There is love inside me. I love, for the best reasons, all the wrong people, and it’s tearing me apart. And I can’t help but wonder why, and that’s the most dangerous game of all because the mind is a terrible place to become lost. But there’s an answer in there somewhere, laughing at me, hiding within a trick of the light. It’s the child I could have been playing hide and seek in the dark.
I don’t like meaning nothing to anyone, the idea of being expendable. The world and all its lovers are expendable. But not me. Anything can be trash when the circumstances call for it. Anyone can be a thing to own, use and throw out. It’s hard work hurting this much, but in that I succeed every time. To shower and shave and dress every day, to look polished enough until the next person comes along and I disappear in comparison. And then there’s the people I don’t know, the ones I’m competing with when the last thing any of this should be is a competition. But my mind pulls in me so many directions and it pricks at my skin like needles and I don’t know what else to do but hit the self-destruct button like 10…9…8…7…, and I really do believe I’m not going to live through this one more time.
But then something miraculous happens. A light flickers through the shadow of suspicion and God presents to me a gift of trust, a person to call my own. He appears to me suddenly, a gilded arc designed by nature. And I feel his exquisite body like a stairway to heaven. Without knowing his name, I knew he’d be the one. He doesn’t see me there, but I am, and though he's not looking at me I can hear him saying I wish you were here. And he’s just too good to be true. I had to excuse myself from the back row of a philosophy class in which I am not enrolled, rushing for the nearest men’s room to ejaculate over a toilet seat, imagining the surprise on his face while he lets me in. That was clarity. That was remedy. All these people around me and in magazines and movie posters, smiling, saying they got to where they are by following their heart. But how? How does one trust their guts when they’re all just a reflection of the same thing carbon-copied by mirrors in a fun house? The answer I’ve found is to use someone else’s, to spill them on the floor and take a deeper look.
It’s hard losing. It’s even harder to win. You know, the special kind of pain that only comes when you’ve gotten your way and probably shouldn’t have. But when it’s happening, nothing could ever feel so pretty, and so fucking good. Winning—winning anything, really—brings out something new in a person that maybe wasn’t there before. Once there’s a taste for it, of course we want more. Success by hard work is one thing, different because it takes time. There’s a gradation to the brilliance of earning one’s way that starts out invisible and eventually flourishes like a flower in summer. Talent is another story entirely. Talent splatters. Talent is incidental, thick with red pigment. The talented take what they want because they can, confusing accomplishment with need. And thus begins the change, a transformation that transcends human capabilities under the hand of God.
What had I done to mean so little to everyone? Not so much the worst, but I didn’t think I was that bad, certainly not evil. I meant well, always. For the most part I just wanted more. But when the work results in less than shit over the course of several trivial years, one begins to understand the complexities of envy. If I didn’t make a change, I’d die alone. Out there in the world I didn't want to be invisible anymore, this breathing ghost above ground, doing time. They never bothered to see me until I forced them too, those men who were all destined to end up under the same dirt anyway. Each of them equals in the end, beneath me now. One day, late into an Indian summer, I realized I could take back what should be mine. Life.
The day I die will not be the end of the world. As it wasn’t when I fell out of the sky to come crashing down on that first boy’s head. I would not know, as many others still do not, where the confidence came from or where it had been all that time. If I had to guess it was probably a place like this: a combination of talent, ambition and anxiety. Courage, viscera and guts. Where there’s a twinge in every nerve within the body strung out like Christmas lights from here to the end of the universe. Close to the edge where you think you’re going to take to soaring heights, enjoy the ride, and land safely back on your feet in the nick of time. A real success story worth the risk of reckless abandon. And have you ever seen the smile on a killer’s face?
It shines.
------
Heavy bass filled the empty spaces separating friends and strangers alike. Glow-sticks around their necks created an atrocious haze of synthetic color that made Patrick feel seasick. This was a good sign, though. He’d arrived at the right time, just when the boys had slurped down one drink too many and everyone was feeling buzzed and juicy. It was after 11:30, he’d have to make this quick. Six weeks of anticipation had led to this, a moment built by bricks into a wall so high it made Patrick’s heart crash through his chest.
