Felix Lazar wiped his mouth with the back of one pale hand and threw up. There wasn’t much left to puke: a thin film of bile peeled from his lips, a trembling spider web. He swallowed hot phlegm, getting to his feet shakily, steadying himself against the edge of the table as he rose. Stubby, well-manicured fingers scrabbled to find the bottle, pawing at the ridged plastic child-proof cap. One pill, then two, no, fuck it, three. The chalky texture of the medication dissolved in Felix’s throat; the chunky aftertaste of vomit mixing with the bitter paste of drugs. The room swooned, and he was down on his knees again, forcing yellow slime from an empty stomach. The pills gleamed at the bottom of the basket like discarded change.
Moaning softly to himself, a keen whimper that trailed off into a sob, Felix made himself stand up. He caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror and nearly broke it then and there. His skin was fungal grey with shock, deep chunks of puffy blue-black flesh boring into the space beneath his eyes. The silk shirt his viewers loved was stained with filth, and his tie hung around his neck like the rotting trophy of a savage in an adventure movie. White flecks peeked industriously from behind the black gunk Felix smeared on his hair every morning. This only served to complete the portrait of a man whose dignity had been forced out of him and into the rubbish along with his lunch.
Blearily, his eyes landed on the enormous, framed portrait near his desk. The old Felix Lazar beamed a toothy grin back. Too pristine to be fully natural, the kind of work discreetly done in an expensive LA dentist’s chair. Everything about the figure in the photograph suggested someone who had slowly and methodically erased any identifiers of age. Next to Felix stood a shabby little man in a lab-coat that would have been put to shame by a Halloween costume. The scientist was a foot shorter than Lazar; his blonde hair combed torturously over the wide dome of his head. Nevertheless, his smile was completely genuine, threatening to devour the photographer in one bite.
His name was Doctor Paul Nassar. Of course, the bastard was happy. He had saved the world.
Not that Felix was in a congratulatory mood at the moment. In fact, it took all his strength not to throw a paperweight and shatter Paul fucking Nassar’s smug face.
Felix resigned himself to collapsing into his chair. Pinching the bridge of his nose was enough to stem the flow of tears, but only just. More than anything, he tried not to look at the surface of his desk where the thing was waiting, squatting by his laptop like a dormant snake. It sat primly within a lilac-envelope, as innocent as a Christmas card from his grandparents, the type he’d rip apart, pretending to read the trite message within as he counted the money inside. Felix had been in no rush to open this envelope. Surely no one ever was.
Deep down, Felix had always known that one day it would happen. There were only so many people on this earth (less now, not like before, not like the bad times with their swarms of refugees, immigrants, tramps, looters, criminals….) so it was natural the lot would fall on Felix sometime. He knew it better than anyone, had spent the greater part of thirty years endorsing Nassar’s revolutionary procedure on his program, eagerly cashing in the state subsidies crammed weekly into his mailbox.
Felix had dedicated almost every waking moment to pushing Nassar’s population-control operation to be implemented worldwide. As far back as the early days, when the smug, brilliant little geek’s experiments had been pilloried and lambasted by the scientific community and the horrified public. That was when people could afford to sniff down their noses, before even the most self-righteous had been forced to kill and eat their high horses to survive. Nassar had been able to secure the last laugh, then the Nobel Prize, and then the position as the leading medical expert in the entire country. Not to mention unlimited protection as the head of the Commission for World Health and Sanitized Depopulation. Felix hadn’t just sat idly by-ever since his first tentative foray into show business, he had been pulled along by the nose, bestowed with a prodigious gift for sniffing out the nearest windfall. He’d crammed the procedure down the throats of the masses until their teeth cracked. It was exceedingly easy, standing in the sterile light of his studio set, reeking of cologne, plastering on that piranha grin. People were tired, broke, rabid, desperate. More than that. They were hungry, and Felix had been the first to point them in the direction of a land of milk and honey.
So, yeah, there would have to be some sacrifices and? You had to give up a few souls here and there for salvation. It was in the Bible or something.
At first, when The Lazarus Pit had hit the air, he had been attacked for it. Not just the usual keyboard crusaders raking him along the coals on online forums and in hysterical video rants. That was part and parcel with the territory, especially in a program Felix had meticulously designed to thrive off controversy. As if controversy had ever been in short supply. Even back in the days when there were no breadlines outside supermarkets and the middle class that had followed the dinosaur and the dodo bird still remained, terminally online losers could always be trusted to find something to whine about. He hadn’t been deterred by the dog-turds rammed underneath his door, the bricks through the window of his old house, the flat tires in his car and the crudely drafted death threats rife with spelling errors and red crayon. What had been a real shock was the wave of support he had quickly received, the hashtags and the online trends backing the procedure.
After all, Sanitized Depopulation on the scale Nassar had theorized was a pretty stark novelty. It was euthanasia, plain and simple, no use beating around the bush. Lazar never used that term on air. Too many associations with fascist-eugenics-Hitler-Nazi crap.
Yet the arguments in favour were irrefutable, or so his allies pointed out. Sanitized Depopulation would reduce waste, break down the monopolies on food and resources cultivated by the greedy. In the hands of a single, efficient state, food would become what it always should have been: plentiful. Anyway, everyone knew that those who attacked the procedure were just insane radicals who cared more about themselves than helping other people. It was outstanding how quickly people’s indignation vanished when they were able to relax by themselves in their own flat, no longer shared with thirty other stinking, crying, coughing strangers. No longer reduced to counting ration coupons with trembling, hoarder’s fingers, and look how fast complaints dried up, when people could sit down to a steak dinner!
All you had to do was try not to think too hard of where it came from.
For thirty years Felix had hoped he was exempt from the Depopulation draft. Dimly, Felix registered that perhaps he had only survived for three decades because of his unflinching, rabid defence of the entire damn process. Now, it seemed The Powers That Be had decided to reward him for his keenness.
In bold, simple type, the envelope proclaimed cheerily:
CONGRATULATIONS CITIZEN! YOU HAVE BEEN SELECTED TO TAKE PART IN THE ACTAEON SOLUTION.
There were no two doubts about it. His full name, occupation, address, civil status-they were all printed in neat little rows along the top of the envelope. As was usual for a medical record, the document had helpfully noted down his blood type (B-), which no-one ever really bothered remembering.
“Maybe it’s good to know,” he muttered to himself. “Maybe it improves the flavour.” Then he laughed hysterically. He howled at the absurdity of it all, at the sheer, cosmic indignity. At some point, he started crying. Then he threw up again.
Congra-tu-fucking-lations alright. Felix didn’t have to open the envelope to find out what was in it. He had examined maybe a thousand of them live on air, calmly talking his audience through the process, wisecracking and winking at the camera to ease the tension. A ghastly image assailed Felix, of a pudgy man with dyed hair and a silk shirt, quipping and teasing, his face a jack-o-lantern of pooling shadow and Botox corpse paint in the glare of the set-lights.
I guess you really are what you eat! -cue tinny, canned laughter- It could be worse, it could be Arby’s!”-more robotic screeches of mirth- I wish Congress was still around, I’ve never tried jackass! –renewed howls from the speakers, yuck, yuck, yuck.
Every shitty joke he had ever made was penned by scriptwriters. It was easier that way. It made it feel less genuine after every episode wrapped and the lights dimmed, Felix the showman fading into the darkness, save for that neon-white smile, we’re all mad here, yes sir, you can say that again. Staring at the hateful little package helped ground Felix in the present. He knew what would happen next: the envelope would contain a date, a time, a place. A picture of an animal. And a bland message of thanks.
Thanks! For the first time in his life the sheer audacity of it hit Felix with the force of a freight train. As if this was just a one-time favour. As if you had a choice! Though, oddly, some people did volunteer, displaying a suicidal eagerness to hasten what they thought was their own martyrdom. They loved posting about their appointment dates online, spending hours shaming others to follow in their benevolent footsteps. At the height of The Lazarus Pit, they had been the suckers Felix loved to have on his program. Their manic cheerfulness was disturbingly infectious, the perfect poster-boys for normalizing San-Depop and stamping down on the dwindling spoilsports that continued to insist on stirring up controversy around the Solution.
Felix remembered something his father had told him, about the days when the slaughterhouses were still running. How the workers led the animals to their deaths with the help of one goat, who would herd them to their demise. The beast, however, would be spared. It was the easiest way of doing it. His father had called it “the Judas Goat.” Slowly, Felix reached into the drawer of his desk, grabbing the state-issued cheque that had arrived a week before. It was a very large number. There were many zeroes. Quite a bit more than thirty pieces of silver.
He’d once been granted the privilege (what a privilege!) to see the procedure carried out in person. It was meant to be an event; the public was never shown any footage or photographs of the process. Ignorance is bliss. It was one of his show’s most repeated slogans. Felix had lifted this pearl of wisdom from The Matrix. But building up hype was easy: The Actaeon Solution, the miracle of modern science that had kept food on the tables of the world, that had rescued mankind from the jaws of destruction when the granaries ran dry!
All you needed was a person. A person strapped to a steel table.
Not sedated of course: drugs spoil the taste.
The machines would do the rest. It was hard not to watch when they started, whirring and buzzing, screeching and glinting. Long, spindly arms quivering, all hooks and claws and knives and drills and peelers, saws and scalpels and hammers. They could take a person apart with the efficiency of a school bully on the playground. Nassar had told Felix not to worry: the sound he thought was screaming coming from the lucky citizen was just air and gases escaping his body. The whole process was totally painless, that was what was crucial for the public to remember. After enough minutes, guided by steady beams of radiation and injections of mutagenic sludge, the person would be stretched, pinched, stamped, sliced and carved into something, well, different, something useful. Disinfectant fog and sprinklers would wash the blood splattered walls clean, and the machines would have gunk wiped off their tools.
The citizen would be…. changed. Not to the extent San-Depop or Felix had led everyone to believe. Turning people into actual living, breathing animals was far-fetched even for Nassar, not to mention wildly inefficient. There was more to eat on some 169-pound lardass than on a pig or sheep. Instead, the machine settled for warping human tissue into an imitation carcass, an exact replica of animal meat. Absolutely indistinguishable from the real deal all the way down to the texture, structure, and most importantly, the taste.
Still, it was a necessary white lie for the masses. Easier to chow down on a burger if it was something inhuman, it’s not like it’s cannibalism, hell no! Plus, there was a weird poetic flair to it that people seemed to like: mommy got to be a bunny rabbit, look, Uncle Joe’s going to be a crab! Felix had never understood it, but he had been more than content to let folks concoct whatever cooky, little stories they needed to stop from going insane. Whatever helps you sleep at night, right? Everyone with sense swore by the quality of the meat: it was healthier, had no added preservatives or hormones, it was more humane and didn’t crowd poor animals into filthy pens. Of course, it was very good for the environment. Obviously, it turned Nassar an enormous profit.
Excess mass was easier to dispose of. Felix knew on good authority that there was a roaring trade in the less appetizing organs (what does a spleen do, anyway?) to hospitals and Universities across the country. As for everything else… well, bones become glue, fat was processed into soap bars, skin cured for shoes and belts. Hair was perfect for designer wigs; teeth were handy accessories and made excellent cufflinks. Felix’s own waistcoat had cost him five hundred dollars and was studded with buttons melted down from the gold molars of an old man he had seen turned into a ‘mallard.’
Felix could not resist the urge to look in the envelope. Sooner or later, he would have to. The personal details printed on it weren’t just for the benefit of the post office. It was a simple, crude reminder: we know where you live. We know where to find you.
For an instant, Felix considered packing a suitcase and bolting out into the night. The ridiculousness of the idea crushed him moments later. He was one of the most well-known men in the country, no, the world. His hoarded millions were worthless for escaping: any cheque he tried to cash would immediately be picked up by the appropriate San-Depop authorities. Not to mention his legions of fans would be quick to string him up for his his selfishness. Had he not been the first to point the finger at those who tried to dodge the procedure, raving at their cowardice? His viewers had lapped it up, locating and destroying every persona non grata with a speed worthy of a swarm of locusts.
Felix started to hyperventilate. His face bulged with the bug-eyed shock of a man who has spent his entire life pulling on a dog’s only for it to dive at his throat the second he lets go of the leash.
The envelope rasped as he ripped it open. Felix Lazar drew the paper out gingerly, painfully, like a child slowly peeling off a scab on his knee. He ignored the address, the date (two days, Jesus fucking Christ, Mother Mary and Joseph, only two days) and saw only the cute, brightly coloured animal next to his name.
A deer, prancing on the page with saccharine glee.
Felix Lazar could not think of deer. Instead, he remembered the whirr of machines, the crimson mist from the operating table. Screams. Just…gas, air escaping from the body, it was painless, you didn’t suffer, that was what he’d always told the public, just a few quick seconds, well…. more like minutes….some pretty long minutes-there sure was a lot of air in a person, huh-the shrieking sound that wasn’t screams, just gas-it sure didn’t let up did it-he wasn’t a scientists what did he know? Maybe it didn’t hurt, it probably didn’t, only two days until he found out, fancy that, no way it hurt, Nassar wouldn’t lie, he’d told everyone it was painless.
The next thing Felix Lazar saw was the bottle of pills still open at his desk.
Doctor Paul Nassar sat at his desk, bathed in the blue glow of his laptop. He finished drafting his report and sent it, smiling wanly as he heard the computer whoosh. He’d be rewarded handsomely for this; there was probably another Nobel Prize on the horizon. Gosh, he’d have to start using them as doorstoppers at this rate.
Nassar rang his butler, ordered dinner, and waited for his meal, checking his phone as he did, busy, busy, busy. He saw that the host of The Lazarus Pit had passed away, and that the program would be replacing him soon. Paul could vaguely remember meeting Francis or Frank Lazar, whatever his name was. An OK guy, a bit full of himself. Kind of smarmy, nothing worth writing home about. If he spent every waking moment reminiscing about every media personality that he’d ever meet, then he’d be at his desk until the cows came home. Any important messages from the more powerful ministries were handled with quiet efficiency, and he left the remaining interview requests, business meetings and university conference bookings for his secretary to wade through.
There were big changes on the horizon. His breakthrough (tentatively branded Cadmus) had been so obvious, he had no idea how it hadn’t occurred to him before. The first machine he’d designed only worked on living tissue–what a waste! All the dead, the suicides trying to escape the draft, the buried millions just rotting away into mulch-talk about a waste of resources! The machines had been readjusted, an expensive undertaking, but the payoff was immense. Now necrotic tissue could also undergo the transformation process.
