cunt toward enemy [s3e5] get well soon

Inanna, daughter of the Moon, put on her regal garment, hung a ravishing sash around her neck,
With fearsome, terrifying radiance she bedizened her brow,
She drew a carnelian necklace with rosettes around her divine throat,
She made a hero’s gesture with the seven-lobed mace in her right hand.
She set her foot on the deep blue step.
— The Exaltation of Inanna

✦

Calendula walks through the smoking corridor. Bones strewn through the walls, fossil palatial. Smoky domes show the stars, blown like glass. Heat radiates from every surface, freshly blasted into existence. Gloriously malformed as the boy that breathed it.

The Rubicon has been crossed, and now there is a Roman triumph, his enemy displayed and humiliated. But he is not the emperor. He is a court eunuch. And those were always the ones you had to watch out for. Who gave him the right to train new speakers? This is why Calendula had to fly out here. To make clear, despite grandstanding displays, who pays the men with guns and the men with lips.

You’ve made a public spectacle, he says. We need—we should go home. He despises how he modified that sentence. Made his placid tone even milkier. The boy oozes imperial, is full in the cunt of his cusp.

In the end, Rubicon gets bored. And this slag-palace isn’t very handicapped-accessible. His wheelchair is locked into the helicopter, earmuffs big on his skull, blond tuft crushed across his eyes. He grips the armrests of his chair as the copter lifts from the earth, phantom fingers digging in.

The technician is in a box, of course. Is there anything more tedious than poetic justice? The box is bigger than the one they put Rubicon in, have to fit that 5’11’ agent with two lungs and actual muscle tone and all his organs and everything else the boy covets. But it’s not much bigger. It must be very uncomfortable.

The vacuum howl of the chopper penetrates Calendula’s earmuffs like they don’t exist, like they aren’t muffs at all but headphones blasting into his skull. It sounds like a scream.

✦

WELCOME TO THE ZEN WELLNESS RETREAT

The boy’s tongue ripped a path across the peninsula. The river rushes past the convention hall, dark green and murky, flanked by jagged teeth of asphalt. In the distance, a refugee camp. The city has pulled its skirts up against it, hemmed with suburbs. The borders are sagging like loose wires, garrotes ripped from plaster scaffoldings.

The last of INNOCENT meets in this neutral room, rented for an affordable rate. The purview of the Sociological Minge, in some absent capacity. A phantom of paperwork. Guns checked at the door. The room is freshly painted, a dissociating white, but it smells old. Greenwich doesn’t trust freshly painted rooms. She’s been in too many before the cleaners came.

She prays silently as seats creak around her. The technician is a sore absence, a secondary cavity of her faith. When the earth is deprived of signs and miracles, when all relics are silent, when you are alone in the wilderness—

Not alone. Twelve agents in this room. The head has been cut off, and the hands must live on, must Continue the Mission. Because the one commonality every single person in this room has, is the absence of a mission is something like the absence of a soul, or a substitute for it.

She tells them, we need to rescue the technician. Before the boy stops playing with him, and throws away his toy.

The recording of a zen fountain flows in the silence, unable to mask the river raging outside. Complimentary meditation candles are stacked at the end of the table, thick glassy objects labeled with irreverent slogans. A painting on the wall depicts the concept of bamboo. Possibly a generated image. She stares at the false greenery, waiting for a response.

Offwhite sits across from her, boots kicked up. The bleached man says, “You want to feed us back into the monster’s mouth. For a man who was dancing with the enemy.”

“I don’t know what you mean by that.”

“He was involved with that little koksinel.”

“Do you have evidence?”

“Come on. Are you protecting him? I thought you were a fucking lesbo.” Laugh. A joke among friends. Soldiers. Gunbonded. But the air of the room is flat and still and sound sticks in it.

She tells him, Cortázar rescued her from a hell with no doors. She lists hollow-sounding things about his operational impact and knowledge base. In the absence of JG, in the rupture left by their gregarious boss, the loss of taped glasses and tarnished gold—in that absence, Offwhite is too bright. The white spills from his bleached teeth. Teeth that spread as she talks. Encouraging her, understanding, comprehending, wider and wider.

