Edge Play X

by Wilson, M. Jarrett

  Compton watched as X pointed the gun towards the floor. She had never shot a gun before. It suddenly felt like she was holding a mistake. And as much as Compton could imagine no better way to die than by X’s hand, he wasn’t ready to leave the world quite yet.

  Compton said, “That’s right, X. Put the gun down. Of all the things that you are, one thing that you aren’t is a murderer.”

  “And neither are you, it appears,” she responded.

  But he was right. She didn’t have it in her. Guns appeared at the end of so many movies, books, and lives. How loud would the sound be if she shot it, X wondered. Maybe this gun wouldn’t go off, but there had been an explosion, loud and injurious, the detonation of her assumptions. But she didn’t put the gun down.

  She asked, “How did you get the other men to go along with it?”

  “What other men?” Compton inquired.

  “The man in the fake hotel room who brought in my food; the men who kidnapped me in Santa Fe.”

  Compton paused for a moment. “They were told that you were playing out a scene in a fantasy of yours.”

  He had thought of everything. She shouldn’t have been surprised, and yet, she was.

  “Tell me why I shouldn’t call the police right now, why I shouldn’t call the real authorities? It’s illegal to impersonate an officer,” she directed to Simeon.

  Legality and illegality. They were words separated only by two letters for Compton.

  “I can give you three-and-a-half million reasons why,” Compton answered calmly. “You can donate it all to charity, of course,” he said, adding insult to injury, negotiating again.

  She didn’t know what the truth was about what the other men had been told, but felt certain that if she did call the police, if any of the truth did come out about what had happened to her, Simeon and Compton would only say that they were playing out X’s fantasy, not theirs. Compton had even had her sign that confidentiality agreement which said that all of their activities were consensual. What proof did she have?

  Three-and-a-half million reasons. The money. X had nearly forgotten. There was still the other part of the money that she was owed.

  There was the two-and-a-half million that she had agreed to in the hotel room and the million that Compton had given her when she had blackmailed him. But she had only gotten half of what she had agreed to.

  “Go get it the rest of the money you owe me,” X commanded Compton.

  “I’ll have to give it to you in cash and bearer bonds,” he answered.

  “Fine,” she replied. “And the papers for the Van Gogh. I need the papers to prove that it’s authentic.”

  X undid Compton’s feet and then freed his hands from the metal arcs that encircled them.

  X walked over to Simeon and put the gun to his temple. She realized then that the safety was on, had been on the whole time. Compton left the dungeon and X took the gun away from Simeon’s head. A few minutes later, Compton knocked at the door and X let him in.

  “Get back in the chair,” X commanded, and after she had secured Compton again, she opened the attaché case, removing a stack of bearer bonds. A few fat piles of cash sat at the bottom along with a diamond necklace. Was the bastard trying to give her a gift? Now?

  “What’s the necklace for?”

  “I had been planning to give that to you. It matches the earrings.”

  X suddenly wanted to put the gun in his mouth, shove the barrel back to his soft palate until he gagged, but she restrained herself.

  “I need the papers for the painting, for the Van Gogh,” she said. “They aren’t in here. Get them for me and I’ll go.”

  “That painting has no papers,” Compton said.

  “Of course it has papers,” X answered. “You wouldn’t have bought it if it didn’t have papers. I want a bill of sale, then.”

  Simeon started to laugh, a risible reaction. What began as a chuckle intensified until he was laughing so hard that his chair was shaking. The sound echoed through the room, intensifying into itself, piercing the air.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “The painting,” he said, barely able to breathe, “it’s a fake! A reproduction! You think Compton would let you have a real Van Gogh? Do you have any idea how much the real one is worth?”

  The painting that she had adored was counterfeit. Those feelings she had experienced when she had studied the brush strokes, brooded over the technique—had that been fictitious as well? An illusion? X looked over to Compton. He was more than a man. He was a magician. He invented his own morality. He had brought about not just a transformation, but a transmutation in X. But no longer would she express her rage. There were other ways to make him suffer.

  “Do you have anything to say, Terry?” X asked.

  Compton considered. “Derevaun seraun.”

  “What?”

  “The end of pleasure is pain.”

  X kneeled down and put the gun into the attaché case before zipping it up.

  Compton. All this time he had played the role of the masochist, the submissive, the bottom. It didn’t fit him; X knew that now. Everything that had happened between them all had been orchestrated by Compton for his own selfish gratification. The control had rested with him and his pleasure was derived, in part, from the personal shifts he had caused in both her and Simeon. Compton was not primarily a masochist; he was a sadist, one beyond compare. Even Simeon, who wanted to play the dominant, was just another marionette on Compton’s strings.

  X’s eyes met Compton’s. As she prepared to leave she was unable to speak, knowing that no final monologue was due to the men before her, men she knew intimately, men she had tasted, communed with. There was only the present silence, the cusp of the past and future.

  X was struck by the absurdity of what had occurred. What did it all mean? It meant nothing; she would have to find her own meaning in it. A gnosis would come. With or without her, the future would unfold and refold in its own origami, with tragedy or insight, who could tell.

  The present. It did not reveal to X that in the future, after Compton’s death, when X was an old stooped woman, a matron, that in his will, he would leave her that Van Gogh. At that moment, she did not imagine that later, after a good deal of time had passed, that she would feel that Compton had taught her everything that she knew about submission and domination. She would acknowledge him as a master.

  But now. Now. She went to Compton, leaned down, and kissed him gently on the lips. Then, X picked up her bags and walked to the door of the dungeon, not pausing to look back.

  Compton and Simeon watched her go. And this part, the abandonment, so bitter and sweet, was an occurrence that Compton knew would one day come although he had been unsure exactly how it would occur.

  As X opened the door and it swung shut behind her as she deserted them, another meaning of her name came to Compton’s mind, and its beauty was all encompassing, a meaning that he saw everyday when he closed an application on his computer after clicking on the upper right hand corner, a symbol that had been ignored because of its commonness, so trivial and prosaic, a meaning which can be described in several ways: X—the conclusion, the end, finis.

  X

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