by Gemma Files
The University of Toronto’s more than a bit off my beaten track, going by these established standards—a bit too close to my former home for comfort, all told. But it had been a long time, and I was invited, and so I came: Back to Toronto. Back to where Karl and I first rubbed up against each other.
And now . . .
. . . now, I don’t get much time to consider whether or not this may have been a mistake before the kid brings his fist up towards me, held at an awkward angle—and I feel my lips peel back, automatic front-or-flight reflex kicking in hard; get a sudden, giddy rush/flash of (gun), (no time), (screw it, screw him, just stand there and take it like a man, you dumb fucking faggot . . . )
Because: You always knew this day would come, now, didn’t you? In your heart of hearts. Or somewhere considerably—
(lower down)
As it turns out, however, all the kid has to offer is his palm, salmon-belly soft and city-bred callus-less—his palm, plus a dull brass key, half caught in the crease of his life-line.
“Brother Speller . . . ” He begins. And I think:
(Oh, be fucking serious.)
Flushing bright, temper flaring—snapping back at the very sound of that long-lost title, sharper than I need to, fear sliding fast into half-embarrassed anger:
“My name is Hengist, little boy. Okay? And I am not your ‘brother’.”
Because, sure, Karl might have pushed me into that fucked-up ritual acknowledgment of his—hand-fasting ‘round the fire, calling me his “shield-brother” in front of the whole camp and daring anybody else to say different. And sure, I might have gone along, like I went along with most of Karl’s suggestions—
(—to a point, anyway.)
But: Doesn’t mean we were ever married, him and me. Doesn’t mean I took his name like some housewife from the fucking ‘burbs, or anything . . .
The kid’s eyes stay steady, under those blond brows—eyes pale as Karl’s, brows almost-white as Karl’s. Karl’s chosen spawn, staring calm at Karl’s chosen . . . what?
Mate? Friend?
(fuck—)
—Buddy?
“Brother Speller,” the kid repeats, calm enough to lull and freeze—a cheap postpube imitation of Karl’s manly Fuhrer rasp, Novocaine-sting over sandpaper-rub— “. . . left us this. And he told us it was for you. Mister Hengist.”
* * *
When I turn my forearm over and look down, exposing the smooth inner flesh, I can still see Berkana—the bear-rune—imprinted just where the skin is thinnest: The slightly raised, black outline of two sidelong triangles on a stick, a Nazi letter “B.” Comes complete with a sense-memory of it going on, faint buzz and hot metal stink as Karl held my arm out to the tattoo artist’s gun, fisting my reluctant hand hard. Like he was helping a fellow soldier face down some battlefield surgeon—to stay brave while his bullet-wounds were packed with gunpowder and set alight, in tiny explosions of righteously-earned pain.
And speaking of pain, I remember that, too. Like getting stung by a bee, only worse. Longer. More intense.
But then, that was Karl for you: Pure intensity, constantly moving back and forth between himself and everything he touched. Including—
(me)
It’s a complex rune, Berkana—one of twenty-four, hallucinated from fallen willow-twigs by the great over-God Odin while he hung nine days and nights on the World-Tree Yggdrasil, a sacrifice, himself to himself. The Futhark alphabet, Viking wisdom reduced to sketchy little bite-sized chunks, each one a mess of contradictory implications. So scratch ’em into stones, throw ’em down on a scraped-out hide, read the results and draw your own conclusions . . . and if you don’t like the way your future seems to be turning out, so what? You can always cut yourself a handy mouthful of foxglove variant—belladonna, lady’s mantle, laurel leaves, whatever—chew on it awhile, and make up something better.
Berkana’s direction is the east: Spadina, Mimico, cottage country. Its bird is the swan, its color blue (like Karl’s icy eyes, or my own), its tree the beech. It’s the rune of birth, of creativity—children, or new ideas. A marriage—
(or remarriage)
—in the offing.
