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Sometimes, he’s faced with the disturbing notion that Hannibal has turned him into an elaborate mouth-piece: he senses it, Hannibal pouring from his mouth like the irrevocable spill of ink from a tipped over jar, like gouts of thick blood from a slashed artery, like God has marked him, chosen him for a prophet, beams of light vomiting out of his burning throat. God’s love for Abraham tested in the crucible of child-sacrifice, Isaac stretched out on the dull prismatic sheen of a rain-worn rock, the sharp blade of a slaughtering knife kissing the sun-soaked neck, that beloved golden neck, the print of Abraham’s palm nearly visible on the skin, a wedding ring, a father’s brand, a steady guidance towards the careening drop of a cliff, towards the terrible fragility of the world’s strange truths. God’s eye flays, ravages, a threat heralding grief, disaster paths carved in the soft flesh, the deconstruction of the body’s vocabulary, testing the fertile soil of faith.
Scarified cheeks. The disarray of spilled organs.
He’s losing ground, waiting for the axe to fall on his sweat-soaked neck, hands tied at the wrist, clasped as if in perpetual prayer.
He’s never been the religious sort: his daddy, gruff and rough, preferring isolation and the privacy which it afforded him, was mistrustful of the church and its brown-nosing pastor. Will remembers his father’s meaty blister-calloused fingers tugging on his curls at the breakfast table, gentle, his drawl breaking the drowsy early-morning quiet: Baby, gun to your head, stay away from Father Bryce. Ain’t no God in that house of God ‘cept, maybe, the devil and all his cousins. God needs men with conviction and my guess is that these men who walk in his shadow are damn weak under his hammer.
Vague enough that Will didn’t understand what his father alluded to, but one of the choir boys, a strikingly beautiful fair-haired soprano who had gone missing for three days, was discovered a stone’s throw from the camp where the church sent its youth to spend the summers. Rumored to be an ‘emotionally troubled teen’ with a secret attachment to substance abuse, the death was quickly concluded to be a suicide, but not many were persuaded. Will heard his father’s teeth grinding in his sleep for weeks afterwards: there was a searing agony permeating the thin wallpapered hallways, a sluggish bitterness carousing in the back of Will’s throat, gathering there like a tightly knotted fist.
Pale-faced and sleep-deprived, with Will tucked between his legs as he read him the Stephen King novel of the week, his daddy told him, Will, men have always used the word of God to mask their evils, justify their basest desires. Make no mistake: they’re hard-hearted and heart-sick to their core. When a man starts waving God around like a pistol, either abandon him to his poison or get your own loaded shotgun.
Is this what Dr. Lecter is? Another man committed to feigning worship when he is rotten all the way through? But, he is less a devout disciple and more the very thing that demands followers, a host of starry-eyed, awe-stricken creatures at his beck and call, begging to be recognized, to be singled out, unaware that such a singularly overwhelming attention could cook them alive and swallow them whole, the heat of it excruciating and devouring.
That’s how God works.
The lamb, slack and empty of blood, is little more than a sack of gizzard and bone at His feet. Jonah’s calls for mercy, while he is trapped in the belly of a whale for three days and three nights, are as inconsequential as a nightjar roadkill. Jesus nailed to the cross, bearing scorn and sins and sadism, burdened and bleeding, a receptacle of God’s scorching love, a testimonial to his generosity and his resplendence, a spectacle of hair-raising torment. Whatever and whomever God picks out of the herd will be sacrificed. Immortalized in canon, exposed to the perils of martyrdom.
Will doesn’t want to be made a subject of suffering; he’s seen them in paintings, their faces tipped upwards towards the heavens, wounded and battered and on death’s doorstep, emanating ecstasy in their final anticipation. The paintings depict abject horror beyond words. Unspeakable horrors. If there is pleasure, then it is obscene and Will’s terrified of its obscenity, an ever-present intermingling of revulsion and fear. He wants to be self-contained, solitary, self-sufficient, like his father.
He isn’t punctured with yearning for a God or a purpose or a psychiatrist. He doesn’t wish to relinquish control, to be torn apart at the seams, to be tortured and to be pleasure-wracked from the torture.
There is nothing but destruction and ruination in that realm.
Hannibal doesn’t make it easy, of course.
He is brimming with the capacity to influence, social proximity effect dialed to its maximal version with Will’s empathy disorder, Hannibal’s practiced mannerisms and speech patterns and economy of movements telegraphed directly into Will’s receptive channels, the mirrors working overtime to reproduce. Jack and Alana point it out, amused at the subtle shifts, the way Will’s brain seems to have latched on to Hannibal, like the faithful recreations of the doctor indicate a deeper attachment that Will’s not yet ready to transmit or to acknowledge. It makes Will’s stomach turn and churn. It’s an invasion of the soul: reshaping the topography of his identity, muddling his personality, the inability to filter Hannibal out reminding him of when he was a kid and couldn’t find the TV remote so he had to sit through episode after episode of shows he didn’t want to watch.
The world grows soft and porous, but Hannibal stands in sharp relief with his impeccable bespoke suits and his smoky lilting accent, socialites swanning around him, begging for scraps at His feet, his bourbon-colored eyes assessing, always assessing, a butcher at an efficient well-appointed abattoir selecting the finest and choicest cuts. He’s too vivid in Will’s memory, the outlines of his body a bright composition of severe brush strokes, his face exempt from rendering, reverse chiaroscuro, incomplete and riven with opacity. An evasion of definition. An unsettling distortion. Faces ripped from the hard ridges of the present, preserved in the amber of Will’s imagination, are more readable when he’s turning them for close inspection, like examining corpses for evidence, for the insects that have wriggled in the dermis. Hannibal’s slips from his mental grasp, a slippery writhing fish jumping back into the murky waters.
At a crime scene in Virginia’s metro station, a thirty-something year old man is found completely stripped of his clothes, every part of him meticulously shaved and plucked, including his genitals and eyebrows, his body carefully suspended from a hook installed in the train car’s ceiling with a bucket positioned right under his head to catch the steady flow of blood from the hole made in his jugular, likely caused by a power drill, a rendition of the processing of livestock, prepared to be hosed down, bled out, skinned and disemboweled. The victim’s tailored suit, Rolex watch, leather briefcase and polished Oxfords are neatly folded and stacked in a pile right by him, a visceral extension of the high level of organization.
He stands in the empty car by the cold white slab of meat and hears Hannibal’s clinical voice before he can rewind and reconstruct the tableau: Do you think society’s sickness lies in their willful blindness and psychological distance from the systemic cruelty inflicted on animals? It is… unfashionable for butchers to hang farm animals in their shops, a stark reminder of the grisly blood-soaked scenes that stalk the sensible sanitized sense of civility. Beneath that deceptive veneer, Will, lies savagery beyond comprehension. God himself is as unforgiving and as blood-thirsty as man. Do you wonder why it is that we retreat so readily from the trappings of our ordained nature? Where does the appeal of masking the real beast within come from?
