To save the reader trouble…of course I’m going to do it. My name is Weasel, for Chrissake. Check your Chaucer. Think about what I’ve already done to tie my body in knots with that of Monica!
It’s hard even to take a moment of decision, knowing that if I don’t get her out of jail a couple of days ago, she’ll be dead in a couple of years. But on the other hand, do I want to become a Norman?
How do you shape a future that‘s already known? Supposedly this infernally confusing technology of Norm and company increases the coefficient of suppleness of the immanent temporal surface. Sort of like lowering the coefficient of sliding friction in Newton’s mechanical world. In other words, it’s a lubricant.
It’s new version of an old story. Originally invented for scientific observation, they chose to ignore the idea that observation’s objectivity is tainted by position. Observation distorts events by virtue of its own structural foundations. From Heisenberg to Levi-Strauss, this recurs in so many branches of twentieth century experience it‘s a California Redwood sized tree of deceptive knowledge.
If you come in with TV cameras to get a picture of savages in an indigenous state, you just annihilated that indigenous state with your presence. You wind up with a picture of your impact on the thing, not the thing itself.
As if that‘s not bad enough, short-sighted, self-serving bozos, like a Norman, or myself, co-opt the technology, and exacerbate malignant possibilities. Four dimensional history provides plenty of precedents. TV, nuclear power, the printing press, and religion name a bare minimum. Good ideas in bad hands. Reason sleeps. Monsters multiply. The hands of time accelerate entropy. And man becomes an extension of his machine. But later for that.
There’s no monster like the monster at hand. And that’s the Brazilian fate for Monica! Whatever this stuff of Norman’s is, it’s real enough for me. I’m no Prince Hamlet, tweaking out the last nuance of my function in fate or providence.
I’m more like an experienced shock trooper. I’ll take the mission, but you bastards better give me topographic maps of acceptable quality. So, of course, I had my more than twenty questions, if only to get the job done right.
"If it’s just a life force you need to drive this stuff, why humans? Judging by some of the people in management or politics, wouldn’t you be better off with a bag squirming with large cockroaches?"
"Yes, theoretically, animal life can be employed, but it is much less efficient at best and impracticable at worst. You’re extracting the fruit of a psyche’s existence, and essentially consuming it, so it can interact with the technology. Cockroaches do not have the tri-pod balance of the human animal. As such they are also basically incapable of volitional evil, yet.
Usable cockroaches will come into being, but that won‘t be until twenty centuries after he extinction of the human animal. Cost of resource extraction is prohibitive, to say the least. It is easier to go backwards on the time surface, the wind is at your back, so to speak. Anyway, history‘s provided with a wealth of human experiential times of death. It‘s easy."
"In addition, a single human psyche provides a remarkably complete potential energy. It is a web work of three survival heuristics Almost like three brains in one. There is a physical intelligence, an emotional resonance, and an intellectual comprehension. Their interaction generates a fourth heuristic of purpose or mystical life. This crystallized fourth dimensional object is the basis for five dimensional being technology, just as the four dimensional human animal employs three dimensional objects for its technology."
"Are you trying to tell me this is a planet of saints and angels?"
"Oh, thank God, no. Then none of the technology would work. Its foundations rest on the same abstraction as a pipe wrench or a refrigerator. One achieves specific advantage over the small by applying gradients derived from the large.
"To continue with the refrigerator example, you effectively lower the temperature in the enclosed space by a method that ends up heating the larger space, the atmosphere. The atmosphere is so large as to render its differential marginal. But anyone who has walked the sidewalks of the big city on a hot summer day can’t avoid the withering blasts of heat from the vents of a large air conditioned building.
"As for true saints, they have no potential energy at all. Fortunately, what few of those malignancies there ever are, die in miserable happy obscurity. Children, dogs, and horses as well. Completely useless. A black hole as far as fuel for a positron time pump. You need a subject who is full of dread and anguish. This is why the moment of death is so valuable.
"The psychic exudations are rich with the awareness of irrevocably squandered potential. The three interacting heuristics that generate this spiritual quintessence crystallize, for lack of a better term, a frustrated identity. It is like a mirror image of the entire historical lifetime concentrated into the brief moments of absolute disillusion and dissolution at the moment of truth.
This is what they mean by your life passing before your eyes. It does. The spiritual substrate is horrified by the lost opportunities. It yearns to reverse the perceived flow of time, after witnessing its lifetime devoted to the apparent acceleration of time’s malign effects. The frustration of a lifetime is packed in these brilliant moments. That’s the potential energy, or fuel, so to speak, we employ."
