Name: Kaatje van der Weydin
KAHT-yah vahn duhr VIE-dihn
Nicknames: Cat, Katie
Age: 18
Birthday: November 11
Alignment: Chaotic Good
Fav. Food: Chocolate-covered strawberries, Neapolitan ice cream, baked mac and cheese, deep-fried ice cream, funnel cake
Hated Food: Nilla wafers, autumn salad, ranch dressing, lasagna
Hobbies:
Painting-- Once upon a time, in a far-away school called Shore Country Day School, there was an oil painting elective. In this oil painting elective there was a girl named Kaatje van der Weydin who felt that this class might be the dumbest thing she had ever taken. And then... it wasn't.
Kaatje excels at oil painting from seven years of practice, and she specializes in landscapes. Technically, she's skillful within limits; creatively, impressive, even if it usually doesn't make sense with physics and reality. Her paintings don't always match up to the image in her mind, but she tries not to let it bother her--painting is supposed to be fun, damn it! She never sets out to depict something in specific, although she might set up her easel outside on nice days. She almost never paints people, and doesn't take kindly to people demanding she do a portrait of them. Her materials are expensive, damn it, and so is her time! She paints to unwind, mostly, when her true ambition has her too stressed out.
Fashion design-- Kaatje watched Project Runway and was lost in what she imagined to be the glamorous world of fashion design. When she came to Crystal Academy, she encountered something quite frightening: she isn't good at it. There are kids in Meadowview who are better than her! Imagine her mortification! This didn't discourage her; she pursued her goal harder, with more fervor, if anything. Her designs are innovative, in sewing she's technically skillful from years (in this case, four) of work. The problem is that her designs are too out-there, too personal. She doesn't design for other people, she designs solely for herself, and that inhibits her progress in the realm of fashion. Slowly, though, she's working her way into a more open mindset...
Tennis-- Kaatje fails tennis. She fails it hard, but she really enjoys it and makes an effort; she's convinced that if she practices hard enough, she'll get good at it. She plays with the intramural team at Sovereign Heights, non-competitively.
Running up her cell phone bill-- If there is a chance to be on her phone, she takes it. Kaatje likes to talk to people, and if she can do it while painting or sewing or working in general, she will take it. Her penchant for surfing the internet while on the train to school doesn't help with keeping the bill down, either. Kaatje just loves her phone, okay?! Kaatje is not much into social networking, she would much rather text you to let you know she's bored. She doesn't really make that many friends, but her RL friends have to be able to deal with hearing from her at least three times a day. She does use Twitter, but mostly to share her wackier thoughts ("You be quiet back there or I'll turn this internet around!"). Other than that, she doesn't really use a networking site at all! She's too cool.
She surfs the internet for fashion photography, mostly, to get ideas for what she wants to do next. Fad diets, certainly; you have to stay skinny to work in her business! Kaatje pays attention to the news only so far as it directly concerns her. So while she'll read the campus bulletin, she won't read the city-wide newspaper.
Virtues:
Creative-- Kaatje loves to examine things from new angles. She experiments with everything--she's the kid who made sculptures out of the tin foil wrapped around her sandwich in grade school. The sort of kid who made the costumes for the drama club and then painted the backgrounds, too, she puts a lot into the right side of her brain. It's this kind of intelligence that she excels in. Math and science, not so much--her creativity seems to end at the brush.
Process-wise, Kaatje does not do well when she has to work on something in bits and pieces. She wants to sit down, work on something, then be done. Breaking for dinner or class messes up her rhythm, and she tends to lose track of time when she's working and work right through it. If she remembers to go, when she comes back to work on it she'll spend more time fussing over whether she wants to mess up what she already has as compared to just starting a new thing. Literally she has to sit down and get it done before she moves on to something else--doing work in class is hard for her, but she tries.
Resolute-- Kaatje decides she's going to do something and then she does it. Sure, it will take her a while to get to the point where she will decide to do it, and it may not be finished to the best of her ability, but once she is settled into a course of action she will finish that course of action. It will take God (or a very convincing argument) to pull her out of her rut if she gets an idea that isn't good, but this is a good thing if you're paired with her. ("Have you finished your part of the paper? Okay. Okay. Let's go do that now. Yeah! Come on. I'll do my part if you do yours with me!") If she's applied for a job, she calls back at least once to see if she's got it. This is, if she hasn't lost the number...
