Only afterwards, alone on his own mattress, did Ghassan give himself over to the corruption of his imaginings. And now the sight of the man’s naked body was making him swoon with an intoxication that was humiliating. He had expected a boy and he had to confront a man. A man like himself but viewed in a false and diabolical mirror. The dark thistles of hair on the man’s chest, the masculine abundance of the belly, the thickness and solidity of the man’s cock, so much like his own except for the serpentine hood covering the head. Yes, he had swooned. He had wanted to fall to his knees and take the man into his mouth. Instead, unable to bear the unfamiliar beauty of the sight, he had savagely turned him around so he was facing away from him. The man had resisted for a moment, and Ghassan had thought that they would struggle, that they both could only legitimise their passion through violence. He had pushed harder on the back of the man’s head. The man resisted, then allowed his body to go limp. It was the moment of submission. Ghassan had loosened his grip and the man had tumbled forward, unresisting, onto the stained black vinyl couch. Ghassan unzipped.
They had not spoken a word to each other all year. Ghassan could not now recall when he had first become aware of the handsome European. He had no recollection of a defining moment, the way there was when he thought back to his first meeting with Omar. That memory was as distinct as the material world created by God that was always before his eyes. He and Saleem were waiting for the 5.15 train to Epping. Saleem had greeted a lonely figure waiting on the crowded platform with a small black bag between his feet. Omar’s greeting had been warm, his eyes piercing. Ghassan had fallen into those eyes and had swum in them ever since. He knew those eyes better, more profoundly, than he knew himself. They were shaped like almonds; they were the colour of the darkest, most luscious honey.
He had no idea of the colour of the European stranger’s eyes. Yet at some point this man had indeed begun to seep into his consciousness; he’d realised this when he was flicking back through his notebook and registered the recurring portrait. In lectures, Ghassan found himself searching for the man’s freckled pale neck, enjoying how the glare of the bright fluorescent lights in the lecture hall made the fine blond hairs glisten on the man’s arms. Dew on snow. He did fancy that there were moments when the man turned and searched for him. But in those moments, Ghassan would avert his gaze and focus instead on the glacial movements of the lecturer.
The European youth only existed within the lecture theatre. Ghassan never saw him around campus, never in the cafeteria or the libraries, never in other lectures or tutorials. He was only ever there on Tuesday mornings at ten o’clock, always sitting two rows ahead of Ghassan and his friends. His fair hair was always kept neat and cut short. His clothes were simple and unadorned, masculine, eschewing vanity. Ghassan desperately wanted to believe in the European’s moral rectitude. He could not imagine him drinking or being intoxicated, could not imagine him surrendering to vileness or perversion. Ghassan wanted with all his will to believe that the emotions stirred inside him by this stranger could also be divine in their essence, as pure and unsullied as his love for Omar. It was the European man’s unfamiliarity, the exotic pornographic danger of his skin, that was threatening. Omar represented all that was worth celebrating in a man — strength, dignity, keen intelligence and resolute faith. Was it possible that this stranger too could embody all these virtues? Was it possible that the young man was a mirror, one that reflected back to Ghassan an image of himself in white skin? Could the European truly be such a man, stripped of degeneracy, decadence, sloth, lust and greed? Maybe one day it could be possible. This was how much he had come to love the stranger.
‘Fuck me.’
The coarse, ugly English words. He had become detached from the savage animal act in which they were engaged. His cock was still erect, he was mechanically thrusting into the man, but his mind had been elsewhere, inside the warm, timeless cocoon of the lecture theatre. The obscene, brutal words brought him back to earth. Fuck me. He increased the speed of his thrusts as he became conscious of the electronic music that was piped through the cubicle, the groans, expletives and screams coming from the frantic couplings in the cubicles on either side of theirs, or from the porn playing on the monitors in the corridor outside. He could no longer block out sound, or sight; he resigned himself to looking at the blood-like stains of the semen marks on the bare walls. He was wrenched back to the body he was sodomising by its smell, a chemical, unnatural stench, but also earthy and nauseating. That smell of offal again.
‘Fuck me.’ The insistent words now almost shouted. The demon words did their work, they aroused him further. Ghassan looked down at his cock, wet from lubricant and spit, flecks of shit visible on the shaft. He stared in fascination at the pink hole that was stretching, opening up to receive him. It was the raw red of blood and the pitch black of night. Ghassan was not wearing a condom and the stranger had not asked for one. He wished for death, he trusted in death, his words were a call to death. Fuck me. Ghassan pushed the whole of himself into the European, as if through his cock he was splitting in two the very universe itself. Ghassan moaned in the darkness and from deep inside his ecstasy and his loathing, he spilt himself. He shuddered, jerked like an epileptic as he dissipated into the whiteness. The body underneath him also began a relentless jerking. The stranger groaned, he called out into the void. Shamelessly, he was calling out to God, not knowing that God abhorred him. A trail of white splattered across the vinyl arm of the couch.
Omar had pointed out the building to him not long after they had first met. He had described, coldly, what went on inside it. Ghassan had listened, shocked, as Omar told him that children were taken there and violated, how iniquitous orgies as vile and blasphemous as those of the time of Sodom and Gomorrah were committed there inside the deceptively innocuous simple brown brick facade of the building, how men were ensnared and made insane by demons who corrupted the holy books with their bodily excretions. A small rectangular plaque the colours of the rainbow was the only indication of the depravities performed inside. Is it not scandalous, Omar asked, that the very symbol of God’s promise to man has been taken by these devils and become a promise of death and sin?
The building sat tucked in between an alley and a large warehouse stocking parts for automobiles and motorbikes. Across the road was a bank. On the corner diagonally opposite was a twenty-four-hour convenience store. Their friend worked there and they were waiting for him to finish his shift. As they were talking, an emaciated girl turned into the alley next to the store and crouched behind a large square industrial bin. Ghassan had been trying to take in Omar’s words, could not believe what he was hearing, was ashamed by how those words made him feel. The girl walked back out from behind the bin and he was staring right at her. She looked startled but then flung a syringe at his feet and jeered, ‘Fuck off, curry muncher.’ She stumbled as she lurched past them and then her gait slowed. Her white skin was the pallor of ghosts.
‘She is the walking dead,’ Omar said quietly. ‘They let their young die on the streets here, alone. And inside, they have their orgies.’
Omar must always be proud of him. Omar would never know his shame.
The stranger wiped his wet cock with a tissue, and then, shyly, again like a little boy, he offered a clean tissue to Ghassan. Wordlessly, Ghassan took it, wiped himself clean and then pulled up his trousers. The European did the same, both of them with their backs to each other, ludicrously embarrassed by their nudity, as if the last few minutes of primal intimacy had not occurred.