Mirage

by Perry Brass

  When it was over, he lay flat on his back, next to me, in a solid, almost drugged sleep; his pipe still swollen, flopping against his thigh. I couldn't see any movement at all on his face. Usually we talked after sex, when the blood was still rushing in both of us, but now he looked almost dead. His breathing was so shallow his chest barely moved. I put my hand on his ball-sac, and felt for his Egg. Nothing happened, either within me or within him. He was completely out of it. I tried to wake him, but he wouldn't budge. Suddenly I felt alone. Unsatisfied as much as I needed my own satisfaction from him. Miserably out of contact with him.

  It was a new feeling. I'd never felt so cut off from another person; it was a feeling of adulthood. I didn't like it. He looked stone white, like a statue lying on the bed. I couldn't stand the feeling of pent-up need anymore. I climbed over and got on top of him. I wanted my body next to his—to feel some sort of emotional union with him. I felt his heart beating softly against me, and the sweet meatiness of his nipples pushing into my chest hairs. I opened his lips with my tongue, and tasted my own sperm on the insides his mouth.

  We lay there, balls-to-balls: the visions began. I rolled into a sphere through space—free-flying—like a diver who knows what he's doing and enjoys every second of an escape into air. Until I realized I was being pulled by an invisible cord back to Ki; the planet had changed.

  It was out of balance. You could smell strife in the air. There were fires all over, as huts in every enclave were burning. I watched and saw my Same-Sex brothers being strapped to posts, beaten, left to thirst. I saw their bodies dumped into the forest by gangs of Off-Sexers who were chanting Ert's name. I saw birds and wolves eating them. I could barely look. It was terrible: the smell and noise of death and violence around me. I looked all over for Woosh, but could not find him. I had no idea where the Blue Monkeys were. I looked throughout our part of the planet, but could not see them. I could not talk to anyone, but could hear every word. And in no place did I hear about the Blue Monkeys.

  Finally, I arrived at the mouth of the cave, hoping to find Woosh there. The mouth of the cave was concealed with stones and clumps of trees. It had been open the night we left. I passed easily through the stones, and entered the first chamber. I called out Woosh's name, but could not hear my own voice. I wandered through the whole cave, without any fear at all. I passed the Pool of the Egg, and the awful room of dead couples. At last, in a small, furthest compartment of the cave, through a coil of chambers and stairways, I saw my own unconscious body, next to Greeland's.

  I touched my nose and felt no breathing at all. I touched my mouth and saw no life upon the lips. I pushed back the eyes: they were blank. I held my wrist. The pulse was working, but at a rate barely able to sustain an insect. Immediately, I left the cave. Woosh did control us to keep us in this state at the border of death. I had to find him. I went back to the Enclave of the Dark Men. Aawkwa was alone in the old men's hut. He saw me.

  "You are looking for Woosh?" Aawkwa said. "He is not here. We cannot find him. There is only fear among the Dark Men. We have canceled the Goddess Dance. The whole planet is suffering."

  Oh, no. I said. That is horrible.

  "The Off-Sexers are doing their worst. They watch us; they wait. They discovered the truth: that Greeland defiled the body of Ert. They call Greeland a criminal to the laws of Ki. They scream for revenge. They talk about the ‘Innocent Ert,’ who died without even a war knife at his side. They are furious that we brought his body back dressed not in his clothes but in ours. We meant no harm in this, Enkidu, only to give him our deepest respect.

  "The priestesses will not allow Greeland's murder, but the Off-Sexers demand a sacrifice. They have killed many in his stead. They bring up the matter often at the Temple. And now the priestesses themselves are discontent: they allow the Off-Sexers to look for you anywhere they want. They have made a war-sport of it: burning, taking, killing. But they still do not know the cave. We concealed the entrance. Others have offered to go in your place, but the Off-Sexers will not be satisfied; they are enjoying their anger too much. They are watching the balance of the planet fall."

  The priestesses have not stopped this?

