‘Gedda loada this shit, man,’ Stu said, waving the video in the air as he stepped into the room and commanded the group’s complete attention. He wore a sleeveless basketball shirt and baggy jeans, with a faceful of stubble, peakless cap and eyebrow piercing — full hip-hop regalia, only he wasn’t black. He did look like the kind of person you wouldn’t want to fuck with, though.
Lankily he sat on the edge of the least tattered armchair, dishing out little plastic bags of drugs as he said, ‘I got this video from a buddy in LA. I ain’t never seen shit like this, man. It’s real, ain’t no doubt. Fuckin heavy West Coast shit. You gonna see what I mean, dog. Here.’ He chucked the tape to Dwayne and ordered him to turn off the single, bare lightbulb and the shitty stereo. Dwayne complied, and Stu cut out a line of coke for everyone from his personal stash. ‘This one’s on me,’ he said.
They snorted the coke and Stu said, ‘Shit, someone gonna roll a J?’ Kearney was thinking that Stu talked a bit like Fallen Henry the Titan.
Dwayne got the video player going and retreated quietly to a spot on the floor, Stu having taken his place on the armchair.
The cockroaches kept pouring into the room, big oily things with scuttling legs. Kearney watched them crawl over the feet and legs of the lads on the ground — no one even bothered crushing them any more. He felt a tingle on the back of his neck and flinched, brushing nervously at his collar. But there was nothing there, it was all in his mind.
Kearney was stoned. Very stoned. This grass they smoked here, it was ferocious, completely unlike the stuff they got back home, which he now realized really was just ‘crap Dublin hash’; something he had long declared but without any real basis for comparison. As the stoned murmurings in the room died down and the spasms of static resolved themselves on-screen, Kearney reflected that this US skunk was as far advanced over Dublin hash as the Xbox was over the Amstrad he’d played as a kid. He liked this analogy, and hoped he’d remember to use it when he got back home to tell those queer little fuckers how clueless they were about life in general and dope in particular.
But now the film was starting. It began conventionally enough, with two brawny, crewcut guys fucking a trashy, hard-faced slut. They fucked her in the arse and fisted her cunt at the same time. Then she played with her tits while one of them fucked her cunt and the other tongued her arsehole. Next she sucked them both off at once, then let one fuck her from behind while the other pulled himself off and sneered down at her. Eventually they both came in her face.
Kearney was starting to wonder what all the fuss was about, why Stu would get so worked up about a fairly standard porno.
But then, very rapidly, it all changed. Right after the pair of men had come, one of them punched the woman in the face. It was a hard, driving, downward punch, pounding her to the floor. Kearney flinched at it, tensing up all over — there was no way that could have been faked. And the woman clearly hadn’t expected it; now she was crying, shrieking, between panic and shock.
The men slung her up from the doorframe, wrists bound by a black leather strap, the first of numerous macabre props that now started appearing on-screen in quick proliferation. The men worked quickly, looking tense and concentrated but managing to turn several times to the camera to flash conspiratorial grins.
For the next twenty minutes Kearney watched the nameless woman being tortured and dismembered. Throughout, she emitted a prolonged, almost unbroken scream and, increasingly bloodied and mutilated, she remained conscious right up to the very end. Her face a gory pulp, teeth smashed in or ripped out, nipples sliced off and hair set on fire, the gapless scream — now more a shrill gurgling — was silenced when the man who had punched her at the beginning drove a screwdriver through her wide-opened eye, impaling her brain.
The screen went black, then buzzed static.
There was no other sound in the room.
‘Whaddaya think? Hardcore shit, huh,’ said Stu, still gazing into the dead television.
There was a silence. The only things that moved were the cockroaches scuttling across the floor, and the static on-screen. Then Dwayne said, ‘Yeah man, hardcore. Hardcore.’
Mumbles and grunts of vague endorsement rose up around the darkened room like the yeas in a house of parliament; there were no nays.
Kearney remained quiet, pensive. When the torturing had commenced, there was a moment when something in him had recoiled from it. Momentarily he’d wanted to stand up and walk out of the room, run down the stairs and out on the streets, jump into the Atlantic and let the ocean swallow him up.
But he had looked around him as the film played on: a roomful of impassive faces, dull with interest, condoning through inaction. Kearney told himself that it made him fierce, edgy, strong; watching this stuff and, what’s more, liking it. And he did like it, in a hesitant way at first, but more and more as he willed himself to embrace the horror of what he was seeing.
Then the quiver of protest in him died out, like the SOS of a forgotten submarine going down in cold, black waters.
Very clearly, right before the woman on the screen died, it had come to him: he could do this. He could watch this stuff and enjoy it, and no one was going to stop him.
The next day, the images from the snuff movie were still fresh and bloody, superimposing themselves over Kearney’s mundane American reality. That was when the idea surfaced. It was a logical progression, like that which he’d gone through after first watching porno: the viewing, then the wanting to do it for himself.
The woman’s death fascinated him: it was the moment it happened, the precise instant when the life force — whatever it was that made the body move, speak, fear, think, know — when whatever it was that did all that, vanished, was snuffed out. It was there, and then it wasn’t. And when it wasn’t there, all you had was what the woman in the film had become at the end, when the screaming stopped: a heap of meat, an inert sack of mess that was something, but that wasn’t human. It fascinated Kearney. He needed to explore this. He needed to know how it felt.
35 | Matthew
I visited Rez in hospital only once more. This time I went there on my own. He looked the same as he had the first time; pale, gaunt, wasted — it was a look that suited him. When I entered the ward, one of the other beds was empty.
‘What happened to him?’ I asked, nodding at the wafer of absence under fresh, straight covers, by way of breaking the ice.
Rez shrugged his shoulders, managing to make the gesture look like it cost him worlds of effort. ‘He got out.’
‘What, you mean he’s better?’ I was surprised; Rez’s brother had told me that the man was on his death bed, about to be dragged under by some terminal illness.
‘No, he’s not better. He’s dead.’
‘Oh.’
So much for breaking the ice. The bulk in the third bed shifted and groaned at the mention of death. Maybe in his fever he believed I was the Grim Reaper, come to collect him. I saw his face; a grizzled, ugly man with a terrible complexion and worse teeth. He peered at me with wet-eyed suspicion, then turned over and started coughing.
I looked at Rez in his bed. Lately I’d grown depressed at the thought — which not long ago would have felt exciting — that most of my friends were twisted, volatile outsiders. You started out playing with this stuff — the extremism, the chaos — and it felt vital and exhilarating; but then suddenly you couldn’t control it, you’d gone too far and it wasn’t exciting any more, only frightening.