Date: Wed, 25 May 2016 12:28:12 +0200
From: Julian Obedient <julian.obedient@gmail.com>
Subject: Given A Way

*Given A Way *



	     *"To give away yourself keeps yourself still..."*


  Shakespeare,
Sonnet 16




1.

      In its beginnings, his story was, really, not unique. Tim was a
lonely kid, skinny, caved in chest, scrawny. He wasn't athletic; he wasn't
excited by sports. He was out of place with boys his age. His mother
expected he would make friends with them, but he didn't; he did not really
have anything in common with them. They could smell he was not one of them.
 Around girls, he was embarrassed, and girls realized it and looked right
through him, giving him all the more cause for awkwardness and
embarrassment.

     He spent much time reading. One solitary vice then gave way to
another. When he was twelve, he began to lock himself in the bathroom, but
instead of using the toilet, or taking a bath, he perched on a stool in
front of the mirror and combed his hair, styling it the way guys in the
movies he watched did. He idolized well-defined, lean, muscular guys – the
kind he saw in the movies, and, every now and then spotted in real life. He
longed to look like them, and despaired of it. In secret, in front of the
mirror, he tried to look like them. He inflated his chest and pulled in his
belly. When he took the subway he would struggle with himself to keep his
eyes averted once he'd noticed someone he could not keep from gazing at,
usually, a guy in jeans, boots, and a leather jacket. Even when he averted
his eyes however, he was oblivious to anything but an overpowering presence
and the nervous fear that he would be seen looking.

     In the real world, in the one he was supposed to live in, not the
world of his relentless enemy, his imagination – where he fantasized a
flamboyance he never could reveal -- he was anything but expressive in
grooming or apparel. His hair was always conservatively cut and combed. In
school, he wore the clothes his mother got him, gray flannel slacks, a
white shirt, and a tie. During winter months, the outfit was completed with
a forest green sweater with a vertical black meander pattern going down the
left side. A gym teacher in health class once cited him as an example of
the way you're supposed to dress for school.

     What else did he do when he combed his hair in front of the mirror? He
played with himself. But "himself" here does not just mean his cock. He
played with his ass, too, not penetrating it, but swiping it in such a way
that made him shiver. And he rubbed his nipples. He caressed them. He
pinched them. He scratched them. As he did, his back arched, his posture
got straighter; he imagined it was somebody else doing it, taking control
of him. His body stretched to rigidity. The first time he came it was a
shock, confusing him with wonder. He trembled, flooded by awe and amorphous
panic. Then his body gave way to a sad ache; he was drained and deflated,
as if he had been beaten.

     At fourteen, he decided he had to do something. He was routinely
teased and told that he was effeminate, called a fag and a homo. He did not
know exactly what the actions were that these words denoted, but he sensed
the disposition they implied: at school kids picked on him, punched him,
tripped him, threatened to beat him up after school. Even random strangers
on the street taunted him. But he was incapable of shifting the paradigm of
reality in which he had become embedded -- until he was assigned to a
speech class to correct a slight lisp that an overzealous English teacher
had detected. As far as he knew, no one had ever noticed it before. He
hadn't. But Mr. Weber had. When he took him aside after class and told him
he was sending him to the speech clinic, he added, "It's for your own good.
That lisp makes you sound effeminate, and I'm sure you don't want that, do
you?" No, he didn't. So he stayed after school every Tuesday and Thursday
and practiced saying, "She dances in France when she seeks for romance,"
until his tongue knew automatically just what spot on his upper gums it had
to tap.

     Mr. Weber got to him with his dig about effeminacy, and he knew he had
to do more about it than just take a speech class. He had to change his
body. He knew you did that by working out, but working out, deliberately
going about changing the way your body looked, was the sort of assertion
that was impossible for him. He feared he was stuck with the identity he
had and could only overcome it in daydreams. Choosing the way he identified
himself and making that identity his, being known as he wished to be, not
as he was, made him shrink back into himself with embarrassment. It was
more than just his body that had to be changed. But he was who he was and
he was stuck with it.

     Around this time, his parents decided to get a divorce. Actually, it
was his mother who sprang it on his father late one night, sitting in the
kitchen, backed up by one of her sisters, after the day of her own father's
funeral. Tim was not asleep, just lying in bed, having been woken when they
returned. His bedroom was down a long hallway, far enough from the kitchen,
yet not so far that he could not hear what they were saying. He sat up when
he heard his mother say she wanted a divorce. It was totally unexpected,
and he sensed that it would be momentous. Everything would change – and
nothing would change. The world that was was still the world that was, and
yet it was not. He would still be himself, but who would that self be now
with this fundamental change? There was some kind of change, but what kind?
It was beyond him. He told his parents in the morning that he'd heard what
they'd said. His mother said that it was for the best. His father shook his
hand and said that it did not have to keep them from being friends. That
was an odd thing to say, he thought, since as far as he knew they never had
been "friends."

     That was it. He left for school, somewhat in a daze, not knowing how
he felt or what he was supposed to feel. Was it a disaster or a release?
Something was being altered, torn apart -- was it being damaged? -- and
he'd never be whole again: he'd always be pulled apart and, if reassembled,
he'd still only be a collection of pieced-together fragments.

     He graduated high school and went on to college – out of town, away
from his now divorced parents, on a scholarship. His roommate, David Eliot
Lance, was also the captain of his gym squad. In gym class, the boys were
divided up into squads. Each squad had a leader at its head. He wound up in
Lance's squad.

     David Lance was extraordinary – his ideal -- and he secretly
worshipped him. He feared, despite how much he tried to hide it, Lance knew
it just by looking at him. Lance had that effect on many people, but he was
not full of himself. Lance was courteous, gracious, and generous, popular
and universally liked, never a bully or self-promoting. It's impossible to
say just how small he felt in comparison to David Lance, not because Lance
was taller than him, lithe, handsome -- handsome and gracefully muscled,
his eyes, bright and deep, his face, aglow with intelligence – but because
of something he could not pin down, because of an essential magnetic force
that flowed from him. When he smiled it broke out with the happiness of
primal nature. He looked like a jock, but when he spoke, you could tell he
was really smart and well read; he had an A+ GPA and wrote a column for the
school paper.

     One morning after gym class, he was changing back into street clothes
before going to French class, when David, splendid only with a towel
secured around his waist, came up to him. Tim had been particularly
maladroit that morning during gymnastics, and spent most of the time
sitting in the bleachers, hoping he would not get called on again to do
anything. This did not reflect well on David as a squad leader, who, as
captain, was held responsible for the performance of the members of the
squad. He'd hoped to avoid him, figuring that if Lance were angry, by
evening when they got back to their room, his anger would have lost its
edge.

      "You don't like yourself," David began without prelude, as a reproach
as well as an observation.

     "What makes you say that?"

     "Look at you."

     "What about me?"

     "You are ashamed of yourself."

     "I'm not ashamed of myself," he shot back too quickly.

     "No?"

     "No," he said.

     "Then you ought to be," David said, but without venom.

     "You're frightening me," Tim said, knowing deep down that David was
right.

     "You're frightening yourself. That's what cowardice is, frightening
yourself."

     "How am I frightening myself?" Tim said defiantly, stupidly, dodging
David's accusation that he was a coward.

     "By not letting yourself be who you are."

     "Who am I?"

     "You don't know?"

     "I don't," he said spitefully.

     "You expect me to believe that?"

     "I don't care what you believe."

     "You keep yourself from knowing."

     "And you know?" Tim taunted.

     "I do," Lance said, "and you know that I do."

     Lance looked at him, through him, so – Tim could not tell if it was *so
blankly* or *so penetratingly* – that he could not doubt that he did know.
Once he was hit by that realization, by David's power of penetration,
everything changed. Tim's resistance fell apart. He could only tell that it
was resistance as it fell away, and a clearing opened inside him where
defiance had been. But he did not know what it had been resistance to. He
did not know what he had been freed from.

     David smiled. He did know.

     "What can I do?" Tim said.



2.

     "It's a force that is always above you and always beyond you, an
energy that fills you with its power. It makes you strong and it makes you
humble. When you're an initiate, that force is embodied in the master.
Without a master, you have no strength."

     They were alone, just David Lance and Tim, in the workout room off the
main gym, in shorts and loose sleeveless t-shirts. They were standing;
facing each other, at what David said was called parade rest. Lance was
explaining the kind of discipline and training that would happen. The two
things, he told Tim, that he had to keep in mind throughout all their
physical exertions were discipline and obedience.

     "Discipline and obedience are the tools you need to gain inner power
and a defined, well-toned body."

     "How will I know who my master is?" Tim asked, afraid not only of the
answer but shaken by his need to ask the question.

     "You will feel it," David said.

     He did feel it. He was ashamed. He stammered, with the awkward
hesitation of somebody realizing something inevitable and inescapable, "You
are my master."

     "What is a master?" Lance asked, gently, easing him into his
enlightenment.

     Tim blushed.

     Lance lifted his chin with his index finger and fixed his gaze on him.
"A master is the man who determines who you are."

     "Yes," Tim said. He understood.

     "Your strength comes from obedience...to him."

     David pressed his palm against the small of his back and he felt a
current of electricity surge through him. He was tingling. David ordered
him down onto the floor to begin crunches and push-ups. He was pathetic,
but at the end of two hours, with David's guidance, he no longer was.



     Their friendship developed, and it became intense.  But, from the
start, it was something other than, more than, different from just
friendship, at least, as far as Tim knew, for him. Friendship implies
equality. In their friendship, there was no equality. David was dominant
and he was submissive. He loved being submissive. He accepted it easily.
David commanded and he obeyed. David was the master; he was the disciple.
They shared a room, they hung out together, they worked out together, they
sat at the same table in the dining room, they horsed around, they spent
hours together in the library studying. That was the surface. David took
possession of him. It was overwhelming. He lost himself in David; he
surrendered his will to David; David took over. David led. He followed
happily. He couldn't resist; he didn't want to.  David was his strength.

     They began going to the gym in September, every evening; by May, he
was not who he had been. He was defined, muscled, masculine, handsome,
impervious. One evening after a draining workout and a long swim in the
Olympic-size pool, David looked at him, and nodded approval. He blushed
like a girl. Yes, he had become impervious, self-possessed, apparently
masculine, but that was not how he was at his core. He had gotten a
reputation for being aloof, even cold. No one taunted him now. He did not
respond to small talk or flirtation; he did not ask girls, or boys, out on
dates – not out of fear, but because he was not interested, nor could he
even imagine initiating a relationship; he was oblivious to temptation; his
devotion to David was consuming; his desire to be with David overrode any
other possible need; it absorbed all of him. David Lance was his only
focus. When he was asked out on a date, which happened a lot, he declined
to go. He did not want anything but what David had to offer. He had
developed pride. Being with David made him proud, but he was neither aloof
nor cold with David, only proud in and of submission to him. He was all
need and entirely dependent on David, but he was disciplined, too: he never
exploited his need in his effort to gain David's attention; he never spoke
of it. To do that would have been making a demand on David, which was
simply unthinkable. It would have been failing David. It would have been a
proof of disloyalty. His role was to be receptive, to obey, to make sure
that he could live up to David's requirements, to behave in such a way that
David Lance would be proud of him. He esteemed himself to the degree that
he felt worthy of David's esteem.



     If he revealed his heart, he would have confessed both open and secret
adoration. He adored David Lance beyond normal endurance, beyond what he
thought was his capacity. David was master and mentor and divinity. He
longed for him, wanting to feel more of his touch, to linger only in his
gaze as its desired object, to bloom for him, with him. He craved David's
devotion as much as he trembled with desire to surrender to him. And that
craving, he hoped, was neither obvious, nor unknown, despite his effort to
keep it hidden. Hiding his longing from David, or at least attempting to,
and thus slighting the power of David's insight into him was his one
disobedience. He wanted David to know, but he was afraid to tell him.

     "We ought to go on a vacation," David said as they walked through
University Woods in early June, after graduation. They had graduated,
both *magna
cum laude*, and they were bursting with the joy of life.

     "Spend the summer with me," David said, taking his hand and pulling
them down on the soft spring grass.

     Tim's parents, who now lived quite a distance apart from each other,
were not at all displeased that he was going to spend the summer with a
friend, despite knowing nothing about him.

     They flew to Greece, and from Piraeus took a boat to an island in the
Aegean, whose name, in the interest of keeping it from becoming a place for
tourists, I will conceal. Not to conceal the wherewithal that made this
possible – David paid for their trip.

     On the small island of -----, beaches roll away towards the sea, away
from the paws of bleached and grassless craggy mountains; the sand is soft
and white; everything shimmers with blue and sunshine. The viscose and
voluminous Aegean stretches, a sparkling cobalt under the sky, into the
azure in the distance, where both sea and sky become one.

     They stood looking out at the sea. Tim felt taller than he ever had.
"I can't believe this," he said. David touched his nipple gently with his
thumb. Tim's knees buckled; he lost his balance and fell into David's
embrace. David held him. He felt his solidity. He felt the force of David's
mouth against his. He felt himself dissolving: David enveloped him and took
possession. It was beyond even the excitement he had felt at school when
they exercised so intensely that they came.

     Something happened that summer. Despite the year's training to develop
masculinity, Tim realized that masculinity was only a body image he
projected, a stance he took – his body was lithe, muscled, rugged, defined,
but his essence was feminine. He had always been – that is what he came to
know -- longing, tender, yearning to yield like a woman, eager to receive
the love of a man. He appeared masculine but he responded feminine. Despite
how he looked! He was not masculine and aggressive. He was receptive and
yielding. It was not in his nature to command but to obey, not to dominate
and direct but to submit and follow. He knew it, and it elated him.

     "You are troubled," David said one evening as they walked in the
Chora, high above the sea. The moon was red and swollen as it rose to the
zenith.

     "No," he answered. "I feel something I don't know how to handle. I
thought that my training was about developing masculinity, about getting
away from the effeminacy that I was ashamed of."

     "But that has not happened," David said.

     "No."

     David put his arm around his shoulder, pulled him to him, and spoke
softly so that his breath caressed his neck. "Look into the distance,"
David said, pointing. "There is no end to it." David stroked his hard belly
– it contracted, and then softened. David moved his hand up his bare chest
and played with his tight nipples. They were tender. Tim's spine stiffened.
His neck elongated.

     "I feel like a woman when you do that," he whispered, throwing his
head back, shivering with a thrill he could not resist, unable to stop
himself from confessing it, or putting himself at David's mercy. "I want
you inside me. I want to take your cock inside me, please," he begged,
taking David's hardening cock, through his thin linen trousers, in his
fist. "I love your cock." David squeezed him to himself. They were happy.

     They walked alongside the white walls of the Chora looking out over
the Aegean, wending their way back to the room. Inside, gently, David
guided him to the bed, but before he lay him down, he undid his cutaways.
Tim stood, sun-bronzed, before him in lacey, white bikini underpants. David
gazed at him, turned him around, stroked his thighs and hard breasts. He
kissed him and cupped him and took off his panties and ran his thumb over
the crown of his cock and then put his lips around it and bathed it with
his tongue.

     He stopped, looked at him, and said, "You are beautiful."

     Tim was reaching a stage he had not known existed. He experienced an
ecstasy of passivity, of submission, of receptivity. David traced a finger
along the crack of his butt, and then he gasped when David pushed it into
him and circled it around inside. He had him in the palm of his hand. David
turned his head upward, drew him down, and pressed his mouth to his and
took him with his tongue. David took him? He gave himself. He lay under
him, legs apart, opened wide above him, holding on as David slowly,
rhythmically fucked him, deeper each time and deeper. David kissed him and
took his breath away. He swam in his embrace; after-images of the sea raced
across his inward eye. The glinting bits of sun became glistering bolts of
golden electricity shattering consciousness.

    When he opened his eyes, it was dawn. David, still asleep, was holding
him in his firm grasp, arms circling his chest, soft thick cock sandwiched
warmly inside him. He closed his eyes again and slept until he felt David
stir in him, caressing with a now hard bar, rolling his nipples between
thumbs and fingertips, making him quiver with the breath of kisses on his
neck and in his ear.

     At breakfast on a terrace overlooking the sea, he still felt David
inside him. He sat forward and whispered, "I still feel you inside me."

    From across the table David caressed his cheek with his palm.

    In the evening, they took a hydrofoil to Naxos.







3.

    The Groove on the Aegean, run by two English guys, is the name of a
discotheque on the waterfront, on the island of Naxos. The docks are on the
left; the Temple of Apollo, framed by sea and sky, is to the right.
Although open to everyone, The Groove is essentially a drag club. David and
Tim trekked through Naxos in the late afternoon, searching, particularly,
for what Tim would wear that night.

      If I'm going to interest you in what Tim would wear, you ought to
have a better sense of what he looked like than I have so far given you.
His eyes are blue, "like the Aegean," David said one night in winter, as he
cradled him in his arms and they gazed at each other by fire light: "Your
eyes are blue like the Aegean." David began to tickle him, and laughed,
"like the Aegean. I'm going to swim in you."

      His hair is full and thick and so black that in the right light it
has a blue sheen. His mother was Japanese, Yan Hiroko; his father, Italian,
Ben Ciraldi. They met in Times Square on New Year's Eve in 1987. In
deference to his mother they named him Timoc, but he was never called
anything but Tim.  His skin is smooth and bronze. "You are beautiful like a
girl," David said. He is 5'9", 145 pounds; slim, with nice muscle
definition. A galloping current of energy courses through him, like a horse
he is always forced to keep in harness.

     "With heels?" David started to question, but stopped, nodding his head
approvingly at the pair he pointed to in a shop window.

     He nodded, "Okay?"  They went in.

