A Bit of Background

This is not the part of the tale where a man puts a skewer in the skull of a Thai cook and watches her body as it rises up off her chair, or the moment on the beach when the sniper shoots a swimmer and watches as her head disincarnates. This is not even the moment in the story where you are told the reasons for, and what led this man to commit what some might say was treason and atrocities, and at this instant it is only stated that this man, at the time, did not think his actions were wrong. If you want to sleep without this dark secret in your mind it may be best to put this one back and look around for one that will allow you to feel inside as if all is right in the world when it isn’t. If you are the sort of reader who wants to see the axe in the protagonist’s hands in paragraph one, then it is best to leave this one for later, and to make matters worse, this is not the beginning of the story, and in all honesty there is a bit of background in the beginning and things are told of this man’s past before the image of an axe, the sight of blood, or a twitching convulsing body pumping adrenaline through veins that some say were like the radiating grate at the back of an old refrigerator—pumping out heat in an effort to keep what is inside cool, and yet in the case of this man unable to keep things from spoiling. This man, in his head, due to an accident and due to his soul, has a mind that his body can not keep cool. A dual core processor with a fan meant for an old 486 CPU might describe it. At times his mind shuts down.

At these times his memory is write-protected, inaccessible, and his network when awake has no recollection of what he has done, and yet still has a conscious plan. It is just that he did not know the things he did to accomplish his goals. Some said he had a problem with his soul, and yet others could empathize with his actions even though they could see everything that he did clearly. In latter years, when he came to know just what he had done, he was not in a position to judge his actions any better than a reader here can. He was looking back on a long time ago and looking on to the future. He was reading his own memory now and hoping that some of it may not have really happened. It was as if he had sent his hard drive in for data recovery services and in the last days had gotten his data back.

I, too, am much older now than then. There is some wisdom that was not there when…