The first meeting had been a nothing! He’d dashed out, barely acknowledging my presence, a brief puzzled look, questioning, too hurried to be perturbed. Then gone.
I was painfully aware that the changeling was in process, afraid least time should snatch him away.
So I went back.
We sat at the table. His mother, Adam and I. He ate voraciously with the ‘being elsewhere’ aspect of teenagers in the presence of age. I tried to engage him.
‘Do you work out, Adam?’
‘No.’ He continued to eat.
‘Sport then?’
‘No.’ An irritated glance.
Ingratiatingly I continued. ‘If I had a physique like that at your age, I doubt I’d have entered the priesthood.’
At this he laughed. ‘You mean you’d have been waylaid by your own attractiveness! Were you such a weed then?!’
‘Adam!’ scorned the mother and got up, clearing some of the plates away, sensing it might be time to leave the men together.
‘No’ I laughed, noting that the mother had left the room. ‘But I wasn’t half as attractive as you!’
Adam looked up from his eating. A sinuous smile crept onto his lips.
‘Are you making a pass at me Father?’
I was indeed making a pass! But I had not known it! Instead of acknowledging it, I behaved as one insulted.
He ended the tasteless tete-a-tete with a further dress down, the impious imp! A homily berating the priesthood whom he referred to as, amongst other things... ‘Cowards... feeding off other people’s grievances and crimes... without the guts to live their own petty preoccupations...’
Then he left. He left me, so to speak, holding the baby and what an angry baby it was!
That angry infant kicked and squalled in the night. As regularly as a mother gets up to tend a new born, it awoke me from my slumbers.
That blighted new born squealed and squirmed, dislodging faith and logic, blasting into their place, with lungs of leather, hot, unrelenting desire, the insistence, the tunnel vision, the grabbing, grappling hunger of the new born who knows nothing of restraint or consideration but only the raw, instinctual yearnings and sensations howling in its innards.
I tried to serenade it. I sang it songs of Angels and ether and the Lord’s compassion. I crooned to it of my own just and useful life. I tried to still it, to quieten, to sooth and when this failed, I threatened it.
Fire, brimstone and wrath, the destitute and the starving gnawing at its right to live.
But it would not be stilled. Its face grew red and its voice grew shrill. Its agitated twisting and turning, its convulsions and contortions revealed an implacable tyrant.
And interspersed with the howling was ‘the boy.’
Fleeting images like a carnal carousel projected before my eyes...
He came to me naked and warm, slipping against my body, lithesome, listing like sapwood, the bark torn away, heartwood betrayed. I was soaked in sticky resin. Was this God’s manna in the desert? ‘...He fed his chosen on nectar from the Heavens...’
Finally, one night I arose. It was almost midnight. I dressed.
I knew of a particular hotel, a meeting place for homosexual men. It was common local knowledge. I drove there.
When I entered the lounge, I knew I had made a desperate mistake. My stomach turned and the gall rose in my throat.
Elderly men, my own age and there about, were seated at the bar. The men were neatly attired, preened even, generally more neatly presented than your average middle aged man.
But when someone came in they turned, not completely in unison but close enough to be unnerving, a haunting projection of underworld clannishness.
Hungry eyes wavered, encountered the novitiate, measured, weighed, assessed, temporarily conveying coddled perversions, offbeat appetite.
The raw nudity of the expressions was terrible, worse than obscene. I almost cried out. For there, there was a mirror, a monkey god, a demon, had pressed up to my own face and oh!... ‘those nights when the infinite wind eats at our faces!’
I left as abruptly as I’d arrived, intending to go straight home.
It was a balmy evening, just passing out of summer and the East End was still busy. People were seated at sidewalk tables beneath gently fluttering canvas awnings, coming and going from brightly lit interiors. Several passed in front of my car, exuberant, exited youths whose animated faces flashed in the street light.
Once again I was reminded of Adam and so I parked.
Huddled in my jacket, I walked.
The atmosphere was that of a fairground or circus, energy, colour, motion. But not just any fairground where it might rain or be muddy, or where something of the tattered cheapness, the commercialism, the gears and cogs behind the rides might intrude and demolish the magic, the illusion, the artifice. No, the sort of fair an artist might construct in one of his better moments… resonant with complementary life force.
I arrived at one of the busiest interiors and entered.
Inside, the style was nostalgic Italianesque. Walls ragged in soft, cloud like sepia. Superimposed on top, breath taking figures of Olympian proportions, mock red ochre copies of Michelangelo’s slaves, all bulk and emotion and gravity. One sipped one’s coffee and the fifteen foot figures tussled and turned above one’s shoulder, or next to one’s skull. The surrounding world had suddenly become a walk in work of art!
I was thus, busy supping and contemplating, enjoying my newly found surroundings, the quality of the young flesh about me, when I caught sight of Adam!
Oh my angel child! Desire of my heart... He had joined a line in front of the coffee counter. He was wearing naval style pants, baggy-legged and buttoned at the hips, a white T-shirt and black crop waist jacket... broad shoulders, back pulling slightly at the fabric of his jacket, tapered hips, firm buttocks. A variety of individuals approached him, talked briefly and drifted away again. He spoke sporadically to someone beside him, an elderly, distinguished looking man in a well tailored navy blue suit and silk tie. Something about their interaction revealed an unexpected intimacy! They appeared to be... I realized astounded, a couple!
