Theo slammed the door before I could say anything. I was left there standing in a brown, badly-lighted hallway wondering what the hell was going on. I was sour inside, poisoned by all the venom he had spat out at me.
I stood frozen, blank, paralyzed. I could not even bang on his door. Although the hallway was empty and there was something naked about it, I was the one who was exposed.
He had become somebody foreign, not the person he had been only a few weeks ago. I walked down three flights of worn marble steps. Unable to remember having done so, in the street I looked around me. Lexington Avenue stretched into the distance. Nothing connected.
The wind that held the approaching winter within its pores wrapped itself around the corner of Fifty-seventh Street and Fifth Avenue. I reentered the urban landscape. I had been lost in timelessness as I walked along the margin of the park away from Theo's place.
The diamonds gleamed in the windows and everything was amber.
A couple, the woman wearing a mink coat, the man just in a tux, passed me. His only concession to the falling temperature was a snowy white silk scarf around his neck. They held hands. They were tipsy. They were leaning into each other as they walked. They were somewhere in heaven together.
My eyes burned and teared in the cold.
Theo did not answer his phone when I called. After a few days, with an ache lacerating my heart I stopped trying. The hours passed stupidly, empty, heavy, with no possibility. The desert stretched out endlessly before me.
As it has done for as long as I can remember.
One of the fundamental images that has served to engrave itself on my psyche and has conformed me to it has been the desert.
The desert, the desert, the desert...the emblem of emptiness empty of everything but consciousness, consciousness that has nothing to be conscious of.
This desert that haunts me descends from the biblical desert, the desert through which the Ancient Hebrews wandered forty years. They were supposed to leave Egypt behind them, including bondage, particularly bondage. But it did not work that way. The yearning for bondage never disappeared. It became a tormenting shadow.
Egypt was the archetypal house of bondage. Slavery found the ideal of bondage in the worship of the golden calf.
And bondage achieved its fundamental reality in the organized sadism of the Third Reich.
I had stood proud humbled before him, my chest strapped in a harness, my nipples each encircled by a chrome ring away from which the leather straps of the harness strained. My torso gleamed. My eyes became mirrors not lenses.
He raised my chin and looked into my eyes asserting his mastery.
He clipped little clamps onto my nipples.
I maintained the posture of attention.
He pulled the short leash attached to my collar.
I stiffened.
He brought his mouth to mine and locked our breaths around each other.
I breathed his breath.
You would permit me to kill you if I said I was going to.
Yes, Sir, I said, but we both knew it was not true.
Kneel.
I knelt before him.
He was my Master.
I bowed as he administered three whip strokes to signify his domination.
It was a long night. I remembered every thing about Theo. I was filled with a hollow, painful sense of loss. I sought to enter a dimension that was now vanished.
The transformation of existence into non-existence, although actually immediate, is not perceived as being immediate. It seems to happen slowly through the deterioration of something essential. There is a period of half-life until everything is discharged, and then we emerge, whole but less.
I was in his apartment, naked but for the black boxer briefs that he loves, and he was kissing me and rubbing my nipples. My head was thrown back and I was in total surrender to everything he was doing to me.
He slapped me and I reached for his hand to kiss it. But he pulled it away.
No, he said. The game is over.
I looked at him as if in that state between sleep and waking, not able to be sure if what I thought was happening was really happening.
You think I'm kidding.
I don't think anything.
He grinned the grin of disbelief.
And I understood. It was something about how controlling I am.
But it is not so. I am not controlling. He is. He is so controlling that if he sees me just expressing myself he punishes me for being controlling.
But I don't care about that.
And I am facing his closed door...again, now in memory, recurring memory, memory that makes me a desert.
I become the desert through which the Ancient Hebrews wander.
It was Christmas and I had not seen Theo for almost a year.
It had been a painful year full of aimless cruising and long hours at my desk. And thoughts, rolling waves of thought teasing and tormenting me, knitting themselves together and unraveling.
My heart jumped out of my chest when I saw him slouched angularly against the wall of the park on Central Park West. I did not know if I should turn around or keep walking or just stop dead in my tracks.
But my heart stilled in a minute. Nothing of the perturbation was left. Everything within me was aglow.
Theo approached me and put his hand out, but not to shake mine. He took hold of me and brought me to him and softly pressed his lips against mine.
It seemed to me it was a phantom kiss.
My heart plunged and I surrendered.
At that moment I grew angel wings.
Why did you stop wanting me?
I never stopped wanting you?
But you closed the door in my face.
Yes.
After I had given myself to you and promised to become however it might please you for me to be.
Yes.
But why?
Because it pleased me to see you suffer.
So terribly?
But you see, it does not affect your devotion to me. My power is total. He smiled sweetly.
Something clicked inside. I felt calm and sturdy.
He winked at me. I smiled, and waved my index finger in the air as a sign that I knew what was next and it would come right away.
The lights went out. I carried the birthday cake aglow with twenty-six sparkling candles.
Nearly fifty people were gathered in the double living room waiting in quiet anticipation to sing Happy Birthday, unsure whether it was a great camp moment or a deep-seated expression of real feeling.
The lights went back on and I was in love with everybody in the room. I felt myself drawn to each of them.
