Date: Sun, 11 May 2003 16:52:40 -0700
From: Tim Stillman <novemberhourglass@yahoo.com>
Subject: ESPecially Yours

			    "ESPecially Yours"

				    by

			     Timothy Stillman


 His name was Van Merchant. He was 10. He was cuddle
creamy. He was a planet of golden imp in a sea of autumn
and winter night darknesses. We talked and huddled and
explored and giggled and touched and tasted and made love
to each other there in the bedroom. His laugh was warm,
and his eyes were huge. He was instant boy and instant
friend. Van seemed to know me the minute we met. There,
in his father's laughing lavish cultic cluttered
antique-studded rich living room, with the huge sofa and the
cushiony seats, all of it in black patent crinkly leather. Van
in his drenched bikini swim trunks, as he stood right before
me, his back to me, as he talked to his father, sitting in his
huge dark impressive throne of a recliner, across the room.
Little Tadzio come home from a canal to tell me, would you
just stop gazing at me, get the lead out, and come over here
and smack me with your lips, for god's sake?

I was so close to Van, I could almost see the flesh of the
little buns of the boy in the wet yellow trunks that
demanded to be pulled down right that second. The top of
his cleft was visible. The bones of his spine were
goosebumps down his sway back. His left hand on his hip.
His body leaning to the left knee. His legs and back tan to
browning I had never seen such a deep tan before, but still
somehow creamy appearing. His neck was small and the
back of his head was the back of a doll's head. His hair
thick, blonde, down to the top of his neck. I smelled boy. I
smelled summer. I smelled his swimming pool and the
exertions he had had in it, the diving, the plunging to the
bottom to the wet concrete and then propelling himself
upward and out of the watery cocoon into the bright yellow
splash of summer sun. I got an immediate erection and
crossed my legs, staring at the back of this boy who had
already come to mean nirvana to me. There was the rococo
look and feel and patina of old gold there in the living room
with the huge coffee table on which were giant cups of
coffee and cocoa and wine glasses. His father, a successful
psychic, was talking to his son in rich deep waves, the same
soothing waves of trust and believability and caring which
got money from people all around the world, because he
was so encompassing, his voice, his large bearish body, his
eyes that seemed to understand everything, as long as cash
checks or credit card numbers were at the center of it.

I almost died. I almost reached out my hand to Van's back.
I wanted to touch him so. I wanted to feel him with me, and
everything else vanished at that point. The huge ceiling, the
book cases chocked full of books on psychic phenomenon,
including some ghost written for Van's father. The boy was
shelves of love and lust and he was the ultimate sensual
animal there dripping pool water onto the thick brown
carpeting, in the cold room in the freezing air conditioning
as I thought I could see little puckers start in his skin from
the air. His shoulder blades were tiny coat hangers. He was
the first boy I had seen almost naked and so up close. There
was a foot or less of distance between us. He moved his
body, rested it on the other leg, and put his other hand on
that hip, reversing his previous stance. He was coming onto
me, he told me later, as we lay together, in each other's
arms, for he had sensed--something in me--something that
made him poke his hips out at me a bit more, make the
crease between them more inviting, more lingering.

I remembered thinking, and told Van later, now we see if his
father really is a psychic or not. His dad noticed--nothing.
Not ever. Either he was a fraud, or he was the greatest
parent in the universe. Van told me he would go with the
greatest parent theory. Afterwards, Van turned to me as I
sat hard as a rock, scared to death, trembling, hair wet with
fear, as dad introduced us. Van's face smiled. The entirety
of his face smiled. He was in concert with himself. He was a
boy symphony. He was everything I could imagine and far
beyond counting anyone's imagination. His nipples were
pale grapes, tiny and hard. His chest was a bow stretching
toward me wanting me to pluck it. His navel was a perfect
oval just right for someone to paint and hang in the Louvre.
His bikini bathing suit delved so low, that if he had had
pubic hair it all would have been visible. His package was
small and firm and I found myself looking right at his,
visible through the wet fabric, penis, water shriveled, then
slightly uncurling, and his balls clinging to the inside of the
yellow fabric, that begged pull me down and look at all of
me as long as your heart contends it.

