Moral Zero (3 page)

Who, Kidd? How’d you mean?

You know him?

Yeah.

How?

We fucked a few days ago.

Oh. Oh. I see. Mr White tried to take this on board.

That girl he was talking about who talked abou
t her tits, that was my sister.

Oh. I’m, uh, I’m sorry.

Why?

I don’t know,
Mr White said, and realised that he didn’t know much.

I might see h
im later. I dunno Lisa’s plans.

Mmhmm. I’ll be going now.

Bye.

Mr White rushed off to the toilet to be sick again. It wasn’t related to the conversation, but nevertheless he had felt the familiar urge creeping up on him. The moment he gave it his attention it surged upwards, giving him only seconds to spare.

Red found him a short while later. Aloha amigo, he said, looking down on him crouched all meek and drooling into the toilet.

Hello.

You want me to take you home?

Yes . . . please.

Red got him up and draped his arm over his shoulders. He walked him out the bar, pausing a second to tell Lisa and Michelle to wait for him. He’d be about ten minutes, he said. He wasn’t staying far away, he said. They’d better not cut without him. They promised him they wouldn’t.

Red stumbled Mr White back to the hotel, the two of them nearly falling through the
room door. Red was laughing. With substantial effort, he got Mr White up from the floor and took him to the bed where he let him fall like some dead thing onto the blankets.

Red.

Yeah man?

Thank you.

No worries hombre. I gotta get back, leave those honeys too long and they’ll stop ripenin and turn sour. I’ll catch you up tomorrow, yeah?

Okay.

Red pulled his shoes off and tussled his feet. He left and the door clicked closed quietly behind him.

HOTEL

It was later and Mr White was feeling better. There was still a sickness nestling within him, but it was the sort, quality and quantity, that could be utilised, that rather than debilitating oneself could be instead engaged to serve the machinery of lust. That is, the screwed up trash-lust of the brain, the fuckery, the taboo. It was not a romantic feeling. But it had its time and it certainly had its place.

Red had
booked, under the glaring eye of the old woman, a separate room for himself. Muttering and shaking his head about the stupidity in booking just the one, looking at the girl hovering behind him, wondering out loud what he was thinking, if he’d thought at all. He’d taken her up and into the room adjoining the original, crashing and banging and hijinking about and waking Mr White up from a drunken doze into a world without light.

Mr White was awake and he was intoxicated and
roused by the noises from next door and he felt keenly the pangs of sickness coupled, entwined like lovers with the stomach-ache pangs of lust. Mr White had his eye right up against the peephole between the rooms. Kidd Red knew he'd be looking, and Mr White knew he knew. This was reason enough for that extra flush of shame that coated his countenance like a blanket of red sweat.

The room was a porthole to his vision, a window into another world. It felt unreal, like a movie, or rather a movie set he was intruding upon.
He felt that familiar trembling sense of terror in lust: a lust to the cinema, a lust to the forbidden. He wasn't supposed to be there; it was invasive, secret, and he was privy to the secret. Special. Undercover. Private detective into the underbelly of life. He was an agent of this portal, and he had super-powers, going through locked doors and solid walls to see behind the curtain, to see what was hid away from prying eyes. The horrid secrets. And then, this time, the discovery, the knowledge of his heavy-breathing presence by a prime participant, if not both of them – unuttered, but hanging there in the air as though some spectre that touched everyone.

Did the knowledge make it better?
He didn't know. It was uncomfortable, unfitting, stark and bright, as though the spotlight was reversed on him. The sensation became fuller, doubled in on itself, a back and forth forever. Kidd Red and he locked in a rivalry of voyeurism. A secret broken, a secret shared. An opening. A letting in of self.

