"Don't trust me," Gilles had whispered in the dark, "nor the flattering truth of sleep. But dream well and sweetly."
The bed was, however, too soft, and Gilles' body too warm, for Daniel to sleep easily.
Inside his new skin - which blazed and sang - his bones were a jumble of gnarled sticks, kindling roughly and hastily bundled. They poked into the mattress; he could not arrange them well, could not find their comfort but only new contortions.
Gilles slept on his side, facing Daniel, his arm flung out as if to grab him if he moved too far away. His face was slack, open and relaxed, his lips moving softly. Daniel wondered what Gilles dreamed of; his eyes moved rapidly back and forth, reading, absorbing, scanning.
Above the bed, the ceiling was cut away, replaced with broad glass panels. Light from fireworks and the ambient reflections of the city's activity filtered down over Gilles' body. His skin glowed, almost ruddy against the white sheets, his limbs long and corded with quietly stirring muscle. The tattoos danced and hovered over his skin in the shifting light.
Daniel traced the length of Gilles' torso, his finger skimming a fraction above the surface, all the way from one broad shoulder, the knob of bone turned out like a piece of carved beech, down over his ribs and into the tapering bands of muscle at his hip and waist.
In Pawtucket, Daniel had seen dolls woven from silken tassels, braided and looped into human figures; he suspected that Gilles was one of these, sheathed in painted skin, then animated.
He had no way of learning whether he guessed right; he could hardly lift free a flap of Gilles' skin and peer inside. He could only touch the surface, press two fingertips lightly into the space between ribs, tilt his head and continue to wonder.
Daniel must have dozed, chin on one hand, the other pressed to the ink of a bleeding heart, anatomically perfect, a rose sprouting from its hollow vena cava, just over Gilles' own, lively heart.
He opened his eyes to milky light, cream and rose clouds shining through the glass overhead and blanching Gilles' skin. For a moment he looked like Daniel felt, as fair and thin as a sheet of paper, as one of the texts Daniel memorized.
Sighing in his sleep, fragrant with mulled citrus and the brine of exertion and sex, Gilles was, perhaps, the text.
More mysterious than any half-invented, half-inspired chronicle, Gilles could not be memorized. Nothing stayed still long enough.
Pictograms gliding on the surface and secret rivers twining beneath, full of blood and electricity, pores arrayed in trapezoids like thousands of minute, intelligent eyes, the twist of muscle and quiver of groans.
Daniel rose from the bed. Early morning brought with it prayer and bathing; having studied Gilles, he decided it was time to bathe.
In the kitchen, he retrieved a large bowl, wide and shallow. He piled the oranges and grapefruit it had held on the counter and carried the bowl to the far corner of the room. Past the elevator, past the table at which they'd eaten dinner, all the way to the bathroom.
Beneath another skylight, behind a set of sliding opaque screens, he found the toilet, basin, and a tub larger than his old bed. It crouched on the bright marine-blue cement floor atop thick, heavy claws, a gryphon's or lion's. When he stepped inside, the tub reached the middle of Daniel's thighs.
He ran warm water and filled the bowl, then squatted in the center of the tub, knees up to his chin - like gargoyles decorating the corners of cathedrals, like the monkeys grooming each other on the balconies of apartment buildings in Mumbai - comfortably shifting his balance as necessary.
It was like washing in the river at the monastery, water slopping over his feet as he washed each limb carefully, rinsing off by pouring a wide stream of water from the lip of the bowl.
Gilles' soap, however, smelled much better than the lard-and-lye mixture they had used at the monastery; this soap was creamy and fresh, like butterfat and mown clover. Daniel closed his eyes, soaping up his face and savoring the fragrance before splashing clean from the bowl.
When he opened his eyes, Gilles stood there at the end of the tub, smiling slightly. His hair stood on end and stubble shadowed the hollows of his cheeks. He wore snug white shorts that reached mid-thigh; they reminded Daniel of men's bathing costumes in old black and white photographs, yet on Gilles they looked modern.
"Good morning," Daniel said and Gilles' smile broadened.
"Morning," Gilles said, sitting sideways on the edge of the tub and touching Daniel's wet shoulder. "You can fill the tub, you know. You won't drown, even if it is both filled and running."
Daniel looked down at the soapy water sloshing over his feet, the suds trailing like trash in the surf. The skin on his cheeks stiffened hotly and he tried, then failed, to turn his gaze back up.
He'd never felt quite like this; he'd often felt small and insubstantial, of course, but just now he felt stuffed with steam, rigid and immobile.
