cunt toward enemy [s3e2] dehiscence

Lazur sits in a cramped office, facing a desk with an empty seat. There is a CRT security monitor on the desk playing cartoons. He is exhausted. He can’t sleep. He has to wait for it to ambush him, when all hope is gone.

Dynamite rains behind his eyelids. Scarred lips chewing on a hissing red stick like Bugs Bunny, smearing it like lipstick. Lazur’s head hangs back, mouth open. He is so tired. Wile E. Coyote just made a bunny sexbot full of dynamite to lure that nymphomaniac Bugs Bunny. Bugs counters with a coyote sexbot. They’re just looking for love. They’re crazy about each other.

The volume fades. Lazur opens his eyes. A man sits across from him, finger on the dial. “Cartoons,” the man says. Wry smile. After a long silence, Lazur finally says “Yeah,” forced to admit it is cartoons.

Blond man in his 40s with a drawl and gold-rimmed glasses held together by tape. He looks like he could have been an actor in an old movie, not the lead, but maybe his best friend.

“Mr. Lazur, how are you doing on this, ah, day.” The man wisely decides to forgo any adjectives.

“Who are you?”

“You can call me J.G.”

“Jesus…Ghrist?”

“Lord no.”

Cartoons haunt the CRT, smothered screaming. Lazur stares at the man, feeling vaguely aggressive. He talks only to find something worth hurting. “You know my name. So I should know yours.”

“Jonquil G. The G lends gravitas.”

“What’s it stand for?”

The man pauses as if counting down in his head. “Gold.”

“Who are you?”

“I’m a citizen of the greatest country on earth…whatever that may be.”

“Who do you work for?”

Easy smile. “You should have been an interrogator.”

“I don’t like asking questions. I just like the answers.”

“You’re in luck, Mr. Lazur. I have all the details right here.” JG thumbs through a manila folder so heavy the papers are falling out. He takes a long time but his face is so serious, even concerned, thumb licked at precise intervals as if he had to account for the saliva, eyebrow raising higher and higher, that Lazur doesn’t interrupt him. Finally, JG sets the folder down. “Good lord, this boy keeps trying to blow you up.”

“Yeah…”

“Any bright ideas as to why he took a shine to you?”

“I’m great with kids.”

“Oh, come now.”

Lazur’s words are the hum of a cocked gun. “Must be my winning personality.”

“Well, we hope so. We like to win around here. You’ll find us a little more effectual than your prior position.”

“Who’s we.”

“INNOCENT.”

“What’s that.”

“INNOCENT is concerned with the ultimate outcomes of things. And the nature of the universe.”

“Tell me about the universe.”

“You reside within a dry universe, Mr. Lazur.”

“I see.”

“All universes are wet or dry. You happen to inhabit a dry one.”

Lazur feels really sad about that for some reason. But he can’t afford to feel sad, so he doesn’t. Flashes of death erase possibility of feeling. The sour smell of a nursing home bed. Sudden bursts of decompressing gas and shock waves. Buildings and bodies turned to meaningless noise. A broken watch that was once treasured from the pristine days of childhood. He works the strap of that middle school watch with the shattered LED crystals but it’s stuck so he leaves it. He can cut it off when he cuts his wrists.

JG says, “You ever tried the qatran? For yourself?”

“Black isn’t my color.”

Except maybe it is. He really doesn’t mind it at all. And it goes with so many things. He really needs to wash his hair.

✦

Accumulation of Explosive in Hair: Part 3: Binding Site Study

The blast whips his hair back, young and full. His first manual detonation, piloting a robot and it hit something and tipped over. He was fine, and he felt drunk afterwards. What do you take from that? That you’re invincible? Or that you could die at any second?

Previous studies have shown that hair can serve as a good template for binding a variety of explosives.

His black hair whipping around, sticking to his face like a hairy song, syllables streaking white, lashing ash.

The interaction of explosives with a multifunctional, biological structure, such as hair, is quite complex.

Every explosion in history hits him like a sea breeze.

…black and red hair sorbed explosives more readily than brown or blond hair…results show that sorption of explosives, via vapor diffusion, to black hair is significantly greater than to blond, brown or bleached hair.

They’re killing us.

…the observation that melanin sorbs both TATP and TNT more readily than some of the best performing black hair—

His skull is like a vat of water in which bombs are sunk. Strange and slow mountains of death.

