Sacrament

by Clive Barker

  “Laura.”

  Koppelman beamed. “You remembered? I brought her book for you to sign.” He rummaged in the bag he’d brought with him.

  Out came a copy of Boundaries. “I had a look through it last night,” he said. “Grim stuff.”

  “Oh it’s gotten a lot worse since then,” Will said, taking the pen from Koppelman’s breast pocket, and relieving him of the book. “There’s a couple of species in here lost the fight.”

  “They’re extinct?”

  “As the dodo.” He opened the book to the title page, and scrawled an inscription.

  “What the hell does that say?”

  “For Laura. Best wishes.”

  “And that scrawl underneath your signature?”

  “Yep.”

  “Just so I know what to tell her.”

  He left two days later. There were no direct flights to San Francisco, so he was obliged to change planes in Chicago. It was at most a minor inconvenience, and he was so happy to be back in the stream of people that the drudgery of getting through O’Hare became positively pleasurable. By late afternoon he was in the plane that would carry him west and, seated by the window, ordered a whiskey in celebration. He hadn’t had any alcohol in several months, and it went straight to his head.

  Pleasantly happy, he let sleep overtake him, as the sky ahead darkened.

  By the time he awoke the day had long gone, and the lights of the city by the bay were glittering below.

  III

  i

  San Francisco had not been Will’s first port of call when he’d come to America. That honor had fallen to Boston, where he had gone at the age of nineteen, having decided that whatever he was yearning for he’d never find it in England. He didn’t find it in Boston either. But during the fourteen months he lived there a new Will emerged, falteringly at first, then with fearless abandon. He had known his sexual preferences long before he left England. He’d even acted upon his desires on a few occasions, though never in a state of complete sobriety. In Boston, however, he learned to be happily queer, reinventing himself after his own idiosyncratic mode. He wasn’t a corn-fed American beauty; he wasn’t a plaid-shirted macho man; he wasn’t a style queen; he wasn’t a leather boy: He was his own peculiar creature, desired and pursued for that very reason. Qualities that would have gone unnoticed in a bar in Manchester (some of them obvious, like his accent, some so subtle he couldn’t have named them) were here rare and coveted. He learned the nature of his advantage quickly and exploited it shamelessly. Eschewing the uniform of the day (sneakers, tight jeans, white T-shirt) he dressed like the impoverished English lad he was, and it worked like a charm. He seldom went back to an empty bed, unless he wished to do so; and in a few months had gone through three love affairs, two of which he’d concluded. The last had been his first and bitterest taste of unreciprocated love. The object was one Laurence Mueller, a television producer nine years Will’s senior. Blond, sleek, and sexually adroit, Larry had drawn Will into a heady romance only to drop him cold after six weeks, a pattern he was notorious for repeating. Heartbroken, Will had mourned over the loss for half a summer, salving the hurt as best he could with behavior that would probably have killed him five years later. In the sex emporia of the Combat Zone and in the darkness of the Fenway, where on weekend nights a sexual bacchanalia was in constant progress, he played out every sexual scenario his libido could conjure, to put Larry’s dismissal of him from his mind.

  The hurt had faded by September, but not before he’d had a pot-induced revelation. Sitting in a steam room, meditating on his misery, he realized that Larry’s desertion had awoken in him some of the same pain he’d felt when Steep had departed.

  Turning over this realization, he’d sat sweating in the tiled room for an unhealthy time, ignoring the hands and the glances that came his way. What did it mean? That somewhere in his attachment to Jacob there’d been sexual feeling? Or that in his midnight encounters in the Shrubbery there was somewhere buried the hope that he’d find a man who would deliver on Steep’s promises and take him out of the world into a place of visions?

  He’d finally left the steam room to its orgiasts, his head thumping too hard for him to think clearly. But the questions remained with him thereafter, troubling him. He countered them the plainest way he knew how. If a man who approached bore even the slightest resemblance to his memory of Steep—the color of his hair, the shape of his mouth—Will rejected him with talismanic cruelty.

  ii

  It wasn’t the Larry Mueller saga that drove him from Boston, it was an icy December. Coming out of the restaurant where he worked as a waiter into the maw of a Massachusetts blizzard, he decided he’d had enough of being frozen and it was time to head for balmier climes. His first thought was Florida, but that night, talking over the options with the bartender at Buddies, he heard the siren-song of San Francisco.

