Wilde
Stories
2010
The Year’s Best Gay Speculative Fiction
Edited by Steve Berman
Published by Lethe Press At Smashwords
Copyright © 2010 by Steve Berman.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, except for brief citation or review, without the written permission of Lethe Press. For information write: Lethe Press, 118 Heritage Avenue, Maple Shade, NJ 08052.
www.lethepressbooks.com lethepress@aol.com
Book Design by Toby Johnson
Cover Image by Aina Buforn Garcia
Published by Lethe Press, 118 Heritage Avenue, Maple Shade, NJ 08052.
1-59021- 301-7/ 978-1-59021-301-8 (paperback)
1-59021-300-9 / 978-1-59021-300-1 (library binding)
“Barbaric Splendor” © 2009 by Simon Sheppard, appearing in Time Well Bent (ed. Connie Wilkins, (Lethe Press) / “Death in Amsterdam” © 2009 by Jameson Currier, appearing in The Haunted Heart and Other Tales (Lethe Press) / “The Far Shore” © 2009 by Elizabeth Hand, appearing in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Oct/Nov 2009 / “I Needs Must Part, the Policeman Said” © 2009 by Richard Bowes, appearing in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Dec 2009 / “Like They Always Been Free” © 2009 by Georgina Li, appearing in Federations (ed. by John Joseph Adams) / “Lots” © 2009 by Marc Andreottola, appearing in Ganymede 5 / “Ne Que Von Desir” © 2009 by Tanith Lee writing as Judas Garbah, appearing in Icarus 3. / “Some of Them Fell” © 2009 by Joel Lane, appearing in Black Static 13 / “The Sphinx Next Door” © 2009 by Tom Cardamone, appearing in Pumpkin Teeth (Lethe Press) / “Strappado” © 2009 by Laird Barron, appearing in Poe (ed. by Ellen Datlow) / “Tio Gilbert and the Twenty-Seven Ghosts” © by Ben Francisco, appearing in Realms of Fantasy, Oct 2009 / “Where the Sun Doesn’t Shine” © 2009 by Rhys Hughes, appearing in Mister Gum.
Tío Gilberto and the Twenty-Seven Ghosts by Ben Francisco
I Needs Must Part, the Policeman Said by Richard Bowes
Ne Que Von Desir by Tanith Lee writing as Judas Garbah
Barbaric Splendor by Simon Sheppard
Like They Always Been Free by Georgina Li
Some of Them Fell by Joel Lane
Where the Sun Doesn’t Shine by Rhys Hughes
Death In Amsterdam by Jameson Currier
The Sphinx Next Door by Tom Cardamone
The Far Shore by Elizabeth Hand
Introduction
Welcome to the third release of the series devoted to the best gay speculative fiction published in the last year, tales of men haunted sometimes by ghosts and sometimes by handsome wolves on two legs—by outsider artists or strange neighbors.
In 2009, the market for queer fiction remained robust. Several of the stories featured in this book were released in prominent spec-fic periodicals. The growth of small presses has fostered a fresh crop of themed anthologies and single-author collections. Yet, all was not fair; last year, the gender and orientations of authors became contentious issues in both queer-themed and speculative fiction (which encompasses such genres as fantasy, horror, and science fiction).
According to their website, the Lambda Literary Foundation’s mission is to celebrate and nurture LGBT literature through various programs. LLF also sponsors annual awards in such categories as debut fiction, mysteries, romances, and, yes, an award focusing on queer spec fic. Last year, for the first time the LLF specified that the “gender orientation/identity of the author” was a criterion for determining whether or not a book was eligible for an award. This measure became divisive; was the announcement a means to highlight, perhaps even shelter, the literary efforts of queer folk, or was it an act of exclusivity that bordered on prejudice? Also within the spec-fic community, debate raged about anthologies whose tables of contents omitted female authors and markets perceived to be unfriendly to female authors.
Why am I mentioning these two issues in a book whose focus is solely on stories with gay male protagonists? Take a moment and look back at the table of contents. A quarter of the authors in Wilde Stories 2010 are women. I neither know nor care what their orientations might be. I imagine that not every male author in this book wants or even cares about labels. The story’s identity matters to me, not the writer’s.
Swordspoint happens to be my favorite (gay) novel. I consumed the book, digesting every scene, every conversation, every description of the world of Riverside where a man could openly adore another man, where duels were fought not over maidens but the hearts of rakes and young dukes. I yearned to live in such a world—or emulate the experience in my own writing. Swordspoint picked the lock on the closet door behind which I hid. The author, Ellen Kushner, not only happens to be a woman, but when the book was released in 1987 she did not identify as queer (yes, one could argue that Ellen’s contemporary identity is permissible, but that’s not the point). I’m troubled that a quarter of a century later, this marvelous book would not be eligible for a Lambda Award.
Moreover, how many gay men, now in their late thirties and even into their fifties, thinking back to the book that first introduced them to a character with whom they could associate their own coming-out struggles, would mention a novel written by a woman? I’d wager the number who respond with The Charioteer or The Persian Boy by Mary Renault, The Last Herald-Mage series by Mercedes Lackey or Lost Souls by Poppy Z. Brite, is larger than those mentioning William K. Eakins’s Key West 2720 A.D., Scott Edelman’s The Gift, or Jay B. Laws’s Steam. Sadly, too many of the early gay spec-fic titles written by men were only published by small presses and have now vanished like their authors—where is Jeffrey N. McMahan now? No one knows. (Though I do recommend to readers Rob Latham’s essay, “World Well Lost: Male Homosexuality in Postwar Science Fiction,” in Gunn’s fine The Golden Age of Gay Fiction).
I state all this not as a criticism of the LLF but rather to let you, my reader, know where I stand as the editor of this series. These stories are enchanting and scary and thrilling…and, as far I am concerned, the only reason you should look at authors’ names is to find more of their work. Let no prejudice stand in way of a good tale. Of course, I do not know your gender or identity, only that you enjoy stories about gay men who have happened across something fantastical, strange, weird or otherworldly, and you happen to enjoy accompanying them along the way. So turn the page and let’s commence with this year’s travels.
Steve Berman
Within moments he’d shaken hands with all and sundry and been inducted by the club of international debauchers as a member in good standing.
