Quid Pro Nihilo

Benedictus Plumber is a young buck.

‘I’ve got all these ideas man’, he says to the bookmaker. She nods, grunts, and then hands Ben another betting slip.

‘Lucky Springs’, Ben kisses the paper catching the scent of a promiscuous note, ‘this is the one-

‘Sylvia.’

‘Sylvia, that’s right. This is the one, I can feel it in my bones’, drawing the “o’s” out in an exaggerated stretch.

All eyes are fixed on the triangular telescreens. The thoroughbreds fog-up the cold racetrack. The jockeys anxiously check the reigns of their chariots.

On your marks.

Get-set…

Lucky Springs collapses as she comes straight out of the blocks. Ben Plumber curses a God he has never once prayed to.

‘It’s a pleasure doing business with you Ben-

‘Quit the BS Sylvester, what do I owe you?’

‘Fifteen thousand.’

‘What do you want to bleed me dry – I’ve got a family to provide for c’mon man.’

Ben had neither partner, nor child, though he could be paternal with his geraniums.

‘Don’t try pull nothing over my eyes Ben. You knew the goddamn amount the bet was worth before you placed it, now give…me… my… money.’

‘Alright, alright.’

Ben signed the check and handed it over to the bookmaker.

‘A curse on this establishment!’

Two faceless Centurions toss Ben out onto the pavement, laugh, then turn back into the dinge of the quaint bordello. Ben puzzled over the source of their laugh, eventually giving up. He might have gambled away fifteen thousand dollars. It might have been the sum total of all his birthdays and Christmases, rolled into the savings burrowed away from minor jobs, combined with a rather successful run as a crooked coal salesman. All his savings, gone like that. All because of Lucky Springs; he vowed to never utter those dreadful words again promising sincerely to his soul that he would never smile at a horse again.

*

Ben sat at the end of his bed. A simple man, never dwelling on past mistakes. The devastating loss of one’s entire lifesavings merely fueled an inner optimism within him.

‘I entered this world with nothing. I can’t lose nothing.’

Truth be told Ben had negative nothing. The cheque he wrote out to Sylvia – void, of course. It being only a matter of time until she met with her Mensarii, he saw him there: his chubby thumb and index finger making an Evil Eye, indicating the sum total of Ben’s bank balance. The Centurions would then come over and kick his teeth in, take whatever they could find as collateral, and then throw him in the debtors prison. Ben shook off the negative thoughts as easily as a dog shakes off the wet.

‘It’s Quid Pro Nihilo.’

He knew this to be a truism. Was it the Mundus Novus motto? Probably not: did it matter; not really. Books hold answers, and fuel: something he found out when running low on coal one time. He owned all the classics: ‘Get Rich in 30 Minutes’, ‘Will Your Way to an 8 Figure Salary’, ‘The Ancient Secrets of the Medicis’, ‘Money Magic’. Ben Plumber’s curiosity waned a little as his passionate intensity deflated.

Out of sheer hopelessness, Ben Plumber got on his knees and opened up his heart to Fortuna, Goddess of fortune. The Roman Empire embraced Christianity a long time ago, Ben’s elementary education could not tell him how long, maybe one thousand years maybe longer, in spite of this the old religion still persisted forming a metaphorical ivy around the wooden trunk of Catholicism.

‘O’ blessed Fortuna, Goddess of prosperity, Guardian of all that which expands for both beneficence and sorrow.’

Where these words came from Ben could not say, he had no clue what beneficence even meant.

‘I Ben Plumber, humbly ask for the warmth of good fortune, so be it or my life may depend upon it. O’ great One-

A book fell from the radiator-bookshelf. Plumber found himself trying to piece back together the fragments of his religious concentration. He made his way through the rubble of his broken concentration and found ‘The Secrets of the Medicis’ staring back at him. He slung the mass marketed paperback across the room with the intent of causing the book harm. The book landed safely on the ironing board turned coffee table.

Something heavy pulled the room. Ben’s eyes gravitated onto something so dark that it seemed to absorb all light in the room. His bedside lamp shivered at the sight of it. Underneath where the cursed Medici book had fallen lay a small notebook no bigger than the Vade Mecum that junior Doctors carry. In high Latin he saw inscribed on the front his own words, ‘my life may depend upon it’, he jumped back. Fortuna had answered his prayer.

It read:

The reader of this book finding themselves in dire misfortune hath called upon the assistance of Fortuna, Goddess of Chance, and she hath decreed fiscal assistance to the querent. The querent mayst write (in their own hand) their desired amount; conditional on the understanding that they forego the pleasures of a single sense for eternity. If the querent so wishes they may forego the pleasures of all four senses, separately of course.

I. Hearing.

II. Smell (including taste).

III. Sight.

IV. Touch.

A loud crash rattles down the hallway from the entrance to Ben’s apartment. A tree-trunk-of-a-forearm has punched through Ben’s front door and is now methodically groping for the lock.

‘Where’s Sylvia’s money.’ Demanded the gruff voice of a Centurion.

‘One second, I’m sure I left it lying around here somewhere.’

‘No more games Ben.’

The two Centurions bypassed the door and were now hovering slowly down the hallway. Intimidation echoing from their bootsteps; they take the occasional interlude to burst the partition wall with their batons.

