The Essential Clive Barker

by Clive Barker

  “I’ve been somewhere like this before,” he said to Rosa.

  “Another ice palace?” she said.

  “No. A place that’s as bright inside as it is out.”

  She ruminated on this for a moment. “Yes. I’ve seen such a place,” she said. She wandered from his side and ran her palm over the crystalline wall. “But it wasn’t made of ice,” she said. “I’m sure not …”

  “What then?”

  She frowned. “I don’t know,” she said. “Sometimes, when I try to remember things, I lose my way.”

  “So do I.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Consorting with Rukenau maybe.”

  She spat on the floor at the sound of his name. “Don’t talk about him,” she said.

  “But there’s a connection, sweet,” Steep said. “I swear there is.”

  “I won’t hear you talk about him, Jacob,” she said, and hurried away, her skirts hissing across the icy floor.

  He followed her, telling her he’d say no more about Rukenau if it troubled her so much. She was angry now—her rages were always sudden, and sometimes brutal—but he was determined to placate her, as much for his own equilibrium as for hers. Once he had her on the bed, he’d kiss her rage away, easily; open her warm body to the cold air and lick her flesh till she sobbed. Her flesh could stand to be naked here. She complained of the cold, of course, and demanded he buy her furs to keep her from freezing, but it was all a sham. She’d heard other women demand such things from their husbands, and was playing the same petulant game. And just as it seemed to be her wifely duty to pout and stamp and flee him in some invented tantrum, so it was his to pursue and coerce, and end up taking her body—forcibly, if necessary—until she confessed that his only errors were errors of love, and she adored him for them. It was an absurd rigmarole, and they both knew it. But if they were to be husband and wife, then they were to play out the rituals as though they came naturally. And in truth, some portion of them did. This part, for instance; where he caught up to her and held her tight; told her not to be a ninny, or he’d have to fuck her all the harder. She squirmed in his arms, but made no attempt to escape him. Only told him to do his worst, his very worst.

  “I’m not afraid of you, Jacob Steep,” she said. “Nor your fucks.”

  “Well, that’s good,” he said, lifting her up and carrying her through to the bedroom. The bed itself was in every way a perfect replica of the real thing, even to the dent in the pillow, as though some frigid sleeper had a moment past risen from the spot. He gently laid her there, her hair spread upon the snowy linen, and began to unbutton her. She had forgiven his talk of Rukenau already, it seemed. Forgotten it, perhaps, in her hunger to have Steep’s flesh in her, a desire as sudden as her rages, and sometimes just as brutal.

  He had bared her breasts, and put his mouth to her nipple, sucking it into the heat of his mouth. She shuddered with pleasure, and pressed his head to the deed, reaching down to pull at his shirt. He was as hard as the bed on which they lay. Eschewing all tenderness, he hoisted up her skirt, found the place beneath where his prick ached to go, and slid his fingers there, whispering in her ear that she was the finest slut in all of Christendom, and deserved to be treated accordingly. She caught his face in her hands and told him to do his worst, at which invitation he removed his fingers and pressed his prick to service so suddenly her cry of complaint echoed through the glacial halls.

  He took his time, as she demanded he did, laying his full weight upon her as he climbed to his discharge. And as he climbed, and her shouts of pleasure came back to him off the ceiling and walls, the feeling that had caught him in the passageway came again: that he had been in a place which this palace, for all its glories, could not approach in splendor.

  “So bright—” he said, seeing its luminescence in his head.

  “What’s bright?” Rosa gasped.

  “The deeper we go …,” he said, “the brighter it gets …”

  “Look at me!” she demanded. “Jacob! Look at me!”

  He thrust on mechanically, his arousal no longer in service of her pleasure, or even his own, but fueling the vision. The higher he climbed, the brighter it became; as though the spilling of his seed would bring him into the heart of this glory. The woman was writhing under his assault, but he paid her no mind; just pressed on, and on, as the brightness grew, and with it his hope that he would know this place by and by; name it, comprehend it.

  The moment was almost upon him; the blaze of recognition certain. A few more seconds, a few more thrusts into her void, and he’d have his revelation.

