Strange Violence

by Michael Chen-Thompson

  I knew immediately what it was. It was Bit City. It is Bit City. The vehicle is coming for me, I know it is. It’s coming to save me, to get me out of here. My time is running short. My expiration date approaches. That aside, the government is always after me. They watch me. Waiting for me to fuck up. Waiting for me to do something that will get me drained before my expiration date.

  I don’t want to be hooked up to that machine. I’ve heard about it. I’ve heard they take out your eye and plug it into your brain, then suck all the memories and intelligence right out of you and put them in the machine. Then they kill you. No one ever gets away from it. Or if they do, the government sure doesn’t tell anyone.

  I thought I found a safe way to avoid detection. It’s painful. Excruciating, really. That’s what makes it so exquisite. Providing the right ingredients beforehand - a large amount of LSD and painkillers - one can have an extremely lucid out of body dream experience while the whole procedure goes on.

  It’s called face erasing.

  Face erasing is very expensive, and it’s not for the faint of heart. I’m talking about surgery. I’m recovering now in the darkness of my apartment from an earlier operation that was done to prevent exposure to the government. The longer I can keep away from them, the sooner the train will arrive. I know it. I don’t know where I’ll find it, but I know that I will.

  Now, I did say face erasing is expensive. But I didn’t say that I pay a lot for it. A simple street peddler such as myself can’t afford to have it done professionally, so I consult my most trusted drug supplier, who also happens to be able to perform minor surgeries.

  His name is Dr. Venison.

  Professional face erasing is done by government practitioners at a store called ‘Bulletproof Faces.’ I could never go there even if I could afford it. I don’t trust them. They would do something to me, mutilate me - maybe arrest me.

  Dr. Venison used to work for ‘Bulletproof Faces.’ His employment with the government was terminated after he gave an unauthorized sex change to a young lady who had been mouthing off to him before being anaesthetized. When the new young man awoke hours later in extreme pain (and with one remaining breast, moved to the center of his chest), Venison had been questioned and terminated.

  His offense did not warrant execution. As he had been working for the government and was thus under extremely close scrutiny already, it had likely been decided that he had no valuable memories worth taking yet anyway. He was released into the general population.

  Why does he still do it? I don’t know. I suppose the man has a passion for it. He charges me a quarter of the price I would pay at ‘Bulletproof Faces’ and he does a fine job of sewing me back up. We have a good working relationship. I can trust him, because he has just as many damning secrets at this point as I do. He wasted no time after termination being a naughty boy. It seems it’s in his heart to break the law. God bless him.

  I sell drugs for him and he erases my face whenever necessary. There is naturally a good deal of scarring under my exterior appearance, but if you can’t see it then it doesn’t matter, I think. One day I’m a rugged, handsome businessman, the next I’m an ugly drug pusher, selling bone marrow and heroin off of the streets. I know the cardinal rule. Don’t ever indulge in your own merchandise, unless you’re stupid! Which I might be. I do an awful lot of my own merchandise.

  So far, so good, however.

  The process of face erasing is rather simple. Once, while sharing with him a line of the most exquisite powdered marrow I have ever snorted, he told me how it works in his strange accent.

  “The face-chop is the first procedure,” said the good doctor. “With your scalpel, you delicately cut a nice smooth line into the already existing scar on your patients face and then you begin to peel back. First layer, gone! The face disappears! Next thing you do, you do this: you cut off the meat on patients face. Yeah. Cut it off slow, be sure you hear the muscle peeling off, adds to the experience.”

  Dr. Venison was easily excitable when it came to his work.

  “After face is stripped and you only see red skull, you begin to put on the sterile new meat. Then you apply plastic face, sew back up. Give pills, takes about 24 hours to heal up, you look like a new man! Literally!”

  Of course, having this done on a weekly basis can be pretty hazardous to one’s health. So I compromise. I only have my face erased once a month anymore. I used to do it weekly, now it just isn’t safe. Give or take (usually take) a few deals (five or six), I can get away with it. Less cash, but less risk too. I wouldn’t want my new face to fall off in the middle of a trade-off, which would be bad for business!

