Mirage

by Perry Brass

  He headed me off to a small waiting room by the elevator. It was empty. He shut the door, and we sat on a torn vinyl couch. "First the good news," he said. "I got rid of that asshole who was bothering Robert. He ticked me off one time too many. You don't call me ‘Ma'am’ in front of my patients. See? Alcohol was all filled up, so I got him into Substance Abuse, with about fourteen other people going cold turkey and twice as mean as he is. He hates druggies, so it's going to be lots of fun for him from now on. I told the other patients any flack and it's outsville for them, too. So the room isn't as nuts as it was when you came in yesterday."

  His eyes lowered. His voice got quieter. I liked Edgar's big beefy tenderness. Even his smell—slightly vanilla—pleased me. "The bad news. His temp hasn't gone down. He spiked last night. You could have boiled an egg on his head. Panjit is going to do a bronchoscope this afternoon. That means they're going to go down into his lungs with an optical instrument, kind of like a little submarine, and see what's in there. Scrape around a bit. He'll be fairly sedated while they do it. It's still painful."

  "They're not sure what he's got?"

  "You hit it. Could be any number of infections, parasites, spores. The usual suspects." He started to get up, then said, "Panjit's not around. If you see him later, don't tell him I told you any of this. By hospital policy, you're supposed to be kept in the dark unless the docs deign to fill you in. But I know I could be in your shoes. Or Robert's, for all that matter." Suddenly I grabbed his hand, and he took mine and then withdrew his. He nodded his head. "Buck up, okay?"

  "I look like shit-on-a-shingle, don't I?" Robert said. I told him he looked fine. He did look pooped. Worn through. "What I need is a good string of pearls. These hospital gowns are so bare. No ornamentation at all."

  It was good that he could laugh. I stayed with him for several hours, sometimes even falling asleep in the chair, while Robert dozed off. The room was eons quieter. Edgar came in often. If he saw that Robert was sleeping, he just backed away. When Robert was awake, he asked if he needed anything. Robert asked for a Big Mac and a milk shake. "Nothing," Edgar said. "No food until this evening."

  Panjit came in at one, took me aside and told me basically what Edgar did. I went back in to see Robert, just as he was being rolled off to the operating room. I thought my heart would stop. I wanted so much to jump on the gurney with him. I waved goodbye to him. There was too much commotion going on for me to walk with him, so I stood motionless, while he disappeared down the hallway. I turned towards the window behind his bed and watched the street, trying not to cry or feel anything.

  "Why don't you get out of here," Edgar said. "Come back this evening. He won't really come around till about five."

  I left and found a Wendy's down the road and had a chicken sandwich and a chocolate milk shake. It's true what they say about chocolate. It does calm anxieties. I went back to the house and answered the phone. Suddenly people wanted to know about the Foundation. We had three calls from social service organizations, and a call from a would-be client. I got my mind off Robert for a while, and then opened the Washington Post and the Blade. In the Blade I read there was an Act Up demonstration, a really big one, going on at the Center for Disease Control—the CDC—that day. This is interesting, I thought: the day that Robert went in for his bronchoscope, there's an AIDS demonstration. It was an all-day situation, so I decided to go over for it.

  The CDC was convenient by Washington Metro. The demonstration, a fairly big one, had about a thousand people. Not bad for a weekday. It was well-organized, featured placards, sit-ins, and various forms of street theatre. When I walked up, two men were being arrested for pouring fake blood on the sidewalks. The cops were pissed at the mess, at the demonstrators, and even more pissed that about a hundred newsmen were busy aiming their cameras and video equipment at the scene: Stage blood. A line of guys in white lab coats that said, "Not Science. Business (Murder) As Usual." Choruses of slogans. Dancing signs.

  The cops strode around, full of butch menacing impatience. It was hard that afternoon to tell them from your basic, everyday-variety bashers. Washington, all gummed up with gay demonstrations, was not going to be a nice town. So much for police protection. They swang their nightsticks and beat them into their gloved palms, like they were going to make mashed potatoes out of human skulls. What stopped them was the press. Things were difficult, and the cops knew it. They just couldn't act like thugs with all those camcorders and Nikons aimed squarely at their faces.

