A Murderer's Confession

Yes, it was me. I killed —. You want to know how I did it, but I will only tell you why I did it. You can’t demand more from me because I’m not your captive. I kill because life is gauche and I am unable to live elegantly and the pains caused by such incapabilities are unbearable. I murdered the witness of my sufferings, the confidant of my inelegance and mortification, the bearer of my bearings. I kill not out of the fear of her betrayal, I kill because I simply cannot carry on carrying the weight of the lightness of the traces of shame of knowing her knowing. Knowing her knowing the concentration of my tears, the rhythms of my heartbeats, the pitches of my screams. I’d rather kill as one kills when the ease of death, despite all the unknown and the sense of finality entailed, outshines the unease of life. I wish I could kill memories, but I can only harm the brain, causing its internal bleeding with countless beatings. This is as much as you’ll get on the how I did it. But be prepared for an account of something else, be prepared to be fed a piece of maimed marred meat — the why I did it. In order for you to understand the why, I need to make sure that you agree with one thing first, that to be alive is an intense experience, a heavy one. As to kill is to construct death, and death must be spoken of in relation to life. You are alive. So am I. I was born some decades ago and I have managed to be alive since then. My first recollection of existence dates back to my crib. I couldn’t be more than a couple of months old. The surroundings were dark and I was wrapped in cloth like a cocoon. I felt a minuscule as if a grain of sand in my belly button. I was irritated but I didn’t cry. I tried to remove it with my weak fingers, but in reality, I was simply rubbing my belly button instead of picking up the minuscule to remove it, as the movements or the thoughts involved for picking something up were too intricate for an infant. I believe I failed the mission, and rubbing my belly button turned into a habit of decades, till this day. Just a second ago, I stopped typing and, with my right index finger, syringed iciness into my rucked and damp belly button. No minuscule present this time, some decades later, as life went on beyond the crib. I grew up and older. In the passage of time, I was biking against the wind and breathing in the smoke of the grilling of my own heart in my own body. The winter wind was scraping my face. I was biking home but I took a long detour. What is a detour in the passage of time? A tour de force? A suicide attempt in the dawning of night. The wind turned into elastic membranes, layered one sheet after another, hugging me, holding me back and each splashing a grade deeper of blue onto me and the sky as I, biking uphill, burst through them one sheet after another, tramping upon the cold dissuasion that they offered, disturbing the texture of time that they were. I biked to the twenty-second floor. Gazing out of the unwary and indifferent window and into the sky in the blue that had just turned navy, a different gust of wind was scraping my face now again, much more at ease. And slow down, slow down, don’t jump, the killing I’m talking about isn't a suicide. As I said, I am alive. So are you. I did not kill myself. I decided to live, a decision that would lead up to my killing, inevitably eventually, of E. What does it feel like to want to kill? Imagine a skinless, overripe peach with visible brown bruises, dripping, mushy, messy, that no one wants to eat or even touch; can’t be left in a basket or sit on a table, what will become of it? Too raw, too ripe, too wet, too sweet. That naked peach wants to kill. E was that peach. I do not recall when or where I first met E, it was a long time ago, surely. E was like that silent one who went to the same elementary school, middle school, and high school with you but never said a single word to you throughout the years. When you finally started paying attention, you realized that E had been around all this time. E was that person you all know without knowing. I started noticing E as I caught her watching me from a distance. Her gazes, like hazes, were delicate and ambiguous. And I was intrigued. Who is she, really? Why does she look at me? What does she want from me? I figured that E was either in love with me or jealous of me or thought I was beautiful or ugly or was curious about me or utterly resented me, or a combination of those things. But I let her. I let her gaze. Allowing E’s gaze on me felt like flowing down the course of a slow, winding, tranquil river. On the left and right sides of the river were an ocean and another ocean. The river was like a long silver ribbon unrolled across a large piece of aquamarine silk, like the Gulf of Alaska. The riverbanks were slightly elevated above the waterlines of the oceans. You might be tempted to think that the river was getting narrower and deeper by the day, being squeezed by the dying waves of both oceans day by day. It was pale blue everywhere above, the clouds and the sky, and turquoise everywhere below — you could see endless prairies submerged by the nearly transparent saltwater on both your left and your right, and tall grass stalks waved back and forth along the silent currents as if waving in the wind, dyeing the oceans green. E would often swim in the oceans and you’d never be sure on which side you’d catch her next, when did she cross the river again? But when you did find her poking her head above the water and her naked body smooth like pearl or wrinkled like coral depending on the day, the entire ocean became her eye, looking at you, oh, perhaps the left ocean was her right eye and the right ocean was her left eye. The entire ocean became her eye, looking at you, and you were on a gondola flowing down the slow, winding, tranquil river. E saw me crying once. I was hiding, so I didn’t know how she found me. She was carefully keeping her distance. I was sitting on the floor in a corner, my hands hugging my shins, my face buried in my knees. I was weeping, weeping, and weeping. Why? Because the gauzy white mosquito net sheltering me from above had turned into a grey spider web trapping me inside, and someone or something had just flipped the switch of my internal gravity, causing the involuntary contraction of all my organs, squeezing their juices out in the form of tears and snots. Rays of light were icicles stabbing me, but only yesterday they were still warm cotton strings weaved softly around me. Grey was infesting my body. My head hurt because grey had infested it most of all, corrupting the dark night within my skull, eating time away, melting everything, melting everything… And everything melted into a slow, winding, tranquil river, carrying me, washing me away. I was floating. My world had become wobbly. The grey seemed to have ebbed, for now. I felt comfortable. I felt at ease. I realized I was naked. I was trembling rhythmically. I was wet. I was soaked in water; tall grass stalks rocked by torpid undertows were gently rocking my body. The salty, brackish water submerging me was part of me, I was part of it, the water came from me, I secreted it, I secreted it all, an entire ocean’s worth of salty, brackish water. No, two entire oceans’ worth of salty, brackish