Abominations of Desire

by Vince Liaguno

  The water knows. The water sounds too much like yes for coincidence.

  Time. Yes, I do remember time. Don't think I've forgotten the before, because I haven't. I never will. It's just that it no longer holds any interest for me, that bright, brilliant life, full of ticks and tocks, and shares and stocks. Rushing from shower to office to wine bar to office to wine bar—and all for what? Chasing the money, chasing the deal. Time was never on my side, then.

  On my side. Left side, right side, upside downside. Doesn’t matter. All the same. All the same when he chooses his pallet with the care of a maestro. All the same when he leaves purple fingerprints on flesh where only freckles remember the sun. There. And there. Those are older, or...I think so. It’s getting hard to tell. They bloom slowly, small round photographs of possession and I count down their arrival. They take about two hundred slow measured drips to show fully, but he’s always gone by then. You’d think, with the pleasure I give him as he creates his finger-painting, that he’d stay around to watch it blossom.

  I understand though. He leaves a torch which burns for the length of time it takes for his art to show itself. His art is not for him. It's for me.

  It’s not the fruition of his work that inspires him. It’s his canvas. I’m his canvas. His inspiration. He calls me that. He’s never called me by my name. But he doesn’t think of me as a name, and now, neither do I.

  The skin is the truest canvas, he says. Unappreciated in this day of blobs and cartoons and people who throw paint onto mere paper with little understanding of what they create. Art takes a lifetime, he says. Art cannot be ripped early from a womb and thrown to the voyeurs, too new for appreciation.

  In fact, he says, people have forgotten about art. The last true artists were the Inquisition.

  He says.

  I rejected all this at first, rejected his creativity, as a body rejects an alien object. I screamed, I damaged myself, attempting to rip the bonds from my wrists, cried out every time I heard someone crossing the floor above my head. On those days, he didn't paint, but left me in my fire and fury, and like a wounded fox I would have tried to gnaw my hands from my arms to escape the trap I had landed myself in.

  He was angry at the welts I made to my skin. And he punished me with such gentle violence that I cried blood-soaked tears of humiliation. Even his anger holds such imagination, a mind that can make marvels from the darkest implements. But he—unlike my ungrateful self—he has never scarred me; he is too careful in his preparations, and oh, the reparations. Sometimes he spends hours preparing me for a session with his steel palette, rubbing my skin with the finest oils. Praising me for my erection, rewarding my emissions with the subtlest of delights. Nimble fingers that can prolong a pain or a pleasure indefinitely; depending on his style of the day.

  I am treasured now; I am acquiescent. The jewel of his collection. The calmer I am, the gentler he is, and he prepares me, treats me like the masterpiece I will become.

  Skin, he says, is the only canvas that recovers, that can be sketched upon with whatever tools the artist desires. Skin is the only canvas which can take a lifetime in the execution of a work of art.

  So now he explains to me about the techniques, and now, now all hope—all care—of rescue is gone, I listen to him. And he's grateful for that. As my blood drains onto the floor, he teaches. As he scores my flesh, crosshatching, with such exquisite care for me that he now uses a knife so razor-sharp I can barely feel it. Chroma: how the purity of the red is intensified when compared to the greyness of my skin as I near death. Chiaroscuro: the effect of light and shade, especially where strong tonal contrasts are used. He sorrows that he cannot show me the perfection I am to become, and I kiss him, with lips blue with lack of pigment, and tell him how little it matters.

  Now I know that it must take time for a canvas to truly appreciate what art is being wrought upon it. A canvas is not born ready for the painting. It must be prepared. It must be primed. It must learn to accept what the artist creates.

  And in the end, I think, skin is the only canvas that forgives.

