by Set Sytes
Johnny sighed, loudly, and stubbed the last of his cigarette in the ashtray on the bar. It means whatever you want it to mean.
Is that a yes?
No.
Two hours later they moved into District Twelve. Mr White wasn’t about to argue, and Kidd Red was drunk and high on XE. He was legless and giggling and they had to carry him through the checkpoint.
DISTRICT 12, HOTEL
Mr White wasn’t a man of action. He wasn’t a man of words. He was the watcher. The listener. He had learned that the quieter you were the more you sank into the background, becoming almost like the scenery. People forgot you were there. And so they revealed more. That self-check that makes you act with a bit more decorum, a bit more dignity and integrity, perhaps a bit more ethically around new people, people not in your inner circle? That wasn’t there when around Mr White.
He watched, and he listened, and inside his head he filed reports and wrote biographies and analysed everything with a fine tooth comb, judging it against his own character, reading people and their conversations like fiction. Making the slightest of adjustments to himself, as if grooming himself for some intangible position, some omniscient all-acting job, held to task to build himself a model human. Emotions on the outside. The mechanisms for emotion on the inside.
He learnt like a scholar.
No, not like a scholar. Like a man of professional distraction, a man that clung to boredom and apathy as livelihoods. A man seeking life in others. He dissected people in his brain, and tossed them aside when they proved of no interest, as they so often did.
Johnny Black and Kidd Red had so far proven far more interesting than anyone he had met before.
He didn’t consider himself a bad person. In fact, he didn’t consider himself a good person either. When he came to think about it, he didn’t really consider himself much of a person at all. He was just a mind, a mind taking in the external. Things he knew he should care about he often didn’t, or felt that any care summoned in his breast was artificial, a mechanical response devoid of soul. He had emotions, sure, but they were principally devoted to himself, the him that was cut off from the outside world. The mind alone. He knew he could feel things for outside influences, for other people, but for large stretches of time they felt isolated and disconnected to varying degrees. He made up for this by what he felt was a tremendous bout of acting, so lifelike that it often convinced him, and was like second nature. If somebody close to him was upset or in pain, he would act accordingly. Sympathetic. Reassuring. Whenever he thought back to these moments, however, he was slightly paranoid that he was too stilted, too short on words, too by-the-numbers. He said what he thought people wanted to hear. By and large, he was right, and he was right because he had listened for so long.
Mr White was unclear as to his position in the world, but he assumed it to be a completely insignificant one. He was a blip on nobody’s radar. He was a ghost in the machine.
When other people tried to engage him it made him uncomfortable. The less he knew them the less the comfort. The greater the engagement the less the comfort. Sex was a challenge. Thankfully sex was unnecessary. But he had the potential to enjoy simple social interaction, even to have fun, and when it was forced upon him by the right people at the right times it could dig him out of his shell.
Johnny Black and Kidd Red were the right kind of people. They were not your everyday men. They were fringe men. Outcasts, exiles. Men of horror and absurdity. Men free of tethers, men unchained. Beasts and devils. Geniuses and madmen. Psychopaths. Judge jury and executioner. Moral zeroes. Glorious fools riding the wave, the wave of shit and fear and nothing.
There was more to learn from them than from the rest of humanity.
Mr White found himself attracted to them, like a fly attracted to hot shit. Like a moth attracted to the light, that when turned out, flutters around blind and crazy and free in the darkness. They were rubbing off on him, their ways like musical terrorism to his ears. He was easily impressionable and always had been. Red and Black were easily impressing and always had been. He was being charmed, seduced, and he lapped it up in all his lust and fear and nightly sweats. Every time he looked at them he could feel the admiration nestling within him, or something like it, and he wondered and kept on wondering why there was so much to like about the very worst of people.
