Part 11 (1/2)

The tall, thin man was naked, and his long, white hair trailed behind him as he kept pace with Tony. His face was bony, beardless, and his eyes were black in the dim, flickering light. He smiled, acknowledging his discovery. ”I never had the chance to show you the back rooms,” the man said, and his smile broadened. ”You and Lisa hit it off so fast the first time you came here.”

It wasn't Guy. Guy was dead. The toothy smile was his, as was the jutting jaw and the body that had been flesh draped over bones even before AIDS claimed it. The man's voice sounded like Guy's, sarcastic and dry, on the edge of a caustic observation. But it couldn't be Guy. The cavern spun once around Tony, and he nearly fell.

Tony stopped beyond the fire's inner circle of light, and the man coasted to a stop a few steps later. They faced each other, the man putting his hands on his hips. Through his body, Tony could see the flames jump as if through a translucent curtain.

”See anything you like, sailor boy?” The man wiggled his hips.

”Who the f.u.c.k are you?” Not believing, never, it wasn't possible.

The man pouted. ”I could understand you forgetting me if we'd f.u.c.ked, Tony. But d.a.m.n, after two years of rooming together, I figured the s.e.xual tension between us would've made me memorable.” The man exploded into hysterical laughter, holding his arms across his stomach and stamping a foot repeatedly. ”Nothing like unrequited l.u.s.t to bring back the dead,” he said after catching his breath, and laughed again.

Tony circled around the man and approached the fire. It was Guy. Alive, or dead, but still Guy. Not possible, but real. Suddenly, the world did not feel so solid or tangible.

”College was a long time ago,” Tony said, measuring his words carefully. He glanced at the figures at the periphery of the fire's light, trying to deny the fact that he was talking to Guy as he searched for Lisa.

”Oh, please, stop acting like a tourist b.i.t.c.h,” Guy said, his good humor gaining an angry edge. ”I'm the f.u.c.ker that's dead, a.s.shole.”

Tony wandered to the other side of the fire, trying to put distance between himself and the apparition. Guy strolled languidly around the fire after him. Tony glanced at the cavern entrance, a distant grey splotch in the darkness. He thought of emptiness, and Lisa.

”I'm sorry about what happened to you, Guy.” Was he really talking to a ghost? ”But I'm here looking for Lisa.” Tony started turning away, desperately pus.h.i.+ng the idea of Guy, of talking to a ghost, out of his mind. Lisa. He was after Lisa. That was his anchor to what was real.

”You always were looking for a b.i.t.c.h, Tony,” Guy said in a mocking tone. ”That's why you liked rooming with me. Didn't give a s.h.i.+t about what the guys said. I was a good b.i.t.c.h to you, even if you never touched me, even if you never let me touch you. And I made your other b.i.t.c.hes feel good when they came over. Mister sensitive and self-confident, so masculine you could relate to a h.o.m.os.e.xual,” he said, rolling his eyes, shoulders, hips, and snaking his arms up and down, ”and not feel threatened. Ooooo, they really ate it up, didn't they?”

Tony's face flushed, and he turned back quickly as a flash of anger washed over his fear. ”Why don't you spare me the helpless f.a.ggot routine, Guy.”

”And if they freaked when they met me, you knew they weren't going to be any fun, right? Too uptight and serious. They'd start in on your image and reputation, like I was going to drag the both of you into a social gutter. And I would've, too.” Guy laughed, but kept his gaze fixed on Tony. ”No, you liked the ones who asked if you ever watched me have s.e.x with my lovers, who were curious about how gays did it, who'd listen to you talk about leather and c.o.c.k rings and fist f.u.c.king.”

Tony jabbed a finger at Guy. ”I used you, and you used me. You liked it when your little studs played seduction games with me, or when the two of you sat back and made fun of me while I was in the house. And you knew things were wrong when your p.r.i.c.k got jealous and macho around me. You didn't mind it when I got some of those wackos off your tail, either.”

”You know how I love it when you get angry, Tony. Sure you don't want to find out what the real thing's all about?”

”Go f.u.c.k yourself.”

”Only as a last resort.” Guy waited a moment, then smiled. ”Just like old times, right?”

