According to the odometer between the handlebars, he must be almost there. Yep, the road forked here, and there was a lightning-struck oak, so he took the right-hand branch, away from the water (twinge of disappointment), and there was the house, “set back from the road a piece,” as Marcus had promised, under shady trees. The yard was overgrown and the house looked uncared for. He knocked on the front door, got no answer, and walked his bike around to the back. A note was pinned there. “Welcome, Gary, I’m down by the lake. Just follow the trail. Hope you left your Speedos at the camp. Marcus.”
He grinned, leaned his bike against the steps and loped down the trail. It was a few hundred yards down a slope, and there was the river again, feeding a medium-sized lake. A homemade dock ran into the water. This must be where the snapshot had been taken. But he didn’t see anybody. Oh, well, the water looked good. He skinned out of his cutoffs and T-shirt and strolled to the end of the dock.
“Dive in! It’s deep enough,” somebody called. There was his host, treading water ten feet away. How had he gotten so close without making a sound? Gary shrugged and slipped into the lake. It felt good.
Marcus had been submerged when Gary arrived, but he felt the tremors in the water when his guest’s feet hit the dock. He came up for air, and it took a few seconds for his eyes to adjust. Nevertheless, he got a clear and very appetizing glimpse of a tall young man who might have been blond if he wasn’t completely shaved. The lack of body hair made his guest seem vulnerable despite his almost inhuman, peak physical condition. Gary had a face that was masculine but expressive. His features had not yet settled into the immobile and unreadable condition of an older, more disappointed and resigned man. He seemed enthusiastic, although Marcus was sure he had to be feeling some anxiety about meeting a stranger. Somebody who might be even stranger than you could guess.
Doubt surged in his chest. Had he been right to come here, to return to his childhood home? So much had changed since he left to enlist in the navy; his parents were both dead, and his brothers had scattered to South Carolina, even Tennessee and Texas, and one sister in Seattle. It was truly unsettling to feel like such an alien in this familiar place, one whose smells and sights conjured up a wealth of nostalgia and regret. (For even a happy memory can bring sadness, since that moment of joy has vanished, one bright bubble in a flock of malicious crows.) And what was he to do with this Yankee boy, someone who came from such a different place and time? But Marcus wanted what he saw. Sex, as it so often does, overcame any qualms he might have had about the consequences. He was bigger and stronger than Gary, and could control the encounter, keep his secret, just this once.
The silky cool water caressed Gary, noticeably more friendly than the dead, chlorinated water in a manmade swimming pool. It seemed to leach any trace of tiredness or pain out of him; the energy it infused him with as he did a shallow breast stroke was clean and light. Then he suddenly felt even better. A hand that was a great deal warmer than the water had circled his shaft, and was measuring him slowly, up and down. He was face-to-face with the man in the photograph, and the smell of his body hit Gary in the face like the first smack in a spanking. Marcus smelled like something that would be good to eat and never stop eating. Up close, he was even furrier than the photograph had shown. He was matted with hair, and Gary wanted to rub his face all over that big chest.
Taken aback by the lack of preliminaries, he tried to reach for the other man’s body, but Marcus evaded him. “Let me take you out farther,” he said, and had Gary in a towing hold before he could protest. Gary could have sworn they didn’t stop until they were in the center of the lake. Marcus let him go, then began a weird game of sexual tag. He was swimming around Gary in amazingly quick, tight circles, and he would dart in just often enough to administer a caress (and keep Gary afloat). Sometimes it would be his mouth instead of his hand that would enclose Gary’s cock. He trembled, trusting the hands under his buttocks to keep his head above water. It had been too long since he’d felt so good. He was eager to reciprocate, but no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t grab hold of Marcus’s dick, although a couple of times he felt it brush his stomach or thigh, and knew it was as hard as his own.
“Let me touch you!” he finally cried, exasperated, near tears, and Marcus (behind him) pulled him close, wrapped his hands around Gary’s aching, over-stimulated rod, and thrust his own cock in between the muscular cheeks of the other swimmer’s ass. He timed the hand strokes to his cock thrusts, giving Gary the giddy sensation of simultaneously fucking and being fucked, though he knew Marcus’s cock remained outside his body. He did not realize they were still swimming until he saw swirls of semen lost behind them and the familiar piers of the dock. He was pushed toward the makeshift wooden ladder before he could turn and kiss Marcus, who had darted away, back to deeper water. “You go inside, lunch is on the table. Don’t wait for me to eat. I want to swim a little more.”
Gary felt like he would collapse if he stayed in the water. The intensity of his orgasm was making his limbs shake as if he had hypothermia. How often had he fantasized about sex in the water – weightless, streamlined sex – with another athlete whose stamina and physique equaled his own? He dragged himself into the house. Just as he entered the kitchen, he saw the back of a departing older black woman. She wasn’t wearing a uniform, but something about her neatly pressed dress and apron made Gary sure she was a servant. The table had been set with enough food for five people. He ate a lot of cheese and fruit and drank a couple of pints of water. He even made himself a thick sandwich out of forbidden cold cuts. This morning had made him feel better than months of coaching, lectures on nutrition, sprints and power-lifting. When he was done eating, Marcus still had not come out of the water. Gary wandered into the living room and fell asleep on the couch.
