The Anarchist's Execution

The collector had trouble opening his eyes. He turned in bed, moaned, and sat up. He rubbed his eyes vigorously, taking off a dry, red film from his eyelids and corneas. He had used too much of the time dilation drug, Red-eye, he knew. Seven bottles of the spray sat in his trash bin. At least he had not littered. After feeling an odd warmth, he brushed the skin below his nasal opening with his index finger, and examined the finger. Blood. Too much Red-eye. His vision blurred, and his pupils burned in the light coming in from his window. The sky, cloudy, foreshadowed rain.
“Courtesan?” he yelled out. But the sex robot that had slept with him the night before was gone.
How long have I slept?
He looked at his bed and his wrinkled blanket with the imprint of two bodies; it was like a fossil. He moaned again. The collector lamented the morning. He had slept in.
He walked outside to pick up his morning newspaper. “Must’ve slept through the morning music,” he muttered as he leafed through the paper. Amongst the condom ads and job offers and corporate announcements, he discerned a story about an anarchist, in a jail, and an execution.
“George Washington!” he cursed, throwing down the paper and darting out the door. Of course he had forgotten his appointment. He rushed past the thoroughfare and knocked into the paper boy.
“Where’re you headed like that?” the paper boy shouted.
“Headed like what?” the collector blurted out, perplexedly.
“You bumped into me prez!” the paper boy said.
“I’m late for an appointment at the prison, kid,” the collector said.
“Isn’t there an execution there today?”
“That’s why I’m rushing.”
The prison complex, located half a mile north of his townhouse, stood, innocuously, removed from the central part of town. The big arch of the upper city faded far away behind the mist of the swamps and the smog of the city. A small building and two detached administrative complexes comprised the prison. The collector walked up to a mob of shouting humans, carrying cardboard signs reading, “Free Bartholomew!” in drawn-on capital letters. Another sign read “Anarchy over Servitude!” with two exclamation marks instead of one, and a clenched fist drawn in crayon. Another sign read, “STOP”. This one was a street sign. Some young men carried shovels and axes, others carried pickaxes, while others still simply had briefcases and handbags: disgruntled bystanders trying to get past the riot. He could smell the discontent, the impotent rage, the cheap cologne of the working-man.
Men in camouflage uniforms stood on an elevated platform between the rioters and the prison. Other well-armed men stood far in front of the platform, forming a wall to block the masses. A figure stumbled and creaked its way towards the platform, carrying with it an old war rifle. Robots were handy executioners: disposable, anonymous, emotionless.
The collector, with bloodshot eyes and a bowler hat, walked up to one of the prison guards who carried an imposing army-surplus shotgun across his chest.
“You again?” the guard asked.
“I should be on the roster. Veteran privileges,” the collector remarked=.
“You a veteran? They ok’d this?”
“I’m a war hero. Haven’t you heard of me?” the collector mocked, gesticulating with contrived surprise.
The guard sighed and led the collector to administrative entrance. Then, he handed him over to another guard and returned to his post.
The collector sat on a chair, opposite a dimly lit, musty prison cell.
Cracked walls with stucco, peeling paint and a lot of dinge and must and gloom and murk and drear loomed over the collector, in the chair.
His friend sat on the other side of the bars of the cell, shackled, muzzled, and starved. His stiffened neck held up a heavy head with great trouble, and his upright posture in spite of his chains acknowledged the presence of a visitor. The friend in the cell let out a tiny grunt, almost a laugh. Their meeting could take place, as scheduled.
The collector reciprocated the prisoner’s attempt at conversation, but without moving his mouth much, and instead made a soft, “hmm” noise. A number on the prisoner’s blue and orange striped shirt read 1, 4, something or other. The collector did not bother reading the rest of the tag. The prisoner was his friend, and he, the prisoner’s, and no further inspection of the clinging, sticky, smelly, and flea ridden article of clothing was necessary to discern this fact. He knew the prisoner as Bartholomew.
Bartholomew made an attempt to stand. The shackles held him down, but he got far enough that the overhead lights in the hallway highlighted his face, emaciated, scarred, unshaved, bruised, but unbroken. Behind the muzzle, his dry lips split apart to form words. But there was nothing to say.
There was nothing to say. The Finks paid well for an auditing firm. That’s all the men in the truck needed to know.
“The name’s Bartholomew,” a lanky, young student said as he stretched out his hand to the collector, who sat opposite to him in the back of the truck.