This usually appears as something of an attitude; if she's left something unfinished it is finished because it ended there. Yes, she prefers to take things to a logical completion, but if she can't, then it's done where she finished it.
Enthusiastic-- When she's doing her stuff, she's doing her stuff. Kaatje might not hop up and down and scream flailing her arms when she gets an assignment she's happy for, or when she has some free time to do whatever she wants, but she will immerse herself in it as completely as she can. She works high-energy, and easily becomes impatient when something isn't going her way. Everything gets finished in one shot. She loses track of time. She forgets prior engagements. Around her is like an intense vortex of tense hyper focus. It is terrible and wonderful.
She also is one of those incredibly annoying people who is just so happy to be alive. She will give anything a go once, no matter how stupid it seems--rock climbing? Let's go! Bungee jumping? Well, all right. There is nothing that she does not want to give a try someday.
Sober-- Making jokes around Kaatje is not going to get you anywhere. She looks wacky and out-there, and certainly isn't organized like the usual humorless student, but a very long time ago her sense of humor was removed. Offhanded comments are taken--what else--seriously. She is not the type to get distracted by outside things. When she's taking a test, there could be a fire elsewhere in the building and she would probably not notice until she looked up to find the teacher to ask a question. Kaatje can and will suck all the fun out of bowling if you're supposed to be working on a project. She's not incapable of fun; she'll smile at a terrible pun or witty turn of phrase and enjoys roller coasters. You just won't find her sitting and giggling over something on the internet.
Flaws:
Disorganized-- Counting on Kaatje to keep track of things is like counting on a wolf not to eat that tasty, unguarded sheep. You can impose as many systems of organization on her as you please. It can be the most beautifully comprehensive system on the planet, so easy a caveman can do it, and Kaatje just. Won't. Touch. It. She will fully intend to touch it. She wants to be organized. But she tends to forget, sooner or later, that she has a system of organization and then she's back to making modern art sculptures a few months later out of old essays. She loses as many essays as she writes, continually displaces pencils, her left sock, and somehow her cell phone ends up in the fridge at least once a month. Months after an assignment is due, she'll find it wedged into the back of her Art History textbook. There are very few things that she can reliably locate: her easel, her bed, her ivory peacoat, and her house keys.
Poor Judgement-- Kaatje does not know when enough is enough. Being in that she will ignore what her body is telling her (exercising past her point of endurance, etc), and that she will disregard common sense (going outside with flipflops in winter).
She knows right from wrong. She won't go "Oh, the guy's so old, he doesn't need his money" and steal someone's wallet. Hermoral judgement is fine. Overeating isn't that common of a problem, either (you're more likely to find her over-exercising and tearing something), but if you put her in front of a buffet of her favorite foods, she will literally eat until she throws up. She'll cook as much as she has materials for. This is a girl who has never heard of the phrase "put it away for a rainy day," and if she has, she doesn't acknowledge it.
Ambiguous-- Kaatje has a hard time making decisions where they pertain to herself. (Once they're made, she'll stick to them--see "Persistent".) She wavers between one choice and another, and it can take her a good long time to decide between them. For instance, it took her most of a year to decide she wanted to be an artist; she spent three months debating hair colors, cuts and styles. She still isn't sure she really wants to be a fashion designer. She won't know what she's having for dinner until she has finished comparing the pros and cons of a reuben panini versus a dagwood. A lot of the time, she goes without things she needs because she simply can't decide between two options.
The Grudge-- This is Kaatje. Kaatje holds grudges like nobody's fucking business. In part because she can be so incredibly serious, so terribly resolute, and so enthusiastic, Kaatje doesn't forget her grudges. She has a long memory for slights, and a longer memory for actual intentional acts. It might take a while for her to decide exactly what she's going to do about you, but rest assured, you'll know when Kaatje decides to get hers back.
