I paid too much at the door because there was some kind of unforeseen live band. Maybe good, maybe the ruining factor of the night. Depends on the band. As an added drag on my mood the middle room is curtained off and guarded by large thugs, meaning it is the band's dressing room, meaning we are confined to the tiny dance-floor. Meaning the Camel Wides I am carrying packed with weed are unusable. Damn it.
I crowd myself into a niche down front, off to one side. Smoke and wait. This band that is ruining my night is called Mourning Glory, I gather from various posters. Bitches. The name is really pretty and it would've been easier to be mad at them if it was something ridiculous.
I'm expecting very little until the lights go down and the noise begins.[br /]
I've named this one Lady Stardust. He isn't in bright blue jeans. Black vinyl. Fishnet shirt with the little electrical-tape crosses over his nipples, universally scorned by all three self-titled "real" goths in Florida. I wonder how long the tape would stretch if I bit and pulled before it came off before my thoughts dissolve into ngggh. That's the closest I can come to spelling the consonants-only exhalation of pure fucking lust.
He's taller than my usual, chin-height to me instead of sternum-height. Spiky, gleaming black hair, fine aristocratic lines, eyes the color of the swimming-pool I still dream about. No lipstick, black eyeliner. He moves like a cat. He takes the microphone and nods and waits. I can't remember a thing about his band, I don't think I spared them a glance.
I'm so up front.
There are probably less than a hundred people at this show. The stage is a grand total of about a foot and a half high. So he's right, fucking, there. Any minute now I'll catch his scent.
Lady Stardust sings his song, and yes, it's probably of darkness and disgrace. I'm not able to notice. He's so good you can feel the silence fall, so good he is suddenly literally the only sound in the building. His voice moves like a bird in flight. It rolls out of him in one effortless sine-wave. He's fearless. There's something of Robert Smith in the anguished falsetto, something of Murphy in the soaring crystalline tenor. He's singing so hard he shouldn't be pretty anymore, but oh, how he is. I want to bite the end of that voice and chew until I reach the mouth that made it.
My mind is hissing a sly running tirade of I need him I'll have this one all fucking week I put up with and waited for and all my life and it went so badly last time and I. Will. Have. This one.
And then his monitor goes out.
I'm close enough to see him glance down at the equipment, to hear that something is gone but not talented enough to know exactly what. He does a feeble kick at it, still singing. After a minute or so he just stops and addresses someone at the back of the room. "It's completely gone, you have to do something about it." He tries to drop back into the song, flustered and.....blushing, for a line or two, before he gestures for the band to just, stop.
My nails are digging into my palm like they talk about in horror novels. Ha, I mean in other horror novels.
In the real world I'd have rushed the stage, snatched him, dragged him back to my Lair and eaten him very slowly.
Well, all right, that IS pretty much what happened, except I didn't really eat any, and I managed a tiny bit more tact than that.
"You sound great," I tell him, loud enough for him and everyone else to hear me in the music-free air. I'm not particularly eloquent on such short notice. I feel the brain threatening to feel stupid and I tell it to go fuck itself.
He laughs. He looks, defused. It helps that there are whistles and a brief staccato of applause from people agreeing with me. He has a beautiful motherfucking collarbone All angle and hollow.
"I know, but I can't hear myself and then I can't do...what I do...."
So there, insecurity. It seems to be, working. Whatever the fuck I'm trying to do.
"Watch our faces. You're doing it. Trust me."
Nobody laughs that time. Though some do clap.
Lady Stardust is doomed. It's much too late for anything else.
Anything I want that much must be rightfully mine. If it weren't meant for me it wouldn't push those buttons.
Never mind. Anyone not nodding yet will never know what I mean.
This is probably the only situation on Earth where you're allowed to stare at a real live boy in this particular way. He spends a few minutes of the next hour or so staring back at me. Sometimes he gives me the ghost of a smile. He has the sort of teeth you want to grind your own teeth against. He keeps catching my eye, as if he's in on the....joke. He's unspeakably touchable, like his sculptor kept a wall covered with photos of tomcats leaping, sprawled, hunting, to keep those lines of force in his mind. When he turns at the waist the flesh of his stomach does something that makes my tongue cramp.
It's over, much too soon, much too late. The predictable close-out chaos of noise.
(i will i have to i will i can't just once and it went so quickly last time and just, this, once)
He stands with his shoulders heaving, catching his breath, holding the mic in a way that is so Bowie I have to knot my toes in my boots to keep from literally jumping him. Hip cocked, smirk, poise. Fucking Hell.
I keep thinking a love, I could not obey.
By any standards except mine Lady Stardust is far more valuable a catch than the boy who haunts me. He's flawlessly, magazine-beautiful, and a higher rank in the bedpost-notch sense. Meaning, it's way cooler to run down the lead singer of a really good band than a pretty college student and sandwich shop employee. But I'm not the least bit nervous. Because I don't love this one at all.
We're both backstage. He's standing at what used to be a restaurant table, doing makeup repair in one of those mirrors that plugs in and has little banks of lights up each side. It's the only light in this curtained-tent of a room. He nudges the mirror with a fingertip so we can see one another in it. "I don't know what the word for heckling somebody in a helpful way is, but you were great at it. Thanks."
"Cheerleading?"
He laughs. So do I. I can smell him. Push the advantage. "You guys were lucky. Last band they couldn't get the sound and the lights on at the same time." This is a lie.
He lifts one shoulder in something too cool to be a shrug, re-drawing a black line under one American-blue eye. "I'm--"
"Lady Stardust. I know. I'm Erik."
He doesn't correct me, which is good, because by any other name he'd become, normal, or something Contaminated. "Holy shit. Half the kindergoths here wouldn't know Bowie if he walked up and set them on fire."
"Most of what I heard in the audience was Peter Murphy. About you, I mean."
"If you're trying to flatter me, it's working." Eye number two. Then powder with delicate little pressing motions. I close my trenchcoat, hoping either he doesn't notice or it looks casual, because my cock is so hard I'm afraid he will see it even in this utter lack of light. He has to lean over too much table to get at the mirror, elbow pushing a wake in a chaos of clattering makeup. His fishnet shirt has ridden up, and there's an ellipse of bare skin at the small of his back. I'm going to fucking tear out my laboriously-inserted lip ring if he doesn't straighten up in the next four seconds.
"So what're you guys doing after this?" A gesture encompassing the club that he doesn't see, and his band, which I don't see.
He does that one-shoulder shrug again. More teeth-flickers. "Karl always fucking wants to drive back. They're probably already gone. I'll hide out here till the crowd wanders off and get a room."
"We could sneak off and smoke, if you wanted."
A wistful sigh. "I don't smoke anymore. Voice."
"But I have opium."
This may possibly be a lie. I can't remember if I smoked it all or not. Whatever works. No gothboi ever could resist the quintessentially goth nature of opium.
He tilts his head without doing the shrug, and I know I've got him.
There will be candy. Just get in the car.
I leave the way I came, through the curtain. Buy and fucking inhale a rum and coke. Itty out to my car. He's already outside through Hell knows which fire exit, huge plastic suitcase dragging one arm down. The plan is almost derailed once we get out into the parking lot; he wants to take his car, an amusingly huge Buick LeSabre painted spray-can black and absolutely covered with a treasure-trove of oldschool capital-G Goth stickers.
I persuade him it's easier if he just rides with me and I run him back. This is another lie.
Once he sees my El Camino, he's enchanted enough to agree. She looks damn good with this spider from Mars slouched in her passenger seat with one delicate boot out the window.
When we've gotten to my Lair I get him settled with rum and coke and dig through my stashes. I have a pipe I use for only opium; I scrape the Hell out of it and roll the result in a lot of very good weed. I pick up two Klonopin on the way, and once I get back to the counter I use for a bar I make him a Screaming Nazi shot to which I add the pills and a dropper full of GHB.
I make my own shot with slightly fewer ingredients. He can't resist the name, and we do them in near-unison. Once it's in my mouth I become convinced I've given him the clean one, but once I swallow I know I didn't.
He laughs, coughs, waxes poetic about just how awful his drink is, daubs at his watering eyes with one long black fingernail, declares it the worst drink ever invented. It's so awful you can't taste anything in it. It's Jagermeister and fucking Rumpleminze, for the love of Hell. The weirdness of the GHB is unnoticeable, and even if you chew Klonopin they taste like diluted sugar. I forget what I was supposed to take them for, but they render you tranquil and extremely unable to do complicated shit like walk around.
I stole this trick from Dahmer, if you hadn't already guessed. The pills in a drink, I mean. How amusing that they give angry psychotics such pills to keep us calm. I think Jeff was using Xanax. I forget.
The drugs are because of the fucking issues with dragging, carrying, and tying people, without them managing to kick me in the nose, teeth, or balls, or making enough noise to summon cops.
I'm getting better at this with practice. That's the plan, anyway.
I'm not wasting this one the way I did Jamie.
We're talking through most of this. I spare you because most of what I'm saying is, fake, and because you're skimming this anyway to get to the good part.
We talk about makeup and drugs and how truly fucking awesome his band is. That last part isn't fake. I'm having some small guilt, here, because I'm getting ready to deprive the world of this band. It's that good, if you like lush heartbroken goth, and I do. But what better end for the lead singer? It'll make him vaguely famous, complete the tragic-deliciousness of his music. That's so circular and perfect that I know I have to do this. He's FOR me.
Lady Stardust settles with his knees bent and his bootheels on the edge of the couch. It does extremely slutty things to his crotch. I remind myself to thank Lucifer for those pants, because they have to be His doing Hell. Fire. And a lot of damnation. I sit cornered to him, replace his beer with a rum and coke. We smoke the semi-opium, so I can watch his eyes drifting closed with pleasure and chemistry. Smudge of eyelashes clotted with mascara.
"So you knew about Bowie being, like, bi, right?"
I'm nodding at this. I'm on my second rum and diet Coke and I realize I'm in the buzzy-pleasant state of drunk that is so hard to maintain. I'm forgetting not to enjoy myself. "Married to Claire-something before Iman."
"For a long time. Both of them fucking whoever they wanted. I always thought that made so much sense."
I'm still nodding. Shut up. I'm dense, and I don't think of myself as marketable.
"See, I totally, get that. My ex-girlfriend thought it was hot for me to fuck around with other boys, but she was, such a fucking bitch, otherwise."
That's when I realize this is a come-on.
The beast is crawling in my hands and my teeth and my cock and my mouth. I grab his head and kiss him, kiss him, and the beast is swarming into his throat like a hive of bees. He tastes of rum, of smoke, and if I kiss deeper still I can still taste the licorice-death of the Rumpleminze. I can't stop replaying that thought from the show; the wish to crawl inside him, and I'm trying to lick his tonsils, I swear, trying to tear up the tip of my tongue on his teeth, trying to split both our lips.
His knees come up and he hugs me tighter than tight with legs and arms and does something like a little I-win purr. It makes me open my eyes for a second, in something like wonder I can smell the powder he's wearing. And then he bites my tongue, just hard enough to hurt, sort of dragging his teeth along and nipping into the very tip hard enough to make me yelp and slap him. I don't manage to do it very hard or very well. We stare at one another. He makes some noise, and it is not a quit-it sort of noise. Then he kisses me, with a lot of suction and a lot of pulling with his legs, arching with his back. Like he's trying to, climb me. Like he's trying to eat me, or trying to help me eat him.
Then we're on the floor. I'm on top of him. He's extremely happy about this fact. So am I. Having my cock suddenly and without fucking warning crammed against his costill in those oilspill pants is an extremely fucking nice surprise. I need to do this a lot more, often. And harder. I can taste his breath, taste the lungs behind it, taste the voicebox that made that motherfucking music.
I say you little bitch and he says yes and I say I'll fucking kill you and he says yes, yes, yes.
The edges are blurring. I hold him down with my hips and drag up his shirt in gestures that make our shadows look like we're fighting. Part of me is standing back in my head, waiting, for, something. The pants squeak under my hands like a raincoat. Synthetic. I get the bastard fly unbuttoned and he's moaning long spools of that voice into my mouth.
I can't swallow fast enough. His pants hang unstoppably at the knee, caught by those eyelet-riddled boots. A lot of teeth-drag when I predator my mouth away from his. A lunge that stops at his stomach to leave bite after bite, almost too hard and definitely too fast, and another pull-drag that has him laughing a little and screaming under his breath. I'm a rollercoaster he's riding.
He hisses careful at me, raises himself up on one elbow. I slam him back down with one hand to his chest and it feels incredibly, leonine. It drives a tiny sound out of him. He stays. Good boy. I struggle to play nice, drawing long lazy licks across his stomach and up his thighs. Apparently he shaves everything, and apparently he's done so very recently. If I lick hard enough in some places I can just get a rasp in return, but only just.
Must, not, eat.
He's hard against my cheek, cock dragging through my hair. The smell of him is making me, drool, and the motherfucking effort not to, turn, into a werewolf, is, making me shudder like I'm cold. I shove his thighs apart hard and do digging, pulling little pinches with my nails, restraining myself back into a soothing pet I don't mean just when his wails really start to delight me. The kicking is awful cute. And it's getting weaker, and, weaker.
I didn't give him enough to knock him out, but he's going to be non-functionally fucked up right, about, now.
He's not going to miss anything, but all he can do is squirm in that darling way, like he's trapped in quicksand. It's gotten to his mind and not just his body. The moans are liquid and edgeless, noise feathering into anguished little arpeggios. It's like I'm, playing him.
I bury my face against his cock, i n h a l e, and he feels my fingernails and my fingertips much too close to the cheek of his ass and he says don't. It confuses me. He hasn't made any words in awhile. He says no without much, enthusiasm. I put my fingers in my mouth and then shove two inside him without asking.
Whatever he's trying to say climbs through his teeth like a bonesaw hitting a screw. His hands smack into my head, and then knot in my hair. He tries to close his legs and it sort of pins my hand, and it's delicious. He's not trying very hard to push me off. I think he's too, stunned, to. Oh, and much, much too high. I pull his dick into my mouth with tongue and lips and teeth and hook my fingers in his ass and sort of yank him towards my face by his pelvic bone.
He's still making various subnotes of distress but that long liquid moan is taking the lead. I mouth that he's such a good boy, but I don't think he can hear me. He's pulling my hair like he wants to get me away from him, but it isn't very sincere. It's increasingly difficult to be this, nice. I settle in on the head of his dick and use too much teeth, hold him with too much thumbnail. It's the thumbnail that does it, I think, because he slams against my face and wails and wails, coming and coming and almost-crying.
Swallowing is the best part. It's like...hmm...irreversible. And unless you're playing some weird game with it or you miss, it never was in the, outside world. Just inside him, and then inside me. It's, magick. It's pure.
He laughs again, when he can get his breath. It's feeble. "So, fucked up..."
"Yes, you are, " I tell him
"...bleeding?"
"Not yet." This is a lie, I discover while licking my fingers. Un-translatable all-consonant noise from me .
"...cool..."
I come up for air and meth. I bring him some on a Deathstyle CD case, just a taste, not even a line. "Lick it."
"Crazy fuck." He's grinning. He crooks his head, darts out a perfect pink triangle of tongue, draws it in again with a little white fast-fading smudge on the tip. Swallows, grimacing. It's mostly to keep him being too sedated. I lick the CD case after he does. It's not because I am worried about wasting the meth.
"Can you sit up?"
He's still lying on the carpet, crumpled, sweating, with his shirt up around his chest and his pants around his knees. He manages to kind of squirm into a zigzag. The little ridge of spine jutting up is so reptilian and so dear that it really is hurting my jaw just to look at it without licking it.
I can't express to you how motherfucking pretty this is. You'd have to have been there. I regret the fuck out of not filming these. Why I didn't get a shitty video camera from a pawn shop is beyond me.
He kind of swings his feet till he flops over on his back with his legs still all crooked and splayed. He raises his arms and does something very funny that looks like a both-hands sieg heil a few times. Then he announces, "Nope," and giggles about this for a minute. So do I, because I can't help it.
"What did you give me?
"All sorts of shit." I light a cigarette. Sit in my desk chair, turned around away from The Novel for once so I can watch the show.
He stops sieging Heil and ponders this. One hand flops at his pants, drags them up a useless four inches or so, not even clearing his thighs, subsides. I don't even think he knew he was doing it. A subconscious little flicker of feeling, unsafe. So good. His cock is still wet, and still twitching idly now and then.
"I meant, just now."
"Oh. Meth."
