Mind Labyrinth, Book 1, Chapter 1 (Part 3)

Warnings: Detailed descriptions of a corpse, depressed musings, and a suicide attempt

Vincenzo was convinced he was a ghost. 

Surely, he must be. He came up with all the crazy theories.

The most plausible one was that he was the corpse found dead at his father’s salon when he was nine years old. He thought it had been his mother. That was what the newspaper said. Woman found dead, nine year old son accused of murder. His family had been hysterical when they found her corpse. His father yelled at the manor staff all that night, calling them incompetent and beating them with sticks. The week that followed after, Vincenzo was taken to the police station, to a child psychologist, to therapy. A witch doctor. A hypnotist. His father eventually got sick of all the trips, and beat him himself all that night. Only the first few blows hurt, he remembered thinking. After that, a numbness came. Everybody tried to pry his mind open with all sorts of crazy tactics, but his answer remained the same. He found her that way.

They didn’t know what happened during the silence between her time of death and when they found him with the gun in his hand. But he knew.

He remembered exactly what he was doing the time of her death. He was out in the wheat field, hiding among the tall grass and pretending he was a cat as he stalked a mysterious frog that entered their property. He heard a loud bang noise. The crows that perched at their roof took flight in surprise. When he turned around to check, he witnessed his mother’s head flicking to the side before her body dropped. He didn’t know what happened, but the sound reminded him of fire crackers, and he wanted the fire crackers so bad because he wanted to scare off some animals in the woods. When he got to her, though, he stood over her body on the floor. It was kind of funny, how her limbs were positioned. He’d never seen a person lie down like that. Her limbs were all over the place, and her hair was splayed out like a mop. Golden wheat curls of hair on one side, vicious red on the other. On the red side, she leaked like a dropped water bottle spilling all over the floor. There were little chunks of meat in the pool of blood. He pulled her head back and peaked at the leaking hole. He thought, his mother was leaking, only, this wasn’t his mother anymore. It was an empty shell, and the essence of his mother flew out of the hole. He picked up a chunk of the meat, and shamefully, he brought it up to his mouth. It tasted like the raw beef they’d take out of the freezer and wait to defrost.

The longer he spent time with that body, the more he thought about how perverse it was. He didn’t handle death like how adults handled death. The first time he saw a goat get slaughtered for a party, he hid and trembled for hours thinking about the sins committed before his eyes. Something was inside there. And now it was gone. Everybody chatted as if it was nothing. They snuffed it out, held it down, skinned it, and carved its meat out from the bone, and when they were done, threw its butchered skeleton away like it was nothing! 

He picked up the gun. Even at his young age, he knew what this was. He fired it at the window. He was shocked it worked. He viewed it as a purely adult item to kill villains in movies with, not small, irrelevant babies. The recoil knocked him to his back. The glass shattered with a loud noise, and the entire time, all he could think about was how he was going to get in trouble. He did immediately. He father grabbed his wrist, and yanked his body back like he did all those terrible nights before — 

How did he know these events happened?

He hadn’t seen his father or the manor in years.

At this point, everything existed in his mind.

He didn’t trust his mind.

It told him the most wicked lies.

Five years had passed since then. He knew the layout of the building, the books he’d read, the art he’d made, and the routines he’d been acclimated to, but he wouldn’t say that any of it felt familiar. He glided through everything like clockwork, but he was a dead man walking. A puzzle piece that didn’t really fit anywhere. Oscar was right about everything he said, about being the bottom of the ladder. He didn’t understand the jocks, the heirs, the philosophers, the nerds, and the politicians, and they didn’t care for him, either. Everyone was out for their own interests. They were only concerned about how they wanted to be seen, not how they did things, why they did them, and who it was they were doing it with, as if everything was a competition, especially within their own group.

He was an outcast, and in many ways, it was self-inflicted. He didn’t like groups. He could feel himself disappear in them, as if he was nothing but a baby bird chirping for attention. He didn’t like that dynamic, because if he was to have conversation, it should be to and with him, and not some bland, agreeable concept of him. But if he didn’t have a group, then that meant there was something wrong with him. He was an enemy. A threat. And to worse vultures, a victim that wouldn’t talk because no one that would believe him. People reacted poorly to his presence, as if he was a live snake in a child’s play pen ready to strike.

He was fortunate enough to catch the prince before he graduated during the spring. He was as stunning as he first met him -- stone faced and stiff, nothing short of an elegant marble statue. Vincenzo remembered asking him what he felt like in this school. Did he like it? Did he feel like, at the end of the day, he was satisfied with what he accomplished? Oscar leaned back and gave him practical tips on how to survive it, but Vincenzo pressed on. What did he actually feel?