     That night Tim wore yellow heels, mauve stockings to mid thigh that
culminated in a black garter of paisley lace, pale copper-colored
hip-hugging leather shorts, a bright, pumpkin-colored, sleeveless,
clinging-to-the-skin t-shirt, cut to bare abs, a gold chain collar fastened
by a tiny lock around his neck, arms bare except for the leather strap
circling the left bicep. His hair was short and shaggy, and wisps fell on
forehead; his eyes were lined in violet and he wore violet lipstick. David
wore a skimpy sunshine yellow bikini and carried a leather riding crop,
twined like a caduceus, that they found in a gift shop among plaster busts
of Homer and Plato. Inside the club, at the bar, on the dance floor, they
were not an anomaly, but going through the narrow white walled, stone-paved
alleys, he was conscious of how intently and how often people looked at
them. He leaned on David's arm, gazed up at him, flushed with excitement
and devotion.

     They sat at the bar pressed against strangers, squeezed against each
other. They were on their second vodka sour when a barefoot young man with
pierced nipples and a few days' growth of beard, an amber-colored sarong
slung low around his hips, emerged from the crowd and approached. His eyes
were soft, liquid and beseeching. His smile was modest and self-effacing.
"May I join you?" He smiled demurely. His name was Panayiotis, he said, and
added, before they could stumble over trying to pronounce it, that everyone
called him Pan. It was appropriate.

     "These are exquisite," Tim said, fingering one of Pan's nipple rings,
caressing his cheek with the free hand. His few days' growth of beard was
soft.

     Pan blushed.

     "May I touch your nipples?" Pan asked.

     "You'll have to ask my master."

     Pan looked at David: "May I?"

     "Yes," David said, putting his hand on Pan's shoulder.

     "May I kiss them?" Pan asked.

     David smiled gently. He winked approval, and shook his head yes.

     Pan bent over gracefully, his hands clasped behind his back; kissed
each nipple reverently, gently bit them, covering his teeth with his lips.
Clutching David's hand as Pan worshipped his nipples, Tim knew that David
could feel the current going through him. They kissed while Pan continued
to flick his tongue over the nipples.

     "Now yours; may I?" Pan asked David, keeping his eyes lowered.

     David threw back his head, arched his back, extended his chest. Pan
bowed before him and pressed his lips to his nipple and kissed it
reverently, fanning his fingers across the other one.

     As Pan worshipped him, David guided Tim, holding his neck, back to
him, and took him by mouth and hollowed him with his kisses. Holding the
back of Pan's neck to keep his balance Tim dug nails into David's flesh –
burning to be fucked.

    Dazed, they looked at each other, breathless; loud disco music thumping
inside them as it hammered the room.

     "I know a quiet nook by the edge of the sea across from Apollo's
island. We can go there. It's quiet," Pan said.

     Stars flung out, salted through the sky, black over the sea. The
figure of Apollo rose from its base, gloried in the heavens surrounding it,
encompassing it.

     "How long are you here for?" Pan asked standing at the edge of beach,
as they all were, tide lapping feet in the midnight sea.

     "You're very beautiful," he said to Pan.

     "So are you, as beautiful as a beautiful woman," Pan answered.

     "You are also as beautiful as a beautiful woman, the sarong hanging
invitingly from your hips," Tim said, touching Pan, teasing him, loosening
it and letting it fall to the sand.

     "I like that you find me beautiful," Pan said.

     David took their hands and joined them. "You are in love with each
other, like lesbians."

     They gazed at each other. Tim took David's hand, brought it to his
lips, looking at Pan, and kissed it. "May I?"

     "Yes," David said.

     Tim pressed Pan close, ran his fingers through his hair, pressed his
lips against his, rubbed his body against him. He felt the bump and beat of
his breath as Pan returned his kisses and drew him nearer. He felt the
firmness of his rump and the power he had at his fingertips to make Pan
crazy.

     "Press your snatch to mine," Pan said.

     They twisted flesh to flesh; David penetrated both with his fingers,
choreographing ecstasy, until he pulled them apart. Tim watched as David
lowered Pan onto the damp sand, pushed his legs open, pulled his butt up,
and drilled in and out of him. With an outstretched hand David held Tim's
cock and brought it to a head. Tim came when David and Pan came and fell
upon David's neck, digging kisses into it.

     Afterwards, they lay on their backs in quiet bliss, on dry sand, their
eyes filling with the heavens.

     David broke the silence, but not the spell. He leaned over and kissed
his lover's lips.

     "I am proud of you," he said.

     "Why?" Tim asked in astonishment.

     "You let yourself go and got yourself back," David said, caressing his
cheek. "You are solid and true."

     Tim smiled. He had come through. An easy happiness spread through him.
He felt as if he had been knighted.

     Pan rubbed his belly, kissed him, and then sucked him slowly and
brought him to the height of an unendurable excitement. He shattered with
pleasure.

     It was the calmest and most assured Tim had ever felt. The warm night
air became his breath. They wandered, the three of them, homeward to their
room, where Pan would stay with them, going through the hilly, dark, and
empty streets of the Chora, lit only by moon and stars.

     Pan had to get back to his job in Athens; he worked in the editorial
offices of an international men's health and fitness magazine, as a
translator. They had to be in Athens to catch a flight... to Paris. David had
rented an apartment there – three rooms on Rue Blainville, near the
Contrescarpe -- before they left for Greece.

     After four years of college, they'd had enough schooling, thanks, and
did not want to sit through more. They wanted life and they wanted to
experience something outside the United States.

     David landed a job at the OECD as an office boy and was rightly
confident that he could rise from the rank of office boy to the rank of
someone served by an office boy. After three months he was assigned to
write a report on the viability of Greece as a member of the EU and the
consequence for Greece and for the European Union if Greece exited. David
discovered that the work -- accumulating, collating, and analyzing data --
interested him. He liked the intellectual challenge and the organizational
discipline demanded as well as the chance it gave him to learn and to
reflect on the variables of international events and scenarios, and,
because of his talent, to succeed.

     Flint Whitlock, the OECD Director of Audits and Evaluations, had been
immediately impressed by David when he saw him several days after he began
working there. It was the kind of pure knowing that is the result of an
ingrained affinity. And it was sexual attraction, too. Whitlock made a
point of sending for him that morning.

     "How long have you been here?"

     "Four days," David answered.

     "What have you learned in those four days?"

     "To keep my eyes open and to watch what I say," David answered,
laughing.

     "Can you write?"

     "Yes."

     "We'll see. I need someone to look at the Greek economy, collect data,
make sense of it, and present it in an easy to read and comprehensive
report." He waited a beat: "Interested?"

     David had no idea yet whether he was or was not interested in the
subject of the assignment itself, but he was certainly interested in
getting such an assignment. He said "yes," unhesitatingly, was given a
cubby, a computer, a list of questions and of issues that had to be
addressed, and several texts on Modern Greek history, economics, politics,
and culture.

     Tim and David did not see much of each other for several months. David
was holed up in his office until late every night – with no break on
weekends – or away from Paris doing library research or fieldwork, in
Greece.

     "Without me," his lover said, pouting. "Greece is ours."

      Walking one afternoon, several months later, following lunch, around
the lake in the Bois de Boulogne, with Whitlock, David was happy. He had
lived up to his plan. Whitlock spoke first.

     "You have a way of expression that is unlike what one usually sees in
OECD reports. You give the statistics and analyses, but you get something,
the way you write, that is not dry and bureaucratic."

     David thanked him, and Whitlock put his arm around him. "Thank you,"
he said.



 4.

     Tim was not sure what he was going to do, what course to pursue. David
said that was ok. He would find his way. As it happened, once again, it was
the other way: his way found him.

     It was raining. He was walking from the Place de l'Odeon to Les
Halles. The Pont des Arts was nearly deserted. It was a hot day's rain;
fell quickly and hard, then stopped, returning the day to sunshine and
heat. He was wet: hair dripping; black t shirt clung to chest; cut-away
jeans were soaked, but bare legs were already dry in squishy tennis shoes,
worn without socks. He laughed to be so drenched. Then he noticed that a
guy was looking at him, and when he finally noticed him, he smiled. Tim
grinned back, indicating he was aware he was a sight. The guy kept looking.
Tim returned the gaze.

     "I would have introduced myself to you whether you noticed me or not,"
he said. "I've been looking at you. I'd like to photograph you for a series
I have been commissioned to do. For *Elle*...That's not a line," he said,
giving his card. "Why don't we go for a coffee?"

     At that hour of the day, there were not many people at the café on the
Quai Malaquais. They took a table outside and saw across the Seine the
immense façade of the Louvre. Tim's shirt was nearly dry.

     The stranger was Jeremy Runsen, the fashion photographer.

     "It is strictly a crass commercial venture, and there's a lot of money
in it," he said smiling.

     Tim listened to his pitch, then told him he had to discuss it with his
husband.

     "Of course," Runsen said. "When can you get back to me?"

     David gave the go-ahead, pleased and amused – pleased at Tim's good
fortune, amused that, once so withdrawn, now Tim would be exhibiting
himself wholesale in fashion spreads on billboards, in slick magazines, on
the internet.

     "You'll be the focus of a million gazes," David said, "and of
numberless secret desires."

     "I know," Tim said, kissing him, exploring the volume of his mouth
with his tongue, his open palm reverently caressing David's neck. David
touched Tim's nipples and his eyes rolled up under the lids. Tim clawed
David, burning desperately to have him inside. But David resisted, and each
rejection inflamed him more, increased his desire to submit, to surrender,
to be a total slave. He trembled with need. "Please touch me.".

     "Put your hands behind your back. Get on your knees."

    Tim became only his mouth; he took David's solid cock slowly-- deep
within, bathing it devotedly with tongue, blindly, cock hard as the cock he
worshipped, and erupted as it erupted.



    With Jeremy Runsen guiding his career, Tim went from success to
success, from event to event, modeling, posing, giving interviews in major
cities.

      But there was no release, only stimulation, binges of excitement. He
told Runsen he was always on edge. Runsen acknowledged that he knew it,
that it was good, the way it had to be. "Being on edge gives you an edge,
makes you edgy. It's visible in everything you do, in your photo shoots, on
the runway, how you walk, how you speak. It makes you hot and always ready
to surrender to whoever wants you. That makes the millions who see you want
you -- and the stuff you are modeling. And it predisposes them to surrender
to the ads you're in."

     They few to Venice to shoot a spread on men's jewelry slated to appear
in all the editions of a major, slick, international magazine. It had been
a long three days of shooting. After it finished Tim stayed on alone. It
was after midnight. He was strolling through dark empty streets looking
down into the canals and up at the ancient palazzos that were reflected in
them and rose above them. He made his way to San Marco and sat on a bench
at the edge of the Grand Canal. David was in Corfu gathering information on
the feasibility of solar panels. Tim looked at his phone, hoping for a
message from him.

     "Can you get a signal from here?" A dominatingly handsome man sat down
beside him. He looked up from the screen.

     "I'm getting one now," he said.

     When the man smiled he took hold of him with his eyes.

     "I'm taken," Tim said, blushing, aware there was danger.

     "All the more exciting," the man said, deliberately playing off his
meaning, and kissed him, and he surrendered.

     The ambiguity of the situation and the lurking traces of guilt and
fear – the element of the forbidden -- only intensified the erotic force.  The
dominator freed his mouth but kept him in his embrace. The loyalty he felt
to David tore at him as strongly as his passion for Antonio, Antonio
Serretti. Resistance and passion struggled against each other inside him,
and he followed where he was led.

     The sun flooded the room in the morning; it was a room as unfamiliar
to him as he was at that moment unfamiliar to himself. Antonio opened his
eyes and smiled at him. He turned away his head, deliberately trying to
avoid the gaze. He did not want this to go on, but he knew that he could
not break it off.

      "Hey, *ragazzo*," Antonio said, tenderly, "tell me what happened."

     Tim would not answer. When Antonio caressed the back of his neck – his
face was turned from him and buried in the pillow – he tried to wriggle
away from him, but he could not escape the firmness of his grasp. Antonio
kept his hand on the back of his neck and he knew he was submitting.

     Antonio turned Tim's face towards his and held him in his gaze. His
voice was tender, but firm, with a trace of menace in it.

     "You belong to me. Your will is mine; you are mine: passive, loyal,
devoted, feminine, receptive, submissive, a slave. It is futile to try to
deny it."

      Frozen by fear and desire, Tim could say nothing. The power of
Antonio's gaze pithed him. He could not move. He knew he was submitting.

     Then Antonio's gaze softened. "I'm hardly human in the morning before
coffee," he said, smiling. "Make yourself some, too. *Andare*, *mio bel
ragazzo schiavo*. You'll find everything in the kitchen. You don't need any
clothes. *Presto*!"

     The word was a command Tim obeyed as if programmed to. Naked, except
for a narrow silver band encircling his left wrist – he could not recall
wearing it or seeing it before, but it was familiar – he went into the
kitchen, with ease found the coffee things, made coffee, carried it into
the bedroom, and put the tray down on a side table.

     "Pour it," Antonio said. "Bring it to me."

     He complied, lost in the ecstasy of following orders.

     "Beautiful boy," Antonio said, as Tim handed him his coffee, and held
Tim by his scrotum. Tim lowered his eyes, humbled by his master's gaze.
Antonio took the cup; with the other hand he took Tim's wrist and surveyed
him as if he were a painting or a sculpture. "Look at me," Antonio said.
Tim raised his eyes and gazed, locked inside Antonio's gaze.

     "I have caught you," Antonio said, laughing, and pointed to the floor.
Tim sat at his feet, on his haunches, his eyes lowered again, confused.
Caught? Had he done something wrong? It was nearly impossible to think. His
brain would not work. Something about betrayal. It was more than he could
sort out, more than he could think about. He stopped wanting to try. His
mind collapsed right under him. It was a waterfall cascading down to
nowhere. Antonio stretched out above him like the arc of a rainbow. Tim
purred like a kitten in a half sleep, overwhelmed and vanquished.



     "What do you remember," Antonio asked him one afternoon as they
sauntered along by a small canal.

     "Remember?" he said.

      "Remember."

     Antonio gazed at him and Tim was unable to think of an answer. There
was only a vast panorama of sky. Wisps of clouds decomposed whitely in
endless variation; shapes formed and decomposed.

     "You have no memory," Antonio said, and touched his lips.



5.

     "Come to Burgundy with me. I have a place there. We can take the
train. It will do you good to get away. And we can work on the report in a
tranquil setting. It's a lovely house, stone, from the sixteenth century."
Flint Whitlock smiled at David and took his hand. "Please," he said, "I
must do something to bring you back to life. It is time."

     "I'm alive," David said with a sigh. "This anguish is proof of that."

     "It's time to get rid of that anguish. He's gone."

     "I don't believe it," David answered. "It is so unlike him. His
letter. It wasn't him."

     "No," Whitlock said, "it wasn't. People change. People change. He no
longer exists. It was not a letter from him but from the stranger he has
become."

     "How can that be, that a person can go through such a complete
metamorphosis? That such light can disappear? How can you be who you are
and not be who you were?"

     "It happens," Whitlock said. "You must not get lost in your loss. I
need you."



     David looked at him skeptically.

     "Not just for work," Flint said.



     They met at the Gare de Bercy – ugly, hardly one of those great French
railroad stations that still suggest, in the twenty-first century, the
romance of nineteenth-century travel, stone and glass monuments to the
powers of industrial capitalist grandeur, reminiscent of the Crystal
Palace, as does, for example, the Gare de Lyon, also in Paris, or the Gare
de Nice. They boarded the TER to Avallon and from there went by rental car
to Whitlock's domain in Lormes.

     It was cold when they arrived, and Whitlock got a fire going.

     It was inevitable: Whitlock wanted it; David was ready for it. He was
still alive, too alive to succumb to loss forever. Whitlock stood behind
him at the computer. David sat in front of the screen. Whitlock caressed
his thick hair with tender fingers.

     Lance swiveled in his chair, looked up at Whitlock with questioning
eyes. Whitlock nodded yes, raised him and pressed his lips to his and slit
them open with a cut of his tongue and touched the recesses of his mouth.
Lance surrendered to his hunger, to his breath, to his desire, to his love.



 6.

     Antonio still asleep, Tim awoke from tormented slumber full of
turbulent dreams, underwear crusted with semen. He had not had a nocturnal
emission since high school. He slipped out of bed without waking Antonio,
without conscious thought, hardly knowing what he did, Tim slipped into
jeans and shirt and moccasins, stuffed his wallet, passport, money into
jacket pockets, and walked along twisting streets, skirting canals, leading
towards and going away from the marble steps of arching bridges. He knew
that something had changed, but was not sure what, what kind of splint had
prodded and penetrated him. He shook himself like a horse, or like a dog
coming out of the water. His mind was as clouded as the vast Venetian sky,
and as blazing as those sections of sky through which the sun yet blazed.

     Still in a trance, but now an inversion of the trance, a counter
trance, with no more consciousness than before, he took the vaporetto to
Marco Polo and arrived at a ticket counter. He showed a credit card and his
passport – both with meaningless names imprinted on them that would not
enter his memory -- and soon was boarding a plane to Paris. It was cloudy
and rainy at CDG. He stood on line for a taxi. Not sure where he was going,
he said the first thing that came to him: *Les Jardins du Luxembourg.*

     Sitting in a lonely wooded section of the gardens, by sweeping verdant
lawns under ancient, heavily foliated, great-branched trees, solid,
grounded although soaring, mind empty, he fell into a leaden sleep. As he
slept, three youths with shaven heads, stealthily, nimbly, went through his
pockets and lifted wallet, credit card, passport, and several hundred euros
without waking him. When he did wake it was raining and he was wet. The day
was warm, and the rain was soft. He breathed deeply taking in the green air
and did not move until a courteous gendarme told him they were closing the
gardens.

     He left reluctantly, going out the gate on Saint-Michel facing Rue
Soufflot and the Pantheon. He walked left at the Pantheon and there looming
in splendor before him was the astounding church of St. Etienne.

    Still in a daze, as the light faded, he sat on stone steps under the
magnificent portico looking blankly at the twin crescent structures in semi
circle of the law school and the Mairie. As he sat, a warm and sleepy buzz
overtook him. His chin fell to his chest. The stones around him became a
flood of water. The buildings became trees. He fell through a mountain of
clouds, and startled, awoke. He did not know where he was.

