The Beautiful Men
Then, something inexplicable happens that ends his former life.
Lainey has a loud friend called Lex, an easyJet steward based at Gatwick who flirts and theatrically emphasizes his words, punctuating his conversations with expansive hand gestures, and Ryan wants to argue with him every time they meet, so he finds excuses not to meet up with Lainey whenever she makes arrangements for them.
But one night the trio end up having a good time, mainly because Lex stops trying so hard to be liked. Three days later Ryan meets the pair of them at a new bar in the port, and that is where he first notices them, standing right in the center of the room.
The beautiful men.
Ryan assumes they’re gay; anyone would. He figures that the new acceptance of gay men gives them permission to be as ordinary as everyone else, and now most of them are. The flamboyant clothes and outrageous behavior of the past has been relegated to old photographs, the former ghettos have been decimated by rent hikes and invading coffee shops. The bars which were once the exclusive province of Riviera queens are now as blended as the wines served in them. But, just as one would occasionally spot a small flock of stunning, unattainable girls, as attenuated and exotic as African flamingos, Ryan starts to notice the beautiful men, half-a-dozen of them, each so ridiculously perfect that he can’t imagine what they ever looked like as children. He wonders if they have been conjured into existence by a coalescence of pure atoms, or perhaps they are man-made and spend their nights floating in amniotic fluids being recharged.
Each night they drift into Lex’s favorite bar, Le Six, and order cocktails, standing apart from everyone else, not even looking around, just quietly talking to each other, so unreal that you want to pinch their flesh for reassurance.
Lainey notices them and Lex definitely notices them, and everyone assumes they’re models because their expensive clothes are casually immaculate and their hair and skin looks retouched. They are all in their early twenties, tall, dark, thick-armed and slender-waisted, with an other-worldly presence that rises above traditional notions of beauty. Nicois men are naturally dark and beautiful, so it takes a lot to stand out.
It is strange that Ryan should even notice them at all, but the simple truth is that they disturb him. They are the wind in the tops of the pines, the tremble of the seismometer needle before a quake. They ruffle still waters and scatter seagulls, they part crowds and make cats cower. They appear shallow to the point of absurdity yet are somehow the opposite, as if they are magnetically connected to life, as if they are the essence of life itself.
The Seventh
As soon as Ryan sees them, he starts seeing them everywhere he goes, throughout the bars and restaurants and art galleries of Nice, on empty night streets and at busy midday intersections, the same six beautiful men, all in dark glasses, all standing a little apart from one another, never touching anyone else, moving aside so that they don’t come into contact with mere mortals, as though something cataclysmic would happen if they did.
And then one day, they are joined by a seventh, the most perfect one of all.
Ryan cannot describe him without sounding infatuated. The object of his obsession is well over two meters tall, with tousled black hair and clear dark skin, a wide jaw and the strangest blue eyes Ryan has ever seen on a real human being. He never wears shades. He is muscled and long in the thighs, wears a steel and leather bracelet on his right arm, skinny jeans and shiny black boots, a jet shirt open at the neck. And when he has occasion to smile, something astonishing happens. He draws down the stars. The air fills with errant electricity, and seems in danger of igniting.
“They started turning up about six weeks ago,” says Lex one night when the three of them are at the bar. He eyes them with a combination of lust and fury. “They always hang around together. Never talk to anyone else. Probably nobody’s good enough for them.”
“And you’re staring at the tall one,” Lainey tells Ryan.
“No, I’m not,” he lies indignantly.
“Yes, you are. You may not realize it but you can’t take your eyes off him.”
“He’s wearing a great shirt. And you’ve got to admit he’s hot, for a guy. I’m comfortable with my sexuality. It doesn’t make me gay to say that.”
“No, I guess not,” Lainey sighs. “You’re not being judgmental, which is a good thing.”
“Do you know how much effort it takes to look that hot?” asks Lex. “I bet he gets up at five in the morning to start his workout and conduct some kind of intense moisturizing program. They all have eight-packs now, it’s the new musculature. He’s probably a model or a professional whore, which amounts to the same thing.”
Here’s the odd thing, thinks Ryan. When you experience extreme beauty, you tend to think of it as other-worldly, but I see the opposite in this man. I’m drawn because he’s completely at ease in his world, entirely connected with it. He is no angel; he smokes and drinks and has a dirty laugh, but there’s something so unknowable and expansive about him that you can’t help but be fascinated.
The Pursuit
Something very strange is happening to Ryan, and he knows it. It feels like love but can’t be, surely. He fights against the word “obsessed,” but the more he sees, the more he wants to see, and when the beautiful men aren’t there he feels a little more lost, and little less alive.
