Date: Thu, 7 Jun 2007 23:32:59 +0200
From: Julian Obedient <julian.obedient@gmail.com>
Subject: Diamond Shadows pt. 8

His dog days were nearly done. Julian looked around cannily, from side
to side. His real mind was emerging from behind the dogmind and he
would soon resume himself, and Morgan, true to his disposition knew
what to do.

Julian thought about Morgan with affection. He wanted to paw him..

It was awkward. Julian had a sense of what was going on. He had a
sense of himself. He saw everything, he felt everything, his
transformation, his canine behavior, his desire to jump on Morgan and
tongue his face, but he was still a human intelligence watching,
watching, and waiting, like the chick inside an egg.

Morgan was dressing them in loose fitting clothes, jeans, loafers, big
t-shirts, hanging sports jackets. He wheeled them to a limousine in
wheel chairs. Robertson had actual restraints upon his wrists and
ankles. At the airfield, attendants took them from the limousine to
Julian's plane. Morgan had gotten it flown over to take them home.

Parker stood in the entrance, at the top of the ramp as they were
wheeled up to the cabin. His handsome face and muscular figure are in
the foreground against the windswept gray marble sky. He is keen,
devoted, obedient. He is as handsome and as loyal as a cliché. He
stares out from the canvass of this story proudly gazing into each
reader's eyes, aroused by the admiration he feels directed at him.

In Parker, too, devotion and obedience have wrought sharpness of mind,
that aspect of mind which is capable of sympathetic perception; that
knows the feelings and needs of another as his own. He was the master
servant, the servant who serves by properly imagining his master's
needs.

Julian knew him immediately and spoke the English words of a man. Help
me up, Parker. Enough of this. It's very good to see you.

Thank you, Sir. It is very good to see you, Sir, Parker said lifting
him out of the chair. Julian took to his feet easily, shook himself,
the way a dog does coming out of the water. By it, however, he shook
off the last vestiges of canininity and opened wide his eyes. He
breathed out slowly and easily, and his face was alight with a smile.

And Mr. Robertson, Parker said, bowing to Robertson, who still was entirely dog.

Julian motioned with a sweep of his fingers and Parker maneuvered
Robinson's chair into the plane and secured both it and him.

They landed in New York. Julian focused through the window as
Kennedy's terminals began turning around outside and the plane taxied
to its halt.

Now Parker put his big paw upon Robertson's chest, pressing the
diamond piercing in his nipple, and the boy felt an ease he had no
memory of and began falling, falling into himself. And he continued to
sleep.

Julian walked to the limousine. Parker pushed Robertson in his wheel chair.


Indignant Spenser scolded Julian for one more time putting himself in
danger and putting her at risk of forfeiting her vow -- through no
fault of her own, she was forced to add -- made to his dying mother
that she would make sure to see that no harm would come to him, but
with his being as reckless as he was, how could she be a woman of her
word?

Julian simply kissed her, and she fell crying into his arms.

And what do we do with him? she pointed, nearly all her passion spent,
at Robertson, sleeping in his wheel chair.

Well, Spenser, we shall see. For the moment, we'll let him sleep.

Yes, Sir.

And perhaps now you might prepare some supper. Robertson will sleep
through the night. No need to concern yourself with him for now.

Yes, sir.

But in the morning, Julian continued, he would be happy to find a
steak bone and a bowl of water on the floor in his room.

Spenser retracted her upper body. The arch of her neck made her pointy
chin seem even pointier. She squinted.

No, Spenser, I'm not teasing you. Please do as I ask. Everything will
come out right.

If only your mother, Spenser said, wiping her hands in her apron and
shaking her head, as much in wonder as disapproval.

* * *

It was a misty morning, the trees nearly bare, their barrenness only
emphasized by a few tenacious leaves hanging from branches, brittle
and sear with autumn's processing. They walked along a rocky path in a
barren woods, Julian upright in khakis, a navy blue sweater with
buttons on the shoulder and beige hiking boots; Robertson, naked on
all fours, until now indifferent to the chill creeping into the air.

But the earth was becoming alien to him. the air was chilly. The power
of his eyes as organs of sight and of judgment was forcing itself on
him: he wanted to stand up. It was Julian. He saw Julian walking
alongside him. He wanted to stand up.

As a traveler -- waking in another unfamiliar hotel room each morning
during a long journey away from home -- faces a period of
disorientation before absorbing that he is not in his own bedroom but
in a chamber he had registered for at the desk the night before --
exhausted after a busy and bitter day -- begins to reassemble the
world and his relation to it, so Robertson began to sense there was an
environment that had meaning surrounding him.

Unable to coordinate action with incipient consciousness, however, he
hurled himself into the woods, dashing forward and darting back. Would
Julian notice anything. If Julian could understand, if Julian could
rush into his mind and grab it before it sank behind a fog bank.

