Love Story

John Price ‘08

1.

She was beautiful in every imaginable way.

Her hair was the sky when the sun sets. A pink with dabbles of red and orange. Her skin was milk, flawless and pale. Her eyes were blue, hard chips of ice. Beautiful and strong. Alluring, hypnotizing.

Her legs went on forever, from her neck and down, down, down. She was perfectly unassuming, a little China doll. It was obvious that she could and would hold her own in a fight. She was dressed in the height of fashion. Plaid miniskirt, black and white knee socks, and a shirt—proclaiming her a “Sweet Thing”—that exposed a pierced navel.

The lights of the lampposts reflected the bracelets that covered her thin arms. She was beautiful as one could ever imagine. The way her boot heels clinked against the dirty, dirty sidewalks of the sleeping metropolis… It was hypnotizing.

The predator felt her cool skin as his arms overtook her, pulling her close to him. Her body tensed beautifully, but the chloroform covering the rag that so pressed against her nostrils slid itself into her system.

She stopped. The predator smiled.

2.

I’m Mister White Christmas. I’m Mister Snow. I’m Mister Icicle. I’m Mister Ten Below.

“You’re awake?”

Blink. Eyes focused onto a pair of wide, pink eyes. Head shot back in vain. A curious iron gag muffled any cries of distress.

“Yes. You’re awake.”

In vain, arms pulled upwards to pull off the horrible metal collar. Sadly, the lovely arms were pinned to what amounted to an operating table.

“Like it?” The face loomed over confused and frightened eyes. It was sickeningly pale and feminine in an oddly cut way. But it was a male. It was so obviously a male. White teeth like fangs flashed from a wide smile. “It’s called an Iron Gag.”

His tone said that it was obvious. That it was stupid for anyone not to know that simple fact.

“You’re a pretty girl.” Matter-of-factly. “It’ll be a shame to kill you.” Nonchalant. Conversational. How’s the weather?

She remembered who she was. She remembered a chemical smell and struggling and then blacking out. She wondered if it was possible to remember blacking out.

“It’s also called the Mute’s Bridle. It’s an unbreakable and reusable gag. You can still breath and stuff. But if you had a stuffy nose…” He put his finger on a little hole on the front of the metal collar.

She finally felt the large slide of metal in her mouth. She bit down. It hurt her teeth. Her tongue ran it against it, and she felt a sharp pain coupled with the copper taste of fresh blood. A scream tore through her throat, but little to no sound came out.

His legs were on either side of her. Both hands were a bit near her armpits. He was on his hands on knees, looming over her. She tried to lift her knee, to knee him in some area that would render him a sobbing mess of a man, but her ankles were bolted to the table.

Christmas music echoed throughout the chamber. It was a clean room. Like a hospital, it smelled like antiseptic and was pure white. Her eyes flicked from wall to wall. It was like a tomb. There was one large metal door. Heavily bolted and shining.

Horrible-looking sharp instruments hung on the walls. Curved and sharp and long.

Cages. Gibbets. They hung from the ceiling. They were all uninhabited. There was no one else in the room, besides the both of them.

“Since we’re going to share some intimate moments together, I’d like to share my name with you.” He paused for that added gravitas. His eyes were done up with heavy amounts of eyeliner and dark mascara. They made the pink eyes look ghastly. Wide and monstrous.

“My name’s Cyrus. You can call me Cy or Cy-Cy, since you’re a pretty girl, and I like you.” A pause, and his face was closer to hers. Her lovely pink hair matched his eyes. Her clothing was still on. He would have never taken them off her.

That would have been utterly vulgar.

The looping Christmas music. She finally recognized it. It was the songs of the Snow Miser and the Heat Miser, played together on loop. Over and over. Because, surely the song would have played multiple times by then? Many, many times.

“What’s your name?

“Oh, you can’t talk, can you?”

She struggled against her restraints. Cold metal. She could not break it. She tried but to no avail.

“You’re going to be fun.” One oddly feminine leg moved over and to the side, pressing against the legs on the other side. Both legs slipped downwards off the table and he straightened himself back up, almost like a man getting off a horse. “But I have things to attend to. Important things. With important people, don’t you know.”

Cyrus reached down and kissed her cheek gently. No teeth-nibbling and no real saliva. It was loving and chaste.

“I’ll see you later, beautiful one.

“I love you.”

I’m Mister Green Christmas. I’m Mister Sun. I’m Mister Heat Blister. I’m Mister Hundred and One.

Cyrus left, and she began to cry, silently and alone in the clean darkness of the torture room.

3.

“No really. Really, it’s far too complicated for me to go into. Isn’t this supposed to be a fun party? Letting loose and such?” Head shook, left to right and robotic.

Cyrus stood near the center of a group of suited men. Except, their ties were undone, and they all had a self-satisfied smile upon their lips. Many held canters of brandy or some other putrid alcoholic beverage.

“Tell us, Cyrus. It’s not every day a man gets to hear from a damned prodigy.” It was followed by a few choruses of “here, here” and some more empty sentiments of the same nature. They did not want to engage in a philosophical discussion. They wanted to be entertained.

