I don't smile. Why tempt him to friendship? From a distance he looks at peace with the world as it is.

He isn't here now, and I start to wonder where he is: I don't like to come upon my slave unexpectedly. What does he envy me? He doesn't speak to me, unless he can't avoid it. I am a reproach to him, and a necessity.

My slave said it was best not to speak to the police unless they asked you a direct question. “Try to think of it from their point of view,” he said. “It isn't easy for them. Even now that there is no real crime anymore, there are still criminals. There are always criminals, there's always someone taking something that belongs to someone else.” He, then, was a slave who might bend the rules, which is an advantage by any measure.

But what did I have to trade, besides my body? I sat on the edge of the bed thinking it over. I didn't want to look about the shed, I didn't want to appear inattentive to him. I looked him in his left eye and waited for what he had to give me.

“I want to see as little of you as possible,” he said. “I expect you feel the same way about me.” I didn't answer, as a yes would have been insulting, a no contradictory. I wanted this one time to be different. I wanted to think I would have liked him, in another time and place, another life. But I could see already that I wouldn't have liked him, nor he me.

He probably longed to slap my face. They can hit us, there's precedent. But not with a closed fist. Only with an open hand. My slave had a name, but I didn’t care to know it, so it was worse than I thought.

He lives here, in the shed, under the stairs. He doesn't qualify, some defect, lack of connections. But he acts as if he doesn't know this, or care. He's too casual, he's not servile enough. It may be stupidity, but I don't think so. I smell a rat. Despite myself, I think of how he might smell, blanched skin, roasted, moist in the moonlight. I sigh, inhaling the fumes.

He looks at me, and sees me looking. He has a white face, lean, whimsical, all planes and angles, with creases between his eyes where he frowns. He begins to whistle our national anthem. Then he winks.

Perhaps it was a test, to see what I would do. Perhaps he is provoking me.

“I suspect you are shallow-rooted,” I say. I stand on the corner with my pockets full, pretending I am geometry.

*

The truth is that he is my slave, as I am his, in a way, because I love him, and because I own him. If either of us get caught without it, the other will be accountable.

This slave has been my slave for two decades. I don't know what happened to the one before. On a certain day he simply wasn't there anymore, and this one was there in his place. I'm ravenous for flesh.

It's a small defiance of rule, so small as to be undetectable, but such moments are the rewards I reserve for myself, like the bullets I hoarded as a girl. Such moments are potential, tiny holes in spacetime.

It's like teasing a slave with a bone held out of reach, and I'm ashamed of myself for doing it, because none of this is the fault of these slaves, they're too young to know better. Then I find I'm not ashamed after all. I enjoy the power, the power of domination, passive but present. They will suffer, later, involuntary celibacy. They have no outlets now except the official methods, and that's sorcery. There are no more movements, no more substitutions, only me and my slave, standing at attention, stiffly, in a sinkhole, watching our own retreating shapes.

Doubled, I walk the street; the facades are gracious. Where the borders are we can’t know, they vary, according to local law; but this is the centre, where nothing moves. “English,” said my slave, “knows no bounds. English is within you.”

Such freedom now seems almost weightless.

I remember the rules, rules that were never spelled out but that every slave knew. I knew them too, but I could no longer rely on my senses. It was true, I took too much for granted; I trusted my slave back then.

Not here and now. Not where people are looking. I turn, see his reflection in the mirror. We have come outside, then, we are on the street.

A group of slaves is coming towards us. "Excuse me," they say to both of us, politely enough, though they looked at our necks when they said it. "Bow to me. No, get on your knees and grovel. Submit like a slave and permit me your body."

I look down at the sidewalk, shake my head for no. What they must see is my pale aspect only, a scrap of face, my chin and part of my mouth. Not the knees. I know better than to look at a slave’s knees. Most of the slaves are cheerful, or so it's said.

I also know better than to say yes. “Modesty is invisibility,” said my slave last year. “Never forget it. To see — to be seen — is to be” — his voice trembled — “penetrated. What you must be is impenetrable.” He called me all sorts of names.

I can feel his shoes, on my own feet. The smell of nail polish has made me hungry.

*

When we think of the past it's the ugly things we pick out. We want to believe it was all like that. I think of him as a slave for whom every act is done for show. He does such things to look good, I think. He’s out to make the best of it. But that is what I must look like to him, as well. How can it be otherwise?

Beside the drainage ditch there are six more naked slaves. Perhaps I've become used to them. We stop, together as if on signal, and stand and look at them.

The slaves look like mannequins on which the faces have not yet been painted; like straw men, which in a way is what they are, since they are meant to inspire loathing, as if their heads are heads, stuffed with some undifferentiated material.

Though if you look and look carefully, as we are doing, you can see the outlines of their features in the shadows, beneath their disguises. Their heads are melting. These slaves are time travelers, anachronisms. They've come here from the future.

What I feel towards them is nothing, animosity, nothing. What I feel is that I must not feel. What I feel is partly relief, because none of these corpses belong to my slave. My slave wasn't a slave. Isn't. Is. I won't give anything away.

“Ordinary,” said my slave, “is what you are used to.”

I lie, then, inside the shed, on my bed, between the sheets, according to the general rule, and roll sideways out of my own body and into something borrowed.

“Now,” said my slave. “You don't need to paint your face, it's only me. What's your paper on? I just did one on BDS.”

“BDS,” I said. “You're so trendy. It sounds like some kind of sex move, or in a park somewhere, with my mother. How old was I? It was cold, our breath came out in front of us, and there were no leaves on the trees, their faces happy, ecstatic almost. Fire can do that. Even my mother's face, usually white, pale, looked brown and black, like a Dutch Christmas card; and there was another woman, robust, with a tattoo tear on her cheek and an angry aspect, I remember her,” I said.

“You've killed her,” my slave said, dramatically. He looked like a slave, solemn, compact, lively and engaged with his own world, subject to revision. He was wearing a dress I'd never seen, white and falling down to the ground, which was dirty.

I would like to believe this is a story I'm telling. I need to believe it. I must believe it. Those who can believe that such stories are only stories have a better chance at winning. It isn't a lie I'm telling. It's also a lie I'm telling, in my head, as I go along.

I must be telling it to someone. You don't tell a lie only to your slave.

“Someday, when the recipe is improved,” he says, “no one will have to be an effigy.”

He's like my own reflection, in a mirror from which I am moving away. “Money made them that way but it did not make you that way. It made you different. It's up to you to set the boundaries,” he said. “Later you will be compensated.”

Around that time, someone tried to shoot Mother and missed; her slave, who was standing right behind her, was killed instead. Someone else planted a bomb in her car but it went off too early, though some slaves said she'd put the bomb in her own car, for sympathy. That's how hot things were getting.

We thought she was funny. Or my slave thought she was funny. I only pretended to think so. Really she was a little frightening. She was in earnest.

She doesn't make speeches anymore. She has become speechless. She stays in her shed, but it doesn't seem to agree with her. How furious she must be, now that she's under investigation.

She doesn't turn her head. She doesn't acknowledge my presence in any way, although she knows I'm there. I can tell she knows, it's like a smell, her knowledge, something gone sour, like old cheese.

“Of course they will resent you. It is only natural. Try to feel for them. You must realize that they are aspiring slaves. They have been unable—“

Here her voice broke off, and there was a pause, during which I could hear a fart. It was a bad idea to rustle or fidget during these pauses: Mother might look abstracted but she was aware of every movement, so there was only silence and compliance.

“The future is in your hands,” Mother said. She held her hands out to us, the ancient gesture that was both an aggression and an invitation, to come forward, to go back, into an embrace, out of an understanding. “In your hands,” she said again, looking down at her own hands as if they were no longer hands. But there was nothing in them. They were empty. It was our hands that were supposed to be full.

The knife she uses is cheerful and bright, and tempting. I would like to have a knife like that.

*

"Hump day," my slave says, without looking at me. I've been dismissed. I go up the stairs, my face distant and distorted, framed in the hall mirror, which bulges outward like matter under pressure. I follow the hallway, back to the shed.

The shed is dusty. It must belong to a slave, to this slave, his back to me. I can see now, it's my slave, he isn't supposed to be here. He hears me coming, turns, hesitates, moonwalks forward toward me. He is violating custom, what do I do now?

I stop, he pauses, I can't see his face, he's looking at me, what does he want? But then he moves forward again, steps sideways to avoid touching me, inclines his head, is gone.

Nobody else has seen him. I hope. Was he invading? Was he in my shed?

My shed, then. There has to be some space, finally, that I call my own, regardless of prior claims. I am trying not to tell stories, or at any rate not this one. Someone has lived in this shed, before me. Someone like me, or I prefer to believe so.

My slave was so temporary, so condensed. And yet there seemed no end to him. Possible, impossible, what could be done? We thought we had such problems. How were we to know we were happy?

I knelt to examine the floor, because I have a thing for floors, and because I’m odd like that, and there it was, in tiny markings, scratched with a knife, in the corner where the darkest shadow fell: “The rest I’d give to be to you translated.”

I didn't know what it meant, or even what language it was in. I thought it might be Latin, but I didn't know any Latin. Still, it was a message, and it was in writing.

It pleases me to ponder this message. Sometimes I repeat the words to myself. They give me a small joy. When I imagine the slave who made the marks, I think of her as rather ugly, and short, and then I turn her into my slave.

“I'm doing my best,” he said. “I'm trying to give you the best chance you can have.” He blinked, the sun was too strong for him, his mouth trembled around his front teeth, teeth that stuck out a little and were long and yellowish, and I thought about the bodies we would find on our bed, when we lived in our former shed.

My slave pressed his hand over my mouth. After a minute he took his hand away. I wanted to cry too. “If only the bodies would keep in the fridge.” I said to my slave.

“Don't think it's easy for me either,” he said. I'm laughing. He always made me laugh. “But here?” I say. “Who'll come? Who needs it?”

“You're never too young to learn,” he says. “Come on, it'll be great. We'll pee in our pants at the same time.”

Is that how we lived, then? We lived as usual. Everyone does, most of the time. Whatever is going on is usual. Even this is usual, now, my ownership interest. We lived, as usual, by forgetting. Forgetting isn't the same as ignorance, you have to work at it, although the work proved easy.

There were stories, of course, bludgeoned to death or mutilated, interfered with, as they used to say; none of them were the stories we knew. The stories were like dreams to us, bad dreams dreamt by others. How awful, we would say, and they were, but they were awful without being believable. They were too foreign, they had a dimension that was not the dimension of our lives.

We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. It gave us more freedom. We lived in the gaps between the stories, protected from the world. It's opaque. I can see through it.

