Date: Mon, 8 May 2006 07:23:19 +0200
From: Julian Obedient <julian.obedient@gmail.com>
Subject: In Harm's way

i.

Pulsing and unrelenting, the heat of the desert sun burned fire into
the desert sand.

Even night became a black density scorched by fire. You had to
struggle for every breath. Each one got stuck in your throat and could
choke you.

ii.

The stars above us -- I gazed at them as I lay supine in our secret
embrace. I gazed, then, enslaved, at him, into his eyes. My deeper
secret, as he took me, before I knew I was gone, my deeper secret,
like a ray from one of the stars, penetrated me just as he did. I
turned crazy in a cosmic embrace. He became the only wonder, the only
order I could follow. Only he! I clung to him with my lips. He burned
me with his eyes.

I might have been going crazy, I know. I was. But the war, oh, the
war! What had I been thinking when i signed? I hadn't been thinking. I
was led by a mad magnetism, drawn by something I was fleeing from that
finally caught me. But it was too late now. It did not matter what I
thought. It was after I was in the army that I realized -- crazy as I
seemed to be, crazy as I felt --  with no doubt about it, the war was
crazier. It was the rule of madness upon earth. It was the kingdom of
death I was serving. It was mad and it made men mad.

He only, only he, was not mad. He filled me and gave me life. He was
the inevitability that guided me.

Nothing of my past remained except my disconnected, disconnecting
recollection of it. But even memory, memory too, was burning out.

You would think it would be painful to undergo what I have undergone,
what then I was about to undergo. But you would be mistaken. Mistaken,
as I so often had been mistaken. That was when I knew it, when I had
to undergo what we endured, when things began to go "wrong." That's
when I knew my life had been a mistake but was no longer.

The pain of the beating was meaningful, exculpatory. It brought me to
a point where it was easy to feel nothing.  That was where I needed to
be. When that emptiness was accomplished, when the man I had been in
the past was gone, then I was able to become his entirely.

We were lucky really. Our fault, although grave -- we had entered each
other's minds and flesh and feeling -- was judged the lesser fault.
Theirs, the bare-chested, drunk-with-anger, battle-ravished,
battle-frustrated, tense as tight coils soldiers' rampage, theirs  had
been a fault of violence and brutality. It had to be hidden. Having
been beaten, we were thought of as punished already and we were,
consequently, only discharged. We were the evidence of what it really
was that war and the army and military repression reallty were, and
they had to get rid of us. The sting we were meant to feel was that
the judges marked our discharges dishonorable.  That was meant to
guarantee our silence and discredit us if we spoke. Why listen to men
branded dishonorable? But what do they know about honor? Or about our
discharges, either?

My life up until the time I had become dishonorable to them -- had been
a mistake. Being with him, however, was not a mistake.

Strange! I was glad it was happening. I remembered the biblical verse.
Yes, that I remembered, always attached to Handel's music: For he is
like a refiner's fire.

And who shall stand when he appeareth?

Evidently not me.

Every time he appeared, I fell upon my face before him and called him master.

No, that is not quite correct, for what is called I did nothing. There
was no I. Something called him master through me. And it was by that
cry of master, in the exactitude of that submission, that I was able
to locate and identify myself.

And he was a fire, and he burned me, and I was consumed.

Of course, there was trouble. There was bound to be trouble. First
there was the beating. Then there were the consequences.

But I was unaware of any of it. I was unable to see any of it coming.
How could I have seen any of it coming? He had blinded me, blinded me
with a vision brighter than anything I had ever seen before.

And there was nothing of cruelty in what we did. There was nothing
cruel in our love, nothing cruel in his domination, nothing belittling
in my submission. Cruelty does not exalt. And we were exalted.  We
were, in that dead and killing land, two men in love. It was a
miracle. The ones who beat us were debased. And the ones who found us
dishonorable are eternally belittled in their deepest hearts.

It was they who were blasphemers.

Exalted, yes, we were, so much so that when there was trouble, when we
had to face the consequences, it was not troubling. Everything was
going exactly as it had to. We had been beaten, and fortunate -- we
were not injured. We were not beaten, not defeated.