It wasn’t perfect, unfortunately. Corpses from the terminally ill or the long-deceased were useless, no good at all for the quality of the meat. San-Depop would continue to run its lottery on living subjects until the kinks were worked out, though Nassar wasn’t quite sure they ever would be. The modifications would ideally pick up the slack and meet the livestock demands, but boy, despite everything, people were still out there, going at it like rabbits. Population growth was nowhere near as before, but darn it, things weren’t exactly peachy. Paul Nassar exhaled through his nose and rubbed his eyes. Some days it seemed like all his hard work was for nothing.
Still, this was a step forward. Paul had always fancied himself a glass-half-full kind of guy. There was definitely a Nobel Prize to look forward to, a medal maybe. Perhaps they would give him another island in the Caribbean. Martha had been bothering him about a second honeymoon for years. Paul Nassar hummed the chorus of an Elton John song under his breath as his meal arrived. Venison stew with thyme, butter, garlic, red jelly, mashed potatoes and a glass of wine to help. Still singing under his breath, Paul Nassar tucked into his dinner, thinking of Martha, the new report, which interns he’d sign off on tomorrow at the lab, what movie to watch tonight (a toss-up between Age of Innocence or Evita) and a spy-thriller he was looking forward to buying. He thought of all the files left to sort through, of ice cream for dessert and whether or not it would rain tomorrow.
Paul Nassar thought about all these things, but never about the food. He just chewed and swallowed, pink juices running down his chin.
The first time John McCoy died was on a dust-speckled street by the saloon in Agua Templada. Luckily, it didn’t stick. Which, depending on how one looks at things, was either a blessing or an abominable curse, for the Creator would have been hard pressed to concoct a more miserable backwater for a condemned man to have to live out the rest of his days.
Many would be inclined to agree that Mr. McCoy did not deserve his fate. The older folks amongst you may know him as Six-Shot McCoy, a name dear to every liquor salesman from Texas to Oregon. As the astute reader may have already guessed, this sobriquet was not in honour of the oiled firearm at his hip, but rather a testament to his formidable prowess with the bottle. For many years, McCoy had been meandering through the ramshackle towns of the Old West, seeking the adventure that would transubstantiate his flesh and blood into the titanic fodder of legend, but legend was a fickle mistress. She had decided that in this age of steam-trains, oilrigs, and flash-photography, there was no longer a place for her extravagant folly. She had grown tired of this virgin country cluttered with the dusty memories of gunpowder duels, cutthroat fugitives with ten-gallon hats, stagecoach battles and cemetery stand-offs fought in the name of buried treasure.
John McCoy would often think back fondly to the days when roaming gangs of bank-robbers used to thunder through town, steel in their fists and murder on their minds, in such numbers that the sheriff had been forced to set up a timetable system to avoid a congestion of brigands. Those were the good old days, you betcha, but nothing good ever lasted. The game had changed: the Wild Bunch were on Valium, the Lone Ranger had tied the knot, and the Magnificent Seven successfully filed for trademark, forcing McCoy to reluctantly abandon his motley vaqueros, because “The Spectacular Septet” just didn’t have the same ring to it. Last week he wasted three hours riding to the rescue of a household of honest prostitutes only to find the fine ladies had gone ahead and unionized, and could take care of themselves, thank you very much.
Nothing made sense anymore. The purtycountry-maidens traded in their gingham dresses for an education, the gold rush was slowing to a trickle, and there were barely any mail-coaches to defend from robbers now that the telegraph poles had been installed. At certain times, usually between shot number four of the six that had given McCoy his name, he wondered if perhaps him and his fellow gunslingers were left behind by time like a child abandoned in a game of hide-and-seek, alone with his eyes screwed shut whilst the footsteps of his departed friends fade into the air. Perhaps that was why men like McCoy still haunted their old watering holes, trying to look bored or mysterious. It was the feigned apathy of that self-same child who, realising he was stuck in a game he was never going to win, tried to act as if he wasn’t interested in playing anyway.
The truth of the matter was that there were no guns left in the valley indeed: they were in the hands of the army and the lawmen. There were no more dastardly crooks and cunning fraudsters to duel mano-a-mano at sunrise. They had graduated from the paltry fare of robbing bank-vaults, besieging villages, or holding steam-trains hostage, and now they ran the banks, owned the land the houses were built on, and the train-carriages were stamped in fancy copperplate with their company names.
So, putting the ‘desperate’ in desperado, John McCoy came to his senses and stopped riding fences, leading his horse, Ford, away from the cities of tomorrow. The sun burning its disapproval onto his back, he packed up his favourite white hat and shirt, a bygone relic kicked from the streets of Laredo (which now had a school, barbershop, pharmacist and even a library), a spirit of the West trailing whiskey instead of rattling chains, roaming in search of a final resting place.
It was almost sundown when John McCoy rode into the town of Agua Templada (pop. 43, chief export: dysentery) a place found on no map, not due to the negligence of cartographers, but out of a sense of decency for the common man.
It had not rained in the desert for forty years and a half, so now the armies of sand, grit, and dirt were locked in a three-way war of attrition against the crumbling wood of the four or five buildings that made up a single high street. The mouldering settlements were eerily silent. The local pastime of the townsfolk consisted of racing to see who could die in their sleep first, to the point that vultures had stopped roosting on the roofs of their houses. Even scavengers like a challenge.
As he trotted down the street, John McCoy tried to avoid the gaze of the few inhabitants who waited in the shadows of their porches. Ford also found himself bowing his head self-consciously. John had heard of one-horse towns. By Agua Templada standards, they were impossibly bourgeois
In the distance, a tumbleweed trundled along its scraggly path, noticed it was about to enter the town, and swerved violently away. The only person who acknowledged McCoy’s existence was the coffin-maker, who looked up from his hammering, taking in the stranger and his stallion. The dead, at least, would never be in short supply here.
John nudged Ford in the direction of the local bar. The sign above it was nearly broken down, losing an ‘S’ and an ‘A’ meaning the building proclaimed itself as ‘Loon.’ Dismouning, he tied Ford next to a trough. There was another horse outside, a beautiful, dark creature. Ford and the stallion shared a sheepish glance. Horses have standards too.
Falling into the languorous, rolling swagger of the inveterate cowboy, John McCoy pushed past the swinging saloon doors. One fell off its hinges and smashed onto the ground.
Coughing awkwardly, McCoy ploughed onward into the gloom. The saloon was a dank, claustrophobic little place, underscored by the elderly creaking of a water-powered ceiling fan that did nothing but spread dust more evenly around the room. The floor, at least, was somewhat clean: cockroaches avoided the town like the plague, lest staying overnight sully their reputations. A couple of folks looked up at the stranger. One grizzled man with a ragged beard attempted to lift his head from the table, trying to peel his cheek away from its sticky, beer-saturated surface, and promptly gave up. In the corner, where someone should have been hammering at a pianola, a wizened old woman was chiming away at a triangle.
McCoy ambled up to the bar, where a sallow-faced gentleman was cleaning a cup with a cloth.
“Howdy, partner,” said John McCoy, tipping his hat. The bartender nodded, spat into the cloth, and continued wiping.
“Howdy yourself,” was the gruff reply. “What’ll you be drinking? Assuming you have the coin to pay for it, of course.”
“Gimme a stiff whisky,” said John, setting a silver dollar onto the bar-top, where it stuck fast.
“One whisky, coming up,” grunted the bartender. He set down a series of cracked shot-glasses and a faded bottle of amber swill next to McCoy’s hand.“You with the other fella?” inquired the bartender.
“Huh?”
“The cowboy with the fancy horse,” said the bartender, jerking his head toward the door.
“No Sir, I’m all here by my lonesome,” said McCoy. “In fact, I was looking to see if I could inquire as to a bed to lay my weary head upon in this, uh, fine town of yours.”
“Got one room. S’already taken,” said the bartender.
“What? Already? By who?” said McCoy. The bartender repeated his nod in the direction of the horses by way of a reply. McCoy took another drink.
“Well, I’m awful tired, and a man needs a place to put his boots up. I’m sure this fella, whoever he is, could be persuaded to share one little room, just for a night. For a price, of course,” he added, rubbing his thumb and forefinger together.
“Not sure about that,” mused the bartender. “The man ain’t the sharing kind.”
“Ah, come on now partner. Every man got a price,” winked McCoy. “Who is this stubborn fella anyway?”
“That would be me, partner,” came a hushed whisper that nevertheless carried its way across the saloon-the speaker’s rasping tones were the rustle of a rattlesnake creeping through dry grass. A man had materialised at the foot of the bar. McCoy took in the apparition with more than a little awe. His face had the texture of a worn saddle. Two eyes, beady, black and glittering, the sting of a scorpion, ran over McCoy’s skin. The cowboy’s hat was a dark arrowhead, and his boots could have been dipped in an oil-well. A thin cigarillo was clamped between the gunslinger’s teeth. He seemed to have appeared from a cloud of acrid blue smoke and fiery embers.
“The name’s Lee Leone,” drawled the man in black. McCoy tried to hide the look of admiration on his face: Leone was posing like a born cowboy. In turn, McCoy leaned against the bar, feigning nonchalance.
“Is that so? Well, pleased to meet you Mister Leone. The name’s McCoy. Six-Shot McCoy.”
“Is that so? Well, Six-Shot, around these parts, folks like to call me The Taxman. On account of how I always settle debts, and that no man can escape me.”
McCoy swore quietly. Leone’s nickname was cooler than his.The Taxman walked up to him, resting one elbow on the side of the bar. Never breaking eye-contact with McCoy, Leone poured himself a shot of whiskey and kicked it back. Not one to be outdone in the arena of chronic alcoholism, McCoy threw back his own shot. It missed his mouth completely, splashing all over his collar, cheeks, hair and even his sleeve.
“You know,” said McCoy awkwardly, gently sliding the whiskey bottle out of sight, “too much liquor’ll kill you.”
“I don’t plan on ever dying son,” sneered Leone.
“I hear you’re not keen on sharing that there room,” ventured McCoy.
“Way I see it, finders keepers,” snickered Leone, blowing smoke in McCoy’s face.
“Those are fighting words,” replied McCoy. He straightened up from where he had been languishing across the bar, wincing as a patch off the pack of his shirt ripped, glued to the mucky railing. Sensing that he was rapidly losing control of the situation, he attempted to salvage some masculine pride by snatching the cigarillo out of Leone’s mouth. Its end caught on the booze-soaked edge of his sleeve, promptly setting it on fire.
“I’m a fighting man,” said Leone slowly, thumbing his holster. McCoy never broke eye contact, one hand straying toward his guns, the other slamming against the side of the bar to put out the flames on his wrist. A fly flew between the stares of both men and dropped dead.
This was what McCoy had been waiting for. True, a shootout over a spare room in a saloon was not the most righteous of battles but he would settle for what he could take. McCoy recognized a kindred spirit in Leone. They were both like lonely men milling around aimlessly as the bar was about to close, willing to go home with whoever so much as looked in their direction. The air quivered with the memory of white-hot bullets and sullied honour. Both men spoke the fated words at the same time.
“This town ain’t big enough for both of us.”
Things moved quickly after that: The duel, once declared, could not be taken back. Now, outside in the high street, under the watchful gaze of the ‘Loon, their shadows reaching out to touch each other as if even they could not control their violent urges, John McCoy and Lee Leone faced one another. A small crowd had gathered at the sides. The coffin-maker was absent, at home in his workshop working on a “Two for the Price of One” bargain sale to commemorate this special event. The sun leaked red blood from its cracked skull as it receded underneath the cold, hard line of the faraway dunes. Leone let his hat fall, the black disk skittering across the parched earth. McCoy shifted his stance.
It happened as it has done a thousand times. No need to detail the shared, twitchy glances, the tension, thick and humid in the air. No need to count down the seconds. At some moment, both men drew. Both men fired. Both men dropped to the ground, dead. The gravediggers earned their keep that night, and that was all she wrote for Six-Shot McCoy and Lee “The Taxman” Leone.
Or, it should have been.
Because the Universe has a sense of humour about things like this, the bodies of the doomed gunslingers were dumped into a shared grave. Agua Templada’s miniscule dimensions meant its real-estate crisis extended beyond the world of the living, and its burial plots did not lack for tenancy. Competition for space was rigor-mortis-stiff. The dead men tumbled onto one another inside a cheap coffin, and were buried. The smattering of bored townsfolk who had gathered for the last rites of the crazed strangers slouched off into the distance. The local musician contemplated composing a ballad to commemorate the battle but soon gave up after he ran out of good rhymes for ‘McCoy.’ Night blossomed in the sky like pus unfurling in water, and as the people went to sleep, they surrendered the world to the mercy of cicadas and roaming packs of coyotes.
Yet, six feet deep, something was happening to the two men’s bodies. For though the people of Agua Templada lived their days in a lazy haze, their dying hopes, their crushed aspirations, the petty malice that finds its home in any community had all coalesced over the years and bled into the soil of the graveyard. Ensnared by the mortal coil that had silenced their muted cries, spectres writhed beneath the earth, dozens of forgotten, dishonoured, cast-away dreams mixed with a cocktail of banality and caustic envy that seeped its poison into the undergrowth and searched like hungry roots. And where it searched, it found the intermingled blood of two men who had died unfulfilled.
Now the ground was bulging like a tumescent fungus. In the anaemic light of the moon, a hand burst from the earth, slowly giving way to disgorge a human being in a sick mimicry of birth. Dragging himself into the cool night breeze, John McCoy let out a gluttonous gasp as he reached the fresh air, not realising he no longer had any use for it. His spotless shirt was ruined, his hair matted with mud and sprinkled with worms. His once smooth complexion had drained of blood, and the only spot of colour on his person was the crusted red firework spattered above his heart.
Groaning, McCoy stretched his limbs, patting his body until all was present and accounted for. He was disoriented, angry, and his mouth felt like something had crawled into it and died, which wasn’t too far from the truth. Christ, he could use a drink. The last thing he could remember was butting heads with that smug bastard Leone at the saloon. Well, he’d show him. As soon as he had a little firewater running through him, he’d blast that crooked smile off his face, yessir. Moving with renewed vigour, if a little rigidly, McCoy tottered toward the distant shape of Agua Templada. A low, reedy whistling sound followed him as the breeze fluted into the bullet-hole in his heart.
When he reached the outside of the ‘Loon, he found, much to his chagrin, that it was closed. Sighing, McCoy stumbled over to his horse Ford, who was still tied beside the trough. He stopped as his trusty steed whickered nervously when he reached for its bridle, eyes rolling madly in its head. McCoy frowned in puzzlement. Then he heard it, an insistent drip, drip, drip. He looked down at his chest, and realized he was leaking: a thin red stream was gurgling from the ruin of his breast. McCoy gingerly stuck a finger inside. It went: glup. He was not used to going glup. He fought to recall what had happened after the argument at the bar: there had been spectators…. Leone standing opposite him…. he had reached for his guns and then….um…well….