“You’re very familiar to me,” Blake Jansen said, cocking his head to one side as if trying to decide in favor of an impulsive purchase. “Were you at Sandy’s get-together last weekend?” The man adjacent to him was also the man who’d just bought him a drink. Gin from the well and tonic from the spout, two limes from the state below, and the crushed remains of a high-milligram Vicodin procured from an elderly landlord. Glaring eyes followed the underage collegiate’s hand bringing the cocktail to his mouth, then to his throat where the tangy elixir slithered down inside him. Guts. The boy’s lips gleamed wet, wiped them at the hem of his sheer tank top.
Hard part’s over.
“I was!” Patrick responded, feigning reticence. “Yeah. Just for a short while, though. I had another party to be at. You’re familiar to me as well. I think we have class in Hawthorne together, right?"
In fact, Patrick had not been at Sandy Ellis’ party the previous Saturday night. Nor was he invited. But he had, in his own way, been in attendance from the building's parking lot. Neither presence was an accident, as Patrick had managed for nearly three weeks to follow Blake from a safe distance in his burnt-orange Honda Civic. An inadvertent benefit of college campus atmosphere was anonymity.
This one was a freshman, more flamboyant than Patrick found necessary, but at least he was active. Patrick often saw him jogging across town or loading up a (male) friend’s car with kayaking equipment. Patrick did not kayak and didn’t particularly enjoy jogging. But he liked that Blake did. More than anything, he liked Blake’s tattoos, as he was too thin-skinned himself to dare get one.
“Do you live around campus too?” Blake asked, and was ignored. Patrick put his arms around the boys shoulders.
“I have some pretty sick weed in my car,” Patrick diverted. “We can smoke an L if you want?”
“I’m down!” the boy said, his pink face lighting up with breakneck enthusiasm. Patrick took his hand and led them outside, fishtailing through currents of sweaty shoulders sticking with glitter. Blake mumbled absently about how he should have covered his drink with a coaster.
Too late, Patrick thought.
“Hey, by the way,” Blake's speech was starting to slur. “What’s your name?”
“Ray,” he lied. “My name is Ray Watson.”
------
There was more blood on the floor than he’d anticipated. More than he thought was reasonable compared to the laceration at Mr. X’s throat. But Mr. X’s mess aside, they were still having a lovely time, right? And with both hands, he grabbed the corpse’s face to manipulate its slack-jawed fear into a gray simper. Later, he’d give Mr. X a chance to make up for causing such a scene. In bed. For the moment anyway, Patrick was content from his seat in the bathtub, staring back at Mr. X who’d gone pale now, arm slumped over the rounded porcelain edge. What an evening they’d had, Patrick thought, and relished the steaming hot water saturating their naked bodies from the shower head. Night clubs can be such a hassle! They’re too much fucking work, like chasing a worthwhile connection through a litter of filth, rats trapped in a labyrinth. Lights from every direction and still everything is dark, voices from every mouth and still no words can be heard. That’s why he learned to dance, to speak with his eyes.
From an early age, he’d recognized something in his face that other people would consider attractive. He knew this to be true because he himself was attracted. Puberty had put hair on his body, new ideas in his mind. While his voice deepened a little bit more every day, he watched the older boys from gym class as they slicked their hair back with Vaseline, combing endlessly until the perfect part reflected to their satisfaction from the wall-length mirror. It didn’t really matter if a boy smoked cigarettes or drank whiskey from a flask or smoked grass in the parking lot during lunch. Somehow, they’d always manage to have a girlfriend, a pretty thing in short heels holding their hand for pictures at the school dance. And since then, he’d always maintained a perfect style of hair. Blonde curls, long in the right places, short in others. When hair eventually appeared on his chest, he maintained that to his advantage as well, unbuttoning his shirts just enough to reveal those wiry curls and the gold chain hanging down amongst the nappy fray.
The very sight of him caused his mother to pray.
“Take those off!” she’d scream, grabbing at his aviator sunglasses. “You can hide your face from me but but you can’t hide from God!” Forcing back tears, he’d push her off on his way out the door, glancing at his father sipping black coffee at the kitchenette. Ester Greenway in her ankle-length denim skirt would charge back into the house, shaking as she chased a nerve pill with a glass of tap water.
