Sleeping as Others
a novel
Estlin Adams
Orientation
People say all the time, I'm just not myself today. This could not be what they meant. It started with his leg being, for the first time ever, too long for his bed. John stretched it out in his groggy state, retracted it from the mattress edge. He wondered idly why, suddenly, he didn't fit a bed he'd slept in for years. He yawningly went back to sleeping. Then he noticed the hair--or rather, that where the hair should have been--was stubble-free. Fingers scratched thighs and the insides of knees that had been scraggly since junior high: nothing--as smooth and clammy, in fact, as someone else's skin he'd remembered feeling, very recently. Still under the covers, lights still off, he awoke far enough to inventory to his body: nails longer than they had been. Waist, somehow, narrower. The tuft of hair over his belly, gone. No traces of razor stubble there, either. Fingers traced the hip bones, skidded past where his appendectomy scar . . . should have been, and continued on into the hollow between legs left much more muscular than he'd last remembered. Pubes curled around his longest, groping fingers--and he clearly he had to stop and switch a light on. This wasn't a true, Kafkaesque experience, he thought. He was still human--just not the same human he had always been.
He and the mirror weren't on speaking terms, but with a few photographs unfixed, some beads knocked out of the way, and a tee shirt rubbed repeatedly over cloudy opacities, a face gleamed back at him while his eyeballs worked, for their part, on fixing and focusing the reflection. The blinking being looking back had narrower, beadier eyes and a perpetual expression of sarcastic, quizzical confusion. Quivering eyelids and pupils gaining and shrinking again made him think those peepers lacked glasses they had grown accustomed to. Over the lips, moist and full enough to remind him, again, of someone or something, no mustache intruded into the space beneath a flatter, thinner nose. A pointier chin scarcely needed a daily shave. A beauty mark aped some boy's version of the distinguished marking of Madonna or Marilyn Monroe. Almost immediately, he puckered what felt like someone else's lips.
He was once again wondering what or whom that mark reminded him of when he noticed his stoop. He was angled down to see himself better in the mirror. He had always looked directly into it, often with his date or his trick on his arm. Now he was looking down into it, and he was alone this weird morning, without the date or trick, who must have slipped out, sometime in the night. John wondered, palm and fingers moving back and forth across the strangely stubble-less face, eyes blinking in disbelief at the man reflected back before them: why had the guy left? Why wasn't he himself this morning? Why, in fact--and this was the head-scratcher, in a head full of chestnut hair combed to have a part in an unfamiliar place--why was it not his own face looking back at him? Why was it, instead, the face of the man he'd slept with the night before?
Starting to sweat, to worry he'd not yet in fact woken up, he explored the rest of the body that was new to him--or, not new exactly, just that all the attributes had been reattached to himself, that he had felt on a partner's body, just hours before. More muscle tone here, longer legs here. Less give and flab to butt cheeks here, longer distance from the head to the ring of the circumcision, there. This familiar scar missing, but that beauty mark added. The mark of a mother who thought the hair should be parted there, not here. The hole in the ear lobe on the left, where an earring must recently have been--though John didn't remember wearing one, and didn't remember last night's man (what had been his name?) wearing one either. Early-morning existentialism threatened to be the mental exercise of a day when he didn't recognize himself in his own mirror, in his own room. He looked around quickly at the posters, the dresser, the tee shirts on the floor: it was the same place he always woke up in. It just looked to all appearances that he wasn't any longer the man who had lived there. He'd brought someone home, it seemed, and then woke up as that someone, still in his, no-longer-John's, home.
Some slaps on cheeks once again chased the notion all of this was a dream. Some telescoping around his eyes established that he wore no virtual reality lenses; what he was seeing was real, even if it wasn't really him seeing it. Fingers, tapped on a hairless chin, accompanied forced recollections of the late night and the wee hours, some point in time which must, in theory, explain the present. He, John, had bought the beers, started the small talk, noticed the birth mark, sized up the man as he'd chosen a song from an electronic jukebox mounted on a wall. He'd decided to let birthmark man pick him up, to see where he took him, to see what John was like with. . . a man whose name started with a T. That man's lips, reflected still in the mirror, snarled up into a chortle that he couldn't even remember T-man's name: Toby? Not Tony; he would have remembered if The Ordinal Tonys had gained one more Tony on him that night (more on the Ordinal Tonys later). No pockets, no jeans to have pockets, no I.D. to look up Trent's name. Trent--and the eyeballs swelled in the mirror in what looked like recognition. Slightly tighter focus brought it out with a sigh: Brent, that was it. Or, maybe that wasn't it, after all. In the mirror he caught a critical glint in the eye of the man whose face he still couldn't--even in this instance--match with his name.