The scene brims with detachment, with a distinct lack of sensationalism. It says: you can’t hide away from the hungry crush of violence. It lives with us, within us; it is the destiny of flesh, indiscriminately, an inescapable truth to be disseminated and shared, an experience unfolding to disrupt the mundanity of routines scrubbed clean of blood. Vacuum-sealed for your viewing pleasure. Will breathes out. The body’s drained entirely of blood, white as a sheet as paper, white marbling, pallid as the meat of crawfish. He hears the drip-drop, rainwater collecting in the bucket, the suffocating smell of copper scraping the delicate lining of his nostrils.
When he was a kid, his hand clasped in his father’s as they wove through vendors and stalls of butchers and farm-owners, he wondered what kind of life these men lived, stunning and slaughtering animals they had raised, had likely cared for, had protected from foxes and minks? What did it take to kill what you loved every day? What was the cost? What did it take from them? How could they live with themselves after, knowing they would do it again and again and again?
But then, he remembers Father Bryce.
He remembers the choir boy, his body used up and tossed away, like a bag of garbage, how when they picked up his body, he was so unrecognizable, his parents couldn’t give a positive ID.
He reports to Jack with as much detail as he can dredge up, swimming against the dark tide threatening to bear him away from the shore, his sentences short and clipped and to the point, scared something unseemly will slip out of him. Behind the wheel of his car, the heat on full blast, he plans out the route to his house, crossing out highways bloated with traffic, distracting his overloaded overheated brain with images of his dogs, their soft thick fur, the way he can sink his fingers into it till they disappear, their exuberance and their enthusiasm infectious, the heat of their bodies, the rise and fall of their chests, the smell of them, comforting talismans, Will’s nightlights to ward off the worst of humanity’s tar-black darkness. He misses them so much he could cry.
Against his better judgement, he drifts away as he drives, muscle memory taking over, pure dreams overriding the gory assault on his senses: the thumps of dogs’ tails on carpeted floors, the ripples of a river stream burnished orange in the autumnal sun, the sway of branches so heavy with leaves that light can’t get through, the crackle of a fireplace on a snowy evening, Buster rewarding him with fervent licks on his glistening cheeks. Bandaids on the wounds the day has left on him. He wishes he could’ve stayed home, taken off work to luxuriate in uneventfulness: walk the dogs, do the laundry, work on crafting lures. A day you could forget. A day you could end without dreading the scourge of nightmares. Without corpses knocking at your door.
The eternal curse of oversensitivity coupled with over-exposure, live wires tangled in a heap of dry leaves. Trapped inside murder-simulations on repeat, all alone. You are not alone, Will. Hannibal’s voice echoes in the corridors of his overcrowded skull. The hunger for the immediacy of childhood lingers in us all. We may seek it out when the incomprehensible threatens the boundary of normalcy.
There were nights when he and his daddy camped out on the anchored cuddy cabin in the boatyard, his dad’s attempt to celebrate or commemorate special days, like Will’s birthday or the fourth. Sometimes, he just wanted a change of scenery, nevermind that fat mosquitos feasted on Will despite the heavy duty insect repellent. Still, even with the imminent threat of bug bites looming over him, Will would fall asleep to the lulling, easeful rocking as soon as he was tucked in his sleeping bag. He’d wake up at dawn’s brightening, itchy with swollen bites, but as restful as a boy who’d just come out of the confessional. He wishes for that, right now. That sweet radiance of peace.
Maybe, tonight, he’ll sleep surrounded with his pack, no boundary of separation between their bodies, man and beast, their breaths and their heartbeats in concert. Just as God intended, he hears Hannibal, the amusement heavy in the remark. Can Hannibal’s transmission of energy be so assertive? Or, is Will so vulnerable and so permeable that Hannibal can possess him without resistance? Maybe that’s what he’s become: a cavity waiting and begging to be inhabited, to be haunted, a certain neediness in him, an unwholesome genesis-dark appetite. Is this what marks prophets? What marks sacrifices? More hunger than the body can hold so it makes a tight fist and punches holes in it to let something else slide right in the new sanctified holiness.
“Will? Will, take deep breaths for me. You are experiencing mild hyperventilation which will only subside if you take control of your breathing.” God’s voice slices cleanly through the grisly brutality with a searing light so blinding it hurts as it reconstitutes the world piece by piece, cold and hostile, except for the firm hands cradling his face—familiar and warm, preventing him from being sucked back into the gaping jaws of the countless murders waiting for him in blood-slicked dreams. “That’s it, Will. In and out, in and out, rhythmically, steadily, deeply.” Hannibal’s so close that Will can detect the spiced leather coming off his suit, his skin. Will thinks of snails burrowing into their shells, of incubation and suffocation, so often intertwined, inextricable from one another. “Open your eyes, Will. You’re all right.”
It’s so much easier to follow directions, easier to go about life like this, guided with his hand held, rather than be crushed in the clutches of his walled-up mind, all alone and suffering from the indignities of that loneliness.
Around him, Hannibal’s office comes into focus: wine-dark, softly illuminated, intimate. And then, Hannibal himself, kneeling in front of Will’s legs in his expensive suit, his white shirt stretched out over his broad frame, his suit jacket unbuttoned, not a hair out of place. He’s cupping Will’s cheeks with a tenderness that borders on reverence, his thumb rubbing soothing circles into Will’s skin, crow’s feet gathering around the corners of his abyssal eyes. The scene registers slowly, like he’s honey-sodden, mud-mired, fever-drunk. He tries to blink it away, wrestle with the sludge he can’t seem to peel away from or a dream he can’t shake off. It happens sometimes: his imagination stretching out beyond the demarcation lines, a hungry infection overtaking everything, a corruption eating away at the healthy tissue, like necrotizing fasciitis.
“There you are,” Hannibal murmurs, undisguised pleasure soaking his voice. “I had faith I could bring you back myself and it seems I have been rewarded. How are you feeling?”
Fear slithers out of his throat: the confusion of a sleep-walker jolted out of their stupor, the fluttering nascence of recalling the debris of dreams. He’s supposed to be driving back to Wolf Trap, to where his dogs are waiting for him, to where the stink of the slaughterpens can’t get to him. He’s supposed to be home. Or, at least, the illusion of it. He’s slipping, the hours are running away from him, the abstractions of time fracturing, his brain like an event horizon swallowing it all up, the darkness inevitable and bottomless. Confusion-wrought, he locks eyes with Hannibal, desperation puppeteering him, driving him to feel around for a latch, for a foothold, a nightlight to banish the tight grip of panic closing in around him. Hannibal looks back at him steadily, as unflinching as always, not one muscle in his face stirring, an unfazed self-possessed calm to retreat into. The gentle rocking of the boat under the silver pinpricks of constellations. He pulls in deep breaths through his nose, subtly leaning his cheek further into the dry warmth of Hannibal’s palm.
He tries using his voice and hopes he doesn’t embarrass himself further than he already has this evening. It’s unbecoming to lose himself during his conversations with Hannibal—that he might have been discourteous or shown a lack of decorum sours his stomach. Another ingredient to add to the cauldron of this illness. “I’m… alright, I think. I’m sorry—the fever’s got its fangs in me and it’s intent on draining me whenever it can, just one more parasite my body’s playing host to. Nothing out of the ordinary.” Crammed with corona-wreathed visions of Hannibal’s keen insights, he’s imbued with his grandiose superiority, the thrumming chorus of his observations, like an oracle peddling in premonitions, armed with delirium and spells of disassociation, Hannibal on a joyride in his head, stripping the meat from his body with the indolent proficiency of an experienced hunter.
