The Price to Pay

A short story by Fletcher Kovich

 

For seven years I had denied myself the basic pleasures in life, though they sang to me as a siren tugs at a sailor’s heart. Connie, my partner, was saving for our dream house. Week in, week out, I watched the office clock, whose pace seemed restrained by my very gaze, until I could take it no longer. I spent one hundred and forty pounds on a designer shirt and Connie left me. This, apparently, was the final straw.

That weekend, I was a free man. I laid out my four pristine credit cards, bounded onto the internet and my spree began. My appetite was a bottomless pit. Into it I poured the aristocracy of technology; I was a baronet, a viscount, a lord; I could see more pixels, at a faster rate and had a greater capacity than anyone who had not shopped in the last two months. I was clothed in designer labels and I holidayed in designer locations, until my credit cards, with whom I was now married, withdrew my right to spend—and once again I was spoken for.

Our honeymoon was over and my eyes again seemed to slow the rate of the office clock. Nine months passed, each week only seeming to nourish my growing debt; the more I watched that impeded clock, the more my debt grew, as if my heavy heart were fuelling the balance, quickening the growth of those figures at my spirit’s expense. Numbers and soul. Neither seemed tangible, so perhaps they shared the same currency. One purchased the other; one submitted, the other dominated; then the other grew strong, and one faded.

“You’re always so cheerful,” said Jessica, who sat at the desk opposite mine.

It was true; I was now a happily married man. I was married to my debt and I had decided to put on a brave face.

“Yes,” I said, “What’s there to not be cheerful about?”

“Wish I knew your secret.”

I looked back to my screen and carried on working. I had even stopped watching the office clock. I had submitted to my fate and I now found that my face was fixed in a smile for hours at a time, until a passing comment would remind me to adjust my expression. Life seemed to endlessly amuse me. Yes, indeed, I was now a happily married man. And my humour, apparently, knew no bounds. Only last week the Department conducted their annual staff psychometric testing. In answer to every question, I ticked the most untrue box and floated out of the room with the satisfaction of a job well done.

Jessica said, “You’re at it again; you can’t stop smiling.”

Two days later, Herbert Singer called me into his office to discuss my test results. He closed the door behind me and I noticed his hand turning the key in the lock. Somehow this amused me. He had imprisoned us both in his small office. I looked to his window, expecting to see bars. In the distance, there was a falling shard of sunlight glimpsed through parting clouds, which then quickly extinguished the shard again, as if discovering their mistake.

Herbert’s pale and sullen face told me, “You achieved the highest score under ‘emotional detachment’ that the Department has ever seen. Under some circumstances you could have become a psychopathic killer.” And then he added, “That is, if you’re not one already——”

I had never spoken to Herbert Singer before and I was not entirely accustomed to being called a psychopathic killer, so my vocal chords stood paralyzed, as if discovered performing some unspeakable act. After a pause, I realized that my face had remained fixed in a smile since the start of the interview, so I simply changed my expression by way of a response.

He seemed more pleased with my new expression. He slowly nodded, as an undertaker nods at a compliant relative, then looked down, opened my file and said, “The management have decided to call in your loan. They have given you two full weeks to repay it.”

Three months previously, my debts, seeming to have acquired a life of their own, had transformed into a monster twice my size, and ever growing. There had never been any realistic hope of me diminishing the monster, let alone slaying it; once I had midwived it into the world, its one purpose in life seemed to be to attempt to consume me alive. And it ate and ate until I seemed empty and my shell trembled with the wind of fear that blew within me. I was about to grasp the lifeline of ‘bankruptcy’ when the Department, apparently valuing my continued employment, granted me a low-interest loan of one whole year’s salary, which I could repay over the following five years, on the condition that my employment continued. I was given one weeks holiday, by way of a honeymoon, and then I returned to work, and for three whole months I had remained faithful and smiling. On some deep level, I knew that this was for life. I had finally found Miss Right. What was there to not be cheerful about?

I watched Herbert Singer’s pale face as he had announced the management’s intentions and my heart heard his words as: “We want a divorce.” I again remained frozen, as a rabbit is transfixed by the headlights of the car that is about to destroy it.

Herbert’s trembling hand lifted his glass of water; he drank and said, “But I have a proposition to put to you.”

I watched, transfixed.