His dreams were disturbing. He had read about Vietnam vets who had been injured by a particularly nasty kind of land mine, one that jumped to waist height before exploding. The men who survived usually lost their genitals as well as their legs. (In his sleep, Gary protectively cupped his drained, waterlogged and tender cock and balls.) These men had a powerful incentive to participate in a government experiment with human DNA that might restore the lost parts of their ruined bodies. While a carefully crafted virus went to work on their genes, the men sat patiently in vats of nutrient solution and antibiotics. Part of the experiment worked fine. With proper recombinant encouragement, their newly ambitious cells recreated perfectly operating cocks and balls. But from that point on, things went awry. Their leg bones fused, articulated like a spine. Where new legs were supposed to grow, large and powerful fish-tails sprouted.
The military was not apologetic. The experimental subjects were reminded that they had known they were taking a huge risk. The men (mermen?) were relocated to a larger, common pool, where they began to forge a team identity – although the purpose of that team remained vague, at least in the beginning. Sexual conditioning was used to reinforce that bond, and some of the methods used to break down the men’s resistance to homosexual conduct were cruel. The Pentagon’s liaison to the research staff hinted at the possibility of them re-enlisting, being formed into some kind of special services unit. The idea of being kept together, belonging somewhere (and the accompanying training in underwater communications, demolition, navigation, flora and fauna) kept many of them from going into shock. But there were some men who could not live in such a drastically altered form. Gary woke up before one desperate man in his dream figured out how to commit suicide in a tank with smooth aluminum walls.
The house suddenly seemed threatening, and claustrophobia propelled Gary outside, back down the trail to the lake. Where the hell was his friendly swimming companion? The hot afternoon sun was soothing, and made the goose bumps fade from his bare skin. Once more he scanned the lake and saw no one, until he went to the end of the dock. “Ready for another round?” leered the handsome face.
“I’m not sure. I had some pretty weird dreams.”
&nb
sp; “Come into the water and tell me about it.”
Gary slipped nude into Marcus’s element. But instead of talking they wound up sexing, even more frantically than before. Gary barely made it back to the camp by curfew. He left behind a thoughtful man who was far too captivated by the young swimmer. Had it been so long since he’d had really good sex with another man that he was a pushover for falling in love? Love had not been part of the plan. But maybe it would be okay to have a regular fuck buddy. Despite his skill at manoeuvring in the water, Gary had spent less time in that element than Marcus, so perhaps there was less danger in meeting again than the older man feared. The sincerity in Gary’s voice when he cried out, begging for the chance to touch Martin was moving, more moving than Gary probably knew. And Marcus wanted to feel those hands and that mouth all over his body. But it couldn’t happen. Ironically, to allow Gary to do the things that Marcus ached to have him do would ruin everything. The sex could only keep happening if it was strictly limited.
There was such a difference between having sex with a man who knew that he was gay and accepted it than a forced encounter with a heterosexual who knew he had no other outlet than to make use of male flesh. Marcus knew that many a straight man had a far greater capacity to enjoy gay sex than he knew. But still, in an institutional environment, such revelations were unwelcome. When a man like that got his rocks off, there was an undercurrent of regret, shame and anger that set Marcus’s teeth on edge. He wanted the man he embraced to be thinking of his body, infused with desire for all of his virile attributes, not pining for breasts and the entryway between a woman’s thighs. Gary’s grace in the water, his quick intake of breath when Marcus supported his weight and almost fucked him, his hunger for more – these things were so seductive that Marcus put his face in his hands and tugged on his hair to try to get them out of his mind. He realized he would have a hard time waiting until Gary’s next day off. A very hard time. Such a hard time that a cold shower (or a bath, of course) would not be much of an antidote.
The next off-day found Gary back at the old, empty house. The week of training had flown by. He had done better than ever before at meeting his goals, and didn’t give a shit when Coach Bassett told him so. The troublesome images of Aaron’s – adventures? Not infidelity! – lost their sting. When he wasn’t with Marcus, he was still with him in the spirit, reliving each precious moment of contact, moving in his arms, panting to be put upon his cock, and coming despite the fact that it was denied him. He was there the next week as well. And the next.
The sex was so good, but Marcus would not allow Gary to touch him, nor would he engage in any kind of penetration. Gary accepted it after a while, assuming that since Marcus was calling the shots, he could change things if he wasn’t satisfied. The brief heat of Marcus’s semen jetting between the cheeks of his ass, before lake water washed it away, became an erotic trigger that always made him come too. Then Gary would get out of the water, go inside and eat, take a nap (always marred by more weird dreams), and eventually come back outside for more sex. When he left, Marcus would still be in the water. Gary would cycle back to the camp, alternately mulling over his sensory impressions of Marcus’s body and the dreams.
