We Should Have Left Well Enough Alone

by Ronald Malfi

  Animals, he thought. They’re acting like animals.

  A man moved past him, sniffing the air, sniffing the ground. For a moment, Keanan watched him with confounded desperation. The man paused directly in front of him, sniffing Keanan’s skin.

  “Watch it, buddy,” he warned the stranger. “The hell is going on here?”

  The stranger froze, stared into Keanan’s eyes for a moment. There was no intelligence in those eyes, he saw. This freak had left all semblance of humanity out in the waiting room.

  The stranger struggled with a frown, then hurried off to some other corner of this make-believe world.

  A cold hand gripped his forearm, spun him around. It was another cloaked gatekeeper, though this one was shorter and carried a big wooden stick.

  “That’s one break,” the cloaked figure said. He brought the stick up and thrust it into Keanan’s gut. A roiling tumult of pain blossomed in his belly. “The rule is simple, buddy. Don’t break it again.”

  Doubled over in pain, he watched the cloaked figure retreat through teary eyes. Bending down, the cloaked figure opened a hatch in the ground—the floor—and descended a stairwell hidden inside it. With nothing more than a bump, the hatch closed behind him.

  “Jesus,” he breathed quietly. Was that for talking? Just for talking to someone?

  A second hand fell on his back. Tense, he spun around to see the slight, pale form of Craig from the waiting room standing behind him, a meager smile playing over his lips. Craig’s small erection jutted from a nest of pubic hair like a baby bird straining for its mother. Disgusted, Keanan turned away.

  I got lost somewhere along the way, he told himself. Somehow, along the way, I lost sight of Casey and wound up here, in this alternate version of reality.

  Casey…

  Craig’s sweaty hands gripped Keanan’s waist and he felt the man’s pelvis thrust toward him—felt the biting sting of Craig’s cock as it nipped his tender flesh. Appalled, violated, Keanan twisted away from the little man, but Craig’s grip was tight. His hips pumped against Keanan’s buttocks, his slender prick struggling for access.

  “Fuck!” Keanan shouted, stumbled forward, then turned around to face the little rapist. He cocked a fist and drove it into Craig’s face. A spout of blood burst from Craig’s nose and the little man reeled backward and slammed onto the ground. His eyelids fluttered; his hands came up to his face. His small, red shoulders hitched. His erection quickly receded.

  “Rapist fuck,” Keanan breathed.

  Shaking, on the verge of tears, Craig surprised Keanan by hissing through a mouthful of blood and scampering off into the forest.

  This is a nightmare, he thought.

  Someone slammed him from behind, knocking him to the ground, a burst of agony rupturing down his spine. Wincing, eyes filling with tears, he craned his neck to see another cloaked figure with a staff standing behind him. The figure introduced the side of Keanan’s head to his steel-tipped boot. Keanan felt the world spin and go gray. Faintly, as if from the far end of a corrugated pipe, the cloaked figure warned him about breaking the only rule of Painstation and the Simian Simulation: do not break character.

  “You’re not a man in here,” the figure said. “Quit thinking like one.”

  Keanan remained crouched on the ground until the spirals and stars faded from beneath his eyelids. He brought a hand up to his temple and it came away wet with blood.

  This isn’t real!

  He was suddenly overcome by the urge to prove this to himself—to prove the falsity of this room, for starters. How big could the room actually be? It was all underground, wasn’t it? There had to be walls somewhere; he’d just have to run far enough to find them. And how far?

  In a frenzy, he darted toward the trees, hurdling over entwined and squirming bodies and brushing past reaching, straining hands. There were walls—had to be—and he would find them and expose this horrendous landscape, this counterfeit world. How could they even keep him locked up in here like this? Anger made him run harder, faster, and it felt good—as if he could do anything he wanted at that moment. Anything at all: rape, kill, bite, fuck, scream…just as long as he did it as an animal, did it without thinking.

  There were no walls. The room had to be miles in every direction. Overhead, a flock of large, colorful birds took flight.

