cunt toward enemy[14] god’s purest devil

Fear the time when the bombs stop falling while the bombers live.
— Steinbeck

*

The light is orange.

Orange. Orange.

Red.

He skids to a stop at the intersection. Burnt rubber hits his nostrils. It smells like he feels. He stares into the red eye of the Fresnel lens. The individual facets seem insectile, infinitely inflamed and malignant.

The lowest bulb on the traffic light, enclosed like the others in a metal hood. Dim, unlit green.

He runs the light. Someone honks at him and he has a perfect vision of hitting the brakes and taking his gun out and shooting them. This replays over and over, hot in his muscles, until he sees the monolithic outline of the agency. WELCOME TO XGILEAD.

A black vehicle is parked at the curb. Smoked glass. On the sidewalk, a strip of orange peel.

*

Enter the lobby. A man with a rifle, next to a painting of a beautiful evening or nuclear holocaust.

The scanner shrieks.

“Sir.”

He hands over his sidearm. Watches them place it inside a locked box. Standard procedure. Cal had to walk through this same X-ray.

He asks the receptionist what floor, trying not to let his voice shake. It seems as if any externalization of his fear will poison the world against him.

He enters the elevator and presses the correct button. As the doors slide shut, he grabs them. His head hangs out between the metal slabs like a thirsty dog. The elevator has the acoustics of a shaped charge. The red number burns above his neck, shining in the sweat.

He forces himself through the steel jaws, landing on the door for the stairwell. He falls through like an astronaut. The reinforced door slams shut behind him, echoing up through the concrete shaft. The unpainted concrete walls are sooty with vibrations, a chimney for structural tension.

He runs up the stairs, then stops at the top, wiping his face with his sleeve and trying not to breathe like a maniac.

This is the floor. Clear walls on a bright day. A cross-section of sun and office supplies. There they are. He enters the glass room, exposed in front of his coworkers. The glass makes it very hot. An incubator for big ideas.

*

Chairs surround a table. A man sits in one of them, with his back to Lazur. It looks like a very comfortable chair. But Cal doesn’t recline in it. He sits so straight, it seems like a cheap dummy of Cal, something that gets blown up for a quick stunt. Then he rotates a half-turn, stopping with his foot, very precise, as if the chair had a limited number of rotations.

Dark suit with a burnt orange tie. His unremarkably handsome face, preserved in venom. He sips from an unmarked steel bottle, then holds it out. “It’s a hot day.”

Lazur says, “What’s in the bottle?”

“Lithium.”

……..

“My father drank it. From our spring. That was how I learned. All kinds of wonderful things come from the ground.”

Darkness. Seeded and harvested. In the flesh of the woman upstairs. And there, Lazur betrays it with the swiveling of his eyes. Cal looks up with a smile, worse, what Lazur knows to be a smile where others would see only placid lips.

No one sees the evil you are. It is the evil they have already accepted. But fatal. Potent. Hyper-competent. In a system that can only survive through its own failure.

“Here’s a truth for you.

That woman is a terrorist.

She killed many people.

Maybe everyone in those cells deserved to be there.”

Lazur watches the words get doled out hypnotically, like candy. Sweet and convenient. “That would be nice, wouldn’t it. If everyone got what they deserved.”

Tktktk.

“You’re a bit of a stalker, Cortázar. You have my address. Were you planning on visiting Zadracarta soon?”

Is that why he’s here? Did you intrude on the domain of the gods? An accident of astral projection. Deadly awareness. Don’t sweat. Stop sweating.

That lithium-smooth voice drones on. “You forced me to play. And now I’m here. And we can play.”

The man reaches into his pocket. Time dilates around the burnt orange fissure, then a phone appears. He places it on the table. Checking his notifications. Already looking back at you.

“Cortázar, do you know of the APOPO?”

…………….

“I speak, of course, of the Anti-Persoonsmijnen Ontmijnende Product Ontwikkeling. The southern giant pouched rat is taught to sniff out tuberculosis. And land mines. They call this rat, the HeroRAT.”

“I met that rat. He wasn’t a hero.”

“The beautiful thing about that rat. Is that he isn’t heavy enough to trigger an explosion.”

“I see.” Lazur waits for the inevitable thread to be drawn together, already resenting it, but knowing if he tries to wriggle out, he’ll just trip.

“You weren’t content with being a rat.”

Lazur wants to say, I’m not a rat, but knows he would only be coincidentally echoing the famous words of the hit feature length animation The Great Mouse Detective (1986), so he keeps his mouth shut.

