The Self Verses The Self Does It Matter Who Wins?

Adriana and I after a long afternoon for me of discovery and for her of amusement arrived at our quarters. We found Colette deliriously sobbing on her knees we approached her with some hesitation and I placed my hand gently upon her shoulder and taking silent notice of Amygdala's absence I asked her: "What is wrong? Why the tears?" Colette responded by magnifying her crying. I looked at Adriana and with a simple head gesture she motioned me to follow her. I stood up, Colette looked up at us her eyes ever more tearful, her sobbings incessant and decibels louder, followed us. I followed Adriana into the area that contained our beds and before our eyes, laid Amygdala’s bloody, bloody, bloody dead corpse. Adriana did not pause to let me go into absolute shock she turned towards me as if she were some kind of inspector fully aware of the truth but without the facts and said, "Looks to me like your friends have had a bit of a cat fight." I took offense, I could be implicated in this just by her statement, and besides how could she know who had killed her? Adriana did not bother to examine or to grieve over Amygdala's body. Now I still needed to feel melancholic for a while before I would draw any conclusions but I was leaning towards Adriana’s theory simply because the aliens had no need to kill Amygdala, and besides one is always killed by one's own if for no other reason that one is never allowed the luxury of betraying the self, and more important to kill someone one has to know them. This is why murders are rarely committed by strangers every killer and victim share a terrible knowledge of each other.

I immediately recalled my dreams and could say with some certainty that none had been murderous dreams and again we were in a different planet, in a different point of space and so it was doubtful that what was true on earth was true here. I walked over to the body ignoring Adriana’s indifference and I searched for a sign of life, for a palpitating heart for a sign of breath, for a bit of warmth and nothing came forth her soul had long abandoned her body, lifeless, void of presence outside the astral plane, I understood Adriana’s indifference to cry over a body that was Amygdala no more, was absurd.

Once past that I begun a visual autopsy there were marks on her flesh, wounds, blood, penetrating foreign objects, there was nothing I could conclude from this but there was much I could ignore because of it. There had been violent struggle, Amygdala was partially dressed as if there had been a seduction in progress not a killing.

I struggled back towards Colette, thinking that I had always wished Colette more dead than Amygdala so much for my powers of attorney. I placed my palm against her chin and lifted her face, intently stared at her non reflective brown eyes and asked the obvious question: "Who killed her?" Colette looked at me and cried even more so, the interrogator repeated the question, demonstrating less patience with more pauses, "Who..... killed..... her?" I was not after the truth because I feared the law, I doubted that any one in this planet much cared if any of us humans lived or die but I wanted to make sure I wasn’t about to suffer the same fate.

Colette finally responded by reaching for my arm as a source of comfort. Being that to her I was the only non alien in this alien world I too found comfort in her touch. She brushed her face against my arm and said, "We were lovers." They had obviously spent to much time by themselves. She repeated herself with more precision, "We were in love." I said, "Who killed Her?" She looked at me with innocence written all over her face and said, "I did." Accumulated silence followed. It was simple like it or not Colette might well be a murderer but in this alien world, besides unseen Abrahms, Colette was the only human I knew, Adriana had shown me many strange things, that I could find friendship and comfort with someone that murdered my friend and her lover was not so unthinkable. Besides I too was a murderer.

