Remy wakes up each morning in the closest thing he can imagine to paradise. The sound of the waves breaking on the rocky beach just beyond his porch is the first thing he hears, before he’s awake enough to notice the yelling in the next apartment, and the salty breeze through his broken windows tickles his nose with the promise of another afternoon spent on the waves. It is earlier than he would like, but it always is; his is a soul meant to stumble out of bed as the sun reaches its zenith, forced by cruel necessity to wake early and labor for his daily bread.
Today is a day like any other. He wakes with a groan, purges himself of his dreams by jerking off, showers the foul liquid off his toned belly, and does not think about the thick layer of masking tape that protects him from his reflection. His breakfast is a box of high-protein slurry, his clothing is whatever bullshit his boss at the cafe told him to buy (“you’re a surfer, right, dude? So play that up. Wear cutoff jeans and a crop top or some shit.”), and he makes it all the way to the street before he sees one of the cacophony of black SUVs that have been patrolling his little village for the last week and remembers what today is.
When he gets back outside, his lucky hand grenade is a comforting presence in his backpack.
There’s no one at the cafe when he gets there, but a couple of black-suited, obviously-augmented ex-military types stroll in and take up position around the shop as soon as he flips the sign from “closed” to “open”. Remy isn’t sure whether they’re watching him or each other, and that makes him nervous. They don’t order anything, so Remy has plenty of time to stare out the streets, waiting to see someone he knows—or even someone he recognizes. None of the people on the village’s streets are familiar, for all that they’re pretending to be; almost all of the village’s real residents have been richly paid to spend today at home.
Remy’s not sure why his boss decided to give him this particular shift, but he definitely understands why she would want to take it herself. Too much risk of being shot in the head for fucking up, and surely she’s being rewarded for offering him up as a (potential) sacrificial lamb.
… and it’s not like he doesn’t want this. He just hopes that none of the security guards think to check his backpack before it’s time.
One of the VIPs arrives at exactly eleven; the other pulls up three minutes past the hour. The first one is in a heavily armored SUV (Remy sees how thick its doors are when the VIP steps out onto the sidewalk, and how heavily it sits on its wheels), and there’s something wrong with Their face. Gaps in what Remy can see, like Her eyes are always in his blind spot. He tries not to stare. Staring is dangerous.
The second one is driving a topless red convertible, and tosses the keys to a security guard as She gets out. She’s wearing a red dress that clings to her body like the blood splattering the streets after private security forces have their fun, high-heeled shoes, and a scattering of gold chains dripping with sparkling stones that Remy can’t even begin to identify. There is something wrong with Her face too: it’s scribbled over, obscured by a mess of thick, red lines. It’s probably all in Remy’s head. It hurts to look at Her.
Remy has been given to understand that the two of them choose to meet in his village because it is neutral ground, far enough from the nearest city to provide a safe distance while still being convenient enough that neither particularly minds the time to get to it. It is also well off the interstate, which makes it easier to secure. Neither expect to find any enemies in its peaceful streets. Remy is trying not to think about the weight in his backpack.
The first VIP, the one in the well-tailored suit, orders a cappuccino with rice milk and a flaky cherry tart. The second one dithers as Remy grows increasingly distressed and finally settles on a banana split and a bloody Mary with extra hot sauce. Neither item is on the menu, but Remy has them ready and delivered to the table quickly enough; the VIP’s security team briefed the cafe’s owner on Her needs shortly after their assistants settled on a location.
With his duty so discharged, Remy is supposed to return home. Any of the VIPs’ further needs will be satisfied by one of the people they have brought with them. Remy isn’t sure why they didn’t have one of them act as their barista, but perhaps they like to play pretend. Perhaps having someone like him, utterly outside their respective worlds, around makes them feel more grounded. Perhaps, he thinks, this is the closest thing to slumming that they’re able to imagine.
Instead of going home, Remy slips into the cafe’s back room. Paces, clutching his lucky hand grenade.
All he has to do is throw it.
Babalon is hip-deep into a story about one of Her interminable stable of lovers, an engineer for a weapons manufacturer who moonlights as a ritual magician, and God is starting to get bored. This is how it always goes, after the greetings and social niceties; Babalon just likes talking about Herself. Likes being seen. God is certain that She’d be happier to have their meetings somewhere public, where She could make people properly jealous, but God’s assistants know to strenuously reject even the faintest hint of that. They do not care for the spotlight.
At least Their drink is adequate. Nothing special, but not a total waste.
“… and so I told him no, there aren’t lunar spiders, and would you believe that the bastard broke down crying? How pathetic can a man be? Great dick, though,” She adds, wistfully. “Biblical.”
“Is that so,” God says, just to fill the air.
