Frisk: A Novel (Cooper, Dennis) (16 page)

"You first," Kevin snickered. He stood, brushed his pants off.

They wound gradually up the spiral staircase. The windmill got tighter and more claustrophobic until it was little more than a glorified stairwell. When they reached the pinnacle of the building, they not only didn't smell anything sickly sweet or find a teenage-sized skeleton, there wasn't even a bellshaped room, period. The steps just ran out maybe three or four feet below a kind of wooden dunce cap caked with spider webs. "I knew it," Kevin said, gazing up. "Rooms like that exist only in books."

They spiraled back down to the level where I and Chretien were sleeping. Julian squeezed my shoulder once, twice. My eyes opened. "Let's go upstairs and confer," he said quietly. "You, me, and Kevin." Okay, I mouthed, and slid out from under the kid without waking him somehow.

Upstairs, Julian smirked, pretend-hardened his eyes. "Confess, asshole." He, Kevin, and I had formed a little huddle under one of the portholes. "You're no John Wayne Gacy, correct?"

I looked away for a second. "Correct."

Kevin suppressed a huge, shit-eating grin, but he couldn't help turning his face away, like he did when he thought he had bad breath, and saying, "I knew it. I knew it."

"Why, D.?" Julian said, ignoring Kevin. "If that's not too gigantic a question.

"I don't know," I muttered, shrugged. "Well, that's not totally true." My forehead crumpled up. "I sort of know ... well, basically because I realized at some point that I couldn't and wouldn't kill anyone, no matter how persuasive the fantasy is. And theorizing about it, wondering why, never helped at all. Writing it down was and still is exciting in a pornographic way. But I couldn't see how it would ever fit into anything as legitimate as a novel or whatever." I shook my head. "God, this feels great. Phew. So I started sending letters to people who already knew me, thinking they'd either write back and give me some sort of objective analysis, or else relate to the fantasy, come here, and give me the courage or amorality or whatever to actually kill somebody in league with them. You're the only ones who ever answered, though."

Kevin's face felt positively prickly with interest. "So you just made up those boys in the letter out of your head?"

"Sort of. I mean, they're all real boys, except Jorg and Ferdinand, who're imaginary. But yeah," I said, and grinned. The kid in the hamburger stand, the punk, the yuppie ... them I see around town all the time."

"Cool!" Kevin grabbed his head and shook it roughly, thrilled to be living inside it.

Julian sniffed. "Well, that's that then." He got to his feet, stretched.

I shrugged. "That's that."

Kevin let his head loose. "Hey, wait. Maybe this doesn't sound that appropriate now," he said. "But, uh ... God, I'm dizzy. I, uh, had this idea when I first woke up of how ... Julian and I could help ... Oh, wait. Give me a second." He felt horrible. "Shoot."

Everything spun.

Julian sipped the worst coffee ever. Thin, yellowy, cold. The train station was freezing, but a ghostly heat passed through the wall of the fast-food stand he was leaning against. Chretien and I talked mindlessly, flirtatiously to his immediate left. Sometimes Chretien would break away, run a few yards up the platform and back again, flapping his arms to get warm. Based on the sneers this received from Dutch passersby, Chretien was more an embarrassment than the young god Julian had originally thought. That would explain a lot. Sip. Kevin shivered on a bench reading Tolkien next to some closet-case guy whose bloodshot eyes kept toppling off the edge of his newspaper and landing in Kevin's lap.

A train's big nose crossed the far end of the platform. Sip, sip, crunch. Julian tossed his crushed cup, then he strolled up to Chretien and me. "So it was good to ..." Now that the kid was a dork it felt totally different to be around him. Boring, even. That haunted look wasn't otherworldly after all, just some weird form of misery trying to hide in the nooks of an okay face. All of which made the big three-way seem kind of pointless in retrospect. ". . . and if you're ever . . ." Whereas with me, well, there was the historical link, and it'd been fun, instructive even, to act wild again, enact the fake snuff, etc., but, well, Julian missed his lover, and I was awfully bizarre now. "... I mean it." Roar ...

... Roar. He hugged Chretien, me. "Send me prints of those photos," he laughed. "And watch my backpack a second." He dropped the thing on the tips of my shoes, turned, strolled over, and knelt by his brother, who lowered his book a few inches reluctantly. The train had arrived and was rumbling, spewing a grungy heat. It tickled Julian's neck. Kevin's eyes were preoccupied, as always. Like mine, Julian guessed, because I don't give a shit either. "You're welcome to move back in anytime," he muttered. Maybe Kevin's eyes moistened at that. Maybe not. It was weird to remember how wet they used to be all the time. "Oh, uh, thanks." The book covered them.