     Someone, a man, well dressed, handsome and patrician, bent over him.
"Are you ok?" he said, speaking in English.

     "I don't know," he said. "Where am I?"

     "That's the Pantheon to the left," he said.

     "I'm in Paris?"

     "You better let me take you home."

     "I don't know where that is," he said, confused.

     "We'll go to my place," the man said. "When did you last eat?"

     "Eat? I don't remember. I'm not hungry."

     "Come," the stranger said, extending his hand for him to take. As they
walked alongside the long majestic gate of the Luxembourg Gardens on Rue
Vaugirard, his companion spoke of the battles fought between German troops
and French Resistance fighters there in the final days of World War II. It
did not occur to him that it was an odd thing to be speaking of. This was
Paris. There were commemorative plaques everywhere. The deportations,
commemorated; the deaths recorded, were tragic; young men fought to live
freely and authentically against men whose humanity had been usurped.

     The interlocutor put an arm around him. "You don't know what happened,
do you?"

    "Happened? In the war?" he said, confused.

    "To you!"

     "Something happened."

     "What happened?

     "I don't know. It passed over me and took me in its wake."

     "What passed over you?"

     "Something that drew my attention away."

     "Away from what?"

     "From myself. I was decimated."

     "Who are you?"

     "I don't know. Perhaps you can tell me who I am. Look," he said,
remembering his passport and other identification. He felt in his pockets,
but they were empty. He was even more puzzled than he had been. "I don't
know."

     He could not get beyond that. He strained to remember. The passages
through which thought travels were blocked. But the way things developed
between them showed that it was of no matter.

     "You may not know who you were, but that is just as well," Luc smiled.
"It won't get in the way of who you're going to be."

    "How can I know who I am going to be when I don't know who I am, who I
was? I am no one. I'm lost."

     "No, you are not lost. You are here, with me."

     "But who am I?"

     "Leave that to me," he said, drawing him nearer to him. "You are who
you will become."

     "What will I become?"

     Luc smiled and kissed his lips, as if sealing a pact. "You will become
what I make you," he whispered.

     Before going back to his apartment, Luc stopped at the Musée du
Luxembourg, and then they turned back to Rue Galande.



     Who was he going to be? What was he going to be? It would not be up to
him. It was not his problem. He only had to do what he was told and he
would become... what? He could not say; he would see. He trusted Luc. He
became weightless. He knew without a doubt that he would become what he was
supposed to be – and that involved submission. Submission was a dimension –
a cornerstone -- of his identity. Who he would be was not for him to
determine but to surrender to. Luc would determine his identity. He was in
control and would define him by possessing him. That is what, he intuited,
it must have been like to be a woman a century ago and earlier, when a man
courted her, took possession of her, gave her his name, determined
everything about her, and created her in the image he desired – at least, a
woman of a certain class, wealth, and physical beauty; in the rapture of
his fantasy, he did not reckon in the mass of precedent human experience.
The very thought that he had become enthralled and was protected in the
embrace of powerful domination exalted him – and gave him a sense of being
complete.

     When Luc Bastienne found him on the portico of Saint Etienne and took
him home, everything was a matter of trust. Luc trusted his intuition and
the sudden flood of desire. He trusted that this beautiful and confused
vagrant was malleable. And our lost hero?  He trusted the man who put his
arm around him and guided him through the dusky streets; that he could find
and define him, could name him. When Luc asked him his name, he rummaged
through the dustbin of his memory but found nothing.

     "I don't know," he said with a combination of puzzlement and
astonishment.

     Luc smiled. "So much the better," he said. "I found you on the portico
of the Church of Saint Etienne, I'll call you Stéfan."

     "Stéfan," Stéfan repeated the name and found himself in it. "Yes,
Sir," he said, some ancient program snaking through him.

     "No, not Sir," Luc said. "Luc."

     "Luc," Stéfan said, quietly, seeing him as if for the first time.



     Houses made of massive timber beams and huge blocks of hewn stone,
dating from the thirteenth century, still stand on Rue Galande, a small
road, crossing Rue Dante, ending at the Place Maubert, and define its
ambience. Luc guided Stéfan up an old wooden staircase, whose steps had
been worn down by footsteps, over centuries, into a grand medieval
apartment with beamed ceilings and stone walls and stone floors. From the
arched windows of wavy glass panes, they could see the Seine.

     Stéfan gaped in amazement as if transported, touched his forehead and
said, "I feel faint."

     Luc guided him to a divan by the window, unbuttoned his shirt, took
off his jeans, and when he was naked, looked at him with pleasure, but held
himself back and helped him to lie down. "Sleep, my darling," he said. "You
are home." He kissed his brow and covered him. Stéfan fell into a deep and
dreamless slumber.

     In the morning, there was the matter of clothing. "Look at you," he
said as he kissed Stéfan's sleepy eyes and lowered the quilt and beheld
naked torso, firm abdomen, thighs and calves of strength and delicacy. "We
must get you clothing worthy of such beauty."

     All the wardrobe Stéfan had he was wearing when Luc found him. For
classic stuff: suits, jackets, jeans, corduroys, shoes, boots, t-shirts,
jackets, underwear, sweaters, they went to the *BHV Homme.* For other stuff
– "I want to see you in s&m gear and drag, too," Luc said; -- they went to
little places scattered throughout the Marais, where, among other things,
they found a black leather harness, and where Luc had Stéfan's nipples
pierced.



     Autumn came. The evenings were chilly. The fire in the old stone
fireplace gave a soothing warmth and a delicious smell to the room.

     "You are ravishing," Luc said, his length stretched along a thick
carpet in front of the hearth, his torso propped up by a pile of red velvet
cushions, lightly inhaling a joint, which he put to Stéfan's lips
afterwards. Stéfan's head was in his lap and he was lost in a dreamy haze
as Luc lightly brushed the nipples on his smooth chest, every now and then
bending over to sweep sweet kisses across his tender lips. Stéfan looked at
him with bright glazed eyes, and placed his palm around the back of Luc's
neck, drew himself up to him and kissed him submissively, hungry with
desire.

     "Get dressed," Luc said.

     Stéfan smiled and loosened himself from Luc's embrace. He rose and
stood before him his cock hard. Luc took hold of it in his warm palm and
kissed the tip. Stéfan closed his eyes and sighed. Luc loosened his palm
and drew Stéfan into him, ravished him tenderly, and brought him to a
gushing overflow, which he swallowed. "Now, go," he said, when he withdrew
his lips; "get dressed." Dizzy still from ecstasy and ravishment, still
wanting more of him, of Luc inside him, Stéfan stepped back and left to
bathe and dress.



   Stéfan bathed, shaved, dressed, outlined his eyes in violet; dusted his
eyelids with bronze glitter. Luc stood by the stone fireplace in tuxedo,
aroma of masculine cologne surrounding him, waiting for him. He brought
Stéfan's wrist to his lips, plucked a rose from the vase on the
mantelshelf, slipped it through the lapel of his bronze-colored silk bolero
jacket. The jacket hugged Stéfan's shoulders and framed his chest; tips of
newly tender nipples pointed through his form-fitting black t-shirt. The
distressed skin-tight jeans Stéfan wore were cut short; instep and ankles,
sleek in sheer amber stockings flashed translucent between cuffs and tops
of suede burgundy boots.

     "You are beautiful," Luc said, "and feminine."

     "I feel feminine," Stéfan blushed.

     Luc softly glossed the tips of his fingers across Stéfan's nipples.
Stéfan shuddered. Luc took his hand in his and again brought the wrist to
his lips and kissed it. Stéfan took Luc's hand, turned it palm up, raised
it to his lips, kissed it, ate from it.

     "I love you," he whispered. "I belong to you."



     What does it mean when you know you belong to someone? First, it means
you know that you do not belong to yourself. But what does that mean? It
means that you are centered outside yourself, that you exist as someone
else, but it is no longer someone else. That someone else is you and you
are yourself because you are him. You belong to yourself because you belong
to him. This absorption of your being by another being whom you become is a
mystery and can bring with it confusion unto dizzying madness were it not
for the alchemy of love.



     Stéfan, pressed chest against Luc's back; held tight, arms round his
waist. The motorcycle raced up Rue de Rivoli, rounded Place de la Concorde,
headed up Avenue du Champs Elysées, turned left onto Avenue Montaigne and
then right, up Avenue du President Wilson. The sky was darkening; the moon
was a pale and glowing scimitar. They stopped in front of a grand mansion,
a palace, rising in the center of an exquisite park surrounded by verdant
lawns, stone benches, a central fountain, and beds of luxuriant flower. The
doors of the great black iron gate tipped with gilded spikes like arrowhead
ferns stood open; light flamed from within the Musée Galliera.

     The guard at the door saluted Luc. Inside, a middle aged, patrician
woman, in beige taffeta and lace, wearing a delicate string of exquisite
pearls round her neck, greeted Luc.

      Luc presented Stéfan to the Duchess de Brignole. Stéfan blushed when
she took his hand and surveyed him, "Luc did not exaggerate," she said.
"You are extraordinary." Stéfan lowered his eyes and ever so slightly
curtsied, "Your Grace," he murmured.

      "Anna-Maria," she smiled. "If you will follow me," she said. "We will
begin," she said to Luc, "whenever you like."

     "It may seem strange to be inside one of the most important museums in
this city and not see even one piece from its magnificent collection on
display," Luc began after an introduction by the Minister of Culture.
"The Musée
Galliera does not keep its collection permanently on display. The garments
are too fragile and can only take so much exposure. It presents exhibitions
drawn from the collection, reflecting a particular theme. Tonight, the
theme is the museum itself rather than any pieces from its magnificent
collection."

     The Duchess who sat Stéfan by her side, took his hand, leaned over,
and whispered, "I do hope you will come with me in our car to the reception
afterward."

     "With pleasure, Madame," Stéfan answered.

     Luc continued:

     "The Musée Galliera belongs to, is owned by, the city of Paris and not
the government of France because of a legal error made by the notary in
drawing up the original contract of bequeathal. Construction of the
Galliera, this Renaissance palace in which the collection is housed, was
begun as a gift by the Duchesse de Galliera, Marie Brignole-Sale de
Ferrari, in 1879, three years after the death of her husband, expressly for
the purpose of housing the family's great art collection. In 1884, she
bestowed 6.5 million francs on the City of Paris. Building began, but
things did not go well. Politics and factionalism got in the way of her
generosity, and of her pride.

     "In 1886, the French Chamber of Deputies enacted a law expelling
anyone from France who was a direct descendent of a French royal dynasty.
The Duchesse was descended from the House of Orléans; she became,
consequently, *persona non grata* in France. She could not take back what
she had already given, but she could and did refuse any further
contribution. She left France and she abandoned the Palais Galliera, left
it unfinished, and went to live in Italy. She gave her art collection to
the city of Genoa, where it is housed to this day in two Palazzos: the
Palazzo Rosso and the Palazzo Bianco.

     "She died in 1888. In 1889, her heirs disobeyed her wishes – there is
no indication why; perhaps patriotism, perhaps vanity, perhaps lobbying --
and gave the City of Paris another 1.3 million francs to finish
construction of the Palais Galliera. Paris had the museum, a museum without
a collection. What to do with it? It became a home for temporary
exhibitions, industrial displays, auctions. In 1977, it became what it has
remained, the museum of fashion, but in itself it stands as a model of the
kind of magnificence that transcends time or fashion."

     Luc had told Stéfan he was a historian and taught at the Sorbonne,
but, until Stéfan heard him introduced and listened to him speak he had not
known just how renowned and accomplished he was or that he had written
*Cultures
and Their Artifacts: from Palmyra to The Twin Towers*.

     "It's uncanny," Stéfan said, in their bedroom, in the candlelight, as
they were getting undressed, later that evening, after the reception
at the Athénée
on Rue Montaigne. "You're a historian, but I have no history; you know
nothing of my past."

     "True. But I have a present to give you," Luc said, taking a red plush
box out of the top drawer of his dresser. He sprung open the box: embedded
in a field of sky blue satin: a diamond ring, the stone glistening in the
candlelight; below it, a pair of diamond-studded nipple rings.





II

     When Abdul Abdul Raqmahedroon, petty thief and small-time drug dealer,
who, on occasion, when he was drunk beyond having the capacity for later
recall, sold himself to men for sex, read Luc's essay in *Le Monde*, a
meditation lamenting the destruction of the ruins of Palmyra, wrought by
the Islamic State, and condemning the hubris of the men and the ideology
that fostered it, his anger knew no bounds.

     "The fool holds the artifacts of the blasphemous infidel higher than
the sacred duty of submission to the highest power," he said to himself,
crumpling the paper and going out to the toilet in the hall. He threw the
paper into the toilet and pissed on it. When he flushed, because the paper
had become a thick sopping wet bunch it would not go down. If he tried
again to flush it, the toilet would overflow. There it was, a mess inside
the porcelain basin, stained greenish blue and black by the mix of piss,
printer's ink, and the toilet cleaner that ran from the plastic filter
affixed to the side of the bowl. With disgust Abdul scooped out the sodden
paper and threw it in the waste can. He hurried back into his little room
and angrily scrubbed his hands, as much to remove the grip of Luc's words
from his skin as the pollution of urine he had been forced to endure.

     He paced the room unsettled in spirit, his head in pain, on the edge
of explosion. He threw open the window and looked at the cracked and
crumbling stone at the top of a grimy airshaft. He could see the light of
the open sky. The room was on the top floor, what still is called, and once
was, the little room for the maid. He pulled the window back, grabbed his
wallet and room key, and hurtled down the dingy back stairs. In the street
he walked toward the Park Buttes-Chaumont, but stopped at the falafel place
he hung out at. Ibrahim greeted him and he growled back something
inarticulate. Ibrahim poured him a burning hot glass of sweet mint tea and
asked him what distressed him.

     Abdul sought to bring the glass to his lips; it burned his fingers to
touch it, but he held it and it burned his lips, too when he touched them
to its rim.

     "The fires of hell will make this seem like coolness," he said with
spiteful bitterness. Fanned out on the counter he saw a pile of the day's
newspapers, including a copy of *Le Monde.* He grabbed it, rifled through
its pages, and showed Ibrahim Luc's piece, slamming his palm upon it in
unremitting rage.

     "If I knew where this man is, it would not be much longer that he
would live," he said.

     "What is it you are saying?" Ibrahim gasped.

     "Read, here, how he thinks, how he fouls the earth by living."

     "These are not words any man should speak of another man. It is for
God to determine life and death."

     "What milk is in your bloodstream? It is for the legion of the
faithful in submission to the prophet's successor to carry out what is
ordained. The way you talk gives power to our enemies and allows them to
enslave us."

     "I am not enslaved."

     "That is how well you have been brainwashed. You no longer know who
you are or what you are. You think you are a Frenchman with a beret because
you can say `ooh la la'."

     "Abdul," Ibrahim began, quietly, "you are taking a mistaken..." but
Abdul cut him off.

     "Be wary. The punishment will fall on you as well if the light of
vision does not return to you," he said, moving his glass away from him,
crumpling this copy of *Le Monde*, too, and hurrying from the shop.

     Outside, he walked with determination, brewing something, but not yet
aware what.

     When he passed an Internet café, it dawned on him that he might find
out something about the writer. He whispered to the clerk who let him log
in without paying a euro, and sat in front of a screen and typed `Luc
Bastienne' into the search engine; each entry he found increased his fury
until the blood of rage nearly smothered him when he saw pictures of Luc
with Stéfan. He read the accompanying story of the event at the Musée
Galliera carefully and dwelt on Luc's remarks about the history of the
Palais Galliera. These people were infidels -- and beasts, vile
fornicators, men bearing themselves like women, beasts. Filth clung to
them. Their heads were repositories of evil and ought to be severed from
their bodies and everything consumed by flame.



 2.

     Sunday morning was cloudy. Luc stood by the window looking at the
Seine and the sky. He turned when he heard Stéfan sit up and yawn. He sat
down on the edge of the bed, tousled his hair, and kissed his lips,
spellbinding him with kisses.

     "Did you sleep well, my precious?" he said touching lightly a
diamond-tipped nipple. In reply, Stéfan blinked his eyes and took him about
the neck and kissed him dreamily, languidly, still drenched in the ocean of
slumber. "I dreamed we were swimming in a Wild Ocean, "he murmured and,
yawned, "struggling against the waves, and we found a large rock. We
climbed up on it and lay in the sun and then you became a swan and seized
me, like a god." Luc stroked his thighs. He spread his legs. Luc mounted
him and teasingly entered him, each time deeper, until he was fully inside
him. They ebbed and flowed like the ocean waves that had crashed in
Stéfan's dream.

     At breakfast, Luc told Stéfan that he had been invited by a team of
archeologists, journalists, and photographers to travel with them to Syria
to examine "the ruins of the ruins" of Palmyra and to write about what he
saw.

     "I've been debating with myself whether to take you with me."

     "Isn't it dangerous?

      "That's why I've had doubts."

     "What about *your* safety?" Stéfan said, embracing him, pouting
adorably, and tracing his finger along Luc's cheekbone."

     "It is a risk I need to take."

     "You are all my life. If something happened to you..."

     "That will keep me safe, knowing you are here."

     "You will go. There is nothing I can say."

     "I will go. It is the only life I have, and if I do not follow it, I
will have no life to give to my beloved, and I will lose you."

     "Never," Stéfan said, and took Luc's hands in his and gazed into his
eyes. "I am yours," he vowed, "and will worship you always." He gently
grasped Luc's penis underneath his robe and knelt before him and lost
himself in adoration, slowly rolling his tongue over the orbs within Luc's
scrotum as his feathered fingers danced upon the shaft of his phallus.



