Daniel helped Gilles out of the room, arm around his waist, and then to the elevator. It was operating now, and Daniel tightened his hold on Gilles' clammy skin as he guided Gilles inside. They both sagged, sweat stinging their eyes, and as the elevator haltingly rose, Daniel used his shirt to clean Gilles' face.
Gilles looked, more than anything, like his own ghost. Blanched and trembling, eyes hollowed and darkly burning. When he spoke, his voice came on dry wheezes and determined heaves of breath. Fear and worry spread over Daniel's skin, thin and sticky as oil, clinging.
In the loft, Daniel helped Gilles to the toilet and ran cold water in the basin, crouching beside him.
"I'll be fine," Gilles said.
"Of course you will." Daniel wrung out the cloth and swabbed away blood and sweat from Gilles' chest. "You look terrible, though."
"So beauty blemished once is for ever lost?" Gilles shivered and his hands opened and closed on his knees. "In spite of physic, painting, pain, and cost?"
"You'll be better," Daniel said, drawing the cloth over the swollen tracks of the whip on Gilles' arm. No broken skin, but so much blood, rioting just beneath the surface. "Promise."
Gilles smiled down at him. "Those wounds heal ill that men do give themselves."
Even if Gilles had arranged the beating, and Daniel believed he did, Mick was the one who had wielded the whip. Pain, Daniel was beginning to understand, sprang from as many sources, contradictory and clamorous, as beauty. "He likes hurting you," Daniel said, wiping the blood away with the cloth.
Gilles ground his teeth when Daniel touched the wound on his right shoulder that snaked around his ribcage to just below his heart. "No matter. Don't I like hearing you scream?"
"Different," Daniel said. "He wants to hurt you. Not pull pleasure out of bruises. Just make you bleed. He delights in it."
"He's a difficult creature," Gilles said. He was not replying to Daniel so much as restating what Daniel had already said. Repeating what he himself had said days earlier. As if agreement were all that mattered.
"You want him to," Daniel said. Slowly, he understood; the shape of comprehension firmed and sharpened in his mind. Sharp and bitter, understanding overtook him, pushed pity and worry out of its way. Or, better, swept up both pity and worry, transmuted them into fear. "You want it."
"Of course I do. Tie myself up, encourage the mortification. I keep under my body, and bring it into subjection." Gilles smiled then, gently, matching the careful patience of his voice, jarring against the pain tightening his eyes and streaming out the welts on his skin. "Forasmuch then as Christ hath suffered for us in the flesh, we are told to arm ourselves likewise with the same mind: For he that hath suffered in the flesh hath ceased from sin."
Ancient words, from troubled souls in devastating times, slipping from Gilles' lips with the authority of millennia.
Daniel shook his head. "Not spiritual. You want him to hurt. You wouldn't mind if he killed you."
Gilles did not reply. Instead, he turned his face away, closing his eyes. All is pain, Daniel thought, needing and desiring foment misery out of misery, generations of squalor.
Daniel did not want him to agree, nor did he want to Gilles to hide. However much he understood Gilles' need to scourge himself closer to death, he could not swallow that fact.
His mouth was dry, his throat closed against it, yet he did not know what to say.
He should have fully understood death and pain as the gates toward release. All illusion stems from attachment, as the great Tilopa sang.
Cut the root of a tree
And the leaves will wither;
Cut the root of your mind
And samsara falls.
Death could be, he knew - or had been taught - the step from illusion into clear light. Clear light, empty mind, the Spirit Gilles frequently spoke of - if ye be led of the Spirit, ye are not under the law - and intellect - with the mind I myself serve the law of God; but with the flesh the law of sin.
Tilopa's song resounded in his skull more forcefully and more sweetly than any music he spun out from the turntables. Overwhelming for that, drowning his own thoughts, light and wispy as they were: a gush of bright flower-water that swept over the shreds and hopes of his thought.
In Mahamudra all one's sins are burned; In Mahamudra one is released From the prison of this world. This is the Dharma's supreme torch. Those who disbelieve it Are fools who ever wallow In misery and sorrow.
Gilles stroked two fingers over Daniel's chin, then his mouth. "What is that?"
Daniel looked up. "I was singing, wasn't I?"
"You were. Lovely."
"Not really," Daniel said. He thought of the prison of the world, the world as prison. Inescapable except through death, through the final moment of powa, when no succeeding breath is taken.
Gilles had been in prison, a real one with bars and armed guards. He spoke of it lightly, as a vacation, during which he ate poor food but learned to play bocce. Difficult to imagine Gilles being captive anywhere, not with the quick, swordsmooth motion of his gestures and the intensity of his mind, flaring behind his eyes, spilling over his words.
Gilles looked at him steadily, green sparks among crisping leaves, the skin around his eyes infinitely, tenderly creased. He was so rarely still that Daniel held his breath so as not to disturb him. Looked at from a certain angle, everything was a prison, from the marrow on outward. Especially the skin, an envelope so fragile that escape could be had through enough lashes of the whip.
Thick with cream, Daniel's fingers skated over the topmost welt. Gilles' eyes did not leave his. "Looking with pretty ruth upon my pain?"
"No," Daniel said. Gilles sounded empty, as he had while Daniel helped him to the elevator, hollow as a lute or the air around a still gong. Words wrapped around nothing, echoing Daniel's own fear. "I just don't want him hurting you."