  I couldn't decide what to do. Join in or try to watch. It was impossible though just to watch. I kept getting pulled into it. Lines of demonstrators snaked around me; flanks of cops pushed me and told me to keep moving. Finally, a hand grabbed me.

  "What are you doing here?" a deep voice asked. I looked. It was Jack Cohen.

  At first I couldn't deal with seeing him. I didn't want to remember New York at all. He was wearing a torn lab coat patched with red tape and laced with loops of small chains. "Pretty neat, isn't it, Alan? Red tape, chains. Listen, I'm in the next street demo thing, so I can't talk. I'll be in town for two more days. I'm staying at the Days Inn in Washington. Mucho cheap. Ask for Jack Cohen. There must be six people in the room, I bet you'd recognize some of them. No sleep, but it's fun. We all came down by car. Kind of like the Sixties."

  Then another lab coat grabbed him, and while the cops glowered on from the side, he joined a circle of men who were lying down on the sidewalks, blocking the stairs up to the CDC. More stage blood splattered the sidewalk. The cops trooped in, and I left.

  The image of the blood stayed in my mind all the way to Washington Public. I thought about Robert's blood—the bronchoscope picking up drops of it, spraying it on the sheets. Then Jack Cohen; and that first night we'd spent on Earth. Why didn't I want to see him again? He was really a nice guy, very appealing. Kind to us. He was sexually into Wright, but who wouldn't be? Still, sometimes you don't want to take other people with you when you go away. I didn't want to take Jack Cohen.

  Robert looked white as a hospital sheet, when I went in to see him. I didn't want to ask him how he felt. All I could say was, "It's nice to see you."

  He looked up. "You don't know how nice it is to see you," he said. "It's really dawned on me—Hetzak, this is for real. You're sick. And I don't like being sick." He smiled weakly.

  "I want to get you out of here," I said.

  "Do you?"

  "Every single cell of me," I said. I grabbed his hand, and held it. We didn't talk much longer. Another nurse came in and handed him some pills. He fell asleep shortly after.

  In the hallway out, I saw Paul Panjit. "We just got back the first lab reports from Robert," he said. "Come with me." We went back to his office. "Things don't look good," he said calmly. "But they could look worse." I asked him what that meant. "Do you want to hear about the little picture or the big picture?"

  I asked him what came first?

  "Okay, the small picture: we don't see any Kaposi's Sarcoma lesions on his lungs. At the moment. He's got a nasty infection in them, but some antibiotics will get rid of that. The small picture, right now, looks good."

  "The big picture?"

  "Not good. He's not fighting infections well. AIDS, you know, does not kill you. No one's ever been killed by the AIDS bug. It's all the other things that land on you and kill you. The next big infection he gets—toxoplasmosis, herpes, spirochetosis, PCP—will kill him. Especially living the way he does. He doesn't take care of himself. That hotel was disgusting. It's like he almost wants to die. Doesn't he have a family he can go back to? A better life someplace?"

  "He doesn't want to go back to his family." I paused to think. What did Robert want? "What's important to him," I said, "is being able to make it on his own. He wants to decide for himself."

  Panjit shook his head. "So he's decided to die in a welfare hotel?"

  "He won't die," I said. "Not if I can help it. Not there, anyway. But I admit, he was pretty far down when I met him."


  "Can you help him?"

  "I want to."

  "Do you believe in karma, Alan?"

  "Yes," I said. "But not in those words. I believe certain things are meant to happen. Like I was meant to meet Robert."

  "That doesn't sound very Jewish to me," Dr. Panjit said. "I thought they believed in choosing—Adam and Eve—shaping things to come. But I guess it all comes down to good deeds, regardless. What you do for Robert Hetzak will be a good deed, and it will affect your karma. Think of it that way."

