Night Soil

by Dale Peck

  When I squeezed past him I couldn’t help but press against his uniform. Reid didn’t lean into my touch, didn’t retreat either. Beneath the beige cambric his body was muscled and taut and his penis was already erect. His eyes stared stonily down at mine. He was only an inch or two taller than me, but broader, thicker, and all of this added to the sense of bigness, so that I felt as though he were looking down on me like one of the figures in the friezes in the pediments in Stammers Hall’s facade. In the allegory of education, Fabulinus touches his rod to the lips of a kneeling boy, conferring the gift of speech on him, while Minerva and Apollo look on, affirming that the words that come from the blessed child’s mouth will be both learned and wise. I exist at his whim, I said to myself. I am his slave.

  “Judas Stammers,” Reid said, as if he’d never once connected the name with a person.

  P-please, I said, and though I can remember stuttering, I can’t remember if I spoke out loud.

  Did he let me strip? Or did he make me? Was I ever actually naked? He put his hands under my robe, guided my arms from the sleeves, then unbuttoned my shirt and slipped it off me. He palmed the back of a sneaker and pulled it off without untying it, then the sock, then unshod the other foot, and then his hands were opening my belt, my pants, pushing them down, pulling them off. He was kneeling now, and looking up at me. I couldn’t have looked any different—my robe was still on, I could feel the broadcloth against my skin—but I’d never felt more naked. Never, until he peeled the latex gloves from his hands and tossed them aside and rubbed his hands together and smiled up at me.

  He slipped his hands under my robe and ran a finger up each side of my body, ankles to armpits, over shoulders, down to wrists. The powder in the gloves left his fingers dry and smooth, and as they chalked my outline I felt a layer of space growing between me and the wool I held up like a tentpole. Felt as though I were sheltering beneath a tent that grew larger and larger until I stood at the center of a circus ring, lights beaming at me from every direction, blinding me from seeing the bleachers that I knew lay on the other side of the coruscating blankness while the ringmaster displayed me for all to see. Reid ran his hands over my chest, ribs, waist. He cupped my ass, fingers laddering over each other deep within the cleft, then wrung his clasped hands down one leg and the other as if squeezing me dry. He pressed his right hand flat against my stomach and began rubbing it in a circular motion, so firmly that I would’ve fallen backwards if he hadn’t steadied me with his left hand against the small of my back. Then he was punching me in the chest, lightly, with the side of his fist rather than the knuckles, but firmly—not to hurt, I mean, though I could feel my heart bouncing around my rib cage, but as if testing the solidity of the body holding up its Academy wool—and as his hands continued to explore, to push and prod, rub and knead, to pinch tenderly, as though feeling for a join between two pieces of fabric, or roughly, as though trying to separate the plies of a plastic bag, I realized he was less interested in my body than in trying to tell if there was any difference between the way my birthmark felt and the rest of my skin. Knew when he thought he’d found the border, and then when he doubted himself. Understood that when his fingers darted to the left side of my body it was to be sure they were touching purple skin, or again on the right, when he pinched the pale. There was a measured movement as his hands finger-walked toward each other, palpating my ribs like a treasure hunter searching for hollow spaces in a wall, but each time his hands met in the middle of my body I could tell he hadn’t been able to spot when he’d crossed from one side to the other, and the funny thing was I couldn’t either. I couldn’t feel any difference between the two halves of my body whose tectonic faults had plagued me for all of my seventeen years. Couldn’t imagine my skin as anything but a solid, uniform casing, colorless, uncolored, erased, a sounding board for the fingers that played over it in continuous arpeggios and glissandos.

  His face was still aimed at mine, his eyes soft as his focus turned to what lay beneath my robe, but when his wandering fingers brushed against my erect penis his eyes sharpened, then his smile, and before I knew what was happening he was lifting my robe, I expected his face to disappear beneath it but instead mine did, as he threw the robe over my head and wrapped it around me turban style, except that it covered not just my hair but my entire head in two, then three, then four layers of fabric, until the dim light in the room was completely extinguished and I was shrouded in . . . darkness is what I want to write, but that wouldn’t be quite honest, because the word that came to mind was “blackness.” He’s choking me, I thought. He’s going to lynch me, and my hand curled around my penis as if it might give me ballast. Do it, I thought. Twist tighter and tighter until it’s my neck you’re twisting, not fabric. Twist until my head spits free from my shoulders and falls on the ground like an overripe berry. With each revolution of Reid’s hands I felt a perfect blackness enveloping me, not colorless, not dark, like the oblivion of a moonless midnight, but a solid layer, like glaze or whitewash or—

  “No.”

