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.