  Casey Madigan was bent naked over a simulated stream, lapping at the water with her tongue. Seeing this, Keanan froze. A collage of Technicolor images flooded his brain: every make-believe fantasy of this woman now paled to the sight of the real thing. This splendid creature, this rape fantasy. It wasn’t just her nakedness that was exposed to him for the first time; it was her baseness, the stripped-down, untamed essence of her being in its purest form. There, crouched beside the river like a creature of folklore and myth, her body proffered and rising, sinking, rising, sinking, her aromas filling his nose, his head. He breathed her in and allowed her natural scent to occupy every cell of his body.

  Trembling, his mind like a single cable pulsing with current, he advanced toward her, stiffening.

  I’ve seen you like this so many times in my head. So many times, just like this…yet never like this, too. It’s this place. We’re all different here, aren’t we? Here, we can be and do whatever we like until the door opens again and we have to get home. Would you even look at me tomorrow?

  He came up from behind, her scent overpowering now, and mounted her. Against him, she shuddered, sighed, rolled her head back. Their eyes met briefly. He pushed into her with a sudden burst of ferocity and she cried out. His body quivered at the sound, the feeling. Her warmth engulfed him. He saw her without opening his eyes: the firm S of her back, the tender flesh of her thighs, the purse of her sex…

  She bucked beneath him and a swirl of colors filtered through his mind.

  I’m here I’m here I’m here I’m here I’m—

  He felt the world pull from his feet, his knees, his spine, and quake through the shaft of his body. A giant network of nerve-endings, his entire physical self convulsed as a tingling wave of excretion erupted inside him. And in the throes of passion, he cried out into the false wilderness.

  “I love you!”

  Casey stiffened beneath him and wrenched her body from his. Keanan shuddered and nearly lost his balance, slamming against the side of a tree. Before him, Casey clambered away on her hands and knees, her wide eyes glowering at him from over her shoulder. Hot with unrequited passion, he watched her crawl away, needing her now more than ever despite the abrupt conclusion of their act—his act.

  “Casey…”

  Behind him: the sound of creaking hinges. He spun around and saw a number of hidden doors embedded in the trunks of the trees swing open. A regiment of cloaked figures carrying heavy staffs poured out and reached for him, yanked him to unsteady feet.

  “No—” he tried to protest.

  One of the figures tore his shirtsleeve up the center, scrutinized the letter P seared into his flesh. “Fresh one,” the figure said.

  A second figure grabbed him by the hair and jerked him backward. “This is three,” he barked. “You’re revoked.”

  In a dress of arms, Keanan was dragged toward the open doorway in the body of one of the trees. As if in a dream, he watched Casey Madigan’s nude, trembling form slowly grow smaller and smaller. He clenched his hands, made fists, felt the tightening of his muscles beneath the strong grip of hands.

  Into the tree. And darkness. The sound of a collection of feet trampling iron steps. Eyes wide, he could see nothing in the darkness. He smelled urine again, and fear. His own.

  The beatings lasted for several long minutes. They were administered with the keen practice of seasoned professionals. Several times he thought he would black out but he never did.

  I’m here, his mind said, and even the voice in his head faltered.

  He was taken to another room. Left on the floor. His own breathing echoed in his ears. He thought of Casey’s body shifting and pumping against
his own and smiled. He tasted blood. His body was a brilliant tangle of pain.

  A door opened and boots clopped toward his face. He was aware of a number of people around him. He thought he heard someone spit on the floor.

  “Revoked,” someone breathed. “Do you understand, sir? You have violated the only rule of Painstation. You are no longer permitted within these walls.”

  But what about Casey? he wanted to ask. Beautiful, beautiful Casey?

  “I love…”

  He was grabbed, rolled over onto his back. Hooded silhouettes swam in and out of the light. His vision failed him. Someone grabbed his right arm, squeezed the brand. He groaned. Someone said something else, but he could hardly comprehend words now. He heard the sliding sound of an enormous knife blade…saw it gleam briefly in the sodium lights above…

  “Remove the brand,” one of the figures said.

  Icy pain pierced the flesh of his right arm. It deepened and struck bone. Paused. Broke through. He thought he might scream. But he didn’t—couldn’t. Now, only his mind was capable of operation.

