The Faithful Servant
My God, to what debasement have I come? To what has he come? This failing flesh, this captured spirit. What deadening grip has come upon us in this twilight age? This endless, empty wasteland, scoured without surcease by a ghost who can neither find his rest nor remember his life enough to seek redemption for the sins which torment him. I am alone here, now. My sad, quisling life is testament to the slinking power of obsequious submission. And I, unlike the pallid ghost who lays in the next room, can remember my sins. Do I dare to seek redemption? I hardly dare to think of it.
I remember the time when we first met. I was a waiter, and he came in with the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen on his arm, but I could hardly look at her, for I could not tear my eyes away from his. The entire place stopped and swiveled its collective head to gape at him, though he was then relatively unknown.
It was not exactly that he was handsome. He was, but only somewhat. Black hair cascaded off his head in ringlets that bounced off his shoulders when he walked, and his eyes were profound, twinkling with destiny. But his nose was a bit small, and a bit crooked, his chin not as full of jaw as might be desirable.
These imperfections did not matter. There was something that called to us, even then, which lends higher tragedy to the events that followed. I used to lay awake at night raging to no one that he did not need it, did not need to prostitute himself as he did, that all he wanted was in his reach already. I knew it was so even then, the moment he walked in my restaurant and sat at my table.
But he did not know. It does not seem possible within the natural laws of the universe, but he did not know it. For years I thought it only faux-modesty on his part, that inside he must have heard the voice of God, telling him to only wait, that all would be his in time. But he did not hear.
The details of how I came to work for him that day are unimportant and uninteresting. It is exactly as you might expect, a word from him and my life changed, nothing more. A week later I was his valet, wearing a smart uniform with his family’s monogram on the breast, proud as ten peacocks that it was so. He was a Councilman then, low in the pecking order but rising fast. Well-positioned, was the word they were using. Councilman Bernardo Barilla, a well-positioned young man.
His grandfather, Trafaldo Barilla, had been a thief and a murderer, who expropriated lands from a succession of neighbors, building up a heap of trouble before getting lucky and finding oil on those lands that allowed him to grease palms and hire hard men to defend his interests. His son—Bernardo’s father—was called Fernando, and Fernando became an oil baron, expanding his father’s empire by the same methods with the same thuggery.
Bernardo grew up in hatred of his father, and swore as a boy to be nothing like him, and his father knew this though he never said it, and so he hated his son though he could not bear to say so. That hatred poisoned him, and he died when Bernardo was only sixteen years old, and left him a great fortune that Bernardo swore to use to make a difference for his country.
He made of himself a gentleman in everything. His father’s hatred had left him in the hands of tutors, and Bernardo studied well. He had read widely, in Spanish, English, and Latin. He sang and played the piano, painted and rode horses, and a dozen other arts, and of course he excelled in all of them. When we met, I worshipped him for this easy skill, this surfeit of talents, but now I can see that it was this lack of adversity that made him so vulnerable to what would come.
Bernardo married the beautiful woman, and I was his groomsman, for he had no boyhood friends. He spent his days traveling the country, speaking beautiful truths to his people and being adored by them. When the next elections came, he ran for Senator, and the crowds increased in size.
These were the halcyon days, and I feel lucky to have known it even then. I would stand behind him and listen to him speak, and look out over the faces of the adoring crowd, feeling their cheers wash over us, and it felt as if they were cheering for me because I was part of him. We all were. It was then I fell in love with him, not so low and base a love as desire, but a spiritual love, a devotion beyond the physical.
Now I sit in this room, with this ghost down the hall, and I weep for my foolish past, curse the man I was, the abandon I allowed myself in dancing to the rhythm of his charisma. When I think back, there was nothing to be done, I was captured, and yet I wonder, if only I had found the strength, to hold something back, to possess myself more jealously, it would have been better not just for me but for him. Then perhaps somewhere along the line— No. There was no line. No progression. Just fate.
He lost the election. Somehow, he lost, and we felt betrayed by our fellow countrymen, just as I could sense he felt betrayed despite the warm and conciliatory words he spoke when it became clear it was over. He lost and he had never lost anything before, never been second best, and poor Bernardo did not take it well. The meals I prepared him went uneaten in the hall outside his bedroom, and I would come round to collect the untouched plates and listen long at the door, hoping to hear him talking or whispering or at least moving within.
