Merciless Gods by Christos Tsiolkas

  Dick Cheese Saunders slapped my hand away from his cock. ‘Not yet.’ I didn’t know if he was talking to me or to himself.

  The red-haired kid stumbled away, crouched over, holding his stomach. He was wiping the cum off his face, making a face at the foulness of the taste. The sound guy gave him a bottle of water. He sat in the corner across from me and I could see he was crying again. But I didn’t care about him.

  It was Mickey’s turn. He was on all fours under the intense, blazing lights. I didn’t want to look. I snatched a glance. There was a steely, determined look on his face and his jaw was jutting out. He looked over at me and I turned away and looked down at the floorboards.

  ‘Have you got a condom on?’

  I turned back to look. Mickey was standing up. ‘I won’t do it if this cunt won’t put on a rubber.’

  Dick Cheese Saunders stepped forward. ‘No condoms.’

  ‘Then I’m not doing it.’

  Saunders seemed bigger than I had ever known him. I thought he might wallop Mickey, but instead he just nodded his head. ‘Alright, kid, that’s fair.’

  The guy who was going to fuck Mickey shrugged and held out his hand. Everyone searched in their pockets for a rubber and the sound guy eventually found one. The guy with the moustache started putting it on but it only covered half of his freaky monster dick.

  Mickey was back on all fours and I didn’t want to look. I crouched and looked up at the ceiling. I noticed that on one of the beams a bird had built a nest. But there was nothing in it now. I could hear grunts, the older guy talking dirty like they do in pornos, the on-again, off-again, on-again of the cameras starting and stopping. But Mickey was making no sound.

  Saunders had me on my feet again, jerking him off. It seemed to go on forever, the heat and the light, the grunting, the spinning and buzzing and humming of the cameras, the fucking, my hand going up and down, up and down Dick Cheese Saunders’ pongy little dick. The bastard wouldn’t come. I wanted it to be over. A sparrow. I decided it had been a sparrow’s nest.

  Dick Cheese Saunders suddenly grabbed my jaw and jerked my head around so I had to look at the room. ‘Do you like seeing your mate getting it up the arse?’

  Mickey was no longer on his hands and knees but on his back. The guy was holding his legs up, fucking him fast, pulling out then thrusting back in, which was what hurt the most when mugs fucked me. But Mickey was still not making a sound, just looking up at the two cameras. From time to time he’d wince, but that was all.

  The older guy suddenly stopped. He stood up, winking down at Mickey, and pulled the condom off his dick. ‘I’m ready.’

  ‘Sure, very good, sure.’ The director motioned for Mickey to get on his knees. The cameras were right up on his face. Saunders’ hand was on the back of my neck now, his grip tight. I had to keep watching. The guy with the moustache was jerking himself off, and even with the cameraman and the director filming around them I had a clear view of Mickey’s face. He was waiting, his mouth closed, his eyes screwed shut, exactly how he had taught me, so that the semen won’t get in your eyes and through your eyes into your blood so you don’t get the disease. The guy grabbed hold of Mickey’s hair and was pulling Mickey’s face closer to his cock all the time, shouting stufflike I’m going to come all over your face, fag, and Dick Cheese Saunders was breathing faster now, and under his breath he was going do it, do it, do it, and I couldn’t bear to look so I pulled away from his grasp and he was so focused on what was happening that he let me, though I was still jerking his cock. I looked out through a crack of the boarded-up window, and I saw a flash of blue and white, sky and cloud, and then the guy finally blew and he started howling, exactly like one of the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park. Dick Cheese Saunders shuddered beside me and his cum spilt all over my hand and when I shook it off, it fell on the floorboards in front of us.

  I looked over at Mickey, I looked over to see he was alright. His eyes were still shut tight; screwed so tight that deep creases had appeared on his brow. Sprog was splashed across his cheeks and the bridge of his nose, and it was dripping down his chin. The guy with the moustache was wiping his cock with some tissues. He passed the box to Mickey, who wiped his eyelids; only then did he finally open his eyes. He was looking straight at me and his eyes were shimmering. The sadness—no, the misery—of the world was looking at me. But then his mouth twitched towards a small smile and I saw Our Lord’s mercy.

