Given A Way

*Given A Way *

"To give away yourself keeps yourself still..."

Shakespeare, Sonnet 16

In its beginnings, his story was, really, not unique. Tim was a lonely kid, skinny, caved in chest, scrawny. He wasn't athletic; he wasn't excited by sports. He was out of place with boys his age. His mother expected he would make friends with them, but he didn't; he did not really have anything in common with them. They could smell he was not one of them.

Around girls, he was embarrassed, and girls realized it and looked right through him, giving him all the more cause for awkwardness and embarrassment.

He spent much time reading. One solitary vice then gave way to another. When he was twelve, he began to lock himself in the bathroom, but instead of using the toilet, or taking a bath, he perched on a stool in front of the mirror and combed his hair, styling it the way guys in the movies he watched did. He idolized well-defined, lean, muscular guys – the kind he saw in the movies, and, every now and then spotted in real life. He longed to look like them, and despaired of it. In secret, in front of the mirror, he tried to look like them. He inflated his chest and pulled in his belly. When he took the subway he would struggle with himself to keep his eyes averted once he'd noticed someone he could not keep from gazing at, usually, a guy in jeans, boots, and a leather jacket. Even when he averted his eyes however, he was oblivious to anything but an overpowering presence and the nervous fear that he would be seen looking.

In the real world, in the one he was supposed to live in, not the world of his relentless enemy, his imagination – where he fantasized a flamboyance he never could reveal -- he was anything but expressive in grooming or apparel. His hair was always conservatively cut and combed. In school, he wore the clothes his mother got him, gray flannel slacks, a white shirt, and a tie. During winter months, the outfit was completed with a forest green sweater with a vertical black meander pattern going down the left side. A gym teacher in health class once cited him as an example of the way you're supposed to dress for school.

What else did he do when he combed his hair in front of the mirror? He played with himself. But "himself" here does not just mean his cock. He played with his ass, too, not penetrating it, but swiping it in such a way that made him shiver. And he rubbed his nipples. He caressed them. He pinched them. He scratched them. As he did, his back arched, his posture got straighter; he imagined it was somebody else doing it, taking control of him. His body stretched to rigidity. The first time he came it was a shock, confusing him with wonder. He trembled, flooded by awe and amorphous panic. Then his body gave way to a sad ache; he was drained and deflated, as if he had been beaten.

At fourteen, he decided he had to do something. He was routinely teased and told that he was effeminate, called a fag and a homo. He did not know exactly what the actions were that these words denoted, but he sensed the disposition they implied: at school kids picked on him, punched him, tripped him, threatened to beat him up after school. Even random strangers on the street taunted him. But he was incapable of shifting the paradigm of reality in which he had become embedded -- until he was assigned to a speech class to correct a slight lisp that an overzealous English teacher had detected. As far as he knew, no one had ever noticed it before. He hadn't. But Mr. Weber had. When he took him aside after class and told him he was sending him to the speech clinic, he added, "It's for your own good. That lisp makes you sound effeminate, and I'm sure you don't want that, do you?" No, he didn't. So he stayed after school every Tuesday and Thursday and practiced saying, "She dances in France when she seeks for romance," until his tongue knew automatically just what spot on his upper gums it had to tap.

Mr. Weber got to him with his dig about effeminacy, and he knew he had to do more about it than just take a speech class. He had to change his body. He knew you did that by working out, but working out, deliberately going about changing the way your body looked, was the sort of assertion that was impossible for him. He feared he was stuck with the identity he had and could only overcome it in daydreams. Choosing the way he identified himself and making that identity his, being known as he wished to be, not as he was, made him shrink back into himself with embarrassment. It was more than just his body that had to be changed. But he was who he was and he was stuck with it.

Around this time, his parents decided to get a divorce. Actually, it was his mother who sprang it on his father late one night, sitting in the kitchen, backed up by one of her sisters, after the day of her own father's funeral. Tim was not asleep, just lying in bed, having been woken when they returned. His bedroom was down a long hallway, far enough from the kitchen, yet not so far that he could not hear what they were saying. He sat up when he heard his mother say she wanted a divorce. It was totally unexpected, and he sensed that it would be momentous. Everything would change – and nothing would change. The world that was was still the world that was, and yet it was not. He would still be himself, but who would that self be now with this fundamental change? There was some kind of change, but what kind? It was beyond him. He told his parents in the morning that he'd heard what they'd said. His mother said that it was for the best. His father shook his hand and said that it did not have to keep them from being friends. That was an odd thing to say, he thought, since as far as he knew they never had been "friends."

That was it. He left for school, somewhat in a daze, not knowing how he felt or what he was supposed to feel. Was it a disaster or a release? Something was being altered, torn apart -- was it being damaged? -- and he'd never be whole again: he'd always be pulled apart and, if reassembled, he'd still only be a collection of pieced-together fragments.

He graduated high school and went on to college – out of town, away from his now divorced parents, on a scholarship. His roommate, David Eliot Lance, was also the captain of his gym squad. In gym class, the boys were divided up into squads. Each squad had a leader at its head. He wound up in Lance's squad.

David Lance was extraordinary – his ideal -- and he secretly worshipped him. He feared, despite how much he tried to hide it, Lance knew it just by looking at him. Lance had that effect on many people, but he was not full of himself. Lance was courteous, gracious, and generous, popular and universally liked, never a bully or self-promoting. It's impossible to say just how small he felt in comparison to David Lance, not because Lance was taller than him, lithe, handsome -- handsome and gracefully muscled, his eyes, bright and deep, his face, aglow with intelligence – but because of something he could not pin down, because of an essential magnetic force that flowed from him. When he smiled it broke out with the happiness of primal nature. He looked like a jock, but when he spoke, you could tell he was really smart and well read; he had an A+ GPA and wrote a column for the school paper.

One morning after gym class, he was changing back into street clothes before going to French class, when David, splendid only with a towel secured around his waist, came up to him. Tim had been particularly maladroit that morning during gymnastics, and spent most of the time sitting in the bleachers, hoping he would not get called on again to do anything. This did not reflect well on David as a squad leader, who, as captain, was held responsible for the performance of the members of the squad. He'd hoped to avoid him, figuring that if Lance were angry, by evening when they got back to their room, his anger would have lost its edge.

"You don't like yourself," David began without prelude, as a reproach as well as an observation.

"What makes you say that?"

"Look at you."

"What about me?"

"You are ashamed of yourself."

"I'm not ashamed of myself," he shot back too quickly.

"No?"

"No," he said.

"Then you ought to be," David said, but without venom.

"You're frightening me," Tim said, knowing deep down that David was right.

"You're frightening yourself. That's what cowardice is, frightening yourself."

"How am I frightening myself?" Tim said defiantly, stupidly, dodging David's accusation that he was a coward.

"By not letting yourself be who you are."

"Who am I?"

"You don't know?"

"I don't," he said spitefully.

"You expect me to believe that?"

"I don't care what you believe."

"You keep yourself from knowing."

"And you know?" Tim taunted.

"I do," Lance said, "and you know that I do."

Lance looked at him, through him, so – Tim could not tell if it was so blankly or so penetratingly – that he could not doubt that he did know. Once he was hit by that realization, by David's power of penetration, everything changed. Tim's resistance fell apart. He could only tell that it was resistance as it fell away, and a clearing opened inside him where defiance had been. But he did not know what it had been resistance to. He did not know what he had been freed from.

David smiled. He did know.

"What can I do?" Tim said.

"It's a force that is always above you and always beyond you, an energy that fills you with its power. It makes you strong and it makes you humble. When you're an initiate, that force is embodied in the master. Without a master, you have no strength."

They were alone, just David Lance and Tim, in the workout room off the main gym, in shorts and loose sleeveless t-shirts. They were standing; facing each other, at what David said was called parade rest. Lance was explaining the kind of discipline and training that would happen. The two things, he told Tim, that he had to keep in mind throughout all their physical exertions were discipline and obedience.

"Discipline and obedience are the tools you need to gain inner power and a defined, well-toned body."

"How will I know who my master is?" Tim asked, afraid not only of the answer but shaken by his need to ask the question.

"You will feel it," David said.

He did feel it. He was ashamed. He stammered, with the awkward hesitation of somebody realizing something inevitable and inescapable, "You are my master."

"What is a master?" Lance asked, gently, easing him into his enlightenment.

Tim blushed.

Lance lifted his chin with his index finger and fixed his gaze on him. "A master is the man who determines who you are."

"Yes," Tim said. He understood.

"Your strength comes from obedience...to him."

David pressed his palm against the small of his back and he felt a current of electricity surge through him. He was tingling. David ordered him down onto the floor to begin crunches and push-ups. He was pathetic, but at the end of two hours, with David's guidance, he no longer was.

Their friendship developed, and it became intense. But, from the start, it was something other than, more than, different from just friendship, at least, as far as Tim knew, for him. Friendship implies equality. In their friendship, there was no equality. David was dominant and he was submissive. He loved being submissive. He accepted it easily. David commanded and he obeyed. David was the master; he was the disciple. They shared a room, they hung out together, they worked out together, they sat at the same table in the dining room, they horsed around, they spent hours together in the library studying. That was the surface. David took possession of him. It was overwhelming. He lost himself in David; he surrendered his will to David; David took over. David led. He followed happily. He couldn't resist; he didn't want to. David was his strength.

They began going to the gym in September, every evening; by May, he was not who he had been. He was defined, muscled, masculine, handsome, impervious. One evening after a draining workout and a long swim in the Olympic-size pool, David looked at him, and nodded approval. He blushed like a girl. Yes, he had become impervious, self-possessed, apparently masculine, but that was not how he was at his core. He had gotten a reputation for being aloof, even cold. No one taunted him now. He did not respond to small talk or flirtation; he did not ask girls, or boys, out on dates – not out of fear, but because he was not interested, nor could he even imagine initiating a relationship; he was oblivious to temptation; his devotion to David was consuming; his desire to be with David overrode any other possible need; it absorbed all of him. David Lance was his only focus. When he was asked out on a date, which happened a lot, he declined to go. He did not want anything but what David had to offer. He had developed pride. Being with David made him proud, but he was neither aloof nor cold with David, only proud in and of submission to him. He was all need and entirely dependent on David, but he was disciplined, too: he never exploited his need in his effort to gain David's attention; he never spoke of it. To do that would have been making a demand on David, which was simply unthinkable. It would have been failing David. It would have been a proof of disloyalty. His role was to be receptive, to obey, to make sure that he could live up to David's requirements, to behave in such a way that David Lance would be proud of him. He esteemed himself to the degree that he felt worthy of David's esteem.

If he revealed his heart, he would have confessed both open and secret adoration. He adored David Lance beyond normal endurance, beyond what he thought was his capacity. David was master and mentor and divinity. He longed for him, wanting to feel more of his touch, to linger only in his gaze as its desired object, to bloom for him, with him. He craved David's devotion as much as he trembled with desire to surrender to him. And that craving, he hoped, was neither obvious, nor unknown, despite his effort to keep it hidden. Hiding his longing from David, or at least attempting to, and thus slighting the power of David's insight into him was his one disobedience. He wanted David to know, but he was afraid to tell him.

"We ought to go on a vacation," David said as they walked through University Woods in early June, after graduation. They had graduated, both magna cum laude, and they were bursting with the joy of life.

"Spend the summer with me," David said, taking his hand and pulling them down on the soft spring grass.

Tim's parents, who now lived quite a distance apart from each other, were not at all displeased that he was going to spend the summer with a friend, despite knowing nothing about him.

They flew to Greece, and from Piraeus took a boat to an island in the Aegean, whose name, in the interest of keeping it from becoming a place for tourists, I will conceal. Not to conceal the wherewithal that made this possible – David paid for their trip.

On the small island of -----, beaches roll away towards the sea, away from the paws of bleached and grassless craggy mountains; the sand is soft and white; everything shimmers with blue and sunshine. The viscose and voluminous Aegean stretches, a sparkling cobalt under the sky, into the azure in the distance, where both sea and sky become one.

They stood looking out at the sea. Tim felt taller than he ever had. "I can't believe this," he said. David touched his nipple gently with his thumb. Tim's knees buckled; he lost his balance and fell into David's embrace. David held him. He felt his solidity. He felt the force of David's mouth against his. He felt himself dissolving: David enveloped him and took possession. It was beyond even the excitement he had felt at school when they exercised so intensely that they came.

Something happened that summer. Despite the year's training to develop masculinity, Tim realized that masculinity was only a body image he projected, a stance he took – his body was lithe, muscled, rugged, defined, but his essence was feminine. He had always been – that is what he came to know -- longing, tender, yearning to yield like a woman, eager to receive the love of a man. He appeared masculine but he responded feminine. Despite how he looked! He was not masculine and aggressive. He was receptive and yielding. It was not in his nature to command but to obey, not to dominate and direct but to submit and follow. He knew it, and it elated him.

"You are troubled," David said one evening as they walked in the Chora, high above the sea. The moon was red and swollen as it rose to the zenith.

"No," he answered. "I feel something I don't know how to handle. I thought that my training was about developing masculinity, about getting away from the effeminacy that I was ashamed of."

"But that has not happened," David said.

"No."

David put his arm around his shoulder, pulled him to him, and spoke softly so that his breath caressed his neck. "Look into the distance," David said, pointing. "There is no end to it." David stroked his hard belly – it contracted, and then softened. David moved his hand up his bare chest and played with his tight nipples. They were tender. Tim's spine stiffened. His neck elongated.

"I feel like a woman when you do that," he whispered, throwing his head back, shivering with a thrill he could not resist, unable to stop himself from confessing it, or putting himself at David's mercy. "I want you inside me. I want to take your cock inside me, please," he begged, taking David's hardening cock, through his thin linen trousers, in his fist. "I love your cock." David squeezed him to himself. They were happy.

They walked alongside the white walls of the Chora looking out over the Aegean, wending their way back to the room. Inside, gently, David guided him to the bed, but before he lay him down, he undid his cutaways. Tim stood, sun-bronzed, before him in lacey, white bikini underpants. David gazed at him, turned him around, stroked his thighs and hard breasts. He kissed him and cupped him and took off his panties and ran his thumb over the crown of his cock and then put his lips around it and bathed it with his tongue.

He stopped, looked at him, and said, "You are beautiful."

Tim was reaching a stage he had not known existed. He experienced an ecstasy of passivity, of submission, of receptivity. David traced a finger along the crack of his butt, and then he gasped when David pushed it into him and circled it around inside. He had him in the palm of his hand. David turned his head upward, drew him down, and pressed his mouth to his and took him with his tongue. David took him? He gave himself. He lay under him, legs apart, opened wide above him, holding on as David slowly, rhythmically fucked him, deeper each time and deeper. David kissed him and took his breath away. He swam in his embrace; after-images of the sea raced across his inward eye. The glinting bits of sun became glistering bolts of golden electricity shattering consciousness.

When he opened his eyes, it was dawn. David, still asleep, was holding him in his firm grasp, arms circling his chest, soft thick cock sandwiched warmly inside him. He closed his eyes again and slept until he felt David stir in him, caressing with a now hard bar, rolling his nipples between thumbs and fingertips, making him quiver with the breath of kisses on his neck and in his ear.

At breakfast on a terrace overlooking the sea, he still felt David inside him. He sat forward and whispered, "I still feel you inside me."

From across the table David caressed his cheek with his palm.

In the evening, they took a hydrofoil to Naxos.

The Groove on the Aegean, run by two English guys, is the name of a discotheque on the waterfront, on the island of Naxos. The docks are on the left; the Temple of Apollo, framed by sea and sky, is to the right. Although open to everyone, The Groove is essentially a drag club. David and Tim trekked through Naxos in the late afternoon, searching, particularly, for what Tim would wear that night.

If I'm going to interest you in what Tim would wear, you ought to have a better sense of what he looked like than I have so far given you. His eyes are blue, "like the Aegean," David said one night in winter, as he cradled him in his arms and they gazed at each other by fire light: "Your eyes are blue like the Aegean." David began to tickle him, and laughed, "like the Aegean. I'm going to swim in you."

His hair is full and thick and so black that in the right light it has a blue sheen. His mother was Japanese, Yan Hiroko; his father, Italian, Ben Ciraldi. They met in Times Square on New Year's Eve in 1987. In deference to his mother they named him Timoc, but he was never called anything but Tim. His skin is smooth and bronze. "You are beautiful like a girl," David said. He is 5'9", 145 pounds; slim, with nice muscle definition. A galloping current of energy courses through him, like a horse he is always forced to keep in harness.

"With heels?" David started to question, but stopped, nodding his head approvingly at the pair he pointed to in a shop window.

He nodded, "Okay?" They went in.