When Gilles blinked, his lashes were wet, tipped into points as fine as brush-tips, glistening brightly. "You never speak -" His hand curved around Daniel's neck, tugging him inexorably closer. "Such certainty there."
"You shouldn't hurt."
"No? And on your certainty and confidence, what do you suggest?" Gilles' thumb slid down the center of Daniel's throat, tapping the hollow over the windpipe. Its pressure recalled to Daniel the hot billows that opened within his chest while he watched Mick beat Gilles. Stoked higher with each crack and resulting squeal from Gilles, each curtain of sweat and blood sent flying outward, each twist of joy and pain to Gilles' face. "Hmmm?"
"Mortify, if you will," Daniel said, the words small and his voice hoarse. Gilles embraced him, torn skin on whole, hands in his hair, on his back. "Just don't -"
"You're disgusted." Gilles smiled against Daniel's shoulder before pulling back. "Yet you loved it. Fucked thin air for it. Dirty boy."
"Because you-" Daniel tried to look away. Failed. "I was-. Seeing you-"
"You loved it," Gilles said slowly, "because you hated it."
His tone was familiar, the care and pleasure of a teacher advising a diligent student. Daniel dropped the washcloth. "Another test?"
"No. Not a test. Call it an observation."
Daniel wrenched closed the taps and spread the cloth to dry over the lip of the basin. Small gestures, inverse to the confusion and fear billowing through him. "An observation?"
"You loved it. If my observation--which very seldom lies--by the heart's still rhetoric disclosed with eyes, deceive me not now, you, dear, are infected."
Because he got caught, Inez had said. Daniel remembered Gilles' face turning toward him, the unreadable torque of his features, both surprise and relief. Perhaps he looked to be caught. "You wanted me to see."
"Sweetheart, if I could, I would hide everything from you. Tell you fairy-stories, wrap you safely in iron, dress you in water."
"I want to see," Daniel said.
"Of course you do. That is both your genius and your bane. I seem to have corrupted you quite thoroughly. Infected you utterly."
Daniel knew Gilles was wrong, knew that this was no corruption, whatever Gilles or the monks of New Drepung would say. Sight was not corruption, nor was he so gullible to think it was revelation; it was simply itself, an unfurling bolt of images both profane and beautiful. He had seen much, watched fixedly, well before ever meeting Gilles.
Now, however, he had a glass with which to focus.
He had, in whatever indescribable manner, Gilles.
*
And yet there was nothing at all like enlightenment, no burst of clarity or angelic choir, to accompany such an epiphany. Daniel did not mind; he did not expect much, and had already well exceeded any reasonable ration of imagination and wishes.
He continued his study, continued watching Gilles, continued dancing with him on both marble floors and gritty sand, continued running errands in costumes both sacred and secular - brown hemp cassock and severely-cut tuxedo - continued working in his booth and returning Gilles' carefully predatory gaze across the multitude.
He continued his life.
Inez found him when he walked down to the fruit market on Pier Four. While he turned a starfruit in his hands, holding it up to the sun to see the seeds through its tender green skin, she stepped in front of him. Blocked the light with her dark hair, such that it flared russet and her eyes were invisible.
"Daniel."
Daniel moved sideways to find the light again. "Sister Inez," he said and swallowed. Gilles was to meet him shortly, and he did not want them meeting. "How are you?"
"A parambola," she said, lifting the fruit from his hand. "Five points, five joys our Mother had in her Son."
Daniel nodded. He knew nearly as many stories as any of the worshippers at Inez's church. "Annunciation, Nativity, Resurrection, Ascension, and Assumption."
Inez smiled widely and dipped her head. She was beautiful, bright as marble, and Daniel fought the urge to run. "The joy that gives me, Daniel, you have no idea. You must have returned to the fold -"
"I've read a lot," he said and chose a pineapple from the stall. Heavier, its hide prickly and uneven, and, he hoped, less prone to overinterpretation than the starfruit. "That's all."
Inez's smile vanished. "Daniel, you're not still-"
She reached for him and Daniel went still, thinking of rabbits caught in illegal traplines in the forest, of the alcoholics spilling out of alleys and doorways he saw on his errands. Her fingers, cool and soft, brushed over a bruise peeking from his collar.
"You're still with him," she said. No question, but statement as a trap. "He hurts you and you're still with him."
Gilles had sucked up the bruise that morning, while Daniel squirmed and gasped on his lap and Gilles wrapped his arms around Daniel's chest to hold him still.
"I'm fine," Daniel said. The heat and soreness of his skin made his eyes water and his groin ache pleasantly. "Not hurting. Believe me."
"Why should I?"
"I -" Daniel stopped and shrugged. He thought it was enough to ask her for her belief; he was wrong.
"You know what his fraternity says, of course," Inez said. "There are many wise men that have secret hearts but transparent countenances."
He didn't know what she meant; such a description fitted, Daniel thought, just about everyone he had ever known. "Sure," he said. "But that's -"
"Yet this would be done with a demure abasing of your eye as those Jesuits also say."
She was warning him, Daniel began to think, not against Gilles but his sect in general. Everything, if you believed as both Gilles and Inez did, everything in the world abased your eye. He saw no reason for it to be related to Gilles' brethren.
"Jesuits?"
Inez inclined her head and took his hand, drawing him close. Daniel felt his skin chill and tighten in her grasp. Her voice was even slower and softer than usual. "Your Gilles lies, as he was taught. He conceals, dissembles, equivocates. You know what equivocation is, don't you?"
"Equal speech," he guessed.
