Moral Zero (22 page)

There was no enemy greater to him than himself. No man woman or devil could get in his way, for he was already there. He blocked the tunnel and shadowed the light, arms outspread, hands weary and weak with apathy. A face ugly with cynicism. He was always there.

Fucking pathetic.

Mr White stared at the wall, creaking slightly in the chair in the corner of th
e room. The hour was late, all enthusiasm drained out of him with his semen. He blinked rarely. His breathing did not make a sound.

The anger had risen
in him over thirty-four years, thirty-four years of staring at the wall, of staring at the ceiling, sometimes reading, sometimes watching, listening, always thinking, a mind that never had an off switch. Waiting for everything, waiting for nothing. Thirty-four years of nothing. An actionless man. A man ridden with desire and ambition, as if it was a plague, and yet one that could not translate those clamouring needs into anything in the physical world. Thirty-four years suffering from apathy, from detachment, listlessness, hopelessness, laziness, pessimism. But mostly it was anger. He was angry at the world he found himself in. He was angry at others for his place amongst them. And he was angry at himself for all the qualities of character he knew would leave him, year after year, without a single success or moment of significance to his name.

Apathy is the cloak that hides the fury, and thirty-four years of it had taken him to breaking point.

He remembered watching a movie at the time, feeling something swell like a tide inside his breast. He could not put words to the feeling, but his pulse quickened and his face felt hot. When a couple onscreen had just looked into each other’s eyes with soul-searching wonder, he had lashed out, hitting the screen in a sweeping movement that sent it clattering into the wall. He had snatched and slashed at everything in the room without mercy, without thought. Any valuables or keepsakes were sacrificed. He screamed and roared while doing this like some kind of animal, over and over, choking on his own voice and feeling bile and spit come up from his stomach and bubble past his lips. Drool patterned his chin, and he still kept going, his voice turning hoarse and guttural and yet still ferocious and loud, making him sound like some kind of demon.

The neighbour had banged on the wall and he had thrown a glass against it, and then hammered at the wall until his knuckles covered it in bloody imprints.

Eventually he had collapsed, heaving and sobbing, the room smashed apart and everything that had ever given him the most transient pleasure destroyed. He curled on the floor and his face pressed into shards of glass.

The neighbour didn’t come round. They had never
even spoken to each other. Nobody was informed of Mr White’s breakdown, and he believed nobody would have really cared. He could have given them no reasons for it to engage their sympathy, nothing could be said that couldn’t be turned into a fault on his life, a fault of character.

One week after the breakdown, one week of numbness and solitude, Mr White had roused himself enough to
order something. Just something to do, to pass the time until he died.

He’d heard it was quite the experience to lose himself in
, and by fuck he wanted to be lost forever.

HOTEL

Johnny held out the tip of his boot and used it to
quietly creak the door open. He saw the bare back of Red, thrusting away. A teenage girl with was on all fours before him, her back arched and her ass raised up like a stretching cat to receive Red. Her obscenely enhanced breasts and elongated nipples dampening the sheets with imprints of sweat. Her left leg tattooed with spiderwebs and a portcullis coming down over a heart. Earrings as white as snow jangling like bells. They had met her in the bar and Red had taken her back to the hotel. Johnny had waited and then followed them at a distance. Following the laughter and the giggles. The smell of perfume and the smell of lust.

Red was breathing hard and slapping her ass which shivered to his touch. He clawed at her and the red scratch of nails decorated her like ribbons.
His cock buried itself in her ass and returned to the air every second like a veteran soldier with a thousand yard stare.

Johnny wrinkled his nose. The room smelt sordid and
full of perversion. The girl had her mouth open and her tongue lolled like a dog and she breathed in the sickly air, a wetly roasting ozone of saunas and steam baths and shit. The carnal atmosphere of the earth’s bowels.

H
e saw Red lick the air, tasting it, his eyes almost rolling back in his head, pushing himself even further in though there was no further to go. He seemed desperate to sink his whole being within the confines of her anus, as though it called to him as some sanctuary, a return to the womb. The place all men belong.

Red
pushed his finger in alongside his slurping cock and withdrew it and hunched forward like some primordial ape man. The finger combed her lips and was thrust in her mouth, and she sucked it greedily. Mindless in the moment. Caring only about new depths. Anything to ignore the clamours of reality.

Red didn’t hear the
rasp of the door but he looked up when Johnny’s dark presence came into his vision.

He
stared at him for a few seconds, and then looked back at the girl. Hey man, fancy double-teamin this chick’s ass?

Johnny Black said nothing
, but took his hat off and moved closer.

I’ll go under,
Red said, and pulled out of the girl. Her hole winked at Johnny, used and openly corrupt. She said nothing, no comment on this newcomer’s arrival, only made small animal noises. A mind would return in time, perhaps a mind rich with all creation, with a cruelty of intelligence, but for now its searing echelons were cordoned off, locked and shrouded in darkness, and in this moment, this moment of eternity, she was not human.

No, said Johnny.

No?

Stay where you are.

Red looked at the girl and then back at Johnny quickly. He grinned mischievously. Spitroast? Alright. He re-entered the girl from behind and she grunted and he sighed happily.

Johnny
unbuckled his belt and unzipped and took himself out and moved on to the bed.

The for
ce of the push bent Red nearly double, hurting his spine.

What the fuck?!!

Red yelled out shrill and torn as Johnny entered him with a single vicious thrust. With all the power of a piston. He felt speared, savaged in one, and a lightning bolt of pain electrocuted his bowels.
GOD AND FUCK.