water. I was at home. I could breathe. I was breathing in salty, brackish water, breathing in myself, breathing out myself, breathing out water, brackish, salty. Everything was just fine, perfect. I could go on forever. I didn’t want to stop secreting salty, brackish water. Let me go on forever like this. In water, salty, brackish, wet, floating, wobbly, trembling. I didn’t want to poke my head out. I didn’t want to go back to the grey. Just put me to sleep, dear oceans, for now at least, let me meet the grey and her gaze the next day, until then let me rest in tears… And my tomorrow came. E greeted me the first thing in the morning. She saw it all, my yesterday of inelegance and mortification. We stood at two antipodal points of a circle enclosing a void. We met eyes and she ran away. I, alone now, closed my eyes and stepped inside the circle, inside the void, destroying the void with my existence, letting the void destroy my existence, proving my vacuous declaration that I didn’t exist, the void didn’t exist, nothing existed. I became transparent, like a detached feather belonging to nowhere and everywhere. I had nothing, not even a witness now, not even E, leaving behind only an undying echo. You could still hear me, couldn’t you? Don’t lie. Not a trace of E, but she would come back. Obsessed with my humming, she always did. And when I open my eyes again, I’d meet her gaze. For now let me not exist. Another day. Another day. Another day. For days I’ve been attempting to capture something with words. Many have made such attempts, what am I adding to those attempting voices heard or unheard? Among them are the voices of Vladimir Nabokov and Clarice Lispector. But regardless of whose voice it is, aren’t words too coarse to pass through the capillaries of life to reach the shimmering glowing end that is the sensation of a speck of sand scampering in the south sough like a shiny sequin scraping through your smile in the seven AM sultry sun, on the first day of July, or September ninth, or something entirely else? Perhaps I hope to create something entirely else, as I try to capture the universal, mundane, yet painful, yet visceral state of being alive for the purpose of constructing death, or justifying death. Perhaps in my bound-to-fail attempts, I’m generating a byproduct that is new, that byproduct not the words I’m writing down, or another counterfeit or simulacrum of the ungraspable, but something nonexistent until now, something that assumes its own form of life, a system, an environment, a universe, a universe self-contained and independent and abiding to its own internal logic and rules, a universe in which I am and I exist as a murderer, and it has to be taken seriously. I have to evaluate its consequences, those of my identity as a murderer, and I am going to, that’s what I mean by it has to be taken seriously — I am going to think about it, think through it, over and over, like a mathematician, creating axioms, making definitions, and proving theorems with no further assumptions, rigorously, with rigor. I have to protect the integrity of the universe, even if it’s just a byproduct, even if all my thoughts turn into scratch work and nothing is written down in the end, but something might be written down in the end. I have to think about it. I have to finish constructing the universe, the byproduct, the sideline, the subplot in which I am and continue to exist as a murderer, mentally or physically, because I have already killed during the incomplete, embryonic, big-bang state of this universe. I have to confess. I have to close up the loose ends so that everything makes sense and stays consistent. It’s a detective story. I think wildly and write with the integrity of a mathematician and an autist and live in a world that is the quotient space defined by the equivalence relations given by metaphors. I check and recheck each sentence, do I mean it, is it sensible, if not is the insensibility intended, is it consistent with what I have already said, is it necessary, is it relevant, is it elegant, if not shall I let it slip this time because it’s a minor imperfection and one has to live with those from time to time or shall I change things up, and if I do change things up, where exactly, how exactly, to what extent exactly, etc., etc., etc. I can’t read Clarice Lispector because I realize that we are too similar. We arrive at nearly the same way of speaking, the same way of writing, the same way of wanting to write, independently. It’s okay. I’m just writing, living in a way I have to, as me. It’ll be okay because despite everything, everything, life and death, being alive and born to die, I firmly firmly firmly believe I am me, not her, and we are different. Different yet the same. Just two universes, two absolute, complicated, insulated universes, like Howl’s moving castle and Owl's moving castle, different yet the same. Math, life and death, the universe I’m creating, myself, we are all like Howl’s moving castle, absolute, complicated, each a giant, ambiguous, mysterious entity, fully alive and assuming eternity according to our own internal logic, self-sufficient and self-contained, and we cast shadows on others. Different proofs of the McKay correspondence, algebraic-geometric, symplectic-geometric, gauge-theoretic, different flavors of Floer theory, Heegaard Floer, Seiberg-Witten, embedded contact, they are all shadows of the same entity from different angles, under different light sources. Life and death are the same entity too, dying pangs, sparkling pains, feeling alive is a reminder that we’ll eventually die. So ironic. Ironies, always with a bit too much going on, always with a bit too much of everything. I want to write about ironies, or rather, write ironically. Because I am, too, an irony. Life and death form one good irony. I’ll use the most delicate, mellow, subdued pastel colors to paint the most macabre scenes. Be a tender murderer, a gruesome mother, utter hate in whispers, scream love in curses, live through absurd chaos with fatalistic determination. Irony is aesthetics, it combines contradictions, bridges dichotomies, commingles streams, the organism that is smooth on the outside and caresses feces from within — I excrete my voice as I excrete words, and I excrete words as I excrete feces, quite so literally, every morning, on the opaline, porcelain toilet drinking up my excrements like you now drinking up my words drunk in my voice, a lot is going on down there, a medley melting pot containing everything in sync, or not in sync but all mixed up anyway, a spectrum from one extreme to the other, the embodiment of coincidence and inevitability, life and death, beauty and monstrosity, me and E.  