Babushka: The Warrior's Angel by Zen Wu Wei

Over the past few months the girl had taken to the habit of spending Sunday afternoons down in her grandfather’s concrete bunker of a study, watching as he worked, heavily hunched over his vast desk, its battleship-gray superstructure lost on an ocean of blueprints, log-jammed with rolled-up maps and mysterious documents marked ‘CONFIDENTIAL’.

            All breeches and gabardine, a chiseled monolith under siege, he would occasionally rise, as he did now, his footsteps across the stone floor accompanied by the smell of freshly polished leather – his hunters and holster and cartridge belt all burnished the same deep brown of calabash husk – to slide aside his favorite Thessalian stallion portrait and remove a few fresh sheets of paper from the top shelf of his wall-safe, the hardwired turn on his heels heading him back toward his desk to scratch away at his secret instructions.

            The irony had not escaped the Generalissimo how the communications system built to track the activities of the enemy had, in fact, become its primary source of intelligence. Suffice it to say, he was no fan of newfangled technology, preferring instead to handwrite the most sensitive missions and pass them to his inferiors in person. Technically, of course, the conduct was against all protocol but nobody was going to tell this war-horse how to do his job: what counted was results and he delivered not just in spades but in sprawling mass-graves. He was a father figure not just to the girl but to every last human soul on the island – his island – or at least that’s what he liked to tell himself. It was, he had decided, his destiny to protect them all; a divine calling that necessitated the grinding of every last rebel back into the dirt like the cockroaches they were.

            All-engulfing, suddenly, the wave of nostalgia came as no surprise to him: this was the way it always arrived – as if it were possible for a monsoon to burst from an empty sky, driving down, heavy and hard; drenching him to the very marrow of his being; leaving him overwhelmed. Defenseless. Impotent…

            Abandoning his scribblings to swim for their own lives across the paper, his focus drifted along the flotsam-strewn desk as far as the teak-framed photo of his younger self with his younger wife, a small bronze star glowing proudly on the lapel of his smart new uniform and a smile on her face that may or may not have been plastic: How the hell could you ever tell with women?

            All he asked for himself was a little one-on-one time with the head roach.

            Just the thought of his adversary’s name made his jaw jut like a baited mastiff, tamed only by the chapel’s timely bell, its toll muted by the house’s thick granite walls. Eighteen-hundred hours: the field-junkers would be handing their machetes – their facāos – back to the foreman about now. Where they were working today, they had at least a ninety-minute walk back before lock-down – it would be sweaty and the mosquitoes would be out in force. Their rags would offer them little protection.

            With some satisfaction, he grunted across a stack of aerial recon photos for the conveniently close brandy decanter and poured a generous measure into his large tumbler, its lead-crystal showing its appreciation with an expensive clink. Reaching for the water carafe, he changed his mind, choosing instead to take his jamoon liqueur neat, as if doing otherwise might dilute the hatred in his veins. It was a hatred no less sincere than that of a cuckoldee for his cuckolder; precisely because that was precisely what it was.

            He remembered how he had sat there at the time, the morning after his discovery (had it really been that many years ago?), munching on his cereals, staring vacantly at the racing results, making his sixth or sixteenth attempt to read a short article on some or other fixing scandal – while all the time the bloated cow in the far field at the back of his mind slowly ruminated on the cud of four short words.

            Women, of course, it had occurred to him, were more than capable of multi-tasking. Not only could they eat and read and think, all at the same time, they could also be simultaneously cheating on you without leaving the slightest clue. They were, it was clear to him, by far the superior sex. <My God, five times!> were the short words she had voxed to her childhood friend – her maid of honor, no less – and he had repeated them to himself at the tiniest of frequencies, as if sprinkling them over his cereals, but the breakfast table was small.

            <Sorry?> his wife had inquired vaguely, still hazy in her own early-morning funk, no doubt trying to figure out exactly where she could have lost her wedding ring. The ring he had removed from her bedside table while she slept. The ring that was yet to meet its undetermined but guaranteed grizzly end. And while she had gazed beyond him, out of the kitchen window, he had tried to imagine what else she might be thinking… He toyed with the idea of her comparing men with race horses: how you just had to be sure you backed the right one; how life was too short for coming in an also-ran.

            <Nothing,> he had replied as he got up from the table for the bathroom. Back then, they had been living in St. Petersburg and the quarters they had been allocated only had two mirrors: one on the wall of the walk-in closet that she used as a dressing room and the other above their bathroom sink. It was the latter he was unable to avoid.

            Every time he brushed his teeth, there it had been, staring back at him, its silver back flaky and peeling, reminding him that he was no longer young and desirable; no longer the dashing Academy graduate with the world at his feet, on the inside track for his first star. Hell, the way things had plateaued out after that star – with not even a sniff of a promotion and little hope of his doing something that might merit one in such a miserable posting – it had seemed he wasn’t even going to get a crack at being old and desirable. Like his backside for eight months of the year, his career had been frozen solid. And with each stroke of his toothbrush in front of the mirror even the nerves beneath his receding gums seemed to be trying to remind him how he was past his prime; as if he needed it confirming that his best days were already behind him; that the once wild colt was already good for the knacker’s yard.

            In front of that flaky mirror, it had all become so bloody clear to him. How he had begun to disgust his wife in all his little ways. How he left his teabag in his cup while he drank from it. How he sucked his teeth after eating the meal she had gone to such lengths to prepare. How he chewed his fingernails when he thought she wasn’t looking… As a man though, he had been naturally oblivious to his shortcomings during all those years prior to his discovery. And yet he could not help but notice when even the air in their quarters had grown frosty, finally prompting him to call in a favor from a former lieutenant he knew at the Voxagon.

            The first reading of the extract had been a blur except for that one crushing phrase:

            My God, five times!

            How could she have boasted of her infidelity with such abandon? Such evident lack of shame? And to a friend he had always gone out of his way to help, ever since his wife had first introduced her. He was willing to wager that the friend had smiled when she heard the news: how the perfect couple were no longer so perfect. As if the friend’s inability to form any resemblance of a meaningful bond with a mate of her own had been somehow vindicated by his wife’s infidelity.

            Indeed, after studying the transcript for the umpteenth time, his mind finally clearing, he had made a mental note that the friend had voxed nothing in reply to discourage such philandering behind the back of the only man who had ever been kind to her without trying to get into her pants. The friend must have despised him for that. For being a better person than any man she had ever known. For disproving her theory that all men were dogs. For not showing the slightest interest in her feminine charms. To the friend, helping her without a sexual motive had probably been like his saying she was not good enough for him: that he was superior to her, morally and in every other way. And he was sure, in her heart of hearts, she knew it was true. That was the thing she couldn’t stomach. Clearly the friend had been glad to hear he had been cuckolded. Glad it was the turn of the righteous to suffer.

            But how could his wife have done such a thing?

            After all he had given up for her.

            After all the love he had given her.

            After the thousands of days and nights he had toiled on in sub-zero temperatures, trying to build their castle in the sky…

            But back then, in his own heart of hearts, he knew he had let her down. That their castle laid in ruins. A muscovite writer had once said of Russian women that they could forgive everything of their menfolk except for failure. So what more was there left to say? His wife had been born to the motherland and he had failed her. His losing her had been inevitable.

            After he had left that flaky mirror to return to the kitchen he had noticed the daffodils wilting in the vase on the window-sill. He had picked them himself, a few days earlier, on the way home for an anniversary present. They were the first of the so-called spring and he had spotted them in the middle of an otherwise barren verge at the edge of the winter-ravaged road. But as he changed the water in the vase he realized it was too late. He could smell it.

            <What is dead, is dead,> he had voxcast at a frequency he knew his wife would receive, dropping the flowers in the bin and leaving her alone, still submersed in her thoughts at the kitchen table, the only sound of protest coming from the tocking of the old grandfather-clock her mother had given them as a wedding present. When he had stepped out on the street everything had been covered in a fresh blanket of white and the sky was crystal clear. The world had not stopped turning. Defying science as he floored the accelerator, his Volga’s tires had bitten into the snow, crushing it to ice as he pulled away – not in the direction of the base but towards where he thought the junker might be holed up.

            Now, all these years later, refocusing on the framed photo at the edge of his desk, he swallowed the ruby-red contents of his tumbler in one large jowly gulp as if it was the bastard’s blood then signed the following day’s orders with a seismographic flourish of antique-gold nib and blue-black ink, the girl watching on, casually perched beside him on the wide armrest. As big as a throne, the chair was made from a wood with a forgotten name and had grown tired with age, causing it to creak when she slid off, as if attempting to remind her that it had once been a grand tree of noble birth.

            Wide-eyed, button-nosed and French-braided, the girl was the very picture of innocence. She was also as sharp as a tack and the Generalissimo knew it. That was always the way with her kind and she was already capable of beating him at the latest combat programs sent over by the boffins for the Academy’s simulators. Whilst he understood that most officers considered their study a personal sanctuary from women and children, the girl was low maintenance and rarely disturbed him so he welcomed her company whenever he needed to work at home: a duty which – as his wife made a regular point of pointing out – appeared to be required of him more and more frequently nowadays.

            Glancing into the passageway, right on cue, he saw the woman’s rubber-soled slippers appear at the top of the spiral flight of stairs, each careful pad downwards uncannily in sync with the chimes from the old grandfather-clock, now ramrod faithful next to the study’s open doorway, reminding him of a hapless corporal posted to permanent guard duty. Next, following her feet and the final chime, came the inevitable dipped head to inspect the troops and then, as usual, the self-satisfied turn back upstairs with the words <Supper in thirty> left hanging in her wake – their tone filtered by monotony as much as the Voxagon.

            The truth of the matter was that it had been so long since he and his wife had shared any affection, the girl was, quite simply, the only softness in his life. He therefore took great pleasure from spoiling her and lived for the half-smiles he occasionally managed to coax from that small round face: a face which would have been regarded as pretty – a frimousse – had those black diamond eyes not usually been fixed with an expression that could only be described as distant, or sometimes even absent altogether.

            Now though, with her tongue poking out, her regard was one of dedicated concentration as she plaited away at yet another friendship bracelet using the multicolored threads of goat-silk that his wife kept her supplied with (seemingly in enormous quantities) to keep her hands occupied. Indeed she was doing no harm here, quiet as a muslin-smocked mouse – settled back in front of the unlit hearth now that his paperwork was all but finished – cross legged and cotton socked next to her heart-shaped sewing box in the middle of his jaguar skin, a souvenir from happier days.

            Yes, he liked having her hanging around his study, ever-ready to clip his cigars and fire up his big brass desk-lighter, long since oxidized green around its base. Tobacco was one of the few pleasures he took from life (it would have been cheaper to smoke rolled-up bank notes), but even more than this luxury, he cherished the moments when the girl would absentmindedly drape her arm over his shoulder and twirl his short-back-and-sides with her little fingers. Far from being annoyed by the habit he actually found it calming, even helping him to better focus on the work at hand: so much so, that he had allowed his hair to grow an extra inch beyond regulation length – much to the bemusement of his barber of thirty years.

            Of course it had never occurred to the Generalissimo that during all the hair-twirling he had actually been teaching the girl how to write.

<Voxcom Extract Ref:09/12/2104:54°34’14”W3°04’08”-18H06:18H14EST00912>

(Surveillance transcript/annotation: Special Operative Carrera, V.R.)

      Screen 1 of 4:

      <Grumps?>

      <Mm-hm?> (Generalissimo distracted, writing new memo.)

      <Gramps?>

      <Present.> (Still writing.)

      <Am I disturbing you?>

      <Now how do you suppose the light of my life could ever disturb me?> (Stops writing, glances towards stairs.) <Talking of lights, fire us up a big one will you.> (Girl selects cigar from box, clips and lights.) <Not bad soldier.> (Generalissimo blows smoke rings for girl to poke.) <Not bad at all.> (Girl sits back on arm of Generalissimo’s chair.)

      <How come you never vox your orders?> (Twirling Generalissimo’s hair.)

      <Machines!> (Coughs smoke, returns to writing.) <I do not trust them any further than I can throw a politician. Same goes for machine-operators for that matter. Every tree has its rotten fruit. Can you imagine the decay you’d find in a forest the size of the Voxagon?>

      <But aren’t our words passing through the machines now?>

      <Idle chit-chat is of no consequence my little honey-bunch.> (Taps memo with finger.) <But these orders are.> (Returns to writing.) <The law-makers may think they know best but rest assured, your grandfather knows better.>

      (Pause.)

 cont/…

Screen 2 of 4:

      <Gramps?> (Girl stops hair-twirling.)

      <Mm-hm?> (Still writing.)

      <I’m not a lefty… simple-scyther (sympathizer?) am I? Or a rebel?>

      <What a thing to say!> (Laughs, coughs, continues writing.) <And what a sad day that would be, having to send my own men after the apple of my eye!>

      <But I’m still not allowed to use a pen or paper.>

      Freedom, my dearest simple-scyther, rarely comes free of charge. Security demands sacrifice. From every one of us. You of all children should understand that. Trust me though, your favorite grandfather— >

      My only grandfather.>

      Your beloved grandfather is on the case. He’ll soon have the last of the rebels where they belong. Beneath this boot.> (Taps toe on floor.) <Or against the wall.> (Pours drink: 18H08EST – #3 of day, full glass, brandy, neat.) <Anyway, what possible need could a scalawag like you have for hand-writing? With all your school friends just a vox away? You must have an entire battalion to gaff with, judging by all those bracelets you’ve been making them for Christmas.> (Consumes drink.)

      <I think you need a hair-cut for Christmas.>

      <Really?> (Stops writing, feels hair at back of neck.)

      <It’s much longer than usual.>

      <All the better for you to twirl, n’est pas?>

      <Les règ-le-ments sont les règ-le-ments.> (French accent.) 

cont/…

Screen 3 of 4:

      <Rules, schmules. Who’s the army going to report me to, your grandmother? There are only three rules for a Generalissimo: War, war and war.> (Signs off memo, stamps and dates seal.) <Now, how about a quick round before chow? The eggheads have sent over a new program for the Academy. Fancy a thrashing?>

      <You say that ev-ery time.>

      <We’ll see, we’ll see, I’m feeling lucky this evening.>

      <You say that every time too.>

      <But first I have a boat to bail.> (Stands.) <You set up— >

      <The machine?>

      <And I’ll be back before— >

      <Supercallafragilisticexpiallidocious.>

      <Hmm, how about before you can say it twenty times backwards?>

      <Ti, ti, ti, ti, ti…>

      <Ti?>

      <You asked me to say it backwards. Ti, ti, ti, ti, ti…>

      <Enough, pax, I surrender, you win, as usual.> (Backs up towards doorway, hands held in surrender. Exits study, walks up stairs.) <Women and children and animals. They warned me. Never work with ‘em, and never let ‘em near your study.> (Girl removes two sheets of paper from open wall-safe, temporarily disturbs position of surveillance camera #12. Hides paper in sewing box. Generalissimo returns, hands conspicuous behind back.) <Now, who gets you exclusively next Sunday?> (Manipulates object behind back, head of soft toy visible: panda bear.)

cont/…

Screen 4 of 4:

      <I’ll have to check my diary.> (Pretends not to notice panda, makes show of checking in Generalissimo’s desk-diary.) <I suppose I might be able to shift a few things around.> (Ignores jingle of bell on ribbon round panda’s neck.) <Bumping the Governor should be easy enough.>

      <That’s a date then.> (Offers panda with another jingle.)

      <Oh you shouldn’t have.> (Accepts panda.)