"You’ll see when I show you how I harvest a temporal slice. I think you’re ready for a foretaste of the knowledge. But this is all turning to blather fast. The very language I’m using here is so dependent on sequence across linear time, that it crumples under the weight of dimensional abstraction."
"Don’t rush me, Norman. Among other things, it subverts your credibility. If all this shit were perfect, you wouldn’t need me at all, would you? So let’s run the basics of eternity so I don’t walk into an eternity of screw ups.
"Let me visualize again. We take a point, zero dimension, and generate a point set infinity. Infinite line result. First dimension.
"Good enough. Old fashioned logic. Infinite line extends into infinite circle, exfoliating a second dimension of contained infinite lines, a flat surface. Kind of sleazy, but given the plenitude of the infinite, it makes enough sense for me. Not like we’re running out of anything here.
"Now set the infinite circle spinning for an infinity of infinite circles containing aforesaid infinity of lines. This is starting to sound like God went to the saloon. Now we have this sphere containing the infinite points, infinite lines and infinite circles. But still now we have volume, I guess. Tell God me another beer.
"From here, time hops into the picture. It has to do with everything that can possibly be contained in the infinite spherical model. All shapes, twists, donuts, tube worms at ocean’s bottom, vast gaseous nebulae. You name it, we got it. In triplicate plus n forever. Their container is time, that keeps all within its compass from happening at once.
"But that means there’s an infinity of these spheres of infinities that can be sliced out of the continuum of time.
"Goody. We’ve got infinity experiencing a population explosion. The more we apply it the more it degenerates into an empty shell of meaningless sound. Couldn’t the whole thing be a squalid fiction hobbled by sense derived ideations and the quirk of grammar that lets me pluralize anything?"
"Weasel, I don’t understand the theory, nor do we have to, to be absolutely confident it can be done."
"But it seems this gigantic technological step forward pitches us back into some variant on blood sacrifice. The very machinery feeds on the RNA and enzymes associated with agony and death the way cars consume gasoline."
"It’s still at an inefficient and early stage. If all theoretical refinements occur, you could drive an entire superficial sub spherical dodecahedron universe across one temporal infinity with the death of a single paramecium.
"This is where free will comes in. It slips into the infinities between infinities. The boxes between the boxes inside the boxes. The greater the content of free will in the theatre of death, the higher the order of signature RNA that can crystallize and be harvested.
"Tor example, the death of Mary, Queen of Scots provided me with a high order of fuel, because there was so much about the event that had been chosen by the participants. Here there is a lust for power so insatiable that it exceeds the lust for life itself.
"She could have escaped and bought herself some more years of life on the run. But she was obsessed with her name, place in history, and relation to her religious fictions. She also didn’t really believe that her own cousin would finalize the beheading.
"But behind the brave charade and religious hocus pocus, was a vain, terrified woman who already considered herself old and past her prime. That agony yearns to reverse the course of time and expresses itself in a momentary final spasm of enormous energy in the face of the disillusion of death.
"This potential energy is ordinarily enough to lend any subject sufficient energy to find a copulating couple and re enter the evolutionary DNA pump. But in a case like hers the energy is outstandingly refined and intense. It is like a high quality diamond next to a coal mine.
"That’s why we only mine the concentration camps and battlefields of modern history as a tertiary resort. It’s like a poor grade of metallic ore. But there is still a lot of it easily available."
Even his sliver from the executions had ramifications. When he first mentioned visiting the execution, out of curiosity I went to the library to recheck a couple of books on the event that I had borrowed several years ago. Just to double check him on the facts. One of the books was not even in the system at all, and the other was listed as having been out of print, and unavailable within the library for ten years. One gone seven years before I had read it, and the other had never been written.
It’s not that the event never happened, but some of the history disappeared.
Fractal universes and perturbations allow him to zoom in on the moments between the seconds like he did at the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots. The fun part, as he called it. Dimensions that are not whole numbers. An infinite number of possible dimensions between dimensions. That may have cost him vast positron counts, or whatever the hell they call them.
Could all these episodes have cost him large before he even knew what was going on? Otherwise why would he, or any of the rest of his kind need me, and god knows who else?
He needs me to drop backwards, and do the hit in jail, instead of the moment before Norm gets whacked. No problem. Personally I like the plan better. But why does the plan change at all? Admittedly, it makes sound practical sense the longer I think it through.
