Moral Zero (27 page)

Johnny rolled his eyes up and kept them there staring at his brow like some kind of zombie so most of
what they saw was the whites. I cain’t see you, I’m all blind see, he said. After a pause he realised something and added, I can smell y’all though. That’s how I know where you at. But you won’t be able to get no kinda help from a blind deaf boy.

Johnny raised his hand.
I’m sure y’all real good boys thoughs so I’m real sorry. And with that he shuffled off to another part of the Store and hid behind the aisles and said no more.

He nodded to Rez drinking his beers at the back of the Store and exited when the unfortunate raiders were far off and just a dust-kicking blob in the distance. He held up his hand and formed them into a pistol shape and cocked it.

Pow,
Johnny said, and jerked his hand. Then he sheathed it into an invisible holster on his leg.

             
He began the walk back home.

              On the journey back he took to remembering his activities in Rule, and they made him grimace. Part of him shuddered inside. It’s fucked up, he thought. I’m fucked up. He narrowed his brown and set his jaw. But I’m not wrong. Not wrong. How could I be? A fantasy can’t be wrong. It can’t be right neither. A fantasy is nothing more than what it is. A fiction. Things that don’t exist can’t be servants to morality. What’s inside a head stays there. Morality don’t come into it unless reality gets itself involved.

But he grimaced again, reflexively, as he remembered the tortured screams and the crying, and he grit his teeth. It’s an exorcism, he said. It’s keeping me right.

He returned home
like a long lost explorer, like he thought he would never see it again, just like every time. He looked about for tracks not his own around his house, and when he was as satisfied as he could be he pushed open the door with weary shoulders and weary everything and heard a miaow from inside, and with a sad smile he knew he was as welcome as he could ever be.

CITY

The man who called himself Kidd Red stroked his girlfriend’s hair as she lay next to him in bed. It was delicate and wispy, and felt like water or cobwebs flowing around and catching on his fingers.

He laid the softest of kisses on her nose, and she nuzzled it into his neck, smiling happily like an angel or a child. She moved up and her lips found his, and when they kissed there was some electricity that passed between the two, a charged sensation deep with affection so strong that the current in some way pained them both to feel it. It was a true love, a painful love, a suicide love. The thought of losing each other was too much to bear.

Kidd Red thought about it often. If she left him. If she died. It made his chest hurt and his brain felt like bits of it withered and melted away every time he imagined it. It was torturous, and yet he tortured himself. He thought about everything; any possible situation, good or bad, out there that could be applied to him in any way was fantasised. He indulged himself, sometimes to the point of tears or sickness.

His girlfriend didn’t think about it. She was too busy being in love.

Red’s love was trapped in his own body and battled on all sides against the forces within him that sought its ruin or corruption. Unlike his girlfriend’s, his was a restless, pacing love, a ceaseless love walking in circles, of overthinking, of unease and changing shifts, keeping watch over the battlements. It never settled. It never slept. And yet he loved her even more than she loved him. There was no end to it, no respite, and he struggled with it as though it were his own shadow.

He kissed her again, and poured himself into her, trying to choke her with the violent strength of his passion, make her feel the sheer aggression of the feelings he had towards her. He couldn’t keep them all to himself, not when he felt like drowning under their weight, and so he tried to offer them across. She whimpered underneath the force of his kiss, but Red knew she couldn’t take in all of him. She never could.

She never knew what there was left to give. What was held back.

She half opened her eyes and he sank a measure of his soul deep into the
aether behind those two emerald portals. I love you, she whispered.

I love you too,
he murmured, and kissed her nose again. She burst into another squirming smile and his heart melted some more. It rebuilt itself just to melt over and over. Perpetual destruction. He never got stronger. He never resisted.

His love was the truth. He knew it more than anyone. It was just that there were other factors at play. You couldn’t ignore the rest of the world.

Red reached out and pulled her tight to him, squeezing her ass as he did so. It felt like some kind of beauty. But it was all too . . . he didn’t know how to put it to himself. Too perfect? Not quite. Too innocent? Well, yes. But that never used to be an issue. It was too . . . platonic. Yes, that was it. Her flesh wanted nothing. It had no desire, not the raw animal desire Red sought. It didn’t beckon him. There was no succubus tainting him and breathing in his ear. It was almost distant . . . her ass was something to touch, but it never gave in to it.

Nothing there to work with. None of those sick sparks of lust, neither in her nor in him.
She may as well be a child. He would be taking advantage.

They had their own longing, their own passion, their own intensity. It was good, very good. The pleasure could be phenomenal at times. Physical pleasure. Romantic passion.

It was different, that was sure. Unlike anybody he had been with previously, although after the years he had been with his girlfriend the memory of those previous girls had become blurred. The blurs had shifted and grown, and they had grown to torment him. The realities of them had become lost to him, replaced instead by lurid imagery and hyperbolic representations. They weren’t lovely. They weren’t loved. They were sexual and foul. They were beasts, succubi, pigs with heaving breasts and sweating asses begging to be rutted in the muck. Their faces were indistinct, with matted hair tossed about it in their throes, but at times the lips could become visible: full and pink and wet with lipstick gloss. He fucked them over and over in his head, and the sensations were far and above anything that the real girls the images were inspired by could have given him.

He did everything with these phantasms, he sodomised them and degraded them and they degraded themselves and they begged and wept for more. They pissed themselves as he fucked them, they orgasmed as they cried, they sucked the filth off his cock and then
re-applied that pink or red lipstick. The eyeliner left ran down their faces like stained whores.

