He parted the kid's lo-o-o-ong legs. That pecanesque smell wafted up. He'd forgotten how strangely profound cute strangers' tastes, odors, looks, etc., could seem at first. And how satisfying it was to hear some cute boy's voice transcend language. "Mmrmph," Chretien said. Julian jabbed his tongue into the craggy brown asshole. "Rowph, mmrm." He jabbed, jabbed, jabbed. .. One of his watery eyes fixed on me. I seemed my old self, just older. Chretien: "Ohmglugm." Maybe Kevin was right. Julian hauled in his tongue, cleared his throat. "Having fun, Dennis?" My head jerked ambiguously. "Hey," Julian continued, motioning me over. "Maintain please. For old time's sake?"
When I climbed off Chretien's face it was a huge messgreasy, drool-splattered, wide-eyed, inflating, deflating, tomato-soup red. Pubic hairs littered his upper lip like a cheesy mustache. "This kid's asshole is truly spectacular," Julian whispered. "Or are my standards just shit after jerking off with my lover for three years? Here." Julian moved his head slightly to one side. Mine aligned. He, I closed in on the crinkled-up gorge-ette. "No, the thing's definitely right up there," I said, force-blossoming it with my thumbs. Julian leaned down, sniffed. It smelled ... touching, somehow, as if he was in range of some dated hit song.
He licked Chretien's hole, inside, out, nostalgically, almost religiously. "I ... love ... you," he said, not really able to help it, but smearing the words so Chretien and I couldn't hear, because it wasn't true. Then he leaned back. I guzzled awhile. Chretien rubbed his cock lazily, eyes flitting around the room. "What are you thinking, kid?" Julian asked. Chretien peered between his splayed legs. "About ... um, you both, and me." That voice. Ugh. "... How I feel like myself with you," he added. Whatever that means, Julian thought. "And you, Dennis?" I unplugged my tongue. It was muddy. "Not much. Good. Great, even ... mm ..." My mouth squashed on the hole.
My ass hung over Chretien's pursed lips. He blinked at it, scrunched up his forehead, then licked a little winding snail trail up my left thigh. Julian watched, ate out, and fingerfucked the kid's ass with a ridiculous smile, he was sure. He'd basically given up worrying if I was about to turn psychopath. Still ... "Hey, Dennis," he whispered. One of Chretien's balls was hanging out of my mouth. That looked laughable, but so did everything, probably. "Are you maintaining?" I dropped the balls. Plop. "Sure. Absolutely. But in my fantasies. . ." My throat made the noise of a faraway explosion. "... Wish you were there."
Chretien couldn't have heard that. Julian checked. "Okay, but keep it under wraps, D. Don't . . ." My face had grown weirdly, unbelievably remote. Shit. "Dennis?" Chretien stopped licking my thigh, grabbed his cock, shook it to get my attention. "Suck me, please," he rasped. Julian snapped his fingers. "Dennis!" "Please?" the kid repeated. "Because it feels so very good. And I love you people." He smiled blurrily. At that, my eyes focused again, grew ironic. Phew, Julian thought. He went back to his rimming. God, he loved doing that, even if now, without drugs and youthful idealism, an asshole was just an asshole, not a spaceship, temple, sun, etc... .
... Julian watched his cock plow through Chretien's lips. "... Oh . . ." I fucked the kid's sloppy ass with a condom. "... oh . . . " My face was a foot, two, from Julian's. It reeked of shit. That had smelled so much better in Chretien's asscrack than it did on my breath, though the odors were virtually identical. "... oh ..." Chretien's beauty had heightened a millionfold ten seconds back. He was the ultimate human being on earth now. ". . . oh ..." I seemed calm. Phew. Maybe Kevin was right and I'd never killed people. Still, any second now, I could so easily reach out and strangle ... Shit! Julian kept watch through a rush of intense feeling. "... oh, oh, oh, oh!" Julian spurted.
