pervert

Les Amants II (1928), René Magritte

Thank you for your silence,

In my sleepy town, Valentines was rearing its head. This is obvious, given how busy the town square was, how the diner I usually skip class to take refuge in has been gentrified by press and fly-ins. Down the square, I counted fifteen couples and thirty two crushed Pilsner Urquell cans. Pink and blue posters flooded the sooty walls as I pace around a corner: Kaleidoscope in kitsch typography smacked between doodles of hearts, leaves, and all that. A bulky-slash-rotund blonde and a brunette looked at each other suggestively. It was all media-trained and focus-grouped and I didn’t care much for it. If you looked close enough between the two hodgepodge leads, you could see a man in a black ski mask underneath the blue. You could tell the posters were hastily pasted over ones a few weeks ago. Some gay couple were beat up off the town’s periphery last week and it was all on CCTV — grainy figures toppling over one another in silence. Everyone talked about it and lamented for a week, but who truly cares when a newer, shinier, glossier reality is guaranteed to come along and supplant all the mess? After all, it was a listless semester where nothing stood out. Love was in the air and nothing felt real or consequential. Everything glitters, but nothing sticks.

I headed into All Saints, the local sleaze spot tucked between an electronics store that was never open and a grocery store that would always close before the advent of noon. The ceiling hung low, lit by the dim amber glow of fluorescent lamps and hoisted television screens with soccer playing in silence. The air was ripe and vegetal like an animal enclosure. I squeezed through chairs and swarms of shoulders, my hand wiping up beer spills and water rings as I parse through crowd of dipsos. My feet mashed rose petals on the linoleum floor, painting a skid mark of reddish brown.

I have never been here and never would have if it wasn’t for Kate. Over three years of university, her social circle whittled. You see, she had a nasty habit of annexing people, of pushing people and vicariously living through them. Unlike her social circle, I only stuck around because I liked lying to her to see how far I could get, how her eyes would light up at my next outrageous story. That was, until the play date.

“Are you lonely?,” she hushed through the turns of papers and clicks of keyboards. She wasn’t the librarian’s favorite.

“No.”

“It’s Valentines,” she said as if it were supposed to hold any weight. She clenched her jaw on a piece of gum and swats her hand in the air, dismissing my answer. “Well, you must meet Seb,” she said. I said nothing. “You must,” she insisted. I just looked at her before she went “Thank. Me. Later.”

“Kate,” I said sternly, but it was too late.

“Okay, I texted him. All Saints. 9 PM.”

So there I was, beleaguered in All Saints at 9 PM. At a corner table, I saw a mousey head paired with shrimpy limbs and a mopey blonde mop deep-fried from bleach. “Seb?,” I asked, sitting down across him. He shook my hand and introduced himself as Kate’s classmate. After he was three pints of Pilsner in and I was barely a quarter through my first, he began to talk and talk he did. I felt at ease, not because he was tending the silence, but because I didn’t have to do the work. He proudly revealed his track record as an active member of society: A frequent guest on a university podcast wherein he details the importance of destigmatization and divulges his numerous sexual encounters — pawning them off as educational, a full-time climate activist, and a part-time poet where he writes of his many flings over many summers by rhyming words like ‘homeschool’ and ‘douche’.

“It’s a social construct meant to limit your full potential,” he posited. Face flushing and glasses fogging as he took a hefty gulp. “Body counts,” he loudened and wiped a foamy streak above his thin lips with his tongue. Then, he began detailing how body counts reset after a set period of time and that ‘virginity’ was also a construct. I began to seep through the spaces between his words, drifting off and latching on to conversations from adjacent tables. The pair next to us complained of the ale. It was too bitter, they said. The table behind was on a blind date — a baritone voice would stutter as another vocal fry would fry on. At a certain point, I latched back on to his droll.

“The clerk down at Oberla got beat up on his third date. Could you believe? Third! You saw the videos? They were standing around for hours and then got clocked. Just like that!” He smashed a fist on his face softly, his words knocking over into one another.

“Third time’s a charm.”

“Are you going to Kaleidoscope’s premiere? I’m organizing it with my faculty and we’ll even get to see Kit,” he abruptly said, handing me a card: CREW in the same kitsch letters as the posters. “I could get us backstage.” I inspected it, ignoring the buzzes from my phone.

“Which one is that?”

“The hotter one,” he said. “You know, this show makes me feel so seen. It connects people. Don’t you think?”

