Note from Diana: I was at the bar one night when a guy in his mid-40s approached me, and by his khaki pants and spook grin, I could tell he was a fed. I was waiting for a friend to finish up in the bathroom so we could hightail out of there. Why did this guy have to choose me? There were two dozen other chudz for him to bother. And yet he sat next to me and lasered me down with his defense-system eyes, and said:
BAD TIMES IN DUBAI
I happened to be in Dubai for work, and bombs were falling on both sides of the Strait of Hormuz, when the cruise ship MV Pinochet, no relation, rather adventurously docked in the city to be closer to the fireworks. But soon the ship was placed under strict quarantine by the World Health Organization, thus putting a slight pause in its years-long party around the world. 67 passengers tested positive for morivirus, an exotic and mysterious virus about which little was known other than that humans can only catch it through sexual intercourse with orangutans.
The World Health Organization was particularly concerned by this outbreak. While the ship’s passengers had spent an orgiastic week in Bali, it seemed improbable that 67 passengers all had sex with orangutans—having sex with an orangutan was an affront to nature and morality and the Baby Jesus more terrible than fratricide—and besides, their stay in Bali had been three months prior. Likely, the World Health Organization concluded, only one, or maybe two or three people had sex with orangutans, caught morivirus, and spread it to the others. This conclusion meant that morivirus was spreading human-to-human for the first time in history—and posed a threat to the whole world. Worse, WHO had no idea how it was spreading and only a vague idea of its symptoms.
I discovered this information after I woke up hungover on the deck of the cruise ship—a rough awakening under the noontime desert sun. I poked my nose over the edge and peered down. Dozens of WHO ghosts in hazmat suits had set up a laboratory on the docks. Behind machine gun nests, armed soldiers with oxygen masks pointed guns at the ship. No escape? I wondered. Waving a pair of white panties that had been left on the deck, I managed to assemble a parley with a couple WHO ghosts. They stood fifteen feet away on the gangway, anonymous beneath their white hoods.
“Hello,” I said. “There appears to be a mistake. I’m not a passenger of this ship. Please, may I deboard?”
“A mistake?” one responded with a Darth Vader voice. “How did you mistakenly board a quarantine ship?”
“It was a rough night? Some woman took me onboard? I thought I would get laid?”
It was all coming back to me. The Firm had sent me to Dubai for another job that required a lot of legwork. Something about import/export, or maybe international insurance? Feeling bored, anxious, pent-up, I ducked out of work early and hit a bar by the waterfront—someplace European. I was halfway through my 4th dunkel when Ava Brawn approached and asked if I’d buy her a drink. She was drop-dead gorgeous: huge blue eyes, ivory-pale skin, flushed cheeks, and a sickly shadow around her eyes that I found Xtra-Sexy.
By the time she mentioned something about going back to her ship, I was eight or nine beers deep. And something funny must’ve happened to one of those beers, because I sure was feeling funny. Boats? I slurred. I hate boats! My father, who also worked at the Firm, died after falling from a yacht off the coast of Chile. His father before him, who worked for a postwar precursor to the Firm, died in similar circumstances in Indonesia. It’s not a boat, silly, Ava said, it’s a ship.
As she dragged me down the street, I wasn’t exactly in the mood or capacity to escape. And next I could remember, I had just awoken on the Pinochet’s deck.
“Well, did you?” the ghost said.
“Huh?”
“Get laid? You said you thought you might…”
“I’m not sure?” I said. The ghost wrote on his/her notepad. “But as you can see, it was all just a mistake. I was drunk and tired. You understand…”
“Regardless of how you got on the ship, you’ll have to remain until the quarantine is lifted. Strict orders,” the ghost said.
“But I’m not even a passenger. I didn’t choose to get stuck in quarantine.”
“Too bad.” Already, the ghosts were shuffling away. Sayonara, Peace and Love, and Bon Voyage.