Tony's anger evaporated. Guy was right; he had fallen right into a petty argument they had re-hashed hundreds times, a standard eruption of the pent-up frustrations that built whenever two people chose to live together. Only now he was arguing with a ghost. His fear returned, stronger than before. To fight it he had to close his eyes and picture Lisa, on his bed, waiting for him with a seductive smile. He had gone too far to run away. He was too close to her to give up, just because a ghost from his past chose to haunt him in Painfreak.

His fear would not go away.

Drugs. Hallucinogens in the drink, in the smoke from the fires, giving life to memories brought up by his return to Painfreak. A bad trip.

Reason calmed his fear to a manageable level. He took a deep breath, let it out slowly. He could handle what was going on. It wasn't real. Just play along, he told himself. Remember Lisa.

”What a pair of predators we were, Tony,” Guy said, stepping to the fire light's edge and sitting cross-legged on the floor. ”To tell you the truth, I can't even give myself a good f.u.c.k anymore. Why don't you sit for a while and help bring back the good times? It's the only way I can get off nowadays.”

”I can't,” said Tony. ”Lisa left me, came here. She's looking for something, I guess, but I need her. I have to find her, make her come back.”

Guy shook his head from side to side. ”I know where she went. I can lead you to her, if you sit with me for a few minutes. That's not too much of a price to pay, is it?”

Tony hesitated. He listened to the sounds, stared into the darkness between the fires. There were exits at the far end of the cavern, and Tony imagined a network of tunnels spreading out under Brooklyn and the rest of the city. Lisa could be anywhere. Real, or unreal, there was a chance this vision of Guy might help.

He sat down next to his old roommate.

”You look worse than a tourist, Tony,” said Guy, with a touch of sadness. ”You look like prey. What happened to you?”

Tony sighed and pa.s.sed a hand over his face. His palm and fingertips came away slick with grimy sweat.

”Please, don't tell me,” Guy continued, breaking into a chuckle. ”Please don't tell me you fell in love.”

”Not quite. Not in love. But I fell into something.” He searched for words to capture what he had with Lisa. ”Safety, companions.h.i.+p. Maybe I just fell into s.e.x. But there's nothing now, there's just emptiness.”

”That's all there ever is, especially for people like us. You just don't realize it. You don't know the emptiness, how deep it runs. That's why you never made the move to being a real player. But don't feel bad. Even I didn't understand the emptiness completely when I was alive, and I was a player there, towards the end. We thought that empty feeling we had was a hunger for something other people could give us. It didn't bother us most of the time 'cause we thought we were filling ourselves up every time we came. What a pair of sharks we were, cruising our own little scenes. You know what it was that let us live so well together? We were the same kind of people underneath all the bulls.h.i.+t. Predators. We went after the same kind of people. Hollow little n.o.bodies who didn't know their a.s.ses from their p.r.i.c.ks, or c.u.n.ts. But the beauty of us being together was that we had our own little territories. You went after the c.u.n.ts, and I went after the p.r.i.c.ks. Tell me about those times, Tony. I want to remember, I want the details. There's nothing inside of me anymore. No feelings, no memories. It's all shadows and emptiness.”

Guy stared at him without blinking, as if ghosts forgot to blink. His mouth hung open, his hands lay in his lap, palms up. He looked like a child waiting to be fed.

Tony closed his eyes and trawled for memories, eager to put Guy to rest. The specter's talk of emptiness and predators had only made his own need for Lisa stronger. And if this ghost could not help him find her, at least its guilty presence would not distract him while he caught up to Lisa and tried to win her back.

Names from his own adventures as well as Guy's returned to him, and their faces. Anne, Shanelle, Kiko. Thurman, George, Larry. Episodes he hadn't thought about in years came back: s.e.x on the dorm roof, in the closet while others listened and commented outside, using the early model video recorders the college owned. There were the games of humiliation, the games of pain, and the entertainments in costume. Simple and complex, he had repeated them all with Lisa. But he had discovered them first with the disposable partners he and Guy had enjoyed. He began to talk, and as the memories rushed out Tony opened his eyes and looked up, letting the words flow, the past catching up to him.

