electricity crackling and a faint feedback whine, made the short hairs on the back of his neck stand on end. Things had changed since his last visit. The music was different, for one thing. And he didn’t remember seeing so many cages.
Seven years was too long away from Painfreak to return.
Tony walked to the long bar — battered tables of different heights and widths set end to end, behind which two naked barkeepers patrolled — and found an empty storage drum to sit on. Something whimpered inside the drum as his weight made the walls pop. He shifted uneasily on the warm metal. Nails or claws scratched feebly at the barrel walls. A new variation in Painfreak’s perversions, he decided.
The male barkeeper came to him and set down a tall styrofoam cup of what looked like frothy fruit punch. Tony reached into his pocket and remembered he had lost his money. He turned to hold his empty hands up in a gesture of apology. The barkeeper shook his head, wiped his palms together in a gesture of dismissal and moved away. Tony didn’t remember paying for any drinks the last time, either.
He took a careful sip of the concoction, aware from news reports that drugs might have been mixed in with the punch. The sweet scent of tropical fruit masked for a moment the warehouse basement’s stale odors. Tangy flavors danced on his tongue, before a slightly bitter aftertaste and a spot of cold numbness told him there was a potent spell hiding behind the drink’s seductive enticement. Shaking his head, he put the cup down. Cocaine had been the drug of choice in his day, when things had seemed simpler.
Tony scanned the bodies jumping, gyrating, hurling, convulsing spasmodically on the dance floor. In single cages suspended at varying heights from the ceiling, naked women and men, some locked two and three to a cage, writhed and sweated and rattled the bars to their prisons. Colored lights flashed stroboscopically over the crowd, illuminating for an instant individual faces contorted by ecstasy. He was not surprised Lisa was not among them. They were both too old for this nonsense. How could Lisa stand it? Over thirty, now, and slowing down, neither one of them had the energy or the stamina anymore to throw themselves into such a bacchanal. In fact, meeting each other had been a graceful means of exiting the world of clubs and scenes and parties for both of them. Was it the adventurousness of youth that she missed? The daring? Was she trying to recapture the feeling that came from being young and living life on the edge? His appetites were no longer as keen or as sharp.
Watching the frantic motions of the dancers and the twisting cages, he understood that now more than ever he had limits. He did not want to abandon himself to music screaming around him or drugs humming from within, or join in tired, panting games that tried to capture dreams of sex and power and life and death. He did not want to dance on the edge. He wanted only Lisa.
The emptiness twisted inside of him as he imagined her as weary of the scene as he was, but wanting something else, something more. His grip on the cup tightened as he imagined her feeling that she had made the wrong choice in leaving with him that night, that she should have stayed, and gone deeper into Painfreak. He shut his eyes against the moment’s vertigo when he imagined her needing to go over the edge, to fall into the emptiness. To enter Painfreak and never come out.
Without thinking, he took a long swallow from the cup, then quickly put it down when he realized what he was doing. He wiped froth from his lips and pushed the cup away. When he looked around, he noticed an older couple standing against the wall, watching him. They were both stout, dressed in formal evening wear, and glittering with jewelry. The woman smiled and nodded to him, a hungry glint in her eye.
Tony remembered seeing their kind the last time. They were not tourists or players, Guy had said when Tony asked about the ones who looked so completely out of place in the club. They were the ones who paid the bills, made the arrangements, worked the bureaucratic magic that enabled Painfreak to appear and disappear without a trace. They were the part of the urban mind that sensed the need for Painfreak in the fabric of the city’s life. They did more than just make arrangements and watch; they filled their own emptiness when others danced on and over the edge. They fed, and when there was nothing more to feed on, they arranged for Painfreak to move on.
More and more, Tony remembered why he had abandoned the scene. He shuddered and looked away.
And found Lisa.
He saw brown hair cut short, a head bobbing up and down in a familiar rhythm, a quick profile that showed the long line of the forehead and nose. Lisa, slicing through the crowd, heading towards a door on the other side of the club floor.
