Carnal Sacraments
A Historical Novel of the Future
by Perry Brass
Smashwords Edition
Copyright 2010 Perry Brass
Discover other titles by Perry Brass
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ALL RIGHTS RESERVED: No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the author, except for brief passages for review purposes in a newspaper or magazine.
The following is a work of fiction. All the characters, specific settings, and events in it are purely fictitious and have no relationship to actual specific personages, living or dead, or business entities except when described as part of a fictional narrative.
Cover design by M. Fitzhugh
Cover photo by Andre DeLoach
Electronic (Ebook) ISBN: 978-1-892149-01-5
Library of Congress Control Number: 2006939266
No one would know his real age. Or how he felt inside. Or what he had to do to stay the way he was.
In the last quarter of the 21st century, Jeffrey Cooper, an Alabama-raised, executive design star living in Americanized Germany, has made a Faustian pact with the global economic system running the world. The system will keep him young and razor-sharp, as long as he can stay on top of do his job and keep profits high. But stress from work and the hyper-competitive life around him is killing Jeffrey. Can he keep his stress level a secret from the system itself, his co-workers, and even his own seductive, very “daddyish” German therapist who has told him that when all else fails, there are “angels” who can save him, and often we don’t know who they are?
One will appear in Jeffrey’s life. At first, he seems to be the Devil himself, offering every kind of excitement, even offering Jeffrey back his own lost soul—but will this younger, mysterious and attractive man end up killing Jeffrey, or saving him?
A Round Up of Reactions to
Carnal Sacraments, A Historical Novel of the Future.
“Exotic locations, high-powered wheeling and dealing and excursions into this new world’s dark underside – as well as sex – make this a book that captures the imagination and will not let it go until the last page.” Toby Grace, Out In Jersey.
“The only rides I like are literary ones, and with Carnal Sacraments Perry Brass has created a page-turning thriller that takes the reader on one helluva roller coaster ride, and oh, the places you’ll go! Steven LaVigne, White Crane Journal.
“Layered with philosophical elements, fascinating descriptions, and a clear focus on character overall, Brass' latest work is one of the most unusual novels I've read in years. Jim Provanzano, Bay Area Reporter.
“Time stands still for Jeffrey Cooper, a successful businessman in 2075 who remains ageless as long as he continues bringing in money. Part sci-fi, part erotica, this is a fast and fascinating read. Mark Peikert, HX Magazine.
Carnal Sacraments was picked to head up HX’s “Autumn Leaves” round up of fall queer reading, 2007.
“Perry Brass has been a pioneer and now a mainstay in the gay futuristic genre, with novels like The Harvest, Warlock, and Angel Lust. Carnal Sacraments: A Historical Novel of the Future, reveals itself in its subtitle. It is about the future, in fact the last quarter of the twenty-first century, but we recognize the connections to the world around us.” Jerry Rosco, Mandate Magazine.
"Smart, sexy, and suspenseful—everything you could want in a great novel."
Michael Lucas, CEO, Lucas Entertainment.
Other books by Perry Brass:
Sex-charge (poetry)
Mirage, a science fiction novel
Works and Other ‘Smoky George’ Stories
Circles, the sequel to Mirage
Out There: Stories of Private Desires. Horror. And the Afterlife.
Albert or The Book of Man, the third book in the Mirage series
Works and Other ‘Smoky George’ Stories, Expanded Edition
The Harvest, a “science/politico” novel
The Lover of My Soul, A Search for Ecstasy and Wisdom (poetry and other collected writings)
How to Survive Your Own Gay Life, An Adult Guide to Love, Sex, and Relationships
Angel Lust, An Erotic Novel of Time Travel
Warlock, A Novel of Possession
The Substance of God, A Spiritual Thriller
“Let us not burden our remembrances with
A heaviness that’s gone.”
William Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act V, Scene 1.
Q. Why does the human mind have to keep closing itself?
A. It’s scared of its own dimensions.
To the men and women among us who are finding age, at any age, an impossible burden, and to those who want to lift that burden, and learn. Also, for Patrick Merla, the memory of Jeffrey Lann Campbell, and for Hugh, and Robert.
Note: A list of foreign words and phrases used in Carnal Sacraments follows the text of the novel.
Chapter One
How could he make himself stop thinking about it, stop remembering it? And how could he make himself forget? The fist in his face out of nowhere, its impact knocking him back, nose bloody, its sound like glass crashing in his eardrums, with him isolated, confused, and angry. The crowd packed and surging in front of him, ignoring him while hushed commuter trains skated in on invisible shafts of magnetic energy; and all of this while he’d been working to be oblivious, holding on to nothing, like everybody else.
There was only work in its many forms. Not even thinking about it was work.
Overstressed, brain-fried, and elbowed to the edge of a cramped pubtran platform, Jeffrey Cooper had been trying to coax himself into some small island of mental safety, even as his mind relentlessly chased his job through its big Byzantine flowchart of goals, purposes, and functions.
“Imagine,” his therapist had suggested, “a calming mist made of your very self, of innermost peace, of everything that you would like to be.”
He wanted that, an atmosphere composed of his deepest, calmest self, that he could enter when things became too stressful, when one stress spitefully mounted upon another. But it was almost impossible for him to achieve it.
Stress ate him.
Stress at work, stress in his life. As much as he tried to hide it, he was too sensitive, and too aware. Both had become handicaps as he got older. Too much awareness could be deadly, overloading the complex connections through the master files of his brain that supervised millions of other files and the images that went with them.
Jeffrey Cooper, Senior Project Stylist, was both a fixed shining star for an age obsessed to its last breath with “Image,” and an agile, whip-wielding ringmaster in the mesmerizing flash and bareback-pony show of “Style.” Arch-critic and super design consultant, archivist and heir to millennia of bright, smartly queerish, wisdom-keeping monks, Cooper, like almost everybody else, was hyper-tightened and overprocessing in the last quarter of the twenty-first century, an insecure but binge-level workaholic period unmarred by the almost regular, world-shaking explosions of the deadly twentieth.
But he had a problem he had to face.
He was getting older—seriously—and all this stress from work as well as the demands of living luxe on one of the upper rungs of the system’s ladder had got to him. Canyon-sized signs warned you about it.
“STRESS KILLS!”
