He was after Lisa. That was his anchor to what was real.
“You always were looking for a bitch, Tony,” Guy said in a mocking tone. “That’s why you liked rooming with me. Didn’t give a shit about what the guys said. I was a good bitch to you, even if you never touched me, even if you never let me touch you. And I made your other bitches feel good when they came over. Mister sensitive and self-confident, so masculine you could relate to a homosexual,” he said, rolling his eyes, shoulders, hips, and snaking his arms up and down, “and not feel threatened. Ooooo, they really ate it up, didn’t they?”
Tony’s face flushed, and he turned back quickly as a flash of anger washed over his fear. “Why don’t you spare me the helpless faggot routine, Guy.”
“And if they freaked when they met me, you knew they weren’t going to be any fun, right? Too uptight and serious. They’d start in on your image and reputation, like I was going to drag the both of you into a social gutter. And I would’ve, too.” Guy laughed, but kept his gaze fixed on Tony. “No, you liked the ones who asked if you ever watched me have sex with my lovers, who were curious about how gays did it, who’d listen to you talk about leather and cock rings and fist fucking.”
Tony jabbed a finger at Guy. “I used you, and you used me. You liked it when your little studs played seduction games with me, or when the two of you sat back and made fun of me while I was in the house. And you knew things were wrong when your prick got jealous and macho around me. You didn’t mind it when I got some of those wackos off your tail, either.”
“You know how I love it when you get angry, Tony. Sure you don’t want to find out what the real thing’s all about?”
“Go fuck yourself.”
“Only as a last resort.” Guy waited a moment, then smiled. “Just like old times, right?”
Tony’s anger evaporated. Guy was right; he had fallen right into a petty argument they had re-hashed hundreds times, a standard eruption of the pent-up frustrations that built whenever two people chose to live together. Only now he was arguing with a ghost. His fear returned, stronger than before. To fight it he had to close his eyes and picture Lisa, on his bed, waiting for him with a seductive smile. He had gone too far to run away. He was too close to her to give up, just because a ghost from his past chose to haunt him in Painfreak.
His fear would not go away.
Drugs. Hallucinogens in the drink, in the smoke from the fires, giving life to memories brought up by his return to Painfreak. A bad trip.
Reason calmed his fear to a manageable level. He took a deep breath, let it out slowly. He could handle what was going on. It wasn’t real. Just play along, he told himself. Remember Lisa.
“What a pair of predators we were, Tony,” Guy said, stepping to the fire light’s edge and sitting cross-legged on the floor. “To tell you the truth, I can’t even give myself a good fuck anymore. Why don’t you sit for a while and help bring back the good times? It’s the only way I can get off nowadays.”
“I can’t,” said Tony. “Lisa left me, came here. She’s looking for something, I guess, but I need her. I have to find her, make her come back.”
Guy shook his head from side to side. “I know where she went. I can lead you to her, if you sit with me for a few minutes. That’s not too much of a price to pay, is it?”
Tony hesitated. He listened to the sounds, stared into the darkness between the fires. There were exits at the far end of the cavern, and Tony imagined a network of tunnels spreading out under Brooklyn and the rest of the city. Lisa could be anywhere. Real, or unreal, there was a chance this vision of Guy might help.
He sat down next to his old roommate.
“You look worse than a tourist, Tony,” said Guy, with a touch of sadness. “You look like prey. What happened to you?”
Tony sighed and passed a hand over his face. His palm and fingertips came away slick with grimy sweat.
“Please, don’t tell me,” Guy continued, breaking into a chuckle. “Please don’t tell me you fell in love.”
“Not quite. Not in love. But I fell into something.” He searched for words to capture what he had with Lisa. “Safety, companionship. Maybe I just fell into sex. But there’s nothing now, there’s just emptiness.”