      <So, how about that thrashing?> (Closes diary and other papers in safe. Couple sit on couch to play combat program: ‘SlayHawk 9er’.)

      Voxcom extract ends.

“ I am in blood stepp’d in so far that, should I wade no more, returning were as tedious as go o’er. ” ― William Shakespeare, Macbeth

***

Less like a dream and more like a sports action replay, the warrior was deep in REM, re-living a scene from the previous night’s raid. His final three opponents had been young, much younger than he’d expected, the smaller of the trio standing to the right, not much more than a pup: smooth fat cheeks puffing in and out, struggling to catch a breath – black thumb-smears for eyes beneath its Kevlar helmet. Whether the junkers were male or female it was difficult to tell. Either way, it certainly didn’t look like they were up to the job of defending the security door behind their hunched backs – a task not made any simpler by all three of them having exhausted their ammo in the fire-fight they’d just scraped through outside. No doubt the junkers would have preferred to be somewhere else but here they were, at the wrong end of the smoky corridor, blocking the warrior’s path, so they were all kind of obliged to see the thing through.

           Forged like a diamond-cutting tool – its super-heated blade easily capable of piercing body-armor, its length easily greater than the depth of a man’s chest – the glowing bayonet on the end of the middle junker’s weapon betrayed it’s owner with a tremor. Lowering his equally lethal bayonet, the warrior stepped one pace to the side, widening the gap between his boots and the cinder-block wall. Attempting to appraise the situation, the junker to the right – the taller of the three – shifted its focus between the gap and the back-lit face of its enemy, the solid antimatter beneath the warrior’s helmet allowing only the tiniest poker-eyed glint of light to escape.

           You could read the question in the sweaty round faces but if you asked the warrior he wouldn’t have called this charity, not really. For as long as he could remember, he’d been in a space where doing good in this life was nothing more than a hedged bet on the next. The problem, he knew from experience, was if you showed someone kindness they’d invariably go mistaking it for weakness. In this respect, at least, these abominations were no different from men.

           It came as little surprise then, when – out of confusion as much as anything else – the middle junker suddenly made its move: a clumsy lunging attack that the warrior fended off a little too casually, allowing the night-goggles to be hacked clean off the front of his helmet by the creature’s deflected weapon, sending the smoldering lump of molten glass and titanium scudding along the concrete floor.

           The warrior’s defense had been sloppy but lack of night-vision wasn’t really a problem at this point in the proceedings; or at least it wouldn’t have been if he’d resisted his urge to cut his opponents another break, this time by flicking a glance over the shoulder of the middle junker, towards a bank of switches up on the wall. Following the warrior’s glance, the younger junker recognized an edge when it saw one, quickly flicking down its goggles and spearing its bayonet into the switches, killing the corridor’s only light source – a lone strip-tube back along the ceiling – with a short buzzy gasp.

           Suddenly feeling the air being thrashed apart in front of him, the warrior dropped and rolled onto his back, driving his bayonet up into the cloak of pitch-blackness where he imagined the middle junker’s chest was now hidden but it had to have jumped a fraction earlier because he felt his bayonet pierce through solid bone: most likely its pelvis, he thought, knowing his thrust would have more easily passed through a rib. In any event, his blade kept traveling up through its victim’s body, transforming it into a corpse along the way.

           From the howl that erupted from his left, it sounded like the second junker was making its move so he withdrew and drove again, harder this time, in the direction of the inhuman noise, and felt the bayonet puncture his target’s torso. Based on the resulting cry though, it must have somehow managed to propel its body backwards, trying to retreat in the direction of his blade, probably by pushing with its feet off the wall, he guessed, as that was what he would have done in its place and that was what he did now, driving home his weapon until it was buried to his knuckles in the pile of dead-weight meat.

           Withdrawing and thrusting a third time into the dark, this time to his right, he realized the third junker, the youngest one, was further away than he’d judged, almost beyond reach, his bayonet feeling like he’d only managed to pierce a couple of inches of belly. Quickly he tried to work the wound by jerking upwards but the young junker’s grunt of a recoil was too fast. This time though the warrior heard the thud of the pup’s body against the unyielding heaviness of tempered steel: the warrior knew – and the junker knew he knew – there would be no further retreat.

            Summoning the motivation to finish this off, he tried citing one of his older mantras, Fight every battle as if it’s your last, but he knew he was fooling no-one, least of all himself. A lot closer to half-heartedly than whole-heartedly, he again drove his bayonet towards where he figured the junker was located – this time staccato style, jabbing shallow, not wanting to damage his blade’s tip in the security door.

           Aided by its night-vision though, the junker was still able to hang on to its defense, desperately deflecting thrusts and parrying at every opportunity. Impressed with the resistance, the warrior was momentarily taken aback by the velocity with which something sliced across the bridge of his nose: the guilty party, he presumed, had to be the front sight-post of the pup’s weapon as the bayonet would have caused considerably more damage.

           Dissatisfied with the position on his back and the slackness in his closing down such a minor piece of business, he rolled on his side in the slippery pool of blood that had formed on the floor then swung at where he was pretty sure the junker’s heels would be, cutting through boot leather and tendons and ankle bone in one smooth cauterizing move. Following as his guide the inhuman wail accompanying its slump to its knees, he plunged towards what had to be its chest.

           Again though, incredibly, he realized he was off his mark: instead of feeling his blade penetrate the sternum and heart, he had hit what felt like more belly, deep, then spine, getting welded between two vertebrae so he had to twist-pull out of the pup – now squealing at a frequency somewhere in the stuck pig range – before he could thrust again.

This time, though, the junker must have rolled forward or doubled over; whichever it was, its face had somehow fallen sideways into the path of the heart-bound bayonet, managing to skewer both its cheeks for the split-second before the sideways flick of the blade generated another inhuman emission, only this time with more bass so he guessed the junker’s mouth was a whole lot bigger now.

           Mulling over how impossible this all was, he wondered at how the pup was still alive and still coming back at him; at how it was that this wasn’t over yet; at how rarely it took him this long in hand-to-hand encounters; how he was never this clumsy; how normally three strokes – max – was all it took. Half of him pitied the junker and the other half wanted to punish it for taking so long to die.

Continuing to flail away with its weapon it now sounded like it was sobbing but it was hard to tell for sure because of what had been done to its mouth.

Rolling away fast, the warrior’s shoulder hit the wall hard, prompting him to consider that there must be something on his mind: something distracting him from the job at hand – something he couldn’t quite put his finger on. If I was the kid, he thought, I would go for the gap now: try and get out of this nightmare while I still can, even if it’s on my hands and knees.

           Anticipating the move, the warrior thrust out to where he judged the junker’s neck would be and this time he knew instantly his hunch was right as he felt the blade slide effortlessly through soft flesh and gristly cartilage. Severing the jugular and larynx in one fell swoop, he had stopped the junker dead, filling the air with a nebula of warm slickness as he withdrew his weapon, leaving it to sag to the deck with a wet thwump.

           Licking his lips, swallowing on the unmistakable rustiness of blood, the warrior took the time to listen to the remnants of the junker’s young life slipping away. Gurgling out between its fingers. Maybe trying to call for its mother, or maybe its father, it was impossible to tell. Either way, the warrior didn’t need night-vision to know it was trying to hold its neck together. The sound of the arterial squirting quickly ebbing away. Its frequency slowing. A brave heart doing its best but failing; the final death-throws jerking the pup’s knees against his own.

           Softly, he patted the junker as if to console it, or maybe to console himself. Like a mother might pat a child to stop it crying. Or maybe give herself a break.

           This is what I do, he thought.

           The World’s Greatest Warrior.

           The World’s Shittiest Butcher, more like.

           At least though there was no light to witness the mess.

           He’d once been told you lost a piece of your soul every time you took a life, but he had to believe these freaks didn’t count. If they did then he’d have run out of soul a long time ago.

           But then who really knew? Maybe they did and maybe he had.

           Maybe that was his problem.

           He’d killed so many of them, Hell had to be getting short on real estate.

            Or maybe nowadays even the Devil was having trouble recognizing the baddy du jour.

           Distracting his thoughts, he selected his soundtrack of choice for such moments, patting the kid again while trying to reassure himself with a recent re-entry in his mantra top-ten:

            If God hadn’t wanted me this way, He wouldn’t have made me this way.

           Then, just as the junker’s knees stopped jerking, part of an old poem replayed in his mind, as if from some distant memory:

                        The young dead soldiers do not speak.

                        Nevertheless, they are heard in the still houses:

                        Who has not heard them?

           And then came the unmistakable stench of the kid’s bowels.

It was a stuffy night in December when the girl, still braided and dressed in her Sunday best, pulled aside her sheet and the mosquito-netting to slip quietly out of bed.

           The mission had been over a year in the planning but she still felt nervous that she had forgotten some tiny detail as she climbed out of her bedroom window like a secret commando: her narrow shoulders spanned by her tightly-wound parasol for a rifle, held securely in its place by her backpack – the pack’s top-flap not quite hiding her new panda, its concerned black glass eyes sparked to life by the fireflies, their loop-the-looping driven even crazier as she clambered down the short rope that she had plaited from more friendship bracelets than she could count.

           According to her glittery wristband – which would have been sink-and-knifed had she had anyone to sink-and-knife with – it was exactly oh-two-hundred hours when her sneakers touched down on the veranda that skirted the back of the house. Imagining herself a cat (a grinning Cheshire perhaps?) she crept along the least creaky of the pitch-pin strips and past her grandfather’s triple-stitched hammock, her eyes quickly adjusting so she could even make out the little white blobs nestling high up in the eucalyptus, the tree’s shiny kitchen-foil leaves blinking in the moonlight.

            How many Sunday mornings, she wondered, had Grumps stormed out with one of his guns, cursing and blasting away at those squawking birds? If he had done it once he had done it a thousand times, but still they kept returning and still they kept teasing him with their racket and their pecking at the mangoes. Now though the parrots were so quiet they could have been stuffed, their crests tucked beneath their wings as if he had at last managed to carry out his threat to blow their bloody heads off. She almost allowed herself a half-smile at the thought of the grownup word, repeating it in her mind three times for luck: Bloody, Bloody, Bloody.

            No luck had been involved though in her choice of this particular night for the mission. Despite secretly training herself for months at sleeping with her bedroom door shut and her bedside lamp off and her drapes drawn, she had to admit that she was still scared of the dark and whatever it was that wrapped itself in it. But now, in the glow of the fat harvest moon, the night was different. Rather than being afraid she felt herself oddly calm – almost as calm as the river – hypnotized by the way everything seemed to be bathed in the strange silvery light: not so much as though the scenery looked painted, but more as though it had been unpainted, stripped of all its color and polished back to bare metal.

            From the neatly striped lawn, bordered by the junkers’ bungalows as far as the old mill, then all the way past the wishing-well and the hedged maze, to the chapel and the private plot by the giant mango: it was, to her, as if all that was left of the scene was its reflections and shadows – soft moonlight shadows – yawning from beneath every tree and every bush and every tiny tombstone… And then, even further: up the gentle slope to the jamoon grove and down across the water, its soft surface tucked into the banks as tight as fresh sheets after a washday; and sweeping out over the cane fields, a bazillion steely spears planted as far as there was land to plant; and, finally, right up to the northern hills, squashed smooth beneath the weight of the Big Dipper and a bazillion other stars – it was as though someone, or as if something, had cast a solstice spell, and from her vantage point up on the deck she was now poised at the edge of a magical pool where, should she dare to dive in, she would be sure to discover a slithy tove or mome rath to befriend.

           Nearly allowing herself another half-smile at the thought of the odd creatures foraging for cheese or oysters (or whatever it was they exactly lived on) she strained her eyes and scanned the enchanted land but even the crickets seemed to have declared a truce and she failed to make out a single stirring aside from the twinkling leaves, whispering their secrets to those dozy birds.

           Lightly shifting the course of her wandering mind, a warm land breeze weaved its way through the herb-garden and up to the veranda, the resulting bouquet as complex in design as any one of her homemade bracelets: tick-leaf, couve, goyave, cilantro, basil – they had been amongst the first words she had learned during her highchair years spent mostly in the kitchen, drooling in the smells coming from the bubbling pots and pans. For a moment she couldn’t quite place the one essential ingredient that was missing in the night air around her – a delicate flavoring that was rarely absent from her grandmother’s cooking – but then she remembered and it reminded her of the next stage of her mission, pulling her back from the edge of the lunar pool and its fairytale kingdom.

           With no more than a few tiptoed footsteps along the deck though she had to pause once more, this time to take a deep breath before getting down on her belly to wriggle past Gramps’ French windows. As Gran’s bedroom was opposite her own at the top of the stairs, sneaking out that way would have been even riskier – especially since she always left her door ajar and the hallway light on.

            Did it run in the family? she wondered as she wriggled. This fear of the dark…

           But then, instantly erasing the question from her mind, came the jingle of the silver bell that hung from her panda’s neck, freezing her for fear of waking the lightest and grumpiest sleeper ever known to mankind. Carefully, doing the only thing she could think of, she reached over her shoulder to pull on the ribbon’s bow, gently freeing the bell and popping it in her mouth before continuing with her wormy progress, her lip tightly buttoned.

           Finally clear of the windows, back up on her feet, she crept down the veranda’s rickety steps to the path that snaked around the house, tying the bell back around her panda’s neck as she followed the broken paving in the direction of the stables up to the side of the grounds. Stopping at a large shiny bush along the way, she picked three generous bunches of spice-leaves: not only were they Gran’s secret ingredient, they were also the preferred currency of the horses – Montezuma, Carmen and their new foal, Zapata – their moon-flecked eyes now gleaming like giant polished hammernuts as they peaked out from the darkness above their stable doors, already smacking their rubbery lips at the thought of her visit.

           Watching them munch away, lightly frothing at the delicacy of her offering, she reached up to caress their fuzzy noses, surely the softest things in the world, except perhaps for the collection of bears piled high at the foot of her bed; a collection she had acquired at a rate of one per week (‘Silverbell’ being just the latest addition) in exchange for promising her Sundays to Gramps. Now though it occurred to her that she was getting too old for teddies and pandas and the suchlike so, with the horses’ silence successfully purchased, the set of her chin became doubly determined as she headed off for her next objective along the winding path.

It was the stench that roused the warrior from his sleep in the middle of the night. But before he could completely emerge from that No Man’s Land between his peace and war, he had to wade through a fog so thick it could have been tinned and sold in fifty-seven varieties.

            His first compos mentis thought was the identification of the horse tranquillizers as the culprits; well, that and the quart of pure-grain cachaça he’d used to wash them down. It then took him a few more moments to tune in to the fact that he’d filled his shorts with a large amount of faecal matter. This was not the first time it had happened though and he was willing to lay down his inheritance it wouldn’t be the last: a firm stool was just yet another pleasure denied to him.

           No, what troubled him far more than the slush down below was the complete hash he’d made of the whole thing with the pup.

            Where had his mind been?

           Over the previous twenty-four hours there had been the extraction then the transporter then the medic then the debriefing then the drop-off then the beer then the week-old pizza then the cachaça then the pills; and during it all, it hadn’t mattered how hard he tried to focus on the question, he just kept drawing a blank.

           Suddenly though, like a flash of some detail from a dream, he remembered where he’d first heard that old poem and how the rest of it went:

                        They have a silence that speaks for them

                        at night and when the clock counts.

                        They say:

                        We were young.

                        We have died.

                        Remember us.

