Truly, there is nothing so powerful on this Earth, nothing so ingrained in minds and hearts, nothing so captured in spirit and song and tradition as that of Christmas. It is far flung across the globe, infecting countless cultures and populations, in an endless variety of forms, re-invented as suits the need faster and smoother than even the religion that claims to sponsor it - chief as that faith is in the art of re-invention. In this day, it retains little of that origin, if any, in most hearts, and what is there is buried under a steaming pile of pagan ritual and pointless ceremony, both millennia old and but a few years young. Anything that happens at the yule-tide becomes blessed, an instant tradition, and in this soup of all-meaning, where every chance happening bears a beatific glisten and heartfelt moral for us all, no message at all is required to be added.
And even better, a most glorious of ironies, is that all of this false meaning, this token tribute of ceremony and manufactured spirit, is, like all such artifices, a great and explosive fuel for the fire of commercialism; perhaps the greatest such fuel the world has ever seen. When the spirit is so easily found, it is also so easily tagged and stamped and sold for a nickel. The price of peace and joy no more than a few dollars, a few rings of a register is all it takes to make the bells of Christmas chime, so that now the actual giving is now almost seen as a formality. Greed and expense are the watchwords of Christmas now, and gold our only gift at the manger.
But beyond the glee that this gives me, there is one even finer aspect of this midwinter delusion. As this Christmas monster grows ever bigger, ever richer, ever wider-spread and ever deeper furrowed into our minds, we grow ever colder, ever angrier, ever beastlier in its pursuance. Like all ritual and ceremony, it builds upon itself like a snowball; what once we had, we must have again, and so a fancy becomes an order and an order soon a threat. Christmas is now an ice-cold carving knife at our throat, demanding us to be jolly whatever the cost. And so in the streets and shopping malls, we tear at each other, as the must-have items disappear and the prices rise and fall with the crowds; a riot of urgent, desperate greed and fear, needing to have the perfect white Christmas, just like the ones we used to know.
The mall is thus our new Abyss, filled with damned souls, eternally scrambling, pushing, fighting their way through the legions, through the miles and miles of gaudily stained temples, temples of no God but man�s own folly, a monument only to the cheapness of our morality. These places destroy the soul, distract the mind , weaken the body and turn the emotions to cruel, sharpened elbows, only there to push others down so we may escape our own self-created Hell. And in the wonderful way of this misshapen, mutated festival of guilt, we accept, welcome and even worship this Hell - for it is, of course, a sign of the season, and thus blessed above all the Gods that live in books, or churches.
Being that which I am (and indeed, no more, but fully aware in that, and proud of it), I find these places most enjoyable indeed. We all do, not least because our work, while often needing to be more subtle in its practices, goes so well within them. This year, however, I have been particularly blessed. Santa, that impish figure who covers his bulbous, overstuffed guts with the colours of Coca Cola, has answered my prayers with just the gift I desired: a food court, as they are called these days.
Not just any food court, of course - this one made special by two simple factors. First, a poor quality of air-conditioning and no free air at all, so that with one simple electrical fault, the heat would rise to unbearable levels quite quickly. Heat, as even the Bible tells us, is a great encourager of sin.
An even greater prod towards evil is that of our fellow human beings. This is particularly true, as history has well shown, when they crowd to large numbers, moving close and sharing sweat and tension, throwing their imperfections up close into others faces, and brooding that stupid, selfish anger that characterises them so completely, and which makes them so deliciously easy to lead. Thus the second factor which blessed this food court was by far the greatest: it possessed but one entry; a wide door, to be sure, but one that could be easily locked and barred, should an unscrupulous individual wish to keep the place packed to bursting, as it is this fine Christmas Eve.
Nobody has noticed the doors so far, which is as I wish. They have, however, noticed the cash registers, which I took liberty to toy with late last night. Not all - for that would then offer no opportunity, and thus no desire - but most of them, are no longer working. Each food place is reduced to a long line of customers, the wait dragging on their souls, the heat exhausting their minds of thought, of patience, of anything but the need to be THERE, that mystical place which is forever where they are not. The lines grow ever longer as people need fluids, and the anger grows steadily and steadily.
I move among them, placing complex orders in their mouths, and forgetfulness in their attendants. For a bit of whimsy, I spill milkshakes on fine dresses and make barbeque sauce all the more sticky and all the more searing as it burns down the inside of fingers, and wrists, and chins. But this is not what I am really looking for.
I find my goal soon enough, though. They are here as they are everywhere; teenagers, of the dirty, angry type. Cast out from their noisy families, squalid but gaudy in their egotistical idea of poverty, they smoke and curse and spite the Christmas around them - the rich people, the rampant consumption beyond their reach, the families who are so smug in the happiness they think they will never possess. Envy and fear grips their souls, and they desire only one thing - to be powerful, to control their fears and fix their worthless lives. They will settle, of course, for the power to impress their friends, to take women, and to cause pain and fear. And it is this need that I talk to. This need that I will warm, shall we say; warm ever so slightly by the Christmas hearth of inspiration.
Still again, I find a middle-aged security guard. His wife is gone, to another lover, in the space of a heartbeat. He wants to feel powerful too, to take control of those things he cannot seem to fight, that crush his heart and make him too afraid to sleep at night. The gun by his side will be a good tool to stop the teenagers. To teach them a lesson. To show them what is right.