“STRESS & YOU: No Benefit to the Team. The System. Your Life.”
“Give Yourself a Hand When You Kick Stress in the Butt!”
He’d been looking at such a sign with its beautiful flow of softly lit, lollypop-colored lettering:
“Be Happy. Forget Everything.
Remember Your Past Only Serves the Present.”
Ah, the present. Yes . . . an endlessly beguiling, mouthwatering visual, extolling a free, glorious, competitive lifestyle offering every possible, advantageous perk and reward. Super-luxe-upon-luxe resorts and all the rewards that came with them, some even more exclusive within other less exclusive resorts, always moving ever upward, more luxe premium, and always more rewarding. Something was guaranteed for everyone at every rung of this always-up-to-date, pushed-to-the-brim-of-its-endurance world.
Falling apart? Barely holding on? Remedial “catch-up” resorts.
First baby steps on the ever-accelerating Road to Riches? Cosmetically rebellious, dishy, and stylishly “youthy” resorts.
Recently divorced? Your kid’s a murderer? You’re still working hard, but it’s time for detox? You’re covered, with “quickie” specialty resorts at which to recoup from those nagging, little personal issues.
And of course, everyone’s least talked about favorite: the Last Resort. The ultimate destination for the ultimate job change.
Very orderly. Antiseptic. Closely monitored. With appropriately distant, concerned attendants trained in the latest Compassionate Sciences. You were sent there when your brief time was over, and you never left. It was the workingman’s last stop before his own particular Nirvana, Heaven, or Paradise.
But for others, there was another place, much higher on the social expectations scale, whispered about nervously as the final cocktail glasses were cleared.
There, “magical” chemicals awaited to nudge a wearied, overtaxed brain right up to the very doorstep of physical extinction, where Death’s resourceful cousin known as “Suspension” played Solitaire silently with you.
Suspension was both a promise and a morbidly joked-about threat. If the system felt there were any possibility of you having some value in the future, you’d be kept in it for some time. The future was indefinite, yet, for practical purposes, defined by some limitations (your job “on earth”; a final reckoning of your worth, etc.). In Suspension, you could even be visited and kept lovely, if periodic reviews permitted it. It was mothballs, so to speak, where you were put into a dreamless coma, instead of what was tactfully called “the other thing.” It had its odd glamour, as well as its drawbacks. The system, always offering choices, gave you an alternative to finality as it decided what best to do with you; but there would be no last poignant good-byes, only brain-waveless sleep.
Sleep could be difficult, so you wanted something restorative while being awake. Jeffrey had been trying to make himself drift into some anxiety-free, Hollywoodized mist of self-containment as he attempted to place himself above the threats and congested realities of life. Within the elbowing pubtran crowd, he was actually close to calm inside, ready to float right into one of those high-end “Escape” resorts, the kind promoted in every form of popular media and fabricated from the diaphanous wishes of dreams themselves. There young, gym-sculpted hunks wind-surfed through crystalline waters, then casually dined à la black-tie at five-star restaurants perched above landscaped jungles, all designed for their unimaginable beauty by youthful prodigies of Marketing.
Then a lightning-fast fist greased with beer-sweat had hit him in the face.
He’d frozen, too shocked to scream. His eyes popped open, his nose and head throbbing. Pain poured through him; reeling to stand up, he had grabbed at the man whose lips were now at his face, he was that close.
Closer than Jeffrey usually allowed himself to get to anyone, but he was only reacting physically. In pure shock, he had removed himself. He might have been dreaming, still floating down into one of those resorts with the trim young men either in black tie or bathing suits.
Then another salvo of fist smacked him again, snapping him out of his own body heat, back into the cold. Like a hurtling comet, the man’s face got smaller, all dark ice, faraway, receding.
Absolute silence. A roaring wall of it, frozen like a Nordic-winter waterfall. Others on the platform had turned away, ears glued to their buzzing earphones. While blood and snot fell from his nose, the man’s wolfish grin had spun in the warm prism of Jeffrey’s tears, and chilled him like a stab with an icicle.
Some of Jeffrey’s blood had spattered on that grin, which now zipped around memory itself, like the blinking electronics of a billboard. But not one with model-perfect young men, starched tablecloths, and aquamarine waters.
Jeffrey’s breath came back to him, forming one word:
“Who?”
And why?
But the man was gone, pulled into the large crowd that gushed from arriving trains, then quickly got sucked back into leaving ones. Jeffrey had touched his face, feeling the pain from his rattled teeth and struck nose, the blood smeared with snot and more tears clogging his nose and eyes. For a second, he felt like he was drowning, choking, lost. He needed to come up for air.
He did, he came up. Then a storm of anger had taken hold of him, an unexpected slam of barbwire rage with which he had too little familiarity. He should have glued his brains together, if only enough to scream and hold on to the guy until the crowd responded. Instead, he’d been out there drifting, not focusing. Just trying to calm himself in the packed menace of rush hour.
Rage stomped all over him, with big German military boots, jerking him about like a half-stuffed puppet: his own too-late rage.
Rage was hideous. It killed as surely as stress did. He had to control it. Yet there was something almost refreshing in its unexpected, stinging wash over him. The fiend had disappeared, a half-seen cluster of features, recalled from split-second terror and confusion. Jeffrey doubted if he could ever identify him again.
He pushed into the crowded train marked “Tiergarten,” trying to compose himself as he managed to find an empty seat. No one noticed him; he wiped blood and snot discreetly from his face with some tissues, glad that nothing he could see had got on his nice shirt.
Jeffrey liked to dress well, with everything carefully chosen, but you had to be supervigilant at rush hour on the pubtrans. Sometimes you’d end up so wrung out by the crowds that your clothing couldn’t find its way back to the creases neatly and beautifully programmed into it.
He tried to reprogram himself, to fade back into the train with everyone brainsucked into their own files or personal entertainments. Some were talking in whispers to home, office, or locations halfway around the world.
Ja. Ja. Ja. Nein. Nein. Nein.
Office was truly everyplace. Everyplace was Büro. Work was constant and unquestioned. The Germans proclaimed universalarbeit: Work universal. Work was good, its own reward. You’d be happy with it, and thankful. It got you into those "Escape"-filled resorts, showering you with an endless array of new merchandise.
