Twentysix Read online

  Now and again Rudy makes an appearance, and Ruby’s feminine demeanour disappears in a vapour of violence. She builds such walls around herself that no one could ever scale them. But I have also seen that moment when who she wants to be and who she appears to be coincide so gloriously that it is enough to make you trust in saints.

  It is thus not a question of language or the body, but language and the body as an interface of matter itself.

  A wasteland.

  Bald earth sprouting a comb-over of weeds.

  Night-time.

  A suburb somewhere in Southern Italy.

  A man I have just met is fucking me over the bonnet of his car, which is parked in a pathway swathed between an overgrown field and a dense orchard, beyond which the only indication of civilisation is the howling of a pack of dogs. The stars and the sound of the cicadas knit a blanket around me, and the metal against my skin is still warm from the engine. His friend has his cock in my mouth and thrusts unenthusiastically, more taken by the sight of his mate’s cock slamming into me, a sight he illuminates with a torch that he holds and guides like a spotlight. They chatter away to each other in Italian (a language I don’t speak) and behave, for all the world, as though I weren’t there. The present no longer has any meaning. I am merely a sensation suspended between them, an excuse for a commonality each, perhaps, in his own silent way, craves – but could never, except now, with my flesh shared like a meal between them, even begin to articulate. These visions of excess burn brightest.

  A dream about you.

  Its appearance, furthermore, provokes both fear and fascination.

  I was in a record shop when suddenly there appeared before me a naked man who so corresponded with my desire that it was as unsettling as a dream come true. He wanted me to wash him and as I did – people all around still rifling through records – I realised, with a joy that also broke my heart with its impossibility, its fragility and its immateriality, that it was you. I washed your body slowly, tenderly, my heart speeding away: so happy it hurt. When I had finished, I stood up, and our eyes met for the first time, followed by our mouths. To kiss you again made me weak and afraid, but so happy. So happy. Then you told me you had a lover, and he appeared beside you, also naked. He doesn’t speak English, you said. I told you that I too have a lover and I turned around to him. I put my arm across his shoulders. It is clear to both you and me, without a word being spoken, that we want each other as much as we ever did. Your eyes, my eyes, our eyes. Our bodies like two strange angels, calling to each other in a frequency outside of human range. It must be the saddest sound. I’m glad that we can’t hear it. It would never stop breaking our hearts. The difference between what we want and what we are able to do emerges with the slow, poisonous crawl of grief. The hunger doesn’t abate, it seems; it only eats you up.

  I wake to find your presence still alighting on my skin, a fragment of your warmth, the weight of you still pressing, and a blurred memory of the dream’s end. The skin thus functions as an epistemological limit, even in the most phantasmatic journeyings beyond it.

  The house was in need of repair, and looked as if it hadn’t been lived in for a while. I think he only used it for such encounters. He offered us warm fizzy white wine to drink. The house smelled of dereliction and suspended existences. There were several dogs, of varying sizes and breeds, all yapping and barking as if they had something important to impart. In one room the floor was covered in dry dog food knocked from a zigzag of bowls. We went to the bedroom and me and my mate started to undress the guy and kiss him. My friend got the guy’s cock out practically straight away, and thank god it was a decent size. We both sucked it for a while and it grew bigger and bigger till we were both impressed and excited. After a while we were all naked and the guy wanted to fuck me. So he fucked me and I watched in the dressing table mirror.

  Where do they come from, these voices that tell us what to do?

  When we’d finished, and my friend had swallowed the guy’s spunk, we got dressed. My mate didn’t want the man to put his cock away. He held onto it and couldn’t stop kissing it and saying, ‘Wow! It’s gorgeous.’ He was totally in love with it.

  In this society I live in, everyone dreams of being able to speak like this. But it really isn’t possible to speak like this in our society. If sexuality has a voice it has yet to find it.

  He walks in the door and falls straight to the floor, belly pressed against the boards, and begins slurping from the dog bowl of piss you have placed there. He breaks off to look up at you and ask, ‘Does sir want me to drink it all?’

  ‘Yes.’

  You marvel at his submission, at his desire to be degraded. It fascinates and disgusts you. Short-term memory includes forgetting as a process.

  You pull down your football shorts and pull aside your jockstrap, releasing your semi-hard cock, and then you watch him kneel at your feet and hold the bowl up to his mouth so he can drain it – with a delicacy that belies the moment – in tiny bird sips.

  ‘Good boy,’ you say when he has finished and placed the bowl back down.

  You push your cock into his mouth, right down to the root, making him gag and choke, which makes you harder. You withdraw and slap your prick against his face, and he groans. You turn around, and present your rump to his face. He buries his foraging tongue, as if he could crawl inside and sleep on the moss there, die there.

  The veneration I feel for that part of the body and the great tenderness that I have bestowed on the men who have allowed me to enter it, the grace and sweetness of their gift, oblige me to speak of all this with respect. It is not profaning the most beloved of the dead to speak, in the guise of a poem whose tone is still unknowable, of the happiness he offered me when my face was buried in a fleece that was damp with my sweat and saliva and that stuck together in little locks of hair which dried after love-making and remained stiff.

