cunt toward enemy [s3e6] save yourself

On the contrary: the effect of the bomb is greater than any conceivable end, for this end will necessarily be destroyed by its effect. Every end will be destroyed together with the entire world in which ‘ends and means’ had existed.
— Gunther Anders

✦

Water glitters on Greenwich’s hairy arms as she passes under the streetlight. Stupid. Can’t be walking the streets like a mad dog. Keep to the dark, and don’t walk like you have a bullet inside you.

The irony is, she probably wouldn’t have survived that shot if the room hadn’t been full of fresh dead bodies. The traitor bathed her in fuel, and the qatran was taut where her muscles failed. But she still needs to get the bullet out, preferably with someone’s help for two reasons. One, it’s in her back. Two, digging into the hole made her too aroused like she could rip herself apart from the juicy itch of it. A self-gorging black hole, the spaghettification of the cannibal.

She’s cutting through the suburbs on her way to the refugee camp, like milky skin parting to reveal the bullet. Refugees of the lipstick. Good chance of finding an overqualified doctor who won’t turn her away, and knows gun wounds.

She should have seen it coming. The typical settler tendency to take what they want, and eliminate all contrary evidence to their reality. Their shared allegiance to INNOCENT could not save her because in Offwhite’s mind, he was not betraying INNOCENT, he was purifying it. His feelings correspond to the overall health of the organization, and the world. The grey goo ego of the colonizer.

Sneaking past endless living rooms, each with a glowing screen. Hoping no one takes their eyes off the slop and sees a real life honest to god superfucker angel. That was what fucked her up about Joining the Civilized World. She had to spend her twenties surrounded by the pop culture onslaught of movies, shows, and games justifying the massacres she lived through as a child. Ten years of cop, agent, superhero shit where the kindest, most charismatic men just have to shoot some fucking kids or torture some guy with skin like hers. And it was all so clean and banal, this Civilized World, where she went to school and dated and worked her way undercover, and these grinning morons seem to have no clue that their “secular”, “apolitical” entertainment industry is a cover up made in full cooperation with army, police, and other death squad euphemisms, a direct response to the dust and blood and loss of her childhood.

There is no separation.

Playing Counterstrike at a cyber cafe back when she was just another lanky boy waiting to be turned into corpo-fuel, not yet become the worst thing, a woman who cannot be bred, although even the fucked quasi-government had an official program to surgically normalize your genitalia, which the most sterile 1st world nation and these bombed tyrannies had in common. They need you to pick a category. But she liked having a penis and even if it wasn’t “cool” to do so she thought of it like a gun, because she thought of everything like a gun. Why is she thinking about Counterstrike? Dense cities with no people in them. Sprawling blocks like ones she’d grown up in or backpacked through and with meticulous expensive detailing of all these regional objects, taking pride in rendering the local adverts, cars, cuisine, and where were the people?

This silent residential street feels like that. Maximum amount of middle class bodies + minimum amount of visibility = creepy. The pain wooze makes her into a zooming lens, a floating camera that exists only to kill, and she has to touch her soaked back, rivercold with stinging blood, to verify she exists. And she digs her finger into the hole and it feels good, but she can’t be popping boners in the middle of the street on a Sunday.

She finds a house with no cars in the driveway. The lipstick war is a good time for a vacation, or maybe they’ll be back in a minute and she’ll have to start running again and she’s not sure she can, dehydrated and ravenous like her body is cannibalizing itself, and maybe it will, with or without her.

She creeps along the side, finds a carelessly unlocked window and pushes it up. Listens. Crawls inside the bathroom. Listens again. No sounds of human or dog, but she doesn’t turn the light on. She examines herself in the mirror, by the faint indirect light of the street. Her tank top is soaked and harder to drag off than she’d have liked, arms turning numb as she lifts them. Can’t get a good look at the hole in her back.

