Date: Mon, 4 Jun 2007 01:32:54 +0200
From: Julian Obedient <julian.obedient@gmail.com>
Subject: Diamond Shadows pt 6

Diamond Shadows

13.

Julian read it over slowly, a few times.

This piece of trash you think belongs to you, but just so you know, I
used it too. You haven't got much time.

                Farrington.

P.S. He's been programmed to return to me, so I don't have to keep his
body locked up. I got his mind, and no one else has the key. Go ahead,
try. You're next. Get ready. You'll like it.

Robertson stood in the doorway insisting he had to wait there for a
reply after Julian read the note, which he had handed him like a
Western Union boy.

Come in, boy, come in, Julian said, I've read the message. Now I have
to write the answer to it. It'll take a minute. I'll scribble the
reply and you may return with it, but no need to wait in the hall.
Come, have a coffee or some tea, while I answer the note. He took
Robertson by the arm and Robertson did not resist. Drained of all
affect, he was a mobile catatonic.

Julian knew it was as tough as it looked. Robertson was very far away,
and this zombie in his place was totally under alien control.

Even if he managed to restrain the body, Julian understood, he would
not possess Robertson's mind without breaking through something, and
if it was too forceful, he would not rescue Robertson from the limbo
of his captivity. He would only destroy the essence  of his friend, of
his beloved.

Sit, Julian invited Robertson, while I respond.

Robertson sat at a right angle to Julian. Julian opened a drawer in
his writing table and took out his stationery and also a silver chain
with a flashing diamond on its end.

Holding it high before his eyes for Robertson to see, he began an induction.

Robertson swung his eyes this way and that way, mechanically, impervious.

Julian put the diamond chain back in his pocket.

Let me offer you some tea before you go, he said, and placed a cup
before him. Its pungent odor steamed up to Robertson's nostrils and
his lips were drawn to the rim,. He took a sip. He slumped and his
head fell backwards.

Julian knew that if he were to save him, he would have to make
Robertson a captive. Until he could penetrate into his essence where
they knew each other eternally! -- and bring Robertson back to
himself. It was Orpheus' quest; he knew what he was up against.

You're a very unlikely Eurydice, Julian said to an unconscious
Robertson. But so it is.

The room in which Julian installed Robertson had windows higher than
either of them could reach and were barred. The door locked with a key
from the outside, and Robertson had a shackle fastened to his left
ankle, from which a chain extended  from either a fixture fastened to
the floor or another to the wall by the bed.

The melodramatics, Robertson, I must endure to have a few moments
alone with you! It is absurd, Julian said, kissing the boy who was
bound immobilized to the bed as he made love to him.

He had used a whip in order to get to this condition of docility.

After he had woken and found himself chained, Robertson bellowed
wildly and scrimmaged on his chain tearing at it this way and that in
an unsuccessful effort to disengage himself and flee to a place where
an inner compulsion as pressing as his own heart was urging him to
return, to Master Farrington's studio. He was yelping and panting like
a hound.

It was by employing actual physical pain that Julian, gradually,
apparently weaned Robertson away from the spell that had robbed him of
himself. He had never before had to exercise physical force to
command, control, or dominate someone. Charm and technique had been
enough.

But Robertson was something else and pain might reach into places
where charm could not go.


Aunt Morgan was always good for advice, and Julian made an appointment
to visit her on rue Marboeuf, off the Champs Elysees, which had been
vulgarized beyond recognition by American franchises and French
capitalists. The Communist menace in architecture lay in the dour
regimentation of concrete and in the heavy heart Communist
architecture represented. The Capitalist menace to architecture lies
in the unimpeded commerce of vanity, vulgarity and inauthenticity
architecture is required to serve.

I don't want to hear another word about that, Aunt Morgan said in her
husky whisper. There are real problems here and you'd better be ready
for surprises.

I don't want surprises, Julian said, as if good spirits could protect him.

Be that as it may, you are in the grip of forces that have no
intention of loosening their grip, and they are confident that their
intentions for you will entirely supplant your own.

Are you trying to frighten me, Morgan?

Don't omit my honorific, Julian. You should be frightened.

What would you have me do?

Stash the both of you away for awhile.

Away?

Hiding.

Hiding?

Now don't go being naughty and changing meanings on me. This is
serious. I mean: go into hiding.

Where?

I have an apartment in the south. Very bourgeois, but it will do well
enough for you.

At this Aunt Morgan rang and Bella, the graceful servant from Sri
Lanka, was instructed to give M. Julian the keys to the Orangerie.


Robertson drugged and disguised as an old, crippled woman, Julian got
him in a wheel chair to the Gare de Lyon where they took the TGV to
Grenoble; there in Aunt Morgan's house in the hills to sequester him
and attempt to reach him.


The last, yes. The last. It was only because he feared something was
going to happen that I did get to see him. But he never arrived. I
spoke to Francisco by phone. They never arrived. No one has any idea
where they are. Now we must do something Milford, and quickly.

