SIX

The small town of Caesarea consists of an arrangement of garden boxes and cottages collected on a hillside lush with willow and maple. Everything drops dramatically into a deep lake.

The colour of this lake is complex. Its blue appears as Braille when wind brushes the sky across the water. Its heart is a delicate shimmer of various focal depths. The surface is very nearly black, except for a reflective fire of copper and candlelight. The area just beneath the water, where daylight holds to the smooth pale ledge, is the roomy, magnifying colour of cold. Its easy to picture moving peacefully from tall room to tall room. There is a whisper down here, a series of wet phrases: “Do not move. Close to you, too close, is the place where you vanished.”

Further down are the dark colours of Cuba, charred and fertile shapes which drain the light away. And when the focal depths separate, only for a second and only by accident, the deep mines of sienna flash away from the floor of the lake and the bottom is a wild and limitless chasm. The rubber of eternity bends the walls of your stomach.

Seated on a tall rock at the edge of the lake is a young man scratching with a pen on a pad of paper. He is the beautiful poet of the lake. With a white, narrow jaw and ink black hair, his cheeks scooped out by glaciers, he is as complex as the sunlight dispersed around him. He lifts the pen from the page.

“Rubber of eternity? The rubber of eternity. Rubber, hmmm. Rubber cement. Rubber … the robber.”

He hears the quiet bounce of water under the edge of his rock and he hears it as “rubber, robber, rubber, robber.” Then, as the wind flips the vowels across the top of the water, he hears “ribber, ribber, ribber, ribber.” He looks over at a smooth curling current where the river falls into the lake, a ghost haunting it, invisible and everywhere. He says, “The ribber flows,” and he sighs.

The poet’s younger brother appears from behind a tree. He is wearing bright yellow swimming trunks and is carefully placing one bare foot after the other as he negotiates the steep rock. His thin, naked arms spike out from his shoulders as he juggles with gravity.

“Hey, fagissimo!”

The word is sharp, and the poet doesn’t like it. He has been suspecting, lately, that he may be homosexual. The fact that he can’t get women off his mind is unimportant, overshadowed by the lively, tragic mood that he is cultivating — that must be a sign of his other heart, his gay brain.

“Fagissimo! Look out!”

His brother bounds past him and springs off the rock. His skinny body breaks toward the sky, hangs for a second, then slips like a knife through the clear water. He is perfectly visible, slightly larger beneath the surface, and he soars along and then skims up, outward. The poet pictures himself scooping his brother from the water, holding his shivering body, and kissing him deeply on the mouth.

“Hey, fagissimo, come on in!”

The poet draws a long line down the page, a sensual line, an attenuated S that bends up at the bottom — the sprung line of his own flesh and blood.

“I CAN’T.”

The poet hears the word like this, italicized, in tall caps, without the apostrophe. Not truncated, but another word. He turns his head away. Oh God, the word “cant,” the beveled earth, a slippery fashion. Pronounced with the longer vowel, the name, Kant. He looks up, and yes, broken off a leaf, a browned tip is airborne: the apostrophe swung back and low. I, Kant. He goes to record this phenomenon, smiling. And when he writes he writes the phrase “I can’t,” and feels the ruthless persistence of words, the brutal lyre strung through his heart, he stabs the page with the pen.

“Fagissimo! Fagissimo!”

The brother has pulled himself up onto a ledge coming out from the underside of the poet’s rock. The poet slams down his pad.

“Thomas (do)nt call me that, you k(now) /eye/ (do)nt l/eye/k it. m/eye/ name is K/eye/l.”

Thomas is making his way up the rock, back in the air, and four long limbs grappling.

“What?”

“No(thing).”

“You’re a freak. Hey, let’s play rock sculpture.”

Rock sculpture was a game that Kyle had begun by himself, when the writing wouldn’t come. He would crawl to the water’s edge, where glaciers had deposited hundreds of white oblong stones. He lifted the stones out and attempted to stand them in precarious balance on the larger rock. He found this an absorbing pastime. Once, when he had dozens of these smooth bright stones sitting up across the rough green back of his rock, like a strange city of cocoons, little Thomas burst on the scene. Kyle flailed across the rock, mortified, knocking over stones with foot and hand, trying desperately, nearly in tears, to find the domino effect that would end his embarrassment. Much to his surprise Thomas was completely taken by the visual effect of these stones standing on their ends like eerie blobs, and he said to his brother, “Wow, cool. Can I play?”

It was the only time Thomas ever looked up to his big brother as an artist, and together they set up the tower again, this time arranging the big rocks so that they could be toppled with a single initiating stone. Kyle hoped that the cascade would erase the awful visual evidence of his emerging gay brain.

Now Kyle watches as his brother bends down into the water. The boy doesn’t appear as sexual any more. He heaves four long stones up behind him and Kyle leans down and grabs the closest one, swinging it up and dropping it on its round end. He rolls the stone over, inspecting it for a viable face. He is not aware that they are being observed from behind the bushes. Brian Hellgate, Deputy Mayor, is assessing this piece of property as a location for two short films he wants to make. One would be geared towards developers and the other, a public relations film, would brag about the pristine condition of the land and water. He steps out from the trees.

“Hey there.”

Without looking back Thomas tips a stone and sends a quick clicking of small towers tumbling over and down into the water.

“This ain’t a playground here, y’know.”

Kyle shivers at this and feels a burning shame fall forward. His mouth dries and a fever creeps up his cheeks.

“Yeah, Christ, what are you doin’?”

Thomas stands, lifts a stone, and lobs it into the air over the water. He spins around and faces the man.

“Fuck off, Fagissimo!”

Brian staggers back, pulling on a branch.

“Awright sonny boy, awright.”

Brian leaps toward the boys, but before he can reach them Thomas has disappeared beneath the water. Kyle has crumpled and begun to cry. He hears the loud bonk as the Deputy Mayor falls beside him, bouncing his forehead off the rock.

“Awww! Ah shit! You little pecker!”

Brian dabs his fingers in the blood on his brow and looks over to the boy cowering beside him. Not a boy. He swings a hand out and slaps his thigh hard.

“Hey, you fuckin’ idiot! You think this is fuckin’ funny?”

Kyle looks down between his knees and through tears he sees the words “I can’t” and thinks, stunned, that’s exactly what that means.

“Funny? You havin’ a good fuckin’ laugh? What’s your name?”

Brian pushes a finger into his eyebrow and winces.

“K(eye)l Fin(n).”

“How old are you?”

“ATE tea(n).”

“Eighteen? Eighteen? And you’re playin’ little fuckin’ games? This is not your property to play on, little man. Ya wanna be an eighteen-year-old fuckin’ retard you oughta be under supervision, eh?”

Brian stands and plucks little stones from his belt buckle.

“I’m officially tearin’ this little meat house down.”

Kyle pushes his head further down so he’s speaking to his heels.

“(Do)nt worry a(bout) it, /eye/ am (Finn)ished anyweighs.”

Brian pulls back and takes the kid in: This little fag’s cryin’. And I can’t understand a word he’s sayin’.

“Uh, yeah, whatever.”

Thomas has emerged about thirty feet out from where Brian and Kyle sit. He dives back down and his bare white ass flips up toward the shore. Brian rises and looks down at the tied-up form at his feet.

“Are you alright? Listen, just get outta here and maybe I won’t do anything. But you tell the tadpole that I got a fifty-gallon drum of whoop ass with his name on it and he’s given me lotsa reasons to lift that fuckin’ lid. Got it?”

“/Eye/ (do)nt c(air).”

“Come again?”

“/Eye/ s?a?i?d, why(how do)nt you j(us)t l+eave (us) al@ne.”

“Huh?”

Kyle feels a flash of bright rage and he squeezes his eyes shut. In the back of his mind, through a clear window surrounded by the usual storm of breasts slurping over the tops of bras and pubic hair that pulls like a fine comb along a pantyline, he sees his brother’s small, cold scrotal sac; it’s not sexual, but frozen solid, dense with feeling.

“Buddy, I can’t understand a word you’re sayin’. I’m sorry, maybe you better wait here till that little bastard comes and gets ya.”

Kyle opens his eyes in the dark little hut of his body and sees long ropes of saliva looping from his mouth to his ankles.

“Well, he’s not gonna come up here with me standin’ here, the little piece of shit. But before I go, here, take this.”

Brian cannot resist. The moment of concern he felt for the young man quickly becomes anger. The conversion happens, for Brian, almost automatically. In fact, most emotions are very quickly resolved as cruelty in the hard jacket of the Deputy’s heart. He slams the side of his foot against Kyle’s leg, but it only bounces there. Not connecting, the action almost seems encouraging. He turns his foot and then kicks hard, once, driving his toe into the boy’s hip. Kyle calls out.

When Brian has climbed back into the woods, looking from side to side as he goes, little Thomas paddles to shore and looks up — without leaving the water — a tiny head bobbing in the waves.

“OK, Fagissimo. This is war. We can get that guy. I know who that guy is. You OK?”

Kyle’s eyes are closed again. He is trying to disappear into his own thoughts. They are a brightly lit buffet of sexual treats featuring prostitutes and cheerleaders. The light of these thoughts hits him and he seeks out a shadow to hide in. He forces his naked brother out from between a woman’s large, glittery buttocks and brushes his hands across him. He feels nothing. And then, suddenly, the slap of the Deputy’s hand against his thigh. The sharp toe in his hip. He feels the dimension added to this environment, that it’s been added to him. A blonde woman rolls her lips off a nipple and pulls her girlfriend away from Kyle’s growing erection.

“Hey, dickhead, are you listening to me? I got plans for that asshole.”

Kyle leans on one arm, away from his brother, and vomits on his hand.