“What gibberish is that?”
“Testamentary necropolis? Perhaps your failure to understand my manifesto is a consequence of too little education. A necropolis is a graveyard, a community of the dead. The necropolis I’m creating is testamentary because it will serve as a testament to the truth of my philosophy and to my commitment to seeing the world restored to its unsullied prehuman condition.”
In spite of her dire circumstances, she sneers. “You mistake insanity for philosophy.”
Xanthus Toller teaches that of all the myriad species on Earth, only human beings indulge in hatred and anger. Therefore, it would diminish the message of Asher’s manifesto if he became enraged at this disrespectful bitch and killed her for the wrong reason. That would be murder. So very human. Justified killing is not murder, either in self-defense or in defense of the planet. But it must be done with regret, solemnly, without rancor and certainly without satisfaction of an erotic nature. He is a priest, not of any faith, but a priest in service to the whale and the wasp, the deer and the dormouse, an archbishop of seaweed and sycamores. He must at all times be measured in his response to provocations of the kind in which this woman traffics.
Asher raises his head from the pedestal of his palm and shakes it slowly, mournfully. “It pains me, saddens me, to say that by your ignorance and hostility, by your refusal to give up hope, you have earned special treatment. Not the quick and merciful knife.”
Because her wrists are bound together, she has to prop both elbows on the table to mock him by resting her chin on a hand. “So tell me, you nutless freak, how does a pained and saddened eunuch kill someone if he doesn’t use a knife? Will you set me on fire?” She fakes a look of surprise. “Oh, gee, I’m asking the questions instead of answering them. Still, I’d like to know.”
Asher Optime has not understood this snarky bitch since she first woke from a chloroform sleep. She isn’t behaving like the two men and two women whom he’d brought here before her. Those four had been properly terrified of him, respectful and eager to please. The longest he’d taken to bleed the hope from any of them had been four days, and one of them had fallen into black despair in less than six hours. This smart-mouthed slut isn’t stupid, so she must be a little crazy—or she’s faking this irrational confidence to put him off his game and keep herself alive in hope of escaping or somehow taking him out. He’d like to punch her in the face a few times, smash that smug smile into bloody pulp.
No. No, no, that would be wrong. That would be an act of anger and would reduce him to the miserable human condition that he has transcended under the instruction of Xanthus Toller and through the act of self-castration. He is above anger and resentment and all of that, high above it, flying on his mission of world restoration. He kills not for his own gratification, but for Mother Earth.
“Will you set me on fire?” she asks again. “Do you have some enormous vat of acid into which you’ll slowly lower me? Is there maybe a pit of alligators, and you’ll throw me among them after you wrap me in bacon?”
She’s mocking him as if he styles himself after a comic-book villain, some nemesis of Spider-Man. Such impudence is infuriating. Rather, it might be infuriating if he wasn’t incapable of violent and vindictive emotions. Having transcended such human weaknesses, Asher merely smiles and nods and says, “You hide your fear behind sarcasm and ridicule. But you’ll be begging for your worthless life soon enough. Excuse me while I step outside to commune with Mother about how you should suffer for the sin of your existence.”
She feigns astonishment. “Your syphilitic mother is here?”
“Mother Earth,” he clarifies. “She’s here. She’s everywhere.”
The necklace of heavy chain, which earlier anchored Ophelia to a wall stud, now padlocks her to the headrail of the chair. Thus shackled, with wrists zip tied, she isn’t fully immobilized. But if she were to get up from the table, she would be able only to hobble clumsily around the room, the chair on her back, too slow and noisy to escape.
Asher carries his straight-backed chair outside, places it on the saloon veranda, and sits facing the ghost town’s only avenue.
In a sky as pale blue as a robin’s egg, the sun is at its apex, so neither the buildings nor the weeds in the unpaved street cast shadows. The warm summer air is so perfectly still that Zipporah might be a diorama under a glass dome. The scene looks flat and unreal.
From a pocket of his lightweight denim jacket, Asher extracts a silver cigarette case and a lighter. The case contains hand-rolled joints spiced with PCP, an animal tranquilizer that, in combination with weed, can often facilitate visions and profound communion with Nature. He already knows to what well-deserved torment Ophelia Poole must be subjected. He doesn’t need Mother’s counsel on the matter. But if the woman is given five or six hours to wonder about what horrors he is contemplating, her unfounded confidence might falter and her hope begin to fade by the time that he takes her down the street to the necropolis and forces her to spend time as the only living person among the decomposing dead.