Survivor's Guilt and Other Stories

by Greg Herren

  The peace and quiet and wine was relaxing. Rarely did a car zoom past on the road up above the wall, and no more screams pierced the stillness of the afternoon.

  “I think I have enough,” Jase said, pouring the last of the wine into his glass and sitting up. He saved the conversation on the app, turned off his phone—there was only 10 percent battery power left, he’d need to recharge it—and his skin felt warm, good, tanned. “Thanks for this, Billy. I think it’s going to be a great article. My editor will, of course, get in touch with you about the photo shoot once I turn the piece in.”

  “Thank you for detouring out of your vacation to do this.” Billy flipped the sunglasses up, winking at him. “And tomorrow you’re off to Florence, right?”

  “Yes.” Florence was about an hour drive. The plan was to drop the car off at the airport and then take a cab to the old part of the city, where he was renting an apartment for a few days. He already had tickets for the Uffizi, the Galleria dell’Accademia, and the Medici tombs, and planned to explore the beautiful old Renaissance city on foot before taking the train to Venice for a few days. “I’ll start working on the piece—”

  “Don’t touch it while you’re in Italy,” Billy insisted. “You’ve already given up too much of your vacation as it is.”

  Jase smiled back at him. He really was considerate, so much more so than anyone had a right to expect, given his past. Maybe the years of retirement had mellowed him, given him a chance to get a handle not only on who he was himself, but on his past as well.

  “About the girl…”

  “Isabella?” Billy’s smile faded. “Jase, you have to believe me when I tell you I would have never done anything with her if I’d known how ill she was.”

  Almost on cue, a scream echoed down the side of the mountain to them, echoing across the vineyards.

  “I don’t know how you can handle hearing that every day.” Jase shivered, and Billy reached out, placing his hand over Jase’s.

  “I don’t even notice it anymore, like I told you.” Billy smiled at him.

  Was it a seductive smile? Or was he just making all this up in his head, his old crush, his old passion, for the boy dancing onstage in his underwear bubbling up from deep inside his memories? Remembering those days of buying Tiger Beat and 16 magazines at Walgreens because of the pictures of him, shirtless and smiling seductively at the camera, his underwear visible above the waistband of the jeans hanging down so low off his hips? Those magazines never were so bold as to have pictures of him in his underwear, which would be so threatening to the tween girls and their parents, because the magazines couldn’t push the reality that part of Billy’s appeal was how revealing the tighty-whities were, the enormous bulge he was clearly so proud of, wanted to show off, which was why he was so popular with the gay audience.

  Had the homophobia of his later career been an attempt to cover up his own sexuality?

  The girls wouldn’t squeal so loudly for him if they knew he was gay, right?

  Or was it again projection of some kind? Wish fulfillment of the worst kind?

  What would Billy do if he made a move?

  No, that was not only crazy but unprofessional.

  “We’re out of wine.” Billy sat up, the straps of his bikini shifting, the muscles in his legs and abdomen flexing and rippling beneath the taut brown skin. He laughed. “One of the best things about Italy is no one judges you for drinking wine all day. Come on, let’s get something to eat.”

  Jase followed him along the flagstones through the grass, watching the barely covered cheeks flexing as he walked, stepping from stone to stone.

  A woman was in the kitchen making a fruit salad, the sharp knife flashing in the sunlight from the windows as she sliced. Charcuterie was already placed out on the kitchen table on a cutting board, another bottle of the wine opened on the table. She didn’t look at them other than an expressionless glance, her eyes running up and down their scantily clothed bodies. She washed her hands, wiped them dry on a towel, and muttered something in Italian. “This is Lucia,” Billy said to Jase, “she’s a sort of housekeeper, comes in a few days a week for me.” He answered her in Italian, straddling one of the chairs, gesturing for Jase to sit down on the other side of the table. She nodded, and climbed the steps, the back door slamming in the distance as she made her way to the steps up to the road.

