The Key to Everything (18 page)

Eventually, he speaks. A quick grin passes over his dry, cracked lips and his eyes glance down at your naked, shivering body. You don’t feel truly exposed until he slowly starts to move closer to you. He takes another a drag from his cigarette, the embers glowing brighter, reflecting off the finely polished steel of the sword he uses as a cane. 

Lifting the sword, he presses its sharp blade into the flesh on the back of your right knee. A gentle pressure causes you to raise the leg, shifting body weight and digging the cold iron chain into your left hip just above the waist. Smiling, he pushes the blade a little bit harder against the soft flesh. You feel the cold metal digging into the skin and strain the muscles in your thigh even harder. All he needs to do now is pull, and the sword will slice through all of the tendons holding your knee together. Sweat beads into a small pool on the back of your neck. 

“Fear is what I want from you. I collect it.” Boot Man slowly moves his tongue across the remains of his top teeth. “The fear of someone who has already suffered a great deal tastes much sweeter than an innocent, you know.” 

He turns his back to you and raises the tip of the sword high  toward the ceiling. “Maybe it’s because you’re a Jew.” His eyes look down below the chains, and he nods his head. “Could be the different diet.” He laughed at that. “No. No. No. It’s the centuries of suffering. That makes the experiences of life, no matter how bitter they seemed at the time, so much more gratifying. Right?” He spins back and the tip of the sword lands on your shoulder, the blade pressing into the side of your neck. “A bit of salt brings out the richness in chocolate’s flavor, don’t you think?” 

“Pain will come eventually.” You can smell the sour of his sweat under the damp moldiness as he moves in, touching his cheek to yours, and whispers, “Live in anticipation for now. Swim in the depths of this darkness and wonder when. It will come not unlike an orgasm. Mounting… rolling…building in waves. Wash the fear down over me. Be scared. Be frightened. Be terrified. Feed me your worst nightmares, soldier.” 

“Oh… I almost forgot. Your children are dead.”

Every muscle in your body turns to stone. 

You can’t move. You can’t even flinch as he rises up on his toes, sticks out his cracked grey tongue, and licks the tear from your cheek. He isn’t lying. You have been lost for so long, and now your boys are taken away from you forever. You will never get the chance to hold them again. They will never go to ball games with you. You won’t help them learn how to play the Goldberg Variations on the piano. 

Boot Man touches your cheek, and you pull away. You feel more than hear him chuckle and watch him put out the cigarette on the ground. In the darkness now, you listen to his footsteps moving away from you. A loud clicking noise, followed by the crackle and hiss of what sounds like a record needle finding its place. The longing sighs of “Sehr Langsam” from Mahler’s Fifth Symphony work their way through your ears and penetrate your stomach muscles. They tighten and churn with grief. You lurch forward against the chains and howl like a wounded beast.

Dancing around the cellar and smiling, he lights candles with a long wooden matchstick. He twirls in circles, moving faster with each howl from his prisoner. Your throat raw and torn, the only sound you can utter is a pitiful rasp, buried beneath Gustav’s prayers for love and redemption. Eventually your body tires and collapses, held up only by the chains keeping you on your feet. 

Taken in all he needs for the evening, Boot Man holds your sweat-drenched head in his hands and whispers softly into your ear. “You are the key to this release. Tomorrow we begin anew and will begin to unlock the pages of forever.”

-34-

Auden: Picasso Taste

Every time you open your eyes, you hope that it’s still a dream. But Boot Man makes sure you know you’re awake. He never actually hits you or cuts you with the blade of the sword. He gives you water, bread, and occasionally a few small bites of some heavily salted meat. There is no natural light in this space, so you can’t distinguish between day and night. Your vision blurs, and you ramble incoherently. He mimics your sounds while skipping around on the toes of his boots in a grotesque and cruel ballet. 

Your skin beneath the chains turns raw and infected, seeping pus and blood. This the Boot Man collects in a rusted tin cup that he places on one of the wooden storage shelves, next to a large burlap sack marked in a language that you can’t read. There is the sound of a distant trumpet through the walls. You look up and see the old man pressing his ear against dirty stone, with his white-within-white eyes stretched wide. 