I love you,
he mumbled again, and this time he kissed her on the forehead, because he did not want to meet her eyes.

She smiled at him. Did you miss me while I was away?

You know I did.

What did you get up to?

Just nodein. Gamin.

The whole time?

Not the whole time.

Which one was it this time?

It’s called Rule.

What do you do in it?

Red shrugged. I dunno. Just wander about.

Sounds thrilling, she said dryly. You’re not gonna keep playing away are you, now I’m back?

No, said Red. I ain’t goin back.

She wriggled into him
and he squeezed her ass again. Um, he started. He paused. How about we try anal sex again? The words rushed out of his mouth before he gave his brain time to think through them. He cringed horribly.

She looked up at him and
her eyes seemed a little sad. You know I hate that.

I know. Sorry, doesn’t matter.

She twisted her lip. We could if you really wanted?

He shook his head
hurriedly. No, no. Forget I asked.

I didn’t think you’d ask again after la
st time.

I didn’t neither
. I’m sorry. Just bein an idiot.

I’m sorry I don’t like it.

No! Red cried, and kissed her several times. Sssh. Don’t say that. I told you, I don’t need it.

Then why did you ask?

I dunno. Stupidity. It were just a random thought. Didn’t think it through. Do you ‘member what I told you before about it?

Not really.

It don’t attract me physically. Well, not really. It don’t feel as good, I guess. It’s just a psychological thing. And I only want it if the other person wants it. You see? I don’t want to do anythin with someone who don’t want to. My pleasure is in other people’s pleasure. The pleasure of – uh – anal, he stumbled over the word, Is in gettin someone else to get off on it. I guess it’s a kind of mutual degradation thing, y’know? I know you’re not a fan of degradation and stuff like that though.

Mm,
she assented quietly.

But if you don’t want
nothin like that, then I don’t. Really. We don’t need it anyhow. The sex we have is great without any of that stuff.

Then, before he could clamp his mouth shut and
stop the words tumbling out, he said it. Normal vanilla sex is fine.

His girlfriend’s f
ace looked like she might cry. Normal! Vanilla! Fine! I don’t want to be just “fine”!

I’m sorry baby!
I didn’t mean it like that! We got so much together. You’re amazin. You know I’m not with you for the sex.

And there it was. Red looked horrified at himself, that he had actually gone and said that.
What a fucking idiot.

You’re not with me for the sex, she said quietly. Ah. I see.

You know what I meant! he said desperately. I mean we are so much more than just that!

I know what you meant.
He tried to kiss her but she turned away from him and faced the other wall.

Red’s hands thought about moving back to her buttocks but his brain finally picked up and stopped them. He lay back and looked at the ceiling, sighing to himself and feeling hurt at the hurt he had caused to her.

The fantasy was everything. Always was, always will be. You could not do better than the fantasy. You could not surpass it, you could not even match it. You could not escape it. You could only replace one idea with another – the fantasy was eternal in its shifting forms. There was nothing in reality that could live up to its power. The fantasy was an orgasm of the mind. It burnt slowly and for forever, a release of pleasure that built and built and never found its release. To make the fantasy real was to invite failure. It could never, ever be the same. It could not be even close. The fantasy to reality was like a dream to waking life. The contrast was crushing, what could have been incredible was mundane in the shadow of that which rushed wild and sick through the mind.

There was no running from the fantasy, only hiding, for as long as you could bear it. You needed to wrest control, you needed willpower and strength. For otherwise the fantasy would devour you.

Kidd Red was being eaten from the inside. 

Somewhere out there was a world. A world of everything, and it glinted and danced at him like diamonds on the horizon. He felt frustrated and angry at himself, as he felt every day. His brain tortured him. The bucking, nubile vixens with their fat tits and open asses and sucking lips swayed in front of him. Time after time his mind felt overrun, snowed under with shit and muck and semen and blood and spit and piss and froth and juices. He wished he could put a stop to it, to halt his crazed hormones. He wasn’t a teenager anymore, but his mind only got more rabid with each passing year. The more he knew, the more he had experienced, the more he found out from pornography and games like Rule, and mainly from just his own wandering imagination, the more he wanted. And that want was overpowering.

He would stay with her until the end.

Sometimes he was almost proud of his faithfulness, as though he was gallantly fighting the expected, defying the odds. He knew that was a fucked up idea. The rest of the time he knew he was only walking the thinnest of lines, or that he was outright deluding himself. A body could stay faithful, with a strength of will that corresponded to your chances and opportunities in the world. How your cards were dealt. Red’s were not dealt in his favour, at least not if contentment and commitment were the games being played.

The body was easy enough to mana
ge though. But the mind? How could a mind stay true? A mind like his? Red saw it as impossible. So completely and utterly impossible that, while he suffered from a constant nagging, tugging guilt, he couldn’t let it pull him down completely. You can moderate your base nature but you can’t fight it inside you or you’ll tear yourself apart. The best you can do is stop it escaping from you and into the outside world.

He knew if he started apologising it would never end. He couldn’t apologise for just being himself. He was full up with all these wants, all this fucked up desire and desperation and frustration and eager, excited need.
He had a need for filth. He also knew that acting on any of these things would never be as cruelly pleasurable as the fantasies could be. The mind was always hotter. But in reality, the pain would always be greater.