Strappado
Laird Barron
Kenshi Suzuki and Swayne Harris had a chance reunion at a bathhouse in an Indian tourist town. It had been five or six years since their previous Malta liaison, a cocktail party at the British consulate that segued into a branding-iron-hot affair. They’d spent a long weekend of day cruises to the cyclopean ruins on Gozo, nightclubbing at the elite hotels and casinos, and booze-drenched marathon sex before the dissolution of their respective junkets swept them back to New York and London in a storm of tears and bitter farewells. For Kenshi, the emotional hangover lasted through desolate summer and into a melancholy autumn. And even now, when elegant, thunderously handsome Swayne materialized from the crowd on the balcony like the Ghost of Christmas Past—!
Kenshi wore a black suit; sleek and polished as a seal or a banker. He swept his single lock of gelled black hair to the left, like a gothic teardrop. His skin was sallow and dewlapped at his neck, and soft at his belly and beneath his Italian leather belt. He’d been a swimmer once, earnestly meant to return to his collegiate form, but hadn’t yet braced for the exhaustion of such an endeavor. He preferred to float in hotel pools whilst dreaming of his supple youth, once so exotic in the suburbs of white bread Connecticut. Everyone but his grandparents (who never fully acclimated to their transplantation to the West) called him Ken. A naturalized U.S. citizen, he spoke meager Japanese, knew next to zero about the history or the culture and had visited Tokyo a grand total of three times. In short, he privately acknowledged his unworthiness to lay claim to his blood heritage and thus lived a life of minor yet persistent regret.
Swayne wore a cream-colored suit of a cut most popular with the royalty of South American plantations. It’s in style anywhere I go, he explained later as they undressed one another in Kenshi’s suite at the Golden Scale. Swayne’s complexion was dark, like fired clay. His slightly sinister brows and waxed imperial lent him the appearance of a Christian devil.
In the seam between the electric shock of their reunion and resultant delirium fugue of violent coupling, Kenshi had an instant to doubt the old magic before the question was utterly obliterated. And if he’d forgotten Swayne’s sly, wry demeanor, his faith was restored when the dark man rolled to face the ceiling, dragged on their shared cigarette and said, “Of all the bathhouses in all the cities of the world….”
Kenshi cheerfully declared him a bastard and snatched back the cigarette. The room was strewn with their clothes. A vase of lilies lay capsized and water funneled from severed stems over the edge of the table. He caught droplets in his free hand and rubbed them and the semen into the slick flesh of his chest and belly. He breathed heavily.
“How’d you swing this place all to yourself?” Swayne said. “Big promotion?”
“A couple of my colleagues got pulled off the project and didn’t make the trip. You?”
“Business, with unexpected pleasure, thank you. The museum sent me to look at a collection—estate sale. Paintings and whatnot. I fly back on Friday, unless I find something extraordinary, which is doubtful. Mostly rubbish, I’m afraid.” Swayne rose and stretched. Rich, gold-red light dappled the curtains, banded and bronzed him with tiger stripes.
The suite’s western exposure gave them a last look at the sun as it faded to black. Below their lofty vantage, slums and crooked dirt streets and the labyrinthine wharfs in the shallow, blood-warm harbor were mercifully obscured by thickening tropical darkness. Farther along the main avenue and atop the ancient terraced hillsides was a huge, baroque seventeenth-century monastery, much photographed for feature films, and farther still, the scattered manors and villas of the lime nabobs, their walled estates demarcated by kliegs and floodlights. Tourism pumped the lifeblood of the settlement. They came for the monastery, of course, and only a few kilometers off was a wildlife preserve. Tour buses ran daily and guides entertained foreigners with local folklore and promises of tigers, a number of which roamed the high grass plains. Kenshi had gone on his first day, hated the ripe, florid smell of the jungle, the heat, and the sullen men with rifles who patrolled the electrified perimeter fence in halftracks. The locals wore knives in their belts, even the urbane guide with the Oxford accent, and it left Kenshi feeling shriveled and helpless, at the mercy of the hatefully smiling multitudes.
Here, in the dusty, grimy heart of town, some eighty kilometers down the coast from grand old Mumbai, when the oil lamps and electric lamps fizzed alight, link by link in a vast, convoluted chain, it was only bright enough to help the muggers and cutthroats see what they were doing.
“City of romance,” Swayne said with eminent sarcasm. He opened the door to the terrace and stood naked at the rail. There were a few tourists on their verandas and at their windows. Laughter and pop music and the stench of the sea carried on the lethargic breeze as it snaked through the room. The hotel occupied the exact center of a semicircle of relatively modernized blocks—the chamber of commerce’s concession to appeasing Westerners’ paranoia of marauding gangs and vicious muggers. Still, three streets over was the Third World, as Kenshi’s colleagues referred to it whilst they swilled whiskey and goggled at turbans and sarongs and at the Buddhists in their orange robes. It was enough to make him ashamed of his continent, to pine for his father’s homeland, until he realized the Japanese were scarcely any more civilized as guests.
“The only hotel with air conditioning and you go out there. You’ll be arrested if you don’t put something on!” Kenshi finally dragged himself upright and collected his pants. “Let’s go to the discothèque.”
“The American place? I’d rather not. Asshole tourists swarm there like bees to honey. I was in the cantina a bit earlier and got stuck near a bunch of Hollywood types whooping it up at the bar. Probably come to scout the area or shoot the monastery. All they could talk about is picking up on ‘European broads.’”
Kenshi laughed. “Those are the guys I’m traveling with. Yeah, they’re scouting locations. And they’re all married, too.”
“Wankers. Hell with the disco.”
“No, there’s another spot—a hole in the wall I heard about from a friend. A local.”
“Eh, probably a seedy little bucket of blood. I’m in, then!”
- - -
Kenshi rang his contact, one Rashid Obi, an assistant to an executive producer at a local firm that cranked out several dozen Bollywood films every year. Rashid gave directions and promised to meet them at the club in forty-five minutes. Or, if they were nervous to travel the streets alone, he could escort them…. Kenshi laughed, somewhat halfheartedly, and assured his acquaintance there was no need for such coddling. He would’ve preferred Rashid’s company, but knew Swayne was belligerently fearless regarding forays into foreign environments. His lover was an adventurer and hard bitten in his own charming fashion. Certainly Swayne would mock him for his timidity and charge ahead regardless. So, Kenshi stifled his misgivings and led the way.