A tense camaraderie, under the banner of capitalism, kept the men in the truck cordially silent. Bartholomew found out the hard way: none of them were “talkers”.
A stack of fifty, 20-dollar bills rested comfortably in the collector’s pocket. The collector held tight onto his money. It was more than he ever made in the army.
“I’m not here for conversation, greenboy. You’d be better off keeping your gab shut and praying the manager doesn’t throw you off the truck for being so damn scrawny,” the collector said.
Tense laughter followed this outburst. And then, more silence.
Their manager sat in the front of the truck, next to the driver. He stood up and carefully crawled into the back of the moving vehicle.
“Listen here!” the manager shouted. The men turned to face him.
“Rough-housers, soldiers, thieves and greenboys alike. Today, you’re all officially auditors for the Finks Auditing Firm of Springfield, Illinois. You’ve read the brochures. You know this job pays well. I don’t want no complaining. You hear?”
The men nodded in unison.
“Now, we’re here to make sure this blackleg over here doesn’t get his head ripped off.” He gestured towards a spectacled African sitting near the door between driver and passenger side.
“Remember, boys, everything you do here today is legal. One hundred percent. You’re protected by the law, by Bishop Buchanan, our contractor, and by Mr. J.H. Fink himself. Kill what you need to. Burn what you need to. But this blackleg gets out alive, and you’ll be buried alive before you let those strikers get to him, you hear me?”
The men nodded, again.
The legality of the Fink’s tentative plan of action was not in question. The men were there for easy, safe money that wouldn’t land them in the gallows with an automaton pointing a rifle at the back of their skulls. The men in the truck were to enforce a pro-commerce business stipulation that forbade the “obstruction of trade, manufacturing, and other unmentioned but included forms of commerce by any body or action or individual, at risk of serious bodily harm and financial penalties.” They were to protect besieged strikebreakers, or blacklegs, from an unruly mob of derelicts and anarchists and disgruntled workers on violent strike. The collector had performed this sort of job countless times before. Without a foreign army to fight, soldiers had to turn to fighting their own countrymen to keep themselves busy.
“Fight a war on one side of the river and come home to fight on the other, huh?” Bartholomew said, again directing his words to the collector.
The collector had now served on both sides of the Mississippi River in defense of the lofty ideals of free enterprise and personal liberty and peace without oppression (as the brochures described it). Perhaps Bartholomew was trying to point out his perception that the collector had “switched sides” in coming home to “fight the working man and the disenfranchised among us” (as the anarchist speeches went). However, Bartholomew sat in the truck as well, for presumably the same reason as the collector in the bowler cap-- an easy salary-- so he had very little moral standing from which he could make such an outrageous accusation. Perhaps he was simply trying to initiate a conversation.
Whichever Bartholomew meant, he did not want to talk about the war or the ideals he fought for or the contradictions many claimed that men like him embodied, so the truck once again fell silent, the men looked towards their boots, and Bartholomew did not speak again.
They reached Abneyville Rock, a large outcrop of weathered stone overlooking the oil fields that could barely be called a cliff, the next morning. Car trouble had prolonged the overnight drive by several hours. The men sleepily stumbled out of the back of the truck. The collector now stood in the middle of a crooked line, alongside his coworkers, facing their manager. The collector looked up. Next to him, Bartholomew, and a clean-shaven man whose tag told anyone who cared that his name read “COHEN” in capital letters, did the same. The collector did not like Cohen. Cohen reminded the collector of the type of man he had fought against and killed in the war: gleefully nihilistic, pretentious, well-dressed, and never satisfied. Men like him thrived on chaos, breathed its fiery fumes, imbibed the morbid and destructive power of its tenets, and reveled in its primacy in all of nature-- a primacy people like him wished to bring to the civilization and rugged order of the city. The collector himself had no outstanding or strong political beliefs. He had fought the latest war for the social status and salary of fighting a war, he told people. But also, he valued the status-quo above all. Sleepless nights, drunken rampages, noisy cities, and half-smoked cigarettes were all too appealing to the collector. To have him instead give up these stanchions of his life for the uncertain future of revolution was unconscionable. For this, he fought rabidly, mindlessly, robotically, like a beast against the anarchists. He would run onto and off of the field of battle in berserker rages that he would work himself into after reading a few pro-order brochures. So he would tell people. Other times, he would fire his gun and run. This, he did not tell people. What he told people, what he did not tell people, what he believed, what he wanted to believe, what he knew he shouldn’t have believed, and what he knew he should have believed all mixed and fused and fermented and mixed some more during the war so that by the end he had lost any sense of direction and identity that he had kept before the war and waltzed around in yet another new life, dazed, aimless, and empty. However, the experience, self-gratifying and self-serving, gave him purpose and money, all that he could ask for in those four short years. But Cohen was an anarchist. That, the collector could tell from the way the man combed his hair, pressed his shirts, and pleated his pants. Cohen’s confidence did not match his physique. He had a rather lanky lower body, with flat buttocks and skinny thighs. However, his torso had prominent upper abdominal muscles, which he enhanced with a skintight undershirt, that contained a power so lumbering yet vigorous it would no doubt leave the desperate women and standardless homosexuals of his hometown in lustful awe. The collector did not like Cohen.
