Broken Rainbows Read online

  He struggled with rampaging sensations for the body he held in his arms. He had just with this embrace, gone beyond what he had imagined possible with a man so beautiful, so much younger, so unattainable.

  “You have the legs of a Greek god,” he said. He felt dizzy, as his fingers traveled up inside Thomas’ thighs and found the firm meat of his buttocks.

  Well-hard muscles, yet the skin was as soft as silk. Not ever expecting to ever be alone, undressed and locked in the arms of such a beauty, he now was lost as to what to actually do.

  Thomas, however, knew exactly what to do; he moved with purpose and direction. He felt Thomas’ knee in his groin and with a push they were both prone on the mattress.

  Thomas’ mouth pressed into his. ‘He’s kissing me!’ he thought, startled by the urgency and power of the man’s face pressing into his and the soft plumpness of his mouth.

  ‘Is it possible,’ he asked himself, ‘to hope for something without knowing it, to long for someone and not feel longing?’

  “You’ve probably heard that before.”

  Thomas chuckled, “The music?” An overhead speaker thumped with a pop song playing everywhere.

  “Oh, I mean your body. You have the proportions of the angels in Renaissance paintings, or an old master drawing.”

  Thomas was silent.

  He had said too much, he was sure. “I guess you’ve heard that before too.”

  He felt everywhere; his belly, the slight swelling just above his dick. He pushed Thomas’ legs back into his left forearm to lift and display the glowing moons of his ass and buried his face into the pale skin, his legs and thighs.

  Faint groans hung in the air as he searched Thomas’ body for something he wasn’t even sure existed.

  Then before he knew quite what was happening, Thomas rolled over onto his stomach and pressed his butt up against him.

  “Well, yeah,” he was driven now by raw desire.

  Thomas sniffed from a small brown bottle; he waved the bottle under his nose just long enough to sniff then put the cap back on.

  Thomas gathered his arms and hands around him and laid his head across his bicep.

  He felt something shift; something was awry, he didn’t want to plunge, to pummel Thomas’ now exposed body…He knew then, he couldn’t come.

  First the simulation; a stirring melody of flirtation, there the accelerando to a false crescendo, each taking each other to a dying edge what was a false climax, hint at the shattering explosion that was to come. Then an interlude; kisses, embraces, the head against a warm, firm chest, lips pressing into each other’s heart, tongues lipping each other’s mouths. ‘Thomas’ tongue was so small!’ He expected a man even one so lean and fine to weigh thick and firm everywhere, but this man’s tongue was small and quick; a boy’s mouth; a divertimento, followed by a pressing onward in a relentless pummeling of flesh and muscle that sent their sweat flying.

  But he didn’t want to come, he put his own hand down and sank into the bed. In a damp vapor of their own heat and sweat and lay flat on the mattress, his mind blank.

  He had had this moment of distraction, he wasn’t going to come, or if he were to explode with noise and pleasure wasn’t through going to try jacking himself only to feel.

  Sometime ago, he wasn’t sure exactly when, but sometime not long ago he let go of the pole star of the orgasm that had compelled him along the landscape of muscles and curves, over the stomach, across the calves and thighs, always following the true north of orgasm.

  After all the men countless legions that stretched out before him nameless, faceless men he suspected he had thought only of desire, that he might have been neglectful.

  “Well, yeah.” He could count on the fingers of one hand the he had helped to rapture, that he had pressed against them to desire.

  One had been trapped in a body with a limp, crooked arm. He had fucked this helpless creature with what? 5, 10 strokes of his cock and hips until he moaned and spilled his pearly juices across his stomach.

  Another fellow, a white band left on his ring finger where his wedding ring had been a moment ago had kissed his nipple, moaning “Oh God,” then jacked off.

  He wasn’t sure of his mechanical role, he hadn’t actually held the desperate husband’s cock, but apparently he was stimulating enough.