“I think it’s tacky,” I tried to teach him. “And pedophilic.”

“Are you AroAce?”

“What?”

“Are you asexual?,” he asked, feigning a tone of concern. “You could tell me. This is a safe space,” he assured self-seriously. My phone kept going at it, etching away at Seb’s cool. He looked down at it before chagrinning: “I mean it must really suit you. You’re not doing bad at all.”

“Why would I want my sexuality to be the lack thereof?,” I saw him hesitate to swallow. “You know, you do so much and you’re still so neutered,” I scoffed, flipping my phone over and there it was — my excuse — but before I could excuse myself and after the waiter placed his next pint, my nostrils were flooded with the fizzing bitter of hop, my eyes stung, and my torso went cold. As I gathered myself, a baritone yell erupted behind, silencing the multitudes. A bald redneck in a damp polo pushed me aside, his callus scraping my arm, and hurled a fist right where Seb demonstrated. His blind date dropped her vocal fry and squealed. In seconds, the hurrah faded into crisps of glass and heavy thuds.

I darted towards the exit, out to the streets along with strangers who could not walk straight. Shivering through a town now asleep, I hopped on the tram towards Ilya’s. Towards the end of the line.

My head leaned against the quaking pane, staining it with the syrup of beer and sweat as my eyes traced the vacant streets and my mind meandered. Some time ago, Kate demanded me to ‘put myself out there’. With a swipe and a click, she downloaded Grindr on to my phone, handing it to me as if she has magically opened my third eye. Then, on an arbitrary night when the silence felt harsher, for reasons unbeknownst to me, I let my fickle curiosity take hold.

I surveyed its inhabitants, eyeing its removedness. There were barely names to the faces and bare torsos and crotches, only estranged self-proclamations: ‘Hung’, ‘Hole’, ‘Oral King’. It reminded me of the first time I saw a cadaver. It didn’t matter who you are, where you’re from, what you called for when you were alive. You come and you go with the same wirings and parts — objects with circuitry that accidentally kicked consciousness and identity into us. Your entire being and legacy inevitably watering down to body parts with the same name across different bodies. We’re all objects, bombarding into one another. I began sleuthing, creating loose profiles of people in my head. Two kilometers away is a polyglot who refuses to believe anyone is permitted to be over the age of thirty and still be viable for ‘breeding’ them. Five kilometers away identifies as a geek who gets ‘rock hard’ to ‘people with brains’.

A slim pixelated torso said: ‘hi’. Weeks after, the torso would graze my lunches with daily affirmations of ‘hi’s. Kate found it to be reassuring, that I was not too far gone, that there is demand in the market, urging me to answer, so I lied, saying I did. She began asking a smorgasbord of questions, irritating ones like ‘is it official?’ and ‘are you on PREP? did you get Gardasil?’. The only way to shut her up was to address the looming presence of the torso. Ilya was its name.

He probed what I was looking for and I told him the truth. “Everything and nothing.”

“Same,” he said simply. “I want a friend.”

In the pitch darkness of my bedroom, I found a lightness on the other side of a screen. Sometimes, I would catch myself with a sheepish grin and groan. I let Ilya form a world inside my four walls, text by text. I feel my mind slowly surrendering into a gushy dreamy slobber as I slowly formed a physicality around his words. I hated myself for it. He was oblivious and offline. Vice junior championship in squash who casually hikes — a rare find according to Kate. He was appalled by how I neither played squash nor hiked: “You can’t be serious? How could you live?”

“By not squashing or hiking or whatever.”

“You should,” he laughed.

We’d talk about anything at any time, traversing through the horizon our minds permit, intrigued by each other’s permutations of letters and silent imaginations of one another. At a certain point, how he looked no longer held any weight as I leaned into flowery images that infested my brain. With the drop of a hat, he asked to meet. He blew off the first time hungover. Something came up on the second time. There was no third as he disappeared, leaving behind only words and a hole of a promise in my head. “He might look squashed in the face too,” Kate assured me.

The tram ground to a halt, sending me out to a vacant station. I sat on a metal railing under the flickering lights of the stop, watching the tram screech and scuttle away. I shuddered, waiting amidst the quiet. Slowly, truth ached through the cold. It was the last ride of the night and there, I stood alone on an unfamiliar side of town, tracing words sent through warm wires to a flesh I do not know. A blind pathetic mouse swinging through in the dark.