The discothèque was a quarter mile from the hotel and buried in a misshapen block of stone houses and empty shops. They found it mostly by accident after stumbling around several narrow alleys that reeked of urine and the powerful miasma of curry that seeped from open apartment windows. The entry arch was low and narrow and blackened from soot and antiquity. The name of the club had been painted into the worn plaster, but illegible now from erosion and neglect. Kerosene lamps guttered in inset sconces and shadows gathered in droves. A speaker dangled from a cornice and projected scratchy sitar music. Two Indian men sat on a stone bench. They wore baggy, lemon shirts and disco slacks likely purchased from the black-market outlets in a local bazaar. They shared the stem of the hookah at their sandaled feet. Neither appeared interested in the arrival of the Westerners.
“Oh my God! It’s an opium den!” Swayne said and squeezed Kenshi’s buttock. “Going native, are we, dear?”
Kenshi blushed and knocked his hand aside. He’d smoked half a joint with a dorm mate in college and that was the extent of his experimentation with recreational drugs. He favored a nice, dry white wine and the occasional import beer, preferably Sapporo.
The darkness of the alley followed them inside. The interior lay in shadow, except for the bar, which glowed from a strip along its edge like the bioluminescent tentacle of a deep-sea creature, and motes of gold and red and purple passing across the bottles from a rotating glitter ball above the tiny square of dance floor wedged in the corner. The sitar music issued from a beat box and was much louder than it had been outside. Patrons were jammed into the little rickety tables and along the bar. The air was sharp with sweat and exhaled liquor fumes.
Rashid emerged from the shadows and caught Kenshi’s arm above the elbow in the overly familiar manner of his countrymen. He was shorter than Kenshi and slender to the point of well-heeled emaciation. He stood so close Kenshi breathed deeply of his cologne, the styling gel in his short, tightly coiled hair. He introduced the small man from Delhi to a mildly bemused Swayne. Soon Rashid vigorously shepherded them into an alcove where a group of Europeans crowded together around three circular tables laden with beer bottles and shot glasses and fuming ashtrays heaped with the butts of cigarettes.
Rashid presented Swayne and Kenshi to the evening’s co-host, one Luis Guzman, an elderly Argentinean who’d lived abroad for nearly three decades in quasi-political exile. Guzman was the public relations guru for a profoundly large international advertising conglomerate, which in turn influenced or owned outright the companies represented by the various guests he’d assembled at the discothèque.
Kenshi’s feet ached, so he wedged in next to a reedy blonde Netherlander, a weather reporter for some big market, he gathered as sporadic introductions were made. Her hands bled ink from a mosaic of nightclub stamps, the kind that didn’t easily wash off, so like rings in a tree it was possible to estimate she’d been partying hard for several nights. This impression was confirmed when she confided that she’d gone a bit wild during her group’s whirlwind tour of Bangkok, Mumbai, and now this “village” in the space of days. She laughed at him from the side of her mouth, gaped fishily with her left eye, a Picasso girl, and pressed her bony thigh against him. She’d been drinking boleros, and lots of them, he noted. What goes down must come up, he thought and was sorry for whomever she eventually leeched onto tonight.
The Viking gentleman looming across from them certainly vied for her attention, what with his lascivious grimaces and bellowing jocularity, but she appeared content to ignore him while trading glances with the small, hirsute Slav to the Viking’s left and occasionally brushing Kenshi’s forearm as they shared an ashtray. He soon discovered Hendrika the weathergirl worked for the Viking, Andersen, chief comptroller and inveterate buffoon. The Slav was actually a native of Minsk named Fedor; Fedor managed distribution for a major vodka label and possessed some mysterious bit of history with Hendrika. Kenshi idly wondered if he’d been her pimp while she toiled through college. A job was a job was a job (until she found the job of her dreams) to a certain subset of European woman, and men too, as he’d been pleased to discover during his many travels. In turn, Hendrika briefly introduced Kenshi to the French contingent of software designers—Francoise, Jean-Michelle and Claude; the German photographer Victor and his assistant Nina, and Raul, a Spanish advertising consultant. They extended lukewarm handshakes and one of them bought him a glass of bourbon, which he didn’t want but politely accepted. Then, everyone resumed roaring, disjointed conversations and ignored him completely.
Good old Swayne got along swimmingly, of course. He’d discarded his white suit for an orange blazer, black shirt and slacks and Kenshi noted with equal measures of satisfaction and jealousy that all heads swiveled to follow the boisterous Englishman. Within moments he’d shaken hands with all and sundry and been inducted by the club of international debauchers as a member in good standing. That the man didn’t even speak a second language was no impediment—he vaulted such barriers by shamelessly enlisting necessary translations from whoever happened to be within earshot. Kenshi glumly thought his friend would’ve made one hell of an American.
Presently Swayne returned from his confab with Rashid and Guzman and exclaimed, “We’ve been invited to the exhibition. A Van Iblis!” Swayne seemed genuinely enthused, his meticulously cultivated cynicism blasted to smithereens in an instant. Kenshi barely made him out over the crossfire between Andersen and Hendrika and the other American, Walther. Walther was fat and bellicose, a colonial barbarian dressed for civilized company. His shirt was untucked, his tie an open noose. Kenshi hadn’t caught what the fellow did for a living, however Walther put whiskey after whiskey away with the vigor of a man accustomed to lavish expense accounts. He sneered at Kenshi on the occasions their eyes met.
Kenshi told Swayne he’d never heard of Van Iblis.
“It’s a pseudonym,” Swayne said. “Like Kilroy, Or Alan Smithee. He, or she, is a guerilla. Not welcome in the U.K.; persona non grata in the free world you might say.” When Kenshi asked why Van Iblis wasn’t welcome in Britain, Swayne grinned. “Because the shit he pulls off violates a few laws here and there. Unauthorized installations, libelous materials, health code violations. Explosions!” Industry insiders suspected Van Iblis was actually comprised of a significant number of member artists and exceedingly wealthy patrons. Such an infrastructure seemed the only logical explanation for the success of these brazen exhibitions and their participants’ elusiveness.
It developed that Guzman had brought his eclectic coterie to this part of the country after sniffing a rumor of an impending Van Iblis show and as luck would have it, tonight was the night. Guzman’s contacts had provided him with a hand scrawled map to the rendezvous, and a password. A password! It was all extraordinarily titillating.
