Moral Zero (21 page)

Johnny took a deep breath and exhaled an
d then took another long drag. Lastly. Lastly . . . He breathed out a flume of smoke. Red has been acting at being bad for so long that he’s convinced even himself. If I thought he was intelligent enough I’d say he was even acting at having convinced himself. He’s overacting. He thinks this is all he can be and so he pushes, starving for attention on one side of the fence if not the other. Most men must see themselves as either good or bad. The former seems out of reach to him. A man needs something to be reckoned as. Red wants people to think he is worse than he is.

Johnny shook his head in silent condemnation, as if this need of justification through others was Re
d’s true vice. It’s pretend bad, he said. Pretend good and pretend bad in everyone, all make-believe moralities.

And you?
Mr White knew the answer before it was spoken.

I ain’t
acting, said Johnny in his smokehouse voice, stubbing out his cigarette in such a manner that it seemed to signal to Mr White some ultimate finality in things to come.

Mr White shook himself and looked up
to see Red sit back down amongst them. He looked over Red’s shoulder and saw the woman looking over at them coolly before turning away.

What happened with that woman
? Why didn’t you, um, get with her?

She were a bit too real for me,
Red murmured, his brow narrowed. He reached for his drink, frowning slightly. I’d rather go for simpler pickins.

What did she
say?

Red played
with his hair and bit his lip. She said . . . she said she likes to see the devil in another’s eyes.

Mr Whi
te whistled through his teeth. She sounds like Johnny.

No. She’s somethin else.

She’s one of us, said Johnny.

Red nodded. I think so.

Mr White looked from one to the other but nothing more was said. He tried to see the woman again but she had gone.

An hour later and Mr White was feeling in a rather exuberant mood. Perhaps something to do with the succession of drinks. He raised his glass into the air and the other two looked at it lazily as if cynics expecting magic. He cleared his throat.

A toast!

Red picked up his own glass with supreme nonchalance and gave it a waggle. Johnny gave a long blink and then touched his own lightly with the tips of his fingers.

What is it?

Mr White hesitated. To, um, friends!

Johnny rolled his eyes.

Yeah, fuck off man, said Red. To sex!

Defying predictability are we?
said Johnny drolly.

To anal?

You’re on a roll.

To us!
Mr White exclaimed with affected enthusiasm.

Again, fuck off.
Mr White looked at Red who stuck his tongue out in response.

To freedom?

You romantic, snorted Johnny. How about . . . to individuation.

What?
said Red.

To ourselves.

Alright.

I like it too,
said Mr White.

Uh-huh.

Mr White raised his glass again which had fallen considerably lower in the air in the preceding half-minute. To ourselves!

Red clanked his glass, sending the liquid slipping about inside. Johnny’s glass touched the others silently.

To ourselves, the others said in their own particular way.

Mr White smiled and Red grinned at him. Johnny looked at them wryly.

STREET

Another hour and Mr White’s exuberance had transformed itself into that familiar sickness and an all-encompassing
need to masturbate. There was no reason to it. There was nothing to masturbate to. Just to existence. To go on existing. What more reason was needed?

He had excused himself, explaining that he felt ill and was going to go back to the hotel. Red had protested but Johnny had told him to let him go and Red had backed down.
Mr White had walked speedily back, almost breaking into a run at one point, even though there was not far to go. Below his gut he felt the pulse, the pang. A stomach ache grew on him and he knew of only one way to release it.

BAR

Do you know the difference between us? said Johnny Black.

T
here ain’t nothin but differences, muttered Red sourly.

The difference
is that you aspire to be less than human. I aspire to be more than human.

Whaddya mean,
less than human? Red narrowed his eyes.

You seek animality, a more debased state of being. I, on the other hand, seek to transcend humanity. You retreat, I overcom
e. You regress. I am posthuman.

Red made as if he was going to spit
, and then decided against it. Animality ain’t a lesser state than humans. Humans are fuckin pretentious and all their lofty-ass intellectuals don’t count for nothin. No addition to life.

Perhaps. But you will agree then that you value the primal, t
he instinctual.

Yeah.

The primitive.

You’re puttin a negative spin on it again.

Yes. You are a hedonist.

I’ll go with that. I’m just
lookin for the spice of life.

And I am seeking its meaning. Neither of us will find it, of course. At least, not lying about on the roadside waiting for us to turn our shadow upon it. But you will get your spice and I will get my meaning even if we
got to inject it ourselves. I will inject meaning into the world and then I will extract it back out and inject it into myself. I will force it. Just like you force your pleasure.

Uh
-huh. I go for sensation first. That’s all that counts. That’s the only meanin I see.

I know there ain’t
nothing that presents itself otherwise. Nothing that presents itself with such insulting overtness. I ain’t got time for something so obvious, for something so regressive.

It’s th
e only truth you’re gonna find.

Is it? Tell me,
Red, what’s your experiences with drugs?

Re
d laughed and rolled his eyes. You’re fuckin with me?

Johnny
raised his eyebrows innocently.