That night Tim wore yellow heels, mauve stockings to mid thigh that culminated in a black garter of paisley lace, pale copper-colored hip-hugging leather shorts, a bright, pumpkin-colored, sleeveless, clinging-to-the-skin t-shirt, cut to bare abs, a gold chain collar fastened by a tiny lock around his neck, arms bare except for the leather strap circling the left bicep. His hair was short and shaggy, and wisps fell on forehead; his eyes were lined in violet and he wore violet lipstick. David wore a skimpy sunshine yellow bikini and carried a leather riding crop, twined like a caduceus, that they found in a gift shop among plaster busts of Homer and Plato. Inside the club, at the bar, on the dance floor, they were not an anomaly, but going through the narrow white walled, stone-paved alleys, he was conscious of how intently and how often people looked at them. He leaned on David's arm, gazed up at him, flushed with excitement and devotion.

They sat at the bar pressed against strangers, squeezed against each other. They were on their second vodka sour when a barefoot young man with pierced nipples and a few days' growth of beard, an amber-colored sarong slung low around his hips, emerged from the crowd and approached. His eyes were soft, liquid and beseeching. His smile was modest and self-effacing. "May I join you?" He smiled demurely. His name was Panayiotis, he said, and added, before they could stumble over trying to pronounce it, that everyone called him Pan. It was appropriate.

"These are exquisite," Tim said, fingering one of Pan's nipple rings, caressing his cheek with the free hand. His few days' growth of beard was soft.

Pan blushed.

"May I touch your nipples?" Pan asked.

"You'll have to ask my master."

Pan looked at David: "May I?"

"Yes," David said, putting his hand on Pan's shoulder.

"May I kiss them?" Pan asked.

David smiled gently. He winked approval, and shook his head yes.

Pan bent over gracefully, his hands clasped behind his back; kissed each nipple reverently, gently bit them, covering his teeth with his lips. Clutching David's hand as Pan worshipped his nipples, Tim knew that David could feel the current going through him. They kissed while Pan continued to flick his tongue over the nipples.

"Now yours; may I?" Pan asked David, keeping his eyes lowered.

David threw back his head, arched his back, extended his chest. Pan bowed before him and pressed his lips to his nipple and kissed it reverently, fanning his fingers across the other one.

As Pan worshipped him, David guided Tim, holding his neck, back to him, and took him by mouth and hollowed him with his kisses. Holding the back of Pan's neck to keep his balance Tim dug nails into David's flesh – burning to be fucked.

Dazed, they looked at each other, breathless; loud disco music thumping inside them as it hammered the room.

"I know a quiet nook by the edge of the sea across from Apollo's island. We can go there. It's quiet," Pan said.

Stars flung out, salted through the sky, black over the sea. The figure of Apollo rose from its base, gloried in the heavens surrounding it, encompassing it.

"How long are you here for?" Pan asked standing at the edge of beach, as they all were, tide lapping feet in the midnight sea.

"You're very beautiful," he said to Pan.

"So are you, as beautiful as a beautiful woman," Pan answered.

"You are also as beautiful as a beautiful woman, the sarong hanging invitingly from your hips," Tim said, touching Pan, teasing him, loosening it and letting it fall to the sand.

"I like that you find me beautiful," Pan said.

David took their hands and joined them. "You are in love with each other, like lesbians."

They gazed at each other. Tim took David's hand, brought it to his lips, looking at Pan, and kissed it. "May I?"

"Yes," David said.

Tim pressed Pan close, ran his fingers through his hair, pressed his lips against his, rubbed his body against him. He felt the bump and beat of his breath as Pan returned his kisses and drew him nearer. He felt the firmness of his rump and the power he had at his fingertips to make Pan crazy.

"Press your snatch to mine," Pan said.

They twisted flesh to flesh; David penetrated both with his fingers, choreographing ecstasy, until he pulled them apart. Tim watched as David lowered Pan onto the damp sand, pushed his legs open, pulled his butt up, and drilled in and out of him. With an outstretched hand David held Tim's cock and brought it to a head. Tim came when David and Pan came and fell upon David's neck, digging kisses into it.

Afterwards, they lay on their backs in quiet bliss, on dry sand, their eyes filling with the heavens.

David broke the silence, but not the spell. He leaned over and kissed his lover's lips.

"I am proud of you," he said.

"Why?" Tim asked in astonishment.

"You let yourself go and got yourself back," David said, caressing his cheek. "You are solid and true."

Tim smiled. He had come through. An easy happiness spread through him. He felt as if he had been knighted.

Pan rubbed his belly, kissed him, and then sucked him slowly and brought him to the height of an unendurable excitement. He shattered with pleasure.

It was the calmest and most assured Tim had ever felt. The warm night air became his breath. They wandered, the three of them, homeward to their room, where Pan would stay with them, going through the hilly, dark, and empty streets of the Chora, lit only by moon and stars.

Pan had to get back to his job in Athens; he worked in the editorial offices of an international men's health and fitness magazine, as a translator. They had to be in Athens to catch a flight... to Paris. David had rented an apartment there – three rooms on Rue Blainville, near the Contrescarpe -- before they left for Greece.

After four years of college, they'd had enough schooling, thanks, and did not want to sit through more. They wanted life and they wanted to experience something outside the United States.

David landed a job at the OECD as an office boy and was rightly confident that he could rise from the rank of office boy to the rank of someone served by an office boy. After three months he was assigned to write a report on the viability of Greece as a member of the EU and the consequence for Greece and for the European Union if Greece exited. David discovered that the work -- accumulating, collating, and analyzing data -- interested him. He liked the intellectual challenge and the organizational discipline demanded as well as the chance it gave him to learn and to reflect on the variables of international events and scenarios, and, because of his talent, to succeed.

Flint Whitlock, the OECD Director of Audits and Evaluations, had been immediately impressed by David when he saw him several days after he began working there. It was the kind of pure knowing that is the result of an ingrained affinity. And it was sexual attraction, too. Whitlock made a point of sending for him that morning.

"How long have you been here?"

"Four days," David answered.

"What have you learned in those four days?"

"To keep my eyes open and to watch what I say," David answered, laughing.

"Can you write?"

"Yes."

"We'll see. I need someone to look at the Greek economy, collect data, make sense of it, and present it in an easy to read and comprehensive report." He waited a beat: "Interested?"

David had no idea yet whether he was or was not interested in the subject of the assignment itself, but he was certainly interested in getting such an assignment. He said "yes," unhesitatingly, was given a cubby, a computer, a list of questions and of issues that had to be addressed, and several texts on Modern Greek history, economics, politics, and culture.

Tim and David did not see much of each other for several months. David was holed up in his office until late every night – with no break on weekends – or away from Paris doing library research or fieldwork, in Greece.

"Without me," his lover said, pouting. "Greece is ours."

Walking one afternoon, several months later, following lunch, around the lake in the Bois de Boulogne, with Whitlock, David was happy. He had lived up to his plan. Whitlock spoke first.

"You have a way of expression that is unlike what one usually sees in OECD reports. You give the statistics and analyses, but you get something, the way you write, that is not dry and bureaucratic."

David thanked him, and Whitlock put his arm around him. "Thank you," he said.

Tim was not sure what he was going to do, what course to pursue. David said that was ok. He would find his way. As it happened, once again, it was the other way: his way found him.

It was raining. He was walking from the Place de l'Odeon to Les Halles. The Pont des Arts was nearly deserted. It was a hot day's rain; fell quickly and hard, then stopped, returning the day to sunshine and heat. He was wet: hair dripping; black t shirt clung to chest; cut-away jeans were soaked, but bare legs were already dry in squishy tennis shoes, worn without socks. He laughed to be so drenched. Then he noticed that a guy was looking at him, and when he finally noticed him, he smiled. Tim grinned back, indicating he was aware he was a sight. The guy kept looking. Tim returned the gaze.

"I would have introduced myself to you whether you noticed me or not," he said. "I've been looking at you. I'd like to photograph you for a series I have been commissioned to do. For Elle...That's not a line," he said, giving his card. "Why don't we go for a coffee?"

At that hour of the day, there were not many people at the café on the Quai Malaquais. They took a table outside and saw across the Seine the immense façade of the Louvre. Tim's shirt was nearly dry.

The stranger was Jeremy Runsen, the fashion photographer.

"It is strictly a crass commercial venture, and there's a lot of money in it," he said smiling.

Tim listened to his pitch, then told him he had to discuss it with his husband.

"Of course," Runsen said. "When can you get back to me?"

David gave the go-ahead, pleased and amused – pleased at Tim's good fortune, amused that, once so withdrawn, now Tim would be exhibiting himself wholesale in fashion spreads on billboards, in slick magazines, on the internet.

"You'll be the focus of a million gazes," David said, "and of numberless secret desires."

"I know," Tim said, kissing him, exploring the volume of his mouth with his tongue, his open palm reverently caressing David's neck. David touched Tim's nipples and his eyes rolled up under the lids. Tim clawed David, burning desperately to have him inside. But David resisted, and each rejection inflamed him more, increased his desire to submit, to surrender, to be a total slave. He trembled with need. "Please touch me.".

"Put your hands behind your back. Get on your knees."

Tim became only his mouth; he took David's solid cock slowly-- deep within, bathing it devotedly with tongue, blindly, cock hard as the cock he worshipped, and erupted as it erupted.

With Jeremy Runsen guiding his career, Tim went from success to success, from event to event, modeling, posing, giving interviews in major cities.

But there was no release, only stimulation, binges of excitement. He told Runsen he was always on edge. Runsen acknowledged that he knew it, that it was good, the way it had to be. "Being on edge gives you an edge, makes you edgy. It's visible in everything you do, in your photo shoots, on the runway, how you walk, how you speak. It makes you hot and always ready to surrender to whoever wants you. That makes the millions who see you want you -- and the stuff you are modeling. And it predisposes them to surrender to the ads you're in."

They few to Venice to shoot a spread on men's jewelry slated to appear in all the editions of a major, slick, international magazine. It had been a long three days of shooting. After it finished Tim stayed on alone. It was after midnight. He was strolling through dark empty streets looking down into the canals and up at the ancient palazzos that were reflected in them and rose above them. He made his way to San Marco and sat on a bench at the edge of the Grand Canal. David was in Corfu gathering information on the feasibility of solar panels. Tim looked at his phone, hoping for a message from him.

"Can you get a signal from here?" A dominatingly handsome man sat down beside him. He looked up from the screen.

"I'm getting one now," he said.

When the man smiled he took hold of him with his eyes.

"I'm taken," Tim said, blushing, aware there was danger.

"All the more exciting," the man said, deliberately playing off his meaning, and kissed him, and he surrendered.

The ambiguity of the situation and the lurking traces of guilt and fear – the element of the forbidden -- only intensified the erotic force. The dominator freed his mouth but kept him in his embrace. The loyalty he felt to David tore at him as strongly as his passion for Antonio, Antonio Serretti. Resistance and passion struggled against each other inside him, and he followed where he was led.

The sun flooded the room in the morning; it was a room as unfamiliar to him as he was at that moment unfamiliar to himself. Antonio opened his eyes and smiled at him. He turned away his head, deliberately trying to avoid the gaze. He did not want this to go on, but he knew that he could not break it off.

"Hey, ragazzo," Antonio said, tenderly, "tell me what happened."

Tim would not answer. When Antonio caressed the back of his neck – his face was turned from him and buried in the pillow – he tried to wriggle away from him, but he could not escape the firmness of his grasp. Antonio kept his hand on the back of his neck and he knew he was submitting.

Antonio turned Tim's face towards his and held him in his gaze. His voice was tender, but firm, with a trace of menace in it.

"You belong to me. Your will is mine; you are mine: passive, loyal, devoted, feminine, receptive, submissive, a slave. It is futile to try to deny it."

Frozen by fear and desire, Tim could say nothing. The power of Antonio's gaze pithed him. He could not move. He knew he was submitting.

Then Antonio's gaze softened. "I'm hardly human in the morning before coffee," he said, smiling. "Make yourself some, too. Andare, mio bel ragazzo schiavo. You'll find everything in the kitchen. You don't need any clothes. Presto!"

The word was a command Tim obeyed as if programmed to. Naked, except for a narrow silver band encircling his left wrist – he could not recall wearing it or seeing it before, but it was familiar – he went into the kitchen, with ease found the coffee things, made coffee, carried it into the bedroom, and put the tray down on a side table.

"Pour it," Antonio said. "Bring it to me."

He complied, lost in the ecstasy of following orders.

"Beautiful boy," Antonio said, as Tim handed him his coffee, and held Tim by his scrotum. Tim lowered his eyes, humbled by his master's gaze. Antonio took the cup; with the other hand he took Tim's wrist and surveyed him as if he were a painting or a sculpture. "Look at me," Antonio said. Tim raised his eyes and gazed, locked inside Antonio's gaze.

"I have caught you," Antonio said, laughing, and pointed to the floor. Tim sat at his feet, on his haunches, his eyes lowered again, confused. Caught? Had he done something wrong? It was nearly impossible to think. His brain would not work. Something about betrayal. It was more than he could sort out, more than he could think about. He stopped wanting to try. His mind collapsed right under him. It was a waterfall cascading down to nowhere. Antonio stretched out above him like the arc of a rainbow. Tim purred like a kitten in a half sleep, overwhelmed and vanquished.

"What do you remember," Antonio asked him one afternoon as they sauntered along by a small canal.

"Remember?" he said.

"Remember."

Antonio gazed at him and Tim was unable to think of an answer. There was only a vast panorama of sky. Wisps of clouds decomposed whitely in endless variation; shapes formed and decomposed.

"You have no memory," Antonio said, and touched his lips.

"Come to Burgundy with me. I have a place there. We can take the train. It will do you good to get away. And we can work on the report in a tranquil setting. It's a lovely house, stone, from the sixteenth century." Flint Whitlock smiled at David and took his hand. "Please," he said, "I must do something to bring you back to life. It is time."

"I'm alive," David said with a sigh. "This anguish is proof of that."

"It's time to get rid of that anguish. He's gone."

"I don't believe it," David answered. "It is so unlike him. His letter. It wasn't him."

"No," Whitlock said, "it wasn't. People change. People change. He no longer exists. It was not a letter from him but from the stranger he has become."

"How can that be, that a person can go through such a complete metamorphosis? That such light can disappear? How can you be who you are and not be who you were?"

"It happens," Whitlock said. "You must not get lost in your loss. I need you."

David looked at him skeptically.

"Not just for work," Flint said.

They met at the Gare de Bercy – ugly, hardly one of those great French railroad stations that still suggest, in the twenty-first century, the romance of nineteenth-century travel, stone and glass monuments to the powers of industrial capitalist grandeur, reminiscent of the Crystal Palace, as does, for example, the Gare de Lyon, also in Paris, or the Gare de Nice. They boarded the TER to Avallon and from there went by rental car to Whitlock's domain in Lormes.

It was cold when they arrived, and Whitlock got a fire going.

It was inevitable: Whitlock wanted it; David was ready for it. He was still alive, too alive to succumb to loss forever. Whitlock stood behind him at the computer. David sat in front of the screen. Whitlock caressed his thick hair with tender fingers.

Lance swiveled in his chair, looked up at Whitlock with questioning eyes. Whitlock nodded yes, raised him and pressed his lips to his and slit them open with a cut of his tongue and touched the recesses of his mouth. Lance surrendered to his hunger, to his breath, to his desire, to his love.

Antonio still asleep, Tim awoke from tormented slumber full of turbulent dreams, underwear crusted with semen. He had not had a nocturnal emission since high school. He slipped out of bed without waking Antonio, without conscious thought, hardly knowing what he did, Tim slipped into jeans and shirt and moccasins, stuffed his wallet, passport, money into jacket pockets, and walked along twisting streets, skirting canals, leading towards and going away from the marble steps of arching bridges. He knew that something had changed, but was not sure what, what kind of splint had prodded and penetrated him. He shook himself like a horse, or like a dog coming out of the water. His mind was as clouded as the vast Venetian sky, and as blazing as those sections of sky through which the sun yet blazed.

Still in a trance, but now an inversion of the trance, a counter trance, with no more consciousness than before, he took the vaporetto to Marco Polo and arrived at a ticket counter. He showed a credit card and his passport – both with meaningless names imprinted on them that would not enter his memory -- and soon was boarding a plane to Paris. It was cloudy and rainy at CDG. He stood on line for a taxi. Not sure where he was going, he said the first thing that came to him: Les Jardins du Luxembourg.

Sitting in a lonely wooded section of the gardens, by sweeping verdant lawns under ancient, heavily foliated, great-branched trees, solid, grounded although soaring, mind empty, he fell into a leaden sleep. As he slept, three youths with shaven heads, stealthily, nimbly, went through his pockets and lifted wallet, credit card, passport, and several hundred euros without waking him. When he did wake it was raining and he was wet. The day was warm, and the rain was soft. He breathed deeply taking in the green air and did not move until a courteous gendarme told him they were closing the gardens.

He left reluctantly, going out the gate on Saint-Michel facing Rue Soufflot and the Pantheon. He walked left at the Pantheon and there looming in splendor before him was the astounding church of St. Etienne.

Still in a daze, as the light faded, he sat on stone steps under the magnificent portico looking blankly at the twin crescent structures in semi circle of the law school and the Mairie. As he sat, a warm and sleepy buzz overtook him. His chin fell to his chest. The stones around him became a flood of water. The buildings became trees. He fell through a mountain of clouds, and startled, awoke. He did not know where he was.

