People often laughed around Zhoumi, not because he was funny or awkward, but because they were afraid of him and what he symbolized. They were afraid of his empty laughter and the noose in the middle of his studio. Mainly the noose.

It was a big attraction for those new to his studio, the noose. Each time the door opened, a little wisp of wind would caress the rope, let it swing gaudily for attention. What was worse than the noose was its shadow: a long, grayscale apparition dancing over the cement floors and walls. Occasionally, just for the fun of it, Zhoumi would place himself in the room such that his shadow would overlap with that of the rope. Then he would claw at his neck and jiggle about a bit. The sight of it amused him and birthed a masterpiece. At least he thought it was a masterpiece, before it got slashed.

Some thought the noose was part of his art, representative of some abstract concept; others thought it was just another symptom of the insanity that inevitably plagued genius. Not a soul suspected that Zhoumi had hung it there just because he felt like it.  

Then again, people generally weren’t capable of sharing Zhoumi’s whims. Normal people didn’t wake up each morning, gargle their toothpaste with paint, and spray it over million-dollar paintings; nor did they scramble up at four in the morning with the sole purpose of demolishing entire months’ work, a match-box and two bottles of gin in tow.

No one would resist inheriting a Fortune 500 company to sulk in the slums, exploited by cheap art dealers with an eye for talent and a better eye for business. Except Zhoumi, of course, because he wasn’t a romanticist, realist, pragmatist, or any kind of person in general. He was someone who had found his purpose in life, and this purpose was to create and destroy. 

“Painting won’t give you dinner,” His mother had warned.

Zhoumi didn’t feel like complying, “Then I’ll eat my feet.”

“And then what?”

“Then I’ll eat my legs, then my groin, then my abdo—”

“Zhoumi, be serious.”

“I am.”

“Suppose you eat your groin and your abdomen, then what?”

“Then I’ll eat everything until it’s only my brain and arms left. And then I’d be dead anyway, because artists can’t live without a heart.”

His mother sighed then, looking every sentiment from disappointed to startled, as she delivered the ultimatum that had changed the course of her son’s life, “If you eat your feet, I will chop off your hands and ask the cook to make porridge with them.”

After the words had been spoken and the invisible fences had been raised, the two spent a pleasant dinner together. The sound of knives dragging across flesh and porcelain and the empty tapping of spoons against glass bowls had filled the air. Zhoumi enjoyed it. He took one of the knives with him, as a souvenir, and when he went home, he used it to saw off his toe.

It hurt like hell. The moment the blade tore into his flesh, he was on the verge of turning back and telling his mother he'll go to business school after all. He didn’t really want to become an artist. He didn’t even know what art meant. He couldn’t tell what was good art, or bad art, or mad art or expressionist or impressionist or plain . All he wanted was a stupid show. He wanted to become an artist for the sake of a rebellion. He knew it was shallow. Foolish. He wanted to give up.

He didn’t, not because he grew used to the pain, but because he wanted to forgive himself with an epiphany. One of those in the novels where the protagonist woke up on a white bed in the middle of a big white room with white around her wrist and flocks of nameless nurses in white and a gentle, well-meaning, I-don’t-give-a- doctor in white. He wanted to act insane with a rational mind. An artistic revelation would be a good excuse for this debauchery. Perhaps this was the price, Zhoumi comforted himself, for others to understand that it wasn’t his paintings which were artistic, but he himself. Perhaps after this they would finally see him as art. Paint, oil, acrylamide and formaldehyde and bowie knives and addictive prescription pills and human brutality, the crusades, black plague, , spider legs, dust, hollow. .

By the time the steak knife finally met his bone, the tears had already burnt pink tracks into Zhoumi’s cheeks. The pain devoured the little of his motivation; he no longer gave two s about what others thought of him because his being an artist was an utter lie. The biggest fib. An artist? Ha!

