by Fox J Wilde
“About?”
“About not leaving me behind?”
“Of course, Vivika. I would never leave you behind!”
“That’s a lie, and you know it. I...I just really need you to convince me that it isn’t a lie. Just for a little while, I need to believe that I’m safe. Because I really don’t feel safe right now.”
“Of course you’re safe, Vivika! I promise you’re safe!”
“That’s not a very good lie...and you know that, too!”
“Why don’t you feel safe? What’s going on?”
“Look around you!” she shouted, “you know as well as I do that we’re surrounded by hidden cameras, in a fake label that’s run by assholes like Victor. You know they follow us everywhere. They have us follow each other too. We just had two of our band members disappear...poof! …without a trace. And...and...”
“But we’re safe right now! It’s just you and me, right here!”
“That doesn’t make me feel safe at all. Not in the least!”
Lena draped herself awkwardly over the crying Vivika then, wrapping an arm around her tightly, and began stroking her hair. Embraces like these weren’t her forte, but Vivika at least deserved the attempt. She lay there, stroking and hugging for quite some time until sobs became sniffles, and sniffles turned to quiet breathing.
“Vivika, why don’t you feel safe?” she asked calmly, after some time.
“Because…” she started, seeming to weigh her words more than she needed to, “Lena, what if they aren’t coming back?”
“Honestly, I doubt they are. Would you?”
“Yes, Lena. Yes, I absolutely would. I may hate this country, but it’s my home. It has all my friends, my family, my routine, my job, my apartment...it has my stuff. It has the beer I like, the shows I watch on a television I purchased, the clothes I stole, and a phone I can use to call for help...help that will arrive. Out there, I’d be nothing but an orphan. Worse, I’d be some illegal orphan that doesn’t speak the same language, has nothing in common with anyone and can’t call anyone for help. I’d just be dodging another country’s Stasi. Sure, our Stasi would happily throw me in a black cell; but the police in other countries would rape and murder me. Or worse, send me back here, where the Stasi would torture me for being a traitor.”
“But that’s just fear talking, Vivika! You’re a resourceful person! You would be able to make it!”
“No, Lena, I wouldn’t.” she began sobbing anew, “Maybe you would. You seem to have the world just throwing opportunities at you. You have help. I don’t know where from, but someone is looking out for you. But I live in the real world, where the rest of us women are worthless...where the rest of us women are nothing but property. Someone somewhere finds you useful, and I’m glad they do. But I’m nothing but a marginally pretty girl that plays keyboard decently. If someone can’t find an immediate use for either of those, they’d just as soon throw me away like trash.”
“There’s nothing marginal about you, Vivika! You’re beautiful!”
“Oh Lena...” Vivika said, turning her head to look her in the eyes, “If you only knew how much it hurt to hear you to say that.”
“What do you mean?”
“Being beautiful is a terrible thing, sometimes. You know, maybe I don’t want to be ‘the beautiful one’...maybe I would rather be just ‘a great keyboard player.’ Maybe I would rather be, I don’t know, a good writer, or a good chemist, or a good...you know, whatever. But being beautiful in a place like this only gets you treated worse than the rest.”
“Vivika, what happened? Where is all of this coming from?!”
Vivika trembled slightly, as she wiped her eyes roughly with her wrist. For the life of her, Lena could not figure out what the problem was. All she knew was this was the moment that she needed to earn Vivika’s trust. Sure, Patrick may have been speaking the truth about her...but she would deal with those implications later, once Vivika was stabilized.
“You...you wouldn’t understand.”
“What do you mean I wouldn’t understand?”
“You wouldn’t...understand,” Vivika said, enunciating her words carefully.
“Well, maybe if you tried to explain...”
“Listen Lena,” Vivika said in a slightly dire tone as she pointed her finger around the room, “You wouldn’t understand.”
