M A R A N A T H A


© Osfer, May 2005


All rights reserved.

May only be distributed for free.

May not be altered in any way.

Contains material of an erotic and homosexual nature which may be illegal to read in your country, state, province or region.

The author takes no responsibility for transgressions on the part of the reader

Comments welcome at osfer.kesh@gmail.com.

Available on paperback in 2005

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~ Enjoy. ~

Chapter XIV - as told by Sybrand Brubaker.


I am walking. The street is busy with morning people. People running to and from public transport stations and work, women ushering children to school, teenagers obviously playing truant. Beside the pavement the road is just coming out of gridlock, with less expensive cars populating the asphalt than just a few minutes ago. Walking in Maranatha is a pleasant experience, if you don't mind the noise and the stink of fumes and of competing foodstuffs from the shops you pass, don't mind the annoying screech of youngsters being poorly managed by their too-soft parents, of girls giggling and bitching about nothing, boys taunting each other about nothing, the glare of the bright winter sun overhead and the air, just cold enough to give you a chill but just warm enough to make you sweat if you're clothed in winter garb, if you don't mind the drone of hundreds of thousands of miserable lives, the flitting snatches of images and phrases from radio stations blaring from open-windowed, horn-beeping cars and televisions mounted in kiosks, news reports complaining about rises in murder rates and this morning's brutal attack on the Sargasso building., if you don't mind the homeless people littered liberally around the streets the farther you get from the commerce district. Like I say, pleasant.
Two people are walking with me. One is annoying and can barely keep up, the other isn't real and consequently can move through people, which is even better than the way I move between them. The one who can't keep up, who keeps getting bumped into and has to trail behind me, is the jackal I saw with Tiber during my surgery and earlier, up on Tiber's floor of the Sargasso building. He's been prattling on about how he knows of my reputation, and have I been working for Mister Ferrum long, and he only started working for him a month ago, he was a bounty hunter of sorts before then, something that runs in the family, and then he mentioned his brother and became quiet. I don't speak to him at all, he annoys me and I am trying to fathom just why Tiber wants him dead. That is, I assume he wants him dead, because he ordered the jackal to meet me outside the Sargasso building once I got past the police and escort me into the city. It may seem like a leap in reasoning, Tiber tasking this jackal, one Kierkegaard, to me and my conclusion that he must be killed, but you don't know me, nor my relationship with Tiber.
We have an understanding, he and I. Which is to say, he seems to understand me but I don't understand him, which fascinates me and is the reason why he is one of the few people in the world I honestly don't want to kill, ever, because as long as he is in the world I am not totally unique. He has a predator's mind in a herbivore's body, something which never fails to catch his business adversaries by surprise. It puts tremendous strain on his psyche, something that I can relate to, though he seems to weather it much better than I. He doesn't appear at all insane, something I can't boast.
Evidenced by the second person walking along with me, Jeremy. He appears to me as a grey fox dressed in grey, featureless clothes. A long grey coat with shoulder-pads gives him an air of austerity, which his permanent friendly smile belies.
"Have you figured Maranatha out, yet?" he asks me. I always listen attentively to Jeremy, because he always has interesting things to say. By always I mean ‘always when he speaks', which isn't often. I can go months or years without seeing him, and then he'll be there, knelt beside a child I've been contracted to kill, laying a hand on the child to calm her before I grip the back of her neck and rupture her spine with my thumb-claw, or he'll be sitting on the counter of a hotel room kitchen where I'm frying up the kidneys of the bell-boy I've been dismembering in the bathroom, and he'll strike up a conversation with me. He is always insightful and I love seeing him. I try to kill most foxes I meet, because he tends to visit most often when I kill that species.
I ask Jeremy what he means, but my lips haven't fully settled into their stitches and my new skin sits awkwardly on the muscles of my cheeks, so the words are garbled. The verbose, chattering jackal behind me pushes past two overweight mothers arguing about the price of veal today to walk beside me for a spell and asks me what I said, but I ignore him and as I return my focus to Jeremy, the jackal has to fall behind or impact the streetlight I pass.
"I can tell you now, and you can realize it later, or I can come back later, after you've realized it." Jeremy says. He has his hands clasped behind his back and unfolds them for a moment to reach behind and between his shoulder-blades, scratching. He does that often.
"Now," I say and my voice has a very different character than usual. Whatever it was Tiber's surgeons sprayed down my throat, it made my voice deeper, more raspy and glacial, rough granite slabs mashing together. I like it.