Where are you, where are you, E, E, E? In the air, in the sound, in the green. I opened my eyes and I could feel E's presence. She was hiding but hiding like how the moisture in a humid spring morning was hiding, invisible, ubiquitous and saturated, hiding but obvious and ominous, pounding my skin and consciousness incessantly. Squinting my eyes and looking carefully, I saw E dancing with the water molecules. Her belly button was exposed and a water molecule jumped right into it and stayed there like an encrusted pearl. The birds were chirping, the rain was coming. And then, pouring down were words, secrets and memories, and a thousand faces of E. I got wet in the monsoon season. I kept on reading Água Viva because I couldn’t let go, just as if I couldn’t turn away from E’s gaze. It was like she was looking at me through the pages, as if the pages were transparent mirrors reflecting her back at me. I felt ashamed to be observed and words, just like rays of light that used to weave softly around me, that used to weave softly around me had turned into icicles falling from the sky, along with the secrets and memories, stabbing me. I was bleeding. My blood was thick and sweet as it was infused with love. It was melted chocolate, it was bitter, too, warm, dark. And no, I’m no Clarice Lispector. I ruminate, I deliberate, I calculate, I manipulate, unlike Lispector — my words are not for the instants. My words are for the notions. Love, for example, is a notion. Let’s talk about love. Did E love me? Before I brutally murdered her, did she love me? Did I love E? There, she was looking at me again, and I let her. Why do you look at me like that? Why don’t you say anything? Perhaps — It’s hard to speak things that can’t be said. It’s so silent. How to translate the silence of the real encounter of the two of us? So hard to explain: I looked straight at you for a few instants. Such moments are my secrets. There was what’s called perfect communion. Who are you, peeking through the pages, trying to figure me out? Don't look away now and pretend we didn't just meet eyes. Are you the detective? Let’s see how deep you can probe into this confession and uncover me, and I’m waiting for you to catch me. Our perfect communion. And yes, I was in love, as always, with whom it doesn’t matter, and E was in love, too, I could tell in her gaze. In love, I felt enveloped, like being in a cocoon back when I was in a crib. It was the perfect temperature and humidity and texture, for a while at least, an environment painted by the sounds of the songs I listened to when I was distracted in the clouds, keeping me intact from the outside world, a gentle and peaceful dictator of my motions and emotions, and I forgot you were there, but you were there. And I went on thinking about something else, and you went on being there. It was a white world I was in. Your world. And then I emerged. I wriggled myself out of the cocoon, and I saw a giant flower. A monstrous flower. A beautiful ugly dying undying growing rotting flower. Taller than all the Rockies and skyscrapers. It stood in the center of your white world, planted in a shallow vessel ready to tip over by the weight of the corolla. The nameless or name-forsaken flower. It didn’t belong. It was so enormous that it cast its shadow on everything in your white world. White cubes, white gravels, white pages, white rules. E was curled up in the center of the corolla, like a tiny almond or a teeny bee, naked but sheltered by the withering petals like burnt paper. She was still looking at me while I was busy getting lost in your white world, searching for you. But if everything was white, what were the colors of emotions? What was the color of the rabbit being grabbed at the ears where I was most delicate and sensitive? What was the color of the dead beetle shriveled, wizened, desiccated, and crawled into a ball? What was the color of that internal gravity when the switch was flipped again and all the organs were swelling, expanding, bending my skeleton, ready to explode? What was the color of me when on the outside, I was shrinking down and hardening up and my skin was turning brittle, yet within me something got sticky and was boiling, trying to escape to the outside but couldn’t? What was the color of the flakes of the brittle dead skin and dandruff produced in the previous process that were desperately dying to be exfoliated? What was the color of the air balloon letting go of the everything it’d been holding onto because it thought — maybe just let me try this time, let me try to let go just for once, and it became soft immediately and the air flowing out of it turned into water drops drizzling down, losing its air, lost in the air, the air balloon that was slowly tumbling down from the sky, almost sozzled, down, down, down, until it was completely flabby and hit the ground, and then fell asleep, and the rabbit fell asleep, too? What was the color of the moment I caught when I caught a newborn bird, ugly, crying, dying, desperate, and I could squeeze it, suffocate it, break its neck, toss it from the tall bough of the flower, kill it, forever be rid of it, or I could hold it dear, kiss it, caress it, warm it with my own breaths, let it live, with me, within me, nurture it, care for it, love it, let it grow into a monstrous bird, with blue feathers — indeed that was what I did, only to kill it later with the lyrics of a lullaby that goes like “the witness of my darkness, my shame, the bearer of my darkness and shame, my doppelgänger, my little sister, my grandmother, you are safe with me, you are harbored in my vessel, let me be tender to you, caress you, massage you, go to sleep, yes, my sweet baby, go to sleep, shush shush, you are safe, it’s warm, it’s quiet, it’s clean, close your eyes, have a deep dream, and I promise you death, kill you I will, yes indeed, I promise, so don’t worry, goodbye now, and goodnight, you are asleep and soon you will be dead, I promise, my sweetest, goodbye, goodnight…”? Oh, Look! Over there! It was happiness! Passing by like a shooting star! Did you catch it? But it’s gone now. What was the color of it, did you see? And look at E, curled up in the center of the corolla of the flower, like a tiny almond or a teeny bee, naked but sheltered by the withering petals like burnt paper, naked with all her feathers plucked out, naked with that blue sheen. If everything was white, what was the color of E? I was scared to touch your whiteness, and I wanted or even tried to dye your whiteness. Everywhere I ran, I splashed my colors and watched them sink into the white soil and turn into indiscernible and indescribable stains. But I loved you. I didn’t quite know how to be, but I loved you. I was dying, too, and E was watching me dying, dying, too. Sometimes I’d run right underneath the monstrous flower to bathe in the eternal grey rainbow outstretched by the mists in the rain of tears of E dripping down from the corolla like Angel Falls, the source of two oceans divided by a slow, winding, tranquil river. And I’d catch a withered fallen petal and ride it like a gondola down the flowing river, tranquil, winding, slow. Trying to reach you. Where are you? I know you are around somewhere hiding in silence. In the silence, I could hear beatings. Up in the flower. My heartbeats. My heart beat on E. Beat and beat and beat. The rhythmic boom-boom-boom, blood and bruises for as long as I should live. The murder of E had begun. Incessant beating, harm the brain, since I couldn’t kill memories — I told you this is the how. This is the how I kill E: my heart kept beating and beating, E kept bleeding and bruising, I kept breathing and flowing, down the river on the gondola, and gradually, the end of the oceans rose to the horizon. I was approaching the shore, the other side of the world. The landscapes were completely different on that other side, I saw a rainforest in the distance. Yet the river