Inez ignored him. "Of course you don't, poor boy." She sounded genuinely sad and she smiled at him with great pity. "Equivocation is nothing else, but when a speech is partly uttered in words, and partly reserved in mind, by which reservation the sense of the proposition may be diverse."
"Everyone holds something back," Daniel said. That much he had learned, both at New Drepung and then here. In both places, honesty was praised and prized, but the surfaces of things, all the transparent countenances and vivid displays of emotion, slipped messily over secret hearts and abased eyes. "It's just - normal."
"Concealing the truth," Inez said and squeezed his wrist, "Is not normal. Your Gilles, in fact, maintains that it's no sin. That if he do but keep, or reserve, or understand his real meaning in his mind, though the words which he speaks be never so false, yet he tells no lie."
In one hand, the starfruit, in the other, Daniel. He wondered which felt better to her, more real. Daniel twisted his arm and pulled it from her grasp. "Gilles doesn't lie. Not to me."
"You know who this man is, then," Inez said, replacing the starfruit on its pile and folding her hands before her.
"I do."
She spoke smoothly, syrup over sugar, the corners of her lips twitching as if she were struggling not to smile. "He is, Daniel, more than you could dream. An open maintainer of mischief, a drunkard, a manqueller, a simoniac, a poisoner, a perjurer, an extortioner, and - but this, I'm sure you already know - an open buggerer."
Daniel remembered then how to move. He stepped sideways again, close to the edge of the pier, and said, "Your Church already expelled him. Already punished him, called him before a council -"
Inez followed his motion with her wide green eyes, tracking him in a long, unblinking sweep. "A council is not so much to be desired, boy, as would be all the multitude armed with stones to kill him as a common pestilence of all the world."
Her voice remained mild and sweet, her face lovely, and Daniel backed away, clutching the pineapple. Certainty cleaved through him, the sudden calm understanding that he did not have to speak to her. "I don't have anything to say to you."
"Of course you don't," Inez said. "Just remember this. All that's in the world, sensual lust, enticement for the eyes, pretentious life, is not from the Father. It's from your lover. It's from the world."
Of course it is, Daniel thought as he hurried away, through the throngs of shoppers, ducking his head. There wasn't enough air, too much salt and sweat, until he came to the sand. He loved the world; that was what Verona Beach had done to him.
Daniel waited at the foot of the pier. He found himself between a sausage-seller and a stooped Cuban man in vibrant guayabara rapidly folding paper into cranes, carp, wolves, and geese.
He bought one of each for Gilles, yellow and red and bright green, and strung them on a length of yarn from his pocket.
Menagerie and protective charm all at once, it twisted in the breeze, the indigo carp nipping the wolf's heels, the goose butting heads with the antelope.
Simply paper, folded so intricately as to be transformed.
*
On Daniel's next night off, although clouds scalloped and swept the sky and they had not yet eaten dinner, Gilles drew Daniel toward the wardrobe.
Smiling, he said, "Every man should put himself into triumph - some to dance, some to make bonfires, each man to what sport and revels his addiction leads him."
Gilles dressed him in fabrics nearly as soft as the water he wished for, moonblues glinting with silver and white linen pants. "You should be arrayed in fine linen, clean and white," he said, stooping to drag the trousers up Daniel's legs. He himself wore dark purples, like foreign fruits, and blacks that picked out the russet of his tan.
They were to go dancing, on the beach, under an awning woven with tiny lights. On Bohemia, one of the islands just off the coast, all rocks and hobos and strange beasts. The bridge to the island was hardly wider than Gilles' car, strung like a necklace between promontory rocks, though Gilles drove at his usual reckless speed, taking the sudden corners without blinking.
The sky rioted with curtains and fleets of clouds, gunbarrel-dark, obscuring the moon, smearing its light, scudding both fast and slow through the air.
Gilles parked in a tiny lot before shingled hut and pulled Daniel close, combing out his hair and kissing him. The night was oddly cold, but Gilles' mouth was warm and his hands sure.
"Don't go too far inland," Gilles said, guiding Daniel on the rocky path toward the beach, his voice full of laughter, teasing and warning all at once. "This place is famous for the creatures of prey that keep upon it."
"Is it?" Daniel asked, smiling, grasping Gilles' hand. "Wolves and bears?"
"Oh, yes," Gilles said, laughing, pushing him forward. "Hideous creatures, goblins swift as frenzy's thoughts."
Near the rocks, before they reached the beach and the party, Gilles pulled Daniel back against his chest, circling him in his arms, whispering in his ear. "This most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave overhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, darling, this is nothing. Congregation of shadows and old ash compared to you."
Daniel shivered in the cold damp breeze off the water. "What am I?"
"You're plumed like estridges that wing the wind, baited like eagles having lately bathed, glittering in golden coats, like images, as full of spirit as the month of May, and gorgeous as the sun at midsummer," Gilles said, drawing his tongue around Daniel's neck, smoothing out his blue shirt with his palms. "You are wanton as youthful goats, wild as young bulls, chaste as orphaned cygnets. Fierce as the yearling wolf."
Images in words, like the tattoos spread beneath Gilles' skin, like the comic books Daniel read when he could not sleep, air twisted into sound as light twisted to images.
"Nature teaches beasts to know their friends," Daniel said, twisting, pulling Gilles down to his knees so they sank a little on the sand.
Gilles kissed him, and his mouth on Daniel's chilled skin was hot and slick as glass being blown. "So who does the wolf love?"
