Hollow Reality - 1. Story

My job entailed me to travel all over the world, losing each identity as I did what I did best; somewhere I forgot my own name along the way. One hit after another as I disassociated myself with the human race and became desensitised to what I did.

I killed men and women. I killed young men, old grannies, pregnant ladies, crippled men, black men, white men, pink with blue spots. I didn’t discriminate because it didn’t matter to me who they were; I would have killed children if someone had asked.

It all came down to price, not that I needed money, I was never saving for anything and Elliot really didn’t cost much.

I see it in black and white, like an old Shakespearean tragedy. I’m under no romantic illusion, it wasn’t love; it was situational passion of the 3rd degree. I don’t and won’t believe in love, I’m sure out of the 6 billion people on this planet someone else would have been more suited to me than him.

Him being Elliot, of course. I don’t know his surname and it didn’t matter, he was there with a smile and a need for his next fix, I was there for a release and a need to get shit-faced. An exchange of cash in the alleyway of the bar after many shots; a condom, and a quick fuck later I became a regular customer. I needed him for release of self and sperm, two things I could never keep.

You see what I did during my days and months away from my sweet whore were something of a secret. My world, like my relationship, was in a balance between black and white, good and evil, money and power. I was a revolutionist in some sense, but a murderer in the eyes of the state.

My time of sexual release was spent with Elliot; a kind of loyalty exhorted me to keep going back. He knew my name, well my false name, and would smile and chat away at me when we met up. I never listened, just watched his mouth move to form words that really didn’t matter.

He had so many faults and he looked like a train wreck half the time. His clothes were ripped and dirty, his eyes were sunken and always glazed. He was a heroin addict; a skinny little smack head who would cry at night when no one was around about how bad his life is then get high in the morning to block it all out.

I was fully aware that I took advantage of this; I didn’t actually care as long as he took my load. I knew the world was unkind and I knew he was probably a nice person but at the end of the day he needed money and I needed to fuck him, like I said; black and white.

It was never the same job but somehow stayed the same; day after day, job after job. The single person who was always there was him. Our arrangement remained the same for a year between him and me. Elliot liked the consistency and I thrived on the single touchstone I had. The normality of sex, just two people getting their needs met in 3-4 minutes was too good a deal.

I never wanted it to change, but it did. On one sobering night he said words unfamiliar to our routine.

‘I’m getting clean’

I laughed at first and tousled his dark hair to an unimpressed look.

‘Nothing to lose’

He had obviously seen some light in his dead little world, and this didn’t include me.

Or so I had thought. He wanted help. From me? To help someone else become a better person, uh huh, right. My response was said in a monotone, a mirror of reality itself.

‘I don’t want to be your friend; I’m not your boyfriend. I don’t want to kiss you or hug you. I want to fuck you when the need takes me. That is the best you are going to get from anyone in this world Elliot. When high you see in colour and it blinds you from the harsh black and white of reality. Stick to what you know in la la land and stay high in those fucking clouds because it’s the closest any of us are ever going to get to heaven.’

He leaned his head onto my knees and cried pathetic broken tears. I let him for a few minutes and then I fucked him before leaving him, same as I always did. There was no looking back, no second thoughts. I was done with what I needed until the urge came again.

My job had me to go to Sweden for two weeks; someone wanted me to implement a forced euthanasia. When I came back I felt the itch for his ass and went back to the same bar I had met my sweet whore 13 months ago. I asked the bar man for the usual services only to get the response ‘Would you take anyone else other than Elliot?’

It turns out the day after I left for Sweden he had OD in his flat, the ultimate escape. Did I feel bad?

Of course not. It was the best option for him, it had been clear he wasn’t ever going to live past his twenties. The only regret I had was that the arrangement so handy to my life was gone. I was put out for a minute until the bartender inclined his head to another skinny waif that had the same look of dirty desperation.

This was never a love story, just an insight to what some would consider the only man I ever gave time to in my life that I didn’t kill. I didn’t love him, he thought he loved me but it was just dependency to the only consistent thing in his life. He was just another broken kid in a broken world.

I won’t even remember his name in another two years just like I don’t remember my own. All I will look back on is there was once someone in my life whose need rolled like fog down a cliff covering stormy waters in a fake white mask of heroin and infatuation. When he could no longer remain blind in the face of those black breakers he stepped off into those deep oceans and tried to really touch heaven.