After a month, he emerged, showered and shaven, as if nothing had happened, and announced he was going away for a time. When he returned, he had it in his bag, though he tried to hide it from me inside his room. Where he got it, I have never known. It is the question I was forbidden above all others to ask, and in my sycophancy I obeyed.
He began plotting another campaign. There was a special election in another district, and he decided to run even though he had never set foot in the district before. People said he’d lost his mind, but Bernardo seemed supremely confident, even in private. I could not imagine then what gave him such belief, I was only glad he had it, and that he was eating again. Then the strange coincidences began.
Bernardo’s main opponent in the special election was a heavy favorite to win. He consolidated support from the other challengers, and the media started to pointedly suggest to Bernardo that he concede. Bernardo refused, smiling like a Buddha and predicting victory. He was down thirty points in the polls, but the week before the election, his opponent withdrew from the race, citing health concerns that were not documented by any doctors.
I know not the mechanism that caused this withdrawal, but I now know the source of the mechanism—The machine he brought home from whatever devil’s workshop, the spiteful, greedy god in a box that he took to his room and would scurry up to consult whenever an important decision loomed. I know this now, I say, but at the time I could not know because I was not looking. It seems so impossible now that I want to deny the reality, but at the time I was happy. He was back, and I was his man, and life was good.
Senator Bernardo was sworn in, and almost immediately, the path between him and power began to clear. The head of his assigned committee had embarrassing photos of him with prostitutes come to light and was forced to resign. Bernardo was promoted into his place. This elevation perturbed several other committee members who felt slighted, but within three months, all were gone from the Senate by various scandals and ailments.
When I simply list out these coincidences, my conscience throbs with guilt. How could I not have known? Not have done something for him? The weight of what this has become stacked atop those early warning signs I missed squeezes my heart, sending jolts of panic through me at odd moments. But I must remind myself of the good things he did, that made these signs so easy to miss.
In truth I do not even know that the box was responsible for all these early coincidences! Lucky things happen in the world every day. Fate may not be real, but fate as a concept has not persisted since time immemorial on the back of nothing. But even if it was, even if he started consciously collaborating with it earlier than I can bring myself to admit, the good things he or they or it did are not erased.
For Senator Bernardo Barilla was a genius of legislating. He saw connections between loci of power that no one had seen, and brought people together with his talent and charisma to illuminate those connections and help his people as he had set out to do. He replaced two thousand miles of lead pipe that had been poisoning children in his state for fifty years. He started a food program that feeds the hungry to this very day. That is why despite his sins, there are so many in this land who love him still, and speak with gratitude the surname of the thief and the murderer and the oil baron who gave Bernardo Barilla life.
If only it had stopped there. If Senator had been enough. My greatest wish is to believe that it would have been enough, for him. That the box was what made him continue. I can never know for certain, and so I choose to believe that. But what I know is what happened—he began to spend more time with it.
At the beginning, he would just ask it questions. He would be stuck on a situation, and he would seek an answer. I would hear him talking to it when I took up his meals, explaining the details. I could not hear the words it spoke back, just a buzz in his headphones so that I knew it was speaking. Now he began to listen more. Sometimes for hours, through multiple meals, there would only be the buzzing, and he would say nothing at all.
I tried to speak to him about these goings on. He remarked that I was looking at him strangely, and he turned those destiny-laden eyes to me, and I felt obligated to speak the truth. But when I spoke the words, his brow turned down, and narrowed, and his head began to shake side to side, almost imperceptibly, and it shut me up quick.
He spoke once, an oblique remark about his “faithful servant”, by which I’m quite sure he meant the box and not me. Then he turned away; when he looked back it was as if I had not spoken, and I did not sleep for three days, so terrified was I that he would banish me from his presence for my impertinence.
I was still in love with him. With what he might be. I still am, even now, as he lies in the next room, a living ghost. My hindsight does not change what the past was, or who I was in it. Hard earned wisdom does not expiate guilt. Redemption is its own activity, not just an understanding.
Then one day, he stopped talking to the box. He went on a short trip, overseas and without me, and when he returned, he took his meals in the dining room once more and no longer went up to his room for long, buzzing palavers. Instead he began to drift at times, lost inside his own head, and after a few days I realized that he’d had surgery while overseas, to have a permanent link installed between his brain and the box.
