Chapter 8 - the king in his alcove

Dread’s frigid grip coiled around his bones like an escaped tapeworm, shrinking Chapman’s colorless, goose-pimpled skin by two sizes. It could’ve been the coke (it usually was), but the certainty of impending disaster had sunk itself in his chest like a lead slug and stuck — the stagnant wound throbbed in exigent song, its bloodless gash-mouth howling.

His musings teetered towards madness, and his favorite stimulant only ever eroded his fraying sanity. His ex wives (all four of them, actually) hated the pits and peaks of his mood, hated its wild oscillations. Sure, he was no happy camper, but none of them understood that he, too, suffered during his episodes. They thought he got off on it, but no! Well, maybe he did, but only one out of every three outbursts. He deserved that meager joy as an occasional consolation; would they deny him of that, too?

No matter. He was through with marriage, with the world’s money-hungry whores. They had no use for Chapman The Man, only his means. Likewise, he had no use for The Wife, only the respect that came with having eye candy on his arm and a ring on his finger. Besides, what was a woman but a mirrored surface, reflecting back at him all his own inadequacies? So why subject himself to the agony of courtship?

Actual glass cut less deeply when fucked.

Not that Chapman was any friend to the looking glass. His anemic body was but a vessel for deal making and an orifice for his chosen vices, nothing more. He was an inch shy of Napoleon and looked about as lively as the infamous general after two whole centuries of moldering in his tomb.

Chapman relied on a pair of silver, thickly rimmed glasses to hide his icy irises, swimming in pink seas of veins. He favored these particular glasses, not because they could hope to stop his tired eyes from retracting further into his skull, but because he fancied himself a John Lennon look-alike while wearing them. He had the nose for it! His other features were less fortunate, but (once adequately booze-blurred) those pesky realities faded into irrelevant distortions, leaving only his precious nose and the halo shine of his spectacles.

He had no love for the rest of his anatomy, least of all his papercut thin slit of a mouth, nearly lipless and scarcely able to sheath his teeth. That hurdle had been a blessing, however, and he had learned early on to hold his tongue; watching his un-lips wrap around words was an awful display, and his peers had been all too eager to share with him their insight. Filthy little worms. As if he could have not already known. As if he could afford the ignorance!

He could buy the world twice over, even then, but children could not yet grasp the value of a dollar. Consequently, his family’s perverse perfusion of wealth burned impotently in Chapman’s pockets. Buying off bullies would only put the predators onto his scent; those fuckers would rather beat the green out of him than scrounge to earn their dollar. Pride was priceless to fragile men and schoolyard tyrants, he learned.

He learned, too, the economy of language. The less he spoke, the more attention he commanded when his silence broke, provided he struck decisively and with purpose pulsing through each line of rhetoric. His sour, pensive face became a weapon, untwisting itself only when he’d cornered his prey and the oratory killing blow was guaranteed. It was one of his few, true abilities, but not one he wielded with gratitude or grace. As he matured, he wished only for night’s merciful abandon, when he’d snuff his cocaine crutch until he could forget his hideous little mouth, his learnt lessons, and the weight of words. He’d jibber like a shell shocked soldier until the white noise of his grinding jaw lulled him into oblivion.

Chapman could have lived easily off of his father’s success (the old money was from many, many fathers back, in actuality), but he craved vengeance against a universe from which he’d wrested every material advantage, yet was still denied the least spark of human spirit. All his youth — spent as a charmless, wretched child-thing! Perhaps there would have been hope for him, if not for his father’s corruptive influence. A body is a limited tool which, as most things, eventually ages into inescapable incapability. But a mind turned rotten? Its influence is eternal, reaching far beyond the bounds of a body — its potential for cruelty bound only by opportunity.

However boundless his cruelty and capital, Chapman felt his authority falter on Bacchanalia, and this lapse in control was the catalyst for his steep mental decline. The grand opening had been a flawless success, certainly, and Dapsaelia distribution had gone off without a hitch in the states. His stocks soared and he was already rocketing towards the trillionaire status he so coveted. To what could he attribute this unshakable anxiety, then?

It was a shift in his employees (the ones he actually paid) that would have been unrecognizable to a man less discerning (or paranoid) than Chapman.

It had begun as what was, by his estimation, the emergence of an unearned reverence for Bacchanalia’s cash crop. Anything that was not money or making him money failed to interest Chapman, and his workers’ juvenile fanaticism was ignored, for a time.

His dismissal of the issue had been a mistake.

He initially welcomed the sudden spike in productivity, until he parsed the logic behind the phenomenon: they wanted to be through with their contracts and focus, in earnest, on procuring more Dapsaelia for themselves. Loyalty to his rule had become supplanted by a zealotry for that damnable weed, if the rumors were to be believed. Chapman may have laughed at the notion, if his sources had been any less reliable. A fucking plant had more power over a man than cold, hard cash? It was madness!

He had hoped to cull the Dapsaelia craze taking root in his men; the thing was a goddamn alien organism in his eyes. There was no issue in the island’s savages and the shit-sucking consumers in the United States eating that garbage; he held them all in the same lowly regard, but he needed the slavish commitment of his employees. Chapman would not tolerate them succumbing to the island’s seductions. Everyone knew full well of his disdain for Dapsaelia, moreso as Chapman cracked down on its consumption among his crew, and they had covertly organized to smuggle and ration its products throughout their ranks. Chapman had no qualms about killing any who would defy him, but the fixation spread to where he’d have to torch the entire island to be rid of Dapsaelia Mania.

Even Scarlett, whose cutthroat cunning he’d been nervous to have in proximity to himself, had dialed him for days on end, drunk on Dapsaelia’s nectar. His only child to have successfully extorted him was reduced to a burping, babbling drunkard whining to her father for petty favors. She rambled incoherently about some nothing-clerk named Mia and begged to “keep her”, to which he swiftly obliged. He’d send a memo through his network of lackeys to enact whatever accommodations would keep his bastard offspring silent. He couldn’t have cared less what station the islanders held, as expendable as they were. Let Scarlett have her plaything.

This was a portent of future misfortune, and unmistakably so. It was pointless to brood on it, though. He would be fine, would be safe in his palace — his sanctuary, away from Dapsaelia’s insidious influence. Ah, the coke was eroding his faculties again. Nothing insidious. No danger. Just brainless workers with no more knowledge of capital than his peers in primary school.

Harmless morons. Pointless superstition. He had commissioned them to construct for him Utopia and they had built Bedlam instead. But as long as the tourists and the settlers spent their money, none of his men’s madness meant anything at all. He was richer than god. He was the island’s king. He was…

*bzzzzzzzzz*

…interrupted.< br>
Goddamnit. Chapman’s phone jittered in his pocket, and right as nerves had started to cool! He might just pitch himself from his cliffside view if Scarlett had rung him again.

Fuck. Not her, but not much better.

It was Felicity.