“Charisma” means “bearing the gift of divine grace,” and that is what they have, the beautiful men, a coalescence that begins to escalate when they enter a room, perhaps not a physical heat but something Ryan perceives to be uncomfortably hot. He begins finding excuses to hang out in their neighborhood—the bars and restaurants to the east of Avenue Jean Medecin. He starts lying to Lainey about where he is going, but Lex sees him around and clearly decides to keep his counsel.
Ryan continues to change each time he sees them. He feels a disgust at the way he’s behaved with girls in the past, as if just being in proximity to these demigods somehow has the potential to make him a better person.
But it is a drug. Each time he sees their leader he wants something more. In the crowded bars of dying summer he can stand quite close, but it still isn’t enough. He tries to hear what the beautiful men are saying to each other, but can never catch the words. Then one night when Lainey has a cold and is staying home, the two men find themselves pressed close together in a scruffy pub behind the flower market. It is the first time Ryan sees him without his friends. He raises his eyes to find his searching gaze returned.
The effect is one of electrocution.
Ryan went to a Catholic school and emerged with a tangle of doubts and suspicions he has never bothered to work through, but this man presses against his heart and catches his breath between parted lips, inhaling and returning it to the universe in an act so perversely religious that he almost faints. He shakes his head as if to clear the clouds from it, but the sensation only grows. The man is still staring at him. It’s as if he does not entirely occupy the space in which he stands. The weight of him is slightly blurred, shimmering with dark matter.
Holding his stare, the man steps back towards the door, and Ryan can only follow.
Outside a light rain sparkles in yellow squares of light. They walk in silence through the streaming alleyways of the Old Town. Ryan follows, knowing that he would pass through fire to remain this close. He sees how others move out of their way, as if the sight disturbs them in some fundamental manner. They reach the square of Sainte Reparate and slip inside the church. Within the cool grey space, Ryan instantly loses the sights and sounds of the city. Beneath the church’s old wooden roof the man he is following stops in the deserted nave and slowly turns. He watches as Ryan draws closer, and closer still.
The Admission
Ryan is suddenly filled with terror. He cannot comprehend what he is doing here. It makes no sense at all, and feels as dangerous as tapping Death on the shoulder. The man he has followed is watching him with a mystifying, silent blankness. Their
faces are lit by the guttering penance candles that line the pews.
Ryan takes a step closer, so that they are but a forearm’s length apart.
“My name is Phosphoros,” says the man in clear but oddly weighted English. “You must not touch me. But you can answer this for me.”
Ryan stops and waits while Phosphoros, the light-bearer, the morning star, taps out a battered cigarette and lights it, the flame streaking his wet face with gold. “Why are you here?”
“I don’t know.”
“Think about your answer very carefully. I must ask again. Why are you here?”
“Because I love you.” Ryan cannot believe he has said this, and tries to bite back the words.
“You don’t know me.”
“I don’t have to. I just know what I feel.”
“It is very dangerous for you.”
“I don’t care.”
“You understand what I am.”
“I think so.”
“And you are not afraid.”
“No.”
It might be Ryan’s imagination, but the beautiful man’s mouth appears to be moving out of synch with his voice, like a poorly dubbed film. The words of Phosphoros resound in Ryan’s head, disorienting him.
“Why are you here?” Ryan throws the question back.
Phosphoros sighs. “We are the rebels. We believe that people should be told. We will probably be punished when we return.”
“What should we be told?”
“That you cannot be saved.”
Ryan touches his forefinger to his chest and looks around. “You think that’s what I want? To be saved?”
“I do not mean you. I mean the world. You will dissipate to atoms very soon now. All humans will. Do you think it will help to know what is going to happen?”
Ryan cannot think of an answer. He had not been expecting to trigger some kind of metaphysical debate in a French church. It briefly crosses his mind that the man with whom he has become obsessed is mad or drugged, just another beautiful burnout who’s had too many late nights. But Ryan needs to believe. He wants answers. It is human nature to seek solutions.
“You’re saying the world is going to end? No, it wouldn’t help me to know how. But it would change me.”
“And you want to change.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because I don’t like myself. I’m lost. I think most of us are.”
“Then come to me.” Phosphoros holds out his arms in welcome.
The Vision
The pose bothers Ryan, reminding him of a hyper-real life-sized statue of Jesus in the chapel at his old school. Yet he steps into his angel’s embrace without hesitation, and feels his warm arms close like wings about his shoulders.
Phosphoros flicks aside his cigarette, exhales and kisses Ryan fully and deeply. It should feel like a sacrilegious act, but is the reverse.
There is a sensation of molten rain in Ryan’s mouth that floods down his throat and into his chest, setting his soul aflame.
The grey walls of the church fall away and he sees. Truly, he sees.
It will begin exactly six weeks after this night. The future unfolds in flashes of brilliance that damage his eyes.
