One night in Hollywood he met a boy. It was at an art gallery where they showed films on Thursday nights. That particular night, the film was Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon, an evocation of trance states and shifting identities — the realm of The Sephiroth, where everyday objects became talismans and an ordinary living room took on the disquieting normalcy of a nightmare.
When he left the foyer, after the film was over, he saw the boy outside, standing in profile with one foot against the wall. He was smoking a cigarette in a convoluted way, examining it like a specimen between his thumb and the tip of his middle finger. In the darkness, he appeared almost as thin as Kenneth, almost as frail, with short, dark bangs. With a slow-blooming swell of unease, Kenneth somehow knew, by the way the stranger wouldn’t look at him, that he was in fact waiting for him to approach.
“The mirrored sunglasses,” the boy said.
Kenneth turned to him suspiciously. Then he remembered: the moment when a pair of mirrored sunglasses, more like goggles, appeared on Maya Deren’s face, just as she raised a long knife that would finally be the instrument of her death.
The boy looked at him for the first time then, his eyes hazy, abstracted. He was older than Kenneth had thought, maybe twenty-five. Up close, he had a faintly unpleasant shading of facial hair in little patches below his ears and on his chin.
“When she stands up with those glasses on,” he said. “And then you see her in that field. The bright sunlight. The way she crouches with the knife.” He shook his head solemnly, then raised his shoulders and pretended to shiver.
He said his name was Francis, Francis Coogan. He was a film student at UCLA. He and his fellow students helped the armed services make training films, which was how the film school stayed afloat.
He had smoked his cigarette down to the nub, so that he’d almost burned his thumb, and now he stubbed it out on the pavement with his shoe. “You drink coffee, don’t you?” he said. “Why don’t we go get some coffee?”
Kenneth had only partly emerged from the film’s trance. The boy before him was still half-real, half-apparition. He followed him to the diner across the street, a brightly lit place with a glass display case full of cigars and chewing gum and a poster for war bonds taped to the aluminum hood above the griddle. There was hardly anyone else there: a couple in a far booth, two men eating separately at the bar, where plates of doughnuts and pie sat under greasy bell jars. By now, Kenneth felt oddly large, as if he were somehow emanating from beyond the framework of his body. Coogan regarded him with a kind of patient fraternalism, as if he already knew everything he would say. He wore an ill-fitting dark suit and a blue shirt with no tie. His knowingness accentuated the sense of their similarity. Kenneth knew perfectly well that no one was looking at them, but still he felt their eyes. It was as if his own wrongness had been redoubled by Coogan’s, as if they were sitting there in that booth holding hands.
“You’re so solemn,” Coogan said. “How old are you?”
Kenneth let out a penurious sniff of laughter, his head bowed. “A hundred and five. Eighteen. What difference does it make?”
He looked at Coogan: his boyish dark bangs, his wrinkled bohemian clothes. He was hardly sexual at all, which made his interest in Kenneth a glaring, confusing thing.
“I have to tell you something,” Coogan said. He leaned closer over the table, making a show of conspiracy. “I noticed you a few weeks ago,” he said. “It was at the Cocteau film, I think. That was where I saw you. And so tonight I thought I’d wait around for you, find out who you were, but before I did that, I went into the toilet and smoked a number. Do you know what that is?”
Kenneth looked away, holding his coffee cup between his hands. “Yes,” he said. “I know what that is.”
Coogan smiled, then rolled his eyes up and to the side. “You’re so serious,” he said. “Don’t you know by now that nothing ever happens to people who are so serious?”
He found himself trying to imagine Coogan’s father — Irish and rough, a broad man in an undershirt — trying to find some vestige of that image in Coogan’s own boyish face.
They went to an alleyway behind the diner. Coogan reached his long fingers into the side pocket of his jacket and brought out a thin, wrinkled cigarette, tapered at both ends. The rich smoke made Kenneth cough. He looked up into the lit window at the rear of the diner’s kitchen, a yellow oblong smudged with grease. Then he closed his eyes and hacked again until Coogan put his arm around him and then with his other hand gripped his shoulder blade. Then he put his lips to Kenneth’s ear and reached his hand down the back of his jeans.
