Guilt
29 April 2009, 4:36 a.m.
48° 34' 55.94" N, 7° 45' 2.86" E
I’m hiding in the shadows on the side of the cathedral. Notre Dame de Strasbourg. There’s a wheelchair symbol, next to a locked iron gate. Is this the handicapped entrance? The lights of the cop car bounce off the windows of the little shop across from me. I press myself back into the iron bars.
All around the cathedral, it’s some kind of pedestrian-only plaza, so the cop is driving real slow. He stops and turns off his headlights. What’s he doing? He gets out of his car outside the Office de Tourisme. He looks at a bicycle. Is that a crime or something? Leaving a bike there overnight?
I tell myself: hiding in the shadows is stupid.
But I reply to myself: hiding in the shadows is better than running up to the cop, throwing yourself at his mercy, and blurting out that you don’t know where the body is because you didn’t do it!
What’s wrong with me? It’s almost like I think it happened here—in Strasbourg! I’ve only been here for what? 36 hours? Yeah, sure, maybe I blacked out a little last night at the BierWagen—no, no I don’t even want to think about that. No way it was one of those Danish girls! They weren’t even Danish!
The cop gets back in his car. The headlights come on. For one terrifying moment, the lights swing across the handicapped sign, but he’s turning. He’s leaving. He didn’t see me.
This is totally insane, I tell myself. It was a dream. Your recurring dream. It’s happened before, back in Waukegan, so that means it did not happen here. In fact, you are absolutely certain it never happened at all.
But that doesn’t help. Probably because in the dream, when it happens, nothing happens. That doesn’t make sense. What I mean is that it’s not like something new happens—some new plot development, or some new event occurring there in my dream life. It’s more like a memory bubbles to the surface, and I catch a glimpse of something that I’ve tried to forget, a reality I can never escape.
So I wake up feeling guilty. I wake up remembering... or believing that I remember... or living under the weight of a memory....
So I tell myself:
In your dream, you remember another dream. When the memory arrives, it’s not a memory of something you did, it’s the memory of something you dreamt.
Huh? I reply.
That’s the only possibility, I say to myself. It’s the only explanation that fits the facts: At some point in the past, you had a dream. You never remembered this dream in your waking life, at least not directly, not the next morning. But now, every once in a while, you remember it in your dreams.
Yeah maybe, I reply. But still... I remember what I remember.
You need to think critically, I say, the way I always talk to myself when I’m facing a tough problem at work. You need to examine the evidence. So what was it that happened in this other world? In your parallel life? In this dream you remember only when you’re dreaming?
I dunno really... it must have been 5 or 6 years ago, maybe 8, it could have been right during the divorce, there was plenty of free-floating guilt in my life at that time, self-recriminations around every corner....
You’re avoiding the question. At some point you’ve got to say it. What happened in the dream? The original dream? What do you remember?
I remember that I... committed murder.
There. You said it. You need to say it again, until it evaporates.
I committed murder.
Of course you didn’t really. But that’s the content of the anxiety, right? That’s the memory that bubbled to the surface while you tried to clean the beer lines? The horrible moral fact you’ve been trying to forget? Say it again.
I committed murder. It’s not evaporating.
You don’t know much about this murder, do you?
No.
What do you know?
That the victim was young and pretty, and I was attracted to her.
What else?
That I chose to conceal the deed and go on living my life as if nothing had happened.
Tell me about this “deed”—the murder itself, the act.
I can’t.
Weren’t there any details?
No.
No blood, no inconvenience, no messiness?
No.
You’re talking about this murder as if it were an abstract moral act.
I... I guess so.
Or rather, a series of abstract moral acts—a violation, and then a concealment, and then a decision.
What?
You believe you killed her, hid the body, and decided to pretend it didn’t happen.
Yeah, yes.... Yeah. I... I remember the decisions, not the body.
That’s my point. Your abstract moral acts culminated in an abstract moral state—a life filled with guilt. It’s like it happened in a debating class, or a game. You’re the one who drew the card that said “I have secretly committed murder.”
I think I remember that! I looked at the card... and I knew it was true....
But that’s proof that it was all a dream, right? In the real world, murders don’t occur as abstract moral acts. Real crimes, real murders, are bloody, inconvenient, and very messy. At least that’s what other people say, and that’s all we have to go on, because I’m very, very certain that you have no personal experience of murder. Not in your waking life. Not in the life we share with other people.
I must have walked around the cathedral three times by now.
Three times at least I’ve run through it all, repeating the same old arguments, my critical faculties joining forces, marshaling facts and logic, details and analysis, doing their best to convince the rest of myself that it was just a dream. It had to be a dream. It couldn’t be anything else.
I sit down on one of the sandstone blocks outside the main door of the cathedral and wait for the cops to come talk to me again. I know I’ll be tempted to turn myself in and confess my crime.
But I won’t. I’ll be strong. I’ll keep living the life of an innocent man.
Next episode: Leaving Grüssau
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