An overwhelming despair doubles Christine over.
“Ahead of me, are you?” Trinculo replies. “Are you sure? Do you even understand my inventions?” Calm, as if he is playing chess.
“Your inventions? You mean your crass pornography and useless paraphernalia?” Jean de Men steps closer. “You will die. And quite slowly. In excruciating increments. I should think that would please you.”
“And you, you knotty-pated boil . . . for your sins you will perish in the solar anus of the sun. I’m being literal, by the way. You mental headless worm.”
Jean de Men hits Trinculo in the face so hard, his head slams into one of the black-lacquered walls.
Trinculo merely cackles again, stirring the air around them, rebellious as ever.
Christine’s room seems to rock and split. A crack of light shuts her eyes and a thunderous hum makes her cover her ears. For a minute, a strange electricity seems to pop and fracture the whole of her quarters. Her walls come alive with light, sound, even smell; they seemed to move—until she sees what it is: hundreds of small white salamanders have somehow materialized in her room.
They are hideous little ghostlike squirming creatures, but her disgust transforms instantly as they crawl out their purpose. For an hour or more she watches as they busy themselves together to build a kind of structure: a kind of lattice, or web, quite beautiful in fact. When they finish, they quiver in unison. She has no idea what is happening until the lighting in her room dims and the web becomes a screen. The Olms light up, glow, and as her eyes begin to adjust, she sees what the screen is unveiling.
Trinculo’s face and neck and shoulders.
Only not like she’s ever seen them before. He is bloodied. His flesh literally shredded. She can see his eyeholes, and something of a nose and mouth, but what used to be his countenance has been obliterated.
“Behold—the monster!” The words come from the hole of his mouth, and his voice is certainly his, but other than that, it is as if the head of death itself is speaking to her.
“My love,” is all that comes out of her.
“Do not despair. Nothing of me was ever my skin,” he whispers.
In a heap of shoulders, and with her hands covering her face, Christine knows what she was looking at: he’s been skinned. Stripped of all his grafts. It was a form of public shaming—not common, but it happened. His body would remain filleted like that for as long as he survived. Meanwhile, his image was surely being broadcast in the halls and rooms and fake environments all over CIEL.
“I can’t actually see you,” he continues. “This is not a two-way visual. But I can feel you, hear you, sense the rise and fall of your breathing. I can tell, for instance, that you are about to cry. I command you to cease and desist, my dizzy-eyed pumpion.”
She smiles, drowning.
“Ah, there she is,” he says.
Christine sits on the floor. She looks up at him on the screen. She can’t imagine her life with him not in it.
“I’ve much to tell you, and little time. Had we but world enough, and time, huh? Alas. Allow me to narrate. Our tyrannical bunion brain, Jean de Men, has gone mad. First, my new . . . look. He intended to perform a full Blood Eagle—”
“A what?”
“The Blood Eagle was a method of torture and execution, sometimes mentioned in old Nordic saga legends. It was performed by cutting the ribs of the victim by the spine, breaking the ribs so they resembled bloodstained wings, and pulling the lungs out through the wounds in the victim’s back. Salt was sprinkled in the wounds—”
“Trinc! He did that to you? I’ll slit his fucking throat. I’ll burn his skull and—”
“Calm, my perfect clam. He did not. He simply removed my outer epidermis. I’ll live. But it is, as they say, beyond painful. Luckily I have a habit of crossing such territories regularly. We have that in common. But I digress.” He pauses. “He’s gone over the edge, Christ. With a sadism of a singularly gendered sort. This”—he waves his hand in a way that re-presents his face—“is nothing. What’s important is, he’s cloistered himself away in some kind of dungeonesque laboratory. He’s—” He closes his eyes. “He’s gutting women open like fish. He’s trying to create a reproductive system. What he’s doing to those women . . . my God. Well. Not God, of course . . .”
Her hands and feet go cold. She swallows. Her throat fills with rocks. The space between her legs aches.
“Don’t try to picture it, Christ. Don’t.”
“How many are there?” she asks.
“Over the years since we’ve been up here? I can’t say. Many, though, very many. All ages, all in various states of . . . horrid evolution. All linked crudely to so-called medical apparatuses. It is one of the most gruesome things I’ve ever seen. And I’ve seen a lot.”
It was obvious: he meant to breed them. Not through two gendered humans engaging in the sacred or profane old practice of love and lust, but by binding “women” to an ever-producing gender and forcing sexual reproduction through their bodies. Christine briefly thought of a film she’d seen as a girl on the topic of artificial swine stimulation: how Danish farmers had hooked their sows up to machines that triggered upsuck orgasm using a five-point stimulation system. Each pig was raised to produce as many piglets as possible, then slaughtered when her body could no longer reproduce.