Are You Loathsome Tonight?

by Poppy Z. Brite

  Each Sunday Billy was forced to sit through the slow torture of a Baptist sermon, enjoying only the lurid image of Jesus nailed to the cross, filthy iron spikes raping his hands and feet, acid-green thorns piercing the smooth flesh of his brow, raw infected gash weeping in his side. He died for your sins, thundered the preacher. He suffered for you. And Jesus’ pain was all the sweeter once Billy knew he was responsible for it.

  He heard the Luger whispering to him as he wandered through the long afternoons, through the resentful house, always avoiding the parlor where Granddad had fallen into his last long sleep, where Grammaw now sat drowsing away the hours until her own. The gun told him stories of his own strength, strength he didn't know he had, strength that would be so very easy to discover if only he would climb to the top of the closet, open the shining walnut case, wrap his hand around that heavy checkered grip...

  It took him nearly three years. He had always tried to be a good boy, to push down the anger he had felt rising in him for as long as he could remember, churning like some toxic black wave. But at last the wave crashed and foamed on the shore of his heart, and he saw that it was not black after all, not entirely. It swirled with a thousand oily tendrils of color, iridescent and lovely, and if those tendrils were poisonous ... well, then, he would learn to live on poison.

  The day Billy finally made himself lift the gun from its nest of soft red cloth and cradle its amazing heft in both hands was the day he had his first orgasm. He couldn't remember if he had actually produced a squirt of jism; it seemed he'd been too young. But he never forgot the pleasure pounding though him like a summer storm, implacable and cleansing. It was so powerful he thought he would drop the Luger, wondered whether it was loaded, whether it would go off and shoot him, then realized he didn't care.

  But he didn't drop the gun. He knew it belonged to him now, just like Granddad had told him.

  ***

  Learning to shoot was more difficult than he had expected. He'd tried it alone at first, as he did everything, skulking into the woods to aim shots at tree trunks that seemed to sway mockingly when he sighted on them. The trigger wouldn't budge at first, and Billy wondered whether it could be rusted; then all at once it clicked back with a dangerous ease, and the muzzle flashed and the sound of the shot filled the world.

  All his shots went wide, and the Luger's recoil left his hand sore. He masturbated with that hand, remembering the little blurt of fire and the smell of cordite, the huge hollow noise, the power pounding back up his arm and shoulder, sending electric tendrils into his heart.

  But firing wild shots in nighttime woods and vacant lots soon grew dissatisfying. Billy wanted to use the gun right, to aim it and hit what he meant to hit, without crippling his arm for the next day and a half. As soon as he was old enough to go without a parent, he signed up for lessons at a firing range. There he learned how to brace his arm, how to squeeze the trigger slow and gentle. He learned to hit a man-shaped target in the head, the heart, the guts. The instructors praised the cherry condition of the Luger. One offered him two hundred dollars for it, then laughed at the stricken look on Billy's face. When anyone asked why he was learning to shoot, he replied For pleasure.

  He began to let himself think about the things he really wanted to do.

  ***

  The ad in B&D Connection promised a “true submissive,” an adventurer with no limits. Billy called the number, got an answering machine with no message but silence and a beep, and left his own message nearly as cryptic. When she returned his call, her voice was low and husky, utterly devoid of accent. They talked business. Later that same day he bought a train ticket to the city where she lived.

  Not until he was actually on the train, inside the train, like a bullet nestled snugly in the chamber of a long-barrelled gun, did he realize how scared he was. What if the hooker knew he was a virgin and laughed at him? What if she was ugly? What if he simply couldn't bring himself to do what he had come for, what he had dreamed of?

  As soon as he met the girl in her cheap hotel room, his first two fears were put to rest. She was far too passive to laugh at anyone. And she was beautiful in the manner of a well-carved mask or a porcelain doll, her skin matte-smooth, her features faintly Asian, almond eyes ringed with black liner, lips smudged deep red. Beneath the black spandex skirt, her ass was as round and sweet as a pair of ripe mangoes. Her face bore no visible scars, no indelible pain, no emotion at all. She held her tall, slender, almost angular body rather stiffly, as if half-sensing some pain ready to flare at any moment from deep inside. But her spine was straight, her shoulders unbowed. The submissiveness was all in her bruise-colored eyes, her mouth lush as an open wound.

