Vision

He didn't think far enough ahead. He saw himself killing, pulling the trigger, seeing the looks of shock and fear. He imagined the satisfaction it would give him. Power. Contempt. Hatred. Disdain. It's something like erotic -- pierced flesh and body fluids. Racing heartbeats. Domination. Tension, release and stillness.

He imagined the tears, the mourning, the gasps of anguish, and he smiled a narrow one-sided smile and nodded his head. He rehearsed the sorrow of it endlessly, author of a masterpiece of grief. All his years have brought him here, to a place where every eye will be on him. He will be a wonder and a watchword, and that will be enough.

He looked only to the final moment of his own life. A last bullet, into his brain. Then everything that matters stops.

He did not see himself, naked and pale, stretched out on the coroner's slab. He did not see his slack jaw, his dry lips, his dry tongue, his teeth now just the first of his bones -- did not see his eyes only half closed, showing the whites now clouded to gray. He did not see his stiff flat flesh conforming to the surface of the table. He did not see his ribs unmoving over breathless lungs, his belly concave and still between his jutting hips. He did not see his flaccid penis and hanging scrotum, like an empty glove, exposed and slack in the cold of death. He did not think of the hands that move his limbs, the blades that cut a long incision from throat to crotch, his organs pulled out and arrayed for examination, pink and purple streaked with blue and green.

Now he lives as an eternal spirit in the place where God is not. Such a place, that lacks every organizing principle, where blackness and fire and torment and abysmal void are only words that hint as dark metaphors at what the spirit cannot comprehend. What has light to do with darkness? What has spirit to do with chaos? But such is all that remains for those who embrace despair.

His imagination did not extend so far. He thought that death is just a final stillness of the body. He will never find stillness again. Life can never end. It just changes locations. He has gone to the place of his choosing. There is no pleasure in this fact. Just inevitability, and resignation to the unavoidable, plodding order of things.


J