But, always, rock-bottom worse was the alternative. Because without work you were nothing. Zero. Statusless. Just a negative number falling through the cracks until you ended up in some unspeakable sewer.
Occasionally in backstreets or alleys, away from street cameras, Jeffrey glimpsed the workless, half-crazy, foraging through garbage, their rags brown-stained with their own feces. Some tried to sneak onto the pubtran platforms, but were quickly spotted and removed. Maybe his attacker had been one of them, only agile and cagey enough to pass as “regular” and get himself in and strike.
But why strike Jeffrey Cooper?
The workless were an embarrassment to Jeffrey; their degradation and drop from acceptable positions secretly embarrassed him, reminding him of his own age, which was close to eighty.
Jeffrey Cooper—attractive, fashionable, mover through the global economic system, holder of big job titles, supervisor of so many—was, in fact, seventy-eight, but on most days looked closer to forty years younger: one of the most secret and well-kept perks of his professional life. His hair was glossy, mahogany dark; his skin healthy-looking, smooth, hardly lined, with an almost undetectable cosmetic glow. Most of the time he was amazingly strong and limber. Even his hands and feet, tell-tale signs of speeding decades, had hardly aged, with only a few sun spots and veins showing. At the most they looked only a few years past thirty, as did his teeth, which were white, healthy-gummed, and closely spaced.
Most of the time, he could pass for a much younger man, though there were days when the “weather” hit him from too much stress, too many deadlines, too many exacting people higher-up to please. Too much to hold in and then release, privately, at precisely the right time.
This holding-in had forced him to form a hard shell over his own rigidly held feelings and sensitivities. He looked young, but never exactly a hundred-percent real, like some very convincing window mannequin, made of a material that closely approximated human flesh.
Due to an exorbitantly costly schedule of drugs, dermatology, cosmetic dentistry, regularly monitored therapies, and secret operations, Jeffrey had been given an almost unlimited extension on life and youth. He was now alive and thriving at the very opposite end of Suspension, though it was all kept confidential, like so much else in everyone’s private work dossier, that ultimate “sacred text,” kept in the most Holy of Holy private files, whose confidentiality increased substantially with a sharp incline of status.
Everything done on him kept him producing day to day, moment to moment, at the very crest of a profitable, optimal flow of performance. It was as if his physical body had placed its hand at the razor-sharp edge of mortality, and in doing so was able to push most of the biological consequences of human existence forward repeatedly.
It might all stop at some point. But who could say when?
A large contingent of his cells as well as his organs (including his digestive, nervous, and lymphatic systems), his blood, fluids, and hormone levels were attended to in a constant process of cleansing, enhancing, and, even when necessary, replacement. But he was not going to be replaced; he was invaluable, and aware of it. But not cocky. His position did not come from education though he was fairly well educated, nor from any standout talent, though he had some talents. It came from a clear mixture of saviness, toughness, usefulness to the system, as well as how long and easily he would be able to stay absorbed into it.
In short, Jeffrey Cooper knew enough to keep himself shining brightly at the horizon of appearing irreplaceable, without ever becoming arrogant or difficult about it. He was clever, negotiable, and adaptable both to the demands of his superiors and the wishes and problems of those working alongside and below him (a number which ran to the hundreds, even thousands, when you counted factory workers). Like a smooth cog in a major pivotal wheel, he kept his own area of expertise within a larger system in steadily productive motion: when the attack came, he was on his way to an appointment with his German therapist Tony, another of his many perks.
Jeffrey saw Tony Rosenputter once a week, in Tony’s spacious, tastefully bohemian, dimly lit apartment in an Art Nouveau building decorated with terra-cotta putti, classical bronze reliefs, and elegantly chiseled marble facings. The building had outlasted numerous wars against Germany, and its dwellings, secured through generations of wise investments and inheritances, gazed softly out at the world through a rosy film of stained-glassed eyes. The charming edifice was on a quiet, leafy street near a small zoo. The Germans loved animals, so living near a zoo was spitz klasse. Elegant Tiergartenstrasse was lined with these exclusive, private walk-ups, many with inside balconies overlooking back gardens or interior courts.
Approaching Tony’s romantically inspired apartment, one could imagine daydreaming through meadows and mist-streaked forests, the sort Beethoven might have walked through, pausing to jot down fortepiano sonatas. But Jeffrey, an American originally from Alabama, in the Deep South, was definitely not German, but sent to Germany to be the head of an international consortium of design consultants. World business had made the planet one neighborhoody kind of place, where all the good neighbors could get along if they acted nice enough, and spoke an almost identical language of Production, Media, Marketing, and Sales. Successful Germans of the polite classes engaged in a fluid mixture of English and German, with some Hindi, Arabic, and even Mandarin thrown in, as well as many old French and Italian phrases that once upon a time quickly confirmed one’s place and sophistication in “the great world.”
Jeffrey was at home in this sort of köstlich neighborhood, knowing full well that no one could confirm their sophistication like the Germans when sophisticated, or be as boorish when they were not.
Tony rang him in when Jeffrey’s troubled face appeared on the security system. The eyes of pivoting cameras followed him up the front quietly carpeted stairs to his therapist’s beige and gray apartment in which the only bright colors came from flowers such as a tasteful arrangement of daffodils or tulips. Sometimes there were more exuberant displays of flowering cherry or quince in the heavy antique crystal vase Tony kept in the waiting room, which was also his living room. Tony’s was a warm, protective setting that seemed yearningly reminiscent of old Teutonic knighthood and those once-patrician, outdated Germanic analyses of the Psyche, all watched over presently by the gaze of the system that pretended to bless it, since Tony was a specialist working for them through a highly-tiered government health plan, fed by a global consumer economy which Jeffrey Cooper, as one of its stars, stoked.
Tony was in his late-forties, square-jawed and nicely boned, but he looked as if he were edging into the vicinity of Jeffrey’s actual age. He smoked, like many Germans, and, without ever mentioning it, drank a lot. He wore a plain gray tunic outfit that, except for its super-immaculate cleanliness, made him look like he should have been working under cars. He had a small beard and a tanned face with big teeth. He’d once been married and he and Elsie, his ex, had a daughter who was now twenty-two.
“How are you?” Tony asked Jeffrey seriously, after they were both seated in another, smaller cozy room that was his office. “Can I get you something to drink? Maybe some tea? I have some infusions that might work for you.”
