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expression that must have resembled concern, unease. Though maybe panic.
    "Are you trying to say we're monsters?" I shook my head with slow distracted movements. "I hardly think... I mean - are you serious? We're not monsters. We're not. I'm sorry." But I suddenly didn't feel as sure as I'd sounded.
    "I, too, am sorry," he said, continuing to nod. "But I am sorry that we
are
monsters. I'm sorry that it's all we've ever been. And most of all, I'm sorry that it's all we'll ever be." Having said this quietly, decisively, he turned to circle the room as he'd done before, and continued to talk. I watched him suspiciously.
    "You wouldn't believe the things that we've done to each other and to the world around us. In fact, there is nothing we haven't destroyed, no amount of pain that we haven't inflicted upon the earth, the creatures on it, or our 'fellow man', no atrocity that we haven't carried out. We've boiled children, dismembered men, burned women, repeatedly raped, mutated, tortured, and then caringly healed the people we'd done this to, to be tortured again. We have studied ways of stimulating the body's nerves in order to make people feel more pain. We have..."
    "Stop," I interrupted. "You're wrong. I mean - maybe someone else did that, but not me, not you. We haven't done those things."
    Harek, who'd been speaking almost serenely while doling through his list of butchery, snapped his head in my direction as soon as I'd interjected, his eyes awake, wild. "Haven't we! Can you be so sure of yourself? Am I to believe that I'm standing in a room with the very first exception to the rule, of which, I might add, we have consistently and unfailingly laid down behind us for thousands upon thousands of years? Am I to believe that?"
    "Well," I muttered, "I guess so, because I don't do those things. And I wouldn't." I was sure that Harek was going to be furious with this, but instead his body relaxed, and to my surprise, he began to laugh, throwing his head back and turning his body around once in a fit of hilarity. I didn't join him.
    "So then! You believe that you are an exception, that you simply cannot have the same evil inside of you that somehow drove those 'other' people in history to commit such acts, hmm? Is that about right?" I didn't move. "Well then, you should know something:
precisely
because you think that you're an exception to the rule, that you are something above the rest, that you alone are better, proves to me, without a shadow of doubt, that you are exactly the same as everyone else. You can join the ranks - because you are only one among the innumerable, the countless 'exceptions' throughout history. Everyone holds that they are above evil. Not a single one of us wants to believe in the cruelty that we are capable of, which, incidentally, has been one of the greatest vehicles for executing it."
    There was a feeling like that of a storm in the centre of my stomach, churning and growing in intensity. I wanted to vomit, scream; or maybe just run, slip out of this place and away from everything he was saying, away from his booming voice, bouncing off the walls in the cramped space. But I couldn't move. I'd become small on the bench, my shoulders crawling up beside my neck; and I felt myself becoming even smaller as he took a few steps forward, his presence looming over me, his words resonating off of my rib cage.
    "Tell me then, you who are above evil, how easily can you pass this test: As men are the weaker sex, the darkest of our innate traits come out in us; and men that haven't yet learned to keep their violent appetites within the rules of their culture, that haven't yet learned how to suppress what they naturally are in order to conform to societal norms, are called boys. And in keeping with that rule, every single boy who has ever walked the earth, with, I believe, no exception, has at some point in time been obsessed with his power; discovered it and abused it, exactly as their ancestors had done. The