Sacrament (20 page)

The following day, inspired by the conversation with Adrianna, he pushed his physiotherapy harder than his
body was ready for, and ended up feeling worse than he'd felt since coming out of the coma. Koppelman
prescribed pain-killers, and they were powerful enough to induce a pleasant lightheadedness, in which state he
made his promised call to Patrick. It was not Patrick who answered the phone, but Jack Fisher, a black guy
who'd been in and out of Patrick's circle for the last half decade. An ex-dancer, if Will's memory served. Lean,
longlimbed, and fiercely bright. He sounded weary, but welcomed Will's call.

'I know he wants to talk to you, but he's asleep right now.'

'That's okay, Jack. I'll call another day. How's he doing?'

'He's getting over a bout of pneumonia,' Fisher replied. 'But he's doing better. Getting about a bit, you know. I
heard you had a bad time.'

'I'm mending,' Will said. Flying, more like. The pain-killers had by now induced a more than mild euphoria. He
closed his eyes, picturing the man at the other end of the line. 'I'm going to be there in a couple of weeks.
Maybe we can have a beer.'

'Sure,' Jack said, sounding a little perplexed at the invitation. 'We can do that.'

'Are you looking after Patrick right now?'

'No, I'm just visiting. You know Patrick. He likes having people around. And I give a great foot massage. You
know what? I hear Patrick calling. I'll take the phone through to him. It was good talking to you, bro. Give me
the nod when you're back in town. Hey, Patrick? Guess what?' Will heard a muffled exchange. Then Jack was
back on the line. 'Here he is, bro.'

The phone was handed over, and Patrick said:

'Will? Is this really you?'

'It's really me.'

'Jesus. That's so weird. I was sitting by the window, having a siesta and I swear I was dreaming about you.'

'Were we having fun?'

'We weren't doing much of anything. You were just here ... in the room with me. And I liked that.'

'Well I'll be there in the flesh soon enough. I was just telling Jack, I'm getting back on my feet.'

'I read all the articles about what happened. My mother kept clipping them for me and sending them down.

Never trust a polar bear, eh?'

'She couldn't help herself,' Will said. 'So how are you doing?'

'Hanging in there. I lost a lot of weight, but I'm putting it back on again, bit by bit. It's hard though, you know.
Sometimes I get so tired and I think: this is just too much trouble.'

'Don't even think about it.'

'That's all I can do right now is think. Sleep and think. When are you here?'

'Soon.'

'Make it sooner. We'll have a party. Like the old days. See who's still around...'

'We're still around, Patrick,' Will replied, the sorrow that was barely buried in their exchange turning his
pain-killer high into something dreamily elegiac. They were in a world of endings; of early and unexpected
goodbyes; not so unlike the time from which he'd woken. He felt a tightness in his chest and suddenly feared
tears. 'I'd better be going,' he said, not wanting to upset Patrick. 'I'll check in again before I arrive.'
Patrick wasn't going to let him off so quickly. 'You are up for a party?' he said.

'Sure...'

'Good. Then I'll get planning. It's good to have things to look forward to.'

'Always,' Will said, his throat so full he couldn't put a longer reply together.

'Okay, I'll let you go, buddy,' Patrick replied. 'Thanks for calling. It must have been that siesta, right?'
'Must have.'

There was a silence then, and Will realized that Patrick had sensed the suppressed tears in his voice.

'It's all right,' Patrick said softly. 'The fact that we're talking makes it all right. See you soon.'

Then he was gone, leaving Will listening to the buzz of the empty line. He let the receiver slip from his ear,
his body so suddenly and completely overcome by tears he had no control over his limbs. It felt good, in its
cleansing way. He sat there for ten, maybe fifteen minutes, sobbing like a child; catching his breath, thinking it
was over, only to have another wave of weeping follow. He wasn't just crying for Patrick, or for that remark
about seeing who was still around to invite to the party. He was crying for himself; for the boy he'd met again in
his coma, the Will who was still inside him somewhere, wandering.

The skies that boy had seen were there too, and the fells and the fox, filed away in his memory. What a conundrum that was: that in this age of extinctions, some of which he'd chosen to document, his memory should have penned a book of his days so perfect that all he had to do was dream and they were conjured as though they'd never slipped by; as though - did he dare believe this? - the passing of things, of days and beasts and men he'd loved, was just a cruel illusion, and memory a clue to its unmasking.