  After an hour of walking, he had returned to his changing room but before he could close the door, a man had walked in, put his leg on the mattress, pushed his cock through the folds of his towel, and with a shove and a pirouette, blanketed him in a tangle of legs and arms that jammed his mouth against a thick inner thigh. He pressed his mouth against the muscles and heat, better to watch a square hand of blunt hairy fingers until the man’s eyes bulged, popped, shuddered, and came all over his face.

  All in the last few weeks, two months tops.

  Chapter 10

  He hid himself in the water. He sank up to his eyes and nose in the heated waters of the county rec center pool.

  He was hiding, all aware of how much larger he was than the small people rampaging in explosions of water and shrieks on the other side of the buoys that protect small boys from adults who swam floppy armed back and forth, again and again.

  He dove underneath the choppy surface. He watched bare legs, miniature limbs, long and elastic, and flat chests and spin that shimmered with pale as the secret insides of conch shells. There were many more boys than girls, although he didn’t understand why this was so, and the girls bobbed in the shallow end of this vast tank heated by infected water. They played in groups, tossed a beach ball bigger than any of them over the palette of light that quivered from edge to edge of the pool in a lazy waves.

  The boys plunged through wavelets; They hung on each other’s necks and ran up the artificial cement beach, and wiggled their tiny balls over the jets of fountains at the wavering of the fake sand-encrusted beach. The little boys pressed close in whispers then broke apart in laughter. The adults – on the deck, sitting in chairs, the mothers, reading books, staring into space.

  ‘Did they see him?’ he wondered. ‘Did they look twice at the bearded man just a few feet away from these amazing creatures?’

  Well, no it seemed.

  The little boys floated and played in their own world of games. Rules that came and went, chasing each other through the waves, holding each other by the waist, running and climbing up a bigger boy’s leg, across his chest, and for a moment, in victory standing on shoulders hardly wider than his own, then diving utterly invincible into the water.

  He retreated to the edge of the pool and stretched against the smooth wall, trying not to actually look anywhere or at anyone. The frolicking in a parallel universe of the little boys safe in the boon of their games and the benign gentleness of the heated pool of sterilized water, the unfocused gaze of their indifferent parents numbed by a day at the bureau, the agency, the commission.

  Large doors led from the deck of the pool to the lobby filled with empty treadmills, a few more steps to yet another door that opened to the street and parking lot. A corner of bleachers only used by the local high schools students for their swim meets, a corner that blocked the parents’ views of the doors so close to the street.

  And the boys everywhere, not just little boys, the boys who whispered to each other, but boys who had already grown out of their body, who held body fat. Boys who caught his eyes and gave a little grin that whispered “I know what you’re thinking.”

  How easy to with a word, a greeting, was it to stop and capture one wave of the hand, a casual imitation, “what do you think of my new swim fins?” Anything as long as it distracted and led him a few critical steps near that blind corner, a small flourish of the beach towel, nothing big that would be seen by a passing glance, and et voila, he would have a small bundle easily silenced by a mouthful of terry cloth a step or two more, and in less than a minute, another child lost in the endless anonymity of the Beltway.

  But it hadn’t happened here, had it? It could
have, though perhaps the same person or persons at the church had known this very place had spent afternoons seeing what he was seeing, studying his query, feeling his time, imagining this or that little play, a distraction, the way magicians plan and plot their illusions, no tricks, no luck here; it was the illusion that mattered, the disappearances pews filled with on lookers, not a trick; but the boy had vanished.

  A shrill long bleat cut the air, followed by another shrill bleat, and he had his distraction handed really to him? A lifeguard had blown his whistle to warn a boy not to run. Everyone’s eyes were on the little boy, but no one was watching the doors to the street. But boys, people don’t simply disappear from view, flesh doesn’t dissolve or transform from the solid into a vapor that melts in the air.

  That only happened in church at the altar.