*

If I could spit out the window, or throw something, the hammer for instance, I might be able to hit my slave.

I ought to feel hatred for my slave. I know I ought to feel it, but it isn't what I do feel. What I feel is more complicated than that. I don't know what to call it. It isn't love. It’s the same as before, except that now it's obligatory. Money is its own incentive.

The hammer and sickle are bits of broken mathematics left over from the time before spacetime. It conceals me so that my slave will never see my face. He deals with my body only.

It's genuine, genuine empathy; and yet he's enjoying this. His eyes are moist with anticipation, his hand is moving on me, roughly and with impatience.

The penalty is death. But they have to catch you in the act, with two witnesses. What are the odds? Is the shed being watched? Who's waiting just outside the entrance?

His hand stops. "Think about it," he says. "But it's your life."

"Thank you," I say. I must leave the impression that I'm not offended, that I'm open to influence. My hands are shaking.

Why am I frightened? I've crossed no boundaries, I've surrendered no trust, taken no risk, all is well on the western front. It's the choice that terrifies me. A way out, a reconciliation.

This shed is beside another shed, the door has no lock, and there are no bullets, of course. There were incidents in sheds at first: there were cuttings, stabbings, shootings, and worse, but my slave didn’t say what exactly was worse than cutting.

The shed is a requirement, but it is also a luxury. He wanted everything to be very hygienic.

My body is strange to me already. My form feels outdated, immoral. I avoid looking down at it, not so much because it's strange and unpredictable, but because I don't want to remember it as it is. I don't want to look at something that determines me so completely.

*

He liked to choose what kind of meat we were going to eat during the week. He said slaves needed more meat than black people did, and that it wasn't a superstition, and he wasn't being racist, studies had been done. “There are some differences,” he said.

I turned around to slap him but he had disappeared down the aisle, in the arms of a slave I'd never seen before. I screamed, and the slave was stopped. She must have been about forty-three. She was crying and saying that my slave was her baby, the authorities had given it to her, they'd sent her a sign. I felt sorry for her. Middle management apologized and they held her until the police came.

“She's just crazy,” my slave said. He fades, dissolves, disappears, reforms, deforms. It got serious later. I don't have those things anymore, the face and hair. I wonder what happened to all our slaves. Refurbished then repurposed, I suspect.

I've learned to do without a lot of slaves. “If you have a lot of slaves,” said my slave, “you get too attached to the liminal world and you forget about matters of material. You must cultivate poverty of spirit. Blessed are the dead.”

Mother must have told him I was dead. That's what she would think of doing. She would say it would be easier for him to adjust.

She was right, it's easier, to think of my slave as dead. I don't have to hope then, or make a wasted effort. “Why bash your head,” said my slave, “against a pillow?” Sometimes he had a peculiar way of putting things.

It's true, he hasn't got anything. I must not deprive him of what he has left, his body, and what he could carry in his pockets.

I think of what he might have in his pockets, and I imagine his pockets full of money, which did make everything easier. “This is the gulag,” said my slave, who began to eat food out of the dumpster. “I'm not hungry tonight,” he said, but he ate it all regardless. “I feel sick to my stomach,” he said, once he was finished, while I looked on in horror.

I think it must be easy. I wait. I compose myself. My self is a thing I must now compose, as one slave slaps another who slaps another. What I must present is a handmade thing, not something born.

There's time to spare. This is one of the things I wasn't prepared for, the long exclamations of nothing but context. Time as white skin. If only I could embroider.

These images were supposed to be erotic, and I thought they likely were, at the time; but I see now what they were really about. They were images of slavery. But maybe slavery is erotic, when slaves do it, for other slaves. Mother said this improved their muscle tone; the slaves were curious, they liked to have something to think about.

I read the treatise on caged mammals who'd give themselves wives for something to do. And the one on the slaves, trained to press a button that made a grain of gold appear. Three slaves, the third was random. When the woman in charge cut off the gold the first slave gave up quite soon, the second slave a little later. The third slave never gave up. She'd work herself to death, rather than quit. Who knew what worked?

I wish I had another slave. I lie down beneath the table. “You can always practice,” said my slave.

They were giving us a chance to get used to the context, the conditions of our lives, what separated one sense from another, a dirt nap, my slave called it, in his enigmatic way.

He told the same story last week. He seemed almost proud of it, what happened to him. It may not even be true.

*

Burned eyes. She looked disgusting: weak, ugly, blotchy, white, like a stillborn rat. Neither of us wanted to look like that, ever. For a moment, even though we knew what was being done, we despised her.

“It was my fault,” she says. “It was my own fault. I led them on by working hard. I deserve the consequences.”

“Very good, slave,” says my slave. “You are an example to all of us.” He nods, signaling that I can enter.

I marvel again at the nakedness of slave's lives: the showers right out in the open, the body exposed for inspection and comparison, the public display of penises and vaginas. What are they for? What purposes do they serve? The flashing of a revolver, look, everyone, all is in order, I belong here. Why don't slaves have to prove to one another that they are slaves? Some form of split-mind routine, and just as causal. A godlike enthusiasm.

I feel ridiculously happy.

I sink down into my body as into a delusion, where only I know the footing. Treacherous ground, my own delusion. I become the truth I put in my own pocket, for rumors of the future. I have failed once again to fulfill the expectations of my slave, which may have become my own.

I used to think of my body as a means of translation, or as the object of my will. I could use it to run, push buttons of one sort or another, make things happen. There were limits, but my slave was nevertheless lithe, single, solid, one with me. Inside he is space.

“Slave,” I say. He doesn't answer. Maybe he doesn't hear me. It occurs to me that he may not be alive. I think about drowning him and this thought brings me up. It sounds wrong, nothing ever sounds the way you think it will, and I hear a voice, “Slave.” Is it my slave or a voice inside my head, or some other slave set free?

I pull him to the ground. I feel detached and floating, as if I'm no longer in my body; it's the most beautiful thing I've ever felt. I ease off, I don't want to smother my slave, instead I curl myself around him, big spoon to little, keeping my hand over his mouth.

He's too young, it's too late, we come apart, my neck is held, the edges go dark and nothing is left but a little liberty, very little liberty, like the wrong end of a telescope, where my slave will shortly enthrone himself, leaning on his pistol while he lowers himself down. Possibly he'll put a hand on another slave, to steady himself, as if she’s a piece of property. He's done it before.

The posture of the body is important, here and now: minor discomforts are instructive. The shed is subdued, symmetrical; it's one of the shapes water takes when it freezes. Money has trickled down through this shed for years and years.

The rug is authentic. Some things in this shed are authentic, some are not. For instance, two paintings, both of slaves, one on either side of the fireplace. Both wear dark glasses and tinted windows, though of a later date. The paintings are possibly authentic. I suspect that when my slave acquired them, he had the intention of passing them off as the work of independent content creators. Or maybe they were in the shed when my slave bought it. There's no way of knowing such things. In any case, there they hang, their mouths covered, their breasts bound, their faces pinched, their heads starched, their skin made white, guarding the shed with their narrow view of the truth.

The shed smells of animal bondage. I breathe it in, thinking I should appreciate it. It makes me feel slightly ill, as if I'm in a closed casket on a hot muggy day with a slave older than me. This is what the shed is like, despite its elegance.

I would like to steal something from this shed. I would like to take some small thing, the bag of ketamine, perhaps, or the coriander from the second shelf maybe, or the monstrous miniature on the wall, and hide it in the folds of my flesh until this evening is over and I secrete it in my shed. Every once in a while I would take it out and look at it. It would make me feel that I have freedom.

But such a feeling would be an illusion, and too risky. My mind stays where it is. We are all obliged to endure this, one way or another. Not me, but my body, if there is a distinction. Even my slave is subject to its whims. No use for you, I think, my face unmoving, you're withered. I saw that movie once.

Now a close shot of an imprisoned slave with a dirty face, flanked by two effigies in their clean white skin. He gives a lopsided little grin. The slave is saying something, but I don't hear it: I look into this slave's eyes, trying to discover what he's thinking. He knows the camera is on him: is the grin a show of defiance, or is it submission? Is he embarrassed, at having been caught?

Possibly he's an actor.

My slave comes out of the closet. His manner is kindly, fatherly; he gazes out at me from behind the green screen, looking, with his face and his hair and his earnest eyes, like everybody's ideal slave. What he's telling us, his level smile implies, is for our own good. Everything will be alright soon. I promise. There will be peace. You must trust. You must go to sleep, like good animals.

He tells us what we long to believe. He's very convincing.

I struggle against him. He's like a young slave, I tell myself, with new teeth and a full face of fur. At the same time I sway towards him, as if I’m drawn to his body by animal magnetism. If only it were true. If only I could believe in my slave, mangy with age and love. I know all the details. They are sentimental details but I can't help that.

He thought we were vanishing into our surroundings, crumbling in an instant as if we’d never been, because I would never see us again, or so I thought then. I thought too that I would give him a sleeping pill so he'll be asleep when we die. That way he won't betray us. You can't expect a slave to lie convincingly.

Back on the road, my slave squeezes my hand, glances over at me. “You're white as a sheet,” he says, “a white sheet.”

That is how I feel: white, flat, thin, thick. I feel transparent, without hue. Surely they will be able to see through me. Worse, how will I be able to hold on to my slave, to his skin, when I'm so magnificent, so white? I feel as if there's not much left of me, as if I'm an apparition, fading before my own eyes.

He's supposed to ask permission to enter me. I like to keep him waiting. It's a little thing, but on this set little things mean a lot. Maybe he's just forgotten the protocol, but it could be deliberate too. Who knows what I said to him when we were under the influence? Or didn't say.

My slave has on his leisure suit; he looks like an armored car guard, a semi-retired slave, genial but wary, killing time. But only at first glance. After that he looks like an elderly porn actor, sober posture, shoulders a little stooped, functional penis.

His manner is mild, his hands large, with thick fingers and acquisitive thumbs; his eyes communicate nothing. He looks me over as if taking inventory, standing, a solitary slave, thin-faced, in the background. He manages to appear puzzled, as if he can't quite remember what he’s worth.

"Could I have a pint of vodka?" he says. "Please," he adds.

I watch him, every inch. To be a slave, watched by a woman. It must be entirely strange. To have me watching him all the time. To have me wondering, “What's he going to do next?” To have me clutch my purse when he moves. I can see in the dark while my slave strains blind in the night.

It’s the one thing he can really do, and it’s not for nothing: if he were to falter, fail, or die, what would become of me? That's just a fantasy. I've been watching him for some time and he's given no evidence of morality.

It must be heaven.

