morally wrong, in the sense
that murdering another human being is wrong.

However, many people will say that that the normalization of
homosexuality opens the door to the normalization of incest, bestiality and the
many other lifestyles we have yet to conceive.

Chapter 23:

THE CITY OF ANGELS

The anthology complex. It's a disease. A psychological build-up of
fiction. I have to know that there is a better life out there than this one.
There are people who write down their dreams, it's nothing unusual, but the
degree to which I have taken it has been from a habit to a lifestyle. An
obsession and an addiction. These are the words of a therapist I was suggested
to see many years ago. "I did what I could." Those are the last words
of a dying writer.

Years ago I had a dream where I was in an apartment on a very tall
building. I was on the balcony overlooking an entire city. If you looked down
from it you could see all the people below you, they looked like ants. A plane
flies by and it has one of those advertisement banners attached to it.
"Welcome to the city of angels." Los Angeles.

I go back into the apartment and on my bed there is a shotgun there
waiting for me. Just like most of us have a dominant hand or a dominant foot,
we have a dominant eye, and in the Bible it says if your right hand causes you
to sin, cut it off, if your right eye causes you to sin, gouge it out. My
question is what if your entire life is dominantly evil.

I'm sitting on the edge of the bed with the shotgun pressed against my
chin. My right hand starts to shake. Do it. Just kill yourself. It starts to
shake even more and the shotgun is slowly rising up on a surface it calls home,
my face. Pull the trigger. Just do it.

I see my mother's face and for a second I am aware that I am dreaming,
but as soon as I realize this the shotgun slips and goes off at a weird angle,
and then it's just darkness and silence.

Lots of times after we wake up from dreaming we may remember more than
one dream, as if there were two or more parts to the dream, and these dreams
were connected by an intermission, even though they don't always relate. A
black silence. This is what the silence and the darkness felt like, then later
I found myself still alive laying on the cold floor of a hospital building with
my entire lower face missing. I'm in so much pain but I can't yell because I
have no mouth. I guess I'll be doing alot more thinking than talking now.

The pain becomes unbearable and just when I think I'm screwed, I see
that same shotgun laying there a few yards away from me. I crawl to it and I
press the shotgun against bleeding flesh and bone and I pull the trigger in
attempt to finish the job and and find salvation from this pain, but nothing
happens. I can't die. Then again I don't think any of us ever really die.

If the mind is separate from the body, then perhaps even after the body
has died and withered away the mind continues to live on.

Despite the fact that I didn't die the second time around, the pain is
gone now. There is no added damage from the second firing but the damage from
the first firing is still there, and I'm bleeding all over this cold floor. As
I run to find a bandage of some sort, pieces of flesh hit the ground. Meat hits
the ground. I find a room with bandages and I wrap my entire face to conceal
this entire night, and then the black silence returns.

Now I'm sitting in a car looking through my windshield and I see two
people arguing across the street. I sit there and think about why I couldn't
kill myself, why I couldn't die. I ponder if I'm actually still alive.

The thing about being a free thinker, or an "enlightened
individual" is that in the process of becoming these things you may either
succeed in finding wisdom or the wisdom you seek will cause you to have a
mental breakdown.

I'd like to believe that's the sole reason why parents or society don't
approve of those who do not want to conform because such a path of isolation
causes one to be different, and difference is murder. This isolation causes the
individual to think and he or she becomes aware of the world around them. Truly
aware.

This awareness, or this truth, it can become so overwhelming and while
certain people will be able to absorb it, there will be those who cannot, and
those people who cannot, they realize that the road not taken is not taken for
a reason. They realize why so many people conform to its society and abide by
its standards.

One of the two figures is completely shadowed in darkness, and the other
seems as if it has a white light casted on it. After a while the dark figure
withdraws a gun and points it at the light figure. I look down at the other
seat for my shotgun but it's not there. When I look back up the two figures are
now completely visible, two ordinary men arguing but the argument has escalated
to what could become murder. I get out of my car and walk towards the two men
hoping I can make things okay.

Fear is what keeps many of us from living the lives we want to live, so
when fear is no longer an obstacle, what becomes of a person? His or her true
self? The only thing that would have kept me from walking towards the men is
the fear of losing my life, but right now I'm almost sure that none of us ever
really die, so I walk up to the man and stare at him. I try to speak but I
can't.

He looks at me and asks me what I want. That him and his pal here are
ready to settle this dispute on their own terms. I continue to stare at him and
I try my hardest to mutter any words I can, but I still can't speak.

He tells me to take off my bandage and talk or to get the hell out of
there. I walk up to him and try to take his gun but he shoots me twice in the
center of the chest. This man knows that the heart is not located on the left
side of your chest.

I fall to the ground backwards, but I don't feel anything. I look down
to where there should have been two bullet wounds but there are no wounds. The
other man, the one who was once casted in white light, he stands there and
starts to laugh. The man with the gun becomes angry and begins to shoot at me
again even though I've already fallen to the ground. Even though I'm completely
helpless.

Eventually he runs out of ammunition. The man with the gun walks closer
to me and stands over my body, and he sees that I am still alive. He is in
disbelief. The man who is laughing stops laughing and also comes closer to me,
and then he kneels down to whisper something in my ear. He tells me that the
Lord has spoken.