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Ben Jordaan and Lt. Vosloo were finding the lack of attention in the psych ward unsettling. They didn't talk to each other—the awkwardness of their shared obsession (the insanely charming and cute Gay-Boy)—still the pachyderm in the plantation.
The morning after their arrival dawned and an orderly came by to hand them some of their belongings; toothbrushes, shaving gear and underwear, but then left them to their own devices. He didn't say a word to them, just throwing the mostly empty balsak (literally ball bag, meaning regulation kit bag) on each man's bunk.
They were fed in the ward. Most of the inmates fiddled listlessly with their slop, whether from the singularly unappetizing look of it, or due to the fact that they were so drugged that they couldn't face food. After "breakfast" the trays were removed and the room was locked again. Most men just lay right back on their beds and fell asleep, the boredom and apathy induced by their environment and drugs combining to numb them to the absurdity of their situation.
About mid-morning the door rattled and two burly orderlies came to remove one of the guys. His departure caused the first stir in the room, some of the less incapacitated men even beginning to show signs of agitation. One or two began to pace the room nervously, sitting down on bunks, only to get up and walk a few steps before sitting down again.
After about twenty minutes the man who had been fetched returned but not under his own steam. He was on a stretcher and the orderlies dumped him unceremoniously onto his bed, where he lay whimpering pathetically. One of the men who had been pacing was next. As the orderlies approached him, he backed away, terror clearly visible on his haggard face.
"No, fuck, leave me alone!" he shouted and tried in vain to fight off the clearly stronger orderlies who managed to subdue him in spite of his heroic efforts not to be dragged bodily out of the room and down the passage, still screaming hoarsely, chilling Pretorius and Vosloo to the core.
When the noise subsided Ben Jordaan got up and went over to the recently returned man. He sat down on the side of his bunk and put his hand on the still quivering soldier's side. He flinched as if he had been scalded.
"Relax, man, I'm not going to hurt you," Ben said softly.
The terrified man seemed to hear something reassuring in Ben's voice, because he calmed down and turned his head to look at him. Tears were streaming out of his eyes and down the side of his face.
"What did they do to you?" Ben asked. His voice was kind but he was clearly distressed by the sorry state of the poor man.
The soldier shook his head as he struggled to articulate what he felt. He didn't manage to bring any coherent thoughts to light and mute tears just rolled down his face.
The silence was broken by a belligerent voice booming across the room.
"What the fuck do you think they did to him? They tortured him same as they torture all of us!"
Ben's head turned so fast he almost pulled a muscle. He couldn't believe he hadn't seen the speaker—or shouter, rather—before: a huge man, as big as Ben himself, stuck away in a corner. He'd not drawn attention to himself, staying hidden under his covers, almost as if to deliberately avoid attention. Now he stood next to his bed and dwarfed every other man in the near vicinity.
Ben stood up and hobbled over to the guy, who stood his ground and looked him in the eye. It was an unfamiliar experience for Ben to have somebody level a gaze at him. He liked the feeling. He stuck out his hand and after a brief hesitation the man grabbed it, although there was nothing friendly in his regard.
"Ben Jordaan.
"I know who you are," the giant said without volunteering his own name.
"And I know who he is too," he sneered, looking askance at Vosloo, who was watching the exchange with cautious interest.
"I also know what he did," he said, dropped Ben's hand and turned meaningfully towards the officer.
"Be sure, *little *lieutenant, that I'm watching you—you'd better watch your back..."
"What did he do?" Ben knew that something had gone down but he still needed confirmation that it had anything to do with Bennie.
"You mean you don't know? He's here because he tried to rape a troep. The fucker is a piece of work. But if he decided to end up with a bunch of queers, this was the wrong place. Us guys are going to sort him out good." His next words were heavy with innuendo.
"Yes pretty boy, would you like some of your own medicine?"
Ben felt his body go cold. When he looked over at Vosloo his face was granite. The officer didn't miss it. He felt his heart skip a beat as he realized he was completely alone in this hellhole. He would be watching his back for sure.
During the course of the morning Ben saw one man after the other dragged out of the room and returned later, in much worse shape. He tried to pump them for info, but to no avail. Only the rough giant, still nameless, walked back under his own steam, although it was clear that he did so with effort.
For some reason Ben stayed close to Vosloo. Each was the only familiar face in a world suddenly gone even more mad, if that were possible. The room they found themselves in was a capsule of insanity, a bubble out of which men disappeared one by one, only to return just that bit more broken.
Ben knew that it was only a matter of time before he and Vosloo would take their turn and he wondered what nameless terrors the victims endured. He took some comfort in the fact that the silent giant still managed to keep his head up, and he hoped that he would have the strength to do the same.
The men in the ward didn't talk to each other in the normal way—the sense of camaraderie that was present even between very different guys, faced with a situation that forced them to seek comfort in each other's company, totally absent. Each man seemed to be locked behind a fuzzy, yet impenetrable wall of despair and fear. So Ben's efforts at finding out what was going on met with a maddening lethargy as each man that returned quickly sought refuge in the numbness of his own brain.
