Moral Zero (18 page)

After a few min
utes, Mr White spoke up again. Why do you cheat on her?

It’s not cheatin,
Red muttered quickly and quietly, as if he had been expecting the question.

What is it then?

Fuck, this stuff is just . . . I don’t know. It’s not cheatin. Not really. You don’t understand.

Try me,
murmured Mr White.

Red sighed.
I need this shit man. I need the escape. I feel like I’m in a cage, like I’m some bird with its feathers clipped. If I didn’t get to play like this I’d go fuckin insane. I need a space my mind can exercise.

I understand
, but I don’t think it’s right.

I never said it was.
I’m not a “right” kinda person.

I don’t think you’re that bad.

Red scoffed.

I think you’re lonely,
Mr White said timidly, after another stretch of silent thoughts.

How’d you work that?
I’m in a goddamn relationship.

So am I. I think there’s different types of loneliness. I think you’re lonely for the world. For what’s o
utside the cage, as you put it.

Okay, so
I’m lonely then. Great, thanks.

Mr White said nothing.

Only the dog who trots about has a bone to bury.

I think you’ve been burying
enough bones in enough people.

You’re wrong there. This is who I am
man. My mind is . . . my mind is fuckin crazy. I mean really. It’s like a bull on a leash. It just wants everthin, all the time, good with the bad. You don’t know. Despite the bluntness of Red’s words his voice was soft and a little cracked, and his eyes were watering slightly.

I don’t think
you know what’s in mine either.

Could be.

So we’re just two lonely guys playing about.

I’m not going to fuck you.

Good night Red.

Night.

He picked up the largest knife from his tray, and the e
dge gleamed in the cold light. I’m afraid our time has come to an end, he murmured, fascinated more by the knife than anything, how the point seemed almost to cut through the world, teasing that there was some kind of hope.

Why.
Her voice was tiny and fractured and he barely caught it, but they all asked the same things anyway.

Why?
Why must you now die? Or why in general, why all of this?

Why.
The voice was like a ghost, as though it was the wind where there was no wind, an imaginary draft, and the only real thing in this room was him.

He leant in to her, laying and then pressing the knife at her throat, blood spots popping up like a ruby necklace. He whispered into her ear, and to her he seemed some spirit beckoning her into a new world.

The answer to all things lies with Death.

THE RED DREAM

There were curtains of fire. They swayed and billowed with a deathly breeze that smelled like burnt blood. The ground was a compost heap. Every few feet were muddy
squelches, little pools of sewage. There were two heavy boots that went up. And down. Up. And squelch.

The boots led up to thin legs in jeans, and then they led further up to him.

He stamped forward through the fire. It opened to let him pass. The ground got softer, sludgier. All mud and bog. The breeze lost the smell of blood and thrust up the stink of excrement. He choked but held back vomit.

He approached a wooden house held with stilts out of the mud. He peered through the ground floor window. There were pigs there dressed up like humans, in suits and dresses. They were sat at a table eating a meal. One of them swivelled its head and it moved at a right angle in a split of a second as though it were on some shocked mechanism. The pig was in a top hat and stared at him with shining black eyes.

He stumbled off and squelched along, the sewage running nearly over and into his boots. He saw figures squirming out in the muck, on their hands and knees crawling out from under the bottom of the stilted houses. They were naked humans but they appeared more like pigs or cattle. Their body parts were engorged. The women were obese in all the best parts, their udders hanging like great sacks, areolae like flattened apples, dripping into the mud thick white stodges from their fatly ripe nipples, more like unskimmed cumcream than milk. The men were stretched out and muscles all tangled, long wiry bodies like trees with heavy roots stiff or drooping down like pink snakes with the inflamed heads buried in shit.

The figures stared at him with the mildest of interest through dull and unflickering eyes. The women on their fours tried to claw their way closer but their hands slipped down deep into the excremental ground. The ones that stayed put had those twisted root
-like males bucking away at their backsides, fat branches stuck out from their groin soft and hard slopped into cavernous holes that convulsed and farted around them. Some of the women were driven into by two males, always from behind, one raised up coming down from above and the other’s face gnawing and gnashing into his back. The males took a hole each or one hole for both, and they were easily accommodated, the entrances and exits swelling open happily.

He shook his head and moved on. He found the house he was looking for. It was white and
raised high out of the mud and it glowed brightly like a gemstone. As he reached up to the ladder his boots sank down and shit slopped in and over his socks. He climbed up to the porch of the house and around him the curtains of flame seemed to back off and the smell of the place diffused into something clean and fresh with black pine and the sweetened juice of a lemon.

He knocked on the door which had windows like crystals and it swung open at his touch. He entered quietly and the hallway was carpeted and decorated with soft lamps and frames of polished old couples holding hands. He tried to stamp the dirt off his boots but it clung all over like it was part of him and if there was any foul smell left in the world it was stuck to him. He thought that all the muck and sewage outside had maybe not been coming against him but coming out of him, drooling and spurting like a shitting cock out of his very bootsteps.

He moved along the hall which stretched and bent like a living snake and the floor bucked as though the house was a pirate ship on the high seas. He finally reached the end of the hall although it seemed like forever and it was the same as how he had come in. He opened the front door and was greeted by a whiteness, nothing but whiteness as though the whole world had been painted over or erased. In the centre of the white was a girl with red hair and he stepped towards her. They embraced and they were the only things in the world. His spine felt like it was a rod of protection and he would use this sanctified artefact to love and hold her and keep her safe from all things although the only thing here was himself. His heart beat like an indian drum and it seemed to break up inside him as though it couldn’t hold all that blood.