The next day he was, if anything, harder on himself than he'd been the day before. The fox was right. There was
work to do out in the world people to see, mysteries to solve - and the sooner he had bullied his body into shape,
the sooner he'd be on his way.

In a short time, his tenacity started to show results. Day by day, session by session, his limbs strengthened and
his stamina increased; he began to feel restored and rejuvenated. In spite of Koppelman's gentle mockery he
sent out for a selection of homeopathic medicines to supplement his diet, and was sure they were in no small
part responsible for the speed of his recovery. Koppelman had to admit he hadn't seen anything quite like it.
Within ten days Will was making plans for his trip back to San Francisco. A call to Adrianna, asking her to
open up the Sanchez Street house and air it out (which she'd in fact already done); a call to his editor in New
York, telling her of his imminent change of location, and of course a second call to Patrick. This time the
prodigal Rafael answered, returned and apparently forgiven. No, Patrick wasn't at home, he told Will, he was at
the hospital, having his blood checked. He'd be back later, but Rafael didn't know when. He'd just take a
message and pass it along. Make sure it gets to him, Will said, to which Rafael curtly replied: 'I'm not stupid,'
and slammed the phone down.

'You've made a remarkable recovery, but you're still going to need to be kind to yourself.' This was
Koppelman's farewell speech. 'No trip to the Antarctic in the next few months. No standing up to your neck in
swampwater.'

'What am I going to do for fun?' Will quipped.

'Contemplate how lucky you are,' Koppelman said. 'Oh ... by the way ... my sister-in-law-'

'Laura.'

Koppelman beamed. 'You remembered? I brought her book for you to sign.' He rummaged in the bag he'd
brought with him. Out came a copy of Boundaries. 'I had a look through it last night,' he said. 'Grim stuff.'

'Oh it's got a lot worse since then,' Will said, taking the pen from

Koppelman's breast pocket, and relieving him of the book. 'There's a couple of species in here lost the fight.'

'They're extinct?'

'As the dodo.' He opened the book to the title page, and scrawled an inscription.

'What the hell does that say?'

'Far Laura. Best wishes.'

'And that scrawl underneath's your signature?'

'Yep.'

'Just so I know what to tell her.'

He left two days later. There were no direct flights to San Francisco, so he was obliged to change planes in
Chicago. It was at most a minor inconvenience, and he was so happy to be back in the stream of people that the
drudge of getting through O'Hare became positively pleasurable. By late afternoon he was in the plane that
would carry him west, and seated by the window, ordered a whisky in celebration. He hadn't had any alcohol in
several months, and it went straight to his head. Pleasantly happy, he let sleep overtake him, as the sky ahead
darkened.

By the time he awoke the day had long gone, and the lights of the city by the Bay were glittering ahead.

i

San Francisco had not been Will's first port of call when he'd come to America. That honour had fallen to
Boston, where he had gone at the age of nineteen, having decided that whatever he was yearning for he'd never
find it in England. He didn't find it in Boston either. But during the fourteen months he lived there a new Will
emerged, falteringly at first, then with fearless abandon. He had known his sexual preferences long before he
left England. He'd even acted upon his desires on a few occasions, though never in a state of complete sobriety.
In Boston, however, he learned to be happily queer, reinventing himself after his own idiosyncratic mode. He
wasn't a corn-fed American beauty, he wasn't a plaid-shined macho man, he wasn't a style queen, he wasn't a
leather boy. He was his own peculiar creature, desired and pursued for that very reason. Qualities that would
have gone unnoticed in a bar in Manchester (some of them obvious, like his accent, some so subtle he couldn't
have named them) were here rare and coveted. He learned the nature of his advantage quickly, and exploited it
shamelessly. Eschewing the uniform of the day (sneakers, tight jeans, white T-shins) he dressed like the
impoverished English lad he was, and it worked like a charm. He seldom went back to an empty bed, unless he
wished to do so; and in a few months had gone through three love-affairs, two of which he'd concluded. The last
had been his first and bitterest taste of unreciprocated love. The object was one Laurence Mueller, a television
producer nine years Will's senior. Blond, sleek and sexually adroit, Larry had drawn Will into a heady romance
only to drop him cold after six weeks, a pattern he was notorious for repeating. Heartbroken, Will had mourned
over the loss for half a summer, salving the hurt as best he could with behaviour that would probably have
killed him five years later. In the sex emporia of the Combat Zone and in the darkness of the Fenway, where on
weekend nights a sexual bacchanalia was in constant progress, he played out every sexual scenario his libido
could conjure, to put Larry's dismissal of him from his mind.

