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His home is everywhere his children are, yet returning to John holds an enormity of emotions he feels nowhere else in the Project. He can show many of the same facets of himself in the company of Jacob and Faith, but in John’s company he begins reclaiming slivers of self-expression left crushed against a tree in Georgia amid crumpled steel bathed in blood. In privacy with John, he smiles more readily and he moves sooner and more freely.
He marvels to have a body to take into his arms, to take, and to take into his own. Handfuls of flesh and skin passing beneath his hands weave themselves into their secret, shared history – a happier secret than driving through the Georgia night dissecting the anatomy of murder to make sure the body in the trunk won’t be traced back to John and silences surrounding other difficult intersections since.
That the veins enlivening that body, flesh, and skin flow with his selfsame blood passes from taboo to ordinary fact.
His Faith sympathized with his terrible history and listened to his nightmares. John shares both, and that is both easier and harder. Easier in that they coexist in perfect understanding. Harder in that the pain saturates them equally with no avenue for escape.
Trees fall in Holland Valley, their trunks split for the raising of the ranch on the ground upon which they once grew. John continuously pours over the blueprints in the grips of his perfectionism, a healthy outlet for his excess energies. The ranch will be another costume he wears, a place to host the businesspeople whose property they intend to acquire, a tool they’ve sorely lacked. John loathes each of his marks so viciously Joseph harbors no concern he’s building an altar to vanity. Distance from the bottomless greed of the leisure class has been no remedy for his hatred, only circumscribed his hobby of visiting calculated punishments on the objects of his keenest ire.
His unbridled enthusiasm for the airstrip and hanger stands in contrast, his bottomless capacity to wax on aircraft still arresting after months of Joseph’s willing captivity. He better grasps the joy of weightlessness, of escape into the sky. The digressions about the ordinance the machines can carry unsubtly reminds him of John’s unbridled capacity for harm, but the Project only benefits from embracing a skyborne arm of security. He can’t criticize him when he spends nights maintaining his own pistols and AR-C and while Jacob builds their army. He accepts the absolute vacancy of interest in just war doctrine.
Their life has every opportunity to settle into harmony.
John keeps pushing boundaries.
Every aspect of John’s life returns to control. His fastidiousness. His choice to study law. His skill at amassing and utilizing blackmail. The crescendo and calculated expenditures of his urge. His attempts to get more access to Joseph’s schedule and probing questions about exactly which aspects of the Project absolutely require his personal attention. His outsized concern for who Joseph has spoken to. His dogged hints Joseph could break his abstinence from smartphones, when Joseph has no intention of considering the adoption of what would amount to a digital leash, however equally it might heighten his influence on John.
John relents on this last point when Joseph wonders aloud if John’s work might be performed without his – never mind that he’s well aware it can’t be.
While elements of his behavior suggest patterns that might under other circumstances be alarming, Joseph understands John treats him the way John himself would like to be treated. He would enjoy being incessantly checked in upon. He would answer for his whereabouts as often as Joseph wished to inquire in whatever detail he prescribed. If John were utterly subjugated, he would no longer wheedle.
Unfortunately, beyond the concerning ethical aspects of the idea, it would demand an enormous amount of time. Their purpose still requires John stand independent. The full devotion that might satisfy John would be a selfish abdication of his charge as prophet and shepherd. John must allocate proportionate time between his roles as lawyer and leader.
He clings tenaciously to the greater portion of happy times no matter that John tests his boundaries and unsubtly attempts to undermine his inseparable attachment to others. Shouting his name, spent and laughing, asleep in his arms, chatting hours about nothing, hiking Montana’s God bestowed beauty, showing special affection toward him at family dinners where there are no secrets at all, affirming his belief there is a coming world where they will flourish–
What a thing for this man to be his, as if no fanged and wounding creature lived within him in the moments of joy in between strobing red warning lights.
*****
John motivates a family near the construction to turn their property over to him, by which mechanism Joseph hasn’t asked. The age and rural features of the house — linoleum kitchen floor, patterned wallpaper, slat closet doors, and old wall hung regulator clock with a still pendulum — have an overfamiliar feeling of their childhood home and childhood nightmares chased to the edges of Joseph’s awareness when at the end of their day John moves on him, insistent on getting him between his legs and being held the rest of the evening.
