((Erika Stieglitz continued from Are You What I Think You Are?))
Don’t look away.
Said it over and over in my head, when I watched someone die up close for the first time. I was trying to see what I'm doing for what it is, knowing it was still necessary. I thought I internalized it, but I didn't.
I’ve kept trying to look away from this; taking detours into self-hatred, questioning my morals over and over again, wearing myself down and getting nothing back. I got shot for it. My mind is stuck in a loop, like I don’t have a choice but to attack myself. The same instincts that keep me playing this game seem to keep me fighting inside. I remember to do it in the same way I keep a count of the supplies I have left, or whether or not the wound in my side has started to smell like death yet. Do I want to die, or to kill, or to live? It seems to change by the hour.
Paloma said that the terrorists wanted blood and guts, not fatalist bullshit. I should’ve listened to her, and killed her on the spot. If I was a different person maybe I’d find some purpose in that. Given those bastards what they want, because I'm here, aren't I? This place has a design, and it runs on violence. There’s a madness in their method, but it’s the only one that gets you out of here.
Maybe it would’ve been easier to be straight-up bloodthirsty. Convince myself I’m death incarnate come to bring my classmates to cruel perdition.
Yeah, right. I dunno if I'm lacking in ego, callousness, or just imagination - I don’t have what it takes to convince myself to go that far. I could never find joy in this. I can’t shake the idea that if I'm going to do it, it has to be honest. Even if no one gives a fuck about my story or what answers I come to. Knowing nothing I say will change what they think of me, I still hang onto the idea I need to know what to say about all this, to reconcile what I was going to do with who I knew I was. I'll say:
I didn’t hold back because I understood this was a zero-sum game. No matter who, they had to die if I wanted to live; I decided to live. The situation we’re in wasn’t going to be merciful, so I couldn’t afford to be either. I know that to everyone else, I’m selfish and evil. I accept that, and I won't try to change that. I just couldn't accept any other choice available to me.
That answer, nothing more.
Should've been enough. It isn’t. I can trace the damage pretty easily, where parts of me are just fucked up and broken from hanging onto that answer. Maybe this is just what happens to a person in places like this. You disassociate. Get used to the feeling of a bomb collar on your neck. Get used to the idea of everyone you grew up around getting murdered. Get used to the idea that because your boyfriend really loves you, he's willing to ruin himself just to make sure you survive. Make a contingency plan in case you don't get to him in time, in case you can't stop him from martyring himself for you. Because, you know you don't deserve it.
When that fails, you start killing as many people as you can just to feel like you control something in this situation. Hate yourself when it doesn't work. No rationalization still is enough. Not when you’ve killed a couple and watched them watch each other die. Not when you watched someone stare you down as they try to breathe out of the hole you shot in their face. Not when you’ve done so much fucked up shit that it all blends together in your mind, so you only remember bits and pieces of each horrible act.
Even with everything that came after, I still think about Thomas lying on the ground after I shot Desiree. How he called out to his friends who were too scared to go out and pull him inside the Infirmary. I hear his voice and it bleeds into Amber’s; calling out to the friend she couldn’t name, because I shot her in the head and literally destroyed the part of her mind that knew who it was searching for.
You think that way long enough, and suddenly taking control feels less like killing people to survive, and more like trying and engineer an end to it that you can accept. Control starts to feel like getting used to the feeling of a gun against your head, and the break in the trigger pull. Knowing that click will be the last thing you ever do, or feel. At least with that I'd feel like I was killing someone that actually deserved it. At least for a split second I'd not feel like I was having to justify betraying everything I've ever wanted to be.
I’ve been so fixated on mortality, so scared of dying, I only ever imagined that someone would want to kill themselves if something was deeply wrong with them. They had to be mentally ill. It wasn't really them doing it. I never really understood, even when people tried to explain it to me. I didn't want to.
I’ve killed fourteen people. I often think of making myself number fifteen. I don’t think I'm insane. Would I even know if I was? We're told that if someone does what I’ve done, they’re just broken at some basic level; irredeemably fucked up, not even really human. They must be cruel, and cold. The parts of someone like that which were supposed to develop empathy just didn’t. God, how many fucking podcasts are devoted to just trying to figure that shit out? I figure people look at killers like me and imagine if you could transcribe their thoughts onto a page, it’d be just non-stop bat-shit insanity, with no rhyme or reason to it. It's so outside the norm of anything we expect to be.
But I don’t feel that way. The lucid parts of me still feel rational. I tried to be numb to it, cruel even. I need to be. Tried. I'm not indifferent. I don't think I can be.
Maybe it’s easier to cope with that idea of what killers are, than the idea that anyone could do this if you push them far enough. No one wants to imagine that this might be something you’d just expect to happen to a person in a situation like this. People feel better thinking that they'd never stoop to this level. Hell, I almost find it easier to believe I’m just so fucked up I don’t realize how far gone I really am. That I'm just inherently abnormal, and that's why I did all of this. It at least explains some of the shit I've been experiencing.
I've said all this to myself before. I keep asking myself these same things, over and over again. As if I’m going to hear a new answer, as if the next time I’ll find a way to make it easier. Every time, before and after every person I’ve killed. That’s someone’s definition of insanity, isn’t it? I keep looking away, looking to see if there’s still some other path when I’ve already committed to one. I know I can't go back. Yet I’ve been making stupid mistakes, hesitating and making choices that lead me away from home. I keep losing the plot, convincing myself there’s something more important than getting out of here.
I let Garnet go, knowing where it has to end for her if I want to live. I still fucking did it. Stitched her up, gave her a gun, even. She should have killed me, and she didn’t. I didn’t kill her, and I should have. I know exactly why I’ve killed so many people up to now, yet I don’t really understand exactly what I thought was going to happen there. What was I supposed to gain? No part of that interaction could've absolved me of what I've done, or given me an answer I hadn't looked over and discarded. I guess there’s a small part of me that will never accept who I am now, that’ll always think that I can still be something else. It's always looking for the exits, telling me to check every other path than the one I know I have to take.
That little voice was so convincing, too. Telling me that a fleeting final moment of knowing I was justified, and giving someone else a better way out, would be enough. Suggesting it was somehow more valuable to me than a lifetime of living with what I’ve already done.
Fuck that.
Alone in the woods, that voice rings hollow. I feel empty. Nearly a day out from when I last saw her, and I’m struggling to remember what it felt like to think that way.
I'm starting to think there’s no lesson to be learned here on this island. It's just the place where our paths all intersected, and ended. My dead friends, my dead boyfriend, they don’t have anything more to say. Erika, the only one anyone really knew, she’s dead too. Her dream, Philip’s dream of a person, that’s gone forever. They have nothing more to tell whoever I am now. The time before I did - no - before this was done to us, it isn't coming back. All the people who can remember what we were like are dead or dying - for real, or on the inside. These stories of people I knew, they don't make sense to me anymore. It hurts to try and make sense of them.
If the others don’t kill me, this back-and-forth with myself is going to save them the trouble. There’s going to be more cause to interrogate my actions as this goes on, but I think I have to stop. Other people can ask whatever questions they like about my sanity or what twisted morality I must be operating on to do this. I can't ask those questions anymore, not if I want to live; and I know I want to live, even as fucked up as I am.
I think now all I can answer with is either silence, or gunfire.
Anything else would be a lie.
((Erika Stieglitz continued in Little By Little))