Corruption

by Adam Vine

  Ink presented the girl’s nude, headless body to us with a white-gloved ta-da as silent horror enveloped the audience. Hands clasped over mouths. Stifled cries rippled through the seats behind me. There wasn’t any blood, neither on Iza’s neck, nor on the blades of Big Ben’s swords, which he was swiftly putting away behind the far curtain of the stage.

  Ink put his tailcoat back on and held up a hand to quiet us. “My good people of Country. Before you storm the stage with your pitchforks and tear me to pieces for taking the life of this poor girl, I would point out that Margarita here isn’t dead.”

  I couldn’t believe my eyes, but Iza’s body was still moving. Her hands scoured the flat line at the top of her neck where the cut had been made just above her trachea, searching for the head that wasn’t there. Their motion was smooth and controlled, not erratic like one would’ve expected from a freshly decapitated corpse. I’d read somewhere that the heads of decapitated people stay alive for a few seconds after being separated from the body. But did that also apply to bodies deprived of their heads?

  I didn’t think it did.

  “What’s that, Margarita? Do you want to tell us something?” Ink asked the headless girl.

  Iza said something too quiet to hear.

  Ink hushed the audience with a wave. “One more time, dear?”

  “You didn’t tell me you were using real swords,” Iza’s nude, headless body said. Her voice sounded wheezing and muffled through the open piping of her neck, but it was unmistakably hers.

  “Sorry. Anything else? Maybe you could tell us how you feel, now that you’ve lost a bit of weight? Oops. I mean, not that you needed to, or anything. Forgive me that faux pas, my love. Doesn’t she look thin, everyone? Oh, dammit. She’s not likely to forget that one anytime soon,” Ink said.

  “You’re an asshole,” Iza’s headless body said.

  The tension gripping the theater eased, and a few anxious laughs punctured the silence.

  “See, folks? This scrumptious, unholy tart is still in perfectly good health. Sure, she’s a few kilograms lighter, but bikini season is right around the corner. By the way, Margarita, baby… have you considered shaving?”

  “Give me back my head,” Iza’s body said.

  The audience roared.

  “Don’t worry. I will,” Ink said.”

  “Well, where the hell did you put it?” Iza said.

  “It’s somewhere safe. Do you want to say any final words before Baldy calls the curtain and gives it back to you?” Ink said.

  Ink placed both hands on the stump of Iza’s neck, twisting it back and forth, like Iza was shaking her head no. “A little hard to do without all the equipment,” Ink said.

  “Stop that,” Iza said.

  Ink let go and gave us a Cheshire Cat’s grin. “Oops. My apologies. Since moving to Country, I’ve developed the horrible habit of not listening to anything a woman says. That’s why I love you guys. You can take a joke. Unlike some people…”

  Ink pointed to Iza, who had begun searching the stage frantically for her head. She stumbled over a bundle of speaker wires and fell over. The audience lost it.

  “Seriously. Kocham Kraj. You guys are the best. Thank you so much!” Ink said.

  The curtains fell to uproarious applause, a single, claustrophobic wave that boomed through the darkness of the theater. When the curtain rose again, Ink, Big Ben, and Iza – Iza, who was whole again, her head and clothes reattached – raised their hands to the ceiling and gave three deep bows.

  The crowd cheered and showered the stage with bread.

  THE CITY

  I FOUND INK in the alley behind the theater, one hand leaning on the grimy bricks, the other wiping tears from Iza’s eyes with ritualistic detachment. I hung back, not wishing to interrupt them, but Ink noticed me standing there and waved Iza away. She stared at him incredulously. He waved her off again, pointing at the street and then clicking with his tongue to get the point across.

  I hadn’t heard what they’d been arguing about, but it must’ve been bad, because she gave Ink one of the dirtiest looks I’ve ever seen in my life before storming off.

  “Spierdalaj,” Iza said over her shoulder as she disappeared back into the golden glow of the City night, a broken bird fleeing back to the infinite nest from which she’d fallen. I knew enough Countryish to know that Iza had just told Ink to go fuck himself. From the way she’d been crying, and the callous aloofness Ink had demonstrated, I didn’t think he would be seeing her again.

