Edge Play X (38 page)

It was simple enough to get him to sit
in the bondage chair, easy enough to snap the restraints over his wrists and
feet. X believed that the metal arcs over his limbs secured with the metal pins
would hold, making escape impossible, but he had never tried to escape. Where
would he go? She had the gun. It was in her bag, wrapped in a t-shirt and
loaded with bullets. Before that evening when X had loaded the gun, she had
never held a bullet. When she eventually pulled it out of her bag,
Compton
was surprised to see her holding it. Next, she
would point it at him. Guns are meant to be pointed. But first she pulled out
the paper. It was crinkled and had paint on it. The ink was coming off on X’s
fingers because of her perspiration.

“Tell me how you know this person,” X
demanded to
Compton
as she held the newsprint in front of his face.

“What person?”

“This man right here,” X said, tapping
the image of her former lover, seeming to injure the paper as she did so.

“I don’t know him.”

“Don’t lie to me, Terry. I know that
you do. It’s something we have in common, it seems.”

X put the paper down and pulled out
the stapled tax forms that Anne had printed out for her.

“You see, I knew him carnally. You
knew him because he was your consultant.”

“No,”
Compton
said. “It’s an error.”

“Look!” she screamed, “it’s right here
on his tax return! He worked as a private consultant for you. You paid him a
large amount of money.”

“I don’t know him,”
Compton
said, squirming in his seat.

“His name is Andrew,” she said. “He
worked for you shortly after I broke up with him, judging by the year on the
tax return. He’s an accountant. In fact, he did my taxes for a couple years. He
had all the passwords to my bank accounts.”

Silence.

“Answer me, Terry. I want to hear your
side of things. I want to hear how you explain it.”

X took out the gun and pointed it at
him.
Compton
’s pulse accelerated. He had never had a gun
pointed at him before.

“Call Simeon,” X said.

“Who?” he asked, her darkest
suspicions being confirmed with the timbre of his answer.

“Ryan Simeon,” she said. “Tell him to
come to the dungeon,” X commanded, dialing Simeon’s number and holding up a
brand-new pay-as-you-go phone to
Compton
.

*

They waited.

“I want to know why,” X said.

Why? That is a difficult question to
answer. Humans are always asking why.
Compton
was the kind of man who asked
why not
. But he looked at her and saw that
she wanted her answer. X wanted an answer. How could he explain it? Certain
things cannot be explained, although people are always trying. They would
evaporate the ocean into a handful of salt just so they could hold it in their
palm.

“Why did you do this?”

This. He interpreted her pronoun. That
was what he did, interpret things.
Compton
interpreted the
markets,
he interpreted events and societal shifts and applied these to the markets.
Interpretation was a kind of magic, a translation of one thing to another, a
type of
mediumship
. It wasn’t so much that X wanted
to know why, he thought, as she wanted him to interpret
a
logic
, a rationale that did not exist. There were a million reasons. Why
did people do anything that they did?

Compton
tried to explain. “Women would come to my
dungeon, but there was always the script, the act. It was pretend. I never knew
if they even liked what they were doing or if they were just doing it for the
money. How can you tell the nature of a person if they are always pretending?”

Compton
was restrained in his chair, but X still held the
gun. She wanted to keep it in her hand. It had fused into her flesh.
A huge gun.
It made her feel safe to hold it. Secure.

“Pretending?” she asked. “Everything
you did was pretend. A ruse.”

Ruse
. In Latin, it meant deny, reject, oppose.
Compton
thought that X’s term for what he had done was
perfect. He had rejected the accepted way of doing things. It had always been
that way. He couldn’t help himself.

“You weren’t pretending,” he replied.
“Tell me why you branded Simeon. Tell me why you beat me until I bled and then
threw salt into my wounds.”
Compton
’s
penis swelled up at the memories. “You took pleasure in causing pain. That was
real.”

“It’s not true,” she said. “I didn’t
give you my consent. I didn’t agree to play your sick game.”

“Tell me, X, did you get my consent
when you blackmailed me?”

“I took the money so I could get away
from you.”

“Did you get Simeon’s consent when you
burned him with your mark?”

“It’s not the same.”

“It’s exactly the same. Our
motivations are different, but our means and ends are the same.”

“How is that?”

“You acted to preserve yourself. You
wanted revenge for your own suffering, for the situation you were in. Tell me
that you took no delight in taking my money, my painting, tell me that you
didn’t get a jolt of pleasure at the thought of me suffering.”

“You think you know my motivations.
What are yours?”

X pointed the gun to his crotch.
Compton
squirmed a little in his metal chair. If he had
paid thousands for gunplay in his dungeon, it wouldn’t have been this good,
couldn’t have compared to the thrill of a loaded .44 Magnum pointed at him by
X.

“You wouldn’t understand it. You don’t
want to understand it. You want to retain your moral superiority. Does there
always have to be an explanation? Can I not do something solely because it
gives me pleasure to do so? Motivations mean nothing; they are a child’s
excuse, a childish explanation.”

“It gives you pleasure to corrupt
others, to contaminate them, to spread your wickedness like a virus.”