Into the kitchen. No light here either, in case Offwhite’s agents roll past. Her pupils are sensitive and dilated, and she knows it is because she has not killed something, has not fed her bloodlust. Tap water will have to do. And crackers. But she needs protein. And FAT. She struggles to open the pack of butter, fancy northern brand with a stiff foil wrapper. She is filled with hyper-awareness of butter. All these people in their houses, they receive the butter, and the crackers, and everything else one at a time. They experience the same butter again and again. They don’t see all the butter that was made today, and that will be made tomorrow, and the foil and plastics for the wrapper, and everything and everything with no plans to stop it. She is horrified by the idea of the butter being manufactured, trees pulped, bauxite mined, aluminum smelted, livestock slaughtered, bodies packed into slave dorms, vehicles to transport them, trillions of gallons of water, galaxies of smog, every step in the process carving its own evil infrastructure with no generative capacity or integration with humanity other than complete service to the machine of death eating out the core of the earth. Et fucking cetera.

Maybe it would be better if the world was destroyed. To put a stop to all this butter.

Hunched on the kitchen floor mangling butter in the dark, leaving teethmarks in the chunks of fat that melt through her fingers, greasy yellow rivulets oiling her tight tits by fridgelight, looks like she crawled out of the movie theater’s popcorn aquarium. Carton of milk hits her lips and sucks into itself and snaps to the floor cashed, white ribbons down her tan skin suckling her throat cartilage. Raw chicken. Raw chicken. Raw chicken. The violence mazing across her skin relaxes and become simple enough for a child to solve.

After she eats, she decides that not everyone needs to die.

✦

Dancing free, pure trance, Sunscreem – Love U More (Solarstone Pure Mix), bodies grinding around him in this island club, pink lasers slashing his limbs as he shines in his crop top and miniskirt, fishnets torn black diamonds of sweat—

You can make the sun turn purple
You can make the sea turn turtle
But you know you can never make me love you more

He is so happy. Like he hasn’t danced for a long time. First summer without his dad. But something is wrong. Dizzy, can barely stand. Did someone spike his drink? What are these pills cut with?

You can make me dance to order
My sex hung, torn and quartered
But you know you can never make me love you more

He came here with someone, didn’t he? Even if he can’t speak, can’t move, someone who understands. A shoulder he was reaching for, an ear he was whispering in.

He smiles as he staggers through the crowd, knowing his every movement is immortalized by paparazzi. Camera flash explodes around him, or is the strobe light? Have to find a bathroom. A dark alley. Cool night air, and water, he’d drink from a puddle if he had to, anything to stop burning up—

Let the new day hide
Leave the scars inside
Still you know you can never make me love you more

The music stops. The strobe goes dark. He runs faster, panicking. He trips and falls to his knees and the pain is like a smashed toe, reverberating sharp and traumatic through his body. Muscles melt, leaving cold wire. He lays below his wheelchair like a deposed prince. The shower sprays a plastic stool with hot water. He hasn’t gone in yet, but muggy moisture clings to his body like club sweat. Humidity fogs the window, hot air with nowhere to go.

He crawls to the door and curls up next to the cool draft flowing under it, wheezing, staring into the fetal underside of his body. A surgeon’s best effort to keep him alive another hour, maybe a day, so his parents could say goodbye. But a funny thing happened. He kept living.

We can turn wine into water
As fathers rape their daughters
But you know you can never make me love you more

His parents didn’t even show up. Mom had long fled the blast zone. Remarried or reinvented in some distant part of the world. Maybe the divorce agreement, bulletproof legalese, fuck you and die eldritch evil lawyer shit, had required she never contact their son again. Even if he’s being reassembled piece by piece in a hospital bed. His father’s invisible force field stretching beyond death, radioactive contracts salting the earth.

Oh, dad. When he wakes up from these dancing dreams, trapped in his body, it seems like karma for blowing up his dad. Black magic bombs bursting back to him.

Why did the technician ask about the plane? Bomb-sniffer dog looking for explosives. Obvious psychological ploy, intended to destabilize his captor, make him sloppy, or set the table for an emotional plea. So why did he look so scared? As if waking from the same bad dream.

But no one can share his nightmare. Rubicon knows this. No one ever, ever, ever.

✦

Greenwich has to be very careful not to become emotional in the airport. Or the dark stains in her skin will swim to the surface. So she tries not to think of the airplane ride with the boxed terrorist. Or what happened after. And she tries not to think of what she is always not thinking about, the land mine and her friend, and all that she could hate, and all that she could rend.