Someone, a man, well dressed, handsome and patrician, bent over him. "Are you ok?" he said, speaking in English.

"I don't know," he said. "Where am I?"

"That's the Pantheon to the left," he said.

"I'm in Paris?"

"You better let me take you home."

"I don't know where that is," he said, confused.

"We'll go to my place," the man said. "When did you last eat?"

"Eat? I don't remember. I'm not hungry."

"Come," the stranger said, extending his hand for him to take. As they walked alongside the long majestic gate of the Luxembourg Gardens on Rue Vaugirard, his companion spoke of the battles fought between German troops and French Resistance fighters there in the final days of World War II. It did not occur to him that it was an odd thing to be speaking of. This was Paris. There were commemorative plaques everywhere. The deportations, commemorated; the deaths recorded, were tragic; young men fought to live freely and authentically against men whose humanity had been usurped.

The interlocutor put an arm around him. "You don't know what happened, do you?"

"Happened? In the war?" he said, confused.

"To you!"

"Something happened."

"What happened?

"I don't know. It passed over me and took me in its wake."

"What passed over you?"

"Something that drew my attention away."

"Away from what?"

"From myself. I was decimated."

"Who are you?"

"I don't know. Perhaps you can tell me who I am. Look," he said, remembering his passport and other identification. He felt in his pockets, but they were empty. He was even more puzzled than he had been. "I don't know."

He could not get beyond that. He strained to remember. The passages through which thought travels were blocked. But the way things developed between them showed that it was of no matter.

"You may not know who you were, but that is just as well," Luc smiled. "It won't get in the way of who you're going to be."

"How can I know who I am going to be when I don't know who I am, who I was? I am no one. I'm lost."

"No, you are not lost. You are here, with me."

"But who am I?"

"Leave that to me," he said, drawing him nearer to him. "You are who you will become."

"What will I become?"

Luc smiled and kissed his lips, as if sealing a pact. "You will become what I make you," he whispered.

Before going back to his apartment, Luc stopped at the Musée du Luxembourg, and then they turned back to Rue Galande.

Who was he going to be? What was he going to be? It would not be up to him. It was not his problem. He only had to do what he was told and he would become... what? He could not say; he would see. He trusted Luc. He became weightless. He knew without a doubt that he would become what he was supposed to be – and that involved submission. Submission was a dimension – a cornerstone -- of his identity. Who he would be was not for him to determine but to surrender to. Luc would determine his identity. He was in control and would define him by possessing him. That is what, he intuited, it must have been like to be a woman a century ago and earlier, when a man courted her, took possession of her, gave her his name, determined everything about her, and created her in the image he desired – at least, a woman of a certain class, wealth, and physical beauty; in the rapture of his fantasy, he did not reckon in the mass of precedent human experience. The very thought that he had become enthralled and was protected in the embrace of powerful domination exalted him – and gave him a sense of being complete.

When Luc Bastienne found him on the portico of Saint Etienne and took him home, everything was a matter of trust. Luc trusted his intuition and the sudden flood of desire. He trusted that this beautiful and confused vagrant was malleable. And our lost hero? He trusted the man who put his arm around him and guided him through the dusky streets; that he could find and define him, could name him. When Luc asked him his name, he rummaged through the dustbin of his memory but found nothing.

"I don't know," he said with a combination of puzzlement and astonishment.

Luc smiled. "So much the better," he said. "I found you on the portico of the Church of Saint Etienne, I'll call you Stéfan."

"Stéfan," Stéfan repeated the name and found himself in it. "Yes, Sir," he said, some ancient program snaking through him.

"No, not Sir," Luc said. "Luc."

"Luc," Stéfan said, quietly, seeing him as if for the first time.

Houses made of massive timber beams and huge blocks of hewn stone, dating from the thirteenth century, still stand on Rue Galande, a small road, crossing Rue Dante, ending at the Place Maubert, and define its ambience. Luc guided Stéfan up an old wooden staircase, whose steps had been worn down by footsteps, over centuries, into a grand medieval apartment with beamed ceilings and stone walls and stone floors. From the arched windows of wavy glass panes, they could see the Seine.

Stéfan gaped in amazement as if transported, touched his forehead and said, "I feel faint."

Luc guided him to a divan by the window, unbuttoned his shirt, took off his jeans, and when he was naked, looked at him with pleasure, but held himself back and helped him to lie down. "Sleep, my darling," he said. "You are home." He kissed his brow and covered him. Stéfan fell into a deep and dreamless slumber.

In the morning, there was the matter of clothing. "Look at you," he said as he kissed Stéfan's sleepy eyes and lowered the quilt and beheld naked torso, firm abdomen, thighs and calves of strength and delicacy. "We must get you clothing worthy of such beauty."

All the wardrobe Stéfan had he was wearing when Luc found him. For classic stuff: suits, jackets, jeans, corduroys, shoes, boots, t-shirts, jackets, underwear, sweaters, they went to the BHV Homme. For other stuff – "I want to see you in s&m gear and drag, too," Luc said; -- they went to little places scattered throughout the Marais, where, among other things, they found a black leather harness, and where Luc had Stéfan's nipples pierced.

Autumn came. The evenings were chilly. The fire in the old stone fireplace gave a soothing warmth and a delicious smell to the room.

"You are ravishing," Luc said, his length stretched along a thick carpet in front of the hearth, his torso propped up by a pile of red velvet cushions, lightly inhaling a joint, which he put to Stéfan's lips afterwards. Stéfan's head was in his lap and he was lost in a dreamy haze as Luc lightly brushed the nipples on his smooth chest, every now and then bending over to sweep sweet kisses across his tender lips. Stéfan looked at him with bright glazed eyes, and placed his palm around the back of Luc's neck, drew himself up to him and kissed him submissively, hungry with desire.

"Get dressed," Luc said.

Stéfan smiled and loosened himself from Luc's embrace. He rose and stood before him his cock hard. Luc took hold of it in his warm palm and kissed the tip. Stéfan closed his eyes and sighed. Luc loosened his palm and drew Stéfan into him, ravished him tenderly, and brought him to a gushing overflow, which he swallowed. "Now, go," he said, when he withdrew his lips; "get dressed." Dizzy still from ecstasy and ravishment, still wanting more of him, of Luc inside him, Stéfan stepped back and left to bathe and dress.

Stéfan bathed, shaved, dressed, outlined his eyes in violet; dusted his eyelids with bronze glitter. Luc stood by the stone fireplace in tuxedo, aroma of masculine cologne surrounding him, waiting for him. He brought Stéfan's wrist to his lips, plucked a rose from the vase on the mantelshelf, slipped it through the lapel of his bronze-colored silk bolero jacket. The jacket hugged Stéfan's shoulders and framed his chest; tips of newly tender nipples pointed through his form-fitting black t-shirt. The distressed skin-tight jeans Stéfan wore were cut short; instep and ankles, sleek in sheer amber stockings flashed translucent between cuffs and tops of suede burgundy boots.

"You are beautiful," Luc said, "and feminine."

"I feel feminine," Stéfan blushed.

Luc softly glossed the tips of his fingers across Stéfan's nipples. Stéfan shuddered. Luc took his hand in his and again brought the wrist to his lips and kissed it. Stéfan took Luc's hand, turned it palm up, raised it to his lips, kissed it, ate from it.

"I love you," he whispered. "I belong to you."

What does it mean when you know you belong to someone? First, it means you know that you do not belong to yourself. But what does that mean? It means that you are centered outside yourself, that you exist as someone else, but it is no longer someone else. That someone else is you and you are yourself because you are him. You belong to yourself because you belong to him. This absorption of your being by another being whom you become is a mystery and can bring with it confusion unto dizzying madness were it not for the alchemy of love.

Stéfan, pressed chest against Luc's back; held tight, arms round his waist. The motorcycle raced up Rue de Rivoli, rounded Place de la Concorde, headed up Avenue du Champs Elysées, turned left onto Avenue Montaigne and then right, up Avenue du President Wilson. The sky was darkening; the moon was a pale and glowing scimitar. They stopped in front of a grand mansion, a palace, rising in the center of an exquisite park surrounded by verdant lawns, stone benches, a central fountain, and beds of luxuriant flower. The doors of the great black iron gate tipped with gilded spikes like arrowhead ferns stood open; light flamed from within the Musée Galliera.

The guard at the door saluted Luc. Inside, a middle aged, patrician woman, in beige taffeta and lace, wearing a delicate string of exquisite pearls round her neck, greeted Luc.

Luc presented Stéfan to the Duchess de Brignole. Stéfan blushed when she took his hand and surveyed him, "Luc did not exaggerate," she said. "You are extraordinary." Stéfan lowered his eyes and ever so slightly curtsied, "Your Grace," he murmured.

"Anna-Maria," she smiled. "If you will follow me," she said. "We will begin," she said to Luc, "whenever you like."

"It may seem strange to be inside one of the most important museums in this city and not see even one piece from its magnificent collection on display," Luc began after an introduction by the Minister of Culture. "The Musée Galliera does not keep its collection permanently on display. The garments are too fragile and can only take so much exposure. It presents exhibitions drawn from the collection, reflecting a particular theme. Tonight, the theme is the museum itself rather than any pieces from its magnificent collection."

The Duchess who sat Stéfan by her side, took his hand, leaned over, and whispered, "I do hope you will come with me in our car to the reception afterward."

"With pleasure, Madame," Stéfan answered.

Luc continued:

"The Musée Galliera belongs to, is owned by, the city of Paris and not the government of France because of a legal error made by the notary in drawing up the original contract of bequeathal. Construction of the Galliera, this Renaissance palace in which the collection is housed, was begun as a gift by the Duchesse de Galliera, Marie Brignole-Sale de Ferrari, in 1879, three years after the death of her husband, expressly for the purpose of housing the family's great art collection. In 1884, she bestowed 6.5 million francs on the City of Paris. Building began, but things did not go well. Politics and factionalism got in the way of her generosity, and of her pride.

"In 1886, the French Chamber of Deputies enacted a law expelling anyone from France who was a direct descendent of a French royal dynasty. The Duchesse was descended from the House of Orléans; she became, consequently, persona non grata in France. She could not take back what she had already given, but she could and did refuse any further contribution. She left France and she abandoned the Palais Galliera, left it unfinished, and went to live in Italy. She gave her art collection to the city of Genoa, where it is housed to this day in two Palazzos: the Palazzo Rosso and the Palazzo Bianco.

"She died in 1888. In 1889, her heirs disobeyed her wishes – there is no indication why; perhaps patriotism, perhaps vanity, perhaps lobbying -- and gave the City of Paris another 1.3 million francs to finish construction of the Palais Galliera. Paris had the museum, a museum without a collection. What to do with it? It became a home for temporary exhibitions, industrial displays, auctions. In 1977, it became what it has remained, the museum of fashion, but in itself it stands as a model of the kind of magnificence that transcends time or fashion."

Luc had told Stéfan he was a historian and taught at the Sorbonne, but, until Stéfan heard him introduced and listened to him speak he had not known just how renowned and accomplished he was or that he had written Cultures and Their Artifacts: from Palmyra to The Twin Towers.

"It's uncanny," Stéfan said, in their bedroom, in the candlelight, as they were getting undressed, later that evening, after the reception at the Athénée on Rue Montaigne. "You're a historian, but I have no history; you know nothing of my past."

"True. But I have a present to give you," Luc said, taking a red plush box out of the top drawer of his dresser. He sprung open the box: embedded in a field of sky blue satin: a diamond ring, the stone glistening in the candlelight; below it, a pair of diamond-studded nipple rings.

II

When Abdul Abdul Raqmahedroon, petty thief and small-time drug dealer, who, on occasion, when he was drunk beyond having the capacity for later recall, sold himself to men for sex, read Luc's essay in Le Monde, a meditation lamenting the destruction of the ruins of Palmyra, wrought by the Islamic State, and condemning the hubris of the men and the ideology that fostered it, his anger knew no bounds.

"The fool holds the artifacts of the blasphemous infidel higher than the sacred duty of submission to the highest power," he said to himself, crumpling the paper and going out to the toilet in the hall. He threw the paper into the toilet and pissed on it. When he flushed, because the paper had become a thick sopping wet bunch it would not go down. If he tried again to flush it, the toilet would overflow. There it was, a mess inside the porcelain basin, stained greenish blue and black by the mix of piss, printer's ink, and the toilet cleaner that ran from the plastic filter affixed to the side of the bowl. With disgust Abdul scooped out the sodden paper and threw it in the waste can. He hurried back into his little room and angrily scrubbed his hands, as much to remove the grip of Luc's words from his skin as the pollution of urine he had been forced to endure.

He paced the room unsettled in spirit, his head in pain, on the edge of explosion. He threw open the window and looked at the cracked and crumbling stone at the top of a grimy airshaft. He could see the light of the open sky. The room was on the top floor, what still is called, and once was, the little room for the maid. He pulled the window back, grabbed his wallet and room key, and hurtled down the dingy back stairs. In the street he walked toward the Park Buttes-Chaumont, but stopped at the falafel place he hung out at. Ibrahim greeted him and he growled back something inarticulate. Ibrahim poured him a burning hot glass of sweet mint tea and asked him what distressed him.

Abdul sought to bring the glass to his lips; it burned his fingers to touch it, but he held it and it burned his lips, too when he touched them to its rim.

"The fires of hell will make this seem like coolness," he said with spiteful bitterness. Fanned out on the counter he saw a pile of the day's newspapers, including a copy of Le Monde. He grabbed it, rifled through its pages, and showed Ibrahim Luc's piece, slamming his palm upon it in unremitting rage.

"If I knew where this man is, it would not be much longer that he would live," he said.

"What is it you are saying?" Ibrahim gasped.

"Read, here, how he thinks, how he fouls the earth by living."

"These are not words any man should speak of another man. It is for God to determine life and death."

"What milk is in your bloodstream? It is for the legion of the faithful in submission to the prophet's successor to carry out what is ordained. The way you talk gives power to our enemies and allows them to enslave us."

"I am not enslaved."

"That is how well you have been brainwashed. You no longer know who you are or what you are. You think you are a Frenchman with a beret because you can say `ooh la la'."

"Abdul," Ibrahim began, quietly, "you are taking a mistaken..." but Abdul cut him off.

"Be wary. The punishment will fall on you as well if the light of vision does not return to you," he said, moving his glass away from him, crumpling this copy of Le Monde, too, and hurrying from the shop.

Outside, he walked with determination, brewing something, but not yet aware what.

When he passed an Internet café, it dawned on him that he might find out something about the writer. He whispered to the clerk who let him log in without paying a euro, and sat in front of a screen and typed `Luc Bastienne' into the search engine; each entry he found increased his fury until the blood of rage nearly smothered him when he saw pictures of Luc with Stéfan. He read the accompanying story of the event at the Musée Galliera carefully and dwelt on Luc's remarks about the history of the Palais Galliera. These people were infidels -- and beasts, vile fornicators, men bearing themselves like women, beasts. Filth clung to them. Their heads were repositories of evil and ought to be severed from their bodies and everything consumed by flame.

Sunday morning was cloudy. Luc stood by the window looking at the Seine and the sky. He turned when he heard Stéfan sit up and yawn. He sat down on the edge of the bed, tousled his hair, and kissed his lips, spellbinding him with kisses.

"Did you sleep well, my precious?" he said touching lightly a diamond-tipped nipple. In reply, Stéfan blinked his eyes and took him about the neck and kissed him dreamily, languidly, still drenched in the ocean of slumber. "I dreamed we were swimming in a Wild Ocean, "he murmured and, yawned, "struggling against the waves, and we found a large rock. We climbed up on it and lay in the sun and then you became a swan and seized me, like a god." Luc stroked his thighs. He spread his legs. Luc mounted him and teasingly entered him, each time deeper, until he was fully inside him. They ebbed and flowed like the ocean waves that had crashed in Stéfan's dream.

At breakfast, Luc told Stéfan that he had been invited by a team of archeologists, journalists, and photographers to travel with them to Syria to examine "the ruins of the ruins" of Palmyra and to write about what he saw.

"I've been debating with myself whether to take you with me."

"Isn't it dangerous?

"That's why I've had doubts."

"What about your safety?" Stéfan said, embracing him, pouting adorably, and tracing his finger along Luc's cheekbone."

"It is a risk I need to take."

"You are all my life. If something happened to you..."

"That will keep me safe, knowing you are here."

"You will go. There is nothing I can say."

"I will go. It is the only life I have, and if I do not follow it, I will have no life to give to my beloved, and I will lose you."

"Never," Stéfan said, and took Luc's hands in his and gazed into his eyes. "I am yours," he vowed, "and will worship you always." He gently grasped Luc's penis underneath his robe and knelt before him and lost himself in adoration, slowly rolling his tongue over the orbs within Luc's scrotum as his feathered fingers danced upon the shaft of his phallus.

"The Duchess wants to take you to the opera next Friday," Luc told Stéfan, looking up from his phone. "And she thinks I ought to get you your own phone," he added, "especially since I'll be away." Laughing, he continued, "She scolds me for having an old-fashioned attitude and calls me `macho'. Maybe she's right."