You imagine yourself at home with Emily. It makes you happy to still have her name. Everything else seems to be fading away. You pour yourself into the memory of her. Send every part that you can imagine back to her. Your only solace is that she is not here in this room with you. You can be with her out in the sun and swimming in the sea. You can go away. She takes all of you with her and helps you stay free.

You dream of making love to her. You’ve fucked other women before, but Emily is the only woman that you ever made love to. No one else ever touched you entirely. You let each other explore and feel every bit of your bodies. She would take you in her hand and feel the weight of you in her palm. You in turn traced the outlines of her strange mysteries slowly, softly.

You remember the wonderment of going inside of her for the first time. That strange feeling of becoming one body together, occupying the same space. You were both patient and gentle, not needing or wanting to rush. Building infinitely upon a growing energy between you that started the night you first met. Heavy breaths led to moans built into groans escalated to howls of pleasure and laughter. 

You feel your back being pushed forward. Your arms are held immobile. A weight crushes your feet into the cold, hard concrete. Eyelids peeled open. Something grabs the top of your head and forces you to look down. Not wanting to see. Realizing where you really are. The sharp tip of the sword pushes slowly into the skin above your bellybutton. Boot Man takes his time carving an oval shape: longer from top to bottom than from side to side. 

“Well,” Boot Man grins, “you weren’t an ‘innie’ before, but you sure will be now.” 

The brain recognizes signals from your stomach. The brain feels every cell of the flap of skin assaulting your mind as Boot Man slowly peels the oval of flesh from your body. The brain tells the jaw to clench teeth tightly together, suppressing any outward vocal sounds. The brain chooses to not give Boot Man any more satisfaction in his torture. The brain tries to picture Emily, Jason and Jeremy.

Boot Man lifts up the flap of skin. He rubs the bloody inside of it against your cheek, leaving a trail of your own gore on your face. Your eyes burn from not being allowed to close for so long. The edges of your vision blur around Boot Man leaning his head back, opening his mouth wide. He holds the oval up over his broken and missing teeth, giving one final wiggle before dropping it in. 

He chews slowly, staring at you with a dark satisfaction. 

“Mmm mmm mmm.” Boot Man closes his eyes and swallows, rubbing his stomach. “Tasty.”

The hands holding you turn your head to the left. You see the woman from the bathroom sitting on the floor next to the old Victrola. Her arm rests on top of the short brick wall, embracing the speaker still singing its warped serenade of crackles and pops. Boot Man smiles, twirling his fingers in the air in time to the screeching metallic violins and out-of-tune piano. Nodding his head, he blows you a long, slow kiss. 

His hand extends its pinky and moves down to the woman. The small finger touches her head just above the ear and gives it a slight push. Her head slides over an inch or so across her freshly sliced neck. It teeters on the edge of bone and tissue but comes to rest right before it falls. In the shallow light of your prison, you think yourself lucky for not being able to see any fine detail of veins and muscle. 

“Not unlike a Picasso, eh?” Taking his finger into his mouth, he glances down at the shape of the broken woman below and shrugs his shoulders. He lifts the head by the hair with one hand and holds it out. With the other hand he grabs her chin, moving her mouth like a ventriloquist’s dummy. His voice becomes a high-pitched, vibrating, failed attempt at the sound of a woman. “I’m feelin’ kinda frisky.”

He moves next to you, holding the head in front of your face, one hand holding it in place, the other working the jaw and lips. The freakish attempts at smiles and pouting grins are made worse by the woman’s lifeless green eyes staring vacantly in your direction. 

“Hey sexy. How’s about you gives us a kiss?” The head moves closer. You fight to turn away, but the hands hold you in place. He opens the woman’s mouth while you feel fingers grasping at your jaw, pulling it down. Your lips reluctantly move apart. 

