Chapter 2: FAQs
He, John, couldn't get it into his head as easily as he could get it into this body. He blinked at the paneled bedroom as morning light grew stronger. He looked in the mirror the second morning in a row, realizing it was not the same mirror, nor the same man, two consecutive mornings, returning his quizzical stare. Smokey eyes sported a spot of bloodshot this a.m., blinked repeatedly without apparent reason, chased translucent floaters around an eyeball that felt different, somehow, though John also could not remember anything distinctive about the feelings in his own eyes, the ones he had had up until the day before yesterday, either. The height adjustment to look into the mirror, the checking of the change in girth for the waist, the checking of the change in girth of dick--again, it was like finding one's self inside an elaborate wardrobe that one had forgotten one had donned. This was a wardrobe malfunction like no other, he chuckled, reflecting that Janet Jackson never had it so good. He'd guessed at Trent's name when he'd found himself suddenly in Trent's body, but this time, other than lumberjack, he had not even known the man's name, before, during, or after. Sighing, he reflected, looking at his reflection, this wasn't one of the usual hazards of anonymous sex they tell you about.
He went onto pragmatic preliminaries of body, forestalling more difficult existentials of mind. Fitting fingers around an imaginary pencil told him he'd been restored to dominant right-handedness. Muscle-soreness rippled up and down forearms and positively cracked in the biceps and triceps, which he took as signs this body was accustomed to arm workouts at this time in the bright, early a.m. Coughs pleaded with him at the end of each exhale, and capillaries, alveoli, whatever they were, they stertorously swam in the exhales of a life-time smoker, and lumberjack's life--a quick check back in the mirror at the smoky pupils and the Tom of Finland smile reassured him--couldn't be one-third of the way over. Maybe--pursing the lips, brushing as hair tufts to see crows' feet--under thirty percent. He found himself standing over a bed of dramatic, disheveled disarray, and wondered which of three distinct sets of stains had been his, had been lumberjacks, had just been their--his--combined, collective sweat, shed in the heat of the moment, the groove of their bodies, the ecstatic vibe recalling nocturnal passion, yet somehow skirting the next hungover morning's clichés. Speaking of hangovers: jiggling the head, the brain didn't reel. Unsettling the stomach, the gorge didn't rise. Spinning the head testingly, the sense of balance in the ears somehow remained intact. Warming up as some would-be baritone diva, the voice cracked into respectable tone for a Tuesday morning's first words. Lumberjack must hold his liquor, among his other things, well. Tolerance for alcohol must, then, come along with the body, even though John had always assumed it was a habit of mind.
Not so well went the deeper, existential worries. Why did this keep happening to him? Why now, when as far as he had known, he had been the same person for all of the previous years of his life? Why the sudden changes, when he'd tricked with dozens--say it, with hundreds--of guys, with no previous transmogrifying going on? When did it occur during the sex act, and why had he given up on trying to answer that question in the heat of lumberjack's moment? Would it occur with every man he slept with from now on, and was that reason not to sleep with, or to sleep with fewer, future hims? What happened to the men he had slept with, who seemingly vanished in both cases so far, post-coitally? What part of the original John did he take with him each time he jumped bodies, and where did the original John leave off, exactly, and the Johns--the hosts? What did he call them, anyway-- pick up? What had happened to the original him, no longer at home, no longer at work, and otherwise, unaccounted for? What kind of trouble could he get into with this new, seemingly super power, which has suddenly superimposed itself without even giving him an origin story? Above all, it seemed, why the fuck was this happening, anyway, and why were his fucks the ones that whatever was happening, was happening to?
Opening dresser drawers, searching for socks, yawning through the familiarity of the still-unfamiliar, John, or lumberjack-as-John, John-as-lumberjack took each question from the top.
