Contrition

“Am I dreaming?”

“No!” The spirit said, sitting at the end of Jane’s bed. His translucent appearance shows a faded green uniform. His dark hair appears short, as he sat, his back to her. “I am here. I am sentenced with a chance.”

“What does that mean?”

“To be this is my sentence. To be a messenger is my function. It is what my afterlife is, because of how I lived my life on earth, and I have been told that this is my chance.” The spirit, still sitting, turns to his left to look at Jane, who is now sitting up in bed. She has no fear of this spirit, only curiosity. She knows the dead cannot hurt her. When they come, they come with messages, ones that need to be listened to. But this visit is different. This is a spirit with a responsibility.

“You’re chance at what?”

“My chance for my soul to finally be destroyed, never to be reborn and to cease walking alongside this world. My reward will be darkness, nothingness, freedom.”

“You deserve a 100 years of torture for every life you took and every life you destroyed.”

“I deserve the sentence given to me by the powers that be. No mortal can or ever could sentence me. I took my own life so they could not have it; should I pay for that one too?”

“No. It was yours, to do with as you please. But you used your life to take life away from others, and that you will continue to pay for. “

“I have spent my spectral years in contrition, but now the four horsemen are roaming free and their horses are being stabled in the nations that once believed I was wrong. The leaders of these countries are very much aware of what they are doing. They are in the pursuit of infinite power and their populations are begging to be oppressed.”

“I know. I’ve been watching it. And I don’t think there is anything to be done.”

“Something can always be done about imperialists. There are more of us than of them.” The spirit replied with force in his voice.

“Us?” Jane replies in complete offense. “Wouldn’t you be one of them?”

“No. That is why I was so appealing. I was a working man. A man led astray by hate and driven to madness by it, but still a working man. These are not working people. They are kings and queens who are building armies with the help of leashed dragons. They are promising children candy in exchange for their souls. What does a soul mean to a child? Nothing. The candy they can taste, the soul they must feel. The candy is only a coating. Underneath it is glass.”

“You murdered millions by your hate. You’ve lost the privilege of being part of any “us.” Jane says, leaning over to her bedside table to sip from the glass of wine sitting on it and light the half smoked cigarette.

“You cannot change someone’s experiences just because it doesn’t fit with how you see them. I know my sins are great, you need not remind me, but that does not change where it was I came from. And it does not change the life I lived that drove my ambition. Your brother does not cease to be your brother because he commits a crime.” The guest declares with certainty.

“Yes he does.” Jane replied, sure of her conviction.

“Only figuratively.” The spirit corrects her.

“What then? What can be done? Fascism, misinformation and lies have replaced any kind of truth here in the states and the other allies are quickly bending to this perversion. Because the people want it. They want a reason to hate, they want to be separated from people unlike them, they want to be told what to eat, when to sleep, what to think and get as many other idiots as they can to approve of it. The free world doesn’t want freedom. It wants control.” Jane is now sitting up, lotus position, alert in her bed, the ashtray just to her side. The darkness of the room, and the impending sunrise do not affect her. However, for her spectral guest, the sunlight is time, and he hasn’t much of it.

“I have seen this world change from what it was when I was flesh. They learned from me. They leaned that bureaucracy makes genocide easy to digest. As long as you can convince the spoiled people that the intellectuals are the foolish ones, you can start destroying freedom swiftly. I never thought the imperialists who slaughtered millions would be studied in universities as misunderstood Christs. I think of what I could do with the hungry minds in this world. Weaklings crying about everything they can’t have because someone won’t give it to them.” The spirit grows angry and his transparency becomes brighter, almost chaotic. “You earn the chance and then you take the power! This world has too many princes and princesses and they pollute your freedom from afar. They do not care about the people in their country, they care only for vanity, and they have the vehicle to propel it. So much communication in your world now and it is used to hurt and divide their fellow countrymen. I united mine.” The spirit realizes he has burned some of his time with this rant. He fades to translucent again. “Who I am is in my soul. We can be forgiven if we are sorry, but the damage done to it and by it is a permanent scar.”

“What are you here for?”

“You are a writer; are you not?”

“I suppose so.”

“Then you write what I tell you. That is my purpose. Like Charles Dickens before you, you must write what the spirit tells you.”

“Dickens? You mean A Christmas Carol is real?”

“Yes. The man wrote a cautionary truth, given to him by three spirits, two whose lights have now gone out. I am forced to try to fill the shoes of other sinners who have finished their penance.”

“I’m not that kind of writer.”

“Take what I tell you and use it how you can!” The spirit, standing pounding his fist into the air, burns his energy in another bright flash of anger. ”You can be any kind of writer you choose! It just takes hard work! Dedication! Purpose!” He concedes to the spectral limitations he is bound by. “You writers will never learn. You’re always looking to limit yourself with redemption. Searching for it, with your well chosen words.” He is calm, sitting on the bed.

“Redemption is the way to insight.” Jane felt very sure of that.

“I never needed redemption.”

“Don’t you think you, more than most, need redemption?”

“No! I had POWER! There is no need for a God to be redeemed. I was a God, if only for a handful of mortal years, but that is more than most in the history of humanity. People still speculate that I took Nietzsche out of its context. I assure you I did not. I used it as a blueprint to controlling the world.” The spirit walks to the window in the bedroom. He looks out on the small city in front of him. “I was no brute. I was a God. A God does not ask permission to rid the world of his species, he just does it. Gods do not debate good or evil, because what “is” exists in spite of both. I do not want redemption. I want darkness. An end to this hell. I am in contrition, but I do not need anyone’s redemption.”