            He had killed the pup in the early hours of the previous day and the previous day had been the ninth. December the ninth. For the first time in a decade he had forgotten the anniversary of his Puziashka’s death.

            All those years and yet here he still was: still alive and kicking; still doing the same shit. While all the time God was still doing His same shit: Still moving in His mind-fuckingly mysterious ways; as if He had nothing better to do with His time than save his sorry ass, over and over again. After all, what was a decade to Him? When we whither and die in a blink of His eye…

           Had that day even registered on His divine Richter scale?

           The day when everything he knew and loved… the day it had all turned to crap.

           Crap of the same stench and form – or lack thereof – as the toxic slime currently contaminating his underwear.

           Had that day even rippled His divine pond?

           The day her life had been torn from him.

           Sucking away his own reason for living.

           As though her flesh had been ripped clean from his own bones.

           As if it was his own soul that had been torn away – hacked like an unborn child from the port of its womb then cast as slop to the whim of the waves. Left to drift, lost and alone. Abandoned like the Mary friggin’ Celeste; the mist of each new dawn about as welcome as a fart in the confession box. Year in, year out, nothing new except the ribbons they kept pinning on his chest and the lines someone kept doodling on his face.

           Nothing of any importance ever changed.

           Or if it did, it happened so slowly you’d never notice.

           Then one day you woke up, decrepit before your time and too late to do anything about it. Hi-jacked by Stockholm’s syndrome, resigned to going along with it all. Willingly submitting yourself to old Torturer Time – drip, drip, dripping away on your forehead until each new drop felt like the anvil-bound hammer of some sex-starved blacksmith.

           You knew it would eventually send you crazy too, but you were powerless to stop it. You just had to go along with the ride and see where the madness drove you. Stuck in first gear on a theme park attraction for under-fives, the ride’s mindless tune looping away ad nauseam.

           Recently it had got so bad it seemed to him as if someone was supercooling Time’s very molecules down to absolute zero – that coldest of temperatures where all matter ceased to move. Like he was one of those pioneering space-monkeys approaching the speed of light, where a single second of life stretched to an infinity back on earth.

           Increasingly, he would catch himself lumbering about as if every tiny effort at movement was a giant leap for mankind; while all the time his star-ship was warp-factoring toward the final frontier – the abort button just beyond his reach.

            Beyond his reach.

            Whenever he tried to draw his Puziashka’s spirit back to him he would start with the obvious, taking the time to visualize every detail of her face, right down to the beauty mark on the fold of her ear and the freckles on her nose; the dimple in her cheek and the sparkle in her eyes. He could even recall the different smiles she had for different occasions: her just-waking-up smile; her just-looking-at-you smile; her just-how-did-you-know? smile.

            Then, moving beyond her appearance, he would recall that just-showered smell – her freshness, her dampness, her moistness – usually aided by the various soaps and shampoos and body-lotions still haunting the bathroom. He would, of course, like to be able to remember her smell: the smell between her legs before they made love in the morning, while she was still sleepy. He remembered how much he’d savored it at the time; how he’d once teased her it reminded him of something between wild-sage and a puppy not yet weaned from its mother’s milk. It was an impossible smell to pin down but he would have died happy with his nose buried in it. The truth was he had never been able to re-conjure the smell in his mind. Instead, in between missions, he’d taken to hanging out in the pet store down by the quay, leaving the apartment to be impregnated by large bowls of the fuming herb.

            He had long since given up trying to recall their smell: that cocktail they mixed up together when they made love – the special finger-licking recipe only their two bodies could create together. But like the last wisp of some childhood memory, their smell had been lost to the heavens. All traces and clues, embers and ashes, had been scattered to the four winds. He still remembered the pleasure it had given him at the time though. How – after her body had been safely birthed in his arms and their blood and breath had lulled to its natural rhythm – he used to inhale that smell under the sheets.

A seashore on a perfect day, that was the closest he could come to describing it.

           But what was it he remembered beyond her appearance? Beneath her smell?

Her laughter was the first thing that came to mind. Everyone who’d ever met her remembered that laugh: more like a child’s than a woman’s – never failing to brighten up even the dullest of company. To him it was composed from the notes of sunshine, its melody flowing with what felt like the warmth and passion of the entire southern hemisphere: a kind of mini-miracle, especially as her roots laid in the north – well, the north and then a few  clicks east to Siberia.

           Vaguely, he also remembered a small sound she’d sometimes made while she slept. Not loud enough to be called a snore, he’d only ever heard it when he was in his own twilight world so he’d never managed to commit it precisely to memory. Had he known at the time how much he would one day want to recall just a snippet of that sound he would have made the effort to wake up and record it. Now he could only guess what her sleep sounded like. He liked to imagine it was as if you were inland from the coast but you could still just make out the faint sound of the surf on the shore when the gulf breeze was blowing in.

           And then, of course, there was the sound she made when she was taking her pleasure.

           But again, alas, it was gone.

           What wouldn’t he have given to have that particular track on his play-list?

           He remembered even back then, thinking how no sound could ever match it: not the crackling of a camp fire, or the cadets’ laughter around it; nor the northern rains on a water-tight tent, or the bush chorus after the clouds moved on. All that stuff was minor league by comparison. The sound of her pleasure was out of the park. It was the sound of conception: of fusion and the beginning of all life. Yet strangely of death too… Of the very essence of being. The reason for our existence. God’s greatest gift. All wrapped up in the tiny package of that sound. Perhaps that was why it was never meant to be recorded – it was just too damn holy. It was never meant to be replayed; only to be lived in the moment by lovers.

           But he would never forget the pleasure he’d taken from it.

           So many men lived for power or money or fame, yet he had lived for that simple sigh.

           Her lips parted, her eyes closed, lost in the colors of her mind.

           Her body no longer her own.

           Just for that moment.

           But didn’t there have to be more to it than that?

           What else could he recall beyond her appearance and her smell and the sound of her pleasure?     

           He remembered once, to bring a smile to her face, he’d compared the taste of her kisses to peaches and cream with chocolate sauce and honey poured on top. Now though, as he searched his mind for the true taste of her lips, he could only think of lotus petals. She had been on the old bench by the pond in the middle of the maze with her head in his lap when he’d stolen their first kiss, preceding it by scooping one of the white blossoms from the water then plucking its cool waxy petals, one by one, to tease her lips and cover her eyes.

           But surely there was still something more about her?

           More than the looks, the smell, the sounds, the taste…

           There was the satin of her skin and the silk of her hair, sure, but there had to be something deeper.

           What did he remember about her below all that surface stuff?

           What had been her essence?

           What was it he had really fallen in love with?

           What had made her so unique?

           What had been hers and nobody else’s?

            What was it?

            It was her suffering, of course.

           Her unspoken suffering.

           It could not be seen or smelt, or heard by anyone else.

           Its low notes were below the register of her laughter.

            Only her tongue could taste its bitterness.

           It was something only she could feel.

            But he had sensed it.

            There was no point in attempting to explain it to anybody else but during their short time together they had grown to become one and he had grown to know it as if it were his own.

           Together they had carried the weight of its phantom pregnancy and together the load was lighter.

           Through no single deliberate act other than love.

           Fortunately they both had a lot of love to give.

            But neither of them spoke of it. They did not need to. Compassion was their language. It was simply enough that it was known. If not in detail, at least in color and hue; in depth and shadow; in light and darkness.

           But most of all in darkness.

           For it would not allow her to sleep in the dark.

           Still light-headed from the horse-pills, he slowly gathered his sheet around himself and knotted it like an oversized diaper before rolling off the workbench where he’d finally blacked out a few hours earlier, spooned against the figure he’d carved from a block of redwood a lifetime ago. It was supposed to resemble her of course: the way she had fallen – a token piece of creation in some futile attempt to balance all the destruction in his life. Her wooden beauty to his beast, he mused, as he shuffled across the wood-chip covered floor. Originally the studio had been the neighboring apartment but he had brought a sledgehammer home one night and smashed through the wall to create a space for his other sculptures of her; and now here they all were: displayed in a gallery-come-Victorian-freak-show arrangement – phantasmagoric in the half-light of the moon.

           There had been no blood, he remembered, when he found her body slumped in the clinic’s blue gown – just her beautiful face looking like it was somehow embedded in one of the room’s marble floor-tiles. Then he had bent down and tried to lift her – a broken doll refusing to stand upright – only to realize the right half of her face had disappeared, rendered invisible by some magician’s trick that allowed you to look straight through it and out of the window: a perfect sky right there where half her perfect smile should have been. An optical illusion he had to put his hand through and wiggle his fingers before his mind could grasp what he was looking at.

           His love, gone – for ever.

           Then had come that vertigo sensation where the movie-camera tracks back while the lens zooms in, leaving the audience disoriented and nauseous.

           It had surged up in him so quickly he hadn’t even had the time to lay her back down before he had thrown up over her gown.

           Now, holding his diaper’s knot extra tight in his fist – more than a little doubtful about its own leak-proof qualities – he opened the studio’s French windows, the night breeze wrapping the long chiffon curtains lightly around the back of his legs, sending a shiver up his spine and prickling his scalp, as if her ghost had just brushed past onto the balcony, teasing him along the way. Never having been a fan of heights he stepped out too, his gaze defaulting to the café terrace three stories down across the street where a young couple were lost in each other’s hair, their love oblivious of the pear-shaped waiter scooping up chairs from the deserted tables around them. If José was shutting up shop it had to be around two, maybe three at the latest: the hour, he recalled, someone had once christened as the midnight of your soul.

           Glancing up from the chair-stacking, José spotted him, momentarily connecting with a courteous nod of that big round head, as if it was the most natural thing in the world for a fully-grown man in an over-grown diaper to be standing out on his balcony in the middle of the night. Perhaps it was the horse-pills, the warrior thought, that had made him step out dressed like that. Or maybe it was because he’d made a point of never farting in the apartment after she’d moved in. Either way, he had instantly regretted it – the stepping out part, not the fart part – knowing what he knew about José’s story.

           Taking a deep breath of his own methane-laced air, he began to overact a yawny stretch then, for security purposes, had to quickly whip his hands back to his diaper’s slipping knot, making him feel like an even bigger fool. Feigning a gaze across the city’s moonlit rooftops cascading down towards the petridish of mercury posing as the old harbor, he waited a moment until he was pretty sure José was no longer watching then stepped back into the studio to shuffle along his way towards the hole in the wall.

           Ducking into the shadowy crypt of the living room and past the sledgehammer (still leaning there after he couldn’t remember how many years), he traipsed across to the Christmas tree’s skeleton in the corner. Propped up and humiliated like some museum display of an undressed mummy from a once-great empire, its pine needles had long since turned to dust but it was still tricked out in all its golden splendour, surrounded by its worldly treasures; the gift-wrapped surprises lying at its feet unplundered, the baubles and fairylights all present and correct. Had the apartment been in the habit of receiving visitors, this would have been the fossilised mammoth in the room of which nobody spoke.

           Using his free hand, the warrior carefully removed a bauble from one of the brittle limbs, softly wiping back its luster with a corner of his diaper before returning it to its rightful place and plucking another. Her funeral had not been the first he’d attended but he remembered so little from his father’s. Somehow though, a defiant clump of neurones had managed to cling on to the detail of the gold epaulets on the new academy uniform that his mother had dressed him in for the occasion. The way he pictured the scene now was as if he was sitting up in the old mango tree, detached from his body, looking down on his cadet-self standing to attention – studiously following his mother’s instructions and saluting his father one last time, the modest size of the tombstone inversely proportional to the enormity of the stain that had ended his career.

           Then it had all became a blur of flowers and strangers’ faces; of strangers’ white gloved hands on his gilded shoulders. Oddly though, he never recalled feeling sad that day. Maybe the child’s mind was superior to the adult’s at blanking out the tough stuff. Hell, even a dog’s mind had to be better equipped for that sort of thing. Come to think of it, when was the last time any animal had been caught mourning?

           Once, when he’d been banged up in the Academy’s glasshouse, waiting for some disciplinary hearing to come around, he’d seen a cat crushed to death – one of the rat-catchers that roamed the barracks – its fate materializing in the form of a wooden loading-pallet that must have tipped over in the wind from where it was leaning against a stack outside the mess. He’d heard the noise when the pallet fell and went to the window where he’d watched it through the bars, a bundle of tabby fur and white-socked paws and stripy tail, fighting to get out from under the wood: a load that would have been heavy for a man but to a cat must have seemed like the weight of the world. It was struggling for all it was worth but it was struggling in vain. The load was never going to shift. The pallet was way too big and the cat was way too small.

           But the tabby had persevered – valiantly he thought – so he’d poked the tongue of a hand-towel through the cell door’s chow-slot, the way you were supposed to get the guard’s attention in solitary. Then, while waiting, he’d spent ten, maybe fifteen minutes watching the struggle – the futile squirts of effort fading until a final, most desperate effort, and then a last couple of deeply resigned breaths. And then, nothing. Just stillness. Sticking out like a sick joke. Static as the pallet had remained through the whole sorry episode.

           Prior to the cat’s demise, he’d seen hundreds of men killed in a hundred different ways but strangely it was the first time he’d ever seen an animal die, assuming you didn’t count junkers of course. From the way the other cats continued about their business, you would have thought they’d never seen one of their own die either. Inevitably though, curiosity got a hold of one of them, a large ginger tom, but when he went to cautiously lick the tabby’s rear quarters the tom had suddenly startled back. Whatever had started to leak from that orifice, it was not a liquid that the tom was accustomed to; the creature was clearly too dumb to understand he had just tasted death. As for the remainder of the crew, they mostly ignored the corpse: giving it an occasional sideways glance and a nonchalant but consciously wide berth – observing some invisible yet clearly defined exclusion zone. None repeated the anus-licking business so presumably word must have gotten out.

           The tabby, of course, had been an entirely innocent party. It had done nothing to merit such a drawn-out demise. It had simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Its end – anything but merciful – had only come only once the cosmic forces had had their fun, conspiring to collide pallet and cat, taking their time to watch the show. The struggle of the powerless versus the all-powerful. Of hope versus hopelessness.

            Live on hope, die of hunger… Isn’t that what they said? 

            Having only that week risen six places in the charts, There but for the Grace of God go I, was the mantra that had come to his mind as he stood at that barred window. He had repeated it to himself, but not without irony: the image of the tabby squashed beneath the infinite weight could not fail to remind him of his own plight.

           Looking down at the bauble in his hand, he now realized how tired he’d grown of all this dusting business. That was enough for this expedition, he decided, replacing the tree’s treasure: paleontology just wasn’t all the fun it was cracked up to be. It was time, instead, to strike out for the oasis of the kitchen, source of all libation. So with diaper firmly re-clamped in fist, he shuffled along on his way, past his recliner, guaranteed one hundred percent simulated leather (she had been a vegan), casually running the fingers of his free hand through the million-dollar plumage perched on the headrest.

           Ignoring his caress, the hawk’s head continued with its three-sixty degrees of infra-red surveillance, smoothly rotating with all the precision you’d expect from a Swiss-made executioner, ever-ready for action. At least with the drone you got what it said on the box. But then maybe it was the drone he should be cursing: it seemed to have saved his life at least as many times as the Big Fella upstairs. Unfortunately, also like God, the bag of feathers had been standard issue for Academy cadets and he hadn’t been able to shake it loose since.

