Monster

Getting to know my peculiar monster. Audio reading can be found here: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B_JsPCME2sNDdHQtbGNodlh4Qjg

I have often noted that I have villainous eyebrows - and a good villain’s face too, really - the satyr I cultivate can so easily be corrupted.  Yet the personae I’ve built is anything but villainous. He is orderly, predictable, helpful, kind, capable. He cares for the people around him. He is quiet, speaking only when relevant. He will lie, but only for others. Within him there is no urge to destroy, no need to take what is not his, no setting of himself before all other things.

This is not truly me. I can be unkind, uncaring, selfish, and cruel, I can be unpredictable, and incapable - I contain the multitude of humanity within me, but I choose to channel that where I can into this single heroic image. I have been doing it for so long now that I almost believe I am just those things, and it surprises me when I am not.

Yet when even the mask of light breaks into darkness, what then? When the rules meant to protect turn to destroy? When I become a monster filtered through the same mask that held a man?

I become a very particular monster, and I need to understand him.

---

I’m sixteen. Homeschooled, I have been dedicating the last several years to accumulating friends. Assimilating into the culture of my peers. I am still considered strange, but my oddities are tolerated, and I am often invited to things now.

I had begun my infiltration from Freeze, my oldest friend - son of one of my father’s oldest friends, the woman who introduced my parents - our families go back into every old story.

From him I’d lept to Luke - the alpha of the group. I joined his roleplaying group, and sat watching he and Freeze play videogames for hours untold. Just getting him used to me.

A whole host of people floated around Luke. We had Ben, who drove all the way from the reservation to go to school with them, and won his place by giving out free fireworks and carrying a lot of knives.

We had Charles, acentric and emotional. He served the comedic role. The savant who deigned to serve us through his cloud of endless airs.

There was Newbie, who somehow always managed to get hurt, or bumble into trouble, yet kind hearted and capable enough to warrant our indulgence.

We had Nick, who was really into making videos, and stepped into the group when Luke wanted to make a Starwars spin-off. Today we had another Nick who seemed to be a bit of a hanger on. A gaming geek like ourselves, Luke knew him, nobody else did.

Tonight, for the first time, everyone has come to my house. Red haired Ash, the Copper Canyon intern, happens to be in my room at the time, and she adds energy to the group, and new honors to me. I have hot women in my room. The group of teenage men would do well to visit more often.

I’m in high spirits, talking more than usual, just saying things to try and make people laugh. Ash especially. Ben has gone out of the room, maybe to smoke, maybe to make a call. Someone says something about Ben, and used the word human.

“Well . . . I mean he’s almost human,” I say.
“What is he?” Ash inquires.
I answer without missing a beat. “He’s an indian.”

Ash laughs, in an ‘I can’t believe you just said that’ sort of way. The whole room laughs in the way of a forbidden joke and I thrill with the power of it. Then Ben comes back in, and the room gets quiet. Everyone a little ashamed we were laughing at his expense. Could he feel that subtle shift? That embarrassed silence?

Several years later I went to see a Sherman Alexie lecture. The hall was packed when we arrived, so that they were seating people on the stage. I ended up in a position back to the side where I was fairly hidden. Soon I noticed Ben, at an angle where I could see the side of his face as he looked up at Sherman.

The author began talking about his book, the experience of being an indian, leaving the reservation to come to a white school. He tells it in such soul wrenching detail. What it’s like to have his white friends tell jokes about him behind his back, the alienation of being so far from home - straddling two worlds with neither really accepting him. I look at Ben and see that there are tears streaming down his face, and it’s only then that I really get my part in this story.

---

There is a monster inside me. His name is Tsaigrin.

He came out of an image from the internet that gripped me, Chiara Bautista, a skeleton bird man - his heart floating in his chest, other organs manifesting as they are needed, but always this heart, getting ripped at, shut in suitcases or stolen by mermaids, it began with that image.

We were beginning a Monsterhearts game. I’d played several times before. The idea is that you play as teenage monsters in a human school - I mentioned to the MC (Master of Ceremonies, the one who runs the game) that I had been struck by this image and he set his game in a dream world where everyone looked a little odd.

