The Hidden Past

CW: Mental health, body horror

John felt the usual repulsion, the ghoulish sensation he always experienced when dawn was just beginning to peek into the city. He couldn’t tell whether he was dreaming because he experienced the slight numbness of a man who had endured the blunt trauma of violence and exploitation, but all the details of these events had been erased from his memory. The hideous giant man with the office clothes, walking jauntily toward his window, made him wonder if the government was after him. Was this man really there? If John hid, would the stranger disappear? He felt as if this city were made of cardboard, air, and nothingness – almost too vacuous and fraudulent for description. He heard knocking at his door but when he ran and opened it no one was there. When he looked out the window, he saw that in the river was a white substance, an anomaly that could have been some kind of industrial waste. However, as he fixed his eyes on the river longer, he noticed that the whiteness turned into a burning crimson. His television turned on suddenly. How could it act from a will of its own?

On the screen, two men were standing in the room of a fortress. A coffin was beside them. These stern men were Japanese, and they wore the robes of warriors he had seen in films from the sixties. John felt faint, and he could barely focus on what they were discussing. Their voices were like the sounds of birds during the hours when one is half-awake. However, the last part of the conversation, he could hear them declaring a war against his country. Then, John found himself inside the film, standing over the coffin. A small, mannequinlike face was growing on the corpse’s neck, and the room had the smell of formaldehyde. He felt more scorn than terror, as if he himself had died for just a moment. His mind became truant, and his urge to laugh was what pained him most. He finally hit a breaking point.

John sat by the coffin for an indefinite period of time, wondering if he would come to his senses. Every horrid thought spoke in a thousand unanimous voices. They were cold, clinical, and imperial. But the face on the neck never moved or spoke. It may as well have been a tumor growing there, which disgusted him immeasurably. The room darkened and a man with a moustache and tattered clothes – which John could only attribute to a workman – entered, smoking a cigar.

“What am I doing here?” John asked.

“We held you in the interrogation room last night, and you refused to comply.”

“I don’t recall anything like that. I was in my apartment last night. That’s –

The stranger cut him off, “You don’t remember all that has transpired? You tried to kill one of our men.”

John realized that defending himself was useless at this point, and he ran to the door and opened it. A large crowd swarmed around him, and he felt as if he was suffocating. After wading through them with diabolical effort, he awoke in his bedroom, shaking and sweating. His diary beside his bed caught his eye, and he picked it up and read it. In messy penmanship, it said, “I decided to abandon my family for reasons of conscience. I cannot wallow in remorse for too long. This secret agency gave me the freedom to love myself regardless of the consequences that my actions thrust upon me. I think that in the long run, ridding myself of familial ties made me a more desirable person. I have more emotional discipline, less heart, and more social intelligence. I can keep all my skeletons in the closet, and the government will protect me from retribution.” John gasped at the stupidity of his own words. “This is the best experience I’ve ever had. I want it to last longer, perhaps even for the rest of my life. I don’t consider myself my own worst enemy because, unlike most people, I am not full of inner conflict, contradictions, shame. I don’t have any attachments. I hope to become more desirable to those even more powerful than the people who accompany me now.”

John heard a knocking at the door again, but he refused to answer it. A smirk flashed across his face. He felt his old self returning. There was a kind of glamor in having all these memories return, even though they were painful. He couldn’t grasp why he was so afraid earlier on. His moments of humanity were lost upon him. The knocking continued, and he screamed, “Go away!” several times, and then he decided to escape out of the window. He crawled down the fire escape, and fell on his back because the stairs gave in beneath his aching feet. People walked past him with care or notice. He may as well have been a ghost. He ran for miles through the city, and lost track of time. He thought that people were speaking to him at times, but he ignored their voices. He continued running until he faced the vast harbor front where ships were being moored by tired and grouchy, young and detestable creatures like himself. He thought that there some inkling of hope in them, which allowed them to continue their jobs and their lives as they did, carrying on in a boring fashion. He was beginning to find that his own life was less fashionable than it used to be. He felt like Macbeth, who experienced paranoia as the aftertaste of pride and rashness. He wished that it was the other way around. If the paranoia came first, he could grow out of it – maybe even develop a thick skin. But that was impossible now.

John sat on a bench and began to rock in an anxious fashion, hoping that the park rangers wouldn’t ask him to leave. When the police finally came for him at midnight, he surrendered to them with a deferential, childish look in his eyes.