Left Hand

by Paul Curran

  * * *

  Paul stumbled around the motel room. He pulled the drawer out of the bedside cabinet and then pushed the whole thing over. The lamp survived the plunge but not being kicked against the wall. After spotting Lucy’s bag under the bed, Paul rummaged through it and found some scrunched up pages and a box of pills. He sat on the bed and washed down the pills with some beer. He pointed the remote at the TV and stroked his cock while flipping channels. A music show with kids in a dance competition caught his imagination. The kids were wearing tight pastel-colored sports clothes. They were thin and tanned and had teeth resembling dead coral. The song was a hypnotic ode to teenage love. Paul stuck two fingers in his ass and smeared them across the TV screen.

  Lying misshapen in the dust at the bottom of the wardrobe was a wire coat-hanger. Paul untwisted the coat hanger and then turned the loose wire into the outline of a hollow cock. He fleshed out the design with the scrunched up pages from Lucy’s bag. He fucked himself with the coat hanger until the pages disappeared inside of him. When he noticed shit and blood all over the bed sheets, Paul turned off the TV and masturbated to the sound of Robert and Lucy in the shower. Paul pissed in an empty beer bottle and tried to put his jeans back on but fell over and hit his head on a chair. He curled up on the bed and smoked some cigarettes and burnt some holes in his arms. He imagined the holes were escape routes. Portals to a different dimension.

  * * *

  As the tide came up, and the rocks sticking out of the sand got closer together, Paul’s steps became faster. He kept walking with his head down hoping the sun would soon become low enough for him to look up and notice something other than that fireball. He concentrated on the way his shadow slid across the sand and buckled over the rocks. Eventually there were more rocks than there was sand, as if the sand was congealing, and it was only when he stumbled, and looked up again, that he figured out the sun was falling and he was able to see in the distance an outcrop jutting sharply into the ocean. On top of the outcrop was a concrete construction that shimmered in the heat.

  * * *

  All along the shore there were scattered pieces of jellyfish and some other kind of dead sea-creatures that Paul had never seen before. The skin beneath the spikes on the sea creatures looked made to pop. Paul found a pine needle and stuck it into one of them. A milky juice spurted out and stung him in the eye. He wiped the juice off his cheek and tasted it. An initially sweet sensation on his tongue turned into a bitter tingle at the back of his throat that suggested the necessity for further investigation. Paul held the creature to his lips and sucked out all of the juice. Then he sat on the beach and looked at his hands. They expanded and contracted before settling into what seemed to be their ideal form. The same thing happened with his legs. He felt as if all aspects of his body were integrated. He left a trail of dead sea-creatures pinned along the sand.

  When Paul saw a huge lump of rotten flesh washed up further along the coast, he walked quickly towards it unsure if it was a shark or a whale or something even bigger. He had never seen anything so big but he didn’t think he was just hallucinating. The creature’s enormous bones protruded curving from what looked like massive bite marks along its side. A group of boys walked around, in and out of the chest cavity, sniffing and rubbing up against it. They had peeled off most of the gray and blue skin. They had shoveled out the organs and left them drying in the sun. Paul asked a boy who was pissing in the sand what had happened to the creature but the boy didn’t speak. The boy finished pissing and then briefly looked up at Paul before disappearing back inside.

  Paul thought the other lumps of flesh he saw in the distance were the same kind of creature as the previous one, just smaller, shrinking back to normal size. But when he got closer he realized he was looking at piles of human bodies. They were bleached white and bloated and they littered the coast as far as he could see. Most of them had been amputated. Many of them were headless.

  Wild dogs and birds searched for pieces of the bodies to eat. The sun charred their skin. Flies laid eggs that turned into maggots and then into other flies that laid other eggs that turned into other maggots, an eternal cycle of nothingness. The wind partially covered the corpses with sand. It was almost impossible to tell them apart. Paul had sat on a rock and was watching over the corpses. He wasn’t sure why he felt responsible for their posthumous well-being. He didn’t think he would ever find Robert and Lucy in this mess. Some boys rode down to the beach on bicycles at night. They smoked marijuana and drank beer. They lit fires and listened to music. They took off their clothes and went swimming. They took turns fucking the corpses in any hole they could find.

