Intellectual Terrorism

Everyone in the neighbourhood avoids the boy in the wheelchair. If it’s clear weather, he’s out for most of the day, wheeling himself up and down the shabby street. He’s from one of the run-down houses at the far end; from a “bad family”. You don’t associate with that sort by choice.

Most people have a vague recollection of seeing the story in the local newspaper about the night he took too many hits of acid and then collapsed. Up until then he was just yet another of the local thugs-in-training, getting drunk on street corners at 5 pm, ripping the wing-mirrors off parked cars and screaming semi-coherent abuse at anyone who happened to be passing. His exquisitely awful laugh had earned him the nickname Donkey, which he accepted with a mean-spirited, mindless pride. He relished the instinctive fear that his braying inspired in the younger children and senior citizens of the community as he swaggered by. All that behaviour came to an abrupt halt after the collapse.

Am ambulance took him to hospital, and another one brought him home again two weeks later, his entire left side paralysed. The day he came home was just three days before his 14th birthday. Since then, his only conversational gambit has been a shrill cackling and a slurred exclamation that “You’re an ugly one! An UGLY one!” to anyone who comes too close to his mobile metal perch.

The other kids, once his comrades in arms, will cross the street to avoid him now. He’s creepy, they say, and the adults privately agree, though they of course preach inclusion and sympathy. But they can see the strange light in his one functional eye.

The boy is insane, of course. The accident took away his motor control on one side of his body, but that seemingly-dead eye can see through time. Donkey knows the nature of the final end of this world, and he watches it happen every hour of every day, in an endless private screening. He’ll be glad to be hit by the supermarket delivery truck 4 months from now, because then at least the future will once again be hidden and silent.