The Children of Old Leech: A Tribute to the Carnivorous Cosmos of Laird Barron (36 page)

The Roman turns, seemingly revived by blood loss. Brings the gladius down on the Samurai’s shoulder, splitting the torso down to the solar plexus. What little blood comes out at all is almost black.

The wakizashi quivers, sheathed to the hilt in the Roman’s kidney. Samurai’s hand touches but can’t grasp it. The Roman’s spade-shaped sword twisting in the burst balloon of his lung. With his other hand, Samurai draws the javelin from his knee. Nearly faints, but somehow he drives the long spike up through the corded muscles of the Roman’s neck, penetrates the ribbed vault of the hard palate and into the cavernous echo chamber of the gladiator’s brain.

It takes nearly another minute for the Roman’s body to get the message.

It takes the surgical team another seven minutes to separate the bodies and check vital signs to certify the winner. The Roman called Pollux, though stabbed in nine places and burned to the third or fourth degree over ninety percent of his body, almost survives the night.

Shot up with painkillers and adrenochrome, the Samurai lurches out of the arena using the Roman’s enormous gladius as a crutch, to the muted cheers of the small, select audience.

***

In the time after a battle is when it gets worst. He can almost remember who he is.

He knows he had a name.

Before this.

His name.

It was… something.

But in the Pageant…

Now… again and forever… he is the Samurai.

Rumors swirl about the champion few choose to fight, relegated to sideshow matches in pariah state circuses. All but destroyed in six of fifteen matches in nine years, but undefeated, and none have ever seen his face. Even in the pitch-black demimonde of the Pageant, the Samurai is a cipher, his identity insignificant next to the paradox of his survival. Students of the art point to the many awful injuries sustained; not even the Pageant’s surgeons could rebuild such terrible carnage. Indeed, from one match to the next, the Samurai gains or sheds weight and height. Lord Sun makes no promises regarding the identity of the Samurai. Only the masked helmet and the mated swords and the implacable, elegant butchery remain the same.

And yet, the obligatory devil’s advocates must insist, compare the perfect discipline, the rigor of technique maintained even unto dismemberment, the reflexive disdain for mere mortal injury, the true absence of fear of death or pain. No matter how many bodies he’s gone through, it could only be the same man.

***

After Lord Sun has viewed his champion and given his orders, the surgeons take Salazar off life support. From behind his mask, he can see the locker room and the masked doctors slick with his blood, drugged with his secrets.

“We’ve learned so much from him, but all of it useless.” Tsukue, the surgeon, changes his gloves while his nurse fills a styrofoam cooler with ice. “A doctor is wasted on this one. He only needs a seamstress.”

He knows he is a freak. No other bodies share his readiness for transplants. He knows they’ve tried to make a transplant enzyme agent from his blood.

When he can remember, he tries to spare his opponents’ limbs so he’ll have a ready spare-parts bank in the locker room. Two out of three donors are compatible with any body with his blood flowing through its veins, and anything that can be laser-stitched together can be walked out in, and might not be rejected for weeks.

Dr. Balance wears no blood, but Salazar’s stink is all over him, oozes out his ears. The hypnotist is as responsible as the surgeons for the miracle of the Samurai. He smiles and dangles a pendant that swings and makes fiery mandalas of the light. Tsukue catches himself staring at it and curses. He takes a phone call and immediately waves to the hypnotist, pointing at Salazar as if he can’t see.

Salazar tries to talk around the tubes down his throat. “I can… come back…”

They cannot fix him in time for the next ludus. Even if the bowel could be bypassed, the torso is cracked.
Look down, boy. That blue shirttail… That’s your lung, the one that still works.

“I can’t feel it…”

The hypnotist bows. He must prepare Salazar.

“You can replace everything. They know I won’t reject it… He just wants to send me… back there…”

Holding up the pendant, he sighs. They have a comprehensive donor. Perfect match, and as he understands, a young Caucasian, and even uncircumcised. Congratulations are in order. Salazar is going home, after a fashion.