  Chapter 11

  “H” was a single letter on the windowless wall of planks studded with rows of metal rivets. He wondered if he could knock on the door without drawing blood but a seam cracked open along his right side. Never in a lifetime would he have found this place on impulse.

  “Say,” he sang out cheerfully to the towel attendant. He had lingered at the spa on his way out, taking a few more seconds to push his towel into the hole at the end of the counter.

  “Yeah”, another of the new words he was pushing up here and there along the way. The towel attendant blinked at him with shining wet grey eyes. In his mouth his front teeth out into his lower lip, the glossy white enamel cutting into the flesh.

  His face was unlined and as open as a toddler during juice break, except kindergarteners don’t wear tank tops over tattoos of dragons tailing across their backs to rest over both shoulders, and toddlers didn’t have a globe for a stomach. Although this massive belly was called a beer gut, beer alone wasn’t enough to explain the fat along the man’s midsection and there alone.

  Seconds passed. “Yeah huh.”

  “I was wondering where a man,” he looked into the travel attendant’s shining eyes to make sure he was included, “Could go and find something special…”

  “The Eagle”

  Every town had an eagle – accountants in black leather baseball caps talking about their motorcycles and plans for summer vacations when their husband’s school term ended.

  “I’m thinking of something really special, something really young.” He held the man’s gaze to grasp his attention in the palm of his hand. “You know,”

  Some men expected life to tell them what to do and were thrilled when life obliged them. The towel attendant leaned in close and whispered, although no one else was around at this slack time just after the end of office hours.

  He looked around at the walls with their lopsided angles, walls painted a flat battleship grey. There was a second door he saw making a pair of doors. He already knew he would enter in one and with luck would exit the other.

  A bright light shone behind the bank teller window. A light above his reached the corners of this odd little box; ‘Neither here nor there but somewhere in between’ he thought. He searched for something familiar, then he smiled with amusement in the unifying symbol of the decal logos of credit cards.

  Freud said sex and money were fundamentally related; no more practical a business proposition was there than the purveyor of the pleasures of sex for those willing to pay for it.

  A round faced appeared in the window.

  “Have you ever been here before?” from the round face, eyes blinking at the brightness of the odd nether world a top a neck covered with agitated waves and bolts of lightning of black tattoo.

  “No.”

  “ID please and a credit card.” There was a pause that hinted at a certain delicacy; with a ducking of his head the caged punk said, “or do you prefer to pay cash”. The boy spoke with small leer, an invitation to a conspiracy.

  He passed two plastic cards under the bottom edge of a window that felt at least three inches thick.

  Without moving his head or neck he looked sideways passed the clerk. On a wall was a shelf of bags of different potato chips, cigarettes, small bags of salted peanuts; packages of aspirin, two pills to a plastic sleeve; breath mints and containers of juice chip.

  Chapter 12

  ‘Everyone looks old,’ he thought, ‘old and sick.’ He sat, his back to the wall in a corner of the waiting room of Dr. Goldstein’s office. He stopped looking around and studied instead a National Geographic. How placid were the expressions of the tigers of India man-eaters all.

  A week had passed since his doctor had looked up from a square of paper and murmured “There’s someone I want you to see, just routine, I like to cover all the bases just to be thorough.”

  There was something about a squiggle on one of his test results. Without remembering how he got there, he stood at the little counter with the receptionist. She didn’t look at him as she pushed a tiny fail envelope at him. “Take this right now,” she said without looking away from her computer screen. He had, it seemed, an appointment the next morning with Dr. Rosenberg.

  Dr. Rosenberg was, unlike Dr. Goldstein, a little hefty. He wore a blue oxford clerk shirt and a yellow tie with bits of red and green, a Western omelet spilled across his shirt. Again that sheet of paper with the damning cryptic lines and spikes.

  “We’re going to do more tests,” Dr. Rosenberg said. He peered through glasses, his eyes alert and suddenly brilliant. He talked about an irregular heartbeat, something that sounded like a contradiction.