I was now stuck. Should I escape? Should I hide? I started to remember strange details from the prior night…naked women…exotic pets…more exotic drugs…Slinking off to the lounge, I decided to read up on morivirus while waiting for more memories to emerge.
A handful of people were strewn about on tables, chairs, and the floor. They groaned, tossing and turning. Their clothes were torn, covered in stains, and even burnt in some places. The place must have been the scene of some horrible disaster. Broken bottles and discarded clothes ornamented the floor. Stockings, wigs, and panties hung from the chandelier. A komodo dragon was (hopefully) asleep by the bar. It had the words VOX POPULI VOX CANIS spraypainted on its back. I vaguely recalled that her name was Clytemnestra. Or was it Chlamydia?—Stand back! A pot-bellied, half-naked Afrikaner growled at me the night before when I tried to feed the komodo dragon beer, that’s a she-dragon! And she-dragons are vicious! She’s already snapped fingers, noses, and cocks off a dozen idiots like you—whatever her name, remembering this, I gave her a wide berth before I settled at a booth table in the shadows to read up on morivirus.
As I scrolled, a new memory—or maybe a dream?—appeared. A dozen naked women were dancing on the deck, silhouetted by a sky ablaze with missiles, burning skyscrapers, and burning water. It was an old-fashioned dance, the kind that the old men—the majority of the passengers—on the cruise ship seemed to appreciate; the old men hollered and wolf whistled and swigged their glass bottles as the young women’s nipples shook erect against the odd light. What was I doing? I remember smoke curling like rancid worms from my mouth and shots of liquor and Ava somewhere nearby. Achtung! Meine Damen und Herren, ich stelle Ihnen den Kapitän vor, a nasal voice screeched from the shadowy recesses within the ship.
The dancers continued their slow shaking steps while the old men grew somber and cleared a space in the audience. They commenced to nervously slick their hair and button their shirts and drink the last of whatever liquor still remained. While I could hear the voices and the bombs and the waves and I could even see the dancers moving to it, I couldn’t hear the music. Like watching a TV show through a window.
A palanquin was dragged out onto the deck by six shirtless men. Der Kapitän! the old men on the deck cheered, all looking away from the figure on the palanquin. The dancers continued their dance. The men looked away. The small crowd that huddled around the bar had gone quiet. The people were gazing somewhere just beyond the captain. No one looked at him—but I looked at him. I stared deeply at the figure resting on the palanquin. I stared so deep and so long that Ava slapped my thigh and hissed at me to stop.
But here my memory rubberbanded, snapping from the image of the captain back to the image of the crowd, buffering and buzzing with static as I tried to remember looking at the captain. I could see the men and the dancers and the water burning behind them and I could see the men carrying the palanquin—but the figure on the palanquin was somehow blurred out of the vision of my memory. In this brief recollection, I tried to force glances at the figure on the palanquin, at the captain. What I saw, or thought I saw, or dreamed couldn’t have been real. I forced my mind’s eye to sneak closer to the captain. I saw what could have only been a pile of broomsticks holding up the wizened face of a tiny old monkey, half-obscured by his giant captain’s hat. Or else the captain was just a sack of bones. Dancing and crying and singing, the old men and the young girls and the other deathly-looking freaks all held up their glasses and toasted—Der Kapitän!—and their glasses twinkled in the light of missiles exploding overhead and everyone laughed through wide bony mouths before downing their glasses and smiling and all of this for a captain who sat silently, motionlessly, nothing more than a shadow.
SEX MONKEY, SEX MONKEY, WHAT DO YOU SAY?
Very little research existed regarding morivirus. And what did exist contradicted the other sources. Eventually I found an anthropologist’s PhD thesis titled: SEX MONKEY, SEX MONKEY, WHAT DO YOU SAY? Or, Relating Visions of Human Power Over, and Stewardship of, Nature in Indonesian Folk Tales, Oral Roberts University, 2017. In suffocated, almost purposefully confusing prose, the anthropologist described a mystery cult hidden in the Indonesian jungle. According to local doctors, members of the cult had contracted a rare virus which caused erratic and evil behavior. The anthropologist attempted to learn more about both the virus and the cult, but found only rumors. She noted that among escaped members of the mystery cult, rates of morivirus are at 100%. But, ex-members always die after escaping the cult.