That's still not adding up for him. It's like a guessing game. I draw blood from my own lip again, but it's still a grin. My cigarette needs flicking too badly for me to make it to the ashtray, so I flick it and rub it into the carpet with my boot without looking.
"Did you give me something else I forgot?"
Aw. How diplomatic of him. He's getting more slurred by the minute, but still somehow clearer than before because he's trying harder. He knows something important is wrong. There's no fear-scent yet, but he's definitely on yellow alert. Lord, no wonder Dahmer used this. It's like bondage you don't have to keep fucking with.
"Opium, and some weed in that, and tranquilizers and G in your drink. I'm pretty sure that's it so far."
He raises a foot that time. Heelthud into carpet. This time he manages to pull his pants up, too, but not exactly fasten them. He rolls over to one side, little hairsprayed-messes in his eyes. Mumbles, "That's really fucking cute of you, have to...gonna call a cab and get a room because at this hour..." Quiet. He has no idea how long he's been here. "Checkout before I can fucking...sleep..."
"No. You're staying here."
"...really, rather..." He's sitting up, but he's listing sharply to fucking port, and wobbling in every direction at once somehow, like the spine I was just admiring is no longer strong enough to hold up his lovely head. His arms are sort of out, which is very LeClaire of him, like he's trying to balance with them, or they're broken. "...get, going, I'm used to hotels...."
"You're not going anywhere. Ever again. I've decided to keep you." His rum and coke is half-untouched on the coffee table. I help myself to it.
He gives up the sitting thing, and kind of flips back down again like a rocking chair falling over. His pants are still mostly down, just framing half a bitemark I left low on the white plane of his stomach. He stares up at the ceiling, panting a little still. I wonder if he's realized nobody knows where he is. Drugs still nowhere near done with him.
He thinks awhile longer and concludes, "Hot."
I agree with him completely.
Then, I swear to you, he goes, "I could crash on your couch, I guess." As if we're negotiating. I'm this close to rum and coke in my nose. I mean it. It's stoner-funny. Invisible ropes that he's kind of tentatively starting to struggle against.
"Wherever you end up."
That's perfect. That lets him continue to pretend that he maybe he's wrong. Maybe I'm teasing. Maybe it's a form of "Stay for dinner, I insist." or the struggle to pick up the tab somewhere.
What a lovely joke. I'm thinking of Jamie relaxing when I told him he had a concussion. Delicious.
I wonder how long I can sustain it.
And my, the ramifications of THAT terrible idea.
He's considering. I go and stand over him and stare down into his puzzled eyes. "Do you want some water?"
A frown. A nod . I bring him an opened bottle of it, cold from the fridge, with more G in it. He's still too able to move.
Apparently I've hit on a good balance, because while he can still squirm, just enough, and moan plenty, his troublesome ability to almost sit up is utterly gone. I have to half-carry and half drag him to the bathroom. He makes little sex-or-ow noises at things that I wouldn't have called particularly stimulating. Drugs. Thank Hell for drugs. I lay him on the rug with a folded towel under his head and wet a washcloth and wipe his face, his chest. He makes a grateful noise that is priceless in its sincerity. I switch to colder water and it seems to increase his joy.
I pull his shirt and sort of hook it behind his head, so it's just fishnet-arms, and I finally, finally get to bite that motherfucking electrical tape. It's gotten semi-sticky-slidy, which is always what happens when you wear the shit. Gums up my lips and his chest and we stick to each other like my mouth is trying to grow into his nipple. I don't bite, but I threaten to until he's whining in a way that makes me think again of dogs. I stroke his head to soothe him, and he shudders, and the whine gets softer. Looser. I stroke him until he believes me, and then I bite him.
He crescendos immediately to the best he can do for a scream, which is quiet enough that I doubt anyone could hear it over the faucet in the hallway. It's like his lungs are as.....limp, as sedated...as the rest of him. He can't push the music out past his ribcage, but I hear him. No one else in the world can hear it. Maybe I don't regret not making tapes, after all.
"Hush. Beautiful boy. I'm not going to bite it off." Joke just for me. I kneel up, grab Vaseline and dip the washrag in it, rub it into these tape-sticky poor wounded nipples with businesslike little scrubs. He whimpers and arches at me, and circles make him sustain-moan and hold himself arched. Pretty, pretty fucking boy. I drag his pants back down just enough and turn him over on his face and spread his ass open with one hand, and stroke him into a series of wails that are such perfection I keep doing it long, long after the really minimal blood is gone. Such drama, this one. It makes me want to give him something to really cry about.
I grope above my head on the counter until I find the Vaseline again, and I use much too much and push one finger inside him over and over again, all the way out, all the way in, just to hear his increasingly frustrated little protest-noises. Whenever he summons up the flail to approach rolling over I push it in hard and deep and hold him, still, that way, and he wails like I've killed him and immediately stops squirming. I rock my hand into him, to hear him try to get louder. Mine, mine, mine. I pull my finger out and forget about the Vaseline until I've already put it in my mouth. Chin and tongue slicked with that bacon-grease texture and inexplicably vivid taste.
I sort of crawl, up him, hands slipping in grease and on tile and making a mess of the rug. He feels me come up over him and rears up under me, trying to throw me off and only succeeding into thumping into me in a series of sticky skin-impacts. I put one knee on the back of his thigh, leaving a trail of Vaseline on my shirt and my waist and my zipper.
"...don't..." That laugh. Kind of a toddler-style, all the limbs at once, kick. A pretend temper tantrum. "I don't do this." That was very clear, and probably took a lot of effort, considering he's facefirst in the towel and still giggling.
"It doesn't work that way anymore." Dreamy. Spreading him open with my thumbs, just to scare him. Getting my pants down and my cock arranged and knee-ing his legs together and sitting on his thighs. I keep thinking, look what I found. To think I was pissed off about the cover charge. That makes me laugh, and he laughs too, because it's contagious. I spread him again and kneel forward and thump at him with my erection, and he does a long wail that's artfully petulant and ends in another giggle. "You can't tell anyone..."
I'm going to fall off him if he makes me laugh any harder. Something has to be an unprecedented kind of wrong with this if we're both still having this much fun. Give me a minute, here. "Oh, I won't."
"And you have to use a condom."
Darling. A condom. If you knew the bodily fluids we're going to share.
"I don't have to do anything, anymore."
This Peter Murphy boy, this David Bowie boy. This Velvet Goldmine boy. I've wanted to make this archetype scream since I was about thirteen years old, and I think it's going to be awhile before I'm tired of it. I slam inside him and feel him go, still, and he knows, he knows and I can almost, hear, his pupils dilate.
I get all the scream I ever could have asked for. He runs out of breath, shaking under me, a r o u n d me. I turn his head and do something too mean to be kissing and fuck him, fuck him. I feel the inhale lock inside him and I pull at his mouth with my lips and my lungs, until I feel the triumph of his breath whistling past this knot in his throat.
Am I his shock, this shock, this loud, this irreversible, this important in the universe of a creature this unspeakably...
I push his squirming hands up over his head like I'm making him make a snow, angel. All my weight is on him and my cock is much too deep and he's sobbing, trying to spread his knees, choking stop, stop. He's so, easy, to hold down. I pin his legs tighter together. I'm snarling. I used to dream of being some kind of...pterodactyl....of dropping that shadow across a crowd of humans and plummeting down at them like an arrow, catching up a squirming crunchy screaming red mouthful. Did I ever tell you that?
There's one fast thud that I particularly like that he seems to find particularly agonizing. Perfect. Faster. Faster.
His wrists in my hands. My fingers in his mouth. Dragging at an earring my teeth found. He's crying against my palm. Mine, mine, mine.
"Now, you're bleeding."
He can't move but I can see this information make him want to. Or maybe I'm reading his mind. I spread his ass with my hands and lick from the base of his balls to his tailbone, tasting us both. He's silent, quivering. I wonder if it's embarrassment or fury or arousal.
I start on the top of his bootlaces. It frustrates me into using scissors pretty quickly. He insists on turning his face and manages "...drive..."
"You'd never make it to the driveway. Quit flexing your toes."
He watches me take off his pants. Sighs in serious relief at the drop in temperature. It upsets him that he's not getting his way. Or that I've ruined his boots. Flicker that he ought to be grateful. Instead, it makes him cry harder for some reason for me to throw his fishnet-shirt over onto the laundry pile.
I take off my clothes, run a bath. climb in with him and wash him, or something like it.
He keeps expecting me to hurt him again; I can feel him, cringe, when I move too quickly. He doesn't smell like actual fear. He's still hard.
I wash his hair, with extreme care not to get soap in his eyes, and I drain the water around us and get both of us out of the tub without anyone falling into any porcelain. I clean off his ruined makeup with remover that won't sting even if he does squirm like a kid getting eyedrops and wreck my aim from time to time. There.
"Do you want me to draw it on again?"
He won't answer me. He's not exactly crying, now. Unresponsive. Internal negations. Dear God, if you get me out of this, I will never, ever let anyone fuck me in the ass again. Please oh please. It's a dream. It's a little like teasing. A joke. I've just been raped. Hazy impossible plan of flagging down a car in the middle of Nowhere, Florida at this hour of the night.
Without makeup, he's, unearthly. Childlike. It's too Man Who Fell to Earth. Wrong kind of hot.
I find waterproof eyeliner and put it on him. He holds his eyes and his face exactly the way I tell him to. He's earned an intermission. I let him have this Gethsemane. I let him lie there while I take down the shower curtain.
A tarp would be better but the only one I have is blinding blue. Pretty as lipstick, ugly as fuck for a serial murder backdrop. The shower curtain is black. Much better. I tested this already. I clip the edges up on three sides with those weird black-and-silver clips for too much paper, leave the bottom unclipped and bunched up into a black five-gallon bucket weighted with a brick at the foot of the bed. Scraps of wood are under the legs at the head of the bed. Just an inch or three of tilt, not enough to really feel when lying on it, but when I poured a cup of water onto the final result, it pooled on the shower curtain and more or less wound up in the bucket. I had to pick up the top to sort of pour in the last bit. Good enough.
He makes happy noises when I finally manage to get him in bed. The crackle confuses him, but the pillow I slide under his head convinces him. I've tied both of his hands Jesus-spread before he really understands what I'm doing. The rope is over, under, around, and fucking through the box springs, and though I can't pull them off, holding the loose ends in my hands, it's never really been tested. Here goes.
I shush him and he subsides again, and I add "It's a game," and he does that one, shoulder, shrug. Sighs. The blindfold does beautiful things to his face. I miss the eyeliner, but the trick I have in mind requires the blindfold, and the, removal, will be worth the loss of eye contact.
I stand back and squint at this. Black ropes, which were hard as fuck to find (home decor store) and the shower curtain is straight and it looks, lovely. All right. Ready as I'll ever be.
I get things, watching him squirm and tilt his head and worry about each little noise. I'm sure the drugs aren't doing much to clarify any data. So good.
I plug in my old hair clipper and hold it beside his face. "Do you know what this is?"
He doesn't feel like guessing. Click. Something is terribly wrong with it that I can't fix, and it goes CRACKZZZZzzzz like it's been struck by lightning when you turn it on. And then it does nothing but hum. He scrunches his face and his shoulder and his body away from this terrifying cattle-prod noise, mouth twisting into another don't.
"It's a violet wand." I click it off, put it in the chair by my bed in a pile of laundry, so that he can't hear that I no longer have it.
He's panting again. That anticipation of pain is so da Vinci to watch. It's a fairy tale.
I pick up an X-acto knife with a carefully not-quite-new blade. Brand new ones are too sharp, much too easy to cut too deep, and much too painless. It's clean, though probably not officially sterile.
"Supposedly it feels exactly like a razor."
"Please--"
That was the very first please. It does something to the pit of my stomach, something irreversible. I watch him shake, bracing himself. I draw a very careful line, just a scratch, really, about as long as my hand, on his stomach just in the concave V of his ribcage. Arch. He grits his teeth; does that locomotive breathing I've gotten to know and love. Exhales.
Relaxes. Mouths god. I wonder which god he means.
"Does it?" He slow-motion nods and slow-motion squirms like a snake drawing a useless S. Rolls towards my hand and the blade without meaning to. Mouths fuck at me, and that's exactly what we're doing,.
I wonder how long I can make him like this. Days, probably, if I manage a successful drug run. If anything was ever worth risking a sick day for three days of evil, it's this.
A red line gets darker across his hips, not even really bleeding enough to trickle. I straighten him up and hold one hip down and draw another line just beside it, much faster. He howls out an anguished something that's wordlike enough to make me curious. "What?"
".....slower...please..."
I can't get enough of that breathing. It's like he's been running. I put my cheek on his chest to appreciate it better, adding a snatch of surprisingly fast heartbeat.
"Slower?" I slide up so I'm curled up on his chest like he's a pillow, holding the blade like I'm going to write something on his stomach, his thighs. I don't think I will, though. Draw, maybe, but not write.
I'm going for a lot of symmetry, and the occasional repeated pattern. Like jewelry.
He's too pretty to just mangle. I want to decorate him.
Oh, never mind. Just watch.
"Slower will take longer."
"....too fucking much, that fast. Please...."
I lean over letting my weight keep him still. Draw over each of my scratches again, until they end neatly at each hipbone and are uniformly deep enough to just bead up with blood. I do it slowly, because that's really not much for him to ask. And he asks, so, pretty. Such manners.
He isn't new to pain. I remind myself to check him for old scars. The thought that this boy would've wanted to cut himself up, alone in the dark, is terribly sad. I'm going to make it up to him right now.
He draws in a breath when he feels me choose where to lay the blade and exhales long and slow and with a minimum of noise. He makes all the noise after the cut, like something that's about to become crying again, but softer, like half the upsetness is that he's so tired. I draw horizontal stripes down his thighs that I'll bring all the way around when I finally turn him over, and tiny Vs nestled in his hips.
I have to lift the blade fast, sometimes, but having him pressed so close gives me kind of a kinetic warning before the pain makes him draw up a knee or slam up against me in protest. I really should tie his feet, but I'm enjoying how much wriggle he can manage with this much slack.
So far there's only been a place or two where the knife slipped, and I don't suppose it'll really detract all that much when I'm finished.[br /]
Sometimes I just kind of drag the tip along, here and there, not really meant to make a mark, or poke at him with the very point just to encourage this useless struggle. He's not being very sincere, not flailing with all of his strength the way he'd be doing without the violet wand myth.
It amuses me that he's....playing along...
He's webbed with sort of freeform-straight lines, from about mid-thigh to waist. I'm saving the pink bits. Foreplay is important. I slide back closer to his head, still lying on him, still turned with my back to him and that long white skein of boy spread out under me.
There's an increasingly large lot of red, but still not enough for there to be an actual pool of blood. If he feels the trickles despite the din of such hurt, I suppose he thinks it's sweat. Though I wonder why he can't smell it; it's driving me increasingly mad. That pennies-in-hand, old key, raw meat scent.
I cut a careful free-hand ellipse around his navel, holding the skin taut with my hand, holding him down with an elbow. I'm getting a lot of please now, and a lot of noise before, during, and after each cut. And his dick is still hard. I put the scalpel in my teeth for a second and stroke one hand up his bleeding thigh and into a hairpin turn down around his cock, slicking him red. He gasps, key-changing immediately, and plants his feet on the bed and pushes into my hand.
This is not what I expected.
I'm probably as slack-jawed as the morons I make fun of have ever been.
It's like Christmas.
I switch hands, donating my left to his cock, retrieving the blade with my right. I add artistic little short lines in all the tendon-hollows of his hips. I turn the knife rather than lifting it and the drag of each direction-change makes him climb an octave, roll against my hand faster.
I can't understand most of what he's saying, but it's to the tune of please oh please, fuck you, you fucking, please, please, please.[br /]
I'm making noise of my own, I realize, sometimes drowning him out. It sounds like I'm really enjoying something that really pisses me off, which is pretty close to the truth.
I lay the flat of the blade against the complicated folds of his scrotum; he screams under me like something dragging a scratch in glass and I hold his cock still and press, tiny, little, point-first dashes into the head in a descending ladder-lines towards the tip. He loses the end of that scream and moans in the most beautiful rolling tenor I ever inspired, coming on my hand, my face, the bed, the blade.
His knees come up, thudding into me because I'm sprawled across his, lap, licking at this gorgeous slick mess of blood and come and sweat and boy. He's crying. I think I finally managed to take care of his case of the giggles. I want to keep him for days, weeks, I'll sell things and replace them when I get a new job, oh, I need this one.
