Part 12 - Ivan: Days of Future Past

I walk a line I can imagine is worn into the hard stone now, my fingers lingering on the balustrade like the spine of a recent lover. I know it’s there, but I feel nothing. Below I can hear the late night traffic, behind me the slow easy breathing of my pets. The cool evening breeze caresses my bare chest, whisks between my bare legs. I stop at the corner overlooking Stuyvesant Square, gaze east toward the river and a container ship bound for Chile. My path is unconscious, a stroll through my past, through my present. I had no future, just like my cargo, just like this city. Just a past and a present. It is what it is now, what it was a moment ago, but it will be…nothing. Not yet. There are no promises kept in this place. There is no tomorrow that you do not make.

Somewhere nearby a man will be murdered, mugged, hit by a car. Across town a couple will be gunned down in a liquor store robbery. A body will be dumped into the Hudson and not found until the fish have had their fill. A child will be lost in the crowd and never see home again. I ignore the brutal horns that threaten my peace, turn away from the snarl at the intersection twenty-three stories below me, where concrete greets flesh with its toothy smile, a goblin waiting to gobble up the spilled blood of the unfortunate. A man will slap his wife and get a pair of shears in his kidney for his trouble. A young woman will be pierced with a butcher knife after a sultry dance and all that will be left of her is a rough chalk outline on smoothed cobblestones.

I scratch at my face, and for the millionth time I stare at my cracked fingernails as if they weren’t there a moment ago. How many times did they pull them out? How many times did they grow back? I remember nothing other than the laughing, the screams, the numbness. Eventually I lost count. Eventually I forgot to cry. I tore the future out of myself as they tore out each nail. The future was my enemy — it was only expectations of pain and misery and betrayal and death. I tore out the fear and left it all for them.

I ignore the gun shots below. The intersection has gone quiet. Somewhere in the growing darkness I hear a siren. Someone’s future is gone. They never even had it.

Inside, just beyond the open French doors, the wide bed embraces the warm, naked innocence. Their slow, steady breaths belie the brutality that was their night, but the marks will bear witness if the sun rises tomorrow. I tear out their fear every night, and every night it comes back weaker. Every night I see less in their eyes, less hesitation, less denial, less hope. Less fear. Every night they welcome the future by casting it aside. Only then can they be free to be who they are, what they are, what I want them to be.

The Tatianas live and breathe my world, their world, and they will never know another. It is a world of love and luxury, unlike the one they came from, the brass ring that everyone I see and hear and feel around me searches for and never finds. The future is pain, and there is no pain here, only pleasure. Pleasure through service and suffering. Pleasure through sex and sensuality. They want nothing; they need nothing. I give them all, and they accept. I need nothing more from them, and they are learning to expect nothing more.

When I walk through the door, they will sit up and greet me with smiles, no worries that my mood will be sour, no concern that my pleasure comes with their tears. They will look up at me with no expectations, only patience and serenity. Acceptance. It is the loss of hope, the death of future. Theirs is the slumber of babes, the innocence that is ripped away in childhood and never returns.

Once the hope of the past is shattered, there can be no hope for the future. Once the future is gone, there is only tranquility.

The cargo will learn this. They cry in their cages not far from here. They will wail when they see me. They will grow quiet when they see what I do. The first step in erasing their future and bringing them closer to peace.

What did they have before? Pain. Misery. False hope. A short-tempered lover with a brutal backhand. A pimp that smelled like cheap cigars and sardines. Back alley gang bangs after date rape drugs. It was the horror of the past that drove them to the shelters. It was the promise of a future that kept them coming back. What future? If you cannot make your future, if you cannot bend it to your will, you have no future. These women have no future; they are the undeserving, the invisible, the misguided. They have nothing ahead to look forward to, so I will give them something, something more than they had.

I slip across the faux stone of the balcony and onto the warm tile of the penthouse suite, the haunting throes of the concrete jungle falling away behind me. The Tatianas lay arm in arm, warm flesh pressed together in safety and love. I lean onto the bed and slide across the silk to my center spot, flick on the telly, and immediately they are moving, one of them sliding over me until they’ve engulfed me in their nubile cocoon. I stroke their innocence, and their legs spread for me without a word. I decide their future, my future, the future of all around me.

At their age, my future was taken from me, willingly discarded, but I won it back through perseverance and pain, forgetting it somewhere in my past until it presented itself again to me, offered me its throat to squeeze. My broken nails claw at its flesh each day, and I throttle it until it breaks, until the cries of surrender stop and it waits just as everyone else waits, knowing that there is no future but what I make. The Tatianas know it. The Giant knows it. The cargo has not yet learned. And Gretel — my mind wanders back to her — she will know it soon. I can see the pain and anguish in her face, in her hope, and she will thank me one day for extinguishing that, but only after she has spent her days naked in a cage and left her future in my hands where it belongs.

There is no happily ever after in this fairy tale, I will tell her. There is only hope, and she will do well without that burden.

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Part 13 - Wolfe: Mirror, Mirror

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Part 11 - Gretel: Two Strikes