Broken Rainbows Read online

  Their orange bodies undulated, then twisted and turned took turns and battered each other’s pale butts. The water of an aquamarine pool barely stirred with faint waves and tiny ripples as one man – boy sprawled on his chest and stomach across the pool gutter and bared his butt, his thighs arching in dizzying lushness.

  His head swam as if he were gulping a thick rich wine…

  … He could see through the blue overalls with taking compact, dense buttocks with dimples that made his throat wet, a glance at the man’s fingernails made him gasp at the sight of inch long nail beds. But even his new sight failed him now when he looked for the god’s shoes. But the dream turned sideways.

  He glimpsed a sizeable nose, the bow of an Edwardian battleship. From its massive shape, he imagined a long cock resting warm almost damp coils of flesh against a pair of balls so palpable he could feel them pulsing heavily in the palm of his hand.

  He walked slowly until just a foot away he veered off in hesitation, just long enough to sniff a mixture of man’s sweat, motor oil, gasoline; then like a ship narrowly escaping a collision he changed course off into another cloud of velvet blackness.

  He waited a moment; having learned anew and again his eyes would serve him even when there was nothing to be seen. He made out that he stood in a room of brick walls. He heard and saw others stirring in the dark.

  He felt something soft and warm pressed into his own stomach; he touched the hot skin just a degree or two below a full sweat. He felt the flannel shirt, the thick hair on the stranger’s forearms. Whoever he was whatever he wanted, the other man lightly stroked his arms holding his shoulder with a light grasp.

  “Is it okay if I touch you?” The words came in a whisper as light as a sigh.

  “Uh, maybe not.”

  The hands fled taking the silhouette with them.

  He wasn’t afraid to say no anymore, he didn’t care anymore. How arrogant he had been when he was a victim to believe that he was the lever that set into motion the machinery that led to his assault. That his yes, or no or maybe mattered enough to explain someone else’s trajectory; that his words propelled another.

  There were many others in this backroom, a universe of others, in this universe, there was always someone else, there had always been someone else and there was always another day and another night.

  Here was a child: a pale round head and narrow shoulders falling to a tiny waist joining long legs. Was he 16, 14? Was it possible?

  Well, no.

  A moneymaker like this in business to stay open; a bust for underage prostitution was a money loser.

  What he saw, a teenage boy sulking against a row of lockers, yes like in high school was probably 30 or, he shuddered thinking even 40. Some men held the long legs and bird like chests of the mid-teens for decades. The rest of the world, forgetting them as their classmates, filled up with broad shoulders and the thickness of powerful arms and heavy thighs. In these shadows, in the place of motionless time in a secret kingdom, were inhabitants who cultivated the illusion of available youth.

  Every bar had them, every club; like drag queens, dealing in illusion, the hustler in a t-shirt and a sneer proffering the rush of sex with a “real man”; the drag queen toying with a harmless fantasy of power, power to transcend convention, to escape the gravitational field of the cubicle, of the kitchen, of the garage sale.

  And the boy next door, who mows the lawn in a wet t-shirt, who comes calling at your door to sell thick mouthwatering candy bars of chocolate for the class trip, who returns your gaze with glossy doe eyes and parted lips, locks your eyes in a hint of union that waits just beyond your reach, the words stirring in formless sounds in your throat, gasps as you flee the forbidden picture, so afraid that you slam the door shut on the beautiful boy who stalks your dreams.

  Chapter 14

  Once again outside he stared into the first shadows of twilight; how long had he been inside? Hours? Minutes? He shook his head to clear it of the lingering dullness of intoxication and then walked down the sidewalk. He had almost reached the corner when a large shadow fell across his path and he felt someone coming abreast of him. Unsure and afraid he was about to be mugged he wobbled along a few more steps.

  “Good evening sir,” said a man with broad shoulders who then leaned into him. The stranger was much taller, his wide shoulders held up a small head and a face on which was splayed an approximation of a smile, a parting of thin lips that bared gleaming white teeth, in an expression that was part a practiced skill and part job description.

