Abominations of Desire

by Vince Liaguno

  “Let’s go back to the hotel,” Song finally said. He looked more robust than anyone his age, who had come off a long-haul flight two days before, had a right to.

  “You don’t have to come with me,” Joseph said. “I know the way.”

  “There’s nothing left on today’s program that I want to attend,” said Song.

  When he insisted on boarding the third carriage from the front of the subway train, Joseph recognized the signs of a divergent agenda. They weren’t just there to experience the spaghetti-tangle of train lines that formed a dense network through Tokyo’s urban grid.

  “We’re not really going back to the hotel, are we?”

  “We are,” Song said. “But not right now.”

  The doors slid shut; the train pulled away from the platform.

  “Isn’t it amazing how crowded these trains can be during rush hour?” Song asked.

  Unable to tell for sure whether the question was rhetorical, Joseph agreed. “I’m glad it’s not rush hour now. I don’t know how people stand it.”

  “They just do,” Song said.

  He pointed at a sleepy-looking college-aged boy seated opposite them: artfully disheveled orange hair, Burberry plaid trousers, tight white shirt, dark nipples showing through the fabric. Joseph watched as a generic salaryman—black suit, white shirt, charcoal necktie—put his hand on his knee, squeezed, and caressed the inside of his thigh, just once. The boy’s eyes widened, but something seemed to prevent him from shouting or crying out. None of the other passengers reacted. When Joseph moved to stand up, Song blocked him with an arm. A second later, Joseph made the connection.

  “No one else can see,” Song cautioned. “Just let it happen. The tagger won’t remember this later, and even the boy won’t be sure.”

  “I remembered,” Joseph said.

  “Which might be why you’re here now and Phil isn’t,” Song said.

  Then it was over: the hand withdrew, the boy’s face relaxed, and the crowd shifted around them, blocking the view.

  “That’s what it’ll be like, when it happens to me?” Joseph asked. A second thought struck him, and he asked before Song could answer the first question, “And in places like Tokyo, not all the gropers are really perverts? Sometimes they’re tagging?”

  From the corner of his eye, he could see Song nodding. “He’ll be taken tonight or tomorrow,” he said.

  *

  Joseph only learned of his first time as a tagger after the fact. He’d survived this long, so the next act had become inevitable, a question of time: a conference in Baku, because there was always a conference. Cities evolved like living creatures: some stagnated, others thrived, and this process of change must be studied, highlighted, dissected, and discussed. Now it was Baku’s moment to enjoy the warmth of the world’s spotlights. Azerbaijan’s sudden torrent of oil wealth meant great things for the ancient capital, which had been spared the fossil-fueled vulgarity of Abu Dhabi, Doha, and Dubai. Joseph, having filled up two passports, rarely grew excited about visiting new places. He’d already seen most of the cities worth seeing. Not Baku, though. It promised to be something different.

  Song, having retired, declined his invitation. Joseph had other friends: Pierre from Montpellier, Hans from Cologne, Bryan from Bristol. All had PhDs and lectured at prominent universities. All had met underground. All had survived their introductions to minotaurs, although by tacit agreement they only brought up that topic when they had to. And all had evolved past the point of being curious about the connection between universities, underground, and the true order of things. There was money in their bank accounts, they owned their homes, and their articles regularly appeared in the best peer-reviewed journals.

  They met for drinks the second night of the conference, at one of Baku’s Time-Out-approved new bars. All around them, international bright young things networked, sparkled, and tossed back expensive vintages and elaborate cocktails. Outside, recessed lights cast a golden glow over centuries-old stone walls that were already the color of pale honey. Bryan was saying something about Bordeaux, although Joseph couldn’t hear over the background noise. Bordeaux: the city, the AOC, or the wine? Bryan had a fascination with trams; probably the city, then. Hans was nodding as he always did when he wanted to give the appearance of caring. Joseph looked outside again. Warmth suffused everything. The noise seemed to recede.

