Date: Mon, 9 Feb 2009 10:00:57 +0000
From: patroclus76@hotmail.co.uk
Subject: The Haunting

This is one of six instalments. Comments to Patroclus76@hotmail.co.uk


It started with a dream. Perhaps most things do; an inner wish or phobia
hatching out into the night, blooming under the darkness. A false memory,
your own or someone else's, a nocturnal invitation into the
sub-consciousness? God knows. As a psychologist I am inclined to
over-interpret, or indeed to over rationalise, but from the onset there was
something deeply unsettling about this particular dream, about Max,
something so tangible and lucid that it was an affront to my waking self,
almost an accusation. And only just a dream, if that makes any sense at
all. It was barely contained, too energetic, eager to break free.  I knew
that immediately.

Although I had never forgotten Max, his sudden intense appearance shocked
me. I had not been prepared to meet him that night. Over the long years
since his abduction my memories of him, his smell; his taste, the texture
of his body had morphed so much into who I was that I rarely acknowledged
them. And there had been dreams once, but like all dreams, the image of Max
had blurred with time; my recollection of what he looked like had lost
focus, bleached slowly of detail until he was a mere V shaped wedge of
shoulders and hair against a soft ambient glare, a metaphor of memory, like
sunlight seen through deep water.  But that nigh, that night, without
warning, I saw Max vividly, utterly in focus; re-imaged with such intensity
that I had jumped awake, gasping, like a man drowning. I had been dreaming
of college, of a locker room, empty for the most part, but with the benches
and lockers littered and messy with gear. The location was ambiguous, it
was almost an actual place, my own high school, but like all dreams it was
both unknown and remembered. A sporting event, some team fixture long ago,
with the tribal occupants on a field somewhere pitching balls and
screaming.  The locker room was silent, smelling of sweat like a stable,
except that is for the soft fuzzy trickle of water; the ambient sound of a
shower on tiles. I stood listening, recalling the frisson of adolescence,
the deep blood felt lust of watching other youths washing and chatting,
tight muscular buttocks and thighs smeared with steam, lazily rotating like
stars. I walked towards the sound.

The communal showers were empty except for one young man, his back half
turned, washing his face and hair in slow rhythmical movements, as if he
was massaging himself, distracted, thoughtful.  Even then, even as an
anagram of Max, with his ink black hair plastered down over his cheek; the
half turned torso showing a crescent pectoral and a dunescape of narrowing
abdominals, even then I had not recognised him. All I sensed was his
essentialised, clichéd beauty, his self possession, his hands moving now
in great soapy arcs over his groin. Side on, his chiselled body glistened,
a perfectly executed relief on the walls of some tomb: the stylised
representation of a deity? A young prince now gone to dust? It was only as
he turned to face me that I realised it was Max. He has been looking down
at his feet, and a rill of soap like a small wave had bled down his lower
stomach, over a boss of public hair and a soft, thick cut cock. He seemed
distracted by the movement, as if he feared he was dissolving. Short black
hairs hazed his thighs and calves. He lifted his arms to stop the water,
looking around as he did so. Water ran over his nose and his bone filled,
sculptured face, pearled in his nose and mouth. As he shook his mane of
hair I had felt the intense, shocking revelation of who he was. When he
looked at me I saw the intense surprise on his face, as if he had caught a
stranger watching him, but then there was the flare of recognition, the
brilliant eyes wide with joy.

`Daniel!' His voice had been unmistakable. I had not heard it for over
twenty years.

Inarticulate with sheer, inexplicable pain, I had snatched myself up into
the waking world, choking on my grief, fighting for air, scrambling out of
the bed like a man who sees an assassin between the sheets. Had I called
his name? I thought I had - I thought I had screamed it - a tangible
shocking name ripped out of me. I sat on the end of the bed with my heart
literally thundering in my ears and throat. I was appalled - almost
embarrassed - to find amid the shock that I had a hard on, appalled by
Max's sheer beauty, slick, almost bestial, impossible to describe. Visibly
shaking, I put the bedside light and rubbed my face aggressively. It was
2.55 am. After a few moments there came a tentative knock and Alex
Whitehead, my resident tenant (usually confined to the attic and his
doctoral studies), a Physics genius and indelibly a virgin, put his head
around my door as if he expected to see me pinned to the wall with an axe.

`You alright Professor?'

I felt able to speak with relative calm, an assurance that the voice would
be mine, calm, slightly clinical, slightly Bostonian still, the syllables
starting in the nose.

`I'm fine thank you, Alex.'

He remained looking at me curiously, not entirely convinced I was telling
the truth.

`You kindda made a noise?'

I smiled. I was definitely feeling better. Alex came from Iowa, he had a
curious habit of ending each statement with a raised accent, begging a
question, as if everything he said was tentative and prone to collapsing in
an instance. He was a physicist. Perhaps it was a sort of occupational
conditioning, Heisenberg by default.

`Really, I'm much better. I obviously had a dream.'

`Yeah?'

I stood up, my hands fussing over my pyjamas bottoms, hiding a semi
erection still. Alex retreated without any further exchange, clicked the
door too and went back to his lair.  For a while I stood indecisively about
the bed, as if I suspected it wasn't mine or that someone was hiding in
it. I felt suddenly and shockingly close to tears. I had a busy day ahead
of me, a whole line of doctoral students, a paper to finish, several
clients to see later in the afternoon: at 55 I was beginning to depend on
that elusive, secretive power nap, smuggled in somewhere between 3 and 4
pm. Reluctantly I returned to bed, and self consciously, looked about me
and then turned off the light. For a while I lay gaunt with tension, my
eyes flashing to themselves in the darkness, but gradually I slipped away
into a shallow, warm sleep, all REM and memory. Max was sitting on the pan
in my bathroom - a place he had never been to - he was naked and lithe,
darkened by the sun. He was leaning down to cut his toe nails, front
deltoids bunched and veined and his hair trailing over deep blue, gimlet
eyes. He looked up as I entered, the room deep in his rich stink.  He
frowned, perhaps at my audacity, a semi ironic look as if I was trying out
some new fetish.

`Hey!'

The alarm snapped me awake. I lay for a while, old and grey, like something
washed up by the sea, a wreckage of something once human . Eventually, with
effort, I swung out of bed and composed my daily professional self.