Two random thoughts occurred to a brain still addled with the seeming transformation. At nineteen, his freshman-year roommate had woefully told him the story of the trick, a man of the then-unfathomable age of thirty something, who had forgotten his roommate's name the morning after. John had commiserated in late-teen angst at the sex-partner who'd shared Tony's body, but then had cared so little he hadn't retained Tony's name. But on this transformative morning, blinking in mirrors, decades and decades later, John more cynically said to Tony--as if Tony were present and could hear him--which would he rather have, if at nineteen he had had his druthers: the fuck or the name? The man who had been great in bed, or the mediocre man who remembered his name the next morning? John reached down to measure head to circumcision scar on this new dick again, thinking, the one who had been great in bed, definitely. But did it still hold true when it wasn't just his name, but the whole body that went along with it, that had been forgotten, or had seemingly disappeared? It must be that a bit more manual measuring had to go into trying to answer the questions.
The other random thought that hit him originated with a Bill Cosby comedy routine from the eighties, back when Cosby had still been sex-scandal free. The father had asked his inexplicably shaved son: Boy, was your head with you all day today? He fixed his eyes in the mirror again, said to himself: John, was your trick with you all night last night? Was your body always with you? Was his body always with you? Chortling self-consciously again, he knew it had sounded funnier as part of the Cosby routine. He faced the more serious business of looking out of someone else's eyes this morning. Why was he no longer himself? Where had the man gone whom he had been all his life up until some point late in the evening? And more immediately, he thought, looking for clothes to fit a suddenly bigger frame--how am I going to put in a day's work, if I'm not going to be myself today?
Problematically, I thought. Ineptly, even. Dressing for work had been odd, as newly hairless tawnies now stretched an extra inch and a half past the ends of my pant legs. It reminded me of the end of seventh grade, when all my compatriots asked if I was preparing for a flood. No, I'd just grown that much since the previous school-clothes buying season. Peachfuzz--thick for a thirteen year old's ankles--had bunched out over not-high-enough hightops. Now I had the serious problem of ill-fitting pants and shirts stretched beyond the point where wrinkles from the waistbands usually began. I would have to look like a strange charity case again, and would have to wonder--though, for a different reason this time--why I persisted in dating, nights when I had to be at work the next day. Then again, perhaps I now had more reason to go out the night before, if it was a different me that had to go to work the next day.
Driving was odd as the controls seemed to have reversed themselves and found their ways into the wrong, unfamiliar hands. My impulse to hit the turn signal flipped on the wiper blades. My other wrist was very slow to adjust the radio dial and set the GPS. Halfway to work I watched myself execute a wobbly turn in what felt like the wrong direction and it hit me: Mr. Trick last night must have been left handed. My wiring must have been reoriented over night, leaving me a southpaw. I mimed signing my name--what had been my name--on my palm. It came out all wrong. Odd, too, how much of my brain and my orientation had gone into this new host, and how much of the host's personality had come along for the ride. Pulling, backwardly, to my senses, into a parking spot, I caught myself reasoning, if I was a lefty now because my trick from last night had been a lefty then, was I necessarily still gay?
Yep. Packages within work slacks bulged pleasingly on angular coworkers. Perfect globes of asses stretched denim when their owners stood up from stools. Odd features I'd never thought to find attractive would suddenly leap to the attention of the new me and the old me: suddenly the eyelashes on an otherwise undistinguished face would arrest my attention and I would lose my train of thought. Not that I wanted to, but I wasn't going to lose my hard-earned gayness that easily, it seemed.
Most of my fellow cubicle creatures just took it to be someone filling for John for the day and only looked me up and down for the familiar clothing on an unfamiliar face. Upper lips settled in briefly ironic "hmms" and dimples tightened in "humphs" when, forgetting I wasn't me today, I lifted my eyebrows or nodded my chin in casual greeting. Several coworkers rushed up to tell me something, then hushed it up in a non-verbal "never-mind" upon seeing, inexplicably, someone else in my place.
