Chapter 4: A Different Dimension
"So, to what do I owe the pleasure, John? If," he said, eyeing me not-uninterestedly, "you really are that John?"
I really was the John he remembered, but I wasn't in the body he recognized. He was the Tony in a long line of Tonys I had been with last. The look in his eyes--flirty but flighty, holding back, as if waiting for me to tell him the punchline of the joke--told me, this was going to be a tricky conversation.
Most Tonys are probably Italian, and this one had the hairiness, the ample stubble soon after shaving, the glisten of slight Mediterranean allure I had always liked. He had danced over to me in a rhythmically pulsing crowd when I'd used to go out and dance. We'd bumped bodies and his eyes--full black marbles of obsidian expression--had telegraphed attraction. After a couple of songs, we'd just talked about whose home we were going to--it was already a forgone conclusion, we would go to one of the two. He'd said something still in the club about my mission, should I choose to accept it. I'd looked at him and said something in turn, but only if one of us is Tom Cruise. He'd laughed and we'd left in his car. He'd said something once we were rolling around in bed, do you like to be fucked or get fucked?
He laughed at his own mistake. I laughed at his slip. It was something close to: heads I win, tails you lose. He'd meant to give me a top's option, too, but he had "forgotten" it. I laughed, knowing and not minding it was my tail I would be losing. Tony, alone of almost all my first-time partners, was okay I had laughed. He didn't take the laugh as a mocking jeer, but as a sigh I already enjoyed being in his arms.
"I really am that John," I said in the now, looking at him and thinking how little he had changed. "I know I don't look like it though."
He stopped what he was doing, some preliminary boiling for cooking, looked me up and down. "If you're who you say you are"--glancing back at a box of pasta--"no, you really don't."
I sighed as Bryan, glad I was Bryan, wearing what I thought were Pete's tee shirt and flannels, but sighing because for all of this bodily change, I was developing a pattern of explaining it, or failing to explain it, the same way to everyone. I went over that first morning, when I hadn't felt myself. I said I was trying to recover former mes, and trying to keep the new mes at a minimum, but that was getting to be like trying to quit smoking: you always say you'll do it soon, right after the next stick. When the guy--Pete, Matt, Mark, and this Tony as the first of several Tonys--didn't believe me, I reverted to saying things about them that only I, John, would know. They were appalled John would tell some random trick what were thought to be intimate, personal details. I would correct the impression I'd been some random trick, and reassure them John was more discreet than that. As I revolve the familiar pattern, Tony's water reached a boil and he shook in a box of rotinis. Rinse, I thought, eyeing the bubbles, thinking this was a bizarre pattern to get myself locked in, lather, repeat.
"I was the guy at Mag's Pride weekend. You danced up to me. We joked about Mission Impossible." I repeated his slip about who would be the top, when he'd only given me the bottom option. He'd told me to roam around in the darkness and I'd started to move. He'd steadied me and I understood he didn't mean roam but grope. He'd pushed me, blindfolded, over backwards when I hadn't known what was against the back of my legs, or if anything were behind me. I'd told him after our play that I'd been terrified, not knowing the bed that was stretched behind me and would catch me, not knowing yet if I could trust him enough to let me fall.
I repeated all of this slowly in a voice I tried to make like John's, though Bryan sounded different, and Bryan's sinewy muscles didn't feel like they'd take, as I'd taken, to someone like Tony as a dom. "I was walking down your street at sunset for a playdate," I said, recounting one of my favorite times with Tony, "and I saw you getting out of your car and going inside with a plastic shopping bag. You'd bought, I later found out, a sheet of shrink wrap."
He fumbled with the pasta he was stirring, gave me a look that said to go on. "Later you wrapped me in it, head to toe, just so I could still breathe. Poppers went up the nose holes," I said and had to force myself, for obvious reasons, not to think about it now. "Something else found its way into the mouth."
He'd set down the spatula, looked at me with increasingly wide eyes. Bryan wasn't someone he'd do that to. But John was. John was someone he had done that to. "Okay," he said, "I've only tried that with three guys. A buddy of mine does that all the time."
"Tom," I say.
"Yeah." Squints of disbelief. "Tom."
"You borrow Tom's get-up sometimes. A harness. A black leather studded jock."
"Yeah." A moment of silence with only the sounds of pasta gurgling. He stirs hot tomato sauce, mixes in spices, tries to think about me instead of his dinner. "I was worried that John--"
"Worried that I . . . was going to pass out? I must have been beat red beneath the plastic wrap after the hit of poppers."
"He--you were. I thought I'd given you too much."
My eyes obviously slid down his torso, onto his tightly blue-jeaned crotch. "You did give me--much."
