by Todd Gregory
Which story should I tell you first? My own or that of Garcia? My own or that of Carville? Or can I even separate these interwoven tales now, inextricably bound as they all are?
Carville is the nexus, of course. And so it is with Carville that I shall begin. Carville—that is what we all called it, the sanatorium, the leprosarium, although Carville is actually the town, nestled in an almost continual bank of fog near the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and New Orleans. When I first arrived at Carville, it was called the Louisiana Leper Home, if you can imagine. It is difficult to believe that such a name could have done anything but strike fear in the hearts of those who were sent there or even those who came, as did I, to help and succor those poor souls relegated to the life-in-death there.
And yet, every attempt was made to embrace those who lived at Carville. The Daughters of Charity did the bulk of the care for the inmates—Louisiana was, after all, a Catholic place, and lepers were scourged doubly through biblical invective. I found the Sisters to be kind and nurturing, however: there was never reproach in their mien.
Shortly before I came to Carville, it was a time of transition. The National Public Health Service would soon take over the running of the place (this would be how Garcia found his way there, to me) and a secondary research facility would be opening nearby. Somehow I found little difference between “Louisiana Leper Home” and “National Leprosarium,” but the government appeared to think the more clinical title to be less alarming. It was not. Nevertheless, the credo remained the same: Carville was to be “a place of refuge, not reproach; a place of treatment and research, not detention.” That none who entered could leave put the lie to that last bit, but good intentions were still inherent in that motto.
Carville is a sumptuously beautiful place, although I never visited anywhere in Louisiana that I didn’t find almost heartbreakingly beautiful. Louisiana had my heart even before Garcia did—and in as firm, compelling and eternal a grasp. Raul Garcia was as breathtakingly handsome as Carville was breathtakingly lush and he would possess me just as surely as that place had done. And—although I had no way of knowing until it was far, far too late—Garcia was as corrupted and decayed and degenerate as the disease out of which Carville was created.
But as was true of what infected all of us who lived there, no one could detect that rot at first. No one could see it. It spread, just below the surface of everything until one day it erupted—small and unremarkable at first. A tiny pink blush on the earlobe or a rosy spot on the inner thigh. And then…
There were several elements to my possession. First, there was Carville and why I was there. Then there was Garcia and how he found me. And then there was the degeneracy that followed—because that is what we called it then, although there are other names for it now. Just as there are other names for what we were at Carville. But underneath, underneath it is all the same. When death stalks you, no amount of literary flourish can alter the facts as they are. Death will win. Death—like desire—is immutable and transcendent.
I came to Carville as a shape shifter. No, I did not turn into a bat or wolf as the moon rose over the fog-dense fields, although I would have loved to roam there as the animal I felt I was.
Rather, I came to Carville in the guise of a redeemer, but I was nothing more than a charlatan, a poseur, a plain and simple liar and cheat. I might as well have been a snake oil salesman who knew his product to be nothing more than lamp or cooking oil. The magic I brought was faux to its core. As I had become faux at my own core. If I promised redemption, then I knew it to be a false promise and myself a false prophet. I came to Carville for one reason—to escape.
Was I a rogue? I was not. I was a newly ordained priest, Thomas Desmarais, from an old, if small, New Orleans family. While still a novitiate, I had traveled abroad to traverse the paths of those saints before me—Aquinas, for whom I was named, and so many others. And it was there in those hallowed and havoc-ridden lands that I discovered the biblical scourge that brought me, surreptitiously, inevitably, to Carville.
I arrived there under the guise of spiritual advisor to the Daughters of Charity who tended to the poor souls who had been brought there by coal barge or shrouded carriage in the darkest of nights, shunned by their families and communities and seeking solace in the desicated beauty of Carville. I was to give succor to those who felt betrayed by God. And yet God and I had parted several times before I ever reached that haunting place. My tight collar and vestiture proclaimed what I was. But just as Garcia did not arrive at Carville disguised as a bat, my own habillement could easily have made one think I was something other than what I was.
