Tuesday

O was reelected again Tuesday.  Mandate and universal acclaim.  It's been that way for as long as most can remember.  People don't live as long as they used to though, mostly.  A couple of generations just fly by.  Anyway, the usual celebrations.  Selubrayshunz.  Every few years, no particular pattern, he calls for his reelection.  Always gives the same speech -- it's a liturgy by now.  The same misty gratitude from him, the same ecstasy from the acolytes.  Owkstusy from the Okuliytz.

The chip in our wrists votes automatically.  Some people started voting the day they were born.  Saves Karbun,  people not having to go anywhere or do anything.  As the national motto says, "Forward! Everything is always getting better."

His motorcade sped by the school a few weeks ago.  I didn't bother to go to the window.  I was alone, so no one could notice.  Afterwards I thought, what if there had been an earthquake, and a great crevasse had opened in the road and swallowed his limousine?  Then I thought, how could somebody make that happen?  Back when there used to be tv with commercials, there was a show about a little boy with godlike powers who did whatever he wanted to anyone he wanted.  I thought of that, thinking of the earthquake, what it would be like to have that kind of power.  Then I realized O already has it.  I'm one of the few, I think, who remember him promising to lower the seas.  Indeed he did.  Froze much of them over to do it.

Yesterday I went mad.  I read her name in the Rejuster and my heart has not beaten since.  I won't bother to describe it.  But, as I said, once, long ago, all bets are off.

I think I've come to a decision.  I have lived in fear and silence and cowardice and complicity and betrayal for, well, for these recent generations at least.  I may not ever have been the man I once thought I was.  That man, living in freedom, is no longer possible.  No gene splicing of atavistic traits will reclaim that humanity. Ubi non est dubium, libertas non est ibi.

A man cannot live, worried about losing his tyreless bicycle. He cannot live, clutching at a glove because it smells of a woman's hair.  He cannot live, denouncing acquaintances who are beaten to death as a result.  I have forgotten about God.  But no atheism promises a more meaningless end than life as it now is.

There used to be a Resistance.  All that remains of it is fantasy and the memory of old tv shows and the skulking pettiness that sneaks an extra spoonful of mash in the commissary line.  We have been so broken that they have grown careless.  Their violence has met for too long with only weeping, and blood other than their own.

We.  As if there were a we.  I will remind them of fear.  I will show them their own blood.  I will work such obscenity on their fresh corpses that all who see will glimpse a mirror of their own souls.  I will be as monstrous as Dumawkrucy, as evil as O.  I will burn down the world, and all its princes and their babes.  The wrong people have been suffering.

I