She has lost momentum. Rooms like this eat it up, anechoic chambers of bureaucracy, nonprofits, nongenerative, non-anything, once your skin is not stapled to the exact fucking game, the exact, gears as everyone else, then the ones with a little slack in their foreskins shuffle back, just an inch, a compromise that seems so logical and necessary, but on a map that inch is a million souls, families sliced in half, naked bodies choking the earth—

She leans forward and plants both hands on the table, swirling with subdermal oil. “There is nowhere left to run. Do you understand? We have to attack now—”

Offwhite scratches his knee under the table, or maybe adjusts his crotch. “Is that an order? Are you in charge?”

Another agent says, “In the absence of JG—”

“Yeah,” Offwhite says. “While he’s absent.”

“—in his absence, we need a leader.”

Offwhite says, “Then I nominate myself.”

She sees how many supporters he has, how many gravitated toward him while she was underground, in that dark womb of weakness. But at least a third of the table doesn’t like him, or goes way back with her.

She says, “You ran a detention center for our enemy.” She is surprised at her own anger, that she long pushed down when the organization was more cohesive.

“The personal attacks. So low.”

“Let’s vote,” she says flatly.

They go around the table. Greenwich. Offwhite. Greenwich. Offwhite. Offwhite. Greenwich. She holds her breath. A wavering hand. One drops. Another rises, and that triggers another.

She won by one vote.

The bleached smile doesn’t drop. It unsettles her, how stuck it looks. Like a freeze frame. Then, movement. His hand under the table like he dropped something, or he’s clicking an intercom.

In the fuzzy silence of the room, something curdles in her inner ear. That marble deagle, hyper-real CGI against the office backdrop. Offwhite clicks it around the room, casual as channel surfing, at everyone who raised their hand for Greenwich.

In this small room, the sound of the gun is a shockwave weapon, disorienting her inner ear. For the purposes of this exercise, consider them as Agents 1-12. Agent 7 runs to the door and the bullet hits him instantly, as if anticipating that of course someone would run for the door. Offwhite swivels his gun left, and the chair is empty. He squats under the table and shoots Agent 4, who was crawling with a knife toward him. Her head drops onto the knife, impaling her through the cheek. Blood runs from the hole in her head and down the knife, soaking the carpet.

Greenwich lurches from her knocked-over chair, toward the light of the window. She is blocked by Agent 10, who wears dark-framed glasses and knows Krav Maga. She picks up a zen candle and bashes the heavy glass base into his face, caving his nose in. The white wax floods with red, burning wetly with his life, spilling over the label that says MY THIRD EYE CAN SEE THROUGH YOUR SHIT. He staggers past her, broken glasses hanging from his ear, teeth spitting as he breathes through his mouth. She picks up a chair, grunting as her arms bulge and swing it into the window, steel legs smashing through the glass. Behind her, Agent 10’s head explodes, landing warm on the back of her neck. The next bullet hits her as she jumps, and she disappears as if deleted. Offwhite can’t tell if the blood on the sill is from the broken glass, or his shot.

The chair splashes, then her body. When he gets to the window, foam is rippling from the spot, and a plume of blood murks through the murky water. He fires into it, then fires along the current. The thunder fades. The green water returns no body. He wishes Agent 10 hadn’t blocked the shot. That was stupid.

Civilians scatter. Windows slam shut. But one opens, an old woman who stares right at him. He winks at her, then points his gun, but he’s out of bullets.

✦

The sun still shines on Zadracarta. The orange trees planted when Calendula was a boy have finally reached full maturity. He eats jeweled slices, carefully peeled to avoid the slightest drop on his hands. When he is finished, he washes away the acidity with lithium water, freshly gathered from the ancestral spring.

He is in a video conference with his remaining business partners. Several minor nations have made backdoor deals, but unifying the entire world will sadly require a blunt display of force. An army scattered across the stratosphere. Satellites ripped from the sky. Capitol buildings made into mausoleums, museums, whatever gets the point across. Plucking away their extremities until each nation is docile and compliant. And then there will be no nations. Just him. This world will be exposed to something greater than it, from an elevated order of being, a superior universe, and it will become stronger, purer, and ultimately, peaceful. It will be a bit of a measles party.

