Smoke and Mirrors

by Lillian T. MacGowan

  He closed his eyes, blew smoke out, and with the smoke, words fell. “It looked like the bathroom where my foster father first raped me. I think I was about eight or nine. I’m not sure.” He held himself tightly, always looking at the floor.

  Deck went white and still as death.

  Naim kept talking.

  “I don’t—I actually don’t know how old I am. I don’t know when my birthday is, so yeah…maybe eight or nine. That went on for a few years, and he did it to all of us. He wasn’t picky about boys or girls, so long as they were young and brown. Me, Halim, Miriam, and Adeela.” Naim remembered things he wanted to see burn into nothing.

  “So after I’d had enough of that, I ran away. I guess I was about eleven by then. And pretty as hell, right? I’m just…so fucking pretty.

  “I left the others behind. Never gave them a second thought. I just got the fuck out of there. Every man for himself.” A muscle in his face twitched, and he didn’t speak for a long time.

  Deck stayed silent, frowning at the floor and clenching his fists to a bloodless white.

  Naim wasn’t finished.

  Naim’s face started to twist and grow red, his thoughts enraging him again. His foot started to bounce.

  Deck saw the face of the man in the hospital corridor the night of the fight, the man who backhanded a kid twice his size.

  Naim finally spat words out accusingly, not looking anywhere near where Deck sat, staring and beginning to sweat. “What the fuck was I supposed to do, Deck? I was a fucking kid. I had nowhere to go. The ICM people would have sent me to another foster home, another fucking rapist. At least”—he choked—“at least this way I got to…” The tears came, and the bitterness and self-hatred crept up his back and clawed at his skin. “I made my own choices. I got to choose who I went with and who I didn’t, and I didn’t go fucking hungry.” His voice turned ugly and gritted like sand.

  Naim hurled the cigarette butt over the balcony, stormed into the kitchen, and ripped a beer from the refrigerator. Pounding his feet back to the balcony, he lit another cigarette and took a long, deep drink from his beer, looking at the floor, his head down as much as he could while drinking and blinking. He felt the wet in his eyes, and some tears escaped and fell to the floor. He watched them splash onto the tile and disappear, and he didn’t care; they were just in his way.

  “Do you get what I’m saying to you, Deck? Dekker?” The masochistic need to repeat Deck’s name gripped him. To remind himself who he was talking to and what he was about to lose, what his cheap, shitty life was costing him.

  “I was a whore. An eleven-year-old fucking whore. Do you understand? I sold my ass, my mouth, and my cock to anyone willing to give me money.”

  Deck swallowed and stayed silent.

  “I lived on the shitty streets of shitty fucking Marseille and sold my skinny brown ass to live. For fucking years. I. Was. A. Whore.” He punctuated every word.

  Deck’s fists clenched harder, and a bead of sweat slid down his temple.

  Naim thought about the men. All the men. Sailors, businessmen, butchers, doctors, politicians, plumbers… There had been hundreds. More. Men who fucked his ass and his mouth. Men who gave him money to fuck them. Men who paid him to do things that most adults he knew hadn’t even heard of. And he hadn’t had to live that way. That was what he’d chosen. He chose to live that way.

  He’d been silent long enough for Deck to blink his way to a question. “How—” His voice broke. He took a breath and tried again, but Naim took pity on him.

  “Dr. Moreau? How the fuck did that happen?” Naim laughed, a harsh, ugly sound. “Fucking Disney story, right? What the fuck was that movie? Pretty Woman? That was the stupidest fucking movie ever fucking made. I think I tried to set fire to the DVD once.” He turned and looked at Deck. “Oh, I was high, of course.” He nodded as though Deck had spoken.

  He lit another cigarette and drank from his beer and went back to staring at nothing, leaning against the door frame, not even okay with his profile being as visible as it was. He wanted to pull his hair down over his face, but Deck loved his hair so he kept it back, tied in a knot and looking crazy.

  “I had a friend.” He stopped, unable to continue for a moment and no longer in the room with Deck anymore. “I had a friend.” His voice was softer, and it broke a little as more tears fell. “Étienne was…he was a little older than me. I guess four years or so.”

