RAYMUND FERNANDEZ
And he could be you, the drug addict fated to die tonight. You might be high on it or getting ready to get your fix. If the latter, you would be feeling drowsy, drowsy as in the dream, only half awake, too drowsy to be afraid even when you should be. To be afraid would have been the most rational thing to feel given the nature of the times. But one is hardly expected to be rational when one is in it. In the lifestyle, I mean. Otherwise, why be addicted? Right?
But let it not be said, it is because you are an addict that you are capable of doing anything -rape, robbery, and everything else criminal. People who relate addiction to criminality have it the wrong way. Not all addicts are rapists, robbers, and every other sort of criminal; even if rapists, robbers, and every other sort of criminal do think nothing much of getting addicted. The two issues are not directly related. People get addicted to a whole assortment of things and for all sorts of reasons. It is a complex of variables too difficult to wholly understand. There is no single road which brings you here, where you are tonight. And you could be anyone. You were only looking for the easiest way to stay thin or keep awake. Or the reason may have been this:
“I know, sir, that I am doing the wrong thing. This addiction could kill me. But when I am high on methamphetamines, the world becomes clearer to me, much clearer, like I can really understand what’s going on.”
And one can poke holes into the logic. But only if one were standing from the outside looking in and making easy judgements. One could say, “Hey the world is really fuzzy and unclear. The drug-induced clarity is the illusion, the drug-induced dream.”
And you might be surprised how so many people are addicted to one sort of drug or other. Coffee is a drug, so alcohol, nicotine, so painkillers, so sugar, or rice, or meat, money, the job, or some other wonderfully sinful thing like a good slice of humba. Each can kill you. Given the right conditions, any one of these can drive you to murder, but you would need a predisposition, the DNA, for it first. Not the humba drove the murderer. He was already a murderer before the humba entered his life.
But all this, does not enter your mind if you’re the addict lining up for your fix. And you had been told that things were quite so “hot” tonight. The cops are making their deadlines and finishing up their quotas for the weekend. They are not bad people. They are only working to keep their jobs. And jobs are so hard to find nowadays especially for those whose only work experience is – policeman who did not play the game everybody else was playing. He was not one of the boys. The only other job for him is security guard.
It is all a big fat tragedy of an unprovable provenance, a narrative both true and yet having all the required elements of fiction. Stalin was right: A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic. Death becomes a mere number give or take a few – like plus or minus 5,900. To see that number as people, one must have known them personally, or bumped across them in the street. This being unlikely, addicts being the sort of people who desire to disappear into the crowd, the number is only a number for most. And when they see another few deaths on television, they are likely to simply change the channel. The enlightened religious might proffer a small prayer in behalf of the dead. The less enlightened are more likely to simply say: “Merisi!” For it is the nature of the unenlightened to see good where good is not, and evil where evil is not. Religion has nothing to do with it. The brain, on the other hand…Well, that depends on how clear the brain is. In reality, the things humans believe in, no matter how so clearly wrong, a false leader for instance, these too are drugs one can be addicted to without even knowing it.
And if only you had your fix. Then these things would have been clearer. There was a commotion. There was a shot somewhere seemingly far. And then the beginning of a second one you did not finish hearing… You went instead into the greatest high of all under the loving care of your merciful God. You came out in the local 6 o’clock evening news. I changed the channel before your picture came out. God have mercy on us whom you leave behind.