A sip of lithium. Watch it travel. A mineral chill.

“Only by reducing yourself to the size of a paramecium would you find my gaze lifting from you. But you have not done that. Because you are proud. And you are strong. And it is not in the nature of life to surrender an advantage.”

Someone is coming. Through the glass, from offstage.

Quince. His boss. Flashback to the desert. Another hot day. The sun too big to think.

Lazur leaves the glass room and shuts the door behind him. “What is Cal doing here?”

Quince looks vaguely caught, almost embarrassed, as if some deep and distant part of him had faint awareness of his wormlike hyperflexibility. He says something so empty it just blows through Lazur’s ears. All he can think is: it’s a fucking trap. Can’t you see it? But what he says is:

“Did you check the scanners?”

Quince says, you know how good our scanners are. There’s nothing on him.

WRONG.

NO.

FUCK.

Lazur takes too long to speak. When he does, it’s weak and stalling. Even Quince is able to roll over him. “You said this was a W. But all I see is a big L standing in front of me. So let’s cut the drama and sort it out.”

His boss enters the glass chamber. On stage.

*

Tktktk.

Lazur can’t go back inside. The spotlight is too hot. Was this Cal’s plan? Interrupt the careful snipping of wires. Premature detonation.

He wouldn’t just come here. He’s hiding something. Poison. Kill the star witness. Need to check on Greenwich. But you can’t turn your back on him. With every second, Cal’s smooth tongue gains an advantage. And your boss is stupid and malleable.

Something intangible. A word. Blackmail, or leverage. A man like that is full of compromising phrases, smuggled like cigars.

Where do you stand, to keep the world from breaking?

Lazur walks in the direction of the restrooms, then looks back. They’re talking. No one is facing him. He ducks behind a cubicle with an unlocked computer. Someone is using it, but the seat is empty. Lunch? On the desk, a hot latte, and a croissant. Which means, bathroom break. Go fast. He checks the scanner logs. He sees himself. The handgun checked in, his virility confined to a steel box. And there’s Cal like the second coming. His body fills the screen. The negatized man. A ghost, a demon of plastic, his true form captured by the machine.

Delve into his pocket universe. The square of a wallet. A tube of chapstick. A nub of lotion.

That watch. Stainless steel. Nothing inside but exactly what it needs to tick. The scanners are very good.

They let him keep his phone. Slim and glossy. Like the watch, too exquisitely crafted to contain surprises.

Still. Poison could fit anywhere. But he would bribe someone for that. Why expose himself like this?

Whatever the qatran is. He’s not willing to let the government impound it. He’s all in. And Lazur’s never seen that side of him before. They’re both so careful. Playing beneath the surface. And now—

A door opens. Lazur creeps away and takes cover behind another cubicle. The frills of a panic attack are spreading from his skin, exotic vanes of endangered cortisol. There is nothing like panic when you know everything you’re afraid of is real and wants to kill you.

Staring into the carpet. Beige, with no colors to spur him in any direction. Not hot or cold. Numb and paralyzed as more powerful people make decisions.

There is a wire he has to cut, if he could see it. But there is only half an inch of office carpet, just enough to muffle the impact of feet. He understands now, the beige carpet is a parasitic network, hardened and fibrous, a sclerotoid mass of morgellons which has been consuming reality for some time now. The endangered folk textiles of the desert have no chance against this immortal growth.

He shuts his eyes, in hopes of seeing some inner optic spark, a roll of the phosphene dice. Pick a color. Any color.

Vibration. His eyes snap open. He flips his phone out and it hangs over the carpet, small and erect and electrical, host to a pivotal signal. A detonator.

The cripple’s voice is more coherent. Morphine wearing off. That means pain.

Where are you?

Almost home.

Are you upset?

Lazur covers his mouth. His eyes squeeze shut, splintering the bright day like glass under his eyelids, and then he is staring at the carpet again.

No, he says.
I just need a few minutes.
Call me back.
Wait.
Okay. Call me at—
You got that?

…

I got a new phone.

…

Why?

Because I’m paranoid.

…

Okay. Bye—

He bites the Rubi back, and just hangs up. Daddy’s at work. And he’s NOT FUCKING YOU. He’s BEING FUCKED.

*

He goes back inside the glass room. A peeled orange, already consumed. The smell is distracting.

Cal reaches into his pocket. A tiny vial with a white cream inside. He rubs moisturizer on his hands, working it into the dry skin. “It’s all very confusing to me. But I have been informed, there was a corporate spy looking around my father’s old property. And apparently she got trapped in some ruined building, and suffered dehydration. Erratic behavior. Hallucinations.”

