The Room on Divisadero

by Renee_Vivien

Summary:

They walked along the water, found Marina Boulevard, and turned left onto Divisadero. As they did, Daniel felt adrenaline build up in his belly and chest. Armand looked like he might hurt him. Like he wanted to hurt him. But then, Daniel admitted to himself, he might enjoy being hurt. Especially by him. Even if he got beaten up, tied down…at least he would feel something. Those hands and that skin. Maybe pain coming from someone like this would heal him. He’d been into it in the 80s, he suddenly remembered. So had Alice.

Two characters, one room. An inverse do-over of Devil's Minion, set in 2022, in which Daniel doesn't go anywhere.

Chapter 1

When Daniel couldn’t sleep, he walked to the water. 

It was a long way to the marina––more than two miles. But it was also a straight shot down Fillmore, which made it seem shorter. All he had to do was get himself out of bed, throw on a pair of pants, and push himself down the hill until the land ran out. He usually made it there in under an hour. It was fine on the way, when the pavement sloped gently downward, and murder coming back, when the incline felt twice as steep. His leg muscles burned the next day. But the pain was worth it. The pain was it. Over the last week it had been the only thing that lifted his despair, even if it returned as soon as he got back to his apartment. It wasn’t the same in daylight, when joggers and strollers and phone-absorbed teenagers pushed past him on the sidewalk, and trucks roared by him in the street. At 3 am he could get all the way to Marina Boulevard without seeing another person. It occurred to him that this was strange, since his despair was tied to being alone. The nighttime walks only made him more so. It was as if, he realized, submerging himself in the loneliness freed him from the pretense of being okay.

Daniel was not okay. He was sick. Managing the Parkinson’s, but sick. His wife wasn’t speaking to him, and neither were his daughters. His writing project had stalled out to the point of being undeniably dead. He’d come to San Francisco hoping that the city would inspire him, bring back some of the possibility he’d felt there decades ago. Instead it made him bewildered and sad. It wasn’t just that his old haunts were gone, torn down and replaced with Apple stores and massage parlors and yoga studios. It was that the character of the city had changed. There was no room for him now, not even in the pockets of counterculture that remained. In the Castro, the Mission, and the Haight, there were traces of what had been. But you couldn’t live on traces. So Daniel lay in his twin bed at night, rarely sleeping, weighed down by something he couldn’t deny was grief.

One night in July he came out of a dark dream at 2 am, as awake as he’d ever been. After an hour of staring at the ceiling, it was time to walk. Remembering to grab for his phone at the last minute, he hurried down the two flights of stairs and into the street, where the wind coming in off the bay hit his face as soon as his shoes touched the asphalt. 

He walked quickly. When he crossed Pacific Avenue he had his first glimpse of the water, though in the dark he couldn’t make it out. Then, at Vallejo, the sightline opened up, and he could tell that the inky rectangle between the sidewalk and the sky was the bay. During the last half mile he always thought of Alice and their walks in Paris, especially the ones that went on for hours without delivering his promised view of the Seine. “We’ve been walking forever,” she’d complain. “Where the hell is the river?” He’d reassure her that they’d get there soon, any minute now. And eventually they did.

He was still thinking about Alice when he looked up and saw that the houses and apartment buildings on either side of him had run out. He was at Marina Boulevard, with only a strip of grass and a parking lot between him and water. There was Alcatraz, to his right; Angel Island, in front of him; and the bridge, to his right, with the hills rising into the sky behind it. He’d reached the end. 

Daniel liked the benches on the walking path because they were so close to the water that the spray hit his face. There was never anyone sitting in them, or lingering in the open space behind. He could be alone. He’d been alone all day, of course, and all night, but in the empty marina he could measure the depth of his loneliness. So far it seemed to have no end, and he thought that with enough effort he could touch the bottom. What would happen when he did, he didn’t know. But the water would be there for him.

The bay was quiet. No gulls called overhead, no noise carried from the wharf and its tourist traps. Daniel sat down on a bench. He appreciated, as he always did, that there were no lights along the marina, even though this made it harder for him to see what was in front of him. He didn’t need to see it. It was there, immovable and indifferent. What was it Alice had said? “The water will always be there, whether you’re looking at it or not.” His thoughts leaned back to her and their walks to the Seine. 

After a few minutes, something in the atmosphere of the place shifted. Daniel knew, though he wasn’t sure how he knew it, that a person was standing behind him and to his right. He turned to look over his shoulder and saw the smudge of a shape there, moving slowly towards him. The light was so weak he couldn’t make out the details, but it was a man, and his eyes were set on Daniel. Even in the dark he had the look of someone moving in on a target. He wanted something, and for some reason, what he wanted was Daniel.

“I’ve seen you here before,” the man called out to him in a rich, musical voice. He walked forward as far as the empty bench next to Daniel’s. 

“Is that so? I can’t say the same about you.”

The man turned to face him, and his eyes were strangely bright, as if lit from inside. And beautiful––so beautiful they seemed like a mirage. The sadness in his face matched his own.

“I’m Armand. I have a place on Divisadero. Will you come?”

Daniel was surprised. It wasn’t that kind of park. Nobody cruised the marina, not when there were so many better places up the hill, and beyond those, the Castro. What was he thinking––nobody cruised anywhere now, they just used apps. But the man’s purpose was clear. Daniel saw it in his tense face muscles and the way he flexed and relaxed his fingers inside the pockets of his jeans, radiating nervous energy. Daniel hadn’t come out here with this on his mind, or so he’d thought. And yet here was this man with his hungry look, and curly black hair, and skin like cedar.  He'd done it before, decades ago, and could do it again.

“Yeah. Yeah, I will. I’m Daniel.”

------------

They walked along the water, found Marina Boulevard, and turned left onto Divisadero. As they did, Daniel felt adrenaline build up in his belly and chest. Armand looked like he might hurt him. Like he wanted to hurt him. But then, Daniel admitted to himself, he might enjoy being hurt. Especially by him. Even if he got beaten up, tied down…at least Daniel would feel something. Those hands, and that skin. Maybe pain coming from someone like this would heal him. He’d been into it in the 70s, he suddenly remembered. So had Alice.

A few blocks up the hill Armand put a key into the door of an old building. He pushed inside, and Daniel followed him into a landing at the bottom of a staircase. At least, he assumed that’s what it was, since there were no lights on. The dark was solid and heavy, and more like a presence than a lack of something. 

“There is no electricity in these rooms,” Armand explained. 

“How do…how do people live here?”

“They don’t. I own the building. I have no tenants.”

Daniel grabbed for his phone and shook it to turn on the flashlight.

“No. No phones. Put your hand on the wall and stay behind me. It’s twelve stairs up.”

He turned off his phone. With their fingers tracing the wall they moved up the steps, Armand steadily and Daniel more slowly. When he lagged behind, Daniel reached out his arm and was relieved to feel Armand’s back as he paused for him to catch up. His shirt was soft and thin, and Daniel could feel the muscles working underneath. The touch released another shot of adrenaline into Daniel’s belly, and lower.

They stopped together on the twelfth step. Armand spoke softly through the darkness.

“Before you come in, you must agree to three rules.”

“Uh…okay.”

“First, no phones are allowed inside this room.”

“Right. So I can’t call 911 when you try to kill me.” 

It was a weak joke. Armand didn’t acknowledge it.