Kevin woke from a light and grayish sleep into a sharp daydream. In it, he and I were leaning over Chretien's naked back, icing his ass as if it were a cake. But rather than reading "Congratulations" or "Happy Birthday," it looked like a crater, no doubt inspired by those photos I'd carefully described to Kevin some hours back. The mood of the dream was amazingly calm. I seemed happy, younger, and he, Kevin, felt purposeful and creative for once, not just a cute, tense, spaced bookworm. "That's it," he said, still half-asleep. He raised his head off the paperback pillow, stretched his arms. Cool, a prophetic daydream, maybe the second or third he'd ever had. He could feel his eyes glittering. Tonight he, I, and maybe Julian would buy some papier-mache, paint, whatever, then restage those photos with Chretien playing the "dead" kid. And if the daydream was truly prophetic I'd wind up cured or exorcised or something. Cool.
He put an ear to the floor. Chretien, Julian, and I had apparently quit fucking.
He tiptoed downstairs. The steps only creaked a few times very sweetly. Julian was standing at one of the portholes, arms crossed, staring out. Granted, he hadn't slept much since they'd arrived, and the light coming in was a brutal white, but he really looked old, Kevin thought. Not old in a great way like in photos of J.R.R. Tolkien smoking a pipe. Just old, a la Mom and Dad. Chretien and I were asleep on the futon. The kid had draped himself over me like I was a boulder and everything else was a rushing river. His ass did look pretty spectacular, Kevin had to admit, not that he knew how to judge things in that way. Anyway, it would definitely make a nice crater.
Julian didn't hear Kevin approach. In fact, Kevin had to shake his brother's shoulder to get him to turn his head. As soon as Julian did, Kevin pointed up and moved his lips to mean "talk," then wagged the finger around to mean "you and I." He made a fist, squinted at the back of that wrist to mean "now," and arched his eyebrows questioningly.
Upstairs they crouched on the floor in the middle of a cloudshaped black stain, faces close, eyes narrowed, whispering.
"How did it go?" Kevin asked.
"Okay." Julian shrugged. "I hate to say so, but I think you were right about the letter being bullshit."
Kevin nodded, not smugly at all. He made sure.
"But there's a way to be positive," Julian added. "You remember that part where he stashed the boy's corpse in a bell-shaped room at the top of the windmill? Well ... ?"
"You first," Kevin snickered. He stood, brushed his pants off.
They wound gradually up the spiral staircase. The windmill got tighter and more claustrophobic until it was little more than a glorified stairwell. When they reached the pinnacle of the building, they not only didn't smell anything sickly sweet or find a teenage-sized skeleton, there wasn't even a bellshaped room, period. The steps just ran out maybe three or four feet below a kind of wooden dunce cap caked with spider webs. "I knew it," Kevin said, gazing up. "Rooms like that exist only in books."
They spiraled back down to the level where I and Chretien were sleeping. Julian squeezed my shoulder once, twice. My eyes opened. "Let's go upstairs and confer," he said quietly. "You, me, and Kevin." Okay, I mouthed, and slid out from under the kid without waking him somehow.
Upstairs, Julian smirked, pretend-hardened his eyes. "Confess, asshole." He, Kevin, and I had formed a little huddle under one of the portholes. "You're no John Wayne Gacy, correct?"
I looked away for a second. "Correct."
Kevin suppressed a huge, shit-eating grin, but he couldn't help turning his face away, like he did when he thought he had bad breath, and saying, "I knew it. I knew it."
"Why, D.?" Julian said, ignoring Kevin. "If that's not too gigantic a question.
"I don't know," I muttered, shrugged. "Well, that's not totally true." My forehead crumpled up. "I sort of know ... well, basically because I realized at some point that I couldn't and wouldn't kill anyone, no matter how persuasive the fantasy is. And theorizing about it, wondering why, never helped at all. Writing it down was and still is exciting in a pornographic way. But I couldn't see how it would ever fit into anything as legitimate as a novel or whatever." I shook my head. "God, this feels great. Phew. So I started sending letters to people who already knew me, thinking they'd either write back and give me some sort of objective analysis, or else relate to the fantasy, come here, and give me the courage or amorality or whatever to actually kill somebody in lea
gue with them. You're the only ones who ever answered, though."