Theo turned me towards him and I felt the same fierce melting I always feel when he presses me to his strong chest.
And then there was applause and the next thing I knew he was kissing me in front of all these people and there was more boisterous applause.
And then he stopped kissing me, and we stood before the company and seemed to take a curtain call. And then a hum of convivial noise rose into a lively concatenation.
He put a chain around my neck and kissed me, and the group near us applauded again, which provoked the whole party once more to erupt in thunder.
But this time we did not camp. We stood still and I felt the power of the collar, a silky, webby, steel thing.
I had never been so calm.
You were good, he said.
The bed was newly made and sparkling. He lay stretched out on the quilts, an unlighted joint between his lips. The cast of the room was amber, a rosy amber made from a mix of candles and delicately shaded bulbs.
Sitting up, he lit the joint, took a lungful and handed it to me, indicating without speaking, but with a wave of his hand, that I take some, too.
I did, and he exhaled.
Before I could exhale, his lips covered mine and he sucked the breath out of me and held it in and then released the smoke I had at first inhaled.
I caught at wisps of it as he expelled it, nipping at his lips until the nips became unending kisses and I felt myself bending under his power.
The streets were slick with an old rain. Hardly anyone was out even though it was not yet midnight. The street lights changed at the corner.
You know, he said, I can't guarantee you that I won't throw you out again and have nothing to do with you, and if at that time you want to think I'm really with you despite how I act, I can't stop you, but you know there's no way you can be sure of that.
I know, I said quietly.
But it's not right now, he said pulling me to him.
I hope it's never, I said.
So do I, he said.
But you, I began.
No more, he said. It is not important for you to understand. You simply must obey, no matter what.
A shiver of electricity made me tremble with excitement. I knew that what he said was true.
Something happened. The intensity of our connection became apparent, palpable. I had faith that we were together, that it would be always.
Theo pulled on his jeans, faded and beginning to thread, sculpted by wear perfectly to his butt and thighs, if I may refer to such sacred regions with vulgarity.
He pulled a long-sleeve black turtle neck over his lean and rippled torso and winked at me. I saw that mischief was in his eyes, and I was excited for him because I knew he was hot and horny and was itching for some new adventure, for a boy to clutch and kiss and ride.
So I was surprised and my heart jumped when he said. Put something on. You come, too.
It was a warm night and he took my hand and smiled at me as we walked through the park to the west side and then took a cab to Battery Park.
It was crowded. The streets rolled with people waiting to groove on each other and wearing the faces to do it.
The light had fallen despite that the days had grown longer.
Benny's was crowded. We found two stools at the bar.
It was the first thing they did. They showed the Iraqi people as looters, nobody you should have too much sympathy for.
What? I said.
It was the first thing they did, Theo repeated, aware of and refusing to acknowledge my shock at the subject of his conversation in a place like this. They showed the Iraqi people, he resumed, as not so good, impulsive, like children, looters, nobody you should have too much sympathy for.
Theo, whom I had never heard talk politics had recently become obsessed: torture, terrorism, global warming, the war, propaganda, the end of democracy, the death of the republic. He had begun talking to me about these things frequently. He would sit me beside him in front of his laptop to watch Democracy Now! with him.
I'd bite his neck and blow in his ear. He'd grab my shoulder.
I'll get you later. Be good.
Yes, sir, I said, turning towards the screen and being good, but not without caressing Theo between his legs.
Why would they do that? I said, lifting a vodka martini and slightly tipping it towards him before I took a sip.
To get people in the mood for what happens next.
What happens next? It wasn't me asking. It was a young man in the costume of a junior executive who was sitting beside us and nursing a Manhattan. .
Are you asking me or just checking that you heard what I said? Theo said with a wink and an ingratiating smile.
No, I mean, What happens next? He emphasized the word happens with a certain duh-like irritability.
But it has happened already, Theo responded, as if that were obvious and the boy were asleep to ask such a thing.
Those people who had been stripped of sympathy, Theo continued, explaining, then became fair game for the horrible brutalities of occupation when the American forces came to claim what they assumed they had won.
They had claimed the lion's skin before they had killed the beast and they began to skin the people.
Cheney, Rumsfeld and their cabal did not believe that the U.S. troops would be greeted by reveling throngs waving flowers, but they wanted the American people to lock onto that image so that when it did not come to pass, as it could not, then people would form a nameless, unidentifiable grudge against the Iraqis for disappointing their expectations. They could blame the war that followed the invasion on the Iraqis, whom the government propaganda outlets proceeded to package as insurgents. Now Cheney's blaming the Iraq war on Iran.
You are full of crap.
Theo smiled gently, wisely, and sighed.
Theo looked at me. I'd never seen him this way. Theo was a man of great tenderness. I was embraced by it as I sat beside him. He took my hand and kissed it as he spoke.
The desert, he said looking into my eyes and smiling.
The desert, I laughed. How did our oil get underneath their sand?
I'm better off holding my tongue, Theo said grinning.
I could have gotten him into bed effortlessly with airy banter and steamy suggestivity in my eyes, he added.
But, really....
But really? I said.
But really, he said, nodding slowly his head, I prefer you.
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