  "They demanded your return by the next Sixth Moon."

  How did they know we left?

  "I had to confess under questioning. We cannot lie."

  How long until the next Sixth Moon?

  "Where you are, a little more than one month."

  "You're lying!" I screamed, no longer able to control myself. "Where is Woosh? Where is he?"

  "As I told you, we cannot lie. Woosh is not here."

  "Bring me back, Aawkwa. I will save our enclave myself."

  "I cannot bring you back, and you cannot return without Greeland. Don't you see the balance has been upset enough here?" He paused, then confessed: "Greeland threatened Woosh."

  Then Greeland was here?

  "I cannot say. He swore me to secrecy and I cannot lie. But remember—only Woosh can bring you back. And he's hiding. There is disturbance in the cosmos. The balance of Ki has been shattered. Greeland. . . ." He paused.

  What was he going to say?

  "Greeland has hurt us. He must come back. I love him. He himself must be saved."

  How has he hurt you? Besides his offense to the body of my brother, how has he hurt you?

  I realized my extension into space was over. The earth was pulling me back. I was leaving Ki before the answer. I heard Aawkwa crying to me: "Come back, beloved Enkidu. Come back."

  "How can I find Woosh, Aawkwa?"

  "Worry not. He will find you."

  I woke up. Wright was still asleep. The dreadful cold dead feeling didn't stop. Now I realized he'd been unfaithful to me in the worst way. He had used my seed to go back to Ki, and in his usual arrogance—the arrogance of Greeland, the hunter—had threatened the magician who kept us alive. I wondered how he threatened him, and why? I felt drained; hungry. I got up, put on a pair of undershorts, and went into the kitchen. The refrigerator door was open. Robert, also in his underwear, was looking through it.

  "How about some milk and cookies?" I asked.

  "Sounds good to me. Those painkillers give you a hell of an appetite. It's one of the side effects."

  "How do you feel?" I asked.

  "Like shit, but I'll be okay."

  Immediately, I held him to me. His body trembled, while I kissed his bruised face and chest. His body was pale, lean, wonderfully soft in a male way. "How did you know I wanted that more than milk and cookies?"

  "Because I wanted it," I said. "We think alike."

  "Where's Wright?"

  "Fast asleep," I said, and began to strip off his underwear.

  His tongue unrolled into my ear. Then my mouth. I closed my eyes, and felt this huge presence—like fog—coming over me. It was Robert's aura, erotic, attractive, so deep, I had no idea where it began. He started kissing my chest, investigating the blades of hair with his mouth. Then he said, "I feel guilty doing this. Like we're deserting your friend."

  I took his hand and led him back into the second bedroom. We huddled together on the narrow couch, while I tenderly—carefully—stroked his body. "Don't feel guilty," I said. "He's already deserted me. That's why he's so fast sleep."

  Chapter Nineteen

  I was showered and dressed by the time Wright, still in his bathrobe, met us the next morning in the kitchen. I was talking to Robert, who was wearing a fresh change of my clothes. Wright asked Robert how he felt, and Robert said still sore. I only smiled. I knew I was a good lover, warm and tender to him. I hoped Wright could not see it on my face—I wouldn't bring it up, but I wouldn't bury it in lies, either—this deep caring I now had for the man we'd rescued the night before.

  "I want to ask you some questions," Wright said to Robert.

  "Sure."

  "Already?" I asked. "Wright, you slept like a log last night."

  "I was more tired than I thought. Blanked out completely. I don't even remember you getting up th
is morning to shower."

  That was good. That meant that he never knew I got back into bed with him only an hour before daylight. Strangely enough, I didn't look like hell. I felt great. My only problem was keeping my eyes and hands off Robert, while Wright was still around.

  "Have you told Robert anything of our operation here. I mean the Foundation."

  "Yes." As a matter of fact, I'd told him about the Smith Foundation while I made some coffee and rolls for breakfast.