Jeremy smiles at me, becoming translucent as he passes through a younger fox with headphones on. He doesn't need to ask why, even though I'd love for him to visit me again, I want to hear what he has to say now. I'm an animal, after all. I will always elect for a little food now over a lot of food later, it's simple. I look at him with great attention because if he's going to give me some clue or insight, it's monumental. It might even have something to do with the mission I'm on, though it's very unlikely. I stop, and the jackal bumps into me, and people complain as they try to shove past me and through Jeremy's image.
"Maranatha is a place where history repeats itself. Things don't just happen, they happen again. And people here never learn from their mistakes. You'll find this useful, I think."
I gape at him. His insights have always been sharp, but more specific. He taught me the love I have for, and the care I take of, my fingers as killing instruments. He taught me that I can observe my emotions and my body's pain with the same detachment with which I can observe my toes. He taught me to accept the things that happen to my body on my long, winding road toward death, and to accept that that road will be littered with corpses and that I should enjoy that aspect of my existence as well. Let me repeat, for clarity's sake, that Jeremy is a figment of my schizoid mind and that he taunts me and drives me to draw out a particular torment as often as he tells me insightful things.
But this degree of revelation is new. He's never mentioned anything that doesn't have anything to do with me personally, and here he's talking about the nature of this city. He's already fading and it's as if the jackal can now move more freely, as the pedestrian crowds thin out and he can walk more comfortably beside me, tugging his coat collar down now the wind isn't so fierce.
"Who was that?" he asks, walking beside me as we stroll past a baker's shop. The smell of fresh bread is intoxicating, especially when mixed with the faint scent of offal from the containers behind the butcher's across the street. These so distract me that it takes me a little more than a second to become curious about what the jackal just said. "That gray fox you were talking to." He must be confused, or perhaps there simply happened to be a gray fox walking near me when I was conversing with Jeremy. At any rate, I feel I am nearing my destination and I ignore him.
There's no one thing in particular that tells me this, not the sight of the oppressively looming skyline in the distance, nor the more weather-worn look of the buildings in this part of town. Not the hurried, eyes-to-the-ground manner of the blandly dressed pedestrians, no doubt selecting the drabbest possible attire so as not to accidentally spark the ire of a gang whose ‘colors' they are accidentally wearing. Some of those gang folk are plainly visible, congregating around expensive cars in their expensive clothes, waving expensive guns and doing expensive drugs to distract them from their all-too-cheap lives. Unconsciously, my fist clenches with the desire to put a few of them out of their misery, or to see, purely out of curiosity, whether I could survive if I simply ran into that group on the corner and started shredding them.
But the day's still early, and there's plenty of time for that.
"Do you have a gun?" I ask the jackal at my side. He grins and nods and can barely keep up with me when I round a corner between two buildings. I'm getting closer to where I need to be, I can feel it. You're aware of the childish old metaphor, "you're getting warmer," yes? I never understood that. When I approach somewhere I need to be, whether I know it specifically or not, it feels to me like the air gets thicker, like it's more difficult to move until I penetrate the very heart of this obstruction and find myself precisely where I am required to be.
I positively grunt with effort, pushing through the webbing of this resistance and my paces slow, much to Ulrich's confusion. To his credit, he doesn't comment or complain. I might not make his death too painful. Perhaps even instantaneous? I'll see how I feel when the time comes. In the meantime, I almost trip over my feet as I push through the last of the pressure and re-enter ‘thin air', so to speak. My jackal guard – how like Ophios! – follows with some confusion and blinks in the sunlight that bisects the brick-building-enclosed plaza we find ourselves in, casting a line of light straight through the middle of a shadowy square.
The light is my path and I experience a hilarious, divine ecstasy as I spread my arms and imagine myself performing a balancing act on a beam of golden sunlight across an abyss of depravity, as an errant son of Mafdet – no, with my new face, hand-stitched and hand-stolen from my dear colleague Claude, I ought to represent a panther god, should I not?
"Do you know any panther gods?" I ask Ulrich, who follows me with some confusion as, in the purest elation, I walk foot-over-foot along the thin line of sunlight, arms outstretched far enough that one could see the slightly red seam between the panther fur covering my hands and wrists and my natural stippled grey hide running up toward my elbow and further. As my eyes adjust to the light I can see the huddled figured in the shadows more clearly... Bums. Homeless. Transients. Intransigent, despite their ability to adapt to their environs. I know these types. Many claim not to want a regular life, so comfortable in the segregated, semitransparent reality in which they live, so distant from everyday life that they believe themselves to have a unique perspective on it. Illusions. I clear my throat.
"Robert Holloway."