He tried to move away but the backwards thrusting girl blocked him forwards and to move backwards
pushed him back into Johnny. He squirmed in a shifting ocean of agony but Johnny threw one strong arm around his neck and tightened it and it was all Red could do to breathe, ragged and desperate.

Johnny
raped him in and out and to breathe seemed the only saviour, for with each hoarse inhalation the pain lessened. It bobbed on a current of feeling, taking two steps backward and one step forward. Red grunted and tears sprang to his eyes. He willed his cock to wilt entirely but as each tide of pain retreated his cock continued to be assaulted by the girl’s clutching, eager asshole, and he found himself returning to full mast. Stretch by stretch, the pleasure from in front combined with pleasure from behind. As he knew it would. In time all things of strong feeling come to pleasure. Given infinite time, and given infinite openness.

Red choked and
felt assailed on all fronts. Not just front and back, but up and down, nose and mouth, eyes and stomach and lungs and heart. His feet twitched with sexual horror. His joints seized and then melted like jelly, and then seized again. He took shuddering breaths and they were not enough for the enormity of his existence.

He
came as a supervolcano might erupt, blotting out the skies and flooding the world. His whole body in wanton destruction. Black shapes lunged at him and he felt the buzzing of flies on his skin and heard the insects tap-dancing in the walls and he sailed away on black ships on an endless black sea.

When he woke up Johnny and the girl were gone.

Red looked at himself in the
bathroom mirror. He was fully clothed but his tight-fitting pants were down by his knees and his cock was free and flaccid. He had showered for an hour last night, long after any hot water left. A thin stream of blood had run down the plughole and he had gone to bed warm and aching and blank.

He looked at his cock as if a zoologist analysing some new species of bird.

Hmm, he said.

He touched it, prodded its softness and felt a vein as it ran down. He touched the base, and then the head. He cupped his balls and then let them go again.

Hmm, he said again, and then, S’alright.

He looked at
his reflection touching himself and he cocked an eyebrow at himself. What you think you’re doin?

His reflection grinned like a cat back at him.

He glanced back down and felt a certain sense of pride. It even looked good flaccid. Not always, but this time it did. Things were good. Things were alright.

He pulled his pants back up and put his cock away. He left his belt unbuckled and hanging loose down his waist. He leant inwards to the mirror and stared hard into his eyes.

Fucked up, he muttered, and it made him grin involuntarily. Fucked. Up. This time he didn’t grin so wide. The smile was wry and tired, and for a second fluctuated into a grimace.

He lost the smile entirely and stared at himself for a full minute, his expression blank. His eyes unfocused and then focused again. He sniffed and sighed, and he blinked a few times. He fumbled about in his pockets for his cigarettes, drew one out and lit it after a few attempts. He stuck it in the corner of his mouth and puffed away, his gaze not leaving his reflection. Smoke blew into the mirror and billowed out around his face. He puffed away for another minute, his eyes narrowed, his good-natured face analytical and judging, but the expressions overdone, appearing put-on and pantomime.

Finally, his reflection shook his head and smiled lopsidedly at him. What are we gonna do with you. He chuckled, and did up his belt tight.

He finished the
smoke and stubbed it out in the sink, feeling a warm flush run through his body, but he couldn’t tell what it was from, if not a curious sense of pride. Alright, he said, standing tall. Let’s face the fuckin music.

BAR

As it turned out, there was no music to be faced.

Johnny Black and Mr White watched Kidd Red as he sauntered around the bar’s ladyfolk in full swing. He charmed, flirted rudely, engaged in attractive tomfoolery and touched the more receptive girls as much as he could get away with, and then some.

Do you think he’s overcompensating? murmured Mr White.

Johnny smiled but didn’t say anything. He knew Mr White had watched them,
heard them, but he wasn’t about to clue Mr White in on him knowing. There was to be no White and Black bandying together, no fun at Red’s expense, no behind-the-back talks or making conversations deliberately awkward. He was keeping quiet and cool on the whole deal. Things had occurred, and all the important people knew, and that was what mattered. To shout out one’s satisfaction would spoil it.

JUST OUTSIDE OF NOWHERE

Johnny Black walked up the stairs crooked and bent and creaked open the door shivering rust and he entered the workshop in the top level of the disused warehouse.

The air was hot and bitter to the point it made the eyes water. Any person but him would have rushed out immediately, as though the place were home to some
contagious disease or pestilence not yet named. The windows were blacked out with smoke and filth and the smoke billowed out to escape through only the smallest pockets of ventilation. The sound of the workshop was hissing steam, and as though they were things distantly echoing, or only in his head, also the sounds of turning clockwork and the rhythmic grind of gears. The room and its benches, its tables and mechanisms seemed to clank and clatter as he walked through. In the room or in his mind he heard the whirring threat of buzzsaws and he heard fire and he heard screaming.

Across the workshop lay pipes and tubing that ran about from vats and machinery and along the walls, each on their own path so determined and half of them could not be followed and so their future unknown and cruel in
such mystery. The walls crackled with grime, seeming as if something living was inside them making them breathe and pulsate. There was a small back room which he did not go near and it smelt of blood. Flies had got in and flew around the vats like lone scouts but most were in clouds coming in and out of the back room, whining and thick like they were shepherding death.

There is a place, somewhere, a place so
low not even the rats can find, he murmured to himself. He took a cigarette and his old black lighter out of his pocket and the end of the cigarette incandesced into a point of heat and light and plumed smoke. He took a deep drag and then he unbuttoned and took off his shirt one-handed, swapping his smoke to his left to unclothe his right.