  U nderground

  Marshall Moore

  Had the businessman who tagged Joseph K on an early-morning inbound metro train been capable of conscious thought, he’d have found Joseph a pretty, naïve blank, like supporting-cast murder fodder in a slasher flick. Not a young man likely to survive his first encounter with a minotaur, and certainly not his second, should there be one. Just nineteen and a little too handsome, Joseph looked like an appetizer: blond hair falling into his eyes and flopping over his collar, big green eyes that tended to go unfocused when he was lost in thought, high cheekbones that looked post-surgical but weren’t. He had no idea that his future had just been set on a course as irrevocable as the stations on the Red Line: subterranean greatness, or mutilation and death. The suit and tie seated next to him leaned over just slightly and stroked his thigh—just once, but it was enough. Joseph, who’d been dozing, snapped fully awake and semi-erect. No one else in the yawning commuter sprawl took notice. Before Joseph could recover from the jolt of shock, the train arrived in Bethesda and came to a screeching stop; the stranger stood up and stepped out of the carriage.

  Twenty minutes later, when Joseph walked into his physics classroom, on time but just by a hair, his professor paled. Joseph knew that look: Dr. Drummond must have been up most of the night working his lonesome way through a bottle of the expensive French wine that he, Joseph, had once seen him buying. Joseph took a step back. Having your physics professor throw up on your shoes is not an ideal start to the day, especially not if you’re wearing them when it happens.

  “Joseph, stay a minute after class. There’s something I need to discuss with you.”

  Throughout the class, Joseph couldn’t focus. He racked his brain, trying to recall what he might have done, or what he could possibly be accused of. Plagiarism? Cheating? Nonspecific slackness? Nothing came to mind. He’d turned in all his assignments. All his work was authentic, not copied. He didn’t buy papers from the online essay factories in India. He made it to class on time, most of the time, and he answered questions often enough to stay in the safety zone between the ass-kissers up front and the living dead in the back.

  Drummond’s explanation at the end of class (“I’d like you to meet with the head of the Urban Planning program tomorrow afternoon around five, if you’re free”) didn’t do much to clear things up, either. Joseph had considered urban planning but wouldn’t have to declare a major until the end of next semester. He’d been focusing on getting his required courses out of the way.

  “Why me?” he asked.

  “Something you mentioned in passing,” Drummond said. He looked less nauseated now. Joseph thought the risk he’d end up wearing the professor’s breakfast had lessened somewhat, but safety is a relative thing. “You take the metro every day, but it doesn’t go where it ought to? The designers got the lines all wrong?”

  Joseph had absolutely no recollection of saying this, ever. He said “Oh yeah, that’s right!” and tried to sound sincere.

  “It’s almost time for members of your class to declare majors. If that’s the way you think about transportation, you might be interested in having a talk with Dr. Song.”

  “Sure,” Joseph said. “Why not? I’m free then.”

  Drummond knew the other students couldn’t have known what had happened on the inbound train. Nor could they see the tag blazing in Joseph’s aura. The average student’s aura was a sparkly, thunder-shot nimbus of electric blues and incandescent golds, the nameless colors one sees but can’t name in lightning, sunsets, and fire. Hormones, excitement, possibility, uncertainty, sex: each had its own hue, and the net effect could be blinding, muted only by the booze they all seemed to drink rivers of. Most days, Drummond (who himself had been tagged in his twenties, and lived) saw more than he wanted to. Before today, he’d had no reason to notice Joseph. In these morning survey courses with forty or fifty yawning students, only a few stood out, auras
or no auras. But today, red surrounded Joseph, portending disasters and emergencies, carnage and death.

  After class, after the last of the students had gone, Drummond used the prefabricated excuse he’d been given for occasions such as this: The Department of Urban Planning had set up a new scholarship for prospective majors. Joseph hadn’t given any thought at all to urban studies (he’d been leaning toward economics or political science), but the potential offer of money grabbed his attention like balls in a fist.

  “Come to Dr. Song’s office tomorrow afternoon at five,” Drummond said, his guts in a roil, both relieved and dismayed by Joseph’s gullibility. One of his own students this time… he’d known this day could come, but he’d spent a long time telling himself it would never involve anybody he knew. “There’ll be one or two other students, too. If you’ve got a class then, don’t worry. We’ll give you a note.”

  “Sounds good,” Joseph said. On his way out, he stopped, half-turned, and asked, “But why me?”