“You will give yours to me here, and you will get it back when you leave. If you have a tablet, a laptop, a smart watch––you give them all to me now.”

Like TSA, but sexy, Daniel thought. “Okay. Phone is all. Here.”

He handed over the phone, and Armand dropped it with a thump into some kind of box on the other side of the door.

“Second, while you are with me you will accept the scenario that I am older than you. Much older. You will not question me when I refer to this. Do you agree?”

“Yes.”

“Third, you will call me maître.”

Kinky and French. He could do that. But Daniel could tell from his voice how serious he was.

“Yes. Yes, I will, maître.”

Chapter 2

Summary:

Armand had smoothed––almost folded––his clothes and placed them, item by item, on the table. But he had not joined Daniel on the bed. Instead he stood in front of the candle, naked and backlit, as Daniel struggled to read the cryptic look on his face.

“What are you doing?”

A beat.

“I’m deciding how I want to have you."

Armand keyed a lock and let them into an unlit room, closing the door behind them. Daniel heard him walk a few steps to the left, shuffle objects on a table, and strike a match. Light flared out from the wick of a candle. The room around them, Daniel could tell now, was spare in the extreme. There were two chairs, a desk, a table, and a bed. The walls and floor were planks of wood. He saw no lamp, no TV, no computer-–not even a clock, and no clutter whatsoever. Other than the furniture, he noticed five things: a matchbook, a candle in a candlestick, a water pitcher inside a basin, a pen in an inkstand, and a stack of papers. There was a window on one side of the bed, but a shade blocked its view of the street.

The light from the candle formed a halo around Armand, and Daniel could see him clearly for the first time. When he did, he skipped a breath. If Armand had been beautiful at the marina, in the candlelight he was magnificent. He had the kind of beauty that wasn’t supposed to exist in everyday life. It reminded Daniel of a painting––as if an artist had composed the planes of his face and chosen its colors to inspire awe: umber and russet and cedar, reflecting the warm light like wet tempera. He looked as much like a boy as a man, with a sweet mouth and long lashes around glowing eyes. But four decades of asking people questions for a living had taught Daniel how to read a face, and underneath the beauty, he saw cruelty. He saw chaos and guile and deceit, and they were frightening next to all that softness. This was a person who would lie to him in a second, with no remorse. He had probably lied to him already. If Daniel had met him in an interview, he’d have put up his guard. Here, he could only sit on the edge of the bed and start taking off his clothes.

They undressed in silence. Daniel hesitated only when Armand’s shirt came over his head, and the reality of their age difference hit him. At the marina it had been possible for Daniel to imagine Armand as older than he was, and himself as younger. It was impossible now, with the golden light from the candle accentuating every muscle in his shoulders and chest. He was an old man, and Armand was––art. He panicked, wondering if he had misread the situation.

“Were you thinking….can I give you some money?”

Armand stopped abruptly. He looked hurt, and so angry he could have hit him.

“This is not about money. I do this when I want to.”

“Sure. I just thought––”

“You will not ask me that question again.

“No. No, maître.” He sat down uneasily.

Armand’s voice softened. “This century fears old bodies. Anything past extreme youth, really. It has not always been that way. I have lived in ages when…” He cut himself off. “If you cannot overcome your prejudice against yourself, this will not work.”

“I can do that, definitely. I can…overcome it.” He tried to relax his shoulders and jaw to show it was true. But he stayed on edge. Armand had smoothed––almost folded––his clothes and placed them, item by item, on the table. But he had not joined Daniel on the bed. Instead he stood in front of the candle, naked and backlit, as Daniel struggled to read the cryptic look on his face.

“What are you doing?”

A beat.

“I’m deciding how I want to have you.”

Daniel saw himself in Armand’s mind’s eye on his back, and on all fours, and draped over the edge of the bed. He gulped. But Armand continued to stand where he was. Only his eyes moved as he tracked Daniel, who shifted his weight on the mattress.

Just when he was about to make another weak joke to break the tension, Armand suddenly shot forward so quickly that Daniel hardly saw him jump, or run, or…pounce?––whatever it was he’d done. He found himself pinned to his back on the bed with the shining face and body bright above him, a wet mouth pressing into his neck and an urgent voice whispering in his ear. “Fascinating boy,” he thought he heard, though that couldn’t have been right. Daniel wanted more of that mouth, but he remembered from decades before the etiquette involved. Some guys got freaked out by that kind of thing. He needed to ask.

“Do you do kissing? If you don’t, it’s…”

Armand answered by lowering his head and slipping his tongue between Daniel’s lips. He moved so quickly, again, that Daniel tasted him almost before he registered his movement. The kiss was urgent and deep and unrelenting, but Armand did not break away even as he maneuvered Daniel toward the front of the bed and pressed their bodies together. After minutes of this Daniel was struggling for breath and giddy from the lack of oxygen. “Am I swooning?” he thought to himself with disdain. “Am I a goddamn teenager?”

Armand finally released Daniell’s mouth and tugged him onto his side, then over onto his hands and knees. Fingers stroked between his legs with a slick of cold liquid that must have been lube. Daniel instinctively laid the palms of his hands against the headboard to steady himself.

As he did, the posture called up a memory so vivid that he seemed to leave the room and travel to another place entirely. A street corner in the Castro at two am. 1973. A stranger coming out of nowhere to light Daniel’s cigarette. An old-fashioned hat almost like a fedora tipped so low it covered most of his face. When he’d tilted his head toward an alley, as if asking a question, Daniel had known he had more than smoking on his mind. “Why the hell not?” he’d thought, and followed him around the corner. “When in Rome, screw as the Romans screw.”

The alley was narrow––just enough room for Daniel to bend over with his palms against the brick wall, and for the stranger to wedge behind him. It was rough and fast, but with an undercurrent of tenderness that caught Daniel by surprise. As he absorbed the blows he had dug his fingertips so deeply into the lines of mortar between the bricks that he’d had chips of cement underneath his nails for days.

A car honked somewhere outside on Divisadero, and he came back to the present with a rush. The room, the candlelight, Armand. Daniel was in the same position as in his memory, but now his palms were pressed against wood rather than brick. Why did it feel…the same? Armand was taking his time, almost testing him, with a sense of urgency only starting to flow through his movements. As it built, he tensed his fingers where they gripped Daniel’s skin and exhaled brokenly, then adjusted the angle of his hips as if to align with some invisible target. It worked; Daniel swore into the headboard. “Fuck, yes. Yes, maître. MAÎTRE.” The word made sense in his mouth now. But one thing was missing. “His face,” he thought to himself. “I want to see his face when he comes.” All of that studied composure wrecked by relief.

Instantly, as if Armand had somehow heard him speak the words, he slipped an arm around Daniel’s waist and pulled him onto his back until they were face to face. Amber eyes shined out of umber flesh, vibrating with need. Legs, somehow, hooked over shoulders, and they began again, deeper this time. If Daniel had felt anything other than pure, healing fire running through his body he might have winced knowing how his thigh muscles would revolt the next day. As it was, Armand’s hand found Daniel’s cock, and after the rough stroke of his fingers and then the enclosure and pull of his fist, Daniel forgot what pain was. He was going home. When the two of them came he could think only of the eyes in that unholy face staring into his, and the way they seemed to be both melting and coming into focus for the first time.