Stéfan kissed him. "I love your old fashioned macho attitude. It makes me weak in the knees."

"It doesn't bother you to be submissive?"

"I love being submissive," Stéfan said. "You Tarzan; me Jane."

Anna-Maria-Solange, Duchess of Brignole, the Duchess Luc had mentioned, was sincere when she had declared her admiration for Stéfan at the Palais Galliera. When she heard from the minister of culture that Luc was going to Palmyra, she phoned him to ask how Stéfan would manage without him and offered to look after him. So began an intimacy between the dowager duchess and the handsome beauty of indeterminate gender who was becoming the idol of Parisian society and a fashion icon.

"You are in love with him, aren't you?" the Duchess whispered as she sat beside Stéfan, the two of them alone in her box, as Violetta sent "E `strano," the tormented first act aria from La Traviata, reverberating through the Palais Garnier. "I can tell. It is something that I seldom see. But I know it when I do. It is not just caprice."

Stéfan blushed and lowered his eyes.

"Don't be a ninny," the Duchess said, poking him with her fan and clasping his hand in hers. "I am happy for you, and very happy that Luc has finally given his heart to someone, and that you are that someone. Luc is a dear love of mine. I want you to know you can be open with me, to confide in me. We shall be friends"

Stéfan raised his eyes, smiling, and returned the pressure of her hand. "Thank you. Yes. You honor me."

In Palmyra Luc trudged through the rubble of antiquities, antiquities, now the ruins of ruins, he wrote, that had remained standing millennia as testaments in stone to the ongoing spirit of humanity, to the continuity of humanity, to the life of culture, to the culture of life, to the art of community and the mutuality of inhabitation. It was a place wherein dwelling materialized out of the abstractions of thought, as it still does, and contained the breadth of human experience. Luc wept amidst the rubble. Here was no isolated Ozymandias undone by time; this crumbled monumentality was not the emblem of a tyrant's or an empire's fall, but the felling of a built, human place held in common and preserved in the amber of history, smashed by tyrannical malice bent on the extermination of humanity and history, in the name of obedience to forces demanding the obliteration of anything human through submission to a violent extinction of the scope and depth of each individual. On the flight back to Paris Luc began to write the piece that inflamed Abdul's wrath when he saw it in* Le Monde*.

Abdul had been so distraught during his visit to Ibrahim's falafel shop that he had not noticed, or if he had noticed, had paid no attention to the customer sitting in a corner booth, but spoke as the words rushed out of his mouth, unfiltered. The customer, however, was decidedly interested in him, so interested that he made certain that there could be no indication of it in his demeanor, but he followed everything Abdul said, and took a picture of him, as he seemed to be attending to something on his phone. After Abdul's distraught outburst and departure, the man in the booth, Tariq Yusuf, smiled at Ibrahim. "He is moved by a great intensity of passion."

"So much passion is not a good thing when it goes unguided. It is like a steed that runs unbridled. It can trip itself up."

"Exactly," said Tariq. "It is a virtue that loses its virtue because of its lack of discipline. Effective measures are measures tempered by thoughtfulness and focus, and by discipline."

There was a silence between them, as Ibrahim restocked trays of peppers, lettuce, and tomatoes.

"What does he do?"

"For work. Whatever," Ibrahim answered evasively. Perhaps the man was a police agent undercover. Then he bluffed:

"Odd jobs. When he gets them. Plumbing, house painting, sheet rocking, furniture moving, electrical wiring, demolition."

"When he's not working?

"Hangs out."

"Any special group?"

"Mostly guys like him."

"Girl friend?"

"Nah."

"He's not bad looking."

"Girls who want a good time, want a guy with money to spend."

"And that's not him?"

"He's heading...nowhere."

"How can I get in touch with him?" Tariq asked.

"He comes here to eat. That's all I know."

Three days after the encounter I have just recorded, the massacre occurred at the Bataclan. All Paris, all France and much of the world recoiled from the barbarism. Once again, humanity was under attack, and not just in Raqqa, Homs, Mosul, Palmyra, Somalia, Egypt, Iraq,

Nigeria, but in Europe, again.

Abdul, too, was filled with loathing when he saw images of the carnage, but it was loathing aimed at himself. He admired, he envied those the infidel called terrorists – the `holy martyrs', he called them, and silently replaced the word "terrorist" with "holy martyr" every time he read it in the paper or heard a commentator on the radio or television pronounce it. He condemned himself for passivity and hypocrisy. The fear of eternal punishment gripped his heart. The desire for eternal reward filled him with longing. He had to do something. He had to join with others to do something. He had to be ready: he had to fortify his mind and strengthen his body; he had to prepare for his own holy martyrdom. And he had to devise schemes for accumulating money.

To strengthen himself, Abdul began a daily regimen of running in the Parc Butte Chaumont. He would have preferred going to one of the fitness centers that had recently opened, but that required money, and he refused to squander what he took in from stealing and dealing. So he ran along the paths of the splendid park, keeping his eyes focused straight ahead as he ran, contemning the verdant landscape of the environment as decadent, a sign of the kind of luxuriousness that sought to distract you from the duties of eternal submission by the seduction of a secular impulse to worship temporal beauty.

As much as he tried however, he could not avoid seeing the obscenities that went on in the park. Men and women walking together, holding hands, kissing, lying together on the grassy slopes, performing forbidden embraces in each other's arms, openly in the sight of all who might behold them. That was bad enough, but to see two men bound in erotic rapture or two women, hair uncovered, skin bared, performing monstrosities -- that was beyond the unspeakable. Each day after running, back in his room, standing by the sink in the corner kitchen of his room, he scratched himself with a rag wet with soap and cold water until his skin burned. And afterwards, he prostrated himself and prayed, his forehead touching the floor in penance for what he had seen and for what he had not yet done. Sometimes when he thought of the holy acts of submission and self-extinction he would perform, he grew excited and succumbed to the disease of abusing himself. If he did, he scourged himself angrily, sometimes until he drew blood, with the knout he still possessed, that his father had used on him in his childhood. Afterwards, he washed himself and slept on the floor imagining what he would do in the streets of Mosul, with a band of brothers minded like him.

Rain beat steadily on the wavy glass windows of the fourth floor apartment on Rue Galande, where the Duchess had joined Luc and Stéfan for an afternoon of coffee and truffles.

"I do have a purpose for this visit," she said, lighting a cigarette, for, try as she might, she could not give up smoking. The best she could do was moderate each cigarette by inserting it into a long silver-tipped holder with a sprinkling of tiny diamonds flecking its black onyx shaft.

I have an invitation, rather rare, to an underground costume ball to be held in a deserted mansion on Avenue Foch, a week from Saturday. The theme is Venetian decadence. You must tell no one about it. I cannot tell you more precisely where it is. My chauffeur will pick you up and take you there. You will come?"

"Gladly," said Luc.

"You must be in costume."

"Of course," Luc said. "I will go," he said after a moment's thought, "as Prince Giangaleazzo di Maria di Giovanetti."

The Duchess looked at him questioningly.

"He was a sixteenth-century Venetian gentleman, loved power, was very handsome, and often posed -- dressed or in the nude -- for monumental statues that still grace some of the most prominent religious and civic edifices in the city. He seized a monastery once, and evicted its monks when he suspected a conspiracy against him. Then he filled the monastery with a dozen of his courtiers, and turned it into a personal brothel. He hosted friends there and men whose loyalty he wished to secure. He called it the Sanctuary. He also made it a center for painting, sculpting, and music, much of it obscene. Many aspiring or accomplished artists inserted their patron in the foreground of their paintings. Of course, it was condemned by the Church, but to no effect. Giangaleazzo withstood anathema and was never excommunicated.

"His henchman roamed the streets of Venice and raided newly-docked vessels for handsome youth, kidnapped them, imprisoned them in the Sanctuary, and dressed them as women. One such impressed boy from Greece refused to dress or be used as a woman. He was castrated, chained by his nipples to a dungeon wall, and left to perish. From time to time Giangaleazzo visited the dungeon and molested him. When the body became a corpse, it was burned. The ashes were put into a bronze casket, which was tossed into the Grand Canal. They say the casket was found by a diving expedition in the 1870s and put on display in the Academia, but I have never seen it."

"How dreadful," the Duchess said.

"Is it decadent enough?" Luc asked laughing.

"As a story, but as a real event, it is horrible and cruel. Is that what is meant by decadent?"

Stéfan looked on in wonder that such questions could absorb them. He was absorbed principally in admiring the Duchess' ruby choker and wondering how it would look around his own neck, and if it would excite Luc to see him wearing it.

"Don't think I don't see you," the Duchess said, turning to Stéfan, smiling devilishly, and waving a finger, "staring at my necklace. I know what you want."

Stéfan turned scarlet, but the Duchess laughed, took his hand and kissed the palm. "We are thinking similar thoughts. You shall wear it to the ball, as part of your costume. Wearing such a necklace you could only be a princess or a courtesan. I think we will make you a courtesan," her laugh rippled, "proud, irresistible, haughty, cruel – unattainable even during the moments of surrender."

He was tall, handsome under a narrow mask that highlighted his eyes, phosphorescent green. The mask, a bright crimson, was the same color as the Cardinal's satin robes he wore. Despite their amplitude, one could see he was trim beneath them. The steel gray of his hair that showed where his miter did not cover it suggested he was a man in his early fifties who cared about keeping in shape and preserving the appearance of youthfulness.

The Duchess dressed as a shepherdess, with bonnet, crook, and a nosegay of rosemary; Luc, as Giangaleazzo, in black cloak and silk shirt ripped open to reveal his medallioned chest; and Stéfan, ravishing, shoulders and back bare, in a scalloped floor-length gown -- from the Duchess' private collection -- flame-colored Persian silk brocade, slit to reveal stiletto heels and majestically arched insteps. It clung to him and revealed the outlines of his physique. It showed the sweep of each of his movements. The style may have been historically incorrect, but that could only be an afterthought to whoever saw him. At his throat, the Duchess' ruby choker. All three caught the attention of the imposing figure of the cardinal as soon as they entered.

Approaching them, the cardinal brought palms together and in unctuous tones greeted them, Stéfan in particular, with a soft but severe reproach. A man of his gravity, he said, ought not be subject to the evils of the allure of such earthly magnificence as the lady – although he bowed respectfully, he said he was certain that her station did not allow her the title of ladyship – as the lady presented. Nor, he added, being blessed by holy light, could he not see trapped within such elegant decadence an anguished soul unsure of its true nature, betraying that nature, which divine providence had provided him this opportunity to bring to salvation?

Giangaleazzo no sooner heard his insolence than his hand gripped the hilt of his sword, ready to unsheathe it. The Duchess gasped. The crowd of boisterous revelers near them became aware of the disturbance and broke off dancing and formed a gawking circle around them.

"My Lord," Luc said, inflating his chest and contracting his abdomen, more with insolence than with respect, "I hardly think one in your position of high ecclesiastical hypocrisy is in any position to offer moral sermons. Take heed you do not find yourself defrocked."

"It was not to you I addressed myself, Sir, but to this lady," the cardinal responded, indicating Stéfan with a nod of his imperious head, summoning as much hauteur as he could but failing despite himself, feeling his vitality dulled by the mastery with which Giangaleazzo spoke and aware that he had a role to play in front of an audience, now.

"There is no approach to her but through me," Luc answered. "An insult to her is an insult to me, and I do not brook insult."

"Do not forget," the Cardinal warned him, "divinely invested in me is the power of excommunication."

"You delude yourself. I am not one of your sheep."

"Mine is the power of the Church, and I will bend you to my will."

"Your will is nothing. You are a hypocrite. You'd rather kneel to me and do my bidding than serve your ascetic god; confess it or I will make you confess it with my sword." With the hand on the hilt, he drew his sword. With his free hand, Luc tore open the Cardinal's robe exposing a body, well wrought and tanned. The Cardinal wore a pair of black briefs and shiny knee-high black boots. A gold, diamond studded chain hung across his chest in a crescent, pinned at each end to a tiny crucifix piercing each nipple.

The cardinal stood in shock. Giangaleazzo slapped him.

"Bend," he commanded.

The Cardinal lowered himself to his knees and bowed his head. Giangaleazzo pulled his head up by the hair and pulled his mask off. It was Marcel Blanchard, the well-known television news anchor. The assembled masked revelers gasped in recognition; the news anchor reveled helplessly in his shame.

"Here is your place in the hierarchy, dog," Luc sneered. "Lick her shoes," he said parting Stéfan's gown revealing his ankles. Too deeply pulled in by the whirlwind of what was no longer a game, the Cardinal prostrated himself before Stéfan and lapped his tongue against the rich leather of his shoes, drinking in humiliation.

Stéfan held high his head. Through the almond-shaped apertures of his mask gleamed his dark blue eyes, and he laughed at the show of power he presented. Then defiantly, he parted his silk stockings-sheathed legs and opened his dress entirely, so that it hung like a cape highlighting his well-wrought masculine beauty dazzling in voluptuous feminine underwear. Again Luc pulled Blanchard up by his hair to have him see towering above him the spire of Stéfan's celestial cock, emerging from his garter belt, and his gleaming thighs. Blanchard, rapt by the power of Stéfan's allure, when Luc ordered him to worship it, kissed the rod that wrought his discipline, and sought salvation in adoration. The miracle of transubstantiation was accomplished; he felt the gush of holy spirit possess him.

"Rise," said Luc, and Marcel Blanchard rose. He trembled with unquenched desire, overwhelmed by the excitement of humiliation.

The Duchess meanwhile had been in animated conversation with a gentleman dressed as a late seventeenth-century English cavalier, a man actually employed by the French National police. She rejoined Luc and Stéfan; Luc could see that she was sexually agitated.

Tariq Yusuf had given up tobacco and was on edge. He wandered by the waterfall caverns of Buttes Chaumont Park, revolving a strategy. After a half hour of seemingly aimless wandering he made his way through crowds of strollers over to Ibrahim's place. Abdul was there with a companion, unshaven, but young enough so that his growth of beard was patchy.

"Musa has been there. He is a changed man. There is fire in his soul. You can see a fixed purpose in his eyes. He only speaks of jihad and..."

"You speak too loud, my friend," Tariq said, admonishing the youth, "too openly. Walk through the park with me and we can talk freely." Ibrahim took in the whole scene as he crushed falafel balls, and was filled with fearful foreboding.

Following him outside, as if compelled, "Who are you?" the green youth asked, defensively, with unconcealed belligerence.

"A man who has lived in the world longer than you and who knows it better," Tariq replied. "You talk like a big shot, like a would-be martyr, but in the struggle, you are nothing. You are nothing," he repeated in nearly a whisper. "You are useless, without education, and no guidance or understanding. You have no place among us. There is no role for you. Your sniveling hinders us. We are overcoming centuries of oppression endured under infidel crusaders. If you want to be useful, if you want your life to be meaningful, if you want to be part of the struggle and earn eternal reward, you must submit to discipline. If you cannot do that, don't waste my time."

Abdul watched Ali deflating before his eyes. He himself felt puny and ashamed. They were silent. Tariq did not let up.

"As I thought. Talk. What can you give? What can you do? Can you make explosives? Can you organize cadres? Are you able to fight and die for the caliphate?" Ali was silent, intimidated and burning with shame. Abdul felt like a whelp caught soiling the carpet. Tariq looked at them both with disdain and disgust

"I'll give you a day to think. If you think you are able to get real and if you want to do something for the caliphate and for your own eternal reward, if you think you can join the ranks of martyrs, be here tomorrow at noon. If you want to rot in a state of apostasy and waste your time jacking off together like faggots, don't waste my time." He got up and left without giving them a second look.

Abdul and Ali returned the next day. Tariq was waiting for them, reading from a pamphlet printed in Arabic. He had bought cigarettes but left them in his room. He was jittery. He had taken an immediate and instinctive dislike to the two young men he was preparing to groom; it would be no loss when they died. He would not miss them as he sometimes did miss, feel regret for, despite himself, one or another of his boys when they sacrificed themselves.

"You have decided?"

"We wish to submit ourselves to your discipline. There is no alternative."

"Why do you say that?"

"It is an evil world and we are besieged by demons."

"What demons?"

Abdul hardly could speak and stumbled when he tried.

"Demons that taunt us with lust for forbidden things."

Tariq said nothing but fixed his gaze upon Abdul, a gaze that suggested a demand to know his secret soul with the possibility of absolution."

"What forbidden things?"

"Sensations that enflame the body and derange the mind."

"What did you do?"

"Demons enflamed us."

"Did you touch him?"

"No"

"But you wanted to?"

"My body wanted to, but I did not want to."

"You do not want to be dominated by your body?"

"No."

"But your body dominates you."

""I am fighting it," Abdul answered, pleading with Tariq to believe him.

"What did you do when you felt pulled to evil?"

"I trembled and Ali saw it, and asked why I was trembling.

