He started laughing. I’m such a fucker; a boy’s dead and I’m worried about my shirt!
“Come on, baby, you’re laughing like the Joker.” Pompeii placed his turmeric hands on his dark ones. They steadied under his touch (he hadn’t known they were shaking).
After a few minutes of solemn silence, Pompeii said, “Well, you can tell me one thing. Was he good?”
“Oh, yes.” Boy Wonder had been… wonderful. He remembered the pale blue eyes when they’d been alive. A petrified ocean that he’d dived into. Oliver didn’t tell Pompeii about the music, or the voices. (Maybe he had been on something, but just forgotten it. Everyone in that dank, smelly house had been on drugs. When he’d been deep into the scene, he would lose whole days.)
“Well, let me tell you about Cameron…” Pompeii leaned forward, his eyes eager.
Oliver dutifully sat through a tale of debauchery.
“It’s hardly a Twin Peaks kinda of night, like you had, but I had a good time,” Pompeii finished up.
Oliver cracked a grin. “That reminds me of something else weird, that happened that night.”
“I hope it doesn’t end in death.”
“Not at all. I met this other guy, a real strange one. He was an albino. You couldn’t have missed him. He had silver hair and was wearing a Coil T-shirt.”
Pompeii shook his head.
“Well, he came up to me, and talked to me—”
“Was he cute?”
“He was—”
“Baby, don’t say he was ‘beautiful’; that’s so Anne Rice.”
“Well, he was. But, it was strange.”
Pompeii looked expectantly at him.
“I always had a thing for albinos,” Oliver said. “When I was young, about five or so, a white family moved into a house in our neighborhood. They were very ‘70s crunchy-liberal: the dad had a ponytail, the mother always wore Indian-patterned skirts. They had a son, who was albino. I remember the first time I saw him, I was scared. I thought that he was a vampire, or something. He was always in dark clothes, even on the hottest days, and he didn’t seem to have any veins. He wore dark sunglasses, pitch-black, the kind you see folks in Civil Rights pictures wearing. My brother told me that; but I soon figured out that he couldn’t be a vampire, ‘cause he was walking out in the sunlight. ‘Oh, he’s a vampire, all right,’ Ken said; he was a real dick, ‘he’s a new breed. He takes a special serum that allows him to stay in the sunlight. I read about it somewhere.’ I didn’t believe him. He dared me to take off his sunglasses. ‘His eyes will be all shriveled and pink, like a bunny-rabbits’ eyes.’ I told Ken that I didn’t believe him. ‘Oh, you’re just scared.’ The upshot of the story is that one day, I went up to him—all white like an alien—and I knocked his glasses off. Ken had been wrong: Silver's eyes were just blue. But instead of running away, I just stared at him. I was mesmerized. He got up slowly, found his glasses, and put them back on. He walked away without saying a word…”
Oliver took a swig of latte. “After that, we never really saw him around. Oh, now and then. All the kids thought he was some kind of ghoul or something. Thanks to Ken, and his friend Steve, they spread stories. Steve was from a Muslim family; he’d always be talking about white devils, and evil Dr. Yacub. He told the kids in the neighborhood that the creatures the doctor made were white, like that kid. And for some reason--”
“You fell in love with the devil.” Pompeii finished for him.
Oliver laughed. “Not quite Anne Rice. His eyes... they're a shade of blue, kind of like... What’s that flower? They’re that color.”
Pompeii pondered for a moment. “I don’t know; I may be a fag, but I’m not a florist!”
He laughed again. Pompeii could chase away the shadows. They finished up their pastries and coffee. Every now and then, Pompeii would sing a verse or two of a Madonna song under his breath. It was an annoying habit, but it made Oliver felt safe.
- - -
Oliver turned over the Weird Book of the Week: Yargo, Jaqueline Susann’s last novel. It was a science fiction romance story, between an Earth woman and her extraterrestrial lover. Oliver carried it, with his other finds: Shadow of the Torturer and The Art of Dali. Nuclear Books was small and cramped, its carpet red and dusty. The shelves were disordered and haphazardly arranged. Vague jazz drifted throughout the store, a musical scent that was mournful and musty at once. It was the perfect refuge for a gray, rainy day. The store was empty—odd for a Saturday. He sauntered over to the comic shelf, where he looked at old R. Crumb and new Gaiman books with longing. But no, these books and the CDs that he’d bought earlier would have to do for now. He still had to get art supplies later.