As a woman and an outsider, she would not be permitted to witness their mysteries. Studying the cult and understanding the virus would be so dangerous as to be impossible. And yet she did it anyway. She made the journey through the Indonesian jungle. It lasted fifteen days. Along the way, one assistant died of “black bile” and another went mad, calling ants “his treasure” and setting out to amass a fortune in his currency. He was never seen again.
The anthropologist carried in one bag journals and test tubes and recording devices to keep careful record of everything she saw. While traversing a canyon halfway through the journey, a flash flood threatened to take the bag. She sacrificed her food and dove into the floodwater to grab the heavy bag, returning half-drowned to the shore—all just to keep the records which she hadn’t even written yet. For the remainder of the expedition, the pair would eat only scavenged fruit and plants—like true indigenes, she remarked.
Finally, after fifteen grueling days to cross a mere fifty miles, she arrived at the cult temple. By this time, her last assistant had parted ways with her, camping in a cave overlooking the site because he was too terrified to meet the cult. She would be alone with the murderous cult.
According to her report, she learned that the cult, known in their own secret language as the Followers of the Natural Ideal, consider orangutans as their brothers. One of the early initiation rites is to live with a group of orangutans for a month. The foundational mystery—which an initiate learns soon after the first rite—tells that man and orangutan once lived in close proximity as brothers, but clever man progressed past the orangutan by receiving the power of language from the god of thunder.
Each subsequent mystery peels another layer from this myth to reveal horror after horror. The anthropologist’s prose grew confusing, labyrinthine, and even inherently puzzling, as if she had gotten lost in the cult mysteries—or was taking part in them. I read a line, drew a conclusion, and was confused; I re-read the same line and drew a different conclusion—the prose itself concealed and revealed layers of the myth. Finally, after the anthropologist’s prose had disintegrated—or sublated—into tortuous, thousand-word long sentences that snaked back and forth from one lie to the next, she finally related the final mystery. It revealed a truth that shattered all prior myths and made a mockery of the hundred rites for which the most elite cultists had devoted their entire lives to learn. The Thunder God raped the Mother Orangutan, his sister, thus creating man. For the sin of the father, man was cursed to leave the forest and suffer temptation and war and sickness in cities and villages, while orangutans would live in primordial peace. Man could reclaim the peace of the forest only by reuniting with the orangutans in a harem bed. This was their way of purifying their bloodline.
As a novitiate progressed through the ranks, they were admitted from one hut on the temple complex to the next, slowly gaining access to new fraternal lodges where social norms were lifted. In the first, speaking was forbidden, and the initiates lived in silence. Those who couldn’t progress to the next rank were stuck in silence for years. In the next lodge, speaking was allowed. In the tenth lodge, free love was permitted and encouraged. And so on.
Each prior lodge removed a new social boundary while each mystery revealed a new horror. After progressing from isolated novitiates to integrated masters, after a dozen lodges moved them from monastic silence to hedonism, in the final lodge there was a brothel, and inside the brothel were orangutans on chains.
Here the thesis disintegrated into blank pages.
After a ten-page long blank space, the anthropologist announced that she had lost her painstaking ethnographic fieldnotes on the eve of her departure from the cult. In a fit of rage—or perhaps a backward sense of mercy?—the high priest had attempted to burn down the anthropologist’s hut with her inside. She only survived because she was sleeping in the cave with her assistant, but she sadly couldn’t say the same of the three thousand pages of ethnographic fieldnotes she had compiled throughout her five-year—five-year?!—stay at the cult temple. She watched from the cave in the mountain above the temple as her life’s work burned. Consequently, her research was typed from memory in a hotel in Jakarta.
