cunt toward enemy [s3e8] half hunter

Prokop’s hands had become transparent through lack of use, but on the other hand they had acquired an extraordinary sense of touch. They felt and detected the potential power of detonation of whatever they encountered. A young body had an enormous explosive tension…

—Karel Čapek, Krakatit

✦

The father has a pocket watch, a treasured heirloom that dangles, glittering with sunlight. When he stares at it, you race to finish your sentences. When he snaps it shut, the conversation is over. A half hunter case, glass window peering into the skeletal face inside. Gears exposed like the mechanism of anyone the man stares at.

✦

Snowcapped mountains burn in the distance. Every day they melt a little more and drool down the slopes. Animals migrate. Plants grow where nothing was. And Lazur keeps watch.

✦

The portable TV is playing in the bathroom.

If someone seduced my daughter it would be damaging and horrifying, but not fatal. She would recover, marry and have lots of children. If some elderly schoolmaster seduced one of my sons and taught him to be homosexual, he would ruin him for life. That is the fundamental distinction.

✦

The greenhouse is trashed with Pop Rocks wrappers and soda cans. And Ruben is asking the other boy—

How do you feel?

Maybe you should have some more?

He is disappointed that the other boy hasn’t exploded yet. He’s wasted a lot of his precious weekend with a schoolmate of lower intellectual caliber, that is to say, any of them. The boy is attractive enough, which had a pleasant socially signifying effect but that quickly faded, only to be rekindled by the power of carbon dioxide injected into crystallized sugar at high pressure, which then dissolves in a boy’s oral cavity. Suddenly his schoolmate seems very appealing, clutching his stomach with dread and nausea, and saying things like, “Am I going to die?”

Ruben looks at him seriously. “Yes. Unless you get it all out.”

The other boy runs off, clutching his bloated stomach. Ruben stares with a tranced-out smile, waiting for the explosion, the surrender of control where nothing remains to be done and chaos triumphs over all rules and fatherly constructs.

✦

The boy missed lunch. Not just any lunch. It was lunch in the village, a puff piece interview with one of the most prestigious magazines in the world. An award-winning photographer, perfect alpine day, and the light was just right to capture the pedigreed features of this powerful family.

The father returns and asks where the boy is. Lazur tells him.

They find the boy in the greenhouse, dancing amid pink flowers in his mother’s skirt from many years ago, when she was still a fresh-faced socialite and not burnt photographs in the basement furnace.

✦

“Look at you. Dressing like a loose faggot.”

A hundred thousand dollar wristwatch lays on the bench directly under the sun, striking the boy’s eyes. So he stares down at the dirt, fingers nervously twisting his ruffled skirt.

“You’re not some catamite. You’re my son. And they will use this sickness against you. Against our name. Do you understand? Cameras everywhere.”

The boy mumbles, pathetically inaudible. Like he’s trying to cringe inside his own body.

“You missed our interview. Left me looking like a fool. A man who doesn’t know the whereabouts of his own son. A man who has no control over his life.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I trusted you to walk over after choir practice. And instead…” He stares with horror at his son wearing the dress of his departed wife. He goes to the sill and picks up the wristwatch. “It’s about time you had one of your own.”

He turns, and the boy sees the watch clearly for the first time. Alligator strap with a blood crimson face.

“Give me your hand.”

“Father?”

He waits until the boy yields his trembling wrist, then straps the watch on, glass kissing the skin.

✦

A scream cuts through the garden. Lazur’s face is a statue with nausea crawling beneath. He can’t cover his ears, because it would mean he heard something.

✦

“Are you really going to embarrass yourself in front of the servants?”

He rips the skirt open, exposing shivering legs. He has a stick in his hand, the exact length his father used. Maybe a few more inches. The boy is a special case.

“You’re going to learn punctuality. One second at a time.”

Tick tick of the burning watch. The boy holds it like a broken arm, writhing.

“If you lose count. We begin again.”

The stick cracks, and the watch ticks into the boy’s skin, strapped so tight he feels his own pulse under the hot glass. Thump. Thump. Crack. The beating of his heart becomes the stick smacking into his knees. The skirt swirls with each blow. No male fabric would dance so skittishly, betraying his agony like this. The skirt becomes something ugly and ragged, this ripped-apart relic of his mother’s. He can’t remember her at all anymore. Just his father’s words about what an unfaithful whore she was, and how she abandoned them.

“Keep counting.”

Sobbing, fighting not to claw the watch off his wrist, the next number comes out in a moan. “E-eight—”

✦

The boy comes out hand behind his back, trying to hide the red circle. He looks at Lazur with hate. Witness to the breakdown of his throat. This snot and bitter dew of tears. These trousers with dark stains soaking through the knees.

You won’t wear a skirt after that. Not with—

Your knees beaten until the skin broke. So cover them up like a man.