When Daniel was aware of himself again, Armand had collapsed beside him. The candle’s flame was burning low in a puddle of wax. Daniel’s high was deeper and sweeter than what he’d felt on the best meth, the purest heroin. His relief was infinite. He drifted toward sleep, but as he was falling under he thought he felt Armand draw his body close to his, settling on his side with his mouth pressed to Daniel’s ear. “Beautiful boy,” he thought he heard him say. “You came back to me.”

Chapter 3

Summary:

“Come, lover,” he announced. “We’re going to the ballet tonight. I want to see Baryshnikov.”

Daniel looked at him and choked back a laugh. It spilled out anyway. He found himself crowing so gleefully that he had to put a hand over his mouth.

“Um, sure. We can…we can do that.” He laughed again, shaking his head. “But…oh, man, you really are weird sometimes. Who the hell talks like that?’

“Like what?”

“You know. Old-fashioned.”

Armand was offended. “Daniel, if you had lived for five centuries and learned eight different languages, you would also sometimes fail to match the latest register.”

Old Daniel tries to see Armand again. He finds cool stuff in the room. Young Daniel makes an appearance.

This one's especially for people who like S2ep5 of the show and Devil's Minion in QOTD. Blending them into one story creates chronology problems, so please imagine that in this AU timeline, Armand met Daniel in 1973 but always saw him apart from Louis. Daniel never met and interviewed Louis, either the first time or the second.

Daniel slept for ten hours without stopping. When he opened his eyes, the room was in half darkness, and without a watch or a phone he had no way of knowing what time it was. He turned his head cautiously to the left. Armand was gone, with only the faintest imprint in the blanket to prove that he’d been there.

He got up, out of habit, to make coffee, before realizing both that there was no way to brew any and that he didn’t need it. He was perfectly awake. There was a bank on this part of Divisadero, wasn’t there? Did banks still have clocks, or did they tear those down when phones came in? He got up without his usual groan, walked to the window, and lifted the shade. Another day in San Francisco. Across the street, where there had once been a bank, stood a bakery that made cupcakes for dogs. And no clock. “Whatever,” he thought. “Time is meaningless anyway.”

The light from the open window showed him the daytime personality of the room he’d slept in, so different from its mood the night before. It was a small space, no more than a thirty-by-thirty-foot square. The wood floors were pitted and unfinished, and the walls (also wood) were unpainted and unpapered. The furniture was old and simple, almost shabby, with no decoration at all. The tables had pockmarks across their surfaces, and the green fabric on the one upholstered chair was threadbare at the edges––so worn away that you could see the mottled turquoise underneath. Daniel sat himself down in a second chair where it stood in front of a table, which he gradually realized was a desk. The inkstand, pen, and pile of papers were still there, but one paper had been removed from the stack and placed on its own, weighed down by a brass key. He realized that it was a note Armand had written before leaving, while he was still sleeping.

Daniel–––

I enjoyed seeing you last night. Stay in the room as long as you like, and take the key with you when you leave. You can use it to retrieve your phone from the box in the hall. The same key unlocks both the door and the entrance to the building, so if you choose, you can come back and stay again some evening. I come here myself in times of grief. I think you’ll find, as I have, that the room is a comfort for a troubled mind––a refuge from the gadgets and screens and insanities outside. You can come whenever you feel called, so long as you never bring a phone or other modern device into the room. It would ruin its soul.

Perhaps the next time you come, I will be there.

-A

Daniel was charmed and baffled. Armand left no phone number, no email address, no contact information of any kind. But the pen––barely more than a stick, now that he looked at it––still stood there in the inkstand, and the stack of paper beckoned to him. If he wanted to communicate, there wasn’t much he could do except leave a note of his own.

He thought about opening it with “maître.” But it felt too needy. So he settled on:

Hey, boss.

I’m glad to know you enjoyed “seeing” me. If you want to “see” me again, maybe we could arrange it in the regular way? It seems unlikely that we’ll show up in the room at the same time by accident. I’m writing a story on deadline this week (I’m a journalist, when I have my shit together), but I can come on Friday night at 11:00.

If I’m being honest, I haven’t been seen like that in a long time. We’re talking decades. It brought back some memories.

-D

P.S. What’s up with this pen? It barely works. If you can make out what I’ve written here, it’ll be a miracle. And maybe you could get a clock in here, so I can tell what the hell time of day it is.

Daniel reread what he’d written to check the tone. About right, he thought. Casual, funny without trying too hard, but also direct in asking for a second meeting. He replaced the pen in the stand and stood up from the desk with a screech of dragging chair legs. He made a move toward the door. Then, in a flash of self-consciousness, he made the bed, smoothed the bedspread, and returned the chair to its original place, flush with the desk. He glanced around. Everything appeared to be in order. Room-soul intact, surely?

He let himself out. Then he used the key to get his phone out of the lockbox, left the building, locked the door behind him, and went home.

––––––––––––––––––––––––––

Daniel hadn’t lied when he’d told Armand he had a story due that week, but he hadn’t exactly told the truth, either. His ongoing book project, the dead one, was supposed to be an oral history of underground publishing in New York City between 1976 and 1989. He’d been part of the scene himself, at least tangentially, and it had seemed like a good excuse to call up a bunch of friends and talk about the old days. The problem was, only one out of seven of them had responded in the three months since he’d reached out, and without a team of contributors, he had no way of keeping the thing going.

As he was brooding over this, an editor at a national magazine had texted to see if he’d be interested in doing a story on the Open AI Foundation. It was preparing to launch a chatbot that could, supposedly, write sophisticated arguments, essays, and even poetry, and the editor wanted to send Daniel to a press demo. His instinct had been to say no, hell no, but the promise of money at the end of it had shut his mouth. He’d promised that he’d look into it and get back to him with an answer by the end of Friday.

Daniel spent a stultifying three days in his apartment reading on his laptop about ChatGPT. He learned about reasoning models, and natural-language processing, and something especially grisly called proximal policy optimization. It made his head ache and his heart nervous. The selling point seemed to be that if everyone embraced the chatbot, no human would have to write anything ever again. This was assumed by the foundation to be a universal and undeniable improvement over the current state of things, and Daniel could see where they were headed. They were going to optimize his craft out of existence.

By Friday evening he knew he couldn’t accept the assignment, but he also couldn’t bring himself to text the editor and turn it down. He sat in his apartment and tried to think of a story to pitch in its place, one that wouldn’t make him hate himself, but nothing came to mind. As the time got closer to 11:00 he gave up thinking about work and started imagining the night to come. At 10:30 he convinced himself that if he left his apartment and walked very slowly, he wouldn’t get to the room on Divisadero until 11:00. So he left, remembering just in time to take the key that opened the doors and the lockbox.

It was a quiet night, and clear––typical for his walks to the marina. But for Daniel there was an electricity in the air that powered his legs and prevented him from going at the lazy pace he’d imagined. In no time he was across Lombard, turning left onto Chestnut, and then face-to-face with the unremarkable door in the drab old building. He looked up at the bedroom window that faced the street, hoping to see candlelight inside. It was dark. As he climbed the stairs, feeling his way up as he had before, he considered skipping the quarantine and taking his phone with him anyway, to give him something to do while he waited. He could stash it somewhere inside, and Armand didn’t have to know. But in the end he thought better of it and dumped it in the box anyway. “Gotta respect the room,” he thought.

