Date: Sun, 11 May 2003 16:52:40 -0700 From: Tim Stillman Subject: ESPecially Yours "ESPecially Yours" by Timothy Stillman His name was Van Merchant. He was 10. He was cuddle creamy. He was a planet of golden imp in a sea of autumn and winter night darknesses. We talked and huddled and explored and giggled and touched and tasted and made love to each other there in the bedroom. His laugh was warm, and his eyes were huge. He was instant boy and instant friend. Van seemed to know me the minute we met. There, in his father's laughing lavish cultic cluttered antique-studded rich living room, with the huge sofa and the cushiony seats, all of it in black patent crinkly leather. Van in his drenched bikini swim trunks, as he stood right before me, his back to me, as he talked to his father, sitting in his huge dark impressive throne of a recliner, across the room. Little Tadzio come home from a canal to tell me, would you just stop gazing at me, get the lead out, and come over here and smack me with your lips, for god's sake? I was so close to Van, I could almost see the flesh of the little buns of the boy in the wet yellow trunks that demanded to be pulled down right that second. The top of his cleft was visible. The bones of his spine were goosebumps down his sway back. His left hand on his hip. His body leaning to the left knee. His legs and back tan to browning I had never seen such a deep tan before, but still somehow creamy appearing. His neck was small and the back of his head was the back of a doll's head. His hair thick, blonde, down to the top of his neck. I smelled boy. I smelled summer. I smelled his swimming pool and the exertions he had had in it, the diving, the plunging to the bottom to the wet concrete and then propelling himself upward and out of the watery cocoon into the bright yellow splash of summer sun. I got an immediate erection and crossed my legs, staring at the back of this boy who had already come to mean nirvana to me. There was the rococo look and feel and patina of old gold there in the living room with the huge coffee table on which were giant cups of coffee and cocoa and wine glasses. His father, a successful psychic, was talking to his son in rich deep waves, the same soothing waves of trust and believability and caring which got money from people all around the world, because he was so encompassing, his voice, his large bearish body, his eyes that seemed to understand everything, as long as cash checks or credit card numbers were at the center of it. I almost died. I almost reached out my hand to Van's back. I wanted to touch him so. I wanted to feel him with me, and everything else vanished at that point. The huge ceiling, the book cases chocked full of books on psychic phenomenon, including some ghost written for Van's father. The boy was shelves of love and lust and he was the ultimate sensual animal there dripping pool water onto the thick brown carpeting, in the cold room in the freezing air conditioning as I thought I could see little puckers start in his skin from the air. His shoulder blades were tiny coat hangers. He was the first boy I had seen almost naked and so up close. There was a foot or less of distance between us. He moved his body, rested it on the other leg, and put his other hand on that hip, reversing his previous stance. He was coming onto me, he told me later, as we lay together, in each other's arms, for he had sensed--something in me--something that made him poke his hips out at me a bit more, make the crease between them more inviting, more lingering. I remembered thinking, and told Van later, now we see if his father really is a psychic or not. His dad noticed--nothing. Not ever. Either he was a fraud, or he was the greatest parent in the universe. Van told me he would go with the greatest parent theory. Afterwards, Van turned to me as I sat hard as a rock, scared to death, trembling, hair wet with fear, as dad introduced us. Van's face smiled. The entirety of his face smiled. He was in concert with himself. He was a boy symphony. He was everything I could imagine and far beyond counting anyone's imagination. His nipples were pale grapes, tiny and hard. His chest was a bow stretching toward me wanting me to pluck it. His navel was a perfect oval just right for someone to paint and hang in the Louvre. His bikini bathing suit delved so low, that if he had had pubic hair it all would have been visible. His package was small and firm and I found myself looking right at his, visible through the wet fabric, penis, water shriveled, then slightly uncurling, and his balls clinging to the inside of the yellow fabric, that begged pull me down and look at all of me as long as your heart contends it. I managed to nod and he smiled, he smiled like the sun was a new invention that he had deeply inside him and he wasn't going to show it to anybody until he showed it to me first. I was 22. I whispered I love you. I saw him naked in my mind. I pulled him to the carpeting frosty in the cold of this house that had many warrens, many rooms, that had a round ceiling and parallel rooms where you would expect parallel to exchange off of horizontal rooms. There were not stairs leading to no where, though there should have been. There were little rooms and there were ceilings that were painted black enamel with white stars in them and ceilings that were white glow with black stars in them. Lighting in the living room was a dim chandelier and the closed shaded windows were huge and massive and made of beveled glass. There was an upright stuffed bear carcass by the giant front door. The carcass was an umbrella and raincoat and winter coat