  “Please come this way with us, sir.” Now there were two men--identical suits and builds and grins like a pair of matched guard dogs.

  They marched him along to a shining white van that apparently had been pacing alongside the curb. No other vehicles passed on the street. They were in this crowded city alone, unnoticed. He wasn’t being mugged.

  They didn’t exactly throw him into the yawning maw in the side of the van. He didn’t resist; he was overpowered and what was the point? To escape, to run off? Assuming he could slip out of the anvil of shoulders and broad chests that carried him along.

  ‘These guys,’ he thought, ‘run miles each day; they lift weights during the daily hour that was part of the paid work shift for “these guys”, of whatever government agency, whatever acronym was, a detail the FBI, CIA, IDEA? Whatever; they all fielded the government issue: white or virtually Caucasian, a dark suit, wide shoulders, a thick neck--square head; clear unblinking eyes, a bright yet shallow alertness within a narrow arc of purpose; without imagination, a mission but no ideology; he knew that if told by the right person these two men would kill him.

  They would get away with it, in this neighborhood at this hour, with his file, he was just another urban adventurer run out of luck. But not now, not today.

  The driver drove west along New York Avenue back to the Federal Triangle or in that direction. He was relieved that the driver didn’t bother to avoid the Avenues to not taking anonymous side streets or to otherwise obscure their progress from the North East to Capital Street and across into the Northwest leaving behind vacant blocks and commuter arterials and passing through Dupont Circle and turning north.

  The driver stopped at the traffic light, and idled as pedestrians surged from one side of Connecticut Avenue to the other; a law abiding and ordinary van. Who would remember an unmarked white van at a stoplight! Someone might notice that all other vans were painted eye catching schemes with logos and phone numbers of dry cleaners, graphics of plumbing repairmen, moving companies, television cable installers; another van in the next lane, was a billboard for the Potomac Valet Washington neighborhoods reflected its residents personal domestic urges, dry cleaners, plumbing; here in the upper altitudes of Connecticut and Wisconsin Avenues of Georgetown, Envoy Catering, Allied Security Alarms.

  Traveling north they moved along just under the speed limit, other vehicles passing at both sides, the driver cautiously avoiding drawing attention. The Mayflower Hotel floated by, its majestic bulk suggesting an iceberg outlined in gilt.

  The Vice President's official residence occupies the top of a hill north of Georgetown, strangely inconvenient because Georgetown’s narrow streets are a grid oriented to the Potomac. The colonial seaport is an obstacle of coffee stone pavements, hard turns, and streets that wander leisurely in no hurry to reach a destination.

  Apparently Blair House, sitting directly opposite Lafayette Park from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, was too close; perhaps the President felt there wasn’t enough room to share with the Vice President, no need to stretch the bright circle of attention and regard with the persons “only a heartbeat away from the Presidency”.

  Whatever the reasons or the strategy, the Vice President and the Vice President’s family found themselves relegated to what had been a rambling frame house on the grounds of the Old Navy Observatory, the equivalent of being at the end of a grave road in Virginia.

  Daily, the Vice President’s motorcade picked its way across
18th Century pavement until it reached Connecticut Avenue where a brace of District of Columbia Metropolitan Police motorcycle officers launched an assault of wailing sirens and flashing lights to guide the glossy black utility vehicles, station wagons really, and a single limousine with a crest on its front doors.

  No one who paid any attention believed the Vice President occupied the long Sedan. Except tourists, the Sedan was a decoy; some suspected the VEEP wasn’t even in the motorcade at all. Traveling by helicopter made more sense. The motorcade raced along the Avenue past intersections blocked by motorcycles under the legs of policemen wearing jackboots.

  The display was impressive and yet an oblique act of submission. The President lived with his family in the White House. The Oval Office was a short walk away through corridors pulsing with power.

