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"Do you not know that the unjust will not inherit the kingdom of God? Neither the sexually immoral, nor idolators, nor the effeminate, nor those who lie with males...will inherit the kingdom of God."
1 Corinthians 6:9-10
It was a tranquilizer. Not Rohypnol. I did not roofie Brandon. You can’t just order Rohypnol apropos of nothing. This isn’t the 1990s.
It was a tranquilizer. Not chloroform. I did not chloroform Brandon. I don’t even know where to get that nor is it injectable.
Just good old Schedule IV tranqs. Some of my patients are swimming in them. Valium, Ativan, Klonopin, Ambien. Go to work on it. Get in their cars on it. Pop Xanax and “do a keg stand.” That’s what Adri said. Loudly. In the lobby. On speakerphone.
He’s in the trunk now. I don’t hear any noise. I’m not expecting to. Would be weird if I did.
It’s his car. Not mine. I took the bus over here.
His car is red. Of course it is. There are Mountain Dew bottles on the floor. Of course there are. Bunch of wrappers everywhere. None are for condoms.
The riskiest part should be over already. Catching him off guard on the street. Threading a needle into the jugular vein. Which I did left-handed, by the way, because the bitless drill was in my right hand and I really, really, really needed him to believe it was a gun held steady.
Back to my place. I left my truck outside so I could pull his car into the garage and shut it.
Pop the trunk. He’s still out. Arms duct taped up like he’s praying. Burlap sack over his head like we’re in a movie.
He’s annoyingly tall, but there’s no meat on him anywhere. All sharp angles save for that scoliotic spinal curve. Pants perpetually falling off his waist. Saw him pull them up five hundred times when I was watching him. Get a freaking belt.
I throw him over my shoulder. 160 pounds tops.
Back to the basement. Had some good times down here. Not really.
I drop him on his ass. “Guh,” he goes. Dirt floor. Not going to shatter any tailbones.
So he gained consciousness at some point. He was making some humming noises on the steps, but I wasn’t sure. Writhing slowly on the floor like he’s in molasses. Feels like it, too, no doubt. He is in the dim twilight of his life now.
I rip the bag off his head. He looks around.
Here are the entirety of the room’s contents: him, me, some rope, some tape, a knife, a drill, a bench.
I knew what he looked like well before I knew his name. In fact, I was prepared to go forward without ever having learned it. They don’t wear name tags at Whang’s Kitchen & Bakery. I suspected there would be a schedule hanging in the back that would have told me a lot of things I wanted to know, and there were a couple days when I was entertaining some really ridiculous schemes to gain access to that area.
By a sheer stroke of luck, I just happened to overhear his name during one of my dry runs of the kidnapping. I was standing in the alleyway.
“Brandon, are you still here?”
It was a female voice, pitched up because of the volume at which she called out in my direction. I knew he wasn’t there. He had walked by thirty seconds ago.
But something about learning his name did something bad to me. He was no longer just The Coworker or The Rapist. Those were extremely simple and easy-to-hate abstract concepts. Now he was Brandon.
There came a period where I had no choice but to spend my limited free time tracking Brandon as opposed to Angel. I had to find out where he lived, who lived with him, when his shifts were, how he got to and from those shifts. I was forced to spend inordinate amounts of space and energy in my brain thinking about
Brandon.
I knew it was for Angel. Do it for Angel. Everything for Angel. Give my life for Angel. I knew that in theory. But in practice my brain was a broken record that would not stop for even one second from screeching
BRANDON.
Felt like literal maggots in my brain. Delusional parasitosis. But I acted fast. It took less than two weeks.
Back to present day, present time. He’s looking up at me. About to say something. I’m about to say something first.
“Hi, Brandon.” First time I’ve dared to say it out loud. It’s grating. That plosive “buh” and that nasally “randon.” So much effort.
“What’s going on?” He asks. Fair question, but it came out more like whuzz goinon.
“You did something unforgivable. So I kidnapped you.”
Blank stare. His vision drifts down to his bound hands, then over to the bench. He’s really out of it. I needed him sedated, but I need him to understand, too.
“Where… am I?”
“My basement.”
He looks down again like he knows that was a stupid second question. His eyelashes are long for a boy. Don’t. Do not think that
“I didn’t do anything. You got me fucked up. Mixed up,” He corrects himself, even though he was only right the first time.
“No, I don’t. You’re Brandon. You work at Whang’s Kitchen and Bakery. You work the front of house. You don’t speak Spanish. You live four miles away. You have one male roommate. And,” I finish, “You sexually assaulted your coworker two weeks ago.”
Brandon goes tsk. He’s been weirdly calm thus far in a way that’s hard to explain even with the drugs. Like he can’t believe this is happening and therefore it isn’t. “It’s about her. Huh. You her boyfriend?”
“That doesn’t matter.”
“‘Cause she didn’t say she had one when we hooked up.”
I take a beat too long to answer. “That’s irrelevant tonight.”
He makes a face. “So you’re not even her boyfriend. You’re, like, her crazy simp or something.”
“You,” I start, “need to learn a hard lesson.”
