cunt toward enemy [s3e9] escapement

✦

The father keeps a tube of lipstick on his nightstand. Lazur sees it on the rare occasions he is called upstairs, to carry the man’s briefcase or do his tie when the man is falling over drunk. Lazur always assumed it was a memento of the absent mother, until he saw how every trace of her was removed from the house, except for the subliminal rubbish in the basement.

Rich men are freaky. But he’s driven the man to secret and depraved gatherings, and never brought him back with makeup on. The lipstick feels wrong to look at. A sense of something black, congealed, and burnt—yet oozing with endless, leechlike intelligence. The walls must be flaking with toxic pigment. Cadmium red. Lazur holds his breath, and knots the tie.

✦

Father is away on business. The servants have gone home for the day. The other guards are drinking in the garden. And Lazur can’t find the boy. He imagines him dead. And who gets the blame? The one who was supposed to be watching him.

He enters the basement, this catacomb of familial detritus. In a shrinelike corner, the walls are painted unnatural colors, flickering and hooting. The boy kneels in front of an old TV set.

“What game is that?”

The boy looks back, his brilliant blue eyes seeming to mock the man for not Knowing What Game Is That.

“Bomberman.”

“What’s it about?”

“We have to help Bomberman become a human.”

“He’s a bomb man. He’s, uh. Ontologically doomed, right?”

The boy raises an eyebrow. “Are you smart or something?”

Usually Lazur makes something up that fits the story. He doesn’t want to threaten their image of him. He’s done it so long he’s almost forgotten it was any other way. But keeping in the truth is a kind of pressure. It hurts the ribs. He wants to share himself, he realizes. Even if he shouldn’t. “I studied engineering.”

“And now you’re my father’s meathead. So maybe Bomber Man can become human.”

Bullshit. But explain that to a rich kid. He settles down and watches. All these stupid deaths. For such a child prodigy, Ruben is garbage at games. Or maybe, however improbably, the bodyguard’s presence is throwing him off. Lazur takes the controller the next time the boy flings it down.

The blue bomb hunts down salmon-colored balloon people. “I like how the bombs explode.” A crunchy explosion, deep and resonant, bursting in the shape of a cross. The fantasy of a bomb.

The game is frustrating and repetitive. This fucking so-called bomber man, his footsteps stab the ears with static. Who wants to listen to his feet? This is not a man Lazur finds appealing. And he keeps dying for stupid reasons. He hasn’t played games for years. But gradually, a teen muscle memory: standing around at the arcades milking a few coins for all he could. And he beats the level. Then another. He gets a power-up. He can’t be hurt by his own bombs. He walks through the flames, unstoppable. He realizes the hardest levels were at the beginning. He has complete mastery now. “Fuck yeah,” he says, and Ruben claps, laughing. At the sight of that smile, Lazur ruffles the boy’s hair. A thoughtless gesture, the kind of tussling you do with your friends after your team wins. But he has no friends, and this is the basement of a wealthy and evil man. He pulls his hand from the blond hair like someone sprayed it with pesticide, and goes back to playing.

“It’s okay,” Ruben says, moving closer to him. A terrible feeling as he realizes what the boy is doing. Glazed eyes, a kind of terror, if you know how to look for it. The terror that says, make them happy first. He takes the boy’s hands. Very softly he says, you don’t have to do that. The boy collapses, as if a spark went out.

The basement is a jungle of rotting clothes, old books decaying in warm vanilla underfoot. A melancholy of family dreams, told through puzzle boxes and wrapping paper and bridal gowns. Was this house brighter once? A place for children and laughter? The basement escapes the military scrutiny of the rest of the mansion, as if it were the one place the father doesn’t want to think about. You can hide down here. Safe with the dead. Or the missing.

He brings back a fur coat that belonged to the mother. He spreads it on the floor and the boy crawls onto it. In those hesitating movements, Lazur feels the creaking floorboards above, and the weight of that man’s step. The antique pipes singing with bath water. The portable television turned up loud, bitter men ranting through the ceiling, infecting the cheerful bips of the NES.