Jane looks at him, and his longing for the power he will never know again. She wonders if this is why the ‘powers that be’ do not punish him more. That they take mercy knowing that having godlike power and losing it is a fate worse than damnation. There is pity in her heart for a moment when she realizes his convictions are not staged. He believes in what he says, which would make him admirable, if he were a different man.

“What is it you want to tell me?” Jane asks.

“I’m here to tell you that history is not going to repeat itself. What is coming is far worse than then any year that has passed. Convincing free people they would be safer in bondage is not hard. Convincing them to turn on their fellow man is not difficult either. Getting them to take each other’s lives for the cause, that is the trick. Very few men will resist the pleasure of feeding their own animalistic hate. Fewer will destroy their own comfort.” He walks to the side of the bed and sits, looking at Jane.

“I agree with you. But what is it you expect me to do? Write about it? Be called every evil term the groupthink witch hunters can conjure up? Just for saying that the very basic freedoms that define us as a society, should not be given away for a pittance and a false promise. That the Ferber Method babies have grown into people so incapable of individual responsibility, consideration, rational and mature thought that they rush to destroy a person’s life if they get the urge. How do you explain to a population of intolerable people that tolerance isn’t perfect but it’s better than creating committees and relying on the unscrupulous dealings of power hungry bureaucrats? How do I convince any of these kids who think they know the secrets of the universe but can’t leave the house without their cocktail of happy pills, that sometimes in life, you can’t get what you want from crying?”

“Yes. Something like that. Your government is involved with other powers stronger than itself to destroy the liberties you hold dear to your race.”

“What race is that?” Jane snaps, offended. She is on her second cigarette.

“The race of freedom. Here; in Europe; in Asia, the races that have known freedom will die out very soon and left with be 1000 years of pain and slavery.”

“The governments would never reinstate slavery. That’s crazy.”

“Woman! Do you not see! The governments are already slave drivers!” With the spirits words Jane became cold. She knew the spirit could not lie.

“They start with discrediting the thinkers. The scientists and doctors who speak to facts. Make them appear insane, jail them for working against the people. Then go after the writers. They are the most troublesome. Suppress the writers who will not comply with the new philosophy. Call them evil, pretend they are part of a conspiracy to destroy a peaceful existence. Call them liars! Bring the mobs of ignorami to burn their work and jail them. It will be easy to convince people to treat them like enemies. Thinking for people who cannot think for themselves. I am most impressed with the new propaganda machine that dominates the information in this world. It is fascinating! Yet no one seems to be fascinated by what it has taught them. When people are given the opportunity to be evil without repercussion, they take it. It’s an endless library of hate. This world has formed mobs I couldn’t have even dreamed of. The amount of fear and hate that flows freely from the mind to the fingers through the personal propaganda machine is magnificent. I yearn for what I could have done with it.”

“I think about that sometimes. What a man like you could do with social media. But then I look and I see it. With every “news source” that creates a narrative and gets 1 million “likes″ for it. Celebrity politicians deliberately lying to the public, knowing their constituents will never do the homework. They spread hate all the time. Everyday. It’s all of them, not just one. Fueling this ridiculous notion that you’re more free if you let the government control every aspect of your life and that somehow that makes you liberal. It’s richly bizarre. It’s almost unimaginable to think that this is really happening, if it wasn’t constantly broadcasted. And our propaganda machine makes it abundantly clear that the majority of people in this world would rather emulate than think.”

“It has always been this way. People look away from real tragedy, they cover their eyes, they pretend it does not exist. They want to believe the lie, so they do. The masque allows them to engage in evil, and they do. You’re politicians do not pretend to love, or connect to the people they claim to lead. They tell you you need them. That they know more than you, they are better than you. They have their cinema star friends endorse them to make them kings. Even I didn’t do that. I was not arrogant enough to think my people where stupid enough to trust an actor.” The spirit said.

“In our celebrity world, it doesn’t shock me that people take the words of actors.” Jane’s tone is droll.

“It shocks me that anyone would believe the words of someone who it is their chosen profession to lie. The politicians with their paid propagandists have learned to wield evil in a way that is so appealing to the darkness in humanity that it appears the greatest good. There is no good in them. Right, left, they are nothing but imperialists fighting over who gets to rule you. They ponder in conversation how many centrists they can torture and kill before your obedience is shaken. None of them have ever known suffering. The country is a card game for them. A coin flip.” The spirit’s eyes looked full and human to Jane for more than a moment. She knew now that Shakespeare’s famous opinion of the eyes was fact. The spirit continued to speak.

“They now have made pestilence their axis of vanity and wrath. Turning mundanity into a heroic trait. Celebrating cowards as brave and the criminals as victims has left this world vulnerable to true evil, and has convinced those prone to emulation that to question this evil, makes one evil. Do you understand my meaning?”

“Yea. I have seen this right along. And the people who have written about it or spoken about it are put on a chopping block. They are made to suffer for simply stating what they have observed over time. They combine observation with study and still they are made into new heretics. Social media has become the new witch burning, but the intent has remained the same. Envy, greed, gluttony, wrath...pretty much all seven deadly sins. Sins have been made into virtues with collective online ranking by emotionally immature minds.”

“You could not understand the longing I feel knowing the power I would have in this time. The minds are fractured and they desire direction. I’d give them a new religion to follow. These generations excuse the most barbaric attacks as long as there is a meaning behind it. They do not care about brutality as long as you can present it as vindication. Culture has become the greatest excuse for the worst actions in humanity, and the thought of what I would do with that kind of power brings back a memory of a feeling that nothing else compares to. Knowing you have the fate of millions waiting on your command. It is that feeling that I mourn. It’s death is my hell.”

“I still think you are getting off easy, Adolph.”

“That is because you have never felt it.”