I said these words quite softly, so it's unsurprising there's no reaction, not even a twitch. I repeat it, a little louder and now I notice some shuffling on the northern border of the little plaza of poverty. People move to the side, revealing something of a tent made of rags and patches of cardboard and similar, hardly distinguishable from any other such structures. Then something flashes in the tent's opening, something yellow and I stagger back as if I'd just been shot.
The concrete surges beneath me in waves, I try to balance myself but the movements are too quick and I'm rolling over the ground, holding my ears – Claude's ears – and the pressure makes blood seep from the seams. I let go, quickly, but only because the pain in my stomach begins to outweigh the bashing agony in my skull. I open my mouth to scream but the sound comes out as a choking, hacking gurgle as my stomach empties itself and in the process of purging, my vision returns to normal and the pain ends.
I tremble, and I'm still unbalanced, but I spit the sick out of my mouth and onto the yellow puddle on the floor and stand up, blinking to see, and find there's clear motion from the square's denizens toward the two or three small alleys that offer routes of escape. My hand clasps the jackal's shoulder, fingerclaws extended through the holes in Claude's hide, and they pierce Ulrich's coat – his name was Ulrich, wasn't it? – and shoulder and he winces, but doesn't pull away. "Kill anyone who tries to leave."
Those words, and the flash of the jackal's gun as I let him go, cease the ripple of movement and this fetid little pond of poverty returns to perfect stillness. "Good," I say with a smile, righting myself, and the stillness turns to frozen paralysis. I always sense a particular kind of shock from people when they witness someone, in this case myself, suffering very powerfully and then righting himself as though it bothered him no more than would a modest burp. The fact that my eyes, ears and wrists are bleeding probably helps. "Now. Robert Holloway," I repeat and I proceed toward the tent, now abandoned by its neighbors. From inside there's the stirring again, a gruff cough and a flash of yellow that makes me dry retch again, though this time it doesn't catch me off guard and I can take the searing pain in stride, keep walking on my unsteady legs and focus through the alternately green-red haze that poisons my vision.
"I'm Holloway," says the gruff voice. No fear, which would be curious if coming from a citizen, but far less rare coming from a bum with nothing to live for. I make a quick judgment as to his nature, and decide he runs on guilt. It is guilt which motivates this man to segregate himself from society and to cloister himself with this filth. Here, he can do the least harm. Interesting.
"Do you know why I'm here?" I ask. My voice is raspy, stomach acid having given my throat that typical rawness, the spasming in my abdomen causing a continuous warble to my voice's timbre. I wonder what that yellow thing is that so excites my instincts that my body reacts so violently to it. I wonder, as well, whether Robert Holloway is going to cause any clarity to form on the subject of why Tiber called me to Maranatha, why he pitted me against Claude, and what the significance is of the names he had me memorize.
"Ain't got a goddamn clue, bud," is what Robert Holloway replies as he climbs out of his tent, but initially I don't hear him because a thunderous buzzing obliterates my hearing, as of a septillion perfectly harmonious wasps which had suddenly swooped, hummingbird-like, into a perfectly static crystalline formation on the inside of my skull. After my hearing, my sight spirals toward absence, first the color fades from everything and then the shape, leaving me with blobs of light and dark which my brain tells me have meaning – ‘wall', is what one blob means and ‘gun' the other and I know this despite the fact that I can't differentiate the blobs, and then there are so very many that my mind shudders to contain them all. Brick, person, belt, sky, cloud, dust, dirt, concrete, leather, face, enamel, oil, all of the concepts we normally only passingly contemplate and instinctively process now clamoring and crowding to fit, at once, in my consciousness. And while that consciousness is, as I've indicated, exceptionally expansive, it's by no means enough to contain the full, total realization of even this small space around me. As if in response to the pressure in my mind, my body tries to empty itself again and wet slime passes my lips, a sensation so clear and unilateral that I cling to it for support.
I must be flailing and screaming, I usually do when this happens. I can only imagine Ulrich's panic, employed to guard someone with a reputation greater (or worse) than Jack's, now mentally degenerated to the unrestrained capacity of a child with a vicious migraine and tasked, as well, with the duty to keep the denizens of this plaza pacified. I can't imagine what it would be like to be intimidated by a situation like that. It must be wonderful.
One color emerges from the zero-gravity maelstrom that surrounds me and punches through me, and it's yellow. I hunger for it suddenly, with a purity that overrides all over sensations, like a child hungering for a particular type of food, its brain tricked by millions of years of evolution to transform the biological process of comparing the food's nutritional value discerned by scent to the nutritional deficiencies of its body into the emotion of desire. I desire that color, that object, I ache for it. And like any predator, without restraint, I pursue it.
