I am unsuited for such despondent thoughts, and when a lissome hand brushed my ankle, I gleefully pivoted. A young jock with crooked teeth leered up at me, his towel tented by the pert stab of his erection. I dove into bed with him. We kissed, lightly at first. His furtive tongue played against my lips as I opened his towel and pulled on his hard cock. I grasped his engorgement while straddling his taut stomach, maneuvering him closer to my opening. He bucked wildly, trying to spear my tight asshole. I pretended to struggle and, failing to grant him entrée, bent backward to lick his tip. He clutched my waist as I successfully positioned myself to lap up his dick, my ass in his face. Boys on either side turned to watch us, eyes moving rapidly from the video games they were playing on their phones to the coupling before them. I slurped on his cock as he licked my slit, orgasm mounting, about to coat my throat—he needed to be home for dinner. I caught him checking the time on his phone while fucking my face. The youths on either side had relinquished their towels and were openly masturbating in unison, a choral whisper of flesh. I was satisfied with the momentary cock in my mouth, knowing I did not need to be anywhere, that wherever I was, it was enough. It was enough.
Chapter Eighteen
Final Ceremony
Cocks aside, if not books and scrolls, then music makes me feel complete. That rarity, a live performance, a dance, the rare whirling dervish of towels and paper napkins and everyone is in on the joke, some hilarious drag or the percussionist supreme, naked on drums of overturned buckets and a big bottle. I am the first one to dance. I will dance for the longest time, forever eternally unclothed, and others follow, for I inspire. And perspire. And dive down when the proffered dicks present themselves. Something about the music, and I am so there. Which is why I enjoyed the flutist, flawed, exposed, mad, a dancing fool you absolutely would not want to follow, but being near him certainly was enough.
I was happy just to dance and sweat away the sting of that fading familial memory. The flutist was content in his service, perplexed he had so few offers, never understanding what his crotch so obviously offered was an itch and a scratch and a burden, for the poor man was laden with a serious case of crabs. Not just any crabs, but a mythic breed, an immortal irritant, a throbbing pox that you would never be free of once it adhered to your midriff. Countless men sensed this, aghast by the undulation within his ginger pubic jungle. They turned away at his approach. Still, he played on, accompaniment to an otherwise enjoyable orgy.
This sauna had a wondrous maze for cruising and a fantastic dark room. I tasted several men who stood in the doorways of small, rented rooms, and after procuring one myself, I skipped down the hall. The floor was only slightly sticky, and the audible pucker of my bare feet lifting off the viscous surface certified my decision to stick around and really just wallow in place for a bit. I soon wandered into a dark room, delighted to find it a pit of grunting and thrusting, of rolling shoulders, upturned asses and, in general, a shifting feast of wanton men. I forded the fleshy thicket of elbows, knees…and horns. Good ol’ Zotikos was rooting around. He snorted as I tapped him on the shoulder, and we both laughed and embraced.
“Watch out for that redhead,” he whispered.
“Oh, him? He of a million pinchers!” I finished his sentence.
We giggled and turned our backs to one another, for cocks needed sucking. The bristle of hair hiding his hooves kept tickling my ankles, a nice reminder that some spots were just magical and right. I surrendered to the surrounding men with great abandon, taking any and all offers, the center of attention, my satyr friend and fellow supplicant working hard just to keep up but enjoying my display of sexual prowess.
Much later, I returned to my cabin happily spent and contemplative. The groping, the open mouths, the frenzied throng within these valleys of steam reminded me of the benefits of immortality: if Athena’s owl were dedicated to the erotic rather than wisdom (though I had my suspicions that the vocations shared the same wingspan), swooping down into the forge to cut through the fog like a licentious arrow, only to rise again and drift toward other landscapes, over expansive seas. These are night flights, and these sealed, windowless chambers are where fantasies, dark and true, find fruition. That I have visited so many, as either witness or participant, affords me the conviction that these are places where we find our rarer but nonetheless precious truths.
