Die in Tune

“Kaleb, what color do you want for your bed sheets?” My maid, Anita, asked me holding up a dark blue, a green and a black one. I looked at them and thought before saying “Green, please.” Anita has worked for my family since I was a baby. And even when I told her I could do my own bed and clean up my room, she still did it for me.

My room was pretty big. The walls were a cream color, picked by my mom who thought it was the best color, even though I didn’t like it much. The floor was carpeted and brown, another thing I didn’t like, because who knew how much bacteria was present in it.

The only things I liked about my room were the big bed, the big windows, the desk and the posters. I had so many posters on my walls, too many to waste my time in counting them. I also had a television in my room, but I rarely watched anything on it, unless it was DVDs.

I turned my attention back to the notebook in front of me on my desk. I was still thinking of more things to write bout the City of Muoia Nell’Aria, but there wasn’t much left to say. I stared at a comic book of Batman that was also on my desk. I picked it up and stared at the cover. I needed a protagonist. Someone victorious, yet rebellious. Someone I could relate to. I need to be that person, I thought.

Anita had already left my room by the time I let go of the comic and picked my pencil to start writing about my character. I pressed heavily with my pencil as I wrote the name of my character in capital letters: Kaleb the Slitter.

I was never very good at coming up with names so I stuck with my name and inspired myself, once again, in Jack the Ripper. I decided to describe in the first person, because it was always easier for me. I was going to be a murderer: that has been established from the beginning. I thought of the place I lived in this fictional world, the school I went to, my friends, my killing techniques, among other things.

I was a young murderer. Still studying the hard art of killing, because you had to be precise, skillful, and strategic and above all you had to be professional and have some originality: all this to make it to the top.

My weapon: a thirteen-inch dagger, because I had an unlucky addiction to the number thirteen. My specialty: slitting throats with class and precision. It was one of the hardest of the four greatest arts of killing. The others included: slow and painful mutilation, lethal poisoning and skinning. I managed to be the top in my class: the ones who decided to follow the daggers and the throat slitting.

I was in my second year at Aeono – the best college for the young murderers at City of Muoia Nell’Aria. I had graduated from Cevok (my previous school where we learned all the basics and a little bit of every art of killing from the ages 5 to 15).

I now lived in a street nearby the college facilities. I wasn’t very wealthy, but I had managed a decent apartment. It wasn’t very big for a house in this wealthy city - it only had three master bedrooms, one big living room, a kitchen and two bathrooms – but it was a cozy space where I could relax after a long day of working and studying.

I shared it with one of my fellow classmates who was also an expert at another art of killing: lethal poisoning. He only attended very few classes with me, but we had some things in common and he was my roommate in my first year at Aeono, therefore we decided to live in the same apartment.

We weren’t best of friends though, we, as murderers, were competitive by nature. We struggle to be the best and use all of our efforts to get recognition for our hard work. But in a way we also helped each other, murderer to murderer, brother to brother, because we were all on the same road to achieve success.

Now, let’s talk about something other than my academic life.

How about my not so innocent love life? People usually ask me that. I never told them the truth though. I would always tell them lies and lure them into thinking they are the one I love. You see, I worked and studied hard by day, but as darkness fell and the night began, I would party at local bars. One awful thing about me is that I’m a very promiscuous fellow. I never really had a true love. I wasn’t proud about it either.

Sure, I’ve had quite a few encounters with people, but every week a different person, every week a different woman. I was numbed by love, I didn’t feel it. I just had lust. But it’s funny how a sudden turn of events can change you. Yes, my uninteresting unfaithful life ended in just one night…

And before I knew it, I was being unoriginal and adapting my real life into my amazing fictional life. Well it wasn’t amazing, but you get the point: I was making it parallel to my own life and I couldn’t control it.

I looked at the paper and at what I had written and suddenly that phrase I wanted so hard to forget (but apparently it was stalking me and wouldn’t leave me alone) repeated in my head like an echo, or maybe a scratched CD. Have your pick of which is worse.

I love you, don’t you love me?

Fiction. Fiction. Fiction.

I forced myself to think about that and nothing other than that.

Fiction. Reality.

Or at least focus more on fiction.

Reality.

Okay, it wouldn’t leave me alone, so I wouldn’t erase what I had written. I would leave it, but I would avoid mixing my real life with my fictional life from that point on.

Pasts were to be forgotten, locked away in the records of my life inside my memories, never to surface again. They didn’t matter to your future. Once you moved on, you had an opportunity. An opportunity to a new beginning. Well, that’s easier said than done. Then people wonder why I’m fucked up.

It was such a relief for me when Anita knocked on my door and said “Kaleb, dinner is ready.” I kept my pencil inside my notebook to mark the page and closed it. I followed the delicious scent of what smelled like Anita’s amazing and mouth-watering lasagna. My nose never ceased to impress me. It was always right. On the table there was a plate with a huge portion of Anita’s masterpiece. Anita was part Mexican and part Italian so she knew how to cook both of those cuisines.

Her lasagna looked so tempting: creamy sauce was melted over the meat and tomato sauce which lay between the layers of pasta that were just perfect: not too hard, not too soft. It was definitely an amazing work of art. One that rapidly vanished before my hungry eyes. Before I knew it, all I had was a fork in one hand, a knife in the other and an empty and surprisingly clean dish before me.

“Gracias, Anita. It was delicious.” Anita smiled. She loved it when I spoke in Spanish. After this pleasant moment, comes the exciting, yet dreadful one: the writing. Just like silence, I sometimes longed for it, other times, I feared it. I had the feeling that making the City of Muoia Nell’Aria parallel to reality wasn’t a good idea, but I just had to wait and see.

