Carnaro

The promised annihilation proved to be nothing more than the opening of my eyes. Her mouth was the first thing I saw, enormous, agape, the blackness engulfing the opening of her throat familiar to me as the amniotic fluid from whose serenity I had just emerged. I felt the dying contractions of my orgasm, her evolving smile a manifestation of the endgame we had now commenced. She lay down on top of me, breathing with heat and distress against my neck, her breasts rising and falling in time with a dull pounding in the back of my skull. With the decomposition of bliss came a series of discomforts -- a cramp in my calf, her arse bone like a blunt blade along the top of my thighs, a smell like washing machine run-off that seemed to be coming from her pores. I heaved her to the side to dislodge her and slid from the table, my feet touching the floor with the uncertainty of the bed-ridden.

'Mick will be back soon.' She turned her face away from me and looked out the window. 'He wants to meet you. Can you stay a little longer? There's so much to talk about and so little time.'

'He's back.'

We looked around. Mick was standing in the doorway, looking on with amusement.

'Room for one more?' he said.

2: Alpha Reptile

July 2004

I leaned on the balcony rail, watching as a convertible Merc pulled up in the courtyard below. The car's metallic navy was a satisfying addition to the afternoon's palette of blues -- the Adriatic in the distance beneath the cranes of Rijeka port, the cloudless sky, the teal of my swimming trunks.

I reignited a dead joint in a cascade of hot rocks, watching as the girl in the driver's seat fixed her dirty yellow ponytail in the rear-view. Even from where I stood, I could see the wan and acne-blasted poverty of her skin, a chronicle of years of undernourishment, incomplete make-up removal, tweaking. She was in her late teens or early twenties -- it was hard to tell with these girls -- retaining some of the willowiness of adolescence in the limbs beneath her white tracksuit. All of the trauma of post-war Central European history was visible in the set of her jaw -- hunger, upheaval, dearth, shabbiness, boredom, paranoia. Back home, a girl her age would still have been mired in the helpless self-absorbtion of childhood. Over here you grew up fast. There was no other choice.

She walked to the popped boot and pulled out a small trolley-case before setting off across the courtyard with a gait of manic determination. I sucked out the last of the joint, flicking the roach away as she vanished into the house beneath me, the wheels of her case rattling upon the tiles of the porch. A bead of sweat fell from my nose and burst star-shaped on the terracotta next to my bare foot. Caned and still drunk from the previous night, I hadn't noticed the thermostat of the day being turned up another notch. Marine life swarmed into my field of vision as I turned and sought relief in the bedroom, only to find the heat more intense in there than outside. Darinko liked to turn off the air-con before things got going. Make the bitches sweat.

I found him and Martina downstairs in the kitchen, sitting between two fans at either side of a table by the open patio doors. Mick was in the pool outside, swimming length after length. Martina looked up and smiled as I came in before returning to her conversation. They spoke in German -- Martina's Croatian, though passable, didn't stretch to Darinko's weird local dialect -- the gravity of their respective demeanours suited to the harsh syllables they uttered. I took a bottle of water from the fridge and sat up on the kitchen island, picking up a camcorder I found there. It came to life when I flipped out the viewfinder. On the screen, I watched Martina lighting a cigarette, a streaming Mick walking through the door. Darinko looked at me with impatience and muttered something.

'He says, don't press any buttons,' said Martina. 'Else you'll fuck up his shit.'

I zoomed in on her face, panning down slowly to take in the diamante choker she was wearing and down again to her cleavage. She was wearing a severe pink and black striped corset, fence net stockings and black PVC knee boots. She also had on a coat of fake tan in spite of the depth of her natural colour -- real fleshtones (Darinko again) looked sickly under artificial light. I lingered a moment on the shiny black lycra stretched over her cunt before moving back up to her face, rendered unfamiliar by the quantity of make up she was wearing. She looked into the camera with solemnity, the perfection of her appearance somehow grotesque.

'The girl is here,' I said.

Mick came over and used my water to wash down a blue pill.

'She's getting ready,' he said. 'It'll be another half an hour or so.'

'What's her name?' I said.

'Lenka. Lolenka. Lenkola. Who gives a fuck?' He laughed and said something in Croatian to Darinko.