He's mine all mine.
And he's open in tiny slits under my mouth, teases, just enough cut in the worst ones for me to have an edge to find and try to force my tongue inside. It's not enough; it's the same hieroglyph as that thing that happens when you're too drunk to be quite hard enough and he's at the wrong angle and your dick just will NOT go into his ass, and I look up at him and the knife is lazy in my hand like a dart more than a pencil, now, and I lift his balls with my tongue and pillow my cheek on his thigh and reach up, casual, it feels so casual.
I thud the blade down like you might do to stick it into the top of a worktable, right below the very tip of his breastbone. At the best part of that fabulous motherfucking line that only Those Boys have, that line from chin, to throat, to starving-artist ribcage and stomach and cock. My knife is in the middle and it's a new hieroglyph now.
He seems to be thrown, upwards, into the blade, and not away, back arching and arms pushing him towards me like he wants it in there. Like he wants it deeper and harder and I groan and I pull and I'm holding it there with my, fist, curled around it, and I pull it down that deep and at a perfect fucking right angle for about an inch, maybe a tiny bit more. The pull of cutting him, open, is like cloth and like clay and like vinyl and like none of those things, and there's almost a sound but not quite. Gorgeous, invisible reverberations of drag; of texture changes along the handle. The blade is not deep enough and too triangular to get stuck in mere skin and muscle and all the clever little things that bind the two.
I lift it out. It still feels like careful, three-dimensional, drawing. Maybe this qualifies that thing to be called a scalpel, now?
He opens for me in a luscious wet thick gout of almost-violet.
Maybe I'm imagining the climb in that slaughterhouse smell.
The knife falls out of my hand, makes no noise on the carpet, and my hands come down on either side of him and my tongue is already out and I'm the motherfucking demon, now, oh how right my shoulders are, my hands, my mind.
He's miles and miles below me, somewhere predators don't want to understand, saying what did you do, oh my fucking god, what did you fucking just do
I can't say anything anymore, but I think someplace And now you're really, really bleeding and it makes me smile but my teeth can't manage that without my lips peeled back.
I'm not touching him, except for my hair. It's getting clotted into stiff little jags. My dick is too hard to hang down. This is the hieroglyph that comes after the knifeline intersects the boyline. I'm e a rainbow, like an arc of dangerous electricity, tonguepointed and toescurled and s h a k i n g. Clear thread of saliva. I've wanted to do this all, my, life.
I claw the shower curtain and it lifts him like a sling and it slams his wound into my lips, my chin, and finally mine you motherfucking bitch, tongue, inside him. Now scream.
Lucifer fucking this, this, is what rimming makes me want.
My brain is empty of everything but red and my mouth is empty of everything but red and I can feel this hurting him feel this hurting him feel the nerves sending quivering interrupted signals into this place where my tongue is inside him, feel the muscles fluttering like dreaming eyes under eyelids, trying to close push pull alter the fact of my tongue. We thud squishy back into the bed and he's howling, that noise can only be called, howling, and I slap my hands into his bird-bone-chest and spread the wound with my hands pointed into a diamond around it, tongue in the center. It probably looks violent, but it feels passionate.
Are you scared yet, my Velvet Goldmine boy? Does that still feel like a razor to you?
I close my lips around this, keyhole, suction at him and swallow and garglegrowl through blood and I might have come against his thigh, the bed, I don't know. It's not about my dick anymore. This appetite is not chasing that kind of orgasm. It's chasing the one I have from cerebral cortex to brainstem when I talon my hands off and the wound wet-noise petals as closed as it can.
I reach up and tear off his blindfold.
The look on his face and the churchbell screams make me want to be, inside him, and I hook at his wound and my fingers slidescratch gouge out again and I bite one of them by mistake. Everything is the same squirming red. I hook them in again and push, push, push, feeling my nails gristle through that last stubborn shred holding him closed, sink in all it once up to my palm into slippery hot space, into a world where a thousand things as soft as tongues wind around my fingers.
I'm pinning him under me, my knees tight around his ribs. He's sobbing words that make no sense, the struggle stirring my fingers inside him. Sometimes his legs come up in bicycling spasms, uselessly thudding his thighs into my ass. I pull, feeling the start of more tearing, feeling my tongue follow my fingernails. I hold him open almost-round and the fury fades out of it, all at once, evening out into something blissful like kissing.
He's gone limp; panting for breath with a mangled noise at the end of each exhale, rise and fall of his ribcage rocking against my face. I look up and he's looking down at me; something about the expression in his eyes makes me realize he thinks I, hate him, I take one hand away from him, liquid sex noise, and cup his face. It makes him scrunch his eyes closed, tight-tight, like a little kid afraid of the dark.
"You don't have to," he says, mouthing this at me like a secret. "You can...stop..."
"But I don't want to stop."
"...but I want you to stop...." This is climbing, almost a wail, and he sounds so, frustrated.....I'm helplessly reminded of a little kid again, getting to the point of stomping a foot. I stroke his face, and I can feel that I look, gentle, and I turn my hand inside him, pushing at things I can't visualize. Gray's fucking Anatomy never told me about this heat, about this lubricated sliding maze of things that feel triple-bagged in silk and suede. I think I'm below his diaphragm. I push down and it makes him do this percolating ugly scream, knees thudding into my back again, and it makes him vomit a little. Stomach? My hand wanders to his mouth, smears away the clear fluid slicking his jaw, leaves red in its wake. I try to push up, wanting under his breastbone, wanting to feel the heartbeat I can sense in all this warm welcoming flesh to thud into my fingers, but this silksuede confounds me. Architecture-edges of bone under my hand, muffled in tissue I scratch at. I pull at him, shake him by this angle of ribcage and sternum, fingers wandering into his mouth to compare the textures. His teeth are so much more, immediate, than his ribcage. I lean up and put my tongue in his mouth, fingers stirring him again, holding his jaw to warn him not to bite me. I want that bonefriction under my nails and I scratch at all this layering between me and his breastbone and he squalls and thrashes, and I realize I'm mangling him and that isn't what I intend at all.
One last long, deep lick, and a kiss against this new vertical mouth, and my fingers slide out. I get off him, and lurch towards the door, red hands out in front of me, wandering to my own mouth, wandering along the walls to leave little Pollack marks so I can find my way back.
I scare myself in the bathroom mirror so badly I backpedal out until my ass hits the closet door across the hall. Heart pounding like a racehorse.
Fuck. Wow.
I cautiously try this shit again, bare my teeth at my reflection. Even my fucking teeth are red. I swallow, tasting keys, well water.
Blood.
I try really really hard and I manage to have one flicker of nausea, the only one all night. It's thin and insincere and soon over. I open the medicine cabinet thinking that one flicker was the last dying spasm of human inside me. It's so goth and so wryly funny and such a staggeringly huge, relief to have it gone.
I pluck the empty shopping-bag liner out of the trashcan, fill it with gauze, peroxide, alcohol, styptic pencil (that one makes me laugh) tape, butterfly bandages. Tylenol, ha. Three flavors of antibiotics I quit taking once I felt better. A roll of toilet paper. A handful of hand towels. I scrub the fuck out of the trashcan and fill it with warm soapy water.
Back down the hall with this load of supplies. He has his knees drawn up, as curled up as he can be with his arms tied out. That's a hieroglyph, too. It's too dark in here. I stumble my way to my bedside table and unload the gear. Things hit the floor. I click on the lamp out of reflex. Okay, I admit it, I have a normal bulb there too. Hey, it's for reading. Something about this warm, bright, going-to-bed domestic light is so....real...suddenly...it's a pretty boy, lying there, one of Us with wounds and wounds and wounds. He looks scared and tired and hurt. His eyeliner is perfect. Ruined. I need to remember to do that next time. His eyelashes are clumped together, wet. Still crying.
There is so much blood.
I don't even bother to look for the Tylenol. I go for the stashbox and come back with it and a clear, cold, unadulterated bottle of water. I open it in front of him so he'll know it's, new. His eyes flicker open in delayed reaction to that seal-cracking thirsty sound and his eyes follow the bottle. Tongue finds lips; finds the sticky I've left there.
"Can't..."
"You can. I didn't puncture anything vital." Yet. Oh, honey, I should motherfucking know.
Flash: virginity after virginity lying deeper and deeper inside him, waiting for me to unclose them. Layers like veils to rend. More naked than naked, over and over.
He lets me hold up his head and he drinks the measured sips I give him, cheek against my knee, without struggle, eyes rolling closed in tired gratitude. He takes the pills I put in his mouth, and he seems to take a minute to arrange them but he swallows them in twos without question: a pair of Percocet and two-of-three antibiotics. The crying stops. It starts again, much later, after I've been cleaning his wounds a long, long time.
I untie him. Turn off the lamp. He's limp and he doesn't want to move his arms. I find and rub the places I know being tied like that must hurt until he lets me coax his arms down into the fetal curl he wants to do. Then I spoon him. This scares him, but he's cold and also I think, lonely, and when I show no signs of imminent evil and pull the pile of blankets over us shower curtain and all. I find that sort of funny, now, that I thought I would care about the state of the bed and tangle our feet together and hold him in the dark. After a very long time he, relaxes, or at least his breathing gets longer and slower and softer, and he's...easier, under my hands. No more kinetic energy.
Maybe he's dying. I sort of hug at him to see and he mrrs at me, a lovers-in-bed noise. Sleeping. It makes me smile.
I don't really sleep. All right, maybe an hour or two. Then I'm up and after the meth, trying to rifle quietly through the party debris in search of my stashbox, so as not to wake him up. He looks like an angel and I am thinking something about what it would be like to catch an one and fuck it to death.
Today we find out, children.
First, though, I have to go shopping.
First, though, wow, I have to shower.
Shower. I find and put on my horrible ugly dumbass prescription glasses, which make me look like any sort of harmless...computer, geek, and a dark brown polo shirt and blue jeans and a ball cap. There. It looks asinine, which means I'll probably blend perfectly.
Meth in the bathroom. Meth in the car. A dizzying mess of a WalMart in which I buy cinnamon and salt and waterproof mascara and gardening shears and cigarettes and too much red wine. That should confuse them. Then I go back inside and buy upholstery needles, the curved ones, so good, and black silk thread and several bolts of black linen and one of black velvet and several rolls of black satin ribbon as wide the clerk could find. I pay at a different register than the first time, and leave by the garage entrance. Both receipts go; one in their parking lot as confetti and one wherever the bits landed on the freeway.
Across town. Took me an hour to navigate to this place, fucking Jacksonville. Before I left I went through Lady Stardust's wallet, and discovered he seemed to have been carrying all or most of what they were probably paid to play there. I feel semi-guilty but it's sort of like...medical, expenses. Or funeral expenses.
I put on a black trench coat that lives in Shelley for this reason and Deathstyle-LeClaire sort of black sunglasses.
Take off the hat. Brush my hair, checking obsessively for blood I missed. Apply eyeliner and powder, because I look like absolute shit. Deep wish for coffee.
New Age sort of headshoppy store. Four things that cost a fuck of a lot but are so fucking perfect they're worth it. Almond oil, tiny expensive bottles of patchouli and myrrh and frankincense and sandalwood and cedar and camphor and ambergris. Incense. A sticker that says MEAT IS MURDER that has nothing to do with Lady Stardust but it was funny and I wanted it. A silver ankh pendant. A copy of The Book of the Dead in very prettily bound and illustrated hardcover.
Next. Hardware store, six huge-ass bags of Wet-Rid, which is not the right thing at all but will have to do. On the way out I steal several wooden skids from behind the building. Shel is so the perfect car. Throw the bastards into the back and drive like mad.
Home again, home again. Meth. Dragging the little boombox out to the shed. Meth. Power tools. Meth. No, you perverts, Lady Stardust is sleeping, and apparently my noise doesn't wake him. I checked. His pulse is strong and his breathing seems, normal. I tied his hands again and I considered tape over his mouth, but in the end it's too risky. He could choke and I might not hear him.
Spray paint. Internet. Meth. Fighting with the printer for three hours. Sprinting back to the shed with the printouts and meth and a Diet Coke and my cigarettes and an ash tray and paintbrushes and more paint all clutched together in my arms with my shirt like an apron around them. Still in the eyeliner. Ha.
When I am finished, it's almost perfect.
Sunglasses. Dumbass hat. No trenchcoat. Flea market; and a porcelain mask, the kind that come with the Mardi Gras paint on them. Black feathers. More incense. Scarabs.
Home again, damn it. He's awake. I bring him chicken broth and orange juice. He manages to drink both without any serious drama. He says thank you. He looks like he feels hung over. I bring him the bowl. Hold it for him. Give it to him once he proves himself able and retrieve the mask. I take off all the feathers and sequins and sand it and paint it flat white. Acrylic paint is your friend. I drape the shower curtain behind it and squint at his face. More contouring.
I'm no artist, but I manage pretty well. He watches me, and I untie his arms, and he manages to sit up a little and peer over the edge of the bed to watch me painting like a madman. He's, modeling, for me, I think. When I'm finished he smiles like it flatters him and tells me it's beautiful. I give him Percocet, and three Xanax and antibiotics, and push him over on his back and watch until he's almost out again. Clean his wound. Lick my fingers.
More shopping. The kind you do from your telephone. More meth and an insane afternoon of making and cleaning and arranging and improvising and painting and squinting and printing-out and sharpening. I'm taking careful notes of what I'm doing so I can change what doesn't work. They're in my head. I'm not leaving anything to explain the real tricks behind the show. Never teach a student everything you know.[br /]
Then, Percocet and a Xanax for me, and Percocet and several lines of X for Lady Stardust, which he snorts either because he's afraid of me or because he's had so much Percocet already. He periodically thanks me as I hand him drugs. I carry him out to the couch and we watch Troll and then Exorcist III for Jeff.[br /]
Jeff, honey, those bitches who bitch that this one is all talk and no scare aren't smart enough to understand the talk.[br /]
Troll is......there's the bit where Malcolm says maybe it wasn't because you were sick, maybe it was because you were Magick.....that I had to, leave, during. But other than that it was okay. He murmured something in a lungful of pot smoke through the end credits about loving the music. Maestro boy. It makes me want to brush his hair, and when I wander off and wander back with a brush he lets me. I'm very, very gentle.
Rum and coke. Half a Soma. That makes up a lot of lines and I patiently hold the Deathstyle cd for him while he's on the couch on a pyramid of pillows and a Pharaoh sweep of soft royalblue flannel with the white square of bandage on his chest like a blank cartouche. I take pity and do the last two for him. Let him snort water off my fingertips, and find it inexplicably unbearably sexy.
I need to be slower. I don't want to waste it. I'm going to miss this one. He has such nice manners. I've blown into the rent, at this point, because I really want to make this perfect. Not just to get better at, this, but because he deserves it. I hope he.....likes it, or something.
I split a single hit of the LSD with him. Three more are triple-bagged on the bedside table. I spoon him in the dark and when I feel my teeth start to grow I wrap my arms around him and the crackle of his bandage, right there in the concave of his ribcage. This little square of, censored, and the hole I know is underneath it makes me understand why straight boys like, lingerie. I nudge at the tape thinking of hands sliding up thighs and I pull until I can slide just one finger underneath, and a fence of butterfly strips stops me, and I think garters and chew a laugh into his shoulder.
He laughs, too, I swear he does, even though it doesn't make any noise. I feel it in my jaw.
I tease with my fingernails at the oblong between two of these bow-tie shaped little vinyls, and I feel him do it again, that, laugh.
I threaten more than I deliver for a long time, and we're in the dark with the blankets over even our heads, and it's a little like a slumber, party. I play that game much, much too long, and I'm crying a little when I disengage and go into the bathroom to get the needles. Thread. Alcohol. A second trip for scissors.
Meth. Fuck being, slower.
I turn him over on his stomach. Tie his hands and his feet and his waist. He's only panting at first but by the time I get through making sure of how very little slack he's supposed to have it's really more like sobbing. "Can you breathe?"
It confuses him. He nods, hesitantly, like this might be a trap. I pull his hips up and push a pillow underneath. Better. I check to make sure he's not suffocating and move his hair. It's dried so soft, still Bowie and pointy and chewable but younger.....wide swimmingpool eyes looking up at me with such, hopefulness.
Meth.