The yellow is wrapped around a body and with all my strength I work to extract that meat object from the precious color. Merely touching it causes my sense of balance to return, my vision instantly clarifying, though the low, buzzing hum continued unabated. I scream, I know this because I feel my jaw ache, I scream with all my being and finally, finally I have what I need, I have the yellow and the hunger abates and the assault on my senses abates and the pain abates and I stand, upright, laughing.
Ulrich's eyes show their whites and every single pair of nicked or torn ears in the square is folded back as far as they'll go. . If shock was what these people experienced after my recovery from vomiting, there isn't yet a word to describe the nature of the paralysis that grounds them as, after my fit of trembling and rolling and screaming, I am suddenly calm, and chuckling.
I'm wearing a yellow raincoat, you see, and I find this terribly funny. As an experiment, I grab the hem, moving to take the coat off, since It's pulled on over the leather jacket I was already wearing, but just as I suspected, my stomach heaves again. My body, or my subconscious, or perhaps some other facet of me entirely wants this coat and won't let me be without. That's fine by me. I have other things to think on.
"Jesus Tapdancing Christ, man! For fuck's sake, take it, take it!."
The body I had taken out of the coat is now lying on the ground, his shirt torn, exposing a rotund belly with the typical coloration of a badger. The old male's face is so grimy one can barely see the white stripes along his face and one might take him for some sort of bear, in the dark. "You are Robert Holloway," I state and I sense that Ulrich takes comfort in the way I return to business, prompting him to return to his, which isn't difficult since the crowd he has to keep quiet is utterly paralyzed. "Where did you get this coat?" Robert Holloway makes a few noises signaling confusion, so to help him clear his mind, I stroll to one of the walls, where a large white polar bear, pupils narrow and eyes red-rimmed from drug-abuse, take the lit joint from his lips, pick up the whiskey bottle he's loosely, limply cradling, roll up the sleeves of my precious yellow coat – there are some gasps, as this exposes the seams where my grey-furred arms are stitched to the sleek black-furred gloves I'm wearing – and smash the bottle over his head, dousing him in foul-reeking whiskey, giving him a quick stab in the ample belly with the broken bottleneck before tossing the joint in his face, causing him to start burning.
He's groaning, trying very slowly to bat out the flames, clearly riding a recently scored high and unable to adequately rise to the occasion. Blood spurts in a little fountain from the gash in his belly while his face and upper body burn away and there are further gasps and shrieks, though none move for fear of Ulrich's weapon, instead huddling together against the walls, literally clinging to each other. I smile. It's not that they have any love for one another, these people. They just want to make sure their neighbors don't move out of the way and leave them as lone targets.
The badger is reacting to what I have done. Remarkably quickly for a male of his size he rises to his feet and charges, thick arms outstretched. I straighten my coat, put one foot backward and dart my other hand forward to grip him by the muzzle, instantly ceasing his motion. My spine and my injured knee catch the momentum; there's some pain, but it produces the desired effect – awe. "Robert Holloway," I say patiently as I push the male back to the ground, the polar bear having now ceased his groaning. Likely he's died of asphyxiation, too high to notice any of the pain. I feel sorry for him. "Robert Holloway, if you answer my questions I'll most likely simply leave. Where did you get this coat?"
Robert Holloway seems more clearly now to understand the nature of his situation, and he answers. He tells me he found it in a dumpster downtown recently, though actually he found it earlier. I ask him what he means, patiently, because people tend to babble unclearly when they're frightened. He explains that he found it months ago, and kept it, and then gave it away to a handsome young male, with whom he slept, and that he later found the same coat in another dumpster. His sentence doesn't end quite right and I perceive that he has more to tell about this person, but he is difficult, so I stand up and walk in the direction of one of the walls, where the huddled people start to shriek in panic until Robert Holloway calls me back, explaining that, mere days ago, he met the young male again and that they coupled again, but that he looked different.
When he's finished speaking, he looks at me, and I look at him. A destitute old man, lying on the floor at the mercy of criminals and madmen, who could be a man with a house and a family or a lover or at the very least a place in society, who would be a benefit to his neighborhood and to all who knew him, but for his wretched, self-chastising guilt over something he did or didn't do, which he feels should have happened otherwise. I contemplate, once again, what guilt is, because while I know the word I have never experienced it, like love or affection.
My silent contemplation lasts just long enough for me to realize that I feel no need to ask more and that I have lost interest in this place, so I turn, and I walk away, and once I reach the street Ulrich understands that this isn't a dramatic gesture but that I'm genuinely leaving, I hear him shout some threats and fire a gunshot, which may have been in the air or into somebody, I don't know. Shortly thereafter the jackal comes jogging out of the alley and onto the street and falls into pace next to me.

