Lovers of crime fiction and even more so, followers of true-life crime stories have a weakness: They want the story to come to a satisfactory climax and denouement which finds justice being evenhandedly meted out, the guilty punished, the innocent freed to resume their normal lives. Neat 360-degree affairs rounded off legalistic tidiness. In the case of murders in a certain town there just wasn’t that happy, convenient set of conclusions followed by the lights coming up, THE END hanging in limbo as curtain rattles closed.
The fact was, the murderer was never brought to justice or even revealed; identified by some of us, yes, but never quite brought to heel. The motive remained hidden from the public and the murders remain officially unsolved. And the innocent would never return to the lives they had once found quiet, comforting, normal.
My life was one of those which exploded. I was no writer, no observer, no reporter. I was a participant. And the story kept peeling away, like a snake dropping away its skins, it was I who held it wriggling and twisting and darting out. The truth, when such extreme efforts are made to conceal it develops a peculiar life of its own. It struggles to make itself known, to receive the credit it deserves, to achieve the capital T. The Truth dies hard. Maybe it never dies at all, but lies sleeping, waiting for someone to find it, decipher its code.
The truth exists independent of us all, for its own sake. It has no moral validity. It reminds me of Melville’s white whale. Captain Ahab was wrong: Moby Dick was not evil, he simply was. And so it is with the truth. There it sits, expressionless, a disinterested party. I am what I am, says the truth, and the rest of us are stuck with it.
You will know the truth and only you will be able to decide if it was worth learning. Worth it for the people involved, worth it for you, and most of all if it was worth it for me.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment