Will I be disembowelled for eschewing the bacteria cube?
An excerpt from a gonzo sci-fi novel-in-progress by Paige Cooper and Jean Marc Ah-Sen
Discordia does not, it turns out, hate everything. Every other week, we share a piece of work from some artists who've earned our respect and affection.
There is art that moves us, and there is art that moves with us. This is Fellow Travellers.
Scrag Show
« The so-called “starver” groups (House of Scrag, Heap Pyogene, etc.) increasingly display millenarian tendencies sympathetic to anarcho-primitivism and ecofascism, but more concerningly fundamental and coherent opposition toward the necessity of ethical anthropophagy. Though self-confined to below-ground infrastructure (eg., the penal colony at Fort Alden gold mine), we see probability of topside activity increasing in line with ideological drive, nutritional deficiency, and dermal absorption of the addictive stimulant known as clot. Deployment of tactical fence-testing units is underway. »
—Major Claudean Engaloys
Chief Anti-Pattern Strategist and ethnopharmacological reporter
Compliance Base Hawk Junction
Compliance has rigged me out with high-visibility coveralls that are meant to be water and flame resistant. They’ve also equipped me with a high-tensile rappelling harness, mountaineering cords, a vented helmet with a light, screen, and hearing protection, licorice-flavoured oxygen canisters, a respirator, and fifteen pounds of quickdraw packs. The ration and first aid kit weigh almost as much as my child, who is still hooked up to the dialysis machine and will not be accompanying me down the starver holes, no matter how much she whines for her pater.
I don’t care for functionality so much as relish the thought that I am bedecked in actual, non-river-scrubbed clothes for the first time in half a decade. I can’t even be annoyed at the fact that I have to ask for use of the G.I. bath—that it was not a courtesy Major Engaloys thought to extend me, knowing full well the abominable living conditions of my familial knoll-site.
Four grunts attach themselves to the lintel of the communal shower room to supervise my scrubbing of crevices, but their mild, listless presence bothers me less than the inch-thick centipede that crawls out of the drainpipe mid-rinse. After ten minutes under water, one of my observers clangs his baton on a drainpipe to signal that time is a-wasting. I turn off the taps sluggishly, to enjoy the final trickle of water. One of the grunts passes me a towel—white, stained, fluffy, with the logo of a long-defunct hotel on its tag—before he tells me that my personnel carrier is leaving in twenty-five.
While conducting a final equipment check, I run my fingers over the clot in my possession. I keep it in a small pouch around my neck. I must assume Compliance knows I have it, and allows me my meagre hoard because I’ll need it for brokering with the starvers once I’m down among them in the mines. Otherwise, Compliance has just blinded their god-eye to my growing dependency on the tarry drug.
I have decided my nugs will be more secure sealed away in the pocket of my ballistic nylon coverall when I catch one of the grunts eyeing me again. He begins a furtive approach, scrubbing at his mustache when he speaks, which I realize is to garble his recorded transmissions back to Compliance.
“Bandy?” he asks.
“Wrong person.”
“No, do you bandy? Like swap. Trade.”
“Is this sex stuff? I saw you humping tile while I showered.”
“Not what you think. I’m on the lookout for clot-splodge. The others didn’t notice, but I saw. One of your areolas is darker than the other. You’re bent. Bent like me.” He smiles.
I sniff, straighten my shoulders under my twenty kilos of rigging. I hadn’t felt naked before but I do now. “What is it you want?”
“That’s your daughter in the med bay? Don’t trust that she’ll be looked after up here in our barracks. Shock troops get shit rained on them from all angles. Big, man-portable shit pieces. Sanity’s the first liability in the field. But I’ve got pups too, not much older than yours. I don’t shivoo with the others, the pederasts and the metho-junkies. I can look after her is what I’m saying. One of my own, like.”
This offer—his dog eyes, the duct-tape tattoo tracking down his neck into his dirty collar—sends my guts rancid. Of course she’s not safe here—did I think she would be? And this scurvoid’s offer is blackmail that Compliance will ignore and a hundred other men will demand their cut of once I cave. The second I’m absent, they’ll help themselves to her. My child.
