Enlightenment: Delve into a little bit of Orsson

We watched it burn. The tree had erupted into yellows and oranges and black smoke, and the birds screeched from beneath the branches. Seconds later, they flew into the sky, fat, spasming masses of flame, before they thudded to the ground. I smelled the cooking meat. And we sat, knees drawn up to our chests. Fire was spontaneous. Finally, after the dust had settled, and the ash fell like rain, he looked over at me. His cheeks were thin and hollow, and there were dark rings around his eyes. When he spoke, his voice was limestone and there was defeat in it because he knew the answer before he even asked the question. “Anything?” I shook my head. He sighed. He stood up. Then offered me his hand. I took it. If he had been expecting something other than cold meat, he didn’t show it. “I was afraid you’d say that,” he said.  

This was how it had been since my vision had first cleared, and I had looked up at the ceiling. The earliest of my memories were of my scarred, green hands pulling apart a lizard. The sound of the skin pulling apart and the bones popping out of sockets sounded like the crunch and smack of a predator eating through a chicken. The lizard squirmed beneath my fingers as the bones poked through flesh and it silently struggled with its legs kicking at nothing, and then the life was prised from it. It was red and blood ran down my fingers and dripped to the ground. I licked them clean, not from curiosity, but because it was slowing my progress. I remembered thinking that it tasted how metal smelled. Then it was a dead husk. He looked at me. I couldn’t speak then. There had been dust motes in the air. That was when he had decided that I was missing spontaneity, emotion. He had given me the lizard, he had made me take it in my hands, my hands that weren’t mine.

My next memory was him making me read poetry. Emily Bronte was my favorite, and her poem The Philosopher was one that I read every day. That was where I read the word unenlightenment. He would watch me while I read, and he would wait and see if there were any changes. All that grew was my vocabulary. When we would eat dinner, he would tell me how he had gotten it all right, how all of the equations and all of the biological experiments had worked in the end, and how he had been able to create life. “But there’s one thing I cannot create,” he would say, “spontaneity. If I can get spontaneity, I can get closer to emotion…and once I have emotion, once I have feeling, I have a human being.”

“I am a human being?” I asked.

“Not yet,” would be the response. And then he would wait, and I would do nothing. And then he would sigh, as he had failed once again. I guess I was meant to feel what was called sadness.

That night, we walked. I was wrapped in coats and jackets so that no one could see me.

I was to do the murder.

We walked the roads, and when we finally came to a man with long, tangled hair and ratty clothes with a damp mattress underneath, my creator started talking to him. I think it could have been described as gently.

I was to kill him, I needed to feel it.

I was given a blunt instrument, an old scraper. I stepped to him, and as my hand reared back and the scraper flashed in the moonlight, his eyes widened.

I thought about unenlightenment. When the scraper hit his throat, the flesh just gave way. His Adam's apple gave a spongy resistance, and it made his eyes bulge, but then it was all red and staining the clothes and the mattresses.

I grabbed his throat and I squeezed until it was all gushing out and running over my fingers. In the reflection of his eyes, I could see my own face, a sallow mask, lines of stitches holding together bits of yellow and green skin, and misty eyes coated in some kind of film.

I felt him beneath my hands, squirming and struggling, and I thought of the burning birds, but this was silent because his throat was ruined.

Eventually, he was gone. The picture of me in his eyes had dimmed.

I thought of being unenlightened.

“Do you feel anything?”

“No.”

He sighed with his limestone throat, and then he stood up.

I stood up after him. We walked, and I thought about enlightenment, about feeling, about spontaneity, and then I did it. I put one hand on the right side of his head and drove the end of the scraper into the left of his neck.

His head cocked viciously to the left and there was a jet of blood that splashed against the wall. It was simple.

Matter of fact.

Death was complicated in idea, but in practice it was simple subtraction.

He gasped. Simple, soft, and his body seemed to deflate. There was no beautiful moment where I lowered him to the ground, I simply let go and watched my creator hit the ground. His blood streaked my face suddenly.

I walked over and I squatted down next to him. I didn’t strangle him.

His eyes flicked back and forth slowly, so, painfully slowly. He looked at me and he gurgled and his voice struggled, and he said, “Anything?”

I said, “No. But we will continue.”

He didn’t nod. But I knew he agreed.

I pulled out the scraper, and I kept walking.

I thought about enlightenment.