I should despise the house you've built from my bones—the framework you've summoned from my despair, the structure you've forged from my anguish the same way a welder heats and remakes metal. I should loathe the little cruelties you made me suffer for the sake of your comfort, the abuses I was forced to endure simply for the good of your luxury and taste.
“This is how it's supposed to be,” you'd tell me when I would question the viciousness, when I would oppose your cruelty. “This is why most people don't love each other their whole lives.”
I often wondered how you could be so certain. After all, my parents had been happily married for thirty-seven years. When I would mention this, you'd say how it wasn't a fair comparison because “they weren't faggots like us.”
“They weren't monsters the way we were,” you would tell me, as if your monstrosities were mine to claim as well.
Of course, others were well accustomed with your vindictiveness, your unforgiving nature and the way in which you drain a person of everything until they're as empty, as uniquely bloodless as centipedes. There were countless before me—wraiths of young men that lingered near us when we were in love. If you could even call it being in love.
I'm sure you didn't.
I've searched my mind for a semblance of hatred to spare for you—an appearance of hostility or even a hint of animosity for the unkind and malicious acts you performed on me—and I seem to go wanting whenever I sense revulsion is near. It's almost as if it were impossible for me to despise the very thing you became once you were finished with me, once you had your way with me and left me to rot the way all predators abandon half-dead carrion.
My stomach curls when I think of how exquisitely divine it feels to find myself in a place as innocuous as the corner where two walls meet. My ribcage—your windows framed with painted white shutters. My shoulders and neck—your stairwell with the alabaster handrail. My mind, the private, most unspoiled places where my thoughts collect like rainwater in a storm drain—your bedroom.
I've been told I would be a far more sympathetic victim if I stayed as small and as quiet as you had willed me to be—if I tried not to provoke you or if I neutered myself the way the world seems to want all feminine gay men to castrate themselves.
It's funny how most people love queer men as long as they're sexless, as long as their genitalia is as smooth and as shiny as a plastic doll's. Heterosexual women are playful and coy, as if somehow their appeal might inspire us as long as we remain indifferent and careless to their advances. The heterosexual men that tolerate us only do so because they've rejected our sexuality. To them, we're as sexually ambiguous as a monastic choir boy.
I often wondered if you might prefer me to resemble that. You already seemed to delight in my androgyny—the lingering glances from older men and women in public, their bewildered stares as if struggling to properly assess my gender: something they could never understand.
I wonder—still do—if you understood.
I should hate you. I should despise the nest you've built from my body—from the others that came before me and that were imprudent enough to place their trust in you.
But I don't.
I'm incapable of loathing you and the atrocities you brought upon me for your sheer amusement.
I can't help but wonder if you hate yourself as you wake to endure another day in your childhood home—the place where you learned to masturbate, the house where you skinned pet rabbits with your father's razor, the home where you learned that to love another man was an unforgivable perversity that earned punishment.
I often wonder if that's why you had kept us here—the ones you had murdered, the ones you had robbed of their anatomy to construct the larger, more ornate parts of your home, the ones you had seduced and then left for dead.
The lover you had met on a trip to Cincinnati—the eternal wellspring of his blood watered your mother's garden and kept her roses in bloom even when they had a mind to wither and die. The gentleman you had met in a BDSM chat room who talked too much so you decided to rip out his tongue—his essence now corkscrews the spiral staircase you had installed last month. The young man you had met and routinely fellated while in college—his veins now spiderweb across your ceiling like dark threads and trickle toward the stonework you've arranged near the home's main fireplace.
“Fags deserve what they get,” you would tell me.
When I reminded you of your penchant for the male anatomy, you'd dismiss me and remind me that there was a difference between making love and fucking.
“Making love is what men and women do,” you would say. “All we can do is fuck.”
But I think the most unsavory, the most reprehensible thing you said to me was your matchless assessment of the AIDS crisis.
“Why don't they just call it what it really was?” you would ask me. “The Neon Holocaust .”
You'd laugh, amused by your cruelty, your disregard for the suffering of countless queer men who were neglected by the government and allowed to perish before it was their time.
You would tell me how you had visions of mass burial sites—the lifeless bodies of queer men piled high on top of one another in their backless hospital gowns and their skin peppered with dark lesions. You'd imagine the machinery rummaging through the maze of corpses, bodies carelessly tossed aside as if they were never someone's child, someone's dear love, someone's absolution.