Pressed this close to Gilles, face to knees, Daniel saw only stretches of autumngold skin and the dark flash of Gilles' eyes.
Daniel kissed back hungrily, fingers closing in Gilles' shirt, tugging it up, baring skin and pinching as Gilles' tongue plunged between his teeth. Such hunger was inexplicable, untraceable, springing not just from proximity to Gilles and his touch, but from the air around both of them, driving Daniel desperately. Moans sank between them, swallowed, and Daniel kissed harder. The first way in, the truest way, into Gilles.
Gilles turned Daniel around, facing the distant tent and dancers, pushing him onto his hands and kissing down Daniel's bared back.
"Hmm, dearheart? Who does the wolf love?"
Breathless, rocking forward into the half-forgiving sand, Daniel looked over his shoulder. Gilles, purple, part of the night, gazed back at him. Daniel drew a shaky breath and thrust back against Gilles. "The lamb."
"Yes," Gilles whispered, palm on the small of Daniel's back, lips above his parted buttocks, "to devour him."
Daniel rocked backward against the sliding heat of Gilles' mouth, and moaned into the teasing, endless kiss, his fists curled into sand, helpless and hungry. He heard the surf, murmuring in time with Gilles' eager kiss and his own stuttering breaths, and the sky was shot through with impossible streamers, comets of his own making, lemonyellow and bright, painful green. Heat that corkscrewed, inside and outside, spreading in entwined circles through him.
Everything stilled, suddenly, when Gilles' mouth pulled away. Daniel twisted, cold wind tearing at his skin, and looked back, about to beg, when Gilles grasped him by his thighs and pulled him back.
"To devour? Or to marry him, to make two in -" Gilles pushed forward, rough and hard so that Daniel fell forward, sand in his mouth, choking his groans. Gritty, concentrated heat now, always too large, too much, yet never enough. "- one flesh. Let us be glad and rejoice -"
Grunting, face tight with heat and gorgeous pain, Daniel bore down, shoving back. Gilles' voice rose to a shout, exclamation and promise scissoring together as he thrust in deep and pulled out, shallowly, until Daniel twisted the other way, pleading and tightening, trapping Gilles, then tightening more. Gilles groaned, high as a choir, circling one hand around Daniel's cock, pulling it in lunatic time with the rocking thrusts, and sang throatily. "Give honor to him, to you, for the marriage of the lamb is come -"
So much heat, the surf and Gilles' hand and his cock, bearing deeper, scraping up embers that flew and whirled before Daniel's eyes. Daniel bucked forward, a shred of the party catching his eye.
Dancing shadows, winding in the night, spangled with the tiny lights. Leering faces, fluttering hands, stamping feet.
Daniel saw it all from afar, dim beyond the brilliance Gilles pushed him full of, stuffed him to bursting until his pores were about to widen and burst.
"Like an animal," Gilles said, bent over Daniel, breath thundering over his shoulder, into his ear. "Take you, make of us one, flesh and sin, and you cleanse me with holy blood and love -"
He thrust harder, breath wheezing, sweat spattering Daniel's cheek, and in the furnace embracing Daniel, Daniel was a single scrap, central yet unconsumed.
"More, fucking more -" Daniel gasped, impossibly swallowed by hunger.
"Yes, more, evermore -" Hand on Daniel's hip, Gilles wrenched him back as he pushed deeper and then there were lights blazing in concentric, whirling spirals and no air that did not flame within Daniel's ribs. "Give you everything, offer everything to you -"
Daniel shook apart, his spine bowing, dipping in a torrential blaze, and he came into Gilles' hand, against his own belly and the disturbed sand. Trembling, he collapsed, forehead burrowing in the sand, and only Gilles' arm held him up at the waist. The shudders that clenched through Daniel echoed, reverberating more loudly, in Gilles' curses and the clap of the surf, and Gilles pushed in more pleasure, brighter light, blinding and deafening, until he, too, fell, clasping Daniel and rolling him over.
Something just birthed, just tossed ashore from stormridden seas, Daniel drew wet, shallow breaths and clutched at Gilles' arms.
Gilles kissed Daniel's face with dry lips and raucous breath.
Later, he said, "Lamb and flesh of mine, this is the offering. All I have for you."
Daniel kissed the base of Gilles' throat and pushed the sweaty hair out of his eyes. "Take you all. Give you anything, all I have."
Gilles' eyes closed, and the shadows deepened over his face. "Don't. No, dearheart. Don't say that."
Sand ground into his skin, his mouth, the afterfires dulling down, leaving him open and yearning, Daniel cupped his palm around Gilles' skull and drew him in close. "Yes. Already said that."
Gilles' forehead rested against his for half a moment, then another. Then he was pulling himself away, stumbling to his feet, wiping his mouth and doing up his trousers.
Wildhaired, shadoweyed, Gilles said, "No."
One syllable, hard, its facets sharp against the cold breeze. Daniel struggled up to his knees, reaching for Gilles' hand; if he spoke wrongly, he could always touch, show what he had meant to say.
Gilles slapped Daniel's hand away. "Despise me, when I break this oath of mine -"
"Just mean to -" Daniel raised his hand again. "Gilles, please. Just to comfort -"
"All strange and terrible events are welcome," Gilles said, raking both hands through his hair and looking everywhere - sky, sea, party - but at Daniel. "But comfort I despise. And love. You and your -"
Daniel's hand trembled in mid-air, pale and insubstantial in the dark; sandgrains bit at his skin and Gilles' voice struck welts across his face. Taking one breath, blinking once, Daniel folded his arms over his chest.
