I reach the bank. Across the river I can see the rotting piers and sheds of East Ba'dan. To my right is what remains of a bridge, the upper structure rotted away, leaving only the piles protruding from green water.
I am standing where Yass-Waddah used to be. The water looks green and cold and dirty and curiously artificial, like a diorama in the Museum of Natural History.
A blond boy enters from my right where the bridge used to be, walking on the green-brown water. He moves with a stalking gait as if he were playing some part in a play, mimicking some actor with a touch of parody.
The boy is wearing a white T-shirt with a yellow calligram on the chest surrounded by a circle of yellow light, rainbow-colored at the edges. He is weaing white gym shorts and white tennis shoes.
A dark boy in identical white gym clothes is standing to my left on the bank at the top of a grassy hillock. He has planted a banner in the ground beside him and holds the shaft with one hand. The banner is the calligram in the rainbow circle stirring gently in a wind that ruffles his shorts around smooth white thighs.
The blond boy walks up from the water and stands in front of his dark twin. The dark boys begins to talk in soft flute calls, clean and sweet and joyful with a sound like laughter, wind in the trees, birds at dawn, trickling streams. The blond boy answers in the same language, sweetly inhuman voices from a distant star.
Now I recognize the dark boy as Dink Rivers, the boy from Middletown, and the other as myself. This is a high school play. We have just taken the west side of the river. This is the conquest of Yass-Waddah.
Good evening, our chap. A good crossing. Yass-Waddah disintegrated.
A slow insouciant shrug of rocks and stones and trees spreads a golf course along the river now several hundred yards away. Two caddies stand in a sand trap. One rubs his crotch and the other makes a jack-off gesture. Music from the country club on a gust of wind. Red brick buildings, cobblestone streets. It is getting darker. Dusty ticket booth.
A sign:
The Billy Celeste High School presents:
CITIES OF THE RED NIGHT
I lead the way through rooms stacked with furniture and paintings, passageways, partitions, stairways, booths, cubicles, elevators, ramps and ladders, trunks full of costumes and old weapons, bathtubs, toilets, steam rooms, and rooms open in front....
A boy jacks off on a yellow toilet seat...catcalls and scattered applause.
We are in a cobblestone alley. I look at my companion. He is about eighteen. He has large brown eyes with amber pupils, set to the side of his face, and a long straight Mayan nose. He is dressed in blue-and-brown-striped pants and shirt.
I open a rusty padlock into my father's workshop. We strip and straddle a pirate chest, facing each other. His skin is a deep brownish-purple gray underneath. A sharp musty smell pulses from his erect phallus with its smooth purple head. His eyes converge on me like a lizard's.
'What scene do you want me to act in?'
'Death Baby fucks the Corn God.'
We open the chest. He takes out a necklace of crystal skulls and puts it on. There is a reek of decay as he drapes me in the golden flesh of the young Corn God.
We are in a vast loft-attic-gymnasium-warehouse. There are chests and trunks, costumes, mirrors, and makeup. Boys are taking out costumes, trying them on, posing and giggling in front of mirror, moving props and backdrops.
The warehouse seems endless. A maze of rooms and streets, cafes, courtyards and gardens. Farm rooms, with walnut bedsteads and hooked rugs, open onto a pond where boys fish naked on an improvised raft. A Moroccan patio is animated with sand foxes and a boy playing a flute ... stars like wilted gardenias across the blue night sky.
