Psychotic Daydreams

Don't read this.

I

"Two hours and no one gets a word out of him. I think he's pretending. It doesn't look like catatonia: sometimes he shows facial expression."
"He's just playing the comedian. Hey! You think you can fool our psychs? You're going to a cell of one sort or another no matter what."
For the first time the perpetrator opens his mouth to murmur something.
"What was that?"
"Lock me up wherever you want." I don't care, he thought: I'll be as content inside as outside, because it's all the same prison. "Just have them leave me alone, or there will be more murders."
But to a prison he went, and when he spent his time there staring in front of him with no expression, the other inmates did not leave him alone. It was only a matter of time before in one instant he inserted a fork into another inmate's eye — then, as sudden as he'd come out of his apathy, he settled back into it, and went on staring in front of him without budging, in contrast to the screaming inmate. It took a while before the wardens took the deceptively nonthreatening human doll as a serious enough threat to actually handcuff him. He was taken to an isolation cell, but it was more of a reward than a punishment. No people. No stimuli. Just the environment he needed to slowly become a little less alive.

As good a place in the universe as any, he thought: just another corner of empty space for an empty person.

II

"I don't owe you anything, either."
You struggle, but the ties are tight. You shrink away.
"Is that what you think you're here for?" I produce a scalpel. "You'll watch — and smell — my body decompose next to yours until you starve, and as you observe the process you'll know the same will happen to you. It's my kind of performance art, and I've titled it karma."
The warm blood spurts over you. That's my kind of rape.