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| panda-like calm through fiction | |||||||||
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Atlas Dug Up
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Before you ask, and everybody does, Ayn is pronounced like “mine.” But this is less my story, than his: his name is William Edward Hickman. I’m sure that name conjures up all manner of degeneracy, including the death of Marion Parker. I became fascinated with him at the same time as the general populace, lured into his circle of infamy by the newspaper coverage of his ordeal. One quote in particular drew me to him: “What is good for me is right.”
I struck up a correspondence with him. Because his “crime” was committed in Los Angeles, he was to be tried there. I suggested, due to the barbarity of it, that he attempt an invalid’s plea under the new statutes; I imagined that he might take offense to this, and so I ended my suggestion by saying, “What is good for you must be right.” In our letters, I discovered he was born with a wonderful, free, light consciousness, absolutely lacking a social instinct or herd feeling. He has no organ for understanding the necessity, meaning or importance of other people. They do not exist for him and he cannot understand why they should. He was the prototypical Nietzschean Superman, and I found once his trial began that I could no longer abide my existence so far removed from him, so I began to visit him. His lawyer vainly attempted to pin the murder of the 12 year old girl on an accomplice- one who it turns out had been in prison at the time of the kidnapping. When arguments were concluded the jury met a scant 43 minutes; they decided to hang him for his “crime.” Awaiting his execution, we sought permission from the prison to wed, but they would not release him for a formal ceremony. I was able to pass the marriage certificate to Ed through the chaplain, but it returned without a witness’ signature, and when I tried to pass the document through again it disappeared. I think the guards were trying to stop me from becoming a widow. I was present at his hanging. He’d told me in his last letter that he “didn’t fear death, and didn’t believe there was anything after that to fear.” They hauled him up to the platform, and he wasn’t standing on his own anymore; even before the trap fell from beneath him he dangled from the rope around his neck. Then the trap fell, and his body with it, and I swear over the sound of the rope, and the creak of it against wood, that I heard his neck snap, and my heart with it. There was a “service” for him after that. The state was putting him in the ground, and I knew there’d be nothing but people spitting on him in attendance. No matter what he did, there’s something loathsome in the virtuous indignation and mass-hatred of the public; it’s repulsive to see all these beings with worse sins and crimes in their own lives virtuously condemning a “criminal.” I couldn’t bear to see it, so I retired home. I could not sleep that night. Thoughts of Ed lying in the mud, waiting for decay… he was too beautiful to simply let rot. I dressed myself and set out into the night without purpose beyond action; something needed-must be done. I drove to the county cemetery. There was an old gravedigger working by lamplight, and I knew instinctually whose grave he was filling up. I told him to reverse course, but all he said was the county paid him to put a body in the dirt, not bring it back up. I pushed my pistol, a pistol I’d bought to defend myself, into his neck and he didn’t say any more, just started digging again. After a half an hour he collapsed. Digging up was harder than pushing dirt in a hole, he said, and I couldn’t stomach his weakness, so I took the shovel from him and pushed him aside. He claimed he was feeling faint and lay down in the grass and was soon asleep. But I continued to dig until I hit wood. The box Ed laid in was more crate than coffin, and they had not bothered to nail the lid in place, so mud had filled it in. I finished the digging with my fingers so as not to cause him damage, but when I reached his arms I discovered with horror that they had been severed at the elbow. Further down, I found that his body from the hips below was missing, and his organs cored out. I hefted the husk of Ed’s body into the trunk, and covered it with a blanket. I felt a pang in my heart; it was not enough to have unearthed a part of him- so long as he was incomplete so would I be. I knew the guard in charge of solitary prisoners, where Ed was kept before his murder; I had initially tried to convince him to pass our marriage certificate. He had said that Ed was his responsibility until he was in the ground. I drove to the pub where I’d first arranged to meet him, and he was at his usual stool. I used my feminine enterprises to convince the young guard into a car, and only then did I show him my pistol, at which point he told me everything. After the hanging the body was spirited away, where members of the police and the Parker family mutilated it. They’d tossed portions of the corpse, including his limbs, in Elysium Park, the same park where Ed scattered Marion’s remains. The guard drove me to the spot and helped me to locate most of his various pieces, but inevitably some were missing. And I realized then this didn’t matter, because what remained of Ed would have returned to me a cripple, mangled and beaten, and I seized upon the idea that here, in the young and guilty guard, lay the solution. I shot him through the throat, taking care to avoid any damage to the spine. His body was heavier than Ed’s, but I drug it to the trunk, and piled on top of it the other remains we’d discovered. By sunrise the three of us in our various states of disrepair were back in my apartment. Exhausted from my labors, I fell into the bed, where I had also lain the remains, and slept soundly. When I awoke, I bathed the remains with a cloth and alcohol, and began in my mind to dissect Edward; certainly I wanted to have care to preserve as fully his body as could be, and to use the guard for parts only where necessary, but this in practice took considerable planning. I started by cutting away the rough, torn areas of flesh, and when I was done set about piecing together the arms. The legs were another matter, and I decided to remove wholesale the upper torso of the guard and preserve as much of the lower limbs as possible, since several portions of Edward’s original legs had been picked clean by scavenging animals before I had discovered them. This also meant inserting the spine and organs into Ed’s torso- but