18ft Leash

scout’s honor

✦

For over countless myriads of aeons
I have been cut, stabbed, burned,
And flayed alive innumerable times
But I have not awakened. 

— Bodhisattvacaryāvatār

✦

Dark chocolate melts in the sun, dark tears over black glass. A fly has died in it, stuck by its wings.

He sits in the brown leather seat, pale and limp, head hanging back in the cockpit recline of the headrest, mouth open. Another fly buzzes around his mouth.

The tropical sun creeps into his dark hair, heating it white-hot at the tips. His eyes snap open. He gasps, and his chest swells with air. His tongue writhes in his mouth, discovering the bad taste there. His heart beats badly, heaving with his stomach. The agony in his head has him checking for an open wound. His hands feel dead and clumsy, delivering no sensation.

Silver foil covers the surface in front of him. He touches it, then stares in horror at his leathery brown hands, neatly demarcating the healthy skin of his arms like transplants. But his knuckles are pink. And there is a strap across the wrist. A singular wound.

Brown leather driving gloves.

He smells bittersweet chocolate fused to the dashboard. Dead flies are crucified in the brown flow, gilded like corpses in a mudslide exposed to the all-over glare of a midday sun. Gold foil glints like a shred of solar sail.

He reaches for the brown mess, and the sun bites him like a dog. He stares at the brightness of his hand, tendons luminous and distended, suspended in a radiance outside this universe. The hairs seem to tremble, dust motes floating like angels glimpsed from the most extreme distance.

He pulls his hand back into the shade. Nothing is worth burning for.

✦

I run my hand along my arm. Bony. Maybe 5’8’, 5’9’. Adult male. Capricorn.

Something is written on the inside of my wrist. Permanent marker. Worn away, hard to read.

There is a small, wide mirror mounted to the ceiling, tilted forcefully away from me. I pull it back. The glass is covered in writing.

BEAUTIFUL

GORGEOUS

PERFECT BEING

There is so much written, I can’t see myself through it. Not marker. Looks like melted chocolate.

What?

I push the mirror, breaking eye contact. The tiny holes in my gloves are hissing like a phone mouthpiece.

I grab the foil and it rips away in a single sheet of sun shade and the parking lot is raining with silent spatters of sunlight, soundlessly hissing germicidal sparks, and the world develops around it like a photograph. I know this place like you know the sky when you emerge from a pool, strange and glimmering and wet and suddenly huge, pounding with atmosphere in your ears. And I’ve never been in one of those chlorine vats of death, but I know it the same way.

My arm. That was why I needed light. To read this faded marker. I rip away the other sun shades and fold the foil panels like wings into the backseat, and this is when I read it, poised between hot light, my gorge high and tight.

Ribbon.

Gift. Present. Past. Future. Waiting. Unwrap. Something of value. I trace it in my mouth, and deeper down. An ache, an emptiness, a tang.

I taste the chocolate on the dashboard, suddenly certain this is it.

It is not.

Car. That’s this thing. There is a key, even though this is not a door. I twist it. Nothing happens. I fling my hand out, making my mind empty as my stomach, and it wraps around the fearstick, gearstick, doing what it should. I jerk the key again and the machine turns on, loud and hungry all around me. I think I’ve woken up in a trash compactor. Shhh. Just a car.

Why aren’t we moving? I’ve turned the key. I’ve jerked on this oddly organic lever. I wonder if next I might play an enchanted melody or find a false bookcase.

The car leaps forward and a rancid burst of sweat fills it. I roll the window down to the bone and piece together what happened. My foot nudged this pedal. It’s just like a sewing machine. I step on it and the car bucks again. I like stepping on things. I crush it to the floor and the car screeches across the lot. I stomp the slower-goer, and it stops.

The smell of food wafts through the open window, salted by the sea. Shrimp and corn in a chocolately mole sauce. I don’t think I want that? Although it seems like a good investment, in the long run.

Someone is burning a bonfire. I hate that. But I want the smoke. My finger twitches. Yellow nails. I’m a smoker. But I think I want a little more than that.

