Sacrament

Before he reached it, however - before he was back in that place of wakefulness - he was determined to take one last look at the past. Ungluing his eyes from the brightness ahead, he glanced back over his shoulder, and for a few precious seconds glimpsed the world he was leaving. There was the wood, sparkling in the spring light - every bud a promise of green to come. And the fox! Lord, there it was, darting away about the business of the morning. He pressed his sight to look harder, knowing he had only moments left, and it went where he willed, back the way he'd come, to look down the hillside to the village. One last heroic glance, fixing the sight in all its myriad details. The river, sparkling; the Courthouse, mouldering; the roofs of the village, rising in slated tiers; the bridge, the post office, the telephone box from which he'd called Frannie that night long ago, telling her he was running away.

So he was. Running back into his life, where he would never see this sight again, so finely, so perfectly- They were calling him again, from the present. 'Welcome back, Will ... somebody was saying to him softly. Wait, he wanted to tell them. Don't welcome me yet. Give me just another second to dream this dream. The bells are ringing for the end of the Sunday service. I want to see the people. I want to see their faces, as they come out into the sun. I want to see-

The voice again, a little more insistent. 'Will. Open your eyes.'

There was no time left. He'd reached the finishing line. The past was consumed by brightness. River, bridge, church, houses, hill, trees and fox, gone, all gone, and the eyes that had witnessed them, weaker for the passage of years, but no less hungry, opened to see what he'd become.

PART FOUR

He Meets The Stranger In His Skin

CHAPTER I

i

'It's going to take time to get you up and moving normally again,' Doctor Koppelman explained to Will a few days after the awakening.

'But you're still reasonably young, reasonably resilient. And you were fit. All that puts you ahead of the game.'

'Is that what it's going to be?' Will said. He was sitting up in bed, drinking sweet tea.

'A game? No, I'm afraid not. It's going to be brutal some of the time.' 'And the rest?'

'Merely horrendous.'

'Your bedside manner's for shit, you know that?'

Koppelman laughed. 'You'll love it.'

'Says who?'

'Adrianna. She told me you had a distinctly masochistic streak. Loved discomfort, she said. Only happy when you were up to your neck in swamp-water.'

'Did she tell you anything else?'

Koppelman threw Will a sly smile. 'Nothing you wouldn't be proud of,' he said. 'She's quite a lady.'

'Lady?'

'I'm afraid I'm an old-fashioned chauvinist. I haven't called her with the news, by the way. I thought it'd be better coming from you.'

'I suppose so,' Will said, without much enthusiasm.

'You want to do it today?'

'No, but leave me the number. I'll get around to it.'

'When you're feeling a little better-' Koppelman looked a little embarrassed. '-I wonder if you'd do me a favour? My wife's sister Laura works in a bookstore. She's a big fan of your pictures. When she heard I was looking after you, she practically threatened my life if I didn't get you back to work, happy and healthy. If I brought in a book, would you sign it for her?'

'It'd be my pleasure.'

'That's good to see.'

' What?'

'That smile. You've got reason to be happy, Mr Rabjohns. I wasn't betting on you coming out of this. You took your time.'

'I was ... wandering,' Will replied.

'Anywhere you remember?'

'A lot of places.'

'If you want to talk to one of the therapists about it at some point, I'll set it up.'

'I don't trust therapists.'

'Any particular reason?'

'I dated one once. He was the most royally fucked up guy I ever met. Besides, aren't they supposed to take the pain away? Why the hell would I want that?'

When Koppelman had gone, Will revisited the conversation, or rather the latter part of it. He hadn't thought about Eliot Cameron, the therapist he'd dated, in a long time. It had been a short affair, conducted at Eliot's insistence behind locked doors in a hotel room booked under an assumed name. At first the furtiveness had tickled Will's sense of play, but the secrecy soon began to wear out its welcome, fuelled as it was by Eliot's shame at his orientation. They had argued often, sometimes violently, the fisticuffs invariably followed by a sensational bout of love-making. Then had come the publication of Will's first book, Transgressions, a collection of photographs whose common theme was animal trespassers and their punishment. The book had appeared without attracting a single review, and seemed destined for total obscurity until a commentator in The Washington Post took exception to it, using it as an object lesson in how gay artists were tainting public discourse.

It is tasteless enough, the man had written, that ecological tragedies be appropriated as political metaphor, but doubly so when one considers the nature of the pleading involved. Mr Rabjohns should be ashamed of himself. He has attempted to turn these documents into an irrational and self-dramatizing metaphor for the homosexual's place in America; and in doing so has demeaned his craft, his sexuality and - most unforgivably - the animals whose dying throes and rotting carcasses he has so obsessively documented.

The piece sparked controversy, and within forty-eight hours Will found himself in the middle of a fiercely contested debate involving ecologists, gay rights lobbyists, art critics and politicians in need of the publicity. A strange phenomenon rapidly became evident: that everyone saw what they wanted to see when they looked at him. For some he was a mudspattered wheel, raging around amongst prissy aesthetes. For others he was simply a bad boy with good cheekbones and a damn strange look in his eyes. For another faction still he was a sexual outsider, his photographs of less consequence than his function as a violator of taboos. Ironically, even though he'd never intended the agenda he'd been accused of promulgating, the controversy had done to him what the Post piece had claimed he was doing to his subjects: it had turned him into metaphor. In desperate need of some simple affection, he'd sought out Eliot. But Eliot had decided the spotlight might spill a little light on him, and had taken refuge in Vermont. When Will finally found his way through the maze the man had left to conceal his route, Eliot told him it would be better all around if Will left him alone for a while. After all, he'd explained in his inimitable fashion, it wasn't as if they'd ever really been lovers, was it? Fuck-buddies maybe, but not lovers.

Six months later, while Will was on a shoot on the Ruwenzori massif, an invitation to Eliot's wedding had found its tortuous way into his hands. It was accompanied by a scrawled note from the groom-to-be saying that he perfectly understood Will wouldn't be able to make it, but he didn't want him to feel forgotten. Fuelled by an heroic perversity, Will had packed up the shoot early and flown back to Boston for the wedding. He'd ended up having a drunken exchange with Eliot's brother-in-law, another therapist, in which he'd loudly and comprehensively trashed the entire profession. They were the proctologists of the soul, he'd said; they took a wholly unhealthy interest in other people's shit. There had been a cryptic telephone message from Eliot a week later, telling Will to keep his distance in future, and that had been the end of Will's experience with therapists. No, not quite true. He'd had a short fling with the brotherin-law; but that was another adventure altogether. He had not spoken to Eliot since, though he'd heard from mutual friends that the marriage was still intact. No children, but several houses.