—because hair appears to be more than a template on which a subliming explosive can condense, the structure of hair must be considered. Hair structure includes a medulla, an inner cortex, and an outer shell, called the cuticle. Melanin granules, responsible for the hair color, are found almost exclusively in the inner cortex layer. There are two types—eumelanins, the brown-black pigments; and pheomelamins, the yellow-red pigments—

Lazur felt sick after reading that study. He’d been able to repress those feelings back then, but for a brief time it made the oiled, machined materials around him into a malevolent presence. These temples of the archons, targeting him on the cellular level. His beautiful mother’s beautiful hair, growing grayer, will it be safer…

His scalp itches. He is a dirty bomb. He wiped himself off with sand, exfoliating and rough but PURIFYING, still smells like death but it’s enough. If he showers he might fall apart, held together by debris and bone paste. He needs to be dry in this dry universe. Keep your powder dry, remember why the bomber has to die.

They keep talking about the terrorist and the CEO. A mission is growing under him like a horse and he hates it. It seems like they’ve been talking forever because he’s half-dreaming, one eye on reality like a beached fish. He wishes he was a child again, that pure sleep he’d need scheduled drugs for now.

The CRT is playing something black and white, like propaganda for the coming world. “You got a lot of nerve, buddy…”

A dog barks, somewhere in the movie or outside. His head hurts. He looks out the window but sees no dog, just a desert and the black quadcopter they came on. He keeps expecting it to explode, leaving them stranded in this desolation, waiting for the end and deprived of any measurements of its arrival, not even the dignity of a timer striking 00:00.

But nothing happens. He says, with the hard wisdom of the PTSD junkie, what he has to tell himself every night even if his body doesn’t believe it to be true: “They can’t be everywhere at once.”

JG gestures at him with a smile as if encouraging a pupil who had trouble speaking up. “That’s right.”

“Calendula will be training more speakers. But anyone he trains can destroy him with a word. So he needs to trust them. Or control them. He already has Rubicon—”

Greenwich searches his face and he looks back dead-eyed, as if to say, I won’t hesitate.

“—so that’s two speakers. One in training, still learning the words
(baby’s first word KABOOM)
We have to
(FUCKING KILL THEM)
strike now. Before the weapon multiplies.” He scratches his scalp. Both eyes are open, pupils getting thicker.

JG says, “Speaking of. We need to break their supply chain.”

“Where does the lipstick come from?”

“There are a few sites.”

“Sites.”

JG is quieter, his smile frozen like the old actor he never was. “The tunnels.”

Greenwich says, “We need to get the boy and the man.”

“We know they left on private aircraft this morning. And we know they split up.”

Lazur leans forward. “Split up?”

“To get the lipstick. Now that people know what the qatran does, that it’s not just a research chemical or ballistic component, he has to keep it close. And when he has it all locked down, it may be too late. The only chance we have, is he’s a little rushed. Maybe he didn’t expect things to kick off this early.”

JG unfurls a map across the table and looks for random things to weight it with. A gun clip, a pocket flask, and he takes his watch off. No matter how much Lazur looks at it, he can’t identify anything about it. His attention can’t penetrate the golden glints of light on the glass. The Super Boring Watch. Lastly, JG takes his glasses off and places them on the final corner, barely holding down the yellowed map which wants to fold up again, Lazur feels it in his spine.

JG leans back and rubs the bridge of his nose. “We have ten best guesses as to where they could be, and only enough time to hit half of that in the next half day. And then it gets pretty dark.”

Lazur looks at the map. Blue borders broken by defiant red rivers, veins shattering the body, a tangle of world-wires. He snipped the bombs and his superiors snipped the borders. Territorial vasectomies. This is the first time he’s been given this top-level power, and it feels good. Because he knows best. His finger comes down, a dark and dirty nail on an old house in an old country.

✦

Lazur has his DNR and a CZ-75. His suit is pulse-tight, black with pinkred triangles and a defusal kit strapped to his leg. Whiteblack hair is trapped under the strap of a respirator mask, skewing out in wild strands. It’s allergy season.