Yes, he says pleasantly. Yes, yes, yes. So much of business is getting people to agree to what has already happened. He enjoys the therapeutic aspect. Helping others understand their place in the world. Showing them the beauty of the mechanism and exactly where they fit, and the comfort this will bring, the mutual enrichment, and demonstrating it with his bearing, his tone—

The howling of a tormented animal in the distance. So distasteful. When are you going to finish it? The boy brushes off his repeated hints, too caught up in his new toy. Certainly a few days were permissible, his character arc justifies that. But after the requisite catharsis and denouement, the dog should have been put down.

✦

Inanna [administers] the sustenance of death, the one who partakes will die before his time,
The one whom she forcefeeds it, gall will wrack him with pain…
— The Exaltation of Inanna

✦

Wriggling snap. Red latex glove, some of the fingers hanging like empty condoms. Inspecting your health, or lack thereof. Marveling at your naked, coveted limbs, is this real, does he really have you?

His bomb dog is flushed red, and covered in red spots, and he even sees red, that was so fucking clever, the cure to nerve gas is atropine, and atropine can cause erythropsia. But mostly the dog is blind, and so the red is nicely paced: despair, despair to see something, anything, but when it does, it comes in apocalyptic blurs, it rains blood, it rains HIM.

✦

Hot as a hare, blind as a bat, dry as a bone, red as a beet and mad as a hatter.
— mnemonic for the symptoms of atropine poisoning

✦

My mission objective is to escape you. And defeat you. And stop your bomb.
What bomb?
You really lost it, baby…
Lost what?
Everything.
That’s what a bomb does. Bomb is God. Big Bang.
Bomb is dog. Bomb dog. Maned wolf. Maimed wolf.

Defusing a bomb, but there are so many wires, he’s tangled up, can’t see the colors. He snips one and blood pours out, flooding the case. He plunges his hands inside, searching for the bomb, the wires, the cutter he dropped.

When did it start? I’m a cool guy. I’m a really cool guy. Getting ready for school. Pipe bomb killed a friend of a friend. When did it start? Seventeen another guy in your class likes to drive fast and you got scared and said, let me out, let me out, and you watched him drive away, and there was something about him, something about him, and you never became friends because he drove too fast and a few months later his car hit something very hard and the soft part of his face turned into an explosion, coming out through the shaped charge of his skull. When did it start?

When does it end.

Crush you. Kill you. Rip out your wires.
With what?

His broken fingers are encased in hard casts that cover his whole hand and lock his wrist in place, puppy paws, and in red marker someone has scribbled all over the bandages, GET WELL SOON!

Staring stupidly at terrorist ass, watching urine shoot through the catheter tube like a scientific project that will never be complete. Someone laughing at his erection. Humping mindlessly, foreskin scraping concrete. Rubicon lays on the floor after a shower, skin grafts dewy. Lounging with his feet facing the sniffer dog, the bomb wolf ready to combust. Ass tight, scars radiating from the (center) like medieval rays of sun, illuminated boyuscript. An instruction manual for the end of the world, bound in living flesh. NecronomiRubicon.

It’s so fucking pathetic.

What did I ever see in you. Oh well. My eyesight isn’t that good, you know.

Can you see yet? Blind as a bat, dry as a boner. But, um. You must see. Something. To get like that…
(LAUGHTER)))
No payloads defused all you can eat braindump of my great nemesis!

✦

“A weapon needs a muzzle.”

The bomb-sniffer dog pants through the wire basket muzzle, leather straps tight around his face and skull. A spatter hits the caged mouth, droplets running capillary along the steel bars. He licks desperately, bone-dry in this atropine desert.

✦

The dog reaches for something that doesn’t exist. Even with his eyesight returning, he grabs at empty air. What did you think that was? A gun? A helping hand?

Drool drips from the muzzle, a steel web of saliva. That’s a good sign, baby. Moisture is returning…

✦

Is this real?

