The Experimenter

   I say I love people. But it’s a lie. I don’t love them because I don’t understand the word ‘love’. It has no meaning for me. People fascinate me. That would be more correct. Their emotions, the things that colour their everyday lives, like love, hate, fear, anger, and many other feelings; these are a mystery to me. I have learned to read the signs of these emotions, but not to understand them.

     I can see by the widening of your eyes, the sweat on your skin, that you are afraid.

    But I can’t understand how you feel. Instead, your reaction provokes a kind of curiosity in me, but there is nothing inside me that can mirror the fear I know you must be experiencing. I feel no pity for your situation, and I regard the journey we’re going to embark on as a purely scientific experiment, one designed to help me gain the tools to understand the world I live in.

    Let me explain. Though your acceptance is of no personal value, I believe it will add some credibility to the outcome for me. I have struggled in vain, my whole life, to understand the world I live in. Watched from the shadows of my own darkness, uncomprehending, as my very existence, fragmented and fractured seems to have been painted with a different brush to the rest of humanity.

    Initially, I was unsure if the world even existed, supposing that it was a was a figment of my own imagination. As a youth, I read Descartes, and his insight ‘I think, therefore I am’, seemed infinitely logical to me. But what about the rest of the world, the world I apparently inhabited?

    Was it real, or a mad dream of my own making, or even a program fed into my febrile brain by some agency outside my understanding? Ultimately it seemed that the complexity of that world was beyond my ability to create or comprehend; the fact that the world contained things I did not understand nor could experience, suggested that it must exist outside myself.

    To survive, I needed to explore that spark, that animus that makes a human being human.  Something I could only conclude was missing within me, a deficiency that left me an alien in society. I tried initially to mimic the feelings of others, but love cannot exist in gesture alone, and my cardboard imitations proved disastrously ineffective. Nor was it easy to express anger appropriately, or even effectively. I finally gave up the struggle to reproduce the emotions I lacked. Instead, I would study them, understand them from a scientific perspective. Use my knowledge to manipulate factors in my life so it became might more meaningful.

    From my reading, it seemed that some of the strongest human emotions are felt in relation to death. The fear of losing of those important to us, or the cessation of our own existence.

    Ah, I see your eyes widen again. Perhaps you now have a little understanding where this experiment is going. Our separate journeys have will soon have become one. 

    Some of the world’s best poetry centres on the grief accompanying death. Not able to share that grief, I decided to use the imminence of death as a tool for understanding, and maybe, the experiencing of emotion. ‘Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light’. Such promise, such beauty in the words of Dylan Thomas, but no stirrings in my blank heart.

    So, you see, I had to look elsewhere. Perhaps the reality of death, the last moments of the spirit, perhaps this would break the dam wall and allow me to feel.

    Do I want you to care? Could you ever understand how the pain of emptiness is so great. I am a hollow vessel waiting to be filled. A lone comet seeking the comfort of a warm sun.

    I have never experienced joy, or love or happiness. Just the lonely world of the outsider, the whispered taunts, the cruelty of the unthinking, uncaring world. The vacuum of aloneness that has followed me all my life.

    You, my lovely subject, might be the catalyst who can unleash my humanity. Do not fear. I am not cruel. At least, I try not to be. But what is ‘cruel’?

    I worked for a while, in a hospice. To try and understand the difference between life, and non-life. Was I no different from the non-life, as I could not feel? I watched people die. I watched the light go out of their eyes; their muscles relax. And felt nothing. I washed their abandoned bodies, without emotion, and observed the sorrow of relatives. Their tears showed me they felt grief. But I felt no compassion for them, and none for the newly departed. Only hopeless alienation, a sense that death and mourning had importance that I could not understand.  

    How does it feel to die? No one has ever returned to tell me. Would I feel something, faced with death? Or causing another’s death?

    So, you see, you are the most important thing in my life, right now. I know you can’t answer. But, please, don’t struggle. I hope the bonds are not hurting you. I have tried to be considerate, and chose soft silk to bind you to the chair. I promise your death will be without pain. The mask that prevents you talking will cut off your oxygen shortly. When you no longer have a pulse, I will revive you. We will share your experience of death. If I experience grief, or joy or any emotion, I will release you, my unwilling subject. If I experience nothing, then your death will be nothing to me, and I will turn off the oxygen once more. Perhaps the fault may even lie within you. Another attempt would then be required to ensure the validity of this experiment. So, for now, I will wipe away your tears, which offend me. Farewell, and with luck, we will meet again.