Badges? We ain't got no badges. We don't need no badges! I don't have to show you any stinkin' badges!
'The Treasures of the Sierra Madre' B. Traven
Closer to the edge now Horatio is getting desperate. His thought helmet going faulty, letting the data slip out. He's stopped keeping the cotton wool in his ears, he's starting to pick up on the truth. Everywhere around him, the dirty walls perform a striptease, dying floral patterns grow towards the floor like their natural counterparts do towards the sun, leaving only cruel bare reality revealed and bleeding into the cavernous gaping abyss that makes up his spilling emptying mind. Swarming, scurrying beetles and bugs are revealed, crawling over each others shiney clicking bodies upon the wall. Bleating words appear on his mobular phone
what the fuck does that
mean
We can find him crying on his bed now in his nicely tidy room. His 'friends' sit downstairs; the females making dirty pictures of each other and giggling behind manicured painted petite nails while the men pluck each others eyebrows and brown each others skins with the oil of black maginara tree root. Later he will lie awake and listen as they fuck squirming mewing; entwined browned bodies, gleaming with pre-cum and sweat, writhing toether on the wooden floor, doing the dirty dance:
You put the left on in, The left one out...
He is dreaming of green spaces with no people and no buildings where everything is free; he has killed his boss, he has killed all the bosses and he sits atop a great yellow horse, savours the sun burning his back through the thin white cotton of his shirt, the cool breeze on his chest where he has sweated wet the work from his body. Water running from the wind on a lake, wet air hanging with moisture and filtered sun grey and yellow still blinding has no place in the desery, 'cept for this oasis that is Horatios alone.
When you live on the outside. Listen to other peoples conversation through your walls, hear them denigrate great art in favour of bland street scenes of nowhere towns, painted by nowhere artists, and listen to tinny music on the bus played for fashion and not for music, and see teenagers, men and boys, stand tracksuited with cupped genitals held in hands beneath shiney but yet dirty adidas trousers you will know of some of 'Ratios existential discontent.
Horatio stands as his own authority, the highest of all, he is the suzerain of all that exists and falls upon his eyes. He recognises no power above his own, accepts no choice made in his stead by policemen, politicians, family, friends, dogs, cats. He thinks his is Max Sterner, and is more Sterner than Sterner himself ever was. His sexual conquests innumerable, his physical prowess and intectual vigour the envy of all men and beasts. Still his malaise turns his face away from victory like a weeping woman he had once lain upon that must be consoled and to whom he returns everytime.
He is crying again now, dry sobs as he tries to fuck way India's infidelities. They sleep together in sweat too lazy to open a window.
