Moral Zero (11 page)

Pedophilia.

Whatever
it is. Sure that’s been in my mind, but that don’t mean nothin, cause
all
shit has, you see? It’s not as if I fuckin deliberate on it or condone it. It’s just a jump, and if it’s real fuckin bad then it gets the scribble. Sometimes my mind just flashes through a whole heap of stuff in a matter of seconds and I gotta try and make these jumps but I ain’t got enough control over where I’m jumpin.

He took
a deep breath. But, like I was sayin, imagine if it’s somethin illegal. It gives me real fuckin discomfort. Like I’m bein observed or somethin. How do I know I ain’t? What if someone were watchin my mind and saw some of this shit? I’d be goddamn sectioned.

We all would, said Johnny.

Providin everone else ain’t just as screwed up.

They probably are. It would just make them go after us more. A guilty conscience breeds hypocrisy in activism. People getting away from their own demons go after the demons of others.
Easier than fighting your own. The joke of it. Moral arbiters with arbitrary morals putting you down to become one of them, to help whip the others into the party line.

We’d be locked up
just for what we can’t control, murmured Mr White.

Red rolled his eyes.
You
wouldn’t. Your mind is a ball of fluff where bunnies bounce on cotton wool and your long lost lover is in the arms of another man . . . under a parasol . . . in a meadow.

Mr White had grown
tired of this, and stiffened. I could jump my mind better and stranger than you could.

Red raised his eyebrow.
Oh really? You wanna go then, Mr White Lightnin?

Yes. Uh . . . What do I do?

Just say first thing that comes into your head man.

Uh.
Um. Banana hammock.

Y
ou’re fuckin kiddin me.

Johnny leaned back in his chair with an amused expression. Corpse fires. Burning cows. Garrotted. Monkey bu
tlers swinging from intestines.

Well a lovely contribution
from the sweet Mr Black there, said Red. But right now I’m fallin down a waterfall towards a lake of baby foetuses . . . shredded like wheat. I’m covered in goat blood. Wearing a crown of shit. The foetuses are now like potato mash. The sky is rainin milk but it tastes like cum.

Mr White closed his eyes.
Red sky at night . . . the barns are on fire. The family is calling out but they are roasting inside. The whole sun is touching the wood. The sun is a fertilised egg. It splits open and inside is a dung beetle with the head of my father. The family is burned black but move about like tree limbs, all staggering and crooked.

Red sniffed. Not bad.

Disembowelled tigers, said Johnny. They’re reading Camus. Libraries are desiccating to dust around them. The kidneys of our mothers are on the footsteps of an Aztec temple. They hatch into screaming apples and each apple is a god and they are bleeding, soaking the earth like red wine . . . in every town people are drinking it and bathing infants in it.

Rednecks frothin at the mouth . . . froth is semen . . .
their pricks ejaculate shit onto the ground and flowers burst forth . . . flowers turn into weeds . . . the weeds grow horses like fruit on the branches and they drop off and rape the rednecks . . . the rednecks cry with pleasure . . . the horses die of infections and just their cocks remain . . . the cocks slide about like snakes and then grow insect legs and skitter into the sewage systems of cities . . . they come up through the plugholes and enter the wombs of expectant mothers causing auto-abortions.

Skulls on a cold moor . . .
engineers parachute downwards -

Hey
it was my turn! protested Mr White.

Fuck turns, said Johnny.
Engineers parachute downwards into a field of human shit and mashed egg . . . irrigated by periods. A rainbow arches across the sky and is crossed by a chariot pulled by antelopes . . . the beasts have ingrowing horns that spear out through their necks . . . climbing all over them like lice or spiders are babies with black eyes who suck on the horns like cocks.

Brains flop over t
he floor like fish out of water . . . the desert looks on them like it was once a man . . . there is a yard that is overflowing with monkey nuts, they spring out the ground like tulips or come up long and hard like erections . . . an old man tends the yard but he is made out of paper and grass and he breaks down slowly and falls into a wheelbarrow made from the spines of giraffes and cheating wives.

Chocolate runs from our cocks and a harem of women an
d men and animals slurp at them . . . our cocks coil up in spirals and tuck themselves inside our bellies which throb and pulse like we are breedin maggots . . . our family fucks pigs in front of us while we tear our hair out and cut off our fingers with pick axes and then when we cannot hold the axes we gnaw at our hands desperately . . . the new harvest falls on our heads and our heads become huge oranges . . . we are juiced by stinkin old women . . .

Women who are obese like mountains and I
dive in the folds like canyons . . . I go spelunking wearing an old miner’s helmet made out of mould and bits of crucifixes . . . I am drowned in the woman’s sweat . . . I make it to the vagina and the folds are like sogging cliff faces . . . scree falls like shit on my head . . . I am caked in primordial ooze… a two headed dog runs yapping at me from some hole and chokes on clean air . . .

Palm trees sway by the ocea
n which breathes like it’s alive . . . it is adorned with huge hats and people ride them like boats . . . the water’s surface is like a great skin like curdled milk and it is yellow in colour . . . a sailor drinks it and says it is better than piss . . . he anoints his children in it and claims baptism . . .

Black men call race hate on coconuts which show razor teeth and bite the cocks of
f white men who whine like locusts . . . the blacks have white heads and the whites have black heads . . . the Asians are crocodiles in the water . . . a military drone flies overhead and drops a bomb . . . everyone explodes into pulp which rains down on a village and is taken as a fashion accessory for houses . . .

Lightning darts like broken veins and punctures t
he faces of lawyers and priests . . . they open up their shirts and make out . . . their skin ripples and then jellifies . . . they become one amorphous mass and cry out their love for the world . . . nearby the only cloud in the sky rains on a single man with hair like bread and his body is so waterlogged it is a wet sponge . . .

