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And I'm lost in the window
And I hide on the stairway
And I hang in the curtain
And I sleep in your hat.
And no one brings anything
Small into a bar around here.—Tom Waits, 9th & Hennepin
He is a sharpened instrument. He is hands and teeth and claw. He is a mariachi puppet, limbs bent, all singing, all dancing. He is the smoke, he is the mirror.
He is a spy.
With a flick of the wrist he disables the closed circuit camera and he waits (he will not wait too long).
They meet in alley ways, they meet in public parks, they meet in restrooms. Never at home, always in darkness and always in secret (if two people fuck on an empty street and no-one is around to hear them, do they make a sound?) His lover is fugitive to his spy. He’s a wanted man and this is risky sexual behaviour at its extreme (they’ve never once used protection either but diseases are the least of their worries). God only knows why he does it but that is not his problem. He doesn’t care if his lover is caught. If you are, he tells him, and you mention me, I will kill you. This is the language they trade in; short declarative sentences of threat and menace.
A cat howls. Bass from a nearby club that neither of them will ever see the inside of (they are young still but they are soldiers, not civilians). The smell of vomit in the air, the moon out and everyone acting like dogs. One of those nights when your skin itches just for something to happen.
The cat hisses; a black dog appears. “I was about to leave,” he tells it.
The dog, now man, winces and extracts something sharp from his palm. “Broken bottle,” he says. He holds his hand out and blood drips down to his wrist.
He takes the hand, wants to take a knife and cut deeper, wants them both covered in blood, claret head to toe (they will be soon; they have a target on their backs—they are in their prime—these are the end days—this is the best of times; they will be dead soon).
He licks up his wrist then sucks on the wound. His blood is thick and hot, his pulse beats out against his tongue and bass pounds in his head and he is lost. When he comes back to himself his mouth is at the man’s neck, there is a hand inside his robes and he is not a spy, he is not an instrument, he is not a teacher, not an Eater or a pawn, he is a man with a hand on his cock and the smell of skin and blood in his nostrils, he is sensation, he is hunger and he is pleasure (there is so little of it to go around and he will steal his tiny portion), and he has no past and tomorrow will never, ever come.
His lover is beautiful and ravaged like a shipwreck. He wishes he were an ocean; dark, fathomless, all consuming. (If he were, he would pull him under, not let him up for air.)
His lover is beautiful and he is not, the dark does him no favours, there is no pretending to be had even in shadow. His lover is beautiful and he is not but their blood pounds the same, chests heave and breath comes out ragged the same. (They are skin and hair and spit and teeth; they are animal and they are not made to be beautiful.)
His lover is beautiful and his scars shimmer silver in the streetlight (if they tried to count all their scars they would never be done counting.)
Tonight there are whispers into skin, kisses across collarbone, hands raking through hair. This is new. Maybe it’s these hot southwesterly’s, the first virgin blush of summer, unraveling them. His lover runs hot like a May winds, he has a mind that will unravel like a spool of thread, he is unpredictable, frightening. Tonight, worst of all, he is soft.
“I wish I could have you in my bed. Undress you, take my time.”
“Don’t,” he warns darkly.
“Don’t you wish that?”
“No.”
“Don’t you wish you knew what that was like?”
He presses palms to scarred brick and tries to focus on the dull discomfort beneath his hands. He wants to tell him not to touch him gently like that, not to smell his shoulder, not to enter him so smooth and careful that his eyes fall closed of their own accord like that. Should tell him he doesn’t want to feel tears wet against his neck.
“Pretend I was your boyfriend and there was never a war.”
“Stop.”
“Shh. I took you out.”
“I said stop … Where?”
“Bowling. I took you bowling and you complained the whole time but you bet me anyway. We ate hot dogs with cheap beer and after we took a train back to my tiny, shoebox flat. I’ve given you a key but you don’t want to move in till you finish your studies. I don’t know what I want to do but you make me want to be a better person.”
He squeezes his eyes shut and there’s a hard lump in his throat like a boiled sweet.
“You’re on my bed and I’m making love to you.”
“And there’s no war,” he concedes.
“There’s no war and no prison and I whisper I love you while you tremble beneath me and the bed is warm and outside there is peace and our bodies are soft and safe.”
I don’t want this, he tries to say as a hand curls up and settles against his heart. I’ve never wanted this. I got what I deserved. Instead his moans curl themselves into the shape of a prayer, hot breath on his neck, skin prickles not with want but with hunger.
His lover moves against him, as steady as a heartbeat, as steady as breath, exhale in, inhale out. He can hear him cry out, his name a broken prayer that falls from his lips like blood down his arm and he slips his hand over his (which is over his heart) and they are two dead men fucking in an alley that smells like garbage and vomit with heads full of pretend and every sound they make is holy.
He’s 33 years old and he’s hardly been touched. He's 33 years old and his body is ravaged with the imprints of other people’s rage. He’s 33 years old and the inside of his mind is a battlefield; sacked, army-savaged. He’s 33 years old and he will be dead soon.
His lover is 33 years old and they will crucify him (he’s the same age as Christ was but his lover wouldn’t know to be comforted by this. No one would be comforted by this).
