Sway (8 page)

Inside, the man was leaning with his back against the sink, his ankles crossed. He was examining his curled fingertips, then
he looked up at Kenneth, his image flattened by the dim brownish light.

His hair was a reddish gray bristle. He had a narrow face with close-set eyes, two arched dimples between the brows. He started
nodding his head, his tongue poking at the side of his mouth. Then he stood away from the sink and moved back toward the stalls,
and Kenneth followed him, his face unconsciously mimicking the clipped purposefulness of the man’s.

“I thought so,” the man said, turning.

Kenneth raised his chin, his nostrils flaring.

“Right away, I thought so,” said the man.

In one sudden motion, he grabbed Kenneth by the shoulder and with his other hand gripped his waist. Kenneth couldn’t see his
face now, could only smell the tang of his perspiration. The man held him upright and pressed his body against his own. He
held him with a kind of paternal restraint, breathing a little heavily through his nose, as if carefully choosing his moment.
Kenneth’s eyes were closed. All he could see was the vague red light, faintly throbbing like the membrane of a cell illuminated
on the stage of a microscope.

“Go ahead,” the man said. “What did you come here for?”

He took Kenneth’s hand and placed it on the inside of his thigh. Through the coarse fabric, Kenneth’s fingers gathered in
the length and presence of the man’s erection, the delicately curved head poking up at an angle above the elastic band of
his underpants. Then the man put his hand on top of Kenneth’s and pulled it away.

“Go ahead now,” he said. “Kneel. Get down on your knees.”

His belt buckle jangled at his waist. Kenneth pulled the man’s stiff briefs down to reveal the muscles of his upper thighs.
He was almost hairless, only a tight clump of red fuzz above the bland shock of his erection. It was pale and smooth, almost
colorless. When he guided it carefully into Kenneth’s mouth, cupping Kenneth’s chin in his hand, it tasted faintly of milk,
or like the faintly sour smell of milk when you first open the carton. It probed his mouth like a bodiless thumb.

The man took a step back for some reason. He inhaled deeply through his nose, his eyes half-shut. His cock jutted out to the
left, faintly glistening with the thin coating of Kenneth’s saliva. He shook his head as if to clear it.

He wedged his stiff penis back beneath the waistband of his underpants. Then he hoisted up his pants, working them from side
to side over his hips, softly grunting with the effort. “That’s what I thought,” he said, looking down at Kenneth. He buckled
his belt. Then he told Kenneth that he was under arrest.

The creases between his close-set eyes were almost sarcastic. Kenneth was still kneeling, then he sat back on the floor, his
eyes on the row of urinals to his left. The man’s taste was still in his mouth, stale like the pages of a long unopened book.
Then the man said, “Let’s go,” and Kenneth felt the jagged grip just above his elbow, pulling him upright, and he moved sightlessly
forward, letting out little rabbity breaths of something like laughter.

There was another cop — in uniform — waiting up the road in a marked sedan pulled up to the sidewalk, the same path Kenneth
had seen in mirror image on the white table of the camera obscura. It was chalk-bright in the sunlight now. The second cop
cuffed Kenneth’s hands behind his back. A pair of teenage girls rode by on a tandem bicycle, a smear of yellow and green that
gave way to the raised, violet-budded arms of a coral tree.

They took him to jail. There were actual bars, like in the movies, but nothing had prepared him for the full-color gloom of
the chipped tile floor, stained and crusted with lime, and the dented black drain with its orange scabs of rust. When his
father arrived, distracted and out of context, the office was still in his face. He stood up in the precinct lounge with his
hat on, his hands in the pockets of his baggy suit, as they led Kenneth in from the cell with the cuffs still on. His voice
was flat, faintly sardonic, as he spoke to the cop. “All right,” he said. “That’s fine.” Then he looked at Kenneth, his mouth
tight, and without saying a word turned toward the door.

They didn’t speak on the ride home. His father drove aggressively, then absentmindedly, refusing to look at Kenneth, whose
wrists were scored pink from the handcuffs. His father would only nod his head occasionally, as if working his way back through
the past to the various clues.

At dinner, he was still wearing his suit and tie, though he had spent the intervening hours working in the garage. He helped
himself to bread, setting three slices on his plate and methodically smearing them with butter, then making a stack. He asked
Kenneth’s mother how her bridge game was. Then he asked Kenneth if the food was all right, if it was refined enough for his
delicate tastes.

“Will,” said Kenneth’s mother.

“Well, we can’t help coddling him now, can we?” he went on.

“Will, please.”

“I understand,” he said. “You don’t want to embarrass him. Kenneth, would you like some cottage cheese? A salad?”

He imagined an appropriate response: violently overturning the table, or slamming down his fork and knife and storming out
the door. But he wasn’t doing any of these things. He wondered why he was just sitting there, eyes averted, slowly breathing.

