“Homo homini lupus est”
Omar wipes the knuckles of his fist clean with an embroidered handkerchief. The body lies in the centre of the room. Blood is creating a halo around the kid’s crown, blooming from where his head met the marble seconds before. He rolls onto his side, curling like a fetus and facing the spectators seated on the white leather couch.
“Want another go?”
“I think he’s done dude.”
Omar gives the boy a final kick in the gut but the spirit has gone from the attack. The jolt of Omar’s foot connecting with his abdomen sends him skidding backwards, his hair painting a stroke of blood on the floor.
Bored with his spent toy, Omar takes the empty seat beside Casper, wiping the perspiration from his forehead with the soiled handkerchief.
Casper’s buzz is fading. Omar gave him a disc at the start of the party. On credit, he’d said while winking and Casper hadn’t wasted time, inserting the disc in his chest and uploading, unsatisfied until his brain swam in ecstasy. Now the room is coming back into focus. The light that had before rained down on him from the chandelier, creating warmth and colour where it danced on the polished floor, retreats back into the crystals above. The sacrificial boy — before a pack-savaged lamb — becomes a face again. Casper doesn’t like the way he looks. It’s reminding him of this kid who he used to know in primary that stuttered until his parents saved enough to upgrade him. Casper had liked that kid. They used to play quietly together in the back of the class while the others threw pencils and taught each other profanities. The pair would write stories, stencilling a sentence each in fat, awkward scrawls. Writing spared the kid from tripping on his untrained tongue. Casper doesn’t want to see the school kid’s face anymore, but it resolutely swims in front of his sharpening eyes. His brain clings desperately to the dissipating high, but like trying to hold a pool of water in cupped hands the sensations trickle out of grasp. He knows Omar’s generosity won’t extend to another hit, at least not tonight, so he stands up and crosses the room, stepping over the body and avoiding the constellation of red droplets garnishing the white marble.
The far walls are entirely windowed, the house set in the mountain like a gem in a crown. Casper gets close enough to touch the glass, then slides the door, identical to the surrounding panes and hidden by its uniformity, to the side, stepping out onto the dark balcony. Casper closes the door behind him and approaches the rail, leaning over so that the night breeze cools his flushed skin.
The door whispers in its tracks as it’s coaxed open again. Elbows join him on the railing, slender fingers tickling the night. He vaguely recognises the girl, pretty blonde hair on a taut frame, wrapped up in a high collared black dress. Wet tracks glow on her round cheeks, retaining the faintest glimmer of the light that had engulfed the room before.
He tries to sketch sentences from his fragmented thoughts, but they run in tired rotations, unable to lend comfort. Instead, he reaches out for one of her hands, anchoring it to him in the expanse of blackness that billows away from the house.
There wasn’t a party yesterday night, so Casper had to go back to his rigid flat. It is hardly lived in, a large studio vast and impersonal and decorated with only a king-sized mattress on the cold cement floor and a chair. Nothing else is necessary because Casper doesn’t have guests over. He only goes there to sleep and shower and he usually does that at Omar’s anyways. But because Omar didn’t have a party Casper was forced to occupy himself. He napped through the morning, and in the afternoon bought breakfast to go and created a spread on his floor, spilling egg and ketchup and wiping it up with his sleeve.
Omar is having a party at dusk. Casper puts the faucets in the shower on hot and softens the stiff bathroom with steam. He strips, tossing his clothes on top of the kneaded duvet, and walks across the loft, stalked by the thin ghost of his reflection as it glides from window to inky window. The bathroom mirror is dripping, blotting out his features. He turns away from the smudged face and steps into the cubical.
Grease from egg and sausage, knots of hair, and stubborn grit are jostled loose from his pores as he lathers. He steps out of the shower and rubs himself dry with an abrasive towel. The butt of his hand makes an arch in the milky glass, and he catches his own heavy lidded glance. Sometimes he hates looking at himself and on those days his reflection haunts him, following him home in darkened windows and burrowing itself into the mirror above his sink. On those bad days his echo jeers at him, smearing his inadequacies across his face like shit on leather brogues.
Casper has earnest blue eyes. His mom gave him them for his seventh birthday. They’d been almost black before, stony flat things that cast spells and, he believed, inspired hostilities between him and his peers. He’d asked for blue because, as he’d insisted, blue is the colour of souls and he wanted his soul to be right against his lenses so everyone could see it and would know he was kind. His mother bought him the upgrade, but the hostilities continued unabated and young Casper learned to alter more than his eyes.
Naked in front of his sweating bathroom mirror he’s not thinking about the bullies. Rather, he’s remembering the feeling of elation he’d felt when the eyes were new. At the time he spent hours admiring the flecks of green and the rim of dark navy bleeding into the black pool of his pupil. He’d stare at himself, in spoons and car windows, overcome by youthful vanity. Working the splayed legs of an old comb through his nipple-length hair he acknowledges that fragment of his ten-year-old innocence. He feels a similar sensation stirring in his belly now. Something like confidence.
He calls a taxi and crumples again amongst his stale sheets. His eyes darken, the pupils still visible beneath the translucent film that begins to play across their lenses. He sees the girl, her recorded face unmarred by the substances that had spoiled his vision and tightened his tongue on the night. He rewinds, regretful at having to abandon her. People, moving backwards, jerk themselves into a state of partial sobriety. He reaches the beginning of the party and begins searching, looking back through his own eyes and trying to tease the right gold out of a crowd of pale-ash and honey and flaxen.
The taxi arrives and Casper pauses the film and hurries downstairs, annoyed by the interruption. The simulation inside is beady eyed and silent. Sometimes you get cabbies that try to plug their owners varied other endeavours. These owners, unhappy with their monthly allowance, invest in simulations, then rent them out for a hefty price. Off to a party, eh? No date with you? Sad boy. Two girls for one tonight. Tonight only. In some cases the cabbie will try to strike a bargain. Tonight, however, the simulation in the driver’s seat only asks where Casper is going and then glides into motion, floating up the winding mountain road.
He finds her as they are pulling into the drive, twenty-five minutes into the footage. The taxi driver asks for Casper’s arm, wanting to scan the embedded code and withdraw the seven bits for the ride, but Casper hushes him. She’s descending the large staircase, eyes downcast, sidestepping people already too wobbly-legged to stand who ooze down the stairs in groups of twos and threes. When she reaches the bottom Omar meets her with a hand on her ass and a quick nip of her neck. She smiles hesitantly, presenting her mouth, which he falls on ravenously. Casper dissolves the film, blinking reality back into focus.
Omar understands parties. When the sun begins to set and the vice grip of darkness, expansive and stifling, promises to choke the world until it becomes pale, Omar understands the need for sanctuary. It’s the togetherness they crave, the deliverance from shame granted by their mutual excess. Omar creates another world with made up rules that everyone preaches but no one fully understands. A world of artificial sunshine which streams from the lights that glare out onto the high windowed deck, and prays the people come and be boisterous as the moths that frenziedly dance around the bulbs until their faces melt. The people do come, and they do burn inside because the flame is bright and warm and feels safer than being alone in the dark.
It’s later than Casper anticipated, the clock in the corner of his vision ticking past eleven, and when he presses through the unlatched door and enters the foyer the room is dimmed, the walls swirling with marbled designs that drip and shimmer like oil.
In front of the white couch, atop a fur rug cut like a Rorschach test, bodies are knotted together. Omar, Stevenson, and John thrust and tug, flip and pin, pant and grunt, as three women, limp and silent, endure. John, first to finish, sputters into a pair of swollen breasts.
“Oi, hurry up. Don’t hog her.” Jacob says, sat on the sofa with a hand resting on his crotch and his mouth wet with anticipation. John slips back into his trousers and roughhouses Jacob out of the seat playfully. He takes Jacob’s place on the sticky leather, letting his head lull back and his eyes close.
Around the exhibition unperturbed people chat and rub against each other. Others, unable to keep their gooey eyes from sticking to the breasts and butts, stand in a ring around the antics and watch. He spots her amongst the latter. She looks on with lips parted in awe. Then, as if able to feel the prick of his observation, her gaze flicks up to meet his. He doesn’t know how to peel his eyes away from her, even though he knows he should, and so stares on. Aware of the surveillance now, she breaks from the circle. He tracks her smooth pace, eloquent amongst bodies that stutter as discs whir and highs build momentum. She disappears down a hall and Casper, freed from the paralysis her body had induced, follows.
He finds her in the kitchen. She is sat on the counter beside a fruit bowl. It’s bronze and dimpled, the light running slick down the sides and splashing back into Casper’s pupils. A cluster of grapes dangle fat berries over the lip of the bowl, and the girl reaches inside and grabs an apple. She raises it to her lips and takes a calculating bite. A sweet droplet rolls over her chin as she chews.
She extends the apple. Casper takes it from her and sinks his teeth into the red flesh. She asks what’s it taste like and he says it’s good. But that’s not what she means and she asks him to describe it to her.
“It’s like, I don’t know. It’s fresh. Sweet. Light? It reminds me of school. My mom would always pack me an apple for school.”
She plucks the apple from Casper’s hand and takes another bite. Then, a hand on each hip, she guides him into the space between her splayed knees. She says that apples taste like first kisses to her.
She’s called Angel.
She says she just wants a place to hide away from it all for a bit, so Casper calls a taxi. He peeks into the living room. The party is louder and rowdier and Omar, used penis stuck to his hairy thigh, relishes in watching. Casper ducks back into the kitchen and tells Angel to meet him at the end of the drive, beyond the lights of the cherub-infested fountain.
Fifteen minutes later and they are both in a taxi, the mansion leering with a dozen bright eyes at them through the rearview mirror. Angel holds Casper’s hand on his knee and smiles. It changes her face. It’s more than beauty; it is an amiability that has stripped back the veneer. They’ve only spoken a few words, but her eyes, and her body, are bombarding him with signals he longs to decipher.
