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The darkness here is stifling.
It fills my nostrils like ash and smoke from funeral pyres or crematoriums, like the smell of burning hair, lingering in the air along with the sound of my fingers scraping the walls and the bell-toll peals of my screams.
By now, after clawing at the stone, my fingers have been worn down to bloody crayon stumps.
And my screams are churchyard things.
They are like submarine pings, echo-locating off of tombstones and mourners with faces as stony has granite angels carved into cemetery obelisks.
The darkness here hugs me very tightly. I am like a child cradled tightly in the arms of mother killed by a bombing run.
*
Those mourners, the ones with angel faces, are here with me in the darkness.
They have always been here.
*
Masks are the only things that flatter my face. Smiles are the only things that can cover up what is really inside. I feel like a funeral hearse with a crumpled fender and windows that are decorated by a million crows-feet cracks (that look like the wrinkles that appear in the corners of an old man's eyes when he smiles), hiding underneath a Ferrari car cover.
People don't know who I really am.
Not until now anyway.
Underneath, I'm sure the Mona Lisa was a rotten person, too.
She smiles just like me.
*
Now – now that the funeral hearse has been revealed – my soul feels all bundled up. It feels like a black man being lynched in the deep south from a sycamore tree, swinging with piñata grace.
Covered up by all that papier-mâché, my soul holds onto it's last few pieces of sanity: lollipops and tootsie rolls that the lawyers and judges are trying to beat out of me with sticks and blindfolds.
I just swing there.
Sticks and stones, right?
*
Everything breaks eventually. It's scientifically proven. Men and women with their eyes pressed up against a telescope eyepiece have been telling us that the universe is falling apart a little every second. That the walls which keep it stable are crumbling like Jericho when Israel marched seven times around it, their cheeks puffed up like air bags as they blew on trumpets.
They call the degeneration of the universe entropy.
(When Louis Armstrong played the trumpet he was taking a sledgehammer to racial segregation.
His cheeks all puffed up looked like the bald, coffee-colored heads of slave children as their spines were bent under the weight of the sun on plantation cotton fields.)
*
My sledgehammer is a bowie knife.
*
A judge asks me, “Are you aware of the seriousness of your crime?”
I don't say anything.
I can't.
My throat feels like a London sewer pipe, clogged up with words and hopes and regrets. My lungs are suffering from pneumonia. Not in the traditional sense, though. They're not full of phlegm and water and bacteria. They're full of blood and mouthwash.
The blood of the man on the bus.
And the mouthwash I used to clean the taste of his flesh from out of my mouth.
In answer to the question: a nod.
*
Something I've discovered: every single one of us, whether we chose to accept it or not, are crazy. We all belong on couches in the offices of psychologists. We all belong in padded cells or in nursing homes playing chess with caretakers wearing clothing as white and as pure as newly folded paper cranes.
A straitjacket is the only answer the world's problems.
The only thing that makes us unique, is our level of insanity.
Once we come to terms with this, peace will follow.
*
The witness stand is cold.
The chair is full of silent confessions and when I shift inside of it the legs squeak, a sound like mice with their hands on the bible swearing to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help me God.
People look at me with disgust.
Their faces hold the expressions of children watching freakshow contortionists screw their limbs up into granny-knots.
The lawyers stand by their tables like scarecrows.
And the ravens of hate and misunderstanding land on their shoulders.
These ravens are throat cancer patients with cigarettes dangling from their lips trying to sing opera. Their caws make the same sounds as scratched-up turn-table records scarred by diamond needles.
The same sound as Elvis with piccolo holes in his wind-pipe.
Their caws make the reporters and the judge and the jury hate me.
*
If there was a stake in this courtroom, they would tie me to it with silky words, baptize me with gasoline and set fire to my feet.
But instead of a witch burning, people have come to see the Canadian legal system at work.
Edison knew exactly what he was doing when he invented the electric chair.
*
The highway makes vacuum grumbles as the bus kneads it's shoulders and hums the passengers to sleep. For Li the air is heavy. It is obese with tension.
