Vide Cor Meum (Male Version)
“...look, a gift from the god of fire—burnished bright, finer than any mortal has ever borne across his back!" -Homer, The Iliad
Lucas watched the little white scars, charming, imperfect and curious, dance in the flickering shadows of his cell. Outside, a crowd had begun to gather, their screeching voices worming through the walls. He lay back and sighed comfortably. His was not a life contemplated but observed. Immune to any lingering traumas of the past, he remembered only the paintings of memory, which served him as a storybook, bringing a simple but reflective richness to his existence.
One night, to the horror of all who loved him, he had become beautiful. Objectively. His was a beauty that even technology’s mighty hand could not emulate; his glory simultaneously demanding and pleading for appeasement. His were all the vulnerable symmetries and proportions of divinity. God’s rarest gift, the only perfection given to what is created by man. People began to murmur.
That same night, after everyone had left, nodding their commiseration, his mother had pounced, and began scouring his arm with sandpaper, not having the heart to begin with her son’s face. Anything for a few blemishes. The young boy cried tears of confusion and pain, his pleas growing louder as the scrapes became scratches became bloody striations, the sight of which halted his mother’s fervor. His mother fell to the ground, weeping, gnashing her teeth, cursing irony for a bitch.
Well-intentioned, they had hid him away with a sect of the arcane, but, in the end, this would only deepen his mystery and appeal. As he grew older, he was able to support his family and growing number of adherents through hidden but platonic, well-guarded relationships with artists and thinkers, eventually housing himself in a small compound.
Becoming the object of secret portraits, a black market would form, dedicated to the provision and continuation of his image. Protective of their own experiences, writers would transcribe their conversations in code, his presence silently guiding them to epiphany. Some would spend the remainder of their lives writing nothing but revisions of their own transcriptions. Such beauty was the muse of a hundred opuses and the suicide of a thousand more.
Of course, the true enemies of beauty have always been the twins: jealousy and imitation. It was custom for those who had not disfigured themselves to wear masks that blurred and bent their features so as to not cause offense to the inherently ugly, the naturally deformed, the disabled. Nevertheless, society needed examples of what not to be, what should be condemned, demonized. Commercial renditions of his portraits, fake and machine printed, along with various mocking and denunciatory slogans became synonymous with this effort, and as his beauty spread to the masses, their calls for his destruction began to crescendo. Inevitably, a cult following grew around his image, leading to infighting, zealotry and denominations. Militias were created and crushed in his name. Families were ripped from their homes when suspected of celebrating him, their idols cast down. Women were forced to self-mutilate for hiding depictions of him away in small places; men were castrated if they adopted him as fashion.
His father, his first protector, who loved him most, gained many scars in his defense, eventually losing his life to an assailant on a cloudy afternoon in Autumn. Lying there on a windswept bed of leaves, the oranges and yellows reddening around him, the warmth of the earth pooling underneath, he watched gathering swallows twitter in the sky before darkness came and shrouded his eyes. Lucas did not speak for one hundred days, and would fall silent for the rest of his life after speaking thusly:
Mourning lies beneath
windows locking eyes
with heaven’s glimmer,
never seen,
but acknowledged by
the ever-facing man in the moon
who glows tired
of his visions
of what is to come,
of all that has passed before.
Tomorrow always becomes yesterday.
Thanks to those who cherished him, his was a beauty never scarred. Proposals and would-be suitors, both men and women, were constant but politely declined. He belonging only to those who created him. The exclusivity kept most participants moral, and the terror of exclusion provoked integrity, but that is not to say there was no trouble at all before his current predicament. A particular memory was of a man who, dressed as a woman, had sneaked into the small compound and almost succeeded in taking his life, but, there under the stench of dogwoods, by grace, his passions, still sheathed, arrived too soon. The men had tore the beast off with the violence of their convictions, and Lucas observed him dispassionately being dragged away, clawing at the ground, screeching, wailing like a girl under each blow until he was gurgling his own blood. And he beheld that scarlet river run over yellow teeth, pink lipstick and blue eyeshadow, before it washed them all away. The monstrosity was buried in an unmarked grave in garish repose.
For a time, even under the ardency of zealotry, his location and identity remained a secret, carefully guarded, held to the chest as a promise. Alas, his betrayal would be one of good intention. A young boy, who had stumbled into the convent begging for food, happened upon Lucas reading. His welcoming smile had filled the child’s heart, his bread had filled his belly. The consequences beyond his comprehension, the child would go on to boast to some of the older boys that he knew who and what he wanted to be when he grew up, and to prove it he showed them the dogwoods under which Lucas had lain. The older boys, being half-wise to the ways of their world, sold his location to the authorities for a sack of golden potatoes.
