Moral Zero (9 page)

After they ate they walked the streets like lost boys, each quiet, even Red, in their own private reveries of the night. Kidd Red was a slave to the gazes of the women, moving closer to them, staring, smiling, shoulders twitching in silent little chuckles at each new delight. Mr White looked and thought and analysed everything about him, reading faces and movements like words in a book. Johnny Black moved through the world as if he were his own shadow, said nothing, and the coloured lights that glared down upon them cast down on his low pulled hat that kept the top half of his face black and impenetrable, melting it into the rest of the night. He stalked like a panther and smoked in whispers.

Red had halted to chat with an aug outside
. She was young with auburn hair and her lipstick was blue and she had no arms. Her figure was a strongly augmented hourglass, and the heavy top and bottom balanced each other out just enough to keep her standing. Mr White could not hear what Red was saying but it was clear they were flirting outrageously and Red was laughing and swaying slightly as if to an invisible breeze. She laid her eyes on his belt and he put a hand on her ass and pulled her in and she said something and he said something and the night erupted in a shrill thunder, a world-trembling foghorn screech that blacked out all other sounds to the tune of red flashes in the sky like blood lightning.

What
the fuck was that? Red looked about in alarm, releasing the girl who vanished into the doorway behind her. The siren had ended as quickly as it had come.

You know what it was, Johnny said. Forget it.

Red looked confused for a second, and then his eyes widened. Oh, fuck. That’s what happens? Fuck.

Remember the rules!
Mr White hissed.

I know the fu
ckin rules man. You know how we all respond to rules. We play them like a . . . like a . . . Red gestured impotently . . . And it’s the same damn thing.

He looked back at the now empty doorway and turned back to them, his face comically sad and puppyish for a second
, and then he shrugged and it left him.

Where
’s Johnny?

Mr White looked around. He was just here. Just here!

Red shrugged again. Ah, fuck him.

Johnny
Black had been lost to the shadows, and within ten minutes Mr White had lost Red too, lost to a brothel and two women of opposite ages that wrapped him in their arms and drew him in to their lair. Mr White wandered the street from top to tail and back again and back again, not wanting to return to the hotel on his own, and worried about Red. He was propositioned by women and men, augs and cyberdolls of all ages and ethnicities and genders. He politely turned them all down and some of them he felt gave him a strange look. As though a man of such resistance was no man at all. Something that didn’t belong.

Two hours later of wandering up and down and going in porn shops and out again and in peepshows and out again and eating pizza in a green-lit parlour
and just when Mr White was starting to think he had missed Red who had most likely gone home without him he stumbled into him exiting a completely different brothel.

Oh man. Red clapped Mr White on the back and bent double and vomited.

Come on Kidd. Come on.

It took a long time but
eventually Mr White managed to steer a tumbling Red home. Or the closest thing to home they had that wasn’t a bar. A home of nocturnal insects and stained dreams.

BAR

              They found Johnny Black in the bar the next day. Sat in the same spot. He watched them come to him and he nodded slightly as they sat down next to him. They didn’t know why they came to him. They didn’t think. They just did.

             
The usual, said Red.

What’s that? said the bartender.

Oh. Rum and mixer. The orange one. That one, yeah. Iceless. No ice.

And for you? The bartender looked at Mr White.

He’ll have the same.

Red gave his card
and they swiped it and he signed his scrawl and got cashback and Mr White thanked them both.

Where did you go? asked Mr White nervously, turning to Johnny. Last night, I mean.

Johnny shrugged. Somewhere. He was sipping his whiskey and he was staring at the wood of the bar top.

I bet you got up to some sick shit, said Red.
Another grand adventure in psychopath land.

Perhaps.

Red shook his head. I don’t get you man.

Johnny said nothing.

All that talk yesterday, murders and torture and shit. That was just talk?

What do you think.

How the fuck you live with yourself man. That’s just totally fucked. You got no morals?

Comin
g from you. There’ll be plenty baying when your neck’s on the rope.

I don’t do anythin bad. Not like you. Not like that.

If you say so.

Red
rolled his eyes. Yeah I fuckin say so. He turned to Mr White. Why the fuck we here with this guy? But he didn’t stand up. He didn’t move away.

Everything is made up of two things. Things that can’t be done and things that can be done. That’s all there is.
Things ain’t wrong just because somebody says so. They’re just things.

Red
took a mouthful of diluted rum and reached for his smokes. What the fuck you talkin about. Course there’s fuckin wrong. Some things are disagreed yeah. But, like torture for no reason? How’d you justify that?

The history of ethics is a history of changing minds. Good or neutral things turned bad. Bad things
now accepted. There’s ain’t no definition to any of it. No absolute. There’s nothing to know, just to put forward, to draw back.