On the other side of the door, Daniel lit the candle on the desk and looked around. The note he’d written to Armand was gone, which encouraged him. Everything else was as he’d left it. He walked to the right side of the bed, the one closest to the window onto the street, and sat down on the edge of the mattress. There was nothing to do now but look out at the moonlight.

Time passed strangely without a way for Daniel to measure it. He tracked the moon as it moved across the sky, but before long it passed out of his line of sight. He had no way of knowing how late Armand was. Had thirty minutes passed, or an hour? He tried to meditate, and failed. He stared at the few pieces of furniture in the room one at a time: desk, wooden chair, green chair, table. Then, in the corner on the opposite side of the bed, his eye fell on something that he hadn’t noticed before. It looked like a trunk––the kind with a hinged lid. Relieved to have something new to look at, he jumped up, took the candle, and brought it over. The trunk was a deep, burnished red color, like merlot, covered in carvings of people and animals and vines. Daniel thought he saw one figure with its head cut off, but in the weak light he couldn’t be sure. He opened the lid and saw three objects gleaming inside: a round plate, a tiny box not more than a few inches wide, and…a ball? It was round, anyway, and covered in tiny holes. Daniel could fit it in the palm of his hand.

He sat examining the three objects as the candle burned lower in the stand. Eventually he returned them to the trunk, closed the lid, sighed, and returned to his place on the bed. Armand hadn’t come. Maybe wasn’t coming at all. Daniel felt like a dipshit for assuming that just because he’d written about it in a note, it would happen. This guy probably had Friday-night fuck prospects all over San Francisco. He let his head fall back against the headboard. “I could go home,” he thought. “But it is pretty nice in here. Maybe I’ll just rest. For a bit.”

Even as he was thinking it, he was falling asleep. Or at least, he must have been. The world he slipped into was as detailed, as real, as waking life, but it was 1975 rather than 2022. He was his young self again––a smirking boy with tight, brown curls and an outward confidence that masked a deeper insecurity. Dream logic told him he was in a room on Divisadero. Not the room, but a normal apartment with decorations and electricity and a floor that sloped noticeably to one side. A television droned nearby. He was sitting in a chair pulled up to a table, scribbling in a notebook. Armand was sitting opposite him.

“Come, lover,” he announced. “We’re going to the ballet tonight. I want to see Baryshnikov.”

Daniel looked at him and choked back a laugh. It spilled out anyway. He found himself crowing so gleefully that he had to put a hand over his mouth.

“Um, sure. We can…we can do that.” He laughed again, shaking his head. “But…oh, man, you really are weird sometimes. Who the hell talks like that?’

“Like what?”

“You know. Old-fashioned.”

Armand was offended. “Daniel, if you had lived for five centuries and learned eight different languages, you would also sometimes fail to match the latest register.”

“Sure, sure. I get it. It’s cool. But Baryshnikov…how are we supposed to see him? Is he even here?”

“No. He’s performing in New York. There’s a one a.m. flight on Delta from SFO to JFK.”

“How do you know that?”

“I memorized the schedule. I called the airline and a kind woman on the telephone read out the departures and arrivals.”

“Of course. Of course you did. But do you really want to get on a five-hour flight at one in the morning? I’d rather stay here. We haven’t…you now. Seen each other in a while.”

“Daniel, we ‘saw’ each other yesterday.”

“Sure, but that’s a long time without…” He flicked his eyes from Armand’s face to his belt. “That.”

Armand regarded him quietly, leaning forward and clasping his hands together in front of him.

“What you want is to stay here?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s what you really want?”

“It is, boss.”

Armand considered this for a moment. “Very well.” He rose from his chair and went unhurriedly into another room to get something. Daniel let out a nervous breath. When Armand was in this mood he was unpredictable. But only seconds later he was back, carrying a flax rope in his hands. He tied up Daniel where he was sitting, securing his wrists together through the slats in the back of the chair and binding his calves to the chair legs, too, forcing his legs open. He pulled the knots just tight enough to squeeze out pricks of pain where they dug into his skin. Armand returned to his seat across from him.

“Boss.”

“You want to stay here. I’m helping you do that.”

“You don’t need a rope. You could do it with your mind trick.”

“That would require ongoing effort on my part. And I don’t think you deserve that from me right now. What we are going to do is stay here, sit, and not go to New York. Just as you want.”

Armand composed his limbs in a relaxed but alert posture, with one leg crossed over the other and his hands folded in his lap. He stared into Daniel’s eyes with deep focus. It was unnerving but undeniably hot. The clock in the hall sounded out sixty ticks of the minute hand, and then 120, and then 180.

“What do you see when you look at me?”

“I see a foolish boy convinced that he is fascinating.”

“Okay. Am I not?”

It was a gamble, but it paid off. Armand rose, walked to Daniel’s chair, and straddled him. With the smallest imaginable movement he rocked his pelvis, up and then down, directly over Daniel’s cock. His fingers smoothed the hair at Daniel’s temples, then traced the contours of his throat. And there, as arousal flooded Daniel’s body, the dream blurred, devolving from a coherent vision into a series of sensations: a fingernail scratching at the spot on his neck where his pulse throbbed. A tongue licking it, and then teeth teasing the skin, tugging and nibbling at it. The strange feeling of those teeth growing, sliding out of Armand’s mouth and driving into Daniel’s neck. The pain of penetration followed by overwhelming pleasure and relief. Armand's mouth sucking at the tear in his throat. A blissful pause, and then drops of tannic liquid on his own lips, trickling into him and coating his tongue with the taste of honeyed fruit. Armand’s blood. He drank it cautiously at first, and then so deeply he forgot to breathe. Armand pulled away reluctantly but with anger. “No more, boy. That’s enough.”

Through the haze of the dream, Daniel knew he was still tied to the chair. He struggled until Armand untied the rope and he collapsed in a pile on the floor. “Please, maître,” he called up at him. “Let me make it up to you.” Armand said nothing but removed his belt.

Daniel bowed his head and waited patiently for him to free himself. When he did, he was dripping and heavy, and Daniel set his mouth to him with the desperation of a man who’d been denied food for days. He savored his weight in his mouth and the taste of him on his tongue, with its hint of the honey from before. He refused to stop until he heard a whimper, then felt Armand’s body twitch and go slack. He began to sink to the floor, but Armand pulled him up and cradled him to his chest. His forehead pressed into the skin below his collarbone. His forehead…

Daniel lurched out of the dream to find himself lying on his face, his forehead resting on the bedspread. He pulled himself up and looked around. The candle had burned out, and Armand, the real Armand, had not come. He was old again. He sighed, rubbed his eyes with his hands, and stared sadly into space.

A spot of white near the door stood out in the darkness. “That couldn’t have been there before,” he thought. He got up and padded over, bent down. It was an envelope with a name––his––written in an archaic cursive.

Armand had come. And then he had gone away.

Notes:

"Come, lover, we're going to the ballet tonight. I want to see Baryshnikov."

This is a real sentence from "The Devil's Minion." Thank you, Anne Rice. If you're wondering, the dream scene happens in 1975 rather than 1973 because Baryshnikov didn't defect to the US until late 1974.

Chapter 4

Summary:

Armand got up and unbuttoned his shirt, then took off his pants. Daniel ached just looking at him.