I managed to nod and he smiled, he smiled like the sun was
a new invention that he had deeply inside him and he wasn't
going to show it to anybody until he showed it to me first. I
was 22. I whispered I love you. I saw him naked in my
mind. I pulled him to the carpeting frosty in the cold of this
house that had many warrens, many rooms, that had a round
ceiling and parallel rooms where you would expect parallel
to exchange off of horizontal rooms. There were not stairs
leading to no where, though there should have been. There
were little rooms and there were ceilings that were painted
black enamel with white stars in them and ceilings that were
white glow with black stars in them. Lighting in the living
room was a dim chandelier and the closed shaded windows
were huge and massive and made of beveled glass. There
was an upright stuffed bear carcass by the giant front door.

The carcass was an umbrella and raincoat and winter coat
rack. The living room was dark amber. David, Van's father,
wore shorts and a blue T shirt with an S emblem on the
pocket, but it was Van who was superboy to me. It was
Van who said something to me, encased in the bubble of
boy words, encased in that tiny little marvel of perfection
known as a voice to conjure all the other endings of the
world worth it for this ending that would start everything in
the grip of the right machinery that would get everything
just right. To a glorious ascent.

I looked at all of Van. I forgot his father's psychic abilities.
I forgot his father's intense and clever ability to read other
persons and fake it as some sort of supernatural thing. I
bathed my eyes in Van, and he glowed in the darkness, this
summer fire fly with the face of oval and the eyes of big and
the nose of pert and the skin of all the happiness God could
ever devise for this planet, a princeling who seemed to carry
himself like a jewel of immense worth on a velvet red
pillow, only it was up to me to do that for him, for it was
with that deed in mind I had been created. He chirped
something back to his father, ran past the king size fireplace
in this house attempt at Kubla Khan, his father's attempt at
making himself into a mentalist Citizen Kane, and the walls
were thick with bricks as Van ran past them on bare feet,
legions of angels pushing them onward, and up the stair
case with gilt on either side, the railing of it pure walnut,
and on there to his room where he told me later that he
masturbated to me immediately.

We talked about the beginning those October and
November nights in bed. We talked and traveled our own
little highways. We swam naked in each other's eyes. We
exposed everything, his success in picking the right parents,
for their wealth and their indulgence of him and his brother
who was now away at MIT. For he fully believed he had
picked his parents and that he could make his life whatever
he wanted it to be. We tangled in each other and in sheets
and legs and arms and penises hard again to remove further
sexual barricades nature set down between us to amuse
itself with, while we broke them down and amused
ourselves with them instead.  We explored the warrens of
the haunted house that was him and the ghosts and cobwebs
that were wearing a little boy face, for he told me he was
ancient, he told me he could make anyone do anything. We
talked about the time his mom wanted me to interview him
(I worked, free, for this family, trying to place articles
ghosted by me under the psychic's name). How she, a big
boned woman with a wreathy face like out of Dickens', as
we sat at the coffee table, that always had coffee and hot
chocolate (in cups that stayed heated for a long time) big
containers, that at least in my memory, were jewel
encrusted, like the kind Kings use in movies, as Van told me
in excited tones, there as he wore a spotless white shirt and
summer shorts I wanted to pull a certain other way, how he
made his teacher sick the other day.

They were to take a test. Van knew he would not do well
on it. I didn't think to ask why he couldn't just read the
teacher's mind or students' and get the right answers from
them. In the morning, as soon as the teacher walked in the
classroom, Van started thinking, you're sick, really really
sick, go home, lie down, go home now. Shirley and I were
trying not to laugh at him because he was so intent on it, so
dramatic, so inspired, for he had learned much from his dad.
He had learned to weave the spider webs.