  And he had not even had to say what he wanted, not in so many words. The girl was already nodding, urging him on. She regarded the gun with an odd serenity.

  “It's not loaded,” he lied. Exploding shells were illegal but ridiculously easy to obtain. The first time he got some, he'd balanced a watermelon on a pile of bricks and blown it apart in a satisfying spray of red and black and green. After that he got a hard-on just holding one of those shells in his hand, warming it in his palm, imagining how it could make flesh rupture and explode.

  His eyes cut away from hers, dry and burning. Twin heartbeats pounded in his throat and the head of his penis.

  “Fine,” she said.

  His fingers felt chilled and clumsy as he groped for his wallet. Holding it beneath her line of sight, he opened it and extracted ten crisp twenty-dollar bills. It was nearly the last of the money from the sale of Grammaw's house in Georgia. After this he would have to get a job, or starve, or ... well, after this, what did anything matter?

  A small sepia photograph of his grandfather stared up at him, broad-shouldered and smiling in his Army uniform, three years younger than Billy was now. There was the Luger at his hip, sheathed in hard leather. Billy closed the wallet on the only person he had ever loved. He pressed the bills into the girl's narrow, bony hand.

  “Okay,” he said, his voice hardly shaking at all. “Here's what I want you to do."

  ***

  Now he was standing just outside the door of the room, in the dingy fifth-floor hallway of a flophouse in a city whose name he had already forgotten. They were all the same to him, cities; the downtown business districts of smooth gray stone and blind silvered glass, the slums and suburbs forming like ulcers around a larger wound. That was what cities were, the wounds of the world. Billy supposed that made him and the girl in the room maggots, burrowing into the world's decayed flesh for sustenance.

  He dipped into his flight bag, tugged a rough wool ski mask over his head. He wore a pair of grimy black jeans, but had taken his shirt off and stuffed it in the bag. The night air coming through the cracks and seams of the ramshackle building made his skin ripple with goose bumps, his nipples shiver erect.

  There was a mirror in the corridor, its glass cracked and smeared with sticky fingerprints. Billy's reflection was only a dim black oval, unrecognizable and sinister. For the first time in his life he looked dangerous—now that his face was covered, his soft, weak, almost pretty face. Every time he looked in a mirror he hated his mother all over again, cursed her for the bowed Cupid's lips and stupid round blue eyes, for the wispy shock of hair that fell across his forehead like spun copper.

  Billy pressed his ear against the door just below the metal numbers that hung nailed to its surface, slightly askew. He thought he could detect movement inside the room, faint and slow and silken.

  He took the Luger from his bag and stood in the hallway cradling it for a few minutes, loving its weight and heft, cold metal sheathed in overheating flesh. If anyone had come out of their room during that moment, he would have bolted and lost his money. But no one came out. It was just after eight, dinnertime, and apparently this was a residence hotel: the sad smells of poverty cuisine seeped into the hall, frying meat and Wonder Bread, the sickly-cheese aroma of canned spaghetti.

  He pressed the barrel to the slow
steady throb in the crotch of his jeans, and his skinny body shook with a rush of heat nearly nauseating in its intensity. He was a criminal stalking the night, incapable of mercy, bristling with murderous intent. He was a soldier, grimy and desperate, under attack from an enemy more insidious than any his grandfather had known.

  Billy twisted the knob. It slid through his sweaty fingers, unlocked. He pushed the door open.

  The girl was sitting at the mirror, her reflection indistinct in cloudy glass, brushing the long midnight spill of her hair. The brush slipped from her fingers, thudded on the worn carpet. The bruise-colored eyes went wide.

  “Who are you?” Her trembling hand clutched at the front of the filmy white nightgown she'd changed into. Beneath that, a lace bra cupped smallish tender breasts, nipples stiff with terror or arcane desire. She was playing along beautifully. “How did you get in here?"

  Billy showed her the gun and watched her cringe. Her face went pale and the irises of her eyes showed a panicky rim of white. God, she was good.

  “Shut up, whore.” He spat the words in the cruelest tone he could muster. Tears darkened those eyes like a summer storm rolling in. Billy almost expected them to stain her cheeks inky purple as they spilled over, but no, they were clear as rain. With the Luger's barrel he gestured at the gown. “Take that off."

