Fiction: ASPHYXIOPHILIA

By Suphi

 

I was only 17 when I murdered my family. I got away with it too. In those days all you had to do to get away with anything was hop a freight train outta town. This was right before CCTV became ubiquitous. Before DNA. Before GPS. Before the FBI even had an N-DEx. The fax machine was cutting edge and cell phones were the size of bricks that only a few Wall Street types could afford. 

That was the golden age. You could disappear. Drift around in a vast landscape. Just another anonymous body moving among masses of other anonymous bodies. Truly detached. Like a phantom. As long as you had no family, no past, no baggage. That’s why I always tell people. You wanna be free? You gotta do two things. Kill your parents and move around. They always assume I mean the former in a symbolic sense. I don’t correct them.

So anyway that’s what I did. I killed my parents and moved around. But I soon ran out of money. So I got a job. But I hated it. So I decided to break into my boss’ house and rob him. Since I’m gonna rob him, I thought to myself, I might as well kill him too. And since I’m gonna kill him, I further reasoned, I might as well cuff him to the radiator and make him watch as I raped and killed his wife. So I cuffed him to the radiator and raped and killed his wife. Then I strangled him with his wife’s pantyhose, took his wallet, feasted on some leftover potato salad I found in the fridge and took a long, steaming piss on their carpet. 

The next day, out of nowhere, I was struck with the sudden realization that I was destined to be a great artist. I stole a book about Francis Bacon from the public library. The preface said that it wasn’t an artist’s job to make society feel good or safe or content. That the job of an artist was to force people to face our dark side in all its horror. To jolt them out of their self-satisfied complacency. I figured I could do that better than anybody. I took up painting. But it was too hard. I got frustrated and bored. Then I took up sculpting. But it was too hard. I got frustrated and bored. Then I took up poetry. But it was too hard. I got frustrated and bored. 

Then finally the universe came calling. A zine got stuck to the bottom of my shoe as I was prowling a sorority house one night. I picked it up. It was about Duchamp and found art. And right there, just minutes away from a frenzy of sexual sadism, I invented a whole new art form. I wasn’t only going to use objects I’d fish out of the trash or scavenged from junkyards for my readymades like Duchamp did. I was also gonna sprinkle in the souvenirs I kept from my victims. Pure genius. I broke into the sorority house to collect some. 

A short month later I was ready to share my work with the world. The exhibit was titled Serial Artist. My favorite piece was the one I called The Mangled Mannequin. I had found a mangled mannequin discarded in the dumpster behind a department store. I was strangely aroused by it. So I took it back to my studio and humped it. Awkwardly. Then I gave it my unique creative touch. I took the pantyhose I tore off my dead boss’ dead wife and pulled it over its head. Pure genius. 

But very few people showed up. And those that did show up sneered at me. This is the problem with people. They’re fucking stupid. They’re too pathetic to create anything brilliant themselves so they start seething with resentment when they see a superior being like me do it. But they’re also passive-aggressive cowards. They dress up their narcissistic envy in the cloak of objective criticism. They reward mediocrity and persecute the gifted. They reward mediocrity because they themselves are mediocre. They persecute the gifted because we remind them of their mediocrity. It’s disgusting! Absolutely disgusting!! 

I was enraged. Particularly at one snooty piece of shit. A wannabe art critic. I stalked him. Decapitated him. Boiled his severed head. Put it on a spike and placed it at the entrance of my next show. The lips and cheeks had boiled off leaving his teeth exposed. It looked like he was smiling 

and greeting the guests as they were coming in. Everyone was amazed at how lifelike it looked. But even that wasn’t enough for the simpletons to recognize my pure genius. I was accused of being morbid. Disturbing. Unsettling. Frightening. What do they want? Cupcakes and handjobs? 

I was indignant. I started exploding into these tirades. It’s not an artist’s job to make society feel good or safe or content I barked. The job of an artist is to force them to face our dark side in all its horror. To shock them out of their self-satisfied complacency. A few patrons bought it. So I decided to do something extra special for the opening of my new gallery. I mixed in the flesh of a pretty little co-ed in the hors d’oeuvre. “Is that tuna?” one idiot asked. “No, it’s a virgin sacrificed to the god Dionysus.” They assumed I meant it in a symbolic sense. I didn’t correct them.

I was slowly beginning to make a name for myself in the art world. But the real breakout moment came when I exhibited my most daring work yet. It was time to graduate to performance art and I had just the perfect idea. I was getting tired of constantly having to go back to the woods to have sex with the corpses I’d dumped there. So I thought why not transport a fresh one and do it on stage in front of a live audience?

But the performance didn’t quite elicit the reaction I was hoping for. One old bag dropped her poodle and fainted. Some man wearing a beret threw up the hors d’oeuvres. The whole place cleared out in seconds. But there was a few people who didn’t believe they were actually witnessing an act of necrophilia. They thought the cadaver I was humping was just another one of my uncannily lifelike dolls. So when I was done I turned to them and took a bow. They started applauding. Slow at first. Then enthusiastically.