Awareness dawned on Lena. It wasn’t safe to speak openly here on the best of days; yet for some reason that Lena wasn’t privy to, it was inordinately dangerous to speak openly, now. Something definitely had changed, and whatever it was had spooked Vivika to the point of hysterics. Attempting to be as natural as possible, Lena ended the conversation. The best course of action was simply to stop talking and hold the poor girl as tightly as she could.
“Lena?” Vivika asked after some time.
“Yes?”
“I...I know this is a little strange to ask. But…”
“Anything, Vivika! Ask and it’s yours.”
“Can I stay at your place for a while? I can sleep on the floor if I have to. I just...I just don’t want to stay at home. It would make me feel a lot safer.”
“Well...” Of course, the answer would be yes, but what about all her...you know, other stuff that she had going on? She couldn’t very well let Vivika in on any amount of it without compromising something. And that warning that Patrick...err, Victor...whoever he was right now... had given her; Lena had tried trusting before. First with Hans, then with Grandfather, then with Patrick, then with...then with…
Sure, Hans hadn’t technically been a spitzel; Grandfather hadn’t lied about anything per se; and Patrick was just doing his job (and he had been open with her once they had gotten to know each other). Sure, her band had been spying on her; but that was just the way things were. Vivika had even come clean about it. Sure, Matt wasn’t the person he had initially led her to believe; but he and Mr. Collins had been honest with her as soon as they were in private. And Mr. Müller…well, Lena had been spying on him too, so she couldn’t really begrudge him that.
But how much did she actually know about the things she thought she did? Heck, even the peripheral people that Lena had met were deceitful: all of the bands that Leibensmude had played with; likely half (if not more) of their fans; the pretty bartender from the Interhostel—It seemed that the only person Lena knew that had ever been completely honest was the pot-head sound engineer from the venue in West Germany. Everyone else—literally everyone else Lena knew—was holding back or massaging some aspect of their doings and dealings. Even Lena—perhaps even especially Lena—was doing the same thing on so many fronts, it made her head spin.
“God, is everyone a liar or a spy?!” she thought to herself. Yet she had to trust someone, or else she would go insane. She felt she could probably trust Matt and Mr. Collins, and she could probably trust Grandfather (with some things, of course), and it seemed that she could trust Vivika. But she knew she could trust Patrick, because he had trusted her with his most personal secrets. And he had explicitly warned Lena about trusting Vivika. “Oh, bother it all!” Lena shouted inside of her head. Suddenly, she realized how hard being a master of espionage could be.
“Look, I know you’ve got to keep some things hidden from me.” Vivika volunteered. “I don’t know what those things are, and I don’t particularly care.”
“Vivika...”
“Honestly, I mean that.” she interrupted. “I don’t want to know. I really, really, really don’t want to know. Everyone I know is a better liar than I am, and they got that way by practicing on me. I’m sick of being lied to...but if that’s what it will take to feel safe, then lie to me. Lie your ass off, I don’t care. I’ll keep my secrets from you, and you can keep yours from me. That’s just how we’ll live from now on, because that’s just the way relationships are now.”
She looked at Lena then, with a fearful, wi
de-eyed stare that bordered on hysterics as she added, “Just please, for the love of god, don’t leave me alone.”
As Patrick walked through Dragon Lady’s front door and into her small apartment, he tried to stifle the feeling of nervousness. He hated coming here; and not just because of its lone occupant. Besides the mattress on her bedroom floor and a desk in her living room, the apartment was completely devoid of furniture. She was finicky about cleanliness to an unhealthy degree, and preferred to have as few things to clean as possible. The first time he had been over, he had shivered from the cold (she kept her apartment precisely at 14-degrees Celsius to stem the circulation of airborne toxins) while she spent almost thirty minutes readjusting her desk. She swore that it was not precisely 90-degrees perpendicular to the nearest wall, and wasn’t equidistant from all walls that it should have been equidistant to.