     "The Duchess wants to take you to the opera next Friday," Luc told
Stéfan, looking up from his phone. "And she thinks I ought to get you your
own phone," he added, "especially since I'll be away." Laughing, he
continued, "She scolds me for having an old-fashioned attitude and calls me
`macho'. Maybe she's right."

     Stéfan kissed him.  "I love your old fashioned macho attitude. It
makes me weak in the knees."

     "It doesn't bother you to be submissive?"

     "I love being submissive," Stéfan said. "You Tarzan; me Jane."

   Anna-Maria-Solange, Duchess of Brignole, the Duchess Luc had mentioned,
was sincere when she had declared her admiration for Stéfan at the Palais
Galliera. When she heard from the minister of culture that Luc was going to
Palmyra, she phoned him to ask how Stéfan would manage without him and
offered to look after him. So began an intimacy between the dowager duchess
and the handsome beauty of indeterminate gender who was becoming the idol
of Parisian society and a fashion icon.

     "You are in love with him, aren't you?" the Duchess whispered as she
sat beside Stéfan, the two of them alone in her box, as Violetta sent "*E
`strano,"* the tormented first act aria from *La Traviata,* reverberating
through the *Palais Garnier*. "I can tell. It is something that I seldom
see. But I know it when I do. It is not just caprice."

      Stéfan blushed and lowered his eyes.

     "Don't be a ninny," the Duchess said, poking him with her fan and
clasping his hand in hers. "I am happy for you, and very happy that Luc has
finally given his heart to someone, and that you are that someone. Luc is a
dear love of mine. I want you to know you can be open with me, to confide
in me. We shall be friends"

     Stéfan raised his eyes, smiling, and returned the pressure of her
hand. "Thank you. Yes. You honor me."



     In Palmyra Luc trudged through the rubble of antiquities, antiquities,
now the ruins of ruins, he wrote, that had remained standing millennia as
testaments in stone to the ongoing spirit of humanity, to the continuity of
humanity, to the life of culture, to the culture of life, to the art of
community and the mutuality of inhabitation. It was a place wherein
dwelling materialized out of the abstractions of thought, as it still does,
and contained the breadth of human experience. Luc wept amidst the rubble.
Here was no isolated Ozymandias undone by time; this crumbled monumentality
was not the emblem of a tyrant's or an empire's fall, but the felling of a
built, human place held in common and preserved in the amber of history,
smashed by tyrannical malice bent on the extermination of humanity and
history, in the name of obedience to forces demanding the obliteration of
anything human through submission to a violent extinction of the scope and
depth of each individual. On the flight back to Paris Luc began to write
the piece that inflamed Abdul's wrath when he saw it in* Le Monde*.



3.

     Abdul had been so distraught during his visit to Ibrahim's falafel
shop that he had not noticed, or if he had noticed, had paid no attention
to the customer sitting in a corner booth, but spoke as the words rushed
out of his mouth, unfiltered. The customer, however, was decidedly
interested in him, so interested that he made certain that there could be
no indication of it in his demeanor, but he followed everything Abdul said,
and took a picture of him, as he seemed to be attending to something on his
phone.   After Abdul's distraught outburst and departure, the man in the
booth, Tariq Yusuf, smiled at Ibrahim. "He is moved by a great intensity of
passion."

     "So much passion is not a good thing when it goes unguided. It is like
a steed that runs unbridled. It can trip itself up."

     "Exactly," said Tariq. "It is a virtue that loses its virtue because
of its lack of discipline. Effective measures are measures tempered by
thoughtfulness and focus, and by discipline."

     There was a silence between them, as Ibrahim restocked trays of
peppers, lettuce, and tomatoes.

     "What does he do?"

      "For work. Whatever," Ibrahim answered evasively. Perhaps the man was
a police agent undercover. Then he bluffed:

      "Odd jobs. When he gets them. Plumbing, house painting, sheet
rocking, furniture moving, electrical wiring, demolition."

     "When he's not working?

     "Hangs out."

     "Any special group?"

     "Mostly guys like him."

     "Girl friend?"

     "Nah."

     "He's not bad looking."

     "Girls who want a good time, want a guy with money to spend."

     "And that's not him?"

     "He's heading...nowhere."

     "How can I get in touch with him?" Tariq asked.

     "He comes here to eat. That's all I know."



     Three days after the encounter I have just recorded, the massacre
occurred at the Bataclan. All Paris, all France and much of the world
recoiled from the barbarism. Once again, humanity was under attack, and not
just in Raqqa, Homs, Mosul, Palmyra, Somalia, Egypt, Iraq,

Nigeria, but in Europe, again.

     Abdul, too, was filled with loathing when he saw images of the
carnage, but it was loathing aimed at himself. He admired, he envied those
the infidel called terrorists – the `holy martyrs', he called them, and
silently replaced the word "terrorist" with "holy martyr" every time he
read it in the paper or heard a commentator on the radio or television
pronounce it. He condemned himself for passivity and hypocrisy. The fear of
eternal punishment gripped his heart. The desire for eternal reward filled
him with longing. He had to do something. He had to join with others to do
something. He had to be ready: he had to fortify his mind and strengthen
his body; he had to prepare for his own holy martyrdom. And he had to
devise schemes for accumulating money.

     To strengthen himself, Abdul began a daily regimen of running in the
Parc Butte Chaumont. He would have preferred going to one of the fitness
centers that had recently opened, but that required money, and he refused
to squander what he took in from stealing and dealing. So he ran along the
paths of the splendid park, keeping his eyes focused straight ahead as he
ran, contemning the verdant landscape of the environment as decadent, a
sign of the kind of luxuriousness that sought to distract you from the
duties of eternal submission by the seduction of a secular impulse to
worship temporal beauty.

     As much as he tried however, he could not avoid seeing the obscenities
that went on in the park. Men and women walking together, holding hands,
kissing, lying together on the grassy slopes, performing forbidden embraces
in each other's arms, openly in the sight of all who might behold them.
That was bad enough, but to see two men bound in erotic rapture or two
women, hair uncovered, skin bared, performing monstrosities -- that was
beyond the unspeakable. Each day after running, back in his room, standing
by the sink in the corner kitchen of his room, he scratched himself with a
rag wet with soap and cold water until his skin burned. And afterwards, he
prostrated himself and prayed, his forehead touching the floor in penance
for what he had seen and for what he had not yet done. Sometimes when he
thought of the holy acts of submission and self-extinction he would
perform, he grew excited and succumbed to the disease of abusing himself.
If he did, he scourged himself angrily, sometimes until he drew blood, with
the knout he still possessed, that his father had used on him in his
childhood. Afterwards, he washed himself and slept on the floor imagining
what he would do in the streets of Mosul, with a band of brothers minded
like him.



4.

     Rain beat steadily on the wavy glass windows of the fourth floor
apartment on Rue Galande, where the Duchess had joined Luc and Stéfan for
an afternoon of coffee and truffles.

     "I do have a purpose for this visit," she said, lighting a cigarette,
for, try as she might, she could not give up smoking. The best she could do
was moderate each cigarette by inserting it into a long silver-tipped
holder with a sprinkling of tiny diamonds flecking its black onyx shaft.

    I have an invitation, rather rare, to an underground costume ball to be
held in a deserted mansion on Avenue Foch, a week from Saturday. The theme
is Venetian decadence. You must tell no one about it. I cannot tell you
more precisely where it is. My chauffeur will pick you up and take you
there. You will come?"

     "Gladly," said Luc.

     "You must be in costume."

     "Of course," Luc said. "I will go," he said after a moment's thought,
"as Prince Giangaleazzo di Maria di Giovanetti."

     The Duchess looked at him questioningly.

     "He was a sixteenth-century Venetian gentleman, loved power, was very
handsome, and often posed -- dressed or in the nude -- for monumental
statues that still grace some of the most prominent religious and civic
edifices in the city. He seized a monastery once, and evicted its monks
when he suspected a conspiracy against him. Then he filled the monastery
with a dozen of his courtiers, and turned it into a personal brothel. He
hosted friends there and men whose loyalty he wished to secure. He called
it the Sanctuary. He also made it a center for painting, sculpting, and
music, much of it obscene. Many aspiring or accomplished artists inserted
their patron in the foreground of their paintings. Of course, it was
condemned by the Church, but to no effect. Giangaleazzo withstood anathema
and was never excommunicated.
     "His henchman roamed the streets of Venice and raided newly-docked
vessels for handsome youth, kidnapped them, imprisoned them in the
Sanctuary, and dressed them as women. One such impressed boy from Greece
refused to dress or be used as a woman. He was castrated, chained by his
nipples to a dungeon wall, and left to perish. From time to time
Giangaleazzo visited the dungeon and molested him. When the body became a
corpse, it was burned. The ashes were put into a bronze casket, which was
tossed into the Grand Canal. They say the casket was found by a diving
expedition in the 1870s and put on display in the Academia, but I have
never seen it."

     "How dreadful," the Duchess said.

     "Is it decadent enough?" Luc asked laughing.

     "As a story, but as a real event, it is horrible and cruel. Is that
what is meant by decadent?"

    Stéfan looked on in wonder that such questions could absorb them. He
was absorbed principally in admiring the Duchess' ruby choker and wondering
how it would look around his own neck, and if it would excite Luc to see
him wearing it.

     "Don't think I don't see you," the Duchess said, turning to Stéfan,
smiling devilishly, and waving a finger, "staring at my necklace. I know
what you want."

     Stéfan turned scarlet, but the Duchess laughed, took his hand and
kissed the palm. "We are thinking similar thoughts. You shall wear it to
the ball, as part of your costume. Wearing such a necklace you could only
be a princess or a courtesan. I think we will make you a courtesan," her
laugh rippled, "proud, irresistible, haughty, cruel – unattainable even
during the moments of surrender."



     He was tall, handsome under a narrow mask that highlighted his eyes,
phosphorescent green. The mask, a bright crimson, was the same color as the
Cardinal's satin robes he wore. Despite their amplitude, one could see he
was trim beneath them. The steel gray of his hair that showed where his
miter did not cover it suggested he was a man in his early fifties who
cared about keeping in shape and preserving the appearance of youthfulness.

     The Duchess dressed as a shepherdess, with bonnet, crook, and a
nosegay of rosemary; Luc, as Giangaleazzo, in black cloak and silk shirt
ripped open to reveal his medallioned chest; and Stéfan, ravishing,
shoulders and back bare, in a scalloped floor-length gown -- from the
Duchess' private collection -- flame-colored Persian silk brocade, slit to
reveal stiletto heels and majestically arched insteps. It clung to him and
revealed the outlines of his physique. It showed the sweep of each of his
movements. The style may have been historically incorrect, but that could
only be an afterthought to whoever saw him. At his throat, the Duchess'
ruby choker. All three caught the attention of the imposing figure of the
cardinal as soon as they entered.

     Approaching them, the cardinal brought palms together and in unctuous
tones greeted them, Stéfan in particular, with a soft but severe reproach.
A man of his gravity, he said, ought not be subject to the evils of the
allure of such earthly magnificence as the lady – although he bowed
respectfully, he said he was certain that her station did not allow her the
title of ladyship – as the lady presented. Nor, he added, being blessed by
holy light, could he not see trapped within such elegant decadence an
anguished soul unsure of its true nature, betraying that nature, which
divine providence had provided him this opportunity to bring to salvation?

     Giangaleazzo no sooner heard his insolence than his hand gripped the
hilt of his sword, ready to unsheathe it. The Duchess gasped. The crowd of
boisterous revelers near them became aware of the disturbance and broke off
dancing and formed a gawking circle around them.

     "My Lord," Luc said, inflating his chest and contracting his abdomen,
more with insolence than with respect, "I hardly think one in your position
of high ecclesiastical hypocrisy is in any position to offer moral sermons.
Take heed you do not find yourself defrocked."

     "It was not to you I addressed myself, Sir, but to this lady," the
cardinal responded, indicating Stéfan with a nod of his imperious head,
summoning as much hauteur as he could but failing despite himself, feeling
his vitality dulled by the mastery with which Giangaleazzo spoke and aware
that he had a role to play in front of an audience, now.

     "There is no approach to her but through me," Luc answered. "An insult
to her is an insult to me, and I do not brook insult."

     "Do not forget," the Cardinal warned him, "divinely invested in me is
the power of excommunication."

     "You delude yourself. I am not one of your sheep."

     "Mine is the power of the Church, and I will bend you to my will."

     "Your will is nothing.  You are a hypocrite. You'd rather kneel to me
and do my bidding than serve your ascetic god; confess it or I will make
you confess it with my sword." With the hand on the hilt, he drew his
sword. With his free hand, Luc tore open the Cardinal's robe exposing a
body, well wrought and tanned. The Cardinal wore a pair of black briefs and
shiny knee-high black boots. A gold, diamond studded chain hung across his
chest in a crescent, pinned at each end to a tiny crucifix piercing each
nipple.

     The cardinal stood in shock. Giangaleazzo slapped him.

    "Bend," he commanded.

     The Cardinal lowered himself to his knees and bowed his head.
Giangaleazzo pulled his head up by the hair and pulled his mask off. It was
Marcel Blanchard, the well-known television news anchor. The assembled
masked revelers gasped in recognition; the news anchor reveled helplessly
in his shame.

     "Here is your place in the hierarchy, dog," Luc sneered. "Lick her
shoes," he said parting Stéfan's gown revealing his ankles. Too deeply
pulled in by the whirlwind of what was no longer a game, the Cardinal
prostrated himself before Stéfan and lapped his tongue against the rich
leather of his shoes, drinking in humiliation.

     Stéfan held high his head. Through the almond-shaped apertures of his
mask gleamed his dark blue eyes, and he laughed at the show of power he
presented. Then defiantly, he parted his silk stockings-sheathed legs and
opened his dress entirely, so that it hung like a cape highlighting his
well-wrought masculine beauty dazzling in voluptuous feminine underwear.
Again Luc pulled Blanchard up by his hair to have him see towering above
him the spire of Stéfan's celestial cock, emerging from his garter belt,
and his gleaming thighs. Blanchard, rapt by the power of Stéfan's allure,
when Luc ordered him to worship it, kissed the rod that wrought his
discipline, and sought salvation in adoration. The miracle of
transubstantiation was accomplished; he felt the gush of holy spirit
possess him.

     "Rise," said Luc, and Marcel Blanchard rose. He trembled with
unquenched desire, overwhelmed by the excitement of humiliation.

     The Duchess meanwhile had been in animated conversation with a
gentleman dressed as a late seventeenth-century English cavalier, a man
actually employed by the French National police. She rejoined Luc and
Stéfan; Luc could see that she was sexually agitated.



5.

     Tariq Yusuf had given up tobacco and was on edge. He wandered by the
waterfall caverns of Buttes Chaumont Park, revolving a strategy. After a
half hour of seemingly aimless wandering he made his way through crowds of
strollers over to Ibrahim's place. Abdul was there with a companion,
unshaven, but young enough so that his growth of beard was patchy.

     "Musa has been there. He is a changed man. There is fire in his soul.
You can see a fixed purpose in his eyes. He only speaks of jihad and..."

     "You speak too loud, my friend," Tariq said, admonishing the youth,
"too openly. Walk through the park with me and we can talk freely." Ibrahim
took in the whole scene as he crushed falafel balls, and was filled with
fearful foreboding.

     Following him outside, as if compelled, "Who are you?" the green youth
asked, defensively, with unconcealed belligerence.

     "A man who has lived in the world longer than you and who knows it
better," Tariq replied. "You talk like a big shot, like a would-be martyr,
but in the struggle, you are nothing. You are nothing," he repeated in
nearly a whisper. "You are useless, without education, and no guidance or
understanding. You have no place among us. There is no role for you. Your
sniveling hinders us. We are overcoming centuries of oppression endured
under infidel crusaders. If you want to be useful, if you want your life to
be meaningful, if you want to be part of the struggle and earn eternal
reward, you must submit to discipline. If you cannot do that, don't waste
my time."

     Abdul watched Ali deflating before his eyes. He himself felt puny and
ashamed. They were silent. Tariq did not let up.

     "As I thought. Talk. What can you give? What can you do? Can you make
explosives? Can you organize cadres? Are you able to fight and die for the
caliphate?" Ali was silent, intimidated and burning with shame. Abdul felt
like a whelp caught soiling the carpet. Tariq looked at them both with
disdain and disgust

     "I'll give you a day to think. If you think you are able to get real
and if you want to do something for the caliphate and for your own eternal
reward, if you think you can join the ranks of martyrs, be here tomorrow at
noon. If you want to rot in a state of apostasy and waste your time jacking
off together like faggots, don't waste my time." He got up and left without
giving them a second look.



     Abdul and Ali returned the next day. Tariq was waiting for them,
reading from a pamphlet printed in Arabic. He had bought cigarettes but
left them in his room. He was jittery. He had taken an immediate and
instinctive dislike to the two young men he was preparing to groom; it
would be no loss when they died. He would not miss them as he sometimes did
miss, feel regret for, despite himself, one or another of his boys when
they sacrificed themselves.

     "You have decided?"

     "We wish to submit ourselves to your discipline. There is no
alternative."

     "Why do you say that?"

      "It is an evil world and we are besieged by demons."

     "What demons?"

     Abdul hardly could speak and stumbled when he tried.

     "Demons that taunt us with lust for forbidden things."

     Tariq said nothing but fixed his gaze upon Abdul, a gaze that
suggested a demand to know his secret soul with the possibility of
absolution."

     "What forbidden things?"

     "Sensations that enflame the body and derange the mind."

     "What did you do?"

     "Demons enflamed us."

     "Did you touch him?"

     "No"

     "But you wanted to?"

     "My body wanted to, but I did not want to."

     "You do not want to be dominated by your body?"

     "No."

     "But your body dominates you."

     ""I am fighting it," Abdul answered, pleading with Tariq to believe
him.

     "What did you do when you felt pulled to evil?"

      "I trembled and Ali saw it, and asked why I was trembling.

