Close to the Knives (6 page)

Something shifts in this sleep and I am standing in a room that has only three walls; as I turn around I realize I am in the ruins of a building, standing on a balcony. The building has different levels to it. As I walk through doorways and hallways I see that some sections are only a story tall, others are five or six stories tall and all of them belong to a dilapidated hotel. Judging by what remains of the molding on the walls and ceilings, and the chandeliers hanging from the center of each room, it was once a place for the rich maybe a century ago. Large sections of walls are missing and there is nothing but jumbles of steel rods twisted and caked with broken slabs of concrete. Off in the distance behind a line of waving palm trees, the sky is developing a dark stormy patch of gray and coal black. The funnel of a tornado is forming and I stare at it for a while before moving into the next room. There is a stranger standing in the corner of the room; he looks like a guy who would work with machines; he has dark hair, strong forearms and he's wiping his hands with a dishcloth. Behind him through the tangled rupture of broken walls, the backdrop of. sky is woven through with flashes of rose and turquoise. The colors are swimming into the shape of funnels making up a couple of tornados that grow larger as I watch. The guy wiping his hands doesn't notice them or else seems unconcerned. “I think we'd better find shelter,” I say as the funnels grow closer and closer. Turning from the guy, I move quickly through a series of rooms and wonder if the hotel has been through an earthquake or fire or bombings and strafing as in war. Twisted silhouettes of girders and shells of rooms with large sections of ceilings, roofs, walls and floors missing, each of them revealing different views of the tornadoes and framed horizon. The whole sky is revolving furiously and beautifully as I wake up, my eyes opening on the cool light of morning slipping between the hotel curtains.

The sun in the part of arizona I was traveling through was so strong it made my eyes half close and all the earth seemed like one enormous field, dry as bone. The sun was bleaching the color out of every surface and shape so my brain had to wrestle to give things form. Anything, bush, cattle, vehicle or human, immediately turned to silhouette against the bright sky. With the combination of heat and light, the air had a frail white quality. The whole sky seemed closer to the road in these parts and I could barely stand the magnesium glimmer of light burning up my lower body. My arms stretched to the steering wheel, I was skimming over the pale gray asphalt and the speedometer was measuring between eighty and ninety miles per hour. The road was so flat in stretches, or there was so little in the landscape to distract the eye, that it was impossible, without looking at the dashboard, to tell when I was speeding. It was a landscape for drifting, where time expands and contracts and vision is replaced by memories; small filmlike bursts of bodies and situations, some months ago, some years ago.

I was headed toward Meteor Crater. It's a blemish on the earth's skin where twenty-one thousand years ago a half-billion-ton chunk of iron blew through outer space and slammed into the planet leaving a hole three miles in circumference. The collision has been calculated as having had the force of a multimegaton bomb, and now, twenty-two thousand years later, some enterprising jerks charge you seven bucks to look at the hole.

Four miles from the service road to Meteor Crater, I pulled into the lane of a highway rest stop and coasted up a slight incline to the parking spaces. Dazed tourists in pastel clothes wandered briefly from their cars to the small building housing the toilets. Some stayed inside their cars, windows rolled up tight, air-conditioning blasting the interior. They looked like critters with hair-dos in aquariums and as I passed the line of cars they turned to look with a small panic in their eyes. It was incredibly hot and the air felt like it would burst into flames. Next to the walkway leading to the toilets was a sign: $1,000
FINE FOR DEFACING THE ROCKS
, referring to a large group of sandstone boulders maybe eight feet high and fifteen yards long and wide. Maybe they were boulders that flew out of the hole three miles away when the meteor hit because they looked foreign to the landscape, as if lifted straight out of a flintstones special. Nearby was a second sign:
POISONOUS SNAKES AND INSECTS INHABIT THIS AREA.
On the walkway by the twin-roofed entrances to the toilets, a Native American family was seated before two blankets filled with cheap turquoise trinkets and hunger. The turquoise was actually blue plastic with mineral veins printed on it. A couple of tiny speakers above the doors to the
MEN
'S and
WOMEN
'S rooms spit out a steady stream of weather information that hovered in the air in a series of metallic echoes. A pretaped program offering tips on how to avoid dehydration in the concrete streets of large urban centers drifted through the men's room as the door swung shut behind me. An old white-haired man rubbed his hands under the electric dryer. I chose the second stall and opened my belt, dropped my pants and sat down on the toilet seat. To my right, about waist level on the dividing partition were two large holes peeled through the metal. An eye was peering through one of them. I leaned forward slightly and through the second hole I could see a disembodied hand pulling on a large uncircumcised dick. I bounced my own dick in the palm of my hand so the eye could see it. I waited a few minutes till the sounds of the rest room door opening and closing subsided, then stood up and pulled my pants back up and motioned toward the hole, giving the guy a signal to meet me outside.