  Deck watched Naim’s whole face soften while his body grew impossibly tenser. He wrapped an arm around his middle again as though to comfort himself as he spoke. “He came from a very wealthy family, but Étienne wanted to be an artist. He left Paris and lived in a little bungalow by the water in Marseille, all financed by his rich father.”

  His face changed into an ugly sneer. “After, of course, Étienne got too old.”

  He looked at Deck, bringing him back into the world. “He was like me, Étienne. His father liked them young.”

  Deck shuddered once, and Naim thought he might be trembling. His eyes faded into the past again. “We used to get high together. He didn’t want anything from me. He bought drugs for me, bought me food. Let me hide out at his place when I was tweaking or my…my…when I was in trouble with…”

  He couldn’t bring himself to say the word pimp, and he didn’t want Deck to hear it.

  Deck wasn’t stupid. He knew.

  “He just… Étienne just liked having me around. He didn’t give a fuck what I did.” Tears slid down his face and dripped off his chin unnoticed as his voice turned soft and kind. “He let me read his books. Actually, he made me read his books. He used to tell me I was smart and…he…” When he raised his cigarette to his mouth again, his hand shook so hard he could barely put it to his lips.

  “He taught me things. Like…school. Math and science and made me read things I didn’t want to.” His small smile was genuine and full of grief. “He kept telling me I was smart. And he called me a trouduc—asshole—a lot.” His soft laugh was genuine too.

  “He OD’d one time. Well, more than once, but one time I was with him. I took care of him. I’d seen it a thousand fucking times on the street before. Johns, other kids like me, whoever. Marseille was a fucking black hole of heroin.”

  He looked thoughtful for a moment. “I think I was the only person I knew who didn’t use it. I used every fucking thing else, but I stayed away from needles.” His train of thought made him laugh in a sickening way. “My street value would be cut by seventy-five percent if I got myself saddled with HIV. Everyone knew everyone else’s status. You couldn’t keep that shit a secret. I was already a cheap whore as it was; I couldn’t afford to get cheaper.” The hatred in his voice dripped, thick and tangible.

  Deck’s jaw clenched harder.

  “Anyway…” Naim shook himself and laughed. “Anyway…like I’m telling some fucking kind of real-person story.” He laughed again, and it was even uglier.

  “I took care of him when he OD’d, and he decided I should be a doctor. Then we laughed about it, got high, and made out.” He looked back at the floor and shook his head. “He didn’t pay me. It wasn’t like that. We never fucked. It was just…affection. He gave a fuck about me, and I loved him.”

  Naim blinked quickly as though he was realizing something. “When I was…I guess somewhere around seventeen, he—” He blinked harder. Saying these things out loud made them real. Marseille had really happened. His foster father, the streets, the men, but most of all Étienne. Étienne had been real. This was different from telling Frannie, and no other soul in his world knew. “He dragged me to some university thing and made me take a test.”

  The blinking got faster, and a long cigarette ash fell to the floor. The look on his face became more and more stunned. It had all really happened.

  “A few weeks later, he…he gave me this…this fucking piece of paper and a hundred thousand francs. One hundred. Thousand. Francs…” Pain and grief and loss replaced the flesh of his face. “He told me to get the fuck
out of that shit hole, go to Paris, and be a fucking doctor. A fucking doctor.” His voice faded along with his eyes, and he just stood for a while, staring. As though he were watching it all happen again, right in front of him.

  After a few long moments, he continued. “He’d bought my entrance to the Université de Paris, put me on a train, and told me not to come back.” Naim tried to breathe, but there were rocks on his chest. “I got a job at a rest home for the elderly. A real job, like a real person. I didn’t even know my last trick was my last trick. Étienne, he just, he found me with some fucking guy. I don’t know who. Who the fuck cares. And he told me to get the fuck out of Marseille and never look back. Go be a fucking doctor.”

  He stopped and stared at the wall with old, exhausted eyes, his face gray and tears falling onto his shirt.

  He didn’t say anything for a long time. He was somewhere else entirely, and it was a private place.

  Finally Naim opened his mouth, but only a choked sob came out, so he snapped it shut. He closed his eyes, took a shallow breath, unable to breathe properly, and tried again. This time his voice came out tired, sad, broken, and quiet. “He died of an overdose five years later. The same month I graduated university.”