A huge bomb detonates in a Siberian oilfield.
The Russians blast the most important Sunni temple in the Middle East.
Saudi Arabia collapses into a state of civil war.
The oil pipelines are cut. The troops are unable to hold back the crowds.
The loss of oil stops electricity, and the loss of electricity stops water. America attempts to form alliances, but is rebuffed. China no longer needs its help. Elderly men shout across vast tables. The crowds mill like panicked animals. The buildings fall. The West is left unprotected, and like a card house it collapses.
The end comes with indecent speed, but the suffering lingers on for years. After-images of cataclysm roll past in a blur of pixels, endlessly looped on the world’s dying television screens. The future screams, then starves, then whimpers, then fades to a nagging soundless pain that reduces everyone to animals, then insects, then microbes.
The Decision
Ryan breaks free, severing the circuit. The walls of the church close back in. He blinks and tries to focus. “This is why you’re here,” he says, forming the words with difficulty, as if drunk. “You know what’s about to happen. You’re testing us, to see if we should know as well.”
“We’re here to help. You need to tell me. The decision is yours.”
“How many others have you asked?”
“We have only asked the ones who have seen us for what we are. The ones who are drawn to us against their natures. We need to know how you wish to survive, with or without this terrible knowledge.”
“If everything will be gone in just a few passes of the sun,” Ryan replies, “I want to be awake, not asleep. If I can’t survive, I want to live. Please, don’t take the memory away. Leave it inside me.”
“As you wish.” The angel Phosphoros seizes him by the hair and kisses him with a vicious force, and this time it feels as if some part of his soul is being restored, forcing the fire of life into him, so that even though he is shivering and frozen in the darkened church, every nerve in his body is alive with energy.
Phosphoros releases him and studies his face to remember it. “I should tell you that all the humans we approached reached this consensus,” he says. “You are the last one to be asked. The seven of us were right to come here, right to question. Upon our return we will throw ourselves upon the mercy of our elders, and present the evidence of your strength. If we are successful in our entreaties, we will end the world a few seconds before you yourselves can destroy it, in a vast and sudden conflagration, so loud that it is silent, so bright that it is blackness, and there will be no anguish, no suffering, nothing left at all. I hope this is of consolation to you.”
“I don’t need to be consoled,” Ryan tells the angel. “I feel—” He struggles to find the right word. “—completed.”
Phosphorus releases him and steps back, to be joined by his six friends, who slowly emerge from the shadows. Ryan follows them outside and watches as they rise up in the rain and become streams of luminescence that burst and glow within the night clouds over the sea, before finally vanishing from sight.
Ryan finds that he is quite alone. His sense of loss is like a bruise upon his heart. He thinks of Phosphoros soaring away, of the risk he took to prove the strength of man, but the sensation of love is quickly replaced by confusion. He cannot understand what he is doing here. His chest is sore. He feels as if he is recovering from a great sickness. Digging his mobile from his jacket pocket, he is about to call Lainey but changes his mind. All he knows now is that he needs to be by himself. The knowledge he has been given carries an enormous weight, and he must rediscover of his spirit.
In the time that’s left his journey takes him back to his family in London, and then to the shoreline of Nice once more, where he feels most at rest. By the time he returns, America has recalled its citizens and Lainey has gone. Nobody knows where she is. Ryan knows he will never see her again.
The End
And now, with just minutes to go before the end of the world, he leans back against the warm stone of the seat, and turns up the music in his headphones. He smiles at the passing pedestrians and looks down at the bay, waiting for the angelic interception, the soundless flare of vermilion light that will tell him they succeeded. He watches as the city goes about its business, tethered to routine, heedless of harm, happy to exist at all.
Once he was lost and miserable. But now the precise details of the world’s conclusion are burned into his cortex. He understands the fall of angels, the hopes of men, the nature of love. Ryan smiles to himself, truly content for the first and only time in his life.
He knows that there are others out there who were touched, who are now watching and waiting for the final hour to arrive. He thanks the beautiful men. He knows th
at joy has the breadth of an atom, and is quickly gone. But while it is here it must be treasured, for there is nothing else that we can do.
Here it comes.
GOING BAD
Jay Lake
“INNOCENCE ALWAYS WAS A RECIPE for disaster.” Sesalem kept one hand on the issue thirty-eight that protruded from the holster at his back like a warm, black egg stuck halfway out of the hen.
A nervous habit.
Corpses made him nervous.
Fork-Foot, his Infernal Liaison, walked around the body, kicking it with needled claws. Sesalem winced at this contamination of evidence. Eight feet tall, jeweled with glittering scales, and armored with Infernal Immunity, there was little the detective could do to influence the demon.
Visitants-Stories of Fallen Angels and Heavenly Hosts Page 42
