The Cleaner

by Paul Cleave

  “I’m more than a buff, Joe. I know everything about police procedure and law. I even had a German shepherd for a few months. Named her Tracy. She’s this big dog that loved me and hated everybody else.”

  Loved? Hated? Did she handcuff the dog and kill it too? “Dogs will do that.”

  “At night I like to walk around in my house wearing the uniform, but with no underwear. I like the way the shirt feels against my skin, Joe.” She rubs her hands slightly over herself. “You have no idea how good it makes me feel.”

  Oh God. I swallow. Hard. What’s she doing to me? Now she laughs again. I mean, really laughs. She steps over me, one leg on each side, then slowly lowers herself down to straddle my waist.

  “Open your mouth.”

  “Why?”

  She puts the barrel of the gun into my eye, pushing it hard enough to make both of them water. I open my mouth. A second later the barrel of the gun is in there. It’s like sucking on a metal lollipop that can destroy the back of your skull.

  She lifts her body up, then, with her other hand, slips my erection inside her. She slides down onto it, tight at first, and painful, but only for a second. She takes me as far into her as I can get. I don’t know whether to be my usual optimistic self, afraid, or thankful, and if I’m thankful, I can’t be sure what for. I try to move my pelvis upward.

  She leans forward and whispers. “You know what else I like about the police, Joe?”

  “Ugh,” I say softly, whispering the word around the gun.

  She slowly begins rocking back and forth, moaning. I keep my eyes on the gun, and it hurts them to focus on something so close. Her finger is locked around the trigger. If she becomes too excited, she may squeeze it. Maybe she’s planning to anyway. This has to be the most surreal moment of my life. Am I really here? It seems so.

  What’s that Latin saying? Carpe diem? Seize the day? That’s what I need to do now: seize the day-or, more specifically, the moment. Why miss the enjoyment of now, if this is going to be my last moment? I’m no martyr. I’m the condemned man. Melissa is my last meal. As she rocks back and forth, I’m getting hungrier.

  “I like sneaking into their houses, Joe. I like to walk around inside, while they’re asleep with their families, and sometimes I like to take things away from their homes as mementos.”

  I do what I can to join her momentum. She speeds up. Her moaning gets louder. The gun rattles against my teeth. Her lack of a condom is both arousing and scary. For all she knows I could have syphilis. Or she could.

  Have to concentrate. Carpe diem. It’s my new motto.

  “I have a lot of books about serial killers too,” she says, keeping her eyes locked on mine. “About what they do. About what makes them tick. Tell me, Joe, do you have a dominating mother, or an aunt? Are your victims surrogates for her?”

  I shake my head. An image of my aunt flashes into my mind but just as quickly I push it aside, a memory showing up that I don’t want to think about.

  “Enjoying it so far?” she pants, looking down at me.

  The gun is restricting my freedom of speech.

  Suddenly she stops, and stands up, as if she’s suddenly become bored with me. My penis slaps against my stomach.

  “You’re a killer, Joe, and I really wanted you to be a cop. I really wanted to have sex inside your house, in your yard, in your car. I wanted you to take me every way you could imagine. Not here, though. Not in a park. And now I’m not going to fuck you at all.”

  The gun is no longer in my mouth, but I can only think of one thing to say. “Huh?”

  She screws her face up into a ball and spits on my chest.

  “You’re just a murderer, and now I’ve wasted my time.” She bends down and strokes the knife where knives shouldn’t be stroked.

  This can’t be good.

  She puts her hand around me where hands should be put, but grips me in a way I shouldn’t be gripped. She places the edge of the blade against my shaft. I feel like crying when I’m hit with the thought she might be getting ready to take a memento. I go completely still.

  “Do you know what I think we should do with rapists?” she asks.

  I shake my head. I stop when she jams the gun barrel back into my mouth. It grates against my teeth and is cold on my tongue.

  I try to ask her not to do anything, but the gun gags me.

  I instantly break into a sweat as I feel the blade run a tight circle around the base of my penis. Oh God. Oh Jesus Christ. I look up at the sky, but neither of them are coming to help me.