A whistle shrieked. Julian grabbed his backpack and ran onto the train. He found a spot in the no-smoking section, lowered the window, and craned his neck. We'd already split, which kind of stunned him. "Fucking assho-" The train jerked. He toppled into his seat. Facing him, an elderly Dutch blond gripped a red tennis racket. His tan looked like bark. His right arm was two, three times bulkier than the left. "Hi." "Hi." Julian shut his eyes ... clack, clack, clack ... His nose itched. He scratched it. His hand smelled like Chretien's ass. He splayed it in front of his face and sniffed each fingertip with a very disappointed expression, he guessed.

He crossed his arms, watched the monochromatic Dutch landscape darken. Occasionally the train stopped in stations. For kicks, Julian picked the cutest guy in each city. After eight or nine stops, he held a mental Mr. Netherlands contest, which was won by a punk at the Eindhoven station. "Mr. Tennis" left. He was replaced by two chubby blond boys reading comic books. They were replaced by a French-looking guy who immediately dozed off. Holland got black, blended into northern Belgium. Julian walked the length of the train grading passengers. Ugly, cute, ugly, cute, cute, ugly, ugly, ugly, cute, ugly, ugly, ugly ugly ...

One or two looked as abnormally cute as Chretien had at first glance, before blending into Julian's fuzzy memory of Henry, a boy he would've never recalled if I wasn't so stuck in the past. But okay, now that I'd mentioned it ... A drunken party? A two-on-one thing with a particularly fucked-up young long-hair? A forehead smacking a glass coffee table? The context had flooded back, thanks partially to that "snuff" photo session he'd just spent two hours lingering on the outskirts of. Still, Kevin and/or his camera would have to be God, Julian thought, to transform a mud pie on someone's ass into the sort of nightmarish image one spends one's adult life obsessing about.

Julian took his seat ... clack, clack ... I came to mind. Not the psychotic me, but the teenager gazing purposefully into the holes in boys' bodies. Back in those days my compulsions were de rigueur, business as usual, part and parcel of sex, as far as Julian knew. I, he seemed like each other's reflections in every way. Smart, cold, curious, horny, drugged. So why was I "out there" and he relatively okay? ... clack, clack, clack ... He pictured the upper two-thirds of my sweaty face across a skinny white back, circa '74, then circa this afternoon ... clack, clack ... The former picture was fuzzy, unfocused. The latter picture was eerie and sad, as though I and he were the last survivors of some fringe master race.

His mind replaced that with an image of me circa '78, punked-out, too thin, called Spit, weaving drunkenly through Julian's hotel room describing some other punk I'd beaten up. He'd thought at the time, This is it, the ruins of our sexobsessive, overly ambitious, great, stupid, etc., youth. Spit had even looked a little bit like a cinder of my teenaged self-black clothes, black hair, voice so slurred by alcohol it might as well have been black. But he, like most of punk, at least to Julian's mind, was no more than mildly amusing in retrospect. Julian closed his eyes, slid down in the seat, following his train of thought toward the cozier prospect of Paris, home, sleep. Blah, blah, blah, blah ... yelled Spit.

He lies naked on a futon with his wrists tied together, legs spread, feet jutting out of the frame. Twisted sheet, like a skinny tornado. In the first shot his long, straight black hair's fallen into his face, covering everything but the tip of his nose, chin, cheekbone, one partly shut eye. He's seventeen. His body's too tensed to be dead or asleep. That's supposedly a noose around his neck.

Two. Another medium shot. His hair's hooked behind his ears. Longish face, upturned nose. Stoned black eyes. Big mouth, wide open. Two wrinkles crisscross his forehead, suggesting worry, confusion. One leg is blurred where he apparently moved it. The other's pale, spindly, hairless. Knobby knees, one scabbed. Bound hands, "noose" still in place.

Third shot's a close-up. His face, neck, "noose," shoulders, armpits. His tongue's flipped over backward and pushed through his teeth. The underside's weird. His eyes are alert, antsy. Each reflects a little camera and part of a hand. The "noose" is neither too tight nor particularly loose, like a necktie. His expression suggests an inexperienced actor trying to communicate shock.

Four's a medium shot. He's facedown, wrists untied, feet jutting out of the frame. His arms are bent in a neo-Egyptian manner. His asscrack is covered with something that vaguely resembles a wound when you squint. His back, ass, and legs are generic pale teenager. His hair's studiedly askew like in photos of '60s fashion models. His shoulders are pimply, narrow.

Five. Close-up. The "wound" is actually a glop of paint, ink, makeup, tape, cotton, tissue, and papier-mache sculpted to suggest the inside of a human body. It sits on the ass, crushed and deflated. In the central indentation there's a smaller notch maybe one-half-inch deep. It's a bit out of focus. Still, you can see the fingerprints of the person or persons who made it.