Nothing in the future can be predicted. We can decide our own destiny.

This world shall be an adventure, not only for me, but for the patient readers that come across it and decide they have nothing better to do, but read about this fictional land.

It was my first day of the third trimester at Aeono. We were already assigned to some homework. I had to find a screamer, people I actually despised, which is in fact surprising especially because I am a murderer, and I had to kill him or her (well like you couldn’t see that coming) and describe the whole process and analyze it in the following aspects: if the technique was fast and precise, if it was effective, if it gave the victim and the murderer the same pleasure (of dying or killing), and if you would use it when you were graduated and would pursue your professional life as a murderer.

I was a throat slitter, and my victim wouldn’t be hard to find. All I had to do was go to Gripelle Street where most screamers lurked looking for their murderer. They thrived the feeling of being stabbed. It was odd, yet it was part of their life. If their murderers gave them good feedback, they would get more recognition, another thing they thrived. Only the best were actually known. Such people as Bloody Sally, who were legends at the art of dying, were people all screamers dreamed to be.

I walked to that street once my classes were done for the day. I always carried with me my thirteen-inch dagger. It was carefully sterilized, because though the screamers weren’t of my concern, I hated to see another person’s blood on my beautiful dagger.

I saw a few people and they all stared at me, each of them wearing something exuberant and over-the-top. I looked around to select my victim. I preferred women, because I loved their screams. My gaze fell upon a lady that didn’t stand out and for that reason I picked her. She had short, wild, rebellious, curly blonde hair that bounced on her shoulders. Her skin was pale and she had freckles. Her eyes were a light shade of brown. She wasn’t very old, about my age, so she wasn’t used to being a screamer.

I looked at her and took my dagger out of my coat with some style. You couldn’t just take it off roughly and aim it at her. You had to do it slowly, giving a hint of mystery, watching her eyes wander over the slight gestures you made as you grabbed hold of your weapon.
It was a thrilling feeling. Like adrenaline before the actual roller coaster. Murdering always gave me a feeling of happiness and excitement.

Then when the sun rays hit the shiny surface of the metallic blade and hit her face, her eyes went wide, but she had no time to react.

Dagger meet throat. Throat meet dagger.

A piercing shriek with just the right tuning sounded through the streets just before the pointy edge of the dagger slit her fragile throat. It was like a breath of fresh air, hearing that scream. It was one of the best feelings in the world. I watched her body collapse on the floor, lifeless, and I wiped my knife on my hanker chief and walked away, getting pleading stares from the other screamers. In a few hours that screamer, lifeless on the floor, would be awake again with a sore throat and in the streets again waiting to be the victim again. She would get good feedback from me.

I stared at the sky as I planned out how my essay was going to be like. It would probably turn out to be something like this:

“The victim was a petite blonde, about 5’4”, with a pale complexion, freckles and chestnut brown eyes. I presume she was between the ages of 16 and 18, due to her amateur behavior, but she had talent nonetheless. Her scream was perfectly in tune, making the whole process pleasurable for both sides.

The weapon used was a sterilized thirteen-inch dagger. The location was Gripelle Street. The technique used was the ever so hard one of slitting throats.

The collapse of the victim occurred just two seconds after the process, but the death was instant. The victim was left lifeless on the floor with a perfect two and a half inch slit on her neck, cut from the right to the left. The angle which the sharp blade formed with the neck when this one was inflicted was approximately 86 degrees which is between 90 and 80 degrees, the perfect angles. So I was very precise throughout the entire process.

It was also very effective, because the victim didn’t have a pulse and didn’t show signs of breathing when she was abandoned, just moments after the process.

The technique shall be used in the near future when I have entered my professional life as a murderer, once I graduate.”

By the time I was done writing the essay mentally, I was already at my apartment. I sat at my desk and wrote in a blank sheet of paper every word I had thought about on the way to my apartment. Once I was done, I went downstairs to the lobby of the building (every building had one), where the message tubes were. The message tube allowed us to send letters or packages to anywhere in the city.

All we had to do was roll the paper up or package it (if it’s not just a letter) and place the address on it. Then, we put it in the correct tube and press a button, so that the item would be sucked into the tube and the letter or package would be in the place you sent it in less than a minute. I never understood how it truly worked, for it was the Supreme Court who had the right to all the knowledge about the city, not the murderers.

I inserted my rolled up essay with the address on it onto the tube that said “Letters”. With a press of a button, my letter vanished. I had done my homework and I now could go to my apartment and get ready for the night. Believe it or not, many female murderers, who lurked during the day, loved being the center of attention in bars at night.

Screamers and murderers wouldn’t meddle with each others lives though. They wouldn’t go to the same clubs, bars, restaurants and shops. They only time they could be seen together was when the murderers would kill the screamers.

One of the few things they had in common though was that none of them meddled with the witnesses. The witnesses were like a world apart from us. They technically lived apart from us, there was a wall separating our kind and their kind. Only the Supreme Court was allowed to go in there to control the situation.

From what I heard, their world was frightening even to my own ears: it was phony, simple, mundane and repetitive.

I had heard tales about those who did the unthinkable: those witnesses who penetrated our part of the city, illegally, and became murderers. They were among us even when we didn’t know. They could be our classmates, our teachers, without our slightest knowledge.

Luckily, according to my sources, most of them have long since joined the rebellion and no longer live among us. But others still do.

I stopped writing. I loved the way the story was shaping up. I actually was proud in my description skills, especially in the part I described the murder of the victim of the fictional me. Ideas just kept popping in my head about this land. It almost felt as if I were really living there.

Well, sometimes I wish I was.