  “Please,” she whispered.

  "Shut up!" Billy lunged at her, grabbed double handfuls of fabric and tried to rip the gown off her. The flimsy weave resisted him. Enraged, he rent it with his teeth, filled his mouth with the bland dry flavor of nylon. The gown fell away. Billy's lips brushed lace, skin. His nostrils caught the lemony tang of sweat. Maybe she really was afraid of him.

  If she wasn't, she would be.

  He pressed the barrel hard against the girl's breastbone, just above the visible flutter of her heart. When she flinched away, he saw a thin red circle already pressed into the flesh. The ghost of a bullet wound. He thought his penis would soon burst the confines of hot denim.

  “Take off your bra."

  “Please,” she said again, barely audible.

  He jammed the gun into her face, into her soft mouth. The barrel smeared her lips across her teeth, and blood blossomed, spilled, ran in thin bright streaks down her chest. Her eyes were huge, gone from bruise to an impossible purple-black, the color of rotting flesh.

  “I said, shut up!"

  Her hands spidered to the frontal clasp of her bra. When he nudged her again with the gun's barrel, she undid the clasp and let the scrap of lace and elastic slide off her shoulders.

  The girl had no breasts.

  With the gun still pointed at her heart, Billy bent to retrieve the bra, stared into the gossamer cups. Flesh-colored padding, with hard little dots of pink rubber like pencil erasers where the nipples should be. Mastectomy? But there were her real nipples, small and chocolate-brown on the flat unscarred chest. They didn't sew the nipples back on after a mastectomy. Did they?

  He yanked down her panties, heard lace rip and elastic give way. There: glossy black delta of hair at the juncture of matte-pale thighs, unadorned, unencumbered. Between those thighs he would find no threat, only fleshy frills and folds opening on an absence of flesh, on a hole, on nothingness. Right? Right?

  He pushed her back on the lumpy mattress and forced her legs apart. He stared and stared; he could not stop staring.

  The soft flesh was dimpled where testicles had been pushed up into the groin. A rubbery penis stretched taut as chewed gum, wedged all the way back into the crack of the ass. No, not wedged. Billy saw the gleam of metal and bent to look closer.

  The head of the penis was pierced with a silver ring that entered through the urethra and exited through the little wrinkle of skin at the base of the glans. This was linked with a large safety pin sunk deep into a thick fold of the perineum. The piercings had a dry, elastic look: they'd been there for a while, though the boy looked no older than nineteen or twenty.

  His eyes were still purple with fear, though, submissive as before. As he tugged the lush synthetic spill of hair off his head, Billy saw his graceful hand trembling. His real hair was cropped close to the skull, bleached an incongruous white-blond; the contrast made his skin seem a shade darker. His left ear was pierced with a number of progressively smaller silver hoops spiraling up the rim of cartilage and into the whorls of the ear, his right spiked with a single ruby through the lobe, vivid as a drop of gore.

  “Are you mad?” asked the boy. There was no trace of mockery in his voice, only the same soft monotone as before.

  Billy was utterly bewildered now. The ski mask had grown hot, prickly, the coarse wool damp at his lips and nostrils. He pulled it over his head, felt static electricity frizz through his hair, rubbed his chin and scowled. The criminal in him was stealing away, absconding with the jewels of pain and forced terror. The boy's slender legs were still drawn up and splayed, and Billy couldn't help noticing that his ass was still as round and sweet as a pair of ripe mangoes.

  “Punish me then,” said the boy.

  Billy blew out a long pent-up breath. The room, the building, the entire world seemed to have suddenly gone inverse. The gun dangled all but forgotten at his side, his hand still curled loosely around the grip but no good strength to it, no raw singing power.

  “What's your name?” he said at last, stupidly, almost shyly. He realized he had not thought to ask before.

  “Jesus."

  Hispanic, then, maybe; not Asian. But the boy pronounced the name as they had done at the Baptist church Billy's grandmother had dragged him to, in the sermons he'd hated except when the preacher detailed the agony of the wounded man on the cross, as it had been intoned over Granddad's coffin in the parlor that day. Not Hay-SEUSS but JEE-zus.

