Stillbirth of a Nation

My hand reaches over the back of his seat. Chloroform sends his mind spinning before he can make a sound. When he’s unconscious I touch the bare skin of his neck and get to work.

            On a screen plays the 1915 silent film The Birth of a Nation. Hint, it was first called The Clansman. My patient and his friends have a private screening. No one else would watch this shit, hopefully. That’s a lie, there are too many people who still idolise the lynch mobs too cowardly to show their faces.

            As white men play out racist stereotypes in black face on the screen, Leonard is losing his mind. My touch draws out all his memories from a life in The Klan. These fuckers can’t even spell that word properly.

            I watch a film replaying in his mind. A life of violence. I have to look around the cinema to check no one is watching me. The rest of his friends are in different seats. Leonard made it easy for me, sitting alone at the back.

            He’s got a swastika tattooed on his head under his hair. The police officer doesn’t like it to be seen when he’s on the job. He has a few friends at work who share his views. They are a cancer with the law at their backs. No one is safe when he pulls them over at night. 

            At first, he just liked to give people of colour fines for things they hadn’t done. It was a childish joke to him and the rest of his friends. Everything escalates. Someone resisted arrest, he can’t even remember that man’s face. He strangled him during an arrest for a parking ticket. No one ever found the body. Now I know where it is.

            Leonard took a while to recover from his first murder. He learned to see it as justifiable in the war him and his friends think they’re fighting. It’s easy to fight a war when the other side are unarmed. That never put him off.

            He marched with his friends at Charlottesville in 2017. A happy day for him, a pride parade for racist shitbags. He got blood on his baton that day.

            Each memory is his for the last time. I’m taking it all. I jump the seat to sit beside him. I need his keys for the rest. There’s evidence in his home that will tell good police what he’s done. I need the officers cheering on the KKK in the other seats to sit that raid out.

            Ink from his scalp tattoo drips down his back. Sometimes I just leave them as blank slates after I’ve wiped away their hatred, but Leonard has been too busy for that. I can’t get rid of them all by myself. He left a trail, someone else can mop it up.

            One of the other guys leaves his seat and says he’s going for a piss. I wait until he’s walked out the door, then I follow.

            “Does this smell like chloroform to you?” I ask him as I slap the rag to his face, I couldn’t resist. He struggles as I pinch his nose with it and see his eyes roll. Danny is a skinny runt. It’s easy to carry him to the cinema toilets. I drop him on the floor and start wiping away all his memories. He’ll be tried for his crimes like Leonard. They’ll say they don’t remember. The evidence will paint them as the lying scumbags they are.

            When I’m done, I drop him in a cubicle and lock the door. Scrambling over the locked door is a pain in the ass but it means no one will see him until I’m done with the rest of them.

            “You seen Danny?” Jim asks me as he emerges from the screen.

            “Yeah, he went outside.” I assess Jim, he’s a tree of muscle and neo-Nazi tattoos. He’s the only one who isn’t in the police. He gets to wear his hatred like a uniform.

            “For a smoke?” Jim asks.

            “Guess so.” I shrug.

            “Cool,” he says. He walks past me. I pull the rag from my pocket and kick him in the back of the knee. He stumbles enough for me to get the rag over his mouth and nose. The chloroform doesn’t work as well on Jim. I should have added more but I was distracted.

            Jim’s muscles, ropey from lifting weights, crush my forearms. I do everything I can to keep the rag over his mouth and nose. I just have to hold on. He mumbles through the rag. I kick him in the back. Finally, he falls unconscious. The toilet is too far down the corridor. Jim weighs a tonne. I push him through the doors of the next screen.

            In the dark of an unlit cinema screen, I drain Jim of his lifetime of punching people for being different. Leonard got rid of evidence that proved Jim had punched a man to death in his own shop a few years before. Their bond grew even closer as their shared sins mounted up. I don’t take away Jim’s tattoos. Just his memory. His hatred. He’ll see what he was all over him. He’ll hate it.

            “Ben Cameron is a fucking hero man,” says Phil. He’s been an officer for thirty years. When I touch his arm, I see how long he’s been abusing that power.

            So much hatred. All because he liked a girl who rejected him. She had every right to. Maybe she saw a hint of what he would become. Phil found people who told him he was better, superior. He let himself believe that he was serving racial justice. He has the same secret tattoo under his hair. I decide to leave it and shave him. Maybe I should have done that with Leonard.

            Phil shot people in their cars. He beat men and women who were already handcuffed. He’s grown to love it. He gets an itch when it’s been too long. He might be the most dangerous of them. He really believes that Ben Cameron from The Birth of a Nation is a hero.

            I burst his nose with a right hook as my left hand holds his wrist. His head flies back. I sweep his leg from under him with a trip I learned in judo lessons.

            When I’m done with Phil, I go for the last of them, Paul. He’s the kid in their group. They call him their protégé. He’s not been at it for long. He talks the talk, but he’s barely done more than that. He likes the praise they heap on him.

            I don’t want Paul doing what they’ve done. He still has a wife who would hate him for all of it. His family don’t agree with it. He’s been a dick, but he’s not a killer. Not yet. I take every memory he has of them. I take every stupid racist joke he ever even pretended to laugh at. Discrimination is poison. Paul can still be cured.

            He lies in the seat at the last of the film plays. I go to the projection room and grab Jim’s copy of KKK propaganda. I find scissors in a drawer in the cinema office. I cut Phil’s hair so that his swastika is plain for anyone to see. I get the zip ties from the bag in my car.

            All of them will be screaming for help when they wake up. They won’t be able to go back to their houses, they won’t know to hide the evidence I’m looking for.

            I break in to check that it won’t be hard to find. Phil’s man cave has histories of the Third Reich on every shelf. He has shit from their reign of terror in display cases. He keeps evidence of his own crimes in a locked box under the floorboards. I find a lock box with a gun inside that he used to kill three people. Clothes he wore during one of the murders. Keepsakes from a man who went missing. He’s handled them.

            I call the police and watch from my car, parked down the street. They leave the house with his lock box in an evidence bag. As long as I didn’t miss anyone from his gang, he’ll go down for it.

            I make another call to tell the boys in blue where to find their white hooded knight. I should be happy as he leaves the cinema in handcuffs, but Jim is let go. They don’t have evidence against him yet.

            A third call tells police where to dig for the body Leonard buried years ago.

            My work is endless. Every time I drain someone of their hatred, I’m devouring it. It makes me hate the world more. The more I know how to blend in with the monsters, the more I hate myself. Flashing lights retreat into the distance as Phil is taken away. Paul makes a statement and walks home. I have his keys.

            I also have the film. When they’re gone, I set fire to it in the middle of the street. They like to burn crosses. I like to burn their toys. The fire is my endless mission to burn away every excuse we make to treat other people as lesser human beings.

            I turn the keys in my car and drive away from the fluttering ashes of The Birth of a Nation. They blow away over lands built and paid for by slaves whose descendants are still under attack.