He'd given it to me a lot and I'd loved it. We'd hooked up about once a month and it was like therapy. It's amazing to forget every single thing in the world other than, holy fuck, that hurt. To be able to think the solitary thought, damn, he's going to do it again. I'd come back to it, again and again. I'd looked forward to it. I organized my month around it. I'd had to, since the conversation about which one of us was going to be Tom Cruise. He was one of the Tonys, after all.
"Okay, so you're John," he said. "Or you're someone John tells everything to." His dinner was ready, and I'd made him randy in his kitchen, though he'd only just met me--or so he still thought. "To what do I owe the pleasure, then?" As if it weren't a cliché, he'd said it, looking at me, and licking his spoon.
That was the tougher part, the part I didn't yet have a pattern for following. `Well, I'm trying to break out of this pattern, trying not to sleep with yet another guy if the guy always disappears after we. . . " and I pause, making eye contact with him as he continues licking his spoon. "After we fuck."
A smile, but one blooming out of uncertainty. "This is the weirdest come-on I've ever gotten."
"It's not a come-on at all."
"Well if it isn't, you're being awfully flirty about it. Either for your own sake, Bryan," he says, picking up on that side of my story, widening his pupils as he mentions the name; "of for John's sake, if for some warped reason, John put you up to this."
"So you don't believe me?" And we cycle through what's beginning to be another familiar routine, too: why some random trick would make up such an unbelievable story, why John would go spreading such intimate details, why the ghoulish twist of the erstwhile partners who keep disappearing, why the evident, existential guilt John and John's successive surrogates would be undergoing. I kept the exasperation within as well as I could. He ate his pasta, poured himself a glass of wine, got me one, too. I interrupted him, midsip, to remind him of something.
"You were sipping wine out of a glass like that one once, naked," I said. "I was on the ground in front of you."
He paused in his chewing, looked at the glass, looked back at me. "Yeah."
"You put the head of your dick in the wine for a second. Just so I could taste it."
The smile was slower to spread, the forehead blushed slightly. The next sip of wine, prolonged.
"Okay," he says with a sigh. "I'm only sick enough to have done that with one guy. John." All solemn-faced and direct eye-contact despite the blush he corrects himself, "You."
We keep the eye contact and I think momentarily he's going to kiss me over his pasta. "I've still got clothes on," he says in a sultry Italian accent. "You're not yet on the floor."
He's loosening his belt, untucking his shirt and I have to stop him, "You already said this was a weird come-on."
"And you said it wasn't a come-on at all." His tone implied he'd taken it all as coyness.
"No, really"--I'm physically backing away from him, though I'm also scanning this Tony's body in its glorious nakedness. "I want you to stay Tony. I don't want to be--you."
"'Be me?"
"Be you. I've been trying to tell you, if I sleep with you I'd become you. And I don't know what happens to--you, you."
"So you"--he's saying it slow, even to himself, as though to resolve the ridiculousness of his own words-- "you don't want to sleep with me. You don't want to sleep as me," and he's mimicking me in kicking that phrase around with him a few minutes earlier, then saying what's evidently the hardest part for him to understand: "You wouldn't want to be me?" He casts his eyes down over his own chest and arms, implicitly surveying for his least desirable features.
"I would want to be you," I'm trying to assure him, "but if I was--if I were," I bizarrely correct myself, "you wouldn't be--you any longer." I try to convey I'm not insulting him by not wanting him, just respecting what I imagine is his desire to stay himself. But then he wants to know what, to him, Tony, is the next logical question:
"Why me, if it isn't to. . ." and his eyes narrow, as if again he can't believe he's saying it, "sleep as me?"
I swallow and sigh and say, "I learned so much from the Tonys"--and we have a back-and-forth about, yes, there were several; yes, with the same name; no, that doesn't mean that they're, that you're interchangeable; just that a lot of men, all of whom individually rocked my world, happened to be named Tony--"I thought I might learn this from them, from you, too."
His sexual self-esteem has reached heights and depths in the same, unfathomable conversation. "Might learn what from them--from us--too?"
"Exactly," I say, stalling somewhat for time. Why this is happening. What I had learned. How I might get back, through the reverse-ordinal Tonys, to the origin story that would explain, why, if not how, all this was happening,. What you, Tony, can tell me about John that just might--one hopes, one hopes--bring him, bring me, back again.
And they had lain there, Tony and John-as-Bryan, speaking up into Tony's rafters, waxing philosophical, waning sexual, trying to understand, giving up on trying. He, like Mark, didn't totally believe Bryan, but didn't know how Bryan would otherwise know the things only John had known. He played along then, hearing further confirmation of theories for, and theories against, accepting Bryan's bizarre hypotheses. Bryan as body channeled John's mind, and John's body, remembering therapy sessions with Tony, recounting hesitations in the bathhouse, looked for his origin stories and the lack of any such stories. They had come close to flirting with one another several times and Bryan had explained he wasn't here for dick, as much as John had liked Tony's, and not, bizarrely, to take that personally: it wasn't that he didn't want to sleep with Tony. But then, in another way, he should take it personally: he had explained what would happen to him, to Tony, if Bryan-as-John slept as Tony.