“Cohen!” the manager shouted. Cohen raised his hand.
“Roll call,” the collector muttered.
“Bartholomew!” the manager shouted again. Bartholomew raised his hand.
“M—”

The collector walked back to the truck. Roll calls made him nauseous.
Atop of that mound of rock, the troupe could see the Buchanan Refinery from across the black fields of oil and tar and human waste and what journalists of the day would call “necrosludge” to sell their papers. The men completed their journey on foot, descending from the cliff and wading through the waste-high marsh of biotoxins and hazardous liquids. Several members of the group believed that such impetuous exposure to a veritable sea of a liquid that some sensationalized as “necrosludge”, or death sludge, would only further shorten their already short, and in some cases, half-spent life-spans, and thus, the potential health costs greatly outweighed the relatively paltry payment of 1000 dollars in cash. The collector needed to cover his nose, his mouth, his senses with the inside of his elbow sleeve: a futile attempt to protect his sense of smell from the rancid fumes that ripped over the bog. Still, the sleeve was not enough, and his eyes began to water. He stumbled, uncomfortably, in pain, awkwardly jamming the cloth of his arm into his face to keep out the fumes.
“The stench too much for you, dog?” Cohen taunted.
The men around him laughed, of course.
“Every breath you take is a year off your life. Every drop that leaks into your clothes and stings your skin is a cancer. Every molecule of filth that touches your eyes is year of blindness. You can do whatever you want, but I’m going to keep my sleeve over my nose.”
By the time they had reached the periphery of the Buchanan Refinery, they could already hear the shouts and crashes and clangs of an angry mob that beat their chests in unison at the gates of the complex. Cohen, who surprisingly proved himself the most physically fit member of the group, now led the auditors out of the swamp onto dry land. The collector emerged, greatly relieved, from the pool following Cohen, and after the collector, Bartholome, the manager, and the rest.
The rioters stood about 300 yards away from the auditors. The manager communicated with the overseer of the refinery via radio to confirm the appointment time and date, and assure the manager and the workers that the situation would be controlled soon. The more sophisticated corporate methods of communications technology had been rendered useless when the rioters ransacked the underground power lines leading to the refinery.
The act itself appeared to have been carried out as a form of conspicuously ironic, uncivil disobedience. The workers that had once given their lives and energies to the fulfilling career of producing energy out of kilogallons of sludge and millennia of waste, energy that would bring power to slums and cities and lower towns and upper towns alike, now, out of a collective sentiment of disenfranchisement, unashamedly ripped apart the fabric of the region’s power grid with a single rip of the wires and smash of the circuits. Manpower had severed power to a power plant, forcing the Buchanan Future Energy Conglomerate to rely on their poorly implemented and rather unreliable tidal power generators and solar farms closer to the Mississippi River to keep the masses in the cities at bay. The supposed wardens of “what made the city tick”, as the brochures read, had betrayed the trust they had established with their employers, their customers, and the region as a whole. Only five days into the strike, the problem had ballooned so out of control that the Buchanan Future Energy Conglomerate had resorted to calling upon the services of the Fink Auditing Company. The Finks themselves had no authority over how strikes were or were not to be handled, and, certainly, they knew that any unprovoked, violent or hostile action taken against these workers would provoke controversy and poverty rage in the masses of working class union members in the Rompopolis and other lower city neighborhoods. Even though such drastic action had not been outright prohibited by the various corporate/union Trust and Employment stipulation contracts (so they were called) that kept order in the region, the trusts did prohibit any action that greatly affected the revenues of any party involved in the trust, not including the unions. The companies had pushed for this stipulation both as a safeguard against overtly or dangerously hostile competition, as well as a counterweight to balance against the stipulations that unions had pushed for, including their right to “peacefully and quietly make their discontent known,” intentionally ambiguous wording that could provide the justification for establishing a strike, as well as the justification for cracking down on one. Either way, the unions knew that this addition had already pushed the boundaries of what they knew they could accomplish, so they left it at that. As the Buchanan Future Energy Conglomerate saw it, the barbarians at the gates of the Buchanan Refinery were neither “peaceful” nor “quiet”, and so, the Finks had been summoned.
