Soul Poacher

Soul Poacher


Does it hurt, Cockroach, to be caught, to be so vulnerable to my power over you? I see you lying on your back, your legs still kicking, your antennae still popping, your very being still hoping for a way out from under the filmy, impenetrable cage. Buggy hopefulness, scampering desperation. Despite your disgustingness, I pity your black-shelled upside-down entrapment. I pity the squirming, the spitting, the whimpering of green-blooded pleas for...for what?

What is it that you truly want, oh ancient insect?

Do you wish for a speedy death to face an immediate answer to the question of immortality, or do you wish to be let out to run, to hide amidst the filth while you await an unknown destiny? Release would be preferable, I suppose. You would be home, you would be triumphant in the feel of polluted familiarity. Warm, inviting squalor, love me, love me, you would say. Warm, inviting squalor, let me love you.

But I cannot let you go. I cannot free you into your beloved muck because of the very fact that you have asked for it. I do not want to give it to you because to give it would diminish the little power I have gleaned from our relationship. The day you revel in purity, in light, in cleanliness, will be the day I allow you to go home to the dark.


Felix tapped the de-labeled glass jar with his fingernail and drunkenly grinned at the bug's frantic waving of its limbs, the bug finally trapped after exhausting every possible way of escape. The cockroach must be fucked-up, he thought, to be so sluggish, to lose to a barely-functioning predator. Or maybe it was near-dead already.

Beyond the crystalline cage, Felix spied two men and two women in varying stages of their own highs lying among rotted-out mattresses, all four indistinguishable from one another. The smells of the place ran together, too, encircling everyone, a blended smoke of used people and hoarded trash. Further across the room, a raisin-like man was getting done up by an even older cackling woman, the guy shaking his grayed head at the miracle of her finding a good vein. Sighed, "Damn, woman, how you do that? Took me nearly two hours this mornin'..."

"Experience, love, experience."

The mostly-toothless woman certainly was experienced, like a poacher with a double-barreled shotgun. Knowing the human body as she'd know a jungle, knowing the ins and outs of veins and arteries crouched beneath damaged skin, she could locate ideal hidden shooting lines hidden the way the big cats hide inside a tangle of thick, drippy trees—all those ins desperately trying to escape capture, trying to survive.

The veins are victims, Felix thought, to be held in place so their purpose of existence, their souls, can be depleted through repeated physical violation leading to their eventual deaths. Over and over, the needle will assault the delicate tissue causing collapse, infection, scarring. Hold the vein in place so it doesn't fucking move. Kill...the vein.

"Yeah," Felix said softly to himself, silently addressing the woman, "That's what we do...we're all soul poachers. You, me…them."

He could see his muted reflection in the glass of the jar: a wildly overgrown blackish beard, equally black curled hair, matted now from lying about, and hazel-colored eyes that had long lost their energetic shimmer. Glancing at his torn jeans and his ruined tee-shirt, he wondered how much money he had left. Patting his pockets, he found nothing. No matter, he had enough dope in his system to carry him a few more hours. After that, well...maybe he'd go back to the apartment. Maybe.

The roach spun to the left and then to the right. Felix stretched out on the floor of the long-condemned apartment which served as one of many shooting galleries in the depths of urban Hell. Days maybe he'd been listening to his own drug-induced, empty analyses, drifting pleasantly, except his theories and analogies were beginning to get confused, morphing into one squishy, disconnected mess. Sweet, though, warm, like spoiled pudding...like spoiled, maggoty pudding.

"How long have we been here, buggy pal o' mine?" Felix asked in a scratchy voice, drumming the jar. Rolling onto his back, one knee resting against the wall, he briefly studied markings on his forearm--bruises from his lousy injection technique: usually quick, either done in anger or desperation, and always uncaring about the poor receiving vein. Closing his eyes, he let his arm fall onto his chest.

How many times had he dosed up here in this room? How much blood had he watched spill out of him with each hit? How much of his soul was left? God...GOD...he was on a roll now...but nothing had been like the first time. The memory of it made him shiver still, it made him smile in that peculiar nobody's-really-home fashion. The price had been high, the cost of that first come, that orgasmic explosion of absolute silence. It had started at a party with a couple of buddies—a snort of heroin—a good one. Look at us, they joked, doing this at our age. Isn't this reserved for slick, sick models on runways? Thin fags on the covers of mags? Street people, screwed up teenagers, rock stars?