Red yawned theatrically
and crossed his cowboy boots. If you’re gonna suggest that I find truth through em then you’re a fuckin fool. I’ve dabbled in lots. The best I got is temporary fun. Nothin that sticks. Usually found em boring, or nauseatin, or depressin. And that ain’t even mentionin the fuckin comedown. I used to figure the best thing for a guy as sick of reality as me was hallucinogenics. What a fuckin letdown. You lose who you are when you do em. You can’t appreciate all that surreal shit when you’ve lost sight of your own identity.  And even if you do keep control of it all, it’s so goddamn vacuous man. You know it’s all bullshit, it’s all fake. Even if you buy into it
and
keep yourself right, soon as it’s worn off you see it for the sham it was. Then all those eye-openin experiences, all that new meanin and inspiration just falls the fuck apart. It’s like . . . like when someone tells you some hilarious thing that happened to em and then says after you stopped laughin that they’d made it up and it ain’t never happened. You feel fuckin robbed. It actually takes more away from you than it gave. The harder you laughed before, the more is stolen back. Ah, fuck it. No.

Red flicked the air t
hen added, as an afterthought, I still do things from time to time though.

Johnny
nodded. Of course. I would agree, to an extent. Although things like that are mere escapism, and possess no less merit as such than movies and, he stopped for a second, And other forms of entertainment and self-distraction.

De
lusions like that keep us sane man.

Yes
, because you and me and White, we’re all paragons of sanity.

Red snorted. This . . .
removal from pleasure you got goin for you . . .

I can feel pleasure,
Johnny interrupted. But I rarely deign to seek it.

But surely that’s a big part of what you do. All that fucked up shit you’re pul
lin. You’re gettin off on it.

Johnny
shook his head and blinked lazily with a slightly curled lip. No. That ain’t what’s happening. If I feel pleasure it is incidental. It is not the focus or the aim. Nor is the pleasure of the other person, although that too can come about. Perhaps. Though it is a different kind of pleasure, unless perhaps the person is an algolagniac – that’s a person who feels sexual pleasure from pain, because of the way their brain is wired. Otherwise the pleasure these people feel wouldn’t really be described as such if they could put word to it.

Pain, perhaps,
Red said dryly.

I’m talking about a different level. It’s something trembling and intense, something that transcends the physical-psychological barriers. The rush of feeling before death. Seeing God when the noose tightens. And then the slipping away of all that sorry mixed up life, all that jumbling wreck of worry and confusion, the stress of it a
ll wafting away into the breeze. The morning breeze that is their dying breath. I’ve explained what I do before. I make people live. I make people live before they die. I am a doctor of the spirit.

You’re a godda
mn predator.

I do not expect you to understand it my way. Few, if any, could. I am unwavering in faith and pride towards my chosen discipline. Though they say t
hat pride comes before the fall, and so I do not let that overcome me or turn me foolish, but I carry it with me like a medicine bag. But no, Red, I ain’t no pleasure-seeker. I am a force among humanity, a challenge both to myself and to others. If another cannot turn their eye upon themselves, then I must do it for them, forcibly if needs be. I must show them how triumphant the intensity, how it can encompass all, how it can change their life.

Yeah
, change their life into death. Red finished his drink and looked at it for a few seconds, before jerking his head up. Wait a second. Wait a fuckin second. You’re not against sensation at all. You just ain’t after it for yourself. You’re a sensation
giver.

Johnny
grinned. Yes and no. What you call sensations are markedly different to what I deliver. Besides, as I understand it you are a giver too, and that would make us the same, which is I’m sure something neither of us want.

Red grumbled under his breath as Johnny continued in his
broken preacher tones, rough and ghost-ridden and yet imbued with southern strength and authority.

I give people the apex of all experience. You fuck them in the ass and give them transient physicality, some altogeth
er temporary impression. Without point or meaning.

In sayin
that, you clearly don’t have no kinda clue just how good I fuckin am. I wouldn’t expect more from someone so detached from pleasure as you. You don’t know the mindfuckin pleasure of it all man.

             
You wish to debate intensities? With that of a brush with or indeed the onset of death? Please. Black waved his hand as if sweeping off gathering flies. My targets will cry until their tear ducts run dry, they will wail and scream themselves hoarse. They will lose themselves and find themselves and they will go through this in a never-ending circle of froth and drool, agony of weakness and power in emotion, spinning faster and faster until they cannot at all separate the loss from the find, the pain from the power, the tension from the release.

What do you think my girls do?
Red raised his eyebrows, a cocky upturn to his lips. You’re describin a good fuck to me.

Black sighed.
It is incomparable. My targets lie there, writhing and twisting like demons. Their faces and bodies wet and stained with the monumental outpour of their own liquid souls. Their bones will ache with the feeling. Their nerves will want to tear out from their body. Their juices rush out desperately as though a mountain stream – anything to get out into the world, to see and be seen and be touched and raped by it all, and to be laid bare and judged by the only arbiter – myself. And yes, looking at your expression I can see you’re thinking with that shit-eating grin that this is all also true of you and your bucking partners and brainless toys, so I give up, and I leave you to your own fanciful delusions lest my own true breath be wasted further.

Red chuckled. You’re a funny one.

Black looked at him in something akin to amazement.

HOTEL

He had never understood why life was so difficult, all the time. Dreams were shot down before they had even taken flight. Nothing ever worked out. Nothing ever came true. Nothing seemed possible. The world was an unjust one. Bad guys made their fortunes riding the spines of people like him, while good guys failed their dreams and killed themselves in small amounts.