Glad Shadow
I've devoted my life to killing others, said Simon, and it was a huge mistake. I may have murdered hundreds and hundreds of people without ever being caught, but I do not view it as a success. I do not regard the number of deaths I've caused as anything but an anecdote. Certainly, reaching a thousand was somewhere in the back of my mind - I may yet be able to accomplish that goal, but I am certain it will not satisfy me.
He was sitting completely still. His jaw barely moved as he talked, his lips parting ever so slightly, ever so briefly, only when they had to.
One can consider that a human life can be examined on the basis of the ends and means it deployed. What I mean by that is that there are certain goals, and that although there are different ways of reaching them, it should generally be possible to determine whether a particular goal has been reached. When I started off, my intention was to murder as many people as possible. And with regard to that goal, no one would dare say that I failed. I even exceeded my own expectations. I developed a trade, and perfected it. It may not be to everyone's taste to admit this, but there are some people who are simply better at killing than others. Some are born with more natural talent for it, and some improve their skills with practice, and perseverance. I was lucky to have been blessed with a natural predisposition for murder, as well as a greater capacity for work than most of my peers. Furthermore, I am endowed with many of the corollary requirements for being a competent murderer: I am naturally athletic and have a strong cardiovascular system. I have excellent eyesight. I am neither particularly attractive or repulsive, and I have very few remaining blood relatives. I am capable of concentrating intensely for long periods of time without any stimulus. I am financially secure in a way that does not bind me to any particular social sphere. Because of this conjuncture and of others I haven't described or am unable to, I have reached the goal I set for myself many years ago, and have surpassed it many times over.
The goal evolved over this period, naturally. At first it was about reaching a certain number, then a larger one and again, until quantity became less appealing. This was long before the number of one thousand even entered the space of possibility. When numbers lost their appeal, other and much more complex objectives appeared. There were certain methods and instruments to master, certain targets, a certain speed of execution.
Simon closed his eyes. His left hand was holding his right ring finger.
These smaller objectives were short-lived, they did not survive their accomplishment. Soon, their proliferation became obviously detrimental to the work and its quality. This was around the time that I began to take much more seriously the question of the quality of my work, after having killed so much and in so many ways already - it had occurred to me before that there were certain murders I preferred to remember. They were not all equal, of course. At that time, I began to write and to make lists. Retrospectively, I made a list of my past work up to that point, I sorted it, many times and with many criteria. In the end, I couldn't find a set of criteria to systematically sort these murders into an order I would consider correct, from best to worst. I always had to intervene manually for reasons that I couldn't formulate. This was very frustrating, but it was also when I began to think more about the contents of my own character, and my abilities. I was able to list off just now a small set of the traits I consider to have helped me to pursue my goals - there are others, but there are also many bad traits, some that have impeded my progress, and some that I have ultimately found to be generally unrelated to my ability for killing. Systemic thinking and statistical analysis are simply not part of my key strengths, no matter how many times I try. But they are hobbies. And they did prove to be helpful after all, not quite in making the list - I eventually found a ranking of my murders that satisfied me completely, but rather in analyzing this data. I noticed certain patterns emerging from my list, near the top were certain methods, and specifically certain victims and conditions of execution that tended to resemble one another. I inverted my procedure, deriving the criteria for good work from the data, rather than the other way around. From then on I began to seek quality, refining my understanding of the criteria as I went. Some of these criteria may surprise the layman. The average, or beginner, may think that control is an absolute good when it comes to killing people. That the best kill is the one performed exactly as planned, down to the second. In fact, the best work always contains a measure of chaos. It isn't to say a controlled chaos, but an opening. Controlled chaos may mean something relating to the act of the murder itself, more blood than expected upon hitting an artery, a sudden witness to deal with, and so on. What I mean by an opening is something entirely different. I once sat in the living room with the corpse of a teenager for almost seven hours, listening. There was a failure within myself, a failure to follow the plan, which was to leave immediately after cleaning up. In delaying the cleanup, I was making it much harder, because blood hardens, and so on, and I was simultaneously leaning closer toward the possibility of being witnessed, although I'd confirmed the family's absence for the weekend. As you can imagine, like quantity and diversity before it, the appeal of quality gradually waned as it was reached. I became convinced at a certain point that I had reached the best level of quality I could deliver with the mind and body I had been given. I may not have been the best in the world, I do not dare to make that claim, especially in this type of work when, as you can imagine, the top performers are unknown to the greatest majority. I would simply say that I had reached the local maximum of my potential. That I couldn't improve anymore, and that going forward my work would consist either in retaining the quality, or watching it decline as my mind and body gave out. Neither prospect was particularly appealing. They weren't repulsive enough to make me stop cold turkey, but my rhythm of work diminished considerably, and I spent more time doing other things, like reading and contact dancing. I had more and more free time. Reading became writing, I wrote something like a memoir. I suppose it would be a very accurate description of it, I simply tried my best to describe from memory the events of my life in chronological order. Some parts of that text are essentially lists, from the most productive time in my career, a time that was long and full when I lived it, but retrospectively seems to have almost disappeared from my memory except for a few basic facts. This may be because although I was killing at a very sustained rhythm, most of that work consists of waiting. My brain probably compacts these endless stakeouts into a general, brief phase of boredom, punctuated by a few very graphic encounters. This was the time when, not being yet concerned with the quality of my work, I really made a mess of it. Come to think of it, the gruesome character of that early period may also have been a kind of retribution for the boredom of the stakeouts, but I may be talking out of school because I remember the stakeouts as rather stimulating. Well anyway…
Now he looked up at the ceiling. His right hand was on his chest, and he was blinking at regular intervals.
