Chapter 24
An exploration into the depths of suffering
"Ok, Tollen. I'll let you in... First, let's settle the matter for you. I'll give you a little demonstration. The man who lives in the apartment next door is named Pham. He and his sister were part of operation Baby Lift out of Vietnam at the end of the war. Generally, he is a nice enough fellow. Stinks up the place every now and then with a bit of weed smoke, but he is quiet enough.
"What may surprise you, is that a man let into the US as a refugee, actively campaigned for our Nazi President. He was a poll observer for the campaign. Once a month he goes down to the US/ Mexico border. There he dresses up in full paramilitary garb, armed with an AR-15 and berretta. He patrols for undocumented immigrants with the Minutemen Freedom Patrol. So, we have a schmuck refugee, that wants to stop other refugees from coming in to the US. My kind of 'scum and villainy'. From what I know about your hatred for hypocrisy yours as well." Nom said.
Nom stood and walked over to the front door. He released the dead bolt and sliding chain. Coming back to his chair, he sat and looked Tollen in the eye.
"Now, I want you to sit there perfectly still. I'll tell you if I want you to get involved." Nom said.
The door opened, and a short thin Asian man dressed like a member of the brat pack walked in.
"Tollen, I would like you to meet Pham." Seeing Tollen starting to rise, Nom shook a finger. "No, don't bother trying to talk with him. I've paralyzed his vocal cords."
The look of excitement was beginning to fade from Tollen's face, replaced by a thin sheer of horror.
"How did he know to come here?" Tollen asked.
"Well, I've been experimenting. I've found, that so long as what I'm doing involves killing something, even if it is only part of a single cell, I can, with nothing more than a wish, make it happen. In some cases, I've reprogramed people's brains, breaking axon connections seems to qualify as death. I've triggered diseases, some quick, others slow. Remember those uncles of mine? The ones who robbed my grandfather blind?" Nom asked.
Tollen nodded slightly.
"I gave them each the perfect disease, so that they would die slow agonizing deaths. Deaths that matched their crimes perfectly. One won't even know that there is something wrong for a few weeks at the least. The other, well from what I can sense, he is only a month from death's door."
Seeing Tollen shrink in his seat, Nom sarcastically offered an apology. "Oh, I am sorry man, this seems to have gotten a bit too real for you. Funny how grim horror in the flesh can seem so much worse. Take another puff on that stogie, nicotine is an excellent anti-anxiety drug." Nom offered.
Tollen looked down at his hand, almost as if he was surprised to see a cigar. It was resting between the fingers of his right hand, over the ash tray on his lap. He hesitantly took a puff and then another. Color did not return to his face, but, as with a man resigned to his fate, he settled his features.
"That's better." Nom said. "My dear Pham…" Nom said turning towards the door. "I know that I was rude for not acknowledging your arrival, but you could at least have closed the door." Pham turned and closed the door. He did not turn back to face the four eyes watching, he simply stared at the closed door, as if that was the sum of his universe.
"Now, as to your question, Tollen. You asked how did he get here? Well to a limited extent, I think I've mastered mind control. To me, Pham, and everyone else I see, is simply an ever-expanding schematic and anatomical diagram. I look at the face, and a sub menu appears identifying all the inner and sub parts. Select the part I want and that expands, so on and so forth, until I reach the final sub point I want."
"In the case of Pham, I caused a spasm in the blood vessels that feed his brain. Do it right, and you can trigger hallucinations. At first, when I started experimenting, I thought I had to be very specific. I thought I had to intimately know the part of the person, that I wanted to effect, and how I was going to affect it. But it turns out that can muddy the results. It's almost as if I have an intuition. If I simply think about the end result I want, the index menu of that person automatically opens up."
"I don't even have to see them face to face. I can feel them. When I decided to call Pham in here, I just reached out. It's like their body is a part of mine. I can feel and sense everything about them down to the last detail. I can feel just about every person on Earth, I think. The ones with functioning brains at least. I can feel them everywhere in the world. Come to think of it… Yes, I can even feel a hand full zipping through the cosmos aboard the International Space Station.