The war had ended. In Santa Monica, there was a new coalescence of gay life, infused by the hordes of returned sailors, newly
freed. There were vague farm boys willing to experiment, and aesthetes who hosted parties by the pool, but it wasn’t what
interested Kenneth. He was the sparrowlike boy who seemed to be starving himself, who could sometimes be seen lurking outside
of bars in black jeans, his unwashed hair falling in blades over his forehead. He was silent to the point of hostility. Everyone
wanted to save him.

He spent most of that next year in a tiny basement apartment in West Hollywood. Its barred windows looked out on a neglected
patio where the landlady grew herbs and fed a pack of cats with cubes of stale bread. On the bare wall, he would project his
films. He would gather old newspapers and food wrappers and catalogues and tear out the words and pictures and paste them
to sheets of butcher paper, then at night carefully burn their edges over the flame on the kitchen range. He made a kind of
shrine out of one of these collages, which he preserved on the wall above his bed. At its center was a picture of a bare-chested
sailor flexing his biceps. Then there were images of cars, particularly German cars, one of them a long black Mercedes with
Nazi regalia on the hood and above the headlights. In the background, a kind of two-dimensional altarpiece was constructed
out of flowers, guns, superheroes, the mushroom cloud over Hiroshima. Over this, he painted a pentagram in red fingernail
polish, smearing it thinly with an edge of cardboard. Then he wrote the words “Ted Drake” in tiny cursive script, over and
over again, filling in each blank space with the letters of his name.

One night in Hollywood he met a boy. It was at an art gallery where they showed films on Thursday nights. That particular
night, the film was Maya Deren’s
Meshes of the Afternoon,
an evocation of trance states and shifting identities — the realm of
The Sephiroth,
where everyday objects became talismans and an ordinary living room took on the disquieting normalcy of a nightmare.

When he left the foyer, after the film was over, he saw the boy outside, standing in profile with one foot against the wall.
He was smoking a cigarette in a convoluted way, examining it like a specimen between his thumb and the tip of his middle finger.
In the darkness, he appeared almost as thin as Kenneth, almost as frail, with short, dark bangs. With a slow-blooming swell
of unease, Kenneth somehow knew, by the way the stranger wouldn’t look at him, that he was in fact waiting for him to approach.

“The mirrored sunglasses,” the boy said.

Kenneth turned to him suspiciously. Then he remembered: the moment when a pair of mirrored sunglasses, more like goggles,
appeared on Maya Deren’s face, just as she raised a long knife that would finally be the instrument of her death.

The boy looked at him for the first time then, his eyes hazy, abstracted. He was older than Kenneth had thought, maybe twenty-five.
Up close, he had a faintly unpleasant shading of facial hair in little patches below his ears and on his chin.

“When she stands up with those glasses on,” he said. “And then you see her in that field. The bright sunlight. The way she
crouches with the knife.” He shook his head solemnly, then raised his shoulders and pretended to shiver.

He said his name was Francis, Francis Coogan. He was a film student at UCLA. He and his fellow students helped the armed services
make training films, which was how the film school stayed afloat.

He had smoked his cigarette down to the nub, so that he’d almost burned his thumb, and now he stubbed it out on the pavement
with his shoe. “You drink coffee, don’t you?” he said. “Why don’t we go get some coffee?”

Kenneth had only partly emerged from the film’s trance. The boy before him was still half-real, half-apparition. He followed
him to the diner across the street, a brightly lit place with a glass display case full of cigars and chewing gum and a poster
for war bonds taped to the aluminum hood above the griddle. There was hardly anyone else there: a couple in a far booth, two
men eating separately at the bar, where plates of doughnuts and pie sat under greasy bell jars. By now, Kenneth felt oddly
large, as if he were somehow emanating from beyond the framework of his body. Coogan regarded him with a kind of patient fraternalism,
as if he already knew everything he would say. He wore an ill-fitting dark suit and a blue shirt with no tie. His knowingness
accentuated the sense of their similarity. Kenneth knew perfectly well that no one was looking at them, but still he felt
their eyes. It was as if his own wrongness had been redoubled by Coogan’s, as if they were sitting there in that booth holding
hands.

“You’re so solemn,” Coogan said. “How old are you?”

Kenneth let out a penurious sniff of laughter, his head bowed. “A hundred and five. Eighteen. What difference does it make?”

He looked at Coogan: his boyish dark bangs, his wrinkled bohemian clothes. He was hardly sexual at all, which made his interest
in Kenneth a glaring, confusing thing.

“I have to tell you something,” Coogan said. He leaned closer over the table, making a show of conspiracy. “I noticed you
a few weeks ago,” he said. “It was at the Cocteau film, I think. That was where I saw you. And so tonight I thought I’d wait
around for you, find out who you were, but before I did that, I went into the toilet and smoked a number. Do you know what
that is?”

Kenneth looked away, holding his coffee cup between his hands. “Yes,” he said. “I know what that is.”