  “They’ll surprise you,” Ink said to me.

  “Uh… what?” I said.

  He beckoned me to come closer. “It was a fight. A broad doing what broads do. It’s not gonna stain your clothes, buddy. C’mere.”

  “Okay.” I edged closer to where he was leaning on the back of the theater. “Uh… you need a cigarette?”

  “The fuck? No, I don’t need a cigarette. I don’t smoke. Neither do you, Boy Scout,” Ink said.

  I pulled the pack of Marlboro Reds out of my coat pocket. “Actually, I do. Started yesterday.”

  “You’re a little old to be entering your 4Chan phase, don’t you think?” Ink said.

  “I broke up with my girlfriend. I guess that makes two of us. You don’t mind?” I said. Ink threw me a quizzical glare. I lit my cigarette. “You did tell me it was a good way to meet women, remember?”

  “Daniel, sometimes I think you must be a fucking idiot to believe half the shit I tell you. Don’t smoke. You want to die when you’re forty-five? No. You want to live forever. Give me that.” Ink snatched the cigarette from my mouth and extinguished it under the heel of his shoe. I withheld my protest. “I’m sorry to hear about your girlfriend. I didn’t know you and that girl were serious. What was her name again?”

  “Kashka,” I said. “And we weren’t. She wanted to be, but I decided it was better not to waste her time.”

  “Give her a few months. She’ll be back. So will that one.” He nodded toward the direction Iza had gone. “You called it off. You know what that means? It means she’ll be checking her phone every five seconds for the next forever until she hears from you again. Then it’ll be easier than it was the first time.”

  “I’m not sure I want…” I started to say, but Ink cut me off.

  “You enjoy the show?” he said.

  “Uh. Yeah. It was great. That’s why I came back here to find you. I wanted to tell you…”

  “Hey, thanks, man… really awesome that you came out tonight. Thank you for supporting me and my work, from the bottom of my heart.”

  Ink extended his hand for me to shake. I shook it. “Actually, I was wondering if maybe we could go somewhere to grab a drink and talk. It’s kind of important,” I said.

  A slow, frozen breath blew from Ink’s mouth. He rolled his top hat through his hands, squinted, and said, “That’s not in the cards tonight, Boy Scout. But let’s meet up another time when I come back to Country.”

  “You’re leaving?” I said. “Why?”

  “It’s time for me to move on - past time, actually - Benny’s already on his way to the airport.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “Romania. Greener pastures. Thinner waists. Better asses. Well, maybe not better asses. Countryish girls have the booty game on lock. But my buddy told me it’s going off down there. Catching a flight out tomorrow. Gotta go home and pack.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said. “I thought you said this place was paradise? I read that on your blog.”

  “Paradise has fallen. Paradise always does. I’m getting sick of the bitchy attitudes, the iPhones, Tinder, blue hair, and facial piercings. Female flakiness has risen 200% in the last two years. This country is becoming too westernized for my taste. You should’ve been here two years ago – that’s when it was really good. Every other girl in the club gave you fuck me eyes like you were a movie star. Alas, not anymore. Now every Aga, Paulina, and Magda has her naked ass all over Instagram and has had her brains banged out by a
dozen horny Spaniards and Italians when she was on holiday.

  “No, I’m just rambling. I really did love it here. This city gave me four of the best years of my life, and too many decent lays to count. But places change, y’know? And I’m coming to realize that, as much happiness as this place has given me, happiness is transient, and my time would be better spent somewhere else. You understand,” Ink said.

  “It almost sounds like you need that drink more than I do,” I said.

  Ink chuckled. “Maybe, but I gotta pack. Plus, Mr. Snow gets cranky if he doesn’t get his sausages within thirty minutes after a show.”

  An awkward moment of silence passed. I didn’t know what to say. If Ink was leaving, who else could possibly help me?

