chapter four: big decision

going to martha's vineyard for christmas. ought to be fun.

going sledding today with girlfriend. ought to be perfect. would be more perfect if I were able to sleep at all tonight. just staying awake. sick. tired. how does that song go? something by jewel or some bullshit.

couldn't get the thought out of my head: "condemned to freedom." what does that mean? all I came up with was an idea for a story of three thousand words or more. starring, of course, the devil and the everyman.

the devil's got his everyman locked up in a jail. cuffs around his wrist draw blood every time he moves. bread and water only once every day. he's put into stress positions, with his arms behind his back, bent forward, chained to a chair. left that way for hours. (of course, a modern version of the hellish prison would resemble guantanamo bay.)

but the devil isn't satisfied with this jail. not cost-effective, and too expensive to be imperfect. so he sets and thinks a while as his everyman is tearing his rotator cuffs. "what," thinks the devil, "is the most perfect, inescapable prison in the universe?"

his answer: a man's heart.

one night, after passing out on a waterboarding gurney, the devil's everyman wakes up to find his arms and legs unbound and the door to his prison open. he walks outside, sheepish, unsure if this is some sort of test or trap- but no. he hears nothing outside, no sounds of life, no footsteps, not even the heavy breathing of his torturers which he'd grown to fear.

he slowly, carefully walks out of his cell, then slowly, carefully out of the prison.

why did they let him free? he asks himself. what did he do? where did they go? did they really go?

not knowing any of this, he'll instead try to think back to the reason he was first imprisoned. what had he done? surely he'd offended his jailors somehow, and surely they'd discovered their mistake, that it was only an accident, his offence, or that it had never happened at all, and, upon realising this, they'd gone, abandoned him, in case he decided to sue them for their criminal actions.

but why didn't they warn him not to seek them out if this were so? if they were barbaric enough to torture him so, surely it wouldn't be beneath them to threaten him. and it was certainly in their power to kill him, should they so decide. if they could abduct him in the first place, they could probably have him dead any day they chose to. with that sort of character and that sort of power, he expected some sort of threat, but nothing came. they just left, all of a sudden.

that was frustrating, but that wasn't the new prison. the new prison was what the devil's everyman was supposed to do now. in prison, he had something to define himself against. he was not the torturer, he was the tortured. they abducted him, they tortured him. he hated them. now that they were gone, what was he?

his definition of what life was had been so altered by his internment that he could barely recognize normalcy for what it was. indeed, he suspected that normalcy no longer existed for him- it only occurred in short gasps of his life spent outside a cloying, unnameable fear. it was a memory.

as misshapen and warped a definition as that was, the devil's everyman will soon realise that, for all its flaws, in spite of it lacking any resemblance to reality, it was a definition. it was clear- in it, there was a place for him, and a place for all other things. he has none of that now.

eventually, he'll find something to struggle with, but it won't be that thing. it'll be the search for something to struggle with. that's his prison: seeking out an adversary. looking for some new devil. when he finds one, oh, it'll be swell, he'll have his side, the devil will have his own. it'll be so clearly, cleverly defined.

in the meanwhile, what will he have? existential stasis. nothing will change, because it won't have to: he's free, after all. isn't he?