Swayne dialed up a slideshow on his cell and handed it over. Kenshi remembered the news stories once he saw the image of the three homeless men who’d volunteered to be crucified on faux satellite dishes. Yes, that had caused a sensation, although the winos survived relatively intact. None of them knew enough to expose the identity of his temporary employers. Another series of slides displayed the infamous pigs’ blood carpet bombing of the Viet Nam War Memorial from a blimp that then exploded in midair like a Roman candle. Then the so called “corpse art” in Mexico, Amsterdam and elsewhere. Similar to the other guerilla installations, these exhibits popped up in random venues in any of a dozen countries after the mildest and most surreptitious of advance rumors and retreated underground within hours. Of small comfort to scandalized authorities was the fact the corpse sculptures, while utterly macabre, were allegedly comprised of volunteers with terminal illnesses who’d donated their bodies to science, or rather, art. Nonetheless, at the sight of grimly posed seniors in antiquated bathing suits, a bloated, eyeless Santa in a coonskin cap, the tri-headed ice cream vendor and his chalk-faced Siamese children, Kenshi wrinkled his lip and pushed the phone at Swayne. “No, I think I’ll skip this one, whatever it is, thank you very much.”
“You are such a wet blanket,” Swayne said. “Come on, love. I’ve been dying to witness a Van Iblis show since, well forever. I’ll be the envy of every art dilettante from Birmingham to Timbuktu!”
Kenshi made polite yet firm noises of denial. Swayne leaned very close; his hot breath tickled Kenshi’s ear. He stroked Kenshi’s cock through the tight fabric of his designer pants. Congruently, albeit obliviously, Hendrika continued to rub his thigh. Kenshi choked on his drink and finally consented to accompany Swayne on his stupid side trek, would’ve promised anything to spare himself this agonizing embarrassment. A lifetime in the suburbs had taught him to eschew public displays of affection, much less submit to a drunken mauling by another man in a foreign country not particularly noted for its tolerance.
He finished his drink in miserable silence and awaited the inevitable.
- - -
They crowded aboard Guzman’s two Day-Glo rental vans and drove inland. There were no signs to point the way and the road was narrow and deserted. Kenshi’s head grew thick and heavy on his neck and he closed his eyes and didn’t open them until the tires made new sounds as they left paved road for a dirt track and his companions gently bumped their legs and arms against his own.
It wasn’t much farther.
Daylight peeled back the layers of night and deposited them near a collection of prefabricated warehouse modules and storage sheds. The modules were relatively modern, yet already cloaked in moss and threaded with coils of vine. Each was enormous and had been adjoined to its siblings via additions and corrugated tin walkways. The property sat near the water, a dreary, fog-shrouded expanse surrounded by drainage ditches and marshes and a jungle of creepers and banyan trees.
Six or seven dilapidated panel trucks were parked on the outskirts; 1970s Fords imported from distant USA, their white frames scorched and shot with rust. Battered insignia on the door panels marked them as one-time property of the Ministry of the Interior. Alongside the trucks, an equally antiquated, although apparently functional, bulldozer squatted in the high grass; a dull red model one would expect to see abandoned in a rural American pasture. To the left of the bulldozer was a deep, freshly ploughed trench surmounted by plastic barrels, unsealed fifty-five gallon drums and various wooden boxes, much of this half concealed by canvas tarps. Guzman commented that the owners of the land were in the embryonic stage of prepping for large-scale development—perhaps a hotel. Power lines and septic systems were in the offing.
Kenshi couldn’t imagine who in the hell could possibly think building a hotel in a swamp represented a wise business investment.
Guzman and Rashid’s groups climbed from the vans and congregated, faces slack and bruised by hangovers, jet lag, and burgeoning unease. What had seemed a lark in the cozy confines of the disco became a more ominous prospect as each took stock and realized he or she hadn’t a bloody clue as to north or south, or up and down, for that matter. Gnats came at them in quick, sniping swarms, and several people cursed when they lost shoes to the soft, wet earth. Black and white chickens scratched in the weedy ruts.
A handful of Indians dressed in formal wear grimly waited under a pavilion to serve a buffet. None of them smiled or offered any greeting. They mumbled amongst themselves and loaded plates of honeydew slices and crêpes and poured glasses of Champagne with disconsolate expressions. A Victrola played an eerie Hindu-flavored melody. The scene reminded Kenshi of a funeral reception. Someone, perhaps Walther, muttered nervously, and the sentiment of general misgiving palpably intensified.
“Hey, this is kinda spooky,” Hendrika stage-whispered to her friend Fedor. Oddly enough, that cracked everybody up and tensions loosened.
Guzman and Rashid approached a couple of young, drably attired Indian men who were scattering corn from gunny sacks to the chickens, and started a conversation. After they’d talked for a few minutes, Guzman announced the exhibition would open in about half an hour and all present were welcome to enjoy the buffet and stretch their legs. Andersen, Swayne and the French software team headed for the pavilion and mosquito netting.
Meanwhile, Fedor fetched sampler bottles of vodka supplied by his company and passed them around. Kenshi surprised himself by accepting one. His throat had parched during the drive and he welcomed the excuse to slip away from Hendrika, whose orbit had yet again swung her all too close to him.
He strolled off a bit from the others, swiping at the relentless bugs and wishing he’d thought to wear that rather dashing panama hat he’d “borrowed” from a lover on location in the Everglades during a sweltering July shoot. His stroll carried him behind a metal shed overgrown with banyan vines. A rotting wooden addition abutted the sloppy edge of a pond or lagoon; it was impossible to know because of the cloying mist. He lighted a cigarette. The porch was cluttered with disintegrating crates and rudimentary gardening tools. Gingerly lifting the edge of a tarp slimy with moss, he discovered a quantity of new plastic barrels. HYDROCHLORIC ACID, CORROSIVE! and a red skull and crossbones warned of hazardous contents. He quickly snatched back his hand and moved away lest his cigarette trigger a calamity worthy of a Darwin Award.