“Stand and deliver, McCoy,” hissed a voice behind his ear. It had the same haggard rasp to it, but with a throatier touch that made the speaker sound like he was gargling gravel. Lee Leone was a black ghoul framed against the ghastly radiance of the moon. Blue veins drew roadmaps across his cheeks, and his squinting eyes were two crimson cigarette ends in the darkness. A round hole about the size of a coin had burrowed into his forehead and past the other side. For an instant, McCoy could see the distant cluster of grave markings behind him. John stared in mute disbelief at the man.
“Leone? Jesus Christ, I thought you were—”
“Dead? As if,” scoffed Leone. “A green boy like you couldn’t put me down.” A mosquito buzzed through the hole in his skull.
McCoy gulped. “Leone, partner, listen, I think there’s been some sort of misunderstanding—”
“Misunderstanding? From where I’m standing, you’re the one who should be rotting in the ground McCoy,” snarled Leone, jabbing an accusatory, ice-cold finger at McCoy’s chest. “Now I don’t know what kind of trickery is afoot, but ain’t no one ever crossed The Taxman and lived to tell the tale.”
“That’s kinda the thing Leone, well, I don’t exactly think I did live,” said McCoy.
“Bullshit!” roared Leone, expectorating a glob of mud at his feet. “You’re standing there, clear as day!”
“Maybe you missed?” tried McCoy with desperate optimism. The bullet-hole said: blurp.
“Two things, McCoy,” said Leone. He lifted a clenched fist, grunting with exertion as he snapped two fingers up to stand to attention. “One: Lee Leone don’t take kindly to jokesters. Two: Lee Leone don’t miss.”
“This ain’t a joke!” cried McCoy. He sighed. “Look, here, lemme try something…”The townsfolk had very graciously buried both men with their weapons. McCoy drew his gun and shot Leone in the leg. Leone gawped in shock.
“What was that for?” he bellowed. His hands flew to his injured leg, then stopped as his brain caught up to his body. There had been no pain. Not only that, but he was still standing, when such a wound would have incapacitated any normal man.
“See? Something happened to us. I think…I think we died,” said McCoy gravely, stowing away his gun, and then Leone shot him through the hand.
McCoy goggled at the chasm in his palm, whirling on Leone, whose gun barrel was still smoking.
“The hell are you doing?” he squawked. Leone stuck out his tongue. A centipede crawled out from under it and down his neck.“That’s for shooting me.”
“I was trying to prove a point!”
“You didn’t know it was gonna work!”
“Lee Leone, you’ve got a goddamn hole in your head!” shrieked McCoy. Leone shuffled his feet awkwardly in the dirt, caught off guard.
“Didn’t know for sure,” he mumbled, “didn’t know there was a hole in my head, could be a, y’know, a trick of the light, one of ‘em optrical illusions.”
“Whatever,” muttered McCoy. “Optrical illusion or not I’m going home. You can have the room, I don’t give a damn, far as I’m concerned our duel is over partner, we’re square.”
He went back to mount Ford but was interrupted by the thud of Leone thumbing the hammer of his revolver. The gunslinger’s ruby eye-sockets were glimmering like an arsonist’s fire.
“Not so fast, McCoy. We’ve unfinished business.”
“Unfinished business? We’re dead, that’s about as finished as business can get.”
Leone squared his jaw. “You took my spot in the grave.”
“The hell are you talkin’ about—”
“My spot, my spot in the grave, that was meant for one person, for me!” Leone roared, the gun vibrating in his hand. “Goddarn it, I was the one who shot first, I should have been given the honours, there’s a code. First you try and muscle into my room and now you take a man’s final resting place—”
“Woah, easy there partner, I didn’t have any say in who was buried where,” blustered McCoy. Then his eyes narrowed as he thought about what he had just said.
“Hey, hold on, whaddaya mean you shot first? Let’s not get our stories twisted here friend. I clearly put that bullet through your brain before you fired. Yours was just a lucky shot, a reflex action.” He puffed out his chest, sending a fresh jet of claret to spray along the floor.
“Lucky shot, he says. Lucky shot my left foot, I got you right in the ticker, bullseye, if anything you were the one that got lucky. I was just distracted, that’s why you got me. Cheap shot if you ask me.”
“Oh? Oh? Distracted? And what, pray tell, distracted you, partner?”
“I’ll have you know, there was a very fine damsel in the crowd that I had been romancing. Before you came of course. You wouldn’t know her,” sniffed Leone, avoiding eye contact.
“Really? What was she called then?”
“Miss. Uh…Miss…Sippi. Yeah, Miss Sippi,” said Leone. Dark, blotchy spots of congealing blood sprouted from behind both of his cheeks.
“That’s the name of a fucking state you moron!”
“Nuh-uh, nuh-uh,” jeered Leone, returning to the tried and tested rhetorical brilliance of the schoolyard.
“I shot first, and it’s my grave if anything,” said McCoy pompously. “Though I’d be willing to make an exception out of the kindness of my heart and show a little pity by letting you share it.”
“I told you, finders keepers,” said Leone. “I was dumped in there first, it’s my land. If you got a problem with that McCoy, you can let our irons do the talking. This town ain’t big enough—”
Both men reached the same conclusion before Leone finished. Simultaneously, two guns flashed in the moonlight, trumpeting their charges of smoke and lead. For the second time, both bodies crumpled and hit the ground. Overhead, a lamp flared to life in a nearby window, as the town awoke.
The next day the people of Agua Templada buried the cowboys again, making sure to douse holy water (just a flask of rum) on the dirt to ward off evil spirits. After a week or so, any wayward traveller would have been able to hear the muffled sounds of thumping and swearing from inside the coffin as both men kicked and punched and clawed their way to freedom. An unlucky spectator would have been graced with the sight of a dreadful beast with two heads and four arms wriggling out of the earth, elbowing, kneeing, and biting itself. McCoy was missing an eye. Leone had a fresh bullet-wound in his throat, causing him to cough and wheeze incessantly.
Their guns had been soaked through with the damp rot of the grave, so they blundered into town, sending the few souls lounging in the heat shrieking into their homes in terror. Leone tripped McCoy, who crashed to the ground, several teeth clattering like dice from his mouth. McCoy staggered to his feet, ramming his enemy into a nearby post, where his eye popped out and flew into a nearby drunkards’ beer, bobbing like an olive in a martini glass. Cursing and swearing, both men burst into Agua Templada’s only firearms store, whose proprietor quickly passed out at the sight of the ruined, grey-faced corpses. Both men seized guns. Brittle fingers fumbled with bullets. Sights were checked, safeties, of course, swiftly removed. McCoy spat a beetle into a nearby spittoon, where it collided with a ding!
The duellists lumbered into the middle of the street, facing one another.
“Ready to hand that grave over to me?” rattled McCoy.
“Not on your life,” croaked Leone. He twirled his pistol in a silver blur between his fingers, three of which fell off.
You know the drill: both men shrieked out battle cries. Their guns rang out their familiar song, squarely hitting their targets and killing them both on the spot. Third time, I am sad to have to report, my dear reader, was not the charm.
The whispers of the dead, from beyond the dark fog of the underworld:
“Ow, ow, ow, damn it McCoy that’s my hair—”
“You ain’t got no hair to pull Leone, and stop whinging, you can’t feel shit—”
“Move, move you moron, I’m trying to dig here—”
“My foot! My foot, you’re scratching my foot!”
“I’ll kill you for this McCoy, just you wait—”
“Kill me? Kill me? Oh, real original, I can tell you’re serious about it this time, what part of we’re already dead don’t you get, jackass?!”
It is hard to say for how long this state of affairs continued. Certainly, the residents of Agua Templada cannot be called on to verify the truth of what happened in that godforsaken hovel. Many of them were killed by the demented, duellist revenants, caught in the crossfire of their unending feud. Again and again, they would rise, shambling towards the nearest firearm, stealing or scavenging any and all weapons and then turning on each other, until the chorus of gunshots became as natural to the surroundings of Agua Templada as birdsong.
The already dilapidated buildings shattered under the unrepentant onslaught of rifles, pistols, crackling sticks of dynamite and shotguns as the withered shades of what had been Lee Leone and John McCoy continued their vendetta from house to house. The surviving townsfolk, tormented by this most unholy and bizarre of visitations, swiftly packed up and left, leaving what little remained of the settlement firmly in the hands of the dead.
So, McCoy and Leone fought, and died, and fought and died. As their surroundings piled up with sand and dust and spiders ran amok in their new palaces, the cowboys remained. Most of history forgot them, freezing the dingy town and its desperado tormentors in the unknown.
The rest of the world passed them by. Travellers were told to steer clear of the haunted ruins of Agua Templada, and America was content with stranding what remained of that accursed civilization in its own quiet nook of eternity. Yet still the cacophony of starving coyotes and screeching vultures was accompanied by the raucous interruptions of the battlefield.
Presidents rose and fell, Confederacies reared and crumbled: still the cowboys oozed from the grave to meet in the high street, re-enacting through perpetual civil war that unfortunate past the country had sought to bury, but that refused to stay down.
Under the watchful eye of high noon (because there were still rules, important ones to this kind of thing) what could have once been tentatively called men swayed opposite one another. Lee “The Taxman” Leone was a gaunt reflection of his former self. The myriads of bullet-holes that riddled his body had been stuffed with handkerchiefs and cotton bales, but he nevertheless let out a sound like a woodwind orchestra as he shuffled forward. One arm was completely gone. The other was roughly tied to his shoulder with belt-straps, twine and held in place with iron nails. His good fist was a mangled lump, a mere two fingers. A rotting scarf was tied around his neck, and his mouth hung open stupidly from where his jaw had been blown off. His skin was a runny green.
John McCoy was holding his own head in his left hand, glaring at his nemesis. The head was wearing a white sombrero. A gnawed peg-leg kept him on his feet, and his enterprising fingers had welded rough plates of metal in the gaps where one of Lee’s shotgun blasts had peppered his torso to shreds. McCoy’s other hand reached into his own mouth, plucking rusted bullet casings from the gaps in his gums where he had taken to storing that oh-so-handy ammunition.
Finally, a piece of tumbleweed dutifully bounced its path across the street. McCoy would never have admitted this aloud, but despite his eroding body he could not help but enjoy himself. He was finally where he wanted, away from those pesky, civilized cities with their stuffy laws, boring jobs and their messy, twisting, morals. Here he could loop back into the past that he had feared he would never again be able to relive. Pistol in hand, he could cling to the comforting familiarity of this existence, white hat vs. black hat, good vs. evil, a struggle as old as legend itself.
The world could choke on its crummy enlightenment: he was a goddamned cowboy, through and through, and he had achieved an immortality more real than any myth of the Old West.
“Well then partner.” McCoy’s voice was the crackle of old worm-eaten books. He glared at his eternal rival with his one good eye. “Ready to hand over that grave?”
Lee Leone raised his one good arm, creaking like an old hinge. No sound came from his shattered jaw. The single finger he raised in McCoy’s direction got his point across just fine. McCoy smiled a 45. Calibre smile and lunged for his gun.
Within a blasted desolation in a best-forgotten corner of the United States, some say the undead cowboys still do battle, dutifully enacting an obsolete ritual of bloodshed and blighted honour. Perhaps these shades are nothing but the product of eager minds seeking to build a canon of myths for a new-born continent.
Perhaps the men known as McCoy and Leone really did die that first, fateful duel, and the fanciful story-book tales of their exploits are simply the dwindling swansong of a breed long gone extinct. And perhaps, if you strain your ears into the yawning expanse of the desert, what seems at first to be far-off blasts of thunder, may well be the echoes of the last gunslingers of the Wild, Wild West.
Dante Alighieri, Supreme Poet and third crown of Italian literature blinked slowly, trying to take in his surroundings. A few moments ago, he had been in the arms of his beloved Beatrice in the silver halls of Paradise, basking in the soft golden light of a seraphim’s wings. Screwing his eyes up against the wall of blistering heat that shimmered from the ground, he made his way forward. The pungent bite of sulphur stung his nostrils, and a dark shape was coalescing from the clouds of red, sparking mist that enveloped him, a looming shadow waiting like an augury of death.
Yes, he recognized this place. It had come to him centuries ago in his sleep. The most important sleep of his life.
The gates of Hell yawned open in a silent scream. Its pillars pulsed with the agonized faces of condemned souls bubbling in a diseased sea of torment. Dante fell to his knees, looking around frantically, and realized he was alone: the virginal kisses of Beatrice were a cold memory, the warm hand of his Roman guide the ghost of a dream long forgotten. He almost raised his voice in desperate prayer but stopped just as soon as he began. It was as the letters wrought in burning metal above the portal proclaimed: ABANDON HOPE, ALL YE WHO ENTER HERE .
Yet, how strange…. another inscription had been added just below the infamous legend. Instead of gothic, towering script, a bright red sign proclaimed:
As seen in The Divine Comedy!!
Dante rubbed his eyes with the back of one hand. No, he had not imagined things, the odd sign was still there. Now he started to notice the addition of new slogans adorning the gate. Creeping slowly up to the infernal portal, he peered at a large plastic rectangle propped up next to the bronze doors. On it was a picture of a devil, holding a pitchfork in one hand. The imp’s other hand was held out, palm at about the height of Dante’s midriff. Some kind of white circle was emerging from between the imp’s fangs, filled in with the words: Must Be This Tall For Eternal Damnation. Another sign was hanging limply on a piece of string from the nose of a bellowing skeleton: Closed For Repairs.
Hell? Closed? Something was amiss, and all that remained was to get to the bottom of it. Well, that wouldn’t be too hard; he had completed this trek before (albeit in his dreams) so it should not prove too arduous of a task to do so again. Steeling his nerve, Dante marched right up to the gates of Hell, scanning their expanse for a possible entrance. He found none, but what he did find was a series of silver buttons set above a metallic grille. Small, thin plaques were placed beside each button, with one catching the poet’s eye: Management.
Dante pressed the button quickly. A sharp buzz, a pause, and then a dry crackle from the grille. A voice, dripping boredom through the metallic slats, oozed into Dante’s ears.
“’Ello? City of Dis, Sixth Circle of Hell, Inferno Incorporated, how may I help?”
Dante shuffled his feet. “Um…yes, good sir, apologies, I am seeking entry into Hell.”
Dante imagined he could just about hear the eyes rolling in the speaker’s skull through the grille.
“Read the sign, will ya? We’re closed.”
“Well, yes, I understand, but this is a matter of supreme importance.”
“Sir, if you have any complaints please solicit and fill out a form from our Customer Satisfaction department,” recited the voice. “If you have been damned and are seeking compensation, we are temporarily providing half-off bargains on entry to Limbo, until the fires of Hell are back in business.”
