Out of the four point of views I've written from, I've found Paul (and this chapter) to be the most fun by far.

***

San Diego, California

Eight Years Earlier

His hands were trembling.

Twisting and shuddering impulsively as if someone had attached kite strings to the ends of his metacarpals and was now controlling them like the hands of a rag doll. He stared at them, his breathing stilted and staccato. The anger replacing his blood like formaldehyde infected his eyes and heightened the contrast of his vision, so that a bus seat, a passenger, a mirror, a grocery bag was incandescent. Glowing like a trillion candles.

And withering his retinas.

Paul could hardly keep still.

He had to move! He had to scream! He had to do something or Godssakes, he was going to explode!

The skin on his hands was loose and papery and freckled with sores.

Shrapnel wounds from the drugs.

Shrugging his marine-issue jacket further up his shoulders, drowning in it like a liturgic cowl, he reached into his pocket for a cigarette, praying the nicotine would do something for him. Tranquilize him. He could practically feel psychosis creeping up his legs, up his waist, up his torso as if he was descending into some kind of foundry, wading into liquid metal that writhed and bubbled like boiling champagne and came up to his neck. Igniting his blood like gasoline. If he didn't get something soon, someone would die.

He was sure of it.

His hands wanted a neck. They wanted flesh. They wanted the warm, gratifying feel of a throbbing jugular and the music of captured gasps and caged screams. They wanted to contract. Squeeze. Squeeze until all the warmth came leaking out of a mouth.

Drooling out of a mouth.

Clenching his teeth, Paul lit the cigarette and sat on his hands.

Outside, San Diego was rotting.

The buildings and high risers were like butchered animals.

The cars and the people were like flies. And above them, rainclouds of cigarette smoke and frying oil and exhaust hung pregnant in the air, magnifying the sun like refracted light through a microscope.

His bus was an ant combusting under the glare of a city-sized magnifying glass.

Paul took a drag on his cigarette and smoke tumbled out between his lips. On his right, a bloated man in a suit glanced at him sideways, following the spirits of smoke – disembodied ghosts – on their exodus to the ceiling. The man frowned. Paul tried to ignore him.

The bus smelled like a spice cupboard.

“Hey buddy, you allowed to smoke in here?”

Ignore him.

But the words were barbed wire, reopening the sores on his hands which jumped and twisted under his thighs. Paul tried to restrain them. Mastiffs on leashes.

Sweat dropped from his hairline and down his face like pearls from a broken strand. He could feel the cigarette between his lips nodding and dancing up and down as he whispered wordlessly. He whispered prayers. He whispered silent supplications, packaged them with his sweat and hopelessness, and tossed them heavenward. Godssakes, he needed to get high. He needed to escape. Because his control over his over his own marionette strings was diminishing. Fading. As if someone with scissors was severing them, one by one, until his limbs and humanness and self-control collapsed into a pile of matchsticks.

Tufts of smoke jumped from his mouth.

The man beside him was saying something.

Paul tried not to hear him.

“Hey, take a look up front. It says 'no smoking'. Can't you read?”

His anger – his blood – flared up like the flame of a Bunsen burner. He was going to kill him. Blood all over his heat-wilted suit. Blood all over the rotting streets of San Diego. Couldn't the bastard see that the cigarette was keeping Paul from exploding? Couldn't he see that all his restraint was a filter and rolled paper and tobacco?

Obviously not.

The man raised his hand and shouted towards the bus driver.“Excuse me, driver. This guy's smoking. Can't hardly breathe back here.”

Paul's mouth opened like a knife wound. “Shut up, you fat bastard.”

Everyone was looking now. Their eyes screamed disapproval. The driver – his arms like arthritic tree branches and his face like the skull of a concentration camp Jew – glanced at him through the mirror mounted above the dashboard and reached for his radio.

“Put it out, mister.”

Paul sat on his hands.

He couldn't move them.

He wouldn't.

The cigarette continued to nod from his lips – a metronome counting seconds – and he looked out the window and at the reflections of traffic in the pools of heat percolating in the road. Just ignore them. Ignore them all. Maybe they'll leave you alone. Maybe they can't see you.

The suit shoved him roughly.

“Godssakes, didn't you hear – ?”

Paul's hands snapped his self-made manacles, tore out from under his thighs, and plunged for the suit's neck. His face contorting, Paul felt his fingers wrap like cellophane around the bastard's throat and squeeze. A little gasp fell from the man's mouth.

Paul was laughing.

People were screaming.

Yelling.

Paul squeezed tighter – and felt the warmth of the man's blood seeping through his fingers like Morphine through an IV drip – and smiled through the cigarette smoke. He smiled as the man's eyes bulged. As his bloated face inflated. Painted itself a lovely shade of red.

