Exit Wound by Michael Marano Read Free Book Online Page A

clear the art books that have offended him as I would dirty dishes . . . the collections of images done by mediocrities whose work has been lauded as masterpieces over the ages . . . images my lover salvages, then unfetters with his vision and Will. Fools would call my lover’s Work “pastiche”—the taking of images into himself, so he can reuse them his own way; I rightly call it “redemption.”
    It is my art to serve him and his Art.
    As he showers the powder and flecks of himself from his hair, I clean his brushes and his gun. I then go to work . . . and so ensure him the solitude that gives the world such Beauty, even though the world is not yet ready to see it.
    He met me on his porch.
    The porch was
his
, though others eddied there as they fumbled with keys to mailboxes and to the converted house’s front door of moulded wood and fine leaded glass.
    He parted my loneliness and asked, “Do you wish to be sired?”
    His first words to me, swimming stars in my awareness, burning through years of smothered want. I’d made coming to Berkeley my pilgrimage to find myself . . . that my
self
could find me seemed too impossible to hope for.
    Desire for him rewrote me. His question pushed all I’d been before coming to Berkeley into dream. My history, my life, became soft-edged and distanced-fogged. I was afraid.
    A patch of sunlight had drawn me to his porch—I’d found it an attractive place to read of those dark angels for whom the sun is destructive. The light of this moment scattered the ash of what I’d been as would wind. I held up the book, invoking a barrier of the mundane (despite the profound truths the book itself held), so he and I could chat as if we’d met in a café, speaking in hushed, awed tones of the passions within the book. Muddy flirtation, to candle-dim the incendiary terror of that moment, to hold on to the dust-cool world in which I’d lived, because leaving it seemed too frightening.
    “We won’t talk about the book,” he said, blocking my parry, sitting next to me. “And we won’t talk about the movie.
Do you wish to be sired?
Do you wish to take the Gift of my blood . . .”
    ‘. . .
into
your blood?’ would have been a more complete asking of his question. More complete, yet less True. The Beauty of the thought lay in
my
completing it . . . and thus allowing my mind to touch his as our bodies would touch while he sired me.
    I drew a breath to speak my Completion when the rough tread of one of his neighbours intruded. The thud of work boots approached the door of moulded wood behind us. I glanced over my shoulder. A brutish head was framed in the leaded glass.
    I dropped my worn paperback shield as the door scraped open and I muttered, “I should go.” I walked away as the oafish neighbour clodded onto the porch. He who would become my lover smiled as I fled to a familiar landscape of want.
    “You know where to find me,” he said. As I backed away, his neighbour gave him the quizzical look the ignorant so often throw at artists.
    I waded into Berkeley, my Promised Land whose Promise I’d forsaken. I let Berkeley huddle me as a vixen would her cub. Berkeley’s hills and her trees were diamond-sharp in my sight, now that my past had become so dream-diluted. The foundations of my existence seemed no stronger than the floss of long-dead spiders.
    Berkeley carried me till evening, when I’d next meet
him
in a way that could not be called Fate, as “Fate” implies a thing from which one can charade an escape. I found myself at a reception honouring an artist whose work honoured his own caricature. I understand that, now. I’d then been impressed by all art, no matter how facile.
    I wasn’t “drawn” to that small gallery. I felt as if I’d refracted there, an illusion suddenly visible to my own perceptions.
    Yet once in the gallery, I
was
drawn to a group of beautiful men who stood about, talking. I was drawn by their looks, the musk of their bodies and the