His nightmarish visions of the military medical experiment were supplemented by dreamy visions of a blue, underwater world where silvery-scaled people cavorted in their strange cities, playing dolphin games with each other all day long, offering each other gifts of necklaces and sex and food. Their behavior with one another was so sensuous that it was difficult to tell where sex began and ended. There seemed to be no restrictions upon who or how they embraced. There was no obvious work being done, yet their playfulness was also creative. There were buildings, ornaments, art, and all of these things had a quality of buoyancy, with no sharp edges or corners. Gary loved these dreams. He sometimes found a trace of tears in his eyes when he woke up, exiled from that idyllic setting and those gentle, beautiful beings.
Over time, the underwater sex with Marcus was interspersed with more and more conversation. What little Marcus revealed of his personality fascinated Gary. He was a man who was apparently capable of violence, in the appropriate context, but was also burdened with a delicate conscience and a sense of compassion for human frailty. Gary had never encountered anyone like him before. Growing up in southern California with its emphasis on youth, novelty and pretty surfaces had not prepared him for the complexity of a southern gentleman’s melancholy character, nurtured in an atmosphere where there was no escape from a tragic sense of history and abundant evidence of man’s capacity for evil as well as good. Nobody would ever guess from looking at Marcus or listening to him that he was gay. But he accepted his own desire for other men as naturally as he accepted all of his other basic needs. There could be no sexual shame in his presence, only permission and – even better – skill. Despite Marcus’s insistence on controlling their encounters, Gary sensed that he would respond to an equally assertive partner. The fact that he could not find the trigger that would allow Marcus to bring down that wall tormented and teased Gary into a frenzy. How could he turn kissing somebody into a sexual fantasy? Who jacked off to thoughts of doing nothing but kissing another man? It was weird, being this crushed out, but the elation of the crush sped Gary through the tedium of rehearsing for races.
One fateful day, the strangeness of the repetitive dreams made it impossible for him to respond to Marcus’s light, familiar, but still achingly arousing, touch. Gary was also feeling a growing anxiety about the approaching end of his incarceration in the training camp. As the lusty grin on his friend’s face was replaced with genuine concern, Gary knew he was falling in love with this man, and instead of making a joke about not being able to get it up underwater, he haltingly described the dark visions that troubled him. Eventually even Gary’s muscles tired of treading water, and he relaxed into Marcus’s tattooed arms, wondering how he could keep both of them afloat so effortlessly. Then he happened to look down, but off to one side, the way his father had taught him to look for fish in a brook. And he saw the lower half of Marcus’s body for the first time. The two-fluked tail was muscular, dappled brown like a rainbow trout and undeniably masculine.
“It’s true, then,” Gary said thoughtfully, and wondered why he was relieved. Probably because he had known the truth for a long time, but had not let himself acknowledge it. Marcus was a mer.
“Yes. Do you want to hear the rest of the story?”
He did. Gary’s body signaled urgently that he wanted something else, too, now that his tension and anxiety were gone, but he made himself wait.
“One of their own scientists betrayed them. She had spent years developing a way to communicate with dolphins, killer whales, and other intelligent ocean mammals. The military had gotten wind of it, taken over her project, and taught the pinnipeds to carry explosives and conduct underwater sabotage. A lot of the animals were injured or killed during carelessly conducted exercises. None of the stupid lifers in charge of this very hush-hush project could understand why this would traumatize her, or anticipate that she might turn against them because of it. She was supposed to teach each of us how to work with a dolphin partner. A weird variation on the K-9 corps. Somehow, she found out that the Navy intended to use us to staff underwater nuclear missile silos. She also found out how they intended to replace us. The mervirus is in our semen. Theoretically, we can make any man into a mer. But they never got far enough in the experiment to actually offer us a victim to see if that transformation would really take place. I think the woman who let us go was actually more upset about the prospect of the dolphins getting killed than she was about the way we had been treated. But one night she sneaked out to our tank, told us what the score was, and gave us the location of the underwater base they had already built for us. Then she let us loose. We found it, and moved in.”
Gary postponed dealing with the full import of this by quibbling about details. “How do you live underwater? You still breathe air, don’t you?”
“I’m breathing with my lungs now, but in the water my gills keep the oxygen coming.” Marcus took Gary’s hand and ran his palm over his chest, then farther down, to his hips. The skin began to change there, acquiring a slightly abrasive texture, the triangular pattern of large, hard scales. Marine armor for a new kind of warrior. Gary could barely feel the frilled edges of raised half-circles, rhythmically fluttering open and closed. “I’m a deserter. I left when I found out that there was another, hidden agenda to our creation that even the scientists didn’t know about.
“Being a mer is really hard on your mind and soul, Gary. I can’t ever go back to the land again, and I never lose my sense of loss about that, the fact that I can be so close to the shore, but never really return home. They wanted to exterminate those people you saw in your dream. After the worldwide boycott of the tuna industry, which happened because of all that graphic publicity about dead dolphins, they are running scared about what would happen if school children and little old ladies and all the members of the Sierra Club knew there were people down there. I don’t know why they think they need a war to do it, though, because we’re killing them already. All the poison that we pour into the ocean has already endangered them.”
Gary was so excited to learn that his idealistic nap-time visions had a basis in reality that he couldn’t stop himself from interrupting. “But you and your buddies, you could put a stop to that. You could fight back! You could save them!”
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