Why does this keep happening to me? Damned if I know. I suppose the simplest answer is that it keeps happening because I keep sleeping with someone: two men in two nights, two transformations. It had been Trent's alluring grin and Marilyn Monroe beauty mark, and lumberjack's smile and hand down my tee shirt--must be the smoky smiles that get me every time. So, beauty, aesthetics, maybe even lust, if it had to be a reason, a curse for this to be happening.
But I cup my hands in lumberjack's jeans one more time and think, this is hardly a curse. At least for me. But what about wherever lumberjack and Trent were now, if they were anywhere at all? Was I cursing them, like some kind of vampire, slowing ridding the town of its gay population, one irresistible stud at a time? Was this something awful I was visiting upon my gay bros, or something they were doing to me, in turn? Another cupping, another in-jeans squeeze: if this is a curse, I am afraid I currently want it to continue, though I also really want to know what's happening to the guys I'm cursing--or blessing, as the case may be.
I lie down on lumberjack's bed, gaze up at a dusty ceiling fan I hadn't really noticed before, sense than now the full light of day shines into the room. The why question implied some sort of moral, too, if I really look into it, like somebody above is trying to tell me something about the men, the lust, the kind of guy who pursues others to the degree I do. Socks got tossed overhead. Some bounced rhythmically back and forth against the wall paneling. Thoughts cogitated by. I did a mental inventory of my admittedly bare pantry of reserves, preserves, and beliefs. I decided--call me a blasphemer if you want to--if some old-school god is teaching me some cracked, Old Testament parable of a heterocentric screed, I'm just not buying it. Not even not being me anymore can get me to change my ways, or get me to believe, or get me to go straight, God forgive me, or not. I shake my Melvillian fist at any god who would want to teach me such a thing. But, I experience a second thought, upon wondering why the explanation of the parable-morality play occurred to me, anyway, as if I had been expecting it at some internal level of Pleistocene fossils and primordial ooze. I also, God help me or not, start humming the tune, a once-underground dance rhythm about, of all things, blasphemy, the apparent, Divine lack of any sense of humor.
Why now, when as far as I know, I've been the same person for all of the years of my life? Why the sudden changes, when he'd tricked with dozens--say it, hundreds--of guys, with no previous transmogrifying going on?
Nothing, after all, other than lumberjack's magnificent dick, had been unusual about last night's encounter. I didn't reach any magic number or really do anything for the first time with Trent, either--other than somehow acquire their bodies at the time. I had climbed into bed with men from tens on down to fours (okay, threes), and had such men climb into my bed, in turn, since junior year of high school and since before tons of cynicism surfaced. Why was I suddenly changing personae now, when no such transformation had occurred, the first several hundred times around?
Lumberjack turned out to have a roommate, or perhaps a sibling, snoring deeply in another room of what turned out to be a split level. I had my dominant hand back, making driving easier, but only half remembered where lumberjack had lived, making the return trip that much more difficult. I had no clue, without any origin story, why the body suddenly swapped bodies, now of all times, starting yesterday of all days. My body and its hormones had picked which days it would make the voice change, would change the smooth chest to gradual hairiness, would tell the legs to stop growing and would tell the zits on the face to stop breaking out. Maybe it had just as mysteriously, just as arbitrarily told itself, in turn, to become its sex partner's bodies, instead of staying its own self. I was driving my car away from lumberjack's house, toward my job, and apparently leaving Trent forever banished, or just vanished, somewhere in my wake. Three houses were empty now, other than lumberjack's snoring sibling or roommate, just because I wasn't at home. Maybe none of this is really happening. Maybe there's one of those parallel universes we're always hearing about, where someone who is now Trent is asking the same questions about someone who is now--who used to be--me. Maybe the same was so of lumberjack, who was now, in turn, trying to navigate his way away from John's house, on one hell of a confusing morning after. I look down at the steering wheel, contemplate the cars speeding toward me, think about drifting out of the lane, or occupying the same space another car occupies, just as some kind of existential test. No, I say to myself in response--horns honking, voices shouting, traffic thickening--this is definitely real, no matter what else it is, and no matter what real things, or real dimensions, Trent and lumberjack are experiencing. At least I know, or think I know, they're the first ones I met experiencing it, and making me experience being them, to an extent, and not being me. Previous tricks and boyfriends hadn't lacked what Trent and lumberjack had--well, they lacked, most of them, what lumberjack had, or how much he had--and none of them had changed me, like this. Or maybe, I thought, once more reaching into lumberjack's jeans for tactile, groping reassurance, they had. I even think of the ordinal Tonys, a string of former flings, each one more studly than the last, all sharing the same moniker (well, technically, one of them wasn't named Anthony, but something close to it), and stretching back in interpersonal history to my early twenties and my first time out in several perverse, experimental respects. I think of all I experienced at the hands--dicks, mouths, scrotums, assholes--of the ordinal Tonys, and wonder these transformations hadn't started with them. Perhaps an answer could come of one of the ordinal Tonys. Even lumberjack, I think with a sigh, has, or had, nothing on the best of them.
