I woke in the night when he opened the door.
“Who are you?” I called, fearing I would never see him again, never see him when I was healthy enough to thank him for his tremendous kindness.
“A man who needs to piss,” he said, and walked out. He returned some time later.
“I have a chamber pot,” I said.
“I know,” he said. “But you didn’t have this.” He held up a small bottle of whiskey.
“I have gin.”
“I saw your gin. Indeed, I smelled it.” He sat on the one chair in the room, a small wooden chair I had built myself from scraps I’d found near the docks. He opened his bottle of whiskey. “What you call gin is a fast road to blindness. I might consider using it to remove stains from my clothing, but I am afraid it would remove the cloth along with the stains.”
“I wanted to thank you,” I said, “for—”
“No need for thanks. My motives were entirely mercenary, and you still should receive the attention of doctors, especially given what looks to me like a broken bone in your arm. I have not called a doctor, however. I must leave that for you to do yourself. You were a useful excuse for me at a difficult moment. I needed to disappear from the vision of certain people for a few hours while they sought me out for debts I most surely do not owe them, and since you are a stranger to me, and we have no previous connection, it is unlikely anyone will think to look for me here. I trust you are sufficiently healthy to avoid immediate death, however, as I have no skill as a nurse. Also, I expect I will become insensibly inebriated within the next hour. I have been an advocate of temperance recently, and I intend to return to advocating temperance in the future, but in the present I desire nothing so much as the soft obliteration bestowed by this bottle.” He drank deeply from it.
“I am still grateful to you. There is no telling what could have become of me.”
After many more minutes and many more drinks, the man said, “How did you end up in this state, if you’ll pardon my curiosity.”
“I hardly know, myself. A poet might say I fell into a vortex of vice and infamy.”
“A villainous vortex of vice. Or, perhaps, a villainous veritable vortex of vice. No, a vortex of villainy, a veritable vice of…” He sighed and swayed a bit on the chair. He emptied the bottle into his mouth, then carefully slid from the chair to the floor, his care undermined by his drunkenness, causing him to end up on hands and knees with little comprehension of how he got there. Eventually, he rolled onto his side and stared at me.
“Are you a thief?” he muttered.
“What?”
“You live in a thief’s establishment.”
“No, there are no thieves here. We are people of business.”
He chuckled. “And what business is your business?”
I looked into his hazed and glassy eyes. “You won’t remember anything I say in the morning.”
He coughed fiercely, but somehow avoided vomiting.
“Men pay me money,” I said. “And for that money, I pleasure them. I kiss them. I undress them. They kiss me and undress me. We pretend at love. Their tastes are, shall we say, Hellenistic. Some of them are strong men whose pleasure comes from dominating a weaker man. Some of them are weak men who fancy themselves women at heart. If they pay enough, I can give them any pleasure they desire.”
“Do you enjoy…” he began, his words fading into gibberish.
“Sometimes, yes, I enjoy it,” I said. “A shallow enjoyment, briefly real. I learned early to survive by trying to fall in love with them all. They pay better when I am convincing. They return. My best men seek my body’s spirit, and they pay me for it, so I must…deliver it unto them.”
He chuckled again, weakly, as he slipped away from consciousness.
In the morning, his body was so consumed with nausea and pain that the doctor I summoned to attend to my wounds spent as much time with him as with me. A few of my friends and regular customers paid a visit during the day, and while most of them assumed the man sprawled on the floor was an especially satiated customer, one of my favorite men, a lovely brute with mischievous eyes and a lady’s lips, who worked among newspapermen, said he had seen my visitor around his own haunts and knew him to be disreputable and irresponsible, often a danger to himself but generally harmless otherwise, though he was said to have an acid tongue.
By evening, he had recovered sufficiently to depart, offering to return with provisions should I need them, but by that time my friends and colleagues had determined a schedule by which they fulfilled my needs in shifts, for though we may be lowly in our employment and circumstances, lowliness inspires fierce comradeship: my fate was one all my peers could envision for themselves, and though I knew of none whose experiences were as decorated with grotesque mystery as mine, few had escaped bruises, broken bones, and alley trash-heaps during their careers.
And so my savior departed, and I thanked him, and he seemed to remember nothing of our conversation, and I set my sails toward healing and forgetting.
I sent my customers away with apologies—the doctor had informed me that my body needed significant rest and tenderness, and my broken arm was going to be a problem for months. A few men offered me a penny or two for food and medicine, though most simply gave me a wary smile or hasty kiss before closing the door behind themselves. Many would never look at me with the same lust in their eyes as before, and most would pay someone else for their pleasures.
As the months passed and my body healed, if ever the terrible night left my mind, my dreams brought it back in monstrous nightmares. Shadow creatures tore all the skin from my face and chest and arms and legs—massive hands pulverized my bones—wild, full, liquid eyes flashed with red light across all my visions—and endless applause echoed through the maelström.
