Sacrament

  “Really?” Drew sounded doubtful.

  “I haven’t had sex with anyone in eight or nine months.”

  “Jeez,” Drew said, plainly relieved. “Well we can just take it real slowly.”

  They were at the front door. “That’s good,” Will said, letting them in, “slowly’s good.”

  In the old days sex with Drew had been quite a show: a lot of posing and boasting and wrestling around. Tonight it was mellow. Nothing acrobatic, nothing risky. Little in fact, beyond the simple pleasure of lying naked together in Will’s big bed with the pallid light from the street washing over their bodies, holding and being held. The greed for sensuality Will would once have felt in this situation, the need to exhaustively explore every sensation, seemed very remote. Yes, it was still there; another night, perhaps, another body—one he didn’t remember in its finest hour—and perhaps he’d be just as possessed as he’d been in the past. But for tonight, gentle pleasures and modest satisfactions.

  There was just one moment, as they were undressing, and Drew first saw the scars on Will’s body, when the liaison threatened to become something a little headier.

  “Oh my, oh my,” Drew said, his voice breathy with admiration. “Can I touch them?”

  “If you really want to.”

  Drew did so, not with his fingers but with his lips, tracing the shiny path the bear’s claws had left on Will’s chest and belly.

  He went down on his knees in the process and, pressing his face against Will’s lower abdomen, said, “I could stay down here all night.” He’d slipped his hands behind his back; plainly he was quite ready to have them tied there if it took Will’s fancy. Will ran his fingers through the man’s hair, half-tempted to play the game. Bind him up, have him kissing scars and calling him sir.

  But he decided against it.

  “Another night,” he said, and puffing Drew up and into his arms, escorted him to bed.

  iii

  He woke to the sound of rain, pattering on the skylight overhead.

  It was still dark. He glanced at his watch—it was four-fifteen—then over at Drew, who was lying on his back, snoring slightly.

  Will wasn’t sure what had woken him, but now that he was conscious he decided to get up and empty his bladder. But as he eased out of bed he caught, or thought he caught, a motion in the shadows across the room. He froze. Had somebody broken into the house? Was that what had woken him? He studied the darkness, looking and listening for further signs of an intruder, but now there was nothing. The shadows were empty. He looked back at his bedmate. Drew was wearing a tiny smile in his sleep and was rubbing his bare belly gently, back and forth. Will watched him for a moment, curiously enraptured. Of all the unlikely people to have broken his sexual fast with, he thought, Drew the muscle-boy, softened by time.

  The rain got suddenly heavier, beating a tattoo on the roof.

  It stirred him to get up and go to the bathroom, a route he could have covered in his sleep. Out through the bedroom door, then first left onto the cold tile; three paces forward, turn to the right, and he could piss in certain knowledge his aim was true. He drained his bladder contentedly, then headed back to the bedroom, thinking as he went how good it would feel to slip his arms around Drew.

  Then, two paces from the door, he again glimpsed a motion from the corner of his eye. This time he was quick enough to catch sight of the intruder’s shadow, as the man made his escape down the stairs.

  “Hey,” he said, and followed, thinking as he did so that there was something suspiciously playful about what was happening. For some reason he didn’t feel in the least threatened by the presence of this trespasser; it was as though he knew already there was no harm here. As he reached the bottom of the stairs and pursued the shadow back down the hall toward the file room he realized why: He was dreaming. And what more certain proof of that than the sight awaiting him when he entered the room?

  There, casually leaning on the window sill twenty feet from him and silhouetted against the raining glass, was Lord Fox.

  “You’re naked,” the creature remarked.

  “So are you,” Will observed.

  “It’s different for animals. We’re more comfortable in our skins.” He cocked his head. “The scars suit you.”

  “So I’ve been told.”

  “By the fellow in your bed?”

  “Yep.”

  “You can’t have him hanging around, you realize that? Not the way things are going. You’ll have to get rid of him.”

  “This is a ridiculous conversation,” Will said, turning to go.