As I recount, it is a beautiful and solitary land of its own, Carville. It isn’t as isolated as Father Damien’s Molokai outpost, to be sure, but it is still a secret place. The long winding roadway that leads through the low, flat fields runs studded with live oaks that encircle and appear to hold each other at dusk as the fog begins to seep in. At the end of the road, right before one enters Carville proper, one old, gnarled, leafless oak stands like a portent to what lies beyond. Its stubs of limbs are both grotesque and fantastical.
An ominous welcome for us, the denizens of Carville, the slowly dying, those cast out from society at all its levels, high and low.
The old Indian Camp Plantation House is where they first brought them, the lepers, back in 1894. It had been a sugar plantation—stalks of cane still stand, unbidden, even now. It was a dark place then—or so I have heard. I arrived somewhat later and Garcia, later still. The building is all historical perfection now—big and white as plantation houses in the Old South were meant to be, with black shutters and a delicate black iron grillwork along the balconied and balustraded front.
It seems small to me now, but then it was—despite its decrepitude—impossibly grand in the way that every plantation was, even so soon after that war.
No one who lived there knew how it was they came to be there. Men and women—none knew how the scourge had come to touch them and only them, singular as they always were in their families or communities. The taint of leprosy never left—it’s still there to this day, despite science and renaming and our knowledge that some are prone to the disease and others not. There is no sin in being a leper—just lack of fortune, bad luck, a grim deal of the cards. But then, as now, we shudder at the thought. No one comes before us ringing a bell and calling out “unclean, unclean,” with the sumptuary zeal of the Middle Ages. No one needs to. Exile has been imposed by language alone: Leper. There is no worse word, still.
There is no romance in leper—only horror. Not as there is in vampire, which evokes both a frisson of fear as well as one of sensual excitation. I would learn that from Garcia when he chose me for his own. I would learn that I could transcend one naming by embracing another. And yet death is death, is it not? Disease and decay are all one, are they not? Had I run a stake through the heart of Garcia as he slept, I would have seen the onset of a decay so swift, it would make a leper cringe in abject revulsion. Not that I could, of course, betray Garcia in that way. After all, he had saved me from a dread fate by offering another. And with what he offered came him—and at the time, that was all I could envision, all I wanted. I was, for all my worldliness, still a youth, after all. And being possessed by Garcia, I felt then, was akin to being possessed by God, blasphemous a statement as that is. Garcia, after all, had become my god. It was he, not my true Savior, who had given me back my life. For I was already dead when he found me at Carville. And now I am something else entirely.
*
Was it in Egypt that I caught the dread disease? Or Jerusalem—that most holy of cities where I walked the Stations of the Cross and knelt where Christ had knelt? Was it at Damascus, where Paul had been struck with the lightning of salvation and redemption? Or was it on the sun-drenched beach at Crete where I lay one night with a young man my own age as we discussed divergent theologies until the tide swelled and we ran naked into the surf and then, as we rubbed ourselves dry on t
he moon-struck beach, found ourselves entangled in the very thing I had fled Louisiana to escape?
I remember that encounter in Crete as if it were yesterday, of course. I have so much time for memory now. An eternity, in fact.
The young man’s name was Nikolos, but it might as well have been Thanatos, because he brought me death. Not like Garcia would later, but without knowing.
We had met at a café late one afternoon. I had expected to take myself off to vespers, but never managed to leave. The climate imbued me with inertia. The heat of the sun, the impossibly bright white light of that part of the world, the pale blue shadows that were cast under the awnings that spread over our little cloth-covered table—it all held a crisp sensuality. We struck up a conversation over that thick coffee and tiropita, a flaky beignet-style pastry filled with a soft cheese. He had ordered these and fed me a bit, ordering me to “taste, taste” in his thickly accented English, and I had. The pastry was salty-sweet—savory and delicious. Later I would taste him on the night beach, savoring his saltiness—the ocean on his skin as well as his own brininess. I still did not know how to describe these degenerate dalliances, but I would have to say that he, too, was delectable. I could not get enough of him, his body hard and wet against mine on the silken sand and his cock pulsing against mine until we both… But I had not wanted to stray again like that. I had pledged myself to God and had every intention of maintaining that pledge. But the heat and the light followed by the cool dark on the beach—it all led me inevitably to take him, devour him, descend into the most lustful of places with him.