The occasional sniff turned into a daily routine which turned into a full-blown intravenous habit. Got expensive. Lost his paltry job as a bus driver at a private school. Lost a girlfriend. Lost a lot of things. But what the drug did do was chase away the hurt Felix had accumulated during his forty years of life (eighteen spent in the foster-care system because nobody wanted to adopt a boy with clubbed feet and a botched repair job of a cleft-palate and lip)—the “h” made him feel…fucking fantastic. Fan-tas-tic.

Above all though, the habit led him to Anna, possessor of mesmerizing green eyes set against luscious olive skin, owner of startling prettiness in contrast to the ragged scar on her right cheek, the scar which traveled downwards across her chin and flowed towards her left breast. Anna, packer of fluffy, sugared doughnuts into crisp white bags at five in the morning from her own rolling coffee cart which sported one squeaky wheel, which she’d push sweetly up and down Seventeenth Avenue. Felix learned to rely on that sound, a rhythmic noise loud enough to stir him awake from coma-like sleep. He found himself relying on her to keep him alive with doughnuts, coffee, with love. In turn, she relied on him to keep her going—with his need and all-consuming dependence. Nobody had ever admired her the way he did...nobody had ever made up to her for their damage of her the way he did.

Shhhhh...shhhhh...it's just a messy pile of words and images...messy...filthy sludge. Do you like that, ancient insect? Do you like that?

How many days had gone by since the last time Anna cried for him? Lying crumpled like a tiger without the stuffing, he had almost forgotten the sound of her delicious despair and the agonized look in her eyes that made his heart beat faster. How stunning she had been as she stared at him from their messy bed and watched him about to sneak off in the early morning. He truly felt her love—tangible as cobwebs strung between them, sticky, fragile webbing which matched her stringy hair the hue of black pearls and her stringy body—such skeletal beauty!

"Felix," she begged quietly, weakened by too much work, "Not again...you can't do this to me again. I can't be sittin' around wondering whether the morgue will be callin' me...or a cop. I can't do this. I want to be with you. I need you! I'll take care of you, I'll make sure you keep breathing—just stay with me!"

He wished he could do what she asked, but his insides ached too much for the jungle beyond the walls of their studio apartment. He peeled her pinching fingers off him. "It's my life,” he snapped, “it's my choice...and why the fuck should I stay around anyway? So what if I don’t breathe—so fucking what?"

Devastation burst across her delicate features, a beautiful display. Felix moved his hand through the air, touching gossamer love. "You're right," she sniffed, "why should you stay? Get the hell out."

She rolled over, sinking into the cheap sheets and curling up in the darkness of that shabby bedroom while he stalked away. But they both knew he would come back when he ran out of money—so she could work her doughnut cart and get him some more dope. And of course, he would give back to her, he would give all her devotion right back in—what’s the term? Oh yeah, he would give her love in spades. He would cover her with his writhing, thumping body, trying to make her come (never reaching orgasm himself), trying to make up for all his badness. He then would clean the studio apartment for her, dusting, washing, scrubbing the floors on his knees. He would listen to her.

He surveyed the cockroach once more and imagined that maybe this was how he loved Anna—as an experimenter, catching her in a jar on her back, imprisoning her. Or was he the one beneath the glass, stuck and helpless, being punished? Or maybe it was both. Yeah...Felix Boden: victim and torturer. Ahhh...it didn't matter...it was all getting jumbled again, the drugs not letting him follow through with his comparisons, with his analogies. They drifted from him and he smiled at their balloon-like disappearance. Up, up and away, "torturer" in a red balloon, "victim" in a blue one, "Anna" in a bright purple shiny one. Those shiny ones last, he thought, that kind lasts forever.

Sighing, he licked his lips and imagined a deep blue sky brushed by her purple brilliance...where would she go? Where would his purpled angel go?

The wall felt cool scraping against his fingertips. How many days had it been? Again and again, banging enough dope to spiral himself into that place, into that near-perfect place...God...GOD. He didn't care what it took—didn’t care that since he started doing dope, he had to increase the doses exponentially in order to feel God's unconditional love, to feel His arms around him. The blue-lipped sinking into God's steady heartbeat made him cry when he was straight—it was precious and only then was he able to forget everything he hated about himself, about his life: abandonment, moving from place to place, never able to get anyone to attach to him.

