Sanctuary (4 page)

“Did you talk to her yet?” Brandon asked.

Cole remained silent. He knew his own room well enough to walk freely through it, but now he stayed near the wall, using his cane for guidance as he moved forward.

“Remember I wanted you to talk to her about the thing in her stomach? Did she go for it?”

Cole walked farther, but still didn’t speak.

Brandon exhaled with sharp disdain. “Poverty. Sound appealing?”

“No.”

“Then either get rid of Crystal, or get rid of the fucking baby.” Better to present the illusion of choice. Cole would play along more easily if Brandon made things simple for him.

Unaware that the curtains were closed, Cole stopped by the far window and faced outward, as if hoping to catch a glimmer of the nighttime expanse.

“Did you even mention it to her?”

“I want to keep it.”

A tense moment passed. Not in Brandon’s wildest dreams had he imagined Cole would dare go this far. Blindsided, he stepped up next to his friend and did his best to remain calm, but he had trouble formulating a response. “Everything we have depends on you trusting me to do my business. You remember how poor you were when I found you? You were gonna sell your dad’s condo, and I said no, give me your place to work in, and I can make us rich.” The visual backdrops leveraged from the condo setting added a distinct professional flavor to Brandon’s videos. Cole knew just as well as he did that without Cole’s facilities, the two entrepreneurs would lose credibility in the eyes of their talent, and thus be unable to attract the kind of actresses their subscribers demanded. “Well Cole, I still intend to deliver on that promise. I can support us, but if you bring a bitch and a kid on board… I’m fucking out, man. You don’t want a little toddler running around shitting its diapers while we’re taping the girls.”

Brandon thought that maybe Cole would laugh at this image, but apparently Cole’s old sense of humor had left him as well.

So Brandon continued. “How will you get by, huh? Crystal’s gonna get a job at Taco Hut and you’ll… what? Sell paintings?” He waved a hand in front of Cole’s unseeing eyes. “You’ll have to give up the condo after all.”

“Hey, Brandon, I appreciate what you’ve done for me, and I really think we have something good here. I consider you a good friend.”

Finally I’m getting somewhere.
“Me too, buddy. Me too.”

“But for starters, you need to stop wasting my money on parties.”

Or maybe I’m getting nowhere.
“Oh, I should stop? I’m
working
, unlike a certain friend of mine.” Brandon tapped Cole on the chest. Cole tried to swat Brandon’s hand, but he’d withdrawn it by the time Cole reacted. He paced around to Cole’s other side and spoke firmly to him. “I don’t think parties to promote our business are quite as expensive as you sitting on your ass in mountains of debt, which was right where you were before I showed up.” Anger flashed on Cole’s face, so Brandon added a soothing charisma to his voice and drew his face closer to Cole’s for emphasis. “We’re close, man. Just give me another year.”

Cole said nothing, and crossed his arms.

“You and me, buddy. Living the dream, just like old times in Vegas, huh?” Cole wasn’t budging, so Brandon let a pointed edge creep back into his voice. “Or are you gonna pussy out?”

Cole swiftly raised a hand as if to strike the wall, but restrained himself, grunted, then swung at the air and yelled in frustration.

Brandon backed away from him, grabbed his putter, and waited until Cole cooled off. Cole didn’t often get so upset. He rested his head against a wall and gave a tired sigh that worried Brandon much more than his fit of yelling had.

“You ever heard of master-slave morality, Cole?” Brandon had recently seen a gangster film featuring a discussion of master-slave morality, and he’d been looking forward to discussing its brilliant implications with Cole.

“No,” said Cole.

Brandon set a ball down on the green and positioned himself for a swing. “Philosophy, buddy. You should read some. You see, Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome used what’s called ‘master morality.’ They believed that a man’s virtue was determined by his strength, his will. Right and wrong didn’t exist. The only truth was power, and the only rules were those you made for yourself.” He paused to make sure Cole was listening. When he saw he did indeed have his friend’s attention, he smiled and lined up his shot. “The Greeks were keenly aware that life is finite. Death is inevitable. And the best we can do during life is distract ourselves from the inevitability of death. Unfortunately not everyone can have everything they want, but a few of us can. Do you know who those few are, Cole? The Romans did.”

