In the beginning there was darkness. Which is good because it requires no description. No fumbling metaphorical references to bewilder and cause panic. Just darkness.

The universe serves as a constant reminder that, in between the lights, there is a mass of nothingness. Which, conveniently for me, is rather dark. There are millions of light years of darkness out there separating us from whatever else may be there. Perhaps even dividing us from some secret afterlife that is hidden somewhere in all that nothingness. Either that or countless worlds inhabited by lizard people and one-eyed bird-men that have yet to discover how fantastically delightful the human brain tastes with ketchup.

So you’ve got these bright lights floating around in all that darkness. One, in particular, is surrounded by countless mechanical devices that enable people in Singapore to watch American Gladiators. This particular ball of light would be called Earth, which (if you ask me) is a rather pathetic name for a planet. You’d think we could have come up with something better than Earth. Maybe something like Supertron, or Varanova. But instead, Earth. We’re just Earthlings. I foresee us being a rather popular target for the one-eyed, bird-headed lizard people. It’s like invading a country called “The Free Republic of Fluffy Teddies.� They’re laughing at us right now. So far they’ve found it so debilitating that they’ve yet to act. But it’ll wear off.

Maybe after we’ve been consumed they’ll change the name of the planet to something palatable, like Tron. But for now, despite such optimism, we will have to make do with the way things are. Which, if you look hard enough, always seems to be pretty much the way things have always been. No matter what creationist tale you champion there is one constant. In the beginning there was darkness. And the beauty of that truth is that I don’t have to describe it to you. How fortunate for me.

I have often watched the sky and wondered where all the voices go after they’ve talked themselves out. Perhaps they fall back down here to Earth. Maybe they continue upwards into that darkness like some unknown weapon of massive sonic destruction.

You’re sitting on your front porch on some far distant planet when you’re unexpectedly bombarded by a million voices talking about nothing at all. The sheer magnitude of the mundane ripping your world to shreds and moving on to claim other worlds.

If sound travels at the speed of sound then think of how destructive we ourselves might be, given that for countless ages we’ve been talking, screaming, and wailing hysterically on The Price Is Right. The audio from that show alone could have wiped out Andromeda for all we know. Those lights up there take their sweet time getting to us. Perhaps those lights have burned out.

I know that sound dissipates. It bounces off of things and its wave form straightens as it hitchhikes through the air. But that’s the beauty of fiction. I can say whatever I want and there’s nothing that you can do about it. Not altogether unlike carnal sin and disobedient Catholic school girls.

The point of all this is that you never can tell what’s out there in all that darkness. There may be some extremely unwholesome figure in a dark alley that represents all the badness in the world.

“For the love of God, don’t go down there!� they say. But everyone does. People always do what they are not supposed to do. Why trade your god given right to act stunned for accountability? There’s just far too much responsibility in it. There are those that have been tempted by the notion. But more often than not they find themselves guests of sedation houses rather than champions of will. Vink Lippy was one such person.

If there was one thing Vink hated it was his name. That’s what happens when your mother has a speech impediment. His birth certificate said “Vincent Libby� but every time his mother opened her mouth it came out Vink. So instead of Vince Libby everyone called him Vink Lippy.

There were many unfortunate adolescent variations of his name: Dink Lippy, Limpy, Dink Lips, and Vink’s all-time favourite: LIMPY DINKSTER. It would be his favourite because the last person who ever called Vink “Limpy Dinkster� was discovered in the woods missing his eyeballs. There’s reason to believe that really gay names can produce tough kids. Going one stop further down the Freudian highway we come to Psychoville. Population 2. Vink Lippy and Seymour Kuntz.

Vink was not an ordinary kid growing up. He wasn’t the sort to rush out and buy purple pants just because everyone was wearing purple pants. Some people might consider that courageous, especially for an adolescent. Others might just beat you up because you’re wearing flared cords. But challenges like that are just tiny parts in the massive equation of life. Every life has a moment in it when the answer to each of our equations is revealed. Due to the years of constant torture he was subjected to, Vink’s came after he was arrested for a double homicide. The two unlucky victims being the last person that ever called him “Limpy Dinkster� and his mother. In a bizarre way, maybe the answers to their equations came to them while Vink was plunging their plumbing with a Christmas carving knife.