Julian crouched and extended his arms, palms open like cups and
Robertson ran to him and began licking his palms and wagging his
imaginary tale furiously.

It's ok boy. Back to the house. They ran through the autumn chill back
to the library, Robertson stumbling as he ran, trying to regain his
two feet.

Magnus had the fire ready. Parker brought Julian brandy and coffee.
Robertson stretched out before the fireplace  warming himself.

Julian crouched beside him and rubbed his head. Robertson looked at
him and great waves of shame broke against the shores of his eyes.

Julian took him upstairs and into his bed.

* * *

For months they continued like that, Robertson gentler than he had
been, but still doggy in disposition and aware of Julian only in a
space behind his mind. He was frantic to break free, but stuck within,
and lingered in his doggyness even after consciousness began to break
in his mind like dawn in the sky, but the dog spell overpowered him.
It had him beaten. Rebellion came out only in doggyness, barking,
senseless barking.

Physical violence could not free him. Beating a dog just reinforces
its identity as a dog, and there was nothing Julian tried that really
gave him actual hope that he was getting to Robertson or confidence
that he ever would.

If anything, his efforts were having a demoralizing effect on him. He
no longer felt the sexual hunger for Robertson. He did not experience
the electricity of attraction or the awe at Robertson's body that
kindled his urge to dominate him and possess him, which had made
Robertson when he was present as himself -- not like now, debased --
thrilling.

Now duty had replaced love, and obligation had trumped excitement. In
looking after Robertson -- and he needed looking after -- like
Eurydice, when Orpheus looked over his shoulder to see how it was with
her, he disappeared. In his place was a humanoid dog dwelling in his
body. Julian was devoid of desire for him, and he grieved at loosing
Robertson and at losing his desire for him.

* * *

The winter months passed and Julian lived with a great gloom in his
heart. It meant little to him that he won the National Book Award for
Poetry or that a novel he had written ten years ago had just been
bought by Sony Pictures for several million dollars.

Spenser and Magnus noted it, and Spenser coaxed numerous cups of a
variety of herbal teas on him, and Magnus was always urging cognac
upon him.

Julian maintained a Spartan regimen nevertheless, drank more tea than
alcohol and drove himself, going to his office every day, answering
mail, taking phone calls, sequestering himself each day between eleven
and three to write. Late afternoons daily he took a vigorous hour at
the gym. He'd never looked so good or felt so bad. His work was
flowing with a brilliant vigor.

In May, "After the End" appeared in The New Yorker:

    1.

    Again
    That time
    Again
    The rain

    A long
    Extending
    Empty
    Avenue.

    Our eyes
    Met
    And turned away.
    The evening
    Smelled like evening. The
    Rose branch heavy with
    Blossoms hung down.
    Still your eyes haunt me.
    I stare into them

    Although they are not here.

    2.

    At the intersection
    of eternity and
    the temporal
    I meet your eyes
    shining brown;
    I long to touch
    the nipples on your chest

    3.

    I would have you submissive as flowers,
    Overwhelmed by profusions,
    Adorned with garlands,
    like Bacchus or
    Adonis.

    The flesh of flowers:
    the texture of your skin.

    I will take you to Florence and put you among the marbles:
    Michelangelo's David or the Dying Captive.
    You will not be out-shown in perfection
    By these precursors.
    Glow in the ancient night, fit rival to those marvels.

    We will know your submission
    By a ring round your cock
    A silver band encircling your love
    A leather bracelet round your wrist
    My breath the air inside your breast
    I will fix your eyes upon a flame until they became smoky
    Melted and turned so deep within that you become a flame yourself
    To heat me upon your breast when winter snows oppresses my soul.

    4.

    Haunted by the phantoms of a life I did not lead
    Supine inside my heart, I watch my past lives bleed.
    Within your heart is everything I need
    My angel, my life, my new heart's new creed.

    5.

    The breeze of my breath
    Blows through the hollow of your neck
    The sound of my words
    Becomes the resonance of your mind
    The meaning I give
    Is the one that remains

    6

    The Sirens are singing again
    Let your eyes gaze into the distance
    And hear the voices of the Sirens
    As their currents electrify and terrify
    Nevertheless not threats
    This time but possibilities
    If you can take them for your own.

    7.

    My mistress the moon
    is rising above the roofs of Paris
    It is the beginning of August
    She is a ghost of yellow silver
    A distant frigid lover
    She draws me to follow her
    with no reward but the glimpse of her gaze
    indifferent gaze
    a pallid wash of bronze
    present and with no significance

    8.

    The world exists
    To be turned
    Into words

    He comes
    A ghost of himself
    Hungry
    Captive

    How distinguish between
    I love you
    I am hungry
    I want to sleep by myself
    Tonight

    I turn the pages in the book
    Unable to distinguish
    The world in the words
    From the world without.