  “I’ve only been out to California once,” the bartender, whose name (Danny) was tattooed on his arm in case he forgot it, told him, “but man, I was so close to staying. It’s faggot paradise. It really is.”

  “As long as it’s warm.”

  “There’s places warmer,” Danny conceded. “But shit, if you want to be hot then go live in fucking Death Valley, right?” He leaned over to Will, lowering his voice. “If I didn’t have my other half,” (Danny’s longtime lover, Frederico—the other half in question—was sitting five yards along the bar), “I’d be back there, living the life. No question.”

  It was a pivotal exchange. Within two weeks Will had packed his bags and was gone, leaving Boston on a day of sparkling frost that almost made him regret his decision, the city looked so beautiful. There was another kind of beauty waiting for him at the end of his journey, however, a city that enraptured him far beyond his expectations. He found a job working for one of the community newspapers and, one momentous day, missing a photographer to cover a piece he was writing about his adopted city, he borrowed a camera to do the job himself. It wasn’t love at first sight. His initial photographs were so piss-poor he couldn’t use them. But he liked the feeling of the camera in his hands, liked being able to circumscribe the world through the lens. And the subject before him was the tribe in whose heartland he lived: the queens, the cowboys, the dykes, the mannequins, the sex-fiends, the drag artists, and the leather devotees whose homes, bars, clubs, grocery stores, and Laundromats spread from the intersection of Castro and Eighteenth, north to Market, south to Collingwood Park.

  While he learned his craft, he also learned how to be a wild boy between the sheets, until he had quite a reputation as a lover. He seldom played anonymously now, though there were plenty of places to do so. He wanted deeper experiences and found them in the beds and embraces of a dozen men, none of whom had his heart, but all of whom excited him in their various ways. There was Lorenzo, a forty-year-old Italian who had left a wife and children in Portland to come be what he’d already known he was on his wedding day. There was Drew Dunwoody, a muscle-boy who was for a time almost as devoted to Will as to his own reflection. There was Sanders, who was the closest Will had to a sugar-daddy, an older man (he had been admitting to forty-nine for five years) who lent him the first three months’ rent on a one-room apartment near Collingwood Park and later a down payment on a secondhand Harley. There was Lewis the insurance man, who never said a word in company, but who poured out his lyrical soul to Will behind closed doors and who subsequently flowered into a minor poet. There was Gregory, beautiful Gregory, dead of an accidental overdose at twenty-four.

  And Joel, and Mescaline Mike, and a boy who’d said his name was Derrick, but who was later discovered to be an AWOL marine by the name of Dupont.

  In this charmed circle, Will grew up, grew strong. The plague was not yet upon them, and in hindsight this would come to seem a Golden Age of hedonism and excess, which Will, by an act of equilibrium that still astonished him, managed to both observe and indulge. Soon, though he didn’t know it, death would come and start to lay its fat
al fingers on many of the men he photographed, an arbitrary culling of beauties and intellects and loving souls. But for seven extraordinary years, before the shadow fell, he bathed daily in that queer river supposing it would rush like this forever.

  iii

  It had been Lewis, the insurance man turned poet, who’d first talked about animals with him. Sitting on the back porch of Lewis’s house on Cumberland watching a raccoon raid the trash cans, they’d fallen to talking about what it would be like to inhabit for a time the body and spirit of an animal. Lewis had been writing about seals and was presently so obsessed with the subject, he said, that they entered his dreams nightly.

  “Big, sleek, black seals,” he said, “just hanging out.”

  “On a beach?”

  “No, on Market Street,” Lewis said with a giggle. “I know it sounds stupid, but when I’m dreaming it they look like they belong there. I did ask one of them what they were doing, and he said they were checking out the lay of the land for when the city drops into the ocean.”