John grows hard again before they sleep, and while Joseph doesn’t, he spends a while pleasuring him with mouth.
They are up before sunrise, as is both their habit, eating together and returning to the bedroom to dress with the dawn light slanting low through the window.
Joseph pulls his shirt on, pushing the buttons through their holes in succession.
“I’ll be up at the Veterans Center this week and into the next.”
Sat at the edge of the low country style bed, John stops dressing with one boot just on, setting the other back on the floor to sit up straight.
“You didn’t say.”
Joseph needs no more than the tinge of accusation coloring John’s voice to see this could go several ways, more than one of them being a conflict.
He searches for a reply difficult for John to instigate from.
“I’m letting you know.”
Threading the needle between I’m letting you know, now and This is me letting you know leaves the fact bare of easy targets.
John retreats to his own calculations as he finishes up with his shoes. Joseph knows his nature: John feels poorly but has yet to invent the least generous reason why.
He seizes on something.
“It’s miles further off than anywhere else.”
“You have no end to your own work here in Holland Valley.”
“And that’s the reason I’d like to hear you’re anywhere but the Veterans Center.”
Joseph meets John’s accusing tone with equanimity.
“We’ve discussed my expectations. There’s no reason to be childish.”
It surprises him John would choose to complain over his intention to seek the company of their older brother. Of all the varieties of petulance John had manifested, he’s never challenged Joseph’s right to Jacob’s company.
They share an uncompanionable silence as he finishes dressing, puts his hair up, and slides his glasses on. He heads into the living room, retrieving the keys of his truck off the coffee table with John trailing after him.
“What, you’re not saying goodbye?”
Pure paranoia. Nothing about pocketing his keys necessitates a brisk exit, as heavy as he suddenly feels and as much as he might prefer one.
He turns to his wary brother, stepping in to gently kiss him. John obliges so sweetly that for the time they share their mouths Joseph could imagine he isn’t on the precipice of an episode. John’s scent rouses his senses, but he must decline the sudden erotic impulse rising in him with proximity and touch.
He squeezes John’s hand. He parts from him.
“I’ll call you when I know my next plans.”
“Not tonight, then,” John says.
He supposes if permitted John would attempt to haggle him down to a definite time that’s neither tonight nor as long as they would be out of contact otherwise. It would be an enormous waste of both their time.
“When I know my next plans,” he dictates without malice but inarguably, holding John’s beseeching gaze until he feels he has imparted the finality of his decision.
He turns from him.
A hand seizes his wrist, the leather bracelet digging into his skin with the pressure. He stops where he stands and declines to react, turning his gaze to a man who himself looks surprised he moved.
He gentles his voice.
“How do you think it would end, John? I’m not so slight you can put me into a wall.”
John immediately frees him as if he discovered his hand on a hot iron.
Joseph permits him to cast around for words until John falls silent on his own:
“I’m sorry. I didn’t– I wasn’t going to. That’s not–...”
An enormous ache weighs in Joseph’s chest.
As abruptly as this they are back to the night when they first kissed. The only thing that has changed is that John would never have dared to put hands on him before.
Looking sympathetically at his rash little brother, he sways a step in, pulling his forehead to his, bestowing forgiveness and speaking near him.
“I don’t want to see you injure yourself provoking an altercation you can’t finish.”
There is no threat in that truth.
He hears John’s throat work to swallow.
He long ago made his peace with the fact John can be unpredictably dangerous and never intends to inflict more harm upon John than he would reasonably have to to defend himself. All the same, it’s a total abdication of good judgement for John to detain someone he has seen kill and so intimately knows exceeds him in strength.
He’s at risk of failing to exercise judgement with someone else who won’t forego retaliation.
“If we are not discerning in regard to ourselves, we will be judged. Only God is lawgiver and judge. Only God can save and can destroy. I don’t judge you, John, but taking your sins upon myself to spare you their consequences is not among my gifts. Even the Son who reconciled us to God left us free to choose salvation or suffering. Your Greed compels you to seize when it is patience that bears fruit. All these things are known to you.”
“I don’t feel like I’m choosing this.”
“I’m the one who chose for us something we were not ready for.”
John’s eyes widen to reveal frightened whites. He begins to shift his weight from foot to foot, as if at any moment he might explode into motion, pacing, or attacking, or taking flight.
“No. No, no, no. No. NO.”
