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captain-ed-tucker · 5 years

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The True Maniac Cont.

What do you mean?"

"Why are so you desperate to join Neberdine?"

"I am addicted to one of your drugs that is undergoing a closed trial, and I really, really need it badly."

She smiles sadly and emphatically and responds

"As long as it doesn't hurt anybody, I see no harm in it."

The next week, the intercom calls out

"Daniel LaRusso for the ULP Phase III intake exam at room four."

I'm ushered off to a plain, sterile room, everything here is so fucking sterile, it drives me nuts, I hate this place so much, I wonder why I even spent so much money in the first place. Soon I'm strapped up to a machine that is reading my heart rate, my oxygen rate, my blood pressure and everything that can be measured, it all feels so unnecessary, apparently, this is what they call a polygraph test and is used to test defense mechanisms. The first picture is a bottle of pills and I respond

"Happy. Super happy."

The woman reminds me

"Take your time, no need to rush."

The next picture shows a family and I can only imagine what I once had, before I lost it all and I reply

"Empty."

Another picture is of a inkblot picture, a father and a son and I reply

"A father and a son...making faces at each other."

The protocor reminds me

"Try to describe with a feeling."

I merely reply

"Alone"

And she then says "I want you to now turn your attention to me as I ask you this final question."

I can hear the clicking and whirring as the needle moves up and down steadily and suddenly a buzzer sounds and a red light is illuminated and she then says

"The test is complete, you may now return to the waiting area."

I'm mad, mad as hell and I yell

"This is fucking bullshit! You rigged it! What was the question?"

The protocor leads me out as I scream

"This is bullshit and you know it! PATRICIA LUGO!"

The woman turns around and begins

"No no no! No more favors! I have bosses around! Go!"

I'm mad all right and I add

"You promised to funnel me through!"

"I got you through the consideration for the intake! You failed the exam, now it's out of my hands! Go! My bosses are watching!"

I know it's a low blow, that I'm sweeping her leg and I have to strike first, to strike hard and to show no mercy and here goes:

"Patricia I know where your daughter is, her name is Usnavy and she goes to Hunter College and I know a man with a white van who will kidnap her."

For a second, a panicking look flashes on her face and she adds

"You are kidding!"

"Nope! I'm just goal oriented."

And she taps her fingers onto the table top before raising her hands in surrender and adding

"Just five minutes, please don't hurt my daughter."

I storm off and sit down and before I know it, I see Johnny Lawrence, oh fuck, well then. He looks tired as hell and hasn't slept for years at all, his hair is graying and turning white, his golden locks are almost gone, he has changed dramatically since I beat him at the tournament. He looks just as stunned as I am but niether of us says anything as Patricia comes over and hands me the number 7 badge and I'm in! Yes! Yes! Yes! I'm in and all I have to do is take the drugs and get cured...maybe. Soon the head Nurse Carl leads us and scans our badges and leads us to the elevator and lucky me and Johnny, we are the Odd numbered candidates, fun. Real fun.

End of part four

Oh...great, you have got to be shitting me all over again! Not only is LaRusso there, he is in the same experiment as I am and in the same fucking group. I'm number one so I stand at the front and I recive my Neberdine uniform and shoes as Carl reads aloud the rules and they are tough and I groan as my bags are checked and handed back to me. I then shove them in the drawer below the hexagon shaped pod where I am assigned to sleep, it's labeled "One" and I get in and get dressed, I look like a mental patient from the days of when I had been hospitalized in a psychiatric ward, I saw you there and you took amusement at my situation and grinned as I screamed and cursed out nurses while strapped down in a gurney all by myself, screaming for my mom as my step dad Sid insisted I was crazy, that I was mental, and that it was a fitting ending for me.

LaRusso glared daggers at me and suddenly York strode by and added

"That man is your handler. Follow him, he will help you save the world."

"York, what the fuck are you talking about? LaRusso is the same guy I bullied back in high school, not to mention the fact that he beat me in the tournament!"