But, at least, he isn’t scared anymore and that, in itself, flushes him full with cold relief.
A flicker of amusement passes through Hannibal’s vacuous eyes like a comet streaking across impenetrable darkness. “Our bodies function as conduits to countless parasites, known and unknown. We walk with the whispering weight of an invisible collective, hurtling towards the unending transference of vitality.” Death is a utopia of life, its inverse and its continuation, a cataclysmic ritualistic birthing of cycles. This is God at His finest, Will. Creation is ceaseless and the economy of the body does not permit waste. Will concocts and spins Hannibal’s voice, the echoes of it filling his gaping corridors, caulking the cracks in the walls, nursing his little obsessions, fortifying himself as Hannibal overtakes every one of his reeling senses.
Hannibal pushes himself up to his feet and, without any thought, Will immediately latches on to his arm, refusing to permit Hannibal distance, too dependent on his grounding touch. The blush suffusing his already reddened cheeks is unavoidable. What must Hannibal think of him? Fever-torn, his teeth-chattering, cold sweat slicking his curls into stringy tendrils, dripping with need like he hasn’t learned and internalized repression from the tender age of ten. Embarrassing and untoward and uncalled for. But, none of that deters him from letting Hannibal go.
Wordlessly, Hannibal towers over him and lowers himself to tuck his nose behind the hot curve of Will’s ear. He inhales deeply, almost greedily, through his nose, taking gulps of fever essence, of the sick heat Will’s no doubt emitting like an outpour of lava from an erupting volcano. Will remains as still as possible, trembling, enduring it with as much bravery as he can muster. When Hannibal pulls away, that shade of pleasure itches itself on the hewn stone of his unmoving flesh as his long age-weathered fingers boldly shift away from his cheek to spread into the tangles of his hair.
“It must tear you apart, this roaring restless heat that has coiled its roots inside of you. Viruses do not discriminate. They’re as blind as the ravages of nature, and yet, your empathy disorder is a fertilizer of the finest quality and it is prying you open savagely.”
Will stares up at Hannibal, his lips parted open, exalting in the thrill of closeness even as terror ransacks him. “What does it smell like?”
“Like it’s ripe for the devouring.”
He blinks, his spine stiffening, the heat whispering below his skin with the languid undulation of a waking animal. He couldn’t have heard that right. Perhaps, lucidity has taken off, no longer in the room with them and his fever-addled brain has decided to direct the show, the last horror of this night, the tickle of insanity teasing the base of his skull, tempting him with the headlong fall. He gives a jerky nod, clawing for purchase, even as the tides of sickness threaten to rise and close over him. “I should probably see a doctor about it.”
“That would be my professional opinion.” The faint amusement is back, dangling like bait.
Will bites. “You have an unprofessional opinion?”
Hannibal pulls away, standing to his full height, his broad chest eclipsing the flood of light radiating off the fireplace, his expression shrouded in inscrutable opacity, a divine beast that has crawled its way out from the boiling depths, primitive and as old as creation itself, predating the loss of paradise. It’s temptation, it’s the blotting out of innocence, it’s Abel’s blood congealing on the jagged rock Cain bludgeoned him with. Immaculately aware of life and death, the work of balancing the scales, hunter and hunted, predator and prey, God and his tortured worshippers, priests and their little choir boys. Will blinks again, an attempt to hack himself away from the dazed smear of images sliding into his vision, immobilized in Hannibal’s prowling silhouette, the incandescence of dreams batting softly against the windows of his soul, as if asking for permission.
“Would you revel in the gashes of madness? This fever might open up doors you are too prudent to peer into. You are less distracted by prediction and calculation, less prone to keep those dusty walls up. It would certainly be… an interesting experiment: your imagination is a vehicle that transports you beyond the thin veil of civilization obfuscating the latent violence poised to strike at all times. The embodiment must shadow you like an open secret that goes unacknowledged. The vulnerability you are currently wrestling with would allow an easier passage unimpeded by your caution.”
Too many words to process strobing into the rotten meat of his brain. Juices are all dried up, the fever steaming it out of him. He’s probably dehydrated from the excessive sweating, steaming skin, hell’s fires licking at his sinews and sucking the marrow from his bones, leaving him shrivelled up, wrinkled beyond recognition. “You’re suggesting I let the fever have its frolic and dance as an experiment ? I’m not sure that’s a great idea given that I’m already so broken.”
Hannibal moves faster than Will expects. Maybe his perception’s skewed, slowed down to a crawl, restrained by the insolent drip-drop of the world around him breaking up, the hungry edges slicing him up, drinking the blood from the wound seams. Hannibal’s strong arms come up around his waist, pulling him up so he’s standing on weak knees and coltish uncoordinated legs, his weight supported by Hannibal’s chest, his cheek pressed up against the starched cotton, right where the heart resides. Hannibal’s body doesn’t absorb him, doesn’t break down the barrier of his skin, which means that Will’s real, solid, made of meat matter. He sighs into the embrace, his simmering panic mollified. You’re not an amalgamation, he tells himself. You’re not a composition of all the psychopaths who have left their stain on you. You’re a real person. Hannibal’s fingers skim up to rest on the back of his sweat-damp neck, patriarchal, his father fossilized in the dimness of adolescence reaching back from the ruin of time, melting into beads of whiskey, sacrosanct elements, steamed membranes oxygenating after the flesh’s been sliced open.
He speaks into his temple, his lips moving over the salty overheated skin. “Conservation goes against nature. It is a forlorn practice that does not take into account the protean multitude layers of identity. You’ll find that humans substitute one mask for another, engaging in annihilating acts of restoration and refusing the opportunity to explore the breadth of their potential. How far can we stretch the definitions of who we are? If we strip ourselves of limitations, what would we be left with? I wouldn’t call that ‘broken.’ Would you?”
“I’d call it insanity,” Will huffs out, on the brink of… something—realization, bursting into bubbles lighter than air, floating above the mayhem, floating above this maze of blood and leaves, but Hannibal cuts off his exits, snips off his wings, and Will remains landlocked, denied ascendence and transcendence. “What’re you…” Everything slips, soaped up, a weird combination of dread and pleasure fizzling in his stomach. “What’re you doing to me?” he manages through the dryness of his throat. Fear is as faraway as the totalizing excess of emotions, the distance measured in light-years, in before the fever and after the fever.