     "I said I did not know but felt like there was a demon gripping me and
I was struggling to evade its grasp. And then I saw that Ali was trembling
also. I was gripped by fear of the demons. I prostrated myself on my prayer
rug, and begged Ali to prostrate himself, too. He did and knelt beside me
on the bare floor. We touched our foreheads to the floor, and recited
Koranic verses seeking strength to resist."

     Tariq regarded them with suspicion.

     "You abuse the holy word. You yourselves are the demons. Do not lay
the blame elsewhere. You are defiled. Only by punishment can you be
cleansed. But you must agree to be punished."

     "How will we be punished?"

     "You will come to my room and be whipped."

     Abdul breathed out and relaxed. Ali tightened himself.

     "You must agree."

     "I agree," they said separately as if with one breath.



     I do not know whether it is a failure in our nature or one of our
greatest strengths: a chief factor that ensures our survival, individually
and as a species; or an indication of a fallen nature alienated from truth
and nature -- that we are prone to, that we are able to compartmentalize
ourselves and to contain within the same frame differing aspects, differing
orientations, differing attitudes, often contradictory, attitudes that
ought to cancel each other out were they mere mathematical equations, but
that do not cancel each other out in the complex psychology of human
beings, but emerge now here, now there, now even somewhere else. The goal,
the aim, of fanatical belief, of single-minded dedication, of the
cultivation of unquestioning obedience is to destroy that permeability of
the human nature, the anxiety of ambiguity and complexity, the capacity to
accommodate contradictions.




     Tariq arranged for Ali to travel to Syria, where he stayed in a
training camp for several weeks until he was sent out to defend a town
still under the control of the Caliphate, on the outskirts of Palmyra, and
under siege. There, he fought with vicious intensity, captured and
crucified prisoners, and put bullets through more heads than one, until a
bullet pierced his own skull. He fell in the sand and was left unburied.
His body rotted and the heat of the relentless desert sun blackened its
remains. Abdul heard nothing from him while he was alive, nor anything
about him after his death. He knew communication would not be possible. His
anger against the infidel among whom he lived, in Paris, grew sharp, became
a razor to wield against them, to cut their throats with. Within him grew
the desire to commit such violence against them that would shatter their
arrogance and their contemptuous sense of superiority. He knew he would not
feel at peace until he had blown them up, and himself with them.



     It was like a gift, more than Abdul could have hoped for, a sign that
he was chosen, when he read that Luc Bastienne would be discussing the
destruction of Palmyra at the American Library. Located inside a circle
whose center is the Eiffel Tower, towards the tip of the pie slice formed
by Avenue de la Bourdonnais and Avenue Rapp, 10, rue du General Camou,
where the library is housed, is a difficult street to find. Surrounded by
magnificent nineteenth-century apartment houses and *hotels particuliers*
the building is nondescript on the outside, a plain stone building on the
street, lacking any sort of monumentality. Abdul wondered just how he would
go about causing havoc, blow himself up in a suicide vest, plant a bomb,
barge in and scatter bullets all over the place? The problem of what
specific action to take was solved when Tariq showed him an M92 he had
hidden under his bed. It was like the ones used at the Bataclan, he
boasted. Abdul took the gun from Tariq, held it waist high, and swiveled
around, pretending to spray bullets in arcs across the room. Tariq said,
for security reasons, he would keep the gun until the day of the operation,
when Abdul could come back to get it.

     Once Luc's talk had begun, Abdul imagined, he would propel himself
into the library and open fire. He liked the idea of causing panic, panic
before death, and seeing it up close. It was perfect. They had, infidels
that they were, reason for panic before stepping into the punishment that
awaited them in eternal damnation. He, on the other hand, was swelling in
anticipation of eternal bliss. He had to stay calm. He had to be
methodical. He shaved his beard. Tariq took him to Bruce Field and
outfitted him in a pair of navy blue slacks, a pale blue Oxford shirt, a
gray blazer, argyle socks, and brown loafers.

     Dressed like that, a week before the scheduled talk, Abdul went to
visit the library. Hardly had he stepped through the door when he was
stopped by a smartly-dressed, white-haired woman, wearing a simple string
of pearls round her neck. She sat by a small table opposite the circulation
desk. She asked to see his library card. He did not have one. He just
wanted to visit the library. She informed him that he would not be allowed
to borrow books without a membership, but he might purchase a day pass for
fifteen euros, which would give him access to all the library's
collections. Abdul was taken aback. He did not have fifteen euros to throw
away. Anyhow, he had seen what he needed to see. He forced a smile and said
he would come back. She nodded without smiling and shrugged.

     Outside, angrily, Abdul walked, by a wandering route, in the direction
of the Eiffel Tower, and reached the *Champs de Mars*. He was disheartened.
The Eiffel Tower loomed like oppression. He crossed a small bridge over a
narrow stream and sat on a bench atop a plateau in the midst of a neatly
planted garden. What would he do? How would he do it? He had never been the
sort to weigh consequences, but now he did. It vexed him. He stared at the
pond fed by the stream without thinking, just blank. Of a sudden, he was
startled by an explosive blast and then a second and a third that sent
things flying. He was hit in the left arm and in the chest. Around him
there were screams and people either fleeing in every direction or fallen
prone, injured or lying flat for safety. He was dazed but dimly aware that
he was outstretched on his back and in great pain. He saw nothing, felt
consciousness ebb within him, mitigating the pain, and then return,
bringing back the pain. He was lifted onto a stretcher. He blacked out.

     The news media reported that forty-seven people were injured, among
them American, British, German, and Chinese tourists. Six people were
killed, two French citizens on a visit from Bretagne and a family of four
from Japan. The culprits who planted the device were not apprehended; a
flaw in the design of the explosives was responsible for the fact that the
Eiffel Tower was not destroyed, although it appeared that that was
intended. Abdul was listed among the injured, who were treated and
released. His right arm was in a sling and hearing in his right ear had
been impaired.



III



      Weeks went by before Abdul felt anything. It was not a matter of a
broken arm, which was mending, nor of decreased hearing. It was a deeper
illness, a sickness of the spirit, a withered sense of worth, a dizzying
confusion. He lay in bed lost, lonely in delirium, hardly aware of where he
was or what he was. Everywhere had become nowhere; everything had become
nothing. He was blank, pushing through a snowstorm. He went without eating.
It was only because of Ibrahim, who obtained a passkey from the guardienne,
who, like nearly everyone in the neighborhood knew him, that he stayed
conscious. Ibrahim visited him daily bringing fruits and grains and fresh
water, and spoke to him, even if he remained silent. Ibrahim made "small
talk," described the weather, jokingly complained that there had been a
hike in the price of lettuce and tomatoes, spoke of what he'd seen on
television.

     "Did they say anything about me?" Abdul surprised him one day, with
the unexpected question. "Was there an explosion at the American Library?
Is that where I was hurt?"

     "What are you saying?" Ibrahim asked.

     "The American Library, the *khaneeth, *the* manyak*."

     Ibrahim knew the slang. He remembered also Abdul's passion when he
read Luc's condemnation of ISIS.

     "What are you talking about?"

      "Did I kill him?"

     "No," Ibrahim said. "You didn't kill anybody. You haven't committed
any crime. You were hurt in a blast intended to destroy the Eiffel Tower.
You had nothing to do with it. You were just sitting on a park bench
nearby."

      "I did not... Everything is..."

     "It is best to say nothing, even to remember nothing," Ibrahim said,
warning him soothingly. "There is no past. Everything begins in the
present. Here. Now. There is nowhere else. There is no other time."

     Abdul did not respond, but he heard him, and was perplexed. It seemed
that Ibrahim knew.

     "Where is Tariq?" Abdul asked.

     "He has gone."

     "Gone?"

     "He is not there. His room is empty."



     Perhaps that was as it should be, Ibrahim thought. Perhaps that was
the one good thing that had come out of this tragically, absurdly ironic
situation. Tariq would not have had anything to offer except further
corruption. Tariq scorned tenderness, he scorned the individual heart, and
he did not need religious fanaticism to justify his scorn. It was a part of
his makeup. But Abdul was naïve. He had no sense of that. He had had no
neurons to feel what Tariq was. For him, in the froth of his confused
anger, Tariq was a catalyst, the one who, the thing that, was going to
bring him to vision, stability, and fulfillment, to steer him to his
destiny, to give meaning to him. But now, meaning had evaded him. Tariq was
gone. His mission had failed Abdul's mission had vanished. He was a broken
man with impaired hearing and a permanently weakened right arm. His once
robust frame was almost skeletal. His eyes, which had burned with the zeal
of a man approaching martyrdom, had become hollow, dull, and sunken; the
fire that burned in them was extinguished.

     Ibrahim saw all this, and knew, additionally, that Abdul was without
resources. He had no money, and he would not be able to continue to rent
the room he occupied, low as the rent, was for Paris.

     "What will I do?" Abdul said.

     He suggested that Abdul stay in the small room in the back of his
shop.

     "Right now," Ibrahim explained, "you have no other option."

     With listlessness borne of a sense of defeat, Abdul complied, going
where he was taken. He remained lifeless, however. Even when he rose from
his bed, he was listless, sat all day in the small fenced-in concrete patio
garden behind the house among the green and yellow dumpsters and the
bicycles, smoking cigarettes.

     "I don't like to see you like this," Ibrahim said, one Sunday
afternoon, as he rubbed Abdul's back, pressing thumbs between his ribs and
kneading both sides of his lower back. And noticing the welts that had
formed where he had flagellated himself. Abdul exhaled and sobs came to his
throat. Ibrahim pressed more strongly into his flesh, and tears rushed out
along with angry screams. Ibrahim switched from the massaging movements of
his palms into long and comforting strokes. He turned Abdul's body over so
that he was lying face up. Ibrahim cupped his face in his hands, bent over
and spoke quietly with great seriousness.

       "Do you know what it is that so shakes you?"

       Abdul shook his head and clenched his teeth, sobbed and gasped
helplessly for breath, and spoke no words.

     "It is called trauma," Ibrahim said. "Something so bad happened to
you, so bad that you are unable to get beyond it. It becomes a ghost that
haunts you, a vampire that poisons your spirit and feeds upon your blood."



      Reclining languidly, seductively on a couch overhung by a
bronze-colored velvet canopy, with a crystal goblet of purple wine in one
hand; the other hand, extended, palm up; extended to the beholder of the
painting, Stéfan, reminded Luc of an odalisque. He wore only a jade
necklace around his neck; diamond pins glistering in his nipples; jade
green stockings held up by the black straps of a lacy red garter belt; his
pubes were trimmed and his penis was tumescent. His eyes were liquid with
receptivity; their depth of blue, intense in the light of the fire burning
in the grand hearth to the left of the divan; the eyelids hung heavily, as
if about to fall over them. His head was turned invitingly toward the
spectator; his face shone with emptiness, there was a hint of an
unpremeditated smile on his lips. Behind him, a grand set of arched
windows, framed by cloth of bronze, like that which overhung the canopy,
gave onto a late autumn scene of almost leafless trees, a turbulent Seine,
a troubled sky.

     Luc stepped back from the painting hanging in the Twenty-One Gallery.
Several months earlier, he had watched as it was being painted. It had
aroused him as he had gazed at Stéfan in his erotic nonchalance, posing so
revealingly and without a hint of reluctance. But to see on the canvas the
transformation the painter had achieved overwhelmed him. It still was an
erotic scene, but there had been conveyed into the composition a resonance
of the hidden, eternal power of eroticism, which the painter had uncovered
by means of her art.

     The Duchess, stately as always, standing by his side watched Luc as he
examined the painting. She was gratified by the awe she saw illuminate his
features. She had organized this exhibition of "fugitive painters" at the
gallery on Rue Raspail in order to position the work of her protégée, Imala
Tamim, a Paris-born painter of Afghan parents within the context of a
series of recent works whose common theme could be considered a meditation
on trauma. Imala Tamim's father, Bruno Tamim, was a photo journalist, best
known particularly for two photos, one taken in 1983 of Ronald Reagan in
the oval office with a group of mujahedeen whom the CIA had decided the
United States would arm in their fight against the Soviet occupation of
Afghanistan, and the other, a photo, taken in 1993, of Osama Bin Laden in
the Sudan. It appeared in *The Independent*, accompanying an interview by
Robert Fisk with Bin Laden in which Bin Laden discussed the construction of
a road his company was building between Almatig and Khartoum. When her
mother left her father when Imala was four and went to the United States
where she became a jazz singer with a small but loyal following, Bruno,
whose work had come to the attention of the Duchess, left London for Paris,
where she subsidized him and became a second mother to his daughter.

    The Duchess had introduced Tamim to Luc and Stéfan and then waited for
a bond of trust to form between them, and when it did, as she suspected it
would, she broached the matter of Stéfan's posing, and when he consented,
she commissioned Tamim to do the painting.

     The Duchess had sent Marcel Blanchard an invitation to the opening. He
came with a small crew and had gotten footage of the paintings, the gallery
and the attendees for a feature on France Culture, which would include a
segment on Imala Tamim's life and career and on Stéfan, the provocative
model in her gender subversive update of the traditional nineteenth-century
Odalisque. Tamim and Stéfan both informed Blanchard beforehand that they
had decided not to participate directly in the broadcast, and declined to
be interviewed.

      "I cannot agree to talk about myself," Tamim had explained to the
Duchess days before the opening. "I do not want to become a self-conscious
object of my own observation." Similarly, she did not want Stéfan to step
outside the frame of the painting, with regard to the experience of the
painting, and present himself, and the painting, as a media commodity.
Stéfan agreed with her. Of course! Only he and Luc knew that an interview
with him or questions that tried in any way to probe, however benign the
intentions, who he was would prove very problematic.

     Imala and Stéfan arrived late at the opening. The Duchess panicked
momentarily when she feared they might not show up at all. She loved Imala,
and Imala was devoted to her, and acknowledged indebtedness, but that did
not make her pliable when it came to the integrity of her artistic vision
or her sense of what she owed herself. When she was convinced that
something ought to be done a certain way, she became intransigent,
intransigent, not belligerent, the Duchess reminded herself. When they did
arrive, the relief the Duchess felt was palpable. She let out a sigh of
relief, and Luc took her hand.

     "You are too nervous," he said.

     "I have an idea of how I want everything to be, and then I always fear
that reality will not live up to it."

     "Does that often happen?"

     "Not as often as I fear it will."

     After greeting the Duchess and Luc with kisses, Imala and Stéfan
withdrew to a corner, undetected by most of the visitors. They were dressed
similarly, wearing baggy, faded blue jeans, grey running shoes, forest
green t-shirts and grey hoodies. They looked like pals from the *banlieue*,
two hippies who, happening to be passing, turned into the gallery to get
out of the rain and get some free hors d'oeuvres and champagne.

     When Blanchard approached and asked Stéfan, despite the previous
interdiction, to go in front of the camera to answer some questions, Stéfan
declined and said, "Imala does not want my actual presence to usurp the
gaze directed at the image she constructed in the painting. I understand
that and agree with it."

     When Marcel pressed, Stéfan and Imala walked away and left him
standing in the corner.

     "How odd," Blanchard said to the sound woman, puzzled, "everybody is
always hungry for media exposure!"



     Ibrahim generally knew more than he let on. He had stood behind the
counter for fifteen years, starting when he was sixteen and hardly knew a
word of French. Daily contact with customers quickly made him familiar with
the texture of his community, and his position behind the counter, while it
did not render him invisible, made him as innocuous as the furnishings of
his eatery to most of his customers, many of them transient, moreover.  As
they ate, they spoke unconstrained, without a second thought about things
they otherwise might be reluctant to have anyone overhear.

     He also had developed a sixth sense, the ability to assess the
authenticity and character of the people who hung around his store. And
Tariq, he knew from his eyes, from his smile, from the pitch of his voice
had a corrupt heart. He did not trust him. And he knew that at some point
or another, he would make trouble. Ibrahim did not want trouble. He liked
having a store, he liked the food he served, he liked serving it, meeting
people, and he liked the street outside the doors of his shop. There were
old, becoming ancient, Parisian apartment houses, not of the grand
Haussmann design, like those on the boulevards, but simple, undecorated,
working class buildings, the kind that were being torn down to make way for
high rises or renovated for the rich who came from the center of Paris in
search of the country in the city, and he liked to stand outside and smoke
a cigarette and look at the stately trees that divided the street from the
park.

     Ibrahim also sensed that Abdul was a good-hearted man, still a boy,
really, who had been twisted, that his vital spirits had been blocked in
their release, and had turned upon him, and rather than being filled with
the energy of love, they were mangled and needed objects of hatred to
justify otherwise inexplicable rage.

     When Ibrahim told Abdul that Tariq was gone, he was equivocating. When
he said he "was not there," he was saying less than he knew. When he said
no more, he kept silence out of concern for Abdul. He did know more.

     At the same time that Abdul was being carried wounded from the park
beside the Eiffel Tower, Ibrahim was in a heated and hushed conversation
with Tariq standing on the bridge that spans the lake in Buttes Chaumont
Park.

     "Do you understand in what danger you are putting both of us?" Tariq
said.

     I understand the peril you have introduced into the life of a
desperately angry boy, taking that anger and focusing it on something that
will blow up in his face."

     "This is apostasy."

     "Apostasy?"

     "I am bringing him to the culmination of our spiritual destiny through
submission to the great will of God."

     "Do you believe that?"

     "Do you not?"

     Ibrahim did not, and he risked saying so.

     "I am afraid that there is nothing further to discuss," Tariq said. He
turned away and left Ibrahim looking at the green-grown cliffs rising over
the lake.

     Tariq feared that he was no longer safe, that his work would be
thwarted, that Ibrahim was an apostate, unpredictable, that he would not
submit to the constraints and the discipline demanded of every subject of
the caliphate. Ibrahim no longer saw Tariq at the falafel shop, and word
reached him that Tariq had left Paris. But that afforded him no comfort.
Knowing what he knew, Ibrahim had little doubt that Tariq did not work
alone, and that he, Ibrahim, knowing what he knew, had to be a marked man.