  Then she was pushing him away from her, pushing his body with all her strength. He held on, determined not to be denied his vision, but she was not going to indulge him. For all her squealing and sobbing, she only ever played at subjugation—the way she played at the lost girl, or the needy wife—and now, wanting him away from her, she had only to use her strength. Almost casually, she threw him out and off her, across the gelid bed. Instead of spilling his seed in the midst of revelation, he discharged meekly, in half-finished spurts, too distracted by her violence to catch the vision that had been upon him.

  “You were thinking of Rukenau again!” she yelled, sliding off the bed and tucking her breasts from view. “I warned you, didn’t I? I warned you I’d have no part of it!”

  Jacob sealed his eyes, hoping to catch a glimpse of what had just escaped him. He’d been so close, so very close. But it had gone, like a firework dying in the heavens.

  From Sacrament

  The following day he went to visit Patrick, in his apartment up at the top of Castro. Though the pair had lived together on Sanchez Street for almost four of their six years together, Patrick had never given up the apartment, nor had Will ever pressured him to do so. The house, in its spare, functional way, was an expression of Will’s undecorative nature. The apartment, by contrast, was so much a part of who Patrick was—warm, exuberant, enveloping—that to have given it up would have been tantamount to losing a limb. There at the top of the hill he had spent most of the money he earned in the city below (where he had been until recently an investment banker) creating a retreat from the city, where he and a few chosen lotus-eaters could watch the fog come and go. He was a big, broad handsome man, his Greek heritage as evident in his features as the Irish: heavy-lidded and laden eyes, a thug of a nose, a generous mouth beneath a fat black mustache. In a suit, he looked like somebody’s bodyguard; in drag at Mardi Gras, like a fundamentalist’s nightmare; in leather, sublime.

  Today, when Rafael (who had apparently recanted and come home) escorted Will into the living room he found Patrick sitting at the window dressed in a baggy T-shirt and drawstring linen pants. He looked well. His hair was cropped to a graying crewcut, and he wasn’t as beefy as he’d been, but his embrace was as powerful as ever.

  “Lord, look at you,” he said, standing back from Will to appreciate him. “You’re finally starting to look like your photograph.” (This was a backhanded compliment; and an ongoing joke, begun when Will had chosen an unflattering jacket photograph for his second book on the grounds that it made him look more authoritative.) “Come and sit down,” he said, gesturing to the chair that had been put opposite his in the window. “Where the hell’s Rafael gone? You want some tea?”

  “No, I’m fine. Is he looking after you okay?”

  “We’re doing better,” Patrick said, easing back into his own chair. Only now, in the tentativeness of this maneuver, did Will get a sense of his delicacy. “We argue, you know—”

  “So I heard.”

  “From Adrianna?”

  “Yeah, she said—”

  “I just tell her the juicy bits,” Patrick said. “She doesn’t get to hear about what a sweetheart he is most of the time. Anyway, I have so many angels watching over me it’s embarrassing.”

  Will looked back down the length of the room. “You’ve got some new things,” he said.

  “I inherited some heirlooms from dead
queens,” he said. “Though most of it doesn’t mean much if you don’t know the story that goes with it, which is kinda sad, because when I’m gone, nobody will know.”

  “Rafael isn’t interested?”

  Patrick shook his head. “It’s old men’s talk as far as he’s concerned. That little table’s got the strangest origins. It was made by Chris Powell. You remember Chris?”

  “The Fix-it man with the beautiful butt.”

  “Yeah. He died last year, and when they went in his garage they found he’d been doing all this carpentry. Making chairs and tables and rocking-horses.”

  “Commissions?”

  “Apparently not. He was just making them in his spare time, for his own satisfaction.”

  “And keeping them?”

  “Yeah. Designing them, carving them, painting them, and leaving them all locked up in his garage.”

  “Did he have a lover?”

