If there is anything that defines the final days of Capitalism, it’s the mutually agreed upon disdain towards the oldest profession. Even those whose sympathies lie with prostitutes often have an air of “They shouldn’t sell their bodies for money someone else only to die tragically due to their chosen lifestyle” to their comments. There are numerous stories, both within and without the City, of prostitutes being treated as if they’re less than cattle. Some are tragic stories of rape, murder, and other banal cruelties. Others feature far more interesting cruelties like being subjected to having one’s hands flayed finger by finger and then being forced to eat the skin. There are far too few stories of happiness and joy when it comes to the City’s relationship with prostitutes. What follows is one of them…
Francis lived in an apartment with his father Victor and his sisters, Lucy and Donna. It wasn’t a nice apartment, probably one of the less valued in an area of terribly valued apartments. Not even the Fuzon Corporation used it for their employees. (It wasn’t even their first choice for City living. The family was kicked out of their previous homes over their unwillingness to sleep with their landlords as a small part of their rent.) There were numerous reports that the building was haunted by some malevolent force that wished nothing but pain and misery for those who lived in it. An absurd notion when considering most things, but the history of this one raises some suspicion.
In the years before the building was even conceived of, the land it would be built upon was said to be the sight of numerous cases of the supernatural. When it was a parking lot, a couple was reported being abducted by aliens bent on discovering the fourth dimensional secrets of water. When it was a strip mall, there were 17 counts of gang violence, each carrying a body count well into the double digits (the smallest of which being 43) and all ending with the last victim writing the words “I love you” out of their own blood and guts. During one of the construction jobs, seven construction workers and three foremen found themselves defenestrated at various points. Even back when it was a mere field, several anthropologists theorized that numerous encounters between the Native Americans and various spirits occurred within that area.
But perhaps the most pertinent and bizarre case would be that of the apartment building itself. To start, it was not intended on being an apartment building. Rather, it was meant to be a beacon of the future. A fully automated complex built to house ideas and new technologies that would recontextualize the entirety of the 21stcentury. Each room would have had enough space to house an entire family and the planned food center could have fed the City and then some. It has been theorized that were the building and Brilliant Resourceful Intelligent Artificial Network, the artificial intelligence designed to run every system within the monument to technological futurism, ever completed to its initial design, then the very concept of cities might very well have survived well beyond the 22nd Century.
Sadly, this was not meant to be. The construction on the project was delayed by several deaths caused by the radiation of the AI’s main power source, numerous protests over the rights of artificial intelligences led by three separate snake cults (who, in a bit of mystical coincidence, all worshiped the same God), and said AI malfunctioning during simulations, projecting a robot apocalypse in four of them, among other complications with lesser death tolls. (There were also negligible issues with the AI such as its inability to make a good cup of tea or recognize the faces of people of color.) The budget for the project bankrupted several arms of the corporation, such that official sources claimed the City had to pay off the debt it incurred by having a single percent stake in the project 10 years after it was abandoned.
There were several attempts at stopping construction all together, most notably by the corporation’s board of directors two years into the project. The proposed budget was almost laughable in how absurdly much it cost, but the actual cost well exceeded that two weeks prior to the meeting. It was easy to see this was going to end up destroying the company should the project go any further. A vote was cast amongst the top shareholders of the corporation. Unfortunately, Jonathan O’Malley was the majority shareholder and he saw the tower as a personal project of his and was able to bully enough of the shareholders into submitting to his singular vision.
It wasn’t until 12 years into production that O’Malley was finally bought out by the Fuzon Corporation and construction could mercifully end. Unfortunately, an earthquake struck at that very moment, causing the building to collapse. That isn’t to say that it was destroyed, but rather it had been tilted into a perfect 75-degree angle with the skyline of the City. Not only did this make continued construction impossible and killed countless lives, but it also had the unfortunate side effect of making deconstructing the ruin ill advised as it wouldn’t be cost effective to do so. And to top it all off, it was an eyesore on the City’s brutalist architecture, more so than even the head quarters of the Fuzon Corporation (though, saying that would be akin to saying that a pimple is an eyesore on a corpse).
With no other alternatives, the Fuzon Corporation opted to let the building fester within the City, a decision that has been argued quite poorly as being the direct cause of the City’s demise. As it stands, numerous clandestine terrorist organizations, a few rogue hackers, and one or two mimes conducted illegal operations in what became an apartment complex for those too unwilling to work directly for the corporation. But most recently, an entire floor of the tower has been used as a brothel for various clients of ill repute colloquially referred to as the Tilted Tower. Which brings us back to Francis and his family.
They had been living at the apartment for well over a year, working for their room and board through various odd jobs from cleaning a shit hole with their mouth to polishing a rod until it ejaculated to simply fucking the landlord while speaking in a posh accent as opposed to paying the rent. These were typical customers and nowhere near the strangest people the family encountered in their time at the apartment (Donna still has nightmares about the man with the glass eye). But it was on that day that Francis would encounter one of the strangest people he would have a sexual relationship with.
It started on a typical Sunday afternoon. Lucy was out of the house with a freebee, as per usual. Donna was caring for Victor while the machine that was his lungs did its duty. She had a look on her face, Francis noticed, the same look she always had when she was around Victor. It was the look of a deer being kept alive after being mauled by a mountain lion. He had always wanted to ask her why she made that look (and, for that matter, why her hair was grey), but whenever he considered doing so, Francis would always decide to be a coward instead. But Francis wasn’t in the apartment at that moment, but instead on the streets of the City looking for a gig.