Without much thought Ben Plumber writes his desired amount: $20,000. Not too much, as to be gluttonous. Not too little, as to be foolish. Just enough to cover his debt and a little bit to gamble away. He draws a line through ‘smell (including taste)’. For Ben smell was the lesser of all senses and thus the obvious sense to ‘forego the pleasures of’ – what did that mean? ‘I guess’, he thought, ‘I’ll find out’.

*

‘Right. I want you to tell us in what order you want to be battered first so we can do the exact opposite of what you want us to do.’ They laugh like two uneducated hyenas…

‘Can you smell that? It smells like off-milk and rotting gore-

‘Shut-up! Don’t you see I’m busting your balls. Forget about it. You’ve ruined it now. Publius pat him down, make sure he’s not packing.’

The other centurion began to search Ben with a zeal suggestive of regularity, and potentially arousal. He gagged at the stench coming off Publius.

‘What’s this then? ‘Appy to see me?’

From Ben’s jacket pocket Publius exhumed twenty thousand freshly printed dollars.

‘Well, I never boss – take a look.’

‘Unbelievable. I was looking forward to beating the little maggot’, the main one counted the money, ‘consider the extra five thousand as collateral.’

The Centurions grinned and swiftly exited the apartment, taking care to smash up Ben’s geraniums on the way.

*

At first the smell was indescribable in its horror, and then Ben quickly identified each individual item. Curdled milk. Rotting corpse fungus. Putrefying sewers in the midday sun. And the worst of all, faecal matter mixed with vomit. All of the scents coalesced as one. His vision blurred from repetitive disgust.

It was unmistakably the book. Ben now understood what the book meant, he was to smell and taste like this for the rest of his life. How stupid it had been to ask for such a small amount of money, he could have asked for all the money in the world. He blamed the Centurions.

Benedictus Plumber should have given up then and there, thrown the little black book in the coal-paper-fire and carried on his life with his remaining senses intact. Did he?

‘Sacrifice one more sense’, he thought, ‘and never have to worry about money again.’

His hand poised over his remaining senses like a guillotine.

Which ending will it be then?

I. Hearing

The mute button was pressed on Ben’s life. ‘Silence’, Ben thought or said, he could only be sure that he had evaded all consequences by picking this option. Granted, he still threw up at regular intervals from the inescapable smell – but deafness was a trifle compared to foregoing his smell/taste.

He bought the biggest house in the nicest District of Mundus Novus, furnished it with all the must-haves and paid for many things he would never use. On the fifth night of deafness as Ben Plumber slept music trickled down the track of his sleep tunnel. “Tiny Dancer” by Elton John played, Ben loved this song. His favourite line was the first line of the chorus, for it was the only line he knew. He waited for it. The song grew louder, ruling out sleep. Verse One… Verse Two… Pre-Chorus… Verse One…Pre-Chorus… Repeat. The chorus never came. This was the caveat of Ben’s agreement. He did not sleep that night, nor did he sleep the next night, nor the night after that. Benedictus Plumber finally died of exhaustion twelve days later. When the neighbour found his body, she told authorities that Ben had been mumbling, ‘hold me close now (sic), tiny dancer’, in a catatonic state.

III. Sight

Ben feared the loss of sight more than anything. He still slept with a nightlight. Fortunately for Ben, the Goddess of Luck was feeling merciful.

He waited for darkness, but darkness never came. There was no light not even the absence of light. His apartment, his bookcase, his clothes, himself; everything folded into lineless nothingness. After stubbing his toe twice, Ben deigned that “blank” – but not white – was the best term for all that he perceived.

He fumbled his way out of the building, heading towards the bank. Every now and then car horns surprised him, and he would shuffle laterally back onto the pavement. On more than one occasion he nearly got wiped out by a drowsy freight truck. Until at last, after assaulting a dozen pedestrians, he reached the bank. Sirens whirred in the distance.

Once through the revolving doors Ben noticed an uneasy stillness in the air-conditioned room. Banks were not meant to be silent, he thought. Someone shouted at him in a language he could not understand. Ben threw up for the first time in a while. The person shouted at Ben again, this time more frantically. Plumber continued to fumble forwards. Something cold and slim was pressed into his chest. Ben tried to identify the instrument. It was too late. The masked bank robber unloaded three slugs into Ben’s heart killing him instantly. In his last moments Ben felt himself smiling, Quid Pro Nihilo.

IV. Touch

What is it to touch? Is it just one thing pressed up against another thing. Tactual adjectives passed like meteors through Ben’s mind. As to which tactile sensation would punish him, he did not know. It was a punishment. And he had the sense that none of it had to happen, his life did not need to carry on this way; if his life were a story, he would have stopped reading after the Centurion’s final exit.

But in that same perversion of fascination that makes everyone a voyeur (in the right circumstances) he was resigned to play through each situation, in spite of his suffering.

Benedictus Plumber ceased to exist. By surrendering his tangibility, he ceased to touch and be touched and thus ceased to exist. How he ceased to exist was somewhat peculiar. Ben filtered through the floor like liquid. He slipped through the foundations, the roots, the mantle, the world, etc. Plumber became a ghostly apparition forever descending through the universe, feeling nothing.