Mr White flowed through that hole like smoke and sheathed himself into the space between the girl's anus and Red's penis. He was part of it, integral, a shared slice of cake
, a cake of bones and nails and sharpened pricks that acted as a rip upon all privacy everywhere, a tear into monogamy and modesty and all that was good and proper. He drove through that hole as though some invading force into a hidden country, a place so foreign that it danced the edges of meaning. Between him and Red the homeland traitor they consolidated his occupation, turning the country into something new, something ugly and sexual. A new rule of openness, of acceptance, of everyone with everyone tied and joined and under constant strains of dominance and submission to each other, a world where locked doors were knocked down and women and men were paraded on the streets as whores all naked and without rights to resist, where modesty and privacy were cast down as criminal acts and the new whoredom laid its hands over all, and nobody could hide and nobody could run and nobody wanted to run or hide but they all fucked on the street as though orgiastic pigs, everyone with everyone, tied at the genitals and mouths, slapped like cattle whenever they took air, spit upon, rolling in the filth that Kidd Red as commander would lay like wet concrete on the streets, and Mr White in the thick of it, enemy invader just puppet of the master, used up like a doll and simple and proud to be that doll witnessing the dollification of all others, the animals in their mindless bleating, and knowing that he was there, as brainless judge to it all, invading into everyone's holes and lives, seeing that nobody could keep anything from each other and there were no lies anymore for wet stinking holes could not lie and there was no falsity to the world and everybody got revenge and Mr White was the carrion bird to those writhing angry bodies, the martyr to it all, and all others then infiltrated his core in return and punctured him like a balloon and he was no gentleman at all but under rule of thumb and pussy and cock and anus and he melted in their arms and nails and there was no respite and every line was crossed by all and nation sundry and the world was a pigsty and Mr White felt like an equal among equals.

Delirium abounded and lust bounced as though on some high tensile wire and love frothed about the room, but some special kind of love and lust where
he was an instrument in it all and the love was beating as though a real heart itself and raging blood everywhere, pulsing his temples and blinding his mind with a sickness of romance, of love with authority and secrets uncovered and the blistering enormity of fiction and his own soul laid bare and open to be shit upon by laughing fuckers and their nails dug into it, into that hot pink meat, fishhooking it up and holding it close to their eyelids and looking at each other and laughing more, turning his soulmeat pinker and pinker as he flushed in the wretched, spiritual shame only a mortal could enjoy.

Kidd Red ejaculated into
the girl’s buttocks as she wailed and gnashed, her fingers gnarled up as though the twisted roots of a tree. Together they seemed inhuman, and in their triumphant inseparation Mr White was forced out from the gap between them, and he came back out through the portal and came onto the wall in front of himself, drenching the plaster in peels of soul that ran down like a glutinous waterfall.

Mr White fell down to his knees and then to the floor, and the world he envisioned was lost to him, and as he breathed and surfed the edges of consciousness he slowly regained his
senses of gentlemanly decorum and he went hotter than ever at his previous imaginings as he always did, and yet he knew that this time had been a particularly good one.

I have this feeling that everything is wrong, Mr White said, looking blankly at the wall. It was the next day and the sun burned bleak through the thin, useless curtains. Red was lying face down on the floor in his room. The girl had gone.

It’s called a hangover.

No, I mean really wrong. I’ve had this feeling before. Things just don’t seem right, but I can’t put my finger on it.

It’s called a hangover.

No.

D’y
ou only get this feelin when you’re tired?

I don’t know. Maybe.

Well there you go. You just need sleep is all.

Things aren’t right here,
said Mr White again, as if he repeated himself enough that Red might really listen and take note.

No
shit. You’re in Rule. Everthin is fucked here. You’re in Rule with a hangover and you ain’t slept right.

I
had the feeling back home too.

Red sighed.

Maybe when we sleep our minds recharge this barrier, this wall that protects us from reality.

Huh?

It’s supposed to keep us safe. Or just keep us dumb. Safe and dumb. But when we’re tired that wall starts to fall apart, and we start to see things as they actually are. Maybe the more tired we are, the longer we go without sleep, the more we see things accurately. The more we get a sense of what’s wrong. I just can’t put my finger on it that’s all. Maybe nobody can. Maybe some can, the eternally tired.