Julian left his office and walked on Fifth Avenue through the crowd of
pedestrians, shoppers, office workers just getting out, random souls
wandering on the streets waiting for something to do. The Christmas
tree blazed at Rockefeller Center. It was all as homey as a Frank
Capra picture.

Except he felt bitterly the underlying falseness of everything. And it
disgusted him. There was no one in the crowd that he wished to go home
with, whom he wanted to be instead of himself. He was lost among his
fellows, not part of them. He could not understand what motivated them
to keep on living except inertia.

They were slavish, and their slavishness consisted in their being
obedient to circumstances and resigned to the fact that they were
obedient. There was nothing rebellious about them. The worst mark of
their defeat was that their imaginations had been^Åcastrated ^Å
perverted, rendered impotent. Imagination for them meant impossible
erotic daydreams and explosions  rather than the workshop of
improvement, the instrument that brings bettering change into the
world.

And then he realized what he had to do: turn grief at lost love back into love.

And if I can't do that, he said out loud to himself, I am no poet no
matter how many verses I have published.

But no one noticed because the store windows were blazing and the
people on the street stood in front of them crowd-deep, gazing.


A late February snow covered Manhattan the morning they flew out of
Kennedy for Guadeloupe. They landed half a day later in the hot
sunshine.

The pale sable of the soft beach stretched out beneath the villa.
Julian looked out at the infinite horizon: the line which indicates
the separation of the sea and the sky but also marks the place where
they touch. Townsend lay at his feet on the deck, panting in the hot
sun.

Julian squatted beside him. He took his friend by the back of the neck
and moved his own face up close and looked the man who thought he was
a dog directly in the eyes. With his other hand he took hold of
Robertson's cock and held him fast. Robertson's deep blue eyes were
radiant with the possibility that things that had become unspeakable
might once more be heard. His breathing became calm and regular. He
felt Julian's presence inside him. That very sensitivity conveyed a
corresponding sensation to Julian and vivified his loins. He saw
Robertson again after so long. He had not realized that one aspect of
his own enchantment had clung to him even as he thought he had emerged
from it complete and all himself. He had continued to see Robertson as
a dog. He continued to see him as he had when he too had been a dog
with him in Farrington's compound.

Now their gazes met again as they had earlier and became one dominant
gaze that had them both enthralled. It was a mutual hypnosis. They
were drawn together each by a power that captured him, emanating from
the other.

The beach stretched out on the left and gently swerved. On the right
it came to a cliff and made an almost ninety degree turn. The sun
burned through the blue sky; the sand was red with heat. Solitary
souls or small bands and couples were scattered random on its stretch.

Julian stood looking at Robertson. He was standing with the joy of
having mastered a skill. He was not naked anymore but wore a black
thong. His nipple diamond glittered in the sun. The intricate silver
chain around his neck was not a dog collar. His muscular torso rippled
with allure.

Julian, he said, I want you to be my master, but not as a dog. Will
you have me as your man?

Julian said yes, he would, yes.

But first a swim, he said laughing.

And he ran towards the jeweled sea, the turquoise Caribbean, like a
demi-god returning to the blue Aegean.

Robertson ran after him and grabbed him at the water's edge. Clutched
in each other's embrace they fell upon the velvet sand at the water's
edge. The tide ran out and left them in its ebb momentarily upon the
wet sand, until it flooded over them again. They breathed one breath
as they devoured each other with welcome, and their kisses exploded
like the ocean foaming round them.

I love the power of your cock, Robertson gasped grabbing his master's
rod. O Julian, take me like a man again, for I am only a man if I am
yours.

There then upon the sand with Poseidon's fierce and mighty daughter
dancing blessings all around them, they looked into each other's eyes.
Julian stretched like the arc of a bow taut and trembling shot his
quivers into Robertson. Robertson cried in ecstasy and swooned to feel
deep within the wounds that heal.

Epilogue

I beg your pardon, Aunt Morgan, but I really do think you exceed the
limits required for a friendship.

Milford, my love, I assure that I only stretch the limits of that friendship.

What do you mean?

If you'll a willing ear incline, my dear, what's mine is yours and
what is yours is mine.

Whatever the devil are you talking about?

It's Shakespeare.

I know it's Shakespeare, and it's a damn  lot of trouble for me to
figure out what he's talking about half the time. I'll be sent as a
candybox on Valentine's day if for the life of me I can figure out
what you mean by saying it.

Me thinks the lady doth protest too much, Aunt Morgan said with a leer.

Enough Shakespeare, Milford said, stamping his foot.

Morgan smiled.

You are adorable, Milford, he said, when you become exasperated.



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