  The Vice President’s office was at the end of this long noisy commute, a trip during rush hour like any other GS 13 living in Fairfax County. Yet who could blame the President for wanting to look the other way, put out of sight someone who was a constant reminder of the President’s mortal status and, despite the power of the office, a heart that soon enough would stop ticking.

  At a guardhouse more of these featureless, faceless men waved them into a tunnel.

  He wished he had worn something else besides these jeans and a t-shirt as he was guided down a corridor in an expensive pale blue. The paintings on the walls, of men in powdered wigs, some brandishing swords, some holding pens in midair as they searched the horizon for the next perfect word looked historical more than merely expensive; they were probably priceless.

  In the White House not too long ago he had recognized one painting in the State Dining Room from a college textbook in Art History. The painting was smaller than expected and crowded by other paintings. With growing excitement he recognized first one and then another and then another painting, all originals of images that had been written about, held up as examples of an artist’s genius, masterpieces all hanging not in a museum but in someone’s dining room, not anyone’s dining room of course but a dining room all the same where over bowls of soup and the ringing of crystal and the clank of silver against china, people chewed bites of Long Island duckling and Maine Lobster and drank California sparkling wine. He felt the tingle of recognition of a sympathetic spirit, of a plainness that looked unblinking at its history without out a false gentility, a confidence that could look at its past without apology or awe.

  They were now crowded in a narrow anteroom hardly wide and deep enough for the three of them. The agents busied themselves by studying the air around them.

  Chapter 15

  There a spear of white light stabbed around their shoulders.

  A man stuck his head around the edge of the door. “You ready? Come on,” he said, not wasting time on courtesy or hospitality.

  He was looking at the back of the head of someone sitting on a sofa underneath a chandelier almost as wide as the room. The U.S. flag filled one of the room’s corners; bookcases lined the walls and a window softened by heavy damask panels stood opposite.

  An odd gloomy light seeped through the window. He wondered if it was really opened into a daylight, so artificial was its glow and color.

  Someone sighed and he realized the sound came from whoever was sitting otherwise in silence on the sofa. The figure raised a hand and beckoned them forward with a small wave, to come around.

  The Vice President was surprisingly small; she seemed taller and younger in her photographs. Lines framed the narrow, sculpted nose, and circles ringed clear blue eyes. Small lines crowded each corner of her mouth. Salt and pepper waves of hair framed her face. She looked like when she had been a Senator, clear-eyed, thoughtful, serious, ministerial.

  Here she seemed a little tired as she had most likely slept poorly the night before. She pressed fingers to her brow and drew them down across the sockets of her eyes, as if to clear away some unpleasant sight? To hide an unappealing view?

  When she opened her eyes and looked at him, she knotted her brows together.

  He squirmed under her gaze. Then she glanced at the two human guard dogs, her eyes blinked, and she looked again at him. He understood the play of expressions, the quick calculations; despite his appearance, some kind of street person, the muscle, protection was close by and what further horrors were possible?

  He saw her shoulders sink making her even smaller.

  “I have only one son,” she at last said. “My kind of life, my work, made even one child…” she tapped a finger on the arm of the chair, “difficult, but I wanted a family. A real family, a husband and children…and I wanted this.” She looked around at the walls around them, but what she meant went beyond the walls of this strange, obscure room. “I want you to see something,” she said, and gestured at the window. The light quivered and flashed as a silver panel dropped down, and on it a child’s birthday party bounced merrily along as small boys and girls lobbed balloons at each other, a donkey endured placidly as its tail was pulled, a man in a sailor suit pawed at the camera lens; the camera returned again and again to a young man in a little blazer and black pants who sat at the arm of the Vice President, his mother. She touched his nose and pointed across the merry battlefield strewn with balloons. She pointed at little plates of chocolate cake, at the other boys and girls, wide-eyed blind gazes with hanging mouths and drunken walks.