A red flannel hung loosely over a tee with a rocket made its way to me. He had broad shoulders, beaten kind eyes, a button nose and smudges of red blotchy acne. I couldn’t help, but fixate on his fingers, it was severely large that it almost looked medically inflamed. He quickly stuck his hands in his shorts and looked away at the gravel. Under the flickers of the stop, he breathed out a dense cloud.

“Bad day?,” he gestured at the state of me. I pulled away the piss-yellow shirt glued to my chest.

“It’s the best day of my life.”

“You smell sweet,” he said in a dulcet tone, tilting his head down to whiff, breaking into a saccharine smile. “So,” he looked at my candied hair sticking out haphazardly. “Wanna watch porn?”

I didn’t decline.

Ilya lived alone in a dorm for two with separate bedrooms, a shared area, and a common bathroom. Michael, his computer-engineering roommate, slept off-campus with his boss, while his parents funneled his rent without batting an eye. Ilya despised Michael. “He’s a nosy creep,” Ilya said as he took off his flannel and tossing it in a wicker basket brimming with used laundry, pairs of socks and dirty briefs draping over its handles. “Always up in my business.”

The Essential Physics of Medical Imaging, Grainger & Allison’s Diagnostic Radiology, along with loose sheets sat on his study which propped against a wall lined with photographs and film rolls. To the other side of the room stood six tripods and a glass shelf littered with cameras, SD cards, and microphones. He swung open his fridge and grabbed two blueberry seltzers from a row of many. Sat near it were a saran-wrapped plate with a half-eaten pork knuckle and a gallon of milk. Ilya quickly retrieved a bowl of popcorn from the microwave and made his way to the ostentatiously red fainting couch that faced a television, the room lit by its beige and gray haze. He tapped the cushion next to him with his palms, beckoning at me. I complied.

“Is that your girlfriend?,” I pointed a frame in the glass shelf where he hugged a doll-like girl with wild blue eyes and even wilder curls.

“Yes.”

He resumed a file called ‘713’. A handheld camera follows a bulky man dealing his hand at a game of cards. It was Christmas and a delivery man storms in all frazzled. His girlfriend was sick and it has been a long day of delivering packages. The bulky man happened to be a masseur, offering to massage the delivery man. For someone as big as he was, I thought he didn’t do a good job — barely any weight was applied. I grabbed popcorn from our common bowl and looked over to Ilya. He was completely lost in it, enthralled and transfixed, hanging by every line of dialogue. The bare back of the delivery man shone at the corner of his oily sclera. He looked strangely handsome under the glow. A sleazy, visceral charm like an old car unashamed of its noise.

The delivery man was offered 4000 to lose his briefs. His glance darted hesitantly, justifying it with his girlfriend before guiltily indulging in his acceptance. As more was offered and accepted, I felt the veil between performance and reality thin and tear. I sat in silence with Ilya, holding hands in an empty bowl with our knuckles buttered, eyes drawn to their sex. Flesh grunted and reveled as we followed the trails of the navel and sharp demarcations of the jaw. I began to feel, for once in an impossibly long time. Not the heat of cheap desires, but a deep rumble of something else ripping through underneath my chest. Our faces painted with bodies painted with sex. It was strange and far away, but unadultered and untempered. Is it love? Could it be? Is this the feeling I’ve been told to search for my entire life? For the first time, something broke through a wall of noise and grain and it felt real and it was bleeding and on fire.

Ilya rested his head on my shoulders, warming his shirt I changed into. We both smelled of faint detergent and tired musk. His roan-ish brown hair contorted to the shape of my clavicle. The videos turned into ‘114’, then the numbers went on as the night rode onto deeper depths of night. He looked up at me, weary-eyed but content, and, unlike me, as if something deeper took hold, I leaned over to kiss his forehead. His hand unlatched off of mine and his gaze turned cold. He backed to the other end of the fainting couch as if he was offended. Ilya got up and walked into his bedroom. In that moment, I cycled through all the possible human emotions. In that moment, I felt like I killed and have been killed. I was left on the opposite side of the screen, barred from a reality that deserved to be realer than mine, sitting in quiet unrest as I screamed ‘what did I do?’ over and over until all voices cracked and numbed to a standstill. In seconds, I was alone in pain, refusing to believe the truest of truths: no one is on the other side to rescue me from anything, especially from myself.

Except, Ilya came back out with a camera wrapped around his left hand. He was calm and something mischievous had crossed his mind. “Not like that okay? Never,” he told me, working the camera until a red dot beamed at me. “Not without cameras.” I nodded as he wiped away a well of tear in my eyes with his thumb.

