Chapter 19: Chapter 19
The Uber pulled into Emerald Gardens at 8:40 and two men were waiting under the portico.
Derek had never seen either of them. They wore matching charcoal vests over white shirts, sleeves rolled to the elbow, and they were both tall in the way everyone at the firm was tall, tall in a way that made Derek's little bouncing stagger look like a toy's. The one on the left was broader, with a shaved head and a jaw like a park bench, forearms roped with tendon where the cuffs were turned back. The one on the right was leaner, longer in the face, hair swept up in a soft black pompadour, a mole under one eye, fingers long and clean. Derek's drugged brain did its usual shameful inventory before it could stop itself. Chests under those vests, thick and plated. Dicks he would never see, certainly big, certainly finished. He hated himself for it even as the thought arrived, and Kai's voice flickered somewhere under the haze: embarrassment converts.
The driver opened the back door and Derek more or less poured out.
"Property," the broad one said. Not a greeting. A label check.
Derek tried to answer. What came out was "hhhuuuhh," a warm wet syllable with no consonant in it, and then a giggle that belonged to somebody much stupider than he had been six months ago. His lips wouldn't close all the way. His eyes stayed half-lidded and aimed at nothing.
The lean one checked a phone, nodded at whatever was on it, and pocketed it. "Same unit as the file?"
"Same unit," the broad one said. "Carry him."
They took an arm each and Derek's feet barely touched the ground through the lobby. The night doorman, a small white man Derek had never spoken to in two years of living there, looked up from his desk and then very carefully looked back down. The fourteen-inch column inside Derek shifted with every half-step, the flanged head pressing somewhere past anything that had a name, and each shift knocked a little "ah" out of him, one per second, a dumb metronome. The concierges didn't remark on it. They'd read the file. The file had everything.
In the elevator the lean one pressed four and Derek stood swaying between them, held upright by two fists on his upper arms, staring at the mirrored doors at the three of them and thinking, through syrup, that the mirror was being generous to him and honest about them. The broad one's neck was a column of muscle going into his collar. The lean one's wrists stuck out of his cuffs, thin and elegant, and Derek imagined those wrists wrapped around something and doing whatever they wanted to it. His hole clenched uselessly around the column, the outer ring that Dr. Lu had pronounced dead giving one sad flicker, and the sensation went straight down and came back as nothing but fullness.
"Can you stand for me, property?" the broad one asked at the apartment door. It wasn't concern. It was a load test.
"mmmyyyeahhh," Derek said, which the concierge correctly interpreted as no.
They had a key. Of course they had a key. It had been in the file too. The door opened onto the apartment Derek had lived in for two years and it smelled, to him, faintly of poppers and silicone, the way everything smelled now. They walked him to the bed and laid him down on his side the way the aftercare instructions always said, and then the lean one stripped him with brisk hands while the broad one stood by the dresser, pulling out the bedtime shorts and the grey tank top that had appeared in Derek's drawer sometime in the last month. Holeless jeans off. Lace thong off, peeled down carefully around the harness. The column stayed. It always stayed.
"Arms up," the lean one said, and Derek raised his arms like a toddler, and the tank went over his head, and neither man looked at his body even once. That was the part that made his caged little dick try to leak. Two tall gorgeous Chinese men, hands all over him, and their faces showed exactly as much interest as if they were changing a printer cartridge. Kai, somewhere: you are not a person to them, and being not a person is the gift.
The broad one set out the pill tray on the nightstand, reading from the phone. "Painkiller, two. Relaxant, one. Extra, one, Dr. Lu's." He shook them out into a plastic cup and filled a glass of water. "Sit him up."
The lean one propped Derek against the headboard and Derek sat there lolling, mouth open, a thread of drool threatening the tank top, blinking at the cup like it was an artifact from a civilization he used to belong to.
"You're too stupid to smoke tonight," the broad one informed him, in the tone of a man reading a weather report. "You'd just drop the joint and burn the building. So this last one is different. It's a pill. Edible cannabis mixed with LSD, Dr. Lu's formula. Onset is fast, ten, fifteen minutes. You'll feel it come up like a wave."
Derek's face attempted gratitude. What it produced was a slow, slack smile and a sound like "fhhank ooo," and the lean one, watching him chew the pills with the water, said to the broad one in Mandarin something short, and the broad one laughed once through his nose. Derek didn't understand a word and understood the laugh completely. They were laughing at him. Warmth flooded him, shame and appetite in the same vein, and he pushed out on the column without deciding to, his body doing its one-party trick, and gave a little "ahh" and then giggled again.
"God," the lean one said mildly, in English, to no one.
There was a knock. The broad one opened the door and Huo Xiao came in with a small rolling suitcase.
Huo Xiao was dressed down tonight, black sweater, dark trousers, hair a little looser than office hours, and he took the room in with one sweep: Derek propped and drooling, the tray, the empty cup, the column's flange base locked flat against Derek's taint, the harness straps over his hips. The concierges reported in Mandarin. Huo Xiao answered with two words and they left without looking back, and the door clicked, and Derek was alone with his handler and his own pulse.
Huo Xiao set the suitcase on the bed by Derek's feet and opened it. Inside, packed in fitted foam like instruments, lay a VR headset and a small machine with a nasal cannula coiled beside it, and a cable.
"Hey," Derek said, and it came out "hhehhh," and he tried again, reaching for something from the man he had been at the coffee shop with a paperback. "Huo Xiao. Sir. I'm really, um." His tongue was a foreign object. "Really far away right now."
"I know," Huo Xiao said. "That's the point of tonight."
