evil – Livesay Writing

Hi.

Coffee: Maxwell House Master Blend, Office Coffee

I used to have vivid dreams. Then I didn’t, but lately I’ve been having them again. Some are nice, some are less so. When I was 15, I often got lost in a blustery black-and-white mansion where I talked to the lanky butler.

Dreams are the only times I come in contact with violence. Even there it’s rare, but sometimes it gets me. I was living in Chapel Hill. I had a flat, and three friends lived with me. The friends’ faces changed throughout the dream so sometimes I’d be talking to R, or E, or the girl who sat behind me in sophomore English. Whoever they were, they were always friends.

Here’s what happened: there was a man in the closet. He wore shorts and a tank top. He’d twisted a hooked whip from our coat hangers. He crept out one evening when there was silver moonlight. We didn’t have curtains, or beds, or separate rooms, so all of us were sleeping on the floor. One by one, the man whipped and strangled my friends until I was the only one left. I woke up, he saw me, he ran out of the apartment. It was morning. In bright, brilliant sun, fresh dawn, dew on the heads of every neighborhood ladybug, I chased the man. I was running along Franklin Street in my pj’s and people were watching. The man wasn’t sprinting, wasn’t jogging, he wasn’t afraid of me. Crowded crosswalks or alleyways, I couldn’t catch him, but I knew that if I did I’d beat his bones to powder, his eyeballs to breath, sweat, damp air.

Though it wasn’t a nightmare, I didn’t like the dream. It stuck with me when I woke up. Not so much the midnight horror, but the things I wanted to do to our attacker in the daylight. There’s a bit of a beast in all of us, no matter how little blood we let ourselves take.

Currently Reading: Queen, Suzanne Crain Miller

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My heart is lost; the beasts have eaten it.
Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du Mal

Hi.

Coffee: Pike Place, Apartment Lounge Blend

When I was a kid, it was hard to imagine violence happening overseas. There were buzzwords like ‘Nepal’ and ‘North Korea,’ but they didn’t mean anything. They were unseen threats. They were happening to someone else. The worst vipers in the deepest sea.

Then, after Iraq, it got a little easier. I didn’t know anyone who was a soldier but I knew people who knew them. American men and women were cutting up other people with automatic guns (and getting cut up themselves). It was closer to home, and the news even showed you pictures: that GI standing on the naked Iraqi men they’d taken prisoner. Horror knew my name now, and was occasionally sending postcards.

I read a piece about the Nazi’s. It was a series of photos of Auschwitz workers on their off days. Men and women eating ice-cream, posing for pictures. All smiles. It said: “These people don’t think they’re evil.” And it went on to catalogue the many years it took them to get there, to where you could be smiling after a day working gas chambers.

These days, the horror’s my closest neighbor. It lives beside me, two floors down. We walk across the lawn and wave at each other most mornings. Sometimes, we run into each other at the pool.

I don’t know how long it takes to go from taking children from their families or forcing men to share such crowded spaces they have to stand on toilets, to removing their humanity with a more literal force. On our Southern border, all of us condone an organized violence on migrants trying hard to be free. We tell ourselves we don’t like it. We still cringe when we look at the pictures. But how long does that last? How long before the horror moves in?

Currently Reading: Queen, Suzanne Crain Miller

Support Relief for Family Suffering at the Border – RAICES DONATION CAMPAIGN

We must be listened to: above and beyond our personal experience, we have collectively witnessed a fundamental unexpected event, fundamental precisely because unexpected, not foreseen by anyone. It happened, therefore it can happen again: this is the core of what we have to say. It can happen, and it can happen everywhere.
Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved

Tag: evil

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