 He had learned how to entrance. He had learned how to
beseech with his glittery bright eyes that sparkled sunlight in
shadows of me and everywhere else that he turned. Van
went on and on in this hypnotic voice as he gathered himself
into himself and something past imp was born in him.
Something past larceny and an intent ability to lie (or
accidentally to guess right or wrong) to people when
fortunes were told, when predictions were made, when
elderly couples or widows or widowers hocked everything
on the trust they gave without hesitation to Van's father,
questions about where they should live the ends of their
lives, what they should invest in, who should inherit from
their wills, and David not to give a damn the answers, or the
conclusions they would make from these answers, for he
was a charming confidence man, but a confidence man
nonetheless.

Yet Van, in wishing a teacher ill, for sheer selfish purposes,
in doing as his father did on radio and TV programs and
through the mail, somehow made the whole thing ineffably
sweet, made the whole thing seen through the aggressively
innocent eyes of a child, right out of a Zenna Henderson
story, the people who knew the deepest rhythms of life, who
knew where the kernels of truth and willfulness could blend
out of themselves not in selfishness but in a beguiling
smoothing out of the wrinkles of life, threadbare no longer,
the tentacles of space and fantasy in Van for me. And at
10:56 a.m. that morning, the teacher said she wasn't feeling
well, that they would not have the test today and she would
have the principal assign someone else to fill in the rest of
her class period. I'm writing this bilge down on my  notepad
and autumn is arriving outside and city blocks are friendlier
then, happiness is bigger then, because Van stayed with
autumn and we became closer. I was the family's go-fer as
well, and would, at noon, walk a few blocks to Hardees and
get everybody lunch. I loved those walks. Knowing Van
would be waiting. Sometimes he walked with me. So good
to have him by my side. We kidded and goofed along. And
he looked up at me and I in looking down at him have never
looked upward quite so high before during or since.

The leaves were red and gold, beginning to fall, the season
in its entry way to a crumpled up stage, and Van and I lay
this night in bed and the room was overheated and we
perspired and the window had rhymes on it, the tiny
window right by our bed, (Van opened the black shutter of
it and showed it to me, I had not noticed it before; in case I
needed to see outside, to orient myself a bit )and I would
touch my finger to the rhyme of the moment and put it onto
the face of Van, onto his cheeks and forehead and to his
mouth. He would put my finger into his mouth and suck it
and kiss it, and then release it, and tell me what the rhyme
was and what it meant. I could feel him in the dark so boy
serious, with this intensity on his face as he told me, and of
course he got it right every single time.

David never found out about me and his son. That or he
was the greatest parent---and so on. I never feared David on
this or Shirley. We were never obvious together, except we
were painfully obvious together. We would sit on the sofa
and listen to David's latest predictions for his upcoming
New Year's radio show. Or we would watch David and
another unpaid writer working on a pilot for a TV show that
involved lots of trips by that would be writer to New York,
lots of work, grinding twelve hour work days (for the
writer, David was too busy resting up for a book tour or
radio show appearance or just concentrating on being his
own noble irreplaceable self), and when it didn't materialize
that writer dematerialized as well.

One day I mentioned I hadn't seen Darien around lately.
David did not say a word, just looked at the carpeting for a
minute as though he had just tasted something a bit too
sour. Shirley wearing one of her infinite number of caftans,
with, it seemed, cheap dime store jewelry wrapped thickly
around her ropy neck, said, "He's gone." Like he had fallen
off a cliff into hell. No more was said about him. The same
fate would happen to me at the beginning of the next
January. With ice very cold and snow far too deep and skies
far too cumbersome and longing and Van and I no more.
"He's gone."

A house of shadows. A house of corners were there until
you looked directly at them, when suddenly there would be
no corners at all, befitting of a now you see it now you
don't psychic, who had had his bio written by a Houdini
expert. The bio was published by Pocket Books. I would
have asked David for his autograph on the book but I had
been dismissed by them by that point. David had a way of
not seeing what he no longer wished to see. Was that why
he never figured it out about his son and me? Or did he just
not bother with small details? He had once been a Baptist
minister, but he said to me one time he didn't mind
homosexuals, because "everyone has a right to their own
religion." I figure all preachers are cons, so he hadn't
strayed far from his flock and was just sheering them in a
slightly different way.