"And none of these guys you've slept--" squinting to get the phrasing right--"as, has ever come back again, that you know of?"
"Nope, not so far." And he'd relayed the empty houses the morning after, the empty cabana room at the club after being with Bryan, the lack of a snorer or the snorer's former partner at the house with the wood-paneled bedrooms when John-as-Bryan had checked. He'd spoken about Luke not recognizing the new bodies he'd arrived in at work, but accepting him, successive hims, anyway. He had said the original John had never, since then, umm, reared his head again. He'd mentioned a client who seemed to need the old him--Matt needing John, without Bryan breaking John's confidentiality and revealing him to be named Matt. He had never seen that old him, despite the need (the client's) and what was beginning to be the reciprocal need (the social worker's). Therapy they needed, indeed.
Tony had bowed his head in quiet frustration halfway through this conversation. They went through the places where John had looked for former Johns. They talked about who would recognize former selves and where he might meet them. They rehearsed the awkwardness of asking random people, "so, you know this guy. . . ?" They went through John's conscience, guilty or not, in sleeping with each new successive guy. They revealed, somewhat stunned at what they were revealing, how many guys they had been with since being with one another. That neither of them had been through John's current transformations made the other encounters mundane by comparison, but Tony, more so than Bryan-as-John even, thereby had mundanity by the dozens, mundanity in spades, multiple "Johns" he'd slept with--and still, he had memories of this John, of the John the current Bryan used to be.
"And just because I'm one of the Tonys, I guess," he said, swallowing some of the attendant pride, "you think I can say why this is happening, or what happened to your origin story."
"Or how I can make it stop happening."
"And why me, of all your Tonys, of all your . . ."
"'All my. . . .?'"
"Johns, in the other, older sense of the word."
"Johns, like I've had a lot of them. Like I'm the whore."
"No," he said, still looking up into the rafters, "we're both the whore, but I'm going to stay the current whore I am."
"Yep. And I'm not going to. As soon as I find another whore to hook up with. Unless I can stop the hooking up, or figure a way to stop this from happening."
"And you think I can make the suggestion."
"Or explain why it started."
"Hmmm." Silence rolled past them noisily. "What did I do to you?"
"What did you do?" He was incredulous they'd retread the wrapped body, the dick in the wine glass, the one-and-only experiences once again.
"No, I mean: what did I do to change you? What made me a Tony, other than being named Tony? What made you remember me, and seek me out as the first Tony you ask all of this to?" He sits up and eyes him, asks, a little anxiously, "I am the first, or the first Tony, you went to, right?"
"You are," he says, then pauses long enough for it to sink in: "But you're also the last Tony, the one with that name I was with the most recently."
They have to get past the chagrin of just having proximity in time in common, of Tony not only not being unique in John's love life, but of his merely being the most recent fuckbuddy of the same name--as if that left him any residual uniqueness. They they'd finally broached the topic, looking back into the rafters, what the original John had learned from the non-original, not-the-first Tony:
What had he learned: sex can hurt and be therapeutic, for the hurt. Pain can redeem and rebirth and revive sensations, both pleasurable and excruciating, long since thought dead. Pain can soothe in a way pleasure cannot, can transform the bearer of the pain in ways the inflector of the pain can't experience, can be more valuable for the receiver of pain than the person causing it. Sex can be the reception of pain and the providing of another's pleasure and still be all that the receiver of that pain can want. John hadn't known that about himself or about his partners, none of them, until he'd met Tony. This Tony.
No one else, even Mark, the best fuckbuddy he'd known, had been as therapeutic for him as this Tony had been. Back when he was still the same John before and after sleeping with others, he'd been transformed after sleeping with this Tony. He'd been himself, physically, still, but also not himself, writhing in the afterglow's transformative pain. Changing now after sleeping as others, he rolled over to look back at Tony, with whom he changed in a different way, back when he'd merely slept with others. He hadn't absorbed anything of the hosts, as he'd called them, since he'd lived in Trent's, Pete's, Jim's Bryan's bodies, in turn. He had absorbed something of this Tony, back when he lived in his own body contentedly as John. "I think," he said, reaching an arm over to lay a hand affectionately on Tony, "I think I've got my origin story."
So, what's the story? Why aren't you at work?
I thought, and Luke agreed, we could get along better sending these messages instead.
And you're John, right? The first guy, John, I talked to in the office?
Yeah, the first John. Sorry there have been more than one.