“Why do you gleefully think of something so horrible?” I would ask you.
You'd look surprised at my brashness. You had thought your reprimanding and constant chastising had rendered me as toothless as a newborn.
“It's what they deserve,” you would tell me. “All faggots should be buried alive. It's the worst thing I can think of.”
It certainly wasn't the worst thing you could think of. You saved your more perverted and reprehensible thoughts for the young men you lured into your home. It wasn't until recently that I realized you were creating your own Neon Holocaust—the bright colored clothing of the men you murdered left discarded on the bedroom floor to be tossed in the furnace and burned until they were black ashes. Your Neon Holocaust—the neon-colored mass grave you've confined between your walls, the rainbow casket you've made of your childhood home.
I should tell you it was never my intention to harm you. It was never my objective to make you suffer the way you had made the rest of us suffer before death. If you could even call this death, that is. It could probably be better defined as existing in the imperceptible space between life and death—the dim, clouded film as thin and worn as cheesecloth where spirits may gather.
“What have you done?” you ask us, pacing the room in your bathrobe and occasionally attempting to undo the locks that have been welded in place. “Let me out of here.”
One of the youngest men you had killed sprouts from his resting place nestled deep in the bookshelf where you had arranged the broken bits of his bones like sea glass scattered on an empty beach. He's dressed in a paisley shirt and his mouth is secured with a ball gag you had fixed there during one of your more enthusiastic sessions of fucking. He removes the ball gag and speaks to you directly:
“You'll stay with us. Take care of us the way we took care of you.”
You stare at him, incredulous.
I wonder if you believe him.
You'd probably dispatch him again if you had the opportunity—if you were furnished with the weapon and the time to hack him into little pieces once more.
It's then I remove myself from where you had planted me—from where you had buried me and kept me as if I were a dangerous exotic plant—and I peel myself away until I'm threadbare and at your feet like a limbless beggar.
“All faggots should be buried alive,” I tell you with the same matter-of-factness you had once shared with me. “It's the worst thing I can think of.”
I see your eyes widen as you come to understand—the coffin you've built for yourself and for your lovers. Even if you were unwilling to call them your lovers when they were alive, they very much think of you as a lover now. Despite your roughness, despite your antagonism, they've loved you in silence for so long as they've watched you bring others to your home and build them into the sturdy framework you've fashioned for a home in such a desolate part of New England. The cops don't come because they don't care.
After all, who actually cares when a faggot dies?
That's what you've said for so long.
I should despise the house you've built from our bones. I should loathe the place where you've buried me—the darkest corner of the house where I now call home. I should yearn for the moment when the monstrosity you've created catches fire and when the grounds are scattered with salt.
But I don't.
I think that's perhaps why this has happened. Because I've willed it to be, just as you willed us to be your victims. I've ached for your criticism, for your unkindness, for your vindictiveness and cruelty. I've yearned for the moment when I can melt into your embrace, when everything around me dims to a soft hum and I feel utterly whole again.
You seem to recognize the fact that this is your home now—that there's nothing you can do to leave, that this is the coffin you've built for yourself and that your resting place will be shared with the young men you slaughtered.
You surrender, if only for a moment, and as we drown in a tide, in a restless current of bodies, I tell you how much you mean to me and how desperately I yearn to make love—the love we were never allowed to make because you deemed it too objectionable.
“Soon,” you tell me.
The parts of me that haven't melted into thought yet are able to smile because I know we've changed you. Even if I haven't changed you fully, I know that the Neon Holocaust is over—the horrible ordeal you've created for the ones you loathed the most. Perhaps you'll love us in your death.
“This is how it's supposed to be,” I tell you. “There may be a reason why most people don't love each other for their whole lives, but there's no excuse for it in death.”
I know what you're thinking. This is just further proof that faggots like us can't be happily in love and that it takes them dying to find solace in one another's company, almost as if our death were contrition for the parody of our character. That's not true. Our love was always destined to end this way. I was always supposed to be your victim and you were always intended to be mine.
I pull you deeper into the parts of the house only we seem to know about—a distant realm where we shrug off our dewy coats of skin and burrow into the places where we know our sadness cannot follow.
Even if sorrow does find us, we have one another to hold for comfort, and eternity has promised us kindness even if we do not deserve it.