A man tells a woman he loves her and she
dissolves like salt in the rain . . . she reforms into a pillar that looms over him . . . the man is no longer a man but a garden plant . . . locked up in a cell with bathroom and dining room . . . the cell constricts like an anaconda . . . through the jail bars asylum creatures chitter and cry, their faces like bugs with antenna that reach in and tickle the man-plant . . .

The jumps ca
me thick and fast, and soon they were all talking over one another. Nobody could be sure who was saying what.

Dead wallpaper . . .
rolled up in wheelchairs all crippled . . .

Peeling flesh . . .
bark of a tree oozing like grease from a sheep’s ass . . .

Taps running all over the world . . .
creaking and moaning as if pain . . .

Do
gs with tails stitched together . . . blamed for the rape of the horned children . . .

Everybody who is loved by s
omeone made to inject radiation . . . pustules form on their body and start to speak . . .

The grim r
eaper comes and is a homosexual . . . he buggers the gods in Heaven . . . the women croon old ballads . . .

Tips of
fingers sliced and put in pies . . . family mealtime . . . everybody watches an empty box where spiders dance . . .

A reservoir of the tears
of oysters and broken men . . . twirling on the edge is a ballet . . . the audience sits in floating boxes and clap at everything . . .

Driving a
buggy over the heads of animals . . . sitting next to you is a boar . . . its hat is made of leather and it laughs at you like your mother . . .

All of us crying and masturbating
with spikes through our cheeks . . . we are on a train . . . in the distance through the fog a family is stapled to a tree . . .

Whirling in oblivion . . . the end of all things . . .
we are surrounded by umbrellas and the scalps of everyone we knew . . .

P
ig arousal the new aphrodisiac . . .

Thunder
in the sky . . . a goddess dribbles . . .

A temple fa
lls under controlled demolition . . . society calls the anus the new church . . .

The voices eventually trailed off and then ceased. The three were quiet for a moment.

Johnny Black eventually stood up. You two need your heads sorting out. Get help before it’s too late for the rest of us. He shook his head and walked off.

Kidd Red grinned awkwardly at Mr White and scratched his ha
ir like a dog going for fleas.

Fun. Another drink?

Yeah, smiled Mr White. Whiskey.

Red
winked and beckoned the bartender over and called for two glasses. He watched her plump rear as she poured the amber liquid, swilling it down onto ice like spiced piss on a glacier. Her buttocks quivered a little, as if feeling the weight of his gaze.

Red unconsciously licked dry lips then turned away from the woman as he re
alised what he must look like. You should try me when I’m on hallucinogenics, he said in a serious tone to Mr White. It’s fuckin crazy man. I’m seeing new textures, new colours, seein in new dimensions, new senses, new concepts unimaginable before, everthin goin at shutter speed like maybe how a fly sees things I dunno. I’m talkin just . . . ah fuck, it’s impossible to describe. I feel like a goddamn genius though when I’m on it. Fuckin staggerin.

I bet.

Red tossed some coins on the bar and took his drink for a sip, whilst looking conspicuously at the bartender’s cleavage as she took the money. Do you think other people can do what we do? He took another sip as the woman walked away.

How do you mean?

Our mind jumpin. All the crazy thoughts.

I think anyone can pr
obably do it. They just . . . don’t.

Red sniffed.
Can’t would have been better.

I know.

Johnny was
back and leaning close, ushering them in by some invisible force that craned their bodies together. The three of them in that cloud of smoke and between them they smelt like sex and death and loneliness. His husky words fell upon them and whether they agreed or disagreed they listened and no matter what was said part of them understood and felt bowed. In each of their heads they saw things to come and things that could never be.

Ther
e’s a sociopath inside everyone, he said. Everyone. Every single man and woman and all of them in between.

Not inside me there ain’t.

Yes there is Red. There’s hot fucking murder in your breast I can tell you that. It’s inside the most saintly of us, so it’s sure as hell inside you. You don’t need to have a killer’s heart to have it, cause killing ain’t in the heart. It’s somewhere else, somewhere deeper. It’s just waiting. You see, the body ain’t as shallow as we think. You think you can go in one side and come out the other a second later, like it’s all that you see, but it ain’t. If you travel on the right wave, you will journey for a long, long fucking time. It’s some half of eternity in there, don’t get me wrong. Now I’m not saying there’s all manner of endless sights to see, cause there ain’t. Nearly all of it is wasteland. Total barren desert, not even that, far as the eyes can see and then some. If you’re lucky or you know the way your path will cross with some place of detail. Maybe a shack, a hamlet, an oasis, maybe even a city. That’s where things are kept, things that make you you. And then it’s back to the wasteland. That’s you too, but it’s the absence of things. The things men can’t fill. And you go on and on, further and deeper, and god knows when you last saw anything but nothing. Finally though, you come to a hollowed out basin, and in the basin a pit, a hole. It’s there in each of us. It looks like a mine or a well but there’s no bucket and no structure, just the hole going down into blackness. It’s too far to go, way too far. But if you somehow reached that bottom, in a place darker than darkness, where light and seeing things are just the ideas of the mad, you’d hear the growling, the snorting and snuffling and the scratching and shuffling, and the drips of saliva hitting the cave floor. And you’d know you’d be in the presence of it. Embodied death. Personified sickness. A grotesquery. The sociopath in you.

Mr White was staring at Johnny with wide, childlike eyes but Red,
pretending to only be listening semi-attentively, now sighed. I’m sure there is a point comin, somewhere.

Shut up, shut up and listen,
growled Johnny.