Mornings like this were typical in his house, an expanding void filled with the dismissiveness of his father in the backyard always mowing the lawn somehow. Or Patrick would be fending off the frantic fist beating splinters into the pressed wood of the only bathroom door. His mother was innovative in her own way, and always found a way in at the worst possible moment. If he were having a shit, he was supposed to feel humility; showering would be shame (there were no showers in the biblical era); and god forbid he have a private moment to masturbate. It was her interest in his body that should have been unnatural he thought, not what nature told him to do with it. One fine afternoon, the scent of freshly shorn grass thick in the summer air, Ester had pried her way into his bedroom as he dressed. It was likely the Madonna album playing on his small stereo had her triggered. Ester’s eyes would bulge and her hands would writhe, and she’d say the way he used the cross dangling between his lungs was sacrilege. She knew his father was wrong to trust him with it.
But it suited its purpose on his body, highlighting the pec muscles, pronounced collarbones. It’s what the Guidos and leather-toting jocks with cars taught him to do. Initially, he experimented with obscene confidence once he entered the jungle of high school, approaching the prettiest senior girls. He’d make Hannah Smith laugh with a joke he heard on Carson, get them to touch his arm by surprising Cheryl Isaacson at her locker one morning with a bouquet of daisies. Cliques of girls were curious and impressed by his chivalry, regardless of how he looked doing it. Groups of boys were cantankerous toward him as a result, which he further regarded with anthropological eagerness. It was the boys, after all, whom he’d come to know as his final destination. By senior year, he’d be well-known by a good majority of the student body, yet he would only know most of them by face. His position in high school ecology as a harmless weirdo, was an outcome he neither expected nor cared to dissect.
To his great surprise, however, the word “homosexual” was whispered around the campfire on more than one occasion. A result of splashy interaction with the girls, perhaps? Taking Cheryl to the homecoming dance three years ago and not making a move under the bleachers? None of it was of particular interest to him, because it was them he chose to understand inside and out but never could. They could talk and gossip, share each other as much as they wanted, spend nights wrapping the phone cord around their toes gabbing about Katie Easton getting her rag in the swimming pool. None of it mattered to him.
Had it not been for one misstep in the locker room, his teenage years would have been somewhat uninteresting on paper. High school at least would have been mostly aggression free. But for boys of a certain type, gym class meant locker rooms, which usually meant showers. And the responsibility of being in a room full of naked, wet testosterone, is something of a burden to carry. For Patrick, it was the day he was caught looking at Joey Miller’s uncut cock.
“The fuck are you looking at faggot?” Joey announced, turning multiple heads in Patrick’s direction. “If I catch you checking me out again, I’ll fucking kill you. If AIDS doesn’t take you out first, asshole lover.”
The next day, Joey Miller awoke to the news that his German Shepherd was dead. At school, still congested from crying, Joey followed his usual class schedule, ending the day with gym class.
It must have come as quite a shock to Joey, and probably the other guys, when Patrick entered the locker room, having been absent for most of the day. Dragging behind him on the polished concrete was an aluminum baseball bat filling the subterranean corridors with a hollow grinding reminiscent of active machinery. And while in front of the mirror, the boys spritzed cologne and combed gel-slick hair, straightened their cross necklaces; Joey watched idly, holding his toothbrush as Patrick hauled the bat high over his right shoulder before bearing down mercilessly into Joey’s left knee cap.
The scream was shrill like a girl's, and loud enough that some people claim elicited the sight of blood. All stood back watching Joey writhe on the ground like a fish out of water, this cries reverberating through their shocked stares. Patrick moved to stand over the boy, who’d begun choking on a mouthful of toothpaste, and pointed the bat into his tear-stained face before walking away without saying a word.
That evening his peers ate French fries at the Spot and ordered fizzy cola beverages, they talked deep into the night about Joey and Patrick and whose side to take. The feminine scream had witnesses embarrassed for Joey. Several of the boys rolled up in the bed of someone’s truck, keeping mum about the incident and choosing instead to eat their hot dogs over idle sports commentary. The girls thought it was solidarity for Joey, presently having surgery in the hospital. But the truth was? They were scared.
