Poppy Z. Brite
Ecstasy belongs to the past.
Barton left the ship at Harafa on a two-day pass. The wharves of this strange city were dark, a series of great grey warehouses looming over the silent piers, an occasional furtive movement in the shadows. He ignored any signs of life. A quarter-mile inland, he began to see the glow of the red-light district. Soon he was amidst its pandemonium, its narrow streets and glowing windows advertising the pink and black and golden girls within. The air smelled of sewage and food frying in hot oil. He was hungry, but he could afford no more than a drink or two, and he would need it to steady him before the thing he must do tonight.
The bars closest to the wharves were rip-off joints, and so were the bars second-closest. He made it a block further before the thirst overwhelmed him. Choosing a place at random, he let himself into a dark little room where other drinkers huddled in small knots. The place smelled of ancient beer and fish. The man behind the bar looked as if he would smell the same, but his nod was friendly enough.
“Double whiskey. If you please.”
“One moment.”
The whiskey was before him, more expensive than he had expected. He drank it in three swallows and banged the glass back down on the bartop. Warmth bloomed in his belly, a seed of false courage taking root.
“Another?” said the barkeep.
“I’ve only enough for the one.”
The barkeep nodded and didn’t offer a charity drink. Barton didn’t want one anyway; it wouldn’t do to be drunk tonight.
“You in town long? This is a hard place to be when you’re broke.”
“I’m headed to the Peeler.”
The bartender’s eyes widened a bit. “Better have some oysters first. Put the iron in your blood.”
“Told you, I’m out of money.”
“On the house. Free for anyone going to the Peeler.”
He’d had oysters back home, but not since he was a boy. He realised he was hungry. “Well. I’d be obliged.”
The barkeep ducked through a low doorway from which a faint cacophony could be heard. A few minutes later he reappeared bearing a large plate. “Dozen oysters. Help you keep up your strength.”
The oysters were raw, served in their own half-shells on a bed of rock salt, an oddly fancy presentation for such a hole-in-the-wall place. He picked up the shells and tipped the molluscs into his mouth one by one, along with their liquor. They tasted of the clean deep sea, of night watches on the deck of his ship when the ocean glittered with phosphorescent life. When he had finished them, he did feel stronger. Perhaps the Peeler wouldn’t be so bad.
“Want to talk about it?” the bartender said.
No, Barton imagined saying. No, I don’t want to talk about it. No sane person would want to talk about it, and who would want to hear the story? Grow up thinking something’s broken inside you, not thinking about girls like you ought to, feeling the wrong way about the other boys. Then – this is a laugh, barkeep – you meet the boy, the right boy, and you realise nothing that feels like this could be wrong. This is what you were made for, this boy, this love. You’re happy for the first time in your life. And then you get drafted.
Even that might have been bearable. He wasn’t opposed to serving his country, and he knew Rudy would be safe at home, because Rudy’s vision was so bad that he had to wear glasses as thick as the bottoms of Coca-Cola bottles. No branch of the military would take him. Except Rudy wasn’t safe at home, wasn’t safe at all.
But the bartender had been kind, so Barton just shook his head.
He lingered for another few minutes, but knew he was only postponing the inevitable. He nodded thanks to the barkeep and left the place, getting his bearings before heading further inland. Occasionally he caught sight of his reflection in a window, a big man in fatigues moving silently through noisy streets. Soon he passed from the red-light district into an emptier area, a place where the streets were cobbled and vehicles rushed endlessly over a great viaduct toward God only knew what. Maybe not even God knew; Barton didn’t think this part of the city had much truck with Him. The light here felt somehow dead. Glancing up, he realised a full moon had risen, spilling its cold illumination down over the city. He imagined it shining down on Rudy, two different places lit by the same chilly moon.
As he passed under the viaduct, blurred movement overhead made him flinch backward. The falling man might have hit him otherwise, might have knocked him right out of this sorry life. There was a flail of limbs, a sound like a thick steak hitting a marble countertop, but louder, so much louder. Then the man lay broken before him, not six feet away. Blood welled from every part of him, a dark rich flow filling the cracks between the cobblestones, shimmering in the light of that remorseless moon. Barton stared wildly up at the viaduct, from where the man must have jumped or been thrown. There was nothing to see, no other pedestrians craning for a good look at this fellow’s misfortune, only the rush of cars. He was still looking up when the man’s hand clutched at his shoe.