The hurt had faded by September, but not before he'd had a potinduced revelation. Sitting in a steam room,
meditating on his misery, he realized that Larry's desertion had awoken in him some of the same pain he'd felt
when Steep had departed. Turning over this realization,

he'd sat sweating in the tiled room for an unhealthy time, ignoring the hands and the glances that came his way.
What did it mean? That somewhere in his attachment to Jacob there'd been sexual feeling? Or that in his
midnight encounters in the shrubbery there was somewhere buried the hope that he'd find a man who would
deliver on Steep's promises, and take him out of the world into a place of visions? He'd finally left the steam
room to its orgiasts, his head thumping too hard for him to think clearly. But the questions remained with him
thereafter, troubling him. He countered them the plainest way he knew how. If a man who approached bore
even the slightest resemblance to his memory of Steep - the colour of their hair, the shape of their mouth - he
rejected them with talismanic cruelty.

ii

It wasn't the Larry Mueller saga that drove him from Boston, it was an icy December. Coming out of the
restaurant where he worked as a waiter into the maw of a Massachusetts blizza-d, he decided he'd had enough of
being frozen and it was time to head for balmier climes. His first thought was Florida, but that night, talking
over the options with the bartender at Buddies, he heard the siren-song of San Francisco.

'I've only been out to California once,' the bartender, whose name (Danny) was tattooed on his arm in case he
forgot it, told him, 'but man, I was so close to staying. It's faggots' paradise. It really is.'

'As long as it's warm.'

'There's places warmer,' Danny conceded. 'But shit, if you want to be hot then go live in fucking Death Valley,
right?' He leaned over to Will, lowering his voice. 'If I didn't have my other half-' (Danny's long-time lover,
Frederico - the other half in question - was sitting five yards along the bar) '-I'd be back there, living the life. No
question.'

It was a pivotal exchange. Within two weeks Will had packed his bags and was gone, leaving Boston on a day
of sparkling frost that almost made him regret his decision, the city looked so beautiful. There was another kind
of beauty waiting for him at the end of his journey, however; a city that enraptured him far beyond his
expectations. He found a job working for one of the community newspapers, and one momentous day, missing a
photographer to cover a piece he was writing about his adopted city, he borrowed a camera to do the job
himself. It wasn't love at first sight. His initial photographs were so piss-poor he couldn't use them. But he liked
the feeling of the camera in his hands, liked being able to circumscribe the world through the lens. And the
subject before him was the tribe in whose heartland he lived: the queens, the cowboys, the dykes, the
mannequins, the sex-fiends, the drag artists and the leather devotees whose homes, bars, clubs, grocery stores and Laundromats spread from the intersection of Castro and 18th, north to Market, south to Collingwood Park.

While he learned his craft, he also learned how to be a wild boy between the sheets, until he had quite a
reputation as a lover. He seldom played anonymously now, though there were plenty of places to do so. He
wanted deeper experiences, and found them in the beds and embraces of a dozen men, none of whom had his
heart, but all of whom excited him in their various ways. There was Lorenzo, a forty-year-old Italian who had
left a wife and children in Portland to come be what he'd known he was on his wedding day. There was Drew
Dunwoody, a muscle-boy who was for a time almost as devoted to Will as to his own reflection. There was
Sanders, who was the closest Will had to a sugar-daddy, an older man (he had been admitting to forty-nine for
five years) who lent him the first three months' rent on a one-room apartment near Collingwood Park, and later
a down payment on a secondhand Harley. There was Lewis the insurance man, who never said a word in
company, but who poured out his lyrical soul to Will behind closed doors, and who subsequently flowered into
a minor poet. There was Gregory, beautiful Gregory, dead of an accidental overdose at twenty-four. And Joel;
and Mescaline Mike; and a boy who'd said his name was Derrick, but who was later discovered to be an AWOL
marine by the name of Dupont.