“Oh, you wouldn’t get it,” She’s right. God doesn’t. “It’s all about—okay, so, when you’re being railed, really properly railed, and you look up into a man’s face and it’s like you’re his entire world and he’s almost high on all of those lovely neurotransmitters and he’d do anything just to have it last one more minute even as he’s desperately trying to cum and you can tell that he’s thinking some fucking regressive shit about claiming you with his sperm but it doesn’t matter because he’s hitting just the right spot and then you clench and he can’t help himself—”
“Stop. Please stop. You’re right, We don’t get it. We don’t want to. You’re disgusting.”
“Yeah? What, you’d rather talk business? Oh, another billion dollars,” Babalon laughs, “like that’ll make a difference. I heard you were killing your investors.”
“… that’s a filthy lie,” God sips Their cappuccino, just in case. “All our dealings are purely within the realm of business.”
“And Vince Orion threw himself out the window of his penthouse suite? As if anyone believes that.”
God shakes Their head, faux-sadly. “Tragic, but We are given to understand it was a family matter. None of Our concern.”
“Really.”
“Yes. Really.”
“Everyone says his daughter’s gonna take over. The only other person who was there, and she’s one of your clients.” Babalon points at God with the tip of Her spoon. Chocolate syrup drips onto the table. “You really think acting innocent is believable?”
“It’s not an act, honey. I have a lot of clients. Even Vince took advantage of my services.”
“Sure.”
“And We have a lot of other investors. None of them have died recently, as far as We know. Losing two in quick succession would be rather embarrassing, considering Our business.”
“One isn’t?” Babalon waves Her spoon, splattering the ground. “If you wanted him to survive that fall he would have! I’ve seen the specs on your latest mods, they’re downright obscene. Really pushing the limits of what human means, aren’t you?”
God shrugs. “Are you going somewhere with this, honey?”
“… no,” Babalon says, visibly deflating.
“Then why bother? Is something wrong?”
“No, I—”
But Her words are cut short as Remy steps out of the back room and, in one smooth motion, throws his half-cooked lucky hand grenade directly at the table She and God are sitting at.
The wind over the ocean is salty and clean. It’s a bit too strong for good waves, but this far out it hardly matters. There’s nothing for the swells to break on. Just the waves, and the setting sun, and Remy lying on his back on his surfboard, staring up into the darkening sky. Another night in paradise.
Maybe in a bit he’ll paddle in towards the beach, get some moonlit surfing in before he needs to fall asleep again. That sounds nice to him, but there’s no rush. He’s got all the time in the world, except …
His brain twitches against the thought, pinned in place like a dying butterfly. There’s no hurry. There’s nothing he needs to do. Except he can’t remember where the beach is. Except he can’t remember why he decided to paddle so far out. There’s something missing, and it hurts to try to think about, like part of his brain has been cut out with so much more precision than his own efforts to excise the thing he sees in his dreams, the reason he can’t bear to look at his own reflection. It hurts to know what he has lost, and it hurts to not be able to, the phantom ache of a missing limb he has never been permitted to acknowledge.
Something has gone very wrong, he thinks, and he shoves his face into the water. Holds himself under until he can fight his way back to the surface and crawl back onto his surfboard, sputtering and spitting. His mouth is full of salt and his nose is full of rotting fish and the surfboard breaks under his weight and drops him right back into the hot, roiling water. He was wrong: it’s nothing like the ocean. It’s just as filthy as he is.
Remy met C. in his village’s one dive bar, a grimy, ill-lit basement lurking beneath a mediocre tourist-oriented lunch spot, nearly four months before he blew up the cafe he’d worked at ever since he dropped out of high school and moved to the ocean. C. was not a local, and really had no business there, but no one cared to enforce the unspoken rule that the unnamed dive was locals only because C. wore the world like C. belonged. After an hour it was hard for Remy to believe that C. hadn’t lived there at least as long as him, and by the end of the night he’d have sworn that C. had known him for years.
Everyone knew C., and everyone liked C.
It probably helped that C. was hot. Like, really hot. Not airbrushed supermodel-hot, like Babalon, by real-person-hot. Imperfect and all the more glorious for it.
Remy wasn’t in the room when the guys started gossiping about C.; he wasn’t really the type for that sort of locker room talk. It always felt a bit … vulgar, to him. Uncomfortable. It wasn’t that it was disrespectful, exactly, he got that that was part of the fun of that sort of male bonding activity. It was a way of taking back power from people who exerted their own power over men, putting the sort of women who were too selective (or not selective enough) about who they fucked in their place, of course. The idea that people could choose whether to consent or not was a threat, he understood that, of course. But it was still uncomfortable.
