The Coliseum

by Patrick Lestewka

  He pulls into the driveway of their three-story brownstone. The mortgage payments give Albert cold sweats but Pamela refused to live in anything less. His rusting Dodge shudders to a stop beside Pamela’s ice-blue Saab. The juxtaposition recalls a diamond set beside a dog turd.

  This is how it ends:

  “Honey?” Al’s voice trembles as he opens the door. “You home?”

  Sound upstairs: Low moans, animal panting, odd cooing noises. From the bedroom.

  “Pamela, dear?” Albert climbs the spiral staircase.

  Outside the bedroom door: A single shoe. Buttery black leather. Male size eleven.

  “Pamela…?”

  The door opens to the sight of his wife’s bare back cresting above the sheets. Her body moves rhythmically, up and down and up and down again. She grunts like a delighted piglet. Albert can see sweat beading on her neck, beneath her tightly-bunned hair, and trickling between her sharp shoulder blades. He cannot see the man below her, the man fucking his wife, the man making her scream and buck and thrust more ardently than he’s ever been able to, the man whose manicured fingernails leave bloodless half-moons in the flesh of her waist and ass. He crosses to the closet.

  “Albert!”

  Pamela stares at her husband while a-straddle the other man. She does not scream and cover herself; her face does not redden in a blush. There is a moist sound as their bodies disengage.

  “Al–bert.” Pamela’s tone is one might employ to chastise a puppy. “Wait outside. We’ll talk about this later.”

  “In a moment, dear.”

  Albert does not know why he bought the shotgun. It wasn’t an impulse buy. He debated the purchase for weeks. He didn’t hunt or shoot skeet, but still he wanted—

  …needed it…

  —siphoning money out of their mutual account over time so Pamela wouldn’t notice. A Van Doekken Longbore with a walnut stock, titanium-blue barrels, dual-action triggerlocks. He had it custom-fitted to his shoulder and loaded with .557 Winchester Failsafes capable of punching fist-sized holes through the grille of a Mack truck. He removes it from its hiding place behind a self-painted pastoral landscape Pamela had deemed too hideous for display.

  “Albert, I am warning you!”

  The man’s voice a reedy squawk: “Listen, buddy, she told me she was a widower—”

  “No problem…buddy.”

  “Albert, you’re embarrassing me!”

  “Terribly sorry, dear.”

  Albert exits the closet. The man has time to look down two impossibly large, terribly dark barrel mouths before the Van Doekken barks, punching a dinner-plate-sized hole through the man’s ample gut. The man stares, with the remarkable calm only extreme shock confers, into the newly organized cross-section of his stomach: Flesh ringing the wound frosted charcoal-black, spine split like a jackknifed tractor-trailer, vertebrae winking whitely and a random orgy of mashed organs spattering the wall behind him. The man says: “Oh, duuuude,” and then his head and a goodly portion of his shoulders are vaporized in a spray of blood and bone when Albert squeezes the second trigger. The man’s headless body topples off the bed, clutching handfuls of white satin sheet in its still-spasming fists. Lying on the floorboards, it resembles a gingerbread man bitten by a very large, very cruel child.

  “Oh my Gaaaaawd—” Pamela moans.

  “Hold still, dear. This thing’s a real bitch to reload.”

  Albert snaps the chambers open, inhaling the smell of spent gunpowder, and slots two more rounds. But by then Pamela is racing across the front lawn, naked as a babe, aristocratic body stumbling, piss running down those creamy coltish legs. Albert has never seen his darling wife move quite so fast.

  He sits on the bed’s red wetness. One of the man’s eyes—cornflower blue, Al notes, the most brilliant blue he has ever seen—is stuck to the wall, beside a tattered stub of flesh that might’ve been an ear. He watches the eyeball lose adhesion and fall off the wall. It rolls to his feet and he steps on it. He laughs.

  He is still laughing when the police arrive. Still laughing as they cuff him.

  Still laughing into the judge’s stern face until she raps her gavel and says:

  “Mister Rose, you’re headed to the Coliseum.”

  Then, abruptly and all at once, Albert stops laughing.