The bosses hadn't looked in yet (how was I going to explain it to them?) and the clients, for the most part, weren't repeats, so they wouldn't have known if their case worker had been on the job for five minutes or twenty years. I obviously knew the stuff and answered their questions, trying to hide the fact the voice coming out was a tad more treble, the pitch a bit shakier, the tone less throaty, than my own voice had always been. It's weird trying to hear one's self talk for the first time, while you're also trying to sound authoritative in your new voice to clients who don't know your new voice from your old one. I kept catching a mistaken ventriloquism voicing my own, but my new voice, all as one.
I was also hopeless at jotting down notes as to what people were telling me. You try suddenly switching to your non-dominant hand in the middle of note-taking, your wrists and fingers clearly on different wavelengths than the brain and the guiding eyes. The left hand just couldn't keep up. The right sat there twitching (until I hid it in my lap), so I covered my quirks with probing but irrelevant questions, as if I hadn't been writing because I'd suddenly thought of something important--not because I just couldn't write. A woman's big brown eyes kept trying to regard me with a reproving smile, but eyebrows would lift, incredulity would settle into her facial lines, each time I dropped the pen, each time a letter refused to form itself out of scrawl, each time I paused to hear myself talk in not-myself's voice. I gave up and just kept fixing those eyes as I tried to answer her questions, recommended her plans of action with her insurers and beneficiaries. Acceptance and indifference were fighting it out in those pupils. By the time I'd answered her last questions, incredulity had won.
"John, what about the--wait, where's John today?"
Shit, and the boss has to stride in as I'm already in brown-eyed lady's quizzical sights. He's paused in the corridor between cubicles, a vision in khakis and eye glasses resting--speaking of visions--more than halfway down the bridge of his nose. His hazels, more confused than her browns, fix on me as he stands equivocally at the cubicle's edge.
"John is--" I look down at the chicken scratch I've jotted on the notepad, as if it will answer his questions. "Coming in . . ."
Trailing off isn't pleasing the client or the boss, both of whom look at me as they trade their own questioning glances back and forth. "You're John," says the lady, glancing down at the blank on a form she clutches in her hands. Sure enough, my name is neatly typed on the case worker line.
"The other John, ma'am," I say to her and to him at once, "comes in after lunch. More than one John at a place like this, of course." She's not buying it and neither is he. I do have what used to be the most common given name around before we were awash in Taylors and Megans, and this should at least buy me some time. Of course, it also starts to connote a different, unwanted kind of workplace for a woman like the client in question. A respectable place shouldn't have too many johns around.
"I wasn't told we'd have a substitute today," the boss says, still eyeing me, his khaki pleating pleasingly over trim hips. He's trying to remember interviewing me, even seeing me before. The office isn't that huge, but the place has a quick turnover rate, and it's possible one of us has been managing cases here indefinitely without attracting Luke's attention. I watch this dawn on him as he scratches his chin, checks his wristwatch, dimly produces a mild smile for the client, whom he's just now realizing he's thrown off by voicing his doubts. "If I had known," he manages to say, "I wouldn't have told Matt he could come in."
"Matt," I say involuntarily. It's my weirdest utterance yet in a strange conversation. They both look at me silently. I'm as certain she's second-guessing ever making the arrangements I'm recommending, as I am certain that he'll go check the personnel file the second he leaves the cubicle. I stammer out something about being able to help Matt and asking when he'll be arriving, but I'm sure the boss is already forming the mental question he'll be asking next, how do I know which Matt? For that matter, how does he know which John? Sweat beads out on my forehead and I reach for more forms from the shelves behind the desk to avert their awkward glances. Luke decides he's caused enough awkwardness and excuses himself, nodding to the still-flustered brown-eyed lady and saying as he turns on his heels, "Matt will be in at three." Brown eyes soon departs and I've systematically undone three appointments' worth of building up her trust. I'll have to gain it back when, if ever, I am myself again. All my attention is on Matt, whom I should have remembered was coming in that afternoon. He is to be one of the only repeat clients of the day, and perhaps the only one who'll know exactly how much John is supposed to know about him. He'll also know the person betraying that knowledge today just isn't that same old John.