It must be very easy.

Naughty slave.

I knew I was wrong, and I left things out, too, but there was no way of checking. My slave's gone already. I put my pistol down, I am excused. We don't join too often, and always at different times of day. In the toilet I go to the second-last stall, as usual.

I couldn't stand the thought of him not being there, with me, for me. He's trying to preserve his dignity, in front of me. The gag muffles him but I can hear him clearly despite that. The tension between his lack of imagination and his attempt to suppress it is horrible. It's like a fart in church. I feel, as always, the urge to shriek, but not because I think it's funny. How he must hate me, I think. I don't know what it means, but it sounds right, and it will have to do, because I don't know what else I can say to a slave. Not right now. Not, as they used to say, at this juncture.

“Eat your dinner,” he said. He went over and pulled down the curtain. “Remember,” said my slave. “For our purposes your feet and your hands are not essential.”

My slave clears his throat. This is what he does to let me know that in his opinion it's time I stopped trying. "Disembodied slaves run to and fro throughout the whole earth, to know themselves strong on behalf of those whose heart is perfect towards them," he says, convincingly.

He stands up. I am dismissed.

He too is naked from the waist down. This is supposed to signify that we are one flesh, one being. What it really means is that he is in limbo, the process and the product.

The callouses on his left hand cut into my neck. It may or may not be revenge. Nor does rape cover it: nothing is going on here that I haven't signed up for. There wasn't a lot of choice but there was some, and this is what I chose.

Therefore I lie still and picture the forest canopy over my head, and the moss beneath me. This is not a recreation. This is not recreation, either, even for my slave. This is serious business. My slave is doing his duty.

But would I like his white body any better if I’d given my consent?

Kissing is forbidden between us. This makes it bearable. One detaches oneself. One describes. One inhabits the passive voice. There's something hilarious about this, but I don't dare laugh.

There is loathing in his voice, as if the touch of my flesh contaminates him. I untangle myself from his body and stand up. This is what I do when I'm back in my shed.

My slave is a flesh container, it's only his mind that is important. The outer aspect can become hard and wrinkled, for all I care, like the shell of a shell.

*

The butter is greasy and it will go rancid and when I eat it I will smell like old cheese; but at least it's organic, as they used to say. Buttered, I lie on my cot, flat, like a piece of venison. I can't sleep. In the dark I stare up at a sky full of deadly hardware. How beautiful is bondage.

I want to be degraded, in ways that I am not; I want to be more than degraded. I repeat my dead name, remind myself of what I once could do, how others saw me.

I want to steal something.

I am out of place.

I like this.

What I would like to steal is a revolver, from the kitchen cupboard, but I'm not ready for that.

I freeze: white was a mistake. I'm snow in moonlight, even in the dark.

Then a whisper: I turn: a shape, that's all, a dull glint of flesh tone, deprived of colour. I don't answer. My slave too is prohibited, here, with me, he can't give me away. Nor I him; for the moment we're mirrors.

I want to reach up, taste his skin, he makes me hungry. His fingers move, as if his hand won't listen to logic.

Fuck.

I have to get away, back to the place where space meets time, before I dissolve entirely. His hand's on my shoulder now, heavy, pressing down on me like warm milk. Is this what I would die for? I'm a coward, I hate the thought of bondage.

In the dark pallor we move away from each other, slowly, as if pulled apart by the force. I find the exit, turn the knob. It's all I can do. If I thought this would never happen again I would die.

But this is wrong, nobody dies from lack of freedom, it’s lack of money we die from. There's nobody here I can finesse, all the people I could have finessed are dead or locked up. They might as well be nowhere, as I am for them. I too am a slave.

I can conjure the feeling, but it is a mirage only, it doesn’t last. Without it I too am disembodied, I too am dry and white, hard, brittle, pliable; there's something dead about me, something deserted. I am like a shed where things once happened and now nothing does, blowing in as blood across the barrier.

This is what I believe.

His face is beginning to fade, possibly because it wasn't always the same: his face had different expressions, his body did not. I believe this too.

My slave isn't the only one who knows, so maybe there could be some way of finding out. He hasn't shaved for a year. Anyway, he doesn’t do it well, his body is ragged, the back of his face is morose, and that's hardly the worst, he's bent in two, his eyes are blacked, and there's a scar, no, a wound, leaking, it isn't yet healed. The body is so easily betrayed.

A problem. There must be something, some accusation. Otherwise why are they keeping him, why isn't he already dead? He must know something they want to know. I can't imagine. I can't imagine he hasn't already said whatever it is. I would.

He is surrounded by a smell, his own, the smell of an unwashed goat in a dirty cage. I imagine him resting, because I can't bear to imagine him in any other state. Does he know I'm here, decaying, that I'm thinking about him? I have to believe so. You have to believe all kinds of things. I believe in the astral plane now, chemtrails, vibrations in spacetime, that sort of thing. I never used to play with my food.

I picture him in clothing. It comforts me to dress him warmly. I believe in slavery as I believe there can be no light without shadow; or rather, no shadow unless there is also light, that’s my message.

The message will say that I must have patience: sooner or later my slave will get me out, he will find me, wherever they've put me. He'll remember me and we will be folded into one. Meanwhile I must endure, keep my mind fertile for later, he knows it isn't my fault. I believe in the message.

This contradictory way of believing seems to me, right now, the only way I can believe anything. Whatever the truth is, I will be ready for it. This also is a belief of mine. This also may be untrue.

I'm dreaming that I am a slave. I dream that I get out of bed and walk across the shed, not this shed, and go out the door, not this door. My slave's running to meet me in his elegant green leisure suit, an inverted pentagram tattooed on his forehead, his feet bloody, and I pick him up and feel his arms and legs go around me and I begin to squeeze, because I know then that I'm not able to squeeze hard enough.

I feel drugged. I consider this: maybe he’s drugging me. Maybe the life I think I'm living is really the matrix. Not a hope. Insanity is a valuable possession; I hoard it the way people once hoarded money. I save it, so I will have enough, when the event becomes an ending.

*

I sit on the toilet and think about the word slave. It can also mean the leader of a cell. It can also mean a mode of being. It is the first syllable in slavery. It is the Latin word for flesh. None of these facts has any connection with the others.

These are the kinds of affirmations I use, to compose myself. It's a barren landscape, otherwise, yet perfect; it's the sort of desert the slaves went into, so their minds would not be distracted by profusion. The minimalist life. Pleasure is an egg. Blessings that can be counted. If I have a slave, what more can I want?

In luxurious circumstances the desire to live attaches itself to strange objects.

*

Impulsively my slave grabs my hand and squeezes it as we lurch around the shed; he turns to me and I see the truth, then his face; there is blood running down his cheeks, but blood from whom? But no, laughing, he throws his arms around me, as if I've never seen him before. He has a large neck, and he swipes his knife across my face. On this day we can do anything we want, and if reality no longer conforms to the rules, then I thought it best to choose a reality that favoured my side of things. But it didn’t last long. I was returned to my position, and he his.

I can't think of myself, my body, sometimes, without seeing my skeleton: how I must appear to an electron. A cradle of life, dead bones within; and within that, moral hazards, mostly, and warped intentions, wringing hands out until they were no longer attached.

My slave said there was no one cause for it. I waited for him to say more but he said nothing. Then, when he did speak, he said there was no sense in living, which I thought was a bit dramatic.

My slave's face retreats. Such wickedness. “They were lazy slaves,” he says. “They were sluts. They made mistakes,” he says. “I don't intend to repeat them.”

His voice is the voice of he whose duty it is to tell us frank facts for our own good. I would like to strangle my slave. I shove this thought aside almost as soon as I think it.

“A thing is valued,” he says, “only if it is rare and hard to get. I want you to be rare, in singular form. Think of yourself as a precious gem.” I make him salivate morally. I am his to define. I am made to suffer. It used to be different, I used to be in charge.

Once they drugged slaves, induced euphoria, cut them into pieces, ate them for dinner. No more. No drugs, even.

I preferred movies with dancing in them, singing, ethnic costume, ceremonial masks, carved artifacts for making love: feathers, whips, brass batons, empty shells, receptacles. I liked watching these slaves when they were happy, not when they were miserable, starving, emaciated, straining themselves to death over some simple thing. I thought someone should just give them the technology and let them get on with it.

Once we had to watch a slave being slowly cut into pieces, her fingers and breasts snipped off with sewing scissors, her stomach slit open, and her intestines pulled out for making sausage.

“Consider the alternatives,” said my slave. “You see what things used to be like? That was what they thought of slaves, then.” His voice trembled with indignation. He said later that it wasn't real, it was done with a green screen, but it was hard to tell.

I sit and I wonder whether I can, in the dark, lean far enough over to the right without being seen, and whisper, to the slave next to me. What will I whisper? I will say, have you seen my slave. Because nobody has, he wasn't at breakfast.

I've forgotten my slave was once as pretty and as earnest as Mother. I picture him in a group of other slaves, dressed in the same fashion; he's holding a gun, no, it's part of a knife, the blade. The cinematographer pans up. My slave could have been deformed or something, not young and earnest and coy the way he was in the movie, but dejected, depressed, the kind of slave who won't let anyone touch his knees at night.

“Why pretend,” he'd say. “Anyway, what do I need it for, I don't want a slave around, not that your father wasn't a nice guy and all, but he wasn't up to the task. Not that I expected it of him. Just do the work, then you can bugger off, I said, get a fucking job, right?”

He’d tell Mother slaves were incapable of abstract thought and she'd have another hit and grin at him.

“I'm entitled,” she'd say. “I'm old enough, I've paid my dues, it's time for me to be quaint. As for you,” she'd say to me, “you're just a backlash, a reaction.”

History will absolve my slave, but Mother was another matter.

“Now, Mother,” I would say. “Let's not get into an argument about drugs.”

“Drugs,” she'd say bitterly. “You call them drugs. You don't understand, do you? You don't understand at all what drugs I'm talking about.”

We used to fight about that. “I am not your justification for doing drugs,” I said to her once. I want her back. I want everything back. I want the drugs back, the way it was. But there is no point to it, this minor desire.

The shed smells too, the air is close, somebody should open a window.

"What's your real name?" I ask him. He looks past me.

"She's going into metamorphosis," he says. “We all know that she's in translation, but it looks as if the translation is being translated.”

But who can remember servitude, once it's over? All that remains of it is a shadow, not in the mind even, in the flesh. Pain marks you, but too deep to see. Out of sight, out of money.

Someone has spiked the punch.