York walked back and snapped

"You wanna save the world?"

I nod, my body is shaking as he adds

"Then stop this nonsense of the perpetual rival, it will help you nowhere! Understood?"

I nod and I reply

"I am tired of being the chosen one York."

"Well guess what Johnny Lawrence, you don't have a fucking choice! You are destined to save this world, whether you like it or not!"

I nod again and he is gone, and when I turn around, LaRusso's jaw drops and shakes his head before adding

"You're a fucking nutjob, you know that Johnny."

I roll my eyes, like hes the one to speak at all considering the fact that he came here, to this Neberdine bulding of all places. I sigh and soon we sit down and they make us watch a video on how our trial will proceed. According to the video, I will first take the A pill, the A pill represents Agonia, this pill will pull my core traumas to the surface and with the help of the headset, I'll be able to see the powerful dreams, but nobody can see them but me and the scientists, it is meant to be safe as well.

The second pill is the B pill, this is the behavioral pill which will pull and twist and destroy my defense mechanisms and shine a light on the blind spots and expose me for who I am to me, that sounds like a tough stage to go through.

The Confrexa stage will force me to confront myself as a whole and move on and become a better human being and find radical acceptance for what I've been through, and soon the cheery, tinny music ends and Dr. Muramoto from the video and he smiles polietly as he asks

"Any questions from the video?"

I and LaRusso and a handful of other subjects raise their hands and he nods and smiles broadly and adds

"Good."

After the question and answer session, us odds are up, the evens are being provided their pre weight meals. Oh jesus spare me the sad bullsit and don't give me your sad ass face! You never cared about me at all! You never did care about me Kreese, you fucking choked me and nearly killed me for shits sake! And of all people to hallucinate, I have to hallucinate you! Fuck you Kreese! This is why I'm at the experiment! To get rid of you at all costs! By the way, TAKE A SHIT OR SOMETHING! STOP STARING AT ME! All right, I don't have time for this, I have to get on one of the dentist office looking chairs and I know I have to wait before I'm activated, what if its during the session, soon the nurse puts on a pulse ox finger tracker and I get a pill, one of them warns LaRusso to wait for Dr. Muramoto to give the signal and a heavy upper chest apron is placed on my chest, Carl explained that it was to protect me from nominal residue and it looks like one of the aprons I wore when taking an X Ray for my broken arm when I was still in Cobra Kai as a student, suddenly the doctor says

"Subjects, you may now ingest your pills."

The others swallow their pills and drink the water that comes in another cup, but I don't do that, I quickly thumb the pill to the side as the machine activates and I close my eyes and I see random colors flashing before my very eyes, they are terrifyingly blood red and everyone is quietly asleep, trying to see their traumatic experiences. I now regret what I have done, coming here was a risk and I regret taking that risk so much, it hurts deeply within. You are still fucking smirking and smiling, wearing your pathetic gi that isn't worthy of being worn on you at all. You clearly should go the fuck away Kreese, all you have been is a burden, I thought you could be the father figure Sid never was, except you proved me wrong, you used me and you wanted me to hurt LaRusso, you wanted Bobby to fucking hurt LaRusso in a way that could've destroyed his knee! Suddenly I see LaRusso's face crumple up and a tear rolls down his cheek and he grips the arm rests and I feel a pang of sympathy, I now understand how much destruction I have caused and it is ugly as hell, I should be the one paying the price, not him, never him.

End of Part five

I was at the middle of the line, wanting to throttle Johnny for fucking joining the same study as me but there was literally nothing I could do, not unless I wanted to be shamed constantly for the rest of my life. Japanese people had a way of carrying their family honor as if their life depended on it. I literally had personal experience with that becuase of the death battles I had with Chozen. That is a story I would rather not go further into detail.

