Friday, March 5, 2004

The Pleasure and Derision of His Own

So, I was dead. I was gone; left; away; floating; free. Not there anymore; no long there; gone from it all. No one could stop me.

I slumped over. Beside me, corpses, starved corpses that couldn't be alive. No, they just couldn't be alive. I wondered if I looked like them. Did I look like a corpse?

All their bodies were skeletal—you could see their ribs, and their skin tight around, baring them, expounding those ribs; those bones in their bodies. Starved bodies, all of them, and most naked, lost of their clothes. How deathly of death they all looked, as it was sure I was, too. How lost they all looked, how depleted and without hope. As I was.

I felt it was time to die. I was already dead; already dead—and so why fight it? Why fight it. They had starved us all, left us there, left us to die. No one would come in time, the liberators wouldn't come fast enough. There was no hope: there was only death.

Earlier I had reason to live. I must keep my Father in good health, we must stay together—that was what I told myself. I lived for him, and he lived for me there; and so I lived, and I had my bowl of soup a day, my crust of bread; and so I worked, I worked and I worked—and it was all for him. And he did the same for me. We would see each other get out of this place.

Oh, how wicked. How decimating, how inundating the struggle, the day-by-day struggle! Oh, the look in his eyes as he died—died of Typhus. I shall never forget it; I shall never. Those eyes ceased to see, be, know, hold me in their gaze. And they had killed them—killed him! The hate beated with my heart, like a fist to a carcass of nothing that did nothing with each beating of the blood. My heart, could it be broken, was broken—and it was ripped to tethers, and my vena cava, oh, assuredly I bled the most from there. I bled the most from the biggest vein of my heart.

Why must you have died, Father? Why? Why must you have? Oh, Father, how it killed me! How I died deaths innumerable thereupon. The reason—oh, the reason, it was not there any longer—it was exhumed and left to rot. Left to die. The reason died. It all died. All of it, all of it. I wished for the SS to shoot me there on sight, or I wished to come upon one of the SS and annoy him, get him to kill me.

But, I was too much a coward; something kept me going.

It was not God. God died long ago, here in this camp, here in this desecrated place. What God there is now has left. God is dead. He no longer lives; for Him I have no faith. If He loved me, I wouldn't have been put here, put here to die; to suffer; to see this torturous perpetuation. Oh, if God knows, how He deserves to be understood for His way; how He deserves to explain, how He himself should feel ashamed.

And food? It was not food. The food, same every day, same soup, did not fill my stomach; it only made it more empty. For with the food I ate; and with what I ate I swallowed; and it all went to a pitiless pit called my stomach, an empty hole serving.

How I wished to die every second of every day after your death, Father! How I kept seeing your eyes—oh, your eyes! The food did not calm me, did not enlighten me, did not euphoria me into anything but more pain—the pain of living, here, in this terrible, oh so terrible, place. How I longed to take off my onus—to take off it all, to let it flutter from my fluttering lips, like a falling butterfly's last flutter of wings—the solemn, slow, tedious up and down, up and down, up. . .down, up and down; then silence, then nothing, then dead, the butterfly dead. My lips dead My thoughts dead. This torture dead. My body dead; my skeletal body gone, lifeless, limp.

How I wished. How I wanted. And how, in desperation, I still lived. Oh, living! That was the hard part. The easiest part was dying.

I lay down here a few days ago, in this bunk house, and have been since. I felt too weak, to inundated to carry on, to do on. I wanted to die, I wanted to die. It was all dead. Survival had lost its reason, food had lost its comfort, God had died, and with his death the death of many to my eyes.; many who did not deserve to die.

We are just pigs to the slaughter here; we are just for the maggots, we are here to squeal and be starved, and suffer, oh suffer, oh misery, misery is here to be done to us all; to each and every one. We did not deserve for this to happen, we did not deserve to be sent here, to be starved. We deserved far worse, far worse. But this is all they can do to us.

Oh, how they look at us just like that—how they look at us as if we are not even human, how they said we deserved worse than this. And how they enjoyed it; how they embrace it like a masochist, a tried-and-true masochist.

So many faces round me; so many, oh so many. Sunken, swollen, sullen, they peer. Most are lifeless, drained; they do not move, they do not move at all. They only sit, lie, and stare. Ribs poke out harsh, protrude weakly. Faces look to be a skull, the eyes seem to not even be there. They are all gone—they are all dead. Dead by His will, dead by Their will. Dead.