But I’m getting that sinking sensation. I’m feeling the difference between murder and homicide. The few times it’s ever happened, any killing I’ve done before was always a matter of survival and self defense. This is cold blooded murder, and I’m feeling those razors icing through my veins. Nevertheless, it couldn’t happen to a much better guy than a scum like Kenny.
But then there’s still Monica! What sacrifice wouldn’t I make to save her? I don’t know what bullshit she let herself into, but she doesn’t deserve a nylon stocking garrote stark naked in a Brazilian gangster’s palace.
If you treated a dog like that, you’d have them screaming all over the media. But an attractive woman? Assholes will jerk off to it. Women too, I bet.
On the other hand, couldn’t this also be one of the means how their kind “harvest” positrons. Did Norman or one of his pals set up a business like this to ensure themselves some kind of guaranteed fuel supply?
It’s not that they’ve been around for a long time. Technically they don’t exist at all, time wise. Therefore, they’ve never been around. That’s how they get their mobility. No inertia I suppose. And Norman needs me to become one of them before I‘m even dead yet. As for why me? Not a clue.
Let’s get this over with. I know what I already know, and I’m sure that that’s about all I’m ever going to know for now. Ha ha.
"Okay Norm. Don't even pretend you aren‘t already on your way. Get the fuck over here. Let's boogie."
"I know. Got here as fast as I could. I was hanging with Ramses III. Now there was a party animal. No wonder they named a condom after him. And as for Mohammed and the seventy two virgins? Old Egypt could teach him a thing or two. Guy should have listened to his elders, before he thought the Koran was an improvement."
"You know I still don’t see the difference between knowing the fullness of time and predestination."
"A tough one to answer without full commitment. It’s the creator’s back door for free will. Time is more like a surface of a sphere, but it has a throbbing quality, quite akin to the human heart."
"When you divest yourself from the innocence imposed by linear time, it’ll get clearer. That much I can tell you. But hey, time’s a-wasting. Ready to kill Kenny, and join the immortals?"
"Pretty much. I’m supposed to whack him with one of the mops in the classroom in Rikers? Thank God for all that oak staff work I did with Dirty Poncho."
"That’s the drill. And I’ll be with you the entire time. Not to worry."
"Oh, I’m worried. It’s been a long time since my life of crime. I never pulled a professional hit. I was wired for defense, not offense. Am I really the best you can get?"
"Don’t sell yourself short, Weasel. And don’t worry about the mop handle mambo. We’re getting you your old Beretta. You are a far more important experiment than I’ve let on. You’re an alpha test. Almost the entire trans-temporal community has contributed positron resources to this venture. A living subject, with clothing and weapons will be transported to secure a specific objective. A time soldier!
"And, think about it, you’ll still have a living body. You have eons worth of temporal dermal slices for your Positronic Pump before you even need to examine harvesting your past. And speaking of time, the event window we‘ve set up for you is far from infinite. Ready to boogie?"
I won’t ask aloud, but if time’s so fucking supple, how come we seem to be operating under a deadline?
"No problem, Norm. But it’s my time to waste here, and then I’ll have those eons you’re talking about. Let me satisfy the final shreds of my linear temporal innocence. Otherwise, you won’t have the full agency of the free will to fuel the initial jump, anyway. Only trying to save you guys some positrons."
"I’m impressed Weasel. You’ve obviously given this real thought. That extends the free will, and adds value to the quality of our transaction. Ask away. I’m in no hurry at all."
Judging by the looks of him, I wonder. Norm looks downright desperate. He must be running out of adult shells.
He’s squeezed himself into what looks like his skin as an eleven year old. The endoplasmic template is, of course, adult sized at point of either death or willful decision. The ectoplasm always conforms to the molecules in the dermal slice at that moment. In other words, he looks like he’s about to burst.
The distension stretches the child’s features over the surface of an adult skull into a paper thin mask of misery. The eyes look like slits carved in an African tribal mask. The ears lean forward immediately behind his cheekbones. The forehead bulges forward and a futile looking dust of patchy hair begins low on the brow and forms a grotesque siege line around his undersized travesty of a face.
I cringe to think abut what must lurk under the gauzy robe that hangs like a disconsolate sheet. The flesh probably rips more easily too. The face is already patched. And it’s a sloppy job at that. This must be eating hours worth of positrons a minute.
I wonder why he already knows about Monica! I wonder whether he set it up. Easy money and shortcuts were always her downfall. A being like him could play her like a flute.