Tuesday, February 1, 2011
Paul Wyndham
Name: Paul Vincent Wyndham
Nicknames: He doesn't particularly have any, and the only one he really accepts is "Wyndham".
Age: 23
Birthday: 7 December
Alignment: Chaotic Evil
Fav. Food: Salads, of all kinds but especially with ginger dressing; cucumbers; tuna salad wraps. He likes cold foods.
Hated Food: He does not like scallions, nor does he like curry. Nor does he like carrots, and he will pick them out of his salads if he must.
Hobbies:
Piano-- Paul is a pianist. He loves the piano, and has since his mother stuck him on lessons when he was eight. Every year, he helped out his school with the musical; he also played in the school orchestra from middle school on up. While he doesn't compose his own works, he likes to download music from the internet that appeals. He has the entire piano score of Atonement memorized. His favorite music to play is more modern than classical; Mozart and Chopin hold no fascination for him. He'd sooner spend his time trying to figure out how to play Vanessa Carlton songs than practicing Chopsticks.
Tai Chi-- This is a hobby he picked up when he was young, after watching his father meditate most mornings. He believes it keeps him centered, focused, and able to handle whatever comes along; what it actually does is gives him an hour or two every day where he can sort out his thoughts on most everything. If he's disturbed, or doesn't get to do his hour of meditation, he is very unhappy and will likely be off-balance (and very unhappy with the person who interrupted him!) for the rest of the day. He feels he absolutely needs this time to function, and it creates a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy; he thinks he'll be off-balance and unhappy if he misses tai chi, so he is.
Journal-keeping/Scrapbooking-- Journal-keeping, a hobby that Paul adores. Adores, adores, adores: he almost has a compulsion to keep records of what he's been doing. At home there are cardboard boxes full of journals and journals and journals and journals. He glues in pictures, interesting leaves he finds, just about everything he can keep to have perfect memories of everything that happens. He's pretty good at this, and in fact keeps three books ongoing at a time--one for secrets, one for class notes, and one for public consumption.
Virtues:
Considerate-- If something bothers you, Paul drops it. It doesn't matter what it is he's doing or talking about that bothers you, he will stop talking about it or doing it as long as he's around you. Does his stance on healthcare offend you? He will never bring it up again. This trait also leads to a very polite, well-spoken young man, who is quite pleased to hold open doors and pull out chairs for all of his acquaintances, not just the girls. He tries his best to help without making it seem like he thinks you're incompetent, thinking quite seriously about how to allow you to save face. Uncomfortable subjects are to be broached in whispers, privately, or not at all. Unfortunately, sometimes this goes too far, and he won't discuss something that really bothers him because he's worried he will offend.
Pensive-- Paul thinks about things. He thinks about them a lot. He mulls them over, writes down his thoughts in his journal, takes a break to write in a different journal or play some piano, and then he goes back and thinks about things some more. Eventually, he might even draw a conclusion. Or, if you draw a conclusion first, he will take this conclusion and turn that over a few times in his head too. And once one issue is resolved, he will think about something else. This means that he makes good decisions, usually; he gets all the information, thinks about the pros and cons, and then he decides. It's not the fastest way to go about things, and can really mess up his long-term decision making, but he usually manages to think up a good solution to most every problem, given enough time.
Humble-- Paul is a great follower. And this is because he knows exactly what he did right and exactly what he did wrong, and he will do his best to repair that for next time. He knows this sort of thing because he is pensive, and tends to review his actions over and over and over. In addition, this means in a team situation he doesn't try to countermand orders; he follows them, helping out with the other members where he can. This doesn't mean that he's a bad leader. He's pretty good at it, as long as he's got sufficient direction--even the vaguest idea of what he's supposed to achieve ("Protect this", "Destroy that", "Get me this" is sufficient) and he'll put his not-inconsiderable intelligence to work.