Tony was up and on his feet, shouting her name. The music drowned his voice. Lisa vanished for a moment and he pushed his way through the dancers, frantically searching for her. He caught a glimpse of the older couple standing against the wall; they were laughing and talking to another elderly pair while pointing in his direction.
Someone who might have been Lisa went through the door. Tony staggered as a teenaged girl slammed her body into his back. Her raw-edged howl bored through his mind before hands dragged her back into the dancing pack, lifted her into the air, and carried her to the center of the floor. Tony cast a final quick glance for Lisa, then went through the door.
He passed through a series of sound baffles made of strips of plastic and material hanging from ceiling pipes. He emerged into a darkened cavern lit by hazy fires. Tony froze, looked up, expecting to see stars through the thin smoke. Street grating set into the vaulted ceiling reassured him he had not been transported to some alien world. The place must have been a municipal storage depot at one time, like the ones inside bridge supports and off subway tunnels. Abandoned, the cavern had been transformed into an incubator for Painfreak’s more serious games.
Tony coughed from the smoke tainted air, and he massaged a tearing eye. The music was absent; in its place, human voices cried out, wailed, shouted, screamed, singly and in small groups. Their rhythms were random, the volume nowhere near as high as in the club’s dancing area. Other noises mingled with the voices; metal grinding on metal, chains rattling, water splashing, the hiss of escaping gases, the soft thump of crashing bodies, wood splintering. Or bone. The sounds chilled him, though the cavern was hot and stuffy.
A few people ran past him, their naked feet slapping on the concrete floor. They faded quickly into the gloom, but he had seen enough to know none of them had been Lisa. Tony began trotting to the nearest fire.
He had almost reached the flames when he became aware of someone running alongside of him. Startled, he turned, anticipating seeing Lisa.
The tall, thin man was naked, and his long, white hair trailed behind him as he kept pace with Tony. His face was bony, beardless, and his eyes were black in the dim, flickering light. He smiled, acknowledging his discovery. “I never had the chance to show you the back rooms,” the man said, and his smile broadened. “You and Lisa hit it off so fast the first time you came here.”
It wasn’t Guy. Guy was dead. The toothy smile was his, as was the jutting jaw and the body that had been flesh draped over bones even before AIDS claimed it. The man’s voice sounded like Guy’s, sarcastic and dry, on the edge of a caustic observation. But it couldn’t be Guy. The cavern spun once around Tony, and he nearly fell.
Tony stopped beyond the fire’s inner circle of light, and the man coasted to a stop a few steps later. They faced each other, the man putting his hands on his hips. Through his body, Tony could see the flames jump as if through a translucent curtain.
“See anything you like, sailor boy?” The man wiggled his hips.
“Who the fuck are you?” Not believing, never, it wasn’t possible.
The man pouted. “I could understand you forgetting me if we’d fucked, Tony. But damn, after two years of rooming together, I figured the sexual tension between us would’ve made me memorable.” The man exploded into hysterical laughter, holding his arms across his stomach and stamping a foot repeatedly. “Nothing like unrequited lust to bring back the dead,” he said after catching his breath, and laughed again.
Tony circled around the man and approached the fire. It was Guy. Alive, or dead, but still Guy. Not possible, but real. Suddenly, the world did not feel so solid or tangible.
“College was a long time ago,” Tony said, measuring his words carefully. He glanced at the figures at the periphery of the fire’s light, trying to deny the fact that he was talking to Guy as he searched for Lisa.
“Oh, please, stop acting like a tourist bitch,” Guy said, his good humor gaining an angry edge. “I’m the fucker that’s dead, asshole.”
Tony wandered to the other side of the fire, trying to put distance between himself and the apparition. Guy strolled languidly around the fire after him. Tony glanced at the cavern entrance, a distant grey splotch in the darkness. He thought of emptiness, and Lisa.
“I’m sorry about what happened to you, Guy.” Was he really talking to a ghost? “But I’m here looking for Lisa.” Tony started turning away, desperately pushing the idea of Guy, of talking to a ghost, out of his mind. Lisa.
