‘I see past your disguises,’ he said. ‘The gods took you behind the mountain. Why did you come back - unless you came back to marry me?’
I tried to kick, but he caught my ankle – and with his other hand he pulled a chair towards us. He lifted my body over it so that my bound left arm stretched towards the radiator at full extent, and then he stamped on my right foot till it lost sensation and I could not kick, so I simply lay. He slapped my face as he knelt on my back, and dragged my coat and sweatshirt over my head – and shoved them along my left arm into a clump around the handcuffs.
‘Last night you came to me in a harlot’s dress, to tempt me from my marriage,’ he said. ‘You came to me in scarlet to stain your mother’s white. You chose a young body to trick me. And at first I was ashamed to desire you. But now I see that it was not a temptation, it is a necessity.’
He spat on my back and drew a circle with his thumb. ‘I shall have you as my father – but first you came as my son. And as my son, you killed your mother and for that you must atone. You need me to make you atone.’
He stamped again on my leg to prevent me rolling off the chair – and then stepped back to admire me, reaching for his gun.
‘You shall taste the blood of the sacrifice,’ he said, screwing a silencer onto its muzzle.
He dipped his gun into the puddle of policewoman’s blood. A dull elation grew in my thighs, and the taste of malt vinegar intensified until it was nearly a liquid in my mouth. I slowed my breathing through my nose, watching eagerly as he greased the silencer with the wine-dark fluid.
‘Leander!’ Francis said at last, with a sob that sounded like a question.
He had stood, finally activated by terror, though was still stooped towards where he was cuffed to the bed. With his free hand he gripped nervously the collar of his sweatshirt. I couldn’t see his face, but his stance seemed stricken, desperate to intervene but too horrified to think.
‘Leander!’ he said again, more like an accusation now.
Francis sounded almost angry at my passivity – projecting, no doubt, his anger at his own passivity away from himself onto me. I was amused to hear his narcissism still at work in crisis. And its accusations were not inaccurate; I was passive, but because I wanted to be. I was fascinated by the promise of my own abjection – by the extremes that Kimber was threatening to take me to. I wanted to break through my own resistances – past pain and past the borders of my self – into somewhere else, and someone else.
‘Just go to sleep,’ I said.
Kimber kicked me in the flank. I tried to twist again off the chair, but I twisted only for show, only to make him feel like he was taking power from me. Really, my strained left forearm was rippling, and I was already changing, as he kicked me – transforming from sinew into water – so that soon, I would be a river.
He stood on the back of my feet until they were no longer mine and slapped me along my torso until I straightened across the chair. Then slowly, eased warmly by its glaze, he pushed the gun’s silencer into my hole.
I cried out the same as I always cried out – to conceal a smile. Francis cried out too, in his powerlessness, and fell back on the bed like he’d been punched in the stomach.
Kimber twisted the silencer in and out of my arsehole until it was enclosed by my flesh. I pretended to be in pain and pretended not to be in pain. I was entirely pretence, there was nothing else to me. I felt the rash of a fever in my glands, followed by a coolness – like an inverse hypothermia whose cold was spreading from my inside out towards my extremities.
‘Stay with me, my dear.’ He released my foot. ‘I don’t have to restrain you any more, do I? You should obey your father.’
He pulled out the gun slowly and forced it in quickly. I tried to relax my muscles into his rhythm. The heroin aided my submission, and detached me from it. But the violence was detaching me faster, further, more abstractly, beyond the hanging garden that Dawn had spoken of yesterday – until it felt like I was splitting towards another part of the world – not a garden but a desert. I was a boy in a bedroom in London, but now I was a boy elsewhere as well. I was awakening, with a new past, in a line of workers leaving a shift at a brick factory. All of us were opiated – to ease the agony and boredom of our labour – and we walked out towards the world’s poppy fields, guarded by landmines and militias, in the dead zone near where civilisation had begun. I was not called Leander here, I was younger, and I had friends, many friends – all of them boys, and most of them dead. I had set a whole village on fire and shot all the adult males in the head, for one crime – trying to hide the painkiller that was now in my bloodstream. The dust of the bricks mingled with sand and poppy seeds in my throat. And in a bedroom on the other side of the world, I listened to Francis’ crying until it sounded nearly like laughter.
