Create in me a clean
heart
And renew a right
spirit within me.
Psalm 51:10
into
revolution
the whole world at my disposal, an abundance, a
profusion, a plethora of different
cultures to experience and appreciate, a veritable spectrum of firm tanned
bodies beneath pin-striped regulation uniforms, silk blouses coiled like
sentient lava flows over breasts of solid presence; black bread in some peasant
strewn-forgotten township – Odessa; pearl of the Black Sea! dewy clit of the
greater Slavic snatch! Odessa! I can
see it all; sandy beaches, temperate waters, fierce heat of the afternoon sun,
lightly pastel architectural style, labyrinthine netherworld inadvertently
created in the extraction of limestone for building purposes, women in achingly
tight stonewashed denim, faces redolent with an archetypal slavic breadth,
bubbling from within the concrete as if leaking from some deep-sunk well of
erotic potential, watermelons piled five high
and marvellous and sold by the slice at the roadside; how modernity demands the timelessness of a religious
response! the emptiness of relationships is magnified by relentless
communicability and the mechanised loneliness of the contemporary experience
continues to escalate, so the shared experience and beliefs and sacrifice of self-awareness
and responsibility to some greater power are all-the-more able to exploit
people’s fear, given meaning by the
sheer excesses of its own rhetoric; and psst we’re in on the joke, thumbing my
ancient volume of Pushkin as though it were the anus of a loved one
the revolution that
is to possibly
come.
*
O world, fallen world, you fell, and hard, fell
with me to the soiled bed of the end, we fell together, fell forever, and now
we are gone and are but nothing but gone, and the one thing we can’t go
is back; I am nameless, carried prostrate from the dreams of the earth; years
are held in unwritten veneration like a remote instinct and voices stagger
intimidating in the grave weight of their own history. The eyes of age they give
youth an ally; in those hapless faces of decline children can confront
their own mortality, they comprehend the passage of time, moved by the walking
projection of what they too will become. My grandfather was evolving. Concrete
and traffic gave way to green hedges and clear skies and so a stagnant,
pointless place, the suburbs no place
for foibles, faded and forgettable like old newspapers, swallowing the
urgency of an active life, the promise of a new life instead felt ancient and
terrible; time so real it was unreal and it stopped making sense and where in a
single second lay death and in a single day slumped your friends stone dead;
they’d fuck until freed from time once more
Other people’s memories become your own,
malleable contexts reabsorbed and reprocessed with unrecognisable variation. At
the end of the garden was the concrete water tower of an old hospital complex,
elsewhere a weird inner-city water reservoir fenced off with an iron railing
beyond which lie what looked like a burial mound reaching several feet above
the crest of the fence. I’ve seen the valves and the pipes now, heard the
surface of the water splashing interrupted in the night. I saw the house’s redbrick
frontage and the lean-to roofed with Perspex sheeting, which led in one long
corridor past the side door to the kitchen and into the garden. The moustache
was large and white and spanned unimaginable time. Without exercise or effort
he got stronger. The nuclear powered heart. I imagined a robotic part,
buried in the depths. There was more to life than being alive, he said. Little
more conducive to confession than a mute relative. It was the end of memory.
It was
*
“And
so… it… is very, very simple. Very, very, very. As.” The rictus of boredom; scantily lit, poorly, uniform
breezeblock; one strip light like a condemned kitchen, peripheries lingering in
almost total darkness, odd embers of the gobbed smokes of security; air thick, cohered
into its own dense atmosphere; regs for smoking sub-terra: fire hazards,
air supply complications and/or contamination, health, similar. Counted for the
thick end of fuck all. “Time ‘nigh’; implantation; tech, ability and foresight aligned.”
The bunker bore one of the world’s most advanced dedicated super computer and
server configurations, under almost constant construction and development since
the end of the 1980s and wired up to immeasurable amounts of memory, data and
growing banks of information. Central
Heart, just Central.
Some wiry fuck scoffed,
busting the silence. ”Sad shits desperate enough to let us get away with it.”
“Anything they think they
think because we made them think it.”
He brought the
handkerchief up but already sodden it was a pointless act. Guards shuffled,
primed for death
“Yanks fucked our arses
like we were weeping women.” Laughter rippled around the table, a short burst
of precise sniggers. “That’s why we funded the virus.”
Thurleigh fucking Hament.
“New Allied Countries?”
“Greedy. KINGDOM was always ours. What price for
peace and harmony? Government’s a mass ego for
the masses.”
Cunt were right, weren’t cunt.
“Your shit mouth’s had its fun, running off
like a reamed dog. People didn’t deserve
freedom in the first place.”
PM swung in, was the man’s man amongst
polystyrene coffee cups and fag ends, every-fucking-man,
as the campaign badges could have or should have said but didn’t; had a love
for “booze and bints”.
“Never again will we feel the senselessness of
death; all will be redundant; all will pale; ours is a truly universal
healthcare; selfishness replaced by obedience; disorder by order. Repentance is
what I loathe most about humanity. If the one thing KINGDOM achieves is the
destruction of the pitiful urge to repent then I’ll go happy.”
He planted two bullets in one two, one
between the eyes and the other just above the chin, clipped by the bullet as his
head slumped lifelessly backwards. They wrapped the body in plastic and carried
it from the room.
*
The
tech as built the nuclear powered heart basked in uranium promise. The first
transplant was at the end of the Second World War, primarily a military
programme and so officially misplaced or redacted beyond sense. In research predictable
results fail to correspond with paper theory. The public were unaware; the dumb
majority did not forget but were
never informed. Despite this seemingly paradoxical mass erasure of limited
information a great many people knew; talking proved a difficult thing to stop;
history laces together the way we think and act and can never quite disappear,
facts of buried history find their way to the surface of consciousness.
It was a challenge to death, would conquer
death in a self-sustaining chain reaction. In wartime the crisis of faith
became a concern for the ravaged nations of the world. This faith ran deeper
than the spiritual. Even as victorious patriotism plundered with prejudice the
hungry souls of the survivors and the pages of the press, the sense of loss
grew with it exponentially.
*
It was wrong to begrudge people their lives
before my existence. The trees outside were nearly bald. He breathed like an
explosion. The sound was astonishing, an atonal fusion of the organic and the
metallic that hit you like a headache, something industrial, splutters of an
immense force, the internal churnings of an epic industrial complex.
“In here,” he said, pointing at his chest,
“there’s a nuclear powered heart.”
“No, no, no,” he said. “Not a bit of it.”
“I can’t remember the feeling of memory,” he said.
“As a species we’ve always sought the key to
immortality without success because we’re meant
to die. An eternal physical existence undermines everything we know about
ourselves, but this was ignored.”
Nuclear power is too much power.
I wasn’t interested in getting fucked up or
talking to girls.
I was a little weird.
Sometimes it sounded strange.
An ideological conflict between formerly allied
countries had led to the unofficial sanctioning of foreign travel, with all
major air and shipping ports either closed or placed under a kind of martial
law. The risk of international terrorist strikes was too great. As a result
nearly all global trade, imports and exports, had ground to a halt, with some
foods rationed by necessity if nothing else. The Ministry of Food was all but
re-established, though we were a people accustomed to greed. Life just wasn’t
life without strawberries in December, without tuna steaks on demand, though people
descended into raptures of patriotism, as if they welcomed their manipulation,
the loss of international telephone networks and satellite television and other
increasingly sophisticated forms of communication leaving a dreadful void comfortably
filled by government propaganda and xenophobic anxiety. The racism inherent to
the lingering hangover of imperial British self-belief had finally found its
acceptable outlet. Faceless strangers carried underlying expressions of war.
They reeled off slurred patriotic monologues, rehearsed lists of the things
that made the country so formidable a force, all printed verbatim in the
tabloids for quick reference. The Union Flag rose in front windows, a totem to barely
concealed hooliganism.
“REVOLUTIONARY TECHNOLOGY!”; “BOLD NEW DAWN FOR
BRITISH SCIENCE!”; “DEVELOPMENT SINCE SECOND WORLD WAR!”; “TOP SECRET!”;
“POWERED BY URANIUM!”; “HEART TO BE ISSUED TO ALL WITHOUT CHARGE!”; “GREAT
SUPPORT IN THIS DIFFICULT TIME!”; “JUNE 1999!”; “MILLENNIUM CELEBRATIONS!”;
“ERADICATE DEATH AND DISEASE!”; “ENHANCED NATIONAL SECURITY!”; “DATABASE!”; “A
UNITED BRITAIN – FOR YOUR SAFETY!”
People feel
British, a bleak matter of fucked fact. A whole nation played like a school
piano. “People without a heart’ll look like the troublemakers, dissenters with
something to hide.” Already things were increasingly dangerous in some parts of
the country, mostly in heavily middle class and Conservative areas, suburbs,
villages, all around the commuter belt. Weird cults had started to develop, so
obsessed with some essential unspoken Britishness that they organised public
symposia of the Anglo-Saxon language, chanting through high streets and burning
contemporary dictionaries as though they had somehow corrupted the purity of a
mother tongue that was ever, in truth, the bastard; when the day finally came,
in June 1999, things were going to explode.
“I never thought I’d say this,” he said, “but
you’ll have to start a revolution.”
All good revolutions start among the stacks of
a public library.
“Motivated by the sheer devastation and
apocalyptic prophecy of the Hiroshima-Nagasaki bombings, the nuclear powered
heart created a devastation all its own: the end point of (an authentic future
for) humanity. It was to become, in effect, the final weapon, the point beyond
which there could only be nothing. The death of death. The destruction of those
two Japanese cities, that atrocious loss of human life – it would mean nought
in comparison.”
