Sacrament

'You want some more?' Lewis said, handing the nub of the reefer back to Will. 'Hey, Will? You listening?'

Will was staring into the darkness, his thoughts as furtive as the raccoon. Lewis was right. There was a kind of poetry in the story Lord Fox had told. But Will wasn't a poet. He couldn't tell the story with words. He had only his eyes; and his camera, of course.

He took the extinguished reefer from Lewis's fingers and re-ignited it, pulling the pungent smoke deep into his lungs. It was powerful ganja, and he'd already had more than usual. But he was feeling greedy tonigh

'Are you thinking about the fox?' Lewis asked him.

Will turned his blurred gaze in Lewis's direction. 'I'm thinking about the rest of my life,' he replied.

In his own mythology of himself, the journey that would take him out into the wildernesses of the world, to the places where species were perishing for the simple crime of living where they felt the need to live, began that night on Lewis's porch, with the reefer, the raccoon and the story of Lord Fox. This was a simplification of course. He'd been bored with chronicling the Castro for a while, and was ready for a change long before that night. As for the direction that desire might point in, it did not come clear in the space of a conversation. But over the next few weeks, his idling thoughts returned to this exchange several times, and he started to turn his camera away from the throngs of the Castro, towards the animal life that coexisted with people in the city. His first experiments were unambitious; late juvenilia, at best. He photographed the sea lions that congregated on Pier 39, the squirrels in Dolores Park and the next door neighbour's dog, who regularly stopped the traffic by squatting to take a dump in the middle of Sanchez Street. But the journey that would in time take him very far from the Castro, and from squirrels, seals and defecating dogs, had begun.

He had dedicated Transgressions, his first published collection, to Lord Fox. It was the least he could do.

CHAPTER IV

i

Arianna came to visit, unannounced, the morning after he got back nto the city. Brought a pound of French Roast from the Castro Cheesery and zuccotto and St Honore's cake from Peverelli's in North Beach, where she'd now moved in with Glenn. They hugged and kissed in the hallway, both a little teary-eyed at the reunion.

'Lord, I've missed you,' Will told her, his hands cupping her face. 'And you look so fine.'

'I dyed my hair. No more grey. I will have this hair colour at a hundred and one. Now what about you?'

'I'm better every day,' Will said, heading through to the kitchen to brew some coffee. 'I still creak a bit when I get up in the morning, and the scars itch like buggery after I've had a shower, but otherwise I'm back in working order.'

'I had my doubts. So did Bernie.'

'You thought I might just slip away quietly?'

'It crossed my mind. You looked very peaceful. I asked Bernie if you were dreaming. He said he didn't know.'

'It wasn't like dreaming, it was like going back in time. Being a boy again.'

'Was that fun?'

He shook his head. 'I'm very happy to be back.'

'You've got a great place to come back to,' she said, wandering to the kitchen door and surveying the hallway. She'd always loved the house; more than Will, in truth. The size of the place, along with the intricacy of the layout (not to mention the excesses its stylishly underfurnished rooms had hosted) lent it a certain authority, she thought. Most of the houses in the neighbourhood had seen their share of priapics, of course, but it wasn't just high times that haunted the boards here. It was a host of other things: Will's rages when he couldn't make the connections, and his howls of revelation when he did; the din of excited conversation around maps which had upon them an exhilarating paucity of roads; evenings of debate on the devolution of certainty and drunken ruminations on fate and death and love. There were finer houses in the city, to be sure; but none, she'd be willing to bet, more marinated in midnight profundities than this.

'I feel like a burglar,' Will said, pouring coffee for them both. 'Like I broke into somebody's apartment and I'm living their life for them.'

'You'll get back into the groove after a few days,' Adrianna said, taking her coffee and wandering through to the large file-room where Will always laid out his pictures. The length of one wall was a noticeboard, on which over the years he'd pinned up exposure or printing errors that had caught his eye; pictures too dark or burned out to be useful, but which he nevertheless found intriguing. His consumptives, he called these unhealthy pictures, and had more than once observed, usually in his cups, that this was what he saw when he imagined how the world would end. Blurred or indecipherable forms in a grainy gloom, all purpose and particularity gone.

She perused them idly while she sipped her coffee. Many of the photographs had been up on the wall for years, their unfixed images decaying further in the light.

'Are you ever going to do anything with these?' she said.

'Like burn them, you mean?' he said, coming to stand beside her.

'No, like publishing them.'

'They're fuck-ups, Adie.'

'That'd be the point.'

'A deconstructionist wildlife book?'

'I think it'd attract a lot of attention.'

'Fuck the attention,' Will said. 'I've had all the attention I ever want. I've said Look what I did, Daddy to the whole wide world and my ego is now officially at peace.' He went to the board and started to pull the pictures down, the pins flying.

'Hey, be careful, you'll tear them!'

'So?' he said, chucking the pictures down. `You know what? This feels good!' The floor was rapidly littered with photographs. 'That's more like it,' he said, stepping back to admire the now empty wall.

'Can I have one for a souvenir?'

`One.'

She wandered amongst the scattered pictures, looking for one that caught her fancy. Stooping, she picked up an old and much-stained photograph.

'What did you choose?' he said. 'Show me.'

She turned it to him. It resembled a nineteenth-century spiritualist picture; those pale blurs of ectoplasm in which believers had detected the forms of the dead. Will named its origins instantly.

'Begemder Province, Ethiopia. It's a walia ibex.'

Adrianna flipped the photograph over to look at it again.

'How the hell do you know that?'

Will smiled. 'I never forget a face,' he said.

ii

The following day he went to visit Patrick, in his apartment up at the top of Castro. Though the pair had lived together on Sanchez Street for almost four of their six years together, Patrick had never given up the apartment, nor had Will ever pressured him to do so. The house, in its spare, functional way, was an expression of Will's undecorative nature. The apartment, by contrast, was so much a part of who Patrick was warm, exuberant, enveloping - that to have given it up would have been tantamount to losing a limb. There at the top of the hill he had spent most of the money he earned in the city below (where he had been until recently an investment banker) creating a retreat from the city, where he and a few chosen lotus-eaters could watch the fog come and go. He was a big, broad handsome man, his Greek heritage as evident in his features as the Irish: heavy-lidded and laden eyes, a thug of a nose, a generous mouth beneath a fat black moustache. In a suit, he looked like somebody's bodyguard; in drag at Mardi Gras, like a fundamentalist's nightmare; in leather, sublime.

Today, when Rafael (who had apparently recanted and come home) escorted Will into the living-room he found Patrick sitting at the window dressed in a baggy T-shirt and draw-string linen pants. He looked well. His hair was cropped to a greying crew-cut, and he wasn't as beefy as he'd been, but his embrace was as powerful as ever.