“Only what you allow me, clever boy,” Hannibal promises, petting his nape with a soft pat-pat. The compassion of a butcher soothing the jumping pulse of an anxious cow, but that isn’t a fair analogy to make. If anything, Hannibal’s his friend, as caring as a man blessed with fatherly instincts, gravitating towards fragile and ailing men like Will, wanting to make them whole, wanting to fix them up and send them right out into the merciless blood soaked playground. Sometimes, a gleam of a knife’s edge, a tendril of threat, or a trickle of malice emerges from Hannibal’s placidity and Will recognizes it, a bloodhound picking up the scent, but it vanishes and Will knows it’s the filthy product of consorting with murder, of making bedfellows out of killers. They hound him, tainting everything he knows and takes comfort in. Crowded with gutfuls and bucketfuls of blood, stabbed with intrusive imagery and analogies, reel after reel, clip after clip, a reverb, stuck pigs and mutilated angels and sacks of gizzard— get out of my head, leave me alone, please, please.
Hannibal’s smelling his hair again; Will hears the less than discreet sniffs as he absorbs every molecule of him, the passion exhaling from him like an atmosphere, not letting a drop of it go to waste, like Will’s the finest port wine preserved for his refined palate. Will hums, his lids fluttering shut, held, cherished, shuddery heat suffusing every inch of his body, the fever stoked from embers to an unquenchable rage. “Hannibal,” he rasps and knows that immolation patiently waits for him. At least, it’ll scour him clean, deliver him from suffering. And he’ll be in Hannibal’s arms, a vial of his tears and sweat fermenting on Hannibal’s nightstand, another piece of curiosity installed to appreciate. Here lies what remains of Will Graham. “Am I going to die? It feels like I’m dying.”
“No, Will. You are not dying. Not unless I let you. After all, I feel an unavoidable degree of responsibility for you.”
Will hums. He’s coming undone. Asphyxiating of conditions. Trafficking in the residue of memory-fissures. Clinging to Hannibal like he might cling to the mast in the heart of a catastrophic storm. He’s an old hand at fear, difficult to rattle, even when the water’s perilous, even when the monsters discern his succulent difference. Like calling to almost-like. An old hand at fear, except for the times his daddy had to hold him through it, his large work-worn hand pressed firmly against Will’s forehead, his voice pitched low and commanding, whispering in Will’s ear: still, be still, deep breaths, I’ve got you . Why’s he thinking so much of his dad? It’s been years, a lifetime since Will was that teary-eyed shivering boy paralyzed with overwhelm who needed to be wrestled to exhaustion and into resigned submission. But, there’s no fight left in him and the frozen glaciers melt with the memories into memorials into embodiments and manifestations. Haunted by warped versions of himself, haunted by shaved carcasses hanging from meat hooks. Murder-choked. Chock-full of bloodfall. A hedonistic bloodfest. “Have you thought of the prospect of fatherhood?” He shouldn’t have said that. Stop it, you’re being obtrusive and inappropriate. But, he can no more stop the flood of words than put an end to the barrage of fever-pain wreaking havoc on his mind and body. “It suits you well. More than I would have assumed at first glance.” His voice comes out in a soft drawl, as though he’s drugged out of his mind. He’s tender and sore all over. Ground down enough that a whine is perched right at the base of his throat, begging to be let loose. He swallows it painfully.
“Does this siphon your hurt, Will? Or, are you living in refractions of the past?” Pure and sheer curiosity ribboned in the elevated smoothness of his voice, wrapping around Will’s slack-jointed bones.
“I don’t know.” The truth, wrung out of him, muffled into Hannibal’s expensive suit jacket. Will rubs his cheek against the wool, the compulsion not stemming from his conscious mind, but from a deeper, older self.
“Then, indulge me, how have you come to associate me with the paternal?”
“Because…” Horror grips him as he realizes, through a small temporary window of complete awareness, that he is tormented with embarrassment. He grapples with it, heart-sick, planning a hasty retreat even though he’s effectively trapped, Hannibal’s arm enclosed around his waist, the span of his hand cradling the back of his head, no where to escape, no where to hide, Hannibal’s omnipresence humming in the air like electricity. It’s why he senses his sudden curling in on himself, a snail retreating back in its shell, but Hannibal’s an expert at extracting snails out with deft fingers and practiced patience. He passes his fingers through Will’s hair, still, be still , and breathes in the heat-slicked fever pulses. Black spots like flies swarm his eyesight and he burrows further into Hannibal, sore-throated, a doomed wreck, he has to swallow several times to dig his voice out of its hiding places. “Isn’t God a father? Doesn’t He bring all of this unfolding into being? The power of creation is equal to the power of molding what is malleable. Isn’t this what you are doing?” Questions piled on top of questions. No definitive, scarcely supportable statements—they are too appalling, too incriminating.
“Is it?” There is a hidden smile inside, as deep as unbeatable darkness, goading, prodding. It wants more out of him. It wants him splayed open, fevered and blooming wildly with endless blood. “Your past pulsates in your body in the present, no distinction between a father and a god in the ivory tower of rationality. You wield a wisdom that few care to espouse, and you are, to a certain degree, right. Fatherhood runs deep in the furrows of my soul. It was—perhaps is—a fate I cannot deny, much as you are incapable of denying your own proclivities.”
He’s starting to drift again, sucking subsidence waiting for him, a crafty measured thing. He holds on, stubbornly, fighting off the dream-like slowness, the detestable gravity. Let me be here a little longer. Let me stay in this moment. He wants to insist that Hannibal tell him more. Spin me the story. Shed a light on your mercurial roots, please. In the haze, he thinks he registers a pinprick of pain and then, an absolute darkness submerges him.
He dreams of Hannibal’s hand fisting his mouth: tanned and wiry as it nudges past his lips, the silvering hair on his arm catching between Will’s teeth. Like a flexible endoscope, the hand goes down, down, past the pharynx, the esophagus, the trachea, slippery and smooth as an eel, meeting no resistance because Will has none, he’s a silken passage, a sacrifice with its screamless mouth open for the owning, eyelids trembling, blood vessels bursting in little starry explosions, blood freckles, solar glare spotlighting him while the hand slides lower and lower till it sits in his gut. Blearily, he wonders if it’ll come out the other side, skewer him, prepare him for the basting and the roasting, the psychological barriers reduced to ash, the taste of Hannibal’s hand seared into the secret flesh that has not known any other touch, mouth-virginity, gut-virginity—is this rape? But, how can you rape the willing? Slicked-up, slicked open, gaping empty—not anymore, stuffed full to the burning brim, watching behind sleep-blind eyes, paralysis-helplessness splaying him open to an infinite degree. Bones leak out of his limbs. The arm attached to the hand shape-shifts into a red-hot pipe, blistering his soft innards, cooking him from the inside. Instead of coughing it out, he swallows around it—if you can’t beat it, join it—in madness, in agony, in bliss.
Scratchy throat, dry mouth, his tongue like a thick snail in his mouth. Sweated his entire body’s water composition, a withered husk of a man on the cusp of disintegration, the visualization of his fingertips deconstructing into fine sand granules coming apart in a slow tender collapse comes to him and he thinks he chuckles, a dry weak sound sputtering in the household drone. His eyelids flutter, no glasses to bring the world in focus, so he casts about for them on the bedside table. The only glad tiding of salvation within easy access, a talisman against the incomprehensibility besieging him. What time is it? Is he outside of time? The subjectivity, forever muddied, atrophies, spins out of control—out of his control, it’s diseased, the sickness-rot siphoning all meaning.