He snaps his fingers, other hand up in his moustache. “Hey. Hey farmwife. You bandy or not?”
I grab his fingers and snap one, enunciate clearly into his mic, “I don’t trade with clot addicts, I don’t speak with clot addicts.” He whimpers like a gelding on the floor, thrashing his feet. Compliance, it seems, doesn’t care either way.
*
When I bid my daughter farewell, I slip a substantial chunk of clot into her kit. “Don’t touch it with your skin, but trade it if you have to. By the gram. You can make shavings with the vegetable peeler. Buy some protection.”
She gives me a suspicious look, opens the kit, and puts the entire stone in her mouth. I slap her so hard it flops out and pinwheels behind her dialysis machine. I am aware that this is possibly the last memory that I am leaving her with. I tell myself that object lessons in self-chastisement will serve her in the long run. Better neurotic than catatonic, is what I always said to Villwock in our arguments re: parenting ideologies. That was before I reported him to Compliance, and he got sentenced to scuttle the mines with the starvers.
Her eyes water until I scoop her, only momentarily kinking the venous line running her clean blood back into her, and she giggles. With her arms around me, she munches on a mouthful of my uncombed hair, I lose myself in a radial of maternal feeling. It lasts barely a moment. I put the clot back in her kit, and tuck said kit under the pillow of her gurney. When I leave the med bay, I don’t turn back once.
*
I am able to sleep on the air transport amid the sound of skypulping airfoils—adrenal fatigue leaves me with no other alternative than a system crash. The tiltwing doesn’t have far to go though, and soon enough I am being ushered down the loading ramp onto thedrop point: a shed the size of an outhouse on the otherwise empty steppe
One of the pilots tells me to wait until the tiltwing has dropped all of its payloads in the surrounding area. She assures me that the surface mining infrastructure has been exhaustively mapped out with LiDAR and won’t compromise the integrity of the tunnel networks I’m about to enter.
“We just want to soften up the starvers for you. Clear you a path,” she says enthusiastically. “Mollify before you occupy!”
The sound of her maniacal laughing is washed out by a thumpy takeoff. I am left alone on the barren grid to die. The smell of choke damp is everywhere.
I register movement inside the pit brow and reach for my machine pistol as Lieutenant Brasenose sticks his nose out, inching sideways with his hands up, cackling timidly. He’s also rigged for an ill-omened subterranean dip.
“They didn’t give me a weapon. Not even a knife,” my liaison officer complains.
“Why—” I start.
“How I’m supposed to protect you from hordes of paleo trash is beyond me. My bare hands, my strength of character?” he is saying.
I consider shooting him now—most pleasant option, especially if he’s lying as he likes to, and is armed—but the shroud of surveillance drapes me sweatily. Compliance sent him along to irritate me or—or—for some useful purpose.
“You’ll need to lend me something,” Brasenose says, shimmying closer. “Spare a projectile? Har.” He smiles weedily at me. His teeth are so white and even. I’ve always wondered where he got them.
“No,” I tell him.
“I convinced Compliance that you’d be dead within the hour without a speleologist, case you’re wondering. Ta da.”
We have an hour before nightfall, by which time my pilot friend promised she’d be finished with her mollifying. I want to spend that time with my fist in Brasenose’s gullet and my knee on his throat, ripping his tongue out by millimeters. But he’s stronger than me and he’s freshly clot-freaked so I’ll need to wait till he sleeps. I thumb my pocket-clot furiously while he takes my frigidity as forgiveness.
“Do you know anything about what to expect down there?” He frames his boast as a question and somehow manages to add a suggestive turn to it. “The terrain? Compliance’s history of rare earth element extraction and the competitive licensing structure that undergirds it?”
I look around for a place to flop down that will not invite him to also flop. “No. Do you?”
“My team led the first Compliance-managed starver incursion. I know the area like the back of my non-asswiping hand.”