The boy’s wrist is strapped tight. That watch follows him everywhere. Tick tick. He wears it to bed. When he bathes, one hand hangs outside. Afterwards, he carefully rubs soap around it, and works lotion under the strap.

But it must never leave his skin.

✦

A visit from father’s friend. A man with coppery hair who sips lithium water. Mineral calm.

“Have we met before?’

Lazur wonders what servant, thug, etc the man confused him for. It’s a skill to cultivate. Losing your friction. Becoming unmemorable, but don’t relax your face into anything that could be interpreted as malevolent. Being too friendly is dangerous too—keep your smile bland or they’ll think you’re mocking them, conspiring against them, stealing the silverware, fucking their wife. Scoop out your intellect, your half-complete engineering degree, the entire grit and substance of your humanity, and become the gun in your holster.

The calm man is speaking to the boy, smiling everywhere but his lips. “You’ll have to visit Zadracarta one day.” He produces an orange, jet-fresh and flayed, ready to eat. He’s always walking around with that small knife, paring away until bits of rind litter the grass.

Ruben loves a treat. He just got back from school, white button-up and red tie and empty stomach. As he takes it, the man lays his hand on the boy’s back, which stiffens in response. “The oranges are most delicious when picked just at the point of ripeness.”

Ants crawl around their shoes like leather watches, toes pointed at insectile infinities. The breeze lifts, then drops his tie like a firm hand inspecting it. The boy takes a bite, juice squirting down his chin. Discomfort at the mess, but he can’t wipe it on his nice clothes, father taught him this. His lips burn with citric acid as the man whispers in his ear.

✦

Lazur goes to the lake with a can of Pabst Blue Ribbon. The poison clears his head and melts him into some kind of guy who can take his clothes off and jump in the water. A luxurious avalanche of trees flows down the slope, filtering mountain snow as it melts into the lake. The purest water of heaven.

He sinks until he can’t see anything, until his feet touch cold pebbles. But his gun is on the shore, and he can’t leave it unattended. Suddenly all pleasure disappears, and he emerges from the tepid water of a bathtub.

✦

He sprawls on toasted grass as the lake evaporates from his tan body. From throat to tailbone, he is skewered on sunlight. He watches an ant crawl inside the black hole of a beer can. Past the red and blue ribbons and into nothingness.

And nothingness.

He doesn’t remember falling asleep, just clinging to his holster as something he has to keep track of, and possibly something he doesn’t exist without. Something as small as a gun, but if he lost it, his master would show no mercy. A million tired bodies like his, desperate for a green card, blue card, some kind of color that says go, stay, safe. And you may send your mother half your paycheck and she will live and your baby cousin will live and everyone will live forever and ever.

He wakes up to the reek of alcohol. Something stronger than beer. Concentrated fuck your brain poison. It burns on his naked skin, and he thinks: I drank too much and blacked out.

Then he sees the argyle knee socks and private school shoes. And a drop of red as he pushes himself onto hands and knees. He was stabbed in the back. It burns, overflowing with his blood. He begins to stand, then a voice comes from above, the flammable sound of barely cracked vocal cords:

“Careful.”

The heat on his back is slow and melting, thicker than blood. So he stays still.

“You’re covered in high-proof alcohol.”

Lazur looks for a match. A lighter. But the boy is just standing there.

“On your back is a candle.”

Red wax on the grass, shiny clots that look heavy and fake against the delicate blades of nature. Rolling smooth over pocked stalks, over the speckles of his ribs. A candle from choir practice.

“If you move, the candle falls over. You catch on fire. It’s just alcohol though. And the lake is right there. But what about the fireworks?”

In his waking haze, Lazur thought he was tangled in creeping foliage. But he feels now the tubes of flash powder decorating his body in wreaths and manacles.

“You know what these are, don’t you?”

He does. Military simulation explosives that became popular as an incredibly powerful consumer firework. Many countries have banned them. People lose fingers, eyes, limbs.

Those schoolboy shoes (leather buckle across a bony cleavage of sock) are wiggling, pent with excitement. Then they disappear into the blind spot behind Lazur. He squeezes his legs together, acutely humiliation mixed with the awkwardness of the boy’s age. The boy shouldn’t be doing this, or seeing this. He tests a slight roll to the side, seeing if the candle will fall off. A hot stream of clear wax spills onto his back and he gasps, tears of pain filling his eyes.

“I’ll tell your—” He bites back the words, but it’s too late. The boy laughs harshly.

“Yes,” the boy says placidly. “I know you will.” Lazur bites his lip, flushed with shame.

Mr Bomb’s greatest adversary yet—a boy with a candle—

“Or I’ll tell him you touched me.” The boy is putting sparklers between his toes, pale soles exposed to the fading sun. “Don’t move.”

