The Black Chronicle (7 page)

              Mister saw the contents of this world, its people, places, and things, as being much like the icons on the desktop of his computer. They were shortcuts, so to speak, to something more real, more purposeful or useful that existed within the physical representation of the thing itself.

              A tree for instance, was not just a tree. It was a representation, a file name, an image, which held inside of it all the contents of something more real, more true than the mere physical manifestation of the tree. Inside that folder was everything that made up the bark, the wood, the leaves and the fibres and the very molecules that were the building blocks of these things. The file contained all the various uses of the tree as well—the oxygen it created through photosynthesis, the shade it provided, the fruits it grew, the nutrients and various medicinal uses achieved by boiling its organic material down into teas and powders. But even all these things were shortcuts. Files within files which all pointed back to something much older, something much larger. These things all served a purpose and were helpful in some way; in essence it was an indication of love. A great cosmic provisional love which pointed all the way back to the source. To God. Which is to say, to Himself. The tree existed because he existed.

              Sitting cross-legged and naked, in a room lit only by a single candle on the floor in front of him, he thought of trees, places, things, people. He thought of all the contents of the earth, and the earth itself; the great tapestry of life of all things seen and unseen, good and not good, and how they were all entwined. No, not how they were entwined—
existed as a singular entity.

              With his arms resting palms up across his thighs, he lightly touched his middle fingers to his thumbs and tried to find his centre. It was so easy to get pulled astray mentally while considering such things.

              This was the only way he knew of reaching God. By delving deep into himself, past the thoughts that arose in his mind second by second, past the sensory information which competed for his attention and past the memories which tried to define him. But he was more than his memories and his feelings and his senses and his thoughts. So much more.

             
I am not my thoughts.

             
A deep breath.

             
I am not my senses.

              A deep breath.

             
I am not my feelings.

              A deep breath.

             
I am not my appetites
.

              A deep breath.

             
I am not my memories
.

              A deep breath.

             
I am. I am. I am. I am
.

              Breathing deeply from his diaphragm Mister opened his mouth and gave voice, in what meagre way he could, to the essence of his existence.

“Oooommmmm. Oooommmmm.”

And after sometime he came to, or at least approached, the centre of himself. The nothing and everything which existed beneath the identity he presented outwardly: the ‘I am’-ness shared by all things.

              He had learned these techniques of meditation many years ago, when he’d still been searching, before he’d become free…or, more accurately, when he’d been less free then he was now.

              He had sampled every religion the world had to offer. He had gazed at the many-faceted, beautifully cruel, and gaudy faces of the divinities Man had worshipped and saw in their eyes, only Man staring back. Only a reflection of the self. Jesus and the Devil and Krishna and Ra and Buddha were all only expressions of the various faculties of Man's soul and the deeper one looked, the longer one sought the truth, the more he was brought back to himself again. The trap was perfect. The illusion was sublime.
Truly
sublime. 

              It was only fate’s plan that had opened his eyes, and now that they were open he would not look away from the truth, no matter how ugly it may be, no matter how cruel the test God had set before him. If that was the path to Him, then so be it.

              He could feel his heartbeat quicken, his muscles tensing slightly. He was getting upset and he couldn’t allow that. That would be a failure of the exercise.

              Mister took a deep calming breath and focused on the candle in front of him. The flame danced back and forth, animated by the gentle breeze of his breath.

              Finally satisfied his emotions were in check and without taking his eyes off the candle, he reached over to a platter next to him and placed it in front of him.

              A whimper in the darkness broke his concentration but he tried not to react to it right away. Then once he was ready, he calmly lifted his eyes to Cindy who was tied to an altar of wood and iron he had constructed just for her. He had combed her long blond hair neatly and tied all those pretty golden strands with cute pink bows. He took casual stock of her firm youthful body, naked save for  the multicoloured knee-high socks he had given to her.

              “What did I tell you Cindy?” Mister asked, his voice devoid of emotion or inflection.

              Cindy tried to answer but each time she opened her mouth a big wet sob escaped from it.

              “What. Did. I. Tell you?”

              “N—not a sound.”

              “That’s right. You’re being a naughty girl and I shall have to punish you for it later.”

              “No, please! Please don’t!” she exploded.

              “Shhh, my dear. Shhh,” he said, lifting a finger to his lips. “Don’t make it any worse for yourself.”

              She nodded frantically and bit her bottom lip to keep herself from sobbing. Better a little pain now than what he might do to her later.