The yard of the mansion is overgrown, snow-capped mountains above the trees. He moves slow, cautious of the overgrown lawn which has been invaded by the garden from one direction and the forest from the other. He is so busy watching the dirt at his feet that he doesn’t see the mass of yellow flowers and what they carry. He brushes it at waist level and it explodes and he jerks to the side and his foot lands in loose earth and he waits for that to explode too but it’s just a burrow. He looks down for blood and finds only a green seed pod curled around itself by the force of its detonation, a white spatter of seeds sticking to his death condom suit. He picks off the debris of dehiscence. He knows that word from his medic duty, a stitched wound that opens up again, a hideous blind mouth refusing to stay shut, refusing to heal, and he knows that word from tending his mother’s garden and reading her plant diary which was a scrapbook of her experiences with each plant and he can’t believe he misplaced such an artifact which now seems like losing the Grail after it was in your hands. Forget-me-not and guilt invades him. He’ll see her soon, on one side or another.

He enters the mansion from the side, through a small parlor and into a hall. He stops at the sight of glistening spider webs, only visible at certain angles. He moves slowly, a spider invading a foreign web, uncertain of where to step. A web has strands for the spider to walk, and it has strands for prey. Dry universe. Wet universe.

Something like black mold in the walls. Like the webs, it hides iridescence, but not at the whim of the sun. Or it’s just the rot of an old house, and panic is neurally radiating from all he sees.

Bodies hang from the ceiling. He is deep down the hall by now and they are up on the high ceiling and he didn’t see until the sun lit them up like dirty honey. And soon that sun will set and he will be left in this house stripped of electrical wiring. But he keeps going, watching the bodies to see if they breathe or move. He smells something rank and fleshly, but not the familiar stench of decay. They seem embalmed. Some kind of rope encircles them and he thinks of a trap that yanks your leg and pulls you into the ceiling. Dummies of ballistic rubber wrapped in detcord bondage, tied in humiliating, strained positions beyond what a human body can take. But the one who placed them here might disagree.

Lazur is directly under one and it reaches for him with blast-amputated stumps, face like a gelatin that a spoiled child has been picking at. Down the torso, yonic wounds full of black mold, and something like ratshit or fruit pits strewn through the gel. A constellation of bullets.

The next one is blood red, red as the richest raspberry syrup you ever saw, bones suspended in a vampiric aspic of biofidelic jelly. He saw one of these during training. A Frangible Surrogate Limb, which simulates the human leg during land mine tests.

Another dummy, explosive cord pulling heels to head, a stick of dynamite forced into a cloaca of bullets, precarious like it might slide out at any moment—

Lazur laughs through the respirator, thinking about the people who obviously have to do this for Rubicon because the terrorist can barely hold a glass of water without spilling it. Men trained to kill, spending their afternoon arranging this ludicrous tableau of blow-up dolls.

He goes silent. Was that a sound, reacting to his? A scratch, or a creak. The interlocking mechanisms of the mansion, far from dead, become apparent to him. A thousand tons of antique kindling. Two stories ready to drop on him. Floorboards that could swallow his foot or puke up whatever ordnance you can pack into a wine cellar, basement, bomb shelter, cistern. Tktktk.

He follows a pair of footprints behind wheel tracks. Wheelbarrow, he thinks. No. Wheelchair, and not the powered one. Cal pushing it? He wouldn’t wear these shoes. These are bodyguard shoes, or a caretaker.

The trail continues, but the dust is thinner here and he stops, wondering why. He sinks down until the last ray of light shows him, amid the cobwebs, a single deathly filament that belongs to no spider.

He unstraps the cute little defusal kit on his thigh. The miniaturized tools are as delicate as the tripwire, as if made for a universe where everything was shrinking to strands of spit, death from the throat. Just as he is about to cut the wire, he stops. He follows it to the faded wallpaper and starts peeling it. The water damage is so severe that the underlying material comes away in chunks. As he pulls away the final fragment, it explodes. A cloud of daddy-long-legs like living hair and his cutter drops and bounces on the floor and his fingers drag at the wallpaper as he teeters on the balls of his feet, hip brushing the wire and making it tremble. He forces himself to stay still as the spiders pour over him, their long long legs with too many segments spilling across his feet and up his thighs and spiraling around his ribs as his lungs carry them like waves up to the trampoline of his heart with the suit stretched tight over it and one of them crawls very slowly across his mask like something on the ocean floor, a single leg tapping just to the side of his earhole as it finds its footing and tickles around his neck and starts to walk down his back. They don’t swarm away like a cloud of bats, Gothically disturbed. They don’t care about his life or his fear, they linger carrying out their tiny arachnid algorithms. So he works amid the spiders.

