There’ll be much you won’t understand, he had said.
They’ll beat it out of you. The understanding. They’ll take you up with crossbars and all sorts of metal. After that, they’ll turn to the sharp things and dig the rest out of you, like bloody surgeons, like they knew all along what the hell they were doing. But don’t be fooled. It’s all shit. It’s all lies. They’ll beat you and gut you and have something to talk about after work. They’ll raise a toast to you and become more than hammered to forget you. There’s some comfort in that if you can take such things, that they’ll drown themselves into oblivion with each other to forget what they’ve done to you. But they’ll do it either way. They don’t leave themselves much choice. Don’t let them tell you otherwise, that they have no choice. They’ll tell you that only to make it easier on them. It’s not for you. As you take against it the forehead they’ll tell you that it’s all out of their hands. Bollocks. They’re there because deep down inside they enjoy it and it sickens them. They enjoy beating it out of you. They’ll pray from mercy, you’ll hear it drop from their lips and you’ll think that they were buggering someone, praying with such passion, grunting.
It gets all silent after that.
After you start fading in and out of pain, when you feel the blood pounding both inside and outside of your head, and the pain doesn’t know whether to put you under or keep you awake, that’s when you got to hold onto your wits, you hear me boy? That’s when they bring in the cart with all the shiny instruments out. Instruments they call them and you eyes will open wide and everything up until then will dash from you like shit when you were a child in diapers. That’s when they’ll lay their hands on you to keep you still and you’ll bang your head under to stop your self from knowing what’s coming next, from knowing what you then know and you’ll see one of their free hands, and then another and another, and you’ll wonder how many of them exactly are there with you and something ridiculous will run through your mind like, how come you never noticed them before, and you’ll piss and shit in your pants all over again just when they thought you had none left.
Hold on, because they’ll carve and carve looking for it, for something, for anything.
You just bite onto your lip and think about everything that you have seen in your life, every friend that you shared a bed with, every father’s daughter you buggered while he slept, every child’s hand that you held, every sunrise that burnt out your eyes when you stumbled on home, every scent that crawled up your nostril and you couldn’t get rid of, every time you whacked off but couldn’t cum, every toss and turn, remember it all for one last moment, have it last as long as it had. They won’t get it and they can’t beat it out of you, but they’ll go at it and be determined about it. They’ll look under all the wet parts and you’ll feel their fingers, feel their hands drop their instruments somewhere inside of you and grope around to find them again. You’ll feel those things but I want you to think about these other things, you understand boy?
You haven’t anything else, no matter what they tell you.
They’ll ask, they always do. They have to. It’s part of it. It’s their entrance into you, it makes it easier on them to believe that you have resisted. And then it will be over. They’ll sow you up and call you a new man. They sow you up so gently that you’ll think that you were sick, that you had some sort of accident and they’ve just saved your life, you’ll be so happy that it’s over. You’ll thank them. And you won’t remember any of it. They’ll put all sorts of medication in for the wounds. To heal. And to forget. You say no now, but wait. It’s almost time. It’s not only you that they have had troubles with. It’s still new to them. They haven’t worked the kinks out. But by god, you’ll die trying.