“Water, please. A man hit me on the pubtran platform today.”
Tony stopped in icy mid-pour. “He what?”
“He grabbed me and hit me.”
Tony paused, his hand suspended, holding Jeffrey’s glass.
Jeffrey, still shaking, looked away from him.
“Any idea why?”
“No.”
He finished pouring, then handed it to Jeffrey. Jeffrey drank it quickly, then put it down.
“Did you catch his eye, looking at him? Maybe you looked longer than was safe. People don’t look at each other anymore. It’s not considered the thing to do, you know.”
“I didn’t look at him.”
“Then you can’t identify him?”
“Maybe. It happened fast. A lot of people were there.”
“There’re always a lot of people there, but that won’t do you any good. How about the police?”
“I don’t need an investigation. They’ll investigate me as much as him. I don’t want to be stressed by it. I’m not sure I could get through any investigation. I’ve got too much work to do and all the projects I’ve got to deal with. There’d be a big police thing, I’d probably end up needing a lawyer, and for what? It all happened so fast. He was young. Maybe screwy. In his thirties maybe, kind of scruffy-looking. Workless, even.”
Tony put his fingertips together. Although often dressed in a casual street-type manner, Tony did not like the strassenklassen, as they were called. His wife had been a modern dancer and though divorced they still remained devoted to the arts together, to all sorts of artistic and bohemian endeavors; but both were cold to the nasty realities of the “street classes.”
Tony tried to figure it out.
“He’s a thug.” His eyes narrowed. “Maybe even one of our little neo-Fascists. They’re all over, like rats. ‘Deutschland für Deutschen.’ Scheisse, it’s crazy but they pop up. Truth is there’s so little German left in Germany anymore. We’re all so multicultural. Everybody does their little ‘Dance of the Seven Veils’ with the real Germany; they all want to look under the veils and sniff around. Neges from Africa. Asians with money. Arabs. We have more mosques than Mecca. It’s not like in the old days when you had safety in the streets. Everything’s changed, you have to watch out all the time.” He shrugged. “Know what I mean, Jeffrey?”
Jeffrey tried to look at Tony the way Tony looked at him: eye-to-eye with a tad of intimacy, yet without aggression. The Germans always gave you the feeling that you should know what they were all about, because they were the norm and you weren’t. You should understand their little quirks, their prejudices, their wounds from the past that never healed. You should understand every bit of that, using all of their own undoubting, self-described “intelligence” and “clarity.”
After all, what was your problem not to know?
“I’m not prejudiced,” Tony explained, going on one his little soapboxes. “But these people are not always the most liberated themselves. They have their own fascism, religious fascism.” He paused. “I can’t deal with it. You Americans—”
Suddenly Jeffrey saw his attacker’s face again, totally clear, even if only for a second. Jeffrey’s neck jerked as he refelt the impact—bang!—in the nose. He was scared he’d start to bleed again.
Tony, oblivious, could have been one of the unseeing multitudes on the platform, glued to their earphones, his voice that of a painfully sanctimonious, liberal preacher.
“—You Americans think in terms of business only. Naturally, business only wants everyone to be alike, so they can all buy the same things, even if you call it ‘multicultural.’ And, of course, being alike is important.”
He gave a little shrug, and smiled.
“Richtig?”
Jeffrey performed almost the same shrug and smile.
“Tony. Listen. I know it’s Jesus over here and Allah over there, but—” He paused. “The truth is, when he came up to me I wasn’t even aware of him. I was so out of it. Trying to keep from being overwhelmed, too—”
“Ja?” Tony leaned in toward him. “Are we panicking again, Jeffrey?”
Jeffrey could not answer.
“Are we?”
Jeffrey could only nod.
“Lieber Jeffrey.”
Tony’s distinguished-looking head shook sympathetically.
“I thought we were going to work on that stress. Schlecht. Remember, my friend, we always need to keep your stress level lower than nine.”
“Ja.” Jeffrey squeezed the word out. “I mean, yes. Sitting discipline. Yoga. Chanting. Meditation. No sugar, no coffee. Less meat. I’m trying really hard, Tony.”
“But you panicked. Richtig. Sorry. Zu viel Deutsch für you?”
“No. I live here. You can use all the goddamn German you want.”
“Don’t joke, Jeffrey. This isn’t about me, it’s about you. Did you panic hard and stop breathing? Come on now, be truthful.”
It was hard not to be truthful. Jeffrey was sweating copiously. Sweat trickled down his armpits, feeling like a high tide. But it was crazy to panic about being in a panic; he had to calm himself. He held out his glass and Tony poured more water into it, then Jeffrey gulped it down.
“Tony, we were right there, eye-to-eye. Then he hit me. All these people all over. Crowds bumping, pushing. Noise. Trains. He grabbed me and he hit me and—”
“What? Did he run?”
“No, he couldn’t run. Too many people.”
“So what did he do?”
“He hit me again!”
“Gott. Where?”
“In my face. Again.”
Jeffrey started crying. Tony handed him a tissue, and he used it to wipe his eyes. A little more blood came out of his nose. It embarrassed him; he felt like shit.
“I could smell every hair on him. Beer. Sweat. Coarse kinds of smells. But I couldn’t see him, much. My eyes just shut from fear. He hit me again, and people were so close that no one could see it. I wanted to shout, but I was scared and a train was coming in and then everybody jumped toward it, and he disappeared.”
Jeffrey’s heart pounded as sweat poured from him. Tony asked him if he wanted to lie down. In order to get paid by the health plan, he would have to do a stress test; there was no way around it. Everyone was closely audited, even people as credentialed as Tony Rosenputter.
Once Jeffrey’s stress level had edged up to seven, and Tony told him he could fudge it a tiny bit. Mostly it stayed around five, but if it climbed up to eight or nine, the report would be very bad and some of the things that were done to keep Jeffrey really young and alive might—well, they could stop. Stress was to be avoided; it meant that you were compounding the pressures of too much input, too much Information in all of its daily, assaultive forms. It meant you couldn’t hold any more: definitely a handicap in this always changing, competitive world where turn-on-a-dime adaptability and razor sharpness meant everything. You needed to know how to float almost effortlessly with Information, no matter what it revealed or what toll it took on you.