Oddly enough, her test tubes escaped unscathed. After an even more grueling return through the jungle, along which they were hounded by assassins of the cult, she immediately had the blood-filled tubes tested. 100% of the samples—51/51—tested positive for morivirus. She did not however make any particular claims about its symptoms or how it spread.
The anthropologist’s findings were that an endemic outbreak of morivirus might have altered the psychology of the cult members, leading to higher levels of sexual activity and violence. Based on accounts of the cult, very few members lived past the age of 40. It seems that human relations of power over nature are simultaneously controlled by the very natures they seek to control, the anthropologist concluded.
A google search revealed she had disappeared soon after presenting her thesis; in fact, she was a missing person, still sought after in her hometown of White Rock, New Mexico.
BOMBS ABOVE, SHADOWS BELOW
Unsure what exactly this could mean for me, I looked for something that would calm my fears. There had to be some article to confirm for me that morivirus was nothing worse than the common cold.
I found a report about a minor American manager of the Grasberg Mine on Papua. Gone mad, he locked himself in his house with his secretary, a group of villagers, and an orangutan (trafficked by business associates from Borneo). The man was eventually forced out, whereupon it was discovered that he was coughing up blood. He was sent to a hospital in Jayapura. He died of internal bleeding soon after being diagnosed with morivirus. Closer study of the virus in the lab confirmed traditional reports that the virus can only be transmitted to humans via sexual intercourse with orangutans. Symptoms of morivirus, cobbled together across a variety of reports, rumors, and lies, include:
pallor
severe weight loss
increased libido
insomnia
narcolepsy
amnesia
erratic behavior
hemorrhages in the lungs
As I read this, Ava Brawn appeared before me. She was bikinied and carrying two oranges.
“What happened last night?” I asked.
She shrugged, grinning.
“It was a typical night on the Pinochet. You don’t remember?”
“Not really. I think I remember cross-dressing, and karaoke, and Clytemnestra the komodo dragon?”
“Clytemnestra?” she laughed. “Don’t you mean Callisto?”
“Oh. So what happened?”
“We had fun. What’s wrong with a little fun? Anyway, I’m going to swim. Would you like to join?”
I looked down at my clothes: an oxford shirt, khakis, and sneakers. I couldn’t remember if my underwear was clean, nor if there were any holes.
“I’m not exactly dressed for it.”
“Man wasn’t born clothed.”
“Yeah, good point, good point. I think I’ll pass, though, you know, I’m not much in the mood for it, I think, you know?”
She raised an eyebrow.
“That wasn’t your attitude last night.”
She turned and left for the pool. Her ass and thighs were covered in long thin bruises, like barcodes.
I went behind the bar and poured myself an expensive scotch, the kind my coworkers at the Firm drink. I drank and tried to collect my thoughts. Was I in danger? I must’ve fallen asleep because suddenly it was night and my head was on the bar. Despite the party, I had been awoken by a strange hum overhead. What was it?
“What is that?” I slurred, sitting up. I had addressed myself to a young girl in cat ears and a black leotard.
« Comment ça ? » she mewed over a glass of champagne.
“What?”
« T’es complètement con ou quoi ? Chuis française, je ne parle que le français »
“Huh?”
« Hein ? Hein ? Nique ta mère, crétin »
Behind her, through the window, a beam of light ripped across the sky and a ball of flame exploded. Then, the sound came: the earth itself was split, a terrible sword had scythed reality apart.
“What the fuck is going on?” I shouted, jumping from the table.
“Relax, man relax.” A man said. “Those were the Patriot missiles. They’re intercepting an Iranian barrage.”
Ah right. The war. Iran. Trump, Epstein. Etc.
“Are we okay?” I said.
“Probably. Chin up. Not much you can do about it anyway.”
I turned around. Overhead, more explosions thudded, and more Patriot missiles poured out of the earth with biblical fury, but if this crowd reacted at all, it was with a mild, ironic cheer.