“That’s all there ever is, especially for people like us. You just don’t realize it. You don’t know the emptiness, how deep it runs. That’s why you never made the move to being a real player. But don’t feel bad. Even I didn’t understand the emptiness completely when I was alive, and I was a player there, towards the end. We thought that empty feeling we had was a hunger for something other people could give us. It didn’t bother us most of the time ’cause we thought we were filling ourselves up every time we came. What a pair of sharks we were, cruising our own little scenes. You know what it was that let us live so well together? We were the same kind of people underneath all the bullshit. Predators. We went after the same kind of people. Hollow little nobodies who didn’t know their asses from their pricks, or cunts. But the beauty of us being together was that we had our own little territories. You went after the cunts, and I went after the pricks. Tell me about those times, Tony. I want to remember, I want the details. There’s nothing inside of me anymore. No feelings, no memories. It’s all shadows and emptiness.”
Guy stared at him without blinking, as if ghosts forgot to blink. His mouth hung open, his hands lay in his lap, palms up. He looked like a child waiting to be fed.
Tony closed his eyes and trawled for memories, eager to put Guy to rest. The specter’s talk of emptiness and predators had only made his own need for Lisa stronger. And if this ghost could not help him find her, at least its guilty presence would not distract him while he caught up to Lisa and tried to win her back.
Names from his own adventures as well as Guy’s returned to him, and their faces. Anne, Shanelle, Kiko. Thurman, George, Larry. Episodes he hadn’t thought about in years came back: sex on the dorm roof, in the closet while others listened and commented outside, using the early model video recorders the college owned. There were the games of humiliation, the games of pain, and the entertainments in costume. Simple and complex, he had repeated them all with Lisa. But he had discovered them first with the disposable partners he and Guy had enjoyed. He began to talk, and as the memories rushed out Tony opened his eyes and looked up, letting the words flow, the past catching up to him.
And as the past flooded him, the darkness beyond the fire seemed to lighten. He began to see what was happening between the fires. He looked away, at first. He spoke quickly, felt as if he were babbling, but Guy did not interrupt or ask him to be clearer, only sat and watched him with his blank expression, his dull, lifeless eyes. The more he talked, the clearer the air became, until he could not help but see the expression on the face of the squirming woman being hauled by giggling men up to the ceiling on a hook and length of chain; until he could see the sweat running down the body of the man suspended at an angle by his outstretched arms and legs, desperately thrusting his erect penis into a fat, laughing woman dancing wildly to the electronic howl of a band that had just started playing; until he could see the broken bones pushing against muscle and skin, warping the smooth lines of the bodies of the two wrestlers fighting and screaming in a pool of water to the cheers and jeers of a few people standing near.
Blood spurted from a nearby atrocity and sprayed across his face, tickling his lips. Shocked, he raised his arm to wipe the blood away, to spit and rub his skin and shield his face from any more splattering. A sudden impulse made him stop. The blood was hot on his flesh, like Lisa’s sweat mingling with his own when they made love. His tongue darted out like a snake’s, licked his lips as he would Lisa’s body. He tasted coppery saltiness, then swallowed. Surprised by his act, he shuddered. The emptiness within him yawned, threatened to take him. Expecting a surge of fear, he was even more surprised when he became excited by what he had done. His erection pressed against his pants’ zipper, as if he had just heard the click of Lisa’s heels on ceramic tile.
Blood. He worried for a moment that it was contaminated, tainted by Death. Death’s blood. He thought of Guy, dead, a ghost, and of the times he had given in to Guy’s nagging and participated in his sex games by disinterestedly watching him with his lover. Kissing, stroking, mouthing, they had ended by swallowing each other’s cum.
An electric shock of pleasure passed through him as he described the scene he had just remembered to Guy. He put himself in Guy’s place, and in the scene his lover was not another man, but Death. Death’s bloody cum was on his lips, in his mouth, in him.
The stream of his words faltered, his memories stumbled over one another. The emptiness that had driven him to follow Lisa into Painfreak blossomed with the promise of secret fulfillment. He saw clearly into the void around which he had lived his entire life. The games, the costumes, the mix of pain and pleasure he had pursued
