i.
Pulsing and unrelenting, the heat of the desert sun burned fire into the desert sand.
Even night became a black density scorched by fire. You had to struggle for every breath. Each one got stuck in your throat and could choke you.
ii.
The stars above us -- I gazed at them as I lay supine in our secret embrace. I gazed, then, enslaved, at him, into his eyes. My deeper secret, as he took me, before I knew I was gone, my deeper secret, like a ray from one of the stars, penetrated me just as he did. I turned crazy in a cosmic embrace. He became the only wonder, the only order I could follow. Only he! I clung to him with my lips. He burned me with his eyes.
I might have been going crazy, I know. I was. But the war, oh, the war! What had I been thinking when i signed? I hadn't been thinking. I was led by a mad magnetism, drawn by something I was fleeing from that finally caught me. But it was too late now. It did not matter what I thought. It was after I was in the army that I realized -- crazy as I seemed to be, crazy as I felt -- with no doubt about it, the war was crazier. It was the rule of madness upon earth. It was the kingdom of death I was serving. It was mad and it made men mad.
He only, only he, was not mad. He filled me and gave me life. He was the inevitability that guided me.
Nothing of my past remained except my disconnected, disconnecting recollection of it. But even memory, memory too, was burning out.
You would think it would be painful to undergo what I have undergone, what then I was about to undergo. But you would be mistaken. Mistaken, as I so often had been mistaken. That was when I knew it, when I had to undergo what we endured, when things began to go "wrong." That's when I knew my life had been a mistake but was no longer.
The pain of the beating was meaningful, exculpatory. It brought me to a point where it was easy to feel nothing. That was where I needed to be. When that emptiness was accomplished, when the man I had been in the past was gone, then I was able to become his entirely.
We were lucky really. Our fault, although grave -- we had entered each other's minds and flesh and feeling -- was judged the lesser fault. Theirs, the bare-chested, drunk-with-anger, battle-ravished, battle-frustrated, tense as tight coils soldiers' rampage, theirs had been a fault of violence and brutality. It had to be hidden. Having been beaten, we were thought of as punished already and we were, consequently, only discharged. We were the evidence of what it really was that war and the army and military repression reallty were, and they had to get rid of us. The sting we were meant to feel was that the judges marked our discharges dishonorable. That was meant to guarantee our silence and discredit us if we spoke. Why listen to men branded dishonorable? But what do they know about honor? Or about our discharges, either?
My life up until the time I had become dishonorable to them -- had been a mistake. Being with him, however, was not a mistake.
Strange! I was glad it was happening. I remembered the biblical verse. Yes, that I remembered, always attached to Handel's music: For he is like a refiner's fire.
And who shall stand when he appeareth?
Evidently not me.
Every time he appeared, I fell upon my face before him and called him master.
No, that is not quite correct, for what is called I did nothing. There was no I. Something called him master through me. And it was by that cry of master, in the exactitude of that submission, that I was able to locate and identify myself.
And he was a fire, and he burned me, and I was consumed.
Of course, there was trouble. There was bound to be trouble. First there was the beating. Then there were the consequences.
But I was unaware of any of it. I was unable to see any of it coming. How could I have seen any of it coming? He had blinded me, blinded me with a vision brighter than anything I had ever seen before.
And there was nothing of cruelty in what we did. There was nothing cruel in our love, nothing cruel in his domination, nothing belittling in my submission. Cruelty does not exalt. And we were exalted. We were, in that dead and killing land, two men in love. It was a miracle. The ones who beat us were debased. And the ones who found us dishonorable are eternally belittled in their deepest hearts.
It was they who were blasphemers.
Exalted, yes, we were, so much so that when there was trouble, when we had to face the consequences, it was not troubling. Everything was going exactly as it had to. We had been beaten, and fortunate -- we were not injured. We were not beaten, not defeated.