  The young Jimmy Madison wasn’t seeing any of it; from under half lidded eyes he had a pink plush bear crushed against the blue jacket; he sat motionless never looking up or down or anywhere really; his eyes didn’t focus on anything.

  The video disappeared in a flash as quickly as it had appeared, and the lights came up.

  “My son,” the Vice President said, “has autism. What you saw is what he is like, except,” she paused, “when he is singing there.” She caught her breath, “then he sounds like an angel. You see, he doesn’t talk at all, yet when he hears music, he has a voice…” This beleaguered woman shuddered to a stop.

  He looked down. There was talk that she would declare herself for the Presidency, there was talk that she could win.

  He hated seeing powerful people break; the sudden unexpected weakness frightened him. He looked away, wishing he were any place but alone with this grieving, lost mother.

  The he heard her again, “He hasn’t sung since then. It’s the stupid toy you see; those monsters kept it. He won’t go anywhere without…

  “Oh yes,” she held herself back from shouting. “I could drag him back to school, I could drag him to choir practice.” She spat out the words as if she were talking of torture and pain.

  “I don’t know how you fit in,” she said briskly, now calm and even, detached, as if wondering whether to go with the blue on the grey paint for the library’s new upholstery. “But I want to cover every possible option.

  “I’m not sure I know what it is you do,”

  He twisted arbitrarily where he stood.

  “Nor,” she said dismissing him with a flick of her wrist, “do I want to know.”

  “But you are said to have access to worlds that I can only imagine and with reluctance at that.”

  She turned away and it was over.

  The lights softened and the guard dogs pinned him in between their matching shoulders and moved him out.

  The retraced their path through hallways and turns, returning at last to the van; the same anonymous vehicle they rode down a dark avenue that he assumed was Wisconsin, until after several turns through Rock Creek Park and the West End, the doors opened and he climbed out.

  At least they had let him out near the hotels, so he could catch a cab.

  Chapter 16

  He sat in the pew having very consciously and deliberately dressed as much the way he ordinarily dressed which was anything but a suit; yes, a white shirt, no ties, slacks and a wool jacket. He was more aware than ever that someone here watched others very closely and he didn’t want to call any attention to some change or break in his habits
that might alert watcher’s attention.

  A well-groomed man with silver temples strode up the aisle nearby and veered off into a box pew two rows ahead. He carried a brief case, literally a leather bag to hold lawyer’s briefs.

  He had never seen that before; someone, anyone carry a brief case into the sanctuary, was he coming from his office at this hour or…was he running off to manage a crisis after Communion?

  In the same aisle, a man on the short side spoke in heavy urgency to an usher. He wore an overcoat, long almost to his ankles; the collar was off; he searched for the style – Eton – a round collar with short, sharp points, yards of grey serge enveloping him like a cape. Its wearer was the father of a young girl in a summer Bible camp; a little girl named Constance; an old-fashioned name for a little girl with old-fashioned manners who addressed him as ‘Mister’ whenever she passed him on her way back from the Communion rail: so this was Constance’ father, dressed like a prime minister.

  He wondered for the first time where the security detail sat certainly not here; the beefy men, head and shoulders taller than average, dressed in dark suits, white shirts, and laughably ugly ties were conspicuous for their very blandness.

  He winced at the notion of armed security guards lurking in the odd corners and shadowy nooks around him. Then it came to him that the presence of these agents might not deter, in fact, their appearance might invite the reckless, the foolish, the kind of risk taker, eager to throw an insult into the face of an oppressor.

  Chapter 17

  He pushed at the unmarked door and walked in. There to his right was a window of thick plastic like a castle. A round-faced, clean-shaven man greeted him, “Good evening, sir. What can we do for you?”

  In reply, he wordlessly slipped a fill through slot in the slab of plastic between them. With a click came the door to his left popped open, and he slipped past the doors into a formless dark, where he felt suspended in a nameless, soundless place.