Moral Zero

by Set Sytes

  Uh, right. Um . . . Red tried to summon back his train of thought. Fuck, where’s White when you need him?

  Bathroom, grunted Johnny. As usual.

  Oh yeah . . . As fuckin usual. Well, my point, yeah. I deny all that child molester shit and always will. It just ain’t in me. It’s more than a preference. I do have morals, believe it or not. No, they ain’t based on no fuckin laws and they ain’t based on history or traditions. They’re home-grown, seein things the way I see em.

  Congratulations, Johnny drawled.

  But I reckon you don’t have any morals. I never seen no account of em. You don’t even defend yourself. If you push me to say I’m workin on preference alone, then what about you?

  Stop dallying about in the mud. Make your point.

  I am doin! Kidd Red scratched his head in exasperation. Right, as clear as day here it is. No tryin to be somethin you ain’t. Would you mess about with kids?

  No.

  Why not? Preference?

  It’s not a matter of preference.

  Aha!

  It’s a matter of will. I don’t have a will for it. No desire, zero.

  Sounds like a preference to me. Now it was Kidd Red’s turn to poke away at Johnny Black.

  You may as well say I got a preference not to kill myself.

  Right. But there’s still this difference here man. It’s about what’s wrong.

  What does that even mean? Do you even know what that word means, or why it exists? It’s the shallowest word there is. It changes like an oasis. It’s got no content. It’ll disappear as soon as you get up close.

  Stop dodgin the question.

  I’m dodging nothing. You wouldn’t see the point if it was an arrow up your ass, Johnny snarled. He put his own back to the wall alongside Red, and he put the tips of his fingers in the pockets of his jeans.

  Do you think pedophilia is wrong?

  Johnny Black said nothing.

  Do you think it’s wrong to fuck kids?

  Johnny Black just looked at the floor.

  Do you think it’s wrong? pressed Red.

  Silence.

  That’s it then, said Red, straightening up and beaming, with his hands on his hips. I reckon I got you there. I got you.

  Before he knew anything else, within a half-second’s whirl of movement Kidd Red found the sharp blade of a knife held close against his throat. Johnny’s fist was clenched tight around the handle and the serration of the blade nicked Red’s neck, drawing little beads of blood like a dotted collar.

  You got shit, Johnny growled, and he was so close their noses were almost touching. Red could smell the whiskey and smoke and death. His eyes were as wide as twin moons.

  Say it.

  I got shit. Kidd Red’s voice was as meek as a lamb and croaked like a toad.

  Johnny Black fucks children.

  What?! came the croak.

  Say it! hissed Johnny.

  Uh . . . Johnny Black fucks children. Red couldn’t swallow with the knife thrust against his Adam’s apple. His mouth was filling with saliva.

  Johnny Black rapes kids and then disembowels them.

  Johnny Black rapes kids and then disembowels them.

  Johnny Black severs their heads and sticks them on spikes.

  Johnny Black severs their heads and sticks them on spikes.

  And then fucks the stump of the heads.

  And . . . fucks the stump of their heads. Red felt sick.

  Johnny removed the knife and Red wheezed, rubbing his neck and feeling his fingers come away with spots of blood.

  You’re an easy one, Johnny said coldly. Don’t try me again. He strode off, the knife vanishing somewhere on his person. Red could hear the echo of his boots in the street outside the bar, and then continuing in his mind, on and on.

  It was in that same bar that Red bumped into his daughter.

  His eyes widened at the fifteen year old girl standing hands on hips in front of him. Fuck, I thought you were arrivin tomorrow?

  I was done early, weren’t I? The girl blinked long eyelashes at him.

  Yeah. Cool. Red grinned widely and put his hand on her shoulder and then took it off again. You look good.

  I know.

  Lemme introduce you to a hombre of mine.

  Okay.

  Red took her hand with the polished pink nails and raised it as though she were a princess and he guided her through the crowd and over to Mr White in the corner.

  Hey man, this is my daughter. Daughter, this is Mr White. My amigo.