I hung the damp towel on a bent nail, sat on the thin mattress, and inhaled the vivid scents of men: sweat, stale breath, some shit, the diffused fermentations of desperation and fulfillment. The cabin beside was still. Too still. It was too late for Zotikos to have checked out. Earlier, we had established that he would take the cabin next to mine so we could compare notes like two veteran campaigners. No one was wandering the halls. Those who remained did so because they had settled into complicated couplings that would take all night to disentangle, or they were sound asleep, as evidenced by the murmur of snoring that reverberated among the cabins. Or they were gone to the private place only certain drugs unlocked, leaving behind bodies to be used, entered, pissed upon by the malicious or, worse, the bored. Warily I rose, sans tired towel, for this sacred duty was best conducted in the nude. I stepped into the hall, as always amazed at how bronze my skin appeared beneath the pale egg of the suspended light bulb. It was as if I had just stepped off an endless beach and was here primarily to wash the sand from my feet and only chanced upon the opportunity to taste the additional salt of so many men. I sauntered toward my neighbor’s cabin and gave the door a knowing knock. There was no answer, so I pushed the door open with two fingers and peered in. Zotikos was on his side, his back to me. He was motionless and seemed to have just exhaled, his next breath taken elsewhere, his shoulders soft, gray spine limp, a knotty cord within a battered bag. I bent over his face and listened for breath. Dry lips parted, a black ooze clung to his swollen, distended tongue.
I stepped out and closed the door, shaking my still-wet locks, both surprised and disturbed at a moment’s tumescence between my legs. I moved quickly to the mad flutist’s cabin and gave it a hard, swift knock. I heard the man rustle and rise, and with towel in hand, he presented himself. At first, he was perplexed, for he had thought he was being roused as if it was dawn and he was to either vacate or pay for an extended stay. He leaned into the doorframe and leered when he sleepily realized that was not the case. I then pulled the flutist from his cabin by parting his towel and yanking the tip of his limp penis, leading him down the hall by it. The man was baffled, still groggy but eternally hopeful that someone desired him. He stumbled down the hall behind me. I stopped before the satyr’s cabin and opened the door with one hand. Excited over the thought of a threesome, the flutist entered and began massaging the old man’s shoulder but recoiled at the cold touch. Stricken with fear, he looked at me and then over my shoulder at the door, wild-eyed, craving escape. I stood firm, hands out, and looked the flutist in the eyes. As a godling, I could, in moments of extreme duress or need, give rudimentary commands to mortals, less telepathy or mind control and more a momentary bending of the desire my form naturally demands.
Therefore, I told the flutist what must be done.
The man sighed; obviously he felt misled and trapped, not yet seeing that his brotherly act would release himself from his curse of magical crabs. He sat beside the corpse, weeping, as I settled against the door to see the final ceremony through. The flutist rubbed and massaged the useless crotch of the old man until it possessed some semblance of warmth, and then he lay atop the body and rocked back and forth. The red crustaceans began to migrate from his pubic forest to their new home. They sensed that the body was dead but otherworldly and were eager to burrow into the folds of mythic flesh and wooly, goatish hair. The earnest exodus caused the mad flutist to shake as host shed parasite. He stood over the old man as the last crustacean had left his body. The orange mass moved over the corpse and, instead of settling in the usual dark crannies, began a quiet, orgiastic feast. The flutist tried to flee but I held him, to ensure th
at every miniature crustacean fled his body, and indeed a few tiny red dots fell to the wooden floor and scurried to join the banquet. The flutist shot me a distraught look, so I let him slip by, and he returned with his musical instrument in hand. We stood there, guarding the door, while he played a somber tune.
Soon the satyr’s body was a trembling orange shroud. Occasionally an exposed bone would jut out, but then it, too, would be consumed. One of his chipped and notched horns broke free from the deflating skull and was upended. With a slow swirl, it was devoured as well. The flutist, exhausted, slouched to the floor and fell asleep, his head resting against my vigilant thigh. His shallow breathing masked the last moments of the carapace’s consumption. The bloated crabs, black with blood, turned on each other in a scarlet conspiracy of cannibalism. I watched until nothing was left but a dark oil-like substance that stained the planks of the bed frame and dripped between the floorboards. All that remained of Zotikos’s essence joined with the bathhouse, adding a dank, underlying scent of primeval forest, a place untrammeled by man, filled with tall trees that shaded proud elk, black moss dripping from their horns.
Absentmindedly petting the head of the sleeping flautist, the image of the satyr’s open mouth played repeatedly in my head. The black kiss crusting across his cooling lips, the mark of Obsidio.
