The New Deal

The day was overcast and therefore a perfect day to make a stop at the cinema. I had the choice of Attack of the Spinefish starring Peggy Lee and directed by Stan Randy or I Want Your Skin which starred and was directed by Mickey Philpot. I’d read the book I Want Your Skin (on which the movie was obviously based) written by Casey Green which was accounted as the best piece of literature ever written in the history of mankind on the subject of racial inequalities in urban life. He wrote the book in prison after he’d been sentenced for the first degree murder of thirteen people. The murders were necessary for his social experiment, he said. He carried with him a basket of glippers which were little animals that looked like a genetic crossbreeding of a piranha and a kangaroo mouse. These creatures would jump down a person’s throat in a swarm and then eat the body from the inside out leaving the skin fully intact. Casey would wear the skin in drugstores and shopping malls and note the differences in how people greeted and treated him. The experiment involved thirteen different suits to represent thirteen different races. The author witnessed from a first person point of view the inequalities of man he was trying to understand. The book went into publication just before he was executed and his last words were "for justice and equality" which were echoed by the executioner as he pulled the switch. The first chapter of the book was titled Looking At Myself Through My Brother’s Glass Eye and it started with something like "…and I gaze at myself through the glazed eyes of every stranger in the universe. My frown is made of lead and my blacked eyes look like thumbholes in clay. My self-hatred is not suicidal, but homicidal". The book went on like that for thirteen chapters of revealing madness. The movie was perfect.

When I reached home I checked my mailbox and found an updated pamphlet warning me of the world’s demise and a summary of the new deal which required that I go to the diamond store in the downtown galleria and kill everyone there in whatever method I prefer. The repossession crew would come later to collect and I’d receive my cut in the form of a cheque in the mail. It seemed easy enough.

I never liked to sleep the night before a deal because it gave me a fundamental sense of right and wrong which was never a good thing when on the next day you had to kill a number of people who you might not be able to count on one hand. I stayed up and ate caffeine plugs and watched video documentaries on all things unnatural until morning when I could justify not only my own wrongdoings but those of every backwards fiend in the galaxy. The business was a fragile process and to be king you had to treat everything like a crystal vase, just never catch your face in the reflection.

The trip to the galleria was unusual as the sun was high and bright while people smiled and said hello and the birds sang their little improvised tunes the whole way. The only sad thing about such a day is its impermanence.

At the diamond store I was shocked to see that my job had already been done and in a more gruesome manner than I would have ever employed. There were two men and a woman, all with their throats cut and their eyes torn out, their bodies held in solemn positions with cheap twine. I could hear the sounds of their killers knocking things about in the back of the store accompanied by the sandy jingling of diamonds sliding into satchels.