“Why couldn’t people be slower in their thought, in their processes? Why does everything have to be a race? Mundane is the norm in our world. People spend decades getting an education and experience in specializing in the gear train of a subject matter they are put into when they are too young to even comprehend its monotony. Success is measured by the degree of how nondescript one’s life is. Community, family, government, and entertainment are things fabricated by the society to quantify opulence and to display how unremarkable and repetitive this so-called “modern” life is. Does ‘purpose’ play a part in people’s lives anymore?” Breaking this critical thought, he checked the time. It was half-past eleven. As he passed by all those streets, the cars, the malls and the multitudes of people, he stared at the passing lights wondering why the world was in such an immense hustle to just exist. He got down the train station and started walking towards his room. As he passed through the scores of houses, the gardens, the big cars, the rope swings on the trees, swimming pools and the families in those houses watching TV, praying and eating together and just being content with their run-of-the-mill lives, he kept cursing himself that he didn’t have anything to grow up to. He didn’t have a family or anyone ever to care for him all his life. He didn’t have money to buy a car or to go to fancy restaurants as his friends did.
As he walked through the streets thinking about these things, he saw a house which was clearly empty and abandoned. He hadn’t seen that house all the times he’s passed by that street. This presented itself as a beautiful chance for Asher to be himself: to walk into the dark unknown. He could be sure, that since the neighborhood was a quiet one, and he wouldn’t be caught trespassing an abandoned house especially at this time in the night. He crossed the fence and reached the door and expected it to be unlocked, but it wasn’t. So, he went for the back door lest nobody sees him loitering around trying to break the lock. As he crunched the dead leaves beneath his feet, he made it through the long grass and the shrubs to the backyard. He saw a dusty swimming pool and a ragged old porch. The waxing moon gave some crepuscular light to the dominating gloom. He reached out to the back door and to his surprise, it was open. It had probably been broken into a lot of times already. He went inside and scanned the dingy house room after room looking for something that got his adrenaline pumping. No movie, no music or hobby would entertain him more than a haunting in that parched backdrop. He wanted to encounter something, like that of an old crime, buried deep inside the antiquity of this little house. He was in a maze, walking around in awe like a little child in a candy store. But to his dismay, he didn’t get anything. Not even a tiny ominous whisper. He sat down by the rickety fireplace in the darkness while the infinite silence started getting disturbed by the wind. It was getting cold. He brought some old cardboard and broken furniture and started the fireplace. It wasn’t very long before he dozed off.
As a 22-year-old final year medical student living in Vancouver, Asher never understood his fellow human beings. He grew up in a smaller city with his dad but almost completely cut off from him all the time, especially after his mother died. Nothing really changed when Asher’s mom killed herself but instead, he realized that she meant nothing to him at all. His dad iterated the fact that his mother loved him, even from heaven but he didn’t care about that. He never knew his mother in a loving way. All the memories he had of her were that she just sat in her room all the time, stared at the wall, shouted at the mirror and cried all day. She never ate or played with him. His dad always had marks in the morning after the night he heard falling furniture, breaking the glass and his parents shouting and screaming at each other. When he woke up the morning of his ninth birthday, the police knocked on the main door. They had found his mother in a water tank of a petroleum refinery outside the city. He stopped feeling things since when he could remember and spent his time killing pet animals for fun. For instance, he would put a puppy in a plastic bag, suffocate it to death and put it back with the other puppies and the mother. He not only relished the agony leading to death, but also the grief the canine family would show to the slain little one. He was alone in school, got bullied by the older kids and ended up sneaking scorpions into their backpacks to get back at them. He used to plan his scare tactics to the minutest detail and never got caught. His IQ of 195 showed on his academics too as he got straight A’s and got into medical school. But he felt that he was destined for something bigger than just academics. He didn’t see med-school as a place where he can heal the sick, but instead, he fed off human misery. The fear and helplessness of injury, sickness, and pain fueled him. His antipathy for human mortals came to a point that he wanted to hurt a living soul to the point of absolute obedience! That is when he met, Dinah.
Six months later, Asher graduated and started his residency in the General Hospital. On a rainy Saturday evening, on his way back on the bus from a 22-hour shift, Asher phased out, as usual, eliminating the world around him. He saw a girl sitting right across him on the bus and he instantly felt like the universe had hit the pause button on him. She had a chiseled face adorned with a matte brown lipstick and her big midnight eyes with long lashes almost looked like they were talking to him, pushing him off his seat. She got off a stop before him. He began taking that bus route at that very time every single day and after a week, the Saturday after that, he saw her again. Calculating the pattern, when he saw her the next week, rather than simply gawking at her astonishing golden hair, he decided to follow her to her house. Asher made it his weekly ritual to take the ‘8:15’ and follow this girl till her house. She was a glorious personification of everything Asher didn’t believe in: a lush Canadian household: complete with a family, car and a dog. But she posed another threat to Asher. In addition to threatening his beliefs, she also was appealing to his sexuality. So, he decided to believe that she was his to treat however he saw fit. He saw her as nothing more than the sum of her parts and intended to stalk and dehumanize her. The open drapes of her home allowed Asher to get into the family, and intricately plan his power process. After a month of ‘getting to know’/stalking Dinah, Asher made his move. “Do you ride this bus often?”, he asked her with a scheming leer. By the time Dinah’s stop came, Asher had her phone number and offered a ride in his brand-new Lexus the next time. The week after that, Asher was ready with his rented Lexus to sell his story and met Dinah near the General Hospital as planned. While having a good time driving back after dinner, Asher pulled a rag with chloroform on it, tied Dinah’s hands and feet and kidnapped her.
