Guilt

I felt sweat drip out of every pore as I walked past the front reception of my fiftieth floor office. Numbers rang inside my head the same way they had been the past eight weeks and they didn’t show any signs of abating today. Annual staff turnover, trailing revenue, adjusted earnings per share, diluted earnings per share, staff options granted this quarter, overhead cuts, squeeze budget bottom lines, whatever the hell it was it didn’t add up. It just didn’t. I had to do it. I saw Walter’s face as I broke the news to him and I can tell you that it just wasn’t pleasant. “But Ravi please you don’t understand. I have kids too. Kate’s just entering primary school this year. You can’t do this to me, Ravi. You can’t.” I couldn’t. But I had to. I felt sorry for Walter. And Melissa, and Aresh, and Kevin, and the rest of you MDs . I couldn’t bring myself to look at the receptionist. “Bye Mr Ramesh” was what Samantha usually said in her bright little twenty year old voice as I walked out of the office. It sounded a little less bright today, and all I could manage was a weak “Good bye” as I walked towards the lift lobby. No small talk about her boyfriend in national service, no advice about her part-time diploma course in the polytechnic, no nothing. Two of her older colleagues had been removed, treated as an overhead that was found surplus to requirements, nothing but a number in the balance sheet that had to be culled. Culled by the plague that emanated from the rest of the financial world as we all drank from the same water infected by the disease that has left everybody writhing in pain and suffering as we all sought brighter futures for ourselves, for our wives and husbands, for our children, for our goddamn Beemers and our own fucking pride. Greed was the name of the plague, and it was time for us to be culled.

I saw the numbers drop rapidly on the LCD as the lift plunged rapidly down the shaft the same way the axe fell on the heads of two hundred other honest colleagues who had to go home to crying babies, screaming teenagers, worried parents and spouses and sleeping pills.

My name was the one that was carved on the culling blade, and everything that’s left on the bodies of these corpses was the indelible mark of my name on the gaping hole that used to be their necks. My hands felt dirty, stained by blood that I could not wash off, even when I commanded them to. I heard a chuckle next to my ear. It had a diabolical and haunting quality, the kind that crept under your skin and squeezed the cold sweat out of the pores of your forehead. Whoever it was, it was gone by the time I turned around, probably laughing its way back down to hell as it prepared to welcome more friends into the land of gnashing and grinding of teeth.
I felt nauseous as I emerged from the lift. The ground floor receptionist nodded his head in my direction as I walked past and I smiled weakly back at him. I walked out of the building and saw a woman waiting at the bus stop with her child in her arms, a baby not more than four years of age and I said to myself, “Ravi, you’ve killed them. You’re a killer”.

I might as well have grabbed the child from the woman’s arms and killed him along with his mother.

The boy looked over his mother’s shoulders and gave me a smile. He was holding a sword and waving it at me. Not the bible, although I wasn’t sure if I was going to hell. Not the kind that cut people either, he was too small to understand what I had done. It was the plastic kind that came with batteries and lighted up when you pressed the little black button on the handle. He waved the sword at me and made little “bish bish” sounds with every little wave of his tiny hands. Maybe he knew. I had to leave before he could remember my face. I turned around and started walking towards the traffic light when I felt a sharp pain in the side of my head. The type that hits you when somebody drove a nail through your temple and into your brain and somehow managed to get the nail to expand and contract so you had those throbbing pains that refuse to go away even when you begged and pleaded. I bent over and rested my hands on my knees. I looked around and everybody seemed to be a little closer to me. I felt surrounded by people I didn’t know, people I might have killed, as if the Great Birnam Wood had come against me.

I looked down again and saw that I had been covered in a thin layer of film, a coating of some sort like a glaze, all over my hair, my face, my fingers, my cufflinks, my suit and I thought “Oh God, what is this?” I turned around and I suddenly understood what had happened to me. I had just emerged from the anus of a large and powerful organisation, whose function in society was to eat up the fruits of labour of honest men and women who put their trust and life savings and all their money in us hoping for a better future, and what we have done is excrete the remnants of our digested waste back into society. I was covered in a patina of excrement, and I could smell the ammonia, the smell that emanated from the layer of shit that covered my entire existence. I had emerged as a member of this big and powerful system and the stains on my body and the blood on my hands were something that would take the rest of my life to wash off. “Out, Damn’d spot! Out, I say!”

The scent became overwhelming. I bent over and gagged, and a small sliver of vomit emerged from my mouth. Oh God, the greed, the excrement, the guilt, the vomit.
I stood up, and looked at myself again, and looked back at the building and I thought, “No no, this is not it”. I had another vision, another moment of clarity, like some sort of an epiphany. The layer of film that covered my body wasn’t what I thought it was. It was something else, something deeper and stranger and yet seemed like it was part of the natural progression of things. And suddenly, it dawned upon me that I had been reborn. Not of woman born, but ripped from the womb of the organisation, the same way these good men and women were so untimely ripped from their workplaces. I was covered in a placenta of some sorts and I had been reborn into a new world of pain and despair and I had been given a new name.

I am Shiva, god of death.