Chapter 4 #3
or the flu, but it was a kind of paralysis, a muteness. The way I had been acting was starting to piss everyone off. I was
being too standoffish. I kept thinking about how I hadn’t seen a single woman all week. It was as if women had been irradicated
from the entire town and all that was left were these roving bands of gassy, balding men who prowled, searching only for one
another, snowballing into pulsating swarms, and myself lost among them, smelling all this beefy red. There’s nothing liberating
about this, I thought, nothing revolutionary. At most, I could force myself to feel the same rotten glee I used to feel as
a teenager when I’d bring a male friend (when I had one) home from school and my mum would be gone, my sister would be away,
and there would be a chance—just a chance—that our video game playing might evolve, a sock-clad foot might slip into a lap,
a loss might lead to a wrestle, a dare, a playful, beguiling begging at the knees. It was embarrassing, contrived, and vapid.
It was titillating and I was dizzy, losing grip.
Amid the undulating sea of men at the club there were the nightly strippers, who performed on small raised platforms like brawny, naked lighthouses.
The night wore off their clothes until they danced completely nude, with pharmaceutically assisted full erections, and as they gyrated, a chemical filled the air—their bodies emitted it and so did mine, intermixing against my will.
These emissions hung low in the air and I began to struggle to breathe.
I backed away from the crush, moving to the side of one of the platforms, but I found myself only inches away from one dancer who was slowly jerking himself off.
His body was bathed in purple and red. Suddenly the inertia of the club zeroed in on him, sensing a hidden synthesis.
I tried to get away, but the crowds were gawking around him.
In fact I was gawking. The veins of his penis rippled and stretched with the rhythmic motion of his hand.
A man next to me reached, grabbed, and felt.
Others had their phones out. The cogs of power wheeled in everyone’s eyes, pointing at the one single thing in the dancer’s hand and I felt the gravity of a thousand white and red eyeballs watching, pupils dilated, irises black.
I couldn’t catch my breath. I couldn’t stop smelling that musty smell.
It was as if every boy was here, every childhood bully, menace, crush, office boy, beach boy, boyfriend had been secreted into the air and was wholly unfit to breathe.
The unthinkable everyone was thinking happened and the dancer in front of me ejaculated thick, splattering gobs into the air.
He twitched and broke rhythm, suddenly afraid and off beat.
The crowd cheered and filmed. I stared motionless at his hand unclenching, the mess on the floor, his eyes looking down and then up.
We locked eyes. And that was the moment.
That was the only other time in my life where I feel like I could have time traveled, like the fabric of the universe had been ripped open because the next thing I knew I was outside on the empty beach, alone.
I was snatched from the static present and thrown into the darkness of a new void, a new timeless silence, an empty plane without men, without women, onto which only the afterburn of the dancer’s eyes remained and the fear in them, the fear in mine.
The fear in that memory latched on to me now as I lumbered along the streets of an ancient London and I shuddered deep within
myself. The unsexiness of it, the perversion, when people can be so organic and odorous, single-mindedly fixated on one modicum
of honey. I vomited into a stone pit I didn’t realize was a well. A man shouted at me and shoved me aside. I fell to the ground.
Everyone seemed to want to fall to the ground. A man on horseback plowed through us with a stick, bashing our heads, clearing
the way. A bell rang in the distance.
“All right get to bed, you bastards. All you lot. Make way, get lost!”
I rolled out of the way, narrowly avoided being trampled. A pile of us were on the cobblestones, men and women giggling, struggling
to stand, another vomited, and I realized I was clutching Simon to my chest, my arms around him.
“Oh George,” he said, laughing and turning.
We pulled each other up and down, tripping.
To feel his body against mine was to feel softness and safety after my days of endless brutality.
We toddled to an inn. Flickering torches brought darkness, lightness, darkness.
Gates shut, merchants packed up, long shadows enrobed streets, and a candle was a floodlight.
A candle was a blaring diode. A candle was only needed in one place downstairs and one place upstairs above the pub, under the beam roof, where we lay down in a darkness that heaved with bodies.
The world spun and I used that inertia to push aside the memory of my life before, the nastiness of it.
This isn’t what that was, I thought to myself.
Here there was nastiness but no mind games, no greedy lusts, no rat race, or strategic ambiguity.
Even as drunk as I was, there was a reasonable density to it, a heartiness that set it apart from the chemical tides of Sitges.
Here we were children. Here our touch was of joy sparking between us.
Holding hands up the dark stairs. Lying down on the shared cot, straw poking through fabric, cold feet under warm legs, curling into each other.
We were children, me and Simon. Me and twenty others, me and a thousand others. And we all shared this joyful single breath,
this creaky floor, this October chill that lay softly alongside us like time itself, the calendar my only old friend amid
a thousand new ones and suddenly I was no longer alone.