rack. The living room was dark amber. David, Van's father, wore shorts and a blue T shirt with an S emblem on the pocket, but it was Van who was superboy to me. It was Van who said something to me, encased in the bubble of boy words, encased in that tiny little marvel of perfection known as a voice to conjure all the other endings of the world worth it for this ending that would start everything in the grip of the right machinery that would get everything just right. To a glorious ascent. I looked at all of Van. I forgot his father's psychic abilities. I forgot his father's intense and clever ability to read other persons and fake it as some sort of supernatural thing. I bathed my eyes in Van, and he glowed in the darkness, this summer fire fly with the face of oval and the eyes of big and the nose of pert and the skin of all the happiness God could ever devise for this planet, a princeling who seemed to carry himself like a jewel of immense worth on a velvet red pillow, only it was up to me to do that for him, for it was with that deed in mind I had been created. He chirped something back to his father, ran past the king size fireplace in this house attempt at Kubla Khan, his father's attempt at making himself into a mentalist Citizen Kane, and the walls were thick with bricks as Van ran past them on bare feet, legions of angels pushing them onward, and up the stair case with gilt on either side, the railing of it pure walnut, and on there to his room where he told me later that he masturbated to me immediately. We talked about the beginning those October and November nights in bed. We talked and traveled our own little highways. We swam naked in each other's eyes. We exposed everything, his success in picking the right parents, for their wealth and their indulgence of him and his brother who was now away at MIT. For he fully believed he had picked his parents and that he could make his life whatever he wanted it to be. We tangled in each other and in sheets and legs and arms and penises hard again to remove further sexual barricades nature set down between us to amuse itself with, while we broke them down and amused ourselves with them instead. We explored the warrens of the haunted house that was him and the ghosts and cobwebs that were wearing a little boy face, for he told me he was ancient, he told me he could make anyone do anything. We talked about the time his mom wanted me to interview him (I worked, free, for this family, trying to place articles ghosted by me under the psychic's name). How she, a big boned woman with a wreathy face like out of Dickens', as we sat at the coffee table, that always had coffee and hot chocolate (in cups that stayed heated for a long time) big containers, that at least in my memory, were jewel encrusted, like the kind Kings use in movies, as Van told me in excited tones, there as he wore a spotless white shirt and summer shorts I wanted to pull a certain other way, how he made his teacher sick the other day. They were to take a test. Van knew he would not do well on it. I didn't think to ask why he couldn't just read the teacher's mind or students' and get the right answers from them. In the morning, as soon as the teacher walked in the classroom, Van started thinking, you're sick, really really sick, go home, lie down, go home now. Shirley and I were trying not to laugh at him because he was so intent on it, so dramatic, so inspired, for he had learned much from his dad. He had learned to weave the spider webs. He had learned how to entrance. He had learned how to beseech with his glittery bright eyes that sparkled sunlight in shadows of me and everywhere else that he turned. Van went on and on in this hypnotic voice as he gathered himself into himself and something past imp was born in him. Something past larceny and an intent ability to lie (or accidentally to guess right or wrong) to people when fortunes were told, when predictions were made, when elderly couples or widows or widowers hocked everything on the trust they gave without hesitation to Van's father, questions about where they should live the ends of their lives, what they should invest in, who should inherit from their wills, and David not to give a damn the answers, or the conclusions they would make from these answers, for he was a charming confidence man, but a confidence man nonetheless. Yet Van, in wishing a teacher ill, for sheer selfish purposes, in doing as his father did on radio and TV programs and through the mail, somehow made the whole thing ineffably sweet, made the whole thing seen through the aggressively innocent eyes of a child, right out of a Zenna Henderson story, the people who knew the deepest rhythms of life, who knew where the kernels of truth and willfulness could blend out of themselves not in selfishness but in a beguiling smoothing out of the wrinkles of life, threadbare no longer, the tentacles of space and fantasy in Van for me. And at 10:56 a.m. that morning, the teacher said she wasn't feeling well, that they would not have the test today and she would have the principal assign someone else to fill in the rest of her class period. I'm writing this bilge down on my notepad and autumn is arriving outside and city blocks are friendlier then, happiness is bigger then, because Van stayed with autumn and we became closer. I was the family's go-fer as well, and would, at noon, walk a few blocks to Hardees and get everybody lunch. I loved those walks. Knowing Van would be waiting. Sometimes he walked with me. So good to have him by my side. We kidded and goofed along. And he looked up at me and I in looking down at him have never looked