Across town there was a playground. Beyond that was the reservoir, then the sticks, and further still there was Patrick, who with a flashlight trudged through soft leaves in search of the brick remains of a long-forgotten settler’s home. There, in the decrepit fireplace, he found the black garbage bag containing the missing head of Joey’s trusting dog, Apollo. The flashlight fell to the dirt. In darkness, he kicked off his store-brand shoes, ripped off his leather belt and jeans, and began to masturbate his already-erect cock. In the moments before climax, and for reasons he wasn’t confident of yet, was compelled to penetrate the animal’s neck and fuck it with both hands until release.
“Mr. X, you’re not behaving very well, are you?” Patrick had spent more time than he wanted folding up the plastic shower curtains that lined the bathroom floor. “What are we going to do with you? Hm?”
The body was heavy in his arms, his cross to bear. There were drinks ready on the coffee table, and once he had the corpse settled on his unsightly brown paisley couch, the second part of their date began. He straddled Mr. X, wrapping his legs around the man’s waist. The man was blonde, similar to Patrick’s, but then again most of them were similar in both size and appearance. He brushed the long strands out of his face to reveal Mr. X’s cloudy eyes, still a shade of their former emerald green but at the hinterland of rigor mortis. No way to pause the collateral progression of time or decomposition. Patrick felt the flames of anxiety ignite in his chest, and once again faced the aggregation of losing a new best friend.
“Drink up,” he said, wiping at the wells of his eyes. “The music’s nice isn’t it?”
Karen Carpenter sang a song about young love that was quickly changing context. The gin and tonic Patrick poured into Mr. X’s mouth came dribbling out the sides. Something like a drug was kicking in, Patrick and his Mr. X staring at each other. Face to face. Shock and awe, opposing tension between two magnets. The highball shattered on the floor before Patrick’s hand struck the corpse across the face. His hands gripped the bruises he’d caused during the initial strangulation, shaking the deceased with futile rage.
“We’ll just get on with it then, is that what you want?”
Patrick transferred Mr. X to the neatly-made four-post bed in the adjacent room. Once his extremities were bound at the joints with heavy chains, Patrick felt tender toward Mr. X, apologizing for his outburst. Attached to each post was a series of metal hooks, drilled in three-inch sequences. Patrick pulled the shell of missing movie theater attendant Xavier O’Reilly, aged 20, down the mattress until his buttocks came just off the edge. He then lifted the chains at each ankle, looping them through the hooks like stirrups and secured the shackles with climbing-grade carabiners. Pre-cum was already creating a translucent sheen on the head of his cock, dripping down the shaft. With the stage nearly set, he finally slipped the white latex mask over his head, snapped the surgical gloves on his hands. Only when he turned the lights off did he press “play” on the video camera, which on night mode would reveal in black and green exposure, Patrick crawling around his room like a spider whispering things, then scuttling across the bed before circling into a position atop his doll.
He nuzzled at the corpse’s neck, ran fingers through his hair, pressed himself hard into the naked body as if trying to become one. The camera showed Patrick spitting a heavy saliva trail into Xavier’s dry mouth, working his way down until penetration were the only option left for the evening. Xavier said nothing when his killer fucked him, asking again and again if this is how he wanted it. Just stared at the ceiling, not quite expressionless, but close enough to the surprise on his face when he looked in the refrigerator, realizing he’d never make it out of this apartment alive.
What the camera couldn’t show is what Patrick was thinking all that time. And at the foot of the bed was an antique oak chest containing blankets, several large-form jars, multiple-sized chains, and among other toys, a used hacksaw.
------
They hadn’t reached the car before Blake had his hands down Patrick’s jeans, feeling him up from behind. Patrick didn’t mind, he’d worked hard for this body and was glad he was being appreciated. But the boy was being messy, tripping over himself on the way through the painted brick walls and past coat check where everyone’s flaws were visible under industrial lighting. Patrick thrust them through the double doors of the club into the alley, where he nearly confused a cloud of cigarette smoke with fog.
Almost there, he thought. Almost there. He could see the Honda in the distance, partially illuminated by a street lamp. His heart nearly stopped when a group of individuals passed by them in a flurry of boa feathers and faux pink fur. Did one of those queens just ask if this was Blake under my arm? Fuck It, just keep walking.
From behind them a high-pitched voice called out, “Blake?” Patrick’s blood ran cold. The queen yelled again, “Blake! Bitch I know you saw me…”
“Tell me again what you’re studying.”