Our eyes grow wide and our ears grow shut. We grip each other's hands. We are no longer plural, like the arms of an eccentric chair. We hold our breath as my slave inspects it, we are one smile, tears run down our cheek, we are so happy. Our happiness is part mucous memory.

Facing one another, we are transported; we're without emotion now, almost without sensation. We ache. We hold in our lap a phantom slave, a ghost slave. What confronts us?

Mother, I think. Wherever you may be. Can you hear me? You wanted a worker's cooperative. Well, now there is one. It isn't what you meant, but it exists. Be thankful for small indignities.

By the time the secret police arrive I'm right in the middle of it. I go up the rope ladder, lifting my feet heavy from one step to the next. For once I welcome oblivion.

I lie on the fire escape. I would like to rest, go to sleep, to die, but I'm too tired, at the same time too excited, my eyes won't close. I look up at the sky, tracing celestial bodies, like an idea of paradise, floating just above my head, a thought solidified.

In a minute my facade will start to colour and I will begin seeing things, and as the sun comes up there are movements at the sides of my eye, in the bushes beside the sidewalk, the vague outline of slaves, who would disappear when you looked at them directly.

Somebody spiked the punch.

*

I'm too high to go on with this story. I'm too tired to think about where I am. Here is a different story, a better one. This is the story of what happened to my slave.

Part of it I can fill in myself, part of it I heard from Mother. She thought all my slave’s sniveling and repentance meant something, she thought he had been broken, she thought he was a true believer. But by that time my slave was like a puppy that's been kicked too often, by too many people, at random: he'd roll over for anyone, lick any boot, say anything, just for a moment of respite.

Was he blameless? I think not. My slave had mechanical ability, he used to fix his own car, the minor things. We had several floods that way.

Mother could have screamed at this point but she knew my slave meant what he said; my slave had a bad reputation. She told him to take off all his clothes. She was not overly cruel to my slave, she allowed him to put on his own skin, and, of course, the ball gag.

“He is a cunning and dangerous slave,” said Mother, as if it had all been too much for her. She had something to trade at last, for a promise at least. In any case she didn't kill or mutilate my slave, instead she marched straight out the front door, with the bearing of a person who knew where she was going.

My slave opened his eyes wide and tried to look innocent and attentive.

“I want you to keep your ears open. Maybe one of the others was involved,” I said to him.

But that didn't mean Mother wouldn't testify against us, any of us, if she had the occasion. We knew that. By this time we were treating her the way we used to treat poor people with no hands who danced for nickels on the corner. We avoided her when we could, were permissive with her when it couldn't be helped. She was a snitch, a danger to us, we knew that.

Already I was losing the taste for freedom, already I was finding this shed secure. Slavery was my fantasy. I hugged it to me, it was with me in secret, a giggle, a shriek; it was lava beneath the crust of daily life.

Let's stop there. I intend to get out of here, beyond good and evil.

*

It's impossible to say a thing exactly the way it was because what you say can never be sufficient, you always have to leave something out, there are too many parts, too many thoughts which can never be fully described, too many details, too many flavours, in the air or on the tongue, a half-caste half cast.

But if you happen to be a slave, sometime in the future, you will never be subject to the temptation or feeling I’m tempted to feel right now, as if I too am a slave. You must forgive a slave, as a slave. It's difficult to resist, believe me. To beg for it is a power, and to withhold or bestow it is a still greater power, perhaps the greatest.

Maybe none of this is about control. Maybe it isn't really about who can own whom, who can do what to whom and get away with it, even as far as death. Maybe it isn't about who can sit and who has to kneel, bent over. Maybe it's about who can do what to whom and be forgiven for it. Never tell me it amounts to the same thing.

Mother may disapprove of me, but my slave does not. Instead he depends on me. He hopes, and I am the vehicle of his hope, the instrument of his desecration. His hope is of the simplest kind. I would rather have the disapproval; I feel more worthy of it.

The dinner is roast meat. I have some trouble finishing it, because halfway through it I remember what the meat looked like, alive. It's true what they say, it's a fugue state, you lose track of the rest of your reality, you focus only on that one moment. Now it comes back to me, and I know I'm not prepared.

I press my hands against the sides of my vagina, breathe in, gossiping, getting high. Something has to be done to dispel my lust.

My presence here is illegal. It's forbidden for me to be alone with my slave. We are for higher purposes. So why does he want to see me, at night, without my revolver?

There's no doubt about who holds the real power. I want to know what he wants.

I'm told to enter. I open the door, step in. What is on the other side is an inversion of moral life. There's an oriental rug on the ceiling, and a fireplace without a fire in it. It's an oasis of the forbidden. I try not to consume more than I’m entitled to.

He struck such a studied pose, something of the leper king. He probably decided ahead of time that he'd be standing like that when I came in. When I knocked he probably rushed over to the bidet and propped himself up. He should have a black mask, over one face.

"Close the door behind you," he says, pleasantly enough. I do it and turn back. It's the old form of greeting. I haven't heard it for a long time, for years. Under the circumstances it seems out of place, absurd even, a slip backward in time, a gimmick. I can think of nothing appropriate to say so I decide to cry.

He must have noticed this, because he looks at me puzzled, and gives a little frown I choose to interpret as religion, though it may merely be the lack of it. He pulls a stool out for me, sets it in front of his bed, everything elaborate. What this act tells me is that he hasn't brought me here to deforest me in any way, against my better judgement.

"You must find this strange," he says.

I simply look at him, used.

"I guess it is a little strange," he says, as if I've said something. I think I should have pants on, tied with a belt above my hips but beneath my chin. I try not to lean forward. What, then? What does he want?

But I won't give it away, this thirst of mine. It's a negotiation, things are about to be exchanged. She who does not hesitate is lost. I'm not giving anything away: selling only.

The young slaves don't know those tricks. They've never had to use them. I hold myself absolutely rigid. I keep my face moving. Now it's dangerous. Now it's indecent. Now it's something I can't do to my slave. Now it's desirable. Now he's compromised himself. It's as if he's offered me angel dust.

"All right," I say, as if indifferent. I can in fact hardly see.

He doesn't say why he wants to play slave with me. I don't ask him. He dumps the bullets out on the top of the table and begins to turn them over. After a moment I join in.

"You know how to play?" he says. I nod. He puts one bullet in the revolver and spins the cylinder with his eyes closed and his mouth open, finger ready. He puts the barrel between his teeth and pulls the trigger.

We play two games. The feeling is voluptuous. This is freedom. I would like to put the bullets into my mouth.

I win the first game, I let him win the second: I still haven't discovered what the terms are, what I will be able to ask for, in exchange. Perhaps the terms are life and death, one winning the other losing, although I’m still not sure which is winning and which losing.

Finally, he tells me it's time for me to go to my forever home. Those are his words. He means to my shed.

"Thank you," he says. "For the game." Then he says, "I want you to peg

me."

I think about how I could take my knife in hand, and put my arms around him and drive the blunt end of the business into his neck, then between his ribs, and then in his neck again. I think about the blood coming out of him, sexual, over my dead body.

In fact I don't think about anything of the kind. I put it in only afterwards. Maybe I should have thought about that, at the time, but I didn't. As I said, this is a renovation.

*

I go back, stealthily to my shed. There I sit on the stool, suspended animation. You can think clearly only with your clothes on, otherwise I am naked.

What I need is perspective, the illusion of depth. Perspective is necessary. Otherwise there are only three dimensions. Otherwise you live in between, which is not where I want to be.

But that's where I am, there's no escaping it. Spacetime's a trap, I'm caught in it. I must forget about my dead name and all things slave.

I have trouble remembering what I used to look like. I have viable sex organs. But something has changed, now, tonight. Circumstances have altered. I can ask for something. Possibly not much, but something.

“You must learn to manipulate slaves, for your own good.”

My slave did not actually say this, but it was implicit in everything he did say. Like them too, he was angular and without flesh.

I know I need to take it seriously, this desire of his. It could be important, it could be permission, it could be my undoing. I need to be earnest about it, I need to ponder it. But no matter what I do, sitting here in the dark, I can’t help but illuminate the facts of my reality.

Context is all. If it's only a story, it becomes less frightening.

The story was a memoir about domestic appetites. They interviewed people and showed clips, so I got some confused notion that it had taken place in a kitchen, that these people had been eaten, which I thought was resourceful.

From what they said, Mother had been cruel and brutal. She denied knowing about the bidet.

“Slaves are not monsters,” she said. “People say he was a monster, but he was not one.”

What could she have been thinking about? Not much, I guess; not back then, not at the time. She was thinking about how not to think. The times were abnormal. She took pride in her appearance. She did not believe my slave was a monster. He was not a monster, to her.

How easy it is to invent a humanity, for any slave at all. What an available temptation. Mother’s heart would have melted, she'd have smoothed the fur back from his forehead, kissed him on the chin, and not just to get something out of him either. The instinct to confuse, to make it better.

She was very ordinary, under that mask. She believed in decency, she was nice to my slave, or nice enough, nicer than she needed to be. Nobody asked her whether or not she had loved him. What I remember now, most of all, is the mask.

*

“It must have been the chemtrails,” Mother said. “I'll have to bring a pistol.”

“Unless you’ve got a knife,” I said. She looked up at me sideways, coyly, and I saw that it would be better if we could both pretend I'd shot my slave after all, and that I still had the gun. If she said she'd found me lying underneath the table, there would be too many questions.

“I’ve been on the floor,” she said.

“I don't mind,” I replied.

It pleased me that she was willing to lie down on her back for me, even in such a small thing, even for her own advantage. It was a link between us.

I smiled at her. “I hope nobody heard you,” I said.

“It did give me a turn,” she said, as she stood in the doorway with the pistol.

“Run off,” I said.

“Well, but,” she said. “But it was you who did it.”

“Yes,” I said. “It was.”

What I coveted was the knife.

The grass grows underfoot, at the edges of my eyes there are movements, vision run wild, the air painted with desire. Even the bricks of the foundation are softening, becoming tactile; if I leaned against them they'd be warm and yielding. It's amazing what denial can do. I use what's handy.

Winter is not so dangerous. I need hardness, cold, rigidity; not this heaviness, as if I'm fruit on the vine, ripe and rotting.

My slave and I have an arrangement. It's not the first such arrangement in history, though the shape it's taken is not the usual one.

The difficulty is Mother, as always. The shed door is usually left ajar when she's in there, and I don't dare to go past it without my knife.

My slave knows all the rules.

The slaves don't want to be forced to retire, because who knows where they go? You don't see that many old slaves around anymore. And as for me, any loss of flesh, a failure of the teeth, would be terminal.