Cole remained silent on the matter. Brandon putted his ball, but yet again it zipped over the hole.

“The people who take what they want are the ones who get what they want. Rome’s elite class conquered the known world with this simple idea. Their pleasure depended on their willingness to seize their happiness from the weak and cowardly. You see, Cole, the only choice that a man ever needs to make is which to be: the master or the slave. I like that idea, I sure do. And let me tell you
why
I like it. You’re into painting, so let’s say I stole a valuable painting from that old lady next door. Is that a bad thing to do?”

“Obviously.”

Brandon putted again, curving the ball too far left this time. “Well, the painting would make me happy. I don’t know or care about that lady. My life is better for having taken the painting, and because I didn’t get caught, there are no negative consequences. So why not take it?”

Brandon putted a third time… too far left again. He dropped the club, and Cole jumped a bit when it clanked against the wooden floor.

“The only reason not to take it is slave morality. The foreigners, Christians, and slaves in Rome saw that they were doomed to lives of servitude, and in their petty jealousy, they invented right and wrong. Through clever subversion, they spread the lie that
powerful
was synonymous with
evil
. Their Roman masters, simply following their own bliss by exerting their will, were made to seem villainous.”

Brandon took a few steps toward Cole as he neared the end of the speech he’d prepared. This was the good part.

“And then something strange happened. Something
unthinkable
. The masters started believing the slaves. They started believing that kindness and humility were virtues, and thus the masters became slaves themselves. The emperor Constantine was the first of them. He made Christianity the empire’s official religion. The idiot masses had corrupted the elite.”

Cole whacked Brandon’s shins lightly with his cane, stopping his approach. “So you and me are the elite and Crystal is the masses in this scenario?” Cole said. “That’s charming. I hope you realize that if everyone followed master morality, the world would descend into chaos.”

“Not everyone has to think the way I do, boss. I’m just trying to show
you
the light. Think rationally about this.”

“So
your
need for pleasure is perfectly rational, but compassion for other people is irrational because… why? Because it’s just your DNA that programs you to feel empathy—isn’t that what you said before?”

Oh, not this again.
Brandon had once tried to convince Cole that human empathy was just a vestige left over from evolution, and Cole intermittently dredged it up in arguments as a crutch to lean on when Brandon was beating him.
Fine, let him have his crutch.
“Give me one good reason to care about anything but my own happiness, and I’ll take it all back,” Brandon said.

Cole may not have read any philosophy, but he was ready with a quick retort. “If all happiness is just a meaningless survival mechanism left over from evolution, why care about your own happiness either?”

Oh, Cole was feisty tonight. And smarter than usual. Brandon’s blood was racing, and he wanted to launch into another diatribe about how Cole lived in a slave’s box, unaware that he was free to do whatever he wanted without any rational reason and without feeling guilty. But he knew that Cole felt too responsible for that damn kid on the way, so instead of another philosophical rant, Brandon opted for an emotional appeal. This wasn’t about ideologies anyway. It was about Cole and Brandon and the future.

Brandon moved so close to Cole that they were nearly nose to nose, and he spoke softly. “When I have a friend, I’m loyal to that friend. And I expect loyalty in return. So I’m asking you, as a friend, please. Don’t turn your back on me, Cole.”

Cole’s head swayed back and forth as he chewed on Brandon’s petition. Brandon was hopeful that his plea had worked until Cole leaned close and plainly said, “So if I kick you in the balls—hard—because it’s pleasurable for me, and because seeing you squirm in agony on the ground would be a pleasing distraction from the inevitability of death… Then that’s okay, because there’s no right or wrong?”

Unbelievable.
In all the years Brandon had known him, Cole had never said something so bold to him.
He must really care about this bitch.
This was getting nowhere. Time to use force.

Brandon paced back to the indoor green and grabbed the putter he’d dropped next to it. “Can I borrow your golf club?”

“What?”

“For the baby.”

Cole strode toward Brandon, arms raised as if to physically confront him.