Aunt Morgan, what on earth are you thinking of?

I don't know. That's why I want your help.

I don't know even where to start.

Well, you must.

If I must, I must, Milford said with mock resignation. But give me a
few days to try to figure things out.

A few days! Aunt Morgan declaimed.

Let me be,  Aunt Morgan. If I will be of any use it depends on you to
let me be as I am. The creator spirit never fails me when I wait for
it.

And he had done a great deal of waiting in the last few years that had
put a damper on his spirit.

Aunt Morgan knew that and became less relentless for the moment.

Hays Milford was an antique dealer, not a distributor or a seller but
a dealer who sought and bought and sold pieces of furniture he liked.
The store on the Ille Saint-Louis had a black sign with fine gold
lettering, Hays Milford & Taylor.

Taylor was dead now, nearly four years already. Robbie Taylor whom he
met wandering through Edinburgh for some inexplicable reason to rev
him up for a monograph on Carlyle he was writing for the Journal of
Nineteenth Century English Thought.

Dead, like so many others.

Ou sont les neiges?

Milford opened the shop early the next day.

I haven't tried hypnosis for years.

He stopped by the door. Through the antique wavy glass he saw the Seine.

He wondered if he could still do it or if he had gotten rusty beyond repair.

When Josquin the shop-boy arrived at ten fifteen, Milford knew exactly
what he needed to do.

Leave the bills. Come I want to show you an antique pendant from the
seventeenth century.

He hadn't lost the knack. Josquin sat slumped forward in the chair.
Following one order after another, his eyes opened, his back
straightened, he stood, he spoke. Each act was performed on command
and reflected Milford's wishes rather than his.

Milford looked at the well wrought gangly figure before him in faded
American jeans and a loose black tee-shirt, which he removed on
command, and remained bare-chested, for he had begun to feel how warm
it was in the back of the store.

I've told you many times, Josquin, how exquisite you are. But it is
always true. Of all the pieces I've collected, it would be with you I
should be loath to part. For everything else, the money would
compensate, but not for you, mon cher, not for you. It is not your
surplus value that draws me to you but your breath, your skin, your
chest, your nipples, that lovely cock that stands so tall when I call
upon you for service.

Milford crouched before him, not like he was kneeling or bowing, but
like a craftsman inspecting the work; he took hold of the lad's balls
and began to lick them, and then took them in his mouth and with his
tongue outlined the spheroid sensitivities held within their satiny
sac.

And then the point of his tongue was circling the slit on the glans,
and then it was encompassing the whole crown of the cock, and then was
pulling more of the shaft down into him and then was kissing it with
his throat.

He continued the boy's training like this until he knew from the
tension of his body that Josquin had entirely surrendered himself and
was swamped by expanding love for him. Then he brought the boy to
explosion, and the fire of his semen burst inside his throat and made
him, too, momentarily, dissociate from terrestrial definition and
enter the realms of lucid fragmentation where the self dissolves into
bliss.

There was a rapping at the front door despite its being locked and a
sign reading, Closed for Private Reasons until Further Notice. And
then he heard a key turn. It could only be Aunt Morgan. She had a key,
and there, indeed, she was.

Milford, at a time like this^Ågood morning Josquin^Åwhen matters of life
and death confront us. He is beautiful though, isn't he?

Thank you, Aunt Morgan.

What have you done to him now?

A simple trance.

What I can't figure is why you don't leave the poor boy alone. He's
crazy about you when he's in his own head. What more do you need?

I'm surprised at you Aunt Morgan! After the life you've led.

Well, perhaps, but that's something else. We really must do something.
Get him -- she said pointing at Josquin with the mauve and rose fan
that always accompanied her -- into some kind of functioning
condition, will you, and let's then be about our business.

Part V

Farrington's orders had been to recover Robertson. The family was not
at all happy with his disappearance. It made them anxious. Focused
themselves exclusively on the acquisition and maintenance of power and
dominance, as they were, they expected the move against Robertson's
interest in the family empire to be disconcerting, but they never
imagined that it could injure him in ways other than those which might
affect them had they been bested in a deal. He had transformed defeat
into a romance. He had not come to negotiate some from of living from
them, gotten himself locked into their orbit. He had disappeared, just
gone off, into the sunset, as it were, with another man. It was
unacceptable, too dangerous.

On the other hand, the way things had worked out was not altogether
inauspicious. That Robertson was unstable and homosexual actually
could provide good cover for any action which might face SEC
investigation or independent audit. Robertson was a perfect fall guy
and if he were not loose and unaccounted for but nicely secured in say
a perfectly pleasant psychiatric institution, on call, as it were,
well...that would be quite appropriate given the unfortunate
circumstances.

Farrington, for his part, became too excited by his assignment. He had
his own agenda, and while it included securing Robertson, it was
motivated not by the emolument contingent upon successful execution of
his mission, nor by fidelity to his employers, but by personal revenge
for having been bested erotically when Julian wrested control of
Robertson away from him so effortlessly the night the Bentley broke
down.


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