Zhoumi kept his eyes wide open, not to watch his own deformation, but to watch the door. For the first time in his life, he wanted someone to walk in on him and rescue him, spoil him as they always had, say something corny and cheesy about valuing one’s body. He didn’t want to chop off that toe. He didn’t want to pay the price. He was afraid and he really liked his toes, even the ugly little one. He really didn’t like the pain. It wasn’t even pain. It was white, hot pokers being shoved up his foot one at a time. He wished, desperately then, that his mother would race through the door—as she always had—take him in her arms, and say comforting things about the world forgiving him. He knew now that such things were lies but he was a wannabe painter. He lived in lies.

She didn’t come. He kept sawing at it. Hoping.

He couldn’t remember much of what transpired after. He only remembered coming to the next morning with a headache, blood in his mouth, deep gashes in his tongue, and a chunk of flesh in his hand. It was probably the sight of that chunk of flesh in his hand that broke him. The second that passed as he tried to figure out the why, what, how, when, where was unexpectedly empty.

Zhoumi had been waiting to greet his epiphany. He had been waiting for his artistic license, to become Picasso or van Gogh or even stupid Pollock, but nothing showed up. All that came was the realization that he was missing a toe and he loved his mother and his entire foot felt as if it had been fed through a shredder and he hated, hated himself so bad.

Giggling, Zhoumi wrapped the toe up in the finest canvas he had, put a bow over it, and wrote his mother a note: eat me, don’t eat my hands. He stumbled and tripped and limped his way to the post-office, because it turned out that it was impossible to walk normally with a toe missing. On his way he wanted to hold his head up high, limp dramatically, keep iron eyes and an unmoving mouth, act like he was a hero. But he knew, just under the coldness in his eyes, that he wasn't a hero. He was a semi-artist. He was someone who lived in lies. Little lies that weren’t enough to withhold physical agony.

Zhoumi sobbed and whimpered on his way up to the cashier. Part of him wanted the man to notice the dried, cracked blood over his chin and on his hands and the tears in his eyes. He wanted the man to gasp, think that he was, if not lunatic, at least fascinating. The man, however, said nothing. He put Zhoumi's toe in a ty cardboard box, asked for twelve dollars and thirty-seven cents, and called for the next person in line.

At that moment Zhoumi saw his position in the universe: he didn’t have one. He had buried himself so far into his web of lies, his paintings, his thoughts of romanticized society and societal segregation and philosophical classes and dreams of being recognized that he’d forgotten they were only dreams. He was nothing. He was the long-forgotten, disgraceful heir to a Fortune 500 company. He was a pebble on the pavement, a budding artist trying to find his niche, himself, and failing. Failing. Falling.

That was when he began rejecting the world entirely. After he’d sent off his toe, he limped back into his ghetto apartment, closed the door, dropped to his knees, and shrieked. He didn’t know how long he shrieked for, because when his voice wore out he screamed with his heart, and when that wore out he screamed with fingers. Fingers thick with paint, fingers coated in graphite, fingers dancing, ripping through sheets and sheets of paper and medium and feathered pillows.

He was happy then, because he had finally gone mad. He had stopped clinging onto his dry dreams and instead dived right into them. He tossed away reality. His mother called him about the toe. She didn’t say much; what she did say, he didn’t remember.

And that was how, more than a painter, a sculptor, a student of colors, Zhoumi became Mi. He’d finally learned the art of destroying.

The next day he showed up to class for the first time in three weeks, with a stack of seventeen paintings. He was lucky. It happened to be last day of the mid-year evaluation. He slammed the wooden frames down on the professor’s desk. Thirty pair of curious eyes floated over him. The room was frozen still, waiting for a show. They wanted to witness something outrageous, something befitting a madman. The professor had to laugh or die or -slap Zhoumi, and in return Zhoumi had to either laugh back or stab him with a broken shard of glass.  

Dr. Lefebvre eyed the paintings one by one, glancing over them and their slashes of red and black and grey, feathers and tar, with flat eyes.

 “Where did you steal these from?”

“I made them.”

He bore holes through Zhoumi’s withered figure. Zhoumi hadn’t seen sun or food for days; he’d been living on tap water, mints, and laughter. He hadn’t realized it until the moment he let go of those frames, but he was hollow. His body was eating itself inside-out and his hands were shaking and seizing. Dr. Lefebvre turned his gaze back onto the paintings. Bore holes through them. Zhoumi waited.

