A Dream about Courtaud

A Dream about Courtaud

            “Ask me your questions.” He says. His voice is thick with a muddy French accent, light tones which suggest his fatal words are lighthearted. The skin beneath his bright brown hair is pale, pulled tight over the sparse muscles of his face and hands. His shirt, neat and collared is stained brown and red. If I did not know better, I would say he is a sickly man.

            But I know better.

            “Why do you do this?”

            “Do what?” He asks.

            “Hunt them.”

            We are on the porch of a rotting wooden cabin, surrounded by dense, coniferous woods with the heavy smell of damp pine. In the fog I hear the screams from the kennels, the men and women brought forth to his ceremonial slaughtering ground, a god’s sacrifice to itself. For its own amusement.

            He smiles and pulls the cup of whiskey to his bearded face. His eyes are dark now, and shine in the right light like a dog’s. He can see in the dark, I wonder if he sense how afraid I really am. Inside, I am screaming with the sacrifices in the kennels. He sips his whiskey, letting it trickle out of the corners of his mouth to blend with the ichor and gore clogged around his face.

            He sighs.

           “You’re asking me about the very state of nature. Every day the human race irrepably damages this planet, kills a species and no one seems to mind. Sure, a few outliers, a few self-hating Homo-Mendaxes will stand up and shout, a few of them will even blow up a clinic or bulldozer to stop the path of human progress. But it’s not enough. They’re just as useless as the bulldozers, just as redundant as the dodo. But human beings have come too far because they have no natural predator. That is me…that is us.”

            In the thick of the woods, it is dark now. I hear baying and tortured howling. The mouths in that woods aren’t human. Not animal either.

            “What do you want with us?”

            He laughs and I feel the monstrous eyes staring from just behind me.

            “You are the very portrait of human arrogance, boy. You act as if there is something special about your species, as if I need to have a reason or a special grudge against you in order to justify doing what I do. Can I not simply do as I please? After all, there is nothing alive that can stop me. Human beings are no different from anything else on this planet. They are meat. Just like everything else.”

            The revulsion on my face must show because he continues, “Oh don’t be that way! You know what? A few homo necans get a taste for a fellow and the rest of them act just the way you are, as if some ancient code has been broken and some damn treason has been committed against the whole world. Well I have news for you, that’s the type of world we are: we are a world in which things eat each other, constantly, ceaselessly. Life is a cycle of teeth and claw. The best way is to end it young, while the meat is still tender.”

            My stomach sinks as he says this. I look down on my own cup, trembling and sloshing in my palms. The tears are right behind my eyes, scraping to escape but hiding behind their white prison so that he does not smell my fear.

            “Please,” he seems to know. “As if I would waste my time. My stock back there, those good people, they are my veal. Trained to perfection, star athletes all of them. And it is not as if I am denying them a chance. They may use any weapon they are able, though it would do them little good.” From my sudden memory I recall that Courtaud has revived from machine gun wounds, that he has swallowed fire and consumed lethal amounts of cyanide, as a display of his divinity. My hands come together.

            “Then why am I here?”

            His smile breaks and I see his teeth, sharp and inches long.

            …

            I wake in the darkness of 3 a.m. I am cold, covered in sweat and slime. Outside dogs are barking in panic and frenzy. There are no dogs in my neighborhood, none that I have ever seen before. A pack of strays would need to be an army for this chorus.

            As I glance back at the window shades I see the outline of a man, and two voice speak inside me. And I know that the rational, awake voice is my head is right, that I am dreaming still and must return to sleep at any cost. But the half-asleep voice speaks a partial truth that I cannot shake: That he is standing outside. He is out there and no matter how much I dream, or do not, he is there.