cunt toward enemy [s3e7] the good life

✦

Darkness forever.

Then.

In this prison, he dug into the wall. A spoon, perhaps, or a turncoat stone come loose from the wall. The spoon bent, and the stone ground to dust. At last he dug his nails into his body and found the wires implanted all over, running from his chest into his neck, his ankles, his wrists. He rips out a throbbing handful. Thud. Thud. Thud. Telling time.

They burst, spraying him with blood.

✦

You were napping, boss.

Another bad dream?

He hunches over the table, nauseous and body aching. Don’t want to make a mess on this nice tuxedo. In this restaurant of marble and ivory.

Glistening black caviar. Squid ink soup. Tall glass of milk. The good life. But he can’t help the twinge of an ancient frugality, an economic anxiety that no longer makes sense. Growing up, he couldn’t afford such things. But now he has everything he ever wanted. It takes time to accept this.

You did it, Mr Bomb. You saved the world.

His call sign. Retired at long last. He knows it better than his own name. Feels like throwing away an old pair of leather boots.

Is that it? The feeling of “offness”. Being turned off. No longer the center of the world. He stares at his soup for maybe too long.

“Are you suffering residual effects?”

Residual?

“From the virtual mission.”

That deep plunge into the grid of simulation that has corroded modern life. A mission to take down the Zhyber Valhalla corporation.

But oh, the damage. Hallucinations. Sleep paralysis. Vivid dreams. Some lingering flaw in his cortex.

It keeps coming, Mr Bomb says. Like echoes.

“But you noticed, right, things weren’t adding up? Little discrepancies. A departure from realism.”

Yeah. It was getting ridiculous.

But it felt so real. Of course, no technology could create a perfectly convincing reality. Instead of shaving the nth percent of a hopeless graphical milestone, it’s easier to hijack your oneiric mechanisms, something like a lucid dream. You don’t need to simulate reality. Just the feeling.

He adjusted too well. No one had ever been in the simulation that long. No one but the denizens of that twisted inner sanctum. They wore their coolant pumps like tails. Writhing in their black suits.

Someone was trying to kill him. He still doesn’t know if it was a person, or a process. Like a dream, details are quickly forgotten, but not emotions. A stain of terror in his muscles, activated like that myth of spinal LSD.

“Boss?”

He looks up with a wry smile, and offers something of his internal state. Trying to bring the mood up. Show that he’s still with them. He says, when it nested the universes. I think that’s where I started losing track.

“The system starts to cannibalize itself in the absence of fresh data. But we never imagined…”

It’s fine.

“I know it came at a cost, old friend.”

He feels foolish now. Bringing the mood down. And him in his tuxedo.

It certainly wasn’t family friendly in there, he says.

That gets a warm laugh around the table. Reminds him of the good times. How much they’ve been through together. His sidekick, Candido, in the white suit. His handler, Nero, black down to the dress shirt, tie, and buttons. And Mr Bomb in the tux.

You did something truly good for the world. The mother of all bombs was about to go off. And deep in the guts of the simulation, you snipped the correct wire just in time. What color was it?

He promised himself that when he emerged from the foul synthesis, he would go to the meadow of his childhood, and with real soil under his boots and real sun on his face, he would find a flower in the color of that wire. And he would stick it in his lapel and come to his lady love. He looks down at the breast of his tuxedo. No flower. Just this pain in his chest. He rubs it and something rustles.

A piece of paper tucked under his tux. His big speech.

That’s why he’s nervous. The need to summarize in a few sentences, a mission that took subjective years to accomplish. A world he can never share with anyone else. Try telling someone the dream you had this morning. The dream you had a lifetime ago.

It’s fine until someone asks him about it. Then a sudden rage explodes, or sadness like a broken bone.

He sits back, cleansing himself with a smile. He says, somehow I wish. Even after everything. That there was time for one more adventure.

“Come on, boss. Don’t you want to go out on a high note?”

An inkling of fear spills into his soup. That he should not upset what he has achieved. It took so much to arrive here, after all. The long convalescence. The prayers of his family.