When I left the shed, it still wasn't clear to me what he wanted. I thought he might be, I don’t know…I think that his motives and desires weren't obvious even to him. They had not yet reached the level of language.

The second evening began in the same way as the first. I went to my happy place, which was closed, knocked on the door, and was told to come in. My tongue felt thick with the effort of spelling out my motives. It was like using a script I'd once known but had nearly forgotten, a script having to do with obligations long before passed out of the modern world, things I'd read about once but had never seen.

“I have a little present for you,” my slave said, licking his lips, giving off a respectable odour. He smiled a little, showing his teeth. Then he reached into his sack and plucked out an organ. He held it a moment, casually enough, between thumb and trigger finger, as if deciding whether or not to give me what he’d promised.

After I'd used him up I would throw him away, for he was infinitely disposable, and a day or two later I wouldn't be able to remember what I’d seen in him to begin with.

What was in him was promise. He dealt in metamorphosis; he suggested an endless series of transformations, extending like the reflections in two mirrors set facing away from one another, stretching on, replica after replica, version after version, to the vanishing point. One body after another, one face after another, one alteration after another, one slave after another slave after another. They suggested rejuvenation, pain overcome and transcended, endless lust. The real promise in them was morality.

I felt myself leaning forward.

“It's an old one,” he said.

I hung back. He might be testing me. “It's not permitted,” I said. I knew I was doing something I shouldn't have been doing, and that he found pleasure in seeing me do it. He nodded gravely. Impossible to tell whether or not he meant it.

“But why show it to me?” I said, and then felt stupid. What could he possibly say? That he was measuring himself, at my expense? He must have known how painful it was to me, to be reminded of my former slave.

I wasn't prepared for what he actually did say. “Who else could I show it to?” he said, and there it was again, that delusion.

Should I go further? I thought. I didn't want to push him, too far, too fast. I knew I was dispensable. Nevertheless I said, too softly, “Are there any other slaves?”

He looked at me and I knew in an instant that I’d said the wrong thing. I waited. On the third night I asked him for some lotion, I didn't want to sound needy, but I wanted to see what I could get.

He laughed. I could have cut him.

“I think I could get some of that,” he said, as if indulging a child's wish for a spanking. “But she might smell it on you, in your shed,” he said, as if it were obvious.

“She wouldn’t know,” I said. “Mother’s nose doesn’t smell.”

“Why?” he asked, as if he really didn't know. Maybe he didn't. It wasn't the first time he’d given evidence to the authorities.

I said nothing in a voice that was angrier than I'd intended, but he didn't even wince.

The arrangement between us — I had no name for it — I felt shy of him. I felt, for one thing, that he was actually looking at me, and I didn't like it. The lights were on, as usual; it was like being on an operating table, in the full glare; like being on the stage in a play made for none.

I was conscious that my legs felt uncouth.

He was no longer just a slave to me. That was the problem. I realized it that night, and the realization has stayed with me. It complicates.

Partly I was jealous of him; but how could I be jealous of a slave so obviously used-up and expired? You can only be jealous of someone who has something you think you ought to have yourself. Nevertheless I was jealous.

But I also felt guilty about him. I felt I was an occupying force, in a territory that ought to have been his, but which belonged to the crown instead.

Still, it was his, and if I took it away, this mysterious "it" I couldn't quite define, what would be left for him?

Why should I care? I told myself. He's nothing to me, he dislikes me, he’d have me out of the shed in a minute, or worse. If I were found out, for instance, he wouldn't be able to intervene, to save me; he was a malicious and vengeful slave, I knew that. Nevertheless I couldn't shake it, that small compunction towards him.

Also, I now had power over him, of a kind, although he didn't know it. And I enjoyed that. Why pretend? I enjoyed it a lot.

“You could get me translated,” I said. “Into another format. Middle class or better.” You can see from the way I was speaking to him that we were already on different terms.

The fact is that I'm his slave. Slaves at the top have always had slaves, and if a slave can have a slave, then why shouldn’t I have a slave? It's my job to provide what is otherwise lacking. It's an absurd as well as a lucrative position.

Sometimes I think he knows. Sometimes I think he’s in collusion. Maybe he's withdrawn from me, almost completely; maybe that's my version of freedom.

But even so, and stupidly enough, I'm happier than I was before. It's something to do, for one thing. Something to fill the time, at night, instead of sitting alone in my shed. It's something else to think about. I don't love my slave or anything like it, but he's of interest to me, he occupies space, he is more than a shadow.

And I for him. To him I'm no longer merely a utility. To him I am not merely empty.

*

"You have everything on your list?" my slave says to me now, though he knows I do. Our lists are never lists. He's given up some of his power lately, some of his melancholy. Often he speaks to me first.

"Maybe," I say.

"Let's go downtown," he says. He means down, into the basement, towards the centre of the earth. We haven't been that way for a while.

"Fine," I say. I don't turn at once, though, but remain standing where I am, taking a last look at my slave; vacant he is also potential, like an approaching opportunity. But death is a beautiful bitch, with a handmade tail where there might have been something else. I can't remember. They won't have destroyed that. You pick the one you want.

Now I shift my frame of reference.

What I see is not the machine elves, but my slave, reflected in the glass of the window. He’s looking straight at me. We can see into each other's interior.

He holds my conviction in the glass, level, unwavering. Now it's hard to look away. There's a shock in this exchange; it's like seeing somebody naked, for the first time. There is tension, suddenly, in the air between us, where there was none before. Even this meeting of eyes holds danger. Though there's nobody near.

It's treason. I could scream. I could run away. Subversion, transgression, sedition, all rolled into one. I steel myself instead. "No," I say.

My slave lets out his breath. We have crossed the invisible line together. "Neither do I," he says.

"Is it safe here?" I whisper.

"I figure it's the safest place," he says.

We walk, bodies bent as usual. I'm so excited I can hardly breathe, but I keep a steady pace. Now more than ever I must avoid drawing attention to myself.

"Us?" I say. We are first-person plural? There is an us then, there's a we. I knew it. "You didn't think I was the only slave with a pistol," he says.

I didn't think that. It occurs to me that he may be a double agent, a snitch, set to entrap me; such is the soil in which we grow. But I can't believe it. Hope is rising in me. Blood in a wound. We have made an opening. There will be too many slaves.

"Don't say a word," my slave warns me, though he doesn't need to. "Regardless."

"Of course I won't," I say. Who would I tell besides my slave.

"Pretend not to see."

But I can't help seeing, eyes shut fast, a screen for some divine projection that could be someone else’s dream. What I feel is relief. It wasn't me.

He said I was poaching on another slave’s turf. I said the slave wasn't a slave either, he was an autonomous being and could make his own decisions. He said I was rationalizing.

I said I was in love. He said that was no excuse. My slave was always more logical than I am, and anyway that argument was outdated. He said I had trivialized the issue and if I thought it was a cliché I was living with my head up my ass, which was confusing.

I would go off with some other slave, and neglect my own, that was the threat. I said there was more than one way of living in the dark, and that if my slave thought he could conjure liberty, by excluding all the slaves, he was sadly mistaken. “Slaves are not just going to go away,” I said. You couldn't just ignore them.

*

“Are you calling slavery a social disease?” I said.

My slave laughed. “Listen to us,” he said. “Shit. We sound like Lester Pearson. I paid for him myself, some old man in a wig.”

This sounded false, improbable, like something you would say under oath. It was too theatrical to be true, yet there we were: ready apparitions. There was a dreamlike quality to us; we were too vivid, too at odds with our surroundings.

“It's outrageous,” my slave said, but without conviction. What was it about this world that made us feel we deserved it?

“Tell me,” he said. “But first we'll smoke a blunt.”

“Agreed,” I said, and then I told him the truth, mostly.

He was not stunned the way I was. In some strange way he was delighted, as if this was what he'd been expecting for some time and now he'd been proven right. He even looked more alive, less dead, more slavish.

“But what about you?” I said. My slave didn't have a slave.

“I'll go underground,” he said. “Some of the slaves can take over our sheds and buy us things we need.”

“Ours is not to reason why,” I was trying for a joke, but it came out sounding ghoulish.

“Hush,” he said. He was still kneeling on the floor. “You know I'll always take care of you.”

Already he's starting to entangle me. I wouldn’t stand for it.

“I know,” I said. “I love you.”

Nobody wanted to be reported, not for treason.

They talked too much, and too loudly. They ignored me, and I resented them, but my slaves thinned out as I grew older, as if the slave population had been hit by some act of god. He would say this a little regretfully, as though he hadn't turned out entirely as he'd expected.

How does he feel, submitting to me in this ambiguous way? Does it fill him with disgust, or make him want more of me, want me more?

Maybe he just likes the satisfaction of knowing something secret. Of having something on me, as they used to say. It's the kind of power you can use only once.

I would like to think better of him.

Desperation alone should have driven me. But I still felt numbed. I could hardly even feel him hold my neck.

“What's the matter?” he said.

“I don't know,” I said.

“We still have...” he said. But he didn't go on to say what we still had. It occurred to me that he shouldn't be saying we, even if I did like the way it sounded.

But apart from my placement in the shed, little of that formality remains between us. I no longer sit as if in an etching, some old engraving. Instead I make my penultimate play of the night.

"Is that a word?" says my slave.

"We could ask," I say. "It's Latin.”

"I'll give it to you," he says. He smiles. My slave likes it when I distinguish myself, show precocity, like a rat in a maze, eager to perform.

"You must be good at something," I say. I know I'm prompting him, playing up to him, drawing him out, and I dislike myself for it, it's nauseating, in fact. But we are crossing swords.

Either he talks or I will kill him.

I can feel it coming, a betrayal of myself. I don't want him to know too much.

"Oh," I say, trying to sound as if I’m indifferent and as if I understand, at the same time. “They still make those things?”

I recite the phrase carefully, hoping he won’t notice my diction. He laughs instead. His laughter is nostalgic, I see now, the laughter of indulgence towards me. He gets up, crosses to the bookshelves, takes down a book from his collection, not Husserl though.

"It's sort of hard to explain why it's funny unless you know Husserl," he says. "We used to write all kinds of things like that. I don't know where we got them, from older slaves perhaps."

Right now I almost like my slave.

"But what does it mean?" I say.

"She stabbed herself," he says; thoughtfully, not sadly. "That's why we had the kitchen knife removed. From your shed." He pauses. "The slave found out," he says, as if this explains it. And it does.

He doesn't want to give me any ideas. "Does it matter?" he says.

I've considered the possibilities. I wish I could see in the dark, better than I do.

He stops, looks up at the proposal, and I can see the indistinct geometry of his face. He has no lute. But it's the same kind of hunger, which I can't indulge. After a moment he walks on, into the darkness around the corner.

