"What are you thinking about?" he said, swiveling in the seat to see the real world. It looked less exquisite than it had in the glass, much less than it did all dolled-up in the book.
"Dennis, naturally," Julian said, resting his forehead against the window/mirror. "Whether he'll actually meet us at the station. What he looks like now. Whether visiting him isn't totally insane under the circumstances. Why we're here. On this train, I mean. I don't mean why we exist, obviously." He sat up, grinned. The grin thinned immediately. "You look sort of . . . I don't know, carefree or something."
Kevin sniffed. "It's this book," he said, opening, reentering it. "I'm ... half with you, half ... in here. It's ... hard ... to ..." Tolkien's language began to affect him again. "... uh . . . " He forgot the train. Actually, a fraction of his eyes still registered it in a way, because he could sense his brother staring off, then watching him, then glancing around the compartment. But most of his thoughts trailed a handful of tiny, humanesque men around a sinister forest.
Gradually, like a filmic dissolve, his mind paved the fictional woods with that image of him at ten or eleven, his eyes full of Tolkien's fog. Perhaps, as Julian claimed, his face was just too near the lens and, so, slightly unfocused, but even if that was true, fate had unfocused him, he thought. Because it was the only great shot ever taken of him, or the only one where he wasn't compromised by the prettiness he felt so much ennui about. "Shoot." He'd just read three pages without learning anything. He folded the corner of page 121, shut the book.
A teenaged boy walked through the car. He was babyfaced, stoop-shouldered, six foot plus, wearing loose-fitting pale raspberry clothes, which only contributed to the sense that he was sleepwalking. From the loaded expression on Julian's fast-turning head, the teen obviously met some criteria of beauty. So Kevin checked him out too, or tried to at least, since he could never evaluate other cute people. He could only take sides, meaning theirs over people's who weren't cute. In this case the young brunet's, since at thirtythree, Julian wasn't particularly cute anymore.
The door at the end of the car shut behind the teen.
Julian untwisted his neck, smiled wistfully in Kevin's direction. "What's his story, Kev? I know he's not hot in the conventional sense, and I'm sure ... well, pretty sure if he was naked I'd yawn, but those clothes, that slight hunch, that spacey expression, those cut-glass features ... something there's devastating. You just want to ... I don't know what exactly. I'm not saying kill him, a la Dennis. Fuck him, eat him out, absolutely. But it's also got some sort of ... ethereal quality? Or no, less lofty-than that. It's more like-"-
"Amsterdam Centraal Station," announced a distorted voice. "Einde punt van deze trein."
Kevin shielded his eyes, pressed his face to the window. Amsterdam's skyline reminded him of a dessert tray. It was lighted so carefully, period detail after period detail, in such myriad of colors, Kevin wondered if it was being photographed for a children's storybook that evening. Or, if not, gee, what sort of people would live in there? He pictured friendly, bewhiskered, blond, diminutive types wearing quaint uniforms with a very slight fakeness around the collars and cuffs, like Disneyland employees. Just then the dirty glass wall of the station slid between him and that interpretation.
"Kev, hurry!" Julian disappeared through the sliding door.
By the time Kevin caught up, his brother was already out on the platform, talking with the teen they'd seen earlier. The teen looked dazedly at the back of Julian's hand, saying his telephone number in a weird accent, watching the digits appear on the skin in a craggy blue script.
"Please call, okay?" The teen smiled, waved, blended into a crowd of similarly dressed, equally tall people.
Kevin, Julian roamed the platform studying male faces. They didn't recognize any. No one registered them, aside from the usual gay men wiped out by Kevin's prettiness. Yawn. Julian raced off to check the crannies of the station. Kevin slouched on a bench on the platform, hugging his knapsack, head tipped back, thinking how palacelike the glass roof looked. He wondered what little changes he'd make if someone were to give the train station to him as a gift. Like would he clean off the soot up there, or leave the sky that swirly, dreamy brown? He was trying to make up his mind when he sensed someone eyeing him off to his left and turned, expecting to see the usual leering, mustachioed male.
It was obviously me. My brown hair had faded to dark gray. Fuller face. The same studiedly casual clothes. Bigger nose than he remembered. Same eyes. "Kevin?" Same voice. "Hey, it's you, right!?" I yelled. Kevin nodded solemnly. "You look unbelievable! Jesus! Where's your brother?!"
