Faith in Numbers
Existentialism: the tenant that the world is essentially meaningless and absurd, and that any attempt to come to terms with this absurdity brings one into conflict with the world.
…In other words, we as human beings can choose the paths we take and we must face the consequences for those actions in a world that does not make sense.
And I, I decided to take this one.
The First Chapter is an Exchange of Information
The handcuffs itched. He considered their coldness with a wry smirk, listening to the papers shuffle across the table and the metal links gently scrape against each other. When his hopes had all but dissipated and the blue skies beyond the seven-foot high fences no longer shone with the same glorious light as before, these chains had barely bothered him. A certain vitality that he never expected to return lazily flowed through his veins, clearing his eyes of the thin fog that had engulfed them.
An unforeseeable change of events had been thrust into his lap, ready for the taking, so fortunate that he was almost convinced it was but a dream. Such an opportunity had been all he dreamt for five or six years, but never had he believed it possible to obtain in this life. It took a large portion of his willpower to restrain the grotesque mixture of a grin and a smirk from marring his otherwise calm face. If he hadn't spent a better part of the last decade perfecting these neutral expressions, it might not have been possible.
His eyes flickered over the whiteboard ahead as per request, skimming the intimately familiar scenes with distaste. A muscle in his back released a random spasm, perhaps from the pressure these handcuffs wrought on his arms. With an audible groan he rolled his shoulders the best he could and leaned back in the chair. The FBI agents fixed him with intermittent stares, observing movements and behaviors he probably had no idea he possessed. He grinned at one, the man who had vied for his temporary release.
It was a peculiar dilemma on the whiteboard. He had previously informed the agents that his crimes halted at the fifth fire, so he couldn't provide a solid location for the sixth. Although he managed to warn them of the fifth arson, there were thousands of homes and only one target. One person survived, but it wasn't as if saving people had been his intention from the start. The FBI knew this well. Perhaps they didn't know what his ulterior motive was at the moment, but they knew that he possessed one. Given their intelligence, he wasn't sure that it would take them much longer to figure it out.
He licked his chapped lips and leaned forward again, elbows on the table. And then he began to talk about a summer that haunted him and a childhood that he had always been trying to run away from. A few agents came and went, but that one man remained a constant fixture. The man named Aaron Hotchner. Despite the time constraints, he appeared no more vexed than Damian himself.
"A ton of people lived in that town. I can't remember everyone, of course. But all of them read or listened to the news; all of them knew of me. It was the hot news that summer, the talk of the town wherever you went – restaurants, hang-outs, stores, the gym – everywhere. I haven't got a clue as to who it might be any more than you do. You'll have to give me more than this." Those were the same words he fed the man in prison. The man's lips pressed into a thin, impatient line.
"Was there anyone that you particularly disliked? Was there anyone who particularly disliked you or had a reason to dislike you? Even if it was a minor thing, it might still be relevant."
"I was disliked by a lot of people and I disliked a lot of people myself. I'm sure I don't need to tell you my entire history of juvenile delinquency. I was one of those annoying kids who never paid attention in school, who the teachers saw a lot in detention, and someone who didn't give a damn about what others thought of me. I hated the people who thought I was bad the moment I stepped in the room for a long time, but after awhile I stopped caring. I had my friends, but they were just high school friends."
"But by committing all those arsons, you were seeking attention. When you weren't able to get it from school or at home, it evolved into something else. You so happened to fixate on fire because it's destructive and attention-grabbing, something no one can ignore. And the town didn't ignore it, did they?"
He regarded the FBI agent with the same caution he applied to new guards in prison. They were always unpredictable, unstable creatures, and the best rookies were hard to read. Whereas one minute they might be imitating a statue, the next they were in a screaming frenzy over some supposedly major infraction to assert their dominance. Agent Hotchner had none of that unpredictability, but he was unable to be read all the same. It was fair, considering the man's job of doing the reading.
"They might've ignored the kid next door whose father beat the shit out of him, but they couldn't ignore a burning building, no. Maybe you're right. Maybe I was 'seeking attention'. The point was that most people had some dislike of me or were indifferent. I'm sure a lot of them hated me after I was caught. I can't remember, really. Even that night is blurry, so I can't recall who was screaming at me and who the cops shielded me from being assaulted with shovels and rocks and crap."
"Alright," Hotchner said. They were unable to come to a consensus over that – no matter how much they pried into his brain, it was simply impossible to pinpoint a single person to fit their description. "What about your crimes? How did you carry them out? There was some amount of preparation and planning. You worked your way up from small places in town to bigger buildings that were the nexus of community life. After that, why did you set fire to a house? Did you have a grudge against the people living there?"
The corners of his lips twitched with the accompanying memories. "I wasn't always friendly with the guy who lived in the house. He was a bit of a jerk, the kind that just looks like a goody-two shoes. That type," he shrugged. "But I didn't want to kill him. Maybe someone would say that I'd threatened to before, but that was only a passing comment. Kids joke about that all the time. I chose his house because I did hate his guts. And I wanted a house because it's…more personal, I guess you'll say.
"As for how I did it," he pondered. The photographs on the board stared at him. He had done it the same way every time. That just went to show how much the others cared. "It was kind of easy. Just a lighter – that was all I needed. The oil was a bit harder to get, but you find a way when you're desperate. I could drive, but I couldn't just buy a whole bunch of oil and say it was for a bonfire or something. Instead, I just stole what we had at home – from the grill, the lawnmower, that sort of thing.