Vink was taken into custody by the police. He was discovered sitting at his kitchen table with a knife in one hand, rolling eyeballs around in a metal mixing bowl with the other. Horrified by what they had found, the arresting officers stood in the kitchen doorway for almost ten minutes before confronting Vink and putting him in handcuffs. Vink simply placed the knife and the bowl on the table and capitulated to the officers’ requests. When they arrived at the police station, Vink was placed in a little room and asked the usual questions that one might expect to be asked while sitting in such a room. Questions like why? when? where? and so on. But Vink didn’t answer them. He repeated a single question over and over.

“How come there’s never been a weapon of mass destruction on a Wheaties box?�

After news of the murders got out a small mob converged on the police station and started demanding that Vink be handed over to them. Everyone, that is, except for the parents of the boy that Vink had killed. They just stood at the bottom of the station’s stairs with blank expressions on their faces, wondering what had happened.

All of this took place, of course, long before the media became more important than the news. In what would have been turned into a three-ring circus with today’s media, and used by a variety of local reporters to springboard their careers at the expense of grief, the murders garnered a minimal dose of public outrage before being buried in the back pages. Up until the trial, most had put the murders out of their minds. And when it started, the public’s interest fizzled mere days into it.

Vink was defended by a lawyer from the public defender’s office. Who to his credit had, prior to the trial, started using words that consisted of more than three syllables. Those at the district attorney’s office, on the other hand, were convinced that they had been given the task of saving the public from the next Charles Manson and were determined to quench their own overinflated desire to see proper justice served. They played their hand with pinpoint precision and painted him as a ruthless and calculating young man. They might have been right. Then again, during all those days of talk and deliberation there were only a handful of people in the whole world that Vink pondered killing. And those were the prosecutors.

After some weeks the trial came to a close and Vincent Libby was found guilty of two murders, both in the second degree. He was sentenced to two years in a juvenile facility and another forty five years in a maximum-security prison. Without a word, Vink did what he was told and went from his sentencing to a juvenile detention centre built in the middle of nowhere. And during his time there no one besides two guards and a court-appointed psychiatrist spoke to him. And for all that time he said nothing.

Vink’s short stint in the hands of juvenile affairs was rather uneventful as prison terms go. Though filled with a variety of so called hard cases, no one dared look at or talk to Vink. Because when you’re in juvie for stealing a car and carrying a gun that you’re not man enough to use when you pull it out, you find young men that have brutally hacked up two people and removed their eyeballs rather frightening. It doesn’t matter if he’s a skinny little freak who looks like he couldn’t hurt a fly if he wanted to. They were scared silly of him.

The psychiatrist at the juvenile centre tried her best to get through to Vink. But in those two short years she was unable to get anything out of him besides his fourteen-word question.

In her report to the Child Welfare Board she wrote:

Vincent is most likely a high-functioning boy whose intelligence has never been nurtured or encouraged. Mr. Whatley has searched his room on several occasions and has discovered reading materials that far surpass the intellect of the young men commonly found in an institution such as this. My failure to make any contact with him places me in a very difficult situation. My recommendation would have to be for Vincent to be transferred to a maximum-security hospital for a more extensive evaluation. At this time, placing him in a corrections facility may only further his detachment and would most likely result in complete disassociation. I have forwarded my own notes concerning this matter to Dr. Landy, whose own preliminary evaluation can be found attached to my own.

Unfortunately the court didn’t seem to care about the evaluations and recommendations of either child welfare or psychiatric services. On the day after his eighteenth birthday Vink was transferred to a maximum-security prison and placed in general population. And there, inside his head, he spent his life floating around the universe in all that darkness that I haven’t been describing, screaming at the top of his lungs and blowing up planets with his favourite words. Those being xenophobia and tits. That’s the way it went for Vink. He spent his entire adult life locked in a small room.

