It the city, people feared one another. Society was divided into those with power and those without, and if it was social interaction that helped to dissolve that fear of each other, it was also social interaction that served up scapegoats—sacrificial victims, a necessary and inevitable function to keep society running. Balot was always hearing such stories from her customers and the other girls.
Stories of sadistic men who could only get their kicks by torturing people, or religious nutjobs who had to follow a precise set of bizarre rules in the correct sequence in order to get off, or men who selected the right girls—or boys—to fulfill their fantasies to the letter, choosing their costumes and the scenery, ordering them around like a theater director would his actors. These men may not have physically been taking machetes to the throats of their livestock, but they were doing the equivalent to the hearts and minds of thirteen-year-old girls.
The Date Club that Balot worked at was one of the better brothels—one of the safer ones, anyway. The club paid taxes, or at least the man at reception said it did. We’re virtually a public service.
In other words, they’d covered their backs against charges of violating the protection of minors law.
Those places that operated under the radar, avoiding such “unnecessary expenses” as taxes—it stood to reason that these were the most dangerous of all.
The pimps weren’t always strangers, either. One of the girls, before she worked at the Date Club, used to be pimped out by her father on a regular basis. She’d already been with nearly a hundred johns by the time she was sixteen—most of her “clients” being his friends, drinking buddies, or customers at the watering holes her father frequented. Then one day her father found himself in deep trouble with one of her clients and mysteriously disappeared from the world. The girl carried on living, surviving, through the profession that her father had taught her so well. As if that was her way of showing her filial love and devotion.
At the club the girls swapped gruesome stories of how girls who plied their wares from street corners had a tendency to meet a bad end. One girl recounted to Balot a particular tale as if she were talking about a horror novel. How one of her friends ended up wasting away in the hospital, her bones shattered, her body jelly. Girls beaten to death by their violent men had looked a prettier sight.
Apparently the dead girl used to refer to herself occasionally as a bomb. A ticking time bomb. Her friend only understood why when she saw the diagnostic charts at the hospital. The dying girl had AIDS and had been slowly dying from it for many years, working the streets all the while. Then the dying girl told her how she had ended up infected with such a disease. She had been raped one day on her way home from school.
Since then she had lived only for her work. For revenge. On her deathbed, she dreamed of all the bombs that she had spread, hoping they would explode in a fiery blast inside the men to whom she had successfully passed on her disease.
Then there were the girls who worked in groups to ensnare the big earners.
Not just ensnare, either—often their behavior would descend into blackmail, forcing their marks into handing over increasing amounts of money under the threat of public disclosure. The gangs often ended up getting sucked into larger criminal organizations—some girls went voluntarily, others in order to protect themselves from the backlash from the disgruntled blackmailee. The girl who told Balot this story was one of the former group, having joined a large criminal gang by choice, but she had run away shortly after realizing that she had made a mistake. Men do understand on some level that women feel pain too, she said, but what they don’t realize is that the pain we feel has just as much impact on us as it does on them. Pain couldn’t fight gravity and always flowed downhill toward lower ground, finding the path of least resistance. However bad life at the Date Club was, it wasn’t as painful as the alternative.
Well, at least nothing like that ever happens here. This was the platitude so often used as the moral of one of the girls’ horror stories—so much so that it became a cliché. The man at reception said so. The girls, who had grown so used to their jobs, said so. It became a mantra, an inoculation; so long as you spoke those words, no harm would ever befall you. But danger came in many shapes and sizes. It wasn’t just the unknowable future that could be dangerous—sometimes danger came in the form of shadows from the past that had finally caught up with the present. Danger could grow and expand to fill any void.
There were teenage outcasts from society, man-boys with no place in the world and at their wits’ end, who abducted middle school girls to use as their slaves. There were middle-aged, outwardly respectable government officials who walked past children’s playgrounds at the same fixed time every day, hoping to catch a glimpse of the young children that they were sexually attracted to. There was the Peeping Tom who had focused all his attention on one girl, and when the object of his affection failed to show any gratitude for his solicitude he raped the ungrateful bitch before dragging her to the local registry office to forcibly marry her, at which point he was promptly apprehended by the police.
A seventeen-year-old did some babysitting on the side to earn some pocket money, and she committed unspeakably cruel atrocities to over ten different children before she was caught and the alarm raised. When asked by the district attorney what could have possibly motivated her, her honest reply was that she thought that was what love was. Such was the reality of how her own parents had treated her.
People who labeled themselves as sadists or fetishists operated a network. Some of them were out in the open, appearing in the media, proud and unashamed of their otherness, and were recognized as outcasts. Different, maybe. Alien, definitely. But not necessarily dangerous per se.
But then there were the other aliens—the ones who didn’t go out of their way to call themselves sadists or fetishists. Not because they weren’t, but because they considered themselves to be absolutely normal. They had no more humanity in them than a giant shredding machine: flick their switches in the right way and they’d rip anyone to pieces without a moment’s hesitation, whether a complete stranger or their own flesh and blood.
These people weren’t particularly complicated, not in terms of what they wanted out of life. Their motivations were really quite straightforward. The only thing that was at all complicated was the process that they needed to go through to get what they wanted.
Sunny side up—the good life: no worries, no boredom, no contradictions.
A desirable goal for people from all walks of life, rich or poor. Ask a child why she had run away from the Welfare Institute, ask a rapist why he repeatedly committed the most horrendous of atrocities, and the answer would be the same: I wanted to be happy. It was the only answer there could be.
On the program Balot had watched about the aborigines, they didn’t actually show the moment the animals were slaughtered.
As is always the case on live television, they showed you up to the moment the machete was held high in the air, ready to strike. Then they cut to the scene straight after that, in which the cow was already engulfed in flame, the part where the blade ended the animal’s life being excised in order to preserve the viewers’ sensibilities.
Or was it to say to the viewer You see this sort of thing every day anyway, so why should we bother showing it to you now?
It was no more than what the viewers did—and had done to them—on a regular basis, after all.