Now he was on the couch with Tony leaning over him, trying to comfort him.
“What would you like?” Tony inquired. “I could give you some herbal drugs; we could meditate together to slow down your breathing. I could even give you a massage. You like massage, don’t you?”
Jeffrey grunted, too tense to answer.
“Lie on your stomach,” Tony ordered.
Jeffrey turned over. Tony put his fingers on the back of Jeffrey’s neck and let them drift down his crisp work shirt toward the base of his spine. Tony was excellent at this, applying orderly, neutral, professional pressure, tapping Jeffrey’s tense, gym-and-hormone sculpted buttocks gingerly through the light material of his knife-creased pants.
Jeffrey sighed, feeling close to tears, just from the promise of relief. He wanted whatever Tony was offering, and wanted to embrace Tony if he could, as someone offering hope, if there were going to be hope. Tony went back up to his shoulders and Jeffrey became happy again. He felt miserably alone most of the time except for Tony. Benign, kind Tony. The perfect, always hoped-for, idealized father; the perfect, always hoped-for, idealized friend. His own valiant knight and healer: solid, sturdy, yet—in his most hidden and trenchant soul, beyond the psychic sciences and the system—artistic. Even though he worked for the system, Tony, in his tenderest heart (which Jeffrey wanted so much to believe), was there for him. And despite the happenstance of him being German, Tony did understand him, understood the very core of him, as much as Jeffrey tried to hide it.
Jeffrey was sure he could feel something between the two of them. Or was he merely feeling himself, liberated momentarily from his age and working role, relaxing in Tony’s lovely, though somberly Teutonic, protective space?
He wanted to kiss Tony.
He wanted so much to take Tony’s usually stoic, tanned face in his hands and kiss him, permitting his lips to graze Tony’s always slightly withdrawn ones. But he couldn’t. Tony was his therapist. And he worked for the system. That was the bitter shit of it, the scharfscheisse, as the Germans called it. So he kept his secret to himself, and it added a dangerous speed-bump all its own. And that particular, resistant blade of tension around Tony stayed with him, like an ambushing jolt of electricity.
“How’s it now, Jeffrey? Gut?”
Jeffrey lied softly. “Yes. Very good.”
But Tony saw through this. He took Jeffrey’s left hand and eased his forefinger into the center of its rather deeply etched palm. Then, using his fingernail, he gently inscribed a figure-8 in it.
“Just relax,” Tony cooed. “Relax and follow the feeling of my fingernail. That’s all you need to do.”
Still on his stomach, Jeffrey knew his palm was sweaty. No lying about that tension sign. Stress was not leaving; stubborn, spiteful telltale stress. It seemed that no matter how much closer he wanted to get to Tony, no matter how much of his always wary, professional self he managed to leave out at any time, no matter how young and resilient he looked, stress—rigid, tight, quickly recalcifying the ancient carapace around him—was always there, waiting below the surface.
“Lieber Jeffrey. Was kan Mann tun? We take the test, and it goes up to eight? Nine, maybe? There’s not much I can do for you then. I don’t like it”—Tony’s face dropped into a splendor of solemnity—“but I can’t change it.”
“Ich verstehe,” Jeffrey groaned, meaning to accommodate Tony in German. He agreed. He hated it, but agreed. Then Tony motioned for him to turn onto his back.
“Gut. As God is my witness, I’m always your friend. But I’m afraid that’s the way everything works.”
There was genuine concern on Tony’s noble face; in his own way Dr. Rosenputter was honest, though never too honest.
“Ach!” he went on. “We have your old problem. Your skills, your talents. What makes you useful, valuable. I’m afraid they exceed your abilities to cope with these gifts. Always the high-wire act: you’re way up there, so very far up. But you can fall. That’s the problem with us, the artistic people. You’re up there, because only you can be up there. You, with the soul of an artist. I know that kind of soul. See, I admit it. I have one, too, myself.”
Jeffrey smiled. At moments like this, Tony did become transparently full of himself, even if his face never showed it.
Tony nodded, shifting his shoulder blades.
“But it’s easy, Jeffrey, to fall. I see it time and time again. You get scared. It’s too sad. And let me tell you—very, very stressed!”
Those words, “very, very stressed!” sounded too threatening. Jeffrey didn’t want to listen, though he knew that Tony’s work within the system also included using threats. The threat was there; there was no denying it. Jeffrey had to balance these things: Tony was another cog in the system, as well as being his exquisitely, embarrassingly seductive therapist and “friend.” Jeffrey tried to shield himself from any sense of threat or consequence, as he focused on only a calming string of sounds escaping Tony’s habitually dry lips.
“We will do our best—!” Tony promised. “Get closer. I’ll touch your head.”
Jeffrey leaned toward him, and Tony’s fingers, like soft rain, danced lightly over Jeffrey’s forehead, oily with a mix of sweat and moisturizer. He closed his eyes but still saw the face from the pubtran, its mouth riveted into a hard, triumphant smile.
Tony’s fingers did their little compassionate dance over him, but in the deep, obstinately punishing eye of his mind, Jeffrey followed a dark, twisting path down, very far down, as it became a maze in which he was quickly lost.
But he did not turn away; instead, he saw things clearly enough now to calm himself. He and the man were no longer on the crowded platform, but alone, like two beasts, two animals recognizing mutual strengths and prowess. Jeffrey’s strength was visual and he realized, like finding one particular file within a sprawling meta-system of data, that if he wanted to he could recognize, and even memorize, the man’s face.
Every detail of it.
He could retrieve the man’s generous lips, the distinct print of them, their texture and alluring menace and savagery, ringed with white flashes of a near-nauseating excitement which intensified and burned, lasering through Jeffrey’s tension and the cold recalcitrance under it. Then the man’s nose, large, pronounced, not pretty but memorable; then his brow and cheeks, slightly heavy but handsome still, scored deeply with creases and dimples. He’d seen these same features on a long-buried, black-glazed Greek vase, showing naked wrestlers incised with such a starkly detailed, testicular realism that it spun off toward the excitement of pornography. The similarity of the Greek image sent a shiver through him; but he felt better now, as if entering a clearing after trudging waist-deep through brambles.
“How are you feeling?” Tony asked, jerking Jeffrey out of his clearing. “Tell me, how?”
“Better. I can be tested now.”