Flaws:
Quiet-- and how. He doesn't talk when he's stressed. He doesn't talk when he's afraid. His thoughts are his own, and sometimes--a lot of the time--okay pretty much all the time--he'll tell you about his surface thoughts but not what he's really thinking. He might be considering dinner superficially, but he might truly be thinking about how he dropped important documents in a puddle and now he's screwed next time he speaks to his superior. And it's really, really hard to tell when he's considering how bad he is gonna hate himself tomorrow, precisely because he spends so much time being pensive and mulling things over.
Pensive-- As long as he has time, he'll make a good decision. But what about when he doesn't have time? What about when he has to make a lot of decisions in a very short about of time? Paul tends to panic and make the absolute worst choice, the kind of choice that comes from his heart rather than his head, if he can manage to make a choice at all. This isn't saying if you've planned to go out to lunch at a certain restaurant and you change your mind, he'll freak, because he won't. If you hand him three different , the deadline's next week, and he can only apply to one, he will agonize over the decision until the day before the deadline where he'll pick the cheapest one or the one with the highest acceptance rate and send it in, only to remember that his transcript isn't with it and he's fucked anyway.
In battle, this can really suck. As long as things are going to plan, he'll do exactly what he's supposed to do. But if something goes wrong, if there's an element unaccounted for, he goes straight for the objective and then gets straight out.
Resentful-- Paul has gone his entire life being told what to do, and he's done what he's been told, and he's done it with a smile. He's studying to be a doctor because his parents wanted him to. He plays piano because his parents wanted him to. He is at Sovereign Heights because his parents wanted him to be at Sovereign Heights, and you know what? He doesn't see how his life is ever going to improve from answering orders to jump with 'how high?' Sure, he's still just a cog in the machine with the Negaverse, but ripping starseeds out of people's chests makes him feel good. It's something he decides to do, and he does it when he wants to do it. He picks his victims. He doesn't kill for the control over others, but for the feeling of control over himself.
He's not crazy; he's not sociopathic or psychopathic. He just relishes his chance to do something just because he wants to.
Writing Sample:
He was six years old and Father was teaching him how to keep the madness in.
“Like this,” he said, holding Paul’s hand to his shoulder. “Slowly,” he said, standing away to let Paul do it himself. And, slowly, his hand a glacier over the mountains of his bicep, he ran his palm along the curves of his arm, to the dip of his wrist and over the thumbs. He shifted his weight from one foot to the other, a counterbalance, bending the knee just so, foot turned out to such an angle. From here, he could lash out--a forward snap kick to break the delicate bones of the wrist, a feint to be re-chambered, to distract from a punch or open-handed slap. He did not lash out, he did not strike; he flattened his hands, drew them before him like he was carving a hemisphere of the world.
“Like that,” said Father, “that will keep the madness in.”
He was eight years old and Mother was teaching him how to keep the madness in.
“Hold still,” she said, sitting Paul on a flat black bench. “Faster,” she said, standing away to let Paul do it himself. Before him was a giant’s skeleton, the ivory ribs linked together with wire. Cancer boiled up inside it in pairs of three, and he touched his fingers to the bone to hear the chime. His madness made the blackness boil higher, but it stayed inside the ribs of the monstrous skeleton. The bone grew brittle, though, and broke, falling to powder under his touch, coating the blackness, keeping it down, keeping it small, fizzing it into nothing. A reverse chemical reaction.
“Like that,” said Mother, “That will keep the madness in.”
He was twelve years old and his parents were teaching him how to keep the madness in.
“Study this,” they said, setting a book before him. “Harder,” they said, standing away to let Paul do it himself. And he looked, reading about the flow of blood cells through the arteries, veins, and capillaries. He studied the firing of neurons, the howling of the madness ringing in his ears. He learned the enzymes that bound and rebound his genes, that gave his madness a human shape, a form that let him stand among others, he learned the bare convoluted fissures of his brain: Temporal lobe, amygdala, cerebellum, the connections between logic and life. The table before him was bare and devoid of meaning, the words were the bone of his skull. He was made of words, crawling with them as ants; one good rain and he would be nothing but madness.
“Like that,” said his parents, “that will keep the madness in.”
He was sixteen years old and it was up to him to learn how to keep the madness in.