Get a grip. Swim upwards. You’ll break through the surface, eventually. The ugly glare of the red digital numbers blink at him from the bedside table: 2:30 AM.
It’s still dark out, the sky an undimmed indigo, fresh piles of snow projecting light back into the retinas, no absorption; the forecast predicted at least eight centimeters of snow on the morning radio, so he hasn’t lost too many hours. He clears his throat, settling an anxious hand on its base and walks in a daze towards the sink to gulp water straight out of the faucet. Disorientation descends upon him like grotesque hellhounds; he stands in the kitchen and tries to put the fragments together: he surveyed a crime scene for Jack, head aching, the consequences of sleepless nights and agonized dreaming catching up to him at full speed. He was on his way to his house when time jumped, skipped and burned and he was at Hannibal’s office. He remembers their conversation, remembers the unreality, the surreality, like being inside a Dalí painting, objects in constant state of disfigurement, remembers… clinging to Hannibal’s front and rubbing his cheek against the tailored suit jacket. The kid-comfort of the demanding vulnerability. Exploring the subterranean structures of swamp-green childhood.
Hannibal’s a reflective window, a one-way interrogation room, a ruthlessly edited invisible damage. He wants to be back there, in the safe enclosure of the office, Hannibal’s fastidious nature bringing restoration and order to the otherwise chaotic unforgiveness. But, he’s never… sought closeness like that, must have been out of your mind, what were you thinking? Is his instability engendering impropriety? His scalp prickles with mortification, shivers rippling up his arms and he reminds himself that he must breathe through it, if nothing else, then, he must deal with it one breath at a time. Something’s gotten inside him, something has poisoned him: the fever, the memories, the tenderness, all of them conspiring to work their way inside his nervous system, attacking the few remaining healthy tissues they set upon. He drinks more water, stands under the spray of steaming hot water, thinks of himself wading into a quiet cold stream on a grey morning and using minnows for live bait.
He keeps having to clear his throat. Feels like something’s wedged there. His esophagus housing a thorny fishbone, a hook tugging on the red meat, parting it open, rising to the dermal surface, digging its way out of him. Fevers induce hallucinations, you know this, and you’re more susceptible than others, the solar glare of empathy frying the neurons up. Face pounding with blood, head pounding like a drum, cloven shaven bodies limply swaying in subway compartments winking at him in the roiling frenzy of his fevered fretfulness, he scours for a good distraction, something to take the edge off, but Hannibal’s clean scent sticks to him, nightmare-warding, like a hand on his cheek, like a hand tucking him in bed, like a hand slipping past his guts. He scrubs his face with both hands, terror brushing its icy tendrils along the ridges of his spinal cord, amplified rancour at his inherent weakness, surrounded by acres of his failures, interruptions, ravines opening up under him, perfect for losing your footing.
No painkillers for your affliction—just pain and killers, fear and anger at the fear. His daddy’s fingers caught in the curls of his hair as he said It’s alright, kid. So what if you don’t fit the criteria for the FBI? For wide is the gate and easy the way that leads to destruction. Who knows, maybe this cloud of locusts will scatter and reveal the true path. That’s what he called Will’s impairing fear: his cloud of locusts. The sundry trials God has set for him, testing his faith, measuring the nobility of his soul. It felt like another hurdle Will couldn’t get past. Another testament of his abnormality, documented, stamped and sealed in his record, a permanent stain that no amount of bleach can disappear, unless a fire purges it.
It’s alright, he echoes in that authorial incisive voice. Nothing happened. No one’s hurt. But, another voice cuts across, stronger, contemplative, silk-sundered, color drained, the modulation of supernal intensity: Does God relish in the exacting punishment of those whom he favours? History swells with the sacred spilled blood of martyrs and prophets. Christianity, Judaism, Islam. All religions demand a pound of flesh. Does pain predate blind faith? Or does faith precipitate pain? No, disentangle yourself from him. A pair of scissors should do.
Blankly, he searches the kitchen’s utensils drawer for it, but stops when he picks it up. What is he trying to do? Cut Hannibal out like amputating a limb? Or try his hand at bloodletting? His eyes feel sick and heavy. Dehydration? Exhaustion? He doesn’t know. He needs to set down the scissors before he does something foolish, the landlines of his temporal lobes stuttering, the signal flaring and dying in a repetitive cyclical torture tactic, splitting him apart, overwrought with disconcerting sensitivity. More water wets his throat. He busies himself with cooking his dogs breakfast: brown rice, ground beef, carrots, spinach, pumpkin puree and dried rosemary for seasoning. They wake up at the clatter and nose at his ankles, their tails windshield wiping, little yips, little snuffles, their nails clicking on the wooden floor—the sound of home.
He calls in sick, which he is, and calls Hannibal: it’s not a whim. Completely premeditated. He’s clean, wearing a fresh set of clothes that make him feel the closest approximation to a human, an act of resurrection that consumes more effort than he calculates, the parameters of the nightmare circling him, closing in on him: slavering jaw, knife-sharp carious teeth, and his ripe dripping meat. Is that what the killer sees when he picks out his victims? Meat on legs. Meaty legs. He blinks and realizes that Hannibal’s voice is actually in his ear and isn’t resonating in the corridors of his imagination.
Measured, each word a careful enunciation, holy light filtering through the storm of locusts. “Will? You’re alright. Regulate your breathing for me.” Hannibal breathes for him, a demonstration of soothing repetition, a balm on the brain blisters, can fever endow a person with blisters? He doesn’t know, but he can picture the pustules sprouting like little mushroom heads thriving in the damaging humidity fogging the grey matter. He’s following the rhythm of Hannibal’s exaggerated breaking, feeling small and childish, feeling inconsequential, like he could be blown away by a particularly strong gust of wind and never find his way back to solid ground. There is no masking the pleasure in Hannibal’s voice. “Excellent. Now, could you tell me what time it is and where you are?”
“It’s 8:23 AM and I’m in my house in Wolf Trap, Virginia. I… lost time yesterday. I don’t know how much. It’s like… trying to punch a hole out of a dream or getting trapped in a collapsing tent.” He sucks in a shaky breath. He sounds like he is unthreading, the stitches holding the wounds closed rupturing. “I attended our appointment last night?”
A surprised pause, followed by the shuffle of papers. “Yes, you did. How much do you remember?”
The shame could eat him raw. “Not much. I… apologize for any improper behavior. I don’t think my head was screwed on right. Everything felt like a soft apparition.” Would Hannibal think to push him away next time? Would there be a next time? Would Hannibal permit him that terrible intimacy that Will hasn’t sought out in years, not since—not since? The calculus eludes him. He doesn’t know.
“There’s nothing to forgive, Will. Your trespasses, whether perceived or actual, will never require repentance, except perhaps making yourself available for dinner at my behest, but that will come when you have recovered from whatever ails you.”