And though some might consider that hell, I can assure you that it didn’t mean anything to him. As far as he was concerned he wasn’t even in prison. He was flying around the universe, igniting the cosmos, as free as a bird. From time to time he’d go outside for a while or down to the cafeteria to eat. And, once in a very long while, he’d be taken to another small room to watch a little TV. His favorite show was Star Trek. He liked the fact that the Enterprise just flew around the universe, not unlike himself. It was the only time he smiled. And, quite often, the only time he cried.

It’s times like these that one looks at a life and poses stern questions. Questions like “What’s all this about?� and “Who really cares if I’m here or not?� The reason? Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that the unknown constitutes one of the largest aspects of being. Maybe being has always been nothing more than what you consider a successful life to be. Vink’s idea of a successful life was floating around the universe, hurling words of cataclysm. Perhaps everyone simply talks too much and does too little. Maybe, at the core, that’s the difference between questions and answers. The difference between talking and doing.

Imagine a life, as if it were unfolding before you like a path through the woods. Imagine that path coming to an end at the rocky shores of a great, alpine lake. Imagine the world devoid of noise and tension and concern. Picture all of this and then imagine yourself trapped in a cage at the beginning of that path, left for the bears— On the morning of his sixty-third birthday Vink was lying in bed, tidying up. He had recently returned from decimating parts of the Virgo galaxy cluster. He was dressed in normal-people clothes for the first time in forty-seven years. They were given to him by the Salvation Army. The reason he was wearing a faded beige suit and shoes that were a half size too big was because he was being released.

He had served his sentence quietly and peacefully and was no longer considered to be a threat to society. A withered old man, he was a sixty-three-year-old virgin.

He was released. Stepping through a large metal door, he entered an alien world of talkers. He had $232 in his pocket and a one-way bus ticket to his home-town. According to the conditions of his parole he would spend the rest of his life in the town, unable to discover the world that had been denied him.

Instead of going home he made a decision. He would use some of his money to exchange his ticket for one to Miami Beach, Florida. He had no idea why he wanted to go to Florida, it just seemed the proper thing to do.

Vink got on a bus and woke up two days later as it rolled into Miami. Deciding to check into a cheap motel by the beach, he spent two days sitting in his room looking out the window at the ocean. It seemed to him to be far too big for its own good. Most things, if you stop and think about it, tend to be.

On the third day Vink decided it would be best to take a walk and wandered into a convenience store to get some magazines to read. One of them was Omni. He also purchased a chocolate bar and a lottery ticket. By the fourth day Vink was left with only fourteen dollars, just enough to get breakfast and lunch. He was also kicked out of the motel.

He found a bus bench and flew around the universe for hours on end, prompting various bus drivers to pull over for no reason whatsoever. On the morning of the fifth day Vink was still sitting on that bench. Sadly, it was there that his adventures on this silly globe came to an end. Most things end that way. Abruptly, lacking substance, and with no fanfare.

After a group of children realized that they weren’t poking a sleeping old man but rather a dead old man, the police were called and Vink’s body was taken to the morgue. Since he had no family, his possessions were placed in a small box, as was his body. Most of his pristine organs were harvested for science, coincidentally, after the authorities discovered he was a fugitive who had broken his parole. His belongings, on the other hand, were held for several years by the city and then discarded. I would like to tell you that the lottery ticket that he had purchased the day before was worth an astronomical amount of money, but that’s just not the case. Doing rarely closes out with critical acclaim or saddled on some mustang with a girl, galloping off into the sunset. Doing closes out by itself on a bus bench in Miami being poked at by adolescents who terminally never seem to know any better. And the lottery tickets in their pockets are never worth anything.

In the end there is only darkness, just like the beginning. Luckily for me I don’t have to describe it to you. It is what it is. Best not to trick yourself with such useless verbs and nouns and things. Best to just start walking.

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