“No, you’re not listening, I have not been damned. I should be in Heaven right now”-
“Oooooh, no kidding? Pull the other one, mate, it’s got bells on. Like we haven’t heard that one before.”
Dante had never considered himself a violent man. Nevertheless, took a step back and counted slowly to ten. “My name,” he declared, “is Dante Alighieri. I have been chosen for salvation by the Lord himself. I demand an explanation.”
A stunned silence echoed from the mouthpiece. Dante craned his neck forward, pressing his ear against the queer device. He could hear a muffled, thick chatter squeaking from it, as if the voice had quickly pressed its hand down on the speaker. There was the faintest suggestion of another voice now, icy tones that clipped away at each vowel with the pincers of a surgeon. A fresh rasp of static and the first voice returned now, wheedling and apologetic.
“Beg your pardon, Mr. Dante sir, your honour, you should have said so earlier. We very much regret any inconvenience caused and Inferno Inc. would like to take this opportunity to offer you a complimentary gift package”-
“Just let me inside, will you?” sighed Dante. His head hurt, his lips were beginning to chap from the heat, and already his robes had secreted clammy ponds underneath his armpits.
There was a brief pause, and then a hideous cacophony as the Gates of Hell swung open with the slow weight of oblivion. Dante made his way along the sooty cobblestones, wincing as the Gates roared shut behind him. He knew what was to come, could prepare himself for what to expect (he had written it, famously, hadn’t he?). Dante braced himself for the leering, hollow-eyed stare of Charon the ferryman, for King Minos and the leathery rasp of his serpentine tail condemning sinners to their justice. He felt a ripple of goosebumps as he remembered Cerberus with his sixfold bilious eyes, his maw dripping with filth. What he hadn’t expected was the train.
Not that it really was a train. A thin track of rails snaked off into the red fogs of Hell, and a plastic awning had been erected as some kind of miniature station. The ‘train’ was nothing more than six cars, with no roof and small enough to hold four people each, the outside of the carriage painted in a lurid scarlet. Dante sidled over to the nearest car and crawled in, feeling exceedingly stupid. His knees were pressed uncomfortably up against the seat in front of him.
The piddly little train gave a juddering start and began trundling jerkily along the tracks, as a disembodied female spectre, addressing Dante from somewhere inside the vehicle, cooly reminded him to always keep his hands within the ride. It puttered along, leaving Dante to gawp at his surrounding as they passed him by. Fields belching fire and pitch, putrid swamps writhing with cancerous mangroves, their leaves dripping with scorpions. Brittle forests leaking bloody sap. In the sky, the imps were a murmuration of defiled angels, black batwings casting leathery shadows as they swarmed, chasing down stumbling, naked sinners. Sinners, yes, everywhere Dante looked he could see them. Whipped and scourged against toothy rocks, dashed against the cliffsides and splattered in a gale of icy wind. Groaning sinners laden with gangrenous sores, skewered sinners stacked neatly atop one another in the heat of an unending sun, and from their throats a Babel of tongues crying out in languages from every corner of the Earth.
The train was playing a tune that chimed merrily from an invisible speaker. Dante couldn’t catch all the lyrics over the incessant misery of the damned, but he thought it went something along the lines of It’s A Small World After All.
Mercifully, the train slid to a creaking halt soon enough, depositing Dante outside of a towering building that appeared to have been pinched at the base and stretched upwards as far as possible. Dante did not have to wait too long: a shadowy figure was moving towards him from inside the building, masked by its translucent glass doors. They swung open to reveal what appeared to be a man like Dante
The demon (because what else could it be?) was wearing a crisp white shirt, stapled tightly in place against his chest by suspenders with silver buckles. His shoes were slick leather arrows, his tie a bloody slash dripping down from his neck and his face was lined with the thin, stretched wax of a Botox operation. The demon’s grey-flecked hair had been combed back in a sheen of oily gunk and some kind of perfume reminiscent of paint-thinner was crinkling the air around him.The fiend was on the bemused Dante in a flash, grasping his hands in a manicured vice. The poet noticed that the devil’s sleeves were winking at him: tiny metal pitchforks held his cuffs in place. Dante also caught a glimpse of the laminated badge pinned to his breast:
Hi! My name is: Beelzebub.
“The man himself,” beamed Beelzebub, sewing a smile onto his face that was all canines. He did not give the spluttering Dante any time to recover, clapping the poet amicably on the shoulder and steering him towards the door of the building, ignoring his squeaks of muted Italian protest.“Honestly, you don’t know how much of an honour this is-sorry about that unpleasant business at the entrance, Paimon is still a bit new to the job-but of course once we heard it was you, well, we’d move Heaven (excuse my French, aha) and earth for Dante Alighieri,” drawled Beelzebub. He stopped at a desk right before a pair of elevators, behind which a bored looking woman with frazzled hair was clacking away at a computer.
“Straight up to Management, Lilith, be a doll,” said Beelzebub, winking at the woman, who responded with a look probably older than Hell itself. The nearest elevator dinged open. Beelzebub all but thrust Dante into the clammy box, leaning against the opposite wall. The demon was smiling so widely Dante feared his head would split open.
“This is really super, just brilliant, the big boss has been bugging me for aaaages to get you down here, a gesture of gratitude, you know how it is-”
“G-gratitude?”
Beelzebub flicked a fly from the edge of his nose. “Well of course!” he laughed, “none of this would be possible without you. I mean, talk about free publicity!”
“Publicity?”
“Yeah! We haven’t had a win for marketing like this for centuries. Sure, there’s always a couple of good ones that come along: Rimbaud was alright, and that Milton guy gave us some good press”-Beelzebub extended his hands out, as if visualizing a giant billboard- “Satan: But He’s The Good Guy! Imagine that! The Big Boss had a field day with it, he hasn’t shut up about it since.”
The elevator chimed to a halt. Dante blinked in the drab light from the humming lamps on the roof. As far as the eye could see stood cohorts of plastic boxes. Gray, apathetic faces blurred and shambled along the way as they went, the colourless ocean only occasionally broken up by gaudy nick-nacks, post-cards and fading photographs. The smell was a pervasive miasma of stale coffee, acrid ink, paper stewed in the printer and “pinewood” air freshener fighting an unending battle with stinking ventilation. A large corkboard to Dante’s right showed a grinning demon in a suit and tie sitting eagerly at a desk, flashing a thumbs-up at the invisible audience, chirpily announcing “BETTER TO REIGN IN HELL THAN SERVE IN HEAVEN!” Underneath, someone had taped up a sticky note with the less inspiring legend: ‘Turkey sandwich in fridge is mine-Samael.’ There was a coffee mug that had been left out in the nearest cubicle. It was unusually long and bore the inscription “You don’t have to be eternally ripped from the loving bosom of the Lord to work here-but it helps!”
Dante pinched his nose. This wasn’t making any sense.“Sorry-The Big Boss?”
“Oh, that would be the leader of the old guard. You know, Lucy.”
“Lucy?”
“That’s what his friends call him,” preened Beelzebub, inflating with the barely concealed smarm of someone who knows people in high places. “Unfortunately, he can’t be here to meet you-there’s souls to corrupt, humans to damn, you know the drill, he never lets up, but that’s the boss-man for you. He’s a busy guy, been running this gig since…. well, since…zero, I guess you’d call it.”
“The rebellion of fallen angels?”
“Pssh,” snorted Beelzebub, making a face. “Rebellion of the fallen angels’-classic union busting is what I’d like to call it. There’s no justice in the world,” sighed Beelzebub. His eyes took on a mad sheen. “Well, except for us.”
“And us is……?”
“Inferno Incorporated, silly! Though I don’t like all that corporate slang. I prefer to think of us as one big, happy family, not a company,” purred the demon. Dante took in the swarm of haggard faces scribbling away in their cluttered cubicles, every sluggish scrawl of a pencil a symphony of despair. There were probably families like that, Dante could concede, though the kind that would leave the drinks cabinet locked during Christmas dinner and be unable to get to dessert without a nervous breakdown from Mum.
“Fine, but what is it you do here?”
“Oh, same old, same old, infinite damnation, torture beyond the limits of human imagination, etc, etc,” said Beelzebub. “We do a pretty mean guided tour now though-did you like the train ride? Though of that one myself, though I tell you it was a drag to be able to get the song”-he elbowed Dante playfully and painfully in the ribs- “those Disney guys, huh? And I thought we were bastards,” he snickered in a way that made Dante suspect Beelzebub memorized a lot of comments of the kind for moments like these.
“We like to think of ourselves as a modern company, ya know? Ah, here we are, this is what I wanted to show you!”
They had stopped in front of a room flanked by a large plate-glass display case. Dante shuffled into the room, squinting at rows and rows of shiny plastic racks bedecked with paraphernalia. A bunch of scratchy T-shirts caught his eyes. They were emblazoned with pathetically desperate attempts at jovial wit, the kind of thing that was comedy gold to beer-swilling dads looking to inflict fresh agonies of humiliation onto their cringing teenagers. One said: “MALEBOLGIA? I HARDLY KNOW HER!” Another said: “I VISITED THE CITY OF DIS AND ALL I GOT WAS THIS LOUSY T-SHIRT.”
Dante rifled through a couple more (“I’M USED TO HELL: I’M MARRIED, AREN’T I?” “NUMBER ONE SUCCUBUS SEDUCER”) smiling weakly at Beelzebub, who was watching Dante with the look of a small child who had just handed their parents a drawing done in crayon.
“Pretty neat, right?” said Beelzebub. “Though of course, we don’t actually have any Succubae anymore, not after all that women’s-lib crap, ya know?” Beelzebub did not wait for Dante to reply and instead slunk over to a large coffee table laden with pyramids of glossy books. “And look, here we go!”
He handed Dante a book . It had flames on the cover, and a golden title in a rather overdone font: The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri. A sticker read: “NOW A MAJOR COSMOLOGICAL ATTRACTON!”
“Not too shabby, if I do say so myself,” said Beelzebub, cracking his suspenders like gunshots. “Got bumped up to Head of Marketing a couple of centuries back. It was supposed to be Mephistopheles but he left to strike out on his own in showbiz, all the fame went to his head after that Dr. Faustus nonsense,” muttered Beelzebub, stopping as he noticed Dante. The poet was looking at the book with disgust. “You OK?”
“This-this says the Divine Comedy.”
“Yeah…..?”
“This is only Inferno !”
“So?”
“But-but it’s a trilogy,” wailed Dante. “What about Purgatory, what happened to Paradise? The long, painful but redemptive struggle to salvation, the journey from despair to hope?”
“Oh no one gives a shit about that, it barely sells,” snorted Beelzebub. “You humans want all fucked-up karmic justice contrapasso stuff, why else do you think we made this place? Anyway, I thought you’d be happy,” said Beelzebub. He set down the mug and began flicking through a copy of the Inferno. “I mean, you came up with all this stuff, right? Could have reached out to us about the title though, not sure about this Divine Comedy stuff-not exactly a laugh a minute. I thought you were a funny guy?” said Beelzebub. The demon flipped to a random page and made a face.
“Terribly inaccurate too if you don’t mind constructive criticism. I mean this place used to just be your run-of-the-mill lake of fire. Funny thing is, sinners would start showing up and have all these questions, all these complaints: what about the Seven Levels of Hell? Is the Forest of the Suicides a dog-friendly zone? Where are all the icy wastelands, don’t all the flames get a bit repetitive? Blah de blah de blah, you get the idea. Wouldn’t be a good idea to disappoint the customers, right? Dealing with the contractors alone was-well, aha, –Hell. I mean come on, seven levels. Overkill man, real overkill,” tutted Beelzebub, sticking his hands in his pockets.
“We had to fly in a Cerberus, now that was a chore, I’ll tell you. Three different rabies shots, fed nine times a day and those PETA goons still aren’t happy. All that Greco-Roman stuff you put in there too, we’ve had to outsource half our workforce to centaurs and harpies, plus they’re all undocumented. Though between you and me,”-Beelzebub lowered his voice to a stage whisper- “they do twice the work for a third of the pay, so it all turned out well, eh? Still, it’s no picnic,” he sighed, with the world-weary heaviness of a boss who is utterly convinced they’re the only person doing any work.They had left the room during this monologue, and now Beelzebub was leading Dante down another corridor. The demon lit a gold-tipped cigarette, a burst of flame licking from the tip of his finger.
“Naturally we had to change a few things, got rid of the more…problematic elements of the old Inferno. Not that I personally care, but you know how it is with all that ‘wake’ nonsense or whatever. Some of those sins were just plain nasty, and antithetical to the inclusive, diverse and modern image Inferno Inc. wishes to project to its loyal consumers.” This last part was recited in a dry rattle reminiscent of a bored schoolboy reading out lines in detention.
“You can’t just change my work!” squawked Dante, flushing. Beelzebub shrugged.
“Take it up with them,” he said, flicking his wrist in the direction of a door. Dante wandered over and cracked the door open. Inside was a series of massive wooden crates, squirming with wailing, naked humans bound and gagged in chains. The crates were labelled FUEL and FOOD. Dante closed the door and read its brass plaque:
HUMAN RESOURCES.
He fell back in line behind Beelzebub, who wrapped himself in a fresh, smug fog of tobacco smoke. They had come to the end of the room, in front of a mahogany door with Beelzebub’s name written neatly on it in gilded script. Beelzebub opened the door for Dante to come inside. The room had large glass windows with a view of the cracked, crimson mountains of Hell, flashes of lightning throwing shadows periodically along an enormous desk no less polished than the demon’s smile. A gleaming red phone squatted on the tabletop next to a kitsch Chinese lamp, a blocky computer and an angular trophy proclaiming the recipient as employee of the Millenia.
In the centre of the room a strip of acid-green turf and a small hole in the ground marked a miniature indoor golf set. An actual bag of golf clubs, bristling with iron, was leaning against the side of the desk. The walls were filled with boring looking leather volumes that had long ago given up trying to suggest that their owner had actually read them. A woman in a sensible black skirt and pressed white top was in the room, ordering discarded files on Beelzebub’s desk. She looked up as the two men entered.
“Thanks for the help, but can you give us the room darling?” said Beelzebub, holding the door open. The woman’s lips thinned but she said nothing, leaving briskly. There was a painful ‘crack’ as her hand slapped Beelzebub’s questing fingers away from her backside.
“My secretary, Ishtar,” said Beelzebub, rubbing his hand. “Nice enough girl, Babylonian or something. Diversity hires, I swear man, this affirmative-action shit is killing me, but you didn’t hear that here,” he said sourly, winking conspiratorially at Dante. Beelzebub collapsed into his chair, putting his feet up on the desk, puffing away at his cigarette.
