Sadness makes you God's prisoner—EM Cioran
I wake to the sound of the TV in the crate.
I jump out of bed and pull on my sweatpants and shirt.
Grab my Glock.
Run to the crate.
Unlock the door.
Go in checking the corners, under the workbench, under the chair.
I check the ceiling. Everything is clear—nothing on top of the quartz-halogens.
Anna is lying back in the chair with the remote in her right hand. Her left is empty, sitting on her thigh.
Her foot shackles are in place. All the other ones are open.
You have nightmares? This is mine.
The TV is on and Anna has navigated herself to one of my worst end-of-life films, which leads me to believe she's come to it after navigating many others.
Anna pauses the screen.
"This girl is five years old."
"I don't kill young girls anymore."
"I'm only 24."
"Yeah. Well. By 24 you've had your chance."
I take the remote from her, close down all the windows, and turn off the video system.
I lock her arms in the arm clamps, tight around each wrist.
I look her over, prodding around underneath her body and inside her mouth and spreading her ass and her vagina to make sure she's not hiding anything.
When I stand up from probing her vag, she says:
"I'm scared."
"What are you scared of."
"Don't be mad..the devil."
"I'm not mad at you. Just because I don't believe in the literal devil doesn't make him any less scary to you."
"I'm afraid the devil is gonna get me for what I'm doing."
"What are you doing? Have you been masturbating to the dead girl films?"
Anna nods.
"Like he can see you? And he's judging you?"
Anna nods.
"You know what you do then? You say, I ain't afraid of no devil—you know why?"
"Why?"
" 'Cause I am the devil. Say it. Say it."
"I am the devil."
"I am the scariest, most evil, darkest, most invincible thing in the world. Say it."
"I am..the scariest..most evil..darkest..most invincible..thing..in the world."
"Good girl. Now keep saying that to yourself until you believe it and you won't be scared of anything."
We're quiet for a while and I hope to myself that she's working that mantra in her head.
I drum my fingers on her inner thigh.
"Anyway," I say, "the technology exists..you may see the devil in your lifetime."
"There's no such thing as the devil," Anna says. "Like a literal devil?"
"Oh yes there is."
"And I know you're not so egotistical as to call yourself the devil," she says.
"Oh no. I never said it was me. It's science—"
"Please. You're not one of those anti-science crazy Christians."
"I was going to say: it's science that will bring about the devil, paradoxically."
"So you're against science."
"No, no—you're not hearing me. Science will tear the fabric of the dimensions—I'm not saying that's good or bad—but they will tear the dimension containing the devil and let him into our world. That's all I'm saying. Haven't you read any Nikola Tesla?"
"No, I guess I'm still getting around to him."
"Well, my Anna—sweet Anna—what you and I are doing here is child's play compared to what is going on in parallel universes."
Anna laughs.
"You think that's funny?"
"Yes!"
"Good then, I cheered you up."
I start to walk away.
"No, tell me..tell me how fucked-up shit in parallel universes justifies what we're doing here. I think you're mentally ill."
"What diagnosis would you give me?"
"What do you mean?"
"I mean, my slave, that mentally ill is a scientific term with a specific definition correlating to a limited set of diagnoses and if you want to call me mentally ill you have to choose one or more diagnoses to go along with that determination."
"I just mean you're crazy."
"I know what you mean. All I mean, my unread friend, is that there are things unknown to our dimension that are far worse than anything you'll find us doing here."
"Why do you keep saying that? We. Us. We're not doing anything. You are. I'm clamped to a chair for a fucking month!!"
"Whether you like it or not, this is something we're doing together. The reason I'm saying we? Us? I'm playing a psychological game with you that you apparently do not understand."
"What? To break my spirit?"
We both breathe in and out at the same time and I say:
"No. Something much worse."
I push her forward in the chair so I can reach her back, and I massage her. It's not an erotic massage; it's a necessity. You can't keep someone locked in the same position for so long without exercising their limbs and massaging them to help the blood flow.
Anna takes the massage without resisting—this is routine now. She bends her head forward without instruction, so I can get her neck.
Eventually she says:
"I don't believe that evil will win."
I create a bridge between her jaw and her neck, with my hand, and stretch out that part of her.
"What you call evil, Anna, is just a difference in power."
"I just don't believe that power is the most important thing," she says.
"The future, my little friend, is a future of psychopaths," I say, and the conversation drops.
When I was massaging her pussy, rubbing and attending to her clit with my mouth, she started talking again:
"Why are you still doing this? Aren't you retired from your former work?"
"Yes, but—"
"So why are you still doing it?"
"Because..it's like the guy who works as a computer programmer all his life and then when he retires, he gets a part-time job as a computer programmer. This is what I do."
"This is what you like to do."