His heel thuds sharply off the kicked floor.
He might be better off with an appropriate grasp of that word. Not, however, shouting it in a fit when he feels his grasp slipping.
Joseph holds up a placating hand without approaching closer, knowing he cannot reward an outburst with comfort.
“Take control of yourself.”
Though all angles and tension, John makes himself still.
“How do I fix this?”
“I do.”
While Christ had a disciple beloved above all others, he submitted himself to God’s calling. Joseph hasn’t even been asked to die. On the contrary, he has already made his sacrifice, and he has been promised a long life in this world.
He thinks of his foreboding vision of John at some obscure crossroads left vulnerable to his mortality.
He has believed the path they’ve walked together might mend and spare his little brother, but for partnership to heal John, it requires a degree of devotion neither of them can presently afford if they mean to see Eden.
In that place he will make himself present. He will work through John’s fears with him instead of constantly leaving him to dwell alone on them. They will not conduct themselves in secrecy, for slanderous mouths will be silent beneath the earth, and so John will not be forced to measure Joseph’s time in direct competition with time spent with others.
Eden has yet to arrive.
It must be conducted like putting a joint back into socket, done all at once.
“I think it’s best that until the passing of this present world you live as a brother to me in the way Faith and Jacob are my siblings. I will go to lengths to show you it isn’t because I love you less. I love you too much to watch you come apart. I want the same thing I always have: to protect you.”
John’s glasses clatter to the floor as he grabs up two handfuls of hair, dragging his head down as he hisses in air through clenched teeth. He kicks viciously at the ground. He drops his arms, raising his head, distress riddling his expression, his eyes wet.
“I can’t. Go back.” His voice rises in temperature. “If you were ever going to leave me alone, why would you kiss me?”
The pain Joseph feels standing before his distress could cripple him with its enormity. It feels larger than his body as if his bones might shatter, splintering outward through his skin; at the same time, it seems a vast and suffocating weight contracting in his chest.
—but pain has been a familiar companion since he was only a child. For him, and for John, too.
“I’ll never leave you. I am frightened you’ll drink, or find pills, or lose yourself in your violence. I have to believe we’ve been together for our highest good, to reveal to me what the Garden could be like for us. This world is evil. It tempts you with wicked thoughts with or without my body and yours in communion. The Great Collapse draws nearer by the day. We must focus everything on ushering in the Reaping. Could you do that for me, John? Fix your purpose to this thing, knowing I love you?”
John seizes up with helplessness his body strains against, flinching in resistance, his panicked breathing shallow. His wide eyes range over Joseph’s face.
Joseph tastes the cruelty of coercing him into this position no matter if it's words alone closing their shackles on him. A deadbolt slides into place, John in transparent horror of his own mouth:
“Yes.”
Joseph pulls him into an embrace, not forehead against forehead but arms enwrapping his shoulders. John surrenders his body to a slump like he did so many years ago in the office of the facade called John Duncan. His heart cries out to the defeated body in his arms. The fear within himself rears ever more terrible as he conjures utterly human visions of finding John in his cabin with his skull blown open by his own pistol, the wonders and horrors of his mind a vast, dried-crimson spray.
Fierce command possesses his usually mild voice:
“If you believe you are going to harm yourself, you will seek me out and harm me instead.”
John whispers his torturously reluctant Yes.
*****
Jacob tracks Joseph’s shoe prints across the forest floor, a practiced stalker of men. He finds him not so far off from his cabin, seated up on a rock, legs dangling off the side. The slouched shoulders of his bare upper body tell a miserable story of defeat.
He doesn’t look toward Jacob. He knows the sound of his tread.
“It might be more beneficial to me to focus your attention on John.”
“No reason to choose,” Jacob says, hearing what Joseph’s really saying: he doesn’t think he deserves consolation.
He climbs up onto the boulder some glacier dumped here unimaginable years ago. He drops his ass down next to him, dangling his own legs over. He feels abstractly sorry for him in that way where he knows somewhere else his own emotions must be happening though his conscious mind holds nothing more than the empty blankness of perpetual dissociation.
Joseph stares off a while, but there’s no hesitation in his voice when he starts talking.