Yeah, you guys should be sorry. You've been sharing information on me.
I know it seems that way, but
"but," what? What were you going to say?
Never mind. Just believe me, Matt. Believe John when I tell/he tells you, we don't share your info.
Yeah, we don't. I wanted you not to. Anyway. . .
Anyway.
. . .
How can I be of help today from afar, Matt?
From afar?
I mean, via these messages.
I'm . . .
. . . ?
. . . getting to that. Hard for me to type right now, tho'.
Hard to put it into words? Usually easy for you.
No. Hard to type. The physical action is difficult. Arms, wrist, hurt . . .
Oh. So you've been
Yeah.
Yeah what? . . . cutting again.
Not `have been' cutting again.
?
Not "have been" cutting again. _Am cutting.
ouch. Ouch for you.
well, ouch, but also numb.
_Also numb?
Also numb.
How both painful and numb at once?
Yeah. Nice paradox. Dunno. Feel . . . something. Numb otherwise, blade brings back feelings. Centering. I can start and stop _this pain.
Ouch. I feel it for you, if don't feel it yourself.
Do feel it. And, don't. Guess it is hard to type _and hard to explain.
Think I got it.
. . .
Blood on keyboard?
. . . No. barely bleeding. Nicks. Traces. Just deep enough to . . .
To hurt?
Okay. Something like that.
Other patient I was talking to--and no, not gonna tell you who
yeah?
Said it was pain she could start and stop, like you said.
Yeah.
Yeah. Unlike other pain that's harder to control, can go on forever, more ambiguous
More . . .
More. . . I guess she meant something like anguished. When you said `centering,' made me think of what she said.
Yeah. Think we said this before, too.
`This'?
Forget everything else in the world, just think: holy fuck, that hurt.
I said that?
You said that.
John said that?
You, John, said that.
Said that, to you??
Said that to me. What?
Umm. . . nothing. Go on.
Like there's . . . some other me beneath the skin I can scrape off. Like I . . . want (deserve?) the pain?
`Deserve'?
It's just how I feel, deserve. I didn't say I could rationally explain it.
No, that's right, you didn't. But causing yourself pain, making yourself bleed. Not exactly rational either, right?
No, I suppose not.
. . .
It's just sort of. . .
Just sort of?
A transformative pain in the afterglow.
A what?? What afterglow? Transformative, how? What's transforming?
I was . . thinking of someone
some _thing else. Never mind.
Can't never mind what I never knew. Weird, man.
. . . So, what got you feeling this way today, especially?
This way? Like cutting?
Yeah. The same things that usually lead to it? Something different?
Same thing that
That . . . ?
Always happens. Rather not talk about it.
Write about it?
Rather not write about it, either.
. . . Okay, but here we are. Writing. How's your
My . . . boyfriend?
So you admit it?
Admit?
Admit you have a bf?
. . . caught me. He's cute.
And it's . . . he's
what?
serious? The relationship is, I mean.
Yeah. More than a month now. More than once to
To . . .?
To bed, of course.
& how's that?
Not as bad as
"Not as bad as"!!
not as bad as
not exactly a raving review.
you know it's hard for me.
I should hope so. You're a young dude.
Not that kind of hard. _That's not a problem. Not for me. Not for him. (Why telling you this?)
Understand. & don't have to tell me anything you don't want to.
I know. At least I don't have to tell _John anything I don't want to.
Let's don't go through that again. I _am John.
okay. Okay. Going to bed with a new or newish guy is . . . scary. Not scary. Not. Not even new.
. . . Lost me somewhere there, Matt.
Even when it's a new guy, like it is now, like it's all new. I'm a kid and it's all new, still, to me.
Of course. Haven't been out that long. Not even out to everybody yet.
Yeah, exactly.
So, but somehow it isn't new, too?
Somehow it isn't new. Somehow it's the same old.
So, it hurts and it's numb to cut, and it's new and yet old to be with a guy at the same time. You expect me to follow this?
Jeez. _Didn't expect to be lectured to.
Just tryin to understand.
Okay. Will try to explain.
. . . All ears.
Always feels familiar in a way I don't want to feel. Always reminds me, being touched by the bf.
Yeah? He's a new guy but touching you reminds you of . . .
Of. Of something I _don't want to feel. Arms not holding me lovingly, but holding my down. Brushing against me not to love me, but to
But to . . .
Force me.
. . . So, someone once forced you to do something, or forcibly did something to you. When you want to enjoy someone else's touch now, you
remember when I didn't want it before
And then _don't want it
Anymore. Yes. Want to, instead
Want to what instead. What do you want to do instead?
To cut myself. More pain. Good pain. Pain I can stop. Pain that can numb.
Yeah. Said before. So, the sex, remembering the sex. . . is painful, too?