Hey Apolitical Stewardess Girl. Hey Backpacking Bougie Student. Hey Tired Mother with Nice Eyes. Let’s fall in amor forever.

Even these fantasies must be pressed down with an ache. Or black wrath, varicose and thrombotic, will reveal her. She will be denied her flight, and her hunters will find her.

I like your tattoos, someone says. Greenwich’s dark hair, cut cheaply at a generic hair salon franchise in a strip mall, still dry and dehydrated from the shampoo and spray, rustles as she turns her head. She hopes her eyes aren’t too bloodshot, or flooding with corruption. A girl sits next to her, maybe early to mid twenties, brown hair and a single starter tat of her own, a broken hourglass. Unaffiliated meat, shyly lesbish.

Greenwich looks down at her arm. Dark thorns. A black fountain. She freezes her emotions, trying to keep the qatran from agitating. It drifts slowly like a murky river, but the girl is no longer looking at the ink.

Would be nice to look at her too, if you could get past the flash of skullfuck an innocent soft thing break her zygomatic bones drag her by the hair and hostage hostage hostage the symptom is hostage you need a hostage these planes need to take off and become screaming palaces these planes need to hit the sides of buildings like your knuckles break her teeth these planes need to rain slowly into the earth as you rise and are bathed in sumptuous reds and oranges. And she has a nice ponytail auburn and nervous and you wish for the moment of sticking your finger in that black hair tie the cheap twenty to a pack elastic, and pulling it down gently as you can not catching any hairs but catching all of her.

Oh, sorry. I said. I like your tattoos.

Thank you, Greenwich says. And she wants to say more. But this war isn’t over yet. And the path ahead of her must have no wires. She’s seen how that goes.

✦

When she had a bullet wound and an empty belly, it was easy to wander in a haze of basic need fulfillment, the future dark and malleable. Assuring herself she would rescue Lazur, and simultaneously hide in a hole somewhere and protect herself forever. But the airport forces you to choose exactly where you will go. The ticket does not lie.

✦

His mother is back from track. She places her stopwatch on the table. Don’t hug me, I smell like sweat. Oh, okay, Laz. Yaaaaaaa. OK OK. What’s this. You cooked for mama? I’m spoiled.

You’re going to be a great chef one day. No, the eggs aren’t burnt. Are you kidding?

How was school?

You’re hanging out with that boy an awful lot.

(He takes her track jacket off the back of her chair and pulls it on, green polyester that falls down over his hands. She smiles.) Okay, I’ll wear your jacket then. How’d you like that?

(The baby blue hoodie doesn’t fit her, and she pretends to be trapped or choking.) I’m okay, Laz. Did I really scare you? I’m sorry, baby.

You were kidding too? I should have known. You’re too smart for me.

✦

The blast windows betray no time of day. There is only darkness in him, and darkness without.

Annoying, uncanny voices. Demonic and taunting and infantile.

Rubicon is watching kid’s cartoons. He always wondered where Rubicon got some of his voices from, precociously sleazy. He figured it was from being a jet set playboy with dual citizenship. Now he sees a little boy alone in front of a TV. But puberty is not coming to save him, this time. And the first one has been violently reversed.

This well read, brilliant young man, shattered into a drooling cartoon. Fingers that once played piano, now mangled. Feet that once danced, now hanging from a wheelchair. The beautiful prodigy, violently castrated and locked in a straitjacket of scar tissue. Fashion is the only thing he can control.

Rubicon is wearing a red dress. The cinched waist sinks into his ribs, slender as the segment connecting an insect’s thorax and abdomen. The loose skirt flows over his pointy kneecaps, moth eaten holes in the hem. The overall effect is at once juvenile and mature, drooping and deadly. It came from the same box as the water-damaged books, old VHS tapes, and Bomberman. Was it your mom’s? Or just the first time you wore your favorite color?

Lazur’s dream still lays upon him. He aches with it.

Let me go, he says softly.

The terrorist laughs in disbelief. “I should have just killed you.”

Let me go.