Van moved against me. I felt his boy body. Touched his side
slender. Touched his hair and kissed him right on the crown
of his head. He shuddered and held me close to him. He told
me I was the first living teddy bear he had ever had and I
said he was the first boy I had ever had who didn't laugh at
me, the first person for that matter, and he said he was sorry
that I could not see how psychic I was, that he was sorry I
had no faith in my abilities. I pushed him on his back on the
huge wide comfortable bed and gobbled his penis into my
mouth. I sucked him hard and he pushed into my mouth,
fucking it. The room we were in was once his brother's
room. It was black. I mean the walls, flooring, ceiling were
painted drop dead blackout black. You walk into the room,
even turn the lights on, and the thing was like being in outer
space. The black swallows the light and you along with it
down its greedy night gullet.

It was as though you were tethered onto an umbilical cord
and you were floating in a desolate space of no stars, and
you fall to your knees and you feel wood beneath you but
it's hard to accept unless the universe you have been
unleashed into is made of wood, and you have trouble
breathing, you don't think you can and you think you are
tumbling head over heels, that there is no up and down,
there is only eternity spinning its way round you and
through you.  One weekend David and Shirley invited me to
stay over, since I lived some distance from them in another
town, and I was at the time working on an article I was
ghosting for  David for "Gallery Magazine," a cheap
PLAYBOY rip off, on how to get someone to fuck you just
by psychically directing them (the pitch with psychics
always starts with this--everybody has this ability; it's
nothing special; it makes people feel important, as well as
stupid they can't do such a natural thing; it makes the
psychic seem lots less creepy too for obvious reasons,
money and trust being the name of the game).

 That first night of the weekend, Van came into my room. I
was holding onto the bed trying to stop the revolving bullet
train feeling that I was rocketing into another solar system,
half laughing at the ridiculous image of me in bed
skyrocketing into deep space, and I felt this little hand on
my hand gripping the bed side.

And this little hand became two little hands and a little face
appeared in front of me. A face that was first of all invisible
in the black. Then a tiny cameo of a smudge. And then the
sun bright face of a boy, a sun bright Aztec godling who
said not to worry, the stars are inside us both, and the sun,
and let me show you how. How I wanted to be psychic.
How I wanted not to be clumsy and awkward and scare
filled. How I wanted to get rid of the guilt. And the boy
came to me and he straddled me and he was naked and he
pulled up my t shirt and he sat his naked balls and bottom
on me, and he leaned down and he kissed my nose and I
reached up with hands that were trembling more but for
totally different reasons, and caressed his long blond hair
and he leaned backward and I felt his hard little three inch
penis on my bare belly and I felt myself grow hard as he
reached one hand for my penis and began masturbating me
and I came just a little at his hips and he dry came on my
stomach. He got off me to see my cum in his superpowered
vision, but there was little because I had already jacked off
twice that night thinking of him in his room right next to
me. No tell tale stains. Kleenex always accompanies me on
such occasions.

He lay on top of me and I rubbed his naked buttocks. And
he leaned into me and he was small and short and filled with
lean energy. Later nights, we talked about our first time
together. We laughed that his mom could not get me to
write the story for "Gallery" in a sexually explicit way. I
kept making it too tame, she would tell me after re-write
after re-write. I tried to include a few more "fucks," all the
passion and hot breath I could imagine, before and
especially during Van, but I couldn't make the thing horny
enough, sexy enough, but I had Van and we laughed about
how I just could not shake that bland good guy image, at
least in words, though I was making progress with this boy.
Boy became a poem. Boy became a night that lasted
forever. Boy became the world's most coveted word. And
when Van and I would sit in the living room after his
parents had gone to bed, we could cuddle on the couch and
watch TV and hold hands and I would nuzzle into his
cheeks, and he would tell me something like he had created
all of this between us, he had made me braver than I would
ever be again, he had wanted this that much and couldn't I
climb out of my selfpitymobile long enough to see it? And I
could not. That was the thing. I could not.