  “I’m heading back to bed.” He was already there, of course, and asleep, but even in dream form he didn’t want to linger down here chatting with the fox. The animal belonged to another part of his psyche, a part he’d begun to put at a healthier distance tonight, with Drew’s compliance.

  “Wait a moment,” said the fox. “Just take a look at this.” There was a crisp enthusiasm in the animal’s words that made Will glance back. There was more light in the room than there’d been moments before, its source not shed from streetlights outside, but from the photographs, his poor consumptives, which were still scattered on the floor where he’d tossed them.

  Leaving his place at the window Lord Fox stepped between the pictures, coming into the middle of the room. By the strange luminescence the photographs were giving off, Will could see a voluptuous smile upon the animal’s face.

  “These are worth a moment’s study, don’t you think?” the fox said.

  Will looked. The light that emanated from the photographs was uncertain and for good reason. The bright, blurred forms in the pictures were moving: fluttering, flickering, as though they were being consumed by a slow fire. And in their throes, Will recognized them. A skinned lion, hanging from a tree. A pitiful tent of elephant hide, hanging in rotted scraps over one of the poles of its bones. A tribe of lunatic baboons beating each other’s children to death with rocks. Pictures of the corrupted world, no longer fixed and remote, but thrashing and twitching and blazing out into his room.

  “Don’t you wish they looked like this when people saw them?” the fox said. “Wouldn’t it change the world if they could see the horror this way?”

  Will glanced up at the fox. “No,” he said, “it wouldn’t change a thing.”

  “Even this,” the animal said staring down at a picture that lay between them. It was darker than the others, and at first he couldn’t make out the subject. “What is it?”

  “You tell me,” the fox said.

  Will went down on his haunches and looked at the picture more closely. There was motion in this one too: a deluge of flickering light falling on a form sitting at the center of the picture.

  “Patrick?” he murmured.

  “Could be,” the fox replied. It was Patrick for sure. He was slumped in his chair beside his window, except that somehow the roof had been stripped off his house and the rain was pouring in, running down over his head and body, glistening on his forehead and his nose and his lips, which were drawn back a little, so that his teeth showed. He was dead, Will knew. Dead in the rain. And the more the deluge beat on him the more his flesh bruised and swelled. Will wanted to look away. This wasn’t an ape, this wasn’t a lion, it was Patrick, his beloved Patrick. But he’d trained his eyes too well. They kept looking, like the good witnesses they were, while Patrick’s face smeared, and all trace of who or even what he’d been was steadily erased beneath the assault of the rain.

  “Oh God,” Will murmured.

  “He feels nothing, if that’s any comfort,” the fox said.

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “So look away.”

  “I can’t. It’s in my head now.” He advanced on the animal, suddenly enraged. “What the fuck have I done to deserve this?”

  “That’s the mother of all questions, isn’t it?” he said, unperturbed by Will’s rage.

  “And?”

  The animal shrugged. “God wants you to see. Do
n’t ask me why. That’s between you and God. I’m just the go-between.” Flummoxed by this, Will glanced back down at the picture of Patrick. The body had disappeared, dissolved in the rain.

  “Sometimes it’s too much for people,” the fox went on, in its matter-of-fact fashion. “God says: Take a look at this, and people just lose their sanity. I hope it doesn’t happen to you, but there are no guarantees.”

  “I don’t want to lose him,” Will murmured.

  “I can’t help you there,” the animal replied. “I’m just the messenger.”

  “Well you tell God from me—” Will started to say.

  “Will?”

  There was another voice behind him. He glanced over his shoulder, and there was Drew standing in the doorway, with a sheet wrapped around his middle.

  “Who are you talking to?” he said.

  Will looked back into the room, and for a moment—though he was now awake—he thought he glimpsed the animal’s silhouette against the glass. Then the vision was gone, and he was standing naked in the cold, with Drew coming to drape the sheet over his shoulders.

  “You’re clammy,” Drew said.

  He was, running with a sickly sweat. Drew put his arms around Will’s chest, locking his hands against his breastbone and laying his head against Will’s neck. “Do you often go walk-about in your sleep?”

