(Thivai speaks)
‘I just want to do it,’ I said.
‘Do what?’
‘Find her. I’ve got to find her.’
‘Why?’ Findus, who was a bum, didn’t understand. Anything. ‘Why do you want to find a woman?’
‘Because I had Abhor on a string and the string was tied around my little finger. Whenever I twirled her around, my finger moved, so I was never bored. I need to pull strings. But it didn’t have shit to do with shit and shit didn’t have to do with it,’ I explained fully.
‘You’ve lost it, Thivai.’ I gathered it was her. ‘You’re always losing your women.’
I thought. That just wasn’t true. I disagreed with the bum, because I always disagree. ‘I didn’t lose the first cunt who tried to kill me because she died.’ Then I thought about how someone says goodbye to someone:
(My cock got hard. Thinking about it.)
(Whenever I stop thinking, I step out of existing into nothing.)
The girl bears a wide black leather band around her neck. There is only emptiness. Its leather edges are so roughly cut, the band scratches her neck. A second leather band, as wide as the first band and attached to the first band at the part of band in the middle of the back of the neck, reaches down almost to the bottom of her spine. There, two thin black leather bands attached to the bottom of the second leather band encase her wrists. Since she’s unable to move, I have to remove her underpants and position her for her and for me. She is my cock and my cock is moving and she will never, because there is no future, be other than me, be not me, be against me. I thought about how to say goodbye to someone. In my world, one doesn’t say goodbye to someone.
When I was five years old, I was carving words which I knew were bad into the bark of a monster walnut tree. The knife slipped out of the bark into the flesh of my little finger. Somehow it slipped right through the finger so the finger was dangling from its root, in my mind just like Nagasaki. A year later, I was playing a game with several of the girls in my class. A pair raced from one point of the roof to a rope stretched between two sticks. The rope was as high as the tallest student. The roof was the top floor of a school which used to be a horses’ stable. The class creep and I were racing each other. I had to win so badly, I didn’t perceive anything besides running, until I turned around, after I had reached the finish line, I didn’t yet know who won, and saw her left hand over her left eye. Blood seeped through her fingers. I had taken out her eye. I have never known who won.
‘I have to find Abhor,’ I told the bum. ‘I have to find her because now that she’s murdered the doctor, she’s my only link to the drug.’
‘That’s not why I’m poor,’ the bum told me.