It was all over the newspapers the next day. By the following week I was mentioned in every respectable art column in the country. I was praised for pushing the envelope. For shattering society’s taboos. I was approached by an agent. A very reputable one. The fashionable crowd were all clamoring to see me do it again. Before I knew it I was banging dead bodies all over the country to adoring spectators. After a while I started running out of corpses. And the celebrity factor made it more and more difficult for me to go out hunting for new ones. One potential victim recognized me just as I was sneaking up on her. She promptly asked for my autograph and offered to blow me in a public restroom. 

Then one day the parents of a missing girl recognized their daughter in a tabloid photo. One that was taken during an especially heated performance. They went to the cops but were dismissed as delusional. Everybody thought it was the grief talking. Then more people started coming forward with identical claims. They too were met with disbelief. It was simply too outlandish to investigate. The police chief went so far as to call it a “moral panic.” He even offered to give me around the clock protection. I didn’t think I needed it but the irony of the police protecting a serial killer from the loved ones of his victims was simply too delicious to resist. So I accepted. 

Turns out I did need the protection. There were riots breaking out outside the gallery every night. I remember being shocked that anybody would be emotionally attached to others enough to remember and search for them after they disappeared. I had always imagined America to be a place where people darted in and out existence with no trace. Once you were gone it was as though you were never really there to begin with. Like a phantom. But apparently not. These pesky little families just would not let go.

The whole media circus was also beginning to take the joy out of the whole thing. And to make matters worse I received the weirdest fan letter ever sent in the history of fan letters. This crazy bitch was begging me to kill her and use her body for my next show. She said she wanted to be immortalized as the first real human prop that I performed on. I didn’t correct her. I accepted the offer only because it spared me from having to go hunting for new prey. It had now become all but impossible with all the groupies and photographers following me around. Plus the irony of a prey volunteering for me to skip all that effort and work from the comfort of my own home was simply too delicious to resist. Perhaps I should be grateful. No serial killer ever had it this good.

She came over. Said she had run away from home with dreams of becoming a movie star in Hollywood. The only part she ever landed was of a prostitute getting stabbed in the opening scene of some cheap slasher flick. How fitting. Anyway she took off her clothes and wanted me to have sex with her. Per her instructions I was to choke her to death just as she started to cum. But the whole consensual role-playing thing was a huge turn off. I could barely get it up. She, on the other hand, was too ecstatic to even notice. I got annoyed by the whole charade and chocked her out early. 

But it happened again during the show that night. Right in the middle of the act… I went limp. The whole place went silent. I tried to get going again but nothing worked. The inauthenticity of it all killed my boner and my art career. The press had a field day. “Performance Art Anxiety” blared one headline. But my rapidly vanishing celebrity status got the worst possible boost with another headline. Apparently the crazy bitch had also sent a letter to the papers. She wanted to make sure the whole world knew that she was the first real human prop that I performed on. Thanks to her letter the world found out that she was the last.

My arrest and subsequent trial was an international sensation. I got on the cover of Time magazine. “Pure Genius or Pure Evil?” asked the title of one of my many unauthorized biographies. T-shirts with the plea “Kill Me Next Please” written across the chest became a fashion craze among busty women. Psychologists were lining up to interview me about my childhood. Scores of female admirers were camping out in front of the prison just to catch a glimpse. I had so many panties mailed to me that I started giving them out to guards and fellow inmates. My art was fetching record prices at the most prestigious auctions.

I turned the courtroom into my own larger-than-life stage. My ultimate performance art. And I managed to split public opinion right down the middle. Half the country was chanting for me to be fried on Old Sparky. The other half worshipped me. I milked it for all it was worth but in the end the former won. The latter were getting bored and moving on to the next scandal anyway. So after a million stays, appeals and escape attempts my execution date was finally set in stone.

As my last meal I had medium-rare steak with eggs (over easy), double hash browns, toast with butter and jelly, milk and juice. Then a priest came to my cell mumbling something about repentance. I told him to go suck Satan’s cock. I don’t believe in Satan or God or anything like that but I couldn’t think of anything else to say that would make him instantly leave me the fuck alone.

Then the guards came and took me to the scaffold. Tied the noose around my neck and my hands behind my back. A few relatives of my victims and other petty bourgeois do-gooders there to witness my hanging were all staring at me with squinted eyes and self-righteous smirks. When asked what my last words were I turned to them and said “Oh just go and fuck yourselves.” I wondered if the drop and snap would cause an accidental decapitation. Then thought how cool it would be if Andy Warhol made a series of silkscreens of my skull if my head did get severed. That brought a smile to my face. 

The trap fell open. The snap didn’t sever my head but it was sharp enough to drop my khakis down to my ankles. And as I was quivering at the end of the rope I got an enormous hard-on! It was so huge that I heard some of the women shrieking and gasping. Then came the most explosive orgasm of my life. I was facing the witnesses and my body started to twist and turn as I was coming. It was like I was spraying the front row with a hose. The shrieks and gasps turned into the screams of people stampeding away to avoid my last cum shot.

I died with a big grin on my face and an even bigger woody pointing right at my executioners. My final fuck you to the world. What a way to cum, what a way to go.