“You should have been. Begging me. To destroy your perfect body. Just before its decline. Because that’s when people stop loving you. Except I learned that way too soon.” A mangled hand, another truncated gesture.

Let me go.

“You get it now, right? Everyone is just fucking faking it.”

Let me go.

“The entire human culture, all their ideologies, symphonies, every beautiful thing is a post hoc justification for raw biological calculations. I see it flash through their faces so fast they don’t even know why they’re doing it. Death, repulsion, bad thing, stay away, like my scars are infectious. Or worse. Pity. Kindness. They convert surplus energy into an emotional reward for themselves. Look what a good person they are. But it’s never. For. Me. And they never. Fucking. Touch me. Unless they have to. Or they handle me. Like I’m retarded. An animal. An infant. A piece of furniture. And I’d rather sit here covered in piss than have that. Perfunctory. Cringing. Gloved. Parody of intimacy.”

For a moment, the wreck in the wheelchair is the blond bombshell, son of the wealthiest ashes scattered in the sea. He fights the manacles of his scars, hands splayed in a grand gesture. Then they drop to his lap, shaking from exertion.

Sloppy whisper, no longer trying to enunciate past his mutilated jaw. “So why shouldn’t they all die?”

This drooling dog brings him comfort. The presence of something more fucked than he is. But he needs the man, not the dog. He needs to know there is comprehension, even if that tongue struggles. So he chases those eyes down, blasted blue dancing with bloodshot brown.

Let me go.

“I know. I know. Even a freak can find love. You see guys looking like, mmm, you know. Dating a supermodel. There’s gotta be a chaser out there. You chased me real good. But here’s the kicker. Now there’s nothing concealing my shitty personality!”

Lazur grips the muzzle with both hands, trying to pull it off. His fingers tingle with nerve damage, aching and slippery on the salivary bars. At that moment, he understands Rubicon’s hate, in an awful poisoned comeup of what he’d already intellectually comprehended and filed away. This spasm of loss in his fingers—but branding an entire body.

This constant reminder.

Rubicon can’t be the better man, can’t shrug it off, can’t have a single day, a single minute without being reminded of the technician. If he’d escaped that explosion unscathed, he would have forgotten Lazur by now. Not even bothered to find out his name. At most, he would have just killed him.

But you sit in a bed on an IV for years as surgeons put you back together as a parody of your perfect blond self? Bound tight in these scars, unable to take a breath or a piss without being reminded?

Killing Lazur would be unthinkable. He needed him to suffer. Needed him to see. Needed exactly this.

The technician crawls toward the wheelchair, too weak to keep his monochrome hair from sweeping the floor. Through the withered curtain, he says, “I understand now. I hope this made you happy.”

In any other tone, Rubicon would have laughed at him. But the simple quietness of it, he doesn’t know how to respond.

The technician didn’t have anything else to say. Thinking is hard. Something comes out of him anyways. “But I think the only time. I ever saw you really happy. Was on the 4th of July.”

Red glare, bombs bursting in air. With laughter instead of tears.

The crippled blur leans down, scars rising through the ocular mist like mountain ranges. In his eyes, black suns are born, pupils replicating by fission, popping with rage. “I called you up when I was blasted out of my mind on painkillers. There was never. Anything.”

The wheelchair rolls backwards and Lazur grabs it, one hand on the leather seat which those stick legs cover so little of, and the other clinging to the foot rest. His knees bang on the concrete floor, dragged across the stains of his torture. He looks up, neck stiffer than the collar around it, fighting to say: “It was. When you weren’t in pain. That you could see a future together.”

The wheelchair freezes. Choked laugh. “I can’t believe my mania deluded you this bad. But what can I expect? I broke your brain.” Wet whisper. “Broken thing making more broken things.”

Those scarred feet hang before him with marbled muteness, the mystery of a statue. One of them flashes pink, like film burning. Or neurons. It’s true, can’t trust this broken brain. But it’s all he has, so he keeps moving his lips in response to the signals descending into them, and perhaps that is the history of the world.

“Cal is the one who breaks things. But you. You just wanted to see. What would happen.”

The wheelchair jerks, a mechanized flinch. He grabs Rubicon’s feet and they moisten in his hands. A gasp from above, and the body twists away from him, head buried into the armrest.