At his apartment he reaches for the light but Angel blocks his hand. His tailbone tingles as her hands undo his jeans and grope beneath his shirt. He has a fleeting feeling of guilt as they fall onto the mattress but her breath, hot as she nips at his earlobe, stifles it.
In the early hours of the morning they lie with the duvet off, letting the sweat evaporate from their clammy bodies. Angel, lying on her belly, drags a finger around the rim of Casper’s bellybutton, planting a delicate kiss above his nipple and whispering that they’ll have to keep this secret. To make this work, they can’t let Omar know. Casper moans noncommittally, rolling onto his side and sinking his nose into the tangles of her hair. Wisps get caught between his lips but he doesn’t bother to spit them out, biting off the ends and reassured by the pieces of her inside of him.
Overcome by a sudden modesty she tells Casper not to look and puts a palm over his eyes to be sure. Then her hand, and afterwards the weight of her body on the mattress, disappears. After a minute she says okay, he can look now.
Dressed, she returns to the mattress and he makes a million whispered promises in her ear.
“Have you ever been to the coast?” She says yes, but only to Omar’s cabin, which is just the same as Omar’s house except with logs and exposed brick. Omar doesn’t like to get in the water, so they stay locked inside his castle and he plays with her and she plays dead.
“I’ll take you down to the water.” Casper says. “Can you swim? No? Then I’ll cradle you in my arms and bob you like a buoy until you learn. And we won’t stay in a house, we’ll camp out in the sand and I’ll keep you warm.” And he shows her how, creating friction between their bodies like kindling.
While they imagine a future the present creeps into the room, and daylight does what it does best and threatens to expose the truths that lie beneath moonlit promises. The truth is that Angel has to go and meet Omar. She doesn’t explain why, and Casper is too scared to ask so hides beneath the duvet when she threatens to go, forcing her beneath the covers as well and blocking out the sunrise.
“Next weekend we’ll go to the beach.” he says. She agrees, they will but only if she goes now and makes sure Omar isn’t suspicious. She makes two false starts before she actually leaves, rushing the door, and then coming back to kiss him, and then trying the door again. Saltiness remains in her absence, soiling Casper’s sheets with the mixture of them.
Omar was born with a temper but hardly anybody knows because he never has reason to be riled. He terminated his first nanny, a woman with saggy arms and a mole on her chin, when he learned to talk, desiring one with fairer hair and nicer features to replace her. Then, once he reached puberty, he forced another rehire. This time the issue with the former nanny wasn’t with complexion, but with age. At thirteen, Omar already had an appreciation for pert breasts and youthful hides.
At eighteen Omar liked going to the pier with different girls. Once when he was there he won a girl a plush shark. So Omar decided he needed to have a shark, too. He had a tank installed, and purchased a real life version of the toy, and then Omar had to throw an ocean party to appreciate it. At the party Omar got too high and fell onto the tank, cracking the glass. Riled by the sting of his fall, he took to kicking the fissure until the entire wall of glass burst, filling the foyer with waves and leaving the shark beached on the marble floor with it’s gills spasming until it suffocated. Omar had shark-skin oxfords made out of the wasted hide. He decided he liked them so much he threw another party based around his acquisition. He bought an array of exotic hides still animated by the beasts that wore them and invited his friends to butcher and skin and make their own unique outfits. Lions and panthers and alligators and bears were slit at the throats, tributaries joining into streams of crimson that stained white tigers and clotted their fur. After the butchery the guests weren’t too fussed with the stitching and sowing bit and none of the garments were created. The maid spent two days cleaning blood and matted fur off the marble floor. After doing her job the maid asked to be relocated. Omar laughed and said no, amused by her realistic weeping.
In adulthood, Omar’s life is an unscheduled series of cruel, whimsical vignettes. Because of his inconsistency the affair is impossible to predict, so Casper finds himself constantly waiting for Angel’s apparition.
Casper hates Omar’s parties now. There he has to watch Angel and Omar touch, or, actually, watch Omar touch Angel. He thinks he sees her flinch most of the time, but then Omar doesn’t react to her repulsion so Casper wonders if he is just fooling himself. Angel says that she is repulsed, but then she won’t answer when he asks why she lets Omar touch her.
These are the worst times, but even the parties aren’t all torture. Occasionally they will find secret moments, like when Omar plays with his simulations and gets lost in the debauchery. Then Casper and Angel can sneak away into one of Omar’s spare bedrooms, close enough that they can still hear the party and listen to Omar’s exclamations while Casper steals kisses. He steals more than kisses. He steals fistfuls of hot flesh and nibbles of exposed neck and fat hunks of tongue. They always try to be quick, but afterwards, redressed and feeling safer, he steals whispers as well. They lie, hidden on the floor between the bed and the wall because they are too scared to spill sweat on the crisp covers. In this cranny Casper studies Angel.
Her favourite place is an old book stall in the city market. The Big Guys don’t make books anymore, there’s no one to remember the real books from before and irrationally lust for clunky and nostalgic things. With words available to download to the optic library, why labor hands with holding and flicking? But when the world was first conceptualised the Big Guys put some books in, easing the pilgrims into the new world by sprinkling it with familiar trinkets. Angel still likes the books. She says she enjoys the way stories can be whispered through flat pages.
She’s only been once to the bookstall, before she was Omar’s, but when she closes her eyes she can bring herself right back to it with the sunshine prickling her arms and a soft breeze relieving her flush. She says it smelled terrific there, like the books had bottled the scent of a hundred human hands. There was an old man who browsed with his hands open, palms down and hovering above the volumes like a metal detector on the beach. Occasionally, he would pause to scoop a book up from the pile. He’d lift it, a hand on each cover, and then slowly crack open the spine and let the pages fall to whatever place. Then, when they’d settled, he’d press his nose into the binding and inhale. Angel says if she is ever touched like those books she will instantly fall in love, and she will know that she is loved back.
Two months into their affair Casper realises that he might love Angel as much as an old man loves books. They are lying on a grey fur rug, the necessary darkness reducing them to textures. He feels the landscape of her body, her hipbones sharp against his belly where she lies, breasts pancaking as the weight of invisible forces holds them against each other. Sounds crawl beneath the cracks in the door to whisper at them, the omnipresent threat of exposure shrouded in the secret language of a hundred muffled voices. Casper fights against their intrusion with his own utterances.
“I miss you all the time. I miss you in the mornings, even when you’re with me, because I know you’ll have to go. I miss you when you’re just out of reach, because just seeing you isn’t enough. Don’t get me wrong, you’re beautiful. But I’ve seen a lot of beautiful things and beauty doesn’t make these stitches in my stomach like I haven’t eaten in days. It must be something else.”
She asks him if he misses her now.
“I can feel you now. I can feel your hips. God, I love your hips, and the hipbones and the bruises they leave on me after sex. It’s like evidence that you were really here. But I still do miss you, yeah. Because I can’t believe this. Even when you’re here, literally in my arms, I can’t believe this. How are you real?”
She doesn’t say anything.
“I’ve never felt like this before you know.”
She tells him that she has never felt anything at all until him.
When Casper is not at the parties he is waiting for her, which is a delicious torture. The anticipation winds him up like foreplay, and sometimes it lasts days. The longest was four days. When Angel finally appeared at Casper’s house she kissed all up and down his neck and apologised and told him how Omar surprised her with a trip down the road to his house on the coast. Casper imagined he could taste Omar’s spit when she kissed him again and had to stop his lips from recoiling and baring his teeth.
More often her absence is briefer. If Omar goes to the club, or to the casino and decides he wants another girl’s breathy luck on his dice, Angel is free. They meet and fuck twice because Casper is too wound up the first time to make her cum, but he recovers quickly. Then they talk about their future, big promises of the places they’ll go together, out in the open away from the fear of discovery.
They never manage to make it down to the coast.
Months pass like this and they form some sort of a routine around Omar’s eccentricities. When she is gone he itches for her touch. When she returns he wants to peel off his skin and just wear her.
Casper notices some peculiar things about Angel. Things she doesn’t know, big things that he doesn’t remembers not knowing. How years ago, before the digitisation, jobs disappeared, and then money became more and more concentrated, and then even the natural things, the things that wealth represented, those began to dry up, too. The first world squeezed everything from every well and juiced every fruitful country. So the Big Guys decided to gather all the people left and create the program. A network of brains digitised, attached to bodies which could be kept alive on the most minimal of substances.
She asks if he remembers outside the program.
“No one has ever been outside the program. This is history and stuff. That was ages ago.”
Her brow furrows, confused. She asks how he knows he has a body then.
He laughs, feeling as if he is back in elementary school. Casper paid acute attention during Sex History, and remembers vividly the anatomically accurate figure of Adam and Eve superimposed on the wall and eliciting giggles from the children.
The teacher, ignoring their falsetto laughs, had ploughed on. She explained how, before the digitisation of society, there had been things called periods and pregnancies, and showed diagrams of adult women grotesquely bloated, fat breasts engorged by hormones and reminding Casper of the pictures of manatees in his biology book. She explained how boys, when sexually aroused, used to do this thing called “ejaculating” and “sperm” would come out. Like squirt guns, Casper thought.
A new slide. This time a real life middle-aged woman and middle-aged man are depicted, stood out front of a rectangular white facility. The teacher explained how, when a man and a woman love each other very much, and decide they want to share that love with another person, they submit their applications to Embriot Inc. and eventually, when a place became available outside of the program, they extract the mother’s egg and father’s sperm and make a new person out of them, his consciousness delivered (by stork, she joked, but no one understood the allusion) to the parent’s awaiting crib.
The children had heard of an outside before, always vaguely, as some ethereal place where the decisions were made for them, and Casper understood the outside to be a dock where all their bodies rested, anchoring them to the vital nutrients an imperfect flesh and blood creature needed to then dream their communal reality, the program.
Angel seems placated by these explanations for a time, and they return to more familiar conversation. That is, until one night, when Omar beats the maid.
