City of Darkness

Chapter SEVENTEEN

11:29 PM





A human kidney is a beautiful thing. It has an almost pearlized pink sheen, especially when it has been as carefully cleaned and trimmed as the one he now holds in his hand. It has a womanly shape, a graceful undulation, and he regrets that he must sacrifice such perfection to this jar of alcohol before him. But he has waited as long as he dares. This kidney is – he pauses to do the math – forty-six hours departed from its owner and although he knows the alcohol will dull its glow and begin to nibble at the sharp outline of the severed veins, he also knows that if he wishes to keep this memento at all, he must take steps to preserve it.

He opens the jar, drops the kidney inside, and watches it descend through the clear liquid to the glass bottom. He puts the jar on his table before his candle, cocks his head, and stares with absorption.

Blood is the great equalizer.

There are a few others who also acknowledge this truth, who share with him in this brotherhood of blood. The world sets the royal above the common, the male above female, white above black, Christian above Jew, the first born above his younger brother - and yet in the end the blood is all the same. Forget ashes. Forget dust. We begin in blood and end in blood, a fact the vast majority of society strives steadily to ignore.

Despite what the papers say, he knows he is not a beast. He believes in God. Actually, he believes in two gods. The god of order, of law, the god of the mind and of science. The one he worships as he eats his breakfast, as he listens to violins, as he walks the morning streets looking at the girls in their soft blue dresses. The girls he knows he is supposed to want, the ones he sometimes does.

But he is no hypocrite. No, still not quite a hypocrite despite the steady and methodical manner in which life has attempted to make him so. He acknowledges this god of daylight and also the deeper, angrier god, the leveling god of sex and death, the one that watches over this kidney, the one who roams the streets at night and who cries out into the darkness like a wounded wolf.

There is nothing unnatural in this, is there? We are all enslaved to the same cycles and there is no reason to feel shame. He walks in light, he walks in darkness, and yet sometimes he wonders: Which one is real, and which is the dream?