“Uh, yeah—good idea, Sulu. Splash that crap on you and your face will melt like glue.” Walther had sneaked up behind him. The man drained his mini vodka bottle and tossed it into the bushes. He drew another bottle from the pocket of his sweat-stained dress shirt and had a pull. The humidity was awful here; it pressed down in a smothering blanket. His hair lay in sticky clumps and his face was shiny and red. He breathed heavily, laboring as if the brief walk from the van had led up several flights of stairs.
Kenshi stared at him, considering and discarding a series of snappy retorts. “Asshole,” he said under his breath. He flicked his cigarette butt toward the scummy water and edged around Walther and made for the vans.
Walther laughed. “Jap fag,” he said. The fat man unzipped and began pissing off the end of the porch.
“I’m not even fucking Japanese, you idiot,” Kenshi said over his shoulder. No good, he realized; the tremor in his voice, the quickening of his shuffle betrayed his cowardice in the face of adversity. This instinctive recoil from trouble, the resultant wave of self-loathing and bitter recriminations, was as it ever had been with Kenshi. Swayne would’ve smashed the jerk’s face.
Plucking the thought from the air, Walther called, “Don’t go tell your Limey boyfriend on me!”
Guzman gathered everyone into a huddle as Kenshi approached. He stood on the running board of a van and explained the three rules regarding their impending tour of the exhibition: no touching, no souvenirs, no pictures. “Mr. Vasilov will come around and secure all cell phones, cameras and recorders. Don’t worry, your personal effects will be returned as soon as the tour concludes. Thank you for your cooperation.”
Fedor dumped the remaining limes and pears from a hotel gift basket and came around and confiscated the proscribed items. Beyond a few exaggerated sighs, no one really protested; the prohibition of cameras and recording devices at galleries and exclusive viewings was commonplace. Certainly, this being Van Iblis and the epitome of scofflaw art, there could be no surprise regarding such rules.
At the appointed time the warehouse doors rattled and slid aside and a blond man in a paper suit emerged and beckoned them to ascend the ramp. He was large, nearly the girth of Andersen the Viking, and wore elbow-length rubber gloves and black galoshes. A black balaclava covered the lower half of his face. The party filed up the gangway in pairs, Guzman and Fedor at the fore. Kenshi and Swayne were the next to last. Kenshi watched the others become swiftly dissolving shadows backlit as they were by a bank of humming fluorescent lamps. He thought of cattle and slaughter pens and fingered his passport in its wallet on a string around his neck. Swayne squeezed his arm.
Once the group had entered, five more men, also clothed in paper suits and balaclavas, shut the heavy doors behind them with a clang that caused Kenshi’s flesh to twitch. He sickly noted these five wore machetes on their belts. Blood rushed to his head in a breaker of dizziness and nausea. The reek of alcohol sweat and body odor tickled his gorge. The flickering light washed over his companions, reflected in their black eyes, made their faces pale and strange and curiously lifeless, as if he’d been suddenly trapped with brilliantly sculpted automatons. He understood then that they too had spotted the machetes. Mouths hung open in moist exclamations of apprehension and dread and the inevitable thrill derived from the alchemy of these emotions. Yet another man, similarly garbed as his compatriots, wheeled forth a tripod-mounted Panaflex motion picture camera and began shooting the scene.
The floor creaked under their gathered weight. Insulating foam paneled the walls. Every window was covered in black plastic. There were two narrow openings at the far end of the entry area; red paint outlined the first opening, blue paint the second. The openings let into what appeared to be darkened spaces, their gloom reinforced by translucent curtains of thick plastic similar to the kind that compartmentalized meat lockers.
“You will strip,” the blond man said in flat, accented English.
Kenshi’s testicles retracted, although a calmness settled over his mind. He dimly acknowledged this as the animal recognition of its confinement in a trap, the inevitability of what must ultimately occur. Yet, one of this fractious group would argue, surely Walther the boor, or obstreperous Andersen, definitely and assuredly Swayne. But none protested, none resisted the command, all were docile. One of the anonymous men near the entrance took out his machete and held it casually at his waist. Wordlessly, avoiding eye contact with each other, Kenshi’s fellow travelers began to remove their clothes and arrange them neatly, or not so much, as the case might’ve been, in piles on the floor. The blond instructed them to form columns and face the opposite wall. The entire affair possessed the quality of a lucid dream, a not-happening in the real-world sequence of events. Hendrika was crying, he noted before she turned away and presented him with her thin backside: a bony ridge of spine, spare haunches. She’d drained white.
Kenshi stood between oddly subdued Swayne and one of the Frenchmen. He was acutely anxious regarding his sagging breasts, the immensity of his scarred and stretched belly, his general flaccidity, and almost chuckled at the absurdity of it all.
When the group had assembled with their backs to him, the blond man briskly explained the guests would be randomly approached and tapped on the shoulder. The designated guests would turn and proceed into the exhibit chambers by twos. Questions? None were forthcoming. After a lengthy pause it commenced. Beginning with Guzman and Fedor, each of them was gradually and steadily ushered out of sight with perhaps a minute between pairings. The plastic curtains swished and crackled with their passage. Kenshi waited his turn and stared at the curdled yellow foam on the walls.
The tap on the shoulder came and he had sunk so far into himself it was only then he registered everyone else had gone. The group comprised an uneven number, so he was odd man out. Abruptly, techno music blared and snarled from hidden speakers, and beneath the eardrum-shattering syncopation a shrill screeching like the keening of a beast or the howl of a circular saw chewing wood.
“Well, friend,” said the blond, raising his voice to overcome the music, “you may choose.”
Kenshi found it difficult to walk a straight line. He staggered and pushed through the curtain of the blue door, into darkness. There was a long corridor and at its end another sheet of plastic that let in pale light. He shoved aside the curtain and had a moment of sick vertigo upon realizing there were no stairs. He cried out and toppled, arms waving, and flopped the eight or so feet into a pit of gravel. His leg broke on impact, but he didn’t notice until later. The sun filled his vision with white. He thrashed in the gravel, dug furrows with elbows and heels and screamed soundlessly because the air had been driven from his lungs. A shadow leaned over him and brutally gripped his hair and clamped his face with what felt like a wet cloth. The cloth went into his nose, his mouth, choked him.
The cloth tasted of death.
- - -
Thanks to a series of tips, authorities found him three weeks later in the closet of an abandoned house on the fringes of Bangalore. Recreating events, and comparing these to the experiences of those others who were discovered at different locations but in similar circumstances, it was determined he’d been pacified with drugs unto a stupor. His leg was infected and he’d lost a terrible amount of weight. The doctors predicted scars, physical and otherwise.
