No(?)Body

“If walls could talk.” The man chuckled to himself under his breath as his feet fell heavy on the stairs he was climbing. The familiar jingle of the keys, the switch of the lock on the door. He was done for the night.

I don’t know much about him; at least, not from my perspective. It is a commonly accepted notion that a person is characterized by the sum of their actions, but I’m convinced there’s more to human nature than that. It’s one thing to know that he sloppily smears parts of me crimson every night, deepening my shade, but it’s another to know the motivation behind it.

Of his name, I am uncertain; contenders include “Please,” and “Help.” Why the majority of the guests he brings down call him by name I don’t know, but they are most often in a state of distress. When he touches them is when the panic becomes obvious. The terror isn’t quite as intense for me, but his trace is the catalyst for a sure sense of dread. For the most part, it is his own calloused hands that drag across me; only sometimes do visitors run their fingers along me, clawing in a sort of rushed desperation.

Last night, as it is most nights, the body dragged down was that of a woman. Nothing of the unordinary, her long hair draped over bruised shoulders. With a slim, almost skeletal frame, her skin stretched thin, her bone structure exposed. The sight that beheld my eyes was just about the same as it always is; scarlet seeps slowly from fresh cuts in pale skin. His precision is remarkable, his attentiveness unwavering. He listens, enthralled, to the screams of his patients, his eyes wildly bloodthirsty. I listen, disturbed, with a sick sense of responsibility.

A few minutes after the lock is turned for the basement door, I hear a faint wailing. The sound approaches rapidly closer, and I begin to understand that the product of the repetitive, headache-inducing sound is that of the sirens that sit atop police cars. The rhythmic noises come from multiple sources, indicating the presence of uncountable authorities outside.

A knock.

Pounding.

The fists that bang on the outside door beat progressively faster, hammering harder with each strike. I am used to the sounds of distress, but they always belong to the visitors; never has it been the man, until this moment. He curses, first quietly and muffled by the floor above me, and then louder. He screams profanities between urgent, panicked breathing.

The door is thrown open.

“Drop the weapon, put your hands up!”

More profanities.

A gunshot.

Silence.

For all of the lifeless bodies to have rot on the floor beneath me, I never pictured him in that way. His eager eyes, glossed over, his crooked smile, fallen still. And then it hit me; his motivation.

All at once, a profound loneliness fell over me. Though my body had been made evidence of a crime I didn’t commit, my identity tainted red by hands that weren’t my own, it was not the stripping of myself that made me feel lost. No, rather, in a peculiar way, it was the absence of him. And the motivation struck me more clearly than anything had before: loneliness. Forcing others to be with him, a method of forgetting that nobody else wanted to. The dismemberment of others, a remedy for a sense of having lost the parts of oneself.

Grief.

Tragedy.

Pain.

He never did say his name. Maybe he didn’t have one; maybe he wished not to. Maybe anonymity was easier than speaking the namesake of somebody that nobody wanted; especially himself.

But if I could talk; if walls could talk; I would have named him Somebody.