And one night in early December, when David and Shirley
were giving me one last chance to work, for free, for them,
by letting me ghost answers letters people wrote David
asking advice, it all began to atrophy. I had had meals at
their house. They let me stay over. They let me read David's
books. Where the hell was my gratitude? Just where the hell
was it? Why couldn't I get anything published under his
name, dammit? Low key, though, they always were. I never
heard a voice raised in that house. So I failed them. I was
not able to do it, not able to use this ability that of course I,
like everyone else, the party line, had, though most of the
letters I answered in David's name were from teeny boppers
who wanted to know if they would ever meet throb idol
David Cassidy. I had no idea what to write other than "Over
my dead body, babe" --at least that was what I said to Van,
which made him laugh so loudly, here in my bedroom very
temporarily/his brother's former bedroom for always, save
on distant visits/next to Van's empty room, Van always
coming over to hop in bed with me.

Anyway the letter answering thing didn't work. David had
some guy down the street answering the live or die make or
break letters for people whose lives hinged on the answers,
until David's lawyer said that was really kind of how should
you put it? dangerous, so that stopped. For a while. Till
David found some other way round it. His computer with its
hybrid form letters coupled with one or two personalized
sentence he or somebody wrote in his name, applicable to
the letter writer. Van said the final night to me as we were
both resting breathing hard in the outer space room, we had
just fucked for the first and last time. I had eased myself into
him, going slowly, carefully, and it was a sense of comfort
and peace and jollity I have never had before or sense, as
now we lay in each other's arms and I massaged his boy ass,
Van said, you don't believe any of this, do you? I said it was
ridiculous, his father was not psychic, he was a venal thief,
even though I couldn't help but like the guy, he was a
preyer on other people's misery, and Van pulled away from
me then, I had never been that direct about his father to him
before. Van said, tremulously, then you don't believe I'm
psychic either do you? I didn't say anything. I kissed each of
his fingers instead.

I made it happen, Van said, brushing my lips from his
fingers. He asked how something as outlandish as this could
happen otherwise? I froze at that moment. Had his father
arranged this, physically or psychically, were Van and I rats
in a maze like in a novel I had just finished reading, "The
Magus"? A novel in which magic and mystery and the
supernatural are really just coverings for a bunch of
psychologists and psychiatrists toying with human
specimens and when some die they are just replaced to go
through the rat maze in their own particular ways? Van said,
that was not it at all. It was the first time it seemed as
though he could actually read my mind. He was adept in
people reading, had gotten that from his dad, but this? We
were both tired. There were obvious keys to what he said to
me, obvious stair steps that he used to get to his reading my
mind or so it seemed. Or he was just throwing out some
sentence that could mean anything at all, a trick his father
loved, to make me believe. No, Van, I don't believe it for a
second, I did for a time, your father, and you, are very
persuasive. But no, not anymore. This very thing. I touched
the length and breadth of him, proves it not so.

And then, because Van could do nothing else to convince
me, and because I had hurt him, had doubted him, and he
had had to hurt me back, he vanished, and I was in the black
bedroom alone. Bereft, silently weeping into my hands, my
body shivering from the cold in this intense fire burning
sweating heat, and I felt I was floating off into space.  One
summer morning, when I was a young child, I was
performing my usual daily rite of taking out the garbage, out
the back door, pushing open the fly specked screen door,
down the wooden steps, trying not to tremble over the warp
and age and bending of them, down the little concrete
stepping stone path, through the junky back yard, to the
trash can beside the garage. I put the sack on the ground
and moved my left hand to open the trash can lid, as I
looked at it for the first time.

 In the first instance, I thought it was a brown and red
speckled stick, lying on the lid, and resting against the side
of the garage. Immediately the stick reared back and seemed
like it was going to strike me. I had never seen a snake up
close before. I don't think I had ever seen one except on TV
and in movies, and though I probably scared him more than
he scared me, I screamed, pulled back, the garbage sack fell
over and I ran through it and the mush in it, back to the
house, terrified beyond words.