  Mr White swallowed. Pleased to meet you.

  Hi. She fluttered her eyelashes at him but in all other respects seemed disinterested, and she quickly looked back at Red.

  Does she have a name?

  No, said Red. I mean, best not have names for the moment. Keep it on the safer side, y’know?

  Uh-huh.

  The girl stretched up on her pink high heels and Red leaned down to her and she whispered in his ear. He looked at her and she bit her lip. He grinned.

  Um, Mr White said. Do you two want to sit down?

  Red looked from Mr White to his daughter. I dunno.

  The girl put her hand to her mouth and yawned deliberately.

  Just for a bit, said Red. I need to get her back to the hotel soon. He looked at her. Can you drink?

  What do you mean can I drink.

  I mean, uh, can you drink alcohol?

  Course I can fuckin drink.

  Alright then. He chuckled. I’ll get a round in. He strode off and the girl hovered for a couple of seconds as if unsure of herself and then sat down beside Mr White.

  He looked at her and smiled but she was looking away from him. He could see she was not naturally beautiful as such, and certainly not elegant, but very sexually attractive, and conscious of it. Red had told him in in the first days they had met that there were two scales of attractiveness, beauty and sex appeal. There was some correlation. But a very beautiful girl, he said, often lacked in sex appeal. And vice versa. A classically beautiful person would be caressed and fawned over. Thought of sodomy did not so readily enter his mind. As if such women were works of art to be kept unspoiled. Then he had pondered on this and said actually, it is more that such dolls have risen above the depravities of sex. You could see it in their face. The way they walked and talked. He said it was a mutual thing, that he could not imagine the possibilities of degradation within them and they themselves offered nothing. He declared there was such a thing as too beautiful. That such women were not mortal, perhaps not even women. Not human. Or perhaps they had become too human. That it was the same thing in the end. They were paintings and he could love them but only as if he were looking at them from afar. A distant viewer in an art gallery. In a crowd of thousands.

  Then Red had remarked on the other scale. That one could have a gallon of sex appeal and yet not be so beautiful. That sex appeal was on some other level less defined, and that nobody could truly explain it to another. It just was. That it thrived, in some way, on ugliness. An ugliness of mind and body. That it involved a step down from the ladder of beauty, the ladders of dignity and grace. That it must be effortless. An animal state of being. That you could not teach it.

  The girl catered entirely to Red’s aesthetic. It was if his desires and attractions had formed from observing his own bloodline. Or as though she was designed by his own specifications. The large breasts and large, apple-shaped rear, on an otherwise petite and slim body. A little teenage hourglass. Dressed to display, and caked in the makeup of promiscuity.

  She was inspecting her nails and tugging at her skimpy halter top that barely contained her heaving breasts. Mr White felt a stirring in his loins and reminded himself severely that she was too young for him.

  So, um, you’re his daughter? Mr White didn’t know what to say to this silently disdainful nymph before him.

  Yep.

  What’s he like as a dad? He never really struck me as the sort. If you don’t mind me asking . . .

/>   The girl shrugged.

  Do you see him often?

  Shrug.

  There was a silence, awkward on Mr White’s side, and then he tried again. So what kind of stuff are you into?

  Stuff?

  Do you have any, um, hobbies?

  She gave him a look. Sex.

  Ah. Mr White settled back against the wall. Fair enough.

  Nothing more was said until Red returned with the drinks.

  You guys been gettin along?

  I think so, said Mr White. The girl rolled her eyes.

  The following fifteen minutes consisted of the following. Red chatting idly with Mr White. Red’s daughter frequently whispering things to her father that Mr White couldn’t hear, but that made Red look very pleased. And Red and his daughter drinking their drinks much faster than Mr White.

  And then they both made their excuses and left. Mr White sat there for a few minutes and then left the rest of his drink and went into the bathroom and masturbated. There was some feeling of anger, he remembered, but he couldn’t direct it towards anything. A formless anger. Afterwards he looked in the mirror at his reflection and twitched. A thin, jagged crack ran through the mirror and through his body. Blank eyes stared back at him and neither him nor his reflection truly recognised each other.

