Balancing the Scales

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“Please, please, I beg of you.” Damian’s throat stings as his screams rub his vocal cords raw. “Save my daughter.”

“I cannot,” the sage begins.

“Please.” Damian interrupts. “She’s dying.”

The sage holds up his hand to silence Damian. “I cannot, without something in return from you.”

“What is it? I’ll do anything.”

“In order to save your daughter, I will be taking away an indescribable pain.” The sage rubs his long, white beard. “The scale of reality must be balanced. In order to even the scale, you must in turn suffer tenfold the pain which you inflict throughout your life. Only then will your debt be paid.”

“How do I do that?” Damian asks. “What do you mean ‘tenfold the pain?’ How will I know?”

“Do you accept?”

“How can I accept when I don’t even know what it means?” Damian drops to his knees before the sage. “Tell me what I must do.”

“Do you accept?”

Damian looks back at his daughter, whose breaths are growing ever more shallow as her blood pools around the wooden rod protruding from her side. “I accept. Please, just save her.”

The sage nods once and produces a staff from within his oversized robes. He lifts the staff high above his head and slams it to the ground. A wall of dust flies up around him, casting a haze through Damian’s vision. “It is done,” the sage says as he begins to fade from existence. “Tenfold the pain you inflict.”

In less than two seconds, the sage had disappeared. Damian whirls around on his heel. The wooden rod has vanished, along with the blood. Layla’s eyes flutter open.

“Layla,” Damian cries as he wraps her in a tight embrace, holding onto the heart he nearly lost. “Baby, are you okay?”

“Daddy?” The little girl looks up at him with her big, green eyes. “I had a really weird dream.”

“It’s okay, baby. You’re okay. I’ve got you.”

#

“It’s okay, baby. You’re okay. I’ve got you.”

Damian jolts upright, clinging to his body in desperation as a cry escapes his lips and tears roll down his cheeks. He doesn’t know why he is crying. It happens almost every morning. He searches his mind, but he can’t ascertain the source of the voice that awakens him each day. He lets the drops fall down his cheeks and into his thick, unkempt beard, leaving trails through the layers of dust and grime.

He looks over to the massive, inexplicable scale, one of his only worldly possessions. Still as lopsided as ever. The two sides must be over fifteen feet apart. He has long since given up on hoping for those platforms to ever truly level themselves. He has done too much, hurt too many, however inadvertently. Had it really once been just a few inches tall, with a nearly even weight on both sides?

He doesn’t know how long he has been here on this island, how long ago he came here to escape the pain of the world. In fact, he doesn’t know much of anything anymore. If it weren’t for the hundreds and hundreds of journals he keeps hidden away, he probably would have forgotten about the meaning of the scale entirely. But the words scrawled across the front cover of every single journal keeps him grounded in what he must do: “Cause no pain. Only hurt yourself.”

If he had the will to look inside, he would find decades of writings detailing his mistakes which caused the scale to grow, furthering the gap between his pain and the pain he has caused. He would find stories about his flicking on the lights and causing a massive jump in the scale, only to later read a story about a worker being injured down at the power plant. Had he really caused that pain? Apparently, the sage thought so. He would find stories about him walking down the street and nodding at a beautiful woman passing by them, only to return home and find the scales further unbalanced. What had caused it? Had she been afraid of him? Was she upset he hadn’t talked to her? Whatever the case, he needed to feel ten times her pain in order to make up even that slight difference.

Inside the journals, he would also find hundreds of stories about the daughter he had lost so many years ago. The daughter whose name he had forgotten. The daughter who he had watched an old woman while he still looked the same as the day he had met the sage. He would find stories of her life and her beautiful soul. And he would find stories that showed how deeply he loved her, until the very end.

If he were to read these stories, the pain he feels would be enormous, maybe even enough to begin making a dent int he gap on the scale. But he can’t bring himself to do it. He can’t bring himself to relive it.

Instead, he opts for physical pain. Each morning, the nearly feral Damian wakes, fully healed and without hunger, in the heat of the blazing tropical sun. He rolls through the scorching hot sand until his body is covered in welts. He refuses to eat or wash himself, allowing himself to feel the pangs of malnourishment. He walks naked through acres of sharp thorns and wild animals, welcoming the nicks and scrapes. He throws himself from the tops of waterfalls and splashes into the treacherous waters below, allowing himself to sink deeper and deeper into the darkness until he finds himself standing, drenched, back atop the rocky cliffs. He begs and pleads with the sky to let him die as he drags a sharpened rock across his skin, slicing open his flesh.

And every night when he lays down to sleep with his wounds seeping and festering, just before he loses consciousness, he sees a pair of big, green eyes looking up at him. He hears a soft voice.

“Daddy? I had a really weird dream.”

#

“How long has he been under this time?”

“For him? A little over four hundred years.”

“And he’s still him?”

“Not much of him.”

“Damn. How much more can his mind possibly take? There isn’t going to be anything left of him when he’s finally done.”

“You are correct.” A satisfied sigh. “I’m tired. What do you say we go home? We’ll check in on him on Monday. That should be a few hundred more years for him. I doubt he’ll have repaid the pain by then.”

“What if he does? What if he wakes up?”

“The weekend crew will be here. Besides, I don’t think he’ll be able to put up much of a fight.”

They laugh. “True.”

A pause.

“What’s wrong?”

“Do you ever feel bad about this? About all the suffering he’s going through in here?”

“After what this bastard did, after all the pain he caused, not at all. He deserves more than the thirty-seven life sentences he’s been given. I wish I could’ve made each and every one of them as long and painful for him as this last one is going to be. My only hope is that some part of him in there, realizes what he did out here.”

“Won’t Chairwoman Rose be upset if his mind is totally wiped?”

“Please, it was her idea. Now, let’s get going. Let the bastard cave.”

“Good bye, Mr. Carter. And good riddance.”

End.