Twenty years ago.
"Jimmy, I want you to talk to me about the short story I had you write for me."
"My name is Wraith."
"Okay then, Wraith, I want to talk to you about your story." Dr. Waters said again.
"Why?"
"I want to understand it better."
"You are too stupid to understand it." Wraith said. "You are an idiot that spills ink on your paper and asks people what they see. You think people deserve life even when they are as stupid as you."
"Jimmy, I mean Wraith; we are not going to have that discussion again." Dr. Waters said, as patiently as he could. "At least not at this appointment. Maybe later we will talk about it some more. I just want to ask you about your story. You wrote it after I asked you to, so you must have known I would ask you about it."
"I wrote it because it is true." Wraith said. "I only do what I want to do, not what you 'ask' me to do. I don't care if you understand it or not."
"Fine. But let's talk about it anyway." Waters said. Wraith knew that he was not going to win with this idiot. The doctor just did not get it. He did not understand life so how could he understand the truths behind it?
"Go ahead and ask your stupid questions." Wraith said.
"I asked you to write about a monster, which you did, but it is not at all what I expected." Dr. Waters said. Of course, it was not what he had expected. He had thought that by having Jimmy write about a monster he would show his fears and maybe provide some insight into why he liked to kill animals. What little Jimmy had written, however, was a disturbing tale of a monster that came out of the closet and killed a little boy's parents. Together then the boy and the monster ate the parents over a candle lit dinner. It was so vivid in detail that Dr. Waters nearly lost the contents of his stomach simply reading it. He was beginning to doubt that he could help this boy.
"What did you expect?" Wraith asked. "That everybody would play patty cake and live happily ever after?"
"I suppose I expected for the monster to be presented as more of a villain than a hero. At the very least, I expected the monster to go after the boy rather than his parents." Dr. Waters said.
"Why would he try to kill the boy?" Wraith asked. "The boy was innocent. The parents were the ones that had shown themselves to be betrayers. They were the ones that needed to die. The monster was just protecting the boy from the real monsters."
"Why do you say that they were betrayers?" Waters knew the answer, but it was clear that he wanted to hear it from the little boy that seemed to be quite sick in his opinion.
"They sent him to bed without his supper." Wraith answered. "They were starving him."
"I think they were simply punishing him for misbehaving." Waters said. "You wrote that the little boy had been told not to kick the dog anymore and so he stabbed it instead."
"There is no such thing as misbehavior." Wraith said. "There is only behavior. It can be good or it can be bad, but it cannot misfire altogether unless nothing is done at all. Everybody does something, so there is no misbehavior. The boy did not disobey his mom. She told him not to kick the dog. He didn't. He obeyed his mother and she punished him for it."
"I think it could be reasoned that when she told him not to kick the dog she meant that she did not want him to hurt the dog at all anymore." Waters suggested.
"But that is not what she said." Wraith argued. "She told him not to kick it and he didn't. How can anybody obey implied instructions? If you told me to eat the sandwich on a table, and there was a drink beside it, I would both eat the sandwich and drink the drink. Just because you did not tell me not to drink the drink is no reason to punish me for it."
"So you don't think it was bad for the boy to kill the dog by stabbing it?" Waters asked.
"No, the dog was making the boy mad. When he couldn't kick it anymore, he still needed to do something to get it to stop irritating him." Wraith reasoned.
"So he killed it. Doesn't that seem a little excessive?" Waters asked.
"Why?" Wraith responded with a question of his own. By his facial expression, it was evident that it made perfect sense for the boy to kill the dog. Waters surrendered the point for the moment and decided to move on.
"Let's just keep going for now." Dr. Waters said. "When the monster came out of the closet, why did it not go after the boy?"
"There was no reason for it to kill him." Wraith said. "The boy was innocent. The monster felt bad for him. He had obeyed his parents and they punished him for it. They sent him to bed without his supper and he was hungry."
"Why would a monster care about how the boy felt?"
"Do you think that monsters do not have a sense of right and wrong?" Wraith asked. "Just because you may not agree with their perspective does not make them incorrect or unable to have their own morals that they decide to stick to. If the boy had kicked the dog, maybe the monster would have eaten him too."
"So why did the monster kill the parents instead?" Waters asked.
"Because they were bad people. They told the boy what was expected of him and then they punished him for doing what they said. If they had not been killed, the poor boy would have grown up confused and never knowing if he was going to be punished or not. He might have turned into a bad person too. The monster was protecting him from that." Wraith said. His voice was filled with exasperation. He really did not understand why he needed to explain what should have been obvious.
"So the monster was acting in the boy's best interests by killing his parents?" Dr. Waters asked in order to clarify exactly what little Jimmy was trying to get across.
"Yes." Again there was nothing but conviction and irritation in Wraith's voice and facial expression. He could not believe how incredibly dense this doctor was. How could somebody this stupid possibly have a degree?
"But why did he feed the parents to the boy?" Waters asked. "Doesn't that seem to be a little grotesque to you?"
"The boy was hungry." Wraith said. "The monster wanted to take care of him. He did not know how to cook or make anything else. He knew how to eat people that were bad and so he fed the bad people to the boy."
"Don't you think that it would be hard on the boy emotionally to eat his own parents? After all, they were the ones that had given him life." Waters was trying to find the slightest hint of humanity in his patient.
"Why?" Wraith asked again with confusion. He did not understand what was so hard to understand. "They were starving him and confusing him. What was wrong with eating them?"
"First, it is both wrong and illegal for humans to eat other humans." Waters said. "Second, they were not just any people, they were his parents. Wouldn't it make the boy sad to see his parents killed, let alone to eat them alongside their killer?"
"You are an idiot." Wraith said. "There is nothing wrong with eating when you are hungry. A lot of things are illegal that are stupid. The governments that make stupid laws are just as bad as the parents. They need to die too."
"If there were no rules and no governments, what would there be other than chaos?" Waters asked.
"What is wrong with chaos?" Wraith asked. "Chaos is fair. Chaos does not set rules and then change them at its leisure. Chaos kills those that deserve it because they are too stupid to survive. People like you would be the first to die and that would make the world a better place."
"So your monster is presented as the hero because it is an agent of chaos?" Waters asked.
"Yes." Wraith said. "He took out those that were deserving of death and ignored stupid rules. He made everything right for the boy. The boy would be able to grow up right because of him."
"Right in your opinion." Waters said. "Did you not say that just because something is right in one person's mind it does not make it right in somebody else's?"
"Yes." Wraith said.
"In my mind, nothing about your story was right." Waters said. "So now we both have different views of what is right and what is not. How do you reconcile this? How do you decide who is actually right?"
"I am right because you are stupid." Wraith said. "You don't believe in violence and I do. I will kill you and then your opinion won't matter. That makes me right."
"I do not think you could kill me." Waters said, referencing their obvious size differences.
"Not yet." Wraith shrugged. "When I am big enough I will kill you. You can think you are right until then. When I come for you and you die, then you will see that you have been wrong all this time. I am patient enough to wait for that."