When he saw him—Silver—walk into the store, he couldn’t say that he was exactly surprised; such an environment was natural for him. Oliver felt more relieved.
Silver didn’t look all that surprised to see him, either. He was in a shirt that looked like chain mail, loosely knitted. His black jeans were creased; you could cut bread on them. His shoes were shiny. He smiled at Oliver as he removed his headphones.
“Hey. Told you we’d meet.”
“Yeah.”
“What are you gonna buy?” He grabbed Oliver’s wrist, and took the books away. When the contact ceased, there remained a bracelet of cold. “Give me de Chirico any day,” he said to the Dali book. “Valley of the Dolls, right? And what’s this ‘Torturer’ thing, eh? He looks awfully fearsome, in a heavy metal kind of way.”
“The author of that book, he wrote an introduction to a comic book.”
Silver nodded, as if in approval. “I’m gonna have a look around.”
“Okay. Nice seeing you again—”
“You leaving?”
It was an invitation. “Not right away.”
They split up, he went back to the science fiction section, Silver-Breath to Philosophy or Architecture. Oliver scanned and ignored cheap paperback trilogies. The pale man pored over books with abstract covers and titles. He had put his headphones back on; if Oliver listened closely, he could make out meaningless bits of music, in miniature.
“Hey, Oliver,” Silver called out, a little to loud. He laughed with embarrassment as he peeled the plugs from his ears. “Come over here,” was softly spoken.
As Oliver walked across the expanse from Fiction to Philosophy, he made a conscious effort not to seem like an over-eager puppy.
Silver held an elegant, slender volume in hand. “This something you oughta read.” He offered it to him. “Baudrillard” (the r’s were dramatically rolled) “writes about the subjectivity of desire like no-one else.”
Oliver accepted the book, and put it with his others.
Silver moved away to another section of the store: Erotica. He’d plugged up his ears again. Oliver followed him. He tapped him on the shoulder.
“What!” then, “what?” a couple of decibels lower.
“I- I was just wondering what you were listening to.”
A phone was pressed into his ear. Industrial drumming, quasi-symphonic synth, and a little girl, reciting words in what sounded like French. “Sacrilege! Sacrilege!” she shrieked in her bird-voice, then the sound was ripped out of him. “It was the Cranes.”
“Oh, I’ve heard of it, but I could never—”
“I know, you just love the Cranes. I like the music, but I can’t stand her voice; she sounds like Betty Boop trying to be Diamanda Galas. With a few exceptions, I find the whole ethereal girl-singer thing to be tired. I mean, punk was trying to get away from picture-perfect aesthetics. Now we’ve come full circle. And the take on women, as naïve fairy-children, or mystical goddesses… Why are you laughing?”
“I think it’s really weird that you have the wherewithal to insult my taste, but you can’t even tell me your name.” Oliver walked away. He put the books on the reshelving cart. The game they were playing was just too much.
He was out on the street, heading towards the Art Institute’s bookstore, when Silver stopped him.
Oliver accepted the bag. It was red, like grenadine.
“My name is John Cane, really boring. My friends call me Silver, for obvious reasons. I grew up in California, mostly the Bay Area, with a stint in Utah. There’s not that much to tell. I saw your work once, at the Institute. That stuff you did with those found objects, in the little boxes, I thought it was cool. They were like miniature theaters. That’s when I learned about who you were. That’s all. Not so mysterious.”
Oliver thought back to that show. His little boxes full of wires, covered and exposed, with black icons—doll-sized gods and goddesses—trapped among them. He tried to remember if he’d seen Silver there. In between the glib comments (“It represents the commodification of Black Culture,” one critic declared), and college-gallery food (spears of raw vegetables, a melting wheel of Brie, and jugs of wine) he had no memory of him.
“Now come on, man, I don’t want you mad at me.” Silver removed his glasses. The eyes were revealed, naked and the color of nightshades. Oliver fell into them.
Before long, he was following Silver into another bookstore. This one was New Age: he could smell it from the incense and sandalwood. Everything was clean and bright. Some watered-down appropriation of Native American music played on the speakers (The Wisdom of Coyote was the title of the CD; both of them laughed at it).
