The Prize of Dysprosium

Chapter V: Heaven and Hell in the Rooms of the Cave

My skin is all raw and pink when Garmen helps me out of the shower and I'm faced with my own terrorized body in the mirror. I have to take a second glance before shock settles, because the body doesn't belong to me at all. It has become a stranger's.

My skin has been terraformed into an alien landscape with craters of blue and purple littering my neck, and night skies with stars shaped like fingernails on my arms, small wounds and bigger wounds and slices from the whip on my back where I imagine all the blood came from. There are reddish and blue marks underneath my ribs, a few of them shaped like bites, and a bruise blooming around my right eye, reaching my cheekbone. My lips are swollen and a small crust is threatening to break if I stretch them too wide. My hair just looks wet, but I can imagine it in chunks of coagulated blood. My wrists look like I've tried to cut them off.

I think I gasp because Garmen quickly pulls the sheet back over me and turns me away from the carcass staring back at me with dark, hollow eyes. She guides me back to my room and ignores the stares at my face and my slow, limping walk. She has me stand and dresses me in thick jogging pants and a t-shirt, then makes me eat a soft plumb and drink a whole glass of water she has Carrie-Ann retrieve from the kitchen. Every swallow hurts my throat, but it also softens the mess in my head. Then Garmen makes me lie down and pulls my blanket up to my chin.

"Sleep," she says softly and draws my hair back from my forehead. I grab her wrist with feeble hands.

"Stay," I croak. I wince as she climbs underneath the covers with me and gently begins caressing the less damaged parts of my face. But as soon as her warm body lies still beside mine I feel my thoughts becoming heavy until I fall asleep.

It's not always that bad. Most nights what happens in the Cave is downright enjoyable. Not everyone is a Father George and some are even nice. I have had customers whom I've had to guide to their own pleasure because they weren't sure what they liked, where it could be equally as enjoyable for me, where they worried about hurting me if they grabbed my shoulders too tightly. There is an elderly man who likes to talk to Endria. Just talk. He is too old to get a rise and he doesn't believe in taking medicine, so he pays for her company and they laugh together for a few hours until he has to go back to his life which Endria knows every detail of. He's an excellent tipper. There is a transgender woman who wants Ricardo to touch her. Not enter her, only touch her, while he speaks the small amount of French his vocabulary allows him to because it reminds her of her late wife. There is another woman who works as a masseuse, who always cries and insists on giving me back rubs at the end of each session. There is a man who likes to see Garmen and I being intimate together while he sits in the corner masturbating. Those are my favourite nights.

I know Garmen's body better than I know my own, know her smell and the feel of her legs wrapped around me. I know how pleasure looks on her, how her skin tastes. I can recognize her touch by the soft scrape of her fingernails alone over my back.

First time I met her was two weeks after my first check-up. Barooba had said that she didn't care whether or not I talked, I was still eating the food she bought and so I had to learn the trade to earn it back to her. I'd seen Garmen in the hallways of course. I'd been sharing a room with a woman named Smeet at the time, and everybody were strangers, but even at fourteen I was mesmerized by her blonde hair because that feature is such a rarity.

I was still being introduced to places where body hair could grow when Barooba grabbed me by the neck and dragged me into one of the rooms in the subterranean Cave. She'd thrown me inside and I'd fallen on the floor in front of the bed where I immediately noticed Garmen lying across the madras, reading something from a magazine and crunching a hard candy between her teeth. As Barooba closed the door behind us and locked the door, she sent me a smile and swallowed what was left of the candy.