“Green light.”

Daniel’s hand flew to his cock and stroked.

“No, beloved, you must show restraint. Red light.”

“Maître.” He was squirming. “I don’t like this game.”

“That’s odd. The last time we played it, you demanded that we do it again."

Armand and Daniel play "Red Light / Green Light." Daniel hates ChatGPT, but he's suddenly very interested in calligraphy and brass engraving.

Armand's dialogue kept coming out in iambic pentameter for this one. One day he's going to say to Daniel, "In sooth, I know not why I am so sad." The way AZ brings out the iambic rhythm of regular speech must be getting to me.

Daniel.

I cannot stop inside the room tonight. You must understand that the San Francisco building is not my primary home, and I am often called away to look after other properties. If we are to continue to see each other, you must accept that I control where, when, and how we meet. I am not a lackey to be summoned. I was treated that way in the past, and I will not allow it again.

The pen that “barely works,” as you put it in your note, is a qalam. It has worked well enough as a writing technology that its design has remained unchanged for thousands of years, and it has created some of the most beautiful calligraphy in the history of art. This qalam is unusually short, since I use it for everyday writing. It is the only object in the room I made myself. I was in Basra during the Safavid occupation and found a man to teach me the technique.

You mentioned your memories. Don’t be alarmed, when you come to the room, if you recall scenes from your past, or even experience them for what feels like the first time. Some memories return to us as dreams. The room’s atmosphere tends to have that effect.

A.

“The Safavid occupation,” Daniel thought. “When the hell was that?” But he had no phone to look it up, and no energy to, either, given how late it was. He wanted to be asleep again, especially in case he had another dream. So he lay down, defeated, and tried to melt into the darkness.

He didn’t melt into the darkness, or into anything else. Before dawn on this second night in the room he was less relaxed than he’d been on the first––for obvious reasons, he realized bitterly. But he did doze for half an hour just as hints of sunlight were creeping around the edges of the window. When he woke up, all he could think about was the note, and how stern Armand had been. “I didn’t think you were a lackey. I wasn’t summoning you,” he wanted to shout at him. “If anyone’s a lackey, it’s me. I’m your goddamn minion.” But there was nothing to do except write another note. Daniel took a moment to consider his rhetorical options. Fury? Apology? Humor? He chose humor.

Armand.

Don’t worry. Your qalam is exactly the right size. It fits in my hand.

D.

At home later that morning, Daniel remembered that he owed the magazine editor a decision about the ChaptGPT assignment. Now, more than before, he knew he had to turn it down. His exchange with Armand about the pen had made him see how relative his stance was. He’d assumed he’d been the reasonable one, protecting the sanctity of writing in the face of lazy AI. But to Armand, he must have seemed as dismissive as the fiercest AI evangelist. A method of creating art that required work, study, commitment? Forget that! Why invest time in making a pen yourself when you could just buy a plastic Bic, and then throw it in the trash when it ran dry?

Fully caffeinated and righteous in his hatred, Daniel rejected the gig. To his amusement, the Gen Z editor had earlier refused to communicate in any medium other than texting, so Daniel lingered over crafting his reply.

dude ChatGPT is garbage srsly. so sus. i’d rather break my own leg than shill for that shit. what’s wrong with you touch grass or something

Delighted with his imitation of Gen Z style, Daniel waited for the reply he guessed would come in seconds. It did.

okay, daniel, i get it. you don’t like ChatGPT. just to be clear, i wasn’t asking you to shill for anything. there would have been room for critique. also i don’t know if you can afford to be this precious with job offers. imo you haven’t done anything worth talking about since the 90s

The send-off landed deep in Daniel’s gut, where it churned alongside the Folgers and Slim Jims he’d had for breakfast. He couldn’t deny it was true. His writing since the twentieth century had been underbaked. He blamed blogging in the mid-2000s and Twitter after that––diversions that became distractions that became an inability to finish anything more than 500 words long. Splitting up with Alice hadn’t helped. He needed her to counterbalance his bad impulses, to call bullshit on him when he got spooked by a big project he’d been excited about days before. “Get it together, Daniel,” she’d say to him. “You’re a reporter. You found the story. Now report it.” He’d told her once that her sweet balanced out his sour, like vermouth in a martini. She’d laughed, kissed him, and said, “Darling heart, if our relationship is a martini, there’s no sweet in it. There’s sour and there’s bitter and that’s it. It shouldn’t taste any good, but for some reason I can’t stop drinking it.”

---

Daniel tried to channel Alice and drag his mind back to his book idea––the one about underground publishing in New York. He thought of another old friend to call, but when he rang and she didn’t pick up, he left what he knew was a less-than-convincing voice mail. His belief that he could get it done was gone, and she’d hear its absence. Disgusted with himself, he threw his phone on the floor and walked over to his kitchen table, where his laptop waited for him. He had, he remembered, some important Googling to do.

So far as Daniel could tell after three hours of research, the Iraqi city of Basra (which he barely remembered reading about during the second Bush administration) had been occupied by Safavid rulers several times, the last one being in the 1600s. Their dynasty was overthrown a few decades later, and he could find no evidence of them somehow coming back to occupy Basra in the 2000s, when Armand would have been able to visit and learn how to make his pen. Could he have made it up? That seemed unlike him, at least with things he cared about. His defense of it had been painfully sincere. Maybe it was part of the role playing––from the start, he’d insisted that Daniel accept him as older. More likely, he decided, there was some obscure Safavid return that nobody wrote about (online, at least, and in English) or called by that name, and Armand was thinking of that. A third possibility stirred in a deep corner of his mind, so far from his conscious thought that it didn’t cohere into words. But then it stilled, and he moved on.

At 3:00 pm he poured himself a bowl of cereal and sat down to eat it on the couch, just to get his eyeballs away from a screen. It was a cold day for San Francisco, and chilly air from the bay blew in through an open window to play at the nape of his neck. He shivered. He thought about Armand’s trunk, and the things he’d found inside it––particularly the plate, with its shiny gold surface that seemed to carry the warmth of the sun. In the light of the candle it had seemed to emit its own heat. He remembered the incisions on it, and the interlacing curlicues that stretched across it like vines. They were so elaborate and seemingly infinite that he could imagine someone believing they’d been carved by the hand of God. The thought surprised him, but there it was. The carvings on the plate reminded him of the ones on the ball, which crowded over each other in the same hypnotic way.

Daniel put his spoon down in his bowl and sighed. He had to look it up. So he trudged back to his laptop on the kitchen table and searched for pictures of gold plates and balls that matched the ones he’d seen. It took forever, since Google assumed he was looking for gold plates and balls that he could buy. “Fuck you, algorithm,” he muttered. Eventually he searched the digital catalogs of museums and found a handful of plates that fit the images in his memory. They were brass rather than gold, but they had the same patina and general design. A few were old––ridiculously old, from the 1400s. They’d all been made in Venice. He zoomed in to the images as far as the screen would let him, following the paths of the never-ending whorls.

