"So where did that scar come from, anyway?" Channon muttered, eyeing the thin dicoloured line that trailed from Spider's armpit and down his side, barely noticeable under the thick black ink covering his chest. The journalist wasn't paying attention, his eyes fixed unmovingly on the bulging, luminous, holographic TV. They sat side-by-side on the couch, a somewhat serene island amidst a sea of refuse and left-over, unrefrigerated take-out. Spider, as per the norm, wore his mid-thigh black shorts and nothing else- and it had been a battle to convince him to wear even those. Channon waited a beat, curious to see if he would snap out of his stupor. He didn't.
"Hey, fuckface," she prodded him in the side with a stubborn finger. He propelled himself from his seat, cigarette escaping from his lips as he swung his fists at invisible foes and screaming.
"Fucking bureaucrats! Make me a muppet, will you?!" He roared before slipping on the filth he had carefully placed and organised around his moldy throne. He was wasted on something, something other than television- something Channon didn't care to know about. She tried to lure him away from his vendetta against the ceiling fan and gently pry the phallic-like remote from his vicious grip, talking to him soothingly the whole way down.
"Cool your shit, Spider- nothing's out to get you, it's all clear, you crazy bastard," she eased him back into the chair, switching the TV off, "I think that's enough high-quality entertainment for one day."
Spider said nothing- his eyes faded and closed, his body relaxed and then tensed sharply. He shook for a good half-minute, and was still again. He sighed mightily before turning to his (filthy) assistant and adjusting his polychromatic glasses.
"What did you say?"
"What?" Channon said, confused.
"What did you say?" He enunciated a little more clearly.
"About quality entertainment?"
"Before then… you asked me something, I didn't hear it. The singing banana drowned you out."
"I was just wondering about that scar," she said after a moment's thought and pointed to his left side. He didn't glance down at it and he didn't look at her. "Did you piss someone off?" She asked, leaning in slightly to get a better look.
"Yeah!" He said.
"Who was that?"
"Whups, sorry- I lied." He stretched his legs out so that his feet were as far from his face as humanly possible, sinking himself down into the couch. The blonde blinked, shook her head, took a sip from her beer, cleared her throat, and tried again.
"What?" She said loudly and flatly. Spider mumbled something unintelligible. "Good god, Spider, if you don't speak up I'm gonna-"
"There's another one on this side, look," he said tiredly, gesturing at his far side. Channon twisted herself over Spider's chest to see the twin scar curved around his pec. He prodded her tit with a finger as it hung perilously over his stomach and she hit him automatically and without emotion. She resumed her seat, her hands in her lap and her face very still and blank. Spider gave no reaction and plucked a slightly oversized joint from between the seat cushions. He lit up and took a long, deep hit.
"So I have a new assignment- gotta write an article about the lizard-baby sex market. Should be a breeze…"
"Spider."
"Of course we're going to need to prepare for it- get all the right supplies. Going to need at least ten pounds of cocaine, a crate of elmers glue, a bazooka-"
"Spider."
"-A chimp, some mescaline, a rubber Nixon mask-"
"SPIDER!"
He went quiet and leaned forward, propping his elbows on his knobby knees. Channon stared at him…
"It's the fucking pinnacle of an age of sin and perversity and they can't even get rid of the damn scars," he said quietly, "Though, admittedly, I did pick at them and pour vodka on them a lot when they were healing up- that probably didn't help."
He looked at her.
"It's not a problem for me," he said sternly, "And if you have a problem with it, well… not much I can do about that."
Her mouth flip-flopped and her eyebrows pressed against each other tragically. She gave the bald man a reassuring squeeze on the shoulder.
"Just another part of you, you fucked up son-of-a-bitch- why should it bother me? Not like that's the weirdest thing about you…" She smacked the back of his head and Spider grinned grotesquely.
"DAMN STRAIGHT."
She grinned back and got to her feet, "Want another beer, Spider?"
The journalist clasped his hands behind his head and leaned back into the stained couch, the joint hanging from his lower lip, "Make mine a bottle of wild turkey, if you don't mind. It's hidden in the back of the cabinet- behind the jar of rat testes."
"Surrre," she headed for the kitchen but stopped cold in the doorway and turned.
"So how d-"
"DO NOT GO THERE, WENCH, OR I SHALL SMITE YOU," Spider barked, his voice hoarse from the smoke.
"But-"
"NO!"
She shrugged, disappeared into the kitchen, and returned moments later with a can of beer and the bottle of booze. She plopped back down on the couch, holding the bottle out to her employer. When he reached out to take it, she pulled back, wagging her finger like a preschool teacher.
"Tell me," she said simply. He growled at her as only a true creature of the wild could.
"Ugh, such a life I lead!" He cried, completely disgusted, "Yes: this is the 23rd century, yes: the medical field is perfectly and fully capable of sex reassignment surgery, yes: I had it done, yes: it was successful, no: I will not let you analyse it for evidence!" He sighed. "Unless you want to see it for other reasons..." A smarmy grin spread across his lips and Channon groaned.