“Well, I like her too.”
My body weight shifts to one leg and my boot connects with his face before I have any say in the matter. I guess that pissed me off. He goes Aargh and falls over, no way to catch himself.
“You’re not getting it.”
“Jesus, fuck, man. Fuck,” Brandon goes, nice clear shoeprint reddening on his right cheek. I take one big step over and stamp a matching print onto his left. Even with that face all mottled with freckles, you can see them.
“You raped someone. You raped someone.”
“Did fucking not.”
“You climbed into your car with your coworker on that rainy day, and you, you…” My black gloved hands are balling into fists of their own accord. I’m losing my composure.
“She was INTO IT,” Brandon yells.
Good. Good. Actually, that’s exactly the sort of thing I wanted to hear. Because it means the conversation is over.
I don’t say another word. I grab his shoulders and I drag him over to the bench.
I’ve been meaning to put up a shed, a bench, things like that, in my yard. Stuff that would have helped it seem less like the decaying decrepit lot of ugly overgrown weeds that it really is. Or maybe the shed would have just leaned into that more. It’s a bit gothic horror out here.
But I wanted to make those things myself, and woodworking takes a lot of time and a lot of materials. I liked shop class in middle school just fine, but that’s the extent of the tutorage I ever received on working with my hands. Sort of a hit to my masculinity, but my dad wasn’t interested in helping me.
So I had started the bench. But all I had so far was the seat stood up on the legs. No back. And it just so happened that that is what would come in handy tonight.
It’s simple enough to get him bent over it. Weak in the knees as he is, they give easily. I take the rope, wrap it around his torso, snake it under the bench and around again. I have to get pretty chest-to-back with him to accomplish this. He’s struggling now, sure, but not enough to really matter.
“What the FUCK are you—“ I elbow his back with my body weight to try to get him to shut up. I’m trying to remember my Boy Scout knots. There is finally, finally a hint of panic coming into his voice.
“Oh my God. Oh my God. Am I getting Dahmer’d?”
The question is so egregious I almost spit out No, but my cooler head prevails, and I stay quiet. The knots are pulled tight now. Lot of leftover rope. He takes up less than I expected.
Important to note he can’t turn his neck much. He can’t see behind him. But he saw the knife earlier, the drill.
I walk over and pick up the knife. It’s serrated. I walk back to Brandon. I hold it to his throat.
“Jesus, man, can’t we just talk—“
I press the knife inward. Trying to impress upon him that speaking from this point forward could have consequences, and if he wants to explain something, that’s a bet he will have to take. He stops talking.
I retract the knife from his neck. Then I walk behind him. I start using the knife to cut his pants and underwear off. He starts freaking out.
“Stop. STOP. STOP, what are you doing, stop, stop, stop,” He’s surprisingly opposed to this simple action. Like this was the thing that finally made it start sinking in what’s about to happen.
It’s been sunk in for me this whole time, but people in the mental health field are well-versed in a practice called compartmentalizing. It’s when you separate your tasks from the tasks of other people, and you sub-divide your own tasks into tasks you can do something about now and tasks you can do something about later. It is essential you not concern yourself with other people’s tasks, and even more essential you focus only on the tasks at hand before you in the present.
It’s how I could work with abandoned demented senior citizens and battered women and violent sex offenders and pregnant middle schoolers and adults who had been abused nightly by their fathers as toddlers and go home and sleep at night. You separate your tasks. Or you will go insane.
So the task of raping Brandon was not before me. Until now. Here it is.
There was some sick part of me that had hoped Angel would be my first. I can admit it now. That I wanted that. Obviously I did. Even when I caved and I rubbed myself raw on their jacket and had the hardest orgasm of my life. I was so in denial about it.
But Angel didn’t come to the trial on Wednesday. I will never see Angel again. There is no need to save myself anymore.
Brandon needs to be raped. He needs to, and there is no one else who will do it. It has to be me.
I was worried I wouldn’t be able to get it up. When I rehearsed this, I really struggled to stay hard. Violently nauseous is more how I would describe what I felt when I ran the steps through my head.
But when I reach down and pop out the button and quietly unzip the fly of my black jeans, as it turns out, I am ready to go.
Brandon’s trembling. Guess he forgot about the knife or didn’t take me seriously or something because he’s going, “Stop, this is fucking crazy, seriously, seriously man, you can still stop, whatever you’re about to do, don’t do it.”
I want to answer so bad. So I give in. I drag the knife across his bare ass, give him plenty of opportunity to understand what it is. Poke a few of the freckles. “This is going inside you.”
“No.”
“I’m going to shove it all the way in. Like THIS,” and I pretend like I just did it, fist punched to his ass, but I switched the knife to my other hand. He shrieks, and his whole body convulses, and then something between a growl and a whine escapes him when the pain doesn’t follow and he realizes nothing’s inside.
“No, no, no, no.”
Wow. This feels good.
“This time is for real,” I say.
“What the fuck is wrong with you?”
“Are you ready?”
“No, no, no, no. No, no, no, no, no.”
He can’t see me behind him.
“Here it comes.”