           Oasis-bound, he continued on his trail, traversing the perils of the hallway, determined not to succumb to the temptress of the locked door floating in darkness at the end of the passage. Acknowledging the Siren’s call of the door with only the briefest of glances, he crossed into the kitchen, his feet hardly breaking their slow shuffling rhythm. In theory, he appreciated how all he had lived through – all he had survived – should have at least taught him the value of life; Carpe Diem and all that. In reality though, when you can’t have the only thing you want, the rest becomes pretty meaningless. Colorless. Tasteless…

           And no number of E-numbers were going to help spice it up, he mused, squinting through the offensively bright light at the bar-graphs of assorted condiments decking out the cavern of his fridge, his troglodyte fist still firmly fixed on the diaper’s knot.

           What kind of life was it anyway, when you only needed one hand to count your blessings? Hell, forget one hand, in his case one finger would do the job. And he’d happily give that finger to Life if he could only figure out which direction to salute. If he could come up with the prerequisite phlegm he’d appreciate a clear shot at its eye too, but then that was his problem in a nutshell really: he no longer had the necessary emotional pool to draw upon – his spittle well had run dry. Even at his artificially stimulated, frothing, rampant best, Life just kept on blankly staring him down, like those jars of junker eyeballs over-populating the fridge’s top shelf: souvenirs from his campaign’s earlier, angry years.

            No, it didn’t matter how many times he challenged it or abused it, Life just kept on silently mocking him; as if Saint Peter was the supreme bouncer telling him straight: Your name’s not down, you’re not getting in.

           And yet the way things had been left hanging he seemed to be constantly surrounded by death. As if it was the very air he breathed, draped over his every move. It was the woman not yet ready to be taken, preferring instead to entwine herself around him, extracting her pleasure by rubbing against him. It was the man-eating spider caging him within its giant black limbs, waiting for its hunger to mount before it was good and ready to consume him. For as far as Death was concerned, there was no hurry. It knew he wasn’t going anywhere. And he knew there was no escaping its grip. Which was fine with him – it was all this foreplay that he found so boring. In protest he’d stopped praying but by way of a compromise he’d taken to repeating various mantras in the general direction of the heavens.

            Oh dear Lord, please grant me my deliverance, had topped his personal charts for a record-breaking three hundred and thirty two weeks.

           Finally identifying his target in the fridge, he reached around a stack of dog-eared pizza boxes and pulled out a can of beer, rolling its coat-of-arms logo across his forehead before cracking it open and downing it in one long loud frat-boy slurp, followed by one long loud frat-boy burp. Out of the myriad advantages of bachelor existence, not needing to control your beer consumption or gas emissions had to feature in the top-ten. He knew how to drink responsibly though – he was a stickler for recycling. Holding the base of the can against the wall, he head-butted it flat then threw the disc over his shoulder, frisbeeing it across the kitchen into a box brimming with aluminum clones. The Academy’s latest batch of whizkids had nothing on him, he told himself, pulling out another beer and shutting the light back in the fridge.

           Continuing on his journey, his smarting forehead soaking up the freshness of the new coat-of-arms, he shuffled out of the kitchen in the general direction of the TV. The fact was, he had stopped yearning for something better than his lot many moons ago, resigning himself to this locked-on-auto existence for as long as it took. Tracing figures of eight in a seemingly endless holding pattern. Hanging around, waiting for the inevitable. Which might even have been bearable had he not lost his hard-on for the war. Once upon a time he used to get a real broom-handle for it, but now it was as if he was just going through the motions of how some vengeful bad-ass should behave. He had become his own copycat killer except without the required dedication or finesse.

           Punctuating the point, he flopped into his recliner, the squelch muffled by his diaper and a wop-wop wing beat. With the drone quickly stabilized on its hundred percent non-leather perch, a new waft of stench came forth from the diaper’s crotch but it wasn’t like he was in polite company or anything – he’d get to the bathroom in his own good time. Let it stew for a while first, he thought, almost amusing himself as he zapped the video-wall alive.

           Nowadays his entire life felt like one big dumbed-down veg-out, watching himself on some surreality show. He didn’t know who was doing all this killing that the news channels kept attributing to The World’s Greatest Warrior but it sure wasn’t him. It hadn’t been him for a long time. He didn’t even know who that guy was any more. Yet no matter how many times he zapped away, he always seemed stuck on the same re-run. When you’ve watched yourself yank out one set of teeth you’ve pretty much watched them all.

           Same goes for eyeballs, really.

           There was just no creativity in it any more.

            Where’s my entertainment? that’s what he wanted to know.

            As for the drama, he’d laugh if it wasn’t so tragic. God forbid he should be allowed a good laugh. And triple digit body-counts sure weren’t doing it for him any more. In this time and space there was more chance of him getting a rise out of a good symphony. In the middle of firefights he would regularly zone-out to his play-list, his glazed expression saying less global warrior and more village idiot. Watching the show but not watching the show. Out to the opera, lost in the string-section.

           Especially the cello.

           Nothing matched the range of a cello.

           Sometimes the music, the tracer-fire zipping around his ears, he would completely break it down in his mind, trying to discover the essence of what the composer was about. And when he was doing this – letting the orchestra soak away the filth of the surrounding carnage – more often than not he wouldn’t really be following the action, what his own hands or feet were doing. Your elbows and knees, when you’d been doing this as long as he had, they pretty much took care of combat by themselves. As if your body was some kind of avatar, its pixels being pulled by the Giant Gamer in the sky.

            Even in the hottest zones, his pulse rarely exceeded seventy. More often than not he was down in the low fifties. It had got to the point where battle felt like some new form of transcendental meditation. Tripping out to the score, sometimes he’d catch himself syncing his fire to the music’s tempo: lento to allegro to hey presto, everyone’s dead. It had all become one big stage production except without the standing ovation, on account of him usually being the only one left standing. And then, with the fat lady finally silenced, an entry-wound for a third eye, he’d taken to lying down wherever the fight had led him – right there on the spot, amongst the bodies and limbs and blood and gore – like he’d done with the kid. He’d close his eyes and imagine what it was like to be dead. To leave his own body and rise up to go home. To knock on those pearly gates and have his Puziashka hug the air from his lungs.

           That’s where he found his true peace.

           Those were the moments he lived for.

           The moments when he was dead.

           He even had his favorite choral piece for the occasion: the way he imagined the soundtrack would be when the Big Guy finally got His white-haired ass in gear… Presumably all this heel-dragging was part of the Divine Plan ‘cos it was sure as hell beyond his comprehension.

            Sinking deeper into the recliner’s anti-leather softness he tried to calm his mind with a golden oldie, Ours is not to question why, repeating it slowly to himself as he breathed deeply in and out seven times: a special number with mystical powers, she had once told him. Somehow though he suspected the mantra and the deep-breathing and the special number weren’t gonna do the job this time around. Maybe the lotus position might help but he didn’t want to take the chance: that would involve hitching up his legs and the risk of diaper leakage was just too great.

           Instead he zapped the wall dead, rousing himself from the chair’s comfort with some difficulty and not a small amount of squelching. It was time, he self-prescribed, to head for the bathroom – or more specifically: the bathroom cabinet. The chemical levels in his blood were probably unreasonably high but they were also running dangerously low. An urgent top-up was in order if he was to keep himself on the right side of sanity. Okay, okay, so he knew that line had been breached a long time ago: anyone who bothered to scratch down to his undercoat could have seen that. But while nobody was bothering he just kept cruising along on the whole delusional trip. Making like four fifths of everything didn’t really lie beneath the surface. Like there wasn’t really some inky creature lurking in the undertow, patient as a Buddha, pregnantly paused, just waiting for the worst possible moment to absorb him in its swollen vacuole of a belly.

           The bathroom, unfortunately, was located half way down the hallway and by the time he had reached it he found his flesh had grown considerably weaker. If strength came from adversity he should have been capable of arm-wrestling King Kong by now – yet here he was, still unable to resist that locked door, beckoning him from the passage’s end.

           But what was a small detour anyway?

           Between old friends and a junkie’s fix…

            The only race is with yourself, seemed like the right mantra for the moment. It was one of those little pearls she had seemed to drop so effortlessly into their pillow talk, making him feel so much younger than her years: even if he was – had been – a few months her senior.

           Though still uncertain, he suspected that the key to the universe – or at least the meaning of life – laid buried somewhere in that mantra. If you added it all up, he had probably dwelt on its sense for days in the can. Or maybe it had been weeks. Perhaps even months. Whatever. The whole concept of time had come to mean about as much to him as a sky full of stars or a plate full of pasta. However long it had been, all he knew for sure was he sure wasn’t getting any closer to solving the enigma. It was like some old Zen Master’s koan, only this student was never gonna get it: his enlightenment had to be light years away.

           In many respects it was his Puziashka who had been his master. Always the wiser one. No matter how much he begged, she would never help him find the meaning to her little riddles. Instead she would paint on her Mona Lisa smile and follow up with some or other mystical reflection that would frustrate him even further.

            Unless you have been thoroughly drenched in perspiration you can not expect to see the revelation of a palace of pearls on a blade of grass…

           Now what the hell was that supposed to mean?

           She could drive him nuts with all that Buddhist baloney but how many times had he yearned to hold her against him for just one more night? For just one hour, to take her in his arms? For just one minute, to hold her hand? How often had he wished to see her face again, just one more time…

           At the end of the dark hallway, standing in his diaper, he turned the key in the door’s lock. Grasping the nettle of the handle, he remembered his beer and stooped to place it on the floor. Discharged of his inappropriate cargo, he cracked open the door to spy on the odd-shaped specters still haunting the shadowy room. Like a sinner entering the box, he stepped in, closing the door quietly behind him before shuffling over to the far corner in as dignified a fashion as his diaper would allow. Then, taking a deep breath, sighing almost involuntarily, he carefully pulled back the dust-sheet that covered the phantom’s head.

Ever-patient, awaiting the girl’s return to the gardener’s shed, the museum-piece was still sitting where she had left it, propped up near the moonlit window, covered in an old paint-stained tarpaulin and surrounded by a jumble sale of dusty flowerpots in every imaginable size and condition.

           She had been secretly servicing the contraption for nearly a year now, regularly giving all the moving parts a good midnight oiling, and had even managed to patch up the rotten inner tubes with a smelly repair kit (discovered stuck beneath the seat) and a squeaky pump left pinned to the dirt-colored frame. Fortunately it didn’t have a boy’s crossbar otherwise she doubted her plan would have ever been possible, the original idea having first hatched its way out of her head as a dream yet here she now was, a dozen full-moons later and finally on the point of setting out on her journey.

            Wincing as she pinched herself to check for sure she wasn’t still dreaming, she pulled the rolled-up parasol from behind her shoulders and shucked off her backpack to dig beneath the panda, extracting a large flashlight and a roll of sticky-tape. Then, as an after-thought, she crouched on the floor and dug deeper to make sure one last time that she had definitely not forgotten anything, lining the items up one by one along the floor before checking them back into her pack: spare flashlight batteries, check; puncture repair kit, check; first-aid kit, check; cereal bars (a dozen), water-bottle (full), map with address (memorized), check, check, check; and, lastly but mostly, her love-worn copy of Alice in Wonderland (the envelope safely tucked away in its middle pages), check.

           Like the head-gardener himself, his abandoned bicycle must have been at least a hundred years old and seemed to tower over her as she pulled off its cover but she knew it would be far better suited to her mission than the little pink-and-chrome model she had received for her last birthday-slash-Christmas present (she being one of those ‘lucky’ third-of-one-percent of kids born the same day as the baby Jesus). Doing her utmost not to knock over any of the flowerpots, she set about the tricky business of steering the relic out of its nest, all the while thinking about what a good job she’d done on the envelope and its contents, even if the color had turned out to be a bit of a bloody disaster.

           When she had first set to work with her grandfather’s’ golden pen (probably older than the bike and the gardener combined), her heart had pounded at the thought of making a mistake with the ink but she had prepared herself well – practicing the words with a stick in the silt at the edge of the river – so she had managed to get everything down on the paper without the letters looking too shaky or blobby. The rest had just been a matter of getting a handle on the massive pair of scissors from the kitchen and what was left of the glue in the crinkly tube from the puncture repair kit.

           To brighten things up a bit around the writing, she had stuck down hundreds of tiny pieces of orchid petals and thin slivers of foil in the shape of butterflies, or flutterbys, as her grandmother liked to call them. Working beneath the tent of her bed covers – propped up by her parasol with the flashlight nestling in its spokes, creating a stripy shadow-theater effect for her teddy bear audience – the project had only taken a few hours from start to finish but she couldn’t remember ever having been so pleased with herself in her whole entire life.

           Now though, taping the flashlight to the middle of the bike’s rusty handlebars, her heart began to race at just the thought of the great paper robbery, an altogether far trickier affair as the only time Gramps had ever left her alone in the study was during his three-point-five-minute toilet breaks. First there had been his jaguar rug that she had to slide across the floor right past the doorway (the door jammed wide open thanks to the bloody grandfather-clock pinning it back against the wall); then there was the pulling and pushing palaver of getting his desk-chair, about a ton of creaky dead-weight, onto the rug; and then there had been the sliding of the chair-loaded rug beneath the wall-safe he had left open; and next, after all this, and with the clock’s tick-tocking seeming to fill the room, there was the discovery that – even with the help of a stack of books balanced on one of the armrests – she was still not tall enough to reach the safe’s top shelf!

           Thanking the baby Jesus, she had instead managed to reach a thin block of paper on the bottom shelf but after inching it out with her fingertips her heart had sunk to the discovery that it was a horrible brown-colored pad, gum-bound down one edge. At least it had been easy enough to peel off the two sheets she needed though, so she had swallowed her disappointment by telling herself it was a blessing the paper was plain and not lined as it could have been.

            Next, with less than a dozen tick-tocks to spare before Gramps was due to return, she had managed to slide the pad and books and chair and rug all back into their original positions so that no one would ever be the wiser. Oh, and there had been that one last strange thing… From her wobbly angle as she slipped the pad back in the safe she noticed that it had been sitting on a large white binder, and when she cracked it open to sneak a peak she realized from the couple standing in front of the priest that she was looking at a wedding album. What was odd was that even though the young woman behind the fine white veil could have been Gran, the young man didn’t look anything like Gramps… Interrupted by his footsteps at the top of the stairs though, her snooping was going to have to be continued another day.

           Yes, aside from the paper’s ugly color, everything had pretty much gone to plan and she couldn’t help but congratulate herself as she set out into the starry night on the big old bike, the rolled-up parasol gripped in its front-rack like a proud dog with a fallen branch almost too big to carry.

            Building up momentum, she stood with all her weight on the wide pedals, first one then the other, following the flashlight’s shaky beam along the backwater track, its surface worn smooth and hard by a century of cane-loading onto the barges that ran the river to the modern usinas at the foot of the hills, the outline of the range clearly visible against the halo of the city beyond.

           At last she could allow herself a real smile as she pulled her plaits loose and reveled in the feeling of the warm night air combing through her hair, the back-to-metal cows and back-to-metal donkeys looking on idly as she rattled past their wire-fenced clearing and rang the bike’s rusty bell just for the fun of it, now she was safely out of sound-shot from the house. Even with all the dung, the island’s air had never smelt so sweet to her.

And then, just for a moment, she found herself wondering if this was how a runaway junker felt… Were those simple creatures even capable of such feelings? But as quick as it had come, the thought dissolved into the dawn of another: this was the first time she had ever felt truly in control of her life. She was no longer just a child, but nor did she exactly feel grown up either: instead she was something… in between. Like a wild spirit set loose from its body, she was now free to chase the moon across the sky. Or was it the moon that was chasing her across the earth? Either way, they were partners-in-crime and she felt braver for having it ride along with her.