The auditors stood, imposingly, now in a spontaneously formed v-shaped line. They puffed up their chests and crossed their arms and furrowed their brows. They stood, self-consciously intimidating, dripping in dark indigo sludge from the waist down, while the manager fumbled with his radio and thought of what to do next. They were restless. The collector could see the crowd much better now than he did when he stood at the top of the tiny cliff, over two miles east. They had, in fact, established a makeshift shanty town, or an army camp as they most likely saw it, around the refinery. The majority of the strikers marched in circles, as they had been over an hour ago (and according to the radio, for the past few days as well), while a lingering few women and smaller men with oversized caps and boots stayed to sleep and eat in the camp. One of the marchers turned away from the gate for only a second, glancing at the morbidly serene sludge swamp behind them. He saw the auditors, shouted to his comrades and fellow walkers-in-circles, and the chanting died down ominously. Cohen took the lead, and began walking at the head of the pack, again, towards the gate.
Was he an army man too?
The collector followed in tow. The collector knew that he, himself, had the capabilities and range of voice and commanding stature to lead the men as well as, if not better than Cohen. But the collector saw, in Cohen’s blue eyes and smooth skin and set jaw an ambition and a hunger like that of a mad dog he had once had to put down with a crowbar, during the war. That same tenacity, that same mindless, cold, unrelenting drive, lay carefully concealed, but still barely visible to the only other beast of the pack. The collector followed Cohen, carefully, and the manager and Bartholomew and the rest followed as well.
The marchers now had no doubt that this small group of men, leaving behind them a trail of tar and oil and purple fluids, intended to break the strike. Cohen stopped a good distance away from the strikers. The manager stepped in front of Cohen and assumed the leadership role. The collector saw: ambition, but the man respected hierarchy just enough to stay under the radar of his superiors. Cohen was a soldier.
One of the strikers expressed his surprise, almost respectfully, at the auditors’ collectively nonchalant attitude regarding their unprotected exposure to the liquid carcinogens and poisons of the marsh. The auditors themselves, however, were either too stupid or too rambunctious to care or notice the danger they had put themselves in. Bartholomew had worn knee-high rubber boots and water-resistant pants, as he was neither stupid nor rambunctious. The collector’s legs had been through worse in his wars. The manager had a job and a boss, neither of whom would accept failure or tardiness. Cohen simply wanted to cross the lake, so he did.
“It’s not too late to reconcile, workers!” the manager called out.
“Go fuck yourself, and fuck your blackleg! Go home while you can, auditors!” the strikers yelled back.
The collector approached the manager and asked, “Are we going to go forward with this? The blacklegs are going to get slaughtered in there. We need to clear out the camp.”
“These men aren’t greenboys. They can take care of themselves.”
“Mr. Manager, sir, with all due respect, it’s not us that I’m worried about. We have to take care of ourselves and the blacklegs, and we can’t do that when we’re surrounded by hundreds of angry men.”
“So?”
“So, let’s clear out the camp. The weaker minded ones will crack first, the ones that have a mind to fight will die first, and we’ll be left with a work force that won’t implode on itself.”
Cohen muscled up beside the manager to offer his advice.
“I say burn ‘em all. Mr. Buchanan can hire more men if he wishes. We’re here to make the facility functional again. They want war? We’ll give them war. Set the shanty town on fire, we’ll see how eager the men are to fight when their women and children are surrounded by flames,” Cohen said.
“And then? The place won’t be in working condition for weeks,” the collector said.
“Mr. Buchanan is a kind man. He wouldn’t take very well to us slaughtering his entire work force. Just the ones rebellious enough to make a real stand. Let’s go with your plan Mr. Bowler Cap,” the manager said.
Cohen smirked, and walked back to the line of auditors. The collector now rallied the men, swinging his lead pipe about his head to lead the charge.
“All right boys, lets break this strike!”