There’d been police interviews; FBI, CIA, Interpol. Kenshi answered and answered and they eventually let him go, let him get to work blocking it, erasing it to the extent erasing it was possible. He avoided news reports, refused the sporadic interviews, made a concentrated effort to learn nothing of the aftermath, although he suspected scant evidence remained, anyway. He took a leave of absence and cocooned himself.
Kenshi remembered nothing after the blue door and he was thankful.
- - -
Months after their second and last reunion, Swayne rang him at home and asked if he wanted to meet for cocktails. Swayne was in New York for an auction, would be around over the weekend, and wondered if Kenshi was doing all right, if he was surviving. This was before Kenshi began to lie awake in the dark of each new evening, disconnected from the cold pulse of the world outside the womb of his apartment, his hotel room, the cabs of his endless stream of rental cars. He dreamed the same dream; a recurring nightmare of acid-filled barrels knocked like dominoes into a trench, the grumbling exertions of a red bulldozer pushing in the dirt.
I’ve seen the tape, Swayne said through a blizzard of static.
Kenshi said nothing. He breathed, in and out. Starless, the black ceiling swung above him, it rushed to and fro, in and out like the heartbeat of the black Atlantic tapping and slapping at old crumbling seawalls, not far from his own four thin walls.
I’ve seen it, Swayne said. After another long pause, he said, Say something, Ken.
What?
It does exist. Van Iblis made sure copies were circulated to the press, but naturally the story was killed. Too awful, you know? I got one by post a few weeks ago. A reporter friend smuggled it out of a precinct in Canada. The goddamned obscenity is everywhere. And I didn’t have the balls to look. Yesterday, finally.
That’s why you called. Kenshi trembled. He suddenly wanted to know. Dread nearly overwhelmed him. He considered hanging up, chopping off Swayne’s distorted voice. He thought he might vomit there, supine in bed, and drown.
Yeah. We were the show. The red door people were the real show, I guess. God help us, Ken. Ever heard of a Palestinian hanging? Dangled from your wrists, cinder blocks tied to your ankles? That’s what the bastards started with. When they were done, while the people were still alive…. Swayne stopped there, or his next words were swallowed by the static surf.
Of course, Van Iblis made a film. No need for Swayne to illuminate him on that score, to open him up again. Kenshi thought about the empty barrels near the trench. He thought about what Walther said to him behind the shed that day. He thought about how in his recurring dream he always chose the red door, instead.
I don’t even know why I picked blue, mate, Swayne said.
He said to Swayne, Don’t ever fucking call me again. He disconnected and dropped the phone on the floor and waited for it to ring again. When it didn’t, he slipped into unconsciousness.
One day his copy arrived in a plain envelope via anonymous sender. He put the disk on the sidewalk outside of his building and methodically crushed it under the heel of his wingtip. The doorman watched the whole episode and smiled indulgently, exactly as one does to placate the insane.
Kenshi smiled in return and went into his apartment and ran a bath. He slashed his wrists with the broken edge of a credit card. Not deep enough; he bled everywhere and was forced to hire a service to steam the carpets. He never again wore short-sleeved shirts.
Nonetheless, he’d tried. There was comfort in trying.
- - -
Kenshi returned to the Indian port town on company business a few years later. Models were being flown in from Mumbai and Kolkata for a photo shoot near the old monastery. The ladies wouldn’t arrive for another day and he had time to burn. He hired a taxi and went looking for the Van Iblis site.
The field wasn’t difficult to find. Developers had drained the swamp and built a hotel on the site, as advertised. They’d hacked away nearby wilderness and plopped down high-rise condos, two restaurants and a casino. The driver dropped him at the Ivory Tiger, a glitzy, towering edifice. The lobby was marble and brass and the staff a pleasant chocolate mahogany, all of whom dressed smartly, smiled perfectly white smiles and spoke flawless English.
He stayed in a tenth-floor suite, kept the blinds drawn, the phone unplugged, the lights off. Lying naked across crisp, snow-cool sheets was to float disembodied through a great silent darkness. A handsome businessman, a fellow American, in fact, had bought him a white wine in the lounge; a sweet talker, that one, but Kenshi retired alone. He didn’t get many erections these days and those that came ended in humiliating fashion. Drifting through insoluble night was safer.
In the morning, he ate breakfast and smoked a few cigarettes and had his first drink of the day. He was amazed how much he drank anymore and how little effect it had on him. After breakfast he walked around the hotel grounds, which were very much a garden, and stopped at the tennis courts. No one was playing; thunderclouds massed and the air smelled of rain. By his estimation, the tennis courts were near to, if not directly atop, the old field. Drainage grates were embedded at regular intervals and he went to his knees and pressed the side of his head against one until the cold metal flattened his ear. He listened to water rushing through subterranean depths. Water fell through deep, hollow spaces and echoed, ever more faintly. And, perhaps, borne through yards of pipe and clay and gravel that hold, some say, fragments and frequencies of the past, drifted whispery strains of laughter, Victrola music.
He caught himself speculating about who else went through the blue door, the exit to the world of the living, and smothered this line of conjecture with the bribe of more drinks at the bar, more sex from this day on, more whatever it might take to stifle such thoughts forever. He was happier thinking Hendrika went back to her weather reporter job once the emotional trauma subsided, that Andersen the Viking was ever in pursuit of her dubious virtue, that the Frenchmen and the German photographer had returned to their busy, busy lives. And Rashid….Blue door. Red door. They might be anywhere.
The sky cracked and rain poured forth.
Kenshi curled into a tight ball, chin to chest, and closed his eyes. Swayne kissed his mouth and they were crushingly intertwined. Acid sluiced over them in a wave, then the lid clanged home over the rim of the barrel and closed them in.
I wonder what it’s like to be with someone when you can’t feel their touch, can’t taste their lips. You’d have to keep your eyes open the whole time to remind yourself you’re making love.
Tío Gilberto and the Twenty-Seven Ghosts
Ben Francisco
New York City is getting me down. The concrete is too hard, and the summer’s too hot. There are lots of guys, but none of them work out because they’re too pretentious, like in the poem with the guy and the albatross and water everywhere but you can’t drink any of it, because of the salt. If New York were a body of water, it would have lots and lots of salt. It’s the worst in the comedy clubs, when I do my stand-up routine. New Yorkers hold back their laughter like they’re saving it up for the afterlife.