And as the past flooded him, the darkness beyond the fire seemed to lighten. He began to see what was happening between the fires. He looked away, at first. He spoke quickly, felt as if he were babbling, but Guy did not interrupt or ask him to be clearer, only sat and watched him with his blank expression, his dull, lifeless eyes. The more he talked, the clearer the air became, until he could not help but see the expression on the face of the squirming woman being hauled by giggling men up to the ceiling on a hook and length of chain; until he could see the sweat running down the body of the man suspended at an angle by his outstretched arms and legs, desperately thrusting his erect p.e.n.i.s into a fat, laughing woman dancing wildly to the electronic howl of a band that had just started playing; until he could see the broken bones pus.h.i.+ng against muscle and skin, warping the smooth lines of the bodies of the two wrestlers fighting and screaming in a pool of water to the cheers and jeers of a few people standing near.

Blood spurted from a nearby atrocity and sprayed across his face, tickling his lips. Shocked, he raised his arm to wipe the blood away, to spit and rub his skin and s.h.i.+eld his face from any more splattering. A sudden impulse made him stop. The blood was hot on his flesh, like Lisa's sweat mingling with his own when they made love. His tongue darted out like a snake's, licked his lips as he would Lisa's body. He tasted coppery saltiness, then swallowed. Surprised by his act, he shuddered. The emptiness within him yawned, threatened to take him. Expecting a surge of fear, he was even more surprised when he became excited by what he had done. His erection pressed against his pants' zipper, as if he had just heard the click of Lisa's heels on ceramic tile.

Blood. He worried for a moment that it was contaminated, tainted by Death. Death's blood. He thought of Guy, dead, a ghost, and of the times he had given in to Guy's nagging and partic.i.p.ated in his s.e.x games by disinterestedly watching him with his lover. Kissing, stroking, mouthing, they had ended by swallowing each other's c.u.m.

An electric shock of pleasure pa.s.sed through him as he described the scene he had just remembered to Guy. He put himself in Guy's place, and in the scene his lover was not another man, but Death. Death's b.l.o.o.d.y c.u.m was on his lips, in his mouth, in him.

The stream of his words faltered, his memories stumbled over one another. The emptiness that had driven him to follow Lisa into Painfreak blossomed with the promise of secret fulfillment. He saw clearly into the void around which he had lived his entire life. The games, the costumes, the mix of pain and pleasure he had pursued with such desperation were suddenly nothing more than s.h.i.+mmering veils hiding his true desire. He did not want to fill the emptiness with s.e.x. He did not want to master, or be mastered by, pleasure and pain. He did not want to feed the hollow hunger with experience, sensation, life. He wanted to surrender to the emptiness. He wanted to be consumed by Death.

Tony stopped talking. Moments later, the electronic howl of music changed, became louder, erupted with sudden energy as if the band had found its groove. A roar like a raging beast echoed through the cavern, deep and raw and edged with the ragged wail of electric guitars. Buried in the roar like a dim heartbeat was the frantic pulsing of drums and ba.s.s. Feedback screeched, pierced ear and mind and thought. Tony doubled over in pain, pressing his palms to his ears. Through tears, he saw the elderly couple nearby, pointing to him and laughing. They looked away. He followed their gaze to a crude cage construction surrounded by a frenetic mob trying to tear down the walls to reach the band playing within.

Tony got up, but the music kept him hunched over. Had Lisa wanted to play in a band? Had that been her fantasy? The band members were shadow forms prancing and miming and sawing the air with their instruments, lost in the pa.s.sion of the moment. He had no idea if she was among them, or their audience. He took a step towards the cage.

A cage wall fell, bringing down one musician. The mob spilled into the stage s.p.a.ce as the other walls collapsed. One by one, the instruments died. Last to go was the pulsing ba.s.s, quivering with a life of its own before drowning in the squeals and cries of the mob fighting for any morsel of meat.

He heard bones crack, flesh tear.

”Beautiful, isn't it?” Guy said, standing beside him and looking at the orgy. ”It's all so ... romantic, don't you think? Art and death and, h.e.l.l, even audience partic.i.p.ation.” He giggled.

Tony took another step towards the mob, then stopped when he felt Guy's touch on his arm. It was not a solid touch; Guy's fingers felt like a cold breeze blowing against his skin.