I’m standing on the platform or quai inside a train station, underground. It’s the St. Michel station, the one to take the RER. I’m looking for one of my best friends’s ex-girlfriends’s sister, who I’m meeting to go to the ex-girlfriend’s modeling show. Names would make it easier, but anonymity has it’s place. I was supposed to be here at 6:30, I’ve been here since six. It is now 6:45. I’m wondering if our train already left or if I was given inexact instructions as to where I should wait. I’ve already paid 2.20 Euros. I’m very anxious, my body is tight and I’m wandering up and down the quai.
It wouldn’t be the first time I would get inexact instructions and the whole thing blows up in my face. I’m raging inside, hoping it just “seems” like it’s very late because I got here at six instead of six thirty. Every face in the crowd is NOT the person I’m looking for and it drives me insane. I want to punch someone, something, anything.
Some part of me deep inside knows she isn’t going to show and that somehow the blame will fall on me. I’m angry, but I wait. I try to think of an extreme way of phrasing how angry I am - to pass the time - and I’m reminded of a piece I never wrote entitled “Shooting someone in the face as the ultimate act of liberation.” It evolved from that into “Punching someone in the face as the ultimate act of liberation.”
The piece was going to explain how we live in a world of rules, of laws, both moral and legal. In order to really liberate ourselves from them (for the simple reason of wanting total liberation), we must perform an act, something symbolic that represents our rupture with the laws, morals, etc. So the way I thought I would do it was by taking a gun, walking up to a random person on the street, pointing it at some middle point of his (or her) face, and pulling the trigger. Shooting them in the face. Then drop the gun and wait. No running, no escaping; you’ve already left them all behind. You are free. Liberated. The news, the jail, the courts, the “horror”, the trial, the verdict, the chair, it wouldn’t be anything more than images in a movie. No crying, no begging, it would just go by in a blur. You would hardly even be there. Liberation. You fry, you die, and you’re gone. But you die a liberated person.
At this point in time, standing here on this quai on St Michel, I’m overcome with a horrible feeling. The rage I feel right now would be sufficient to drive me to shoot someone in the face. The horror lying in the fact that if wouldn’t be for a noble goal such as liberation, as I just explained previously. It would simply be to express my rage, my anger. To let off a whole lot of steam, as they say.
“That’s terrible, but it’s true. I’d do it right now.”
I could run away and try to escape obviously, and I would regret it before the body even hit the ground. But I had enough rage in me to do it.
A flash of familiarity passes before the whole idea. It’s her, she’s here. My body relaxes and I walk over to her. The people on the quai were safe.