He scratches his chest again. This can’t be a speech, this is denser than paper. He sticks a finger under his shirt and the ache intensifies. Bandage padding.

He says, what is this?

They look at each other. “We’ve been through this, sir.”

Oh. Sorry.

“You injured yourself,” Nero says wearily.

“Yeah,” Candido says with concern. “Don’t you remember?”

He stayed in too long. Years of meticulous work and he couldn’t just throw it away. All he needed was 5 more minutes. And another 5. Hands shaking as he struggled to snip the final wire—

The suit overheated. Sensors burnt into his chest, nearly stopping his heart. The scar still itches, taking him back to that burning room.

He stares at his reflection in the spoon, upside down. Dark hair smeared and melting, white streaking into silver like he’s becoming mercury.

“I’m not hungry,” he says.

✦

They go into the parking garage. A gust of gasoline hits his face like a Molotov rag. Black asphalt and white pillars of concrete.

It’s a gorgeous car. ‘83 Катран, lemoncake yellow. The top flips up like a visor. He always idolized it. It was in his favorite spy show. The reason he got into this business in the first place. Action hero, but suave, not a meathead. Beautiful kinetics, percussive engineering for the world-machine.

You shouldn’t have, he says.

Nero tosses him the keys. “Oh, but we did.”

“Yeah, boss. Take her for a spin. You deserve it.”

Iconic, credits-rolling car. And is that a big ass bottle of champagne in the seat? He could do with a drink. Drown these echoes in his head like late night reruns. And that burnt smell.

He squats down. In the dark space underneath the car, there is an oil stain.

“Easy, boss. You’re not going to throw up again, are you?”

There’s just something I keep missing. Like someone died in there with me.

“I’m right here, boss.”

Black and white slacks surround him. Concerned. He says to their kneecaps, did I kill someone?

“We don’t have to talk about it,” his handler says.

Mr Bomb looks up into those gray eyes. He doesn’t find the pain he’s looking for. The pain he feels.

Where even were you, he says. Stabbing pain in my chest, he thinks clinically. This fucking bandage. He undoes a few buttons. Picks at it.

“Come on, boss.”

Just going to take a look, he mumbles. The bandage stings like an electric zap, nearly forcing his hand off. But he peels it another inch.

“Boss—”

What time is it, he says suddenly.

I had a watch, didn’t I?

“Uhh.”

He says, I had a grappling hook and a special little gun. I had all this shit. So it seems like a sure bet. That I had something to tell the time with.

It was. You know. That one color. The color of when you’re feeling down, down, down. All the way down…

“You’re gonna hurt yourself, boss.”

Are you sure this isn’t infected? If I could just see the color…

His handler says, “You changed it ten times in the last week. Give it a rest. Let yourself heal.”

“Yeah,” Candido says. “Aren’t you tired?”

He is tired. His feet drag. This tuxedo weighs on him, all this ceremony. But the bandage irritates him somehow. The mystery of this wound, the implication of lost faculties.

“Come on,” his handler says gently. “Your wife is waiting.”

My wife. My watch. I just can’t seem to find anything.

“You’re not making sense.”

What does she look like?

“Your memory loss can’t be that bad, can’t it?”

Mine could, he says. But not yours. You were sitting in an office, right. With my whole biography in front of you. So tell me. What color her hair is.

“Oh, you know. It’s a kind of…”

Silence. Reeking with oil. He finally looks up. Their faces are harshly shadowed from this angle. They’re staring at each other instead of him.

His handler says, “I didn’t want to tell you this. Seeing as I’ve told you a few times now. But your wife is dead.”

No, he says. That can’t be right.

“You continually repress it. Beg for the suit again.”

It was my mother. My mother is dead.

“So much subjective time had passed in the simulation. You began to identify your wife with your mother. A loss you had already survived.”

He runs his hand across the smooth flank of the car. The yellow seems so pale now. He says, that sounds about right.