"I said I did not know but felt like there was a demon gripping me and I was struggling to evade its grasp. And then I saw that Ali was trembling also. I was gripped by fear of the demons. I prostrated myself on my prayer rug, and begged Ali to prostrate himself, too. He did and knelt beside me on the bare floor. We touched our foreheads to the floor, and recited Koranic verses seeking strength to resist."

Tariq regarded them with suspicion.

"You abuse the holy word. You yourselves are the demons. Do not lay the blame elsewhere. You are defiled. Only by punishment can you be cleansed. But you must agree to be punished."

"How will we be punished?"

"You will come to my room and be whipped."

Abdul breathed out and relaxed. Ali tightened himself.

"You must agree."

"I agree," they said separately as if with one breath.

I do not know whether it is a failure in our nature or one of our greatest strengths: a chief factor that ensures our survival, individually and as a species; or an indication of a fallen nature alienated from truth and nature -- that we are prone to, that we are able to compartmentalize ourselves and to contain within the same frame differing aspects, differing orientations, differing attitudes, often contradictory, attitudes that ought to cancel each other out were they mere mathematical equations, but that do not cancel each other out in the complex psychology of human beings, but emerge now here, now there, now even somewhere else. The goal, the aim, of fanatical belief, of single-minded dedication, of the cultivation of unquestioning obedience is to destroy that permeability of the human nature, the anxiety of ambiguity and complexity, the capacity to accommodate contradictions.

Tariq arranged for Ali to travel to Syria, where he stayed in a training camp for several weeks until he was sent out to defend a town still under the control of the Caliphate, on the outskirts of Palmyra, and under siege. There, he fought with vicious intensity, captured and crucified prisoners, and put bullets through more heads than one, until a bullet pierced his own skull. He fell in the sand and was left unburied. His body rotted and the heat of the relentless desert sun blackened its remains. Abdul heard nothing from him while he was alive, nor anything about him after his death. He knew communication would not be possible. His anger against the infidel among whom he lived, in Paris, grew sharp, became a razor to wield against them, to cut their throats with. Within him grew the desire to commit such violence against them that would shatter their arrogance and their contemptuous sense of superiority. He knew he would not feel at peace until he had blown them up, and himself with them.

It was like a gift, more than Abdul could have hoped for, a sign that he was chosen, when he read that Luc Bastienne would be discussing the destruction of Palmyra at the American Library. Located inside a circle whose center is the Eiffel Tower, towards the tip of the pie slice formed by Avenue de la Bourdonnais and Avenue Rapp, 10, rue du General Camou, where the library is housed, is a difficult street to find. Surrounded by magnificent nineteenth-century apartment houses and hotels particuliers the building is nondescript on the outside, a plain stone building on the street, lacking any sort of monumentality. Abdul wondered just how he would go about causing havoc, blow himself up in a suicide vest, plant a bomb, barge in and scatter bullets all over the place? The problem of what specific action to take was solved when Tariq showed him an M92 he had hidden under his bed. It was like the ones used at the Bataclan, he boasted. Abdul took the gun from Tariq, held it waist high, and swiveled around, pretending to spray bullets in arcs across the room. Tariq said, for security reasons, he would keep the gun until the day of the operation, when Abdul could come back to get it.

Once Luc's talk had begun, Abdul imagined, he would propel himself into the library and open fire. He liked the idea of causing panic, panic before death, and seeing it up close. It was perfect. They had, infidels that they were, reason for panic before stepping into the punishment that awaited them in eternal damnation. He, on the other hand, was swelling in anticipation of eternal bliss. He had to stay calm. He had to be methodical. He shaved his beard. Tariq took him to Bruce Field and outfitted him in a pair of navy blue slacks, a pale blue Oxford shirt, a gray blazer, argyle socks, and brown loafers.

Dressed like that, a week before the scheduled talk, Abdul went to visit the library. Hardly had he stepped through the door when he was stopped by a smartly-dressed, white-haired woman, wearing a simple string of pearls round her neck. She sat by a small table opposite the circulation desk. She asked to see his library card. He did not have one. He just wanted to visit the library. She informed him that he would not be allowed to borrow books without a membership, but he might purchase a day pass for fifteen euros, which would give him access to all the library's collections. Abdul was taken aback. He did not have fifteen euros to throw away. Anyhow, he had seen what he needed to see. He forced a smile and said he would come back. She nodded without smiling and shrugged.

Outside, angrily, Abdul walked, by a wandering route, in the direction of the Eiffel Tower, and reached the Champs de Mars. He was disheartened. The Eiffel Tower loomed like oppression. He crossed a small bridge over a narrow stream and sat on a bench atop a plateau in the midst of a neatly planted garden. What would he do? How would he do it? He had never been the sort to weigh consequences, but now he did. It vexed him. He stared at the pond fed by the stream without thinking, just blank. Of a sudden, he was startled by an explosive blast and then a second and a third that sent things flying. He was hit in the left arm and in the chest. Around him there were screams and people either fleeing in every direction or fallen prone, injured or lying flat for safety. He was dazed but dimly aware that he was outstretched on his back and in great pain. He saw nothing, felt consciousness ebb within him, mitigating the pain, and then return, bringing back the pain. He was lifted onto a stretcher. He blacked out.

The news media reported that forty-seven people were injured, among them American, British, German, and Chinese tourists. Six people were killed, two French citizens on a visit from Bretagne and a family of four from Japan. The culprits who planted the device were not apprehended; a flaw in the design of the explosives was responsible for the fact that the Eiffel Tower was not destroyed, although it appeared that that was intended. Abdul was listed among the injured, who were treated and released. His right arm was in a sling and hearing in his right ear had been impaired.

III

Weeks went by before Abdul felt anything. It was not a matter of a broken arm, which was mending, nor of decreased hearing. It was a deeper illness, a sickness of the spirit, a withered sense of worth, a dizzying confusion. He lay in bed lost, lonely in delirium, hardly aware of where he was or what he was. Everywhere had become nowhere; everything had become nothing. He was blank, pushing through a snowstorm. He went without eating. It was only because of Ibrahim, who obtained a passkey from the guardienne, who, like nearly everyone in the neighborhood knew him, that he stayed conscious. Ibrahim visited him daily bringing fruits and grains and fresh water, and spoke to him, even if he remained silent. Ibrahim made "small talk," described the weather, jokingly complained that there had been a hike in the price of lettuce and tomatoes, spoke of what he'd seen on television.

"Did they say anything about me?" Abdul surprised him one day, with the unexpected question. "Was there an explosion at the American Library? Is that where I was hurt?"

"What are you saying?" Ibrahim asked.

"The American Library, the khaneeth, the manyak."

Ibrahim knew the slang. He remembered also Abdul's passion when he read Luc's condemnation of ISIS.

"What are you talking about?"

"Did I kill him?"

"No," Ibrahim said. "You didn't kill anybody. You haven't committed any crime. You were hurt in a blast intended to destroy the Eiffel Tower. You had nothing to do with it. You were just sitting on a park bench nearby."

"I did not... Everything is..."

"It is best to say nothing, even to remember nothing," Ibrahim said, warning him soothingly. "There is no past. Everything begins in the present. Here. Now. There is nowhere else. There is no other time."

Abdul did not respond, but he heard him, and was perplexed. It seemed that Ibrahim knew.

"Where is Tariq?" Abdul asked.

"He has gone."

"Gone?"

"He is not there. His room is empty."

Perhaps that was as it should be, Ibrahim thought. Perhaps that was the one good thing that had come out of this tragically, absurdly ironic situation. Tariq would not have had anything to offer except further corruption. Tariq scorned tenderness, he scorned the individual heart, and he did not need religious fanaticism to justify his scorn. It was a part of his makeup. But Abdul was naïve. He had no sense of that. He had had no neurons to feel what Tariq was. For him, in the froth of his confused anger, Tariq was a catalyst, the one who, the thing that, was going to bring him to vision, stability, and fulfillment, to steer him to his destiny, to give meaning to him. But now, meaning had evaded him. Tariq was gone. His mission had failed Abdul's mission had vanished. He was a broken man with impaired hearing and a permanently weakened right arm. His once robust frame was almost skeletal. His eyes, which had burned with the zeal of a man approaching martyrdom, had become hollow, dull, and sunken; the fire that burned in them was extinguished.

Ibrahim saw all this, and knew, additionally, that Abdul was without resources. He had no money, and he would not be able to continue to rent the room he occupied, low as the rent, was for Paris.

"What will I do?" Abdul said.

He suggested that Abdul stay in the small room in the back of his shop.

"Right now," Ibrahim explained, "you have no other option."

With listlessness borne of a sense of defeat, Abdul complied, going where he was taken. He remained lifeless, however. Even when he rose from his bed, he was listless, sat all day in the small fenced-in concrete patio garden behind the house among the green and yellow dumpsters and the bicycles, smoking cigarettes.

"I don't like to see you like this," Ibrahim said, one Sunday afternoon, as he rubbed Abdul's back, pressing thumbs between his ribs and kneading both sides of his lower back. And noticing the welts that had formed where he had flagellated himself. Abdul exhaled and sobs came to his throat. Ibrahim pressed more strongly into his flesh, and tears rushed out along with angry screams. Ibrahim switched from the massaging movements of his palms into long and comforting strokes. He turned Abdul's body over so that he was lying face up. Ibrahim cupped his face in his hands, bent over and spoke quietly with great seriousness.

"Do you know what it is that so shakes you?"

Abdul shook his head and clenched his teeth, sobbed and gasped helplessly for breath, and spoke no words.

"It is called trauma," Ibrahim said. "Something so bad happened to you, so bad that you are unable to get beyond it. It becomes a ghost that haunts you, a vampire that poisons your spirit and feeds upon your blood."

Reclining languidly, seductively on a couch overhung by a bronze-colored velvet canopy, with a crystal goblet of purple wine in one hand; the other hand, extended, palm up; extended to the beholder of the painting, Stéfan, reminded Luc of an odalisque. He wore only a jade necklace around his neck; diamond pins glistering in his nipples; jade green stockings held up by the black straps of a lacy red garter belt; his pubes were trimmed and his penis was tumescent. His eyes were liquid with receptivity; their depth of blue, intense in the light of the fire burning in the grand hearth to the left of the divan; the eyelids hung heavily, as if about to fall over them. His head was turned invitingly toward the spectator; his face shone with emptiness, there was a hint of an unpremeditated smile on his lips. Behind him, a grand set of arched windows, framed by cloth of bronze, like that which overhung the canopy, gave onto a late autumn scene of almost leafless trees, a turbulent Seine, a troubled sky.

Luc stepped back from the painting hanging in the Twenty-One Gallery. Several months earlier, he had watched as it was being painted. It had aroused him as he had gazed at Stéfan in his erotic nonchalance, posing so revealingly and without a hint of reluctance. But to see on the canvas the transformation the painter had achieved overwhelmed him. It still was an erotic scene, but there had been conveyed into the composition a resonance of the hidden, eternal power of eroticism, which the painter had uncovered by means of her art.

The Duchess, stately as always, standing by his side watched Luc as he examined the painting. She was gratified by the awe she saw illuminate his features. She had organized this exhibition of "fugitive painters" at the gallery on Rue Raspail in order to position the work of her protégée, Imala Tamim, a Paris-born painter of Afghan parents within the context of a series of recent works whose common theme could be considered a meditation on trauma. Imala Tamim's father, Bruno Tamim, was a photo journalist, best known particularly for two photos, one taken in 1983 of Ronald Reagan in the oval office with a group of mujahedeen whom the CIA had decided the United States would arm in their fight against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, and the other, a photo, taken in 1993, of Osama Bin Laden in the Sudan. It appeared in The Independent, accompanying an interview by Robert Fisk with Bin Laden in which Bin Laden discussed the construction of a road his company was building between Almatig and Khartoum. When her mother left her father when Imala was four and went to the United States where she became a jazz singer with a small but loyal following, Bruno, whose work had come to the attention of the Duchess, left London for Paris, where she subsidized him and became a second mother to his daughter.

The Duchess had introduced Tamim to Luc and Stéfan and then waited for a bond of trust to form between them, and when it did, as she suspected it would, she broached the matter of Stéfan's posing, and when he consented, she commissioned Tamim to do the painting.

The Duchess had sent Marcel Blanchard an invitation to the opening. He came with a small crew and had gotten footage of the paintings, the gallery and the attendees for a feature on France Culture, which would include a segment on Imala Tamim's life and career and on Stéfan, the provocative model in her gender subversive update of the traditional nineteenth-century Odalisque. Tamim and Stéfan both informed Blanchard beforehand that they had decided not to participate directly in the broadcast, and declined to be interviewed.

"I cannot agree to talk about myself," Tamim had explained to the Duchess days before the opening. "I do not want to become a self-conscious object of my own observation." Similarly, she did not want Stéfan to step outside the frame of the painting, with regard to the experience of the painting, and present himself, and the painting, as a media commodity. Stéfan agreed with her. Of course! Only he and Luc knew that an interview with him or questions that tried in any way to probe, however benign the intentions, who he was would prove very problematic.

Imala and Stéfan arrived late at the opening. The Duchess panicked momentarily when she feared they might not show up at all. She loved Imala, and Imala was devoted to her, and acknowledged indebtedness, but that did not make her pliable when it came to the integrity of her artistic vision or her sense of what she owed herself. When she was convinced that something ought to be done a certain way, she became intransigent, intransigent, not belligerent, the Duchess reminded herself. When they did arrive, the relief the Duchess felt was palpable. She let out a sigh of relief, and Luc took her hand.

"You are too nervous," he said.

"I have an idea of how I want everything to be, and then I always fear that reality will not live up to it."

"Does that often happen?"

"Not as often as I fear it will."

After greeting the Duchess and Luc with kisses, Imala and Stéfan withdrew to a corner, undetected by most of the visitors. They were dressed similarly, wearing baggy, faded blue jeans, grey running shoes, forest green t-shirts and grey hoodies. They looked like pals from the banlieue, two hippies who, happening to be passing, turned into the gallery to get out of the rain and get some free hors d'oeuvres and champagne.

When Blanchard approached and asked Stéfan, despite the previous interdiction, to go in front of the camera to answer some questions, Stéfan declined and said, "Imala does not want my actual presence to usurp the gaze directed at the image she constructed in the painting. I understand that and agree with it."

When Marcel pressed, Stéfan and Imala walked away and left him standing in the corner.

"How odd," Blanchard said to the sound woman, puzzled, "everybody is always hungry for media exposure!"

Ibrahim generally knew more than he let on. He had stood behind the counter for fifteen years, starting when he was sixteen and hardly knew a word of French. Daily contact with customers quickly made him familiar with the texture of his community, and his position behind the counter, while it did not render him invisible, made him as innocuous as the furnishings of his eatery to most of his customers, many of them transient, moreover. As they ate, they spoke unconstrained, without a second thought about things they otherwise might be reluctant to have anyone overhear.

He also had developed a sixth sense, the ability to assess the authenticity and character of the people who hung around his store. And Tariq, he knew from his eyes, from his smile, from the pitch of his voice had a corrupt heart. He did not trust him. And he knew that at some point or another, he would make trouble. Ibrahim did not want trouble. He liked having a store, he liked the food he served, he liked serving it, meeting people, and he liked the street outside the doors of his shop. There were old, becoming ancient, Parisian apartment houses, not of the grand Haussmann design, like those on the boulevards, but simple, undecorated, working class buildings, the kind that were being torn down to make way for high rises or renovated for the rich who came from the center of Paris in search of the country in the city, and he liked to stand outside and smoke a cigarette and look at the stately trees that divided the street from the park.

Ibrahim also sensed that Abdul was a good-hearted man, still a boy, really, who had been twisted, that his vital spirits had been blocked in their release, and had turned upon him, and rather than being filled with the energy of love, they were mangled and needed objects of hatred to justify otherwise inexplicable rage.

When Ibrahim told Abdul that Tariq was gone, he was equivocating. When he said he "was not there," he was saying less than he knew. When he said no more, he kept silence out of concern for Abdul. He did know more.

At the same time that Abdul was being carried wounded from the park beside the Eiffel Tower, Ibrahim was in a heated and hushed conversation with Tariq standing on the bridge that spans the lake in Buttes Chaumont Park.

"Do you understand in what danger you are putting both of us?" Tariq said.

I understand the peril you have introduced into the life of a desperately angry boy, taking that anger and focusing it on something that will blow up in his face."

"This is apostasy."

"Apostasy?"

"I am bringing him to the culmination of our spiritual destiny through submission to the great will of God."

"Do you believe that?"

"Do you not?"

Ibrahim did not, and he risked saying so.

"I am afraid that there is nothing further to discuss," Tariq said. He turned away and left Ibrahim looking at the green-grown cliffs rising over the lake.

Tariq feared that he was no longer safe, that his work would be thwarted, that Ibrahim was an apostate, unpredictable, that he would not submit to the constraints and the discipline demanded of every subject of the caliphate. Ibrahim no longer saw Tariq at the falafel shop, and word reached him that Tariq had left Paris. But that afforded him no comfort. Knowing what he knew, Ibrahim had little doubt that Tariq did not work alone, and that he, Ibrahim, knowing what he knew, had to be a marked man.