upward quite so high before during or since. The leaves were red and gold, beginning to fall, the season in its entry way to a crumpled up stage, and Van and I lay this night in bed and the room was overheated and we perspired and the window had rhymes on it, the tiny window right by our bed, (Van opened the black shutter of it and showed it to me, I had not noticed it before; in case I needed to see outside, to orient myself a bit )and I would touch my finger to the rhyme of the moment and put it onto the face of Van, onto his cheeks and forehead and to his mouth. He would put my finger into his mouth and suck it and kiss it, and then release it, and tell me what the rhyme was and what it meant. I could feel him in the dark so boy serious, with this intensity on his face as he told me, and of course he got it right every single time. David never found out about me and his son. That or he was the greatest parent---and so on. I never feared David on this or Shirley. We were never obvious together, except we were painfully obvious together. We would sit on the sofa and listen to David's latest predictions for his upcoming New Year's radio show. Or we would watch David and another unpaid writer working on a pilot for a TV show that involved lots of trips by that would be writer to New York, lots of work, grinding twelve hour work days (for the writer, David was too busy resting up for a book tour or radio show appearance or just concentrating on being his own noble irreplaceable self), and when it didn't materialize that writer dematerialized as well. One day I mentioned I hadn't seen Darien around lately. David did not say a word, just looked at the carpeting for a minute as though he had just tasted something a bit too sour. Shirley wearing one of her infinite number of caftans, with, it seemed, cheap dime store jewelry wrapped thickly around her ropy neck, said, "He's gone." Like he had fallen off a cliff into hell. No more was said about him. The same fate would happen to me at the beginning of the next January. With ice very cold and snow far too deep and skies far too cumbersome and longing and Van and I no more. "He's gone." A house of shadows. A house of corners were there until you looked directly at them, when suddenly there would be no corners at all, befitting of a now you see it now you don't psychic, who had had his bio written by a Houdini expert. The bio was published by Pocket Books. I would have asked David for his autograph on the book but I had been dismissed by them by that point. David had a way of not seeing what he no longer wished to see. Was that why he never figured it out about his son and me? Or did he just not bother with small details? He had once been a Baptist minister, but he said to me one time he didn't mind homosexuals, because "everyone has a right to their own religion." I figure all preachers are cons, so he hadn't strayed far from his flock and was just sheering them in a slightly different way. Van moved against me. I felt his boy body. Touched his side slender. Touched his hair and kissed him right on the crown of his head. He shuddered and held me close to him. He told me I was the first living teddy bear he had ever had and I said he was the first boy I had ever had who didn't laugh at me, the first person for that matter, and he said he was sorry that I could not see how psychic I was, that he was sorry I had no faith in my abilities. I pushed him on his back on the huge wide comfortable bed and gobbled his penis into my mouth. I sucked him hard and he pushed into my mouth, fucking it. The room we were in was once his brother's room. It was black. I mean the walls, flooring, ceiling were painted drop dead blackout black. You walk into the room, even turn the lights on, and the thing was like being in outer space. The black swallows the light and you along with it down its greedy night gullet. It was as though you were tethered onto an umbilical cord and you were floating in a desolate space of no stars, and you fall to your knees and you feel wood beneath you but it's hard to accept unless the universe you have been unleashed into is made of wood, and you have trouble breathing, you don't think you can and you think you are tumbling head over heels, that there is no up and down, there is only eternity spinning its way round you and through you. One weekend David and Shirley invited me to stay over, since I lived some distance from them in another town, and I was at the time working on an article I was ghosting for David for "Gallery Magazine," a cheap PLAYBOY rip off, on how to get someone to fuck you just by psychically directing them (the pitch with psychics always starts with this--everybody has this ability; it's nothing special; it makes people feel important, as well as stupid they can't do such a natural thing; it makes the psychic seem lots less creepy too for obvious reasons, money and trust being the name of the game). That first night of the weekend, Van came into my room. I was holding onto the bed trying to stop the revolving bullet train feeling that I was rocketing into another solar system, half laughing at the ridiculous image of me in bed skyrocketing into deep space, and I felt this little hand on my hand gripping the bed side. And this little hand became two little hands and a little face appeared in front of me. A face that was first of all invisible in the black. Then a tiny cameo of a smudge. And then the sun bright face of a boy, a sun bright Aztec godling who said not to worry, the stars are inside us both, and the sun, and let me show you how. How I wanted to be psychic. How I wanted not to be