“Richtig? Delighted. I’m happy, Jeffrey. I was scared for a moment.”
“Were you?”
“Yes. I had a lot of fear for you. I was determined to do anything. I must tell you that.”
“Really?” Jeffrey gazed into Tony’s eyes. Normally, they gave little evidence of Tony’s feelings, but he could see actual fear there. Tony wasn’t hiding it.
“Yes,” Tony answered quickly. “I was determined—” He paused, cleared his throat, then said, “To bring in other help. That’s it! I admit it. I would even go into your—”
“Into my what?”
Tony looked flustered, very unusual for him.
“I would go into your—” He dropped the thought for a second, then resumed it with, “Your spiritual makeup, Jeffrey. If you’d let me do such a thing.”
Jeffrey smiled. Tony looked vulnerable, perhaps even more vulnerable than Jeffrey felt after coming out into a clearing of his feelings.
“Why wouldn’t I, Tony? By now you must know that I’d let you do almost anything.”
Tony’s tanned face darkened slightly more.
“Whatever you say. It’s just not something normally covered in therapy. Not by the system. Some people get bothered by it. And others—” Tony’s hands became expressive, like a dancer’s miming a rising waterbird. “That’s all they want. You’d think they invented God. Which, of course, is true. We all at some point do invent God.”
“I haven’t yet,” Jeffrey said with genuine relish. “But what would this spiritual thing do? Tell me.”
“Sit up,” Tony ordered.
Jeffrey did.
“It provides a framework. It’s like a contract. It gives you someplace to meet the higher ‘Thing.’ Fill in whatever blanks you’d like. Some people call it God. Others call it Ethics, Morality, even Imagination. Yes,” he added with insistence. “The very bull’s-eye center of the Imagination.”
Jeffrey rearranged his shirt, tucking it into his pants. “You never spoke to me about this, Tony.”
“I wasn’t so concerned before.”
“And are you now?”
“‘Fraid so. Believe me, I don’t bring in the spiritual thing often, and never directly. That seems too arrogant for me. What I do is, well, bring in the ones who can help.”
Now Jeffrey was indeed lost; Tony could see it.
“Jeffrey, I feel I know you well enough to speak. I can trust you, richtig?”
One of Tony’s hands, completely out of character, suddenly dropped to Jeffrey; Jeffrey clutched it. It would have been easy to transgress the boundary then, to jump over the fence separating patient and therapist. Tony had large strong hands, and for a second Jeffrey drew his therapist’s hand toward his face, dangerously close to his lips.
Tony pulled away. But their eyes remained on one another.
“O.K. We’ve gone this far. No going back, right? It’s like this, Jeffrey.”
Jeffrey held his breath, and looked at him.
“The spiritual . . . ‘helpers,’” Tony said slowly. “They’re like agents, see? Some people use words like ‘saints,’ but why burden the idea with such loaded words? Too many people have been hurt by words like ‘saints.’”
Jeffrey listened. He had never associated hurt with “saint,” but he could see the trap in that word.
Tony went on.
“I don’t talk much about this, but Elsie, my ex-wife, got me to believe in them.” He smiled guiltily. “The truth is, some humans have an oddly godly nature. This may be hard sometimes to see, since that very nature can be violent too. So, the truth is, you don’t have to believe in God, whatever that means to you, but you can believe in these agents, the ‘helpers.’ And you don’t need to call them saints, if you don’t want to. They can be anything you want. ‘Saints’ is just an easy word.”
“I see.” Jeffrey’s voice lowered to a whisper. “But you’re like that. To me. I mean, saintly. You are, Tony.”
“Nein. Nein. No, please don’t say that. The truth is, I need agents, too.”
Jeffrey smiled.
“I understand.”
“Good. If you want, I can bring some ‘helpers’ in. They’re around sometimes on an imaginative level, sometimes real. Maybe today’s not the day. But perhaps sometime, when you don’t pull out of your stress and it’s pulling you in so badly that even I get scared, we can—”
Jeffrey nodded, eager to agree.
“Yes, of course. Someday, you’re right.”
He felt happy, just listening to Tony; Tony could sell him anything. The weird thing—too weird—was that Jeffrey, even at seventy-eight, felt his therapist to be immeasurably older than he was. This was not simply because Jeffrey looked and acted so much younger, but because his emotions had been, for the most part, deep-frozen in immaturity as he managed to stay a part of that relentless world of style that had, in fact, produced him. He was a comfortable part of it: that always new, always freshly reinventable haute bourgeois world and its vast, interlocking system, which kept Jeffrey functioning smoothly, youthfully, at least on the outside.
So, even though on the surface he appeared to glide through his utterly professionalized life, inside, having a “Tony” there as his dad, protector, and captain was supremely pleasing to him.
“Tell me about these agents, Tony. Who are they?”
Tony shrugged self-consciously.
“Simple, really. They are . . . part of a belief mechanism. Kind of like the way we describe time. Time is only a function of perception, without perception there would be no time: you could go backward, forward; even remain stationary. That is, not backward, not forward. Just there. The agents then are another function of perception. If you can believe time exists, and we all do, then why not believe they exist?”
Jeffrey smiled. He’d never heard Tony sound like this. It punctured some of Tony’s professional “artistic” superiority, that he could believe in something so basically irrational, like anybody else.
Tony got up and, making a quick gesture of apology, lit a cigarette. “Habit I can’t break,” he said, as he’d done so many times before. He settled down again. It was deliciously nice to see Tony like this, fully human for a moment.
“We believe,” Tony picked up his thoughts, “that the pubtrans will run. Cars will work. Everything that biotech does, we believe in that, too. If you can believe in all that, why can’t you believe that there are places in perception where normally you don’t go? But the rub is you have to go there to believe them. In fact—”
Tony halted.
“What?”
“Well, you have to push a lot of yourself aside to go there, because sometimes the regular, working part of your brain can’t follow it. Get what I mean?”
Jeffrey looked at him, not wanting to speak, not wanting to break the fragile bubble of that moment. He nodded, forcing a smile, putting aside any possible, reasonable doubt that might stand between him and Tony.