flew on, splitting the shore, entering the rainforest. I was sure I was on my way to reach you. You must be hiding in that rainforest, I thought, and I’d finally reach you there. But I was wrong. You weren’t there, and the rainforest was hell, a tropical, vernal, lush, solstitial hell, but nonetheless hell, but all the same hell, but utmost hell, something I only learned afterward, after I ventured into it to search for… I turned around when I was just about to flow into the rainforest, to look back one last time at where I came from, at what I left behind, the flower, E, to gaze a soundless bye. And then I saw you. All of a sudden. You were at the base of the flower. You were… chopping it down…? You were chopping it down. With an axe or something? How… could you…? How could you. How could you! How! How! How! Could you? Could you… I couldn't… I couldn't stop you. It wasn't just the rhythmic boom-boom-boom I was hearing, it was the rhythmic boom-boom-boom and the obscured metronomic thwack-thwack-thwack in sync all along. And there you just dealt the one last strike — the corolla wavered slightly, then it crashed down like a truncheon, hammering right into the heart of the rainforest, causing an earthquake, a typhoon and a tsunami, and in my last glimpse before getting blown away by the hit, I saw E crashing down along with the corolla… I woke up somewhere deep inside the rainforest close to the riverbank, covered in blood and bruises. I must have been out of consciousness for quite some time. Far, far away down the river, I could see that the ugly giant flower was lying above felled trees like a hated ideology that had splashed its fallen petals of icons all over forced worshippers. And then I noticed E — she was hanging by the tip of a withered petal still tethered to the crushed corolla, hanging, naked, beaten, wouldn’t let go. Hanging plus naked plus beaten equals lynched. Dead, too? Has the murder been completed, then? I had to find E, I had to cross the rainforest and reach the crushed corolla to which a withered petal was tethered, where E was still hanging. I needed to confirm the kill. E is only dead when I declare it. So let me tell you now the story about my journey crossing the rainforest, the tropical, vernal, lush, solstitial hell, to find E. The story that I wrote before this confession, the premise of this confession, a semi-travelog documenting my obsession to reach E. But unlike a documentary, the story is filled with allusions and metaphors, as you’ll see. For example, even though in reality my journey occurred in the rainforest hell, I wrote the story as set against the surrealist backdrop of Budapest to create a sense of mystery and fantasy, and instead of writing about flowing down the slow, winding, tranquil river to the heart of the rainforest as how I indeed traveled to find E, the sail is metaphorically represented by a train ride along the Rhine River and the final destination a botanical garden as if in a fairytale. Twisting the usual literary device of letting reality collapse into a dream, I reversed the process — as I said, the story starts in the dreamland of Budapest ladened with symbols and metaphors, but it would eventually wake up back to reality, to the rainforest hell. Also, even though the story is about me, it is told in the third-person narrative. Anyhow, just a heads up, and here we go — My name is I. I am going to tell my story in the third-person narrative. Bear with I. It’s springtime. It’s after noontime. Black peony poppies are in full blossom inside the miniature circular parterres enclosed by low parapets. The gardens are scattered around the open park utilized by both skater boys flip-flopping their flat steeds along easy slopes and by salarymen out for a quick post-lunch coffee break under the warm sun. The warm sun hangs itself up there that is just the sky of a drowsy spring day wearing an airy gauzy floral mesh gown sifting out little pink and tiny brown, cozily reposing along the quiet Danube, afternoon; the spring day rests its head on the sage green park, dozing off, crystalline pastel blue sky up there holding the warm sun. I thinks black peony poppies are flowers from hell. Both the single-bloom variety and the double-bloom variety. The black, baptized and blasphemous, is chromatic, a deep deep deep purple, a violent, violated violet. And it shimmers under the sun, the black, as if choked by pearl dust, a smile of immense sadness and dry of tears. The tears are supposed to be held by the petals, but the petals are holding nothing, the tears are not there, none, hence dry. The corolla is empty, just black. The smile contains something else, though, more than sadness, perhaps also a sense of nonchalance that is debonair. The fat pistil of the flower, pale cadmium green and wearing a radiant yellow astral crown, is surrounded by numerous white anthers attached to short filaments, all completely divulged for a single bloom variety, against the refulgent black, as if one’s own detached and floating (plucked out) third eye staring right back at the body, piercing right through it, and slithering right to the darkest corner of the soul along the shortest route home. I is tempted to pinch a petal without removing it from the corolla with her left thumb and index finger, to listen to the softly cried-out crisp from where it folds, to press and rub back and forth arduously, ardently, feverishly but delicately the two sheets of the pleated petal against each other, each of which endearing, enduring, enforcing a forced and other intimacy with the other (zoom in, zoom in), to mutilate the sheen in the slow friction generated by the mild texture of the petal and indulge on the gentle resistance from the gently pulled flower, to extract the juice and contract the volume through the wringing and squirming and splicing of the tender chip, to commit with two dyed fingers as evidence not a sin but something sinister. Timidly, exhaustedly trying mostly in vain to recover, the post-traumatic petal brimmed with newly acquired creases and bruises needs to be still attached to the flower at the end of the deed. I lets go of the vision. The double bloom variety at the height of its blossom (happens to be right now) looks like a quintessential dead flower, perfectly darkened, perfectly withered, perfectly rotten. It looks like a sculpture, ever-changingly fixated, in perfection of interminable pulchritude and putrefaction, black. I simply doesn’t want to touch it in this case and is deadly certain that it stinks, too, although she hasn’t tried to sniff it. The chief ingredient for opium, papaver somniferum var. paeoniflorum, the black peony poppies generate sleep. The single bloom variety is death when death is smiling at life; the double bloom variety is death when death is copulating with life. They are flowers from hell. They remind I of M. Enough about M. Perhaps just another word or two about M. I thinks about death when she thinks about M, although she certainly doesn't equate death with M, more like the process of construction of death for that matter, she thinks about hell, a tropical, vernal, lush, solstitial hell, but nonetheless hell, but all the same hell, but utmost hell, when she thinks about M. M has hazel eyes but they turn blue under the sun. I likes them, as well