If the common proposition that in every denial there is embedded the seed of the confession of its opposite, then readers will hardly take it at face value when I report here that Luc was not jealous when Stéfan and Imala began to show an interest in each other. Yet, that is the truth. How could there not be an erotic frisson drawing them together? Luc realized it, understood it, embraced it when he saw them collaborating on the portrait of Stéfan as an odalisque. Collaborating! From the erotic attraction between the muse and the artist is distilled the creation, the work of art, the essence of the human that is realized through inspired transformation. Sublimation does not mean the suppression of the erotic. Sublimation is the process through which the erotic is realized. So it was with Imala and Stéfan. Through a symbiotic affinity each energized the other. They realized themselves through and in the other. Imala was the woman Stéfan became when he posed for her. Stéfan was the man Imala became when she painted him. When she painted him, it felt to both of them as if she were caressing him, stroking his chest, brushing his lips with her fingers, bringing him to tumescence with delicate strokes along the stem of his desire, arousing him with the sweep of her palms on his thighs, wiping him out with feathery finger tips skating over the soles of his feet.

Luc sat at his desk in the library facing his computer preparing the lecture, "History and Time," that he had been invited to deliver in New York at the Metropolitan Museum of Art after Christmas. It was several weeks after the opening at the Gallery 21. Stéfan was poking the fire and waiting for the coffee to brew. When it was ready he placed a cup upon the table beside Luc's desk.

"Thank you," Luc said, looking up at him, clasping his naked inner thigh and sliding his hand upward. Stéfan smiled and Luc saw something that needed his attention. He swiveled his chair and faced him. Stéfan lowered himself and sat at his feet, on his haunches and looked into his eyes, like a lost puppy. "Tell me," Luc said, gently.

"You know that Imala and I have been spending time together," he began tentatively.

He told him that when they had walked along the Seine, they had held hands, and put their arms around each other, and kissed, and that he felt his soul mingling with hers, and that she experienced the same thing. He said he was worried that he was betraying Luc's trust. There was no betrayal Luc said. He said that he knew that an erotic current flowed between them – how could it not? – and that the only betrayal Stéfan ought to worry about was betrayal of himself, and of Imala, if he betrayed the reality of their desire. Stéfan rose, took Luc's hand, kissed it. Luc stood, and kissed Stéfan. Luc kept him in a tight embrace. The warmth of their bodies touched and flared into an erotic heat.

Late afternoon in December and it was as dark as night. They gazed at each other in the firelight. Stéfan stepped out of his shorts and unbuttoned Luc's shirt and unzipped his jeans and slipped them off his legs, bowing before him as he did, and kissed his bare feet. Luc raised him, kissed him and each took hold of the other's cock and exchanged their love in frottage. When they came, they still could not let go. The ardency of kisses and the heat of their skin bound them together.

"Tell me you love me," Stéfan said.

"I do," Luc said. "I love you."

"I will always belong to you. I adore you and worship you," Stéfan answered.

As I began this section with an anti-psychological admonition, so must I conclude it with another one. A rule of fiction is that an assertion delivered confidently must be undermined in the course of the narrative, that there are at play forces beyond our ken that play havoc with our promises, mock and undermine them. But these demons were not present at this encounter and the words Stéfan said, he meant and was not deterred from sustaining.

The Duchess and Imala accompanied Luc and Stéfan to New York for the conference at which Luc would deliver his paper, and they would stay over until the first week of January. The Duchess owned an apartment overlooking Central Park and had a number of invitations from friends and family for New Years Eve. After some consideration, looking at the snow falling heavily on Manhattan, they decided they'd go to an early evening champagne reception at one of the Duchess' cousin's place in Greenwich Village and then, with plenty of time to go back home and get into their costumes, they'd go to an all-night costume ball in SOHO. Stéfan and Imala decided to go as each other.

In Paris they had swapped genders and gone out one night to eat at the Bon Vivant on Rue des Ecole. Imala dressed in jeans, work boots, a bomber jacket over her buttoned-on-the-shoulder blue and white striped mariner's sweater; her hair spiked, a wool scarf around her neck. Stéfan, in knee high, calf-hugging, dove colored boots with heels, sheer black panty-hose, black silky culottes, a dove-colored silk shirt open at the neck, a string of baby pearls round his neck, a crimson velvet, fitted outer jacket; his nails painted gold; his lips the color of Merlot wine; his eyes lined with black pencil; the lashes extended; the lids dusted with gold powder, his hair slicked to fit round his head like a cap. They sat across from each other with drinks in front of them drowning in each other's eyes.

They took their way over the Pont Neuf, through the Place Dauphine, back to her apartment. She made them another drink and sat down beside him on the leather couch. Through the windows they saw the Eiffel Tower sparkling like a million diamonds in the distance. She placed her hand on his thigh and told him he was the most beautiful girl she had ever seen, and told him to get undressed for her, slowly. He took a deep breath and began to unbutton his blouse.

"Do it standing up," she said.

When he stood before her in only boots and panty-hose, she told him to stop and to come over to her. His cock was hard and pressed upwards against him, flattened by the panty-hose and the bikini panties underneath. She caressed his perineum and teased his cunt. She pulled down his hose and panties and took his stiff cock in her hand. "How did you get this?" she said.

"The cock? It's yours," he said. "I want you to fuck me with it."

"Take off my boots," she said.

"He knelt before her, unlaced them, and pulled her boots off. When her feet were bare, he kissed them. He undid her jeans and pushed his face into her sex, thrust his tongue into her darkness and kissed her wildly as she flooded and drank her in with a great thirst. She pushed him gently onto his back onto the floor and lowered herself onto him, in that way entering him, rising up and lowering herself as he lurched up to grasp her cock and keep it inside him as she pulled out and he pulled her in again. She held him on her gaze and told him how precious he was. He screamed in joy-filled agony as she flooded him with her semen. They collapsed and fell into a mutual sleep.

He woke. She was inside him still, soft. Hovering above him, she traced the shape of his eyelids with a fingertip. She touched his lips with hers and withdrew. He gazed at her in rapture.

Obvious it was that Stéfan had been transformed. Luc saw it, and Stéfan did not hide it. With delight, running like the water in a clear brook over sunlit stones, he gushed his love. He was enthralled by his love for Imala; each was in the other's power, their desire burning mutually. Luc knew it would happen; that it did, pleased him. Nature will have its way. Eros the shape shifter will not be constrained. He will dance in our souls. Stéfan was subsumed, helplessness in the face of desire. It was a noble weakness: a strength: to submit when you encounter divinity. And Imala was as deeply enflamed, enthralled, and wounded by love as Stéfan! They were the kind of lovers Plato wrote of in the Symposium: separated parts of one entirety that had rejoined. When Luc held Stéfan close to him, and Stéfan yielded rapturously, as he always had, worshipping him with kisses, the passion that rushed within and flooded him crossed the boundaries of their skin and illuminated, also, him.

Abdul seldom spoke. With stoic endurance he performed the tasks Ibrahim apportioned him to perform. By way of earning his keep, in the store, he did simple tasks, cleaning the counter top and the tables, sweeping the floor, rinsing plates and silverware, loading the dishwasher, seeing that the supply of plastic cups and paper napkins was maintained.

Despite a steady undercurrent of anxiety, his fear of retribution for getting in the way of Tariq's mission, Ibrahim was steady as a rock in carrying out each day's work. He tended the store, cared for Abdul, and, although he did not go to mosque or by himself observe the prayer rituals, he devoted time each day and each night to observe the natural beauty of the surrounding world. He walked through Buttes-Chaumont Park, sometimes taking Abdul with him. He gazed through the darkened heavens at the moon and stars and felt the world around him itself as an awesome presence in which he dwelt; which held him in the folds of its envelope.

"Can you not open yourself a little to a breath of life?" he asked Abdul as they climbed stone pathways under leafless trees. "Look at the web the branches make against the sky. There are no leaves now, but spring will come, and so will new foliage. It is with us like that. The past need not cling. There is a future to grow. It is nurtured by the world around it, but there are seeds of it within us, within you, too."

"Whatever is within me must stay within me," Abdul answered.

"Is it so painful?"

"It is so tainted by evil."

"What have you done? You have done nothing. Providence rescued you. Is it not wrong to be bowed down with grief afterwards and not be thankful?"

"Even if I have been saved from doing one evil in the world, there is a world of evil within me."

Ibrahim looked at him, inviting him to continue.

"There is nothing more I can say."

Ibrahim was puzzled and thought it must be something other than the madness of the plot Abdul had formulated under Tariq's sway that was crippling him. It was something that gave that frenzy its energy. But what it might be...that was beyond his power to see. All he could do...was wait, and try to keep Abdul from further harm.

And his ministrations seemed to be having some good effect. By the end of August, Abdul had begun to stir. He left the shop, took walks by himself, and began playing checkers in a corner of a nearby café with other young men. This was progress, Ibrahim thought, but with reservations. Abdul was reentering the world, yet the companions he hung out with were rudderless, like him, and shifty. Perhaps that was to be expected. Perhaps that was all that could be hoped for. Still, Ibrahim worried. This did not lead to a future. To be stuck in the same present, over and over, that was not a good thing.

But there was nothing to do except what he had been doing. Ibrahim put Abdul, in his meditations, into the hands of divine care and quietly hoped, and kept his eyes open. There was no more he could do. He could not confine the young man to the little room in the back of the store. The grace of nature might guide the boy yet, Inshalla.

"You cannot live your life imprisoned in darkness. It is a sin," Umhad said, looking up from the checkerboard set out between them on the unmade bed of his attic room, after double jumping Abdul and getting a king. His words were in response to Abdul's confession that he felt his life had no purpose when Umhad casually asked him if there was anything he believed in so much that he would die for it. Abdul had answered, "I wish it was so. It would be a great light in the darkness I am in, but everything is without meaning."

"You find a meaning, a great meaning in life, when you find a great thing to die for," Umhad said.

"I have looked, but it has evaded me."

"You did not look with enough dedication. You looked with a weak spirit. You must look harder. You are not acting the part that is befitting a man." He swept the board off the bed with a sudden backhanded swipe, scattering the pieces on the floor. He stood up. "You are not a man. You are passive, waiting for destiny. Instead of approaching destiny, taking ahold of destiny, and offering yourself to destiny to lead destiny forward, you show your ass to destiny, waiting to be fucked. Perhaps you are a kushaad."

At the sound of kushaad, of being called kushaad, the blood rose to Abdul's temples and beat so hard that his head would burst. In one gesture he was on his feet, spun around and took Umhad by the throat and began to choke him. Umhad's arms shot upward like two swords forming a Y and broke Abdul's hold. Then his palms fell onto Abdul's shoulders with shattering force, and his fingers grasped him in a firm grip.

In a minute, Umhad unleashed what Ibrahim had not been able to locate over a stretch of months. It was manhood that Abdul desired and feared.

"I am not," he said, and without repeating the word, both of them knew what he was talking about.

"How can you show it?" Umhad challenged, unyielding in his show of contempt.

"What do you want me to do?"

"That is the question a kushaad asks," Umhad sneered. "Since you behave like a kushaad, I will use you like a kushaad. He slapped him so hard across the face that Abdul fell backward on the bed. He felt Umhad's body weighing his down and he felt Umhad's fingers forcing his mouth open and putting his own mouth upon it, not to kiss it but to spit into it. He pulled Abdul's jeans, which were already loose and low, around his ankles, pulled his underwear down and forced his finger up his ass. Abdul screamed in pain. Umhad slapped him again and unzipped his own fly.

"Tell me you are not a kushaad," Umhad threatened and rammed his terribly hard cock up Abdul's unready ass and came screaming kushaad repeatedly. "Kushaad, kushaad, kushaad, kushaad!" Abdul screamed too, grabbing onto Umhad writhing to free himself from him but by that only drawing him nearer.

There was an unseasonably warm interlude the last days of December after the snow that had fallen on the day of their arrival in New York. Having eaten breakfast together in the Duchess' penthouse apartment – the table set by a grand picture window overlooking Central Park – the four set out across the park to the Metropolitan Museum where Luc would give his lecture. Warm although it was, the weather threatened rain. Luc wore a conservative dark gray flannel suit with an Oxford blue shirt and a dark blue silk tie under his trench coat. He carried a black umbrella with a carved teak handle. The duchess wore a high-neck, jade green sheath that stopped mid-calf, with a left side slit. Brown vinyl boots hugged her calves. Over the sheath, she wore a full gold cape of raw silk. Stéfan wore a smart, blue silk, man tailored suit with a sexy sheath skirt that just came to the knee, sheer nylon pantyhose; blue, leather pumps with a four inch heel that compelled him to walk on the pavement and not stray onto the grass; a pale creamy white blouse; a soft fulvous silk scarf. He wore a classic trench coat and a wide brimmed dark blue Borsolino. Imala wore a pair of faded jeans, boots, a rust-colored V neck pullover, a Dresden blue chamois jacket, a knee-length mustard-colored over coat, and a coffee-colored trilby. They passed through the metal detectors and entered the great hall. From there they made their way through crowds to the Grace Rainy Rogers Auditorium. They agreed to meet afterwards on the steps of the museum, knowing Luc would be delayed by audience members wishing to talk to him. Luc left them to go backstage, and they took their seats in the auditorium.

After Luc's talk, a man approached him as he stood leaning against the platform at the front of the auditorium, answering questions from members of the audience who had surged up to the stage. He suddenly waved a gun at Luc and cried out " by fatwa". With incredible reflexes, one of the men in the circle around Luc threw himself at the man and sliced the side of his palm against his wrist. A shot rang out; a bullet flew in an arc over them and imbedded itself in the proscenium above the stage. The gunman fell to the floor beside the gun and the man who foiled the attack dug a knee into his spine.

One of the security guards who had rushed to the front of the auditorium – but it would have been too late -- picked up the gun. Two other guards cuffed the assailant and took him, stumbling, from the room.

"The world is crazy," someone said.

"Don't they have metal detectors just for this?" somebody else said angrily.

In both his hands Luc took the hand of the man who had sprung and knocked his would-be assassin to the ground, and held it, looking at him without saying anything. At last, he said, "Thank you." The man nodded. "I owe you my life," Luc said. "It was Providence," the man said. "I read that the reconstructed arch from the temple at Palmyra was going to be displayed in Times Square, a few days ago. I'd read your book and admired your work. And I knew that you'd played an advisory role in the reconstitution of the arch. When I picked up the brochure being sold there I saw your article on Palmyra and an announcement that you would be speaking here today. I was free and decided to come hear you. Everything is chance." He smiled, and Luc approached and embraced him. "Who are you?" Luc asked.

"James Engg," the man said. "I am in the Philosophy department at Columbia – and I have a black belt in karate." And now Luc saw him, a handsome man of Japanese origin. When he embraced him he felt his body's muscular solidity.

"I would like to thank you somehow," Luc said, and smiling, added, "I would like to get to know you. May I invite you to join my friends – who are waiting in front of the museum -- and me for lunch?"

Engg smiled. "I would be honored," he said.

"Everyone must wait here, please," a man who seemed by his uniform to be the head of security announced in a voice that was not to be disobeyed.

Luc asked why and the officer explained that the museum was on lock down. That meant that the building was being scoured by a security team and that the visitors to the museum were being let out one by one, and being subjected to the same security procedures they had been subjected to when they entered.

"A lot of good that did," someone said.

Outside, where the duchess, Imala, and Stéfan were waiting on the steps, the news quickly arrived that there had been an attempted assassination in the Rogers auditorium, but that no one was injured. Stéfan was overcome by an insidious panic and grabbed Imala's hand so hard he nearly crushed it. Imala took him in her embrace and held him. He was shaking and his teeth were chattering. Fortunately, they did not have to wait long before Luc appeared. He was escorted out of the museum, along with James Engg, by a security detail comprising museum employees and one New York City cop who was assigned to stay with them as long as Luc wanted him to.

When Stéfan spotted Luc at the door he ran up to him and took hold of him, holding on to him as if for dear life.

"I'm alright," Luc said, kissing his eyes.

"I'm not... Or I wasn't... Now I am," Stéfan said laughing and crying at the same time. He loosened his grip and took Luc's hand as they descended the steps and joined the others.

"I guess we ought to scrap our plans to have lunch in the park and go back to Anna-Maria's," Luc said.

"I think that would be best," she agreed, and, after a quick exchange of glances with Luc, invited James to have lunch with them, too. When she heard what he had done, she took his hand and kissed it. He smiled foolishly and blushed. She called ahead to Robert in the kitchen and told him to prepare a lunch for five, that they'd be there in about an hour.

IV

After he was raped, Abdul fell apart. His ass was sore; tormenting cramps stung his belly. He felt as if he were stuffed with ordure he was unable to void. He was bent over, and he keened desperately.

"There!" Umhad spat at him. "Now you know what you are, nothing more than a dog, a bitch. If you continue to whine like a bitch, I will whip you like a bitch," he said, and kicked him. "A barren bitch! You cannot even whelp." He went out, locked the door, and left him naked, alone, cringing on the floor.