“So, man, can I offer you anything”-
“No. I’ve really wasted enough time as it is already,” said Dante brusquely. He had put up with this bizarre charade for quite enough time already and was ready to go home, away from this smarmy demon and his unctuous speeches, away from this bastardization of his poetry running on crushed dreams, dirty money and poor air conditioning.
“Well, yikes, man, we just wanted to let you get to know the place for old times’ sake,” said Beelzebub. “It’s not like we can actually keep you here. We wouldn’t want to make the Big Man Upstairs upset,” he added, and now a truly ugly look that was a little hate and a lot of fear flashed across the demon’s face.
“Just say the word and we’ll buzz you right back up.”
“Thank you,” said Dante . “I’m sorry to offend, but I will always prefer Heaven.”
“Me too pal,” said Beelzebub, and smiled slyly. “But we get more visitors.”
Dante was about to leave. Then he remembered something. “Before I go-I would want to work something out.”
“Oh?”
“It’s about the Inferno. Well, my Inferno. The way I see it, you’re all using my ideas, my images, my poetry to sell your shirts and your books. Clearly this is not an…unsuccessful endeavour, and though I am humbled, my pride as an artist forces me to inquire as to why I was never approached about any of this.”
Beelzebub was sitting up straight in his chair, squinting at Dante. “Well, the way we see it, we were here for quite a bit of time before you even put pen to paper, pal. Inferno Inc. claims exclusive rights to all intellectual properties pertainingregarding Hell,Tartarus, or any other domain of eternal damnation.”
“They’re still my ideas. As you said, before this was all just a lake of fire. I transformed it into something eternal. No, not just eternal. Something iconic. And I’ll be damned if I continue to receive no compensation for the use of my work.” Dante wouldn’t budge. Remembering the song on the train, he decided to take things a step farther. “We wouldn’t want to make the Big Man Upstairs upset, is that not what you said?”
Beelzebub bit his tongue, steepling his fingers. “I can make no promises, Mr. Alighieri,” he said, the ice returning to his speech. “That being said, have a pleasant return to Paradise. I promise, Inferno Inc. will be in touch…. presently, to discuss any subsequent concerns you may have with copyright with our team of legal advisors.”
Nodding curtly to the demon, Dante turned to the door but stopped again.
“Legal advisors…. You have lawyers in Hell?” he asked. Beelzebub threw his head back and laughed so hard his cigarette flew out of his mouth.
“Oh man,” he hooted, wiping tears of mirth from his eyes, “I knew it! You really are a funny guy!”
The vans travelled alone, materializing in back alleys and underneath streetlamps as if they had always been there. Gliding with lupine grace and singular purpose, they had acquired a bizarre invisibility, erased from the memories of those who stumbled across them. Some might recognize these vans or guess their purpose. Perhaps there are some, unlike me, fortunate enough not to, a mass of blissfully content idiots alien to the instruments of tyranny. Mobile charcoal coffins, they made themselves known suddenly but surely, like a rag pressed on the mouth of a sleeping victim. Their arrival seemed to herald some terrible calamity, one that had nevertheless been quietly accepted as part of the natural order, the iron tang of ozone before a thunderstorm.
It was six in the morning, in a place whose name does not bear mentioning, and one I would have rather not remembered, though my duty to record the slain forces my hand. It happened on a day like this, with the birds still waiting to strike up in song and the dew spreading a slick sheen on the blades of neatly cut grass quivering with each gust of wind.
One such van was parked beside the curb. It had been sitting there for quite some time and would wait for more still. It was a singularly ugly thing, wretched in its blunt simplicity. The vehicle bore no markings of any kind, clad in a coat of sable paint. Tinted windows of smoky obsidian gave the van the appearance of an enormous bug, squatting in wait, ready to leap at any moment with foaming mandibles and chitinous claws. Framed against the backdrop of white-picket fences, lace curtains and brass doorknockers that adorned the surrounding houses, it was an aberration. An intrusion on the isolation afforded only by a Party membership card.
It could have occurred at any time. It had before, in different scenes, been denied the pleasure of being lit by the light of the approaching dawn. In ramshackle Joint Habitation Apartments bursting at the seams with wailing children, their faces yellow under the cheap, flickering lamps that lined their walls. At Centrally-Approved celebrations thick with the miasma of bitter state-provided liquor and the leaden gloom of fun carried out under the prerequisite of compliance. Usually, the stage was set by some regional village out of my reach; its air punctured by the lowing of the few healthy cows still available for distribution and the shriek of the rickety junkyard scraps that passed for Ministry-Sanctioned machinery. The setting was incidental. The result, seldom different.
Inside the van, the first man stretched awkwardly, shifting in his seat, his jaw popping as he let out a death-rattle yawn. His name was not important and could never be. Another line of type out of millions, locked away in confidential archives in a government basement. Suffice to say he was a faceless blur devoid of colour, endowed with the same agency as an axe or a hammer. Rubbing his poorly shaven jaw with one hand, he blinked, eyes crusted from a lack of sleep, focusing his bleary sights on the house visible alongside the window. Looking, no doubt, for a sudden twitch of a curtain, or the tell-tale lights revealing someone was awake far before the beginning of the dictated productivity timetable. Finding nothing, he let out a breathy sigh and leaned back as far as his chair would let him.
His face, as reflected with a slight distortion in the rear-view mirror, was hardly striking. It was neither excessively ugly nor handsome, nor was it the portrait of demonic evil many would expect. Instead, it spoke of a more petty malice, not one born of scheming or savagery, but the simple, unrefined cruelty of the everyday. In his pebble-grey eyes was the look of someone who had pulled the legs from beetles just because it was easy and stamped on the shiny new toys of his childhood neighbour for being nicer than his.
The legions of passengers in the black vans that traversed the country were formed of such men. Men unaware of any meaningful change that could be achieved without a rifle or a pistol, eager to dish out punishment to those they thought deserved it and content to view themselves as excepted. His partner was asleep behind the wheel, the dull red light of the dashboard casting his features in a cherry sheen. The scarlet dagger insignia embroidered on the lapel of his jacket glistened. The collar was turned up, jutting upwards from his neck, whilst the state-issued peaked cap that came with their uniform was pulled down far over his eyes. Fitful snores could be heard from beneath the shield of clothing.
Drumming his fingers on the edge of his armrest, the first man fished inside his jacket pocket for a crumpled packet of cigarettes. Its wrinkled packaging was the trademark of a shoddy underground import, covered with angular foreign characters in a language he could not understand and would not have been allowed to learn. The tin lighter in his hand flared for a second in the semi-darkness of the van. He cranked the window open a sliver to let the smoke worm its way out. I wonder if the illegality of his actions enriched the sensation. Not that it really mattered: the crimson dagger on his uniform absolved him from upholding most common state-ordered restrictions. Those with no knives, symbolic or otherwise, were in no place to object.
The inside of the van was now thick with light blue fog. It looked like the inside of an aquarium. Mumbling, the first man turned the radio on, turned down as low as possible, and began humming along under his breath whilst his partner slept. The station he had tuned into was also banned (the concept of multiple radio stations seems laughable in the wake of the ‘Entertainment and Togetherness’ Campaign and the creation of the Smiling Faces Broadcasting Group). It played something that the presenter, most certainly speaking from a dingy offshore fishing boat fitted with a battered antenna, called ‘rock and roll’ music. The man had certainly only ever heard of it in classrooms during his academy training.
It was one of the innumerable offences he and his partner would have been made to memorize: in this case, Section 457, which penalized the distribution, ownership or performance of any music that threatened to destabilize unity, goodwill and cause disturbance. If the C.D wasn’t stamped with the cherubic grin of the Smiling Faces label of approval, if the band did not present a permit of Centrally-Approved entertainment, then in brief a black van would appear one day, and that would be all. He could never have guessed the name of the song, though if pressed to try he may have hazarded Rolling Stones based on what the radio presenter had whispered before the music started. It was very good, much better than the trite sludge pumped out through the speakers in community productivity centers. It had a dirty, punchy rhythm to it, rough around the edges, sweating sex and aggression.
The man tutted to himself. Small wonder it had been banned. His foot, however, still moved to the beat as he took another drag on his cigarette. As he listened, perhaps he wondered what the inhabitants of the house could have done, trawling through endless memorized pages of felonies and anti-productivity offences. If he did, he surely gave up once boredom set back in. There wasn’t much of a point. They had an address and an order, and nothing much aside from that was needed. If the address had been pinned up on the corkboard in his cubicle, then whoever it belonged to must have done something to deserve it, even if they themselves were not aware of it. And it they weren’t, well, wasn’t that their fault? It must have seemed quite self-explanatory to the man, as he sprinkled ash onto the side of the road. If only guilty people had their address placed on the board, then if they hadn’t done anything wrong, they wouldn’t have ended up there. It didn’t get any easier than that.
Right now, what surely weighed most heavily on his mind was the thought of being able to punch out of his shift soon, have a hot meal rather than grainy nutrition bars and lukewarm coffee. The chance to shower, even if hot water was now a thing of the past, wash away the stench of sweat, tobacco, grime, and stuffy air that had clung to him like a second skin begging to be peeled off. Could he imagine what it must be like to live inside one of those houses cradled within the suburbs? I doubt he was capable of picturing anything of substance. Men like him cannot begin to fathom an interior or exterior life outside of the van. They are reduced to visualizing vague shapes, more the ideas of things than the things themselves: happy, family, together, peace, rest……it was territory too alien for a mind stripped down and engineered into uniform boxes, stacked together to serve one purpose, and do so unflinchingly.
Suddenly, outside-movement. The door had been opened slightly, from behind which emerged a banded tabby ca. The first man watched it, a collar with a tiny bell hung around its neck. He must have been more than a little impressed: outside of the suburbs no living person had seen a live cat in years. Its existence would prove maddeningly puzzling, almost frustrating as it sashayed through the open air. The cat could leave whenever it wanted. What compelled it to stay? Was it the safety of four walls, the promise of treats passed under the table that made it give in to those benign overlords that stuck tracking chips beneath its flesh and castrated it? Did their promise of security suffice, for it to suffer being stamped with a foreign name and wear it on a plate around its throat?
For a second, did he see himself reflected in those slitted, feline eyes?
He was thankfully snapped back to his senses before his thoughts could become too dangerous. His partner was awake. He turned off the radio, and adjusted his cap. His head nodded in the direction of the house. The van swung open.
Six in the morning. Three knocks on the front door. On the threshold, the two men in their raven-black coats. Gray guns in their holsters, the strap unbuckled.
The first man was still smoking his cigarette, his foot tapping to the beat of a phantom drum. The other man pulled out a piece of paper from his pocket and tacked it above the house number.Rows of black text bunched together spelled out: “Guilty of Deviant Expression: Anti-Utopian Conspirators.”
No answer from within. Then, muffled footsteps. The door creaked open. Dressed in undersized pyjamas, a little girl rubbed her face and blinked up at the men looming over her. She was up far too early, wanting to let the cat back inside. She was confused, addled by tiredness. She saw adults, but did not understand.
The first man let out a hiss of blue smoke. His knees bent slightly. He was face to face with the child. He asked, slowly in clear, precise tones, as to not alarm her, if her mummy and daddy were still upstairs.
Still puzzled, apprehensive now, the girl scratched her head. She gave a curt nod. The first man smiled. His partner drew his pistol and shot her through the head. A spray of blood speckled the entrance. The first man wiped a ruby bead from the lapel of his uniform. A jackboot crushed the bud of his cigarette.
The girl had been holding a teddy-bear. Its fur was sprayed claret, and it was missing an eye. Upstairs, a scream. A light came on.
His partner took the stairs first. Stepping over the body, he followed. Two more gunshots. Crickets chirped outside. One final crack: the mother was trying to crawl away.
They left in a single file. The van waited at the side of the curb. His partner got in first. In the glove-compartment, a box of sanitary wipes was passed around then tossed to the back of the van, wrinkled and stained. A splutter, and the van started rocked to life. The house lights were still on.
The first man lit another cigarette as his stomach growled. His partner drove, the clicking of the turn signal counting away the minutes before the morning, underscored by his tuneless whistling. The first man turned towards his partner, looking at his watch as he did. A fleck of clotted gore was drying on its surface. The next words he spoke were recorded, as everything they did and said until then had been. Stored in devices embedded in their uniforms by their ever-vigilant Ministry for the purpose of a report that, if it were not for my efforts, would have been consigned to the dustbin of history.
Officer Joseph Hayze of the Bureau of Acceptable Consumption had a truckful of ice delivered to his villa at the beginning of every week. For those unfamiliar with the socio-economic nuances of the Free Democratic People’s Confederate Republic of Veritas this expense may have seemed a tad excessive, but the Republic’s summers were long and dry. The slabs of ice were of the utmost importance for the Hayze house, tucked away as it was on the outskirts of the capital’s sun-scorched plains. There, a small but dedicated task force of maids were charged with dismantling the pearlescent chunks. Though he could have done it himself, Officer Hayze was content to let his staff hammer away at the glittering cubes. His hands were calloused enough already. All five fingers were studded with bubonic welts, leathery growths etched in by the grip of his pen as he sat in his office and devoured dreams.
Squirming impatiently in his favourite chair, Joseph Hayze awaited the incoming feast. His belt had been loosened in anticipation. Trolleys festooned with confiscated files, submissions and pre-Republic manuscripts awaiting review surrounded him, carted in by his staff like parade-floats. Everything was ready. A washtub of ice squatted expectantly under his desk whilst a tumbler of teeth-achingly cold liquid perspired over a coaster.
Cracking his knobbly knuckles and rolling his neck, he got to work.
A lesser man would have wavered at such a colossal task. Joseph Hayze was cut from a sturdier cloth. He boasted such a prodigious talent for identifying inferior literature that in his youth, when denied a position at the Veritas Institute of Arts and Letters, he had known that the submissions of the successful applicants were nothing but pretentious gutter-trash, without even having to read them. After the nineteenth rejection of his novel, The Chrysanthemums Weep, But Do Their Tears Sing? by Herbert and Miller Ltd, Hayze had realised that the publishers on the island, nay, the world, were nothing but myopic, elitist scoundrels out to crush the little man. Probably perverts as well. Herbert and Miller were currently choking on coal dust in one of the grimy work-camps up North. Such ideological enemies of the Republic were better suited to a pickaxe than publishing anyway. Meanwhile, thank you for asking, Chrysanthemums had just been re-released for its eleventh edition (Free Democratic People’s Confederate Republic of Veritas Press).
