Chapter Twenty-Two
And So I Brought Him Home
I had been in the bathhouse for only a few minutes before I realized by the language, the playfulness of the men, that I had landed in one my favorite bathhouses in Montreal. I always enjoyed the men here, the earthy locals, the eager and interesting tourists. A jovial atmosphere filled the place.
I exited the sauna and entered a large, subterranean room with a swimming pool. Men lounged about in the nude, assessing one another or lost in thought, taking a break from all the revelry going on in the other chambers above. I felt the temperature in the air subtly drop.
My brother and your death rose from the waters like a black dolphin. Unlike me, he had aged since our last meeting. Taller, he somehow appeared to be trying to hide his height by bringing his shoulders in, as if he wanted to conceal his dark powers. He looked at me and smiled a toothless smile; the smoldering amusement he exhibited was infuriating. My cheeks burned as he caught my eye and gestured lewdly down toward his pelvis with a sweep of long, mantis-like fingers. His penis had lengthened since I had seen him last. It hung between his sleek, muscled thighs like a midnight eel, charged with electric menace. My knees buckled slightly, as I wanted it inside me again, filling my mouth with its balanced fury. I worked my jaw in anticipation as he stood there, waiting for me to return to my rightful and only real vocation. Oblivious, men on either side of the pool involuntarily shivered and slid down farther into the water, as if the chill were in the air and not standing before them. The shimmering net of blue tiles at their backs caught the reflection of a thousand minnows of light, throwing them across the curved ceiling above. A slight mist rose, obscuring Obsidio’s cock and his brief ebony bush. His skin had darkened, as if he had spent his days committed to some outside sport and not within ruptured tombs or exacting ceremonies in broken and abandoned churches, shifting across time and space the way a shark calmly cuts cold channels. I leaned in and tried to part the ferns of mist with my eyes.
There it was. Every contour I remembered was calling to me, that heavy, almost droopy head, the beautiful flange of flesh. His coil of foreskin receded slightly, and the redness of his head shone through like the tip of a giant viper’s tongue, an angry beacon of lust. It pulled me forward. My mouth felt dry, and I swallowed a nearly forgotten hollowness, an added dimension of raw need: my original thirst. I was possessed by a personal knowledge of gravity as I stepped into the pool, shocked at how cold the water had become. I knelt before him as a supplicant bending before his most worthy king and extended my tongue as if in handshake, welcoming a long-absent ruler back into his castle’s throne. I suddenly recalled that time in the cemetery, as I lay across the body of a dead boy. The dirt in the corner of his placid eye. Obsidio had lured me there not only to fuck me, but to see if I would survive his seed. Nothing more than a cool experiment. Certainly nothing less.
And so I brought him back home. Into my mouth. The place where his passions were born and nurtured.
We joined and I sought eternity, a timeless period where I housed his lust inside me, breathing and massaging his dark cock with my tongue as it filled my throat, my emptiness. The very curse placed upon me by my father Neptune wavered. The joy I felt threatened to rend the universe itself apart, I so violated the concept of punishment this existence was supposed to visit upon my servile frame. I craved Obsidio’s pungent, heavy spunk. It was so thickly seeded that I often thought of masticated, rotting grapes as I gulped his semen down—not that I did not want to savor it, but I needed to move it quickly into my stomach so I could be better prepared for the next lumpy load.
The dark sediment that had caught on the ridges of his shaft came loose in my mouth. I was able to massage them into smaller particles between my tongue and his penis. My taste buds discerned the effluvia of black deeds and dried semen, specks of shit, and the metallic tinge of blood. I swallowed the dissipating granules while making the mental note to try and be more observant when I next excreted my pearls in a few months. Perhaps some of this current grit would add a touch of color, punctuating the milky quartz with a starry rise, or even transform one of the jewels into something like a cat’s eye, staring up at me in malignant judgment as I fished it out of the toilet.
As I sucked my brother’s dick, I wondered how many souls had knelt before him, serving him so tenderly and with such admirable surrender as to warrant something kinder than an actual kiss of death.