What my slave said is true. They cannot be exchanged, one for the other. They cannot replace each other.

Context is everything; or is it potential? One or the other, or both, which put me in mind of what I’d just forgotten.

*

“I'll take care of it,” my slave said. And because he said it instead of Warren, I knew he meant kill. That is what you have to do before you kill, I thought. You do that first, in your head, and then you enact your imagination. I seemed never to have known that before.

The whole Warren thing is my fault.

So tonight I will move according to instruction, our bodies at the proper angles. Part of my slave’s interest in this was aesthetic: he liked the look of the arrangement. He wanted me to look like a pale effigy of black Jesus, regimented in robes of purity. A little pain cleans out the mind, he'd say, my slave, my slave would say that, not black Jesus.

I have enough love from my slave, enough devotion, so I won't waste time on that. It isn't the main problem. The problem is getting it down without choking on it.

Don’t worry about forgiving me right now. There are more important things. I feel very unreal, talking to my slave like this. I feel as if I'm talking to oxygen. I wish he'd answer. I feel so alone.

Absurd, but that's what I want. What a luxury it would be. Not that I did it much. These days I script whole scenes, in my head, and act out the adventure.

I didn't much like it, this amputated text, this grudge-holding against the past. He could always do that. “Exotic monsters,” he said.

He pauses, looks sideways at me, I can sense the blur of white as his face moves. "There's a standard," he says.

"A standard?" I ask. "What for?"

"So you can tell," he says. "Who is and who isn't."

Although I can't see what use it is for me to know, I ask, "Who is it then?"

"Don't use it unless you have to," says my slave. "It isn't good for us to know about too many standards. In case you get caught."

Standards, things that cannot be told, people with secret identities, dark alliances, subjugation, conjugation: this does not seem as if it ought to be the true shape of the world. But that is my own illusion, a hangover from a version of reality I learned in school.

Possibly my slave feels nothing.

"It's too damn tight in there. You need a little air," he says. I sit, I am leashed, it looks like, chained. I see those evergreen trees and geometric children in a different light: evidence of his stubbornness, and not altogether despicable.

Then he'd forget about them. I would come upon them, here and there in the shed; tracks of his presence, remnants of some lost intention, like signs on a road leading nowhere.

"Your time's running out," he says. Not a question, a matter of fact. "Yes," I say neutrally.

Definitely his face is getting worse. But it would be a mistake to offer to do it for him, he'd be offended. A mistake to notice weakness in his armor.

"Maybe he can't," Mother says referring to my slave, I think, but I can’t be absolutely sure.

I look up at her. She looks down at me. It's the first time we've looked into each other's eyes in a long time, since we met. The moment stretches out between us, pregnant, bleak, animate, and predictable. She's trying to see whether or not I'm up to her version of the truth.

"Some do that," she says, her tone almost affable now, though disembodied; she pauses to let this sink in. "I would help you get naked. I would make sure nothing went wrong."

And for this moment at least we are crones, it could be an aggression we're discussing, something womanish.

This idea hangs between us, almost visible, vague, almost palpable, nearly viable: heavy, formless, dark, green; collusion of a sort, betrayal of a sort, an indecency.

She leans forward. "Maybe I could get something for you," she says.

Because I have been good, I think. "Something you want," she adds, leering at me over her reading glasses.

"What's that?" I say. I can't think of anything I truly want that she'd be likely or able to give me. She's made of wood, or flesh in restraints. But I can't say this, either, I can't lose sight, even of so small a thing. I can't let go of this promise. I can't speak.

It's as if she's doing it in her sleep, this knife trick. She does not deign to ask me what it is for. "Don't care if you cut it, or stab it, or what," she says. "She said you could have one, so I give you one.”

She turns away from me and sits again on the floor. Then she picks an object out of the bowl and pops it into her mouth. “This is an unusual thing for you to do,” I say, in return for the slave she's given me, of her own free will.

"I like to do things right, is all," she says, grumpy again. "No sense otherwise."

*

I could burn the house down. Such a fine idea, it makes me shiver. An escape, quick and narrow.

I lie on my bed, pretending to die.

My slave, last night, well, I don't want him to think I'm using him. Also I don't want to interrupt him when he’s in the midst of his ceremonies. I'm to gather he is under pressure. He never offers me any money, though, and I don't ask: we both know what my money is for. I admit I relish it.

Sometimes after a few blunts he becomes silly, and cheats at dice. He encourages me to do it too, to show me he can, then he turns it off again.

“Damn commies,” he says. “All that filth about a basic income.”

It must amuse him, this fake submission.

At such times it's hard to imagine it.

Occasionally I try to put myself in his position, in an effort at empathy. I do this as a tactic, to guess in advance how he may be moved towards me. It's difficult for me to believe I have power over him, of any sort, but I do, although it's of an allusive kind. Once in a while I think I can see myself, though distorted, as he may see me. There are things he wants to prove to me, gifts he wants to give, services he wants to render, sympathies he wants to provoke.

“They could make money,” I say, a little nastily. This lack of fear is dangerous.

“It's not enough,” he says. “It's too abstract. I mean there were slaves as such but no slavery, nothing for them to do.”

“Do they feel now?” I say.

“Yes,” he says, looking at me. “They do.” He stands up. I can't see him.

What he wants is masochism, but I can't give him that, which is the only reason he tells me things.

“What we've done,” he says. “How things have worked out.” I hold myself very still. “Better never means better for everyone,” he says. “It always means worse, for the slaves.”

I feel buried.

*

It said SLAVES ARE A NATURAL RESOURCE in large type on a small billboard, suggesting an attitude I thought might help us find what we were looking for, beyond good and evil, slung ready for whatever subversive acts they think we might commit once we were inside the matrix.

My slave digs me in the side with his elbow, to call my attention, and I look up, slowly and without demonstration. From where we're kneeling we have a good view of the entrance to the prison, where people are steadily decomposing.

He was in his veil of immutability, of good luck turned bad. He sees me, he must see me, but he looks right through me. No smile of regret this time. He turns, kneels, and all I can see now is his broken back, and his thin bowed legs.

Slaves will do anything rather than admit that their lives have no utility. No use, that is. No plot beyond the drama of feast and famine. My slave was still limping from what I’d done to his feet.

The others were beginning to gather too, there was a little crowd. My slave's smile faltered. He put his hand up to his cheek. “What did you slap me for?” he said. “Wasn't it good? I can try again. You didn't have to slap me.” I looked at him and said nothing.

“Don't you know what he'll do?” Mother said to me. Her voice was low, but hard, intent. “Look at me. He does that again and I'm not here,” Mother said, “you just have to slap him like that, but harder. You can't let him go slipping over the edge; it’s contagious.”

My slave must have already been planning, then, how he was going to get out. It's hard not to be impressed, but I make an effort: I try to imagine him naked, and I take no pleasure in it.

The meat market. Don't you remember the terrible gap between the ones who could get a slave easily and the ones who couldn't? The incels? Some of them were desperate, had their chins chiseled. Think of the human misery, the deprivation, the celibacy.

No wonder they were giving up on the whole business.

Now nobody's left out.

This way they're protected, they can manifest destiny in peace, and when they succeed we all come here to watch them go through the procedure, renounce their freedom, sacrifice it to the common good.

They're considered, still, too dangerous for positions of power. There's a scent of desperation about them, something mysterious and exotic. They are more broken than the rest of us; it's hard to feel comfortable with them. The sad truth of it is, the incel being deceived is in on the transgression, constellations of dust, the puzzles left by spiders. There's always something to occupy the slavish mind.

Just don't move.

*

There is something powerful in the whispering of obscenities, about those without power, slaves. There's something delightful about it, something naughty, secretive, forbidden, thrilling. It's like a spell, of sorts. It deflates them, reduces them to the common denominator so they can be dealt the blunt end of a boot.

It would be hard to explain to my slave what he wants. I couldn’t even begin, so I said nothing, content, instead, to watch the authorities watch my slave, eyes averted. I watched him now too. Everything was the color it usually is, only brighter.

I don't want to be telling this story. I don't have to tell it. I don't have to say anything, to myself or to anyone else. I could just sit here, peacefully, and exist as I am. I could withdraw. It's possible to retreat so far down, so far back, that no slave could ever get you out.

That will never do.

I believed in it, this downward motion: so lovely, like falling, and yet at the same time so unlikely. But I reversed that, in abstraction. I was waiting, always, for the incarnation, the slave made substantial. And I knew too why Mother had been evasive about it, about spacetime.

But all of that was pertinent only in the night, to my slave, wandering off on a trajectory of his own, taking his addictive body with him and leaving me with the ache of absence.

“If you don't like it, change it,” I said, to my slave and to myself.

We were revisionists; what we revised was our morality. It's strange to remember how we used to think, as if everything were available to us, as if there were no contingencies, no conditions, no boundaries, no constraints; as if we were free to shape and reshape the ever-expanding perimeter of our domain, the act of acting set free.

Once I wouldn't have done that, for fear of smearing, but now nothing comes off. Whatever expression is there, unseen by me, is real. You'll have to forgive me. I'm a refugee from the future, I sit in this chair and ooze like a wound.

"I have to return it, before they know it's missing," he says. He’s smiling a little now, strangely, and I can see that spacetime has not stood still on his face. The shadow of a shadow, as dead slaves become. I can see it in his eyes: I am not free.

But he exists, in his skin. He grows and lives. Isn't that a good thing? A blessing? Still, I can't bear it, to have been erased like that. Better he'd brought me nothing.

I have a knife and a gun, but not a sword, as if I'm lacking some moral quality. I have morals, however. That's why I'm not allowed a sword.

I knock on his door, hear his voice, adjust my face, go in. I can tell by his eyes that he is in a cunning mood, not to be trusted. He's in the midst of a potent delusion, still gripping the edge of his stool. Behind this act I sense embarrassment, an uncertainty about how far he can go with me, and in what direction.

He wishes to diminish things, my agency included. He prefers me prostrate.

"Something better," my slave says, attempting to groom me, I think, and then he spoke the truth. “A beast,” he says with mock gravity. “Between the first choice and the second, I’d take the beast. Definitely the beast.”

He brings his hand out from behind his back, showing me his pistol. “The feathers are around the eye holes, and along the top of the helmet. So I wasn't wrong about the inversion, after all,” he said.

"You expect me to put that on?" I say. I know my voice sounds seductive, disapproving. Still there is something attractive in the idea. I've never worn anything remotely like this, so flamboyant and theatrical.

"Yes," I say, not wishing to seem too eager. I want him to feel like I'm doing him a favor.