And do I really know the extent to which he’s playing me? The other side remains the other side.
"This foreknowledge of life’s forgone conclusions thing. I’m still not comfortable. You’ve compared it to that of the inhabitants of Dante’s Inferno, but easier to live with, so to speak. Correct?"
"Precisely. One knows the future better than the past. Knowledge defines the being, and the future erases the past. Knowledge for the being also opens up the gates of desire and pain, as Buddha points out with clarity and elegance. Therefore in the fullness of time the future converges to zero and pain disappears. In Dante’s case, that provides hope for even the damned."
"What’s up with the way desire creeps through the back door of the argument?"
"Well, that’s where the metaphor of damnation becomes problematic. See, knowledge was always more supple than people knew. The whole notion of absolute knowledge is absolute hubris. Poor old Oedipus seems rather emblematic there."
"You’re pushing it too hard Weasel. As any pot smoking ninth grader doing a creative writing assignment knows, there are areas where words crumble under the weight of a meaning that only resides in experience. Thus reams of poetic mediocrity writing about how words can never tell what the writer means. Would you want to explain Beethoven to an ocelot?"
"And if so much is already known, what’s up with the little change of plans for Kenny? It looks to me like I’ll need to get him back in Siberia and run the mop drill."
With all this infinite talk, why do I feel like I’m running out of time?
"I’m glad you picked on the tweak in tactics. Buys me some time to track my body and harvest the living being of centuries worth of slices. Figure out how kidnap myself after I hijack, I mean harvest a couple of Celtic vegetation rituals. High end stuff."
"And what will I be hijacking or harvesting, jumping on the caboose of this train?"
What difference does it make? You have all of history to work with here. We’ve barely scratched the surface. Hey, laugh. It’s an infinite sphere joke. You’ll be laughing later. When you’re running Monica! through the whole Kama Sutra in reverse."
"Well you got me cold, there. We both know I’m going to do it because I love her. But I’m not dead like you were. And I’m having a little trouble where all this talk about harvesting from infinitely contracting time and great fun at executions is really leading me-"
"Out of the shackles of the day job that’s for sure. I admire, even envy you. Yours can be the courage of the first monkey to drop from the trees and pick up stone to heap on stone."
"The first man to leave the miserable huddle of huts at the base of a valley to scale the girdling mountains. To be one of the point men, the antennae of the species. You will do more than merely see the future as my kind. You will be its one of its primary shaping forces."
"Fuck that Norman, I just want to save Monica! I want us to get laid happily ever after."
"Well if you want ever and after, you better get on the task at hand now."
Just one last thing, before I get into this new life, I want see one of these god damned pumps, and know how use it discriminately. I don’t want to waste three clips learning to pull the trigger on a machine gun."
"Good thinking. More evidence it’s better to make the transition while one is still living."
"One demonstration is worth hours of talk. So look, let me get tomorrow’s paper for you, and bring it right back to prove it can be done. Be back with you a half hour sooner than a moment later."
Immediately at my feet I see a tall naked emaciated man of about sixty. He’s flat on his back with chalk gray skin that could be camouflage on top of the old newspapers and open music books littering my bedroom floor. His horse shaped hollowed face is a corkscrew study in bony suffering-cheeks canyon gouges under watery pale hazel eyes. Blank as the gaze is, there is palpable dread. The yellow corneas float in black lake socket pits.
Norman’s bulk is on all fours straddling him, mouth hovering above the victim’s nose and mouth like a lover about to bestow a kiss on the gaunt unshaven face. Norman inhales slowly and deeply, motionless except for the steady expansion of his chest and abdomen. The moments I’m sure this is taking seem like tortured hours of a devouring silence.
I’m staring just long enough for the shock to wear off. Details are the bread and butter of horror. Several crusted little plum colored holes near the heart and stomach. Pustule strewn blotches on his ribcage and legs. Flaccid yellow chicken skin dimpling atrophied muscles on skeletal arms and legs.
Norman slowly brings himself up to an erect seated posture, indifferent to the quivering wreck beneath his pelvis. He exhales with the deliberation of a yogi adept. He smiles for a moment of radiance that seems ecstatic.
"Oh yeah that’s the shit!"
He holds up his lift pinky like a wine snob with a fresh glass. The nail glistens a rainbow of purple shades, like a jewel under a strobe light.
"Be right back."
They’re gone.