  Reid leaned over me. He had opened the front of his coveralls and his abdomen pressed into mine from his chest down to his penis, which settled in the crack of my ass like a gondola sliding into its berth. His words were the kindest anyone had ever spoken to me.

  “You okay, Stammers?”

  I am perfect, I told myself in my colorless coccoon. I am pure.

  I reached back and opened my ass and pulled him between my buttocks, athwart the hole rather than into it, then squeezed my ass closed.

  Reid groaned. He began to slide himself up and down, slowly at first, then faster, he held me by the hips and pulled me closer to him and I could feel his knees bending and his cock sliding down until just the tip was between my ass cheeks, and then he was standing again, aiming his cock, and then he was inside me. I worried about lube for half a second but either he’d put something on or I was too keyed up to feel anything other than the sensation of Lovett Reid sliding all the way into me until his hipbones touched my ass and he lay himself over me again, wrapped his arms around mine and squeezed my chest so tightly I thought I was going to pop him out like a cork and I bit down on a mouthful of robe as though I could hold him in that way. I am a lump of coal, I told myself. I am a diamond.

  “That—is—the—fuck.”

  I moaned and bent forward and my forehead came down hard on the tank of the toilet whose existence I’d forgotten. Reid put his hands on the side of my head and grabbed fistfuls of fabric and I felt the tug in my mouth like reins against a bit. I imagined that I caught a whiff of shit and I wondered if it was me or the toilet bowl, but when I inhaled all I smelled was wool and my own breath. I wondered if Reid was the person who had cleaned it. I wondered if he could clean me. I am a dray horse, I told myself. I am a palfrey. I am a gelding.

  The robe had come unwound by the time he shot, spilled off my head in a hollow sagging funnel, and when I stood up it fell down my shoulders. Reid had already zipped up, and when I pushed my arms through the sleeves it was if nothing had happened. I farted.

  Reid laughed, then tossed me my pants. “I don’t suppose I’ll ever see something like that again,” he said, and walked out of the room.

  But to my surprise he was still waiting when I walked out five minutes later. He stood in the middle of a crypt whose shelves I hadn’t noticed were empty when we walked through it the first time. The fir planks sagged as though the books they’d held had been especially heavy, but they were completely bare save for a handwritten label pinned to one shelf. “Contents removed, March 32, 1995.” I would tell you that the date rang a bell but I don’t want to sound coy. I knew exactly what day that was.

  “I didn’t know anything ever left this library,” I said, which was as close as I could come to asking the question that was actually on my mind.

  “Seriously?” Reid said, even as I looked around the empty shelves and noticed that here and there a plank wa
s missing along with the books. Although it wasn’t really “here and there.” It was six. Six planks were missing.

  “These were Gaius Stammers’s books? Your uncle?” Reid said when I continued to look at the six gaps in the shelving. I wondered how she’d gotten them out and why she’d chosen the six she’d taken. Had she moved the books or somehow slipped them free without disturbing the boxes atop them? Were they the planks I was conceived on, or just the easiest ones to grab?

  “Gaius Stammers,” Reid said. “Your mother’s brother? He disappeared when he was a kid.”

  I looked at the label again. March 32, 1995. The spring we moved to the Field. The spring my mother disappeared for four months and my father’s books showed up to watch over me in her absence. I had the sense of myself as a person who’s been walking a path so long and tortured and walled in on all sides that he doesn’t realize he’s walking a circle, and then I remembered that this was the terminal point of the “Parable of the Man Lost in the Snow.” Except it wasn’t snow I’d been walking in. It was shit. It had always and only been shit.

  The first rule of the parable is that any question phrased concretely and completely will be answered to the full extent of the knowledge of the master administering the lesson. I summoned a breath.

  “What happened to him? To them, I mean. To the books.”

  Reid shrugged. “I guess he died? The library got a request to send them to his next of kin.”

  “My mother?” I said, which question the masters would have scoffed at as a feint.

