I cut my shadow from me, without a second thought. And then . . .
. . . I threw it away.
* * *
“One for Midnight Madness,” I told the girl behind the Bloor’s window, slipping her one of Doug Whatever’s crisp new twenties; she smiled, and ripped the ticket for me.
I smiled back. There’s no harm in it.
Hitting the candy bar, I stocked up an extra-large popcorn, a box of chocolate almonds, and a Cappucino from the cafe upstairs. My Ma always used to tell us not to eat after 12:00 p.m., but the program promised a brand new Shinya Tsukamoto flesh-into-metal monster mosh-fest—and after tonight’s job, I was up for as much stimulation as I could stand.
Back down in the ravine, meanwhile, Doug and his girl still stood frozen above the remains of their mutual investment—their blood reverberate with a whispered loop of intimate-form Sumerian, heavily overlaid with mnemonic surtitles: Humbaba’s answer to their question. The same question I hadn’t wanted to know before they asked it, and certainly didn’t care to know now.
I didn’t exactly anticipate any repeat business from those two. But for what I’d made tonight, they could both disappear off the edge of the earth, for all I cared.
I took a big swallow of popcorn, licked the butter off my hands. A faint smell of Power still lingered under my nails—like dry ice, like old blood. Like burnt marigolds, seed and petal alike reduced to a fine, pungent ash.
Then the usher opened the doors, and I went in.
* * *
I used to be afraid of a lot of things, back when I was a nice, dutiful little Chinese boy. Dogs. Loud noises. Big, loud dogs that made big, loud noises. Certain concepts. Certain words used to communicate such concepts, like the worst, most unprovable word of all—“eternity.”
Secretly, late at night, I would feel the universe spinning loose around me: Boundless, nameless, a vortice of darkness within which my life became less than a speck of dust. The night sky would tilt toward me, yawning. And I would lie there breathless, waiting for the roof to peel away, waiting to lose my grip. To rise and rise forever into that great, inescapable Nothing, to drift until I disappeared—not only as though I no longer was, but as though I had never been.
So I read too much, and saw too many movies, and played too many video-games, and drank too much, and took too many pills, and made my poor Ma worried enough to burn way too much incense in front of way too many pictures of my various Hark ancestors. Anything to distract myself. I took my Baba’s feng shui advice, and moved my bedroom furniture around religiously, hoping to deflect the cold current of my neuroses onto somebody else for a while. Why not? He was a professional, after all.
And I was just a frightened child, a frightened prepubescent, a frightened adolescent—a spoiled, stupid, frightened young man with all the rich and varied life experience of a preserved duck egg, nodding and smiling moronically at the next in an endless line of prospective brides trotted out by our trusty family matchmaker, too weak to even hint around what really got my dick hard.
On the screen above me, bald, dark-goggled punks took turns drilling each other through the stomach, as yet another hapless salaryman turned into a pissed-off pile of ambulatory metal shavings. Japanese industrial blared, while blood hit the lens in buckets. I could hear the audience buckling under every new blow, riding alternate waves of excitement and revulsion.
And I just sat there, unconcerned; crunching my almonds, watching the carnage. Suddenly realizing I hadn’t felt that afraid for a long, long time—or afraid at all, in fact.
Of anything.
* * *
Then somebody came in late; I moved my coat, so he could sit down next to me. A mere peripheral blur of a guy—apparently young, vaguely Asian. Hair to below his shoulders, temples shaved like a samurai’s, and the whole mass tied back with one long, thin, braided sidelock—much the way I used to wear it, before Andre down at the Living Hell convinced me to get my current buzz-cut.
I never took my eyes off the action. But I could feel the heat of him all the way through the leg of my good blac
k jeans, cock rearing flush against the seam of my crotch with each successive heartbeat.
The screen was abloom with explosions. A melting, roiling pot of white-hot metal appeared, coalescing, all revved up and ready to pour.
Some pheromonal envelope of musk, slicking his skin, began expanding. Began to slick mine.
More explosions followed.
I felt the uniquely identifiable stir of his breath—in, out; out, in—against my cheek, and actually caught myself shivering.
Above us, two metal men spun and ran like liquid sun, locked tight together. The credits were beginning to roll. I thought: Snap out of it, Jude.
Run the checklist. Turn around, smile. Ask him his name, if he’s got a place.
Tell him you want to taste his sweat, and feel his chest on your back ‘til the cows come home.
Then the lights came back up, much more quickly than I’d been expecting them to—I blinked, shocked temporarily blind. Brushed away tears, as my eyes strained to readjust.