They’re at one of Omar’s parties but they don’t linger in the main hall long, stealing away as soon as they are reassured Omar’s high has uploaded, so they don’t see him beat the maid. They later learn he found a crimson stain on the white upholstery of his sofa and said she had left the place a mess on purpose, to embarrass him in front of his friends. So Omar beat her until her swollen lips bubbled with blood and her tongue became so fat it choked her apologies.
Omar’s screaming brings Angel and Casper back to the main hall, Casper quick to redo the buttons on his shirt. Omar is ordering everyone to leave, shouting at the maid that she has ruined his party, even though her boxed ears can’t hear him.
“We’re going to Attica.” he demands, and a dozen frantic calls birth a taxi rank out front that whisks the guests away, down into the neon city and to the club, which boasts of over one-hundred deluxe mattresses and stinks of lubricant.
Left alone in Omar’s house, Angel approaches the wheezing woman. The maid’s face is morphing before them, swelling bruises changing the plane of her nose and bloating her eyelids. Angel asks Casper how Omar can do this to someone, why no one stops him, why no one helps.
“It’s because she’s a simulation. You know what simulations are, right?” She opens the maid’s blouse, exposing her large breasts, and points at the smooth skin along her collar.
“Yeah, that’s right. Simulations don’t have this.” Casper taps his shirt where his disc slot hides. “There’d be no point cause there isn’t a body out there, no consciousness to alter.”
So a body equals consciousness, Angel paraphrases. But why does Omar hurt simulations?
“Because that’s what they’re for. Sure, they’re for more than just that. They’re for doing all those jobs people didn’t want to do anyways, all the boring stuff, and then we can just have fun and make things if we want to make them, or make trouble if you’re like Omar. That’s definitely part of it.”
Casper pauses, and Angel wonders aloud what the other part of it is.
“It doesn’t sound nice when you just say it like this…” Casper warns. Then, standing and distancing himself from the maids writhing body, he continues. “They’re just dolls, remember? They’re just an outlet. You know, before the digitisation people would fight. Riots and things, really nasty stuff, and not only when things got bad. It’s like, we always did this. Always had this awful need to hurt each other. So when they got a second chance the Big Guys created simulations, so that people could get all that meanness out of themselves. We’re like wolves in suits, and we’re really damn good at wearing the suits most the time but occasionally we have to bare our teeth a little.”
Angel’s back is to Casper and she’s hunched over. The maid’s breath crackles on the way out, blood and phlegm clogging her oesophagus. She has closed her eyes, head resting on the marble. Angel asks Casper what they should do with her now.
“Her? She’s done. Or, she will be when Omar gets back anyways. No way to fix it.”
Casper approaches Angel and stoops down as well. He puts an arm around her arched back and attempts to rub some life into her frozen stature.
“It’s cute, you caring about a simulation like this. For real, I think it’s lovely. Common now, I’ll call us a taxi.”
That night, in bed, Angel asks Casper if he has ever bought a simulation before. Discomforted by the silent taxi ride and their mechanical lovemaking, Casper answers no. Reassured, Angel cuddles into his shoulder, and Casper, eyes wide and unseeing in the black, empty room, rolls back footage from his own life.
The boys had saved up for ages, six months at least. There were eight of them, all fifteen years old, who would hang out in the woody bit behind the school, skipping classes and speculating about the existence of different discs that were rumoured to have somehow infiltrated the halls. Casper didn’t say much when he was with them, but they let him join in cause they thought it was funny the way he’d try ad-libbing raps when the discs got him dizzy. Casper was just grateful for the attention so laughed when they’d ape the teacher’s overbite when his back was turned. So when the girls started growing breasts and they suggested getting a simulation to get a bit of practice in, Casper went along. They’d known about simulations for ages, of course, they’d serve their school lunches and wipe down the halls. But this was another kind of simulation they were after, the kind made for pleasure, not function. About them, they knew some, but the information was fragmented, an accumulated knowledge pieced together from overheard adult conversations. You couldn’t even purchase them until you were over eighteen, but one of the boys had a big brother that said he would help them out with it. They couldn’t do it at any of their houses without their parents finding out, so they had her delivered to the woods.
Even split eight ways, she was expensive. Almost too expensive for what they got, making Casper think the brother had pocketed some of their funds. She was tall and blonde and old, with a heavy chest and tiny waist that looked like it might snap under the disproportionate weight. They asked her to undress, and she did so without modesty, baring her breasts to the licks of October gusts. Goose pimples didn’t raise from her skin, even while Casper shifted away from the wind. Her pouting lips remained half-parted, neither smiling nor frowning.
The boys took turns, the other seven watching while one approached at a time. They’d undress quickly, thin pubescent frames taut with excitement and nerves, then mount her and buck ferociously. None of them lasted long with her, and she didn’t move as one boy retreated and the next approached. She did pant, sometimes grab a gyrating ass cheek, leaving red marks from her long nails. Casper assumed it would cost more to get one that would groan, bite, and orgasm. When it was his turn, he didn’t feel the excitement he had anticipated. He crouched behind the mound of fleshy rump, raised high, her face and knees creating divots in the mud. Casper’s frantic thrusting dug her deeper into the wet earth. He’d felt guilt when he came. He hadn’t liked it. He’d rather share the pleasure than keep it all for himself, he had thought.
In spite of all that he still bought again. Growing up it was normal.
On Omar’s birthday Casper arrives early but it isn’t overly conspicuous because Casper is known to arrive whenever he fancies. Omar never questions it because he knows that Casper has to live in the city with all those people hurrying around and sometimes even running into each other. Omar doesn’t know how Casper does it so he takes pity, and if Casper is suddenly in the parlour Omar just takes it in his stride.
Angel lets him in, explaining that Omar is just upstairs, just getting dressed, and they should have a few minutes to themselves. She’s wearing a silver dress that is cut high at the throat and flows down to her bruise-dimpled thighs. When they both sit down on the white sofa the fabric rides up so that it barely sits beneath her. The middle cushion remains empty between them, and Casper wants to slip over and rest his hand in the groove between her pressing legs. He denies the impulse.
She says Omar noticed she was gone the other night. She tried to lie it away. The house is so big, she had said, she was just in the other wing. Just exploring, waiting for him to come back. He hadn’t understood. He’d wondered why she should explore. Just sit up and wait for me from now on, he had said.
“This is too much. I don’t care what he has on you Angel, we have to get you out. I can protect you. I swear I can.”
They hear the approach of Omar’s footfalls on the stairs and Casper stops speaking.
Omar wears a tartan suit in green and brown.
“Had to buy a new birthday suit. Everyone has seen the old one.” It isn’t funny but Omar laughs at his own joke so Casper forces laughter too.
“Come.” Omar grabs Casper by the collar and tugs him to his feet. Angel begins to stand up too but Omar extends a palm stopping her. “Just the men, Angel honey. You understand.”
To the left of the entrance hall there’s a large staircase that tapers as it climbs to the second-story balconies and Omar drags Casper to the top and down the right wing. At the end of the hall double doors preface Omar’s room. Inside thick pinstriped curtains are pulled shut, the room lit only from the opened doors and the bright hall. Omar slithers into the gloom, crossing to the vanity table and switching on a lamp. He opens the drawer and extracts a disc, distractedly eyeing the parting of his hair in the mirror. He licks his palm and flattens an imagined flyaway.
“Don’t be shy.” Omar coos and Casper joins him. They stand side by side in the ornate frame. Omar, roasted brown, with feral eyes set in the valley between sharp cheekbones and arching brows, and Omar’s stare, swallowed and spit back by the reflective surface. It sets Casper’s cheeks aflame, his frizzy hair like smoke. Omar offers the disc to Casper.
“Nah, I think I’m gonna take tonight off. Thanks though.”
Omar ignores Casper’s protest, popping the top buttons of his shirt open with nimble fingers and sliding the disc into the slot. The flesh sucks the disc inside and it purrs as it settles in Casper’s chest. His head begins to swim and he steadies himself with a hand on Omar’s shoulder, looking down at his slick wingtips.
“Not feeling good, are we?” Omar strokes Casper head and Casper tries to nod but the motion makes his stomach flip. “Must be a bad batch. I’m sorry.”
Omar grabs a tuft of Casper’s hair and tugs so that Casper’s view of the floor is replaced by the ceiling.
“What are you doing?” Casper asks.
“You thought I didn’t know? You. Actually. Thought. I. Didn’t. Know? I’m really rubbish at sharing Casper.”
Casper turns clammy. He wonders what is churning inside him, the tampered disc making his vision go wavy. He begins to struggle like a hare caught by the throat. Omar tugs down and Casper loses his balance, crashing onto his back. Omar mounts him, knees pinning each shoulder.
“How was she? Brilliant girl, am I right? Tightest bitch I’ve ever fucked.” Omar begins to thrust his hips, throwing his head back and moaning. Then, gathering the phlegm in the top of his throat, he mock finishes and spits into Casper’s face. The mucus is hot and thick and clouds Casper’s eyes. He begins to cry.
“Oh don’t be a fucking baby.” Omar stands, throwing his handkerchief at Casper. Casper uses it to wipe his face, but the mucus leaves a sticky residue he can’t seem to rub off.
“All’s even if you just split the cost.”
“The cost…?”
“Yeah. I mean, no use losing friends over toys but she’s expensive and you’ve been getting free rides. Fairs fair.”
“What cost?”
Omar is overcome by giggles. He has to swallow them down before he can regurgitate words.
“Has she been pretending again? The saucy devil that’s her favourite trick to play.”
“What are you on about?”
“Aw I’m sorry. That’s a rough one. I didn’t realise you didn’t know. Here.”
Omar extends his hand and after a pause Casper, seeing no other option, takes. There is a glimmer in Omar’s eye that Casper recognises. He gets it when he has the one up on someone, a tight smirk uncovering sharp canines.
“She isn’t even real mate. She’s just a silly doll.” He laughs.