  2. The dandy crackdown.

  I’m sitting at a glass table in the middle of Fountain Square. Jets of water burst in the center of the tiny man-made lake in the middle of the cross-section, and water splashes lightly to the brick red cobblestones that the glass table that I’m sitting at rests upon.

  There is a ragged copy of a novel to my left, an odd little piece entitled The Picture of Dorian Gray. The government claims to have written it. Maybe they did. I’ve never heard of a citizen ever creating anything aside from an outfit to wear. All entertainment is provided to us by the government, even the nightclubs are run by them on some level.

  It is a good day. The heat has been too much for me lately. It’s been so intense that it has warped all of the city’s dandies into cartoonish wooden puppets, no longer standing straight when they walk but bending into indeterminable angles.

  Even in the heat, they won’t stop wearing eight layers of velvet clothing or multiple scarves and top hats. Their plastic eyes gaze out, almost melting, their pupils dilated from obviously the strongest of drugs. The dandies consume absinthe and marrow like water and bread, making homage to their dark god Bacchus, the absinthe his milky green blood and the marrow his own red flesh.

  They wear feather boas and fur coats, holding their canes out and slapping the peddlers they pass by. Their hair is dyed black, purple, burgundy, or whichever color they happen to fancy on whichever day it happens to be, and they paint on the darkest of eye make-up, smearing it on their faces like charcoal and smudging it without notice. It runs down their faces in thick rivulets of sweat in this horrible humidity.

  I know the government turns up the heat somehow. They must be behind it. They claim it is an unexplained phenomenon, but I’m not as dumb as most of the “citizens” of this prison. They’re behind everything that ever goes on here. I even suspect they are behind my drug dealing. I can’t be sure.

  I don’t know Dr. Venison well enough to know anything as an absolute regarding his motivation. But I do know the government is behind this heat. They’re behind the cold when that comes too. I don’t know why. I don’t know why I should care, either.

  I have heard that the dandies can be rather violent. Once I saw one beat a young boy of about sixteen bloody and senseless with a cane in a back alley. The boy lay bleeding for ten minutes before crawling under a bench and waiting to die.

  I am not a dandy myself, nor could I be. I am decadent, yes, excessive, yes, but I could not fit in with these people because, for the most part, they are my customers. It is not good business to fall in league with your customers. And aside from that, though I do many drugs, I do not find myself reaching the level of pivotal madness that these men do - they are haunted with ghosts from the past, ghosts who visit and torment in the form of syphilis, amongst other things.

  I don’t have syphilis because I know who I’m fucking (usually). They really don’t care who they’re fucking. And that, you see, is the essential difference between myself and a dandy. I give a shit.

  The city’s government tried to crack down on the dandies nearly two decades ago. At this time I was a young man of twenty-six (and I do rather look like a twenty-six year old to this day, as a result of my constant face erasing and other plastic procedures which I have undertaken at great pains to myself). I remember it as if it were yesterday.

  The
government was not successful in capturing all of the dandies, and it wouldn’t surprise me if the whole thing was a sham crack down anyway. Those who were not imprisoned or killed were let go for a reason.

  They controlled many things that happened in the city back then - maybe starting to rival the Bit City government for power. Now they don’t, of course. Now they are simply mechanical creatures, re-fueling with drugs and unloading all of that un-necessary semen in the closest vessel at hand. Something happened after the crackdown. Maybe they had gained too much power, climbed too high up a tree, and our fearless leader had to shake it to get them to come back down.

  Dandies are great lovers because they always fight back. They hate being out of control. Naturally, the older the dandy, the harder it is to capture him (or her) for such a means, but of course, the older the dandy, the less you want to capture him (or her) anyway. The older they are, the more decayed they are, the more dangerous, the more risky.

  Get them while they still think they have the city in their hands, ready for a fucking. Hold them down and listen to them protest before the heroin takes effect and collapses their veins, softens their eyes, drains their vitality and hardens their flesh with age. Take it before the marrow powder fills up their eyes with blood and their souls with filth.