I choose a smaller blade. Alcohol the fuck out of it, flame the blade mostly to watch him watch me do that. Wipe him down from the nape of his neck to his heels. The drugs would push him into moaning reverie and then he'd remember what this chemical-cool sort of petting, meant, and whimper awhile until the long long strokes and the ceiling fan and the LSD rocked him back into serenity again. Pretty boy.
Then I pick up the blade.
I can see enough of my lines from before to continue them around in a more or less symmetrical pattern. Some places like the base of his spine I improvise, with mirrored shapes that could mean anything. I swear for at least half of this he was moving towards the blade and not away from it, and after I got myself arranged kneeling between his legs and reached under him to stroke his cock this got a lot more fucking pronounced. I drew little artistically-complicated brackets around each of his vertebrae starting at his neck and just above his waist he started to come, and it was apparently the sort of orgasm that happens twice in five years if you're lucky, the right drug, the right boy, the kind where you can't make any noise, only, shake.
I linger, cutting, holding the knife really more like a pencil again. You can get up to so much more detail when they are so paralyzed to begin with. Make a note of that. If you're into artistry. And I roll my hand in piston-thudding rhythm so fast I'm afraid to imagine how fast or I'll lose it, and the knife is between us and I can't see it and he buries his face against my shoulder and chews me, biting hard enough to really, really hurt.
It broke my heart a little when that bruise was gone.
I come against his thigh. I let go of the knife at some point and Hell knows where it is in the sticky lack of space between us. He kisses my arm where he's bitten me. I kiss the top of his head because it's all that I can reach.
After all the cuts are laid, I thread a needle, and start to sew.
It takes me till early on Day Three to finish sewing him. Partially because as I went along I began to see places that needed more cuts. Ribcage. Breastbone. Throat. I switch from forceps that don't fucking work to needlenose pliers that do, pulling up each quarter-inch of skin, laying careful stitches through the cut in black silk thread. Sometimes the frictiony pull-through makes him scream harder than the initial double-puncture.
I have to stop twice to fuck him. The heartfelt tears are much too much. I can't sew when my dick is so hard I can't think.
Then I clean him, and mix oils in a silver dish and anoint him from scalp to sole, wounds and all. I rub ocher-red cinnamon into the little stitched-closed lines, and I bind him in strips of black bandage I cut, sealing the ends with sewing and wax because I have no fucking clue what the Egyptians used. I do his fingers and his toes and his hands and feet and arms and legs up to the knee, and his neck.
I need the rest of him, still open.
At exactly four pm tomorrow it will be midnight in Egypt.
I gave him most of the rest of the acid at about one-thirty. I eat a hit and a half myself, and put I forget how many in his mouth. I forget how many I bought. I give him glass after glass of red wine, while I lazy half-peel off his test bandages, and toy with licking his wounds and poking cocaine into them with a fingernail. I haul him back to the couch and leave him to the LSD gods for a few minutes and find some Coil that works with the mood and light dozens of candles, carrying them into the bedroom from all over the house. I add another few pieces to the stack of wood holding up the upper end of the headboard. It just wasn't enough tilt last time, and this time there's going to be a lot more fluid.
Then I carry Lady Stardust back to bed.
He's booted in Osiris-black bandages up to his thighs; gloved in them up to his shoulders, collared in them from chin to Adam's apple. I tie him on his back, arms out but legs together, black rope at wrists and ankles, shoulders and knees and thighs.
I need him to be very, very still.
This is almost the end and it has to be perfect.
I brush his teeth for him. It makes him cry again. I repaint his makeup last. He's conscious but not really, responsive, and I have to hold his face in certain postures with my fingertips. Too much eyeshadow, pointed black lipstick, both waterproof, with the line from the center of his bottom lip down in a straight line to the bandages.
Everything is closed, covered, all but that one beautiful wound right where the soft place starts below the sternum. That one is held by butterfly tapes under scrupulously clean gauze that's the only white thing in the room.
I've given him as many painkillers as I dare. I'm very fucking careful with my dosage. Do not try at home unless you are willing to lose your subject. I don't think he knows where he is, really. I'm hoping the LSD makes this into something transcendental for him and not....hmm.....unalleviated, nightmare-ish. Something beautiful. He deserves that.
I've laid out blades on black velvet. Every X-acto in the house. Gardening shears. Nail scissors. The thread and the needle. Everything less aesthetically pleasing than that that I need is out of sight under the bed. I kiss him for a long time, and it soothes him, lures him into the dream until he's sort of crooning under his breath, limp with chemical bliss. I straddle his hips for the last time and coax up an edge of the butterfly tape and p e e l.
It's like drawing a curtain aside.
I've set a blade back in this cut a dozen times over the last day and a half. It made me think of dryhumping someone every fucking time. Now it makes me think of a, tongue, or a paintbrush again, and I draw him open, open, open. I deepen it twice, feeling along with a fingertip until that spreading sense of falling in knuckle-deep runs in a wide red seam from midchest to almost his waist.
Here I'm stuck for a second. For direction, ha, not literally. I think the Egyptians just kind of wandered to one side so I choose left and cut in a careful crescent around his navel, and then down again through flesh that drags differently at the knife, until the edge of where he's only just starting to have the faintest pubic-hair stubble.
The blood spreads in gravity wings, in ribcage hollows and in lengthening points on the shower curtain. He's doing some set of spasms and he throws his chest up when I lift the blade, very Exorcist. I'm making more noise than he is. The new curve draws bloodlines up to branch at his collar, settle in the hollow of his throat. Now it's Fun Boy I'm thinking of. Only this crow has two heads. For a second I know what this hieroglyph means but then I lose it in the smell. I lean forward without thinking, fingers spreading in, and everything is a wet mess but I don't feel any new openings, only that soft space kissing at my hands. I put my tongue in at the bottom and l i c k and the length of that stroke reduces me to helpless groaning sorts of snarls.
If there's a Zen, this space is it. This is the....ego loss, all the psychedelic gurus talk about. There's no me, anymore, only a set of overwhelmingly delicious stimuli; there's no real and no event and nothing that thought could really, quantify. There is no past, no present, no future to link or correlate. The only thing that exists is the space where we're intersecting. This is the only thing there has ever been.
I love him; oh I do. I think I'd have to love somebody at least a little to do, this.
Did I really think it was better when I didn't? Did I think I'd be able to help it?
He's screaming. He seems very far away. I suppose the acid has taken us each away from the world, and in different directions. He doesn't sound, entirely, uh, against this, though I'd be hard-pressed to tell you just what in the fuck makes me think that. He's not able to struggle very well or do anything very loudly, but I can feel this try at it...sloshing him, around my fingers. And I'm tired of careful and I want him open and I start low, and stir the blade back into the wound alongside my hand, find the sliding surface that blocks me and draw a long shallow line.
There's that sense of a...pressure-change, that I remember from the first real cut, and here's the heat I'd read about and I don't expect it to be quite so fucking, tangible. It's like having someone exhale against you. Heater-warm. The LSD has the courtesy to give me a lot of reverb on it and I twitch forgetting the knife, up to my palms in bliss, in a new place that makes me think of those strange fleshy plants in deep-sea films. Books don't do it justice, even the ones with the full color plates. And I think you kids expect a nice Mr. Body sort of a, stack. Pieces that click neatly into one another like a spatial puzzle. So did I. I thought this would be on top of that and so forth, but it's all...meat. Like petting a flock of...birds...
I press, and my hand slides in and I have a flickerthought of a devouring carnivorous plant and it's more delicious than horrifying. We'll see who eats who. I find something that I have to sort of burrow with a fingertip to make out that makes me think of...suspension bridges.....cables.....and he thuds against the restraints suddenly and I have telepathy and I feel him being stunned that his plan to, grab my wrist, hasn't worked.
Will never work again.
If I could push my hand in farther I could hook my fingers behind, this....then I realize that he can feel me doing this and I swarm up beside him to watch his eyes while I do it, trailing my fingers up through him like he's the ocean.
I can feel him starting to fail already...nothing I could pinpoint, just the sense of a light, dimming. Brownouts here and there in the lines. He's quite aware of me, though his eyes have a fractured kind of revelatory gleam in them that makes me wonder how he sees me. How he sees any of this. Whether he thinks he'll wake up. Where he'll wake up.
I want to open his ribcage, but I don't want him ruined, to that degree. I try to spread him with my hands because I don't want to cut flaps and I leave blood on the dresser and the carpet leaning over to retrieve things. Leather thongs, laces I sacrificed from dress shoes, gripping panic that I'm doing this wrong and I can't get a do-over if I fuck it up.
Cupping his stomach, teasing out the limits of this shape. It's amazingly smooth in my hands, and struggles by itself, still processing alcohol, ignorant of the fact that it's become obsolete. The esophagus at the top feels a lot like vacuum-cleaner cord wrapped in velvet, sort of ribbed and resistant. I can't get to all of it, just an inch or three, and then I hit the diaphragm, this stubborn elastic-vinyl kind of wall that I know is what's left of what lets Lady Stardust breathe. I wrap my fingers around it; pull down in an absurdly handjob-like motion, hitting these tight circles in moist pothole thumps, until I a soft place where the flesh of him begins to spread into his actual stomach. This is where I must tie him off. Inevitable pictures in my head of umbilical cords plague me.
A push and a pull, the messy working of leather cord around it, a tie that leaves little wings of droplets zinging off the string. The pulling makes him scream, shifting everything around my hands in frantic synch, and I realize again and again that I am wrist-deep in the machinery of this boy.
I tie a thong between the esophagus and the stomach, and after he stops coughing and gagging and shaking. I took my hands out of his wound and, held him, after, and you can fucking believe me or not....I reach back in and I push my fingers up his ass until I can feel them, inside him, masked by layers of that veil-tissue. Some of the books I've read insist that if something is swallowed it's not "really" inside the body at all........it's inside the self-contained alimentary column and that's all.
I don't agree, and I don't like the degree of separation that implies. If you swallowed it into realms that could never see the sunlight, it's inside you, so fuck you.
I tie the thong till I feel it close around my fingers, and draw them out and tug it down and tie it as close to the outside of his body as I can manage.
Then the scissors, and the cutting.
It doesn't take long.
I think he realizes what I'm cutting. That's why he makes such noise, all during, and for a long time after. He's looking right at me. This is the last eye contact we have. He watches me lift his insides out, and closes his eyes.
Double handful, though it isn't heavy and it feels like a water balloon, which I'm not fond of. Into a waiting jar. Then there's an endless sliding interlude of moist noise and wet impact and I keep thinking of a magician pulling knotted scarves out of a sleeve, of trying to straighten tangled yarn. He screams when I find the sources of this inside him, where things connect that I have to tie off with black thread and take scissors to. I've given up thinking of any diagrams; I no longer have names in my head for the places I'm touching.
His liver is heavy. It's fingernail-polish shiny. It's the color of oxblood boots.
He's becoming more and more hollow.
I forget which jar-lid goes with which organs and I have to look it up. Blood on my keyboard, mouse, cigarettes. I'm going to have to clean every inch of this house when I'm finished cleaning this boy. The same thing happens with any art project I'm in the middle of; all kinds of unforeseen obstacles that lead to improvisation...and messes...
I find varying opinions on what goes where. I even find a varying opinion on what goes at all, except that nobody wavers in their certainty the heart stays where it is. Exactly. I'm trying to remember if I found anything that looked like a gall bladder. I know I'm supposed to take out the brain, but I'm not interested. And I don't want to risk that beautiful face. I give up. Osiris will understand.
I fill the jars to the top with desiccant; now they're pristine and heavy without any liquid-slosh. Seal the lids on with wax.
Sit on the couch and burn incense and smoke. Everything I put near my face tastes of slaughterhouse and clove. My mouth is kiss bruised. I don't think anyone ever kissed me long enough to bruise my lips. I cry a little because he's gone, because I'm scared, because I can feel and hear and smell and taste how quiet the house is, and because I'm why.
Lady Stardust is lying on my bed, with the shower curtain under him, shiny black with shinier redblack here and there. His wounds are bloodless and smooth, and his face is gorgeous, peaceful. He's powder-white. He smells like Egypt.
I kiss him with my bruised mouth, stroke his Osiris-folded arms. I try to exhale into him, to share the Lucifer kiss, but it's like the machinery inside him is locked still, and I can't exhale hard enough to fill his lungs. I hope it blesses him anyway.
I start at his toes, wrapping him into the last hieroglyph. I remember the tucked-in baubles, and I give him a pewter pentagram, a polished piece of lapis lazuli, an onyx arrowhead, a Deathstyle ticket stub, a full neatly-rolled joint, here and there wound in his bandages. The police will have seizures trying to decode this. Morons.
I'm no priest, but I gathered what they gave were tiny little....holy...objects. So that was what I gave. I hope he liked them; I liked him. He was lovely, and yes, I do fucking miss him. Believe what you like. Those who matter will know the truth.
At the last minute I remember The Book of the Dead. I take off the ugly paper dust jacket; underneath it is perfect, black cloth with silver stamping. I put it under his folded hands. That'll have to do. I can't paint well enough to put it all over the coffin, and I don't have the time.
The deathmask is last; I tie it on with a loop of black ribbon and when I'm finished I see what I've made as I suppose none of you will ever see it. The last hieroglyph before that line around it, to end-name, hold the sigils trapped.
El Camino. One Lady Stardust/Osiris sculpture, wood, ceramic, paint, linen, inhumanly lovely remains. One wooden box with four jars nestled inside it wound in last-minute red scrap velvet. They were clattering when I carried them.
One stop for bolt cutters. One stop somewhere else for a padlock. Driving north and west in no particular direction. The Sisters of Mercy's Vision Thing is unlistenable for me now because I discovered that was the only tape I had in the car. Yeah, you're right, that IS the one with the Egyptian-eye cover. Isn't it romantic.
After one fill-up and about twelve times through the tape I drove into the moment I was looking for; the windows down and the cool damp night-ocean-sacred sense that is so, necessary, sometimes. Skein after skein of ribbondark road and lightless houses and wide sweep of sky. I think I might be in Georgia. Whatever. I know where to turn without knowing how I know and I'm going a reasonable thirty-five or so in this tiny Southern town and I turn off the headlights long before I stop at the gate. I leave her running. I get out and cut the padlock off and push them open and drive in and get out and push them closed again, apply the new padlock with the key still neatly looped through it. It's not for, security, exactly-it's for politeness.
Graves stretch out in sedate aisles along us, and it's quiet and solemn and makes me think of church-pews and the uncanny rows of perfectly-straight planted trees you pass along highways. Shelley feels, awed. I roll her at an almost-idling purr up to the first stone building. I have to three-point turn her and it's more scary than I expect because I'm tired and even though I know I'm nowhere near any graves I'm terrified I'll hit somebody's tombstone. This is their place and not mine; I'm here on business, and it's important I don't.....disturb the peace.
This is a holy place. That's why I'm putting him here.
Getting him out is not difficult; he's heavy, and he thumps, but I've backed all the fucking way up to the doorway-there's no door, just an arch. Inside the mauseoleum it's a double wall neatly laid with plaques, and a wide open space at the end. That's where he goes. I push him there and find that dear Lord, I do have a tiny brush and dustpan in my car that I have never ever used. I tidy up our traces until it looks like he materialized there. Good. Put the small box on top of the large one. They're opaque black with only the smallest of sigils running in exhausted last-minute silver in a thin thin border. Stick the few stubs of candle I remembered here and there, and light them. Shove incense into the crack between box and lid and light stick after stick till it smells like it's supposed to, like a, temple.
It'll have to do.
Sometimes I wish I had a picture and sometimes I'm glad the only pictures of it are in my head. Did I tell you that already?
I hope the candles burn long enough to let him have light until sunrise.
I drive and drive and I'm lost as fuck, and I spend thirty of the fifty-five dollars I have on an awful hotel room and five of the fifteen remaining of that on a bottle of horrible red wine. I lie in bed and stare at the television with the sound too far down to hear it. Cry. It's so fucking quiet in here. There's blood under my fingernails I missed. I keep cleaning them with my teeth and no matter how long I do it I can still taste him.
I'm still trying to grasp that he's gone. It seems like a play were in or sex that we had that was mindnumbingly elementally perfect; I keep turning to say to him "I was really fucking happy about how the mask came out; and your nail polish, did you-" And of course, the answer is no. He didn't. Or if he did, he sure as fuck can't get stoned with me and run his mouth about it now. Because he's gone.
I fall asleep, TV painting the room blue.
The police find him. There are a few confused blurbs. They lie about bits of it and seem to think I got some of it from some comic book. I have no idea what they're talking about. Nobody arrests London After Midnight and Ressler is not consulted.