  I stood up, stepping over the cables and past the men. As I walked over, I ripped off the bottom of my T-shirt, and when I reached Mickey, I wiped clean his face and his neck. I kissed his mouth. As I did that I could see Jesus again in his eyes.

  But as soon as I’d finished wiping away the spoof, Jesus had gone and it was just a sandy-haired black-eyed laughing boy staring back at me. ‘Don’t you dare kiss me again, ya crazy poofta.’

  We were laughing like little kids at Luna Park, going down down down, fast fast fast on the Big Dipper. And just as we stopped laughing the red-haired kid stood up and was pointing at his arse. ‘I’m fucking bleeding,’ he screamed, and that just started us up again. We were crying from the laughing.

  For my fifteenth birthday, Mickey got me a ticket for the Big Day Out. We took acid, it was my first time, and when it started, first with the tingling and then with the rush of colour and sound and smell and movement, I knew that this was how heaven will be. Angie and Mickey walked through the crowd, hand in hand, and I bumped into friends and even glimpsed one of my mugs in the crowd. Mickey slipped me an E as the sun was going down, and I watched Courtney Love bare her tits to the crowd. Afterwards I wandered to the techno tent and bumped into Angie and Mickey. The DJs were wicked and I was peaking and the crowd was going off and the music was in my body and in my soul and I was jumping around like a madman and so was Angie and so was Mickey and so was the whole world. Everyone was shining and screaming and dancing and I climbed onto Mickey’s shoulders and I was looking straight into the light and into the night, and the music was the sound of the angels and the bass beat was the sound of heaven and I raised my hands towards the stage and one of the DJs pointed at me I swear electricity shot from his fingers towards me and I was happier than I had ever been. I was happier than I would ever be.

  That same night, on the train going back to town, Mickey was sitting in the middle of the seat, holding Angie, and I was next to him, resting my head on his shoulder. Then Mickey grabbed me, all of a sudden, and gave me a long kiss, his tongue in my mouth and his hands on my chest. His eyes were looking into mine. He stopped and Angie was laughing and the young kids on the seat opposite, straight kids, civilians, were looking away embarrassed. Then Mickey sat back with one arm around me and the other around Angie. He was smiling a huge motherfucking shit-eating grin.

  I had fallen asleep by the time the train got to Central. Later, Angie told me that Mickey had carried me all the way home.

  Porn 3

  GHASSAN HAD NEVER TOUCHED A EUROPEAN before, not even to shake hands with. He had never smelt one up close. He was finally to do so. It was fated to be this pale young man beckoning him to come closer. As he approached, the man’s features became more distinct, emerging slowly from the hellish darkness. The only light came from the video screen behind them and a solitary red globe above them in the corridor. The blood-hued flickering illumination distorted everything, so that the man’s fair hair appeared orange and there were deep shadows across the bottom half of his face. Still, Ghassan could espy the white scar on the left side of his top lip, that there was stubble on his chin. The man reached out and tugged at the front of Ghassan’s shirt, bringing him closer so that their lips were almost touching. Ghassan had to resist sniffing at him: he wanted to search the man’s body with his nose, as if they were dogs, not men; he wanted to determine the source of the man’s distasteful odour. He pulled away from the European, who then offered him an anxious shy smile. He reached for Ghassan’s crotch and had his hand swiped away. Ghassan breathed in.

  The man smelt
of offal, of guts and stomach and lungs. He did not smell of skin. He smelt of the foul secrets inside the body.

  Aware that something had changed, the man tilted his head to one side, his eyes now alert and suspicious. The two men stared at each other, as if daring each other to make the first move, to speak, to reignite or disavow their earlier intimacy. This is a dance, thought Ghassan to himself with some disappointment, not so different from the one we dance with whores. The man suddenly coughed, an abrupt sharp sound, but it acted as a concession. The man had coughed, and then he had raised his arm to scratch his head, the gesture reminding Ghassan of something a little boy would do, an act that seemed to encompass shyness and diffidence and assertiveness all at once. It was a sweet, simple movement. As the man had raised his arm, Ghassan had glimpsed swirls of fine wet hair under the sleeve of the man’s shirt; as well, his nose had detected the tang of citrus. The man’s deodorant banished thoughts of decomposition, visions of flesh and meat. As did the sight of the dark hair against the man’s pallid skin. Ghassan’s cock pumped with blood; he placed his hand on the man’s shoulder and drew him close. This was desire.