His hands around Father’s throat eased nothing. The man gasped and choked, fingernails ripping into the skin of Paul’s wrists, carving out pleas (please) along veins and capillaries and the hemisphere of the world could not stop him, the bones did not free Father’s neck, the words did not hold him back until he chose to draw his hands away. And there, sketched over the arteries, over the windpipe, just under the Adam’s apple, was a butterfly in crimson red that took wing and flew over Paul’s shoulder.
He was seventeen years old and it was up to him to learn how to keep the madness in.
He turned to watch the butterfly become a leaf and flutter to the ground; with calm deliberation, he stepped on it, yielding a quiet crunch. His mother whimpered as he shifted his weight to his toes and leaned, ancillary cracks like Arctic ice, breaking under heat, under pressure--and his mother shattered along fault lines, like brittle glass, her peach-toned skin peeling off like so much paper. It was easy, under his nails, like an orange; he had to be careful not to reach too deep, but in the end, it all came away, leaving bare bone and bubbling black. His father’s eyes dripped with Paul’s madness.
“That is how you keep the madness in,” he said. “Like that.”
He was eighteen years old and it was up to him to learn how to keep the madness in.
He cracked his mother’s sternum to pull out a gorgeously brilliant stone; from inside his father’s throat he pulled its twin. And, to keep the madness in, he ground them to stone with his own, their dark triplet, and released the opalescent powders to the wind.
The madness was not contained, it would not go away. It was leaking from his nose, a thick black trail following the thin blue vein no one quite ever notices from the corner of his lips down along his jaw. His fingers were covered in it. His hair trailed in it. It fell from his eyes and turned to obsidian beads that clinked against the shards of his mother’s beautiful bones.
Could beauty grow from those severed limbs? Paul hit one knee, hard, clutching his hands to his head with desperation aforethought. Could the madness give birth to ivory keys, lovely but empty of meaning? The world seemed to be dissolving, falling to pieces around him, into the frosted trees of piano keys he imagined, lilies taking their sustenance in the places where life still flowed.
Not so bad, he thought, to let the madness free, if in place of him and his graceless body there would be a white willow, or perhaps a brilliant, blood-drunk Martagon lily.
Nicknames: He doesn't particularly have any, and the only one he really accepts is "Wyndham".
Age: 23
Birthday: 7 December
Alignment: Chaotic Evil
Fav. Food: Salads, of all kinds but especially with ginger dressing; cucumbers; tuna salad wraps. He likes cold foods.
Hated Food: He does not like scallions, nor does he like curry. Nor does he like carrots, and he will pick them out of his salads if he must.
Hobbies:
Piano-- Paul is a pianist. He loves the piano, and has since his mother stuck him on lessons when he was eight. Every year, he helped out his school with the musical; he also played in the school orchestra from middle school on up. While he doesn't compose his own works, he likes to download music from the internet that appeals. He has the entire piano score of Atonement memorized. His favorite music to play is more modern than classical; Mozart and Chopin hold no fascination for him. He'd sooner spend his time trying to figure out how to play Vanessa Carlton songs than practicing Chopsticks.
Tai Chi-- This is a hobby he picked up when he was young, after watching his father meditate most mornings. He believes it keeps him centered, focused, and able to handle whatever comes along; what it actually does is gives him an hour or two every day where he can sort out his thoughts on most everything. If he's disturbed, or doesn't get to do his hour of meditation, he is very unhappy and will likely be off-balance (and very unhappy with the person who interrupted him!) for the rest of the day. He feels he absolutely needs this time to function, and it creates a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy; he thinks he'll be off-balance and unhappy if he misses tai chi, so he is.
Journal-keeping/Scrapbooking-- Journal-keeping, a hobby that Paul adores. Adores, adores, adores: he almost has a compulsion to keep records of what he's been doing. At home there are cardboard boxes full of journals and journals and journals and journals. He glues in pictures, interesting leaves he finds, just about everything he can keep to have perfect memories of everything that happens. He's pretty good at this, and in fact keeps three books ongoing at a time--one for secrets, one for class notes, and one for public consumption.