The moorings were loosened and the vast and waste desert was becoming
the sea of radiant waters lapping upon the grassy slope of ground upon
which we could stand.

Certainly I might have felt something disturbing had there been
incarceration. But there wasn't. There was only discharge.
Dishonorable discharge! Hah! But not for me was it dishonorable.
Everything to do with honor, pride, ego, had already been discharged
in me after that first discharge, after he had kissed me and taken me
and bent me and made me everything I knew I always might have been.

I could not tell: was this a trance now or had everything until now
been a trance. Reality had been a nightmare. If this now were a dream,
then it was so: in dreams begin reality. The war was Plato's cave, and
we had seen the light and known it for what it was, and we fled from
it.

The dead and bleeding bodies passed before me of men who had been
nothing to me. My poor and beaten doubles! In death they became
symbols of everything to live for and not to die for. Just the breath.
Just the breath. Leave us the breath. That is what we need. But the
wars and the rulers rob us of it. Just the breath.

He had chosen for me not to die. It was in his eyes, on his lips, in
the quivering of his whole body when he was inside me. And I felt with
all my soul the same living love for him. It was a conspiracy of love
in which we were joined.

This is not what we are here for, this war, he said as his eyes
searched mine for a place of entrance and his hard masculinity met
with my opening receptivity.

There is a barrier of pain. But it must not be endured. It must be
broken through. And the pleasure on the other side is more than bliss.
It is where you dissolve. But it is not death like the madness of war
is death. It is vital like the on-going energy of life, of life that
is allowed to live.

Madness, brutality and violence. In order for them to rule, order and
regimentation must be imposed, established.

But with me with him with us the force that made order was the
meandering of the stream and the rushing of the current, the gusts of
frenzy, and the placid cool pools of gently swirling and lapping
stillness upon which to float.

iii.

A mile or two beyond the town, which has not seen prosperity for
nearly a century, up a steep road that winds along the side of the
mountain up to the next plateau, and then over a serpentine dirt road
to a clearing --  the old Victorian house appears under the expansive
blue and cloud flecked sky, behind the arboreal gate flooded in spring
by foliage. It is of a previous time when wealth still came to the
area and families practiced the habits of abiding by civilized and
civilizing rituals. Now it was under-populated and rough, and we got
the house for a song.

But I did not expect that Geoffrey would be so fragile. I did not. Or
that I would have the strength to endure without him. He had been a
rock and a ramrod in the desert and I loved the feeling of his skin so
close to the always stirring power of his muscles even when he lay
upon his bunk in repose, and I could occupy myself for hours with
resisting touching him. But now, the spirit that had been so firm in
him grew entirely slack.

Perhaps as he withered, for that reason, it could find its way into
me. So much we had become one. We had become home to one and the same
power.

I held him as he sobbed, day after day, in the morning as he stirred
into wakefulness. He would look at me and then bury his face in his
hands weeping and curling himself up into an inflexible inwardness.

Slowly and gently with kisses and caresses I held him and warmed him
and brought him to loosen his hold upon himself, to open up, to open
up and give himself to me, to open, yes, to open up, to open, no
matter how bad it had been. Now all we needed to do was just breathe
quietly.

Together, we breathed. I held him and we breathed, and he loosened
himself in my arms and smiled at me and kissed me and thanked me and
told me how much he loved me and how much I meant to him and he
stroked me on my chest and gazed into my eyes and brought his lips
down to mine and kissed me.

And I was deceived and believed we had escaped.

iv.

It was only after he told me, sobbing, that he was afraid I was going
to kill him, and so he was afraid that he was going to kill me first,
before I killed him, that I really became afraid.

He stayed awake for days, sleepless, and I was wary.

The night he finally slept, I sat awake beside him and I kissed him
and told him he was mine, even if he was gone, that I loved him and
would have died for him and never would have killed him but would
always have protected him and would have been with him wherever he
might have had to go.  I had told him that before. But now he was
still, as if he were listening.

I cradled him and kissed his eyes shut.

But it was too late.

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