"Well it's not easy to deliberately go insane," I told my rather pale
reflection in the mirror. The reflection agreed but that didn't stop
either of us from rolling up our sleeves and filling large hypodermic
needles with murky madness.
"Here's looking at you," I said, and slipped the needle gently in the
vein and slowly pushed the plunger home.
The results were anticlimactic to say the least. Outside of a ringing
in my ears and a twinge of headache that quickly passed I felt nothing.
I knew better than to go out though, so I read the newspaper for a
while, until I felt tired. The whole thing seemed a little foolish
and pretty much of a letdown. I went to sleep with the tape player
whispering softly in my ears such ego-building epigrams as, "You are
better than everyone else and you know it, and people who don't know
it had better watch out," and "They are all fools and if you were in
charge things would be different, and why _aren't_ you in charge,
it's easy enough."
Waking up was uncomfortable because of the pain in my ears where the
earphones were still plugged in, my own stupid voice droning away at
me. Nothing had changed and the whole futile experiment was a waste
and waste makes me angry. The earphones broke in my hands and I felt
better, felt much better still when I had stamped the tape player into
a tangle of rubble.
My face rasped when I ran my hand over it; I had been days without a
shave. Rubbing in the dip cream I looked into the mirror over the sink
and an odd fact struck me for the first time. This new face fitted me
a lot better than the old one. A fault of birth or the ugliness of my
parents--whom I hated deeply, the only right thing they ever did was
to produce me--had given me a face that didn't fit my personality.
The new one was better, handsomer for one thing and a lot stronger.
I should have thanked that fumble-finger quack Vulff for producing
a masterpiece. I should have thanked him with a bullet. That would
guarantee that no one would ever be able to trace me through him. It
must have been a warm day and I was suffering a fever when I let him
get safely away like that.
On the table was a piece of paper with a single word written on it, my
own handwriting though I can't imagine why the hell I left it there.
_Angelina_ it said. Angelina, how I would love to get that tender
white throat between my hands and squeeze until your eyeballs popped.
Hah! I had to laugh at the thought, made a funny picture indeed. Yet I
shouldn't be so flippant about it. Angelina was important. I was going
to find her and nothing was going to stop me. She had made a fool of me
and had tried to kill me. If anyone deserved to die it was her. It was
an awful waste in some ways yet it had to be done. I shredded the note
into fine pieces.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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