“He’ll never be well. There are days I don’t think he wants to be. There are people in our growing family full of light and love, ready to help their neighbors and their neighbors them because of the freedom he’s gifted them with. I see his good works and give thanks to God for his gifts. We are all safer, can each trust one another, because he keeps the snakes from our garden.” He shakes his head. “He’s built all of this, selflessly, giving over all his worldly goods to us. There is not one thing he would keep for himself if asked. How is it I’m helpless to rescue him?”
“You stuck your hand in a bramble bush to haul him out and it got torn up. Truth may be the thorns aren’t something he’s stuck in. They’re who he is.”
“I struggle to believe he can’t make more of an effort. It took time to trust Faith again, but I understood she was only just no longer a child and had never been taught self-discipline. John is a man, and he has. But I see the part of him that’s trying. His thorns may still be pruned.”
Jacob thinks of Faith.
He picked up her trail as she hitchhiked across the county, ordinary folks weighing giving up information on a sweet young woman against putting themself on his bad side. He only had to pressure one.
He put his hand on the closing, exterior gas station bathroom door and threw his weight against her so the wall took the breath out of her before she could scream, kicking the door closed behind him. Her weightless little body came right off the floor, his hand clamped over her mouth while she kicked at his shins. Her fight vanished upon recognition. She moaned like a wounded animal and started to sob. Still holding her he told her he wasn’t here to kill her. Joseph wanted her to come home.
He set her loose and let her cry until he felt certain she wouldn’t start screaming on the way back to the truck, aware all the time that standing in a couple feet of a bathroom with a man twice her size wasn’t even a little bit comforting, her tremor wracked body an unsubtle affirmation.
He did let her pee.
When she opened the door and stepped onto the parking lot she was red around the eyes but climbed up into the truck with a smile. She’d realized in the time it took to piss that being a drug lord didn’t come with alternate career opportunities.
John’s a different story. If he had to hunt the guy down, he’d fucking bite. They’re lucky that for everything else going on with him he’s obedient.
He gets to play princess, too, but with rock bottom expectations. It’s obviously not equitable, but Jacob knows Joseph: obedience is the only currency.
He doesn’t think coaching Joseph on his perspective in his words would make things better for anybody. Joseph, John — Faith, too, whyever she chose to kill Selena in the first place — are better off buffered from cruel realities by their God, or at least their belief in him. Maybe they’re right and the whole fucking country coming up on being atomized, scorched and poisoned is God’s retribution for the evils that birthed and sustained it, the entire flesh churning machine disgusting somebody better than any of them watching from up on high.
He wants his brothers to live. He never wanted more than that. They can’t thrive where they are. The world must be wiped clean.
“Listen,” he says as his think settles into his bones, “you have to keep at it. I’ll keep at it. The most anybody can do for him is try.”
“‘Lord, how many times shall I forgive my brother or sister who sins against me? Up to seven times?’ ‘I tell you, not seven times, but seventy-seven times.’”
“I never found religion, but it sounds like seventy-seven’s not a hard limit.”
“I’ve chosen not to count.”
Joseph stares down at the plant life growing below them, hopping with crickets and crawling with spiders unaware fire will fall from the sky and they will sicken and die with radiation or starve over the long winter.
“Before I received the inspiration that led me to John, when I still lived with my wife, we attended an Episcopal church. I couldn’t understand how in the wake of a prophet so filled with love the Bible could close with Revelation. Now I believe that the devil does rule this world, and there will be no peace before his overthrow. I know the Word can’t reach your heart–” They have a mutual understanding it’s on account of his heart’s dogged separation. “—but can you understand how afraid I am when Paul writes upon the fate of the children of wrath living in the passions of the flesh? I start to fear John won’t be permitted to cross Eden’s threshold, just as Moses and his generation never reached the Promised Land despite their intimacy with God in their desert sojourn.”
Sometimes Jacob can’t believe how damn serious Joseph is about this narrative of his. He watches connection propagate connection until they’re all characters in one huge cosmic story when really they’re sitting on a rock in Montana in the middle of building a rogue narco state like El Chapo did down in Sinaloa south of the Rio Grande.
Via one of his brothers in service who couldn’t get enough of narcocorridos he’s aware the cartels have folk songs just like what the Project airs on their radio stations, which helped him grasp why anybody would ever write a song about him in the first place.
He claps Joseph on the shoulder.
“Don’t knock yourself around too much. Let me know if it’s time to try twisting his arm. I’m up on my tetanus shot if he tries using his teeth.”