Painful, too, not in a good way.
Ever pain a good way, not always bad?
Sometimes pain's good, guy on guy
Yeah, I _might have heard that. . .
What?
Never mind.
Again?
Again. What's it like for you, then, say when the sex starts, or when you and him are acting like it's going to start soon?
I'm always . . . having it. Always feeling it. Always the same memories. Trapped. Can't stop feeling it. Can only feel
Can only feel . . .?
Blade instead.
Want not to have sex at all, if having it again means remembering, reliving it from before. Always again and again
Matt, can you tell me
Prob not
Can you tell me who you were with who hurt you? Whom you keep remembering?
Whom I keep remembering?
Whom you keep. Okay, I dropped a whom bomb again. Whom was it?
Him is whom.
Him is . . . Can't tell me?
Can't. . . . Won't. Can't.
. . .
Not sure I can help you if you don't tell me.
Not sure I will keep trying if you keep asking
. . . Fair enough, kid.
Umm, John?
Yeah. Here. What?
get4ting harrdert o type. Numb. Numbber. Not number, more numb
Why getting harder?
Just iss. Get4ting harder. Getting
Matt, have you been . . as we've been typing?
bee3n?
cutting yourself, as we've been writing? Cutting, more?
. . .
. . . ? Matt, you're there, right?
he2er. Gettg closer to the
Closer to what, Matt?
close4 to the . . .
to the wrist, Matt?
. . .
Matt? Mayday! Tell me you're not cutting, not slashing there
slashjing
Matt!
. . . .
Matt???
sesssion times out <<
He preferred screen static the way it used to be. Old t.v. sets would play, tuned to a channel without any station. The gentle buzz of the static would emanate from sliver and gray blips, tumbling over one another, never resolving into any pattern. Noise would rise and fall as space somehow conjured one's glances deeper and deeper into depthless ether. The association would remind him of the girl saying into a set's static, straight out of early-eighties horror-film schlock, "they're here.. . ."
Now, they were constantly here, but the static was digital, beeping and blipping in constant stops and starts as pairs of eyes resolved themselves out of the ether, then submerged again as glazed expressions became so many ghosts behind the static screens, "poltergeists," indeed. Granddads squinted doubtfully through bifocals. Teens in ball caps stole glimpses in between their warier checks at thresholds or closed doors off in the distance. Hairy guys with husky voices urged partners with higher-pitched voices, just off-camera, to--"damn it!--look this way," too. Policemen in interrogating rooms stared dead-on through shades as their fingers rapped keypads, and suppressed indifferent "tsks" already on their lips.
For most of them, almost as soon as the eyes flashed on the screen and thrust aside the visual ether, they would digitally disappear again, first geometric, then gibberish, until more eyes replaced them, or until he wished it were merely static, all over again. Men were present but ghostly behind the screens. They were there but not there, gone into the digital nothingness again as soon as he saw them.
For some of them, though, squints would widen into stares, eyebrows, kinked quizzically at first, would relax. The face and upper body, staying still, betrayed just enough of the rhythm of the forearms to rock back and forth--gently for some guys, and appallingly vigorously for others. Off-screen voices squealed in overacted pleasure as guys' eyeballs alternated between his glance and someone else's he couldn't see. Sometimes, something other than a fixed look, a cold stare, would surface somewhere in the more honest, more earnest pairs of eyes. An actual personality would glint at him through some stranger's electronically mediated pupil. Real people seemed to see him through cameras' lenses and ether nets and digitized connections. For a moment, he felt less alone.
Which was silly, he realized--for he wasn't alone at all in that virtual, digital space. He was never by himself, even without any of the dozens of pairs of eyes momentarily appearing, looking, and disappearing again. He was perpetually with the partner whom the rhythm never allowed him to look at. The script called for him instead to meet the virtual viewer's gaze, a coy lilt forever stamped on his lips, and "come hither" somehow forever implied by his eyes. He told his viewers tacitly, but never his partner explicitly, how much he liked it, and he felt like he'd been saying so, over and over again, for years. In the virtual space of an Internet porn tube site, he was locked in a perpetual motion, performing rhythms all over again, each time one of the pairs of eyes looked in, each time the light glinted blue again and the sensation returned, repetitively, to cue his coy looks, his body's rollicking, bark-like grunts in his throat.
It was a hot scene he enacted, all right--or at least he remembered it had been, before it had all become perpetual, emotionless motion. The big-dicked partner behind him thrust himself deep. Cock slid into shaft and he felt himself filled. Muscles relaxed, then sang from the realization: dick shoved all of the way up inside, girth forcing hole-walls apart, thighs slapping against skin, a slow bucking rhythm achieved. Coy glints in his eye faded back into his pupil. His expression meditated solely on inner ecstasy. God, what joy it is, some curl in his lips would manage to say by its absorbed, arced design, to be fucked, just this way.