  Drummond thought of all the things he wished he could say. He settled on a safe, anodyne half-lie: “Consider this your lucky day.”

  *

  Underground, Joseph found that the metro network comprised much more than just featureless tunnels. The tracks also passed through spaces he’d have described as caverns, if not for their shadowed right angles and black festoons of utility cables. Their flashlight beams cut the dark; it re-formed an instant later, stronger and harder to see through. Now and then someone put a foot wrong and swore. Debris shifted underfoot; there were obstacles.

  “Is this a test?” asked Phil, the other student the Drs. Drummond and Song—the department head—had led underground.

  Joseph had seen Phil around campus, and his first thought on seeing him in Song’s office was This is some kind of sex thing. Phil was gay too: he was dating a closeted frat boy rumored to drink too much and beat him up from time to time. And Phil stuck around for it. Not bad-looking at all—dark hair, light brown eyes—he had the rangy build of a boy who’d grown up on a farm and knew how to drive tractors and combines, or maybe one of those guys from the Northwest who worked on Alaskan fishing boats to pay their way through college. Yet he gave off a vague air of submission. Maybe he’d been punched in the mouth one time too many. Joseph couldn’t tell. Was this some kind of test? Of course it was. More than that, he wanted to know why the only two students chosen were both gay guys, but he didn’t actually want to bring this up.

  “Our benefactors impose very strict scrutiny on the award process. So, we take applicants on tours like this to see how it resonates with you,” Dr. Song said.

  “So, like, I’m supposed to be on the lookout for resonation?”

  “Resonance,” Dr. Song said. “But yes. We have one of the best urban planning programs in America. Maybe the world. If we’re going to pay your way, all the way through the PhD, then yes, we do have a vested interest. If you don’t click with it—”

  “No harm, no foul,” said Drummond, perhaps trying for cool but only sounding as if a dose of cold medicine had just kicked in.

  Through the dark, Drummond squinted and watched Song pretend to discover a stairway leading down.

  A life of requirement, Drummond randomly thought, following Song and the three students deeper into the recesses of the metro. The subtle heroin of irony coursed through him: he and his colleagues enjoyed a freedom and power that everyday people could not even conceive of, yet the price they paid for it was a form of enslavement. Perhaps the same could be said for anyone in a position of leadership—politicians, royalty, judges, entertainers—but the underground stood above them all.

  It happened fast: the beast rushed up and out of the black, silent except for its breath. Song, who knew what was coming, flattened himself against the gritty stone wall to avoid being gored or hurled out of the way. He’d been through this more times than he could remember. Not wanting to see, he shut off his flashlight. The minotaur didn’t need light: it could see in the dark better than humans could in full sun. Drummond was slower. The beast knocked him aside, having made a split-second decision not to break any bones: Drummond deserved a lesson for being stupid and unprepared, not to mention clumsy and hung over, but Song didn’t need to be burdened with the task of helping him limp back to the surface. And the meat, the meat… they’d brought two this time, marked by taggers who would remember nothing.

  The quality of the offering also helped save Drummond’s bones. Two: one for now, and one… for much later.

  *

  Drummond had seen a minotaur feed and wished he hadn’t. The creatures preferred to keep their human offerings alive and aware because the struggle was its own spice: victims tasted better screaming, or so he’d been told. He’d been allowed to retain certain memories from a hellish night in deep-subterranean Boston two decades before—the bull’s head burrowing into a belly, tearing hunks out of a well-muscled upper arm, gnawing the flesh away from a lower back before moving down to gorge on the buttocks and the nest of meat in between. The plea in the young victim’s eyes, as horrifying as the bloody spectacle below his neck, tinctured his nightmares.

  Please, the boy had mouthed. Tears shone in streaks on his face. Please.

  I can’t, Drummond remembered replying.