The First was to become a symbol.
“the British government wanted a sacrificial
lamb for their own as yet unwritten Book of Revelations. It is more than
reasonable to suggest that even then the government was well aware of the
marketing opportunity of their development, constructing as they were a new
spiritual and cultural mythology that saw a notional saviour incorporated into
policy, this ‘messiah legislation’. Future leaders would increasingly develop
this same mythology. It was a practical development borne of rich symbolic
potential, the heart sent to conquer Babylon, to conquer death and suffering
and to bring the eternal life of the messiah to all believers. It was a project
constructed in the light of ancient prophecy and given spiritual credence in
the turbulence of European post-war life.”
Reduced from man to corpse to experiment. He
was a symbolic body. A heartbeat burst through the great haunting silence of
the stethoscope.
It is poeticised conjecture where no fact
remains.
A man can’t possibly get a second go at life
and not feel slightly different about themselves and the meaning of it all; the
main thing was that it gave us another chance at what never even got started.
We were very grateful for that. What mattered was remembering. The world from
which we had sheltered each other had now crept into the edges of our lives and
would continue to do so until we were a part of it.
The young can’t hide forever so please do for
as long as you can.
When the letter did arrive I couldn’t accept
what they were telling me, despite the military seal and the Lieutenant
General’s signature. My husband had died and was once again impossibly alive. Death’s death,
my father had always said with some pleasure.
“Sickness and weakness will no longer be a
concern for your husband. He is coming to terms with the fact of his own death.”
He often talked of being alive with an air of
gratitude, confusion and concern.
We were rushed into the packed Adelphi; he was
brought to the stage for the questions allotted to the last twenty minutes of
the programme. The rest of the lecture had involved the scientists expressing
their professional excitement, the room ablaze with the anticipation and hope
of possibility.
Now I am a very old woman, diagnosed with
stomach cancer. There’s very little hope of treatment. I’m waiting to die.
“I’m in so much pain.”
“I know you are.”
“I’m afraid.”
“I know you are.”
The majority of tickets were exclusively
reserved for high-level government employees though also journalists, tycoons,
entrepreneurs, surgeons, medics, managers, headmasters, civil servants, the
occasional athlete and even actors, all keenly awaiting the unveiling of the
very end of science. In the drab streets of wartime it must have seemed like a Tinseltown
premiere. The very notion of fear
became meaningless. God bless this government, God bless this nuclear powered
heart!
A blind lust for the eternity of youth and a
life without pain pulsed through the populous like blood through veins, and
London fell into the hands of an ugly chaos.
“These were communities forced together by the
horrors of war, all left in desperate hope for the release the heart had
promised from the destruction wrought across the face of their country. It was
essentially a crowd psychology – the individual had been consumed by war,
leaving Britain not as a nation of individuals but simply as a Nation, and with this was lost an
integral sense of moral responsibility. This era of selfishness, of
self-preservation at the expense of all else, was ushered in with the heart’s
incredible promises and sculpted into acceptability as people longed to succumb
to the lure of the anonymity of the masses, of submission to something greater
than they themselves. The heart would thrive on isolation, on jealousy, fear
and distrust; society grew around it, essentially reformed by the projects
expectations, with the intense capitalist values of the latter century becoming
extremely dangerous when coupled with the overwhelming fear of death and a
governmentally sanctioned promise of eternity.”
Face of weakness; I’m not a man made flesh from
the sweat of my labours; the resplendent repulsiveness of insignificance
perforates my spent pores; a contradictory face, unforgettably forgettable,
ventriloquist dummy from the malformed mould, a man of little quality I might
think to mention.
Every fucker’s in on it. I’m in on it. But
I’m not like you.
Only the man with nothing gain it all
“And is this, our own Great Britain, not a
nation of the Lord?”
Without destruction there could be no creation,
the two irrevocably linked in a circle of modernity. Everything is created for
its own destruction. The wind collects in the street like an obsessive meteorological
experiment channelling gale force gusts of rubbish and week-old newspapers,
photographs of already forgotten faces and memories discarded for the sake of
convenience with the polythene packaging of microwave spare rib dinners. The
hallway still smells like last week, rotting fruit and the bitterness of dry
sperm. Through the door and on the stairs, rotten and damp with a half-century
of neglect, slowly leaking pipes tracing a symbolic path of orange
discolouration over the folded wallpaper, its swirling pattern turning the eyes
back on themselves in assaultive disassociation. The stinking corpse of dead
humanity.
I can hear the radio inside, stuttered
propaganda songs commissioned by the culture secretary to encourage a
fundamentally British strength in the face of adversity with medieval backing,
lutes, mandolins and whatnot; you get by and get drunk, make plans that never
see the light of day and that certainly wouldn’t work if they did.
The machine guns are AK-47s, the pistols
semiautomatic Colt 45s. The AK is a gas operated Kalashnikov assault rifle,
uses a 30-round curved box magazine and fires a Soviet 7.62 x 39 mm round with
a cyclic firing rate of 600 rounds per minutes. Effective range of about 300
metres. Safety off and the trigger under your finger is the only thing that’ll
stop the hammer falling and a bullet being fired. Little need for the safety. The
45s are simple semiautomatics which hold seven rounds in a detachable mag. Once
it’s cocked it’ll fire a round every time you pull the trigger back.
We start in the morning where it hurts them the
most. Westminster. Populous, political and perfect for our requirements.
Soupy polluted sky of the metropolis. There’s
no bird song. The shots echo with menace down the street and around the square;
they trample each other in an ugly self-preservation, the crunching of bones
like a chaotic orchestra, bodies flattened out beneath patent leather shoes; he’s
still spluttering when I break his neck; some woman’s throwing up behind a coffee
stand, piss dripping a hot trail out of her skirt and down her legs and I shoot
her in the back of the head.
New year’s parties had become stunted painfully
sad affairs, failed attempts to awkwardly grope a friends older sister in some
icy garden, the security light flicking on and off with every inappropriate
squeeze, straining for fun and hope and finding little but despair in a world
that had been on a self-destructive downward trajectory since the last flickers
of optimism were beaten out of the 60s mind-set by the booted feet of war and
greed, all final hope transferred to the big one, 1999.
Relentless twenty-four hour news coverage was
immediately thrown live to central London, terrorism in action. Men and women
alike broke down spluttering, running from their front doors with confused and
lost expressions on their faces, as though a shock of fatal severity had been
inflicted upon the comfort of their brains, bodies and central nervous systems.
We could hear their grunts from the street outside; pensioners were actually
vomiting on their front lawn with wretched gags, across the shiny plastic
casings of their vibrant orange lawnmowers. Other people began to drive their
cars quickly and in circles, hoping for an end but never finding one. The
country became a media event. This was an act of beauty, of hope and salvation.
Cameras lingered for what felt like forever on piles and piles of savaged
bodies torn through by the racing bullets, white police shirts soaked red with
blood, faces twisted in anger, as though death had been the ultimate
inconvenience to the meticulous timekeeping of the morning commute. The public
needs to see people pay; they were beating the bodies and degrading them. Truth
itself had become a myth, superseded by the broadcast.
“Britain still reels.”
The role of the news was to incite violence.
“What they did,” he said. “It was beautiful,
wasn’t it?”
“No one, NO ONE, is going to give you something
for nothing. That’s Fact, capital ‘–Fact’. Same was true of the nuclear powered
heart. They were going to give you everything – life, strength, health – yet
they wanted it back in return. Something for nothing was an outmoded maxim,
replaced by the new appropriation: EVERYTHING FOR EVERYTHING, and no room for
half measures.”
“They were creating a database state, where
instead of looking at the whole of society as some kind of entity in itself,
they looked to the individual persons of whom it was comprised as a way of
attempting to manage that same society. Their goal was to then abolish the
individual, to construct a self-regulating social unit with a shared – and
arbitrarily defined – morality that had grown from a base fear of observation.
In short: “Know the individual to crush the individual”. It was establishing
the paradoxical totalitarian rule that was actually desired by the populace, a
political anomaly found often in the twentieth century. People had been so
manipulated and verbalised to the very edge of fear that they longed for the
consistence of eternal life, for the anonymity of the masses, the same social
whole to which they would relinquish their Selves.”
Control by observation, making a vast
Panopticon of the entire country.
In
Her (now late then not) M’s Prisons the nph was tested, perfected, corrected,
rejected, finally completed. The prisons smeared like felled stacks of dogshit
across the face of Great Britain stood as formidable ethical erections, an
aggressive sense of righteousness in even the artificial fibres of the
desolation of their architecture, pertaining to a rigid morality of symbol; yet
these prison walls were built to dehumanize outside of the moral, to
keep criminals criminal, all filth
ensconced within. The disposable flesh of the common prisoner was prime
testing ground. You can’t make a nuclear powered heart without breaking some
human guinea pigs. It was a creation set to revolutionise the human
condition. Our father, hallowed be thy Prime Ministerial capacity, let it be
tested on those who object to the
human! From the end of 1991 all offenders sentenced to
time over and above a consecutive six-month period were issued with an
affidavit to countersign, declaring their agreement to the use of their body –
living or dead – in the organised trials and testing of the nuclear-powered
heart by government appointed researchers. Everybody signed. They weren’t all
used. There were great risks associated with the heart: uranium poisoning,
precise functioning in incredible perplexity, perfection of the solid materials
that formed the casing of the detonation chamber, perpetuation of the reaction,
successful union of the heart’s genetically engineered tissues with the organic
valves and vessels of the human test subject, meticulous balances of
temperature, power, force and efficiency. There was speculation as to what
happened throughout prison basements during that silent dark period of human
history, erased from the records like a bad pencil drawing. Staff sworn to
secrecy found themselves having to
discuss it, some basic human need in the witnessing of trauma that makes
silence impossible, spluttering out fractured confessions of the terrible
things they had done, the burdens of which they could no longer carry alone. Throwing
over circular wooden tables they would run through the upset pint glasses and
ashtrays, out and into and up the streets, broken by the grief of their own
guilt. The weaknesses of human beings were not to be trusted.