Your brain has lost control. You can no longer stifle the screams as her lifeless tongue falls downward into your mouth. Boot Man twists the head from side to side while he mimics moans of pleasure. 

“I’m curious…what does death taste like?”

Boot Man throws the head backward over his shoulder. The squishy thud when it hits the floor is muffled beneath the volume of your screaming. He stands in the center of the room with eyes closed, his arms spread wide. Cackling hysterically, he begins to twirl. It starts slow, almost graceful. He speeds up faster and faster until his arms become a blur. Wind builds around him, picking up dust from the shelves and small rocks from the floor. 

He stops. The wind stops. The record stops. The rocks fall, making dry cracks as they hit the floor. Silently, he moves back over to the body still holding its lifeless arm around the now-silent speaker. He pushes up his sleeve and dips his right hand into the remains of the woman’s neck. He pushes dramatically slowly, until he is in her down to his elbow. He closes his eyes and shifts around, apparently trying to find something. You can see the bulges pop out in her skin where his hand moves organs and bones out of his way. He stops. His eyes open with a smile, and he pulls his hand out. 

“Here it is.” Boot Man holds something metallic tightly in his meat-covered fingers. He glides across the room to you, stopping toe-to-toe. His left hand grabs the back of your head gently. His right hand opens, palm up, between your two faces, revealing a small padlock. He blows on it sharply, pushing a small grey piece of some internal organ down to the floor.

When the metal first touches the hole in your belly, all you can feel is pressure. With one firm shove, the lock enters deep into you. His hand pulls back, letting your muscles close around it. Now that it’s in you, it’s part of you. You can feel the shape. You can feel the cold metal as it warms to the tissue, embracing it. And you want it out. 

Feeling has all but vanished from your torn throat. Your ears remind you that you are still screaming. All that you are now is a pitiful and hoarse sound, slowly disappearing in the dark folding around you.

Before you are lost completely, you hear Boot Man giggle with the voice of a child. Thousands of tiny paws climb up your legs. Their claws dig into your skin, making little holes as they rise higher. Up they climb, until you feel them cover you completely from head to toe, leaving only the hole in your belly untouched. He blows out the candle, and you are gone. 

-35-

Auden: Arrhythmic Wounds

You are the key… 

You are the key…

You are the key…

Like a mantra, it repeats over and over in your head. 

You are the key…

You lean back and to the left against the chain digging further into your ripped skin. There has been no food or water for some time now. If Boot Man is still in the room, your eyes can’t find him hiding in any of the shadows. Needle skipping over and over as the Victrola continues to spin. The static hiss and pop provide an arrhythmic accompaniment to the voices in your head. 

You are the key…

Arching forward, you pry the chain out from the indentations in your waist. The wounds don’t feel like they will ever heal. Given no time to scab over, you try to rotate where you let yourself lean when you can’t stand straight any longer. You can’t feel your feet anymore. They walked away from you a long time ago. 

You are the key…

Looking down, the hole in your belly isn’t bleeding. The edges of the cut are clean and smooth. You can see the muscles tensing and releasing with every breath. A dark reddish-brown color coats the curves and folds inside of the hole. You can’t bring yourself to touch it.

You are the key…

You feel a rustling behind you. Something takes hold of the chain, gently pulling it from the wounds around your waist and lowering it to the ground. You fall to the side into an embrace of too many cold arms. There is no sensation of touch when they lift you. Your eyes burn, unfocused from the darkness and too much exposure to the air. The arms that you can see through the haze are black metallic. Smooth. Frictionless. Obsidian seas waxing and waning from the pull of some unseen moon. Washing you clean and dressing your wounds. Warm and soft white cotton trousers cover your legs. A knitted white sweater rests unbuttoned atop the fresh bandages. 

You are the key…

The white room has a soft feather bed. Thick wool blankets cover you from waist to feet. In the center of the room sits an unfinished oak writing desk with a blank stack of paper and a white sharpened pencil resting on top. An ornately carved frame outlining nothing but empty black space hangs on the wall across from you.