He sat on the edge of the bed and fitted the cannula behind Derek's ears first, looping the thin tubing, seating the two soft prongs in his nostrils, checking the flow dial on the machine. Then the headset, over the tank top strap, snug, the world going black and then blooming into the loading blue. Derek felt the poppers start before he saw anything, a soft warm gorge rising in his chest, the heavy formula Dr. Lu mixed, slower and deeper than the little bottles, a river instead of a slap.
"You know what tonight is, derekreads?" Huo Xiao said.
Derek didn't. He shook his head as much as the headboard allowed, which was an inch.
"It's your last night as a thing that uses a phone." Huo Xiao stood, closed the suitcase, and looked down at him with the flat professional face Derek had learned to read as kindness, because it was the closest thing on offer. "Everything you used to get from the reels is in the headset now. Don't worry about checking anything. It's covered. It's all covered from here on."
That sentence had layers and Derek was too stupid to dig for them. He just nodded, lips parted, poppers rolling through him, and Huo Xiao turned the machine's dial up one notch, checked that Derek's pupils were doing what Dr. Lu's chart said they would do, and left.
The door shut. The apartment went quiet except for the machine's small hiss.
For a long time it was just the reels.
The headset showed them one after another, the same feed his phone had served him for weeks: generated Chinese men, hundreds of them, in gyms and lobbies and penthouses, shirtless under bar bells, suited in boardrooms, laughing at parties with their sleeves rolled. Derek watched from wherever he now lived, which was not exactly behind his eyes anymore, huffing on the river of poppers, pushing out on the column in slow unconscious waves, his caged dick twitching its tiny useless twitch against the cage. His hips did a slow stupid roll against the mattress. His mouth made sounds. The pill wave came up the way the concierge said it would, a warm pressure behind the eyes unzipping the room, colors getting fatter at the edges.
And then a man in one of the reels, a big one in a grey henley, squatting in a gym, turned his head and looked straight out of the screen, and instead of the screen there was air.
He stepped out of the frame the way a man steps off a curb. His sneakers found a floor. Behind him the rest of the reel kept looping for a moment, then spilled out after him, three dozen men pouring through the breach into a wide room that assembled itself around them as they arrived, mirrors and rubber flooring and a rack of bars appearing out of clean white nothing.
Derek was there too. He didn't remember arriving. He was standing, which was its own event, because the column was with him, inside him, fourteen inches of flanged silicone that the dream had decided to keep, and it hobbled him into exactly the walk he had in real life, the bounce, the little involuntary pop of his hips at every step, his knees knocking, his back arching so the base sat deeper. A fag walk with no pants-size to hide it in. He was in his tank top and shorts. Everyone else was enormous.
The gym filled up. Derek drifted through it like a ghost, and the ghost feeling was literal, men's shoulders passing through the space his body claimed without a glance, until they didn't. The man in the henley finished a set of squats, racked the bar, and turned around and saw him.
"Look at this," the man said.
Everyone looked. The whole gym, forty men, faces turning in sequence like a stadium wave, and every face was the face Derek had spent months falling apart over, square-jawed, gold-skinned, lips full, eyes dark and bored, and every one of them was straight, he knew it the way you know the sky is up, and every one of them now had its full attention on the little white thing wobbling by the squat rack with a steel column lodged in his ass.
"White faggot," someone said from the pull-up bar, not cruelly, just identifying him, the way you'd say rain.
"Look at his walk," someone else said, and there was laughing, warm and easy, the laughter of men who had never once been laughed at, and Derek felt it hit him in the chest and convert, right on schedule, embarrassment into heat, heat down into the fullness, his hole pushing out on nothing because Kai had trained the word big into him and someone had just said look how big I got this winter, flexing.
The henley man crooked two fingers at him. "C'mere."
Derek came. Hobbling, bouncing, the flange dragging that deep place that made his mouth drop open. When he got close the man turned and presented his back, trapezius down to the lat spread, thick as a car hood, and said, "Hands. Rub me down while I finish my sets. You're basically furniture, right?"
"y-yessir," Derek said, and his voice in here was even worse, the lisp fully unhidden, and he put his little pale hands on that back and rubbed while the man squatted 400 pounds, Derek's hands riding the shifting mountains of muscle, close enough to smell the heat coming off him, and Derek thought, weeping a little without knowing when it started, I'm rubbing down a god and he thinks I'm furniture and he's right, I'm furniture, I'm the firm's furniture, and the thought didn't hurt the way it used to. That was the scary part. It fed him.
The gym dissolved into a hallway. The house was endless. He wandered it for hours that were minutes that were hours.
A boardroom: twelve men in tailored suits around a long black table, and this time nobody noticed him at all, and he stood against the wall for what felt like an hour watching a forty-year-old roll his sleeves and unbutton his collar, exposing a throat and collarbones Derek would have committed crimes for, imagining the chest under the shirt, the heavy cock under the slacks, the shame coming and being drunk like poppers, and then the oldest man at the table glanced over mid-sentence, held his gaze, and said, "Under the table, faggot, you're blocking the screen," and there was nothing under the table, no Derek-sized errand, it was just a thing to make him do, and Derek bent and waddled under and crawled the length of the table on his forearms with the column tilting him side to side while eleven men discussed quarterly figures over his back.
A club: dark, the bass coming up through the floor into Derek's bones, three hundred Chinese men drinking and dancing in packs, and here everyone noticed him at once, a whole dance floor turning, and a man with a sweat-shined chest grabbed Derek's shorts from behind and pulled them down to his knees in front of everybody, and Derek stood there in the harness with the column's base on display and the lace thong and the tiny cage, bouncing to the beat because his body couldn't do anything else, and the club laughed and one man filmed it and another said "look how loose his little ass must be, they could park a car in there," and Derek said "thank you," out loud, to no one, because honesty was his only remaining function.