When I had played before it had been as quietly heroic teens - sure I was a ghoul, but I fed off love not flesh. Sure I was a Hollow, but I married an angel in the end. This time I wanted to play a character who really was a monster. I chose to be a dragon. I named him Tsaigrin.

Dragons in the game are deal makers, manipulators, the rich kid who throws around money. He cannot tell the difference between people and objects. Some he sees as bargaining chips, others as treasure to be won and owned at any cost. I took mine to the extreme.

In Tsaigrin I found the closest thing to the cold calculating mind, manifesting from a hot impulsive heart, that drives me to hurt. In him I found the vindictive nature that makes people for or against me. The jealous snake, that stems from this ancestry of owning people. In him I found, and allowed myself to seek power for power’s sake.

I only hope in bringing him to light, I have not become more like him.

---

Eithne is in a relationship. I know that, acutely, but I have two gift certificates, tickets for two, and disney has just come out with a new rendition of Beauty and the Beast with Emma Watson as Beauty - how couldn’t I invite her?

I get downtown just in time to trade in for tickets and meet her at the coffee shop, or across from it, as it turns out. She sees me, and I don’t see her ensconced across the dock.

“I have a gift for you,” she tells me after she’s hugged me hello, and hands me a book of her poetry. A perfect beginning. She’s surprised when I produce her ticket. We go in. I want to sit in the front, and she in back, and we’ve just compromised on a row in the middle when I realize there’s an old enemy of mine, a troll in that row, and hastily reassign us further forward. By accident my choice puts us next to a magical bird, one of Eithne’s friends. We all sit together, and talk until the movie starts.

The story unfolds. I hardly notice her beside me, I’m so enraptured in the story - when it ends I’m more in fairy tale than usual, we walk out into the dark together, downtown illuminated in street lights now, and make our way to her truck by the docks.

On the ride home we discover that it is both of our favorite disney movie. She because of its magic, a resonant allure that she can’t quite put a pin on, I because it mirrors my story.

I try and explain to her this sense of monstrousness within me. This sense that I need someone to love and accept this beast before I can be a man. She nods, understanding, but not really understanding. I wonder how long it will take until I show her everything she need fear.

---

Tsaigrin was, what we call in D&D speak, Lawful evil - that is, he follows laws, works through a complicated mesh of rules and regulations that somehow always end up benefiting him in the end. He might bribe an officer every once in awhile, but he’d do it upfront - offering a large donation to the department. Tsaigrin didn’t lie.

Tsaigrin couldn’t lie. Part of his character was that his heart would turn black if he lied, clearly visible through his transparent chest. Part of his character was playing the line between telling something true and telling the truth. Tsaigrin misled people all the time through their own expectations.

I had asked for someone new and the MC had given me a married woman, someone who the lawful monster couldn’t touch - he made her his secretary, as close to ownership has he could come and kept her there.

There was a shapeshifter under his employ, another player who needed some article of clothing, and if he wore it, could fully transform into the person whose clothes he was wearing.

One day putting these things together, Tsaigrin walked into the office, summoned his secretary.

“Take off your panties.”
“I, sir?”
“I said take off your panties.”
“She takes them off. She seems willing to do anything you want.” The MC tells me. Monsterhearts is a very sexual game.
“Hand them to me.”
“She hands them to you.”
“Thank you, you may go.”
I see dawning come over the other player’s faces. The MC takes a moment to realize what I’ve done, then laughs, high and startled. “She seems confused and hurt, but she goes.”
“Good, now I summon my shapeshifter.”

---

Yellow is a bundle of emotions. An explosion waiting to happen. She is small and looks like a child, and so it easy to treat her like one. I have sex with her, but also parent her - several kinks coming together here, none of them healthy. None of  which she’s agreed to.

She’ll often ask for things and I’ll just say no. She wants to be in my gaming group. I don’t want to deal with her. She wants to spend the night, I want to be alone. I say no easily, and effectively. She never says no to me. Not once.