Chapter Nineteen
The Last Sound a Drowning Man Hears
So my brother was fording the same shallow waters as me. Was he similarly cursed? I tried to imagine him crossing paths with Neptune—did he bravely challenge the god to try to win my release? Doubtful. It was possible that our worlds merely intersected. The human realm thirsts for death as much as it craves the sensual, both forms of release different sides of the coins Charon collects. Still, I was chilled by the thought that we had occupied the same space and that his actions were deliberate while I was completely unaware.
I walked the halls, scouring every inch of the sauna to see if I could locate Obsidio. The place had pretty much emptied out. A tired-looking man went from cubicle to cubicle flipping mattresses and hustling groggy, hunched men out and toward either the showers and lockers or the booth where they could purchase a ticket for an additional day. A few men showered. Shoulders bunched in the locker room as pants were pulled on, lusterless wedding rings restored. I decided to step into the steam room and let the mist transport me to another time, another place where I could feast and forget, and again take flight, my wings the cocks simultaneously pummeling my mouth and ass until it was as if I were airborne, cruising above mountains of flesh.
* * *
I sat on the bench as tendrils of steam slithered across my toes. The whiteness rose from the vents along the floor and soon heat clouded the room, and I felt unmoored. The bench beneath my bare ass receded and, as I had done so many countless times before, I leaned forward as if I were about to dive into the large pool within the Baths of Caracalla. Instead of finding placid waters, I felt a rush as the steam turned into an oceanic tumult. A forceful, swirling tide embraced my body. I am always transported from one place to another within this kind of mystic whirlpool. I feel pressure, the very pressures of time and space, but it is never crushing, just coolly reassuring, and then voilà! I am spat out, literally, into another era, having moved across the globe while traversing time in what feels like mere seconds.
The sting of salt water has never bothered me, considering my progenitor, so for the first several eons of voyaging, I peered long and hard into the waves rocketing my body, to see if I could determine their source. Perhaps a gigantic kraken spewed forth this private water spout, and I could crawl backward across his massive tongue and toward the origin to discover…what, exactly? This was not a carnival ride I necessarily wanted to end. Still, I struggled to keep my eyes open against the onslaught, and I never saw the source of the whirlpool that claimed my body and flung it here and there around the world. If I were tunneling through the ocean, surely I would see the bows of boats, a tangle of seaweed or darting fish. Only once did I see something unusual.
Exiting a memorable night at a Spanish bathhouse—oh, how their mouths have chewed the calculus of Latin into something syrupy, seductive, and when I was on my knees, sweetly demanding—I launched into my dive and immediately noticed a glimmer just over my shoulder. I twisted as a swimmer gulping for air to see the trailing glow of a large luminescent jellyfish. I blinked to make sure none of the poppers I had just huffed were clouding my brain. When I opened my eyes, it was still drawing closer, with a quickening pulse of light illuminating every exciting dimple of its calmly undulating form. Caught within its gelatinous body, a perfectly intact human skull rode a jelly throne through a funnel in time. Just as I reached out to make contact with this peaceful messenger, the water rushed and, in a mad swirl, I was deposited on the floor of a crowded steam room. I was surrounded by the dark shadows of men, one who turned and, seeing me on my knees, pointed his penis and doused me with urine as if I were a fire he needed to put out.
I traveled repeatedly, desperate to put as much distance between the unwelcome family reunions and myself. There were so many days-nights-mornings-evenings, freed of even the awareness of time it was hard to imagine a life measured, opposite this secret and separate Sargasso Sea within which I float. Oh, the stories I have picked up from sailors. How I have loved the ones I was able to taste before they showered or bathed—that seasoned oil of labor, sweat, the salt of battering waves. I imagined, several times over, that whichever bathhouse I currently occupied was in actuality a sunken ship, an overturned ark of sighs, forgotten on the ocean floor, stocked with moribund, starving sailors sucking sustenance from each other. By working my mouth and ass, with my body spread like a sheet to catch the wind, I would be able to lift this doomed ship. For that is what it felt like, some nights. The sauna full, brimming with erotic energy, yet an aura of loneliness hovering over the hot proceedings, forcing us to cling that much more to one another, as if we could all fill the hollow spaces with sweat and breath. Whenever this feeling descended upon me, I knew it was time to travel.