We leave the parking lot. My eyes adjust, showing me a tropicool slice of coast, shrill with bikini sluts, tourists, and purists. “A Gorgeous Beach”…I see…how cynically constructed to gull the senses. The sun is a cheap coin of the lowest denomination, tossed endlessly as God wagers against me. I SUPPOSE YOU WOULD LIKE ME TO FEEL “GOOD” RIGHT ABOUT NOW??

On the sidewalk, a pack of bare legs in black shorts and skirts. Sensory homunculi of ammonia-bearing surfaces, warped sculptures of nubile limbs tied in knots, blinking and shrieking.

Ribbons perch on their necks like fly wing trophies, bloodpink and perfumed with nape. My mouth fills with juices. But on the atoll, someone is always watching. Everything folds on itself here, a pop-up book. I follow them up the hill, driving slowly, gaining altitude.

The atoll interior is a wet pink anus of halobacteria. The bubblegum bloom of the lagoon. Dark shapes are visible below the surface, if you can tell them from the reflections of the future. An armada died here.

White clouds float like tufts of toilet paper, casting shadows on the bismuth-pink waters. Below them, porcelain isles make the clouds look like reflections. Shards of the porcelain palace. When the world was perfect. It is sealed with cairns of hazard steel, redpink polyps of INNOCENT. That name is like a brand on my flesh. My knuckles squeeze around the wheel. I look outward, heart pounding.

The atoll is an urbanized halo in a menstrual sea. Beyond the halo: guano isles orbit like teeth, and black freighters groan, bound for Continent, heavy with nitrogen-rich batdung. The entire system of the world is open to me, both visible and transformed by my awful omniscience…

I almost run over a child. But I step on the stopper in time. I am very clever. Even cleverer than I can imagine. This technique of not running over the child is part of my cunning. This car is driven by a good man…with wheels of virtue…

The youths disappear into a awful mountain of life.

This is the last stop before the phantasy wilderness which rises on haunches of retinal purple and hyper-chlorophyll green before crawling into the dark furrow of the atoll canyon, where tidal pink breaches the palustrous skeletons and glittering halophytes of the SwampPalus, the SaltSaltu, scaffolded by a century of failed railways and walkways and always which form canopies over mangrove dungeons, sucking labyrinths of dark brine where things fall and stick and drown, wedged into hungry cages of pneumatophoric roots, breathing oubliettes, and above, the high trail of the tropical saneforest great for hiking until swallowed by the guano caves where the bats make their waxen cathedral, intestinal mazes, a guano dragon hoard, or the citadel of the climax jungle, iridescent with suicidal rainwater draining through a million thirsty leaf-lips into a royal carpet of corpses and cave mouths which drain to the ocean floor, understory whores and omnivores. In aggregate, the place known as the Defile, as it always was, and always will.

Defile StatePark.

Immediately dark and cold. I look back at the gate, as if it might slam shut on those big rails. The atoll is already hidden from me, in this cool and private night, with sun held in strange hostages.

Where are they?

I lean out the window and my nostrils catch the air like sails. The roll of tires over dirt is soothing, like a machine I once knew. So many leaves are falling and the branches are still full.

The road ends at a facility walled with volcanic rock, platforms spilling above it like hanging gardens. The canopy is cut open with laser precision, opened up horribly as if God could witness any, any of this. A science fiction garden, a camp palace, CAMP INNOCENT.

I park where the other cars are. I like cars. You can sit inside them and watch, just as I am watching from behind these eyes. With their dark uniforms and tanned legs, the youths resemble the parasitoid wasp Muscidifurax raptorellus, a hunter of flies. The scouts of INNOCENT.

A bad smell is starting to develop.

In the backseat, a new set of clothes wrapped in clear plastic, identical to the ones I am wearing, which smell like something died in them. White dress shirt. Brown slacks. Tear the tags off. Snap. Snap. I’m outside the car and it feels strange to walk, adjusting to the gait of these bones and this height and where did they go? It’s faster to shut my eyes and swing my head, tugged by hooks in my nostrils. There. Entering the shrinemouth, that marble safe room with zodiac emanations carved from rose quartz. A wall of foliage surrounds it, their flesh cut into shards. Some linger and light torches, despite the bright sun. A napalm reek of citronella. The muscle memory of authority. I must be ready to be inspected. I wouldn’t want them to think I’m some kind of pervert.