“You pass. Flying colors.”

Dr. Lefebvre was brisk and grave, as he had always been. The class behind him cat-called and whooped at the happy resolution; Zhoumi found it ridiculous—what did they think they were watching? The fight for the talent of a deviant? The birth of a great? Yet another mad call for attention from a desperate painter? Fools.

Zhoumi nodded, swallowing the four words with great difficulty. He was disappointed. He had always looked up to Dr. Lefebvre and his sober, monotonous voice because he always thought Dr. Lefebvre knew true art. Apparently he didn't. Zhoumi had fed him a stack of feathered and tarred garbage and the old bastard graded them 'flying colors'. What a load of bull that was. Zhoumi reached into his messenger bag and produced a razor scraper.

Carrying the delighted smile of a child waiting for the final act in a magic show, he diced them up in the same kind of silence that he had shared with his mother. The sound of his blade ripping through thick layers of flesh, paint, skin, linen, gesso, and madness gave him great relief. The shredding was done not in a fit, not for rage, but for love. His razor was his final tool, a brush that painted null colors. He was trying to break back out of his dreams and find the little Zhoumi buried under layers and layers of artistry and confusion. He was crying tears that he thought he no longer had, in a silence that he thought couldn’t be true. It was déjà vu, but this time the item on his porcelain dinner plate was his artist’s soul.

When he was finished the professor told him to take a seat. Zhoumi didn’t just sit. He fainted. The class clapped. Of course they did.

Zhoumi awoke the next day in the ICU with bandages around his wrists and his left foot in a cast. He overheard nurses whispering about suicide. His mother and father were at the foot of the bed. He realized that this was what he had been fighting for, that this was the white epiphany that he wanted. Nurses in white. Walls in white. Sheets, bedding, flesh in white. Except this time he no longer had any more tears to shed or words to say to the world. He had become an artist and departed from reality.

He spent seventy-two hours under observation. People came and gone, questioning his thoughts and trying to understand his art and pretending that they did with big words that everyone else pretended to understand. He was sent home. His mother wanted to embrace him and cry; there were already tears welling around her eyes—around his father’s eyes too. He denied them. He denied them not because he had rejected them, but because he had rejected himself. He was no longer Zhoumi. He was Mi. Just Mi. Finally an artist, and insane. 

That was the day that he sat up the noose, not as an exit from insanity or reality, but on a whim. People called him a maniac, ingenious, antisocial deviant, because they were afraid of him. People wanted to speak to him and hear his voice. People wanted to relate themselves to his method. His madness. Frenzy. Outrage. They wanted to reap the cream of his emotions without sowing a about anything. They wanted to go skinny dipping in his ocean of misery for a vacation, and then go back to their office jobs the next day. They wanted were all, so, very bored and wanted to be scared a little, just enough; what better than to his marrow dry?

Suddenly everyone knew of his past and his old identity and began forming conjectures of his personality. There were internet forums set up to discuss talent that he knew he didn’t have. No one wanted to buy his paintings. Everyone wanted to see them and imagine that they, too, had cut off a toe and destroyed themselves before.

He didn’t hate them. He hated their voices, their collective identity and thoughts and self-justification and pretension. He hated how they thought they could understand emotions that he, the creator, had idea about. He found humanity filthy. Pragmatists. Realists. Liars. Frauds. Romanticists. Impressionists. Exhibitionists. Dogs. Pigs. Wolves. . He began changing mediums and subjects. His paintings evolved into the macabre. His colors grew darker and darker. He could no longer differentiate between method and madness and it was all fine with him because he was just putting up a show. It was all a show. A display of his guts and organs because his art no longer imitated life. His life began imitating art.

And then he met that hollow shell of a person screaming about trash and proofs and Prozac in the hallway to the shrink. That person stared at him through the eyes of a fellow actor.

For the first time in his life, Zhoumi tasted empathy. It was salty.