He said, “There is a consortium who work with the Department. They will repay your loan for you, but in return you must perform some tasks for them.”

I heard myself saying, “Tasks?—what tasks?”

He said, “They will contact you.”

I, of course, had no choice but to accept. It seemed that I was again spoken for; my life was no longer my own. First, I had given myself to Connie, then I had been enticed into a marriage with a monster, then I had accepted the Department’s hand, and now I belonged to this anonymous “consortium”. Somewhere along the way I had forfeited the ability to choose, as a freefall parachutist looking up at the diminishing plane.

On my way home that evening, I arrived at the underground station. There were two turnstiles with a queue at each and a man was stood between them, apparently undecided which queue to join. Until he had decided, no-one behind him could proceed. I tapped him on the shoulder and said, “Which queue are you in?” but he said nothing. I took the right-hand queue, which now seemed to be moving, and he turned to me, pointed his finger and said, “Don’t you touch me like that!”

I stepped forward in my queue, saying, “Just pick one and go for it. You were holding everyone up.”

He was now trembling with rage and he fiercely jabbed at the air between us and warned: “Don’t you touch me like that!”

As I boarded my train, I found myself thinking about him. I recognised the person who dwelled behind his wild eyes. It was myself. I knew that he was just as desperate as I had been three months earlier, and that, I thought, was perhaps the explanation for his behaviour.

The following evening, as I was leaving the Department, I became aware of a shadowy figure standing nearby. He tailed me along several streets. I stopped and he stopped. I changed my route and so did he. I turned, by mistake, into a blind, darkened alley. As I was retracing my steps back out of the alley I came face to face with him. His hands disappeared inside his overcoat and he smiled wryly, glancing round at the alley, and said, “How appropriate.”

I was again transfixed and speechless.

He said, “I am Benedict, from the consortium. You are expecting me?”

I slowly nodded, as a prisoner acknowledging his turn on the scaffold.

Benedict told me that I would need ten “credits” to clear my debt to them. These credits were earned by performing certain tasks. Some tasks earned more credits than others. “You see,” he told me cheerfully, “the Department employs us to generate funds using—” he raised his eyebrow— “imaginative methods. We pursue any avenue that generates disproportionate returns, and due to our colossal returns, we are indispensable.” He watched me while slowly repeating this word, “In-dis-pens-able,” then continued, “It is only our methods than enable many firms to exist. Without us, the financial realities would cripple them. Anyway, that’s us. Now, to you. Your tasks will be screened live on a certain website. I will tell you more later.”

“My tasks?”

“I will come to your house tomorrow evening.” He told me the name of the website and his parting words were, “Be prepared.”

On my journey home, the substance seemed to be seeping from my body. I had no thoughts in my mind, except for this awareness of my body gradually becoming more hollow. It seemed as though space were being made for—something—something that were beyond my imagination. I was powerless to avoid viewing the website. It contained a gallery of stills from some of the previously screened tasks. Each of these stills seemed to enter me, to pour in through my eyes and down into this hollow that was me, and their presence there terrified me. What was now inside myself terrified me.

The following evening I waited at home, watching through the window. And the rain poured, heavy, probing, inescapable. I looked out across the square and saw three figures walking this way, a blur through the rain. I undid the latch on my front door and waited there for the knock. I watched the floor and imagined their progress and in my mind I could only see them as a blur, even as they came near, as though my mind were incapable of comprehending what was about to happen. My eyes groped through the rain, clung to those formless, approaching figures but were incapable of grasping them. And then the knock sounded. I opened the door and saw only two of the figures. Benedict entered, carrying a black suitcase. He removed his overcoat and hung it in the hall. His companion removed his coat and I saw that it was the man who had pointed angrily at me at the underground. His rage had now escaped him to leave a washed-out expression, as though he were suffering from hypothermia. Benedict placed his hand on the man’s shoulder and gently guided him into my living room, as though he had been here before and knew what to do.

He noticed my large-screen television and said, “Perfect.” This TV had been the last straw in my financial ruin and I had come to loathe it, sitting there in my living room like a giant goblin that had entered my life and refused to leave. I had not switched it on for the past three months, yet still it seemed to possess a life of its own and to sit there silently, gleefully watching over me.