  I tighten my fists and pull at the handcuffs, but they won’t break, and the damn tree won’t fall over. I tilt my head up and I don’t know whether to be relieved that I can’t see what she’s doing. I want to buck my hips and start kicking at her, but at the moment it’s one hell of a bad idea.

  I try to scream, but the damn gun is pushing at the back of my throat and I want to be sick. My scream is a gurgling, gagging sound, accompanied by the sound of my teeth chattering against the barrel. The skin all over my body is shriveling away from her, and I feel so damn cold even though I’m sweating. Tears are springing from my eyes and they tickle the side of my face. The pressure on the knife becomes harder, but I can’t do anything about it. This is crazy. I’m the one who decides who lives and dies. I try to push my ass further into the ground but it won’t go.

  Images of having my penis torn away flick through my mind in split-second images like those on an old movie projector. I squeeze my eyes shut and try to get those images to move backward, bringing my penis back, having the knife taken away, the handcuffs released. I can feel a load of vomit rising from my stomach and pushing at the back of my heart. My entire body is shaking and my feet are beginning to cramp. I can’t figure out how anybody could be so cruel.

  The temperature keeps dropping and I don’t know whether I wish I was dead. The problem is I don’t want to die. I have so much to offer. I don’t want to be dead and I don’t want her to do this to me, but dying will be easier to live with than having my penis hacked from my body.

  I sob as more tears blur my vision. I try to plead with whimpering sounds, with my wet eyes, but she ignores me.

  Then suddenly she pulls the knife away.

  I blink away my tears. Tears of pain are now tears of relief. She’ll let me go and then she’ll die for this. She’ll die slowly and painfully, though I can’t even begin to consider how. I try to thank her, try to thank God, but she still has the damn gun stuffed into my mouth.

  She reaches into her handbag and pulls something out. Suddenly I realize things are about to get worse.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  I remember once, when I was a teenager, I’d been playing cricket at school. I was never good at sports, but if you didn’t play them, you got thrust into classes like basic art or sewing for faggots. Cricket wasn’t fun, but it still beat baking and knitting. One day-and this day haunts my memory-a cricket ball was thumped hard in my direction. I was unable to coordinate my hands in time so my crotch fielded the ball, saving four runs. I fell into a blubbering pile of agony and play stopped for more than twenty minutes until they could roll me onto a stretcher and carry me from the field to the jeers and laughter of my schoolmates. My testicles bruised and swelled up. Had it been a cartoon, they would have been glowing as if they had been smashed by Wile E. Coyote’s Acme hammer. I had to take four days off school, and though I couldn’t speak, I could certainly vomit. The laughter directed at me over the following months was constant. The boys were bad, but the girls were worse. They teased me constantly and called me Numb Nuts. The girls never forgot about it. Five more years of school, and they never forgot.

  I dealt with it, though. I learned that you can put up with anything. Right now, nearly twenty years later, I would give anything for that pain, because I’m sure it would be less than what I’m about to go through. Every pore in my body has a drop of sweat being pushed through it.

  In this little park in the early dawn, all time has
stopped. I can hear voices whispering to me what is about to come. Pain is the loudest; the voice of anger is a close second. Trailing those two is the voice of regret. They aren’t the only ones. There’s even the small voice telling me that this is what happens with you not living to work, and that I should have stayed at home and continued reading the files.

  Melissa’s toy is a pair of pliers, which force even more tears from my eyes as she positions them around my left testicle. The gun in my mouth means there can be no conversation, no negotiation. I beg with my eyes, but she doesn’t care. I try to sway my body left and right, up and down, but she increases the grip enough to kill that urge. It feels like she’s just strapped a block of ice onto it. I’m paralyzed, as if my spinal cord has just been severed.

  She smiles at me.

  And closes the pliers.