“Primo! Excellent.” Tony shot some smoke out, like an ejaculation, up at the elegantly plastered ceiling. “You can follow, I knew you could! Let’s make it truly simple. Let’s call this a ‘technique.’ A therapeutic technique—and let’s say you need it. There are things we normally don’t allow ourselves to see, so we just dismiss them as unreal. Zum beispiel, you’re not going to die, Jeffrey. Tell me, how real is that?”
It was a loaded question, hitting Jeffrey hard between the eyes. He became tense again, and wondered where Tony was going: it was someplace they’d never been before and Jeffrey, suddenly, was shocked by it. Tony’s eyes became harder, losing that wonderful, soft, daddy quality that Jeffrey treasured.
“Let’s be frank: You’re going to have quite a life, Jeffrey. It’s going to go on and on, until you can’t absorb all your necessary information anymore. That’s when you’ll find yourself incapable of doing the work. We accept that. You have a place, you do it. Richtig? You’ve given up a lot to have that place. I admire you for it. I do. I couldn’t do what you do. I admit it. As your therapist, I can tell you—I could not give up what you’ve had to give up just to stay alive. Please, forgive me, Jeffrey, for saying this now. But it seems this is the right time.”
Jeffrey looked at him, stunned, feeling almost punched again; as if Tony were moving into a real forbidden territory of his own, and this declaration exceeded in intimacy and revelation any fantasy Jeffrey might have had about merely kissing him.
Jeffrey had to strain to pull himself out of his quiet.
“I’m sorry,” he confessed. “I feel like my very existence bothers you.”
“Nein!” Tony insisted. “Forget this. I’m the one who should be sorry. You don’t know how helpless you make me feel! For all sorts of reasons, I can’t be you and yet I’m supposed to help you. I’m here to help you stay alive. The system has put me here for you. To make your job easier, and without the system—well, we know what that would be like! Misery. Disaster. So what I’m saying is that even if I am at my wit’s end, rational as I am, there are others of a less rational nature who can help you, if you let them.”
“Yes?” Jeffrey blinked, feeling extra-confused now, as well as slightly blackmailed or at the very least manipulated, as if Tony’s offer of some new intimacy had been yanked away. He wondered: Was Tony actually saying that, as a last resort, he had to bring in other forces, “spiritual” ones, to get Jeffrey back on to the good side of the system?
This definitely did not make Jeffrey feel better, or closer to Tony.
“What happens . . . once I allow them to ‘help’?” Jeffrey asked cautiously.
Tony shrugged again. “You grow a second head.”
“No, come on, I mean it! Do I start seeing things, Tony? Allowing strange hallucinations to hit me? How can that help?”
Tony looked at him patiently, as Jeffrey went on.
“Are you sure this isn’t some kind of weird self-hypnosis that can get out of hand? I mean, isn’t that what most religion is—self-hypnosis?”
Jeffrey had heard that stated once at a party; it had stuck in his head. Now it fell out.
“Jeffrey, that’s not it at all. Besides, a little self-hypnosis in your case would not be so bad. Trust me on that.”
Tony shook his head, smiled, and then suddenly winked so seductively that Jeffrey winced. The tables were being turned too fast, and he felt as if Tony were peeling away some very guarded and unappetizing layers of himself, and too quickly inviting Jeffrey to bite.
As if reading Jeffrey’s mind, Tony said: “Why don’t we go through a little bit of it now? A little taste of it?”
“But I was feeling better before.”
“Relax. A small taste. That’s all. Ein geschmeck. Lie down again. Breathe slowly.”
It was getting late and Jeffrey knew that their session would soon end, and he had to be tested even if Tony didn’t do it. Somebody else would; somebody less of Tony’s caliber. It was part of the system. Tony was being really kind, which Jeffrey was also smart enough to know. So he did lie down.
“Now, let’s suppose you’re someplace you especially like being.”
Jeffrey closed his eyes.
He was in a rural district outside of town, a mile and a half past the end of the main pubtran line, where a lofty forest, refreshingly light-soaked, smelling of moss and ferns, gave way to a great rolling meadow, and paths lined with oaks and birches drew on to a lake colonized by lily pads, handing up gold and white blooms in the summer. Every winter he thought about the forest, the meadow, the ideally perfect lake, yearning for it like something in a beautiful dream.
Actually, the meadow was part of a public park and much of the woods around it had been reforested so many times after the wars that the trees grew up in perfect rows. Still, there were denser, off-path places that blocked out the sun, where at first Jeffrey had got lost, but now he was familiar enough with the area. He visualized the main dirt road cut through the forest, then more private footpaths, and finally deep stands of tall pines, waiting in silence. Sometimes noisy but harmless families intruded, but you could escape them. Solitary men often walked around shirtless with knapsacks on, wearing extremely short lederhosen exposing their muscular German legs. He liked all of this: the rich, living depth of the trees, the silence, the men; Tony had been correct, he could feel himself relaxing.
“Where’s this place?”
“A forest outside of town.”
“The Blichtenwald?”
“Yes.”
“I like that place, too.”
Jeffrey groaned happily, as peace flooded his mind like a summer sunset, all amber warmth glowing through the wood’s dark greens. His body relaxed in a foreign, unfamiliar way. Then, like a reflex, it snapped back into rigidity: the recall of his first experience there. After feeling so alive, open, curious, and young in that beautiful place, he was suddenly lost. Darkness spread, bringing fear and confusion with it. Unable to find the path out, he became terrified that any move would only take him deeper into the forest. He panicked.
Then out of nowhere, a wrinkled old man in lederhosen, bearded and hunched over, but with sturdy tanned calves and an ancient hiking stick, appeared.
“Sind Sie fürloren?”
Jeffrey was embarrassed.
“Ja,” he whispered.
The old man chattered on in some barely understandable, thick German dialect, but indicated with a smile that was all glittering eyes and wrinkles that he lived in the area, had been hiking it for ages, and there was nothing to fear. Jeffrey could not keep his eyes off him. He was incredibly calming; even as the darkness intensified, Jeffrey started to see fireflies, silvery night moths, and the orb of a distant moon rising over the trees.
“I vill bring you!” the old man suddenly broke into English, then took his arm and led him all the way back to the platform of the station on the slower, connecting countryline, where they both smiled and said good-bye.
Jeffrey opened his eyes.
“Someone is taking you back, taking care you?” Tony asked, smiling. “How would you describe him?”