I clutched his calves and was disappointed that they had substantially changed shape in my absence. As Obsidio had grown, his leg muscles had elongated. Gone were the grooves and veins I used to steady myself. The back of his legs used to be as recognizable as a favorite discus to the thrower, but he had changed, and this unfamiliar canvas mesmerized me.
That death actually stalked the halls of sodomy—oh, how that would titillate some sour Christians. This schizophrenic sect, that incestuous threesome, how they have harried my fellow catamites since long after Rome tried and failed to stamp their pestilence out. Ironically, they survived and unknowingly made Obsidio a central figure in their mad myths. I had seen his visage countless times before and had failed to recognize him tattooed on arms and chests of men traipsing the halls eon after eon. He is their devil. Rumor and exaggeration had turned his dark complexion into a vivid red hue. They assigned him horns to better illustrate his satyrlike lust. Legend lengthened his already considerable penis into a whiplike tail. I ran my fingers down to his sharp heel bone and breezily lingered there, a maneuver which always drove him mad with delight.
I heard the familiar, appreciative sigh, which was as close to a thank you as I had ever received all those years ago. How many years? Drunk on some peculiar ambrosia, I had once driven myself to distraction trying to count backward and tally all the times my tongue had tasted from this ongoing cornucopia of cocks, where and how often my ass was entered. However, in my obsessive delirium, I hit about the idea that really, this was not an adventure, and most definitely not the curse as it was intended to be. This was an ocean. I was joyously lost at sea. As if to bear the point home, Obsidio let loose a torrent of urine down my throat. It must have been ages since he had taken a piss, so much hot brine flooded my internal channels. I steadied myself against the gulping onslaught, and with a mental gasp of delight, I recalled a line from Lucretius, “For thee the Ocean smiles.” Now, though, I realized this ocean began and ended with my brother’s cock in my mouth.
* * *
Obsidio showered. I waited with a fresh towel across my outstretched arm. I needed to be his slave. Rather, I needed him to enslave me. He would have nothing but disdain toward voluntary service. However, if I pretended to flee and was accidentally successful, or if his interest in me was only fleeting at best, then his lust would again be genocidal. As he turned under the water, I caught sight of his perfect penis and almost dropped the towel. This he witnessed from the corner of his eye and was quietly pleased. I would not have to grovel, then. He had taken note that my natural sense of servitude had recommenced. Fine. Let him claim me as a pet so all would be right in the world. I will drink his darkness so that all may live.
Greedily so.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Pluto’s Kiss
After his shower (cold, of course), I blindly followed him around the bathhouse. He was like a predator, noting all of the dark corners, assessing where men gathered. I licked my lips, ready to feast on his length, to please him utterly, though he had gained a snake’s swiftness and for a moment I lost him in the locker room. As I turned the corner, Obsidio kissed a man. He held his head in his hands, one finger coated in wet shadow. He touched that finger to the man’s lips playfully, as if asking him to keep a secret.
As the surprised corpse slipped to the floor, Obsidio caught the swinging locker door in his hand, pulled out a pair of neatly folded black jeans, and shimmied them on. I reflexively knelt to help the man, as if what oceanic powers I possessed could reverse my brother’s deadly touch. But I, of
course, could not. The sea is a conduit of life, not life itself, and Obsidio had become more than the visage of death, he was death. I had not yet observed up close the gross nonchalance with which he took life, and my stomach guttered like a candle. I rose and clenched my fists as if to strike him, but he had sped past the other dressers, their actions slowed, mouths agape, as their brother slumped down on the floor. He turned and laughed as the exit door slowly swung closed behind him.
Enraged, I left the dead man and marched toward a water fountain crammed between a soda machine and an old coin-operated condom dispenser that also sold aspirin and Alka-Seltzer and mouthwash. I grabbed one of the conical paper cups and went over to the hot tub. An old man arched an eyebrow as I dipped the cup in the water and filled it up to the paper rim. I turned toward the door but paused. I had never ventured outside like this before. Sure, I had mounted a balcony, lain on a rooftop tanning deck, testing the boundaries of my god-placed spell, but nothing as overt as the action I was about to take. I pushed through the crowd that had gathered and stepped over the body of the dead man. As I pulled his shirt out of the still-open locker, a twink with an absurdly overdeveloped upper body glared at me as if I had come to rob a corpse rather than save my brotherhood. I looped one arm through the sleeve of the button-down and switched hands to squirm into the other, all while trying not to slosh the cup of water. As weary paramedics kicked open the door, I slipped past.