"Here’s your damn paper. I took the liberty of removing the winning lottery numbers, but you can verify that this is tomorrow‘s paper tomorrow."
"Jesus, Norman. What the hell just happened?"
"Not Hell, my boy. That was a real taste of heaven."
"Try telling that to my stomach. Remind me never to doubt you again."
"Remember this one. I got lucky."
"Okay. Tell me how that little moment of joy was luck for anyone involved?"
"Well, admittedly luck is relative to the subject."
"Look, you’re not running for president here. Again, what the Hell just happened?"
"Harvested a slice and got you the paper. What do you think?"
"That’s funny. I thought I saw you almost French kissing a some poor bastard who looked like he belonged in a coffin, and then putting this New York Post in my hand."
A quick glance tells me it’s tomorrow’s date. The headline reports another sixteen year old kid’s been shot dead in the slums of Brooklyn. By another fifteen year old. Could have been last week’s.
"So was that what you were talking about when you were telling me about mining the concentration camps?"
"Oh no. This was way better. We’re talking top of the line. I got me a Sloan-Kettering rich guy. Fully conscious, agonized with pain and anguish, and only two seconds from death. Somebody screwed up his painkillers. I got lucky. It was exquisite. And look at that pinky!"
That one nail is rippling ever varying shades of metallic violet scintillating a rainbow of all the color’s possible tints, from pale amethyst to a flaring purple so dark it could almost be black.
"What’s up with the one finger manicure?"
"That nail is the entire machinery."
"A pinky? No wait, not a fucking pinky, a miserable pinky fingernail?"
"To see the universe in a grain of sand, Weasel."
"Good Norman. You passed the pop quiz on high school poetry. Blake. Songs of Innocence and experience. What’s the point?"
"Experience does not need to count the stars. It finds the infinite in the smaller and smaller."
"Blah blah, Norman. Now do you want to spare the riddles for someone who enjoys them? What’s up with the pinky?"
"That’s the positron reservoir, positron pump, and geomagnetic deflection lens. Cool, huh? So we’re good to go, right?"
"Yeah sure. You can start warming it up, I guess."
The last time I heard Norman say, Cool huh like that, he was getting ready to apply a pair of jumper cables to some hapless loan shark customer’s balls. Miserable bastard was a six and a half foot, three hundred pound Leviathan. Martin O’Toole was the new alias for this second rate torpedo that the mob retired out as a no show union carpenter, currently a whimpering naked hill curled fetally on the floor of Norman‘s Nautical stygian one light bulb sub-basement. The acrid animal urine stink of fear was thick enough to bathe in.
His face was a three chinned oval Greek mask with a about a foot of ex-hippy salt and pepper frizz halo. Bald on the top, of course. The ruined blotchy features of somebody who was pig faced even in the fresh bloom of youth.
Martin was eight thousand behind on a five grand loan from Manny The Pig Salmonero. He only had two large in his pocket today, and The Pig had just found out that he had shot twelve grand down a Vegas casino rabbit hole several days before.
Crack and gambling will do that for you. And then some, in most cases. O’Toole was two weeks away from his next pay check, Manny had to make an example of him. Norman had found a substitute for the baseball bat Salmonero had suggested.
Norman was treating it like high drama.
"This’ll make you beg for the baseball bat next time you fall this far behind to The Big Pig."The jaws of the jumper were on a long cable. Norman swung it around like a lariat, and then snapped it down on that massive, well haired fish belly white butt.
"For a big guy O’Toole, you whimper like a six inch puppy. What’s the matter? Cat get your balls? Is that why you can’t pay The Pig?"
Snap, he brings the thing down again with full force. The cable’s brass jaws rake across a gumball sized weeping boil on the guy’s top ass cheek. Blood and white pus jets out in an arc that misses the ankle cuffs on Norman’s white linen suit by inches.
"That’s it! That’s a sign from fucking God, O’Toole. You almost cost me a dry cleaning bill on top of the fine I got to pay The Pig because you can’t be a man about your fucking debts! Roll over on your back and spread your legs before I have professor Weasel here, start doing the steel toed two step on your kidneys."
"I swear I’ll get the rest tomorrow, please Norm. And keep that fucking sadist off of me."
"Good boy, O’Toole. Weasel’s pissed too you know. What the hell money you think I can pay him for the gig this week, huh? That’s good. Flat on your back."