Cyrus hated them.

He smiled a little, playing along. His hatred for them was boundless, and his indifference in regards to them was unfathomable. Growing up intelligent was hard, especially when you realized how worthless most people are.

“Really, I don’t have a set personal philosophy. I just tend to believe that people are worthless stains to be manipulated for one’s own pleasure and profit.”

The drunken men laughed. The few women standing around him giggled. It was a party held by his father’s company. The long-dead father. The joyless, loveless father. Not a bad man, just more interested in business.

Just a man who had deposited his sperm into mother’s womb, himself being one of the waste byproducts.

His father’s associates held the little parties and showed off their poster boy: Cyrus Mundus, the former child prodigy and just general damned genius. They paid him to be a mascot. They paid him to be a sparkling, bright personality. And they paid him well.

“Solipsism and general egocentricity is by far the best frame of mind for the working world.” Cyrus Mundus stood tall, a glass of sparkling water in a wine glass.

The floor was marble, and the walls were white. The orchestra played, and the waiters and waitresses patrolled with their trays filled with used bottles and plates and overly-expensive imported foods.

Mostly from France. Despite the fact that France hated Freedom.

“You see, it’s the most reasonable of all personal philosophies. It is nigh impossible to discern what is real and what is not. Timothy Leary—yes, Tom, that Timothy Leary—said that when one were to drop acid, one experiences true existence. One sees reality. Of course, that’s just another baseless perception set forth by a man trying to justify his need to get his rocks off, as it were.”

They laughed. A tinkering sound that made his ears burn. It felt as though someone were sticking a burning fork into his ears. He wanted to scream, he wanted to destroy them. But he smiled. Cyrus waited for them to stop.

He continued, as he always did.

“Morality is entirely based on what the individual perceives. Who are you to question their reality? For the individual, no one else may exist. For the individual, every choice that they make is justified. Every single thing they do is because it is right. Right now, there is nothing to prove that I am really standing here. My information-stream is merely reacting to yours. But maybe it isn’t even doing that. I could be imagined. I could be something in your mind existing completely independent from the rest of you.”

They were quiet for once.

“For instance, how can you truly say that you are drinking that wine, Tom? Yes, yes, I know I’m using you as an example far too much, but you’re so damned noticeable. But really, maybe you are a mere brain in some sort of stasis fluid being chemically and electronically manipulated to experience the sensation of drinking from a glass of wine.”

Once again, they were quiet. The rich were getting slowly more and more drunk, and Cyrus was speaking to them about solipsism. It was a fun time for everyone.

“I understand that. I feel free to manipulate everything and everyone. Who can be sure that they exist? And if they do, are they not inferior to me in every way? Why, right now, I could have a young woman strapped to a table in my basement right now, and that would be right. She may not even exist, and if she does, is she not inferior?!” He felt himself yelling.

His eyes glowed. Brown. Boring. Shitbrown, nutbrown, mudbrown.

Cyrus lowered himself and smiled. There was uneasy laughter. One did not joke about death when a serial killer was loose. Never never ever.

“Surely, surely you don’t really believe that, Cyrus?” an elderly woman who he had never seen before asked.

Cyrus stood still. He stared and thought. The synapses misfired. He stared more. The white blinded him, and so he closed his eyes.

I don’t know. I do not know. I do not know anymore.

The prodigy shrugged and sat down, draining the rest of his water as though it could wash discomfort away.

Discomfort was an illusion, after all. Purely chemical reactions.

4.

“Consensus-reality says to me that you’re crying, but I know that’s a product of my own recent misgivings as to the nature of my pleasures and perversions.” Cyrus glared at the girl. Her eyes were bloodshot, ragged. She still wore the iron gag, and he wondered how it had scraped against her skin.

He wondered if she was in pain, and he felt better.

She was struggling again. Her wrists were raw. Her throat was probably ragged. She screamed, and no sounds came out. The purest beauty cried, and there was no sound. A television on mute set to the Schadenfreude Channel. Watch the pretty people suffer, and all problems melt away. Like dripping candle wax, light as cotton candy.

“I apologize for being so glum and gloomy and gothy the last few days, but I have not had a very nice…” he trailed off and stared up at the ceiling.

A smile crept up on those pale, feminine features. His eyes glowed with a fierce pink light. “I suppose that your last few days were not too good, correct?”

His pretty, pretty little thing screamed and struggled against the restraints and the collar. Her eyes were bloodshot, and her mascara ran like rivers down the side of her face.

“Your name’s Julia,” he announced. Blood clung to his hands. Blood was all of the life-force that remained from his last playmate. He had been interesting. A goth dressed rather like a girl. Fishnet and boots and mascara.

He now lay in the bathtub. His name had been Aiden, and he had cried. But it was all better, because he was being cleaned. Cleaned and stripped away of everything dirty. Everything that could lead to a conviction.

Cyrus knew he was better, knew they were below him, and knew that it was impossible to see if they really existed anyway.

Black gloves and black boots and a black dress shirt, sleeves rolled up to the elbow, and tight black jeans. He sat in the corner of the room, glaring at her. The little doctor’s table next to her was still a bit bloody. The dagger was on the floor. His clothing was unstained.