First were compulsory implants into live
specimens, restrained and sedated with additional localised beatings; numerous
were lost to these beatings. Plenty more cunts in the sea. Usually too messed
up to be used for the second phase of testing, faces spread out thin like pizza
sauce across the flattened stump that’d been a head, features caved in or
hanging exposed from the places they had once been tethered; remains were
stuffed into plastic yellow medical waste bags by the quiet guard who always
drew the short straw, new to the job and lip trembling and hands shaking, face
white and ready to puke while fatter colleagues laughed and had smokes and wiped
the blood from their hands and congratulated each other as though they’d won
the lottery. The flesh-structures would often be rejected by the body and these
artificial tissues were eventually manipulated further, engineered and
interwoven with the human genome to fool the body into thinking the heart was a
naturally occurring part of itself; they became wholly invasive, retaining the essential
debilitating viral qualities that would interfere with the brain and its nerve
endings to deconstruct the experience of emotion. The greatest danger and
promise also lie in detonation, the process by which life might recommence;
this phase of testing saw life slump to new nadir of worthlessness; it was a
utility, a function in the name of Great Britain. The silence of held breath
exploded, sufficient to puree and liquefy the body of the test subject almost
instantly. “Can we or can we not harness it?” “Couple of changes here and there.
Tweaks, they – to mean we – call them.” Harness they finally they did. Flicked
switch, expecting the fifth blower that afternoon, head blasted from shoulders,
a jolt of sheer energy sent so hard through the convict that masses of shit
followed by the stomach and intestinal tract from whence it came were propelled
from the gasping anus until the open chest cavity was left devoid of organs.
But not this time. Subject’s eyes open in brute confusion, gawping down at his
chest still cracked open like a chestnut and which he pushed back together with
two cupped hands, the nuclear power of the heart sealing the wound almost
instantly, binding the skin back to itself.
Other teams constructed the electronic
infrastructure at the core of the heart’s control, the supercomputer, a vast
databank of biometric information. It was an immense organisation running with astonishing
perfection. Tests were required to ensure the more logically complex effects –
the crucial symbolism of resurrection, of rendering death obsolete – of the
heart’s potential were grounded in physical reality resurrection. The parallels
between heart and Christian scripture were clear. Cadavers flowed freely from
prison cells. Necrotic tissues posed problems for the successful union of man
and machine into the force of eternity. Leaders weren’t afraid to get other
people’s hands dirty. The unrecorded death toll would never be confirmed, although
as many as three prisons were decommissioned shortly before the heart’s launch
because of an unprecedented drop in inmate numbers. “There are no longer
sufficient crimes committed in these areas to justify further taxpayer
contributions to these institutions.” A kingdom of fear already crowned. The
heart a Technicolor reality in the greyness of the everyday. There was blood on
the hands of the many as they danced suit-clad hooligan jigs like deformed
stereotypes around prison hospitals and parliament offices, around commercial
skyscrapers and radioactive production lines. All left one problem so big it
had to be ignored: Brut Meatus. His old man had a thing about the colognes
(dumb bastard pronounced the “g”), Brut among his favourites. Could hardly call
a boy Old Spice. A beast like this would have been best left to rot in solitary
as they tore the prison down. Instead they pumped him full of a nuclear power
that no cunt had a handle on, and the inevitable and instinctual followed like
clockwork. They gave him the very power they’d tried in prison to take away.
What was he to do with it all?
Shattered
was Beesley, and TV the oracle of decay. He was a schizoid nightmare. He was
the chemical by-product of a hazardous fume cupboard. He was the weird molecular form demanding a
constant input of compounds and poisons to continue to exist. He moved in the
fringes of all the major drug circles around the city. He’d smacked, cracked,
snorted, smoked, popped, dropped, licked, shot and shoved the lot. Brain had
changed with it. They called him the chemist due to his uncanny ability to
craft the most remarkable hallucinogens. He preferred Consciousness Terrorist. Most
stuck with Beesley. He planned to administer a synthetic hallucinogen of
incredible potency nationwide, so as to undermine the mind controlling elements
of the nuclear powered heart. He supposed it would unite the human mind into
one with itself, uniting all of those separate mental-entities in shared
experience and feeling, a mind united in its own individuality, a single
organism joined by a weird telepathy. Each person would be at once alone and a
part of something bigger. He wanted drugs that could throw the brain screaming
into the timeless and spaceless soup of the eternal. Visions beyond the call of
language, systems of thought patterns and the vein of the universe, its very
own carotid artery, all of it there for the taking, entirely coded and
operating in suspense. He gobbed a tab of acid and waited for the room to
breathe, moving slowly like magma or clay and forming still frame photographs
of a thousand faces growing rapidly, disfigured faces, beautiful women with
such hideous noses, shifting tectonics, lights all off but still so bright,
rolling like a blanket shaken, each face a person and each person a naked
clown, a microscopic aspect of a greater channel of masks, wax pouring down
over one screaming mouth whose eyes have gone and building towards a centre,
dead skin on fire falling down, wet rubber or latex stretched over gargoyle
features, it pours never rains, grapefruits the size of watermelons ejected
grotesque from cavernous mouths, exploding and crushing in a madness of
vitamins, light chasing light behind closed eyelids, walls pulled open with
nothing but eyes, mind separated and in need of reconciliation. What meaning
the heart after ingesting his wares? Its promise of pure physicality would
count for nil when the body is but the vessel that holds the glorious softness
of our supple minds until they might fly alone. Mind lives forever,
infinity the self-perpetuating mind regenerating. He set to mass-production.
One drop’d leave you dangling over sweet oblivion
My
wife vomited blood several times a day. My wife rasped and wheezed and coughed.
My wife was unable to swallow food. My wife was rarely conscious. She knew she
was going to die and that time was short and found no room for affirmation when
she wanted only to live. When she had gone I would remain
“Where’s the dignity?” she said.
“The world is terrible and beautiful.”
“I’m afraid.”
She eyed me with a love infectious. She didn’t
struggle. Her face was like nothing was wrong.I lay down next to her on the bed
and cried no tears, the worthless whirring of my worthless heart so meaningless
in the serenity of the bedroom.
Later they came by darkness. I was their
original experiment. They would always find me, my inevitable life more theirs
than ever.
Dr
Ermine “Fur” Tygel – of the United Britain Prison Medical Committee and Primary
Governing Body of Appropriate Clinical Procedures Pertaining to Premises of
Judicially Imposed Incarceration (or, conveniently, UBPMC & GBoACPPtPoJII)
– bore rich nicotine staining across the sausage digits of his surgery hand. All
blood vessels and decay, a rippling walking caricature of rotund ostensibly
male genera; the elongated rear topple of his thatch greased his cheap shirt
collar with permanent murk; his beard oiled and sprase though adored like a
single treasured possession; the body a doughy memorial to itself, short and
squat, malformed and neglected, soft and foul. He was brilliant, an
intellectual anomaly too weird for the world who ended up in the prisons, without
so much as a blemish on his personal record despite being findings of gross
misconduct in his first GP role in a small Sussex village, employed as one of
five other surgeons working behind prison walls, installing, testing and
monitoring the nuclear-powered heart. The required outcomes of the successful
heart should be immunity to disease and death. The project tapped into the same
potential within the human body to which he had devoted so much of his life’s
work. It became his entire life. Every thought he had, every book he read,
everybody he spoke with, everything became secondary to the project or, better
yet, an extended part of it. Conversations became recorded segments of
research, field works to be studied later. It infected his thoughts like a
computer virus. Even a man as eccentric and socially inept as Tygel would on
occasion let his meticulous mind drift into fantasies of Nobel prizes and, only
years from now, the standing ovations of hundreds of his learned peers
following the delivery of yet another of his own inspiring conferences on the
bright future of synthesized body parts. As the great warmth of this orgasmic
reverie engulfed him during a routine transplant procedure, and he longed for
something to touch his flesh, might he really be blamed for a slight
miscalculation of the heart’s core level charge in subject F-Ty-052? Wouldn’t
this single instance of uncharacteristic distraction be easily forgiven? Science
is built on error, depends on it. Would any
mistake really matter? Subject F-Ty-052, as Tygel specifically hadn’t found
out, had been imprisoned after nearly four decades of crime across a varied
spectrum of brutality for the rape and subsequent murder of two
fourteen-year-old schoolgirls. Their bodies had been found a mile or so from a
freestanding garage he had rented out in the scrubs of one of three deserted
industrial estates in the bleak and backwards southern England country village
he’d been living in, a place so dull it throbbed with violence and cruelty. The
girls’ faces had been almost unrecognisable when a party of female dog walkers
eventually uncovered them a week or so after death, left carelessly atop piles
of burnt pallets and empty vodka bottles, spent machine components and metal
shavings strewn around the open pyre. They’d been fiercely beaten, shreds of
flesh scraped from their bones like jerky; their eyes were bloody exposed balls
rattling in their sockets; they reeked of the petrol he had forced them to
drink; they were raped blue and each stabbed through the heart with a kitchen
knife, more than sixty wounds decorating their torsos. He’d left the weapon and
his fingerprints at the scene, washed his bloody clothes in the only launderette
the village had. He cared not at all, not a bit. The joy he had felt in doing
it. You, Meatus, are evil. Do rot. Justice for the social ego. The
papers turned fourteen-year-old murder victims into page three pin-ups, up by
the Big Ds in sweaty boozers with piss-stained carpets. Tygel’s head a
whirlwind of disjointed images. The meat on the gurney quivered and jumped. The
heart burnt irradiated orange in the still open chest.
