Saints+Sinners

by Saints

  “Will Alexis and Paul have separate rooms?” I asked before I could stop myself.

  “Given how poorly she sleeps. I’d say yes…I’m sorry to spring this on you!”

  I thought of Paul, so handsome, so young, so apparently willing. I thought of luxurious week-long cruises up the Nile and two weeks down the Danube. I thought of four-star hotels in Monte Carlo and Biarritz, Cartagena and Shanghai and all of it with this charming, sophisticated lady. Could I possibly bear it? You bet I could! “When do we leave?!”

  But before she could do more than be radiant in response, I said, “But I’ve got a gift for you, for your house actually. For that downstairs billiard room that no one has used since 1918. You cannot say no.”

  “Then I’ll say yes,” and Diane leaned across the arc of table laden with crystal and porcelain and sterling candlesticks and set a perfect little kiss on my forehead.

  “Now I’m off to the Ladies. I’m grabbing Alexis on the way so we can scream like twelve-year-olds over how happy we are. Why don’t you sit with Paul and keep him company?”

  * * *

  The flower I’d picked out of the forest was Licula, from the Ingei Forest outside of Sarawak. The leaves I’d grabbed belonged to another flowering plant, Thrixspermium Eryhisbron, again from that forest in Borneo. At least, that was the conclusion of the researcher at the Botany department at Berkeley I’d brought them to. He’d been “thrilled” to see them and so I left them with him, taking only his detailed report, which added, “This forest contains over 1,175 species of flora and fauna, much never seen elsewhere. Both of these plants grow near the so-called pitcher plants, Nepenthes, also known as the Venus Flytrap.”

  Next step was the most daring: to go through the mirror all the way.

  I guessed it led only to that forest. I’d seen nothing indicative of a building or construction of any sort, and so I would need a knife or sharp edge to mark exactly where the entryway lay in the forest. Prepping for that meant dressing down from the formal clothing I’d worn whenever I went into the shop—to be able to say to Hans that he didn’t know me and had never known me.

  A lie, of course. He knew me from my bartending days South of Market in one or another motorcycle bar. Or from my work before that as assistant manager at a sex club. “Manager with extras,” my friends called it. Meaning I visited client’s rooms for pay. True, I looked different. Gone was the long hair, the full beard, the eternal brown glass aviator glasses, though I’d kept souvenirs, especially the leather vests I’d stretched across my tanned, muscled, at times oiled, torso. My hair was short now and salt and pepper; my face bare of hair; gone now were the small tattoos on my neck. And, I was always clothed now. More than clothed, well clothed, thanks to a friendly woman at a certain snobby Episcopal church donation room who had a maternal interest in me and so saved nicer things for me. It was there I’d encountered Diane, who saw me in good clothing and who’d assumed I was donating, like she was. That led to chat. Chat led to a coffee date. That led to a dinner date and…

  But Hans could still screw it all up. So Hans must be dealt with. Which meant I would have to make certain he was out of the way before the trip around the world began. For that, I needed to go in.

  Hans closed early on Thursday. I slipped in when he was busy over-gesticulating, secreted myself in the back room of the shop behind the mirror. As soon as he locked up, I turned to the mirror and touched it to clarify. Shortly it did. Same scene as before. The broken twigs were those I’d taken. I took many deep breaths, then tried a finger, a hand, an arm, and I stepped through and spun around, took out the knife and marked the four upper and lower corners of the way I’d come through onto tree trunks and by arranging twigs on the ground. It was astonishing: I really was there. I needn’t cut too much ahead to get out of this copse. Perfumes and odors assailed me. But the immediate area became quiet, noting my arrival. I kept turning to mark my path back, cutting many landmarks.

  Ten minutes of walking ended when I heard voices. Suddenly above me there was a whoosh and the cry of an animal. I saw the little monkey struck by the arrow fall to the ground. Three young male New Guinea natives wearing only penis sheathes and headdresses hustled into the area and picked it up, celebrated with each other and took off again. They were too excited by their prey to stop and look around and perhaps notice me, crouching, silent, half-terrified. Seeing them was all I needed to know.

