The room was oddly cold for the middle of September. It was too early for the weather to be that cool. From the middle of the ceiling hangs an incandescent bulb lighting the whole room in its hot yellow light, slightly moving to a non-existing current.
In the room there is furniture, not like a page from an interior decoration magazine, but just enough furniture to get one through the day. The walls were full of writing and paint splashes in a myriad of colors, on the wall facing the door there was a huge water stain that looked oddly like the silhouette of the king.
The writings on the wall ranged from esoteric symbols, half formed words to fully formed sentences, and even a whole paragraph in one instance. On the top right hand corner of all four walls was a painfully reproduced hendecagram. The significance of this symbol is known only to the artist.
Back to the furniture in the room: there was a small cot in one corner of the room; a table and a chair in another, the table had a turntable on it and was piled high with books and records; and in the third corner of the room was an electronic keyboard on a stand with a small stool in front of it and an old acoustic guitar with a circle drawn on it lying beside the keyboard. The bed looked unused.
The books on the table were on a plethora of subjects ranging from Buddhism to art criticism to the occult. One book lying open on the table had the words “desert of the real” underlined in green ink.
The floor of the room was littered with clothing and old food wrappers but there was a circle in the middle of the room clear of all clutter, whose circumference was lined with eleven scented candles so as to reproduce the location of the vertices of the hendecagram, the eleven pointed star. That’s where Yokoshima sat.
His skin was a sickly, almost jaundiced yellow. So pale that one could see the veins through his skin. He had very light, almost white, blond hair that would reach down to the small of his back if it were not tied in a bun on the top of his head with a pair of chopsticks. His features were soft, almost woman-like. His eyes were red like the eyes of a mythical Japanese dragon and he had a triangle tattooed on his left cheek.
Yokoshima was a person with albinism.
He sat on the floor in the lotus position, naked. The skin on his body did not look so pale; this was because of the fact that his whole torso was tattooed with a collage of pictures and writing. The most prominent of which was a poem written in Latin that spiraled from over where his heart would be located on his chest. This poem was tattooed over a red hendecagram.
The only sound to be heard was the song “Everything In Its Right Place” by Radiohead being played on the turntable. The spiraling loops of voice and sound sounding ambient through hazy ears. Yokoshima sits there, singing along with Thom Yorke.
“Yesterday I woke up sucking a lemon.
Yesterday I woke up sucking a lemon.
Yesterday I woke up sucking a lemon…”
The track ends, the stylus makes a clicking noise only to be greeted by a gunshot.
Yokoshima looks down at his right hand, on which he holds the gun backwards. Then he looks further down at his chest and sees a bit of smoke rising from the puncture wound in his chest. It looks like he shot a bullet through the bull’s eye of a spiral target.
Strangely it is a sense of calm relief that he feels after performing the macabre deed, no fear or sadness, just a sense of calm, soothing relief. He watches as the dark, almost black, blood flows down his pale body, contrasting against his pale, milky skin. He then hums a tune of his own creation.
The last thing Yokoshima remembers is the tingly, metallic taste of his own blood.
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