TIJUANA BC. Mexico (MaremotoM) – His name is Patrick and life has not smile at him. He is 21 year-old and lives in South Texas. Short hair, huge glasses and a face that reflects eternal hours of computer screen and a hand constantly used to play with himself.
He feels identified with the white supremacists and wants to “Make America Great Again” (MAGA). For now, that is the only board to which he can hang in the great shipwreck that is his life. The rest is pure shit, a spit on his face, a confinement in his grandparents’ house in some Texas hellhole. I imagine many dead hours, a ritual of nonsense.
For now, let’s say that he is officially unemployed and that his existence has no incentive whatsoever. Patrick thinks he deserves more, much more than compulsive onanism and incomprehension.
Patrick wants to matter, to transcend, perhaps to be feared but it happens that Patrick is afraid, very afraid and the worst thing is, that his fear gives him to disguise himself with the mask of hatred, and only hatred can redeem him. His hatred is his balm and his fuel.
We look at his picture and the feelings are that every day, we come across people like him. He did not come from another planet nor is it a mythological aberration with lava instead of blood. No. It’s just a “white trash gringo” of our time, a little nothing, a meaningless human, a person without any attribute. The kind you would never turn to look or acknowledge his existence.
A few months ago, Patrick couldn’t legally buy a beer or a pack of cigarettes, but in his beautiful country he can easily buy a high-powered assault rifle that he certainly didn’t intend to use to hunt quails or play target shooting.
Patrick drove nine hours through the immensity of the Texan roads. Nine hours to be able to talk long and hard with his thousand and one inner demons. Nine hours of desert and blue sky to give free rein to his internal dialogue.
If you ask me, I would be interested in reproducing the internal cassette of a miserable and self-conscious man who is about to massacre dozens of innocent people of whom he knows absolutely nothing. I believe that the key lies in that internal dialogue.
Did he doubt, pondered, questioned himself or was he fatally determined? What kind of worms’ crawled through the neurons of someone determined to kill innocents? He did not know which lives he was about to destroy; the ones that randomness puts in front of his rifle.
Free hatred, blind hatred. Destroying bodies, extinguishing lives. To kill for the mere fact of existing, because according to him Mexicans belong to another race and invaded his country. And then? Nothingness, the abysmal emptiness of an era that has made hatred its liturgy.
By inheritance there remain doubts, desolation and only one certainty: it will happen again. They are everywhere.
Daniel Salinas Basave (Monterrey, Nuevo León, 1974) is a reader who has earned a living as a reporter. Everything else has come in addition, almost as an inevitable consequence. He is the author of the books “Mitos del Bicentenario” (ICBC, 2010), “Réquiem por Gutenberg” (ICBC, 2012), “La Liturgia del Tigre Blanco” (Océano, 2012), “Cartografías absurdas de Daxdalia” (CECUT, 2013) and “Vientos de Santa Ana” (Literatura Random House, 2016). He has won, among other recognitions, the International Competition Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz for “Under the Light of a Dead Star;”the Gilberto Owen Short Story Award for “Days of Bad Whisky” the José Revueltas Essay for “El lobo en su hora” and the Malcolm Lowry for “Nostromo Cartographers”.