Lazur watches his boss latch onto it. Quince loves when you give him a good narrative.

Cal says, “I’m willing to drop the charges.”

Lazur bites back a laugh of disbelief. Sweat is creeping up his shirt sides. “He has a fucking weapon.”

Quince says, “No need for language.”

“We’re not fucking apes, Quince. This man has control of a deadly. Ultra, modern, post-modern, hyper-exotic material.”

Cal says, “Hyper-exotic material. That’s very interesting. Can you describe it?”

“This black. Viscous substance. Called the qatran.”

“Sounds menacing.”

“You make it into bullets. And activate it with verbal commands.”

He sounds insane. His boss is leaving the room. Has to “take another call”.

In the silence, staring at Cal, gripping the table so hard your nails hurt. Rage, that beautiful, pure chemical. A crystalline distillate of his PTSD. Schedule 1 potency. Eliminating all time except the present. Snapping all social chains and abstractions.

You can kill this man. Leap on the table and kill him.

Is that how afraid you are? Is the threat he poses so fundamental and absolute?

Or is there something you want, so badly, irrationally, that somehow it makes sense to grab that copper hair and slam that serene face into the table until the glass cracks—

“Careful, Cortázar. I am more than a shadow.”

Tktktktk. A second drips in. Then another. Plink plink. Time has you again. Handcuffed by your wristwatch. The world is full of fragile things. What if you knock something over? Your job, your income, your mother.

“Do you have what it takes? To push through skin, and muscle, and hit bone?”

Lazur says, “You’re bad for him.”

Satisfaction breathes through Cal’s face. A confident prediction, proved beyond all doubt. “You’re gambling for the boy.”

“I’m just doing what’s right.”

Cal’s amber eyes search him with the coldest warmth, like marbles that once were molten glass. “Too innocent to know your own ambition?”

Tktktktk.

“God’s purest devil.”

The door opens, and the static silence is broken by ordinary voices, murmuring and laughing. Quince stands there, phone in hand. He has the relief of someone who passed the buck.

Lazur understands, before any word is spoken. There will be no trial. They might record some testimony they can dump in a vault somewhere, to be remixed at some hypothetical point in the next couple hundreds years when the hydra head of the agency needs something from the hydra head of the Zhyber Valhalla corporation. Everything is infinitely absorbed into the bland flesh of men like Quince. A wall of raw chicken.

Then why isn’t Cal happy?

“I was hoping the woman would be remanded into general custody.”

Quince says, “It’s out of my hands now. I’m sure there will be an opportunity to litigate.”

“When will that be?”

“I’m just getting the ball rolling here.”

“If you can’t push it all the way up the mountain, it might go in a direction you dislike.”

“Sorry?”

Calendula looks at the ceiling. His eyes show their age from this angle. He checks his watch, then sighs. In the silence that follows, even the muffled ticking of his luxury timepiece can be heard, in counterpoint to the ticcing in Lazur’s throat.

“We are unable to work this out.”

“I’m sure we can. It’ll just take a little time.” Quince taps the frame of the door. “I really need to get back to my wife, you know how it is—”

Cal says, “He’s fucking Rubicon.”

“What?”

“Your agent is in a sexual relationship with a terrorist.”

A cold sun has landed. Ice burns in Lazur’s armpits, melting down his ribs.

Nervous laugh from Quince.

Cal says, “It makes sense, doesn’t it. Rubicon’s fixation with one particular man. You must have wondered.”

“That’s, uh. That’s a heavy charge.”

“Do a routine check on his personal phone.”

Lazur’s boss looks at him, and he feels the realization clicking into place, neat as the mechanism of a timepiece.

Did he really think he could conceal his indiscretion? He is reminded again of his teen arrogance, thinking he was smarter than everyone else, because he knew so little. But he can’t outgrow this mistake. He really lost his whole life to a boy half his age. And there was no bomb. No ultimate explosion. Just this dull, unfantastic humiliation. Forced to live with nothing left, is this how the cripple feels—

The glass table vibrates, a nasty, whining sound, like a power tool held against it.

Cal’s phone.

Pick it up, Lazur says.

I can take it later, Cal responds.

Lazur reaches across the table and hits the answer button. A mangled voice shreds the speaker.

Hello?

Lazur looks at his boss. Recognize that voice?

Quince sits there, his mind blown. Then he stands up, retreating from the table, from the entire reality collapse of the glass room. “I need to make a call.”

Yeah. Go pray on it.

Cal, with a frayed smile, “Quince.”