At nineteen, I’m new to relationship. New to sex. She becomes something of a plaything, someone to be used when I want, and dismissed when I don’t. I ignore her when she asks for more and it doesn’t serve me. When she explodes into violent outbursts I gently chide her, calm her, shame her. She is a pet to be pavlovian conditioned into the shape I want.

I get upset at her for getting jealous. I invite another woman who wants me, to sleep the night one night, and Yellow insists on sleeping between us, but she has to go to class in the morning, and leave the two of us in bed together. When she’s gone, pretending to be asleep I pull the other girl close and spoon her. Perhaps we can have a threesome sometime - I imagine. Yellow confronts me afterward and I defray her. “It’s nothing to worry about.”

She needs to be obedient. She needs to be quieter. She needs to show her affection when I want it, and not when there are other women I’m attracted to watching us. I’m disappointed at her inability to be these things. When I am done with her - about a month before school ends - I don’t want to deal with the mess of a breakup, so I just stop having sex with her. She begs and pleads, and I take a lot of pleasure in refusing her. She tries to bribe me, cajole me, but no.

I can say no. She can’t. I have all the power.

---

When Eithne breaks up with me, it is because she has all the power. She tells me that she doesn’t think it’s fair to me to be in this relationship, open on her side, closed on mine - where she doubts the premises, and I am so wildly in love. She can’t stand my small gestures of affection, the love notes, the flirtatious texts - they prove that I am too much under her sway. It is better for us both if we end things here.

I admit that imbalance of power. I don’t think it’s skewed as much as she thinks it is, but there’s definitely more power on her side than on mine. The details are all hers, and I’m leaning off center, willing to be pulled by the gravity of her.  It’s worth it for me, but yes I feel it.

We break. I grieve. The balance of me shifts entirely back to me, all bonds ripped to tatters. My gravity grows to eclipse hers, and let me care for the hurt she’s caused. I cut her off. She’s not allowed to talk to me, message me, dance with me - without my permission.

She’s not good at respecting those boundaries, as I knew she would not be. She wants to talk in person, move through some of this together. I tell her that I hate her, that I want to hurt her. That I hope I can make her hate me so she’ll blessedly leave me alone. She doesn’t, I agree to a meeting. She comes and tells me she wants me back.

And I find I don’t want her. The grief shifts and I grieve this new indignity. That I should be the betrayer now. That this ripping has so transformed something previously so precious. She keeps trying, keeps slamming against these spikes like an idiot, keeps ingesting the poison I feed her.

Gradually I find I don’t want to hurt her. If she’s going to bloody her hands with me, I must become less sharp. If she’s going to ingest my venom, I must become less noxious. The play of monstrosity becomes more subtle, a spinning of power, a testing of ownership.

I find, to my dismay, that this monstrosity attracts her. That I have become dangerous, catching her up in the complexes of hot and cold. The play of mankind with woman in their darkest moments. I find she courts the monster, watching for him with expectant eyes, even as she rails against him.

I find that I am the one with more power now.

---

I enjoyed Tsaigrin. He may have been my favorite character I’ve ever played. I liked the idea of him, a dragon who couldn’t tell the difference between technology and magic, spun so deeply in his own web of lies that he has forgotten the dragon he truly is, and now seeks it through imitations of a dragon’s nature. He just wanted to be a dragon again.

I liked the webs he spun, the way they crashed apart and he wove again. When the game began the other players shunned him. I kept offering his services for free, and everyone suspected a plot and stayed away when I just wanted in on the action, and the chance to play in more scenes.

Gradually I discovered that people were more likely to take my bargains if I named a hard price. Where before I offered for free because it benefitted me, now I offered for a price that could be bargained down,and it benefitted me twice as much. I learned to play the other player’s expectations of Tsaigrin’s deceit, giving shallow reasons for deeper plots.

What he did with his power was actually fairly benign. He wanted valuable people to live with him, and be accessible to him when he needed them. He called on them rarely, payed them well, and treated them well as long as they obeyed. Really Tsaigrin desired power for power’s sake, to fulfil his draconic need, and using that power for anything but getting more power, was a waste in his mind.