But I thought I was going to have another conversation with John.
You are.
Well, where is he?
Here. It's me. John.
No, I mean John. The case worker I've talked to several times. Harrier, shorter guy than you.
Harrier?
Yeah, no offense. Blue eyes. You must be new here.
No, I've been here . . . a long time.
I guess we've just never spoken before.
No.
No? What? So, we have spoken before?
More than you know.
Oh. [swallows. Silence. To himself:] Creepy.
So, you haven't been . . . [gesturing toward the palms]
Haven't been. . . [looks at his hands in response]. No. Wait.
Wait? What?
How do you know about. . .? Do you guys write that down in a file or something?
We . . . .We take notes, yes, . . . on clients' actions and their . . .
"And their . . "
Self-harm.
So John specifically wrote down for complete strangers to read about my. . . " self-harm"
No, not for . . . strangers.
For all of you, then? For you? For anybody?
No. John wrote that stuff down . . for himself.
Himself. Which still doesn't tell me how you know about it.
He, actually, uh, didn't write that stuff down.
He didn't. Well then . . . how do you know about it? [Wringing the hand he's been pointing to]
Just tell me, Matt, about the cutting. I can see it there (gesturing) further down your arm. You told me . . You told John about it. You can tell me.
This is really weird. I thought I could trust John. I don't even know your name.
John.
You're John, too? Oh, yeah, The Other John.
Well, to me, I'm the first John, but yeah. You didn't say you didn't tell him. That means you did.
Yeah. [pause. Deep breath.] I'm not sure why I do it. I don't know why I do it where people are going to be able to see it. I don't know why I keep doing it. I know what it's going to feel like and I do it anyway. I know how far the blade goes in when the pain will start to be sharper. When the arm will start to ache. And then I can stop feeling everything else and just feel, for a minute, "holy fuck that hurts." Nothing else but the pain.
So the pain focuses everything. It's like there's nothing else to feel, nothing else to worry about.
So you did talk to John about me.
No.
You did. How else would you know?
I didn't have to. I can't say I've never been there, if you know what I mean. . . .Was it something . . . he did again?
So John told you about that, too.
No.
Yes. He must have.
No, he . . .
Didn't have to? How? [mockingly looking up and down his arms] Is there some sign of that, too?
No, it's just . .
"Just"?
Just something you don't forget about hearing.
But you haven't heard. John has.
I am John.
The other John. So you keep telling me. He . . . hasn't been . . . much. Lately.
Okay. I don't like the "much," but that sounds like progress.
How do you know it's progress?
You just told me so. He hasn't been getting as angry as much?
No. I think his work's going better for him. Not drinking as much. Not taking as much out on me.
And the . . .
The . . . other thing you're going to say John didn't tell you about?
He didn't have to tell me.
[lifting his bared arm] You just know.
No, I do know. You told me.
You've got to stop with that shit. When would I have told you? Why won't you just tell me you've talked to the other John? About, everything, it sounds like.
So, then . . . ?
So, then [flatly, not making eye contact:] he's kept his hands to himself.
Every night?
Every night.
[after a pause]. Okay. You're going to tell me if that ever changes, right?
Well, I'm going to tell John. Who I guess is telling everything to tell you.
No, he--
Wouldn't have to. Got it.
[long pause] Anything else we should be discussing here, Matt?
[Another pause] It's hard. . .
What's hard?
[swallowing, no eye contact:] It's hard not to think about my dad when I'm with my boyfriend.
Scene.
Luke, John's boss, chewed a pencil in the cubicle behind them through this conversation, listening the whole time. Professional ethics had urged him at least a half-dozen times to intervene, and yet something in their inflections, in their intimacy in conversation between case worker and patient, stopped him each time. Luke honestly didn't know who this seemingly new guy was, but he knew his stuff and knew Matt's case top to bottom, even knew how to tip toe around confidentiality with other case workers in a way that still encouraged the client to keep sharing. Matt had been and still was a tough nut to crack, and even though the words he said had him questioning and resisting, pitch and timbre told Luke a few concealed, camouflaged inches away that he has glad to confide in someone, and glad someone who at least knew what John had known was there to be confided in. The catch in the statements, the sense he was bravely making a clean breast of something, then backpedaling and doubting he'd even said that much--it was classic confession and then compensatory clamming up. John, or whichever, whoever John this was, was deftly dancing Matt's dance, Ginger-Rogers style, backward and in high heels. Matt, without coming close to knowing it, or really even admitting it out loud, was doing his best conversational Fred Astaire.