Coogan smiled, then rolled his eyes up and to the side. “You’re so serious,” he said. “Don’t you know by now that nothing
ever happens to people who are so serious?”

He found himself trying to imagine Coogan’s father — Irish and rough, a broad man in an undershirt — trying to find some vestige
of that image in Coogan’s own boyish face.

They went to an alleyway behind the diner. Coogan reached his long fingers into the side pocket of his jacket and brought
out a thin, wrinkled cigarette, tapered at both ends. The rich smoke made Kenneth cough. He looked up into the lit window
at the rear of the diner’s kitchen, a yellow oblong smudged with grease. Then he closed his eyes and hacked again until Coogan
put his arm around him and then with his other hand gripped his shoulder blade. Then he put his lips to Kenneth’s ear and
reached his hand down the back of his jeans.

He saw a flash of pictures from the film: Maya Deren’s sandaled foot tramping on grass, then sand, then concrete, then the
carpet on the living room floor. Everything was happening so suddenly that he could only react and try to comply. They were
standing near a pair of garbage cans, and then Coogan was down on his knees, unbuttoning Kenneth’s fly. It was oddly shaming
until it became something else. He looked down at Coogan’s hair and experimentally touched it. He felt vividly for the first
time that they were both boys. It sent a wave of stiffness up his spine, a barely perceptible tingling around the heft of
his scrotum. He closed his eyes, feeling the atmosphere on his skin — the cool air, the wedge of sky above the alleyway, the
resonant hum of distant cicadas, Coogan’s mouth almost indiscernible around him. Then he began to swell and dissolve, merging
into Coogan’s warmth, until his mind could register only the light on his skin, the expanding air, the sweet reek of the garbage
rising from the cans. He swallowed and breathed and stretched his fingers out beside his waist. Then he came into Coogan’s
mouth.

“I bet you always thought about that,” said Coogan. He was looking up at Kenneth, grinning as he wiped his lips with the back
of his wrist. “I used to always think about it too, when I was serious.”

A boy is sleeping on the living room couch, troubled by dreams, surrounded by photographs of sailors. When he wakes, he steps
through a white door on the wall beside the fireplace. The door is marked MEN. On the other side he finds a highway blurred
in darkness, the cars’ distant headlights like smears from a grease pencil. Now he is in a kind of saloon, except that it
is obviously only a paper backdrop. A sailor appears, takes off his shirt, flexes his muscles in a showy array of poses. The
boy knows what to do, or knows the conventions of the game. He takes out a cigarette and asks for a light. The first onset
of violence is mostly comical, vaudevillian: it happens as a kind of slow-motion punch that sends the boy falling lamely to
the ground, as if both he and the sailor are acting. But then in the darkness and fog, a group of other sailors emerge, a
few of them tall and menacing, most of them scrappy and small, carrying chains and hammers and pounding their fists. Their
faces gloat and then grimace with the effort of what ensues, knocking the boy to the ground, flat on his back where they can
prod him like a dying bird. Someone jabs his thumbs into the boy’s nostrils and they burst forth with blood. He is screaming
now; he mouths words, but there is no sound. He screams harder when they tear off his shirt, his chin and neck spattered with
blood. Someone probes his nipple with the point of a knife. Before long, they have torn through the skin, their fingers stripping
away at the gleaming viscera, until they find the boy’s heart in a tangle of meat. It is a machine, a light meter with an
oscillating dial. Somewhere far away, against the gray sky, an abstract shape looms like a pair of plaster dunes or a polished
white stone. It begins to quiver slightly as a thin flow of milk bathes it from above. It reveals itself to be the boy’s chin.
The milk covers the ridges of his lips and slowly spreads over his cheeks and his eyes and finally drips like paint over his
bloody chest until it is covered in white. He finds himself alone on the floor of a tiled bathroom, completely naked, lying
on his side near a row of urinals. His groin emits shards of light. He has a sailor’s cap on his head; his body is intact
and clean. The door opens, and then another sailor, this one blandly handsome, lifts him in his arms. They form a kind of
pietà in the humid darkness by the highway, the sailor distantly smiling, his face like a face from a recruitment poster.
They lie together on a bed in a living room, bodies half-covered by white sheets. Above the fireplace is a faux Renaissance
painting of a cherub on a bed of clouds: the boy Lucifer, extending his hand in a blaze of light. The sailor stands above
the bed with a firecracker jutting out from his fly. He strikes a match and the long tube explodes in a shower of sparks.
It causes the boy to writhe, bare-chested, in the living room, with a tinseled Christmas tree on his head. Its pronged branches
rise from his skull like metastatic silver antlers. Some combination of boy and Gorgon, he dances out a frenzy that is equal
parts Pleasure and pain. It is in this state of rapture that he aims the point of the tree at the fireplace, beneath the portrait
of the cherub, where the photographs of sailors burn in the flames.