A bar: quiet, leather stools, a bartender with shaved sides and a white towel over one shoulder. Only one person noticed him here, a man alone at the end of the bar with a whiskey, handsome in a quieter way, reading glasses pushed up into his hair. He looked at Derek for a long moment.
"You're the new one," the man said. "The little reader."
"mmmyeah," Derek said, drooling slightly.
"They told me you used to read science fiction." The man's voice was almost gentle, which was the cruelest register yet. "What do you read now?"
Derek searched for an answer and found the shelf in his head wiped bare, titles gone, Kai's mantras sitting where the books used to be. "f-fist is c-c-coming," he said.
The man smiled, touched his glass to Derek's forehead like a benediction, and went back to his drink, and Derek stood there stunned and dripping and more grateful than he had ever been for anything, because the man had spoken to him, had given him words, had seen him.
A restaurant kitchen: the cooks, the same cooks from the real cafeteria or their dream-brothers, wide-shouldered in whites, and they roped him to a prep counter without a word, the way the old dream had, and Derek's heart leapt at the familiarity of it, and the biggest cook fed him something off a spatula, just broth, warm salt broth, the only thing his stomach could hold now, and patted his head like a dog while the others went back to chopping, and Derek knelt there pushed out on the column, drugged and dazed and present, thinking about how he couldn't remember the last time he'd eaten a salad, thinking about how skinny his wrists had gotten, how the numbers on the scale were going to keep falling and fall until he was light enough to be carried by two men without their breathing changing, which had already happened tonight, they'd carried him and it was nothing, and Kai's voice came from nowhere and everywhere: hunger reframed is purpose, fullness reframed is purpose, and the column pulsed, or the LSD pulsed, or Derek pulsed.
A gym again, or still. The henley man was back, spotting someone else now, and Derek wandered the racks in his bouncing fag walk, past a man doing dips whose chest was a shelf of flat muscle, past two men laughing at their phones, and the poppers machine in the real world hissed and the headset fed him another hit automatically when his breathing slowed, and every man he passed was a whole cathedral of a body that Derek catalogued helplessly, chest, arms, the bulge, always the bulge, imagining the dicks, big, all of them big, finished, while his own little caged thing twitched and leaked nothing.
Somewhere in the endless house he found a room that was just a mirror. He stood in front of it a long time. The mirror showed a small smooth white figure in a tank top and bedtime shorts, knees together, hips popped, mouth slack, eyes glassy, a steel base sitting flush between his cheeks where his ass had used to close. He tried to remember the man who'd sat in the coffee shop with a paperback and found him the way you find a photograph of a stranger in your own family album.
"hi," Derek said to the mirror. "hhhi. f-fuck."
The mirror man said it back, lisp and all, and smiled his slack smile, and looked, Derek had to admit, exactly like something that was about to get fisted by a rotation of Chinese alphas and love it more than it had ever loved anything.
The house went on. Derek went with it, hobbling, full, pushing out.
The hallway turned and became shelves. That was the way of the house; it grew rooms out of nothing as Derek needed them, or as something in it needed him. Floor to ceiling books on both sides, ladder leaning against a distant wall, green-shaded lamps with brass stems, a smell of old paper and dust so thick it was almost edible. Somewhere deep in the stacks a clock ticked.
Li Wei was sitting at a reading desk.
He looked better than he had ever looked, and Derek's ruined brain catalogued him before it could be stopped, the way it catalogued everything now. Gym clothes. A black sleeveless shirt, cut low, clinging with a sheen of sweat to pecs Derek had only ever glimpsed under cafeteria tablecloths. Grey shorts that ended high on thick thighs, the quadriceps carved into three visible heads each, a faint line of vein running down the left one. His forearms were stacked and vascular, the tendons standing when he turned a page, and his hair was pushed back off a jaw that looked drawn by someone who hated Derek personally. Chinese men were finished. The thought arrived on its own, Kai's voice wearing Li Wei's face, and Derek's caged dick gave its tiny dead twitch.
Li Wei looked up from the book in his hands and smiled. He'd seen Derek, which the rest of the house mostly hadn't tonight, and the seeing went through Derek like the poppers did.
"There he is," Li Wei said. "My little derekreads. Stop."
Derek stopped. His body stopped on the word the way it had learned to stop on bigger, on serve, on down, a marionette with an extra string in his ass.
"Sit," Li Wei said, and there were two leather armchairs now, facing each other by the desk lamp, and there had not been two armchairs a second ago. "Sit and talk with me. I know you can still talk. Barely."
Derek crossed the carpet with his knees knocking and his hips popping, the fourteen inches of flanged silicone shifting inside him with each step, and lowered himself into the near chair. Sitting was an event. The column went deeper. His mouth fell open and his eyes rolled a little and a warm "ahhhh" leaked out of him, high and lisping, and he settled into it, half in the chair and half on the column, bouncing faintly on it without deciding to.
Li Wei watched him with the calm fond look of a man watching a fish swim in a bowl.
"You have no idea where you are right now," Li Wei said. "Do you."
"i-i'm in a l-l-library," Derek said. It was the only honest answer he had and honesty was his only function.
"You're in a headset in your bed at Emerald Gardens, drooling on your tank top, huffing a machine's poppers and pushing out on a fourteen-inch column your little hole can't even feel anymore. And I'm in my apartment eating dinner. So which of us is real right now, hmm? Am I in your dream or are you in mine?"
Derek's forehead creased. It took him a long time. The poppers river hissed somewhere far away and the colors of the room breathed at their edges, the lampshades swelling and shrinking like lungs.
"i d-don't know," he said, and giggled, and the giggling made him bounce, and the bouncing made the flange drag that deep place, and the drag made him moan, and Li Wei laughed at the whole chain of it.