  Billy pictured a sacred heart pierced with thorns, limned in scarlet flame, dripping lurid blood. No Baptist icon this, but Roman Catholic by way of a Georgia tattoo parlor. He imagined jamming the Luger's barrel up against it and blowing it into a million chunks of useless twitching muscle. He thought again of that figure on the cross, pale and thin and pierced: a true submissive, a submissive for all humanity. He remembered a line of graffiti he'd seen scrawled in the men's room at Port Authority once: Sure Jesus loves you, but will he swallow?

  He realized he had not lost his hard-on.

  “Okay,” he said, a little cautious but still eager. It wasn't as if he'd ever been with anyone at all; he didn't know what he liked. Maybe it could still be good. Boy, girl, what did it matter? Inside the fragile envelope of skin, they were much the same. Jesus’ body was a mirror image of Billy's own; bleach the raven tuft of his pubic hair, yank the genital hardware, and from the neck down they would be twins.

  He slid the gun's barrel under the flaccid shaft and pulled up. Jesus moaned, shifted his bony hips on the mattress. Billy wanted it to hurt, and it looked as if it did, but the ring popped open just before flesh tore. Jesus’ penis sprang free, already beginning to harden.

  Take, eat; this is my body.

  Billy realized the torn lace panties were still dangling from his left hand. He crumpled them into a silky ball and dabbed at the blood on Jesus’ mouth. The fabric began to stain deep red. Jesus’ lips felt slick and tender against his fingers, and those Oriental eyes glittered with—what? Desire, fear, pain? Or some exotic blend of all three, some new emotion brewed just for Billy?

  He knelt at the foot of the bed, pressed his lips against the velvet concavity of the boy's stomach. “Don't move,” he murmured. “Be still. Be quiet. Be cold..."

  His tongue flicked into the cup of the navel, around the curve of a hipbone. The gun moved lower, nudging Jesus’ thighs apart, kissing the dark sweet cleft of his buttocks.

  “ ... wait..."

  Billy's head jerked up. His hand flashed out and smacked the boy's face hard enough to make his palm sting. "Don't talk!"

  Helplessly, Jesus gestured at the nightstand by the bed. Billy saw a large jar of Vaseline half-hidden in drifts of tattered Kle
enex.

  “Oh...” He blinked, sheepish. “Okay.” He grabbed the Vaseline, popped the top off and stuck the Luger's barrel deep into the opaque snot-colored whorls of petroleum jelly. It came up glistening with grease, its notched sight nearly hidden in a thick coat of the stuff, the tip of its bore clogged. None of this mattered.

  He eased the barrel back between the cheeks of Jesus’ ass and found the tender hole, hesitated only for an instant, and sank six inches of greased steel deep into the boy. Jesus’ eyes went wide. He sucked in a harsh breath, then let out a long shaky one; his penis gave a little jump and wept a single crystal tear.

  As Billy struggled to free his own hard-on from the tangle of jeans and underwear, then kick his legs free of confining fabric, he felt the rest of his life peeling away. There had never been anything but this, no stuffy parlor where his grandfather slept in a long wooden box, no pretty mother who disappeared forever into the Summer of Love, no brittle bleached skull shipped home in a cardboard box, no withered years or husked dreams. There was only the giddy throb of his cock in his hand, only this boy's willing pain that flowed over him and into him, burning like napalm.

  Billy felt orgasm stalking him, moving fast and close, then drawing away again. It had eluded him this way on so many lonely nights when his own hand was not warm enough, was not slick enough, was too obviously his own unsundered flesh. But all at once Jesus was tugging him up on the bed, nearly making him lose his sweaty grip on the gun. All at once Jesus was wrapping skinny arms around Billy's hips, sliding a mouth hot as an open wound around Billy's cock.

  It was the nicest thing anyone had ever done for him. It was a feeling he wanted to last a thousand years, to last forever. It eclipsed his feeling of moments ago. This was all there was. This was all there had ever been. He and Jesus, their wet flesh melting into one another, the linkage of their bodies by orifice and cold metal, the mingled smells of sweat and Vaseline. The mattress beneath them was insubstantial, a cradling hand of mist; the tawdry hotel room shimmered and began to dissolve at the corners of Billy's eyes. He was dimly aware of Jesus thrusting his hips against the Luger, letting the barrel slide in and out of his ass.