When did it occur during the sex act, and why had I given up on trying to answer that question in the heat of lumberjack's moment?
That's what I had really wanted to know, until I hadn't wanted to, any longer, because I didn't care, as long as it kept happening. Trent's body had dissolved into lumberjack's, the same way, I guessed, John's body had merged with Trent's, not quite twenty-four hours earlier. I had not done the same things in the same order with the same body or the same organs either time, but I had come out the other end, so to speak, fundamentally transformed. In both cases, I had lost myself, had lost Trent's self, had lost myself-as-Trent, again, so to speak, but then again, more literally, so.
Walking into my, John's, office, dressed in what I had thought were lumberjack's bests, I absurdly take out John's photo I.D. and pin it to my, lumberjack's shirt pocket. It's obviously the image of a different man, out of even fake-ID range, and yet some quirk at the back of my brain insists I put it on, as if nothing has changed. I know no one will accept this I.D. on me now, any more than bartenders and cops accept fake IDs for teenagers; and yet I stride right into work.
I wonder what acts were more, which were less, essential to the sex act, or acts, with Trent and lumberjack, and which ones, or which combinations, brought about the change. I wondered if by further experimentation I could do less and less with each successive act, until I passed the tipping point and remained myself, or remained whomever I had been, going in. I purse my lips and think, probably so, but only with, dontcha know, comparatively less attractive men.
Would it occur with every man I sleep with from now on, and was that reason not to sleep with, or to sleep with fewer, future hims?
Again, man, in theory, I could gradually whittle the sex act down (ouch, painful analogy that) to essentials, and see if it happened or didn't happen each successive time. But that meant a lot of unwitting guinea pigs, playing along with some kind of tantric self control maneuvers, even if and when karma is a proverbial bitch. It's not like it happened with Trent or with lumberjack because I had wanted it to, so it wasn't voluntary. They were excellent partners, but they weren't the best I had ever had, so it wasn't a matter of transformations only occurring at the moment of peak sexual experience. Two nights told me it could happen if I had topped or if I had bottomed, but I wondered, if there were parallel universes, if Trent and lumberjack had propelled different directions on continuums--continua?-- for their respective roles. If it didn't get to anal sex, one wondered, then, if the same transformation would occur, anyway? Would I want to know at that point, badly enough to pause the action at physical preliminaries? It mattered, for me, what would be in control at the moment, the brains or the balls, the heart or the hard-on: how badly would I want to know?
Poor Luke was eyeing the image of the old John on the name tag, glancing up at lumberjack's chin and eyes, then down at the name tag again. He was drawing his own conclusions, drawing a deep breath of resignation. Waiting to hear what I, or this new he, had to say this time. I know to revert to essentials of the job, say the most esoteric knowledge, and harp on Matt's case most of all--a long shot, as he just came in yesterday and has nothing to do with today's caseload. Fingers are tapping and frowning faces twitching in a long line, and I know Luke's weighing the decisions to trust me or not, and also picturing with an increasingly lulled but still furrowed expression, what it would be like to share his doubts about me with HR. He manages the meekest of smiles and a flick of the eyes and I know that I--know that lumberjack--can get back to work. That settled, the body slumped in the swivel chair, I realize nicotine fits, a hoarse throat, and a set of muscles that miss their morning workout, are going to punctuate my day.