It must have been Gilles' presence; he supposed this was shame, being caught out, not knowing how to bathe himself. Not knowing much of anything.
"It's all right," Gilles said. "You'll learn soon enough."
Daniel nodded, his stomach and mouth twisting around hot, empty air.
Gilles rubbed slow circles over Daniel's back and neck, bringing up a flush at once hot and cold. "Let me wash your hair."
Daniel reached up, intending to clasp Gilles' hand, and brushed instead the rocky heat of his cock, trapped beneath the thick cotton of the shorts. Gilles chuckled, smiling down at Daniel as if in pride.
"Wait -" Daniel turned until, on his knees, he faced Gilles. Looking upward, he gripped the lip of the tub and leaned forward, his mouth opening.
Bathing and prayer, he thought, recalling the ritualized cannibalism he'd witnessed when he'd first come to Verona Beach. When the congregation of St. Athanasius took him in, he'd attended their prayers and rituals.
He thought now of the row of worshippers, heads bent and hands resting on the railing, while the priest crept down the line, offering bread and wine from elegant white fingers, whispering blessings and old stories of transformation.
Gilles stared down at him, nodding. Daniel gazed back, still and hopeful, lips parted.
"Oh, what you do to me -. Yes," Gilles muttered, palming the back of Daniel's skull. "Ab omnibus iniquitatibus meis, et universis malis: et fac me tuis semper inhaerere mandatis, et a te numquam separari permittas."
Elegant brown fingers, whispering over Daniel's lips, then tugging free his cock, bruise-bright silk around heated steel, from the white cotton.
Kissing the head, hearing the whispered Latin above him, Daniel tasted both brine and heat - heat had its own flavor, salt crusting sand and shimmering air over tar - and he dug his nails against the porcelain of the tub until the tips of his fingerbones pulsed in time with Gilles' heartbeat.
Names and skin, ancient languages, the secret and the obvious, twirled together into Daniel's mouth as Gilles rocked his hips, fast, then faster. Daniel's lips burned around the shaft, his tongue and palate the tightest channel, direct route inside, expressway to his skull.
Above him, Gilles towered, fierce and shaking, his mouth open, twisting black and red around incantations, as his skin wavered beneath the black words and pictures. Something terrifying and half-bestial and *thrilling*, the sight captivated Daniel. Hotter and more bitter than the wine last night, the understanding that Daniel could do this, effect such shuddering, clawing *need*, swept through him, cascaded in sheets of bright fire.
"Sed tantum dic verbo, et sanabitur anima mea -" Gilles shouted and the words were rocks, sharp-edged and heavy, hurled at the sky and into Daniel all at once.
Words meant things, conjured-charmed-tricked them into existence, passion in old Latin and need in guttural grunts. Gesture was a language, too, the tremor of Gilles' cock and the slap of his balls, the scrabbling grip on Daniel's hair, and Daniel plummeted down *through* his own body, wrapping his arms around Gilles' waist and cracking open his jaw, pulling and grasping and suckling.
Tears of exertion streaked the aching skin of his cheeks and his knees were smashed flat on the tub's floor, and Daniel sought *more*.
He knew he should not, knew that hunger was a disease, the sicksallow fever symptom of life, but he could not stop himself. Could not stop moving, touching, sucking deep and tasting everywhere.
There was, around the top of Gilles' thigh, exposed now by his twisted, rucked-up shorts, a black circlet - blackpurple, like pansy petals or the inner ring of a child's eyes. Daniel thought it was another tattoo, but when the side of his hand grazed it, Gilles gasped, breath sounding in a whine as sharp as metal slicing metal.
A bruise, intricately linked, crowned with pinprick scabs. Daniel tasted it - blood staining skin from beneath, terribly tender - and pressed his knuckles against from behind until Gilles cried out and would not stop. Crystal-etched whinny of pleas and urges, to stop, to never stop, and Daniel pressed harder as he plunged his mouth back over the nova-hot head of Gilles' cock.
He had never known, never had cause to suspect, just how various and vulnerable the skin and its secrets might be. The spurting, overrunning flood of Gilles' orgasm, spilling from Daniel's lips over his cheeks, hot and bittersweet as crushed weeds and small, early flowers, promised more. More secrets, more revelation, mysteries upon mysteries.
Gilles' cry was release and demand, sharp and high.
Daniel fell back into the tub, gasping and shaking, vibrations of sympathetic magic rocketing through him as he wiped his mouth.