Her walls in turn were covered in chalkboards and pictures of her informants, as well as their friends, lovers and habitual locations. All of these items were precisely positioned. Patrick knew from experience that her closet had tarps she would place underneath the pictures when she cleaned or wrote on them to catch every spare speck of chalk or any other matter that may fall on to her floor. She also kept several medical masks nearby so that she wouldn’t breathe in any of the chalk fragments.
In and on her desk, she had various wires, connectors, soldering irons and other items (all precisely positioned from front to back). He knew these to be her singular hobby besides torture: making explosives. She was extremely knowledgeable about bombs—to a degree that would exhaust most men in the Army—and she was known to launch into protracted exposés about RDX versus PETN, and why Semtex was the explosive of choice for the IRA in Ireland. Patrick found all of it quite boring, excluding the general fear he had over such a terrible person having weapons even more destructive than anything she already had at her disposal.
“Well, hello pussycat.” her voice taunted from the other room.
“I hate it when you call me that.” Patrick said, swallowing the lump that caught in his throat.
“Well, stop being one, then.” she replied, walking fully into view.
As always, she was completely naked. And as always, Patrick shivered—as much from the cold as from being alone with her. It wasn’t that she was ugly; the reality was quite the opposite as a matter-of-fact. She had the wiry frame of an athlete, and sharp features that accentuated her tight muscles. Her skin was very white, and eerily un-marred by any moles, freckles or other defining imperfections. A pair of perfectly-formed and sterile-looking breasts bounced lightly with her step, and Patrick couldn’t help but notice that she was shaved everywhere, arms, legs and...well, you get the idea. Dragon Lady hated body hair. She felt that any body hair immediately attracted microscopic organisms, and she would go to great lengths to avoid them.
Yes, Dragon Lady was otherwise beautiful by the standards of most men. To him, however, she looked like a vampire—a degenerate creature addicted to blood and pain, and perfectly prepared to extract blood in the most painful way possible. To most men, she looked fully predisposed to nights of wild and heart-pounding sex. To Patrick, she looked fully prepared to slit a man’s throat and bathe in the remains. He trembled at the thought of either fate. The thought of having this albino freak slide her skin against his was almost worse than the thought of being exsanguinated by her.
“Oh, poor, poor pussycat,” she teased, grabbing herself in a few areas that Patrick preferred not to think about. “Does he need some milk?”
“Would you please stop that?” he asked, less sternly than he had hoped. “I don’t like it when you talk like that.”
“Well, I like it. Mostly because you don’t. Now, let’s get down to business.”
“Would you at least put some clothes on first?”
“No. I want you to look,” she smirked. “Now, I called you here because I wanted you to know that I know your secret.”
Patrick swallowed yet another lump in his throat. Not just because he had one secret to keep...but because he had many, many secrets, and all of them he wanted kept from her specifically. He knew very well the sadistic power she wielded when she knew things people didn’t want her to know—that was the reason he had been compelled to keep coming to her for the past year, after all—but now that she knew something else (and he didn’t doubt for a second that she did), he could only guess as to what that was. He wanted her to know as little about him as he could manage. And there were certain things she must not know under any costs.
“And what the hell is that?” Patrick asked, still trying not to notice that she was completely shaved.
“Oh, don’t act like that,” she laughed. “You try to talk smart, but you don’t succeed. And you won’t stop looking at my pussy when you do.”
“I’m not looking at your...at you,” he stuttered, “I’m avoiding your eyes. There’s a difference.”
“You know, most men avoid the eyes when they are lying. You do it when you’re intimidated.”
“I’m not intimidated.” Patrick swallowed.
“You know what it means to avoid the eyes when one is intimidated, don’t you?”
“I told you, I’m not intimidated.”
“It means that I’m in control.”
“You’re not in control.”
“You’re not in control,” she mimicked in a patronizing voice. “I am in control, little pussycat. I’m in control, because you are weak. That’s why you keep coming back here. Because I control you.”