Salazar reaches out, twisting the hypnotist’s wrist. He could break it and do many terrible things with a greenstick fracture before the hypnotist could even scream.

But Dr. Balance would not scream. He would have only to utter a control word and all the memories Salazar has carefully buried, which should have killed him by now, would rise up to crush him.

“Set me free.”

The hypnotist shakes his head. “I have tried to teach you…”

Breathing exercises. Counting sheep. “I can’t… Go back, I… Won’t…”

“Please.” Red hands free, the hypnotist waves away the surgeons and the bodyguard. “Now, are you an enthusiast of haiku?”

“I hate poetry.”

“The perfect haiku is a perfect translation of a dream of a moment. But a moment, as you must know, may contain lifetimes…”

Salazar begs. “Just let me loose… His own people despise him. They won’t kick once he’s put down. I don’t want anything but that. You can have it all…”

“I am so sorry not to oblige, but I already have so much more than I want in this life.”

“I can’t go out and come back, again… all over again. I can’t…”

“But you can. You have and you will. This is your seventh body, after all. What a wonder you are! You have cheated death, but who would share your secret?”

“Fuck you… Set me free. Kill me…!”

“Matsuo Bashō’s haiku lose nearly all their potency in English, but listen carefully.” Swinging the pendant in front of Salazar’s remaining eye until it defocuses, he recites,

“A cuckoo cries,

And through a thicket of bamboo,

The late moon shines.”

Salazar’s agitated, bubbling wheeze subsides to a soft, circular rasp.

“Did you hear the cuckoo?”

Salazar nods.

“Did you see the moon shining through the bamboo?”

Choking, he trembles and says, “Yes.”

“Then you are free.” Pocketing the pendant, he nods to the surgeons, who winch Salazar down and pump him full of a cocktail of drugs similar to that used on California’s Death Row while a third technician enters with a portable guillotine.

***

The Dark would be nothing to fear, if only it were empty.

His Darkness is an invisible orgy of bodiless abominations. Hardboiled horrors within soft-boiled eggs. Cracked and showed him unbearable visions, the worst of all possible worlds…

His.

Amerasian war-trash, street-raised in Saigon after Papasan went home with Uncle Sam and killed himself without producing a legitimate male heir. Suddenly, the family came looking, and eventually got Salazar immigrated to the United States.

He made them pay, though whether for neglecting him so long or for dragging him into a world he could never understand, even he never knew.

Boxing cultivated his skill for inflicting harm into a genius. He acquired a rep for cracking skulls with his fists. Bad temper got him blackballed, sold downriver. Gray-market cage-fighting. After he killed an opponent in a practice bout, he was jailed and forgotten.

Salazar in Folsom lockdown, a walking death penalty. Gladiator school. Shivved seven times; disciplined for nine jailhouse murders, thirty assaults. Recruited into the Pageant at twenty-two. For nostalgic value, he is christened the Cong.

His signature move: crack the chest and cut out the beating heart. Fuck Vietnam. Fuck America and absentee Papasan.

Call me the Aztec.

Twelve main events… and then a brutal, pyrrhic championship that left him unable to defend his title until a tissue donor could be found to give him new hands. When his cumulative injuries couldn’t be repaired for competition, he was retired.

Burning with bitterness, denied a glorious exit, circling a funeral pyre. Out of his search for the ideal death, he found the cult of the samurai. He acquired a sword and a book of Mishima and a promise of inner peace.

It didn’t last. Lord Sun’s people found him in a Myanmar prison that had exploited his talents to relieve overcrowding. Lord Sun bought Salazar from the prison and took him in as a bodyguard for his family.

Under Lord Sun’s wide, shadowy wing, he trained fighters and courted wisdom, but when he expected it least, his anger was abruptly snuffed out.

