What he had seen remained something he was reluctant to talk about.
Insistently, again and again, it coursed through his veins like blood. It projected itself onto the screen of his imagination like a movie. But it did not play itself out. It had excited him beyond anything he had ever known.
It was not inside him, no matter how often it possessed him, however, that it could or that it had to play itself out. For that to happen, in order for him to be freed from its grip upon his nerves, it would have to happen outside, in the common world. There would have to be someone else, someone who knew what he knew. Then what existed as a haunting longing might be transformed into something actual, fulfilled, and contained.
He went around for days, abstracted.
The after-image of the men, posed like somnambulists, razor-sharp their cocks, in their leather leggings, buff bare chests, and with rings in their nipples and submission in their eyes haunted him.
A cloud of identity enveloped him and solidified around him like an armor.
Autumn returned to the city in a clean haze of gray. Formidable clouds, green and yellow billows, marbled the sky like Rorschach blots. The old brownstones and townhouses on the north side of the park expressed something ineffably sad. Furtive ghosts they seemed, unsure why they were still in the world after their spirits had vanished.
A tree here and there, the sole remnants of an ancient forest that had been supplanted, stood with twisting branches in its isolated square of earth-left-exposed, bordered by the concrete.
He thought he saw that someone was looking at him and turned around. But now nobody was there. Perhaps no one had been there at all, not just not when he looked.
Wishes were becoming fleeting hallucinations. He shook his head as if to wake himself, but he shook out none of his obsessive desire.
It began to rain and he put up the collar of his jacket and quickened his pace.
Under the awning he bought a bouquet of white and yellow tulips and rushed again through the streets.
She waited until she despaired of waiting.
I told you I would not come when you asked me. You insisted but I knew I wouldn't. I couldn't.
It was defiance, not an explanation.
He was helpless to do anything but refuse to go to her even as he seemed to be complying with her demand that he come. Refusal had come to him as the only essence. Prevention was permission. He had felt the force of his own being as the force of another's power acting upon him. His heart spread its arms and clapped its hands.
He paced back and forth with the phone at his ear from window to desk unable even to listen to her voice.
He did not tell her what he had gone through, of the epiphany in the flower shop as he was handing a twenty to the bowed Korean old man, or how he gave the tulips away one by one in a gay bar to grinning or glaring recipients.
Nor did he explain how he had stopped caring how others thought of him or how they received what he did or how they responded to him. Such spirit-killing anxiety had fallen from him in an instant of defiance. That instant he became diaphanous. He hovered like the enveloping air. He had never felt such heat in himself or felt himself generate such an intensity of heat in others.
I don't want anymore. I'm sorry if that hurts you. But I don't want any more.
He said it and snapping his own phone shut, he left her with a phone in her hand, a piece of technology devoid of life. Without his voice, his presence, it was nothing. When her furious attempts to call him back were blocked by his recorded message, it was something hateful.
Rebecca fell into her chair, clenched her fists, gritted her teeth and cursed herself for caring.
Riding on the D train that night he saw a boy he could not take his eyes off.
The boy smiled and he smiled back.
The boy approached him, stuck out his hand, and they shook.
Lee, said the boy.
Christopher.
I saw you looking at me.
Was I obvious?
I'm glad you were.
Where do you get off?
Wherever you want me to.
I live on eighty-eighth street.
Eighty-third.
We're neighbors.
Your place or mine?
Come home with me.
Sure.
A crowd pushed into the train at Columbus Circle.
Their thighs, in the crowded train, touched, and then their pelvises and torsos pressed together. It could not be avoided. They were face to face, almost lip to lip. It was not accidental, the fortuitous result of a sudden lurch. It was deliberate: their lips momentarily touched.
The streets were full of snow. They walked up the car-less width of the road, open now like a meadow in Spring, a white field, because of the long snowfall, as if they were in the country, as if they were ice-skating.
The children across the street watched them as they walked that way hand in hand up the center of the snowfield under starlight and lamplight.
The children across the street watched from the window, kneeling on the sofa that was pressed against it, leaning forward against its back.
The boy of twelve felt the sofa pressed against him as if it were one of those bodies he was looking at, but he did not know that. He was lost in the warm sensation that came from his groin pressing against one of the sofa's more extenuating springs, imagining their punishment if they could be arrested. For their sin!