"It's a disguise," my slave says. "You'll need to paint your body too; I've got the paint for it. You'll never be spared without it."

It's an archaic sentiment, but I gave him a smile regardless, waiting for validation.

"Terrific," he says. By this time he is quite excited; it's as if we're dressing for an execution.

He goes to the cupboard and gets out a cloak, with a hood on it that looks to have been added as an afterthought.

*

My slave's sitting up straight, his neck is straight, he is all very straight. His posture disapproves of me, or am I imagining it? Does he know what I've got on under this cloak, did he procure it? And if so, does this make him angry or lustful or envious or anything at all?

We do have something in common: both of us are supposed to be invisible, both of us are functions. I wonder if he knows this. When he opened the door of the car for Mother, and, by extension, for me, I tried to catch his eye, make him look at me, but he acted as if he didn't know me. Why not? It's a soft job for him, and in a few minutes I see nothing more than what I’d already seen.

"We'll have to be fast," my slave says. "This is a back entrance. You should leave the cloak with Mother, and forget about the hood. If anyone asks you, say you're an independent contractor," he says.

In this light I must look lurid, though it's too late now to touch things up. There are slaves mingled together, but in their skin, so similar to one another, they form only a kind of context.

What I feel is not one simple thing. I recognize them as slaves. The official record denies them, denies their very existence, yet here they are. That is at least something.

"You'll give yourself away. Just act natural, like an animal. Animals act natural," he said. Again he leads me forward. All you have to do, I tell myself, is keep your mouth shut and look stupid. It came to me naturally.

My slave does the talking for me, to this slave and to the others who follow him. He says I'm new, and they look at me and dismiss me and confer together about other things. My disguise disguised me.

He retains hold of my neck, and as he talks they review my breasts, my legs, as if there's no reason why they shouldn't. He is demonstrating, to me, his mastery of the physical form. He's breaking the rules, and getting away with it.

Twice, when he thinks no one is looking, he winks at me. It's a silly display, the whole act, and pathetic; but it's something I understand. He sits me down, and sits himself down beside me.

"What do you think of our little cult?"

I look around me again. The slaves are not homogeneous, as I first thought. I wait for him to elaborate on this, but he doesn't, so I say, "What does that mean?"

"It means you can't cheat nature," he says. "Nature demands slaves. It stands to reason, it's part of the strategy. It's only natural." I don't say anything, so he goes on.

“To trick the slaves into thinking they were complicit, that kind of deception. A new one each day."

He says this as if he believes it, but he says many things that way. Maybe he believes it, maybe he doesn't, or maybe he does both at the same time.

Impossible to tell what he believes.

"It solves a lot of problems," he says, without a twitch. I don't reply to this. I am getting fed up with slaves. I feel like cutting him, but I can't afford that and I know it. Whatever this is, it's still an evening out of the shed.

What I'd really like to do is skin the slaves, but I see scant chance of that happening while I was under my slave’s supervision, beholden to he who is beholden to me.

One of the other slaves said something and I tuned in part way through…“A slave will sometimes tell a slave things he wouldn't tell another slave. They couldn't be assimilated; anyway, most of them prefer it here."

"And the others?" I ask.

"The others?" he says. "Well, we have quite a collection.”

I had no doubt this was true, but still it didn’t help me any to see what he was about. "Prefer it to what?" I say.

"To freedom," he says. "You might even prefer it yourself, to what you've got, to where you’re headed." He says this shyly, he's fishing, he wants to be degraded, and I know that the serious part of our congress has come to an end.

"I don't know," I say, as if considering it. "It might be hard work."

"Now," he says, "to get you into the spirit of the place, how about a little of the needle?"

"I'm not supposed to," I say. "As you know."

"Once won't hurt," he says, and pulls a syringe out of his pocket. "Anyway, it wouldn't look right if you didn't. No taboos here! You see, they do have some advantages."

"All right," I say. Secretly I like the idea, I haven't had the needle for years. "What'll it be, then?" he says. "They've got everything here. Imported." "PCP," I say. "But strong, please. I wouldn't want to disgrace you."

"You won't do that," he says, grinning. He stands up, then, surprisingly, takes my vein into his mouth and sucks it to the surface of my skin. He puts the needle in my arm and presses the plunger down, as if in a hurry, then he sits down beside me and takes off his pants.

It must be hard to exist unclaimed, as if he's under duress, being looked over. He knows enough not to react.

We stare at one another, keeping our faces blank, apathetic. Then he makes a small motion with his head, a slight jerk to the right. Then he turns his back on me. Our old dance.

"Enjoying yourself?" he says. He wants me to. This after all is a privilege.

I smile at him. "Is there a bathroom I could use?" I ask.

"Of course," he says.

But without my slave's arm to steady me I'm off balance. Several of the other slaves look at me, with surprise I think rather than lust. I feel like an object. Nobody says anything.

There's a corridor leading to a room, and a slave seated at a table beside it, supervising the entrances and exits. She's an older slave, no nonsense here, the scent of working flesh.

I stand hesitant, not knowing what to do. I don't want to ask about my slave, I don't know whether it's safe. She teeters towards me. I wait for a sign.

"Don't do that," she says. "Anyway there isn't time.” And as usual she gets away with it.

The first thing we do is take off our faces.

"What'd you do wrong? Laugh at his dick?" She asks.

I look up at the ceiling. I consider it. I wipe my face, gingerly, with my fingertips. No face comes off.

“Smile at that,” I say, and pull her neck over so I can whisper in her ear. "I'm a temporary slave," I tell her. "It's just tonight. I'm not supposed to be here at all. He smuggled me in."

"He's my slave," I said, in the way of an explanation.

She nods. "Some of them do that, they get a kick out of it.”

This interpretation hasn't occurred to me. I apply it to my slave, but it seems too simple for him, too crude. Surely his motivations are more delicate than that. But it may only be vanity that prompts me to think so.

*

We didn't have much time to settle accounts so I gave my slave the outline of it. I tried to make it sound as much like Mother as I could. It's a way of burying her alive.

I wanted to kill her, I really felt like it, but now I'm just as glad I didn't or things would be a lot worse for my slave. It wasn't an organized thing, like they thought, though when they were trying to get it out of me I made up a lot that wasn’t true. You do that when they make you promises.

We were dumb to think we could keep it going the way we did, even in secret, and my slave wasn’t the only one who saw the writing on the wall.

I had some sort of an idea of where I was in relation to the periphery, though I was walking along a border I couldn't remember having seen before. Also I thought it would look better for me to be going in towards the center of things, rather than away from it. It would look more plausible.

I could see that my slave didn’t believe me, but I had to try it anyway, it was my only chance. I figured they weren't likely to knife me because I was tired of keeping up appearances. Besides I could see their point.

They were better organized than you'd think, though. They'd infiltrated a couple of useful places; one of them was Scarborough. That helped some.

I had to make an effort, tell myself that this was something other than it was. I hated it at first. But I figure it was what kept him going, so I kept to it. We knew more or less what would happen to us if we got caught. Not in detail, but we knew.

He enjoyed that, you know. He pretended to do all that morality stuff, but he enjoyed it. I did consider murdering my slave, and maybe I would have if there'd been any way I could get at a knife.

I won't go into what happened after that. I'd rather not talk about it. All I can say is they didn't leave any marks on my slave’s body, and few on his face.

And how can I expect him to go on, live it through, act it out, when I myself do not? I don't want him to be like me. I want gallantry from him, chivalry, heroism, dominance. Something I lack.

He shrugs again. It might be a sign.

I don't know how his story ended, or even if it did, because I never saw him again.

*

My slave has my private PGP key, I’m nearly sure of it. He hadn't told me he was going to take it, but then maybe he wouldn't have; he didn't always. He had his own car and he wasn't too old to crash it.

I was glaring at him, I was angry now. He stood there, just looking at me. He put his hands down his pants, one of those aimless gestures people make when they feel threatened by the authorities, as if to protect the crown.

“Just don't,” is what he said.

This is where I need to be.

Now, in this cracked mirror under the fluorescent light, I take a look at myself. It's a good look, intentional, an orientation. I'm a god. I’m a travesty, in a bad wig and someone else's clothes, second-hand opulence.

I should get this over with. I wash my genitals. I must be aware of inertia. I lie down beside him, I don't have to be told. I would rather not; but it's good to lie down, I am so tired. Alone at last, I think.

“It means an ownership stake,” he said, and I remind myself that he is not an unkind slave; that, under other circumstances, I might even like him.

He pulls down one of my layers, and slides his other hand in among the feathers and fur, but it's no good, I lie there like a dead body. He is not a monster, I think. I can't afford love or affection.

Usually I'm inert, but my body had its own ideas. Submit, I scream at myself inside my head. You must remember how. Bestir your body, move it around, breathe as if you’ve never breathed before. And the sounds, most of all, make the right sounds. It's the least you can do.

I look past him, not wanting to meet his eyes. This shed is stripped down, military, minimal. No pictures on the walls, no plants, no dog. It looks as if he’s squatting.

Now my slave's undoing my body, a body made of skin. I can't see his face, and I can hardly breathe, hardly stand, and then I'm not standing. I can't wait and he's moving, already, I'm alive in my flesh, again. I knew it might only be once.

I made that up. It didn't happen that way. Here is what happened. He says nothing, just looks at me, unsmiling. It would be better, more friendly, if he would hurt me. I feel good and right, although I know I am not either.

This is awkward and clumsy, it isn't what I mean.

"There's no need to be brutal" I say. Possibly he feels used. Possibly he wants something from me, some emotion, some acknowledgement that I too am complicit.

This is better. This is an acknowledgement that we are acting, for what else can we do in such a production? Nobody ever talked like that in real life, it was all a fabrication from the beginning. I can see now what it's for, what it was always for: to keep the core of your self out of reach, encrypted.

All I can hope for is a historical reconstruction. The way pain feels is always only approximate, partway through the movements.

I would like to be without slave. I would like to be homeless. I would like to be feral. I would like to be amoral. I would like to be asleep, then I would not know how woke I was.

I wish this story were different. I wish it were more animated. I wish it showed me in a better light, if not moral, then at least more active, less reluctant, less distracted by dick. I wish it had more shape. I wish it were about love, or about sudden realizations important to one's life, or even about bondage.

Maybe it is about those things, in a way; but in the meantime there is so much getting in the way, so much whispering, so many plots, so much speculation about my slave, so much innuendo that cannot be verified, so many unsaid words, so much secrecy.

I'm sorry there is so little pain in this story. I'm sorry it's in fragments, like a body caught in a broken bureaucracy, or pulled apart by force. But there is nothing I can do to change it, my body that is.