  HOTEL

  Mr White was searching for a peephole into the adjacent room. There had to be one. Whether for voyeurism, plain paranoia, or for use as a gloryhole, all these dirty old hotels had them in the rooms. He combed the wall with his fingers, feeling a little frantic as he heard the noises coming through. The place was better than their last dive but it couldn’t be that classy, could it?

  Just when he was getting himself truly worked up, on his third sweep of the wall, his eyes darted towards the hallucinogenic painting slap bang in the centre of the wall. Of fucking course. He lifted it up and threw it on the bed and immediately glued his eye to the small round hole that had been hidden from view. He thanked some misplaced deity that there wasn’t a picture covering the other side.

  The porthole view looked on the side of the bed, right on the two bodies. Mr White whipped down his trousers and underpants and kicked them away and he held his erect member in a choking grip.

  Red was naked except for, as always, a couple of never-identifiable pendants, one on a thin silver chain and one on black thread. Red’s daughter was on all fours, still in her clothes, even in her heels. Her microskirt was pulled up and Red was rutting away at her.

  Mr White took sharp, ragged breaths. His head swam like an ocean with this terrible knowledge, and he felt unable to keep it to himself, and so it drained out of him like a tide, finding its exits: the watering of his eyes, the saliva of his mouth, the leak of his penis.

  There was such an enormity to what could be observed in others. That was the real sexuality, he thought. The evidence that came into your possession. Your very own. You could keep it as locked up as you want, in chests within chests, but you couldn’t stop it bubbling out. It ran from the bolted off recesses of your brain into the rest of your body. Into your lungs, so you breathed it. Into your gut, so you were sick with it. Into your genitals, so you fucked with it. As though everything you knew was some great black beast that whispered in your ear and grew and sat on your shoulder and grew and put its arms around you from behind and grew and cloaked you, covered you like a wretched second skin.

  Knowledge wasn’t power. Knowledge was lust.

  The witnessed scene took on a new turn to disgust. As though a test to any watcher. The filth was intimate in its perversion. Red pulled the girl back by a fistful of hair and wrapped an arm around her neck as he bucked against her. He stroked the girl’s face and murmured spicy nothings into her ear, whispered encouragements with hot breath, asked her rhetorical questions and delivered unto her insults and compliments in equal measure. She was red-faced and clenching her jaw and grinding her teeth. Her eyes tight shut and then open, searching his, finding something within his gaze to hold onto. A stardust connection, fizzing with electricity and the universal wonders of space and time.

  The sheets became soiled, the bodies fouled. The girl wept and moaned and Red held her close, slapping her face. Her blonde hair tossed around like a sandstorm. Their limbs twisting and writhing like tentacles.

  There are some things so ridden with abasement, so indefatigably corrupt that, should one become suddenly privy to such secrets, a strong moral effort has to be entertained in order not to become entranced. Hypnotised by the damage. It is not a love of evil that spellbinds them. Certainly, the open-eyed Mr White could see no evil, hear no evil in the other room. It is a love of the transgression. A falling apart of the natural order, a shredding of the rulebook, the pages disintegrating into the furnace of secrets and flying up into hot specks of ash to breathe in and ingest.

  For good or for ill, what other people did was godly. It was fiction come to life. As long as he was party to it. There had to be an overseer, a scribe, someone to take the minutes of the breaking of the world.

  It was his duty. His only duty. But to take on board such things, such terrible devilry, required an exorcism of self, a necessary cleansing. Too much within oneself was uncontainable, agonising to the mind. And so a siphoning off was required, to all that wicked excess.

  He pumped his hand harder on his cock, nails breaking the skin, and as Red’s daughter slapped him, stinging, again and again on the cheek, Mr White made a gargling noise and fell to the floor, drowning his leg in a desecrating current.