"Darling, dirty boy," Gilles crooned, gathering him up, washing Daniel's face all over again with trembling hands, kissing his bruised lips with sharp teeth. He sucked clean Daniel's mouth and communion, reciprocated and profane, began to make a rough kind of sense.
"Let me clean you," Gilles whispered, hoarse and apologetic, "you whom I've defiled, whom I will pollute again, let me bathe you."
Gilles stared at him, and Daniel realized he was waiting for something - permission, acknowledgement, admission.
"Yes," Daniel said. "Please."
Gilles reached past him for a bottle and sang a little, under his breath, as he poured soap into his hands.
"Dunk your head, sweetheart," he said quietly, and then, only then, was Daniel able to move again. Leaning forward, he poured the contents of the bowl over his head and face. Gilles grasped Daniel's arm and pulled him back against the side of the tub as he swung his other leg inside. "Good. Very good."
Gilles' hands were redolent with the scents of the new soap, honey and ground almonds, as his fingers worked gently, slowly, through Daniel's wet hair.
The touch was sure and careful, pulling Daniel back to himself, reminding him of where he was, who he might be, alive and warm in shining new skin.
He drifted a little, held there between Gilles' knees and under his fingers. They dug at his scalp, rubbing and tugging clean his hair, and whatever shame and confusion he had felt started to loosen and ran rapidly down his neck with the soap.
His scalp bristled and hummed, a song brighter and faster than the hymn spilling from Gilles' mouth, but the rhythms lifted together, intertwining. Not just his scalp, but his skull, too, touched with clever hands, set singing like old prayer bowls, the music travelling along the seams of bone, opening them, streaming and overbrimming.
Gilles refilled the bowl and rinsed Daniel's hair, one hand shielding Daniel's eyes. Behind his hand, Daniel could see only a faint red glow of fingers as silver water poured down his back.
"Better," Gilles said. "Now just to part the knotted and combined locks. Stay still."
Daniel held his breath as Gilles drew a heavy bone comb through the clean hair. Its tines scraped his singing scalp and he only released the breath when he felt Gilles lean forward and kiss the dome of his skull.
"Cold?" he asked when Daniel shivered.
"A little."
Gilles helped him stand and wrapped in a large blue towel the same color as the floor, rubbing first each leg, then his back and front, then each arm. He turned and extended Daniel like one of those dolls made from silk tassels.
If pleasure could dwell with pain, Daniel was also coming to understand that gentle care might coexist with a sort of harsh, intense scrutiny. Gilles' hands and words were tender, light and warm, but his eyes were dark and attentive. Hooded, like falcons, against eventual wild liberation. Wheeling against the white sky, diving for the kill.
Dry and clean, his skin rubbed pink, Daniel waited on the rim of the tub while Gilles cleaned himself, body, face, and mouth. In the mirror, Gilles' eyes seemed even larger than ever, purely dark as some animal's, river cat or nocturnal predator, fastened on Daniel as he sang and chatted.
Gilles led him, naked and flushed, across the loft, back to the bed. Daniel touched his drying hair; it was softer and longer than it had ever been, and he wondered for a moment what he looked like. It hadn't occurred to him to check *himself* in the mirror.
"Here," Gilles said as he turned from the open wardrobe. Its curtains were thrown back, revealing racks and racks of clothing, crowded together like people on a bus. He held out a white shirt and a pair of blue trousers, still on their hangers. "Clothing, grave ornaments. For you."
Daniel took the hangers and pressed the clothes against his body. Their fabrics - smooth and light on the shirt, puckered and soft on the trousers - felt cleaner than his own skin, much finer. They hung against him, exactly the right length, and he looked up at Gilles.
"They fit."
"Yes, of course," Gilles said.
"How? Magic?" Daniel recalled, somehow, stories about enchanted mice sewing gowns from the trash.
Gilles removed the shirt from its hanger and helped Daniel into it. "Not magic," he said, buttoning up the shirt and rolling the sleeves to Daniel's elbows. "Expectation. Hope and preparation. Elements of magic, to be sure, but entirely mundane in this case."
"You knew I was coming," Daniel said.
Gilles tugged the shoulder seams until they lay straight, then cupped Daniel's face in both his hands. The shirt was alien, so thin and soft that it made Daniel think of bird skins, of the air off hummingbird wings, not quite of this earth, but Gilles' hands were smooth and warm. More familiar, somehow, Daniel thought, than anything. "As I said. I *hoped*. Never knew, never will, not for sure."