Set the knife down softly on the dirt. Pull my boxer briefs down. My cock springs out. Line it up without making contact.
“In one, two…”
And I push in and he screams. I don’t wait for him to figure out what happened. I grip his waist with both hands and I pound him like I’m trying to kill him.
The noises coming from him would be impossible to describe, but I can hear the confusion and disgust and outrage ripping through him. Garbled protests, pleas, cries over the beat of our repulsive bodies slapping together and the grunts of exertion I’m making.
I can feel it, too. Turns out you really can very distinctly and minutely feel people gripping and tensing and loosening their hole around your penis. I never knew. I doubt he’s doing it intentionally. His body is trying and failing to eject me from itself. Wrong Hole, like the PornHub category.
Slap, slap, slap. The gloves help me keep my grip. My palms are sweating like crazy. The rest of me is, too. It’s cold down here in winter, but there’s no air flow whatsoever, no ventilation. Deafening silence, amplified acoustics. Slap, slap, slap.
He’s saying stuff I’m not paying attention to because I’m thinking things like I’m not into men and This isn’t doing it for me and The age difference here is weird and Angel Angel Angel Angel Angel Angel Angel. I can’t control my thoughts, only my actions.
I tentatively screw my eyes shut and think about Angel some more, but this just isn’t an Angel situation and I need to stop trying to make it one. There’s too much curly hair and ball stench in the room for that. Angel wouldn’t feel like this or sound like this or beg me to stop like this. This is all Brandon. I’m screwing Brandon. His voice breaks through.
“This is so fucking gross, come on, stop, shit, man, I, I’m going to…” and he gags and dry heaves a few times, but nothing comes up.
“It’s this or the knife,” I tell him.
“No,” which isn’t a valid response.
“If you want the knife, I’ll give you the knife instead.”
No response. Slap, slap, slap.
“Tell me which one you want. You want the knife?” I lean over and pick it up.
“No.”
“Tell me which one you want,” and I stab the blade a little into his backside over his kidney. Blood wells up around the entry point. Nice bright red on the tip. He yells. Ha ha ha. I feel crazy. My knife is inside him. My dick is inside him.
“Which one, Brandon? Speak.”
“The… not the knife. Your d—… the… your…”
He’s SHY? It’s okay. I don’t like saying naughty words out loud, either. You’re not supposed to even think them because God will get mad at you and abandon you. He’s not down here tonight, though.
I keep fucking Brandon. Nonstop brutal pace.
There was no way I could ask Angel, but I have to assume. That it was raw. If Brandon had something, then Angel got it, and if Angel had something, then I have it now. And that’s how you know this is the worst reality.
There was no way I could ask Angel, but I have to assume. That he finished inside. So that’s what I have to do too.
Again, I worried I wouldn’t be able to get there, and again, my expectations were betrayed. There was a warm, wet hole presented to my body, and my body is steadily approaching the point of inseminating that hole, and it will not stop until it does. The goal of the male reproductive system, so singleminded and inhumane that achieving it and being deprived of it drives men to the most heinous acts there are.
My quads ache from bending my knees and my chest burns from the force with which I’ve pulled this kid’s hips back hundreds of times in rapid succession. Real workout, and I didn’t skip the gym at 6:00 this morning, either. It was a long day. It’s going to be a long night. But I’m not tired. I’m close.
There’s a few seconds where Brandon stops struggling, and then there’s a sniffle, and then a sob. Good. Finally broken in. He’s crying. Good. You little bitch.
I don’t tell him. I just cum. I stay inside, stop moving for ten seconds so it’s dead obvious what happened, and then I pull out. He’s still crying, “Help, help. No, no.” No was never an option that was going to be afforded to him.
What he doesn’t know yet, and what I am about to tell him, is that this was Round One. He doesn’t know he will be asked to pick a letter and a number. He doesn’t know I’m going to follow the winding trail of his spine, counting each vertebrae with my finger as I go. He doesn’t know I will press the drill to the spot he chose and paralyze him from the waist down at minimum, from the neck down at maximum, no matter what. His bladder will most likely give out. His legs definitely will. And then I will unbind him because his body will be bound unto itself forever. And then we will have Round Two.
Because he raped Angel twice. Fair is fair.
- - - - -
I’m going to hell. My brain thinks it even though I stopped believing in Heavenly Father the same day my older sister told me Santa Claus didn’t exist, which, granted, was an embarrassingly late age for a child. But once she told me, I knew there was no way one glowing white-bearded man in the sky who grants wishes was fake and the other was real. My parents had made up both to control me.
There is no heaven. There is no hell. There are only the rewards we sow and the punishments we reap here on Earth. All my life I behaved myself as well as I was capable of, and it was nowhere near good enough, and it left me miserable and rotten and alone.
That is why I was ready to do some permanent damage to someone else. To someone who really, truly deserved it, even more than I do.
Angel. I love you. Please stay sweet and kind.
Brandon. You and I will die together. If hell existed, I would gladly go there just to drag you down with me. That is where you belong. That is not possible, so I picked the next best thing. That is what I have done.
THE END