The guy’s sobbing and whimpering mama. Given my mother‘s approach to compassionate child rearing, that’s not a good career move for the blubbering deadbeat’s future. Mama was a sadist, and taught her children well. I finger the cigarette lighter in my pocket, and toy with the idea of egging Norman on. Maybe we could get a couple of extra bucks out of O’Toole, if we play it right.
But first things first. I want this guy lashed down before I need to work with him. My work starts where his stomach for the job stops. If O’Toole suddenly jumps to his feet, gets past Norman, and lays even one hand on me, those arms could throw me straight into intensive care.
Norman already has him posted by the four one inch iron rings set in the concrete floor which define a six foot square.
I’ve seen O’Toole drunk in the bar at four in the morning paste five ex-football players in less than a minute. If inspired by desperation, he’s lethal. But, as Confucius say, subject with hope will lie still for the rope. Play it smart Norman.
"O’Toole, you know I need to mark you up, but you know I’m also basically a nice guy doing my job too. The Pig is pissed. He ordered broken bones. I went to bat for you, so to speak. I told Pig, they’ll cut your salary to shit if you go on disability, right?"
Martin sobs assent.
"So look, let us tie you down, get the job done quick, and I’ll be buying you drinks all night. All I’ll need from you is what I know I’ll get. You’ll spread the word that you never fuck with The Pig, or they’ll end up in even worse shape than you. Okay?"
With the silence of practiced discretion, I already have the shackles out of the tool box and ready. We install Martin’s arms and legs in the rings in seconds. Norman takes the left hand and I get the right foot. The first diagonal pins him face up into the square. The second one’s a piece of cake.
Martin is submissive in the manner typical of true bullies. He’s hoping for the mercy that he’s never shown to anyone. I wonder if this is a component of his love life. He starts thrashing in panic too late. Heh heh.
Now the fun begins. I wonder what Norman has in mind, in that mindless mind of his.
"You know, Martin, when I convinced The Pig not to bust your kneecaps with the bat, he told me get creative. He suggested wiring your balls to a car battery to jump start you into understanding the urgency of your situation."
Ever the ham, he puts a hand to his forehead, Tonto style, and looks around the shadowy basement like it’s the Grand Canyon.
"Trouble is, I don’t see any cars around here. Do you, Martin?"
He bends over and gets just out of biting distance from a now silent, gasping O’Toole. He caresses the jaws of the jumper cable.
"Do you, Martin?"
O’Toole nods his head no. His breathing is slowing. Regaining his cool. Norm tosses it to me without even looking my way. I catch the jaw one handed. You’d think we’d practiced for hours, but actually we were both simply simpatico improvisers for this kind of work. Call it a gift.
"Weasel. We need to leave a mark of some kind on our friend, Mr. O’Toole. His body lies before us like a vast empty canvas. You’re the artist. Get creative."
The threat is always mightier than the execution. I fondle the jaws, surveying the bulk before me and free associating. Nose. Amusing. Testicles. Obvious. Throat. Not really. Ears. Trivial. His penis is a half inch private hunkered down in the shadow of his belly. The prick is about the diameter of a quarter, urethra peering out from the circular folds of the foreskin like a one eyed turtle. Bull’s-eye!
"Norman. Why do you keep staring at Mr. O’Toole’s balls?"
"Because here we do have a man who did not have the balls to keep his word. And The Pig wants a body part. And what I’m trying to figure out is whether a scrotal sack of balls constitutes one or two body parts."
O’Toole is staring straight ahead at the ceiling at some point miles away. I respect the fact he’s settled into stoicism. He’s given enough beatings to know his only ally is silence. Makes the job way easier on the nerves. Hopefully, he’ll only start screaming at the end.
"No pun intended Norman, but there are two issues here regardless of technicalities like that. Money and friendship. How much money did Martin need to have in pocket today?"
"A minimum of four large was promised. He hands me two with fourteen days to the next paycheck. He’s tapped out all over town. Peter’s sick of helping him pay Paul."
"Are we talking about a scrotal de-balling over two large then? That’s a thousand dollars a ball. I’m worried about setting a precedent. What happens if every time somebody is a grand short, they just hand over a testicle instead? How long can we stay in business?"
"And if we do a scrotal de-ball, won’t the scrotum be another body part? What happens if somebody gets the bright idea to hand over their scrotum next time we come by to collect? And just keep their balls?"
"Weasel, this is a case where It’s not the money it’s the principle, is not just a code for It’s the money. The Pig won’t be satisfied without a piece of O’Toole."
"Okay, then let’s work principles. Martin’s violated our friendship. True. But the scrotal de-ball would make an enemy of the man for the rest of his life, wouldn’t it Martin?"