On the glass screen of the tablet, fingerprints radiate fractally and reflections swim, his shadow and the shadow behind him and all the random light sources, confusing him. But underneath, there is a Place. A negatized beach, seen from high above. Zoomed out, game-like. The dark brown negative is a nightmare entering him.

A clump of dust. Little black dots. The dots are people. Something comes from the sea. A dark gap in the world. And they are scoured away.

Another video, and this one has colors, but it’s at night. Or maybe everything is dark now. The windows are covered in blast shielding.

The coast is a strip of fire and people are swimming away from it and the tide pushes them back. Then words appear, superimposed and disorienting. In his delirium they seem like military installations, astral assaults from a higher dimension. And that must be what words are, because they already infesting what is unspeakable—words like carrion feeders, they have always been here, the lingua-bacterial rot in whatever happens to us. Their almighty Moloch, Thoughts and Prayers.

A news broadcoast. Broadcast of the coast. The reporter’s voice, fake and disaster filmic, drugs him like a bad airplane movie, he can’t look away. The navy is coming for Zadracarta. And somewhere there is a wheelchair and in that chair…

The great battleship transforms into a palace of ovens. It does not sink, it falls into the hissing maelstrom, the steam that cooks and suffocates and separates skin from bone. A hole in the ocean, gaseous and rising into the sky and fogging the lens—

The tablet runs out of power. Lazur is startled by the black screen, his face buried in shadow behind the muzzle, or glimpsed in panels like comic closeups, a shocked eye a strand of hair clenched teeth. The ocean is coming through the tablet, hot and steaming saltwater, and he paws at it, trying to turn it off before the infected universe spreads to him. Then a drop hits the screen. Tears and drool, breath fogging. His own panic coming to a boil.

He tries to get the muzzle off before Rubicon comes back. A laugh, and he scrambles back, tripping on his bandaged paws. The wheelchair was behind him the whole time, as he stared like a terrified child, muzzle right up to the screen and he kept bumping into it, squinting through his atropinized eyes, the tunnel vision of being severely stoned. The tablet was showing him something that already happened.

✦

Calendula reads over the latest results from the firing range. Captured agents, methodically subjected to the words of destruction. Some are explosive patterns. Varying rates of bone shrapnel to boiling blood. Turning the human body into a versatile ordnance. Others are more esoteric, twisting the body horribly while somehow leaving it alive. Hagfish decompression, sensory homunculi. Others act directly on time itself, or rather, expose the illusion of time in selective areas. Delayed, backstabbing explosions, explosions like water torture, explosions that must be dreadful for the victim to endure in subjective time for hours and days. Explosions that travel in threads and ribbons and here Calendula theorizes that the viscous material of the lipstick is performing calculations through the use of itself, searching through the medium for moisture flinging endless versions like lab rats hunting probing stabbing each burst of viscera dreaming finding break points in the song and hope is the Gram stain the test dye not hope but love, the death-song, hunts not for love, but the decay of it, carrion feeder, love, the death-song, in the steppe, vast and empty, she darkens the glow of day, turns high noon to gloom—

Ringing in his ears. So difficult to focus on the numbers. Captured agents. Methodically subjected to the words of destruction. A few pages of his father’s notebook validated (how precious to apply his orange highlighter to the aged black ink, to finally become worthy). Very good. He snaps it shut.

He goes to the balcony overlooking the orange trees, from which he watched them grow for many years. In his hand, a bottle of lithium water. But he doesn’t take a sip.

It was hard not to notice, working side by side on the firing range. Even with his mutilated mouth, Rubicon’s words are more effective than Calendula’s. Every time he steps onto the range, next to that raw power, his entire body is tense. Only a throat’s angle and a dart of eyes between him and the permanent revocation of consciousness, and the older he gets the more this awareness permeates his days, that this is not a simulation, there are no repeats, and all he has stored, in steel vaults and digital encoding and the ornate architecture of his brain and all the echoes of those before him, the wishes of his bloodline converging within him, will be gone.

Everything tastes so dull lately. He pours out the lithium water, glimmering in orange droplets against the evening.