"Hunting for you," Kevin squeaked. He was practically strangling his knapsack. Weird. "You look, uh, nice too." He tried to recall how positive he'd been back in Paris, and how strenuously he had argued with Julian that my letter was fiction. At the same time he tried hard to loosen his grip on the knapsack but couldn't quite manage it.
I sat down beside him. "Kevin, I'm so glad you could..." Kevin smiled desperately at the far wall of the station, willing Julian to reappear at that instant. "... amazing discoveries I'm making about. . ." He could feel the small, fat rectangle of The Lord of the Rings, Book One, through the plasticesque fabric of the knapsack. "... because you won't believe how I can ..." He gripped the rectangle like it was J.R.R. Tolkien's hand.
"Dennis?" Julian traced my line of sight to Kevin's body. He'd drifted to sleep on my futon. "... uh . . ." Following the sightline more carefully, Julian came to his brother's ass. Ugh. "Listen, man," he whispered. "I understand the appeal. I mean of killing some guy you've completely objectified. Sure, sure. I can picture it. It's crossed my mind. Not as elaborately as it crosses yours. Still, you're actually murdering guys, and I'm not being moralistic. I'm talking fairness, which is not a particularly bad rule to live by, as rules go." He raised his voice. "You know?"
Sniffle. Kevin's head left the pillow, raised a foot, and gazed blearily at Julian. The lower half of his face had turned a moist purplish-pink with scraggly indentations; the upper half was the usual. If Opie, the kid on the old "Andy Griffith Show," had grown up cute like he was obviously supposed to, and not gotten chubby and bald like the actor who'd played him, he could have been Kevin's twin, minus a few million freckles. "Sorry, Kev," Julian said, grinning. Kevin lowered back down into sleep. "So, Dennis . . ." I was still studying the ass. ".. . why don't we take this conversation upstairs, eh?"
-- - - --- - - ---- Julian couldn't get over how otherworldly the windmill felt. The lower of my two floors was quite spartan, if livable, an arklike UFO. The upper floor, which he and I were touring at that moment, was a little bit smaller and extraordinarily dusty. Parts of the floorboards were stained with a black substance, shimmery as a dance floor, presumably dehydrated blood. Some young punk's, if Julian remembered the letter right. So these were the rafters the punk had supposedly dangled from, spewing stuff. Julian leaped up, grabbed one, did a few wobbly chin-ups.
Then he dangled there, spacing. I circled the wooden room, fingering my temples. Once, years ago, Julian had believed in some theory that criminal types had a black aura, halfway between a cloud and veil, which covered their whole bodiessix, seven, eight inches thick. In the right kind of drug state, the theory went, one could spot this covering. Julian squinted. I just seemed older, uh ... thicker, less sexy somehow, but no more physically dark than any thirty-three-year-old in inadequate light. Maybe my walk was too stumbly, or, uh ... Shit. I'd stopped circling, turned, and glared up at him.
"What's your verdict?" I mumbled. Julian dropped to the floor, lost his balance. Thud. . . thud, thud. "I think," he said, clambering to his feet. ". . . I think you remember our friendship selectively. Either that or I've changed a lot, which I doubt, though Kevin says I have too. Changed, I mean. Because that thing we used to do with the three-ways was druginduced youth shit, before I knew what I wanted in life, which, it turns out, is your traditional gay relationship with occasional affairs to keep myself alert. Anyway, no, I'
m not interested. Sorry." He felt immediately guilty.
"But, uh, Kevin's always had this obsession with you, so maybe . . ." He froze. "Jesus! What am I saying? Shit. Forget that. Besides, Kevin thinks your letter's bullshit. I don't know what I believe, but I will say it's strange how you stare at him. At Kevin. It reads as desire, but under the circumstances, what's that to you? Because desire and violence seem inseparable, if I'm reading that letter right. I realize Kevin's cute. I've objectified him all my life in different ways. But he's my brother, which overrides everything technically. Point is, one, no, I won't help, and, two, lay off Kevin, man!"
I shrugged, nodded. My eyes looked kind of drugged. Amphetamine, maybe. Julian didn't know how else to place the tinniness of my expression. It didn't seem crazy exactly, at least not in the way actors' faces would suddenly lose it, explode. It was just a bit off, which is why he thought drugs, i.e., distortion, but ... "It's the weirdest fucking thing, Julian," I muttered. "About Kevin. He reminds me of something I felt before I stopped feeling anything. Pre-desire, previolence. That sounds ridiculous, I know. But I can't imagine it actually is, is it? Shit." I swayed in Julian's mind.
