Page 147 of Cruel Malady: A Necrosis of the Mind

Keeping our fingers threaded together, he pulls me close. He doesn’t say it; he doesn’t have to. The intoxicating combination of blood and his heady scent is an aphrodisiac, coaxing me even closer, and I meet him there, our bodies colliding together.

Lust. Comfort. Purging.

We experience it all in a secret chamber of our minds. We express what’s too overwhelming to be voiced through desperate caresses and needy kisses, taking and giving and loving until we’ve expended every energy-carrying molecule between us.

When the heightened emotions start to ebb and release us, we do what’s necessary to remain free—to remain together.

EPILOGUE

MALADY

BLAKELY

Mary Shelley wrote: “It is true, we shall be monsters, cut off from all the world; but on that account we shall be more attached to one another.”

I once referred to Alex as Dr. Victor Frankenstein. With his makeshift mad scientist’s lab, and his medieval instruments designed to torture, he was the very essence of the fiendish scientist who sought to create life from death, to make man a god.

Alex viewed my psychopathy as a form of emotional death. To him, I was lifeless, unfeeling, wielding the ability to hurt and cause injury cruelly and without remorse. And like the doctor, he aimed to bring me to life, to give me the capacity to feel, to experience empathy, to suffer guilt.

I was already a monster in his eyes, and he would not only breathe metaphorical life into me, he would recreate me in his image.

What an obvious god complex.

Yet, for all their similarities, none drew a deeper parallel to Shelley’s sinister character than Alex subjecting his cruel experiment on the unwilling and taking lives he deemed expendable. In doing so, Alex himself became the monster.

The point of all scientific endeavors is to answer a question, to solve a problem.

Alex claimed psychopaths were the problem, that our ability to kill and cause pain mercilessly needed a solution. But I never believed this, not really.

Having recently experienced the depth of emotions, I discovered what it feels like to be alone, to feel so isolated you can’t breathe, you can’t function. Loneliness is a disease that will wither your body and mind far more ruthlessly than any physical illness.

Alex was alone.

That was the truth of his incurable malady.

In the novel, the monster demanded that Frankenstein create a soulmate for him to share in his misery, so he would not suffer alone. Even to a gruesome monster, the reality of living his life in solitude was too great to bear.

Alex was a conundrum in that he shared characteristics with both the doctor and the monster simultaneously.

After he lost his twin sister, the last of his family, I’d argue this was the true catalyst for his descent into madness. Not the desire to restore her reputation (though discovering such a horrific secret about one’s sibling could nudge one closer to the edge), but it was staring into a lonely future that catapulted the first experiment.

When Alex found me, he wasn’t trying to cure a disease, but rather, he wanted to create another monster in his likeness to share in his misery.

Even the most cruel and monstrous villains desire love.

And fiends like Alex and I are in fact detached from the larger world. We had to create an existence of our own, governed by our own logic and rules, an existence we share only with one another.

In my case, it was love that nearly destroyed me. As Victor stated himself through Shelley’s narrative: “Nothing is so painful to the human mind as a great and sudden change.”

I am a testament to the veracity of that statement.

It’s when I stopped fearing change and embraced my evolving nature that I was able to trust my feelings for Alex and accept us together.

As London’s advice stated: “You have to learn to embrace your emotions.”

She told me this was the only way, and for all her psychotic psychobabble, she was ultimately right when it came to this one crucial element.

The pain and fear and isolation faded into the backdrop of my past, like abstract art splattered on canvas. Disordered, chaotic, feverish, yet the colors bled together to create a beautiful union only we can appreciate.

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