In the dream, I’m back in Chicago where it’s snowing hard as I step out the front door of a Greek diner. I’d been trying to avoid him, because he wants to blame me for what had happened. Suddenly, he pulls up in his black Supra, opens the electric sun roof and sticks his white-haired head into the crisp winter air. Snowflakes swirl around him, giving him an icy halo. I wince, shivering, the metallic door handle stuck to my bare hand in the sub-zero cold. I figure he’s going to blame me for the loss of his limbs, the decay of his young body. But no, he’s still beautiful and eternal. “Why haven’t you called me?” he wants to know. I mumble something about being busy as I tear my hand from the cold handle with a sound of separating Velcro. There he is, in all the immortality of his youth, yet I see him in my dream as the corpse he will soon become—the corpse I’d always taken him for, if only metaphorically. Now his death is about to be real. I see that his white hair has already fallen out of its sockets, his balls have shriveled with infections, his lungs have hemorrhaged, his leg bones have broken into hundreds of jagged pieces, and his lips have shriveled and cracked and bled against his cracked skull from which his teeth have slowly rotted. It is a question of minutes, not decades, for this thin little ghost in front of me… In the effort it takes me to calculate, I wake up.
• • •
Coming out of the metro last night in Paris, I could swear I saw Malcolm going down the stairs. I studied his face, and he looked back at me like “do I know this guy?” There was a trace of what could have been irony (i.e., “I know damn well who you are, you son-of-a-bitch, but I’ll pretend I haven’t recognized you…”)
Or maybe he was just some guy who thought my wide, worried eyes were actually wide with interest.
Is Malcolm dead? Could it have been his ghost I saw?
But that’s silly. Paris is too busy for ghosts. Like New York. Too many tortured souls who’ve died before their time. Quickly forgotten. Where would they go to seek their vengeance? They’d have to take a number in some dingy bureau de sécurité sociale full of dusty old desks stacked with papers.
Malcolm couldn’t have made an appearance in this Parisian life I’m living. This has nothing to do with London, which has nothing to do with Florida or New York. I can’t believe he exists. He’s no more than a story to tell.
Or is he still a real live being of soft, threatening flesh?
He follows me around the metro, ascot covering his bulging lymph nodes, blue veins pulsating through his soft white skin. I still find him pretty, you know, even prettier than Derek. I might agree to fuck him if it wasn’t for all the shit we played out over the years and continents. If I wasn’t so sure he’d refuse to use a decent condom. If he wouldn’t start talking about the Queen Mother. If he didn’t call me “boy” when I refused to tolerate his arrogance. What a great fuck he could have been if he had woken up once and for all to the fact that no one worth fucking gave a damn about the true genetic content of his blood—peasant stock or royalty. All anyone was really interested in was how fast he could pump up that nice velvet meat of his with his own infected strain of whatever lineage.
• • •
I leave my boyfriend—could be any boyfriend—in our apartment on a hill—could be any hill. I take some streets—could be any streets—to get to the club—could be any club—where I pay three dollars to get in to stroke my cock in front of other men—could be any men—stroking their cocks. These memories have reshaped themselves in my brain in such a way that all (or most) of those related to the conditions of street/cock/men are summoned at once to the screen of my brain. While I am capable of further analyzing the resulting collage to determine which night happened in which club and with which men, it’s the drunken cloud of sensory detail which seems so much more appealing: night-time lights on the hills, buses rolling down dark streets, tattered posters in arty cafés… In my effort to recreate the staccato images flickering in my head, I’ve dissolved them away to almost nothing, though in my mind, the fleeting series of overlapping moments remains no less intense. Accurately writing them up in paragraph form is, frankly, impossible.