And even now, after I’ve had every other trace of that crazy man I once thought I loved lasered from my body . . . a demure swastika on either hip, palm-sized, like handles; an elaborate iron cross above my heart; Karl’s name like a half-collar across the back of my neck, where the first big visible knob of the vertebrae nests, so he could read it aloud while he plowed into me from behind . . . I still force myself to look at Berkana every day. The bear-rune. The sign of Karl’s chosen totem. The ancient, meaningless symbol that bound us together, then tore us apart.
I do it to remind myself why I left him, in the first place—why I ran away, and hid, and haven’t seen him since, even assuming he was still anywhere he could be seen. And I do it to remind myself just how much, how oh so very much indeed, I once wanted—
—to stay.
* * *
So—stones on hide, falling, shifting; rune-magic, poetry and probability conjured together from the empty air. Berkana in air, first reading out of a possible four. Exciting family news quite probable. A birth or a new venture a distinct possibility.
I recognized the kid’s key, of course. Last seen—Christ, ten—years earlier, on a chain around Karl’s neck, swinging hypnotically between his pecs as he labored back and forth above me. Grunting low, right in my ear; saying, over and over:
Oh, baby. Oh, Lee, baby . . . you’re it. You’re . . . the one.
The bulky weight of him, all over me, making me ache and strain with secret heat: Big hands, big muscles, big, rough head. Mica-fine blond stubble of cheek, chin, scalp abrading my inner thighs as he rooted and lapped at me impatiently—forcing me open, willing me wet and slack enough to take all of him in one slick thrust. Karl never had any of the hangups my other nominally-straight tricks clung to; never thought twice about enjoying every part of me he could reach, as long as it made us both moan and snarl and sweat together. From the minute we met, he treated me less like some uppity academic fag he was way too cool to kiss than a long-lost brother, rediscovered at last in the very heart of the enemy’s camp—some fellow warrior who’d fallen amongst thieves and picked up bad habits, not that he didn’t like the result.
“Key to your heart?” I suggested, flicking idly at it, as we lay together after our first encounter. He snorted.
“Ma’s folks left her a cabin, up Gravenhurst way. I go there, sometimes.”
“To get away from it all.”
“Yup.” A pause. “That, and find my bear.”
Uh—
(—’scuse me?)
My key, then, to Karl’s cabin. Where I’m heading, by car, even as we speak—even as I cast my mind back further still, remembering how we first met: At a faculty do, earlier that same evening. I was there alone, bored and horny and single, just one more Media Studies T.A. backing up the Prof of the moment in return for some help with my never-ending thesis; my duties included Pop Culture and Literary Antecedents MMS301, which mainly involved showing up and grading papers.
Karl, meanwhile, was ostensibly “there” with Nini Machen—Barbie’s thinner and far less smiley twin turned program student rep, the female equivalent of those straight guys you hear about all the time who think lesbians only exist because none of these poor, deluded girls has met them yet. She’d already tried that tack on me, only to be rebuffed. And now that I’d been officially erased from her personal radar screen, it just made it all the easier for me to sidle over and cast Karl the narrowed, flirty eye—which he noticed, eventually. And, eventually . . .
. . . returned.
Big and blond and peach-fuzz pink-and-white all over—he looked like me times two, the cartoon super-hero version, cut and solid, utterly unrufflable. Every fetish made flesh, every neo-fascist dr
eam come true. Son of a bitch made my knees knock, and I’m not a knees-knocking kind of guy.
When Nini turned her attention on the Prof, we drifted to the door, swapping names as we went: Karl Speller, Lee Hengist; Lee, Karl. He smiled when he heard my last name— good Swedish stock, fair-skinned and fuckable, with no fear of contagion.
(Not racially, at least.)
“You’re a fag, though,” he said, a minute later, shattering my initial assumptions. “Right?”
No particular revulsion in his voice, just a seemingly genuine interest—a relief, coming from somebody who looked like they could crack my skull and eat my brains for breakfast.
I nodded. “And you’re . . . not?”
A shrug. “I do what—”
(who)
“—I want.” A pause. “You clean?”
