The straps only get tighter.
You ready?
Ready in two.
It’s for his own protection. It’s hard to talk with the restraints around his jaw. Last time round in this contraption, he nearly bit his own tongue clean off.
Jst gt n wth t, mthrfckr.
The red light on the camera blinks in disbelief, and then it begins.
SILK-LINED COFFIN PRODUCTS
present
SURFING AGONY
Ice ricochets through his veins. He smells something burning, most likely hair. They always shave before they start, but when the nerves are playing pinball with your fingers you always miss a bit here or there, and then they start to fizzle when the switches drop. One of the other voices says,
He’s burning.
Leave him.
He’s lost in a country below the country he came from, where their sort of sport is prohibited. People still watch them in the country he came from. You can’t stop people watching, not unless you want to become like those other countries, countries where people aren’t allowed to watch what they want. Because in that sort of country, that sort of sport is… well, it’s safe to say that the sport has been perfected here. So they exercise due caution, but there are always stray patches of hair smoldering here and there.
Did he say something?
I didn’t hear anything.
The fucking cable hum is killing the audio on this one.
It’s amazing how many thoughts you can fit into such a short space of time. Each of them has something different to get them through. G-Jax counts and ranks the women he’s fucked. Hallo Gritty recites proofs for irrational numbers under her breath. Firebreathing pictures himself beating his ex-boyfriend to a pulp. Nobody said they were a healthy bunch.
He practices voluntary time dilation, the feeling of simultaneously moving through maple syrup and sprinting the home straight. When he’s successful, he can control the sensations almost completely, dodging them when they get too intense, rushing ahead of the pain and then ducking back to watch it move on. When he’s unsuccessful, of course, the screams break the monitoring board.
When he’s unsuccessful, he’s unsuccessful in a spectacular way; when he loses the game, he goes out with a bang. There was that time he nearly bit his tongue off, for example, and now he can’t say say his plosives properly. A small price to pay for what was quickly translated into several minutes of fame and the sponsorship deal that paid for their website upgrade.
That website. It’s been their undoing. What used to be a privilege, a pass to the VIP lounge, a sense of superiority – whatever, bite me – is now the new thing. They’re hated, they’re loved, they’re copied – especially copied. Fucking copycats have turned the sport into a bourgeois distraction, forcing them to up the ante once again. Always one step ahead of the crowd, just like he’s one step ahead of the pain.
Whoops. Nearly lost his concentration there. Sometimes one step isn’t enough.
He definitely said something then.
Forget it. Those safewords are useless anyway.
Ahahahaha. They used to take the safewords seriously, can you believe that? They really were a bunch of kids then, fresh from the club, stoned on special k, sitting around the computer and wondering how they could make the feeling happen again. It was just a game back then – that’s why they needed the safewords, just like all those wannabes without the balls to see the game through. So now they refer to it as a sport, and they take it seriously, but they brought the safewords with them. He’s always slightly embarrassed when he gets asked about them in interviews.
Tm.
He said something.
I heard it.
What was it?
He said “Time”.
Ah. Okay.
They know him. He trusts them. That’s why he doesn’t need a safeword. They’ve been doing this for so long they know each other more intimately than parents or lovers. They know exactly what it means when somebody pisses themselves, they know how to read the grind of the teeth, they can predict the exact moment when the line will snap and they can reel you in a split second before that.
Tm.
He said it again.
Relax. It’s what he always says.
He said it different this time.
Ah, those guys. They know him so well. Let’s talk about Checking Out.
The big lie is that nobody dies. Lots of people get hurt – that’s the point, after all – but nobody dies. Oh, there are the copycat deaths, the kids in the burgs and backwaters who don’t follow the instructions carefully, but in the spotlight – not a chance. Except there’s a always a chance, because that’s the whole point, isn’t it? Not hurting people, but taking them to the edge and looking over.
Castor and Pollux are now retired. Brothers (but not twins) until Castor drops over the edge courtesy of Pollux. Pollux wants to continue, feels that it’s what Castor would want him to do. The others look at Pollux differently now. It was an accident – everybody knows it was an accident – but was it really an accident?
JESUS FUCKING CHRIST. He’s got to keep focused. A wave of ice crashes over him and he goes under. This is the price you pay when you’re surfing agony. Ha! That’s a good one. That’ll be the title of their next video mix, the anniversary edition they’re putting out to distract attention from the retirement of Castor and Pollux.