  “Once in a while,” Will replied, staring at the littered floor, still half-thinking he might catch a glittering light in one of the pictures. But there was nothing.

  “Shall we go back to bed then?” Drew said.

  “No, actually I’d prefer to stay up for a while,” Will said.

  He’d had enough dreams for one night. “You go back up. I’m going to make myself some tea.”

  “I can stay with you, if you want.”

  “I’m okay,” Will told him. “I’ll be up in a while.” Drew bequeathed the sheet to Will and headed on upstairs, leaving Will to go brew himself a pot of Earl Grey. He didn’t particularly want to revisit the images that had just come to find him, but as he sat sipping his tea he couldn’t help but picture the uncanny life his littered photographs had taken on as he dreamed them. It was as though they contained some freight of meaning he’d neglected to see or understand and had chosen to communicate it to him in his sleep. But what? That death was terrible? He knew that better than most. That Patrick was going to die, and there was nothing Will could do about it? He knew that too. He chewed it over and over, but he couldn’t make much sense of the experience. Perhaps he was looking for significance where there was none. How much credence should he be giving a dream that showcased a talking fox claiming to be God’s messenger? Probably very little.

  And yet, hadn’t there been a hair’s-breadth moment at the end, after Drew had called his name, and he’d woken, when the fox had lingered, as though it were testing the limits of its jurisdiction, ready to trespass where it had no business being?

  He returned to bed at last. The rainstorm had passed over the city and the only sound in the room was Drew’s peaceful breath.

  Will slipped between the sheets as delicately as possible so as not to wake him, but somewhere in his slumber, Drew knew his bedmate had come back, because he turned to face Will, his eyes still closed, his breathing even, and found a place against Will’s body where they fitted together comfortably. Will was certain he wouldn’t sleep, but he did, and deeply. There were no further visits. God and His messenger left him undisturbed for the rest of the night and when he woke it was to sunlight and kisses.

  VI

  Patrick was as good as his threat: The centerpiece of the buffet table at the party was a large cake in the shape of a rather port-ly polar bear, complete with a fine set of fangs and a lascivious pink tongue. It inevitably invited questions, and Patrick directed all inquiries to Will, who was then obliged to tell the story of the attack a dozen times, compressing it with every repetition until it was honed to the impressively casual: Sure, I got chewed up by a bear.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” Drew said, when the information had found its way around the room to him. “I thought you’d got the scars in a crash. But Jesus, a bear!” He couldn’t resist smiling. “That’s really something.”

  Will claimed the slice of chicken and artichoke pizza Drew was devouring and finished it up.

  “Are you trying to tell me something?” Drew said. “Like stop eating?”

  “No.”

  “You think I’m too fat, don’t you? Admit it.”

  “I think you’re just fine,” Will said patiently. “You have my permission to eat every slice of pizza you can get your sticky fingers on.”

  “You’re a god,” Drew said, and returned to the buffet table.

  “Are you two picking up where you left off?” Will looked up around and there was Jack Fisher, elegant as ever, with a brooding white boy in tow. There were the usual hugs and how-dos before Jack got round to introducing his friend. “This is Casper. He doesn’t believe I know you.” Casper pumped Will’s hand, stumbling over some words of admiration. “You were one of my idols when I was a kid,” he said. “I mean, shit, your stuff’s so real, you know? I mean, it’s the way things are, isn’t it? All fucked up?”

  “Casper’s a painter,” Jack explained. “I bought a little erection of his. He only paints dicks. Don’t you, Casper?” The boy looked a little discomfited. “It’s a small market,” Jack said, “but it’s devoted.”

  “I’d love to . . . maybe show you some of my work sometime,” Casper said.

  “Why don’t you go get us a drink?” Jack said. Casper frowned; he clearly didn’t want to play the waiter. “And I’ll persuade Will to buy a painting.” Reluctantly, Casper departed.

