Liberty Rose

Logan Berry

Chicago, 2050 I complete the cut. Her carotid artery unleashes blood like a raging spigot, drenching her white satin pillows and linens in moonlit crimson. Through the penthouse casement windows, only celestial lights perforate the thick, billowing smog that smothers the city. I'm mesmerized by the flow of it, the coruscations like a million epileptic angels seizing into the night, when I catch her scent: cherries dipped in butane, cat fur, Carlton 100's, and mint. Exactly like my First Foster Mother, the Witch. It hurls me through the recesses of my mind, to a time before I learned the limits of tolerance––before I became an infamous quantity, a hitman-for-hire for the corporate bots that load my ewallet with shitcoins, keeping me a tier above the other flotsam scrounging about to not die, to not succumb to the digital-vassal's chaotic flights of fancy––razing neighborhoods for new developments filled with nobody, dumping fresh hordes of vagrants onto the streets, soliciting them to battle for their lives in back-alley gladiator fights. I was at war with only myself back then, a child made too aware of its cowardice, of its potential to bleed and to scar, thanks to a savage matriarch. I missed her scent when I slipped in at noon. When I climbed atop the ceiling fan above her bed, contorting my limbs and blade to be flush with its shape, to await her arrival. Adrenaline sustains me on assignments. I never merely "wait" for a target, never merely "hide." I transmogrify. I dive inward, into a depthless, oceanic silence. I imagine my skin shedding, feel myself becoming untouchable, ethereal—a primal fear. An anxious thought-made-flesh, I become a breathing nightmare. And, like some prehistoric bug, I camouflage. My faculties for empathy, communion, and memory dulling to a distant drone, I disassociate. I skulk. I strike. Not this time, though. This time my humanity rushes back in, head-on headlights out of nowhere, as her scent incites a flood of memories: sunsets through a sticky plastic playset, chalk drawings on the sidewalk, itchy green grass, a doe carcass coated in wasps, hot pink lips exhaling smoke, veiny thighs clapping thunder strikes, a plastic bag over my head, phosphenes, filthy threadbare floors, baby snakes dangling from an ancient pussy. I catch my breath in a massive gasp and bulge my eyes to suppress the tears attempting to escape my skull. This can't be her. She died when I was eight. The oncologists deemed her glioblastoma a pitiless invader. Despite the infusions and radiation therapies, it devoured her brain, usurped her motor functions, and spread its malignant influence through her blood—all in a matter of months. The Witch had died finally, but her rapid decline was her final transgression against me. Throughout the years she tortured me, I dreamt of one day reciprocating, of vengeance so severe that the cosmic levers of Justice would balance, and I would enter the æther a god of punishment. I was a fanciful idiot. Who the fuck is this? I lean into her, our noses nearly touching. Terror has receded from her eyes, replaced by the murk of meat. She's a corpse now. I taste the gash, tracing my tongue along the wound's hot, metallic tang. The untarnished portions have the chemical sharpness of perfume mixed with salty trails of dry sweat. Why didn't she shower before getting into bed? My First Foster Mother never showered. I can't control the tremors, the sweat. I'm panicking. I jolt to a dressing table and snatch her reticule, keeping one eye on the corpse lest she's faking dead to sneak-attack. I dump its contents on the table: a .480 Ruger (loaded), a mini hand sanitizer, bougie lotions, elastic bands, a syringe, emerald phials, and a wallet. I stuff the Ruger in my waistband and dig through the wallet. The ID reads, "Liberty Rose," DOB: 7-7-77, address is here. Nothing too remarkable until a second glance at the portrait stops my breath. It definitely depicts the woman dead on the bed, but it's constructed from a slew of sources. A thousand screenshots cobbled into a pointillist counterfeit. From a distance, it appears seamless, but up close it's a collage of competing textures, colliding flecks of fabric and skin. The eyes, though, are whole. They're transfixed by something distant, aglow in her pupils, something beyond me, beyond the bounds of consensus reality. A thought screeches through me: Inasmuch as it's not her, it's her. It repeats like a hypnotic song lyric from hell, beating through my cortexes, into my brainstem, and all the way through my erecting arm hairs: Inasmuch as it's not her, it's her. Inasmuch as it's not her, it's her... Fuck it. I kick open the front door, greeted by the muffled snarls of dirty techno pulsating from an adjoining penthouse unit. Tiny teal pumps rest atop the welcome mat. I bang the door. "Pizza's here! Pizza! Pizza! Pizza! Pizza!" "You have the wrong unit!" A softness at the center of the voice's otherwise gruff timbre emboldens me with its palpable weakness. "Pizza! Pizza! Hablo inglés!" "Oh my God, you have the wrong unit!" The lock unsnaps, and I shove the door with all of my might, hearing the crack of a skull as I burst through. "Ohhhh." A fatso in a black and gold filigreed robe moans on the gray and blue veined marble floor. Inasmuch as he's not her, he's me, I think, Inasmuch as he's not her, he's me. He's like a phantom testicle. He belongs to me. I draw my gun and raise my voice above the blaring music. "STAY DOWN. WHOEVER ELSE IS HERE NEEDS TO EMERGE. NOW. I'M ARMED AND DANGEROUS. DON'T MAKE ME INAUGURATE HUNTING SEASON." A gaunt girl in yellow lingerie enters the vestibule. Her caked-on makeup, evocative of a moldering Weimar marionette, does not disguise that she's no older than 10. Her glare suggests that she's either high or that it's not the first time she's stared down the barrel of a gun—probably both. She is purely other. A witness. She is Justice, blinded by ignorance. She can help me. "GOOD GIRL. NOW TURN UP THE MUSIC. ALL THE WAY." She plucks a remote control from the Fatso's pocket and complies. It's deafening. Using the gun to gesture, I instruct them to walk with me. I ram the Ruger into the Fatso's lower back, clutch the girl's shoulder, and guide them down the hallway, into the corpse's