“I’ve considered making it part of a reward system.”
Jacob barks a laugh.
“I didn’t think that all the way through, but the offer’s still on the table.”
“I doubt inflicting controlled pain would produce better results than supervising any of his other vices. Trust that he will escalate.”
“Point taken. Don’t go too hard on yourself, brother.”
Joseph fails to reply.
*****
His skill as a shapechanger serves John each day he wakes up stricken with the acute knowledge of his failure. As a brother. As a lover. As a man of any semblance of character.
He opens his eyes to the thought that he needs to feel the barrel of a pistol itching against his skull, its weight in his hand, his finger on the curve of the trigger.
He gets up, costumes himself as a human being, and takes up his proverbial shepherd’s crook. His sermons fall from his lips like pearls. If he holds a penitent under until they start to kick out at the riverbed, their life a stream of bubbles as they thrash in his hands— he enjoyed that part already. He brings them to the precipice of death as the bliss works on them, as the river washes them clean, and in that moment they see the value of their lives. In that moment he feels ravenous joy in his power, amped up by the bliss coming off the water.
He deserves the reward of his works, but it only just takes the ragged edge off the fantasies of self-annihilation.
He gave his word he’d first hurt Joseph in any way he means to hurt himself.
He said ‘Yes’.
Shooting Joseph in the head lies beyond the scope of his most vicious desires. Joseph did everything right. He’s fundamentally good in a way John can’t even taste except in the brief way he had been tasting him, by proximity sharing in the brilliance of his light.
He doesn’t shoot either one of them.
He rebuffs Jacob’s simple overtures. He ignores Faith placing herself in proximity to him at Sunday service, although he understands her wordless offer to listen if he speaks. He treats stiltedly with Joseph outside of his crowd settling showman’s routines at their sermons and retreats to his work.
The fantasies tame themselves with time, taking another familiar form. Or maybe that’s not quite right and the generous amount of cutting he’s been allowed as ever more souls are brought to see the light within Joseph has kept his mind off watching his own blood run from an open wound.
He aches for the sinners in his chair to refuse the liberatory purgative he bestows. But in all their snotting and screaming and pleading only three impugn Joseph with a rejection he judges absolute. Three bodies rendered into meat would otherwise but don’t now satisfy the enormous intensity of the urge crushing his body like a closing trash compactor that sometimes stutters but never stops.
He struggles to push aside fantasies of taking sinful bodies with the capacity to be redeemed across the threshold of death. He fights to banish thoughts of eviscerating his own disobedient flesh. Yet he begins to find it difficult to put aside his tools. He cleans his knives too long, turning them over in his hand watching the light flash off every facet. He breathes heavily while he strops them, seized by the carnality of his own smooth motions.
He sees what rough beast slouches toward Bethlehem to be born.
Even in the depths of obsession he struggles against fixing his urge on the single person he loves beyond measure. It would be easier to fix these thoughts on Jacob, adored and trusted, feared, but not sanctified by God and never an object of passion. It would be easiest to prey on Faith, who in her compassion would enter willingly into his private company and unlike Jacob would be easily overwhelmed.
He has only ever abstractly wanted to hurt Joseph as a body. There is a body. It can bleed. Those facts foreground themselves when Joseph asks for purification by his knife, but those worshipful incisions are performed in perfect obedience, the incandescent peace of being chosen to scarify his brother’s skin the crowning sentiment.
Which is why the urge builds so long, until at every moment he feels it chafing at his spiraling control.
*****
To Joseph’s surprise, John has restrained himself from visibly acting out, and so he treats being asked to call John’s business-only smartphone from a landline with due gravity. As a rule, he abstains from dialing it unless John has an emergency and likewise barring an emergency John abstains from dialing him from it out of respect for his disdain of the devices’ pernicious antisocial influence.
The energetically breathless words on the other end of the line are not unexpected, however much he hoped not to hear them:
“I need to cut. I think, if I don’t, I’m going to hurt somebody bad.”
He need not elaborate he himself is the primary target.
Joseph’s hand tightens on the old receiver at his ear, pushing aside the apprehension for his own body the frantic energy raises.
“Are you at the house?”