The men responded in eager shouts of, “For the Finks!” and, “Rip the anarchists from their tents!”

The collector looked towards the clock on the prison wall behind him. Time ran short.
“The papers say you’ve joined anarchists,” the collector said.
“I simply weighed the merits of the current political environment against the potential benefits that Bakuninism could bring to the Rompopolis. Yes, I was converted. But you know me. I don’t sway easily. I only became an anarchist because I know Bakunist theory will save this world.
“And are the allegations directed against you true?”
“You’ve read the papers haven’t you?”
“I just want to know if you really did plant those ‘dago-town bombs’”.
“Friend, I’m not a victim of an anarchist witch hunt; I indeed planted the bombs in the Vanzetti St. Community Center. When a security contractor detained me and questioned me, I confessed to the crime,” Bartholomew reassured.
“But my crimes aside,” Bartholomew continued, “I would like you to join the anarchist movement.”
“I read your letter. I’m not joining your fucking war,” said the collector.
“All the same. Hear me out, just this one more time,” said Bartholomew.
“Alright.”
“I’ve been away from the Rompopolis for a long, long time. I look upon fondly my younger years of rampaging around the bayous and the countryside while working for the Finks. But the fondness of those memories arose from the bonds I had built with my coworkers, not from the nature of my work.”
“But you left the Finks a year before your contract had ended. While I stayed on to complete the required four years, you “deserted” near the end of year three. Without a word,” the collector interrupted.
“It was that very first audit against the Buchanan Refinery. The mark it left on me… I could never erase it. Never forget. What went down that day, the things that I and the you and the men had done, festered inside of my subconscious for over three years.”
Bartholomew saw the world through the prism of a self-loathing hindsight. His memories, judgmental, his conscience, hyperactive, prevented him from seeing the past clearly. The collector saw the uncertain gaze, the constantly pensive gait of Bartholomew. In any other man, the collector would have scorned, even despised such a stilted and arbitrary weakness in character. The self-serving, duplicitous morals of man repulsed him— the smell stung. Men who did evil, or did nothing, or did too much and then regretted their “doing” of evil, nothing, or too much only to later “do” in the exact same manner: these men espoused morality, these men donated and served and cooked and killed to cleanse their souls of perceived flaws. All they did, they did looking inwards, correcting themselves, straightening their arms and ironing out their thoughts to become the men they wanted to be. How directionless! Were these men not capable of thought? Were these men not capable of autonomy? Yet these men, these men who most often became anarchists or soldiers (and died doing so as well) flooded the world like a plague of robots. Their souls shone no brighter than the empty, metallic machines.
Bartholomew was no robot, however. Somehow, the collector could sense, smell, see, something different inside this man that proved to him the purity of his actions and motives. Bartholomew acted and lived selflessly, and loathed himself not in spite of his own idealized personality, but the idealized values of a civilization. He saw beyond image and esteem, and hated himself for holding back society. The collector disapproved of this world-view all the same. But in his disapproval, there was respect. Bartholomew’s same selflessness had conflicted with his conduct during his work under the Fink agency.
“The day of the Buchanan audit,” Bartholomew continued, “I watched grown men and their sons and grown women and their daughters fall by my hand and those of my coworkers. But the actions of us auditors were nothing to what I saw after the slaughter. Once the gates of the refinery had opened, the overseer stepped out to greet us. Not minutes later, a whirring thunder resounded in the distance. We saw a shining object in the distance moving slowly closer, closer, and closer. We could see it. You and I had seen helicopters and other old war technology used by the anarchists during the war before war. This thing was not old war technology. It radiated in its descent, like a god descending from the heavens. It shimmered, it illuminated, it glowed. It floated down, like a feather or a cloud. It was almost spherical with a tapering cone at its south-facing end, it struck me as remarkably geometric. A door made itself visible in the nearly seamless, reflective metal. It opened, as the gates of heaven might open for the deserving. Out stepped a man in a sparkling suit, who regally drifted down to the mortal soil, as would an angel with invisible wings. The CEO of the Buchanan Future Energy Conglomerate. The king of southeastern Illinois. Bishop Buchanan, in the seraphic flesh. The God among men.