              “What’s rule number two sweetheart?...Rule number two?”

              “No closing my eyes. No looking away.”

              “Very good cupcake! Very good!”

Pleased with his pet he diverted his attention to the platter in front of him and the human kidney resting on it. He picked up the heavy slippery organ in his hand and jostled it up and down a bit, gauging its weight.

Cindy watched as he sniffed at it like a dog sniffing at road kill and then bit into it with sickening enthusiasm.

The meat was tough and he was having a hard time with it. He took the organ in both palms and forced it against his upper teeth which finally helped him breach the rubbery membrane around it. Once he had a good grip with his teeth he pulled down hard before snapping his head away from it with a bloody mouthful.

              Cindy whimpered again and this time Mister’s eyes darted up to her, hot and full of hate, and stayed there. The blood from the kidney smeared across his lips and cheeks like the make-up of some demonic clown. Chewing the gamey meat Mister looked his little pet up and down, from her cute little cunt back to her pretty little face, amused at how hard she was trying not to cry. He wondered if this snack would merely whet his appetite.

              Conference Room B was a large room on the main floor of the ANN headquarters in downtown Los Angeles. Around the table sat a panoply of network execs, producers, and a smattering of journalists. In an inconspicuous chair mid-table sat the ever-cordial embodiment of professionalism, three-time Emmy winner Richard Lansdown.

              “Somalian Pirates are, as they say, old news,” Richard declared between sips of his Toffee Nut latte.

              “It’s been in the public eye before but what hasn’t?” a mid-level producer volleyed back.

              “That’s true. There’s still more mileage there. ‘Somalian pirates. Are they still a threat?’”

              “A four-part mini-series on Somalian pirates? Are you joking?”

              “What about Pirates in general. There actually is still a lot of pirate activity taking place around the world.”

              “We're not going with fucking pirates,” Richard laughed.

              This meeting had been called to workshop a topic for Richard’s forthcoming special mini-series.  As per his contract, he had four hour-long segments blocked off annually for a mini series. His previous series had covered such apropos topics as: Listeriosis: Mystery or cover-up?”; “American Jihad: The enemy under our noses”; and “Who is Molly?: The truth about designer drugs in America.” While there was a whole industry of journalists who would have killed for four hours of special programming on ANN, Richard had only opted to fill two of the previous year’s hours with an admittedly half-assed special on the Tea Party.

              Maybe it was because he had just turned fifty-nine, bringing him within uncomfortable proximity to his “golden years” and, beyond that, his mortality. Or maybe it was because he had only three years left on his contract, which he was fairly sure would not be renewed. Or maybe it was just because he was bored to death. But he suddenly felt an urge to cover something important, to do something big and bodacious with the time left in his career, which certainly did not include working on Somalian pirates.

              “What about serial killers?” Andrew Presley asked. Presley was the head honcho’s golden boy. A Harvard alum who was so obtusely liberal that he started to double back around to right-wing bigotry, which made him, in Richards opinion, twice as ignorant as those hateful religious republicans. He was the kind of kid who also had a well-thought out, seemingly pre-scripted opinion on everything under the sun, and Richard fucking hated him.

              “Serial killers?” Richard asked absently while checking his phone for messages.

              “Well, the Mister killings have definitely brought the topic back into the public consciousness.”

              “He hasn't been caught yet. There will certainly be much more to talk about once he has.”

              “What if he's never caught?” Presely asked.

              “He'll get caught. They always do. And when he does, we will know who he is and where he came from. Until then, how in the hell could we possibly spread that story into four hours?”

              “It could be about serial killers in general,” somebody vaguely important suggested.

              “American serial killers,” someone else chimed.

              “There's plenty of content if we go that general with it. One segment can cover the history of serial killers, Jack the Ripper and so on, and then an entire segment just for serial killers in America.”

              Richard put down his phone and lifted his hand up to silence all the nonsense.

              “Okay, first of all, that’s only two segments. Four hours on that topic is a bit of a push. Not to mention it’s just a little...I don’t know…What's the word I'm looking for here, kids...‘hacky?’  This is really what we want to talk about? We can choose any topic, any topic at all and this is what we're discussing? Mister? As I said, the guy hasn't been caught yet. There are a lot of friends and family out there affected by this thing and covering it feels like rubbing salt in the wounds doesn't it?”

              This shut everyone up but Richard could tell Timothy Froshber was mulling it over and he found that more than a little worrisome.