  He heard words coming from the faraway end of a tunnel; blood thickener and blood tests and monitoring and names of drugs, and more appointments.

  He wasn’t supposed to be here; there was some kind of mistake, an error that once, and very soon, discovered, would explain this mix up. A sign on a table offered metal tags that alerted the world to the wearer’s heart problems, drug allergies, frailties and vulnerabilities.

  Where was the one that warned “I have a broken heart”? Or that was engraved “I regret my misspent youth”, or in his case “This is all a mistake!”

  He didn’t see those epithets. The sounds of the world were muffled as he trudged to the drugstore, waited in line at the supermarket. Everything was the same; the gas station at the corner, the post office behind it, the library across the street. Yet everything seemed different.

  He had until now a heart that was hardly more than assumption; the bouts when his heart raced in excitement as he wrestled with naked angels in darkened rooms; of disappointment and hollowness as suddenly excited hopes died lingering slow deaths from loneliness; rumors and hearsay about this organ vital but, a word, a sensation that had fled as soon as he spoke it, and now…

  He lay on his side in a cell of a room, shadows heaped up on the walls.

  “My name is Abdulla,” said yet another stranger in a white coat that covered him to his knees. “You lie here and when I say breathe you breathe.”

  In the twilight of the laboratory, Abdul reached around him in an embrace to attach a strap and a cold device against his left breast, was that the right word for this part of the male surrounding a nipple?

  A machine clicked and whined in a strange chat with itself.

  “No breathe,” Abdul said.

  He thought of puppies and took eight breaths, like a half asleep puppy, playing dead, maybe he was dead in this limbo of clacking machines and expressionless technicians.

  “You hear heart?” said Abdullah. A gasp came from the machine then another smaller gasp, a swoosh ending with a choke.

  ‘My God,’ he thought in horror and wonder, ‘my heart! Talking to me, calling to me; saying something I can’t understand’.

  The gasps and wheezes echoed in his ears, then the machine chattered with the technician and with a final sigh, said goodbye, an orphan dragged back into the bleak anonymity of his heart.

  His heart it seemed was beating to its own drummer heedlessly stampeding to its own rhythm. Dr. Rosenberg spoke in commands ordering a test, a drug with the crisp certaint
y of someone who had never been questioned.

  “We’ll fix this,” Dr. Rosenberg said with a finality of a commander directing his troops.

  Yet, he thought in the cab leaving the good doctors office, he had not felt much different than before… before the machine had betrayed him. His heart marched to a different drummer. Was it so? Had it not been always been so?

  Chapter 13

  Although his eyes were open, he saw nothing. Instead of night, felt the velvet plush of nothing; there was nothing there so he felt his way along a wall against which he pressed his back and legs as he stepped one foot in the instep of the other moving along sideways, his fingers feeling for and feeling for…

  He didn’t know what. In this dark and void he understand he was eager but not afraid. The darkness that once found him lying in bed gasping in fear was now a soothing refuge; he heard his breathing, felt the brittle smoothness of the paint, heard the soles of his shoes skim the carpet beneath him, until a moon light glow swam into view. How far away he couldn’t tell for a moment and then a hard edge of a wall and with another step he was looking at two men ten feet tall moaning against each other. He heard the efficient whining of a video projector, the heartbeat of a nation, one heart among tens of millions of TVs and film screens, and phones broadcasting the dreamscapes of eternal desires and immediate satisfaction, care free upholsters, happy children, disease free dates, the perfect car at last, the rodeo that had become the onscreen car chase, the full color tomorrow of hope and unlimited chances to begin again.

  On the screen a painted wall was the version of the dream titled “California Boys horse around at the pool and you are there.” Guys, males most decidedly so, with muscles and tan lines and cocks that probably had their own agents. But most definitely not husbands, fathers, or brothers. Naked and bare they appeared magically out of nothing like Adam appearing instantly, well developed and endowed, fully grown and in luxurious full frontal nudity.