My faux master mostly kept me in a box. It was just large enough that I could lean a little to sleep, but small enough that there was no chance of falling down. He opened it a few times a day to let me use the chamber pot and to feed me the black tar. Mostly I stood alone and the tar sprouted and grew roots into my tongue and throat, and I floated there in his box.
And I floated there, and I floated there.
Sometimes he would take me from his box and I would lay with rotten cadavers. They would push their dry, too tight skin against mine, and plant in me their infertile seed. But I only floated and I did not care, too high for the horror or disgust of the moment to reach through to me. They were distant horrors. Zombies in a tragic play, decayed, empty husks that jerked about to their beast's minds. Their human minds. And I the vase to catch the overflow. La da, La da.
I know not how many days or weeks or months past. In the drug I lost all track of time, every moment seemed an infinity, the future and past a vague abstraction too unimportant to ponder. And slowly, deep in a body that seemed almost an alien thing to me, I felt my heart beat. My own heart. And with it, that terrible unease. Murder, it said, murder murder, with each beat, murder. It built only slowly, each moment it seemed a little stronger than before, the only progression of that time, time building and moving forwards, the unavoidable catastrophe, the falling body that knows it must strike earth.
My true master came to me. Still in the box, the reek of urine and feces.And there was light and my master held a woman in his claws. Impossibly, in a too large space without limits. It was the woman I had slain. She rolled her head in circles, foam dripping from her lips, strange shrieks and sounds, inarticulate sounds that made me question the words I had heard her speak.
My master now had the body of a tiger and the head of a man. His claws, now the claws of a vulture, racked through her flesh, and through the thick gouges spilled her guts. Her eyes bursts their sockets. And a baby, too little to live outside the womb, struggled amongst the viscera,
“MINDLESS LITTLE SPECK OF ICE, MINDLESS BIT OF FIRE,” thought my master, his thoughts deafening my own. “NEED NEED NEED, THE HEART OF ALL THAT ARE HUMAN. NEED. LOVE ME LOVE ME FUCK FUCK FUCK.” He snapped the infant's neck. “BROKEN LITTLE THING BROKEN LITTLE THING, YOU MUST BREAK MORE LIKE THIS.”
I let myself from the box. It was simple, a latch that jiggled loose in a few minutes. Floating, crazed, I stumbled through a thick black fog. A great structure was before me all white marble and columns, and I stumbled into and through it and a thousand faces watched and gawked at my nakedness. A thousand gray undifferentiated faces, all eyes and eyes and eyes. Nobody stopped me as I floated through the streets and buildings. Different streets. Pastel colors blurred into each other, hard angles jumbled impossibly together.
And then I was alone, and a great pit of refuse was before me and I vomited flowers into it. The world drifted by, quiet under its thick black fog. A heavy mist of my drugged mind. I sat and was quiet with it. A man came and dropped into the pit a bit of bone and skin. Another man dropped into it some broken clay, and another man, staggering drunk, urinated into the pit.
I paid no mind. I floated with flowers sprouting from my lips and tongue, and the great subsonic thud of my twin hearts, one screaming murder and the other love, and in my hand was a broken shard of pottery and the thundering heartbeats bore down on me, their terrible contradiction bore me down and I could not bear the weight, I writhed on the earth, naked and filthy. And with the clay I scratched bloody lines into my flesh, scraped as if my hatred could carve away my human form that I might appear the monster that I was.
A man kicked me and laughed and still I could not rend my skin from me, and the man had grabbed my breast in his meaty hands and squeezed as if its milk would spay salvation over him, and still my strange second heart loved and pitied the lonely heart that could only take by force what should wash over him with love and love and love and his cock was battering at me and wide I spread my legs and scraped open a vein inside my thigh and blood poured out and my love for him flowed out and over me and I held wide my legs and pulled his bloody cock inside me and laughed and laughed with joy! What joy! That this man and I should be one! This brute, this clenched and throbbing mass of muscle, instinct and lust, should join with me, should hold me in the genital embrace that we might be some savage obscenity of sweat and blood and cum, more beast than mind, more human than these play things we call our selves. And I laughed and laughed for joy, and great giddy tears heaved themselves from my eyes, and sobbing I scratched deep channels of skin and blood into his back and clutched him deeper into me.
He was screaming and hit at me, and with great love I took the pain and held him to me, and he scratched at me and he held a knife and cut away the woman's breast that was sewn to me. And from my torn breast poured sand, and it soaked up the blood of our mating, and from my breast poured all my joy and love, all the beauty and wonder, and left nothing in me.
The man beast clutched at his torn testicle, I must have torn it somehow, and stumbled cursing into the black black black. I sat and rocked and rocked. And some time later it was dark and my head spun about me. A woman was there, a girl really. Dressed in silk rags, a whore once, now filthy and discarded. She stumbled over me and broke me from my ennui. She was tearful and tried to speak but sobbed instead. Me, I thought, had I a self to pity.
She had an infant, not more than a day our two old. She starred at me with shame on her face. I looked back with a blank mind, dizzy from my loss of blood.
“I came to kill my baby” she said, sputtering and sobbing.
I stared at, or maybe through, her. I saw her but made no sense of her. My hearts beat, but muted. I had neither hate nor love in me. I had nothing in me. Obey obey obey. Obedience is life. Obedience is my food and drink. Obedience is life.
