Moral Zero (10 page)

Your l
ife may well be affected by it.

Whatever. I’m still livin
it. I’m doin it my way, by myself, with whoever wants to come along for the ride.

Of course.
Johnny turned back to Mr White, causing Red to frown. I think me and Red might share not completely alien views, but perhaps his are less . . . erudite.

Whatever, muttered Red, and stood up.
I’m gonna go find me some girls. He walked off with a thumb cocked in his belt and the other running his hands through his locks.

I don’t thin
k he’s interested, said Mr White, looking after him with a slightly concerned expression.

It complicates his world view.
Johnny didn’t watch him go, but sat at the bar and smoked.

His world is pretty small,
Mr White observed.

Of course it is. It’s on
ly got him in it.

Johnny had been gone for an hour. He hadn’t said where he was going he had just up and left. Red was half laid down in the far, shadowed corner of the bar, blowing blue smoke from his mouth. A thin trail of blue wisped its way from the end of his cigarette.

What are you smokin
g? Mr White sat down beside him, back from the bathroom.

Blue snake.

What’s that?

XE.
Red blew another big cloud of blue.

Okay.

It’s a drug, said Red helpfully.

I know what it is,
said Mr White. Then, after a pause, Why’s it called blue snake?

Red shrugged.

What does it do?

Red shrugged again. Somethin
. Not much. It’s just, like, a relaxant, y’know?

Yeah.

You want a puff?

No thanks.

Johnny returned a short while later, his head down as he approached their corner. Red stood up like a jack-in-the-box.

Johnnyyy
! Red stumbled forward and, before Mr White could put his hand out, wrapped his arms around Johnny’s frame, right around his dark jacket for his hands to clasp each other at his back. He was leaning forward a little, his head pressed against Johnny’s chest, his eyes closed and a wide cat-like grin slashed across his face.

What are you doing.
Johnny looked down at the beaming figure pinning his left arm to his side. His right arm was holding a black cigarette, the lit end trailing the thinnest smoke signal up into the air.

I’m huggin
you man. Red squeezed a little.

Johnny lightly tapped the end of his cigarette on Red’s head. A crumble of hot ash fell into
the nest of hair but went unnoticed.

Why?

Because we’re friends and I like you. Hombre.

Oh dear.
Johnny took a couple more draughts and once again used Red’s hair as an ashtray. Please stop.

Nope.
Red buried his face in Johnny’s chest.

Johnny grazed the end of his smoke onto Red’s bare arm.

Fuck! Red yelped, instantly letting go and spinning off. Goddamn!

It appears I’m free now,
said Johnny dryly. He moved his drink over a few inches to the right.

Is that drink for me?
Red rubbed his arm, distracted by the movement and the slosh of amber nectar inside polished glass.

It is if you want it to be.

Red grabbed the drink, the affront of being burnt forgotten. Does this mean we’re friends?

Johnny sighed, loudly, and stubbed the last of his cigare
tte in the ashtray on the bar. It means whatever you want it to mean.

Is that a yes?

No.

Two hours
later they moved into District Twelve. Mr White wasn’t about to argue, and Kidd Red was drunk and high on XE. He was legless and giggling and they had to carry him through the checkpoint.

DISTRICT 12, HOTEL

Mr White wasn’t a man of action. He wasn’t a man of words. He was the watcher. The listener. He had learned that the quieter you were the more you sank into the background, becoming almost like the scenery. People forgot you were there. And so they revealed more. That self-check that makes you act with a bit more decorum, a bit more dignity and integrity, perhaps a bit more ethically around new people, people not in your inner circle? That wasn’t there when around Mr White.

He watched, and he listened, and inside his head he filed reports and wrote biographies and analysed everything with a fine tooth comb, judging it against his own
character, reading people and their conversations like fiction. Making the slightest of adjustments to himself, as if grooming himself for some intangible position, some omniscient all-acting job, held to task to build himself a model human. Emotions on the outside. The mechanisms for emotion on the inside.

He learnt like a scholar.

No, not like a scholar. Like a man of professional distraction, a man that clung to boredom and apathy as livelihoods. A man seeking life in others. He dissected people in his brain, and tossed them aside when they proved of no interest, as they so often did.

Johnny Black and Kidd Red had so far proven far more interesting than anyone he had met before.

He didn’t consider himself a bad person. In fact, he didn’t consider himself a good person either. When he came to think about it, he didn’t really consider himself much of a person at all. He was just a mind, a mind taking in the external. Things he knew he should care about he often didn’t, or felt that any care summoned in his breast was artificial, a mechanical response devoid of soul. He had emotions, sure, but they were principally devoted to himself, the him that was cut off from the outside world. The mind alone. He knew he could feel things for outside influences, for other people, but for large stretches of time they felt isolated and disconnected to varying degrees. He made up for this by what he felt was a tremendous bout of acting, so lifelike that it often convinced him, and was like second nature. If somebody close to him was upset or in pain, he would act accordingly. Sympathetic. Reassuring. Whenever he thought back to these moments, however, he was slightly paranoid that he was too stilted, too short on words, too by-the-numbers. He said what he thought people wanted to hear. By and large, he was right, and he was right because he had listened for so long.

Mr White was unclear as to his position in the world, but he assumed it to be
a completely insignificant one. He was a blip on nobody’s radar. He was a ghost in the machine.

When other people tried to engage him it made him uncomfortable. The less he knew them the less the comfort. The greater the engagement the less the comfort. Sex was a challenge. Thankfully sex was unnecessary.
But he had the potential to enjoy simple social interaction, even to have fun, and when it was forced upon him by the right people at the right times it could dig him out of his shell.