His lover is 33 years old and he was beautiful once. Like a dried up river after a drought.
He does not like to be touched (but sometimes he thinks it’s because he wants it too much.) He does not like to be looked at either but when he says pretend, pretend I am yours, pretend you are mine, he feels terribly, skin-achingly seen and he’s not even sure if he hates it. Just once he will let him see the raw, ugly humanness of him and when this man dies, which he will, that knowledge will die with him. This is a comfort and a relief, of sorts.
A hand firm on his neck, just as he turns his head, just as he opens his mouth gasping, as lips chapped, rough and inexpert meet his (his lover has been locked up til now and there was probably no kissing in jail.) And it feels like they’re digging their own graves there amongst the rats and brick and dogshit because where else would the two of them kiss like they were drowning in each-other’s arms except at the end of the world. And it turns him on so hard even his teeth ache. This is how the world ends, after all, with enemies in arms, praying for salvation. He knows of such things. He knows of heaven and hell and the holy Eucharist, knows of sin you carry with you in your marrow.
When he was five his mother taught him to pray. When he was ten his father taught him no one was listening. At 33 he would learn, cock enshrouded in the warm mouth of a madman, hair rain-wet, shoes filled with water and a broken Christ spilling from his lips, that God was something else altogether and prayer was exultant not transactional.
Then again, a man that beautiful would make you see God. He’s like a mountain or an ocean like that. Or at least he was once. An angry angel of a boy who took on the world screaming and they locked him up for it. Who fucked an ugly spy one grim winter midnight around the side of a Tesco Express, drunk, still angry, cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth, and after, who sat on a flattened cardboard box and smoked, brilliantly, achingly, until embers reached his fingers.
And the ugly spy, being what he was, thought then: whatever it is that’s wrong with him is the same thing that’s wrong with me. He’d of course been an ugly boy, a girly boy, a queer boy, a vicious, unlovable boy, and then he’d become a man who let himself get fucked in the ass in public restrooms, and who blew and was blown in public restrooms, pathetic insatiate fucking in public restrooms — and in dark, filthy mid town laneways, those hotel rooms for fags, addicts and whores and he says, “Yes,” and he says “Please,” because he is at once a faggot, an addict and a whore. And his desperate cries echo off cement walls and the bass from the club echoes in his head like the ghost of another life where he wasn’t hand-reared, milk-fattened on war and hate and his lover wants to kiss him.
The word no requires a press of the tongue to the top of the palate which is so easy even toddlers do it but instead he turns his head as far as he can and that’s not no, that’s begging and he didn’t know that kissing could make you feel like you were flying.
What kind of man falls in love getting railed in a stinking alley anyway?
Ah, Tobias, didn’t you say this would happen? (I wouldn’t have wanted a sodomite freak for a son either, da. We’re good, you and I.)
But Da — look—
Arse like a tight forward. Money in the bank. His mammy and daddy real proper like. Real fancy people they were.
He? Aye, well, you can’t have everything, Daddy. You of all people should know.
This right here is as close as they will ever get, yet monstrous as he is he wants more, he wants their flesh to fuse, their blood to run in rivulets. (We are the same, what’s wrong with me is what’s wrong with you, were you a queer, unlovable boy too?) A hand next to his, look — even their forefinger and pinky entwined. His lover an x etched onto each of his knuckles. One for every year he was away, he said. His prince of misery. Depression king. His fury so straight razor sharp you’ll beg for him to cut you.
His own fingers scraped and scarred at the knuckles, nails bitten to the quick, cuticles torn n’ ragged. Look further. Body too thin, eyes with dark bags, crooked, broken nose. Why then does his lover touch him like this? He is sullied flesh and bile and ash and black inky tar through and through. He will ruin and smother and kill (this is not hyperbole, merely observation). He can’t have this feeling tight in his chest, he mustn’t be touched and kissed like a dear thing.
He’s never been a good man. Bad thoughts. Bad tendencies. Because despite that he wants it anyway. Sweet Jesus. What he wouldn’t do to keep it.
It’s alright. The world has a way of correcting for these things. Tomorrow they’ll be worm food — and if not tomorrow it will be the next day and if it’s not the next day: it will be soon.
At the bottom of the ocean it is dark and black, creatures spiny and monstrous, bones from the dead picked clean, limitless, cavernous trenches that reach down to hell. His lover is a shipwreck, full of holes, bough rotted, barnacle attracting, tendrils of creeping algae growing like mould.
At last both of them pulled under, tide tossed like plastic bags, sucked down to the ocean floor, it’s as seductive as breathing, as tempting as death, bright pops behind eyelids like hospital lights. Then — release, heads bob above water, alive, gasping for air in the warm London night, each other’s names on their lips like rosary.
After they pull up their trousers — he guiltily, clumsily, the other with typical insouciant grace — and for a moment there is peace and they are free men with no blood on their hands as the red end of a cigarette bobs between them.
Be safe, is the last thing the other says and he stands there dumbly as footfalls echo. You too, he calls after but he’s too slow and it hangs limply in the air, like a spell cast too late.
And in the end all that’s left is a smear of blood—dark, metallic red—over his heart.