     If the common proposition that in every denial there is embedded the
seed of the confession of its opposite, then readers will hardly take it at
face value when I report here that Luc was not jealous when Stéfan and
Imala began to show an interest in each other. Yet, that is the truth. How
could there not be an erotic frisson drawing them together? Luc realized
it, understood it, embraced it when he saw them collaborating on the
portrait of Stéfan as an odalisque. Collaborating! From the erotic
attraction between the muse and the artist is distilled the creation, the
work of art, the essence of the human that is realized through inspired
transformation. Sublimation does not mean the suppression of the erotic.
Sublimation is the process through which the erotic is realized. So it was
with Imala and Stéfan. Through a symbiotic affinity each energized the
other. They realized themselves through and in the other. Imala was the
woman Stéfan became when he posed for her. Stéfan was the man Imala became
when she painted him. When she painted him, it felt to both of them as if
she were caressing him, stroking his chest, brushing his lips with her
fingers, bringing him to tumescence with delicate strokes along the stem of
his desire, arousing him with the sweep of her palms on his thighs, wiping
him out with feathery finger tips skating over the soles of his feet.



     Luc sat at his desk in the library facing his computer preparing the
lecture, "History and Time," that he had been invited to deliver in New
York at the Metropolitan Museum of Art after Christmas. It was several
weeks after the opening at the Gallery 21. Stéfan was poking the fire and
waiting for the coffee to brew. When it was ready he placed a cup upon the
table beside Luc's desk.

     "Thank you," Luc said, looking up at him, clasping his naked inner
thigh and sliding his hand upward. Stéfan smiled and Luc saw something that
needed his attention. He swiveled his chair and faced him. Stéfan lowered
himself and sat at his feet, on his haunches and looked into his eyes, like
a lost puppy. "Tell me," Luc said, gently.

     "You know that Imala and I have been spending time together," he began
tentatively.

     He told him that when they had walked along the Seine, they had held
hands, and put their arms around each other, and kissed, and that he felt
his soul mingling with hers, and that she experienced the same thing. He
said he was worried that he was betraying Luc's trust. There was no
betrayal Luc said. He said that he knew that an erotic current flowed
between them – how could it not? – and that the only betrayal Stéfan ought
to worry about was betrayal of himself, and of Imala, if he betrayed the
reality of their desire. Stéfan rose, took Luc's hand, kissed it. Luc
stood, and kissed Stéfan. Luc kept him in a tight embrace. The warmth of
their bodies touched and flared into an erotic heat.

     Late afternoon in December and it was as dark as night. They gazed at
each other in the firelight. Stéfan stepped out of his shorts and
unbuttoned Luc's shirt and unzipped his jeans and slipped them off his
legs, bowing before him as he did, and kissed his bare feet. Luc raised
him, kissed him and each took hold of the other's cock and exchanged their
love in frottage. When they came, they still could not let go. The ardency
of kisses and the heat of their skin bound them together.

     "Tell me you love me," Stéfan said.

     "I do," Luc said. "I love you."

     "I will always belong to you. I adore you and worship you," Stéfan
answered.



     As I began this section with an anti-psychological admonition, so must
I conclude it with another one. A rule of fiction is that an assertion
delivered confidently must be undermined in the course of the narrative,
that there are at play forces beyond our ken that play havoc with our
promises, mock and undermine them. But these demons were not present at
this encounter and the words Stéfan said, he meant and was not deterred
from sustaining.



     The Duchess and Imala accompanied Luc and Stéfan to New York for the
conference at which Luc would deliver his paper, and they would stay over
until the first week of January. The Duchess owned an apartment overlooking
Central Park and had a number of invitations from friends and family for
New Years Eve. After some consideration, looking at the snow falling
heavily on Manhattan, they decided they'd go to an early evening champagne
reception at one of the Duchess' cousin's place in Greenwich Village and
then, with plenty of time to go back home and get into their costumes,
they'd go to an all-night costume ball in SOHO. Stéfan and Imala decided to
go as each other.

     In Paris they had swapped genders and gone out one night to eat
at the *Bon
Vivant* on Rue des Ecole. Imala dressed in jeans, work boots, a bomber
jacket over her buttoned-on-the-shoulder blue and white striped mariner's
sweater; her hair spiked, a wool scarf around her neck. Stéfan, in knee
high, calf-hugging, dove colored boots with heels, sheer black panty-hose,
black silky culottes, a dove-colored silk shirt open at the neck, a string
of baby pearls round his neck, a crimson velvet, fitted outer jacket; his
nails painted gold; his lips the color of Merlot wine; his eyes lined with
black pencil; the lashes extended; the lids dusted with gold powder, his
hair slicked to fit round his head like a cap. They sat across from each
other with drinks in front of them drowning in each other's eyes.

     They took their way over the Pont Neuf, through the Place Dauphine,
back to her apartment. She made them another drink and sat down beside him
on the leather couch. Through the windows they saw the Eiffel Tower
sparkling like a million diamonds in the distance. She placed her hand on
his thigh and told him he was the most beautiful girl she had ever seen,
and told him to get undressed for her, slowly. He took a deep breath and
began to unbutton his blouse.

     "Do it standing up," she said.

     When he stood before her in only boots and panty-hose, she told him to
stop and to come over to her. His cock was hard and pressed upwards against
him, flattened by the panty-hose and the bikini panties underneath. She
caressed his perineum and teased his cunt. She pulled down his hose and
panties and took his stiff cock in her hand. "How did you get this?" she
said.

     "The cock? It's yours," he said. "I want you to fuck me with it."

      "Take off my boots," she said.

     "He knelt before her, unlaced them, and pulled her boots off. When her
feet were bare, he kissed them. He undid her jeans and pushed his face into
her sex, thrust his tongue into her darkness and kissed her wildly as she
flooded and drank her in with a great thirst. She pushed him gently onto
his back onto the floor and lowered herself onto him, in that way entering
him, rising up and lowering herself as he lurched up to grasp her cock and
keep it inside him as she pulled out and he pulled her in again. She held
him on her gaze and told him how precious he was. He screamed in joy-filled
agony as she flooded him with her semen. They collapsed and fell into a
mutual sleep.

     He woke. She was inside him still, soft. Hovering above him, she
traced the shape of his eyelids with a fingertip. She touched his lips with
hers and withdrew. He gazed at her in rapture.

     Obvious it was that Stéfan had been transformed. Luc saw it, and
Stéfan did not hide it. With delight, running like the water in a clear
brook over sunlit stones, he gushed his love. He was enthralled by his love
for Imala; each was in the other's power, their desire burning mutually.
Luc knew it would happen; that it did, pleased him. Nature will have its
way. Eros the shape shifter will not be constrained. He will dance in our
souls. Stéfan was subsumed, helplessness in the face of desire. It was a
noble weakness: a strength: to submit when you encounter divinity. And
Imala was as deeply enflamed, enthralled, and wounded by love as Stéfan!
They were the kind of lovers Plato wrote of in the Symposium: separated
parts of one entirety that had rejoined. When Luc held Stéfan close to him,
and Stéfan yielded rapturously, as he always had, worshipping him with
kisses, the passion that rushed within and flooded him crossed the
boundaries of their skin and illuminated, also, him.



     Abdul seldom spoke. With stoic endurance he performed the tasks
Ibrahim apportioned him to perform. By way of earning his keep, in the
store, he did simple tasks, cleaning the counter top and the tables,
sweeping the floor, rinsing plates and silverware, loading the dishwasher,
seeing that the supply of plastic cups and paper napkins was maintained.

     Despite a steady undercurrent of anxiety, his fear of retribution for
getting in the way of Tariq's mission, Ibrahim was steady as a rock in
carrying out each day's work. He tended the store, cared for Abdul, and,
although he did not go to mosque or by himself observe the prayer rituals,
he devoted time each day and each night to observe the natural beauty of
the surrounding world. He walked through Buttes-Chaumont Park, sometimes
taking Abdul with him. He gazed through the darkened heavens at the moon
and stars and felt the world around him itself as an awesome presence in
which he dwelt; which held him in the folds of its envelope.

     "Can you not open yourself a little to a breath of life?" he asked
Abdul as they climbed stone pathways under leafless trees. "Look at the web
the branches make against the sky. There are no leaves now, but spring will
come, and so will new foliage. It is with us like that. The past need not
cling. There is a future to grow. It is nurtured by the world around it,
but there are seeds of it within us, within you, too."

     "Whatever is within me must stay within me," Abdul answered.

     "Is it so painful?"

     "It is so tainted by evil."

     "What have you done? You have done nothing. Providence rescued you. Is
it not wrong to be bowed down with grief afterwards and not be thankful?"

     "Even if I have been saved from doing one evil in the world, there is
a world of evil within me."

     Ibrahim looked at him, inviting him to continue.

     "There is nothing more I can say."

     Ibrahim was puzzled and thought it must be something other than the
madness of the plot Abdul had formulated under Tariq's sway that was
crippling him. It was something that gave that frenzy its energy. But what
it might be...that was beyond his power to see. All he could do...was wait, and
try to keep Abdul from further harm.

     And his ministrations seemed to be having some good effect. By the end
of August, Abdul had begun to stir. He left the shop, took walks by
himself, and began playing checkers in a corner of a nearby café with other
young men. This was progress, Ibrahim thought, but with reservations. Abdul
was reentering the world, yet the companions he hung out with were
rudderless, like him, and shifty. Perhaps that was to be expected. Perhaps
that was all that could be hoped for. Still, Ibrahim worried. This did not
lead to a future. To be stuck in the same present, over and over, that was
not a good thing.

     But there was nothing to do except what he had been doing. Ibrahim put
Abdul, in his meditations, into the hands of divine care and quietly hoped,
and kept his eyes open. There was no more he could do. He could not confine
the young man to the little room in the back of the store. The grace of
nature might guide the boy yet, Inshalla.



     "You cannot live your life imprisoned in darkness. It is a sin," Umhad
said, looking up from the checkerboard set out between them on the unmade
bed of his attic room, after double jumping Abdul and getting a king. His
words were in response to Abdul's confession that he felt his life had no
purpose when Umhad casually asked him if there was anything he believed in
so much that he would die for it. Abdul had answered, "I wish it was so. It
would be a great light in the darkness I am in, but everything is without
meaning."

     "You find a meaning, a great meaning in life, when you find a great
thing to die for," Umhad said.

     "I have looked, but it has evaded me."

     "You did not look with enough dedication. You looked with a weak
spirit. You must look harder. You are not acting the part that is befitting
a man." He swept the board off the bed with a sudden backhanded swipe,
scattering the pieces on the floor. He stood up. "You are not a man. You
are passive, waiting for destiny. Instead of approaching destiny, taking
ahold of destiny, and offering yourself to destiny to lead destiny forward,
you show your ass to destiny, waiting to be fucked. Perhaps you are a
*kushaad*."

     At the sound of *kushaad*, of being called *kushaad*, the blood rose
to Abdul's temples and beat so hard that his head would burst. In one
gesture he was on his feet, spun around and took Umhad by the throat and
began to choke him. Umhad's arms shot upward like two swords forming a Y
and broke Abdul's hold. Then his palms fell onto Abdul's shoulders with
shattering force, and his fingers grasped him in a firm grip.

     In a minute, Umhad unleashed what Ibrahim had not been able to locate
over a stretch of months. It was *manhood* that Abdul desired and feared.

     "I am not," he said, and without repeating the word, both of them knew
what he was talking about.

     "How can you show it?" Umhad challenged, unyielding in his show of
contempt.

     "What do you want me to do?"

     "That is the question a *kushaad* asks," Umhad sneered. "Since you
behave like a *kushaad*, I will use you like a *kushaad*. He slapped him so
hard across the face that Abdul fell backward on the bed. He felt Umhad's
body weighing his down and he felt Umhad's fingers forcing his mouth open
and putting his own mouth upon it, not to kiss it but to spit into it. He
pulled Abdul's jeans, which were already loose and low, around his ankles,
pulled his underwear down and forced his finger up his ass. Abdul screamed
in pain. Umhad slapped him again and unzipped his own fly.

     "Tell me you are not a *kushaad*," Umhad threatened and rammed his
terribly hard cock up Abdul's unready ass and came screaming *kushaad*
repeatedly. "*Kushaad, kushaad, kushaad, kushaad*!" Abdul screamed too,
grabbing onto Umhad writhing to free himself from him but by that only
drawing him nearer.



     There was an unseasonably warm interlude the last days of December
after the snow that had fallen on the day of their arrival in New York.
Having eaten breakfast together in the Duchess' penthouse apartment – the
table set by a grand picture window overlooking Central Park – the four set
out across the park to the Metropolitan Museum where Luc would give his
lecture. Warm although it was, the weather threatened rain. Luc wore a
conservative dark gray flannel suit with an Oxford blue shirt and a dark
blue silk tie under his trench coat. He carried a black umbrella with a
carved teak handle. The duchess wore a high-neck, jade green sheath that
stopped mid-calf, with a left side slit. Brown vinyl boots hugged her
calves. Over the sheath, she wore a full gold cape of raw silk. Stéfan wore
a smart, blue silk, man tailored suit with a sexy sheath skirt that just
came to the knee, sheer nylon pantyhose; blue, leather pumps with a four
inch heel that compelled him to walk on the pavement and not stray onto the
grass; a pale creamy white blouse; a soft fulvous silk scarf. He wore a
classic trench coat and a wide brimmed dark blue Borsolino. Imala wore a
pair of faded jeans, boots, a rust-colored V neck pullover, a Dresden blue
chamois jacket, a knee-length mustard-colored over coat, and a
coffee-colored trilby. They passed through the metal detectors and entered
the great hall. From there they made their way through crowds to the Grace
Rainy Rogers Auditorium.  They agreed to meet afterwards on the steps of
the museum, knowing Luc would be delayed by audience members wishing to
talk to him. Luc left them to go backstage, and they took their seats in
the auditorium.

     After Luc's talk, a man approached him as he stood leaning against the
platform at the front of the auditorium, answering questions from members
of the audience who had surged up to the stage. He suddenly waved a gun at
Luc and cried out " by *fatwa"*. With incredible reflexes, one of the men
in the circle around Luc threw himself at the man and sliced the side of
his palm against his wrist. A shot rang out; a bullet flew in an arc over
them and imbedded itself in the proscenium above the stage. The gunman fell
to the floor beside the gun and the man who foiled the attack dug a knee
into his spine.

    One of the security guards who had rushed to the front of the
auditorium – but it would have been too late -- picked up the gun. Two
other guards cuffed the assailant and took him, stumbling, from the room.

     "The world is crazy," someone said.

     "Don't they have metal detectors just for this?" somebody else said
angrily.

     In both his hands Luc took the hand of the man who had sprung and
knocked his would-be assassin to the ground, and held it, looking at him
without saying anything. At last, he said, "Thank you." The man nodded. "I
owe you my life," Luc said. "It was Providence," the man said. "I read that
the reconstructed arch from the temple at Palmyra was going to be displayed
in Times Square, a few days ago. I'd read your book and admired your work.
And I knew that you'd played an advisory role in the reconstitution of the
arch. When I picked up the brochure being sold there I saw your article on
Palmyra and an announcement that you would be speaking here today. I was
free and decided to come hear you. Everything is chance." He smiled, and
Luc approached and embraced him. "Who are you?" Luc asked.

     "James Engg," the man said. "I am in the Philosophy department at
Columbia – and I have a black belt in karate." And now Luc *saw* him, a
handsome man of Japanese origin. When he embraced him he felt his body's
muscular solidity.

     "I would like to thank you somehow," Luc said, and smiling, added, "I
would like to get to know you. May I invite you to join my friends – who
are waiting in front of the museum -- and me for lunch?"

     Engg smiled. "I would be honored," he said.

     "Everyone must wait here, please," a man who seemed by his uniform to
be the head of security announced in a voice that was not to be disobeyed.

     Luc asked why and the officer explained that the museum was on lock
down. That meant that the building was being scoured by a security team and
that the visitors to the museum were being let out one by one, and being
subjected to the same security procedures they had been subjected to when
they entered.

     "A lot of good that did," someone said.

     Outside, where the duchess, Imala, and Stéfan were waiting on the
steps, the news quickly arrived that there had been an attempted
assassination in the Rogers auditorium, but that no one was injured. Stéfan
was overcome by an insidious panic and grabbed Imala's hand so hard he
nearly crushed it. Imala took him in her embrace and held him. He was
shaking and his teeth were chattering. Fortunately, they did not have to
wait long before Luc appeared. He was escorted out of the museum, along
with James Engg, by a security detail comprising museum employees and one
New York City cop who was assigned to stay with them as long as Luc wanted
him to.

     When Stéfan spotted Luc at the door he ran up to him and took hold of
him, holding on to him as if for dear life.

     "I'm alright," Luc said, kissing his eyes.

     "I'm not... Or I wasn't... Now I am," Stéfan said laughing and crying at
the same time. He loosened his grip and took Luc's hand as they descended
the steps and joined the others.

     "I guess we ought to scrap our plans to have lunch in the park and go
back to Anna-Maria's," Luc said.

     "I think that would be best," she agreed, and, after a quick exchange
of glances with Luc, invited James to have lunch with them, too. When she
heard what he had done, she took his hand and kissed it. He smiled
foolishly and blushed. She called ahead to Robert in the kitchen and told
him to prepare a lunch for five, that they'd be there in about an hour.



IV

    After he was raped, Abdul fell apart. His ass was sore; tormenting
cramps stung his belly. He felt as if he were stuffed with ordure he was
unable to void. He was bent over, and he keened desperately.

     "There!" Umhad spat at him. "Now you know what you are, nothing more
than a dog, a bitch. If you continue to whine like a bitch, I will whip you
like a bitch," he said, and kicked him. "A barren bitch! You cannot even
whelp." He went out, locked the door, and left him naked, alone, cringing
on the floor.