He sounded sad, and Daniel meant to ask him why, but Gilles was handing him the trousers.
"I need -" Daniel started, and then had to pause, search for the right word. "Underwear, first."
Laughing, clapping Daniel's shoulder, Gilles showed no trace of his former sadness. He kissed Daniel's temple and pressed him down onto the bed, handing him the pants. "You'll survive without them. Indulge me."
Daniel wore his trousers naked from then on; even clothed, his skin was regnant, brushed and alive, brimming with music.
*
Grave ornaments, indeed. The clothes Gilles gave Daniel were fine but exceptionally plain - severely cut, nipped at the waist and boxy at the shoulders - not at all adorned and loose like what most people wore here. Their colors were as simple as their tailoring - most were white as the moon, as water in a basin, and the others were black, spring blue, dark green.
Daniel had always admired the vivid, lurid colors in this place, its acid greens and neon yellows, throbbing reds and strange, clattering blues seamed with silver.
He'd known, by heart and skin, just three colors in New Drepung: the shifting, brilliant green of the forest and river banks and the red and saffron-gold of robes, temples, worship.
Here, however, electricity and fireworks and magic crowded out simplicity, brought garish, novel colors into being. They made him thirsty, hungry to touch and see more.
Gilles shook his head regretfully when Daniel spoke of those colors. "They're lovely," he said, "and very exciting. But they don't suit you, dearheart. They wouldn't look right."
"I don't know what I look like," Daniel said.
Gilles' hands moved up Daniel's shoulders and squeezed his neck. "But I do. I can see you."
Daniel turned his head, kissed one of Gilles' thumbs as it massaged his jaw. "I'm glad."
"Are you?"
Questions were like mouths, Daniel thought; if language was a skin, as he was beginning to believe, thin and superficial as well as utterly complex and secretive, then questions were lips. Where the skin folded into itself and opened, inviting you inside.
Gilles rarely asked questions. He knew far too much, dwelled in this world so confidently, that Daniel trusted that he didn't *need* to ask questions. Didn't, couldn't, fold and open.
When he did ask, however, his voice softened slightly. It reminded Daniel of a cat's fur, damp after it has groomed.
"Yes," Daniel replied. "You have good eyes. Intelligent and wild. What do I look like?"
Gilles' eyes closed and his mouth curved; just for a moment, he looked at once happy and agonized, pleased and bereft. Then his hands moved back into Daniel's hair and he tilted Daniel's head back, opening his eyes. "You look like you," he said. "Innocent, chaste and immaculate in very thought. Beautiful."
*
That first morning, they retrieved Daniel's few belongings - texts and books, his sockful of cash, and his worn prayer mat - from the rooming house.
It all fit in a sack at Daniel's feet in the car; Gilles marvelled that they didn't have to open the boot.
In the loft, Gilles rearranged some furniture and so Daniel had his prayer space in a corner before a narrow window overlooking the sea. The books on the shelves below the sill made way for Daniel's candles and the postcards of his shrine, as well as a small wooden statue of the Buddha.
"He's just decoration for me," Gilles said when he gave it to Daniel. "Perhaps he'll work for you."
Gilles spoke of things - the dead man hung around his neck, this statue, a fading gold-leafed portrait of a sorrowful woman in a blue veil - as if they held magic. As if power and potential lay coiled in the Buddha's belly, in the plaits of her hair and silvery tracks of tears on her cheeks, within the thorns piercing his god's forehead. As if, with the right combination of luck and diligence, magic would be released and everything transformed.
"Your faith is a false one," he told Daniel, "but innocuous. Quite attractive, actually. All that gold and quiet."
Daniel nodded; gold, quiet, and reaches, expanses, of green and empty space. That was where he had been, where he found himself still when he meditated. But it wasn't where he was, not any more.
"Take my mother as well," Gilles said, handing him another picture. It could be the sorrowing woman's sister, brighter and more modern, her blue shawl electric and hair brassy-gold, crimped and curling. Her sorrow resembled rage and Daniel thought of those goddesses who bear compassion in one fist but trample the skulls of the dead beneath their dancing feet. "We are enjoined to praise the ornaments and the buildings of worship. Likewise images, and to venerate them according to what they represent."
"And she?" Daniel asked, fingering the edges of the portrait, at once fearful and captivated by her anger. "What does she represent?"
Gilles kissed his cheek and turned away. "You'll see, darling boy. I'm sure you'll see."