“Hey!” Brandon yelled. But Cole came at him so fast that Brandon barely had time to lift his club, which swooshed as it parted the air between them.

“Yeah, go ahead,” Cole said. “Hit a blind guy.”

“She’s a fucking street girl, okay? She’s not worth shit.”

Cole swung a fist. It passed well over Brandon’s left shoulder.

“You missed.”

Cole abruptly swung again, and this time he caught Brandon square in the jaw. Then he clutched Brandon’s collar, yanked his torso forward, and spoke with eerie calm. “Brandon. Cut your parties out of the budget. Stop losing my money.”

“What money?”

Cole continued as if Brandon hadn’t spoken. “You can keep using my place as long as you make us money. I keep Crystal. You keep your job. Everyone’s happy.”

They stood there for a moment, eyes locked in a wordless duel, a gentle breeze blowing at their hair. Cole didn’t seem to notice the wind, which was faint, but too strong to have been the air conditioning. Brandon looked around for an open window but found nothing, so he ignored the strange breeze and set the club on Cole’s bed.

“You need me, boss. I don’t need you.” He walked quietly out of Cole’s room and left it at that.

Cole’s father had been a disgustingly wealthy man, and his condo unit was expansive. Brandon had to walk through nearly two minutes of hallways just to reach Crystal’s room from Cole’s, journeying past the living area, kitchen, barroom, entertainment room, two balconies, two bedrooms, and several bathrooms on the way. Yet despite the grand size, and several renovations over the years, a musty stink lingered that Brandon had come to associate with old money—with lethargy and complacency. Beneath the trendy furniture and cutting-edge interior design, all the refurbishing couldn’t hide that this place was old, rotten. You could see it in the rust that flourished on the air vents, and in the occasional wood splinter that pierced through the wallpaper. You could hear it in the creaky old pipes that haunted the building at night. And Brandon saw it in the blind fool he called his best friend, chained forever to his tragic past.

Cole could go fuck himself. Cole and his whiny voice and his toneless muscles and his short stature. He’d never read any Nietzsche or other important philosophy. He was totally in the dark. Cole could try to control Brandon’s life, restricting him, telling him what he could and couldn’t do, like an imperious parent. But Brandon was not a slave. Brandon deserved to be free. Free from the brainwashed masses living their pedestrian lives with their all-important families and purposes and artificial morals. What a clueless society the slaves had built. Brandon had thought more deeply about existential issues than all of them combined. His bleak conclusions were the only ones that a sane person could come to, and Brandon was one of the few sane people left in the world.

When he’d been younger, living in foster home after foster home—most of them highly religious environments—Brandon had kept a journal so people would remember his ideas after his death, just like Kurt Cobain had done. Most of it had been big-headed plans to get hired in the upper echelons of a company, then to siphon off as much money as he could get away with. But the very first entry, written before he’d formed any of his grandiose plans, had been different. It had formed the foundation for the rest of his thinking, and remained the perfect, most accurate filter through which to understand life’s misery. He still knew it word for word.

If any one of us dies, who notices? We are all just specks on a tiny planet circling one small star in all of space.

The Fun cannot last forever. If I die on a wild night out, that is a good death. Live like a rock star, party hard, die young. Go out with a bang instead of a whimper.

Living is not good or bad. Dying is not good or bad. The Universe does not care about me, so I do not care about the Universe. I am indifferent.

That entry had stuck with Brandon through the years. He’d made it his manifesto, if he could be said to have one. It reminded him that he owed it to his younger self to take what he wanted out of life while he still could.

Brandon threw open the door to Crystal’s bedroom. Still wearing that turquoise dress, she sat on her bed texting someone. At Brandon’s entrance, she looked up from her phone, then stood and backed away when he shut and locked the door. “No, no, no,” Crystal said. “We’re not doing this again.”

That’s right, bitch. See which one of us has the power.
He strode toward her. “Beg,” he said to her.

Crystal bolted for the far end of the room, where a sliding door revealed a small balcony. She ran to the door, pulled, and fled onto the terrace. Her breathing quickened, thrilling Brandon all the more. As he neared her, she backed toward the terrace’s railing, and he glanced past her at the ground ten stories below.