Many months later, as I undressed in darkness for a customer who sprawled naked across my bed, a shaft of moonlight illuminated my face more fully than he had seen it before, and he gasped and covered himself with the sheets. I knew then what I had first suspected when I saw him: This was Charles, the attendant to my nightmares. His face had grown more sallow, his body more angular, but this was he.
I jumped atop him and held him to the bed. (In the moonlight, we perhaps resembled a strange etching of midnight wrestlers.) My muscles flexed with fury, and I wanted nothing so much as to tear him apart with my hands, not because he had himself abused me—he had been nothing but gentle and sympathetic—but because here, for the first time since that ghastly night, I held in my hands some physical representation of the misery that still terrorized my mind.
Leaning down close, I spat his name into his ear, enunciating it as a vicious noise, an accusation and condemnation, a curse. I held him firm, but gave him everything he had paid me for, and more than that—for though I always made sure to keep him pressed to the bed to prevent his escape, my every caress was soft, careful, loving. Malnourishment and maltreatment had faded his previous beauty, but its shadow remained, and it was the shadow I sought, the shadow I held in my imagination. This was a greater torture to him than any I could have inflicted with fists or whips or the manifold tools of so many Inquisitions. Once I recovered from my terrible night, I took to keeping my room quite dark, for certain scars and bruises never left my skin, and only a minority of customers are excited by damaged goods, so Charles had not been able to discern my features and had not known whom he was buying—his intent was as innocent as any such attempt could be.
After, as he lay nearly comatose from exhaustion and shame, I retrieved some rope from a corner of the room and bound him with it. He fought listlessly against me. I hauled him to the floor and dragged him up against the wall. And then I waited.
Though first he resisted and pleaded ignorance, then wept over the consequences his words would bring himself and his family, by mid-day, he had told me everything I hoped to know. He did not know names, or at least not useful ones (the names he knew were descriptive: “The Sailor,” “The Old Swede,” “The Pai
nter,” “Doctors D and F”) but he knew times, locations, and passwords. Though he wailed that he was certain things had changed since he had been unceremoniously relieved of his duties (for reasons he knew not), I thanked him and removed the ropes that bound him. I had brought a bucket of water into the room, and I cleaned him with it, and as I did so his tears subsided and his weeping gave way to stoic impassivity. I dried him with a small towel, then dressed him as if he were an invalid. I kissed him, but he did not respond. In the years since that moment, I have imagined many words that must have passed through his mind, but the truth is that he did not speak—he lifted his head high and walked away, a new force of will, or a newly willed force, propelling him from the room.
He had given me the address at which the malevolent club would meet, for they moved their meetings according to a strict plan, and he said it was always the third Thursday of the month, and that the revels began precisely at eleven minutes past eleven in the evening. That gave me one month to prepare, for Charles had visited me on the night of the third Thursday.
I spent the month perfecting my scheme and collecting the various items I would need to effect it. This required much cleverness and a certain amount of daring, for I had not nearly enough money to purchase all the items, particularly the clothing, and so I had to insinuate myself into places where such things could be acquired. My greatest luck came when a friend of a friend introduced me to an expensive card game in a building near Gramercy Place, and my experience with far less trusting competitors in far more complicated games allowed me to leave not only with what was, for me at that time, a small fortune in cash, but with what I had really come for: a fine hat, cape, and walking stick. (The other players were so amused by my encouraging them to wager their clothing that they insisted I return again in the future, as indeed I did many times, making the associations that would, in fact, send me toward the far more reputable sort of life I lead today.)
Thus it was that I was able to dress myself as a man of considerable means, and to secrete on my person two pistols obtained for me by a faithful customer who was also an officer in the Navy, and who provided me with, in addition to the pistols, ammunition and numerous small sacks of gunpowder.
I began writing this as a way to, I thought—or I told myself—exorcise Adam. But that’s not it.
Words are magic. That’s what he said to me when we started dating. I loved his words, and I told him so, and he smiled and he said, “Well, words are magic.” It’s only when you’re first in love with somebody that such banal and empty ideas seem profound. I should know better, but those first, rushing, blinding moments of love make everything seem profound, unique, consequential. I should know better. I’ve got a master’s degree, I’ve studied philosophy and literature and art and history—and yes, my daily life is not glamorous, I work as a shipping and receiving manager at a warehouse, yes, I know I am not, as he said, living up to my potential (whatever that is!), but you don’t think I’m as aware of that as anybody else? I’ve spent a lifetime being told how much potential I have, how brilliant and talented I am, what a fine mind I have. At the warehouse they call me “Professor” and “Einstein,” but that’s nothing compared to what people say to me when I get into a conversation with them about, for instance, the building of the Croton Water Aqueduct or the history of the Tombs and then they ask me if I’ve written a book or if I work at a university and I mumble and I shuffle my feet and I cough nervously and eventually, if they’re persistent, I tell them, “Actually, I work at a warehouse.” You should see their faces. You have seen their faces. And I’ve seen your face when you’ve seen their faces. It’s not just that you think I haven’t lived up to my potential, no—you’re ashamed of me. At your book parties, at your conventions and conferences. You were always happy to be around anybody other than me. Remember the party where, after at least a couple of bottles of wine, you grabbed me and groped me and people gathered around, laughing nervously, and you yelled to them all, “Look, friends, at my Hop-frog!” I should have grabbed a torch and hurled it at you and set you all aflame.
