After Sundown 1e

The last thing anyone wants to be told is that their capabilities have diminished. Even if it's true. Especially if it's true. That's not to say that people don't want to hear bad things about the present, or good things about the past - people eat that shit right up. Nostalgia is a powerful thing, and you can get a lot of drunken agreement by talking about how great the Reagan years were. The Reagan years! Back then we all thought we were going to die in a radioactive hellstorm, and unemployment was over ten percent, but no one remembers that shit anymore. No one remembers Paul McCartney subjecting us to Take it Away or John Mellencamp calling himself "Cougar" either. Every day, the past gets a little bit brighter, because we forget our failings. And we are left with nothing but Physical and Eye of the Tiger, and we wonder how kids these days can listen to such crap. But while everyone wants to hear about how those days were better than these days, it becomes downright insulting to mention the fact that possibly an actual person has lost their edge. At least if that person is within earshot. And yet, that is what happens to us. To all of them anyway. It doesn't to us any more, because we are still in 1982. To an extent we are there all the time, but especially now with Joan Jett playing - on an oldies station of all things, we are brought quite unwillingly to reminisce.

Back then I was in high school and I began noticing boys and hearing the voices. Because of my upbringing, I naturally thought that the voices represented goodness and my burgeoning sexuality was wickedness. This illusion was shattered for me when the voices crawled out of me - revealing them to be not the whispers of a loving god but the humming of dreadful wasps. Panic was of course the first thing that filled me, and I lashed out with my World Civ textbook against the demonic creatures burrowing from beneath my skin. It burned like lightning, an analogy that I am able to stand by given my later encounters with the subject. But it was worse than that, because in striking them flat I was striking myself - in a very tangible and literal fashion as I later came to understand. With each flattened bug I found parts of myself, my memory, my time were gone. Perhaps this is what normal people go through when they simply forget things, when they allow the janitor of nostalgia to clean away the dull and the embarrassing - leaving nothing but fondness for a time that cannot be recovered. But for someone recently a child, the sudden realization that history could be taken and lost was soul shattering.

Making peace with the bugs was not easy for me, but since they really were us, doing so was inevitable. My abilities to open doors and carry books were valued, as were their own abilities to fly around and hear things. And in time we grew close, we became the same. It was precisely our ability to hear things that allowed us to come to terms with ourselves, to see that the desires we felt guilt for were quite normal. Not accepted, but certainly common. And yet, while we certainly accepted ourselves, we felt ostracized. We could hear peoples' thoughts, and we could see easily the hypocrisy of those around us - that even if we came to people who had thoughts like ours that we would still be condemned as a pervert, as a wasp-filled monster. It was a lonely time for us. We watched the boys playing together without us, and there was no place for us there.

But we weren't alone. Not forever. We met Robert, who at that time was scouring through a bunch of used LPs at a record store we frequented. It was immediately obvious that he was special, both because we could not hear the buzzing of his thoughts and also because he recognized us for being a hive of sorts immediately. He quickly abandoned his work and inquired as to the "Syndicate" that I belonged to - even though he could see the conflict and chorus within our body, he talked of us as a singular entity - not out of ignorance but out of a friendship and respect that had never been offered us in sincerity before. And yet, we had no choice but to offer our own ignorance in return - for we knew nothing of the world Robert was part of save that we could infer from our own existence. Robert took us to get some wine and pizza, we were underage, but Robert used his own powers to make sure that we were not carded. He told us about the Cauchemar Communes, and his reasons for coming to Iowa in the first place. Robert was a soldier of sorts, and he was here to fight a battle on behalf of the Communes. Not because he had been paid, not because he was threatened, but simply because he had been convinced that it was a good idea. We admired, still admire Robert for his dedication to his ideals. That he would put himself in danger for things that he believed in, and for no other reason was incredible to us. That these Cauchemar would inspire that kind of loyalty while demanding so little attracted me immediately. So did Robert of course, but alas it turned out that the "I" in us was the wrong sex for him. But this did not stop us from becoming friends.

When he was finished with his mission, we followed him back to Paris, to join up with society in the Syndicate. It was both more and less than we had hoped for. We had imagined firstly that in coming to the heart of the Communes that there would be an endless supply of creatures as strange to the human eye as we were, that we would be strolling through an endless cantina scene where we would be not a tenth part the strangest, where we could casually vanish into the shared camaraderie of inhuman origins. But it turns out that even there, the number of creatures strange and profane seemed scarcely enough to fill a small town. There were certainly places to go and parties to attend, and for the first time we felt we could be ourselves - but even so we could not do so without being noticed. Worse still, there were many who felt that our type of creature - which we now call "Mi Go" - was the strangest of all. And there were only a hundred bodies filled with Mi Go. Though nothing could have prepared us for the majesty of the Dreamlands or the profanity of the Dark Reflection.

There is a certain ennui that comes from having absolutely nothing demanded of one's self. And so it was that we must confess that the first impressions we made in Parisian society were of something resembling a dissipate. We viewed the art made by others, we tried our hand at flirting, and unfortunately produced nothing of value from that period. It wasn't until much later that we were convinced of our own ability to produce things of lasting or artistic value by relating our own matured reflections on past experiences. For now we hoped to find strength and purpose in others - as Robert had done by joining the Vanguards and fighting the enemies of our way of life. But here, we hoped merely to make that way of life ours, and hoped that personal relationships with other Cauchemar would make for us a reason to take a stand. On anything.

And so we took up with Doré Guermantes, who was a well liked vampire of considerable personal beauty. We looked to him for strength because he could lift and throw a car, he looked to us for strength because in having dollars we appeared to have a boundless source of financial independence. This was before the Euro, so perhaps our errors were understandable. We fell deeply in love with him, but his interest in us turned out to be a mere flighting fancy. Vampires it seems, cannot help trying to leech off of others - even when those others want nothing but to share everything with them. We drifted apart, and we tried for a time to cultivate physical relationships. But it turns out that when you have little to offer but the warmth of your embrace, that there was little temptation for others to stay true when your embrace is absent. And the dating pool amongst supernatural creatures is... sadly not large. We were particularly enamored of an orphan android named Albert, but he would have nothing to do with us romantically because of our basic flippant worthlessness.

Well later it was that I discovered the truth about the Communes. That it is hard indeed to live when there is nothing whatever that is demanded of you. It means that no one will find a place for you, and you must create a niche for yourself. Sometimes you might get lucky and be on hand when someone has an idea that needs extra bodies, and then your purpose is - for a time - given. But the reality is that when you follow a demagogue, you aren't really offering any more than your warm embrace. If someone stronger or more talented, or even simply more proximate comes while you are away, the project will be performed by others. But in any case, your contributions won't be remembered, it will forever be Bergotte's project, and never yours. And so it is that as we sit here in Iowa for perhaps the last time, we have determined to make something of ourselves. Which is why we are writing now. The art we create gives us purpose, provides us a place in society.

Once we have buried our grandmother, there will be nothing left to us. We will return to Paris. We will make writings for others in the Movement. And this will give us meaning. And possibly, just possibly, to make Albert notice us.