  I found the mirror re-entry only after some searching and some panic. What if I couldn’t get through again? Or only later? It hadn’t been long. Maybe twenty minutes.

  I found it, and closing my eyes, I pushed a hand through. Yes!

  Then I went about destroying those careful signs I had made to find it. And stepped through to the other side. It was dark in the room where it had been twilight before and I held my hand out before myself and didn’t crash into anything. I let myself out and locked the shop door behind me.

  * * *

  “Aren’t you glad you listened to me and put the mirror up for sale.” I paused for effect. “You’re a hundred dollars richer and you got rid of something you never expected to sell.” Before Hans could reply, I said, “Here’s the address I want it shipped to. It’s up Nob Hill a few streets from where you found it. By the way, since I did pay for the shipping, they’ll be here in a half hour at the most to wrap it and take it; I’ll remain—if you don’t mind.”

  Hans still looked surprised as he pocketed the cash I’d given him and marked the bill ‘paid.’ “I don’t understand why you want,” he sounded aggrieved. “It’s flawed.”

  “I happened to discover it’s flawed in a particular way. Which makes it marvelously valuable. Would you like to see?” I teased.

  He followed me to the back room and together we took hold of it and faced it forward. Anthony-Whatever-His-Name had bought one smaller glass, so there was room now.

  I knelt. “See! Right here!” I touched the surface and as I did it began to clear, and then become green. I heard Hans grunt in surprise behind me. “Now look closely!”

  The surface gradually cleared and it was the same New Guinea forest scene from before.

  I heard him grunt again behind me. “But what is? A painting under?”

  “Better than a painting, Hans. It’s a doorway.”

  He grunted again. I touched the surface and my hand went right through.

  “This cannot be!”

  “It gets better!” I said in my best Abracadabra voice. “Watch!”

  I stepped through the surface into the forest. He made a loud noise. When I turned, I could see him dimly, fallen against the far wall. I swatted at an insect and plucked a Licula off its branch and then stepped through into the shop again.

  “It’s trick of some kind!” Hans asserted.

  “You don’t believe me,” I said, waving the pink and white flower at him.

  “It cannot be.”

  “But it is. And now the wondrous magical mirror belongs to me.”

  He hesitated then he reached forward and touched the surface and watched his finger go through. He turned to me with a childlike grin on his face.

  “Go on. Why stop there?”

  “Oh, no!” He backed away.

  “Suit yourself,” I said, unconcerned. “But when the deliverers come…This really will be your last chance.”

  “You have gone through? It continues?”

  “I have gone through. It continues. I’ve stayed an hour already. But once I have it for myself…no one else will be able to go in.”

  He’d been slowly inserting all five fingers and then a hand through. By this time his hand has reached a twig. He snapped it off and pulled it through. Wonder on his face.

  “It’s real.”

  “Of course, it’s real.” I began polishing the wooden frame with a dust cloth I’d carried in my overcoat.

  “So…Maybe I can go in for one minute?” Hans asked.

  “It’s now or never.”

  It took him a while to get
up his nerve, then he cautiously entered the mirror. He found himself on the other side and suddenly there were hummingbirds all around him. He was like a child again. He moved forward, then turned and could see me dimly, and then he went forward.

  When I could barely make him out, I touched the mirror at its top right corner as I’d learned to do and swept my hand down through on a diagonal to the lower left. And then from the lower right to the upper left again, until it was solid glass again.

  Then I took the hammer out of the inside pocket of my coat and slammed the mirror as hard as I could.

  I expected it to smash. Instead it rang like a giant bell. At least in the little back room it did. I don’t know what noise it made on the other side. But the mirror didn’t shatter, as I’d hoped. Instead it fogged over completely.

  Not a minute later the front bells jangled and I went to let the shippers in. I’d already begun wrapping the mirror and they took over swiftly and efficiently. They wrapped it tight, sealed it with tape and carried it to the truck. I went with them and met Diane’s housekeeper at the door and we placed it in the downstairs game room.