Such complications make me wonder if I'm going to make it three nights in a row (the Tuesday night crowd, oh, my) in search of a new me, in an ongoing variation on what people mean by that expression. Or is this the karmic payback equivalent of telling me to seek out fewer hims, fewer mes, or a complete lack of future mes, as if lumberjack's body is all I can inhabit from here. A mental groping of my own crotch in my dress slacks, but a long slow inhale through lungs a decade older than what I take to be lumberjack's chronological age, and I debate if I'm okay with that. I wish I had had the choice when I was still the original John. Prostitutes and homos, it seemed, can only take so many Johns. Some body-switching or body-snatching, but hopefully not of the invading variety, could theoretically get me back to the original John, maybe if I followed the ordinal Tonys in reverse--an attractive idea. But what was happening to all of the partners, all of the hosts--I guess I would call them? Would working my way through the Tonys backwards--historically, not positionally --mean eliminating each one in turn? Would I reach the theoretical point of having to have sex with myself--my original, John self--to get to be my original self once again? What would happen to me, to him, then, in what would appear necessarily to be a sexless thereafter? For the sake of saving innocent, sexy men from whatever fate sleeping with me meant for them; for the sake of saving myself and the selves I had been up until that point, including the original, seemingly unrecoverable John, I may have to call a halt to future hims. Well, future unnecessary hims. Well--swallowing, stifling a raspy throated cough--future very unnecessary hims. Most of them. Maybe.
What part of the original do I take with me each time I jump bodies, and where did the original John leave off, exactly, and the . . . Johns--hosts? What did he call them, anyway-- pick up?
Mind and brain, mind and body, nature and nurture, innate instinct and learned behavior--where was that ambiguous interface between what people take to be separate spheres, anyway? In some way I could not totally explain, I was still me underneath the new man, and not just when I was literally, physically underneath him. My memories, knowledge, personality, preferences, passed onto the new shell, as it were, but that soul, if that's what I'm going to call it, pantomimed around in the dark after the old body it had been accustomed to working within. The fingertips missed the size, shape, responsiveness of the dick I'd been jacking off since junior high. The random thought patterns thought it was weird lumberjack's lungs needed and yet clearly loathed cigarettes as much as they did. The arms wanted to lift weights to go along with the body, but it was the wrong brain, mine, to know how to go along with the routine. The excitement of letting lumberjack mutually semi-seduce me was that it wasn't me, physically, bodily speaking: I had wanted to know what it was like sleeping with someone as Trent instead of as myself. The foreignness made it different and fun and the new body felt like a tight, unfamiliar disguise I was still adjusting toward wearing. But I wasn't sure the limits of the mask, the end of the costume, the breaking of the fourth wall, or even the appropriate, over-extended cliché. Could I acquire a new phobia thanks to a random but instinctual fear asserting itself in the body of a new partner? Could I pick up an allergy for foods or of respiration, like I picked up lumberjack's nicotine addiction along with his body? Could I shed extra years or excess pounds if I slept with a younger or a thinner partner, approximating as closely as sick little me could the experience of being born again? By associating with men of increasing degrees of bisexuality, could I gradually make myself straight? Could I ultimately take Atticus Finch's advice, Scout, and walk a mile in the shoes--fuck a sex-partner with the dick--live within the hosting body of, a man of a different color? If I took it into my head to rape someone in anger, take him unwillingly, would I wake up, not the perpetrator, but the victim? It would be going against John's original personality ever to answer these questions, and there was still the essential me in there somewhere. But it was frightening, distracting, Tuesday afternoon career-ending, to keep asking the mind bending questions. Lingering looks from Luke--eyes following lumberjack's chest contours, expressions rioting with one another as those eyeballs roved--spurred me back to work, but also left me wondering, why was Luke looking for so long?