“Just one more level,” Ruben says. “And we beat the game.”

Lazur pulls the fur coat over the boy like a blanket and he clings to it with heartbreaking quickness, curling up and disappearing in the luxurious folds. Real fur, still soft despite the gnawing insects. Lazur pats the boy through the fluff and whispers what his mother whispered to him. Knowing even in this gentle silence, something gave its life for this peace. There is a bitter pain in his eyes that will not go away.

✦

A week later, the boy comes home late. He’d been trying, he really had. Maybe it was what the psychiatrist called time-blindness or executive dysfunction, before father chased the man out of the house, yelling, my son is not defective.

The boy goes around the side of the house to the quietest door, a servant’s entrance, and carefully opens it. Lazur watches from the garden with a tense chest, hoping he’ll make it upstairs. But the house creaks. He can’t hear it, but he knows those stairs. And sees the failure in the boy’s limbs. And the flinch as his father finds him.

By the time he reaches the house, the screaming is over. It was much shorter this time.

A red circle on the boy’s wrist. Another on the back of his thigh. The rest are left to Lazur’s imagination.

The father comes back to the dining room like nothing happened and goes back to eating his eggs and blood sausage.

✦

The boy’s posture changes. He smiles less. And Lazur knows what it is to be changed at that age. At thirty, offhand words from childhood still echo, still scar the most mundane actions. He sees that smile being broken. The kind that returns on command, yanked on strings, but no longer blossoms effortlessly with simple, pure, childish delight. The kind of smile the boy gave so freely.

✦

“He’s burnt, Mr. Bomb.”

The tape plays in the background, soothing his nerves. Early morning. Naked at the window once more. Vigilant as the world sleeps.

“The whole thing. Up in flames. Our entire network…”

When he straps his gun on, he smells the boy. Fireworks phantoms in the gunpowder. A day by the lake.

He was supposed to drive Ruben to school today. But no one comes downstairs. After long hesitation, he climbs into the private darkness of the second floor, where all sounds seem to fade away except the creaking which becomes much louder and dangerous. With just a few steps he seems to have passed from bodyguard to criminal, hated by the dust itself. He prepares excuses in his throat, his feet try to turn themselves backwards, but something pushes him onward.

The bathroom door is open. The boy sits in the tub, a thin layer of water pooled around his waist. Lazur sees the full picture for the first time. The bruises. The beaten knees. The burnt circles from hot glass. And the bony arm hanging over the side, weighed down by the wristwatch like a shackle.

The boy hasn’t seen him. Just stares at the wall with a dead gaze.

✦

The great man is passed out in bed. Shirtless, in his underwear, bottle of wine staining the sheets dark red.

On the nightstand, a black tube of lipstick. Gold pens that could pay for a liver transplant. A silver pocket watch. The father’s eyes open, and stare as if not quite recognizing what he sees. “What are you doing in here?”

“Was there anything you needed, sir?”

The man rubs his eyes, “What time is it?”

Lazur picks up the pocket watch and it dangles like a ticking flail. He tries to read the time but for some reason he can’t, his vision is vibrating. The man on the bed says, “Give it here.” Lazur swings the watch and it sleds through the man’s teeth. The man tries to sit up and the watch swings again. The man drools blood onto the bed, reaching for the wine bottle. Lazur wraps the chain around his knuckles and smashes with the full force of his arm until the glass is cracked and the chamber floods red.

This is the time, Lazur says, holding the watch to the man’s battered face. Gears submerged in blood, turning though no hands remain, just the reflection of blacked-out eyes and smashed teeth.

A floorboard groans. Lazur looks back at the bullet that will kill him. It was inevitable he would be discovered by another bodyguard. But it’s only the boy watching from the doorway: a pale sliver of ribs and girlish hip, and a shock of blond hair, seen for the first time before its mandated combing. It juts out in wet spikes, a madness of gold.

