Michael Cunningham - Specimen Days

“I think you know.”

“No. I don’t.”

Could that be counted as second refusal? According to the contract, yes. The client might complain. But he had signed the paper.

“I’d slap you around a little. Like this.” Simon administered a quick slap, open-handed. Fingertips against the soft white cheek. “But harder.”

“You’d hurt me?”

“Blind loving wrestling touch! sheath’d hooded sharp-tooth’d touch!”

"Was?"

Focus. Concentrate.

“I’d hurt you, daddy,” he said. “Yes, I would. You going to pass me some yen now?”

There was a pause. Again Simon said, “I want the money. I need it. Now.”

The client said, “No. I’m not going to give you anything.”

Third refusal. Initial engagement fulfilled. “Yeah,” Simon said. “You are.”

Second slap, full palm. Hard enough to draw a thread of saliva from the client’s lips. It connected his mouth to Simon’s hand like a strand of liquid spiderweb.

“No. Please. Stop.”

This was always a tricky moment. The novices sometimes forgot about the safe word. They forgot that “no” meant yes. They had signed the paper. It had all been clear. Still, a disgruntled customer was never good news.

This client didn’t seem particularly innocent, though. He might be new to mugging. It seemed unlikely that he was new to paying for play.

Simon administered another slap, backhanded. His knuckles crunched painfully against the client’s jawbone. The client’s head snapped back and struck the stone column with a hollow sound.

“Please,” the client said. “Please, leave me alone.”

“Not until you give me what I need.”

Simon took two handfuls of shimmering suitfront. He hauled the client up off his feet and bashed him semihard against the column. Level six now. Almost done.

“What if I don’t have money?” the client panted. His voice was high with excitement. “What will you do to me?”

Simon tried sending a telepathic signal. It’s not sex, sir. This is robbery. Sex is more expensive than this.

“I will waste your sorry ass,” Simon said. He offered no note of S&M seduction this time. He spoke in the breezy monotone of a genuine killer.

The client’s eyes were tearing up. A lot of them cried. It was time to take it one notch higher. It was time to finish the job.

The client said nothing. He looked down at Simon, breathing, bright-eyed. Unmistakable signs of arousal. The client was being satisfied, he thought. The client would have a story for his friends back in Frankfurt or Berlin.

“I. Will. Kill. Your. Fat. Sad. Ass,” Simon said. “You follow?”

“Yes,” the man gasped.

There were variations at levels seven and up. You had to improvise. It was a dance. There was no reliable way of telling what your partner really wanted until you got out on the floor. There would be no bloodletting. There would be no weaponry. It could be a punch, though. It could be a head butt. It could be…

Simon decided. He hoped he was correct.

He grabbed the client’s crotch. The client had a hard-on, as Simon had expected. He took hold of the client’s package and squeezed.

“No,” the guy squealed deliriously. “I will never give you anything.”

It was over now. Simon had delivered. He let go of the client’s lapels. The client slid downward. He would have fallen, but Simon snatched him up under his armpits, turned him, and pulled the wallet from his back pocket. The man’s breath came in stifled gasps.

Simon held his collar in one hand and bumped his head rhythmically against the column. These were called love taps. He extracted the bills from the wallet, did a quick scan. Yes, it was the exact amount. Simon pocketed the bills. He threw the wallet on the ground.

“You’re a lucky boy,” he whispered. “You’re lucky you aren’t fucking dead right now.”

He let go of the client’s collar. The client was panting, clinging with both arms to the column, his face squashed against the stone.

“Repeat after me,” Simon growled. “I am a lucky boy.”

“No. I won’t.”

Simon gave him a final slap across the back of his bright blue head. “Say it.”

The client wheezed. His voice was barely audible: “I am a lucky boy.”

“You got that right, sport.”

Simon decided to give him a bonus. He hooked his thumbs under the client’s belt, pulled his pants down to his knees, and smacked him across his shivering, naked buttocks.

“I swear I think there is nothing but immortality,” he said. At this point, the client did not appear to notice the incongruity.

Simon walked off. He thought hopefully of his tip, though experience indicated that Germans were not reliable in that area.

He returned to his crash at twenty past four. He poured himself a shot f Liquex, paused over its aquamarine glow. It was a glassful of brilliant blue serotoninade, about to be downed by a man who had done a day’s work. Beautiful? Probably, in a minor way. It had, of course, been designed to be beautiful, to attract the buyer. Various color possibilities had been considered and rejected before the company arrived at this one, the precise color of a swimming pool at night.

Corporate intention diminished the liquid’s beauty, shallowed it out. The most potent incidences of beauty were the ones that felt like personal discoveries, that seemed to have been meant specifically for you, as if some vast intelligence had singled you out and wanted to show you something.

Simon removed his shit-kickers. He peeled the fetid T-shirt over his head and tossed it in a corner. He tumbled onto his bedshelf and sipped his fiery drink.

There was a message on the vid. “Speak to me,” he said. Marcus shimmered up. Right. Who else would call?

Mini-Marcus appeared, pallid and wavering. It would be nice to have a vid with better resolution. It would be nice to have a lot of things.

Flickering Marcus said, “I’m nobody, who are you? Are you nobody, too? Call me when you get in.”

He vanished in a fist of sparkles. Simon said, “Marcus.” The vid purred up the number. Marcus answered on the second tone. He reappeared with slightly better resolution, being live.

“Hey, Simon,” his image said. He was still in his kit, his blacks and kickers. He had not taken off his eyeliner yet. His model, called up out of the Infinidot archives, was Keith Richards with no money. Simon had been told to alter his first choice: Malcolm McDowell more than a century ago, in A Clockwork Orange. Deliberating over the ancient vids, he had finally decided on Sid Vicious instead and had added Morrissey hair.

“I celebrate myself, and what I assume you shall assume. How was your night?”

“The usual. Listen. I think a drone was watching me tonight.”

“You do?”

“I’m not completely sure. But yeah. I swear it hovered over me for, like, almost a minute.”

“Might not have been interested in you. Where were you?”

“By the band shell.”

“They cruise the band shell. It’s a campsite. They’re always checking for Nadians there. You know that.”

“I’ve got a feeling. That’s all.”

“Right. But do you think you’re being, shall we say, a little oversensitive?”

“I hope I am. I’ve just had a feeling. For a couple of days now. I didn’t want to mention it.”

“I am satisfied I see, dance, laugh, sing.”

“Could you stop that?”

“You know I can’t.”

“I’m starting to think,” Marcus said. “Maybe this whole June 21 thing is just crazy. Old New York is too risky for us. They watch too closely here.”

“They watch the Nadians and the tourists. Scabrous subprostitutes such as we are low on the priority list.”