In an effort to maintain some sense of his own sanity, Ben even tried to talk to Vosloo but his conversation met with a stony silence. Ben wanted Vosloo to deny the charge that the nameless young giant had leveled at him. His instinctive loyalty, forged by the months of military indoctrination, wanted him to cleave to the officer, to believe the best of him. He didn't understand that the system was designed to make him hate and defend the same man in an aberrant parody of the natural affinity men had for each other. It exploited the homoerotic currents innate in masculine interaction while at the same time charging them with homophobia. Men were trapped in the best and the worst of their nature—an eternal AC-DC of magnetism and resultant self-loathing that boomeranged backwards and forwards. Then it found its expression in an irrational hatred that was so easily exploited and channeled into warfare.
Ben Jordaan was a simple man, although not unintelligent. He didn't try to analyze what he felt, but went with it in a direct route. When he had felt his heart morph in the presence of Bennie Pretorius he had known not to resist. It had felt wholesome and true, a path to goodness and joy and his instinct had proven to be trustworthy.
That same instinct now pulled him in the direction of giving Vosloo the benefit of the doubt. When he looked at him, the ambivalence that he felt, the vacillation between revenge and loyalty drew him to the latter. He knew that given the chance he would wait to hear Vosloo's side of the story. But the officer resisted any attempts at conversation.
Vosloo was trapped in his own cell of guilt and uncertainty. He dreaded facing what he saw when each victim displayed when they were reintroduced into the ward.
He also feared Ben, knowing that the man would turn on him the moment that he knew what he had done to Bennie Pretorius. He was certain that not even Jordaan's unflagging good nature would survive the knowledge of what he, Vosloo, had done to the Gay-Boy.
He couldn't credit that he had gotten so lost in the maze of his twisted heart that he had *tried to rape a man—*and Bennie Pretorius, of all people. His shame rankled in his guts, rage at himself for squandering the opportunity to get close to something that drew him in a way that defied his comprehension.
He remembered how he had felt the first time that he had seen the boy. He wondered why he thought of Pretorius as a boy. He was in his twenties, more or less the same age as Vosloo himself, but there was something about the man that made him want to protect him, make everything ok for him. The feeling had been so confusing that he had lashed out in a way that completely contradicted what he felt. The attraction that assailed his heart caught him so by surprise that he expelled it from his consciousness with such vehemence that it had no time to nest, and so upend all that Vosloo had come to believe about himself. But at the same time he had watched as his tirade had played itself out on Bennie's face, first as surprise and dismay, and then as determination and loathing.
But it wouldn't leave him alone. When he touched Pretorius' body in the execution of his duties, the natural care and empathy that caused him to be a physiotherapist in the first place, mixed with the pull that the patient had on his heart. It was an appealing concoction that befuddled his senses and made first his emotions, and then his body, respond in profoundly traitorous ways. The professional mask that he always adopted when dealing with war amputees couldn't withstand the surprising grief that he felt when he touched Pretorius' stumps. Internally he shook his head, aghast at the inconceivable violence that a system inflicted on young lives, so drenched with promise and vitality.
But then again, his whole being rejected the Trojan horse that Bennie Pretorius inserted behind the fortified lines of his heart with his winning vulnerability—and his plump ass.
The scene of his "seduction" of Bennie Jordaan played in his mind, a twisted tableau, so far from what he had envisioned as to be a complete parody. He again mentally shook his head as if to clear his mind of the shame that quaked his being when he remembered the look on Bennie's face when he had opened the door naked. But he hadn't known what to do to bring to the Lance Corporal's attention the fact that he secretly desired him. It wasn't as if he knew how to act in the unfamiliar landscape in which he suddenly found himself wandering. He could only trust that the troep's own attraction to him would be the road on which they would meet and discover each other. But of course the giant obstacle, Ben Jordaan, stood between him and every time he peeked around the block of a man to try and catch a glimpse of the beautiful boy that he longed for, he could only catch sight of the unbreakable cord of devotion that linked the men.
He wondered what Ben had done to forge such a tie. What did the giant have that had clinched the deal so suddenly, so completely? Weeks of working with Pretorius while he vacillated between revulsion at his own twisted attraction to the boy and irresistible tenderness that he felt for him had obviously derailed any chance that he had of winning the young man's affections.
Is that what he wanted? His affections? Didn't he just want to fuck the cute ass as he had done with the disgusting Parvus? Again he shook his head internally. What he had done to Parvus was a perverted attempt to sate his lust. A lust he knew was a pale shadow of the emotion that wafted through his heart; a fragrance of a promise of joy and satisfaction. He knew that he had squandered an opportunity to know a deep connection with another man, something that his attraction to Bennie had woken in him, and that he knew his clumsy attempts at wooing had perversely repelled, rather than attracted.
He was shaken from his reverie when suddenly the lights went out and the room, not well lit or ventilated by any means, was plunged into a darkness so solid, so unrelenting that Vosloo and Jordaan felt as if they had been momentarily dipped in molasses. Vosloo reached out for what he thought was the certainty of Ben Jordaan's reassuring presence. He felt a stump-like arm and held onto it as a bastion of familiarity. His relief at knowing that Ben was close was short-lived. A malevolent voice whispered in his ear, the warm breath tantalizing as it chilled.
"Yes, pretty boy, time for your medicine. Your ass is mine!"