Froshber, a.k.a. The Head Honcho, was an iron fist kind of guy who wielded his control over you with such passive aggression and casual determination that you didn't even realize he had that iron fist until he was done fisting you with it and had lit a cigarette. Presley had his hairy old ear. Froshber thought he was the voice of the informed youth or something, and Richard knew him well enough to know that he was considering this stupid serial killer idea.

              Presley must have picked up on it too. That little shit.

              “Just because it's sensational doesn't mean it's not a valid topic. Murder is a very real and a very important part of our cultural discourse. Law and society began to form as a direct result of man's violent impulses towards one another. Murder is as old as recorded history. Hell, Cain slew Abel. True or not, it's metaphorical that murder has always been a part of human society.”

              “Hmmm,” Head Honcho said, and Richard could suddenly see this slipping away from him if he didn't speak up.

              “This isn't news! There are much more important conversations we can and should be having. How about the growing political polarization of the county? How about climate change?  This isn't Unsolved Mysteries.”

              “Like listeriosis was ground breaking news?” Presley quipped.

              “Look here, you little up-start…”

              “—Whoah! Whoah, let's just take it easy,” Head Honcho said. “The reason we have these meetings is to get a dialogue going, not to win or lose.”

              And then the Head Honcho looked directly at Richard, the way a parent looks at a child as if it say, do you want me to pull your pants down right here and spank you? What he wouldn’t have given to be able to punch his boss right smack in his surgically lifted face, and then broken a chair over Presley’s head. The little prat. Richard’s heart was pounding so hard in his chest he began to feel jumpy.  He counted to ten.

              “Fine. Serial killers. Mister. I'll give it some thought,” Richard said as calmly as he could. “What else do we got?”

              “How about 'The End of Money'?” someone suggested, hanging finger quotes over the title. “What the world would look like after a total economic collapse.”

              The day was long and tedious, as all his days had become. His nightly broadcast wrapped at seven and he was on the road by seven-ten. In his head, he had told off Presley and Head Honcho a hundred times that day. Sometimes he found it difficult not to obsess over things that were troubling him. But he wasn't going to let them ruin his rediscovered optimism... Richard Lansdown: optimist. That was news indeed, he thought with a snort. And then it suddenly hit him like a Newtonian dropkick to the head. He was a newsman, but there was, in fact, nothing new about what he had been doing with his career. The things he reported on weren’t news. The fact that the world was fucked up had become a forgone conclusion a long time ago. The world was, it seemed, a dying planet. A place of incalculable suffering and strife, whose existence hinged on any number of disasters which would, in a best case scenario, “destroy our very way of life” or in the worst case, simply destroy our lives. One after another, the endless parade of looming catastrophes hung over the heads of average Americans every day. What luxurious or even simple comforts, striven for and attained by them, was made to seem like a bubble whose bursting was one jihadists explosion, one super bird influenza away.

Richard was not a naive man. He knew that there was a whole lot of wrong in the world, he knew it more than most. It was his stock-in-trade after all. For decades now he had chronicled the looming dangers and disasters of the world. But he wondered how much of all that negativity and bleakness was not so because they framed people’s world-views by sensationalizing the dangers in the first place. How could the world dig itself out of the hole of twenty-first century apathy when the media was overwhelmingly clear that resistance was futile? The apocalypse was inevitable. Like someone who is diagnosed with aggressive cancer and given but a year to live: why
not
take up smoking? Hell, why not take up heroin?

But did it have to be that way? Might covering what was good and beautiful in the world, at least some of the time perhaps lighten the general public’s worldview? And wouldn’t that, in turn, ‘trickle down’, to use modern political parlance, to create a little bit of optimism and hope?

And that was when he had his epiphany. Perhaps the greatest epiphany of his life: those who report the news have an obligation to report the positives as well as the negatives. They had a duty to inform people that there were many reasons to believe that everything will be okay. And he was sure there had to be plenty of stories that did just that, and would focus his specials on those. He would talk about breakthroughs in medical science and illustrate how close they must surely be by now, to curing some disease. He would shed light on growing political awareness and free thinking amongst youth around the world and discuss theories for alternative energy sources. He would frame the world, if just for a couple hours, as a place where human ingenuity and creativity would pave the way to a better tomorrow, not just for America but for all people. It was going to be great. He was going to do something truly good with what time he had left in his career. He was going to show the world that they could be better; he was going to show himself.