If he’d been in the room then maybe he’d have picked up on some of the inconsistencies. Everyone objectified C. a bit differently, of course, personal preference and all that, but the details didn’t line up. Even the most basic stuff, like what color C.’s skin was, seemed to be entirely up to whoever was talking at any given moment.
But of course by that point all the men were very drunk, so it was probably nothing.
C. didn’t go home with Remy the first night. C. waited a whole week before suggesting the idea, probably knowing that C.’s image had haunted his dreams since the night they’d met, seamlessly stepping into a role that had previously been filled by an amalgamation of several of his high school crushes and one particularly strict teacher—the one whose disdain had, ultimately, led to him dropping out and fleeing the city. C. filled the role better than his imagination had, so of course Remy leapt at the chance to make it real.
It was his first time bottoming.
Afterward, as they lay on the bed together, looking out at the ocean while C.’s cum leaked out of his well-stretched ass, C. started talking politics. Not the sort Remy knew anything about; C. had to explain that direct action wasn’t about voting. He’d never heard a thing about the history of the struggle of labor against capital, nor how the material conditions that capital ascendent created inevitably led to its downfall—or how they had, once, before the bosses chained the world with technology that only they could control and, in so doing, mortally wounded it.
A lot of it went over Remy’s head. He knew that he wasn’t really a thinker. But it made sense when C. talked about it, in a way that nothing else in the world ever did except the ocean’s waves beneath his surfboard, and he loved listening to C. talk. He was very much in love, and when C. told him about God and Babalon he knew exactly what he needed to do.
It hurt to pull the pin on his lucky hand grenade. It was the only thing C. had left him before C. vanished, and he wished that he could have kept it to remember C. forever.
“… Sea? Weird name,” Babalon muses.
“C., ma’am,” God’s memory retrieval technician murmurs without looking up. “Like the letter.”
“Huh. An alias? Are they one of yours, Lydia?”
“No,” God’s missing eyes are fixed on the extracted videos—a whole wall of them, brief clips looping over and over, slowly coalescing into a coherent picture. Remy’s miserable little life, splayed open for Their perusal. “They are not. Don’t insult me.”
“Sorry, sorry! I just thought,” Babalon waves Her hands to ward off the suggestion of God’s anger. She hasn’t bothered to change out of Her ruined dress, and nor has She allowed God’s technicians to repair Her injuries, so the effect is rather like a fresh corpse denying its own death. “They aren’t one of mine! And there aren’t any other players sophisticated enough for this, are there?”
“Not that We knew.”
“… then who the fuck are they?!”
“If We knew,” God hisses, glaring daggers from the emptinesses where Their eyes aren’t, “We would tell you.” God’s coiffed perfection is an uncanny contrast to Babalon’s dishabille; They patched Their wounds and changed into a fresh suit immediately after the attack. It is a perfect, opalescent white, untouched by blood or ash; the kevlar plates are tailored with such care that only someone who was intimately familiar with God’s body would notice the extra bulk. “Perhaps you should go back to your own stronghold and wait until We find out more.”
“You want me out of here? Sure, but I’m taking him with me.”
“… what? Why?”
“Babe, he’s our only lead on this fucker,” which should not be true, but their security forces have combed the village for anyone else who can recall C. and found nothing. “I want to know what’s up just as much as you do.”
“Hah. Like you have the tech to,” God shakes Their head. “Fine. Fine! You can have whatever’s left of him when We finish imaging his brain. Got that?”, they snap at the technician, who nods distractedly. “Okay?
“That’s perfect,” Babalon practically sings, loving the frustration on God’s face, “thank you~”
Remy wakes up each morning in the closest thing he can imagine to paradise. Each week he is somewhere different, as he follows his dreams across the country, and today the morning sun’s rays slip in through cracked glass to dance on his closed eyelids as a chorus of birdsong ushers him into wakefulness. The bodies next to him—two, this time—grunt and roll over and snuggle closer together as he extricates himself and stumbles over to the little shack’s toilet. There’s a mirror hung right over it, and he watches it unwarily as he noisily pisses. She is there, again—not the one from his dreams, but the other one, with Her face scribbled over. She is naked, just as he is, and the sight of Her body makes him shudder in fear even as his cock stiffens.
He shakes the last few drops of piss off his tip and turns away from Her, and Remy does not see Babalon watch him as he walks back to bed, where the bodies of his temporary companions reach up to embrace him. One of them coos over his dick and shifts and he sinks inside, engulfed in warmth, feeling nothing.
As he thrusts he thinks about his motorcycle, and the feeling of hills beneath its wheels, rising and falling in a warm, comfortable rhythm. He thinks about the weight in its saddlebags, and how he will soon share that weight with his latest friends, and the bodies kissing and panting beneath him as he fucks them—
Remy comes with the taste of salt on his lips, and Babalon smiles.