By the time Ulrich and I reach a place where I feel like stopping, which is at least an hour or two of solid, silent walking, I have developed a measure of appreciation for the jackal. He hasn't asked any questions, and while, in part, this is because he fears me, I feel it is also because he is beginning to understand what I am and how I function. I feel rather comfortable with him now, and have spent some time during the walk considering methods of killing him that would most show him my appreciation.
When I stop, immediately Ulrich is at my side, reaching under his jacket for his gun, but I lay my hand on his and stop him. "We're not here because of a name on the list, Ulrich. We're here because..." I scan my surroundings, letting it inform me why I've chosen to stop here and when I'm faced with a splendidly crafted sign with gold letters on a red background, I understand, and it makes me smile. "We're here because I'm hungry."
The windows of the Dong Ma Eatery – an understated name for what looks to be quite a prosperous restaurant, perhaps hinting at more humble origins – are dark and there are no lights on inside. The sun on the streets is at its peak, casting a dry, pale warmth to battle with the hesitant frost that's been creeping in and out of the air all morning. When I stand at the glass door for over a minute, Ulrich looking rather anxious behind me, all the more so when he suddenly jumps at the sound of a distant police siren, an older fox appears on the other side of the door. He shakes his head, and then his arms to the negative. "I'm hungry," I explain to him, but he continues shaking his head.
"Close, close," the old fox enunciates, pointing at the sign to the side of the door, indicating the Eatery's opening hours. He turns his back to me and takes his mop out of his bucket to continue vigorously cleaning the white-and-black tiled floor. I knock on the window again.
"I'm hungry," I repeat and reach into my pocket, finding a money clip. I've never fully understood money, and while Tiber has frequently offered to explain it to me I've always found my interest to start wandering after the first few sentences and we both simply gave up. The roll of bills is quite thick, and I tap it against the window, which attracts the old fox' attention. "I'm hungry."
This time, the meaning of my words seems to ring home and the fox immediately sets his bucket and mop aside and runs to the door, jangling keys to unlock the locks while he shouts incomprehensible commands over his shoulder with obvious enthusiasm. Ulrich and I are led into the restaurant, whose lights flicker on suddenly and the older fox bids us to wait at the ‘wait to be seated' podium while he closes the door and begins to draw the curtains on all the windows, a laborious task which he takes to with relish.
The colors are dark, rich and deep, reds and blues, the mere sight of which gives the sensation of being wrapped in velvet, all decorated with gleaming gold and onyx, or crafty simulations of such materials. The chairs are high-backed, with thickly padded upholstery and the large round tables of deep-varnished mahogany are spaced far apart. I must be holding a lot of money, that the proprietor of such a fine establishment should alter his regular opening hours for me.
The money is pressed, in full, into the hand of a young Siamese cat whose gender I can discern neither through sight nor scent, which is uncommon for me. The creature, whatever the case, is beautiful in appearance, garb and manner, and soon joined by four more, all wrapped in black silk robes, tight around the flat (or flattened) chest and wide, sensual hips, flowing loose about the legs, whose cream-colored hide sometimes teasingly offers glimpses through the nearly imperceptible folds and bands of the garment. They appeared out of nowhere, these Siamese, and though they have no features that distinguish one from the other I become aware that every time one of them disappears, gracefully vanishing into the discrete, recessed black doors that lead to the service area or to the kitchen, it is a different cat, identically dressed, which reappears. This is curious, but it entirely fails to attract my interest and I am quite comfortable.
Soup bowls with those elegant porcelain spoons the Chinese favor, black-lacquered chopsticks with gold engravings which, considering the earnestness of our hosts, will most likely be destroyed after our meal. Carafes of spring water and red wine are placed on the table without Ulrich or myself asking for them and to drink from them we have the choice of crystal glasses or bowls. This thoughtful blending of Western and Eastern culinary styles is continued in the plate setting, which is complimented by jade plates with gold trim and silverware which is as decorative as it is functional. Menus are produced, thick, leather-bound books displaying pictures of almost every meal, and are removed as quickly as they appeared when Ulrich makes his selection and I show no interest whatsoever. With a smile and a nod, the Siamese who takes the menu from me assures me that the chef's selection will not disappoint.
All this, mind you, without a word. Only soft, bare footsteps, the rustle of silk, the gentle clink and ting of tablesetting and soft, ephemeral music, in short, it's utterly sublime. I wonder if any of my victims now reside in afterlives as sublime as this. I wonder if I will, when my time arrives. I consider that if my existence has to continue beyond this wretched life, I would like it to be like this.
As we wait, and simply enjoy the atmosphere of utter peace and luxury, all but four of the cats depart. Their slitted eyes display a serenity and calm I rarely see and their motions are mesmerizing in their fluidity. Hips asway, black-tipped tails trailing after them like smoke after an incense bowl and with perfect synchronicity they circle the table, feline muses smiling soft smiles as they regard my jackal guard and his panther prince. Such a pantheon we represent, it brings tears to my eyes.
A look of shock, then from one of the cats and the manner in which that shock dissipates tells me this one, at least, is a male, though I know no more about the others than before. The shock was at the sight of my stitches. The jacket under my precious raincoat fell open, it seems, exposing, ha ha, my seams. I regard the felines who share a look as they unzip the jacket under my raincoat and peel the collar back as if they understand that removing my yellow raincoat would mean the death of them all.
One straddles my lap side-saddle, the male, and he's a creature of silk and air, so light. He takes my hands and holds them, palm-up, bidding me to hold them in his position while he peels my sleeves back. The other stands behind my chair and frees my neck from obscuration by the triple collars of shirt, jacket, coat and my whole body shivers deliciously as two pairs of delicate feline hands stroke my bloody stitches. The shivers turn to chills and back to shivers when I feel a coolness around wrists and neck, and I must have experienced another, brief episode because there are now bowls of water on the table, one wine-red and the other nearly clear and a pile of square linen napkins which the felines tending to me take, wet, and apply to my stitches to clean them, squeezing the reddened napkins out over the wine-colored bowl before they lay them in a basket.