  Christ, I’m tired, he thought.

  And then it was night, pitch-black night, and he was lying fully clothed on his hotel-room bed, atop sheets that smelled faintly of bleach. Joseph sat up in the dark and looked around, waiting for his eyes to adjust.

  “What the fuck just happened?” he asked the empty room. Far from panicked, he felt profoundly relaxed.

  In the back of his mind, he knew the answer: I must have tagged somebody. Unless someone had drugged his gin and tonic, this was the only other explanation. People didn’t slip into velvety fugue states and lose hours for no reason. Taggers were activated most often in crowded places: bars and clubs, subway trains, city buses, shopping malls. Nothing about them suggested possession; there was no frightening blankness in the eyes. Only the small cabal of acolytes to the minotaurs and the ones elevated to the rank Joseph and his friends now enjoyed would be able to tell. With that in mind, he left the room and walked down the hall to knock on Hans’s door.

  “I wondered how long you’d be out,” Hans said. Still in his underwear and a T-shirt, he rubbed sleep from his eyes and stepped aside to let Joseph in. Yawning, he continued: “You seemed a little different after your first drink. Distracted. Then you said you had to go.”

  Joseph nodded. “Did any of you follow me?”

  “No. We all knew where you were going.” Hans sat on the edge of his bed. “But you walked in the direction of the metro station. That’s probably… where it happened. Local people will take care of the rest. I have no idea how things work here. This country, it’s so…”

  “It’s so not Germany.”

  Hans nodded. “Baku is nice but it’s not Cologne. I would never want to live here. Do you remember anything at all?”

  “Nothing,” Joseph said. “Just… a sense of warmth. It was like waking up after a massage. I’m relaxed.”

  “Don’t tell him I said this, but I think Bryan was envious. He’s never experienced it. Not yet, anyway. Do you want something to drink?”

  “No, I should be getting back to bed. Thanks for confirming.”

  Hans didn’t reply right away: “Or you could stay here.”

  So Joseph did, and the rest of the conference was simply that: another conference. Papers and workshops. The results of a design competition. Announcements of another conference, this time in Portland, Oregon, followed by one on the reconstruction of Sendai, and a green energy symposium in Singapore. Joseph slept with Hans every remaining night of the conference, both knowing that they might pair up differently next time, both quite comfortable with that arrangement. As usual, the proceedings came to a close about the same time the jet lag had begun to wear off. With a collective groan, the attendees checked out of their rooms and queued up for taxis back to the airport. Half the conference seemed to be on Joseph’s Turkish Airlines flight to Istanbul; en route, he overheard urban-planning shop talk in four languages. At Atatürk Airport, layover goodbyes were said. On the flight back to Washington Dulles, he gave up on the paper he needed to finish editing, shut off his laptop, and watched stupid action movies until he drifted into an awkward upright jet nap.

  *

  Urban mobility, Joseph proclaimed at the end of his address in Singapore, was the lubricant humankind needed to ease its way into the future. In much of the world, the migration—unprecedented in history—from the hinterlands into the cities had more or less ended. Even sprawl had begun to contract. Places like Detroit, once written off as past saving, now led the way. With nothing of value left in their suburbs and no resources with which to police or maintain them, a constructive form of demolition had ensued. Much
was recycled; the rest had been scrapped. The tract mansions of twenty years ago had given way to acreages of trees. Urban gardens now grew in disused city parks. As the density of cities increased, the demand for appropriate transit grew.

  “Detroit pulled down its suburbs and became a pretty nice place to live,” Joseph said, an impromptu afterword. “Well, that’s what my friends there tell me, anyway. Cold winters, but the city’s finding its way after decades of decline. They’ve put in trains and decent landscaping. Solar streetlights. A dozen things we all know about, and it’s worked. People want to be in the city because they can move around in the city. This is the way forward for all of us, and this is a message we need to take home and to share—with community leaders, with thought leaders, with the people whose voices will be heard. Thank you.”