           Emboldened, she pushed down even harder on the pedals, picking up even more speed. Finally she was doing something, doing something for herself – something that nobody else was ever going to do for her. For the next few hours this nickel-plated world would be her world and the rules would be her rules. She would be the boss and no adults would be around to tell her what and what not to do. What and what not to make 'allowances’ for… What and what not to feel.

           To question.

           To want.

            To need.

            She wasn’t even ten yet and she was already taking her destiny into her own hands.

The phantom of the old wooden dressing-table looked as if its former mistress had just stepped away: her red satin pumps neatly parked between its delicately carved feet – its ornate mirror still framed by her hanging necklaces, their colored stones kindled to life by the moonlight slicing through a gap in the drawn curtains.

            Pulling out the dresser’s stool, the warrior sat down in his diaper with a passing moment of discomfort and rank odor to survey the female clutter, a collection of small hand-painted boxes containing her most precious trinkets. Where did women manage to find so many things? he asked himself. And then the things in which they squirreled away their things? Pride of place on the dresser was her Babushka doll and a music box in the extravagant form of an Orthodox church, both echoes from the valleys of her ancestors. Carefully, he wound up the church with its small golden key then watched the bulbous spire as it slowly rotated away to its traditional tune.

           Hypnotizing him for a minute.

           Or maybe ten.

           Of nothing.

           Of everything.

           Until it had run its course; the last labored notes prompting him to resuscitate the tune with another few turns of the key before he shifted focus, reluctantly, to the reflection in the mirror.

           Less than enamored by what he saw, the face staring back looked vaguely familiar but it was an obscene shadow of what it had once been. Hollowed-out by his old friend Time, it seemed to have become the muzzle of some pitiful creature. A creature that had clearly seen more than its fair share of horrors. A creature he normally wouldn’t have hesitated to put out of its misery.

           Unwilling to look his very own Dorian Gray portrait in the eye, he averted his gaze and noted instead how bowed its once proud shoulders had become, as if finally worn away by the forces of nature. Then, lower, beneath a deep shag-pile of bruises, its torso had become an intricate patchwork of scars and burns and skin grafts. Despite the curiosity of their pattern though he couldn’t stop himself from being drawn back up to the epicenter of this burnt-out wreck.

           For him, the real victims in this pile-up were the creature’s eyes, the bags beneath them hanging so much heavier than he remembered, like two sorry sacks of shit that forgot to buckle up, now slumped over the hood after being propelled through the windscreen of what had once been his soul. As if they were filled with every last ounce of all the crap he’d had to wade through in his life. Those bags, it occurred to him, all the happiness in the world wasn’t gonna resurrect them. An academic observation really, seeing as that particular supply-line had been cut before his campaign had even started.

           He’d heard somewhere that you got the face you deserved by the time you were forty. Still a good ten years short of that mark, he found it difficult to imagine what Gothic heights the creature might scale to if it ever got to live that long. But didn’t they also say thirty was the new twenty? In this particular case, thirty-going-on-sixty looked closer to the mark. And as for those crow’s feet, well, after the bags they ran a damn close race for second in the disgrace stakes – stretching as they did, well into the patchy scrub-lands of the creature’s hairline. More like vulture’s claws, he thought, watching the creature pull a tissue out of a box on the dresser to wipe away some dried blood from the corners of its eyes: maybe the blood was his own – most likely it was the kid’s.

           There was always cosmetic surgery, he reminded himself. But then the moonlight had to go and have its two cents’ worth by glinting off the pair of wedding rings hanging with the dog-tags from the creature’s neck, its chain looking more like a pearl necklace, strung as it was with dozens of fat molars (more souvenirs from those early years).

            He had to agree with the moon though: Surgery for whose benefit?

            He was not a vain man. Nor was he a womanizer. And that was the understatement of the siècle. His salad days were far behind him and he was under no illusions to the contrary. To him, passion was just another lost friend: lost so long, it might as well have been buried in an unmarked grave on some foreign shore.

           What was left, he wanted to know, when your passion had gone AWOL?

           When it had even deserted your dreams?

           Anyone who had ever lost anyone knew how it felt: what could be more banal?

           First they love you, then… Not.

           There one moment, then not.

           Then life goes on, like it always does.

           You start searching for the positive.

            The kopek in the snow, as she would have called it.

           It had been one of her mother’s expressions, passed down through generations of Babushkas. The joke back in the motherland being that a kopek had never been worth much in the first place. And now it didn’t even snow there any more.

           It was true though that there had been that one saving grace: the family had at least been reunited, what was left of it, around that hole while the Padre preached his piece, finishing with the last part of that old poem:

                        They say we leave you our deaths.

                        Give them their meaning.

                        We were young, they say.

                        We have died.

                        Remember us.

            Astonishing them all, it had been his mother who had been the first to hold out the olive branch, her half-sister numbly accepting the gesture, still reeling from the shell-shock of it all. There had been so much bad blood between the two women for so many years that his Puziashka had begged him not to tell anyone when they had first fallen in love, reprising the old Shakespearean scenario. Cousins weren’t suppose to do that kind of thing, especially when their mothers hated each other with more venom than a sack of bushmasters. But there the bitter siblings had been, black-laced arm in black-laced arm at the end of the funeral beneath the old mango, its leaves crackling in the tyrannical heat: Isobel, his mother, heir to her mother’s brains, and Gaia, the heir to her mother’s Slavic beauty – the only common trait, their common father’s eyes. Dark as burnt almonds, they were also his Puziashka’s eyes. More disconcerting for him though, was their resemblance to those that had filled the iron-grilled windows of the senzelas, the quarters allocated to the field-junkers.

            The boias frias – or ‘cold meals’ – was their common name (that being all they ever got to eat), and their normally flat vacant eyes had been bulging at the sight of the procession: the two women, side by side, leading the mourners along the garden path back up towards the house, la Casa Grande, proud of its place astride the top of the landscaped grounds. First came Vera the peacemaker – the adopted ward – an ever-faithful two paces behind with the Padre and the General; then, filing behind in order of rank, came the long line of military brass, all stars and spit and polish; and then, finally, caps under arms, came the Academy cadets covering the rear in their flannel uniforms, bleached supernovae-white by the island’s unforgiving sun, busy at its stove, caramelizing the plantation in its own juices.

            The engenho was where she’d grown up and he’d never questioned that it should be the place where she was laid to rest. The place where she’d first learned to grind cane, the old-fashioned way in the squat terracotta mill, and gotten the scar that so intrigued him from messing with the business end of a facāo. The place where, at the end of the lawn, they’d made their first wish together by throwing one of her mother’s old kopeks into the ivy-covered well. The place where, hidden away in the center of the maze, he’d stolen his first kiss after he noticed how fast the pulse on her neck was racing. And the place where, along the river behind Caïman Rock – the spit of magma that had spread the bank in two, sinking its long snout deep into the current – they’d first made love and she told him how she had never imagined it could be so good.

            So many places where she’d never be again.

           Nudged back to the present by the music-box’s tune winding down once more, he slid open the dresser’s top drawer and took out the neatly folded kimono he had bought for her eighteenth birthday, its smooth black satin hand-embroidered with scarlet lilies. She was never going to catch him complaining when she’d taken to wearing it unsashed around the apartment every time a match was on – regularly reaching for some or other object between him and the screen, accidentally on purpose.

            Removing the lid of her favorite perfume, he gave the kimono a light spray and slid his arms into its smooth wings, fanning them out in their full glory, the fine material translucent in the pearly glow of the moon, the sleeves more than a tad short on the wrists. Lost in the scent and the coolness of the satin, he remembered how he’d decided to wait by her grave until the cadets had made their way into the house; until the very last dazzle of uniform had disappeared. Then – he had thought – maybe then the tears would come. And while he waited he had stood staring at the headstone, engraving its words deeper and deeper in his mind: Beloved daughter and bride. We will meet again. Our Darling Puziashka. The childhood name – Russian for pot-belly – had only ever been used by him and the family. Even in death 9ers were supposed to remain anonymous. Safer that way they were told. Safer for all concerned.

           Then, reminded of the contents of his clenched fist, he had opened his palm to take one last look at the pair of gold bands, seemingly identical except for their size: after the wedding though, neither he nor she had been surprised to find the private messages they had separately and secretly asked the jeweler to engrave inside the other’s ring.

            Her secret message had read: 'From Siberia With Love’.

            His had read: 'To Siberia With Love’.

           That’s how in tune they’d been.

           Then, as he had crouched over the open grave, about to drop in the rings, those white parrots had kicked off with their squawking number, evacuating the eucalyptus in a frenzy and heading off, northward bound.

           That was real freedom, he had thought. Free to leave, free to return. Where they went when they weren’t in that tree he had no idea. Where she’d gone he didn’t really know either. Nobody ever knew for sure. Of course he hoped. He wanted to believe she was waiting for him. He had to believe he would see her again. That was his reason for continuing. He would have followed her the same day but he knew the rules. He had picked up that much from his father’s death. Suicides went straight to hell: They did not pass go: They did not collect a blind kopek. He knew there would have been no chance of a reunion if he had taken his own life. At least this way there was still hope. Plus he didn’t much fancy the idea of an eternity at the other place with his father.

           It wasn’t like he hadn’t given the idea some thought though.

           On more than one occasion.

           After all, hadn’t everyone? If only for a split-second?

           What you had to understand though, was once you’d looked into that abyss – really looked, deep deep down into its brown swirling waters – and then decided not to jump – even when you were so far down the line that you were beyond your own primeval fear and knew nothing would be easier – once you’ve done that, nothing can scare you any more.

           It’s like you’ve become a walking shadow.

           Unhurtable. Unpunishable. Unkillable…

           Your conscience, your emotions, your senses, they all switch off.

           You’ve stopped caring what happens any more: you’re simply curious to watch.

           Like the crowd staring at the accident, you’re not really participating. Not really responsible.

           You wonder if you’ll ever feel responsible again; but only because you’re curious, not because you care.

           Because all that’s left is your curiosity.

           Curiosity to see how the game’s gonna turn out – now you’ve decided not to fold.

           What everyone else had to understand though, is it’s just not safe to hang around someone in this condition. Especially as the curiosity – like everything else – could end at any moment.

           And the thing is, none of this is written on your forehead.

           This could be anyone.

           Even your own father.

           He remembered the death scene of course: what boy could forget the sight of his old man going hara-kiri? Falling on his own sword like some disgraced samurai…

           Until that day he’d never had reason to think about how much blood the human body contained.

           That day turned out to be quite an education.

           Turned out there was enough blood to cover half the family’s basement floor, as far as his mother on her knees in the corner, her hands and mouth bound, sobbing in her wedding dress, ten years out of style and tight enough so that each time she gasped for new air, nostrils flaring, shoulders shuddering, it seemed to physically pain her. Then there had been enough blood left over to seep a good quarter of the way up that dress before help finally came.

            Slowly refocusing on the dresser, the mirror now seemed to him to resemble one of the Casa Grande’s upstairs windows – her window – looking out onto the veranda where the last of the cadets had filed up the steps to the main sala, leaving the double-L’s of their boots lined along the edge of the deck before walking backwards into the house, making sure no jumby spirits could trace their footsteps in from the cemetery.

           Back there again in his mind, still crouching alone by her grave, the parrots reduced to arrowhead patterns in the northern sky, he remembered how his tears had never come. Vowing to hold on to the rings until they did – even if it took the rest of his life – he had closed them once more in his fist, clenching them tightly at the thought of the others back in the house, sipping their port wine and munching their canapes and playing their dominoes and whispering their pleasantries as if life would soon be back to normal.

            As if life could have ever been normal again.

           Even with all the flowers – the dozens of wreaths and beds of orchids in full bloom – he remembered thinking how the island’s air had never smelt so stale.

           But more than that, he remembered the emptiness in the pit of his stomach – the ache of some abnormal hunger – as he looked down into that unworthy hole; that vile gash, seemingly cut to earth’s very bone, its polished whiteness scattered with the black dirt and lilies that had marked the end of the ceremony.

           In front of the dresser, crossing his kimono arms against his chest, he closed his eyes and wondered if this was what it felt like to be a vampire. Lying in its own coffin. With the same ache. The same hunger…

            –Yeah, right, came the creole-meets-surfer-dude drawl from the mirror, the creature not needing or bothering to move its lips as it spoke. Maybe after being blocked up in some Transylvanian rampart for a century or two.

           Not even cracking an eyelid, he pretended to ignore the unsolicited remark. It was right though of course: this was a craving he had never been able to satisfy – he hadn’t even made a dent in it, no matter how many rebels he’d bled. Like one of those dreams where you drink and drink but you’re still dying of thirst. No amount of anything was ever going to fill this void. No amount of consumption. No amount of destruction, either.

            –Might as well be trying to fight a bush fire, the creature drawled, one bucket at a time… 'Insatiable’ is the word you’re looking for.

           Insatiable.

           As he digested the word, he became aware of something beginning to saw away deep inside his gut. Its blade felt double edged: one sharp and honed by the whetstone of hate – the other dull and pitted by the tedium of time. Surprised at being any longer capable of feeling such emotion, he allowed himself the luxury of bathing in it for a while, leaving the disheveled creature to pimp itself out with a few of the necklaces from the moon-spangled collection on display around the mirror.

            –Here’s the thing, said the creature, sounding like it was about to spin off on one of its obtuse monologues, stopping first to slide on a wristful of silvery bangles then clipping on a pair of amethyst earrings, an elegant choice from one of the trinket boxes. Your God ain’t gonna do us any favors, man. The gangster retired from our business eons ago, ya’ sight? He’s off in some other universe right now, prepping His spread-sheets for some new geek-boy startup. It was unreasonable of us expecting Him to go on lighting the way indefinitely. That’d make things wa-ay too easy, check. His game was never to make it a smooth ride. Only those of genuine merit are supposed to make it through the play-offs. I mean, lemme ask you, the creature prodded with a jangle, finding finger space for yet another ring, this time a blood-red ruby encircled with tiny black diamonds, one of her grandmother’s heirlooms. When was the last time we saw a slice of His grace?

           Allowing the creature to vent, he focused on the kimono’s fragrance and his deep breathing and the magic number, keeping his eyes closed as he shrugged his reply.

            –My point exactly. I’m telling you bwano, He of the Santa Claus fuzzy-chops fame has truly left the building. So don’t go even thinking about praising Him in my presence – sight? He’s one sick punk if you ask me. God helps those who help themselves? Ple-ease, do me a favor. Somewhere over the rainbow, maybe just maybe He might have once had a slight personal penchant for help-themselvers but He sure ain’t been running us any services recently. And He sure as hell ain’t gonna help those who can’t help themselves. No, sorry partner, we’re gonna have to ride this pipe our own sweet style. Win our place on that pearly podium in spite of Him, not thanks to Him.

            Pausing for a breather, the creature looked down at the female paraphernalia spread across the dresser then selected a fat pen-shaped object from amongst a bunch of make-up brushes and eye-liner pencils in a jar branded with its Art of Beauty promise.

            –You know, there are a hundred and ninety-three living species of primate, resumed the creature in a calmer tone. Over six hundred if you count sub-species, it added, looking down the barrel of the object. All of 'em peace-loving vegetarians, except for us humans: the only ape that decided to evolve into a flesh-eating war-mongering predator.

