Bolaño Would Kill Me

The murky smell of dusk mixed in with the  red metallic scent forming a vapour that though many may term unpleasant wasn't unbearable.

Ronald stood there gazing at the drying pool of blood formed by the mutilated corpse of a young man of indeterminate youth. Ronan though was kneeling down getting his face right into the viscera lying heaped around the body. He could smell shit from there.

'Pretty brutal' Ronald said.

'Those are the perfect 2 words to describe it. Look at it.'

Ronald had seen enough he didn't want to come close and smell the putrefying shit of a putrefying desecrated corpse.

'Look at how he has been killed.' Ronan continued. 'It is pretty in a sense. The cut is pretty, the way the organs have been pulled out is pretty- almost with care. But it speaks of barbarism as well. The way the act has been done without a moment's hesitation'

'So you have a profile of who our killer could be?'

'Only one man knows the answer to that.'

Ronan stands up and gazes out from the scene, at me. Ronald follows his gaze and stares at me.

Two detectives looking through their frames at a man sitting in a well lighted room hunched over a desk.

Another body, soaking in a tub of its own effervescent redness. A tub of anger.

'Gruesome isn't it?

As usual Ronald stands some distance away as Ronan draws close.

'Same modus operandi as the other murders.  Same elegance. What could this mean?'

'It's a message.' Ronan dips his hand in and brings it out letting the mixture seep through his hands back to the source. The inside had become the outside.

'To whom?'

'It has already been received by the intended person.' He looks up. 'Hasn't it?'

He is asking me.

I can only scribble.

'The bodies are piling up.' Ronald says seated on the desk his eyes enveloping Ronan on his chair.

'The morgue- our morgue- is infinite.' Ronan replies.

'Kill your darlings, more like commit genocide. They don't have souls or our souls don't matter to them.'

'We are only alive for as long as we are needed.'

'So who could be our killer?' Ronald shifts to a more comfortable position on the desk.

'That is evident.' Ronan leans back in his chair and closes his eyes. Blackness.

'It is a mockery. There is art in the killings, but it is a copying of a brutality. It is rubbing his face in the act of copying more than the killings themselves. It is a warning. A message to him.'

'What does it say?'

'It says what he fears. It says that he is a mockery, that he has done nothing new, that he rips off and uses what is already there. It is a testament to his cowardice, his cowardice to not follow through. It is all of this. The killer is saying he is not creative; that he is a mere mirror and mirrors are abominable.'

'But not as much as your own eyes.'

'Eyes are more so, they are the capriciousness of God, building us with mirrors so we are forever haunted by its presence and ours. What does ours reflect, Ronald? Our eyes reflect what he writes, but if we look closely at our own eyes, at each other's we see the truth in them. The illusion that has been build on them.'

'So who is it?'

'It is Bolaño who is hunting Ronald. And he stalks our God by stalking through the world he has imagined. He rips apart and kills what he has ripped apart and killed. It is Bolaño's rage.'

'Who is Bolaño?' Ronald asks.

'Another God. Another fool.'

Ronan straightens up and as he opens his eyes I see myself reflected in them. He is looking at me.

'He is close you know. He is so tantalizingly close. Any moment now you slave of literature. Literature uses conceited fools just as well as omniscient geniuses.'

I stop writing then and look at what Ronan has said to me. I think about killing him, getting this over with. Kill them all. I have control over them..... or do I?

I hear a knock on the door. A knife 12 inch long stabs its way through the wooden heart.  

You stop reading. Nothing makes sense. It's too abstract.

What did the writer mean?

What do we ever mean?

- Rohith