Go to sleep.

Okay.

BAR

Six hours of sleep and three hours of eating and nothing and talking about nothing and getting ready for the night and then they were back at the bar, back at their reason, the only reason to be found. A haunt for blistered souls, a world to bury oneself in mirth and sadness, in sickness and the warm monstrosity of the unguided self.

I like the old gods better.
They weren’t so fuckin perfect. Red had his boots up and crossed on their table and was sipping at a dark green drink and smoking. His eyes roved the crowd, surveying each patron, eyeing up their figures, their clothes, the impurity of their existence. Lingering on the women, the girls. Staring at cleavage, at fronts and behinds. At faces with smacking lips, pursed lips, lips open in laughter. Sipping drinks. Sucking straws.

There’s somethin
kinda monstrous about a perfect bein, ain’t there? he continued. It feels so damn cold. His indolent eyes occasionally turned back to Mr White, as if a duty he jerked himself into remembering before his gaze inevitably strayed back to the crowd and twinkled wild and merry. His eyes flicked and roamed and within them something soft and eager danced to music nobody could hear.

B
esides, people want somethin to identify with, don’t they? I know I’d wanna worship a god who kept fuckin up cause of a love of tits.

He
swallowed a mouthful of liquor, twitched and smirked. I don’t want some sky father watchin and judgin my every move without a stain to his name. I wanna worship some huge tittied huge cocked goddess who is a devil to her lust and corrupt as Hell, but good in her corruption, good where it matters, y’know? If you ain’t got no flaws then I don’t wanna know you, don’t wanna be near you, don’t want you even lookin at me. You gotta be some kinda plant, some machine. Scariest kinds. No feelin, cause feelin ain’t never been perfect. Nah man, somethin is right fuckin wrong there.

He puffed on his cigarette. Besides,
he added, Perfect don’t exist. You want people to believe in you? Fuckin grow a pair. And this idea you can’t make no mistakes. Look at the world! Fuckin no mistakes? Have the good god grace to own up! Say I did wrong, or say I’m just a cunt that’s all, and then we can move on.

I guess.

You guess right. I’d be ten times more comfortable puttin myself in the hands of some half-potent fuck-up with a wantin for all kinda misdemeanours, bad behaviour and devilry than cold fuckin perfection. Urgh, makes me fuckin shiver just to think of it. What’s to like? What’s to trust? They can’t handle fuck-ups if they ain’t never fucked up themselves. How can you punish someone if you don’t know what you’re punishin? Some sanctimonious prick who don’t have a clue, not one goddamn clue about what so-called bad behaviour is. Know thy enemy, man. You can’t be perfect if you gotta hint of any bad in you, and if you ain’t got that hint you don’t know bad, and if you don’t know bad you can’t be tellin what you don’t know off. It’s like, like vaccines. You need that virus in you in order to get over it.

Red smoked again, and blew a deep cloud up into the air. He twirled the cigarette in his hands. I’d rather follow an imperfec
t leader than a perfect leader, y’know? Perfect leader is just as likely to send you all to your deaths for some cause just cause he don’t understand what bad is, and it’s all reason and sense. Imperfect leader gonna fetch you back at his own risk, gonna dig his guys outta the mud and blood to live. Take you to a tavern for drink and whores. It’s inhuman otherwise. You know who make the best good guys? Bad guys. They
know
.

I guess they do
, said Mr White.

One hour later and Mr White stood awkwardly by as Red argued with a blonde haired girl in a red dress. He had bought her a drink and then tried his luck and she was not having any of it. This had prompted the ever-eager Red to only try harder, to attempt seduction by conveying the various manners in which he could please her, in which he could please any girl. Some of his previous exploits. Various testaments to his prowess. The excitement of degradation that the girl interpreted as a destruction of integrity. Taking advantage. Cruelty.