Nobody looks at me twice.
_____
This is a piece of the novel Psychomotor Agitation.
www.thenineteen.net
I crowd myself into a niche down front, off to one side. Smoke and wait. This band that is ruining my night is called Mourning Glory, I gather from various posters. Bitches. The name is really pretty and it would've been easier to be mad at them if it was something ridiculous.
I'm expecting very little until the lights go down and the noise begins.[br /]
I've named this one Lady Stardust. He isn't in bright blue jeans. Black vinyl. Fishnet shirt with the little electrical-tape crosses over his nipples, universally scorned by all three self-titled "real" goths in Florida. I wonder how long the tape would stretch if I bit and pulled before it came off before my thoughts dissolve into ngggh. That's the closest I can come to spelling the consonants-only exhalation of pure fucking lust.
He's taller than my usual, chin-height to me instead of sternum-height. Spiky, gleaming black hair, fine aristocratic lines, eyes the color of the swimming-pool I still dream about. No lipstick, black eyeliner. He moves like a cat. He takes the microphone and nods and waits. I can't remember a thing about his band, I don't think I spared them a glance.
I'm so up front.
There are probably less than a hundred people at this show. The stage is a grand total of about a foot and a half high. So he's right, fucking, there. Any minute now I'll catch his scent.
Lady Stardust sings his song, and yes, it's probably of darkness and disgrace. I'm not able to notice. He's so good you can feel the silence fall, so good he is suddenly literally the only sound in the building. His voice moves like a bird in flight. It rolls out of him in one effortless sine-wave. He's fearless. There's something of Robert Smith in the anguished falsetto, something of Murphy in the soaring crystalline tenor. He's singing so hard he shouldn't be pretty anymore, but oh, how he is. I want to bite the end of that voice and chew until I reach the mouth that made it.
My mind is hissing a sly running tirade of I need him I'll have this one all fucking week I put up with and waited for and all my life and it went so badly last time and I. Will. Have. This one.
And then his monitor goes out.
I'm close enough to see him glance down at the equipment, to hear that something is gone but not talented enough to know exactly what. He does a feeble kick at it, still singing. After a minute or so he just stops and addresses someone at the back of the room. "It's completely gone, you have to do something about it." He tries to drop back into the song, flustered and.....blushing, for a line or two, before he gestures for the band to just, stop.
My nails are digging into my palm like they talk about in horror novels. Ha, I mean in other horror novels.
In the real world I'd have rushed the stage, snatched him, dragged him back to my Lair and eaten him very slowly.
Well, all right, that IS pretty much what happened, except I didn't really eat any, and I managed a tiny bit more tact than that.
"You sound great," I tell him, loud enough for him and everyone else to hear me in the music-free air. I'm not particularly eloquent on such short notice. I feel the brain threatening to feel stupid and I tell it to go fuck itself.
He laughs. He looks, defused. It helps that there are whistles and a brief staccato of applause from people agreeing with me. He has a beautiful motherfucking collarbone All angle and hollow.
"I know, but I can't hear myself and then I can't do...what I do...."
So there, insecurity. It seems to be, working. Whatever the fuck I'm trying to do.
"Watch our faces. You're doing it. Trust me."
Nobody laughs that time. Though some do clap.
Lady Stardust is doomed. It's much too late for anything else.
Anything I want that much must be rightfully mine. If it weren't meant for me it wouldn't push those buttons.
Never mind. Anyone not nodding yet will never know what I mean.
This is probably the only situation on Earth where you're allowed to stare at a real live boy in this particular way. He spends a few minutes of the next hour or so staring back at me. Sometimes he gives me the ghost of a smile. He has the sort of teeth you want to grind your own teeth against. He keeps catching my eye, as if he's in on the....joke. He's unspeakably touchable, like his sculptor kept a wall covered with photos of tomcats leaping, sprawled, hunting, to keep those lines of force in his mind. When he turns at the waist the flesh of his stomach does something that makes my tongue cramp.
It's over, much too soon, much too late. The predictable close-out chaos of noise.
(i will i have to i will i can't just once and it went so quickly last time and just, this, once)
He stands with his shoulders heaving, catching his breath, holding the mic in a way that is so Bowie I have to knot my toes in my boots to keep from literally jumping him. Hip cocked, smirk, poise. Fucking Hell.
I keep thinking a love, I could not obey.
By any standards except mine Lady Stardust is far more valuable a catch than the boy who haunts me. He's flawlessly, magazine-beautiful, and a higher rank in the bedpost-notch sense. Meaning, it's way cooler to run down the lead singer of a really good band than a pretty college student and sandwich shop employee. But I'm not the least bit nervous. Because I don't love this one at all.
We're both backstage. He's standing at what used to be a restaurant table, doing makeup repair in one of those mirrors that plugs in and has little banks of lights up each side. It's the only light in this curtained-tent of a room. He nudges the mirror with a fingertip so we can see one another in it. "I don't know what the word for heckling somebody in a helpful way is, but you were great at it. Thanks."
"Cheerleading?"
He laughs. So do I. I can smell him. Push the advantage. "You guys were lucky. Last band they couldn't get the sound and the lights on at the same time." This is a lie.
He lifts one shoulder in something too cool to be a shrug, re-drawing a black line under one American-blue eye. "I'm--"
"Lady Stardust. I know. I'm Erik."
He doesn't correct me, which is good, because by any other name he'd become, normal, or something Contaminated. "Holy shit. Half the kindergoths here wouldn't know Bowie if he walked up and set them on fire."
"Most of what I heard in the audience was Peter Murphy. About you, I mean."
"If you're trying to flatter me, it's working." Eye number two. Then powder with delicate little pressing motions. I close my trenchcoat, hoping either he doesn't notice or it looks casual, because my cock is so hard I'm afraid he will see it even in this utter lack of light. He has to lean over too much table to get at the mirror, elbow pushing a wake in a chaos of clattering makeup. His fishnet shirt has ridden up, and there's an ellipse of bare skin at the small of his back. I'm going to fucking tear out my laboriously-inserted lip ring if he doesn't straighten up in the next four seconds.
"So what're you guys doing after this?" A gesture encompassing the club that he doesn't see, and his band, which I don't see.
He does that one-shoulder shrug again. More teeth-flickers. "Karl always fucking wants to drive back. They're probably already gone. I'll hide out here till the crowd wanders off and get a room."
"We could sneak off and smoke, if you wanted."
A wistful sigh. "I don't smoke anymore. Voice."
"But I have opium."
This may possibly be a lie. I can't remember if I smoked it all or not. Whatever works. No gothboi ever could resist the quintessentially goth nature of opium.
He tilts his head without doing the shrug, and I know I've got him.
There will be candy. Just get in the car.
I leave the way I came, through the curtain. Buy and fucking inhale a rum and coke. Itty out to my car. He's already outside through Hell knows which fire exit, huge plastic suitcase dragging one arm down. The plan is almost derailed once we get out into the parking lot; he wants to take his car, an amusingly huge Buick LeSabre painted spray-can black and absolutely covered with a treasure-trove of oldschool capital-G Goth stickers.
I persuade him it's easier if he just rides with me and I run him back. This is another lie.
Once he sees my El Camino, he's enchanted enough to agree. She looks damn good with this spider from Mars slouched in her passenger seat with one delicate boot out the window.
When we've gotten to my Lair I get him settled with rum and coke and dig through my stashes. I have a pipe I use for only opium; I scrape the Hell out of it and roll the result in a lot of very good weed. I pick up two Klonopin on the way, and once I get back to the counter I use for a bar I make him a Screaming Nazi shot to which I add the pills and a dropper full of GHB.
I make my own shot with slightly fewer ingredients. He can't resist the name, and we do them in near-unison. Once it's in my mouth I become convinced I've given him the clean one, but once I swallow I know I didn't.
He laughs, coughs, waxes poetic about just how awful his drink is, daubs at his watering eyes with one long black fingernail, declares it the worst drink ever invented. It's so awful you can't taste anything in it. It's Jagermeister and fucking Rumpleminze, for the love of Hell. The weirdness of the GHB is unnoticeable, and even if you chew Klonopin they taste like diluted sugar. I forget what I was supposed to take them for, but they render you tranquil and extremely unable to do complicated shit like walk around.
I stole this trick from Dahmer, if you hadn't already guessed. The pills in a drink, I mean. How amusing that they give angry psychotics such pills to keep us calm. I think Jeff was using Xanax. I forget.
The drugs are because of the fucking issues with dragging, carrying, and tying people, without them managing to kick me in the nose, teeth, or balls, or making enough noise to summon cops.
I'm getting better at this with practice. That's the plan, anyway.
I'm not wasting this one the way I did Jamie.
We're talking through most of this. I spare you because most of what I'm saying is, fake, and because you're skimming this anyway to get to the good part.
We talk about makeup and drugs and how truly fucking awesome his band is. That last part isn't fake. I'm having some small guilt, here, because I'm getting ready to deprive the world of this band. It's that good, if you like lush heartbroken goth, and I do. But what better end for the lead singer? It'll make him vaguely famous, complete the tragic-deliciousness of his music. That's so circular and perfect that I know I have to do this. He's FOR me.
Lady Stardust settles with his knees bent and his bootheels on the edge of the couch. It does extremely slutty things to his crotch. I remind myself to thank Lucifer for those pants, because they have to be His doing Hell. Fire. And a lot of damnation. I sit cornered to him, replace his beer with a rum and coke. We smoke the semi-opium, so I can watch his eyes drifting closed with pleasure and chemistry. Smudge of eyelashes clotted with mascara.
"So you knew about Bowie being, like, bi, right?"
I'm nodding at this. I'm on my second rum and diet Coke and I realize I'm in the buzzy-pleasant state of drunk that is so hard to maintain. I'm forgetting not to enjoy myself. "Married to Claire-something before Iman."
"For a long time. Both of them fucking whoever they wanted. I always thought that made so much sense."
I'm still nodding. Shut up. I'm dense, and I don't think of myself as marketable.
"See, I totally, get that. My ex-girlfriend thought it was hot for me to fuck around with other boys, but she was, such a fucking bitch, otherwise."
That's when I realize this is a come-on.
The beast is crawling in my hands and my teeth and my cock and my mouth. I grab his head and kiss him, kiss him, and the beast is swarming into his throat like a hive of bees. He tastes of rum, of smoke, and if I kiss deeper still I can still taste the licorice-death of the Rumpleminze. I can't stop replaying that thought from the show; the wish to crawl inside him, and I'm trying to lick his tonsils, I swear, trying to tear up the tip of my tongue on his teeth, trying to split both our lips.
His knees come up and he hugs me tighter than tight with legs and arms and does something like a little I-win purr. It makes me open my eyes for a second, in something like wonder I can smell the powder he's wearing. And then he bites my tongue, just hard enough to hurt, sort of dragging his teeth along and nipping into the very tip hard enough to make me yelp and slap him. I don't manage to do it very hard or very well. We stare at one another. He makes some noise, and it is not a quit-it sort of noise. Then he kisses me, with a lot of suction and a lot of pulling with his legs, arching with his back. Like he's trying to, climb me. Like he's trying to eat me, or trying to help me eat him.
Then we're on the floor. I'm on top of him. He's extremely happy about this fact. So am I. Having my cock suddenly and without fucking warning crammed against his costill in those oilspill pants is an extremely fucking nice surprise. I need to do this a lot more, often. And harder. I can taste his breath, taste the lungs behind it, taste the voicebox that made that motherfucking music.
I say you little bitch and he says yes and I say I'll fucking kill you and he says yes, yes, yes.
The edges are blurring. I hold him down with my hips and drag up his shirt in gestures that make our shadows look like we're fighting. Part of me is standing back in my head, waiting, for, something. The pants squeak under my hands like a raincoat. Synthetic. I get the bastard fly unbuttoned and he's moaning long spools of that voice into my mouth.
I can't swallow fast enough. His pants hang unstoppably at the knee, caught by those eyelet-riddled boots. A lot of teeth-drag when I predator my mouth away from his. A lunge that stops at his stomach to leave bite after bite, almost too hard and definitely too fast, and another pull-drag that has him laughing a little and screaming under his breath. I'm a rollercoaster he's riding.
He hisses careful at me, raises himself up on one elbow. I slam him back down with one hand to his chest and it feels incredibly, leonine. It drives a tiny sound out of him. He stays. Good boy. I struggle to play nice, drawing long lazy licks across his stomach and up his thighs. Apparently he shaves everything, and apparently he's done so very recently. If I lick hard enough in some places I can just get a rasp in return, but only just.
Must, not, eat.
He's hard against my cheek, cock dragging through my hair. The smell of him is making me, drool, and the motherfucking effort not to, turn, into a werewolf, is, making me shudder like I'm cold. I shove his thighs apart hard and do digging, pulling little pinches with my nails, restraining myself back into a soothing pet I don't mean just when his wails really start to delight me. The kicking is awful cute. And it's getting weaker, and, weaker.
I didn't give him enough to knock him out, but he's going to be non-functionally fucked up right, about, now.
He's not going to miss anything, but all he can do is squirm in that darling way, like he's trapped in quicksand. It's gotten to his mind and not just his body. The moans are liquid and edgeless, noise feathering into anguished little arpeggios. It's like I'm, playing him.
I bury my face against his cock, i n h a l e, and he feels my fingernails and my fingertips much too close to the cheek of his ass and he says don't. It confuses me. He hasn't made any words in awhile. He says no without much, enthusiasm. I put my fingers in my mouth and then shove two inside him without asking.
Whatever he's trying to say climbs through his teeth like a bonesaw hitting a screw. His hands smack into my head, and then knot in my hair. He tries to close his legs and it sort of pins my hand, and it's delicious. He's not trying very hard to push me off. I think he's too, stunned, to. Oh, and much, much too high. I pull his dick into my mouth with tongue and lips and teeth and hook my fingers in his ass and sort of yank him towards my face by his pelvic bone.
He's still making various subnotes of distress but that long liquid moan is taking the lead. I mouth that he's such a good boy, but I don't think he can hear me. He's pulling my hair like he wants to get me away from him, but it isn't very sincere. It's increasingly difficult to be this, nice. I settle in on the head of his dick and use too much teeth, hold him with too much thumbnail. It's the thumbnail that does it, I think, because he slams against my face and wails and wails, coming and coming and almost-crying.
Swallowing is the best part. It's like...hmm...irreversible. And unless you're playing some weird game with it or you miss, it never was in the, outside world. Just inside him, and then inside me. It's, magick. It's pure.
He laughs again, when he can get his breath. It's feeble. "So, fucked up..."
"Yes, you are, " I tell him
"...bleeding?"
"Not yet." This is a lie, I discover while licking my fingers. Un-translatable all-consonant noise from me .
"...cool..."
I come up for air and meth. I bring him some on a Deathstyle CD case, just a taste, not even a line. "Lick it."
"Crazy fuck." He's grinning. He crooks his head, darts out a perfect pink triangle of tongue, draws it in again with a little white fast-fading smudge on the tip. Swallows, grimacing. It's mostly to keep him being too sedated. I lick the CD case after he does. It's not because I am worried about wasting the meth.
"Can you sit up?"
He's still lying on the carpet, crumpled, sweating, with his shirt up around his chest and his pants around his knees. He manages to kind of squirm into a zigzag. The little ridge of spine jutting up is so reptilian and so dear that it really is hurting my jaw just to look at it without licking it.
I can't express to you how motherfucking pretty this is. You'd have to have been there. I regret the fuck out of not filming these. Why I didn't get a shitty video camera from a pawn shop is beyond me.
He kind of swings his feet till he flops over on his back with his legs still all crooked and splayed. He raises his arms and does something very funny that looks like a both-hands sieg heil a few times. Then he announces, "Nope," and giggles about this for a minute. So do I, because I can't help it.
"What did you give me?
"All sorts of shit." I light a cigarette. Sit in my desk chair, turned around away from The Novel for once so I can watch the show.
He stops sieging Heil and ponders this. One hand flops at his pants, drags them up a useless four inches or so, not even clearing his thighs, subsides. I don't even think he knew he was doing it. A subconscious little flicker of feeling, unsafe. So good. His cock is still wet, and still twitching idly now and then.
"I meant, just now."
"Oh. Meth."
That's still not adding up for him. It's like a guessing game. I draw blood from my own lip again, but it's still a grin. My cigarette needs flicking too badly for me to make it to the ashtray, so I flick it and rub it into the carpet with my boot without looking.