  “She didn’t seem very happy,” Jase commented as he helped himself to the fruit salad. The flavors exploded in his mouth.

  “She never seems happy,” Billy replied, his face grim. “They still haven’t found the escapee from the mental hospital.”

  “Are we in danger?”

  “Most likely not. The girl’s probably trying to get home, to Greve. She’ll turn up, they’ll find her, they always do.”

  “Ah.”

  After the late lunch, they went for a walk through the village. There was a cathedral, smaller than most, Billy explained, but Panzano was a small village. But as before, whenever Billy waved and smiled or said hello to a villager they encountered, Jase couldn’t help noticing how the villagers looked back at him. They seemed friendly on the surface—but there was something more to it than what appeared. There was an undercurrent of dislike, and he’d even noticed that one of the women made the sign against the evil eye once Billy’s back was turned. He felt claustrophobic, afraid, and was glad he would be leaving the village the next morning. Having a mental hospital so near—Billy pointed out its high stone walls, the statue of the Holy Mother just before the gates on the narrow cobblestone road—yes, he would be glad when he could load his suitcases back into the Fiat in the morning and get on the road to Florence, following the instructions from Google Maps app to get to the Florence airport. He wasn’t sorry he came, no, he was glad, glad to be able to play a part in the comeback of his childhood crush, his teen idol, the man whose pictures he’d masturbated over so many times with the door to his bedroom closed, in that miserable house he’d grown up in.

  They had dinner in the small restaurant on the town square, the fountain now shut off and not bubbling, the enormous koi in the big pond swimming up to the top looking for food as they passed by. The food was amazing, the wine delicious, but again Jase was aware of looks from the locals, something about the flamboyantly gay waiter, a slender young Italian man in his early twenties who was flirtatious with Jase but coldly formal and distant with Billy, who didn’t seem to notice it any more than he noticed the cold looks, the obvious distaste.

  Maybe I’m imagining it, Jase thought, maybe it’s the wine, maybe it’s the claustrophobia of being in this small town, beautiful as it is.

  After they paid, as they walked out the front door of the restaurant Signora Agretti stopped them on the narrow sidewalk. She raised a gnarled finger and pointed at Jase. “Panzano not good for you. He warns you to get away before it too late.”

  Billy laughed and stepped around her. “Lovely to see you, Signora Agretti.”

  As Jase moved to get around her, she gripped his arm with her hand. “You must go,” she whispered hoarsely, “before it too late.” Her hand dropped away, and he could see pleading in her reddened eyes. “Go.”

  “Tomorrow,” he whispered as she made the sign of the cross.

  He could hear her muttering in Italian, glanced back over his shoulder. She was watching them, the upraised finger still pointing as they walked along the narrow sidewalk.

  He felt better once they went around a corner and he couldn’t see her anymore. Heading out of the village and back to the villa in the blackness of the still night, the velvety night blue of the sky above them, he tried to shake off what she said, how it made him feel. She’s just a poor crazy old woman, he reminded himself over and over. There’s no such thing as second sight, and there’s no way Philip is here with you.

  And as they walked in silence along the old road, it seemed like they’d somehow gone back in time to the past in some ways, the houses they passed silent in their darkness, no lights within other
than the light of the moon overhead.

  Another scream pierced the night as they walked down the steps from the road to the front of the villa.

  Jase shivered involuntarily. “I could never get used to that,” he said.

  Billy put an arm around his waist. “It’s nothing.”

  Jase was aware of the heat of Billy’s body, aware of his own desire rising from the closeness of their bodies as Billy unlocked the front door of the house. As the door swung open, Billy turned and grasped Jase’s face in both hands. Billy kissed him deeply and passionately, pressing him against the doorframe.

  Jase knew he had to stop this, couldn’t let it go any further, it was unprofessional and wrong, but he couldn’t, wouldn’t, he wanted this, he’d always wanted this.