“Did that person just say my name?” Blake slurred, giggling at a high he couldn’t comprehend.
“I don’t think so, but you know what?”
He playfully pushed the student against the car and, in an attempt to hide their faces, began kissing his neck. Blake’s tongue was wet, tasting of cigarettes and gin, a component of physical affection Patrick already couldn’t stand. But the kid was also sloppy, practically licking his face like a dog. It was unbearable. Reaching behind him with one hand, he opened the passenger door, taking a moment to glance toward the misty alley thumping with music. The queens were gone, either inside or snorting key bumps by the dumpsters. This was his chance.
“You’re fucking gorgeous,” Blake grinned, running his painted fingernails through Ray’s hair. “Are you sure we haven’t met before?”
“You know what, is…uh, my weed is at home, actually. Why don’t you come to my place and we can smoke and I’ll make you a drink?”
Blake laughed as though he’d caught the punch line to an inside joke, swaying a bit between light and shadow. His Converse shoes were pitiful with dirt and glitter. Finally he sighed, a decision had been made.
“Alright. I’ll go home with you. But you have to take it slow, ok?”
“Get in.”
“Do you have a good music collection?”
“Get in the car.”
“Bitchin'.”
------
In North Carolina, boys had a less obscure reason to go missing before the late ‘80s. Drowning would be, and still is, a frequent adjective written on the line next to “Cause of Death: _________” in many coroner’s reports. Hunting mishaps, car collisions, alcohol poisoning were among other fan favorites in local obituaries featuring boys and men of all ages, wearing different versions of the same flannel shirts and snapbacks. The primary differences were in the facial hair. Gray or graying? They’d lived at least, but a shame none the less. Sprouting or solid-colored facial hair? Tragic, but not surprising. A shame none the less.
When that boy from Elizabeth City disappeared out of the blue, walking home from raking that woman’s leaves, no one knew what to say or print or stammer during a prayer at supper time. It was as if the boy were a ghost, vanished without so much as a cry for help, no underlying plot to run away from home. By the time authorities finished dragging the nearby swamps, combing the brush surrounding waterways, there wasn’t much else to do pray to god for an absolution. There was also the temporary curfew, and more than a few conversations with children about trusting strangers.
Those newspaper clippings referenced earlier? They’re taped into a baby book under the very bed where Stevie Williamson was raped and decapitated. It was a long drive home to Wilmington with the teen bound and gagged in the back of his trunk, which would have actually been Mrs. McCready’s trunk. Patrick’s landlord was a geriatric close to kicking the bucket into eternity, and twice a week she paid her neighboring tenant $5 to do her grocery shopping. The $5 was useless, more or less, but her en suite medicine cabinet meant a great deal to Patrick. As did the various family portraits strewn about the lady’s lakefront home where her great grandson was proudly displayed, beaming in a school picture despite a mouth full of braces. Patrick later discovered that boy, Stevie, was on summer vacation and with his family four hours north.
Three weekends and 24 hours in the car, driving to and from, scouting out forest reserves, camping locations, times and whereabouts. It was exhausting. It was a rush of blood inside his body evocative of something supernatural, something primeval and intoxicating. This was his first time, and had no context for what would be safer, easier. In town, out of town? It made no difference in the beginning. But when he saw the picture of Stevie, his mission became clear. It kept him up at night, thoughts so unrelenting he practically rubbed his dick raw concentrating on them. Out of town. It was the circumstance, not the preference. In the end it would do him the favor of appearing innocent from any angle. In the end, no one bothered to ask him anyway.
Should the occasion call for it and he couldn’t control his compulsion for orgasm, he’d plotted out a spot in the sticks where he could perform undisturbed. When he opened the trunk to look at his bloodied deer, who was awake now and bleeding from the head, Patrick came in his shorts. Because the boy began to squirm and cry for his mother, Patrick had no choice but to sedate him, pressing down hard on the esophagus just long enough for the kid to pass out. Turning him over, he inserted a washcloth into Stevie’s mouth, then reapplied a thick layer of duct tape. He also fashioned the rope into a structure reminiscent of that done to hogs; for no reason but his own pleasure, ripped the white underwear violently from under Stevie’s cut-off jean shorts.