A thing lays.


A person lies.


I've never lied in my life.


Am I?


Beautiful.


Everything used to be so beautiful.


Jimmy Knuckles, how could you?



My Ophios is enjoying himself. While I'm enjoying the bathing by my curiously mute and furiously cute attendants his pair of felines is treating him to different kind of cleansing. Apparently his dick was in need of cleaning because, by the bobbing of the lower Siamese' head just below the table it's getting a thorough tongue-bath. Either the young cat had his or her tongue surgically smoothed like some of the working boys like to do (such a challenge, to be a feline cocksucker – I wonder if I should try it sometime?) or he's a master at his art because Ulrich is thoroughly enjoying himself. He's sprawled out in his chair, balanced perfectly on its hind legs, swayed back and forth by the sensuous motions of the two felines, one at his feet, the other, like mine, behind him, sharing open-mouthed yet shallow kisses. Ulrich's eyes are closed, his jacket open to reveal a sweater-clad chest which I know, without seeing it, bears even more scars than even my body does.
Time passes. He climaxes, his sighs suddenly laden with a high-pitched whine, the cat at his feet slowing the bobbing of his or her head... But the scene doesn't change, and it continues, and Ulrich climaxes again and only then does he open his eyes. By this time, my stitches are cleaned and feel far more comfortable, even my clothes have been washed, as much as possible without me taking them off, and I have hardly a bloodstain to show for the surgery I underwent mere hours ago. Ghost-like, the four felines vanish through the wooden doors and before they can even fall shut behind them, Ulrich and I both already wincing at the loud slam that's going to ruin the blissful calm we've been enjoying, others come through, the Siamese in their silk wrappings, one after the other, carrying bowls and baskets and trays, dozens of dishes, each of them of sufficient quantity to sate the appetites of five healthy men, each of them intended only to be sampled and enjoyed.
I wonder at these creatures, who orbit my jackal guard and me so ephemerally. Every movement of their gorgeous bodies invites one to take them for granted, encourages it even. Why are they here? Why are there so many such exquisite beings in an admittedly prosperous, but still ordinary ‘eatery'? The obvious method of obtaining an answer to that question would simply be to kill one of them, for the purpose of discerning how they would respond. Would they huddle In fear, would they attack me... Either way, their response would give me information about their nature, the purpose of their presence here and their relationship to the aged grey fox who opened the door for us. Perhaps my initial instinct was flawed – a hideous notion, as I'm sure you'll understand, but it's been known to happen from time to time. Perhaps these felines own the restaurant and the old fox merely was a janitor.
I take one of the creatures by the hand – even the smoothness of their fur invites a more delicate touch than I intended. How very curious, their magic. "Tell me," I ask the feline as I draw him or her onto my lap, a position the cat gracefully inhabits, leaning its modest weight on me and treating me to the press of hip and thigh as it extends a perfectly coiled arm to the table and deftly takes two chopsticks in its fingers, bringing some fried vegetable or another toward my lips. I accept the morsel and it delights me to such a degree that I begin to purr, Ulrich laughs at this, he himself stuffing his face with the delicacies presented on the table, but I'm so entranced with the cat on my lap that I can't even be bothered to walk around the table to impress upon the jackal the impropriety of his reaction. "Tell me," I continue, lickin my unfamiliar lips, "Why is it I feel no desire to kill you?"
"Perhaps we are not for you to kill," say all the cats at once, dulled voices coming even from the doors, droning from above as if every one of the Siamese spoke the words at once. I nod and politely push the cat off my lap, much to its surprise.
"Thank you," I say as I stand up and take a bowl of fried pork from the table, and I've pushed the outside door open and walked onto the street before Ulrich can break the spell of the eatery's peace. I stand outside with my bowl, waiting for Ulrich to emerge which, after a few moments, he does. He's zipping his pants up and blinking in the light and quickly zips up his jacket even though it isn't now as chilly as it was this morning. Disappointment of an almost child-like quality emanates from him despite his attempts to keep his demeanor dour and his ears pricked upright. He loved being in there and, though he knew he wouldn't be in there forever – he's clearly a man raised with disappointment from when he was very young – he had counted on being in there a little longer and would have liked to know a little beforehand when I intended to leave, so that the transition from the soft, heavenly embrace of the room and the service and the meal to the coldness and noise outside wouldn't be so abrupt.
"I was hoping I could sneak out back to the men's room to bang one of those kitties," the jackal says mournfully, stuffing his fists in his jacket pockets. "Why did we have to leave all of a sudden?"
I look at the Dong Ma eatery, and concentrate very deeply. Not on the sight of it, in particular, its windows drawn, its sign unlit, but on my memories of it, my experiences. "Because it was weird," I answer my jackal guard and begin to stuff sweet and sour sauce into my nostrils. Ulrich completely abandons his attempts to understand me and I smile, which causes him to remember whom he's serving, and shuts him up. I, meanwhile, my olfactory senses appropriately overwhelmed by the pungent sauce, concentrate. As I said, very deeply.
The half-empty noonday streets vanish from my experience and are replaced with half-empty evening streets. The difference is that during the day, people try to disregard the presence of others o they can feel more alone and independent while at night they take comfort in knowing there are other people also enjoying a night on the town. Glass half empty, glass half full. Half full of what? And why not simply drink it? Honestly, you people and your expressions.
Peeling away layers of interpretation and interpolation I let my instincts and their sensory memories shape the universe. My body and my mind are intimate lovers, and my body's faculties know the lusts of their bedfellow. They know that I want information, salient information about this place. It must be significant, because I was drawn to it, so my instincts are already yearning to pour their sage whispers into my reality-deafened ears. Rounded, bereft of their tufted points. I don't miss my old ears yet.
Light gushes onto the street. Succlent, scintillating warm light bursts from Dong Ma's wide-open windows and sloshes over the pavement and onto the street which seems to rejoice in the warmth it's granted, soothing it against the chill of a night that's just not frosty enough to draw snow from the sky, at least to give some purpose to the cold the streets endure. Sounds, smells, everything radiates from Dong Ma, where males and females of all types sit and talk and laugh and eat and have the best time living people can have when they're not having sex.
