Moral Zero (23 page)

His shirt fell to the grimy floor and covered a
bow-legged spider lurching its way along. Johnny’s body was hard and mean, strong but without vanity muscles and without paunch. It was lean but powerful like a wolf and rough, without any smoothness. Small scars and marks decorated parts of his body like pock-marks or animal bites or burns. The hair on his chest had not gone grey but his body was not that of a young man. Perhaps such a body aged faster than its years, picking up the hardship and weariness of life around it and finding strength in the darkest of corners.

The cigarette trailed its thin beacon of smoke and was not put to his mouth.
He had switched back to his right and held it between his two forefingers pointed like a gun.

There is a place, somew
here, where old gods have died, he said, pointing the smoking gun at himself and tracing its end on the sides of his stomach. He breathed in sharply and let it out again. The cigarette withdrew and then came back, prodding in sharp spots of pain. Something immediate and recognisable. Sharp and clear, a flashlight in the fog, a call from the darkness.

There is a
place where all gods have died, he whispered, closing his eyes and opening them black and rolling like an animal. He hissed through his teeth.

Death and sickness, he said.
Filth in the cellar. So far down. So far down.

The cigarette was withdrawn and he took another drag, taking it right to the end and throwing it to the floor before his fingers burnt and crushing it with his bootheel.
He walked past vats, two steaming and bubbling one cold and coagulated, with a layer of congealed skin as on boiled milk left out. The fires were left on. Some things took a long time to change. He stood looking at the blacked out windows and walked back to the vats and looked in. They spat and popped at him and stung his face. If the whole place burned down while he was gone so much the better. He moved to the cold vat and looked in and stirred with a ladle and then he opened a valve on the vat and siphoned it off. It ran through pipes that led around and twisted back on themselves to the other vats and then away and through the floor. To the great below.

Johnny watched the vat empty, watched the thick
torrid liquid drain out, leaving bits hard and pasty stuck to the sides like lumps of sick. In the lack of light it looked black and maybe it was. More bits would be found at the bottom, things more resilient to the process. They would need to be cleaned and disposed of later, but not now. He sniffed the sharp and intoxicating fumes to which he had become accustomed, almost to the point of appreciation, where others would have gagged and vomited. The strength of the acridity made his head swim and he moved away with a hacking cough, to a mattress and a cluster of clothes not his that he used for blankets. The mattress was pushed in a corner against a wall and the wall was peeling and stained yellow and brown and black. There were pictures on the wall by the makeshift bed and they were scrawled with notes and amendments as though by a madman. Spiderglyphs. Pictures of serial killers.

He sat down and put his head in his hands.
It felt like it was full of white noise.

Johnny
knew why he did what he did, but there was something to it that couldn’t seem to be put into words. Maybe he hadn’t really tried. It felt disconnected from language. Perhaps there was some tongue somewhere that could put form to the idea. It was self-interest, certainly. Oh, he said he wanted to give others the maximum of all experience, and that was true, but the root of all this intention was born of self-interest. But wasn’t everything?

Johnny was, quite simply, fascinated with it all. He had a fascination with the transcendence of limits. He had a fascination with causation and prime movers. He wanted to know what could be done, how it could be done, and the why just seemed self-evident.

He desired above all to see someone moved to their limit, and he was empowered by being the one who enforced it. It was about dominance beyond dominance: control not just over someone’s body (which was easy), and not just over their mind in the temporary sense (which was also easy), but their whole being, their soul, the core of who they were or thought they were. To control someone’s present? Child’s play. But to take over their future . . . to change their
past
. . . that was power to dream of, for hallucinating madmen to lay awake at night in feverish sweats over. The dominion you could hold . . . to hold the rulebook over the creation of a human being . . . the
new
creation . . . to hold all the cards . . . the slate to rub blank – make them this mewling inhuman mess, this sack of meat and shit, unable to remember even their own name – and then
rewrite
. . . automatic writing . . . to draw obscenity in the classroom . . . to draw skulls and blood and orgies . . .

In this impotent life, this life of nothing and nothing and nothing, where your reach extended not even as far as yourself, to feel all this was intox
icating. The power over another . . . To reach out across the great divide and to stab your fingers in another person’s soul. It was so
interesting
. The power over another . . . making his mark . . . branding his name . . . a cattle prod stamped on their soul like an ugly and beautiful birthmark. It made him feel deified. It was the work of gods.

It felt like living.

THE BLACK DREAM

             
Smoke and darkness. Little lights like glowing insects popped into existence and he saw that they were beetles, their carapaces embedded in the walls and their antennae feeling out to brush against him like the hairs of a carpet. They were alive. The feelers tickled his skin as if judging his merit.

             
It was a tunnel and he moved down it, moving like a phantom, something not really there, perhaps a hallucination or a memory. There was dark at the end of the tunnel and it was this that he was shifting towards. It was this where the smoke was coming from. It billowed like a plume, caught up in the dull beetle light and shining in patches, coming reflective in wisps – and then just a thick, lifeless fog. He could feel the hissing from the end of the tunnel and yet he could not hear it. The tunnel seemed without air and he was not breathing and the smoke as it rolled and writhed seemed at moments as though some creature winding out the netherworlds, and then other moments was a mirror to him, a mirror almost fully gaps and broken shards and the spider-thin fingers of smoke reflected his eyes and nothing more and at one instance a thousand eyes stared at him and then it was just smoke.

He reached the end. The vacuum trembled with the hissing and still all was silent and now he was in darkness.