So it didn't matter where he was anymore, it didn't matter the dirtiness of the floor or the infested couch. It didn't matter that on the wall were black letters, red ones, scratched-in ones, all saying, fuck this, or eat my that...or...or...I was here, I exist. It didn't matter that he'd hear the occasional child of the addict in the background of his high, it didn't matter that he'd hear laughing or people ranting incoherently or threatening others—or threatening him. It...didn't...matter. He'd found a heaven, he was home.

Love me, love me...oh warm, inviting squalor; let me love you in my breathless way. Breathless...solidly breathless.

"Hey, baby," he heard out of nowhere. Anna kneeled close to him and lightly tugged his arm. He complied, pup-like, sitting up lazily.

"Come on, I'm gonna take you home," she said in a syrupy voice.

Felix gazed with unfocused eyes at the woman in front of him, at her hollow expression, then at some never-before-noticed purplish bruising around her neck. He touched the shadows and said softly, "What didja do, woman?"

Anna put her hand over Felix's, smoothing the skin with her thumb, "Ain't nothin'. Come on...it's been too many days, baby, you gotta rest—you gotta give your body a rest."

Felix chuckled voiceless, then leaned forward and whispered thickly, "You mean...I gotta heal?" He lightly bit her earlobe and she lifted a shoulder because he'd tickled her.

"Baby...come on," she urged, smiling at him.

Felix did nothing, though, lost for a moment in a renewed flow of serenity washing over him. Then, "Where you been, Anna? I was lookin' for you...I'm always lookin' for you." He spoke to her but fixed his gaze on something indefinable (most likely a soothing speck of light) and far away, his eyelids then drooping.

"I'd never leave you," she said.

Felix sniffled and leaned back against the graffiti-stained wall, closing his eyes finally, letting himself fall into a transitory condition of non-being, her voice humming along with the hum in his head. Days...it had been days of hanging out in the divinely dim rooms. Some called it a "shooting gallery" because this is what people did here: they shot themselves up in artistic misery, in black and white, in color, in three-dimensional sculpture. The subjects shot themselves to their versions of heaven by injecting, sniffing, smoking, ingesting, anything and everything, ultimately creating a gallery featuring freaky images, unspoken truths, bound, ecstatic and agonized screams. A shooting gallery...ha ha ha ha...

Anna settled in next to Felix, contemplating the gray sky outside a grimy window, resigning herself to waiting out Felix's high. She closed her own eyes, dozing a little. After some time, he reached over and rubbed her arm through her jacket. Her hair was stuffed into a wool cap which he slipped off, long damp-appearing strands toppling out. Leaning over, he inhaled her scent and furrowed his brows because he couldn't smell the vanilla or the cleanliness she usually obsessed over.

"Whatcha been doin', sister?" he asked, dreamy, nuzzling against her, his mouth grazing her damaged neck.

Anna averted her gaze and said, "Been workin'." She caressed his head a while, then eased him away, smiling thinly at him. Her eyes pleaded with him to get up.

He chuckled, and kept touching her, pushing her down at last to the floor and climbing on top of her. His boots clunked against the floor. "You letting customers hurt you, Anna?" He kissed her, sloppy in form, wet, thinking of her as that overturned cockroach, as that scrambling insect hoping to be saved. Hoping for release. But where his salvation was in the form of heroin, where was hers? How did she expect to be saved?

Oh yeah, the pain and the making-up to her was her salvation. It always had been…it always would be.

Scissors, once they are ripped out of a witch's hands when she’s caught cutting apart a bed sheet with which to make clothes for a beloved doll, can be so damaging.

“Anna! What are you doing, you evil child! Bruja!”

“Mama, I'm sorry! No, Mama!”

“Bruja!”

A pair of scissors slashed back and forth make ugly scars on five-year old skin, but it also can replenished a soul that’s been captured. How a poacher can make up for all that pain—how Anna’s mother made up for the gashes with all the doll clothes she could have ever asked for! Salvation!

"Baby, baby," Anna said, putting her arms around Felix as he fumbled with her, as he made some useless attempt at initiating something akin to sex. After a bit, he rolled to the side, enjoying another wave of slow reality. The place fogged up as he slipped into that place of half-existence again--remembering. The two regarded each other in knowing silence, two barely-alive children, two lost souls knowing the price they had paid for these days... understanding they’d probably pay again, and again.