“Please. Rubi. Please.”

“What?”

What can you even ask for, after great plans have been destroyed, and so much has been lost? What remains in the quiet, dark places? The technician had so long to think.

I’m so terrified of you.
I can’t stand up.
I’m sweating. Shaking. Can’t you see?
Please don’t kill me.
Please let me.
See my mother.
And say goodbye.
Please let me.
Just.
Disappear.

The technician’s tears stream onto the scarred feet, mirroring the sweat of their undersides. The smoothness of those soles is like grasping something unbroken.

✦

Rubicon sees the faint lines on the man’s wrists, where the collagen is losing elasticity. The dark hair, growing too wispy to hide his left eye, even overgrown and flowing over his face like this. The white strands where melanin was blasted away, erratic as camouflage, in patterns digital, woodland, and flecktarn. His telo mimetico skin, which caught red hazard lights and burning evenings so beautifully, deprived of anything but this cold fluorescence. Those tired eyes slashed with lines, which seem to have erupted all at once in the last year. The creases in his thighs and under his belly, even this toned body can’t fight time. The artful hands which defused so many of his bombs, now hang at the man’s sides, burst blood vessels spiderwebbing the tremulous fingers. This body he envied, (trembling) and broken.

✦

Always the light teases him, as that door opens for the wheelchair to exit. He waits to be trapped in darkness again, his chest heaving, eyes broken, no longer producing tears. He is too old and like an unserviced machine still aware of his empty and unfed compartments, cast in a shape which can no longer fulfill its purpose. He turns his head, trying to block out the fresh air and light he cannot have.

The light remains. He looks to Rubicon, trying to understand best as he can through blurred retinas and fogged brain.

A drop of red hits the floor. The boy doesn’t have enough fingers to hide his face, but he tries anyways. A stark, twitching eyeball. Stricken and dilated. And the whisper:

It’s no fun anymore.

Just go.

Lazur is afraid to move. Afraid this caprice will end. Afraid it’s a trap. But he manages to get to his feet, hunched over, legs shaking. He finds the key to the muzzle on the table, mixed in with bomb parts, nostalgic and obsolete next to that glossy bullet of lipstick. He rips the muzzle off and touches his face, afraid of what he will find. Shocking scars greet his fingers, worse than he imagined. Or just indentations left by leather straps, slowly rising. He still has everything Rubicon doesn’t.

He hobbles toward the door, supporting himself with the wall. With each step, a little more strength. Zadracarta’s evening glows on the dark hairs of his legs. Breeze flows into the stale chamber, alive and circulating. Sky and citrus, like letters to a prisoner. Each gulp of air is like a sob.

And then he is at the threshold. He can’t look at the wheelchair. Head bowed, he prepares to take his first step without the wall. And a shadow fills the orange light.

✦

Calendula enters the room, a suit of the deepest burnt orange. Lazur presses against the wall like he’s trying to melt through it, spread naked so his leg tendons can be seen twitching in animal pulses of escape, escape, escape. But there is such silence, such traplike calm, he cannot move.

✦

He comes behind your wheelchair, and still he does not speak. You sit there in the red dress, smoothing it out nervously. Until finally, he leans over you, close enough to whisper, and a clean smell of citrus oil exudes from his copper hair. He takes your hand gently, and you exhale at his touch. At this acknowledgment, after so long. His fingers gliding down your palm. You say his name, and try to look back at him. And his hand tightens around your wrist.

✦

Few really consider Calendula’s strength. He doesn’t bulk or use steroids. He wears conservative business attire on nearly all occasions, rarely exposing his skin to the world. And when he sleeps, he sleeps alone. He is simply the result of a scientifically-calibrated diet and fitness regimen, and he hasn’t missed a day of it since he was 10 years old.

And Rubicon barely weighs a thing.

He lifts the young man by the wrist, arm held high and trembling, skinny muscle jerking. The weak body hangs from his grip, scrabbling to stay in the wheelchair like a driver lifted from their seat by a fatal plunge.