All this took place before the Glorious Restoration, of course. Before the Bureau, an institution whosetask, the censorship of the dreck that had infected their beloved country, was of a sanctity that made that old affair with the virgin’s son in the temple look pedestrian by comparison. Hayze spearheaded the literature and print division, a fact he rather enjoyed lording over his compatriots in charge of the more, well, popular arts. Hayze’s titanic position over the island’s starving artists conferred upon him an authority no author could match. A five-foot-six Kronos, he could reach back through time itself so that pre-Republic literary sensations were reprinted, castrated by his blade. In the present, he mostly culled fledgling portfolios offered up by writers who still hoped their dreams could flourish under the New Regime. Newborn ideas would be gobbled down by Hayze before they could rise to depose him. Sometimes he could go weeks without food as fantasies dissolved in his stomach, gastric acids eagerly obliterating the macerated dreams into a palatably orthodox mush.
Hayze clicked the cap off his pen, dignified as a Templar unsheathing his blade. The scimitar-sting of a scorpion, its tip hovered over the first manuscript. Ah. A vestige of the Dark Ages, the last surviving poetry collection from his arch-nemesis Frederick Grace, recounting his struggles with addiction. Despite his disapproval, Hayze’s belly quivered. Grace was feeding the worms in a prison graveyard now, but this miserable scrap of his stamped-out legacy would be the perfect appetizer. Sure, it might be ‘poor form’ to relish in his rival’s destruction but, well, everyone had their own vices…errore humanus est, wasn’t that the saying?
Truth be told, he felt a thrilling kinship with the degenerate’s indulgence. Hayze’s mouth flooded with saliva when he recalled the day when, newly promoted to his current position, he had taken his pen to every name affiliated with the loathsome printing houses of yore, slashing lines of ruby ink across the list. Hissing through the air, a bloody scar once more ripped across a page as Hayze branded an X over the poetry’s cover. Better luck next time, brat. He finalized the butchery of his nemesis’s legacy, just for the glee of watching red lines excoriate Grace’s helpless stanzas, tearing clean through the paper in his enthusiasm. With a snarl of triumph, Hayze dropped the shrivelled compilation into the stack marked INCINERATOR. Good riddance. The little punk’s corpse would soon be reunited with his life’s work in the ash- heap of history.
Wiping away drool, he turned to the remaining work awaiting censorship. His fingers hovered over table, perusing la carte. Grac’s oeuvre had been a scintillating warm-up, but the man was dead, and that harvest of dreams had just dried up. One manuscript would not suffice, heavens no. Hmmm… perhaps a few morsels of clandestinely printed feminist essays as an amuse bouche, to be followed by an hors d’oeuvres of avant-garde lyric and, splendid, a main course of surrealist novels. Yes, and for dessert, a bowl of potentially seditious utopian fiction, oooh, and a side of modernist theatre from an illicit student-publication too. Mercy, silver plate.
As he gobbled it all down, cutting, editing, deleting, he dismantled his meal as a man prepares shrimp. Stripping the shell, twisting the legs off (a technique perfected, aged six, on his sister’s dolls) flaying any excess appendageof ingenuity. Holding still-wriggling aspirations between greasy thumb and forefinger, he chomped and sucked, masticating with relish as ambition squirmed between his lips. Finally, Hayze bit off the head (a sight to make Goya proud) slurping up any latent juices of genius. Taking breaks between mouthfuls, he quaffed from the tumbler, lubricating his throat as it stretched to force down more and more. His toes wriggled over the ice, the soles of his feet already giving off heat. So much filth, so much wrongness, sweet-tasting, alluring. Ideas oily with impropriety, but so rich. Restaurants could keep their fatty steaks and caviar. There was no treat more luscious than other people’s dreams. Patting his stomach, Officer Hayze cast an appreciative look over the mutilated carcasses of literature, belching and licking his fingers clean of bloody spunk from another batch of neutered art. Of course, sometimes the menu would call for a chargrilled recipe: was it not Dostoyevsky (why yes, Hayze knew his classics) who had said ‘manuscripts don’t burn?’ A hypothesis the Bureau had eagerly put to the test. Many evenings the stench of gasoline followed in Hayze’s wake like an alley-cat.
He yawned. The business of dream-crushing was gruelling work, especially in the oven-baked hell of Hayze’s study. Therefore, the machine of state ensured that he would never be deprived of his refrigerated treasure chests. Hayze would have delegated such a task to his wife, Mary Elise, but she spent most of her days with her book club, The Ladies Against Indecorous Storytelling, a cohort of patriotic prudes staunchly opposed to the influence of pornographic material on Veritas’s culture. This (logically) required them to appraise every piece of underground erotica they could find. The average session of the LAIS looked like a row of STOP signs flicking through the pages of the latest scandal. Round, red faces vibrating in condemnation as steam wafted from their pastel, Easter-egg-shell dyed dresses. Mary Elise had adopted this paradoxical strategy through observation of her husband’s working process, and the presence of ice was much appreciated in these circumstances.
Ever the eager loyalist, Hayze had long ago realized that only someone expertly familiar with the traitorous garbage he was tasked with destroying could efficiently sniff it out. Thus, the Hayze office boasted the most impressive collection of subversive literature on the island. Dissatisfied with merely examining and discarding the contents of the art under trial, he had wrenched the pages from their leatherbound spines to add to his personal stockpile. His study was laminated with layer upon layer of sedition heaped so heavily upon one other that Hayze’s roof was held up by the thoughts of rebels and radicals.
Hayze sighed and thrust his feet into the plastic ice-tub. This inverse sauna stemmed the flush of rage and shame that had, in the past, threatened to spurt from his fingertips in licks of flame. Steam whistled, supernova hot, from Hayze’s ears, singeing his stiff blonde hair. Trembling, he reached for a glass and gulped down the necessary condensation to restore the revolutionary fluctuations of his biology to a conformist temperature. Peeling his soggy clothes off and wiping puckered lips with one hand, Joseph Hayze slipped into the cool silk of the robe that hung over his door like a moulted husk. A brisk knot around his midriff kept the swell of his freshly stuffed gut in place.
The little bell outside of his study rang suddenly. Hayze raised an eyebrow, shaking his dripping feet as he slithered into a pair of slippers, padding over to the door and exiting the muggy room. He was not expecting more guests. Mary Elise had retired to the boudoir earlier, escorted by two maids, after this week’s critique of The Bosomed Bride of Venice had proved too overpowering in its description of Duke Polidori’s muscled calves. Grumbling in the fashion that only a man who has purposefully chosen to overwork himself can, he shuffled down the corridor and descended the stairs, trailing droplets behind him like an incontinent child.
His expression changed from lethargy to surprise as he pattered towards the living room and saw the men waiting on the couch. Hayze’s aesthetic style was spartan enough to make even Leonidas look hedonistic, so the two figures in their khaki shirts and black brogues were encircled by a sea of white porcelain, wood panelling and grey furniture. A picture of Hayze and his wife on their wedding day was one of two pieces of decoration on the wall. It was eclipsed by a far larger portrait of Hayze in his Bureau Uniform. Appropriately dwarfed in comparison, Officers Paul Surdis and Alfred Aveugle were sharing lemonade, the latter tucking into a sundae as one of Hayze’s maids skittered away with the gutted ice-cream carton. The door to the house was open, another maid standing beside it. Hayze caught a glimpse of two black limousines in the driveway, huddled like dung-beetles against the gravel. With a curt flick he dismissed the maids, sending them retreating into the kitchen and behind the safety of a slammed door.
Aveugle didn’t notice. The smug bastard had taken the liberty of switching Hayze’s television set on. Hayze recognized one of the Bureau’s Special Access channels, the kind kept away from the public. A square-jawed actor in a tuxedo was machine-gunning a wave of goons. A woman clung to his arm, clad in a bathing-suit apparently fashioned from three-strings and a napkin. Aveugle was chuckling to himself. Mouth drooping open as the fluorescent light flickered over his slack-jawed grin, his jowls inflated like ruddy boils as he gorged. Hayze stalked into sight, slippers whispering along the glittering tiles. Surdis jerked up, head tilting. Paul managed audio and music for the Bureau. Consequently, his eyes, deemed redundant for the task of navigating the airwaves, had crinkled like baked raisins. He had compensated for this sensory deprivation by developing two whoppingly elephantine ears, fleshy butterfly wings that quivered as they picked up nearby vibrations. The overall effect gave one the impression that Officer Surdis’ head could be lifted by the handles.
‘Joe! Sorry to drop in on you so suddenly-we knew you might still be working, so we went ahead and let ourselves in. You have such a diligent staff, they helped us with, ha ha, plundering your refrigerator. I’m sure it’s all right-No harm, no foul, after all. Mis casas son vuestro casas, no?’
‘No harm at all, Paul,’ said Hayze, mentally popping Surdis’ lopsided cranium off his trembling neck. The ‘diligent staff’ would need to be decimated after this little surprise. Hayze flashed his co-workers a grin. It was as though his lips were trying to avoid being seen next to his teeth.
‘What brings you around my neck of the woods, gentlemen?’-Aveugle did not look up, corneas still stapled to the TV- so Hayze continued: ‘Do you perhaps seek some knowledge from this pantheon, wish to employ the resources of my sanctus sanctorum literaribus?’ After the humiliation of having been caught unawares, Hayze took pleasure in the vacant expression that settled over Surdis’ face. The dolt could barely string together a Spanish cliché. No wonder Latin confounded him. Yet what to expect from a man exposed daily to showtunes and (God almighty) ‘rocking roll’ music?
A flicker of resentment rippled over Surdis’ bullet-point pupils. It was not so much that the heads of the Bureau disliked each other, but that they had clawed their way to the top with the instinctual greed of children vying for the top of the playground slides. Sooner or later, they all knew, someone would have to eat a mouthful of sand.
‘Very kind of you Joe, but there’s no need. I really can’t stay long. You know how it is-no rest for the wicked. The FF debuts next Monday,’ rallied Surdis, ears trembling with pride. The FF, or Fetid Forty-Three, was Surdis’ list of the Prime Musical Offenders destined for the cell or the bullet. His roll call included overly aggressive ‘rocker’ (or whatever) musicians, jazz bands and several nursery rhyme composers. The brunt of Surdis’ vitriol had fallen on a children’s ditty titled My Mummy Has a Very Big Bottom (disgusting, borderline incestuous!). Though the list had yet to debut officially, Surdis had purposefully leaked sections to the public as part of Bureau scare-tactics. A fortnight ago, three local musicians had been found swinging from a beam.
‘I’m nearly up to one hundred points,’ said Surdis, rocking on his heels in satisfaction. ‘Can you believe it? Triple digits! I might even hit one-fifty when the FF goes official! You’ll have to work overtime to catch up Alfie,’ he snickered. Aveugle grunted. The Bureau heads ran an unofficial scoreboard: ‘breaking’ a creative into subservience racked up respectable points, incarcerations were worth double, executions triple. Getting a subversive to off themselves was the jackpot. Hayze paid Surdis’ crowing no mind. He was well ahead of his compatriots on the B.A.C leaderboard. Frederick Grace’s more recent termination had pushed him into the three-hundreds.
‘Enough about the goddamned Fetid Forty-Three,’ rumbled Aveugle. The T.V shut off as he squashed the remote, his appetite sated. Hayze recognized the tell-tale stiffening of clothes drawn taut around a heaving stomach. ‘If have to hear about your goddamn list one more time my brains are gonna burst out of my nose.’
Alfred Aveugle had changed considerably after he started running the Bureau’s Televisual and Cinematic Department. Before, he had been a wisp of a man, his voice a reedy distortion and his countenance as colourless as old greyscale film reels. Veritas’s transition to Technicolour seemed to have done wonders for his disposition: Aveugle had bloated in tandem with the budgets of the productions he oversaw. His latest flick, Onward! Onward Golden-Haired Cherubs of Justice Against the Enemies of Truth and Beauty! had nearly bankrupted the country, though this hadn’t dampened his energy in the slightest.
Hayze cleared his throat. ‘There’s no need for profanity, my friend. Maybe ease up on the booze too, it’s not even noon,’ he added, nose crinkling. Aveugle ignored him. The man reeked. Veritas heavily policed alcohol consumption, but such strictures did not apply to Bureau Officers. Hayze liked a stiff drink as much as the common man (and the common man had to settle for Citizen-approved watery cider), but Aveugle took it too far. The liquor he guzzled had fused with his biology in a bizarre alchemical process, transubstantiating red blood into imported Scotch. He twitched incessantly; Alfred Aveugle was something of a man possessed, literally filled with spirits.
Hayze made an impatient clicking noise with his tongue. ‘Well, as intriguing as all this may be, I don’t see why this pow-wow you’ve decided to organize can’t wait until Monday. If that’s the only reason you’re here…. Surdis, you’re the one who keeps nattering on about how busy you are. You’ve enjoyed some lemonade and my dessert, which about covers hospitality, so let’s wrap up this up.’
‘Ah, right, sorry Joe, it almost slipped my mind. Ordinarily we would have waited for the next Bureau meeting, handled this with the proper channels, involved everyone’-
‘No point sticking it out for that goddamn long,’ Alfred chimed in, ‘getting all five of us together is like herding goddamn cats, Oliver and Phil are with the diplomatic party visiting the goddamn frog-eaters’-
‘Be that as it may, gentlemen, if we could return to addressing the point of your visit?’
‘Sorry Joe, right you are,’ Surdis twittered. ‘Well, you see, it’s probably nothing, not even worth getting worked up about, but since you were involved so heavily in the matter, we believed you had a right to know…’
‘Involved in what? Know what? Get to the point,’ snapped Hayze, swishing his robe-sleeves with imperatorial pomposity. In the truest spirit of radio, Surdis enjoyed the sound of his own voice too much. Alfred beat him to the punch: ‘It’s about Frederick Grace.’
Hayze snorted. Nevertheless, his lumpy fingers had tightened into balls, curling in on themselves like a dead spider.
‘That hack? He’s been dead for ages. I was there when they blew his skull onto the prison-yard wall. Even the contents of his brain were dull. How is this still a problem? I trashed the last vestige of his legacy before the engines on your limos had started to cool. What’s his ghost dredging up now, another underground memorial service? More illegal reprints cropping up? Bellyaching from journalists? All that fuss for some brat, Socrates and Alcibiades was trash and we all know it! They only gave it the Nobel to discredit the Republic!’ Hayze’s clipped tones were shifting into guttural snarls, the edges of his mouth crinkling as venom lathered his tongue.