All his life, he had paid for the damage inflicted by his anger. But it was his first true act of love that condemned him to
ling chi
, the Hell of Slow Slicing.

***

Just like his father, the new dictator has his guests waited upon by starving, malnourished servants. Jaundiced eyes slather every sumptuously overloaded platter with longing and loathing like an exquisite condiment, complimenting the savory spice of terror infused into every dish by the slaves in the kitchen.

Salazar eats with his handlers in a bunker beneath the arena in a subterranean athletic complex that could adequately host the Olympic games, if it were not in an insane dictator’s pariah state, and if the Olympic committee was more receptive to bloodsports.

At least twice that Salazar knows of, he has been served human flesh, this time in some weird approximation of beef bourguignon with plum sauce. He recalls a period when gray, freezer-burned pork was a daily staple. Rancid, but he devoured it grimly and doesn’t remember why it was so important to have it inside him…

Tsukue worries that Salazar shouldn’t try to eat, that intubation is the only sure way to stave off infection of the ridiculously elaborate tapestry of microsutures and meat-glue holding together his new head. But tonight, Lord Sun has made an exception and provided every comfort. Even his owner expects him to get demolished by whatever’s ripping the plumbing out of the concrete walls of the adjoining bunker.

Only two days in the Dark this time, they told him. Only two eternities. After the third transplant, he has never come all the way back. The surgeons tirelessly recorded his impressions. He no longer registers colors, except in sporadic, terrifying bursts. Pain is a capricious and fickle liar; sometimes a grievous wound goes unnoticed until he slips in his own blood, but phantom agonies like being burned alive suddenly assail him in his sleep, as if his well-traveled nerves had become some sort of shortwave for picking up distant pain. His motor skills, however, have become uncannily refined. Dr. Tsukue credits his revolutionary dendrite braiding technique, which might’ve rendered spinal injuries curable, if anyone in his peer review group thought cripples were worth saving.

Salazar wants to stab someone. Something in a time-release drip makes him drop his fork. His hands slur across the table like drunken crabs. Dr. Balance comes in and the food is taken away. The hypnotist gives him another haiku, repeats it until Salazar can see the moon and his breath as crystals…

While he is distracted, they put the helmet on. An authentic but heavily rebuilt Edo Era helmet of bronze, steel and lacquered wood sheathed in a carbon fiber mesh, with a bronze facemask. Lord Sun’s engineers reinforced the dome of the helmet to stop anything short of a sniper’s bullet.

Lord Sun has invested more in Salazar than in the rest of his stable combined, but not to bring victory in the Pageant. Lord Sun would give his whole fortune to insure that Salazar will continue to survive and suffer forever.

The technician takes the surgical steel screws out of his breast pocket and closes his eyes to fight down panic. The gong has sounded and it’ll be his ears if the Samurai misses his entrance. He fits the first screw on the 1/16” Phillips driver of a two-speed cordless drill and sets it into the recessed guide over the insulated hole in Salazar’s left occipital bone.

The senior engineer usually uses an ordinary manual screwdriver to remove and attach the Samurai’s helmet. His trainers use a penlight-sized screwdriver.

Though Salazar is heavily sedated, he jerks as if stabbed in the face just as the technician applies the screw.

The spinning steel screw sinks up to the hilt in Salazar’s left eye. Already grimacing with phantom pain, his face freezes, set in concrete.

The technician drops the drill. The surgeons fulminate but immediately take X-rays. Lord Sun’s staffer orders the orderlies to seize the technician, and reluctantly picks up the phone.

Dr. Balance seems amused. Dangling his pendant, he asks the technician if he has ever been hypnotized.

“You can’t take it out on me… you can fix him, you fix anything!”

“We
will
fix him,” Tsukue says. “He is most important. While you…”

“Please, I didn’t mean to… Just fix it, it’s just one eye…”

Somewhere overhead, a deranged marching band strikes up nobody’s national anthem. Salazar will be the opening event.