"Look at you," Li Wei said. "You can't even hold a thought long enough to answer a dream question. That's the pill. Dr. Lu's wave. Ride it, faggot, it gets better."
He reached into the pocket of his grey shorts and produced a small amber bottle, the little brown poppers bottle shape Derek knew better than his own face now, and held it out. The bottle in the dream looked real down to the worn label and the little crackled cap. Derek's hand came out and took it before his brain was consulted.
"Sniff," Li Wei said. "One for me too."
He had his own. They huffed together, Li Wei's nostril flaring around his bottle with the casual expertise of a man who did this at lunch in a cafeteria, Derek's whole body blooming warm from the scalp down, and the library went fat and soft and glowing, the gold letters on the book spines lighting up like the lamps were inside them.
"Good boy," Li Wei said, and Derek's hole clamped and released around the column, one wet useless flutter, and Li Wei saw it happen and smiled wider. "Every time. It's like a little bell."
He closed the book he'd been holding and set it on the desk. It was old. Very old, boards cracked, spine sun-bleached, pages the color of weak tea. On the cover, in faded characters, a title Derek couldn't read even with the small remaining part of him that could once have read anything.
"This is a lesson, derekreads," Li Wei said. "You've had lessons from the machine. The machine is gentle. This one I'm teaching myself, because you've earned it, or because I enjoy it. Both." He opened the cover with two thick fingers. "Do you know what you are? At your essence?"
"e-equipment," Derek recited.
"That's what you are to us. I mean what you are, full stop." He turned the book around and there was a diagram, an engraving, crosshatched and antique, of a human figure, and it moved. Not video. It moved the way diagrams in very old books move in dreams, a slow ink animation, the little figure turning, its proportions redrawing themselves, the limbs shortening, the frame shrinking, the chest caving slightly, the face going soft and slack. The figure became, unmistakably, a small pale man with an open mouth.
"This is a European physiology text from 1741," Li Wei said, tapping the page. "Before your country had a word for itself worth using. The author was wrong about almost everything, disease, humors, all of it. But this plate," the figure wobbled its small shoulders, "this plate he got right. He just didn't know what he was looking at. See the spine? Weak lumbar curve. See the pelvis? Tilted forward, made for sitting, for receiving. Made for being filled. That's you. Born that way. Your body knew before you did."
Derek stared at the little animated faggot on the page and felt the strangest thing, recognition. The figure's posture was his posture. The bouncing little tilt of its hips was his bouncing little tilt. "i l-look like him," he whispered.
"You've always looked like him," Li Wei said. "You just used to have clothes that hid it and books that distracted you. Whose books? Science fiction. Little white boy dreaming of other worlds because this world had no part for him. And there was no part for him, Derek. That's the lesson." He turned the page. Another plate, a line of figures, tall gold-skinned men drawn in the same crosshatch, standing in a row, and the ink made them breathe, chests rising, the erector muscles of their backs shadowing in as they flexed, and their proportions did not shrink when the page animated them. They grew. "Here is the other plate. Same book, same author, right about this too."
Derek's eyes went to the page and stayed there. The figures were naked, drawn without shame, and they were beautiful the way the club men had been beautiful, the way the boardroom man unbuttoning his collar had been beautiful. Li Wei watched Derek look and did not comment, which was its own cruelty, letting him look.
"Notice anything?" Li Wei asked.
"t-they're big," Derek lisped.
"They're everything. Bone density, shoulder girdle, tendon insertion, jaw. Five thousand years of continuous civilization selecting for it. Men who ran a state, fed a population of hundreds of millions, wrote poetry and laws in the same afternoon. While yours," he turned back to the first plate, where the little figure had sat down on the ground, knees up, mouth open, in exactly Derek's sitting position, "were burning witches and starving. Nature sorted you out early, derekreads. The white race bred itself a servant caste and called it a middle class, and you're the last rung of it. Born stupid, born weak, born open. It's in your bones. It's in your pelvis."
The diagram man turned around on the page and Derek saw, drawn in antique crosshatch with scholarly arrows pointing to it, a small flaccid cock, tiny, with a little ring drawn around it and a handwritten annotation. The arrows moved. The ring tightened. Derek's hand went to his own caged dick without thinking.
"Yes," Li Wei said, watching. "That annotation says the same thing Dr. Lu's chart says about you. Different century. Same verdict."
Derek bounced on the column. He couldn't help it now, the poppers and the pill and the lesson all feeding the same fire, his hips doing slow little circles on the flared base, and Li Wei watched him do it and let him, sipping his poppers, magnificently relaxed, one huge arm draped over the chair's wing, the sleeveless shirt pulling across his chest, and Derek's eyes slid off the book to that chest and stuck there. He was supposed to be learning. He was learning. He was also worshipping. In here the two had become the same activity.
"Stop staring at my chest," Li Wei said, mildly, without moving anything.
"s-sorry sir," Derek said, staring at his chest.
"You've been staring at it across a cafeteria table for two months. Every lunch. I log it, you know. The desk logs everything. You stare at my chest while you push out on your plug and you think you're hiding it, and the whole time your little eyes are going back and forth, chest, plate, chest, plate." He flexed, just once, a casual double-bicep pose in the chair, and the shirt sleeves had nothing to do with what happened to the room's temperature. Derek's mouth actually hung open. "Like that?"
"y-yes sir. f-fuck. yes."
"Then look properly. It's part of the lesson too. Superior form is evidence."