as M’s side profile. I writes M messages and letters, walls of them, every once in a while, but I doesn’t send them as she knows they will remain unaddressed even if she does. But I keeps writing them until the walls start to pile into a castle, and then she’d demolish the castle in a second when she feels like — after all, deletion is just a short dance of the lithe fingers. Sometimes I wonders why she keeps writing those messages and letters. But she keeps writing those messages and letters. Perhaps because of those hazel eyes that would turn blue under the sun — they are like a benign April night, one of the first few that are genuinely tender to a lonely pedestrian walking on the street, lost in mind and cold at heart, amidst the orange darkness without a jacket on. I writes because she is much less reserved in writing, hence the thick walls of messages and letters, and she always has something to say, a lot to say, even if no one is listening, even if no one understands even if they are listening, even if no one talks back even if they understand, even if no one is listening even if they talk back. Above all, I wants M to hear her thoughts. “I think Nabokov is my soulmate, that he writes in a language that’s not his mother tongue, that he is both an artist and an academic, that he is most definitely neurodivergent, all of these make him my soulmate. Do you like him? Although he does seem pretty mean, the ratings he gave of some authors and their books are hilarious, and mean, I mean, but I forgive him for being mean, I mean, just look at his prose in Ada, or Ardor, so beautiful, reading more than ten pages of that book a day feels like tossing money into the ocean, or going to a Michelin 3-star restaurant after stuffing the stomach with instant noodles, or getting all dressed up in glamor and clamor and jumping right into a summer thunderstorm. It’s so dense and rich, the prose, it’s just such a waste to go through more than ten pages a day. I can’t. I won’t. I’ll get a dyspepsia of pure gold. I came upon this little reference to the Bosch triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights in Ada, or Ardor. It was fun to read how Nabokov talks about Bosch. You know Nabokov is such a butterfly fanatic. Two butterflies are mentioned in part II chapter 10 of the book, a meadow brown butterfly and a tortoiseshell butterfly. The meadow brown lives in the rightmost panel of hell, and the tortoiseshell butterfly whose wings are incorrectly depicted, lives in the central panel, a paradise filled with lusts and delights. I suppose the meadow brown butterfly symbolizes Ada, the main female character in the book, whose name is written in orange and black in Nabokov’s eyes as he has synesthesia so he sees letters in colors — perhaps a is in orange and d is in black, or maybe the other way around, and the wings of a meadow brown butterfly have orange and black on them; also in Russian, Ada means hell, and the meadow brown butterfly is in the hell panel as well. The other butterfly with incorrectly depicted wings most likely symbolizes Lucette. She is frequently associated with paradise and has red hair and wears colorful outfits, and her butterfly lives in the paradise panel. But on the other hand, Lucette is a sickly child, and the butterfly has incorrectly depicted wings, too, so in a sense sickly and disabled, oh, and her love is unrequited. So it’s like paradise is fragile, about to be lost, becomes tragic and dies young, but long lives hell, along with all the addictions, temptations, and obsessions. Ada is the most vernal, tropical, lush, solstitial hell, no? But I guess perhaps aren’t we all drawn to hell sometimes, subconsciously, subliminally? Just like Van to Ada. What do we want from hell? Read this —An individual’s life consisted of certain classified things: ‘real things’ which were unfrequent and priceless, simply ‘things’ which formed the routine stuff of life; and ‘ghost things,’ also called ‘fogs,’ such as fever, toothache, dreadful disappointments, and death. Three or more things occurring at the same time formed a ‘tower,’ or, if they came in immediate succession, they made a ‘bridge.’ ‘Real towers’ and ‘real bridges’ were the joys of life, and when the towers came in a series, one experienced supreme rapture; it almost never happened, though. In some circumstances, in a certain light, a neutral ‘thing’ might look or even actually become ‘real’ or else, conversely, it might coagulate into a fetid ‘fog.’ When the joy and the joyless happened to be intermixed, simultaneously or along the ramp of duration, one was confronted with ‘ruined towers’ and ‘broken bridges.’ And then this — The classical beauty of clover honey, smooth, pale, translucent, freely flowing from the spoon and soaking my love’s bread and butter in liquid brass. The crumb steeped in nectar. ‘Real thing?’ he asked. ‘Tower,’ she answered. And the wasp. The wasp was investigating her plate. Its body was throbbing. ‘We shall try to eat one later,’ she observed, ‘but it must be gorged to taste good. Of course, it can’t sting your tongue. No animal will touch a person’s tongue. When a lion has finished a traveler, bones and all, he always leaves the man’s tongue lying like that in the desert’ (making a negligent gesture). ‘I doubt it.’ ‘It’s a well-known mystery.’ Her hair was well brushed that day and sheened darkly in contrast with the lusterless pallor of her neck and arms. She wore the striped tee shirt which in his lone fantasies he especially liked to peel off her twisting torso. The oilcloth was divided into blue and white squares. A smear of honey stained what remained of the butter in its cool crock. ‘All right. And the third Real Thing?’ She considered him. A fiery droplet in the wick of her mouth considered him. A three-colored velvet violet, of which she had done an aquarelle on the eve, considered him from its fluted crystal. She said nothing. She licked her spread fingers, still looking at him. Van, getting no answer, left the balcony. Softly her tower crumbled in the sweet silent sun. Isn’t it epic? It’s epic, isn’t it? I mean, isn’t it? And by definition, a triptych is a tower, a real one. And do you know I’m painting a triptych, like Bosch? And I’m also referencing Bosch, just like Nabokov. In each panel of my triptych, I pick a subtle or not-so-subtle detail from Bosch’s triptych to mingle with the rest of the painting — a strawberry for the left panel, the bird monster for the central panel, and the very meadow brown butterfly for the right one. It will be my masterpiece to come! And I’m writing a triptych, too, you’ll see soon. And I need to write a series of three math papers, so they’ll form a triptych, too, and then I would have created a triptych of triptychs. So far I have two math papers so I still need a third one, it can’t just be about anything, it must be good and related to the previous two papers, I’ll have to think hard about what the third paper should be about. And I know what you are thinking right now, you are thinking that I should do this three times, creating three triptychs of triptychs, a triptych of triptychs of triptychs, making it a cube, 3 x 3 x 3! Am I right? It will be a series of real towers, a supreme rapture of life, a ziggurat, according to Van!” Messages like this. I writes long