I had felt not the least regret. Rather I had felt a wave’s rush of longing for more and more of him. It was this very desire—and its damnation—that I had fled. And yet Nikolos led me back to that abyss and I went willingly, aching for the scent and taste and feel of him as a starving man does for bread, a thirsting man does for water. It was on that beach that I began to realize my calling might not be to God, but to some Other. I wish I could plead ignorance of my actions—claim to have been led and seduced and not to have known what it was I was doing. I could not even plead drunkenness, for we had but a few sips of a ghastly drink, retsina, which left me neither drunk nor desirous. That was all Nikolos. Nikolos and my burning cock.
It was Nikolos’s black hair and even blacker eyes that lured me. The scent that came off him was of the sea and leaves and something I could not quite discern. He grabbed me when we ran out of the surf and I stiffened despite the chill of the water. I won’t deny I ached to have his mouth on my cock and his hands caressing my buttocks. Is it any wonder then that this latter thing would happen within minutes and that I would be unable to restrain myself from paroxysmic orgasm? One that I wished to repeat as soon as I had sated him as well?
We had lain on that beach for hours, Nikolos and I, and I had drunk as deeply of him as I could. And as I did, without remorse, knew that I was indeed damned.
All of this, I now know, was in preparation for Garcia. I was being made into a creature ready to accept the dark vampire from Mexico with his ruff of black hair and his strong laborer’s hands. Garcia was, when we met, an artist. He had in fact come to Carville to do paintings of the place for the government’s museum, and to give the remaining inmates the treat of someone who was neither doctor nor scientist yet fully, wholly interested in them. Garcia had been trained by the great Diego Rivera—but he had the tall, muscular build of the laboring class he had been born into. I was equally attracted to both the men that he was. And also to, I must acknowledge, the darker being he held at bay to all but me in our days at Carville.
Yes, Nikolos was one of those who prepared me for Garcia. Without Nikolos I would never have gone to Carville and never have met the man who brought me into the realm I inhabit today. Without Nikolos I would never have understood that passion—like the Abyss—has no real depth of ending, it just goes on and on, into infinity.
Did Nikolos know he carried the disease when we lay together, drinking each other in? I doubt it. He was far from a malevolent sort. And in fact, I could have intuited it, had my focus been more on my surroundings and less on my companion and the urges he stoked in me. But for that, my companion would have had to have been a less handsome, less virile, less willing partner in debauchery and drawn my thoughts more toward the spiritual than to the viscerally corporeal. Instead we spent my week in Crete dazed with the days’ white heat and besotted by the very different heat that came with each subsequent night.
Nikolos told me—another novitiate, he was—that he was beginning to train to work at Spinalonga, the leper colony on Crete. He spoke passionately of St. Damien and the work he had done. Somehow Nikolos had managed to separate our debauchery from his spiritual calling. Or he saw it all as one and the same—his body as a temple, as God’s temple, and all the actions performed by it a form of worship. Thus his tending of the lepers was no different from his tending of my pulsing cock. He believed in giving of himself. And so he did for the entirety of my visit, leaving me with memories that would heat me up on nights I spent alone after I left him and Crete behind.
*
No one knew why I had left Louisiana to travel abroad, but I knew. There was a man—a man who was as much like Garcia would later be as I had known up to that time. A dark, truly unholy man with unholy desires who had discovered me in St. Louis Cathedral one evening kneeling at the Prie Dieu before vespers. He had invited me back to his home for dinner. What had transpired after a meal of fish and rice and a wine I had never drunk before had made me question my faith and myself.
