He was six years old and Father was teaching him how to keep the madness in.

“Like this,” he said, holding Paul’s hand to his shoulder. “Slowly,” he said, standing away to let Paul do it himself. And, slowly, his hand a glacier over the mountains of his bicep, he ran his palm along the curves of his arm, to the dip of his wrist and over the thumbs. He shifted his weight from one foot to the other, a counterbalance, bending the knee just so, foot turned out to such an angle. From here, he could lash out--a forward snap kick to break the delicate bones of the wrist, a feint to be re-chambered, to distract from a punch or open-handed slap. He did not lash out, he did not strike; he flattened his hands, drew them before him like he was carving a hemisphere of the world.

“Like that,” said Father, “that will keep the madness in.”

He was eight years old and Mother was teaching him how to keep the madness in.

“Hold still,” she said, sitting Paul on a flat black bench. “Faster,” she said, standing away to let Paul do it himself. Before him was a giant’s skeleton, the ivory ribs linked together with wire. Cancer boiled up inside it in pairs of three, and he touched his fingers to the bone to hear the chime. His madness made the blackness boil higher, but it stayed inside the ribs of the monstrous skeleton. The bone grew brittle, though, and broke, falling to powder under his touch, coating the blackness, keeping it down, keeping it small, fizzing it into nothing. A reverse chemical reaction.

“Like that,” said Mother, “That will keep the madness in.”

He was twelve years old and his parents were teaching him how to keep the madness in.

“Study this,” they said, setting a book before him. “Harder,” they said, standing away to let Paul do it himself. And he looked, reading about the flow of blood cells through the arteries, veins, and capillaries. He studied the firing of neurons, the howling of the madness ringing in his ears. He learned the enzymes that bound and rebound his genes, that gave his madness a human shape, a form that let him stand among others, he learned the bare convoluted fissures of his brain: Temporal lobe, amygdala, cerebellum, the connections between logic and life. The table before him was bare and devoid of meaning, the words were the bone of his skull. He was made of words, crawling with them as ants; one good rain and he would be nothing but madness.

“Like that,” said his parents, “that will keep the madness in.”

He was sixteen years old and it was up to him to learn how to keep the madness in.

His hands around Father’s throat eased nothing. The man gasped and choked, fingernails ripping into the skin of Paul’s wrists, carving out pleas (please) along veins and capillaries and the hemisphere of the world could not stop him, the bones did not free Father’s neck, the words did not hold him back until he chose to draw his hands away. And there, sketched over the arteries, over the windpipe, just under the Adam’s apple, was a butterfly in crimson red that took wing and flew over Paul’s shoulder.

He was seventeen years old and it was up to him to learn how to keep the madness in.

He turned to watch the butterfly become a leaf and flutter to the ground; with calm deliberation, he stepped on it, yielding a quiet crunch. His mother whimpered as he shifted his weight to his toes and leaned, ancillary cracks like Arctic ice, breaking under heat, under pressure--and his mother shattered along fault lines, like brittle glass, her peach-toned skin peeling off like so much paper. It was easy, under his nails, like an orange; he had to be careful not to reach too deep, but in the end, it all came away, leaving bare bone and bubbling black. His father’s eyes dripped with Paul’s madness.

“That is how you keep the madness in,” he said. “Like that.”

He was eighteen years old and it was up to him to learn how to keep the madness in.

He cracked his mother’s sternum to pull out a gorgeously brilliant stone; from inside his father’s throat he pulled its twin. And, to keep the madness in, he ground them to stone with his own, their dark triplet, and released the opalescent powders to the wind.

The madness was not contained, it would not go away. It was leaking from his nose, a thick black trail following the thin blue vein no one quite ever notices from the corner of his lips down along his jaw. His fingers were covered in it. His hair trailed in it. It fell from his eyes and turned to obsidian beads that clinked against the shards of his mother’s beautiful bones.

Could beauty grow from those severed limbs? Paul hit one knee, hard, clutching his hands to his head with desperation aforethought. Could the madness give birth to ivory keys, lovely but empty of meaning? The world seemed to be dissolving, falling to pieces around him, into the frosted trees of piano keys he imagined, lilies taking their sustenance in the places where life still flowed.

Not so bad, he thought, to let the madness free, if in place of him and his graceless body there would be a white willow, or perhaps a brilliant, blood-drunk Martagon lily.