So Derek looked, with Li Wei's permission and therefore without shame, which was better than poppers. He looked at the column of Li Wei's neck going into the traps. At the pecs under the black cloth, imagining them bare, the nipples Derek would never be permitted to touch, the heavy cock he'd never see and never suck, never, the dream beach man had told him that, a cock he nonetheless knew with certainty was big, big the way the men in the books were big, finished, complete. His own wrists looked like two chopsticks resting on the armchair. Somewhere under all of this a small grieving part of him noted that he hadn't eaten since before yesterday and that his body was being subtracted, kilo by kilo, salad by missed salad, until it would be light and neat enough to be whatever they needed it to be, and Kai's voice under the grief said hunger reframed is purpose, and the grief converted, and Derek bounced harder.
"Good," Li Wei said. "Now attend. Book three."
He got up, and getting up was a display in itself, the thighs and the glutes and the easy way he rose out of the leather like the chair was smaller than him, and he walked the stacks and pulled a volume off a high shelf without using the ladder. This one was even older, its pages thick and soft-edged, and when he laid it open on the desk the diagrams were maps. China, drawn enormous and central, its rivers inked like veins, and the map was alive, the rivers flowing faintly, the mountains breathing.
"Ten thousand years of agriculture on the same river valleys," Li Wei said. "Feeding more people than existed anywhere else on earth, continuously, while order held. Do you understand what kind of selection that is? A civilization that keeps its men fed and disciplined for a hundred generations produces men like this." He put his hand flat on his own chest, over the shirt, over the plate of it, an obscene gesture of ownership. "And what does five hundred years of your history produce?"
"m-me," Derek said.
"It produces you." Li Wei smiled. "A hundred and thirty-eight pounds of faggot in a chastity cage, drooling in a dream library, bouncing on a pole, agreeing with everything I say. And loving it. That's the part you should be honest about, since honesty is your function now. Tell me you love it."
"i-i love it," Derek said, instantly, bouncing, and meant it, and the meaning of it was the warmest thing that had happened to him all night.
"Born that way," Li Wei said, softly, and it landed like the softest cruelty yet, gentler than the bar man's benediction. "The little reader was always going to end up here. You were born for a Chinese man's house, Derek. This house. Every room in it. You were born to wander it full and stupid and grateful."
He turned the page of the map book and the map became figures, little inked workers on the rivers, hauling, bowing, serving, and one small pale figure among them drawn at half their height, and Derek recognized the drawing style from the first book, the arrows, the annotations. The little figure bowed lower and lower as he watched. Then it turned and, in a slow line of antique ink, began to bounce.
"That's you in the historical record," Li Wei said. "They never drew you because you hadn't been invented yet. But you would have been there. You were always going to be there."
Derek bounced. The chair creaked. His tank top had ridden up and his bare soft stomach showed, pale and empty, and Li Wei's eyes went down to it once, clinically, noting the ribs, the weight loss, the progress of the diet, and Derek saw him note it and felt seen, and the seeing was better than food. Better than the salad he couldn't remember the taste of. The poppers machine hissed somewhere behind the library walls and fed him another hit on schedule and the lamp light went gold and molten and the little ink faggot bounced in its book and Li Wei sat back down, crossing one ankle over one knee, huge, unhurried, entirely in charge of the dream and of Derek.
"One more book," Li Wei said. "Then you can go back to wandering. The house wants you in the club later, I think. It's building something for you down that hallway." He reached over and cupped Derek's jaw with one big warm hand, thumb resting on Derek's slack lip, and tilted his face up. "But first tell me, little reader, while you can still form words. Who made you this?"
"y-you did sir," Derek said. "the f-firm did. china did. i-i was b-born this way."
"Good boy," Li Wei said, and Derek's hole fluttered around the column, and Li Wei laughed, and reached for the last book.
The last book was smaller than the others, bound in red leather gone dark with age, its gilt title worn to a ghost. Li Wei carried it back to the desk like it was nothing, like it wasn't the most important object in the dream, and set it down, and looked at Derek over the top of it for a long moment before opening it.
"This one isn't European," Li Wei said. "This one is ours."
He opened the cover. The paper inside was thin as onion skin and glowing faintly, and every page turned itself a little as his fingers approached it, leaning up toward his hand the way plants lean at a window.
"Flip through it," Li Wei said. "Slowly. I'll explain what you're too stupid to read."
Li Wei turned the first leaf. There was no text on it, only a plate, and the plate was a room. An office, crosshatched in fine antique ink, a long conference table, and at the head of it a figure drawn tall and broad, and at the near end of the table a tiny figure in a chair that looked, in the antique linework, like the training chair, the contoured one with the stirrups. The little figure's legs were up. The ink of its face was smudged, as if the engraver had wanted it anonymous.
"That's your first week," Li Wei said. "The interview. We keep records, derekreads. The firm has kept records of every asset for sixty years. Every file ends up in a book eventually. Yours is being written right now, page by page, session by session. Do you understand? This book is you."
"t-this book is me," Derek repeated, and bounced, and the flange dragged the deep numb place, and his eyes rolled.
Li Wei turned the page.
This plate showed the douching room, rendered in the same patient crosshatch, the tiled walls, the two technicians drawn in profile with their sleeves rolled, and between them a small pale figure bent over the stone shelf with the little nozzle drawn entering it, and annotation lines running from the nozzle to handwritten notes in the margin. Derek couldn't read the characters. He could read the arrows. The arrows pointed at the small figure's opened body and then at a column of numbers descending the margin, and the numbers got larger as they went down, and Derek understood, through the syrup, that the numbers were sizes.
"Your progression," Li Wei said. "Centimeters by week. Look at the curve."
He held the page closer, and Derek looked, and the numbers climbed the way his weight had gone down the scale, faster and faster at the end, and the last number on the page was followed by a blank space where the next entry would go, and the blank space was the size of a fist. It was drawn that way deliberately, an empty rectangle the exact proportions of a broad hand with the fingers folded, waiting.