Benedict pushed my coffee table aside, opened his case and placed a large plastic sheet over the floor, whistling merrily to himself as he then began laying out his tools. We both watched like a magician’s captured audience, our souls gaping at the spectacle as he pulled out a piece of cord, a large mallet, a butcher’s clever, a chopping board and then a long, thin knife whose sharp edge glinted like a precious jewel in the blue light of my freshly awakened TV screen which he had just switched on. He set up his laptop and a camera and then the TV screen came to life, displaying the plastic sheeting and the tools. The goblin now seemed to be almost audibly laughing.

Benedict rubbed his hands and explained, “We will soon go live. It’s very simple. The website has over twenty thousand subscribers who pay a large annual fee. In return they are guaranteed one weekly act of live mutilation or a fatal accident.” He looked at me and slowly said, “This is guar-an-teed—one or the other.” He went on, “Of course, you are both volunteers and do this of your own accord. It will be as if I am not here.”

The other removed his clothes and knelt on the plastic sheet. Benedict took the cord and expertly lassoed all that the man held dear, leaving that vulnerable bundle of flesh held proud of the man’s body by an encircling ring of cord. Though I had never imagined such a thing, my eyes focussed on the narrow gap between the ring of cord and the man’s body and I seemed to know, on some instinctive level, that this was where I was expected to cut. I looked at the image on the TV screen and then to Benedict’s face and his eyes drew mine down to the knife lying on the plastic sheet. I noticed the man’s hand resting on his naked leg and the sight of his finger reminded me of that very finger pointing angrily at me.

I said, “Can’t I just cut his finger off?”

For the first time, Benedict seemed flustered. He said, “He wants castration. It’s more credits. Anything sexual has far more value. And you will get more too. His finger would only be one credit for you. Do this and you’ll get three.”

“I don’t think I can——”

Benedict saw me looking down at the knife and said, “Pick it up!”

My body seemed to make an involuntary step forward but then paused. He urged, “Go on——!”

I heard my own voice saying, “I can’t——!” but my trembling hand was already holding the knife.

“You’re on—live.”

I glanced at the image on the screen, which now also showed the trembling knife hovering near to the cord, and I pictured those thousands of eyes watching me from within that screen, almost as though they were the spirit, the innards, the mind and soul of that goblin that had sat there in my living room for these past few months, secretly aware of what was going to happen, right here in front of it, and it had waited, containing its glee, though barely able to contain its excitement as it waited and patiently waited until it was now looking down on this inevitable act that had kept it alive, had driven it, through rain and wind and cold and night and day, right here, to this very moment, but I could not, I could not, I could not.

Benedict yelled, “Do it! It’s him or you. You knew the score. Your gain is someone else’s loss.” He screamed at me, as though at an imbecile in the classroom: “That’s how it works——!”

The blade was now in contact with the man’s skin, and the glee of that goblin was bearing down on me, was a burden over my shoulders that was more than I could bear; my knees could hardly hold my body up and my voice was still saying, but now feebly, “But I can’t, I just——“

Benedict yelled, “Do it, just do it! If you couldn’t pay the price, you shouldn’t have started. People like you make me sick. You take, take, take, but you won’t give. Well, now it’s payback time. It’s payback! You have to!”

And the crazy thing is that I then felt my body obeying his command; I felt my arm drawing the knife through that soft trunk of flesh between the cord and the man’s body; but there was still some will left within me and it seemed to finally gain strength, from somewhere, and it took command of my body, took command of me, and I stood up, strong again, and said, “I won’t.” I dropt the knife and started walking towards my front door.

I heard Benedict’s voice calling from the living room, “You’ll pay. You know you’ll pay——”

I opened my front door and stepped out into the street. I knew that I was leaving my home, my job, those possessions, everything. I would start again. I did not know how or where. I felt the rain against my face, cold and clean. I was free, elated; I had never felt so good, never known that such feelings were possible. And then I saw him. I noticed that third figure. He was standing across the street from me, pointing a camera at me. For some reason, I walked out into the street, all the time watching his camera’s lens. I don’t know why. Then something caught my attention and I looked to my side and saw a black van speeding towards me, only yards away from me. I looked back to that camera’s lens, which now seemed much bigger. It seemed as though it were the only thing left in existence. And then I saw just blackness, and then time ceased.

 

10 October 2008