  Will Casey Madigan love me with one arm? he wondered.

  Discussions Concerning the Ingestion of Living Insects

  Mid-October.

  Soon-Lee, amongst other things, reflected on flies. Mostly, he considered the way they congregated, purple and black and green, their voices like stinging spikes breaking the air. And he pictured them in a scuttle, like spawning salmon in too-shallow water, rumbling overtop one another like knotted turns in a rope. That was how they were in reality, and how he imagined them in the hours when he closed his eyes. These things, he would think, are most important. He ate them, ate several of them. He did this only after they became too fat and too lazy to escape him. With one hand, he was usually capable of grasping two or three, sometimes four at a time, and he’d rattle them around and feel them flutter against the flesh of his palm before shaking them into his mouth and biting down. Or swallowing them whole. Sometimes, he liked the way they felt. A living train, receding in lethargic contractions down the back of his throat.

  They came in through cracks in the windows—through fissures in the walls and up through crevasses in the floorboards and tiles. Nights, he could hear them coming, working through the foundation of the building like an inevitable doom, building and building only to rupture and expel themselves into the air in a burst of wings and eyes.

  And onto him.

  And into him.

  There was no repulsion associated with the acts—neither his nor theirs. It was simply rotation, simply cycle, the mere spinning of a wheel. And in his mind he could picture that wheel, forever in slow-motion, forty-five revolutions per minute, and he could make out the rutted sound of its churning. It was a grand wheel, aflame with a myriad of colored ribbons and diamond studs. With each turn, a brilliant new light reflected off his mind-face, and he could sense each oncoming color with the same clarity as he’d witnessed the passage of the old ones. All the same, he knew. It was all the same.

  When a man dies, he thought, he leaves several things behind. But what will I leave behind? And will I really, truly even die?

  Often, he laughed. He’d discovered a way outside the wheel, a way to beat the system after all. Eternal life. Immortality. Disenfranchised from the human race. And how many people before him had discovered the same thing? A hundred? A million? None?

  Across from his bed and against the far wall hung a calendar. It claimed it was mid-October, but it was well beyond October. Like him, October was long forgotten. A filthy blackness had claimed one corner of the calendar—had withered it and curled it like a burnt leaf. He, too, had been burned…though the details, having grown much too unimportant, were now lost to him. Like many things.

  “My name is Soon-Lee.” He said this occasionally to remind himself, though he did not know why.

  Burned. He remembered something about a fire: the acrid stink of charred wood and a great conflagration…yet nothing was clear. The conflagration, after too much time turning the half-memory over in his head, merely became the wheel itself, spinning colors out of control, powerful and all-knowing the way God is massive and unyielding. And what about God? What about that bullshit? Was there anything to fill that husk?

  Soon-Lee laughed. His left eardrum was blown out, and the sound rattled like static in his head.

  Between the miserable, segmented hours of his consciousness, Soon-Lee slept. It was a sleep corrupted by violent images and unrelenting waves of nausea. Sometimes, almost blessedly, he would dream of Kilfer and Mines and Tonya—blessed, for these dreams, horrid and painful as they were, represented his last handhold on reality. The specifics of the dreams changed from time to time, but the core always remained the same: they were negotiating a series of narrow, subterranean tunnels beneath the village, walled in on either side, the stink of their sweat in the air. They could hear each other breathing, could hear the fabric of their khakis rubbing against their legs. And the sounds of screaming people, screaming children…

  “You hear ’em?” Kilfer breathed. “All of ’em, up ahead somewhere?”

  “Children, too,” Tonya said.

  Kilfer snorted in the darkness. “I don’t trust it down here. Let’s move topside.”

  “We’re almost to the end,” Soon-Lee insisted. “Swab the fucking place.”

  “Kids,” Mines stated to no one in particular, “is just the same.” Soon-Lee didn’t know what that meant, but continued to listen nonetheless. “Goddamn fountain of youth, little sons-a-bitches. Christ, my head hurts.”

  Occasionally, the dream segued into the purely bizarre…

  “You b’lieve in God, Soon-Lee?” Kilfer said.