In this charmed circle, Will grew up; grew strong. The plague was not yet upon them, and in hindsight this
would come to seem a Golden Age of hedonism and excess, which Will, by an act of equilibrium that still
astonished him, managed to both observe and indulge in. Soon, though he didn't know it, death would come and
start to lay its fatal fingers on many of the men he photographed; an arbitrary culling of beauties and intellects
and loving souls. But for seven extraordinary years, before the shadow fell, he bathed daily in that queer river
supposing it would rush like this forever.

iii

It had been Lewis, the insurance man turned poet, who'd first talked about animals with him. Sitting on the back
porch of Lewis's house on Cumberland watching a raccoon raid the trash cans, they'd fallen to talking about
what it would be like to inhabit for a time the body and spirit of an animal. Lewis had been writing about seals,
and was presently so obsessed with the subject, he said, that they entered his dreams nightly.

'Big, sleek, black seals,' he said, 'just hanging out.'

'On a beach?'

'No, on Market Street,' Lewis said with a giggle. 'I know it sounds stupid, but when I'm dreaming it they look like they belong there. I did ask one of them what they were doing,
and he said they were checking out the lie of the land for when the city drops into the ocean.'

Will watched the raccoon efficiently sorting through the trash. 'I dreamt about this talking fox when I was a kid.
. .' he said softly. Maybe it was Lewis's hashish - he never failed to find good ganja - but the memory was
crystalline: '... Lord Fox,' he said.

'Lord Fox?'

'Lord Fox,' Will replied. 'He scared the fuck out of me, but he was comical at the same time.'

'Why'd he scare you?' Will had never spoken about him to anyone, and even now - though he liked and trusted
Lewis - he felt a twinge of reluctance. Lord Fox was part of a much bigger secret (the great secret of his life),
and he was covetous of it. But gentle Lewis was pressing for further explanation. 'Tell me,' he said.

'He'd eaten somebody,' Will replied. 'That's what scared me about him. But then I remember he told me this
story.'

'About what?'

'It wasn't even a story really. It was just a conversation he'd had with a dog.'

'Yeah?' Lewis laughed, thoroughly engaged.

Will repeated the substance of Lord Fox's exchange with the dog, amazed at how easily he could recall it,
though it was a decade and a half since he'd dreamed the dream.

'We hunted for them, we herded for them, we guarded their brats. And why? Because we thought they knew how
to take care of things. How to keep the world full of meat and flowers'

Lewis liked what he heard. 'I could get a poem out of that,' he said.

'I wouldn't risk it.'

'Why not?'

'He might come after you for a slice of the profits.'

'What profits?' Lewis said. 'This is poetry.'

Will didn't reply. He was watching the raccoon, who had finished scavenging and was scampering away with its
booty. And while he was watching, he was thinking of Lord Fox; and of Thomas the painter, living and dead.

'You want some more?' Lewis said, handing the nub of the reefer back to Will. 'Hey, Will? You listening?'

Will was staring into the darkness, his thoughts as furtive as the raccoon. Lewis was right. There was a kind of
poetry in the story Lord Fox had told. But Will wasn't a poet. He couldn't tell the story with words. He had only
his eyes; and his camera, of course.

He took the extinguished reefer from Lewis's fingers and re-ignited it, pulling the pungent smoke deep into his
lungs. It was powerful ganja, and he'd already had more than usual. But he was feeling greedy tonigh

'Are you thinking about the fox?' Lewis asked him.

Will turned his blurred gaze in Lewis's direction. 'I'm thinking about the rest of my life,' he replied.

In his own mythology of himself, the journey that would take him out into the wildernesses of the world, to the
places where species were perishing for the simple crime of living where they felt the need to live, began that
night on Lewis's porch, with the reefer, the raccoon and the story of Lord Fox. This was a simplification of
course. He'd been bored with chronicling the Castro for a while, and was ready for a change long before that
night. As for the direction that desire might point in, it did not come clear in the space of a conversation. But
over the next few weeks, his idling thoughts returned to this exchange several times, and he started to turn his
camera away from the throngs of the Castro, towards the animal life that coexisted with people in the city. His
first experiments were unambitious; late juvenilia, at best. He photographed the sea lions that congregated on
Pier 39, the squirrels in Dolores Park and the next door neighbour's dog, who regularly stopped the traffic by
squatting to take a dump in the middle of Sanchez Street. But the journey that would in time take him very far
from the Castro, and from squirrels, seals and defecating dogs, had begun.

He had dedicated Transgressions, his first published collection, to Lord Fox. It was the least he could do.