She looked at him then. That gaze...that horrible, horrible gaze she had when she knew she had won a victory. Whatever species this wretched creature was, she didn’t revel in the emotions that humans did—success, love, happiness, triumph—no, Dragon Lady only reveled in two things: discomfort and pain. Her facial expressions weren’t merely a betrayal of her success in forcefully extracting those two things. They were an integral part of their extraction. Worse, it was working...and worst of all, she now knew it.
“Fine, I’m intimidated. Does that make you happy?”
“Only two things in this world make me happy, Patrick. Demeaning you, and watching you squirm. Now, would you like to know what I know?”
“I don’t know, honestly,” Patrick said, dreading the answer.
“I know you’ve been cheating on your boyfriend, Freidrich.”
The hammer cracked the anvil, and the hammer followed suit. Perhaps it wasn’t the very-most damaging thing she could have possibly learned about him, but it was very likely the thing that hurt the worst. And that disgusting look of triumph spreading across her face told him that she intended to savor every bit of that hurt.
Patrick had...issues, you see; certain immoral proclivities that he wasn’t able to satiate like normal people. Sure, these proclivities weren’t unique to him, of course. Lots of men in the GDR were just as interested in men as they were women. Patrick knew this because most of his informants were gay or bisexual, which was precisely the main card he held against them. He would call them abominations...and they were, make no mistake. He would threaten to expose them to their families and lock them up in the black cells...they deserved it. They weren’t just sick—they were filthy, abominable sinners for which there was no salvation. Patrick knew this because he was one.
Patrick hated himself for his unnatural desires...for his terrible sickness of the mind. He had tried to stop thinking the things he thought for so long. He had even gone to lengths normal men likely wouldn’t, by attempting to fix himself with some of his female assets. Yet nothing worked the way it was supposed to unless he thought about men. He hated all men that felt this way, including himself. That is, with the exception of his secret: the one person that he refused to think such terrible, damning things about. Freidrich, the beautiful, tortured soul, hated himself nearly as much as Patrick did, and Patrick would do anything to help him feel differe
ntly, including lie to him.
Freidrich wasn’t important. He wasn’t anything. He was less than nothing, really. A minor player with a minor job and minor aspirations. Perhaps that’s why he wasn’t minor to Patrick. He was the one secret that Patrick was allowed to keep from everyone—even God. He didn’t deserve God’s judgement, and he certainly didn’t deserve the Stasi’s. Thus, he was excused from the HVA and Stasi’s scrutiny— Patrick had made damn sure of that. But now that Dragon Lady knew...this was disastrous.
“Do I detect some emotion?” Dragon Lady teased, and Patrick hated her for it.
“You…” he began with as much acid in his voice as he could manage, “...how...how dare you.”
“That’s what you want to ask?” she smiled. “How dare I? Not how did I find out?”
“How dare you,” he repeated, as the horror of her knowing this secret sank in. “How fucking dare you. How fucking dare you, you vile bitch!”
“Oh, I haven’t dared to do anything yet, pussycat,” she laughed. “But once dear little Freidrich finds out about your little indiscretions, you will do the damage for me.”
“How dare you!” Patrick repeated again and again, “How dare you!”
“Could you even imagine! Imagine how it will break his poor heart…especially once the Stasi kick in his door and arrest him!”
“You wouldn’t…y-you…”
“Maybe I’ll even have you interrogate him. Oh, wouldn’t that just be a treat? To have you accusing your own secret boyfriend of homosexuality as your coworkers look on? Oh, how he would cry! Such a betrayal!”
The tears flowed freely then, although Patrick did wipe them away roughly with a sleeve. Oh, how terrible and unfair it all was. No one deserved to be tormented in such a way; especially by creatures like her!
“Oh, don’t you worry, pussycat,” she interrupted his tears. “I won’t hurt him. I won’t even tell him...I’m going to just let you dig your own grave and screw it up for yourself. I’ll even be a perfectly magnanimous ‘evil bitch’ and keep your secret from the rest of the team.”