  After that, there had been applause, handshakes, and one glass of wine after another. A restaurant in Holland Village: expats, smoked salmon, champagne. A mad swirl of languages; an air of festivity. Then, the dark.

  *

  Joseph awoke strapped to a table. How much time had passed?

  You have brought dozens of people down into our tunnels over the years. The voice spoke as clearly in Joseph’s head as if he’d heard it on the loudspeaker: You have served us, and served us well. What’s more, your ideas have shown leadership. You have intelligence, and you have nerve. And you’ve survived. This is what we require.

  Again, blackness came. Although Joseph couldn’t see what followed, he could feel it. The pain took him places he’d have never imagined it was possible to go. Apparently minotaurs eschewed anesthetics, preferring the rough magic of tools with blades and teeth. He’d have screamed but for the ball gag. Somewhere in the depths of this torture, his reason tore free of its moorings. When his head itself was torn free of its own moorings, his screaming mind was a vortex rampaging through a dark network of tunnels, somewhere amid the structures and conduits under some unspecified city. It could have been anywhere that had ever been blasted by a grim, relentless onslaught: Baghdad, Homs, Sarajevo, Benghazi. Craters in bloodstained walls, dust in the air, buildings pounded down to their foundations. Joseph lost himself in a hundred cities until the pain-war ended and his body began its process of urban renewal.

  When he awoke, straps and gag now gone, he didn’t need to look in the mirror he’d been given to know what they’d done. And were the minotaurs standing around him... smiling? He ran his hands over the bristles of his new head, pressed fingertips against the points of his horns. At least they hadn’t put a ring through his septum.

  Joseph could feel the rumble of another subway train leaving the station, far above. Knowledge cascaded in when he listened: Singapore, the Northeast Line. Familiarity echoed in the walls. They were far beneath Doby Ghaut Station in a warren few people on the island knew existed. Joseph could hear every train on the line, every commuter shuffling through every station, every car on every street.

  Welcome to your city, said one of his horned colleagues.

  This is your life now.

  Welcome home.

  Ofrenda

  Lisa Morton

  Ben looked up from Nicky’s grave when he heard music.

  It came from the other side of the cemetery; mariachi music. Ben stood and gazed over headstones and past trees and parked cars to spot the musicians, five men in sombreros and somber black suits, melancholy notes flowing from their guitars and trumpets.

  The band had gathered a small group of listeners, swaying in skirts and dress shirts, and Ben was surprised to see that the cemetery had filled with visitors since he’d arrived two hours ago. Everywhere he looked there were families carrying bags and baskets and bouquets of bright yellow-gold flowers. Some crouched before stones, polishing the marble surfaces and trimming away grass; others set food and drink out.

  Checking his watch, Ben saw that it was just after three. He wondered why they were here; he’d visited Nicky every Sunday for the past three months, but he’d never seen anything like this. If Nicky had been here, he would have taken Ben by the hand and said, “Let’s find out.” They would have walked up to the nearest family, and Nicky would have asked them what was happening, and they would have been seduced by his smile, that smile that had won Ben over the first time they’d met.

  But Nicky wasn’t here, or at least he wasn’t here alive. He was gone, charismatic Nicky, and Ben didn’t possess an ounce of his dead lover’s confidence or charm.

  Especially not now, when he was at the end of a two-day meth binge and desperately wishing he had more. He was jittery, anxious, wanted that first hour of euphoria when the drug kicked in; most of all, he wanted anything that would make him accept that Nicky was dead and not coming back.

  The dream, goddamn that dream, he’d had it again three nights ago, the last time he’d slept: He’d been visiting a friend when Nicky had walked in from the back yard, and Ben realized he hadn’t died at all, there’d been no ridiculous sudden fatal car accident, no “we’re very sorry, but…” call. No, Nicky was fine, but Ben was furious at him, for damning him to the worst three months of his life, three unimaginable months when Ben had tried to lose his grief in a replacement addiction.