  The feeding went on for hours, the minotaur only releasing Drummond and the other novitiates when the first victim passed out from blood loss and the next was brought in. To a one, and regardless of what city they ruled, minotaurs loved an audience when they fed yet became almost prissy when the time came for sexual release. Young men were offered up for feeding and fucking, and either one could take place first. Drummond sometimes thought, given the older minotaurs’ bullish endowments, that their willingness to mate with a boy whose face they’d just eaten was the more merciful option. If the obvious holes weren’t big enough, new ones could be excavated, after all, and usually were. That part of the ritual, Drummond had never actually witnessed, nor had anyone he knew; and for this, he was thankful. Rumor was more than enough.

  When the minotaur seized Phil and dragged him down into the black, Drummond and Song grabbed Joseph and held onto him, keeping him from chasing after.

  “WHAT THE FUCK JUST HAPPENED?” Joseph shouted.

  “You can’t go after him,” Song said.

  Joseph struggled, but the two men—Song in particular—were much stronger than they looked.

  “It’s done,” Song said. “If he was your friend, we’re sorry, but this is how it has to be. This has gone on for years. Centuries. You can’t stand in its way, and there are good reasons why you shouldn’t try.”

  Joseph allowed himself to be led back to the surface. In Drummond’s office once again, now sipping red wine from his professor’s apparently limitless supply, he persisted: “What the fuck just happened?”

  Song refilled his glass because Drummond’s hands wouldn’t stop shaking. Song had known him long enough that asking wasn’t necessary. The man would gore himself with the corkscrew, fountaining blood and Rhône varietals all over the office before the wound sealed itself shut. Although Drummond had his talents, Song wished someone sturdier had been chosen for the night’s activities.

  “You won the scholarship,” he told Joseph. “The department will cover the costs of your studies, up to and including your doctorate. Surviving tonight just created your future. Urban planning it is.” He paused to let all this sink in. “You’re incredibly lucky.”

  “What about Phil?” Joseph asked.

  “He was less fortunate,” Dr. Song said. “Look at it this way. At least now he doesn’t have to worry about student loans.”

  *

  For his dissertation, Joseph spent months riding subway trains in one city after another. Dr. Song, now his supervisor, suggested this might be the most expensive dissertation in history, but he supported Joseph’s work. New York, Taipei, Caracas, Santo Domingo, Vienna, Lausanne, Lyon, Moscow, Shanghai—large or small, if the city had a subway, Joseph had eithe
r visited or put it on his list, not just zooming along on the trains underground, but spelunking in the tunnels, guided by one or two senior members of the engineering staff. Officially, he was interested not just in the subway systems themselves, but in how crowds of people moved through them: fluid dynamics, as manifested in stairways, on escalators, and inside the train compartments. More specifically, he wanted to know how things moved in the dark.

  At times, he wished he could forget that first trip underground, but more often than not he felt grateful for it. No one knows everything, Song had told him. Not even us, and certainly not… (here, he had made a gesture out the window of his office), not the outside world. The normal people. Behind the scenes, we run almost everything. But I couldn’t tell you how it all works. Only the minotaurs have the big picture; the rest of us… we’re like terrorist cells, but in a necessary way. Without us, cities would descend into an even worse level of chaos. We’re the guardians against the worst sort of entropy.

  “Entropy,” Joseph repeated.

  “It’s all more benign than you’d think,” Drummond slurred.

  “It seemed benign,” Joseph said, and Drummond by now was too drunk to catch the irony.

  That night made me, Joseph thought, looking back. Whatever horrors he’d been spared, he also counted himself lucky in a way that many students were not: he had direction. Too many people his own age had no idea what to do with themselves, either drifting into their major on a whim or being implanted there at the command of their parents. Having a definite pathway before him and no impossible-to-repay student loans now seemed like an exotic luxury, something it had never occurred to him to want until he had it.

  *

  Joseph went to Japan with Song for a conference. The real lessons were often in what Song did not say, in what he let Joseph figure out for himself. Trudging from one session to another, fighting the mire of jet lag every step of the way, Joseph struggled to keep his focus amid the mucky bombardment of papers and findings. Despite all the excitement that Tokyo offered, there was little chance to enjoy it. Joseph had an impression of tidiness and right angles, amazing food and more good coffee shops than he’d have expected. Despite an endless supply of decent caffeine, he struggled to stay upright and coherent.