My little soldier likes to beat whores. I’m okay with that, so long as he pays for the service and doesn’t ruin my face. I fucking work with that.
His camo suit, sagging on the chair, lifeless like the snail dangling between his legs; his combat boots next to the bed like twin sculptures; his army smell, of cots and mite fishbones, crème brûlée of cooked adrenaline, steel balls chock-full, left to themselves too long to guard a tank of green shit, that mush of synthetic protein which by now they fob off on everybody: soldiers, citizens and whores, here in the insipid paradise of New France. Welcome!
He really cannot get a hard-on; we’ve been at it for half an hour and my ribs and butt hurt. He keeps whipping my ass with his mangy cartridge belt, but apparently this is not working out as usual for him. Head and cock aren’t connected.
“You’re a damn bitch, a damn bitch…”
“I know that already, but look, time’s almost up, buttock tamer. Can you go all the way or not?”
“If you don’t shut that fucking mouth I won’t…”
“Maybe this fucking mouth can help you out, little soldier…else, you’ll have to go away with your balls still full.”
“I already told you not to call me that…”
“Okay, okay, try to uncork the champagne within ten minutes, though, ’cause I’m waiting for another customer.”
No way: he keeps hitting me and telling me I’m a damn cock-sucking slut, but the little soldier’s machine-gun keeps misfiring. And he refuses any help on my part.
He isn’t looking at me or at my ass in the air—who knows what the fuck he’s looking at…there, where he aims the sights of his eyes, there is nothing but the window, with a nice view of South Paris 5’s blocky prosthesis factory; and a tramp, clambering up a lamppost, trying to tie a rope to jump down and break his neck.
That’s why he cannot get hard, or maybe what he sees is all inside his head. Anyhow, he’s certainly seeing the wrong movie: he should browse his catalog of memories better, there must be something good, after all, in all his shit.
Jesus, after so long on the bed on all fours, I can no longer feel the blood flowing in my hands and knees. Let alone my striped ass, burning more and more; if he keeps up with this heat, I won’t be able to work for a few days. He paid well, the dork, but at this point that’s no longer enough.
“Hey, easy!”
“Don’t break my balls, I’ll pay you for your time…you say the price, but now shut up.”
Will pay? No way! Around here, future tense is worth jack shit, it doesn’t exist, by now nobody uses it anymore. What you paid for, little soldier, is already over.
I try to get up, but he holds me down pushing my neck. Then, he finds better purchase on my hair. Everybody knows you cannot touch my hair: all the rest is fine, inside and outside, but not the hair. I think I consider that my virginity, something like that. There must be something not for sale, and this is true even for a whore like me.
I flex my back as much as possible, reach out with a hand under the pillow and take it—my knife. He is still watching his shitty movie; he doesn’t even notice.
“You’re a bitch, a damn bitch…”
Yep. I am.
I wait for him to charge yet another blow, raising his belt, I turn around in a jerk and sink the blade into his right thigh, just below his groin. I well know it really hurts there.
That would turn off even the most randy Mujahidin.
“You really are a bitch…”
The script hasn’t changed, maybe the little soldier doesn’t know other words. He only adds something to his usual rosary: “Now I’ll make you pay for it…”
The nutjob is in front of me now; I close my eyes and bite full strength into that rubbery appendage between his legs, which has been spineless for the last fifty-five minutes. If there’s someone who must pay, here, that’s certainly not me, little soldier. And there is more than one way to pay for my services. You’ve chosen the worst one, you’ve asked for it. I’m already thinking about my fridge, where I keep many pairs of testicles, pledges for which I never give any receipt.
The nutjob—with rusty shells inside his head, making it sound like a pre-Uxor money box—holds his dick in his hands, kneels on the floor and cries like a priest ignored by his deaf god.
I get up from the bed, grab my thought-extinguisher from the nightstand: a nice hammer, nothing high-tech like the tools used by many of my colleagues to sedate ass-wipe customers or bad payers. Maybe I’m too old school, but it never happened that my thought-extinguisher malfunctioned or wasn’t loaded enough.
I learned the job in Nogales, a small town in the Mesoamerican Republic, where customers will mount even dogs, if they have enough syntequila in their body; and at San Sebastian church, Monsignor Rico baptized shaven cunts with holy water—forget sanctified heads—and he rented out the sacristy by-the-hour, to those of us who didn’t have a place to go whoring. Amen. This one I’m holding right now is my grandmother’s hammer, the hammer of a family of whores, and it has crushed many an excited brain.
I’m sorry, little soldier, you were so young, I tell myself after smashing his head in, brain marmalade coming out his ear together with the black-and-white film of those shitty movies, of his bastard memories. I did him a favor, though; his gaping eyes look clean and clear now, as they keep staring at the ceiling—from where the usual shadows come down to vacuum-seal the souls of the freshly dead and carry them to the final warehouse. I drag him into the kitchen by his legs, work his shivered scrotum with my knife, and I put his steel balls with the others, in the fridge, behind a tiny New Scotland eggplant—a very expensive gift from a filthy-rich customer.
My treasures are safe in the lower compartment, hosting my cold chest of testicles and, sometimes, when work is really good, portions of illegal human meat—maybe fine under-thigh cuts, guaranteed against the prion disease and bought by Mersault, the dealer with connections at the central morgue. Fort Knox, the Eldorardo of gluttons and fat cats who only use the synthetic green shit to unclog sinks.
I go to the window. That scarecrow, the scrawny tramp, has finally managed to break his neck; like that, hanging from the fitful lamppost, floating and shoe-less, he looks like a human pendulum clock.
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