I get the summer off from school and I was going to stay with my parents in the Bronx like usual, but then I realized I’m an adult now and can do whatever I want. I’ll go some place that people don’t take themselves so seriously, where the laughs and smiles aren’t so expensive. I’ll spend the summer in San Francisco with my uncle Gilberto, at his haunted house.
- - -
Gilberto can’t meet me at the airport because of some excuse about the moisture in the air and the aches in his back. So I have to find my way to the BART on my own and then walk from the station, a heavy duffle bag on each shoulder, the straps digging into my skin. Gilberto’s building is as big as my memory of it. Five stories high, a rundown warehouse refurbished in a coat of bright purple paint, like an old woman dressed up for a night on the town.
Before I can even ring, Uncle Gilberto opens the door and gives me a big hug and a kiss that smells of gin and menthol cigarettes. His dog, Ganymede, barks and snuggles his head between my legs. The cat eyes me suspiciously from the next room. From behind me, someone helps me slip off my jacket. I look over my shoulder, but nobody’s there. “Who’s that?” I ask my uncle.
“That’s Daniel,” he says.
“Hey, Daniel,” I say. “Been a while.”
Gilberto shakes a finger at the air behind me. “No, you cannot also take his shirt! I told you to behave.” Uncle Gil throws both hands into the air. “Dios mío, what have I done? Bringing my innocent nephew into a house with twenty-seven horny ghosts. Qué barbaridad. You tell me right away if any of them try anything, me entiendes, James?”
“I’m twenty-one, Uncle Gil. I’m not so innocent anymore.”
Gil’s hands go up toward the sky again. “Por favor. You kids think you invented the debauchery, but long before you were born they closed down the sex clubs and put up a parking lot.”
- - -
Uncle Gil invites me to play Monopoly with him and a few of the ghosts. They’re all picky about what piece they get to use, so I get stuck with the wheelbarrow. At first it’s fun to watch the pieces and the dice move by themselves, the money passing between invisible hands. But it’s hard to keep track of who has what properties when you can’t see the other players, and Uncle Gil has to translate for me when the ghosts tell me how much the rent is. Only Gilberto can see and hear them. Ghosts can only be seen by the people they haunt.
- - -
The doorbell rings, and Gilberto opens the door to a young Asian guy with two brown paper bags of groceries in each arm and more on the floor beside him. Gilberto sets them down in the hallway by the door, then gives the delivery man a generous tip and a flirtatious rub on the shoulder. As soon as Uncle Gil closes the door, the grocery bags lift themselves into the air and parade into the kitchen. I follow them and watch as the bags are unpacked in a flurry of floating cans, fruits, and meats.
While the ghosts are putting away the food, Gilberto comes over to me and brushes his fingers through my hair. “It makes me so happy that you are here for all the summer,” he says. “Finally we will have a new player for the Monopoly and the Hearts, and you can help out with the shopping too.” When he says “shopping” it sounds like “chopping.” Uncle Gil is okay, but it makes me want to groan, the thought of an entire summer of shopping-cart pushing and board games with finicky ghosts.
“Sure,” I say, “we should definitely hang out, you know, when I’m not at the restaurant or working on my act.”
- - -
The ghosts have a party at least twice a week. They gather around the piano and sing Broadway show tunes. Gil’s voice and the piano are all I hear. Late at night, they pull their favorite props out of the trunk, and the piano room is animated by top hats, black canes with white tips, and red feather boas flopping about the air in unison. When they’re happy, they sing the finale from Chorus Line, that one that starts, “One… singular sensation, every little step she takes…” When they’re sad they sing “Another Suitcase in Another Hall” from Evita.
I hear a lot more suitcases than singular sensations. I’m glad I’m a heavy sleeper.
- - -
Gilberto is sitting in his armchair with a glass of gin in his hand when I ask him if he wants to go out to the Clean Break Bar and Laundromat, for their open mike night.
Gil is so surprised he coughs a bit mid-sip, as if his pipes are getting crossed. “Now they are having bars in Laundromats?” he says. “I am so outside of the loop. No, I’m too old for the clubs and the comedy.”
“Oh, come on, tío,” I say. In that moment, I make it my mission to get him out of the house before the end of the summer. “You’re only fifty-four. Maybe you’ll meet somebody.”
This makes him laugh. Then he looks over his shoulder with a guilty frown. “Lo sé, Tomás, lo sé,” he says to the air behind him. “No,” he says to me, shaking his head, staring into his lap. “You go on without me.”
The gin bottle floats from the liquor cabinet to the coffee table to freshen up Gilberto’s drink.
- - -
The far wall of the Clean Break is lined with washing machines and dryers in stacks of two. They whir in the background while musicians, comedians, and poets take the stage for a maximum of seven minutes each. I grab a beer and sign up with the goth chick at the bar, and halfway through the night I’m called to the stage. I do my comedy routine about the funniest deaths in history—Nero, Catherine the Great. It takes me a couple minutes to warm up the exhausted audience, but once I do, I have them rolling. There’s a young white guy with a ponytail almost falling over with laughter as he folds a stack of blue jeans behind the counter of the Laundromat. He’s wearing a snug t-shirt that says, “Homosexuals are so gay.” I find this funny, and also cute. After my seven minutes, I want to go up to him and start a conversation, but I haven’t got the nerve.
Next time, I’ll bring my laundry. When I hand the cute long-haired guy my sack of clothes, the conversation will flow naturally from there. He’ll tell me how funny I am, and I’ll tell him how cute he is, and then he’ll whisk me back to his apartment and put on a Miles Davis CD, and we’ll make love that’s hot and sweet, like cocoa.
- - -
Something changes in me when I’m in front of an audience. I scan the shadowed faces of the crowd and find the person with a frown that broadcasts the message, “I am determined not to enjoy myself.” My mission is to make that person laugh. The moment that person cracks a smile, I know I’ve got it. Once the smile slips out, laughter is bound to follow. Sometimes the serious person just keeps frowning the whole time, and then I feel defeated.
There were too many days when New York defeated me. I’ve come to San Francisco hoping for less defeat and more laughter. Also, more boys.