Jason was a dangerous boy. He went to church and had been hypnotized, seduced into a fervent belief in chastity. He had watched a pornographic video with several of the other boys in the church one wet autumn afternoon as they were gathered in one of their basements.
Look, Monty said.
What? Jason asked.
You promise to keep this here?
It was a movie of men kissing each other and doing other things. They were alone in the house and they watched it. Afterwards, they would not name or speak of the things they had seen, except sideways. They all complained of a headache. They expressed mutual abhorrence. And they found a lesson: It is important to find in yourself forgiveness for the sinners, although not for the sin, of course not for the sin.
Jason's handsome, new-formed chest swelled proudly at the aloofness of his virtue.
The boys justified what they did, agreeing that they watched the video in order to understand how Satan insinuated himself into the fallen world.
In addition to the word chastity, Jason also knew the word faggot. He was, by that knowledge condemned to a greater guilt because he could not forgive faggots for the fury of disgust they roused in him.
He looked on out the window, his hardon pressed against the sofa back, at them, one in a sheepskin parka and the other in a motorcycle jacket, tight jeans and boots. He saw everything. He could not take his eyes off them, handsome figures, riveting him, as they walked slowly holding hands in the middle of the snow-bleached street.
In his mind was only impulse, not thought.
He told his father, who said there was nothing he could do.
You saw two faggots holding hands.
Yeah.
What do you want me to do? his father asked not hiding his own disgust or his frustration at his lack of jurisdiction.
But you're a policeman.
Lee made a fire in the fireplace.
Christopher stood in the doorway waiting eagerly for him to turn around and see him.
Stiff, shiny, high black boots, bare thighs, black leather shorts worn low letting the silver waist band of his thong show, chest smooth and flat and bare, silver rings in his nipples, wrist bands, knotted ropes and ridges of muscle, a thin chain round his neck, eyes softened by surrender, feeling the easy fullness of his breath. Then Lee's kiss: the assimilation of his breath.
He took hold of Christopher's nipples and began to hurt him.
Christopher gasped and suppressed the gasp simultaneously and stiffened his body in acceptance of the pain.
He struggled to bring his lips near enough Lee's, but Lee pulled away and kept him at a distance.
He pulled and twisted the nipple rings more to bring Christopher greater pain as Christopher obediently withheld himself, his tensile body shaking with desire.
Jason as the spring approached began to meet his friends in the street in the afternoons, after school.
You know there are faggots living on this block, he said. I've seen them.
Mark with his cap turned backwards shrugged, and Ben giggled.
Yeah, Mark said.
So what does it matter? Ben said.
But I've seen 'em, Jason said. What they do is unnatural, Satan's triumph.
Mark sighed.
Jason's eyes hooked on to Mark's. Their two heads filled one space.
You want to fight? Jason said.
Something else tonight, Mark said. Let's do something else.
Come on, Jason said, waving his hand very near Mark's face and suddenly dropping it to chest level and pushing him hard enough that Mark caught himself staggering.
Jason laughed, but it was a challenge and an invitation. He was expressing desire not animosity. But how could there not be animosity when he recoiled from the desire that drove him?
Rebecca thought Christopher was stupid. Nevertheless, she was waiting for his call.
When after three weeks he still had not called, she became distraught. She dropped things and broke things she liked.
It did no good that she was angry. Thinking that, that her feeling could effect nothing, made her angrier.
But there was nothing she could do. She could kick herself for having been so stupid. Still she longed for him beyond her power to control it.
When she called his cell, she always got a recorded message. When she texted him, she got nothing.
Christopher was not thinking of her anymore.
He had been transformed. Like an image in a convex mirror, he had entered the turning point and everything had been turned upside down, had been inverted. Perhaps the more important transformation was that everything had been turned inside out. Image had become actual. Form had found flesh.
He lifted the champagne flute and held Lee's eyes.
Lee returned his salute, gently touching the side of his glass to the rim of Christopher's. They drank. In the candlelight flickering on their table, legs pressed together, heads turned towards each other, they brought their open mouths together still tingling with the champagne bubbles. They tasted the cold wetness and drank each other.
They withdrew, and through closed mouths drew in a stream of air. Their eyes grew heavy under drooping lids.
Christopher pulled a twenty out. Laying it on the table, he said, Let's get out of here, babe.
I've noticed the kid, too, Lee said as they walked home.
He looks at us with a combination of hatred and desire.
Poor kid, Lee said.
Watch out for poor kids, Christopher responded.
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