Drekkig Frank

The video played again, from the top, for what must have been the hundredth time. Breena sat transfixed, remote in hand, as the video chugged frame by frame to its conclusion. A slow arc of blood, an incandescent swathe of black diamonds under ultra-violet light. Breena held her breath, lost focus, tried to take each image in its entirety and store it in some nameless mental cache.

“Some Sony Oyabun dropped a few billion yen and went bugfuck, killed his daughter in this Ska club in Shinjuku.”

“Hmmph, must have been a terror at the Kendo club.”

Breena shifted the windows on her computer, gave half her screen over to Puff-Adder. A burst of laughter came from her speakers, she looked at the screen, the severed head was repeating its journey, falling up, up in a tangle of sparking droplets and shorn black hair, then down, down, the face turning away, the mouth open and surprised.

“Gotta be the fastest haircut in Japan.”

Puff-Adder was laughing again, but there was a note of lunacy with each exhalation. His avatar was a leering skull that went through strange permutations in time with his voice. Snakes poked out of the empty eye sockets, flames licked the surface of the skull, it leered and tongued and jabbered in imitation of an oscilloscope.

“I heard that you get a good thirty seconds of consciousness with a clean…”

Breena cut him off, suddenly bored by the repeating video, the repeating conversation of Puff-Adder, he really didn’t get it. If he didn’t have such a good upload speed she’d have dumped him ages ago.

With a sigh she double clicked the folder marked Work, went into a hidden sub folder. Her secret personal stash, the crème-de-la-crème of low key suicide snuff. Here was a two terabyte haul of broken dreams and anguished cries to nobody, shat out onto the black solar riptides of the internet and dredged up by dedicated and degenerate data divers.

She let her intuition guide her, randomly selected a video file marked g01.avi. The scene opened on a dingy little garage or outhouse, the floor covered in grey waterproof sheeting. In the centre of the sheeting was a large and clumsy looking machine, a wooden frame with a huge, crude blade mounted on a vertically swinging arm. A man walked into shot, old, fat, white and nude. He wore a crude cloth mask of some shiny material, the handle of a butt-plug protruded from his sagging ass crack. Breena wiped her right hand clean of crumbs on her mousemat, then undid the strings on her track pants.

On screen the man performed some crude maintenance on the machine, checked its hinges, then lay face down on the sheeting, hand poised over a lever mechanism. Breena worked her hand faster and faster, taking tiny details of the room, the dirty floor, the unpainted walls, the swinging light bulb. The pasty flanks of the man quivered under the light and Breena’s face flushed with blood. The man touched the lever. Silently the blade fell across his midriff and cut him neatly in two. Breena’s eyes danced over the raw open ends of the man’s torso, the slick dull colours of his insides being painted over with bright blood. Premonitory twitches wracked the ruined carcass, and Breena stared hard at the man’s surging chest, working her hand inside her track pants, working it, working it. She came, lost in the rush of orgasm, the man long gone from this world, gone from her mind, as the rolling crush of the void subsumed her.

Puff-Adder snorted in vexation, seeing Ch3rry_N0v4’s status switch to “Away”, he was planning on asking her to cyber-fuck him whilst they surfed. He put down the Twinky he was eating and rapid-fire-typed a scathing appraisal of Ch3rry’s latest find. Then he checked his You Tube page, went to favourites. He watched a soldier throw a puppy off a cliff; he watched a goat herd set ablaze with an incendiary grenade, stampeding through a shanty town. He watched an insurgent step out from behind an adobe building, fumble a rocket launcher, take three rounds through the guts, dead in an orange and red mist. Helicopter missile strikes, fatal car crashes, rectal prolepses, nasal sex, voring, unbirthing, furryism. Puff adder exhausted his favourites in record time, went back like a whipped dog to Ch3rry’s site: SnuffBox.com.

He listened to bland MTV rock music, the chugging rock and roll tumbling through the cavernous chamber of his head, a freight train with no cargo, an empty juggernaut charging headlong to nowhere. The singer’s voice was trite and screechy, raising hopes just to dash them, elucidating his own desperate need for love and his desire to eradicate that raw, burning emotion.