He screamed, really screamed for the first time since childhood, and stumbled backward. If the viaduct wall hadn’t been there, he would have fallen right into the growing puddle of blood. As it was, he banged the back of his skull against the bricks. Silver spangles filled his vision. He blinked them away and stared down at the broken man, the man who was still, impossibly, moving. His body was prone, his head twisted on his neck so that Barton could see his face. His teeth were bloody splinters. One eyeball quivered on his cheek; the other regarded Barton with hellish awareness.
“Heela,” said the man.
How could any kind of speech emerge from that bloodhole? Surely it was the last firing of a damaged brain, meaningless noise, no different than the sounds a cow might make in the slaughterhouse.
“Heela!” the bloodhole insisted.
“Christ, pal, don’t try to talk. Look, help is on the way, all right?”
Barton had no reason to believe that, but he did hear footsteps approaching, coming fast. The man who appeared from the darkness was taller than Barton, but not as broad through the chest. His skull was lumpy and unevenly shaven, razor-nicked in a few spots, paler than the rest of his curdled-milk complexion. His eyes were bright and somehow ratty, seeming to jitter in their sockets.
“You roll him already?” the man said.
“What?”
“Roll him, you roll him? No? Good, no trouble, we go half and half, what do you say, sailor, half and half, no trouble, good deal, right?”
“You’re talking about robbing him.”
“Roll him, yeah, he don’t need it, not no more, right?”
The skinhead dropped to his knees, dragging his trouser legs through the lake of blood. Barton took a step forward. Slick as a magic trick, a knife appeared in the skinhead’s pallid hand. “He don’t need it no more! Share or piss off, but don’t mess me around!”
Barton moved fast, seized the skinhead by his collar and hauled him up. It wasn’t hard; you built up a lot of muscle on the ship. He grabbed the skinhead’s wrist and twisted hard. Bones grated against each other. The skinhead screamed. The knife clattered onto the cobblestones and Barton kicked it away.
Tears stood in the skinhead’s eyes. “You broke my fuckin’ arm! You don’t, you don’t have to, you don’t have to do that, you fuck!”
“You tried to rob a dying man but I’m the fuck. Right.”
“You broke my––”
Barton feinted towards him. The skinhead stood his ground for a moment longer, clutching his wrist with his good hand, then whirled and ran.
Barton prodded the broken man with his foot, got no response. He used the toe of his boot to turn the man’s body over. While Barton and the skinhead had tussled over him like some tawdry carnival prize, the man had finished his dying. A pink-grey coil of intestines trailed from his belly. His good eye stared skyward, sightless.
Sightless.
He thought of the letter he’d received from Rudy last month. The Coke-bottle eyeglasses were no longer doing the job. There was an operation he could have, but without it, the doctors thought he would be blind in a year. The thing was, Rudy painted. Had done so since childhood. He created beautiful canvases in butterfly-wing jewel tones, paintings that filled the jagged spaces in Barton’s heart when he looked at them. The operation was expensive and his family wouldn’t help him. I don’t think I can stand it, Rudy had written. There’s still so much work I want to get out of me. If I can’t make art, I’ll go insane. I won’t want to live anymore.
Barton had racked his brain for days trying to figure out a way of making the money. Finally he remembered something he had heard on shipboard, on the night watch. The dog watch, they called it, when the stars unfurled a glittering carpet overhead and strange stories might be passed around. In Harafa, a boatswain’s mate had told him, there’s a thing called the Peeler. A thing or a place, I don’t know exactly, but they buy pain. And they pay well.
Buy pain. He had envisioned some sort of sex dungeon, a place where you were beaten and burned in front of a live audience. But no, another sailor chipped in, it was worse than that. The Peeler actually took something from you, something you could never get back. It was an open secret, the kind of place that could exist on the fringes of a city like Harafa by greasing the right palms.
Barton looked down at the dead man, observed the twisted limbs and smashed face. Had this man just come from the Peeler? Had he sold something he couldn’t afford to lose?
“Rudy is what I can’t afford to lose,” he muttered. “Never mind this poor bastard. Remember Rudy.”
As soon as he turned the next corner, he stopped thinking about the dead man.