“Everyone just. Sit right here. Okay?”

Quince is on the other side of the glass now. Dialing one of his beloved numbers.

They are alone. Staring at each other. With the phone between them.

What did you do?

The broken voice is pulverized now. Shards ground into dust. Static on the line. A sob of humiliation. Click.

But for Lazur, there is only the adrenaline of the play. Suddenly he doesn’t have to be afraid. And nothing is better than that. He has flung his shame onto another man. He can breathe again.

Calendula takes out the little vial of moisturizer, and sets it next to the bottle of lithium water. He reaches back into his pocket and removes something else of similar size, unscrewing it.

Lazur says, “What’s that?”

“Lip balm.”

A rush of air. The door was opened, and now it is closed. Quince is back. Behind him, the silent moving figures of the office, made indistinct by the sun, and the sweat in Lazur’s eyes.

“It’s a hot day,” Cal says.

He brings the tube to his mouth, an unlabeled cylinder actually about the size of a bullet. And he runs it across his lips and they are glistening and black.

*

He speaks, and the lights flicker. Not the lights. The fluorescence is still up there, but dull and flat as beige paint. The windows are black rectangles. That was the sun going out.

But the room is hotter than ever. And there are fractures across your world. Those desks, those people, the silent theater of the office, and the entire universe beyond, are starting to crack.

Quince says something, then wipes his head, feeling sweaty. His hand comes away with blood and he stares at it. The eyes he stares with are turning pink, then red, his blood vessels spreading with the cracks in the glass behind him.

The sun is back, hitching on a consonant. The office is glancing, pointing, mouths opening, without sound. The mall keeps returning. The ring of watchers. He’s stuck on a beat of time, and everything that happened since that day has been a reprise of the same hallucinatory moment.

The doomed shudder of his heart is finally in the world, exposed to everyone. The sleep paralysis, the panic attack, it was his grenade to curl up on, to cuddle into his stomach and squeeze his eyes shut and his sphincter tight. With the consolation that, at least no one would know. He would not be shamed. And they would not be contaminated.

Lazur kicks the table and the rollers of his chair spin across the thin carpet and it hits the glass wall. He puts his arms up and the room goes dark.

Light returns. But the sun is gone. There is only the overhead lighting.

There is pain in his arms, as if stung by insects. He twists them to see shards of bone.

A shivering, shocked breath, like snorting magnet shavings. Hotboxing the iron in Quince’s blood. It drips down the walls like rain, through clouds of drifting fat.

Quince is a fountain. Blood squirts from his neck, dying his body crimson.

Watch it with fascination. As if disconnected from your understanding of what it is.

Pan slowly across the room.

A suit, half-dipped in red.

Dilated pupils. Specks of dark sun swallowed in a white void that erases all meaning.

Lips black and bubbling. Calendula gasps smoke, and the trapped air of the room drags with his breath.

It propagates through atmosphere. Like any explosion. His word, the trigger.

Lazur bolts from the room and slams the door shut. The cracks spread on that brittle slab, blood and fat finding new paths. But it holds. And now he is on the other side, with all the nervous sounds of feet and mouths. Someone laughs in shock.

He jams a chair against the handle and steps back, and with each step, another red footprint is added to the carpet.

His gun is downstairs. He keeps walking backwards, watching the red cube in the middle of the office.

A ruby monolith. A dead pixel. A toxic cell. A Boolean silence. Unknowable as cancer. They watch it like a screen. This vast, air-conditioned silence, as of worship.

Another step back, his bloody footprint faded at the edges like an old rubber stamp.

Cracks appear in the foundation of the woman next to him, cool ivory craquelure, dragging her hair into the seams and then something like a sudden sneeze, did Lazur sneeze? A reflexive jerk so total it seems to have come from within.

A wave of glass fills the air, glossy blood on one face, clean glass on the other, and then nothing is clean.

Screaming.
The glass is part of everyone.
A giant shard lodged in someone’s stomach. Silica particles sting Lazur’s eyeball.

The glass room is a jaw ripped in half. A chunk dangles from the ceiling and shatters on the floor. A man with dark lips stands on the tongue of gore.

He says something, and it is like a bucket of blood tossed through the air.

Night crashes into the building. Lazur gets 37 papercuts. Pens eject their ink in black clouds, a trail of deadly flechettes. Something gasps on the wall, still alive, then falls apart.

Wind howls through the shattered floor. Open-office plan. The sun is back. Bolts and screws and teeth. Nails, and nails. He crawls through the I Spy hell, cutting himself on unrecognizable pieces of things. He is covered in confetti. Loose flaps clap around him.

