Nothing is inflammable, p.29
Nothing Is Inflammable, page 29
“No doctors for you,” I said.
And there weren’t.
That night had been a busy night.
On my way back from seeing Anatoli I had stopped off for an hour or two at one of the bars downtown to look out for any potential new friends. A few possibilities, a few phone numbers and some unnecessarily direct offers later and I was heading along the winding roads that led up into the hills and the large houses that dotted them.
I always felt like I was ascending into a better world when I went over to Kristian’s, or at least a world that promised to be better. There were sure as hell no gypsy camps allowed anywhere near there.
I wore a black cocktail dress that I had shoplifted the day before because Kristian acted like he wanted class, refinement. I knew better, that underneath it, just like all the others, what he really wanted was a slut—so the dress only came a quarter way down my thigh, almost enough to see some of my scars.
Kristian had the penthouse in an exclusive block of apartments at one of the highest points on the hills. I took my usual route, an emergency exit stairwell at the back of the building, so as to avoid any issues with the doorman but had only gone up one flight when I heard footsteps descending. I ducked into the recess of a doorway that had been cemented over and watched as a young man, certainly no older than me, walked past. He looked stoned, didn’t see me.
I waited until he was out of sight before hurrying the rest of the way up.
I had felt teased by Anatoli’s nearness to death then, as if someone had been stimulating me to orgasm then stopped at the very last minute and I was still looking for that final release. It was Kristian’s moment tonight and I had a very special concoction waiting for him in my handbag.
It first looked like something was wrong when I noticed his door wasn’t closed. I thought perhaps that he was ready and waiting for me, strung out on the bed like he had been once before but although his bed sheets were ruffled he wasn’t there. I called his name. Again.
There was a strip of light visible under the en suite bathroom door. Something new, this time?
I tried the handle and the door was unlocked.
And there was Kristian, waiting for me—naked and slumped in the bathtub, one long leg and one arm hooked over the porcelain rim. Blood seeping from the slashes across his wrists.
Motherfucker.
This didn’t make any sense, no sense at all.
I dropped to the floor beside him but I already knew he was gone. A straight razor lay on the tiles amidst the growing pool of blood.
I touched his head because it was something to do.
This ruined everything!
“What the fuck have you done!” I shouted at him, beat his chest with my fist. “Why would you . . . ?”
I took out the poison I had prepared for him and poured it into his mouth anyway, an act of defiance. I had been working for weeks for this night and he goes and . . . .
Wait.
The boy.
He’d come down the stairwell and in the dozen times I had been to Kristian’s I had never seen or heard anyone else use the passage. As far as I knew it only supplied access to the penthouse.
That little bastard.
I spotted him walking dreamily along the private sidewalks that wound back down to the grubby tenements of the city below. He didn’t seem aware of the car until I pulled up alongside him, angling it slightly in front of him before stopping. I opened the passenger door.
“Get in,” I told him.
He was as young as he had first looked, though he emphasized his youth with a close-fitting top and shiny jeans that highlighted his spindly figure. He had the passive-aggressive stance of street trash.
“I’m not interested,” he said and started to walk on.
I jerked the car forward, blocked his way again.
“I’m a friend of Kristian,” I told him.
“I don’t know any Kristian. I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”
“Get the fuck in now or I’m calling the police.”
The threat seemed to deflate his nonchalance a little. “I didn’t do anything,” he said guiltily.
“Then get in.”
He wouldn’t tell me at first how he had done it and I pretended not to care but of course I did and I think ultimately he was desperate to be sharing it with someone. Perhaps that was true for me too.
“Imagine you’re standing on one of the bridges in the bay over there. One hundred and fifteen foot drop. Just one step, that’s all it would take. One step over, a moment’s thought. A moment’s decision. It’s that easy.”
“If it’s that easy,” I challenged, “then why we aren’t all killing ourselves?”
“Fear, mostly.” He shrugged. “Maybe we just need a little encouragement.”
“And you’re the one to provide the encouragement?”
Again a shrug.
“You know I’d really rather you hadn’t encouraged Kristian to be perfectly fucking honest with you. He was mine.”
“Your boyfriend?”
“Hell no.”
“Then what?”
So I told him, I told him because I thought, fuck it, he’s the same as me, more or less.
“Well how was I to know?” he said. “You should have been quicker off the mark.”
“I didn’t think I needed to be!” I shouted at him, then had to slam on the brakes as some asshole pulled out in front of me. It looked like a gang car so I let it go. I’d had enough trouble already that night.
“Poisoning,” he said and was that derision I heard in his voice? “How crude.”
“Fuck you is it crude! I spend a lot of time and effort finding and mixing the right shit to get each dose exactly right. There’s nothing crude about it.”
“If you say so.”
“You prey on the weak, the suggestible ones—what is that if not crude?” I countered.
“First of all, I don’t prey,” he snapped at me. “And secondly they’re no more suggestible than anyone else.”