  Later, afterward, he untangled himself from Billy’s naked body. Billy was snoring gently, softly, the sleep of the content.

  He picked up his clothes, pulled on his underwear, shaking his head. He would get fired if this ever got out, never work as a journalist again, and yet he found he didn’t care. As he slipped down the stone steps of the circular staircase to the first floor in the moonlight, he didn’t care. He couldn’t report on it, he couldn’t ever tell anyone about it.

  Billy Starr was at the very least bisexual. Or open to sexual encounters with other men.

  He put his clothes down in his bedroom and went to the back door.

  A shadow darted across the lawn in the light of the moon.

  “Philip?” he asked, opening the door and stepping out into the cool of the evening, feeling like a fool.

  The old woman sure did a number on you—

  The pool surface glittered in the moonlight, the absolute still and silence broken suddenly by a face looming up out of the darkness.

  The blade of the knife shone in the moonlight.

  She looked like—she looked like the old woman, a younger version of Signora Agretti, her eyes flashing and her smile wide.

  His neck was burning, like it was on fire, and he put his hand up to his throat.

  Warm blood gushed out from the deep cut, spilling over his hands.

  She laughed. “Lui appartiene a me finocchio,” she whispered and danced away, along the flagstones in the moonlight, running when she reached the pool, disappearing once again into the shadows.

  He sank to his knees, aware of the blood running down the front of his shirt, feeling cold in his hands and feet and fingertips, unable to scream.

  He heard the old woman’s voice in his head again, Panzano not good for you. You must go.

  And she was right, he thought, as he fell facedown into the grass, his hands and feet starting to get cold. Panzano wasn’t good for me.

  Digestif: Out of the Darkness

  I’ve always been afraid of the dark.

  There was always a Donald Duck night-light plugged into the outlet across the room from my bed, in my direct sight line in case I woke during the night. To this day I sleep on my left side on the left side of the bed facing where that night-light would be if I still used it. I remember waking up many times when I was a child and drawing comfort from that bizarre, yellowish-orange glow. While the dark doesn’t necessarily scare me now that I am an adult, it does make me uncomfortable. When I’m home alone, I leave the bathroom light on when I go to bed, and I always leave a light on downstairs when I retire for the evening. In hotels I leave the bathroom light on. Intellectually, I have never been able to make sense of this fear, this discomfort with the darkness—the absence of light doesn’t necessarily correlate to possible danger or to monsters hunting me, waiting out there in the darkness, ready to pounce and rip my throat out—but what I know intellectually to be true has no effect on my visceral, primordial, emotional reaction to being in the dark. It’s a primal fear, coded into my DNA millions of years ago, when cavemen huddled around fires wondering what was out there in the dark with sharp teeth and claws, just waiting…

  The supernatural creatures I feared as a child, the ones I imagined out there in the darkness and the shadows, the ones I read about in books or saw on the late-night movies on my television, aren’t real. There are no witches or warlocks, goblins or gremlins, vampires or werewolves, phantoms or ghosts. They aren’t real, they are fictions and folktales. The true monsters are human. People like Charles Manson and Richard Speck and Ted Bundy and Jeffrey Dahmer—those are the real monsters, hiding in human flesh, who look like everyone else, whose eyes hide true darkness, madness, a desire to cause pain and hurt others.

  I became a crime writer because I was curious about that human darkness, about what turns a human being into a monster in human costume. What is it that makes the wife, after years of being beaten down emotionally by her husband, shoot him one night? Why? What was the breaking point, the thing that was just too much to be borne any further?

  I am also interested in the aftermath of crimes: how does one who has been the victim handle it and go forward? The families of the victim?

  I find the short story format is perfect for exploring morality and amorality.

