Anthology Complex by M.B. Julien (new reading .txt) 📕

Tao is now yelling out my name, and it takes a few yells for me to realize. What? "You're always stuck inside your head." I know. Tao was calling me to tell me he was going to go to work, so I tell him I'll see him later and he leaves. Always stuck inside my head. Can't find a way out of this mess.

A few hours pass, and I'm wondering what Lynne is up to. Wondering what she meant by she has work to do. Before I know it, Tao is back from work, knocking on my door. I have to let him in. As soon as he walks in he starts talking about how a black guy has been parked down the street at all hours of the day for the past few days. I put it in the back of my mind and pay no attention to it because I know he is going to jump to the next subject soon.

To my surprise, soon after he ends up leaving because he has to work on something, or be somewhere, one of those two. I can't read in between the lines. After he leaves, like many other things in the back of my mind, the idea of the black guy sitting out in a car waiting for so long tries to push itself to the front and unlike so many other things it succeeds.

My curiosity causes me to go out my back door, walk across the alley and attempt to find this man. I eventually find him, and I am surprised for the second time today. That's not true, earlier today I was surprised when I realized that the superficial cut on my right thumb was getting worse. I'm surprised because the man in the car is the same man that came to pick up Derek. The same man who told me that Jamal had died, but in only so many words.

I begin to ask myself why he would still be around here, in this neighborhood. I question my safety. I question Lynne's safety. For some reason, even Tao's. After I come to my senses, and logic finally prevails, I assume that if he were going to do any harmful acts to me, they would have been done already. I also helped out one of his associates, why would he do me harm? We all know life doesn't work that way, though. You help someone out and they still find some way to justify screwing you over.

The only other conclusion I could come to is that the people Jamal and Derek were hiding from found out they were staying with me and now this man is sitting on my apartment so he can be there when they decide to do me harm, if they ever do decide to. The question is though, who dedicates this much time to help protect someone you hardly know? My guess is Jamal was well-connected and the leader of his organization has sent this man out to help me out for helping out Jamal. Back when I first met Jamal, he made it so obvious that he was part of something big. Something illegal.

Or maybe it's as simple as something like Jamal's people are waiting for their enemies to attack me so they can attack them unexpectedly and kill a few of their people. Appear to be resting. I would just be a casualty of war.

After a while I find that I am not taking this situation seriously enough, because my life may actually be in danger. I knew it was a bad idea to take them in.

I go back home and go to the room that houses the composition notebooks and pick a random notebook. Which one is going to be lucky enough to be chosen. I end up looking through about twenty of them in the span of two hours trying to forget that I could die soon. I guess it was just my luck that they knocked on my door. Maybe I'm overreacting now. Never could seem to find that balance.

While looking through all these notebooks I start to see that the chapters get longer and longer. When I first started writing down my dreams, my memory wasn't that great, so I couldn't remember many details which resulted in a short paraphrasing of the dream. As my memory improved, the chapters got longer and more detailed. As they got more detailed, the more of a story you could find in them.

Chapter 38:

30 PIECES OF GOLD

A long time ago, someone had a nightmare. Imagine a dark basement where the only light that is visible is the light that is coming in from the top of the stairs because that door up there is cracked open. Now imagine the who are two people, one man standing in front of another man who is tied to a chair. The standing man knows there is a man sitting before him, but the sitting man has no idea there is a man standing before him.

Not until the standing man pulls on a piece of string that causes a light bulb to turn on. The sitting man's eyes begin to hurt as they adjust to the light, but they hurt even more when he finally sees the standing man before him who intends to do him harm.

I'm standing there, watching this man as his nightmares come true. In some kind of unexplainable narcissistic view I am looking at myself, seeing only a man who has matured into a being capable of controlling his compulsions. A man who once could not control his obsessions but now has the confidence to do so. A man who once could not understand why he was the way he was, but has now accepted that he was meant to be this way.