What had happened to the original me, no longer at home, no longer at work, but otherwise, unaccounted for?
I stood as lumberjack in John's kitchen, looked into the bedroom mirror in which I had first spied Trent the morning before, opened the refrigerator I, John, has always stocked before--and nothing, no sign of myself, other than the self now encased in lumberjack. No one had slept in the bed. No one had rifled through the clothes. No one had brought in the mail. No one had fed the cat. No one whom I was fooling with that last feint, either: for, really, I had no cat to feed.
The pad had stood empty, without so much as a voice mail, as its owner's life had changed twice, as two more faces than had ever looked out at me from that mirror had looked out from within it. Wherever Trent had lived had probably stayed empty since Sunday evening. Whoever had snored in the bedroom opposite lumberjack probably still missed him. I was leaving empty bedrooms, empty houses, in my sexual wake, and no former selves, as far as I knew, returned to fulfill them again. A silence squatted coarsely on the place, echoing a rudely abrupt departure, an occupant who had left without plans for relocations, an assumption a life, now interrupted, would play out the next, post-coital day as it always had. Wasn't I back now, and yet why was I listening so intently to a silence I--a previous, former I--had unknowingly left behind? Was I going to have to go back again and again and check on whomever it was snoring nearby to lumberjack? The silence around me seemed to confirm the necessary awkwardness, the awkward necessity, of it.
I lay down on my, John's, the old me's bed, once again with the leg length right for the mattress's long span. Nicotine pangs begged for automatic attention, but where were these men and where had my somatic body gone when my sexual soul had moved on? Hunger called me back to the kitchen, but was I going to go on with John's mundane life of routine, having kidnapped lumberjack's body, unwittingly, to do it? I really had to use the bathroom, but would it never again be the same organ meeting me there in my unzipping fly as had been meeting me there my whole life? I knew the answer to the last one and yet wanted badly enough not to experience it, I remained lying on the bed.
I missed the old me and yet enjoyed the exhilaration of what polyamorists call new relationship energy. Playing with lumberjack's dick was immensely fun, remembering how it and its owner had played with me just a few hours before. The girth and the length felt good in my, his, hands, and yet uncanny as a kind of flipped transparency, a tool, as it were, I was working myself, having seen someone else work it last, having animated and experienced something kept abstract previously and at a conceptual distance. Synapses fired as my palm and fingers ricocheted, a thought with each stroke, a familiarizing impulse with each successive jacking. The dick was deliciously not the one I had been jacking for years and years--not that I had gotten tired of jacking with that one, either. And, it was not entirely foreign, having been the object of my obsessive oral love making the evening before, to boot. It was me and not-me combined in some sense, orgasmic transformation from passive (though very enthusiastic, laborious, even) to active. The old John was, in a way, with me, as my fingers mentally contrasted this body with the old one, this sexual response with the ones I had been accustomed to. Trent, on the other, umm, hand, was gone. I was not accumulating mental men like physical notches on existential bedposts. But John, again, in a way, was with me in the sense of the spirit inhabiting me as it, as I, became a new me. And John--I hated to admit it, tousling lumberjack's hair, but regretting smoky lungs' yearning for a light--was, again, umm enjoying the ride, very much.
What kind of trouble could I get into with this new, seemingly super power, which has suddenly superimposed itself without even supplying an origin story?
Well, there was the trouble of the missing mes, the former selves and the original self, disappearing one by one. I could theoretically lessen the community one man at a time, enacting the gay sexual rendition of a brain drain, as I polished off (another bad analogy, under the circumstances) the handsome men and was eventually left with the all of the previously cast-off chaff. I could one day meet myself coming, or going, or meet several former selves together, if they were indeed still abiding in some post-coital somewhere. I could arrange for a threesome and see if at the end there were two mes, subsisting in a panting twinship--and which two, or which twins, would they be? I wondered idly, again, if I could work my way via bisexuals toward being straight--then, theoretically, become female--then, viscerally, shuddered at the thought.
