Date: Tue, 21 Jul 2009 10:49:42 -0700 (PDT)
From: Tim Stillman <novemberhourglass@yahoo.com>
Subject: chapter two "Antonio and Bree"

And, suddenly, as if by accident, Autumn returned and I was in
University. I was in my dorm room all light and big windowed airy, sitting
on my narrow bed and lost; for it was my lot to never forget my friends. I
had had so few; the two love affairs did not count, for either him or me,
or she or me. I read a great deal. Especially D.H. Lawrence, for it seemed
he knew best of love and its chasing after; of hiding still inside and
dying for that rainbow just up above us. If reach it some other century we
could. I loved the charcoal painting of his words; they sent me into
comfortable sadness of missing Antonio and Bree. My name seemed to be
Barry. I seemed to be 18 now. I had deep dark eyes and my hair was longer;
as I got up from my bed and went to the window, open, so Autumn could come
inside, and now I looked at the season out there; the brown grass, the
leaves of gold falling mightily off the dark tree branches; the wind
kicking cool against my pale face. I touched my tongue to the cool and I
put it back in and my mouth tasted of Autumn glazing.

In a world of categorizing, I seemed not to fit. I had not forgotten one
moment of Bree and Antonio and how I was allowed to hold their shadows over
my arm as I watched them make love. It seemed as though I was bereft of my
own, as if they had become child vampires, sucking out of me and the boy
and the girl, separately, last year, I had tried to lose myself in, our
souls, and making us from almost the start, uneasy with one another. I felt
anger toward them and anger toward myself and they toward me almost from
the very start. They were two years younger than I, and were so very eager
to learn a sexual education from me. I smiled as I leaned against the left
side of the window and looked at the campus as if a beginning beast just
stirring to wakefulness. I was someone who had somehow grown into the how
to variety--not only sexually--but in helping other students with their
classroom studies; I was such a sham; and was ashamed of myself.

Had I only been able to tell Bree's and Antonio's parents, but that would
have been horrid and impossible and ridiculous, how their son and daughter
had been so beautiful making love and letting me watch and touch and one
time join in; if I could have done--something--to stop the future of them
now their past--it was so helpless feeling--and in those aborted making
love attempts later, and in my own solitary masturbation, I kept feeling
like a thief, like I was the man fox who had stolen March away; like I was
always spouting this philosophy and had no idea what it meant; as if I had
betrayed myself by always looking "out there" when the answer should have
been in my heart; oh I had enough friends since then; for I had acquired a
seeming depth; easy to do---just betray your friends and then mourn them
and yourself the rest of your life; and the rest of them in past yesterdays
and tomorrows to come; hide inside and pretend you know what you could have
done; be your own Autumn and winter too and take endless pictures of the
sky with your very nerves and remember, remember....

And sometimes when masturbating, feeling so wonderfully happy, feeling
one's self not alone in the world, anymore than anyone else is, and feeling
Antonio sucking me, and Bree letting me suck her budding girl blooms, my
hands on their child plump hips, and caught in amber that was the winter
that almost happened; when I almost threw off phlegmatic me, and
became--tender and giving as we ministered to each other; as we smiled and
closed our eyes and enjoyed our being naked and discovering so very much;
ideas and feelings and rushes of blood and examining each other and me
watching them from mere inches away, and me hard and masturbating, and them
examining my shaggy pubes and me examining their downy ones; so I turned
from the window, and I looked at the wooden desk with my laptop on it; I
could have found them; I could have found out what had happened; where they
were now; I could if I were not a coward and an ageist; for I didn't want
to see them now, as they had matured or for them to see me as I had; for I
pictured myself as the prow of a ship going through choppy winter iced
water and hard cold winds of danger; I, the foolish cavalier, I the one
lured boy and lured girl, with my intemperate climate.

Who thought, each in turn, by their climbing onto me and our sexual giggles
and our removal of clothing, we could hide in each other, other than penis
in mouth or vagina or arsehole, not ourselves, but little notes we had
perhaps unconsciously made of our lives to this point--had Antonio and Bree
and I done the same sort of thing?--for there in sex, there in love, we
would say yes no matter how life and the days take us, we were here, and no
one can shuffle the cards any other way; in dry cums or wet, in male or
female, in kisses on bodies; in closing up shop at one end, in order to
open up shop at the other; we were somehow always to be children, and
somehow always to be safe; and I sat on my narrow bed in the third day of
my being here in this strange scary place; and I did what I would do my
whole life through--I remembered.

I lay and stretched out myself with legs hanging over the soldered cheap
bed's foot and I unbuttoned myself and had a shag and was in the throes of
cumming on my jeans and hands when my roommate, Joseph, with a brace on his
withered leg unannounced came barging in--well, it was his room too--he
calling my name and walking past the desk partition separating the bed side
of our room from each other--and then he stopped dead still, and I opened
my eyes, still I was cumming a bit, and we stared at each other, so there
was really nothing else but to continue till finished, while he marched
quickly to his side of the room and sat on his equally squeaking bed; so I
cleaned myself up and used the lav, buttoned myself and then went to his
side of the room where he was blushing his baby chick looking face half to
death as his hair was short and gold and stayed there unperplexed, as I sat
beside him; as he moved rapidly away to the head of his bed and took his
pillow, holding it over, not his face, as I had the distinct impression he
wanted to do, but over instead his lap.

