The two girls who'd been in the car with me emphatically pleaded with the police who were handcuffing me.
"It's not him. He did nothing. He was with us the whole time!"
"Have you lost your minds? How could he have caused all this when he was in our car?"
The police have as their stated goal to be the truth. But the truth is more than most can bear so one switches to what is considered to be a more pragmatic - if eventually fatal - view of keeping one's job. Just arrest somebody - anybody - to keep the angry masses at bay. God can be dealt with after paying the rent.
So I was led away in handcuffs, never once protesting my innocence nor speaking a word. Amazing how the truth comes out sometimes.
The two girls were sitting up front in the four door sedan while I was in the back. We'd all seen the madman on the white horse interjecting himself into the stopped traffic at our intersection just below a highway overpass. It was a WTF moment for all of us. As if sensing the tension he was causing, the rider suddenly took off to the right. It was easier for me to track him from my vantage point and I wondered how he was going to overcome the concrete obstacles on the side of the road that would hamper his escape.
The galloping horse attempted to jump over them but failed on his landing, knocking the rider off but with his foot stuck in the stirrup. Panicked, the horse veered back into traffic, bouncing the head of the rider on the pavement who must either be unconscious or dead. Cars were slamming into one another in avoidance and just when I thought it couldn't get any worse the horse became entangled with a car, causing it to veer onto oncoming traffic and the tragedy increased multi-fold.
I'd witnessed all this as if watching a dream, not believing my eyes, not wanting to witness the daylight insanity before me. It repulsed me to think I lived in a world of such disconnected values that a man would endanger himself, a helpless animal, and others in such a reckless way. What was he thinking? How could he have hope? All I knew I was put in a position of undeniability - the last place my lying ass wants to be.
Besides the unfolding horror of what I saw, what got me most was my unspoken guilt in watching it. Maybe I wondered if I could be that man on the horse, losing his way, perhaps desperately asking for help in some perverse way. It was if he'd reached inside me and grabbed my soul in questioning inquisition. I was not ready for this thief in the night.
I guess the guilty nature of my recounting to the police made them arrest me, that I was somehow in cahoots with the horseman, that I was holding back. Most of all, I knew I could never say the words, "I'm innocent." I couldn't remember the last time I felt innocent.
Naturally, in jail I was asked what I was guilty of. "Name it," I'd reply, giving no eye contact. Even the creeps wanted nothing to do with me. Maybe they felt I would be a vehicle of revelation for them too and no one wanted that - especially the lying cops.
My silence frustrated everyone. Yet, I had nothing to say. To speak would be to do self-harm. "What is truth," inquired Pilate of Jesus, as if Pilate could not know himself. Why would I speak to what is self-evident? I've spent a lifetime of lying and could do more, regardless of the consequences. But a society that fears change more than damnation needed a convenient scapegoat. There was no shortage of professional Judases willing to define me in the worst possible way and did it with great, if short-lived, glee; for it was themselves they were defining in the end.
Can there be any seepage of real-time justice into this world? Apparently not. I'm surrounded by those who insist the farmer mix the chaff with the wheat, bringing ruin to all. It became clear judge and jury wanted to leave no living witnesses to their earthly deeds. How ironic they did not perceive my own guilt, that I had simply run out of lies. I was placed on a pedestal of righteousness and in doing so gave cause righteous cause in the minds to tearing me down. The more I was reviled, the more moral they must be.
I was silent to the end, a witness to the persecution, watching mad fairies fly around me in constant agitation, wielding swords and lances in wild ejaculations of ecstasy, furious at the inner fears they cannot escape, blindly stabbing at repressed demons of their own making, seen only in their own mind, praying to slay that which cannot be slayed - only freed - and to lose their life by trying to preserve it.
The madness was here, the madness was there, the madness was everywhere.
People think this is political. God, do not forgive them, for they know what they do.
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