Even for those to whom life and death are equal jests. There are some things that are still held in respect.
CALGARY, ALBERTA
FEBRUARY 7, 2025
AIR IS FOUL AND FOUL IS FAIR, I say to myself before returning to the sitting room of the Fairmont Palliser suite after hiding out in the bathroom for a much needed reprieve from today’s agenda.
Johnny, who is Chinese, is on his feet aggressively barking at the waiter in Japanese. I don’t know if he’s aware that I speak the language, though given his propensity for being a fucking know-it-all, the chances are high. I’m assuming for this to make sense the waiter is from the Land of the Rising Sun.
Johnny shouts and points at the champagne sitting in ice on the dining cart. He’s pissed because it’s apparently the wrong brand. Oh, and the waiter’s glasses aren’t to his liking and he should not wear them when he returns. I will say they are peculiar with wire frames and red lenses dark as oxblood. It’s a stark contrast with his otherwise meticulously professional tuxedo, creased pants and white gloves.
The waiter bows his head and says, “Hai wakarimashita.” Johnny waves his hand dismissively then turns to sit down on the sofa. The diner cart’s wheels squeak softly as the waiter pushes it to the doorway where he’s met by Johnny’s bodyguard, Haruto, and escorted back to the elevator.
I cross the room in my Khaite boots and sit down on the other end of the sofa. “I thought his glasses were kind of cool,” I say while tossing my hair.
He scoffs. “You think so?”
“I do,” I say matter-of-factly. “Does that bother you?”
“You saying something nice about anyone is a grand occasion,” he says while raising his rocks glass before taking a healthy sip of whisky.
My head tilts and I say, “That sounds suspiciously close to calling me a cunt.”
A laugh bursts out of him. “That’s not the word I would use.”
“What word would you use?”
He makes a half-smile. “Ruthless. I’ve watched you fight.”
The food on the coffee table does look delectable. On the main platter is a charcuterie and cheese tray with sliced baguette halves and other finger-food staples. My stomach wants to grab a cheese knife and go to town but not in this bodysuit by Commando. It perfectly fits against the outline of my broad shoulders, built arms, and the firm shape of my braless breasts. I am snug as a bug. So instead my nimble fingers select a club cracker.
I say, “Don’t believe everything you see,” then take a bite.
Let’s review. This is Wú Yuēhàn·Lǐ, the Chinese tech billionaire. CEO of Hùlián Zhōngguó, or Huli for short. Most call him Johnny and is often referred to as the Chinese Elon Musk, which isn’t a pleasant comparison these days (was it ever?).
Johnny isn’t Musk but he’s no angel by any stretch. The man is worth sixty billion freedom dollars and you don’t get that many zeros in your net worth by being a gentleman and a scholar. He simply has the good sense to hide his megalomaniacal supervillainy from the masses.
The point of this little soiree is because the Niels Gram Foundation, who recently shitcanned me from the board for making them look bad, wants out of the Gorgo business. So their 49% stake in my company, Bitfrost is up for grabs.
I have two offers on the table. The first is from Huli. The second is from a Japanese company, Hanami Partners. However, HP isn’t satisfied with only 49%. They want it all. Johnny is content with the minority stake. Unfortunately given the mental state of the POTUS, it might not be a great idea to invite a Chinese tech company to my table.
It’s boring business mumbo jumbo. Johnny isn’t interested either. He keeps bringing up wrestling.
He says, “Speaking of, congratulations on your last match.” His fifty-year-old face is mostly devoid of age lines, either through quality surgery or good genes, and the effort he puts into his physical fitness is obvious with the way that dark beige crew neck fits on him. “Very impressive performance. I have no doubt you will repeat this success against Charlie Nickles.”
Make no mistake, Johnny is a real fan. A year ago he even tried to open his own promotion in Hong Kong. It never got off the ground. Rumor was the communist party was insisting on having a very active hand in the company’s operations.
