Panopticon

At First Sight

“There are two types of killers in this park.”

Nathan had helped Henry to recover. He would never get his sight back, not with both eyeballs ruptured, but the wounds were far from fatal. The man who had blinded him seemed content with mere mutilation, leaving his victim with a face that almost mirrored his own.

To the technician’s credit, he was handling it as well as he could be expected to. He had screamed at first, fluid leaking down his cheeks, but with some support he seemed to have seized control of the pain. Perhaps he was simply being pragmatic, understanding that he would have time to cry and wail later, but now those feelings had to be shut down in the interests of survival. Either way, Nathan was impressed. He wouldn’t have picked the two of them as likely friends, but now he was almost coming to respect his new companion.

He had been dependent on Henry to survive and escape this island. Now, it seemed, that dependence was mutual.

“There are those who consciously chose to kill. These are people in full possession of their reason, just using it for evil or vengeance.”

Nathan had asked about the eyeless killer, to give something for Henry to do rather than just thinking about his injuries. His voice was still a bit hoarse from the screams, but despite his ordeal it was stable and didn’t waver. For him, the attack had been and gone. He had little left to fear.

“Then there are those who are simply insane and cannot help what they do. That man was in the latter category.” He clenched his jaw. “What he did was wrong, but it was not his fault.”

That took Nathan aback. He couldn’t believe that anybody could be so understanding, let alone a man who had seemed so bitter and hostile just hours before. It might be more pragmatism, he suspected, with this perhaps the lie Henry told himself to control the rage and pain, but it felt more sincere. Was this just another side to the technician, or had the trauma cost him his sanity?

Then again, everyone Nathan had met at this park did seem to have a confused approach to killers, from Charon to the psychiatrists. Perhaps they were right, and he was the unusual one.

“Insane how?”

“He’s a conspiracy nut. We know that he tried to tell to the police about a big criminal gang taking over his town, alleging that they basically ran the place, threatening everybody into silence, recruiting their children, the standard paranoia. He said he’d been watching them for weeks, creeping around alleyways like some comic-book vigilante. With no proof, of course they laughed him away and dismissed it. Nobody knows what happened next, but he showed up the next day without his eyes.”

“The gang?”

He increased his pace, eager to put as much distance as possible between them and the attacker. He would still be lurking, seeking his next victim, and the screams would undoubtedly have attracted more killers like sharks to blood. Henry had been painfully slow at first, struggling to manoeuvre without sight, but as he became more comfortable they could begin to move faster.

“Nobody knows. Perhaps he had been on to something, and just exaggerated it in his madness. Perhaps they’d seen him watching and, taking a rather literal approach to punishments, decided to make him stop. The cops looked into it, but they couldn’t find any evidence that he hadn’t done it to himself.”

“Why would he do that?”

“Like I said, he’s crazy. He then went on to kill two police officers before they brought him down, taking both sets of eyeballs as trophies. If he could do it to them, I think it’s very likely that he did himself too. There aren’t that many people with a taste for that sort of violence. He kept ranting that the cops were part of the conspiracy too, working with the gang, that they didn’t need their eyes because they weren’t using them anyway. He killed his cellmate in his first prison, for similar reasons.”