  I sit at the table with my ragged copy of The Picture of Dorian Gray, imagining.

  I look into a back alley from my safe vantage point in the gray daylight. I see a teenage boy trying to fight off an attacker. He’s got green make-up on his face.

  “Fuck you, green boy. You got it wrong,” yells a withered dandy with a pin-striped suit and gold cane. He’s the type who thinks he’s more important than he really is. Maybe one of the ones the government let go. He smacks the boy in the face with a hard thud. I hear crying. Bittersweet tears flood into the boy’s mouth, salty and sugary at the same time. The tears of a fallen angel.

  “I’ll carve you up like a turkey,” mumbles the ancient dandy. The dandy slaps him again. “You’re not one of us,” he accuses, and the boy starts to push back. “How old are you?” The boy doesn’t answer. He holds his words in, hot air pulsating in his lungs. He likes it. I can see it in his eyes, even from a distance. The abuse appeals to him. It turns him on.

  “Sixteen,” he mumbles softly.

  “Yum,” says the dandy. And so the corruption begins. I don’t particularly approve of this, but it’s a common site and it’s done in open view of the authorities.

  I can be critical of the others as easily as I can be apathetic toward them, but in regard to myself, I feel lost. I have something to do, something to occupy my time. But I desire more. I feel like there is something I’m not quite understanding, something that hovers just out of my comprehension.

  I don’t know where I’m heading personally. I often feel directed, as though someone is telling me what to do, like I am not in control of myself. Perhaps that’s only an illusion.

  3. Illusion meets reality.

  He moans. There’s a light dusting of coke on his face. He’s one of the drug-Catholics. Snorts marrow for Jesus, some fake God he made up - or maybe the city government made it up. I suspect they created all of these movements a long time ago. The drug-Catholic inhales the marrow as a part of his own selfish metaphysical crucifixion.

  “Oh Jesus, how I doth love thee. I snorteth this marrow for you! I sacrifice mine own body and soul for you!”

  Same old shit. Just another lofty excuse for indulgence. The marrow is always first. Next comes the heroin. For dessert, he might drink some albinoid blood. Then he runs through the streets screaming that “THE END IS COMING” and we should “REPENT!” It’s really the drugs talking.

  I quickly surmise that things are not what they seem. I’ve woken up from a face-erasing. And now, as usual, I am on acid. I must be hallucinating, or dreaming. I try to find a solid, definite shape. There are only amorphous blobs. Some of the blobs shape themselves into faces of my old dead friends. I see Stephen, my first love. His eyes are blue. His hair is burgundy, twisted into soft curls.

  “Ashes rain down on the kingdom of Sodom,” he says. I am confused by this statement. His face disappears.

  A spike of light pierces into my eye. It comes quickly toward me, and begins to curl like smoke into the air. As it approaches. It spirals up, and I gaze in awe.

  Rainbows dance in its gray translucence - without knowing why, I think the word ‘Technicolor.’ I can hear the colors changing. The blue is soft, light, the sound of a baby’s sigh. The red is a gasp for air, the result of a knife being driven upward, tearing apart the sternum and piercing the Adam’s apple.

  The smoke comes to my face, plays lightly over my eyes. I laugh in my stupor. It comes into my corneas, and suddenly I see through it. I see it traveling down a black tunnel through my pupils. There is a piercing light at the end of this tunnel, and I can see a waterfall.

  There are statues behind this waterfall - once more I see Stephen, as I remember him twenty years ago. Sheer perfection. His body is sculpted into the rocks, and he looks trapped. I stand at the edge of the tunnel in my eye looking at him, but he does not move.

  The waterfall blanketing him turns slowly to pink, and then into red. It flows downward. I look at the bottom of the bloody pool and I see dead bodies floating upside down. Bodies of children. Some of them are my customers, some of them are the different children I have seen running throughout the city, heading toward their inevitable abuses.

