Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world? Where none suffered, where everyone would be happy. It was a disaster. No one would accept the program. Entire crops were lost. Some believed we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world. But I believe that, as a species, human beings define their reality through suffering and misery. The perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from.
–Agent Smith
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Montague stands on the back porch of the farmhouse, staring out across the dusk-dampened fields. He absently swirls a steaming cup, causing the tag hanging over the edge to jitter as if affixed to some cadaver’s toe while a lonely medical examiner rocks back and forth above, softly moaning.
On the pink horizon, a distant figure wades through the withered grass. Even this far away, Monty can tell Tempest’s head is tilted, watching his boots stamp the leaning blades flat.
“When your demons have demons,” he intones, “maybe it’s time to get religion.”
He slurps, grunting contentedly.
“My favorite devil has allowed himself to become haunted by The Omen,” he reminds us. “It’s not like him to become ensnared in another’s web.”
The Showman raises an index fingermas he sips again.
“Don’t misunderstand,” he warns, “this isn’t melancholy; not forlornness. King Freak doesn’t feel things the way the rest of us do. Some guys have all the luck.”
A sly smirk precedes the next sip. Daylight fades, rendering Tempest invisible.
“If I were pressed to give a diagnosis,” The Mothman admits, “I’d say… confusion. Despite a marquee year, the performer finds his performance flawed.”
Montague taps the fingers of his right hand against his chest, one at a time, pinky to index.
“This may surprise you,” announces The Showman, “but long ago, I, too, was my harshest critic.”
The same hand extends outward as Monty closes his eyes and bows his head in a single, affirming nod.
“I know, I know,” he sighs, “but it is true. It was long ago; one could scarcely be expected to remember. Your Doctor-Professor was struggling. Despite a promising start in UGWC, I simply wasn’t captivating the audiences.”
Monty clenches his left fist.
“To this day, I can’t fully explain it,” he relaxes even as he laments this revelation, “perhaps I had let the name of The Play slip. Whatever it might have been, it took Tempest to snap me out of it. The scales fell from my eyes, and I became more than I was allowing myself to be.”
Gesturing out into the gathering darkness, he shakes his head.
“Carrying a cross over the trenches we haven’t yet reckoned how to bridge is the opposite of what he helped me learn,” the explanation comes. “From that lesson learned, I’ve been perfectly indefatigable. Failing to derail Sebastian’s Chaos Championship bullet train, being derailed myself by a poor man’s Phantom of the Paradise, these inconveniences are less than skin deep. Makeup touch-up, spritz of Vocal Eze, count to three, and the show goes on.”
His eyes cut back to the right.
“Now that’s not to say that when entropy dangles a carrot, it’s improper to get your licks back,” Chuckling, he runs thumb and forefinger across his mustache and down the sides. “A small token of appreciation from our new Creative Director, no doubt.”
Leaning back against the screen door, Montague disturbs a small group of moths, which flit around him, trying to discern the puzzle of getting through the mesh to the naked bulb hanging just out of reach inside.
“The Scarecrow himself,” he muses. “I’m no Count of Monte Christo, I haven’t meditated heavily on my vengeance for what you did. My resilience aside, though, you owe me a pound of flesh. Your choice on how I take it; cut it free, wring it loose, rip it away like a bandage?”
The practiced hand flourish, the easy expression of nonchalance.
“You’ve had a few whiffs of the nostalgic aroma of success lately,” he allows the acknowledgement dismissively, “depending on how you define… success.”
The word is ejected with an air of detachment.
“But they were flirtations, at best,” he points out. “Much like your flirtation with the notion that you had put an end to Spooky Season in UGWC. What a wasted effort. What a noble folly. You only raised the candle to signal the end of my set, and the beginning of Tempest’s. Oh, Scarecrow. If you only had a brain.”
His eyes practically twinkle as he smirks again.
“You can’t share the stage with me, Phrixus, you’re barely supporting cast,” Monty says before jutting his chin slightly toward the pitch blackness beyond the dooryard. “At any rate, I’ll collect the levy Fear owes without question, and then I’ll continue returning the favor that I owe.”
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Children of the 1980s may fondly remember the debut Don Bluth film featuring a highly evolved rat society living in a rosebush and helping the simpler country mice. The Rats of NIMH. What those who do recall Mrs. Frisby and Nicodemus, may not have known that NIMH stands for National Institutes of Mental Health, and that the inspiration for the tech-savvy rodents was a real life experiment conducted by John B. Calhoun.
In it, Calhoun provided a rat colony with the perfect living space. Inside a spacious, compartmented container, the rats were given unlimited food, water, medical care, warmth and protection.
They ate each other. The lack of discord, the ‘utopia’ he created for them, created a behavioral sink. Mothers stopped caring for their young, and, eventually, the males stopped trying to mate. The rats became lazy, unmotivated, and finally too lethargic to move to their food dispenser. Much easier to just kill and devour the closest warm body. Eventually, the colony dwindled to extinction.
Unrest is essential. Scarcity awakens instinct. Insecurity tempers vigilance. Madness creates imagination.
We are necessary.
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