“You were setting him free.” He ignores the denials bleating from that gash of a mouth. Such a weak thing must of course resort to lies. “Our enemy. Out in the world. Free to plot against us.”

And it says, let go, and other predictable things.

“I thought you had matured. But it has become clear. I cannot trust you with my plans.”

Rubicon’s bony hand shoots out, reaching for the lipstick on the table. Then he cries out in pain. The man holds this wrist as well, and their arms stretched apart are almost like a partner dance. The wrist bends back, twisting like a Ouija planchette with the merest subconscious impulse. So brittle. So fragile. Like a stitched-together doll. And the doll says, you’re, y-you’re hurting me.

Yes.

Snap.

Calendula is surprised by how satisfying that was. The boy can ignore his gracious words, but he can’t argue with a broken bone. It feels good to be powerful, and the body has chemical rewards for this.

You were careless with my plans. Deceptive. Self-indulgent. Embarrassing. Playing both sides. Hush. This limp wrist is what you are. You doom men. You twist them up. Hush. You twist them up and ruin everything and spread your shame to all. Hush. Around and around, the same mistakes. I thought you were a genius. But I was mistaken. You play childish games with my perfect design. You do not think before you act. You are dangerous. You are weak. Badly formed. Twisted up. Hush.

The hand hangs from Rubicon’s wrist, skin twisted and sagging around the dislocated joint. The boy is more difficult to understand than ever, everything is difficult about him, what an embarrassment to life. But it’s something like, please, Cal, stop, stop, and other sundry clichés. What was that? La? La? Are you musical now. What a whine that is. Lazzzz? What? Him?

Calendula turns around. The technician leans against the wall, eyes huge and white under a mess of overgrown black hair, pale streaks like extensions of his eyes.

To which the man offers his unsmile, a slit of teeth.

The source of all this trouble. Reduced to this perspiring, aging animal. Those dogbruised legs, poised so taut. For what?

I will show you what your technician is.

Calendula applies the lipstick in a fastidious and chapped gesture, clicking his tongue at the flavor. The room grows hotter. Through the open door, orange twilight is becoming charred.

He takes Rubicon’s hand again, these twitching spidery fingers. His fist tightens, and they become incapable of movement. Knuckles popping. Surgical miracle, chicken gristle, the kind of skinny wings a poor family buys in large volume, meat sucked quickly off the bone revealing the kind of cartilaginous knobs he now grinds in his fist.

And he says: Run, Cortázar.

Save yourself.

For a moment, the technician is completely still. The only movement is a glistening stream down his face. Then he limps to the open door, and passes into the fading light. Screams erupt behind him. He clutches his chest, but keeps going.

✦

More noise from the boy, not-a-boy, a stain on the family name. The son of his friend and business partner. From good stock, had every opportunity, and became this obscenity. Dressing like a loose faggot.

I told you to stop wearing this ridiculous dress. He tears it open, exposing the scarred chest underneath, deformed and pulsing. A single lung, all to say: don’t take my hand, please.

I remember when you were learning the piano. Those halcyon days so long ago. You were so good.

But now. You don’t really need these.

Do you?

The finger breaks off in his hand and he looks at it, surprised by how easily it came off.

This last one, wiggling so inexplicably. Like a worm. A bizarre and offensive sight.

Symmetry.

Pathetic bursts of saliva from the boy’s mouth. What are you saying?

Come back.

Calendula can’t believe it. Crying out like a child who pits one parent against the other. And really? After everything? The technician, the last person on this planet who would ever help you. His torments discolor this room: Rotting, yellowed casts. A muzzle that smells so badly it will need to be burnt. And you wouldn’t allow anyone to mop away your favorite color, even if it faded to brown.

✦

The technician staggers through the halls of Zadracarta. It is overwhelming after so much time in that room, wind blowing from an open courtyard, the marriage of vertigo and claustrophobia. His muscles burn. Every step crashes the cymbals of his heart. Every scream shreds tears from his eyes. Then all is silence.

Only the sticky padding of his unwashed feet on this very clean floor. Surreal to be surrounded by so many dull, everyday objects. Phones and screens and couches. Antique clocks and abstract sculptures, Cal’s nice things passing in a blur.