During and after the raid, his entire entourage, his artists and his believers, were massacred without mercy. Lucas, hooded in black, awaiting transport in the back of a vehicle, was forced to experience all of this aurally: the screams of those who loved him consumed by the roar of the fire in the night; the house on which his life had centered, now painted red; the dogwoods set ablaze, their frames blackened and sagging like candle wicks inside the inferno, becoming the center of the conflagration that would spread to the rest of his life, reducing it to ash and dust.
The jail where they took him, a secret, was an unassuming two-room shack with a receiving room followed by a walled cell. Media silence was imposed on the topic of his capture, and the most dire penalties threatened for those who would betray his whereabouts.
The officer who processed Lucas’ arrival had begun to remove his mask, but, seeing his countenance, cried out, lunged backward, and ran into the night. He hung himself under the shadow of a bridge above dark waters, his body swaying as if it too came and went with tide.
A group of eunuchs were assigned as his guards, but even they were found, and summarily executed, while in the grips and entanglements of orgy. A complete ban was instituted regarding any interactions with and viewings of him.
A short time later, the National Media Director came to meet in secret and took Lucas to her residence, a preserved town-home, the third floor of which overlooked the river at the center of the city. The director did not speak until Lucas was seated in a high backed, uncomfortable chair, a plush forest green wreathed in ornamental gold. The director then, after removing her jacket and hat, lay herself across a coach, posing rotundly, as if for a portrait, before explaining the various centuries and times and owners of each piece of furniture in the room, the details of the decor and the prices of imports, presuming these facts meaningful, or even beautiful, rather than a simple list of the historical.
Lucas had sighed at the “Qin dynasty hairpins” on the small table next to his chair, the legitimate beauty of the room ruined by the impositions of its owner, and instead turned his gaze to the river out the windows. A bird flew toward the sun, eclipsing it briefly before being swallowed in its light.
The Director, a great box of a woman with a p(r)iggish face and the frosted tips of a mohawk, had gone on to explain that as the media director, her job was image; message. And how, as could be imagined, Lucas’ beauty had come to dominate every aspect of her life, without rest, for retainable memory. And so, seeing him there in-person was surreal and unbelievable, and how she lusted for his beauty, how she wanted it, how she needed it, had to have it, could use it; how much she could give him if she could just...
Luridly, she had begun rubbing her over-sized clitoris through her pantsuit before pulling her hand out of her crotch and patting the spot next to her on “the Victorian era, properly termed a ‘day-bed’ not ‘fainting couch, with the indigo dye of the crushed velvet brought by the East India Company.”
The director had worked herself into a sort of estrus, and, when Lucas would not acknowledge her gesture, or anything else for that matter--dismissal burrowing so much deeper than disdain--she had stumbled toward the chair, pants fallen to her ankles, and lunged at him, knocking the small table and him to the floor onto “a second century Persian rug” before tearing at his clothes.
Laying there, Lucas remembered the dogwoods from what seemed so long ago but could only smell the oily must and hair gel of the woman beginning to lurch on top of him. His hand searched and found the hairpins, and he repeatedly stabbed toward the woman’s gyrating crotch, nicking the femoral artery, which expelled her life at great pressure. The Director had rolled over and tried to rise, screaming, before collapsing in a pantless pile.
Hearing the noise, the guards rushed through the door and seeing Lucas standing there--unmasked, his pouting lips parted in awe, his eyes watering, frozen mid-breath, his hair disheveled and falling, his gown ripped with his heart exposed, covered in blood but for his face--they fell to the ground as dead men.
And so, he was here, the crowd’s murmur outside now a rumble, awaiting the whims of existence, the lives of others swirling around him since his beginnings.
He rose from his recline when they called his name and, adjusting his mask of disfigurement, stepped forward. After dressing himself in a formless smock, the guards, wearing blinders, came in and put the loop of a control pole around his neck before leading him out the front door into the blinding light of midday.
The crowd hissed and spat. The men were shrunk to their frames; the women bloated and doughy. Those born beautiful were disfigured by the scars of acid burns; those too tall with their limbs hacked to size. Signs of the religiously devoted were total disfigurement; armless, legless, formless, faceless; purposefully reduced to their voices. They rolled around in wheelchairs, shouting through megaphones mounted above armrests. The masks of the institutional class watched from balconies around the town square.
As he was marched through the crowd, they ripped at Lucas from all sides, and a large tear, a ‘v’ ending in his navel, went down the center of his garment before it was ripped away entirely. He stood there, gorgeous and lithe in the sun, his mask twisting into the obscene. At this, the crowd ceased, silent with their reconciling of expectations and reality. When recovered, they threatened violence even more until a woman who was directly in front of Lucas was accused of having an orgasm.