I was making like the first man on the moon walking the deep creviced surfaces of the flintstones landscape. I was hoping to spot a rattler or a scorpion—àfter almost a decade of wandering through the southern and western states I'd never come across a rattler in the wild. Too many rattlesnake roundup jubilees and development moves have been killing them off. From the top of the boulders I also had a clear view of the bathrooms and the pathway. More cars were arriving than departing and families were going back and forth from their cars to the rest rooms. Finally the guy from the first stall stepped into the hot glare of sunlight shielding his eyes with an enormous hand. He was what some would consider a freak: a circus giant in american bloodlines and genealogies, the lumbering object of surprise and fear. Had he been of average size and carrying a machete or gun, no one would have given him a second glance. But to have a massive body and height and the two large hands broad as palm leaves caused kids and even adults to unconsciously move backward or sideways a couple of extra steps as if his height took up horizontal space along the path. His body was well proportioned to his height, slightly muscular like he'd been a farm laborer in his youth, but now he looked like a salesman: cheap cotton short-sleeved shirt and beige car-dealer pants. I found him very sexy because I love difference. An unbearably handsome face bores me unless something beneath its surface is crooked or askew: even a broken nose or one eye slightly higher than the other, or something psychological, something unfamiliar and maybe even suspect.

He looked up toward the boulders from under the roof of his hands, then crossed the pebble garden to begin climbing up. In case there were cops, I pretended not to see him and wandered out of view. State police get lots of overtime pay lurking around interstate rest stops hoping to catch some hungry queer kissing another in the loneliness of the tiled bathrooms. Some cops make it a point to step back from urinals and flash their hard dicks at a suspected queer and then arrest him when he makes a move to show he's interested. In new jersey, an undercover cop used his eighteen-year-old son who would stand at the urinals five hours at a stretch and display a hard-on to anyone entering the bathroom. In north Carolina I read a newspaper story in which the columnist was worried about how the sleaze types, attracted to the highway rest stops because queers supposedly made such easy robbery targets, might accidentally beat up and and mug a family man. Funny thing was I'd seen and met family men on their knees in rest stops around the nation. The best part of the article was a map of the state that noted which rest stops had the most homosexual activity—that helped keep me from feeling lonely that day.

We met at the far end of the landscape and both acted shy, but within minutes were in our separate cars heading onto the interstate to look for a side road that would give us cover away from the eyes of the world, a place away from the trooper patrol cars where we could get to know each other. There is no such place in that part of arizona. I was tailing him when he finally pulled onto the service road leading over a small bridge and crossing the interstate in the direction of Meteor Crater. Our cars drifted down a service road in a swirl of dust and pebbles, past a low-set gas station offering free pieces of petrified wood to customers. About a quarter mile farther down the road, a mile from the crater parking lot, he pulled over onto the shoulder and stopped the engine. I pulled up behind him and walked to the passenger side of his car, opened the door and slid into the hot front seat. He was staring straight ahead out the windshield at a plume of dust that grew larger and larger because it contained a car filled with vacationers. His hands were gently smoothing over the folds in his trousers around the general area of his crotch.

The service road leading to the crater is made of a brown asphalt material, roped on both sides with dry red earth and plains of scrub brush and an occasional loping boulder pocked with holes made by the friction of wind-driven sand. In the distance, in any given direction, all you can see is the general curve of the earth and maybe the beginnings of mountains far away in purple tones looking like goofy cartoon hats or sideways faces. The sky is a bowl; it is like the inside curve of the eye if it were mirrored and it's filled with a dusty white blue that catches like imaginary chalk in the throat and it contains the hot disk of sun and a hot wind that buffets the sides of the car and enters over the top of the window glass. After the tourist car passed, and he could make sure of its disappearance in the rearview mirror, his face turned toward me and began the slow swim through space toward mine. His rich dark eyes set into the general outline of his face slowly obscured my view of his hand undoing the zipper of his trousers and reaching into the resulting envelope of cloth, “You ain't a cop are you?” The heat inside the car was so saunalike that I was pouring sweat down my face, under my arms and over my chest where it cooled in the slight breeze. His face was an inch from mine when he saw the answer—no—in my eyes and his tongue slipped between parted lips and entered my mouth.