“I can’t,” Jeffrey said. “I can’t, because I don’t know how he got there. I mean, he was an old man and he got there just when I needed him.”
Tony took his hand again.
“It’s all right, Jeffrey. I understand. You feel terribly alone at times, isolated in your own years, don’t you?”
“Yes,” Jeffrey whispered, then started crying as more feelings swelled up within him.
He hadn’t expected this. It was that difficult memory of his first trip to the forest, which he had erased and now had come back. He wondered what had happened to the old man; he was probably dead.
Why had Tony led him into this? It was hard for him to believe that the old man had served any special purpose, other than happy coincidence, but his wrinkled face was now illuminated in his mind by fireflies and moonlight, and Jeffrey felt as if he were breathing in the very air of magic.
As relaxed as he now was, he felt suspicious. If he had to, backed up against the wall of the system, he could control his panic and push down his stress numbers and go on working. But where was Tony leading him, and what even more pivotal place was he trying to dig out for himself inside Jeffrey’s overworked brain?
Tony moved closer, wondering if Jeffrey could take this, and a bit scared himself. Definitely, this was not something he was licensed to do, or that the system smiled on. His therapeutic professional reserve melted.
“Do you want me to hold you?” he whispered.
Jeffrey nodded.
As Tony took him into his arms, into the crisp gray tunic that smelled of eau de cologne and tobacco, Tony’s room with its distinctive furnishings, stained glass upper-window panes and jewel-colored glass shades, seemed to embrace Jeffrey as well, becoming his refuge. And Tony, a guardian of the system, somehow magically became the old man with the walking stick.
“Relax, lieber Jeffrey,” Tony cooed, his voice pure liquid. “There are beings who will come to help you, just like that man in the forest.”
“I was frightened. How did you know?”
“Your face. I could even see him there, believe me.”
“Oh, God!” Jeffrey cried as if he’d been unmasked. “What can I do? I need you to help me, Tony!”
“I know.” Tony hugged him kindly, cautiously. “I know that. The system has placed me here, but I can only go so far. That’s why I say there are other ‘good’ forces, if you want them. I’d like you to think of me as someone who can bring them.”
“I vill bring you!” Jeffrey heard the old man promise. He released a deep breath, then said to Tony, “I really want to do that—to think of you that way.”
Tony smiled.
“Then do, my friend.”
“Are they . . . ?” Then Jeffrey said it: “Saints?”
“Whatever you’d like to call them. But even saints are human. So when we call upon these forces, we must remember that a human element comes with them as well.”
“But you know they are there?”
“I do.”
Tony grinned, and impulsively kissed Jeffrey lightly on his forehead, as he’d never done before.
“Elsie has seen them. She made me believe in them. I couldn’t at first. It seemed so lower-class: that’s the truth. But when I began to really believe in them, I realized that they have a light and you can see it. It comes from within; maybe it actually comes from within you. But, for our sakes, don’t tell anyone that I suggested this to you. I’ve gone very far out of my bounds, I know it. There’s nothing in the system that talks about this. And one can never be too careful, as I’m sure the system would never consider this to be therapeutic. Verstehsen allis?”
“Yes, of course,” Jeffrey said. “I understand it all.”
Chapter Two
A moment later, Tony brought over the small gray instrument that measured Jeffrey’s stress level. Its printout, done in little columns, was like a report card, except that exactly what the figures meant and how the genial but unseen “man behind the curtain” himself would interpret them, was still in most circles a mystery. All of it was “open to interpretation,” meaning its significance varied with your position and how stress-prone that was, what exactly was being done to you, what investments had been made in you, and then how all of that would appear to the various business-suited analysts whose offices interpreted the results.
Basically, no one knew who they were, or what they actually looked like, yet one’s very insides would run across their desks, appear on their data systems along with other anonymous comments, and then get filed away in places that only a select group of people, whose identities were often unknown even to each other, would ever know.
Once “accidentally,” several decades earlier, through an obliging quickie “friend” whom he’d met one late rainy night on a business trip, Jeffrey had obtained a copy of his own complete medical transcript: something so forbidden that he was sure his fingers would burn just touching it. They were both drunk in a cheap bar at an end-of-the-road junction in Southeast Asia, one of those almost comically slimy sex-trade dives, eons off the “Escape”-resorts map, where factories teeming with child labor sprouted up at the edges of jungles, along with bootleg pharmaceutical labs and nomadic scam mills churning out unlimited opportunities for suckers. His “friend” was a horny little mole burrowed deep into accounting, but Jack “XYZ,” sweet, chubby, balding with a hairy back, had other invisible mole-like “friends” who in turn could get him virtually any piece of information he wanted. After they both “popped,” in Jack’s roach-spattered rented room, as a favor to his good-looking guest and to prove that even as a pond-scum, frog-in-the-bog he had hidden charm and powers of his own, he offered, bleerily:
“If I can see you again, I’ll get it for ya.” He burped. “Bet you’d love t’see it.”
Jeffrey swallowed hard and said, “Yes.” He’d see Jack again, for that. It was all very sub-rosa. Nightmare scary. But after one more sex-drenched night in a third-rate motel in the States with this dodgy little mole, chunky little Jack in revolting striped boxer bloomers fished some papers out of a secret compartment in his briefcase.
Jeffrey sat at the edge of the bed, getting slightly nauseated just starting to read it. It was like looking at his own autopsy report. Everything was there in cold blood and type: so many organ and body system analyses, work done inside him, expensive but necessary preemptive cell replacements, all the procedures and their settings. The drugs, the meds, the therapies and consultations. Everything in neat rows of figures, beautifully captioned in matter-of-fact accountants’ English, usually ending with the words:
“Need for Funding.” “Cleared for Funding.” “Forecast for Funding.”
His head throbbed while Jack smiled anxiously. He handed it back, and Jack took it into the bathroom and burned it. He made sure he never saw Jack again.
His confidential medical file almost destroyed all the faith Jeffrey had in something he needed to keep some piece of faith in: the idea that he was more than just a business deal. He was a substantial “talent,” an irreplaceable expert. Not something they might categorize at any moment as “Uncleared for Funding.”
He hated thinking about their second meeting in that even more sordid room. It was painful to see the evidence of his worth spreadsheet like that in so many cold numbers, but he had been able to forget it, which also was a genuine part of the process of extending his life.