His phone buzzed suddenly from its place on the floor across the room, where he’d thrown it. Thinking that Armand had somehow found his phone number, he jumped out of his chair and hustled across the room to where the black rectangle was jerking helplessly, like a beetle on its back. He lunged at it and brought it up to his face. It wasn’t a message from Armand, but a text from the friend he’s called earlier.

hey daniel, it’s good to hear from you. don’t you know that no one under eighty uses phones for talking any more? j/k. anyway, it’s been a million years. how’re things with alice? and writing? I don’t think the project you mentioned is right for me. i had a career change decades ago…got tired of making no money in publishing and went to business school. I’m not saying what we used to do was crap, it was great at the time, but…things have changed, you know?. i don’t want to dwell on the past. i don’t have the time! i’m insanely close to selling my start-up concept to this guy at OpenAI…

Daniel stopped reading and, for the second time that day, threw his phone across the room.

---

A week passed, but only in the sense that the sun came up in the morning, went down, and came up again. Daniel wrote nothing and did about as much. He read everything he could find on the history of brass engraving, Renaissance Venice, and Safavid Iraq. At night, he walked to the marina after midnight, taking his usual route and pausing at the place where Armand had found him. He was never there. One Saturday, as Daniel sat on his bench and watched two seagulls fight over a scrap of food, he decided he needed to be in the room again, even if the chance of meeting Armand there was close to zero. Even without Armand, he could look at the plate and the ball again, and watch the way they glowed in the candlelight. He could practice using the qalam. And he could stare at the stars through the window until the sun ruined them by coming back.

Coming up the stairs in the dark this time, he was relieved to slide his phone into the locked box. He wanted a break from its buzzing and chirping, but most of all from the sense that there was something happening in it that he was missing, and that it was his duty to scroll endlessly to find.

Inside the room, there was a second candle in a stand next to the old one, but no note from Armand. Daniel made a light for himself and perked up when it shone on the burgundy trunk in the corner. Sitting on the floor next to it, he eased open the lid, which creaked on its hinges, and removed the plate and the ball. As he studied them, he thought about his dream. He’d put off reckoning with it until now because it scared him––not the kink itself, but his hunger for it. Armand had drunk his blood, and he’d drunk Armand’s. And yet it had been the most natural thing in the world, and the most desirable. He’d never fantasized about, let alone done anything like that before, not even during his most deranged benders in the 70s. So why did it feel like what he’d wanted for years?

The candle’s flame sputtered in the path of his breath, and he shielded it to help it burn again. His head dropped to one side as he watched the light dance on the surface of the plate. His eyelids drooped. In his mind’s eye another vision came to him, even more like a memory than a dream this time.

He was decades younger, as before, and sitting on the edge of a bed in another candlelit room. He was wearing no clothes. Armand stood before him in a crisp dress shirt, open at the chest, and creased pants, with a wild expression on his face. He approached Daniel and held a hand to his cheek. “Green light,” he said sweetly, rubbing his thumb across Daniel’s lips. Daniel opened his mouth to receive the thumb and draw it inside, sliding a hand down his own cock as he did so. “Red light,” snapped Armand, and Daniel drew his hand away obediently. But Armand continued to tempt him, kissing him on the mouth and then crouching at his feet. He seized Daniel’s right nipple with his teeth, alternated between biting and sucking it. “Green light.” Daniel palmed himself again, and Armand moved to his other nipple. Then, too quickly––

“Red light.”

Armand rose and unbuttoned his shirt, then took off his pants. Daniel ached just looking at him.

“Green light.”

Daniel’s hand flew to his cock and stroked.

“No, beloved, you must show restraint. Red light.”

“Maître.” He was squirming. “I don’t like this game.”

“That’s odd. The last time we played it, you demanded that we do it again. You told me to make sure we finished even if you objected.” As he said it he ran a cool hand down one of Daniel’s thighs, across his belly and down the other leg, pointedly avoiding his cock.

“Green light.”

Daniel pulled desperately. “I don’t remember that. You’re lying.”

“I don’t lie to you, ever. I give you what you need. Red light.”

He sat at Daniel’s side, gazing innocently into his eyes before sitting on his lap and licking a wet path with his tongue from Daniel’s ear lobe to his collar bone.

“Like this. Green light.”

Armand’s hand clamped down on top of Daniel’s where he’d resumed stroking. The doubled force caught him by surprise and he dared to hope. Maybe…

“But also like this. Red light.”

He took his hand away. “When I was a boy in Venice we used to call this Fast Horse / No Horse. Otherwise it hasn’t changed.”

Daniel struggled to breathe on the edge of his orgasm. Tears stood at the edges of his eyes. Armand saw them and kissed them, one after the other. “Soon, my angel.” Then he tilted his head, paused to release his teeth, and bit down on Daniel’s neck.

The outflow of blood and the rhythmic sucking of Armand's mouth were merciful distractions––a different kind of release, if not the one Daniel had been reaching for. He floated outside of himself, shivering with pleasure as his essence surged out of his body and entered Armand’s. Minutes passed of quiet, devastating surrender. Then the pleasure faltered; it soured into pain, and Daniel nearly fainted. He was taking too much.

Armand could feel the change and threw his head back, eyes shining and impossibly bright. He staggered backwards a few steps, as if drunk, and struggled to catch his breath. Daniel had never seen anything so beautiful, so obscene. The throb between his legs came rushing back to him.

“Maître. Oh God, please…”

He was still waiting for the green light. But Armand only smiled––the smile of a devil who has fooled a human. He kissed Daniel on the forehead and then backed out of the room, beaming as he went.

“No!” Daniel shouted. “It’s not fair, Armand! I obeyed! ARMAND!”

The memory––for that was what it was––crashed down around Daniel in 2022 as the door to the room flew open. He was still on the floor, sitting next to the trunk. A figure swept in out of the darkness and pulled him to his feet, murmuring into his ear.

“I’m here, Daniel. You summoned me after all. I was wrong to do that then, I see it now. Will you let me repay you?”

Notes:

In the first draft, I found myself writing the sentence, "Daniel couldn't stop thinking about Armand's chest," and laughed myself out of my chair. So I changed every instance of "chest" to "trunk." Technically, it's a cassone, but "Daniel couldn't stop thinking about Armand's cassone" is even funnier. So for now, it's a trunk. For the record, Daniel can't stop thinking about any of them.

Chapter 5

Summary:

“Is it so impossible that one person could hear the thoughts of another? You pick up a block of plastic, tap it, and hear a voice from a thousand miles away. That is nothing to you. Could thoughts not travel through air, as sound waves do, and into living receivers?”

“Yeah, well, I think scientists would’ve figured it out by now if they did.”

“That is what people said about gravity. About vaccination, evolution, electricity.”

“Sure. Everything’s impossible until it’s not. But that’s the easiest thing for me to accept on a list that keeps on going. Maybe, maybe, I can believe that you stumbled across an ability to read minds one day. But my memories, Armand. I knew you in the 70s. We fucked each other…I don’t even know yet how many times. And then I forgot about it for, I dunno, forty years, until I saw you again two weeks ago and started remembering...This is some deeply disturbing shit, and you need to explain.”

Armand pays back a debt and starts to answer Daniel's questions, but only some of them. He explains why he created the room and what the objects in it mean to him.

Daniel struggled with the four impossibilities that had become true. First, that he'd known Armand in the 70s, and was only now remembering it. Second, that Armand had not aged between the 70s and 2022. Third, that they’d exchanged blood. And fourth, that Armand could sense his thoughts, to the point that he could tell Daniel was recovering his memories from decades before. This was clear from the way Armand was looking at Daniel, apology written into his face, the way his fingers soothed the skin on the back of Daniel’s neck, and his resolve to give the satisfaction he’d withheld before. They stood face to face, Armand refusing to withdraw his hand.