Mr White didn’t have sex. He didn’t fuck and he didn’t make love. He kept himself to himself, and all his greatest pleasures had been known in his own company. He masturbated religiously, devoutly and zealously. He was dependent on his organ as though the touch of it was the only union he ever desired. It wasn’t – he wanted so much more, so much greater – but all of these were unattainable, because all of these things were imaginings. None of them could exist. All the women and men and more. All the beasts and demons. All the things, all the things in the universe were in his universe and his universe was a fantasy.
He had lived whole lives of masturbation. Shut off from the outside world, lusting and self-loathing and yet also apathetic and distant, his body feeling like some alien plant, some wall decoration. His mind hallucinating, dreaming. Great visions. Feelings of genius, of sexual dominance and submission, of worlds and their people conquered and terraformed. Feelings of disgust and love. A sexuality of fiction.
What had Red said on the night they had first met? The fantasy is everything. It was all about the fantasy. It always was, always is.
Mr White was weary, inescapably weary. But then again he always was, if not in body then in mind. He finished his glass of water and climbed into bed. There was silence from next door, and he guessed that Red had passed out.
Mr White sighed and settled down. He ran his hands down his body to the place where there was still feeling and gripped it tight. Another night in Rule.
THE WHITE DREAM
There was a room of pale faces. An audience hall lined with figures. They were clad as ladies and gentlemen, in elegant ballroom dresses and tuxedos. Their heads were all blank and smooth, without form or feature, like white eggshells. They all faced him in the centre. Nobody moved or spoke. There were no mouths, no expressions. It was as though being under the judgement of hundreds of statues.
Silently, the room shifted inwards. It got smaller. The figures got closer.
He wanted to edge away from the people but they surrounded him all sides. All four walls were shrinking in, almost imperceptibly. The people crowded. Without a single movement, they came closer. Fifteen metres. Ten. Five. Two. One.
They clustered in, their faces right up to him. He couldn’t speak for terror. His skin dripped with liquid fear and he felt even this judged, appraised with condescension and sneers, even though no emotion was displayed by the pale faces. But the mood was palpable and prickling.
You are useless, sir. The buzzing flat-spoken words came from behind him, and he span around, but there were just more empty faces looking at him in silence.
You are nothing, sir. He span around again but there was no sign of a culprit, no sign of mouths.
This won’t do, sir.
You are a maggot, sir.
You can’t be enough, sir.
You just won’t do, sir.
You are a nobody, sir.
The torments in all their gentlemen’s decorum came thick and fast, battering him from all sides and yet none he could see as he span hopelessly on his feet, weeping down his shirt.
I am me! he wailed.
Silence.
Silence.
All the ballroom dancers with their eggshell heads opened up mouths, huge black holes that took over most of their face like gaping pits of oblivion and without a single other movement they screamed laughter at him. Every figure assaulted him with the same conformed hating, mocking laughter, and it sounded like the tidal buzzing of flies or a thousand buzzsaws or the screech of static.
Then, as though they were on rails, they rushed in at him.
He woke up.
BAR
&nb
sp; Johnny had taken them to the nearest cheap hotel he could find and checked them in, holding the incapable Red’s pen hand and arm and operating them like a puppet to give a better signature than Red ever made sober. He had then disappeared back out into the night, only to be there waiting for them in the first bar they entered. He nodded to them from a table. Whiskey in hand. Their drinks were already set up for them. Rum for Red. Water for Mr White.
My mind’s fuckin crazy guys. I mean it. Red coughed from his straight rum. It’s just – he waved his hands as if painting a scene of chaos. Just, you got no idea.
I think of some dark things too sometimes.
C’mon White, you ain’t got shit but pretty flowers and rainbows in that heada yours.
You’re wrong.
Yeah, you are, said Johnny, eyeing Mr White. I would be surprised if he couldn’t shock you a dose or two.
You guys don’t have what I got.
Try us.