My beautiful boy... was he selling himself?
Finally, having acquired their drinks, Adam and his companion moved away from the counter and I lost sight of them behind a group of youths.
Suddenly, there was a voice at my elbow.
I turned and Adam stood there, proffering his hand. Startled, I rose slightly and shook hands with him. He gestured for me to sit down.
‘I believe I owe you an apology,’ he said. I shook my head.
‘No.’
‘I had no right...’ He touched down briefly in the seat opposite me. ‘I can’t stay...’
‘You’re with someone’ I said.
‘You want to arrange something?’ he asked.
I must have looked furtive and blushed.
‘I don’t usually...’ I began. He reached out and laid his hand upon my arm.
‘Look, this is business...’
We met in the parklands on a Saturday afternoon, an unusually hot spring day. Families were setting up picnics in the shade. Children ran excitedly around the lake, sailing improvised toy boats, throwing bread to the ducks.
Adam sauntered toward me, sporting thick denims despite the heat, a ferociously white T-shirt, fleshy biceps, thick forearms. His upper lip sustained a fine line of perspiration which glistened in the heat. My heart was racing. What a wild card he was, wanton and voluptuous in this suburban idyll!
I am afraid I carried on like something of a dotard, infatuated as I was. After we had exchanged greetings and commented upon the unseasonable heat, I found myself relating to him as though he were a comely grandchil
d, comfort and restitution for a bothersome and restless old age... ‘Was he too hot?... Would he like a drink?...’ a multitude of nervous and exaggerated concerns, quite feeble...
He was surprisingly polite and patient, professional I suppose, in return.
We went to my car and I drove us towards the hills, picking up soft drinks on the way.
The car ascended a road full of hairpin bends. Every new curve alternatively gave rise to lush green nooks, whilst increasingly spectacular views of the plains unfurled below us. The plain began to look like something slowly on the boil, something teeming and fetid and small, cloaked in gases of its own excretion, whilst the calm coolness of green shade and expiring plants beckoned us onward.
Eventually, the ascent was made and the car devoured kilometres of pleasant, gentle, undulating road, nestled amidst velveteen folds of green land.
I found a plain covered in soft, waving grass which came up beyond our knees. It was dissected at a comfortable distance from the road by a fissure with plump grassy banks, at the bottom of which we could hear but not see a tiny bubbling stream. We parked the car beside the field and walked through the swaying grass to the edge of the creek. There we lay down in the cool air, beneath the bow of a straggly blackberry bush, which would have torn us if we had gotten close enough, for it had gone quite wild with its roots in the rich dark loam and its branches luxuriating in the dampness. It, and the long grasses, the curved bank, provided a sense of green seclusion.
Adam rolled carelessly toward me, he smelt of mint, of sage, coriander, all things green and good and life giving. Or perhaps it was the grass crushed in his wake, but burying my lips in the soft, red flesh of his was like drinking youth and life, primordial and ripe. I sighed all of my breath into him. We began to undress and then to entwine, at first basking in gentle dry warmth, then becoming more adamant, dripping moisture to the earth, my belly sliding against the firmer flesh of his. He pushed his hand toward my crotch crotch and the intimacy of the gesture was too much. My heart welled within me and my life’s fluid came to rest beside his small, protruding belly button.
‘Too soon,’ he complained. ‘Come, I will show you...’
And he did, many a time, the wilful and ingenious little beast.
We’d have been fine. We were fine for many months, almost a year but then we began to get lax, to vary the location of our activity according to convenience.
I arranged to meet Adam one winter’s afternoon in a local national park; quite sure that foul weather would keep the majority of outdoor enthusiasts at home.
Having parked my car, we began to toil up a hillside in search of privacy. The sky was threatening and full and we began to pant a little in our exertions and in my instance, in anticipation. Sweat was beginning to trickle down my brow when the first drop of rain hit. It broke against my forehead and was followed by several more. We began to hurry along the path, which was slightly muddy from previous rains.
At the top of the first incline, where the ground flattened out, Adam reached out his hand and pulled me panting, over the rise. The rain was falling heavily now, in sheets, which from this vantage could be seen sweeping across the plain in front of us. A dozer had been employed to level the area, so that a small oval of sorts existed here, pocked by the recent earthmoving. The rain smashed against what seconds before must have been little muddy pockets brimming with calm water, like tiny smooth surfaced pebbles. Now they were angry little hollows, receiving the rain and spitting it skyward again.
On the far side of the oval, just visible through the slashing rain was a small building, a toilet block made of grey concrete blocks. It stood at the base of an incline steeper than the one we had just traversed. We dashed toward it.
Inside the shoddy structure, rain thundered on a tin roof. We paid little heed to it, if anything, we were cocooned by the surreal intensity of the storm.
Casually, Adam turned towards the wall and dropped his pants down around his ankles.