"That's Thursday," Li Wei said. "Maybe Friday. The desk hasn't fixed the day. The blank is where you go."
Derek made a sound. It was not a word. It came from somewhere below language, a high nasal note, and his hips did two full circles on the column before he could stop them, and Li Wei watched him do it with the fond patience of a man watching a dog hear the word walk.
"Turn your attention to the plate's figures," Li Wei said, and turned the book so the technicians were facing Derek. "Recognize them?"
The tall one had his scar, inked as a fine doubled line through the eyebrow. The short one had the silver ring on the drawn hand, a tiny circle of uninked paper inside a shaded band. They were them. Dream-logic had gone into the archive and pulled the real men out and dressed them in 1741 engraving style, and Derek stared at the crosshatched forearms of the tall technician and his mouth water, actually watered, a thread of drool leaving his lip and darkening the tank top at the collar.
"Every man in this book is a man you've seen," Li Wei said. "Every man you've degraded yourself over at the cafeteria, the line, the lobby. The book knows what you looked at. The book logged it. Turn the page, derekreads. Go on. It's your book. You should see what's in it."
Li Wei turned the page.
This one made Derek's breath stop, poppers or no poppers. The plate was the cafeteria, rendered whole, every table, and the men at the tables were drawn nude. The engraver had simply omitted the suits. The charcoal-suit businessman sat at the corner table with his slacks gone, and the antique ink gave him everything Derek had spent two months imagining, the chest slabs, the tapered trunk, and between the legs, rendered with scholarly care and a neat annotation arrow, a cock that hung heavy and full even flaccid, foreskin drawn as a soft curling lip of ink.
Derek whined.
"Mm," Li Wei said. "Go on, look at them all. This is the page the desk calls your confession. It's assembled from what you looked at, in what order, and for how long. The rendering engine sizes each of us according to what your eyes did. The longer you stared, the bigger we're drawn."
The page turned itself a little, eager, and Li Wei put two fingers on it and held it flat for Derek. The cook from the wok station stood at his station nude, forearm muscles crosshatched into cords, and his drawn cock was a forearm itself, thick at the root, the head sketched with the loving precision of a botanical illustrator. Further down the page the two businessmen, the salad attendant with his shaved head and his scrub top removed, and at the bottom corner, small, drawn at its true scale, a tiny caged figure of Derek at the table with his salad, the cage inked in the finest lines the engraver had, a little lattice with a small pale thing inside it.
"See yourself at the bottom," Li Wei said. "See the proportion. That's not cruelty, derekreads, that's data. That's the actual ratio as the sensors logged it. Every time you looked up from your dressingless leaves at a man's hands, the engine recorded a two-hundred-milliliter spike of blood leaving your brain and going to your caged little clitty, and it drew us accordingly, and it drew you accordingly. You've been telling this book everything for two months. You just thought you were eating lunch."
"i-i was eating lunch," Derek said, hopelessly, and then heard it and giggled, and the giggle bounced him, and Li Wei smiled at the bounce.
"You were," Li Wei agreed. "A hundred grams of celery a day. And now your stomach has shrunk to the point where that's all it holds, and your arms are chopsticks, and you get carried like a suitcase. It's all in the later pages. Turn."
Li Wei turned the page and the paper whispered, and the whisper went through Derek like a finger down his spine, because somehow the sound of the turning was the sound the pages of his paperbacks used to make, and a small lost part of him heard it and ached.
This plate was his apartment. Emerald Gardens, drawn in ink, the balcony, the four flights of stairs, and inside the bedroom a small figure asleep on its side with legs open, the column drawn entering it as a series of crosshatched rings diminishing into the body, depth lines, and around the sleeping figure the margins were filled with tiny handwritten entries, dated, and Li Wei read one aloud.
"'October fourteenth. Asset pushed out involuntarily four hundred and twelve times during sleep. No waking. The training is now autonomic.'" He looked up. "You train in your sleep, derekreads. Your hole works the night shift while you drool. That's why the desk is pleased. That's why Thursday is possible."
The page turned. The ink showed the elevator, the lobby, the coffee shop, drawn from above, and there at a little round table by the window sat two figures, a large one in a suit and a small one hunched over a paperback, and the large figure's face was turned toward the small one, and the small one's mouth was open mid-sentence about a spaceship or another world, and the annotations around the large figure's head were one word repeated, in characters, over and over, filling the whole margin like a tide.
"What does it say?" Derek asked, and it cost him, the longest sentence he'd assembled all night, his tongue tripping on every second consonant.
"Recruitable," Li Wei said. "It says recruitable forty times. Mr. Chen sat down having already read your file. You thought it was chance. You thought you were interesting because of the book. The book was the bait, derekreads. The firm buys coffee-shop readers the way fishermen buy flies. You were selected for exactly what you were. Skinny. Lonely. Starving for a man's attention. Readable."
Derek looked at the little inked figure with the paperback and couldn't hate it and couldn't save it. It was already gone. It had been gone since the ink dried. Its mouth was open about a story and a tall man was already leaning over its table with recruitable written forty times around his head, and the paperback in its hands was drawn open to a page that was blank.
Li Wei turned the page.
There was only one figure on this plate. A man, drawn nude, standing, and the engraving style had changed, the lines finer, more modern, almost photographic in their hatching, and the man was not any one person Derek knew. He was all of them. The jaw was Kai's, the shoulders were the henley man's, the forearms were the tall technician's, and the cock, the cock was every imagined cock at once, drawn in absolutely certain line, thick and heavy and hanging over a sack rendered in soft stippled shadow, and beneath the figure a caption in English, the only English in the whole book.
The caption said: Thursday.
"Who," Derek started, and his voice failed, and he tried again. "w-who is he. the man for th-thursday."