“The rest, you know. I left the Finks to join Bakuninists near the Missouri coast, three years after my first audit. Several years later, I placed three dirty bombs around the outside of the Dago-town community center, I was arrested, I was tried, and I was imprisoned. But before I am executed, my friend, I want to know, above all else, whether you saw the same thing that I saw on that fateful day. Not saw, in the physical sense. More like felt, sensed-- what I couldn’t see, but knew existed in that divine vessel that descended from the skies, beyond the range of the human sensory experience. It existed as a sentiment. Something wrong, profoundly wrong, existed in that remarkable chariot of the heavens that brought Bishop Buchanan down to the earth of the Buchanan Refinery.”
Bartholomew paused, and began to sob. Finally, he found the words from three years of searching and unrelenting contemplation.
“Utter despair.”
Bartholomew began to shake, his brow narrowed and his voice reached out for reason— or perhaps an ear. The collector was sitting in front of him. There was an ear. The collector continued to listen.
“How could it be possible, that, in over three millennia of existence – no small length of time— as an empire, the people of North American continent had seen no substantial, scientific achievement. No progress. Stagnation. I had blindly accepted the state of affairs of the world before my encounter with Bishop Buchanan. But after seeing that avatar ride down to the terrestrial floor of Illinois in a vessel of supernatural metal, I could no longer accept that status quo. This God, this man, whose eyes and skin and very movements seemed to move with ageless and celestial perfection, presented an anachronism. How could it be possible, that any human could have attained such power, such wealth, such knowledge over the common man? How could it be possible, that the Rompopolis, the lower cities, the countrysides, the earth, had seen none of it. None of anything.
“I saw the truth, that day. The haze of propaganda, the past and the future blending together, the stage of the world, the illusion of control-- I saw all of it. The world has come to a standstill. Nothing moves for the masses. The masters allow only enough progress to keep the proletariat content. An elevated roof-bound public transportation system where there should have been flying machines. Primitive robots that could only dance and pretend to sing where there should have been robotic surgeons and soldiers. Increasingly addictive cigarettes, new variations of narcotics, dress-shoes that weren’t that stiff, energy efficient light bulbs, crude prosthetics, fancy and entertaining ways of killing people en masse, and ergonomic spray-cheese dispensers. I’ve seen all of it. But, for some strange reason, no one else has. No one else in the refinery that day, no one else in the Rompopolis, no one else in the world. How could humanity collectively blind itself, so completely, to reality?
“Where the hell was the future? Have you seen this too? Have you felt this too?”
The collector looked darkly at Bartholomew. “First things first, If you’re an anarchist, why’d you join me with the auditors, the army… the war?” he asked.
“I was following you. You seemed so full of purpose. You knew where you were going, what you were going to do. I was lost. I found Bakunin after everything. After I sold my soul to the murderers of the world.” Bartholomew said.
“You were following me? I didn’t know what I was doing,” the collector said.
“You knew what you were doing!” Bartholomew barked with clenched teeth, clenched fists. “I’ve lost sleep, I’ve lost years of my life thinking, hating myself for everything that I witnessed. But you? Everything that you’ve done?” Bartholomew seemed ready to explode, like a dago-town bomb.
“YOU KNOW WHAT YOU DID! And yet you sit here. Judging me. Not a dent on your conscience, or what little conscience you have left. Well you know what? I’m not the only who knows. They do too. You know it, just as well as I do. The syndicate can’t protect you forever, M—

The collector’s attention faded into the shouts of the people outside the compound. He joined the crowd of protesters in front of the scaffold. The executioner prepared the ceremonial old-war rifle.
Bartholomew joined the enemy of civilization, of humanity perhaps. The collector almost felt wistfully sad, disappointed in his once close acquaintance. Such demagoguery. Anarchist dribble. Years and years of living on the outskirts of civilized society had made him paranoid. Bartholomew overanalyzed many things. Over-analysis was, for better or worse, part of Bartholome’s character, the collector knew. Perhaps Bartholomew was right. Perhaps indeed something profoundly, inherently wrong, rancid, and rotting pervaded and enshrouded the very fabric of society. The collector, himself, had not picked out anything terribly strange or ominous about Bishop Buchanan's “chariot”. Perhaps, too, the collector might have under-analyzed many things. But did such strong beliefs about the nature of the world’s political hierarchy really merit the kind of immature, reckless violence that Bartholomew had demonstrated himself capable of? The collector realized the papers (or at least, the headlines of the papers) had been right. This level of delusional thinking, which had compelled Bartholomew to plant and detonate three bombs and kill several innocent dagos of no consequence, startled the collector. It startled and disappointed him greatly. But only for a moment.