  You turn around and hold out your cock, uttering the single word, ‘Toilet.’

  He holds his mouth open for the steady jet of warm, clear liquid, which arcs from your body to his, from inside you to inside him, this circuit of pleasure and waste that constructs its own economy within this blasted region of the soul.

  By the time he leaves, he has choked so much on your cock that bile stains are visible on his shirt and trousers, you can see the black curls of his chest hair through the damp fabric; he has drunk your piss and swallowed your cum, and thanked you for the privilege. He measures the success of these encounters by the amount of piss and seed consumed.

  Something has been released, some demon fed; the walls fall away and spaces yawn around you, unfathomable, unknowable spaces. And although it is still daylight, all you can see is darkness, the many shades of darkness, patterning your vision of yourself and this world, yourself in this world. And you see him, getting into his car, renegotiating his way back into his life, as you must renegotiate your way back into yours. It isn’t possible to write sufficiently in the name of an outside.

  The bed is covered in naked men, an eiderdown of flesh. Two Italians (one from the north, one from the south), a Brazilian, and two Brits (one from the north, one from the south).

  Commenting on the action later to a friend, one of them will say, ‘I took two cocks up my arse at once; it felt fucking great,’ thereby proving the inadequacy of words, demonstrating how they wring dry the intensity of every moment and hang it up for inspection, hang it out to dry, colourless and mistaken. Wrap me in colours that cannot be described, patterns that change with each movement like a kaleidoscope. Give me a world beyond what is here. Give me a body in flames dancing in a place where there is no shame. Give me lies, if you like, but take me there, to that other world where language can only play games of hide and seek with what is really going on.

  Either that or give me the words with which I can speak, teach me a new tongue that licks itself closer to the contours of bodies. Make my voice form shapes and sounds approximating more perfectly the perfect anguish of my joy. Ho
w does anybody learn? How can language say that? It trips and flies like an angel avoiding the bullets being shot at its feet. A dance of desperation and avoidance. Give me words with substance, words that taste of skin and smell like a well-fucked man. Give me a new alphabet, a new vocabulary of sliding verbs and solid nouns. A is for all of it, B is for bareback, C is for craving. Twenty-six letters burning in the flames like a taste upon the tongue. D is for deeper, E is for everything, F is for fear. And fear is for those who cannot speak this way, but stutter none the less, tripping over tongues that hold a key, a key to another world, a key that is swallowed before it can be snatched and used to unlock the cage door, before it can let loose this new alphabet that would flit around your head like so many birds, embroidering a song with no meaning, a song that exists for its own sake, for its own beauty, a song that tells of nothing but the joy it manifests.

  Give me this language, if you can.

  You press the buzzer and the black door releases with a click. On your left immediately as you enter: a doorway, leading to a badly lit room. You walk into it and approach a counter where a portly man with a grey ponytail and beard greets you.

  ‘That’ll be five pounds, dear,’ he says, and you hand over the folded note in your hand. The act of submission, in other words, is linked to the very process by which knowledge is acquired.

  You then remove your jacket and swap it for the ticket another man is holding out to you. You feel a mixture of emotions, lust mingled with fear, inhibition fighting courage and curiosity, and gradually losing. Your thoughts tumble and dance, a mixture of memories and fantasies, lighting the fuse, lighting your way.

  You turn and look around, taking in the vintage porn-mag collage papering most of the walls and the timelessness it seems to create. In one corner, an L-shaped unit of cushioned seating, on which a topless man is sitting, rolling a spliff. A television screen shows a silent moving image of men having sex. You see a cock slide into an eager mouth as you make your way to the door on your right, a door through which you walk to find a staircase leading down. You descend into the Sybarite’s cave – a cellar divided into rooms, all of which have bare, black walls licked with condensation. You can smell amyl nitrate spit sweat and semen blended into some odour you recognise. It is hot, and it takes a while for your eyes to adjust to the darkness. A man wearing nothing but a jock strap and army boots passes you, exchanging a glance.

  You follow him into a room with a bench running along two walls, upon which sits a naked man, sucking off the man standing before him. In another corner a crowd of men are gathered around a man on his knees, taking it in turns to feed him their cocks. Your ears fill with the deep slow lowing of the pleasured. You pass through this room and find yourself in front of a doorway, curtained off with a black piece of cloth. A season, a winter, a summer, an hour, a date have a perfect individuality lacking nothing, even though this individuality is different from that of a thing or a subject. You push aside the curtain and enter the darkroom. You can hear the sounds of slurping and sighing, gagging and groaning unfolding in the darkness around you. The familiar sounds lash around you like the ropes that held Odysseus. Hands are unbuttoning your jeans, easing out your cock and you feel lips around it. Within seconds you are rock-hard, tuned in to every sensation. You reach out your hands and find a cock in the darkness, seeing with your fingertips its dimensions, its girth. Your hands explore your surroundings, the bodies in your vicinity. You select the one you want and move towards it, withdrawing from a mouth unwilling to release its prey.