"He hasn't been drawn yet," Li Wei said. "The plate fills itself in the night before. It's been the same for sixty years. Every asset gets a page like this with a blank figure on it, and every asset stares at the blank figure for weeks trying to imagine it, and every asset, on the night before, dreams this library, and every asset asks me the same question through that little lisping mouth." He closed the book, gently, and Derek's heart went with it. "And every asset gets the same answer."
"what ith it," Derek breathed.
"Whoever it is, you'll take him." Li Wei leaned back in the leather chair, the sleeveless shirt pulling across his chest, one huge arm draped over the wing, utterly at rest. "That's the answer. You'll take him, because you were born to, because the plate is already drawn even while it's blank, because the blank is a formality. You'll be carried in, dosed, opened, and you'll take his fist, and the page will ink itself in while you're pushing out on his wrist, and then the book turns to the next section, which is the section I like best."
He opened the book to the back. The last pages were a run of small plates, and they showed the same small pale figure over and over, in different rooms of an endless house, kneeling, serving, carrying things, bounced on laps, walked on a leash down corridors, and in every plate the figure was drawn smiling. Slack, open-mouthed, glassy, but smiling, and the men around it in every plate were drawn ignoring it, conversing over it, eating over it, its existence a fact of the furniture, and the annotations in the margins of these pages were small and neat and dated decades apart, sixty years of them, and every page's little figure was a slightly different white man.
"There were others," Li Wei said. "There are others. There's one in your building. There will be ones after you. This is the section the book never stops writing. Your Thursday page gets inked, and then you move into these pages, derekreads, and you stay there. This is the part of the book you live in forever."
Derek stared at the smiling little figures. One of them was holding a tray. One was kneeling at a man's feet while the man read a newspaper. One was asleep at the foot of a huge bed while the man in it slept sprawled and huge, the little figure curled by his feet like a dog, and Derek looked at that one a long time, and something in his chest that still had a name, some last sliver that could remember being twenty-five and alone in a coffee shop, looked at the sleeping figure at the foot of the bed and recognized it as the happiest drawing in the entire book.
"i want that one," Derek said. It came out tiny. "the one at the foot of the bed."
Li Wei looked at him. For a moment the calm fond expression changed into something almost real, some flicker of genuine surprise, a man discovering that the fish had jumped an inch higher than predicted. Then it settled back.
"Noted," Li Wei said. "Logged. That page exists in every copy of the book, you know. Every asset points at it. Sixty years, and every one of them points at the same plate and says the same thing in the same ruined little voice. You're not even original in your dreams, derekreads. And that's the final lesson, so attend."
He stood, and he closed the red book, and he pressed it flat to Derek's chest, against the tank top, and Derek felt its weight there, the weight of himself, sixty years of thin paper and crosshatch, and held it with both chopstick arms without being told.
"The book ends where you began," Li Wei said. "Every copy. First plate, the coffee shop. Last plate, the bed. Everything between is you being emptied so the bed can hold you. There is no other arc. There was never going to be a spaceship, Derek. The paperback was a preview of the dream. You were always going to wander a house full of bigger men, getting smaller. The only choice you ever made was whether to be sad about it." He took the bottle out of his grey shorts again, huffed once, deep, nostril flaring, exhaled slow, and Derek watched his throat work and nearly wept. "Are you sad?"
Derek searched. He went looking through himself, through the poppers and the pill wave and the fourteen inches, down through the ruin of the inner ring, and he found, where the sadness used to live, a warm fat glowing room, gold-lit, full, occupied.
"n-no thir," he said. "i'm f-full."
"That's what the book says too," Li Wei said, and smiled, and took the book from Derek's chest and put it back on the shelf, high, out of the little figure's reach forever. "Now go. The house has the club built for you down that hall, and the bass is already starting, and you're expected. Bounce nicely. Everyone there has read your file."
The library thinned at its edges like mist. Derek stood, and it was an event, the column seating itself with that deep seismic settling he felt in his teeth, and he turned toward the hallway the lamp light didn't reach, where the bass came up through a floor made of nothing, and behind him the shelves breathed and the clock ticked and the red book sat with its Thursday page blank and already true.
He went. The fag walk carried him, hips popping, knees knocking, full and stupid and smiling, down toward the music.
The hallway gave up its mist and the club assembled around him in pieces, bass first, then light, then people.
It was packed. Men everywhere, hundreds of them it felt like, all Chinese, all in work clothes, suits with the ties already loosened, dress shirts with collars open, rolled cuffs, glasses of beer and brown liquor held loosely in big hands. They stood at tables and leaned on the bar and the noise of their laughter rolled over the dance floor like weather. Derek catalogued them helplessly as he hobbled in from the edge of the floor. A man near the bar in a dove-grey suit, six foot three at least, forearms thick as Derek's neck where the sleeves were pushed up. A pair at a high table laughing with their heads back, throats working, adam's apples like knuckles. Every one of them big. Every one of them finished. Derek's caged thing gave its dead little twitch inside the shelf of his jeans and his hole pushed out on fourteen empty inches and felt nothing and wanted everything.
Nobody looked at him. He was a small pale thing drifting at the rim of a world built for men, and the ignoring was so familiar it felt like home.
Then a man did look.
He was standing by the stage-side rail, maybe early thirties, in a black crew-neck over shoulders that filled it completely, dark hair cropped short, a headset looped around his neck with the mic arm resting on a jawline that could have cut paper. He had a clipboard in one hand and a lanyard with a laminated badge and his eyes were quick, professional, scanning the floor the way a man scans a room he is responsible for. They stopped on Derek. They went down Derek's whole body in one pass, the threadbare T-shirt, the jeans with their enormous open back, the pale cheeks framed inside the huge torn hole, the steel base sitting flush between them.