It was like that with Van no longer with me. With Van back
in his room. Where he had always been at night. I had never
touched him. He had never touched me. A goddam fantasy
on my part, like always. The boy would never have dreamed
I was thinking such things. Would have been repelled if he
had known even a tiny part of those thoughts. Hopeless me.
Reading him all wrong. Like I read everybody all wrong.
Him thinking me a joke. All of them thinking me a joke.
Here in the house of a millionaire psychic, me the dumb
duck competing against them. And somehow thinking he
was winning, and would be a part of them with Van forever
ten beside me always 22 all the world long.

The whole universe seemed to rear back and bare its fangs
and get ready to strike me. The house was suddenly not
huge. It was suddenly not a mansion that took up half of its
city block. It was not welcoming and expansive. It was not
a house where theories of supernormal would be talked
about as fact, as credo, for this house was groping at me,
getting tinier and tinier. And I wanted Van's golden penis in
my mouth again. I wanted to fuck it with my mouth. I
wanted to go up and down on it, I wanted to feel its tremble
and his giddy giggly release into it.

I wanted to be there for the time he spurted first. I wanted
to be inside him again, like I was earlier tonight, I wanted to
hold him and feel him yield gracefully as a swan to me. I
wanted to push into him and be careful not to hurt him, I
wanted to feel my penis ejaculating into his boy hole, and
then my pulling out and letting some come on his back and
left hip, which he reached back and rubbed into himself like
precious ointment. I wanted that closeness back again. The
closeness that had been--oh god here's that old chestnut
once more, I apologize deeply for it--a dream. So I dressed.
Packed. Got silently out of the house with no one knowing
it.

I walked down the midnight senseless snake screwed streets
in the hoary cold air. I walked an hour or two to try to calm
down, figure things out, before I went to my car and headed
home. I should have gone to my car first. I should not have
walked so long. I should have not spent time at the river
front, seriously considering drowning myself, till I
remembered a particular Dorothy Parker rueful gin
drenched poem about suicide being so inconvenient and
hurtful that you might as well live. It made me hollow,
remembering. But it made me want to die a little less. When
I finally walked back to the car, I took the keys out of my
pocket. A slip of paper fell onto my lap with the keys.

 I started the car, turned on the ceiling light,  unfolded the
paper, and read a child's scrawl, "It did happen. You didn't
make it happen. No one did. But me. it was in my mind. you
were. I was. It was real. Believe. ESPecially yours." It was
not signed. But that "ESPecially yours" sickly cuteness was
how all David's and Shirley's letters were signed. That Van
used it too made him one of them. I wanted nothing more to
do with him.

And, I had seen Van's handwriting enough when I went
over tests with him to know this note was from him. I rolled
the window down, balled the note, threw it out. Then rolled
the window back up and turned on the heater. Sat a minute.
Got out. Picked up the letter--very gently. I looked up at
Van's room, hoping he would be looking back at me from
the window, begging me to give him another chance,
tearfully crying out, banging on the windows with his fists,
rain pounding the window dramatically, his voice weak with
love, I'll forget Rebecca this time, honest to god I will,
Rebecca who?, see? Who the hell is Rebecca?, don't know
the dame, just come back, pleasssseeeeee. But, that was for
the movies and Daphne Du Maurier readers. Put it in my
coat pocket. Got back in the car. I turned off the ceiling
light. I put the car in drive. I left. I did not believe. I do not
believe. I was mad as hell. I guess I still am. I never saw
Van again. The last time I was summoned was for David to
ignore me and Shirley to say an ersatz goodbye. Van was at
school. I don't know if he made any other teachers sick.
That no longer seems funny to me.

So, because the whole thing is so bizarre, I've decided to
put it down here, to let you decide. Or to let Zenna
Henderson decide, if anyone knows a channeler who could
get through to her.