Kevin's face felt positively prickly with interest. "So you just made up those boys in the letter out of your head?"
"Sort of. I mean, they're all real boys, except Jorg and Ferdinand, who're imaginary. But yeah," I said, and grinned. The kid in the hamburger stand, the punk, the yuppie ... them I see around town all the time."
"Cool!" Kevin grabbed his head and shook it roughly, thrilled to be living inside it.
Julian sniffed. "Well, that's that then." He got to his feet, stretched.
I shrugged. "That's that."
Kevin let his head loose. "Hey, wait. Maybe this doesn't sound that appropriate now," he said. "But, uh ... God, I'm dizzy. I, uh, had this idea when I first woke up of how ... Julian and I could help ... Oh, wait. Give me a second." He felt horrible. "Shoot."
Everything spun.
Julian sipped the worst coffee ever. Thin, yellowy, cold. The train station was freezing, but a ghostly heat passed through the wall of the fast-food stand he was leaning against. Chretien and I talked mindlessly, flirtatiously to his immediate left. Sometimes Chretien would break away, run a few yards up the platform and back again, flapping his arms to get warm. Based on the sneers this received from Dutch passersby, Chretien was more an embarrassment than the young god Julian had originally thought. That would explain a lot. Sip. Kevin shivered on a bench reading Tolkien next to some closet-case guy whose bloodshot eyes kept toppling off the edge of his newspaper and landing in Kevin's lap.
A train's big nose crossed the far end of the platform. Sip, sip, crunch. Julian tossed his crushed cup, then he strolled up to Chretien and me. "So it was good to ..." Now that the kid was a dork it felt totally different to be around him. Boring, even. That haunted look wasn't otherworldly after all, just some weird form of misery trying to hide in the nooks of an okay face. All of which made the big three-way seem kind of pointless in retrospect. ". . . and if you're ever . . ." Whereas with me, well, there was the historical link, and it'd been fun, instructive even, to act wild again, enact the fake snuff, etc., but, well, Julian missed his lover, and I was awfully bizarre now. "... I mean it." Roar ...
... Roar. He hugged Chretien, me. "Send me prints of those photos," he laughed. "And watch my backpack a second." He dropped the thing on the tips of my shoes, turned, strolled over, and knelt by his brother, who lowered his book a few inches reluctantly. The train had arrived and was rumbling, spewing a grungy heat. It tickled Julian's neck. Kevin's eyes were preoccupied, as always. Like mine, Julian guessed, because I don't give a shit either. "You're welcome to move back in anytime," he muttered. Maybe Kevin's eyes moistened at that. Maybe not. It was weird to remember how wet they used to be all the time. "Oh, uh, thanks." The book covered them.
A whistle shrieked. Julian grabbed his backpack and ran onto the train. He found a spot in the no-smoking section, lowered the window, and craned his neck. We'd already split, which kind of stunned him. "Fucking assho-" The train jerked. He toppled into his seat. Facing him, an elderly Dutch blond gripped a red tennis racket. His tan looked like bark. His right arm was two, three times bulkier than the left. "Hi." "Hi." Julian shut his eyes ... clack, clack, clack ... His nose itched. He scratched it. His hand smelled like Chretien's ass. He splayed it in front of his face and sniffed each fingertip with a very disappointed expression, he guessed.
He crossed his arms, watched the monochromatic Dutch landscape darken. Occasionally the train stopped in stations. For kicks, Julian picked the cutest guy in each city. After eight or nine stops, he held a mental Mr. Netherlands contest, which was won by a punk at the Eindhoven station. "Mr. Tennis" left. He was replaced by two chubby blond boys reading comic books. They were replaced by a French-looking guy who immediately dozed off. Holland got black, blended into northern Belgium. Julian walked the length of the train grading passengers. Ugly, cute, ugly, cute, cute, ugly, ugly, ugly, cute, ugly, ugly, ugly ugly ...