Castor and Pollux retire and nobody ever hears from them again, the crew forensically cleans its cabins and decamps to another country entirely, a country where even if things do go wrong they can be made right if you have the money and the connections. Of course it was G-Jax with the connections, the bastard son of a diplomat and a cleaning lady, with his own hush fund and a hotline to the old man in the mother country.
He’s – hold on.
What?
He’s spiking. Pull him out.
He hasn’t blinked yet.
He’s not going to blink. Not to give you the satisfaction. Not for the pleasure of those monkeys watching. Not for the rinse of the dark god who sits over their shoulders. Polls show that 84% people switch off after around 42 seconds – and doesn’t he love that precise statistic? That’s up, though – when they started, most people switched channels after only 23 seconds, which means that the pain threshold of the viewing public is going up faster than theirs.
So, no safewords. 60 serious seconds. (Hey, another title for a v-mix.) Everybody has to run the same clock, the only thing you get to choose is the method. He favors the electricity, the intimacy of the coils, the restraints, the absence of scarring. The only damage is inside, but isn’t it always? Those others with their dreams of drowning, the perpetual limps, the blurred vision and tinnitus, they don’t test as well in the polls. The audience wants youth and beauty to shimmer and disappear before their eyes, but they don’t want too much of what the rack does to Hallo Gritty’s long, tanned limbs. Not after a certain point.
TM.
Jesus!
We should put you in front of the camera. You’re jumping and twitching more than him.
So, let’s talk about time. Time is always running out, even when you’re not on the clock. There’s only so long that G-Jax can keep the authorities off their back, only so long that the powerful and principled will accept their extra-curricular activities. The only people who are allowed to throw these switches are paid professionals, carefully trained to inflict suffering, not pretty-boys and riot-grrls just trying to make a splash.
The real pain athletes – the ones safely locked in cells around the world, whose travails aren’t televised – make them look like amateurs. In the end that’s why they’re unacceptable; because they’re amateurs. On the government dollar, everything would be fine, but because they’re all about
corporate sponsorship – oh, and tax evasion – they’re criminals.
If you’re the victim of your own success, with 2 million hits a day from all over the world, if your names are close to being revealed, where do you go? There are only so many countries in the world who’ll turn a blind eye, and sooner or later the money will run out and blind eyes will see again, praise the lord! No, there are only two ways they can stay out of the spotlight; either break the surface and lose each other in the crowded bodies back home, or go deep, deep, deep.
Castor and Pollux showed them the way without even realising it. Pollux is back up in the daylight and nobody will ever find him if he doesn’t want them to, while Castor is so deep down that not even God could find him. That’s the decision that all of them will have to make if they don’t want to be crucified, if they don’t want the mainstream media to turn their sport into a joke, into a fucking mockery of what they dreamed it could be. Who are you going to be today, Castor or Pollux?
Cstr -
He said it.
No he didn’t.
You heard him. He said it.
Don’t let him down, not after you’ve come so far together. You know him well enough to know when he’s serious. Sixty serious seconds, remember? He always goes the distance, no matter how much it costs. They had a deal that they’d always respect each others’ wishes – and now the pain is catching up with him, that wave is going to break right over his head unless they -
Cstr –
You didn’t hear him.
I can’t do it.
G-Jax, you fucking coward.
You made a promise same as me.
Silence in the room except for the beehive of wires. Then whoever stayed turns up the power and lets him burn, just like he wanted. He’s going Castor – he was always Castor, because he hasn’t got anywhere else to go. Pollux went home, back to mom and pop, but he doesn’t have a home to go to. So take him to the edge, because that’s the only home he knows.
He focuses on one thing: it doesn’t matter now if he goes out with a bang or a whimper. Those idiots are so focused on spoiling it for everybody, they don’t realise there’ll be somebody else along in a minute, somebody with less sense, more money and even more dangerous ideas, and then the idiots will wish they had them back again. They’re not the pied piper, they’re the safety valve. They’re the mixed metaphor for the generation that took the greatest hits of the twentieth century and re-edited, remixed and re-released them for the twenty-first.
It’s difficult to tell which he’s addicted to, the pain or the time dilation. Does it matter? It’ll all be over in 12 seconds, unless the door is kicked in and the plug gets pulled and the video cuts out and the end is nigh and the
END FEED
START A/V
We’ve got you exactly where we want you, motherfuckers. I’ll see you back on the surface, except you won’t even recognise me. I’ll be in the crowd, cheering you on and waiting for you to realise that you’ve been taken for every cent you’ve got. This is entertainment dressed as politics, you assholes, this is politics dressed as entertainment. You were the ones that pulled down the walls between the two, and this is what you got.
I hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed this.
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