  Stories must contain things that are not simply replacements, but concrete individuations that have a status of their own and direct the metamorphosis.

  That is how we need to feel.

  You fall to your knees before your chosen prize and anticipate the feeling, the taste, a second before it becomes reality, unlocking doors into your soul. Nothing else exists for you but this throatful ease. Hands caress your hair, as you caress his furred, tense buttocks.

  This is the way the world ends. Annihilation of the self is so close to pleasure as to make no difference. This is the way your world ends. You enter this new life with its fog of joy and intensity. You groan as you become something else, something not quite human, some dark hybrid hanging somewhere between man and beast, some creature nothing and no one can ever fully tame; and this realisation, this transformation, always leaves in its wake, always, every time, that unnameable feeling of a werewolf showing remorse for those he has slain and devoured. By claiming the existence of ‘innocent’ monsters, the poet-narrator is thus securing for himself an exoneration from blame or guilt: he cannot help his passion, his fascination, his curiosity.

  There are places only the night knows, places only shadows can show us. The city wears a different face when darkness falls, a face I prefer. I walk the occluded streets looking for something, looking for something, looking for something. A knowledge of the shadow, that eats away at logic, creating patterns far brighter than I can bear; patterns that burn at the temperature of wanting. It traces its way through my veins, this wanting, finding solace only when I fall and feast. I find solace only when I fall and feast. This map I draw with the tip of my tongue takes refuge in a book of dreams. Forgive me for not having the words to describe it, this place in which I dwell. I have tried, I have tried. I have drenched myself in words and sensations, seeking a way to make them speak to one another. This is all I have to offer.

  The body wants what it wants. The chaos of the body’s wants – as we know – will never surrender itself to language, can never succumb to reason, even if, even if, even if it wanted to – which it never will. Words will help you to live, as your body will help you to die. When the body lets go, the mind lets go too. And fear is the least part, that’s what I learnt first.

  I know I fly, like Icarus, too close to the sun; I feel its heat on my wings. But I also know that only this white-hot danger can ever bring me peace. As the wax softens and gives I feel the height more keenly; the altitude, the drop, entice me like a siren song: oblivion, waiting to enfold me.

  Movements, becomings, in other words pure relations of speed and slowness, are below and above the threshold of perception. Nothing left but the zigzag of a line, like the lash of the whip of an enraged cart driver shredding faces and landscapes.

  I am hanging, suspended, like an angel trapped in the branches of a tree, sling-shot and low-slung; the cum of twenty men drips from me, like hot wax, creating a pool beneath me on the pearl-licked floor. I hang like a cage between heaven and earth, inside which, perched on a swing, my big red heart is singing. The taste of twenty men bruises my lips. I suffocate in an aroma composed of sweat and amyl and the cold damp of bare brick. I am euphoric with weightlessness, lost in some transcendence that still defies language, try as I might to trap it in the loose-knit net language offers. Each grunt still rings in my ear, each thrust still lodges in the archive of my skin. Each touch and taste documented, etched with crystal on the cold metal of my memory. Every detail hovers above the moment like a halo: the leather encasing my back, the metal links kissing my legs, the circuit of pleasure flickering around me like static, the solidity of the last cock inside me.

  And still… still I want more, still I feel a need within that nothing can assuage, a deep, dark thirst or hunger that comes from some place I have yet to find. Perhaps I never will. Perhaps this maze inside me leads nowhere at all. I am raw from the roaring of my soul, for tonight my evil twin stormed the city gates and besieged me.

  I am pure sensation, no consciousness, no ego. Pure id: still demanding, still hankering.

  The claims society makes on the body will, perhaps, always be at odds with the claims the body makes on itself. As I reach for my clothes, still stoned from the experience, still wobbly, and proceed to dress, I find the pieces of that other self I left behind in the scramble to obey my every wish. I wrap my self around me like a life. I retrieve the fragments of another individual and assume the shape they offer. F
or now I can inhabit the oblivion, like an addict after a fix, a cloud around my head that will rain down happiness. Everything on earth is broken apart by vibrations of various amplitudes and durations. Each moment is as empty or as full as a mirror.

  I am oblivion, I recognise no law, belong to no one, but all belong to me. I move towards a darkness only I can see or feel. I am that which can never be caught, never delivered, that crawls between bodies, towards the new night that promises to be glorious, festooned with wounded males, praying for rack and ruin.

  As the sun is setting I step off the train at an unknown station in Essex, make my way outside and climb into the passenger seat of a silver BMW, and this man I am meeting for the first time, let’s call him R, greets me. Handsome, stocky, rough. As we pull out of the car park he places my hand on his crotch, and I know I am in for a good time. After five minutes, we pull into the gravel drive of a large detached house. In the driveway stand two ice-cream vans. Once inside, we begin to kiss and before long I am kneeling with his glorious prick in my mouth. He pulls back the foreskin and I can taste the fat head. We swap places. He stands and opens the fridge door, pulling out a can of lager and handing it to me.