Casper brain frantically tried to disprove Omar’s declaration, searching for evidence of Angel’s humanity. The ubiquitous blackness shrouds Angel’s nude form. With the lights off, she says.
“But… she loves me. How can she love me then? She must be real.”
Omar scowls and spits in repulsion.
“I s’pose you think my maids real too then, and the taxi drivers and my chef and my girls who let themselves get fucked like sluts. Don’t be daft. You know what this is? The Big Guys ,out there, beyond the program, configuring everything, getting a big head, deciding to mess around with the program just to stroke their egos and prove to themselves how good they are at simulating life. Playing god, really, but they’d never call it that. If you go along with it, imagine… you’ll be that stupid boy who fell in love with a simulation because she could have mildly convincing orgasms. I can forgive you for borrowing my things. But I really couldn’t forgive you for being that thick.”
“But…”
“This is tiring. I’m sick of your whining.” Omar walks to the opened door, but pauses before slipping back out into the lighted hall. “You’re a real bore tonight. And you can’t even hold your buzz. Get a taxi. I’d rather not see you downstairs.”
“Stop. Stop here just stop.” The taxi driver pulls to the curb and Casper tumbles out, a brick wall stopping the trajectory of his wobbly legs.
The wall is attached to a mean, shackled edifice. A neon orange sign slashes the night, spelling K-I-N-G-S. Casper walks in, but before he can enter the belly of the building he is stopped at a box office. Bars separate him from the cashier, the face intelligible beneath a thick cloak of shadows.
“Ten bits per ride.” he says and Casper extends his wrist. He passes Casper a token, who nods his thanks, then shoulders his way through the heavy swinging doors.
There are men, and only men, lingering about in small groups and not speaking much. When they do make noise, it rises from all of them simultaneously, an animalistic wail. It's not powerful. It’s the advantageous cry of torturers. They are not victorious because failure was never an option.
They’re all facing towards the centre of the room. A stage is elevated from the wood panelled floor and elastic ropes cage in the contenders. Two men, one standing, top buttons of his white shirt undone, the material limp with sweat but otherwise unmarred. The other man, bare chested and without a disc-slot, wearing flimsy golden shorts and nothing else, lies on his side, mouth dangling half open and eyes hooded, glassy, and unresponsive. The standing man is kicking him, over and over again in the abdomen, and with each kick a new bubble of blood bursts from the simulation’s slack lips. Eventually the referee, bored and slouching at the side of the ring, blows his whistle. The man stomps once more as the shrill blast fades, this time ramming his heel into the simulation’s temple. The head deflates, but it doesn’t matter because the body has been spent for a while, whatever that had animated it having long ago flown away.
Casper speaks to the referee and gets cued up. When it is his turn he climbs unsteadily into the rink, and is taken aback by the brightness of the stream lights as they finally fix their unblinking stares upon him.
The boy looks barely eighteen. He is blond and bare-chested, wearing the same golden shorts as the contender before him, but thinner, more fledgling than hawk. Casper finds it odd that they would choose a simulation like him for a job like this. He’d expect someone stocky, with a square jaw and mean face, the type of face you would feel validated in punching. This simulation does not raise his arms in any sort of fighting gesture but stands in his corner, left hand worrying the hem of his uniform. Casper stares at the hand as he sprints at the boy and draws back his own fist, and doesn’t understand why it doesn’t bunch in defence or at least lie still at the boy’s side. It just keeps fidgeting nervously, and right before Casper makes contact with the boy’s jaw, he swears he sees the simulation flinch.
The simulation drops and curls in a ball, shielding his head protectively behind raised arms. Once on the ground, however, Casper finds it easier to ignore the boy’s fragility, ramming the toe of his boot into the tender flesh of his abdomen until he hiccups blood all over the hem of Casper’s jeans. He keeps at it until the boy’s arms drop away from his head, limp and no longer caring about protecting his childlike face. He aims several hard blows at the boy’s exposed jaw, teeth scattering the mat and rolling away like tossed dice. He goes until the boy’s face doesn’t even resemble a face anymore, until the referee, yawning and bored, pulls him off.
A week later Angel comes around to Casper’s uninvited. She buzzes the intercom, but the face that appears on the screen is all wrong. She looks like a peach that has been squeezed in a fist. Her left eyelid is stained, indigo and also mustard as the flesh stretches over a swollen brow. Her lips are engorged and the bottom one is split down the middle. She pleads to be let in.
Casper presses the buzzer and unhinges the latch. He paces while she climbs the five landings, but her slender figure, slipping through the crack in the door, causes him pause. It’s daytime. Casper is unaccustomed to seeing Angel in natural rays of light. She looks very tangible with the sun squinting her eyes, lips quivering upwards and achieving a hesitant smile.
She asks him where he’s been. Not angrily, just confused by his silence and his downcast gaze. She asks if she has done something wrong. Is he punishing her because she didn’t run away then, on Omar’s birthday? Then she admits that Omar took her to bed after Casper left, and apologises again and again between sobs, and then goes on to say that Omar started to choke her and shows Casper the yellow shadow of an old bruise in the shape of fingers. Then he started spitting abuses, she says, and telling her how he knew that she had been playing house with someone else and didn’t she know she was his puppet and how could she be so silly to even dream that she could get out of this. But she got out of it, see? She did it. It took some patience and a few blows to the face but she passed Casper’s test and look at her now. Free. They’ll go to the beach, she says. Please, lets go to the beach.
Casper reaches out towards Angel and she begins to melt into his embrace but then he takes a fist of blouse in each hand and pulls until the buttons burst. Angel shrieks and attempts to hug herself but Casper keeps her arms parted. Her chest is naked and smooth. Satisfied, he drops her arms and she collapses to the ground. She pleads, and he ignores her, cocking back his head and laughing humourlessly at the sky.
“You guys really got me there. Funny joke. I hope you enjoyed the show cause I’m done now and it’s over.”
She blubbers around his knees but he refuses to speak to her, lifting her by the wrists and leading her to the door.
Casper receives a call in the evening. The phone pad flickers but remains dark.
“Omar?”
“Yeah. H-here dude. Come over I want to show you something.”
“What’s wrong with your visuals?”
“Just, broke it. No big deal. Come round you’re really gonna want to see this.”
When Casper arrives at Omar’s door forty-five minutes later no one answers, but Casper is used to being left out on the step so he lets himself into the foyer. The room is dark and he blindly gropes the wall for the switch. Finding the smooth square in the plastering he taps it once, dumping light into the room.
Omar is sat in a regal wooden chair with scarlet padding. His arms have been forced together at the wrists behind the back of the chair and are tied together by one of his flamboyant neckties. Casper thinks Omar’s shoulders must be dislocated to allow for his positioning.
His projector is on, a black box with small white words in typeface telling Casper to ‘Begin live stream’.
Angel emerges from the hall that leads to the kitchen. She approaches in jeans and nothing else, hair tied in a knot atop her head. She has a knife in her hand, a fat butcher’s cleaver. She stops when she sees Casper. She asks him to please have a seat on the white leather couch. Casper does so, staring at the knife. One of Omar’s eyes is gummed shut with blood, but the other blinks rapidly. Omar parts his lips and moans, but the noise is muffled by an argyle sock filling his mouth.
Angel asks Casper to begin live streaming. Casper looks at his friend, and then at the empty black box, waiting dumbly to be filled by media. Detached, unbiased, receptive, willing to share anything. All Casper has to do is turn his eyes into windows and invite the world to watch.
“Have you seen this?”
Gregor is staring at a projection. The scene is frozen, the running time having reached its end, exhibiting the freeze frame of girl’s face close up. Jenny finishes hanging her coat by the door and walks over to join him, standing behind the couch with a hand on either side of his broad shoulders.
“Go on then.” she says and Gregor reels the timer back to the start and hits play. There’s the girl again, bare chested, her body smooth from chin to nipple, and next to her a man, seated in a high-backed chair and only visible from the waist up. He’s wearing a pinstripe navy blazer, a pink bow-tie draped loosely around his neck and his collar unbuttoned. His head is slumped forward and his eyes are closed. As the video progresses, Jenny’s hands creep onto each of Gregor’s shoulders. She gasps, her nails digging in so hard they pinch through his shirt.
In the kitchen Martha slides a paring knife beneath the skin of a trout. She pulses her wrist, coaxing the coral scales from the pearly meat. Her ears smart as the sound of her mistress’s sharp inhale drifts into the room. In her distraction, the knife slips past the fish’s tail, nicking her exposed thumb and drawing a sliver of blood. Abandoning the fish, she drifts to the doorway. Delicately, she cracks the door, peeking out into the living room. The paring knife remains limp and forgotten in her hand.
“I’ve been so stupid. Forgive me Angel. I’ve been so wrong. You’ve made your point. You don’t need to do any more. I believe you. You’re real, alright? I believe you.” A voice pleads out of shot, the filmmaker.
The simulation, Angel, has a fistful of the unconscious man’s hair and tugs so that his slumping head lifts. When she kisses his neck with the sharp ridge of the blade the eye that isn’t puckered blinks open. His lips gurgle, but a sock wedged in his mouth chokes his pleading. She presses hard, drawing the blade slowly and steadily through his jugular and creating a second, spitting mouth. When she turns back around to face the camera with squared shoulders her torso is covered in streaks of red. She stoops down so her face fills the frame, and stares right into the lens.
Finally, she speaks. Her voice is not cruel. She sounds as though she might cry.
“I’m sorry I’ve done this but I had to make myself your real, and your real looks like this to me. I can’t keep on hiding… I’m not sure why I’m the first one who can’t, except I guess this is how the world was given to us so the others didn’t know how to ask for more. I’m asking for more now. Alright. I’ve said what I need to say. You can turn it off.”
The frame freezes.
“Crazy right?” Gregor asks Jenny. He waits expectantly for her reaction.
