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.