Abdul had met his destiny. His destiny was pain.

Umhad returned when there was darkness outside. Abdul still lay on the floor, shivering. Umhad pushed him with the toes of his boots, kicking him under his scrotum, out of the fetal position he lay in onto his back, and fucked him again until he bled.

"Please," Abdul whimpered.

"Shut the fuck up," Umhad said, slapping him in rage across the face as he banged relentlessly in and out of his ass, unable to come, growing increasingly violent. "You don't know how lucky you are that I'm fucking you, bitch, because when I'm tired of it, you get castrated."

When Abdul did not return to the shop, Ibrahim worried. When the first night of his absence gave way to another and then to another a frightful heaviness, the weight of fear and guilt and sadness, fell upon Ibrahim. A sense of urgency to do something, to look somewhere, and the inability to get beyond some barrier blocking the possibility of doing anything made him tremble. The sense that he had failed, that he had not done something he ought to have done, that he had failed to know how to protect Abdul wrenched at his vitals. He knew that something terrible had happened, was happening to Abdul, something that was suddenly epidemic in the world he had known: inhumanity had inserted itself once again into history. It was beyond him.

The next mid-morning he went to open his shop to prepare for the office workers and construction workers and students who crowded the place for lunch. A gash had been cut in the metal portcullis, and window glass lay all about. The register had not been touched, but a blade had ripped through the leatherette banquettes and the condiments had been emptied all over the place.

Ibrahim covered his mouth with one hand as he sucked in his breath. The other hand, he extended, bent, palm up, as if in supplication demanding the answer to a question he did not know how to formulate.

He called the police. When they arrived, they took him to a precinct house and began questioning him, it seemed to Ibrahim, as if they were trying to establish that he himself had done the damage, or hired someone to do it, in order to collect on the insurance. When he had managed to convince them that that was not so, they began to question him about his possible association with terrorists.

When finally they released him it seemed to him that it was reluctantly. All the same, he was glad to be free of them, for they represented nothing like help but only further misfortune. Inside the wrecked store, he phoned the owner of the property. Mr. Banqui asked him to wait for him, told him that he would get there soon to see what had happened. As he waited for him, Ibrahim reviewed his options. Continuing in the falafel shop, was that one of them? If they were going to get him, they were going to get him. So what did it matter? But maybe – how could he know? – maybe the vandalism had nothing to do with Tariq and Abdul and what they supposed he knew about them. How could he know? And what else was there for him to do? Where else was there for him to go? It was not in his hands. Only what he did was in his hands. Only what he could do was in his hands.

The cop who had been assigned to protect Luc had the euphonious name of Art McCarthy. He was in his twenties, strong, lean, good looking, and it was obvious to our friends that he was gay, although there was nothing stereotypically obvious about him, as more and more, in general, there was not, as homosexuality became an accepted strand in the fabric of society. The perception was reciprocal, and, despite the seriousness of the recent threat, it put him in a bright mood, which was infectious. Accordingly, the duchess asked him if he would like to join them for lunch, too, when they reached the Dakota.

"After all," she said, "who can say that we still don't need protection."

"If it's in the line of duty, it would be dereliction not to accept," he responded. "Besides, I've never been inside this building."

"There's always a first time," James Engg said, placing his arm around him. "If it's ok to touch an officer of the law."

"Tell Robert that now we are six, Molly," the duchess said with a laugh in her voice to the maid who opened the door. "And I think the number will not further increase."

Molly curtsied.

The assailant the police dragged from the auditorium, as he was being led along an empty corridor through the museum to a waiting van, lurched suddenly and lunged at one of the cops. Reflexively, without a thought he pulled his gun and shot him four times, and killed him. Found in his pocket was a folded paper on which the following transcribed words were scrawled. They were immediately released to the media along with the report of his attempt on the noted French historian, Luc Bastienne, and his death while in police custody.

"This is a warning," the message read. "If you attempt to mock the holy work of our brothers in the Caliphate, we will mock your blasphemous attempts. When you restore the heathen arch of Palmyra and show it off in your foul cities, you bring destruction upon yourselves. We have obliterated Palmyra once in the desert and we will destroy the modern Palmyra again wherever it stands: in the midst of the most decadent Times Square in New York or the reeking Trafalgar Square in London."

Despite himself, after lunch, Luc asked the duchess to turn on the news.

"We don't know if the gunman was a solitary terrorist or part of a larger cell," the newsreader intoned, "just as we do not know whether the note found on him is the deranged ranting of a madman or a serious warning of an impending terrorist attack. In any case, twenty-four hour security around the arch on display in Times Square has been substantially increased. The arch, meanwhile, is scheduled, all eleven tons of it, to be disassembled and shipped to Syria in the coming days. In the interest of security, the exact timing is not being revealed. In other news..."

Luc shut the television and walked over to the window and gazed out over the park. James went and stood beside him and said between his teeth, "They want to obliterate the past, destroy the present, and deny the future. We have our work cut out for us. It is simple. Not to let them. That is what the study of history and the practice of philosophy are about."

After the story was released, Art McCarthy was informed that he was being pulled off the security detail for Luc. Forensics had determined that Luc was not the target of any threat, that neither the Islamic State nor any other terrorist organization had anything to do with the incident. Similarly, the Foundation for the Display of the Arch of Palmyra was notified that the security alert with regard to the arch had been reduced.

Forensic tests and old-fashioned footwork had dispelled the mystery of the gunman's identity and the motives for the attack. It was the work of a deranged young man with no political bias and no connection to the Middle East. The note, the authorities decided was an indication of paranoid displacement, a sign of a delusional attachment to violent rebellious forces within himself with which the young man was struggling, that he could not accept as his own, and assigned to forces outside himself, with which external forces, pathologically, he then identified himself. Thus, he experienced his own turmoil as a force from outside, and he became the agent of this turmoil, enlisted to execute its dictates, rather than its source.

Christy Thompson was a Wall Street brat, a man who had been struggling with schizophrenia since his teens. His family was ashamed of him and tried to keep his condition secret by setting him up in a small East Village apartment. They provided him with domestic and medical care, but otherwise kept their distance and strongly limited their contact with him, seldom visiting him and never including him in family events.

When Kristophe Thompson, who, as a partner in a great Wall Street brokerage/banking house had introduced the use of credit/default swaps, heard the news of Christy's death and the circumstances surrounding it, he send one of his lawyers to confer with the police commissioner to arrange for his son's burial and to manage the way the news of his death, of his family connections, and of his health was to be released to the media, and through his lawyers, also, he pledge one million dollars to the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation, which donation was to be reported in the lede in all the reporting of Christy's death.

After midnight; champagne flowing; bowls filled with pot on every table; sumptuous buffet tables against walls of windows; clear views of Manhattan roofs; the Empire State building towering high over everything. Snow no longer falling, the sky, deep, cold, blue.

"From the point of view," said a black haired woman in a yellow see-through blouse and a brilliant red flamenco skirt, who was trying to detain Luc as he was saying his goodbyes, "from the point of view of a professional historian, do you think that the Islamic State has put an end to history?"

"A happy people has no history," Luc answered. "Geoffrey of Monmouth, the Welsh historian of the twelfth century, wrote that."

"I don't see the connection," she interrupted.

"I never quite understood what he meant," Luc continued, unfazed and undeterred, "unless he was being droll, implying that there never had been such a thing as a happy people, or, if there had been, we could not know of them, their having no history for us to read about, having been a happy people. Thus, all the evidence that has been passed down necessarily confirms Geoffrey's observation. History, as we know it, is a record of unhappiness and of the effects and ramifications of unhappiness."

"This is at best sophistical," said the woman. "But how is it relevant to what I asked?"

Luc smiled and looked around the room searching for his friends, who were also saying goodbyes, as he answered, "Maybe it isn't."

V

Art McCarthy, in mufti, looking at the excellent copy, in marble, of Michelangelo's "Dying Slave." It stood commandingly in an alcove in the library of the duchess' Manhattan apartment. Beside him, James Engg, looking not at the magnificent statue but at Art McCarthy, with as much admiration as McCarthy bestowed on the sculpture.

"You've decided to throw it all over?" he said.

"In the end, there's not much to throw over," McCarthy said. "If I stay on the job, in eighteen years I can retire at thirty-seven – not bad, but, eighteen years is still a lot of time."

"Why did you become a cop?"

"My father was crippled in an industrial accident – confined to a wheel chair. My mother was always somewhat...flighty... and had always relied on him. So she could not cope financially or emotionally after he was incapacitated. The company he worked for claimed that the accident was his fault – negligence -- in order to get out of having to pay him the pension he'd earned and worker's compensation. We had to get a lawyer, and that took money. I had to leave school, and being a cop seemed like the best thing. The pay was decent. I am young and strong. It was a challenge. But now..."

"Now?"

"It's not enough, anymore. These last few days in particular have made me sure of that."

"And your parents?"

"They won the suit. They are set financially, and there are social services in place."

"Do they know you're leaving?"

"I told them last night."

"And?"

"I also told them that I am gay. My mother didn't believe me. She said it was ridiculous.' My father didn't say anything for a minute. Then he looked at me and said, Isn't one cripple in the family enough?' So, that's what I'll be `throwing over.'"

Engg put his arm around McCarthy. "I'll miss you," he said.

"You can visit us in Paris, and maybe even get a visiting appointment at the Sorbonne."

"Engg smiled. "I've thought about that already, and I've spoken with Anna-Maria, whose influence seems to be wide-ranging. What do you intend to do in Paris?"

"I'm going to study French, and Anna-Marie's influence extends even to Amnesty International."

"Exactly, it does," the lady herself said, approaching them. She was still in her blue silk, floor-length dressing gown. "Coffee's on," she continued, "and there's bacon and eggs, pancakes and apple pie. We're being very American for our last day here."

Once Ibrahim had an attestation from the police, the insurance company agreed to cover the cost of repairing his falafel place. It just entailed a good deal of paper work, but that was nothing Ibrahim was unfamiliar with and could not handle. He got a neighborhood contractor who had known him and eaten in his place for years to do the work, and in a month the shop was reopened. At first, while the work was being done, Ibrahim did not leave his studio apartment on Rue du Général Brunet, a short walk from the shop. Now he appreciated that the complex at Number 6, was built like a fortress or a prison. He never had before. But now the barred prison-like doors and the multiple interphone systems gave him the sense of security he needed in his shaken state. Was Tariq behind the attack, even if he himself was not still in Paris? Was it a random act of vandalism, impersonal violence, or was it something deliberately aimed at him? There was no point in scaring himself with ugly scenarios. Fate has an ugly way of revealing itself. He could only do what he could do. What he could do was run a restaurant. That was his work. That was how he prayed.

He had not entirely given up hope of learning anything he could about Abdul, but he was not sanguine. He had connections to neighborhood grapevines, but this was something else, and he knew he could be courting danger by sticking his nose where it was not wanted. What good would it do, anyhow?

When the OECD's budget was cut and lay-offs were declared the only way for the organization to survive, Flint Whitlock was told that his work had been very much appreciated over the last fifteen years, and that it still was, and that the organization grieved to let him go, but severance was the only possible course for survival. David Lance, on the other hand, at a lower grade on the pay scale, was not laid off, but he was embittered by Whitlock's firing and by the change that was perceptible in the culture of the organization. It became distasteful for him to stay on. It felt, too, that if he did, it would be a betrayal of Flint, a failure to honor, an offense to loyalty.

"We are not desperate," he argued, regarding their finances, when he told Flint he was quitting, "and we are not without resources," he added, considering their skills. He was right.

He gave notice the following day and dismissed several entreaties to reconsider and several hints of real possibilities waiting for him if he stayed on.

It was a gamble. It paid off. The work of Whitlock and Lance was known and respected throughout the international cultural and economic research community. Following some networking, they were invited, as a team, to become part the International Agency for the Study and the Preservation of Historical Sites and Cultures. It meant living in New York. They gave up their apartment in Paris, but kept the house in Burgundy.

Like so many, they were appalled at the barbarism unleashed by the invasion of Iraq, and after the innumerable deaths, cripplings, devastations, and sufferings, the destruction of Palmyra became just one more horror, one further offense against history, culture, and the living stream of humanity.

"They want to obliterate humanism along with humanity," David said," as they made their way through Central Park on their way to Lincoln Center. Whitlock just shook his head. "I often think our work is useless," he said.

"No," David said. "It is just exactly in the face of any deformation of the human spirit, and when the monstrosity of human actions against humanity seem to dominate, that our work takes on its greatest meaning. Who was it said that a happy people does not have a history? Well a traduced and wretched people needs a history, and that is what we are doing, laying the foundations of history by examining the world we live in at the time we live in it.

"Don't tell me I did not know what I was doing when I took you out of the typing pool," Whitlock said, clutching him by the shoulder.

Assam Hanood, one of the young men with whom Umhad was hanging out at the café and speaking to about jihad, spotted him, in the Parc Buttes Chaumont, in the distance, sitting by himself, smoking a cigarette. This transgression made Hanood become suspicious of the trustworthiness of Umhad's devotion to jihad and of the sincerity of his submission to the laws of holiness. He was using tobacco. That showed contempt and a lack of discipline. It was his duty to correct this fault, Hanood thought. And perhaps there were others. Hanood had uneasy feelings that Umhad kept secrets, that his soul was impure – whose was not? – but that he was complicit with the impurity rather than in a holy struggle with it, even if that struggle meant martyrdom. Umhad's fascination with jihad, Hanood could not help thinking, was a ruse. And that was pollution, and a great offense. Umhad had to learn discipline through punishment, and punishment had to be imposed as a loving duty, essential for his salvation. Hanood understood, being outside the Caliphate, without the Sharia police to enforce it, it was his duty to impose the necessary punishment.

He did not own a whip, but knew that it was necessary for him to get one. The easiest thing was to order one on the Internet. They could be expensive, works of real craft, if you wanted to pay, he saw, but he did not need kangaroo hide. He did not want nylon, though. Leather was important. There was something about dead animal hide that excited him. He ran the length of the whip through his palm, over and over, when it came, and felt its heft, and he developed reverence for what he began to think of as its "authority," and he sensed the whip conferred authority upon him if he needed to use it.

He saw Umhad in the café a few night's after the whip arrived, and found himself in a state of heightened excitement, which he made an effort to subdue, but that very effort brought a fire to his eyes that Umhad could not help noticing and that had a force he found it difficult to resist. Hanood saw that Umhad kept glancing at him with pain filled eyes, drawn to him, and had trouble keeping his gaze away from Hanood's.

"Why do you look so at me?" Hanood said.

"There is a flame in your eyes," Umhad answered.

"What kind of flame is it?" Hanood asked.

"I think it is the flame of devotion, to jihad," he answered.

"I do not think I see such a flame in your eyes, no matter how much you talk of it."

"I would like it to be there."

"I wonder if you believe that. I wonder if you are not lying to yourself and to everyone else," he said.

Without knowing why, Umhad felt afraid.

And it was at this peculiar moment that Hanood asked Umhad if he remembered Abdul, who had not been to the café for more than a month.

"I have wondered," he said, "feigning less concern than he had, "what has become of him."

Umhad quickly said, "I don't know." Too quickly.

Hanood caught it and asked, "Why should you?" He paused, as if thinking, "And yet, you were very involved with him, talking intensely with him about jihad."

"We all spoke about jihad, and about the danger of the infidel. Is it not worthy of our intensity?"

"Yes," Hanood said. "Yet there was something in the way you spoke that made me uneasy, even suspicious."

"Suspicious?" Umhad asked uneasily. "Of what could you be suspicious?"

"Perhaps your motives were not pure. Perhaps you were using jihad only as a way to express another passion, an impure passion."

"How can I prove my sincerity?" Umhad asked.

"Why does it need to be proven?"

"Because you doubt it."

"What has happened to Abdul?" Hanood asked surprising him.

"Abdul?"

"Do you know where he is?"

"Perhaps he has gone to Syria."

"Perhaps he has not."

"What are you accusing me of?"

"Accusing you? Why do you think I am accusing you of something?"

"It is late," Umhad said. "They are closing. I must go home."

"I will walk with you."

"I'd rather be by myself."

"So be it," Hanood said, "for now, but do not deceive yourself. No man is `by himself.' Every man lives in the eye of God and in the eyes of His appointed holy representatives."

"It is late," Umhad repeated "and it is chilly, and I am beginning to shiver."

Stéfan's eyes did not flare furiously with fierce fire or cower guiltily with derelict passion. Their light was immanent and tender. His eyes were luminous, illuminated by the incandescent light cast by Luc's. Stéfan absorbed that light and it was integrally his: it was an emanation of the love he and Luc dwelt within reciprocally, a love that proved the possibility of the triune mystery – although with them it was not three but two: remaining two, becoming one.

Love does not prevent restlessness. I don't mean sexual restlessness. Sexual restlessness is symptomatic of a disturbance in loving. I mean the existential restlessness that looms when the soul is not absorbed in an essentially creative interaction with the world that expresses, amplifies, and, yes, redeems the self, redeems it from its own self-reflexivity, from the possibility and torment of solitary selfness.