Something woke Kevin. It wasn't the voices upstairs, which resembled a clumsy drum solo, at least to his focusing ears. He hadn't sprung from a nightmare, because he either didn't have dreams or he never remembered them. Maybe he daydreamed so much that his brain used bedtime to take minivacations. He'd lie down, switch off, click, hiss ... That's how he imagined it. So what could have woken him? Maybe the windmill was haunted. He was positive the things in my letter were fiction, but say if they weren't, and there were these cute young ghosts drifting around in the mill in another dimension. He yawned, squinted, scanned the place. Nothing. "Shoot." So he made one up. A boy who looked like he did at ten or eleven, but transparent, frail, stooped, melancholy, whereas he'd been a bundle of nerves. Kevin made the "boy" float over shyly, hands behind his back, and announce in a wispy voice (this was the hard part), "Oh, I'm sorry to disturb you, sir. See, death is extraordinarily interesting and all, but sometimes, well, I get lonely." The ghost extended a see-through hand. Kevin reached out to grip it. That part was way too theatrical, he realized, for as soon as they "touched," the ghost not only vanished, it seemed like a corny idea in the first place. Besides, any ghost here would have to be nude, Kevin thought, and mutilated. He propped himself up on his elbows and tried again. The same "boy" drew close, nude this time, his hands cupping his genitals. Kevin had never seen anyone seriously hurt, so he just made the "boy's" chest look shredded, using as his model a painting by Rembrandt that some nut had slashed with a knife in some poorly attended museum. Cool, he thought, admiring his work. "Say something." The "boy" shuddered. "Don't be afraid," Kevin added. "I made you up, after all." The "boy" sat down gingerly on the edge of the futon. He seemed about to cry. Kevin smiled sympathetically, remembering not to try to touch the ghost, no matter how appropriate it seemed, lest-
"Tell me about him," the "boy" said, grimacing at the ceiling. He had a voice much like Kevin's own, though it equally resembled the sound of the little humidifier Kevin kept by his Parisian bed.
"Are you referring to Dennis?" Kevin whispered.
The "boy" nodded. "The ... one ... who ... killed ... me." He wrapped his arms around himself and looked tenderly, emptily into Kevin's eyes. The "boy's" face was swollen and bruised, but his fogginess made him as easy on the eyes as a puffy cloud.
"Dennis used to be great," Kevin said. "We were lovers when I was a kid. He'd get distant on me and kind of rough sexually, but I didn't care, even though I was miserable in general. Because Dennis listened. He respected my fantasies, probably because he has weird ones himself. Julian never cared. I had a nervous breakdown two months ago; Julian took me in, but that was pure obligation. He hates me. I drive him and his lover nuts. But I guess I'm not answering your question."
The "boy" shook his head. Maybe he'd started crying. Yeah, why not? Sure. Cool. The idea gave Kevin chills. A boyshaped cloud raining. Weird. But how would that look? Kevin couldn't imagine. "Shoot." So he had the "boy" cover his face with his hands. "Don't cry," Kevin sighed, secretly willing the ghost to grow hysterical. Then he got an idea. "Hey," he added brightly, "tell me what it was like to be murdered by Dennis."
"Oh, it was gross," the gray boy wailed through his hands. "I-" Wait, Kevin thought. He'd have an accent or something. Start again. "It was gross," the "boy" reannounced in a coarse accent, somewhere between German and some sort of Irishy brogue. "First Dennis-" Kevin fast-forwarded him through the speech, not knowing how to describe a violent scene. Now what? He couldn't decide. Anyway, he was tired of the ghost idea. He killed it off, lay back, and stared at the splintery wooden ceiling. After an indeterminate number of bland, drifty thoughts, he stood, straightened his clothes, and scaled the mill's central, spiral staircase. It was at least ten degrees colder up where Julian and I were sitting. "Brr." Dimly lighted by one crumpled clip-lamp, the room was a lot like the other floor, only totally unfurnished, sans bathroom, and covered with dust like the bag in a huge vacuum cleaner.
"Sleep well?" I asked, startling Kevin out of a forgettable daydream.
He tiptoed across the room. "Okay, I guess. Aren't you guys freezing?"
The instant Kevin sat down, Julian jumped up, stretched, yawned in a totally phony-ass way. "I'm gonna go call that kid," he said, eyeing Kevin dismissively. "Have you got a phone, D.?"
"No, but there's one at the corner. Turn left when you go out the door. Tell the kid we're in the windmill. He'll know it. Here's the key." I fished around in a pocket, threw Julian what looked like a particle of light. "And a Dutch quarter. For the phone." Ditto.