This was another Gilles, the cruel and heartless one everyone warned him against. Cunning and equivocating, speaking only half the truth.
Daniel lifted his chin. "Go, then."
Gilles caressed Daniel's head, fingertips in his hair. "I have long dreamed of such a kind of love." Thumb over Daniel's brows, around one eye-socket. "So beauty-swelled, so young, and so profane." Cold fingers, describing Daniel's skull, his death-mask. They rapped three times on Daniel's temple before withdrawing. "But, being awakened, I do despise my dream."
Gilles turned, still stumbling, and ran. Not towards the tent, but away, into the rocks.
Daniel watched him go.
The sky glowed like metal.
He pulled his shirt more tightly around him.
*
The party boomed and shook the beach. Daniel turned his back on it and drew his knees to his chest, resting his cheek on his knees, staring at the damp lichens texturing the darkness around him.
He could hardly approach the party now. He could not ask someone for a ride home, nor could he walk the narrow bridge without certainly being run over.
As soon as they occurred to him, the possibilities, both walking and asking, sank quickly in a thick haze of panic. He could not, he believed, speak, nor could he be seen. Not yet, not like this, disheveled, stained, spattered with sand, tears, and come.
He needed to bathe. He needed to get away from this place.
Daniel stripped off his ruined shirt and stood, pain throbbing dully in the center of his back, to untie his shoes and pull off his pants. The pants, with their keyring clipped to one empty belt-loop, he tied around his waist, the shoes around his neck.
Everything else, he left behind.
The skin of the water shone, threaded with the silver underbellies of the clouds and reflections from Verona Beach, which glittered, like knotted strands of cheap Christmas lights. The L'Amour Cola sign throbbed red fire just beyond the huge ferris wheel, The Sovereign Eye, flattering the black water with spinning gilded flecks.
Not so far; he'd swum father many times. The water twined him in cold currents as Daniel pushed ahead, toward the lights, away from the beastly island.
He did not look back; its crags and battered, twisted pines he already knew better than most of the city, the sputter and flash of bonfires and cruelty already sunken into his memory.
Dolphins no longer swam these inlets, poisoned by decades of sewage-dumping and discharge of fuel oil from the freighters that arrived in port at all hours. But Daniel felt like a dolphin, small and slick, moving with the water, his burdens streaming out behind him, the cold of the air penetrating him down to the marrow, only to vanish in the swirling warmth of the confused currents.
Swimming could be meditation, just like walking, just like folding up lotus-tight. Daniel's skin was his own, his mind empty except for the sign's glimmer. No emotion, no filth any longer. If he thought of Gilles, and Gilles' face kept bobbing up, contorted with pain and equivocation, the thoughts dispersed like the slices of the moon on the water ahead of him.
As he neared the shore, he swam like a frog to save his arms' strength, keeping his head above water, gulping down air like insects, his eyes on the L'Amour sign.
He slept on the beach when he landed, a thin strip of dirty sand sheltered from the sun by the backside of an old ammunitions factory. He spread out his pants next to him like an amputated ghost to dry.
He dreamt of fireworks and elaborate silver-and-coal choreography and howling beasts.
*
His pants were still damp, redolent with salt and rot, when Daniel woke and pulled them on. His shoes squished as he hiked up the beach and swung over the guardrail to the Mitylene Road.
Mid-morning, and the commuters still whizzed by, trapped in their metal boxes, doing their makeup, singing with the radio, gulping their coffee. If he followed the road westward, he would come to the center of the city and then work his way through the side-streets to Gilles' loft.
He had nowhere else to go, and his books were there.
Daniel preferred swimming to picking his way along the narrow, pebbled pedestrian walkway, buffeted by the exhaust from trucks and the screech of horns. He kept his arms wrapped around his chest, knowing he would burn anyway, and measured the distance in squishes of his soles.
A black car, boxy and ridiculously long, nearly took out the guardrail as it swerved to a stop in front of him. Daniel jumped back, ducking his head against the rocks thrown up.
"Danny!"
He knew Mercutio from the various clubs, from snooker shot at the Globe, knew him to smile and stride forward to grasp his hand.
Mercutio hauled him close, up against the hot metal of his car, embracing him awkwardly through the window.
"Morning constitutional?" he asked and Daniel nodded. Mercutio's hair danced in hundreds of twisted hanks, as enthusiastic as his smile. "Worthy lad, you'll burn. Your exercise has been too violent for this time of day. Come, get in."
Daniel glanced into the car; a blond man was sprawled in the back seat, one hand cupped against his groin, the other flung over his face.
"It's all right," Mercutio said, laughing. "Ignore him."
Despite his sleep, Daniel was tired and he found it impossible to refuse. He slid into the car and Mercutio peeled away, toward the city, weaving in and out of traffic as if the rest of the world were just tin obstacles in a child's maze.
"You've been to the sea?" Mercutio asked, his hand on Daniel's thigh, his nose wrinkling. "How it chafes, how it rages, how it takes up the shore!"
"Swimming from -" Daniel did not say whence, but stopped and nodded.
"Where to, dolphin my boy?" Mercutio asked when traffic slowed. He had his arm slung around Daniel's shoulders.
"Mistress Quickly's!" the man in the back seat croaked.
"No, no." Mercutio twisted around and smacked the man's thigh. "Come, I am for no more bawdy-houses. Shall we go hear the vestals sing? Daniel?"
