Viktor WIP

When I woke up the next morning, Abigail had left. The smell of her suffused the white bedsheets. She had left strands of tawny hair as mementos on the pillowcase. I laid there for a good five, ten minutes bathing in her lingering scent, my mind content and blank, awash in ponderous joy.

Viktor stalked in, fully alert and erect, wearing nothing but his Bahamas shorts. He carried a lean, sinewy upper body with stringy muscles, tanned head to toe from the Belizean sun. For a 59-year-old, he had a body even I envied.

Chin down, eyes up, he studied my posture.

“You like her?” he asked casually, in his low, round baritone, as if I had sampled a delicacy at a sweets shop. “She’s not bad, da?”

“What?” was all I could screw up the courage to say.

“Abigail. She’s one of the better ones.”

A triptych of short films whuffed and smash cut one after another: the furtive brown eyes from across the bar, the demurred flirty questions and cute umbrella drink and delicious giggles with her slightly gapped teeth, her electric touch riding down my arm ending in held hands, her small soft fingers tangled with mine at just the right time.

The evening had been seamless. Orchestrated. Perfect. I had felt like an alpha-dog at the nadir of his masculinity. I had attracted this beautiful, innocent creature and seduced her.

Now, I see it was the other way around. I felt betrayed.

I had never slept with a prostitute before in my life. Nor was I planning to. But out here in the middle of the jungle, Viktor had decided for me. I scrutinized the strangely, over-confident man filling out my doorway. A technological prodigy who had made and lost billions by the age of 27. Now, three companies later, a self-imposed exile on an island in the Caribbean.

I was supposed to be writing his biography, but ever since I’ve arrived last Saturday, it’s been a long blur of absinthe, weed and cryptic conversations about global politics, online security, secret cabals of powerful men, and unearthing the spiritual self to release it from the mind barriers we willingly imprison ourselves in… or some other bullshit I couldn’t grasp in my drunken state.

“Did you pay for her?” I asked, not wanting to know the answer.

“Nyet, she was doing me a favor,” he replied in his thick Russian accent. “Client privileges, I guess.”

This made me queasy in a way I never knew I could feel.

“So she never liked me to begin with?”

It was a dumb question. I knew that. I mean, who the fuck cares at this point? But that’s what I blurted out.

“She seemed to liked you. Maybe she likes you. Who knows? David. Are you in love with her or something?”

“No, I…”

“Listen, we have a full day ahead of us. Get dressed. Let’s get breakfast, da?”

He sauntered off, not expecting my input or objections as all powerful men acted. I stewed. I worried about STDs. I dissected our talks. What was genuine? What was an act? I questioned every act, every touch, every sound of pleasure.

I reflected on my ex-girlfriends, unprofessional as they were at lying, but trying so hard to please me. Their intent were good. This, however, this was transactional. I had, or Viktor, had paid for a carefully rehearsed experience.

It wasn’t the sex that bothered me. It was being part of a show without being in on it.

“David!” he screamed from the kitchen. “Breakfast!”

I scrambled off the bed, bunching up my boxers, cargo shorts and Hawaiian shirt.

“Coming!”

After breakfast, poached eggs and bacon on English muffins drowned in Hollandaise, with a smattering of chives and pepper, we adjourned to his indoor porch to “work”.

We sat across from each other, him on a rattan weave bench with futons, me in an uncomfortable hand-twisted cattail rush chair. Between us, a low thatched table with thick bamboo stick legs, held together with hemp rope. On top: a Smith & Wesson revolver, two open cans of Pabst Blue, and my portable digital recorder.

“David, this book you’re writing. I want you to focus on one thing. This is the most important thing to me.”

“Yes.”

“I want you to tell the people that the stories they’ve heard about me, the media, the blogs. They’re not real. In fact, nothing’s real.”

He stared out the side window. The hush of ocean waves filled the room with a natural white noise. If the room were bugged, they would not be able to make out the conversation.

“How do you mean?” I asked. “Are you saying they lied about you?”

“Nyet. That’s not what I mean, David.”

“What then? Throughout your thirty-three year career as CEO of over four companies, you have flooded the press with endless interviews and hype, every chance you got. But you never refuted nor argued the claims they made on you.”

He made no eye contact. Without looking, in one swift motion he swiped at his beer, brought it to his lips and sipped loudly.

“I guess, in a way, that’s a noble way of handling it. You were aloof to their absurd claims of illegal drug use, manufactured sensationalism and PR stunts that would’ve gotten any other person in your position into a lot of trouble…”

He turned to me. His face was placid, expressionless. His limpid eyes could’ve been dissecting me, judging me or fucking me up the ass for all I knew.