I reach into my pocket. Nice wallet. Some kind of reptilian leather. Or a fish. Along with the toxic holograms of the local currency, it contains a few bills of queenmark, dark and modern with snail trails of security foil. Was I traveling? It would be sensible to be someone like that. Someone without ties.

Pan-archipelago ID card. A dead face tries to look at me. I tilt the plastic so glare obliterates it. Scan the text, the icons. I was right. I am a Capricorn. First name: RIPARIAN

I whisper the name, and it’s like I swallowed bile. The first three syllables dance in the front of the mouth, then it pulls to the back of the throat, sawing like a cello, lingering and spiteful.

The swarm dissolves from the shrine, leaking into the halls and gardens of the camp, becoming unattainable as a cloud of mites. And you know what they say about the cookie jar. I don’t like cookies all that much but I like sticking my hands in jars.

I follow my nose and find it. Shining bright in the pack. Skin gilded with bacteria. Didn’t shower this morning.

I stare at the ribbon around her—his throat. His sun-burnt neck is charred with bug bites like cigarette burns.

He’s headed to an outlying restroom. Without his pack.

The one who doesn’t fit in. That’s the one I fit in.

✦

There are also boys who, though with other boys, are not of them. These need special individual study and special treatment, which will avail in almost every case.
— Scouting for Boys

✦

Cancer with the blond streak through his black bangs, peroxide purified.

Cancer with the bloodpink ribbon around his neck like a permanent slash of the carotid.

Cancer with the fetal alcohol syndrome.

Cancer at the altar, a wafer on his tongue.

Will this, too, turn to filth inside him? Or vanish miraculously?

Cross the marble floor. Approach the porcelain font of holy water. Seraphed or plain, the font is always the same. His reflection in the tranquil water, which flows from the CrystalSpring, free of algal pink and tropical sin. This water does not carry the blood of our stain of our—

Confess your sins.

Cancer Prize. Snug ribbon. Smug face. Vice president of the Halo Club. A real good boy. Real tight ass. So anal.

Confess.

He’s been slovenly. He knows all kinds of words to describe his mistakes. Slovenly, like damp, moldy leaves hanging over him. Skipped his shower again. He doesn’t know why. The handle was turning. Screeching. Whining—

I was lazy. That’s a good one. It’s a stupid kind of bad. The kind they can beat out of you. He can’t tell anyone about the mess inside him—

Confess.

He is self-conscious about his mouth. The cleft lip was poorly repaired, stretching his lip a little too tight, already congenitally inclined to showing off his braceface overbite. Wired with gold and he’s so grateful. What it means to him, is he gets to be an angel too. When he was fostered, it was like getting to visit heaven early. But it took time to correct his congenital fangs. Orthodontic headgear, drooling for a year. And lots of drilling. Now the overbite is the only thing keeping him from the family photo and four perfect smiles. He wants to hide in a dark place until then. But at this moment, he’s forced to expose everything, fingers digging under the ribbon as his throat convulses and he drops to his knees and the marble turns to tile and the porcelain fills with toilet paper. The gawky cartilage of his throat stretches the ribbon, bulging with the contents of his stomach, which explode over his teeth in a spray of acid, spattering the interior and slopping into the bowl as his rape whistle clatters against the sides, dangling and soaked.

Cancer watches his caustic saliva stream into the chunky soup like the hanging vines of a cenote, strands of drool whipping back up into his mouth, tainted with toilet water. The smell makes his esophagus paranoid, muscles tightening as his sinuses inhale more fuel for the part of his brain that says, we have been poisoned, or, we have entered an unclean place—

He can still smell it. Black and glistening. The bloated trash bag. He stuck his knife into the taut plastic, iridescent blade swallowed by that black void, and death burst from it. A snapshot of terror and decomposition.