Johnny Black and Kidd Red were the right kind of people. They were not your everyday men. They were fringe men. Outcasts, exiles. Men of horror and absurdity. Men
free of tethers, men unchained. Beasts and devils. Geniuses and madmen. Psychopaths. Judge jury and executioner. Moral zeroes. Glorious fools riding the wave, the wave of shit and fear and nothing.

There was more to learn from them than from the rest of humanity.

Mr White found himself attracted to them, like a fly attracted to hot shit. Like a moth attracted to the light, that when turned out, flutters around blind and crazy and free in the darkness. They were rubbing off on him, their ways like musical terrorism to his ears. He was easily impressionable and always had been. Red and Black were easily impressing and always had been. He was being charmed, seduced, and he lapped it up in all his lust and fear and nightly sweats. Every time he looked at them he could feel the admiration nestling within him, or something like it, and he wondered and kept on wondering why there was so much to like about the very worst of people.

Mr White didn’t have sex. He didn’t fuck and he didn’t make love. He kept himself to himself, and all his greatest pleasures had been known in his own company. He masturbated religiously, dev
outly and zealously. He was dependent on his organ as though the touch of it was the only union he ever desired. It wasn’t – he wanted so much more, so much greater – but all of these were unattainable, because all of these things were imaginings. None of them could exist. All the women and men and more. All the beasts and demons. All the things, all the things in the universe were in his universe and his universe was a fantasy.

He had lived whole lives of masturbation. Shut off from the outside world, lusting and self-loathing and yet also apathetic and distant, his body feeling like some alien plant, some wall decoration. His mind hallucinating, dreaming. Great visions. Feelings of genius, of sexual dominance
and submission, of worlds and their people conquered and terraformed. Feelings of disgust and love. A sexuality of fiction.

What
had Red said on the night they had first met? The fantasy is everything. It was all about the fantasy. It always was, always is.

Mr White was weary, inescapably weary.
But then again he always was, if not in body then in mind. He finished his glass of water and climbed into bed. There was silence from next door, and he guessed that Red had passed out.

Mr White sighed and settled down.
He ran his hands down his body to the place where there was still feeling and gripped it tight. Another night in Rule.

THE WHITE DREAM

There was a room of pale faces. An audience hall lined with figures. They were clad as ladies and gentlemen, in elegant ballroom dresses and tuxedos. Their heads were all blank and smooth, without form or feature, like white eggshells. They all faced him in the centre. Nobody moved or spoke. There were no mouths, no expressions. It was as though being under the judgement of hundreds of statues.

Silently, the room shifted inwards. It got smaller. The figures got closer.

He wanted to edge away from the people but they surrounded him all sides. All four walls were shrinking in, almost imperceptibly. The people crowded. Without a single movement, they came closer. Fifteen metres. Ten. Five. Two. One.

They clustered in, their faces right up to him. He couldn’t speak for terror. His skin dripped with liquid fear and he felt even this judged, appraised with condescension and sneers, even though no emotion was displayed by the pale faces. But the mood was palpable and prickling.

You are useless, sir. The buzzing flat-spoken words came from behind him, and he span around, but there were just more empty faces looking at him in silence.

You are nothing, sir.
He span around again but there was no sign of a culprit, no sign of mouths.

This won’t do, sir.

You are a maggot, sir.

You can’t be enough, sir.

You just won’t do, sir.

You are a nobody, sir.

The torments in all their gentlemen’s decorum came thick and fast, battering him from all sides and yet none he could see as he span hopelessly on his feet, weeping down his shirt.

I am
me
! he wailed.

Silence.

Silence.

All the ballroom dancers with
their eggshell heads opened up mouths, huge black holes that took over most of their face like gaping pits of oblivion and without a single other movement they screamed laughter at him. Every figure assaulted him with the same conformed hating, mocking laughter, and it sounded like the tidal buzzing of flies or a thousand buzzsaws or the screech of static.

Then, as though they were on rails, they rushed in at him.

He woke up.

BAR

Johnny had taken them to the nearest cheap hotel he could find and checked them in, holding the incapable Red’s pen hand and arm and operating them like a puppet to give a better signature than Red ever made sober. He had then disappeared back out into the night, only to be there waiting for them in the first bar they entered. He nodded to them from a table. Whiskey in hand. Their drinks were already set up for them. Rum for Red. Water for Mr White.

My mind’s
fuckin crazy guys. I mean it. Red coughed from his straight rum. It’s just – he waved his hands as if painting a scene of chaos. Just, you got no idea.

I think of
some dark things too sometimes.

C’mon White, you ain’t got shit but pretty flowers and
rainbows in that heada yours.

You’re wrong.

Yeah, you are, said Johnny, eyeing Mr White. I would be surprised if he couldn’t shock you a dose or two.

You guys don’t have what I got.

Try us.

Red
sighed. My mind is like this… this electric current right. And it leaps onto anythin it can, without thought or direction. It’ll just go. And often it leaps onto stuff it ain’t supposed to. So it’ll just jump right over there before you’ve even fuckin thought of anythin, before your mind’s even willed it. Nothin conscious about it. I don’t wanna think of most of this shit but I do. And, right, I do this thing right, where I scribble out my mind. Like I have a big black pen and I just scratch all over my mind’s eye like I’m crossin it all out real fast. And that buys me half a second, and then I can get my mind offa that thing and there it’ll go fuckin bouncin to somethin new, and if that’s wrong I gotta scribble that out too, cause if my mind stays, well, that just feels real wrong. Imagine if it’s something illegal -