‘I need more than blood,’ I said, trying to disrupt my own fantasy by engaging with Kimber’s. ‘I need flesh.’
‘Do you see the angels yet?’ he asked, pushing the gun’s silencer deeper. ‘What can you see?’
‘I can’t see anything,’ I said. ‘But I can hear them, I hear them singing in fear. You’re afraid.’
‘I’m not afraid!’ he shouted, and pulled out the gun with a suction that made me gasp.
He laughed. ‘Silence is the father of fear. And you should know your father.’
‘You can’t see my real form,’ I said, trying to wriggle my neck away from the chair edge to breathe more easily.
He’d dropped his trousers and was unrolling a condom over his dick.
‘Your form can become mine,’ he said, ‘You can merge with me. You can transform for me. I am not afraid.’
But this second denial made me realise that he actually was afraid – or part of him was. The meth had destabilised his emotions – and perhaps there was a way I could take advantage of this. But before I could think further, he pressed the gun into a cut in my shoulder.
Instead of screaming, I slipped again into the second me – the brick-maker in the desert – and my scream became a bomb beneath a soldier’s car – his legs were blown off but he did not die.
‘You had wings here, and here,’ Kimber said, returning me to the room, smearing bloodied figures into my skin. ‘When you were an angel. But your skin has been ripped.’
He began fucking me – and speaking faster, as though the words themselves were compelling him to speak. I draped my right arm over my left and rested my head between them. His grand accent was unravelling into something more acerbic, perhaps more Russian, or Georgian, or Eastern European.
‘You were beaten before I found you,’ he said. ‘The gods beat you before me. And so I join them. But why did they beat you? What did you see behind the mountain?’
His gun was reopening the wounds across my back, as the carpet burnt my kneecaps. Vinegar oozed from my eye sockets, sandalwood oozed from my guts. I tried to scream again, but my throat was too tired – and I couldn’t fall fully into the second me, although I felt hot wind on my face. I was above the desert, above the poppy fields, but still aware of Kimber – and I was forced to consider his past. It was his drug inside me, after all, that was lessening the pain of his assault – he was protecting me from himself – and it didn’t seem like a coincidence. Perhaps he’d been born near the desert I imagined below me, by a brick-factory – and grown to become some syndicate’s boss, controlling heroin’s transition from east to west in a war that seemed to Europe like a revenge on its enlightenment – beckoning its citizens beyond reason, towards impossible space and imaginary time.
‘My father took me behind the mountain too!’ Kimber shouted, jolting me back to attention. ‘When I was a child. Ink filled the valley behind the mountain and the ink was singing out a hymn – and the hymn was what kept the mountain there. There was an eagle and a whale – and they were the same size, and they were fighting each other – and becoming each other. And there was a moon, made of a ruby, and it was trying to pull me away. And the eagle’s mouth ha
d teeth in it and so did the whale’s – and they were singing to me, a different hymn – and I didn’t know if I was happy or afraid. I asked the eagle to hide me from my father, but he became the whale and ate me.’
Suddenly, he prodded the gun into my stab wound and an ice-cube slipped into my windpipe.
‘Your marks should be mine,’ he whispered, digging the gun into the wound until its stitches split. ‘I made you, only I can mark you.’
The ice-cube spiked in my throat, stopping any reply. I was eluding myself into pain, sliding away from my head into ice. Here were no poppies, no bricks, no sand – there were only numbers, impossible numbers.
The ice left me, too, until I was alone on the edge of a black rip where gravity meant something else. There was no distinction between time and space here – they were the same finite borderless surface – like the surface of the earth, but the surface of the universe, with no beginning or end. I was where real time was a fantasy, and imaginary time was real. I fell.
He slapped me awake. I vomited.
‘May I please have some water?’ I asked as a joke.