  The problem is that there aren’t many paying markets for short stories. When you add the adjective crime to the mix, the market shrinks still further; adding gay makes it almost completely disappear. When you’re a gay writer, short stories are not the direction you want to go if you’re trying to make a living through your writing. I am a firm believer that writers should be paid for their work, but sometimes…sometimes you just bite your tongue and put your principles aside in order for your story to find readers. I didn’t get paid for many of the published short stories in this collection, and while the exposure I did receive might not have made up for the time spent on the story, sometimes the satisfaction of seeing the story in print is its own reward. I am terribly proud of the stories in this collection, and I am very happy to have them—along with the new, previously unpublished stories—collected in print in the same place.

  I enjoy the challenge inherent in writing short stories. When I was beginning my career, I wasn’t terribly interested in telling stories about straight people; there are plenty of other writers doing just that. There weren’t many gay crime short stories, and that was undoubtedly due to the lack of places to publish them. There weren’t many markets for literary gay short stories, let alone adding crime to the descriptive adjectives. At the time I was breaking into print and getting paid to write fiction, the gay fiction anthologies were beginning to die out: the last volume of the Men on Men series had already been published; the His series had also finished; and as those opportunities for gay writers dried up, the print magazines interested in publishing short fiction about gay men were either shutting their doors or cutting back dramatically on what they were publishing.

  The only markets open to gay short stories were erotica anthologies and magazines, so I wrote—and edited—erotica. I used to call myself “the accidental pornographer”; it had never occurred to me to write erotic short fiction. It wasn’t on my radar, but a friend suggested writing erotica as a way to break into print, and I was willing to give it a shot. I found myself writing short stories for Men magazine, and anthologies like Men for All Seasons and Best Gay Erotica and Friction, or putting together my own anthologies, like Full Body Contact and FRATSEX.

  I am not ashamed of my pornographic past; nothing could be further from the truth. I am very proud of those stories (collected under my pseudonym Todd Gregory in the collection Promises in Every Star and Other Stories—pick up a copy!), and I am equally proud of the anthologies I edited. Writing erotica was an education in and of itself—an education in writing short stories better than any course I took in college.

  Erotica writing teaches story structure in an easy, perfect way: two people meet, they have sex, and what happens after.

  Beginning, middle, end.

  Before I wrote erotica, writing short stories for me was difficult. If I wrote a good, solid story it was usually entirely by accident; I quite literally had no idea what I was doing. But af
ter writing a dozen or so erotica stories, I found that writing short stories had become much easier. I had trained myself to follow the structure of beginning, middle, end and had done it so many times it had become almost innate, like muscle memory for exercise. That doesn’t, of course, mean that I don’t start short stories that never get finished because I have no idea how to finish them; I have two file cabinet drawers filled with ideas not carried to term. Sometimes I repurpose them—any number of nascent ideas that I never finished were converted and adapted to other ideas.

  But in order to write short stories, you have to love short stories.

  Like I said earlier, no one is ever going to get rich writing short stories—I remember a college writing instructor telling us that you make your name writing short stories for small literary journals, then get an agent and write your novel. Perhaps that’s still true; maybe that does still happen. But the days when there were scores of publications looking for short stories are distant memories, and many of the ones that still do publish either pay nothing or a token pittance.

  So, while some of the anthologies that published some of these stories paid nothing, I didn’t mind so much. In many of those anthologies, I found myself sharing the table of contents with writers I had long admired, with best sellers and critically acclaimed, award-winning writers.

  And while I am an ardent advocate of the writer must be paid, there’s also the element that stories are written to be read.

  And no one can read them if they’re just electronic files on my hard drive.

  When you’re a writer, you have to sometimes backtrack on your principles.

  I don’t write short stories for the money because there would be no point. I write them because I love the form. I love trying to figure out how to tell the story in the space constraints. I love writing to theme; trying to come up with a story that, while fitting the theme, sometimes stretches and bends and turns it on its head. I love creating a new character, figuring out some moral or ethical dilemma for them to face, and figuring out how best to handle a situation.