“You’ll be a God.”
“A
nuclear powered nonce! Not the kind of beast we like.”
“Burn it
all.”
The
weight of commuters smeared into one grotesque silhouette before vast nuclear
powered heart posters that gripped the tunnel walls like fat in fucked arteries
and armed guards monitored the walkways, the platforms, the escalators. There
were nuclear powered heart impulse sign-up desks dotted throughout the station.
The white tile walls were smothered in right wing slogans. I saw “Britain for
Britons” and “God Fuck America”. At the other end of the carriage a group of
four well-dressed men had encircled a fifth. The rest of the passengers made a
point of looking away.
“Get out of my face.”
“Get the fuck out of my
country.” Anger had turned his neck turn red in blotches, boiling around his
stiff white shirt collar.
“You fucking yanks.”
“I’m Canadian.”
“It’s the same fucking
thing to us.”
“Extremists, the lot of
you. Terrorists.”
“Don’t paint me with
your twisted brush.”
The crack of a slap echoed
through the carriage.
“Good shot!” shouted a
seated passenger.
“Let’s just fucking sit down and forget this
happened.”
“Forget nothing.”
“We saw what your lot
did.”
“My lot?”
“Yanks!”
“I am not American.”
“You fucking raising
your voice at me?”
Punched, this time,
hard in the middle of the face. Head jerk back, another gut shot.
“Kill him!” shouted a
woman’s voice.
“Kill him!” shouted a
child’s voice.
The sound of violence was awful. Most were on
their seats, clapping and cheering.
I came to a river latterly, a tributary of
something timeless. It was only water, its motion entirely inevitable, moving
to its outlet with utter certainty. The lame sun only mustered the strength to
hint itself feebly in half-bright chokes through the blanket of cloud weighty
above; still it caught the primeval rolling water with garish irradiated winks.
I tore my arms bloody on hawthorn, oak, holly, bramble, and enjoyed the feeling.
The bank rolled down in great toupees of moss muddy into the water. Roots and
rocks made messy piles. Beesley was up to his thighs in the centre of the river.
He might have been there for an hour, a week or an eternity. It felt offensive
of me to be here.
“I knew you’d come.”
He proffered a vial which I held to my lips and
drank down in one swallow. I was weeping as a bird screeched over our heads, I
simultaneously sank and flew so very far inside myself that I was entirely outside myself and out of the world
also. In fact I soared.
He
gagged after a few seconds, you could see it happening below the surface of the
champagne, and his doubled-over torso was wracked by violent spasms,
long-forgotten muscles jiving with nausea. The Prime Minister stood up, his
slender body dripping champagne from the pubic hair and the arsehole, and he
reached for a couple of fresh bottles from the case. He popped the corks and
passed one over to Hament as he sat back down.
The
union of the New Allied Countries was established in the January of 1962.
Towards the turn of Y2k once strong partnerships crumbled. International
trading, imports and exports, all ceased, and global communication networks
were dissolved. As the crisis worsened – with the rationing of certain food
products, tobacco, alcohol and entertainment – the heart’s second ‘official
revelation’ was thrust into the press, information cards distributed in their
millions to every residential address across the country, headlines confirmed
by reassurances of officialdom.
Reports
cited a bionic man-criminal of the
terrorist ethics, deployed weird airbrushed unions of man and robotic
prosthetic body parts based on police gaspings picked up by kids across the
bandwidth or uncorroborated eyewitness reports, cited too a socio-defunctionalised psycho-physical
mutation for century’s end, an operative testament to evolutionary
adaptation in the immeasurable progression of an untamed celebration of man and
machine. Really GB couldn’t bloody believe its cumulative eyes. News hit of some
lunk caught devastating the Midlands, wanton slaughter of Coventry. Try to stop
him? Twist and crack! Car in the way? Punch and explode! Fucking lamppost?
Topple and smash! One newspaper aroused a marketing sensation, printing a huge
pull-out centrefold wall chart depicting Coventry city centre replete with
street names and landmarks, with little red markers pointing to the
corresponding locations of every known victim and attached to a little
information box containing a before and after photograph and short personal
biography of the slain. It came with extra blank information boxes, which the
readers could add themselves as and when new victims were announced in the
press, as they were daily in printed alphabetical lists. Absolutely vast in
size, a true memorial. It sold unimaginable numbers of newspapers.
The fundamental decency of humanity – once
epitomised within the very fabric of the streets of Coventry – was breached.
Ten police, two female, were instantly crushed, skulls shattered like pottery
and forgotten in bloody pools, features eradicated with one violent gesture of
immeasurable force, pulped and left around the now pointless bodies cooling
quickly with death. The horses touched the – ahem – heart of the country.
Four police horses plus riders halved, equestrian innards steamy and vile on
the concrete. What kind of a man would do that to a horse? An estimated
hundreds witnessed at least part of the Coventry
Situation, and all who’d listen knew immediately that each of those
witnesses had done absolutely nothing to lessen the pain and torture of their
fellow citizens.
Armed
police with handguns and rifles and automatic machine guns stockpiled for the
millennium eve celebrations and warranted by the giddy heights of the death
count. Needed it publicly nipped in
the bud before it broke too far out of Coventry, if not actually. “What actually is, actually?” Death doesn’t need to
be hidden only reappraised, drawn in an alternative context. Tranquilizer guns,
too. The brute didn’t falter. The encircling agents couldn’t retreat, were just
powerless slaughtered meat. They opened fire, bullets raining into thick flesh,
, yet he didn’t balk but moved faster. Cries of loss echoed through multi-storey car
parks. The populace needed a phoenix from the ashes: New Coventry. Now that’s
opportunity.
“Widespread administration of volatile narcotic
necessitates the water supply.”
We were terrorists of the mind.
A major nuclear powered heart installation
hospital had been constructed outside Manchester. We wanted to take a look. Rain
stopped as quickly as it had started. The field smelt drenched and alive. Grass
and liberty were not the accepted ways of entering a city. We ascended a tree
and looked upon their works. The Greater
Manchester Nuclear Powered Heart Installation Hospital. It spread across a
vast footprint of previously undeveloped greenfield sites that flanked the city
limits, some fifty metres tall and three-hundred-and-sixty-five across, built from
the same architectural blueprints as the primary hospital build on the
reclaimed Greenwich peninsula. It was a white domed erection, held firm by
twelve yellow iron support girders each equidistant from the last like the
numbers on a clock face. There were scores of these things around the country. The
perimeter fences must have been twenty feet high, with only two main access
gates located at mid points. People carriers slack-jawed whole families through
the heavily guarded gates and into the car parks. The children were laughing
and excitable, and through opened electric windows I could hear them discussing
the transplant with the anticipation of a Christmas morning. Their parents
looked tenderly into eyes that hadn’t seen warmth for a decade, or burst into
sharp peals of laughter like machine gun fire that wouldn’t stop. Anything to
feel less alone in the universe. Packs of teens emerged from the hospital entrance
plastered with big smiles, wearing promotional nph t-shirts and putting their
hearts through their paces. Some drew pocketknives and with triumphant howls
and mirth started jabbing the short blades at their own and each other’s
increasingly audacious body parts, soon stabbing at necks and faces and
laughing the whole time because they didn’t even flinch. A coach full of the old
was pulling into the car park, even the tour operators cashing in, a holiday
excursion for lonely single pensioners. They had the manic eyes of religious
freaks but were full of a spirit that was anything but holy, and their withered
frames surged slowly but as one towards
the doors ready for prime healthcare, for physical restructuring. Above the din
of car engines turning over and distant conversation came the piercing shrill
of an alarm. I heard the explosion, saw the entrance area wrenched apart from
the building in a mess of shattered glass and twisted burning metal, the most
brilliant and sincere violence. From the fires rushed a man towards the main
gates. He shot and caught a guard in the eye. Pushed on by reflex the guard
doubled over, yelling out, screaming “no no no” before he had a chance to
realise that he wasn’t in any pain and that his perfect vision was still
intact, and before he felt a foot scrambling up and across his horizontal back,
over the barriers and through the gates. “This way,” he said, and we followed, the
sound of ankle-support work boots trampling the soft mud behind us and growing
in pitch like an apocalyptic thunderstorm. He led us towards the thick moving
traffic. The ground started to slope downwards in a soft verge to the edge of
the road and we were at long leaping strides. He pulled the both of us straight
over the hard shoulder and across the road. I felt the killer velocity of heavy
eighteen wheelers brush at me but the guards, all of them, were swept hard down
the road away from us like man-sized skittles struck straight-on by an artic, the
thuds of their bodies heavy at roll. At rest came more gunfire, closer now, struck
the canister I had, cool liquid running down my spine. I felt hands closing on
me, heard “leave it fucking leave it!”, bullets whistling and voices. I had to
leave it. Had to.
Literature
struck doormats in unison. You are invited. The heart will come. There would be
no more choice. The first day of the rest
of your millennium. The final point of all history.
What
else, her name, but Odessa. Like waking with your feet in the sun. Her dirty
low-slung jeans.
“I know a guy in the
Midlands I think’ll be able to help.”
“What the fuck? Where
does he live?”