  “Well, shit,” Ink said. “It’s been good getting to know you, Boy Scout. You’re a solid individual. I see great things ahead for you in this land of withering carnal opportunity. Just don’t get any of these crazy fields you’re plowing pregnant. Then you’ll witness the true insanity of the Slavic female, and trust me, that isn’t something you want to experience.”

  Just ask him, I thought, but the words caught behind my teeth. It was a struggle even to dance around what I wanted to say. “Actually, when I said I wanted to talk to you, I meant about something other than girls. It’s… personal. I think you might be the only one who knows something about this.”

  “Is it serious?” Ink said.

  “I really need your advice, man. Twenty minutes of your time. That’s all I’m asking for.”

  “And what personal subject is that, Dan?”

  Don’t be afraid of him. He’s made of flesh and blood, just like you. Just ask.

  “It’s about the Blot. That thing you mentioned the night you introduced Iza to me and Big Ben. The one they say rots your brain, turns you crazy,” I said.

  The alley became a grave of echoes until finally, just when I thought Ink would turn and walk away, he said, “We can meet at Drinks Bar, all right? One beer. Meet me there in thirty minutes.”

  THE CITY

  “YOU THINK this girl gave you something, huh?” Ink said with a yawn.

  “I’m not sure, but I think so. Nasty bitch," I said.

  We were sitting in the back room at Drinks Bar, at the same corner table where I’d met Ink and Big Ben my first night out in Country. We sat huddled over a slowly amassing collection of empty beer glasses and cigarettes disintegrating to ember in the ashtray. We were the only two people in the joint other than the bartender, a big, bald Countryish guy who looked like a soccer hooligan. The cute one must’ve had the night off.

  For weeks, I’d fruitlessly scoured Google for any information I could find about what Kashka had given me. I tried every search term I could think of: Blot, the Blot, Blot and Country together, STD nightmares, viral hallucinations, and more. Nothing came up regarding the Night Country, or sexually transmitted dreams. Ink became my only hope of figuring out what was happening to me.

  "Girl game is a real thing. Sounds like you got played,” Ink said. He gave me a sympathetic tip and sip of his beer. “Don’t take it too much to heart. Every player hits a speed bump once in a blue moon. Hell, I’ve caught things before. We won’t discuss the particulars of those thankfully infrequent episodes. But it happens even to the best of us. As long as it’s nothing permanent, don’t consider yourself out of the game just yet. Unless she gave you HIV, then I doubt you’ve been struck down in your prime, Daniel. Even herpes…”

  “She didn’t give me HIV or herpes. It’s something else,” I said.

  “Hmmm. You mentioned earlier that you thought it might be this, what did you call it?” Ink said.

  “The Blot. That’s what you called it. Remember? That night we were here with Iza,” I said.

  Ink blew a raspberry into the dregs of his beer. “Yeah, I remember. But I was just kidding around, man. How do you know I wasn’t just talking out of my ass, that I didn’t make it up on the spot?”

  “Because there’s a black mark on my dick, steadily spiraling outward,” I said. “Because I’m sick all the time. I'm having recurring lucid dreams about the same group of characters, in the same screwed-up world, and it isn’t ours. Any time I fall into a deep sleep I go back there, without fail.”

  “Did you go to the doctor?” Ink said.

  “Yes. The doctor couldn’t see it. He told me I should take folic acid and vitamins.”

  “Vitamins. Classic,” Ink chuckled.

  In the most honest tone of voice I could muster, I said, “Listen, Ink. Normally, I’d never beg someone else for a favor. I have way too much pride for that. So, trust me when I say that it is taking everything I have to set that aside and ask this of you right now. But, from one man to another, I truly, deeply need your help. I don’t know what to do. I have no one else to turn to. So if you have any idea about what’s happening to me, please, just tell me.”

  Ink took a long time to respond. When he finally did, his voice had lost its typical, jovial aloofness, and became an even monotone, like that of a scientist.

  “Tell me what you dream of,” Ink said.

  “You really don’t know?”

  Ink crossed his arms. “I really don’t.”