           Using the object to airbrush solid black circles over its closed eyelids, the creature expanded its argument:

            –Now you take the giant panda. It evolved in the opposite direction. Slowly, the airbrushed circles grew out into panda-sized eye patches, covering the creature’s unsightly bags. It started out as a predator, just like its mummy, daddy and cousin bears, the creature continued, moving on to its nose with a final squirt of black, until one day it decided to become a cuddly fun-loving bamboo-muncher.

           With his breathing still deep and his eyes still closed, he ruled against his better judgment and entered the debate, casting his vox to the creature as if addressing a stranger who had yet to provide an ID.

           <Nearly getting itself extinctified into the bargain,> he ventured, barely recognizing the sound of the words in his head, their grungy timbre as soiled as his underwear, distorted by any one of half a dozen substances: all of the noxious and consumed-without-moderation variety.

            –Hey dude, no pain, no gain. But who’s to say we can’t do the same? Tell the man where to stick his predator job.

           <Get in touch with our panda within?> he suggested, making no attempt to hide the sarcasm in his tone and giving his kimono wings a vampire-esque flap for good measure.

            –Tell me where it’s written we have to remain carnivorous to the end of our days?

           <Get back to our roots then?> he played along.

            –Our vegetarian roots. Yeah, that works for me.

            <Presumably it has occurred to you that it took us millions of years to evolve? And that it would probably take us just as long to, um, de-evolve?>

            –You may call me a dreamer. I say it’s time to wake up and smell the doo-doo. It’s time to drop out and tune in to Panda Bearwin’s Theory of Devolution.

           <I say its time you took your meds.>

            –You and me both brother.

           <And maybe a little lie down.>

            –I’m not the one talking to my reflection.

            <Now there, you may have a point.>

            –All I’m saying is that our species established its superiority fifty thousand generations years ago. We can afford to kick back a bit now.

           <Let our hair down.>

            –Exactimundo. We are no longer competing with the wolf.

           <The only race is with yourself.>

            –Ri-ight, now you’re getting it.

           <I wish I was,> he replied, finally opening his eyes and standing up in the room’s sombre reality. <I wish I was.>

           Stepping back from the mirror he took in the sight of his half-lit reflection.

           Dressed in the diaper-kimono combo, panda-faced and resplendent in his Puziashka’s jewelery, he reminded himself of a glam rock star at the end of a particularly long night out.

           Exhausted, he draped the dust-sheet back over the dresser and shuffled out of the bedroom in the general direction of the bathroom cabinet.

By the time the girl rode into the city the moon had long dissolved with the stars and she could already feel the sights of the sun’s ray-gun focusing on her back, its acidic beam beginning to etch the outline of the pack’s straps onto her shoulders, thankfully soothed by the cool brisa blowing in with the high-tide’s waves; waves that the subhuman chains of boat-junkers described to each other in their simple language as pumpy and chippy-choppy while their shiny muscles offloaded the morning catch of live jellyfish, passing the large slippy-slobby trays along the line and stacking them on the dockside in columns that swayed and jiggy-jigged, reminding them of the dancers in the local bars where they were allowed to spend their scrimpy-scrimpy wages on the last Saturday night of the month.

            Despite having munched through half a dozen cereal bars along her way, pushing the bike up the last hill before the coast had taken its toll on the girl and she had been fading fast in the morning mist but the sudden welcoming sight from the crest, of an ocean furrowed with an endless crop of diamonds and sapphires, all sparkling ripe for the picking, had instantly filled her spirits with a new and exciting energy.

            Watching the tiny skiffs and jangadas racing in toward the harbor’s finishing line – their sails swollen, white and keen as courting doves, their hulls sharp, cutting through ribbons of gold, silver and bronze – the strange energy then propelled her forward on her own run, thrusting her along the hilltop and down towards civilization, the bike picking up speed fast beneath her, whisking itself to an impossible rate of knots, leaving dust-devils dizzy in her wake and catapulting her senses into the smell of freshly baked bread and freshly birthed trawlers.

           Bushy-tailed once more, she was now chasing after the long skinny shadow fleeing before her along the cobbles of the old port’s palm-lined quay, generating all kinds of new rattles from the bike and chatters from her teeth to accompany the tinkling stays of a hundred bobbing boats and the competing cries of a thousand greedy gulls.

            Sailing beneath the town’s merry bunting, clip-clapping its applause from its web of wires, she rode into the main square, seeing it as she had never seen it before: with new eyes at that special hour when the last of the late-night party-goers tacked upwind along their vague homebound courses – zigging past cash-hungry market traders hammering away at their bazaar of slapdash stalls, then zagging past over-fed bakers and butchers ratcheting up the tinplate fronts of their arcade stores.

            Once gray and battered by old age, now bright and rejuvenated by misspent youth, even the shops’ graffiti-tagged shutters seemed to be celebrating the girl’s arrival as she circled the plaza’s fountain three times for luck, freshening up in its downwind spray until the bike’s party-pooping chain had to go and bring a halt to her back-pedaling pleasure, forcing a pit-stop opposite a junker stall.

           Unfazed (it being only about the ninety-ninth such breakdown of the trip), she hopped off the bike and propped it against a nearby bench, its wooden slats looking to her as if they had just been sifted with her grandmother’s finest icing sugar, begging to have something, anything, scrawled in the thin coat of dust. Resisting the urge to make an exhibition of her newly acquired – and highly illegal – writing abilities, she decided instead that this was a good time to grab another cereal bar before tackling the chain.

           Slipping off her pack and burying her arm elbow-deep past the panda, she unzipped the wrapper of a bar and took a large unladylike bite, instantly tripling her sugar-levels. With the bar clamped between her teeth, she then went about the business of lifting up the bike’s back wheel and using her hand to peddle the oily links back onto the sprockets of the main cog – a smooth operation that she now took pride in, having reduced it to less than ten seconds (surely a new world record, if they had a world record for that sort of thing).

           Teasing the flanks of the spray across the plaza’s paving – one of her sneakers hopping in the damp-dark dust, the other scotching in little dry-white puffs – she plunked herself on the fountain’s smooth rim between the town’s twins: kneeling in their finest togas and laurels at the edge of the marble center-piece, their faces were understandably stony considering how long they had been all dressed up with nowhere to go – left to an eternity of water-gathering with nothing but their large pots to cradle for comfort.

           Failing to impress either of the sisters with her attempts to rinse off such a grubby pair of paws during their watch, she glanced around with her most angelic face then gave a cheeky rub to the pointy joint of one of their arms, leaving the black smudge of elbow-grease for all the world to see. Smiling to herself, wondering if anyone else would ever get the joke, she quickly finished up by scraping the last of the grunge off her hands onto the gritty-wet underside of one of the pots.

           Whistling her innocent way back to the bike, her hands now more or less skin color, she was just about to hitch up her pack when, seeming to register them for the very first time, the junkers caught her eye. Crouched in their individual chicken-wired cages, they were certainly piled high, wide and deep for Christmas but it seemed to her that their Santa hats and beards weren’t adding much seasonal cheer to their blank eyes – all of which (she now noticed) were staring at the half-eaten cereal bar still poking out of her mouth.

           Shrugging off the attention and shrugging on her backpack, she stepped across the bike’s frame, taking a firm hold of its worn rubber hand-grips and setting a foot on one of its worn rubber pedals. But rather than pressing onwards, she felt her head turning, as if some mysterious force was rotating it like a magnet to face its opposite pole, guiding then aligning her with the dark gaze that somehow stood out from all the others in that wiry wall: all scrunched-up in its hessian smock, it may have looked little more than a sack of sticks but even beneath the fake beard and silly hat – even with its eyes seemingly scrubbed of all life – she could tell the female was not much older than herself.

           Slowly stepping off the bike, leaving it leaning against the bench, she felt curiously drawn to the junker, unaware of the bridge she was building with each dreamlike step toward its stall. Unclamping the cereal bar from her teeth she took in the sight of the two men haggling at the next stall: the taller (by what looked to her like a donkey’s head) dangling his long fluffy nose and even longer black mustache into a packing crate; the shorter standing on guard over whatever treasures the crate contained.

           Guessing the donkey-faced man to be the owner of the unminded junker stall, she shifted her attention back to the female and stooped in front of its bottom-row cage to slip the cereal bar through its wire mesh. Timidly accepting the food with its twiggy fingers, the female broke off a small morsel for itself before passing the remainder into the cage of a neighbors, itself doing the same – then the next and the next – until every last piece had been whisked away beneath the cloud-cover of a dozen fluffy beards.

           Sensing the remaining hunger in the cages at the outer edges of the stall, the girl double-checked that donkey-face was still safely buried in the treasure chest then once more pulled off her backpack, this time coming up with the last of the cereal bars which she quickly unwrapped, sneaking them to the female for passing along – one up, one behind, and one to either side – with each neighbor breaking off a piece and repeating the ritual until every last Santa junker had been fed in what seemed to the girl like the blink of an eye.

           Turning her attention back to the female, she watched it hold its sprig-like hand flat to the cage’s wire: a gesture she felt drawn to mirror, as if it was her only chance to connect with this through-the-looking-glass version of herself. Slowly, she followed the regard of her strange yuletide reflection as it drifted down to the two black patches peaking from the top of the forgotten pack at her feet, prompting her to pull out the panda and hold it to the twiggy fingers, sparking alive their owner’s wide eyes with a surprised look, matching the expression of the plaything itself. The reaction became so full of joy – as if such softness was unknown in the junker’s world – that she would have happily made a gift of the bear right there and then, had the wire allowed.

            Settling on the next best thing, she untied the ribbon from around the furry neck and passed it through the cage, watching with pleasure as the female’s round bearded face lit up once more, this time at the unexpected jingle coming from the ribbon’s silver bell. Then, suddenly seeming to arc out of nowhere, the booming one-word voxcast <VAMOS!> jerked the couple apart like an electric shock, its source surging towards the stall, spitting with all the power of a million-volt generator, spark-plugged eyes crackling with tension, fully-charged mustache fanned in fury.

           Sounding to the girl as if the wheels’ spokes were whining in protest at the rubber she found herself burning in the getaway, she doubted the bike had ever been scooted so fast or pedal-pumped so hard in all its ancient existence. Daring a quick glance back, she stretched her focus beyond the stall-owner, now paddling air like an upturned bug (squashed beneath a couple of the late-nighters: her guardian angels back on duty she assumed), and spotted the junker holding up its tiny hand once more – this time to say goodbye – only to be wiped from view as the bike shot out of the plaza at such a speed that, had she been pointing upwards, it felt as if she could have escaped the earth’s atmosphere.

           During the thirty-minute ride that followed her escape from the square she had only needed to twice refer to the map (pulling it out of her pack as she rode along, doing her best not to crash in the maneuver) before she finally found her way to the razor-wired fencing that circled the grounds of the Academy, its pillared facade a hard-to-miss landmark set as it was into the side of the plateau that rose up from the city’s southern limits. Based on her midnight sessions with the flashlight and map beneath her bed covers, she had calculated that her objective was no more than fifteen minutes west of the Academy’s front gates where the sentry guards seemed far too busy making a racket with the morning presentation of arms to notice her as she cycled past. Realizing for the first time how close she was to her final objective she had just wished there was a cereal bar left to settle down the flutterbys in her stomach.

           Now though, at last, she was coasting down Obispo Street, shaded and sloping in her favor, reeling her in to her mission objective, conveniently located opposite a corner café at the bottom of the thin asphalt strip. Free-wheeling past the café’s doors, yawning their steamy coffee-breath into the dry still air (the ocean’s breeze having lost its way behind her after just a few blocks into the city’s maze), she swung into a short dead-end alley and parked the bike next to a dumpster, the sound of a cappuccino machine escaping from the café’s rear doorway like a locomotive from a tunnel.

           Hanging back on the corner of the alley, she watched while a super-sized waiter unchained a stack of wicker chairs, slowly setting each chair in its place around the café’s terrace tables. From the way the waiter’s stripy marquee of a waistcoat bulged and rippled with every move, it looked to her as if there might be an entire circus of animals inside, all squirming about in search of an exit while, on the opposite sidewalk, so hunchbacked and head-scarfed it was impossible to make out a face, a concierge in a dark apron busied herself with the sweeping away of the night’s dust, using what looked suspiciously like a witch’s broom. Finally, after what seemed like a forever of painful grunting from the terrace (and even slower scritchy-scratching from across the street), the puffing waiter stopped to wipe his shirt-sleeve across his forehead, seeming to congratulate himself on a job well done before waddling back into the depths of the café.

            Strolling casually around to the end table, feeling every inch a saddle-sore gaucho, the girl paused to offload her pack before easing herself ever so gently into one of the chairs. Glad to be sitting on something close to comfortable – enfin! – she thanked her lucky stars that she had managed to notch the bike seat down to its lowest position before she had set off or things could have been a whole lot worse for the wear. Grateful, also, for the position of the terrace, she could now study the whitewashed sobrado that formed the corner on the opposite side of the street, jutting out like a fancy cruise-liner.

            Rising three stories and anchored to its berth by what looked to the girl like a wooden boarding gate, the canopy above its gangway spanning the entire sidewalk, Obispo 556 was large for a town-house and equipped with exactly thirty-eight white shuttered windows, each with its own railed balcony. Some blooming with colors and others colored with bloomers, she smiled uneasily to herself, skating around the crack that had just appeared in her plan. Clearly the building contained quite a few apartments but what was not clear was which one contained The World’s Greatest Warrior…

            Emerging with his standard chirpy morning greeting, it seemed to the waiter that he had startled the girl, sending her head diving like an ostrich into her pack, apparently looking for a mislaid purse which he soon came to suspect had never really existed in the first place. Eventually finishing her charade – coming up for air and the nerve to ask for a glass of tap water – he was at least encouraged by the polite tone of her vox: ordinarily, such a request in any one of the city’s other cafés would have gotten the girl what waiters referred to as The Parisian Treatment but fortunately for her this was no ordinary café and he was no ordinary waiter.

           Like all civilized junkers, José and his wife had only been offered one infant but José Junior had died of breathing complications when he was still in diapers and Señora José (as most people called his wife) had not yet been able to bring herself to file for another license. As a consequence – and as his own private coping mechanism – José had developed both a special sense of humor and a special soft spot for kids. Junkers, humans, he saw the young ones all the same, although he knew that this one had to be something out of the ordinary, judging by the way she had every one scrambling about; he hadn’t had to open the café this early since they’d given him the job, and the best part of ten years had passed under the bridge since then.

            Not knowing the waiter or any of his story, the girl innocently accepted his alternative suggestion of a nice fresh glass of Adam’s Ale – seeing as the establishment only sold grownup drinks – and she wasn’t to worry about paying either, she was happily reassured (having not a single centavo to her name), as the first one was always on the house for new customers. She was a new customer? he double-checked, the honesty of her nod apparently satisfying him before he vanished into the café, only to magically reappear – in what seemed to her almost no sooner than he had disappeared – with a silver tray and a fancy glass of clear liquid, complete with bendy straw, crushed ice and a generous chunk of pineapple perched with a mini-parasol on the sugary rim.

           Serving the drink as if pulling a rabbit out of a hat, José accepted the girl’s thanks but only let go of the glass once he had secured her cross-your-heart promise to follow his advice and sip it slowly, on account of her never having drunk a grownup drink before and him not wanting any trouble with the police, especially so early in the morning. She wasn’t to be fooled though, she was made to understand: it was a lot stronger than it looked.