  * * *

  After screwing his knuckles into his eyes for several minutes, Paul searched the dark kaleidoscope of images spinning out of control somewhere perhaps inside his brain. He tried to select and hold onto some of the images that seemed to correspond with a consistent narrative thread but they floated away as quickly as they appeared. He decided he was sitting hunched with his elbows on his knees on a foldout bed in a sickroom at school. His mouth was open and letting saliva drip onto the floor. Bubbles formed and then popped. Paul imagined he could hear the popping but couldn’t really hear much except the noise from a row of washing machines churning in the laundry down the hall and some kind of laughter probably coming from his throat. There was no one else around. His spine and tailbone ached. His stomach felt like a scrunched up piece of paper an over-ambitious student had torn from a notebook and thrown into the bin.

  “Your turn.” A teacher had opened the door and was shouting. When Paul looked up and made eye contact with the teacher she handed him some pills and a paper cup of water. “You better have remembered your lines.”

  “I didn’t know there were any.”

  “Is that meant to be a joke?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  A different teacher had arrived. He stood there looking and grinning at Paul and the other teacher as if knowing something they didn’t. “Hurry up. Everyone’s waiting. Now, wipe your mouth and put your cock back in your pants, you disgusting little faggot. We would tie your wrists behind your back, but of course you’d love fingering your ass all the way to hell. Boy, when they get through with you today you’re going to wish you never heard of this place.”

  Both teachers stood in the doorway looking at scripts and saying things Paul couldn’t hear. They walked over to the bed and told Paul to get up. He spat at them before curling into a fetal position. He offered only laughter as they lifted him onto his feet and dragged him down the hall. The kids in the laundry watched the teachers carrying Paul up some stairs that looked temporary.

  * * *

  A sewerage pipe covered in rust, fungus, and barnacles was dribbling out soggy wads of paper and mashed up computer peripherals along with the usual waste. Computer screens and televisions floated in the sea. Paul peeled down his jeans and stepped out of them. He kicked his jeans into an inky pool. He looked up at the sun and rubbed his cunt. He straddled the sewerage pipe and rubbed his cunt. He reached for a bottle and pressed its neck against his cunt. He lay back with his feet in the pool. He pushed the bottleneck into his cunt and fucked himself with it as hard as he possibly could. His eyes were closed and he was concentrating on where the bottle was going and what it was going to find inside of him. He didn’t know what he was looking for. He just felt something should be there. Blood ran down his legs. Tears ran down his face. He rolled off the sewerage pipe and squatted in the pool. When his stomach contracted he took a deep breath, clenched his teeth, and drummed his head on the sewerage pipe. He imagined the sound echoing back to the processing plant and up through the toilets at the mine.

  * * *

  Robert slowed down and pulled over where the road crumbled into potholes and weed-infested sand. The car behind swerved around the van before accelerating even more and drifting into the murky heat haze that made up the distance. The road ahead seemed to melt everything into its own lethargic vortex. Lucy slid a
cross the seat and got behind the wheel. She grinded the gearstick and jerked the van forward. Robert showed her something about driving he said was easier not to explain. She glanced in the rear-view mirror at the lump curled up under a spiral-pattern blanket on the back seat.

  “Forget about him,” said Robert, turning up the radio. It was a hits and memories channel. Some grunge ballad whose chorus they both tried to sing.

  “I want you to fuck me lying next to him on the beach.” Lucy slipped one hand down Robert’s jeans. “And then send him off.”

  “Whatever makes you hot.”

  “Do you think that’s weird?”

  “The little creep probably planned it that way.”

  “Are you jealous?”

  “You’re definitely weird.”