This oxygen-cellulose cocktail – fat liposuctioned from Buddha's nipples – vibrates like water mattresses in eight point-oh earthquakes.
Li's chest is being crushed.
His ribs are turning into wishbones.
He is completely aware that the man sitting next to him is the one he will kill. It is an impersonal awareness. The man sitting next to him is nothing more than a light bulb with a filament strung up between to wires like Christ's arms on the cross. It is Li's responsibility to turn it off. There is too much light in the compartment.
Li wants to rest.
He wants to sleep.
And the man sitting next to him is glowing like little Japanese men wandering around the rubble of Hiroshima at night.
*
My crimes are being read out loud for me in court.
The gasps that slip from the mouths of the spectators are like the breaths taken by a newborn infant choking on it's own tears. They are bassinet sounds. They are the sounds of a roomful of puritans who have just been shown a pornographic film reel.
I am feeling a strange combination of emotions.
My throat is still clotted. It's as if my voicebox has declared independence and seceded from my brain. I feel the need to justify myself, but I also feel overwhelming guilt. I feel like a god. And at the same time, like laboratory rat with a needle full of chemicals gnawing at my blood vessels.
It is a strange kind of rapture.
The light sawing through my darkness is refracted through stained-glass, it seems.
Suddenly I say, “Please kill me.”
*
Because I don't deserve to be here, on earth.
*
Behind them, the lights of the nearest city wink out like eyes being poked out of urban skulls by lances of darkness. The bus is traveling down a hallway of trees; ancient, sighing pines whose limbs are held out feebly, groping for a little sunlight, begging like a thousand Oliver Twists with outstretched hands. They nod at Li, too.
Silent children watching him.
Waiting for him to act.
He feels as if frigid hands are performing CPR on his gut. Droplets of rain cry down the windows that also reflects his face. As he reaches for the knife in the backpack between his feet, Li decides that the face in the window is a noble one.
Pixels like gnats clustered around campfire lanterns will not do it justice.
Beside him, his seat-mate closes his eyes.
Li imagines what a person really looks like on the inside. He wonders if intestines strung out will look like Christmas lights and if kidneys will seethe like live coals. And the heart. The heart will smile with solar warmth. It will look like the sun; a lit cigarette tip cupped against the wind by the hand of the universe.
There will be a lot of light to extinguish underneath all that skin, he decides.
*
People are monsters. It's as simple as that. We are a disease that the earth – the cosmos – need to be inoculated from. We are plague rats reproducing at astronomical rates, poisoning the water and the land and the air like oil from the gut of another Exxon-Valdez. Termites, burrowing through everything that is good and right, making twisted moth-holes in mother nature's wardrobe.
I consider myself an exorcist of sorts.
I am here with a cross and a cowl and whispered Hail Marys.
*
Don't you see?
*
He stabs the man sitting next to him with as little emotion as possible. He is not here for thrills or satisfaction or revenge. He is here because honor and duty.
The man's mouth drops open like the stomach doors of a stealth bomber over Afghanistan and a thousand gasps fall to the floor. Li stabs him again. And again. The blood that comes out of his chest and soaks his shirt is like the juice on the apron of an Italian chef making tomato sauce. There is a lot of it. It is oily and slippery, like the floor of a slaughterhouse. The man struggles, he reaches out and paws at Li's face weakly, but all his energy – all his light – is dribbling down his torso.
Around him, the passengers of the bus are screaming.
Their voices are concert halls full of out-of-tune violins.
The bus is stopped now and people flow from the seats and through the doors and gather around it like a family watching their house burn to the ground.
It's just Li and the man sitting next to him.
The people outside of the bus look as if they'd like a show.
*
The darkness here fills my nostrils and congests my breathing. There are voices with me, too. They sing sometimes. They hum like choirs of Himalayan monks, but croaking and cracking with dissonance. A sound that might come from the throat of a stone angel carved into a headstone.
It turns out that the voices belong to the mourners in rain-washed trenchcoats standing around me like trees loitering around interstate highways with their hands outstretched.
I wish I could see their faces.
I wish I had a flashlight.
Or a candle.
Or a match.
*
But all the light here is gone.