  A guttural scream makes it halfway up my throat and then expands, lodging itself there so I can’t breathe. Don’t want to. She’s just crushed my testicle as easily as someone crushes a grape between their thumb and finger-and, like the grape, the insides spill out. My stomach and thighs cramp up. My lungs swell and refuse to offer me air. My scream forces its way north, escaping into the air. Above me, birds are flying from trees, too damn scared to land. From my groin a throbbing heat replaces the ice-cold feeling of a moment ago, a heat that surely cannot be found in any other place than the very core of hell. It boils up through my body, radiating from the epicenter between the pair of pliers.

  I still have my erection.

  The explosion of heat uses fingers with claws to reach into my soul and tear it open. It shreds every cell in my body and sucks them dry. I can do nothing but scream and cry and curse every living soul as the claws dig deeper. I try to get away from it, try to separate myself from this entity, but it has me in its grip and won’t let go. All the pain in this crazy, motherfucking universe has bonded with me and it likes what it finds.

  I stop screaming because I’m no longer able. I can hear dogs in the distance, howling and barking and crying. My jaw locks up. My throat is sore and I feel like I’ve swallowed a soldering iron. I start to black out, but I can’t make it there, instead coming back on the waves of pain as they crash against my consciousness. My body is paralyzed except for my head, which moves side to side, the silent screaming still burning my throat and eyes.

  Then I see her. She kneels there, this devil who calls herself Melissa, this creature from Hades who has done this to me. She readjusts the pliers, not on the opposite testicle, but on the same one. Every movement she makes down there vibrates up my nerves and right into my mind. She grips it across the width and squeezes, as if trying to push it back into shape.

  I scream and scream and scream as if my life depends on it, whereas the only thing I want to do is die. I try to clear my head, try to make it go blank. This is hell and I have been brought here. Fire crawls over my lap, my skin sizzles from this heat: it’s blistering, but I can’t see any flames. Melissa pushes the gun further into my mouth. The trigger guard etches my front tooth, but I hardly feel it. I beg her silently to pull the trigger.

  She doesn’t.

  My testicle is only a fraction away from becoming two-dimensional. I can feel fluid dripping down my thighs, can almost hear it turning to steam. The aching is so intense, the pain so deep, that I can’t believe I’m still alive. Melissa is asking me something, but I can’t understand her words. All I can hear is this constant ringing, a ringing louder and deeper in my skull than that from the music at the club.

  Carpe diem.

  I still can’t breathe. My blood is cold and my body temperature high. I close my mouth, bite onto the gun, and pray for Melissa to pull the trigger.

  I orgasm.

  I’m nearly blind now. Dark shapes shift in the edges of the softening morning. The pain surely must fade, because that’s the nature of pain, but at the moment it’s defying nature. I can barely make her out standing above me, the pliers now well away from my genitals, the gun away from my mouth. I can talk, but I have nothing to say. Nothing to plead for.

  I close my eyes, hoping for death, but when I open them I only find freedom. Melissa has gone and she has taken her handcuffs with her. I’m a free man who has just been fooled by time, but I can’t move. I suck in a deep breath. My stomach is hot, my chest warm, my legs cold. I close my eyes again, and the world around me starts to fade away.

  I don’t know how much time passes before I slowly lift my head and look down my naked body. My penis and thighs are caked in dried blood. My stomach is covered in a mixture of red and white fluids-a cocktail of blood and semen. Vomit has pooled on my neck and chest, and I can feel it crusted over my face and chin. It smells putrid. I can’t even remember throwing up. I guess I’m lucky not to have choked to death-then decide I’m unlucky not to have. I gently lower my hand down to examine the damage. Something that feels like spaghetti is pushing out of something that feels like cardboard.

  Oh God, no. Please, please let this be a dream!

  My arms are stiff, the muscles tender and sore. I put them behind me and lever myself up. Pieces of sick roll down my body. I nearly black out. The pain is nothing compared with earlier and, judging from the sun, I’m guessing earlier was about three hours ago. It’s somewhere around nine o’clock, and Sunday morning means people are either still in bed having a lazy morning of bondage, or are at church. Either way, they’re being fucked over.

  There won’t be anybody coming down to the park for a while yet.

  I roll onto my side. A scream rises in my fragile throat. I fight it back, but not hard enough.