But there was no room in his reality for freedom, and it was this that the other players in his nets struggled against with all their might. He could not understand the need to be free, could not conceive that it doesn’t matter how well cared for you are - people don’t like being beholden.

He couldn’t understand, as I cannot understand. I like limits. I like knowing who I am responsible to, and what I am supposed to be doing next. I like the web of gifts or debts that weave through a community pulling all of us together, and making none of us free. As long as I’m not asked to do anything immoral, I see no need to assert my freedom, and neither should anyone else.

It is somewhere in this tangle of power and totalitarianism, that I become a monster. Yet if the game tells us anything it is how monsters can walk among humans unseen, each playing their game - the witch seeking vengeance and the werewolf courting anger, the succubus sinking into her desires, the ghoul following its hunger.

The dragon seeking to own, for such is his monster’s heart.

---

Why am I living the way that I am? I ask myself. It’s because I want to make my Papa proud.

When I left for college, Papa told me I was always welcome back. When my plans fell through, a housemate going to standing rock, a failed test, a class I didn’t want to be in, financial aid gone, forced to graduate, I told Papa I was moving back with him.

Told. I didn’t ask.

Papa had no memory of telling me I could return. I was late in the telling too, a phone message pleading for help moving, a conversation just before I arrived -  It was not well done. I came back home as a college graduate, but it was not a triumphant return. I felt like I was slinking in with my tail between my legs. I’m sorry on my lips.

“If you had asked me, I would have offered to help pay your way in Olympia.” Papa tells me. If you’d asked me I’d pay money to keep you from being here.
“But I’ve always said if I could live with anybody - it would be you.”

There are a number of conditions though. He doesn’t want to drive me anywhere. He doesn’t want to move out of my room, warmest of the house. He doesn’t want to have to cook for me. “No problem,” I tell him.

“Hopefully you’ll get a job,” he hints
“Maybe this year you’ll finally get a driver’s license,” he teases.
“Living with you is like living with your mother - I have never seen anyone make such a mess as they cook,” he scoffs.

I move back onto a bed of eggshells - a place I am not welcome but feel like I belong. One goal - make him believe I belonged too.

I arrange rides with neighbors so that he never needs to drive me, an endless game of getting people to take me places. Favors owed, friends enticed, I stack up debts like pincushions collected without reason. I dance around my driver’s license - finally getting a learner’s permit.

Cooking for myself is easy. Keeping things clean as I do so, harder. Papa takes a long time to cook anything, pausing between each step to clean and put away. I was taught another way, everything going at once, four burners on, each with their peculiar timings. I finish in half the time he does, but in a more scattered state. If I have extra time I’ll clean, but only then. Now I clean after, letting my food cool as I wipe down counters and put things away. There is no waiting until after I’ve eaten. That is not the way of things here.

Papa spends the day 8:30 - to 2:00 or so, writing in my room. I try staying up late and sleeping in so we’re not conscious in the same space, but he grumbles at my candle use. I switch tactics, going to sleep with the sun and waking up when he does. I write while he writes, high above him in my bunk bed - finishing all the pieces I never finished in the rush of school. It is this, in the end that finally gets me accepted.

Once this happens I set my plans in motion. I mention chickens. He doesn’t want them. I mention them again. He brings up reasons against them. I deal with the reasons, he still doesn’t want them. I inform of the date I’m getting chicks, three months out, two months, one month - after sufficient repetition he accepts things.

Once some time has passed, and he’s accepted the chickens, I begin mentioning that I’ll be getting internet. He doesn’t want that. I mention it again. He brings up concerns, I address his concerns, he still doesn’t want it. I tell him three months out, a month . . . my technique perfected.

The satellite dish ends up getting installed just below the kitchen window, where looking out you can see a corner overlapping the window.  It’s big and grey and ugly and Papa isn’t going to like it, but I know I can paint it and he’ll get used to it. I’m already considering what the next thing I want to force through is - a goat perhaps?

That night Papa is very quiet. In the morning I find that he’s vacated my room entirely. All his pictures littering the walls, all his things on my shelves, and his books littering my desk. Gone.

