cunt toward enemy [s3e1] business casual

Parsani notes that the premature birth of Ahriman is in fact an allegory for the self-introspection of Time (Zurvan) into its more abysmal scales…
— Reza Negarestani, Cyclonopedia

✦

Greenwich is showering. The concrete floor and gritty sand makes her think of a beach shower. But there is no ocean, only the black sea of petroleum beneath her feet in this desert bunker.

She opens her eyes and her skin gives her vertigo. Serpents barely visible in the murk of deep waters. The qatran is feeding off the violence like a school of red garra. She remembers going with her mother to a salon (the lull of fans and a corner-mounted TV and some toys sticky with other children’s fingers) and her mother’s feet going in a basin of fish which nibbled away the dead skin.

The memory sprays away, ash running black into the drain. But the stains of the qatran remain. She is relaxed enough for the ink to be still, the way distant clouds are still.

The water turns to sand, hissing down her spine.

In the desert, on the outskirts of town, her friend was raining.

It was so sudden, she had no reaction. Sand blew past, in endless particles, uncaring. That was when she knew. She lived in an hourglass.

She picked up a piece of metal and it burnt her fingers. She dropped it then picked it up again. As long as she held it, she didn’t have to feel anything else. The land mine fragment had a symbol which she did not recognize. She sketched it on her skin with her nail every day until she had memorized it. Years later, she came to know it as the logo of Zhyber Valhalla, that is, a brand stamped into the earth to cauterize and make it subservient. She had something she wanted to destroy.

It was enough, for awhile.

She would like to be less rigid. To become less precise in her speech, and to stop dancing with snipers in her dreams. To find some softer self she could have been. She was a hard boy and now she’s a hard woman. Or she was never anything but a weapon, and maybe everything is, the only difference is whether you have the luxury of denying it.

Sand turns to water. She washes ash from her foreskin, then reaches for her towel. It isn’t there. An unforgivable lapse. What’s wrong with her? What’s next? The death of millions?

She walks out, dripping on the bunker floor, and stands at the open slit of the embrasure, a rectangle of desert. A speck of sand catches on her wet face. Then another. Dead sparkles.

She dries in the open air. Lazur hasn’t moved this whole time. Laying against the wall, still dark with debris.

Clean yourself.

He turns toward the sound of her voice.

As long as the scent is on you, you will remember.

She leads him to the shower. He automatically takes his clothes off and sinks back to the floor, legs folding. She turns the shower on. He crawls away from it, disturbed by the fast moving droplets and the loud noise. Ash runs from his body, not enough to be clean, just a wetter kind of dirty.

She thought it was building dust at first. But it didn’t weep with the water. She touches a pale lock of his hair, unnaturally bleached chunks like a broken transcription, Morse code from hell. White as a syllable, she whispers.

Streaks of another man’s mouth. A bite taken out of Lazur’s eumelanin. The sentence Cal did not finish proclaiming.

✦

He forgot to visit his mom.

It doesn’t matter. Her brain is rotting. No one really sees anyone. And whatever they do perceive, so bright at first, begins to decay until it’s an embarrassment of itself.

He examines the desert with post-traumatic coldness. Greenwich comes to his side, a warm battery of violence. A distant part of him is glad that her heat radiates so far from her body. Because despite how badly he wants to touch another living thing, it feels impossible.

This desert will one day bloom. Even here, even now. All will be green again, by the grace of God.

Lazur doesn’t see her vision. He doesn’t see anything.

I’m just so lost.

Greenwich places her gun in his hand.

Where does this point?

✦

The boardroom of some high building. The outside is brown with smog, the color of a dirty aquarium. The air is aggressively clean inside. Cal always liked that smell. Air that had work done on it. The smell of heaven-huge HVAC systems, a trip to the mall or his father’s skyscraper.

His blown-off ear is covered with a bandage. He has taken off his cast to avoid appearing weak. It hurts, but not as badly as he expected, at this age where everything lingers. He wonders if the qatran is healing his body. Probably placebo. But if his ear could reform, that would be very neat and pleasant. He hears strange things in the burst drum. The circulations of his body, surging and whispering. He tries to ignore it as he speaks.

“So you see. Things will be a certain way now. And I will give certain suggestions. But everything will be all right for you.”

“Huh,” Taupe says. Taupe is a man with tarnished brown hair, dead grass on a gray beach. He has a Myers-Briggs tattoo on his shaking hand, oriented toward the recipient. He uses the same plastic surgeon as Cal. He is exactly fifty percent old money and fifty percent new money, and he has been favored by the gods of his ancestors and the gods of the stock market.

He says, “I don’t like it. My money doesn’t like it.”

“This transcends money, Taupe. This is about legacy.”

“Huh.” The man always had this efficient way of neutralizing eloquence. The grunts and monosyllables. You drive a sports car and he flings a brick into the road.

“I’m asking you to imagine the world the way God would have imagined it.” Spacious pause. “Start with a void.”

If you press him enough, Taupe has to speak at length, to avoid appearing retarded. “That’s pretty abstract. And you’ve been getting some heat from some hard to fuck powers. The West—”

“You’re still thinking in states. Names on a map. A map we will burn.”