  I look for my clothes and see them about thirty feet away. As I try to crawl toward them, my testicle sways back and forth, jamming between my legs. It feels like the pliers are still clamped on. I keep thinking that if I can make it home I can survive this. I just don’t know if I can make it home.

  It takes two minutes to cover the thirty feet. I feel like I’ve just run a marathon. Sweat drips from my forehead. Blood rolls down my thighs. I shrug into my shirt. My jacket is nowhere to be seen. Same with my gun. And my knife.

  My keys are sitting on top of my jeans. Rocking as gently as I can onto my back, I try jamming my legs into the denim. Much harder than it sounds. I stop halfway during the movement to take a small time-out, during which my world grays away. My strength drains with it and the pain seems happy to come back. I have to fight to keep from passing out. I wish I had been wearing jockeys rather than boxers, because then the weight of my swinging mess would get braced. Instead it’s hanging like a rotten tomato, seeping as if infected from too much sun. I pull up a handful of wet grass and wipe my face. Two more handfuls of grass clean most of the vomit off my neck and chest.

  I glance at my wrist and am surprised to see my watch still there. It’s only eight o’clock. The last few days I’ve been running late. This morning I’m thinking it’s later than it is. Okay. Time to do this. I make my way to my knees, then onto my feet. All I have to do is get home. Not far. Just one foot in front of the other. Repeat the procedure. Ignore the pain until I collapse onto my bed. One foot forward. This is the first step. I push away from the tree.

  The plan is to walk evenly at a slow pace, and I don’t appreciate the irony as I try to step slowly but end up running forward in an attempt to maintain balance. Not only do I move fast, but my legs land heavily, jarring me and sending pulsating blasts of heat up my legs into my groin. A combination of staggering and falling takes me sixty feet before I land on my knees in a crying ball of bloody agony. I want to close my eyes and just lie here for a few more hours, but I know I can’t. Sooner or later others will arrive in the park. From beneath the benches on the fringes and from the cubbyholes in the children’s playground, glue-sniffers will be waking to the morning of another chemical-induced day. They’ll eventually find me, but they won’t help me-only help themselves to what possessions I have left.

  I get back onto my knees. Onto my feet. Start forward.

 
It’s easier this time. I hold my arms out to my sides, balancing myself as I zigzag forward. I keep my eyes focused on the edge of the park. Don’t look down. Don’t look around. Just keep walking. Just keep walking and I’ll be fine. . Twenty yards go by, thirty. Then, in a few minutes, I’ve covered a hundred yards. A few minutes after that and I’m back on my knees fighting to contain a scream. This time I win.

  I watch the sun as it crawls up into the sky. I wonder what the weather will be like today. Sunny, warm, with lots of pain scheduled for brief but strong periods over the day. And for the remaining week. Perhaps the whole Goddamn year.

  I manage to get back onto my feet. I walk slowly, with my legs spread. I cup my balls in one hand: it hurts like hell, but the walking becomes easier. I stumble a few hundred yards, pause to vomit, then stumble a few hundred more. I even pause to urinate; the sensation is painful yet simple since I just keep my dick in my pants and go. Urine drips down my legs and onto my leather shoes. It is warm, uncomfortable, and it stings.

  The journey home takes me more than an hour, by which time the front of my jeans are soaked in piss and blood. Not once do I pass out, but on several occasions the world sways and darkens. I pass a few people on the way; some see me, some don’t. Those who do stare at me and say nothing. Nobody offers to help. It’s not the kind of neighborhood where people care. I consider it a miracle just to get home still in possession of my empty wallet and watch. When I reach my building, it no longer looks like it was meshed together by a junk sculptor. Instead it looks like a palace. I wish the architect had designed an elevator for it.

  I make my way up the stairs by sitting backward and slowly lifting my ass stair by stair, taking most of the weight on my arms. I only have to make three flights, but it becomes an epic journey, like scaling the outside of the Empire State Building-only naked with my balls rasping against the walls and getting caught beneath all the window frames. I keep telling myself I’m almost there, but I know when I reach the top I’m still looking down the road of a thousand problems.