An Act Without a Motive
He insists the killing had no reason, and calls that his freedom
They keep asking me why I did it, as though a reason would make the killing smaller.
I have no reason to offer them, and this, more than the act itself, appalls them.
A motive would have domesticated the deed, folding it neatly into the of human causes.
Jealousy, greed, revenge: these are the respectable landlords of murder, and I paid rent to none of them.
I did not hate the man whose life I ended on that grey afternoon in October.
He had done me no injury that the courts, in their fondness for narrative, could name.
I simply raised my hand, and the gesture was as free as lifting a glass of water.
That freedom is the whole of my confession, and it is also the thing no one will accept.
The prosecutor prefers a beast driven by appetite to a man exercising a pure and will.
An appetite can be understood, condemned, and filed away; a free act cannot be so easily buried.
I had read too much philosophy, they say, as if books were the accomplices in the room.
But I did not kill out of an idea; I killed to see whether the idea was true.
Could a human being act without the puppet-strings of cause, without the of a swollen heart?
The of existence had always seemed to me a lecture, elegant and safely abstract.
I wished, once, to feel it in the wrist, in the weight of a single motion.
And so I chose arbitrarily, which is to say I chose freely, which is to say I chose at all.
The victim might have been another; the hour might have been dawn; nothing was necessary.
This is precisely what my judges cannot forgive, for it implicates them as much as me.
If I could kill for no reason, then their own restraint rests on no firmer ground than habit.
They want the world to be a machine of motives, where every effect obediently reports its cause.
I have shown them a hole in that machine, and through the hole a cold wind blows.
My lawyer begs me to invent a childhood wound, a grievance, anything to feed the hungry file.
To lie about my freedom, he insists, is the only way to save my neck from the rope.
But a purchased mercy would cost me the one thing the act was meant to prove.
I would rather be executed as a free man than pardoned as a mechanism that malfunctioned.
So I sit in this cell and polish my argument until it gleams like a blade.
I am, I tell myself, the first honest man ever to stand in that .
And yet, some nights, a small and unphilosophical voice asks me whom exactly I was so free to erase.