Soon I sat down in one of the chairs that resembled a dentist chair and they placed a heavy apron on me, the head set was clicked into place and I was handed the A pill...what I had been searching for...it was here in my hands and just as I was about to swallow it, Nurse Carl warned me

"Don't take it. Wait for the signal."

I quickly hold the pill in its little cup before me as my hands shake from desire...from want...from the addiction to these A pills that were ruining me. I wanted to ruin myself, I wanted to self destruct in a spectacular way.

The doctor soon said "Subjects, you may now ingest your pills."

And I quickly swallowed the pill and drank the mini cup full of water handed to me by an orderly and the humming of the machines roared and I was back in there.

LaRusso impatiently stood nearby, tapping his foot as his mother and father were filling up the gas tank and talking, none of their conversations intrested the young boy much, he leaned his chin on the dashboard of the car and yawned slightly, he looked over and saw his father pay for the gas and his mother sat in the back row of the car as she protested

"You do realize Daniel is still very short and small right Albert?"

Albert rolled his eyes and snapped

"Oh shut up woman! Let me raise my son! He wants to sit in the front? Let him! He wants to enjoy some fresh air for fucks sake!"

Lucille shot back

"Oh and like you know how to raise a teenage boy! Why, I'm glad I filed for divorce from your stinky ass you piece of shit!"

And they are at it again, arguing and yelling as my dad is driving, now that right there is a bad combination, as the yelling continues at a fever pitch, LaRusso yells at both of em

"Niether of you are even realizing you both suck at being parents!"

And at that moment, the car swerved into the left lane of a two lane road and the sixteen wheeler smashes into the tiny car and sends it flying over the cliff, throwing out Daniel and Lucille, while Albert is unconscious and he remains in the car, being crushed to death and the car soon ignites and burns him to death as well. The smoke plume is dense and black as nothing is left of the shattered remains of the family car. Niether Daniel, nor Lucille know it, but Albert is dead.

In the control booth where the scientists are working and grabbing data and studying it,

Dr. Fujita notices something unusual about number six's data output.

Dr. Mantleray asks her

"How are the subjects."

"Doing well. However, I see data anomalies from One and Six. Number One may not have ingested the pill at all, he isn't putting out any data. As for Six, it seems as though he has been here before, like he knows the grooves to the narrative. Strange..."

Soon Dr. Fujita adds

"Ten seconds till re entry."

And as the red light fades to a harsh white glow above them, she adds

"Welcome back subjects, welcome back."

Johnny and the rest of the odds were eating when Nurse Carl added

"One, five and six, Dr. Muramoto wants to see you."

Number five groaned and muttered

"Oh shit."

Johnny asked him

"What's wrong."

"What's wrong? Whats wrong is that we have been flagged, means that they saw something in our numbers they don't like! They call you up and talk to you before they kick you out, it doesn't matter what you say."

"And you know this becuase?"

"I have been doing this for decades, you can do it too if you can work the system like I do, I do at least thirty or forty a year. Pretty good money too."

Johnny also adds

"You're the man who pointed out the bombs on my form..."

"Yep that's me."

Johnny leaned back as Daniel sat down in a room filled with TV screens filling the side of one room and cameras ready to film his damn face, he was anxious and fearful. He sat down in the chair and Dr. Fujimori asked him "How do you feel?"

"Tired, like I just want to cry a lot."

Fujimori handed him a tissue box but LaRusso didn't touch it as Fujimori continued

"Describe your reality."

"My reality is that I'm depressed and that I don't matter."

Soon it was time for Johnny Lawrence to talk and he sat down before the scientist and the man asked him

"How do you feel?"

"Empty."

"Describe your reality."

"My reality is that I don't matter. That whatever I do, I always get pushback. And in the end, I get criticized."

"Why don't I ask you the most important question? What do you think is wrong with you?"

"You know the movie It's a Wonderful Life?"

"Yes."

"If that happened to me, there would be no difference in the world."

The scientist took the notes and then smiled and before adding

"Mr. One, our data output concludes you were not under fully. Care you explain?"