‘Drink this.’ He thrust two fingers into my mouth – and my tongue tasted latex and semen.
I vomited again.
‘You seem tired, my dear. Your body is weary, but your spirit cannot be weary. Your true labour is not yet begun.’
He pushed me off the chair onto the floor, on my back, my face towards the window. Clouds obscured the hour, but it seemed high night outside – as though I’d been asleep in ice for hours. My body barely worked. I felt like a tongue attached to a throb.
And my tongue wanted to babble, break character and mock him. ‘You’d like the poetry of William Blake,’ I said. ‘He invented his own metaphysical friends.’
‘You can’t mock me,’ he said. ‘You can only prove yourself to me.’
He sat in the chair with his feet on my stomach, and took the pipe out of his pocket. From its heated bowl, he sucked more ropes of smoke, until his jaw stiffened with serotonin.
‘You can’t mock war. And this is war.’ He looked over to Francis, huddled against the bedpost, his head between his knees. ‘Don’t avert your eyes,’ he told him. ‘War happens to bodies one by one. And we are bodies, happening to each other, one by one. War is a test of fertility. And through it, we are made men.’
He placed his pipe on the table. From his pocket, he removed a plastic syringe. He held its tip to his dick and carefully drew up his semen into the barrel. Carefully he squirted this out into the bowl of his pipe – to dissolve the meth residue there in his semen – and then carefully sucked this mixture back up into the syringe.
‘You have been cleansed, and now you can receive me.’
He kicked my un-cuffed arm away from my stomach and squatted over my thighs. I gazed away at the window, trying to think of a poem by William Blake – but could only remember Satan’s most obvious lines in Paradise Lost, which I whispered to myself, failing to smile with irony.
‘“Which way I fly is hell; myself am hell;
And in the lowest deep a lower deep,
Still threat’ning to devour me, opens wide,
To which the hell I suffer seems a heaven.”’
Kimber wasn’t listening. He lifted my flaccid penis between thumb and forefinger, unhooded it, and forced the blunt syringe into the hole in its head.
‘You shall feel eternity,’ he promised, pushing down the plunger.
The meth in his semen scalded the tender tissue of my urethra into swelling – and as it heated, it spread to my blood. Its chemistry countermanded the opiates of my afternoon – and soon all my muscles convulsed with amphetamine instead. Still holding the syringe in place, Kimber reached past me, fumbling on the dead constable’s belt for the key to my handcuffs – and unlocked me.
‘I was sent a son,’ he said. ‘And for years I was his father. But he disobeyed me. He did not become a man. I have been sent other sons since, I have chosen other wars.’
Delight seared along my legs as Kimber lifted me up, my arms heavy, my lower body lightening. A reel of white tape spun up my spine. Spots of green light dappled the air – ladybirds hatched in my hair. He pushed me backwards onto the bed – into Francis. And I was amazed Francis was still here – I’d forgotten him, and now regained him in delight. Kimber came to the other side and fastened my handcuff to Francis’ wrist.
My limbs were exhilarated. Francis hugged me, but his clothes were too warm to my nakedness – and as my head lolled in waves of pleasure, my tongue licked out for his ear. He flinched and clenched me into himself tighter, until the scent of his washing powder and coconut oil filled my mouth in multicolour and I smelt orange zest and walnuts. I wrested away from him, to allow cooler air across my skin. His fingers had the taste of pepper – and the small hairs on his neck reminded me of a song we’d heard together on a motorway months ago, in his dad’s car, whose chorus was ‘lose it all, lose it all, lose it all’. His body was more than a comfort – it was superimposed with hundreds of memories that I was inside all at once, merging with a thousand sense impressions – like the smell of a new basketball and the sound of it being inflated and the hardness of its pressure, which had the hardness of Francis’ thigh. My hands patted him down, forgetting where or when I was. He was all I could comprehend, an excess of stimuli and desire.
Kimber had moved the tripod alongside the bed and turned the camera’s recording light to red.