Fetishes arranged themselves on another continuum from fascinating to impossible, as I marveled at the dom waking up as the defeated sub he'd disciplined the night before. Flip flopping could conceivably involve yo-yoing between two selves, and I had to stop myself from reconfiguring my M. C. Escher orouboros to understand that graphic orientation. A lot of sex, gay and straight, it seemed to me, revolved around trying to empathize with one's partner, imagining one was experiencing what one was putting one's partner through and vice versa.
Here was the most perfect, and the worse imaginable, emotional, logical extreme, all at once: become one's partner in the act of sleeping with--sleeping as--him or her, in my case, him. And yet, cease to be one's self, or sacrifice one's self, in a way, for the sake of achieving that transformative empathy. I can know what it is like to be someone else sexually this way, I reasoned in the night with myself, and yet for that knowledge of someone else, I give up myself. But not, I tried to complete the thought, not also giving up the knowledge of the self, or even the selves, I used to be. This was indeed getting myself, getting my community, getting my sex partners, into trouble, but it had an element of "be careful what you wish for," though I had never consciously wished for it. I could merge with my partners' bodies and souls this way, and that was trouble, enough. But evidently, my own and my previous partners' bodies vanished in the process. I wondered, hand once again creeping down to crotch, where were the previous mes and theys? What dicks were their hands playing with? What trouble, what fun, were all of them, all of him, all of us, all of me, having?
Then again, fourth or fifth logical thought down the chain, why was I so sure this was happening without a superhero's origin story? Maybe my life of tricking, my boyhood history of jacking, my somewhat illustrious life as a free and easy gay man, was an origin story of sorts, and all of this switching was some sick god's idea of karma for what I had or hadn't done. It hadn't been heroic, but then, it hadn't been pathetic. It probably was more than most men had experienced, even most gay men. But it wasn't the biting of the perfect spider or the destruction of the ice planet or the cursing of some shadowy nemesis, out of the graphic novel of one's choice. Maybe the ordinal Tonys, the story behind Luke's odd, quizzical glances, or even something about Matt's non-responses, held keys, respectively speaking, to origin stories. That thought presupposed all of this was happening for a reason, and even that I had brought it about, somehow. If I was going to take my life, John's days so far, as an origin story for this super power, if that's what it is, what was the nature of that past as prologue? If my previous days just foreshadowed what had been coming, so to speak, all along, I was still clueless, I had to admit, why, if there was a reason why, even, any of this was happening to me, had happened to us, had happened to . . . them. Them: the former mes, and perhaps, as tricks from here on out went, future, soon-to-be mes, in turn.
Above all, it seemed, why the fuck was this happening, anyway, and why were my fucks the ones that whatever was happening, was happening within?
He, John, had a hard time with that one, so to speak, in the body of an Asian man, tight, loving recipient of lumberjack after two days of trying to work with his muscles, trying to breathe with his lungs. He felt his way around a now hairless, taut chest that was a relief map of ligature and muscle, pulled as flat as could be between two quarter-sized, completely unresponsive nipples. He, so help him, wondering if it was politically incorrect or not, inserted each index finger into the upper, outer corners of the eyes, the origins of the "slant" epithets, the signature of the curiously, scrutinizingly exotic. He swept palms down hairless cheeks and chins, recalling former stubble, former bearded plain, former Caucasian roughness haunting a presently Asiatic sheen. The body was compact, the carriage and attitude, the physical type, conserved space former white men had taken for granted. The legs were narrower, shorter again, and again, bereft of hair except for a dark tuft above the crotch, which itself, risking another round of political incorrectness, risked largely defying stereotyping. The brain didn't feel any smarter than John had always felt, but John hadn't been Asiatic before. He wondered, apprehending soreness in a predictable place, why he had swapped bodies a third time, knowing full well going in this time, it would happen again. He felt an eighties pop tune run gratingly through his head, something about turning Asian, becoming Japanese, and really thinking so.