Johnny was terrified, so this was what it was like to be on trial for your life, to be unable to form words, much less sentences to try and defend oneself from certain death.

End of part six

I trembled in my chair as the scientist continued

"What was the core trauma you experienced when you took the A pill?"

"You mean...like the worst day of my life?"

"Your core trauma please."

I sighed as I remembered that incident, of course. The memories of it all flooded me, the reason why we had to hold another engagement party becuase of what I had done at the first engagement party. That day I was more depressed and I wished someone would listen to me for once. But that day, my younger brother was the star of the show, it was his day since he finally wooed Adelade, the woman I had been pining over secretly. That day, he was beaming and his blushing fiancee was giggling, everyone was smoking Cuban cigars and gimlets were being handed out, everyone was happy, everyone was celebrating his engagement except for me. All I wanted was happiness and at this moment, I felt like there were no reasons in the world to live anymore.

My brother took the mic and began to sing Sting, whaveter that meant. He was clearly in love with her as he sang.

He was a pretty damn good singer too, everyone loved him, he was the golden boy. Me? I was just some unwanted stepchild, a waste of space, waste of breath, waste of carbon, waste of time, waste of energy. I was all that and more, I should never have been born in the first place.

Maybe if I had never been born, my mom would have had a better life, you would have your perfect karate champion that would have beaten Daniel. I wish I had never been born and that was a desire that was never stronger than at this time right now.

I was a pathetic human being that was irredeemable of anything I had done, I was not worth the effort you put into me, nor the energy, nor the time, not even the passion, you were right Sensei, I am a loser and I always will be a loser, I stood over the ledge, they say suicide is for cowards, they don't know better.

They are cowards themselves becuase they have never tried to meet death like I did. I jumped off the ledge, falling, falling, and plop...I opened my eyes and I realized...I was alive, I landed on the plastic roof overlooking the party as my step mom screamed.

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annabelaplit · 7 years

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Why Remember?

Below is my submission for the Lawrence Alan Spiegel Holocaust Remembrance Scholarship.

In today’s world the Holocaust is known. It is more than known; it is famous, the ultimate symbol of evil and tragedy. It is the great archetype of fear-mongering, the most taboo topic for off-color jokes. Give people a historical figure to kill, and Hitler invariably ends up with 1,000 bullets in his skull. But I think there is a difference between knowing what the Holocaust is and remembering it. It can be hard for people dozens of years and thousands of miles removed to see its magnitude, its misery, and its effects on their own lives.

Growing up, my brother and I saw Sylvia, our great-grandfather Jack’s second wife, infrequently. The pair lived in Florida and the rare times they would visit we would often find ourselves captured by other childish pursuits. However, we always heeded our mother’s warning not to inquire about the strange markings on Sylvia’s arm. In fact, it took years of curiosity for my mother to give the scars context, and even then I was too young for the answers of Holocaust and Auschwitz to have any real meaning.

My mother would also tell me stories of my other great-grandfather, Martin. Although implausible in retrospect, they seemed like fairy tales to my young mind. Martin was the youngest sibling in a very wealthy Hungarian family, perhaps even royalty. However, his parents and siblings supposedly treated him very badly, locking him away in a basement and making him do a great many laborious chores. Finally, he was able to escape in the middle of the night and flee to America. His abusive family met a far more grisly fate; their comeuppance in the form of a certain faith based persecution, implied but never explicitly named. The story ends with Martin catching the eyes of my beautiful grandmother Madelyn on the deck of a ship in the early 1940’s.

I knew these things about my family, knew their Jewish face caused them great hardship, but this knowledge always seemed abstract. To me, the Holocaust was a tragedy, but it was a tragedy consigned to the past, an atrocity before my time. About it I felt a detached sort a sympathy, a recognition of its immorality but not much deeper. It was not until my sophomore year of high school that I started to think differently.