"Get your mind out of the gutter… that's not what I was going to ask you about, moron."
He blinked.
"I just wanted to ask about how you came out, that's all," she took a gulp of the sour beer. Spider squinted at her.
"You weren't going to ask about the mighty rod?" He said, gesticulating at his crotch, slightly confused. "That's odd- they usually do at this point."
"Not my business- it's the fucking 23rd century, like you said," she smiled, "Stuff like this ain't exactly uncommon or taboo… well, at least not as much as it used to be. 'Specially in my line of work. Some of our best girls at the club are transchicks."
Spider frowned, extinguished the dead roach on his tongue, and dropped it into his half-full bottle of wild turkey.
"So what's the story?" Channon curled her legs up beneath her chin.
"None of your business," Spider snapped, reaching for the TV remote. "I don't talk about stuff like that to anyone." The blonde woman kicked the black box off the couch.
"I'm not 'anyone', fuckface," she said tenaciously, "Look- don't talk about it if you really don't want to, but you're the one who opened up to me about this. You could've lied about the scar and covered for yourself, but you didn't. You invited me into this personal realm of your life and, in all honesty…" She leaned in towards him, "I think you want to talk about it- to get it off your chest. So stop being a pretentious, macho dipshit and do it!"
Spider's mouth opened and closed and emitted no verbal sound of any nature. He looked genuinely shell-shocked.
"Fine," he grumbled. He closed his eyes, gathering his thoughts, and finally cleared his throat to speak, "I knew exactly who and what I was from the point of conceivement. I knew, but every person around me was in absolute, righteous denial. Believe it or not, I came from a pretty conservative household," he chuckled. "Well, my mom was conservative… in a really weird fucking way, and I didn't see much of my dad- he drove a bus. Anyway, when I was about five, II took to the streets. From that point on, I did anything and everything for cash for transitional hormones and surgery. I was about eight by that point, I think." Spider went quiet for a moment, his face set in stony blankness. He took an aggressive swig from the brown bottle and turned to Channon, "When I was a kid, I hated myself more than anything- more than my parents, more than the system, more than politicians… and then I started writing." A mad brightness flashed in his eyes. "Suddenly my body didn't matter anymore- it was... transcendental! I stopped caring and just became!" He gestured grandly, grinning from ear-to-ear. "I could move mountains, reduce the most hardened, testosterone-filled jackass to a sobbing pile of mush, make the street-bastards feel like kings…" He trailed off and his arms returned slowly to his sides. He was done. Channon nodded once and joined him in silence.
"So you CHOSE the name Spider Django Heraclitus Jerusalem YOURSELF?" She gasped in sudden revelation, shattering the placid silence.
"Oh, fuck off!"
Chanon laughed wildly. "Oh my god, it all makes so much more sense now- the tattoos, the clothes, the ambiguous baldness!"
Spider gawked at her. "What's wrong with my clothes? My-? What-what the fuck are you talking about?!"
"Oh nothing. Nothing, forget it…" She struggled to regain her breath. "Just… watch TV or something, I gotta go pee before I wet myself."
Spider Jerusalem watched his assistant rush to the bathroom in an uproarious cloud.
He sighed as she shut the door behind her.
He looked down at himself, digging his chin into his collarbone, trying to get a good view of his chest. With an uneven hand, he ran a finger across his scars, feeling them, taking in their unnatural, plasticine smoothness. He remembered how his mad mother used to call him her "little angel" as she forced him into raggedy dresses and tangled ribbons into his hair. He remembered standing on street-corners as a child and being beaten or worse when his customers uncovered his sex, claiming "false advertisment". He remembered the exact locations of each stitch and how it had felt when the unlicensed practitioner first dug the scalpel into his flesh without use of anesthetic or drugs. He remembered that feeling when he first stood in front of the mirror after taking off the bandages- the feeling of being born again. He remembered the endless nights of complete agony and tears from the rampant infection in his torso and genitals. He remembered his first tattoos- the glorious black stripes that emblazened his chest, put there simply to distract from the scars mere centimeters below. He remembered the first time he had overdosed on drugs and how he left his body and became something other than human and how wonderful it had felt to become one with nothingness and how painful it had been to return to this twisted body on this twisted plane.
He felt something tug at him- tug at him from the inside. It hurt.
"I lied," he said in a hushed whisper. "I still hate myself."
When Chanon returned she found Spider in a daze before the holographic TV, watching Anthrax Cat being put through a rusty meat-grinder and munching on pills and drinking like his life depended on it. When he noticed her, he leapt up.
"About fucking time! We have to go shopping for supplies for the Lizard sex babies story! What, did you rupture your spleen in there or something? Come on, get a move on before all the shops close! Damn, I need a snort of coke right about now, where did I put that case of it? And, where are we going to get a Nixon mask at this time of night…" He continued on into an unintelligible stream of gibberish as he ran about the room frantically, grabbing random odds and ends that he deemed useful for the operation. Chanon smiled to herself.
'Still the same old Spider.'
-Fin