Interview With The Fly
Rated NC-17 for strong language and for references to sex and violence.



In darkness, it's the mind, not just the other senses, that compensates for what it is that the eye no longer receives - light, colour, depth of field, the glimmer in the other man's eye that gives away the hand that he's carrying...or the shiv. A shine-job only gives you the luxury of that extra moment; the difference between avoiding the blade and getting cut, surviving or dying.

So you develop strategies - move slow, talk quiet. That way, you don't miss what matters. A man talks too much and he’s not paying attention, he gets sloppy, then winds up lying in a sticky pool on the concrete. He fills the cell with that sweet-metallic stench until the trustees come clean it up and leave another stink - carbolic acid. They got HIV under control in here but some super-strain of hepatitis has everyone spooked, so now a man can't even jack off without having to clean up his load with antiseptic wipes. They issue them with the food every day.

Not talking gives a man a lot of space to think. That's why they do it, see? No light, no talking. It makes a man reflect, consider what he's done and what he's all about, so the next time he sees the Slam shrink, he just barfs up what's been crawling around on its belly inside his head, so they can report on it and pull it apart and compare it with the previous psycho-fuck...just like you're doing now.

Hey, it's all right; don't shift in your seat like I said something dirty. You got a job to do or a paper to write or...something.

The food? Aright, the food. You're thinking I don't look like I could use a little extra. It's high protein with all the other necessaries but it's tasteless. What they give us for breakfast could pass for dog biscuits - hard, grainy and about as appetizing as something they'd give to cattle. I don't expect cattle graze outside in the light any more, either.

No, I don't see colours the way you see them. I see echoes, shadow; shadows in darkness. What I see with shades on depends on what colour the lenses are. They issued grey ones today so you’re in monochrome. Not a lot of difference to me, though...blood’s always pitch black, whatever colour they give me.

They keep it hot - not so hot that you sweat all day - but if you start moving around too fast, you sweat hard and cooling down can be a problem, so fights are always at night when it cools just enough for people to get pissed off... or horny. Even so, you can still lie with the sweat running off of you, even if you weren’t the one doing the fighting, or the fucking.

Sometimes the air is thick with it - acrid sweat and testosterone, cloying, floury semen and sickly sweet puke, piss and shit that didn’t make it to the toilet, because that happens a lot when a man knows he’s about to die...or when he dies. Then it’s more carbolic acid, more of the quiet, like nothing’s gone down before.

Strange how the night can get so full; full of sound, sex, fear, blood and death...and then there’s nothing - a silence that suffocates and sucks you in, knows everything about everyone, well...almost everyone.

Yeah, they got their methods, trusted and tried, fucked-up and failed, and who knows, ten years down the line, when Richard B Riddick is gone from Slam City, there might be another evaluation like this one. Someone like you will sit right where you’re sitting just to try and find out how much more fucked up a man can get, in the cold, in the heat, in light...in darkness.

END

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