IDEA - 9-21-2020
by
Patrick Ryan
1,619 Words
Socrates said, "the unexamined life is not worth living," well, certain lives should not be looked at too closely, either. Fred Crawley has trouble sleeping; despite resorting to prescription medications, various sleep apnea apparatuses, numerous meditations, and eastern remedies, Fred will still be up all night. He spends most nights looking at his family's genealogy, collecting details about his family tree, immigration to the United States, and birth and death records. Fred was intrigued by his great-grandfather, who lived the last 30 years of his life in an insane asylum. He found that the family had seven children, but three were killed in three separate fires. Looking closely at the fires' timing and the commitment of his great-grandfather, he formed the theory that his great-grandfather killed three of his children. Someone suggested that Fred go to see a therapist, perhaps it was a mental block that prevented him from sleeping. At his first appointment with the shrink, everything was as expected until Fred, under hypnosis, confessed out of nowhere that he had killed a random person outside a bar in Wyoming and just drove away. It was such a shock that Fred even stunned himself. Saying after exiting the trance, "I never did that, I don't know why I said that." Of course, the doctor wanted to discuss that admission further, but time was running out. Thoroughly perplexed by what he said, he spent the night investigating murders in Wyoming outside bars. His great-grandfather was a truck driver, and he would sometimes drive across the country. His routes would take him across Wyoming, often. There have been several murders that his great-grandfather may have committed, but which ones? His research concluded as inconclusive. That same night, he fell asleep for the first time in three days, he slept three hours before a nightmare woke him. From a first-person viewpoint, someone wandered around an unknown darkened home. Children fast asleep, the intruder makes his way to the kitchen and extinguishes the pilot on the stove, turns the temperature up filling the room with gas, and drops a lit match as he leaves the house. Fred became convinced that he just witnessed one of the murders of his great-grandfather. Somehow there was a shared connection between their memories, a common connection to a madman. Every night, a vivid re-enactment of a horrific murder took over what little sleep he was having. Night after night, his mind started to become poisoned, obsessed with murder and the exhilarating feeling of witnessing insanity. He remained tired all the time, his appointments with the shrink began to become a game; he would create scenarios a professor would call textbook. The shrink enjoyed his superiority, talking over Fred’s head by tossing out diagnosis after diagnosis. Fred had no idea how he knew what to say and what to do to get the doctor to respond, but he enjoyed it. Without a doubt, Fred was experiencing the memories of his insane great-grandfather. Fred’s fixation with arson and murder reached a breaking point where the allure of voyeurism was no longer enough for Fred; he wanted to share in the murderous act with his own hands. Thus started a murder spree, killing ten people in a month, all brought on by an epigenetic propensity for killing shared with his great-grandfather. Fred became a psychopath, killing at will and feeling no remorse. His family began to become suspicious, and his daughter was the one to turn him in. Like his great-grandfather, Fred ended up in a mental institution. Fred's son, Ben, was angry with his sister for turning their father in, and so begins another descent into madness; proving genetics to be a powerful device.
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