“Somewhere in the
Midlands, like I said. Where are we?”
“Well. Fuck. Somewhere
in the Midlands.”
“Then he should be
right around here.”
Beesley was a remarkable man who wouldn’t once
let me down. It was a privilege to cough on his exhaust fumes. I could smell the
petrol and the road burned up, melting the countryside with it, our hearts
beating fast and ready in seatbelts. Every horizon packed a hospital. It began
to rain. Rain makes the coast meaningful. The way it makes the beach a
spiteful, aggressive, primitive place. A hundred yards ahead a sign stood battered.
“To the Sea”, it said, until before us the North Sea, reflecting the occasional
glare of sun which poured shafts of light like milk between a rip in the clouds
and through the windscreen. There were tears forming in her eyes. She started
undressing piece-by-piece until wearing nothing but her underwear. The edges of
her jeans fluttered with squalls of wind that came from the sea. I looked at my
dick and tried not to secrete it. Nothing had ever felt so small. My underwear was
carried by the wind to a better place. Is this what death feels like. Afterward
she cut deep into her chest and revealed the internal machinations of the nuclear-powered
heart.
“Please help me to kill
me.”
“How can I? And what?”
“You have to pull it
out.”
I moved my hand into the wound and felt the
wetness of the flesh and reared hastily away.
“Light shines from you.
You’ve been in my dreams.”
“Odessa.”
“I know.”
I probed further in and felt the cool edge of
the nuclear powered heart, alien to my fingertips. Then she was dead, and I
loved her. I carried her body to the edge of the cliff. I drank back both vials.
I later met Beesley and Wilde. We left one of the cars there. I laid across the
back seat beneath a blanket. The car was filled with a blinding light that was
coming from me.
Brut Meatus lay for a spell where the State
Cinema once stood in the beauty of his own destruction. Kilburn now had fallen.
He killed without discrimination, took a craftsman’s delight in his cruelty.
Children fell with women and with men. Power took release in violence. Streets
near running with blood, bodies piled chest high strewn like leftovers on food
plates.
Beyond the dismal facade of Kilburn High Road
station half-hunched DI Caveat. He was shit scared and would have said as much
to his men if they’d not been too terrified to listen, watching agape as a cloud
of mobile destruction stripped NW6 of life and architecture. The moaning
silence was unbearable and he was clueless. Wished he could be frightened but
was too afraid to bother. He’d served the public his whole life to get exactly
where he’d always been: hopelessly screwed under some other cunt. He had three
PCs allocated, sitting with their backs to an abandoned Nissan and sobbing. He
didn’t comfort them, didn’t know how, just looked through the binoculars and
waited. Too young to die like this.
“Oh God in heaven oh
Jesus Lord Christ Lord save us all who art in the heavens deliver us from this
evil oh Lord God Jesus and Holy Spirit forever the glory be with you my Jesus
who loves us take us up oh God Mary mother of Jesus Christ Joseph and John and
Peter and the disciples and Lazarus of the good camel oh Lord Almighty God
Christ Jesus protect us from this.”
“Shut him up. Little
bastard’s making me nervous.”
“Jesus God Almighty
Lord I give myself over to your guiding wisdom my God of Noah’s Ark.”
“We’re all nervous.”
“Fuck’s wrong with him anyway?”
“I think he’s found
God.”
“He’s better off than
us three.”
“Do you think we’ll be okay guv?”
“I think we’re fucked.”
“Have you said goodbye guv?
To your family, like?”
“I haven’t had the
chance.”
Some hapless civilian blundered out of Quex
Road and into Meatus’s path; he took him in one hand, lifted him up, held him out
horizontally before him and pulled him in half, the poor prick severing at the
navel.
”The fucker’s fucking coming
right at us lads.”
Meatus had them crushed like tomatoes under a
hatchback. Caveat shit himself, felt free with it, the warmth and texture his smalls
like haemorrhoids, So alive at the
moment of death. Should have done it years ago. More regrets. He could smell
the blood on Meatus like a butcher’s shop, coppery and rich.
“We’re human. We’re men. We are human.”
“Exactly.”
And Meatus crushed Caveat’s skull like a
chestnut.
Beesley heard gunshots and pulled the car over.
Wilde pulled a squat automatic. They saw Meatus take the head of a man and crush
it whole, until blood spilt from its ears and then eyeballs like a cosmetic
product. Beesley poured out a huge dose
into an empty plastic water bottle and screwed on the lid.
PM Avalon Fylde said “You can’t make an
omelette with breaking, cooking and then eating some eggs.”
“And the CCTV works
brilliantly.”
Leaning into the screen they saw two people
creeping from behind an old car and towards Meatus.
“We
need to get this in his mouth.”
“Ape
doesn’t really look like the spoon-feeding type.”
“Ape
doesn’t.”
“And
if we do? What’s it going to do with him?”
“It
should make him think.”
“Make
him the fuck think?”
“What
did it do for you?”
“Busted
my head open a mile wide.”
“Yes.”
The
contents of the water bottle splashed across his face. It went straight into
his eyes and trickled down his cheeks and nose towards his mouth where of
course he swallowed. He then came at them.
“Just
keep backing away. It was a huge dose.”
Wilde
stumbled some, backwards over a kerbstone dislodged in the lunacy and hit the
floor hard. Meatus was on him, threw a single punch into the middle of his
face, which pulled the skin and features into the skull along with the fist,
all stretched like latex and then torn shredded out of the exit wound through
the back of Wilde’s head. He shook Wilde’s inert body from his arm like a coat
he couldn’t get off.
“What’d
I swallow?”
Before
he could ask again Meatus’s eyes rolled back in his head and down he went,
synapses fizzing and frying in the beauty of the world. Beesley watched Meatus
splutter his last. The drug had invoked such insight that he could finally feel
the loathing for all he had done on this day and other days. He struggled to
his knees, his whole chest bucking back and forth in violent rapid actions, the
vomit from his mouth now blood, and over the din of his pleading the heart
finally blew, shredding Meatus into fine pieces
My
grandparents’ house was decaying and neglected and empty in the dark. I could
feel their death in the footpaths around me, in the shrubs and the foliage, in
the windows and fixtures and the old Ford in the driveway.
“Wilde’s dead.”
The windows were streaked with condensation, the
air and the walls and tables and chairs sat festering, used teacups and
crumpled papers across hard floors, sapping the nutrients of the brickwork with
their wreckage. There was no point to the house without them. It withered in
mourning. Moon was up and cast a brightness over the street, far brighter than
the streetlights. At the crest of the tall grass verges that surrounded the
suburban reservoir Beesley was silhouetted against the rich navy blue of the
summer night sky,
pouring
drug around the periphery of this unmanned eastern outpost of the metropolitan
water supply. It splashed loudly into the water in thick gulps, jerking with
the sound of a struck bass drum as the escaping fluid sucked the sides of the
thin plastic container in on themselves. About nine litres done, more than enough
to psychiatrically paralyse the city several times over. A bullet ripped a fist-sized piece of flesh
from his thigh and he fell heavy down the verge. He downed the contents of a
vial in one swallow and clawed at his leg. They pulled a handgun and shot
Beesley twice in the face. They looked me over. I
saw a CCTV camera pointed right at me, filming and processing and recognising
with the ceaselessness of artifice.
“You’re dead already.
See you on TV kid.”
The engine finally turned over and I had the
car into reverse, running straight over as many of the gathering congregation
as I could hit. I heard bones snapping under the wheels. Was I on TV already. News
was happening inside fibre-optic cables and television studios even before it
happened in reality, people simply fulfilling the hopeless prophecies of the
newsreader. I saw sweet old ladies defecating on American flags in front of
cheering crowds with Handycams.
A
right national event was the Met commissioner’s funeral, simulcast on all the majors,
looped and repeated for days on end in a death made perpetual by media
construction. Moral guardians took to the streets in their thousands, shocked
into slogans, the only feasible direction one of violence. The slaying was
caught live on CCTV and fed through to the TV channels for immediate emergency
broadcast. Conventional programming ceased. The ceremony was spectacle. Central London was closed to traffic as
vast parades of mourning Britons staggered lamenting across the rivers of
macadam, weeping for the life of a stranger. Thousands of pounds worth of
rotting memorial wreaths on the street outside Scotland Yard. The continual
broadcasting had forged a closeness unattainable in real relationships, so much
more than actual experience. Bore by the leading pop stars of the day the
coffin journeyed up The Mall and Constitution Hill on its way to the memorial
site in Hyde Park, to be interred beneath a hundred-foot metal spire that shot
high pressure jets of tepid chlorinated water from a rotating nozzle at three
second intervals, day and night. The mourning here was at its most meaningless,
where amidst the constant din of human wailing were huge banks of TV cameras,
satellite vehicles, food stalls, PA systems, government information tents and
light-hearted BFI-funded promotional videos for the nuclear-powered heart,
behind it all a full stage erected for the PM and a handful of other assembled
celebrity socialites to deliver their memorial speeches.
Specially commissioned by the Bank of England
and adorned with detailed engravings of the heads of both HRH and the PM – as
well as other quintessentially British symbols of importance, such as St.
George’s cross, Churchill’s jowls and the Marmite jar – the ceremonial coffin
was forged from solid gold, a Union Jack hanging from either end. The crowd
itself had become a functioning organism, distinct from its parts, all moving
together or not at all. It was set carefully atop a plinth just left of front
centre. Camera flashes drowned out the sun and the crowd basked in the glory of
the artificial rays. The PM was greeted with rapturous applause.