I had stood looking out on the bayou—for he had lived in St. John’s Parish and the bayou loomed in the near dark before the long, unshuttered windows. I held my wineglass and contemplated the encroaching night and inhaled the sumptuousness of the wine and the leftover aromas of the meal.
When he came up behind me, his arm draped lightly over my shoulders. I felt an inexplicable and alarming frisson run down my spine and into my cock. I would like to say that I fought him, that he did not take me easily or readily. But that would be one more lie like the ones I told when I went to Carville.
As a boy I had felt this frisson again and again, but I had satisfied it solitarily and always felt ashamed after, washing my hands again and again, promising myself I would never touch myself with desire in future, saying a prayer or two or more. But it was a vain promise that I could never maintain. Desire is immutable, I have discovered. It must be sated one way or another. I had hoped to sublimate my base desires into love of God and pursuit of all that was holy and decent. I would surround myself with good works and I would wash away the uncleanness with which I felt I had debased myself.
Or so I thought. But desire might not come from evil, always. Or so I am starting to convince myself. Certainly Nikolos believed this—I was keenly aware that he felt none of the shame and guilt I had come to associate with sensual desire before I met him. Desire may be God’s way of making us feel alive and in harmony with him at a deep and impenetrable—yes, that is the appropriate word—level.
This is not what Garcia would say. For he is, to be sure, from that other side, the dark one. Although I still cannot bring myself to think of him as evil, even after all he has done and all he has told me.
I have steeled myself against that dark side—or so I say. I have tried to keep myself from succumbing to it, except that Garcia is there, and how can I not want to be with him wherever he is? These are the things all men have wrestled with as long as there has been desire and heat and the elusive promise of immortality—be it in Heaven with God or elsewhere.
My own struggles began with that man at the Cathedral. I will not reveal his name, even now. Yet it was he who brought me to this ultimate place. He was the first one, the one to show me what desire fulfilled really was. He wanted to show me even more, but I was not yet ready. I’m not sure I was even ready when Garcia took me over and made me what I am now—vampire.
But then, then I knew nothing of the worl
d but books and my own conflicted desire. Why had I let this man lure me back to his home? What had I told myself? I had told myself that he was older and cultured and I was young and in need of mentoring. And over dinner it had indeed seemed like a lesson—in food, in wine, in conversation, in literature—he quoted liberally from books I had barely skimmed and I considered myself a budding scholar. He had told me about his trips abroad. We had discussed Aquinas and Augustine and the flaws of men attempting to be saintly when they were merely men. He had grown discursive over Augustine, lingering over Augustine’s life of degeneracy and sin, barely touching on his conversion. But I was rapt. I might as easily have been a schoolgirl, I was so attentive to his every discourse. But of course he was handsome and virile, and his trim beard and well-cut suit merely accentuated the body beneath. As he talked of Augustine, I felt myself wondering, shamelessly, given where we had met, what lay beneath the morning coat he wore, and where the buttons on his trousers would lead. I shook myself from that reverie, however, and took a long—perhaps too long—draft of the wine and stood, a bit unsteadily.
I had gone to the window and he had come up behind me. I had held fast to my glass as his arms encircled my waist and then his strong right hand traveled down onto my already stiffened cock. As I said, I should have resisted. But I never thought to. I wanted it—what he offered—and clearly he knew this. He had stalked me like prey, I realized. I wanted it and he sensed it. Just as I had wanted the dinner and the talk and the excitation of my intellect, I wanted this: I wanted his hands on me. I wanted to feel his flesh against mine. I wanted to feel the pulse of him against me, and soon I would.
We left the window. He led me to his bedroom and lay me on the bed. He took time undressing me—a fetishist’s time, I would think later. The slow unbuttoning of my shirt, the opening of my pants, the exposing of my cock—it all happened slowly. Deliberately, maddeningly and exquisitely and torturously slowly. I ached for him to touch me, to touch me fully, to release me from the intensity of my desire.
