In the Moment Between Glory and Suicide

The crowd exploded in its bursts of discontent. This struck him with the pain of embarrassment. There was a tickle in his throat from his screaming and his heart burned. His mind wandered, staring at the soldiers for a moment in his own wake, to basic training. In his nose, the scent of gun-oil, the pang of fattened steel, and the sweat of men in uniform. Their sebaceous musk lingered heavily, creating a perfumed cocktail of Apollonian might. In his mind’s eye, he dreamt of this delicious scent and the safety it provided. No, the safety it guaranteed. He wondered, how could no one see what he saw so clearly?

The heights of symbolism, literary idolatry, burnt into his visage with an ashen glow. In each of his arteries was an arrow, bleeding him of the glory and hope and love, what little there was left, contained within. For years, he poured himself into a never ending goblet of poetry and prose. From his first memory, words, and in a moment of cacophony, words were not enough. What is one to do when their creation is not enough? As he stepped over the windowsill into the office, in all its performativity, he sought an understanding.

This understanding is amorphous, a balloon with an incidental amount of air. As he squished it, it slid away in defiance. There was an insistence in the air, an insistence that nags and pokes and prods at you. All of this pageantry, for what? His mind reeled with the possibility of power, and lamented his lack thereof. A blade shone in its linen cloth, reflective with glory everlasting. A fierceness inflated his throat; the chords of his vocabulary throbbed and ached with unspoken shame. If he cannot free his land from decadence, then he was honor-bound. What else is there but honor?

The people jeering him were not honorable. They weren’t even brave. The soldiers below him were simply cogs in a machine, without voice. His own folly was believing that maybe, just maybe, he would be able to convince a machine. How silly, how stupid? There is no convincing a machine already in motion to stop itself, and especially not to betray its own programming. The feeling this gave him was a kind of dread that was almost theatrical, like he was performing it for someone else. He wasn’t, of course. If anything he was performing it to himself, showing himself off.

He was struck with the recognition of a defining moment. In the stories, the plays, great works of art, this is a sublime moment in which the process comes to fruition. In the spark of sharpened steel, there was a nagging prospect, vibrating with the potential of history, of recognition, in an ink so thick it cannot help but be life. He slid his hand around the leather-bound handle. It was supple, reliable, radiating with the waves of elimination. He grasped the leather grip with the ferocity of a scholar. The pen and the sword both bare the same sheen of progressive steel. In this instance, he would gesticulate the throes of a similar but far more intense expression. He would show, no, he would do what others were unable to.

As a young child, he’d always been inept and frail, even sickly at times. He stayed inside away from prying eyes, with his family who doted on him carefully. In school was when he learned the male form, its prowess and beauty. That was the beginning of what would be his lifelong quest for the type of manhood that was absolute; a quest for manhood that held a quiet power. He dedicated himself to the art of the pen, then the art of physique. It was in this growth that a stunning realization dawned on him.

He realized how he was the last of a dying breed. A realization that only he could make. It almost felt cliche. He had read of these moments in songs and poems that he swore grew flowers in their veracity. He felt the pressure of age as he knelt against the hardwood. In his grip there was a pride he hadn’t felt before. All his life, he felt he had sought beauty. He sought order, solution, a mending of what was broken. As he grew, he realized his proclivity for the written word, Tolstoy and Husymans, the power of a sentence, could translate to action. He felt if he asserted his physicality, his words would be that much more powerful.

They were not.

He lifted the beautiful katana in his once frail hands with ease. Maybe it crossed his mind, this ease, and he made a soft comparison to his younger and weaker self. Maybe there was a bit of stalling, a bit of fear as the impending action broke the dawn of his choice.

He tried to imagine himself as a fish. He pictured his beautiful scales gleaming in the water before being lifted up by the fisherman. He felt his dorsal fin being gripped, his stomach being squashed, his underside being put on display for the blade. He took a small breath. The fattened steel pierced his flesh with a selfish sting, splitting the muscle and tissue and the organic walls in its wake. His appendix or kidney or stomach tissue cried out in protestant anguish, but all he could feel was relief.

He swore he was Sebastian; he was beautiful and clean, sans the gore prolapsing from his abdomen. The pain didn’t even register in his clouded mind, full of disappointment, sadness, and a furious glory that practically blazed out of his eyes. He knew, of course, this was a futile gesture, that this would be nothing more than a paragraph in his biographies they will no doubt write of him. He didn’t care. He was fulfilling a tradition that perfectly fit the time. In that moment he thought, in the stillness of a violent siege of the self: Tenno heika banzai!