Once I realized what was happening, it became painfully obvious. He practiced hard at it like he did with everything, until in public nobody could tell that he was ever drifting or having a secondary conversation through his link. But I always knew. I knew him better than anyone, even his beautiful wife who only seemed to care about his money anyway.
He announced his intention to run for President casually, while I was serving him breakfast. I had two sausages on a large fork, poised over his plate, and when he told me I dropped them in his lap, then had to scramble to get his backup uniform ready and on him in time for his first meeting.
What shocked me was not just what he said, but his tone. It was growing deeper, adding gravitas. It had the same feel of destiny that his eyes had once had, but the eyes were dulling as the voice brightened. No one in public could see it yet, but I could.
He embarked on his campaign, and became famous for being the first Presidential candidate in the nation’s history to direct his own commercials. Those spots were so riveting that he vaulted into the lead in the Presidential race, and in time won it without anything terrible even happening to his opponents.
I was standing beside the stage when he gave his Inauguration speech, and I could see that he was faraway, talking to the box, which was stored safely in his bulletproof limousine. Everyone else seemed to see nothing, and it occurred to me not for the first time that perhaps I was insane, that there was no box, and that Bernardo’s ascent to the Presidency had been simple talent and luck. Would that it were so. Insanity is my fondest wish at this moment, but I do not believe that we are so lucky. I have seen too much.
It was scarcely two weeks after the Inauguration when the first murder occurred. It was his cook, who stumbled upon him in the kitchen while he was in full communion with the box through his neural link, eyes rolling in his head. I was standing beside, waiting for him to return, but concentrating on him and unaware of the cook’s approach. When she gasped, he came to in an instant, and grabbed her before I could protest.
She tried to fight but he was a strong man, hardened by years of competitive athletics, and he shrugged off her arms and strangled her, right there in front of me. And I shook with fear but dared not run; I convulsed with remorse in my soul but lifted no hand to stop it, only watched, and saw him watching me, and knew that the box was judging my reaction to see if I needed to die as well.
He tried to explain it, afterwards. He made strange excuses about secrets she had revealed to our enemies, as if his attack had been long-planned, and even though it made no sense I rushed to assure him that I understood. I wish I could say that it was fear that prevented me from speaking the truth, but it was still love, even then, misguided and wavering but still strong in me. I knew I had already given myself to him, that his downfall was mine no matter what, and the desperation of that state must not be underestimated. That is no excuse for me, but perhaps it is some explanation for why I stayed.
There were others in the years to come. I tried to find a moment to tell him that it was unnecessary. I wanted to say that no one could tell what was happening, and that even if they could, they were too terrified of him—of it, now, I realized I had begun to think—to breathe a word to anyone. The deaths of those close to him were far more suspicious. But he was paranoid, and never in a good mood anymore, and his anger frightened me into silence. The shames washes over me to admit that truth, and this one besides: I no longer remember how many I have watched him kill.
He was reelected, then elected a third time, in landslides. His governance was immaculate. Internationally he became known as The Miracle Worker. The economy grew at ten percent for six straight years. He had eighty percent approval. But he ran up against constitutionally-mandated term limits, and there was a core of opposition determined that he should step down. Even many of the people who approved of his leadership thought it best for the constitution to stand.
Bernardo called a secret meeting of the most important people in the country. He had them all to the Presidential Residence for a lavish meal, and plied them with the best food and drink. He stood before them and spoke words of peace and reconciliation. I stood beside him and listened to those words, and heard that he was not drifting—these words were coming from the man I loved—and tears flowed for my face. Whatever happened to his power after this, those words meant something.
I looked out over the faces in the crowd, and I saw that they were moved as well. I felt a flash of insight in my heart, that he might just convince them to give him a third term and change the constitution.
Then I started to notice bulging on the faces of the opposition. Redness crept into their features. Mouths opened, and someone in the back vomited, though I didn’t see who it was. Poisoned. In thirty seconds, they were dead. I looked at Bernardo and found him still smiling, seeming not at all to see the distress of his guests. And then I realized that it was not Bernardo at all that I was looking at, but the box. It had taken over somehow. The man I loved was not gone. He was a golem. A ghost.