  * * *

  Nineteen months later, after our trip—and our official engagement—Diane suddenly had to see “her gift.” I was afraid she would be disappointed. I was prepared to make excuses about the shippers’ mishandling it.

  It was unwrapped without ceremony and before I could step to the front to look, I could see utter delight on Diane’s face. “It’s a beautiful painting, Darling! Remarkable! Almost three dimensional. I feel like I could reach out and touch one of those hummingbirds!”

  “Wait!”

  Before I could stop her, she did touch it. She touched glass. Solid glass.

  “It’s too nice for this dingy room. We’ll put it upstairs. But where?”

  “How about the mantel in what we are now calling my library?” I suggested.

  “Perfect. Then I can visit it every day!”

  That meant I can look at it every day.

  I do.

  Sometimes I think I see a hummingbird wing flutter. At other times I’ve almost convinced myself that I can see the very edges of Han’s ginger moustachios behind a clump of Thrixspermium bushes.

  Winner

  The Grove of Mohini

  J. Marshall Freeman

  The offer was weird—possibly illegal—and Sid wasn’t sure why he’d accepted. Maybe because he had to waste three nights on the hookup app for every hookup that actually happened. Guys ghosted on him all the time. Others were openly racist in that polite Toronto way: “No offence. Just a preference.” So he’d said yes to Friday night’s first offer, even though it went against his instincts. After all, what had his instincts gotten him so far? Isolation, lies, following someone else’s script in the drama of his life.

  And that was why he was standing on the sidewalk while the lights of the city winked on, and everything quivered on the brink of a midsummer weekend. Sid peered down the street, willing his ride to arrive. What if one of the neighbours he barely knew spotted him and asked what special plans he had for the night?

  “I’m being paid $250 to be a nymph in an enchanted grove,” he would probably admit with his unhelpful reflex for honesty. He looked down at his decidedly un-nymph-like outfit: sky-blue polo shirt, white chinos, and flip-flops with plastic straps in popsicle-orange. Arthur, the mysterious stranger on the app, had said to wear sandals; the rest would be provided.

  The bubble tea shop across the road was a glowing fishbowl of movement and colour in the deepening twilight. A cluster of friends exited into the night, laughing, slurping from their big plastic cups, leaving behind just two guys, sitting at a corner table. They were in their mid-20s, a few years older than Sid. The taller one was white, a cloud of auburn curls falling to one side of his head, the other, black, with an elaborate architecture of dreads. They held hands. They leaned in close. The white guy lifted their interlinked hands to kiss the black guy’s fingers. Sid watched them for clues, trying to recognize himself in either one, until a silver SUV pulled up and blocked his view.

  The van’s back door slid open, and a young guy with a diamond nose stud said, “Are you NewInTown99?” He looked Sid up and down with an uncertain expression.

  Sid put on the same big smile he used in family barbecue pics. “Hey, yeah, that’s me,” he said and climbed in. There were two other guys inside, not including the driver who didn’t acknowledge the new arrival. The boys were all twinks—skinny and white, in shorts shorter than Sid would buy. One wore a tight Nicki Minaj t-shirt, one a striped crop top, and the third, the guy with the nose stud, wore a semi-transparent, sleeveless black shirt. Sid could see his nipples, pierced and ringed. The boys were pretty in a way that left him vibrating with a mix of desire and unease.

  “I think I’m underdressed,” he told them, laughing awkwardly.

  The boy in the crop-top tossed back his bangs and said, “There’s always room for a J. Crew queen!” The other two giggled. Sid had no choice but to smile.

  It grew darker outside, and Nicki Minaj rolled down the window. “Leaving Oz. Next stop: who-the-fuck-knows.”

  “We’re on the Rosedale Valley Road,” Sid explained as they sped along between the trees, but the boys weren’t listening.

  “Darryl,” said nose-stud. “Are you sure we’re not being serial murdered?”

  “Or sex-slaved,” added Nicki.