*

Lazur understands why Cal was willing to make this play. If Cal destroys the building, it will be a crime no one has the imagination for yet. The witnesses to a new weapon, gone.

Cal’s voice cracks through the room, amplified by the lipstick, as if his sound waves are flammable gas passing through a slit of fire.

Where are you?

His voice drones like the killing horn at the end of the universe.

None of them had to die.

Something stabs Lazur’s heart.

You flew too close to the sun. Adopted. But mine nonetheless.

The blown-out windows expose Lazur to the sky. A solar rift, paperwork flying into the sun, evidence incinerated. He only finds the door when the wall of viscera and shrapnel opens from the other side, and a soldier is birthed from it like a spawn of the building sent to defend itself. The man unholsters his sidearm and Lazur feels a beat of hope. Just one bullet. He has to believe, it could end so simply.

And it’s true. Cal flinches at the sight of the gun. He can be harmed. But his voice is faster than the soldier’s finger.

Bullets explode in the gun, then the soldier’s teeth explode in his mouth, and then the rest. The air gasps and gulps. Human fireworks. A black stain, anorexic in its char. A trembling laughing anatomy embedded in the ceiling. A giggling skull worm with pasta limbs. It slops to the floor, and goes still.

Lazur runs through the open door. At the end of the hall, someone is limping down the stairs. His witness. Institutional green gym pants and sweatshirt. Jagged dark hair still growing back.

You are the only person who understands, how badly we need to kill this man.

*

Another soldier runs past. Lazur waits around the corner, begging for the sound of a gun. Please shoot him. Please. His heart beats three times, then the building shakes. A gun spins across the floor in a skid of gore. He stares, transfixed. It lays in the crossroads, exposed at the intersection of hallways. He takes a step toward it, then freezes. He can’t make himself move. His breathing is so loud. His heart—

A whiff of green apple gum and Greenwich shoots past him, skidding into the open space. She bends down stiffly, reaching for the gun, then she looks up. Lazur knows what she is looking at. Nothing is faster than those lips.

But she tries anyways.

Her fingers touch the gun, lifting it an inch before it drops, and she rises on the balls of her feet, hands splayed into claws, veins bursting in her eyes like plasma lamps of blood.

Cal pronounces his sentence.

The lights flutter along the hall, as if along the passage of an invisible projectile. There is a brief silence.

Her jaw snaps open, saliva spraying, hair flaring around her head, sneakers kicked off, joints popping, blood spurting from her nose, black lines racing along the walls as the wiring chars and when those lines lap her, the bulbs burst in the ceiling, along with the sun, and debris pukes from the darkness onto his shoes, chunks of plaster and rags soaked so deep they’re almost black, a hot copper smell of circuits and blood, and a clean white tooth, the one she just had replaced.

Cal emerges from the smoke. The heat from his lungs expanding and contracting, pushing back the black dust and sucking it in again. His lips are cracked, a gentle smile. Pupils like dots. Lazur in the milky crosshair. The dark-haired man stumbling away, then crawling, then paralyzed, trembling in the nerve jelly of his limbs.

Cal stands over him, blowing smoke in mesmeric rings. A blister jewels his lip. He wipes the corner of his mouth, a dark streak. His breathing is amplified, heavy and draconic. Lazur catches the hint of a smile, waiting for him to bolt, for effect to follow cause.

Good. You know the futility of running.

Cal’s face empties.

There is no hate. And there is no love.

Why did it have to be him?

A man so cold, and so methodical. Without imagination. Like being killed by a car.

If it was the boy. At least there would be a genuine joy, in what he does. It would, at least, have felt like something, or given meaning to someone else. Something more than a molecular process, a stepping stone.

Somewhere across the world, morphine is draining from the body he will never hold, distant and useless as an angel. Why does he think of him? It was just a brief attachment. It never meant anything. And whatever contained him in your head, will soon return to atoms.

Lazur looks up, a trickle of watery blood running from his scratched cornea.

Those thin lips spread above him, and the air is hot between them, and that teeth and tongue are transforming it, and the sun is blinking out but Lazur can’t see it, there is only this beige hall with its dull carpet and shitty lighting, this nothing place where nothing can be felt except the same anywhere nowhere parking lot cortisol that has haunted and faded the lines of his entire life.

A kh sound.

Death is in the K’s
the voiceless velar plosive.

The heat strips whatever wetness from Lazur’s eyeballs and sucks the air from his mouth and his veins swell and the lights flicker and his synapses snap and he’s gone.

*