It was just this way every time, though, whether the last time had been three seconds ago, or whether they had stayed in black, shapeless blankness for hours, their rhythm never kicking in, the eyes never glimpsing, the motion never resuming. He and his top had performed this moment of their tubed, lubed action, he thought, thousands of times in intermittent succession. He'd felt it every time. His face had telegraphed unspeakable joy alike to every eye looking in. He had forgotten what his top looked like, he'd been looking at the viewers so long. He had forgotten the story's pre-sex set-up, they had been at it so long. The sphincter, already split, longed to remember the sensation of first being pierced. He'd been fucked and fucked and fucked in the virtual space of the Internet porn video tube site for so long, he'd forgotten, in his ecstasies, what it felt like, momentarily not having sex.
And he therefore envied the pairs of eyes, for they seemed to have a privilege he no longer ever had: they could hover in the ether, watch, and not always be in the middle of the act. They could blink or look away or tune out, fading back in the ether and making his body and his top's rocking cease, mid-motion. They could reflect the shock, the indifference, the skepticism of someone not himself having sex, and not having it constantly. The grass is always proverbially greener, and he's long since reached the point where not having sex outstripped perpetually, reprehensibly always having sex, for the performed pleasure of others, who could join in or tune out anytime--his ecstatic eyes, identical rhythms of body, and sorely fucked asshole forever not withstanding. It was no longer voyeurism for them or exhibitionism for him, just a fetish he had for those not having fetishes, a desire of the oversexed for those still able to not have sex at all.
He was trapped. He was perpetually in motion. He had no choice. Any present and future sex for him hearkened back to the same, forced sex in the same position, with the same person, as if the pre-sex set-up and foreplay, such as it was, played out in what was for him reality, every time someone selected their video from the tube site, every time someone prodded an arrow along a progress bar, every time someone re-played the same forty-five seconds of a scene again, and again. Whether it was pleasure for the top at all, or pleasurable for him the dimly remembered first time, it was constant and perpetual now and the trap only let him roam so far, only allowed for so many moments, only closed in on him in the same familiar, sickening ways. And still, he knew in a well-fucked heart of hearts, some of the eyes emerging from ether enjoyed seeing him trapped in these pre-arranged ways, and some of them were entrapping partners, or being entrapped by partners, in between pauses and plays of his video, all the same. The stripper knew the viewer's fantasies, the prostitute already knew the john's desires, and none of it was new or pleasurable, after a moment of sheer joy, anymore; and yet the stripper, the whore, and this boy in this tube, all went through it again anyway. And what did the viewer care? Why should the liberated, mind? What do those who can enjoy sex in any wild way that tickles their fancy care for those doomed to repeat the same bad, too-early sex over and over again their whole lives? Why care, when another video can bring oblivion, and when one can stop, start, re-stop, restart someone else's action, anytime one wants to?
Tremors in his cheekbones, a latent unwillingness suggested in his still-crouching thighs, started to spoil the glint of unbridled joy that was supposed to curl his lips, and draw his pupils back ecstatically far into his eyes--when something different arose from the chaotic digital ether. Static zapped, plains pixillated, and dimensions bent, but something poked through what had always been a digital barrier, a space where he'd always seen eyes within, but never, until now, something permeating, a something seemingly passing through. It resolved itself and blinked on and off a few times, and yet he started to recognize girth, cylinder, pubic bush, slightly hesitant exuberance of an erection's angle, even a slight curvature in a circumcision scar. It was a dick, jutting out at him like some schlong in a glory hole in a tube site's static interface. It wasn't the dick of his top, but another's. It wasn't ramming his rear, but teasing his lips. It wasn't the same old body he'd been interacting with half-willingly in some electronic trap, but a new, unglimpsed man's thereby beautiful dick. It was thick and long and luscious. He wasn't sure how it had reached him, how it could possibly transcend whatever digitized barrier stood between him and his viewers, or even what would happen to him or his top, should he engulf this other man. But he was certain as he opened his lips he could engulf and taste it, and appreciate it for what it, what he, apparently was. It was a dick--he thought, finding joy in wordplay when sexplay had long since ceased inspiring joy--it was a dick of a different dimension.