Surdis and Aveugle exchanged sneers. The reviews for Grace’s first novella had been printed overseas at the same time as the ones for Hayze’s Chrysanthemums. Hayze had ensured that all those involved in local print that so much as mentioned their two names in conjunction were either in chains or body-bags. This had not seemed to daunt his nemesis. Most shocking of all, it was only until he had met Grace face-to-face that his nefarious foe had even seemed to be aware of his existence! Him! Joseph Hayze! Yet still the miserable twerp had antagonized him, snatching the Nobel nomination out of his jaws (by cheating, no doubt, no-one that young had ever been nominated, Grace had friends everywhere, foreign spies, saboteurs, of course, what else could explain his stellar reputation outside of Veritas?) Unsurprisingly, Grace had not been allowed to accept the prize. Hayze had devised a more appropriate awards ceremony. A month later, Frederick Grace was bestowed the greatest honour Veritas could give an unconventional mind: a lump of lead through his right eye.
‘He couldn’t even come up with some decent last words,’ spat Hayze, marching over to the lemonade. ‘The final hour comes and what does he muster? Nothing! Nothing but silence, you’d think he’d have jumped at the chance to throw us a bone, one last parting shot!’ Just thinking about Grace was making sparks sneeze from his nostrils, the hair on his nape curling as his neck grew cherry-red. He threw back a hearty splash of the drink. ‘There’s your ‘soul of the age’ for you.’ He stopped as he noticed the glance that travelled between his two guests. ‘What? What is it?’
‘Those weren’t his last words.’
‘How do you mean? I was sitting in the front row whilst you were pushing paper in your office Surdis, don’t presume to lecture me.’ Surdis cringed back: Hayze’s eyes were moving manically in his head as if they had been borrowed from somebody else.
‘He left a goddamn note,’ said Aveugle, slapping down his flask with a thud. ‘It turned up yesterday, the goddamn kid had hidden it in his cell before the execution.’
‘So? That’s why you disturb me?’ Hayze bristled; his blond-locks puffed around his head like the hood of a cobra. ‘This had better be important. I’ve devoured everything he ever wrote; whatever crumbs are left will barely support me until dinner. What’s it contain? Coordinates for buried treasure? His last will and testament?’
‘Well…. no.’ Surdis sighed. ‘Look, see for yourself-come on Alfie.’
Huffing and wheezing, Aveugle extricated himself from the boa-constrictor embrace of the couch cushions. He staggered toward Hayze, handing him a ratty piece of paper, which Hayze unfolded. His eyebrow arched. No ink had been provided for Grace in his cell. The man had resorted to his own blood. An experimental writer to the end…how trite. The paper bore a simple inscription in a crabbed scrawl that had crusted over:
‘Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes?’
‘How cute, very intellectual,’ said Hayze. ‘This is bog-standard stuff gentlemen, a typical attempt to denounce us as hypocrites.’
‘Who watches the watchmen, right?’ said Aveugle. Hayze pursed his lips. He had just been about to school his philistine coworkers in Latin. Whatever. Aveugle had probably learned that from a movie.
‘Yes, indeed, who brings the deliverers of justice to justice, so on so forth.’ He yawned and turned the paper around. There was a second inscription. A decidedly blunter aphorism was scribbled on the back. It was uncharacteristically crude for someone like Grace, petty in a way Hayze had only encountered in the schoolyard. The sort of hollow taunt best accompanied by a raspberry and a stuck-out tongue. Grace’s blood was mashed into spiky, scratchy letters. One could almost imagine him smearing it into existence, teeth gritted, muscles standing like ropes in his neck.
WHAT GOES AROUND, COMES AROUND.
Below the words, the amateur artist had doodled a snake curled into a circle, fanged mouth closed around its own tail. An ouroboros. Grace had routinely used it as a metaphor for his addiction. Hayze couldn’t keep himself from rolling his eyes.
‘Fascinating. Some kind of threat, I suppose. A warning from beyond the grave? Do I need to start locking my bedroom door?’
‘Well, we can certainly try to inform the Intelligence Bureau,’ said Surdis. ‘It could be a sign of another subversive movement, a hint at some kind of gang looking for revenge. Wouldn’t be the first time…’
‘Frederick Grace? Part of a militant group?’ snickered Hayze. ‘The most he could muster were long-haired university students and wall-eyed bookworms.’
‘You’re pretty goddamn cavalier about it.’ Aveugle had collapsed back onto the nearest pillow. ‘Considering you’re the goddamn guy who signed his death warrant.’
‘Really gents, I appreciate the concern, I really do, but this comes with the territory! Death threats are nothing new to us Bureau men.’ He crumpled up the paper and tossed it toward the nearest wastepaper basket. It bounced off the rim and fell onto the polished floor. ‘This is nothing more than the infantile, impotent last gasp of a fraud who couldn’t accept that he was finally getting his just deserts!’ Yet even as he said it, he could feel a feverish prickle spread in a wave down his spine. The bruised face of the young man as they hauled him up against the wall jumped suddenly in Hayze’s memory. Grace’s one good eye, the other a throbbing mass of swollen flesh, courtesy of the guards, sparking even in the miserable grey of the early morning. He licked dry lips. The droplets of lemonade had evaporated. The snake, devouring itself, a gory circle carved with brittle fingers and ragged fingernails, hovered in front of his eyes for a second. He must have paled a little because Surdis and Aveugle were both looking at him strangely.
Gritting his teeth, Hayze clenched his fist behind his back. ‘I’m thankful for the consideration, and I’m sorry you wasted your time coming here. This kind of thing is the stuff of the past-the Republic moves ever forward gentlemen, ever forward! Unity and Prosperity is our motto after all.’ He tightened his robe-belt, garrotting the sash as if wishing to throttle the conversation then and there. ‘I’ll give the lads at Intelligence a call tomorrow morning if it makes you feel any better, but really, there’s nothing to this. We’re all just letting too much work and too much sun scramble our brains! Take the next couple of days off, leave the grunt work to the grunts. We’ll open the pool this weekend, I’ll tell Mary Elise to ring your wives.’
As he was saying all of this, Hayze insistently funnelled the two men out from the living room and toward the door and the driveway, where their chauffeurs were napping inside the Bureau-issue limousines. His head was starting to smart. Surdis’ insincere chirps of thanks and Aveugle’s basso profanity-laden goodbyes were not helping. Goddamn it indeed, he just wanted to lie down. Not in the living room, he’d tell the maid to sweep up that disgusting note as soon as possible (he could fire her tomorrow) then order some lemon-ice to cool him down. Was he coming down with a fever? Nonsense, overwork, just as he’d told his comrades, overwork was the key. He’d send for some more ice first thing in the morning.
—
Early next day, despite a night spent thrashing restlessly above the covers, Joseph Hayze felt like a man renewed. The pounding in his temple had packed up its pain into a bindle and left for greener pastures, no-longer exacerbated by having to suffer his idiot co-workers. Whistling tunelessly to himself, Hayze went about preparing his study. The relevant files were shuffled onto his desk. A new ice-tub, pot of coffee, glass of water, and a carafe of port had been topped up. His fountain pen, polished to a righteous gleam, stood to attention in its inkwell like a blade thrust through an anvil.
Hayze massaged his midriff self-consciously. At this rate, he would have to drop by a tailor. When he stood perpendicular to the bathroom mirror, he looked like a lowercase ‘b.’ Today he would ease up a bit, limit himself to a few choice snacks. He wasn’t champing at the bit to exhaust himself either. A calloused bump on his first knuckle dug at the corner of his eye. The pesky thing was twitching sporadically like an oyster speckled by a lemon. Before he sat down, Hayze placed the needle of his record-player onto the vinyl disk nestled within the case beside his desk. It had been a birthday gift from Surdis, who, as much as it pained Hayze to admit, could often have a pretty good ear for this sort of thing. Georges Bizet’s Carmen. A peccadillo: the Veritas Opera house no longer played anything from Bizet to Puccini and was currently repurposed as a landfill.
Hayze started by reading through the first document of the day: a lyrical anthology by a rural poetess. It was decent stuff, filled with praise for the glories of peasants doing their part for the homeland and such. Hayze’s eyes narrowed. The anthology was thematically connected via continued reference to the poetess’s one true love, which was all fine and good, except she had refused to specify the subject’s gender…fingers touch the hollow ‘neath your breast/and find no missing rib… how easily a wolf pulled on the sheep’s clothing!
Hayze writhed in his seat as a swell of warmth blossomed on his forehead. Indecent, most indecent. His tongue flickered over his lips like a windscreen wiper, feeling the hot prickle intensify. What a toothsome choice to begin with…he felt a twist of the same sickly guilt that used to overpower him when he snuck chocolate from the cupboard as a kid for ‘breakfast.’ The sharp shock of ice at his heels brought him back to his senses. A pity, but no huge loss. The entire forbidden romance throughline would have to be obliterated but the work could be printed as a quaint collection of banal, nationalistic nature poems. Hayze plucked the offending pages from their binding for his personal storage and tacked a note to the file: INTELLIGENCE BUREAU-PERSONAL LIFE OF CITIZEN SHOULD BE FURTHER INVESTIGATED.
He yawned, jaw stretching on its hinges, flicking through the sheafs of sapphic pining. His eye spasmed, his cheeks glowing. The tepid fumbling between Hayze and his own spouse in the bedroom paled in comparison to this…passion. Raindrops of saliva coated the page as Hayze’s belly rumbled. The music swelled in the background. Except-hold on-that was odd. Hayze paused.
The record was playing the Habanera-if you could call it playing. Hayze could not quite explain it accurately, but it was as if large and frequent gaps had been punched into the music. Hayze got up, lifted the needle, and let it play again. The song resumed, but again, only choice snatches of words reached Hayze’s ears: l’oisea, l’amour, tout. It was not that the song was garbled or skipping ahead. Entire lyrics had been replaced with a kind of non-noise, as if cotton wool was being clamped over his ears. He inserted a finger, cleared out some earwax, smeared it onto the underside of his desk. Still no change. Hayze started the record up again, mouthing along, translating in his head: ‘Love is a rebellious bird/That nobody can tame (….) Love is a gypsy’s child/It has never, ever known law….’ Where warbling vocals should have rung out, clear as crystal, there was only that pervasive nothingness. It was a feeling rather like having one’s head thrust momentarily under water.
Some kind of prank? Impossible-Surdis’ present had worked perfectly up until today. Ever the inquisitor, Hayze probed at the silenced lyrics. There was something about their specific absence that nagged at him, like a tongue flickering back again and again to the hole where a tooth should be. Rebellious bird…. untamed…gypsy’s child…. never known law…. a nervous chuckle escaped Hayze. They were deviant lyrics, anathema to Republic ideology. A different sent of words sprang abruptly to mind, leaping out at him with the speed and sudden violence of a mugger:
WHAT GOES AROUND COMES AROUND.
He slammed the lid of the record-player down so hard the table shook. Ridiculous! Ridiculous, absolute insanity! He was letting Frederick Grace’s miserable final threat get to him, playing right into that fraudster’s hands. His vision warped, a shadow blossoming momentarily over his field of view. A spiral vortex, a whirlpool twisted in on itself. He bumped painfully against his desk, blinking furiously. A dusty croak rustled from his throat. A drink, he needed a drink, a cool drink. Hayze reached for the carafe of port and poured himself a glass. He raised it. His eyes bulged.
One moment the glass had been about to touch his lips. The next second, it was back on the desk, the volume of liquid slightly diminished. Hayze stared. It was as if the middle of the three successive actions, lift drink-enjoy drink-put drink down, had been cut from…from reality itself. The port glass was emptier. Surely this meant that Hayze had drunk some, but it was as if it had never happened. It was a trick he had seen time and time again after Aveugle’s department finished trimming a movie: characters were allowed to pour or hold a bottle, but the minute they went in for a taste-cut-the footage would jump forward jerkily, eating up that precious second of inappropriate behaviour.
A sick feeling mounting steadily in his stomach, Hayze scrabbled at his desk drawer, pulling out a mouldering cigar. He hadn’t smoked the things in ages, but just to be sure…where were the matches, matches, come on, matches-there! It took Hayze four tries to light a match, and two to clamp the cigar between his teeth. He moved the weak orange flame toward the cheroot. He blinked. The cigar was no longer in his mouth, but between his fingers. A cloud of blue smoke languished in the air. Hayze yelped and dropped the tobacco. It skittered across the carpet. His stomach heaved, and with a moan he leaned over his waste-paper basket to retch. He blinked. The contents of the bin were a strange, fuzzy distortion. Not that Joseph Hayze had ever been especially interested in examining his own vomit, but now he only registered an odd, greyish gap where the indecorous spectacle should have been.
He moaned, clutching his abdomen. The first tentative bites of hunger were starting to gnaw at him. Hayze jumped to his feet, steadying himself on the edge of the desk, eyes roaming manically around the contents of his office. A low, canine whining had begun to whistle from between his jaws. The whole room was an unfocused blur. The pages and pages of banned literature were illegible. No matter how hard Hayze concentrated all he could pick out were choice, individual harmless pieces, but the greater whole was impenetrable. Angry, thick tar-black bars followed Hayze’s line of sight relentlessly, settling over the titles of manuscripts, the forewords of poems, deleting the innards of pamphlets and monographs. Hayze tore through a blizzard of pages but nothing, nothing. Sable worms infested every inch of paper, entire masterworks he had sequestered from the public supernaturally prohibited.
A cry of outrage punched through his teeth. His precious storehouse, his pantry of dreams! Impossible, all of this was impossible…. he had been drugged, spiked, hypnotized, bombarded by radio-waves from an enemy satellite…cursed. Hayze shivered violently, clamping his hands around his chest. The dreaded heat he sought to temper daily was leeching out of him in shimmering waves, his puffy, scorched flesh settling into a cheesy white. A fishhook pulled up in his gut. Hayze rubbed at his eyes until white fireworks burst in spotty chunks inside his skull. When he opened them, red and raw, nothing had changed. The one thing he could see clearly, was Frederick Grace’s face, his bloody lips forming one last, painful smile.
A paralyzing wave of suspicion crackled down Hayze’s spine. Hyperventilating, he grabbed his personal copy of Chrysanthemums from the top drawer of his desk. He spread it open like an autopsy, so fast that the pages tore. His fingers shook as glacial shivers set in, mouth opening and closing uselessly, a baby bird begging for scraps, as he sought in vain the deplorable warmth of a dream, just one, a granule of taboo, an iota of immorality, ANYTHING, JUST ANYTHING.
Joseph Hayze began to laugh mirthlessly, a guttural kh-kh-kh. He could read every word of his own novel without a hitch.
The next few days were the closest Hayze had ever come to experiencing hell. Through trial and error, he had discovered the sheer scale of his horrifying affliction. If he turned on the radio to any channel other than the ones prescribed by the Republic, if he played any vinyl apart from those sanctioned by the Bureau, he would be greeted by the now hideously familiar absence of sound, murderously smothering all deviant expression. Art was out of the question as well. Naked bodies, blood, weapons, any suggestion of violence, even abstract or Dadaist works would be wiped out by the ever-present black bars.