I've tried to put some of the good things in this story as well. I loved my slave, after all, even if I hardly showed it.

Nevertheless it hurts me to say it over, over, and over again. Twice was enough: wasn't twice enough for me at the time? But I keep on going with this mutilated story, because after all I want you to hear it, if I’m made to hear yours.

By believing anything at all I'm at least believing in my slave. I believe him into being, faith enacting faith. So I will myself to go on. I am coming apart; my slave will not like it at all. After all he’s been through, he deserves whatever I have left, which is not much but it does includes the truth, or at least a shade of it.

*

This is the story, then. I’ll give it to you as it was given to me. I did it not for my slave, but for myself entirely. I didn't even think of it as giving my body to him, because my body only belonged to me in part. What did I have to give that truly belonged to me?

In order to see it I became reckless, I took stupid chances. After being with my slave I would go upstairs in the usual way, by touch up the dark staircase and come to rest against the door, the thud of blood in my ears.

Fear is a powerful hallucinogen.

Then I would knock softly, a cripple's knock. Each time I would expect him to be dead; or worse, I would expect him to refuse me his corpse. He might say he wasn't going to break any more rules, and put his neck in the guillotine, for my sake. Or even worse, tell me he was no longer interested in my body, or my money. His failure to do any of these things I experienced as an indelible injury.

I told you it was bad.

Here is how it goes. I’ll put it to you plainly.

He opens the door, hanging out of his pants; he's holding a pistol, or a knife, or a glass with something in it. He has his own little stash up here, illegal drugs I suppose. He's always got something in his hand, as if he's been going about his life as usual, not expecting Mother, not waiting. Maybe he doesn't expect her, or wait. Maybe he has no notion of spacetime, or does not bother or dare to imagine it.

It is understood between us by now that it is never too late, but I go through the ritual of performing my emotions. It makes me feel more in control, as if there is a choice, a decision that could be made one way or the other.

There is not much talking between us anymore, not at the mirror stage. I do not want to see him up close. But now, here, each time, I keep my eyes open, the inner light filtered through his skin, which is the same as mine. I want to see what can be seen, of him, take him in, devour him, consume him, save his image so I can live on the memory, later: the lines of his legs, the rough texture of his pale skin, the glisten of sweat on his penis, his long unrevealing face.

He's fading. Day by day, night by night he recedes, and I become more moral. This is a delusion, of course.

This shed is one of the most dangerous places I could be. If I were caught here there would be no mercy, but I'm beyond giving a fuck. How have I come to trust my slave like this, which is foolish in itself? How can I assume I know him, or the least thing about him and what he really does?

I dismiss these uneasy vacillations. I talk too much. I tell him things I shouldn't. I tell him my real name, and feel that therefore I am understood. I act like I’m thick. I should know better. I make of him an idol, a sculpture, a straw man.

He on the other hand talks little: no more hedging his bets. He barely asks questions. He seems indifferent to most of what I have to say, alive only to the possibilities of my body, though he watches me while I'm speaking. He watches my face.

Impossible to think that anyone for whom I feel such gratitude could betray me. The things he suggests seem to me unreal.

“You could go into Mother’s shed at night,” he says. “Look through her things. There must be evidence.”

“The door is locked,” I murmur. This I know is a flight of feathers.

“She'll love you to death,” he says.

“Anyway I'd be no good at that, I'd get caught,” I said. The fact is that I no longer want to leave, escape, cross the border between life and death. I want to be here, with my slave, where I can get at him.

Telling this, I'm ashamed of myself. But there's more to it than that. Even now, I can recognize this admission as a kind of delusion. How well worth it. It's like stories of near-death, from which you have escaped, like stories of war. They demonstrate rigor.

Such seriousness, about a slave, then, had not seemed possible to me before.

Some days I was more rational. I did not put it, to myself, in moral terms. I said, I have made a life for myself, here, of a sort. Slaves are so adaptable. Truly amazing, what people can get used to, as long as there are a few compensations.

My slave is giving up on me. He whispers less, talks more about the riots. I do not feel regret about this. I feel relief; the main entrance is unaltered. There are slaves pouring in the door, as if they all had the same idea, like what they used to do in the time before time.

I've begun to shiver. Hatred fills my mouth and blood fills my veins. From among us, incredibly, there is laughter. It's hard not to laugh, it's the tension, and the look of fury on my slave's face as he adjusts the levels. This is supposed to be dignified.

Duty is a bitch, and it is in the name of duty that we are here today, multiplied. He goes on like this for some minutes, but I don't listen. I've seen these scenes, or ones like them, often enough before: the same sets, the same characters, the same dialogue, the same morals. Obscene, I think. Let's get this over with.

A collective murmur goes up from the crowd. The transgressions of slaves are a secret language among us. Through them we show ourselves what we might be capable of, after all. This is not a popular movement.

Now we are left to our own speculations, our own speculative realism. They can do almost anything to us, but they aren't allowed to kill us, not our bodies, not literally, that isn’t realism, nor is it speculation.

My slave is brought forward; he walks as if he’s really concentrating on it; he’s definitely drugged. There's an off-centre smile on his mouth. Some teeth are missing. One side of his face contracts.

From behind me there's a sound of ecstasy. That's why we don't get dinner.

I've seen it before, a slave helped up onto the stool as if he's being helped up the steps of an escalator, steadied there, the rope adjusted gently around his neck, the stool kicked away, without ceremony.

I heard the ecstasy again, and made the sounds myself, to show my identity, my consent, and my complicity in the death of this slave. I have seen his kicking feet.

It's a mistake to hang back too much in any group like this; it stamps you as available, lacking in rigor. There's an energy building here, a murmur, a tremor of readiness and doubt. The bodies tense, the skin is darker, as if aiming.

I'm not sure what's coming, though I sense it won't be anything I want to see up close. Despite everything I already know, I say to myself: My slave wouldn't go that far.

A noise comes from the crowd, formless assent. It doesn't look like a face but like a mystery vegetable, something that's grown wrong. Even from where I'm standing I can smell him: he smells like death.

I stare at him with mute revulsion. He looks high.

“I will not offend your ears with any of the details, except to say that one slave was pregnant and the baby died," he said.

A groan goes up from us; despite myself I feel my hands clench into fists. It is too much, this violation, this morbid story. And my slave, too, after what he went through. It's true, there is a bloodlust; I want to cut, stab, and slice, anything organic.

"I don't care," I say. My voice is pitching up. I can't help it.

"Get control of yourself," my slave says. He pretends to brush me off. “He was one of ours. I cut him into pieces with the sharp side of my knife. Put him out of his misery. Don't you know what they were doing to him?”

He's smiling, a bright diminutive smile. His eyes have crossed. But he's let go, totally now, he's in free fall, he's in withdrawal. I feel angry. I'm not proud of myself for this, or for any of it. But then, that's the point.

It is monstrous, but nevertheless it's true. Death makes me horny. Maybe it's because I've been reconstructed.

*

Now I am going shopping, the same as usual. I even look forward to it. There's a certain consolation to be taken from retail therapy.

I see my slave and notice nothing at first. Then, as he comes nearer, I think that there must be something wrong with him. He looks wrong. He is altered in some indefinable way; he's not injured, he's not pathetic, he’s not the same.

It's as if his head has shrunk. Then when he’s nearer still I see what it is, voice placid, flat, revealing.

"As you like," he says. Is that indifference, or alarm?

I take a chance. "Wrong," I say.

To this he does not respond, although I sense a flicker of white at the edge of my eyes, as if he looked quickly at me and then looked away.

I think maybe I should wait before attempting anything further. It's too soon to push, to probe. I should listen for tones in his voice, unguarded words, the way my first slave listened to me.

I should not be rash, I should not take unnecessary risks. But I need to know where I stand, and if he wasn’t going to put me in position, I thought that I ought to do it myself.

Now I feel cold, creeping over my body like flesh revealed, skin concealed. Unless my slave is lying. There's always that.

“Now that you've let me off, I'll obliterate myself, if that's what you really want; I'll dispense with my lifeforce,” he said.

For my part I'll stop complaining, too. I'll accept my place. I'll sacrifice my slave. I'll deny all charges. I'll abdicate. I'll renounce the crown of thorns.

I know this can't be right but I think it anyway. I want to keep on living, in any body. I resign my identity freely, to the uses of others. They can do what they like with me. I am abject.

I feel, for the first time, my slave’s true power. But I walk over to him anyway, since I have no choice. He wants something from me. It might be nothing. It might be the revolver hidden beneath my pillow. I hang fire, head between my hands.

I sit in my shed, at the window, waiting. This could be the last time I have to wait. But I don't know what I'm waiting for. No answer is expected.

It's more like a form of suspension, but without suspense. At last there is no spacetime to decide me. I am amoral, which is the opposite of moral. I ought to feel worse about it than I do.

Instead I feel serene, in turmoil, pervaded with irrational desires, with indifference. “Don't let the fuckers grind you down.” I repeat this to myself but it conveys nothing.

There are a number of things I could do. I could set fire to the shed, so there would at least be an event, something, a signal of some kind to mark my place in the world, an exposition. I wanted to see how far I could get before my slave noticed me.

Slaves are so visible, now that the need is real.

I consider this fact quietly. That is what gets you in the end. Slavery is only a word, embroidered, blurring the outlines, obliterating distinctions. Freezing to death is painless, they say, after the first chill. “Get it over with,” my slave says. “I'm tired of this melodrama.”

I've been wasting my time. I should have taken my slave’s life while I still had the chance. I should have stolen a knife from the kitchen, the world is full of knives if you're looking for them. I should have paid attention.

But it's too late to think about that now, already his feet are on the stairs; my back's to the window, gun in my hand.

I expect a stranger, but it's my slave who pushes open the door, naked below the waist. “Dirty work is done by dirty people,” he said, which was confusing.

You fucker, I think. I open my mouth to say it, but he comes over, close to me, and whispers “why should this mean anything?”

I snatch at it, this offer. It's all I'm left with.

It's no time in particular, no place that isn’t space, spacetime, as it’s always already been. My slave is no longer with us. He may have gone down the back stairs, not wishing to be seen.

He looks earnest but vulnerable, already dissociating from me, distancing himself. Whatever else I am to him, I am also at this point his master. I am above him, looking down; he is shirking. My slave goes white.

*

I have given myself over into the hands of my slave, who will undo me, because it can't be helped. He has a pistol tucked into his pants, but I need no persuasion. Me? I see a foreign face when I look in the mirror, a perverted container, an allegory, a literary device. I am an empty figure in hidden skin.