✦

You lost your mother’s watch.

The stopwatch? Does she yearn to run, still? Or has she forgotten that she ever did?

The blue watch she bought for you. A kid’s watch. Where did it go? It’s like something he lost in a dream.

Lipstick smile burns into his eyes, lingering even after the wheelchair has rolled away. He sees the iridescence within the oil. It is a rainbow of death, catching colors only to travel through them. In the end they all blight and burn, beyond the beauty of black and into nullity.

Deliver me through your mercy from the chastisement of the Fire, the disgrace of shame—

Greenwich’s voice. Has she come for him?

My dreadful crimes have deadened my heart.

Kill them all. Kill them and save me. For once he yearns for the sound of gunfire. Where did she go?

It was his mother. Her voice mocks him, pleads with him, as she never did, and the voice becomes his own, whining so high he mistook it for hers, begging for his life, begging for death, begging for morphine, atropine, anything, nothing.

Drinking from a dirty bowl. Is this lithium water? The silent disgust of those shoes. Sometimes protein shake, tasting what his enemy tasted all this time. Slurp slurp slurp, bandaged paws wrapped around the bowl. Need to get strong to save the world. The world is in danger the World the World the World the World the World the World the World the World the World the World the World the World the World the World the World the World the World the World the World the World the World the World the

You’re my world, baby.

✦

I know you’re watching me. I feel your eyes like wet fingers touching me in special places.

The wheelchair watches old movies and they all melt together, fucking his sense of time, all this vintage film making it seem like the future never happened.

Wanna wanna watch? You wanna watch me shimmy? I’ve got a shimmy button really low down. Take me, daddy, please. I am a tongue bomb. I am life on Venus. I know how to make it sizzle. Pleasure will short your circuits. I could leave you an erotic husk. Am I your sex dream, or maybe a whole new me?

Dr. Caligari 3000 melts into Nightmare on Elm Street.

Booby traps and anti-personnel devices? What are you reading that for?

The girl smiles. I’m into survival.

✦

He gradually recognizes the crude pharmo-mechanism he saw in a field hospital when he was deployed. A fentanyl lollipop taped to his paw. When the fent has sufficiently sedated him, his arm drops, pulling the sucker from his drooling mouth.

Darkness. More old movies, real or hallucinated. How long was this wire in him? This IV, whispering to his veins. He doesn’t know if he begged for painkillers, or he was addicted against his will.

His hair is long and dark and covers his face. More wires growing out of him. Nothing to cut them with. Tic tic tic.

Lazur sits up in the airplane seat. He has the great relief of waking from a nightmare.

Dark outside.

It is much better to have a tomato juice. Than to experience whatever he was dreaming about. What is this bad feeling? Is it the woman he left behind? His mother?

The tomato juice quivers. This is when he becomes aware of the turbulence, even without any sounds that would cause alarm. Despite any sounds at all. A very quiet plane.

The tomato juice has the appearance of water seen by flashlight. Like water in a submerged car with an inch or two of air left. It is very, very red, and thick like it has been sitting there a long time.

It takes him a long time to stand up. The suction of a plane taking off. Endless like a Shepard scale.

The other seats are empty. All except for one.

Relief to see another passenger. Businessman with neat blond hair. Expensive but wrinkled suit, and his eyes have something similar going on. Bright blue, severely jetlagged.

Continental accent, hard to place, like a distortion of the ears. Mostly shaved to something international, inoffensive, but the hardness never goes away. Butter melting on a steel beam.

He checks his watch. Vintage gold, with a strap of scaly leather.

It would be one thing if I could just get to sleep.

He smiles, and shadows fill the creases of his mouth.

The armrests rattle. Lazur looks out, and it’s still dark. Not even the coldest glow on the horizon, or the faintest smear of cloud. How long is this flight, he says.

Perhaps he didn’t say it loud enough.

It seems a long time between sentences.

Excuse me, Lazur says.

The man checks his watch again. No reply.

A long time.

The smell of smoke is now impossible to ignore. There it is, the man says.

The plane shakes. Lazur goes back down the aisle, but he can’t find his seat. They all look the same. It seems very important to find the same seat. But now it is impossible. He did not leave a marker.