  “A blue-collar honey like that, are ya kidding? He’d had hundreds.” Before Will could protest. Patrick said: “I know what you’re asking and no, he didn’t have anyone permanent. It was his sister found all this beautiful work when she was cleaning out his house. Anyway, she asked me around to see if I wanted something to remember him by, and of course I said yes. I really wanted a rocking-horse, but I didn’t have the balls to ask. She was a rather prim little soul, from somewhere in Idaho. Obviously the last thing she wanted to be doing was going through her cute fag brother’s belongings. God knows what she found under the bed. Can you imagine?” He gazed out toward the cityscape. “I’ve heard it happen so often now. Parents coming to see where their baby ran away to live, because now he’s dying, and of course they find Queer City, the only surviving phallocracy.” He mused a moment. “What must it be like for those people? I mean we do stuff in broad daylight here they haven’t even invented in Idaho.”

  “You think so?”

  “Well, you think back to Manchester, or, what was the place in Yorkshire?”

  “Burnt Yarley?”

  “Wonderful. Yeah. Burnt Yarley. You were the only queer in Burnt Yarley, right? And you left as soon as you could. We all leave. We leave so we can feel at home.”

  “Do you feel at home?”

  “Right from the very first day. I walked along Folsom and I thought: this is where I want to be. Then I went into the Slot and got picked up by Jack Fisher.”

  “You did not,” Will said. “You met jack Fisher with me, at that art show in Berkeley.”

  “Shit! I cannot lie to you, can I?”

  “No, you can lie,” Will said magnanimously, “I just won’t believe you. Which reminds me, Adrianna thought your father—”

  “Was dead. Yeah. Yeah. She gave me hell. Thanks very much.” He pursed his lips. “I’m beginning to have second thoughts about this party,” he groused. “If you’re going to go around telling the truth to everyone I’m going to have a shit time; and I know the party’s for you, but if I’m not having fun then nobody’s going to have fun—”

  “Oh we can’t have that. How about I promise not to contradict anything you’ve said to anybody as long as it’s not a personal defamation?”

  “Will. I could never defame you,” Patrick said, with heavily feigned sincerity. “I might tell everyone you’re a no-good egotistic sonofabitch who walked out on me. But defame you, the love of my life? Perish the thought.” Performance over, he leaned forward and laid his hands on Will’s knees. “We went through this phase, remember? Well at least I did—when we thought we were going to be the first queers in history never to get old? No, that’s not true. Maybe we’d get old, but very, very slowly so that by the time we were sixty we could still pass for thirty-two in a good light? It’s all in the bones; that’s what Jack says. But black guys look good any age so he doesn’t count.”

  “Do you have a point?” Will smiled.

  “Yes. Us. Sitting here looking like two guys the world has not used kindly.”

  “I never—”

  “I know what you’re going to say: you never think about it. Well you wait till you go out cruising. You’re going to find a lot of little muscle boys wanting to call you Daddy. I speak from experience. I think it must be a gay rite of passage. Straights feel old when they send their kids off to college. Queens feel old when one of those college kids comes up to them in a bar and tells them he wants to be spanked. Speaking of which—”

  “Spanking or college boys?”

  “Straights.”

  “Oh.”

  “Adrianna’s going to bring Glenn on Saturday, and you mustn’t laugh but he’s had his ears pinned back surgically, and it makes him look weird. I never noticed before, but he’s got a kind of pointy head. I think the protruding ears were a distraction. So, no laughing.”

  “I won’t laugh,” Will assured him, perfectly certain Patrick was only telling him for mischief’s sake. “Is there anything you want me to do for Saturday?”

  “Just turn up and be yourself.”

  “That I can do,” he said. “Okay. I’m on my way.” He leaned over and kissed Patrick lightly on the lips. “You can see yourself out?”

  “Blindfolded.”

  “Will you tell Rafael it’s pill time? He’ll be in his bedroom on the telephone.”

  Patrick had it right. Rafael was sprawled on his bed with the telephone glued to his ear, talking in Spanish. Seeing Will at the door he sat upright, blushing.

  “Sorry—” Will said, “the door was open.”

  “Yeah, yeah, it was just a friend, you know?” Rafael said.

  “Patrick said it’s pill time.”

  “I know,” Rafael replied. “I’m coming. I just got to finish with my friend.”