Montreal was in full revelry while I was in a private storm. A dark churn of reality, as if gravity itself were slamming against my still-boyish body with a lash of knife-sharp, invisible wind. A vicious undertow gripped me and tried to pull me back toward the bathhouse. I soldiered on as if I were walking beneath the sea, the sand under my feet quick and slippery. I kept as many of my fingers in the cup of water as possible without displacing too much of the precious fluid. Men and women packed the streets, also cupping their drinks, but with cheer and laughter. I held on to mine the way a sea captain holds the mast as his ship is heaved back and forth. The lights, the night air, air! Unfiltered by steam, cramped quarters, and sweaty bodies, the luxurious silk of fresh air ran beneath my nostrils. This distraction caused me to momentarily lift my fingers from out of the cup, and I felt the full force of the tidal current swirl at my back. The pull was unbelievably strong, but I shook my head and caught a whiff of Obsidio. His rich, mammalian smell, which I had always associated with the dirt a strigil would scrape off a goat, caught beneath the ample hood of his foreskin; the scent, which I had found so alluring in my distant youth, well, I knew now its true and deadly origin: sweet carrion. I nearly retched as I pivoted and homed in on my prey.
Death was inside a strip club. Surely all the boys were dancing for him, whether they knew it or not.
The doorman gave me a puzzled look and was about to physically position himself between me and the entrance when I caught his eye and used every ounce of my celestial charm to sway him. He blinked, I glowed, he wavered, and I passed. My first impression was that I had entered a sparkling bordello. The boy leaving the stage possessed the look of a professional wanton, and the pale meat hanging between his legs, though impressive, had the wrung-out quality of a well-used washcloth. His eyes were distant and calculating.
Not so the pixie who bounded onto the stage as his fellow stripper stepped down to seduce a few more dollar bills from the assorted drunks and tourists in the audience. All of them sat, mouths gaping, aglow in the same golden amber of small table lamps, uniting them in a drunken, lustful hue. This young man took the stage as if it were life itself and he its gleeful conqueror, his proud penis not only fully erect but bouncing off his beautiful stomach, a slight youthful paunch, as a silver-sticky-singular web of pre-cum bobbed between tip and belly button. He smiled and looked at me, then pivoted to acknowledge every member of the audience not currently digging into the proffered crotch of his colleague. Then with an athletic flourish of his hand, he again drew attention to his moist, hard cock, as if we needed to be reminded of why we had all gathered here. Well, I did not. My goal was to keep him alive, and the generations of boys yet to be born that did not deserve Pluto’s Kiss.
Syncopated music and lights filled the room with throbbing geometric patterns. He swiveled his lithe hips, cock twirling, and I thought to lean in close and catch a stray flying teardrop of semen in my mouth, to quench my thirst as I scanned the room for my brother, but then I caught sight of him. The tired stripper who came before the gyrating Ganymede mechanically turned his back to the audience and parted a red curtain. As the flap closed, I could see the men’s room. Obsidio stood before a urinal, his wolf’s penis extended, about to let loose a torrent within the cracked porcelain basin.
I entered the bathroom, and he let fly a rueful laugh.
“Look at that, a fish walking on land. Lucretius was right, all life began in the sea!”
He turned, and as he did so, the jeans he had stolen dropped to his ankles. He displayed his lethal cock, knowing it would cast a spell over me. I had already transgressed the boundaries of my curse more than I thought possible. My knees quivered at the sight of it. His penis was as hypnotic as always, the perfect, flaring head, the reptilian folds beneath, and the extensive length, serpentine, spotted like a snake that lived in a volcanic basin.
