A reasonable person might ask, Why did you do it? If I possessed the power to lead them, surely I could have put a stop to everything. The rage was part of it, yes. All that I loved had been taken from me, and that which I did not love as well, which was my human life. So, too, did the biological imperatives of my remanufactured self; could you ask a hungry lion to ignore the bounty of the veldt? I do not note these things to seek the pardon of any person, because my actions are unpardonable, nor to say I’m sorry, although I am. (Does that surprise you to hear? That Timothy Fanning, called Zero, is sorry? It’s true: I’m sorry about everything.) I merely wish to set the stage, to place my mental contours in their proper context. What did I desire? To make the world a wasteland; to bring upon it the mirrored image of my wretched self; to punish Lear, my friend, my enemy, who believed he could save a world that was not savable, that never deserved saving in the first place.
Such was my wrath in those early days. Yet I could not ignore the metaphysical aspects of my condition indefinitely. As I boy, I spoke often to the Almighty. My prayers were shallow and childish, as if I were speaking to Santa Claus: spaghetti for dinner, a new bike at my birthday, a day of snow and no school. “If, Lord, in your infinite mercy, it would not be too much trouble …” How ironic! We are born faithful and afraid, when it should be the opposite; it is life that teaches us how much we stand to lose. As a grown man, I mislaid the impulse, like many people. I would not say I was a nonbeliever; rather, that I gave little if any thought to celestial concerns. It did not seem to me that God, whoever he was, would be the sort of god to take an interest in the minutiae of human affairs, or that this fact released us from the duty to go about our lives in a spirit of decency to others. It is true that the events of my life brought me into a state of nihilistic despair, yet even in the darkest hours of my human life—the hours that, to this day, I dwell in—I blamed no one but myself.
But as love turns to grief, and grief becomes anger, so must anger yield to thought, in order to know itself. My symbolic properties were inarguable. Made by science, I was a perfect industrial product, the very embodiment of mankind’s indefatigable faith in itself. Since our first, furry ancestor scraped flint on stone and banished night with fire, we have climbed heavenward on a ladder made of our own arrogance. But was that all? Was I the final proof that humanity dwelled in an unwatched cosmos of no purpose, or was I something more?
Thus did I contemplate my existence. In due course, these ruminations led me to but one conclusion. I had been made for a purpose. I was not the author of destruction; I was its instrument, forged in heaven’s workshop by a god of horrors.
What could I do but play the part?
As to my present, more human-seeming incarnation: all I can say is that Jonas was right about one thing after all, though the bastard never knew it. The events I am about to describe occurred just a few days after my emancipation, in a certain benighted prairie hamlet by the name (I was later to learn) of Sewanee, Kansas. To this day my recollections of that early period are drowned in joy. What soaring liberty! What bountiful slaking of my appetites! The world of night seemed a glorious banquet to my senses, an infinite buffet. Yet I moved with a certain caution. No roadhouse-tavern massacres. No families slaughtered whole in their beds. No fast-food emporia painted red, patrons strewn willy-nilly in bloody dismemberment. These things would come eventually; but for the time being, I sought to leave a lighter footprint. Each night, as I made my way east, I dined upon only a handful, and only in situations in which I could do so at my ease, and swiftly dispose of the remains.
Thus my heart sang an aria of delight at the sight of the truck.