What did you want?

Did you want it to be a mathematical formula? Something serious that scientific study could eventually unravel? Or did you want it to be a song?A dance? A game? 
Numbers are the victims of sums. 
Are you just a number? To be counted among them?

There was a time when - In order to do a great thing - I would have closed my eyes and sent up a prayer for the steel but I had long ago severed that transmission. Nowadays, I have to find the steel within me, scrabble around for a clue and delve further into my core. The closer I get to it the greater the feeling of dreadful power, the dark accomplice encroaching on my nerve ends like fingers of electricity.

In times of stress you may note a scene in intricate detail. In this scene the field leading off the rear of the house lays primed and ready to incubate fresh life. It seems here that the same birds cry the same cries in the same trees, as if their evolution is stagnant and their epiphanies long ago reached. Gusts of enduring wind lean on the fences. Beetles work on a seemingly important project. Yet natures music is unnaturally quiet, its volume turned down.

My methods to stop the onset of madness are tried and tested.  I use intensive exercise and then equally intensive drinking. Some days I run ten or more miles and then drink three bottles of wine. After a bath and before the wine clinches a mainline to my mind, I spend many hours planning, gathering ingredients for and cooking a meal. I am spreading out base joy thinner than the membrane of an egg.

Time has become conspicuous, its meters now pass with tortuous accuracy, time is an enemy to be plotted against, and time is all I have, too much for any man. Time breeds life, life moves toward death, death stops life, time breeds life, but not ad infinitum because one day the Andromeda galaxy will swallow this galaxy like a dog on a sausage, and I am increasing concerned by this.

The gun in my hand makes tiny wobbles as I strain to keep it fixed on the back of the beasts head. All I have to do now is pull the trigger and then I can run ten or more miles, bathe, cook, drink. I only wish that I had been cut out for murder, this would be one less thing at least; to have little or no empathy for other living things. I used to believe that empathy was the great key to evolution, to develop an understanding for our neighbors, not to tolerate but to really understand. Had I looked inward I would have seen the indicators of destruction, it was there in my guts, a desperate unshakeable urge for suicide, working like a parasite to sicken the mind. It would be agreeable to think of this urge as an alien stowaway in an otherwise wholesome machine, but it had always been in there, symbiotic to the end. It's nefarious intent only distinctive against the selfless capacity of a human, the two poles separating under particular conditions, like wheat from chaff.  We the naturally schizophrenic.

'Don't look at me my old friend' I say to the beast. 'just survey your territory one last time. Recall the frolicking and also the pride you took in your crucial role as centurion. Goodbye'.

Only I hear the trailing snap of the gunshot that bends the air and vibrates into nothingness. My old friend is dead and the warmth of his body will dissipate also and nothingness has become his destiny, his finality, leave alone his carcass on which I perform a solemn ritual. The morning is over and I will run ten miles or more, dream up a meal, gather ingredients, bathe, cook, drink. I am the last man left alive, and begining to dare contemplate that I am also the butt of his joke. The most elborate prank of all.  

not THE END