Charlie, part two

GAH. I'm still not pleased with this. I think it ends too abruptly. I hate writing endings. >.<

You have to understand, you really do, that anger and heartrape and mindfucks make people do strange things. I'm not excusing what he did – nothing could ever do that, and he never tried to – but maybe I'm explaining it. I'll spare you the gruesome details because I don't know them. I wasn't there. He didn't write about them, either, and police reports are only so telling.

You'll judge him, I know you will, and I'm reticent to tell you because of that, but I promised myself that I would write his story, and it would not be complete – it would not be a story – without this.

"This" can be summed up with a colour, I think: red. At the beginning of the night, he was seeing it in the metaphorical sense, and by the end of the night it was all over him, covering his clothes, his hands, his face. He had intended to paint the town red with their festivities that night, living and loving and exulting in their togetherness, and he ended up painting himself red with first his anger, then his thirst, then his guilt.

It seems to be a natural human reaction to turn to violence, and, if Charlie was – is – anything, it's human. It started with a simple fight, calling someone out for absolutely no reason, feeling the thud of fist to flesh like most people feel the bass thrum of a dance anthem when the club's too crowded and you're standing next to the speakers. The slap, the crack, the thick sounds of laboured breathing and the sharp whistle of limbs careening through the air to land wherever they could in this targetless, blind rage...

I can imagine, because I know him, the fierce smile sliced across his face, stretching his lips thinner and making his teeth glitter in the moonlight, in the streetlight: a wolf-smile. The words come to my mind because he wrote them, later, in his email. He described feeling like a cast-off, lone wolf, hunting by himself, abandoned by the ones who were supposed to love and support him, taking pleasure in the kill, in the red-hot blood swimming beneath his fingernails, crusted onto the fine hairs on the back of his hand, splashing on his face, his torso, his shiny black patent-leather shoes.

The fight wasn't enough for a Copernican revolution, no; the earth stayed standing still, everything was the way it wasn't supposed to be.

At least, I figure that's how it was. I wasn't there, you'll remember, and he wouldn't have wanted me there anyway. What I can tell you without a shadow of a doubt is that, after the fight, he went on into the night and began to systematically haunt all the places she had been with him. All the clubs where they'd danced until the early hours of the morning – there he was, silently kicking in someone's head, screaming obscenities as he kneed someone's gut, chuckling bitterly as he brought his fists down onto someone's shoulders. All the restaurants where they'd shared a bottle of wine and shrimp cocktail or veal scaloppini or raspberry chocolate mousse – there he was, breaking noses, cracking ribs, bruising shins. The cinema, the theatre, the bars, the dress shops, the bookstores...

Over the next few hours, he beat people in all those places, imagining (he later wrote) that they were her. It was at the fifth or sixth place, about two in the morning, that the person who was her current incarnation didn't get up from the pavement despite the increasingly large pool of blood that was surrounding his head. That, I assume, is when he had his bright idea.

He described his insides like some demonic flower, slowly opening to kiss a sky of rage and despair, feeding on his pain and on the blood that he was spilling. He described his heart like a rotting cavern, ligaments un-stuck and muscles pumping irregularly with a sort of sickening sound at every palpitation, forcing a thick, black, evil-smelling liquid through his veins. He described his mind as locked up in a rusty cell, unshaven, sordid, and entirely unhelpful, tossing out the occasional mumbled burst of swearing and silent otherwise.

I can tell you that, if those things are true, then they offer some explanation for his behaviour, perhaps better than any I could give. You must understand: he can't be blamed. If his heart was ruined and his mind was gone, then if his actions are understandable, right? You're judging him. I know you are, because I did, at first.

His brilliant plan was to flip through the dead man's wallet, pull out the driver's license, and scrawl the information onto the front window of the silent restaurant in the slowly congealing blood conveniently pooled at his feet. And he did this for the rest of the night, fighting for real now, and using the spilled blood to announce to the world what he'd done.

I wish...I wish I could tell you that his lawyer convinced him to plead insanity, that the jury had pronounced him mentally unfit, that the judge had sentenced him to a prison for those criminals who had...defects. But none of that happened. He pled guilty, the jury recommended the strictest course of action, and the judge sentenced him to 20 years, no chance of parole until after the first five.

I wasn't in the courtroom, but I can piece together the action from everything I've read, and from his personal descriptions, and it all seems so cold, too cold for such a passionate heart. But cold it was, and sterile, and blandly antagonistic as only a courtroom can be...at least, that's how I picture it.

I know, right now, that you're judging. "Heartbreak wasn't enough for that level of violence," you're thinking, "he's overdramatic, or something's not right in his head, or she's telling the story wrong..." I understand that it's really easy for you to blame me, denounce me as someone with no grip on real life, a deluded fool.

I sometimes wonder whether someone will go through my papers, my emails, my police records, all of my everythings, when I've been dead as long as he has. I wonder if my story will have as long a shelf life as his has had, wonder if someone will fall in love with me through 200-year-old documentation and a description of a heartbreak.