Martin keeps the faith in silence. Wisely done. There is no correct answer to this question.
"And what if he goes into shock and dies on us? We’ll be responsible for the disposal of the body, and The Pig won’t feel like he owes us a dime. That’s a lot of work for no money. The Pig might even hold us responsible for Martin’s debt, since principles are involved. We’re the monkeys in the middle, Norm, the unlucky monkeys. So we better be smart monkeys."
I fondle the cable’s jaws.
"I’m getting sick of holding these damn things. Martin, I hope you don’t mind, but I’m going to leave them to hold onto you for a while."
A quick quiet gasp and silence. O’Toole’s found his backbone. You got to hand it to the man. I open the jaws and close them around the quick of the three smaller toes of his left foot. A quick intake of breath, and again, silence.
The trick with where the nail grows out of the flesh is to get as close to the nail’s origin as possible. The pain increases over time that way, but an uneasy, creeping discomfort supersedes the pain.. Sooner or later the subject will involuntarily twitch the grasping metal teeth off. Then the party will begin in earnest. Martin knows this drill well.
"Norman, time is money. How much time do you need me to invest in the O’Toole endeavor here? A couple of hours? All afternoon into the evening? Or are we talking something even longer term? What if I simply rip off a toe or two? Put them in a sandwich bag and deliver them to Salmonero with a heart warming message like ‘these little piggies can go in a glass jar on your desk?’"
"I need creativity, Weasel, not cuteness What the fuck kind of threat is a couple of toes in Brooklyn? You want to make a laughing stock of The Pig? You’ll be next on that floor."
"Just free associating, Norm".
I hear the tell tale clink of metal kiss the floor. Martin must have flinched. The jumper cable has hopped off. I bend over to pick it up.
"Uh oh, Martin. That’s naughty. Shirking off the cable is like shirking off a payment. It only forces me to increase the ante. Interesting earring this might make."
I let me voice trail off and stare at his right ear lobe. This leaves him completely unprepared as I suddenly lean towards his tightly contracted sack and close the jaws all the way over the testicles, capturing them in the relentless squeeze of the brass mouth. The saw teeth meet just at the base of his miserable, no doubt nervous penis.
O’Toole grunts and futilely tries to pull his body into a fetal curl. The manacles dig into the fleshy wrists and ankles. They should start bleeding in no time. That’ll look good later. Poor bastard starts thrashing. The cuffs cut ever deeper. But that cable is staying put. I take a butterfly knife from my back pocket and open it one handed.
"Well, Norman. Is this what we want?"
We, exclusive of Martin. Norman turns green and looks like he could lose a meal or two down here. More stench. Just what we need.
"Jesus, Weasel. You are a sadistic son of a bitch!"
"No, Norman. You’re the one who says we needed more for The Pig. I just wanted a couple of toes. I can rip these right off and we can be drinking in half an hour. So make up your mind. You’re the boss."
"I don’t know I don’t know I don’t know. He says it needs to be symbolic. What the fuck would be symbolic?"
Martin’s fae is a study in sweat and terror.
"Symbolic is heady stuff. It needs to be intelligent and memorable. That means somehow funny. Sort of where horror meets the harmless. As we all know, I’m pretty comfortable with a sharp blade. Do you think a good old fashioned home style circumcision would do the trick?"
That stops Norman dead in his tracks. I knew he’d like it the moment I thought bull’s eye earlier. Even Martin looks relieved. He knows if anyone can do a clean job of this, it’s me.
One long heartbeat passes. I can almost hear hamsters working the rusty wheels in Norman’s walnut brain. Another heartbeat. O’Toole starts shaking uncontrollably. Even I’m rooting for him by now.
"You know, Weasel, sometimes I wonder why I hire you, and sometimes I know why. This is one of those. Do it. Make it clean, and we’ll put the foreskin in a bottle full of Stolichnaya. If The Pig goes for it, everybody wins."
"O’Toole is actually smiling. Thanks Weasel. I’m sorry I ever called you a sadistic bastard. You’re a fucking genius."
"Only if The Pig swallows it, so to speak."
The blade was sharp. O’Toole had relaxed enough that we got a decent piece of meat with virtually no damage to the prick itself. It was precise work, so it took longer than I would have liked. Only incised a quarter inch at a time.
O’Toole’s so relieved, I don’t think he felt a thing. But he bled about a quarter of a cup. Norman started sopping up the blood with his white linen suit cuffs.