Words blistered out of the intercom and the tire's of the bus sighed as the driver pulled out of traffic, but Paul couldn't hear anything anymore. The world was suddenly shrouded by a blanket. So that all he was aware of was the suit's torn breathing and his own drunk laughter.

“Got a light, buddy?”

A choking sound leaked from the man's mouth. Spit gathered at his lips like yarn, streaking down his cheeks, staining his chin. Paul could see his own face reflected in the bastard's eyes – lacquered with unadulterated terror – his expression feral, rabid, possessed. His mouth was twisted like a contortionist. His eyes glittered like crown jewels. Somewhere – somewhere beneath the orgasmic bursts of laughter and the church-bell ringing in his ears and the silent screams poisoning the mouths of the passengers around him – Paul heard himself.

He saw himself.

Reflected in the suit's eyes – blooming like mushroom clouds.

A monster.

Corrupted, violent, spastic, uncontrollable.

But the bigger part of him, the animal part of him, was strangling his better judgment on a sweat-gummy polyester seat, on a bus as it made its exodus across the carcass of downtown San Diego.

His hands were contracting on their own accord now.

His laughter was blitzing from his mouth.

Something that felt very much like an iron bar was rammed into his back.

Crushed glass infested his vision, a scream was ripped out of his throat, and he rolled off of the seat and crumpled to the ground. His ears ringing, sobbing, Paul tried to stumble to his feet, but the iron bar crunched into his jaw. His body suddenly felt as if it was strapped down to a table and a surgeon with a rusted scalpel was vivisecting him. Cutting out his spine, his jaw.

Blood dribbled down his chin.

“Get the hell off of my bus, you filthy bastard.”

The driver, wielding a broom handle, stood above him, his breath creaking like new leather, his cheeks scooped out of his face. His mouth twisted. “The police'll be here any minute. They're gonna – ”

Paul gagged gumballs of blood and spit and dove for the matchstick thin bus driver. His arms wrapped around his waist and he tore him to the ground. On his knees, he drove his fist into the man's stomach. Once, twice, three times.

He could feel ribs snapping like celery sticks under his blows.

And he was laughing again.

Dissonant carnival music.

Stop! Stop, you idiot, stop!

The man grunted and retched blood, his legs jerking weakly, his entire spine folding itself over Paul's fist, jackknifing. Paul could hear sirens. Like whining violins, accompanying the music of his laughter. Behind him, hands were groping at his clothing, at his hair, at his shoulders, pulling him down, pulling him back. He shrugged them off, roaring, snatched the broom handle from the bus driver's hands – like crumpled newspaper – and plunged it into someone's chest.

A gasp.

Paul twisted around, scrambling to his feet, and swung the wooden dowel a second time at a Mexican man with a face smeared with sun and grease, and clubbed him upside the head. He fell to the ground spewing Spanish like a Pentecostal speaking in tongues.

Get off!

Get off the bus! The police are coming!

Paul tossed the broom handle at the surge of bus passengers – their faces like a hundred masquerade masks, sequined with shouts of anger – as they moved to restrain him, turned, stumbled over the driver, whose arms were outstretched above his fallen head, crucified, and burst out the door. He fell to the blistered asphalt of the parking lot of a Chinese restaurant. Droplets of heat from the sun spattered his face and his vision bulged suddenly like a carnival mirror as he slowly moved back to his feet.

The air outside had the viscosity of petroleum.

And was laced with police sirens; first chair violins in a heat wave chamber orchestra.

Paul spat again and began running, jogging towards the slumped over restaurant with peeling paint and a halo of frying oil, but his back felt serrated and cut razor-sized holes in his skin. He couldn't keep running. All his energy was exiting his mouth in a cocktail vehicle of sobbing and laughter. He was insane. He was going to hell. The twitching, the lack of control, the violence was like some kind of Legion living in his nervous system. Like two thousand demons that no amount of cocaine or pills could satisfy.

Paul collapsed to the ground again, in the sorrow-black shadow of the Chinese restaurant. Behind him, two police cars pulled into the parking lot; their sirens making ripples in the hydrogenated air and their lights spasming dimly. His hands were trembling again. But weaker this time. Dying sparrows. Paul looked up at the sun, a phosphorescent hole punched out of the blue sky, and choked. He was going to prison. His hands had purchased a one-way ticket to a cell, a public defense attorney, and an orange jumpsuit.

Someone with a bullhorn was screaming at him.

Hands on your head.

Up against the building.

Sounds and words that jingled to the ground like splintered glass.