clumsy and awkward and scare filled. How I wanted to get rid of the guilt. And the boy came to me and he straddled me and he was naked and he pulled up my t shirt and he sat his naked balls and bottom on me, and he leaned down and he kissed my nose and I reached up with hands that were trembling more but for totally different reasons, and caressed his long blond hair and he leaned backward and I felt his hard little three inch penis on my bare belly and I felt myself grow hard as he reached one hand for my penis and began masturbating me and I came just a little at his hips and he dry came on my stomach. He got off me to see my cum in his superpowered vision, but there was little because I had already jacked off twice that night thinking of him in his room right next to me. No tell tale stains. Kleenex always accompanies me on such occasions. He lay on top of me and I rubbed his naked buttocks. And he leaned into me and he was small and short and filled with lean energy. Later nights, we talked about our first time together. We laughed that his mom could not get me to write the story for "Gallery" in a sexually explicit way. I kept making it too tame, she would tell me after re-write after re-write. I tried to include a few more "fucks," all the passion and hot breath I could imagine, before and especially during Van, but I couldn't make the thing horny enough, sexy enough, but I had Van and we laughed about how I just could not shake that bland good guy image, at least in words, though I was making progress with this boy. Boy became a poem. Boy became a night that lasted forever. Boy became the world's most coveted word. And when Van and I would sit in the living room after his parents had gone to bed, we could cuddle on the couch and watch TV and hold hands and I would nuzzle into his cheeks, and he would tell me something like he had created all of this between us, he had made me braver than I would ever be again, he had wanted this that much and couldn't I climb out of my selfpitymobile long enough to see it? And I could not. That was the thing. I could not. And one night in early December, when David and Shirley were giving me one last chance to work, for free, for them, by letting me ghost answers letters people wrote David asking advice, it all began to atrophy. I had had meals at their house. They let me stay over. They let me read David's books. Where the hell was my gratitude? Just where the hell was it? Why couldn't I get anything published under his name, dammit? Low key, though, they always were. I never heard a voice raised in that house. So I failed them. I was not able to do it, not able to use this ability that of course I, like everyone else, the party line, had, though most of the letters I answered in David's name were from teeny boppers who wanted to know if they would ever meet throb idol David Cassidy. I had no idea what to write other than "Over my dead body, babe" --at least that was what I said to Van, which made him laugh so loudly, here in my bedroom very temporarily/his brother's former bedroom for always, save on distant visits/next to Van's empty room, Van always coming over to hop in bed with me. Anyway the letter answering thing didn't work. David had some guy down the street answering the live or die make or break letters for people whose lives hinged on the answers, until David's lawyer said that was really kind of how should you put it? dangerous, so that stopped. For a while. Till David found some other way round it. His computer with its hybrid form letters coupled with one or two personalized sentence he or somebody wrote in his name, applicable to the letter writer. Van said the final night to me as we were both resting breathing hard in the outer space room, we had just fucked for the first and last time. I had eased myself into him, going slowly, carefully, and it was a sense of comfort and peace and jollity I have never had before or sense, as now we lay in each other's arms and I massaged his boy ass, Van said, you don't believe any of this, do you? I said it was ridiculous, his father was not psychic, he was a venal thief, even though I couldn't help but like the guy, he was a preyer on other people's misery, and Van pulled away from me then, I had never been that direct about his father to him before. Van said, tremulously, then you don't believe I'm psychic either do you? I didn't say anything. I kissed each of his fingers instead. I made it happen, Van said, brushing my lips from his fingers. He asked how something as outlandish as this could happen otherwise? I froze at that moment. Had his father arranged this, physically or psychically, were Van and I rats in a maze like in a novel I had just finished reading, "The Magus"? A novel in which magic and mystery and the supernatural are really just coverings for a bunch of psychologists and psychiatrists toying with human specimens and when some die they are just replaced to go through the rat maze in their own particular ways? Van said, that was not it at all. It was the first time it seemed as though he could actually read my mind. He was adept in people reading, had gotten that from his dad, but this? We were both tired. There were obvious keys to what he said to me, obvious stair steps that he used to get to his reading my mind or so it seemed. Or he was just throwing out some sentence that could mean anything at all, a trick his father loved, to make me believe. No, Van, I don't believe it for a second, I did for a time, your father, and you, are very persuasive. But no, not anymore. This very thing. I touched the length and breadth of him, proves it not so. And