Mister Winner

Lynx drove slowly through the empty city streets, something he always found a powerful experience. It seemed as if the ghosts of previous generations had come out and about, some with their shopping bags full of disappointment and guilt, trying to swap them for nectar and holy grace. Others, maybe, happily remembering good times and a world without enemies. Mello sat beside him. It occurred to Lynx that the man still made a curiously pleasant companion, even when saying little. As yet, he had divulged no hints or issued no statements about himself other than to tell Mello his name and to agree that, yes, he was the famous athlete. Who was this sensitive and gentle man who had, for some absurd reason, applied for a body-building course? Maybe Mello could read Lynx’s thoughts, because he spoke almost as soon as they had passed through the athlete’s brain cells. “Success,” he said. “You’ve done pretty well for yourself, eh? I never seem to get any.” “It’s entirely a matter of attitude,” Lynx replied. Beside him, the mass of carbohydrate shifted in its metallic wrapping. “I know about all that,” Mello said with his wind-driven communications gear. (Lynx had always found it curiously absurd and sort of ‘make-do’ that humans convey sense to each other through their mouths. The precious words could so easily get tangled up with food, or some other bodily substance). “If you have a success attitude you win, if not you lose,” I did a PhD in psychology some years ago. An enigma, thought Lynx Foxberry-Sorbonne. Suddenly he felt that he really did need a drink. He had never been a great alcohol man, preferring to keep his general wellbeing and sexual response at the peak of sensitivity. At parties he would often just hold a glass of something and never touch it, but still enjoy every moment (or at least he used to). He sometimes wondered if he had his own built-in cocaine distillery that served up just what he needed automatically. Now, however, he felt he needed a diversion, with the psychic atmosphere of a cold rain coming into his relationship with Bunny. The silent echo of an unspoken curse, bounced round his being, just out of reach, yet perceptible for all that. He didn’t know many of the night clubs at this end of the city. ‘I’ll just go to the first one I see,’ he decided, falling back on his thickly reinforced foundation of self-confidence, his assumption that everything would always turn out just fine if he followed his nose. Only by some gigantic misfortune did he see ‘The System’ first. Maybe one of the old ghosts, out for a laugh, guided him there. It would have amused the old thing to see how a clean-living numbat would cope with the dive’s garbage-strewn psychic paths as they twisted through so many crumbling hopes and broken dreams. Normally Lynx liked the sort of night clubs where you can rave. This was one where you could die, the loud music not intended for dancing to, but for hiding the screams. At the door a bouncer said “You got ID?” “No, I use a condom,” Lynx said and pushed past. He was big and obviously muscular, but beside Mello he fancied he would look almost cute. The doorman must have been an intelligent soul, maybe a uni student. He made no effort to stop the two men, after sizing up Mello and working out that trying to push a bulldozer back out of the door would only end in tears. Inside, they found the proprietor peeling the cerebral cortex off the brains of his clients, using high-volume, high-frequency sound as an abrasive agent and then finishing the work off with a strobe light. This presumably made it easier for him to pour the various drugs and intoxicants directly onto their brain cells, no fuss, no waste. Lynx tried to move carefully and slowly through the fragmented light and the intermittent figures that skittered and twirled as if dodging the thunderbolts of music that roared about in random flight paths, scattering whatever they hit. Inevitably though, while the music chipped away at his own brain, knocking out one relay station after another, he blundered into a body with something resembling a girl’s face but with, maybe, an old-fashioned hand-operated car horn as lips. The girl had no flesh that he could discern and if somebody said “Oh you met her last night, how was she?”, he would have had to answer that he simply couldn’t make out, there being nothing much in her being to have any type of health. Even then, that early in his relationship with the girl, Lynx thought he saw a party of morals sneaking away out of the club door in tears, afraid that he would accost them and ask the meaning of a world where girls like this could exist. Briefly, he wondered if the thin body, a body he could actually only see by slitting his eyes, was in fact levitating or just using the up-current from somebody’s joint to maintain its upright position. “Mind what’cha dooin’ya bugarse,” a voice called out as Lynx pushed on against the resistance of the crowd, its accent as broad as the great red deserts of central Australia. The origin of the voice? A sort of youth, this one big and oddly boyish of face, but with blue hair. The youth-like thing stood up, fists at the go, bop-bop-bop, already trying out the air pressure with little stabs, while his feet jerked him this way and that. “Comon then,” he snarled, “youse a wuss or what?” Mello gently pushed Lynx aside and hit blue-boy with a single straight right. The terror-kid fell uncoordinated over a table, where a threesome of girls worked at laying out the precious lines of powder that would constitute the ‘life’ that they had got for themselves that evening. The whole party disappeared, as the table collapsed and one lone syringe took off like an Apollo 12, desperate to escape the earth and go somewhere really turned on.