It was half-past eleven when Dinah woke up in a dark room. There was a dingy light creeping in from the other room. She took a full two minutes to come to her senses and understand that she was not in her house with her family, but instead in a very rickety room. She could hear sounds of rats and stench of cockroaches. She suddenly remembered the chloroform rag and being with Asher before that. She had a bad headache and realized she was very tightly bound to a bed near a cold fireplace which smelled of burnt plastic. She had a taped IV cannula piercing her arm, but surprisingly there was no pain other than an excruciating headache. Asher hadn’t hurt her but instead made sure that she was comfortable. He even gave her a blanket for the night. “Want some snacks?”, Asher emerged from the other room with a flashlight and a packet of pretzels. Sobbing loudly, Dinah begged him not to do anything to her, and that she had a family which depends on her. She thought of him like some sick serial killer, but, Asher was himself unsure of how things would turn out to be. She was scared, pale and parched. He offered her water, but she wouldn’t take it. He tried to calm her down and tried to tell her that anybody who is abducted would react the same way. He explained to her that he is not some weird homicidal sexual predator, but instead truly a medical resident who doesn’t necessarily approve of the opinions of his fellow human beings. But since the sobbing won’t stop, Asher knocked her out with some anesthetic through her cannula. Vancouver Police Department meanwhile got a call from Dinah’s parents that she hadn’t returned home. As the investigation to her disappearance began, they knew that more the time they took, lesser the chances of finding Dinah were. The cafe at Heather Street where Dinah worked was the first stop, and the police found out that she left work as usual but there wasn’t any CCTV footage of her taking her usual bus. So, it was clear that she had taken a detour and went missing somewhere in between. Meanwhile, Asher made sure that Dinah’s phone couldn’t be traced and even all her correspondence with him was deleted from the network itself so that that the authorities couldn’t trace anything back to him. Without any security camera clues or phone location signals, the investigators knew that she was abducted, that too by someone who was one step ahead of them and extra cautious.
Next morning when Dinah woke up, Asher was sitting right opposite to her reading the newspaper. She saw that there was light in the room, and there nothing near the house. There wouldn’t be one person in the neighborhood to hear if she screamed. She began to cry again and implored mercy from Asher. After a warm ‘Good Morning’, he offered her coffee and a medicine for her headache. “what do you want from me? Is it money? I have a lot of savings. I’ll not tell anybody!” Asher got a little agitated and wanted her to listen to him just one time. So, he wielded a handgun and asked for her silence, a threat which she obeyed this time. She pretended to drink her coffee, but her eyes dripped with tears, emptying into her chest while clutching tightly to her blanket. Asher was a gentle person but never wanted to show weakness and knew that maintaining an ambiance of subservience and fear was important. His sabotage story had to go exactly as planned and going to prison was not a part of the plan. He knew that the police would track him down in a few days, so he had to end this tale as soon as he could, with as much control as possible. Without wasting any time, he took Dinah to the bathtub and made a quick incision to her thigh, just short of the femoral artery. Her eyes froze, as a tearing pain burst through her weak synapses as she almost blacked out. Pointing the handgun towards her, Asher handed her a letter that he had prepared for this moment. “Read it loud. Don’t worry, there are no cameras here. When you’re done reading it, you can go!”, he said with a smirk on his face.
Dear Dinah
Did you know that there are geometrical shapes everywhere in nature? There are hyperbolic curves and their directrices in waterfalls, parabolic asymptotes in wind patterns, a simple harmonic motion in the bustling of leaves and the Pythagoras theorem in oozing blood. Did you know that a perfect circle does not exist? All shapes have edges and all humans have flaws. Nature has its own way of functioning, but somehow human beings have lost the essence of that. They disregard their existence and they run an egocentric race thinking that they and their petty lives are perfect. Capitalism is killing our society bit by bit, and our fascist regimes do nothing about it. Politicians live out their propaganda of reforming technology, which will one day wipe out humans by restraining us to its rules, regulations, and discipline of its ephemeral pleasures. The system is a machine. The machine is ubiquitous! It is relentless!
Dinah, while you live with a perfect family, I don’t have one to call mine. While you had an eventful childhood with your girlfriends, I saw my mother die. While you played with your barbies and went to theme parks, I wiped the blood off my lips after getting beaten by bullies every day. While you get to fall in love and not fall in love, I am repelled by everybody I know. While you were thinking of succeeding in what lies ahead in the future, I tried to kill myself. While you save money to go to college, you invest towards becoming more like these power-hungry dictatorial men. This is a flawed world.
I’m sorry for what comes next. Just know that this is not your fault. I need to do this. This callow world needs deliverance. Deliverance from me…
Before she finished reading the last sentence, Asher completed the incision on her thigh this time severing the femoral. As Dinah began to choke, her eyes filled up with tears as she writhed inside the bathtub, while still clutching Asher’s letter firmly in her hands. In a few moments, she had become a ghoulish mannequin. Her eyes were open, lips were flaccid and as she lay in a malodorous puddle of her own blood, she took her last breath.
Asher had breached the system exactly as he had envisioned. He took Dinah’s life for feeding on his excessive pride, and that was not her family’s price to pay. But they did. Dinah’s body was never found. The police closed the case after some years and the mystery remained unsolved. Asher moved on with his life, continued his practice and lived a successful life as a surgeon in the same city he once loathed. He started a family, had a daughter just like Dinah. A narcissistic self-seeking man blended in, never once breaking the law, knowing that he had a grave secret. A secret that he had a great amount of pride keeping. A secret that he had once spurned the order of human existence, without anyone knowing.
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