Hannibal’s warm regard for him gathers in his teeth, restructures the boneless limbs he lugs around. You are the essence of curiosity, aren’t you? The sweetness that would put sugar to shame. The sun that would melt the wings off Icarus’ back. Tragedy and beauty growing from the same vine . No, that’s his demented imagination box knocking on the door again asking politely if invasion is possible. The connection to verifiable reality has been severed and he doesn’t think he can trust his misfiring neurons. But, he can trust Hannibal to construct that reality for him. That’s God speaking for you, Will. God speaking through you. You can trust that.
“Thank you, Hannibal.” He’s mirroring, channeling Hannibal’s clean calmness, putting it on because it feels so nice. So civilized. “I don’t know if I can ever repay you the kindness you’ve shown me, but I’ll try. The longer this fever percolates in my mind, the thicker the smoke gets. Sometimes, its impenetrable heaviness obscures everything. An apocalyptic shroud killing the sun. I remember… you said…” Long pauses. Awkward stilted speech, like that of a surly kid: he’s coming back into himself. It’s hard gripping onto Hannibal when he’s fighting an internal battle. Shooting fish in a barrel. Fish floating belly up. “This fever would be a passageway into dead rooms? I’m not… traumatized. At least, I don’t think I have any trauma worth boiling my brain for.”
“Do you not? Every day, whenever Jack calls on you, you are tasked with facing what common sense would categorize as traumatic. Sanctioning murderers, sadists, and psychopaths into the riotous absorption of your empathy is akin to willingly injecting yourself with unpredictable viruses without fully researching the consequences. Tell me, Will, what unacknowledged changes has your consciousness been forced to endure? What strange and fascinating shapes have your dreams taken as of late?”
Will listens, feeling as though he’s taken a hit to the head, blunt force trauma, new types of shame gripping the limp bones of him; Hannibal’s meticulous cadence, careful enunciations, and the whistle of his consonants like strategic knives cleaving the meat, the defenses, anything that might indicate resistance so that nothing remains except the exposed instinctual affect, immediate reactions stripped of socially acceptable veneers. “This… feels like another dream,” he murmurs, stupified, bleeding heat, suffused with heat. “Miles and miles of dreams, landscapes of them, I―I’m scared I can’t tell the difference between what’s a dream and what isn’t. Whichever thou art, or shade or real man! I don’t know.” He laughs feverishly, rent at the sludgy seams. “Can I really tell you? Can I… trust you?”
“Don’t you already? You’ve got me on the phone. Neither Jack nor Alana are on your menu, Will.”
The phrasing pushes a weak chuckle out of him. “Yes, I suppose you’re right.” He slumps on the rickety dining table chair, too weak to stand any longer. Winston trudges over to him and kindly sits by his legs, resting his chin on the knob of his knee. Will rewards him with an affectionate scritch just behind his ears. “You’re not… busy?”
“Not if it’s you asking for my time.”
“You make it so simple,” he marvels.
“Isn’t it always?”
Will grunts, soothed by Winston’s living warmth. “When I was… I don’t know, time is so tricky. Catastrophic. The carnage of a corpse hides nothing; time is marked in the decay and the decomposition, in the bowl movement, in the rigidity and bloating of internal organs. You know, an acquaintance who worked in a morgue theorized that killers must have a weak sense of smell because the stench of dead bodies is so uniquely unbearable. It was so abhorrent he sometimes felt faint and, so, he got in the habit of carrying around strawberry candy to use like smelling salts. Bodies carry more excrement than is commonly known.” He pauses, then sighs. “Sorry. I don’t want to talk about that. I know I’m evading. But, the tangent could also be a symptom of the fever. Fever-talk. Um. In Louisiana, when I was living with my daddy—my dad—the milkman was doing the delivery rounds in the early morning and, by chance, discovered the body of a twelve-year-old boy who had been missing for a week. I think I was around his age. He was… very pretty. The kind of pretty that’d turn heads. Soft corn-yellow hair. He had a pretty voice too.”
“A choir boy?”
“Choir boy,” Will confirms. “The milkman was Dad’s friend and he called him up immediately. I remember the phone call. I think I was having cereal and we had a phone mounted on the wall in the kitchen. I remember Dad’s white-knuckled grip on the phone. He glanced at me, as though making sure I hadn’t been taken right from under him. I didn’t see the body, of course. But I heard the townspeople talking about it. Their grief was… pungent. Cataclysmic. It burrowed under my skin. Made a home inside of me. I kept dreaming of the boy for weeks afterwards: drowning in molasses black as tar, his mouth open in a perpetual soundless scream as the waters rushed inside the pit of it, his organs squirming, a disembodied hand exploring the unseen terrains while he fought so hard to extricate himself. Night terrors, my dad called them. But I knew they were vibrations. Echoes. I lived inside them. The violence had flavors in the dreams. The boy was a framework of little terrors with skin stretched over it. I think I remember one where his chest just… peeled open like a sardine can. I… I couldn’t stand any of it. I stopped wanting to sleep. Drank so much coffee on the sly till my heart felt like it was going to explode out of my chest. Pretended to sleep whenever my dad checked in on me. It couldn’t have gone on for long and I know I must have dozed off in short bursts. But, at some point, the world turned into a factory of casual violence, rot creeping at the pristine edges, the surface layer crinkling and crisping to reveal what’s underneath.” He’s never talked to anyone about this before. Hasn’t spilled his belly juice in so long. Always scared of what people might think of him. Always scared of Alana getting that look in her cornflower blue eyes. With Hannibal, he isn’t scared. Wonder what he sees in me. What he thinks.
“And what’s underneath, Will?” Hannibal murmurs, quietly coaxing.
Will realizes that he’s stopped talking. He comes back into himself piece by piece. “That desire moves through the sprawl of life with its hundred rows of gnashing teeth. That men of God are not godly at all. That pretense is part of the adaptive personality of predators.”
“Precocious and precious. The shock of inventing death in the imagination drastically developed your psychic functions. Does it come to you in fragmentations?”
“It does,” he whispers.
“Also common in victims of prolonged abuse. You believe your overactive sensibilities are responsible for the orchestration of lies you have concocted or convinced yourself of their veracity. But, as is the case with abuse victims, all recollections are collections of the truth, only they have been distorted through cycles of recreations, an element and a mechanism of protection against the unfathomable.”
Hannibal’s voice is the bright red sear of a wound. The electrical jolts that shock the heart into beating again. The very thing he needs to stay afloat, grounded, anchored, safe. He clings to it, to the unblinking unflappable presence coalescing within the beheaded kingdom of his windswept fears. His fingers flutter on top of Winston’s head. “Hannibal…” he doesn’t know how to say it. Stumped. Embarrassed. Silenced by the embarrassment.
“You’re welcome to come by as soon as tonight if you’d like. You’d be my only guest.”
How does he know? How can he tell without even looking at Will’s face? Without seeing the eyes?
“Didn’t you know? Your voice is your eyes. It reveals your gnashing desires. It is soaked with everything you want.”
An accidental spillage. A leak from the faucet of his mouth. Not meant to be spoken. This fever is really doing a number on him. No wonder his father was so protective of his health: made sure he got his flu shots, supervised the supplements intake, had him wear a mask whenever a classmate had a cold even though no one ever did. Did he somehow suspect that Will’s empathy disorder would flare and flip out at the onslaught of viral infections? No way to know.