  — | — | —

  The Man of God

  This is how it begins:

  The moment Jackson Cantrell convinced his stepbrother to stab his own eyes out to better behold God, he knew there was something powerful about religion.

  “Can you see, brother?” he had asked, his voice a mellow lilt.

  “No, brother, I cannot.”

  “Do you want to see, my brother?”

  “Yes,” His stepbrother knelt prostrate, arms outstretched. “Let me see. Please.”

  Jackson reached into the folds of his robe and produced a kitchen fork. Light pinwheeled off the stainless-steel tines. He placed it in his stepbrother’s trembling hand.

  “The light of the Lord can only be glimpsed through sacrifice.” He ran his fingers through his stepbrother’s sweated-shined hair. “The kingdom of God can only be glimpsed through a veil of tears. Will you take the next step?”

  “Yes, brother.”

  “Then surrender your sight to God.”

  His stepbrother drove the fork into his eye. The tines punctured his eyelid and sunk deep into the socket. His eyeball erupted with a liquid farting noise and corneal jelly gushed out like red, veiny egg yolk. The sight reminded Jackson of a bath bead bursting in warm water. Although shocked by the pain, his neck-veins standing out like fat tubes, Jackson’s stepbrother pulled the fork, tines now webbed with viscous red runners, out of his dead eye and jammed it into the other one. Jackson peered into the emptied socket: The flesh was red and wet, the surface crisscrossed with slender capillaries that resembled the veins on a leaf.

  His stepbrother’s hands clutched at Jackson’s robe.

  “Can you see the Almighty?” Jackson’s hands were clasped in prayer. “Do the gates of Heaven shimmer before you?”

  “I…I can’t see anything,” his stepbrother said. “J–juh–just pain.”

  “Then you are unworthy,” Jackson said, and left his stepbrother to his blindness.

  Jackson Cantrell was, at the heart of the matter, a lazy man. A lazy man with a sharply incisive mind and an overabundance of charisma. What he sought was a way to make weak-minded men lend him their blind and unwavering support. He quickly realized no tool better suited his aim than religion. Like many before him—Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, Billy Graham, Jim Jones and David Koresh, to name but a few—Jackson harnessed the power of the Word, honing it like a blade on a whetstone.

  First came the faith-healing: Jackson walked the streets of Toronto, restoring sight to blind men, giving legs to those who were paralyzed, clasping divine hands around deaf ears. Nobody saw Jackson the puppeteer, Jackson the snake-oil peddler, Jackson paying healthy men to play cripples, sighted men to feign blindness, virile men to claim impotence. Many believed what they saw. Jackson has the body of a preacher: Tall and lean and geometrically angular, with shoulder-blades that rise into jagged peaks, long blonde hair and a sharply curved nose, cold blue eyes like crosshairs. A jarring solidity defines him, a sense he could weather any storm, forge onwards while others fell and died. His voice is by turns sandpaper-harsh and butter-mellow, a voice commanding attention. He favors in a white suit, white spats, and an albino leather coat. Moses for a new millennium.

  Next came the spiritual retreat. People flocked to him. Men and women, young and old, all with the same hunger in their eyes—the same terrible need. He took them in, took their money, built a retreat in the country. Locked away from society and studying Jackson’s bastardized tenets, his disciples were reborn.

  First polygamy was adopted: Men took women as trophies and traded them like baseball cards. Then rape was acceptable and soon the night was alive with the screams of women and men and children stra
pped down and mercilessly abused. Jackson spurred his followers to greater depths of perversity, finding biblical loopholes to justify torture, and murder, and pedophilia: “Corinthians 17:8: Thy wife and thy child are possessions of thine alone, to be happ’ly occupied to thy betterment,” he quoted to an ardent male supplicant making voracious eyes at his six-year-old daughter. The retreat, christened “Eden Revisited,” was transformed into a modern-day Sodom. Jackson’s flock, some 500-strong, were utterly under his spell.

  And today, as he watches a brother and sister fuck in the dirt, Jackson has an epiphany.

  He is bored. Terribly, thoroughly bored.

  This is how it ends:

  “People,” Jackson’s voice echoes in a cavernous barn, “we have come far, achieved great things. Our ways may be frowned upon by society, but only because society is blind to the Lord!”