  They are dead, drowned. Hands jut up occasionally and pull the bodies under. Then there are bubbles. Two hands rise up again out of the gory pool. They are my hands. I know because they are wearing all of my rings - I can see the gold glimmers shining before they sink back into the crimson murk of stale blood and gore.

  And then the water turns from red to black, and the blackness bleeds into reality. It encompasses the blood, the children, everything, and I see only darkness now. For a moment. A headlight is coming toward me. I hear the shrieking of that metal beast I hallucinated last time I had my face erased. It’s heading toward me, a harbinger heading toward Bit City from outer oblivion.

  The image fades into television snow, I can hear it crackling, sizzling in the background. I try to adjust the antenna, and a silhouette becomes forms out of the static into a solid image. There is an anchorman staring directly into my eyes.

  “Hello, this is Channel 12 News at eleven o’clock,” he announces, “and we have breaking news. You are dead. You have always been dead. You will always be dead. Death is eternal - death is life, because without death, there is no life. With death, and dead, only dead are you truly alive. Death. You are death. Death is you. Death is… izzz… zzzzzzzZzZzZz--”

  His eyes fade into insect eyes, viewing me from four hundred different perspectives. Suddenly I see myself through those eyes, and I have black wings. Bones jut through the edges, and my eyes are purple and sorrowful. My heart beats so hard it burns a hole into my chest. There is a pair of red scissors sticking into it, and I pull them out, lick the blade. I collapse into sand.

  I sink downward and become part of a thousand civilizations. I am a lizard. I am an ant. I am a rock star. An alien. A demon. An angel. A crimson seraph with a golden blade cleaving away the darkness of Hell, eating the eyes of madmen. But no, I am not. My mother aborted me in the womb. I am not an angel, I am an abortion. I lie in a dumpster. A homeless man looks down on my tiny gray body. He stares for a moment, picks me up. He looks confused. Then he bites my arm. He rips it from my frail torso. Spits me out. Throws me back in the dumpster.

  I feel no pain.

  I am Dr. Venison. I look down on my body, writhing in my acid-dream delusion. I pick up the scalpel. His mad eyes glint off of it in reflection before I walk to my own body. As Dr. Venison I plunge the scalpel into my face, tearing it off, looking at the red meat underneath. I am not phased. Then I hear the voice inside of his head.

  ‘kill him vennis rip his face off kill kill kill kill kill kill kill kill. the gh
osts are waiting for you return come back love we love you we will hold you leave this ugly place behind it is nothing for you we love you more than he does kill him kill him kill him kill’

  There is a void. I am flailing. My face is gone, there is only a white, crimson-streaked skull below. Darkness is eating my flesh. It punctures holes in my skin and crawls inside, infecting me with it. My veins flow with black blood. I plunge in a needle and inject. Orange fire floods up my arms and into my brain, where it dies. Ashes look out through my eyeballs. I see Dr. Venison. He’s cowering in a corner.

  “Where is my fucking face?” I ask him. He does not reply. He cries instead. “Where is my fucking face?” I repeat. No reply again. I grab the bloody scalpel. I see skin sitting on the tray beside it, covered in blood. I’ll kill him.

  “You’re wearing it!” he screams. “You have a face!”

  I have no face. I want his face.

  “I want your face,” I tell him.

  “But you can’t,” he whispers in denial. “You can’t have my face!” But I can have his face.

  “I can have his face. If I want it.”

  I don’t know where I am. But I walk to him. I plunge the scalpel into his throat. I twist it. Blood gargles out of his mouth. It soaks his clothes. I plunge it in further until I feel the cold metal clink against the tiled wall. Then I pull it out. I ram it into his eye. Blood spurts across the room. I taste it. It’s salty. I continue. His jugular is last. He feels pain.

  How much is illusion, I cannot say. But the blood? That much is real at least.

  4. Jakob the vampire.

  There is a rumor here about vampires. The kind that suck your blood, that take your children from their bedrooms at night, seduce them, defile them, then suck them dry, leaving their white candle wax corpses to collect dust. The kind that only exist in the fictions printed by the government and stocked in the Bit City libraries. The rumor is that they are not fictions at all. At least not completely.