Mercutio's arm was warm and heavy, and his skin smelled like cocoa butter and sandalwood. When he smiled at Daniel, his eyes were the brown of leaves at the bottom of a well, sunken for years, pierced by sunlight.
Daniel did not want to look away. He knew, however, that this loneliness was no love for Mercutio, kind and handsome as he was, but simply the absence of Gilles.
"I-I need to get home," Daniel said.
Mercutio shrugged and squeezed his shoulder. "I'll do any thing now that is virtuous," he said and kissed Daniel quickly, tasting as sweet as lilacs and dew, as if acknowledging Daniel's unspoken decision, "But I am out of the road of rutting forever."
His friend laughed uproariously and kicked both feet against the back of Mercutio's seat.
"You and the ghostly father?" Mercutio asked as Daniel directed him to the loft. "He's the best for dreams and slumbers, your priest. Tell him I could use a refill, in fact."
Daniel curled his fists, ready to hear another round of warnings, but Mercutio just nodded and grinned.
"Impressive, boy," he said, popping the lock. He kissed Daniel again, more roughly, and swatted his ass as Daniel climbed out of the car. "Hold onto him. He's sure to take you - well, places, at the least."
The motor laughed, nearly as loud as the two men, as the car pulled away.
Daniel crept into the silent building.
*
Everywhere he looked, he found empty space. Shadows were the most substantial occupants of each floor and Daniel tracked each one down, alert for any sign of Gilles.
In the loft, he held himself tight and small, ready to turn at any moment and see Gilles. In the bathroom, on the roof, even in the depths of the wardrobe.
Daniel searched, mindlessly, carefully, and found nothing.
Nothing had changed, but the life was gone from this place.
Through the windows, the breeze blew in scraps of revelry, fumes and cooking-smells, and Daniel waited.
He was patient and time, supposedly, meant nothing.
But he could not sleep; he passed out, on the floor, in a chair, never on the bed, but he did not sleep.
Always, he listened for Gilles.
Two days passed in silence. No enlightenment, only patience and loneliness.
*
He still had to work, however.
Daniel wove through the crowd, going up on tiptoe, sliding sideways, dancing his way back toward the booth. The lights spun, and at times, entire moments, the crowd seemed frozen - arms crooked over their heads, mouths open in eternal yells, hips cocked and feet raised - then melted back to motion.
Niches that might have held statues or relics were full now with bodies, black-indigo-purple, and pale sliding skin. Hair rippled, lifted in the currents of song, then fell.
Bodies parted and a cap of gold and thin legs wrapped in red leather brightened into focus before him. Daniel's mouth opened, about to say her name - Joan - when her head fell back, exposing her tan throat and small breasts in a red bra, and she kicked out one red leg, wrapping it tightly around someone's thighs.
Joan, dancing, groping. Around a taller woman, stormdark in black, gray, and white, willowy and writhing up against Joan, one sharp white hand on her back, the other on Joan's throat. Black hair, glowing skin, curve of one architecturally perfect brow. Inez.
Inez, who was quiet, sharp, smelled like hothouse-flowers and told Daniel what to do.
Inez, who was kissing Joan now, digging bonewhite fingers into the redleather hip, dragging a scarlet tongue down Joan's golden throat and rocking a black knee between Joan's red thighs until Joan thrashed. Wildly, out of time, Joan spun and dipped past the rhythm of the music.
Daniel pushed forward and away.
Perhaps it was not Inez; perhaps it was her twin, a double just as beautiful but stuffed with all the love and passion Inez herself had forsworn.
Split, like some impossible dialectic, the one that Gilles somehow managed to live through and for, the division of body and spirit.
Ringing through the music then, Daniel heard Gilles, heard him laughing as they tumbled across the bed, heard him shout as he tickled and thrust, there's another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is in my members.
Bodies and song, pulsating with the spinning lights and splashing colors, pushed him to the end of the dancefloor.
Breathless, synaesthetic waves roiling through him, Daniel grasped the rungs of the ladder to his booth and felt his knees buckle.
*
He had lived alone before, of course. Before he met Gilles, and since; there had been nights, sometimes several, when Gilles travelled and Daniel slept alone.
And it had only been a few days.
Silent and empty days.
Daniel knew that he had done nothing wrong, had simply spoken the truth. No equivocation for him; his secret heart was as vivid and visible as any fireworks display. The truth had scared away Gilles, frightened him deep into the dark.
Because he could not sleep, Daniel missed his dreams.
He set up the smaller projector and opened reel after reel of home movies, the strips of film as wide as his thumb and no wider. Movies of Gilles posing and aping at the beach, laughing, beckoning Daniel closer; moves of Daniel himself in the tumult of the bed, naked, touching himself according to Gilles' urgent directions; movies of Gilles and Daniel together, wrestling, rolling in and out of frame, limbs flailing.
Garish colors, so bright it was as if everything - sky, skin, foliage and bedding - was illuminated from within as well as without.
Silent movies, overwhelmingly bright. No words here, nothing that could be concealed, only patches of color in constant motion.
Daniel's favorite movie, however, was almost static. It showed Gilles just out of the bath, leaning against the partition with a white towel wrapped low on his waist. He smiled slowly, knowingly, as he noticed Daniel with the camera at his eye, and scrubbed his hand through his dark, slick hair. Scrubbed it into disordered, shining spikes.