  “They’re pretty good, actually,” Jack said. “And he means what he says, about you being an idol of his. Sweet, isn’t he? I’m seriously thinking of taking him off to Louisiana and settling down with him.”

  “You’ll never do it,” Will said.

  “Well, I’m certainly over this fucking town,” Jack said wearily. He lowered his voice a little. “The truth is, I’m sick of sick people. I know how that sounds, but you know me, I call it the way I see it. And I’ve got more scratched-out addresses in my little book than I care to count.”

  “How old’s Casper?” Will said, watching the fellow weave back toward them with two glasses of scotch.

  “Twenty. But he knows all he needs to know.” Fisher grinned conspiratorially, but Will looked away. He didn’t want to leer over this kid who for all Jack’s domestic talk would be out on his ass, fucked and forgotten, within a month.

  “You must drop in at the studio,” Jack said, picking up the hype now that Casper was back within earshot. “He’s doing a whole series of sperm pieces next—” He stopped in mid sentence. “Uh-oh,” he murmured, his gaze going to the door, where a striking woman in her fifties, dressed in flowing gray, had just made an entrance. She surveyed the thirty or so guests somewhat imperiously, then, spotting Patrick, headed directly over to him.

  He left off his conversation with Lewis, who was using the event to circulate a very slim volume of his poems, and went to greet her. She lost her regal manner as Patrick hugged her, kissing his cheek and laughing raucously at something he said.

  “Is that Bethlynn?” Will said.

  “Yep,” said Jack. “And I’m not in the mood, so you’re on your own. Just don’t let her have the ruby slippers.” With that, and a sly smile, he made himself scarce, Casper in tow.

  Will was fascinated, watching Bethlynn chat with Patrick. He was hanging on her every syllable, no doubt of that, his body language suggesting an uncharacteristic meekness on his part.

  He nodded now and again, but had his eyes downcast a lot of the time as he listened intently to her wisdom.

  “So that’s her.” Adrianna had sidled up to Will, and was casually attempting to scrutinize the pair while she nibbled a piece of polar bear icing. “Our Lady of the Crystals.”

  “Does anybody
like her?” Will said.

  “This is the first time any of us have even seen her. I don’t think she descends to the mortal plane very often, though Lewis claims to have seen her shoplifting eggplants.” She guffawed behind her hand at this unlikely vision. “Of course, Lewis is a poet, so his testimony doesn’t really count.”

  “Where’s Glenn?”

  “Throwing up.”

  “Too much cake?”

  “No, he gets nervous when he’s around a lot of people. He thinks they’re all looking at him. It used to be that he thought they were looking at his ears, but since he got his ears fixed he thinks they’re trying to work out what’s different about him.” Will tried to suppress a laugh, but failed. It erupted from him so loudly Patrick looked up and at him. The next moment he was leading Bethlynn across the room. Adrianna pressed a little closer to Will’s side, to be sure she was included in the introductions.

  “Will,” Patrick said, “I’d like to introduce you to Bethlynn.” He was beaming like a schoolboy. “This is so great,” he said.

  “The two most important people in my life—”

  “I’m Adrianna, by the way.”

  “I’m sorry,” Patrick said. “Bethlynn, this is Adrianna. She works with Will.”

  Close up, Bethlynn looked a good deal older than she’d first appeared, her high-boned, almost Slavic features etched with fine lines. Her hand, when she took Will’s, was cool, and when she spoke her voice was so low and husky Will had to lean closer to hear what she was saying. Even then he only caught “ . . . in your honor.”

  “The party,” Patrick prompted.

  “Pat’s always been a master at throwing shindigs,” Will said.

  “That’s because he’s a natural celebrant,” Bethlynn replied.

  “It’s a sacred quality.”

  “Oh, is giving parties sacred these days?” Adrianna chipped in. “I hadn’t heard.”

  Bethlynn ignored her. “Patrick’s gifts burn more brightly every day.” The woman went on, “I see it. Manifest.” She glanced around at him. “How long have we been working together?”

  “Five months,” Pat replied, still beaming like a blessed acolyte.