"Asset?" the man said. His English was clipped and excellent.
"ahh," Derek said.
"That's an asset." The stage manager took Derek's arm above the elbow. His grip was warm and absolute. "You're late. Come."
He walked Derek through the crowd. Men turned out of the way without looking, the way water parts, and somewhere in Derek's swimming head Kai's voice said you move through their world like weather moves through a valley, and Derek bounced along on the grip, hips popping, smiling at the tile.
The backroom was stairs and crates and coiled cable, a ramp running up to the underside of the stage. At the top of it a line of figures waited, and Derek's heart went sideways when he saw what they were.
White men. Five of them besides himself. All small, all pale, all dressed like him. Skinny jeans with a giant open hole cut through the back, threadbare little T-shirts, and each of them standing with the same knocked-kneed tilt Derek saw in his own mirror every night. One of them caught Derek's eye and gave him a slow, glassy, blissed-out smile, and Derek saw the steel base between his cheeks too, and the laced thong strap riding up over his hip bones. They were all full. They were all walking the same walk. A whole line of him.
"Line up," the stage manager called, and a second man came down the ramp, tall, in black, arms like the technician's, a silver ring winking on one finger, and he walked the line with a crate of little brown bottles, pressing one into each white hand. When he reached Derek he looked down at him for a second longer than he needed to, dark eyes, handsome face, completely uninterested, and Derek burned from scalp to cage with shame that arrived and converted and came out as heat. Big, his brain supplied. His hole fluttered. The stagehand was already moving on.
On the stage ahead of them, a long metal rod ran at seat height across the width of the stage, and mounted along it, evenly spaced, pointing straight up, was a row of dildos. Derek's eyes climbed one from base to tip and kept climbing. Sixteen inches if it was an inch. Fourteen around. slightly rounded at the head, tapering wider as it went down the shaft, to maybe eighteen inches around at the base. Six of them, gleaming under the stage lights, and six white faggots were being arranged in front of them, one each, the stage manager's hands turning them by the shoulders like signposts.
A curtain hung between the stage and the club, heavy black velour, and through it the bass was enormous and the crowd's noise rolled and a voice moved through a microphone, quick Chinese, and the crowd hooted and laughed and the voice let them laugh and laughed a little itself. Derek knew that cadence. It was Zhang Ming's cadence, it was Wei Li's cadence, the voice of a man performing for men, and Derek stood in front of his sixteen inches with his little brown bottle sweating in his hand and waited to be used.
"You feel it?" the faggot beside him whispered, high and lisping, nodding at the dildo. "It's warm. They warm them."
The curtain opened.
The light hit Derek and the club hit Derek, the whole room at once, hundreds of Chinese men turning as one toward the stage, and every single one of them looked at him. At him and the five others, at the line of small pale open-backed faggots standing before a row of giant warm silicone dildos, and the room made a sound, a big warm wall of laughter and hooting and whistles, and it went through Derek like the poppers did. He had spent two months begging to be looked at. He was looked at. He stood in it, high and swaying and smiling his slack smile.
The MC stood at the front corner of the stage with the mic in one hand. He wore a shiny silver suit jacket over black, a novelty jacket, party-clothes, and he had a big theatrical smile and thick black hair swept back and a build Derek could read through the whole suit, the chest, the taper, the thighs. He said something in Chinese to the crowd, sweeping his free hand along the line of faggots, and the crowd roared and someone near the front stood up on a chair.
Then the MC leaned toward the wings and called out, two words in Chinese, and the stagehands came out.
Six of them. Tall men in black, silent, one for each faggot, and they took up position behind them and Derek's eyes did what his eyes did, dragged over the man behind him, over the forearms, the chest under the black shirt, the heavy shape under the black trousers that Derek knew with total certainty was big, and the knowing was warmth, and the warmth was shame, and the shame was fuel.
"White fags," the MC said into the mic, in English, big and bright. "Sniff."
The word landed on Derek like a hand on the back of his neck. He raised the bottle. He felt the whole room watch him raise it.
"On the count. Yi. Er."
The audience counted. All of them, hundreds of voices in Chinese, one, two, three, climbing together, a tide of numbers, and Derek inhaled on the count, both nostrils, deep, the burn blooming up into his skull, the stage going gold and molten, the crowd's count going soft and round, seven, eight, nine, and on shi he held it.
"Hold," the MC said.
Derek held. The poppers sat in him like a swallowed sun. His eyes crossed. Behind him the stagehands moved, quick and professional, unbuckling the leather harness at his hips, and the word big echoed somewhere in the swim of him as knuckles brushed his spine, and then the pull.
The fourteen-inch flanged column came out of him in one long hydraulic slide. The room watched it come out. Derek heard the crowd's reaction, a rising hoot, laughter, applause, and he exhaled the poppers in a long shuddering groan and felt the emptiness open beneath him like a shaft, vast and cold and aching, and the audience laughed harder at the groan because it had come out through the mic on the stage manager's floor pack, high and lisping and helpless.
The stagehands lifted the harnesses and the withdrawn columns off them and walked off the stage with the whole rig, six dildos swinging from one man's grip like a bundle of pipes, and the MC said something long in Chinese to the crowd, gesturing at the faggots standing there emptied and swaying, and the crowd howled. Derek caught maybe one word in ten through the drugs and it didn't matter. The tone carried everything. He was the joke. He was the warmup act. He was the little white thing six big men had just pulled six big things out of, and the room loved it, and Kai's voice said embarrassment converts, and it converted, and Derek's hips pushed out at nothing.
"Sit," the MC said.
Derek sat.
Chapter excerpt truncated at the edge.