* * *
Ready to depart again, I stepped into the deep end of a most azure pool of wintry water, and colorless bubbles rose around me, weaving wreaths of frolicking impermanence. Sinking downward, the bubbles coalesced into the white petals of an aqueous plant, one meant to shoot seed through the darker caverns of human interaction. I thought, well, if I am the spore, why not try to assert my direction? And so, again instinctively assuming the arc of a diver, I waited until I was subsumed by the watery charge and I shot upward, attempting to alter my course. I pushed toward my left and felt my form rock back and forth, as if in a swing made of waves, and the water slapped my face as if in reprisal of my anarchistic efforts. The force spread my lips, and the salty froth scoured my gums until I thought they might bleed.
This sparked the odd erotic memory: a rotund chef in a bathhouse in Nice flipped me over and nudged his fat sausage toward my crack. When I resisted, he drunkenly snorted, “blood is nature’s lubricant,” before stuffing his meat up my unready hole. This was in the back room, no lights save a fluorescent pink sign that screamed “SORTIE” that painted the men stalking the circular hallway surrounding the black bunker a craven hue. The dark den within was a scene of some of the most relentless fucking I had ever endured or witnessed. It was a room of total surrender. I was pummeled by a train of cock, every member whetted from the previous bleeding ass or spittle or sweat or from similar, effusive cornucopias of cum just as my righteous hole had become. I was but one among the throng on the floor, elbows blackened by the flakes of ancient semen and shit that tiled the ground beneath a multitude of bent and broken beasts. But how I digress.
I plunged rather than rode, for the first time directing my body. The forces that carried me buckled and pitched in retaliation. Fear filled me. Could I, the son of Neptune, drown? That darker, colder, invisible hand of the ocean gripped my throat, and I remembered as a child rolling in the waves off our se
aside villa, realizing the tinkle of the shells and tumbling coral I heard underwater would be the last sound a drowning man hears.
And I emerged, born again into the world of men who feast on other men. I plopped down hard on a familiar bench. The bathhouse in Spain. The towel on the floor was just as I had left it, but not that dead man in the corner. He was alive when I was last here, which, judging from the familiarity of the room, its warmth, the smells in the air, was only moments ago. I searched the sauna. Everyone was dead. Men lay on the floor of the changing room, lockers open. A man floated in the shallow cooling pool, his wrists bobbing as if he had just been released from the cruelty of the crucifix. I examined a body slumped against the door of the dry sauna, towel discarded by his fall, the question mark of his flaccid cock now forever unanswered in a nest of riled, straw-like pubic hair. He was so beautiful, not quite young, one of those older men who hold on to their looks as if their very appearance were their true foundation, and not the bones and muscle that propped it all up. I hoisted his head up by the chin. Black ooze dribbled out of his slack mouth. I fell backward in disbelief of what I had already sensed to be true: Obsidio had slain these men.
My heart tried to leap out of my sallow chest. I looked over my shoulder as if my demonic brother might be behind me, but this was a quiet place, a still place, as still as a charnel house after the gravediggers depart. I went momentarily mad with speculation. How did he follow me? How did he sow such destruction? I thought of our trip to Athens, the pod of porpoises that rode our ship’s wake and, recognizing me as a son of Neptune, frolicked in the waves, winking at me in spirited delight. He was riding my wake. Whenever I departed a place, he was able to step into the vacuum my traveling form made before the watery forces closed in on itself. How many steamy utopias, what rare erotic playgrounds has he destroyed? And then how did he find me again? Zotikos’s slaying was not some mere coincidence. At some point, our paths must have crossed. Eons ago, he stood in the shadows and watched how my curse played out in reverse, delighting me and a multitude of others. He must have realized that this, too, was a buffet for the true gourmand, and that he could not only join in but spoil it, to his immense satisfaction. As I fed on life, so he gorged on death. But at that moment, I doubted his powers were as they are now. His mischief so vile and far-reaching. No, it was when he found me a second or third time that he hatched such a plot. And why not? I was the one body he could claim whose soul he could not snuff out. How maddening, to be the personification of death and not be able to own that which you desired most. So he would torment me until he could claim me as his sole property again. No matter where I went, he could follow and punish all whom I had provided succor. How could I resist? Stop my travels and stay in one place, imprison myself in an abandoned bathhouse for all time. Then I would never know if he was satisfied with my self-imposed banishment. What was there to stop him from continuing this roving holocaust? He is the personification of death. He has all the time in the world.
The Lurid Sea Page 10