All of Gilles there, broad shoulders and long, tapering chest alive with inked ciphers. Lean muscles, golden skin, long arms, all glittering with droplets of water. The towel dipped over his hipbones, brilliant and blank against his skin, dropping to his shins.
Daniel watched this movie again and again. The rise of Gilles' hand, the steady widening of his grin, amused and confident. Squinting eyes, lazy scratching of his belly.
He stripped off his own clothes and stood in front of the projector. Opened his arms to the light. Colors spun in a thick rope until they hit his skin and broke apart, became images. He made himself a screen.
Thus he held Gilles closer than he ever had, right against his skin with no obstruction.
This was everything and nothing, bathing in vivid motes of light arranging themselves into Gilles. Something like Gilles. Slippery, but the film could be threaded again, never had to end.
*
Daniel kept Gilles' absence a secret. Who would he have told? He saw Mercutio the same night he came across Joan entwined with Inez, and told him that everything was all right.
He protected his loneliness. He didn't know where Gilles was, if he was safe or lost, happy to be away or desperate to return, exiled or travelling, but Daniel guarded the absence.
The third night that Gilles was gone, Daniel walked down the shore past the amusement park and across the footbridge to the Gardens to meet Mercutio.
He had told Daniel to meet him in the greenhouse, entering from the side, and Daniel arrived early.
The zoo animals were invisible in their dark cages, the paths to the greenhouse twisty and overgrown.
The greenhouse crouched at the rear of the park, an intricate wrought-iron dome and bony buttresses supporting pane after pane of milky glass. Like an invisible cathedral, a preliminary and careful blueprint done in black ink on soft paper, for a faith and congregation that had never caught hold. It was both Greek temple and medieval church, vaulted and soaring over the dark park. Daniel stood beside a thick-trunked oak and craned his neck to see it all.
To his eyes, it was old, obsolete, but the building itself puffed up with its own importance and originality, so where his gaze met the glass an antiquated novelty arose. A concretized, wrought mirage, fata morgana trapped in unanticipated glass and premature iron.
Inside, the plants stooped and ramified, massive prehistoric ferns, spun yew trees and overhanging monkey-puzzle trees. So much vegetation, alien and half-animal in the gloom. He wondered about the name Green House, how houses were to shelter the needy, both people and gods, but this place was both rich and kind enough to shelter and tend to plants.
Mercutio never appeared.
Daniel waited on the shallow marble step, just in front of the side door, breathing in the lush loamy air and watching the lozenges of nacreous light move over the hedge abutting the greenhouse. He toyed with a long blade of grass. Warm and broken in his palms, it eventually bent like a ribbon or strand of hair, perfectly pliable, and he wound it three times around his wrist.
Here where he waited, the old garden wall was evident, half broken down, overgrown with hedged shrubs and, twisting among their branches, grapevines. Although the sea was well behind him, at least half a mile away, Daniel heard water gently moving. Ahead of him, beyond the wall.
He grasped one of the thickest vines and pulled himself up and over the wall. Releasing the vine, he landed on his hands and knees in the midst of something like a maze. The path was worn marble, split by grasses and flowers, the walls composed of thick, glossy-leaved shrubs, and it all curved around gentle corners toward the madrigal whisper of the water.
At the center of the old garden, the pool was shaped like a star, full of black and shining water, bordered with softly glowing limestone. A low fountain in the middle of the pool continually spilled fresh water.
Inside, Daniel felt quiet, as untroubled as the water, for the first time since leaving Bohemia. The searing ache around Gilles' absence still burned, but as he crouched, then sat, at the edge of the pool and dipped his feet in the water, the pain became memorial. He missed Gilles terribly and wished that he could see this place.
Underwater, his feet glimmered, seeming very far away and insubstantial, the skin nearly glaucous.
Daniel bent at the waist and watched them hang there, suspended like fish, and breathed in the scent of fresh water.
He heard someone approach behind him; thinking it was Mercutio, he didn't turn, but said quietly, "You're late."
"Am I?" Joan asked and dropped down beside him, shucking off her boots. "Didn't know that."
Daniel kicked his feet back and forth and smiled. "Sorry. Thought you were someone else."
"I'll say," Joan said, slipping her arm around Daniel's waist and pulling herself closer. "Remote spot you've got here, hon. Quite the curious-knotted garden, all unweeded. Things rank and gross in nature possess it."
Daniel glanced around at the flat water and looming hedges, then down at the cuts and welts on his hand from the vine and fall. He smiled at her. "I kind of like it."
Joan tipped her head against his shoulder. "Yeah, me too."
They sat together, silently, watching the underbellies of clouds drift over the water and disappear into the shrubbery. Daniel wondered, but did not ask, what brought Joan here. Silence, it seemed, just as it had brought him.
Sighing and stretching - she was never still for long - Joan dipped her toes into the pool's dark water. "How's he treating you?"
"Well," Daniel said. "He's - was very kind."
She laughed and he felt himself smile. "That's a new one."
"He was cruel to you?" Tenses of verbs captured memory, made Gilles a figure of the past, just as remote as Tilopa or Achilles. Daniel straightened his spine and stretched out his hands against the sadness of that thought.
"No, he -" She shook her head, pushing back the long lock of hair. "He's a good-. He's all right."
"But not good?"
Joan sighed and pulled him closer. "I don't think like that any more. Used to, but it fucked me up. Take my advice and don't even bother trying."