I walk up and down the street, peering into Dong Ma's unlit windows, my jackal guard following with some trepidation, though he's used to me by now and doesn't mind my curious behavior. Good. My senseless instincts show me the world as it was, the night-time spectacle of plenty. None of the cats are to be seen, but for one fat Siamese who eats his meal with such a lack of sophistication that any relation beyond their species seems unlikely.
Do you understand what's happening, my inadequate sweetheart? I call you sweetheart, of course, because I love you. Is joking the same as lying? If you know, send me a letter. What's happening is that the faint clues I subconsciously perceived – hairs on chairs, stains, wear-marks on the carpet and billions upon billions of scents – are being tabulated in my mind, weighed against one another and filtered to produce a digest of Dong Ma's recent history, showcasing its most significant events, all by my instincts' primitive judgment.
The number of males receiving oral sex from someone under their table is staggering. This of course doesn't mean all these males were being serviced simultaneously, as I explained, this tableau is a digest. Still, how can people be so unimaginative in their secret thrills? Where are the people carryiing body-parts of others in their pocket for the sheer excitement of it? Where are the bullies who stabbed a young streetlad in the stomach, bandaged and dressed him up nice and told him he had to resist the nausea and pain for an entire evening, and not call for help and not let anyone notice he was dying – or the bully would kill the boy's friends. These are secret pleeasures I could get behind, not the sad, tawdry blowjob-under-the-table.
Fortunately not all Dong Ma's occupants are so unimaginative. Some merely eat their meals and converse, others – immediately, my thoughts shift track and everything I can see through the sense-memory of the Dong Ma's windows vanishes except one table-setting in the near corner, a large space reserved for a single table whose occupants enjoy a masure of privacy. Tiber Ferrum is among them, the only one eating his meal.
Tiber makes a point of eating meat when he eats out, even though his gastrointestinal system can't digest it and he has to take various medications afterward to keep from regurgitating it. I've always admired self-destructive principles, as opposed to addictions. I suppose it stems from the typically carnivore-dominated nature of the business-world, some signal Tiber wants to send or some type of understanding he wishes to foster. He fascinates me, Tiber. And he, just a horse! Time was when I made a point to kill just about every herbivore I came across, at least one of every species. Sure, I made plenty of forays into the stalking of predators – infinitely more interesting prey, let me tell you – but the purely basal, instinctual satisfaction of killing and eating a prey animal is something that fascinated me for many years.
Until Tiber.
He frightens me, and that makes me love him. I know I'm not alone in this, but I also know that it isn't a competition. I look into those eyes of his and I am satisfied that the purpose blazing behind those large, dark, gelatinous pupils is hidden at such a depth, between so many layers of plots and contingencies that I will never understand fully his designs. Merely the knowledge that there is a creature in this world whose intent, not merely his intelligence but his intent, surpasses mine, fills me with a hope I have experienced only since knowing Tiber.
Would you like to know how he slew me, way back when? I could dangle this morsel of information in front of you and you would follow me like a famished streetdog. I could deny you even the hope of hearing the story and you would be forever eager for it, so perhaps there is no greater disappointment I can give you than merely to tell you. Why, you may ask, do I wish to spoil your fun? I am displeased with you, dear reader. I suspect you haven't been following me lately, that you haven't been doing your best to understand. No, don't scan back up the page, stay with me now. Eat the scraps I feed you, and do better.
Some years ago, in a city not Maranatha, I was killed. The manner of my murder caused me to lay myself at my murderer's hooves. Tiber had killed me, while I had never known him. I was living in his city, taking lives and exploring the ways that fear rippled through communities in response to the deaths, the way people hardened or shattered, utterly fascinating. For how long Tiber had me watched, and by whom, I honestly don't know. I never asked him, and I have punished myself on more than one occasion for failing to notice I was being observed.
But observe me he did, did Tiber, my beloved scourge, and somehow he, lacking the instincts I put to such good use, employed his intellect to understand me. He couldn't have known me beforehand and by his admission he didn't, merely he picked a victim at random. One morning he woke up and set himself the task of cornering and killing a murderer the police couldn't stop, all without interrupting his usual duties, making use of no more resources than normally were at his disposal. Often my victims are chosen for similarly trite reasons – I want to find out if the taste of liver changes over the years and then find a large multi-generational family to butcher and sample, for instance.
Tiber scanned the papers and found reports of grisly murders which, he decided, were connected and sent out his private security detachment and employed private detectives, in the same manner he would if he were spying n a colleague or competitor. They tracked me circumspectly, reporting to him over months or weeks, I don't know, until Tiber had devised a strategy. Which he implemented, to my ruin.
I became aware of what was happening almost instantly. One morning, I was throttling someone and I felt the life slip from the old lady well before her pulse ceased. She died before I properly killed her. I was horrified and left her body behind and ran away like a young man after his very first kill, which was foolish because if I'd inspected the body I might have discovered what had happened. Some kind of poison in her bloodstream, perhaps introduced slowly, which caused her heart to fail in response to the severe level of stress she experienced when I strangled her right beside her dozing husband, letting her see the Wheel of Fortune on her black and white television all the while.