Silver parked himself in front of the aromatherapy counter, inhaling vial after vial. The bottles were minute and stylized, a color like smoky pomegranates. The liquids seemed to steam and swirl in their prisons. It was fake. You were supposed to imagine that you were some High Lord, uncorking a bottle of magic. A simulacrum, to use academic terminology. Like Silver himself.
“Smell this,” he demanded. Oliver obeyed. Eucalyptus stung his nose. They went through scent after scent, until Oliver felt intoxicated. Some were sharp, others so subtle that he could barely detect them. “It’s sexy, isn’t? Better than poppers,” said Silver.
It didn’t seem so odd, that his real name (or almost-real name) was the same as the one Oliver had made for him. The whole thing was unreal, anyway. With the fragrances exploding in his brain, Oliver no longer cared anymore. This strange angel was as much a creation of his mind as the boy who came blood. They were from the same place. Who cared? This real-life trip was better than that other one. The gush of blood onto beautiful skin, the rush of smell into his head. Glans, glands.
“You remind me of someone,” said Oliver, drunk on bottled vapors.
Silver smiled. “Look, I’ve got to be going. I have an appointment with an acupuncturist.” He held up a bottle of some shimmery oil. When he paid for it, he left the store without looking back.
- - -
The throngs of club-kids twisted and swirled their anorexic bodies to deep house, drums ‘n bass, and acid jazz. In silver, green and blue, in spandex and lycra, with straight and crimped hair, they were post-modern fairies. They embraced every era and rejected them simultaneously: bell-bottoms and Birkenstocks competed with combat boots and ripped T-shirts, void of contradiction, or even competition, really. They were beautiful, young and vapid. “Beatific” would be their spiritual classification, according to a role-playing game that Oliver had played, long ago. Centaurs in polyester, elementals in platforms. Like the dryads and nymphs of that imaginary realm, they were oblivious to him. He was here because goth bored him, with its stupid pretension; and gay-only places were fascist, filled with assholes. “Nazi FuckBoys” was what he called them. These New-Age discos, however, had very little baggage. They were clean and relatively good-natured, maybe because of the E people were taking.
Oliver sipped his ‘smart drink’: wheat-grass infused with bee-pollen. It tasted green and insect-like, appropriately. There was something in it, obviously, to tone down the wild flavors. But in spite of the raw taste, he was getting some kind of buzz from it. Whatever it was, Oliver felt the urge to dance. There was no music, only beat. Occasionally something recognizable would come on, a bit of Annie Lennox or Björk, but the melodies and voices would be remixed, sacrificed to the god of dance.
The crowd moved as one, in love with itself. Each spaced-out whoosh and whir of the music brought a member deeper into the collective trance. The women were dolls, with porcelain faces and jewelry eyes; you could buy them on the Shopping Network, and display them on mirror-stands. They were dolls; not the strong dark goddesses that he’d imprisoned in his boxes of snake-wires. Put these little white girls in the nest of vipers, and they’d be devoured. The boys, however, were something more. They were perfect specimens, like the figures in medical books. Flip one page, and you’d see (through transparent flesh) the muscle structure. Flip another page, and organs, fabulous coloring-book shapes, were revealed. You could flip, through tissue and tendon, until only bone was left. It was putrescence without the baggage of rot. Was that what had come out of Boy Wonder’s dick? Throwing himself into the sea of them, Oliver wanted to rip layer after layer off the beatific boys. There was a moment when he felt that he was being unfair, but then he remembered. In the gaming manual it had stated that those with a “Beatific” alignment were essentially naïve, and amoral. They could kill at any moment, and not feel the slightest regret. Centaurs have teeth, and diamond-sharp hooves.
The music he was dancing to was soulless, meaningless. It didn’t even pretend to have emotion. It was something that Silver might’ve commented on, in his odd, theoretical way.
“He’s a mindfucker,” was Pompeii’s assessment of him, after hearing Oliver’s story. “He doesn’t give a shit about you. I’ll even bet it’s that same albino kid, after all these years, trying to get you back at you.”
Oliver agreed with him—partially.
“I know that he’s all fucked up; I still find him fascinating.” To Pompeii’s unasked why: “I don’t know. It’s just—I can’t explain it. Sorry.”