  Just remembering the dream again now brought fresh waves of anguish, his face lighting with heat and forcing tears.

  “Goddamn it, Nicky,” he whispered, and dropped to his knees before the grave again.

  It wasn’t possible.

  That was the simplest answer, and the least true. It was possible: Possible that Nicky’s life had been taken by one terrible collision, that their five years together were ended in five seconds of screeching, buckling metal. Five years they’d built together, leading up to the house last February, the three-bedroom they’d bought together, with the citrus trees and rose garden in the backyard.

  That first night in the new house, when they hadn’t even unpacked sheets yet, and they’d tasted each other on a bare mattress, and somehow they never tired of the taste, and Ben had been sure it would last forever.

  And then Nicky wasn’t there, and Ben realized how much of their shared life Nicky had overseen. Ben’s job at the software firm had actually brought in more money than Nicky’s public relations, but money slipped through Ben’s fingers like water. Nicky had kept their books, their accounts; he’d even done the cooking. With Nicky gone, Ben was forced to deal not just with his bludgeoning sorrow, but with bills, appointments, food, condolences, and relatives. When it was too much, he’d called Jason – the stringy-haired, bearded connection Nicky bought his occasional pot from – and told him he needed something stronger. At first the rush from the meth had given him the space he needed – blissful moments when he almost forgot that fate had crushed him; but then the high faded, and he needed more. And more. And soon there wasn’t enough money, and he borrowed, and his company forced him to take “an indefinite leave” (unpaid, of course). When he had no more credit, he borrowed from the same people he bought the drugs from; and when the deadline (today) had arrived for repayment, he’d fled the house and come here, buying himself a few hours.

  Hours with Nicky.

  He imagined Nicky pulling him to his feet, turning those gleaming brown eyes on him, saying, “Benno, you can’t keep doing this. You need to pay these guys and then you need to get off the glass, because one or the other is going to kill you.”

  That sounded fine to Ben right now. Maybe he should just go home, be there when they came…but he was afraid of the pain. They might not kill him, they might just fuck him up and leave, and then he’d have no Nicky, no drugs, no money, no comfort, no hope.

  Ben looked up and was shocked to realize the sun was halved by the horizon. It was after 4 p.m., and the activity around the graveyard had increased – now there were vendors set up near the main entrance, food trucks and booths and carts.

  Realizing he hadn’t eaten since yesterday, Ben checked his wallet and saw he had twenty-four dollars left. His head whirled with figures and possibilities: Tw
enty-four dollars is what percent of what I owe? Less than one, one fucking percent. It’s not even enough to get me somewhere, and besides – where would I go? Family, friends, they’ve all cut me off. “Clean yourself up, Ben,” they say, and now I’m fucked, and there’s no one left who cares. He couldn’t stay here all night, but he was certain that Jason would be watching his house, waiting, probably with a couple of friends who had biceps bigger than Ben’s neck. No, Ben’s few dollars wouldn’t buy an escape, but maybe he could think more clearly with a full stomach.

  A last meal.

  He forced himself to his feet and staggered past graves now decorated with photos and fruit and bottles of beer and fat rolls of bread; some of the displays were incredibly complex, with wooden arches and cluttered, tiered layers. Petals from the yellow flowers outlined coffin shapes, and families chatted amiably, mostly in Spanish. The mariachi band was playing a lilting, more upbeat tune now, and the lines were long at the food stands. Ben was torn between a stall advertising homemade tamales and one displaying banners for a tequila brand, but when he shivered in the first chill of approaching night, he decided to go for the warming liquor. He took his place in the queue.

  At first he paid little attention to the man in front of him, but when the stranger began to clutch his cell phone more tightly and his voice rose in volume, Ben couldn’t help but listen.

  “…you walked out on me, and now you think this is okay?!”