“Bullshit.”
“Is it hell. And I can prove it.”
“How?”
So skip the drive across town towards these little shacks that I guess count as houses and then to the tower blocks that loom over them. About thirty stories high, the poverty levels getting steadily worse the higher you climb. The ones at the very top are probably high enough to give them a great view of Kristian’s luxury apartment across the other side of the valley.
He takes the stairs to the fourth floor and I can smell urine in the air, old stale urine.
He knocks on the door and this balding guy with a barrel chest and military tattoos down one arm answers. Wiktor introduces me as a friend and we step inside, though the guy barely acknowledges me. He looks pleased to see Wiktor, however. The apartment is grubby but well organized, the remnants of a regimented upbringing. There is homophobic graffiti on one wall and I don’t know if this guy put it there himself or not.
We sit on the floor because there is no furniture to speak of and still the guy ignores me. Wiktor talks with him, laughs with him, caresses him and I just sit there mostly. I don’t touch the drink he gave me out of habit. Then they go off into the bedroom and I’m left for a few minutes before Wiktor comes back out.
“Why don’t you go down the car,” he tells me. “I’ll be there in a few minutes.”
I nod because it seems like the thing to do, sneak a look behind him and see the guy sitting on the edge of the bed, his face in his hands.
It’s just when I’m starting to feel like the boy has pulled some con job on me that he emerges from the broken doorway of the high rise and climbs onto the car’s hood, slaps it for me to join him.
“What’s going on?” I ask as I do so.
“Just wait,” he says.
I follow his gaze up, up, up and then there on the ledge that splits the first twenty five floors from the final five, there’s a figure.
“Is that . . . ?”
Wiktor stops me from getting up, presses a finger to his lips. “Don’t disturb him.”
And the man way up there, I can see him spreading his arms and I wonder if he is thinking of fighter jets or birds of prey as he leaps from the ledge and into the air. It seems to take an awfully long time for him to hit the ground and it also seems like no time at all. I’ve never heard a noise like it when he makes contact.
“Shit!”
“Come on, we’d better go,” Wiktor says, and climbs into the car.
For a few moments I can’t move and I want to go see the body, at least I think I do, but already people are looking to see what that terrible noise was and I know it’s not safe. I start the engine and Wiktor says, “Do you have a place? I don’t have a place. Just somewhere for tonight?”
I don’t answer him. I just get us out of there.
And so it’s not exactly a competition, what developed between us, although I guess that is an aspect of it. Although neither of us would admit it, I think it feels good to be sharing what we do with someone.
My place was one of the smaller trailers in the camp, the wheels removed and replaced by concrete blocks to keep any dampness from rusting the undercarriage. There was abusive graffiti scrawled all over it but that’s no big deal, everywhere we go the hatred follows us. I felt Wiktor’s hesitation as I pulled onto the wasteland we’d been on for the past few months and that was natural, I guessed. Over the weeks he’d gotten used to it.
He made decent money doing what he was doing, before he killed them off of course, and split it with me in return for allowing him to stay with me.
We crossed paths irregularly and would trade stories to one another like a married couple discussing their work days and these tales were part boast, part confessional.
He told me about Olivio, a Latin American man in his forties who had blasted the top of his head off with a shotgun and about Nico, a DJ with a speech impediment who lay down on the train tracks under a tunnel at the edge of the city. In return I told him about some guy I’d picked up in a metal club whose eyes didn’t leave my legs, encased as they were in stripy thigh-high socks, and how he had grunted orgasmically as I had shoved the hypodermic into his back and pumped all 100cc of the special concoction I had formulated the night before. I told him about the secret shack out in the nearby woods that acted as my lab and workshop but I never took him there.
One night we lay next to one another on the fold down bed and he was in a bad mood, I could tell, though he wouldn’t say why. I’d made some new friends that night and had already decided that I would test one of my new compounds on a pair of them at the same time, a kind of field trial.
“Are you listening to me?” I asked him. “Like an LD50 test.”
“A what?”
“Lethal Dose 50%. It’s a test they do on animals. They dose them with increasingly stronger amounts of a substance and see how longer it takes for half of them to die from it.”
“What are you going to use on them?”
“I’m not sure yet. One of the orals anyway—but this time I want to see if they’ll drink it willingly. Maybe the herbicide mix.”
“The green one?”
I nodded, passed him my cigarette.
“Can I ask you something?”
“If you want to,” he said.
“What do you say to them?”
Wiktor took a long drag, held it, the let the smoke unfurl from his mouth. “It depends.”
“On . . . ?”
“On them. On me. On the situation. I usually just make it up as I go along.”
“But what do you actually say?”
“Whatever I have to. It’s usually not that difficult to figure out what would work best on a person.”
“What about me? What would you say to me?”
“That would be telling,” he said, and for the first time that night he smiled.
“Does it always work?”
His jaw flexed with tension and there was a momentary pause before he spoke next. “Most of the time. Some people, however, are more resilient than others. I almost always get them in the end.”