In 2015, I was lucky enough to go on the Carl Burkhardt Gymnasium-Thornton Academy German Exchange. Besides creating enough memories and anecdotes to last a lifetime, the trip was also an incredible educational experience, as I gained first-hand knowledge of German history and culture. Our group spent the final day of the exchange in Berlin; we walked the streets for twelve hours, soaking up the city’s beauty and life. At about 8pm, we passed the Holocaust Memorial and decided to go inside. Although our group entered together, we soon found ourselves splitting apart. I had been conversing with a friend, but as we went deeper into the memorial, we grew silent and then she went one direction and I went another. I found myself standing in the center of four concrete slabs, each rising far above my head. The sky was dusk and the world around me was completely silent.

There’s something about that memorial that makes you think. Alone like that in the dark and quiet, the stones take on an almost menacing presence. The feeling is unsettling, something resembling the sensation of being lost and frantic. It makes you think, question why the memorial was built like this, why the memorial was built in the first place. Standing there, flanked by four sides of stelae, I thought about Sylvia, wondering for the first time about the horrors she might have endured. I thought about Martin, realizing how lucky he was to have escaped in time. I thought about the other branches of my family, the ones who weren’t so lucky, and how inexcusable bigotry and hatred culled them from the pages of history. I thought about how the dark demons of my family’s past are actually amplified by six million.

This is why I believe it is important to remember the Holocaust; because it affects all of us. For every person like me, able to exist because of random combinations of luck and fate, there are thousands who never came into being, whose ancestors perished in the worst genocide known to mankind. The Holocaust has stolen our potential pen-pals, doctors, neighbors, and loves of our lives, people who could have brought more meaning to our existence. It is a not a tragedy tucked into the past, rather one whose tentacles stretch into the present day. We must mourn for the people the Holocaust has robbed us of, and those who bear the brunt of its mental and physical scars. We must mourn and we must make sure history will not repeat itself.

So let us do our best to learn. Let us read Night, watch Life is Beautiful, and search online for witness testimony about what happened in concentration camps. Let us face the horrors head on, embrace the grief and guilt and anger that intertwines with this tragedy. Let us not stop with the Holocaust, but look at Rwanda, Cambodia, and Bosnia and other places where we failed to remember. Let us feel that sick drop in the pits of our stomachs when news articles state abortion statistics as “half a Holocaust”, and major political figures insist Hitler didn’t use chemical weapons on “innocent” people. It is only through learning, through trying to understand the impossible, and committing ourselves to stand up to bigotry of all types, that we can achieve remembrance.

Fighting for these lessons requires courage. It is easy to be brave in the abstract but retreat back into cowardice under the weight of specific scenarios. The United States, the great purveyor of equality and freedom, showed this in 1939 when it turned away 900 Jewish refugees on the St. Louis who were trying to escape from the Third Reich. America’s lack of empathy doomed over a fourth of the passengers to death. To go against protocol and popular opinion may be terrifying, but the cost of such cowardice is paid in lives and your name being inscribed on the wrong side of history.

However, standing up for one’s beliefs can have a tremendous impact, even if one faces nearly impossible odds. Hans and Sophie Scholl were two siblings alive during Hitler’s reign. Appalled by the ideology and actions of the Third Reich, they helped to create a resistance movement at the University of Munich. Between 1942 and 1943 they pronounced and distributed leaflets denouncing World War II and other Nazi crimes, including the treatment of Jews. Although they were caught and executed, their words managed to reach thousands of others throughout Germany, and today they serve as a symbol for the ability of morality to take root in even the most desolate of circumstances. I think that emulating the Scholls, even in small ways, is essential for opposing bigotry. The siblings are certainly heroes of mine.

The history and the lessons that stem from the Holocaust have shaped my life, and will continue to do so as time progresses. I hope through the study of history and German in college I can dig deeper into this tragic event and explore its causes and consequences. But I am just one person. It requires a collective effort in the part of my generation to keep the remembrance of the Holocaust alive.

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