#9.20 - Undead

The Picture of Dorian Gray

The Unveiling of Dorian Gray

The fire was lit. She stood back from it to admire it. Fire held a magic, a power, which was immediate, instant. The warmth, the glamour, the changeability. The sound. The power - the power you had when you were able to command and control it. The power it had to make you feel loved. To make a room come alive. Fire was true - it never lied. That is one thing you could say about it.

Unlike him. He was full of secrets and lies. Secrets and lies which undulated within him like a blind worm. At was only at this moment that she realised what she found so disconcerting, so disturbing - that all these years, it was only now, when she placed him beside fire that it was clear - his discomfort with himself came from his own dishonesty. His dishonesty with himself. She understood now. This was the reason why he was the way he was. He was a skinbag of lies.

This was what she was trying to understand, what she was trying to get at - he was a liar. Her son had said this to her recently, "If he could lie about that, what else is he lying about?" and now she knew the answer - he was lying about everything. Everything. The hiding, the subterfuge, the refusal to be accountable - that was all part of his MO. The continual moving on - job after job after job - trying to find recognition for the nothingness inside. Traveling fervidly, seeking approbation and approval in conference halls, through women, through superficial talks and the technocratic bollocks he threw around, the appearance of intelligence, coupled with an interest in a vanity - she saw it all now, clear by the light of the fire.

In her presence, he was miserable. He was miserable because he knew that she knew. She knew and she saw and she called out the bullshit. She had always had a very VERY poor ability to suffer fools gladly, especially fools who claimed they knew better and it was not long before the bullshit was called. But in her infinite belief that people cannot be made of bags of lies, she constantly gave him the benefit of the doubt. But now she saw, now she saw, the writhing, heaving, twisting sack of crap that he was. If there was any humanity in him, it was long, long gone. He was nothing but habit - desperately running from one lie to the next and be was beyond reach. Well, there was nothing to reach, nothing. The skinbag of lies. She whispered this again. I understand now. I understand now. I see it.

His unhappy face by the fire. The face of a liar that had come to the end of his lie. She felt a bit sick, a bit revolted. It was only after all this time that she saw. She had to dehumanise him because all his life he dehumanised everything else. Everything was a calculation, a pose, a contortion and it was all lies because there was nothing which despite having decades and decades to construct, no kernal. No garden which had been tended and cultivated. There was no personality to speak of. There were only a series of activities which led to this moment by the fire.

It has all been a huge waste of time. Not her waste of time - ok, some of it her time - but really, his life has been a huge waste of time. How must that feel, to have nothing by way of self to show after all this time. No self awareness, no personality, no principals, nothing to stand by and say, hey, yeah I stood for that - that's something. Virtue signaling, like a feeble battery operated light on drowned man too too late. That was the other thing - everything owed him something. He was the victim - he was the one hard done by. He owed it to himself to take everything. Perhaps that was his personality. If it was, then it is probably best that he didn't have one. The rapist, the marauder, the parasite. That is some personality. No wonder the skinbag of lies was the better idea.

She could no longer bear looking at him. His self hatred now raged all around him. She could see it. Like a drunk looking for a bottle, a junkie needing their next fix, he moved from person to person, seeking the affirmation he could never find in himself. But like each hit, this soon wore off, and after awhile the same self loathing would return and a new victim would be required. He was quite like a vampire in that sense. The self importance, the demand to be fed, the draining of the prey. But she was not that victim, not that person - well she was for a while. However, there would come a point when she was say to him, er, what are you doing? It was like sunlight that question - accountability. It was terrible because he never knew what he was doing and the why he was doing it was utterly invisible to him. He had no idea why he was doing it - however, ignorance is not innocence. 

She was gobsmacked. She had been on the wrong track all this time. All this time she thought that some kind of humanity would eventually reveal itself, but no. Humanity presumed the possibility of a soul - and there was no soul. There was the cold emptiness of the Nosferatu, the undead. He was from the realms of the undead. The unfeeling. Beyond the various circlings of Hell.

At that moment, instead of losing all faith in humanity, it was redeemed. She understood, that somehow he must have a spirit which was perfect in its conception, made of a small drop of love. However that spirit was never allowed to incarnate in his soul. It was never allowed to take root. Instead of love, there was the idea of love, and there was intellect. His vanity grew roots over the sapling of love and strangled it to death. In his soul at least. Certainly the desperation of the spirit, trying to reach out was what compelled him to act in the way he acted, driving him to seek out new victims to create the reflection he so longed for, but this was never to be. Because there was already an image, one which he already had and could not relinquish.

She put another log on the fire and now could no longer bear to look at him. She knew why now. She knew why he also could not bear to look at her - because she saw. She saw... and at that moment, he dissolved. Dissolved into the ashes, by the merciless light of day.