“How did this happen? How did they let this happen? Up there, why didn’t the Big Guys stop her?” Gregor’s eyes harden, the implication of the video dawning on them both simultaneously.
In the doorway, Martha’s grip tightens around the handle of the knife.
“Want another go?”
“I think he’s done dude.”
Omar gives the boy a final kick in the gut but the spirit has gone from the attack. The jolt of Omar’s foot connecting with his abdomen sends him skidding backwards, his hair painting a stroke of blood on the floor.
Bored with his spent toy, Omar takes the empty seat beside Casper, wiping the perspiration from his forehead with the soiled handkerchief.
Casper’s buzz is fading. Omar gave him a disc at the start of the party. On credit, he’d said while winking and Casper hadn’t wasted time, inserting the disc in his chest and uploading, unsatisfied until his brain swam in ecstasy. Now the room is coming back into focus. The light that had before rained down on him from the chandelier, creating warmth and colour where it danced on the polished floor, retreats back into the crystals above. The sacrificial boy — before a pack-savaged lamb — becomes a face again. Casper doesn’t like the way he looks. It’s reminding him of this kid who he used to know in primary that stuttered until his parents saved enough to upgrade him. Casper had liked that kid. They used to play quietly together in the back of the class while the others threw pencils and taught each other profanities. The pair would write stories, stencilling a sentence each in fat, awkward scrawls. Writing spared the kid from tripping on his untrained tongue. Casper doesn’t want to see the school kid’s face anymore, but it resolutely swims in front of his sharpening eyes. His brain clings desperately to the dissipating high, but like trying to hold a pool of water in cupped hands the sensations trickle out of grasp. He knows Omar’s generosity won’t extend to another hit, at least not tonight, so he stands up and crosses the room, stepping over the body and avoiding the constellation of red droplets garnishing the white marble.
The far walls are entirely windowed, the house set in the mountain like a gem in a crown. Casper gets close enough to touch the glass, then slides the door, identical to the surrounding panes and hidden by its uniformity, to the side, stepping out onto the dark balcony. Casper closes the door behind him and approaches the rail, leaning over so that the night breeze cools his flushed skin.
The door whispers in its tracks as it’s coaxed open again. Elbows join him on the railing, slender fingers tickling the night. He vaguely recognises the girl, pretty blonde hair on a taut frame, wrapped up in a high collared black dress. Wet tracks glow on her round cheeks, retaining the faintest glimmer of the light that had engulfed the room before.
He tries to sketch sentences from his fragmented thoughts, but they run in tired rotations, unable to lend comfort. Instead, he reaches out for one of her hands, anchoring it to him in the expanse of blackness that billows away from the house.
There wasn’t a party yesterday night, so Casper had to go back to his rigid flat. It is hardly lived in, a large studio vast and impersonal and decorated with only a king-sized mattress on the cold cement floor and a chair. Nothing else is necessary because Casper doesn’t have guests over. He only goes there to sleep and shower and he usually does that at Omar’s anyways. But because Omar didn’t have a party Casper was forced to occupy himself. He napped through the morning, and in the afternoon bought breakfast to go and created a spread on his floor, spilling egg and ketchup and wiping it up with his sleeve.
Omar is having a party at dusk. Casper puts the faucets in the shower on hot and softens the stiff bathroom with steam. He strips, tossing his clothes on top of the kneaded duvet, and walks across the loft, stalked by the thin ghost of his reflection as it glides from window to inky window. The bathroom mirror is dripping, blotting out his features. He turns away from the smudged face and steps into the cubical.
Grease from egg and sausage, knots of hair, and stubborn grit are jostled loose from his pores as he lathers. He steps out of the shower and rubs himself dry with an abrasive towel. The butt of his hand makes an arch in the milky glass, and he catches his own heavy lidded glance. Sometimes he hates looking at himself and on those days his reflection haunts him, following him home in darkened windows and burrowing itself into the mirror above his sink. On those bad days his echo jeers at him, smearing his inadequacies across his face like shit on leather brogues.
Casper has earnest blue eyes. His mom gave him them for his seventh birthday. They’d been almost black before, stony flat things that cast spells and, he believed, inspired hostilities between him and his peers. He’d asked for blue because, as he’d insisted, blue is the colour of souls and he wanted his soul to be right against his lenses so everyone could see it and would know he was kind. His mother bought him the upgrade, but the hostilities continued unabated and young Casper learned to alter more than his eyes.
Naked in front of his sweating bathroom mirror he’s not thinking about the bullies. Rather, he’s remembering the feeling of elation he’d felt when the eyes were new. At the time he spent hours admiring the flecks of green and the rim of dark navy bleeding into the black pool of his pupil. He’d stare at himself, in spoons and car windows, overcome by youthful vanity. Working the splayed legs of an old comb through his nipple-length hair he acknowledges that fragment of his ten-year-old innocence. He feels a similar sensation stirring in his belly now. Something like confidence.
He calls a taxi and crumples again amongst his stale sheets. His eyes darken, the pupils still visible beneath the translucent film that begins to play across their lenses. He sees the girl, her recorded face unmarred by the substances that had spoiled his vision and tightened his tongue on the night. He rewinds, regretful at having to abandon her. People, moving backwards, jerk themselves into a state of partial sobriety. He reaches the beginning of the party and begins searching, looking back through his own eyes and trying to tease the right gold out of a crowd of pale-ash and honey and flaxen.
The taxi arrives and Casper pauses the film and hurries downstairs, annoyed by the interruption. The simulation inside is beady eyed and silent. Sometimes you get cabbies that try to plug their owners varied other endeavours. These owners, unhappy with their monthly allowance, invest in simulations, then rent them out for a hefty price. Off to a party, eh? No date with you? Sad boy. Two girls for one tonight. Tonight only. In some cases the cabbie will try to strike a bargain. Tonight, however, the simulation in the driver’s seat only asks where Casper is going and then glides into motion, floating up the winding mountain road.
He finds her as they are pulling into the drive, twenty-five minutes into the footage. The taxi driver asks for Casper’s arm, wanting to scan the embedded code and withdraw the seven bits for the ride, but Casper hushes him. She’s descending the large staircase, eyes downcast, sidestepping people already too wobbly-legged to stand who ooze down the stairs in groups of twos and threes. When she reaches the bottom Omar meets her with a hand on her ass and a quick nip of her neck. She smiles hesitantly, presenting her mouth, which he falls on ravenously. Casper dissolves the film, blinking reality back into focus.
Omar understands parties. When the sun begins to set and the vice grip of darkness, expansive and stifling, promises to choke the world until it becomes pale, Omar understands the need for sanctuary. It’s the togetherness they crave, the deliverance from shame granted by their mutual excess. Omar creates another world with made up rules that everyone preaches but no one fully understands. A world of artificial sunshine which streams from the lights that glare out onto the high windowed deck, and prays the people come and be boisterous as the moths that frenziedly dance around the bulbs until their faces melt. The people do come, and they do burn inside because the flame is bright and warm and feels safer than being alone in the dark.
It’s later than Casper anticipated, the clock in the corner of his vision ticking past eleven, and when he presses through the unlatched door and enters the foyer the room is dimmed, the walls swirling with marbled designs that drip and shimmer like oil.
In front of the white couch, atop a fur rug cut like a Rorschach test, bodies are knotted together. Omar, Stevenson, and John thrust and tug, flip and pin, pant and grunt, as three women, limp and silent, endure. John, first to finish, sputters into a pair of swollen breasts.
“Oi, hurry up. Don’t hog her.” Jacob says, sat on the sofa with a hand resting on his crotch and his mouth wet with anticipation. John slips back into his trousers and roughhouses Jacob out of the seat playfully. He takes Jacob’s place on the sticky leather, letting his head lull back and his eyes close.
Around the exhibition unperturbed people chat and rub against each other. Others, unable to keep their gooey eyes from sticking to the breasts and butts, stand in a ring around the antics and watch. He spots her amongst the latter. She looks on with lips parted in awe. Then, as if able to feel the prick of his observation, her gaze flicks up to meet his. He doesn’t know how to peel his eyes away from her, even though he knows he should, and so stares on. Aware of the surveillance now, she breaks from the circle. He tracks her smooth pace, eloquent amongst bodies that stutter as discs whir and highs build momentum. She disappears down a hall and Casper, freed from the paralysis her body had induced, follows.
He finds her in the kitchen. She is sat on the counter beside a fruit bowl. It’s bronze and dimpled, the light running slick down the sides and splashing back into Casper’s pupils. A cluster of grapes dangle fat berries over the lip of the bowl, and the girl reaches inside and grabs an apple. She raises it to her lips and takes a calculating bite. A sweet droplet rolls over her chin as she chews.
She extends the apple. Casper takes it from her and sinks his teeth into the red flesh. She asks what’s it taste like and he says it’s good. But that’s not what she means and she asks him to describe it to her.
“It’s like, I don’t know. It’s fresh. Sweet. Light? It reminds me of school. My mom would always pack me an apple for school.”
She plucks the apple from Casper’s hand and takes another bite. Then, a hand on each hip, she guides him into the space between her splayed knees. She says that apples taste like first kisses to her.
She’s called Angel.
She says she just wants a place to hide away from it all for a bit, so Casper calls a taxi. He peeks into the living room. The party is louder and rowdier and Omar, used penis stuck to his hairy thigh, relishes in watching. Casper ducks back into the kitchen and tells Angel to meet him at the end of the drive, beyond the lights of the cherub-infested fountain.
Fifteen minutes later and they are both in a taxi, the mansion leering with a dozen bright eyes at them through the rearview mirror. Angel holds Casper’s hand on his knee and smiles. It changes her face. It’s more than beauty; it is an amiability that has stripped back the veneer. They’ve only spoken a few words, but her eyes, and her body, are bombarding him with signals he longs to decipher.
At his apartment he reaches for the light but Angel blocks his hand. His tailbone tingles as her hands undo his jeans and grope beneath his shirt. He has a fleeting feeling of guilt as they fall onto the mattress but her breath, hot as she nips at his earlobe, stifles it.
