Baccano:Volume5 ~Immortal - personal opinion on Elmer C. Albatross~
「Immortal: Personal Opinion regarding Elmer C. Albatross 」
Written By: Huey Laforet (Immortal, Terrorist)
Elmer C. Albatross. My friend, and also the only person on earth who I think of as "human." Every other thing in this world - even my own daughter - is nothing more than material for my experiments. I thought of him for some reason today, this day before I put my plan into motion, and decided to put my thoughts down on paper lest I forget.
There was great despair in his past. No, maybe saying that there was nothing but despair would be a better expression. The man known as Elmer was born solely to be given despair. He was born as a living sacrifice to a cult. In other words, his own mother bore him in the hopes that he would become a sacrifice.
A noble sacrifice, he was abused as a sign of respect, and tortured as a sign of love. He was at the mercy of the dozens, no, hundreds, of twisted hopes that surrounded him. A decade passed, and lo, he was rescued. No, perhaps it would be more accurate to say that he fell into new and deeper depths of despair.
The witch hunts that spread across the whole of Europe like wildfire - the power that had caused countless innocent souls to be wrongly accused... The influence of that power made itself known, at length, to that cult as well. The boy who was to be a living sacrifice was saved, just moments before the blade of sublimation fell upon his head. The boy who had been captured by heretics and doomed to death was then raised up as the boy who had been saved by God.
When I met him, five years after the events mentioned, he laughed as he explained his peculiar past to me.
"At that moment, I knew there was no such thing as God in this world. That's why I want to make people laugh by myself."
Though Elmer's smile was clear, I could not help but feel as though that very smile served to show the dark inside him.
"I don't know much about the emotion you call happiness. I don't even know if the expression my face is holding right now is a real smile. That might be why I want others to smile and be happy. I think maybe then, I'll be able to believe that my own smile is also genuine."
But can he, a man who knows not happiness or laughter, give that to others?
I asked him this question and he laughed, as though it had only served to amuse him further.
"I see. Then that means that everything I do is a worthless act of self-satisfaction... Don't you think that's pretty funny?"
He is a happy man. As that thought rose in my mind, a tiny bit of envy made itself known in my heart, and at the same time I laughed in front of another person for the first time in my life.
I have much to write still, but it seems the FBI's minions have arrived outside. My, my, Victor is unexpectedly impatie (the rest of the page is blank)
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