42 :

I was in the street. Sat down, my head in my hands, and it felt odd – but not entirely unwelcome to be sat in a storm without my hair matted by rain. I keep having to remind myself – I don’t actually have a body. This – the things that I see and feel – is my perception of what my body is. Warts and all. I feel my own body when I touch it. I feel the touch of others when they too are ghosts. I feel the cold of the concrete wall I am sat upon even though I can’t actually feel the cold. Because I expect to feel that. Not because I actually am.

But that’s not what bothers me. I’m sat alone. If I ever want to see my new friends, those tragic, grotesque fucks living out what’s left of their afterlives in dull mundanity like homeless bums, I know what to seek out. They stand out a mile.

They’re windowshoppers through a life they wish they still had, and never appreciated when they were alive. But I knew how lucky I was to be alive. Each breath, each dull moment of commuting, every time I stubbed my toe was a reminder that I was not just living, not just existing, but alive. I may have hated it, but I knew what it is.

These people, these dull ghosts, just walk through life, and yet – they don’t look right, like characters that have been optically added in the cinematic blue screen process. Around them their circumstances just seem false, cardboard. And yet I too, am one of those. But I feel as if I belong. I’m not deluding myself that I’m alive – I know I’m not. I’m just trapped here, trying to find a way off this planet.

And I am alive again, born again, in the blinding headlights of a car crash. But not alive, not living. I exist, therefore I am.

I think, therefore I am.

And that’s not what worries me. I know I’m dead. I can’t open my front door. So I’m sat on a concrete wall and listening to someone cry.

I’m listening to the wracking sobs of my girl as she screams at the senseless, pointless, waste of my life. It isn’t even a human sound, but some kind of guttural, angry, desperate sob from an animal. A hurt, defenceless animal.

From somewhere beyond human, somewhere where pain is the only real feeling. I used to think I rather feel pain than be numb. I was wrong.

All of us are animals at times of our lives. We just fool each other that we’re better than cows and insects. We’re not – just better dressed.

Outside the flat, a police car. Inside, a heartbreak. Soft calm voices of two officers, their black and silver lapels, their trained, rehearsed lines of comfort. They’ve seen it all before. Murder is more common than one might think, but still not as common as prime time ITV detective shows will tell you.

Right now there was no body. They were still scouring the nation, trying to find me, just another one of the disappeared. No longer was I a missing person, though its very likely that without interference or warning signs I too might have been just another one of those thousands that walk out of their lives every day and never come back. It’s only thanks to his poor planning that I was even anything more than a statistic and a “Case Pending” file.

The fucker murdered me. And she’s probably next. If I could find him. If I could change anything.

I can’t do anything. I CANT DO ANYTHING. Goddammit. God Damned me. What did I do to deserve this? I’m wracking my brains. I can’t think of a single thing, nothing that could justify this happening to me and my loved ones.

If you want to hurt a man, don’t hurt him. Hurt the people he cares about the most. Hurt his lover. Hurt his family. Hurt the thing he loves.

Each man loves the thing he hurts, and hurts the thing he loves. Steve most certainly did. He did this to me. Because in my arms was the heart he had betrayed, the heart he had hurt so much and had lost through his cruelty and malice.

He knew how to hurt her. He knew how to hurt me. He more than hurt me. He removed me as if I were never even alive. My crime? I loved.

I couldn’t let him do this again. The world would be a better place without him. Safer. Helen would be safe again. My girl would be able to walk through the streets without fear of a familiar, ugly voice. Without fear of those dirty, killing hands and that dangerous jealousy.

I didn’t want to spend my immortality like this.

Furious at my impotence. Furious at everything I couldn’t control. But I wasn’t impotent was I? I could change things. See into the things other people could not see, look beyond these things, change the world, go anywhere I pleased, walk invisible through the halls of power. Walk invisible through His Front Door. Protect my girl. Get my revenge.

Did I want to do that?

And how would I do it?

And even if I could, would I want to?

Fuck yeah. Of course. I had to learn how to change the world. How to feel objects again. How to see myself in mirrors. How to open doors and how to whisper in someone’s ear. How to appear in dreams and how to make this world a better place.

I had no choice. He would do it again, and where would I be? Nothing can bring me back to earth. Nothing can save me – only I can save others now.

There is no such thing as choice.

The fucker terrorised me. He threatened me and my love. He risked my life. Made our lives hell. Oh yeah, and he put a gun in my mouth and threatened to pull the trigger. Instead he merely ran me over, and sent my body cartwheeling like a statistic to fall unconscious onto concrete in the rain of England.

Whatever, whatever, happens to him isn’t enough.

I’ve got the Hard-On of Infinite Justice.

But what type of man would it make me? Yet, he would fights monsters, has to fight like a monster, has to become what he hates to vanquish the things he hates. Lest ye become a monster. So I had no choice. To defend my purity, I had to defile. To allow beauty, I had to do the things I despise the most. I had to find a way to murder a man.

As I said, sometimes the choices are so limited that there is no choice.

Who knows what he would do now I was dead?

I know what he would do. Without proof, he’d be free to walk the streets. I remember he was wearing gloves when he held a gun in between my mouth and I could speak only in vowels.

The worst thing Helen ever told me about him was about what type of man he was. He’d never killed anyone. Or more correctly, he’d never pulled the trigger, but merely, merely, ordered it. He was meticulous. And after the last time he’d been sent down after choosing the wrong man for the wrong job, what choice did he have. He chose the right people this time.

Like the perfect serial killer, he’d leave no trace that he was ever there. He’d only get caught if he chose to, if he left clues for the police to find. And this? I was just another dead man. The world is full of them. People who live and die, people who just vanish off the face of the earth everyday. Without a body, I would not be found. I’d just be another of the thousands who did a Disappearing Act, who took a left turn out of their lives one day without a reason given or an explanation. One of the Disappeared.

Even if they found me, I’d only be an unexplained corpse found on an industrial estate by a nightwatchman or a morning caretaker. Without motive, without reason, without anything to say why he was dead.

Just some guy who got hit late at night by some speeding teenagers on a joyride through an Industrial Estate. Just another drunk who collapsed of having had one too many.

The question no one can ever answer belongs to those three simple letters, why.

There was no choice at all. No why in his mind. Merely an exercise of power. There was never any right, merely an exercise of the fact that he had the power. The rule of the jungle – those who have the power, those who can give or take a life, are God. And he wanted to be God.

In his loins the power to give life. In his actions, the power to take it. He was God.

But I was God. I had been murdered, yet I still lived. Even in death, I could not die, could not sleep, could not do anything but mute and dumb, watch the world around me and wonder how to make a change.

Life came down to survival. I had to do this. I had to save her from the designs he had, the fate he planned for his bride. She’d suffered enough. If not for me, then I must become – reluctantly – that which I set out to destroy. A monster. A killer.

I made up my mind – I had to kill him to save others.

It really was that simple. There was no debate. No fucking choice. Just do, or do not. I had to become a monster to destroy a monster.

So be it.

I couldn’t bear to hear my best friend crying anymore. It hurt me in a way beyond words. I cannot, cannot, ever describe how much it hurt.

I stood up.I couldn’t bear to hear her anymore, these wracking sobs, these evil stabs at her happiness. Walking down the street I lashed out, and kicked the green plastic dustbin.

My foot connected. The bin shook.

The bin shook.

I was learning. I forgot that I was dead. I expected this to happen. And it happened.

I could move objects.

And that meant that I was Master of The Universe.

And I could kill him.

I wanted to. The reluctant killer. The coerced murderer. Helen’s Protector in life and death. The Guardian Motherfucking Angel.

There really was no such thing as choice.