He starts waxing poetically about Charlie Nickels. Oh, the violence. Oh, the humanity. Oh, the crass portmanteaus. I can only imagine what clever little word play he’ll come up with for me. Opponents always enjoy trying to twist my name into some playground insult.
“Why should I be worried about Charlie?” I ask with a side eye.
He says, “The man’s crazy,” then leads forward to place his tumbler back on the table before reaching for a piece of bread and a cheese knife.
From inside my head, the Other Me says with a snort, “Charlie Nickles is crazy…what are we? Chopped liver?”
My eyes follow Johnny’s hand to the food and settle for there a moment before something in the background catches my attention. It’s Haruto walking backward into the room with his hands raised. At the exact moment a soft PHFT! pops from the foyer, followed immediately by the back of his head bursting open like a melon. A second suppressed bullet hits him in the chest before his body collapses on the floor with an uneven thud.
Johnny yells in Chinese and drops to the floor when the waiter marches back into the room holding in his hand a semi-automatic pistol with a perforated cylinder attached to the barrel.
RUN, the Other Me screams but my body doesn’t respond because a terrible feeling has overtaken me. I almost don’t recognize it because it’s been so long since I’ve felt the cold, numbing ache of fear. Real fear. The kind that makes you want to flee for your life or give in to the inevitable. I never get afraid. I never panic. Not even when half my face was sliced off on the streets of New York. Not even when I murdered the attacker with his own knife. Not even when I was bleeding out on the sidewalk.
But at this moment, I am terrified. I can’t move. I can’t breathe. The shock has paralyzed my reflexes from acting. Despair has dug into my skin and wrapped around me like ice-encrusted chains. I’ve only ever felt this way once before, long ago, and the irons of unrelenting terror drag me far from the hotel room back to that distant memory of a frozen playground in Chișinău.
AM EIGHT YEARS OLD and sitting on a park bench in winter. Large tufts of snow are suspended like cotton balls in the air. Children are frozen in mid-action: hovering between running steps, levitating on the swingset, bent from the gravity pull of an unmoving merry-go-round.
Next to me is my father’s lawyer. He just told me that dad has been committed to a psychiatric hospital. He stressed the word indefinitely and made it clear that I may never see my father again. He’s quiet now, with his eyes half-open and his mouth is stuck partway through a syllable.
I’ve ever experienced such pain and sorrow and in this singular moment, I want to die. I can’t live without dad. Without him, without his guidance, Moldova will never allow me to leave. My life will be nothing more than a depressing extension of my mother’s. An alcoholic single mom living in a world bleached with silver nitrate. Lost and never found to even be forgotten.
“I’m your boogie man, that’s what I am,” whispers the familiar voice of the Other Me, my Darker Half, as her reproduction of my adult body saunters into the scene from my left, seemingly unaffected by the tenuously stretched seconds. Her knees bend and in a herky-jerky, bone-cracking spasm, they meet the snow with a squelch.
“You’re here,” I say meekly in a child’s voice.
“…to do whatever I can,” she says with a wide, exaggerated grin, before thrusting her hands at my face and violently seizing me by the head. Her fingers, long like insect legs, fold around the back of my cranium.
“Be it early morning, late afternoon, or at midnight, it’s never…too…soon…”
Movement pulls my wet eyes away from her to see the waiter with the red lenses standing in the snow. His hand is raising to aim the gun but in slow motion, arcing from his hip like a pendulum blade and I am strapped to the table, unable to escape its inexorable descent.
“Stay with me,” she growls loudly then roughly yanks me closer by the skull until I see nothing but her grotesque copy of my own face. “Do you want to die? Do you think you’ll magically wake up in Never Never Land and daddy Spiral will be there waiting to give you a big ol’ hug? No, of course not, because that’s what scared, stupid little girls believe. It’s what they cling to when the world is crashing down around them. Hope is the noose we don’t see slipping around our necks in our darkest moments and when it cinches, we cling to the knot thinking somehow the thing that is killing us will save us.”
