#4

[Jules]

The Indian guru Paramahansa Yogananda once taught “life is a battlefield”. The lesson John Dionysus had learnt that the battle was against Life itself, and its powerful generals Fate, Fortune and Circumstance. For fifteen years John Dionysus had suffered at the hands of these conspirators and their attempts to sabotage him. Like a super-virus infiltrates the host and assimilates itself with that very system to eventually work against itself and destroy itself, so too had Life done to John Dionysus. The real enemy was elusive, subtle, within.

On the battlefield there are no winners, only survivors. John Dionysus had survived the blows of Fate, Fortune and Circumstance; he had parried every offense that Life could throw at him. He had found the enemy within and had set about conquering it. This battle was a struggle greater than any a man could face; so why should anyone possess the idea that ‘The Grave Stalker’ could have a weapon powerful enough to destroy a man who had fought long and hard against the colossus of existence itself?

*

We are inside a dimly lit room, the presentation of which is via a low-spec digital hand-held camera resting on a tripod. As a result the picture is poorly lit and not of the highest quality; the effect is quite deliberate. John Dionysus is the only human soul in the room. He is sat on chair, centre screen, and a small table can be seen to his right. On the table is a single 70cl bottle of bourbon whiskey and a single 13oz glass tumbler; the tumbler is empty.

“I am a man in pain,” John Dionysus begins. “For the past fifteen years of my life I have felt nothing but the most excruciating and relentless pain a man could bear. I’m not talking about the kind of pain you pop to the doctor’s or to the emergency room in order to have relieved and satiated. I’m talking about a pain that burns faster, deeper and with greater intensity than a mere ailment of the body.”

“My father used to say it was the pain of the fires of Hell flickering away at my spirit. My father understood this pain, but try as he might he should could not provide any cure that would extinguish it. It frustrated my father greatly, but sometimes you just have to accept that the pain will not go away, and that his cure wasn’t the ‘one-size fits all’ cure he thought it was, like a paracetamol for the soul.”

“As time went by I stumbled across a name that seemed fitting for this pain: another man called it the ‘unbearable lightness of being’, and appreciating its irony I adopted it as the correct diagnosis of my condition.”

“How did I come to be afflicted in this way? In short a certain number of catastrophes befell me; the details are not important but for the sake of my witnesses let’s just say by observing our futility in the face of Fortune’s depravity the weight of ‘lightness’ is a heavy burden on one’s soul. For me the burden was too much to bear and ‘society’ was only too ready to provide me with the anaesthetic.”

Dionysus opens the bottle of bourbon and fills the tumbler to the brim, carefully setting down and resealing the bottle of bourbon afterwards. For a few seconds Dionysus considers the tumbler and its amber contents. In such a short space of time so many thoughts pass through Dionysus stream of consciousness; his craving flickers deep inside the network of neural pathways that trigger his emotional response to this false opiate.

“For fifteen years I tried to drink away the pain, and with every mouthful I felt increasingly liberated from the weight of the pull of ‘lightness’ on me. There is a world of people who will tell you there is nothing to be found at the bottom of a bottle, and there is nothing but nihilism in addiction. I can only conclude about these people that they have never felt this pain [thumps his chest], or they are too stupid to know a ? from a ?. In this bottle [points at the bourbon] I found a cure that no doctor could prescribe, a release no psychologist could give me, and salvation that extends far beyond what any preacher may have promised me. Or so I thought.”

“When you are sober it feels just as heavy as it did before.”

Dionysus opens the bottle of bourbon again. He picks up the tumbler and carefully returns the whiskey to the bottle and re-seals it. Vapours from the bourbon waft into his nostrils and its heady fragrance conducts its sensual flirtations, exciting a recognition that sets in a motion a familiar bodily and mental chain of events. Dionysus shakes off the urge with some difficult, resting the practically empty tumbler back in its place next to the bottle.

“So why tell you all of this? Well, it is strictly relevant to my story and why I am in APW, but the long and short of it is that in Miami I will face a man whose goals appears to me to be the destruction of something he perceives as evil; a corrupt edifice he wants to raze to the ground. Fortunately, and I can say this with some confidence, it is not me. However, I am part of the means to that end. Donovan Caine sees me as some barrier that stands between him and what he has fixed his mind on to achieve. Well that’s fine, let’s just see ‘The King of The Dead’ try and knock me over.”

“The purpose of my anecdote Donovan is to illustrate incompatibility between your story, as you see it, and my own. In your story you defeat me at Survive & Conquer and from there your hunt for C.J. Gates begins. Am I right? Well I am sorry to disappoint you Donovan but that scenario is based on a reckoning of me that is grossly misplaced.”

“When I reflect on my own life’s story I come to realise one vital thing: I have survived? Throughout the hardship and the suffering I have faced I have endured; despite the best efforts of Fate, Fortune, and Circumstance I remain; in spite of my attempts at self-destruction the fire inside of me still burns. For the past fifteen years I have had life itself doing its level best to put me in the grave, and I have deflected to relative safety everything she has thrown at me. I am not dead, so you tell me, what do I have to fear from a ‘Grave Stalker’?”

“After fifteen years of trying to drink myself free of the ‘unbearable lightness’ (as though I could exorcise the pain through my urine, my faeces and my vomit) I have found a new cure that is serving me much better than the old, add to that I am as battle-hardened by the school of hard knocks as any championship veteran in this company. As you’ll find out that can be an explosive combination.”

“I’ve come to realise that there is no better painkiller than adrenalin, and nothing has been a greater source of that in my life than when I have been inside the wrestling ring competing against another man, woman or alien. Please, do not confuse me for either a sadist or a masochist. I take no pleasure in carrying out excessive violence and harming others; by the same token I derive no pleasure or inspiration from taking physical punishment at the hands of another. Sure, this is a sport of warriors and sometimes you are going to have to harm another to a certain extent to get the job done, and there are days when you are going to have to take a few blows and to make it in this business you’re going to have to learn to suck it up. But I am not greatly moved by either: I am neither a psychopath nor a freak. Physical harm is simply something I accept as something that comes with the territory; a necessity of the path we choose.”

“But my pain, the very pain I am concerned about, you, Donovan, can do nothing to either alleviate or prolong it. I’m here to compete and to battle in the only art I’ve known thus far: survival. There will be good days and there will be bad days, but in that squared circle I have a reason, I have a meaning, I have a way to escape the unbearable.”

“Over our two previous meetings I have taken everything you can throw at me, and you have done likewise with all that I’ve got, but on Sunday Donovan you are going realise win-lose-or-draw that there some things that even ‘Thing King of the Dead’ just cannot take down.”

The scene fades.