  He stared empty-eyed through his next words. “Étienne was my savior and my salvation, and I loved him, and I left him there to die alone. Not even a cheap twink whore to be there with him because I fucking abandoned him. Just like everybody else.” He didn’t sound angry anymore. Just destroyed.

  He stopped, no more story to tell.

  After a long time, Naim remembered that there was one more thing he needed to say.

  “I’m sorry, Deck. I’m sorry I’ve disappointed you. I’m sorry I’m not brave. I wanted to be. I want to be. But I’m not. I’m just dirty. And a coward. And I’ve been lying to you this whole time.”

  The silence of the room blared, and Deck’s beer sat forgotten by his feet, as his gaze never left Naim.

  Naim was easily on his tenth cigarette when a thought occurred to him.

  “Being raped wasn’t my fault. I know that, and I’ve dealt with it. It’s part of me but…Claude did that to me…to us.” He wanted Deck to know that he understood the difference between what was and was not his fault. “I think…I think I’ve made my peace with that. But everything else… I made my own choices, Deck. I let men buy me. I sold myself.”

  He still couldn’t look at Deck. It took everything he had not to hide his face and his shame and filth, but he owed it to Deck not to hide. He fought hard against the need to vomit, feeling completely empty in every other way, nothing left to say. He couldn’t think and didn’t feel anything but sick and dead.

  Now he would just wait.

  The silence was interminable. He watched Deck blink, and think, trying to process the reality of who Naim really was. Naim tried to process the reality that this would be the last time he ever saw Deck. He swallowed back a sob and waited.

  Deck didn’t speak for a very long time, and Naim’s sense of defeat and hopelessness grew. How disgusted must he be? How dirty had his own filth made Deck feel?

  Naim stood in the doorway and shook with cold and grief, just waiting.

  “YOU KNOW I love you, right? You know I love you?” Deck couldn’t think of anything else to say. It sounded silly to his own ears; so frivolous and pointless in the face of everything he’d just heard. But it was all he had.

  Naim blinked for a moment, stunned, then turned violently toward Deck. “Oh fuck, Deck!”

  Deck just sat there helplessly with tears on his face.

  “Did you not hear any fucking thing I said? I…” Naim closed his eyes, turned, and violently pitched his cigarette over the balcony. He turned back, calmer, and Deck looked at him with wet eyes and a graceful sadness. The late afternoon sunlight was shining into the room over Deck’s head, and he looked like an angel.

  Naim remembered thinking Deck might be Lucifer, and he closed his eyes and pleaded with Étienne to make it rain.

  He wrapped his arms around himself again, realizing it had been a mistake to look at Deck. He leaned against the door frame again, and stared at the wall again, and started to shake again, still unable to breathe.

  “I thought maybe… I thought you were starting to believe that but, Deck—”

  “I wasn’t starting to believe anything. I love you. This whole time. I…” He was lost with nothing else to say.

  Naim sighed, exhausted, and wished the fucking idiot would process what he’d said so Deck could get angry, and they could move on with this. Now that he’d gotten everything out, the fear and anxiety and tension dissolved, and he had nothing left but humiliation, regret, and the knowledge that this would be the last time he saw Deck.

  Grief was starting to feel like a living, greedy thing inside of him, demanding to be fed. “You didn’t know me, Deck. You can’t love something that you’ve only seen a small part of, the horrible, ugly parts hidden away. Deliberately hidden away. Because I was lying to you.”

  “I know how I feel. You can’t tell me how I feel.” Deck started to shake off the stupor, but he still couldn’t focus on anything other than his annoyance at Naim arguing with him about what he felt. He wanted to laugh. It was sick, but he wanted to laugh right then and there. If he knew it was his own feelings, why would Naim argue with him about that? If he said he loved Naim, then he loved him. Naim knew he knew his own stupid feelings. What was he talking about?

  “I’m not… I’m not telling you how you feel. I’m saying your feelings aren’t based on anything real. That’s…that wasn’t me.” Naim still faced the wall.