  Crop-top shook his head. “No, I hooked up with Arthur before. He swore on his mother’s Hammacher Schlemmer catalogue that we wouldn’t have to do anything but prance around and drink cocktails while a bunch of old guys discussed, I don’t know, their mutual funds and the cost of Viagra.”

  Nose-stud snorted. “I don’t mind bending over for some sugar daddy if he promises to pay off my student loans.”

  They were heading up the Bayview Extension, the Don River dark and silent to their right. Sid imagined jumping from the van the next time it stopped. Shut up! he berated himself. You’re not a child. He would handle whatever came his way. Maybe he too would find a new daddy to pay for university, one whose money came with fewer expectations. The daring thought made him smile, and he turned his face into the shadows so the others wouldn’t see.

  The twinks were staring into their phones, swiping and texting, while Sid looked out the window, keeping track of their route. The van turned left onto Eglinton West, and then right into a quiet suburb, winding around and around through courts and crescents, until he’d lost all sense of direction. The houses grew larger and farther apart, brooding judges with wrought iron eyes and cobblestone tongues, their grand wigs the canopies of ancient oaks and maples that curled above them into the night sky. When the van slowed and pulled up to the curb, Sid’s stomach clenched.

  * * *

  Leo was lost. Gavin had said to use the GPS on his phone, but Leo insisted on jotting down directions on the back of an envelope. Old School. Now his neck hurt from peering up at street signs, half-obscured by abundant foliage. Reluctantly, he turned on the GPS.

  “Speak, O Sybil!” he told the phone, and its thin, bossy voice responded.

  “At the first opportunity, make a u-turn.”

  Leo sighed, grinding the gears as he threw his 15-year-old Corolla into reverse. The evening had barely started, and already he felt like a loser. Tonight, a coterie of A-gays would gather to ooh and ahh at Gavin’s grand new residence. They’d network and ask who did the catering and the gardening, and hate on each other with Botox smiles full of whitened teeth. Meanwhile Leo, who taught introductory communications at a community college, would stand in a corner, compulsively straightening the curled collar points of his fading “good” party shirt and remind himself not to drink too much.

  He hoped to hell Stefan would show up. Stefan wasn’t really of the A-gay world, but he knew how to navigate its currents. Leo, Gavin, and Stefan were all that was left of their old group. Leo had been barely 18 when they all met at a protest following the 1981 bathhouse raids,
and Stefan was still his best friend after all these years. Stefan had ridden the wave of a new media in the 90s to become the head of his own “media group,” whatever the hell that was. Leo, on the other hand, had never quite finished his PhD in patterns of global mythology.

  “You’re smarter than most professors I know,” Stefan had recently scolded. “You could have tenure by now.”

  To which Leo retorted, “I don’t need the meaningless approval of academia.” But he didn’t convince either of them.

  “You have reached your destination,” Sybil proclaimed.

  “So be it,” he answered. He peered through his dirty window at the edifice that rose into the hot night—a mini-Versailles, lit like a national monument.

  “Oh my God, Gavin Keenlyside,” Leo said. “You probably bought it just to spite me.”

  He tried not to feel humiliated when the valet drove his accidentally-vintage car off to join whatever climate-conscious hybrids and midlife-crisis sports cars the other guests drove. He was just relieved he hadn’t been mistaken for the pizza delivery boy.

  As he climbed the steep driveway, a van pulled up to the curb, and four young men hopped out. Three of them, in a laughing knot, were the newest generation of gay scenesters. Probably they’d been out to everyone at 14, oblivious to the history that made their freedom possible, to all the ones that died along the way. The fourth boy, a sober South Asian, followed behind, pushing his glasses up his big nose and eyeing the house with astonishment.

  From the shadows to the side of the three-car garage, a no-nonsense woman in a neat white polo shirt and black khakis called out, “Boys! I’m Jeannine, the stage manager. Come around to the side door and check in.” Catching sight of Leo, she said, “Good evening, sir. The front door is open. Have a nice time.”