I swallowed, mouth suddenly dry. “I’ve been, uh . . . tested . . . ”
“Negative.” At my nod: “’S good. Ma always says condoms are a Jew plot to keep us from breedin’, but I just hate the way the damn things feel. That, and I like bein’ able to—taste—”
(—what I’m . . . eating.)
Hunger boiling off him in a wave, too pure to even seem intrusive. He was up against me, looming, so close all I could breathe was his hot musk. I’d never felt so small, so slight, so patently unable to defend myself. Or so—weirdly—
—desirable.
I fisted my hands and gulped, through growing dizziness. Stammered, annoyed by my own inarticulateness:
“Uh, I don’t, I don’t go bareback, that’s just dumb. I mean, you do two friends, and I do two friends, and HIV takes five years plus to even show up on the chart, so—”
Karl just looked at me, knitting those no-brows, like I was the cutest, dumbest little thing he’d ever seen. Making me . . . blush.
“But—you’re not gonna be with anybody else, Lee,” he said, finally.
Simple as that: No one. Never.
(Ever again.)
I reddened. “Say what?”
Dick going: Yes! Brain going: Nut. And everything in between slapped suddenly awake, tentatively up, from the rising hairs on the back of my neck to the crawling skin of my balls, my widening nostrils, my fluttering pulse.
An hour later, we were back at my place, with him already in me deep enough to hurt. And me, already—
—pulling him deeper.
* * *
There are a lot of bears to choose from, but the one Karl had in mind was—naturally enough—the biggest aside from long-extinct Arctodus simus, the prehistoric short-faced monster bear, which ranged from six feet at the shoulder on all fours to fourteen standing up. Under the skin, Karl believed he was a Grizzly: Ursus horribilis, “The King Of The Brutes,” able to weigh two thousand pounds, run thirty miles an hour, and survive four bullets in the heart just long enough suck the marrow from your bones.
He reeled off statistics like they were love-talk, or family anecdotes: Told me how bears eat each other, adult and child. How fights between bears lead to broken jaws, shattered teeth, lost eyes. How the female bear is called a sow, the male bear a boar. How female bears won’t have sex while raising their young, which can take two to four years.
“Thought you were a cat, y’know, first time I looked at you,” he murmured that night, into the sweaty side of my neck. “But now I think maybe . . . maybe you’re a bear, too.”
(Uh huh.)
Nini aside, you see, Karl wasn’t faculty—but he did teach: White Power cant, liberally admixed with a highly personal form of Viking Shamanism. The first he’d inhaled, almost literally, with his mother’s milk; “Ma” was Verena Speller, called Vee, currently serving twenty-five to life on a particularly grotesque beat-down that turned into a full-scale race riot—payback for Karl’s father, Grand Wizard of Klan North, who died of a heart attack after getting into a fist-fight with the Holocaust survivors’ group protesting his initial public appearance. Karl, a toddler at the time, could no longer remember seeing her outside of a contact visits room.
“She knew what she was doin’,” was his only comment, the one time I asked about it. “Ma’s a soldier. She knew the risks.”
We went to visit once a month, after Karl and I had become an item. But I usually stayed out in the car, because Ma had “issues” with “my kind”; she was old-school to the bone, and didn’t want to be anywhere near the narrow faggot ass of any white guy who wasn’t doing his level best to replace the race. Karl was safe enough, though—he’d already done his bit, and then some, sowing his seed with nine good Aryan wenches he’d met through ads in the backs of Heritage Front hand-outs. He got baby, toddler, preteenage pictures through the mail and took them in for Vee to coo over, destroying them ritually at each visit’s end to keep the guards from confiscating them.
And every time, he left saddened in a way that made me sad just to witness it: Revolted, horrified, shaken to his unshakable core by the spectacle of his mother stuck behind bars, penned and prowling restlessly as a lioness confined to a stall built for dogs.
“They’re never gonna put me in a cage,” he told me, with equal emphasis on all parts: Not them, not me, not a cage. Not ever.
Oh, no.