Japanese, maybe--he didn't know for sure and hadn't asked. The expression, arrangement of facial features reminded him of Japanese he'd known, and the name, Jim, hadn't helped any in saying which it was. He, Jim, had clearly been obliging, had clearly seen as much charm in lumberjack as John/Trent had seen in him before. He, lumberjack, had remembered and pantomimed the same moves lumberjack had made on John. The hand had gone down the Asian man's tee just as lumberjack's had gone down his, rough, surly knuckles dragging down a chest as flat and smooth as a ski slope, belly presenting no obstacle on a hot, straight shot to an easily unclaspable fly. He'd had a strangely inverted sense of deja vu, picking up someone as the someone who had picked him up the night before, remembering and performing this time what he'd seen performed to get him, John/Trent, the night before, in some crazily repeated dance of lust and vertical foreplay. He'd known, flirting in a club's corner, flexing the muscles as he brought the cigarette to his lips, cocking, as it were, the head at the angle of the sensitive, rapt listener, he'd sleep with Jim the Japanese as soon as they could get to John's house (no good waking up at his place as him, nor going back to lumberjack's and meeting the snoring roommate or sibling while awake!) and out of one another's clothes. He'd known it would happen again and that he could not claim this time, if it came to claiming, that he hadn't seen it coming and didn't know it would happen. He would breathe easy again, as it appeared and smelled as though the Asian didn't smoke. He could lose the constant sense he should be working out, as Jim's musculature ran in the direction of wiry, taut, but not bulky, showy bumps, a pronounced but understated bicep flexing in the tee impressively all the same. He looked to lose about a foot and a half in height. He would know for the first time how it felt to cross a racial barrier in his transformations, would know how it felt to wear yellowface, would pose, until he slept with the next man, as a model minority. He looked into the Asian's man's sharp, dark eyes, classically molded and solid-boned cheeks, and chiseled stature ending sleekly, cleanly wherever hot physique left off, and had nodded to himself, then pinched the nipples he did not yet know accorded Asian man no inner pleasure whatsoever: model minority, indeed.
The Asian man had been kissing him passionately against his own bedroom wall, he'd been an excellent kisser, and he had liked the feel of lumberjack's powerful frame in being the sexual aggressor, seeking out and wanting to stab through what in the Asian man, the lumberjack had stabbed through in turn the time before. He'd blinked, he'd paused between kisses, he'd told himself: I'll be this Asian man if I go through with this. And he went through it anyway, knowing it made him an awful person. Knowing Jim the Japanese man (he thought), would be gone, would vanish once they passed the tipping point, wherever and whenever it was. And he went through it anyway, once Jim's kisses felt good enough to obliterate the doubt, once certain tastes on Jim's lips made him want to be Jim and not just kiss Jim, once the M. C. Escher surfaced again in his mind of the hand holding the pen, drawing the hand, holding the same pen, drawing a different, but also the same, man's hand.
So, physically, that's why he had done it: he passionately wanted to bury lumberjack's divinely big dick in what had to be Asian man's unbelievably tight and probably--yep, definitely--hairless hole. He'd wanted to feel that phallus rocking and rocketing between his own thighs and piercing someone else's. He'd wanted Asian man's thin, understated lips wrapped around the head of lumberjack's dick, wanted to see him working his, my, our, dick anticipatingly, lovingly, as its own reward. He wanted it badly enough to fuck with lumberjack's body, knowing it would be the one time he could do it as lumberjack, knowing the next time, he'd have passed on the magnificent dick and left it with Trent's beauty mark, John's charms, wherever they all were now, if they were anywhere at all.