He saw a flash of pictures from the film: Maya Deren’s sandaled foot tramping on grass, then sand, then concrete, then the carpet on the living room floor. Everything was happening so suddenly that he could only react and try to comply. They were standing near a pair of garbage cans, and then Coogan was down on his knees, unbuttoning Kenneth’s fly. It was oddly shaming until it became something else. He looked down at Coogan’s hair and experimentally touched it. He felt vividly for the first time that they were both boys. It sent a wave of stiffness up his spine, a barely perceptible tingling around the heft of his scrotum. He closed his eyes, feeling the atmosphere on his skin — the cool air, the wedge of sky above the alleyway, the resonant hum of distant cicadas, Coogan’s mouth almost indiscernible around him. Then he began to swell and dissolve, merging into Coogan’s warmth, until his mind could register only the light on his skin, the expanding air, the sweet reek of the garbage rising from the cans. He swallowed and breathed and stretched his fingers out beside his waist. Then he came into Coogan’s mouth.
“I bet you always thought about that,” said Coogan. He was looking up at Kenneth, grinning as he wiped his lips with the back of his wrist. “I used to always think about it too, when I was serious.”
A boy is sleeping on the living room couch, troubled by dreams, surrounded by photographs of sailors. When he wakes, he steps through a white door on the wall beside the fireplace. The door is marked MEN. On the other side he finds a highway blurred in darkness, the cars’ distant headlights like smears from a grease pencil. Now he is in a kind of saloon, except that it is obviously only a paper backdrop. A sailor appears, takes off his shirt, flexes his muscles in a showy array of poses. The boy knows what to do, or knows the conventions of the game. He takes out a cigarette and asks for a light. The first onset of violence is mostly comical, vaudevillian: it happens as a kind of slow-motion punch that sends the boy falling lamely to the ground, as if both he and the sailor are acting. But then in the darkness and fog, a group of other sailors emerge, a few of them tall and menacing, most of them scrappy and small, carrying chains and hammers and pounding their fists. Their faces gloat and then grimace with the effort of what ensues, knocking the boy to the ground, flat on his back where they can prod him like a dying bird. Someone jabs his thumbs into the boy’s nostrils and they burst forth with blood. He is screaming now; he mouths words, but there is no sound. He screams harder when they tear off his shirt, his chin and neck spattered with blood. Someone probes his nipple with the point of a knife. Before long, they have torn through the skin, their fingers stripping away at the gleaming viscera, until they find the boy’s heart in a tangle of meat. It is a machine, a light meter with an oscillating dial. Somewhere far away, against the gray sky, an abstract shape looms like a pair of plaster dunes or a polished white stone. It begins to quiver slightly as a thin flow of milk bathes it from above. It reveals itself to be the boy’s chin. The milk covers the ridges of his lips and slowly spreads over his cheeks and his eyes and finally drips like paint over his bloody chest until it is covered in white. He finds himself alone on the floor of a tiled bathroom, completely naked, lying on his side near a row of urinals. His groin emits shards of light. He has a sailor’s cap on his head; his body is intact and clean. The door opens, and then another sailor, this one blandly handsome, lifts him in his arms. They form a kind of pietà in the humid darkness by the highway, the sailor distantly smiling, his face like a face from a recruitment poster. They lie together on a bed in a living room, bodies half-covered by white sheets. Above the fireplace is a faux Renaissance painting of a cherub on a bed of clouds: the boy Lucifer, extending his hand in a blaze of light. The sailor stands above the bed with a firecracker jutting out from his fly. He strikes a match and the long tube explodes in a shower of sparks. It causes the boy to writhe, bare-chested, in the living room, with a tinseled Christmas tree on his head. Its pronged branches rise from his skull like metastatic silver antlers. Some combination of boy and Gorgon, he dances out a frenzy that is equal parts Pleasure and pain. It is in this state of rapture that he aims the point of the tree at the fireplace, beneath the portrait of the cherub, where the photographs of sailors burn in the flames.