He goes back up the aisle and the man is in the smoke. Facing away, or toward him. It seems important to know. Stepping forward, or backward, either way, he is closer now.

Lazur goes back down and sits in a random seat.

The plane shakes very hard, arm rests jamming into his ribs. He puts his head between his legs like he was taught. The floor smells like cigarettes. Red juice slops onto the thin blue carpet, adding a metallic tang.

The lights go out. His ears pop. Big black everything and wrenching splitting of metal and skull and the corkscrews in his ears meet in the middle and bang.

The lights come on. Dark outside.

He stares at the red juice. He is terribly thirsty. And it would be better to drink, than to dream what he was dreaming.

After awhile, he walks up the aisle. He is relieved to see another passenger.

How long is this flight?

No response. Just the smell of smoke.

The man checks his watch.

There it is.

He looks up at Lazur, and his face changes.

You’re not on this flight, he says. His face is like a bad mask, the kind you rob banks in.

He follows Lazur down the aisle. All the way to a door like a restroom might have. But those are small and when you are in them you are in them. So Lazur goes past to it, through the curtains. They take longer than he thought to push through. He wonders if he took something. Something to help him sleep.

Dead end. This is where things are placed on trays, things which are soft and break apart. But he can’t find the names of any of those things in his head. There should be something in a bottle. The clearest softest thing of all, which would make his throat stop closing up. But you can only have what you bring. Once you are in the air, you cannot go back and retrieve what you forgot. So he will have to face the dreadful consequences of this lack.

He can feel the curtain swaying closer than it should, as the plane becomes turbulent or his feet become unsteady or something has changed which he does not understand. In the air there can be no resting place.

There is a place on the floor. In the corner. He goes to it. It is brighter than the rest, or warmer, or something. The lights keep flickering, or his eyes keep closing. The curtain rasps behind him.

He touches the floor. He wonders when he lost that watch, the watch he had from childhood, the watch his mother took him to buy. The blue watch with the cracked face, a rectangular LED. Even if it is broken, he is glad to have it.

Smoke fills the room. Something pushes through the curtain and the curtain drags on its body so only the shape can be seen, but soon the curtain will fall away.

Lazur squeezes the watch. The floor drops and his head bangs into the wall and his spine snaps. But he knows what time it is.

✦

His crushed fingers sweat in their casts, these doggy mitts that prevent him from expressively hurting. The familiar pain anchors him. The wheelchair above him, that scarred back hunched over some inscrutable project, wires and circuits and the smell of noxious chemicals or extremophile BO, drifting burnt from those lanky limbs.

The bomb dog says, what did you use to kill your dad.

Did you mix it into his fuel.

Did I speak.

Can you hear me.

✦

In the steppe, vast and empty, she darkens the glow of day, turns high noon to gloom…
She performs the death-song in the steppe for her enjoyment,
While she performs her favorite song,
She bathes these weapons in blood and gore…
— The Exaltation of Inanna

✦

“They used to make these with deer bones.”

A row of ballistic dummies, blood red and skeletonized. Perfect previews of what will happen to your body, in so many ways, from so many angles.

“Maybe I’ll use yours, dummy. Something to remember you by.”

Rubicon looks like he ate out a car’s tailpipe, evil black mess oozing from his lips. Too high to put it on right, or just crippled as ever. “My daddy used to go hunting. Came back smelling like gunpowder. He smelled so good. I sat on his lap and explained his gun to me. All the parts. He was so nice after he’d been killing. Like the bad stuff got used up for a bit.” He looks down, polycoric pupils split into spidery blobs. “You’re a hunter too. Hunted me all over. But you’re more of a deer, huh? Found that out. The hard way. Baby.” Those blood-filled eyes, arterial arachnids, glaze over. And again, maybe high, maybe just fucked. “Your frisky globetrotting adventures. Saw my home. Didn’t want you to see that. Now it’s all burned up…”

The lipstick isn’t black anymore. Impossible colors, fractals like glass edges he couldn’t see until they were too late, his eyes bleed to look at them, infected with recursive worms, wires, digging into his skull—

The word bangs like a gun made of teeth. A dummy explodes, and like a derangement and displacement of blood, Lazur pisses all over the floor.