In the early hours of the morning they lie with the duvet off, letting the sweat evaporate from their clammy bodies. Angel, lying on her belly, drags a finger around the rim of Casper’s bellybutton, planting a delicate kiss above his nipple and whispering that they’ll have to keep this secret. To make this work, they can’t let Omar know. Casper moans noncommittally, rolling onto his side and sinking his nose into the tangles of her hair. Wisps get caught between his lips but he doesn’t bother to spit them out, biting off the ends and reassured by the pieces of her inside of him.
Overcome by a sudden modesty she tells Casper not to look and puts a palm over his eyes to be sure. Then her hand, and afterwards the weight of her body on the mattress, disappears. After a minute she says okay, he can look now.
Dressed, she returns to the mattress and he makes a million whispered promises in her ear.
“Have you ever been to the coast?” She says yes, but only to Omar’s cabin, which is just the same as Omar’s house except with logs and exposed brick. Omar doesn’t like to get in the water, so they stay locked inside his castle and he plays with her and she plays dead.
“I’ll take you down to the water.” Casper says. “Can you swim? No? Then I’ll cradle you in my arms and bob you like a buoy until you learn. And we won’t stay in a house, we’ll camp out in the sand and I’ll keep you warm.” And he shows her how, creating friction between their bodies like kindling.
While they imagine a future the present creeps into the room, and daylight does what it does best and threatens to expose the truths that lie beneath moonlit promises. The truth is that Angel has to go and meet Omar. She doesn’t explain why, and Casper is too scared to ask so hides beneath the duvet when she threatens to go, forcing her beneath the covers as well and blocking out the sunrise.
“Next weekend we’ll go to the beach.” he says. She agrees, they will but only if she goes now and makes sure Omar isn’t suspicious. She makes two false starts before she actually leaves, rushing the door, and then coming back to kiss him, and then trying the door again. Saltiness remains in her absence, soiling Casper’s sheets with the mixture of them.
Omar was born with a temper but hardly anybody knows because he never has reason to be riled. He terminated his first nanny, a woman with saggy arms and a mole on her chin, when he learned to talk, desiring one with fairer hair and nicer features to replace her. Then, once he reached puberty, he forced another rehire. This time the issue with the former nanny wasn’t with complexion, but with age. At thirteen, Omar already had an appreciation for pert breasts and youthful hides.
At eighteen Omar liked going to the pier with different girls. Once when he was there he won a girl a plush shark. So Omar decided he needed to have a shark, too. He had a tank installed, and purchased a real life version of the toy, and then Omar had to throw an ocean party to appreciate it. At the party Omar got too high and fell onto the tank, cracking the glass. Riled by the sting of his fall, he took to kicking the fissure until the entire wall of glass burst, filling the foyer with waves and leaving the shark beached on the marble floor with it’s gills spasming until it suffocated. Omar had shark-skin oxfords made out of the wasted hide. He decided he liked them so much he threw another party based around his acquisition. He bought an array of exotic hides still animated by the beasts that wore them and invited his friends to butcher and skin and make their own unique outfits. Lions and panthers and alligators and bears were slit at the throats, tributaries joining into streams of crimson that stained white tigers and clotted their fur. After the butchery the guests weren’t too fussed with the stitching and sowing bit and none of the garments were created. The maid spent two days cleaning blood and matted fur off the marble floor. After doing her job the maid asked to be relocated. Omar laughed and said no, amused by her realistic weeping.
In adulthood, Omar’s life is an unscheduled series of cruel, whimsical vignettes. Because of his inconsistency the affair is impossible to predict, so Casper finds himself constantly waiting for Angel’s apparition.
Casper hates Omar’s parties now. There he has to watch Angel and Omar touch, or, actually, watch Omar touch Angel. He thinks he sees her flinch most of the time, but then Omar doesn’t react to her repulsion so Casper wonders if he is just fooling himself. Angel says that she is repulsed, but then she won’t answer when he asks why she lets Omar touch her.
These are the worst times, but even the parties aren’t all torture. Occasionally they will find secret moments, like when Omar plays with his simulations and gets lost in the debauchery. Then Casper and Angel can sneak away into one of Omar’s spare bedrooms, close enough that they can still hear the party and listen to Omar’s exclamations while Casper steals kisses. He steals more than kisses. He steals fistfuls of hot flesh and nibbles of exposed neck and fat hunks of tongue. They always try to be quick, but afterwards, redressed and feeling safer, he steals whispers as well. They lie, hidden on the floor between the bed and the wall because they are too scared to spill sweat on the crisp covers. In this cranny Casper studies Angel.
Her favourite place is an old book stall in the city market. The Big Guys don’t make books anymore, there’s no one to remember the real books from before and irrationally lust for clunky and nostalgic things. With words available to download to the optic library, why labor hands with holding and flicking? But when the world was first conceptualised the Big Guys put some books in, easing the pilgrims into the new world by sprinkling it with familiar trinkets. Angel still likes the books. She says she enjoys the way stories can be whispered through flat pages.
She’s only been once to the bookstall, before she was Omar’s, but when she closes her eyes she can bring herself right back to it with the sunshine prickling her arms and a soft breeze relieving her flush. She says it smelled terrific there, like the books had bottled the scent of a hundred human hands. There was an old man who browsed with his hands open, palms down and hovering above the volumes like a metal detector on the beach. Occasionally, he would pause to scoop a book up from the pile. He’d lift it, a hand on each cover, and then slowly crack open the spine and let the pages fall to whatever place. Then, when they’d settled, he’d press his nose into the binding and inhale. Angel says if she is ever touched like those books she will instantly fall in love, and she will know that she is loved back.
Two months into their affair Casper realises that he might love Angel as much as an old man loves books. They are lying on a grey fur rug, the necessary darkness reducing them to textures. He feels the landscape of her body, her hipbones sharp against his belly where she lies, breasts pancaking as the weight of invisible forces holds them against each other. Sounds crawl beneath the cracks in the door to whisper at them, the omnipresent threat of exposure shrouded in the secret language of a hundred muffled voices. Casper fights against their intrusion with his own utterances.
“I miss you all the time. I miss you in the mornings, even when you’re with me, because I know you’ll have to go. I miss you when you’re just out of reach, because just seeing you isn’t enough. Don’t get me wrong, you’re beautiful. But I’ve seen a lot of beautiful things and beauty doesn’t make these stitches in my stomach like I haven’t eaten in days. It must be something else.”
She asks him if he misses her now.
“I can feel you now. I can feel your hips. God, I love your hips, and the hipbones and the bruises they leave on me after sex. It’s like evidence that you were really here. But I still do miss you, yeah. Because I can’t believe this. Even when you’re here, literally in my arms, I can’t believe this. How are you real?”
She doesn’t say anything.
“I’ve never felt like this before you know.”
She tells him that she has never felt anything at all until him.
When Casper is not at the parties he is waiting for her, which is a delicious torture. The anticipation winds him up like foreplay, and sometimes it lasts days. The longest was four days. When Angel finally appeared at Casper’s house she kissed all up and down his neck and apologised and told him how Omar surprised her with a trip down the road to his house on the coast. Casper imagined he could taste Omar’s spit when she kissed him again and had to stop his lips from recoiling and baring his teeth.
More often her absence is briefer. If Omar goes to the club, or to the casino and decides he wants another girl’s breathy luck on his dice, Angel is free. They meet and fuck twice because Casper is too wound up the first time to make her cum, but he recovers quickly. Then they talk about their future, big promises of the places they’ll go together, out in the open away from the fear of discovery.
They never manage to make it down to the coast.
Months pass like this and they form some sort of a routine around Omar’s eccentricities. When she is gone he itches for her touch. When she returns he wants to peel off his skin and just wear her.
Casper notices some peculiar things about Angel. Things she doesn’t know, big things that he doesn’t remembers not knowing. How years ago, before the digitisation, jobs disappeared, and then money became more and more concentrated, and then even the natural things, the things that wealth represented, those began to dry up, too. The first world squeezed everything from every well and juiced every fruitful country. So the Big Guys decided to gather all the people left and create the program. A network of brains digitised, attached to bodies which could be kept alive on the most minimal of substances.
She asks if he remembers outside the program.
“No one has ever been outside the program. This is history and stuff. That was ages ago.”
Her brow furrows, confused. She asks how he knows he has a body then.
He laughs, feeling as if he is back in elementary school. Casper paid acute attention during Sex History, and remembers vividly the anatomically accurate figure of Adam and Eve superimposed on the wall and eliciting giggles from the children.
The teacher, ignoring their falsetto laughs, had ploughed on. She explained how, before the digitisation of society, there had been things called periods and pregnancies, and showed diagrams of adult women grotesquely bloated, fat breasts engorged by hormones and reminding Casper of the pictures of manatees in his biology book. She explained how boys, when sexually aroused, used to do this thing called “ejaculating” and “sperm” would come out. Like squirt guns, Casper thought.
A new slide. This time a real life middle-aged woman and middle-aged man are depicted, stood out front of a rectangular white facility. The teacher explained how, when a man and a woman love each other very much, and decide they want to share that love with another person, they submit their applications to Embriot Inc. and eventually, when a place became available outside of the program, they extract the mother’s egg and father’s sperm and make a new person out of them, his consciousness delivered (by stork, she joked, but no one understood the allusion) to the parent’s awaiting crib.
The children had heard of an outside before, always vaguely, as some ethereal place where the decisions were made for them, and Casper understood the outside to be a dock where all their bodies rested, anchoring them to the vital nutrients an imperfect flesh and blood creature needed to then dream their communal reality, the program.
Angel seems placated by these explanations for a time, and they return to more familiar conversation. That is, until one night, when Omar beats the maid.