"This’ll look great for the boss. He’ll probably buy me a new suit."
He goes upstairs and returns with a handful of shot glasses, a bottle of Stolychnaya, and another of Tullamore Dew.
I drop the skin in the vodka and open the bottle of Irish whiskey. I fill the first glass and tell O’Toole that one’s reserved for his wounded Johnson. I put it down on the floor by his right hand. I pour him a second.
When we unchain him, he dips his dork immediately while Norman gets him back his clothes. He starts giggling, and before you know it we’re all cackling like a hen convention.
O’Toole flips us an extra hundred dollars he suddenly remembers he forgot he had. Norm hooks him up with a fresh shylock, insuring The Pig’s cash for tomorrow.
By now we’re three quarters of the way through the bottle and moving from tipsy to drunk fast. Hammered and staggering don’t look very far away either.
We know the rest of the way from here. Norm goes upstairs to the bar and calls a car service. The blood on his jacket had him dressed to impress. One of the old timers took a look and stared down into his beer mug at some place a quarter of century away.
"Ah. Now that’s how we used to do it, back in the day. Norm, you’re one of a dying breed, God bless you."
He chuckles about that downstairs.
"Okay, Martin. Let’s put this puppy to bed. Got any teeth that bother you?"
"Yup. Bottom left has been killing me, and I’ve been dodging the dentist for a month. See where it’s swollen?"
"Got it. Remember to stay relaxed. Here. Kill the bottle. O’Toole empties the quarter bottle in seconds. He unlocks his knees and stands still. Norman gives his face a good couple of smashes for the audience of wagging chins upstairs. Pro that he is, Martin takes them."
"We need a shot for blood. Let me fatten your lip on the other side."
"No problem Norm. Try not to loosen any of those teeth. They’re my chewing ones."
The left is surgical quality. Popped blood from the lower lip against the upper canine. We climb the stairs and pause at the door into the bar. O’Toole’s in front and turns back to look at us with a face smeared with the blood from his lip. He says with a lopsided smile,
"It’s show time."
Norm gives him a good shove that sends him staggering into some empty stools at the end of the bar. O’Toole staggers forward and almost collides with a codger nursing a small draft.
"Remember fuck face, let this be a lesson to the whole world. You fuck with The Pig, it’ll cost you one of your fucking balls. Try explaining that to the wife tonight, pal. Now get the fuck out of here, and don’t come back without twice what it’s supposed to be. Got it?"
O’Toole cowers with his hands over his crotch, and does a stiff legged hobble out the door. The car awaits.
The Pig loved it. He kept the vodka prominently displayed on his desk. He’d swirl Martin’s foreskin around the bottom, and never tired of telling the story about his soldiers who had a genius for the symbolic when they recovered his assets. People who pissed him off had to drink from it.
Being a cheap bastard, he refilled it with Gordon’s Gin every other month. And he never offered Norman a dime for the white linen suit.
"Cool, huh?"
The son of a bitch has already thrown me off the airplane. He said nothing about no sense of transitions. I suppose I should have guessed. So this is the liberation from the shackles of blah blah blah?
This is nothing that’s more nothing than I ever could imagined nothing could be. Super saturated nothing. No color. Not even black. No word for it. Just a sense of light that has been sucked off into a vast plurality of holes. A silence that makes what I remember as my skin crawl.
It only takes moments before the horror of what I miss most of all jumps in. Gravity. Without gravity’s permeating bath of orientation, every cell in my body is screaming with the agony of raped virginity. Even space station inhabitants orbit planets and participate in the universes web of gravitational interaction. I have all my answers now. Terrible answers.
Why they feed on agonized fear. Why they will not hesitate to consume an eon of human history for even a moment’s respite. This is our eternity.
As promised, everything is obvious. I can’t deny Norman told the factual truth. Trouble is if you nail a couple of facts together into some grotesque construction, your omissions are the bricks and mortar of hell.
This is absolutely nothing like what nothingness is supposed to be like. This is the presence of absence, not the absence of presence. How did they get this so wrong?
I think about that old joke where one of the damned looks at the new guy. New guy says "This is way worse than I thought it could be." The other says, "wait until the break is over."
Which is why I will find Norman at my earliest convenience, and blow his lying sack of shit being to a hell he never even had nightmares about. Yet. .
But first, I got a con to kill, and a new pinky nail I need to learn how to use. When I get back to the back I never knew I could yearn for like this.