They, eyes glued to a screen synced to a porn-tube site, seemed never to blink. Eyes bulged, narrowed, glinted, focused, flared, rolled back in the head, blinked, were rubbed by raw fingertips, and bulged all over again. They skitted over the uninteresting but noticed, subliminally, the curve of body that corresponded to hidden contours of mind. They took in erotica. They rendered the voyeuristic vicarious. They reflected, so people say, the soul. These eyes showcased pupils intent on repeated action, on savage scenes, on just that money shot, even when that money shot had been seen multiple times before. They, the eyes, functioned more than one commonly knew in this age of digitized sex, sex that was mediated through pixilated screens, tracked with emerging and disappearing progress bars. Eyes were as sex organs, in and of themselves. They were the portals for watching others' sex organs, receiving provocative information, coaxing the soul into receiving it, them, the perceptions, again and again. They barely blinked, they reflected almost no self-consciousness, and yet they betrayed a tiredness, a wear, from watching, again and again, more and more.
They seemed to have their own electronic problem with focus, with vertical hold. They assumed the attributes of monitors and monochromes, to the point where one looked away and still saw faint shadows rushing around corners, merging with backgrounds, reflected in the eyeball's floaters. They blurred the interface of individual and world as the bearer of those eyes assumed the glimpsed organs as his own, as existing in his own plane of reality, as tangible and touchable, not merely visible and digital. They, the eyes, ceased to discern the real from the simulated, were fooled by the simulacrum, didn't care as they told the brain the difference didn't matter, simulated partner from real.
The eyes dilated and closed in the rush of poppered technicolored, scarlet sunsets on the optic nerves. They registered rushed blood pressure in bloodshot whites to others, blurred the internal camera lens to pulsing crimson to the self, momentarily lost amid the nostrils' inhale, the brain's fumbling, the veins' dilation, the soul's passing euphoria. They betray tiniest regrets one has inhaled once again, broke one's vows not to do poppers, seen the internal sunset lights that fry retinas, that shake up rods and cones, that just can't be good for the vision in the long term. Must be, reasons the brain somewhere in the lengthening wavelength, time for an additional hit.
They, the eyes, lovingly glide up and down pulsing, bucking bodies, fixate on penises, notice the node of the ass some director somewhere wants such eyes to notice. They move independent of the director's camera in his wandering, it shaking, its gentle rhythmic matching of porn stars fucking, it seems--when really they had fucked for the cameras years ago, gone home, left this endlessly scrolling, playing-out pantomime of one-time pleasures. They, the eyes, blinked away knowledge of the keyhole's fakery and insisted what they were seeing were real, insisted on looking at that dick again, couldn't believe, as eyes could or couldn't believe, the throat wrapping itself around the dick letting itself sink its shaft, within, within. They blinked, they looked away, they stared back. They eyed the progress bar, watched as the fingertips set it back a heavenly second earlier, watched again. They seized upon their favorite star, on the favored part of his physique, on the star's best scene, on the details that make them think, this time, it actually wasn't his best scene, after all.
They, the eyes, screened oblivion, they reflected ignorance, they didn't think about images any longer than the images themselves lightning-lasted. They thought nothing of simulated boys living in tube sites, fucking endlessly through the same ongoing but in-fact long-ago fuck. They disregarded the porn stars following directors' orders, yet another take, gay for pay and actually thinking of girlfriends--even watching screens showing straight porn, ill-concealed just out of the shot of what was supposed to be gay porn. They, the eyes, have as little of a conscience, then, as the dick itself, looking on, absorbing, taking what they wanted from what was, what had been, original and real.
They rolled back, lost focus, looked at a nothing spot in the ceiling as the blood pressure dropped down again. They momentarily concentrated on the screwed-tight poppers cap, watched the fingers rub the edges of the nostrils for a poppered rawness, saw as the paper towel, the cum rag, dabbed at the splattered chest. They waited, they felt and embraced, the divine shut-eye of a masturbatory afterglow. Eyelids still pulsed with oddly reddened sunsets and the eyes still sensed heightened heart rates, but a divine tiredness sneaked up on them, sapped their energy, brought down the eyelids, brought on a sexually satisfied sleep. The eyes in their last act of mercy to an overtired mind, let the bearer believe in his satiated heart of hearts, he'd actually had it, real sex.
I put down the transcript of John's electronic conversation with his client Matt and sighed. Neither John, nor no one claiming to be John, had shown up for work the last two days, and the ground is shaky enough when some possible impostor shows up with knowledge only John could have. Now John is IM-ing or whatever with the most fragile client we've got and all I can do is read the transcript after the fact, not even knowing where John's side of the conversation had originated--no answer at his house, no response to his pager, no response from the friend who's a flight attendant and who seems the closest to family John has. Just some weird blip on a screen and my boss asking what's up with Matt and what's up with John and what's up with me, not knowing what's up with Matt and John.