Ruben looks terrified. Then his face relaxes into a dreamy smile. He extends his slender wrist and unclasps his watch, exposing the pale band of skin underneath. He drops it like a discarded manacle. Water drips to the floor from his hair, from his hip, keeping wet time in the absence of the watch.

✦

He doesn’t know if he killed the man. Adrenaline pumps him down the halls he tiptoed for so long. He knows exactly where the other bodyguards and servants are, as a cog knows the other gears, and now he’s spinning out of control, spraying sparks, with the son of the man he bludgeoned at his heels.

✦

They wave him through the gate. He’s ran so many errands for the father, it raises no alarm. But this time the boy is hiding in the backseat. Staring at his empty wrist, finally free of the ticking weight. A sudden exhale as his heart beats its own time again.

Lazur drives. Seeing the forest for the first time, not as a perimeter or prison, but something boundless.

He drives off the road, wheels struggling with the marshy meadow. He hopes another rain will come and hide his tracks. He drives the car into a mass of foliage, crunching and crashing until it’s hidden from the road. Fuel nearly gone anyways. And then they walk.

✦

The boy is watching him. This quiet man, a docile servant for so long, suddenly erupting into violence.

Lazur says, “What?”

“It was beautiful. The perfect explosion.”

Lazur’s hands are still soiled with dried fatherblood, cracked patterns awful in the evening sun. It’s not beautiful at all. They’ll never be able to stop running.

The boy says, “What’s wrong?”

Whispering as if to himself, “I can’t stand the thought of this ugliness touching you.”

The boy rushes him and Lazur grabs him by reflex, hands around that slender waist. Bony and fragile and he can practically feel the boy’s stomach flipping under his thumbs, overwhelmed by the very contact that was sought—

Lazur pulls away. Of course the boy would imprint on the next dad-shaped figure. The next guy to use violence to get what he wants. He plunges his hands into a puddle, water bursting into coppery plumes and swirling around his wrists. “I shouldn’t have done what I did. It’s so. Fucking ugly.”

“And it wasn’t before?”

That bruised body in the bathtub. Counting every vertebrae in the boy’s back.

The boy leans on his back. From anyone else this would be enraging, but to throw off this delicate weight would be like hitting a bird that alighted upon you. “I was late on purpose.”

“What?” A familiar nausea creeps back.

“I watched the hands tick past. And thought of your undetonated arms.”

“You knew he would hurt you.”

A smile that glows in the dark. “It was worth it. To see what would happen.”

“So I’m your fucking bomb?”

“You’re my hero.”

Lazur snaps to his feet, the blood of Ruben’s father dripping from his fingertips. This undiluted fantasy is unbearable. The universe is a hopeless place and no one should have to listen to this shit. This stupid kid is sugar in his gasoline. No wonder people hit him. “I stood there and listened while he beat you. And did nothing. If you knew the things I’ve done— didn’t do—“ Banging on the walls. His mom crying out. And him, covering his ears under the covers. “—I always did the easy thing. I never—” He’s losing control of his face and he wipes it and that must be where the water is coming from, his hand shiny from the puddle, blood still under his fingernails, bright and reactivated— “I’m not a hero. I’m a coward with a shitty temper.”

A long silence where only the trees are breathing. Where trenches sleep and leaves fill them until they can dream themselves ravines.

The boy comes closer, trembling but taking his hand. “Maybe you should try being angry more often.”

✦

He expects the boy to complain about sleeping outside. It isn’t like the adventure stories. It’s deeply unpleasant and there’s no fridge, sink, or toilet to visit in the middle of the night. No blankets to pull tight. Just the cold and the stones digging into your back and the dry fucking air that scrapes like a razor.

But the boy sleeps. And at some point, his blond head is up on Lazur’s chest. And sleepily the man strokes it, in that easy way of being barely awake where all hierarchies and protocols are forgotten and there is only the simplicity of warmth and touch.

The boy used to sleep in the greenhouse. As close to running away from home as he could get. Passed out on the dirt with some stuffed animal that was thrown into the furnace. And sometimes it was the basement. A hard floor, but his mother’s clothes to blanket him. Should have brought that fur jacket.