  Will watched the raccoon efficiently sorting through the trash. “I dreamed about this talking fox when I was a kid,” he said softly. Maybe it was Lewis’s hashish—he never failed to find good ganja—but the memory was crystalline: “Lord Fox,” he said.

  “Lord Fox?”

  “Lord Fox,” Will replied. “He scared the fuck out of me, but he was comical at the same time.”

  “Why’d he scare you?” Will had never spoken about him to anyone, and even now—though he liked and trusted Lewis—he felt a twinge of reluctance. Lord Fox was part of a much bigger secret (the great secret of his life), and he was covetous of it. But gentle Lewis was pressing for further explanation. “Tell me,” he said.

  “He’d eaten somebody,” Will replied. “That’s what scared me about him. But then I remember he told me this story.”

  “About what?”

  “It wasn’t even a story really. It was just a conversation he’d had with a dog.”

  “Yeah?” Lewis laughed, thoroughly engaged.

  Will repeated the substance of Lord Fox’s exchange with the dog, amazed at how easily he could recall it, though it was a decade and a half since he’d dreamed the dream.

  “We hunted for them, we herded for them, we guarded their brats. And why? Because we thought they knew how to take care of things. How to keep the world full of meat and flowers—” Lewis liked what he heard. “I could get a poem out of that,” he said.

  “I wouldn’t risk it.”

  “Why not?”

  “He might come after you for a slice of the profits.”

  “What profits?” Lewis said. “This is poetry.” Will didn’t reply. He was watching the raccoon, who had done scavenging and was scampering away with its booty. And while he was watching, he was thinking of Lord Fox, and of Thomas the painter, living and dead.

  “You want some more?” Lewis said, handing the nub of the reefer back to Will. “Hey, Will? You listening?”

  Will was staring into the darkness, his thoughts as furtive as the raccoon. Lewis was right. There was a kind of poetry in the story Lord Fox had told. But Will wasn’t a poet. He couldn’t tell the story with words. He had only his eyes, and his camera, of course.

  He took the extinguished reefer from Lewis’s fingers and reignited it, pulling the pungent smoke deep into his lungs. It was powerful ganja, and he’d already had more than usual. But he was feeling greedy tonight.

  “Are you thinking about the fox?” Lewis asked him.

  Will turned his blurred gaze in Lewis’s direction. “I’m thinking about the rest of my life,” he replied.

  In his own mythology of himself, the journey that would take him out into the wildernesses of the world, to the places where species were perishing for the simple crime of living where they felt the need to live, began that night on Lewis’s porch, with the reefer, the raccoon, and the story of Lord Fox. This was a simplification of course. He’d been bored with chronicling the Castro for a while and was ready for a change long before that night. As for the direction that desire might point in, it did not come clear in the space of a conversation. But over the next few weeks, his idling thoughts returned to this exchange several times, and he started to turn his camera away from the throngs of the Castro, toward the animal life that coexisted with people in the city. His first experiments were unambitious, late juvenilia, at best. He photographed the sea lions that congregated on Pier 39, the squirrels in Dolores Park, and the next-door neighbor’s dog, who regularly stopped the traffic by squatting to take a dump in the middle of Sanchez Street. But the journey that would in time take him very far from the Castro and from squirrels, seals, and defecating dogs, had begun.

  He had dedicated Transgressions, his first published collection, to Lord Fox. It was the least he could do.

  IV

  i

  Adrianna came to visit, unannounced, the morning after he got back into the city. She brought a pound of French Roast from the Castro Cheesery and Zuccotto and St. Honore’s cake from Peverelli’s in North Beach, where she’d now moved in with Glenn. They hugged and kissed in the hallway, both a little teary-eyed at the reunion.

  “Lord, I’ve missed you,” Will told her, his hands cupping her face. “And you look so fine.”

  “I dyed my hair. No more gray. I will have this hair color at a hundred and one. Now what about you?”

  “I’m better every day,” Will said, heading through to the kitchen to brew some coffee. “I still creak a bit when I get up in the morning, and the scars itch like buggery after I’ve had a shower, but otherwise I’m back in working order.”

  “I had my doubts. So did Bernie.”

  “You thought I might just slip away quietly?”