messages like this, addressed to M, never meant to be sent out, but it’s always important that they are addressed to someone, to M, yes. I likes to compose these messages in her periods of distraction, when her body rests still or operates on autopilot, with some music in the background for extra-infused sentimentality. On a train ride from Budapest to Vienna, then to Frankfurt, and finally to Bonn along the Rhine River, for example, in search of —. So here are the messages I wrote on that train ride. “I’ve been pairing writers with painters lately, you know, to match their styles. It was a lot of fun actually, I got a bit obsessed with it. Here are the pairs I’ve come up with so far: Thomas Mann and Egon Schielle — for they both remind me of sickness, the sickly figures of Schielle’s portraits, and the sickly desires imbued in Death in Venice, the psychological, homosexual qualities of their works; Foucault and Otto Dix — their works are both rich and dense, like a British Christmas pudding, maybe, the paragraphs, the layers, the lines, the colors… but really I pair them for that I sense this deep, palpable empathy they both hold towards the weak, the victimized, the impeded; Nabokov and Bosch — well, no need to say much here, my absolute favorites, saturated geniuses; Henry Miller and James Ensor — I think both of them are ahead of their time, daring and under appreciated, a bit occult, and both of their works have a strong sense of self; Italo Calvino and Florine Stettheimer — obviously, and another favorite pair, airy, lightweight works of pure beauty, floaty dreamlike aesthetics, they create utopias of colors and joy; Rimbaud and Goya — grotesque, morbid, beauty in monstrosity; Octavio Paz and Botticelli — perhaps this pair is one I’m less sure of, but to me, they are both poetic yet refined, serious yet colorful; Schopenhauer and Francis Bacon — they are both so depressive; Kafka and Leonora Carrington — their works are like gothic, dark fairytales, but there is always a sense of wistful innocence hidden somewhere beneath the surface; Garcia Marquez and Henri Rousseau — magical, magical, magical, realism; Hermann Hesse and Hilma af Klint — philosophical, geometrical and divine, elegant, poetic and simple;  Julio Cortázar and Diego Rivera — both of them are tender yet kind of misogynistic, yet both among my favorite artists, not to mention both Spanish-speaking; Borges and Escher — lovers of mathematics(!); Georges Bataille and Hans Bellmer — deeply erotic and transgressive, disturbing yet philosophical; Virginia Woolf and Georgia O’Keeffe — two iconic women artists whose names I often mix up, I suppose it’s because they both contain US states and end with an f-sound, but seriously, they are both so sensual and introspective, free yet precise, feminine and poetic; Georges Perec and Victor Brauner — absurdity packaged in the symmetries of words, shapes and structures, surrealism in simple geometric forms; Melville and Andrew Wyeth — two of the best American artists, musings told in vast whiteness and deep emptiness; H.P. Lovecraft and Max Ernst — campy; Mikhail Bulgakov and Stanley Spencer — biblical, rich visuals, among my favorites; William Blake and Jean Delville — I almost wanted to pair Blake with himself since he is both a writer and a painter, but then there is Jean Delville who paints just like Blake, and guess what, Delville is also a poet and writer captivated by spirituality so the pairing has to be the two of them;  Hemingway and Henri Matisse — they are both intense but in opposite ways, bleak versus colorful; Allen Poe and Odilon Redon — the creatures of Redon’s prints seem like they might have crawled out of Poe’s haunting horror stories; Kawabata and Maurice Denis — gentle, mild and a bit sad; Rainer Maria Rilke and Winifred Nicholson — their names are both so beautiful, remind me of seasons and weathers, just like their works are about the colors and aesthetics of the simple nature and mundane everyday; Dostoevsky and Manet — whites, greys, blacks and blues are their colors, also both of them represent the tipping point between old master and modernity; Clarice Lispector and Frida Kahlo — another pair of my favorites, two female artists exploring femininity to its bloodiest core saturated with pains and self-awareness; Roberto Bolaño and R.B. Kitaj — eerie, intense, their works carry a sense of doom, and I see darkness seeping through colors or colors seeping into darkness all the time; Marcel Proust and Rembrandt — to me their works always capture the fleeting and misty moments of memories and impressions, carrying the fineries of nostalgia, the slightness of intensity and a sense of longing; Wittgenstein and Kandinsky — another mathematical pair(!); David Foster Wallace and Google Deep Dream or Andy Warhol — I really just can’t decide between Google Deep Dream and Andy Warhol, so okay, both of DFW and GDD are fractal fanatics with similar maximalist aesthetics and fragmentations, and both DFW and AW have this postmodern emptiness permeating their works wrapped in capitalism, consumerism and medias, and deep down they are both insecure wannabes, and the works of all three get a ‘meh’ from me… Okay that was a lot, I told you I got a bit obsessed. I guess it was so much fun to come up with these pairs maybe because I write and paint, too, and art to me is never just about one particular medium but about how to communicate something in the most genuine and truthful way to someone who wishes to listen and understand, and it’s interesting to just ponder on how to delivery a message precisely and particularly, finding the perfect form of medium to delivery that exact message so that it can be said best and not any better, does that make sense? Sometimes it’s through painting, sometimes it’s through writing, or through music, or film, and who knows, maybe it can even be through math, or a combination of different mediums, because the message can be so multi-faceted and each medium can only capture a shadow of it under a single light source. The same idea or concept may have different representations — actually, for example, I’ve been trying to assign faces and personalities to math subfields, almost like painting portraits for them, giving these concepts anthropomorphic representations, capturing their essence behind all the formalism and abstraction in a sense: homotopy theory is someone who wears dresser shirts and fancy blazers and reads postmodern philosophies, and loves routines and is austere, a bit hard to approach and get to know at first; low-dimensional topology is someone who has colorful dyed hair, a bit chaotic on the outside and deeply intuitive on the inside, a modern witch who’s into the science of astrology; functional analysis is someone who’s nice and meticulous, always taking things literally, who doesn’t stand out much but tries to be helpful whenever needed; algebraic geometry is a bit mean and snobby, but not a bad person at heart… You might be surprised to find how similar math is to art, I mean, they are intertwined by the shared appreciation for beauty, the beauty that is encapsulated by the most inevitable coincidences, the interpolation between sameness and difference, that’s my definition, ironic, isn't it? Coincidental, yet inevitable, same yet different. Think about symmetry — if two things are the same, you’d just say that they are the same, you wouldn’t say that they are symmetric, it’s because symmetries by definition capture both sameness and difference; think about poetry — you don’t rhyme with the exact same word at the end of each line, you use different words that sound similar, it’s again symmetry, the symmetry of sounds, same, yet different; think about an old master landscape — the harmonious burnt umber hue, yet in different shades, lighter, deeper, forming delicate chiaroscuro, complemented by diluted yellows and blues, same, again, different. You see, it’s sameness and difference simultaneously, similarity, that’s why metaphors are beautiful, because they pull together similar things, they are equivalence relations, unexpected like two strangers on the street run into each other and realize that they know each other from childhood, unexpected, coincidental, yet fateful, yet inevitable, because now that the connection has been forged, it cannot be undone, the world can no longer go on without this tiny piece of treasure existing in its own teeny corner, that’s beauty to me. Nature blesses us with tremendous beauty, order in endless chaos, chaos in homogeneous order. Both math and art see it. Both math and art try to create their own version of it by putting pieces of puzzles together to form something bigger. I can even find parallels between the processes! Words into lines, elements into groups; storytelling is just like writing a proof — the background and setting of the story are like the hypotheses and assumptions, the characters are the definitions, the plots of the story correspond to the arguments in the proof, and the theme and message of the story are the mathematical theorems, see, perfect parallel!” I put down her phone and looked out of the window. The sky had turned grey and clouds were gathering. Soon enough, it started drizzling outside. The movement of the train talked to the tiny droplets of rain in a quiet conversation along the slant zigzag paths traversing across the slightly fogged glass. I picked up her phone again because she just came up with something more to say. “It’s raining outside right now. I feel a bit sad, maybe it’s because I just read about Lucette’s death. I knew she would die young because the family tree is printed at the beginning of the book with everyone’s birth and death years, but I always thought she’d die of some illness as she was a sickly child, so her suicide really took me by surprise. I think the sky is crying for her, it’s cliché, I know, sorry. Have you listened to the song Say Yes to Heaven by Lana Del Rey? I think it’s a song from Lucette to Van — she’s the heaven, she’s the paradise, but she couldn’t convince Van. By the way, do you see imageries when you listen to music? Sometimes when I listen to a song on repeat, I start to paint it in my head… When I listened to Descent by Berlinist, I imagined I was a blue whale sinking and drowning in deep water, sinking, sinking, and drowning, it was like the music was pulling me down until it was just all darkness around me. That first sharp high note about halfway into the song after the long and slow intro always stabbed me right to the core, and the broken shards of me would shatter into more broken shards. I was so sad when I kept on playing this song over and over and over again during that humid summer, I think I could still breathe it in the air when I play Descent again, walking again along that long trail in the forest behind my house, till this day. Sorry if it was a bit depressive, but despite how sad it made me, Descent will always be one of my favorite songs. There is another song I really like, Crystalline by pg.lost. I see black at first when I listen to it, and it’s not clear what this whole blackness is about, and the music goes on, and the blackness goes on, nothing but blackness in front of you, sucking you in; and then gradually or perhaps suddenly, you see a bit of dim reddish-orange appearing from the bottom of your vision, and there is a moment of quietness and stillness, and then, the reddish-orange starts to grow and glow, larger and brighter, rising up bit by bit, until it becomes the shape of a full disk and the disk keeps rising — that’s when you suddenly realize that the blackness you’ve been seeing is the sky and what you are witnessing right now is the sunrise, yet the sky remains as black as ever, only the reddish-orange sun now is right at the focal point of your eyes staring straight back at you, and it just hangs there, the reddish-orange sun in the black sky. That’s my painting for Crystalline. Lately, I’ve been listening to a song called Xī Wàng Xiàng Xīng Xīng Yí Yàng Shǎn Shuò by Wén Què, and in translation, it means Hope Shines Like Stars by Sparrow. When it starts playing, I picture myself lying flat in a desert and looking at the starry evening sky, and I see blues, deep navy, a mix of Prussian and ultramarine, maybe also a few sparks of pink here and there; the colors are uneven and diluted, like in a watercolor drawing. If you keep looking, you start to discover all sorts of other hidden colors, too, slivers of emerald green and Indian yellow, like tiny gems embroidered on the blue satin, and when the climax hits, you see a sudden burst of oranges with shifting gradients ranging from pale and pastel to warm and over-saturated outshining everything else… the oranges linger for a while, and then fade as the climax fades, but the music continues into a rehabilitative state, and the dimmer colors from before reappear and start to dance with each other, mix up, spread and sprawl, grow and grin, and you’d almost see shapes and stories now forming in their kaleidoscopes, but then they morph into something else soon enough so you aren’t quite able to keep up with the plots, and then there is a moment of silence, and just when you start to wonder if the song is about to end, the climax reblooms admist the silence, and the oranges are back, but in the center of the oranges you see white fountaining out or perhaps just light so bright, and the light sings so loudly, flies across the entire sky… That’s what I see when I listen to Xī Wàng Xiàng Xīng Xīng Yí Yàng Shǎn Shuò. But right now I’m listening to Sleep by Godspeed You! Black Emperor on repeat, it’s my favorite piece from the album, it's so dark, so intense. I was just looking out of the window. I’m on a train crossing the Rhineland right now. The Rhine River is so beautiful, the Rhineland is so beautiful. It's such a magical world, and such a magical word, Rhine, I think to me it will be forever wed to Sleep. The undulating guitar notes match the undying waves, the rhythmic beats chase the gentle bumps from the train, the slow or sudden changes of tempos dance to the winding turns of various degrees of the river, the brassy metal percussions vibrate with the blinding reflections of the sun reflected by the river — ah, right, the rain had let out and the sun is back now. I think the climax will kick in in just a bit, right now I’m hearing the part building up to it, the tension is drawing up, and I’m a bit sad again, this very instant, it’s hard to pin down exactly what it is that I’m feeling, just a sense of aching, perhaps. Maybe sad isn’t the right word. Maybe it’s the repetitions, the