One or two looked as abnormally cute as Chretien had at first glance, before blending into Julian's fuzzy memory of Henry, a boy he would've never recalled if I wasn't so stuck in the past. But okay, now that I'd mentioned it ... A drunken party? A two-on-one thing with a particularly fucked-up young long-hair? A forehead smacking a glass coffee table? The context had flooded back, thanks partially to that "snuff" photo session he'd just spent two hours lingering on the outskirts of. Still, Kevin and/or his camera would have to be God, Julian thought, to transform a mud pie on someone's ass into the sort of nightmarish image one spends one's adult life obsessing about.
Julian took his seat ... clack, clack ... I came to mind. Not the psychotic me, but the teenager gazing purposefully into the holes in boys' bodies. Back in those days my compulsions were de rigueur, business as usual, part and parcel of sex, as far as Julian knew. I, he seemed like each other's reflections in every way. Smart, cold, curious, horny, drugged. So why was I "out there" and he relatively okay? ... clack, clack, clack ... He pictured the upper two-thirds of my sweaty face across a skinny white back, circa '74, then circa this afternoon ... clack, clack ... The former picture was fuzzy, unfocused. The latter picture was eerie and sad, as though I and he were the last survivors of some fringe master race.
His mind replaced that with an image of me circa '78, punked-out, too thin, called Spit, weaving drunkenly through Julian's hotel room describing some other punk I'd beaten up. He'd thought at the time, This is it, the ruins of our sexobsessive, overly ambitious, great, stupid, etc., youth. Spit had even looked a little bit like a cinder of my teenaged self-black clothes, black hair, voice so slurred by alcohol it might as well have been black. But he, like most of punk, at least to Julian's mind, was no more than mildly amusing in retrospect. Julian closed his eyes, slid down in the seat, following his train of thought toward the cozier prospect of Paris, home, sleep. Blah, blah, blah, blah ... yelled Spit.
He lies naked on a futon with his wrists tied together, legs spread, feet jutting out of the frame. Twisted sheet, like a skinny tornado. In the first shot his long, straight black hair's fallen into his face, covering everything but the tip of his nose, chin, cheekbone, one partly shut eye. He's seventeen. His body's too tensed to be dead or asleep. That's supposedly a noose around his neck.
Two. Another medium shot. His hair's hooked behind his ears. Longish face, upturned nose. Stoned black eyes. Big mouth, wide open. Two wrinkles crisscross his forehead, suggesting worry, confusion. One leg is blurred where he apparently moved it. The other's pale, spindly, hairless. Knobby knees, one scabbed. Bound hands, "noose" still in place.
Third shot's a close-up. His face, neck, "noose," shoulders, armpits. His tongue's flipped over backward and pushed through his teeth. The underside's weird. His eyes are alert, antsy. Each reflects a little camera and part of a hand. The "noose" is neither too tight nor particularly loose, like a necktie. His expression suggests an inexperienced actor trying to communicate shock.
Four's a medium shot. He's facedown, wrists untied, feet jutting out of the frame. His arms are bent in a neo-Egyptian manner. His asscrack is covered with something that vaguely resembles a wound when you squint. His back, ass, and legs are generic pale teenager. His hair's studiedly askew like in photos of '60s fashion models. His shoulders are pimply, narrow.
Five. Close-up. The "wound" is actually a glop of paint, ink, makeup, tape, cotton, tissue, and papier-mache sculpted to suggest the inside of a human body. It sits on the ass, crushed and deflated. In the central indentation there's a smaller notch maybe one-half-inch deep. It's a bit out of focus. Still, you can see the fingerprints of the person or persons who made it.
Table of Contents
00
WILD
TENSE
TORN
SPACED
NUMB
WILDER
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Frisk: A Novel (Cooper, Dennis) Page 12