I went searching for Ava. At the pool, a group of beautiful women and rather ugly old men were drinking Bloody Marys in the water. I went out on the deck, where a couple games of pickleball were in progress as bombs exploded overhead.
Inside, my knees gave out, forcing me to seek refuge in a nearby cabin. It looked like it had been ravaged by a troll, but I sat on a bunk and decided to read more about morivirus until the fatigue passed.
In the handful of hours I’d been asleep, the quarantine had become an internet phenomenon. Where previously I had been able to find academic papers and old articles, I saw headlines from papers like the New York Post and Russia Today that read: “MONKEY SEE, MONKEY DO? HUNDREDS STUCK AT SEA AFTER DOING MONKEYS.” I learned nothing from the contents, which appeared to be AI-generated, viz. this line that I found in both:
Morivirus. It’s not a normal sickness, it’s a life-threatening virus.
Let that sink in.
The articles reported intensively about the terrible conditions onboard the cruise ship, where passengers were stuck at sea without a drop of clean water to drink. One AI-generated article by the Goochland Examiner furnished a link to a crowdfunding website to send aid to the unfortunate passengers. Accompanying this was an AI-generated image of a crying girl on a liferaft, with a thermometer in her mouth, an icepack on her forehead, and a crying puppy in her arms. A million dollars had been raised.
Then there were the memes. A new wojak had been created, Cruzjak, a sunburnt-and-sunlotioned overweight cruise ship passenger with a double-chin, a bucket hat, and a sign that said “I ❤️fuckign monkeez.” An image of Saruman at his magic orb read: the Rothschilds creatign some fuckass new disease in their Yakubian laboratory when the goyim have finally recovered from the last catastrophe. A white girl who somehow smelled of patchouli through the screen had captioned a tiktok of her making a :| face: yt people are fucking orangutans. YT PEOPLE ARE FUCKING ORANGUTANS. Morivirus is just Mother Earth getting her payback ❤️.
I scrolled for an hour, finding nothing informative. If it had suddenly become transmissive, how could I avoid it? Was I doomed? What would happen to me if I caught it? I closed my eyes. Down here, the echo of explosions had a festive quality, as if a race of titans were wrestling in the world above.
Needing comfort, shelter, a shoulder to cry on, I left the cabin finally in search of Ava. And as I entered the hallway, there she was.
“I’ve been looking for you. Want a drink?”
“How’d you know?” I said. She shrugged. “I’m starting to freak out. What’s going on here? What’s morivirus? Are we in danger?”
Her face twitched as if she wanted to look over her shoulder, before settling for a smile and a raised eyebrow.
“Come to my cabin.”
She took me down dozens of stairs and across many more hallways. We criss-crossed and doubled back. I started to feel dizzy. But the pilgrimage into the depths gave me a lot of time to stare at her ass, her thighs, her back. Gorgeous. She must have been a model. What was she doing with me? And what was she doing here?
“What are you doing on this cruise ship anyway?” Everyone seemed to be either old or bought.
“Well…” she said.
She was an aspiring actress, but her parents had fallen on hard times and wouldn’t support her career. An uncle invited her to the cruise ship off the coast of Lebanon to meet some producers. About here in the story, she trailed off, just a few dozen beats too early for her cabin door, which was still a hundred yards ahead.
“Well, it’s a boring story. And here we are,” she said. We walked the remaining football field of hallway in silence. I tried to calculate how long it had been since Lebanon. If they were in Bali three months ago, and now Dubai, how long had she been on this ship?
Ava immediately closed the door. Another girl was on one of the bunks masturbating. Ava waited thirty seconds and opened the door again.
“Can we get the room?”
“Sure, I’ll head to the usual spot.” She winked at Ava, then at me, then disappeared.
“Vodka okay?” Ava said, producing a bottle of Grey Goose.
“Chaser?”
Ava dug through a pile of clothes and chip bags and books before excavating a room temp gallon of green orange juice.