unit, into the master bedroom. "Who the fuck is this?" "I don't know!" I fire a warning shot in the air. The Fatso flinches, the girl tenses. "Don't try me! No one will hear you dying over the music! You're a zit escaped from my guardian angel's oily taint." "Good god." "Who is she?!" "I never saw her before today! I believe she just moved in." "When?" "Last week? I don't know. I'm a very busy man!" I press the barrel against his throat, imagining the novel ways I could use the gun as a tool for torture––when I catch the girl's gaze: beneath its icy exterior, sorrow simmers like a storm imprisoned in a crystal orb. Above her, I see myself reflected in a mirror: through the gaps in my lace mesh balaclava, surrounded by a face deformed by beatings and a lifetime as a conduit for carnage—I recognize the sad eyes of a love-starved orphan. She has my eyes, and hers are mine. The Work begins anew. "Get on the ground." The detainees sit on the shag carpet, as I leap atop the bed, Ruger always fixed on them. I prop the corpse against my chest and twist its head to stare at them. So they can bear witness to its transformation. I draw my blade and take a breath—the maternal doppelgänger is stiff and cold in my grip. With rapid stabs and subtle slices, I flay the skin from its skull. It happens fast. I extract the mask in a single sheet, frayed but intact. I shove its benefactor off the bed and stand up proud, giddy as a child king. "Come here." The Fatso kneels before me on the bed. Using the elastic bands from the purse, I fasten the skinmask to his face. It bulges at its seams, making him look bloated and asphyxiated. Tears stream through the eye holes as he gurgles against the straps. "You next." The girl stands on the bed. I remove my balaclava and gently fit it over her tiny head, securing it with an extra knot at the back. Using my thumbs, I tear two holes into the mesh for her eyes. I kneel before her. "I'm sorry, but you're Me. You're Me." I jump to the ground and point my gun at the Fatso. "And you're Liberty. Beat Me. Tell Me I'm nothing." He requires zero coaching to get into character. It feels like every grim facet of this psychic tableau has transferred from my soul into his, as he backhands the girl across the cheek, the force of it sending her sprawling across the bed. It shocks me. My memories materialized, battling––a sacrament so cathartic that God has kept it secret. "You are nothing," he says. She shudders. The Fatso weeps, "But I love her." He's disrupted the spell! "Yes, you do!" I bark, "Slither under the covers. Tell Me. Tell Me." He obeys. The girl lies supine atop the duvet, as the Fatso writhes like a giant slug underneath. His head pops out next to hers. "I'm sorry, for all the insanity." "My mother would never say that!" "What then?" "Tell Me what you told me." I catch myself begging, exposing too much of me. But it doesn't matter anymore. Nothing, besides their performance, matters anymore. They need to get it right, or I'll turn this into a murder-suicide. "I love you, honey." "Good. Now piss on Me. Like a lady. Exactly." He squats atop the child, pressing his tiny prick between his flabby thighs. Urine dribbles through them, wetting himself, the girl, the bed. The girl's resignation and docility are astounding, heightening the scene's stark banality, the everydayness of this agony. It's realism at its best, and it's devastating. I feel scandalized and nauseous, yet somehow, profoundly proud of her performance. "Beat Me. Tell Me you love Me. Say you're sorry. Repeat your past offenses. Continue saying sorry. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat." The beatings repeat. Her suffering deepens, as does my shame, which fills my groin with hot pulsing blood. The Fatso grows more emphatic with every chokehold, slap, and kiss. He's transforming, becoming nearly indistinguishable from the Witch. So much so, I find myself addressing him directly as, "Mommy," speaking for the girl as if she were my dummy, even as she quivers and cries. "No more, Mommy!" "I'm sorry." Thwack! "Your silence sickens me!" Thwack! It's unbearable. I cross to the bed and grab the girl by the back of the neck. I lean her into me and plead, "Fight back. You little bitch. You're Me. Show him your teeth." I step back, and she collapses in the middle of the mattress. The Fatso lifts his foot to squash her head, to suffocate her in the softness. But she rolls to the side, and with bestial abandon she tugs at his robe and love handles, heaving herself up his back. He thrashes about the bed, flailing like a man on fire. She presses her chin into his shoulder, scrunching her mask above her lips, opening her mouth. She bites his neck. He screams and screams and can't secure a solid grip to rip her off. He throws himself backward off the bed, attempting to crush her. But she twists. He crashes to the ground with a thud, and she lands on top of him, sinking her teeth into his face. Full of warm paternal pride, I place my hands on her shoulders. She relaxes her jaw and turns towards me, her eyes emptied of world-weary knowing. She's free. We both are. She spits two wet lumps into the air—his actual nose and the nose from his mask. Blood erupts from the red chasm on his face. He groans feebly, a pitiful creature, dying. I give the girl my blade. "The final act of love. Finish him." It's over in an instant. As the blade cleaves my neck in two, I feel my life compressed to a final exhalation, a pathetic note swallowed through my spine, through a crystalline canal winding through myself and out, efflorescent presence subsuming the past, nullifying the future by becoming a ripple deep inside it. See the girl above my dying body? The me outside of me? The white lights blinding me? The melody trapped inside the symphony of Time unrelenting. Inasmuch as Time is me, I am not Time. It's impossible to notate what's forgotten in the scale of Forever. See the oily faces of angels laughing? The stars smeared to nebulae, funneled out of nothing? A flick, a flame, a crackling. When will you forget me?

Logan Berry is the author of several books, including Ultratheatre: Volume 1 (11:11 Press) and Doom is the House Without a Door (Inside the Castle). He's a playwright and theatre director. He lives in Chicago. Website. X.