A glass hallway shows him the orchard, all those oranges turning black as the sun dies in the mountains. At the end of the hall, an open window. He runs to it, and the air whooshes faster around him, a gust of citrus razors.

He comes to a stop, but the air doesn’t. The air is an iron lung full of gravel, each breath a river of static. The hall shimmers with amplified cilia, aerobic floaters slithering and undulating. Calendula’s face is pure white, pupils floating like dots above waxy black lips. He is drained of color all over, so the red stands out even more. Dripping from his hands onto the black marble. Smearing along the glass as he approaches, a bloody river across the sky, hemoglobin chemtrail over the orchard.

I have tested nearly every word in my father’s book. But this. The most terrible of all. It seemed excessive. Until now.

A fitting end for his dummy.

The air catches black fire. Lazur flings himself through the open window, and the evening rims his naked body with crimson light. Nothing hits the ground.

✦

The crack is heard all the way back in the chamber. As if something in the world had been unmade. The door opens, letting in the citrus, and a burnt smell, something like ozone. The door closes with a pressurized finality, but the smell remains.

Sobbing on the table. Red dress torn open, ribs surging through, the lopsided lunge of a single lung. Clutching its cauterized stump with the incomplete fingers of the other hand, a pathetic gesture. Are you ready to behave?

A foot kicks him in the face and he grabs it, outraged. He touches his stinging cheek and comes away with blood. That jagged nail. This untrimmed, filthy foot in his hand, slimy and self-lubricating. Absolutely disgusting. His grip tightens like a blood pressure cuff, until the spasming sole begins to change color.

Little piggy goes to market.
Do you remember that?

You were such a promising boy.
Playing on my lap.
You were his pride and joy.
And look what you made of yourself. This screeching, ambiguously sexed pile of bones.

And it says something like
i know i’m soryry gjht plsghhh ighhh not that not that

And this little piggy.

And this little piggy.

And this little piggy.

And this.

It seems the piggy market is suffering from excess demand.

It tries to say his name, tries to plead, in desperately gathered half-lung ejaculations. Mere sputum.

This toeless foot, so ugly and rudimentary without wiggling extremities to offset it. Just a slimy, disgusting wedge, not recognizable as anything. He watches the ankle joint roll in his grip. He turns the foot around.

You could hear the snap, if it weren’t for the scream.

Twisting, twisting. Toylike joint. How many times around can it go? The surgeons put you together out of gossamer and filament. Just enough blood flow to keep the limb alive. How repulsive and sweaty it is, so slippery can barely keep a hold on it—

And then the foot dangles, unmoored from the two major bones of the leg, rolling in a cloud of bone fragments and screws. Screaming so loud the tinnitus is finally drowned out. A felicitous discovery. The perfect frequency.

Twisting, twisting. This skin was already cannibalized, borrowed, it cannot be further reduced. It stretches and splits. Righty tighty, lefty loosey. Either way, really. It wants to come off. And then it does.

He stares at the cross-section of titanium rod and flesh, fascinating but so messy, gushing all over his nice suit and turning him into a blood orange. He cauterizes the spurting stump with a whisper. Flesh crackles with a mouthwatering aroma. Dinner, children. Dinner.

But there’s still something not quite right about this leg. Still a little too active. He feels up the skinny stick, so scarred that any softness is shocking. The barest curve of a calf, into the sweating fold under a jagged knee, and then a quivering thigh.

Too many blood vessels up here. His hand returns to the knee. Tapping it like checking for a hidden compartment. Then he bends it back, turning his head to avoid the spray of saliva which shoots from that screaming throat as if all the screams were being squeezed out like toothpaste. That was better than a snap. A good crunch. This one is more challenging, but it’s not too different from breaking off a prosthetic leg. Surgical elegance has sculpted the boy into something as articulated as an insect.

Traumatic drool pools in that sunken chest, flooding ragged meadows of red fabric and flowing into the valley of the hollow stomach, running between canyons of jutting hip and into the stinking pool of blood that surrounds the boy’s lower half. How awkward to be holding this leg, not even useful as an anatomical model, broken and birdlike, vaguely velociraptor. He considers opening the window and throwing it out, but it wouldn’t do to contaminate the oranges. This limb is full of polymer and titanium and opiates and all kinds of impure, foul things that don’t come to mind but surely exist, lowly and obscure byproducts of ugliness and struggle. It must be separated from the earth.