He rested the camera steadily from the television and made his way over. Caressing my face, he leaned over to perch his lips against mine. It was slow and warm and the night suddenly fell into place.

Kaleidoscope was all people could talk about as Kit has landed around the precipice of the premiere. For weeks leading up to it, I would avoid Kate and my usual café to study at Ilya’s. At the foot of night, we would repeat our ritual of watching his television, but nothing seemed to sate his newfound unrest. He demanded more which means I must provide. If love was churning, my bones screamed to keep it running.

“How about we do it backstage?,” I offered, fanning Seb’s CREW card, sparking a lightness in him. “Will you be my Valentines?”

“We need to get suited then,” he swirled the contents of his backpack and whipped out a credit card. “Michael’s treat.”

We ran through town in crisp-collared tuxedos to catch a tram towards the hall they’re hosting the premiere. He held his camera, while his sleek satin lapels flipped with the wind. My neck-tie fluttering, still untied and wrapped around my fist. He flew through with ease as my years of inactivity began catching up. He stopped three streets away, looking back at me and hollering. “Come on! Put your legs into it!”

“They taze you during squash or what?,” I yelled. The unassuming passersby perplexed by us.

We hopped on a tram. Ilya gawked at the town through the window as I panted. It was hours away from the premiere and a crowd has amassed out front. With ease, I flashed the card at security who let us both in. We were ushered towards the auditorium to ‘check with Seb’. “Tell him to stay backstage. There’s going to be people here and no one wants to see… that,” a stern lady juggling folders admonished before dropping us at the auditorium entrance. As soon as she left, we took off to explore the grounds. Ilya took pictures of hallways, stacks of red chairs leaning against a wall. As I took in the paintings adorning the establishment, a flash and a click faced me.

“You should smile more,”

“You should frown more,” I said as he walked closer, sticking his concerning fingers into the corner of his mouth, drawing a frown. He never seemed to get tripped up in my thorniness and all I could do was laugh. Behind Ilya, a crowd started to shuffle in and from afar, Kate marched in, dressed top to bottom in Kaleidoscope’s color scheme. An entirely sequined top that reminded me of ‘The Rainbow Fish’ and a whimsically pink suede pencil skirt with blue pumps. A purple feather flourished around her bun as she marched our way, towards the auditorium. “Shit.”

I took Ilya’s hand and made a run down the unoccupied hallway that went beside the auditorium. We descended down the long-winded carpeted length into the dim. Right before the turn, I tried the crew card on a scanner as Ilya took another photo. A whir and a beep later, the door let us into another world: A rectangular room with four chairs facing the right, all walls mirrored one another into an oblivion of copies, a blue and purple fluorescent lamp lined the corners. Our polished leather shoes clacked against the floor. I saw my mirrored selves, unfamiliarly dressed up and floating. I could hear chatter and stunned gasps from the other side of mirror. We were in a kaleidoscope of sorts and there were people watching. We were on stage.

Ilya went silent, searching the room for something before resting his camera down on the nearest chair. He gently took the neck-tie from my hand and looped it around my neck, tucking it underneath my collar. I could feel his breath brush my hair and smell the woody cologne he snuck. He crossed the velvet black over one another and knotted it as if he has been doing this all his life — something that wouldn’t surprise me. Through screens and lenses and living, I imagined him to have experienced the world in a careful delicate way. He has seen and have learned to touch, to move through reality as all harm has been simulated and all feelings have been pulverized into pixels and expounded. He perceives and control how he’s perceived. He wasn’t a slave to images and its politics, but an embodiment of the world reflected back again and again — a person of all. I decided it was love I felt. He brought the finished knot up to my neck.

Slowly, he lead me to the mirrored wall facing the invisible audience.

“Kiss,” he said to my reflection, gently caressing the back of my skull. I did. The mirror felt steel-cold under my tongue, air condensing to droplets around its trail. Ilya chimed in, our images merging with us in the purple haze. The voices beyond our reflections loudened into disarray. My phone began ringing, but I didn’t care. I bet with my head it was Kate.

The door swung open and we stopped.

“What the fuck?,” screamed Seb, a gauzed gash on his right face greeted us. I laughed. “You have no idea what you’re doing. Security!”