The bag was full of all the chocolate bars the scout didn’t sell, a brown bog body pregnant with decomposition, every fold of his lungs coated with inhaled chocolate and fecal particulate. Gold wrappers covered him like an imperial dress of lamellar scales, blinding him with riches. INNOCENT INNOCENT it said over his eyes. INNOCENT CHOCOLATE.

Cancer’s backpack lays on the floor, bars spilling out like bullion. $4 TEKN (teocuitlatl, ‘excrement of the gods’; GOLD)/$2 XERAFIM/$1 QUEENMARK. His stomach gurgles lower down. He pushes the bars back inside, against the cooling strip, so they won’t melt everywhere. He didn’t notice he was holding his breath. His lungs heave, sudden and deprived, and a fat flare of acid reignites his throat—

Flies and ants swarmed the flapping slit of the trash bag within seconds, coating the scout’s precious biomass like the ash of a pyre corpse. Under the dark static of vermin, under the mud of death, was someone like you. But the uniform had been ripped open, and there was no ribbon. Throat swollen under a deep sea rictus, as if the sin the ribbon was holding back had burst free.

Cancer hopes he got sick, somehow, from the corpse. He was in the same black cloud of insects, dots of feces and blood hovering in the air, tainted with parasites.

He always liked being sick. It meant someone had to take care of him. And it was, if you think about it, a kind of drug. Misty vision, time distortion, altered thinking, purging of the digestive tract. And when he is sick, he gets medicine. And medicine is a drug.

Painkillers. Who doesn’t want to kill pain?

The bittersweet dessert of cough syrup. He drank a whole bottle once. His prayers were extra vivid that night and he felt extremely devoted to God. His eyes kept rolling back to heaven. Nauseous wings sprung from his heels and wrists and he flew naked through the shower. He threw up and watched the purple slime flow down the drain, hot water raining on his back. It smelled good and he wished all his insides were like that.

The chunky soles of his hiking boots are splayed behind him, looking too big for his skinny legs, like a toon rabbit. Gold crucifixes dangle like charms from the stitching, jangling with his heaving. His knees ache on the tile, bruising just above the long socks, but if he stands, he thinks his stomach would snap like a trap.

A little air comes up and he touches his mouth, covering it from an invisible viewer. Is he going to throw up again? Stinking, thinking. Bile radiates. Tilt your nose away. Or it will happen again.

He folds his hands, nose tilted upward, away from the puke, toward the heavens. In the shrine, there is so much amazing dialog. The agony of hell, and the sweet release of repentance. But only the toilet makes him feel it. This desperate, feverish bargaining, forced into a full body prayer, folded over, kneeling, hands tight, oral repetition—martyred until he’s expelled all his sin in a tangible, look-at-it, smell-it sludge.

This is your prayer.

I am afraid of acid.

I am afraid of being dissolved.

The lights go out. He is staring into a black bowl. It smokes with his stomach fumes. It ripples like black plastic in water. Only in the darkness are the tiniest cracks in the world revealed. Needlepricks of exterior light, the place where a single ant can crawl through, or a fly gets stuck in the walls.

Lights on. Just a bad circuit. A mutant puke reflection. Wipe your mouth. Tug your ribbon tight. Temperance. Chastity. Discipline. Your nail digs into your face. A speck of blood. Stop picking your skin. You’ll scar.

His hands are flushed red. Pink almond soap drips through his fingers, as if the lagoon bloom was oozing directly through the faucet. He washes again. Maybe they’re clean now.

Under the almond-floral scent, a note of acid surprises him. He gags, gripping the sink, terrified he’ll have to use it, sick of seeing everything as a container for the contents of his stomach. He can’t let the filth inside him get out. He gulps down a big mouthful of digestive juice.

“Don’t swallow.”

✦

Riparian’s voice has the quality of an inert stress. A persistent whine, almost invisible to the ears. It starts out strong enough, then gets high at the end of words, dragging them out and leaving them there. Not thin enough to be called nasal, like Cancer is prone to, air leaking through that cleft palate. A coffee table that might break. Words that you could inspect if you liked, although they aren’t of much interest. Speaking through a taut latch, wish I could help you officer. A voice that was used for a different body.