“What do you need? Everything I can give and do is yours.”

“I need for all of this to make sense,” Daniel shouted. “But it’s not going to, because it can’t. I’m crazy, and you’re crazy, and every time I see you, it gets worse. I can’t stay away from this goddamn room. My memory has holes in it. You’re some kind of evil mastermind who never gets older. You drank my blood like it was root beer. I should be running out the door right now, but all I can do is stand here and hope you’ll fuck me until the world ends.”

An expression Daniel couldn’t identify moved across Armand’s face. He looked relieved, but stricken. He brought their faces together to reassure him, seizing one of Daniel’s lips between his two. Then he pulled their hips together. There was no foreplay this time. They’d done enough of that in 1973.

With a glance so fast Daniel could barely see it, Armand put out the candle burning by the trunk. With a second slip of his eyes, he lit the unused one on the desk. But Daniel had no time to puzzle over this small miracle, because in another lightning movement, Armand had him lying on the bed on his left side and was pulling the two layers of fabric off his hips, denim and then cotton, before dragging down his own. This time Daniel could tell where he kept the lube: in a niche in the bed’s side rail. It was on Armand’s fingers almost before he’d resettled his body behind Daniel and propped himself up on his left arm, leaving his right free. The fingers of his right hand nudged Daniel open before falling into a rhythm of advance and withdrawal.

When Daniel was nine years old, his parents had sent him to a neighbor’s house on the other side of Modesto for piano lessons. Having no talent for the instrument, he hated it, and asked––whined, really––to stop after the first day. But his parents insisted on five lessons before they let Daniel give up. The only part of each visit he enjoyed was using the metronome, which the teacher told him would show how fast he had to play. On the lowest setting, the clicks were soothing, as if the beat were in no hurry to get to its destination. At the highest, they were so frenzied they made Daniel’s heart beat faster. Whenever the teacher left him alone, he grabbed the triangular box off the piano and advanced it, setting by setting, from slowest to fastest, his pulse rising with each increase. The odd Italian words on the box’s instructions amused him so much he memorized them, from grave to presto.

As Armand set a tempo with his fingers, a word surfaced in Daniel’s thoughts: grave. So gentle, so slow. But before long he’d doubled the beat, and Daniel thought of the next setting: lento. Armand’s precision was unreal. He was playing music, and his instrument was Daniel’s body.

At largo, Armand replaced his fingers with his cock and held the tempo without missing a beat. Daniel exhaled out of his nose and mouth to distract from the pain, almost forgetting to breathe in again afterward. “Do you remember the fountain?” The words dropped into Daniel’s ear from above. “We’ll make it now.” He tried to remember, but Armand moved on to adagio, and there was no space in Daniel’s mind or body for anything but what he was receiving.

In a feat of self-control, Armand was increasing the rate, but not the pace, of his movements, spending as much time on each new tempo as he had on the last. The consistency of it would have been mechanical in anyone else; in him, it was divine, like the steady motion of a planet around a star. If he felt strain from denying his own need, he did not show it through his body, which he synchronized with Daniel’s.

Andante. Armand slipped his right hand over Daniel’s hip to reach his cock, then timed his grasp and release in front to match the driving force behind. Cock behind and hand in front slid into Daniel, retreated, and returned, in one fluid sweep.

Moderato. Daniel stopped perceiving Armand’s limbs around him, and his cock inside him, as exterior to his own body. The two of them became one organism, flexing to satisfy itself.

Allegro. Armand shifted his weight on top of Daniel to add force. He shifted his angle, too, to reach Daniel’s prostate. He knew he’d found it when Daniel clutched at the bedspread with his fist.

Vivace. Through his delirium, Daniel heard an inhuman wail vibrating close to him. It was his own voice. Behind and above him, though Daniel could not see it, the effort finally showed itself in beads of blood-red sweat on Armand’s forehead, where his black curls fell across his face.

Presto. With one last double stroke in front and behind, Armand released what he had so diligently held back. Daniel came at the same moment, and the effect was of a spray of liquid starting in the first man’s body, entering the other’s, and then streaming out again in one unbroken jet.

The fountain.*

––––––––––––––––––––––

The world didn't end for Daniel, but it softened. He watched, sitting in bed with his back against the headboard, as Armand got up to wash his hands. The edges of things seemed permeable now––the outline of Armand’s body, for example. It seemed to merge with the shape of the desk, to admit its matter into its own form in a circuitous flow. The globes of his shoulders were inseparable from the basin and the candle, and even from the candlelight itself. The world outside the room was nothing compared to the sight of Armand, dressed now below the waist but shirtless, pouring water from the pitcher into the basin and moving his hands inside it.

“This used to be normal,” he said. “Every bedroom had one of these, from the richest home to the poorest. It was inconvenient, but I miss the ritual. Especially late at night, after…”

He turned to face Daniel and drew a wet hand through his hair to dry it. Droplets reflected the candlelight as they fell. He returned to the bed to sit by Daniel.

“Armand…I have some questions.”

“I see.”

“The answers don’t seem as important now as they did half an hour ago, but I need them if I’m going to leave this room as a halfway sane human being. First: when you came in here, you could tell I was thinking about Red Light / Green Light. You apologized for doing something I’d only remembered. Two weeks ago, you heard me when I thought about wanting to see your face. So how. In the goddamn hell. Are you reading my mind?”

Armand smiled. It was the first time Daniel could remember seeing him do it.

“Is it so impossible that one person could hear the thoughts of another? You pick up a block of plastic, tap it, and hear a voice from a thousand miles away. That is nothing to you. Could thoughts not travel through air, as sound waves do, and into living receivers?”

“Yeah, well, I think scientists would’ve figured it out by now if they did.”

“That is what people said about gravity. About vaccination, evolution, electricity.”

“Sure. Everything’s impossible until it’s not. But that’s the easiest thing for me to accept on a list that keeps on going. Maybe, maybe, I can believe that you stumbled across an ability to read minds one day. But my memories, Armand. I knew you in the 70s. We fucked each other…I don’t even know yet how many times. And then I forgot about it for, I dunno, forty years, until I saw you again two weeks ago and started remembering. This is not Parkinson’s, which I admit I have. This is not undiagnosed Alzheimer’s. This is some deeply disturbing shit, and you need to explain.”

Armand moved closer to the center of the bed to reach for Daniel’s hand. Daniel noticed how completely the touch disarmed him.

“It is disturbing, and I’m sorry. It’s too much to take in all at once. That’s why I can’t tell you everything just yet. There are parts I can explain now, and others that will have to wait until you’ve had time to adjust. But yes, we met in 1973, here in San Francisco.”

“The man with the hat on the corner, and then in the alley. That was you.”

“Yes. I found what I was looking for that evening, and you…you were curious. At first it was sexual, but it grew into more than that. You captivated me. I flatter myself to think I captivated you. I stopped seeing my companion. You and I lived together, traveled together to Europe. For seven years.”

Daniel covered his face with his right hand and massaged his eyes. “Jesus,” he whispered.

“I can’t say there weren’t disagreements. There was always volatility, and we quarreled. But I…” He squeezed Daniel’s free hand. “I cherished you.”

