In my dream, a special executive officer from someplace comes into my room and tells me I've been promoted. He's been sent to officially forgive me on behalf of the Universe for every nasty or timid thing I've ever done.
He has a flickering, intermittent face and a briefcase full of pure evil.
I don't know what to think. It seems like the sort of favor that can't be verified. He asks me to tell him the worst thing I've ever done. I think about it for a minute, then something especially heinous comes to mind, and I tell him. There's a pause and his face has gone blank, like he's crunching numbers or attending to some digestive process, deep within.
Then he smiles and says "You are forgiven". I almost rankle at his flippancy. The moment in question was a real atrocity, an act some sickly shadow of me is almost proud of, for its unbridled, amoral audacity.
Reflecting on that audacity, I realize it doesn't seem so bad, all of a sudden. I am filled with a deep conviction and confidence that all those effected are strangely better off, in different ways, than they would have been if I'd never done it.
I believe him. I try another sin. And so it goes. He forgives me everything. Officially. All I've ever been is a desiccated agent of destiny, he says. We are but the wriggling nodules of some higher power. My killing hand goes whichever way the dark wind within might blow. I'm just following the fractals, your honor. I am pure as the driven snow.
He forgives me all night long, in several different languages.
The automatic grace is so sweet, I wake up hungry to fill up my accounts with every kind of wickedness. It's such a kick when no one cares anymore.
And yet I almost never leave my office. If I went beyond good and evil, who would notice?
I'm a moral code falling to pieces in the wilderness. Only the Dalai Lama can hear me going straight to hell. Does that smug bastard ever wake up screaming?
I can smell the Holy One and his monkish minions meditating always on my sloughed iniquities, like perverts huffing the burgled panties of a superstar.
We're all just living for kicks, it seems.
But one man's penance is another man's poison.
Even hatred for the flesh is a fetish.
Even the supreme sacrifice, ultimately, is just some sick fucker's idea of fun.
As I have been so efficiently forgiven, the least I can do is forgive all of you.
The account is empty. Fill it up again with darkness. Do this, in sketchy memories of me.
image provided by Michael Josef K.
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