Red snorted.
What about somethin like, like pedophilia? You sayin that ain’t wrong? Red puffed on his cigarette, looking down at the floor, his boots swinging back and forth on the barstool and kicking the bar.

I’m saying that a crime is the product of its time. And, by extension, the law. Once innocuous things are now called evil. Things once wrong are taken back into the fold. Our law ain’t careful and measured, it’s something cultured in a vat. Sometimes it gets mutated. People only really notice when something’s wrong when there’s a disparity, when the law has stopped fitting the time and grown out malignant and pompous, and there comes a chasm between the two. Then there comes an ugly mood. Justice can’t have independence. There’s gotta be some modernising, no looking back, no conservatism for law if it is to survive – and it’s only lived by the skin of its teeth so far. Times it
’s got so big and sprawled, so ungainly and unfitting to the happenings and prevailing moods around it that it has come close to collapse.

Red looked from Johnny to Mr White and raised his brow and then looked back again.
And murder?

Ah, murder. The pure amorality.

Immorality, Red corrected, helpfully.

Amorality
. Law and order and morality and all that are just fixtures to make things work as we’re told are supposed to. To make people get along. It’s a community thing, there’s nothing right or wrong about it. There’s just what we give them. If God exists then that don’t change nothing, he doesn’t have the authority no matter what anyone says. That kinda authority is impossible once you give another free will. You can’t give a guy a choice but only if he obeys you. If he wanted authority then he’s failed. Why is it his to wield anyway? I didn’t give him it. I don’t acknowledge that kind of command, why should I? Because of a system of reward and punishment? As if the world ain’t already that. How can such a system make anything  right or wrong? It makes people selfish and scared. It’s pure self-interest and that’s how we got to this state of affairs. A beautiful morality, that is. No, there’s no moral arbiter. There ain’t nothing but us.

What about
do unto others as you would have done unto you? suggested Mr White timidly.

That old maxim
. That old maxim presupposes that the “other” is equal to the “you”. It’s wrong in that. It’s an unproven assumption. I ain’t no other. I’m me. I ain’t the same kind of human. There’s no reason that I should treat them as I want to be treated. And even if I were the same, the maxim still holds no reason. Why should I do unto them as I would have done unto me? Because I’m told to? I’m expected to? It don’t make me a hypocrite if I never expect something mutual out of relationships, out of connections with others, and why should I?

Mr White stayed silent. He didn’t know. He knew that some things were just
wrong
, but he couldn’t explain why. They just were. But that feeling itself was fading, slowly. Blacks and whites were turning to greys. There was some vague concern within him that he may end up fighting with his own sense of morality, and perhaps losing it entirely.

Red had turned to face away from them both to bette
r peruse the growing crowd, and became intent on analysing an attractive twenty-something woman who had just walked in. She wore a leather dress, skin-tight about her chest and loose past her thighs, and her face was assured and smirking. As Red was thus engaged, a middle-aged woman in a scarf and a long beige overcoat tripped over his outstretched boot. She sprawled onto the floor. Red uselessly tried to stifle a smile, and then said he was sorry. He was about to add that it wasn’t his fault, but stopped himself.

Johnny stepped forward, and leant
down and took the woman’s arm. Let’s get you up, he spoke kindly, and lifted her to her feet. She looked at him, smiling, and then losing the smile as she looked into his eyes. She mutely nodded her thanks, her eyes on the floor. Red’s boots now withdrawn to hook on the stool.

Yo
u take care of yourself, ma’am, Johnny touched his hat respectfully.

She nodded again
and managed a faint smile, and she scooted off, gathering her coat about her and not looking back.

Red looked at Mr White, grinning, his
head back. Did you hear that? Ma’am. I ain’t never heard someone say ma’am in real life. Does he think he’s in some black and white movie or somethin?

Mr White didn’t say anything but pursed his lips and tried to smile with his eyes, wanting to humour Red without insulting Johnny. Johnny ignored them both, pulling the brim of his hat lower over his eyes and sipping his whiskey.

You gonna kill her later, J-man? Mr Polite? Red raised his eyebrow and curled his lip a little. He continued to be ignored.

You like the older girls huh?
Her tits weren’t
that
big you know, Red sneered. I seen bigger.

These
women ain’t your objects, Red, said Johnny coolly.

I never said they were.

Their curves ain’t for your attention.

Well they got it.
Red peered at Johnny cockily. I know you look too.

Know much, do you?
drawled Johnny.

Red ignored t
his, and pressed Johnny again. What’s the matter, don’tcha like big tits?

Johnny blew a ring of smoke and said nothing.

What, ain’t you gonna answer?

Another ring of smoke.

I’ll take that as a yes then.

