It had begun self-consciously, facetiously, but like so much that begins that way acquired some of the emotional substance it lampooned. And this memory, in the perverse way of these things, did pierce me, set an ache in the empty place where the energy to go after Grainer should be.
The second was that the agent, who’d followed me and was now down on one knee not twenty feet away, fired his weapon directly at me.
I felt a single icy stab in my thigh, an eternal three seconds of something like mild outrage—then all the lights went out.
WHATEVER THEY USED they didn’t get the dosage right the first time. I floated up to consciousness just long enough to deduce—from the tremor, the noise, the shape of the ceiling—that I was in the helicopter. Restraints pinned my arms, legs, chest, head. A man’s voice (definitely
Transformation woke me to the smell of rust and fuel and seaweed. I was lying on my spasming back on a metal table and the restraints were gone. So were my clothes. Shoulders, shins, head, hands and haunches shunted blood and hurried bone to meet the Curse’s metamorphic demand. My circus of consumed lives stirred. The world felt strangely undulant. I thought, Well, I hope you’re ready for this, kidnapping fuckers, whoever you are. Then, throbbing with Hunger for living meat, I howled and rolled over onto my side.
Bright halogen lighting showed I was in a cage.
In what looked like the hold of a ship.
Being filmed.
Beyond the bars three men and a woman stood between a pair of tripod-mounted motion-sensitive cameras. One of the men was the agent who’d tranquilized me, early thirties, with a sullen, guinea-piggish face, wearing a nose stud and a black woollen cap. The other two were large skinheads in unmatching fatigues and Timberlands. One, arms covered in golden fuzz, was worryingly glazed. The other was baby-faced, with surprised eyes and a dimpled chin. Both were equipped with automatic rifles and side arms.
The woman, in tight white trousers and a clinging bloodred top, was Jacqueline Delon.
She hadn’t changed much in ten years. Slender, petite-breasted with a tiny abdomen and a lean face. Short red hair in the boyish style only French women seem able to carry off. The last time I’d seen her, outside the Burj Al Arab in Dubai, big sunglasses had hidden her eyes, and my inference—of constipation and usefully disturbed sexuality—had been drawn (wishfully, lazily) from the thin-lipped mouth and the patent narcissism of her deportment. Here, however,
“Can he talk?” the baby-faced skinhead asked,
“No,” Jacqueline said. “But he understands. So don’t say anything you might regret.”
Without the faintest twitch of warning I flung myself snarling at the bars.
To her credit, Jacqueline barely flinched. The men—to a man—leaped backwards, the two meat-goons with guns raised, the Tranquilizer with a priceless falsetto shriek.
Immediately, I subsided, stood down, shook my head
“Fuck
“He’s playing with you,” Jacqueline said. Then to the Tranquilizer: “For God’s sake, don’t be such a baby. Turn off the cameras.”
Apparent nonchalance notwithstanding, I was booming with Hunger. And in a cage. Mentally I flashed forward a few hours to the cold turkey scene from every heroin-addict movie. Please, man, just somethin, you gotta give me
Jacqueline stepped forward and wrapped her red-nailed fingers (blouse-matching) around the bars of the cage. “Jacob,” she said, in English, “I’m so sorry for all this. It’s not what it appears, I promise. I know you can’t answer me, so just let me talk for a moment. My name is Jacqueline Delon. I’ve wanted to speak with you for some time. I have a proposition for you. But that can wait. You must be wondering where you are.”
I didn’t move. The cage was bolted to the floor. Other than a few wooden crates, some heaps of rope, rolls of tarp and half a dozen oil drums the hold was empty.
“You’re on board the freight ship
She stepped away from the cage and said quietly, “Let’s go.”
“You sure?”
“I’m sure.”
“The cameras?”
“Leave them off. I’ve got what I wanted.”
The men went ahead of her. At the hold door she turned and looked back at me. “I’m so excited to meet you at last,” she said. “You’re everything I hoped you would be. I know this can be the start of something exceptional.”
After she’d gone I forced myself to lie still, listening to the Hunger turning the volume up in my blood, heartbeat the buzz-thud of a car with the stereo’s bass set to max.
An idiotic injunction.
Because you and I know.
What’s underneath us in the box.
IT’S NO ACCIDENT that the great moral philosophers invariably wrote on aesthetics, too. Figuring out what made something Right (or Wrong) was akin to figuring out what made something Beautiful (or Ugly). These days scientists are in on the act: At the unprovable cosmological fringes beauty swings it. Now mathematical models are like supermodels: They have grace, symmetry, elegance. It’s hardly surprising. Modernity having done away with Absolute Moral Values and Objective Reality, there’s only beauty
Or what instinct (to stick, as Madeline would have it, to the story) won’t we overcome?
For a while, standing with my warm lethal hairy hands wrapped around the cold bars of my cage, I resisted opening the container. Truth was I felt slightly seasick. The tip of my snout was dry. Beyond my confines the full moon made its inexhaustible suggestion, sent down its unbankruptable love, weirdly mingled just then with the memory of Jacqueline Delon’s thin face and tightly red-wrapped breasts.
This, of course, was the embarrassing heart of the matter. I was an animal who’d been caught, caged and