only after carefully cutting out those that had been left clinging to his ribs. Now, taking great care, I sowed the pieces together, having pains to connect arteries and line up nerves with their severed endings. By sunset it was accomplished, but I felt that there was still some lacking; I had preserved as best I could the majority of Ed and the guard’s blood, but his cheeks were still pallid. I had once given blood to a wounded relative in my family’s pharmacy in Russia, and rigged together a similar system to transfuse the body. I stopped when I began to be dizzy, and only barely managed to close my own cut before I passed out. I cleared away the last few pieces of the guard, but still, there was a lifelessness to Ed that I found unnerving. I remembered reading of experiments made by Prevost and Batelli on dogs with electricity and the heart, and now I could not contain my curiosity. I tore the cord from my reading lamp and placed positive and negative ends to the right and left of his chest; his body arched as his glorious muscles flexed. I removed the current, and for a moment I dreamed that his body still twitched as if alive again. My long day had drained once again my vitality. I decided to fall again back into bed, and curled around Ed, now complete, and even though he was cold, I felt warm in his arms. I woke near to midnight. I believed I’d felt his hand squeeze my arm. I put the thought aside, and was nearly back to sleep when again he squeezed me, and this time I turned to him and perceived his eyes staring at me- following me. I whispered his name, and pressed myself to him and his breath came out, heavy, and something in that sigh was exhilarating, perhaps for the mere sake that for the first since I’d written him our bodies were in proximity to one another. I kissed him, and he responded. I will forego the lurid details, except to say that, mid-coitus, he wrapped his hands around my throat; I quite liked that: a man in control, of his destiny, of me. The entire time he did not speak, and afterwards, lying in his embrace, I began to wonder if he could, or if his time in the dirt had robbed him off some of his higher faculties, until he whispered in my ear, “Ayn mine,” and squeezed me possessively, and I thought it might not be so wrong to be possessed like this. Quickly our lives settled. There was a slight prick of interest from the police, who knew that I had tried to marry Ed, but rumors of his mutilation and subsequent treatment by the police hushed the investigation of that and the guard’s disappearance. I continued to write for the Hollywood studios, toiling in my obscurity. Ed returned to the work he did well, subtle robberies and cons. He showed how impossible it was for a genuinely beautiful soul to succeed in our present day, as in all modern life one has to be a hypocrite, to bend and tolerate. Ed demanded sovereignty of himself- he was not able to serve, when he felt worthy to rule, and unable to obey, when he deserved to command. It was blissful. Then, come the spring, Ed brought someone home. A girl, younger than me, and I thought, perhaps, she reminded me of Marion- or at least the black and white photograph of her from the paper. And my disapproval must have shown on my face, because he looked to me, stared into me, and then he shrugged. And for an instant, I became afraid I idealized Ed, that he might not be everything I believed him to be, and in truth he most likely isn’t. But it does not make any difference, because if he isn’t, he could be, and that’s enough, and it is likely mere jealousy. And do I deserve even to be jealous, or more importantly, do I deserve to have Edward only for myself? She came and went over the better part of the summer, and in that same span his interest in me began to wane, until one afternoon, after she’d left for her home, I asked him, “Why did you kill Marion Parker?” He paused to think a moment. “It was a dual force, I think, the impulse to harm anyone I care for, and a desire to execute a master crime.” He had, he explained, labored for the majority of his life in petty crimes, but he had decided to strike out at the plain mediocrity of this very average society. Initially, he had envisioned a grand scheme, with the ransom money as seed for a larger, wider plot; but he admitted underestimating the police, and the abhorrence of a public unused to having its laws flaunted- outraged at the audacity of one man to live as he pleased. I wondered aloud when his crimes would return to their former extravagance, and he became wounded; I had not guessed that his “death” had chastened him, but his reaction was transparent. A few days passed, and I rarely saw him save when we shared our bed, until I came home to find him with that girl again, in our bed. By that point he had already cut away her limbs, and was tearing the entrails out of her chest. Calmly, I asked the girl’s name- I thought it only proper- but he would only call her Marion, though I thought it preposterously unlikely that was actually the case. I should have been disgusted, and perhaps somewhere I was; but I was thrilled, because his interests in her had been different- no more a competitor of me than the air he also needed. But for several days her body remained in the apartment, where I’d first found him and it in our bed, and when finally I asked the purpose it served he claimed he had been waiting for the proper mood. He kissed me, and at the beginning I did not question his meaning, but then he began to choke me with one hand, and in the other, choke the lifeless body of his second Marion. I continued to kiss him, but unlike at other times his grip did not slacken, but tightened. My lungs burned for lack of air. “Please” I managed to squeeze out. I tried to open my eyes, and realized I had never shut them, that I was blacking out. I fumbled at the nightstand, for the lamp, since repaired, that had brought him to me, and I smashed it into his skull. He lay on the bed, as he had when I’d first finished sewing him back together; the only signal of his life poured liberally from his temple, and my heart bled in kind. This brilliant, unusual, exceptional boy turned into a purposeless monster. But by whom? By what? Yes, he is a monster now. But the worse must be the cause that drove him to this. Isn’t it significant that society was not able to fill the life of an exceptional, intelligent boy, to give him anything to outbalance degeneracy in his eyes? I felt disgust well in me as I raised the lamp one final time to right society’s wrong, and put my Atlas back in the ground. |
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