Most of the time, finding a gig isn’t too difficult to find. By and large, customers came to Francis for a “good time.” But that night, the streets were inexplicably empty. It wasn’t like there was a riot going on in the area or anything (though there was one brewing on the other side of the City, waiting to burst like a bottle of soda on a bumpy road). Nor was there the smell of a raid in the air. Francis knew damn well that the police are impossibly unsubtle about their raids and “being too quiet” is not the kind of unsubtly the police tend to go for. Instead, the streets seemed almost abandoned. There were a few vagrants here and there: a sleeping couple protecting a cat like it was their child, a mad man muttering about the end of the City for the third time this hour, and countless other stories too sad for Francis to contemplate.
But what caught his eye was a lone man standing on the corner of the street. He wasn’t the kind of man to typically court these dark, abandoned streets. He was far too well fed for the City. He looked to have been Hansel to someone’s wicked witch, the scars on his arms told Francis as much. The man’s hair was surprisingly grey for someone who had just become 20-something. His clothes were too finely washed. They weren’t nice clothes like a collard shirt of pants that require a belt to wear. They were the clothes of a field worker, Francis thought, though he didn’t look like one of their kind. The man’s dark skin was probably from being out in the sun for too long, he told himself. On a whim, Francis approached the man.
“So what’s a guy like you doing in a city like this,” Francis asked. There was an aborted answer before the man spoke.
“Nostalgia. I grew up here, you know?” The way the man spoke was as if he was trying to remember how to speak and was only inexplicably doing well at it. Maybe once he was an expert at speaking, but as the years grew on, he had less and less use for the spoken form. Indeed, any form of its kind was for a long time alien to this man.
“Really,” inquired Francis, “When was this?”
“Oh. Some time ago, I suppose. The memory’s a bit… foggy, especially in my old age.”
“You don’t look that old, if anything you look a year younger than me.”
“And how old are you? 100?”
“27.”
The man let out a small, sad, single syllable laugh. “Looks can be deceiving, old man.”
“Yeah… so, I was wondering-“
“How much?”
“E-excuse me?”
“You were about to ask me if I’d like to pay you for continuing to be in your presence while I decide what we do during that time. Is that not how the oldest profession works?”
“…Yes?”
“Well then,” said the man while he fished out a wad of cash larger than Francis could ever comprehend, “How much?”
“Ah-Ah-About that much!” The man looked down at the money in his hand and considered only briefly.
“Heh, fair enough I suppose.” There was a sense of nostalgic sadness in the way the man said those words. Not in the typical way people express such sadness. It was as if, in that singular moment, the universe shared that sadness with the man and forced everyone else’s hearts to break, if only for a second. The man led Francis a few blocks away from where they were to a small motel. It was located almost directly on the edge of the City. The parts that weren’t within City limits had been consumed by the various vegetation that dominated the outside world. It was as if there was an invisible dome protecting the City from Nature itself. The room they ended up in was itself nearly symmetrically within and without the City, such that the vines and weeds seemed to recoil at the exact midpoint of the room. This had the effect of stimulating Francis in a way that he hadn’t felt since he was a young boy. A pity that the sex itself wasn’t much to write home about; it was pretty run of the mill anal, with Francis getting it in the rear over and over again like he was land being dug into by a mechanical drill. There was no foreplay, and certainly no conversation afterwards. When the sex was done, the man left without a word. Francis was given all the money he asked for and then some. For once in his life, Francis knew what it was like to have two dollars and ten cents on his person. He would never again know such wealth.
But there was one moment of oddness, one moment where the man seemed to acknowledge Francis as an actual person as opposed to the “fuck-hole” his other clients treat him as. It was during that dull, ordinary, not even all that great sex that Francis noticed something about the man. The man was talking. Many a man talked during sex, usually about how they’re better than their wives or their husbands or whoever was making their lives miserable. Sometimes, they would talk about things thematically related to the fetishes they were about to experience. But this was different. The man was talking to Francis himself. He was telling him a story (his own, Francis believed). He didn’t remember much of the story, a few fragments, maybe one or two lines. What he did remember was the feeling of the story. At first, it felt like a miserable story; it brought the mood down so much that it reminded Francis of those bleak days when Donna disappeared for two weeks with Victor, only to return with grey hair and a dead look in her eyes. Francis nearly pleaded the man to stop talking, that it was turning him off and not because it was making him feel bad. But suddenly, the tone shifted into something completely different. A minor moment in the telling of the story recontextualized the whole thing into a tale of triumph. It wasn’t a story of how life brings nothing but pain and misery and there is no way out, but rather one of overcoming impossible odds to gain one’s freedom while still acknowledging that freedom has a price.
When the sex was done and the man long gone, Francis sat on the bed covered in weeds and thought about his future. What was he going to do with all this money? Would anyone let him spend it? Would he be arrested for carrying so much? And what about the story the man told him? He realized in that moment that he didn’t remember a single moment, a single line of the story, a single thing about the story, bar the feeling it made within him. That wasn’t quite true. He did remember one line, the first line. It didn’t mean anything to him and it wasn’t even all that memorable, and yet it stuck with him. Francis didn’t know why “It returned to the City on a Tuesday” stuck with him, and he suspected he never would.
Francis returned to the tilted tower they called an apartment complex and did another couple more gigs before turning in for the night.Support the blog on Patreon.
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