"It's just what I do, you know. Forget about like or not-like, it's..just..what I do."
I licked and fingered her vagina, and I didn't consider it sexual, exactly—it was just an extension of the massage. One's genitals must be kept limber, just as one's back, one's neck, one's feet, one's legs, one's scalp.
I needed her vagina to be functional for me so that when I wanted to fuck, she would be ready. So I touched her like I would touch myself—any time, any day, any moment, any place that I wanted to.
I licked her clitoris just right and leaned back and I could see her labia flattening and opening.
She lifts her head.
"Why are you doing this?"
"Why do you think? Come on, Anna—the smartest person that I've never killed! If you don't know, then no one knows."
She lies back and I finger her with three fingers.
Her eyes are closed, squinted.
That precious mouth opens.
I put my mouth on her clit again and pretend she was my wife.
"Fuck!" Anna says. "Stop! Tell me why!!"
"I told you before. Because I want to. And because I can."
"But why do you want to?"
"Because I can."
"No! I don't believe that."
"No, you can't believe it, because if you did your moral universe would fall apart."
"I just don't believe that some people have more power than others."
"No? Some guy who's trying to fuck you—that you and your girlfriends laugh at—you believe that you and he have equal power in that situation?"
"But I don't believe he's less of a person than me!"
"You don't? You don't make fun of him with your friends and assert that his sexual desire is less important than yours?"
"Yeah but if he rapes me then the tables are turned!"
"Exactly and in each situation there is a master and a slave."
"Ok, master. Slave speaking. This girl you like to make cum, who you use to make yourself cum at all hours of the night—anytime you wake up hard—what are you gonna do with your slave, just turn me into bones on some rock field somewhere?"
"I'll cut your head off. I'll slice you up your vagina with a chainsaw."
"You like my vagina too much to ever hurt me."
"I don't like your vagina."
She can hear, in my tone, that I'm true—and she cries.
"You have to get over the idea that you're special, Anna. You're not. There's a thousand girls in a thousand cities who have just that vagina. The exact same one. I've seen your vagina a hundred times and I wouldn't hesitate to put a chainsaw to it if you fuckin' talked sarcastic to me a second time. You're a dead girl—and no one cares about a dead girl's vagina."
I unclamped her left hand.
Pushed down my sweatpants.
"Get me hard. Get me hard."
"I will. I will. But why. Why are we having this relationship?"
"I loved a girl and lost her. You're helping me process that loss."
"How many girls have helped you process your loss so far?"
"Thirteen hundred."
"How many more is it gonna take??!!"
"Well, I'm fifty-four. I figure sixty-five is a good retirement age. Of course, I have to ask my doctor if my heart is healthy enough for sexual activity. But I figure a hundred more."
She protested. Asked me to make her the last one.
"I'm considering it," I said.
Then I fucked her 24-year-old pink-line pussy that looked like the first pussy I encountered in school.
"What do you think about being fucked by a fifty-year-old man?"
"I've been fucked by a fifty-year-old man before."
"Oh really? Who?"
"My father."
"Oh! He like his little girl, huh?!"
I rubbed Anna's head to comfort her.
I imagined I was her father and that got me off right away. I pushed and pushed my cock into her and came as deep in her as possible. Then I looked down and saw my cock stretching her little hole to fit me, and my cock gone—buried deep inside the girl.
I got off her and kissed her on the lips—which she majorly shied away from—but I got my lips on hers.
"See? I'm not really a criminal."
"Then what are you?"
"I'm a creator. I'm a psychopomp. Do you know what that is?"
She shakes her head.
"Well remind me to tell you about it sometime. It's a fascinating class of myths."
"But tell me really—why are you doing this?"
"There is always, only, ever, one answer to that question—and this is like the third time I've told you—because I can, and because I want to. You know it's like the idea of killing a chinchilla for its fur. We don't mind because we're smarter than the chinchilla. It's like the idea that aliens are abducting us, experimenting on us, raping us, injecting us to make us cum, breeding with us—all with little regard for our wants. They probably feel fine about it, like us using a mouse for a science experiment, because we don't feel that the mouse has much of a life to lose..we feel it is inferior, and so we feel it should serve us with its life..and maybe it should."
I close my eyes and what I see is a child playing with a dog. The child is about three years old. The dog is as tall as the child, and twice as long. The child is petting the dog and then the dog turns his head sideways and grabs the little boy by his abdomen and bites down and the boy screams and the dog shakes him like a rag doll as the boy cries out for help but no one hears him—no one comes to help. That's what I see when I close my eyes.
Anna sees me shaking and she moves her left hand within the clamp to touch my knee—now she is the one comforting me.
"Why do you care how I feel?"
"Why do you sometimes rape me, sometimes make me cum?"
"Well that's the thing with people, right? We are—as they say—gods and monsters."