The End of a Vile Man
(Judas al-Khalaileh)
He was a practical scoundrel; one of those who never dirty their hands, but leave everything they touch dirty. He lied in a quiet tone, betrayed without raising his voice; he was a scoundrel of the quiet kind; he didn’t shout, he didn’t threaten, and he didn’t raise his hand.
He hurts with a smile, lies with eloquence, and betrays as if performing an administrative duty. He believed that survival belonged to the cleverest, and that morality was a luxury for failures. He walked through life as if it were a public toilet: emptying his bowels and moving on.
That night, he was driving alone. He was speeding, as usual, in a hurry. He was returning from a deal that was clean on paper, but dirty in reality. He left behind people without work, without dignity, without explanation. He thought the road was made for him to pass first, and that others were merely temporary obstacles. The road was almost empty, and the radio was playing an old song about love, something he had never believed in.
He only noticed the truck at the last moment. A large, slow-moving, rusty, faded yellow tanker, old, with the words “Human Waste – Excrement – Feces – Treatment Plant” written on its side in monotonous lettering. Human waste, no longer needed, with no names, no faces, no stories to tell. Just what remained after its usefulness had ended.
He didn’t see the tanker until it was too late. He slammed on the brakes, but there was no response. The crash wasn’t heroic. No music, no screams, no drums. Just a sudden stop. The impact wasn’t dramatic. The car didn’t explode, and the sky didn’t stop. Just the crunch of metal, then profound silence.
When they reached him, his body was trapped between his car and the tanker. He was swimming in a pool of excrement, ten cubic meters of feces. No one could say exactly where he ended and where the remains the tanker had been carrying began. When they opened the place, the scene was uncomplicated: a man injured in a direct collision with what he had spent his life leaving behind.
Civil defense personnel needed ten green water tankers, each with a capacity of ten cubic meters of potable water, to wash away the feces.
Top of FormIn the report, the Civil Defense Director wrote coldly: “Traffic accident involving an organic cargo; it was impossible to separate the victim from the transported contents.”
Judah was taken to the hospital, where he remained for three months. He was discharged in a pale-yellow wheelchair, his neck tilted to the right, and required to use large, family-size sanitary pads for the rest of his life. For the first time in his life, he understood that treachery might win him a day, but it bankrupts him for a lifetime.
He wasn’t wronged in the incident, nor was he punished. But for the first time in his life, he was no longer special, no longer intelligent, no longer above anyone else.
He became the remnants of a scoundrel, and thus unnecessary. For justice here came not as punishment, but as a final comparison. A collision with his true self.