There is a musty reek of mold (death, the smell of death, he thinks, something black and rotten and living) and he adjusts the seal on his mask. Amid the vibrating mass of harvestmen hair, he finds a stick of vintage dynamite weeping nitroglycerin, with a jury-rigged detonator at the tip. If the tripwire is pulled taut, it explodes. If it loses tension, it explodes. He recognizes the principle, but the mechanism is odd and sloppy with excessive parts, a childlike puzzle. He holds a gear in place with a wad of putty, then gets to work. Years ago he would have just stepped over the wire. But he needs to make sure that if he becomes something that can only run, head emptied of everything but fear, that the wire is gone. He doesn’t believe he can eliminate his fear. It is too great and horrible and it has dominated him too many times. All he can do is work around it.

Just as he disarms the tripwire, he hears something in the walls. He steps away and it follows him, scratching just on the other side. He points his gun at it, this scraping that drags itself through his hair, a claw in his scalp—

The rat waddles from the hole, a spider struggling slowly in its mouth, legs brushing the fur like a dog it is disappearing inside. The rat scampers to the end of the hall, through a door cracked just enough for the mangy body to squeeze through, leaving a smear of spider leg.

Lazur goes to the door and pushes on it with his gun, very slowly, afraid of the old hinges. It opens a little wider and nothing happens. He follows the rat into a dining room in decay.

He knows that scarred back anywhere. It doesn’t sit in the usual luxury power wheelchair. This is a flimsy and temporary throne, vintage wood with a cobweb stretched between the handlebars. The web is the only moving thing in this room, breathing softly from a draft. He stares as if transfixed by a trap.

A gunshot in the forest. The terrorist doesn’t wake up. So the technician comes in slow, feeling like an intruding shadow. But most shadows don’t have guns. That’s why they’re slaves to their bodies.

Rubicon’s dark sleeveless midi dress is unzipped from back, showing off his scars like the shrapnel of his fragged shadow. The gentle dusk cannot change the angle of it.

The rat is licking a puddle of something under the table. On that table, a tube of lipstick. Lazur moves toward it and his boot hits plastic, a bottle of empty Ensure rattling across the hardwood.

The terrorist opens his eyes, as if emerging from a morphine haze. A dark crust stains his lips.

“Aw, fuck,” Rubicon says. He reaches for the lipstick with an amputated ET hand and Lazur effortlessly crosses the distance and swats it from his fingertips. It hits the floor with an ear-splitting crack and the rat explodes, guts on the wall like a tomato, tail sticking al dente.

Their hearts beat in the silence, deafening them to each other. Both of them had imagined so much they would say. But the distance and all its ethereal maybes are collapsed into shame and rage and the number of bullets in the chamber and the tube of mass destruction on the floor.

Lazur takes the lipstick. It’s so warm in his palm he has to tell himself he’s not being burnt, and that his hand isn’t bleeding. He can almost taste it on his lips like second-hand smoke triggering the taste of old highs, something dank and psychoactive—

He shoves it in his pocket and it’s like an amplifier was turned off. He grabs the wheelchair, a cage for that squirming body, the only way out is the floor. Rubicon grips the armrests, unable to see the expression on his face.

Gunshots.

Rubicon says, “You’re in trouble now.”

A door opens and Lazur steps back, thumbing his safety off. Floorboards creak. Greenwich enters the room and her black skinsuit seems to flow onto her hands and face as the qatran surges with violence. In all this rotting wood and paper and the scent of lignin, she is a tritagonist whelped from ink. She lowers her gun when she sees Lazur has the lipstick. She comes over to the exploded rat carcass and prays for it. Only then does Lazur feel sad. You can’t remember to feel sad unless someone says it’s okay.

Rubicon spits on the floor, a sticky pink strand that hangs from his lip. “You got your qatranny to do the killing for you. As usual.”

The qatran surges in her flesh, hot from the killing, hot from seeing him. “Is that how you greet guests in your own house?”

Rubicon stammers and she grabs his wheelchair from behind. Her violence-waxed skin burns the back of his neck, hissing between the scars. The heat is strongest in his hair, blond marking the skin that isn’t burnt yet. He tries to get up, atrophied legs trembling, but Lazur straddles the chair.