  “It crossed my mind. You looked very peaceful. I asked Bernie if you were dreaming. He said he didn’t know.”

  “It wasn’t like dreaming, it was like going back in time. Being a boy again.”

  “Was that fun?”

  He shook his head. “I’m very happy to be back.”

  “You’ve got a great place to come back to,” she said, wandering to the kitchen door and surveying the hallway. She’d always loved the house, more than Will, in truth. The size of the place, along with the intricacy of the layout (not to mention the excesses its stylishly underfurnished rooms had hosted) lent it a certain authority, she thought. Most of the houses in the neighborhood had seen their share of priapics, of course, but it wasn’t just high times that haunted the boards here. It was a host of other things: Will’s rages when he couldn’t make the connections, and his howls of revelation when he did; the din of excited conversation around maps which had upon them an exhilarating paucity of roads; evenings of debate on the devolution of certainty and drunken ruminations on fate and death and love.

  There were finer houses in the city, to be sure, but none, she’d be willing to bet, more marinated in midnight profundities than this.

  “I feel like a burglar,” Will said, pouring coffee for them both. “Like I broke into somebody’s apartment and I’m living their life for them.”

  “You’ll get back into the groove after a few days,” Adrianna said, taking her coffee and wandering through to the large file room where Will always laid out his pictures. The length of one wall was a noticeboard, on which over the years he’d pinned up exposure or printing errors that had caught his eye, pictures too dark or burned out to be useful, but which he nevertheless found intriguing. His consumptives, he called these unhealthy pictures, and had more than once observed, usually in his cups, that this was what he saw when he imagined how the world would end.

  Blurred or indecipherable forms in a grainy gloom, all purpose and particularity gone.

  She perused them idly while she sipped her coffee. Many of the photographs had been up on the wall for years, their unfixed images decaying further in the light.

  “Are you ever going to do anything with these?” she said.

  “Like burn them, you mean?
” he said, coming to stand beside her.

  “No, like publishing them.”

  “They’re fuck-ups, Adie.”

  “That’d be the point.”

  “A deconstructionist wildlife book?”

  “I think it’d attract a lot of attention.”

  “Fuck the attention,” Will said. “I’ve had all the attention I ever want. I’ve said Look what I did, Daddy to the whole wide world and my ego is now officially at peace.” He went to the board and started to pull the pictures down, the pins flying.

  “Hey, be careful, you’ll tear them!”

  “So?” he said, chucking the pictures down. “You know what? This feels good!” The floor was rapidly littered with photographs. “That’s more like it,” he said, stepping back to admire the now empty wall.

  “Can I have one for a souvenir?”

  “One.”

  She wandered amongst the scattered pictures, looking for a picture that caught her fancy. Stooping, she picked up an old and much-stained photograph.

  “What did you choose?” he said. “Show me.” She turned it to him. It resembled a nineteenth-century spiritualist picture, those pale blurs of ectoplasm in which believers detected the forms of the dead. Will named its origins instantly.

  “Begemder Province, Ethiopia. It’s a walia ibex.” Adrianna flipped the photograph over to look at it again.

  “How the hell do you know that?”

  Will smiled. “I never forget a face,” he said.

  ii

  The following day he went to visit Patrick, in his apartment up at the top of Castro. Though the pair had lived together on Sanchez Street for almost four of their six years together, Patrick had never given up the apartment, nor had Will ever pressured him to do so. The house, in its spare, functional way, was an expression of Will’s undecorative nature. The apartment, by contrast, was so much a part of who Patrick was—warm, exuberant, enveloping—that to have given it up would have been tantamount to losing a limb. There at the top of the hill he had spent most of the money he earned in the city below (where he had been until recently an investment banker) creating a retreat from the city, where he and a few chosen lotus-eaters could watch the fog come and go. He was a big, broad handsome man, his Greek heritage as evident in his features as the Irish: heavy-lidded and laden eyes, a thug of a nose, a generous mouth beneath a fat black mustache. In a suit, he looked like somebody’s bodyguard; in drag at Mardi Gras, like a fundamentalist’s nightmare; in leather, sublime.