STARVED FOR JUSTICE

STARVED FOR JUSTICE

Your character gets everything they ever wanted —

 only to realize the true cost

Antoine J. Polgar

Things happen on a May afternoon the smartest person is not clever enough to foresee or understand. A paunchy retired academic Philip Kohl, the hero of this story, sits alone in the study of his Woodward Avenue, Buffalo home in the Parkside area house he shared with his wife Eugenia. She noticed that since the delivery of what appeared to be a piece of heavy computer equipment, he locked the door to his study and the electricity bill had doubled. She assumed he was either working on his unpublishable poems or novel, watching porn, or playing games on his computer.

When Eugenia and Philip met in Graduate School, they were planning to attend a Conference in New Orleans but Eugenia had no intention of booking an expensive room in the hotel that was hosting the Conference. “We can share a room,” Philip boldly suggested. She said, “I’ll sleep on the floor.” But it turned out there was room for both in the king-sized bed. They had been together ever since.

I knew Philip and still found it odd he had found someone to share his life with. There had never seemed to be any room for anyone else in his life. Philip lived in a world of distrust and resentment. Instead of making love to his comely wife, Philip went to bed every night indignant over a particular historical injustice thinking about how to get even with the perpetrators of that injustice. He thought of nothing else but ridding the world of evil.

Twenty years later, Eugenia is asleep beside him with an eye mask and ear plugs to avoid intimate contact and thinking about moving into the guest bedroom. She is hoping he will not touch her, but she needn’t worry. He is impervious to her needs. He has other things on his mind. As a tortured soul, and as a man disappointed with history, he spends his waking hours studying atrocities and trying to think of a way of reverse engineering time. Of course, he can’t cover the entire course of human history from its beginnings to the present. That would be insane. It would be tactless to provide an inventory of other cases of injustice he has catalogued in his head because he is keenly aware that he cannot alter history or spare anyone the ordeals to which they and their loved ones and surviving descendants were subjected.

Philip is now focusing on the present to get even with evildoers and their accomplices by taking revenge on them and their lineage. This too might seem insane since a sane person knows we can do nothing to change the inevitable outcome of violence. But Philip aspires to the impossible challenge of becoming a heroic knight wielding the sword of vengeance in the irrational belief that he could alter the course of history in reverse. Why should the wicked die the same death has their victims?

According to Philip’s unforgiving perspective, the wicked should die a different kind of death for eternity. Notwithstanding the banality of evil in life, every unjust death of an innocent unavenged was unfair, a stain on the collective conscience of humankind that would never be eradicated until old scores were settled. Too many evildoers had escaped retribution. Many were still alive. Philip was intent on identifying the culprits and if they were still alive, punish them and if they were dead, know how long they lived and if they suffered when they died.

In Philip’s opinion, the solution to the world’s ills was conditional upon liquidating evil. He was a man starved for justice. His thirst for justice kept him pacing the floor at night. He was the prisoner of his thoughts until he could get back to sleep. Although his rational mind told him he was on a fool’s errand, he was determined to find an answer. One morning, after nights of frustration over his inability to find a solution and coming to a dead end, his single-mindedness and determination were miraculously rewarded with the big answer: a secret code of vengeance. This secret code conferred upon Philip the unique role of the righteous man as the self-appointed angel of retribution.

He was henceforth armed from his desktop at the controls of his sinister platform on the dark net with an algorithm that combined facial recognition technology, the use of artificial intelligence, cellphone numbers, chaos, and fractal theories, gps coordinates and fleets of lethal drones that enabled him to target and exterminate evil doers in all parts of the globe. If their loved ones happened to be on the premises at the moment of the drone strikes, that was collateral damage. he labelled the secret code “the justice code” because it enabled him to reverse engineer and trace evildoers back to their origins and proxies and accomplices. Fractals and chaos theory were an integral element of the operation because the reverse misfortunes visited on the assassins or their accomplices indirectly through unpredictable tragedies that deeply affected their lives by making them conscious of the risks inherent in their complicity with the process. Blood was on their hands and their loved ones – not only them - would have their share of trouble and the perpetrators would realize that the consequences leaned towards an unimaginable infinity of the catastrophic.

A few nights later, Philip went to sleep feeling he had accomplished everything he wanted in life. But as he fell into a deep sleep, Thanatos, the personification of death appeared along with his brother Hypnos, the god of sleep. He resisted as they covered him with buckets of blood.

“Where are you taking me?” Philip asked.

“To the underworld,” Thanatos said. “Your time has expired. There are people waiting for you down there.”

As they descended into the underworld, Philip experienced a feeling of vertigo. He was facing a reckoning he had never anticipated. If you think you are without sin or have suffered some great misfortune, it is nothing compared to the misfortunes others experience.

The underworld was a dark street under an expressway underpass where a crowd of homeless derelicts were crowded around fires burning garbage out of oil drums. As Philip approached, a crowd assembled around him. There were familiar faces. His mother and father and brother and abandoned wife and children. And then there were unfamiliar faces.

“Thanatos said, “They are holding a vigil to memorialize their deaths and the deaths of their loved ones as your victims in your campaign for vengeance.”

“I don’t deserve this,” Philip protested. “I was trying to avenge their annihilation.”

“You thought you were the angel of vengeance. You’re not without sin. You have blood on your hands. It is the height of hypocrisy to focus on avenging the State murders of innocents and their families when you are about to target people anonymously based on algorithms. It is the height of presumption to think that you could get out of your rendezvous with death without paying for your own sins,” said Thanatos.

“I’m not perfect,” Philip said. “I never said I was perfect. But what did I do?”

“Here are your father and mother. They died alone. Although they were old, their lifespans were not over. Your father died alone in a hospital bed because of a doctor’s malpractice in a retirement home. You were not there to get him proper care. Your mother also died of an accident in her home because of neglect. Have you anything to say?”

“It is true. I’m remorseful. I knew they were going to die on my watch and failed to prevent it. I visited them as often as I could but I’m guilty, I wasn’t there” Philip confessed. “I was thousands of miles away trying to make a living,” he said in his defense.

“You were always late,” his mother said. “A civilized person would have dropped everything.”

“You were never on time,” his father said.

“I was in denial,” Philip said.    

“Here is the African student you sponsored who was murdered leaving behind a wife and child,” Thanatos brought the young man forward to confront him..

“I had nothing to do with his murder,” Philip cried out. “He disappeared. He was leading his own life.”

“You did nothing to find me or find out how I was,” the youth said.

  “…and the mother and children you abandoned are still alive, but their lives have not been easy,” Thanatos said, “not to mention the doomed romances that caused heartbreak.”  

Philip began reflecting on every detail of his delinquent past. There were many details he had overlooked. Memories of transgressions surfaced in his mind. The cruelties inflicted on his brother and mother when he was a child, the malicious acts that caused pain to others. He thought that he was somebody because of his diplomas and that he deserved to live a long life but the dreams of sainthood to which he aspired as a child had been dashed long ago.

Philip awakened in tears and awakened Eugenia.

“Why are you crying?” she asked. “Something is wrong. Why don’t you talk to the doctor and get a prescription for what ails you instead of suffering with sleeplessness?”

At first Philip appeared to be in denial. “There’s nothing wrong with me,” Philip said. “I think the dream was triggered by the trauma of the AIDs epidemic, the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the COVID pandemic. Remember the vigil we attended after the 9/11 attacks?”

“That was over thirteen years ago,” she said.

“It must have made an impression upon me. I was crying at the vigil,” he said.

“I don’t remember you crying,” she said.

“I remember,” he said. “I’m guilty. I have blood on my hands.”