Her hands tighten around my head and squeeze hard enough to inflict a swelling pressure on me. She licks the spit from her shining teeth then says, “Hope isn’t going to stop that bullet. WE ARE.”
Her fingers hook into my scalp and, like parasitic worms, burrow under the flesh. My nerves convulse to recall a pleasure as sweet as this incalculable suffering. I am overdosed on torment and it teeters my mind on madness as her hands plunge into me with the ease of slipping on a pair of gloves. A loud shriek pierces my ears and I realize the wail is my own breaking voice.
“Close your eyes,” she says sweetly, “and buckle up, buckaroo. It’s gonna be a bumpy ride!”
The ride draws out like a broken bow grinding across an out-of-tune violin string. Her face begins to shake in stop-motion and blur, a dozen semi-transparent copies moving out of time, as a monstrous roar bears down on me like a warning howl of a freight train.
She is my savior. My protector. My one and only.
I close my eyes.
And then WE OPEN THEM.
HE MAN IN RED LENSES is leveling the barrel for his killshot when our hand snatches the silver platter off the table and throws it at him like a disk. It crashes into the bridge of his nose, sending him reeling back into the foyer but it doesn’t stop his finger squeezing off a blind shot. The bullet pops into the sofa cushion a breath after we dive over the armrest. The platter clangs on the floor next to a broken pair of red-lensed glasses as we scurry to our feet.
Johnny is pleading for his life with his hands over his head when the waiter returns to the living room covered in blood from a severely broken nose. He levels the gun on us as we bolt for the kitchen door but without his glasses his aim suffers.
PHFT-PHFT-PHFT! Three shots fire in quick succession. The first two pepper the drywall. The third misses our hip by an inch and crashes the stereo system but through some miraculous electrical happenstance, it doesn’t destroy the receiver. Instead it sends the machine into overdrive.
As we duck into the kitchen, electrical signals trigger a burst of current to the speakers. The volume is cranked to max when the brass horns scream a familiar opening riff—then a sexy voice says in a husky twang, “Let’s go girls!”
The syncopated guitar rhythm of Shania’s Man I Feel Like a Woman! crunches to a swing beat as more bullets pepper the wall around the stereo and we’re at the sink in the kitchen reaching for the largest handle jutting out of the butcher block.
An eight-inch chef’s knife draws free when the nearby espresso machine erupts after another subsonic bullet narrowly misses us. Our hand twists around then throws the knife toward the door where the waiter stands in his blood-stained tuxedo. The blade flips end over end through the air then sinks half deep into the meat of his right shoulder. His arm retracts, drawing the barrel into the air and another shot misfires into the ceiling.
Shania croons, No inhibitions, make no conditions, when we charge into him. Our shoulder hits his chest while our hands go for the gun. Two bullets blast into the refrigerator when we slam his arm into the door frame. His left hand comes over top and rabbit punches us in the back of the head, radiating our vision with lightning.
Quickly we twist him around, spiraling both of us into the living room. We try to sweep his leg but our boot hits drops of his blood on the marble and we fall with him, both of us landing arm’s length from the gas fireplace.
We dig our fingers into his, trying to pry them off the gun, but his other hand is pulling the knife from his shoulder to use against us. Our right hand grabs at the handle as he pulls the knife out but it’s slick and neither one of us can hold on to it. The knife skips across the floor and in the chaos he gets free with the gun. Rolling onto his back he takes aim. We drop to the floor, avoiding death by a split second.
A light fixture sparks and explodes from the bullet as we grab the gun’s slide and force it backward, ejecting the loaded round. Our mad eyes look at him through messy locks of hair then we drive his hand against the blistering hot front of the glass-sealed fireplace. His flesh sizzles as Shania belts out, The best thing about being a woman is the prerogative to have a little fun!
The chorus shatters his screams under a boot-stomping hook. The gun drops. We let go of him to crawl after it. He rips his hand from the fireplace, leaving a strip of burnt skin stuck to the glass then leaps on our back like an animal just as our fingers brush across the barrel.