“Wait—”

The flick of a lighter, and Lazur’s body seizes up—every sense screamed danger, yet he could not move without certain death—vibrating as sparks spray his most sensitive areas like white-hot needles, like a rape of wasps. Raking his sensitive soles and the backs of his thighs and between them. A gob of drool escapes his mouth, webbing the grass. He makes incoherent noises mixed with violent, gruesome threats. Fuck you kill you rip your head off.

And then it’s over. The alcohol doesn’t ignite. The M-80s don’t explode. His feet burn terribly, smoking between the toes. He tries to lean forwards or backwards but the candle wobbles at the slightest movement, perched in the slump of his spine, forcing him to adjust to the melting wax, the growing heat. Paraffin drips down his ribs, and oozes into private places. A slow, molten violation. His shoulder blades tense and his tailbone arches. Unable to beat this skinny kid.

A quick enough movement and he could fling it off. If the melting candle doesn’t stick to him, and doesn’t hit the ethanol-soaked grass around him, and he doesn’t trip on the fireworks encircling his limbs. And he knows the boy carries his dad’s old lighter. He’s caught him burning enough shit with it. But he never expected to become the kindling itself–what could Mr Bomb have done to incur the wrath of this sinister firebug–

“I’m sorry,” he says to Ruben, so low and sad that the boy has to lean close. “He shouldn’t have done that to you.”

“That’s big of you,” Ruben says without emotion. And Lazur realizes how many times the boy has to have heard these useless regrets from relatives, teachers, nannies, any adult he’s shared his pain with. It hurts worse than denial. It hurts like hope. Then the lid shuts again.

So Lazur laughs.

“Yeah. I know. It doesn’t change a thing. You never met a single person who wasn’t owned by him.”

The knee socks twist with cotton emotion, strained by their caps. An alternating pattern of red and blue diamonds. “That’s right.”

“So run away.”

“He’ll find me.”

“Yeah. It’s just fucked, isn’t it.” Sweat pours down Lazur’s face that he can’t wipe. A hot pool of wax bubbles in his spinal slump.

“I wish he was dead.”

“Me too.”

Ruben is surprised. No adult has ever said that. They always say, just wait, you’ll be out of there soon, or no, you don’t wish that, you’re just angry. “But you take his money.”

“What do you want me to say? I’m a coward. I’m a walking gun. But the only person I’m killing is myself. Day after day in this place. No one is insane enough to attack your father. I just stand there like a piece of shit waiting to put this gun in my mouth. So light me up. I guess I can do it. If I just let that candle fall. But I’m a coward. So I’m stuck here. I’m stuck and you’re stuck and it’s fucked—” The candle slides on his back, vibrating with laughter, but he can’t stop, the heat is building inside him and everything is going to—

Something touches his flank. A soft, small hand. And his laughter turns to something else. Dripping on the grass.

“Make a wish,” Ruben says.

“Huh?”

The boy blows the candle out, a cool breath on his tortured back, splotches of wax like keloid whip scars. He collapses into the boozy mud, taut legs spasming with relief.

✦

As they step into the parlor at the back of the house, it is so still they don’t see the father at first. Lazur turns to the boy to say something dangerously familiar, a joke or threat, he doesn’t know yet, something earned by the tension of what happened at the lake. But something holds his tongue, the instinct of living in other people’s houses. And indeed, on that bloodwood sofa upholstered in crimson velvet, there is a man in a smoking jacket, lustrous red in this room of antique browns, like a silken fire burning through reality.

“Do you know the time, Ruben.”

The boy is breaking apart in Lazur’s periphery like a fighter in formation about to burst into debris, sucked into the wind. It hasn’t become visible yet, but it will in a moment. The terror is an acid.

Lazur says, “I told him to wait at the cabin. I thought I saw a trespasser.”

The father sniffs him, and Lazur’s innards clench. He rinsed off the sweat-wax-gunpowder fear slime in the lake. But he didn’t dunk his head in, didn’t want to walk back looking like he’d been skinny dipping with the boy. So his hair stinks of—

“Booze.”

“I saw that drunk again. Was pulling him back to the road and he stunk.”

The father is inches from his face. Lazur stands there without emotion. A stupid, vacant look.

“You know you can shoot the drunks.”

“Yes sir.”

“I own the entire village. You can shoot them.”

“Yes sir.”

The father goes to the drink cabinet. “Go to bed, Ruben.”

Only Lazur sees the boy collapse in the shadow of the stairs. Legs shaking so bad he is forced to crawl upstairs, trying very hard not to make a sound. Lazur has a similar disease: Deposits of gelatin in his joints. Burnt feet itching madly in his boots. The fear that if he moves, he will fall. That even a single muscle out of place will spring the trap this man is, those eyes that see nothing good and believe every ill that comes to them.

“Flying the jet out tomorrow. Keep Ruben out of trouble. No fireworks.”

“Yes sir.”