  * * *

  Most of the rocks going up the outcrop were covered with barnacles that dug into Paul’s mangled feet. The seaweed on some was moist and soothing but it made him slip. He alternated his steps between the safety of pain and the uncertainty of comfort. He rested for a while and looked up at where he was going and then down at where he had come from. He could make out a fuzzy image of the van sitting on the road. The van was small enough to fit between his fingers like a toy. He imagined picking it up and strapping in figurines of Robert and Lucy, and then flicking them on their way in the same direction they were meant to be going. He wondered if he did that would a toy truck suddenly appear. He watched the hole where the door had been ripped off the van. He pictured some kind of life force seeping out from that empty space. He stood up and obeyed the voices that told him to keep moving. The seaweed covering the rocks soon dried out and then disappeared. By the time Paul got to the top of the outcrop, he was running because the rocks were so hot and the sun was so bright that he needed to feel some shade.

  * * *

  A trail curved through broken glass and abandoned drug paraphernalia, juice bottles, hosepipes, and aerosol cans. The smell of urine and dead animals punctuated the smell of concrete and extinguished fires. Paul crouched in the corner of the bunker on top of the hill. He rummaged through some shopping bags full of used condoms, needles, and medical swabs. He flipped through some magazines and Polaroids showing amputated boys and girls being fucked and tortured. The sun eventually shifted its angle to reveal graffiti splashed across the concrete. Scrawled messages said to meet Paul here for the roughest fuck in town. Call this number anytime. There were recommendations, testimonials, criticisms, and counter-criticisms. Ridiculously over-sized stick-figure cocks fucked holes dug through castrated bodies and spurted wads of come. Next to the gun slit in the wall was a coin-operated pair of binoculars attached to a rusty stand that oscillated from the ocean to the beach.

  * * *

  At night the road was quiet, streetlights fading, palm leaves, the moon, until two cars came racing out of that emptiness. They swerved, skidding around the van, before stopping. The cars idled alongside each other while the men squashed inside shouted over the music. It was two similar heavy metal tracks slightly out of sync. The men eventually swapped cigarettes and beer cans. Then one of the cars turned around and drove back to town. The other car’s engine went off but its headlights stayed on.

  A few men got out from the front of the car. They walked to the van and looked inside. They talked to each other for a while. They called to the men in the back of the car. Those men wrestled with each other, falling down, to be the first there. They watched as one of the other men leaned through the van’s broken windscreen. Another man helped when he was asked to help. They dragged a dummy out of the van. Its head was almost hanging off and its face was crushed. All the men gathered around the dummy and talked and drank and smoked.

  The other car came back. The driver was carrying an old video camera that was gray and heavy. He parked and then twisted around to film Robert and Lucy getting out of the car. They acted like they were being interviewed on local TV news and should be treated like stars. All the other men gathered around the van and lifted it up the right way. It took them a few tries to do it. The cameraman eventually put down the camera to help. Another dummy fell onto the road. This dummy was a pile of twisted limbs. The men grabbed both dummies and dragged or carried them down to the beach.

  * * *

  “Are you going to fuck the dog girl in the cunt or in the ass or in the mouth?” a boy said to Paul after they had shot-up some heroin. They were lying on mattresses in the kitchen of the largest building in the compound.

  “I bet he goes for the mouth,” said another boy, possibly older than the others, although this may have just been an impression because he was not taking drugs or having sex. He was leaning against an old gas oven that had been ripped apart and stuffed with firewood. He was stirring clumps of paper with a wooden spoon into a big pot. “Maybe we should make her a new hole.”

  The dog girl’s cage had been dragged into the middle of the kitchen. The walls of the place were so thin they might have been transparent without the paint. Every movement formed a shadow. Two boys were standing over the cage and masturbating. Their cocks were raw and spiky. They were gritting their teeth, panting angrily, and trying to shoulder-barge each other off balance. They occasionally stepped on other boys’ ankles and knocked over their drinks. One of the boys whose drink got knocked over asked Paul to pass him a knife from the table. When the first boy was about to come, slapping his cock against the cage and the dog girl’s shoulder, the boy with the knife got up and hacked off some of that boy’s cock.