Lazur inhales sharply at the realization: he is that fur jacket. The comfort flowing between them is raw as an open wound. The boy is sleeping because of him. And though he watches darkly for some time, eventually his eyes close too.

The old apartment is empty. His bicycle is missing. The old room has someone else in it. A dark shape low to the floor, with feet like rats. He should have visited his mother. Time is running out. His eyes open and he stares blindly into the weird moon shapes, this glowing white hair on his chest, something held to him like a cat. Then he falls asleep again.

He dreams of the boy on fire. An accident with the fireworks. Contagious, can’t put it out. It spreads calmly and does not kill, only covers your body with a doomed sensation. His name changes in his mouth, subtle rotations and occasional spikes. Lazur. Cortázar. Laser. Mr Bomb. Agent. Technician. Laz.

✦

They wake early. Only hours before the sun comes out.

The boy brought some old jewelry with him. Diamonds and gold. Memories of his mother, and worth some money if they can find a buyer. It makes trudging through the darkness toward the border seem almost hopeful. And if they cross into that web of fractured nations where just a few hours of walking gets you into a laxer set of laws and fewer cameras, where plenty of other people are running from something—maybe it could work.

In the dark they stumble over branches and bang their toes on rocks. The boy flicks his lighter and Lazur flinches. He snuffs it with his hand, and shakes his head.

The border becomes visible. A crossing station with a lit-up guard booth. But the forest flows past, can’t be tamed. In this darkness, they could make it. Swimming through this heavy brush, they feel invisible—

The boy says, “Do you smell that?”

“Smell what?”

“Smoke.”

The lighter must have nicked some dry foliage. He looks for the flame behind them. But there is only darkness. He turns swiftly back and the darkness is the same in every direction. He whispers loud as he dares, but no one replies.

As he stands there waiting for a sensory spark, warmth grows in his pocket. He doesn’t recognize the contents. A loose bullet, he thinks, but that would be cool to the touch. This is the lipstick from the father’s bedroom, melting in his pocket like candy. He wipes his hand on his pants, unsettled by the tarry texture which seems to cling to the very whorls of his fingers and soak through like mercury.

A light. He walks toward it. There is the flame, that sneaky flame, and the boy next to it. They have to run. They can cross the border as everyone swarms to the light. He tells the boy to come over. The boy moves, and the flame follows him. The boy looks up, lip trembling, and tries to speak but something wolfs the air from his throat. His mouth stretches in a silent scream, eyes glowing with the flames on his shirt.

The fire engulfs his body, youthful skin consumed as Lazur tries to find a way in, tries to pull the boy’s shirt off but he feels the skin stretching with it, then the flame hits his fingertips with a pain that shuts out every other consideration in the universe and he recoils. He rips his jacket off with numb arms and throws it on the boy and it fuses with the crackling cotton and the arm stuck by webbing to the boy’s chest.

He wants to run. He wants to run and block this sight out. The border is so close and he will be caught if he doesn’t move now. The fire has changed his mind as completely as it has changed the boy’s body. He takes a step back, then another. It is good to be away from the fire. Anything is better than touching that fire.

The boy makes no sound, his gasps only visible by the fire leaping at his mouth, hungry for oxygen. Then he reaches out, fingers shaking. Lazur grabs the boy’s hand and the fire travels across and begins to destroy his own flesh. He doesn’t let go.

They fall to the grass and it burns around them, dark blades bursting to needles of flame. His tears dry on his face. Their flesh is melting together. The face across from him is a mask of burning holes. But he feels the fingers pulsing into him. Not alone.

The lipstick in his pocket burns and wrenches like something trying to escape the flames. He thinks it has burst from the heat, and the oil has caught on fire. It must be the smoke that is attacking his mind, it must be death that has pulled him through the grass into the darkness below all things, ripping his hand from the only thing he ever wanted. But the cracked flesh on his palm is like they’re still touching, into eternity.