Defiant scarred cat look. But that sunken chest is beating hard. The presence of their two personalities in the same space, this time with nothing to hold them back. No diplomatic immunity or warped affection. I break you. Or you break me.

“Better run now,” Rubicon says, but his voice is shaking.

Lazur looks at Greenwich. “Are we good?”

She made three bodies cold. A hole in each suit but one. The last hid in the trees and it was like a child’s game, around and around, shooting off bark and bits of skin and as she spent her last round she realized the man might kill her, was paid well by her enemy for years of experience taking years from others, the kind of man who shaved seconds and could dance in the places that fear fenced from most of her foes, and her gun’s silence would tell him to step out and kill her. So she ran at the tree and shouted through her hand, nails drawing black like straws full of ink, a simple phrase she heard many times on headphones laid heavy on her head with big earmuffs swallowing her face like baby black holes and then many times as she spoke that phrase, forced to destroy things in the glass room, locked naked into that steel frame and watching pigs and men and women explode. Some had been fellow agents. Loyal companions. Her voice, not yet burnt, struggled with the phrase as electrodes charred her back for each failed attempt, for each sob or scream or threat she replaced it with. At the sound of her voice, a friend told the one-way glass, do what you have to do. It’s okay. I know. Others begged for their lives. She prayed for each one. And when her hand strikes the tree and splinters burst in a spray of sap, shredding through the man on the other side, and the canopy crashes between them and he is dying in the branches, she reaches for his hand and takes the gun from it and replaces it with a hand no less black and prays for him like she prayed for all the others.

She gives Lazur the operational gist of it, just a few words, and he receives the rest in dark clouds unspoken, with his natural sensitivity and perhaps the shared field of violence buzzing between them. He knows her hand is hotter than the rest of her and smells like tree sap and she carries bad echoes like he does and they have seen each other’s hells like astronauts.

They came with a van of agents and split off from them. The agents went into the forest, to the site where lipstick was harvested by Rubicon’s father long ago. “I don’t know if my people succeeded there or not.” She sets her khaki field watch to a 20 minute timer. “When this goes off, we have to leave.”

Everyone came here prepared to die. If a single stick can be recovered from the mansion or the site, that will be considered success. But to have captured the terrorist—Lazur feels like he has his own runaway nervous system in his grasp, and can finally hold it accountable for how slimy and disgusting his own blood has become, poisoned with the trickle of his damaged amygdala.

He picks an ampule from the table. In such a small piece of glass and clear liquid, your manhood. He drops it on the floor and steps on it with a wet crunch. He plants his foot on the wheelchair between Rubicon’s crotch and the cripple gasps. His combat boot glistens with testosterone, a sweet smell between their faces. “Not hurting anything, am I?”

“C-Cal is coming, you’d better—”

The technician’s boot digs where the black dress sinks between skinny legs, until he feels the catheter tube. “No cock, no ball, just torture.”

They’re speaking very low now, the dark suit over the cripple. Rubicon writhes but there’s nowhere to go, words squeezing out instead: “This is all, your fault. Could’ve walked away—”

The whisper is a spark on the dry kindling of Lazur’s guilt. Without him, this conflict might have been resolved by lawyers in a very boring way. Instead, a building exploded and hundreds died and more will die and it might never stop. All his victories, all those careful defusings, ruined by how it ended. He got involved with a boy half his age, a terrorist, a mass murderer. All his noble intentions burned up in a blaze of gross controlling lust.

On the other side of the wheelchair, Greenwich studies the blond terrorist, his deformed spine, how pathetic his breathing is. She can’t believe this weakling was one of her captors. He’s just a crippled boy. Less than that. He looks like take your daughter to work day meets roadkill.

She pushes the wheelchair down the hall and Lazur runs alongside. Stop, stop—

They stop and he spills out, landing between their boots. He crawls blindly and they grab him, ripping the dress from his body, tearing the zipper down to his bony ass and ripping the skirt up the side until his panicked lung is exposed, ribcage hanging out and knocking on the hardwood.

✦

Evening red paints Rubicon’s childhood room. Greenwich trashes it in bursts of dust, ripping down precocious accomplishments, academic trophies next to coke-fueled bomb diagrams. Her timer is at seven minutes.