"Did you give me something else I forgot?"
Aw. How diplomatic of him. He's getting more slurred by the minute, but still somehow clearer than before because he's trying harder. He knows something important is wrong. There's no fear-scent yet, but he's definitely on yellow alert. Lord, no wonder Dahmer used this. It's like bondage you don't have to keep fucking with.
"Opium, and some weed in that, and tranquilizers and G in your drink. I'm pretty sure that's it so far."
He raises a foot that time. Heelthud into carpet. This time he manages to pull his pants up, too, but not exactly fasten them. He rolls over to one side, little hairsprayed-messes in his eyes. Mumbles, "That's really fucking cute of you, have to...gonna call a cab and get a room because at this hour..." Quiet. He has no idea how long he's been here. "Checkout before I can fucking...sleep..."
"No. You're staying here."
"...really, rather..." He's sitting up, but he's listing sharply to fucking port, and wobbling in every direction at once somehow, like the spine I was just admiring is no longer strong enough to hold up his lovely head. His arms are sort of out, which is very LeClaire of him, like he's trying to balance with them, or they're broken. "...get, going, I'm used to hotels...."
"You're not going anywhere. Ever again. I've decided to keep you." His rum and coke is half-untouched on the coffee table. I help myself to it.
He gives up the sitting thing, and kind of flips back down again like a rocking chair falling over. His pants are still mostly down, just framing half a bitemark I left low on the white plane of his stomach. He stares up at the ceiling, panting a little still. I wonder if he's realized nobody knows where he is. Drugs still nowhere near done with him.
He thinks awhile longer and concludes, "Hot."
I agree with him completely.
Then, I swear to you, he goes, "I could crash on your couch, I guess." As if we're negotiating. I'm this close to rum and coke in my nose. I mean it. It's stoner-funny. Invisible ropes that he's kind of tentatively starting to struggle against.
"Wherever you end up."
That's perfect. That lets him continue to pretend that he maybe he's wrong. Maybe I'm teasing. Maybe it's a form of "Stay for dinner, I insist." or the struggle to pick up the tab somewhere.
What a lovely joke. I'm thinking of Jamie relaxing when I told him he had a concussion. Delicious.
I wonder how long I can sustain it.
And my, the ramifications of THAT terrible idea.
He's considering. I go and stand over him and stare down into his puzzled eyes. "Do you want some water?"
A frown. A nod . I bring him an opened bottle of it, cold from the fridge, with more G in it. He's still too able to move.
Apparently I've hit on a good balance, because while he can still squirm, just enough, and moan plenty, his troublesome ability to almost sit up is utterly gone. I have to half-carry and half drag him to the bathroom. He makes little sex-or-ow noises at things that I wouldn't have called particularly stimulating. Drugs. Thank Hell for drugs. I lay him on the rug with a folded towel under his head and wet a washcloth and wipe his face, his chest. He makes a grateful noise that is priceless in its sincerity. I switch to colder water and it seems to increase his joy.
I pull his shirt and sort of hook it behind his head, so it's just fishnet-arms, and I finally, finally get to bite that motherfucking electrical tape. It's gotten semi-sticky-slidy, which is always what happens when you wear the shit. Gums up my lips and his chest and we stick to each other like my mouth is trying to grow into his nipple. I don't bite, but I threaten to until he's whining in a way that makes me think again of dogs. I stroke his head to soothe him, and he shudders, and the whine gets softer. Looser. I stroke him until he believes me, and then I bite him.
He crescendos immediately to the best he can do for a scream, which is quiet enough that I doubt anyone could hear it over the faucet in the hallway. It's like his lungs are as.....limp, as sedated...as the rest of him. He can't push the music out past his ribcage, but I hear him. No one else in the world can hear it. Maybe I don't regret not making tapes, after all.
"Hush. Beautiful boy. I'm not going to bite it off." Joke just for me. I kneel up, grab Vaseline and dip the washrag in it, rub it into these tape-sticky poor wounded nipples with businesslike little scrubs. He whimpers and arches at me, and circles make him sustain-moan and hold himself arched. Pretty, pretty fucking boy. I drag his pants back down just enough and turn him over on his face and spread his ass open with one hand, and stroke him into a series of wails that are such perfection I keep doing it long, long after the really minimal blood is gone. Such drama, this one. It makes me want to give him something to really cry about.
I grope above my head on the counter until I find the Vaseline again, and I use much too much and push one finger inside him over and over again, all the way out, all the way in, just to hear his increasingly frustrated little protest-noises. Whenever he summons up the flail to approach rolling over I push it in hard and deep and hold him, still, that way, and he wails like I've killed him and immediately stops squirming. I rock my hand into him, to hear him try to get louder. Mine, mine, mine. I pull my finger out and forget about the Vaseline until I've already put it in my mouth. Chin and tongue slicked with that bacon-grease texture and inexplicably vivid taste.
I sort of crawl, up him, hands slipping in grease and on tile and making a mess of the rug. He feels me come up over him and rears up under me, trying to throw me off and only succeeding into thumping into me in a series of sticky skin-impacts. I put one knee on the back of his thigh, leaving a trail of Vaseline on my shirt and my waist and my zipper.
"...don't..." That laugh. Kind of a toddler-style, all the limbs at once, kick. A pretend temper tantrum. "I don't do this." That was very clear, and probably took a lot of effort, considering he's facefirst in the towel and still giggling.
"It doesn't work that way anymore." Dreamy. Spreading him open with my thumbs, just to scare him. Getting my pants down and my cock arranged and knee-ing his legs together and sitting on his thighs. I keep thinking, look what I found. To think I was pissed off about the cover charge. That makes me laugh, and he laughs too, because it's contagious. I spread him again and kneel forward and thump at him with my erection, and he does a long wail that's artfully petulant and ends in another giggle. "You can't tell anyone..."
I'm going to fall off him if he makes me laugh any harder. Something has to be an unprecedented kind of wrong with this if we're both still having this much fun. Give me a minute, here. "Oh, I won't."
"And you have to use a condom."
Darling. A condom. If you knew the bodily fluids we're going to share.
"I don't have to do anything, anymore."
This Peter Murphy boy, this David Bowie boy. This Velvet Goldmine boy. I've wanted to make this archetype scream since I was about thirteen years old, and I think it's going to be awhile before I'm tired of it. I slam inside him and feel him go, still, and he knows, he knows and I can almost, hear, his pupils dilate.
I get all the scream I ever could have asked for. He runs out of breath, shaking under me, a r o u n d me. I turn his head and do something too mean to be kissing and fuck him, fuck him. I feel the inhale lock inside him and I pull at his mouth with my lips and my lungs, until I feel the triumph of his breath whistling past this knot in his throat.
Am I his shock, this shock, this loud, this irreversible, this important in the universe of a creature this unspeakably...
I push his squirming hands up over his head like I'm making him make a snow, angel. All my weight is on him and my cock is much too deep and he's sobbing, trying to spread his knees, choking stop, stop. He's so, easy, to hold down. I pin his legs tighter together. I'm snarling. I used to dream of being some kind of...pterodactyl....of dropping that shadow across a crowd of humans and plummeting down at them like an arrow, catching up a squirming crunchy screaming red mouthful. Did I ever tell you that?
There's one fast thud that I particularly like that he seems to find particularly agonizing. Perfect. Faster. Faster.
His wrists in my hands. My fingers in his mouth. Dragging at an earring my teeth found. He's crying against my palm. Mine, mine, mine.
"Now, you're bleeding."
He can't move but I can see this information make him want to. Or maybe I'm reading his mind. I spread his ass with my hands and lick from the base of his balls to his tailbone, tasting us both. He's silent, quivering. I wonder if it's embarrassment or fury or arousal.
I start on the top of his bootlaces. It frustrates me into using scissors pretty quickly. He insists on turning his face and manages "...drive..."
"You'd never make it to the driveway. Quit flexing your toes."
He watches me take off his pants. Sighs in serious relief at the drop in temperature. It upsets him that he's not getting his way. Or that I've ruined his boots. Flicker that he ought to be grateful. Instead, it makes him cry harder for some reason for me to throw his fishnet-shirt over onto the laundry pile.
I take off my clothes, run a bath. climb in with him and wash him, or something like it.
He keeps expecting me to hurt him again; I can feel him, cringe, when I move too quickly. He doesn't smell like actual fear. He's still hard.
I wash his hair, with extreme care not to get soap in his eyes, and I drain the water around us and get both of us out of the tub without anyone falling into any porcelain. I clean off his ruined makeup with remover that won't sting even if he does squirm like a kid getting eyedrops and wreck my aim from time to time. There.
"Do you want me to draw it on again?"
He won't answer me. He's not exactly crying, now. Unresponsive. Internal negations. Dear God, if you get me out of this, I will never, ever let anyone fuck me in the ass again. Please oh please. It's a dream. It's a little like teasing. A joke. I've just been raped. Hazy impossible plan of flagging down a car in the middle of Nowhere, Florida at this hour of the night.
Without makeup, he's, unearthly. Childlike. It's too Man Who Fell to Earth. Wrong kind of hot.
I find waterproof eyeliner and put it on him. He holds his eyes and his face exactly the way I tell him to. He's earned an intermission. I let him have this Gethsemane. I let him lie there while I take down the shower curtain.
A tarp would be better but the only one I have is blinding blue. Pretty as lipstick, ugly as fuck for a serial murder backdrop. The shower curtain is black. Much better. I tested this already. I clip the edges up on three sides with those weird black-and-silver clips for too much paper, leave the bottom unclipped and bunched up into a black five-gallon bucket weighted with a brick at the foot of the bed. Scraps of wood are under the legs at the head of the bed. Just an inch or three of tilt, not enough to really feel when lying on it, but when I poured a cup of water onto the final result, it pooled on the shower curtain and more or less wound up in the bucket. I had to pick up the top to sort of pour in the last bit. Good enough.
He makes happy noises when I finally manage to get him in bed. The crackle confuses him, but the pillow I slide under his head convinces him. I've tied both of his hands Jesus-spread before he really understands what I'm doing. The rope is over, under, around, and fucking through the box springs, and though I can't pull them off, holding the loose ends in my hands, it's never really been tested. Here goes.
I shush him and he subsides again, and I add "It's a game," and he does that one, shoulder, shrug. Sighs. The blindfold does beautiful things to his face. I miss the eyeliner, but the trick I have in mind requires the blindfold, and the, removal, will be worth the loss of eye contact.
I stand back and squint at this. Black ropes, which were hard as fuck to find (home decor store) and the shower curtain is straight and it looks, lovely. All right. Ready as I'll ever be.
I get things, watching him squirm and tilt his head and worry about each little noise. I'm sure the drugs aren't doing much to clarify any data. So good.
I plug in my old hair clipper and hold it beside his face. "Do you know what this is?"
He doesn't feel like guessing. Click. Something is terribly wrong with it that I can't fix, and it goes CRACKZZZZzzzz like it's been struck by lightning when you turn it on. And then it does nothing but hum. He scrunches his face and his shoulder and his body away from this terrifying cattle-prod noise, mouth twisting into another don't.
"It's a violet wand." I click it off, put it in the chair by my bed in a pile of laundry, so that he can't hear that I no longer have it.
He's panting again. That anticipation of pain is so da Vinci to watch. It's a fairy tale.
I pick up an X-acto knife with a carefully not-quite-new blade. Brand new ones are too sharp, much too easy to cut too deep, and much too painless. It's clean, though probably not officially sterile.
"Supposedly it feels exactly like a razor."
"Please--"
That was the very first please. It does something to the pit of my stomach, something irreversible. I watch him shake, bracing himself. I draw a very careful line, just a scratch, really, about as long as my hand, on his stomach just in the concave V of his ribcage. Arch. He grits his teeth; does that locomotive breathing I've gotten to know and love. Exhales.
Relaxes. Mouths god. I wonder which god he means.
"Does it?" He slow-motion nods and slow-motion squirms like a snake drawing a useless S. Rolls towards my hand and the blade without meaning to. Mouths fuck at me, and that's exactly what we're doing,.
I wonder how long I can make him like this. Days, probably, if I manage a successful drug run. If anything was ever worth risking a sick day for three days of evil, it's this.
A red line gets darker across his hips, not even really bleeding enough to trickle. I straighten him up and hold one hip down and draw another line just beside it, much faster. He howls out an anguished something that's wordlike enough to make me curious. "What?"
".....slower...please..."
I can't get enough of that breathing. It's like he's been running. I put my cheek on his chest to appreciate it better, adding a snatch of surprisingly fast heartbeat.
"Slower?" I slide up so I'm curled up on his chest like he's a pillow, holding the blade like I'm going to write something on his stomach, his thighs. I don't think I will, though. Draw, maybe, but not write.
I'm going for a lot of symmetry, and the occasional repeated pattern. Like jewelry.
He's too pretty to just mangle. I want to decorate him.
Oh, never mind. Just watch.
"Slower will take longer."
"....too fucking much, that fast. Please...."
I lean over letting my weight keep him still. Draw over each of my scratches again, until they end neatly at each hipbone and are uniformly deep enough to just bead up with blood. I do it slowly, because that's really not much for him to ask. And he asks, so, pretty. Such manners.
He isn't new to pain. I remind myself to check him for old scars. The thought that this boy would've wanted to cut himself up, alone in the dark, is terribly sad. I'm going to make it up to him right now.
He draws in a breath when he feels me choose where to lay the blade and exhales long and slow and with a minimum of noise. He makes all the noise after the cut, like something that's about to become crying again, but softer, like half the upsetness is that he's so tired. I draw horizontal stripes down his thighs that I'll bring all the way around when I finally turn him over, and tiny Vs nestled in his hips.
I have to lift the blade fast, sometimes, but having him pressed so close gives me kind of a kinetic warning before the pain makes him draw up a knee or slam up against me in protest. I really should tie his feet, but I'm enjoying how much wriggle he can manage with this much slack.
So far there's only been a place or two where the knife slipped, and I don't suppose it'll really detract all that much when I'm finished.[br /]
Sometimes I just kind of drag the tip along, here and there, not really meant to make a mark, or poke at him with the very point just to encourage this useless struggle. He's not being very sincere, not flailing with all of his strength the way he'd be doing without the violet wand myth.
It amuses me that he's....playing along...
He's webbed with sort of freeform-straight lines, from about mid-thigh to waist. I'm saving the pink bits. Foreplay is important. I slide back closer to his head, still lying on him, still turned with my back to him and that long white skein of boy spread out under me.
There's an increasingly large lot of red, but still not enough for there to be an actual pool of blood. If he feels the trickles despite the din of such hurt, I suppose he thinks it's sweat. Though I wonder why he can't smell it; it's driving me increasingly mad. That pennies-in-hand, old key, raw meat scent.
I cut a careful free-hand ellipse around his navel, holding the skin taut with my hand, holding him down with an elbow. I'm getting a lot of please now, and a lot of noise before, during, and after each cut. And his dick is still hard. I put the scalpel in my teeth for a second and stroke one hand up his bleeding thigh and into a hairpin turn down around his cock, slicking him red. He gasps, key-changing immediately, and plants his feet on the bed and pushes into my hand.
This is not what I expected.
I'm probably as slack-jawed as the morons I make fun of have ever been.
It's like Christmas.
I switch hands, donating my left to his cock, retrieving the blade with my right. I add artistic little short lines in all the tendon-hollows of his hips. I turn the knife rather than lifting it and the drag of each direction-change makes him climb an octave, roll against my hand faster.
I can't understand most of what he's saying, but it's to the tune of please oh please, fuck you, you fucking, please, please, please.[br /]
I'm making noise of my own, I realize, sometimes drowning him out. It sounds like I'm really enjoying something that really pisses me off, which is pretty close to the truth.
I lay the flat of the blade against the complicated folds of his scrotum; he screams under me like something dragging a scratch in glass and I hold his cock still and press, tiny, little, point-first dashes into the head in a descending ladder-lines towards the tip. He loses the end of that scream and moans in the most beautiful rolling tenor I ever inspired, coming on my hand, my face, the bed, the blade.
His knees come up, thudding into me because I'm sprawled across his, lap, licking at this gorgeous slick mess of blood and come and sweat and boy. He's crying. I think I finally managed to take care of his case of the giggles. I want to keep him for days, weeks, I'll sell things and replace them when I get a new job, oh, I need this one.
He's mine all mine.
