Conversation Between Two Parts Of The Same Mind

To learn that savagery sleeps inside us all

Stop talking about Danny. He was just a guy that came into my life for a while. He’s gone.

Yeah, but you tried to kill him.

No. I was merely the instrument of your will. You propelled the arm.

Don’t blame me.

Forget about it. It was a long time ago.

Not for him. He’s dead.

I didn’t do it.

You tried. You wanted to. You reached for the blade, gripped it tightly in your hand, thought about the thrust.

Thought about it. Dropped the blade. Got in my car. Drove east and east until the state lines blurred behind me. Got lost in the mountains of my mind. Met a girl. Had sex for the first time. Slept in a bathtub.

Drunk?

Something like that. What’s the difference? At least Danny wasn’t there. He was back on the coast hitching a ride or throwing a cat into a wood chipper.

He wasn’t that bad. He came to you with tears in his eyes the night he remembered he was human. Wanted to change the course of his life. Asked you for help.

And I gave it. Gave him a place to stay. Otherwise, he would have died sooner. Alone, on the road, in between his occasional bouts of goodness, stabbed by his past, or strung up by the future he would never have. He was a loser and a loner and nothing good was ever going to come of him. No matter what. Some things are just broken.

Harsh.

Don’t get sentimental. We both knew. The rational, the irrational. All the neighbors knew, too. He was a young man lost.

It’s been a long time. And sometimes the past gets blurry and today’s emotions, scratched by years, make you see things that weren’t there.

Like what?

His inherent evil. Maybe he just needed another push in the right direction to be saved.

He was evil. He was an ungodly evil mother fucker who consumed – or tried to consume – everybody he came in contact with. He robbed people of what was theirs. Their dignity, their humanity. Their innocence. He tortured animals and took delight. Yes, we had good times, too. But they go stale in comparison to those final days.

The days in which you tried to kill him?

Don’t say that. I only thought about it. I realized what cliff he was driving me towards and I stopped. Dropped the blade and left. Never saw him again

Yes. You went east. Ran like a coward away from the confrontation.

Yes. I ran, but not from the confrontation. I ran from what I might have become, someone who came up snarling and plunged the blade, all twelve inches of it, into his stomach. Someone who twisted the blade left and right, moved it up and down, until he was still. I didn’t want to become that.

But he died anyway.

Don’t we all, but not at my hand. The world finally had enough of him I guess and put him in the back of a pickup truck that flipped over on the highway. I didn’t relish the news, but it didn’t surprise me, either. His whole life led up that moment.

You didn’t know his whole life.

Okay, that’s true. He was just a guy I knew for six months. But in that time, I learned that savagery sleeps inside all of us and just needs an excuse to awaken. It wants to climb from its elemental lair and pounce.

You sound sorry that you beat back the beast.

Not really. I might have received a moment’s satisfaction to watch Danny’s face change from its twisted, smirking arrogance to the absolute realization that he had maybe 30 more seconds to live as his guts fell out, but it would not have been worth it. It wasn’t my place to decide the hour of his death.

Simple, then.

Yes. It wasn’t my hand that needed to stop him.

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