'The sooner these fuckers all speak English the better,' I said.

'How so?'

'Diversity may be colourful and all but it's inefficient. It costs money.'

'You need to relax. You need a blow job.'

He repeated himself in Croatian and all three of them laughed. They had the luxury of doing so. They didn't have to look at the figures that I did every day, each set more catastrophic than the last.

Mick clapped me on the shoulder and started to shadow-box. He was coked out of his head, the drug merely serving to accentuate the pitiablity of his badass posturing. But the drugs had little to do with it. The years had, if anything, made him into even more of a dickhead. Even though my dislike of the man was now complicated by sexual rivalry, it didn't take away from his fundamental worthlessness as an individual. These guys. They think they're making all that money because they're so smart, oblivious to the fact that the wealth accrued is as illusory as their intelligence. Chuck the ego accelerant of aesthetics into the mix and they become completely intolerable. But I was only a facilitator, one of Capital's pimps. What the fuck did I know?

I looked over at Martina, wanting to let her know that we needed to talk but she was talking to Darinko again, possessed by the same impulse as her husband, hopped up on talk of camera angles and story-boards. It was better to leave them to it. I climbed down and went into the back garden, taking a lighter and one of the pre-rolled joints from Martina and Darinko's table on my way. I collapsed into a lounger and lit up, watching an enormous dragonfly flickering over the surface of the pool. The new dope made me whimsical, transforming the specks of sun upon the water into diamonds and the space between the insect's wings into a rainbow. The fairytale vibe was apt, I decided. None of this was actually happening, and even if it had been, it didn't matter. Grow up, get a job, procreate, retire, die. Or perpetuate your adolescence indefinitely and spend the rest of your life seeing rainbows connecting the tips of dragonflies wings.

I closed my eyes against the heat, remembering, on the edge of sleep, the shades I had left in the bathroom upstairs. Martina came to me at some point although it's entirely possible that this was a THC and sun-induced fantasy.

She crouched down at my feet, smelling of plastic and carbonized sugar, and took the joint from my fingers.

'Tell me,' she said, holding in her toke.

'We were too late,' I said. 'It's over.'

'It hasn't even started,' she said. 'It's a long way to rock-bottom. There's not enough of us yet is all.'

'And you think there will be?'

You know there will. You know they're coming. You of all people should know that they can't help themselves...'

The sun had moved to the rear of a grove of orange trees on the other side of the pool when I woke up. Disoriented by sleep and by the complete stillness that prevailed, it took me a minute or so to work out where I was. My tongue was dry like sackcloth but I had no water left, having knocked the bottle over as I slept. I shivered with incipient sunstroke as I walked towards the house, a vague uneasiness liquefying my bowels.

The kitchen was deserted but not long since. Recent smoke still tainted the air and the red stain of Martina's lips was still wet upon the rim of the glass from which she had been drinking. I examined a pad that Darinko had been sketching upon, the page full of doodles of curved blades piercing perfectly rendered hearts and vulvas, looking up when I heard a cry sounding from somewhere within the house. I walked into the hall and towards the front room, following a sound of gagging and battered meat that increased in volume as I got closer to the door. Stoned, heat-addled, I lingered on the threshold, watching the scene within with autistic vacancy.

The room was stifling. It was white tiled, glass walled on two sides, dominated by a vast granite fireplace that was a megalomaniac parody of the bucolic simplicity it was intended to embody. The curtain slats were drawn and the only light came from two strategically positioned arc lamps, trained on a three sided tan leather sofa in the centre of the room. My view was blocked by one of two screens situated at either end of the sofa, more of Darinko's cinematographic posturing. How hard was it to point a camera at people fucking?

I drifted inside, wiping away the sweat that streamed into my eyes. Stripped to the waist, Darinko was on the floor behind the screen nearest to me, manipulating his small camcorder with the restlessness of an auteur. His lens was trained upwards, recording what Martina called the God Almighty shot; penetration captured from the angle that best displayed the cock in all its outlandish and obnoxious arrogance.

'I wish it was actually as big as it looks on film,' she had once said to Mick. 'You wish it was that big.'