And he's open in tiny slits under my mouth, teases, just enough cut in the worst ones for me to have an edge to find and try to force my tongue inside. It's not enough; it's the same hieroglyph as that thing that happens when you're too drunk to be quite hard enough and he's at the wrong angle and your dick just will NOT go into his ass, and I look up at him and the knife is lazy in my hand like a dart more than a pencil, now, and I lift his balls with my tongue and pillow my cheek on his thigh and reach up, casual, it feels so casual.
I thud the blade down like you might do to stick it into the top of a worktable, right below the very tip of his breastbone. At the best part of that fabulous motherfucking line that only Those Boys have, that line from chin, to throat, to starving-artist ribcage and stomach and cock. My knife is in the middle and it's a new hieroglyph now.
He seems to be thrown, upwards, into the blade, and not away, back arching and arms pushing him towards me like he wants it in there. Like he wants it deeper and harder and I groan and I pull and I'm holding it there with my, fist, curled around it, and I pull it down that deep and at a perfect fucking right angle for about an inch, maybe a tiny bit more. The pull of cutting him, open, is like cloth and like clay and like vinyl and like none of those things, and there's almost a sound but not quite. Gorgeous, invisible reverberations of drag; of texture changes along the handle. The blade is not deep enough and too triangular to get stuck in mere skin and muscle and all the clever little things that bind the two.
I lift it out. It still feels like careful, three-dimensional, drawing. Maybe this qualifies that thing to be called a scalpel, now?
He opens for me in a luscious wet thick gout of almost-violet.
Maybe I'm imagining the climb in that slaughterhouse smell.
The knife falls out of my hand, makes no noise on the carpet, and my hands come down on either side of him and my tongue is already out and I'm the motherfucking demon, now, oh how right my shoulders are, my hands, my mind.
He's miles and miles below me, somewhere predators don't want to understand, saying what did you do, oh my fucking god, what did you fucking just do
I can't say anything anymore, but I think someplace And now you're really, really bleeding and it makes me smile but my teeth can't manage that without my lips peeled back.
I'm not touching him, except for my hair. It's getting clotted into stiff little jags. My dick is too hard to hang down. This is the hieroglyph that comes after the knifeline intersects the boyline. I'm e a rainbow, like an arc of dangerous electricity, tonguepointed and toescurled and s h a k i n g. Clear thread of saliva. I've wanted to do this all, my, life.
I claw the shower curtain and it lifts him like a sling and it slams his wound into my lips, my chin, and finally mine you motherfucking bitch, tongue, inside him. Now scream.
Lucifer fucking this, this, is what rimming makes me want.
My brain is empty of everything but red and my mouth is empty of everything but red and I can feel this hurting him feel this hurting him feel the nerves sending quivering interrupted signals into this place where my tongue is inside him, feel the muscles fluttering like dreaming eyes under eyelids, trying to close push pull alter the fact of my tongue. We thud squishy back into the bed and he's howling, that noise can only be called, howling, and I slap my hands into his bird-bone-chest and spread the wound with my hands pointed into a diamond around it, tongue in the center. It probably looks violent, but it feels passionate.
Are you scared yet, my Velvet Goldmine boy? Does that still feel like a razor to you?
I close my lips around this, keyhole, suction at him and swallow and garglegrowl through blood and I might have come against his thigh, the bed, I don't know. It's not about my dick anymore. This appetite is not chasing that kind of orgasm. It's chasing the one I have from cerebral cortex to brainstem when I talon my hands off and the wound wet-noise petals as closed as it can.
I reach up and tear off his blindfold.
The look on his face and the churchbell screams make me want to be, inside him, and I hook at his wound and my fingers slidescratch gouge out again and I bite one of them by mistake. Everything is the same squirming red. I hook them in again and push, push, push, feeling my nails gristle through that last stubborn shred holding him closed, sink in all it once up to my palm into slippery hot space, into a world where a thousand things as soft as tongues wind around my fingers.
I'm pinning him under me, my knees tight around his ribs. He's sobbing words that make no sense, the struggle stirring my fingers inside him. Sometimes his legs come up in bicycling spasms, uselessly thudding his thighs into my ass. I pull, feeling the start of more tearing, feeling my tongue follow my fingernails. I hold him open almost-round and the fury fades out of it, all at once, evening out into something blissful like kissing.
He's gone limp; panting for breath with a mangled noise at the end of each exhale, rise and fall of his ribcage rocking against my face. I look up and he's looking down at me; something about the expression in his eyes makes me realize he thinks I, hate him, I take one hand away from him, liquid sex noise, and cup his face. It makes him scrunch his eyes closed, tight-tight, like a little kid afraid of the dark.
"You don't have to," he says, mouthing this at me like a secret. "You can...stop..."
"But I don't want to stop."
"...but I want you to stop...." This is climbing, almost a wail, and he sounds so, frustrated.....I'm helplessly reminded of a little kid again, getting to the point of stomping a foot. I stroke his face, and I can feel that I look, gentle, and I turn my hand inside him, pushing at things I can't visualize. Gray's fucking Anatomy never told me about this heat, about this lubricated sliding maze of things that feel triple-bagged in silk and suede. I think I'm below his diaphragm. I push down and it makes him do this percolating ugly scream, knees thudding into my back again, and it makes him vomit a little. Stomach? My hand wanders to his mouth, smears away the clear fluid slicking his jaw, leaves red in its wake. I try to push up, wanting under his breastbone, wanting to feel the heartbeat I can sense in all this warm welcoming flesh to thud into my fingers, but this silksuede confounds me. Architecture-edges of bone under my hand, muffled in tissue I scratch at. I pull at him, shake him by this angle of ribcage and sternum, fingers wandering into his mouth to compare the textures. His teeth are so much more, immediate, than his ribcage. I lean up and put my tongue in his mouth, fingers stirring him again, holding his jaw to warn him not to bite me. I want that bonefriction under my nails and I scratch at all this layering between me and his breastbone and he squalls and thrashes, and I realize I'm mangling him and that isn't what I intend at all.
One last long, deep lick, and a kiss against this new vertical mouth, and my fingers slide out. I get off him, and lurch towards the door, red hands out in front of me, wandering to my own mouth, wandering along the walls to leave little Pollack marks so I can find my way back.
I scare myself in the bathroom mirror so badly I backpedal out until my ass hits the closet door across the hall. Heart pounding like a racehorse.
Fuck. Wow.
I cautiously try this shit again, bare my teeth at my reflection. Even my fucking teeth are red. I swallow, tasting keys, well water.
Blood.
I try really really hard and I manage to have one flicker of nausea, the only one all night. It's thin and insincere and soon over. I open the medicine cabinet thinking that one flicker was the last dying spasm of human inside me. It's so goth and so wryly funny and such a staggeringly huge, relief to have it gone.
I pluck the empty shopping-bag liner out of the trashcan, fill it with gauze, peroxide, alcohol, styptic pencil (that one makes me laugh) tape, butterfly bandages. Tylenol, ha. Three flavors of antibiotics I quit taking once I felt better. A roll of toilet paper. A handful of hand towels. I scrub the fuck out of the trashcan and fill it with warm soapy water.
Back down the hall with this load of supplies. He has his knees drawn up, as curled up as he can be with his arms tied out. That's a hieroglyph, too. It's too dark in here. I stumble my way to my bedside table and unload the gear. Things hit the floor. I click on the lamp out of reflex. Okay, I admit it, I have a normal bulb there too. Hey, it's for reading. Something about this warm, bright, going-to-bed domestic light is so....real...suddenly...it's a pretty boy, lying there, one of Us with wounds and wounds and wounds. He looks scared and tired and hurt. His eyeliner is perfect. Ruined. I need to remember to do that next time. His eyelashes are clumped together, wet. Still crying.
There is so much blood.
I don't even bother to look for the Tylenol. I go for the stashbox and come back with it and a clear, cold, unadulterated bottle of water. I open it in front of him so he'll know it's, new. His eyes flicker open in delayed reaction to that seal-cracking thirsty sound and his eyes follow the bottle. Tongue finds lips; finds the sticky I've left there.
"Can't..."
"You can. I didn't puncture anything vital." Yet. Oh, honey, I should motherfucking know.
Flash: virginity after virginity lying deeper and deeper inside him, waiting for me to unclose them. Layers like veils to rend. More naked than naked, over and over.
He lets me hold up his head and he drinks the measured sips I give him, cheek against my knee, without struggle, eyes rolling closed in tired gratitude. He takes the pills I put in his mouth, and he seems to take a minute to arrange them but he swallows them in twos without question: a pair of Percocet and two-of-three antibiotics. The crying stops. It starts again, much later, after I've been cleaning his wounds a long, long time.
I untie him. Turn off the lamp. He's limp and he doesn't want to move his arms. I find and rub the places I know being tied like that must hurt until he lets me coax his arms down into the fetal curl he wants to do. Then I spoon him. This scares him, but he's cold and also I think, lonely, and when I show no signs of imminent evil and pull the pile of blankets over us shower curtain and all. I find that sort of funny, now, that I thought I would care about the state of the bed and tangle our feet together and hold him in the dark. After a very long time he, relaxes, or at least his breathing gets longer and slower and softer, and he's...easier, under my hands. No more kinetic energy.
Maybe he's dying. I sort of hug at him to see and he mrrs at me, a lovers-in-bed noise. Sleeping. It makes me smile.
I don't really sleep. All right, maybe an hour or two. Then I'm up and after the meth, trying to rifle quietly through the party debris in search of my stashbox, so as not to wake him up. He looks like an angel and I am thinking something about what it would be like to catch an one and fuck it to death.
Today we find out, children.
First, though, I have to go shopping.
First, though, wow, I have to shower.
Shower. I find and put on my horrible ugly dumbass prescription glasses, which make me look like any sort of harmless...computer, geek, and a dark brown polo shirt and blue jeans and a ball cap. There. It looks asinine, which means I'll probably blend perfectly.
Meth in the bathroom. Meth in the car. A dizzying mess of a WalMart in which I buy cinnamon and salt and waterproof mascara and gardening shears and cigarettes and too much red wine. That should confuse them. Then I go back inside and buy upholstery needles, the curved ones, so good, and black silk thread and several bolts of black linen and one of black velvet and several rolls of black satin ribbon as wide the clerk could find. I pay at a different register than the first time, and leave by the garage entrance. Both receipts go; one in their parking lot as confetti and one wherever the bits landed on the freeway.
Across town. Took me an hour to navigate to this place, fucking Jacksonville. Before I left I went through Lady Stardust's wallet, and discovered he seemed to have been carrying all or most of what they were probably paid to play there. I feel semi-guilty but it's sort of like...medical, expenses. Or funeral expenses.
I put on a black trench coat that lives in Shelley for this reason and Deathstyle-LeClaire sort of black sunglasses.
Take off the hat. Brush my hair, checking obsessively for blood I missed. Apply eyeliner and powder, because I look like absolute shit. Deep wish for coffee.
New Age sort of headshoppy store. Four things that cost a fuck of a lot but are so fucking perfect they're worth it. Almond oil, tiny expensive bottles of patchouli and myrrh and frankincense and sandalwood and cedar and camphor and ambergris. Incense. A sticker that says MEAT IS MURDER that has nothing to do with Lady Stardust but it was funny and I wanted it. A silver ankh pendant. A copy of The Book of the Dead in very prettily bound and illustrated hardcover.
Next. Hardware store, six huge-ass bags of Wet-Rid, which is not the right thing at all but will have to do. On the way out I steal several wooden skids from behind the building. Shel is so the perfect car. Throw the bastards into the back and drive like mad.
Home again, home again. Meth. Dragging the little boombox out to the shed. Meth. Power tools. Meth. No, you perverts, Lady Stardust is sleeping, and apparently my noise doesn't wake him. I checked. His pulse is strong and his breathing seems, normal. I tied his hands again and I considered tape over his mouth, but in the end it's too risky. He could choke and I might not hear him.
Spray paint. Internet. Meth. Fighting with the printer for three hours. Sprinting back to the shed with the printouts and meth and a Diet Coke and my cigarettes and an ash tray and paintbrushes and more paint all clutched together in my arms with my shirt like an apron around them. Still in the eyeliner. Ha.
When I am finished, it's almost perfect.
Sunglasses. Dumbass hat. No trenchcoat. Flea market; and a porcelain mask, the kind that come with the Mardi Gras paint on them. Black feathers. More incense. Scarabs.
Home again, damn it. He's awake. I bring him chicken broth and orange juice. He manages to drink both without any serious drama. He says thank you. He looks like he feels hung over. I bring him the bowl. Hold it for him. Give it to him once he proves himself able and retrieve the mask. I take off all the feathers and sequins and sand it and paint it flat white. Acrylic paint is your friend. I drape the shower curtain behind it and squint at his face. More contouring.
I'm no artist, but I manage pretty well. He watches me, and I untie his arms, and he manages to sit up a little and peer over the edge of the bed to watch me painting like a madman. He's, modeling, for me, I think. When I'm finished he smiles like it flatters him and tells me it's beautiful. I give him Percocet, and three Xanax and antibiotics, and push him over on his back and watch until he's almost out again. Clean his wound. Lick my fingers.
More shopping. The kind you do from your telephone. More meth and an insane afternoon of making and cleaning and arranging and improvising and painting and squinting and printing-out and sharpening. I'm taking careful notes of what I'm doing so I can change what doesn't work. They're in my head. I'm not leaving anything to explain the real tricks behind the show. Never teach a student everything you know.[br /]
Then, Percocet and a Xanax for me, and Percocet and several lines of X for Lady Stardust, which he snorts either because he's afraid of me or because he's had so much Percocet already. He periodically thanks me as I hand him drugs. I carry him out to the couch and we watch Troll and then Exorcist III for Jeff.[br /]
Jeff, honey, those bitches who bitch that this one is all talk and no scare aren't smart enough to understand the talk.[br /]
Troll is......there's the bit where Malcolm says maybe it wasn't because you were sick, maybe it was because you were Magick.....that I had to, leave, during. But other than that it was okay. He murmured something in a lungful of pot smoke through the end credits about loving the music. Maestro boy. It makes me want to brush his hair, and when I wander off and wander back with a brush he lets me. I'm very, very gentle.
Rum and coke. Half a Soma. That makes up a lot of lines and I patiently hold the Deathstyle cd for him while he's on the couch on a pyramid of pillows and a Pharaoh sweep of soft royalblue flannel with the white square of bandage on his chest like a blank cartouche. I take pity and do the last two for him. Let him snort water off my fingertips, and find it inexplicably unbearably sexy.
I need to be slower. I don't want to waste it. I'm going to miss this one. He has such nice manners. I've blown into the rent, at this point, because I really want to make this perfect. Not just to get better at, this, but because he deserves it. I hope he.....likes it, or something.
I split a single hit of the LSD with him. Three more are triple-bagged on the bedside table. I spoon him in the dark and when I feel my teeth start to grow I wrap my arms around him and the crackle of his bandage, right there in the concave of his ribcage. This little square of, censored, and the hole I know is underneath it makes me understand why straight boys like, lingerie. I nudge at the tape thinking of hands sliding up thighs and I pull until I can slide just one finger underneath, and a fence of butterfly strips stops me, and I think garters and chew a laugh into his shoulder.
He laughs, too, I swear he does, even though it doesn't make any noise. I feel it in my jaw.
I tease with my fingernails at the oblong between two of these bow-tie shaped little vinyls, and I feel him do it again, that, laugh.
I threaten more than I deliver for a long time, and we're in the dark with the blankets over even our heads, and it's a little like a slumber, party. I play that game much, much too long, and I'm crying a little when I disengage and go into the bathroom to get the needles. Thread. Alcohol. A second trip for scissors.
Meth. Fuck being, slower.
I turn him over on his stomach. Tie his hands and his feet and his waist. He's only panting at first but by the time I get through making sure of how very little slack he's supposed to have it's really more like sobbing. "Can you breathe?"
It confuses him. He nods, hesitantly, like this might be a trap. I pull his hips up and push a pillow underneath. Better. I check to make sure he's not suffocating and move his hair. It's dried so soft, still Bowie and pointy and chewable but younger.....wide swimmingpool eyes looking up at me with such, hopefulness.
Meth.
I choose a smaller blade. Alcohol the fuck out of it, flame the blade mostly to watch him watch me do that. Wipe him down from the nape of his neck to his heels. The drugs would push him into moaning reverie and then he'd remember what this chemical-cool sort of petting, meant, and whimper awhile until the long long strokes and the ceiling fan and the LSD rocked him back into serenity again. Pretty boy.