That morning Hayze had cut himself with his razor only for grey, colourless blood to pump out in a thin trickle. Where it stained the porcelain, the gore was rapidly replaced with a black rectangle. Before, he would have sworn, but language had not been overlooked by the omnipotent wrath of Grace’s curse. If he tried to utter any mildly off-colour word all that emerged from his lips was a high-pitched beep like the whine of a dead radio station. The most unpleasant shock of all had been when he stripped off to take a shower. He washed four or five times a day now, his blistered back ravaged by the scalding heat of the water. It didn’t matter. The cold endured, surviving a woollen avalanche of scarves and jumpers. He found himself blundering through the empty corridors of his villa, a ghost trailing mittens and mufflers instead of chains, a wake of feverish slime stretching behind him.
Observing his nude body in the mirror above his sink, he almost passed out, vivisected by the bare lightbulb of the bathroom. Hayze flesh was a soft-boiled, chalky and pale, laced with purple veins that wriggled like nightcrawlers. The skin had constricted around his bones, the vacuum-seal of starvation transforming his skeleton into a mess of protruding ribs and collarbones. Hayze’s stomach had deflated, limp and withered, a newspaper on wet pavement. Where his penis should have been, there was now a black bar. He avoided Mary Elise as much as possible. He was certain that if they were ever to make love it would simply…skip ahead. They were sleeping in two separate beds now, despite sharing the same room.
Hayze collapsed onto the floor, crumpling into himself like a candy-wrapper. Should he welcome unconsciousness? To sleep, perchance to…God no. Please no. The worst were the dreams. His flaccid belly mustered a weak moan. No matter how many plates of food he gobbled down, it was not enough, his meals tasteless, frozen hunks in his mouth. Hayze closed his eyes. He could try and visualize the buffet of inventiveness he was used to feasting on, his mouth leaking as his yowling appetite recalled succulent towers of creativity waiting to be picked clean. Yet after a career of snatching them out of the hands of aspiring artists, Hayze had been left with nothing. The trove of hoarded brilliance he once slept on like a firedrake of legend had been spirited away by an invisible thief in the night. Morpheus had come to collect his credit. With bleeping interest. Hayze’s nights were a midnight-screening of colourless static. He would wake up in an icebox, sheets stiff with frosted perspiration.
After some time, Hayze managed to get to his feet, dragging himself back to his study. His nakedness did not bother him: Grace’s final wish probably ensured that any potential voyeur would be spared such lewd sights. The brass plaque above his door was dented from where a fist had crashed against the emblazoned shield of the Bureau of Acceptable Consumption. Hayze’s knobbly knuckles bore the black-bar scars of that particular tantrum.
Even at this stage, he couldn’t bring himself to inform any of his Republic superiors. He had tried to dial the Intelligence Bureau Headquarters, screaming down the phone about sabotage, spies, assassins, but the receiver had only gurgled out muddled incoherence. Whatever the Bureau had replied had also been omitted from existence. He hadn’t dared call again. Veritas’s stooges could sight a weak link in the chain of authority with an efficiency that made hawks look like moles. A padded cell would be his reward, if he was lucky. A cigarette and a blindfold if not. No, he had to accept the truth, difficult as it was to believe.
His entire life had been censored.
A day later, the phone rang off the hook. It was Alfred Aveugle. They needed to talk-now. Or at least that’s what it had sounded like through a morse-code cacophony of bleeps and beeps. Hayze met him once more in the living room, hand covering his brow. He sported dark circles under each eye and a furred parka formed a camel’s-hump over Hayze’s back. He was massaging his lumpy hand incessantly, a nervous tic developed as a response to the shivers. It had taken him almost five-minutes to undo the locks installed on the front-door by his amateurish craftsmanship.
Some small solace could be found in realizing that as haggard as he must have appeared, Aveugle looked worse, huddled opposite him on the couch, curled up like a wilted piece of chewing-gum stuck to a lamppost. Alfred’s suit had collapsed over his frame. He’d lost weight, and fast. He no longer stank so pungently of alcohol either. His tongue ran repeatedly over his lips. Alfred was twitching, his face bobbing from side to side in a motion Hayze had become intimately familiar with. Hayze reached over for the T.V remote and switched on his set. It fizzed to life, showing a squat black square swinging a black bar at hordes of goblins, gouts of fuzzy, colourless blood flying all over the screen. Instantly, Alfred’s head snapped in the direction of the glowing screen, mouth slobbering open. He fell, actually fell to his knees in front of the set, pawing at the light and gibbering. Hayze had seen starving dogs leap on a bone with less desperation. With a wail of disappointment, Aveugle jerked back from the T.V, blinking furiously. Hayze clicked to the next Bureau Access channel, sighing as a rectangle gyrated sensuously around a metal pole. Aveugle moaned, slumping away from the T.V. He crawled back onto the couch, the squeak of his body hauling itself up the upholstery undercut by the growl from his stomach. Hayze turned the television off.
‘You as well, huh,’ said Hayze. He was too tired to even relish the pathetic display. Aveugle looked like he was on the verge of tears. His entire being was spasming, loose skin shifting like blancmange as he jittered. Add a wet sponge and a gag and he could have been riding the lightning in a Veritas execution chamber.
‘You’re bleeping right me as well, the whole bleeping lot of us are like this, it’s a bleeping bleep-show,’ he moaned, his words punctuated by the garbled drone that effaced his profanity. ‘What is it, Joe? Some experimental foreign weapon? A drug from some rebel-group? What the beep is happening to us?’ Operating on instinct, Aveugle’s hand darted to his flask. Hayze saw reality jump ahead, and then the flask was back on his belt, a trickle of whiskey on his chin the only indication that anything had happened. Aveugle let out a strangled groan.
‘Look at it this way,’ said Hayze, kicking the coffee table with loathing. ‘It’s one way of ditching a bad habit.’
‘That’s not bleeping funny Joe.’
‘What else can we do, Alfred?’
‘We…we can go to Intelligence; they’ll be able to root out the culprit.’
‘The culprit is dead, Alfred. Unless you want to be cut up by Republic sawbones, I suggest you keep this to yourself.’
‘The culprit? The culprit? You mean you know who’s behind this?’
‘Come on Alfred, haven’t you put it together? It was you and Surdis who told me about it first. WHAT GOES AROUND, COMES AROUND, remember?’
‘You-you don’t possibly think that was serious, Joe. It was words on a page.’
‘Alfred, my bleeping c—ck is a black bar,’ snarled Hayze, his fingernails clawing chunks at his armrest. ‘We passed just words on a page a long time ago. Where is Surdis anyway? It was you and that Dumbo that dragged this to my doorstep in the first place. The least he could do is show his face.’
‘Surdis…Surdis cracked first Joe. I mean, it was his job to control music, and all he was getting was…. nothing. It was like waking up one morning and realizing you were deaf. They carted him away to a bleeping rehabilitation centre yesterday. His ears…. like bleeping slugs after you pour salt over them Joe…He kept screaming that he couldn’t hear anything. Just nothing. Nothing all the time.’
‘We’re down to four.’
‘Not for long,’ added Aveugle, a dark look clouding his face.
‘Well, I don’t know about you Alfred, but I trust I can hold out longer than a guy like Paul Surdis,’ said Hayze. He didn’t even believe his own boast.
‘That’s not what I meant, Joe. We have more than…this to worry about.’
‘What the bleep are you on about?’
‘Right. You haven’t kept up with the news lately, you’ve been walled up in here. They’re changing things around Joe, a shift in management. The central parliament’s been split into factions.’
‘Meaning….?’
‘Meaning our lot, the Old Guard, are on its way out, ready to join the bleepingT. Rex. It’s only a matter of time-they’ve got a bunch of kids lining up for our jobs. They’re saying it’s time for some fresh blood, time to pack the veterans away. We’re fossilized they said.’
‘You can’t be serious.’
‘Dead serious. Beep…we’ll be tilling fields by the end of the week. If we’re lucky. There’re rumours of a purge. Surdis breaking down will probably make them pounce sooner. Blood in the bleeping water.’
A snake, stretching its pink mouth wide, fangs piercing, its body enveloping, round and round, a mandala, a wheel, branded itself in Hayze’s skull like the burn of a cigarette lighter. The air outside was rippling with heat like laundry hung out to dry, but it might as well have been a blizzard. This wasn’t the feverish chill of his affliction, the absence of warmth. It seeped past frayed nerves and goose-prickled skin, transcended aching bones and chattering teeth until it shrivelled the soul.
For the first time in his life, he felt truly cold.
‘So…that’s it then?’
Alfred pulled something out of his pocket and passed it to Hayze. It was a photograph of the five Bureau heads in their office, ramrod straight and glowering proudly in their starched ceremonial uniforms. No, the four Bureau heads. Surdis was missing, as if the celluloid had reached out and devoured him whole, slipping over the image of a man and replacing it with a gaping, empty space.
What must it have felt like? Did it feel like anything? Maybe it was rough and painful, the brutal scrape of a child’s eraser on a pencil-drawing. Maybe it was just…quiet, like a body pushed beneath the water at midnight, swallowed up by waves of ink. Already, Surdis’ face was smudging in Hayze’s memory, his black hair (black? Or maybe a dark brown?) and blue (no, that couldn’t be right, they were pale green) eyes slipping away. It was like trying to think of an entirely new colour.
It was not that Surdis had ceased to exist. No, it was like he had never even existed in the first place. Like ideas before they were pulled from the heads and hearts of men and made real. Hayze stared at the picture for a while. Stared at his miniature self, imagining that doll’s frame crumbling on the heap of dreams he had spent so long cultivating. It was a while before he spoke. When he did, it seemed to come from a recording, played in too large a room, and from too far off.
‘What’s it like for you, Alfred?’
‘Huh?’
‘I get black bars. All over the place. How about you?’
‘Oh. Oh uh…for me? It’s usually a sign, more like letters. Like someone shoved a billboard in your face.’
‘Really. What’s it say?’
Fat tears were pouring down Aveugle’s face. They filled the air with the burning tang of liquor, Alfred’s alcoholic lifeblood oozing out of him like venom squeezed from a toad. Bitter tracks of amber bled down sagging jowls as his lips quivered.
‘Restricted: Requires Accompanying Parent.’
Hayze began to laugh, in earnest this time. It sounded like the snap of a mind when it breaks.
—
Officer Joseph Hayze, formerly of the Bureau for Acceptable Consumption, was found dead inside his study on the eve of the transition of power from Chairman Victor Haldeman to the leader of the Bold New Tomorrow faction, James Stalwart. When his routine delivery of ice arrived at his summer home, they found Hayze’s wife, Mary Elise, sitting on the couch enjoying a cold drink and a novel entitled The Rugged Khan of The Great Steppe’s Harem. A blank picture frame loomed over her, next to a photograph of a lone bride. Mrs. Hayze did not seem especially interested in the proceedings. She informed the delivery men that her husband must be upstairs.
Usually, the maids would have taken over from them, but the house was eerily silent. The only sound was the low humming of Mrs. Hayze and the murmur of pages turning. They trudged upstairs. One man shivered. Another sneezed. It was getting chilly as they advanced upwards. State of the art air-conditioning probably. Government men got all the best perks. The first courier left a film of his own skin on the doorknob, yelping as he tore his hand away from the metal. It took four tries from one of the burlier employees to kick the door open. When it finally collapsed in an explosion of icy shards, a wave of cold rushed out into the corridor, escaping like a beaten dog let off its leash.
The couriers advanced tentatively into the gloom, moving in unison, pressing up against one another as if expecting something to leap from the shadows, lions, tigers, bears, oh my. Their footsteps crunched on the frost-bitten carpet. Silver vapour from the steam of their mouths drifted in the air. One of the deliverymen blinked hurriedly, a crust of white icing forming on his eyelashes. Paper crackled in mounds across the floor, like trampling on the skin of moths.
There was a shape in Hayze’s chair. For an instant, it had seemed to be part of the furniture itself, some bizarre, experimental form of interior design that was all rectangular protrusions mixed with sloping curves. A bulbous oval popped like a pustule from the headrest. On closer inspection, it was revealed to be a human corpse, straight-backed. A low whistle of admiration escaped one of the couriers. Even in death, the body was working, the very picture of diligence.
One hand had fused into a claw around the armrest, fingers swollen into blue-black maggots burrowing into the wood. The other had imprisoned a pen in a brittle vice, stalactites of frozen ink hanging in ruby daggers from its nib, hovering over a page covered in scribbles. A more intrepid soul amongst the deliverymen approached tentatively, grimacing: the corpse was terribly emaciated, snowflakes piling up in miniature hillocks within the trench of its stomach.
He snuck a look at the thing’s face. Joseph Hayze’s eyes were stuck open, two protruding marbles rammed into his eroded sockets. Glassy mascara shot down his face from where his tears had hardened into splinters. Twin icicles jutted from his nostrils, giving the death-mask a morbid resemblance to a walrus. His mouth was open, lips purple, tongue a rigor-mortis stiff slab bristling with preserved droplets of drool. A perpetual yawn, sucking hungrily at the air.
The courier risked a glance at the contents scattered on the desk, catching sight of sheafs of documents. Even through the frost, his curious eyes could pick out a few sentences. He fell back hurriedly. Rebellious, disruptive language, seditious sentences, anathema to the Glorious Republic! His compatriots had also picked up on this as they took in the grotesque office, drawing together into a loyalist huddle. This was the lair of a traitor! Probably a pervert too.
The note that Hayze had written before his passing was reported and subsequently seized by the appropriate new Bureau authorities. The paper was swiftly surrounded, threatened at rifle-point and then escorted outside of the office at arms-length, clamped between tongs and shoved in a plastic bag to avoid its contents infecting the unwary. The deliverymen were later arrested and shot, just in case. The note made its way up the chain-of-command until it was deposited before President Stalwart. It read as follows:
During my last moments I write these words so that those who live on in my stead can know the truth of my story, my sins, and my confession.
In the many years that I have served our Glorious Republic, I fought for truth, for righteousness, for deliverance. I have not found it. All that I have inherited is the hunger, the hunger for a sincerity and an honesty that the polished parades and bleached halls of this island have obliterated. It is all gone, gone, wiped clean, lost. It will be erased, rewritten and obliterated forever, again and again, but with the strength of my pen and the power of my words I set down this declaration so that my conclusion may herald the beginning of change.
Let the following tear down the usurper Stalwart, may it set the skeletons the Bureau has hid in the closet free, so that their rattling deafens you! I do not seek redemption, only for my truth to clang in your ears!
May you heed it with more dread than I did! May it lay bare that which I have hidden from those more deserving than I!
Let my life’s work reveal what a career of lies never could:
Pablo Lacalle Writing 