I’d rush over to his house and find different ways to ruin him. There is nothing—nothing—I haven’t done to Carl Samuel. I know well-done Carl from medium-rare Carl. I made sure his mother knew the difference too. Even made her choose a favorite. It was a good day for me when she admitted her preference.
“Tell me, Patricia, which do you prefer?” I laughed. She was tied to the posts on the side of the stairs. I grabbed her cheeks. Her son’s blood was crusting beneath my fingernails. I pulled her face down to the two strips of meat I’d cooked just a few minutes before. I fried the boy’s arm pieces in olive oil. I even added salt, pepper, and adobo. Carl was writhing and crying behind me. His arm severed and the wound cauterized. I didn’t even have to tie him up.
“Hey, baby. You are supreme and—” Mrs. Samuel started, and then I snapped one of her fingers. She screamed. By then I was immune to the sound of humans screaming. Or the thing I think others felt when they heard someone hurt, I felt the exact opposite. It was music for me: the way people scream when they’re just afraid versus when they know their life is going to end. The unrelenting throaty sobs a man makes when you dangle his life in front of him, the shouts a child makes as you remove their arm. The sharp harshness that comes from a mother who can’t save her son and can’t stop trying. But that day Patricia Samuel swallowed up her scream and stared past me to her son. “You are infinite; this is nothing. I love you, Carl. You are perfect. You are supreme. You are infinite. We are forever.”
“Very sweet. Now tell me, Mrs. Samuel.” I smiled and made my voice soft. “Do you prefer the well-done or the medium?” Patricia Samuel wept as I turned my back to her.
“Please, Queen Ama, I beg you, please spare him today.”
“Knife Queen Ama,” I corrected. “If you tell me which you prefer, I may find some mercy for you.” I took the knife out of my fanny pack.
“Please, Knife Queen.” She wept, just as desperate as a person can be.
I shook my head. “Carl, your mother did this to you,” and then I pressed my knee on his neck. It’s not that hard to remove someone’s eye.
Carl’s screams: yippy and small, and then they grow. They’re wordy and pathetic. “Ah! Hey! Okay! Okay!” like I was giving him a wedgie. Then they grow and pull and stretch. “Nooooo, nooooooo!”
“I love you, baby; it’s okay,” Mrs. Samuel said.
“Yeah, Carl, it’s okay,” I said, stabbing deeper, shucking the blade into the boy’s skull. Laughing at how easy it was.
Carl was silent. He wasn’t dead. His body shook.
“Please, Knife Queen!” She screamed for her son.
“Which do you prefer?”
“Ama, please!”
“Medium or well-done?”
So much misery in that room.
“Neither!”
“You have to pick,” I said, looking up at her, smiling with her boy and so much of his blood in my hands.
“I—”
“In a second there’ll be a very rare option on that plate,” I said.
“Baby, I promi—”
“You have to pick,” I repeated. It was like holding down a fresh-caught fish.
“Mom!” Carl screamed.
“Well-done,” she finally said.
I stopped. “Take another bite to make sure.” She followed my command immediately. Bending down, almost breaking her own arm to eat the meat with her mouth as her hands were tied to the posts behind her.
“Well-done, Knife Queen Ama.”
“Good to know,” I said. “That’s how you’ll have your Carl next cycle.”
Then I got up and left.
I forced Carl and Patricia to live similar nightmares hundreds of times. What’s surprising is how it never got easier for them. Carl was always terrified; his mother was always desperate, destroyed, and ready to be destroyed for him.
I hunted Carl for so long that even though I still hated him I got bored. I started hurting other people. At first I only bullied the bullies. The people who tried to hurt. And then I started hurting everybody. The way I felt about Carl sort of leached out. I was a real terror. People accumulate differently. When Carl’s body started accumulating like mine, when he got as strong as I was, as fast as me, as good with sharp things, then he became a real genuine terror too.
There’s dark red streaked everywhere on Kennedy. It’s like walking into an old room you haven’t lived in for a long time.
“Maybe let’s get back on the bike,” I say.
“Wise,” Ike says, and then, as he’s climbing up onto the handlebars, there’s a bang. I look down and I don’t have a knee anymore. It’s just a shattered bloody thing. I eat back the screams I feel because I’m not the kind of person who screams anymore.
“Dammit!” Ike says. “We have to go.”
“Sheesh,” I say. “Okay, we’re okay. We are—”
“Ama, I know, we have to go!”
Then Carl screams from above us. “How dare you! Sliht baree ki lopper TRENT.”
When I realized that Carl was also accumulating in his body, that he was becoming like me and maybe had been like me the whole time but wasn’t smart enough to realize it, I let him be my friend. Here in the forever Loop anything can happen. You can make a friend of the Devil. You can pretend everything was a dream. Carl was my only friend for a while. We did what we wanted to other people. We hurt them together. We even invented our own language: Carama. There are a lot of bad words in Carama. It’s a language for war gods, so it’s pretty aggressive. We’ve sat on rooftops and watched without fear as entire communities joined together to try to bring us down. “Sliht baree ki lopper trent,” he screams again. It means something like “Prepare for a violent death, you lowly creature.”
“Just checking in,” I say. “We’re leaving.”
“Ama!” Ike screams. I can see he’s afraid, and he should be. But I haven’t seen Carl in such a long time, and there’s a chance that even he is different now.
“Checking out, actually,” Carl says. And I hear him laugh at what he thinks is clever. He flips down from the roof of a house to the street. He’s holding his piercer rifle. That’s one thing. When he starts his day, Carl has some pretty serious stuff ready in his house. His father, before he died, was some kind of Aqua Nazi. Even before the Water Wars started, he was preparing against Black people, Middle Eastern people, Christians, and Jews because he thought they were going to steal from the water reservoirs or something. He was a pretty mean guy, I guess. Carl used to come to school black-eyed and bruised. Kids used to laugh at how crazy his pops was. He wasn’t a happy boy. He’s still not a happy boy. He wears a T-shirt on his head with the neck hole slanted to cover his left eye, and the shirt’s arms are tied back in a knot behind his head. He uses an elastic band he cuts from a pair of underwear like a headband over the shirt to keep it in place even better. It’s the first thing he does every day. His eye, his eye. Some pain lasts through a hundred deaths.
The hot rain starts falling. Blue sky, Horn, hot rain, Flash. Those are the totems. Those are the things that come no matter what you say, think, pray, do, or die. The hot rain feels like a warm shower. Ike says the rain is a thermonuclear by-product of all the bombing that was going on during the time the Flash first hit. He says that even if the Flash didn’t come the rain would give us all cancer. But I like it. Every day it comes and it’s warm and it reminds you like, hey, wasn’t that pretty good when you were dry earlier?
“Kia Udon Rosher, ki twlever plumme sun,” I scream, which means, like, “Oh great destroyer, you are supreme.” The feeling in my mangled leg is disappearing, and the world starts flickering out.