“If you cherished me,” Daniel asked flatly. “Then why did you make me forget you existed?”

Armand’s gaze fell, and he took back his hand. “In our seventh year, you demanded something from me that would have hurt you. Never mind for now what it was; in a way, it does not matter. You thought this thing would make you happy, but I knew it would bring only misery. In your anger at my denial you threatened to end your life, but still I refused. Eventually I decided that the best way to protect you from yourself was to remove all traces of me from your memory, and I did. The process is similar to perceiving a thought.”

“Like hell it is. One is listening, and one is erasing.”

His face hardened. “I could not prevent it. It broke my heart, but it was necessary. Where I erred, I suppose, was in yielding to the loneliness of the next forty years without you. I followed you, sometimes, to reassure myself you were doing well, first with Alice, then your second wife. But the pain of separation became unbearable this summer. To dull it I started bringing boys to this room who reminded me of you…some who had your hair, or your smile, some who echoed the timbre of your voice. Then you came back to San Francisco. I found you at the marina, and I couldn’t help myself. I thought that if I brought you to this room, you might come to remember me. And now here we are.”

Daniel turned his head to look at him. “That is…that is quite a story. I shouldn’t believe it, even though I want to. If I were interviewing you I’d be chewing you out for wasting my time with lies.”

“My feelings for you are not lies, Daniel.”

Armand looked back at him with huge, unblinking eyes. The intensity of them made Daniel look away. When he spoke again, he stared at the candle.

“Another question.”

“Yes.”

“The aging problem. In my memories you look exactly like you do now. How do you explain that?”

“There is a reason. One I can’t tell you now, but will in time.

“Right. So for now, you expect me to believe that you found the fountain of youth at the same time you figured out how to read minds.”

“Two weeks ago, I asked you to accept me as older than you. This was to prepare you for it. I ask you now to accept that I am older than you can imagine, and to give yourself and me the grace of delayed judgement.”

“Okay, okay. I accept it. I feel too good to do anything else.”

Silence fell over the room again, more comfortable this time. When the candle sputtered a minute later, Daniel spoke up.

“This room. It’s doing a number on me. I don’t know why, but it’s like a different dimension.”

Armand smiled again. “I’m glad you feel that way. That was my hope. It took me years to find a building like this…built only a year after the earthquake, no plumbing, no electricity. I’d become obsessed with the trappings of modern living––motorcycles and airplanes and cellular telephones, but also silly things, like microwaves and blenders and junk food. I once spent three sleepless weeks building a robot dog; afterward I had every flavor of Oreo cookie for sale in every country shipped to my flat, so I could taste the full variety. These manic projects wasted my time and alienated my friends. Then iPads were introduced, and I found it impossible to live without the cool aluminium under my fingertips. I became a servant of the thing, incapable of working and thinking for myself, But I could not retreat from technology; my business required it. So I set out to make for myself a room in which I could detach from the devices and recover my lost soul.

“The tragedy of living for as long as I have is that you leave behind pieces of yourself as you go. You must do it, in order to move forward. Think of the decades of memories a person carries with them. The sound of a mother singing above a bassinet; fingerpainting in school; petting a childhood cat; the touch of a lover’s lips. All of them precious, formative moments. Take those memories and sink them five centuries into the past. Heap on top of them new experiences, just as precious and formative, that crowd the view back into childhood, and continually disappear themselves. You have to salvage what you can. I’ve done this by keeping with me objects that remind me of my past, in a room that blocks out the present.”

“Your trunk in the corner,” Daniel spoke up. “With the plate and the ball and the box inside.”

“My cassone, yes. They were common enough in Italy long ago, though often grander than mine. When I used it as a boy it was already a hundred years old. Today, it is my oldest possession. The plate is the next oldest, and then the ball. The two halves of the sphere come apart, and you burn incense inside. Marius used to…” his voice faltered. “I lived in a fine household once, in Venice. The man whose bed I shared kept the orb burning next to us, late into the night. I loved it so much that he gave it to me as a gift. The box has a similar tale, tied to another man and another time.”

“The carvings on the ball and the plate. Are they the same?”

“You have a good eye. They are the same. When I lived in Venice, the color of my skin inspired comment––much of it hurtful. Strangers in the street called, ‘Look at the Saracen!’ and jostled or grabbed. I knew this word from my study of art, but only as a term for the brassworkers whose wares filled the city’s markets. I deduced that Venetians used ‘Saracen’ for anyone they saw as Muslim, whether from Egypt or India, as well as for the engravers of the treasures they prized. Their technique, damascene, decorates the plate and the ball. The fact kindled pride in me, and the next time a Venetian cried ‘Saracen!’, I stood my ground. ‘Do Saracens not make the goblets in the doge’s palace,’ I asked, “and the bracelets the dogaressa clasps to her wrist? If Saracen craft suits them, I am as fit to walk this street as anyone.’ In this way, I learned self-respect. The plate and the ball are my tie to it.”

The weight of what he’d said hung in the air. Then he laughed. “I heard myself through your ears just now,” Armand said. “You’re right; I do sound old-fashioned. It’s not my fault. I learned how to speak English in the 1860s.”

Daniel opened his mouth to ask, then gave up. He was getting sleepy. He slid further under the sheet, enjoying the warmth of Armand's body close to his. “Tomorrow night you can tell me about the box,” he said drowsily. “And the desk, and the table, and the chairs. Those must be really old, too.”

“I can’t see you tomorrow night, Daniel. Or after that. I’m flying to Dubai tomorrow.”

Daniel sat up. “What?”

“I have a home there, and business to oversee. I need to stay for six weeks.”

“Oh, really. Do you have a––God, what did you call it––companion. Do you have a companion in Dubai, too?”

“Yes. His name is Louis.”

“So you’re leaving me to go to him.”

“No, I am not. My life is complicated. Its complexity does not cancel out my concern for you. I have duties and alliances around the world that require tending, just as I have them here in San Francisco. I’m sure you have obligations of your own.”

Daniel thought of the family members not speaking to him and the friends not returning his calls. “Uh, sure. Obligations.” He tried to mask his disappointment, then remembered Armand could read his mind.

“I will not forget you,” Armand said, turning to face him. “I tried for four decades to do that, and failed. You are in my thoughts always, and in my breath and blood. You asked, in that memory of yours, what I saw when I looked at you. I know you are wondering the same thing now. The answer remains the same as it has always been: I see a sweet and fascinating boy whose brilliance illuminates my days. That has not changed for me, and never will.”

Armand reached out an arm, and Daniel found himself falling forward into it. He laid down his head in the hollow under Armand’s collarbone, just above the swell of his chest. And he let himself believe.

Notes:

*“You'll see I ride him and stroke him with one artful rhythm, and you'll behold a sculpture of flesh that becomes a fountain, as what I pump into him comes forth from him in my hand."

A minor character says this to Marius in The Vampire Armand about Amadeo. He dies before he can do it (which is good––consent doesn’t seem to be part of the scenario). I’m imagining that Amadeo/Armand absorbed the concept and, over the next few centuries, tried it out for himself.

Iambic pentameter again this time. What the f. Also, the perfect tense of “to lay down,” which took a minute.

Daniel won’t get to hear about the box, so if you’re wondering, it’s from Lestat. It wasn’t a present, though. Armand stole it.