  He had first noticed this European in the orientation week at the university; he always sat two rows in front of Ghassan, and he was clearly equally bored by the lecturer. They all were. The professor for Chemical Engineering Applied Methods was one of those men who seemed never to have been touched by youth, one of those insipid sexless European men who spoke in a hushed monotone that squeezed any passion or interest from the words. Granted, there was little musicality or emotion to be gleaned from the dry calculus and rules of applied engineering, but the man’s dullness caused spontaneous yawning, restlessness and fidgeting among the students within the first five minutes of the lecture. Ghassan dutifully scribbled down the notations and equations the lecturer wrote on the whiteboard, but the words the man spoke were nonsensical. Ghassan trusted his own intelligence, he knew that his command of the English language was adequate—no, better than adequate, he had a true aptitude for languages—but the man behind the lectern might as well have been speaking an obscure dialect of some ancient lost civilisation. It was as if the tedium of his delivery drained the words of their meaning. Ghassan found he did not understand a word of what was being said.

  The only thing that saved him from being bored senseless over the interminable creep of the hour was the freedom he had to examine his fellow students. The margins of Ghassan’s notebook were filled with quick sketches of the faces and bodies of the young women and men who sat around him in the lecture theatre. For the most part, the sketches were of the young blonde girls with their shamelessly exposed breasts. Tits filled the margins of his notes. His friends would lean over to look at his sketches and then giggled conspiratorially. They’d take turns guessing which girl he had sketched. They’d surreptitiously point to a young woman and ask in Urdu, Is it that slut there? Ghassan would smile and never confirm or deny their queries.

  For him, sketching those interchangeable European women was a smokescreen for his real purpose. If any of his friends had taken the time to really study his drawings, if they had properly paid attention to his work over the year, they would have noticed that two portraits kept reappearing. They would have also noticed that these portraits were never mere caricatures, unlike Ghassan’s sketches of the European women, which were always crude and often insulting, their expressions either those of imbeciles or showing a trace of animal cunning. But it was different with the two recurring portraits of the men. The first portrait was that of the elegant, lean and dignified Omar. Ghassan’s love for his best friend was pure, a love beyond the degrading treacheries of lust and desire. Omar was untouchable, incorruptible. In every sketch Ghassan drew of him, he was unsmiling and straight-backed. He floated in the white margins of Ghassan’s notebook, separate from the vulgar sketches around him. The other recurring portrait was that of the young European man with the broad sloping shoulders who always took that seat two rows in front of Ghassan and his friends. Whenever Ghassan sketched this portrait, he would drop his free hand to his crotch. He did not dare do more than feel the bulk of his cock through the cheap fabric of his trousers. His love for Omar was pure. The European he wanted to fuck.

  And now it was happening. The man was on his stomach, his jeans around his ankles, naked and vulnerable. Ghassan was shocked by the amount of hair that covered the man’s plump arse. It was unexpected. Ghassan realised at that moment that in his masturbatory imaginings of Europeans he had really always dreamt of youth, of boys between childhood and manhood. These were the degenerate fantasies that fed his lust. He had assumed that a European man would be hairless, smooth, that to touch white skin would always mean touching feminine skin. As with the sexless lecturer who had bored him all year, he had never thought of virility being something that European men could possess.

  He could hear the man’s slow heavy breathing. His face, now hidden from Ghassan’s view, pressed against the filthy black vinyl of the couch, was most likely tensed, grimacing, anticipating Ghassan’s first thrust. The man had tried to kiss him but Ghassan had quickly turned him over. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to kiss him—in fact, there was no act between men that Ghassan preferred to kissing. Sometimes after their final evening prayers, Omar would hold Ghassan, they would stroke each other’s hair, and they would kiss, as Omar specified, as brothers, as friends, as comrades. Skin never touched skin. Omar’s purity was such that his passions were never inflamed.

  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.