“Friends, Citizens,
Britons. We are joined here today as one to mourn the terrible loss of a good,
good man.” The national grid surged with the collective nationwide turning up
of the television volume. “A man who loved” – he was pointing to the crowd as
he spoke – “every single one of you. A man with a wife, children. A man with a
motorcar and a lovely house. A man with so much life left ahead of him. A man
devoted to the protection and safety of the British people. A man who makes us
all proud to call ourselves British. A man who loved this country. A good man. A man.” The assembled many
began to comfort each other with simple touches. “And do you know what he was
fighting against?”
“EVERYTHING!”
“Yes. Everything. And
everything is what we, as a country, as a people, must continue to fight. We
are all British. We all have a
responsibility to honour this man.
They started yelling
for more. A light of violent xenophobia disguised as hope had burst through the
dull veil of their earlier sadness. So many pairs of feet were stamping that it
felt like the earth would be misaligned on its axis, doubling in intensity when
a crane-mounted TV camera panned over the front rows of the audience,
broadcasting their delirious faces right back at them on the vast stage
screens. They screamed as if their lives had only now been allocated a meaning.
They felt so alive on television.
A pair of security
cunts took to the stage like sides of meat, dragging some kid between them, face
bruised and swollen, white t-shirt smeared with blood. He could barely stand.
As soon as they relaxed their grip on the kid his legs gave out from under him
and he fell hard like a sack of shit onto the stage and lay face down in the
mass of wires that powered the microphones, lights, cameras. The mood in the
crowd changed quickly, grateful cheers replaced with taunts and catcalls.
Nothing would stop what was coming, it’d gone too far. Like neglected testes
they needed release, needed to feel the reluctant give of savaged flesh and the
finality of crunching bone.
“This is a killer.”
He held the microphone
to the boy’s mouth, which was frothing with saliva in awful heaves and
magnified to immensity on the screens. “I didn’t,” he said. “I didn’t.”
They picked up the kid
by hands and feet and to an ecstatic three count they swung him up and over and
into the mass of gyrating bodies.. He was dead before he hit the ground,
suspended by the very bare hands that tore his organs from their positions and
the flesh from his young bones. His detached head was thrown back to the stage,
and great chunks of the crowd had fallen upon him like jackals, tearing at the
tissues with their teeth, entirely removed from the humanity that had once been
theirs. The Prime Minister lifted the head high into the air and a camera swept
in for a final dramatic close-up for the television audience. Like a balloon at
a party he threw the head back into the crowd. Later, children would use it as
a football, laughing at its humorous shredded features, its scuffed surfaces.
It would be a news feature, the children themselves becoming local celebrities.
“Friends,” boomed the PM.
“Are we having fun? At this stage in the service it‘s with the very greatest of
pleasure that I welcome to the stage a true legend in his own six strings –
it’s Mr Brian May and his fabulous electric guitar!
What an event. Could
things really get any better than this?
*
You’d
have been forgiven for mistaking the men as two of any number of mid-ranking
managerial figures from a successful private enterprise, though they were in
fact Chancellor of the Exchequer and Secretary of State for Education. Torture
was an aside. A hobby. A bonus.
The Chancellor, let’s call him Kenneth
(“Kenneth! Canneth! Fucketh! Offeth!” ran the wonderful protestors chant),
half-removed the black leather glove from his left hand then quickly pulled it
back on, a habit he’d slipped into over the past few hours. Now he’d started it
he’d grown quite fond of the repetition of the action. He looked at his
colleague, we’ll call him Michael (Mick the Cunt, his colleagues fairly
surmised), who struck an imposing figure in the dull light. He was scraping the
metal edges of various weapons and implements across the metal surface of the
equipment table. The industrial cacophony created by this seemingly thoughtless
act was unsettling. He pushed the man’s chair back towards the wall. There were
two of them, a him and a her, and both were tightly strapped to swivelling
office chairs mounted on a four-wheeled base, wheeled down from the offices
upstairs for the occasion. The hard plastic of the chair back hit the bricks
with a piercing slap, the impact vibrations jolting the man roughly in his
shackles.
“We ready to talk?”
Beneath the black cloth hood that covered the
bound man’s entire head were a range of grunted emissions, semi-vocal in form,
the gasps and incomprehensible pleadings for which language has no translation. His thighs were tied to the chair with thick
abrasive rope, his ankles bound together with the same. Attached tight to his
neck was a length of narrow wire, which trailed down his back and was fastened
to his crossed wrists where it cut slowly into the flesh, and was finally bound
to the adjustable pivot of the seat back. The effect was sufficient to prohibit
even the slightest movement. To lean too far forwards would have inevitably
commenced the wire’s incision through the delicate skin of the neck, finally
severing the key arteries and veins supplying crucial blood to the body. When
the chair had hit the wall the sheer force of the impact had resulted in an
unplanned involuntary burst of motion, the coolness of the wire felt tight
against the neck, closer and closer, tiptoeing a fine line of pending
destruction.
Michael walked to the chair. He was carrying a
large hunting knife, but of course the suspect couldn’t see it because of the
hood.
“You don’t want us to lose patience, do you?”
He held the blade of the knife flat against the
man’s bare chest. He’d been stripped naked as a routine gesture of indignity
and longed to recoil, the last reflexes of his adrenalin fuelled brain
immediately working to construct a very clear image of the tool he felt at his
breast.
“You see,” Kenneth said, “and this goes for you
too,” he said, turning to the female, bound in identical fashion and similarly
naked, probably in her late forties, judging by the shape of her bruised body,
“we don’t like to ask the same question too many times.”
“It gets boring,” said Michael, tracing the
sharpened tip of the blade across the chest, which hurriedly rose and fell,
rose and fell, with every completed circuit of the knife.
“And we haven’t the time to be bored in this life.
Busy men like answers.”
It was as though the volume of his voice had
sent a weird burst of energetic life into the blade, which Michael plunged three
or four centimetres deep into the pectoral of their prisoner, pulling it
through malleable flesh and leaving a wide incision like some new essential
orifice. He wiped the blade clean with a cotton serviette taken from the top of
a pile he had collected for just that purpose. The cloth-muffled screams barely
materialised, stifled as they were behind the dense fabric of the hood. To be
refused the freedom to move his hands was the ultimate nudity, stripped bare
and exposed for the fraudulent invalids we are, twisted codes of weakness.
The woman was ineffectually trying to move her
chair, overcome by a last ditch survival effort, convinced in her hysteria that
a two hundred and seventy degree rotation of the office chair would afford her
some protection from the monstrosity of the situation. It was all so pointless,
but her body had taken over in a bid to save itself, operating without sense or
reason, nothing but reflexive motor functions.
“Don’t fret my love. We haven’t forgotten you.”
Kenneth bent low over her breasts and poked
them with an exploratory extended index finger like a chef weighing up produce
at market.
“Perhaps your wife will be a little more
forthcoming.”
Michael laughed, a sadistic schoolboy sinking
gradually out of his depth, the situation around him deteriorating out of
control until all he could do was hang on with both hands, play the role, even
overplay it. The woman felt a damp tongue circling the areola of her left breast
and tried to plead. She foresaw the doom that was coming. Michael was staring
at the woman’s body with a curious sexual intent, wanting to taste it and touch
it in the bleak perversion of the basement room. Kenneth pulled his glove half
off, then back on, and pummelled his fist cleanly into the centre of the man’s hood.
The attempts at pleading were replaced by gurgling, probably blood pouring fast
down the back of a throat.
“Where’s your boy?” said Kenneth. The man could
hear his wife hyperventilating, the high-pitched whimpering that escaped from
the sides of the gag.
The Chancellor pulled an average sized penis
from his fly. Taking aim at the fresh wound that Michael had stabbed into the
prisoner’s chest he released a flowing jet of urine, the rich yellow fluid
seeping into the wound, careening from the surrounding unbroken skin, mixing
with the blood to form a pus-coloured liquid the colour of unspecified medical
waste. It stung, the hydroxides uniting painfully with the torn intricacies of
the flesh. The last violent spurts – without the momentum of the entire act
behind them – drooped slightly, raining like an insincere shower onto stomach
and genitals. The feeling of another man’s urine on your own genitals was very
wrong.
“Where’s your fucking son?” The man said
nothing. “Take his hood off.”
Michael wrenched the hood wet with sweat and
spit and tears over his head. His left eye was swollen completely shut, the
ball encased somewhere beneath the puffy purple mound of bruising that had
ballooned in self-defence. Like an old sock his broken nose hung loose under
its skin, a steady stream of blood passing from the nostrils and over his burst
lips. The one good eye stared.
“And the gag.”
Michael cut through the material with the
hunting knife, gouging a slice from the cheek as he did so.
“You fucking bastards,” he said, spraying his
own blood from his mouth as he shouted like a morning drunk. Michael staggered
back, wiping the blood from his face, red smears down his cheeks like poorly
applied make up.
“I’ve got his blood on my face!” he said,
punching the man in the stomach.
“Don’t you touch her.”
“Now we’re getting somewhere. You want
something from us and we want something from you. That sounds to me like an
understanding.”
“I’ll ask you again. Where. Is. Your. Son?” “I
don’t know.”
“Yes, you do. So tell me. Where is he?”
Michael was reaching a crest of arousal,
rubbing at himself through the front of the trousers. He kept lunging in at the
woman’s breasts, sucking them greedily.
“Look, please, I don’t know, I swear to it,
please.”
“Of course you know where he is.”
“Please.”
Kenneth grabbed the man by the throat with both
hands and beat him back into the wall, three, four, five times. “He’s a killer,
your boy, you know that? Killed two policemen. You can’t always blame the parents, we appreciate that. We just want you to
tell us where he is, and then you’re free to go.”
