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A Moment of Shame "Are you afraid?" "No. No. I thought I would be. But I'm not. I'm... relieved. Oh, God, all these years. All this waiting..." "Yes," V agreed. "It's a horrible thing, to have to wait so long for something you want so badly. It's even worse when what you want never materializes..." Who are you? Twenty years ago, Delia Surridge reflected quietly, she had asked that question of the man perched on the edge of her bed. Now, at the hour of her death, he was asking her, with the same intense humiliation he had displayed then, when she had asked him his name and he had answered, "I don't know." "Who am I, Delia?" V asked softly. He had wrestled with himself, to not ask this question of her, tried to convince himself of the insignificance of her answer. He had decided long ago: the answer did not matter. It would not change the past; it would not alter his chosen course of action for the future. It did not matter. But for the sake of the man he had once been... "Do you know who I am? Who I was?" The moon played tricks with the skeletal mask, giving it a pleading expression its wearer had not intended. Delia pitied him, as she never had when he had been one of her subjects. "No," she whispered. The masked face tipped slightly. Questioningly. "For most of the people that were in my program, Larkhill was their first and only camp. Some were different; a handful had already been in detention facilities, and had been processed once before by the time they arrived. Hair cut, serials numbers..." Internally, V nodded in confirmation. He remembered--imagined that he remembered--arriving at Larkhill in a cattle van, barefoot and shore of hair. So one memory, at least, was truthful. He said nothing, waited for her to continue. "One of the subjects I was given came without any paperwork, no documentation of any kind." She was looking at the blanket covering her left thigh, staring past it into another life she had tried so long to forget. "I was furious; without medical histories I had no idea of what you were immune to and what you would be susceptible to. I thought you would be useless." "But I was not." Delia closed her eyes, feeling slightly nauseous. "No," she managed to whisper. "You weren't." "And so in order to test my resistances, you subjected me to every diseases imaginable." It was an exaggeration, but not an unjust one. "I understand." "Do you? I wish I did. I thought I did... I used to believe I understood... but I never did. I never understood anything, did I?" Her tense fingers picked at the weave of her blanket. "Everything we did... How you must hate me..." "I do not. I can't." She refused to believe that. "Why?" "Because hate is a precious liquid, a poison dearer than that of the Borgias--because it is made from my blood, my health, my sleep, and two-thirds of my love--I must be stingy with it.1 I cannot waste my hate on the likes of you, Delia. I must keep it to baste richer meats." That stung; he was going to kill her and not even give her the benefit of hating her for what she had done? But then she felt clammy and foolish... she didn't deserve anything from him. Not his hate, not her death. Only the shame that she had given to him, and that he was returning. "Someone wanted you erased. And they succeeded. You probably know as much about yourself now as I did twenty years ago." There was a long, long pause. "Why?" she had to ask. "Why do you want to know now, after all this time?" "It's not important. If you knew, then I would be able to finally lay that chapter of my life to rest." A shrug of his black-covered shoulders; had he always been so elegant? "It doesn't matter." The life you stole from me... it doesn't matter. But it did matter. To Delia. All the words she had kept buried for so long... out of fear... out of shame... came welling up from inside her, and she knew if she did not speak now--and to this man--she would never have any peace. Finally looking up at him, she began to confess. ~Finis--November 11th, 2006~ 1 adapted from Charles Baudelaire, "Advice to Young Writers," 1867 |