He wiggles his broad, orc-like feeler demonstratively, but he is looking at my face with a goo goo drip in his grey pearloids. He used to always flinch and look in the opposite direction when I caught him ogling me, but now he does it openly. He is two meters tall, with blonde hair he’s obviously vain about; he’s grown it long enough regulation requires he comb it back into a bun. Any minute now he’ll take out his horsehair brush and give it its one hundred gloaming strokes.
He gestures at the hoist house: “We’ll make camp here till dark, and take the south ingress point. Let’s talk environmental assessment procedure. Lots of algal blooms and metalliferous tailings down there. Chance of ammonia clouds too. Compliance’s decarbonization efforts have turned everything into a potential life-snatcher.”
The clagtrail of a daydream helps me imagine how his pretty teeth will cut up my knuckles when I cave them back into his hard palate. Maybe my wrists too. I badly want to put my fingers into his thalamus and squeeze his amygdala like a muscat grape. Not least because, as he goes on, I see why Compliance sent him. He knows what he is talking about.
Brasenose spends an hour describing the terminal swellings of various mutated mycorrhizae, and their effect on human lymph systems, while I watch the sun turn into a flat red button behind the scrim of dust hanging over the horizon. The night heat is coming up, and with it my weighted blanket of malaise.
Normally, I’d be bickering with the child over the last inches of flavoured water. Now she is fending without me. Will that moustached freakio attempt to interface with her? By giving my child her own clot-chips to bargain with I have made her a target, too. Both pistol and dog—her quotidian security tools—were left behind at the knoll-home when Compliance airlifted her to the Med Bay. I pray she sources herself a firearm before she licks the clot herself.
Brasenose’s encyclopedic recitation continues as I gnaw on my poor decisions. The culpability feels slightly more practical than the murderous bloodrage. I miss my child’s damp torso, hugging me.
*
When the sun melts behind the ridge of brown cloud, and the distant thumps of the bunker busters cease, Brasenose kicks away a dry-rotted wooden manhole, flicks on his headlamp, straps and restraps his gloves, and crawls headfirst down a thirty-degree adit. I follow cautiously, but the dirt slides under my weight and all my effort goes into braking my palms so I don’t slide face-first into the man’s jellied crack.
Ten meters along, a few down, the tunnel flares and Brasenose rears up to his knees to start tearing out his comms. He stashes it within a toothy vug in the wall above us, then gestures at me to do the same.
“Compliance doesn’t set foot down here. Too chickenshit about dusty lung. They basically took the goldbricking infanteer’s word that the signal craps out past the upper threshold. Look no further as to why.”
I peer into the vug. In my headlight, the amethyst sparkles occultly, like a palace for a flower fairy. Without light, nothing ever sees this beauty. Behind Brasenose’s wiring, there are other dusty coils, earbuds, torn-apart transmitters, general commstrash. I try to coil mine neatly, at least, so I’ll have all the right bits when I come back. If I come back.
“What about evac?” I ask dumbly. “In case… things?”
“You’ve been intentionally misled about surface-starver relations, not least of all by me. They are perfectly sensible and commercially reasonable. Come on. We’re burning eventide.”
We continue for a few more meters in the featureless dark and suddenly we can stand. The dirt changes to shale aggregate, and Brasenose puts his two fingers into his mouth and produces a pintail whistle. Within minutes, two sooty bipeds limp up from the deep crepuscular gloom. They are naked as bog corpses. Brasenose removes his respirator and presses his lips to the first starver for an open mouthed kiss. She glides her hand over his waist and caresses upward until she has bisected his chest with a whetted keratin spur. I flinch, expecting gore, but no wound opens under her touch. The second starver repeats this odious ritual, then sways toward me.
“Copy what I do,” Brasenose says, “They’ll gut you like muskellunge otherwise.”
The first starver’s face is shark eyes and a sunken leer that has no fat to fold into a smile. I flinch away and she laughs, lunging after me. When she corners me, she gives me her toothy kiss and runs her talon up my plumb line. A small whit of clot is passed through to my mouth, and then sucked back. I am supercharged with adrenaline and my extremities slump into numbness.