You’ll take what I give you.
The question is both impertinent and irrelevant to my concerns.

Ah. A fancypants cunt answer.

A more clever cunt than you, Johnny smiled meanly, and drew out another cigarette and lit it.

             
More drinks passed along with the time. Mr White went to the bathroom while Red wandered through the crowd, making cheeky comments to random patrons and trying to find the most interesting girl in the room.

             
Johnny was standing with his back to the bar when a short girl came up to him. She was dressed in a black corset over a black frilly dress, with pink fishnets and knee-high strapped red boots. Glitter was on her face and her hair was in pigtails, decorated in pink lace. Her breasts were pushed up obscenely by the tightly tied corset and the top of one was tattooed in little hearts. She wore a dog collar that sparkled.

             
Fucking hell, said Johnny under his breath.

Is that your friend? He’s hot.
The girl looked in Red’s direction, twirling her hair between her fingers flirtatiously even though Red currently wasn’t facing her.

His name’s Kidd Red.

Do you think he’d like my pussy?

Johnny put his hands to h
is face and then removed them. No.

No?

He prefers assholes.

The girl giggled. Oh, really?

Johnny didn’t say anything.

I h
ope he’d like my asshole, then.

You talk like him.

Is that a good thing? The girl finally turned her face to Johnny, but he wasn’t interested in eye contact.

It’s a thing.

Mr White came back from the bathroom and as soon as he returned Johnny left wordlessly. Mr White stood uncomfortably by the girl in the corset and looked at Red as he walked unsteadily off with the woman in the leather dress, navigating through the other patrons and stumbling into a table as he passed.

             
Why do all you women go for him? Mr White ventured. He’s, well, he’s an asshole.

             
The girl at his side watched Red too and smiled. Yeah, but he’s a fuckable asshole.

             
You sound like him.

             
The girl looked at the back of Red wistfully as he departed the bar with the woman. We’re all the same breed, she said, and walked away from him.

STREET

              It was three and a quarter hours later and Red was in an alleyway near the bar getting fucked.

             
His hands splayed on the wall, dirt creeping into his fingernails, crumbling down as though the wall was the decaying state of the world and the fierce, half-pained pressure of his stance was that which was taking it down.

             
He heard the slap before he felt it, and the pain was quick and white. He yelped. Other things came, and he felt claw marks, felt savaged by animals.

             
Do you fucking like this? The woman’s voice snarled in his ear and his hair was wrenched tight.

             
He said nothing.

             
I said do you fucking like this, slut?

             
He grunted. He was loathe to answer her. He did not want to hear his own voice. To hear it would be to come back, to acknowledge who he was and what he was doing here.

             
She mauled him and he murmured yes, as low as he could. It replayed in his mind a hundred times on a loop, over each other, forming a dumb chorus, a cacophony of yeses. He shuddered.

             
It wasn’t enough for her. She thrust harder, and commanded him to tell her what he wanted.

             
Silence.

             
Slap.

             
Fuck off!

             
Slap
.

             
He grit his teeth. Fuck my ass. His body felt a warm wash of shame. He covered himself in it like a blanket and his head swam and his body prickled and he stiffened and leaked.

             
Louder.

             
He shook his head desperately and then, Fuck my ass! The full length prickling again, like pins and needles all over. There were spikes in his brain. Thin fleshy spikes, probing and stimulating.

Good boy.

He was clutching hold of his masculinity as though a drowning man on a lifebelt, but it was slipping, slipping wet and sticky through his fingers.

His body was
on some new switch, feeling the extension of her inside him, pulsing, unnatural. For moment after long moment he was one of his toys, one of his conquests.

But no, he was hers.

His breath was staggered, rushing, coming all at once or not at all. His insides were full, too full, as though the thing was going to burst out his throat in a fountain of white blood. Every instance of retreat he was hollow, an empty cave, an oblivion waiting for the universe to come in. In that half a second he lived a lifetime as a thing without filling. A vacant lot. An uninhabited hovel. Some stretch of desolation waiting for its purpose, its fulfilment.

The next half a second
the world would move in. His body would explode, a shuddering apocalypse, an end of times that tore him apart. He was ruptured, intestines to jelly, organs died, and still the thing mushed his body up. He felt like he was backed into a tree, feeling it split him, use him, bouncing on the thing as the smallest ragdoll.

He felt fucked in his very soul.

The hammering continued as endless cycles of the universe born and dying, a rebirth from every death. The claw marks were near lost to him now, but the insults volleyed back and forth like rocks in his head, clanging against the insides with boundless energy. They dropped into his gut where he nourished them with his intestinal jelly, and they jumped up and down like a stomach ache.

