We have lost, being born, as much as we shall lose, dying. Everything—EM Cioran
I stepped to the back of the crate and used a remote to start my video. I upped the volume to make sure she could hear it. Then I let myself out of the crate, locking it behind me, and went into the house.
The volume was so loud I could hear it from the kitchen. Of course I already knew what it said. And I had heard it so many times I almost had it memorized.
Stock photography of a deer.
Its head turns.
Then a shot rings out.
The deer limps a few steps and dies.
Shot of the sky.
Clouds in fast motion.
Blue fades to red.
Then my voice:
Welcome to my crate. You have unluckily found yourself in a shipping container in Pain, South Dakota. What you did before you came to the crate may have varied. But what will happen inside my crate is the same for you as for all who have come before you.
You will not be killed. Nothing like that. I will not hold a gun to your head and pull the trigger. That's being killed. You will do something else entirely. You will get to know pain. You will know what it is like to have holes drilled through your cheeks, to be unable to eat because the food spills out the holes in the sides of your mouth. You will be fed by tube. You will be anally raped with a series of dowels of increasing diameter, and your once-puckered asshole will become a gaping chasm which can no longer withhold feces. You will no longer shit as normal people do—you will leak from the ass.
The chair you are in?
It is bed.
It is toilet.
It will become everything to you.
When you are alone for the first time, when you can still withhold feces, you will reach a point where you must let them go and you will shit yourself and the shit will spread out between your ass and the stainless steel chair you are sitting in.
You will learn degradation.
You will learn to urinate on yourself and beg for food like a dog.
You will beg for death but you will not be given it.
You will learn to be fucked blindfolded and ball gagged, so that your expression and inputs are ignored, and you just become a hole to be fucked. I will use you anytime I please. You will learn to crave my cock, as it is the only warmth you shall receive for the rest of your life. By degrees, you will learn to cum when I fuck you, and you will hate yourself for it, but you will let yourself cum because it is the only pleasure you will receive.
You will be examined, photographed, and catalogued right down to the microscopic level.
Your vagina will be sampled and ultimately preserved for my own visual analysis and remembrance of you. Long after you are rotting flesh, your sex organs will remain in jars, useless to you, existing only for my memory. Occasionally I will remove your dead pussy and masturbate with it, returning it to its formaldehyde jar which is labeled with your name only after it has served its only remaining purpose—to make me cum. I want you to know this, now, so that every time we fuck you can imagine your lifeless body leaning against a rock in my decomposition field while I am still convening with your most private parts in the comfort of my home.
I advise you not to disrespect me. You see those cabinets to your left? They contain tools you cannot imagine—tools you have never seen in your sheltered young life but which can be used to inflict extreme bodily pain and destruction. I am equipped to lobotomize you, if I feel necessary. I am equipped to remove organs or parts of organs, including the brain, while keeping you alive. All surgeries in the crate are sans-anesthetic—to invite me to perform these with your rudeness is not advised.
I am also equipped with a wide variety of drugs I can use to sedate you without putting you to sleep. For example, I can put you in a tunnel where you can see and feel and hear everything that is happening to you but are unable to respond, unable to speak, unable to move your limbs. The horror you will experience of a surgery under these conditions will be enough to make you vomit even under such sedation and they will change you psychologically for the rest of your short life. Few people have the opportunity to watch, unable to move, as their uterus is removed—but you may become one of these if, with your insolence, you invite it.
Respect is the number one rule in the crate, and if you don't learn it now by listening to these words, you will learn it with pain, and you will learn it with pain you do not have names for. You will learn what only soldiers of war know—the horrors only experienced by the military.
You cannot escape the crate. No one has ever done it.
You will not be heard if you scream. You are welcome to scream—starting now. Scream all you want. I have made physical calculations involving the distance of our closest neighbors, probabilistic calculations involving the likelihood of a car driving along Blythe Road at precisely the moment you scream. The fact is Blythe Road is a dead end road, and this is the last house on it. No one ever drives this far down Blythe Road except me. I don't ever have guests—or pizzas delivered—so I'm afraid there's not much to hope for there.