When Will hangs up, he’s filled with a strange sense of disconnect, like talking to Hannibal kept him real, or delineated the emphasis of not-dream. Standing up sucks up the dregs of energy from his legs. He drinks more water, then a cup of black coffee so hot he burns the roof of his mouth. Have to take the dogs out for a walk or they’ll be upset at him, so he slips on a sleeveless jacket and a pair of long-necked rubber shoes. The dogs surge around him, full and excited and ready to expend their energy. The air outside is delightfully crisp, he could bite into it, but he only breathes it in, letting it expand his lungs as far as they can go. He knows a normal person would go to doctor, get their head checked, MRIs and CAT scans and blood testing, get their symptoms assessed for a diagnosis and a treatment plan, but he can feel Hannibal’s subtle influence guiding him away from the rationality of medicine and into labyrinthine shadow boxes, rich with the dazzling possibility of surrender. Like when a body surrenders itself to the whims of maggots, to the swarm of hungry insects. How far can he push himself? Push past the limits of imagination, stretch them out as far as they can go before they break, before he breaks.
The curiosity nags at him. Has he always been this curious? He isn’t sure, anymore. But he isn’t scared. He knows that, at least, and his breathing softens.
A room of rare orchids the color of a drinker’s liver, your mouth filmy with succulent residue, the stretch of a lavish dining table, a roasted limb (leg/thigh/arm?) taking the center stage, dirge of the sacrificial on the altar of worship—worshipping whom? A hungry knowing, razor-hungry, faceless, masked? No, serpentine? No, not quite right. Cloven-hoofs. Black-horned. Old. As ancient as Cain’s grudge against Abel. A primordial knowledge of superiority. Your eyes shift away from it, looking is costing you the flicker of the soul, so, maybe, you shouldn’t look too closely. This is familiar: you know how the smell of death clogs your nostrils, bodies spinning in a slaughter cyclone, human bodies unraveling, the skin peeling away, ploughing off, sloughing off. Devoid of a moral center. A little fucked-up. Disturbingly dark. Nothing to measure up against because it defies calculation and definition. Can you define the type of violence that imposes its own golden standard? You blink and time melts, Dali clocks sludging over your skin, the limb (legthigharm?) licked clean to the bleached glisten of the bone. You swallow and the meat is in your stomach, the same way Hannibal’s hand pushed past your gag reflex and into your innards. Sat heavy and nice inside of you. Made you less distracted with the notions of bleakness and grimness and instability. You’re Jonah trapped in the belly of the beast but in reverse, the beast trapped in Jonah’s belly. You’re in a dream-carriage. The dream is taking you somewhere and you follow, obediently, it’s easy to do it. The easiest thing in the world. You just have to stop being such a person.
Will’s sitting at Hannibal’s dinner table: it’s a scene he knows. Memorized. The ins and outs are predictable. Should be predictable. A smooth rock tossed back and forth between his fingers. It’s just… he’s burning. Scorching with fever-heat, in pulses and flashes, an intractable contamination, extending from the hurting heart to the tips of his fingers. It’s resplendent. It’s tortuous. He knows he’s rosy-faced, or sun-blasted, or roasted-red. His face radiates it like the throb of a fresh bruise. Deliriously, he wonders if this is what burning at the stake feels like: flames licking at the soles of his feet, Jeanne d'Arc given the bitter treatment of fire because the visions burnt the Christianity out of her even though the messages were inscribed in her dreams by God, the chosen and the prophets and messengers shot and burned and locked up.
So much violence woven in human history. Heaps of it. Past and ongoing, while the undeserving live on for ages stacked upon ages. Maybe, he should drink some water. It’ll clear and cool his head. The glass is blissfully chilly.
He glances at Hannibal over the rim: he’s in a dark suit, his hair combed away from his angular and lean face, lashes fluttering as he puts the forkful of meat in his mouth, lips closing around the savory burst on his tongue, Will’s mouth watering in sympathy. Always a mirror, never a real person. Too weak to form his own image for others to mirror.
“You know, you’re the first person to get me to realize that eating can be so erotic.”
This is a dream. It has to be. He doesn’t remember driving over to Hannibal’s, there’s just that dark gap for a path, meaning he’s still in Wolf Trap, Virginia, and he’s fallen asleep somewhere. Fevers are always conducive to lucid dreaming and he is apprehending the dream state by coming clean, confessing to the subtractions of truth he’s been forced to masquerade for the sake of pure propriety.
A twitch of Hannibal’s mouth as he thoughtfully chews. Will has absorbed him completely, swallowed the movements and the reactions, all of it stored in his bloodstream, the perspicacity of empathy overindulging on Hannibal’s mannerisms. “I am glad to have introduced you to the concept. By denying certain passions and inclinations, we transform them into ferocious obsessions and frenzies. What is pleasurable should avoid legislation, which only deflects and represses. Puritanism is often the central culprit.”
“Not religion?”
“Not religion. The erotic resides in it. It is the very heart of it. Once the morality of civilization is abolished, religion is no longer oppressive; it liberates, exalts, and unites our instincts, without excluding any of them. In fact, I would posit that we have a duty to apply the passions such as nature creates them without changing anything in them.” His knife rends the meat from the bone and it parts like hot butter. Will’s mouth floods with saliva. He looks down to his plate and finds that the presentation is a sensual display of a lamb shank, the seared bone protruding out of its core like a spear, sitting on a thin bed of artfully swirled mash of some kind blended with gravy and framed with grilled cherry tomatoes and shiitake mushrooms. “Pure pleasure should not lean towards concentration, but should propagate and extend itself through taste and savoring.” Will raptly watches Hannibal’s jaw grind the meat, the entrancing movement of his throat as he swallows, the theatre of gastronomy. As though in a trance (he’s losing time within the ebb and flow of the dream, Hannibal opining as a voice-over, superimposed over the stop motion consumption of the meal, Will picks up his fork and knife and shaves off a glistening strip of meat.
“Does desire reveal who we are?” Will can barely recognize his own voice: there’s a sultry tremor to it, a neediness that wasn’t there before, reaching out in the dark for a connection, however broken, however obscene.
“It beckons us to transcend beyond the confines of ourselves.” Soft, soft like the coming of death, acrid like a shot of bourbon over the rocks, leaking gilded blinding scintillates. “Desire is the active agent, the secret producer of changes. Certainly, it renders the subject helpless and may inspire discomfort, but both are necessary modes of experience.”
He wants to tell him. He needs to tell him or it will destroy him forever. It’ll undo him, because the longer he sits with it, the more it chews and bites on the connecting tissue, the tendons, the vertebrae, and there will be a collapse, the weight of him unsupportable, a limp bag of flesh. His stomach turns and twists, but he braves through it. Always a brave boy, my boy . His father’s smoke-choked drawl, never alcohol-soaked because he stopped drinking when Will was born. Would Hannibal tell him he’s brave? Would Hannibal stroke the back of his head with his rough-tipped fingers? How would they taste brushing his uvula, so deep inside Will’s mouth that thought and identity and the brokenness are obliterated from whatever remains of his consciousness? “Hannibal,” he says, the need so strong and ragged it’s splitting him apart, the shape of Hannibal’s hand visible in the internal secret passages like thumbprints on drying clay. His sternum burns with the ache of wrongness. Should he ask? But, this is a hallucinatory dream, and he’s drifting in the strobe-lit kingdoms of disassociation and innocence. Complicit separation, absence of shame, redemption blues.