"How did you kill her?" "I seduced her and then I poisoned her by injecting liquid from that container into her." Adriana who was leaning against the door frame, failing to be impressed, arms crossed, spoke, "It is a liquid poison to kill things like the ones you like to call roaches, your friend did not have time to enjoy her own death it kills instantaneously." I looked at Colette and asked, "Why?" Colette could not say or would not say, all she did was tighten her lips and excrete silent tears. I spoke to Adriana, "We will stay here no longer you must return us to earth immediately." Adriana, moving not, dropped any niceties and responded, "Not possible, your here to stay you are the interpreter we were after, Abrahms was a cover and it is doubtful that destiny want's you back on earth. Sorry chap till now I had actually enjoyed it all a bit!" She did not mean one bit of that sorry, she could not even understand the meaning of the word sorry. She felt my anger rising and spoke again, "Amygdala had to be killed and you will kill Colette and..." I interrupted with a feast of anger, "Stopped it! Stopped it! Damn it, why are you doing this?" Adriana responded refusing an ounce of empathy, "You, you still don't want to accept that there is something that is bigger than you or I, that there is something that matters more! Well there is and it needs your mind for more important things than the idiotic romantic fantasies that you use it to formulate." I yelled back at her, "You betrayed me! You betrayed me!" Adriana shouting back with a molested passion I had never seen, hands violently pounding at the air, "This coming from the man that wrote the Selfish Mode where everything is an act of selfish absolutes! Did you think the tour was free! Did you think we had nothing to gain from it! There are no free rides…” (now moving her head and hands wildly,) “…you wanted something! I wanted something! They wanted something! (Pointing fingers in all directions,) we all got something but maybe not what we wanted, even Colette and Amygdala got something!"

I knew that being right was expensive which is why I had always wanted to win more than I wanted to be right. So I grabbed the murderous Collette's hand and dashed towards the door which automatically closed. Adriana demonstrated her fluency in our many languages by clapping while saying, "Bravo, bravo, bravo." A facetious smile accompanied all that while Colette and I crashed into the ground. I looked at Adriana with all the hate in the universe and this only made her smirk even more. She said, "It is a terrible situation to be in, to be fighting once destiny is a loosing proposition, you are not going to win and still you try, such a character you are."

Then all the doors slammed open and we felt a sudden rush of air, soon I thought we will be dead. But then I noticed that Adriana was just as surprised as Colette and I. Then we heard a mysterious but familiar echoing voice, it was Amygdala’s. It eerily said, “Follow the noise... follow the noise...” The rush of air became a noisy wind and we got up and pursued it with intent. Adriana was pursuing the noise as well but Amygdala’s ghost was making it difficult for her to keep up, she kept on falling, things like bottles and chairs kept on flying into her. Whistling, the wind pierced our ears.

The noise properly led us back to the spaceship we were able to stay ahead of Adriana who was no longer smiling but she was close enough to reach us while we were breathlessly waiting for Amygdala’s ghost to open the damn hatch. We felt a pressurized steam bath and the hatch split in half, half swinging towards the sky and the other half towards the ground. Colette, reverting to her natural self serving survival instincts, dashed into the spaceship while I got tangled up with Adriana. We wrestled, rolling on the hard surfaces. Adriana was actually making noises produced by pain, our love bites turned to anger bites, my hands that had previously adored her gorgeous black hair resorted to ripping it from her scalp, and instead of inducing heavy breathing we tried mutual strangulation; but Amygdala’s ghost, not aware of our attempts to retrieve our passions, pulled and shoved Adriana off of me long enough for me to run for it. I grabbed a handle on the inside of the ship and, with more help from Amygdala’s ghost, I repeatedly kicked Adriana until her face suffered some severe wounds. But even profusely bleeding from the cuts, she kept persisting, pounding her tired hands into me, until I cleared the hatch area and pulled a red chord which released another pressurized steam bath, and the upper half of the hatch reunited with its lower half, severing beautiful screaming Adriana in not to pretty bloody half!

I knew we did not have much time for melodrama and Adriana did not like me to dwell on things so I left the half of her that made it into the ship squirming to death, and I went to find my traveling companion. I found Colette trying to figure out the navigational controls of the vessel, but let as agree that this was a complicated control panel and we proved futility true enough; but we had a ghost on the ship and so the spook just begun to power up the time and space warping mechanisms, which quickly surrounded the spaceship with antigravitons, the ship acted as if it knew where we wanted to go, and that done Amygdala's ghost disappeared, explaining nothing.

After I spent a good amount of time placing Adriana’s remains in a clear plastic bag that I was able to seal so that her smell would dissipate from the ship, Colette and I rested. We did not speak much, we did not know what to say or what to think, we trusted our fate to a ghost and I thanked Colette for killing Amygdala.