Lazur sits on the bed, suit making stretching sounds as he spreads his legs, getting real comfortable and taking his mask off. He sweeps his dark hair to the side, exposing the lightning of linguistic bleach.

The cripple is on the floor. Not your room, cripple. This belonged to a boy with a future and all his skin and teeth and two lungs and a straight spine. The cripple is writhing as something stretches him out inside, swollen and stinging. Lazur has the catheter bag in his hand, squeezing it like he’s checking the cripple’s blood pressure.

“Where’s the lipstick?”

“You have it—”

“Do I look stupid? You didn’t come here for one shitty piece of lipstick.”

“Uhhhhhh you do look stupid—” Piss shoots up the tube, stabbing Rubicon’s bladder. He grits his mismatched teeth, feeling them wiggle in his loose gums like a dental nightmare. Then he smiles. “Come on, you know torture doesn’t work—”

Lazur throws the bag on the floor and stomps on it and Rubicon’s bladder bursts inside him, this is what the pain tells him, but the bag explodes instead, cripple piss on Lazur’s boots, toxic gold with excreted medication and vitamins. The smell saturates his childhood bedroom and through the piercing pain, the endless raped cramp, there is deep shame.

He screams as the tube pulls taut, lifting his knifeboned ass from the floor, hips quivering, feet sweating and slipping, suspended by the catheter balloon still inside him. The tube is wrapped around Lazur’s fist and filling with blood.

The next thing Rubicon says isn’t very intelligible, but Lazur understands. Rubicon’s ass hits the hardwood, red piss spraying from the tube. His mouth seems permanently ripped open, an invasive dental angle into the shattered teeth and cheek holes, the landscape of a painted desert or a maggot’s view from the inside of a rotting head. His eyes roll at the ceiling, clouded with blood and tears, blind with pain.

Lazur scratches his itchy scalp, fingers digging through dark strands like a dog burying a bone in black grass, a pleasurable tingle like the thrum of distant convoys or the goosebumps of land mines detonating at a safe distance. “He put it in the bookcase.”

Greenwich was watching, had to be watching, but the terrorist can’t see her face through the red blur. She’s a pair of dark skinsuit legs with a gun, brown hands stained with intravenous tar. “Another example of the decadence of the aristocracy.”

“Yeah. I never had a secret bookcase growing up. Didn’t have a pony, either.”

They fondle the bookshelves together. Claude Cahun, I Spy, vintage war thrillers that spill their yellowed pages onto the floor. Then something clicks, a book called Krakatit, and the wall slides open with a shriek that makes Lazur jerk back and Greenwich roll out of the way of the blast that never comes, but never say never.

The watch goes off. Beep beep. Beep beep. She silences it.

A few tubes of lipstick are scattered on the floor of a wooden nook he has to crouch to get inside. Hot as a crawlspace in summer, with a warm sawdust smell. He checks the walls for compartments, tapping with his gun, tracing with his fingers like rubbery children of that barrel. He finds smears of something in the corner and he thinks it’s dried blood at first. Explosions of red crayon, and stick figures with X’s for eyes. He finds the crayon stuck in a crack like a contraband cigarette, worn to the nub, paper peeling off. Little bite marks in the paraffin wax. You can stabilize explosives with that. But they don’t stop being explosives.

He pockets the lipstick.

“That’s it?”

Greenwich says, “We can kill Cal now. Let’s go.”

✦

Lazur pushes the wheelchair across the lawn as the mansion starts to burn. Forget-me-nots burst around them, seed pods sticking to Rubicon’s sweat and urine and the blood under his eyes. The wheelchair stops and he coughs, his single lung inhaling smoke. He doesn’t know where anyone is. He grabs the wheels and tries to roll himself but his hands are slippery with sweat that doesn’t have anywhere else to go.

Fire, fire, terror in his eyes. Your skin has feasted well at this trough before. And there isn’t much of you left for the surgeons to cannibalize. They’d have to start plastering a pig onto you. You’d be a worm.

Rubicon throws himself onto the grass and drags himself, sparks stinging his bare legs, flames lapping at the unblemished soles of his feet. His catheter tube gets caught on something and he looks back at the agent with a boot on it, and another, and they’re all around him, dark suits licked by firelight, except for the technician, who is already gone.