Matt: Jesus, the kid's on the edge of admitting lethality the whole conversation and our guy's all "I am John" and shit, when protocol said to keep the client talking and assess the situation, determine whether and when to call the police. A few steps from telling us who in his family is abusing him, when, where, and how, and John's coyly establishing trust and rapport or whatever that is with his usual tricks--code words only they know, references to earlier conversations only they had had. Chestnut haired kid with adorable dimples had the wildest looks in his eyes at times and had only focused them, of all of the times I had seen him, on the old John. Squints and doubtful looks at the new Johns, or the succession of guys claiming to be John, paled in comparison to the trust that used to shine in the kid's pupils, the breakthrough look, the supplanter of the parent, glimpsed through eyes that had been seeking that savior all along. That adorable kid had tracks on his arms, red scrapes from rusting blades, nicks closer and closer to wrists, stigmata on the Christ child, mortal wounds on the angel. I've got neither savior nor saved, neither the wounded nor part-inflicter of those wounds, in my sights, and I'm supposed to be in charge.
John: How am I supposed to manage a guy I haven't even seen lately, a guy who's a different guy each time I see him, just with the same, improbable story every time? How can I fire him if I can't even find him, and if--as I suspect--he'd go on contacting this client, even if I did? I'm foolish for believing him, them, them for saying they're him, him for letting all of them show up in succession in his place. He always bats an eye or wrinkles a forehead in the most John-like way and then tells me something about the client only he could know, some detail of protocol ninety percent of our guys and gals ignore, even some things--some things I won't admit to myself--only he and I would know. I've been suckered by the best of them, I've heard it all, I know manipulativeness when I see it, and I know I'm seeing it when the next "John" arrives. And still I let him handle cases. And still I let him contact Matt. And still he doesn't follow protocol. And still he doesn't know--I don't think--Matt's dad got him to the emergency room just in time. Blood lost, wounds treated, doctors incredulous, another round of psych doctors questioning my methods, another talk with the big boss and the even bigger boss about John's handling of cases, and I can't even produce John to face the music. All I've got is a transcript and a lot of explaining to do.
Me: It's a glint in John's, the latest John's eyes. It's the confidential manner that I know I would spill my guts to. It's the solemn dropping of the eyes to the floor when a queer teen's case comes to the fore. It's the hard swallow when the kid's parents don't understand and the kid can't catch a break. It's the confident stance of a gay social worker for the gay client he thinks needs him. They're all--arresting. Charismatic. Unprofessional, but one looked into his eyes, what used to be his eyes, and didn't care for professional protocol, provided John was looking out for someone, John would catch someone, John would save Matt from Matt himself. John would-- John would save--
I catch a breath and chew a pencil stub pensively. I've almost just thought it to myself, almost let it come out, almost said something to myself that my self would make my self regret. John would save me. John would save me. I'd said it, I'd thought it, I'd strayed that far from the thoughts a boss is supposed to think. I'd thought as a straight guy the only gay guy I work with could somehow save me in the act of saving Matt. And Matt had made it to the hospital and Matt was the client. And I was the one sitting here perfectly healthy and I was the manager, not the client, and maybe I--I thought, gathering my mental image of the old, original John--maybe I was the one who had needed, who had wanted, to be saved.
It hadn't happened in person but had been a transcript of a computer conversation, and I could still picture John's face. It wasn't John's face anymore but the latest man he had tricked with. It wasn't men I, Luke, tricked with, but a girlfriend I went home to, and still I'd come, somehow, on some weird level, to intuit the men walking into the office each morning as John's type, as a john I could extrapolate from John's johns, whom I had known so far. I wasn't, I shouldn't have been, interested at all in who those johns of John's had been at all, and yet I had caught myself thinking: I'm not so far from that myself. I might be--glancing at my reflection in the face of a watch, inhaling slightly for a tighter diaphragm, laughing inwardly at myself for thinking it--one of John's type, myself. If I wanted to be. If I--do want to be, which, of course, I didn't.
Did I?
These gay guys, their frantic dates, their dramatic lives, their passionate commitment that seems totally not to fit the rest of their character--where do they come from? How do they live with themselves? What's essential to a gay life that no straight life ever essentially possesses as well? What does a gay relationship--what John had with the flight attendant, or what he had, it seemed, with the men he showed up as each morning--have that sets it apart from a straight one, if anything? What's--what's causing me to have these thoughts, phones ringing, the big boss waiting, the message coming in that the father had taken Matt home and wishes to meet with us (with Luke and John) in the morning--what's causing me to have these thoughts, anyway, just looking over a transcript of a conversation that should be enough to have John fired? What's not in the transcript, what's in the subtext, what's in what I'm reading here that no one else reading, it seems, that's going to keep me from firing John? What's here that's convincing me he's still the man to keep on Matt's case? What's here--last question, eyes lingering on the last prompts of the printout--that's going to keep me from longing for the return of the original John? So much so, I'll defy my own last-question protocol: why do I anticipate that John so much, I'll put up with, even welcome, the next John to walk through the door?