  There is an idea. The idea that there is something beyond your life, something hidden, something inexorably and ineffably corrupt. Ridden with it, pestilent, a dilapidated world shrouded from your eyes, lurking like a foul beast in the darkness. The idea that there are worse things out there than you. Infected things, crawling and dying. An end of times, the last days of Rome.

  Behind every locked door acts of the most illicit kind are carried out with secret impunity. There was no need to be afraid, for the world was falling apart. There was no whole anymore, just edges, a world of edges, tattered and fraying into the endless void.

  The idea that there was something wrong that would exist no matter what, that no matter what you did neither you nor anyone could have any effect on such an underbelly of disease, that the worst of things ran like sewers under the world.

  This was beauty of the most scabrous kind.

  Red entered Mr White’s room a while later, showered and clothed once more. Mr White avoided eye contact. He blushed when Red moved past him, and felt a pang of irritation at himself for it.

  Red thumped himself down on the bed causing it to painfully cry a trio of squeaks. He put his feet up and lit a cigarette.

  How is she? said Mr White, wincing when he realised the innuendo.

  Red grinned, and then dropped it. She’s alright.

  Are you going back to her or staying here for a bit?

  She’s okay by herself. She ain’t good for conversation.

  Your daughter’s not good for conversation?

  Uh-huh.

  I, uh, heard you before.

  Red looked up innocently. Why, what were we doin?

  Mr White looked at Red and raised his eyebrows and Red broke into a chuckle.

  Um. Mr White tried to find the words, but he had no idea what to say.

  Yeah?

  Do you think this is . . . fair on her?

  Red rolled his eyes. Fuck man, she’s more of a devil than me.

  But, I mean, you should be a father to her. You should be doing, well, good. I don’t know.

  Red put his chin on his hand and his elbow on his thigh as he smoked. He seemed to be thinking. Doin good, he said.

  Yeah. You know. Good. The world isn’t all filth and obscenity you know. There is cause for other things. A need for them. Other ways of going. More . . . a more ethical approach, perhaps. To raising her. And all manner of things. You can’t treat everyone around you as playthings. Do you not care about h
er? Care about people in other ways. Real ways.

  This is real.

  You know what I mean. Sometimes, even if we don’t want to, we have to make moral decisions Kidd.

  Why?

  Mr White gestured impotently.

  Red stubbed out his cigarette on the bed, burning a black mark into the sheets. He looked up at Mr White wryly. We think different amigo. These little moral decisions of yours are, well they’re nothin. Soundless creations without substance. They’re all over the fuckin place and you can’t walk to the fuckin shops without trippin over one. They try to pull you in but you can turn away from them if you want. People don’t think you can but you can. Whenever I’m faced with a moral decision, like not a huge one but a small one, like something where I got vested cock interest in, like, for example, this girl wonders if she should cheat on her partner cause of all these desires and whatnot . . .

  He clasped his hands together, pulled his face into a frown and affected femininity. Should I fuck him Kidd? What about my poor husband?

  He dropped his hands and his voice went back to normal. You see, not even fuckin me, just fuckin anybody else. Just fuckin. An increase in the level of fuck in the world, in one more person givin in to desire and ceasing to be some high-minded planet-fuckin philosophisin genocidal ethical shitbag. I ain’t even involved, I just know about it. I’m an overseer of all the shit that’s been drained from everbody, and that sounds like some kinda Hell I know, but hell it’s good to get dirty.

  Anyway yeah, whenever I’m faced with a choice like that, where I have a clear desire for it to go one way and an ethical consideration for the other, I just ask myself this. I ask myself Kidd Red, do you give one flyin fuck about humanity? And I say fuck no. And I say Kidd, is a more sexual world what you want or a more moral world? And I say the first man. The fuckin first. And I say Kidd, what exactly is the problem? And I say fuck off. And I relish that little act of sexual degradation like it was a goddamn cheeseburger.

  He grinned and leaned back, pleased with himself as Mr White nodded silently, and then he lurched forward with uncommon urgency. That reminds me, I’m goddamn starving. Let’s get takeout, yeah?