He made as if to vomit, but nothing came, not even a retch. After a few seconds a thin
hang of drool stole from his lips and ran to the floor, the only part of his soul that could escape the bombardment.

The rest stayed for the show.
The final denouement was at hand. One could not leave before the curtain call.

He was a lost thing, and nothing was blocked out, everything was
integral. The woman groaned and the augment inside him began to release. He was flooded, a reservoir to her pleasure. He was infused.

Good boy.

             
BAR             

We need to decide on where we’re going next, said Mr White. They were all sat back at the bar. Red shifting in his seat.

             
Who says I’m done with this one? Red mumbled around a straw as he blew bubbles into his drink.

             
We’re going to District Twelve, said Johnny. We got to keep moving.

Who says?
Red shot up, taking his mouth off the straw.

I do.

We can vote on it. Make it a democratic decision. Mr White crossed his arms.

The
re’s only three of us you cock, said Red. How’s that gonna work. Unless you side with Johnny like a goddamn kiss-ass.

Mr Whi
te went red and Johnny snorted. I don’t believe in democracy.

You’re joking?
Mr White looked aghast.

No.

I mean, I know it’s not perfect -

You can say that again.

- But
still
.

Still nothing. Every man woman and child should have their full right of choice. Any democratic decision leaves out the minority. Those figures in the minority might have some prett
y damn good ideas on the world.

And what if they don’t?

And what if they don’t? Johnny echoed. It’s still their choice and they should be free to make it. Take that away and you rob a man of his autonomy, his will. He is no longer his own person but the person of the Majority. Every figure should be able to live without having to slink along in the footsteps of some pitchfork armada, should be able to live without someone else breathing down their shoulder and steering their knife and fork as they eat. When you’re a minority, you’re nothing.
Everybody who’s been a minority knows that.

B
ut the world would be in chaos! Mr White protested.

It already is, and we’re
still no more free. It don’t matter where the state of the world goes, the first maxim is to allow a man his choice, and give him the personal responsibility of each and every one of them. Don’t make him ride on the coattails of others and have to put up and excuse and apologise for what others decided and counted him out on. It don’t matter if the world goes crazy with all doing their own mad thing. That’s the first tenet of the world. Once you got autonomy, then the rest follows. But that has to be set in place first.

And this means what for us? Mr White said helplessly. We all go our separate ways?

Johnny smoked and said nothing.

So wait,
what about when someone’s rights infringes on yours?

Don’t say rights,
Johnny sighed. It means nothing. It’s law speak. As if you’re supposed to be expecting to be protected by someone else and have
them
stand up for what you think you deserve. It’s a soundbite. We don’t need that. Human choice is an inalienable
fact
, is what it is.

Alright
, so what about when someone else’s choice infringes on yours.

Let it infringe.
I can infringe back. If you ain’t got the strength to fight back then maybe someone somewhere will make one of their choices be protecting the weak.

S
o maybe a group of people, murmured Mr White, tentatively, Maybe a group of people want to make that protective choice, or any kind of choice that they all agree on… and they as a group, maybe a really big group, infringe on you . . .

Johnny didn’t say anything for a moment,
just stared at the wall smoking, and then he grinned widely. Alright. Alright Mr White. I see where you’re going. Then how about we got free reign over our choices up to when they infringe upon another’s.

You mean the choice not to be killed or t
ortured? Mr White said quietly.

Johnny grinned again.
Aha. He beckoned to the bartender and she came over.

Yeah?

Whiskey for my friend here.

I don’t -
started Mr White.

Whiskey for my friend here.
He laid coins on the table and she went off.

Thank you,
said Mr White sheepishly.

Yeah.

You called me your friend.

Johnny closed his eyes.
No I didn’t. He fixed Mr White with a Look that made him go red.

We’re friends now?
said Mr White hesitantly, after a long pause.

When did I say we weren’t?

So that means we are?

No.

You respect me now though.

Johnny
coughed and leaned his neck back as if looking to the sky. Lord. What do you want my respect for?

Mr White shrugged, embarrassed.

The whiskey came and Johnny pinged it with his fingers over to Mr White. Drink up. And we can talk. But don’t get any funny ideas. There ain’t no me-and-you. There’s just me. And then there’s you.

Red had been flicking his eyes from one to the other without saying anything
this whole time. Finally he ruffled his hands through his mess of hair and put his hand on his chin, blinking wearily. If you’re gonna go back to all that then I’m outta here. I ain’t got no truck with this shit.

With what shit?
Johnny turned to Red, as if he had forgotten he was there.

With this political shit.

Johnny raised his eyes to the ceiling and down. Lord. All shit is political, Red. You can’t avoid that.

Like h
ell I can’t. I just get on with my own life. I do. Not. Care. About any of this otherwise shit. I just want to live my life.