He snatches a fistful of our hair and yanks back, torquing our neck. The pistol spins away and he slams our face into the floor. A high-pitched siren erupts in our ears and our consciousness flickers like an overtaxed power grid. When he wrenches our head back again, fresh blood spills in ribbons on the white marble. He tries to drive us back down for the coup de grace but our left arm braces while our right elbow drives back into his liver.
The girl’s need a break, tonight we’re gonna shake, the song says as we race him to our feet. The close-quarter death match begins. Rapid fire punches and counter punches. Perrying. Feingts. Short-lived grapples.
Adrenaline and sheer determination prevents his shoulder from hindering a hard right hook that cracks our jaw. The impact sends us backward two paces but he pursues with a barrage. Duck and jive, his fists miss but our straight left doesn’t when it shoots through his defense to crush his already broken nasal cavity.
The pain racks him, making his next swing a wild haymaker that sails wide. We grab him above and below the elbow, turn, and toss him over our hip to the ground. In a flash we’re on him, leg’s split over his abdomen, and our concrete fists are assaulting his face. Thudding, wet smacks land to the beat of the music. His slippery hands try to fight us off but by the guitar solo he’s rendered defenseless.
On our hands and knees we crawl to the gun as he coughs up a mixture of teeth, bile and blood. The firearm feels heavier than expected as we get to our feet. He’s speaking nonsense when we return to his side. “I have to call Adalina to cancel her lesson tomorrow.” The trauma has made him delirious. “Light fingers…proper posture…”
Our hand lifts the gun until it trains on his forehead. His wide eyes stare past the length of the barrel at our face without fear.
We speak in our deep, grinding way:
“Normally this is the point where you beg but not you. You aren’t gonna cheapen the moment with appeals for mercy in exchange for information. You knew the score before you walked off the elevator, didn’tcha? The kinda people who’d send someone like you after someone like Johnny wouldn’t want any loose ends.”
He did something just now, something we almost didn’t notice. When our lips said Johnny, his eyes twitched, as if all of his remaining strength buckled trying to restrain the sudden need to blink.
“Ohh,” we say with a razor-slashed smile. “Yelena was the target. How curious.”
Our hand moves five degrees and the gun fires into his chest. A spent shell casing clink-clatters on the floor as his throat sucks in wild gasps of air. Are you watching closely? This is our favorite part. See the inner struggle on his face? That’s his brain desperately trying to escape its inevitable conclusion while also coming to terms with the fact it’s already over.
This could have been Yelena. This could have been our end.
After he takes his last breath, we aim the barrel at the stereo and fire. Sparks burst out of the receiver and Shania’s final I feel like a woman! stretches and pitches down like a dying robot then cuts out.
Johnny’s head pops up with the distrust of a prairie dog in the wild but when he sees the waiter dead he gets brave enough to stand.
“What the fuck, Yelena?”
Over our shoulder and through tangled hair, our eyes find him cowering and hunched over in case more bullets come flying. We say, “You know people who can deal with this.”
It wasn’t a question but he answers anyway with a reluctant nod. “Oh sure, yes, I may have someone that can help with this…” He waves his hand around like Mr. Miagi. “…situation.”
“Got your phone?”
“You want me to call now?” he asks while reaching into his pants pocket. After he takes out his six inch friend, we say, “A little small. It better have a good camera.”
“Are you kidding? This is the new Huliphone. Not even listed yet. It has 200 megapixel main camera. 8k video!”
A long sigh leaves our lips then we say, “A yes would’ve sufficed. Bring it over here and steady Your hands because Mama wants to cook.”
INT. HOTEL SUITE.
It begins with a cream-colored sofa with brass trim that looks rather expensive but for the quarter-sized hole in the left back cushion. A coffee table sits in the foreground, littered with a tray of finger foods, glasses and a bottle of champagne in a bucket.
