“Ha. Ha. Ha. I’m not as strong as before, but I’m back, kid.”
Ha. Ha. Ha. I’m not as strong as before, but I’m back, kid.
“Do you know who killed Rengganis the Beautiful?” asked Kinkin.
“Yup. It was Krisan who killed Rengganis the Beautiful. Kill him, if you really love that girl, and if you have the balls. Ha. Ha. Ha.”
Yup. It was Krisan who killed Rengganis the Beautiful. Kill him, if you really love that girl, and if you have the balls. Ha. Ha. Ha.
And that was how he killed Krisan, in Beauty’s room, with five well-practiced shots from an air rifle.
For seven years after that he huddled in prison, at the mercy of all the bad guys there. He was sodomized about once a week, beaten almost every day, forced to share half of his allotment of food at every meal, and lost all of the possessions that he had given to Kamino for as long as he was locked up. But even amid all of that suffering in prison he was happy, because he was there on a mission of true love, avenging the death of the woman he had adored ever since the first moment he laid eyes on her.
He received one year’s clemency for good behavior and was freed. He appeared in the outside world looking haggard and emaciated, with long unkempt hair and his face turned into skin and bone, his brow and jaw protruding. He was like a living skeleton, but he inhaled the air of his liberty with a sense of complete independence.
Even though he had been given some clothes and some money for food and transportation he walked on foot from the city jail, and didn’t change his clothes, still wearing tattered rags like a city hobo. The clothes they had provided him were just folded in his hands, and the money he had been given was safe in his pocket. He didn’t want to stop anywhere or waste any time. He wanted to go back home and make sure that that man had been buried.
Finally he found Krisan’s grave, next to the grave of Comrade Kliwon. His name was clearly written on his grave marker, so there could be no mistake. Kinkin made a new grave marker. He threw away the old one bearing Krisan’s name, and exchanging it with the new one he had made.
And so now there is written: DOG (1966–1997).
For years, Krisan had kept thinking about that idea, about having a hideous lover. “What’s wrong with ugly women?” he asked himself. “They can be fucked just like beautiful women can.” And he remembered the talk about Dewi Ayu’s daughter who people said was ugly, maybe the most terrifying-looking person on the face of the earth, and even though he knew that Dewi Ayu was his grandmother, which meant that this ugly face who they said was named Beauty was his aunt, he didn’t care. He had screwed his own cousin, so where was the harm in screwing his own aunt?
So one night he went to his grandmother’s house, and saw that the girl was sitting on the veranda as if she was waiting for someone. He was a little bit unsure about how he could get to know her, so for a number of days he just watched her from the darkness before going home tired. Only on the seventh day did he dare push through the hedge at the side of the yard. He picked a rose that was growing there, approached Beauty, and gave her the flower.
“For you,” he said, “Beauty.”
After that it all went well, until they finally fucked. Fucked. Fucked. And kept on fucking. What was the difference now, everything felt the same. Sleeping with Rengganis the Beautiful and sleeping with hideous Beauty wasn’t all that different. Everything was the same, everything made his genitals spew. He kept on having sex with that woman. “Fucking her,” he explained. And then he found out that the girl was pregnant, but he didn’t care “and kept on fucking her.”
Until one day Beauty asked, “Why do you want me?”
He replied, not knowing whether he was being honest or not, “Because I love you.”
“You love a hideous woman?”
“Yeah.”
“Why?”
Because “why” is always difficult to answer, he didn’t answer. He could only respond “how,” and that was easy. To show his love, he kept on caressing her; he didn’t care how ugly she was, how disgusting, how terrifying. Everything felt fine, he had discovered a joy almost unlike any other that he had ever experienced in his life. But Beauty kept on hounding him, every time they met and made love, with the question, “Why?” Krisan stayed mute. Even though he knew the answer, he didn’t want to say it. But the night before he was killed, he finally replied.
His fourth confession: “Because beauty is a wound.”
Because beauty is a wound.