not require kindness- Helga’s consideration was a way of saying that she
believed this man would once more be one of the living, welcomed back to
the brotherhood and sisterhood of humanity, and that he should be
treated henceforth with tenderness and compassion and not just as an
interesting and challenging prospect for reanimation.
2
The weeds and grass were as high as his knees, lush from an unusually
rainy winter. A cool breeze whispered through the meadow.
Occasionally bats and night birds passed overhead or swooped low off to
one side, briefly drawn to him as if they recognized a fellow predator
but immediately repelled when they sensed the terrible difference
between him and them.
He stood defiantly, gazing up at the stars shining between the steadily
thickening clouds that moved eastward across the late-winter sky- He
believed that the universe was a kingdom of death, where life was so
rare as to be freakish, a place filled with countless barren planets, a
testament not to the creative powers of God but to the sterility of His
imagination and the triumph of the forces of darkness aligned against
Him. Of the two realities that coexisted in this universe-life and
death-life was the smaller and less consequential. As a citizen in the
land of the living, your existence was limited to years, months, weeks,
days, hours. But as a citizen in the kingdom of the dead, you were
immortal.
He lived in the borderland.
He hated the world of the living, into which he had been born. He
loathed the pretense to meaning and manners and morals and virtue that
the living embraced. The hypocrisy of human interaction, wherein
selflessness was publicly championed and selfishness privately pursued,
both amused and disgusted him. Every act of kindness seemed, to him, to
be performed only with an eye to the payback that might one day be
extracted from the recipient.
His greatest scorn and sometimes fury-as reserved for those who spoke of
love and made claims to feeling such a thing. Love, he knew, was like
all the other high-minded virtues that family, teachers, and priests
blathered about. It didn’t exist. It was a sham, a way to control
others, a con.
He cherished, instead, the darkness and strange anti-life of the world
of the dead in which he belonged but to which he could not yet return.
His rightful place was with the damned. He felt at home among those who
despised love, who knew that the pursuit of pleasure was the sole
purpose of existence. Self was primary. There were no such things as
“wrong” and sin.
The longer he stared at the stars between the clouds, the brighter they
appeared, until each pinpoint of light in the void seemed to prick his
eyes.
Tears of discomfort blurred his vision, and he lowered his gaze to the
earth at his feet. Even at night, the land of the living was too bright
for the likes of him. He didn’t need light to see. His vision had
adapted to the perfect blackness of death, to the catacombs of Hell.
Light was not merely superfluous to eyes like his; it was a nuisance
and, at times, an abomination.
Ignoring the heavens, he walked out of the field, returning to the
cracked pavement. His footsteps echoed hollowly through this place that
had once been filled with the voices and laughter of multitudes.
If he had wanted, he could have moved with the silence of a stalking
cat.
The clouds parted and the lunar lamp beamed down, making him wince.
On all sides, the decaying structures of his hideaway cast stark and
jagged shadows in moonlight that would have seemed wan to anyone else
but that, to him, shimmered on the pavement as if it were luminous
paint.
He took a pair of sunglasses from an inside pocket of his leather jacket
and put them on. That was better.
For a moment he hesitated, not sure what he wanted to do with the rest
of the night. He had two basic choices, really: spend the remaining
predawn hours with the living or with the dead. This time it was even
an easier choice than usual, for in his current mood, he much preferred