The spaceship begun to make horrendous life threatening noises, We were so tired that we failed to panic, I begun to think what could be malfunctioning, the instruments displayed their usual insensitivity to things emotional. And so this spaceship begun to demonstrate how ridiculous it was to expect a huge pile of plastic metal to fly. It begun to plunge, to drop. The altitude indicator was not able to keep up with the rate of the descent, in feet or in miles. This sophisticated alien spaceship had no sense to realize that by its own calculations it was going to smash and turn into a few pieces. I, however realized that there was a certain amount of objectivity in these calculations and that I too was going to smash and turn into a few pieces. I realized at that point that people survive out of body experiences, even deadly accidents and then it occurred to me that destiny was merely going to cripple me, to shove me into the earth with my lofty thoughts, this was so that I would break my back and thus made forever incapable of action. Disabled only to serve as a thought machine for destiny.

The dizzying drop brought me near a bar that had a flat like screwdriver end. I quickly grabbed the damn thing and placed it on my chest right in front of my heart and I supported the back of it by forcing it to balance between me and the deck of the ship. I had to work hard to maintain that bar posted between my heart and the floor but I was not going to let destiny take me alive. Ha, I had seen through his plan I was about to foiled it, there was no way I was going to come out of this alive. That bar would plunged and rip its way through me, passing my torso into my heart, tearing every piece of flesh, vein and bone, not much else could be argued. I was holding the bar tightly, destiny only had a grip on the spaceship, it was unaware of what was going on inside, I laughed, I laughed aloud, a boisterous and victorious laugh, that got louder and louder as my speeding bleeding gyro got closer to sea level....

The doctors whom strangely spoke as if it had been a helicopter instead of a huge UFO crash, told me that I was one lucky son of a bitch, that we had crashed into a construction site where much of the material acted as a cushion to absorb the force of the crash, otherwise I would be dead. I was also even more fortunate in that the crash site was only minutes from a hospital possessing some of the most gifted doctors in the world, and were it not for their incredible skill I would be dead. I was of course to sickly to appreciate my luck and I was disgusted at the sight of these fine doctors displaying my situation as a sign of my good fortune or their gifted skill. So often people compare bad with worst to make bad look better it makes me even more sick to hear doctors tell it. Doctors that love to brag about how they save lives, which by the way should be condemned, they brag about how if it had taken a few more minutes for my wounded body to reach them I would be dead, saved by expediency, saved by life savers, saved, fucked! No one, not even these good doctors know what would a happened if I had crashed in a desert or if it had taken a few more minutes for me to reach the trauma center, no one knows, everything changes in few minutes, everything!

The good doctors saved me, a priest came by and told me how the grace of God had rescued me. All the miracles all the perfect coincidences saved me, all of humanity was trying to take credit for my survival, I was their proof positive that they could conquer death. I explained to the good priest that the grace of God should consider prevention as a more humane application of divine powers. But the good priest just made this meek face as if he were asking for a dime, and kindly suggesting that I accept this as a sign not only of the grace of God, but also of his wrath which could cause a deviant soul to swallow his tongue and close his jaws well enough to crush, gnashing teeth. I must be fair and say that that is not how he said it but it is a fair rendition of what he said. Besides if scientists like to cling to the atom bomb to feel mighty I can not fault priest for clinging to the awesome God, both have bad side effects. I did ask the good priest about Colette and he was kind to tell me that the wench had suffered minor injuries, she was home and not talking much these days.

A wheel chair was not my ideal method of transportation but a part of me was happy to have predicted destinies true intentions. Still destiny had been foiled by my awareness of its intentions, the doctors were confident that I would walk again. Months were to pass and I was in the hands of Joe, a male therapist, not a woman therapist or a gay therapist, which I would have preferred but a real man type that drove me nuts with his incessant conversations on mobile vehicles, and sports, always delivered with a passion, and a precision of figures that was as impressive as it was boring.