“You just watch yourself.”
In the flashing, glitter-light of a disco ball, Oliver wondered what about paleness was so seductive? All the other boys were nothing next to Silver.
In the shifting, punctuated light, borne on faceless music, a faceless boy drifted over. Faceless because the boy looked like all the others: pretty, thin, standard-issue gym body. Though Oliver wasn’t a very good dancer, whites imposed the spirit of rhythm on him. So he became the Jungle personified and danced with the faceless boy.
Oliver forced himself to memorize this boy’s face, his hair. He could’ve been Boy Wonder, or any of the boys in front of him. Sandy-brown hair, blue eyes.
The two of them danced until Oliver’s legs hurt, until sweat ran down his brow.
“Hey,” said the faceless boy, “you’re pretty good.” He, of course, wasn’t sweating. Instead, he was laved in a golden sheen. “James,” he said, pointing to himself.
“Oliver.”
“You don't come ’round here much. You new, bro?” James asked.
He knew where the conversation would end up. The delicate meandering around the eventual goal was exhilarating, if perplexing. First Boy Wonder, then this guy. Why did they suddenly want him?
They talked about music (James was into techno), and Oliver’s studies at the Maryland College of Art.
“Man, I think that shit is cool. You’re a fuckin’ artist. I mean, I’m inta computers an’ shit, you know, cybershit. But it ain’t nothin’ like drawin’ shit.”
They danced some more.
Finally, at closing time: “Do you want to come home with me, bro? I don’t live too far from here.”
The two walked a couple of blocks to a basement apartment in silence. James was flush with excitement; Oliver could see his nipples were hard. Oliver himself was full of dread; but his lust overcame it. It had been three weeks since the death, the details receding in his mind. The memory had a trippy quality. Maybe Pompeii was righ
t, he’d taken something earlier, had forgotten about it.
“This is a mess,” said James, after they were inside. It was. Mounds of balled up clothes were on the floor, spots of the drab carpet showing through. A pallet lay in the center of the room. The walls were forest green, hung with posters of computerized landscapes—jungles, beaches, mountains—with futuristic lettering and hieroglyphics on them. Cybernetic organisms, featureless, sleek and created of not-yet-created alloys, were frozen in various poses. One of the poster-cyborgs disturbed him. It was a white face that looked poured: formed of some white liquid that had both the qualities of ice and clay. The eyeless eyes saw. Its subtle mouth grinned. The head floated in a void.
There was no preface, no opening remarks as they removed their clothes in the small room. James knelt in front of him, and took his dick in his mouth. Oliver was enveloped in velvet moistness. He closed his eyes. James stopped, and turned off the lights. When he’d returned, Oliver was on his knees, waiting. “No,” said James, “you don’t have to do a thing. Not yet.” Oliver stood up, was again in his mouth. An upstairs neighbor put some music on. It was techno of the bass and drums variety. It thudded downwards into the room, his brain. Muffled, aroused, Oliver analyzed it, deconstructing the beat. Dark bass tones covered, then frittered away, to reveal the naked bone of rhythm, which, after all, did not have structure. The music was appropriate, pornographic. He groaned. Behind his lids, things formed. Liquid white and speckled dark, the leaves of a jungle of electronics and sound. Pale antelopes, made of 0s and 1s, bounded before him. Whirring insects, machines morphed of special effects, buzzlessly flew. He gripped James’s shoulders and shoved his head forward. He made him gag on his dick, before releasing him.
Gasping, James said, “Fuck me.” A while later, he entered James, through membranes and lubrication. The music above seemed to get louder. They perspired. Grunting, he was in the jungle again. The fetid scents filled his nostrils, screeches filled his ears: real or sampled? He opened his eyes, looking at the form he impaled. The head in the poster stared. It encouraged him. The piece of music above him was now slower, dubbed out, filled with echo and spaces of silence between the beats. It got hotter in the room. There was an organic smell in the small room, of overripe mangos, bananas, and vegetation. And flesh. It was sweet, the smell of the golden boy’s flesh, like all those fruits, and more. Blood, like nectar, the flesh tender like a peach. Even the bad parts, the shit and the urine, would be inoffensive, when devoured.
Sea Swallow Me and Other Stories Page 5