Megalomania

Enjoy.

Lewis and I were always having psycho-analysis competitions with each other. He’d claim that I suffered from monomania, so I’d have to go one up on him and say that he was schizophrenic. He wasn’t, of course, but just by saying it aloud I knew he’d believe it for a few hours. After these accusations, we’d always keep away from each other for a few hours; half out of annoyance and half to analyze ourselves, just to make sure the claims weren’t true.

On that particular day I went for a walk in the snow. We lived in a small village about an hour’s drive from Zurich, which was guarded on the eastern side by the ever watchful eyes of the offspring hills of the Alps. The land was just letting go of winter, which had gone on its inevitable nine-month holiday recently, leaving spring to watch over things. You could tell the place really did belong to winter though; there was no real summer to speak of and even when the milder seasons moved in, they didn’t bother to change temperature much. You could only tell it was winter when he brought the snow with him. I liked him, and his snow.

I left the village and walked for about twenty minutes in the white-powder furniture of the season just gone and eventually sat down amongst it. I had made my way up one of hills the near our home and was now sitting on a boulder that had been in the same place for longer than I could remember. My life was too spread out and lacking in order for me to have monomania, so I eventually put that allegation to rest and started back home. When I got there, Lewis was in his room listening to some vaguely classical post-rock that sounded like someone had killed a bunch of musicians and their instruments had been left producing faint sounds of life. He’d be in there for a few hours, sorting himself out with the aid of a pack of cigarettes. I turned on the TV and slipped into the sensory numbness of daytime drama. When he ultimately came out, smelling of tobacco and retrospect, I told him that he was wrong.

“We both know I don’t have the attention span for monomania,” I told him, almost proud of the fact.

“I know that, Hugo.”

He never did deny having schizophrenia, but I knew that if either of us were ever diagnosed with a mental illness it would be him, but it wouldn’t be schizophrenia. Megalomaniacal bastard.

I guess sometimes, with the gift of hindsight, we can see that we were so right in our accusations that we’re eternally wrong in making them. Right now I’m sitting here in a prison cell and Lewis is somewhere in Eastern Europe, plotting another revolution. Certainly, it was that first revolution we planned that landed us where we both are now. It was a failure and totally unnecessary, insofar as it was a revolution against society, but as an uprising against ourselves it will go down in history as an irrefutable victory. It began as a broken sentence, spoken slowly in the cold Swiss twilight as we sat out the front of our house, which started the chain of events that led me here.

The sun went down in the mystic shade of red that it sometimes wore, leaving an almost ethereal quality for us mortals to bathe in. It hid behind the far-off mountains to the west, so that maybe if we’d tried we could go looking for it again. I knew it’d find us, though.

“Hugo,” he began, with the condensation on his breath making the words feel tangible. “I... something needs to be... I... I’m feeling it again.” He had a way of sounding drunk without having touched a drink in months.

“Is it sad that I think I know what you’re saying?” I asked. I’d been listening to his rambling for years now, and I’d learned to interpret the gaps in what he said, rather than just the words. I knew all too well what he had been feeling.

“No. I just want to find out-”

“What’s out there?” I cut him off because I knew exactly how he felt. For three years now we hadn’t left the village, and before that – back home in Australia – things weren’t so fulfilling either.

“Exactly. I’ve been thinking about it, and I think I know what we should do.”

I didn’t know it then, but the first domino in a line of self-destruction and spiritual exploration was about to fall. “What?” I asked.

“We’re going to start a revolution,” he announced to me with a glimmer of hopeful uncertainty in his eye. “It’ll be fun.”

At that moment two things happened. First: the word megalomania popped into my head, and second: I decided that I wanted everything to do with it.

“Lenin started a revolution, and look at his life,” he reasoned with me, though it was totally unnecessary.

“He also had a reason to start a revolution,” I said, though I had no intention of standing in the way.

“Do you know what that reason was?” he asked.

I had no idea. I can describe in detail the structure of the human brain, and tell you how it works, but to this day I have trouble working out why anyone does anything. I don’t even know why I moved to Switzerland in the first place. “No, but I know that the idea didn’t come to him simply because he was bored with his life.”

“Maybe it did, Hugo. Maybe it did.”

I didn’t expect that answer, and I certainly didn’t want him to elaborate on it. Maybe later if we need to prove a great deal of Russian history wrong, but that’s doubtful. “Alright, I’m with you. What now?”

“Well first we’re going to watch TV for a while and then we’re going to bed.”

“How very dedicated of you.”

After that we sat in silence, neither of us sure what we just committed ourselves to. That was just over a year ago now, and I’ve been in prison for about seven months. I’m sure if I tried I could figure out how many hours our rebellion lasted for, and exactly how many people died, but I don’t want to.

The next day was exactly as if nothing had happened. There wasn’t a feeling of upheaval in our house, or anywhere for miles around. I decided against asking Lewis why we weren’t doing anything; it was his idea and he should have been issuing both the questions and the answers. I had a jam sandwich for lunch that day, just like every other day, and as I sat eating it in front of the television, Lewis walked out of his room, straight past me and out the front door. I stood up to follow him, or at least ask where he was going, but when I got out the door he was nowhere in sight. I remember thinking that he’d probably gone to see Dimitri at the general store about getting more CDs. Lewis could live anywhere in the world, no matter how isolated and remote, as long as he had music.

It turned out that he wasn’t seeing Dimitri. I didn’t see him for the next three days.

I spent those three doing the same thing I’d been doing since we moved here: nothing. I didn’t really know anyone in the village, mainly because most of them spoke German and I only knew English and French. I ate, I watched TV and the only times I left the house were to go walking in the hills. God, how I miss those hills.

When he came home I didn’t even speak to him. I’d gotten past worrying about where he could be and was now just annoyed with him. Three days is too long a time to be gone if you’ve been attacked (which is rare around here), and far, far too short a time to be gone if you’ve been killed. Had he been gone another two days I’d relapse into worrying.

He came in and sat down on my bed. The sun had just come up, but I was awake. Normally I lie in bed for about an hour after waking up, just thinking.

He came in, sat down, and he had look in his eye that either meant he had found a way to get music delivered right to him, or the revolution had begun. In a way, it had.

“So, where have you been?” I asked him, lackadaisically.

“Zurich. I’ve been to the library – studying.”

“For three days?”

“You’re lucky I didn’t go to Paris. Listen-”

“Like you could afford to get to Paris,” I sneered. He ignored my remark – which was true – and continued.

“I figured that since we’re going to do this – this revolution – I though I’d need some inspiration and some knowledge. There’s a lot to know, trust me.”

I got up and walked over to the bathroom. It was small, but it was all I needed. We got hot water, so I was happy with it. I briefly saw myself in the mirror. I desperately needed a haircut, but I’d have to get to another village for that, after having a disagreement with the local hairdresser. How he got the impression that I was stealing from him, I don’t know. How can you steal from someone who performs a service?

“So what’d you learn?” I asked, and when I turned around to look at him I knew I was in for a large blow to the head with a lot of information. Now, sitting in this prison cell, I become enraged whenever I hear the word ‘Lenin’. Of course, this is prison, and not many of the people here know anything about him, but occasionally they’ll be talking about the Beatles, and someone will say ‘Lennon’. Even that is too much for my serenity; Lewis loves the Beatles.