Luck loved him that way.

“You cry a lot, Julia. But then again, how can I truly be sure that you’re crying? Everything is a construct up to interpretation. Your information stream interacting with the consensus-reality makes me think you’re crying, but you really may be laughing, correct?”

Julia could not bring herself to show any real agreement.

“I’ve had enough of you laughing at me, Julia. Tonight, we shall dance.”

A few songs were set to play, beautifully arranged. Romantic and binding.

“I hate you, Julia, but you know that I love you.”

He felt his eyes shut tightly, and he did not remember shutting them. It hurt, and he felt warmth welling up from a hidden reservoir somewhere inside of him. His mascara was set to run, and he wondered if he truly believed.

Egocentricity and solipsism, intertwined snakes on his own staff. They were his insignia. Egocentricity white and pink and purple, bright as the sun. Solipsism black and white and grey, never sure what it wants to be.

But the snakes were dying. The snakes had bitten each other, and their respective poison coursed through their veins. They were rotting, and they were still alive and dying.

5.

“You look beautiful, Julia.”

If God has a master plan that only He understands, I hope it’s your eyes he’s looking through.

“You are beautiful, Julia.”

And you make me think. Only, Cyrus did not say that. He could not say that. The moon was a sliver in the sky above him, out of his view, and the snow fell in white flakes. Soapy white.

She was crying harder than ever. Only, he did not hear her ragged sounds. Julia should have been dry by then, but she was a deeper well than previously imagined.

“Don’t like Depeche Mode, I see? ‘Precious’ is like wine, really. One needs to be exposed to the song many times before one finds joy in it.”

He slid his fingers lovingly along a button on the remote. There was silence, and then a bouncy vaguely techno song bumped from the speakers.

“And we do not have the necessary time for you become accustomed to it. Yes, I do want this to last, but we mustn’t give it too much time. It spoils the moments, gives it more chances to be ruined, stained in our memories.”

Why does it matter to me? He wondered for the first time. She was not even real, and she was worthless if she was. He enjoyed it. He was loving them and hating them at the same time.

She was not even real. He did not love her. Her information stream responded to his own in such a way the produced a chemical reaction within his brain, giving him the impression of love.

But he enjoyed it.

You hold a candle in your heart. You shine the light on hidden parts. You make the whole world wanna dance. You bought yourself a second chance.

‘Cherry Lips’ by Garbage.

“Why are you doing this to me, Julia? It makes me feel quite uncomfortable.” His gloves felt too tight, and his eyes were watering. Hot tears spilled forth.

They welled out like blood.

Julia looked like she was crying yet again. It was dark inside of the serial killer’s head, and it made things confusing, more intangible than they already were. Dark shapes moved in his peripheral vision. Things were hazy.

He liked it. It was not product of solipsism. He liked killing. It was not a product of egocentricity. It was a product of sociopathy, psychopathy, and other such possible mental disorders.

The snakes died, withering and falling.

Cyrus loved Julia.

Cyrus hated Julia.

Cyrus jammed the blade in between Julia’s ribs over and over. The music went on, and he was yelling. Yelling at her and him and everyone else that had died in the room.

The blade kissed her flesh, and fountains of blood sprayed in the air. A jet of fresh blood, red rubies. Her crying had stopped. All movement was gone. Her eyes were wide and open, but there was no life. Only darkness. Someone had turned off the light.

And he had enjoyed it despite it being wrong, despite it backing no personal philosophy of any kind. He enjoyed it because of the perverse pleasure, the thought of owning another being. The thought of killing that human being.

Stabbing in lieu of sexual intercourse. Piquerism. They had a word for it, and he was it.

Cyrus let the stained blade drop to the ground, and he fell to the floor, staring down at his boots.

They were black and pretty. Golden buckles down the side. They caught the light nicely. So beautiful. Gold was beautiful.

6.

The mirror’s reflection was starting to change. If he did not act quickly enough, it would change back. The cloud would come back, and he would go back to doing what he did.

They say that after a psychopathic episode that there is a moment of clarity. They also say that there is no real cure for sociopathy, no real way to bring the sociopath back into society.

“I found the cure,” Cyrus whispered. The gun’s eye was in his mouth. It tasted cold. Metal. If it was made out of real iron, he would have tasted blood, but it was not made out of real, real iron. It was made out of some alloy. He wished that he had a Peacemaker, but he did not have a Peacemaker. Cyrus had a pistol.

He had written on the mirror with black lipstick. Loopy, feminine script. Yet cultured. But there was a sort of haze, a distortion in the way the letter formed. You could tell a lot about people based on how they wrote.

I have found the cure.

They would wonder. The press would report on the fallen Son of Mundus. Psychoanalysts would analyze everything. The way he cut, and the way he wrote his final note.

Cyrus wondered if they would ever delve into his mind. The reflection flickered. Pink to brown. He let his contacts out. Pink to brown.

The sociopath administered the cure, and the pill punctured through the back of his head. Blood splattered on the wall.

His last thought was to thank Julia and to tell her that he loved her.