They, John and Matt--Luke knew--had met across the same desk eight months before. The kid had been in bad shape--ruffled hair, bleak expression fading in and out, marks and spots on the face and neck that might once have been old bruises, flat affect, noncommittal when he wasn't blatantly sarcastic. He had attempted. He self-harmed. He cut, and left the tracks and scratches showing. He left off in mid sentence, spoke of enigmatic he's, but never identified guilty parties. He'd run away from home, he'd toed the line of coming out in conversation without ever really saying the words, he'd implied his sexuality had gotten him kicked out, he'd breathed the words that had gotten them thinking incest, without ever fully voicing the accusations. One couldn't look in that cherubic face without guessing his story, without wanting to help the kid, without wanting to scour every last state statute to get him to a shelter, without grabbing his ribboned arm and wanting to know when and why the last cutting had occurred. Other cases came and went without ever calling out for emotional investment, and then there was Matt, who inspired emotions that made up in seconds for the dozens of cases that left them all cold. Not just John as case worker, but Luke as supervisor, began to look forward to Matt's arrivals, scanned his face for signs of what had transpired since last time, sighed small sighs of relief he was here again and had only tracks and scratches to show for it--that he, in sum, was at least back, and not gone entirely, after all.
John, the old John, the classic John, it seemed, had furrowed his brows and dug in deep, question after question and offer after offer of help, deftly descending through every rule and custom of informed consent, voluntary intervention, and avoidance, above all, of course, of doing harm. Gleams had danced in raptly attentive eyeballs. Minutes had passed in which John watching Matt hadn't noticed--and Luke, across the room, had noticed--that the case worker didn't so much as blink through the client's entire confession. Luke had looked up from what he was doing and seen John more involved in Matt than he had been in any other patient. He'd been willing to put off other appointments, set the whole team behind, spend afternoons looking up obscurities and copying minutiae in triplicate. And somewhere in knitted eyebrows, staring eyes, gleaming appreciation, Luke has seen some nameless something that made this case of eavesdropping far from the first time he had almost intervened. Luke had been poised to interrupt, rising to interject with some distraction so he could momentarily counsel the counselor in a sidebar, pausing for himself before he'd paused their conversation--when that nameless something had winked out from John's unwitting expression and Luke had once again almost stopped them right there and then.
Almost, but he had not, for in examining them from afar, Luke was also examining something in himself in reaction to them. What he'd seen, not in John's expression or in Matt's candor but in the depths of Luke's own soul, had made him pause. Something that didn't look like counselor's concern or generic young male camaraderie has shown itself in John's expression. That's why Luke had risen. He'd stopped from rising, intervened in his own almost-intervention in their conversation, not because a look that looked something like love had emerged, but that that love had shown itself, for Matt, a client and not--and this is where he, Luke, shuddered, sensing something he hadn't admitted to himself before--for Luke. It bothered Luke on some subliminal level, not that John had beamed love inappropriately at an underage, same-sex client, which was bad enough--but that John's eyes and brows had beamed love at someone. And it wasn't him. Which was odd because, well, Luke was supposed to be straight.
He, Luke, sat back down as a minor collapse on his chair from his half-hearted rising the first time he had almost intervened in John and Matt's first conversation. He sat back just as heavily, collapsing just as despondently, now, as someone else, apparently in John's body, deftly recalled everything that John alone, he had thought, had known about Matt. He had stared at John anew the first time, watching that beam in his expression persist. He sat alone in the cubicle next to them this time, recalling that beaming, recalling that it wasn't the beam, but his own visceral reaction to it, that had kept him from interrupting them. Luke must then be, he had reasoned to himself repeatedly since then, what they jocularly called one hell of a piece of work.