So, spiritually, that was why he'd done it: against his own better judgment, and in full knowledge of the loss in body that the gain in sex would bring about. To see if, indeed, it would happen again. To be an Asian, another race, if only for as long as it took him to find a partner, of that race or another. To try to inch, as it were, closer toward understanding why this was happening, what it meant, whether it was happening to others in parallel worlds, parallel lives, whether it had been happening to others, all along. To have sex for the same reasons that one always has sex with someone--but this time, for the third time, knowing one would be that someone when he awoke. Why the fuck was he fucking, knowing whom he was fucking would then be himself, until he could fuck, or be fucked by, someone else, again?
It, Asian man's hairless aperture, relaxed around gentle but insistent knuckles. It elastically eased back into place, felt the stabbing of further fingers, other knuckles. It quivered further open in anxious anticipation, rocked with tensing, relaxing nerves up the kegel muscles into a pelvis seared with delight. It led to a prostate keyed to stimulation, a nerve ready to meet a finger, a probe, a dick, primed to meet a hole opened that much further, a body wanting dick that much more, a rhythm rising and falling to meet lumberjack's digs, thrusts, reenterings. It pulsed and pinched, relaxed and dilated, slid and ignited friction, contracted divinely even as it felt itself finally growing open to the slow numbness of ease. It felt itself blessed with his heft, full of his girth, expanded from within way inside the man's guts, his soul, his center. It braced itself against bucks, anticipated delayed returns, clinched to keep within all it wanted to encompass.
It detracted from every other pleasure center, dick being massaged, teeth gratingly biting, ear feeling the man's teeth bearing down, nipple jammed in quick rhythm--all collapsing into single pleasures shooting up his spine, filling his pelvis, bending his thighs up and apart. It concentrated on the phallus inside it, the tongue that had been up it, the brief absences between thrusts back in. It felt divine soreness, positive pain, aching delight it knew more intensely than the body had known pleasure. It knew this would end even as it braced itself for more, knew more was coming even as it sensed the coming end, knew soreness would linger awesome hours after, visceral reminders in a later solitude of the man who had come to occupy his inner space.
It was his, Jim's, relaxingly relenting, opening moistly, moving as sweet, slick sheaths with lumberjack's rhythms, quick stabs, long sawings, counter intuitive moves taking the ring of dilated muscles by surprise. It was theirs, a point of contact, sexual intersection, bowel meeting penis and penis stabbing intestine, rectum, organ, being. It was . . . mine, Jim's, lumberjack's, sexual aperture as mobius strip, hole the dick had filled becoming the hole around the dick, active become passive, fulfiller becoming fulfilled. It was me, back in solitude, aching, loose, still pulsing with remembered, experienced thrusts, now merely remembered. It was mine now, John thought, probing fingers into still gaping, quivering hole, feeling his, their sweat on bedsheets, knowing aloneness all at once on an occupied mattress, knowing he'd changed, becoming Jim, banishing Jim, feeling in his guts the thrusts he'd just finished thrusting, still not really knowing precisely when he had become him, when he had become me. It was all he had to show for it, closing his eyes to feel keen pain's pangs, rising for the bathroom, wiping sweat off the mattress, wiping moisture off himself. It left him wondering if it was worth it, not the divine stabs of pain but the loss of the partner, the feeling of waking up with one's self, when it wasn't the former self, when it was, in final solitude, the he, the partner he had just conjoined.
The orouborus, the modified Escher, not of the hand holding the pen drawing the pen that is drawing the hand, but of the dick and the ass in the same, reciprocal, symbiosis, became the yin and yang of locked gay bodies dissolving ecstatically into one another. Sleeping with someone gave way to sleeping as that someone, waking up as him, relinquishing one's body to absorb and become his, sacrificing his spirit for gaining his body. It was "Blowing John Malkovich," the movie, as in Rule 34, rendered as porn, joining his consciousness and reckoning the implications in terms of inviolable individuality and yet conjoined points-of-view. Still me, but part of a different me, another physical sheath for an ongoing gay spirit, transcending yet retaining: post-human, but still-gay, all the same.