Virtues:
Considerate-- If something bothers you, Paul drops it. It doesn't matter what it is he's doing or talking about that bothers you, he will stop talking about it or doing it as long as he's around you. Does his stance on healthcare offend you? He will never bring it up again. This trait also leads to a very polite, well-spoken young man, who is quite pleased to hold open doors and pull out chairs for all of his acquaintances, not just the girls. He tries his best to help without making it seem like he thinks you're incompetent, thinking quite seriously about how to allow you to save face. Uncomfortable subjects are to be broached in whispers, privately, or not at all. Unfortunately, sometimes this goes too far, and he won't discuss something that really bothers him because he's worried he will offend.
Pensive-- Paul thinks about things. He thinks about them a lot. He mulls them over, writes down his thoughts in his journal, takes a break to write in a different journal or play some piano, and then he goes back and thinks about things some more. Eventually, he might even draw a conclusion. Or, if you draw a conclusion first, he will take this conclusion and turn that over a few times in his head too. And once one issue is resolved, he will think about something else. This means that he makes good decisions, usually; he gets all the information, thinks about the pros and cons, and then he decides. It's not the fastest way to go about things, and can really mess up his long-term decision making, but he usually manages to think up a good solution to most every problem, given enough time.
Humble-- Paul is a great follower. And this is because he knows exactly what he did right and exactly what he did wrong, and he will do his best to repair that for next time. He knows this sort of thing because he is pensive, and tends to review his actions over and over and over. In addition, this means in a team situation he doesn't try to countermand orders; he follows them, helping out with the other members where he can. This doesn't mean that he's a bad leader. He's pretty good at it, as long as he's got sufficient direction--even the vaguest idea of what he's supposed to achieve ("Protect this", "Destroy that", "Get me this" is sufficient) and he'll put his not-inconsiderable intelligence to work.
Flaws:
Quiet-- and how. He doesn't talk when he's stressed. He doesn't talk when he's afraid. His thoughts are his own, and sometimes--a lot of the time--okay pretty much all the time--he'll tell you about his surface thoughts but not what he's really thinking. He might be considering dinner superficially, but he might truly be thinking about how he dropped important documents in a puddle and now he's screwed next time he speaks to his superior. And it's really, really hard to tell when he's considering how bad he is gonna hate himself tomorrow, precisely because he spends so much time being pensive and mulling things over.
Pensive-- As long as he has time, he'll make a good decision. But what about when he doesn't have time? What about when he has to make a lot of decisions in a very short about of time? Paul tends to panic and make the absolute worst choice, the kind of choice that comes from his heart rather than his head, if he can manage to make a choice at all. This isn't saying if you've planned to go out to lunch at a certain restaurant and you change your mind, he'll freak, because he won't. If you hand him three different , the deadline's next week, and he can only apply to one, he will agonize over the decision until the day before the deadline where he'll pick the cheapest one or the one with the highest acceptance rate and send it in, only to remember that his transcript isn't with it and he's fucked anyway.
In battle, this can really suck. As long as things are going to plan, he'll do exactly what he's supposed to do. But if something goes wrong, if there's an element unaccounted for, he goes straight for the objective and then gets straight out.
Resentful-- Paul has gone his entire life being told what to do, and he's done what he's been told, and he's done it with a smile. He's studying to be a doctor because his parents wanted him to. He plays piano because his parents wanted him to. He is at Sovereign Heights because his parents wanted him to be at Sovereign Heights, and you know what? He doesn't see how his life is ever going to improve from answering orders to jump with 'how high?' Sure, he's still just a cog in the machine with the Negaverse, but ripping starseeds out of people's chests makes him feel good. It's something he decides to do, and he does it when he wants to do it. He picks his victims. He doesn't kill for the control over others, but for the feeling of control over himself.
He's not crazy; he's not sociopathic or psychopathic. He just relishes his chance to do something just because he wants to.
Writing Sample:
He was six years old and Father was teaching him how to keep the madness in.