  When I got back to Holy Resurrection, there was a message on the Foundation's answering machine. It was from Reggy. "Hi, guys," he said. "I'm afraid the Sudanese are really interested in the property. Now, there are ways you can get out of this and really make something. Or, ways you can get your butts burned. We're talking about a two-week time thing now, so get back to me as soon as you can."

  I turned off the message machine in the office, and then went back up to the bedroom. Wright was there, lying on the bed in his underwear. He held his arms out for me. "We've done it," he said.

  I asked him what.

  "We cracked the last tablet. Come here."

  I crawled into bed with him, and he took off my clothes, peeling off my shirt and pants like so many banana skins. "I love you," he said. "We're going to go back. Now I know what I want to know, and I'm ready to leave."

  "What about Robert?" I asked.

  "We'll get him out of the hospital tomorrow."

  "Tomorrow? He just had an operation today! Suppose he's not ready to leave?"

  "He'll be ready. One way or another. Don't you see, we're going to offer him life? Have you told him yet?"

  I told him no, I hadn't.

  "Why not?"

  "He knows there's something strange about us. He knows that already. But I couldn't tell him about taking him back. Not simply to be traded over to those people."

  "He's going to die here if he doesn't come with us. That's the bottom line, Alan."

  He grabbed me and started kissing me, practically tearing my lips and tongue out of my mouth. "I want you to make love to me," he said. "I feel so empty. I'm as frightened by what we're going to do as you are. Make love to me as Wright."

  "Wright?"

  "Yes," he whispered, ripping off his underwear so that his cock flipped straight out, hard and fat, like a gourd dropping from a vine. "I'm Wright now. I'm the man you fell in love with once—years ago, and, Alan, this is the last night I'll be him."

  I looked at him, and I forgot everything about him, every bad thing that he had done in those last few weeks. I had stopped being Alan. Now I was Enkidu—worshipping Wright.

  I became a panther of desire, an adult, finally. My whole body became inflamed from him. Was it just the suggestion of who he was? That he was Wright, only? My mouth slid all over his strong, warm body. I lavished the shaft of his penis and then went for his balls. "Don't take my seed," he begged. "I have no seed for you. I am Wright."

  He was: I knew it. It was a complete act of magic. He was soft and tender, shy, loving. He held me in his arms, while my fingers searched his ball-sac.

  Where was the third Egg? I couldn't find it anyplace. "Where is it?" I whispered.

  "I've hidden it. You can't find it."

  Suddenly I went berserk, trying to figure out who he was now. A dark veil covered my mind: my physical body took over. I started screaming with desire. I plunged my cock down his throat until he gagged, choked, and started to pull up mucus from his stomach. I pulled at his mouth and reached my fingers as far down his throat as I could.

  "Where are you hiding it??" I screamed.

  He wouldn't leave my cock alone and I ended up blasting my sperm down his throat, without giving him the seed from my third Egg. He turned me over and fucked me, and I fell asleep. It was the blankest sleep. A complete darkness; an orgasm of blindness. I woke up in the middle of the night and realized that he was awake.

  "We'll never do that again, will we?" he said. "We will never be Wright and Alan again. Meeting for the first time. Or the last."

  I turned away from him. I knew that I was not Alan; that Enkidu was in love with Wright, and would be. Just as Alan—whatever part of him was left—was in love with Robert. "What did you do with the Egg?" I asked.

  "I can't tell you now, but it'll come back."

  How did he know it would come back?

  "I know a lot more now than I did before," Wright said. "Believe me." He got up and turned on the light. He put on a pair of jeans and walked barefoot down the stairs. When he came back, he had with him a small notebook. I asked him what was in it.

  "The story of the three-balled men. Taken from these tablets four thousand years old."

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  "Some of the lines are blanked out," he said. "But basically, this is what was on the tablets." He sat at the edge of the bed, and began reading:

  In olden days, before this was written,

  before this was put to scribe,

  the men of Inanna, ... (with) three-testicles where men have two,

  found refuge in Nippur, and gave service to Ki,

  abundant service, good service, they gave—

  they gave good service to Ki, silver, goats, sheep, . . . . . .