then, because Van could do nothing else to convince me, and because I had hurt him, had doubted him, and he had had to hurt me back, he vanished, and I was in the black bedroom alone. Bereft, silently weeping into my hands, my body shivering from the cold in this intense fire burning sweating heat, and I felt I was floating off into space. One summer morning, when I was a young child, I was performing my usual daily rite of taking out the garbage, out the back door, pushing open the fly specked screen door, down the wooden steps, trying not to tremble over the warp and age and bending of them, down the little concrete stepping stone path, through the junky back yard, to the trash can beside the garage. I put the sack on the ground and moved my left hand to open the trash can lid, as I looked at it for the first time. In the first instance, I thought it was a brown and red speckled stick, lying on the lid, and resting against the side of the garage. Immediately the stick reared back and seemed like it was going to strike me. I had never seen a snake up close before. I don't think I had ever seen one except on TV and in movies, and though I probably scared him more than he scared me, I screamed, pulled back, the garbage sack fell over and I ran through it and the mush in it, back to the house, terrified beyond words. It was like that with Van no longer with me. With Van back in his room. Where he had always been at night. I had never touched him. He had never touched me. A goddam fantasy on my part, like always. The boy would never have dreamed I was thinking such things. Would have been repelled if he had known even a tiny part of those thoughts. Hopeless me. Reading him all wrong. Like I read everybody all wrong. Him thinking me a joke. All of them thinking me a joke. Here in the house of a millionaire psychic, me the dumb duck competing against them. And somehow thinking he was winning, and would be a part of them with Van forever ten beside me always 22 all the world long. The whole universe seemed to rear back and bare its fangs and get ready to strike me. The house was suddenly not huge. It was suddenly not a mansion that took up half of its city block. It was not welcoming and expansive. It was not a house where theories of supernormal would be talked about as fact, as credo, for this house was groping at me, getting tinier and tinier. And I wanted Van's golden penis in my mouth again. I wanted to fuck it with my mouth. I wanted to go up and down on it, I wanted to feel its tremble and his giddy giggly release into it. I wanted to be there for the time he spurted first. I wanted to be inside him again, like I was earlier tonight, I wanted to hold him and feel him yield gracefully as a swan to me. I wanted to push into him and be careful not to hurt him, I wanted to feel my penis ejaculating into his boy hole, and then my pulling out and letting some come on his back and left hip, which he reached back and rubbed into himself like precious ointment. I wanted that closeness back again. The closeness that had been--oh god here's that old chestnut once more, I apologize deeply for it--a dream. So I dressed. Packed. Got silently out of the house with no one knowing it. I walked down the midnight senseless snake screwed streets in the hoary cold air. I walked an hour or two to try to calm down, figure things out, before I went to my car and headed home. I should have gone to my car first. I should not have walked so long. I should have not spent time at the river front, seriously considering drowning myself, till I remembered a particular Dorothy Parker rueful gin drenched poem about suicide being so inconvenient and hurtful that you might as well live. It made me hollow, remembering. But it made me want to die a little less. When I finally walked back to the car, I took the keys out of my pocket. A slip of paper fell onto my lap with the keys. I started the car, turned on the ceiling light, unfolded the paper, and read a child's scrawl, "It did happen. You didn't make it happen. No one did. But me. it was in my mind. you were. I was. It was real. Believe. ESPecially yours." It was not signed. But that "ESPecially yours" sickly cuteness was how all David's and Shirley's letters were signed. That Van used it too made him one of them. I wanted nothing more to do with him. And, I had seen Van's handwriting enough when I went over tests with him to know this note was from him. I rolled the window down, balled the note, threw it out. Then rolled the window back up and turned on the heater. Sat a minute. Got out. Picked up the letter--very gently. I looked up at Van's room, hoping he would be looking back at me from the window, begging me to give him another chance, tearfully crying out, banging on the windows with his fists, rain pounding the window dramatically, his voice weak with love, I'll forget Rebecca this time, honest to god I will, Rebecca who?, see? Who the hell is Rebecca?, don't know the dame, just come back, pleasssseeeeee. But, that was for the movies and Daphne Du Maurier readers. Put it in my coat pocket. Got back in the car. I turned off the ceiling light. I put the car in drive. I left. I did not believe. I do not believe. I was mad as hell. I guess I still am. I never saw Van again. The last time I was summoned was for David to ignore me and Shirley to say an ersatz goodbye. Van was at school. I don't know if he made any other teachers sick. That no longer seems funny to me. So, because the whole thing is so bizarre, I've decided to put it down here, to let you decide. Or to let Zenna Henderson decide, if anyone knows a channeler who could get through to her.