Crossing the threshold, he wishes John could have been anywhere but this vacated home that haunts him with nostalgia for tribulations suffered decades ago two thousand miles away. It had been an ideal place for John to go to ground away from potential victims among the communion and is now ideal for its lack of potential witnesses who might rise to his defense.
Afternoon light at his back, he calls out John’s name from the doorway and receives no answer. The fear rising in his heart quells as he passes the kitchen island and sees his brother curled in the corner formed by the intersection of the counter topped cabinets. No blood has been spilled on the incurably grungy linoleum beneath him.
He comes to him and checks him over, John stripped down to his jeans and clammy with nerves. His eyes display clear, undrugged intelligence. Joseph surmises he hasn’t spoken because he fears what he has been bound by his word to ask for.
His own voice has lodged itself below his Adam’s apple. He does not want to be in pain. He doesn’t want to bleed. He has seen why God’s plan necessitated the cultivation of John’s capacities, the expulsion of sin only possible by his talent. That makes him no more eager to face John’s impulse in its rawest form.
He has been charged to lead and must.
“You are going to cut me. The urge will pass. Take up your knife.”
John pushes him off, standing of his own accord, shooting him a resentment-riddled look before passing into the bedroom.
He returns with a first aid kit and a black plastic case Joseph recognizes before it’s opened, the deer hunting knives he brings along when Jacob takes him or them both out to bring down their own food.
He moves to the island separating the kitchen from the living room, sourly opening the set.
“You should really let me work on myself, brother.”
Compassion moves Joseph to inflict his capacity for refusal on his brother with soft care for the undeniable disparity of power.
“No, John.”
John makes a reluctant sound as he picks up a wicked gut-hook knife, titling it in consideration before closing the case with knife in hand.
Joseph’s organs squirm nauseously in the embrace of his ribcage in animal fear of the switchback at the top edge of blade behind its point which when hooked into the smallest incision beneath his ribs could so smoothly and quickly unzip the skin of his belly. He would watch his intestines spill free, death a distant hope.
That is not why John chose this knife. It’s the other side he means to use, gracefully curved for depth control so that nothing a hunter wants left undamaged will suffer harm.
Joseph can almost convince his inborn self-preservation of this certainty.
This linoleum offers the best surface in the home for cleaning up blood, and so Joseph, already shirtless, lowers himself to it despite memories of smashed dishes and failing to shield his own small body from kicks to its ribcage. On his back, he stares up at the ceiling, willing himself to relax though he can’t.
John comes to him. He goes down on one knee beside him. The better, Joseph thinks, to leverage himself over him in whatever way the knife requires.
John jerks his head indicatively. Joseph rolls onto his left side, facing John’s muddy, unshined boots.
Reaching cautious fingers forward, John touches unmarred skin along Joseph’s ribcage, just above his tattoo, breathy sounds adrift in the air around them.
“I don’t want to hurt you,” he murmurs, an inflection at the end saying I want to hurt myself. I want to hurt anyone and everyone else besides you.
Joseph has feared at abstract intervals that John imagines grievously injuring him. Whatever fantasies natural to his urges his brother may or may not have harbored have never risen to the level of threat. Now John has a wild, glazed look in his eyes, his humanity eclipsed by his urge. He will cut, whatever he might want for himself.
An immediate fear roots in Joseph that once John begins in with the knife. He has seen and buried John’s mistakes. He has extended cover to other deaths he knew to be moments of excess beyond that first deceased woman whose name he asked to pray over her unmarked grave.
There is a chance his dream of Eden could bleed out on this floor.
He flexes his hand over his prayer beads. Did Isaac not obey Abraham when God demanded sacrifice, though he received mercy? Did Jephthah not offer his daughter up to God though her life was extinguished, as he himself did within the uncaring white walls of the neonatal unit? Did God’s Son not lay down his life? God will adjudicate if he lives or dies according to his purpose.
“My flesh is your flesh. Use it as you would your own.”
A shuddery breath above him. John closes in, starting far from himself and drawing forward.
How different it is without the ecstasy of devotion in which John’s knife usually breaks the flesh. His frightened body shivers at the touch of the whetted steel. He is its master and doesn’t recoil.
Pain spreads electric from its first effortless bite. It slices deep into skin and meat under John’s steady hand. The pain moves from first shock to a singular sensation, a pure, agonizing tone that’s volume builds. Tears well in the corners of his open eyes. Blood streams hot over his back, following the gullies of ribs and muscles.