“I have money in those names. I’m not looking to shake things up.”

Cal takes a deep drink of his lithium water, trying not to drop it. His wrist hurts intensely. “If you could only open your mind. Just a crack. And imagine anything. Something money can’t buy.”

“I like what money buys.”

Cal is finding it hard to think. “Taupe. We went to school together.”

“I know we did.” Flat silence. “But treason with every nuclear power isn’t easy to swallow. And what does your lipstick do that a bomb can’t?”

A murmur of arms dealers and defense contractors. That was clever.

“In terms of the qatran’s vocabulary, we are at toddler level. The level that leveled the headquarters of the foremost intelligence agency on the continent. By the time I reach primary school equivalence, I will be able to tell lies to God.”

“I have no idea what that means.”

Cal’s wrist aches. He needs to buy a new watch. But there’s no point. He’s run out of time. The best he can do now is retreat before he loses face entirely.

The door opens with a sensor-activated swing. Slow, seductive, ADA-compliant. Wheels roll across the burgundy carpet. Sleeveless black midi dress tapers down a perma-rexic frame, business casual meets Basic Instinct. Black tights hide the catheter bag. And, in a concession to the conservative surroundings, sensible black flats.

Taupe says, “What’s he doing here?”

“You know Rubicon. By reputation if not—”

“He’s a terrorist.”

Short pause. “He is the son of my friend.”

“We deal with these people through intermediaries. Or has the entire social order collapsed overnight?”

Rubicon swallows and mumbles, “My father said good things about everyone here, and I just wanted—”

“Listen, boy. The secretary will get something for you. Mm?

Now. It’s clear you have something with the qatran. But you have limited amounts of it. And judging by your lips—

(a white, lizardy flake flutters to the conference table)

—you have limited capacity to use it. So. Distribute your supply among the men in this room. We’ll train trusted women to say these words, maybe one word per woman, keep it siloed—”

“You just reinvented mutually assured destruction.”

“It’s a functional system.”

Cal coughs and grabs for his water, faster than he would have liked. His throat is still so dry, no matter how much he drinks. “Gentlemen. My intent was not to create another captive bureaucracy, or another set of borders. Anyone can own those, for a little while. But I would prefer to leave more than a pretty statue for the desert.”

Blank-faced oligarchs. Some of them might have listened, if Taupe weren’t here. It’s the man’s personality and it’s worked his whole life, keep talking, keep bullying, get your piece of the pie. It’s the same for every man that Calendula meets at his age. Deeply entrenched, enough money to turn their defense mechanisms into a lifestyle. It’s too late to change, and he knows he is no different. The only optimal move is to maintain momentum.

“I am trying to create a bullet that pierces the heat death of the universe—”

“That’s all very lofty, Cal. But we’re talking in practicalities. We need the source of your freaky tar, and we need a pro rata plan for distribution, and a print manual, laminated very nice, of the specific words and their uses—”

The conference table makes a crackling noise. Taupe picks up the phone. “Hello?”

The phone flips from his hand, flung across the table with a plastic clatter. Red worms crawl from the holes in the mouthpiece, oozing like dirty tomato paste. The man’s body is opened like a flower, petals of torso flapping wetly. The back of the room is covered in a Gothic gradient of raspberry-vanilla, a fine mist of blood and bone dust.

The man next to him appears to be staring, remarkably calm all things considered. Then he rolls backwards and around in his chair until it exposes the shredded half of his body, skull like an ivory bowling ball buried in a gooey red cake. Okay, okay, okay, he says. Then he falls on his face and out of his body and some of him is on the table and the rest is on the floor. But he’s still talking, still saying okay, okay, okay—

Rubicon pants from the heat, feeling the strain of his singular lung. He drinks Cal’s lithium water and it spills through a hole in his cheek, spattering black on the carpet.

“My apologies,” Calendula says. “He’s still getting the pronunciation down.”

It bothers Rubicon to look at that half-dead man make all those noises. He’s used to being so far away that his massacres look like pretty fireworks, and get packaged into fun, digestible videos. This is important practice. He needs to work on his public speaking. One day, someone will have a gun, or an army, and he’ll need to enunciate perfectly and not run out of breath. But most of all, because it prepares him for what he has to do to the man who ruined his body and betrayed him and broke his heart, the last part of him that wasn’t broken. He’ll show that insufferable technician what a broken heart, a broken everything feels like—

He shouts and the oligarch explodes, a controlled burst that shoots straight up, splatting the ceiling and raining back down. But despite the elegance of this performance, the audience reacts in exactly the same way. A cheap circus of limbic shock, clutching their hearts and gasping and being so annoying and predictable…

Cal lays a hand on his knee under the table. Smooth palm on pantyhose, the barest tremble from the broken wrist. Adrenaline sheathed in lithium. Thumb stroking his razor kneecap with pride. “That was much better.”

Rubicon looks up with a smile that stretches wide and oily, evil tar melting into the cracks of his lips. He forgets what he was thinking about.