  "What's this Holy Resurrection thing on the sign," Robert asked.

  "The place was a mortuary before we moved in," Wright answered. "Don't worry, that was all in the past. Alan's still a bit skittish about it. I couldn't get him to go down to the basement to save his life."

  "That's the only reason I would do it," I said.

  After Wright had showered and dressed, we met in the office. "Tell us about yourself," he said to Robert.

  "Why do you want to know?"

  "We're trying to keep a file on men who're impoverished because of AIDS. Research, you know."

  "That sounds like my story," Robert said.

  I grabbed a clipboard with a fresh legal pad and started to take notes. Robert began with his growing up in New Jersey. He grew up well. He had a nice childhood filled with toys, clothes, pets, security; but at some point it stopped being filled with love. By the end of that first session, I had filled the legal pad with my sprawling loose notes. Every day, in the evening, I looked them over, and tried to make sense of them. I wanted his story to have coherency, a flow to it. It seemed to me that it should. I didn't want it to be clinical, just a history taken down by an uninvolved observer. He seemed so real to me; his story so compelling.

  My notes ended up gobbling up twenty other pads; it took us a week to get all the information down. Robert moved in with us. There seemed to be no question that he would. He and I drove back to the Capital Palace Hotel, with him at the wheel of the Honda. He was great driver, completely assured. Everything about cars seemed to come natural to him; I was impressed with that. Mabel met us at the desk. "You look a lot better, Robert," she said. "Xaviera sure misses you." We went up to his room, and she helped us pack up most of his things. "I guess you're moving out?"

  "No, Mabel. I'm going to keep it. I need someplace that's mine." I understood what he was saying.

  I spent as much time as I could with him after that. We went out together. He loved to shop for clothes, even if he didn't have the money. I had to hold myself back from buying everything that appealed to him. I was tempted to put it all on my credit card, but didn't. It would have been too much of a tip-off for Wright. Together though, we managed to scrape up enough money to look like we could actually buy some things in cheaper places like the Gap. Some new tee shirts, shorts, and polos came back with us. He had nice taste, sort of slightly funky and preppy at the same time. I could tell it was different from Alan's, who'd never been the chino pants and polo shirt type. But on Robert, even things like that—especially polos in wild colors—looked great. Maybe I was simply excited by him.

  One afternoon, he took me to the back of a raunchy gay bookstore near the Eagle to look at porno magazines. There were all these beautiful young man on slick paper, who looked like they were poured out of plastic. We laughed and bought some, along with a jar of Lube and more rubbers. In the car, Robert took a small dark bottle out of his pocket. "Bought this while you weren't looking," he said. "Like it?"

  I shook my head and remembered that Alan never liked amyl. "You'd better keep that bottle away from Wright," I said. There was no telling how it might affect Wright, if he used it.

  "It's for us," Robert said, and started the Honda.

  "No," I insisted.

  "Spoilsport. Where next?"

  We went to the National Gallery, and Robert pointed out his favorite pictures. He didn't like the Impressionists. "Too pretty." But he liked the early Italians. He knew a lot about them, and made me interested in them. Being with him made me change my feelings about places. Going out to shop, or to museums, became really exciting again.

  Other men dropped by at the Foundation, and often Wright went out to help them. I stopped being interested in the Foundation, and only in Robert. I knew Wright was becoming even more cut off from me, as though he inhabited a different world. Frankly, I minded it less. He and George Marshall talked a lot on the phone. When Robert and I weren't using the car, he drove over to George's apartment, or he went to the Library of Congress with George, or the Smithsonian. Sometimes they went to academic cocktail parties together. They were indeed becoming a strange sort of couple—both of them cool, detached with each other; very different from the way I knew I acted with Robert.

  Wright seemed to have a complete guilelessness as far as Robert was concerned, as if he couldn't see at all what was in my eyes for him. I knew I was having an affair with Robert, behind Wright's back—and I had no intention of telling him about it. I knew this was the affair Wright had always feared and accused me of having. And it was the affair Greeland could never accept.