  A resounding cheer from the gathered throng.

  “These last days I have sat in council with God. He is proud of how we live according to His wishes. But,” his voice drops and his fingertips whiten around the edges of a cheap plywood lectern, “He said His bastard children are destroying what He created, perverting His scheme, poisoning His gift. My brothers and sisters, God has promised a great scourging—apocalypse!”

  A murmur passes through the crowd. Men in flowing robes circulate with silver trays.

  “The time has come to test your faith!” Jackson slams his fist on the podium. “You who truly believe must prove yourselves! Trust in me and take my gift! We must take flight before the way is clogged with the heretics and infidels; arise and accept my bounty!”

  Each tray holds hypodermic needles filled with 20cc’s of strychnine. They are taken eagerly. Parents take two or three and roll up their children’s sleeves, tapping the crooks of thin arms to raise veins.

  “Yes, my lambs! Remember how I love you, and know how I treasure your sacrifice!”

  “Take me, God,” a woman screams, needle jutting from her arm, white froth streaking her bluing lips. “Take me from this world of sin into your sweet loving arms!”

  “Hear my prayer!” A middle-aged man sits on the floor, the heads of his dead children resting in his lap. “Let us be reunited in Heaven!”

  “Good, my children! Rise to meet your God!”

  The barn is soon a snakepit of arms and legs spider-skittering in the dust, bodies shaking as if electrocuted. Women bite their tongues off as their jaw tendons clamp spastically and men tear their throats out as the poison constricts their esophageal muscles. Children run in headless-chicken circles as bodily liquids explode from their asses and their mouths and—cartoonishly, horrifically—from their ears and noses and the seams of their eyes.

  Then the barn doors are thrown wide and uniformed men are fanning around the perimeter. Clad in body-armor and face shields, semi-automatic carbines slung over their shoulders.

  “Shit,” one of them says as he bends to take a pulse. “Medics!”

  The task force wades through his flock, administering anti-toxin shots to those showing feeble signs of life. Jackson kneels, arms upraised. The SWAT team leader approaches him.

  “You sick fuck.”

  “It’s not too late, son. You too can be saved—”

  The officer clubs the preacher’s skull with his rifle butt. Jackson does not go down but instead stares up at the officer, beatific, blood trickling across his forehead.

  “I forgive you. You know not what you do.”

  “Baby-killing freak!”

  Another blow sends Jackson to the floor.

  “Cuff the fucker. He’s earmarked for the Coliseum.”

  Upon hearing those words, for the first time in years, Jackson Cantrell is afraid.

  ««—»»

  Telephone Conversation Between Ontario Premier Henry Triggs and Minister of Corrections Leon Knight. March 13, 1990.

  KNIGHT: Hello.

  TRIGGS: Leo old hoss!

  KNIGHT: Hank!

  TRIGGS: How’s tricks?

  KNIGHT: Busy. Election time and I’m canvassing like hell—

  TRIGGS: Uh-huh. Pressing the flesh, kissing babies, the whole rigmarole. How’s the campaign shaping up?

  KNIGHT: Tight, Hank, real tight. Kelvin’s running hard. A lot of soft money powering that campaign and he’s going to run the coffers dry—

  TRIGGS: Kelvin’s a paper tiger; if he makes office he’ll be bent over to the corporate thugs who feathered his nest.

  KNIGHT: He’s got a nice head of steam rolling, though, making sappy podium speeches about leniency and prisoner’s rights and all sorts of heartstring-tugging bullshit.

  TRIGGS: That son-of-a-bitch. [Pause] What banner are you running under?

  KNIGHT: You know me, Hank: I wept the day this country abolished the death penalty. Now what do we do with all the pieces of human trash that litter our penal system—the serial killers and recidivist rapists and child molesters, the incorrigible freaks who’ll never see the light of day? I just read a report listing the sticker price our government foots for incarceration: Sixty thou per felon, per year.

  TRIGGS: Jesus H. Kee-rist.

  KNIGHT: Sixty grand supplies a murderer with cable television, three hots and a cot, a weight room and a library. We’re talking a goddamn health spa!