Joe would stand a few feet from me and say “walk,” and I would look at him with all the contempt I had always possessed towards my kind, and Joe would just say, “Walk man, common man I know you can walk, so walk,” a bit of an impatient fellow he was, thoughtlessness is impatient, and his hairy arms waiting to catch me on the other side just motivated me even less, and Joe would just creatively repeat himself “Common man walk, I know you can walk man so walk,” I begun to walk towards Joe but not because he inspired me but rather because I wanted to get away from him. I wanted to be able to run as fast away from him as some of the fine athletes that he had described. I walked and ran out of that hospital on June 17th and my bad memory will never ever forget that date.

As I looked back on it now I wonder why Joe admired those men and the metal so much. What kind of sexual experience do men derive from watching other men brutalize each other, the victor and the vanquished, hurting one another and then sharing a beer with those that hurt them. And perhaps now I understand better why Joe was a physical therapist, and perhaps I also understand why what is woman obsesses over female beauty. In the end having sex with an opposite might be as close as we can come to having sex with the same sex, because we are trying to love that which is like us, that is to love ourselves, but our selves might be incomplete without the opposite, and we are not only to bridge a physical difference but a character difference. Having sex with an opposite maybe no different than bucking heads with the same sex, this must indeed complete us into a bloody tornado that bridges the physical and mental abysses.

After leaving Joe’s hairy arms, and hairy smell and after leaving Joe’s putrid cologne smell, I immediately went to a coffee shop where I could rest the thoughts of my resent past, thoughts that I could only now share with a cup of coffee and soon maybe with Colette.

I drank the coffee, a moment, an aroma, to ponder the colored movements that had transpired in that strange place with that strange woman. Adriana had been a passionate companion, yes she was logical, always calm but to me she understood no limits, she gave everything but betrayed nothing of herself. Always a secret I had to guess her, I had to imagine her love for me which was exceedingly demonstrated as she pounded herself into me by punching me, and smiling as she did, and I thoroughly enjoyed the pain, as much as I enjoyed the marks of her love on my flesh. It was with this constant pounding that we got into each other and if our mutual passion produced children they were dogs.

But no matter how close, always she remained a mystery. I had to imagine her, to imagine her honesty, yet I know that she never betrayed me until the end. I could trust our relationship, I could feel wonderful about it, we were swiftly moving through the color spectrum and every moment was worth the violence, when the abrupt end came nothing existed. No one knew who she was, I had no knowledge of her true appearance, how she lived, if she had a real sort of life. I knew not these things, and still I could hold her dear with all my heart for we had stood before each other, while saying nothing to the other, in a sort of perpetual stalemate, feeling and thinking identical movements.

Indeed it was the real her that I did not know that I loved, this could be no other way. And she was in love with the real me which she always saw though I did all to hide. And these mutual unknowns were twins. Our end was tragic because no one knew of us, because we too had never acknowledge our relationship, grace was not to be ours. An obscure relationship, that no one acknowledge, a love in perpetual secrecy, died. I could run to no one for comfort, it was now to late for anyone to consider me a widower, for always we were nothing and now nothing again.

The hot coffee burnt my tongue so as to ensure my silence. She was, I was told, a secret the universe had to keep. I had had the privilege of touching her, of sensing her sadness, of breathing her sweet passions, I was not being reasonable in expecting something so special to last. I was to be sad now, and to grieve with happiness in the love of another, consumed by the desire to conceal my heart from her.

And yes, with time my sentiments have not diminished, to near the heart, to close to the soul! My mind still longs for answers, my dreams are still hers, will it ever be clear why I touched her soul? Why I am now deprived of its odor, its tender madness, its exquisite calm? Calumny! I love her. To feel that heart again, to touch that fleeing soul, to kiss her wedding breast, …but silence lingers in the soul, we shall not speak again, our kisses never to share, our love only to know expanding solitudes. She, who exist for me more than all, exist for me no more!

After some time I was able to form some conclusions of my many wonderings, some political, some personal, and some that would change the way that I would continue my struggle with life, with humanity and even with destiny. Consider if you will my findings on our political and social nature, they are not something that I could have formulated before my trip abroad, but Erehwon had changed me and given me a view of our political process that seemed as accurate, as it was undesirable.