Past the viaduct, his surroundings soon became seedier. Not interestingly seedy like the red-light district; this was just an area of scrubby wasteland and swaybacked industrial buildings, occasional shuttered businesses with names like Cryptid Imports Limited, Wo Fat Noodle Company, Premature Burial Solutions. Some of the signs were written in characters Barton could not read. These streets had a stagnant, swampy smell, though he saw no standing water. He was beginning to wonder if the directions he’d ferreted out of the other sailors were wrong when he saw a green-lit sign ahead. It ain’t an ordinary type of green, a hick lieutenant had told him. It looks like poison. Like the sickest you ever felt in your life. It’s a green you don’t want to look at.
Barton had dismissed this as melodrama, but there was something awful about the sign’s verdant hue. MEMORY, it read, aglow in an upper window of an otherwise dark building. There was an appearance of wrongness about the place, some unnatural slump or angle that the eye and the mind could not reconcile. He didn’t know what was causing the effect – maybe just apprehension – but he knew he didn’t want to go in there.
No, he couldn’t think like that. He thought instead of Rudy’s eyes, soft blue behind his glasses. That wasn’t quite enough to get him going, so he took out his wallet and flipped through it to a photograph of him and Rudy together at the beach. Not touching, not even looking at each other, but something in the arrangement of their bodies spoke of love. He put his wallet away and made himself ring the bell beside the door.
Nothing happened for what felt like several minutes. He began to worry that this place was all rumour and raree show, a story for sailors to tell on the night watch, nothing more. He was about to push the bell again when a buzzer sounded and the door’s lock clicked open.
Barton stepped into a tiny foyer where a single electric bulb flickered high overhead. Before him, a narrow staircase led upward into gloom. He didn’t want to climb it any more than he had wanted to ring the bell, but climb it he did, his boots loud on the cheap linoleum. At the top was a curtain made of heavy red fabric. He pushed through it, hating its musty smell. And on the other side, everything changed.
He had no real frame of reference for the room he saw. The closest comparison he could make was to a ship’s bridge, with its banks of lights and dials and knobs. This place was like that, times a hundred. There seemed to be machines everywhere, all of them whirring and flashing. At the centre of the room sat something that looked like a huge electric dynamo. Barton could not hear it humming, but he thought he could feel it in his teeth and behind his eyes, a subliminal itch. Closed doors stretched away down a long hallway. All this was presided over by a pretty receptionist who looked as if she belonged behind the desk of a five-star hotel. Above her left breast was pinned a nametag that read Moneta. He could see no one else in the place. The receptionist smiled at him and said, “Removal or addition?”
“Uh, removal, I think.”
The woman’s smile grew more dazzling. “Yes, if you were coming in for an addition, you’d know.”
Then why did you ask me? Barton thought, but he just nodded.
“Are you familiar with our removal procedure?”
“Not really.”
“I’m required to tell you that the services we offer are one hundred per cent legal in this country. I’m also required to tell you that once a procedure has begun, it cannot be stopped. In your case, we would be removing one or more of your assets in exchange for a one-time cash payment. Here’s our price list.”
She handed him a yellow sheet of paper. Barton scanned it. There was only one item that would provide the sum he needed.
“My mother,” he said.
His mother. The lodestar of his childhood, which had been an otherwise lonely time. He had never made friends easily. He was bigger and stronger than most of his schoolmates, but he had no taste for fighting, and bullies quickly learned the taunts that brought shameful tears to his eyes. One day he couldn’t stand it anymore and laid into them, giving one a black eye, another a bloody nose. The school suspended him. For the bullies there was no punishment.
“I’m not mad at you,” his mother had told him that day. “I’m not disappointed in you either. But I can see you’re disappointed in yourself.”
He’d shrugged, still too angry and hurt to articulate his feelings.
“You don’t want to spend the rest of your school days getting into trouble. You’re too smart for that. Know what I used to do when I was a girl? When other kids would pick on me?”
“What?”
“I’d pretend I loved them. No, listen” – she’d seen his scowl – “I know it sounds sappy, but I’d look at them, and I’d try to see the things that made them act mean, the things that hurt them or scared them. And instead of giving back my own meanness, I’d start to feel sorry for them. I wouldn’t want to be mean anymore.”
“Did it make them stop picking on you?”
She smiled. “Well, it made me stop caring so much when they did. And when they saw I didn’t care, they didn’t do it as often. So I guess you could say yes, it did.”