I take a dull pocketknife out of the sitting man's pocket, and as his eyes widen and his attempts to yell fail, I begin to hack away at the top of his nose and make my way down. These things use to terrify me, but I have gone through a sort of therapy that allows me to control my fear.

Sometimes I wonder if anything will ever go wrong. Maybe someone will get the edge on me before I get it on them, maybe someone will find out what I do, maybe a law enforcement agent will catch me. The thing is I only wonder, I never fear these things actually happening. I know that since I have chosen to commit these murders in a state that enforces the death penalty, if I ever do get caught I'll be killed myself instead of having to live the rest of my life in a small cage. If you ask me, I believe there are a lot of people who would much rather die than serve a life-sentence.

Now imagine a bright basement where the door at the top of the stairs is now shut so that no light is coming in. The who is a man who has been murdered and left to rot. On the cold floor beside him are two ears, two eyes, two lips, a nose and some hair. The appearance of the person's head is only something you can imagine.

Now going through these notebooks under the same category as the one with a serial killer, I find a few dreams with a detective who is searching for a serial killer with the same modus operandi. The same M.O., the same mode of operating. As I read and read I find that at the end of the serial killer and the detective's speechless discourse, the detective catches him and the serial killer is put to death. The last words of the serial killer are "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do." The serial killer who seems to be suffering from megalomania paraphrases his life in one last sentence to be compared to that of Jesus Christ's life. He compares how they both are executed by a body of government.

Thinking of these two men now, the killer and the messiah, I can't help but remember the dream I had with Satan on the airplane where he told me that the christ and the antichrist look similar in appearance.

Is it possible that the man on the subway who gave me his shoes wasn't the christ, but actually the antichrist? Is that why he told me he will be whoever I decide to call him? I quickly realize that these ideas are trivial since these are all just dreams, but even the trivial things in life have a way of making us tick.

Attempting to move on from the subject of murder and personal salvation, I find the dream where I see a billboard of Maria, and how it is telling me that she is missing. I guess I must have forgotten it when I woke up, but that page reminds me that I recently had a dream about Maria. It was maybe a few weeks ago. In the dream Jesus told me that she had died and was eventually judged and separated from this place. After I wake up from that dream I start to think about her, and I wonder where she is. What are the chances that she is actually dead? Thinking of the people you are no longer in contact with always bring along a fury of questions.

Is she married. Does she have children. Does she have a good job. Is she happy. Is she sad. Is she still angry at me?

"One teacher killed." That comes out of the television in the living room and it grabs my attention. I put the notebooks back in their order and I go see what this news piece is about this time. Today, in a city school there was a shooting that has resulted in an unknown amount of deaths. All they can really confirm is that one teacher had died on the way to the hospital.

What everyone is waiting for is to see if the shooting was motivated by anything drug related. If the constant decline of the quality of this city hasn't been noticed yet, it will be noticed now as this story is going to be reported nationally eventually.

Somewhere in the middle of the report there is a knocking at my door. It's Kathleen, who is asking me if I can help her move some of Joe's things out of his apartment. I finally get to see what his possessions are.

Along with her are her two nephews who seem to be about twenty five even. Kathleen opens the door to his apartment, and for the first time, I walk in. I've glanced inside maybe two or three times, but I had never had the front row seat.

After the four of us walk in, and after we've wiped off the confused looks on our faces, we quickly realized that Joe had stopped living here. It was completely empty as if someone had just moved out. Kathleen goes into the bedroom, the only thing there is a bed. In the bathroom there is a bar of soap, a tooth brush but no tooth paste and a box of cotton swabs. Maybe Joe only slept and showered here, and was living somewhere else most of the time. So much for me finding out what type of person he is.

I am relieved of duty early because the two nephews are able to handle the bed by themselves, and after about ten minutes I watch from my window as they drive off in a moving truck with Joe's possessions. So little in so much space. It almost makes you terrified of living a long but meaningless life.

The truck is no longer visible, but what does come into vision is a person named Mary. She gets out of a car and begins to yell at the driver. After a few seconds the driver