“Like this,” he said, holding Paul’s hand to his shoulder. “Slowly,” he said, standing away to let Paul do it himself. And, slowly, his hand a glacier over the mountains of his bicep, he ran his palm along the curves of his arm, to the dip of his wrist and over the thumbs. He shifted his weight from one foot to the other, a counterbalance, bending the knee just so, foot turned out to such an angle. From here, he could lash out--a forward snap kick to break the delicate bones of the wrist, a feint to be re-chambered, to distract from a punch or open-handed slap. He did not lash out, he did not strike; he flattened his hands, drew them before him like he was carving a hemisphere of the world.
“Like that,” said Father, “that will keep the madness in.”
He was eight years old and Mother was teaching him how to keep the madness in.
“Hold still,” she said, sitting Paul on a flat black bench. “Faster,” she said, standing away to let Paul do it himself. Before him was a giant’s skeleton, the ivory ribs linked together with wire. Cancer boiled up inside it in pairs of three, and he touched his fingers to the bone to hear the chime. His madness made the blackness boil higher, but it stayed inside the ribs of the monstrous skeleton. The bone grew brittle, though, and broke, falling to powder under his touch, coating the blackness, keeping it down, keeping it small, fizzing it into nothing. A reverse chemical reaction.
“Like that,” said Mother, “That will keep the madness in.”
He was twelve years old and his parents were teaching him how to keep the madness in.
“Study this,” they said, setting a book before him. “Harder,” they said, standing away to let Paul do it himself. And he looked, reading about the flow of blood cells through the arteries, veins, and capillaries. He studied the firing of neurons, the howling of the madness ringing in his ears. He learned the enzymes that bound and rebound his genes, that gave his madness a human shape, a form that let him stand among others, he learned the bare convoluted fissures of his brain: Temporal lobe, amygdala, cerebellum, the connections between logic and life. The table before him was bare and devoid of meaning, the words were the bone of his skull. He was made of words, crawling with them as ants; one good rain and he would be nothing but madness.
“Like that,” said his parents, “that will keep the madness in.”
He was sixteen years old and it was up to him to learn how to keep the madness in.
His hands around Father’s throat eased nothing. The man gasped and choked, fingernails ripping into the skin of Paul’s wrists, carving out pleas (please) along veins and capillaries and the hemisphere of the world could not stop him, the bones did not free Father’s neck, the words did not hold him back until he chose to draw his hands away. And there, sketched over the arteries, over the windpipe, just under the Adam’s apple, was a butterfly in crimson red that took wing and flew over Paul’s shoulder.
He was seventeen years old and it was up to him to learn how to keep the madness in.
He turned to watch the butterfly become a leaf and flutter to the ground; with calm deliberation, he stepped on it, yielding a quiet crunch. His mother whimpered as he shifted his weight to his toes and leaned, ancillary cracks like Arctic ice, breaking under heat, under pressure--and his mother shattered along fault lines, like brittle glass, her peach-toned skin peeling off like so much paper. It was easy, under his nails, like an orange; he had to be careful not to reach too deep, but in the end, it all came away, leaving bare bone and bubbling black. His father’s eyes dripped with Paul’s madness.
“That is how you keep the madness in,” he said. “Like that.”
He was eighteen years old and it was up to him to learn how to keep the madness in.
He cracked his mother’s sternum to pull out a gorgeously brilliant stone; from inside his father’s throat he pulled its twin. And, to keep the madness in, he ground them to stone with his own, their dark triplet, and released the opalescent powders to the wind.
The madness was not contained, it would not go away. It was leaking from his nose, a thick black trail following the thin blue vein no one quite ever notices from the corner of his lips down along his jaw. His fingers were covered in it. His hair trailed in it. It fell from his eyes and turned to obsidian beads that clinked against the shards of his mother’s beautiful bones.
Could beauty grow from those severed limbs? Paul hit one knee, hard, clutching his hands to his head with desperation aforethought. Could the madness give birth to ivory keys, lovely but empty of meaning? The world seemed to be dissolving, falling to pieces around him, into the frosted trees of piano keys he imagined, lilies taking their sustenance in the places where life still flowed.
Not so bad, he thought, to let the madness free, if in place of him and his graceless body there would be a white willow, or perhaps a brilliant, blood-drunk Martagon lily.
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