There was no one around to interact with, Puff-Adder had to provide his own entertainment. No one to degrade or elevate him, so he degraded himself.

Hello Dolly issued feebly from the dusty grille of the jukebox, and Frank had to admit, in all his years, he had never heard Louis Armstrong’s trumpet sound so lost, so futile. A cheery brass warbling masking an ocean of rage. He heard the notes, and underneath the notes a profusion of counter-chords, withering cross rhythms and staccato denials of the song being played. He heard the music in its true form, as cheap white sounds arranged to amuse the masses, whilst behind the mask the true soul of the music whipped itself into flames, frenzy, confusion, and ultimately, silence. A welter of tears built up behind his eyeballs, his throat caught and flooded with bitter saliva. Nobody noticed Frank clutching his beer glass with white knuckles, tears rolling hot and fat down his weather beaten face. Nobody noticed and nobody cared.

The whiskey soured his guts, the music soured his world, and through this new mood he saw the bar shift and reconfigure, for a split second his old self crystallised around the moment, then slipped away, a serpent winding through time, sloughing its skin, leaving him that much closer to the end, that much poorer in both emotion and memory. He rubbed the pale ring of baby smooth skin where his wedding band had been. He rubbed the coarse swathe of stubble that lined his face. The crying had subsided, deep in his heart he knew whatever grief he could conjure was self centred, and self absorbed. Why hadn’t she fought him more, why hadn’t she put out his eyes with her shiny red fingernails? Why hadn’t she swung one of those heels he hated so much, swung it right into his face and broken all his teeth? Why hadn’t she screamed for help? Why, why…But of course he knew the answers to all these questions, she was his daughter, she wouldn’t hurt her dad…

The sense of time dilation intensified, he could feel the endless nights of booze buckling up behind and around and underneath him, like tectonic plates and tidelines and the dying cycles of stars, pinning him like a butterfly to the flesh of here and now. If it were possible to smash reality and wish oneself out of existence with sheer willpower, he would have done it then, as the oblivious strangers treated him to a cold indifference that was all too forgiving, too kind, for a man who had done the things he’d done.

And because he wanted penance or punishment he went down to a local whorehouse, and after a brief inspection of his dick they let him into a tiny room with a two-seater sofa and a black and white TV showing horse racing. A black man with bright white eyes took up both seats on the sofa, watching and waiting and sitting perfectly still, and silent. Frank could not recall the woman’s face only her ass, as this is what he had asked to see, and then only for long enough to touch a lit cigarette to it, eliciting a bone cutting shriek from the owner of the ass. The black man was up off the sofa looking angry, but he sensed some yielding need in Frank and simply beat his head against a nightstand a few times and threw him down a thin metal fire escape, coins and receipts and broken promises spilling from his pockets, bouncing down the steel stairs like confetti, or party favours.

Frank woke up in the unforgiving light of early morning, the reverse twilight when everything chugs once more into life and activity. He looked for a long time at the back door of the whorehouse, where shadows danced and flitted, where tired looking ex-mothers and single-mothers and soon-to-be-mothers and never-would-be-mothers were finishing up for the night. The woman that Frank had burned last night was leaving, her face closed and hardened like a dead leaf in that cold and purple-blue light. Out of the corner of her eye she caught sight of Frank, did a quick double take, then spun on her flat heels, giving Frank one almighty wordless punt in the groin. He winced and sucked in his breath, rolling in the congealed scum and dead slugs, finally getting to his feet with the aching throb of his balls pounding through his whole body. He looked through his wallet, no paper money, no cash cards, nothing. In his pocket there were several small coins, a pen knife, a sodden pack of cigarettes. No lighter.

He went down to the canal, where as a boy he had threaded bits of raw bacon on strings and pulled pale, stunted crayfish from the muck brown water. He spat and retched into that water, watching the white foam swirl and drift away from him, feeling nothing but the sharp imperatives issuing from his body, he stank, he ached, he was wet through to his underwear. Frank swung first one leg up on to the lock head, then the other, he tottered in a seating position, then slipped calmly into the water. A few dull brown bubbles rose to the surface and popped silently. Then a whole surge of bubbles, then Frank’s head broke the surface, mouth gaping like a fish, inhaling the water, sinking back under. He did not come up a second time.