The piece of work came in every day and supervised the office. Looked John in the face and forced himself to regard John professionally, stay on the level, not try to picture what was beneath his shirt's buttons nor squeezed into his slacks or jeans. Went home to the supposed girlfriend each night and wondered why his thoughts lingered on John. Wondered why none of the other employees, male or female, mattered to him as much as John did. Wondered why he considered John an exception in his, Luke's sexuality, even as it encompassed all other persons he knew as the rule. He sighed so deeply the exhalation expanded to fill the cubicle. He abruptly drew in another breath on the odd chance they had heard him sigh.
John, Luke knew, was too professional to love a patient. And yet, if there were any patient John could love, those beams in his eyes hinted, that would be Matt. Luke, Luke kept telling himself, was too heterosexual to love another man. Yet, if there were any man Luke could love, he said to himself as a second, second thought, that would be John. With a gulp the sublimating instinct kicked in and he once again glanced over the cubicle's partition at the handsome man working in the place of the even more handsome John. He, Luke, could be gay, for John alone. But even John wasn't John anymore. Where did that leave Luke? Just what kind of a guy did John's departure make him?
I'm now the kind of guy who goes out on a Monday night. Bass music thumped deliberately but, it seemed, half-heartedly. Strobes flashed indifferently across a faded carpet, upon which one could still see someone's grooves from vacuuming, probably not even an hour before. Conspiratorial glances from men on bar stools ricocheted away from looks that expressed disbelief one was really back at the bar this soon--and so were the others who had just been out on Saturday. And, hopefully, somewhere among them, was . . . Trent? Or, Brent, I thought his name was, with whom I'd played this unwitting, unwanted switcheroo.
Waiting in line for cocktails passed time, but there were no lines to wait in early on a Monday evening, just a bartender smiling too welcomingly, and too few faces to scan in search of familiar features, while also not being too convivial, so as to invite further flirtation. I'd dwell on a cleft chin, admire the green of eyes that appeared emerald in the strobes' flashes, then realize I'd lingered too long, and emerald eyes was cruising back. Cleft chin was looking down at me, evidently not liking Trent's perceived intent. I sipped slowly and sighed. This was going to be a long, taxing Monday night.
Who or what was I looking for anyway, I asked himself, not yet understanding the finer points of today's identity and its existential dramas. An eighties synthesizer anthem pulsated with the strobe lights and one rocked lightly to the side, then the back, to the rhythm of Annie Lennox from thirty years ago. This dream, if that was what it was, wasn't particularly sweet. Would I see my old self, also in the bar on a lonely night, also looking for his own version of the body snatchers in turn? Would I run into Trent again, who'd see a double of himself, right down to the beauty mark that made him some gay male rendition of a pouting lipped Marilyn Monroe? Would I have some explaining to do, as some mirror image of Trent, or some apparent stranger to him? How would I explain it, anyway, I wondered, sipping his gin and tonic, reflecting that it was too easy for Annie just to say her encouraging cliches. She'd never been, I was fairly certain, through something like this.
And, it had already been a day of going through too many things--learning to write again with the opposite hand, or at least concealing it when I couldn't write, right switching with left and the world going topsy turvy on me. Masturbating--of course--with a new dick, the new or reversed sensations traveling down fingers unused to connecting with a different shaped cock, a different preferred rhythm, a new direction for a southpaw's head to be steering me in. Realizing as a kid I'd started jacking off with the non-dominant hand, so as to make it easier to turn the page of the magazine, and going right on to clicking the mouse with the right hand, rubbing it out with the less controllable but more brute-force left paw all along. Dressing the body in passable going-out attire--tight tee and jeans that were supposed to cup package and butt tightly and lovingly, but the orientation, again, was all off--and getting to a bar on an unheard-of night at a respectable hour. Knowing I'd be relieved and dismayed to be recognized, going out to a dive on a Monday, but then having the second thought, reviewing myself in multi-colored tinted panes of mirrors, flashing amid laser lights, that after a day in this body, I wouldn't and didn't even recognize myself.
Luke, though, had eventually recognized something, just as those mirror tiles amid the laser lights reflected, and thank God for that. I'd stared at the man's khakis so as not to give away my own terrified facial features. I'd stammered out info only a long-time veteran of the company had a right to know. I'd detailed cases that hadn't been on the books for eons. I articulated arcana of state social work regimes long since made obsolete. Luke's eyebrows had drifted up in odd recognition. I couldn't dress the part or physically appear to be the part, but damn it, I knew that part, from years on the job, and just had to show it, in words and memories, if not in appearances. Intimate knowledge of Matt's case, of course--early 'nineties New Order now infusing a poppy groove into a gradually filling place as the night had begun to wear on--had done the proverbial trick.