"Your little forensics guys probably found the cloths I used to spread the fires. I just smashed the fire alarms and stayed out of the way of the cameras. It wasn't that hard. Everyone knew how to avoid the cameras when you didn't want to get caught doing something stupid or illegal. Is that enough for you?" The agent's facial expressions shifted a minuscule amount as he spoke, this time leaving the room without a second glance at the man in the handcuffs.
Of course he could care less about the actual criminal behind these fires. He had no doubt that this man was guilty, that he killed to prove a point and didn't care how many people were hurt in the process. Maybe his entire point was to cause as much pain as possible for those involved. He heard brief, insignificant catches of the other agents' conclusions about his copycat. He was in a panic, prolific because of it, but they now knew that there was no grand execution behind the arsons. It was hard to screw this up. A kid had done it.
Although he still got caught and landed in prison. A small scowl crossed his face, though he might not have noticed had he not glanced up and seen himself in the mirror. Scowls and glares were regular features in his everyday life, and in truth he had a hard time remembering the last time he had genuinely laughed.
A smile, though, he had given a genuine smile not so long ago in the confines of his jail cell. He addressed no one except for lovely fate and the corner that contained his meager laundry. He had lost the ability to believe that hope existed because even his young, childish fantasies could never anticipate the perfect timing the FBI provided him. Any earlier and he might never succeed and any later and he would miss the chance altogether. And he had held onto a small sliver of hope all these years for the simple fact that it was still possible.
Another agent stepped in, a blonde one, a woman who had passed through perhaps only once or twice before. He had been content to fade into the wallpaper as they conducted their business, speaking only to Agent Hotchner, but he glanced up as the woman paused at the other end of the table. That reminded him. Except for the absolutely rigid expression and maturity, the woman faintly resembled a teacher he had in high school around the time of his arsons. She was two or three years out of graduate school, young and naïve and still an incompetent teacher.
She had caught him fooling around with a girl on more than one occasion. Now that he reconsidered those memories, perhaps that was the only reason he hated her so much. He never paid attention during her class, and he couldn't even recall which subject that had been. She gave him grief about fooling around in a corner of the hallway, though. And she had blonde hair that was always in a tight ponytail. She might have looked around this woman's age now.
"Did you really not mean to kill that family?" she asked. He scowled, wishing that he could cross his arms before his chest, but he had been robbed of that right long ago. It was still a stubborn human reflex. The accusation always stung, no matter if ten years or twenty years had elapsed, and he was hardly foolish enough to believe that she doubted his guiltiness. Tones of voice always betrayed something, which was why he had decided to bury his hopes and most intimate emotions in a place nearly impossible to reach again.
The anger was always the first emotion to resurface, though.
"I didn't," he spat defiantly. "They were supposed to be out. Their car wasn't in the driveway. I didn't hear a thing when I broke in the house. Why didn't they stop me if they were just at home sleeping? The son at least should have been awake. I don't know how they got there. I admitted to everything else. I set all those fires, I stole gasoline, I got into fistfights, I punched a cop, and I even killed those people by accident."
"They were tied up in the master bedroom. Of course no one could stop the fire or call the fire department then."
"That's why I'm saying that I didn't do it. I didn't tie anyone up and I sure as hell had no way of doing it alone. The guy was on the football team. His father was a big guy. I'm pretty sure no matter how much I threatened them they would have managed to bash my head in, at least. Besides, it doesn't matter much now, does it?" he huffed. "They're dead and I'll be rotting in jail for another ten years, if I can't win an appeal in five. I've got no future and they've got no future. Either way you want to look at it, we're fair now."
She gave him a strange look, but perhaps it was only strange because he had seen so little variety in facial expressions these last ten years. Nothing deeper or more profound than banal anger and disdain ever graced anyone's face in jail.
"Tell me about your family," she said as she pulled a rolling desk chair over. He narrowed his eyes, clenched his fists to show his bitter resentment. "How did they treat you when you were younger?"
So she wanted to avoid the messy questions for now. That was fine. He didn't have to flip out for a few more minutes. He shrugged in response. Not that it was particularly hard to remember those tumulus months, but they were less than pleasant either. "They were decent, I guess. I didn't want much to do with them at all. I guess they tried early on, but anyone would get tired of a kid that hates you and does nothing but get into trouble. They had a kid already, too, but she and I never really got along. We didn't hate each other either, though."
"Why did they turn you in? Parents usually go to all lengths to protect their kids, even if it's just to protect their own bad parenting," she insisted. He scoffed, pausing for a moment to glare. So she didn't have tact after all. Not that this was a terribly sensitive subject anymore, but it still grated on his nerves. His foster parents hadn't visited once since his trial and detainment, but he was sure the agents knew that.
"Who knows but them? I didn't exactly get an answer when I asked. They seemed kind of scared though. So maybe they weren't being malicious or maybe they were and were just really good at hiding it. They didn't even want to sit on the side where I was during the trial." He stopped, because he simply had nothing else to say on the subject. It had once filled him with the most extreme levels of anger that he had ever experienced, but even that was empty. The fury had died down to a low thrum, a familiar irritation.
He stared at the marker on the whiteboard for awhile. He could not hate so intensely anymore. Although the thought scared him, although he probably should have saved it for when the woman left, he allowed himself to wonder: what if he couldn't love so intensely anymore? Thin, sharp coils of fear strangled his heart. It might be too late to retrieve those emotions now.
• 4/5/12 Edits: I rewrote this story because I didn't like the direction it was heading in. The plot doesn't change, but I started in a different place. Hope I'm able to write better now that I picked a spot I like.
• I studied existentialism briefly in school. It's fascinating, but overall a negative outlook on life. For those of you who remember Reid's little speech over existentialism, Grendel by John Gardner and No Exit by Jean-Paul Sartre are works of existentialism and personal favorites of mine.