           So there she sat for a while at the empty table on the empty terrace in the empty street, her dangling feet not even reaching the ground, occasionally taking little hiccupy sips on the straw and little flutterby-chasing nibbles on the pineapple as she tried to imagine on Jupiter or Mars or Saturn or… or any of the other planets, whatever her next move might be. It had taken all her daring and the cunning of a coyote to get the street address from Gramps’ desk-diary but she had never for a moment thought about bloody floors and bloody flat numbers and the bloody suchlike. Plus there was no way the name she wanted was ever going to be advertised on the building’s intercom, crammed as it was with bloody dozens of bloody buzzers.

           Then, impossibly, the ocean’s salty breeze finally managed to catch up with her, lifting the fringe from her eyes and freshening her cheeks, mesmerizing her for a moment as it brought with it around the corner the most perfectly beautiful woman she had ever seen. Tall and tanned, the woman glided across the street as if that old samba song had been written about her, seemingly floating along on the air’s cool current, riding its wave into number 556, her hand brushing lightly over the intercom’s scanner along the way.

Slumped in the shower, a pile of extinguished limbs, for just a moment there was peace in the sleeping warrior’s heart. Following the weight of his head through the cracks between his jewel-encrusted fingers – his hands forming a kind of royal pin-cushion between his crooked neck and the tiled wall – the black makeup that ran from his eyes had merged into a single oily trail, leaching its way down one of his arms to the elbow embedded in his thigh, the last obstacle before the ceramic base still swirling with the unspeakable remnants of the diaper, piled and sodden at his feet.

            And then came the click of the apartment’s front door, followed by the vox <Any-one ho-ome?> sing-songing its way through his mind and sucking him, drooling, out of the plug-hole’s gravity.

            On groggy autopilot, he rinsed himself down as efficiently as he could before stepping out of the shower and selecting an old towel out of the dirty-linen basket, giving it a quick security sniff before wrapping it around his waist. Removing the jewelery, he made a gentle golden nest of it on top of the old hand towel in one of the twin sinks – her sink – still curled up like a sleeping pup, just how she’d left it.

            Opening the bathroom cabinet, its mirrored doors criss-crossed in manic strips of insulation tape – something he had absolutely no recollection of doing – he found the brown pharmacy bottle he was looking for amongst the jars of junker teeth (he knew, he knew, but he’d been very angry back then) and shook out half a dozen of the crimson and cream capsules: his ever-trusty rhubarb-and-custards, a hundred times more potent than espresso and Red Bull combined.

            Popping the rhubarbs and bending for the faucet, he noticed out the corner of his eye that there was a cachaça bottle floating in the toilet bowl. A scrolled-up message appeared to be stuffed in its neck so perhaps he’d tried to flush it to someone. Or maybe someone had flushed it to him…

            Fishing out the bottle, he extracted a long, laminated menu. Spider-scrawled in what looked like eyeliner pencil the handwriting may or may not have been his but as he’d never really learned it was hard to tell.

            The only race is with yourself, is what it said.

            Well, that and the takeout prices at the local Chinese.

            Tell me something I don’t know, he thought, eying the backwash at the bottom of the bottle. Sucking out the last swig and sluicing the rocket-fuel around his teeth he swallowed hard, sending the capsules along their way, deep into his inner space. Now ready to make an appearance, he dropped the empty bottle in the linen basket and headed for the door, remembering along the way to lower the toilet-seat because that’s how she liked it.

            Sporting his fresh(ish) white(ish) towel, he then dripped his way out of the bathroom, right smack bang into the pair of what he’d once heard the Academy’s locker-room jocks describe as perfect blowjob lips. Over their owner’s flawless shoulder the early-morning light was spilling through the living room’s balcony windows and into the hallway, bathing everything in a soft focus, accentuating the feminine touch the apartment had clearly once reveled in; the decor’s color scheme tastefully tying in with the lily-pond frescoes and a scattering of oriental rugs and cushions, all carefully co-ordinated with strategically placed vases containing a variety of dried flowers. Closer scrutiny of the water-stains hooping down the interior of each vase though would have quickly revealed the arrangements to have been originally constructed with fresh flowers that had simply been left to wilt and die.

            Finally pulling away from their kiss, the very vision of beauty gazed up at her man with love in her eyes and a designer handbag in the crook of her elbow. Barely legal in the tan dress clinging so desperately to the golden bodywork, her luxury-model hair – as black and shiny as the most executive of limousines – air-flowed down the full length of her back. If half of her face had been missing she could have passed as the muse for his sculptures.

            <Hmmm,> she murmured, the tone resembling how he imagined milk and honey would sound if it could whisper sweet nothings to you. As with all voxes, it wasn’t so much that he heard her with his ears, rather he registered the transmission deep inside his conscience – like at the end of one of those old movies where the lone gumshoe seems to hear the voice-over of the femme fatale reading him the words of her farewell note.

            <Is that a light-saber in your towel or are you just pleased to see me?> she milk-and-honeyed into his mind.

            He looked down at the rolled-up menu still dripping in his hand. <Huh,> he replied, having forgotten he was holding it. <More like some new kind of fortune cookie.>

            <Hmmm,> she murmured once more, moving tightly to his body. <Any firm predictions for this morning?> Then, squeezing even tighter, <Or maybe some solid advice?>

            <Not sure yet,> he answered honestly. <But no doubt you’ll be the first to know.>            Whether the reassurance was for her or himself, he wasn’t really sure. That’s how screwed up his life was.

            Suggestively, she lifted the towel from around his waist and began to dry his chest and shoulders with delicate little pats. <Are you stin-ky?> she asked, looking up at him through her unnaturally long eyelashes, her vox taking on a childish tone, as if cutting to a make-pretend scene played a hundred times before.

            <I’m not stin-ky any more,> he played along in his own child-like tone.

            <Are you shuuure?> she sing-songed with a pout.

            <I’m shuuuure,> he sing-songed back. Boy, those lips: those jocks weren’t wrong.

            Lifting up his arm, she pat-dried his armpit before giving it a playful sniff. <Goo-ood boyyy,> she voxed, keeping the game going, taking his hand in her own and leading him seductively into the living room, past the Christmas tree quietly fossilizing to itself in the corner.

            As if aligning him for another kiss, she steered him toward the recliner, the drone looking on with mild interest as she laid down the towel and handbag on the coffee table. Playfully, she pushed him backward into the recliner, generating a flurry of feathers as the drone flapped its way to safer territory, reluctantly leaving its master prone and vulnerable to attack. Teasing every inch of the way, the enemy pulled lightly on her dress zip, spiraling it down and around the skin-tight fabric to finally reveal her body in nearly all its glory, the most notable features covered in the skimpiest of leopard-print underwear, tying in nicely with her high-heeled shoes.

            <Remember these?> she asked mischievously, her vox’s tone reverting to its regular purr. She looked down at her own body in such an ambiguous way that anyone else might have been confused as to whether she meant her physical assets or her underwear or (the hundred-to-one shot) her shoes. Either way, he was happy to nod his appreciation – a nod which she took as her green-light to go to work by placing a scatter-cushion beneath her knees and bowing her head in worship of his nether regions.

            Then, as if having forgotten himself for a moment, beggaring all belief amongst the audience, he placed his hand on her impossibly smooth shoulder, stopping her from going any further. <How about we talk a little first?> he suggested, dropping the rolled-up menu on the coffee table and sitting up to re-wrap the towel around his waist.

            <Sure baby,> came her soft, entirely unperturbed reply as she re-established eye contact. Stroking her fringe away from her face and behind her ears, she finished the magical movement with a curling twist of her fingers, leaving her long hair to unwind itself like a slippery eel across her leopard-printed breasts. <What would you like to talk about?> she inquired cooperatively.

            He lowered his eyes and contemplated his empty hands. <How about the first time you read my palm?>

            Affectionately, she took one of his hands in her own and traced his love-line with an immaculately manicured fingernail. <It was in the maze,> she voxed tenderly. <I kissed the place where our love-lines cross.> Then, lightly kissing his palm, she added: <You had to scratch it because my lips tickled.>

            Re-living the moment, he had to once again scratch the tickle of her kiss away from the palm of his hand. <And you said,> he began to reminisce, only to be interrupted by her own recollection:

            <You can’t rub it away silly. Our futures are already sealed.>

            Bitter-sweet pleased by the memory, he almost found himself smiling as she became momentarily occupied with a scar meandering along the length of his arm. Lovingly, he thumbed the tiny mole on the curve of her left ear, studying it as if it was an exquisite work of art in its own right. Then, evoking even deeper memories, he noticed something on her face.

            <You’ve got an eyelash on your cheek,> he voxed in the tone of a whisper.

            <Uh-huh,> she voxed back, idly, still distracted by the course of the scar.

            <Which one?> he asked her softly, a surge of warmth rising through his body: maybe the rhubarbs kicking in; maybe not.

            <Hmm?> she inquired, the purr a little too languid for his liking.

            –She’s ducking the question bwano, observed the creature in his head.

            <The eyelash,> he clarified. <Which cheek?>

            Casually – a little too casually? – she pulled a make-up compact from her handbag and clicked its catch – a little too quickly? – to reveal a small mirror. But before she could hold it up to her face he gently took her wrist in his hand.

            <You’re supposed to guess,> he voxed, generating a bemused look on her face.

            –A look we don’t like the look of, noted the creature.

            <So you can make a wish,> he persevered, studying her expression as it subtly changed, her eyes vaguely uncomfortable as they shifted to her wrist, still in his grip.

            <Oh, right,> she voxed, as if remembering the game at last; as if she was saying: Silly me for forgetting.

            With her free hand, she pointed to her left cheek. <This one,> she voxed, reverting back to her playful tone.

            With her guess on the money, he removed the compact from her hand and dropped it back in her bag then carefully picked the eyelash from her cheek and placed it in her palm. It looked too perfect to be real. <Did you make your wish?> he asked, feeling a tightness across his forehead: the rhubarbs again, maybe.

            <Uh-huh,> she confirmed, nodding her head like a child would if you asked before bedtime that each tooth had been brushed.

            <Well?> he asked.

            –She hasn’t forgotten man…

            <Well?> she replied uncertainly.

            <Aren’t you going to blow?> he prompted her.

            –She just never knew in the first place.

            <Of course,> she voxed, as if she didn’t need telling.

            –But she did need telling.

            Pursing her lips, she blew over his face, softly as if drying nail-varnish, slowly winding down from his forehead to his eyelids to his nose and then, finally, to his lips, closing in for the kiss.

            –This wasn’t what we paid good money for, the voice in his head reminded him, prompting him to pull back from her lips.

            Delicately, with finger and thumb, he picked the eyelash from the palm of her hand then rolled off the recliner, spinning her around by the wrist and sending her flying backwards with such force that the French windows shattered on impact, their glass and wooden-frame disappearing with her over the top of the balcony.

            In no particular hurry, he made his way over to where the windows had once been and stepped onto the balcony, shading his eyes from the sun. Peering over the railing, he looked down at her body all bent and buckled on the deserted sidewalk in a pile of glass and splintered wood. Placing the eyelash in his palm, he closed his eyes, taking a moment to make his own wish before blowing the eyelash into the air. It was an impossible wish, he knew, but wasn’t that what wishes were for?

            <You’re supposed to blow the eyelash,> he voxed in a tone more sad than angry.

            Then, dreamily, his focus pulled to the little wide-eyed girl staring up at him from the café terrace, instantly revving his BPM to a hundred and cuing his retreat back beneath the cover of the apartment, leaving the eyelash to float down through the air, miraculously returning to its owner’s cheek three stories below. Not missing her own cue, the crash-victim’s eyelids flashed open, her dilated pupils contracting with a tiny electrical whir. <Sorry baby,> she voxed, no longer a beautiful woman but instead a beautiful JoyBot, anatomically designed and programmed to satisfy her owner’s every need.

            Awkwardly, with the girl watching on from across the street, the Bot stood up and dusted herself off then picked up her leopard-printed shoes, placing the ankle straps between her teeth before jumping up onto the edge of a first floor balcony, using it as a springboard to jump video-game style up onto a second floor balcony which she used, in turn, as a platform for her final leap up onto the edge of the balcony from whence she came. Hopping over the railing, pausing only to slip on her shoes, she limped into the apartment with a broken heel and a conciliatory:

            <I can feel you’re tense hon’. Why don’t you let me give you a back-rub?>

            Shrugging off the Bot’s advances with a <Just Go> the warrior was already back in the bathroom, pulling on a pair of sharply pressed khakis. What he wanted to know was what the hell the girl was doing down there?

            And anyway, shouldn’t she be in school or something?

            Business-like, he slid into a fresh khaki shirt, its left breast tricked out with the colors of a hundred and one combat ribbons, its shoulders holographed with his regiment’s hawk emblem swooping over the 3D logotype of The SlayHawk 9ers. Lost in his thoughts, he combed back his damp hair in front of the taped-up cabinet mirror, oblivious to its offering of zero reflection. And how the hell was he supposed to get past her now? he wondered, his peripheral vision momentarily distracted by the Bot bending over in the bathroom doorway, struggling with the zip of her dress – accidentally on purpose, he suspected.

            <And don’t come back until you’re fully upgraded,> he ordered, generating a sulky pout from those lips. Those to-die-for lips. <And you can stop looking at me like that as well,> he admonished as he buttoned up the shirt over his molar-toothed chain, leaving the casual observer none the wiser as to what lurked about his neck: Four fifths of everything, he reminded himself. <I sent my new spec to the agency over a month ago,> he pitched at the Bot, punctuating with the pop of a silver stud into the collar of his shirt, the fabric scanning his thumb with a quick glow and instantly deleting all trace of its military markings.

            Grabbing his father’s watch from beside the sink, he reminded himself not to crack under pressure, then the toothbrushes – one blue, one pink – caught his eye but he didn’t have time: the eighty-proof sluice of cachaça would have to do the job. Clicking down the toothpaste tube’s open lid (a small task yet one that had been worth double brownie points), he slipped the watch around his wrist and moved to leave the bathroom but the Bot’s contortions were blocking his way. Forced to observe her efforts for a few futile seconds, he begrudgingly tried to help with the zip but it was clear the fall had done some expensive chassis damage: something he doubted he could get away with on the household insurance.

            But wasn’t this supposed to be a safe-house, dammit?

            So maybe someone could explain to him how the hell the girl had gotten hold of the address in the first place.

            <And you,> he scolded, still struggling with the zip, <Delivery by the eighth the contract said, not the tenth. And not half an upgrade, a full upgrade>.

            <Don’t worry baby,> soothed the Bot in her most understanding mode. <I’ll get the techies to– > she began, but then the zip finally zipped and she profited from their proximity, stealing a quick kiss before finishing her vox: < –fast track it for you.>

            Brushing past her perfect (oh-so-perfect) breasts, he identified his spit-polished boots ready for duty in the hall beneath the coat-stand, looking like it was ready for a beach party in its gaily-colored silk scarves and an alpaca poncho, topped with one of her ribboned straw hats. You name it, she had known how to dance it – samba, marimba, cha-cha, tango, and the rest – learning the moves as a child by sliding around on her mother’s feet. It wasn’t until after his Puziashka had gone that he realized he’d never made the time to learn the steps himself.

            Made the time.

            If only it were possible.

            Quickly, he bent down to toe his way into the boots and tighten up their long laces, not without some difficulty and some regret at having fallen asleep in the shower: his back had suddenly flared up out of nowhere. Providing a momentary distraction from his lumbar vertebrae, he spotted a tiny piece of color shining from a shallow groove between two pieces of the floor’s parquet. After all these years he would still find the occasional piece of confetti in the hallway, leading to the bedroom…

            Brutally interrupting his thoughts, the knock at the door froze him to the spot, racing his pulse up to one-twenty, maybe one-thirty. Instinctively, commando style, he held up his hand, pausing the Bot in the bathroom doorway. Placing a finger to his lips, he  parked her in mute mode.