I lay my head down, I have my will done. I lay me down; the world weights upon my shoulders, encumbers me down, weary, to the abode where I shall dwell. I lay me down, in sufferance and abuse; mistreatment and death's-head. Would I die and agony leave me; go from me; no longer be here, that would be all I need Would I leave here and no longer feel the pain; no longer feel. If I just shut my eyes now, yes, if I just shut my eyes now. Eyes close; shutters closing on a window, my Father's eyes closing, the gas chamber being closed; eyes closed; the door to my house, long gone, shutting, the door to the train shutting, closed; eyes closed, eyes rest, eyes no longer see.

And I died. My eyes faltered and I felt death touching me, fingering me with long, prying fingers. He beckoned me to open my eyes again, sweet and suave in voice.

My eyes opened, the door opening, the barb wire on the side, opening, opening. In I go. My eyes opened. Here I was, my eyes opened. But where?

I looked at my hands, and they were emaciated; I looked at my legs, and they were thin. And I was back home—but how? How was I back here—how, oh how was I? Where was I? What was going on?

I went to the mirror. And oh, horror most profound, oh, ugliness beyond ugliness.

There stared back a corpse. Eyes almost dead if not dead. Face sunken, swollen, unrecognizable.

It was terrible! The face—the face was mine, but wasn't. I had died long ago—I had died long ago, I had died so long ago, from the very first step into the camp.

And then—then I was back in the train—I was on my way there! But why was it happening again. Oh, I tried to tell them all! I screamed, I screamed "No! We must leave! WE MUST LEAVE AND BE OUT OF HERE!" but no one would listen, they were all fools; fools, all of them fools. And I said to them, "Can you not see my face? LOOK AT MY FACE! I LOOK LIKE A CORPSE! I LOOK DEAD!" but they did not listen, they would not hear it, the fools, the utter fools. How could they not see me for what I looked like? Could they see it? Did they know? Oh, how I wished they would heed me. How I wished they could see what I looked like! Oh, what torture brought me back here, I wish I could know.

Subdued, I had sat down; I had sat down and given up on them all. I wanted them to die—wanted them to die for being such fools!

They were all praying—praying to God. To God. Their hands held in embrace, their eyes closed, they prayed. He can't hear you, I wanted to say. He can't hear you, He can't, and He won't. He's already set on his ways. But I said nothing; not a thing at all, not a single word. They would not believe me, they wouldn't listen to me for a second; I sounded insane to them. I sounded insane to myself.

And there was the camp, I could see it from the window of the train: a small window with little ability to see out of. It did, in fact, make a nice reflection of my face; and oh, I flinched back upon that sight—that horrid sight! I was dead—dead, but I was here. I had died at the camp but I was here. How? How? And for what reason? Could I not just have died? Could I not have ended my suffering?

We walked toward the camp. Get into groups of five they said; those tyrants, those bastards; it was them again. How I wanted to act and kill them, or have them shoot me, kill me for real, or as real as real can get. But I looked upon my Father, now beside me. And it all rushed upon me, and I decided I would live again—or be here as I was—for him. For him and only for him.

And, from there things went as they had all before. I shall not lumber out an entire tree of what happened; I shall not say a thing more of it. It is too bad to hear—and it is too difficult to describe.

I lived the pain and anguish all over again, once more, all again. And when my Father, sickened with Typhus, died, I wished to be killed perpetually, I wished to die, I wished to not be here; I wished to spit in God's face, I wished to kill all these SS men, I wished. But no such thing happened.

And there I sat myself on the ground once more, as happened last time; and there I saw all the people round me, and there, in the distance, I could hear the liberators coming. They were too late, I was already dead. I was long gone and I would not be saved; I would not be saved, and I would rather die.

I thought they all knew what I had said in the train by now; I thought that they knew. And I felt they wished they had listened, deep in their dying hearts, deep in their skeletal bodies, where that one part of them still beated. I thought they knew now.

Death came swift knocking upon my heart. And with its hand, it seized, and pressured my heart to beat no more. And I died again, the second time, hoping it would not all happen again.

I woke this time in the large hands. These hands, I felt I had felt them before. I looked upward, and I saw God. I saw Him, and upon Him there was a moustache. A moustache that was a small strip upon His upper lip. And I saw in His eyes cruelty unimaginable; I saw it all in His eyes. I saw Him for what he was, and I felt I would spit in his face; that I would tempt Him to kill me. But first, I pleaded. "Why did you do it," I asked of him; asked and expected nothing.

"Nein."

Nein, it was all he said. Nein. It was all I could hear him say with each asking of a question.