It’s nice but I know this doesn’t bode well. At dinner I bring it up. He tells me how he’s realized that I’m my own man, that he’s just an old man in the way. How profoundly disrespected he feels by my walking all over his desires. How at this point he doesn’t want to cohabitate with me anymore. He’s just waiting for me to leave.

I tell him that if there’s one thing more important to me than internet access, it’s my father. That if it means that much I’ll take the dish down, cancel my service, undo the months of work because he’s worth more. He accepts this.

A few days later I suggest that if he doesn’t want to live with me, I could build my own house out in the uncleared four acres of our land. “How much money would you be willing to throw at getting me out of the house?” I ask
“Absolutely none,” he tells me. “Buildings are expensive.”
“So what I’m getting out of this conversation,” I joke, “Is that I need to be more obnoxious if I want to be worth money to get rid of.”
He takes me dead seriously. “If money is worth more than getting along with me . . . “
“No! I was joking!”
“There’s truth in every joke.”

---

How do you hurt with honesty? How do you own another human being through your benefit to them? How do you tie another up in strings, a web of hot and cold until they are trapped in the underpinnings between them?

I’m not ashamed of what I do with my power. I collect people, yes, but it is for purposes like bonfires on the beach, or bringing them together around a table. Rarely have I harmed with the power I hold.

Rather the harm seems to come when I don’t accept the power I have, and strive for more. It is in the accumulation of power, the hoarding of wealth, that is my undoing. If I can sit back and hold what I have, learn to use it as best I can before seeking more . . . but that is not my age or stage in life. I am twenty four.

The mask I wear pretends to be older. You do not expect this mask to strive as ruthlessly as it does for more. I don’t expect it, when I stretch beyond the bounds of this bright white face and into the corners of good that border on other things. I want to be trusted but I cannot even trust myself, not yet.

Perhaps by understanding this monster I can speak to it, reject or embrace its many aspects until I am made stronger by it and not weaker in fleeing it. Perhaps I already do. This monster is built into the very fabric of my headpiece, and I doubt there is any getting rid of him.

If this is my mask I must understand it.

If this is my mask I have to know its underside.

---

“Don’t f*****g play games with me. I’m not a yoyo, and I will cut the string if I keep feeling how I felt last night.” Eithne texts me.

I don’t immediately answer, and it echoes with me all day. Yes - she’s right of course. I”m not trying to toy with her, but that doesn’t mean I’m not. Where is the line between holding my center, stepping back towards relationship, and not making her orbit me for my own amusement. There have been moments where I have been amused.

In round one I handed her the power, because I didn’t want to play. I had work to do, finding in her the seeds of radical consent and wanting to water them with love not power - yet that wasn’t fair to her. Jung has a famous quote that love and power cannot exist in the same space at the same time, and there is truth there.

In round two she has handed it back, and now it is for me to hold. I wonder if her discomfort with power is the same as my own, the knowing that I like it a little too much. Watch as I slowly slide it back her direction, writing pieces about my monstrosity in the vague hope her projection will lessen and I’ll have less of this addictive creature to contain.

Yet in the end I know that part of being an adult is learning to hold power and do it well. I have seen men who refuse to take it up, and I do not want to be them. So long as it is not the monster who holds it, but the man, then there is no harm in it. In time the scales will balance, and we will both hold our own share, it is only in early relationships that it shifts so radically as this.

Man and monster - I separate them so easily, yet I do not know that they can be separated at all. Tsaigrin partook of so much of me, the good as well as the bad. In the end it was he who saved the city from the vengeful ghost, he who solved the riddle of its departure, he who mustered the army of the elite. He who made sure all his people were cared for and raised sweet Carla from the dead when she fell. I am proud of him for that.

As a villain I can hold power without shame, and wield where I see fit. Embracing the monster I get things done, and suffer the consequences. As a beast I walk without pretext, and if I do good than it is a gift and not a given.

Can she be beauty to my beast? Come into my castle and come under my power? Can she endure the yoyo of my temper, the hot and cold of mankind? Can I become man and monster each in their part to honor the beauty I see in her?

No games. Only bright, brutal, reality.