  TRIGGS: Just yesterday I was talking with one of my constituents, a retiree, name of Estella Bainbridge. She said: “Mr. Triggs, why does my pension tax support the man who murdered my daughter?” So I ask her who her daughter was: Georgia Bainbridge, victim of Nathan “Shovelface” Lange, one of your sixty-thou-a-year residents at Fulgate.

  KNIGHT: [Sighs]

  TRIGGS: So I said: “Mrs. Bainbridge, your pension shouldn’t have to support that awful man, but we live in a democracy, and sometimes unfair things happen in democracies.” I felt so goddamn… inadequate.

  KNIGHT: Join the club. If I had a nickel for every time I gave the old sometimes unfair things happen in a democracy spiel—

  TRIGGS: But does it have to be, old hoss? Don’t you want to look a victim’s family straight in the eye and tell them, “I did all I could?” Goddamn it, I do. Did we fight so hard to assume office just to pitty-pat around the real issues?

  KNIGHT: Hold on, Clarence Darrow. When did you become so idealistic?

  TRIGGS: Just listen: I was up in the Northwest Territories a few weeks back. I’ll tell you, Leo, it’s the bleakest patch of earth I’ve ever seen: Nothing but rocks and ice and snow. There’s an abandoned arena on the outskirts of Whitehorse; the town used to have a minor-league hockey team. Seats twenty thousand or so and it’s isolated: No factories, houses, or shops for miles around. And I got to thinking…well, maybe we convert it into a prison.

  KNIGHT: [Laughing] Now you’ve gone and done it. Now you’ve gone and done—

  TRIGGS: What’s the problem?

  KNIGHT: Do you know how much it’d cost to convert an arena—an arena out in boony-land, no less—into a prison? You’d need to gut the insides, build cells and guard towers, provide all the amenities those goddamn civil rights groups bleat about—

  TRIGGS: Nope. Way I’m thinking, you don’t need to do any of that. Yeah, you’d have to ensure security met prison standard, install closed-circuit cameras, post guards outside the arena.

  KNIGHT: Wait…you’re proposing no cells, no guards?

  TRIGGS: Bin-go.

  KNIGHT: [Long Pause] Hope you’ve got a parachute handy, Henry. ’Cause you just sailed off the deep end.

  TRIGGS: You don’t think a segment of the population wants it? Be honest: You want it, don’t you? So do I. We’re two of the most influential politicians in the country. So tell me: Why can’t it happen?

  KNIGHT: Why can’t it happen? Listen to yourself. How can we rationalize treating human beings like animals? It’d be a nightmare.

  TRIGGS: I agree; it would be a nightmare. And so what? I’m not suggesting we incarcerate ticky-tack criminals. We populate this place with the scum of the scum who deserve—no matte
r what the bleeding hearts trumpet—to suffer.

  KNIGHT: I can’t believe I’m pursuing this, but…what about food? What about treating sickness? What about gang violence? What about—

  TRIGGS: What about any of it? Drop food every day and let them scrounge. If you’re lucky, you eat; if not, tough shit, you starve. Get sick, bye-bye, you die. Gangs? I say go for it: Create factions, war over turf, spill blood. These men are beasts. Let them live by the only law they understand: The law of the goddamn jungle.

  KNIGHT: Jesus, Hank. That’s merciless.

  TRIGGS: You think Nathan Lange showed any mercy with Georgia Bainbridge? Did you know he poked her eyes out and stuck his pecker into her sockets—he fucked Georgia Bainbridge’s goddamn eyes, Leon, with the poor thing alive and screaming the whole time. You think he deserves three hots and a cot, evenings whacking off to HBO softcore? That’s the goddamn problem, Hank, and you know it: Everyone’s got a hard-on to show mercy to sick fucks who don’t possess a shred of it themselves.

  KNIGHT: Jesus, Hank–settle down. You’re preaching to the choir. But the proposal would encounter a massive backlash; people saying it’s savage, a social experiment with human guinea pigs…

  TRIGGS: Look at it another way: It’s a second chance. The prisoners live under their own rules and free from intervention. They might co-exist peacefully.