Undertow
by northern

As long as JC can remember, he has liked to take things apart.

When he was little, he could sit for hours with old alarm clocks, plucking piece after piece away, until only the shell and the different parts in tidy little piles were left. His mom was always scolding him for destroying every piece of machinery they had. He never was that good at putting things back together again. Sometimes he made art works of the prettiest and most interesting parts. The arrangement of wing nuts, springs and the shiny green circuit card from the inside of his dad's new computer was beautiful and strange, the objects freed from their former, hidden existence.

His dad usually liked that he was interested in fiddling with mechanics; he stumbled on Joshua lying on the floor with a screwdriver and the old tape recorder and merely smiled, ruffled his hair and called him 'my little scientist'. When Joshua got his new Atari computer open and gutted into seemingly random heaps of junk, he wasn't nearly as understanding. The insurance company didn't see the experiments of a ten-year-old boy as something they'd be liable to pay for.

At the Mickey Mouse Club, JC quickly became known as the strange boy with the Swiss knife, since he was always using it for something. Picking his nails. Slicing dried blobs of gum into little pieces with the serrated blade and kneading them back together again with his fingers. Using the tiny screwdriver to unscrew the locks on doors. They asked him to open their coke bottles, if he was close when they needed it. Mostly, they left him alone when they didn't need to rehearse or record with him.

He had found a dead mouse once and used a scalpel he had stolen years ago from his uncle to dissect it. It was kind of neat, the way he could use the sharp sharp instrument to peel away the skin from muscle, once he had gotten the hang of it and he had turned the mouse on its stomach so he didn't have to see the mangled mess he had made of it with his first try. He looked at the anatomy picture in the book about rodents he had borrowed from the library to see where it would be best to cut next. He tried to be as precise as possible, dividing the flesh from the bones, but either the scalpel wasn't sharp enough or he wasn't tidy enough - his fingers were sticky and the mouse parts were only uneven blobs of flesh when he was finished. The mouse bones looked promising, if he could find a way to get rid of the slimy membranes clinging stubbornly to them. He had read somewhere that you could leave bones in anthills to clean them, but he didn't know of any nearby anthills, so he decided that a pile of leaves might do as well. After all, there were insects living there too.

But when he came to collect the bones early in the morning on the day after, they were gone. He couldn't decide which thought was more unsettling to him; the thought of some larger animal crushing the bones with its teeth, or the idea that some other boy had found them and was now the proud owner of his hard work.

He didn't want to go through that again, though, with some other animal. There was no challenge in digging with an actual knife through actual entrails. There were no secrets to be found inside.

Sometimes when he sang, he liked to close his eyes and imagine that his voice was a knife, a needle, piercing into whoever was listening and cutting them open to bring all their secrets into the light. When the girls cried, he studied them and wondered if he had succeeded. The other guys in the band never cried when he sang to them, but then, they had their own singing to think of.

He wasn't really interested in much else. The music, and the taking things apart; they were intertwined and hard to separate. He usually didn't try.

JC was much too interested not to find the clubs tempting. He asked around carefully to find out which ones were safe for him and acquired a membership with one of them. He went to an interview and asked to be taught how to take people apart, the real way. What he learned was how to bottom and how to top. He understood the concept of bottoming, but it didn't intrigue him as much. He liked the way it was possible to make someone naked to the bone without actually wielding a scalpel.

There was a fine line between naked and broken, and he learned how not to walk it. It was like music, in the way that improvisation and rigid rules were equally important, making art together when he trusted his instincts. He stripped people and brought out the shiny pieces hidden inside them, in a more tangible way than he could with music.

He never tells the others what he does once in a while in his spare time. He thinks they might know, anyway. Chris makes jokes, sometimes. Gives him different kinds of handcuffs for his birthdays.

JC knows there are shiny bits buried in Chris, waiting for him. He can see hints of them in Chris's eyes when he looks into them long enough, until Chris looks away.