I cleaned it up for him. They took the bodies away to do whatever they did with the bodies, and I supervised the household staff in cleaning up the plates, and washing off the blood and vomit, and separating the salvageable table linens from the ruined ones, and the normalcy of it jarred something inside of me, set it to rattling, and the rattle has not stopped for all these long weeks since that night. I wake in the darknesses like this one, and smell the smell of that room, and feel the rattling, deep inside of me.
He has a nuclear weapons program. I know that for a fact, because he told me. I’m his only real companion, now, though the bitter taste of it will not allow me to say friend. I am not his friend, because I am not it’s friend, and it is him now. But whatever part is still him needs to talk to someone, and I am that someone. It must trust me, too, on some level, for it allows him to talk to me, and I must believe that if it did not permit that to happen, it would not.
The weapons program is well hidden from the international inspectors, and in less than a year, it will produce operational warheads and ICBMs to fire them anywhere, and then he will be untouchable. And I know now that it is insatiable. I have made peace with that. There will be no stasis with control of our country and the protection of missiles. It will not be satisfied to make us prosperous and be beloved. The same impulse that made it kill to avoid the chance of detection, however minimal, will not let it rest until the world is in its control.
I do not know where the box came from, but I know that about it.
He grew more paranoid, yet somehow I stayed inside the circle of its trust. I cook his meals and sleep in his guest bedroom and clean up his messes, bloody or otherwise. And I stay, and do those things, still, as this madness spirals upwards towards a sky of unknown height.
It is not merely his need for companionship that keeps me trusted and keeps me alive, despite what I know. It is that the box cannot imagine a human as inconstant as me. That is its one weakness. At scale, it knows what we will do better than we do ourselves, by far. But one human can contain multitudes, and that is our great— well, it’s hard to call it a strength, but maybe it’s our great equalizer.
Why do I stay? It thinks me cowed, no doubt. To do the things I have done for him, to countenance what I have countenanced from him, surely I am a dog from back to belly and nose to tail. And so it does not protect him—does not protect itself—from me, as it should.
And I am afraid. But I am not cowed. If I were, I would not lie awake these long, hot nights, sweating through sheets and contemplating terrible deeds. I stay because I love him still, love the man he was, grieve for the ghost he has become, wandering this land looking for redemption and rest yet only piling more sin upon his soul.
I want to believe that he has been gone a long time. I want to think that the glimmers I saw of him, as he was, during those speeches and the long years after he began to talk to the box, were just affectations that the box stole from him when it stole his body, and that the greatest man I have ever known has in truth been dead a long time. But I will never know.
That duality is what gives me my opening, for the box cannot believe it. That is the only explanation for why I am not dead already. If it believed I was even capable of thinking the thoughts in my mind now, it would have killed me long ago.
When I go and smash the box, only moments now, I want to believe that Bernardo will re-emerge, that the years will fall away from his eyes, that perhaps he will even have no memory of the years between, that he was no golem but a prisoner in his own mind.
But even if that happens, I will turn from smashing the box and kill him next. I can never know that it is not a trick, that there is not a backup box that will immediately reconnect with his link and take over seamlessly. Maybe if there is, that backup box will take over another body after Bernardo is dead, and this cycle will begin again. Perhaps it will use one human host at a time until one of them succeeds and it is able to rule the entire world through that proxy.
But that is someone else’s problem, not mine. I am a poor player, with but one small hour to slink about the stage. My problem is to go kill the man I love most in the world. I am making this record to inform the international authorities of what has happened here, in case of a backup box, and in any case so they can go dismantle the nuclear weapons program. I don’t know where it is, but it exists.
May God have mercy on me for what I am about to do. The idea that I may be insane has never left me from the first time I thought it. It is possible that I am about to kill the greatest President my country has ever had. It’s possible that I’m the one with the box in my head being controlled. It is possible that— well, all sorts of things are possible. I’m just a waiter, I’d never thought to play any great part in history.
I see why he yearned for the relief of advice from a being smarter than we are. If someone or something could take the responsibility for this choice from my shoulders, I would give them a lot in exchange. I already gave my freedom and my soul for a lot less.
Enough message. I’m stalling now. I wonder what I’ll do when it’s over, but it doesn’t matter. Run or turn myself in or kill myself, I’ll have fulfilled my purpose. I don’t know who built the box, and I don’t need to. None of us knows how our fate is constructed, otherwise it’s not fate. Here I go. I love you, Bernardo. Be free.
END
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