“I got this from the restaurant?” She sniffed the jug and tried not to make a face. “Well, maybe we’d better not.”
“I didn’t really need one. Well, what’s this morivirus? Are we in danger of getting sick?”
“Morivirus?” She said as she poured 3-4 shots of vodka into a couple glass tumblers.
“What?”
“What’s morivirus?” She said, handing me a glass of warm vodka.
“You know all those World Health Organization goons guarding the dock? That we snuck past last night?” I asked.
“I didn’t think you’d’ve noticed.”
“This ship is under quarantine. Why’d you bring me on board?”
She shrugged.
“Cheers?”
“Hold on, am I in danger?”
“I don’t know. Why worry about things we can’t control? Let’s drink.”
There was a convincing logic to that, especially the way she said it, with her hand lightly lying on my thigh. I emptied my glass with a minimal amount of sputtering while she started playing a rather generic house music playlist. Still, I couldn’t stop myself from asking,
“Where are you guys isolating the sick? I mean, are they confined to their rooms or what?”
“Isolating?”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t know anything about that.”
I sat up straighter. She withdrew her hand.
“What? You’re not afraid of getting sick?” I asked.
“Why be afraid of something you can’t control? Besides, no one knows the true symptoms. Or how it’s spread. As far as I care, they were 67 false positives.”
Hmm.
“Another drink?” She asked. I was already feeling dizzy.
“Why not?”
She turned the music past a comfortable volume. As she poured, she said, very quickly and quietly,
“You want to go down the cruise ship. Get all the way to the bottom. You’ll see what this is all about if you can reach the ship’s depths.”
“What?” I asked.
“What? Here, let’s cheers again.”
We both downed our cups as the music played.
She’s homeless,
as she stands there
begging for money,
la da dee la dee da,
la da dee la dee da,
la da dee la dee da,
la da dee la dee da.
Just as Ava Brawn’s breath licked my neck, I started to fade. The song circled and the beat circled and the words circled and the ship rose and fell and my head circled. I woke up in Ava’s bunk alone. A girl was going through the pile of clothes on the floor.
“Morning, princess,” she said in a heavy Eastern European accent. She was skinny and pale and had haunted, baggy eyes. “Do you think Ava Brawn will mind if I take her Hugo Boss skirt?”
“Wha?”
By the time I had pulled myself upright from the bunk, the girl had slipped on the skirt and disappeared. I looked through the porthole window. It was night. How many nights had I spent on the ship now?
IN THE BELLY OF THE BEAST
Stumbling into the hallway, I could hear music somewhere far overhead. It was—oh God!—AI-generated EDM covers of 90s rap. Further above, I heard the thudding of missiles.
Feeling exhausted from a hangover that I suspected wasn’t entirely alcohol-related, I crept down the hall. Outside one room, I heard these lyrics:
I don’t practice Santeria
I ain’t got no crystal ball…
Through the open door were a handful of shirtless older men and young girls smoking weed. One of the girls was nodding asleep; another flashed her teeth at me and asked me to join them. I looked at the older men and their massive guts and their shadowy eyes. They looked like they wanted to eat me alive. Laughing nervously, I hieroglyphed past the doorway, then sprinted. I turned to look as I rounded into the staircase, just in time to see a gang of shadows at the end of the hall, following me?
I flung myself down four flights of stairs, stubbed my toe at the bottom of the fifth, and looked down to see—count them—four, five, six, seven…twenty more flights of stairs?! receding into the darkness. Above, a door opened, followed by voices—mais ce putain de virus a rendu tout le monde complètement parano. Pourquoi pas simplement profiter de la vie? Manger, boire et faire la fête, putain. Merde!—hearing which, I ducked into the hallway, running to the next staircase.
Was it me, or was the music a lot closer and louder? Or was that sound my heartbeat? Or the missiles? I ran, jumped, flew, hobbled, and hotfooted two dozen more stairs.
