The One Percenters (21 page)

It is a gray day, which I assume is only appropriate.

At least the Good Lord provided a proper setting. I came in with nothing, and that’s all I have now. I am fortunate to have somebody to help me with this each day. They will not afford me a pencil. I suppose I could take out an eye with it if I wanted to.

It took a lot of hard work to find someone to help, and it is time now to thank him. Guilt for the damned, I suppose. I also have to thank all of those people in my life who helped me find some measure of peace in this unpredictable world. I need to thank those who I loved; you know who you are. None of that award-ceremony nonsense.

I’m not going to go out with a hissy fit, Mother; I want you to know that. I will take my medicine with dignity and honor. Not that I should, mind you. I have more than one reason to gripe. The abuse as a child.

The abuse as an adult. I had to suffer through a world I didn’t understand just because you and dad got the itch one night to raid your foul-smelling hole. Maybe it’s not me. Maybe
you
wanted a child like some people want a dog. Someone to feed and to give shelter to and to turn to for self-assurance in a hostile world. Trouble is, I didn’t always bring back the stick. Sometimes I chose to run far and wide with it. To meet other dogs and to explore. This bothered you; I know it did.

The women in my life have held me back, and the men have pushed my head beneath the surface of the water.

I don’t regret what I’ve done, and when I’m gone, the papers will all write that I showed no remorse.

Remorse for what? I ask you. For thinking on my own two feet? For trying to feel? I cannot and will not feel
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shame for that. I hope that after I go, the man beside me will take these papers and continue them, so that my story will be written and I will have died with purpose.

I can only hope for that. Perhaps I’ll even make it into come college kid’s term paper.

But now it is time for me to go. I wish to enjoy my final hours in golden silence, daydreaming of high, blue skies and of better places than this, where the showers are always hot and dreams really do come true. I’ve been in and out of a haze for quite a while now. I know my obituary will not be a thing of beauty. It will be written by an underpaid employee at the newspaper who knows me only as a natural born killer.

I’ll be labeled as “sick” or “disturbed” or some such euphemism. It won’t look to explain my actions, though my lack of children might be suspected as contributing to my “illness.” He’ll turn his copy in to his editor and return to his home, where he will spend the rest of his days wondering how it is that he should spend his time writing about other people’s lives rather than living his own. He will crawl beneath the covers of his bed at night in the thirty-dollar pair of underwear he can’t afford and wonder where it all went. And one day his time will come, too, and all he’ll be left with is the wish that he be remembered and the knowledge that he won’t.

I really hope there is a bright light and a long tunnel. I hope God will approach me and shake my hand and order me a drink from the bar. If He should, I am sure the liquor will be stiff and the glass will be tall. I can see God as a bourbon guy. Bourbon and unfiltered cigarettes. I bet he’ll wear sneakers too.

Maybe I’ll meet up with all of the great minds of the past, and they will turn to me and say in unison,

“You had it right.” Maybe there will be a flavor better than vanilla. And perhaps, just perhaps, I’ll get another crack at this world. Maybe you will too. And perhaps, just perhaps, I’ll come back as
your
son or daughter.

Maybe then you’ll understand what true love is all about, when I look at you and you look at me and we enjoy a moment of comfortable silence.

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And maybe years from now, Doctor, as I sit beside you on your deathbed far away from here, I will turn to you and say thanks for bringing me into this lovely world, and bring a smile to your face. For that is all I could ever want.

—Edward Pritchard Caine

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Addendum

Edward Caine died on February 13th. He didn’t quite make Valentine’s day, I am sorry to say. It was his favorite holiday. It is my duty now, as he would have liked, to finish the tale with the same instrument I’ve been using all this time.

Edward spent the last years of his life in a compromised mental state. From all of the evidence I can gather, he was a good man with a big heart. In his final days, I spent a lot of time speaking with him, getting to know him, really. Sometimes a clouded mind speaks the most truth. Unfortunately, his mind did not provide for him all the years it should have been expected to.

Edward’s father was a sore subject for him, but I feel it would help you now to know more about him.

Robert Caine was a merchant who married too young and for all the wrong reasons. There’s no need to name them. When Edward arrived in this world, Robert felt jealous of him. Jealous of his own son. I don’t believe Edward ever got over this fully. The guilt was omnipresent.

Edward felt he had a lot to prove. He took to drinking as a young man, and he left his best years behind him as a teen. Very few people were able to see the good in him after that time. To be truthful, very few people saw the good in him before, from what I hear.

It is my belief that his real problems—the problems that eventually led to his mental breakdown—

originated at the time that the Solemn Stalker was doing his thing, back in the fall of ‘05. The whole occurrence turned Edward against humanity, and who can blame him? He began to dwell on the limitations and flaws of modern society. At first it led only to heavy drinking and a fatalistic attitude, but then the element of nature came into play. He seemed to develop a belief within himself that he had a purpose, something that most of
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us never find for ourselves. For that I give him credit.

Unfortunately, he never reached his full potential.

Not by a long shot. His actions became despicable. He would curse the very people he loved. But it is my belief that he did all of this with the greatest of intentions. It was Edward’s desire to shake up the world, which we must quietly admit has gathered quite a bit of dust in recent times.

Edward was given a mind which craved knowledge, and he felt alone in that cause. There was no way anyone he knew could ever understand what he was feeling, no more than we can understand what anyone is feeling on God’s green Earth. Suffice it to say, he began as a simple man who had little noticeable effect on the world around him, and ended as a complex man who had just the same.

In truth, Edward never murdered anyone. Maybe now you’ll understand that, if you didn’t before. He fell into a spiral of self-pity where every day was a gray day in his eyes. He had, after all, only two options. He could try to fight an impossible battle—waking up the world to its own limitations—or he could fault himself.

He was a good man, as I’ve stated, and he chose the latter, not out of laziness or incompetence, but because he realized the other would only cause pain. Pain is something he’d rather inflict on himself. And so he did.

It started mentally, creating a fantasy world where the rules were his to create, where there was reason and purpose, and where he could place the blame squarely where he felt it belonged.

Eventually, his mind suffered from it, and this had repercussions on his day-to-day existence. He lost his lust and love for life, the qualities which made such a simple man so oddly admirable to begin with. At last, I presume, he found it just wasn’t worth the effort anymore.

I found his body on a Friday; that much I remember. The worst part about it is that, yes, it was my gun he used. And I have to live with that, always.

—Jill McIntyre-Caine

About the Author:

John W. Podgursky

John Podgursky lives in Brooklyn. He’s spent the last 15 years traveling the U.S. of A., trying to make sense of it all. He’s still confused, but sleeps well at night knowing that nobody else knows any better, and in the end we’re just going to die anyway.

Also from Damnation Books:

Concubine

by Geoff Chaucer

Erotica Horror

Short Story

ISBN: 978-1-61572-027-9 ebook

The Emperor fi nds a certain concubine very pleasing. She studies with an old hetaera to make herself yet more pleasing but soon discovers that the old woman is actual y in the employ of the Empress and has something other that the sexual pleasure of the Emperor in mind.

Natural

selection

has

become

unnatural. Having dealt with the vicious murder of his wife, Edward Caine takes his rightful place as a One-Percenter, eliminating those not fit for the human race. He must fight his instinct to use his role for revenge; he is after those who live on only because of money and medicine.

The weak-gened are not fit to breed, and it's the job of Edward and his brethren to see that they don't. But can he finish the job before his own mind betrays him? He is an agent of the Earth. He is a One-Percenter.

Damnation Books, LLC

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Santa Rosa, CA 95402