  “What? No!” Reid laughed, as though I were putting him on. “I guess he had a kid. A son. Out there,” he waved a hand at the whole world as though it were a bit of dust he was brushing from his thigh. “Oh, man!” he said then, an awe-struck smile curling up one side of his mouth. “If your uncle hadn’t run off that kid’d be in charge of this whole place. But instead it’s you. That is some fucked-up shit.”

  I don’t know, maybe he didn’t say “fucked-up shit.” Maybe he said “duct-taped ship” and it was just my ears playing tricks on me again.

  6

  In his weight room, a.k.a. the loft over his dad’s work shed, Reid told me his maroon nickname was Bosky “’cause—ta-da!—my ass is hairy as a forest!” To a bunch of smooth-bottomed teenagers it probably looked pretty bushy, but, though numerous, the hairs lay on his ass in discrete ticks, reminding me more of Marcus’s shaky sketches of his newly planted pines than the gnarled masts bristling across the craggy hemispheres of Aventine and Caelian, Capitoline and Esquiline, Palatine, Quirinal, and Viminal. One time a man I was sucking off in the rest stop pulled his dick away and whirled his ass in its place, cheeks pulled wide, tea-dyed flesh spiraling into pink shadows. The two plies of the wall were separated by less than an inch, which as it turned out was pretty much exactly how much tongue stuck out of my mouth. Even with my nose mashed against paint-flecked rusty steel I could do little more than trace the outline of the wrinkled rosebud on the other side. But I could still tell that the odor coming off it—out of it—was different from the air in the stall. Sharp rather than rotten, alive rather than dead. A flower in the soil as opposed to one in a vase. Reid’s ass didn’t smell like much of anything (he’d gone for a run before his shift in the crypts, showered right after) but with the hairs of his ass tickling my nose and his sphincter pulsing around my tongue I could definitely taste . . . something. Telluric, minerally, metallic. “Steely” popped into my head, then “irony,” and I burst out laughing. Before he went to bed I asked him to tie me to the weight bench. Reid rolled his eyes. “Dude, it’s cool, no one comes out here. Stay as long as you want.” But I didn’t want to stay. I wanted him to keep me.

  My mother said once that the act of making something from clay, giving it form, breathing life into it, was the closest a human being came to duplicating God’s creation of Adam. My mother. The woman who gave me life. I think it’s not unfair to say that she valued her bowls more highly than she did her son. Not just the mass of them, but each one of them, a sorority of 174 Eves—174 Liliths really—from whose ranks I was excluded because I was a one-off, maybe, or because my flaws reflected badly on her craftsmanship. Despite what it says on her Wikipedia page Dixie Stammers didn’t have a “Ph.D. in pottery.” Didn’t know the difference between Cherokee and Cheyenne, Aztec and Inca, Inuit and Yaghan. I’m thinking of their pottery, but the statement applies equally to the people. She’d acquired techniques but not the cultural realities that produced them and gave them local meaning. All she knew was what she knew: that Native Americans had made perfectly round pots without the wheel. She’d picked up a factoid (literally, if you bought her story about the funerary casket at the Met) and immersed herself in it so deeply it became aesthetic, ethic, and raison d’être. “Think about it, Jude. It’s not just that they didn’t have potter’s wheels. They didn’t have the wheel.” She always said it that way—“the wheel”—her voice as pedagogically stilted as Sydney Poitier’s in To Sir, with Love. “I mean, the pots must’ve rolled, right? They must’ve seen them rolling. And yet they never saw the potential. Must’ve seen the tendency of round things to, you know, roll as a drawback, and instead of making axles or flattening them out they made really fancy bases to keep them from weeble-wobbling away.”