Red sighed. My mind is like this… this electric current right. And it leaps onto anythin it can, without thought or direction. It’ll just go. And often it leaps onto stuff it ain’t supposed to. So it’ll just jump right over there before you’ve even fuckin thought of anythin, before your mind’s even willed it. Nothin conscious about it. I don’t wanna think of most of this shit but I do. And, right, I do this thing right, where I scribble out my mind. Like I have a big black pen and I just scratch all over my mind’s eye like I’m crossin it all out real fast. And that buys me half a second, and then I can get my mind offa that thing and there it’ll go fuckin bouncin to somethin new, and if that’s wrong I gotta scribble that out too, cause if my mind stays, well, that just feels real wrong. Imagine if it’s something illegal -
Pedophilia.
Whatever it is. Sure that’s been in my mind, but that don’t mean nothin, cause all shit has, you see? It’s not as if I fuckin deliberate on it or condone it. It’s just a jump, and if it’s real fuckin bad then it gets the scribble. Sometimes my mind just flashes through a whole heap of stuff in a matter of seconds and I gotta try and make these jumps but I ain’t got enough control over where I’m jumpin.
He took a deep breath. But, like I was sayin, imagine if it’s somethin illegal. It gives me real fuckin discomfort. Like I’m bein observed or somethin. How do I know I ain’t? What if someone were watchin my mind and saw some of this shit? I’d be goddamn sectioned.
We all would, said Johnny.
Providin everone else ain’t just as screwed up.
They probably are. It would just make them go after us more. A guilty conscience breeds hypocrisy in activism. People getting away from their own demons go after the demons of others. Easier than fighting your own. The joke of it. Moral arbiters with arbitrary morals putting you down to become one of them, to help whip the others into the party line.
We’d be locked up just for what we can’t control, murmured Mr White.
Red rolled his eyes. You wouldn’t. Your mind is a ball of fluff where bunnies bounce on cotton wool and your long lost lover is in the arms of another man . . . under a parasol . . . in a meadow.
Mr White had grown tired of this, and stiffened. I could jump my mind better and stranger than you could.
Red raised his eyebrow. Oh really? You wanna go then, Mr White Lightnin?
Yes. Uh . . . What do I do?
Just say first thing that comes into your head man.
Uh. Um. Banana hammock.
You’re fuckin kiddin me.
Johnny leaned back in his chair with an amused expression. Corpse fires. Burning cows. Garrotted. Monkey butlers swinging from intestines.
Well a lovely contribution from the sweet Mr Black there, said Red. But right now I’m fallin down a waterfall towards a lake of baby foetuses . . . shredded like wheat. I’m covered in goat blood. Wearing a crown of shit. The foetuses are now like potato mash. The sky is rainin milk but it tastes like cum.
Mr White closed his eyes. Red sky at night . . . the barns are on fire. The family is calling out but they are roasting inside. The whole sun is touching the wood. The sun is a fertilised egg. It splits open and inside is a dung beetle with the head of my father. The family is burned black but move about like tree limbs, all staggering and crooked.
Red sniffed. Not bad.
Disembowelled tigers, said Johnny. They’re reading Camus. Libraries are desiccating to dust around them. The kidneys of our mothers are on the footsteps of an Aztec temple. They hatch into screaming apples and each apple is a god and they are bleeding, soaking the earth like red wine . . . in every town people are drinking it and bathing infants in it.
Rednecks frothin at the mouth . . . froth is semen . . . their pricks ejaculate shit onto the ground and flowers burst forth . . . flowers turn into weeds . . . the weeds grow horses like fruit on the branches and they drop off and rape the rednecks . . . the rednecks cry with pleasure . . . the horses die of infections and just their cocks remain . . . the cocks slide about like snakes and then grow insect legs and skitter into the sewage systems of cities . . . they come up through the plugholes and enter the wombs of expectant mothers causing auto-abortions.
Skulls on a cold moor . . . engineers parachute downwards -
Hey it was my turn! protested Mr White.
Fuck turns, said Johnny. Engineers parachute downwards into a field of human shit and mashed egg . . . irrigated by periods. A rainbow arches across the sky and is crossed by a chariot pulled by antelopes . . . the beasts have ingrowing horns that spear out through their necks . . . climbing all over them like lice or spiders are babies with black eyes who suck on the horns like cocks.