I dropped my preserving cup of water as Obsidio again unleashed a torrent of urine on my face. This golden salt water cemented me to the floor, to this room, in this moment. I was free to service him, so I gulped and swallowed while placing my hands between his ass checks, the hair there coarse like a donkey’s—black as a midnight charnel pit. I combed it with my fingers, untangling hard knots fused by the charcoal of shit and the grime kicked up from horseback rides through Hades. The head of his penis pushed through my lips, and I kissed it. I tongued the brine still brimming in his slit as he sighed, gripping my hair like the red hell-stallions he tamed under his father’s tutelage. Piss dripped off my chin as more of his length filled my throat. I welcomed the sacrament of this familiar and familial girth. As I did so, I felt sorry for him He was doing all that his father had bred into him. Not I. I was the rebel who reveled, who flaunted desire. His killings were not born of any need. I was wrong to think he murdered for sport. His was a hunger as unbridled as mine. However, where he was purposeful, I was gloriously lost in a shadowy aquatic forest filled with bizarre coral castles and beckoning mermen. I was at play. He, at work. His cravings had become a scythe I must still. Tears crept into the corners of my eyes as my tongue snaked around his column of flesh and milked from it what I needed. Sure enough, his dark seed issued forth, with all the dank weight of dirt on a fresh grave, and I gulped while maintaining the bulk of the black pulp spackled across my tongue. Another gush of hot urine followed, and I pretended to wash his effluvia from my face with this providential shower. He was spent. As his shoulders slumped, I rose and thumbed one of his nipples tenderly, lovingly—as playfully as when we first started to couple. He grinned, and I looked at him wide-eyed and tilted my head, and he instinctively leaned in for a kiss. I embraced him hard, with arms that would not let go. My tongue pried open his cracked, raw lips, which relented more from surprise than my strength. I slathered the cavern of his mouth with the seminal death he had painted on so many other faces, across so many beautiful lips, some so young that they had yet to fully sing the song that was their soul. Like them, he was not immune, as I was, to his own poisonous kiss.
I would like to think the look he gave me as he clutched his throat and began to jerk and writhe was one of knowing release, but it was not. It was the real anger of a carnivorous beast, angry not that it was dying but that dying meant it would not feed on the flesh of others again. So he collapsed and I felt my form waver, as it did in the clouds of steam. His body shook and turned to ribbons of red flesh that in turn tore at each other until all that was left was a dissipating mass. I started to sweat. No, it was not sweat but drops from the ocean, a crashing wave I couldn’t see coming to transport me to anot
her place, another time.
It was far past time for me to go.
A black speck shambled out from the middle of the thick pink primordial part of the undulating accumulation that had been my brother. It was a beetle, black as the pupils of Obsidio’s ambitious eyes. I thought to stomp it before I was taken from this place and even raised my foot but imagined that in my absence the goo of the crushed insect would revolt into a thousand teeming maggots ready to reform an entirely new and unknown carapace of death.
I scooped up the bug and popped it my mouth.
Better to consume death itself than be consumed in turn by imaginary unknowns.
Then I was gone.
Coda
This time it felt like I was walking in the rain. All of my other movements, parting the curtains of steam or plunging through tidal forces, I had been pressed from one reality to the next, but now I was walking, hands out as always, pulling aside sheets of water without the pressure of time.
I continued, not yet entering another room or bathhouse. It had been centuries since I had gone for a walk. It felt like a luxury. I looked down at the gray, rounded stones beneath my bare feet, smooth after countless centuries of cascade. I’m somewhere different, am I not?
A place between the centuries, a place where I could catch my breath.
Finally, a home?
I turned a bit, and the rain rotated as well, this sea salt rain, as gray as the rocky ground. My cloak of rain. However, I also felt the nourishing power, understood that the slash and run of the water circulated back upward, that there were no clouds, no stars above, just looping currents for me alone to ford. The air was heavy, mineral. I cupped my hands and drank what I thought would be the water of knowledge and found it startlingly bland, lifeless. The salt it contained seemed exhausted of nutrition. It tasted like how some journeys end. But of course, time contains no life. It is but a crumbling road, a looping Appian Way littered with graves. Then the water stopped falling all at once, and the final splash erupted into a fog that curled in on itself, effervescent and everywhere convulsing grayness with slight pirouettes that quivered and beckoned. Soon this parted to reveal a sudden wall rising from the path. Then the inevitable door within the wall appeared. I opened it and stepped inside.
The Lurid Sea Page 12