Christos Tsiolkas - Merciless Gods

‘Fuck me.’ The insistent words now almost shouted. The demon words did their work, they aroused him further. Ghassan looked down at his cock, wet from lubricant and spit, flecks of shit visible on the shaft. He stared in fascination at the pink hole that was stretching, opening up to receive him. It was the raw red of blood and the pitch black of night. Ghassan was not wearing a condom and the stranger had not asked for one. He wished for death, he trusted in death, his words were a call to death. Fuck me . Ghassan pushed the whole of himself into the European, as if through his cock he was splitting in two the very universe itself. Ghassan moaned in the darkness and from deep inside his ecstasy and his loathing, he spilt himself. He shuddered, jerked like an epileptic as he dissipated into the whiteness. The body underneath him also began a relentless jerking. The stranger groaned, he called out into the void. Shamelessly, he was calling out to God, not knowing that God abhorred him. A trail of white splattered across the vinyl arm of the couch.

Omar had pointed out the building to him not long after they had first met. He had described, coldly, what went on inside it. Ghassan had listened, shocked, as Omar told him that children were taken there and violated, how iniquitous orgies as vile and blasphemous as those of the time of Sodom and Gomorrah were committed there inside the deceptively innocuous simple brown brick facade of the building, how men were ensnared and made insane by demons who corrupted the holy books with their bodily excretions. A small rectangular plaque the colours of the rainbow was the only indication of the depravities performed inside. Is it not scandalous, Omar asked, that the very symbol of God’s promise to man has been taken by these devils and become a promise of death and sin?

The building sat tucked in between an alley and a large warehouse stocking parts for automobiles and motorbikes. Across the road was a bank. On the corner diagonally opposite was a twenty-four-hour convenience store. Their friend worked there and they were waiting for him to finish his shift. As they were talking, an emaciated girl turned into the alley next to the store and crouched behind a large square industrial bin. Ghassan had been trying to take in Omar’s words, could not believe what he was hearing, was ashamed by how those words made him feel. The girl walked back out from behind the bin and he was staring right at her. She looked startled but then flung a syringe at his feet and jeered, ‘Fuck off, curry muncher.’ She stumbled as she lurched past them and then her gait slowed. Her white skin was the pallor of ghosts.

‘She is the walking dead,’ Omar said quietly. ‘They let their young die on the streets here, alone. And inside, they have their orgies.’

Omar must always be proud of him. Omar would never know his shame.

The stranger wiped his wet cock with a tissue, and then, shyly, again like a little boy, he offered a clean tissue to Ghassan. Wordlessly, Ghassan took it, wiped himself clean and then pulled up his trousers. The European did the same, both of them with their backs to each other, ludicrously embarrassed by their nudity, as if the last few minutes of primal intimacy had not occurred.

Ghassan was about to undo the latch on the door when the stranger spoke.

‘Do you smoke?’ He was offering a cigarette. Ghassan reached over and took one. The man lit the cigarette for him and their hands touched. Ghassan pulled away.

‘I think you are in my lecture. At uni. I do engineering as well.’ There was a hopeful glint in the man’s eyes. He was waiting expectantly for Ghassan’s answer.

And for a moment Ghassan wished to answer thus: I know you and I know who and what you can be. I have loved you for months now, and I have wanted to communicate to you all the wonder and joy and pain that is in this world. I have dreamt that together we would discover God and in our submission and faith we would also discover that there is a union of souls in love that the body and its base functions can never compare to. Oh, how I have wished for this and how I regret that this is not possible. Come now, take my hand, and I will lead you out of here. This place is death and destruction, and if it did not occur today, it would happen tomorrow or the day after, for this place is an abomination. Will you come with me?

Instead, Ghassan shook his head. He made his accent deliberately thick, his speech broken. ‘No, no me. I no go university, I no student.’

He thought the man would object, contradict his deceit. But instead the man nodded, and a rueful half-smile appeared on his face. ‘My mistake.’ The smile vanished. ‘Got a girlfriend, have ya?’ Then, more spitefully, ‘Or maybe a wife?’

Ghassan said nothing. He dropped the cigarette and stubbed it out on the dirty wet floor.

The man sat back on the couch and unzipped his jeans. ‘You can fuck me again.’

Ghassan unlatched the door and pulled it open. The whiff of chemicals and offal, men visible in the shadows.

‘Leave the door open,’ the man called out, in a tone both defensive and accusing. ‘I’m not finished.’

The corridor was full of shadows, naked ghouls — luminescent, poisonous white skin — whose hands groped at him. Ghassan pushed them all away, refusing to look at the bodies surrounding him. The noise of fornication was all around him, but he ignored it and maintained his purposeful walk. He walked past the showers and sauna and into the small alcove with the lockers. He pulled the key from his pocket.

Ghassan began the countdown in his head. He looked out past the locker room to where a bored attendant was sitting at the counter flicking through a magazine. Behind him was the exit, the door that led to the street and to the light. Ghassan hesitated, he panicked, his resolve gone.

Every second of every minute of every hour of every day, awake or asleep, we must pray in order to resist sin . In the diabolical din of this hellhole he heard Omar’s words break through, a ray of illumination that cleaved the darkness. The words, their light, wrapped themselves around him. He would not flee; he secured the bulky belt that contained God’s fury tighter around his middle. He patted, and he set forth.

As soon as he had entered this inferno, paid the surly attendant twenty dollars and spotted the youth in the alcove, Ghassan knew that he was doomed to sin, he did not have the resolve to resist temptation. Their magazines, their videos, their films, their dirty words scrawled on toilet walls, their nakedness, their parading of their bodies, their hatred of chastity, their decadence, their sadism, their brutality, their filth: it had infected him, it was in his blood. And like a cancer, it fed on itself, bred on itself, so that the fever intensified. He had once wondered what it would be like to touch another man’s skin. Now that was not enough. He had seen too much; nothing was sacred, nothing was safe, not even a child. He had become one of them but soon he and all of them would be gone. By doing God’s work he could atone. There would be no more magazines, no more films and filthy words, no nakedness, no brutality, no sadism, no filth. He was bringing the fire.

He walked out of the alcove and back up the stairs that led to the cubicles, to the violent red and orange light. A frail old man was desperately stroking at his crotch and clutched at Ghassan as he shoved past him. He stopped in front of the scene of his sin and saw that the European was once again bent over the vinyl couch, and another man was entering him.

Ghassan was the fire. He turned away and looked down the corridor. A dark-skinned man with the fleshy jowls of a bourgeois Punjabi was looking away from him, ashamed. Your false gods cannot save you. There is only one God, my God. At the end of the corridor, a television monitor looked down at them all. On the screen a scrawny pale-skinned youth had his eyes screwed shut as a man furiously ejaculated all over the boy’s cheeks, his chin, his naked shoulder, his hair, his lips and mouth. This was what they did to their children.