And this guy? He’s one of the halfway decent. In that same
span of time, in that same metropolitan area, hundreds of children will have
been abused and molested, millions of dollars will have been stolen or
misappropriated, armies of homeless men and women will have been viewed with
pity or loathing, or ignored altogether, dozens of women will have been raped
and battered, and scores of animals will have been mistreated, sometimes for
entertainment.
And that doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface.
All the while, people will drive and ride and walk around
with fake smiles on their faces and false platitudes on their lips. They’ll lie
and say things like, “Fine,” or “Good,” when someone asks how they are without
really caring one way or the other. It’s just what you say. And most of the
rest of their day and indeed their lives follow that same pattern.
A few will smile in genuine delight at the warmth of
sunshine on their faces, or the clean smell of recently fallen rain, or the
wise and baffled expression on an infant’s face. These little beacons of light
in a drab and darkening world send ripples outward into the crowds around them,
and for a brief moment the emotions they emit touch others and are shared, and
sometimes, hours or even days later, one of the touched will recall that
moment without consciously remembering it, and reach out in some way to touch
another, whether with just a smile or with physical aid or an act of kindness,
and all the anger and frustration and resentment brewing in the cauldron of
teeming humanity will lose some of its force for a time.
And that’s heavier still, because the smallest glimpse of
hope outweighs the longest stare into the dark. Every sliver of rising sun
peeking over the horizon offers a shot at redemption, a new start. It burns the
darkness away into the cracks and crevices. But the tallest and broadest of
things and men cast the longest and widest shadows, always, and even at its
highest and brightest, the light cannot penetrate there. The darkness crouches,
waiting, and we always reach into it with one hand even as we reach for the
light with the other, because we’re made of both, and are called to both.
That’s why I write the kind of stories I do. All good fiction
peers at this paradox and tries to peel away layers to see what’s underneath.
It peeks at the horror and joy of it all. But crime fiction tears those layers
away violently, and stares unflinching at the heart thus exposed, in a way
that cannot be denied or written off as fanciful. It’s bald truth masquerading as
fiction. Only the names have been changed.
And that’s how it should be.
Yeah, it’s heavy, and down here includes everything under
the sun, from the poshest penthouse to the dimmest subbasement. The high and
the low alike are subject to the gravity of things, no matter how they might
cry out in denial, or more accurately, because they do.
SR
SR