He tries to stop it, hide it, but his bandaged hands splash it everywhere. It brings sick relief, to lose control of his fear on such a fundamental level, after being wound so tight for so long. He’s on a endless ayahuasca trip of nerve gas sequela and atropine poisoning, a pissing brain-exploded loser, can’t even rage or apologize, just drool into the muzzle, a steel cage webbed with gossamer. Maybe it would be better to be a dog.

Itching all over. He tries to scratch his ribs and his fingers curl weakly under him and he falls on his side and lays in the warm urine. The wheelchair rolls over and Rubicon scratches his flushed skin, skeletal fingers delicate as death against the pangs of that athletic chest. A moan of relief.

“This is how the lipstick works. My words give the universe a rash.”

And like a rash, it can be so many shapes. As the boy sings, the dummies burst and collapse and extrude and spiral and even seem to come alive and walk around, mutely pleading for their lives that only just began.

✦

Calendula digs his thumb in until juices squirt. The dog screams, blinded, bandaged paws flailing uselessly.

“Shame to see you like this. So diminished.”

The last of the skin drops to the floor.

“But I did warn you.” He finishes peeling his orange and holds the denuded orb in his hand, dripping from where his nail pushed too deep. Juice spatters the dog’s eyes and it howls, citrus tears streaming into its caged mouth.

The boy wheels over. “What are you doing?”

(WHY ARE YOU IN MY SPACE. WITH MY THINGS.)

(WHY.)

A cool pause. In the background, the dog tries to rinse its burning eyes in its drinking bowl, but the muzzle hits it (still forgetting about this extra space in front of your head) and knocks it over. The water inside flattens across the floor.

Calendula checks his suit for citrus stains, then the hem of his trousers for any mess. This is a bad-smelling, unstable room. He does not like it in his house, even if Zadracarta is many acres wide, and seems to be growing by the day, or passing out of day entirely, into a private night. It only takes one cell to become a cancer.

The boy says something like, aw, can’t I keep him? More tiresome juvenile pastiche.

“Keeping him alive is—”

An idiotic decision. As it always was. But again he muzzles his words. “Keeping him alive is dangerous.” (You are the danger. Always were. But in the right hands, you are explosive putty. Shelf-stable, impressionable. And then the technician comes along, your blasting cap.)

More chirping from that gruesome mouth, with no purpose but to increase the agony of this tinnitus.

“Don’t pout. You don’t have the facial muscles for it anymore.”

Whispering the last part, knowing the boy’s ears were boxed by God, a lesson which fails to have sunk in.

✦

Calendula is sticking something like hairs to the window, using his saliva.

His ears won’t stop ringing. His office is full of clocks and zen water fixtures and they do nothing against the war of his inner ear. He scratches the knot of scar tissue. The part of him that trained himself not to smile is in shock. This is so far beyond an overworked nasolabial fold.

He picks up the arachnid by its last leg, some kind of brown house spider. It struggles, reflected in the golden grease of his ambergris eyes. He twiddles his fingers until the leg is crushed between them, and just as the spider is about to be rolled under his thumb, he sets it down on the sill.

He stares at it. The way it is batted by the slightest breath from his nostrils. Tick. Tick. Tick.

✦

The cast is finally rotting open. A finger pokes through, nerves jaggedly vibrating. For the first time, Lazur questions whether a wheelchair no matter how heavy and rugged had the power to break every single finger. Certainly some could have been broken and others merely crushed. He was in a lot of pain and expecting to lose everything forever. He wonders if the perceptions became part of his body, and to what extent this has been true across his entire life, and to what degree he can no longer afford his defense mechanisms, and what, if anything, remains in their absence. In his forties, he feels the unique condemnation of his past choices. The inability to erase, pivot, or otherwise become lighter than he is. And perhaps every finger is broken forever.

It is lightness he longs for, and lightness he cannot have. Here in the dark, wires cut, waiting for disposal.