They’re at one of Omar’s parties but they don’t linger in the main hall long, stealing away as soon as they are reassured Omar’s high has uploaded, so they don’t see him beat the maid. They later learn he found a crimson stain on the white upholstery of his sofa and said she had left the place a mess on purpose, to embarrass him in front of his friends. So Omar beat her until her swollen lips bubbled with blood and her tongue became so fat it choked her apologies.
Omar’s screaming brings Angel and Casper back to the main hall, Casper quick to redo the buttons on his shirt. Omar is ordering everyone to leave, shouting at the maid that she has ruined his party, even though her boxed ears can’t hear him.
“We’re going to Attica.” he demands, and a dozen frantic calls birth a taxi rank out front that whisks the guests away, down into the neon city and to the club, which boasts of over one-hundred deluxe mattresses and stinks of lubricant.
Left alone in Omar’s house, Angel approaches the wheezing woman. The maid’s face is morphing before them, swelling bruises changing the plane of her nose and bloating her eyelids. Angel asks Casper how Omar can do this to someone, why no one stops him, why no one helps.
“It’s because she’s a simulation. You know what simulations are, right?” She opens the maid’s blouse, exposing her large breasts, and points at the smooth skin along her collar.
“Yeah, that’s right. Simulations don’t have this.” Casper taps his shirt where his disc slot hides. “There’d be no point cause there isn’t a body out there, no consciousness to alter.”
So a body equals consciousness, Angel paraphrases. But why does Omar hurt simulations?
“Because that’s what they’re for. Sure, they’re for more than just that. They’re for doing all those jobs people didn’t want to do anyways, all the boring stuff, and then we can just have fun and make things if we want to make them, or make trouble if you’re like Omar. That’s definitely part of it.”
Casper pauses, and Angel wonders aloud what the other part of it is.
“It doesn’t sound nice when you just say it like this…” Casper warns. Then, standing and distancing himself from the maids writhing body, he continues. “They’re just dolls, remember? They’re just an outlet. You know, before the digitisation people would fight. Riots and things, really nasty stuff, and not only when things got bad. It’s like, we always did this. Always had this awful need to hurt each other. So when they got a second chance the Big Guys created simulations, so that people could get all that meanness out of themselves. We’re like wolves in suits, and we’re really damn good at wearing the suits most the time but occasionally we have to bare our teeth a little.”
Angel’s back is to Casper and she’s hunched over. The maid’s breath crackles on the way out, blood and phlegm clogging her oesophagus. She has closed her eyes, head resting on the marble. Angel asks Casper what they should do with her now.
“Her? She’s done. Or, she will be when Omar gets back anyways. No way to fix it.”
Casper approaches Angel and stoops down as well. He puts an arm around her arched back and attempts to rub some life into her frozen stature.
“It’s cute, you caring about a simulation like this. For real, I think it’s lovely. Common now, I’ll call us a taxi.”
That night, in bed, Angel asks Casper if he has ever bought a simulation before. Discomforted by the silent taxi ride and their mechanical lovemaking, Casper answers no. Reassured, Angel cuddles into his shoulder, and Casper, eyes wide and unseeing in the black, empty room, rolls back footage from his own life.
The boys had saved up for ages, six months at least. There were eight of them, all fifteen years old, who would hang out in the woody bit behind the school, skipping classes and speculating about the existence of different discs that were rumoured to have somehow infiltrated the halls. Casper didn’t say much when he was with them, but they let him join in cause they thought it was funny the way he’d try ad-libbing raps when the discs got him dizzy. Casper was just grateful for the attention so laughed when they’d ape the teacher’s overbite when his back was turned. So when the girls started growing breasts and they suggested getting a simulation to get a bit of practice in, Casper went along. They’d known about simulations for ages, of course, they’d serve their school lunches and wipe down the halls. But this was another kind of simulation they were after, the kind made for pleasure, not function. About them, they knew some, but the information was fragmented, an accumulated knowledge pieced together from overheard adult conversations. You couldn’t even purchase them until you were over eighteen, but one of the boys had a big brother that said he would help them out with it. They couldn’t do it at any of their houses without their parents finding out, so they had her delivered to the woods.
Even split eight ways, she was expensive. Almost too expensive for what they got, making Casper think the brother had pocketed some of their funds. She was tall and blonde and old, with a heavy chest and tiny waist that looked like it might snap under the disproportionate weight. They asked her to undress, and she did so without modesty, baring her breasts to the licks of October gusts. Goose pimples didn’t raise from her skin, even while Casper shifted away from the wind. Her pouting lips remained half-parted, neither smiling nor frowning.
The boys took turns, the other seven watching while one approached at a time. They’d undress quickly, thin pubescent frames taut with excitement and nerves, then mount her and buck ferociously. None of them lasted long with her, and she didn’t move as one boy retreated and the next approached. She did pant, sometimes grab a gyrating ass cheek, leaving red marks from her long nails. Casper assumed it would cost more to get one that would groan, bite, and orgasm. When it was his turn, he didn’t feel the excitement he had anticipated. He crouched behind the mound of fleshy rump, raised high, her face and knees creating divots in the mud. Casper’s frantic thrusting dug her deeper into the wet earth. He’d felt guilt when he came. He hadn’t liked it. He’d rather share the pleasure than keep it all for himself, he had thought.
In spite of all that he still bought again. Growing up it was normal.
On Omar’s birthday Casper arrives early but it isn’t overly conspicuous because Casper is known to arrive whenever he fancies. Omar never questions it because he knows that Casper has to live in the city with all those people hurrying around and sometimes even running into each other. Omar doesn’t know how Casper does it so he takes pity, and if Casper is suddenly in the parlour Omar just takes it in his stride.
Angel lets him in, explaining that Omar is just upstairs, just getting dressed, and they should have a few minutes to themselves. She’s wearing a silver dress that is cut high at the throat and flows down to her bruise-dimpled thighs. When they both sit down on the white sofa the fabric rides up so that it barely sits beneath her. The middle cushion remains empty between them, and Casper wants to slip over and rest his hand in the groove between her pressing legs. He denies the impulse.
She says Omar noticed she was gone the other night. She tried to lie it away. The house is so big, she had said, she was just in the other wing. Just exploring, waiting for him to come back. He hadn’t understood. He’d wondered why she should explore. Just sit up and wait for me from now on, he had said.
“This is too much. I don’t care what he has on you Angel, we have to get you out. I can protect you. I swear I can.”
They hear the approach of Omar’s footfalls on the stairs and Casper stops speaking.
Omar wears a tartan suit in green and brown.
“Had to buy a new birthday suit. Everyone has seen the old one.” It isn’t funny but Omar laughs at his own joke so Casper forces laughter too.
“Come.” Omar grabs Casper by the collar and tugs him to his feet. Angel begins to stand up too but Omar extends a palm stopping her. “Just the men, Angel honey. You understand.”
To the left of the entrance hall there’s a large staircase that tapers as it climbs to the second-story balconies and Omar drags Casper to the top and down the right wing. At the end of the hall double doors preface Omar’s room. Inside thick pinstriped curtains are pulled shut, the room lit only from the opened doors and the bright hall. Omar slithers into the gloom, crossing to the vanity table and switching on a lamp. He opens the drawer and extracts a disc, distractedly eyeing the parting of his hair in the mirror. He licks his palm and flattens an imagined flyaway.
“Don’t be shy.” Omar coos and Casper joins him. They stand side by side in the ornate frame. Omar, roasted brown, with feral eyes set in the valley between sharp cheekbones and arching brows, and Omar’s stare, swallowed and spit back by the reflective surface. It sets Casper’s cheeks aflame, his frizzy hair like smoke. Omar offers the disc to Casper.
“Nah, I think I’m gonna take tonight off. Thanks though.”
Omar ignores Casper’s protest, popping the top buttons of his shirt open with nimble fingers and sliding the disc into the slot. The flesh sucks the disc inside and it purrs as it settles in Casper’s chest. His head begins to swim and he steadies himself with a hand on Omar’s shoulder, looking down at his slick wingtips.
“Not feeling good, are we?” Omar strokes Casper head and Casper tries to nod but the motion makes his stomach flip. “Must be a bad batch. I’m sorry.”
Omar grabs a tuft of Casper’s hair and tugs so that Casper’s view of the floor is replaced by the ceiling.
“What are you doing?” Casper asks.
“You thought I didn’t know? You. Actually. Thought. I. Didn’t. Know? I’m really rubbish at sharing Casper.”
Casper turns clammy. He wonders what is churning inside him, the tampered disc making his vision go wavy. He begins to struggle like a hare caught by the throat. Omar tugs down and Casper loses his balance, crashing onto his back. Omar mounts him, knees pinning each shoulder.
“How was she? Brilliant girl, am I right? Tightest bitch I’ve ever fucked.” Omar begins to thrust his hips, throwing his head back and moaning. Then, gathering the phlegm in the top of his throat, he mock finishes and spits into Casper’s face. The mucus is hot and thick and clouds Casper’s eyes. He begins to cry.
“Oh don’t be a fucking baby.” Omar stands, throwing his handkerchief at Casper. Casper uses it to wipe his face, but the mucus leaves a sticky residue he can’t seem to rub off.
“All’s even if you just split the cost.”
“The cost…?”
“Yeah. I mean, no use losing friends over toys but she’s expensive and you’ve been getting free rides. Fairs fair.”
“What cost?”
Omar is overcome by giggles. He has to swallow them down before he can regurgitate words.
“Has she been pretending again? The saucy devil that’s her favourite trick to play.”
“What are you on about?”
“Aw I’m sorry. That’s a rough one. I didn’t realise you didn’t know. Here.”
Omar extends his hand and after a pause Casper, seeing no other option, takes. There is a glimmer in Omar’s eye that Casper recognises. He gets it when he has the one up on someone, a tight smirk uncovering sharp canines.
“She isn’t even real mate. She’s just a silly doll.” He laughs.
Casper brain frantically tried to disprove Omar’s declaration, searching for evidence of Angel’s humanity. The ubiquitous blackness shrouds Angel’s nude form. With the lights off, she says.