‘The second son must overcome the first,’ he said, cutting up his own words with the speed of his sibilance. ‘This is how you prove yourself. Your brother is not an angel, but I shall grant him eternity, if he accepts your authority. This ritual shall bond us in eternity.’
‘What do I do?’ Francis asked me.
But I had nothing to say. Unlike heroin, meth had no interiority – I had no sense of my mind or of his. I was only body, and he was only body. I marvelled at the texture of his face.
Kimber heated his pipe again and breathed in in anger, his hand trembling towards his gun.
‘Do you wish to live forever?’ he asked, aiming the gun at Francis’ groin. ‘Take it off. Take it all off.’
He ripped Francis’ tracksuit off over his trainers and twisted him onto his front. From Dawn’s suitcase he snatched up a white nightgown pattered with forget-me-nots – dislodging a bottle, spilling red wine – and tore off its sleeve.
‘Dress in this,’ he said. ‘You are the groom now – these are your wedding-robes.’
I fidgeted into Dawn’s nightgown, stained with wine and the constable’s blood, and soon stained with my own. My gaze buzzed at the stimulant’s urge, exciting my body into a carnivorous frenzy.
‘Begin!’ Kimber said, retreating behind the camera to watch our scene on screen, reheating his pipe in rapid inhalations.
‘Just do it,’ Francis said, sinking his face into the pillow.
I had lost the ability to interpret his tone. I couldn’t tell how defeated or afraid he was, or what he felt about me. The meth had inverted heroin’s introspection; I was outside myself now, and not a point but a field – like a magnetic net across a void – except not a void, and not detached, but here – overly here, twice-here, here here here.
‘Just do it,’ he repeated, thinking I had hesitated – but I was flexing for the camera.
I fucked him and hurt him gladly.
‘This is it!’ shouted Kimber, his mouth over-spilling meth smoke as he sucked from his pipe, masturbating, his gaze fixed to the screen. ‘I see your final form, Leander. This is it. You committed a crime behind the mountain. Your father took you behind the mountain. And you killed him. I see it. I wanted to do it too, but my father was too strong. You’re stronger – and stronger even than your brother, despite his body’s strength. I see the swirl of two skins. You restored night! But I shall save you. And I shall marry you!’
Kimber’s speech had quickened and split. But as he fragmented, I was acclimatising to the blitz in my head. I gli
mpsed a thread within me – that could be pulled towards a single thought – enough to regain some control. So, at the peak of Kimber’s cry, I took a chance: I pulled out of Francis, as he bit into his mother’s pillow – and erect, I turned to confront the camera, beckoning for Kimber to approach.
‘I will be father now,’ I said. ‘And you must come to me.’
Kimber hesitated, but his smile couldn’t twitch, his thoughts multiplied too fast into hyperactivity. His visions had been obsessed with the authority of the father – maybe even a father who had violated him as a child – and now that he was at his weakest, perhaps this obsession could be used against him.
‘Come to me,’ I said.
He opened his mouth as if to speak – but was unable to. Fear passed through has face. He did not move. I held his gaze.
‘Come to me,’ I repeated. ‘And kneel.’
He approached, unsure, turning his head rapidly back to his camera and his gun, but his legs obeyed the amphetamine’s logic – and soon he stood before me, shaking close to overdose, his eyes flittering, avoiding mine.
‘Kneel to confess,’ I said.
Kimber knelt, itching his neck.
‘Forgive me,’ he sobbed.
‘Who is your father?’ I asked him.
‘You are,’ he sobbed, ‘You are.’
‘You call me sir.’
‘You are, sir.’
His psychosis hade made him as susceptible to suggestion as a man under hypnosis – and as willing to play out subconscious anxieties. He accepted a subordinate role with no resistance, as if he’d been practicing this in his dreams for years – and so now he was just like any of my other clients – and I knew what tone of voice to use, and what concessions to demand.
‘And you know what I want,’ I said.
‘I do.’
‘You call me sir,’ I said again.
‘I do, sir,’ he sobbed.
I stepped down from the bed and snapped my fingers.
‘Confess. Your son was not a man. You failed him.’
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