The Carnival Master

4.

Timo had found the book dumped in a skip near the university, behind a house that was being renovated. It was an academic tome, an old copy, and its cover still felt gritty from the skip beneath Timo’s fingertips, but it was similar to the one he used to have. The one he had sold along with so many of his other belongings. He had first read it while he had still been studying philosophy at Hamburg University. It was Emile Durkheim’s Rules of Sociological Method: a treatise on social order; on the need for structures and forms to guide behaviour. Durkheim was considered the father of sociology, but Timo thought with irony how much more appropriate it would have been, given his current situation, if it had been Durkheim’s later work, On the Normality of Crime, that he had uncovered.

Timo shivered in his inadequate jacket and leaned against the wall, gazing across at the store. It was getting dark and the lights in the store came on, turning the windows into warm embers in the January evening. Timo tried to read another page, but the light had faded too much. He sighed. The book had been a piece of his past that had fallen unexpectedly and unbidden into his present. It pained him to look at it: a reminder of a time when he had had hope, when his mind had been sharp and clear and organised. A time before. As if to snap him back to the reality of his current life, the gnawing pain in his gut intensified and the shivers that convulsed his body were not caused by the cold evening alone. He closed the book. He couldn’t take it with him, but he didn’t want to let it go. He didn’t want to let his past go.

Max Weber, Ferdinand Tonnies and Emile Durkheim had provided the focus for Timo’s studies. Max Weber’s State Monopoly on Physical Force had been the basis for his thesis. Or at least the thesis he had started.

There were too many customers in the store. He’d have to wait. The cold seemed to penetrate his flesh and chill his bones. Weber’s hypothesis was that only the organs of state, the police and the army, should be permitted to use physical force; that otherwise anarchy reigned and the state was unsustainable. Timo had planned to posit, in his thesis, that such a monopoly could also be destructive to the state, as in the case of the Nazis.

A man in a business suit left the store, talking into his cellphone, followed by an older couple. The ache and the craving that burned in Timo’s gut intensified. He slipped his hand into the pocket of his jacket and closed his fingers around the chill, hard steel.

Timo had also planned his thesis to balance this argument with a discussion of the United States, where the Constitution expressly allowed the citizen to bear arms, and therefore the means of independent physical force; consequently denying the state a monopoly on it. Yet the US existed and thrived as a nation.

He looked across the street. A car pulled up and a woman trotted into the store. She re-emerged a few moments later with a carrier bag and drove off. Timo felt a pang of something other than his body’s craving. It was his grief, his mourning of his past-tense self: the disciplined, clear-eyed, organised philosophy student with the world at his feet. But that had been then. Before the drugs.

Timo stepped out of the shadow of the corner, his thin shoulders hunched against the cold, and made his way across to the store, his fingers closing around the gun in his pocket.