The Melancholic Death of the White Rabbit: Chapter 4

Lying underneath the freeway and cradling the dusty shores of the bay is a stone of unusual powers. Submerged in buzzing fumes and caked in greasy feces is a stone beaten by the winds of time and mutated by humankind’s fists. A stone unlike other stones. A stone that speaks voluminous stories about an unfinished future yet imagined. A future anticipated only in the unconscious memories of a dream’s shadowy characters. A future yet crafted. The hardness of the stone still unformed, almost soft. An unrecognizable future still waiting to pave its way into the gut of our fragile species.

It is true that we no longer live in the ancient age where a human might be transformed into a pillar of salt at the instant of a wrong turn. Nor are we born into a mystical age where an omniscient being speaks the guiding, absolute Truth by way of burning bushes. We do not even live in the majestic epoch when feeble heroes (David) overcame enormous villains (Goliath). But a delicate spark of such ancient mysticism lingers in the darkest fog puddling over our melancholic modernity. We still live in a time where things breathe the puzzled allegory of prophecy. And we must not neglect these signs! Yes, we must engage in meticulous exploration. The future calls on us to practice refined exegesis of the riddles scribed onto nature’s wrinkled skin. Belshazzar ignored the writing on the wall, “numbered, weighed, divided” gleamed the symbols before the fall of Babylon.


An imprinted face of the killer stares back at us in globular strokes of white paint. And what a mysterious beast of unimaginable disfigurement! Or is it supernatural origin? His spiked skull adorns two hooked horns reminiscent of Michelangelo’s horrific Moses. An ovular beak clad with forests of teeth beams sardonically. The empty eyes spin in endless cyphers. His skull is curved in the skeletal shape of a scream or a Faustian bird.

Or, the image strangely resembles the white rabbit in demonic form. Its face is melted to the rough bone and ears charred to tree stumps of cartilage. Burnt fur settles into the recesses of the rocks among gray pebbles and plastic needles. I cannot make out the scribble of yellow paint framing the bottom arc of the teeth. Words or mere ornamentation? A signature or a title? A prophecy or an accident? The return of Belshazzar’s mistake?

I cannot make out whether its a portrait of the murderer or the murdered. Did the white rabbit paint the killer’s image in aid of our detective pursuits? Or, did he in his last moments wish to once and for all imprint his own visage in a rocky eternity upon the melting shores of the freeway?

If you were chased by your killer and knew you would not survive, what would you do? Imagine. In your last moments would you fill your heart with redemption, scribbling anxiously the portrait of your killer on nature’s palette? A just being will see the signs and avenge such unfairness of your death you reassure yourself! Your pen grows steady and you gather strength in the thought of such tales of justice and balance. Or in those last moments would you etch yourself onto the solidness of a stone that would outlast your rotting corpse? A last shadow by which others may remember you. Paint the tribute to such an astounding life on the elderly palm of this crumbled mountainside! Pray to the drenched sands of Narcissus for your future my white rabbit! A vengeance, a memory, a story told--your destiny is finitely returned.

The Melancholic Death of the White Rabbit: Chapter 5

Chapter 5

Guider to distant regions of the earth and discloser of worlds of infinite possibility, how your death renders me forlorn! A death so melancholic that we do not yet realize the extent of your passing. The wretchedness of your threaded corpse--impaled on the sliver end of a lone support beam--still requires time to be seen and felt. Our bodies lug forward listlessly in your wake, driven by a mechanical habit heavy with rust rather than the joyful spirit of volition.

Was it the Madman who guarded the entrance to the belly of the freeway who caught you in a moment of indecision? Perhaps the whooshing noise of this demonic land under the concrete behemoth freeway startled you, or the sporadic spouting from the steamy sewage pipe slowed your foot. Or, did the Madman manufacture a trap, designing it from strewn shopping cart pieces and rubber tires, powering the engine with stolen electricity from the hidden underpass wires?

It must have been the fastidious Troll! Have you heard of that wide-eyed Troll who patrols the entrance to thresholds? He planted a garden rich in engineered seeds, watered his crop with guzzling waste, and cultivated roses in the filth of it all--was it he who offered the rabbit to his gods? Was it this robber of imagination who required a sacrifice to construct his gravely altar honoring the specters of the forgotten past? Did he wish to strike vengeance and fear in the hearts of all who could not believe his previous mythological predictions? All who laughed carelessly in his face and spat at his boots? And what will become of us now, the bearers of dead white rabbits and compelled believers in porcelain gods? By what creative powers might we invent a destiny still unwritten and a future worth living? By what means will we gather a courage never before demanded for humankind?

Oh, what dissemination I trick myself into believing! If the white rabbit is dead then only we could have killed the beast. Yes, you and I--we are his murderers! The troll has built a tomb for his lord in this illuminated garden of excrement. And he has forgotten his own graveyard, leaving its nurturing to the deadening drone of the cars on the freeway and the fleeting pounding of the trains that come and go like clockwork. The open toothed sepulcher takes nourishment in the sewage spilled forth from the city's most dreadful underground arteries. And it bathes in the shit, the dirtied plastic, the oily purple waters of the bay's shore.

But how did we do this? How could we pollute the entire sea with our excrement? Who gave us the rag to muddy the the skies? What were we doing when we chained the stars to the earth? Where is it moving now? Forward, forward, endlessly forward? Towards mass produced horizons? Is there any other direction? Are we not straying even through an infinitely organized nothing? Do we not feel the horrendous grumble of heavy space? Has it not become hotter? Is night not continually closing in on us? Do we need not yet feel the divine composition of the white rabbit? White rabbits, too, decompose. Springs of inspiration may be drank up and pissed out.

Yes, the white rabbit is dead. The white rabbit remains dead. And only we could have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, us most pathetic murderers of all murderers? What was most adventurous and outstanding of all the world has yet seen has bled to death under our waste: who will wash the blood from our hands? What unadulterated water is there left for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games could we ever invent anymore? Is not the despair of this deed too hopeless even for us? Must we ourselves not become white rabbits to even appear worthy of it?

Upon the horizon of the junkyard docks, a makeshift, stuffed white rabbit bobs in the blinding skylight. It sways in a dissonant percussive rhythm like the chopping of a sail's broken mast in the shifting winds.