He could prefer this to no longer being touched by John whatever. His brother’s hands inflicting pain are still his brother’s hands upon him. John’s knife breaking his skin is John’s penetration, a possibility he barely knew before it was lost.
He slides his gaze to the side. John has eyes for nothing but his slowly parting flesh, breathing shallowly, hypnotized.
He has watched his brother animated at his work, explaining each new purgative torture and encouraging his subjects to free themselves, every variety of pain serving its holy purpose. The urge in its purest form in no way resembles the impulse as channeled in service to their flock.
John whispers more fervently than in sexual passion:
“Tell me it hurts.”
“When I’m still, and every breath.”
His brother exhales in pleasure.
*****
John must cut slow, slow, slow to not use up the flesh over Joseph’s ribs.
The scarlet stain spreading on the floor becomes a dark mirror of his brother’s bleeding body, just large enough to see the light scattered by the fluttering tremors of his belly.
John thinks about the last sinner he threw out of the chair, the woman crawling elbow over elbow as blood drained from her wounds and waterfalled from her split stomach so that as John strolled behind her, footfalls matching her dragging pace, he saw his own reflection walking in uncanny parallel in the ruby mirror.
When she collapsed unmoving on the floor he declined to deal the killing blow. He left her to make her peace with God while he got out the usual trash bags and duct tape.
Joseph continues to separate, sharpened metal following the curve of his body. John tilts his head to the side, lips slightly open, his tongue wetting them as they begin to dry.
His eyes fall on the scarification in his sight, SLOTH, LUST, GREED, WRATH and ENVY, each an obedient gift to Joseph. His hand halts by itself in disorientation, blade resting in place.
“I love the smell of your blood when you make me the vessel for your penance. I love it now. I don’t…” He searches for the rest. “…want to get confused.”
Glittering beads of sweat stud Joseph’s pores.
“You are doing my will now, just as then. Don’t be afraid.”
John’s confusion disappears into the command.
He rests a splayed hand over Joseph’s side, leaning nearer as millimeter by millimeter he keeps cutting. An intense sense connection vanishes the world around them as the strong, familiar scent of this body awakens a warped facsimile of adoration. Words leave his lips.
“I love this skin. I could tattoo it. Take it off you. Tan it. There’s no sin to write. Just your name. I’d always have you close.”
In his imagination he carries out his sacred rite, slicing a bloody strip of Joseph free to belong to him forever. Must he tan him? Could he graft that living flesh upon himself, if he were to shed his skin in turn? Aren’t they blood, and might Joseph not grow into him, so that he’d never be out of reach of his fingertips however far the rest of his flesh might be?
He would shake from his excitement were he not so practiced in stillness when at his joyful work.
Joseph’s dilating pupils and slackening body tell a story of endorphins uplifting him to a gorgeous height. The desire to escape sighs from him, his tensions unknotting.
John wills himself to be his brother’s mirror, excitement rising to an ever more ecstatic pitch, the urge’s imperative eroding in the onrushing satisfaction.
“That’s right. That’s it. I wish I were you. Free.”
*****
His body’s survival mechanisms sweep pain and terrible memories to a remove.
He has watched John bring his children to this ecstasy as a litany of their sins vomit from their mouths when he comes to be in the suffering of those who struggle toward their own liberation. It is right for them to know he is present, for what seems like torture now is only for their good. He will embrace them as his children when they have passed through kenosis, made themselves nothing as did Christ.
His body floats light and liberated beneath its sheen of sweat. He wonders if amid the terrible suffering inflicted upon his body by the Romans the prophet from Galilee knew relief.
His relief will be equally transient.
The knife lifts. A single long cut runs deep through his skin, the meat of his ribcage open to the air. Blood overflows, a pool cooling beneath him.
“It’s gone,” John says. He repeats it like a prayer, relief palpable.
He casts the blade aside to clatter somewhere feet away and moves hastily for the first aid kit.
He sets silently, diligently to work, his breath even with regained sanity.
The endorphins begin to ebb halfway through the stitching. Now each pass spikes a fresh agony in the terrible soreness radiating over Joseph’s entire ribcage. He declines to reflect on the quality of the stitches, except to ask himself why he didn’t call on Jacob. John has no inclination to mend, his careless hand unpracticed. He grimaces and gasps through the excruciating second half. John, emptied of malice, makes shushing noises gentler than he’s usually inclined toward.