Then I pick up the blade.
I can see enough of my lines from before to continue them around in a more or less symmetrical pattern. Some places like the base of his spine I improvise, with mirrored shapes that could mean anything. I swear for at least half of this he was moving towards the blade and not away from it, and after I got myself arranged kneeling between his legs and reached under him to stroke his cock this got a lot more fucking pronounced. I drew little artistically-complicated brackets around each of his vertebrae starting at his neck and just above his waist he started to come, and it was apparently the sort of orgasm that happens twice in five years if you're lucky, the right drug, the right boy, the kind where you can't make any noise, only, shake.
I linger, cutting, holding the knife really more like a pencil again. You can get up to so much more detail when they are so paralyzed to begin with. Make a note of that. If you're into artistry. And I roll my hand in piston-thudding rhythm so fast I'm afraid to imagine how fast or I'll lose it, and the knife is between us and I can't see it and he buries his face against my shoulder and chews me, biting hard enough to really, really hurt.
It broke my heart a little when that bruise was gone.
I come against his thigh. I let go of the knife at some point and Hell knows where it is in the sticky lack of space between us. He kisses my arm where he's bitten me. I kiss the top of his head because it's all that I can reach.
After all the cuts are laid, I thread a needle, and start to sew.
It takes me till early on Day Three to finish sewing him. Partially because as I went along I began to see places that needed more cuts. Ribcage. Breastbone. Throat. I switch from forceps that don't fucking work to needlenose pliers that do, pulling up each quarter-inch of skin, laying careful stitches through the cut in black silk thread. Sometimes the frictiony pull-through makes him scream harder than the initial double-puncture.
I have to stop twice to fuck him. The heartfelt tears are much too much. I can't sew when my dick is so hard I can't think.
Then I clean him, and mix oils in a silver dish and anoint him from scalp to sole, wounds and all. I rub ocher-red cinnamon into the little stitched-closed lines, and I bind him in strips of black bandage I cut, sealing the ends with sewing and wax because I have no fucking clue what the Egyptians used. I do his fingers and his toes and his hands and feet and arms and legs up to the knee, and his neck.
I need the rest of him, still open.
At exactly four pm tomorrow it will be midnight in Egypt.
I gave him most of the rest of the acid at about one-thirty. I eat a hit and a half myself, and put I forget how many in his mouth. I forget how many I bought. I give him glass after glass of red wine, while I lazy half-peel off his test bandages, and toy with licking his wounds and poking cocaine into them with a fingernail. I haul him back to the couch and leave him to the LSD gods for a few minutes and find some Coil that works with the mood and light dozens of candles, carrying them into the bedroom from all over the house. I add another few pieces to the stack of wood holding up the upper end of the headboard. It just wasn't enough tilt last time, and this time there's going to be a lot more fluid.
Then I carry Lady Stardust back to bed.
He's booted in Osiris-black bandages up to his thighs; gloved in them up to his shoulders, collared in them from chin to Adam's apple. I tie him on his back, arms out but legs together, black rope at wrists and ankles, shoulders and knees and thighs.
I need him to be very, very still.
This is almost the end and it has to be perfect.
I brush his teeth for him. It makes him cry again. I repaint his makeup last. He's conscious but not really, responsive, and I have to hold his face in certain postures with my fingertips. Too much eyeshadow, pointed black lipstick, both waterproof, with the line from the center of his bottom lip down in a straight line to the bandages.
Everything is closed, covered, all but that one beautiful wound right where the soft place starts below the sternum. That one is held by butterfly tapes under scrupulously clean gauze that's the only white thing in the room.
I've given him as many painkillers as I dare. I'm very fucking careful with my dosage. Do not try at home unless you are willing to lose your subject. I don't think he knows where he is, really. I'm hoping the LSD makes this into something transcendental for him and not....hmm.....unalleviated, nightmare-ish. Something beautiful. He deserves that.
I've laid out blades on black velvet. Every X-acto in the house. Gardening shears. Nail scissors. The thread and the needle. Everything less aesthetically pleasing than that that I need is out of sight under the bed. I kiss him for a long time, and it soothes him, lures him into the dream until he's sort of crooning under his breath, limp with chemical bliss. I straddle his hips for the last time and coax up an edge of the butterfly tape and p e e l.
It's like drawing a curtain aside.
I've set a blade back in this cut a dozen times over the last day and a half. It made me think of dryhumping someone every fucking time. Now it makes me think of a, tongue, or a paintbrush again, and I draw him open, open, open. I deepen it twice, feeling along with a fingertip until that spreading sense of falling in knuckle-deep runs in a wide red seam from midchest to almost his waist.
Here I'm stuck for a second. For direction, ha, not literally. I think the Egyptians just kind of wandered to one side so I choose left and cut in a careful crescent around his navel, and then down again through flesh that drags differently at the knife, until the edge of where he's only just starting to have the faintest pubic-hair stubble.
The blood spreads in gravity wings, in ribcage hollows and in lengthening points on the shower curtain. He's doing some set of spasms and he throws his chest up when I lift the blade, very Exorcist. I'm making more noise than he is. The new curve draws bloodlines up to branch at his collar, settle in the hollow of his throat. Now it's Fun Boy I'm thinking of. Only this crow has two heads. For a second I know what this hieroglyph means but then I lose it in the smell. I lean forward without thinking, fingers spreading in, and everything is a wet mess but I don't feel any new openings, only that soft space kissing at my hands. I put my tongue in at the bottom and l i c k and the length of that stroke reduces me to helpless groaning sorts of snarls.
If there's a Zen, this space is it. This is the....ego loss, all the psychedelic gurus talk about. There's no me, anymore, only a set of overwhelmingly delicious stimuli; there's no real and no event and nothing that thought could really, quantify. There is no past, no present, no future to link or correlate. The only thing that exists is the space where we're intersecting. This is the only thing there has ever been.
I love him; oh I do. I think I'd have to love somebody at least a little to do, this.
Did I really think it was better when I didn't? Did I think I'd be able to help it?
He's screaming. He seems very far away. I suppose the acid has taken us each away from the world, and in different directions. He doesn't sound, entirely, uh, against this, though I'd be hard-pressed to tell you just what in the fuck makes me think that. He's not able to struggle very well or do anything very loudly, but I can feel this try at it...sloshing him, around my fingers. And I'm tired of careful and I want him open and I start low, and stir the blade back into the wound alongside my hand, find the sliding surface that blocks me and draw a long shallow line.
There's that sense of a...pressure-change, that I remember from the first real cut, and here's the heat I'd read about and I don't expect it to be quite so fucking, tangible. It's like having someone exhale against you. Heater-warm. The LSD has the courtesy to give me a lot of reverb on it and I twitch forgetting the knife, up to my palms in bliss, in a new place that makes me think of those strange fleshy plants in deep-sea films. Books don't do it justice, even the ones with the full color plates. And I think you kids expect a nice Mr. Body sort of a, stack. Pieces that click neatly into one another like a spatial puzzle. So did I. I thought this would be on top of that and so forth, but it's all...meat. Like petting a flock of...birds...
I press, and my hand slides in and I have a flickerthought of a devouring carnivorous plant and it's more delicious than horrifying. We'll see who eats who. I find something that I have to sort of burrow with a fingertip to make out that makes me think of...suspension bridges.....cables.....and he thuds against the restraints suddenly and I have telepathy and I feel him being stunned that his plan to, grab my wrist, hasn't worked.
Will never work again.
If I could push my hand in farther I could hook my fingers behind, this....then I realize that he can feel me doing this and I swarm up beside him to watch his eyes while I do it, trailing my fingers up through him like he's the ocean.
I can feel him starting to fail already...nothing I could pinpoint, just the sense of a light, dimming. Brownouts here and there in the lines. He's quite aware of me, though his eyes have a fractured kind of revelatory gleam in them that makes me wonder how he sees me. How he sees any of this. Whether he thinks he'll wake up. Where he'll wake up.
I want to open his ribcage, but I don't want him ruined, to that degree. I try to spread him with my hands because I don't want to cut flaps and I leave blood on the dresser and the carpet leaning over to retrieve things. Leather thongs, laces I sacrificed from dress shoes, gripping panic that I'm doing this wrong and I can't get a do-over if I fuck it up.
Cupping his stomach, teasing out the limits of this shape. It's amazingly smooth in my hands, and struggles by itself, still processing alcohol, ignorant of the fact that it's become obsolete. The esophagus at the top feels a lot like vacuum-cleaner cord wrapped in velvet, sort of ribbed and resistant. I can't get to all of it, just an inch or three, and then I hit the diaphragm, this stubborn elastic-vinyl kind of wall that I know is what's left of what lets Lady Stardust breathe. I wrap my fingers around it; pull down in an absurdly handjob-like motion, hitting these tight circles in moist pothole thumps, until I a soft place where the flesh of him begins to spread into his actual stomach. This is where I must tie him off. Inevitable pictures in my head of umbilical cords plague me.
A push and a pull, the messy working of leather cord around it, a tie that leaves little wings of droplets zinging off the string. The pulling makes him scream, shifting everything around my hands in frantic synch, and I realize again and again that I am wrist-deep in the machinery of this boy.
I tie a thong between the esophagus and the stomach, and after he stops coughing and gagging and shaking. I took my hands out of his wound and, held him, after, and you can fucking believe me or not....I reach back in and I push my fingers up his ass until I can feel them, inside him, masked by layers of that veil-tissue. Some of the books I've read insist that if something is swallowed it's not "really" inside the body at all........it's inside the self-contained alimentary column and that's all.
I don't agree, and I don't like the degree of separation that implies. If you swallowed it into realms that could never see the sunlight, it's inside you, so fuck you.
I tie the thong till I feel it close around my fingers, and draw them out and tug it down and tie it as close to the outside of his body as I can manage.
Then the scissors, and the cutting.
It doesn't take long.
I think he realizes what I'm cutting. That's why he makes such noise, all during, and for a long time after. He's looking right at me. This is the last eye contact we have. He watches me lift his insides out, and closes his eyes.
Double handful, though it isn't heavy and it feels like a water balloon, which I'm not fond of. Into a waiting jar. Then there's an endless sliding interlude of moist noise and wet impact and I keep thinking of a magician pulling knotted scarves out of a sleeve, of trying to straighten tangled yarn. He screams when I find the sources of this inside him, where things connect that I have to tie off with black thread and take scissors to. I've given up thinking of any diagrams; I no longer have names in my head for the places I'm touching.
His liver is heavy. It's fingernail-polish shiny. It's the color of oxblood boots.
He's becoming more and more hollow.
I forget which jar-lid goes with which organs and I have to look it up. Blood on my keyboard, mouse, cigarettes. I'm going to have to clean every inch of this house when I'm finished cleaning this boy. The same thing happens with any art project I'm in the middle of; all kinds of unforeseen obstacles that lead to improvisation...and messes...
I find varying opinions on what goes where. I even find a varying opinion on what goes at all, except that nobody wavers in their certainty the heart stays where it is. Exactly. I'm trying to remember if I found anything that looked like a gall bladder. I know I'm supposed to take out the brain, but I'm not interested. And I don't want to risk that beautiful face. I give up. Osiris will understand.
I fill the jars to the top with desiccant; now they're pristine and heavy without any liquid-slosh. Seal the lids on with wax.
Sit on the couch and burn incense and smoke. Everything I put near my face tastes of slaughterhouse and clove. My mouth is kiss bruised. I don't think anyone ever kissed me long enough to bruise my lips. I cry a little because he's gone, because I'm scared, because I can feel and hear and smell and taste how quiet the house is, and because I'm why.
Lady Stardust is lying on my bed, with the shower curtain under him, shiny black with shinier redblack here and there. His wounds are bloodless and smooth, and his face is gorgeous, peaceful. He's powder-white. He smells like Egypt.
I kiss him with my bruised mouth, stroke his Osiris-folded arms. I try to exhale into him, to share the Lucifer kiss, but it's like the machinery inside him is locked still, and I can't exhale hard enough to fill his lungs. I hope it blesses him anyway.
I start at his toes, wrapping him into the last hieroglyph. I remember the tucked-in baubles, and I give him a pewter pentagram, a polished piece of lapis lazuli, an onyx arrowhead, a Deathstyle ticket stub, a full neatly-rolled joint, here and there wound in his bandages. The police will have seizures trying to decode this. Morons.
I'm no priest, but I gathered what they gave were tiny little....holy...objects. So that was what I gave. I hope he liked them; I liked him. He was lovely, and yes, I do fucking miss him. Believe what you like. Those who matter will know the truth.
At the last minute I remember The Book of the Dead. I take off the ugly paper dust jacket; underneath it is perfect, black cloth with silver stamping. I put it under his folded hands. That'll have to do. I can't paint well enough to put it all over the coffin, and I don't have the time.
The deathmask is last; I tie it on with a loop of black ribbon and when I'm finished I see what I've made as I suppose none of you will ever see it. The last hieroglyph before that line around it, to end-name, hold the sigils trapped.
El Camino. One Lady Stardust/Osiris sculpture, wood, ceramic, paint, linen, inhumanly lovely remains. One wooden box with four jars nestled inside it wound in last-minute red scrap velvet. They were clattering when I carried them.
One stop for bolt cutters. One stop somewhere else for a padlock. Driving north and west in no particular direction. The Sisters of Mercy's Vision Thing is unlistenable for me now because I discovered that was the only tape I had in the car. Yeah, you're right, that IS the one with the Egyptian-eye cover. Isn't it romantic.
After one fill-up and about twelve times through the tape I drove into the moment I was looking for; the windows down and the cool damp night-ocean-sacred sense that is so, necessary, sometimes. Skein after skein of ribbondark road and lightless houses and wide sweep of sky. I think I might be in Georgia. Whatever. I know where to turn without knowing how I know and I'm going a reasonable thirty-five or so in this tiny Southern town and I turn off the headlights long before I stop at the gate. I leave her running. I get out and cut the padlock off and push them open and drive in and get out and push them closed again, apply the new padlock with the key still neatly looped through it. It's not for, security, exactly-it's for politeness.
Graves stretch out in sedate aisles along us, and it's quiet and solemn and makes me think of church-pews and the uncanny rows of perfectly-straight planted trees you pass along highways. Shelley feels, awed. I roll her at an almost-idling purr up to the first stone building. I have to three-point turn her and it's more scary than I expect because I'm tired and even though I know I'm nowhere near any graves I'm terrified I'll hit somebody's tombstone. This is their place and not mine; I'm here on business, and it's important I don't.....disturb the peace.
This is a holy place. That's why I'm putting him here.
Getting him out is not difficult; he's heavy, and he thumps, but I've backed all the fucking way up to the doorway-there's no door, just an arch. Inside the mauseoleum it's a double wall neatly laid with plaques, and a wide open space at the end. That's where he goes. I push him there and find that dear Lord, I do have a tiny brush and dustpan in my car that I have never ever used. I tidy up our traces until it looks like he materialized there. Good. Put the small box on top of the large one. They're opaque black with only the smallest of sigils running in exhausted last-minute silver in a thin thin border. Stick the few stubs of candle I remembered here and there, and light them. Shove incense into the crack between box and lid and light stick after stick till it smells like it's supposed to, like a, temple.
It'll have to do.
Sometimes I wish I had a picture and sometimes I'm glad the only pictures of it are in my head. Did I tell you that already?
I hope the candles burn long enough to let him have light until sunrise.
I drive and drive and I'm lost as fuck, and I spend thirty of the fifty-five dollars I have on an awful hotel room and five of the fifteen remaining of that on a bottle of horrible red wine. I lie in bed and stare at the television with the sound too far down to hear it. Cry. It's so fucking quiet in here. There's blood under my fingernails I missed. I keep cleaning them with my teeth and no matter how long I do it I can still taste him.
I'm still trying to grasp that he's gone. It seems like a play were in or sex that we had that was mindnumbingly elementally perfect; I keep turning to say to him "I was really fucking happy about how the mask came out; and your nail polish, did you-" And of course, the answer is no. He didn't. Or if he did, he sure as fuck can't get stoned with me and run his mouth about it now. Because he's gone.
I fall asleep, TV painting the room blue.
The police find him. There are a few confused blurbs. They lie about bits of it and seem to think I got some of it from some comic book. I have no idea what they're talking about. Nobody arrests London After Midnight and Ressler is not consulted.
Nobody looks at me twice.
_____
This is a piece of the novel Psychomotor Agitation.
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