A ragged voice, female but stranger, and darker, sings off camera:
You’re one-o-them guys who likes to shine his machete. 
You wanna tie me down and turn me inta confetti.
From stage right THEY enter the frame from the shoulder down. Their movement is stiff, possibly painful, giving them an awkward gait. They stop dead and then, like a broken ballerina in a jewelry box, twist around to face forward. Their right hand is damaged and bloodied.
Oh you think you’re something special? Oh you think you’re something else?
(silence)
So you talk to your mother who’s
been dead for twenty years?
That don’t Imress-ah-Me Much!
Onto the sofa they plop down, suddenly giddy like a schoolgirl. The entire left side of their face is crusted in dried blonde and swollen, as if they’ve already been in a fight, causing half their smile to droop a little lower than the other.
Hi, Charlie. We’re Gorgo. Some people find that confusing but you seem like the kinda guy that doesn’t get bogged down in the explanations. Before we get started we wanna say that we’re a big fan. Huge fan. We love the whole psycho-killer-qu'est-ce-que-c'est thing you got going on. It reminds us of dear ol’ dad back in the day.
They wince. And here comes the:
Buuuuuttt… You aren’t anything like our father, are ya, chum? Oh, sure, you’ll spin that into some kind of ‘THAT’S RIGHT I’M CRAZY’ or ‘YOUR FATHA WOULD DINE ON THE RATS OF INFINITY AFTER SUFFERING MY WRATH.’
No, and definitely no, but most importantly, that’s not what we mean. See here, we think you’re a swell guy. You made an entire career from being a vile, violent bastard and we’d never insult’cha by pretending otherwise. You’ve been playing with barbed wire since Yelena was a baby. Maybe longer depending on your childhood tendencies. They didn’t screen for those things back then.
But that’s where your charm runs out with us because there are two categories of humans. Yes, just two. Almost every walking-talking person on this planet belongs in Category A. It encompasses the entire range of human experience. You have your saintly good people who exist solely to help others at their own expense. You have the normal, everyday people who do good things, bad things, and everything in between. Then at the bottom are folks like yourself. The brain ain’t workin’ right type. Maybe you were born with it. Maybe it’s fluoride in the tap water.
Just kidding. What do we look like, a Kennedy?
Anyway, point being, even human garbage like yourself belongs in good ol’ Cat A, because you share a common trait with the rest of these people. You all have hope.
Yes. Even you, cupcake.
Even when you hate yourself.
Even when you pull out your own hair.
Even when you question your existence.
You’re free and in freedom lies hope. The hope that with your freedom you’ll do something worthwhile for once. Good, bad, evil—doesn’t matter. Hope doesn’t care whether you’re building a homeless shelter or setting an orphanage on fire.
You hope you’ll still be television champion after Monday.
Then there’s Category B.
The Hopeless Ones.
Now before your mind goes straight to emo, allow me to clarify. They’re fakers. They have more hope than anyone, it’s just sadder. Like I hope I can live long enough to see the next Black Parade.
No, sir. Cat B is the real deal. It’s for nonbelievers. That’s right, friend. People who know that hope doesn’t exist. People like us understand that hope is an illusion, created by the human mind to offset tragedy. House burns down? Get fired from your job? It can’t get any worse! It can’t rain all the time! What doesn't kill you makes you stronger!
There is no hope, Charlie.
People like us—well, not us as in you and us. Us as in Yelena and Co.
People like us don’t rely on the law of averages or the assumption that things’ll work somehow someway, so if we want something, we take it. If we need something, we kill for it.
Metaphorically, of course.
We wouldn’t even be considered human if not for modern genetics. In archaic times people like us weren’t even sent to asylums. We were tortured. Executed. Incinerated. Because your forebears still believed in monsters.
We are not human. We are hunger.
We are not human. We are suffer.
We are that and nothing more.
You’ll find out. Real soon.
So let it be written.
So let it be done.
BLACK.