The knot, at least, feels like it fixes itself firmly, the pain in Joseph’s skin so loud each tiny motion shouts. He can see the result in his mind’s eye.
With great care and John’s help, he picks himself up from the floor to a seated position. He doubts he lost so much blood as to endanger his life, but the blood loss married with the torture of knife and needle have exhausted him. He lay nearly still for so long every reluctantly flexing joint reminds him that he already had an unpleasant time lying on hard floors sleeping rough as a young man and the sun set on his youth years ago.
He banishes all consideration of himself, focusing on his little brother. He must finish this good work.
“I’m grateful you came to me, John. Losing you would be worse to me than anything a knife can inflict.”
John searches him for further succor with pleading eyes in visible fear of his own actions. Joseph cannot move as he otherwise would, but nods for him to be free with him. It’s John who takes his face in his hands, John who presses his forehead to his.
“You give so much. To everybody. To me. I don’t want to be alone, again. Not alone.”
He feels such love for this man. His brother, his lover, a wicked chameleon and unpredictable killer, an extension of himself as God’s baptizer and inquisitor.
“You won’t be, John. I promise you. No part of me ever wants to be parted from you. Until we fulfill our purpose in this life we must live chaste of each other, yet I love you no less than when we shared our flesh. Dwell among your siblings knowing I am building a new world for you. Our Eden.”
It cannot be different and so Joseph puts regret from his mind.
John sits back from him. He begins to rock, self soothing. Joseph recognizes it exactly from when he was a child. He declines to comment, sure his brother has no awareness of his anxious motions. A fragment of the boy he’d been when their parents first beat him has remained dislodged over his long years of deprivation.
He wonders how much of his erratic behavior this shard and pieces like it cause, as if John is a mouth riddled with loose teeth unshed but aching in their sockets, the parts of him never permitted to flourish trapped behind them.
The pain of his wound swoons him, his vision blackening at the edges and returning.
The earliest blood and the thinnest edges of its spread have begun to coagulate into a crust. Under the water, later, it will break off in tiny pebbles, the fine grit of clumped hemoglobin a tenacious opponent in the shower.
He would not choose to shower, just now, alone, and will not bathe with John. Although through rallying his willpower he could endure and act indefinitely, without necessity he can’t imagine pursuing anything besides lying down.
He will not risk sending John away in such a fragile state.
“Sleep beside me, John. As my younger brother.”
They have one or the other been wounded enough times for John to know he should collect himself and get Joseph onto his feet. He pulls himself out of his regression and stands, stooping to get an arm under Joseph’s uninjured side, John seeming as strong as Jacob in comparison to Joseph’s weakened limbs.
John lays him down, pulls off his shoes, and tells him to wait. He comes back with tap water and helps him drink it, then a second glass. He sets the glass at the bedside and steps out of his own boots. He crawls beneath the covers, tangling himself with him without touching his mutilated side. Weeks ago, they were making love atop this same mattress. Joseph trusts his little brother not to take advantage of him as he vanishes into the black on the backs of his eyelids.
*****
John worries over how pale Joseph looks in the late afternoon light beaming through the gap in the curtain, although he knows it is stress and pain as much as blood loss. He has intimate knowledge of the stages of blood loss and an eye for how much blood has been left on a floor. Joseph’s heart won’t struggle to pump despite the blood he spilled. He’ll take iron, he’ll keep hydrating, and he’ll regain his strength.
He’s loved having Joseph beside him like this, asleep, off his guard, so he can study every hair of his beard and high hairline, all the tiny imperfections of his skin. He won’t, anymore. Because he’s cruel and obsessive and paranoid. Because he can’t behave. Because he failed his brother.
“I love you,” he says to his sleeping body. “Sorry I’m a piece of shit.”
Joseph’s too chilly. He squirms a little nearer, sharing more of his body heat. He ignores the questions his body asks about having their crotch up close to their partner, again. It hasn’t gotten on the same page, Joseph stinking with sweat a false signal it should be cumming any time now.
It will learn, with time, sharing pleasure has been dictated impermissible.
“You’ll be proud of me, someday,” he says.
The idea seems impossibly distant.
An opportunity will eventually present itself. When it does, he will seize it.