There was a stretch of time alien and unknowable as he shifted and hovered and drifted as though smoke himself. He felt pulled back and forth as though on currents not his own. His legs remained useless and dangling and his body was pained by the pressures of larger forces upon it. He wanted to speak, to say that he was under his control and his alone, but that which controlled him would not permit this and his mouth stayed shut and sewn.

After the alien time and alien movement there was a flicker of light and he fell to the floor. His legs buckled and jarred and he had to recall the methods of their use. The flicker was growing and the first sound came, that of sizzling meat.

His eyes blinked and there was fire all around him and he was choking. But not from the smoke, which infested him as though part of his being. He choked at the sight of the lumps of meat in the fire, sizzling away, and then great sobs found their way through him and his body racked and heaved and he vomited and drooled and trembled impotently as the flesh bubbled and he traced the contours of the body parts with his fingers as if sketching in the air. The noises of the cooking and blistering meat were now accompanied by screams, even though there was nothing alive to make them and the screams were more like a chorus of echoes.

The stitching around his mouth was gone and he whimpered like a pup and was
on all fours as he put his hands over his ears but the screams of the burning woman were still there, now louder and fierce as though the desperation to be saved had reached its point of crescendo and yet any hope of salvation was a lifetime ago and all that resounded within his head was a spirit, accusatory in his not being there and shrill in her anguish.

I couldn’t stop them, he said, all cracked and pathetic like a broken thing. The fires burned brighter and the smoke clogged and almost mercifully began to blind him from the detail.

She wailed as though a banshee and his tears fell so strong that they seemed that they could hold back the fires, and if they did it was only for him, or perhaps the fire just refused itself to touch him, but no amount of tears or buckets or oceans of water could quell its hold on her body.

He fell to the ground and curled up, twisted and unformed, more corpse than babe,
some thing almost all dead inside, and even his raging hatred of mankind for its evil deed was at the moment stoppered and empty, ready to fill back up to overflowing whenever some idea of life returned to his body and mind, whatever its guise and whatever black road such an idea might lead him down.

HOTEL

Mr White sat in the room, his eyes half closed, his body lazy – not borne of warmth but a sad, thin and bored laziness without passion or energy. The early afternoon sun shone outside like a circle of immense ferocity and calling, as though it was a signal to death or a white hole sucking all towards it. His chair was at the window, pointed outside to the stark desert day. He stared dispassionately at the sun through his half-closed lids without turning or looking away, as if daring himself to be blinded. His eyes bled its tears and his vision flickered and blurred every so often, but he kept on staring into that authority that wouldn’t back down. At least not until several hours later when it would slink away like a suspicious father figure, a police state headlight, crouching down gorilla-like behind the edge of the world as the lights turned out.

It didn’t feel quite the same.
Mr White used to challenge the sun like this back home, and he used to revel in the deterioration of his eyes, the conscious wounding of oneself in the face of an omnipresent authority. The sun was an eye that breathed its fury and control into him like a rippling wave. He would not succumb. Death was preferable. Death was always preferable.

It was not, however, chosen.
Because.

There was
, perhaps, an emptiness awaiting him at the end of the long spindle-narrow tunnel, and from most accounts it appeared to be even emptier than things now. On the one hand that was unsettling and uncertain, and the uncertain is feared. No matter the enormity of dissatisfaction personal consciousness is
not
to be erased, and no true desire anywhere can be found for that end of days. An apocalypse must be observed in order to be enjoyed.

On the other
hand the end could be a much needed release. From all false promises and expectations. Mr White hoped that no further demands would be placed upon him once he had reached the end. He did not desire a new beginning if it followed in any way from the present. All rules would have to be eradicated or completely rewritten. The universe would have to reboot. Try it again. Make it easier. Make things happen. Give people a chance. All the chances. More.

Mr White finally let his eyes close, letting the drops of weakness in the face of authority slide from him and descend like rainfall down his face. The sun grinned like a carnivore. Mr White put his hands up to touch his face, and for a second his fingers curled into tight little fists, but then they lost the energy for this too and dropped like dead weeds to his lap.

Mr White thought about what he wanted, but it was too hard. Trying to grab hold of it was like
flailing at individual fronds as you tumbled through a succession of nets that changed their shape and pattern faster than the wingbeat of a fly. It was all so scattered, so elusive. It was everything in the world that couldn’t be had. If one thing was attained, what was desired was the other.

It was easier to think of what was unwanted.
But there was so much, this vast feculent valley of disease and boneyard machinery that strained the eye to see the edges. What was important was reduction and descent, journeying through the cracks in the grey earth and down the mines and winding, hissing cave systems into the bowels of the valley, to find the roots of it all, the roots of malignancy. The beginning of bad thought. And if you travelled deep enough you could find the drooling beasts gnawing and slurping away in the barrel of the earth.

Mr White saw them when he closed his eyes, if he could descend far enough without feeling sick.
They were creatures of poison. They were the spirits of life. This life is poisonous, Mr White knew. It is a creeping vine to choke you, a putrid slime to drown you, a racking cough to lose your last air away. It turns the sky skeletal. All regulation on living turns it anorexic and ugly like bones.

Mr White whispered
inside his own head, the words fraying about like cobwebs in the darkness. I feel like I am in death’s twilight, he croaked, and the clustered daemons inside him nodded and clacked understandingly, and beckoned with arms like diseased bark for him to continue while others grunted and dribbled.