     Abdul had met his destiny. His destiny was pain.

     Umhad returned when there was darkness outside. Abdul still lay on the
floor, shivering. Umhad pushed him with the toes of his boots, kicking him
under his scrotum, out of the fetal position he lay in onto his back, and
fucked him again until he bled.

     "Please," Abdul whimpered.

     "Shut the fuck up," Umhad said, slapping him in rage across the face
as he banged relentlessly in and out of his ass, unable to come, growing
increasingly violent. "You don't know how lucky you are that I'm fucking
you, bitch, because when I'm tired of it, you get castrated."



     When Abdul did not return to the shop, Ibrahim worried. When the first
night of his absence gave way to another and then to another a frightful
heaviness, the weight of fear and guilt and sadness, fell upon Ibrahim. A
sense of urgency to do something, to look somewhere, and the inability to
get beyond some barrier blocking the possibility of doing anything made him
tremble. The sense that he had failed, that he had not done something he
ought to have done, that he had failed to know how to protect Abdul
wrenched at his vitals. He knew that something terrible had happened, was
happening to Abdul, something that was suddenly epidemic in the world he
had known: inhumanity had inserted itself once again into history. It was
beyond him.

     The next mid-morning he went to open his shop to prepare for the
office workers and construction workers and students who crowded the place
for lunch. A gash had been cut in the metal portcullis, and window glass
lay all about. The register had not been touched, but a blade had ripped
through the leatherette banquettes and the condiments had been emptied all
over the place.

    Ibrahim covered his mouth with one hand as he sucked in his breath. The
other hand, he extended, bent, palm up, as if in supplication demanding the
answer to a question he did not know how to formulate.

     He called the police. When they arrived, they took him to a precinct
house and began questioning him, it seemed to Ibrahim, as if they were
trying to establish that he himself had done the damage, or hired someone
to do it, in order to collect on the insurance. When he had managed to
convince them that that was not so, they began to question him about his
possible association with terrorists.

     When finally they released him it seemed to him that it was
reluctantly. All the same, he was glad to be free of them, for they
represented nothing like help but only further misfortune. Inside the
wrecked store, he phoned the owner of the property. Mr. Banqui asked him to
wait for him, told him that he would get there soon to see what had
happened. As he waited for him, Ibrahim reviewed his options. Continuing in
the falafel shop, was that one of them? If they were going to get him, they
were going to get him. So what did it matter? But maybe – how could he
know? – maybe the vandalism had nothing to do with Tariq and Abdul and what
they supposed he knew about them. How could he know? And what else was
there for him to do? Where else was there for him to go? It was not in his
hands. Only what he did was in his hands. Only what he could do was in his
hands.



     The cop who had been assigned to protect Luc had the euphonious name
of Art McCarthy. He was in his twenties, strong, lean, good looking, and it
was obvious to our friends that he was gay, although there was nothing
stereotypically obvious about him, as more and more, in general, there was
not, as homosexuality became an accepted strand in the fabric of society.
The perception was reciprocal, and, despite the seriousness of the recent
threat, it put him in a bright mood, which was infectious. Accordingly, the
duchess asked him if he would like to join them for lunch, too, when they
reached the Dakota.

     "After all," she said, "who can say that we still don't need
protection."

     "If it's in the line of duty, it would be dereliction not to accept,"
he responded. "Besides, I've never been inside this building."

     "There's always a first time," James Engg said, placing his arm around
him. "If it's ok to touch an officer of the law."

     "Tell Robert that now we are six, Molly," the duchess said with a
laugh in her voice to the maid who opened the door. "And I think the number
will not further increase."

     Molly curtsied.



      The assailant the police dragged from the auditorium, as he was being
led along an empty corridor through the museum to a waiting van, lurched
suddenly and lunged at one of the cops. Reflexively, without a thought he
pulled his gun and shot him four times, and killed him. Found in his pocket
was a folded paper on which the following transcribed words were scrawled.
They were immediately released to the media along with the report of his
attempt on the noted French historian, Luc Bastienne, and his death while
in police custody.

     "This is a warning," the message read. "If you attempt to mock the
holy work of our brothers in the Caliphate, we will mock your blasphemous
attempts. When you restore the heathen arch of Palmyra and show it off in
your foul cities, you bring destruction upon yourselves. We have
obliterated Palmyra once in the desert and we will destroy the modern
Palmyra again wherever it stands: in the midst of the most decadent Times
Square in New York or the reeking Trafalgar Square in London."

      Despite himself, after lunch, Luc asked the duchess to turn on the
news.

     "We don't know if the gunman was a solitary terrorist or part of a
larger cell," the newsreader intoned, "just as we do not know whether the
note found on him is the deranged ranting of a madman or a serious warning
of an impending terrorist attack. In any case, twenty-four hour security
around the arch on display in Times Square has been substantially
increased. The arch, meanwhile, is scheduled, all eleven tons of it, to be
disassembled and shipped to Syria in the coming days. In the interest of
security, the exact timing is not being revealed. In other news..."

     Luc shut the television and walked over to the window and gazed out
over the park. James went and stood beside him and said between his teeth,
"They want to obliterate the past, destroy the present, and deny the
future. We have our work cut out for us. It is simple. Not to let them.
That is what the study of history and the practice of philosophy are
about."

     After the story was released, Art McCarthy was informed that he was
being pulled off the security detail for Luc. Forensics had  determined
that Luc was not the target of any threat, that neither the Islamic State
nor any other terrorist organization had anything to do with the incident.
Similarly, the Foundation for the Display of the Arch of Palmyra was
notified that the security alert with regard to the arch had been reduced.

     Forensic tests and old-fashioned footwork had dispelled the mystery of
the gunman's identity and the motives for the attack. It was the work of a
deranged young man with no political bias and no connection to the Middle
East. The note, the authorities decided was an indication of paranoid
displacement, a sign of a delusional attachment to violent rebellious
forces within himself with which the young man was struggling, that he
could not accept as his own, and assigned to forces outside himself, with
which external forces, pathologically, he then identified himself. Thus, he
experienced his own turmoil as a force from outside, and he became the
agent of this turmoil, enlisted to execute its dictates, rather than its
source.

     Christy Thompson was a Wall Street brat, a man who had been struggling
with schizophrenia since his teens. His family was ashamed of him and tried
to keep his condition secret by setting him up in a small East Village
apartment. They provided him with domestic and medical care, but otherwise
kept their distance and strongly limited their contact with him, seldom
visiting him and never including him in family events.

     When Kristophe Thompson, who, as a partner in a great Wall Street
brokerage/banking house had introduced the use of credit/default swaps,
heard the news of Christy's death and the circumstances surrounding it, he
send one of his lawyers to confer with the police commissioner to arrange
for his son's burial and to manage the way the news of his death, of his
family connections, and of his health was to be released to the media, and
through his lawyers, also, he pledge one million dollars to the Brain and
Behavior Research Foundation, which donation was to be reported in the lede
in all the reporting of Christy's death.



         After midnight; champagne flowing; bowls filled with pot on every
table; sumptuous buffet tables against walls of windows; clear views of
Manhattan roofs; the Empire State building towering high over everything.
Snow no longer falling, the sky, deep, cold, blue.

     "From the point of view," said a black haired woman in a yellow
see-through blouse and a brilliant red flamenco skirt, who was trying to
detain Luc as he was saying his goodbyes, "from the point of view of a
professional historian, do you think that the Islamic State has put an end
to history?"

    "A happy people has no history," Luc answered. "Geoffrey of Monmouth,
the Welsh historian of the twelfth century, wrote that."

     "I don't see the connection," she interrupted.

    "I never quite understood what he meant," Luc continued, unfazed and
undeterred, "unless he was being droll, implying that there never had been
such a thing as a happy people, or, if there had been, we could not know of
them, their having no history for us to read about, having been a happy
people. Thus, all the evidence that has been passed down necessarily
confirms Geoffrey's observation. History, as we know it, is a record of
unhappiness and of the effects and ramifications of unhappiness."

     "This is at best sophistical," said the woman. "But how is it relevant
to what I asked?"

     Luc smiled and looked around the room searching for his friends, who
were also saying goodbyes, as he answered, "Maybe it isn't."



V

     Art McCarthy, in mufti, looking at the excellent copy, in marble, of
Michelangelo's "Dying Slave." It stood commandingly in an alcove in the
library of the duchess' Manhattan apartment. Beside him, James Engg,
looking not at the magnificent statue but at Art McCarthy, with as much
admiration as McCarthy bestowed on the sculpture.

     "You've decided to throw it all over?" he said.

     "In the end, there's not much to throw over," McCarthy said. "If I
stay on the job, in eighteen years I can retire at thirty-seven – not bad,
but, eighteen years is still a lot of time."

     "Why did you become a cop?"

     "My father was crippled in an industrial accident – confined to a
wheel chair. My mother was always somewhat...flighty... and had always relied
on him. So she could not cope financially or emotionally after he was
incapacitated. The company he worked for claimed that the accident was his
fault – negligence -- in order to get out of having to pay him the pension
he'd earned and worker's compensation. We had to get a lawyer, and that
took money. I had to leave school, and being a cop seemed like the best
thing. The pay was decent. I am young and strong. It was a challenge. But
now..."

     "Now?"

     "It's not enough, anymore. These last few days in particular have made
me sure of that."

     "And your parents?"

     "They won the suit. They are set financially, and there are social
services in place."

     "Do they know you're leaving?"

     "I told them last night."

     "And?"

     "I also told them that I am gay. My mother didn't believe me. She said
it was `ridiculous.' My father didn't say anything for a minute. Then he
looked at me and said, `Isn't one cripple in the family enough?' So, that's
what I'll be `throwing over.'"

     Engg put his arm around McCarthy. "I'll miss you," he said.

     "You can visit us in Paris, and maybe even get a visiting appointment
at the Sorbonne."

     "Engg smiled. "I've thought about that already, and I've spoken with
Anna-Maria, whose influence seems to be wide-ranging. What do you intend to
do in Paris?"

     "I'm going to study French, and Anna-Marie's influence extends even to
Amnesty International."

     "Exactly, it does," the lady herself said, approaching them. She was
still in her blue silk, floor-length dressing gown. "Coffee's on," she
continued, "and there's bacon and eggs, pancakes and apple pie. We're being
very American for our last day here."



     Once Ibrahim had an attestation from the police, the insurance company
agreed to cover the cost of repairing his falafel place. It just entailed a
good deal of paper work, but that was nothing Ibrahim was unfamiliar with
and could not handle. He got a neighborhood contractor who had known him
and eaten in his place for years to do the work, and in a month the shop
was reopened. At first, while the work was being done, Ibrahim did not
leave his studio apartment on Rue du Général Brunet, a short walk from the
shop. Now he appreciated that the complex at Number 6, was built like a
fortress or a prison. He never had before. But now the barred prison-like
doors and the multiple interphone systems gave him the sense of security he
needed in his shaken state. Was Tariq behind the attack, even if he himself
was not still in Paris? Was it a random act of vandalism, impersonal
violence, or was it something deliberately aimed at him? There was no point
in scaring himself with ugly scenarios. Fate has an ugly way of revealing
itself. He could only do what he could do. What he could do was run a
restaurant. That was his work. That was how he prayed.

     He had not entirely given up hope of learning anything he could about
Abdul, but he was not sanguine. He had connections to neighborhood
grapevines, but this was something else, and he knew he could be courting
danger by sticking his nose where it was not wanted. What good would it do,
anyhow?



     When the OECD's budget was cut and lay-offs were declared the only way
for the organization to survive, Flint Whitlock was told that his work had
been very much appreciated over the last fifteen years, and that it still
was, and that the organization grieved to let him go, but severance was the
only possible course for survival. David Lance, on the other hand, at a
lower grade on the pay scale, was not laid off, but he was embittered by
Whitlock's firing and by the change that was perceptible in the culture of
the organization. It became distasteful for him to stay on. It felt, too,
that if he did, it would be a betrayal of Flint, a failure to honor, an
offense to loyalty.

     "We are not desperate," he argued, regarding their finances, when he
told Flint he was quitting, "and we are not without resources," he added,
considering their skills. He was right.

    He gave notice the following day and dismissed several entreaties to
reconsider and several hints of real possibilities waiting for him if he
stayed on.

     It was a gamble. It paid off. The work of Whitlock and Lance was known
and respected throughout the international cultural and economic research
community. Following some networking, they were invited, as a team, to
become part the International Agency for the Study and the Preservation of
Historical Sites and Cultures. It meant living in New York. They gave up
their apartment in Paris, but kept the house in Burgundy.

     Like so many, they were appalled at the barbarism unleashed by the
invasion of Iraq, and after the innumerable deaths, cripplings,
devastations, and sufferings, the destruction of Palmyra became just one
more horror, one further offense against history, culture, and the living
stream of humanity.

     "They want to obliterate humanism along with humanity," David said,"
as they made their way through Central Park on their way to Lincoln Center.
Whitlock just shook his head. "I often think our work is useless," he said.

     "No," David said. "It is just exactly in the face of any deformation
of the human spirit, and when the monstrosity of human actions against
humanity seem to dominate, that our work takes on its greatest meaning. Who
was it said that a happy people does not have a history? Well a traduced
and wretched people needs a history, and that is what we are doing, laying
the foundations of history by examining the world we live in at the time we
live in it.

     "Don't tell me I did not know what I was doing when I took you out of
the typing pool," Whitlock said, clutching him by the shoulder.



      Assam Hanood, one of the young men with whom Umhad was hanging out at
the café and speaking to about jihad, spotted him, in the Parc Buttes
Chaumont, in the distance, sitting by himself, smoking a cigarette. This
transgression made Hanood become suspicious of the trustworthiness of
Umhad's devotion to jihad and of the sincerity of his submission to the
laws of holiness. He was using tobacco. That showed contempt and a lack of
discipline. It was his duty to correct this fault, Hanood thought. And
perhaps there were others. Hanood had uneasy feelings that Umhad kept
secrets, that his soul was impure – whose was not? – but that he was
complicit with the impurity rather than in a holy struggle with it, even if
that struggle meant martyrdom. Umhad's fascination with jihad, Hanood could
not help thinking, was a ruse. And that was pollution, and a great offense.
Umhad had to learn discipline through punishment, and punishment had to be
imposed as a loving duty, essential for his salvation. Hanood understood,
being outside the Caliphate, without the Sharia police to enforce it, it
was his duty to impose the necessary punishment.

     He did not own a whip, but knew that it was necessary for him to get
one. The easiest thing was to order one on the Internet. They could be
expensive, works of real craft, if you wanted to pay, he saw, but he did
not need kangaroo hide. He did not want nylon, though. Leather was
important. There was something about dead animal hide that excited him. He
ran the length of the whip through his palm, over and over, when it came,
and felt its heft, and he developed reverence for what he began to think of
as its "authority," and he sensed the whip conferred authority upon him if
he needed to use it.

     He saw Umhad in the café a few night's after the whip arrived, and
found himself in a state of heightened excitement, which he made an effort
to subdue, but that very effort brought a fire to his eyes that Umhad could
not help noticing and that had a force he found it difficult to resist.
Hanood saw that Umhad kept glancing at him with pain filled eyes, drawn to
him, and had trouble keeping his gaze away from Hanood's.

     "Why do you look so at me?" Hanood said.

     "There is a flame in your eyes," Umhad answered.

     "What kind of flame is it?" Hanood asked.

     "I think it is the flame of devotion, to jihad," he answered.

     "I do not think I see such a flame in your eyes, no matter how much
you talk of it."

     "I would like it to be there."

     "I wonder if you believe that. I wonder if you are not lying to
yourself and to everyone else," he said.

     Without knowing why, Umhad felt afraid.

     And it was at this peculiar moment that Hanood asked Umhad if he
remembered Abdul, who had not been to the café for more than a month.

     "I have wondered," he said, "feigning less concern than he had, "what
has become of him."

     Umhad quickly said, "I don't know." Too quickly.

     Hanood caught it and asked, "Why should you?" He paused, as if
thinking, "And yet, you were very involved with him, talking intensely with
him about jihad."

     "We all spoke about jihad, and about the danger of the infidel. Is it
not worthy of our intensity?"

     "Yes," Hanood said. "Yet there was something in the way you spoke that
made me uneasy, even suspicious."

     "Suspicious?" Umhad asked uneasily. "Of what could you be suspicious?"

     "Perhaps your motives were not pure. Perhaps you were using jihad only
as a way to express another passion, an impure passion."

     "How can I prove my sincerity?" Umhad asked.

     "Why does it need to be proven?"

     "Because you doubt it."

     "What has happened to Abdul?" Hanood asked surprising him.

     "Abdul?"

     "Do you know where he is?"

     "Perhaps he has gone to Syria."

     "Perhaps he has not."

     "What are you accusing me of?"

     "Accusing you? Why do you think I am accusing you of something?"

     "It is late," Umhad said. "They are closing. I must go home."

     "I will walk with you."

     "I'd rather be by myself."

     "So be it," Hanood said, "for now, but do not deceive yourself. No man
is `by himself.' Every man lives in the eye of God and in the eyes of His
appointed holy representatives."

     "It is late," Umhad repeated "and it is chilly, and I am beginning to
shiver."



    Stéfan's eyes did not flare furiously with fierce fire or cower
guiltily with derelict passion. Their light was immanent and tender. His
eyes were luminous, illuminated by the incandescent light cast by Luc's.
Stéfan absorbed that light and it was integrally his: it was an emanation
of the love he and Luc dwelt within reciprocally, a love that proved the
possibility of the triune mystery – although with them it was not three but
two: remaining two, becoming one.

     Love does not prevent restlessness. I don't mean sexual restlessness.
Sexual restlessness is symptomatic of a disturbance in loving. I mean the
existential restlessness that looms when the soul is not absorbed in an
essentially creative interaction with the world that expresses, amplifies,
and, yes, redeems the self, redeems it from its own self-reflexivity, from
the possibility and torment of solitary selfness.