  Wright interrupted himself. "There's a whole list here of what they brought to the goddess for their services. That's common on these tablets."

  I told him to go on.

  The men of three testes did lie with (regular) men,

  and took the seed of goddess-men into . . . anus. Mouth took seed.

  Took holy an-lil into mouth,

  then spoke praise-words to Ki, and offered silver, goat, sheep,

  cedar, oil from tree . . . . . (obliterated line)

  poured sweet oil on head of goddess-men, offered prayer

  for zi (soul) of goddess-men, took an-lil-seed into . . . .

  "What happened then?" I asked.

  "The next word after an-lil-seed is obliterated."

  I asked him what an-lil-seed meant?

  "An-lil was the incorporation of An, the male form of the sky, and lil, the male form of wind or spirit. It is the incorporation of two male forms. It meant literally the potent spirit. Power. Potency. An-Ki, the incorporation of An, the male sky and Ki, the female earth, was a heterosexual symbol; an-lil was definitely a homosexual one. An-ki was a Sumerian expression for the whole universe, because everything to them was either of or about the earth and the sky. But An-lil was spirit itself, incorporated in male seed. Remember, Enki, the god of wind, spirit? George mentioned him to you. Well, he was also the god of clear, flowing streams; knowledge; and potent sperm. The Sumerians believed all of these ideas were related.

  "So, taking male seed into the mouth—in the most ancient times—was a way of receiving all these things. The Sumerians believed it was a magical act. That does make you wonder why the people down here are so terrified of it. There were, of course, many men even back then who despised the idea. It was too potent for them. Too filled with symbols they couldn't cope with. Eventually—we're talking here over a period of a thousand years—An-lil became something extra-terrestrial, outside of normal human experience, and thus in the province of the goddesses."

  "And the goddess-men?" I asked.

  "They were men who came to the temple to seek out the favor of the goddess. But we think they really came to seek out the favor of the temple's male prostitutes. They were 'trade' as we say today. They fucked the temple workers or were sucked by them. Frankly, I'm sure that they did a bit of sucking themselves. But like today, they wouldn't talk about it. In return for the sex favors, they offered the goddess payment. It was also, we think a way of them saving face: if anyone back home gave them grief for fucking the male temple workers, they said they did it for the goddess. As you can imagine, this created a bond between the goddess and the local men, with the temple workers—in this case, the three-balled men—acting as go-betweens."

  "Oh." Then it dawned on me:
a bond . . . to the Goddess. The male workers with three testicles: the bond among them as strong as their own bond to the Goddess Herself. "Yes," I said. "Go on."

  "This must have infuriated outsiders, who could never penetrate—so to speak—the mysteries of the inner temple, and gain the favor of the goddess without some sex involved. The local goddess was a center of power. She held the community together. So the outsiders produced very strong laws—taboos—against frequenting the temple and lying with the temple whores, especially the male ones. Abraham, for instance, from Ur, would have found the temple workers especially repugnant, if he were trying to establish his own god, a father image, who had no face. The God of Abraham. So he bade his children and followers never to bow before the image of the goddess, a female, unclean, or to have intercourse with her temple workers.

  "But even the Hebrew men wanted these favors. So to keep them away from Assyrian idolatry, later, in Leviticus, it was written that man could not lie with man ever in the same way as with woman. Now for the Hebrews, as for most Middle Eastern men, it was unthinkable to give these pleasure away free. This was a loss of face or masculinity. To be fucked and then paid was alright. This was another profession. You earned your living that way. But if you did it for free, you were considered immoral; a pervert. Sex, you see, always had a price in the ancient world. Therefore, the Hebrews believed that if you could not lie with a man and pay him, homosexuality—as an accepted practice—would be destroyed, or driven completely underground."

  "So what happened to the men—these 'men with the three-eggs', or whatever they were called?"

  "I'm getting to that," Wright said.