41

Two days later, after I’d fucked Wilson once (and Devaz a second time) the scientists cut my right hand off.

42

I wish I could say the time that followed was a blur, but it wasn’t. It was dense with detail. I learnt two things. One was that no amount of violence you’ve done to others prepares you for violence done to yourself. The other was that you can’t escape the marriage with your body. Divorce isn’t an option. Even when you want to stop caring about it you can’t. Even when the solution to knowing they’re going to cut off your left breast is to disown it, you can’t. It’s yours. It’s a friend you never realised you loved so tenderly and completely – until they separate it from you. It screams in silence. It retains, for a while at least, its life, its bond with you. But then, when it understands you’re never coming to reclaim it, that the contract has been utterly broken, it dies, alone and betrayed, and becomes an inert, pathetic object, indecent and forlorn.

The new totalitarian regime was pain. Pain was exhausting in its inane imperviousness to everything. There was nothing, no persuasion or bribe you could bring to it. It was a monolithic idiot, the dumbest thing in the universe given complete power over the smartest, a heartbreaking inversion. I got used to the sensation of my screams locked in by a gag, having to back-up and cash themselves out in my skull. I discovered pity for my body. It was endlessly renewable, this well of pity. Every mutilation drew its unique portion. Every amputation subtracted, poignantly, took away – literally – some of who I was. I cried. Not in front of them. Later, strapped to my bed, surrounded in the dark by the Christmassy lights of lab technology I cried first for my losses and second because who deserved them if not me? The scientists were indifferent to my suffering – but at least they didn’t relish it. It’s only the best for us if it’s the worst for them. Those were my words to Jake, in bed. It’s only the best for us if it’s the worst for them. Unlike the men in white we, monsters, wanted the person we were killing to know – through the blood-blur and the din of their own screams – not only that we knew what we were doing but that we loved doing it. We wanted our victims to see that our pleasure increased with their horror, that their horror was required, that their situation was hopeless. That was the dirty truth, the obscene heart of fuckkilleat: their hopelessness serviced our joy. In the court of human appeal the scientists were better off. At least they weren’t doing it for fun. At least it didn’t turn them on.

Not that that made any difference to me when they cut my breast off or gouged out my eye or wrenched the teeth from my jaws. The flesh in pain isn’t interested in Old Testament justice or ironic justice or any other kind of justice. It isn’t interested in anything except the cessation of pain. I hated them and wept for my poor body and my lonely self in the winking darkness, even as wulf rushed the butchered cells into regenerative action, a sensation in bone and nerves and tissue like a mass of insects racing towards something. No matter what atrocities you’ve committed you rage at those committing them on you.

They performed a hysterectomy.

I slept, on and off, dropped into and struggled out of fire-buckled dreams: one (not surprisingly) of being eaten by ants; another of Jacqueline’s French-manicured fingers peeling back the skin from Lorcan’s skull; another of the diner on Tenth Street, with the Coors neon and the pink leatherette booths and the faux shellacked counter where Clay would let me sit with my vanilla shake and talk to me about the hell his girl was giving him as if I were an adult; another of the lab mixed with the night at Big Sur, Jake dipping his cock into the raw pulp where the torn-open scientist’s heart used to be.

Then the fluorescents would vibrate and flutter into life and the white coats would appear and another session would begin. I’d never known fear before. You don’t know fear – not the fundamental kind – until you experience knowing what they’re going to do to you and being utterly powerless to stop it. Invariably I wet myself when the lights stuttered on. The scientists didn’t mind. The scientists expected it. I saw my distorted reflection in a stainless steel kidney dish. The young Clint Eastwood leaned over me and I smelled garlic and an aniseed breath mint. They punctured my lungs and broke two of my ribs. One of the bald men was named Hugh. He had large deep-printed fingertips that smelled of latex. He lit an acetylene torch and held it against me, shins, abdomen, back. First degree. Second. Third. The main surgical lamp was like a War of the Worlds flying saucer. They pulled out my fingernails. A blue and white cardboard box on a gurney said ZENIUM X-ray detectable abdominal sponge. Sometimes a radio played a couple of rooms away. The Black-Eyed Peas; Kylie; Lady Gaga. The scientists’ shoes squeaked on the rubberised floor. It sounded like a language. Hugh lifted my severed hand as if it had broken off a holy statue. They were interested in everything. Primarily regeneration speeds (my breast took twenty-four hours, eye six, hand and foot forty-eight, skin two, internal organs a matter of minutes), but everything else too, from T-cells to C-fibres, from lymph nodes to hormones. Sometimes they used anaesthetic, sometimes not. I healed thirty per cent faster without it, they established. A particularly rigorous session with the acetylene torch and pliers revealed that up to a point – up to a point – rate of regeneration increased according to the increase in pain. They called that point the UPH: the Useful Pain Horizon. Sex with Devaz and Wilson receded, became years ago. All the life before the first amputation was distant and sealed. Cauterised. Eventually, even the first amputation seemed remote. My mind was a terminal any old rubbish could enter: advertising jingles; pop songs; scenes from obscure TV movies; the laminated alphabet chart from kindergarten.

Meanwhile, through the haze, I knew days were passing: the hunger first stirred, confused, then woke, then despite the pain began to beat and scratch its distinctive demands. Wulf’s nose asserted itself, insisted on the scientists as living meat. Deodorants and the lab’s chemical fug were flashed through by stinks of their sweat and blood, an occasional whiff of stale piss or recent shit. Clint’s breath spoke now not just of a noon tuna sandwich or yesterday’s scotch but of his own deep and vital secretions. The moon was fattening and drawing the monster up through my human knit. I felt her in the join of my jaws, my femurs, my spine. I wondered what they had planned for transformation. Whatever it was it wasn’t the same as what I had planned. I spent my entire time secured in the lab now, and hadn’t seen any of the guards for days – but Devaz and Wilson were still around, not far away. I could tell.