Given time I thought, things are bound to pick up, they'll improve. I was mistaken. And not just in my mind. It was a commonly held notion, that we would always be going someplace, heading somewhere, reaching for where ever more of more was to be found. It never remotely crossed anyone's mind that civilisation might go into reverse, and could do so rapidly. Decline was more than feasible. But to lose our entire grasp on economic progress and decent civility? Impulses became coarsened, natures turned unfiltered, the raw and the prejudicial began to rule. To permeate everything and everyone with an authoritarian stridency. I tried to tell myself that I would not, could not, respond in such a way. That such a regressive change may indeed be happening, but not to me.
Yet I too harboured intolerant, murderous feelings. I thought badly of my neighbours without good cause, even loathed my closest oldest friends, was highly judgemental of family members. If anything, how I was, well this was way worse, simply because I affected a surface facade, that not an ounce of malign prejudice was there. Until of course it was, very much there. Fully formed and vicious. When I acted, I acted with an unearned impunity, a lack of remorse, brutal in intent. Too late now, as it was then, for regret. The worst cruelty was in my cold heartedness, indifferent to any opprobrium of my killing spree. For goodness sake, I took the time to chalk a white line around the slaughtered bodies of my victims. Circled, numbered and named the important clues. I meant it as a joke, a knowing reference to the cliches of detective fiction. But what does that tell you? Murder had become just a cultural reference for me. I wanted to take an active part not just in the crime, but in its discovery and the catching of the perpetrator, that was me. I wanted to be in charge of how this whole storyline was framed and unfolded. From the puritanical vigilante finally purging society of its self evident delinquents and defective minds. To the inevitability of the detective catching and putting me away for a very long time. Posting photos on social media standing by corpses grinning with the pleasure and infamy of it all.
I ended up here, in this sparse miniscule room, with a sink, a bed, a bucket to shit and pee in. My creature comforts. The only view an obstructed one of the roofs of the prison block opposite, through a window striped with iron bars. I scrawl on the wall feelings of injustice, so defiant am I not to be ignored in my ignominy. I wanted my public fame to continue. Speedily removed from general society and my phone. I was incarcerated here in the hope of minimising copycat murders. When the riots kicked off, they didn't happen in the prison, but erupted in the ordinary streets and houses of suburbia. The days of middle class reserve and politely modulated dissent suddenly collapsed. There was a war on for food, heat, resources, general survival going on. Our prison guards left in a hurry, in order to barricade and defend their homes, never to return. Leaving myself, and a handful of others, boxes of Snickers bars and tap water to survive on, til both of those ran dry. One day, very soon, I'll go to sleep, never to reawaken. Maybe it's for the best they didn't leave the keys. For who knows what further atrocity a middle aged hedge fund manager might perpetrate, as it all comes tumbling down.
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