"Well," I said, "I guess that was kind of awkward."

He said nothing, wishing, I would imagine, he was ten again, and could hide
in his single room with a kitten named Mittens or some such; instead, we
sat there unmoving; as if we were playing Statues, till I started tapping
my fingers on my knees and coughed.

"I mean we all do it. We just have to arrange our times more
strategically." I felt horribly guilty, as though he could mind read I was
remembering a girl and a boy; and somewhere in there the girl and then the
boy later; and though I had placed my childhood in full bloom and then in
waning though still close memory, I had never felt silly as I did now; I
had been the child/adult then the once child but not adult adult, even with
Antonio and Bree; I had seen myself as a kid then; and they as experienced,
though younger than me and in reality, not in my mind hall, far more
children than I had been; and it seemed utterly unfair eyes were on me for
what to do next, after Antonio and Bree, who knew quite nicely what to do
next in love, in sexuality, but in most everything else, they had deferred
to me; and now I felt like a foolish child, caught by an adult in this far
younger looking face and far more childlike body, especially when compared
to my older stronger looking one and classical chiseled face. I could not
help that. It was my genes, and inside here, inside this little over heated
room, in spite of Autumn coming in through the opened window, I felt that
terrible overriding fear, for the first time, that he would tell.

But tell what? And it was foolish to feel this way; still though that
embroidery of the human mind that said he could see what I had been
remembering as though a film projected on the wall, as in "Quartermass and
the Pit," though it would be of me and Bree and Antonio instead of
monstrous locusts from another planet, thus creating for us the image of
the devil for endless times; I wanted to strike the bed with my fist; I
wanted him to understand how he had made me feel like my friends when
discovered by their mother, when Bree and Antonio had been fucking; and
suddenly it hit me, for I had somehow never felt guilty about masturbation
and sexuality; it had honestly never occurred to me; as I put my hands to
my sides to push myself off Joseph's bed, to go to my desk and pick up my
books for my two classes this afternoon, as he looked up at the pegboard
ceiling, and I was lost in child and in adult, myself and him; his neck was
very small and thin, and his shoulders were very shallow and narrow; he
crossed his ankles and smiled at some secret thought; which made me angry;
he somehow knew mine as if I were made of glass, but I was not to know his
for he was opaque; when all my life, it had seemed to be the other way
round.

I could not make up to Antonio and Bree for my somehow failing to defend
them, even though then, adult as I had felt, it was still the province of
adults, and we were forced to let them do with us as they would, and if I
had to remember and to grieve, for that I had no control over, and if I
spread my anger to the boy and to the girl after the objects of my
obsession had left great big crayon marks in my heart and soul; if I had to
make up for all of that, then I might as well go on pretending I was a
lecturer, I could use my voluminous reading to make me sound profound,
though in truth, I always used others' ideas and words and images as
springboards to my own, I like to think, individual ones, then I could
pretend to still be an adult before my time, and---I got off Joseph's bed,
looking at his brace outside his jeans, his brace he tried to hide somehow
with his hands; perhaps he was ashamed of it and wished he could change it;
as perhaps Antonio and Bree's parents wished soon after their children were
taken away from them, they had been more mature about it; more
philosophical about it; that they had somehow talked to them and their
children to them--I had no idea, I just always imagined the silence deep
that followed the outrage loud--I knew as soon as I left the room for
classes, Joseph was going to masturbate, for any fool could see that; and
if I could pretend to feel happiness for that, perhaps I would; I would
not, nor did I want to, exorcise any ghosts in my mind; for they would hold
me together in a consolation of sad joy which I needed in order to stay
alive; so I got my books and stood at the door at the end of Joseph's bed,
as he did an extra ordinary thing, I feel, for his shy self, he looked at
me as though he were the last passenger on the Titanic as it had all but
sunk, reconciled with always being like that; and I smiled at him; I
genuinely smiled at him; for I had known embarrassment at his eyes and
mind; I had known just a bit what horrors Antonio and Bree had and probably
were still going through; never to live down; and, even if freed by now;
even if living together in secrecy by now; and the destruction of their
parents' lives caused by themselves; all of this supposition; everybody
might be as happy and normal as hell; I deeply hoped so; I thought of all
Joseph's embarrassment; for that was way too obvious; so I smiled at him;
and very warmly and genuinely meant too; as he smiled back sort of at me.

I said then, opening the door to the hallway, "See you later?" He turned
his face away and managed an "ok," and suddenly as I had fallen it seemed
by accident into an Autumn University, I thought there might have been
another passenger on the Titanic that may not sink after all. I left,
closing gently the door; perhaps it was time for me to listen and to learn
and be a student in so many vast ways that books and false facades could
not teach. I walked past the music noisy rooms and students walking up and
down the halls; and I experienced something that felt suspiciously like
happiness; and maybe Joseph could help me assuage the massive guilt I had
had all my life, that I had been totally unaware of. Autumn looked to be a
nice season.