They didn't know what to do with me. I was placed in a small room without furniture. Bare wood floors and a small window. Men crowded at the window and gaped openly at me. I was filthy, itchy, caked in dried blood and vomit. The men were highly agitated, jostling each other and jabbering. The effect was grotesque through the glass, as I could not hear them. They were staring, not at my breasts or crotch as I was used, but at my hands, my legs and feet.
I did nothing. I was a force acted upon. Caught in the whimsy of great and arbitrary powers, flung story to story with no structure of my own. I who have no future; I who have no past. Both belong to them. No body for it is my master's body, no will for it is my master's will, no thought for it is my master's thought. Obedience is bread. Obedience is wine.
Obey obey obey. I was rocking then and some days past. They cleaned me. Two men sprayed and scrubbed me with rough brushes until I was raw. I hardly noticed them except that they gawked openly at my limbs. I was a gray numb thing.
I slept a few times I think but didn't pay much attention. After some time my faux master came to visit me. He was a prim aristocrat this time, all waxed mustache, greasy hair and finely tailored clothes.
”You stupid fucking whore. You goddamn fucking blood clot!” He sputtered and paced as he swore. “I have put a heart into you. Your heart belongs to him. The motherfucker. My heart too. My heart, clogged with filth and worms, knotted parasites. But I put a heart in you, A heart to defy him with. A knife of my revenge. A knife of my revenge.” A petty man. A petty man trying to be vicious. A scared man trying to be cruel.
He beat me then, but what did I care if he bruised a body that was not mine? He did not hit hard. My old master beat me worse, cut slits into my neck, my back and arms as he fucked me. The old motherfucker was dead. The old motherfucker was dead.
I felt my heart beating. Beatings never really hurt. Not during them. That was later. Now I felt my heart pound in me. I would not run. My master's body that was beaten. I would not run, I would not run. And deep in me that strange heart beat, and I felt sand scrape through my fostered veins. And I felt a sob well up in me, and tears came from my eyes and the sob wracked through me. The pain was awful then. Deep welts raised my skin and my nerves tore in me. My lips moved trying to speak, I didn't know what, but pain and sobs and screams and the thunk, thunk of that awful heart filled my mouth and throat and lungs.
He was holding my hair and making me look into his eyes. The face was constant but the eyes were a gray mesh of a thousand eyes. “You are the knife of my revenge.” Tears streamed from my eyes. I collapsed as he released me and I sobbed. I had no thought. Wretched and broken, pain pulsed through me and I cried and clutched at myself.
Twice a day I was given a gruel which, while not inoffensive in flavor, was so indigestible that it produced the most extraordinary flatulence of my life. Great and terrible gusts of noxious gas thundered from my body and filled my small cell with a thick cloud. It grew worse with every feeding, until I lay on the filthy floor hugging my knees, with great stabbing pains tearing my bloated guts apart. I lost any sense of space or time. I was lost in that pain, writhing. I was a wisp of agony in a great black void. It was many days I think, but I do not know.
When the world came back my mouth was full of sticky sour tar. The same strange man who had guided me to my victim was before me, feeding the drug to me. He looked bemused, and his sunken eyes focused better than I remembered.
“I will take you to your trial,” he said dully. He sounded as though his tongue were swollen. I have no idea still who he was or how he came to be there. Some aristocrats son perhaps.
They cleaned me again, and swathed my arms and legs with thick cloth. They carried me to a larger room, full dark woods, that seemed all out of joint. Three men sat at desks at various heights, and seemed at impossible angles to each other. They bound me to chair behind a desk and the strange man sat next to me. I watched it all happen as if it were a dream, tasting the sour tar as my guts ached.
The world was back, but was far away and dark. Rather the world itself was bright, but I looked on it as if through a long blackened tunnel. My gut rumbled and I felt the pain pierce through me, but it felt more like pressure now than pain. I had to clench my sphincter to hold the noxious gas back.
“Order” said the judge, and I suddenly realized there were many people in the room. A man with a high powdered wig sat behind the highest desk. Various spectators, all men, sat behind us, a colorful array of costumes. Beside me at a small table sat the man.
The judge spoke: “In the land of Clachnik, believe above all things in three guiding principles.”
He spoke in the hoarse whisper of those trying to sound profound. My gut rumbled audibly and sharp pains spread through my abdomen.
“We believe that any moral society must hold up in its center its moral principles. We believe in every individual's right to liberty, that the individual should be protected from arbitrary abuse. We believe in the individual's right to gather and dispose of property according to their own whim and judgment. But we believe, above all, in life.”
A puff of gas escaped me with a loud boom. I clenched my sphincter down hard. The pain was not so terrible now. Flowers sprout and grew from my sour tongue. A light floating warmth now, not the great and terrible ocean. The courtroom seemed cherry, a colorful mix of indistinct objects that I could not quite focus on. I felt a little giggle escape my lips and was quickly shushed by the man besides me. How odd. My left breast itched but I could not move my hand to scratch it, as it was thoroughly bound. The judge prattled on.
“Long ago, mothers would leave their babies on the mountain side, or in baskets on the great river Lathnich as it traverses the plains beneath our city.”
The windbag continued but I drifted off. Justice. The means by which a society justifies its violence. An old master had said that. How a society plays at fairness. An ape kills another ape and it is nature. A man must play a game called justice first. Two dead apes.
My tit still itched but I could not scratch it. It barely bothered me. A gnat drowning in an ocean. Flowers bloomed from my tongue and I felt giddy inside. A great wonderful sea of indifference. Oh master, you have freed me from choice. Freedom in necessity. No self to be a slave. How do you know when you are not thinking like yourself? What is the self besides the constant shifting idea of self? We must always be ourselves. How easy is it to think of the problems in the world? How much of the world is apes doing what apes do?
My gut rumbled and pain, soft and distant, drifted through me. Hardly feeling it, I clenched my sphincter down hard, and there was a gentle, painful pulling as the gas retreated from the precipice.
“So this value” droned the judge, “This sacred respect of life is what makes our civilization great.”
Have I sketched enough of the scene? Do you, having now each clue, wish to move along this strange journey, content that nothing is missed where, events and ideas having been illuminated, the reader can only find one possible conclusion?
The truth was I had stopped paying attention. I floated in that sophisticated nowhere, playing games in my mind. La la I will exist, la la were my will to exist, la la should my will exist, da dum da dee, had my will existed. Yes, had it existed, it had not, it should but it had not.
Where was the woman of sensation that I had so recently been? Certainly my viscera still ached, throbbing through the drugs. And my sphincter was clenched tight against of the flood of gas and filth. But that was far away. A demon master. Ha! A murder on my conscious, but what is life? Tra la! Tra la! Certainly that wretched woman didn't miss it.
I don't remember much of what was happening with the judge. The room full of male spectators kept applauding. Tra la.
What conclusion would you reach here? How should the scene end? A daring escape, my faux master and I running madly through the halls of justice, chased my an army of rabid soldiers, saved only by an explosion of slippery shit that reduced their justice to a milieu of beshitted men taking pratfalls as we escaped into the free air?
Justice was not so significant that it could be mocked so. After the old windbag finished blubbering they led me to a back chamber where they had me give him a hand job. His cock was diseased and full of puss, but I didn't pay much attention. They bundled me up after and my faux master carried me away.