“But… she loves me. How can she love me then? She must be real.”
Omar scowls and spits in repulsion.
“I s’pose you think my maids real too then, and the taxi drivers and my chef and my girls who let themselves get fucked like sluts. Don’t be daft. You know what this is? The Big Guys ,out there, beyond the program, configuring everything, getting a big head, deciding to mess around with the program just to stroke their egos and prove to themselves how good they are at simulating life. Playing god, really, but they’d never call it that. If you go along with it, imagine… you’ll be that stupid boy who fell in love with a simulation because she could have mildly convincing orgasms. I can forgive you for borrowing my things. But I really couldn’t forgive you for being that thick.”
“But…”
“This is tiring. I’m sick of your whining.” Omar walks to the opened door, but pauses before slipping back out into the lighted hall. “You’re a real bore tonight. And you can’t even hold your buzz. Get a taxi. I’d rather not see you downstairs.”
“Stop. Stop here just stop.” The taxi driver pulls to the curb and Casper tumbles out, a brick wall stopping the trajectory of his wobbly legs.
The wall is attached to a mean, shackled edifice. A neon orange sign slashes the night, spelling K-I-N-G-S. Casper walks in, but before he can enter the belly of the building he is stopped at a box office. Bars separate him from the cashier, the face intelligible beneath a thick cloak of shadows.
“Ten bits per ride.” he says and Casper extends his wrist. He passes Casper a token, who nods his thanks, then shoulders his way through the heavy swinging doors.
There are men, and only men, lingering about in small groups and not speaking much. When they do make noise, it rises from all of them simultaneously, an animalistic wail. It's not powerful. It’s the advantageous cry of torturers. They are not victorious because failure was never an option.
They’re all facing towards the centre of the room. A stage is elevated from the wood panelled floor and elastic ropes cage in the contenders. Two men, one standing, top buttons of his white shirt undone, the material limp with sweat but otherwise unmarred. The other man, bare chested and without a disc-slot, wearing flimsy golden shorts and nothing else, lies on his side, mouth dangling half open and eyes hooded, glassy, and unresponsive. The standing man is kicking him, over and over again in the abdomen, and with each kick a new bubble of blood bursts from the simulation’s slack lips. Eventually the referee, bored and slouching at the side of the ring, blows his whistle. The man stomps once more as the shrill blast fades, this time ramming his heel into the simulation’s temple. The head deflates, but it doesn’t matter because the body has been spent for a while, whatever that had animated it having long ago flown away.
Casper speaks to the referee and gets cued up. When it is his turn he climbs unsteadily into the rink, and is taken aback by the brightness of the stream lights as they finally fix their unblinking stares upon him.
The boy looks barely eighteen. He is blond and bare-chested, wearing the same golden shorts as the contender before him, but thinner, more fledgling than hawk. Casper finds it odd that they would choose a simulation like him for a job like this. He’d expect someone stocky, with a square jaw and mean face, the type of face you would feel validated in punching. This simulation does not raise his arms in any sort of fighting gesture but stands in his corner, left hand worrying the hem of his uniform. Casper stares at the hand as he sprints at the boy and draws back his own fist, and doesn’t understand why it doesn’t bunch in defence or at least lie still at the boy’s side. It just keeps fidgeting nervously, and right before Casper makes contact with the boy’s jaw, he swears he sees the simulation flinch.
The simulation drops and curls in a ball, shielding his head protectively behind raised arms. Once on the ground, however, Casper finds it easier to ignore the boy’s fragility, ramming the toe of his boot into the tender flesh of his abdomen until he hiccups blood all over the hem of Casper’s jeans. He keeps at it until the boy’s arms drop away from his head, limp and no longer caring about protecting his childlike face. He aims several hard blows at the boy’s exposed jaw, teeth scattering the mat and rolling away like tossed dice. He goes until the boy’s face doesn’t even resemble a face anymore, until the referee, yawning and bored, pulls him off.
A week later Angel comes around to Casper’s uninvited. She buzzes the intercom, but the face that appears on the screen is all wrong. She looks like a peach that has been squeezed in a fist. Her left eyelid is stained, indigo and also mustard as the flesh stretches over a swollen brow. Her lips are engorged and the bottom one is split down the middle. She pleads to be let in.
Casper presses the buzzer and unhinges the latch. He paces while she climbs the five landings, but her slender figure, slipping through the crack in the door, causes him pause. It’s daytime. Casper is unaccustomed to seeing Angel in natural rays of light. She looks very tangible with the sun squinting her eyes, lips quivering upwards and achieving a hesitant smile.
She asks him where he’s been. Not angrily, just confused by his silence and his downcast gaze. She asks if she has done something wrong. Is he punishing her because she didn’t run away then, on Omar’s birthday? Then she admits that Omar took her to bed after Casper left, and apologises again and again between sobs, and then goes on to say that Omar started to choke her and shows Casper the yellow shadow of an old bruise in the shape of fingers. Then he started spitting abuses, she says, and telling her how he knew that she had been playing house with someone else and didn’t she know she was his puppet and how could she be so silly to even dream that she could get out of this. But she got out of it, see? She did it. It took some patience and a few blows to the face but she passed Casper’s test and look at her now. Free. They’ll go to the beach, she says. Please, lets go to the beach.
Casper reaches out towards Angel and she begins to melt into his embrace but then he takes a fist of blouse in each hand and pulls until the buttons burst. Angel shrieks and attempts to hug herself but Casper keeps her arms parted. Her chest is naked and smooth. Satisfied, he drops her arms and she collapses to the ground. She pleads, and he ignores her, cocking back his head and laughing humourlessly at the sky.
“You guys really got me there. Funny joke. I hope you enjoyed the show cause I’m done now and it’s over.”
She blubbers around his knees but he refuses to speak to her, lifting her by the wrists and leading her to the door.
Casper receives a call in the evening. The phone pad flickers but remains dark.
“Omar?”
“Yeah. H-here dude. Come over I want to show you something.”
“What’s wrong with your visuals?”
“Just, broke it. No big deal. Come round you’re really gonna want to see this.”
When Casper arrives at Omar’s door forty-five minutes later no one answers, but Casper is used to being left out on the step so he lets himself into the foyer. The room is dark and he blindly gropes the wall for the switch. Finding the smooth square in the plastering he taps it once, dumping light into the room.
Omar is sat in a regal wooden chair with scarlet padding. His arms have been forced together at the wrists behind the back of the chair and are tied together by one of his flamboyant neckties. Casper thinks Omar’s shoulders must be dislocated to allow for his positioning.
His projector is on, a black box with small white words in typeface telling Casper to ‘Begin live stream’.
Angel emerges from the hall that leads to the kitchen. She approaches in jeans and nothing else, hair tied in a knot atop her head. She has a knife in her hand, a fat butcher’s cleaver. She stops when she sees Casper. She asks him to please have a seat on the white leather couch. Casper does so, staring at the knife. One of Omar’s eyes is gummed shut with blood, but the other blinks rapidly. Omar parts his lips and moans, but the noise is muffled by an argyle sock filling his mouth.
Angel asks Casper to begin live streaming. Casper looks at his friend, and then at the empty black box, waiting dumbly to be filled by media. Detached, unbiased, receptive, willing to share anything. All Casper has to do is turn his eyes into windows and invite the world to watch.
“Have you seen this?”
Gregor is staring at a projection. The scene is frozen, the running time having reached its end, exhibiting the freeze frame of girl’s face close up. Jenny finishes hanging her coat by the door and walks over to join him, standing behind the couch with a hand on either side of his broad shoulders.
“Go on then.” she says and Gregor reels the timer back to the start and hits play. There’s the girl again, bare chested, her body smooth from chin to nipple, and next to her a man, seated in a high-backed chair and only visible from the waist up. He’s wearing a pinstripe navy blazer, a pink bow-tie draped loosely around his neck and his collar unbuttoned. His head is slumped forward and his eyes are closed. As the video progresses, Jenny’s hands creep onto each of Gregor’s shoulders. She gasps, her nails digging in so hard they pinch through his shirt.
In the kitchen Martha slides a paring knife beneath the skin of a trout. She pulses her wrist, coaxing the coral scales from the pearly meat. Her ears smart as the sound of her mistress’s sharp inhale drifts into the room. In her distraction, the knife slips past the fish’s tail, nicking her exposed thumb and drawing a sliver of blood. Abandoning the fish, she drifts to the doorway. Delicately, she cracks the door, peeking out into the living room. The paring knife remains limp and forgotten in her hand.
“I’ve been so stupid. Forgive me Angel. I’ve been so wrong. You’ve made your point. You don’t need to do any more. I believe you. You’re real, alright? I believe you.” A voice pleads out of shot, the filmmaker.
The simulation, Angel, has a fistful of the unconscious man’s hair and tugs so that his slumping head lifts. When she kisses his neck with the sharp ridge of the blade the eye that isn’t puckered blinks open. His lips gurgle, but a sock wedged in his mouth chokes his pleading. She presses hard, drawing the blade slowly and steadily through his jugular and creating a second, spitting mouth. When she turns back around to face the camera with squared shoulders her torso is covered in streaks of red. She stoops down so her face fills the frame, and stares right into the lens.
Finally, she speaks. Her voice is not cruel. She sounds as though she might cry.
“I’m sorry I’ve done this but I had to make myself your real, and your real looks like this to me. I can’t keep on hiding… I’m not sure why I’m the first one who can’t, except I guess this is how the world was given to us so the others didn’t know how to ask for more. I’m asking for more now. Alright. I’ve said what I need to say. You can turn it off.”
The frame freezes.
“Crazy right?” Gregor asks Jenny. He waits expectantly for her reaction.
“How did this happen? How did they let this happen? Up there, why didn’t the Big Guys stop her?” Gregor’s eyes harden, the implication of the video dawning on them both simultaneously.
In the doorway, Martha’s grip tightens around the handle of the knife.