The second one pokes his tongue and I tolerate that, too. He tastes the way maggots smell when left to flambé in the sun. Bile burns my sinuses. Brasenose begins to disrobe, but keeps his respirator on. He is in good shape for his habits—his slightly distended breadbasket shows signs of toned attention. I notice that one of his pilose testicles droops a good inch lower than the other.
“You too, Britt. Skivvies off.”
I protest, thinking that the equipment I have lugged all this way is there to keep me alive. Leaving it by the mouth of the cavern seems like confirmation that I will never return to the surface. I’m paralyzed by the thought and ignore Brasenose’s directive.
The male starver gives me a hard shove on the shoulder and bares his teeth at me, some of which have been filed down and are showing pustulant signs of infection.
“Don’t be dumb,” Brasenose singsongs. “They are ‘Compliance’ down here. You can’t set at naught the lawgivers when they outnumber you a hundred to one.”
I drop my rations pack and pare down to Brasenose’s respirator-only ensemble, my clot pouch notwithstanding. I thumb out the two from the little sporran around my neck. I see how this immediately placates the starver envoys, who relax into the posture of dressmaker mannequins. Brasenose is saying something that sounds like “troglofauna” to the lady starver—all I know is that they have a deranged chuckle at my expense.
She bids us to follow her along a steamy couloir ending at a rack and pinion elevator. Brasenose insists on taking the rear and I simmer loathsomely under his gaze. As we descend deeper into the shaft, the temperature lifts, like it’s rushing up to meet us.
My eyes are adjusting to the darkness as we emerge out of the elevator into a haulage drift. I wonder how close by the pilot’s penetrator ordinance has hit. How structurally sound these ceilings. After thirty seconds I’m runnelled with sweat. My concern turns to what the humidity is doing to my respirator. There are faint sounds of human activity at the other end of the drift, followed by a point of nascent illumination turning the kaleidoscope of black into a blurry gradient of movement.
The narrow opening we reach looks like it was blasted out, carved out by primitive implements. My calves and forearms are scored with nicks from the effort of squeezing through. We emerge into a karstic landscape overrun by cave popcorn, carmine-coloured liverworts. A hundred yards away, a throng. What must be a half-legion of starvers are clumped around an elevated ledge brocaded by flowstone formations.
This “stage” is lit by carelessly arranged stockpiles of climbing helmets—some bearing resource extraction wordmarks, some brandlessly black and recognizably Compliance-issue. One by one, with much sound and fury, individual starvers are filing out of a grotto entrance deeply set into what passes for stage left. From this distance, they look like filaments of boiled yuba skins sauntering upright.
A weak waterfall creates a curtain of water that trickles into a plunge below the stage. One of the parading starvers slips, cracks her hip and skull on the jutting edges, and slides algal into the drink. Cheers erupt and echo throughout the cave.
The next starver in the string quickens her pace to close the gap. I can make out five more besides. It takes some time for me to understand what is happening—it beggars comprehension, but I am actually witnessing a starver runway show.
“Corn smut goes next,” our chaperone bosses, edging Brasenose and I through the crowd, towards the grotto. She clutches my hip, which, while not exactly plump, looks positively podgy compared to her bulging iliac crest and the skin hanging from it.
Her speech is impaired by a Marlex patch sutured to her tongue: “If you can’t fit through the keyhole, gonna embowel you, fatso.” For the first time since the world turned into an ash heap, I consider the size of my ass. Narrower than Brasenose’s ribcage?
I push up close enough to Brasenose to mutter, “Have you done this before?”
“Every time,” he affirms, straightening his spine and brushing his palms pridefully down his hips.
“What happens?” I ask, but Marlex scolds me by pincering my tricep with her bony talons. She nudges me forward.
The throng makes way. Disgust folds their features. Brasenose hops pertly up the stone steps; as I follow, someone darts forward to bongo my gluteals before leaping away. This act of beasting is followed by heinous peals of laughter. I don’t turn around to see which dungeon freak did it. I just follow Brasenose into the grotto, dripping at the pits in the mouth-warm heat.