And there are so many more. The woman who�s baby is screaming will fight like a tiger to make sure it comes to no harm, for then she can forget the horror she feels when she cannot love it. The skinny scholar who has been reading comics this morning, and has very much learnt their message of might makes right. The girl who can�t stop starving herself, who is hearing her own death echoing in her ears and will do anything to get away from it. The boxer on forced sabbatical, desperately wondering if the world will see through her charade now. The musician who thinks his girlfriend is leaving him, bristling with chivalry and righteous bravado. The man on his lunch hour, who thinks every spare second will keep his career that much further from failure. The woman who�s last dose of nicotine is wearing off just a little too quickly. The young teenage boy masturbating surreptitiously through his jeans in the corner, feeling nothing but exquisite disgust. The unemployed woman who feels only the hunger that has gripped her for three days as she saved for a feast that will be forgotten in a day. All of them fearful, worried, angry, all of them oh so ready to fight, to tear, to kill, if need be, just to save their own pathetic lives and to momentarily banish their own pathetic demons. All of them pushed to the utmost limit by the heat, the stresses, the unceasing stench of greed ,and the endless nightmare of the shopping mall, with its infinite tinsel-covered crapulence and rotten fa�ade of good cheer.
Each of them a monster in making, pushed to the limit by this Christmas charybdis, each an explosive of fear, with the timer counting down for each second they remain in this Bedlam. Each of them only needing but a spark to complete their transformation, to light the fuse; a spark which I can - and do - so easily provide.
Someone starts rattling the doors and yelling. Panic begins to lift. A woman collides with the teenagers, spilling soda. An angry retort. A sudden movement. A threat made. And then it begins.
The part that most appeals to me - that makes me clap my hands and jump with glee - is where a bullet slices through a young black man, and follows straight and true to strike the girl behind him, who cannot be much older than six. And but a few seconds after scooping her bloody form up in horror, a man uses her body as a shield to save himself. At that I laughed so hard, I feared I might even fall from my perch.
But it is skant moments into the chaos when my enjoyment is interrupted by a noise by my side, and I know I have been joined in my lookout position, high up in the rooftop, by another whom I am not wanting to see.
�Why?� he asks at the first, as is typical of his kind. I can hear the tears in his voice, and I take small pleasure in that; it is as much as I am likely to gain from his unctuous presence. �Why do you do this? Why do you drive them to such things?� At that, I turn and look upon him, for I cannot ignore such slander, even from such a one as him. Alas, by the time I turn back to my masterpiece, the passion is running out of them. The doors have been opened, and the crowds are fleeing. The gun chambers are empty, the arms hang limp. All is left is the sweet shock, the delicious abhorrence and the dismal, hopeless horror that will ring across all those who see the grisly scene that remains; which, thanks to the extreme competence of this modern media, is just about every person on this small planet.
Oh, I do enjoy this time of year.
But there is one thing that is spoiling my enjoyment of the horrific aftermath. Through the screams of pain and of fear and of despair - and, best of all, screams of pure, terrifying understanding of who these humans truly are, under their egotistical godhoods - through all these screams, I hear other sounds. Sounds of comfort. Sounds of care. Those who have not fled, those who have training, those not crippled by fear or insecurity - and even some who are - these and more remain, and ply what trade and gifts they can to help the injured, to calm the terrified, to clear the chaos and remove the dead. They are but a few, but their presence blemishes my picture like the proverbial taint of sin on even the greatest saint.
Even more strangely, I see the reporter at the door switch off her camera, and stand aside to let the ambulance men attend. I see the security guard, his face red with blood and guilt, holding a compress on one of the teenagers, keeping his blood pumping, his heart beating. That�s when I realise there are too few corpses, too little blood, the entire event too short in all. The people were afraid, but they were not angry, not enough to truly come to riot, to hurt, to kill, their hands were in the most part stayed, their hearts little more than saddened at the end of it. I turn viciously to face the entity by my side.
�You� I accuse, my words bubbling with splenetic saliva. Again, he said nothing, only shook his head to reply that he did not believe my truths. Sure that I had him weakened now, his true heart exposed, I pulled him close and demanded:
�Then why, cuz� I spat �do you waste your pathetic existence encouraging hope and love in these ugly, damned souls?�
He looked at me and for the first time ever in my long existence, I saw him smile.
�Because it�s there.�
�I bring about situations and incidents, nothing more than. The choices they make for themselves. If I encourage, so I encourage - but mark me well, I can only encourage what is already present.�
�But again, why? What pleasure does it gain? Why bring these darkest of things to the surface?�
"Why? Because I can. Because it's there." And I laugh like a madman at the truth of it.
�Look again, cuz� he admonishes. �Do you see my hand played? Do you see me bind a wound, or share a comfort?� I chafe as he returns my words so artfully.
�I, like you, old one, only encourage� he adds, with barely a glimmer of satisfaction breaking through his sadness.
�Aye then, so you encourage. But now it is my turn for questions. Why do you bother? You saw it yourself, then, as you have seen it countless times before. It is in them, whatever you might do, whatever you might think. They are, one and all, monsters, as much like me as I might see in the looking-glass. Why bother saving a few with your pathetic gestures? Let them be the monsters they are, and have sport in it; or else kill them all and save yourself the trouble�
At this, he simply shook his head, as if in pity for me, and a more insulting sentiment, I have not seen. I flew into a rage, my tongue lashing at him like a claw in return: �Damn you for a fool, then; a poor deluded fool, to think them special, and a beast as well with it. For what other word is there for one who will not put the whelping cur out of its misery, and instead pretends that one day it will be well again. You torture just as much as we, admit it!