=2=

Time does not exist here.

There are no clocks or watches anywhere. But it’s unclear whether this is by edict or simply because such instruments are irrelevant in such a place. Perhaps they simply don’t operate here.

How do you measure eternity?

No one is born and no one dies in this place. No one ages, or, if they do, it happens at such an incremental level that you cannot see it actually happening. Imagine seeing only one frame of a bullet captured on film in mid-flight towards the innocent lover it is aimed to murder.

There is no coming here and no leaving here, never a time that one wasn't here, and never a time when one won't be here again.

It's an immortality, of sorts, Neena thinks, whenever she feels the life draining from her cold toes for the millionth time and hears the distant, polite, yet ever-so-slightly bored applause of jeweled hands that have never touched a thing that had its origins on planet Earth.

In the hallway of this subterranean complex Neena presses herself against the wet wall to let a gurney pass. Upon it, a creature lies like a broken butterfly.

It is not uncommon to see victims being brought back to their rooms at any hour of the day or night, or, wheeled, full-speed, down to what is presumably the emergency surgery for unnecessary and futile procedures. The attendant pushing this particular gurney is almost invisible, a mere outline of an attendant. Neena has to look closely to even see him, or her--it’s usually impossible to tell their sex--otherwise the gurney would seem to be propelling itself.

Maybe it is.

The stylized faces of the attendants are designed to approximate the same dreamily expressionless mask of implacable indifference that might be seen on department store mannequins. Perhaps it is even more accurate to say that their expressions mimic what might be the result of an autistic’s rendering of moon-people, drawn left-handed, with eyes closed, in a hypnotic trance.

Neena, dazed and dizzy, stands confused at an intersection of featureless corridors.

She tells herself not to look at the victim on the gurney. But she looks, anyway. Who wouldn’t?

They have purposely denied the girl the dignity of a sheet to cover her abused remains. The terrible cruelties inflicted on her body are on display for the sole purpose of enflaming the passions of whatever guests might be strolling the halls. 

These marks of ardor on the soft and surrendering flesh serve as an ever-present reminder to the regular inhabitants (aka prisoners, dreamers, etc.) of this section of the mansion. A reminder of what, though, is a variable sum. 

Back to the blonde girl on the gurney (before she is wheeled away forever and we think of her no more): she is naked, as mentioned (I think) except for a pair of red, high-heeled ankle boots. She has been cored through the middle, where her navel had been once, by what looks to have been some kind of huge, minutely machined screw-bit. Whatever the actual cause of death, that unnamable engine of destruction has left an absence at the center of her being that makes of her corpse the perfect comic representation of a woman who, for one reason or another, could never satisfy her need to be filled.

There is a look of utter horror on the blood-speckled face that has accentuates, in fact, amplifies, a delicate beauty which puts Neena in mind of a cross between the white garters she is wearing and a slice of French vanilla cake.

“Absurd,” Neena murmurs and licks her lips, unconsciously.

They are taking the poor girl off to be repaired (ha-ha), or altered, or fucked by one of the necrophiles who pay handsomely for the privilege of abusing, with absolute impunity and no-questions-asked, a pretty, blameless, and terribly disfigured young corpse. They come to the topside gates of the compound above the necropolis in limousines and private jets, in helicopters, and aboard intercontinental yachts. At least such is the rumor that sifts down to this place deep inside the earth, which could be Hell, if Hell existed, but is not.

It makes no difference to Neena. 

She has her own fate to fulfill, and she must hurry to her appointment along a corridor that leads even further, even deeper, passed a “no exit” sign, along a one-way corridor into the very bowels of the subterranean sex mansion.