"Who's `kid'?" Kevin asked once Julian had split. He could see in my eyes how enamored I was with him. Still, the crush or whatever seemed kind of ironic or something, Kevin couldn't quite tell, which made it a lot less nerve-racking, though obviously, and he could never forget this, that crush shared the same brain with scary ideas like exploding boys, necrophilia, etc.
"Some boy Julian met on the train. You didn't see him?"
"Yeah."
It was as if my blue eyes had been hit with a spotlight. Each iris framed a white, upside-down, wavy teardrop. "And your verdict?" I demanded.
"First, what are you guys planning to do? I mean you're not going to murder him, right?"
I looked away. The eyeball ghosts vanished. "Julian doesn't want to. So I guess it'll just be three-way, or ... a four-way if ... " I glanced at him. "Otherwise, you can hide out up here, read..."
That sounded innocent enough. "Let's see," Kevin said. "Well, you want to know who the boy most reminded me of?" He could feel himself blushing. "A guy Julian and you had a three-way with millions of years ago. I used to watch you guys screw through the keyhole sometimes."
"Wh-which guy?" The light had returned to my eyes, but it was all twisted up. "I mean ... do you remember us saying his first name was Henry?"
"No." Kevin scrunched up his forehead and tried to think, but I was acting too interested. "Gosh, let's see. Uh, he had long black hair. Skinny. He had sort of a baby face. He seemed really drugged."
"That sounds like anyone we ever slept with." My shoulders slumped, head dropped, face dangled loosely. "We had such specific tastes," I continued mournfully. "I still do. But Henry. Shit. Didn't I ever tell you about these fake snuff photographs?"
Kevin shook his head. "No, I don't think so," he said, but his memory was notoriously flaky. "Describe them to me."
"Dennis, you, hmm, stand at the foot of the futon." Julian pointed there. I lumbered over, eyes fixed on the bedding's new centerpiece, a kid's bowed head. "And, uh, Chretien?" The kid looked up from the purple shoelace he'd been fingering nervously. He looked stoned. Julian still felt a little too wowed by the kid's beauty. "You're amazing," he announced, and glanced over at me. "Very us circa 'seventy-four, 'seventyfive, right, Dennis?" "Definitely." I nodded, eyeing the kid. "He's exquisite." Chretien crink
led his nose, wiped it off with a pale purple sleeve. "And so endearing," Julian sighed. "Anyway, Perfect Young Being, could you get naked and lie on your back for us?" "Or else!" I added, shaking -a fist.
It was like time speeded up for cheap, comic effect. Within a second or two Chretien had undressed, flung himself onto the futon, and buried his face in a pillow. Yum. "Hey, Julian!" I hissed, indicating the heap of discarded purple clothes. At their top was a perfectly circular dent like a nest, and inside it, a mock treasure trove-green chewing gum pinched in a thin paper cloud, two condoms, coins, half-smoked joint, student ID card with a scared-looking kid in one corner. Julian immediately snatched the card. "When was this photo taken?" he demanded. Chretien scrunched up his forehead. "1988," he answered in his sludgy accent.
The boy in the picture was even more stunning than Chretien himself. "D., in your letter you mentioned something about-Oh, wait, Chretien, you should be lying on your back now, okay?-about the way Dutch guys age poorly, right? Because this kid, as nice as he looks nowadays, is prettier in this picture. See?" Julian passed me the card over Chretien's chest, which was pretty much sterling. A great, complex rib cage. Maybe his nipples could be a teensy bit bigger, the shoulders, um, wider ... "No," I said, tossing the card back, "I think in this case it's the objectified-people-look-better syndrome. Photos are perfect by nature. A kid's just, well, workable?"
"Mm," Julian said, studying Chretien with that thought in mind. "Anyway, we're starting. Are you as stoned as you want to be?" The kid's forehead crumpled. "Yes. Can you tell?" he chirped. Horrible accent. Everyone laughed simultaneously. Nice. "D., take his face. I'll . . ." Julian positioned his grin over Chretien's groin. ". . . start here. Mm." Whitish blur. My ass blocked his view of the kid's upper half. Julian bobbed for the balls. Once, twice ... A ball oozed down the back of his tongue. "Mm." The kid's crotch smelled very faintly of ... pecan pie? Julian opened one eye to make sure I wasn't turning psychotic.
Frisk: A Novel (Cooper, Dennis) Page 11
