Exequy

People no longer smiled at him on the streets, and sometimes they veered away from him. When he looked up he could no longer sea the sun. Everything seemed clouded in a verdigrised haze. Every chair he sat in was damp, even before Dickie fucked him in it. Every bed he slept in was slimy and suffocating, the sheets winding about him like giant strands of kelp; everything he drank, from coffee to pernod, was salty and cold like seawater; everything he ate was threaded with a whitish glue only he knew was Dickie's semen. He was rarely hungry, anyway, but Dickie always made him eat it all, fucking the last morsels down his throat. Several times people had rushed over to him, thinking he was choking when they saw his mouth gaping in that wide painful `O', and Tom was unable to speak with Dickie's length plunging down his throat as Dickie held him by the hair and sodomised his face, making Tom gag on his cock for minutes until he got his climax. And the way those concerned expressions changed to veiled disgust when Tom puked grey ooze all over his plate, and to open disgust when Dickie shoved his face in it and they watched Tom, weeping, lap it up again...

He started fainting in public from lack of nourishment, yet his belly was constantly bloated with the freezing slime that Dickie so forcefully pumped into it, till he carried the pangs of childbirth everywhere he went. At night, when it was still, and Dickie was still within him, he thought he heard the lashing of tendrils and chitter of claws come from inside his body, and felt the scuttle of small spiny feet and the blinking of scaly eyes against his inner walls. He shivered all the time, now, even at noon; piling on layers only for Dickie to strip them off him in the most public places.

When spring came it brought him no warmth. His possessions brought him no comfort. His new expensive clothes acquired coats of dust in the closet. Even being called `Signer Greenleaf' now agitated rather than cheered him. He stopped going out, avoiding even the bellboys. The only people he saw now were the police, who interviewed him frequently, and ended each visit more assured of Tom's guilt, even in the absence of any `hard' evidence linking him to the bloodstained boat recovered from San Remo harbour.

(They still hadn't found the body, and Tom could have told them why, if they would have believed him. Dickie found it tremendously amusing, how they inquired so solemnly after the whereabouts of the corpse they didn't even know was his, when all the while he was right there, doing something awful like pissing down the back of Tom's collar or in his ear. `Isn't that funny, Tom? They're looking for me, and here I am right in front of their faces. Why don't you tell them? Why don't you tell these nice policemen I'm right here. You should tell that handsome young fellow—I know you want to make him happy. Don't you, you little fagwhore?' he'd say, with a cruel twist to Tom's tit.)

What was hard—in fact, impossible, was for him to maintain a calm act in front of them, even if Dickie hadn't delighted in molesting and ruining him while they looked on, unseeing and uncomprehending. Driving his seat-splitting length savagely into Tom's backside over and over again, all the while Tom had to sit primly on the sofa and try not to moan or gasp or cry. Usually, he ended up doing all three. And jizzing himself in front of their avid disdainful faces.

It was now only a question of how long it would be till they arrested him. Tom couldn't dread it any longer, given what his life had become: the nights of endless drowning, and days of endless rape. His only question was if Dickie would follow him even to prison. Or to a sanitorium, if that was where they put him. When they spoke, their voices were distant and distorted, as if they came through a thick glass window, or from underwater.

 

∞

 

Tom had tried things to end it. He had been to several priests—each time Dickie, far from being afraid, had been over the moon at the opportunity to rape Tom witless in front of a man of the cloth, to defile him in new and blasphemously erotic ways. Whatever had Tom in its grip was older and stronger than the crucifixes the priests flailed impotently at the quivering defiled wreck of a man that writhed and moaned on the floor before them.

He had been to analysts, the best American analysts in Europe that American money would by, willing to pay whatever was asked to anyone who could somehow snap him out of it, get him over this guilt complex or whatever it was (guilt for what he managed to conceal); who could convince him that what was happening to him wasn't real. Dickie dealt with them in the same manner as the priests, only he was more subtle about it, more sadistic. He would give Tom a reprieve, just long enough for the hope to rise that he was free—then return when both Tom and the shrink were convinced he was cured, visiting some newly vicious form of vengeance upon him, stripping him bare and bleeding and opening him up to the stranger's horrified gaze with the relentless precision of a vivisectionist. In the end it was the analysts who ended up terminating their sessions, more disturbed, if possible, than he was.

He'd tried gurus, mediums, hypnotists, mesmerists, hacks and quacks of a dozen kinds—they were worse charlatans than he was. At least he had never been duped by his own scams.

When all these failed, as some already half-dead part of him had always known they would, he returned to bargaining with Dickie. Dickie received his entreaties with calm delight; cruel but never angry, explaining with savage detachment as he mounted and bred him that all these depraved torments were merely the cosmic consequences of his actions, and nothing he had any right to resent, or that even Dickie had any power to change. Not, he assured Tom as he bit at his hair, squeezed his arms across his chest and pressed his sopping balls up into his taint, that he had any wish to.

He did not discourage Tom from trying to find a way to be rid of his living nightmare; on the contrary, he seemed pleased that Tom had not yet resigned himself to it. Tom was nothing if not resourceful. Yet none of his tricks or wiles availed him against the force of a dead man's lust and hate.

The only thing Dickie forbade him was suicide.

That was an idea that had come late to Tom—later than it might have to others. It was not something either Dickie or Tom were predisposed to: Richard Greenleaf had been given too much in life, and Thomas Ripley had fought too long and too hard for too little, for either of them to think of throwing it away. The thing was, the bastard always let him get right to the brink of escape, right to the edge of the razor set at the wrist or throat, the edge of the bridge or cliff, of the noose around the neck or the finger on the trigger—before jealously snatching away the oblivion that was now the only thing Tom desired. Until eternity or repentance, he'd said. Tom couldn't fathom eternity, but didn't know how he could possibly repent more than he already had. Repent killing Dickie? He repented ever setting eyes on him! He'd wept a lifetime's weight of tears, and yet still more came and still Dickie fucked him and broke him down little by little till what remained of Tom Ripley was as fine and dissipated as the grains of sand the sea tossed on the beach of San Remo, where maybe it was Tom who had been left after all, dissolving with Dickie into death.

He was adrift in an ocean without shore, without bottom, without end. And he had never learned to swim.