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Page 7
 As a Nurse Practitioner, I have seen in my young years what humans do to each other. We see it every day in the Emergency Rooms: shot, stabbed, broken, beaten, burned, run over… adults and children alike. Not counting the more subtle things humans do to each other, all the emotional and mental abuse that leaves no visible scars except if you know what to look for in behavioral abnormalities (which leave the victims, especially children, further open to brainless abuse on the playground).
As an educated woman, I also studied history and read literature and knew that every generation must learn the same tragic lesson again on its own. It's called the Human Condition.
One of my favorites is in a dusty book published long ago by a folksy philosopher named Ann Landers, who wrote: We are Stone Age people living in an Atomic Age society.
Nothing ever changes. And here we are again, as always, starting over from the bare essentials.
And here I was, with darkness flooding my eyes and a droning filling my ears, as from a thousand bees, thanks to that unknown monster or monsters last night at that bar.
Or was he (they) as unknowable as I wanted to think?
As I held my head pressed between white, desperate palms and uttered a silent scream, I caught fragmented flashbacks of those cold, insect-like lizard eyes of the men looking at us.
It was starting to come back to me, because I really wanted to know who did this to me.
I saw them or him, whatever… I just blocked it out, avoiding it, as a woman will do, as a human being will do with things too unpleasant to consciously dwell upon with the reasoning mind.
I saw him (them)…
…staring in cold hunger at me, the way that bird had just eyeballed me to see if I'd make a quick snack.
Predators.
My hyperactive brain sorted through thousands of snapshots of men's faces, of dark eyes in white eyeballs, of all manner of faces from narrower to rounder ones, with longer noses or shorter ones, with brown or black or kinky or slicked back hair. With mustache or beard or just bluish shadow needing a shave. In those fleeting seconds and that cutting room floor sequence, I did spot one face…
…I must have noticed him and looked away in utter loathing.
He had a smirk. That alone is nauseating, and cuts like a knife.
Oh, and his eyes were like cold chisel points, carving away at my soul. He had no soul, just a hunger to hurt and dominate and maybe kill.
He was a sociopathic predator, a human-like creature with no soul. He was more of an insect, a spider throbbing patiently in its web, waiting for a passing victim to get stuck and die a slow, agonizing death. Or maybe one of those female spiders that eats the male while they are having sex (he gets one final orgasm for his trouble, before she tears his head off and his world goes forever dark; and she gets a lot of protein to strengthen up her eggs). That face… something about him… He was with three companions, all woman-haters, with those dirty grins that the wolf pack or bully mob shows as they destroy the weak one in their pack.
The guy staring at me had a short, dirty-blond, almost military looking haircut. He had a tattoo of a swastika on his closely shaven temple on the right side. I could figure out that he would let his hair grow over it most of the time, until he was ready to go hunting, with this three beta males following closely. He'd show his colors by shaving the hair along the sides of his head. Maybe it was a prison thing. Sure, he seemed like the kind of male who spent years in prison, learning the whole spider and snake culture there to replace any sort of civilized (or what passes for civil) social norms on the Outside.
I got a fleeting glimpse of his three accomplices as well. They all had short haircuts and some form of tattoo, although theirs were gang symbols on the neck. Mr. Swastika was the leader…
Now I had a clearer memory of who did this to me.
No evidence that would hold up in court.
And I had long ago decided I was not the type of person to get a gun and go hunting for revenge. As abhorrent as that idea was to me to begin with, filling a person with the acid sickness of hate and anger, nothing could outweigh the terrifying idea that I might shoot the wrong person, an innocent person, maybe a loving parent who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong moment, while the dreadful perpetrator would know he'd gotten away once again, and would rejoice at yet more death and horror caused by his presence in this universe, where his type should not exist in the first place, but they do, and they are part of the Jurassic Yard reality of our existence.
At that horrible, terrifying moment, I started to feel a sense of relief. I had an idea who had done this to me, and I understood the (utterly senseless reasons why). I would never see them again, and thus would be spared any further shattering emotional conflict and yes, they'd get away but that also brought me a sense of liberation, of freedom, because I would get better in a few hours and be more careful next time I went to a bar to have drinks among strangers. A lesson learned. And I could tell my story to hotel security so that maybe they also would be wiser next time.
I remembered the cell phone, and looked down.
Not that I could have summoned the concentration or coordination to call my friends.
The cell phone, in any case, had fallen into a puddle of water near the garden hose at the edge of the patio, and was dead and drowned. A bubble sat trapped in its plastic face, and I could be sure its interior was entirely underwater and short-circuited. In fact, I could hear sputtering, sparking noises. So much for calling. I was on my own for however long it took for this hallucinogenic event to pass.
I was not done yet with this madness.
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