He reminded me of a the Raven saying "Nevermore." And what was the difference between nevermore and nein? There was not much at all; no, there was not. The two meant the same things.

How we believe in Him. Oh, how I wished He didn't do what He did. How I wished to just die.

But it was not my time. I asked of him, "Can I just die?"

And the answer, emanating all about me, all around me, covering me like a thick vieled cocoon: "Nein." And again. "Nein."

He closed my eyes gentle with His hand. He whispered in my ear things I could not hear.

And again, death beckoned me to open my eyes. It was Him beckoning, He was death, He was life, He was all. He was the one to blame for it all. It was all His plan.

I opened my eyes, oh, and there I was again—my house—my house, and it all began again. And then it all stopped again, as I died on that floor; and then it all began again, and stopped again, and began again, and stopped again. It never ends; it never stops. The endless torture—oh, the endless torture.

I have been tortured so long that I take the torture for pleasure; and I have been tortured so long that I take the pleasure for torture.

The torture, the pleasure, and the derision. Oh, it is a terrible thing, a terrible fate. Could I escape, and I have tried many times; I have ran away many times, I have fled much.

The closest I have gotten to fleeing I cannot remember extensively. All I remember is a man sitting next to me, with a beard, and glasses. He was talking to me slow. He told me he was an alienist; that he was finding if I was sane, and how sane I was if so. I asked him what he could be talking about, and he then proceeded to say another thing, but by that time I was gone; I was back in His hands and I was back in my house again, looking at my hands; my thin, emaciated hands, and my lips were fluttering, and I stepped to look in the mirror again.

The same corpse; same face; same, same, same. I felt I would die, and I felt pleasure in looking upon my face. The torture was no longer torture; the way I looked was no longer horrible. It was now beautiful in every way, and now appeared to me to be the best thing I had ever seen. And people who, in the train, looked fine; those people I found torture in looking at. They looked so fine, so beautiful as they were pigs; as they were pigs for the slaughter.

I had long given up on ever asking them, telling them, of the dangers ahead; for they were not dangers to me any longer. They were pleasure. And from them I would derive the best feelings I ever found. And from His powers, I continued to go through and through it all again; all again, all again.

It took a long time for me to find I enjoyed it. It took me longer than He even expected. But I now enjoy every second of the concentration camp; I enjoy the way they all starve and die, the same people each time; I enjoy the way I am inclined to go about doing what I am to do. I used to fight it, I used to try to derail from what it was I was supposed to do. But fighting it did not do a thing; I was still put upon to do what I was to do—even if I fought it. It was His way, and His way cannot be severed from.

Made to relive this torture, now pleasure, over and over again, while all the rest are probably dead; are probably no longer alive. Oh, they must like it. They must be glad.

I feel one day He will let me go, back to my body. I feel He will let me do what I now find pleasure in. I feel He will get pleasure from it too.

I shall kill all of them; all of them, every single person I can find. Especially those whom I see each and every time through this. I shall love killing them, it shall feel good. It's what they deserve, it's what He says they deserve.

And to think I used to think He was dead. He is more alive than He ever will be. He has made me something better than I could ever be by doing what He has for me: by making me go through this over and over again. Perpetually.

Now when I'm in the train, and they pray, I pray too. But I pray for Him, to Him. Not like they do. Not like they do at all.

One time, I told them all about Him. And I told them they would all die soon, and I would be able to see it again after this. I told them I enjoyed it, and they would too if they were me. I told them He was glad they were dying. I told them all about how each of them would die—I had memorized it all, to visceral as well as verbose details. I told them it all, and when I was done, I smiled at them. I told them I looked much like a corpse when I looked in the mirror at myself; I told them it was quite beautiful. I was beautiful, I told them. Just like He was. I told them they didn't understand at all. And I smiled and felt pleasure at this.

They did not believe me. But, as they did die, as they starved, and were gassed, I am sure their beliefs changed quite drastically. Quite drastic indeed; to the point where they knew I was right on.

Even when someone knows how and when they're going to die, they don't even try to stop it. A sad thing it is indeed. The autonomy, oh the autonomy. And the beauty of this all.

When I get out of here, and get back to where He sends me, I shall have fun putting my derision to them all; to make them feel like I do about this all. They will learn what they think is torture is beauty and pleasure. And they will learn that what they think is pleasure and beauty is torturous and horrible.

Oh, do I await that day; I await it like I await the dead look in my eyes, the tasty dead look; I await it just like I await the look in their eyes once they understand their fate: once they understand His fate for them, and His fate for me.
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