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The sane envy the freedom of the mad. I know that I’m the last person you want to talk to. But they asked me to come down. They thought I could persuade you to change your course of action. I know it’s a waste of time but I thought I’d try. I could never figure out what it was that I did to make me dead do you. Did I pick my nose? Where their holes in my clothes? Did I snore? I just can’t figure out what it was about me that repulsed you. I felt like I had a stain on my face that I could not see, that I could not cleanse, and because of that I could not hide it from you. You turned away from me the moment you turned for the worst. But I promised I’d try. Here’s what I want you to do. I want you to think about the opposite of existence. Nothing. Abyss. And fully ponder what that means. It means that there is nothing. No light. No dark. When you really try to do it, you’ll find it extremely hard to conceive. I’ve done it many times but I can’t say that I’ve ever been able to fully grasp the concept. We had a world in which the worst of the worst of humanity was executed. Then the 31st Amendment came along and the death penalty was abolished. A new horizon dawned. No matter what grotesqueries a person was capable of committing, our nation was far too civilized to put them to death. No one was so worthy or so detested as to deserve death at the hands of the body politic. There was the death penalty and now there isn’t. Lucky for you, I suppose. I never understood how people could commit such psychotic acts. I never understood how people could destroy things due to out some yearning void within them. You robbed a store and shot the clerk in the face. I never knew what you needed the money for. A jury gave you life without the possibility of parole. Not the decision you wanted. You even warned the judge that you’d kill until you got the sentence you felt you earned. Once in prison, you killed a guard. They sentenced you to death. We were the last state in the union with the firing squad as an execution method and you asked for it. But then the anti-death penalty groups lobbied enough states to get the amendment ratified. Thwarted again. So you put everything in the new system to the test. How bankrupt a soul do you have to be, you asked. Every society has its limits, you thought. Public safety demands the removal or neutralization of malcontents. So while the warden was out touring the unit, he made the mistake of walking by your cell. You stabbed him in the neck. He bled to death. Now the state had a quandary. You were a clear danger and they couldn’t execute. But they had to protect everyone around you. They took your clothes and kept you in a room with nothing but a toilet. After months of debate among the courts, a legal technician got the idea to use the Judicial AI Engine. They entered the cold, logical parameters of the law into the artificially intelligent quantum processor and out came an equally cold, logical solution. It wasn’t death but it was extreme. The machine opted to do something the law didn’t say they couldn’t do: they took your arms. No finger to clench a trigger. No hands to throttle a neck. That limited your options. They amputated you at the elbow, enough to make sure you couldn’t encircle anything with them. Trying to anticipate your next move, they also took your legs, cutting them off at the knee. No way to choke or struggle. You didn’t give up though. You bit your tongue to cause bleeding. When the medic bent down to look in your mouth, you lunged forward and bit his neck, nearly severing the artery in his throat. He managed to get away. The law decided not to take another chance. So they took your teeth. They want you to change. They don’t want to keep taking pieces of you, little by little, until you no longer cease to exist in a proper sense. But I know better. That’s never going to happen. You’re not going to quit. You’re still fighting the new world. They asked me to convince you otherwise and that is the reason I am here. I could try to resurrect a memory. I could try to make you recall that you once seemed happy and functional. But I know that would be a waste of time. You’re at a point that I could never reach you. You’re down a road that I could never travel. And I have slowly come to the realization that that is no longer my problem. You’re probably wondering, if I am so liberated and so free of you, then why would I be here trying to implore you to stop? That’s a fair thing to ask, I suppose. I guess what I want you to see is growth. I want you to see the process, and how I have changed over time. That’s the point of any story: to somehow express change and truth. Since they can’t remove any more appendages, they’re going the last route they can: drugs. They’re going to inject you. With what, I don’t know. But this might finally be the end. You can fight without a body, but you can’t fight without the mind. Who knows? Maybe you were right all along, there is no bottom. But even if part of you survives this, you’ll never be the same. When they take everything away, you have to wonder if you’re still living. |
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John Tompkins is a writer living in Texas. He has published both fiction and non-fiction in both online and print with a variety of outlets including Levee Magazine and the American Philosophy Association. |
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