Ideations of Incomprehensible Evil

A man is walking through the canteen with a overbrimming, plastic tray. Plastic coffee cup. Loose crisps arranged about a stale ham sandwich and a sarcastic salad. He’s struggling, holding the tray with one hand, pressing it against his chest. His other hand holds his boy’s. Cheap light strips, cracked plastic, buzz above us. Cheap, squalid chatter buzzes along with it. Why do they call it small talk when it occupies so much space?

I step towards the man. I’m giddy. It’s so easy. I place an open palm beneath his tray and smack upwards. The plastic tray upturns. Coffee cascades across stark shocked faces. Crisps catch the non-existent breeze like autumnal leaves. Ham and bread divides, processed meat flopping wetly against the soap-mopped, sticky floor. The salad takes to the air in frantic flight. The tray flips and strikes the young boy on the head with one, triumphant clap of plastic against skull. A perfect, slow-motion vignette. I stride away. The man doesn’t stop me. He doesn’t know what to do. What can he do in the face of such idiotic, childish, incomprehensible malice?

But then I blink, and return to reality. Just a daydream.

He gives me a weird look as I snort with laughter, ushers his boy away. A lone crisp slips from his plate onto the red plastic tray.

I’m standing at the platform, waiting for the tube. It's heat: wet, sweaty heat, the kind of heat you can taste. Body odour. Exertion. The nine to five, grinding down all those unhappy spices into that one, sloppy pot we call Bank Station on the Central Line. The train is coming; step forward, feel the relief of rushing, stale air, displaced and pressured along rat-infested, mouldy tunnels and loose-wire signalling. An elderly woman stands there, almost lost in the crowd. She’s a tourist, checking her paper map, searching down red line capillaries across the beast of London. Red line capillaries that match the wrinkles across her forehead.

I stand beside her. When I pick her up, she’s weightless. Her long years have hollowed her out. Her limbs flail like I’m shaking a limp doll. When I throw her, she sails through the air with a tiny little “o” of surprise on her stupid, old face. Then BANG – the train hits her and she shoots forward, a crumpled tissue through a wind tunnel, whoosh, gone, grotesque in its suddenness, strangely funny in the way that unfathomable, ridiculous violence can be. The screech of impotent brakes. The silence, followed by a scream: not many, but one made by many voices, rising up as one, a howling wave of idiot noise. Then hands – a monster of hands – grabbing my shoulders, grabbing my arms, grabbing my legs, pinning me down.

But then I’m standing on the train, and the old lady is beside me, muttering something in French. No one notices me smile to myself. There are too many people here: it’s impossible not to be alone.

I’m walking through the streets of London. A fat, suited man sniffs past some hooded teens, flicks a cigarette butt onto the rancid pavement, throws a can upon the litter habitat of rats and pigeon feathers. The teenagers don’t look up from their penguin huddle, their faces ethereal in the pale light of phone screens, snippets of face swallowed by tracksuit hoodies. Somewhere, a car blares its horn at an ambulance siren. Black exhaust smoke strangles out the last holdouts of unpolluted air.
 
I pick up the discarded can, jogging to catch up. ‘Hey,’ I say, and the fat, suited man turns just in time for the can to find his rolling forehead. I push and the can crumples into his uncomprehending face. It clatters to the ground, leaving a big, red circle in his skin. I press it like a button, and he shrinks back, spluttering. Dribbling half-words. A series of empty vowels, uuuh ooh err… then a sputtering outrage, the half-formed dignity of empty vocals, and I press his face-button again, and he stares, he just stares with his drooping, bovine eyes just seconds before the slaughter.

 But then I scratch my nose, and the suited man has turned the corner, and the teenagers are laughing about something on their phones. I’ve walked past the Coca Cola can. It still litters the dustbin wasteland of the floor. My little chuckle is swallowed by the traffic noise of a thousand angry vehicles and the black smog of the air.

I’m sitting on the couch in my rented, cold-water, paper-peeling apartment. The TV blares brazen nothingness, showing me the empty face of the endless void. My lips are wet with the ghost of Yorkshire tea. I taste the salt of Walkers crisps along the roof of my mouth, and I wait for the next thing to happen.

Instead of sheep I count imagined deeds, lulling me to black sleep. Chance meetings and clever one-liners. Recalculated arguments and seized opportunities, otherwise missed, romances, violences, friendships. My waking self, some stunted, emaciated part of what I could have been, what I dream of being.

I don’t know what happened. My imagined totality used to be someone good. Someone heroic. Temptations of the devil. Frustrations of the flesh. Original sin, I guess, corruptions worming into the rotting apple of cancerous cynicism. All those dreams of incomprehensible, nonsensical evil, serenaded by the hysterical laughter of the chronically impotent.

Impotence. That’s the truth of it. Not good and evil. The throughline of every ideation and stray, wisping thought: it’s power, the potency of action, the violence of popping my bubble of the world, rage, love, frustration – whatever – to scream ‘I’m here, I’m here, I’m HERE, damn it, I’M HERE, LOOK AT ME, HEAR ME, I’M HERE, I'M HERE, I'M HERE!’

But then I blink, and the daydream’s gone, and it turns out I was never here at all.