“Why say one machine is bad and
another is good when they function the same way and produce the same thing? You
felt that you were morally superior and that justified your cruelty. The
easiest way to get someone to do something bad is to have them convince
themselves that they are doing something good.”

“You put me into this place and that
is why I did what I did.”

“You acted out of your own accord, you
and Simeon both. I set the stage but the play was your own.”

“Shut your mouth.”

“All those clothes, did you give them
all to charity? Did you donate the Van Gogh to a museum?

She hadn’t. That was true.

He continued. “You wanted to dislike
the wealth. You wanted to dislike me and Simeon. When you couldn’t hate us
anymore, when you started to actually like us, even love us, you felt guilt
because you want to be better than we are.”

“I’m not your slave to do with as you
please.”

Tell me, X, what slavery is greater
than the slavery of love?”

Silence.

Compton
spoke. “We are alike, all of us, we are cut from
the same cloth. Our essential natures are the same. That is true.”

“No.”

“You hate me now because you hate the
parts of us that are the same.”

“I don’t hate you. I pity you.”

“You will search for this the rest of
your days. In the future when you beat men or ask them to beat you, you will
yearn for this, for its authenticity. Consent creates a charade.”

“No.”

“At least I can admit what I am,” he
said. A few beads of perspiration had formed on his forehead. “Tell me your
name, X, your real name.”

“You know my real name.”

“Do you think that your parents could
have ever imagined how fitting your name would be, how perfect? I want to hear
you say it. I want to hear the sounds come out of your mouth, see your lips
shape the words.”

He didn’t deserve it and she would
keep it from him.

“My name is X.”

“Is that your name? What is your real
name? The one your parents gave you or the one you gave yourself? Is X true?”

Behind her, X heard a key turning in
the lock and she darted into a corner. She had made
Compton
tell Steinberg to allow Simeon into the dungeon,
told him to lie to Steinberg and say that X had already left with the driver.

When Simeon entered the room, he saw
Compton
secured in the metal bondage chair. Then, he
heard a voice behind him.

“We’re so glad you came,” X said,
pointing the gun at him. “Put those cuffs on,” she said, motioning to a pair
she had set onto the floor, and he obeyed.

Once they were on, X kicked him in the
nuts.

Simeon dropped to the floor in pain,
gripping his testicles. Pain shot through him, radiating from the center of his
being.

“You’re lucky I don’t blow your face
off!” she said as she listened to him gasp the air. “Get in the chair!” she
demanded, and Simeon climbed onto the wooden seat next to
Compton
, his face still a tangle of pain.

X pistol whipped him, and it pleased
Compton
to see this, the full circle of Simeon and X’s
interaction, their cycle complete.

“Good to see you,” a grinning
Compton
said to Simeon.

“You have some explaining to do,” she
said to Simeon, “you both do.”

Simeon, his face still red from the
pain, said, “I never thought you’d figure it out.”

X ran the tip of the gun down his
cheek. “Is Ryan your real name?”

“Yes,” he answered breathlessly as he
stared at the floor. He looked over to
Compton
and directed a question to him. “How did she find
out?” he asked.

X picked the newspaper up and handed
it to Simeon who held it with his cuffed hands.
 

“This picture, back when Terry still
had his mustache. I thought it was strange that my old boyfriend, a man who had
a real taste for submission, was in that photo.”

Simeon shook his head in disbelief.
Fucking newspapers.

Now that he was able to sit up again,
X removed the duct tape from her bag and wrapped it around Simeon’s torso,
securing him to the chair, keeping the gun in her hand as she did it, and once
it was done she just left the roll of tape dangling at his side.

She posed a question to
Compton
. “Why did you have Simeon imply you were a
murderer?”

Compton
replied. “It gave you a reason to detest me other
than my wealth.
A reason to want to punish me.
What is
more despicable than a murderer?”

X, as she looked at
Compton
, thought that perhaps she was staring at the
answer to that question. He had murdered something within her.

“And you,” she said, pointing the gun
at Simeon, “why did you go along with it, aside from whatever money Compton
paid you? Why did you get involved?”

When Simeon gave X nothing but
silence,
Compton
answered for him.

“He was there at the meeting when your
former boyfriend, Andrew, was going over the expenditures with me. They saw all
the purchases of my dungeon equipment.”

“You’re an accountant?” X asked Simeon
in disbelief, repeating it to herself in order to try to make it seem real, “
an accountant
?”

Simeon shook his head yes.

Compton
smirked. “Accountants, my dear, are some of the
biggest tricksters you might ever meet.”

“But you were shot. I saw the scar on
your back,” X said.

Simeon laughed. “The scar isn’t from a
bullet. I had a mole that I got removed. They took off a lot of skin.”

“You had
CIA
credentials.”

“Almost anything can be forged,”
Simeon responded. “Ask
Compton
.”

“But those men who kidnapped me, you
shot them. I saw you shoot them.”

“Did you see me shoot them, or did you
hear a gun and hear them drop onto the floor? There was a blanket covering you.
Did you see blood? Did you see their wounds?”

X had broken out of her subjective
reality. No, she hadn’t seen their wounds. Simeon was right. X had been on the
couch, covered up with the blanket, paralyzed with fear when she heard the gun,
one that clearly had been shooting blanks.