Someone once said that the ancients believed that light came from within the eyes and that you cast this light upon things in the world wherever you turned. I remember wondering if the world disappeared or was cast into darkness when you closed your eyes, or, even further, if you died, did the world die also. This guy was so intensely sexy I almost couldn't look him in the eye. His body had such presence or something, I don't know what it was; perhaps his height, his large hands, the way he might look sitting in a chair with his clothes having disappeared and his legs pulled apart with me in front of him standing, his head viewed from above, or kneeling, his knees viewed from a close angle. Or maybe it's the shadows of his crotch where it meets the plastic cushion of the chair my face a camera, moving into a slow close-up of his dick, the head of it peeking from the fold of foreskin, a sexy soft-lined pink eye in a hard organ and the sense of it warm in my palms and maybe I just want to feel the sense of it sinking upward in my wet mouth; maybe it's the feeling of my moist palms running over the front of his chest through the folds of his open shirt, soon to have him more naked, his dark head tilted back and small pockets of pleasure sound escaping from the back of his throat. Maybe I just anticipate seeing that light in his eyes, that glitter of life glazing over in the heat. Or maybe it's the way his arms lift up over his head in the limited space so I can better lick the heat of his body.

If light does come from within does that make us walking movie projectors? Are we casting form onto a dark screen? When I move my eyes very slowly from left to right while sitting still, I can feel and hear a faint clicking sensation suggesting that vision is made up of millions of tiny stills as in transparencies. Since everything is generally in movement around us, then vision is made up of millions of “photographed” and recalled pieces of information. In the seventeenth century a jesuit friar by the name of Scheiner engaged in an experiment where he peels away opaque layers at the back of the eye and revealed a faint image, a transparency of what the eye had imprinted upon it at the moment of its owner's death. Another scientist took the excised eyes of guillotined prisoners and studied them under a microscope to see if there were any legible images imprinted on them. This scientist wanted to see if an image was recorded despite the black hood placed over the guillotine victims' heads at the moment of decapitation. He reported finding one image that was fairly consistent in the eyes he examined: something like a small cloud with two tiny arms waving out from the sides.

Sometimes when I'm caught in the flow of rush-hour traffic in the tangled arteries of interstate ramps and elevated roadways that surrounded an enormous and unfamiliar city, I come to believe that I no longer exist and similarly all the forms and shapes of metal and glass that contain what appear to be human beings are also a fragment of imagination: something like a vision cast into time and space from something outside of myself. I move to a place in the back of my head and merely witness it all. I am amazed by the undefined spectacle of this vision as I pass through, waiting for the code or the anchor that reels me in, brings me through its contours and sets me down like gravity.

He was whispering behind my closed eyelids. Time had lost its strobic beat and all structures of movement and sensation and taste and sight and sound became fragmented, shifting around like particles in lakewater. I love getting lost like this. I'm trying to recall where his hands were, or how they felt under my shirt, or grasping the back of my neck while his tongue licked across my jaw, over my throat. I'm trying to recall the drift of it, trying to recall where we were. I remember sitting in his car, mine parked a few yards behind his in the side weeds. We were in the front seat of his salesman station wagon with the windows open and my door slightly ajar, the two of us jerking off and the rearview mirror adjusted so I could see the span of road behind us while he kept his eyes peeled, scanning the road in front of us, both of us looking for any signs of cop or trooper cars that might glide up silently and unannounced. But in the rear-view mirror I saw nothing but empty space and earth and sky except for the lower part of one electrical stanchion—it might've been a radar tower—two grazing cows beside it and nothing else but the curve of the earth and out in front of the car through the frame of windshield: nothingness and here we are, here I am, some fugitive soul having passed through the void of the cities, skimmed across the emptiness of landforms and roadways through holes in the mountains westward to this one point in the dead road where vehicles have stopped to rest in the boiling heat and the entire landscape is silent except for the dull flat whine of insects and the dry brush. The oval stones and straw-colored vegetation and cracked red earth and everything feels dried and red except for the pale hanging color of the sky emitting a tone that matches or continues the tone of the human body in absolute stillness. And to be surrounded by this sense of displacement, as this guy's tongue pulls across my closed eyelids and down the bridge of my nose, or to be underneath all that stillness with this guy's dick in my mouth, lends a sense of fracturing. It's as if one of my eyes were hovering a few feet above the car and slowly revolving to take in the landscape and the small car with two humans inside slowly licking each other's bodies into a state of free-floating space and semiconsciousness and an eventual, small, momentary death.