The Hive

There are roughly six thousand apartments in this place, this hive, two hundred floors, and the elevators run vertically and horizontally. Progress.

I make honey. So do we (honey doesn't make me, certainly, but neither does it make itself). So do we all. Up and down, floor to floor, junction to junction, the left brain controls the right brain, and vice-versa. Yesterday, there was a disturbance in the cell next mine; it seemed some little girl wanted to have an ice cream cone or a steak or a sports car, because she was wailing, and that means one thing: want, followed by punishment. I don't condone it, no siree; but mete it where it's most desperately in need of meting is one philosophy I adhere to. I didn't used to, but now I do. Stop it at the source. Stop it, not now but right now.

You want ice cream? I bet you don't want ice cream now.

Every day the maids come in to clean up my place. I'm embarrassed what they might find, but of course that's all kept secret, or so I hope. The contract says so, but in the history of Man and Beast has a single contract ever been honored? My Magic 8-Ball says hell no. I know what goes on beneath the surface, where the truth and the aborted fetuses lie. Apartment A1115 has cigarettes hidden under his bed, and while I was cleaning the kitchen I found a certain note. They're probably planning to stab me as I sleep and steal my measly fortune. Sometimes I wish they would. For I deserve it.

You will never find a more depraved man as me, I'm convinced. I once cut a woman's vulva with electric shears, and if that doesn't do the trick, I don't wash my hands after I pee, unless I pee on my hands. Still, I derive(d) pleasure from neither acts; in both cases it was basic human nature -- base, perhaps, but isn't that the very definition of basic? -- and what jury would convict me for that? A mad one, I suppose.

Here I sit, encased in four walls, each with a name I've given them. To my right, Jessica. To my left, Jenny (Jennifer Oh, like that De La Soul song). Behind me stands Claudius, in front of him Leopold.

This is not a trick or an illusion. Watch me as I go stark raving mad. Up, down, diagonal -- any which way but loose.

But there is another dimension. Gravity. And He always wins.