“Why did you never deny them?”

“It’s like this, David,” he slurred, then struck each of the next words emphatically. “Reality. Doesn’t. Exist.”

I wondered if he was about to venture into the philosophy of Napoleon Hill or some other New Thought, The Secret woo-woo spiritual laws of success. Instead, the revolver had suddenly teleported from the tabletop into his right hand.

“Woah, Viktor,” I tensed.

“Take this gun,” he said, as he released the barrel, spun it and flicked it back in. “Is this gun real?”

“Victor. Let’s put down the gun, OK?”

“Well, OK,” he strained, as he stretched to reach for something behind his couch, something hidden low or in the side table abutting it. He never let go of the pistol once. He waved it with nonchalance, as if it were a part of him. “What if…”

Viktor put the tip of his tongue on his philtrum as continued to rummage. He grimaced as his torso contorted to reveal toned musculature.

“Ah,” he gasped. “There they are.”

He produced a box .500 magnums and slammed them on the table. The metal clinked and echoed. He palmed a bullet.

“OK, David,” he said as he nudged the thumb piece and dropped the barrel, “the model 500 has five chambers…”

He spun it, stopped it, loaded the bullet from his other hand, spun the barrel again, and locked it.

“You see? Five.” He pointed the gun vaguely in my direction. My brow glistened with sweat.

I didn’t dare move a muscle. I had never seen a real gun in my life, never mind having one aimed at me. “Viktor, seriously… put down the gun. Please. You are making me uncomfortable.”

“Now, David, you’re a smart boy, da? One bullet. Five chambers. That means there’s a twenty percent chance it will go off if I pull the trigger.”

He cocked the pistol. The erect hammer hung in the humid air, heat eddying around it. He pulled the trigger. I slammed my eyes shut in the same moment, nearly wetting myself. A harmless click echoed. I blinked, tears of fear and relief blurring my vision. Reflexively , I leapt up to my feet.

“What the fuck!?” I cried.

“Sit down, David. Do not worry. Nothing will happen to you.”

“You just fired a loaded gun at me!”

“It’s fine, David. Look,” he said, calm as ever as he carelessly placed the barrel against his right temple. “Now we know there’s a twenty-five percent the gun will go off.”

He pulled. The double-action mechanism snapped. Nothing. “Thirty-three percent now.”

I had not sat back down. My entire body vibrated uncontrollably now. “Jesus Christ! Stop this! Stop this now!”

He pulled again. Nothing. “Fifty-percent. Either or. The next shot could be the end of me… Or not.”

A part of me felt an incredible moral urge to tackle this bear of a Russian man and stop this insanity, but my feet were firmly planted in concrete.

“Watch this, David,” he fired the Smith & Wesson three times in rapid succession. The gun did not go off. “I can do this all day long.”

He pulled the trigger another four, five, six times. I had lost count. Time had frozen for me. I was not there anymore. I was looking down at the scene like an overhead camera.

“David, you there?” Viktor asked, as if he saw my disembodied spirit floating over the husk of my body. The revolver fell to his side as he snapped his fingers twice near my face. “David?”

I reconnected with reality. He was not dead. The spell broke. “What did you do?” I asked.

He grinned. A set of perfect pearly whites. Expensive work done, no doubt. “What did I tell you, David?” The gun barrel nudged against his short, crisp sideburns again. “Reality,” click. “Doesn’t,” click. “Exist,” click. Nothing.

Was it sleight of hand? It’s got to be. He must have not loaded the bullet at all. I’m interviewing David Fucking Blaine in the middle of nowhere. I am fucked. This is fucked. The thought chilled me to the bone despite the tropical heat. I shivered.

He must have read my mind. Because at that moment, he aimed the pistol out the window, fired and the shriek of startled birds pierced my ears before I registered the crack of the speeding bullet. The chronology of sound had reversed for me.

Later that afternoon, I found myself at Manny’s downing whiskey shots after a greasy burger and fries lunch. Viktor had led me there after my nerves had settled.

Manny’s was the nearest sign of civilization after you left Viktor’s secret compound in the isolated northern jungles of Ambergris Caye. In truth, I had no idea where I was anymore. San Pedro was somewhere south of me and the Mexican border north of me. On the day I had arrived, Viktor had driven me for hours far from the peninsula’s lonely airport and long into his sweltering green labyrinth. I had not needed a blindfold to get lost.

Manny spoke broken English and laughed wholeheartedly with a set of broken teeth. “Ah, the American journalist,” he had announced to no one and everyone in the bar. “You write rich man’s book!”