The most basic forms of anger provoke an immediate desire to retaliate. There is no thought behind the impulse, merely action and reaction. Restraint is the supposed hallmark of human judgment in such a case.
Then there is righteous anger, the self-assured pursuit of justice, motivated not by thoughtless hormonal surge but contemplation, examination of the facts in evidence, logic. A righteous cause ignored or denied will see the anger continue to rise until it reaches its breaking point. These are the cauldrons where revolutions are born, where empires die, where the future is remade in an instant.
Perhaps at the opposite end of the spectrum is jealous anger. When the attention you crave is instead handed to another, the sense of betrayal is as palpable as it is irrational. Affections are not finite. One soul can be shared with many, can it not? Yet this anger also simmers if unresolved, driving men to incurable madness. The violence this has sometimes wreaked embodies the terrible potential of human emotion.
But these are not the only types of anger. There is another, deeper anger. It goes beyond rage, beyond jealousy, beyond justice. It cannot be screamed out of one's system, resolved by the careful judgment of a magistrate, nor cooled by the sympathetic embrace of a lover. It is a heightened numbness of the soul, pain searing every inch of your body, incomprehensibly intense yet held just beyond the boundary of sensation, as if you are walled up in a cocoon made of your own seething hatred, and now nothing can reach you.
There is no one person, no one event, no one thing to blame. Lacking direction, it is the most impotent and gut-wrenching of all angers. But to sit with it is to ultimately feel nothing other than the final purpose for which an individual so suffering might seek. If nothing is to blame, then everything is to blame. If no one is to blame, then everyone is to blame. To lash out randomly would be pointless, pathetic whips of hair strands against the thick hide of an uncaring universe. No, the destruction must be more targeted, more systematic, more methodical. And it is not enough to merely destroy. Destruction annihilates all feeling. This rage cannot be salved with the mere elimination of the agents who provoked it. It requires their enduring and increasing suffering, and sufficient proximity to drink it in vicariously.
Why conceive of targets if there is no one target? There are always some who bear more culpability than others, some who pushed you along on your path to a rage so blinding that, once it has stripped away the sight that burdens ordinary men, you become able to see anew, to understand for the first time how it all fits together, and why the greatest mark you can leave upon the universe is grief that will reverberate through the eons. If the anger is a gift in the clarity it bestows, then like any good gift, it must be shared to be fully enjoyed.
And thus we come to Robert Thomas Maxwell, the first and primary recipient of my gift. Small-minded man that he is, he believes he has already suffered uniquely. Were I to ask him directly, he would doubtless claim that I could not hurt him any more than he has already endured. Should he wish to present such a challenge, I will gladly rise to it.
Orphaned? Many souls are orphaned in this world. They are not special. Childhood love killed in violent conflict? Sad, but common. Mutilated by munitions? A daily cruelty, unremarkable in the extreme. Traumatized soldier? I reserve derisive laughter for such arrogance. Time-tossed relic? Ah, a rarer breed indeed, but it is these endeavors which drew my attention in the first place.
Would that you had perished in those ruins with June. You would have been spared so much pain. Would that the escape pod in which you suffered your debilitations had finished the job. Would that your many military sorties had sent you astray from this mortal plane all the sooner. But stubbornly, you have deigned to survive. Just as stubbornly, it emerges as my sole purpose to make you regret it.
Once, you were my friend. Rather, I believed you were. The three of us, I imagined to be entwined perpetually, souls fused together, unbreakable. Little did I realize that you and June had already determined that I was an appendage better discarded, that three weights made the balance unstable, and only removing one could straighten the scales. I was the weak leak, easily cast off. But grim reality saw fit to discard June first.
Did you reach for me, Robert? No, you fled. You fled into the arms of stronger men, let them take everything else from you, let them shape you and manipulate you, let them strip your humanity and fashion you into a machine made for killing. A glorious weapon, but a horrific human being.
There are no words that could communicate the depths of my antipathy. Thus, I allow my actions to speak for me. Every coincidence, every happenstance, every loss, every tragedy, every misfortune, every rainy day, every parking ticket, every time you step in dog shit, every time you catch a beard hair in the zipper of your fucking bomber jacket, know that I placed the dominoes just so, knowing the outcome, knowing it would ratchet your suffering just that little bit more, hammering a nail slowly but surely into your sanity, until you break and give in to desperation.
And the best part? I can do this to you over and over and over. I can do this to a million Robert Maxwells. I never have to be satisfied. I get infinite do-overs. What could be better? What more could a man want? You may be a machine of bone and metal, but I am a machine of vengeance. Cold, perfect vengeance.
I will see you burn past the edge of eternity, and I will light as many matches as it takes, and then I will do it all over again, and again, and again, and again....