Gabriele Micozzi

Last Weekend

Lana is sucking my cock as if she were paid by the stroke of her tongue, and in fact she is. Four hundred euros for every client she makes come within three minutes. She looks me in the eyes while she works. She is a professional. She killed her husband with a wood axe in 2022, seven blows to the back of the skull while he slept. She told me ten minutes ago, smoking a cigarette on my lap. Now she is sucking my cock. On her right wrist she wears a white bracelet identical to mine.

There are seven of us in this room they call the premium suite. Four men, three women. All wearing the bracelet. All sentenced to death. Cigarette in mouth, cock out, cunt in the air, cocaine on the marble coffee table like powdered sugar on my grandmother’s fritters. The State – don’t ask which one; at that level they all start to look alike – has thought of everything. Four-hundred-dollar Japanese whisky. MDMA in little heart-shaped candies. Poppers in the bathroom dispensers as if they were hotel soap. Marcus, to my right, has just snorted two lines and now Aaliyah is jerking him off while he cries. He cries. She laughs. She is beautiful. Black, nearly two meters tall, with a knife scar under her right breast. She slit her boyfriend’s throat and his lover’s in a Memphis motel in 2023, five cuts each.

“How much do you think they’re paying us?” Marcus asks me, his teeth stained with coke.

“They’re not paying us. The people watching us? They’re paying like maniacs.”

“How much?”

“Manhattan-apartment money. Per head.”

Marcus nods. He was an auditor before he slit his wife’s throat over the toilet because she had discovered he had not been going to the gym for five years and had kept it from him so she would not humiliate him. Courtesy kills more than discourtesy, Marcus explained earlier. He did not take it well.

Lana pulls away, spits into the champagne glass beside her, drinks from another. Her eyes are red. Not from crying. From eight straight hours of coke.

“Not long now,” she whispers. “Room two at eleven.”

“What is room two?”

“The one where they kill you.”

She smiles. Starts sucking again.

“How do you know?”

She pulls away again. “I’ve been here a week. They tell you everything the first night. They want you to know. It helps the performance.” She turns toward one of the cameras in the cornice and makes a little heart with her hands. “You’re on, too, Mister Italian. Say hello.”

I say hello. The camera waves back, I imagine.

“When do you die?”

“Tonight, after you. I’m in the Premium Plus package. The clients bought the encore.”

“Fuck.”

“Whatever. Outside there was only a cell and an injection eight months from now. Here there’s cock, coke, and rich men paying fifty thousand euros to watch me come. I feel like Madonna.”

The bell rings at exactly eleven. It does not growl. It does not scream. Ding ding. Five-star hotel concierge.

A door opens in the wall that had looked blind until then. A man in a gray suit comes out. Fifty or so. He smiles like a dentist. Hands folded.

“Ladies. Gentlemen. The second part of your experience awaits.”

Marcus grabs my wrist. Hard. Says nothing. Aaliyah is still laughing, but it is a different laugh now, the laugh of someone who has started seeing the walls breathe. Lana walks in front of everyone, naked, like a hostess closing a flight.

Room two.

White.

Seven luxury dental recliners. Seven IV bags already waiting. Seven nurses smiling like Lana. The chairs are angled toward a wall of smoked glass. Behind the glass, in the half-dark, silhouettes of seated people. Drinks in hand. A soft round of applause. Not enthusiasm. Purchase confirmation.

I sit down. The nurse strokes my arm. The needle goes in. Lana was right. It does not hurt.

The last thing I see before I go is the reflection of my cock, still half-hard, superimposed on the smoked glass over the face of an old man on the other side, calmly touching himself under the jacket of his five-thousand-euro suit.

***

I wake up.

The package did not include death.

They drug you to the marrow, carry you to room three, open you up – kidneys to Riyadh, liver to Istanbul, heart to an industrialist in Milan who does not want to know the donor’s name – and then they put you back together. Yes. It costs three times as much. The Resurrection package, clients call it, laughing among themselves. Seventy-two hours of presumed death, partial harvesting, organs replaced with gene-edited pig tissue grown in the Netherlands, and then they return you to prison with your white bracelet. All legal. All consensual. You signed, remember?

And now, for the eight months you have left before the real injection, you have to live with a liver that is not yours, two pig kidneys, and a heart that stopped beating the day before it began beating for you.

The first beat of a new heart is not something you forget.

The second is when you understand that even the first one was never really yours.

In my cell, they left me the souvenir. On the nightstand. A little blue velvet box with a white card printed inside: Thank you from the client. Enjoy the rest of your stay. Inside, preserved in formaldehyde, was the little finger of my left hand. I checked it under the neon bulb in the cell. It is mine. The cat scar from 1997 is still there.

The client had paid for it as a trophy. Then he changed his mind.

They returned it to me because he did not want it anymore.

On the back of the card, a QR code. Rate your Concierge experience. Your opinion matters.

I scanned it with the disposable phone they had left me for the eight months I still have.

Three stars out of five.

The pinkie had arrived cold.