  “All right. The dream I have whenever I fall asleep is about a place called the Night Country. It’s a dark, frozen world where the people are forced to live in tunnels, because an evil king has stolen the sun. On the Surface the night is everlasting, and the Undercity is plagued by hunger, famine, sickness, and death. A few of the people in the tunnels have formed a loose resistance movement called the Vermin who fight to overthrow the tyrannical regime, but they’re disorganized and poorly armed. And, they have legends about spirits called Visitors, who are sent to the Night Country to reanimate the bodies of the recently dead and help the rebels fight. In the dream, I’m one of those spirits.”

  “That’s one hell of a story,” Ink said.

  I sighed. “You did say that the Blot rots your brain. I figured that must include some sort of hallucinations, maybe even dementia…”

  “Dan.”

  “I’m sorry. I just want answers, man. I haven’t slept in weeks.”

  “Dan,” Ink said again.

  “What?”

  He reevaluated me with a narrow, beery gaze. “I owe you an apology. I lied earlier. The truth is that I knew a guy once who claimed he had the Blot. That’s how I heard about it.”

  “You did?”

  Lying son of a...

  Ink folded his hands and nodded. “The stories have been around forever. The people of Country have always had myths about sexually transmitted curses and nightmares visited upon immoral men and women by sex demons. It’s not something we hear about in our culture anymore, since sex in America is considered a strictly biological phenomenon, without much of a spiritual component. Do you know the theory of genetic memory?”

  “I don’t think so,” I said.

  Our conversation was interrupted by a group of men noisily entering the bar. There was a scuffle of removed jackets and raised voices conversing loudly in the front room. I couldn’t see the men, but I recognized their voices instantly, and a chill seeped into my blood. They were the same men who had tried to fight Ink, Big Ben, and me on the first night we hung out together.

  I thought for sure Ink and I were going to get jumped the second the hooligans stepped into the back room and saw us sitting there, but nothing happened. The bald, tracksuit-wearing thug who Ink had nearly decapitated with his spoon walked in, gave us a dirty look, said something under his breath, then immediately turned around and left.

  When they were gone, Ink smiled and said, “I guess they didn’t want to watch the BBC.”

  I glanced over my shoulder at the muted big screen TV mounted on the far wall. Indeed, the usual football match had been changed to an emergency news report about a peaceful student protest that had escalated into a riot somewhere in the east of Country. It showed a raging crowd clashing with the police amidst a cluster
of concrete apartment buildings. The camera even briefly focused on one man lying on the ground in a pool of his own blood.

  The crowd was protesting a high-level trade agreement between Country and the Russian Federation, meant to line the pockets of a few Russian and German billionaires and their former Soviet-era allies still holding office in Country, all the while further impoverishing Country’s poor.

  This wouldn’t have surprised me much as an American, since our history in America can basically be summed up as “the government helping the rich to gangbang the poor,” but in Country, it was what historians call a watershed moment. Country’s economy had been steadily growing ever since its ascension to the European Union after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and was finally poised to break the Eastern European curse of poverty.

  This deal, made behind closed doors by a few corrupt individuals operating in the highest hallways of power, was set to threaten all of that.

  I wouldn’t find out until much later, but three people died in those riots while Ink and I were sitting in Drinks Bar sipping beers and discussing possibly mythical sexual curses.

  Ink leaned back in his chair, taking a deep drag off his cigarette, and blew a string of smoke rings up toward the dim lamp above our table. The rings drifted and began circling that tawny, flickering light, falling into its orbit like planets orbiting a star.

  Or worm holes orbiting a galaxy, I thought.

  “Back to what I was saying about this Blot thing,” Ink said. “A guy I knew claimed he had it. He told me a similar story to the one you just told. Only, I didn’t believe a word of it. Not at first. But then, over time, I watched him descend further and further into his delusions. He became exhausted. Agitated. Paranoid. He was tired all the time, always had these huge black circles under his eyes, and was always talking about dead cities and crippled kings. I started to believe that the Blot was real.”

  He does know, I thought.

  “I have a theory about this ‘Blot.’ I formed it after observing my friend suffer and ultimately die from his infection. But let’s establish a few things right off the bat. The doctors won’t help you, here in Country or anywhere else. They don’t know what it is.”