Acceptance had fought a war with doubt on the surfaces of Luke's forehead as I had elaborated, paused mid-sentence to see how something was going down, added, superfluously, spoken knowledge of other legal arcana, just for good measure. I read there the thought that he was going to accept all of this, despite his doubts and despite not recognizing me, before he spoke it, and wondered if I'd picked up a new trait from last night's trick--that of reading people, better than I had been able to read them, or perhaps, better than I had cared to read them before. At the bottom of it, I reflected--mentally seeing Luke from the afternoon and yet really sipping a cocktail as a Monday night shrank meekly into the wee hours of a Tuesday morning--for God's sake, at the bottom of it,was my care for Matt. Not love for the job, not respect for Luke, not even enthusiasm to find out why my body had suddenly transformed, or wonder as to how I could transform it back again (if that's even what I wanted to do)--none of those had done the trick (so to speak) to keep me acting in the face of Luke's doubt. Just chestnut haired kid's affecting, dimpled smile, reflecting back something I had never wanted to see in his eyes--nothing else but the vision of the kid and his dimples had kept me able to sustain the lie--or perhaps, to sustain the lie in actions to keep up with the truth of not being myself, and no longer having the truth of myself, the truth of one's self, to be told.
All of this was a hell of a lot to think about over New Order, then a newer, punkier band I didn't recognize, people shuffling through the crowd and out onto a sort of patio for quick and not-so-quick smokes, then back to see who else had joined the group. I didn't see myself shuffle through the nameless mini-throng, but I wasn't the kind of guy, or hadn't been the kind of guy, to go out on Mondays. Nor did I see Trent, if that was his name. Not even any friend or acquaintance arrived, though, true to form in a gay world this small, the peripheral faces in corners and propped on bar stools looked passingly familiar. Of course I'd seen them all before. And of course they'd seen me, even the wispy lumberjack who made repeated eye-contact in the corridor leading from dance floor to dance floor and past, of course, yet another mini bar in an alcove, the bartender raising an eyebrow to every patron to cruise or amble by. Checkered flannel clashed with the décor of what was trying to be a nineties and eighties dance bar. Jeans with a belt cinched up a lithe waist, belying bulkier belly and chest, making you wonder which proportions matched, and which ones didn't, what we think of as the lumberjack form. Lifting a cigarette to his lips allowed for a flex of an impressive arm muscle, but glancing at me just as the ember glowed hinted to me he'd only dragged at all to show that muscle's bulges in my particular direction. That had to be the most cunning reason for smoking ever: just to flex one's arm to deliver the drag to one's lips. Then again, it might be an even more cunning reason for exercising in the first place: just so one's arm looked good when one smoked. He was looking at me so intently as I finished this train of thought, I wondered if it had been his all along, and not just something I was thinking, looking at him in the pause between drags.
In those pauses, the pauses between the pauses, I was wondering if I really wanted to give up this body again so soon. If that would indeed be what happened. If I were just imagining it all along or hallucinating it (but hallucinating is just seeing, perhaps hearing things, right? Feeling them--living them? I'm not so sure). If I could really attract lumberjack in the body I was currently in. If I could have attracted lumberjack in the body I had inhabited up until yesterday. If I was going to make a habit of this. Meanwhile, lumberjack had taken a few steps toward me. The curl of the chin and the smile was Tom of Finland cute and the frame and muscle padded out the flannel and belted jeans nicely. The pulsations of one body on the edges of a dance floor became two. The trips to the bar became occasions to buy two drinks. The eyes showed back appreciation for the face, the beauty mark, the external signs of someone who wasn't me. Or, I thought, as the eyes kept looking and kept reflecting, the signs matched the me, now, after all. But still, was some anonymous hunk--just calling him "lumberjack" wouldn't do--worth giving up the quest to find the man (still didn't know his name) from last night? To find the man I had been for every day of my life, save one? Would I stay this second, adopted body, though I didn't know how I had obtained it in the first place, in the wee hours of the night? Would I become lumberjack, midway through, or all the way through, whatever act he and I--he and he?--initiated at whomever's house we went to, after the last song and after the last round of drinks. My own eyes swelled with sudden wonder, the thought, oddly, counter-intuitively, not having occurred to me before. When did it happen during the sex act, and could I metaphorically pull out, as a straight man did, while I was still me--or while I was still whoever I had been, umm, going in? And how could I know, ran this new, existential puzzle, without concerted efforts to find out?