In the wings of the cave, the last performing starvers are almost out of the gate downstage. A few of them spit at the sight of us. Brasenose and I can’t make out what is being expressed beyond the sheet of water, which is indeed shaped roughly like a keyhole.
He raps the small of my back, letting me know he’ll take point. Behind me, I can hear ragged breathing. A starver is being assisted by our two envoys. One is female and half the size of her handlers—a skeletal system of bony winches and tackles that sounds like a creaky piano being tuned. A man sturdier than her but still smaller than the envoys slots into place behind her, wheezing.
Marlex hands Brasenose two cubes the size of visitandines. I do not see where she has extracted these samples from and don’t want to know, but Brasenose hands me one. It’s almost like a fragrant Vieux-Boulogne.
Brasenose chomps down on the block of cheese—it’s hard to guess what source they are culturing down here other than bat milk, or human—and gestures that I gobble my portion with a swish of his hand.
I want to ask whether I’ll be disembowelled for eschewing the bacteria cube, but Brasenose continues his pacing around the subterrain without glancing at me again. It’s Marlex who keeps her gluey gaze trained on me. I swallow her gouda whole with my tongue pressed to the bottom of my mouth. The flavour is nutty, buttery, and earthy with truffle-spore. I find myself wanting more even as I anticipate my bowels bloating with gas. Finally, satisfied I’ve swallowed, Marlex signals us to troop out onto the catwalk.
Brasenose does some preliminary breathwork as his antecedent passes through the keyhole. He is huffing kundalini fire as he fidgets with his nostrils. When the starver throng notes we’re next, their chant stumbles. A few jeer, but Brasenose is sucking in his gut and shimmying through with his knees bent.
When he makes it—a little slip on the wet-weed rock, but no fall—Marlex butts in line and walks through before me. She runs ahead of him and hooks Brasenose by the respirator hose, leading him offstage. He is welcomed with ringing cooees of approbation. I feel, upsettingly, an absurd need to achieve this response for myself.
Up close, the keyhole looks slightly wider at waist-height, helping only exceptionally leggy femmes or deeply tiny men. I go through crabwise on tip toe. Silence from the throng. I fear the damp rough touch of the flowstone. But then I’m through, and none of the starvers are looking at me.
The legion has turned its gaze to the man perched on a crag twenty feet above us all. A dishy frontiersman in banderoles of animal flesh, ripped from the shivers of time, daubed in offal-mucilage, oxblood-toned ribbons girdling his torso so as to suggest some kind of primitive hunger-regalia.
He observes my scant achievement, all my gristly joggling, with a familiar forbearance. Villwock, my child’s father, apparently now lord of the starvers and clot king, says, “My former fleshwife herself. Welcome to the House of Scrag, sweetmeat.”
P.S. Keep an eye out for another excerpt from the novel in McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern #82, coming later this spring!
PAIGE COOPER's debut collection of short stories, *Zolitude*, won the Concordia University First Book Prize, and was listed for the Giller Prize, the Governor General’s Award, the Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction, and the Danuta Gleed Award. She was the 2020 editor of *Best Canadian Stories*. Her novel *Nulligravida* is forthcoming from Flying Books in 2027.
JEAN MARC AH-SEN is the author of *Grand Menteur*, *In the Beggarly Style of Imitation*, and *Kilworthy Tanner*. His work has been published in *McSweeney's Quarterly Concern*, *Hazlitt*, *The Comics Journal*, and *The Globe and Mail*. He writes the "Reading Habits" column for *The Toronto Star*. 
Interested in being a Fellow Traveller? Email your poetry, prose, visual art, etc. to discordia.sucks@gmail.com. We pay (not much), and pieces are collected a few times a year in a small print edition.
Fellow Travellers “Eyes” banner adapted from Opal Louis Nations’ “An Eyeball Alphabet” (1980).
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