I trudged over to Seb and placed his card back into his hands — his index finger held static by a stint — and kissed him gently on his wound. “Kit’s cucked. Get real. Grow up,” I shook him before Ilya whisked me out of the room of mirrors into the hall. We took the final turn and headed up the fire exits, out through the back door and into the snowing streets. This time, we ran in tandem.

Bus stations were empty around the city as the entire town congregated at the premiere. Trams are down from heavy snow. Shops closed. Three years here and I have never seen it this vacant, yet I have never seen this much of it. We headed underground to a station in hopes of catching the next train elsewhere, anywhere, but here. Melted snow dripped down the cracks in the ceiling to puddles on floors. Only our footsteps and the low hums of LEDs showed any signs of life. The underpass became a chamber of howls, reminding me that winter has not relinquished its claws. For if seasons could change, things could also fade. And I needed this to stay.

“Ilya?”

He turned back to me, remediating the frostbite with black gloves. I blew into mine and hoped for the best. “Yeah, bub?”

“Could we do this?,” I despised how I sound, but I was at a lost for words. “You know, just us.” I followed his eyes as they plummeted down to a puddle between us, his brows haplessly fell.

“What do you mean?”

“You have a girlfriend.”

“So?”

“The whole thing. Isn’t this like… gay?,” I winced. Ilya said nothing.

“What are we?”

“We have to go down here,” he said before setting down the flight of stairs to the underground train, deeper into the cold heart of the town.

“Ilya,” I called with urgency, beckoning for an answer. I trailed behind him further and further, hopping down several steps to catch up.

“Fuck!,” Ilya yelled, wielding a punch through the air. As I set foot onto the platform, a screech of the train have already diffused into a distant howl. “We missed it.” I stood at the ledge of the stairs, facing his back. His hair swirled lusciously down the nape of his neck. “Why?" he asked plainly. “We could be anything. Everything and nothing, just like you wanted.”

“No.”

“No?”

“I don’t know what I want, okay?,” I bleated, hearing myself break into a disgusting sob, my legs buckling as I slumped to the curtail step. “I’m alone. And I wish could shrug it off and I lie to you and say I’m okay with it all, this aloneness, but I’m not. I’m not okay. And you’re the closest to okay I will ever be,” I breathed. “I love you. Not your cameras. Not your videos. Not your texts. I love you, Ilya.”

He looked at me now, straight through me for the first time, as if there were no longer objects at our feet that demanded tending. I searched him for a response, a shift, anything at all, but there was nothing. His gloved fingers unraveled from a fist, sauntering and crouching to the floor near him and placed his camera. Its red eye bloodshot, taking in the dead silence. He held out his arms before he called my name.

“Come here, Tomas.”

There were no answers and there will be no answers. There is no one on the other side to rescue me from anything, especially from myself. But this was all I have, a boy with a face I knew, but no longer felt what lurked underneath. I gathered myself, hoisting up my heavy limbs and walking over. We embraced. Our tuxedos wet from melted snow and sweat. I let go, but he held on to my back, pushing my head into the nape of his neck. I heard him sob and felt his lungs quiver. I patted his back, gently.

“It’s alright. It’s okay to cry.”

Suddenly, something hard hit me across the face and I flung onto the floor. The pain was sharp, but it was real. A man larger than the both of us stood over me and launched his fists to the same other side. This time, I heard a crack and my face felt warm. I saw Ilya’s shoes, hazy through a film of red, darting away, back up the stairs. I could hear his last footsteps sink away into the drips of melted snow. The man in a ski mask grunted, fluttering his fingers to stretch his knuckles for another blow.

I pictured myself, lying comatose on the platform after a public display. How Seb would have gotten his last laugh. How it all would have never happened if I just went to sleep in my sleepy town. How love did this to me. How pathetic I was. And how I will never forgive myself for it.

I reached for Ilya’s camera and slid away under his stance. Standing up as fast as I could, I felt the world blare around me as I swung my foot towards his crotch. Then, I bottled my resentments, reservations, and rage into one swing, putting my legs into it — smashing Ilya’s world onto the man’s head with all the will I could muster. He was sent to the ground the same way I did. The camera screen whirred and crackled in my hand as I sat on top of him. I tugged off the black ski mask to reveal a man I have never seen in my life, crying and groaning. His left eye bloodied from the impact and an open gash on his head gushed out viscous red.

I looked at the ceiling, near a stranded vending machine to see a security camera. I waved at it, sent a kiss to it, before bending down to kiss the man with my cracked lip.

He began crying, an ugly harrowing wail.

There, we were bruised and we were both real.