The girl was on all fours, trapped between Mick at the rear of her and Martina at the front. She was naked except for a gypsy princess' dowry in gold adorning her neck, wrists and ankles and a pair of spike heeled sandals of the same colour, laced to her calves in trellis patterns that culminated in bows underneath the back of either of her knees. When she turned her face to the side, I saw that she was no longer the forgettable thing I had observed from the balcony earlier. She was a work of art. The purple and brown of her eyelids, her rusty cheekbones, the pink jewels of her lips...I remembered Martina, who would have selected the colours, talking about the suggestion of wounds, blood and soil, the marriage of beauty and abuse. Apart from a network of stretch marks upon her flanks and the streakiness of carelessly applied fake tan, the flesh of her body was uncanny in its perfection, more beautiful than any living thing had a right to be. She had so far resisted the lure of breast enhancement but I knew it wouldn't be long before she was defacing herself, like all of the girls did in the end. Comical tit and lip jobs, chin and ass implants, tattoos...between surgery, booze and drugs, they all managed to fuck themselves up. But it didn't matter because there was an endless supply of these girls; an infinite amount of freshness to enjoy before it all went to hell. In spite of the heat and my wasted state, I felt my cock swell with blood.

Martina took the girl in a complicated headlock and turned her around to where Mick was waiting to stroke his cock into her mouth. The enthusiasm with which she set about him verged on hysteria, its blatant falseness somehow more obscene than the act itself. Mick babbled dirty movie clichés at her -- suck the fucking cock, show me how good you suck the cock -- his mean girl's affectedness leading me to speculate, and not for the first time, about what team he really played for. His narcissism notwithstanding, he possessed a combination of self-absorbtion and completely irrational misogyny that you only otherwise saw in gay men. The key relationship in what was happening in front of me was not that of Mick and either of the two women but that of him and Darinko. Both seemed to understand implicitly what the other wanted, communicating via a semaphore whose subtext was unrequited love. And though Darinko flattered himself with the term director, it was really Martina who was in charge. Nothing happened that wasn't initiated by her. When Mick lay the girl on her back, it was at Martina's prompting, just as it was her who pulled open the girl's ass cheeks to grant Mick access.

'Show me how you fuck her worthless hole,' she said, looking at me as she did so. Was she talking to Mick or to me? And did 'her' refer to herself, the girl or to womanhood in general?

'Show me how you fuck her worthless,' I thought. 'Show me how the fuck you're worthless...'

I rubbed my cock through the lycra of my trunks. Martina, sucking on the cock that Mick had just taken from the girl's ass, looked at me with eyes full of approval. Darinko shouted at me as I walked into the frame but was silenced by Martina. As if I gave a fuck about the niceties of composition. Shoot the scene, cupcake...

As the girl took my cock into her mouth, I caught sight of a face in Darinko's viewfinder. It took me a moment to recognize the blotch of glistening meat as my own. I looked up, saw the same expression on the faces of both Martina and Mick. Feeding time at the reptile house. Darinko's insect sac stomach undulated beneath us on the floor, as if on the verge of disgorging a new generation of parasites. He grunted in Croatian, his back leaving a coat of slime on the tiles underneath him, his camera becoming still as the bodies in its gaze attained the economical rhythm of machine production.

Though the girl's mouth upon my cock was lusciously wet, as was Martina's cunt, which I frigged violently while kissing her obscenity spewing mouth and though I anticipated the prospect of fucking both women, I felt no real pleasure. I understood for the first time what an addict must feel when giving in to the vice that he knows is destroying him and yet which he nurtures with a parent's love. My head teemed, with impossible numbers imprisoned in spreadsheet cells; a vision of Martina as I had first seen her, turning her head to look at me in the hotel lobby, half of her face boiling with maggots...

Mick and I swapped places but I decided that I didn't want to put myself where he had just been. Instead I fell on Martina, pushing her back on to the sofa and spreading apart her thighs. I put my fingers in her mouth as I started to fuck her.

'Choke the bitch,' said Mick.

I looked back at his face of pure hate. For a man who as good as pimped out his wife, he remained a slave to the peasant covetousness that had defined his forebears. His libertine pretensions withered away when confronted with the fact that it was his smallholding I was laying claim to. I wouldn't choke the bitch but I would fuck her more thoroughly than he ever could.

