Title: Via Dolorosa: A Novel
Author: Kirill Khrestinin
Author Guest Post
The Monsters He Was Fighting With
by Kirill Khrestinin
Harry Dolan is a strange man; there’s something good in him, and that goodness makes him even more dangerous. Bad people are shadows; a slight piece of goodness gives them eyes to see, and there’s nothing more dangerous than a shadow with eyes. Harry Dolan is a police officer. Mistakenly, he thought that if he wore a different kind of skin on the outside, he would never bring this badness of the street into his home. He was wrong. His outside skin, the mask of a monster, grew deep over his normal skin, blinding him to things that used to be important to him. Because if you pretend well enough and long enough, you become what you pretend to be. That’s how his character works: he accidentally practices what he doesn’t want to become, until he becomes it.
He knows how to read people because he assumes the worst about them. He’s cruel and unforgiving to the outside world because he knows this world with no gloss of illusion upon it. He sees its guts daily. He looks at crooks and pimps, at down-on-their-luck prostitutes, knowing what they know. In LA, too many people dream high, and that’s why their lives are so low. He uses cocaine because the street life he deals with daily drains him badly. Cocaine helps him see things in higher resolution, but it also forces him to act on the impulses of his hidden homicidal lunacy.
His partner is a real homicidal maniac. Harry knows it, but somehow he does nothing about it. He learns to live with it daily, because the streets around him are filled with trash that he and his partner have to clean. And if his partner enjoys this cleaning routine a little too much, well, that’s on his partner’s conscience, and he has none. At home, Harry has a wife who is rapidly drinking herself into the grave, cutting every inch of her skin on the sharp pieces of her broken dream. She recognizes more and more of a monster in Harry, while she recognizes nothing in herself, as if she were nothing at all. Their crippled daughter Lidia, a fifteen-year-old girl welded into a wheelchair, tries to survive her own personal tragedy in silence. She and Harry were in a car accident that Harry blames himself for, since he was the one driving that day. Lidia fights her resentment toward a world she believes has mistreated her badly. Everything is falling apart around Harry Dolan while he throws all his anger into punches and bullets on the streets of LA. He cannot recognize that he is the real danger in his family, the real monster who can no longer protect them. He reads people on the streets by assuming the worst about them. He refuses to read his partner because, deep inside, he knows that once he does, his partner might become the one he must fight, so Harry breaks himself to pieces with cocaine to ignore it. And Harry refuses to read his family because, deep inside, he knows he might find that he is the danger in the room.
Harry recognizes that he’s a bad person. He knows the monster within himself that stares murderously through his eyes. This monster is slowly destroying everything he loves by abandoning it to chance. But at the same time, this monster helps Harry hunt other monsters, the monsters on the streets. He hunts them, and he makes those streets safer, but at what price, if the real monster next to him, in the shape of his partner, somehow stays invisible to Harry Dolan? Is it justifiable to do evil while fighting evil? Is it justifiable to become monsters while fighting them?
If you suspect someone you love, your suspicion will poison your love; therefore, we stay blind to preserve that love within us. There’s nothing worse than betrayal by the people you love. In Dante’s Divine Comedy, the last and worst circle of hell is reserved for betrayal. Betrayal destroys people because, when it happens, you suddenly ask yourself: who the hell is this person I’ve spent years with? And if you suddenly understand that you never knew your spouse, then all those years together were just a badly written fiction, and it falls rapidly apart. Our past is our foundation. Once you’ve been betrayed by someone you truly loved, the foundation is gone, and the entire structure of your life falls on you, burying you beneath it.
You build your characters the same way. You place them in a situation where they have to stay blind to some things, because seeing them clearly might destroy them completely. And here comes an interesting question: what would your characters do? Would they do the right thing and sacrifice themselves by facing the truth, or would they keep living in lies? As in real life, we don’t become bad all at once; we become bad one little lie at a time.
Via Dolorosa is the book I worked on for more than eight years. Through it, I was trying to understand my own road of sorrow by walking it with the characters I wrote. All of them have reached their own endings. I am still walking toward mine.
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