Shunned

Seven days ago I was a presidential nominee.  Now, nobody will talk to me.  I don’t mean that figuratively –like I can’t get booked on a talk show.  I mean it literally.  How could I be erased from the consciousness of the people that once gathered in the thousands to chant my name?  The sentence.  Even the damned parrot I bought only talks to itself.

When the sentence was first passed I was amused.  Even the most reprehensible characters get spoken to at some point, but not me.  You’d think that these “invisible” people whose names, social security numbers and very identities have been erased from humanity would seek each other out – form an underground of undesirables or, what did those Indians call it?  Untouchables – but no.  It seems as if the untouchables don’t want other untouchables around them.  I’ve seen it, they seem to float off into the distance.  Bodies are found on the street, cleaned away as so much refuse.  No mention of it in the paper of course.  If you’re shunned, you’re nothing.

I took the subway for the first time in my blessed existence to test the sentence.  The booth attendant turned his back on me.  Irritated then finally irate, I pounded on the bullet proof glass.  Announcing my intention to everyone around me; including the subway cop, I jumped the gate and got on the god-damned train fully expecting a ticket-he’d have to ask for my ID at least.  But nothing happened.  I wasn’t there.  How far do people want to take this?  Could I beat someone to death in front of them and they would continue to ignore me?  Has it come to that?  Should it?

Was what I did so bad?  I didn’t slaughter people like Hitler.  I didn’t assault kids.  I was, if anything, brutally, courageously honest.  I think it’s time.  That was my platform, honesty.  I believe that my affinities and propensities are nothing to be ashamed of.  Many cultures have shared my vision.  So what if they are all defunct.  My way will come to be seen as the one true path.  Jesus was vilified after all – now he is a god.  It’s unfortunate the sentence wasn’t death.  I could have had a last speech broadcasted everywhere and been made immortal through martyrdom.  I was shunned instead.  I have to admit, when it was first passed into law I didn’t think it could really be applied.  People can’t help themselves.  Haven’t we always been a society that seeks out the vulgar, the repulsive and the disgusting for public display?  How could one law, passed overwhelmingly though it was, change the entire personality of the culture?  How could everything reverse itself so utterly.  How could it apply to me?

I saw a jumper once, while in my campaign bus prepping a speech.  Funny, the topic of the speech was “how individuals overcome crime by using collective will power.”  I heard screaming, then a sucking sound and something like a crack/splat.  I saw him on the ground-his head split open, the telltale sky blue clothes of the shunned bloodied and ripped.  For a moment I saw the reactions of the people before they recovered themselves enough to realize who it was.  A woman in a brown hat and camel coat pulled her uniformed child quickly and his little head snapped back and he cried out of fright.  A businessman’s mouth dropped open then he busied himself with refolding his paper and sticking it under his arm as he hurried off.

I watched the crew come, lift the body and toss it into a truck.  Was this my end?  If I spoke to no one for a month, a year, no human contact, would I too be lured by the idea of oblivion by way of public suicide only to be ignored and literally tossed into society’s trash can?

No.  I vowed to create my own, private death.  If they didn’t want to know, screw them.  I would seal myself into a crypt complete with my treatise on society and my place in history - to be found by future archaeologists who would surely recognize me for what I am, a visionary.  My condemners would be judged as harshly as those who killed their last god. 

Sealed in my crypt I wait.  I read.  I wait.  I wait for the courage to pull the trigger – I wait for the courage that has never before eluded me, the courage I was shunned for.