Brains flop over the floor like fish out of water . . . the desert looks on them like it was once a man . . . there is a yard that is overflowing with monkey nuts, they spring out the ground like tulips or come up long and hard like erections . . . an old man tends the yard but he is made out of paper and grass and he breaks down slowly and falls into a wheelbarrow made from the spines of giraffes and cheating wives.
Chocolate runs from our cocks and a harem of women and men and animals slurp at them . . . our cocks coil up in spirals and tuck themselves inside our bellies which throb and pulse like we are breedin maggots . . . our family fucks pigs in front of us while we tear our hair out and cut off our fingers with pick axes and then when we cannot hold the axes we gnaw at our hands desperately . . . the new harvest falls on our heads and our heads become huge oranges . . . we are juiced by stinkin old women . . .
Women who are obese like mountains and I dive in the folds like canyons . . . I go spelunking wearing an old miner’s helmet made out of mould and bits of crucifixes . . . I am drowned in the woman’s sweat . . . I make it to the vagina and the folds are like sogging cliff faces . . . scree falls like shit on my head . . . I am caked in primordial ooze… a two headed dog runs yapping at me from some hole and chokes on clean air . . .
Palm trees sway by the ocean which breathes like it’s alive . . . it is adorned with huge hats and people ride them like boats . . . the water’s surface is like a great skin like curdled milk and it is yellow in colour . . . a sailor drinks it and says it is better than piss . . . he anoints his children in it and claims baptism . . .
Black men call race hate on coconuts which show razor teeth and bite the cocks off white men who whine like locusts . . . the blacks have white heads and the whites have black heads . . . the Asians are crocodiles in the water . . . a military drone flies overhead and drops a bomb . . . everyone explodes into pulp which rains down on a village and is taken as a fashion accessory for houses . . .
Lightning darts like broken veins and punctures the faces of lawyers and priests . . . they open up their shirts and make out . . . their skin ripples and then jellifies . . . they become one amorphous mass and cry out their love for the world . . . nearby the only cloud in the sky rains on a single man with hair like bread and his body is so waterlogged it is a wet sponge . . .
A man tells a woman he loves her and she disso
lves like salt in the rain . . . she reforms into a pillar that looms over him . . . the man is no longer a man but a garden plant . . . locked up in a cell with bathroom and dining room . . . the cell constricts like an anaconda . . . through the jail bars asylum creatures chitter and cry, their faces like bugs with antenna that reach in and tickle the man-plant . . .
The jumps came thick and fast, and soon they were all talking over one another. Nobody could be sure who was saying what.
Dead wallpaper . . . rolled up in wheelchairs all crippled . . .
Peeling flesh . . . bark of a tree oozing like grease from a sheep’s ass . . .
Taps running all over the world . . . creaking and moaning as if pain . . .
Dogs with tails stitched together . . . blamed for the rape of the horned children . . .
Everybody who is loved by someone made to inject radiation . . . pustules form on their body and start to speak . . .
The grim reaper comes and is a homosexual . . . he buggers the gods in Heaven . . . the women croon old ballads . . .
Tips of fingers sliced and put in pies . . . family mealtime . . . everybody watches an empty box where spiders dance . . .
A reservoir of the tears of oysters and broken men . . . twirling on the edge is a ballet . . . the audience sits in floating boxes and clap at everything . . .
Driving a buggy over the heads of animals . . . sitting next to you is a boar . . . its hat is made of leather and it laughs at you like your mother . . .
All of us crying and masturbating with spikes through our cheeks . . . we are on a train . . . in the distance through the fog a family is stapled to a tree . . .
Whirling in oblivion . . . the end of all things . . . we are surrounded by umbrellas and the scalps of everyone we knew . . .
Pig arousal the new aphrodisiac . . .
Thunder in the sky . . . a goddess dribbles . . .
A temple falls under controlled demolition . . . society calls the anus the new church . . .