He hadn’t expected it to work. He didn’t have her good heart. But the next time a kid said something that angered him, he remembered his mother’s words. He looked at the boy currently plaguing him, a rat-faced kid named Lew Mayorkas, and noticed for the first time that Lew had real horrorshow acne. It must be awful to look at that in the mirror every day. The realisation didn’t make him love Lew, but it took away some of the sting. The time after that, it was a little easier. And Barton was amazed to see that after a while, the bullies really did seem to get bored with him. He still didn’t have a lot of friends, but he no longer had so many enemies.
“Very good,” said Moneta, noting something on a paper form. “Is your mother deceased?”
“Yes.”
“Fine, that entitles you to an irreplaceability bonus.” She beamed at him. “Now please follow me.”
Irreplaceability bonus? He thought of the boatswain’s mate saying They buy pain. Was it possible that they actually bought joy? What was he about to sell away?
The receptionist led him past the banks of lights, past the dynamo, down the hallway. Opening an unmarked door, she ushered him into a claustrophobic little cubicle. In the centre of this room was what looked like a dentist’s chair. Except he had never seen a dentist’s chair with leather shackles on the arms and footrest. They looked more like something that belonged on an electric chair.
“The restraints are only to keep you from hurting yourself during the procedure. Please have a seat.”
He thought again of Rudy’s eyes and sat without further hesitation. Moneta fastened the shackles around his wrists, knelt and fastened the shackles around his ankles. Would a metal cap complete the electric chair picture? No, instead she brought a pair of heavy black headphones and clamped them over his ears. Twisting his head, he could see a cable connecting them to a larger cable on the floor. That cable led to an even larger one, and at the spot where they entered the wall, the braided wires were as thick as Barton’s wrist.
Moneta stepped over to a bank of machinery on the wall, flipped some switches, typed briefly on a keyboard. Then she stepped in front of him, made sure she had his attention. “Okay?” she mouthed with an absurd thumbs-up. He nodded. She twisted a dial, and Barton’s world ended.
Had there ever been a world? He couldn’t conceive of anything outside this world of agony. There was no individual part of him being hurt, no thread of physical pain he could fixate on. It felt as if every atom of him was being turned wrong-side out, as if dirty fingers were rummaging through his brain, seeking to take what was not theirs, tossing some things aside, seizing others with no care at all. He saw his mother at the end of her life, so fragile in the hospital bed. He saw her young and strong, digging in her garden. She smoothed his hair on school picture day; she brought in a cake with his name and ten flaming candles on it; he cried on her bosom over a skinned knee, smelling her hairspray and Shalimar perfume; she pushed him on a swing until he flew higher than the clouds.
Without warning, the memories began to swirl away. He was reminded of a film he’d seen where a flower blossomed, withered, and died in an instant. Like dead petals, his recollections of his mother lost their colour and scattered. He scrabbled after them, grasped for them, but even as he touched them, they were gone. A red wave washed over him, drowning him. He sucked it in. Then it was over. His body felt as limp as a strand of seaweed. It occurred to him that they shouldn’t call this the Peeler; a better name would be the Drainer.
“Well done!” said Moneta, taking off his headphones and unfastening his restraints. “That will make a lovely past for some motherless soul.”
Barton rubbed his eyes, dazed. What had he done? What had he given away in an instant?
Faint images of some woman, like faded photographs loose in a drawer. He didn’t care.
He collected his payment and his bonus, thanked Moneta, ducked back under the musty curtain. Outside, the night air revived him. He took a moment to get his bearings. There was the viaduct. On the other side were the pleasures of the red-light district, and he had a roll of money in his pocket. Had he really been planning to send it to Rudy? Just so Rudy could keep painting pictures? He laughed, a harsh impatient sound. Let Rudy pay for his own operation or go blind. It was nothing to Barton.
For a moment, he wondered again exactly what he had given up. He still remembered having a mother, but the image of her face was dim, a dying flame. There was no resonance to it. Likewise, the things she had taught him were now meaningless. Why love anyone, why endure the bother and mess of sharing a life with anyone? Why bother looking out for anyone but yourself? Love was a fool’s game, and his mother had been a fool raising a foolish son. The Peeler had done him a tremendous favour.
He set off for the red-light district, the sound of his boots echoing off the pavement in the empty night.