“I, I came to kill her.” she said, breaking into uncontrolled sobs. “My baby, I came to kill my baby.”
I stared back blankly. I don't know why I looked at her at all. How did all this concern me? Obey, my tired mind whispered to me. Obey and kill the child. But it was distant, I could barely hear.
“What!” she screamed at my silence, an angry sputter. “What!”
“I am with death,” I said, my voice distant and strained, my voice speaking from some other part of me. She seemed to see my bloody flesh for the first time and she stepped back, eyes wide. “A strange bloody mess! A tangle of sinew and bone. I am a tangle of sinew and bone and mess mess mess.” I stepped towards her, my eyes fixed intensely on her.
“Whore!” my voice cried, loud and righteous, “Whore, I absolve you. I will take your baby and murder it. I will take the sin from you. I will crack its neck and with its entrails I shall write the unholy signs of my master. The vulgar and obscene sigils of my demon master!”
I was stammering and shouting in my excitement, stumbling towards her. She clutched her baby and stepped back, but stood transfixed, horror and shame crying out her eyes.
“Obedience is my food! It is my drink, it is all” I reached for the baby. And I felt my alien heart in me, thunk, thunk, a subsonic thunder pulsing through my body, shaking me so that the world seemed to wink in and out, and with it came a queasy shame, nausea and dizziness.
“I am death I am death I am a tool of the obscene, of the filth!” I cried, uncertain now as sand scraped through my veins. My true heart beat its hate through me still. Obey obey obey. But I stumbled, uncertain as the sand slowed my raging blood. It took all my will to focus on her, the world around her and the child was all a blackness. I stumbled another step forwards, all my will in that step, all my will to keep from falling and tearing out my veins.
The woman was shrieking and clutching her baby, backing away as if to run. An ape now, her human complications buried in terror and shame. Obey, obey, obey. Another step and the baby was there, I snatched it from her hands and she shrieked. The infant wailed and choked on its sob. The woman rushed me but I knocked her easily to the ground. I held the baby in my hands and I felt nothing. The pressure eased, I felt dizzy and giddy, uncertain of the ground beneath me but also peaceful, floating somehow still.
The infant's stupid eyes stared up at me as it wailed. A vacant being, cosmically insignificant. A black hole of need. I raised it, to snap its neck then, but that strange heart, I felt nothing for the child. But the sobbing woman was at my feet, clutching at it as I held it above her, my foot on her to hold her down, though I do not know how I managed that. Some trickle of love inside me blossomed up. She was me. Whore, used by the world, suffering for her nature. Some little bit of love left inside my battered flesh.
But obey, obey, my heart beat. Not my murder, not mine. A tool of my master. Not mine. I raised the infant up, it's fragile neck would almost snap itself if I but shook the thing. It wailed at me but the sound barely penetrated. I raised it up. I would do the thing. I would obey. I raised it up, and hesitated.
And a hand touched my naked shoulder and a soft nasally voice said “please stop,” It was a command, gentle and firm at once. I did not mean to listen. Love, love, that strange heart in me, my blood screaming murder in my veins, the sand clogging, an ineffective sludge of hate in my veins, poisoning me. Vertigo overcame me again and the world seemed too far away. That strange heart in me, thundering through my consciousness, bearing me down beneath its weight. I did not mean to listen. The babe's life was nothing. Another death in an infinite series of deaths. Neither good nor evil, only dead. A cold uncaring stone.
But my blood pushed through me too thick, I hesitated, I did not snap that crying infants neck, I did not. A terrible moment, my master's will thundering in my ears and yet I did not do it. A tool that did not obey. A broken tool. I was weak, blood leaked from my missing breast, I stumbled as if to faint, but did not fall. The world's edges filled in with black, I was not sure where was down. I lowered the baby, I did not snap it's neck. I lowered the child and her mother took her from me.
“Care for her,” said the man, handing her something, maybe coins? I stumbled away but fell. Too much blood gone. The world spun and blackness closed around me. I blinked it away and I was on my side. I stared down at my naked chest and a strange breast, that other woman's breast alone on my chest, the gory raw flesh where it's twin should be. Should I be feeling pain? I heaved myself up to run again but only stumbled and sank, too dizzy and weak. The taste of flowers strong still in my mouth. No pain, it was as if I floated on the ground, sinking into a great blackness, sinking into death. I did not mind that.
“You are badly hurt” the nasally voice said.
“I must kill it, I must kill it” I muttered. The world returned around me, but hazy, a black and dreamy edge to everything. I started up after the woman but only fell pathetically, flopping on the earth.
“Go now,” he said. Go where? But then the woman left sobbing, but with her child clutched to her. I chased her but only flopped again, I do not think I even rose an inch from the earth. The man caught my arm. I turned to claw at him but only touched his bearded face with my hand, a gentle pathetic pat.
“You're badly hurt” he said, his voice cautious and uncertain. I looked down at my severed breast, at the bloody sand that still seeped down my body. I tried to stand again but fell again. Tentatively, he placed a hand on my shoulder and turned me so my chest was up.
“Damn” he said. I was nothing again. My two thumping hearts were far away. The pit of refuse, the man, they both were far from me and retreating, as though they were behind a thick clouded glass. An infinity of atoms spread across all of space. A vague and uncertain thing. I sank into blackness and hoped that it was death I fell into. The world pulsed back once, when he hefted me into his arms, but it was a faint stutter, it fell away again and it was black black black.