Bunny

This calm white room with its calm white drapes could pass for a punishment room, vanilla punishment, not on most dungeon menus but ZZ always said Whatever it is, some client’s going to ask for it and ZZ had the stories to prove it: ZZ’s stories used to make her laugh, even the hazardous ones, especially the hazardous ones, the clients who begged to be smothered, asphyxiated, the ones who begged to be starved—

“—the petit dinner, or service for two?” the concierge’s voice in her ear, tiny titanium earbead, and “Two,” she murmurs, glancing to Thomas who sits at the little brutalist desk across the room. Thomas loves ZZ’s stories, though he has no idea ZZ ever existed, he believes those stories are hers, relics and battle scars of her stint as a high-end domme. “And the cabernet. With three glasses.”

“Certainly. Would—”

—and she taps off the bead, flicks back the curtains for a glance at the street, a blue hotel jitney at the black-striped curb, a state liquor store, a pair of crumbling buildings, half-dereliction, half-aspiration, Thomas always picks these kind of places for their weekend jaunts. He chose her for the same reason, thinks he chose her—that faux leather bar in Zurich, she had already picked him out of the corporate crowd, so when he tried to buy her a drink, she said Go and get it yourself. Eiskaffee, extra crème. He did what she told him to, then asked her name, but instead of her name she told him a story, one of ZZ’s stories, and left Zurich with him that night, like Scheherazade; ZZ had a lot of stories. People at that bar had no idea what to make of her leaving with Thomas, being with Thomas, people never do: is she his assistant? his muse, his anima? his girlfriend? He calls her his girlfriend. Everybody wonders, but nobody ever asks.

Right now Thomas is busy in his toy castle online, scrolling and scrutinizing a prospectus from his marketing savant Jason Rice. Thomas bought and is now rehabbing Jason Rice, to somehow help create his great architecture of commercial spirituality—Thomas had asked What would you use Jason Rice for, Bunny? and she had shrugged, I wouldn’t—though this is a project she fully supports: Thomas is interested in more than making money, he already has more money than anyone could ever spend, yet his money and acumen and experience and whatever love he can feel are all being poured down a rathole of useless longing, and she finds this even funnier than ZZ’s sad clients. She likes Thomas, she even likes fucking him, but what she really likes is to watch his doomed expensive quest, trying to build a cage to catch God.

Her own quest is private, unspoken even to herself, but it has been with her for as long as she can remember, it turns in her like a wheel, like a gas engine burning black sludge oil, it beats like a second heart because she wants, she lives, to break apart that heart, ruin that engine and ride that wheel, ride to the very end of it all—the end of hotels like this one, and leather bars and couture sex clubs and restaurants that charge four hundred euros for a dead chicken and a glass of port, of savants and experts and consultants, of hospital rooms and peritonitis, rotting forests and puke-pink floods and climate slums that spread like cancer, money and plasma and blood and shit on the bottom of her bespoke alligator boots—she wants to crack heads and split ribs, she wants to be the end of the world because if ever a world needed ending, this is the one.

Now the hotel waiter arrives, pretty and nervous, a blond twink with a very faint lip ring hole, do they make him take it out for work? He fumbles, barely managing to open the expensive wine, as she watches, smiling, scaring him, and “Should I pour?” he asks, confused by the three glasses, but “No,” she says. “You can go.”

Then she pours, first for herself, then for Thomas, leaving the third glass empty, empty, drinking without waiting for him, there is no reason to wait anymore, there is no more time. And finally “Look,” Thomas says, “Bunny, look at what Jason sent,” urging her over to his screen, its moving small confusion of neon colors and stuttering beats. “It’s an event he attended with Martin’s boyfriend, a rave event. He’s completely engaged by this DJ, he thinks this DJ is exactly what we need to go forward. Look—”

—at that screen, the dancers gathered under tall black trees, the hot spotlit DJ dressed in white and wearing some kind of sculpted headpiece like coral or bone, everyone is looking at him—

—but she is looking at the man dancing just below that makeshift little stage, a man in black jeans with a flower at his heart, he glows, he radiates, he jacks and twirls and for a moment he faces the screen—

—and she sees him, she sees, she tastes the wine like a flower in her mouth, she tastes her own spit as she says, “Who’s that?”

“His name is, let me see, Mister Minos, apparently that’s his DJ name—” but “No,” she says, and leans over Thomas so far that she almost blocks his screen, if she could climb into that screen she would, crawl into it like a tunnel or a grave. “That one, the dancer there. Who is he?”

“I have no idea. Do you want Jason to find out?”

She leans back in a kind of joyful vertigo, she feels her smile, her wet teeth and “Yes,” she says. “Find out. I want to meet him.”

“You think he might be helpful to our project?”

“Oh,” she says, “I know he will.”