Like I said, I wrote that text. I published it, actually, online, where it received almost no attention. I contacted publishers. I received some rejection letters, many of which I suspect weren't written for the occasion, but mostly I was ignored. This was unnerving to me. I had never seeked the approval of others before, and it was very a very unpleasant sensation. I had the sensation that the sum of my life's work, in the best form I could deliver it with that memoir, was nothing after all. The writing of the book wasn't perfect, of course. There were bad sentences. I'm not exactly sure what is meant by "from the heart", but I'm sure it's what I was trying to do when I wrote it, and I would have been more than happy to make modifications to the style, or even let the text undergo very serious editing work, if it was felt that it required it. I am now sure that text was never read, never entirely anyway, which is a shame since as I said, some of by best work was also my latest at the time of writing. I said earlier something about a life examined in relation to the ends and means. By any reasonable account, I have given to the end of killing other people all the means at my disposal. My lifeforce itself - I did not mention it yet, but it must be said that it is a very exhausting type of work, straining both the mind and the body by requiring the utmost concentration from both for greater periods of time than can be expected of any worker in any other line of work - my lifeforce itself was drained, sacrificed on the altar of my pursuits. And it is only now that I question the nature pursuit itself. One cannot live long on a single track: although I have been an unusually focused person, I have also gained knowledge and developed certain notions that did not serve directly my aims of killing others, nor did they distract me from them exceedingly. They simply made me a more complex person, one whose life cannot be summarized in a phrase with a single proposition. Killing, yes, but I also made lists, I wrote books. I danced. I did many other things I did not mention, and I am thankful that I did. My younger self would probably disagree strongly with me. Like I said, after so many successes and, in a sense, deferrals, my attention is now focused on a subject that I failed to thoroughly investigate, even as I was devoting the greatest part my life's span to it: the question of whether or not killing others was the right thing to do with the time I was given. Most people will probably agree that it wasn't, and their reasoning will likely be grounded on very simple ideas. If I was immortal, there would be virtually no limit to the number of things I could choose to do with my time. Most people choose to do very little, or refuse or fail to make choices at all, going with the flow, as it were, spending their time in the world in a manner allotted to them by their circumstance. Naturally, this is to some extent a question of privilege: not all are born with the means and the freedom to do with their time what they want. But many of those who are, do not. All persons who are able to must live with the certainty of death. It may seem almost absurd given the type of work I have described doing, but the question of mortality did not become a concern or a topic of interest for me until very recently. I began by considering the question of my own mortality. I am sure when this question is resolved, I will devote more time to the question of the mortality of the people I have murdered, and to the relationship between those two kinds of mortalities: my own and that of others. For now however, the question of my own mortality is unresolved. I am sure it is connected with my gradual realization that there may have been better pursuits to organize my life around than the murder of other people. Or rather, it is possible that the dawning of my mortality in the landscape of my mind brought on this concern I now feel about having wasted my time. I realize it now: I have seen many beautiful things. In fact, I might even say that I have enjoyed all that I have seen in this life. And now, I am torn between two positions: I am bent on maintaining an awareness of that enjoyment, to remind myself in the remaining time, to always notice the beauty of what I am given to see. On the other hand, I am consumed with a sense of regret over having wasted so much of the time I had, in failing to acknowledge that I was enjoying it. I do not mean that I did not enjoy it as it happened, but rather, that I do not remember taking note of that pleasure. The contraction of my memory around the time I enjoyed the most, this period of total productivity in my early career, is characteristic of this pattern, since I can now barely remember any of it. In fact, there is something maybe even deeper than that. My command of my language is, I am sure, insufficient to fully communicate it, but I can try to express it like so: I have failed in this life to enjoy my own enjoyment. I have enjoyed many of the crimes I committed. But this pleasure, this beauty, remaining unacknowledged, has been wasted. I have created much of the beauty I wasted myself, which brings me a sense of guilt, and shame. I cannot say that I have killed these people for nothing - no, the murders themselves were not wastes, but they were wasted. This is the core of my current dissatisfaction, perhaps an experience common to all of humankind, but something that is of particular interest to me as I take the measure of the time I've spent, and try to find the best way to live in the time remaining.
Simon was now reclining all the way back, his feet were off the floor. Someone shuffled in the room, waiting for him to continue, and one officer was already sleeping.