"But it's more than just a feeling. It's like a light I see out of the corner of my eye. Did you ever sit in a room with a window facing the sun? The dining room at my grandparents' house has a west facing window. Throughout his tenure, my grandfather was given countless awards, political, academic, medical, scientific, charitable, on and on. When he got one that was glass, or better yet a prism, my grandmother would put them up for display in that window.
"One of my uncles as a teenager put in glass shelves for them to sit on. By the time I was old enough to start remembering family events, there were five shelves overflowing with prisms of every shape imaginable. The setting sun would first come through the weeping boughs of a hemlock tree, only to be spun into dervish-like spins. That spinning light came in through the window, bounced through the prisms, and painted the beige walled room in a symphony of light. I used to love lying on the table, just staring at the ceiling when the sun started going down. The rainbows surrounding me, they danced in my peripheral vision, and, somehow, this made them seem all the more alive."
"When I think about humanity Tollen, it's just like those rainbows. Over the years, I came to recognize the distinct painting each prism would cast. I would position them just right every time I came over, just to make the perfect show. Like them, I recognize the human life lights I see in the corners of my vision, and I know them. Without any conscious effort, I know exactly which one I need. I can see everything about them regardless of where they are. I saw Pham's light and knew that he was in his apartment, the perfect subject for my little demonstration."
"I told you, I gave him a hallucination. Pham loves to garden. When he isn't being a hypocritical asshole and discriminating against refugees from the Mexican cartel civil war, he is running a local green house that he partially owns. He has a love for desert plants and a real gift for making them grow. That is why he illegally grows peyote and poppies. He has quite the fat little income coming in from it. Normally, I wouldn't care. Hell, he's helped me with my own plants. He is a consenting adult after all, but he uses that green house to finance his hate. And that, I do care about. He hates Hispanic illegal immigrants for breaking the law, so he breaks the law to persecute them."
"While I looked at Pham's light, I saw that he has a recurring dream. A dream of a perfect flower. Somehow, he knows that if he ever finds it, it will bring him happiness and true enlightenment. So, with my hallucination, I gave him a vision. From what I can tell, he's seeing the most beautiful flower he can imagine. With just the right stimuli, I added in an understanding. He should follow and obey the flower's every instruction. When he looks at us he does not see us, he sees that flower. When he hears me, he hears the voice of the flower."
"By shaking the hairs of his ears, to the point of damage, and eventual death, I can make him hear me without having to utter a word."
Pham turned from the door, crossed the room, and sat cross-legged on the floor in front of Tollen and Nom.
"I'm telling him to relax and sit before his wish." Nom said
"Nom, what do you think you are doing?" Tollen said, dread rising in his voice.
Nom's look could have shattered a steel plate. "I told you to be silent man! Do not come between me and my prey!" His voice was a hiss of steam.
He looked back at Pham. "It really is a shame. Even if I let him live, in order to dig up the vision of the flower, I had to destroy the memory engrams that held it. He will never have his dream again. He won't even remember that he ever had it. In a way, it seems just. He likes destroying the dreams of a safe life for others. There are so many who want nothing more than a chance to live as he does here in the US."
Nom's thinking process had gone external for the sake of his audience. "What would be appropriate I wonder? Here we have a man who was adopted by this country, but, like a selfish child, would rob his younger siblings of the same experience. Well, I can't just magically send him back in time to face the horrors of the Viet Cong. Whatever I do, it has to be done to him here and now."
"Alright, Tollen, you may speak. What would be a just reward for such hypocrisy? What punishment fits this crime?" Nom asked.
Tollen shook with fear in his seat. "I don't know. This just seems so wrong."
"What a peasant answer. It is the powerless who judge by fear those with power. Do you know what death I fear the most?" Nom asked.
"No." Tollen said.
"Thirst."
Tollen seemed surprised. "Why? There are far more gruesome and long deaths: cancer, Alzheimer's…"
Nom cut him off. "With both of those, you lose your mind. Hardly an act of suffering." Nom replied.
"With cancer you either have the cancer actually kill your brain, or you are put on so much pain medication that you leave this world, not even knowing it exists any more. Alzheimer's may make the person you become a terrified freak. But not before you are locked in a prison body. A prison of ignorance so profound you are unable to even speak. The person you were is destroyed long before that happens. To me that is the true death, not the death of the body."