Finally at the bottom, I was confronted by a door with a sign:
CAUTION / VORSICHT!
AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY
RISK OF DEATH, DISMEMBERMENT, AND IMPRISONMENT
TRESPASSERS WILL BE VIOLATED
The sign was decorated with skulls and thunderbolts. A door creaked open somewhere far above. This time it was not followed by voices. After a couple beats, I could hear hobnailed boots trying to quietly descend the stairs.
I entered the door.
#
It was dark in the hallway and hot and it only got hotter and I had forgotten why I was here. Eventually I came to a final doorway. A pilot light shined urgently overhead. The throbbing, gulping, shivering bilge pump rattled the walls and rattled the floors and rattled the bones in my legs and arms and chest and the 22 bones in my skull, each individually. I counted them. This doorway was featureless. It was blank and it was the last door at the end of the long dark hallway at the bottom of the ship. I entered it.
I stood blinking under the bright light in the doorway as the bilge pump wheezed and humped, wheezed and humped. All else was silent. Even the frantic beat of the music, of my heart, of the bombs far overhead had gone quiet. It was like I had trespassed into the world’s guts, where now all I could hear was the rattle of her diseased lungs.
Finally the dark blobs in the room took shape. The captain was in one corner and I was not surprised to see him there. His desiccated skin had been drawn latex-tight over his face; his arms and legs were skin and bones and dust. On such a head, whose last remaining hair may have just been cobwebs, his captain’s hat looked ridiculous. He rested with dry eyes on a palanquin, his chest rising and falling only with the ship’s rising and falling. I followed his blind gaze, which was fixed on something in the center of the room.
In the center of the room, in a cage, sitting there dumb and mute, were two orangutans. One was wearing a sailor boy’s outfit. The other was wearing stockings and a plaid skirt and a blouse. A ribbon was tied neatly around her hair. Lipstick and eyeshadow had been applied delicately to her face. As I approached, the orangutans hissed and backed into the shadows of the cage. My feet squelched on the sticky floor, and I looked down to see dried layers of blood and liquor and vomit and piss and cum and more blood and vomit and cum. I stared at the orangutans.
“Take your pick.”
Who said that? The door was still closed. I hadn’t yet been followed here. The bilge pump wheezed and humped. I was alone.
“Go ahead, boy. It’s your turn now.”
Had the captain been sitting up like that before? The orangutans were bashing their feet and fists against the cage bars. They were screeching and weeping and seething. But I couldn’t take my eyes off the captain’s face—his skeletal cheeks were working against bony gums, or was that just the ship’s rocking? As I watched, the captain’s jaw opened and a flap of leather flicked out between taxidermy lips.
“Take your pick—the girl or the boy. Heaven knows we aren’t judgmental here. And they’re just playing at being scared. They like the game of it all. Once you get going, you’ll see how pleasurable it is for them too. They’ll be quite sweet in just a few minutes, just you wait.”
He spoke with a wheezing British accent. The words tumbled from his mouth, slurring slightly.
“We’ve been waiting for you for quite some time now. Go ahead.” The captain reclined in the palanquin to watch. Finally the door opened. A gang of older men entered and crossed their arms. Among them, I noticed one of the associates at the Firm. He nodded at me, an admiring grin on his face. He too had been waiting for me to come here, to the orangutan cage, to morivirus, to join him.
#
Diana: here, the man’s story ended. I waited ten minutes for him to speak again, but he was silent. As I carefully observed him, I realized that he had unnaturally pale skin and hooded eyes. His gaunt face gave him a skeletal appearance.
“Why did you tell me this?” I asked.
The man shrugged.
“I had to tell someone.”
The way he said it, it sounded like he didn’t have much longer to live. So saying, he paid for our beers and stood up. Before I could say anything else, the man had disappeared back into the shadows of the bar.
Peace and Love,
Will Diana.
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ur stories always have me hooked, wowowowow.
Love it Will