The next day I was chasing a young streethustler through the warehouse district, howling like a hyena, following the trail of blood and terrified sweat he left as he ran. I loved the scent of panicked young flesh, I savored every second of it. Finally I cornered him, turning him into an alley between two large silos, with a fence at the end. Naturally he would jump up against the fence and naturally I would be faster, pulling him down and tearing him to shreds – but the fence was electrified to specifications vastly beyond the legal, and the boy was fried to a cinder before I could lay a hand on him. Week after week I was taunted at every turn, with unseen, unheard snipers or small spring-loaded shrapnel mines taking out my victims before I could get to them, Tiber successfully predicting every single target I would pick and killing them before I could until after two months of this torment I could take no more and decided privately to get one more night's sleep and then kill myself. Somehow Tiber anticipated even this.
And when I awoke, the final torment. My claws, my precious claws, had somehow been clipped and my house – or rather, the house of the recently deceased Davidson family – had been stripped of all implements of death. No stabbing weapon, no pen or nail-file, not even a slightly pointy spoon. For hours I screamed and shook and beat the walls until I broke my hands. And then I saw a gun on a chair, a gun, of all things, and while I normally would never have touched it I was so desperate for death that I didn't care, I had to have it, and with shaking hands I held it at my temple and pulled the trigger and a spray of confetti hit the side of my head and a little flag saying ‘bang' came out of the barrel and I lost my mind and fell over.
I awoke, naked, on the floor of an office. Tiber was standing at his window-wall, with his back to me and explained to me that there was no security, and that he'd had enough to drink that his reflexes were dulled enough that he'd pose no threat to me even if his reflexes had been a match to mine to begin with, and that there were knives of various shapes on the coffee-table between him and myself, and that he was behind my recent lack of success.
The rage in me swelled and ebbed like the tides of a world whose moon spins at any speed it fancies until the emotions in me melded, tears streamed from my eyes, I crawled over to Tiber's hooves, clung to the fabric of his trousers and sobbed against his thigh while he cupped my chin and told me everything would be all right. Never once, throughout all this, did the horse in his splendid suit look at me.
And now, cutting this revelation short enough that hopefully it gives you less satisfaction than you'd hoped for, let's return to the issue at hand: Tiber, in my memory world, having dinner In the Dong Ma Eatery. Across from him sits a ferret in a black leather trench coat – literally, a trench coat that looks like it saw service in the Great War – and some other males in black bomber jackets, though it's the ferret I deem important and put to memory.
"We're done here," I inform Ulrich and drop the bowl of fried pork, blowing my nose into my hands to get the sweet and sour sauce out of it. Having no immediate instinctual sens of direction, I decide the next name should be best looked up in a public directory and proceed in the direction I perceive to be most likely to feature an unvandalized phone booth, with Ulrich trotting behind. We're crossing the pedestrian walkway over the inner Maranatha ring road, a route which is either utterly pointless or so new as to be as yet largely undiscovered, because the traffic is so light, when I suddenly feel the urge to kill Ulrich, a very very strong urge that strikes me as so peculiar that I don't immediately satisfy it.
I look at him, walking behind me with grim determination, but also some honest acceptance of his fate and a steadily growing self-respect, which he takes from his service to me. He's grown on me, and I could tolerate having him around more than I've ever tolerated any assistant before, and I don't even feel the need to kill him because he's annoying, like all my other assistants were. But I still feel the need to kill him. I see a handsome grey fox sitting on the handrail of the walkway, and I recognise him as Jeremy, and when Jeremy nods to me I turn and grab Ulrich by the shoulders and before the poor jackal even has time to formulate the question in his mind why, suddenly, I thro him over the edge of the walkway and onto the highway below, I push him, and he falls, and before he hits the ground he himself is hit by a car – the only car to have passed under this walkway in the five minutes it's been in view as we walked up to it – and the car screeches to a halt. Jeremy stands up and lays his arm around my shoulders.
"I told you," he says as he kisses my cheek, and I giggle like a teenager. Jeremy is so sweet to me sometimes. "Maranatha is a place where things happen again. Where people don't learn from their mistakes. And it's also a place where brand new mistakes are made. Your friend Tiber understands this."
Below, the sound of a door opening, running feet, searing, running feet and the static of a radio. "This is detective Lombardi, request immediate backup and medical assistance for a civilian at the second western pedestrian bridge over the Maranatha inner ring road." More footsteps, the pulling of a gun. "You up there! Show yourself! Police!"
I look over the handrail, and I chuckle at what I see. "May I play with him?" I ask Jeremy, pointing at the police officer below. He's a black panther, with a face as uncharacteristically rough-hewn as mine, who could easily pass for me is he were wearing the face Tiber's surgeons removed from me before they gave me Claude's. It's a detail few normal people would notice on anything but an intuitive basis, but I can, even at this distance, see the skull under his skin and now I understand why Tiber wanted both me and Claude to come to Maranatha and felt so drawn to the yellow raincoat, which is identical to the yellow raincoat the policeman below is wearing.
"Play nice," says Jeremy and pats me on the shoulder as I leap over the handrail, making use of the policeman's hesitation at the sight of both that display of athleticism and the sight of me, and the striking similarity I bear to himself. I bat the gun out of his hand with ease and for a moment we circle each other, perfect mirror images.
I will never understand the depth or the limit of Tiber's calculating predictive ability. How keenly he understnds some facets of my insanity that even I haven't begun to classify, and how elegantly he exploits them. It is a privilege to be his pawn and I decide, for the duration of this assignment, to make it my mission to spread this understanding. To find the players in Tiber's game, the pieces of his puzzle, and by hook or by crook to teach them what a privilege it is to be manipulated by a mind like Tiber's.
Detective Lombardi's education begins with a left hook to the jaw and the binding of hands, feet and muzzle before I dump him in the trunk of his cop car and hop onto the severely dented hood, sitting next to Ulrich, whose head is turned in a direction opposite to his shoulders. He's alive, clearly, but for how much longer I can't really tell. I decide to wait for the ambulance to arrive and meanwhile to sate my curiosity, and simply watch my jackal guard to see if he sees me and to imagine what he's thinking.
Curious.


To be continued.

Available on paperback in 2005

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