“Almost?”
Again a slight pause. “There is this one guy I’ve been seeing for a while, ever since I first came to this city. He just . . . nothing I say seems to faze him for some reason.”
“Who is he?”
“No one special. His name is Rollins, Tariq Rollins. He’s an artist that apparently has a bit of a reputation in the underground scene. He paints and makes sculptures of out of junk and I’m constantly trying to tell him how terrible he is. But he just doesn’t seem to care. He usually calls for me when he’s finished work on a new piece like I’m champagne or something. I always make a point of criticizing the new work but he just smiles. All that work, all that effort and in a fucking hooker walks and tell him it’s awful. And he fucking smiles.”
“Was that where you were earlier tonight? With him?”
He nodded and took a final drag on the cigarette.
I’d watched the blood settle in this one’s veins before I had finally left his apartment, sneaking out the fire escape because it was busy in the corridor outside. I already knew from previous nights that he liked rough sex but he wanted it rougher than ever before. He had broken the skin when he had bitten into my shoulder so I hadn’t felt that guilty when I lashed out and fractured his jaw in response. I hadn’t planned on finishing him so quickly but I was pissed off at him and hurting when I sprayed the stuff into his face and chest.
It had been absorbed directly into his bloodstream through the epidermis, a technique I’d read about in some journals I’d stolen from the library and one that had been employed by South Africa to deliver weaponized biological poisons to leading anti-apartheid protestors. It went straight to his nervous system and ignited every nerve ending along his spine simultaneously, overloading the pain receptors until they had all just shut down and his body had gone limp. The shock must have killed him because he was already dead when he slumped to the ground.
Then the blood settled.
Twenty minutes later and I was back at the camp and listening to the sounds of a fight. Someone from the city must have felt like a go at one of the family and around the back of a burnt out flatbed truck I saw one figure beating the shit out of another. I grabbed a piece of wood that had been staked into the ground and shouted at the aggressor and it was only then that I realized it was Wiktor he was attacking.
“Stay out of this you piece of trash!” the man looming over him shouted at me.
“Get the fuck away from him!”
“This is none of your business!” And he kicked Wiktor in the head, hard.
“This is our home, this is our business.” Yvgeny, one of my cousins, emerging from his caravan, armed with a machete. His wife Maria, swollen with another child, glimpsing out from the doorway, a shotgun at her side.
“Get back,” the stranger warned, waving a switchblade in our direction as we converged on him. “Back!”
And Yvgeny was on him in a moment, as lightning quick as his father before him had been, his immense hands around the man’s neck and the two fell to the ground beside Wiktor’s prone form, random limbs flailing. The man screamed as Yvgeny dropped the machete into his shoulder and I shouted at my cousin to get back, the spray I had used earlier in the night in my hands. One quick dose into the intruder’s face, and another.
His screaming suddenly stopped and his body went rigid, then limp.
Yvgeny booted the man in the head and retrieved his weapon before telling me, “You’d better check on your friend there. I’ll take care of this one.”
I nodded, went to Wiktor’s side. “I’m sorry, Wiktor, this shouldn’t have happened to you. He must have thought you were one of us.”
His eyes were bloodshot and unfocused, a large split welt rising on his left cheek.
“Come on, I’ll get you cleaned up,” I told him.
“You don’t understand,” he mumbled. “This is my fault.”
So it was his pimp he told me, that man, as I traced the edge of his facial wound, collected up the blood on the tip of my finger. Or ex-pimp.
“He found out I’d had something to do with the deaths of some clients back home and . . . and so I ran. I didn’t think he’d still be after me after all these months.”
“Apparently he was,” I said.
“What’s your friend going to do with him?”
“We don’t ask questions like that,” I told him, dabbing the wound with a cloth soaked in antiseptic solution.
“I’m sorry. I should have told you. I didn’t think he would find me.”
“It’s none of my business.”
“I still should have told you.”
“This isn’t a fucking marriage. You can keep secrets from me if you want. There’s no obligation.”
“But I wanted you to know.”
And I thought to myself, if this is a night of secrets, should I tell him one of my own in return?
Maybe just the one.
Turned inside out, plastic veins, flickers of metal clasps to hold everything in place, squirts of light to describe the motions of her internal systems, a new decadent hum through which it is all filtered and it is my sister, lying there on the bed.
“How long has she been here?” Wiktor asked me. He looked down on her prone form, examining her as if she were a piece of art.
“Five years,” I told him. “She was transferred here after intensive care, once she’d fallen into the coma.”
“What happened?”
“She tried to hang herself.” I thought of telling him about our father and what he had done then changed my mind.
“She isn’t getting any better?” Wiktor asked.
Her skin was now the color of the sheets laid across her. I could almost see the blood sliding through arteries laced with the medicinal additives that had hijacked it. Riding her like a machine. She wore a neck brace to cover up the wounds that refused to heal.