I kept my opinions on the subject to myself, for then. Things had already gotten complicated enough once news got around, and my friends started telling me I was screwing Hitler. I’d scoff: Rommel, maybe. After all, he’d never said anything too repulsive to bear without response about non-white people around me . . .
And was that rationalization? Bet your ass. And did I need it, just to make my own behavior endurable, and still dream myself moral?
Not—
—as much—
—as I should have.
I told myself what Karl told me—that he didn’t really give a damn about “the Cause,” about paramilitarism, neo-Nazism, racial Separatism, any kind of ism. That all he really cared about was the grail he pursued to the exclusion of virtually everything else: The maddeningly elusive goal of evolution—or de-evolution—into his own “natural” animal form.
It was the second part of Karl’s creed, the one he’d been left to come up with all on his ownsome . . . a Frankenstein faith patched together from romance and ritual, mythology and madness, snips and snails and old wives’ tales. Put simply, he aspired to remake himself into a berserkgangr, or berserker—a bestial warrior-poet, Odin’s champion, intoxicated with blood-mad ecstasy, who could wade into battle naked except for his totem animal’s flayed hide, the ritual bear-shirt.
Pretty nutty, huh? So much so that even other Aryans considered Karl cracked. To the Far Right Christian coalition he was a renegade, an unrepentant Pagan, maybe even a devil-worshiper. Straight-up paramilitarists, meanwhile, thought his time would be better spent fighting the good fight on a battlefield the rest of them could share—down here on earth, where the usual weapon of choice is rocket-launchers, not shape-shifting.
But Karl didn’t care what they thought. He truly believed this state of holy fury was the true nature of every white man—his true nature. What he wanted to be. Could be, with just a little more . . .
. . . application.
Go out into the woods, find your bear, kill it and wear its skin—into battle. And then—
“Battle?”
“Find a fight, get in it; shit, baby, what’d you think I meant?”
(I mean, this ain’t rocket science, here.)
“Okay: Skin, battle. Because . . . ?” I prompted.
“’Cause that’s how you change.” A pause, while I took this in. Adding: “Won’t work if it’s not your bear, though.”
“And you know this—how?” I asked. He just shrugged. And replied, simply—
“’Cause it hasn’t worked yet.”
( . . . yet.)
* * *
Skirting the lake, Karl
’s key already pulse-warm beneath my shirt; haven’t driven this route for two presidencies, but it’s not like I have to check the map. So I here I sit, letting the engine’s drone pull me past an endless panorama of long-forgotten sense-memory material: Grey walls of rocks, green-brown blur of trees—reflected light lapping back and forth, setting sun gone liquid all along the shore. Berkana in water, my tattooed rune’s next logical reading made flesh. Synchronic or coincidental, sports fans?
(You decide.)
The books agree, mainly: A time for self-assessment, for inward thinking. A time to relax, and count your blessings.
And: Ten years, I think, as I take the next hill. Three with Karl, seven without.
Ten . . . whole . . . years.
(Christ.)
Because sure, I know you must all be saying to yourselves, right about now: The sex sounds good, but there has to have been something else to keep Lee with this nutcase after the lovin’ was done, smart guy that he obviously are. Right? I mean, let’s not fool ourselves—freak sex, good or not, is kind of like pure Scotch: You can only drink it every day for just so long, before your insides spring a leak.
So what was I doing, exactly, while those initial years flew by—besides letting Karl have his wicked way with me anytime he wanted, that is? Well—
—not . . . a lot.
But lest you think I just lay there and took it the whole damn time, I might as well mention the other primary component of the whole Lee/Karl melange—the not-so-hidden character flaw Karl sniffed out in me that very first night, and lovingly nurtured every subsequent second we shared: My aforementioned temper, which tends to range—on a daily basis—from simple finger-snap snarkiness to outright barfight-picking piss-artistry. I’ve struggled with it all my life, and turning out gay has neither helped nor hindered, especially since the men I sleep with usually seem just as uncomfortable with my sudden flare-ups as those few women I forced myself to get jiggy with ever were. More so, in fact—because most guys don’t really know how to deal with rage, except by producing some of their own.