“We haven’t seen him for weeks, I...”
“Where is he?”
“We saw him on the television, when you
broadcast the murders. And then you killed that other boy. Oh God don’t hurt
her.”
“What do you think, Michael?”
“Me?” He didn’t look up when he spoke, instead
running his hands up and down her naked sweating body. “I think he’s telling
the truth.”
“Yes. Me too. Kenneth nodded. “Rape her,” he
said
.
Michael giggled and started stripping the
clothes from his body. The woman was trying to scream. Michael pulled the back
of the chair over to one of the walls, untying the ropes from around her thighs
and the wire from the lower chair back and instead fastening her wrists to a
rigid metal ring held firm in the sureness of the brick. He cut the wire
between her wrists and neck so she didn’t choke to death when he pushed her
down onto her back and lifted her arms up above her head and tied them to the
wall. Then he cut a new length of wire from a large reel and tied it back
around her neck, which he also tied to the wall, like an animal’s leash. This
would stop her from thrashing about too much. He cut the wire around her ankles
and drew her legs apart.
“You should watch this.”
She struggled, kicking her legs, hopelessly
blind, but Michael persisted, stabbing at her midriff with a little
pocketknife, scores of times, and beating her breasts with his fists. Even when
he got it inside her she couldn’t scream, not past the gag.
“I’m just going to take a couple of pics. For
the PM.”
He took a Polaroid camera from the table and
started snapping, documenting the rape for archive.
Michael burst in orgasm, his passion enflamed
by the relentless soundtrack of the begging husband. He grabbed hold of the
woman’s hood and started pounding the back of her head down onto the concrete
floor, pulling it up by the sides and ramming it down again with massive force.
He didn’t really know why he was doing it, though knew that if he was to
suddenly stop this chain of events – that had unfolded so wide that it had
taken him with it – then he would also have to confront the reality of his
depravity. He couldn’t stop. After about twenty blows the hood felt different
in his hands, as though something was slopping about in there. Bits of brain
and tissue, odd fragments of skull. He removed the hood, looked at the lifeless
face of the woman, slowly submerging in its own gore. The back of her head had
been completely broken off, like part of a chocolate Easter egg. The flash of
the camera snapped him out of his reverie.
“Fucker doesn’t know where he is.”
Michael laughed, coming around, starting to relax
into his newer, crueller self. His dick was drooping back to regular, his
ill-defined stomach bloody from the wounds his knife had left on hers. The
man’s mouth moved as if in prayer, his face swollen almost beyond recognition.
“Get him out of the chair.”
Michael starting cutting the wire and the rope,
his limbs falling limply to his sides when they were untied.
“Your turn, big guy,” he said, and tipped the
chair up. Kenneth had donned a pair of latex gloves and had a police issue
telescopic baton in his right hand.
“Get him on all fours.”
He rammed the butt end of the baton into the
man’s anus, much further than the insides should take. The prisoner’s mouth
opened wide as the baton shredded the sensitive nerve endings, and the men from
the government laughed belly laughs. Kenneth pulled the prisoner’s head back by
the hair so the neck was taut and slit the man’s throat with a sharp knife.
Blood spurted.
“Come on,” said Kenneth. “Let’s get a coffee.”
*
I
was lucky enough to watch my own death on TV, pulverized to human smoothie and
packaged home audience. It wasn’t me, of course; it was the theme-park
presentation of the imagined me, a replacement for the unknown reality. That
poor dead bastard had hair brown as earth and not the red of mine. I watched as
maniacal women burnt effigies of the fake me in complex rituals apropos of nil,
their bare breasts falling from the sides of shredded blouses, howling
incomprehensible mantras back and forth amongst themselves. Everything was
changing and everything taking every possible course all at once. Everyone,
everything, lost. Carrying on the only thing to do. I made my way in through
the tube zones. Smell of smoke like a doomsday barbeque. There were checkpoints
up, gun towers housing armed soldiers and television crews, both primed and ready
to shoot. There will be incredible void where once there were dreams. The trees
were bare like the gnarled hands of the elderly reaching to the skies for help.
The nuclear-powered heart took it all, turned it bad, screwed everything and
left it all blinking confused towards the light. Now we are all alone. I walked
faster but tried not to. The City Farm had gone, burnt to the ground. Two men
in suits had stopped and were talking together and pointing towards me. I
turned and made for the exit and was quickly encircled by many men dressed head
to toe in black.
“We’re friends,” one
said. He did clear his throat. “Come with us. We’re friends. The Redheaded Revolutionary
Front.”
We took to an open
Transit van and drove the shortest, most ridiculous getaway around two corners
and into a covered garage. One of those lights a mechanic uses was hanging from
a hook in the middle of drably beamed ceiling.
“Your fight,” they
said, “is our fight.”
I pushed down hard into
my eyes, until the blackness of the closed lids became whirling flickering
rainbows like spilt oil in a puddle, fractious ego given vibrant realisation
with an immense temporary force, the internal strobe dancing like an epileptic
possession. People seek hope in the most trivial places – the TV guide, the
supermarket, the holy scriptures, inside some underwear or in the nuclear-powered
heart – because everyone feels scared and alone. Only the rot’s already there,
right inside us.
“Nothing’s easy. But
we’re a commitment to something better.”
“We can get you inside.”
“Inside where?”
“Parliament.”
Turned out the RRF ran
a catering outfit as a day job which, along with a few other small but prestigious
providers of exceptionally high-end finger food, had somehow landed the
contract for parliamentary lunches, as and when outside catering might be
required. We loaded the van up with platters of sandwiches, hors d’oeuvres,
canapés, salads, antipasti, charcuterie, all manner of the most delicious
looking foods, great vats of olives and oiled chargrilled artichoke hearts,
sundried tomatoes and bricks of aspic-topped pâté, all meticulously prepared as
a culinary decoy, as gastronomic terrorism. Screened off on the other side of
the garage lay a comprehensive mini-kitchen unit, stacked to the rafters with
stainless steel catering gear, storage fridges, freezers, ovens; it was all
there, spick and span and caressed by day by those same fingers which at night
dreamed of pulling triggers. It was a suicide run really, kamikaze nibbles.
“They’ve a lunch like
this some few times a week. Costs them a fucking fortune. It’s for the nuclear-powered
heart strategic group meeting. It’s just a bunch of shitheads slapping each
other on the back and planning world domination.”
They wheeled a hotplate
trolley towards the open back doors of the Transit. It was about four feet in
length but the elements and internal workings had all been removed from the
stainless steel casing to make more space inside. I peered inside and then
climbed into it, one foot at a time. It was dark and smelt of decaying metal
and it wasn’t really wide enough to accommodate my shoulders comfortably, but I
heaved myself about, heavy on one side, knees bent foetal to fit my legs in. It
wasn’t a long journey, just down the embankment and over the bridge, past the
military checkpoint with a flash of their government catering identification
laminate on into the loading area at the lowest floor of the palace’s four.
From there I could be wheeled through the endless corridors and straight to the
nuclear-powered heart strategic group lunch. I was passed a loaded machine gun The
lid was closed and the trolley began to move and I moved inside it as it tilted
up the ramp into the space left clear in the centre of van. I heard the ramp
folded and laid in the van next to me. The suspension shook as the rest of the
group climbed aboard and the rear doors were slammed. I heard the garage door
slide up, the ignition turning over, felt the van move carefully out of the
garage, the door closed behind it. All I heard then was silence, punctuated by
occasional creaks from the wheels of my tomb and the steady vibration of the
van making its journey towards Westminster, the anxiety of revolution amidst
its cling-filmed finger buffet. After an indeterminate period I felt the van
slowing to a stop. It seemed to be taking too long. I was sure it was going
wrong, that we’d fallen at the first hurdle, and then the van doors closed and
we were on our way. A hand rapped on my stainless steel side panels and slid
the top open a crack. Even the dull afternoon light was blinding.
“We’re in.”
A minute or so later
and we’d come to a standstill. The clutter of food platters being removed
eventually gave way to the hotplate with me still inside it lurching into
motion, carefully lowered down the ramp from the back of the van and onto solid
ground. We were in transit until a voice I didn’t recognise screamed through
the architecture. “Stop there,” it said, followed by gunfire. I counted eleven
shots, calmly delivered without time for an answer, then the sound of bodies
falling down, finally obedient
“He’s in here,” Jude
said. He opened the lid. “In the hotplate.”
The clip-clop of
leather shoes approached and a tall dangerous-looking bastard glanced sharply
in. I smiled and raised the gun up in line with his massive face and pulled the
trigger back, watching as the bullets hit his face and careened off elsewhere
in a jagged ricochet without a suggestion of the slightest inconvenience. He
slowly took the gun from my unresisting hands and snapped it into two distinct
pieces then pulled me up, his hands in my armpits, and lifted me out of the
hotplate. We walked a narrow corridor until it split into two directions at the
end. He ushered me through some double doors, then Jude, then came in himself
and closed the door behind us. A projector screen was set up in the room but
nothing was playing on it.
“Welcome,” said Avalon
Fylde cordially.
“Little shit,”
blurted the man beside him.
“Hament,” said Fylde “Let
us at least be civil.”
The PM walked over to
where I was standing and offered me his hand. I didn’t take it. He didn’t seem
to mind and took the guards hand instead.
“Younger than I
thought,” he said, apparently to Hament. “Much younger. Looks too puny to cause
any real trouble.”
“Dangerous though.
Cold.”
“And causing, it would
seem, a great fucking deal of trouble.”
“Excuse me sir,” Jude
said quietly, apologetically.
“Who’s this?” said
Fylde.