The moorings were loosened and the vast and waste desert was becoming the sea of radiant waters lapping upon the grassy slope of ground upon which we could stand.
Certainly I might have felt something disturbing had there been incarceration. But there wasn't. There was only discharge. Dishonorable discharge! Hah! But not for me was it dishonorable. Everything to do with honor, pride, ego, had already been discharged in me after that first discharge, after he had kissed me and taken me and bent me and made me everything I knew I always might have been.
I could not tell: was this a trance now or had everything until now been a trance. Reality had been a nightmare. If this now were a dream, then it was so: in dreams begin reality. The war was Plato's cave, and we had seen the light and known it for what it was, and we fled from it.
The dead and bleeding bodies passed before me of men who had been nothing to me. My poor and beaten doubles! In death they became symbols of everything to live for and not to die for. Just the breath. Just the breath. Leave us the breath. That is what we need. But the wars and the rulers rob us of it. Just the breath.
He had chosen for me not to die. It was in his eyes, on his lips, in the quivering of his whole body when he was inside me. And I felt with all my soul the same living love for him. It was a conspiracy of love in which we were joined.
This is not what we are here for, this war, he said as his eyes searched mine for a place of entrance and his hard masculinity met with my opening receptivity.
There is a barrier of pain. But it must not be endured. It must be broken through. And the pleasure on the other side is more than bliss. It is where you dissolve. But it is not death like the madness of war is death. It is vital like the on-going energy of life, of life that is allowed to live.
Madness, brutality and violence. In order for them to rule, order and regimentation must be imposed, established.
But with me with him with us the force that made order was the meandering of the stream and the rushing of the current, the gusts of frenzy, and the placid cool pools of gently swirling and lapping stillness upon which to float.
iii.
A mile or two beyond the town, which has not seen prosperity for nearly a century, up a steep road that winds along the side of the mountain up to the next plateau, and then over a serpentine dirt road to a clearing -- the old Victorian house appears under the expansive blue and cloud flecked sky, behind the arboreal gate flooded in spring by foliage. It is of a previous time when wealth still came to the area and families practiced the habits of abiding by civilized and civilizing rituals. Now it was under-populated and rough, and we got the house for a song.
But I did not expect that Geoffrey would be so fragile. I did not. Or that I would have the strength to endure without him. He had been a rock and a ramrod in the desert and I loved the feeling of his skin so close to the always stirring power of his muscles even when he lay upon his bunk in repose, and I could occupy myself for hours with resisting touching him. But now, the spirit that had been so firm in him grew entirely slack.
Perhaps as he withered, for that reason, it could find its way into me. So much we had become one. We had become home to one and the same power.
I held him as he sobbed, day after day, in the morning as he stirred into wakefulness. He would look at me and then bury his face in his hands weeping and curling himself up into an inflexible inwardness.
Slowly and gently with kisses and caresses I held him and warmed him and brought him to loosen his hold upon himself, to open up, to open up and give himself to me, to open, yes, to open up, to open, no matter how bad it had been. Now all we needed to do was just breathe quietly.
Together, we breathed. I held him and we breathed, and he loosened himself in my arms and smiled at me and kissed me and thanked me and told me how much he loved me and how much I meant to him and he stroked me on my chest and gazed into my eyes and brought his lips down to mine and kissed me.
And I was deceived and believed we had escaped.
iv.
It was only after he told me, sobbing, that he was afraid I was going to kill him, and so he was afraid that he was going to kill me first, before I killed him, that I really became afraid.
He stayed awake for days, sleepless, and I was wary.
The night he finally slept, I sat awake beside him and I kissed him and told him he was mine, even if he was gone, that I loved him and would have died for him and never would have killed him but would always have protected him and would have been with him wherever he might have had to go. I had told him that before. But now he was still, as if he were listening.
I cradled him and kissed his eyes shut.
But it was too late.
[When you write to me, please type the name of the story in the subject slot. Thanks.]