There is incredible poetry in the way the arms of a corpse are sometimes lifted towards the sky, as if silent hallelujahs have been infused into its fingers – carried reverently in its palms like glass baubles. As if its hands carry last rites, sealed by coagulating blood. Sealed by blood-stained screams and erotic thrusts and twists and gasps.
There is incredible sexuality in murder.
Muscles taut like violin strings, bodies tense and sculpted. Iron resistance that cries to be coerced into flexibility; brittle limbs massaged into willow branches. Pliant and supple as life drifts out of open mouths and open eyes and snakes up through the atmosphere like cigarette smoke. Here, screams are operatic soliloquies. Sounds that pierce performance halls as backs arch with the shock of the moment, eyes bleed terror, hands flutter violently. Like delicate moth wings.
Powdered with hopelessness.
A knife thrust is like a verse of poetry.
Gunshots are contralto singers delivering final notes.
Fingers around a neck contract with all the grace of the hands of a dancer.
If you can manage to look past the brutality – past the lust and frenzy. Past grinning faces with mouths that slather globs of dementia. Past the lack of basic human goodness. Past the mutilation of symmetry, there is an impeccable and exquisite moment of twisted beauty.
Outstretched hands.
Strung-out muscles.
The baptism of sweat and blood and spit: essence of humanity.
At first, the ordeal is nauseating. The combination of the lighting – the jaundiced smoke-masked lighting – the sounds, the smells, the gasps of electricity that twitch and pluck in the air results in a very physical reaction. At first, you see only the violence. You see only the thievery of human life. As sadistic, sorrow bent men use piano-fingers to choke the life out of naked women or innocent men, shake hands with Death, clean their fingernails casually, and point to the baggage, the souls that required transport. You see the face of Death – the decay of his features – and smell the rancid mustard gas-disinfectant cleaner scent of his breath.
And your obvious reaction is.
Throw up.
Eject it.
For the love of God, get rid of it!
But time after time after time, forced to observe, desensitivity weighs in. It slips over your eyes like crimson tinted glasses and reveals the poetry of the situation. There is order in chaos, my friends. Death is an artist. And his tools – the paints, the pastels, the wire-headed brushes, the canvas eaten raw by trillions of fleeing-life paroxyms – are the hands of the greatest human nightmare. The superlative monster:
Another human.
Art, poetry, sexuality.
Sure, my tastes are avant-garde, but so were Picasso's, so were Van Gough's, so were Da Vinci's. My thirst for human expression can easily be gratified by a well-placed brush stroke or a pencil line glissando. Like good wine. Like good conversation.
But after all, the key to appreciating good art is knowing it.
Little corsages of blood freckled his Italian-tailored designer suit like shrapnel and his sharp, angular face was bloated with a trillion unborn screams; swollen and pregnant. His eyes bulged from their sockets and bled tears of droplets that slipped down the bridge of his nose, into his mouth, down his neck, and tasted like salt-fused hysteria.
Mingling with the blood.
Crimson cocktails, on the rocks.
Adam looked at the man – his limbs strung out on the inclined rack, his spine scoliotic, arched so that only the heels of his feet and the back of wrists made contact with the metal grating – overcome with disgust. They way he writhed and twisted and squirmed only made Adam feel better about what he was doing. What he was going to do. In his absence it seemed as if humankind had deteriorated into a listless, vacant group of individuals. There skin had melted into putty, their bones were fragile and worm-eaten, their faces were pockmarked and corpulent. They were a fallen race.
Their instinct for survival was a dull guillotine. And one by one, they were placing their own heads under its blade, their eyes like fractured marbles, and pulling the cord.
Hiss.
Thump.
The percussion of a melon-sized head hitting the ground.
With dazed expressions and a collar of Merlot colored blood.
Adam touched the orb attached to the metal grating. The man's screams – the screams collecting like water behind a dam – ruptured from between his lips and filled the room, shoving at the walls, pushing hands through the bars. His chest inflated and deflated with a kind of tachycardia of the lungs, gasps stumbling from his mouth and down his chin.
Frantic Chinese followed them out like splintered bamboo.
Adam smiled lazily.
The man's name was Jin.
He owned a flat in Hong Kong.
He was a successful corporate consultant.
No doubt that being here and in this situation was an unpleasant change in scenery. But Adam had to know what he was up against. He had to know what ten thousand years of evolution had produced.
Jin was sobbing.
All his humanity ripped from him like clothing in a kind of rape, reduced to the level of an animal, reduced to begging for his life, begging for Adam to stop. All his composure was drooling from his mouth. Ten thousand years and mankind had atrophied. Wasted away in searching for a Utopia instead of searching for perfection and endurance and power.
Adam touched the orb and the little Chinese man jackknifed in pain again, screaming, his eyes clenched shut. He was shivering now. His muscles were raw and paralytic; loose so that they hung from his bones like telephone wires. Blood was spreading faster across his shirt and suit and tie, glistening weakly.
Adam shook his head.
Disgusting.
Frail.
Torpid flesh clinging to creatures gutted of any intelligence, of any sapience.
So kill him.
Adam walked over to the iron grating, pulsing with residual twitches of energy – lazy blue snakes of electricity arching bridges – and smiled down at Jin. And a single word dropped out of the man's blistered lips.
“Please.”
Adam flicked his hand.
A clean, surgical wound appeared across Jin's neck and disclosed a little fountain of rich blood – boiling and spattering onto the floor, scalding Adam's hand. The man's eyes bulged. His hands jerked up to his neck as if they were attached to marionette strings.
And then he stopped.