  “No,” he answered, “and God don’t believe in me.”

  “Fuck God,” snickered Mines. “What’d God ever do for any of us? Made Tonya here one ugly bastard, that’s about it.” He laughed. “God can shine my Christing shoes, I’ll tell you what.”

  Kilfer sighed in the darkness. “That’s ignorant.” He was only a few feet in front of Soon-Lee; Soon-Lee could smell Kilfer’s sweat fanning off him in moist waves. “Better yet, what you think about flies, Soon-Lee? You like ’em? They taste good?”

  Soon-Lee froze, the hairs on the nape of his neck prickling up. “What you know about flies?”

  “I know you been eating them to stay alive. You ever read Dracula?”

  “I seen the movie once. What’s that got to do with me and flies? How’d you know about that?” Even in his dream, he was aware that the flies had not come yet, that Kilfer was talking out of order, that the flies wouldn’t become a part of the whole thing until after he was pulled from the tunnels and taken to the hospital, burned and forgotten.

  “Don’t worry about it, Soon-Lee.” It was Tonya, some distance behind him. “He’s just bustin’ your balls. Forget the flies. We’re all gonna die down here anyway.”

  “Tonya—”

  “Shit, buddy, you know that, don’t you?”

  “What’s going on? What are you guys talking about? This ain’t how it happened.”

  And he’d wake up, too exhausted to scream.

  Night and day alternated without pause. After many days he lost count and assumed, from the coldness of the walls, that it was sometime in December now. Or maybe even January. Christ, had it been that long? Passing, in the blink of an eye…

  He had no feet. The initial explosion had sheared them off at the ankles, the flames working their way up his shins, his thighs. The pain had been exquisite, but he only now remembered this because he remembered thinking this, and did not necessarily remember the pain itself. And even the events which led to his arrival at the hospital were fuzzy. Kilfer was there—something about Kilfer, something about Kilfer dying yet saving his life.

  Sure, he thought. Anything you want, buddy. Anything at all.

  “Soon-Lee,” he moaned.

  Eight of them had gone down into the darkness, yet only four of them had made it to the end. The other
men—Soon-Lee couldn’t recall their names, though he’d been good friends with all of the Special Operations guys at one time—had split off into separate corridors communicating with equal darkness.

  “Up ahead,” Tonya repeated. “Trapped themselves down here like rats. And with their children, man. You hear that?” Tonya’s face was a roadmap of scars and burned tissue—the only medals he ever received during his tour of the islands. The expression on his face was always one of constant pain, even when he laughed, which was rare.

  Soon-Lee shook his head. “How do you know about the flies?”

  “Forget it, man,” Kilfer said. There was exasperation in his voice. “I didn’t say nothin’ about no flies anyhow. You’re dreaming this, buddy. You got me?”

  The screaming of the frightened and trapped grew louder.

  Mid-October. Or December or January.

  Soon-Lee opened his eyes wide and found himself staring at the calendar on the opposite wall. He wasn’t in the tunnels; he was here in the hospital. Alone. And there was no pain. Just immortality and flies. And the cracks in the ceiling. And the graffiti across the walls—CON DIED DEAD and BEG MORT and GOD SPARED ME BLADDER and I WEAR THE ROSE. Words of dead men, all of them. Forgotten, like him. Dead.

  Not me, he thought. Never me.

  “The only way to beat God is to never die,” Mines said, creeping along the cinder walls. His booted feet crunched gravel or bone or both. The flame at the tip of his flamethrower passed briefly before his face, bringing his features into stark relief. He looked like a man who’d just been given a glimpse of his greatest achievements, all compiled into one singular, continuous reel. “Other than that, He gets us all in the end.”

  “All of us,” Tonya agreed.

  “All of us,” chimed Kilfer.

  But that wasn’t how it went down. There’d been no talk about God, and certainly no discussion concerning the ingestion of insects. In fact, there’d been no talking at all in the tunnels. Was that all really just in his head? Perhaps. But the people and the children and the explosion—those things were real, all right. There was no forgetting them. Not ever.