Do not ask me to loosen the clamps around your wrists or ankles. I know they are tight. I know they hurt your bones. You will get used to it. Your hand will not lose circulation. It will not fall off. I really don't appreciate requests for loosening of the clamps. I will punish you if you make such a request, starting with clamping down your neck.
You are now my toy. I will do anything I want with you. You will acquiesce. If you embarrass me, you will experience wrath of the type found in the Old Testament of the Christian Bible. If you go with the flow, this doesn't have to be all bad for you. You can even have some fun. Everyone dies. Consider yourself lucky—you won't die alone. I will be there with you, when your final moment comes. I will hold your hand. I will brush back your hair. I will help you into the nothingness that likely follows this life in a gentle way if you let me. If you are wise, you will consider me your friend, if only for the reason that from some point earlier today, onward, I am the last person you're ever going to see. So let's go easy, ok? You let me do what I want—which is to play with my toy—and I will be nice to you, just like anyone is with a toy that cooperates. If you don't cooperate, that will make me angry, and when I get angry I smash my toys, cut them, break them, poison them, and hurt them. It is your choice what type of toy you want to be.
I want you to think for a second about this.
About what kind of toy you want to be.
You are already dead, for every intent and purpose. Two-hundred fifty women have sat in that chair. None of them have departed without me. All of them are dead now. I killed every single one in just the way I found appropriate to each—and that is exactly what is going to happen to you. I have an extremely high rate of success—a perfect record. You will not be the one who breaks this record. You will go into the night. Do you want to go kicking and screaming, like an idiot child, or do you want to go with dignity, like a woman walking down a corridor of light, holding my hand.
Because this is how it can be for you.
I have drugs that will keep you from feeling a thing.
If you relax, you can experience a month of sexual ecstasy.
If you resist, I may shoot a bullet through your mouth, sideways, deforming you but leaving you alive. I have spent my life collecting ways to demean a prisoner while keeping them conscious—and I specialize in young women. They had a nickname for me where I worked—a place most people in this fucked-up world will never know of. And in that place, because of what I did, they called me by this sympathetic moniker, informally naming me, "Dead Girls"—and you should know that before the fifty I've tortured in this crate, I tortured two-hundred in other cities, and before that, entities you'll never know of paid me well to torture a thousand more.
That's pretty much how it goes. Like I said I have it mostly memorized. I keep having to change parts of it to fit the changing particulars of the circumstances but all this gets easier every year with the advent of the new computers. All the while they're listening to this voiceover, images play of natural environments—some Steadicam through the woods, some shot by snowboarders, parachuters, some great shots of the waves off the coast of northern California. It's supposed to be a juxtaposition of opposites—you know, the psycho killer audio versus the peaceful nature photography—kind of a Stanley Kubrick thing.
I put a styrofoam plate on my forearm and carry a plastic spoon and a paper towel out of the house and balance it all while I unlock the crate. I let myself in and set the plate on my workbench. I pull the crate door closed and lock us in, carefully putting the key in my right pocket.
I'm just behind Anna so she can't see what I'm doing.
"Are you awake?"
"Yeah, fantastic movie. Did you do it yourself or did you get Frank and Billy Bob Thornton to help you with it?"
"You mean did I use a local video service to help me with the editing?"
"That's what I mean, yes," she says, trying to turn her head far enough to the left to see me. "That's really fucked up, you know, to show me a deer getting killed. I hope whoever killed it didn't just leave it there."
"I'm sure they ate the meat, if that's what's worrying you."
"Yes, that's what's worrying me. Where the fuck have you been?"
I slide forward on my stool and show her the plate:
Eggs and bacon.
She looks me in the eyes.
"I promised you eggs and bacon. Here it is. I'm going to have to feed it to you."
"Are those..over medium?"
"Of course."
"Over medium is my favorite!" she says, like she's forgotten she's locked in a gynecological chair. "How did you know?" she says, and there's a weird quality to her words and every action that unnerves me: trust.
I haven't seen that face for a long time on anyone, and it reminds me of someone I knew who is never ever coming back.
"How did you know I liked over medium?!" Anna Miller says.
"Lucky guess," I say, and for once I find myself the most uncomfortable person in the room.