The Misanthropic Humanitarian, or, A Double Murder in Late 21st Century Los Angeles, or, We are All Red

He stood over their lukewarm, dead bodies. His eyes laughed in an ironic, bittersweet way. But to look at him, his face revealed nothing.

They lay before him – the “Movie Star” and the “Fugly Bitch”. “Society calls you this,” he said aloud, walking around them slowly, conversationally. “You each wore your own crown of thorns, your own shame: you both felt the pain of judgment. You each wanted the same things. I will show you to them.”

He worked for four hours. It had to be immaculate. He had no joie de vivre save the small sense of happiness when his aspirations of perfection really did result with everything in its right place.

The man removed the skin, and cleaned up the area, leaving only the clean, red muscle.

He looked down at them and spoke once again. “Man is an animal that hopes for both too much and too little. We are drowning in the baby pool of our possibilities. This will not change anything.”

Violently, he dropped to his knees, filled with self-hatred and love. He cried out, “Where was it? Where was progress? Some feeling that people were who they seemed. That they didn’t just cultivate the most pragmatic persona possible. That there was unity and not discord…Emily! I’ll be with you soon, honey. If there is something…You were the only real human connection I ever felt…it’s tragic that tragedy is so indiscriminate...” He collapsed in a ball and wept. He felt sadness.

“FREEDOM! Psssh.” He sat up and leaned against the side of one of the gurneys. “A means of expressing disagreement or justification without any personal accountability.” He rallied a bit. Equilibrium. He walked steadily around his work room. Confidence. He smiled, flashing what he knew others to experience as his “winning smile”. Deception is a bitch, he mused.

Hamlet burst into his consciousness and said, “What a piece of work is man..” and faded out. He didn’t finish the rest. Maybe he was too tired. Maybe he never meant the rest. The man roared with laughter. He enjoyed the sword of double, triple, quadruple edges, even as it broke his soul for the last time.

He looked from the canvas to the gurneys back to the canvas. “Is this senseless? Or is this the greatest act of humanity I am capable of?”

CLICK. The tape recorder stopped loudly and the man’s voice was no longer heard. His words hovered in the air. Homeless. For a time? Forever?

The two detectives looked at each other and then, once again, at the tableau-d landscape before them. Two female bodies. Leaned up against one another, like they were laying out, relaxing at the beach. Stripped of their skin’s identity, reduced to the dead-though-throbbing red of their muscle. The woman on the left read Milton’s “Paradise Lost.” The other’s head was inclined to the ceiling, a beautiful counterfeit of Michelangelo’s Garden of Eden from the Sistine Chapel.

In the next room, the man swung from side to side. His body limp. His neck broken. Dostoevsky’s Ridiculous Man lay open on the table, waiting for an introduction.

Three Weeks Later

A Thought Train:

Happiness to pain to enjoyable pain? I don’t know but that seems to be my progression. It is truly as if the pain I feel has always been the most real thing, the landscape on which all other events take place. I don’t know what it indicates: my lack of success or that pain really is more real than pleasure.

She is a new landscape and a new canvas. The possibilities escape my understanding and I am unaware. She destroys the whole goddamn paradigm with a look. Again and again she does this. ‘Flourishing’, that’s the word. In the world Jane made for me, I am actually pursuing happiness. I’m not following a theory of what I think happiness should be. I am not the product of my history. I am the product of her: she actualizes me, takes me from floating possibilities to one cohesive whole.

When a theory, or hope, long considered ‘probably true’ turns to reality, it is still an astonishing event. Oddly enough, I reacted unlike I have of late: I was myself. I didn’t worry about how my words were being received. I knew that they were finding a home and that was enough. I was finding a home. A place of comfort and familiarity, typically called a ‘home’, right? I am at home wherever I am at, as long as it is with her.

I don’t know what I expect from myself. I don’t know what she is thinking. All I know is that this the first time I have felt alive in a very long time. And it’s her. I don’t have to translate my words before speaking. I don’t have to worry about loss of interest. I don’t have to worry that I am speaking with a person who cares. I don’t have to worry about being myself.

Pain does settle in around the edges, never seriously breaching the happiness. My joy – Our Joy – is there. It cannot be touched by any outside influence. It’s been said that connections like these – rooted in a spiritual, mental connection – are rare. I know it to be true, but, still, it is bizarre and I think counterintuitive. We are rational, emotional animals. At the forefront of the former is of course our ability to Reason, and, the latter is some combination of Love/Empathy/Compassion. So, if we are naturally animals who have as our essential characteristics the ability to think critically at high levels and the ability to love, why is it so difficult to reach people, to experience people on these levels? Why are we so eager to take the impostor over the real thing? How can we not know the difference? I don’t understand how the lie is told, and I don’t understand how others don’t have the same voice nagging at them, exhorting them to do the right thing.

There is an incredible capacity for recognizing Beauty, but at what point is the line blurred between “Beauty” and just liking something on a completely superficial basis. Is the guy who only goes home with 'dimes' or ‘nines’ a lover of Beauty? I don’t think so. This is why we have proper and common nouns. He likes beautiful women, he does not love Beauty. Beauty is found all over the place – the cloud formations we anthropomorphize as we stare out the car window, the happy eyes of a laughing child, the realization that We are a crack in the massive pavement that is society.

Beauty is not strictly sensory. The way she moves her hands as she speaks, conducting her words to work in the exact manner she wishes. Yes, I am viewing the act with my eyes. You got me. But what my eyes take in isn’t purely beautiful, it needs language to accompany it. And the words. Spoken with honesty and intelligence, her whole face is involved…there is no filter – from her earnest, unflinching blue eyes to her huge radiant smile. She does not hold back. She is both startling and completely matter of fact. How could she be so unique? How could she live in this world and turn out the way she did? How could she be anything other than this?

I don’t think there are answers to these questions, but the fact that they exist at all is the most unexpected, joyous plot twist of my life.