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.