Damp, short of breath, aroused by our short traverse of the sodden field, I lifted his jumper and nuzzled into his back, burying myself in the familiar, sweet smell and the warmth. The air was heady with the smell of eucalypt and frosted with mist from the rain dashing against the roof. I dropped my trousers to the ground and, straddle-legged, pushed the damp flesh of my thighs against Adam’s small firm buttocks. I was avid, intent only upon the wondrous creature before me, when I heard a scuffling sound just behind me. Goodness knows how I heard anything given the din. On reflection, perhaps it wasn’t so much my hearing which was stimulated, perhaps a shadow flickered briefly across my back, showed itself against the wall in front of us. Perhaps it was just a momentary shift in the air which should not have been but suddenly I was aware of someone behind me. I turned and for the briefest instant glimpsed someone retreating in the doorway, the back of a head, a heel. I’ll never know his identity and unfortunately my presence of mind was not sufficient to investigate. Perhaps it didn’t matter who the intruder was, knowing would not have saved me. For you see, the intruder knew me and very shortly my intimate activities were common knowledge in the circles within which I move.
These things do not go unremarked and I was, as could be expected, both sent down and protected.
I go about my daily duties in my country parish in relative calm.
In Adam’s absence, my passion has declined, my agitation ceased. I am grateful for the peace and I know that ‘my’ Adam, ‘young Adam’ is no more; rather he’ll have evolved into the adult which was unfolding even as I knew him...
And what of conscience? The reader may ask.
Indeed, I have wrestled with it frequently but, in the end, all I can do is take comfort in the words of Saint Paul:
‘I cannot understand my own behaviorbehaviour. I fail to carry out the things I want to do, and I find myself doing the very things I hate ... In my inner-most self I dearly love God’s Law, but I can see that my body follows a different law that battles against the law which reason dictates...’
What can I say?
I am no more of a man than was the Apostle.
The Dreamer and the Dreamed – by Michael Rumery
Eat, eat, thou hast bread;
Drink, drink, thou hast water;
On that day, dust possesses the earth;
On that day, a blight is on the face of the earth,
On that day, a cloud rises,
On that day, a mountain rises,
On that day, a strong man seizes the land,
On that day, things fall to ruin,
On that day, the tender leaf is destroyed,
On that day, the dying eyes are closed,
On that day, three signs are on the tree,
On that day, three generations hang there,
On that day, the battle flag is raised,
And they are scattered afar in the forests.
Mayan poem
(Books of Chilam Balam - Jaguar Priest)
December 14, 783 A.D
High atop the summit of the Temple of Giant Jaguar, haunting sound of bone flutes floating on the morning ether signaled arrival of great star named Daybringer (Venus), as it leads the Lord Sun, emerging triumphant, from his Underworld passage.
Five tattooed musicians wearing brilliant masks, multicoloured feathered headdresses, greenstone earflares, oyster shell necklaces, jade bracelets, anklets of copper bells, and brightly-patterned hip-wrappings trimmed with sky bands; tootled a mournful tune ‘The Blame Is Ours’. Wondering where their widely separated brothers might be at that very moment. Briefly, sunrise reunited the scattered tribes.
The Popol Vuh (Council Book), The Light That Came from Across the Sea, teaches: “This is the account of how all was in suspense, all calm, in silence; all motionless, still, and the expanse of the sky was
empty....There was nothing standing; only the calm water, the placid sea, alone and tranquil....There is not yet one person, one animal, bird, fish, crab, tree, rock, hollow, canyon, meadow, forest....Then came the word. Heart of Sky. ltzamna, and Heart of Sea, Sovereign Plumed Serpent, Kukulcan, came together in the blackness, in the night....Itzamna and Kukulcan talked, then they thought, then they worried. They agreed with each other, they joined their words, their thoughts. They said, “Earth!” It arose suddenly and was endowed with plants and animals.... Anxious for praise and veneration, after creation, the divine progenitors tried three times to fashion devout men but they did not act right or provide nourishment or praise the gods; so they were destroyed by a great flood.... On the fourth attempt, they succeeded. Man’s flesh was formed from finely ground maize mixed with water; transformed by blood offerings of the deities into human substance. In unity, true pious men waited for the dawn. Great star named Daybringer came first, followed by the dawning of Lord Sun. All tribes were overjoyed at the light. Together they looked toward the place where the sun came out. There were countless peoples, but there was just one dawn for all tribes.”
The exotic polyphony expanded, growing in power, when more elaborately costumed musicians stationed on the Temple of the Masks across the Great Plaza facing the Temple of Giant Jaguar joined the flutists with zealous playing of their assorted decorated instruments.
Nine drummers garbed in knee-length, pleated ocelot-skin wraparounds and deer head hats beat on drums of various sizes with deer antlers. Drumheads were made of wood, giant turtle carapaces, and human skin.
Eleven shakers, in magenta loincloths and barefooted, shook rattlesnake or tortoise-shell rattles or maracas adorned with green, blue, red, yellow, purple, white, and striped feathers, which they called “Shadows of the Gods”.
Fall - A Collection of Short Stories (Almond Press Short Story Contest) Page 7