Four hours, no stops. They were home. Shaking hands set up the camera, triple checking that the tape was blank and would record. The chains were a source of some clatter, but from the basement it shouldn’t be a worry, nothing an extra notch on TV’s volume during the Price is Right couldn’t handle. For personal reasons it was the incessant blubbering of Mr. Blue that had Patrick on edge. By the time he’d opened the trunk again, the boy had mostly cried himself out. Upon seeing his grandmother’s house at the end of the backyard on the opposite street, something must have triggered him. In spite of the duct tape gag, the boy was making too much noise and fighting back harder than he should have been able to against his bondage. So Patrick threw him to the ground in hopes of knocking the wind out of him, and proceeded to drag him across the pavement into the bowels of his new home.
Patrick produced a zip tie around Stevie’s neck, cinched just enough to put pressure on the throat. Infrared exposure would reveal the boy’s eyes, remarkably bright and noticeable against the darkness, his expression pouring with utter terror. Clinging to the peripherals was a creature without a face, his captor crawling around the room like a spider. The boy grew quiet, nodding fervently when the stranger whispered into his ear. Candles were snuffed out. For some time, Patrick disappeared becoming one with the darkness, leaving Stevie to his thoughts. He wondered about his new soccer cleats, lost somewhere in this place—would his teammates be wondering where he was? Are his parent’s mad, thinking he’d skipped practice to meet the waitress from the dock again? If he could just find his shoes, maybe he could get to Gran’s.
When the lights came on, he’d have to forget all these things. Standing before him was the same naked man, slick with something like Vaseline. The hole in his mask revealed a depraved smile, and for a moment Stevie would believe they were pointed. And was he drooling? Patrick produced an instrument he’d been hiding behind his back. It was a large red hacksaw. Stevie held his breath, thinking if there were any time for a miracle, this would be it. Then the man took one step forward.
There were no miracles that day. Or the next. Not ever again.
-----
Mr. Blue was the first. When he’d left the kid in his room, he retreated upstairs to writhe on his living room floor. It took nearly an hour for him to succumb to the inevitable. He had an itch to scratch, and no amount of praying over the years was able to cure him of his need. The loneliness would eat him up inside, and he considered what would happen to his soul if he killed himself. If he denied himself another chance for love. Love, he thought, makes people do the craziest things. And while he languished in the threat of giving up, he had a conversation with God:
What will happen if I don’t go back into that room? What will become of me? Is it ok to die? Is it possible to die? The only fear greater than that of living is the fear of dying and waking up somewhere else for eternity.
What do You see, Patrick? What do you feel?
For some days now I had considered the possibility that everything might be ok. My world could be full, vast and unstoppable. There was time to figure it out. There was a place to exhale when the worst of it was over. There was an idea, cutting down barriers with a chainsaw when no other door presented itself. Possibility, it was. A sense that I (as a person whose own face could become unfamiliar when staring into the mirror too long) might experience the joyful surprise of recognizing myself as somebody. My back did not ache like this then. It wouldn’t have.
I can feel him directly under me, past the floorboards and pipes and cobwebs. In my bones I know he’s enjoying himself. There’s a smile on his face as the chains close off his body, opening his mind up to the mysteries of the universe. I could have him, beg him to let me keep him. If I let him go, allow his spirit to void in the picture in my head, the regret will be too great to handle. This moment is captured like a family portrait on disposable camera, but the shape of him is replaced by distant stars.
But I am weak, so I came to my living room to talk it out. This option presents itself to me, an alternate ending, one in which I die, laying here when the greatest sound penetrates the subterranean quiet of our bedrooms. The sound is religious in its impact, terrifying in a way like watching the engine of a plane explode and disarticulate from an aircraft flying high at 30,000 feet. It’s that nowhere-to-hide kind of feeling. I’m going down, and there’s nothing anyone can do or say to make this what it isn’t. Death and nothing less.
Sharp spikes of pain flare down my back as the house shakes, lamps falling from the ceiling. Tiles crack sequentially under the walls. Now smoke and heat and endless noise. Anxiety. For a moment considering, remembering, I have done nothing with my life. Can’t save himself with a single choice. Can’t get high without regretting the carnal need to relax. And then the fire glazes over my head like an expanding wave. There is no time to fear for the flesh of my body, the hair on my head, the blue of my irises, a smile that never seemed to open wide enough. There is no time to consider anyone else, not another thing in life but the thing clinging to all the oxygen in the room. But I do consider death at the hands of something else—what it is, where it came from. Did someone push the red button, had a plane crashed, was there really a god who’d had enough of our bullshit.