            Then, as the digits marking the seconds on his wrist seemed to slip into slow motion, a few minutes short of seven-hundred hours on that bright December morning, a cold bead of sweat ran down the back of The World’s Greatest Warrior.

            The experience was so overwhelming that he actually caught himself holding his breath.

            All he could hear was the blood coursing through his ears and all he could feel was the buffalo stampeding through his chest.

            This was crazy, he tried to tell himself, his throat suddenly drier than a pile of woodchips: he hadn’t felt fear since – since… But this was just a ten year old girl for Christ’s sake. No, she had to be nine, right?

            Then, abruptly, came the second knock, this time more insistent, bliping his BPM even further, somewhere deep into the red-zone, the confused question in the Bot’s eyes spearing him with shame: an emotion he’d lacked for a shamefully long time.

            Cornered and struggling to manage even two deep breaths in a row, he was unable to recall a single mantra for the occasion.

            His mind was a complete blank.

            A game-show contestant overwhelmed by the sixty-four million dollar question.

            More to save face in front of the Bot than anything else he could think of right now, he managed to slowly straighten himself up – knees popping, back flaring, temples throbbing, shirt sticking – until he was high enough to peer through the door’s peephole, only to be confronted with the girl’s mango-sized eye staring straight back.

            Dropping to his haunches, he suddenly found himself having to maintain a psychopathic stranglehold on his sphincter.

            Unfortunately, at the same time, he also had to strain himself to think what the hell his next move was going to be.

            Stalling for time, illustrating his complete lack of imagination, he again placed his finger to his lips, as if the Bot needed reminding she was still in mute mode. Then, after a few more seconds of avoiding eye contact by staring blankly at the door, searching his mind while simultaneously trying to paper over the cracks, the best idea – the only idea – he could come up with was to reach for the door’s chain, realizing how truly pathetic he was as he quietly slid it into position.

            And then came the girl’s unmistakable vox.

            The vox he’d heard on a hundred different messages.

            The vox he’d failed to reply to a hundred different times.

            <Papa,> said the vox.  <It’s me, Gabby.>

            And that’s when he realized how truly pathetic didn’t even come close.

Whilst this was something of a monumental event as they faced off against each other either side of the door – Gabby 9er balancing on the fire extinguisher she had dragged over from the stairwell, Solomon 9er shaking in his unlaced boots – the attention of Special Operative Villa R. Carrera (Jr.) had drifted across the video-wall from his two principal subjects to the window displaying the scantily clad creature in the bathroom doorway. Polishing off his last cookie with a quick dunk in his coffee, he slid his feet off the surveillance desk and lent forward, using the workstation’s slinky metallic glove to push in nice and tight on the window.

Boy that Bot was hot…

            At the expense of the hundred other windows – some displaying satellite feeds and CCTV angles on the exterior of the subjects’ homes, others displaying various interior angles – Carrera enlarged the window on the Bot, watching those deep dark eyes as they watched the show unroll. Not that there had been much to watch for the last few minutes. The girl repeatedly pressing her ear to the door then peering through the wrong end of the peephole, occasionally rapping as hard as her little knuckles could, ringing the bell every now and then for good measure. While all the time The World’s Greatest Warrior had been cowering like some poor defenseless little lamb.

           As far as Carrera was concerned this family was way beyond dysfunctional, but what was far more interesting to him right now was the effect that the Bot’s vulnerable look was having on him: the way she seemed so confused by the scene, you could just imagine yourself… But then he heard his superior’s throaty cough at the door, cutting short all hope of further impure thoughts. You had to give Jack his jacket though, some of these Bot designers were goddamn artists.

           Entering the dark surveillance room in his customary dark suit and holding his customary plate of breakfast pastries, Special Operative Miguel Huerta (Sr.) was confronted with the gigantic close-up of the Bot’s cleavage in a window spanning the entire width of the video-wall. Having seen it all – and eaten most of the leftovers – he sighed to himself as he put down his plate next to the coffee pot then cuffed Carrera’s brilliantined head, prompting the whippersnapper to resize the windows, returning prominence to their principal subjects.

           In one of the CCTV windows – a wide angle from the top of the stairwell – Huerta noted Gabby 9er’s position as she wobbled on the extinguisher, forcing her to unglue her eye from the peephole so she could recover her balance. Gyros quickly re-stabilized though, she glued her eye straight back again, giving the door another hard knock and voxcasting, <Papa, it’s Gabriella,> in a tone about as stable as the extinguisher. Out of the corner of his eye, Huerta also noted that Carrera was leaning for one of the pastries, the one with glazed sugar and raisins and cinnamon: the boy had to be dreaming, he thought, and so woke him up with a swift rap using the back of his hand, the one with his heavy signet ring on.

           Back up on the video-wall, clearly struggling to maintain a constant tone, the girl tried again, this time casting the vox, <I Just Wanted To… To Give You Something,> but it looked to Huerta like she was wasting her time. Making a show of nursing his bruised knuckles, Carrera piped up:

           <Shouldn’t we be waking Her Highness for this?>

            <No clear or imminent,> Huerta replied matter-of-factly. <And its Madame Governor to you,> he added, settling into his workstation’s well-worn chair and the plate of pastries. <Let her get her beauty sleep. She can catch the re-run. And make yourself useful, pour me a coffee.>

           Still unsteady on her toes, trying once more to peer through the wrong end of the peephole, Gabby voxed her father again, trying to ignore the pain as she knocked even harder. When she had first knocked she was sure she heard the chain but now she was wondering if she had imagined it because the door hadn’t budged since. She figured it had to be the right apartment though, as it was the only one on the top floor that was on the street-side of the building.

           She had nearly jumped out of her skin when the Bot had crashed down onto the sidewalk, but when she had seen the man up on the balcony she had known straight away it was her father. Although he looked a lot older now, there was no mistake: he had been the man in the wedding album – which meant the bride must have been her mother. So when the Bot had jumped back up and the concierge had appeared like magic to sweep away the mess, she had slid behind her back into the lobby, not even waiting for the elevator, running instead straight up the slippery wooden stairs, running so fast it had made her head spin.

           Still a little dizzy, now up on the extinguisher, doing her best not to rock the boat – her eye once again glued to the peephole, trying to spot some movement, any movement – she fumbled for her book in the backpack’s side-pocket, blindly thumbing the envelope from its middle pages.

           <I’ve Got An Invitation For You!> she cast at the highest frequency she dared use without disturbing the neighbors.

           Perhaps he was carrying out some emergency repairs on the Bot, she told herself.

           Maybe there was a life-or-death operation going on in there, she tried to imagine, straining once more at the peephole.

           Maybe that was why he wasn’t coming to the door…

           Or maybe the real answer was a lot simpler, she thought, after a few more unanswered knocks and rings.

           Maybe it wasn’t such a tough thing to figure out, especially when it was something… something that had always been there, in her bad dreams.

           All the times she had been told that she had to make allowances because of his work, she had known that didn’t really make sense.

           Simple and plain, her father didn’t want to see her.

           Didn’t want her, period; that was the truth.

           How could she keep pretending differently?

           When here she was now, and all he had to do was open the bloody door.

            She knew she wasn’t strong enough but half of her wanted to smash the bloody thing in. While her other half wanted to smash him in. If she had a third half, she thought, it probably would have wanted to smash her in. It wouldn’t know who to hate most: him for not caring, or her for not being worth the effort. Clearly there had to be something wrong with her. Otherwise why else would he have ignored her all these years? She just had to be too young to understand what that something was.

            One thing she did understand though was that her whole mission had been one humongous mistake. She had come all this way for nothing. She thought he would be proud of her but she had been wrong. She thought that by finding him she’d be able to find that piece of her that seemed to be missing.

           But now that piece seemed more lost than ever.

           The reality was she didn’t even exist to him.

           And why should she? There had never been any ties between them. They had never been a real family, and they were never going to be.

           She just had to be grownup about it and accept the facts.

           He had locked her out of his life and she was never going to be even a small part of it. She was like some strange parcel making a loud ticking noise. He was never going to sign for delivery.

           Return to sender, that was the easiest thing.

           <Look, I’ve Ga-got To Rush,> she voxed, betrayed by the tone’s distressed frequency, making the words sound like she had a stammer. <My Friends Are Wa-waiting For Me Downstairs,> she lied, plunking off the extinguisher. <I’ll Just Slide It Under The Da-door.>

           But as she bent down and pushed the invitation through the crack, she knew he would never reply. She knew he would never come. For a second though she thought she heard a shuffling movement the other side of the door and was about to knock one last time but then she realized how stupid it was to keep hoping – to keep believing…

           Somehow she managed to stop herself from knocking again, instead dragging the extinguisher back to its proper place, telling herself that it was too late – too late and she didn’t care any more – as she made her way down the dark waxy stairs, being careful not to slip and make an even bigger bloody fool of herself.

           Back outside, she walked past the empty terrace in a slightly wavy line toward the alley, returning the waiter’s friendly smile from the café’s entrance as best she could, trying not to give away how she really felt, her fists balled down by her sides, somehow controlling herself with the pain of her little sharp nails, digging them deep and hard into her palms.

           Reaching the cover of the alley, she ran to the dumpster and stepped over the bike’s frame, deciding she was going to ride back up the street as fast as she could. She just hoped he wasn’t at his window: she didn’t want him to see she was alone – that she had told that stupid lie about having friends waiting for her.

            Taking a few deep breaths and turning over the words, Bloody, Bloody, Bloody, in her mind, she strained down on the pedals with all her weight to build up as much speed as possible in the alley, but when she hit the street’s gutter the bike jolted and she must have been pedaling too hard because the chain suddenly slipped a cog, bringing her to a grinding halt in plain view, right in the middle of the street.

            Bloody, Bloody, Bloodying to herself, she got off the bike and started fumbling with the grimy chain. Not daring to look up at his building, she allowed herself a peek from under her fringe in the direction of the café but the waiter was nowhere to be seen. Catching a break, she quickly managed to hook the chain back over the top of the largest cog but when she tried to lift up the back wheel to pedal it around she lost her balance, tumbling over with the bike in one awkward dusty heap, skinning her legs and hands in the process.

           Back at the surveillance desk, Carrera leaned forward and zoomed in tight with a CCTV-feed from the bottom corner of the street. Trembling from the fall, the girl was inspecting her red-raw palms for damage, trying but failing to blow away the gritty dirt. Squeezing the cut on her knee, she seemed to be watching it with curiosity, as if it was someone else’s blood oozing from the skin. Enlarging the CCTV window to fill the entire wall, blowing up the sorry-looking wound to gargantuan proportions, Carrera traded a look with his superior.

           <Minor abrasion,> Huerta offered in return, dunking one of his pastries. <She’ll survive,> he added, filling his face.

           Keeping her head dipped, Gabby scanned the street from beneath her fringe but there was clearly no-one around to help untangle her from the bike. At least though she was facing away from his building, she told herself, trying not to let it show as she pawed away any chance of a tear, unwittingly greasing her cheeks with what looked like war-paint. At least he couldn’t see her face and she couldn’t see his. The last thing she wanted was to see a look of pity in his eyes – she couldn’t bear the idea of seeing him seeing her being pathetic.

           She hated, hated, hated him.

           She wished he was dead.

           Anyway, he might as well be dead.

           And yet she still wanted him to rush down those bloody stairs and take her in his bloody arms and kiss her knee better and fix her chain like fathers were supposed to bloody well do.

           To show her that he did really care after all.

            To show her that she was worth caring for.

            To show her that he was worth caring for too.

           But instead she was alone.

           Left with no choice but to stand up on her own two feet.

           That was just the way it was going to have to be, bloody knee or no bloody knee. She understood that now. All she had to do was gather her courage…

           The chain, though, refused to see things the same way, instead deciding to jam the back wheel from going around properly – her attempts to correct the situation only flushing her upside-down face, leaving her wondering if she had caught a fever as she swayed bent over the bike, unsteady on her feet. Suddenly the street seemed to close in on her and the trembling from her fall seemed to have turned into shivers – shivers that ached right through her. Trying to flick away her hair only added to her frustration, and pawing away the chance of another tear just added more war-paint to her cheeks. For the first time in her life, she thought she might actually faint.

Standing slowly back upright and straightening the torn parasol in the rack, she forced her lungs to take a whole deep breath and made a decision: rather than risk another tumble right there she would wait until she was out of sight before trying to fix the chain. Plus, she thought – flapping away a greenbottle that had taken a sleepy interest in the blood dribbling down her shin – there was no way she was going to get the first-aid kit out here either.

           So doing her best to hide her limp (her dirty fingers gripping the handlebars so tight she wouldn’t have blamed them for squealing), she bit her lip and ignored the way her gritty palms were stinging as she strained with all her strength to push the skiddy-wheeled bike up the street while straining with all her will not to look back.

           Never, no way, no how: she wasn’t going to give him the bloody satisfaction.

           At least until she reached the corner of the side-street she was going to show him how she wasn’t some… some feeble little creature to be ashamed of or… or embarrassed by.

           But then, no matter how hard she tried to blink it away, the unstoppable tear came calling, snailing its slimy trail down her grimy face.

           She still never looked back though.

           She still never let him see.

           She’d rather have died than let him see.

            She may not have been eleven yet but she was already teaching herself to never look back. That looking back could never do any good. That it only showed others how much they’ve hurt you. And it only reminded you how much you’ve been hurt. The past belonged to the past – that was the moral of this story. At least she had learned that much by now. That was the positive in the negative. What her grandmother called the kopek in the snow.

           But with the morning’s rising temperature she quickly felt her resistance melting, evaporating away from her body as fast as her sweat, so that when she finally reached the corner she could no longer stop herself from glancing back.

           By then though it was too late and too far to see any life in the building.

           By then, in the morning light, the top-floor windows had become a single mocking smile: all white and straight and perfect – except for that one gap-toothed hole, all black and broken and hollow.

           At the surveillance desk, Carrera switched to a camera feed with an angle on the tiny figure of the girl as she turned her bike into the empty side-street, scrubbed and bleached by the sun except for the dark stain of shadow dragging at her heels. Something about that shadow reminded him of a beaten dog following its master home.

           <Character building,> observed Huerta, anticipating Carrera’s look and tucking in to the last pastry.

           Resizing the display of the feed from the bottom of Obispo, noticing an object lying near the alley by the café, Carrera panned and zoomed the window until it was filled with the image of the girl’s panda, lost and forgotten in the gutter.

           Giving Huerta another look, Carrera readied himself to plead the girl’s case when, offering some glimmer of hope, a man’s hand interceded by reaching into the window’ frame.

           Pulling back the zoom, Carrera watched with his superior while Solomon 9er brushed down the soft black-and-white ball of fur, the Bot joining him to follow his distant gaze up the empty street.

           <Okay,> decided Huerta, <Get Señora José in there. See if she can pick up the girl… Try and get her back here for the Duchess.>

END OF BOOK ONE

If you can’t wait for Book #2, here’s the next few chapters to keep you going :-)

http://thewarriorsangel.tumblr.com/IX

http://thewarriorsangel.tumblr.com/X

http://thewarriorsangel.tumblr.com/XI

http://thewarriorsangel.tumblr.com/XII

http://thewarriorsangel.tumblr.com/XIII

http://thewarriorsangel.tumblr.com/XIV

http://thewarriorsangel.tumblr.com/XV