“Informant,” said
Hament.
“I Infiltrated his
group, delivered them to you. As agreed? For the safety of the nation? We had
an agreement?” He was speaking in questions. “100K and an nph? We discussed it
here?”
“Let me see if I’ve got
this right,” said Fylde. He was not speaking in questions. “You want me” – he
pointed a thumb at himself – “to give you” – he pointed an index finger at Jude
– “a hundred thousand pounds. For delivering, as you say, this boy, to us. You
want me to give you a hundred thousand pounds for your betrayal. Your cowardice.
You expect a reward for your greed.” His voice was louder and getting more so.
“No, I mean. It’s okay.
Maybe I can just go?”
“Go?” said Fylde, who
walked towards the door and pulled a smart cashmere cardigan from a hanger hung
on a coat rack. He put it on and fastened the buttons slowly. “Why would you
want to go? Surely you want something
for your little troubles, something to have made all this death worthwhile?”
Hament was smiling approvingly, relishing it.
“It’s okay. If I could
just go?” He was pleading. “Can’t I just go?”
“You fucked your
friends, one by one. You appreciate that it would be wrong of me to be seen to
reward such actions, I’m sure.” He was standing in front of Jude, about a foot
away from him. “You brought them here knowing they would die. If every man on
the street decided it was up to them to make decisions about who lives and who
dies then where would we be? That is why we have leaders. Strong men, who can
think for everybody. Which means people like you don’t have to. Me. I make those decisions. Not you. Not
him. Me. I don’t know who you
think you are,” he said, drawing a stubby, rather feminine pistol from his
slacks pocket, “but I think you’re nobody. And I decide.” He shot him in the
side of the head like a fascist executioner.
Hament handed him a
tumbler full of scotch, the stench of which he inhaled deeply. “Great scotch. Give
him a chair Hament.” He reluctantly
pushed an office chair towards me and went back to his seat. Even more
reluctantly I sat down. Fylde noticed that he was still absent-mindedly holding
the pistol and he tossed it into a drawer secreted somewhere under the table.
“Civilised men having a
civilised sit-down conversation,” he said. “Civilised.”
“Civilised?” Hament
guffed.
“You don’t say a lot,” said
Fylde.
“Kills a lot, though,”
said Hament.
“Do shut up, Hament.”
“I’m going to kill both
of you,” I said.
“I see,” said Fylde. ”Might
I ask why?”
“For what you’ve done.”
“Which is?”
“Nuclear-powered
heart.”
“Of course, the nuclear-powered
heart! What else?”
“That’s fucking funny,”
sneered Hament. “And even more fucking rich. You don’t know a thing about it.
It’s hard fucking science, dickhead, and you don’t have a clue what it does,
how it functions, nothing. We did it for you people. The average ungrateful
British bastard.”
“Let’s all calm down,” said Fylde. Hament
shook the drops of spilt whiskey from his fingers and rubbed them dry on a
serviette.
“How can any single
nobody be so entirely blind?” I said.
“Nobody?” said Fylde. “Nobody? I’m the
fucking-Prime-fucking-the-fuck-Mini-fucking-ster. So say you kill me” –
“I will.”
“What then? How do you
stop the rest of it? I’m not the
nuclear powered heart programme. It’s running itself. Everything goes on. It
always does.”
“I can’t think of
everything,” I said. “I kill you, that’s my part done.”
“That’s it exactly. You
never have a viable solution. You find the faults and you demand a solution, but none of you has any fucking idea about the
future, about the aftermath of your big idea. You can’t just leave things half
finished! That’s the selfish act, the
irresponsible act. Those people out there can’t cope alone, they need me to
guide them – that’s what government is.”
“They can only cope without you.”
“Christ this is
hopeless,” he said. He picked up a single salted peanut – carefully so as not
to break it into its two constituent halves – and put it into his mouth,
sucking the saltiness then chewing deliberately. “We know who you are, you
know?” he said. “Yes. We know an awful lot about you.”
“Doesn’t matter,” I
said.
“I think it does. We
know about your grandfather, of course, and his old heart. And we know about...
what was his name? Beesley. We know about Beesley and the little drug in the
water. Very clever. Unlike anything our chemical technicians had ever seen.
That is, before they isolated its
properties from the water, purified it and created an antidote, of sorts.
You’ll be glad to hear no one was affected. We found the canister. You dropped
it in Manchester.” I felt deflated when I thought of Beesley. “Odessa. We know
about her. Lovely looking girl. And your terrorist friends. You see in some
respects you’re right. It is about power and about knowledge, knowing what will
happen before it does. Without that knowledge, without observation, how can a
country hope to transcend the petty lives of its individual components? The
government knows everything. Everything.
We see and hear it all. Everything. We even met your parents,” he said, voice
distorted by his own self-satisfied face. “Can you imagine?” My selflessness
had been so very selfish. Hament was trying to stifle laughter. “They had a bit
of an accident, actually,” he continued. Hament could hold it no longer and
burst into laughter as undignified as flatulence, so hard his whole body shook,
the table too. The PM joined him and they laughed together.
“I’ll say,” said
Hament, beaming and pulling greedily at a fresh tumbler of whiskey.
“Here,” said the Prime
Minister, offering me some Polaroids. I didn’t want to look but did. I could
feel and taste the vomit in my mouth, stuck choking me in a single solid lump.
My eyes seemed to be flickering, going out like old light bulbs, and I couldn’t
focus, just had flashes here and there, of a dark room, of their fresh blood
and naked bodies, naked like you never expect your parents to be. The PM and
Hament just laughed. I threw my glass hard at where Hament was sitting.
“Motherfuck!” Hament
screamed, doubled over with both hands pressed to his face. There were
fragments of glass all over his shoulders and lap and on the table in front of
him. He was bleeding heavily through the gaps between his fingers and when he
moved his hands away there was a huge gash across his forehead surrounded by
smaller wounds down his cheeks. Shards protruded awkwardly from his soft flesh,
and the force of the impact had pretty much wrenched an eyelid away from his
face. It hung there limp, like an old rag brushing against his horrifically
exposed eyeball. “Look what you’ve done!”
Fylde held his hands
like obsolete flippers at hip height. Even his smile had gone.
“Thurleigh?” he said.
Hament was grunting like an animal, loudly trying to pull glass out of his
face. “Hament? Are you okay?”
“No,” came his
high-pitched response. “I’m fucked. My fucking eyelid! I can see my eyelid! And
I’m pissing blood. Fuck. He fucked me! Didn’t I tell you? My fucking face!”
“We’ve all had a bit of a shock.” Hament was
trying to quell the bleeding by holding paper napkins over his face and
muttering curses under his breath. His hand caught on the flap of his hanging
eyelid and he puked down the front of his cardigan, then he put a napkin over
what could have been the eyelid and held it flat against the eye area, trying
to keep it in place. He looked at us furiously. “I like a person with the right
attitude,” Fylde said. “This fucking soon-to-be twenty-first century – it’s a
terrible time to be alive but an even worse time to have nothing. I’m offering
you a choice. The final choice. Play on our team.” Hament groaned, was tipping
over the edge into unconsciousness. “You must admit it makes sense.”
“Fuck,” I said, “you.”
He didn’t want to give
me the satisfaction, the release of death. Was death my victory or his?
He couldn’t decide. It was complex.
“I get it,” he said. “Maybe I can’t persuade
you. However.” He walked to the telephone on the table and picked up the receiver.
“Send them in,” he said, and hung up.
“None of your doctors’ll
persuade me either,” I said.
“Just shut up,” he
said. “You’ll want to see this.” He pointed towards the door. I think Hament
had stopped breathing but couldn’t be sure. The door handle turned and it was
opened cautiously.
Odessa came in, her
flesh again coloured with the warmth of a beating heart, so beautiful, like a
dream. Then Beesley, and Wilde, my grandfather, grandmother. And my parents.
The glorious dead, all returned, all laughing among themselves like old friends
meeting for coffee. The Prime Minister draped his arm loosely around my
shoulders and I was surprised to feel that it burnt with the heat of the
living.
“Go ahead,” he said.
“Touch them. Don’t they look well? Healthy?” And they did, lined up like beasts
for market, glowing with the pride of people being talked about.
“This can’t be,” I
said. “What have you done?”
“Nothing that wasn’t
wanted,” he replied. “Look at them.” He directed my gaze with a pompous
outstretched hand, as if they were his own children, the products of his filthy
loins. I suppose they were, children of a future time.
I wanted to be happy to
see them but wasn’t, wouldn’t be, couldn’t be. The shadows of their own
mortality no longer crept like exhaust from every pore and orifice. I longed to
hear them scream again but no.
“We can be a family
again.”
Everything had been so
pointless.
“It’s really okay.
We’re all happy now.
“I miss them.”
“Well they don’t miss
you. Without a thought in their heads they’re happy as pigs in foul shit.”
I heard gunfire
outside. It meant nothing. I felt a jet of hot piss leaving my body and in my
head I wished the world a happy life, and as my grandfather’s huge hands closed
around my neck with a grip like iron I heard the nearing gunfire, and then
soldiers bursting through the reinforced office doors of Parliament with hearts
glowing and buzzing in their chests and stars and stripes stitched onto their
uniforms, and outside a blinding white light swelled from one central point and
engulfed the city’s parks and buildings, incinerated the tissues of its
remaining organic citizens, tore through its streets and overturned its cars
with a celestial wind, and the glass of the windows came in as if in slow
motion, my eyeballs melting like plastic from their sockets, finally at peace,
and I laughed and laughed and felt the joy of the end like the heat of a
thousand suns.