  In fact Native Americans did have the wheel, although for various reasons they never put it to much practical use. And of course there were thousands of examples of Native Americans’ transformative acts, the shaping and vitrification of clay into cooking, carrying, and sacred vessels being a case in point. But Dixie Stammers practiced what she preached. Though it might sound like she was calling Native Americans stupid, in her mind she was paying them a compliment. Their insistence on seeing objects as what they were rather than what they could be enabled them to create perfectly round vessels for aesthetic rather than utilitarian reasons. It wasn’t a lack of imagination. It was focus—purity—and part of me wonders if she looked at her brother with this same clarity of vision, of intent. Wonders, too, if that’s why Guy ran. Not from the Academy, I mean, but from her. He was a weak boy, she always said, susceptible to powerful personalities, and he knew it. Knew that he couldn’t help but fall into the role of yes-man and boot-licker. At the time I assumed she meant to the Stammerers, but in hindsight her words apply to herself as much as her father, his father, every one of those stick-up-the-ass Southerners and Scotchmen going all the way back to Marcus. And of course she was a Stammerer too. It must’ve been clear by age ten or eleven that she was the family genius, the family giant. Certainly it was to my grandfather, who after discovering that she’d attended nearly as many classes as Gaius chopped off her brother’s hair so they’d no longer resemble one another. Her brother’s hair, mind you: because it was only her brother he could control. (To be fair, he told my mother to cut hers, and she just flipped him off.) “It was the first time I ever thought of Guy as a boy,” she told me when she relayed this story, smiling one of those wistful smiles that makes me shudder to remember. “I guess that’s another way of saying it was the first time I thought of myself as a girl. Physically, I mean, as opposed to socially or politically, or however the feminists would put it.” In fact her first impulse had been to cut her hair too, so she could keep going to classes. “I liked feeling like a boy.” But as she contemplated Guy’s shaved scalp she realized there were other ways to find out what boys felt like. (“B-U-one T but,” as she said on that other occasion, though it’s clear now I hadn’t sunk nearly as far into the sewer as she had.) They were thirteen then. In a few months he’d take off and in five years he’d be back, to finally give her what she wanted, only to disappear for good when he realized it wasn’t him Dixie desired, but his body. His manhood, and the privilege of primogeniture that came with it. The ability to receive and to bequeath. It’s no mistake, after all, that the dispersal of one’s property after death is called a will. But the laws of the polis are a poor reflection of the laws of physics.
Instead of an heir, my mother got me.

  Reid hated the Academy. His dad made him go. Mr. Reid owned a filling station where the interstate crossed the Post Road at the foot of Wye, a last-exit-for-twenty-seven-miles kind of place, pretty much every car that went by topped off. “Nigger barely finished eighth grade and he clears a quarter mil per annum. Clears. I don’t know why he thinks I’ll do better just because I can read fucking Latin.” He lifted weights for two hours every night, not because he loved his body but because he hated the other novices, who looked down at him as a dilettante even though he’d advanced apace with the Foundry boys and stood ready to graduate with them in June. When he checked himself in the mirror he saw only imperfection, frailty. He flexed until the veins stood out in his neck and thighs, punched himself in the chest like he wanted to roquet his heart out of his ribs. He whipped his shirt off, then his pants, then his underwear. “Grow, you fucking faggot, grow!” His sweat made a bloody mirror of the red vinyl that covered his gym equipment. “Lick it up, bitch.” He guffawed when I pushed my tongue the length of his weight bench. “I meant me, doofus,” he said, reaiming my mouth at his balls. He fucked like he was trying to kill with his dick. He put his hand around my throat and squeezed so hard I saw spots (afterwards I found them around my throat, or at least the parts that weren’t already purple), palmed my face and leaned on it till I thought my nose would break, or my skull. But after he was done he pulled me down on the floor, nestled my head on the pillow of his left biceps while his right hand traced the median line of my birthmark. It was the seam that fascinated him more than the birthmark itself, the high tide of its reach. His fingertips skimmed the border like a low-flying shorebird scavenging for snails and crabs, and when he found a hint of a raised lip he paused, pinched at it with two fingers or nudged under it with the edge of a nail, as if it might suddenly fold back and reveal the unblemished skin beneath or, who knows, maybe the works that gave it color, minuscule dwarves powdering amethyst or garnet and mixing it with my blood to dye it purple. He flicked my dick back and forth as though it were a wood sample whose genus he was trying to identify by grain, color, density, slipped two pinched fingers into my ass and opened them like a forceps—slightly, probably no more than half an inch, but I found myself imagining a light shining out of the crevice from a miner lost deep inside the shaft. I felt a breath of air, cool against the friction-warmed walls of my rectum, imagined the light flickering, going out. “Is it true your mom made you shit in her pots when you were growing up?” “She still does,” I giggled, and Reid smacked me in the nuts. “Don’t fuck with me, nigger.” Then, in a voice whose lack of malice made it that much more painful: “I could stare at that face all day.”