  “I’ll leave you two alone,” Will said. Before he’d even closed the door Will heard Rafael picking up the thread of his sex-talk while it was still warm. Will went back to the living room to tell Patrick the message had been delivered, but in the minute or so since his departure Patrick had fallen asleep, and was snoring softly in his chair. The wash of late afternoon light softened his features, but there was no erasing the toll of years and grief and sickness. If being called Daddy was a rite of passage, Will thought, so’s this: looking in on a man I fell in love with in another life, and knowing that there was love there still, as plentiful as ever, but changed by time and circumstance into something more elusive.

  He would gladly have watched Patrick a while longer, calmed by the familiarity of his face, but he didn’t want to be hanging around when Rafael emerged, so he left the sleeper to his slumbers and headed off out of the apartment, down the stairs and into the street.

  Why, he wondered, when there’d probably been more literary ink spilled on the subject of love than any other—including freedom, death, and God Almighty—could he not begin to grasp the complexities of what he felt for Patrick? There were many scars there, on both sides; cruel things said and done in anger and frustration. There were petty betrayals and desertions, again, on both sides. There were shared memories of wild sex and domestic high jinks and times of loving lucidity, when a glance or a touch or a certain song had been nirvana. And then there was now; feelings extricated from the past, but being woven into patterns neither of them had anticipated. Oh, they’d known they’d grow old, whatever Patrick remembered. They’d talked, half jokingly, about withering into happy alcoholics in Key West, or moving to Tuscany and owning an olive grove. What they’d never talked about because it had not seemed likely, was that they would be in here, in the middle of their lives, and talking like old men: remembering their dead peers and watching the clock until it was time for pills.

  From Subtle Bodies

  THE LIGHT IS FADING, TURNING A DUSKY PINK, AS IF BEFORE A MAJOR THUNDERSTORM.

  MR. FOSS: Significance does seem to lie in insignificant places, doesn’t it?

  In an arrangement of clouds, in the ink stain on my thumb.

  ROB: In dreams.

  MR. FOSS: Of course in dreams. There most of all.

 
; TREADAWAY, WHO HAS TAKEN OVER AS PHOTOGRAPHER, COMES TO FETCH MR. FOSS AND ROB.

  MR. TREADWAY: Please take your seats, or we’ll never get to the Wedding Breakfast.

  MR. FOSS: I hope everyone’s in the mood for nuts and bananas.

  MR. FOSS GOES TO STAND IN THE CENTER OF THE PICTURE, BESIDE HIS GORILLA. SOME OF THE GUESTS ARE SITTING, OTHERS STANDING. MRS. CORCORAN IS THERE, AS IS ULYSSES. SEAN. OF COURSE NOW ROB JOINS THE GROUP TOO.

  MR. FOSS: Well, here we are. Finally.

  MRS. CORCORAN: You have to say a few words.

  MR. FOSS: Must I?

  MRS. CORCORAN: It’s traditional.

  MR. FOSS: Well, I’m a great believer in tradition.

  THE REST OF THE GUESTS APPLAUD. MR. FOSS QUIETENS THEM DOWN.

  MR. FOSS: Of course, it’s all a complete mystery to me. I freely admit it. Who proposed to who. What God can possibly mean, joining us in Roly-Poly Paddle Me. But isn’t that the sweetest thing, mystery? To have that is, I think, to have everything. Everything.

  TECHNICIAN: Poem!

  MR. FOSS: No …

  ALL: Yes! (They chant) Po! Em! Po! Em!

  MR. FOSS: I have nothing prepared.

  ROB: Make it up.

  MR. FOSS: Then you’ll have to help me.

  ROB: I’ll do my best.

  MR. FOSS: So … There once was a fellow called Lear …

  ROB: Whose life was … exceedingly queer.

  MR. FOSS: One day, for a jape. He married an ape …

  ROB: And …

  EVERYBODY WAITS, BREATHLESS, FOR THE NEXT LINE.

  ROB: And swung from a tree for a year.

  MR. FOSS: Yes! Yes! (Applauds)

  HE KISSES THE BRIDE.

  MR. FOSS: Yes. Oh yes. Oh yes … (Quietly, to Rob) It’s all nonsense of course. But it brings a tear to my eye nevertheless.

  ROB: Ah, love!

  MR. FOSS: Ah. Love.