     Stéfan was not plagued by the torment of solitary selfness: his love
for Luc was real, proffered, and reciprocated. His soul was not isolated
and alienated but engaged and nourished by unwavering mutual affection.
Perhaps it was the activation of his inherent femininity, his natural
receptivity, his need to receive -- he was trying to understand what was
unsettling him -- that depleted as well as nourished him, that weakened as
well as fulfilled him. Perhaps he had too determinedly retreated from
something in him intrinsically and inescapably masculine; perhaps in
realizing himself he had also been denying himself. But did it, he worried,
inevitably come down to a conflict between two ineluctable and incompatible
parts of himself? Was his sexual femininity keeping him from engaging
creative masculinity? Was his generous receptivity blocking an equally
generous aggressivity?

     "It's a question of what I do with my days every day," he explained to
Imala as they sat one evening over vodka sours at a table, outside, in the
Place Dauphine, as a swollen moon was climbing to its zenith.

     "What work in the world is there for me to do? What have I to offer,
actively?"

     Imala watched him, quietly listening.

     "It seems to me that you are always offering yourself. You are always
giving."

     "I only give passively, narcissistically," Stéfan answered. "I gave
myself to you to be painted, but what did I give, really? I posed. I
offered myself as something, not even someone – I became an *objet d'art *--
to look at. I was not even the subject of the painting, just a part of its
iconography, suggesting a multitude of themes to a multitude of viewers."

    Imala began to object, but Stéfan continued. "I was not even the
subject of the painting. Through the painting, I became, the object of
other people's gazes. Actually, an image of me that was not even me became
the object of others' gazes. Yes, I became an admired object, yes, but an
object nevertheless. I was transformed into an object by your gaze and then
transformed again each time somebody gazed at the painting. How do I become
the person whose gaze transforms things, whose gaze suggests or, even
better, can initiate actions that transform things in the world? It is not
enough to absorb and reflect and give back."

     Stéfan was, as he had attempted to explain to Imala, disconcerted, but
not unhappy. His vital spirits had not been vitiated by these sometimes
naggings of an overactive mind. Luc saw that Stéfan sometimes looked
perplexed. At those times he knew that Stéfan's mind was churning, like an
automobile stuck in sand, or snow, or mud whose driver keeps accelerating,
spinning the wheels without achieving traction, getting the car nowhere but
into the deeper rut of his impotent pushing and only bringing himself a
worse frustration.

     At those times, Luc took him in his arms and caught his glance and
brought their eyes into alignment until he felt Stéfan's breathing conform
to the rhythm of his own. Then their breaths mingled, their eyebeams became
inseparable threads, and Stéfan smiled in blissful surrender. This was not
subversion. It was not brainwashing or inducing in Stéfan a loss of will.
His mind was not being short-circuited. It was in fact bringing him back to
himself; providing

him a stay against depersonalization.



     "I have been turning over what you said the other night, especially
when you spoke about wanting to control the gaze rather than be determined
by another's gaze."

     "It's a funny time to bring that up," Stéfan laughed, for he was
sitting in a reclining chair at her dressing table and she was putting
make-up on him in preparation for a commission she had received for two
stain glass windows facing Rue du Jour to be installed in the Church of
Saint-Eustache, which was undergoing restoration. In one Stefan would
appear both as the angel Raphael and as Tobias, the son of Tobit, in a
painting of Tobias catching the fish that he would later use to defeat the
power of the demon Asmodeus. That episode was to be depicted in a second
stained glass window in which Stéfan would be used as the model for both
Tobias and Asmodeus. Imala was desihning Asmodeus's face on him now as they
spoke.

     "Stop talking," she said. "I need you to be still. I need to get a
sense of the demon." He grunted obediently.

     "Good," she said, and kept talking as she studied his face and applied
her paints to it. "It might be obvious, but I was thinking of photography!
Taking pictures, the photographer is the one who gazes, and everyone and
everything else is the object of his gaze. The photographer takes control
and determines the form of things and how they are seen. He turns an event
into an image and gives meaning to images."



     Paris overwhelmed Art McCarthy. He rose every morning at five-thirty,
showered, made a cup of coffee, which he drank with a multivitamin, briskly
took the five flights of stairs down from his small apartment on the Place
Constantin Pecqueur, whose windows in the front overlooked it and its
modest fountain, and in the back, gave out onto a verdant cemetery. He was
not a jogger, but he walked briskly. The first weeks he limited to going up
and down the streets of Montmartre, discovering its legendary landscapes
and being infused with its, noticeably disappearing, bohemian ambience.
After a few weeks, however, he strode briskly through the quite different
sights of the Boulevard de la Chapelle, over to Stalingrad, across to
Avenue Simon Bolivar and from there, around the crescent of Avenue
Botzaris, where he was overwhelmed by his discovery of Parc Buttes Chaumont.

     The streets were full with workers on their way to their jobs. The
cafés, too, were full with those who were getting a fast coffee at the old
zinc tops or those who had no jobs to go to and had small round stem
glasses half full of ruby-colored wine set before them on grey and chipped
marble top tables, drinking even at that hour.

     McCarthy was clear-headed and horny. In the park, he quickened his
pace from a brisk walk to an almost jog and felt the smell of green in the
breezes that met and passed him by. Then he saw something odd, in the not
far distance, something out of keeping with the pastoral loveliness he was
inhabiting, that jolted him out of the pastoral mind-set that he was
enjoying. It took him back into the streets of New York City. It was a man
sitting, doubled over on a bench.

     "Are you ok?" he said, automatically, in English. The bent man looked
up at him and said, also in English, "I think so."

     "You're in pain." The man looking at him was young, lean, with curly
black hair and carved sharp features.

     "What happened??

     "Two guys approached me, coming at me while I was running, blocking
me, and one of them asked for a cigarette. I said I don't smoke. So the guy
tells me to give him ten euros so he can buy a pack. I say `No." They block
me and start punching me and kicking me and steal my wallet."

     "Were they guys you know?"

     "Never saw them before."

     "Did they say anything while they were beating you?"

     "When I was down, they kept kicking me and yelling `faggot, infidel
faggot, animal'."

     "Would you recognize them?"

     "Probably."

     "Good," McCarthy said.

     "Anything we could look for?

     "One of them was wearing an orange colored hoodie."

     McCarthy sat down beside the injured man, put his arm round him. He
jumped, but McCarthy held firmly, and he realized that McCarthy was his
friend. "It's nice of you to stop and help me," the young man said.

     "It's normal," McCarthy said. "Can I take you home? Where do you live?"

     "They walked through the park, keeping close to Rue Manin and came out
near Avenue Simon Bolivar, where Adam – his name was Adam Echebbi – lived
by himself in a small fifth-floor apartment of not quite forty square
meters, with a colossal view of Paris.

     "Come up and I'll fix you some tea?" Adam said, weak but not
incapacitated.

     "Can you lift your arms and get out of your shirt? It must be
painful," Art said, helping Adam take off his nylon shell.

     Adam managed. McCarthy saw the cuts and bruises on his back and chest.

     "Take your pants off, too, please. They did a job on you. Vicious.
Let's go into the bathroom." McCarthy washed Adam's wounds and rummaged for
salves and bandages in the medicine cabinet."

     "You have a warm touch," Adam said. "Perhaps I will feel it again
under happier circumstances."

     Art smiled and nodded his head.

     They sat in the small kitchen, hardly seeming small because of the
great sliding windows that gave onto the city, and drank scalding mint tea
slowly out of glass cups decorated with flower patterns.

     "Do you know what it's like to be Muslim in Paris?" Adam said. And if
you're a secular Muslim! And gay! You are doubly scorned, and worse, as you
see. You are banished from the heart of the city and consigned to a ghetto.
The French are suspicious of you. They don't want you near them. And your
own people don't want to know you either." He pointed out the window.
"You're hardly twenty minutes away from the heart of Paris but as far as
what's around you, you could be in Baltimore or the South Bronx, including
the gangs," Tajik said, but stopped when McCarthy grinned.

     "What?" he said.

     "How do you know what Baltimore or the South Bronx are like?" he asked.

     "I have traveled throughout your country," Adam said, and I think I
know it pretty well. I've even had a few close calls there with people who
look at Muslims like they carry bombs and box cutters in their back
pockets."





     Abdul heard Umhad's key turn in the lock. The panic that had become
his familiar stirred once more within him. He started from his chair and
dropped the tele-command. He was scrambling to pick it up from the floor
and slide the pieces together. Umhad stood above him.

     "You don't do anything all day but look at the television screen,"
Umhad said, prodding his chin with the toe of boot.

     "I don't know what else to do," Abdul said, getting to his feet.

     "You never think anymore of jihad?"

     Abdul was silent.

     "Or of getting a job? We don't need money?"

     "You don't let me go out. I think you are afraid I would not come
back. You don't give me a key. What can I do?"

     "Did you ever ask for one?"

     "You make me afraid. And I have no clothes. How can I go out naked?"

     "Do you say I keep you a prisoner here?" Umhad challenged him.

     "No, Umhad, no," Abdul responded in fear, trying to avert a storm of
wrath he could feel about to break.

     "Because I do not," Umhad said in chilling quietness.

     Abdul said nothing.

     Umhad was unsettled. Hanood had shaken him. "We will walk in the park
tomorrow. That will satisfy you that I'm not keeping you a prisoner here."

     "Yes, Umhad."

     Abdul was confused. For what was Umhad setting him up? But he was
grateful to Umhad for letingt him sleep without disturbing him that night.

     The next day, as they did everyday, they awoke when morning was nearly
gone. The room smelled of Umhad's cigarettes. Umhad rose and paced the
room, a half-smoked, unlit cigarette stuck between his lips.

     "You sleep too much," he said. "Go, wash. You smell like piss and
shit."

     Abdul washed with a used damp cloth that hung by the sink. Umhad threw
some clothes at him, a pair of his jeans and an orange-colored hoodie. "Put
them on."

     Abdul complied and made some instant coffee using the water from the
hot faucet, and broke a piece off yesterday's baguette.

     "How long does it you take?" Umhad said, getting into his jacket.

     The park was not crowded. They walked slowly. Umhad seemed to be on
the lookout for something, as if he were checking to see if he was being
followed, but there was no one, except, in the distance, a runner was
running towards them, not towards them, but in their direction. Normally,
he would pass them by.

     "You have lost your heart for jihad," Umhad said. "You have become
soft in your will, like a woman."

     "No, Umhad, no. That is not so. Try me. Let me prove myself."

     "You are full of fear."

     "What would you have me do to prove this is not so?"

     The runner neared. Umhad was inspired.

     "Stop the apostate you see approaching and teach him what it means to
break the holy injunctions."

     "How can you tell he is a Muslim?"

     "Are you blind? Does he not look like us?"

     "You want me to attack him, to beat him up?"

     "Are you afraid?

     "It is not that, but..."

     "But what, cowardly dog?"

     "But I do not know him."

     "Do the blessed martyrs who set off bombs in the market places know
those who die in the explosions? Are you a coward, without the strength
that God confers on His chosen martyrs, a true *kushaad*?"

     Abdul felt the blood rush through him and hatred bite him.



    Two days after the attack and his encounter with Adam, Art McCarthy
texted him, inviting him to have dinner with him.

     "2nite?"

     "Sure."

     "Delighted."

     They met near the Contrescarpe atop Rue Mouffetard and ate at the Thai
Restaurant on Rue Blainville. Afterwards, they got a cab to Art's place on
the Place Constantin Pecqueur. McCarthy offered Adam a joint, and Adam said
with a friendly smile, "Now I feel at home, but isn't it a little unusual
for a former New York City cop to be offering it to me."

     "You don't know New York City cops."

     "Perhaps," Adam said, "you are trying to entrap me."

     McCarthy lit the joint and took a hit and gave it to Adam, not
removing his fingers from Adam's as he handed the joint to him.

      "Perhaps I am," he said.

     Adam inhaled and kept the smoke in his lungs. He beckoned to McCarthy
to come close. He did. Adam pressed his lips to his and exhaled into him.
McCarthy took in the smoke and kept his mouth pressed to Adam's.



     A temperate August in Paris: half the population is away; the
spaciousness of Parisian streets is uncluttered; the depth of Parisian
vistas is unobstructed; the Parisian air is less polluted; evening extends
itself in a rosy twilight that slips unnoticed into a violet dusk; night
comes late.

     Their windows are open on Rue Galande, and a midnight breeze flutters
through the apartment with its pure breath. Stefan in only a short sarong
of burnt umber with a black border, fastened on his left hip by a red
tassel, places two iced vodka and tonics on the table beside the desk where
Luc is working late, finishing an essay called "In Defense of History," a
topic that he had been revolving since that conversation in New York last
New Years Eve.

     Luc turned to him when he sensed Stefan's presence and smiled.

     "Thank you," he said, standing and stretching. He is bare-chested and
wearing only loosely fitting ochre linen drawstring pants. "I get lost in
what I'm doing and forget the time." He picked up both drinks, handed one
to Stefan, touched their glasses. He took a long swallow and sighed with
pleasure. "But I don't forget you." His palm was cool upon the back of
Stefan's neck and Luc drew him to his lips. A knocking on the door
interrupted the kiss.



Epilogue



     "We apologize for barging in at this hour," Art McCarthy said. "We
were at the movies trying to distract ourselves, unsuccessfully. We saw
your lights."

      Adam was standing next to him. Luc and Stefan had met him once
before, when they all had spent a happy Sunday in Buttes Chaumont Park a
few weeks earlier. He looked distressed, now.

     "Come in," Luc said. "What's the matter? Will you have a drink?"

     Stefan brought two more vodka and tonics, and Adam began, torn between
tears and rage.

     "I got news this afternoon," Adam began, "that a boy I have known all
my life, went to school with, grew up with, was the first one to tell that
I was gay, and who supported me, especially when he returned my confidence
with his own, has been jailed in Tunisia, for the period of one whole year
for the horrible crime of just being gay, not even for – God help us –
`flaunting' his gayness or making a public disturbance, but just for being
gay."



     The next morning, Luc phoned the duchess, who told him to call Anne
Hildago to find out what could be done.

     The mayor shared his concern and pointed out that although there was
an enlightened element among the Islamic lawmakers in Tunisia, ironically,
it was an "anti-sodomy" law that remained on the books from the time of the
French colonial occupation that was being used in this case.

     "The best I can think of, off hand," she said, "is to put pressure on
the Tunisian government by bring this outrage to public attention, perhaps
by holding a kind of `teach-in' about it at the *Hotel de Ville* in
September, after the *Rentrée." *She would appear, the city of Paris would
sponsor it, publicize it, and publish the proceedings. She thought Luc
ought to organize it, devise the program, and be the principal speaker.



     "In nearly eighty countries world wide," Luc's final draft read,
"homosexuality is criminalized. In some of them, it is a capital offence.
If something is to be called an offense, then there must be someone or some
group that is offended, or some abstraction, like the State, or some
principal, like honor, decency, or human dignity, that is said to be
offended. It has long been a practice for human beings to put other human
beings to death capriciously, ignorantly, for abstractions, for principals,
because they take offense. To decide whether that is a mark of honor,
decency, and dignity; or cowardice, darkness, provincialism, and
viciousness seems hardly problematic to me. It is, nevertheless, to a great
many of mankind. That it is, that is what is problematic to me.

     "Our focus, tonight is on one man in Tunisia, but a focus on one
individual, if it is to be a meaningful focus and engender essential social
action and bring about changes that benefit everyone, ought to be a focus
on every individual so threatened. It must be a focus on injustice itself;
not on the abstract idea of injustice but on every vulnerable human being.
So, yes, we want to free one gay man from prison, but we also want to see
all gay men and women and transgender people freed from the threat of
prison and of death, from the threat of danger and indignity.

     "When we talk of the atrocities committed against ourselves in other
lands far from France and far from Europe, it would behoove us to remember
that many of the laws that justify what we now hold as barbarities were
first promulgated in France and Europe, not under Islam but under
Christianity, and that these laws and the attitudes behind them were
brought to distant lands by colonial masters, in some cases French colonial
masters.

     "The last time gay men were killed for being gay, in France, it was in
Paris, in 1750, not three hundred years ago, not in the middle ages but
during the Enlightenment. There are records. We know the names of the men.
We know the name of the policeman who arrested them. We know where they
were arrested, at what time, exactly what they were accused of doing, and
we know when and where they were burned at the stake. We even know that
France was a country with a certain humanity, for it is reported that the
men Jean Didot, forty, a servant, and Bruno Lenoir, a shoemaker, twenty,
were strangled to death before they – or the bodies that no longer belonged
to them – were burned at the stake.

     "Our fight today is the fight to guarantee that our bodies belong to
us."

      Luc finished writing the last sentence and mouthing it *sotto voce*
when the ping of his computer turned his attention to his inbox. It was a
request from the International Agency for the Study and the Preservation of
Historical Sites and Cultures asking permission to reprint, in an English
translation, an essay on Palmyra that Luc had written. The request noted
the importance of his work, described the volume in which it would appear,
and regretted that there would be only a small honorarium for the rights to
reprint the essay. It was signed: Flint Whitlock and David Lance. Luc had
heard of them, had read some of their work, respected their research. He
agreed to give them the right to use the piece on a one-time, non-exclusive
basis.

     The digital clock in the upper right hand corner of the screen told
him that it was after midnight. Luc shut the computer. "Enough looking at
screens," he said. "Stéfan," he called out, stretching his cramped limbs,
and feeling the strength in his muscles returning.

     A late summer night's vision, Stéfan, in open work umber espadrilles
with high heels and thin straps that circled the ankles, bare, silky long
legs, a mini sarong of lemon yellow with an umber border, and nothing else
but an amber bead necklace lying upon his naked chest approached him.

     "I've been waiting for you to finish," Stéfan said. Wrapping his arms
around Luc, he brought his amber-tinted lips to his, and teased them with
yielding, eager kisses.