repetitions like layers and layers of elastic membranes surrounding me, enveloping me, and as the music progresses, as the train moves forward, I’m breaking the membranes each by each, veil by veil, sheet by sheet, and the counterforce from the membranes is getting stronger and stronger so I have to push harder and harder to break through the next one’s resistance, just like years ago, when I was biking in the wind, against the wind, I'm remembering again that night from years ago when I biked in the wind, against the wind in the passage of time, but I kept on pushing then and I keep on pushing now because time was still flowing and music is still playing. Just like years ago, when I was biking in the wind, against the wind, now I’m listening to Sleep. Will you listen to these songs?” I got off the train. It’s so crowded and lively here, she thought, a beautiful town. The city center was right next to the station, and the Rhine River was just a few blocks away. “You know, every city with a river across it, the river is always the same river, Danube, Rhine, Erdre, Seine, Thames… Whatever the names are, they are all the same river. And when you cross the river, you go to the other side of the world. You enter a rainforest, a rainforest filled with things from the other side of the world, things you don’t have, shouldn’t have, things you nevertheless want and long for, things that don’t belong to you because you don’t belong to this side of the world. There are many hidden gates to that rainforest, a noon market selling birds and flowers and insects and fishes is one of them, and many of the immersive art museums, the place you end up at by chasing after a stray cat, the bridges across every river flowing across a city, some underpasses and tunnels, the alley followed by a wrong turn, and botanical gardens… There are at least two hidden gates in this town, because there's a river and there's a botanical garden. I’m walking to the botanical garden right now, the neighborhoods around me are so colorful.” I wrote another message to M on her walk to the botanical garden. The front architecture of the botanical garden was a building of a simple rococo style in white and yellow. Behind it, the conservatory of the botanical garden was surrounded by a pond and a garden. The outdoor area was extensive and delightful, especially on such a spring day but I couldn’t contain her excitement for the tropical, vernal, lush, solstitial greenness of the greenhouse any longer and rushed inside as soon as she could. “I just entered the conservatory of the botanical garden, it’s so warm and humid in here! I feel like I'm inside a rainforest! So many plants I can’t name, but it’s okay, because my amazement lies in seeing and touching them, maybe even in sniffing them, not in naming them, except when I do know how to name a few of them! Ah there, I see a fiddle leaf fig tree hidden in the crowd! But it’s so so big! Ten times, no fifteen times bigger than the one I used to have at home! And an elephant ear plant, too! And all the water lilies! The giant ones are so big, they are like gourmet spinach pancakes! And look at the tiny ones, they are so puny, puny green Pac-Mans! The lilac lilies glowing in the lambent underwater light like little princesses on a midsummer night playing with their younger cousins in fuzzy white! I feel like in a daze, a dazzlement, I'm so enticed. Aren’t you drawn to those exotic plants? I so so am, because I mean, they are so so weird, it’s like why would you want to go to space when there are plants like cannonball trees and baobab trees and king proteas and queen of the night growing on this very dear planet? Have you seen any of them? Those plants and flowers, they are so so weird, and I just, can’t look away anymore. I know they belong to the rainforest, to the other side of the world, but I still think about them and I wish I could talk to them or eavesdrop on their conversations. Have you ever wondered if two flowers have sex, what the scene would look like? Because, I mean, it's a natural question to wonder, no? Pistil, stamen, the orifice to pregnancy. Because, always, a flower blooms in the ephemeral whim of an orgasm and withers in the onerous bearing of the offsprings… Yet flowers are androgynous, containing both the male and the female parts in one. What's odd to me, though, is that a pistil looks like a penis, always remarkably stiff, even though it’s supposed to be the female organ of the plant, and the stamens are like pubic hairs growing around it, but they are the male organs. Imagine being caressed by the fragile petals of a flower, and how they mingle in variegated colors, magenta, turquoise, violet... but the petals get bruised and fall apart so easily… what if they are pulled just about to detach by a malicious force, and the force goes on pressing and rubbing them back and forth arduously, ardently, feverishly but delicately, mutilating the sheen in the slow friction generated by their mild texture and indulging on the gentle resistance from the gently pulled flower, wringing and squirming and splicing them to extract their juice and contract their volume, a force wishing to exploit tenderness and sensuality, to commit not a sin but something sinister? Flowers and I. We look so different, we are so different, but, what if we aren’t? Different, yet same, is that why I find you beautiful? You who reside on the other side of the river, the other side of the world. And what is that in front of me right now? Ruffled spathe in warm crimson purple on the inside and light cadmium green on the outside, and wrinkled radiant yellow spadix, with the texture that almost looks like crepe paper, and the smell of a corpse. So big, bigger than me, much bigger than me. Is it, is it… It’s a corpse flower (google it). Yes… A corpse flower. A corpse flower in bloom, how wonderful…” A corpse flower. For the first time I’m seeing you in real life, so up close. I found you. Right in front of me. We finally met. This feels like fate now. A corpse flower. Corpse and flower. Corpse, flower, corpse, flower, corpse, corpse, flower, corpse… the corpse! I suddenly woke up from my dream back into the confession, the reality, the rainforest hell, and remembered what I was searching for — E, and there she was, in front of me, there she was, the corpse. E is dead then, confirmed. Corpse flower, another metaphorically literal literary metaphor. In the ugly language filled with darkness, a kindness permeates because I lived up to my words. My words. I stripped them bare and saluted their physicality solid like a stone. I cleansed their representation and honored their meaning unbreakable like a promise. I kept my promise. I killed E, literarily and literally, as I saw not a rose, not a black peony poppy, but a corpse flower. Corpse, flower. Corpse and flower. E the corpse. And the flower, crushed, monstrous, with a withered petal still tethered where E was still hanging, started talking: Why did you do it? And who are you? That’s right, why did I do it? I said I’d tell you about the why in this confession, didn’t I? And did I? And who is I? And who is M? And who is E? Who are they? Let me answer. I am I. M is Murder. E, well, E is just E, or what do you say, detective? Who are we? — I. M. E. 

*This story belongs to the manuscript.