So many layers, sheets of brilliant color shifting and sliding together. The skin of the world, sloughed off in radiant fragments, bits whirling and jangling. He didn't trust Gilles, never had, but he could not deny his kindness, either. Inez warned him to stay away from evil and avoid sins of the flesh, then appeared dancing with Joan.
Daniel wished for a moment that he could think as Gilles did, through structures marble-fast and judgments that clarified matter and boiled away contradiction.
Branches snapped and creaked, the pebbles on the path ground together, and both Daniel and Joan twisted at the waist to see who approached.
"Daniel," Mick said, crossing his arms. "There you are. Looked all the fuck over for you."
"Hey," Daniel said. "Right here."
"Supposed to take you home -" Mick grabbed his arm and pulled Daniel to his feet.
Daniel curled his toes and did not move. "I'm fine here."
Joan stepped between them, although Mick did not release Daniel's wrist. "Leave him be."
Mick grinned. "Hey, babe. Just running an errand. Don't get huffy."
"Fuck off," Joan said. "Kid's okay here."
"Following orders."
Joan blew the lock of hair from her eyes and tilted her head. "Since when?"
"Old man's indisposed, you know that. Got to get this pretty little thing safely home."
So Mick had seen Gilles, and Daniel bit his tongue, tasting hope like flowers, about to ask where Gilles was. Until he thought that Mick was as much a liar as anyone here. Mick would say anything, do anything, to get his way.
"Fuck. Off," Joan said again. "Just crawl back under your rock." She took another step forward, hand on her hip, pushing back her jacket and revealing a dark wooden stake, mahogany or rosewood.
Mick dropped Daniel's arm - red bars on his skin, pulsing in time with his heart, where Mick's fingers had been - and shook his head. "On your head if anything happens to him."
Joan laughed. "I can live with that."
Mick leaned in and Daniel wrapped his arms around his waist reflectively. But Mick just smirked as he stroked the curve of Joan's cheek. :Taking him back to your nun? I'd pay to see that. Bet he'd like it, nice fish sandwich like that. Blush real pretty."
Raising her tiny white hand, Joan shoved Mick backward.
"Going, Christ -" he muttered, raising his hands, twisting, stumbling back through the foliage.
Turning, Daniel rubbed his arm and stared at the still black water.
"Guess now you bitch me out for rescuing you, right?" Joan said, sitting on the corner of a low marble bench and tapping out a cigarette.
"No," Daniel said. He swayed a little as cold air and worry crept inexorably back around him.
The match flared, orange and scarlet, as Joan sucked on her cigarette. "Good, 'cause I didn't." She tossed the match toward Daniel, and it died on its arc. "Rescue you. Just like to piss him off."
"Thank you," Daniel said. "Regardless."
"Such an asshole -" Joan offered her cigarette and Daniel shook his head. If he stood much longer, he was sure, he would crumple to his knees, so Daniel took the other corner of the bench and slid his wet feet, grass clinging to him, into his shoes. "Him, not you, I mean."
"Yeah," Daniel said. "I - I really don't like him."
"Smart kid." Joan exhaled a dragonstream of smoke and leaned back against the hedge. "Such a prick. He'll court you, kiss you, say he loves you. Then he fucks you once and he's gone."
She was talking about Mick, but Daniel uncrossed his arms and looked down at his hands, thinking of Gilles. He didn't know what to say, and the thought that Gilles and Mick might be in any sense similar sickened him, writhed sourly in the pit of his stomach.
Joan smoked silently, sending blue smoke against the dark sky, and the soft lap of the water against the marble sides of the pool was the loudest sound.
"Full moon," Daniel said, as clouds parted against Joan's smoke.
"C'mon, kiddo." Joan stood, pulling Daniel to his feet. "Let's get you home."
They wove through the dark garden, brambles snagging fabric and scraping their bare arms, hand in hand. Joan was nearly exactly his height; Daniel had forgotten that, had remembered her as much larger.
Against the broken shells and pebbles of the parking lot, her motorcycle gleamed smooth and alien. Bright silver, even in the dead of night; scrolling red letters like flames picked out its name - The Scythe - over the gas tank.
"Got it off an old lady," Joan said, handing Daniel a helmet and helping onto the motorcycle.
"Inez?" He buckled the helmet and Joan slid in behind him, reaching through his armpits to grasp the handlebars.
Joan laughed as she kick-started the motor. "No -" she yelled, spinning the motorcycle around and roaring toward the highway. "But that would be fucking *awesome*."
They poured like light through the night, towards the shore, swooping around corners and slicing off oncoming traffic. The wind battered at Daniel's face and swept through his body until he felt almost as he did when a moment or two from climax: both joyful and terrified, ecstatic in every possible sense. Joan pressed against him, pushing him forward, molding her body to his.
Sooner than his pounding heart and flying skin would have liked, they sluiced up the street backended by Gilles' warehouse and Joan turned the bike to a grinding, shuddering stop. She wrapped her arms around Daniel's waist, not letting him rise, and he twisted to see her.
"Stay safe," she whispered, just in front of his lips, before kissing him and slapping him away.
Daniel staggered awkwardly off the motorcycle, his limbs windblown and hollow, and tried to speak. But Joan was already gunning the motor and pushing away.
Inside the elevator, he slid to the floor, grasping the bars of the grille, and when it arrived at the top floor, he had to pull himself up through a wave of nausea and exhaustion to his feet. He stumbled into the loft, wind shrieking in his ears, and collapsed on the bed.
Maybe he would sleep tonight.