He said that, if you have even a little bit of hope of things to get better and brighter, it was best to snuff it out before you hurt yourself. This place beat you down until your spirit was dead in the dirt. He had to learn this the hard way. The key to surviving was to take things as they came, and to not have standards about anything at all.

That was terrible, Vincenzo said. But the dead look in Oscar's face suggested he already knew it. He was the one that had to kill himself to be like this.

Vincenzo had joined the art discussion club when he was thirteen. It was a mortifying experience. Everybody agreed with the most popular opinions and gossiped about scandalous opinions which were, as far as he knew, already unpopular. It wasn’t a forum. It was a mob. When he brought up his honest opinions and questions, he could see their minds blank. The answers were clipped and uneasy. That wasn’t how you thought about art. You don’t question this, and you should respect that. He respected this at first. They were older than him — high schoolers — which meant they knew better. But their responses repeated over and over like a broken record. He decided he was going to keep provoking them, just to see if they could think for themselves, even if it was to come to terms that they despised him. More and more outlandish opinions came out of his mouth, until finally, everybody unanimously decided to kick him out. There was a sick sense of pride that came with being acknowledged. At least when he was hated, they finally, finally saw him as a living being.

That was a feeling he craved the most. He didn't feel like he was alive. He existed. By the grace of God, he ate three meals, slept in a nice bed, and took classes at an acclaimed Institution. But unlike the other good Catholic boys, he wouldn’t say that this was enough. He was sad, and bad, and ungrateful. People went into such trouble to tolerate his antics. They tolerated his crying, and they made excuses for his bad behavior. He wanted more than that, though. He wanted them to pay attention, and hold nothing but understanding and affection in their eyes when they looked at him. His heart was a black hole of longing, and he was sure it would never be filled. He wanted to scream into the heavens: would somebody please, please see me?

He couldn’t be seen. They saw him in a literal sense, but the human brain can't process all the stimuli presented to it. It filtered out the irrelevant details, and by most people's standards, Vincenzo was an irrelevant detail. At least ghosts were interesting enough to focus on and spread as a scandalous story.

As far as he was concerned, he wasn’t alive, and he wasn't sure if he'd ever been. He was the ghost of St. Michael’s, cursed to haunt its hallowed halls until the end of time. 

After midnight, during hours where no living thing stirred, he would leave the middle school boy’s shared bedroom barefooted and cross the long stretch of hallway to get to the communal bathroom. The trek to get there was the most difficult. The shadows felt like there were legions of eyes set on him. In particularly bad nights, he swore he could see those eyes, and they were as dangerously yellow as a every predator. The technique was to take off at full speed, and flick the lights on inside the bathroom. 

It was a whole different world in that room in the night compared to the day. It was busy during the day. Young boys coming in and out, skin glistening, refusing to make eye contact because it would be gay. At night, there was an unstated holiness in its grimy walls and tile floors, a sanctuary of perverse introspection.

He climbed the counter and spent hours staring at the image he saw in the mirror. He asked himself multiple times why he did this, why he had such an abject fascination with it. He concluded it was because there was an intimacy between himself and his own reflection. Most of the time he felt like a walking, talking video camera, a mind disjointed from everything else that existed only to comment on what the shell experienced, but it move the same way he move, talk the same way he talked, provided a sharp counterpoint to his fantasies. He was a tangible being. That was a fact, undeniable in its objectivity. He could wave his hands, kick his feet, scrunch his nose, and wiggle his arms.

He often wondered what would happen if he destroyed this form. Would he wake up in the manor? Would he see that he was, in fact, a ghost stuck in purgatory? Would he be a different person, or the same? The thoughts branched off into an obsession in his mind. To destroy the flesh was the biggest affront to God’s design, but even defective canines had to be put down. Why should a defective human continue? 

He hated himself. That was the gist of this narcissistic soliloquy. God loved him, but he only felt the deepest, most intimate loathing. He shut his eyes tight in the dark, finding it hard to get air into his lungs as demented musings started to crystallize into an action.

You loathsome creature. You vile, miserable little cretin. 

Why do you insist in continuing in such a state?

Don’t you just want to make it all go away?

He did.

He swallowed down rat poison he found in a supply closet.

It wasn’t as beautiful and poetic as the deaths in his books and plays. He didn’t faint in a glorious, poetic sprawl. His eyes watered, and he vomited until the janitor found him passed out in his own vomit in the kitchen. He couldn’t forget that god awful texture from his tongue. He was convinced he expelled his own intestines.

He woke up two days later at an infirmary bedroom. His eyes glazed over to the delicate snowfall outside the window. His body ached in an ache it had never felt before, and in those four days spent bedridden, he was convinced he would perish. He didn’t.

It turned out he wasn’t a ghost.

He was as pathetically human as they came.