The incinerator, perhaps. Watch it burn to irrecoverable ash in this fire you fear. But for now, it goes with a meaty slap to the floor, which has become red and reflective. The man’s shape regards itself, then looks to the source of all this wetness. A white-hot exhalation melts the torn skin together, and hushes up those wailing arteries. That’s better. A proper stump.

The man is very still. Then he places his hand on the panting stomach, and is pleased by how much of the body he can immobilize with a single touch. Even here, on this little pocket of abdominal muscle built up from kittenish straining, in and out of your wheelchair. Won’t need that anymore. You will be spared your half-life, little isotope. All this compensation and handicap compliance. The weak should not be given false hope. And the strong should not have to navigate architecture designed for the weak.

So manageable now with that stump waving (raw and folded like fresh red dough) and with just one leg to pin down. All one has to do is hold you by your foot, no, too disgustingly moist. Ankle is better. But still too wiggly. Thumb digs under the calf, fingers in the ergonomic indentations of your kneecap.

The catheter bag is swollen taut. At some point, the golden fluid was saturated with crimson, tube backed up with blood all the way into your groin. Your eyes overflow with it, red tears and snot spurting and disfiguring your face even further. What a mucky mess of a mask it is. Squeezed ugly as a newborn.

The last hand paws at his nice suit, please, please. He releases the kneecap, and the remaining foot flops down. A shuddering breath is finally taken. Audible licking of lips, throat cracking, trying to speak through the hiccups.

And then the last hand is enfolded by two stronger, larger hands.

Cal please
Not that
Just one hand
Just one
I need it I need it to see please anything but that—

Anything?

What else do you have?

No
Cal
Khhh
Kuhhh
Cal
PLEASE
NO

I WAS GOOD I DIDN’T DO IT I DIDN’T DO IT DIDN’T DO IT

Fingers trembling as the wrist is bent back. The dance begins again.

NOT HAND NOT HAND PLEASE

The foot kicks up wetly in his face, but not from defiance this time. An offering. Take this instead. Not the hand through which so much cleverness flows, painstakingly self-taught and compensating.

He takes the leg and breaks it, then sets it aside. It hangs from the table, reflexively spasming as gravity stabs the broken bone into muscle over and over. The remaining hand tries to reach for it, but he takes it again.

I decide.

The wrist joint pops out of its socket.

DADDY
NO

The words repeat incoherently. Good and necessary work is done. Lessons extend up the arm. Then it is laid straight off the side of the table, pointing with broken fingers, an apt compass for something that no longer exists. And a trousered knee puts weight on it.

DADDY PLEASE
PLEASE
BE GOOD
BE GOOD

That side of its body becomes much lighter. Sealed with a kiss. Branded shut.

Drool turns red, the inside of its mouth cut apart by a panic of jagged teeth. It leaks on the sketches and schematics it can’t make anymore, cauterized stumps of elbow and wrist jerking and jabbing like a malfunctioning robot being stripped for parts.

He doesn’t even recognize the mess on the table. Choking on snot and begging to keep its hand, so in shock it can’t process what already happened. That no one is even touching it. Why would they?

So pale. Even your flesh is becoming skeletal. You can’t lose much more blood. A breath of cauterization, and another scream. I should have been at the operating table on that day, to advise them as to your appropriate shape.

Yes. This is permanent.

You remember. This is permanent. The sounds you make. This is permanent. Your shape. This is permanent.

This is the day you woke up. This is permanent.

How merciful to let you live. To take care of you like an old family pet. Which is all you were, in the end. A reminder of him. You will go in some dark, forgotten corner, where we won’t have to look at you.

But not yet. Realize how helpless you are without me. Reach for water. With what? Try to urinate. Your bag is full. Try to clean yourself. Whichever way you roll, you’re spreading it around. Stew in the puddle of your own mess. Smell the price of disobedience. Then perhaps you can be something, approximately, vaguely, in the shape of a good boy.