"Thirst is the worst I have yet seen. For three days or more you suffer. Just a little at first. It's like an itch in the middle of your back that you can't reach. Slowly it takes over every thought you have. You fight it, but there it is. Some might say drowning is the same, an unquenchable need for air. That lasts only three or four minutes, this lasts half a week or more."
"As true thirst progresses, your eyes grow scratchy, and it becomes difficult to see. Your mouth grows a glue-like saliva to torture you. Your tongue is unable to pry free from the sticking surfaces surrounding it. But that glue turns to dust after a day or two. By that time, you wish for even that glue, anything to quench the fire in your throat."
"Your muscles knot and cramp. Not just a Charley Horse, but every muscle in your body shrinking, trying desperately to conserve fluid. Your stomach's acid can't be diluted, and it starts to eat holes through your guts. Your urine grows stronger and stronger, until it too is nothing but acid eating away at your insides in an unquenchable fire. Your brain literally starts to shrink. Finally, your lungs do not have enough water, to keep the enzymes that bring you oxygen running. Slowly, every system in your body shuts down. You feel nothing but an unquenchable, unanswerable, need. Water! It is your last thought as the darkness takes you." Nom took a sip from his gin as if to ward off the specter he had summoned.
"How do you know any of that?" Tollen said.
"I can see it right now. I can see all over the world; people becoming, living, breeding, suffering, and dying. I can see down to the last detail the suffering of them all. The worst by far, is those who are thirsty. No, the worst suffering is my own. I see them, feel them, whether I want too or not. I hear their screams, I feel their pain, but I can only grant them oblivion as relief. Every gift comes with a curse and this is mine." Nom said.
"But as for Pham? Those Hispanic immigrants need freedom. They need a safe place, one free and away from the horrors of their homelands. They did not cause the chaos there, we did. It was the retarded 'War on Drugs,' and with our endless meddling in their affairs. Always to their loss, and to our gain."
"Pham was once the same. He was created in the horror of another useless war. One the US started for no just cause. Pham came to the US seeking a better life, that is after we destroyed the good one he might have had. Now, he is no better than the monsters who launched either of those wars."
Pham slowly came to his feet. He looked Nom in the face with tears of joy.
"Thank you!" Pham mouthed.
He walked out the front door. Nom and Tollen heard him walk into his own apartment.
"What is he going to do?" Tollen asked?
"The flower told him to go home. He will go back to his apartment and lock his door. Then he will tell anyone via group text who might care, that he is going out of town for the next two weeks. He's going to the Arizona desert and will be out of cell range. Right now, I can feel him taking off his clothes, and walking into his bathroom with his phone. He's stopping to turn the thermostat in his apartment up to eighty-five. He's setting the central air to maintenance, so come heat or cold it will stay steady. Do you want to watch? I could have him let us in?" Nom asked.
Tollen nervously shook his head no.
Nom shrugged it off and continued. "Ah, he is doing better than my command, I only told him to contact his loved ones and boss. He's sending out a group text to all of his contacts. Good he will be ready for the next step in a moment."
Nom looked through the walls, and watched as Pham sat down in his empty bath tub. Why leave a mess for the landlord? Nom thought.
"Pham." Nom said into his ears. "Put your phone into the toilet bowl so that it shorts out."
When Pham had complied, Nom said: "Now go, and sit back in your bath. Relax."
Nom switched back to his real voice so that Tollen could hear him. "I'm making the paralysis of Pham's vocal cords permanent, by severing the laryngeal nerve. Pham will not be able to cry for help. I'm removing his brain's ability to send voluntary muscle commands to his limbs. I am not breaking his neck, because I want him to feel everything, just as his victims have felt the suffering of deportation. Of being separated from their families and hope. I want him to be able to move his eyes, and face. I want him to be able to accelerate his breathing when he feels panic."
"Now I will leave him there. In a room heated to a balmy survivable temperature, so that he does not die of exposure. There he has a sink, a shower nozzle, a tub nozzle, and even a toilet. All sources of water. I'm removing his hallucination, and leaving him just as he was minus his dream."
"Oh, Tollen." Nom said in ecstasy. "If you could only taste the delicacy that is his terror. He is in a pure blind panic, trying to understand what is going on. Now he will slowly sink into oblivion. But, not before he sits in his own waste for days, and craves that which surrounds him, but that he cannot reach, water."