- - -
Right after work, I go back to the Clean Break, this time with my laundry. The same cute guy is working. It’s an intimate moment, handing him a trash bag filled with my dirty clothes. He says he thought I was funny the other day. His name is Kasper.
“The friendly ghost?” I ask. He rolls his eyes. I guess everyone says that.
“My uncle has ghosts, lots of them,” I say. “They’re all friendly. This morning I think one of them was checking me out in the shower.” He smiles but without showing any teeth, which seems patronizing and also makes him less cute. Sometimes I forget that for most people realism can’t be magical. I stop talking about the ghosts, and compliment him on his t-shirt, another tight one that says, “Danger: Men at Work,” like a construction sign. He says he made it himself and he smiles, this time with all his teeth sparkling, and looks cuter by the second.
He asks if I want to go out some time.
“Cool,” I say.
I like San Francisco.
- - -
Most of the ghosts have their own rooms, but Tomás shares Gilberto’s bedroom. I don’t think the ghosts sleep—I think Tomás just lies awake beside Uncle Gil all night long. I wonder if they still spoon with each other. Gil can see and hear the ghosts, but I don’t think he can feel them. I wonder what it’s like to be with someone when you can’t feel their touch, can’t taste their lips. You’d have to keep your eyes open the whole time to remind yourself you’re making love.
- - -
I ask Gil if he’ll come see me at the next open mike. He says it’s too hard on his back, plus he doesn’t like to leave the ghosts home alone. He asks if I can do my act right here at the house, a private performance for him and the ghosts.
Gilberto and the ghosts rearrange the living room, setting up mismatched chairs in four rows of seven. One of them brings down a desk lamp to use as a spotlight. I step into the light. The twenty-eight chairs look empty except for the one in the second row where Gilberto is sitting. My routine about comical deaths might be insensitive for this audience, so instead I do all my best jokes about cheesy gay pick-up lines.
From the moment I start, Gilberto’s arms are in the air and he laughs that giant laugh of his that fills the room. I pause, listening for laughter I can’t hear. “Ay sí,” says Gilberto, clapping his hands. “Verdad que sí.” He gestures toward the empty chairs and says, “Everybody is laughing because it’s so true.”
I stumble through my next joke. I want to find the ghost with a frown on his face, the one that’s buried in sadness, the one that will measure my success. But I’ll never find him in those empty chairs.
- - -
Kasper has one night off a week. He takes me out dancing and then back to his apartment. You can tell it’s not a college dorm room because all the posters are in frames. This reminds me that Kasper is four years older than me, which is sexy. Kasper takes off all his clothes, and I can’t help but think it—he’s as white as a ghost. This makes me think of Uncle Gil, that I should call him so he doesn’t worry.
As I dial the number on my cell phone, Kasper sucks on my nipple. This is distracting, plus it’s hard to hear Gilberto because “Any Dream Will Do” is playing on the piano in the background. “I’ll be home late,” I tell him. “Or maybe not at all.”
“Bueno,” says Gil. “Just make sure you are using a parachute, okay, m’ijo?”
“Okay,” I say. “Cuidate, tío.” Kasper says it’s hot when I talk in Spanish and he starts to go down on me. I hate it when guys say that, but I like him and he gives good head, so I talk a little Spanish, just to encourage him.
In the morning Kasper makes us pancakes. On the counter he finds a note from his housemate saying we were very loud last night and it kept him from sleeping. The note has lots of exclamation points and capital letters and underlines. Kasper says he wants to move out, but in the Bay Area it’s so hard to find a decent place.
- - -
I’m walking out the door with a ten-gallon trash bag filled with laundry when Gilberto asks, “What is wrong with my washer and dryer that you are running around the city with all these bags of filthy clothes?”
There are two answers to this question. The first is that his washer and dryer are in the basement, which is dark and a bit grimy and almost always filled with ghosts watching old, sad movies from before there was color. Or if they do have color it’s that cheap grainy color that’s missing half the rainbow. The ghosts watch the same movie again and again as a chorus line of handkerchiefs dab invisible tears.
The second answer is that Gilberto’s washer and dryer are not staffed by Kasper.
But I don’t say those things. I say, “I just need some air,” and close the door behind me.
- - -
Kasper says he’s not going to be working at the Laundromat forever. Someday he’ll have his own business, selling the funny t-shirts he designs. He sells them to friends and at festivals, and a friend of his has promised to make a website so he can sell them online, too.
We stay up all night brainstorming ideas for t-shirts. I spout one-liners like, “These nipples are armed and dangerous.” Then Kasper sketches graphic design ideas on his laptop. He says I’m the first person he’s ever met who can keep up with him, in terms of t-shirts. Some day, he says, we’ll be co-owners of a successful business. I’ll perform my comedy act in front of a packed audience, and Kasper will have a booth by the door where he’ll sell t-shirts to the mob of people who can’t get enough of our cleverness.
A lot of people have dreams, but Kasper is cool because he invites the other person to be part of them.
In the sleepless morning, we’re too tired to even have sex. We trudge through showers and cereal, and I head off to the restaurant, Kasper to the Laundromat. Working there is not so bad, he says, because while he’s folding clothes he gets to do research, assessing the latest t-shirt fashions in people’s dirty laundry.
- - -
Gilberto is letting Ganymede in from the backyard, and I ask him if he wants to come with me to the March for Marriage downtown. He says he and the ghosts already have plans to play a game of Hearts. “Don’t you care about our equal rights?” I ask.
“Claro que sí,” he says. “I was an activist once, in my day. Pero back then no one even thought of marriage. We were too busy fighting for our lives.”
I meet up with Kasper for the march. We hold hands.
“So what would you want your wedding to be like?” Kasper says, with a shy half-smile.
“Nothing pretentious,” I say. “Something fun.”
Kasper agrees, and we start fantasizing about weddings. The pronouns slowly shift from mine to our. It will be in a comedy club, not a church, and everyone will wear funny t-shirts with pictures of tuxes printed on them. There’ll be little ceremony and lots of laughter.
- - -
Kasper is naked except for a necklace of purple beads on thin black cord. I’m naked, too. We’re kissing, all wrapped up in each other’s legs on a twin bed that’s too small for two, trying to be quiet so as not to disturb the writer of notes of many exclamation points.