A rough, hairy arm running down the neckline of my tee shirt, tweaking a nipple and sweeping at chest hair--good thing Trent had a smoother chest than I had ever had--interrupted that reverie. I twisted toward him, feeling the arm of that hard body as I twisted, and met him face to face. Tobacco smoke, Tom of Finland features, and what I then realized were smoky eyes--dim hazels, enigmatically set back far enough to make you wonder just what smoky eyes and smoky lungs was thinking--decided me. I clasped that hand, now out of my shirt--Trent's tee, that is--and led him off the floor.
It, lumberjack's dick, jutted supremely from hairy, tawny flesh. It manifested steely hardness. It filled mouths and kissed the backs of throats. It exhibited a girth that made one reopen one's eyes to get a better look. All of it. It tasted moistly fragrant, musky-manly. It entered and slipped out. It went in further. It got lumberjack so excited his hips involuntarily, then voluntarily, thrust. It got John so excited he forgot to remember when he passed out of his body--Trent's body--into lumberjack's. A collective, writhing, sweaty body so intent on slamming body on and into body, it no longer mattered, he thought, deeply sucking it, where one man's body ended and the other's began. It was so good, it was not until John had tasted it that he recalled, he had never asked lumberjack's name.
It pulsed within him and jackhammered quivering skin and weakening flesh. It convinced thighs and joints to assume positions. It got foreheads furrowed,eyes rolled back, teeth clenched, pain borne as it bore down, expanded--he swore to God--getting inner parts of him feeling what he, they, had not felt before. It got haunches instinctively seeking better positions, easings of entry, aimings to please, beggings for more. It got John realizing, contra last night's experience, this body liked to bottom. Another squeeze, another tightening, groaning, writhing, then--who wouldn't, it got him thinking, for a dick like this.
And maybe it was the poppers--the sheer, exuberant fucking the first time he'd been with this man, the first time he had been this man--but whenever the moment was, it came, so to speak, and went. It was a dick he was enjoying--sucking, tasting, swallowing; then it was a dick he was enjoying--thrusting, pivoting, fucking. It was a flip-flop fuck of a new dimension, each top trying the dick on for size, each body switching without pausing for either pulling out. All toes curling, phallus thrusting, an obscene M. C. Escher print, not of a pen in hand drawing a pen in hand, but a dick in an ass attached to a dick, fucking that ass. A recursive loop of fucking gay male flesh, fucking the flesh that had been getting fucked. It fucked on, and still he still did not know when it had happened, but knew it had happened at a moment he was too far gone to care, too deeply appreciating of lumberjack's dick--his dick, John's dick, Trent's dick--to stop to check that it was still his, his, mine. One was supposed to lose one's self in sex. But for the second time in twenty four hours, with regard to two separate bodies, two separate expressions, he knew, this was probably not what people meant when they said so.
It, lumberjack's dick, remained impressively sized when flaccid--a shower, not a grower--pressed into unfamiliar, printed, still-moist sheets as a faint dawn reddened, then deeply oranged what looked like a paneled bedroom. It stood up again, very easily aroused, as memories and imaginings ran through its new possessor's mind. But he had possessed it before, just in a different way, throat muscles clinching, epiglottis sword-swallowing, then; extending, expanding, pending from his body, now. It made him realize, dripping pre- (or perhaps post-) cum, making him want to jack off in the deepening dawn light, his language was just not keeping pace with his experience. He had enjoyed lumberjack's dick in both senses of the word, possessed his magnificent phallus actively and passively, slept with him and then been him, being slept with. The girth now sheathed in bedsheets, the stirring phallus now feeling friction on the palms of a new set of hands, made John/Trent/lumberjack realize, an eye popping open at the thought, he no longer was sleeping with someone. He was sleeping as someone. And it appeared that was the way it was going to be, every time he slept with someone--as someone--from now on.