“Come on, boss,” his sidekick says softly. “Let’s have a drink.”

Mr Bomb rips the bandage off and it feels like skin. Red spreads on the white of his fancy dress shirt like the first color he’s seen all day. A terrible feeling. It would have been better to leave it on.

“Boss.”

What time is it?

“I don’t…”

Not a one of you has a watch. Nice restaurant, nice suits, no watch. You can’t find a, a device, with even the most basic, timetelling, uh, I’d settle for a sundial at this point.

Nero says, “This analogue fetishism has gotten out of hand.”

“Yeah, boss. You know what year this is?”

No. Why don’t you tell me?

Again, they look at each other. Their mouths open, but nothing comes out. They spread their hands like, come on. Be reasonable. Mr Bomb backs up, ears pounding as the blood flows faster. He claws at his collar and rips it off like the bandage.

He says, I’m not mad because you lied to me.

I just wish you told a lie I could believe in.

Because I’m so fucking tired.

He goes to the concrete railing and looks over the edge.

Hmm, he says.

He thinks of the surface of the sun. If it was made of oil. The churning of lava in a black and white film.

The men are blurs. Coming closer. It’s understandable. Blood loss, we’re just trying to help—

He lurches away, leaving a trail of blood brighter than anything else. As he slows, the blood collects into a puddle, and he becomes sick and afraid.

“It’s just a hallucination,” his handler says. “We’ve been here before.”

No watch on his wrist. But his heart beats steady. He smiles, very pale, and falls on his face, into the red pool.

✦

✦

Lazur was watching an old spy thriller. He always found the poorly paced onslaught of escapist imagery comforting. A parade of violent holidays. The ultimate tourist. A man with a gun.

He fell asleep before the end. In this small room, with the portable TV hooked up to an old VCR on a little wooden desk made by a village artisan a long time ago. Stripped paint, rattling whenever a door slams or he rolls out of bed. He stands up, and the sunlight reflecting from the snowy mountains slices across the green dawn forest and hits his naked body.

He always sleeps naked. Sweaty dreams. He unlocks the drawer of that little desk and takes his handgun out. He scratches his hip with the muzzle, then slides a magazine into the chamber. He thinks of his mother taking her pills in the morning. It hurts, this ocean between them. It severs souls. He wires her money but hasn’t replied to her letter yet. It’s so easy to put it off another day, and another day, and just be a walking gun. Bodyguard to one of the richest men on the continent.

The corny conservative psychedelia of that movie soaked into his nightmare. Mr Bomb under hypnosis. Induction within induction, the pendulum sway of a pocket watch. Tick tick, Mr Bomb. A gruesome graveyard. Your mother’s skeleton. But Mr Bomb has an iron will. He’s stronger than that. It says so on the tape sleeve. The Man With Nerves of —. Weathering has stripped away crucial nouns. Nerves of Shit.

He found these old tapes in the basement. Mr Bomb is a bit cooler and cynical nowadays. His palette leans cobalt, not the molten evening colors of the acid era. They spray sweat under his armpits. He fights computerized terroristics and cocaine hyperplots. He’s one beautiful dead woman away from crossing the line. It is increasingly difficult to be a gentleman.

But you have to drive to the theater to see that. A long drive to the village. Here in the mansion, there are only old things. And a very young one. He sees the boy playing in the garden. The same sunlight on Lazur’s thighs is shining on that blond hair.

In his early 30s, he wakes with a snag in his bones. Quickly fading but enough to remind him how fast kids are. Unpredictable as insects, flitting if you blink. Some are straight up retarded. But this is a fast one. And in the way he’s responsible for his employer’s body, he’s responsible to some extent for what came from that body. So he rips the window open and rasps, “No firecrackers in the garden.”

The cold breeze nips and reminds him of his body. He kneels by the window, covering his nakedness. Forced to rest his arm on the sill.

The boy: sharp white smile and pink tongue like a fox. Holding the match like a conductor. Bringing it to the fuse, then away. Then back again. This secret symphony between them.