***

Days earlier, Anna dragged Felix to the gallery because he was sick and in pain, and she was desperate for him to get better. They barely had any money, but hoped it would be enough. L'il Toby was the "owner" of the place--a huge dark-skinned man who had a sick sense of humor when it came to addicts. He liked to be cruel to them, humiliate them, he liked the power he maintained over them. He kept asking Felix what he had to offer, kept asking him to prove he wasn't a cop, stringing Felix along. Felix held onto Anna protectively, doing the talking, doing his damnedest at not appearing as sick as he was, much to the cruel enjoyment of L'il Toby.

Finally, as the torture grew dull, Li'l Toby agreed on a price--at least with regard to the cash. Then, he spiked the deal. He said, "You got it, you ain't no cop--that's cool. You can come in... you can hang for a while and use my shit for your offered price...with one more thing, one last …charge."

Swallowing hard at the nearness of salvation, freedom, Felix asked, "Sure...what is it? What do you want?"

"I want your woman," Toby breathed heavily, his mouth stretching into a wide grin, a toothy, blood-colored splotch of ugliness as he ogled Anna.

Felix balked at such a price, listening to some strain of humanity left in him despite the intense pain, and turned to walk away. “No, no…,” he grumbled, the humiliation of the "negotiation" stinging him. Love encouraged him to leave, but the sickness made him ready to give her up. His departure slowed, weighted by reluctance.

Anna then made his choice easy, stopping Felix, telling him it was okay, she was okay, it didn't mean nothin' to her because this was what she was: she lived to give of herself for her loved ones--it would be made up to her later. If selling herself to Toby was going to help Felix, so be it.

So the fuck be it.

They scrutinized each other in those few minutes outside the doorway to heaven, Anna smiling at Felix and wiping the sweat from his face, grasping his shaking body. Then in the radiance of the wintry morning shining on her from a window down the hall, Anna sold herself for several days worth of drugs for Felix--several hours of pain and degradation for several days worth of nirvana, all for her man.

So...the fuck be it.

While Felix stripped himself of his jacket and some other layers of clothing to scramble for a good vein, he listened to the grunts of his lover and the moans of the pig on top of her or wherever the bastard was. And as his body slammed against the wall in a most relieving rush, he recognized that the last bit of decency within him had disintegrated into nothingness.

It could have been worse, he thought later, cuddled up against that filthy back wall, not only could he have sold Anna for a little peace, he could have sold himself. Yeah, he'd already depleted himself of his soul, but he hadn't sold his body. At least not yet. No, no, he hadn't sunk that low. Besides, Anna had pronounced herself a whore, making herself into a nothing who had no feelings, who felt no pain, who had no future. One who had already been ground up and spit out. Who was souless. If someone found value in what was left of her...well ...so the fuck be it.

It sounds kinda like you. Might as well give up that last bastion--it's not like there's much to protect anymore. Who cares? Who really gives a shit?

***

With another sniffle, Felix touched the scar on Anna's cheek, following it along her chin and neck as if fingering the blue line of a river on a map. Skipping down to her stomach, he whispered, "It was just the once, right? You didn't have to do any more with that pusher?"

"Just the once--but don't you worry about nothin'. Let's go."

"Anna--did he do more than just screw you?"

"Don't you worry 'bout nothin'--everything's all right, now."

Felix heard himself talk but didn't recognize the voice, the words. It was like listening to a movie with eyes closed or overhearing a conversation through walls--the inflection was different, the tone flat, the emotion muted, the meaning lost. Don't matter no how--shit was shit was shit. They were both halves of a single whore, halves of a single street junky who would do everything, anything, for another fix. For a little peace. What did the metamorphosis matter? This was his destiny, this was his salvation--worth the cost. Likewise, Anna had her salvation and it was worth her pain. Felix would make it up to her.

After a while, Felix and Anna got to their feet to leave L’il Toby’s, walking past the other spaced-out people towards the door. But just before they left, Felix went back and let the cockroach go, flicking it with his fingers to get it moving once it was upright. Soundlessly, it scurried away along the wall into dirty oblivion, running alongside a string of light filtering in.