Several guards led Bartholomew out of the prison compound. The collector could see the procession exit through the same door that the collector had used to enter the compound, on the side of the building. Slowly, they trudged through the mud and the dirt of the path, towards the scaffold. The crowd grew louder, livelier, angrier. People shouted, some threw stones, others raised their signs higher. They jostled and pushed and the collector fell backwards into the wave of the disenfranchised. Some in the crowd wanted vindication for Bartholomew. Others, mostly dagos, wanted him to die faster! Faster!
Others wanted entertainment. The blood and the common, human themes of inescapable death and unnecessary violence resonated with the spectators. They would chant and scream, laugh and point at the spectacle. The meek would shirk away and call the thing horrid and barbaric and frightening. But it brought people together. It had the power to unify people from disparate backgrounds under the banner of a common passion. It would give opportunity and hope to children and men who did not have the mental capacity to become intellectuals or functioning members of society. They could dream towards something greater, the prospects of becoming an guard or an executioner, of entertaining the public with the power of their arms, and they could feel powerful, fulfilled, important. For a moment.
So why a robot? The dagos screamed death to the accused, and the anarchists screamed death to the executioner. Sometimes, more people came to executions to see the execution than to have fun. And when an execution stopped being fun, it became dangerous, so important people who didn’t want the streets filled with more blood than usual made robots do the deed, occasionally. Then, only oil would fill the streets.
Neither oil nor blood had filled the streets yet. The collector looked enviously at a child holding a bag of sweet crackers that vendors would sell outside the venue. The child looked at a guard, but the guard didn’t look back. So, the child ate more crackers and sucked his thumb and his mother raised her hands and shrieked with the people. The people chanted and shouted and screamed and pushed some more, and while the collector attempted to maintain his proximity to the scaffold, the crowd pushed him back further still. The collector tried to see Bartholomew’s face through the waves of people who all had veins popping out of their heads and beads of sweat flying off their flapping, furiously vibrating lips. The guards walked up the stairs of the scaffold. Suddenly, something inside the collector panicked. He shoved a dago woman behind him, breaking her nose as his hand struck her face and pushed her down into the filthy cobblestones of the street. He elbowed and kneed and elbowed more as he desperately tried to get closer to the scaffold. He found his eyes darting from guard to guard, determining their numbers, assessing each one’s prowess. He pushed further forward, the strongest, most aggressive man in the crowd, almost shouting with desperate rage as he flailed against the tide of discontent, chest-beating flesh. The crowd pushed back, so he pushed harder and made the fleshy waters turn black blue and red with every stroke, every kick, every paddle.

"Am I trying to save Bartholomew?" he asked himself.

Only the executioner had a gun. The robot would not dare harm a human who hadn’t been sentenced to death. The collector had sins too! Sins and actions and contradictions and lurking demons that plagued him and kept him awake and asleep and in between at all hours of day. Was this his vindication? Could he, himself, be saved by saving his own friend from death? The escorts were young, aspiring thugs and the scaffold guards were balding former thugs. What chance did a handful of has-been’s and might-be’s have against a real thug, a veteran, in the flesh, who beat men daily like the dagos beat their wives… for a healthy salary of 50,000 dollars a year and unlimited Roaring-brand cigarettes, no less! He rushed towards the scaffold. Left foot back, push, right foot back, push, arms part the water, forward more. He thrust his head up to gasp for air, but the crowd pulled him back. He began to hate the swamp of spouting, disgruntled, impotent rage. He smelled death, the end of the road. It approached for some, perhaps all, and of course, it approached for his friend. He smelled petty grievances in the sweat, melodramatic and contrived fury in the tears, and the systemic fetor of a culture in the piss that flowed and trickled down the legs of the half-grinning, half raging men and women. He seethed, his teeth clenched, and he propelled himself further. These beasts were no better than robots. He reflected on his friend’s offer. He would never join the anarchists. But for a moment, during their conversation, he had sensed, or perhaps smelled, a glimmer of salvation for him, for the city. His arm moved like a steel sword and came down upon the flood, cutting through the murky waters. The crowd parted before him, of its own accord now. Three yards left. His path was clear. The guards had not noticed him. For a second, an image of a golden, floating orb flashed and lingered in his memory. His friend’s desperate, hapless exasperation at a city’s blindness pried his lids open, ever so slightly. The orb shone through the tiny crack in his flesh and into his cornea, and beyond the rays he could see the scaffold.

Bang.