Posted by Max Fallen on September 06, 2007 at 09:44:37:
This is a story. Is it an account of a reality or is it purely fantasy? A question, really, as large and as loopy as “who am I?” I pinch myself, and I feel it, and it must be real. I press the point of a knife into a woman’s back, and feel it pop her skin, and hear her gasp of pain, and bend my lips to the spot, and taste her salty blood, and of course, it must be real. But then, well, almost immediately it’s in the past. It’s just a memory. And what is a memory? Does a memory have better credentials than a doubt, than a dream, than a fantasy? Isn’t it just my inner workings churning out video with sound? Is this movie a documentary or a Hollywood fiction? In other words, does Max really know, even within himself, if any of this ever actually happened?
Of course, you can take this sort of musing to extremes. Does Max (himself) actually exist? I think he does, because I know him well, see him often, have listened raptly to his accounts, the stories of his exploits, or excesses, or whatever you choose to call them. But how do I really know that he really exists, really? Well, really, if we’re going to go on and on along these lines, we’ll never get to the stories themselves – and I can already sense the audience becoming restless...
I’ll just say this: Max told me, or at least I’m pretty sure he did, and he told me so convincingly that I felt like I was there – good God, like I almost was Max himself, and was there, and did those things myself. I’m pretty sure he believes these things happened, which is enough for me. At least it’s enough to make me sit up and listen. So, sit up and listen.
Max told me a number of stories. This fellow has lived a rich life (not as in wealthy, particularly, though he does all right – more as in...oh, I don’t know...I guess you could say he pushes boundaries, experiences things, goes places others just won’t – okay, if you want examples, he leans his motorcycle too much on wet pavement, he cheats a bit on his tax returns, and he kills people. Well, as I’m trying to be truthful here, within the bounds of the “who knows what the truth is: the truth is what a man believes” philosophy, I don’t think he does any more, or at least hasn’t for a while. More accurate to say he has killed people. Even more accurate to say he has killed a number of women. Young or at least youngish, usually very attractive women, as I understand it. “A number” means just what it says. I really don’t know how many. I don’t know if Max does, any more.
He just came right out and told me, one day, quite some time ago, about two of them. The first, a married lady in North America, knew perfectly well that she had been really quite bad, and deserved punishment. Not just that, but she was looking for some sort of escape. Well, her punishment was actually a notably mild one, since it was fairly quick, probably fairly painless, and very sweet. Her escape was total. At the critical moment, she offered no resistance whatsoever, taking the blade deep inside her with no more than a gasp, a little cry and a long sigh. The second, a teenaged girl in the South of France, had been served by life a sad, cold dish. She was sweet, pretty and vibrant, but her future was not. In her soul, she clearly knew this, and when her rescuer took his grip on her, she relaxed against him almost immediately, and fluttered away silently into a more welcoming world of darkness.
Before I tell you what Max told me about these two, I feel I have to lay out a sort of prologue. It touches on what strikes me as the common feature between two stories that, on their face, might seem otherwise very different. Tell me if you want to hear the prologue.