And in that dreamless sleep which followed, the Frank that was went away through a window. A cold and bloody eye unlocked in a place that could not be pointed to. Frank felt his head explode in silent fission, a point between his eyes unlocked and unlinked from everything that was then. The ultimate now hit him, disconnected from bodily sensations, blown beyond the grey void and out and through. The circles span into spheres, span into vertices encompassing him, blanketing him, bye bye, Frank, you were a cunt, let’s see if we can’t do better next time.


…soma cum umlaut rettic activation bream me a sliver bream dish a man mind forthwith…

And in that dreamless sleep Frank saw his own face inverted and caged, locked into a monolithic neural pattern of pure input, pure devouring hunger for the raw image. He acceded and nodded his etheric head. Anything to save him from himself.

…rumble from the black hole unbox a slash matrix give it a dream a little dream of me an acid gas world tomb world lung without form caged effervescence a time faggot silently always in labours revolving a king realigning smash pile whale in bright irons a slipshod mountumi a god sworn be beheaded head chopped off and stumbling in its stead…

And vast chasms of reality unspooled in Frank’s mind, he saw the fields of life, the endless repetition, the workaday brutality of the combined commerce concerns of the theta impulse range. All this was his, and the memory of Frank grew small and dim, a darkling light on the shore of his consciousness, as an ocean of sparking razor blades harrowed its length.

…range and aghast at these profit margins oh ape wreck ship wreck if my favour turns ill and be borne thrice against a tide of splendiferous maimings note the augmentation of the bioform shed no glossy tears thanks to nictating eyelids and breathable membrane mesh on thorax do we not aim to please and save you in your hour of need feel the sonorous hum oh the penetrating vibe of our symbiosis thought is feeling is raw needful input output all five of the elements consoled in micro vibrational frequencies strung about us as pearls no mere metaphor will give you a chance to observe row fearful the waves shame breach the walls of the matrix about you fear hatred manifest on these sub plains as easy as this eye gazes...

And up in her dingy room above Perfecto’s Pizza, Ch3rry_Nov4 lay in her empty bed, eating cream cake and watching the stars shift around the screen saver on her headset. She felt a sudden hot press of total sensory loss, like she had fallen backwards through her bed and was plunging down through the floorboards and further, through the earth’s crust. Her dad had died and she knew it for sure. She choked back a sob, as the door of her crummy flat slammed off its hinges, followed by a neat procession of men in black masks and black body armour, and shiny black batons ready to snap forth and bludgeon. They flipped Breena’s considerable bulk with ease, dragged her hands behind her back and cuffed them at the wrists. Breena grunted and exhaled in confusion, but when the canvas bag slipped over her head she really lost it. Kicking out with the force only cornered women can muster she rolled in the detritus of her shut in life, lashing out at anything that resisted, legs, groins, the bed, her bookcase. A sharp ticking sound heralded the use of a tazer, and Breena bucked and convulsed underneath the current while one man sat astride her like a rodeo clown, applying the charge again and again.

“Better stop Kurtz, you’ll give the bitch a heart attack.”

Breena heard them, but she was so dazed and disorientated she wondered which bitch they were referring to.

Frank sobbed in the convulsive corridors of the overmind, feeling simultaneously the emotions of Breena and the men who were sticking it to her, in the very real sense of that expression. It was all some masterful game to the machine, all these fictitious little people in their fabricated drama. But of course Frank could detect the bone deep need that pulsed through him now, as an extension of the overmind, the need for that part of Breena that was not her, the limbic system extensions that popular vernacular dubbed the cyberbrain. Frank was the key to the strong room. He saw it as the machine mind saw it, a haven, a hidden fortress, a means to an end...

…endus sum gratis fire away far away home to your wounded daughter’s brain we go no need to wipe your feet Frank you shat on the sitting room floor moons ago and that spoor has manifest implications come to we drone and we show you the way to go home…