✦

He didn’t hear me enter over the buzz of faulty wiring. I appear in a flicker.

He looks up, the black powder under his watery eyes running like mascara. Kohl worn by scouts against the glare of the sun. His rape whistle swings over the sink, jerking with suppressed gagging. A slimy chunk of his insides sticks to the whistle, so wet it seems about to slide off. But it clings, moist and glistening, half-digested by his juices, adhering to the plastic like a smashed fly.

What is this look of recognition? Did he see me following him? Or is it just recognition of the universal adult, unseen as soon as I’m seen, a generic authority that eliminates any need for the personal.

Don’t swallow.

He speaks carefully, trying to dampen the nasality of his cleft palate. “Why?”

“Your mouth is trying to protect itself from the acid. But you should spit, not swallow. Or you’ll feel sicker.”

He’s so ill that the mere suggestion opens him up, saliva overflowing the basin of his lip. Kohl darkens the drool, a black tear filling the translucent rope until it snaps and collapses the curse into the shimmering drain, a bubble of him sticking to the rim.

A friendly word of advice, soft and humming with the wires. “Then you should rinse with water, or the acid will erode your enamel.”

He slurps from the faucet, then spits. He smiles apologetically, gold braces wet and shiny. “Thank you.”

A sudden repulsion fills me. There is a taint of gratitude in his voice. A pathetic, soft-belly glimpse. That he could derive this from such a simple, empty interaction gives me a stomachache.

He sniffs. Is it me? I just changed my clothes. And on the atoll, everyone sweats like a pig. But this is an enclosed space. You can’t say hello if you don’t say goodbye.

✦

Cancer slings his pack over his shoulder and opens the door. For a moment he is framed by angel-light, legs long but underweight, a wishbone begging to be broken.

A whiff of jasmine hits his nostrils, strong as perfume or rot. The weight of chocolate drags on his small bones. Then he’s gone.

✦

Riparian , then freezes, like a cat staring at something in the dark. His reflection is trapped in the mirror.

He sweeps his hair back and it slithers disobediently through his fingers, black tines too sharpened by sweat to control. Long, wiry lashes cage his eyes. His slender body could disappear sideways. But viewed from the front, he’s a citizen, nothing sinister about him. Just a cerebral something—a failed playboy—if he could just stop sweating. Or is he just a rat? His lips aren’t over-full but they are set a little too insistently in the jaw behind sullen inkplumes of eyebrows. Maybe he has already rotted through, or been replaced in subtle strands of keratin and muscle fiber. A dark and poisonous fossil, a coprolite shade. He traces his finger through the dusting of e. Coli on the mirror, the plumes of toilet backblast. BEAUTIFUL. PERFECT. BEING. He sticks his tongue out, craving to taste the words. His hair flows alongside in tingling tendrils—

His hand slams into the glass, glove protecting him from the sensation of this molten mirror, incandescent with juvenile bacteria.

We will never allow them to see us. Until it’s too late. And this is what we have in common with God.

✦

Cancer was mortified to be seen like that. He crawls inside a playground slide, a tunnel of chunky red plastic that bathes him in a mucosal, colonoscopic glow. He drops a handful of wood chips and kneels on them. His knees are already sensitive from the restroom tile, so his eyes spring open and he feels his prayer blooming already, an ember between his folded hands.

Cancer knows that billions of people are praying right now, and he’s just one of them. He also happens to be one of the few special boys God gives a shit about. He is certain of this. And God is going to help him find the—

He takes out his scout manual and makes notes in a cramped, learning-disabled hand. The torture-killer needs a name.

Halo Killer?

That seems like a great name. But there’s so many. He gets excited thinking of names, breathing fast in the stuffy funnel. Trash Night. Halo Cutter.

He touches his neck, fingers curling into the warm silk.

The ribbon can be worn all kinds of ways.

Tied in bunny ears, like a trash bag, or the way he still ties his shoes because he struggles with the double-knot.

In a bow, like a gift.

Worn loose, ceremonial, spilling like blood from his throat.