I’m blind now, the flesh cooked and melted from the face down, eyes collapsing inward and boiling over like yolks through my head. I think maybe I had heard the pain doesn’t last long depending on what the circumstances are, which in my mind can only be slow torture by serial killer or something else ridiculous. But to my surprise there wasn’t much in that moment. Pain, I mean. But there was fear. For the last thing I saw in my life felt like home.
Therein hides the answer to my question. His heart is my home. I can live, I can grow, or I can resist it. But he can handle the entropy. He can savor the taste. He can thrive in the dark with me. He is the kind of person who is going to be loved forever and ever, inside me. Two hearts beating as one.
It’s my time.
-----
“This is your place?” Blake asked, as if it would be anyone else’s. “It’s nice.”
“Not really,” Patrick replied. “Work in progress I guess.”
The walked up the creaking steps, which were cracking with old paint. Patrick was struggling with basic motor skills, dropping the keys as he tried to unlock the door. A hard-on was pressing angrily against his jeans, and there was really no reason to keep up all these pretenses.
“After you,” he said, and closed the door behind them. As Blake gazed around the living room, snooping at pictures along the mantel, Patrick shut the curtains and turned the exterior lock, then the interior lock. No one was getting in. No one was getting out.
“How about some music?” Patrick offered. “Stereo’s over there. You can pick something out.”
“You don’t mind?”
“I don’t mind.”
Patrick sauntered into the kitchen and ran a glass of water for each of them. When he came back in, his guest was fidgeting through various records. He set the glasses on his coffee table and observed.
“This is a good collection,” he said. “Ah, I love this one.”
He slipped a Tracy Chapman vinyl from the shelf.
“Maybe something a little more…up?” Patrick suggested, walking over and pulled out a Prince album. “Whatcha think?”
“Sure, I like everything, really.”
They all do, Patrick thought and rolled his eyes. He put the needle down and let the brassy love songs fill the air. This was a good feeling, living areas were always spotless when he had guests. The house was old but it always smelled of Pine-Sol and Murphy’s Oil Soap.
“Hey,” Patrick said. “Come here.”
He’d begun unbuttoning his shirt, prompting Blake to bite his lip. They kissed and Blake removed his own shirt, pushed his host to the couch and began massaging his crotch.
“Care to make me a drink?” he asked with a. timid laugh. “I always get a little nervous.”
“That’s ok, so do I,” he sighed. “All I have is beer, though. Why don’t you grab us a couple from the fridge?”
“K,” Blake said, pecking Patrick on the lips before hopping of the sofa. Slinking over the hardwood toward the kitchen he stripped off his shorts revealing a playful jockstrap. “Hey, who’s the guy in the picture on your mantel?”
Patrick was already standing, pulling something from under the couch cushions.
“He’s on your fridge, too. The polaroid?”
The stranger behind him stepped forward.
“That’s Ray Watson,” he said.
“What?” Blake turned, reaching aimlessly into the cold air for a bottle. He noticed the door next to the sink was dead-bolted under a Master lock. “No, I meant the other guy,” he chuckled.
“I know what you meant. That’s Ray Watson.”
Blake fumbled for bottles, feeling none the size of a beverage. His own grin faded into quizzical concern. Whipping around, he peered into the fridge trying to make sense of it all. Looking back at him with bloodshot eyes was Ray Watson, his severed head pressed against the glass in yellow fluid.There were others present Blake wouldn’t be familiar with until he joined them: Mr. X, Mr. Blue, etc. Others, souvenirs. What Patrick would call his friends.
During Blake’s confounded gasp, the kind before a scream, a thick link of chain came over his head and constricted his windpipe beyond repair, crushing the small Adam’s apple he had always been self-conscious about. But not today.
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Heaven is just through that door. Can’t you see it? It’s so beautiful. You’ll be so beautiful to them. Open your mouth wide, have a taste, take a bite. Open your mouth and smile.
You’re a winner, Patrick. Down here, you’ll always shine.