The following is another excerpt from my new novella, Solitude and Its Enemies. Now available in paperback and kindle formats here.
II
And what about her? Have you seen her around town, this mute and rigid woman of monochrome? Have you noted the way she flinches and frowns when people speak to her unexpectedly? You cannot read her distaste for humanity in her eyes on account of them always being hidden behind sunglasses (even indoors! where are her manners?!)—but if you could see her eyes, a chill would waltz up and down your spine. This woman does not simply hate the world. She wants it to burn.
She knows that this desire is plain as day in her eyes, and she knows that it will mark her as someone to keep an eye on—and thus, the sunglasses.
Kara Krauss she is called. (They’ve been calling her that since birth, and she has resigned herself to it, although she was not consulted on the matter.) Once as a young woman, she stepped out into the street without looking twice and was struck by a motor vehicle. Her hip was shattered in the impact, and steel screws were implanted to put it back together. And now she has to walk very carefully to hide her limp, of which she is ashamed. Weakness repulses her, especially in human beings, and what’s more, she is ashamed of having looked only once before stepping off that curb. She is not the kind of woman who looks only once. She must have been preoccupied. Maybe she was in love.
She likes cigarettes and books about architecture and general societal order. Once when she was a girl, a brutish uncle played a game with her at the public pool, where he held her underwater for so long that she almost drowned. She hopes he dies choking on his tongue.
Much has gone wrong with her life—that much you can tell just by looking at her. What you can’t tell is that her life was ruined for good on the day the Great Leader fell. What they did to that poor hero’s wife was one thing—to be expected of a mob. But what they did to him was quite another. Like a hellish work of art. Satanists! How dare they? (She often thinks that they will get what’s coming to them, but then again, maybe not.)
There was order, and now there is chaos. There was prosperity, and now there is rot. There was something to be proud of, and now there is only shame. Everywhere she looks: shame and decadence. Undignified people running amok with their beloved blasphemies: Liberty! Democracy! Equality!
Hogwash!
Get over yourselves, she thinks. Not only a mantra, but a painful one, like a steel screw twisting in her brain, right behind her shaded eyes. She weeps inwardly for the blasted soul of her country, while outwardly she shows to the world nothing but stolid contempt. And there are, of course, days when she does not see the point of going on—days when no amount of sunshine or birdsong or nicotine can convince her that there is anything to look forward to beyond a slow and cruel demoralization: a most vulgar crawl into history’s grave. She wishes they’d done it to her, too: flown her up in a helicopter and dropped her over the burning palaces of the country’s leaders. But she can’t do it herself. Or she could—but she won’t. Because every breath she draws and every second of excruciating demoralization she endures is an act of defiance: a counter-rebellion! It is as if they were putting the proverbial screws to her, strapping her down and pulling out her fingernails, but no, she will not talk! She’ll bite off her own tongue before she speaks!
Not that she has anything to say. No Party apparatchik, this Kara Krauss of a woman. She was an editor for the city paper before the offices were sacked in the Revolution, driving the paper into bankruptcy. And now she is not much of anything. Just a ghost of the glorious past, haunting the ruinous present. Just a stain on the shroud of degeneracy. Scraping by on her husband’s military pension. You get the picture: She was of one political mind, and that political mind has been trounced in battle by its antithesis, and now, were anyone to discover her mind, she would be persona non grata. (She used to play it close to the chest, her reverence for the Great Leader and all his Works, and now nobody bothers to ask, because they’re all too busy getting on with their repulsive lives.)
Is she alone in mourning the death of her country? She can’t be the only one. But you’ve got to keep your grief to yourself these days, do all your mourning in private. The enemy knows you’re out there, and they’re content to leave you be only so long as you don’t go making a fuss.
Just the other day, while perusing the mounds of potatoes and yams at the farmer’s market, she nearly burst into sobbing. Out of nowhere. All that grief she keeps stuffed down in her guts, threatening to break free. (It’s a pressure cooker in there!) Everywhere she turns, she sees the easy smiles of the bastards. Such mockery! She can hardly stand it. She trembles with the effort to stay cool and collected. When all she really wants is to go on a stabbing spree.
How could this happen? It’s true, she’ll concede, that in the later years of his reign, the Great Leader went a touch overboard in his constraints upon the economy and his suppression of popular dissent. He shut down the ports, which was not ideal. And she did not exactly cheer when he started burning “heretical” books (so many of which were about architecture, if you can believe it). Okay, okay, there was famine in the countryside and bread riots in the cities, which the Great Leader was at pains to pin on his enemies abroad and within. Elections were permanently suspended, and all minority political parties were outlawed. There were waves of unexplained arrests and even rumors of some vanishings. There were police dispatched to block citizens from entering hospitals or pharmacies. There were checkpoints set up everywhere to inspect people’s papers. Probably too much fiat currency was printed and circulated. The banks stopped doing business with anyone other than the larger corporations, and a lot of people’s life savings vanished into thin air—so sorry, we don’t know where they went!
But.
We still had order. And we still had our national pride. And now what do we have instead? As far as Kara Krauss can see, all we have is a pile of shit. The world looks down upon us now, she thinks (she can feel it every second of every day, the disdainful gaze of the world). And worse—we ourselves look down upon who and what we used to be. So many statues ripped down. So many historical monuments burnt to a cinder. Nothing left but the charred bones of a suicided nation . . . nothing but shame and degradation—and millions of smiling Satanists pretending that everything is A-OK!
She dips into a café for some lemon tea, and a TV is playing a speech by one of the leaders of the New Party. The woman bloviates about a “new fraternity of men” and a “rejuvenated civic pride.” Kara is stricken by the urge to spit. And she will, too, just as soon as she’s outside.
Nothing tastes right anymore. How are “free and democratic elections” supposed to fix that?