He feels like a kid at the dinner table asking his dad for the unspoken forbidden, may I have dessert first? Could I have a sip of your coffee? Did you know about Father Bryce? His hunger had a tongue that licked me with his eyes. What could we have done about it? Should you and I have killed him together? Strung him up from the feet and bled him with a thousand cuts? Slick with pain-sickness, a horrible emptiness yawns in his thoracic cavity. He should be full there, his damaged brain supplies, should have a hand worming its way through the moist channels and tunnels.
Who is he if he isn’t occupied? Time and self defined against the cataclysmic fear of unbecoming. The invasive force knocking at the hellish gates.
He’s drifted off, lost some more precious currency of minutes (hours?), time-distortion dream scrambled, and he’s somehow gripping Hannibal at the wrist. Hannibal doesn’t blink; unfazed, he continues to chew deliberately, absurdly unaffected, like every dinner they have had. His sense of unreality doubles, reinforces itself on his temporal lobe, fire ruin blackening his lungs, the haze of hunger stringing him up like a marionette as he uses both hands (reverence is a show of faith) and brings Hannibal’s fingers up to his mouth like a profane Eucharist, the lamb shank forgotten, discarded for choicer meat, for the savoring of penetration. The throes of sickness sharpen everything; Hannibal’s fingertips smell like thyme and rosemary, dried mint and figs. Will’s attention narrows down to this point of intense study: the coarseness of Hannibal’s fingers, the fine-lines criss-crossing and bisecting and travelling up and down the wide length of palm, so wide it could encompass the world, a chalice from which life trickles.
Will’s panting into it, his humid breath melting into the skin, his brain mutinous, spinning out of its axis, dancing around his tight skull and he’s so empty, so bare, nothing constituting him, nothing to use as a reference point. With Hannibal’s palm fanned open, his face is blurred out beyond it, easier for Will to amputate the limb from the person it’s attached to. Easier to torture Christ when he’s been severed from God, blinding yourself to the witness bearing down on you. “Had a dream you stuffed your hand down my throat. Can you remember dreams within a dream? I don’t know. But, it seems I can, right now. I… think it tasted of… soap and a hint of steamed garlic. Can I…” he pauses, struggling with the shyness of what he’s about to ask. But, he can’t. The weight of control fractures his will and the skittish fragility comes back to claim him, a living lashing force that pushes him back from the finish line.
“Ask for it and you shall have it.” Hannibal bestows permission with the benevolent generosity of the compassionate.
Will wants to beg, touch me, ruin me for everything else, carve me out till I’m hollow and fill me back up with whatever pleases you, eat me alive, take out my brain and autopsy it, see what lurks in the squishy soft meat of it, would you cook it or would you consume it raw? He’ll go mad with the screeching ricochet of childish demands, they’ll perforate him and find their way out from the bullet-holes while the heat sloshes like a liquid thing underneath his steaming skin. He opens his mouth, the desire to be shattered and rebuilt hitting him like a sledgehammer, the crescendo of heat and desperation burning everything, ignoring the warning cries and the smoking of singed flesh. His voice is someone else’s. His hunger is his own. “Can I have your hand inside my mouth again? Need to feel it against my tongue, blocking the entryway, entry barred, no one else allowed.” Derangement. Delusion. Defensive action. But, he’s allowed it all here, in this sacred dreadful dark where no prying eye may impose its rattling presence.
Hannibal’s eyes, the eyes of God, the eyes that unmake and remake, settle heavily on him, slow-blinking, the harbinger of the totalizing eclipsing predator. No alarm bells ring in the deafening silence of the graveyard. Will doesn’t care. Too pinned against the flame-licked walls, brain cooked to perfection, the circumstantial alignment of strategic surrender, what is amoral and immoral reduced to a set of indistinguishable numbers, the terrible incomprehensibility of the universe flattening his organs, shaking the soul out of him and using it as seasoning for the lamb. Hannibal doesn’t have to tell him to open up because Will’s mouth is slack-jawed, already practiced in making room for Hannibal.
Three fingers, at first, climb past the ring of his pink mouth to rest on his tongue, a flood of saliva frothing at the exquisite intrusion, something in him screaming I was made for this, a hole to hold things in, an auditorium of reproductions against my will.
Will’s trying to breathe though his nostrils, trying to stop himself from panting like an overexcited puppy dog, but the memory discs are slotting just right, clear and true, like putting on glasses for the first time without having known that not everything’s supposed to be blurry and out of focus. It’s… revelatory, the relief rushing in at the high speed of fast-acting hardcore drugs, like a slow crucifixion, like the drowsiness of peace.
“Contamination is erotic; to allow that which is thought of as foreign inside of you, to permit its influence and its taste and its essence inside of you is to annihilate the ethics of hygiene. Your sensibilities often walk in the violent and vandalistic terrains of death. Are you worried about being contaminated, Will?” Ever so slowly, his fingers crawl deeper inside the hot suction of Will’s mouth, burrowing towards the back of his throat. Will’s eyelids flutter, skin prickling with goosebumps. Hannibal doesn’t expect him to answer, not really, because he sips on his white wine and continues. “Or are you frightened of contaminating others?” Will’s eyes water as his throat works to swallow the excess spit. Without taking out his fingers, Hannibal smoothly stands up and pins him in place with a paternal hand on his neck. The calm attention, the probing curiosity, the complete and singular point of bright fanaticism seeping through the mask, hot on Will’s face, on his neck, wriggling on his tongue, a collector of sensations. He bends over Will and thumbs away the tear-streaks tenderly. He’s all Will sees, tastes, and knows. The comfort he takes from that is astonishing. “Are you overwhelmed?”
Will shakes his head. There’s no room for anything else. No room for killers and their grand designs. No room for the slaughter. Just Hannibal and his voice and the taste of his fingers pushing deeper into Will. He doesn’t speak a word, but Hannibal translates the blistering soundless begging for more and fits all of his fingers into the wet heat of Will’s mouth. It’s too much, it’s not enough, it’s the fall into the inferno, it’s the grace of the heavenly father, to be ravaged and savaged like this, Hannibal’s mouth-piece and his instrument, speaking his truth, his fingers reaching all the way to the vocal cords, strumming the words out. A possession. And hasn’t God always affirmed His existence and creation through speaking? This, then, is the hand of God reaching inside the burning wreckage of his body to deliver a miracle. Hannibal could push deeper, push harder, could make a sleeve out of Will’s throat, but he doesn’t. He holds Will as Will holds his fingers, as drool webs down his chin, as a serenity lights the darkest corners of his mind.
As he closes his eyes, he sees a vision of the choir boy: a man of God also spoke through him and left him for dead, a drifting bottle carrying a message. I was here. And so is Hannibal.