The mob turned toward her, and she was savagely beaten from all sides before given a brutal and amateur mastectomy, her breasts thrown through the air. A flamboyant bone-thin man picked one up, pretending to lick it, and, after the laughter died down, threw it to the ground, where all around began stomping and spitting on it with great gobs of disdain. Blood pooled in front of the once whole woman’s mouth and chest, a steady flow through the gapes where her teeth and breasts had just been.
Taking advantage of the distraction, the guards hurried Lucas up onto a tall platform where they hanged men of old. They strapped him standing to a large wooden X, and, averting their eyes completely, removed his mask and fled.
The crowd again fell silent. With a collective wail, they beat their chests and tore their hair. They screamed and beat one another. They cast dirt upon their own heads. In their anguish, some wept tears of blood. Each one thrust into their own personal hell of inadequacy. They smeared themselves in excrement. They cursed beauty and all that it had wrought.
Through it all, Lucas stood quiet and dignified. His naked body without shame. His eyes studying them. The crowd regained their composure and jeered, their cruel wishes and intentions, their frothing curses always falling short beneath his gaze. They hated him the more and were becoming frenzied with blood/lust, when, to great cheers, the executioner arrived.
Commissioned after Lucas’ killing of the media director, the Excision, a semi-sentient medical robot, walked onto the platform, bowed to applause and commenced its deconstruction.
A straight razor, carelessly applied, shaved his head. His locks falling in great clumps, stray hairs blowing in the breeze, still perfumed; a pleasure the Excision could never know. Lucas’ scalp began to bleed, and trickles of blood ran down expressions of discomfort and sadness. His hair now gone, he felt the sun on his bare scalp as he hadn’t since he was born. The light’s presence on what had been hidden now felt warm and caring.
Still guffawing, the thespianic among them miming his falling tears, the crowd jumped with one another in childish glee as the Excision drew out a large bucket of whitewash, and, dumping it over top of him, began smearing it across his body, the flesh and muscle hard and defined beneath steel that felt nothing. Before it covered his eyes, Lucas thought of the whites of dogwood blooms.
The metal man scoured Lucas’ extremities with sandpaper. A succession of violence to each of his limbs, the tears coming quickly, and his bare belly then torn. Blood mixed with the paint that still covered his body, bleeding from the white of dogwoods to the soft pink of the cherry blossom.
He moaned half-consciously, and the crowd moaned back, imitating lust, removing their clothing and exposing their orifices. One group began sing-songing as it formed a naked, prancing circle, each member with a finger, some a hand, inserted into the anus of whoever was in front of them.
The Excision raised a steel fist high in the air, calling for quiet, before swinging the fist in a great downward arc and shattering one of Lucas’ kneecaps.
His cries were choked off by the shock, his gasps of exhalation sputtered cherry blossoms to the ground below.
They cheered.
His heaving breaths and lulling head had helped to remove the paint from his face, and as his features again became evident, beautiful even in displays of anguish, in their purity of experience and expression, the mob called for his end.
As Lucas cried out a final time, his neck outstretched and face to the sky, the Excision amplified his voice to operatic levels, the crowd returning his cry with shaken, outstretched tongues and viscious grins before his voice was silenced entirely, his head removed with a single swing of a blade before being thrown into the crowd. His body was unstrapped, also tossed to the mob below. The spectacle now over.
And they ate him. A society of vegetarians turned to cannibalism in a mad rush. The wheelchairs running over cripples as their occupants tried to roll themselves down and onto his body. They dismembered him. They clawed and bit at one another. Every patch of his skin, exposed by their pouring sweat and drool, was an affront to be devoured. Those clamoring from the back began to crush the first, who, writhing from under the great weight, began stumbling off, vomiting paint and blood and flesh into the gutter. They howled how they would shit him out. The masks on the balconies bent one another over the railing and fucked, calling below for more flesh. Others in the pile, having engorged themselves, forced themselves to vomit and began to eat again. And when it was done, when the ground was soaked and puddled with fluids, they clapped one another’s backs, swaggering home, puking and stinking, boasting that beauty was dead for they had killed it at last.
That night, two brothers walked quietly out to the platform under a glowing moon, and, removing their shirts soaked up Lucas’ blood, wringing it out into a small bucket. He was the most glorious thing they had ever seen, and ink was hard to come by. Their task done, they began their journey home when the younger boy happened upon an unblemished lock of Lucas’ hair, and it smelled like peaches.
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