Words are magic.
No they aren’t. I keep writing this, thinking of you, wondering what you would make of it, wondering if it would, somehow, be enough. Enough what? Enough magic.
Words are not magic. Words are echoes, shadows, ashes.
We tell stories because what else is there to do? This is a story. I am telling it. Summoning voices to keep me company through the night.
The entertainment that month occurred in a palatial private residence far north, at 52nd Street and Fifth Avenue. My card winnings easily paid for a fine carriage to carry me to the location, and though I had feared the password system Charles taught me would have been changed, it was not, for I was admitted without a second glance from the masked and muscled men who guarded the inside of the door. From there, a very small man—a dwarf, really—dressed in an expensive (and miniature) butler’s uniform led me through a corridor and up two flights of stairs to a kind of recital hall. It was a circular room, very lofty, and received the light of the moon only through a single window at top. A few dozen chairs stood in rows in front of a small stage, at the center of which had been placed a settee, and above which hung an immense chandelier dripping wax from its countless candles. Most of the seats in the audience were filled by well-attired men, and none of us looked at each other or spoke.
Within minutes, the man in the world whom I most loathed, the man who had first enticed me to attend one of these performances and then scarred and humiliated me so brutally, so publicly—this man now stood on the stage, directly in front of the settee, his face unmasked. His words echo through my ears as if I heard them mere minutes ago:
“Hello, my friends. Tonight’s revelry is a singular one for us. It has been arranged to honor one of our most devoted members, a man who has been a friend to these festivities for longer than most, and who has provided us all with much continued pleasure through the imaginative chronicling of the emotional forces that are unleashed here every month. His is our true voice, his words the metaphors of our reality, his dreams the ones we share. He has, alas, fallen on hard times, as can happen to any man, and to lighten the burden of his days, I asked him what spectacle he would most like to see, and so tonight’s pantomime is one that we should consider authored by our dear friend.”
With that, the man gestured to a figure sitting in the front row, a figure who stood and acknowledged us—and it was at that moment that I nearly gave myself away, for I could barely stifle a gasp of shock and revulsion on seeing the face of my savior, the man who had rescued me after I had been subjected to such evil, the man who guided me home and stayed with me on the first night of my recovery.
I hardly had time to absorb the fact of his face before most of the lights in the room were extinguished, save for the chandelier above the stage, and a young girl stumbled forward, golden braids bouncing over her face. She looked confused and stunned. Before she could gain her bearings, the malevolent host strode forward and grasped her in his arms. She screamed, and a few men in the audience responded with laughs. The host lifted the girl onto the settee and then his hands performed a terrible dance upon her body. As her screams grew more desperate, the laughter in the room rose, and so, too, did sounds of encouragement and goading. I felt a psychic hunger course through the audience as the host held a dagger in his hand and, with great precision, sliced the girl’s dress open slowly and methodically, then, after excruciating minutes of this, pulled the dress from her trembling body. It was then that we all saw that this was not, in fact, a young girl, but a young boy—and the men in the audience screamed their approval as the host slit and removed the last garments from the unfortunate boy’s frame and then held him aloft like a prize calf. He held the boy before the man in the front row, who nodded his approval without touching the chaste, white, shivering body.
I was about to enact the climax of my plan when two men wearing masks of the commedia dell’arte style appeared
, carried a small ivory casket onto the stage, and opened it. I stayed my hand because of a moment’s fascination. The host then placed the naked and whimpering boy into the casket and closed it. The casket had been fit with locks, and the cover was thick enough to muffle the boy’s terrified screams. The host gestured to the audience to enjoy the screams. It was what they had assembled for—not merely the sight of the boy being degraded and abused, but for the pleasure of his terror.
I couldn’t keep watching. I stood, withdrew a pistol, and shot the host in the chest. The audience thought this was part of the entertainment, and they applauded and cheered. Only the man in the front row seemed to understand that something was wrong, and he stood up. I moved forward, keeping the pistol aimed at his head. “Do you know me?” I said. “Do you?”
He stared at me, and then recognition dawned across his face.
The pistol now pressed against his forehead, I repeated, “Do you know me?”
“Yes.”
The shot would have cracked his skull open, but at the last moment my hand wavered and I merely fired past his ear—the shock and noise enough to make him fall to the ground, thick red blood oozing from inside his ear, but very much alive.
The men who had guarded the front doors rushed into the room, and the audience had now figured out that something was amiss, but they were paralyzed by shock and confusion.
I pushed the bleeding body of the host away from the casket, its ivory now decorated with blood. I sprung the locks, opened the lid, pulled the terrified boy out, and wrapped him in my cloak. “Hold onto my hand,” I told him. “Don’t let go.”
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