  The cut boy collapsed in a ball on a mattress. His blood sprayed further than his come across the floor. Everyone watching laughed. Except Paul. The boy at the oven looked around to see what had happened, and then he scooped up the piece of flesh and dropped it into the pot. He banged his spoon on the oven before grinding in some more paper. Realizing how popular he had become, the cut boy was also laughing now. The other masturbating boy didn’t appreciate the way this game was turning out. He grabbed the knife and hacked off some of his own cock. He added it to the stew.

  “Are you going to join us?” someone grinning wildly said to Paul. Most of the boys were lined up masturbating and waiting to use the knife. Some were fucking and sucking each other oblivious to what was happening. A few had passed out. The boy at the oven was stoking the fire with ripped up paper.

  “Maybe I’ll just watch for now,” said Paul.

  “Don’t you like her?” A different boy had found a key and unlocked the cage. He grabbed a clump of the dog girl’s hair and twisted her head around.

  “I think I’m too stoned to get it up.”

  “He’s saving it for the dog girl’s cunt,” said the boy at the oven. “He wants to marry her and make dog girl puppies.”

  Some boys were chanting at Paul to fuck the dog girl in the cunt. They had pulled off Paul’s jeans and were kicking him. He rolled around the floor until he found another mattress. They flicked cigarette butts at him. They lit sticks in the oven and poked him with them. Paul imagined the holes were portals to a different dimension. He willed the holes to become bigger so that he could climb into them. He was barely conscious. The boys wrote words and drew pictures on Paul’s skin. The writing and the pictures were a caricature of the kind of thing young lovers burn into trees supposedly forever.

  When the boys had got tired of tormenting Paul, they kicked and burnt the dog girl. She proved just as lethargic. Even when they stabbed her with knives she didn’t move. One of the boys suggested entering the cage to see if she was still alive. Being dead was boring. He got down on his knees and pulled her leg stumps apart. They flopped untangling. He dragged her half out of the cage and turned her onto her stomach. He spat on his fingers before working them into her ass. He put on a stupid voice, pretending he was a ventriloquist and her ass was his projection point. He got her ass to say, “I want Paul to be acquitted.” The other boys cheered. He did the same thing with her cunt. There was blood all over his chin and neck because he kept licking his fingers. He dr
ank some beer and still managed to make it look like his voice was her voice. He pushed away a boy who was sticking his cock in her mouth, and tried to complete his ventriloquist act with some kind of verdict there, but the boy who he had pushed away kicked him in the face. They swung punches. They fell over. They passed out on top of one another.

  * * *

  “He’s definitely dead or a fucking good actor.” Lucy was searching for a hairdryer. She found one by the door and plugged it in then turned it on.

  “You’re probably right.”

  “What did you say?”

  “I can’t find a pulse.”

  Robert showed Lucy the box of pills on the bedside cabinet. He threw the box towards the bin. The lid came off and spun back under the bed. He picked up the twisted coat-hanger and sniffed the edges. He prodded and whacked Paul with the coat hanger. It added marks to the smears of shit and blood spelling out something Robert couldn’t make out across Paul’s torso. Robert sat next to Paul and drank some beer. Robert poured some beer on Paul.

  “Leave him alone. He looks cute like that.” Lucy took the beer bottle off Robert and finished what was left. She opened the fridge and saw that it was empty. She knelt next to the bed and licked the beer from Paul’s thigh.

  “He’s gone.” Robert rubbed his towel between his legs then dropped it on the floor. He stroked his cock a few times before pissing on Paul’s shoulders.

  “Let me try.” Lucy took off her panties and straddled Paul’s face. She rubbed her cunt up and down against his mouth and nose.