  Wright was always present when Robert gave us his history. I wondered how I'd ever be able to pull this off, without destroying myself in the process. I felt that every word I wrote and every glance gave me away. But Wright still made me believe that he knew nothing about my feelings—he seemed calmer, more serene now in my presence. On my side, I was never catty. I wouldn't hurt Wright in front of this other man I loved. Of course, a certain part of me was simply smart. There was no telling what Wright—or Greeland—might do out of jealousy. But sometimes I wondered if my feelings for Robert actually ended up in the notes I took.

  I fell completely in love with him. I'm not sure why, nothing like that had ever happened to me. Robert wasn't noble or heroic. He wasn't a hunter like Greeland or carved out of stone, like Wright. He could be petty sometimes. Peevish. His body—soft, thin, boyish—even with lesions, attracted me.

  But it was more. It was a feeling of complete tenderness and openness that I had with him; and the possibility of a complete connection. I knew some of it must have been imaginary. Love, I decided—I'd had so little experience with it, really—was the embodiment of imagination; it was the possibility of every illuminating fantasy, where before there had been only forms, rituals. At best, hope.

  As they said here on Earth, money made the world go round. But I knew that only love could change things.

  I didn't have those feelings for Wright; and I had never experienced that wholeness with Greeland that Robert gave me. It was like I felt safe and myself with him. These were feelings I'd never had before anywhere. Robert came into my life in a miraculous way; and I knew that he had—I wasn't sure how—some connection with every life I'd had before.

  Two weeks later, on a wet dark night, I reviewed the notes. Wright had been out of the house for a long time. I suspected he was with George. It was the sort of night when electricity was pouring out of me, and I—because I knew I wanted this more than anything—was in bed with Robert. I had to keep some kind of control over myself. I had never told him about the Egg, or given him any of its seed. But surging, whipping through me, was the desire to share myself completely with him.

  “Why do you keep rereading the notes?" he asked me.

  "Because," I kissed his ear, "they tell me your whole story."

  "Why did you take it all down?"

  I couldn't tell him, not then. I had to lie. "It's interesting," I said.

  "Do you think Wright even suspects us? He's got a mean temper, doesn't he?"

  I turned to him and kissed him on his lips. "He won't find out."

  "That doesn't answer the question; maybe he does suspect already. Are you two setting me up for something? Tell me, why did you want me here?"

  "You make a great sex object," I said.

  "Pu-leese! Don't joke with a sick man."

  I told him that he wasn't sick, at least as far as I was concerned. He might have AIDS, but it wasn't the end of him. I had to tell him so
mething, so I said that there was something—definitely something—keeping Wright away from us. "When the time comes, he'll find out."

  He smiled. He seemed satisfied with that answer. He had a shy, sweet grin. "So, what do you think of my story?"

  I didn't have an answer for him. "I'm just thinking of the connections between us."

  He reached out and held my cock. "I like that connection."

  I knew he did. Then he tried to put his hand on my balls. I drew away from him.

  "Why don't you ever let me touch your balls?" he asked.

  "They're sensitive," I said.

  "I'll be soft and gentle."

  "I just have a thing about anyone touching my balls," I lied.

  "Even me?"

  I couldn't resist anymore. I drew his hand towards my scrotum, let him explore and stroke it, until he found the third Egg.

  "What's this?" he whispered.

  I hesitated for a second. "Genetic," I answered.

  He explored it further with his hand, rounding the deeper pocket it made in my scrotum. "How does this feel?"

  I didn't answer. I sighed.

  He began to stroke more, and the Egg warmed. I felt my head swimming through space. His mouth became filled with me, as he took the Egg delicately into it. I had to be careful. I couldn't give him my seed now. He stopped, and got up and looked at me. "You look like you've been sniffing poppers for three years. I thought you didn't do those things."

  "Stroke the Egg some more," I said.