  Deck was confused. He could hear the sound of tires crunching in the snow outside. It confused him. There was a world happening outside, and it confused him.

  He was still stunned and not thinking very well. “Of course it was you. It just wasn’t all of you.” He stopped, trying to make sense of his words. Everything was broken into strange, misshapen pieces in his head. He had to fit it together like a puzzle. “Now…now this…is all of you.”

  Naim made a terrible noise that might have been a laugh. “Yeah. It is.”

  “So, I love you.”

  “Mother. Fuck.” God, he was so fucking stupid. Naim clenched his fists, determined to make Deck see, to understand. He wasn’t processing and Naim knew it. He would help him.

  “Look at me, Deck.”

  He already was; his eyes had never left Naim, but Naim hadn’t noticed.

  Naim turned from the doorway and went to Deck, ignoring the ripping feeling in his chest and throat. He knelt in front of him and deliberately touched him, his hand on Deck’s thigh as Deck’s eyes followed his face, his expression dazed and still sad, still confused.

  “Look at my mouth, Deck. Look at it.” Deck’s eyes dropped slightly, and Naim knew he’d obeyed. “Think about how many times yours has been on it. Think about what you want to do with it. To it.”

  Deck blinked, and Naim waited, giving him time to think, to relax. He squeezed Deck’s thigh through his jeans, feeling warmth and solid strength, and he embraced the familiar feeling of shame and loneliness. He slid his hand along hard muscle, up and inside, and rested it between his legs, kneading gently at the muscle of Deck’s inner thigh, and felt the heat from his crotch warm his frozen hand. Deck still dutifully looked at his mouth, entranced.

  “Now think about how many filthy, stinking cocks this mouth got paid to suck.”

  Naim waited. It surprised Naim that Deck didn’t react immediately, and his cheek twitched from tension but then he was glad; Deck was really thinking about it.

  Naim needed him to.

  Deck blinked slowly, studying Naim’s mouth, distracted and hazy from Naim’s hand, teasing and close. He knew what Naim was doing; Deck wasn’t stupid. But Naim wanted this from him. To see it. Feel it. So he did.

  He imagined Naim, young and thin and afraid. Maybe his hair was short, and he was so skinny his eyes were somehow even bigger. Deck imagined thi
s child with eyes similar to the ones he’d fallen in love with, only cold and dead like they were here, in this place. Giant and dead and fogged with crack or meth and far, far away from the dirty, sweating, and stinking animal who gave him money to wrap his sweet, soft, red mouth around its cock.

  Deck shuddered, blinked at more tears, and swallowed back bile and vomit.

  Naim smiled hatefully. “That is who I am.”

  “Stop it.” Deck grabbed Naim’s hand away from his crotch, and Naim’s smile grew even more twisted. Now he was getting it.

  Something about that image and that smile woke Deck up, and everything crashed into his head all at once, falling immediately into place, clicking and right. “Stop.” He couldn’t help the ferocity in his voice. He wanted to stand, but he wouldn’t stand over Naim. Not now. “Naim, stop.” He went from fierce to pleading in an instant, and he tried to weave Naim’s hand in his, to remind him of now and of them.

  Naim yanked away from Deck and backed up, glaring. He’d thought it worked. “What the fuck is wrong with you?” His glare was sickening. “What aren’t you getting?”

  “I get it, Naim.” And he did. Better than Naim, who had lived it. “I get it, and I get that you want me to…to…what? Do you want me to hate you? To be angry with you? I know that’s what you want, and I think I know why, but it doesn’t make any sense.”

  “What in the fuck doesn’t make sense to you? That you should be angry with me for lying to you? That you should be disgusted with me because I let you put your hands on me. I put my hands on you, and I’m fucking filthy.” Naim was starting to shout and come unglued.

  “Fucking, stop!” This time Deck did shout. “What—” He shook his head and couldn’t stay seated anymore. “What are you talking about? You didn’t lie, Naim. How—I mean, Jesus, do you just walk up to everyone else and say, ‘Hi, I’m Dr. Naim Moreau, and I was systematically and repeatedly raped for a fucking decade.’” His voice broke, and his throat closed, and he didn’t understand why Naim fought him when they needed to be doing this together.