Martina put her hands on my face and held it steady in front of hers, gouging my cheeks with such force that one of her acrylic nails snapped.

'Good. Good fuck,' said Darinko.

It was good. I thrust my cock into her with the steady, deep strokes I knew she liked, dripping sweat and saliva into her open mouth. When I lifted her up, buried to the quick in her, and sat back down with her on top of me, I saw that Mick and the girl had stopped fucking and had moved to the side. The frame belonged to Martina and I. The girl reached for a water bottle and her mobile while Mick could only look on, jerking off his redundant cock with the pathos of the dispossessed.

'Obsolescence.' I took Martina's whole ear in my mouth and hissed the word.

'You want it all,' she said.

'Everything is permitted?'

'Everything...'

I came inside her, much to Darinko's disgust. Martina slid from my lap and spoke to him impatiently.

'Now what's his problem?' I said.

'He didn't get a pop-shot.' She wiped her forehead with the girl's discarded thong. 'I told him we can get one later.'

She looked at the girl, who was talking on her phone in the far corner of the room, and said to Mick, 'Get her back to work soon. I'm paying her arse to get fucked, not to be sat on.'

He was vanquished. All he could do was nod obediently.

I picked up my trunks and walked out of the room, back through the hall and the kitchen and into the garden where I dived naked into the pool. I swam a length underwater and crawled back lazily to find Martina standing on the spot from where I had launched myself. She towered above me, her frame blocking out the setting sun as I pushed myself out of the water.

'We should talk business,' she said.

'We should.'

3: The Rapture

July 2006.

'Leisure has diversified in the past two decades and will continue to do so. The imperatives of an expanding marketplace cannot be gainsaid. Consumers are continually evolving, becoming ever more sophisticated, liberated by access to hitherto unavailable sources of credit and the capacity to dream that the resulting state of financial independence bestows upon an individual. Carnaro has understood this new reality since its inception. To those who would accuse us of exploitation and pandering to the basest whims of humanity, we reply by holding up a glass in which even the most self-righteous of individuals must acknowledge the truth of what looks back at them. Not their pious fantasy of themselves but themselves as they actually are. Creatures of flesh, blood and desire.'

Martina paused, taking a sip of water and resetting her glasses upon the bridge of her nose before continuing.

'Paradoxical as it may seem, we are mindful of morality, but of morality in a new, flexible incarnation, decoupled from an archaic and inutile absolutism. To suppress desire, against the backdrop of an increasingly globalized world, is to transgress against that world's most fundamental motive force. To impede the ability to consume...surely this, given the openness of our contemporary social arrangements, is the real sin?'

A couple of the shareholders listening coughed nervously. Watching from a corner towards the back of the room, I rolled my eyes. She couldn't help herself. I kept telling her to skip the theological shit, that it made us sound like loons. Martina disagreed.

'Scratch any of these hard-headed old bastards and there's a drooling romantic within,' she said to me once. 'This is America. Frontier heroism, Manifest Destiny...There isn't a Yank entrepreneur alive that doesn't get a hard-on from the breath of the ineffable.'

One of them approached me after Martina had finished speaking.

'I don't know what the hell she was talking about half the time but goddamn it if it don't make sense.'

He was from the mid-West, the architect of countless hostile takeovers during the eighties. He'd laid the workforces of entire cities to waste and yet here he was, ecstatic as he would be on the day of the Rapture. Martina, surrounded by a throng of suitors at the base of the lectern from whence she had proclaimed, looked over at me and smiled. Did she ever get tired of being right all the time?

'She's too young to be a widow.' My friend had become grave. 'Such a tragedy.'

'The property racket,' I said. 'The stress killed him. It's a relief to be done with it.'

He nodded.

'Too many marks jumping on the bandwagon. But this here...' He swept his arm around. 'We're going to make a lot of money.'

'With the help of God, sir.'

*

'Look at this.'

Martina handed me a folded over newspaper. The headline read: "Croatian Movie is a Surprise Summer Hit."

"The first-time director has fashioned a bittersweet tale about a gay teenager's coming of age in Split during the Balkan conflict," I read. 'Doesn't say anything about his apprenticeship shooting fuck movies.'