Stéfan was not plagued by the torment of solitary selfness: his love for Luc was real, proffered, and reciprocated. His soul was not isolated and alienated but engaged and nourished by unwavering mutual affection. Perhaps it was the activation of his inherent femininity, his natural receptivity, his need to receive -- he was trying to understand what was unsettling him -- that depleted as well as nourished him, that weakened as well as fulfilled him. Perhaps he had too determinedly retreated from something in him intrinsically and inescapably masculine; perhaps in realizing himself he had also been denying himself. But did it, he worried, inevitably come down to a conflict between two ineluctable and incompatible parts of himself? Was his sexual femininity keeping him from engaging creative masculinity? Was his generous receptivity blocking an equally generous aggressivity?

"It's a question of what I do with my days every day," he explained to Imala as they sat one evening over vodka sours at a table, outside, in the Place Dauphine, as a swollen moon was climbing to its zenith.

"What work in the world is there for me to do? What have I to offer, actively?"

Imala watched him, quietly listening.

"It seems to me that you are always offering yourself. You are always giving."

"I only give passively, narcissistically," Stéfan answered. "I gave myself to you to be painted, but what did I give, really? I posed. I offered myself as something, not even someone – I became an *objet d'art *-- to look at. I was not even the subject of the painting, just a part of its iconography, suggesting a multitude of themes to a multitude of viewers."

Imala began to object, but Stéfan continued. "I was not even the subject of the painting. Through the painting, I became, the object of other people's gazes. Actually, an image of me that was not even me became the object of others' gazes. Yes, I became an admired object, yes, but an object nevertheless. I was transformed into an object by your gaze and then transformed again each time somebody gazed at the painting. How do I become the person whose gaze transforms things, whose gaze suggests or, even better, can initiate actions that transform things in the world? It is not enough to absorb and reflect and give back."

Stéfan was, as he had attempted to explain to Imala, disconcerted, but not unhappy. His vital spirits had not been vitiated by these sometimes naggings of an overactive mind. Luc saw that Stéfan sometimes looked perplexed. At those times he knew that Stéfan's mind was churning, like an automobile stuck in sand, or snow, or mud whose driver keeps accelerating, spinning the wheels without achieving traction, getting the car nowhere but into the deeper rut of his impotent pushing and only bringing himself a worse frustration.

At those times, Luc took him in his arms and caught his glance and brought their eyes into alignment until he felt Stéfan's breathing conform to the rhythm of his own. Then their breaths mingled, their eyebeams became inseparable threads, and Stéfan smiled in blissful surrender. This was not subversion. It was not brainwashing or inducing in Stéfan a loss of will. His mind was not being short-circuited. It was in fact bringing him back to himself; providing

him a stay against depersonalization.

"I have been turning over what you said the other night, especially when you spoke about wanting to control the gaze rather than be determined by another's gaze."

"It's a funny time to bring that up," Stéfan laughed, for he was sitting in a reclining chair at her dressing table and she was putting make-up on him in preparation for a commission she had received for two stain glass windows facing Rue du Jour to be installed in the Church of Saint-Eustache, which was undergoing restoration. In one Stefan would appear both as the angel Raphael and as Tobias, the son of Tobit, in a painting of Tobias catching the fish that he would later use to defeat the power of the demon Asmodeus. That episode was to be depicted in a second stained glass window in which Stéfan would be used as the model for both Tobias and Asmodeus. Imala was desihning Asmodeus's face on him now as they spoke.

"Stop talking," she said. "I need you to be still. I need to get a sense of the demon." He grunted obediently.

"Good," she said, and kept talking as she studied his face and applied her paints to it. "It might be obvious, but I was thinking of photography! Taking pictures, the photographer is the one who gazes, and everyone and everything else is the object of his gaze. The photographer takes control and determines the form of things and how they are seen. He turns an event into an image and gives meaning to images."

Paris overwhelmed Art McCarthy. He rose every morning at five-thirty, showered, made a cup of coffee, which he drank with a multivitamin, briskly took the five flights of stairs down from his small apartment on the Place Constantin Pecqueur, whose windows in the front overlooked it and its modest fountain, and in the back, gave out onto a verdant cemetery. He was not a jogger, but he walked briskly. The first weeks he limited to going up and down the streets of Montmartre, discovering its legendary landscapes and being infused with its, noticeably disappearing, bohemian ambience. After a few weeks, however, he strode briskly through the quite different sights of the Boulevard de la Chapelle, over to Stalingrad, across to Avenue Simon Bolivar and from there, around the crescent of Avenue Botzaris, where he was overwhelmed by his discovery of Parc Buttes Chaumont.

The streets were full with workers on their way to their jobs. The cafés, too, were full with those who were getting a fast coffee at the old zinc tops or those who had no jobs to go to and had small round stem glasses half full of ruby-colored wine set before them on grey and chipped marble top tables, drinking even at that hour.

McCarthy was clear-headed and horny. In the park, he quickened his pace from a brisk walk to an almost jog and felt the smell of green in the breezes that met and passed him by. Then he saw something odd, in the not far distance, something out of keeping with the pastoral loveliness he was inhabiting, that jolted him out of the pastoral mind-set that he was enjoying. It took him back into the streets of New York City. It was a man sitting, doubled over on a bench.

"Are you ok?" he said, automatically, in English. The bent man looked up at him and said, also in English, "I think so."

"You're in pain." The man looking at him was young, lean, with curly black hair and carved sharp features.

"What happened??

"Two guys approached me, coming at me while I was running, blocking me, and one of them asked for a cigarette. I said I don't smoke. So the guy tells me to give him ten euros so he can buy a pack. I say `No." They block me and start punching me and kicking me and steal my wallet."

"Were they guys you know?"

"Never saw them before."

"Did they say anything while they were beating you?"

"When I was down, they kept kicking me and yelling `faggot, infidel faggot, animal'."

"Would you recognize them?"

"Probably."

"Good," McCarthy said.

"Anything we could look for?

"One of them was wearing an orange colored hoodie."

McCarthy sat down beside the injured man, put his arm round him. He jumped, but McCarthy held firmly, and he realized that McCarthy was his friend. "It's nice of you to stop and help me," the young man said.

"It's normal," McCarthy said. "Can I take you home? Where do you live?"

"They walked through the park, keeping close to Rue Manin and came out near Avenue Simon Bolivar, where Adam – his name was Adam Echebbi – lived by himself in a small fifth-floor apartment of not quite forty square meters, with a colossal view of Paris.

"Come up and I'll fix you some tea?" Adam said, weak but not incapacitated.

"Can you lift your arms and get out of your shirt? It must be painful," Art said, helping Adam take off his nylon shell.

Adam managed. McCarthy saw the cuts and bruises on his back and chest.

"Take your pants off, too, please. They did a job on you. Vicious. Let's go into the bathroom." McCarthy washed Adam's wounds and rummaged for salves and bandages in the medicine cabinet."

"You have a warm touch," Adam said. "Perhaps I will feel it again under happier circumstances."

Art smiled and nodded his head.

They sat in the small kitchen, hardly seeming small because of the great sliding windows that gave onto the city, and drank scalding mint tea slowly out of glass cups decorated with flower patterns.

"Do you know what it's like to be Muslim in Paris?" Adam said. And if you're a secular Muslim! And gay! You are doubly scorned, and worse, as you see. You are banished from the heart of the city and consigned to a ghetto. The French are suspicious of you. They don't want you near them. And your own people don't want to know you either." He pointed out the window. "You're hardly twenty minutes away from the heart of Paris but as far as what's around you, you could be in Baltimore or the South Bronx, including the gangs," Tajik said, but stopped when McCarthy grinned.

"What?" he said.

"How do you know what Baltimore or the South Bronx are like?" he asked.

"I have traveled throughout your country," Adam said, and I think I know it pretty well. I've even had a few close calls there with people who look at Muslims like they carry bombs and box cutters in their back pockets."

Abdul heard Umhad's key turn in the lock. The panic that had become his familiar stirred once more within him. He started from his chair and dropped the tele-command. He was scrambling to pick it up from the floor and slide the pieces together. Umhad stood above him.

"You don't do anything all day but look at the television screen," Umhad said, prodding his chin with the toe of boot.

"I don't know what else to do," Abdul said, getting to his feet.

"You never think anymore of jihad?"

Abdul was silent.

"Or of getting a job? We don't need money?"

"You don't let me go out. I think you are afraid I would not come back. You don't give me a key. What can I do?"

"Did you ever ask for one?"

"You make me afraid. And I have no clothes. How can I go out naked?"

"Do you say I keep you a prisoner here?" Umhad challenged him.

"No, Umhad, no," Abdul responded in fear, trying to avert a storm of wrath he could feel about to break.

"Because I do not," Umhad said in chilling quietness.

Abdul said nothing.

Umhad was unsettled. Hanood had shaken him. "We will walk in the park tomorrow. That will satisfy you that I'm not keeping you a prisoner here."

"Yes, Umhad."

Abdul was confused. For what was Umhad setting him up? But he was grateful to Umhad for letingt him sleep without disturbing him that night.

The next day, as they did everyday, they awoke when morning was nearly gone. The room smelled of Umhad's cigarettes. Umhad rose and paced the room, a half-smoked, unlit cigarette stuck between his lips.

"You sleep too much," he said. "Go, wash. You smell like piss and shit."

Abdul washed with a used damp cloth that hung by the sink. Umhad threw some clothes at him, a pair of his jeans and an orange-colored hoodie. "Put them on."

Abdul complied and made some instant coffee using the water from the hot faucet, and broke a piece off yesterday's baguette.

"How long does it you take?" Umhad said, getting into his jacket.

The park was not crowded. They walked slowly. Umhad seemed to be on the lookout for something, as if he were checking to see if he was being followed, but there was no one, except, in the distance, a runner was running towards them, not towards them, but in their direction. Normally, he would pass them by.

"You have lost your heart for jihad," Umhad said. "You have become soft in your will, like a woman."

"No, Umhad, no. That is not so. Try me. Let me prove myself."

"You are full of fear."

"What would you have me do to prove this is not so?"

The runner neared. Umhad was inspired.

"Stop the apostate you see approaching and teach him what it means to break the holy injunctions."

"How can you tell he is a Muslim?"

"Are you blind? Does he not look like us?"

"You want me to attack him, to beat him up?"

"Are you afraid?

"It is not that, but..."

"But what, cowardly dog?"

"But I do not know him."

"Do the blessed martyrs who set off bombs in the market places know those who die in the explosions? Are you a coward, without the strength that God confers on His chosen martyrs, a true kushaad?"

Abdul felt the blood rush through him and hatred bite him.

Two days after the attack and his encounter with Adam, Art McCarthy texted him, inviting him to have dinner with him.

"2nite?"

"Sure."

"Delighted."

They met near the Contrescarpe atop Rue Mouffetard and ate at the Thai Restaurant on Rue Blainville. Afterwards, they got a cab to Art's place on the Place Constantin Pecqueur. McCarthy offered Adam a joint, and Adam said with a friendly smile, "Now I feel at home, but isn't it a little unusual for a former New York City cop to be offering it to me."

"You don't know New York City cops."

"Perhaps," Adam said, "you are trying to entrap me."

McCarthy lit the joint and took a hit and gave it to Adam, not removing his fingers from Adam's as he handed the joint to him.

"Perhaps I am," he said.

Adam inhaled and kept the smoke in his lungs. He beckoned to McCarthy to come close. He did. Adam pressed his lips to his and exhaled into him. McCarthy took in the smoke and kept his mouth pressed to Adam's.

A temperate August in Paris: half the population is away; the spaciousness of Parisian streets is uncluttered; the depth of Parisian vistas is unobstructed; the Parisian air is less polluted; evening extends itself in a rosy twilight that slips unnoticed into a violet dusk; night comes late.

Their windows are open on Rue Galande, and a midnight breeze flutters through the apartment with its pure breath. Stefan in only a short sarong of burnt umber with a black border, fastened on his left hip by a red tassel, places two iced vodka and tonics on the table beside the desk where Luc is working late, finishing an essay called "In Defense of History," a topic that he had been revolving since that conversation in New York last New Years Eve.

Luc turned to him when he sensed Stefan's presence and smiled.

"Thank you," he said, standing and stretching. He is bare-chested and wearing only loosely fitting ochre linen drawstring pants. "I get lost in what I'm doing and forget the time." He picked up both drinks, handed one to Stefan, touched their glasses. He took a long swallow and sighed with pleasure. "But I don't forget you." His palm was cool upon the back of Stefan's neck and Luc drew him to his lips. A knocking on the door interrupted the kiss.

Epilogue

"We apologize for barging in at this hour," Art McCarthy said. "We were at the movies trying to distract ourselves, unsuccessfully. We saw your lights."

Adam was standing next to him. Luc and Stefan had met him once before, when they all had spent a happy Sunday in Buttes Chaumont Park a few weeks earlier. He looked distressed, now.

"Come in," Luc said. "What's the matter? Will you have a drink?"

Stefan brought two more vodka and tonics, and Adam began, torn between tears and rage.

"I got news this afternoon," Adam began, "that a boy I have known all my life, went to school with, grew up with, was the first one to tell that I was gay, and who supported me, especially when he returned my confidence with his own, has been jailed in Tunisia, for the period of one whole year for the horrible crime of just being gay, not even for – God help us – `flaunting' his gayness or making a public disturbance, but just for being gay."

The next morning, Luc phoned the duchess, who told him to call Anne Hildago to find out what could be done.

The mayor shared his concern and pointed out that although there was an enlightened element among the Islamic lawmakers in Tunisia, ironically, it was an "anti-sodomy" law that remained on the books from the time of the French colonial occupation that was being used in this case.

"The best I can think of, off hand," she said, "is to put pressure on the Tunisian government by bring this outrage to public attention, perhaps by holding a kind of `teach-in' about it at the Hotel de Ville in September, after the *Rentrée." *She would appear, the city of Paris would sponsor it, publicize it, and publish the proceedings. She thought Luc ought to organize it, devise the program, and be the principal speaker.

"In nearly eighty countries world wide," Luc's final draft read, "homosexuality is criminalized. In some of them, it is a capital offence. If something is to be called an offense, then there must be someone or some group that is offended, or some abstraction, like the State, or some principal, like honor, decency, or human dignity, that is said to be offended. It has long been a practice for human beings to put other human beings to death capriciously, ignorantly, for abstractions, for principals, because they take offense. To decide whether that is a mark of honor, decency, and dignity; or cowardice, darkness, provincialism, and viciousness seems hardly problematic to me. It is, nevertheless, to a great many of mankind. That it is, that is what is problematic to me.

"Our focus, tonight is on one man in Tunisia, but a focus on one individual, if it is to be a meaningful focus and engender essential social action and bring about changes that benefit everyone, ought to be a focus on every individual so threatened. It must be a focus on injustice itself; not on the abstract idea of injustice but on every vulnerable human being. So, yes, we want to free one gay man from prison, but we also want to see all gay men and women and transgender people freed from the threat of prison and of death, from the threat of danger and indignity.

"When we talk of the atrocities committed against ourselves in other lands far from France and far from Europe, it would behoove us to remember that many of the laws that justify what we now hold as barbarities were first promulgated in France and Europe, not under Islam but under Christianity, and that these laws and the attitudes behind them were brought to distant lands by colonial masters, in some cases French colonial masters.

"The last time gay men were killed for being gay, in France, it was in Paris, in 1750, not three hundred years ago, not in the middle ages but during the Enlightenment. There are records. We know the names of the men. We know the name of the policeman who arrested them. We know where they were arrested, at what time, exactly what they were accused of doing, and we know when and where they were burned at the stake. We even know that France was a country with a certain humanity, for it is reported that the men Jean Didot, forty, a servant, and Bruno Lenoir, a shoemaker, twenty, were strangled to death before they – or the bodies that no longer belonged to them – were burned at the stake.

"Our fight today is the fight to guarantee that our bodies belong to us."

Luc finished writing the last sentence and mouthing it sotto voce when the ping of his computer turned his attention to his inbox. It was a request from the International Agency for the Study and the Preservation of Historical Sites and Cultures asking permission to reprint, in an English translation, an essay on Palmyra that Luc had written. The request noted the importance of his work, described the volume in which it would appear, and regretted that there would be only a small honorarium for the rights to reprint the essay. It was signed: Flint Whitlock and David Lance. Luc had heard of them, had read some of their work, respected their research. He agreed to give them the right to use the piece on a one-time, non-exclusive basis.

The digital clock in the upper right hand corner of the screen told him that it was after midnight. Luc shut the computer. "Enough looking at screens," he said. "Stéfan," he called out, stretching his cramped limbs, and feeling the strength in his muscles returning.

A late summer night's vision, Stéfan, in open work umber espadrilles with high heels and thin straps that circled the ankles, bare, silky long legs, a mini sarong of lemon yellow with an umber border, and nothing else but an amber bead necklace lying upon his naked chest approached him.

"I've been waiting for you to finish," Stéfan said. Wrapping his arms around Luc, he brought his amber-tinted lips to his, and teased them with yielding, eager kisses.