She pulled away from him and asked him what the smell was. He said he didn’t know.

She stepped back. He looked down and his boots were leaking out filth. It oozed out of the sole, out of his very soul, and there was a pervasive sense of unfairness, and the whiteness of the world shrank and creased like paper and seemed to acknowledge the unfairness and he nodded back sadly.

The girl cried in front of him and kept moving backwards as the muck spread out from him and ran like plasma towards her. It twitched and bubbled and out of the mud poked what seemed like fingers and then hands, snatching, all splayed out and webbed.

The fantasy is everthin, he murmured quietly. I’m sorry. The fantasy is everthin. Always was. Always is.

The girl sobbed harder and he fell back into the sewage, his eyes closed and his face calm and almost expressionless, as though all the peace in the world was just something to cover yourself with like an old coat that was never yours. The mud closed up around him as though a sheltering mother beckoning him back to the fold and the curtains o
f flame blazed up once more into the whiteness.

HOTEL

The next day Red seemed quiet and sullen. As if through sleep he had had something stolen from him. He lay on his mattress and said little to nothing. Mr White went to the bathroom in the hall and showered and came back and Red was still lying there.

Are you okay?

Yeah.

Are you sure?

No.

Mr White sat down on his
bed and smiled sympathetically at Red. What’s wrong amigo.

Red shook his head.
It’s not just now. It’s all time. Runnin back and forth from the beginnin to the end. I don’t know if I can explain it.

Try. For me.

Red twisted his lip and took a deep breath and exhaled. I feel caged man, real fuckin caged all the time. It’s like, like I’m a bird of prey in the tiniest of damn cages, like it can’t even move not one feather but it’s got this
strength
y’know and the muscles never weaken not one bit, ‘stead they just get stronger the less it moves. And its eyes are black man, real fuckin black like some kinda jet stone I dunno. Red gestured vaguely like a magician as he talked.

That’s how I feel see, and I don’t think that cage should break, no I don’t, part of me wants it to but I don’t think
nobody else gonna want it to. This is my outlet, right here, shit like what I been doin since you met me. Way before you met me. This is keepin me safe, y’know, this is keepin everbody safe. Sure it’s not cool, I know that, but it’s the best opportunity. And maybe I don’t tell my girlfriend but maybe she don’t wanna know, or maybe she does, yeah she would, but fuck, a man’s gotta have somethin to keep for himself don’t he? It’s that bit of sanity left in a wounded man, and what’s better – that she don’t know or that I wreck her to fuckin pieces?

Red
stood slowly and reached for his cigarettes and lit one. He sat on the bed next to Mr White. A grey angel burst into being, shivering out of his mouth as he spoke.

Not talkin about sex here, I mean this shit would break her but there’d be no end to it. Should
a man or even a woman tell everone everthin? Fuck man. The closest person I ever got to was her and she don’t know half. Should she? If I say it all then it’s like it’s all flushed outta me, you know? Like I siphon it off to her and she cracks up and can’t handle it and I got nothin left. A man gotta have secrets cause, well, what else is there to keep in the cage with me? Fuckin magazines? Ain’t no room to read, ain’t no room but to brood and keep to myself and shiver in the heat. Yeah that cage gets real fuckin fierce inside. Don’t nobody else touch those bars.

Red leaned back a little and c
rossed his boots. His cigarette blistered away in his hand but he had barely stopped to smoke.

I dunno man, my mind just
gets so hot it burns, it fuckin hurts man. Like, it’s like somebody struck up a fire inside and is stokin it about with every thought, like these thoughts ain’t passed through but engineered in this huge foundry with steam hammers and hissin metal and everwhere’s goddamn smoke, y’know, and you can’t see and you choke and you can’t breathe and it steams up your goddamn eyeballs and you can feel them turn to fuckin jelly. Well, yeah. I think and I can’t stop it and it comes in like swingin pokers. My brain man, it goes white hot and glowin like, like I dunno, and my brain starts bubblin like some fella not me placed it in a vat, and if I let it I feel like it’s turnin to glue, this white magma or fuckin whole fat cum at some alien temperature. You see man, my mind gets like this all the time and I feel like I can’t see anymore, like I’m blind with lust y’know?

Mr White didn’t say anything but nodded vaguely and Red took a heavy drag on his c
igarette and coughed. I mean don’t get me wrong, I’m not a fuckin rapist or nothin cause that ain’t how I roll, but that don’t mean to say the deviance in me couldn’t get stirred up so fierce that bad fuckin shit could go down. I mean shit does go down, but I fair don’t think I seen the worst of it. No man, there’s fuckin danger signs stamped up around my brain like a broken fairground or some goddamn industrial accident waitin to happen. I mean, I dunno, maybe Johnny has the right idea. In a way. Killin someone, the ultimate expression of affection. Lettin out the demons. Extreme violence as, like, a desperate display of love, you know what I mean?

Mr White frowned.
If it’s so bad all this, could you not change, somehow? Is it possible?

Yeah I could change, well no, ah shit I dunno, but I’d have to want to and I don’t. I just don’t want to. See I hate it, I really hate it
man, but I love it too, I love it cause it’s me. It’s like a drug and turnin my mind up to a thousand and droppin out is my fix. I need it. I would be someone else without it. I’d be you man.

             
You wouldn’t be me. You’d be someone else. You wouldn’t be me.

             
Whoever. I fuckin hate it but it’s me and I wouldn’t change that for nothin and she couldn’t change that and she wouldn’t even if it fuckin killed her, even if her heart split into a thousand bloody bits and she killed herself she wouldn’t tell me to not be me. That’s why I fuckin love her, and that’s why sometimes a man gotta keep some things to himself.