Superior

By Josh Ryan

THIS IS A STORY FOR ADULTS AND ABOUT ADULTS.

Part 1

"You're too old for this," he said, sticking the last of my

books into the cardboard box. "You're too old to run away from

home."

"I'm 35," I said. "I can afford to run away. And be

careful with that red one. It's hard to find anything good about

Burne-Jones."

"Uh, sorry," he said, surreptitiously straightening one

corner of my book. "Knights in sexy armor, eh? `Le Chant

d'Amour.' Knight, castle, angel . . . How Victorian can you get?"

"I have my moments. I guess I've got a weakness for young

guys on a quest."

"Sure. Soldiers. UPS boys. Impoverished artists like

yourself. Basically, Daniel, you're a narcissist."

"Sarcasm won't work. I've got plenty of money. That's why

I can leave. And there'll be more waiting for me when I get back."

"I dunno. Haven't you ever heard that expression, `you

can't go home again'?"

"You've used that word twice now. `Home.' What does it

mean, anyway? Maybe I don't want to go `home.' Maybe I don't want

a `home.' Anyway, New York isn't `home' to me."

"You grew up on Long Island."

"That's not `New York.' And it wasn't `home,' either. Not

even before my parents died. I've never been at `home.'"

"`Daniel Niskanen, Alienated Artist.' Or is it, `Painter

Flees Depravity of Gotham?' In any event, `Portrait of the Artist

Becoming a Stereotype.'"

"Funny, Tom. But not funny enough. I don't care if I'm a

stereotype. I'm outta here."

"I always thought you liked your loft, at least. It took

you long enough to find it. Why don't you just sublease it for a

few months? No need to burn your bridges."

"You don't like stereotypes, but you don't mind cliches.

Look, I already told you. I don't know when I'm coming back. And I

don't want to know. Knowledge equals responsibility, and I want NO

responsibilities. None. Not now. Not ever."

Tommy pushed down the flaps of the box and looked around for

the tape. "But really, what about your work, man? That last show

went over so well . . . "

"Sure it did. Maggie Barton's a fantastic publicist. And

Marcusson's the best gallery in the Village. And Clive Steiner gave

me a great review in the `Times.' You'll never know what I had to

do to get that creepy old queen to come through for me."

"I can imagine."

"You can't. Anyhow, it worked. Which means that from now

on, I can do what I want. I can go away. Meanwhile, Noel Marcusson

can sell my stuff, and the little ladies of both sexes who read the

Arts and Leisure Section can be just as `inspired' by my `insights

into the ambiguities of the human condition' as they would have been

if I'd stayed in town. If you remember, that's what Clive said

about my paintings."

"Maybe he was right. I know it sounds silly, when you put

it the way he did, but I do think your paintings are better than

anybody else's."

"Thanks, Tommy. That's bad news for the rest of them. Do

you really think that I'm making `subversive insinuations about the

superficiality of "freedom"'? Because that's what I'm doing,

according to that dyke from the `Village Voice.' She loved the s

and m stuff in the`Triple Cross' pictures. My own opinion is: it

sells, and the gallery knows where to deposit the cash."

He looked at me like he was about to cry. Good old Tom. He

took the art world seriously.

"Maybe if I get off by myself," I suggested, "I'll do some

art that's just for me. And maybe it'll be good for a change."

"I thought the `Triple Cross' sequence was something you

were a little more . . ."

"Engaged with? Sure. I like s and m. What red-blooded

faggot doesn't? But that's all it was. Just cocks and chains and

humiliation. It sells, and that's fine with me. I'd buy some

myself, if I didn't know so much about how it was made."

Big sigh from Tom. "I just think . . . right now, you're

the golden boy. But you know how long these things last. You've

gotta keep cultivating your contacts. You've gotta keep showing up

at the right parties. You've gotta be available for interviews.

You've gotta . . . "

"Kiss their asses."

Long pause.

"Yeah, I guess so."

"Sorry, man. Speaking of humiliation, I'm tired of being a

slave on the ol plantation. A slave to people I don't respect, to

people I wouldn't even want to paint pictures of, for God's sake.

I've sweated my balls off for people like that. I've already . . .

worn their chains, if you want to get dramatic about it. You may

not think so, but I have. It hasn't been easy--despite the fact,

which I know you're about to mention--that I came from . . . "

"A wealthy family."

"Well-off." It was a sore point between us. Tom always

thought that he'd have been a full partner in his agency by now, if

he'd only had the right background. "Money isn't everything," I

added.

I almost said, there's such a thing as talent. But that

would have been cruel. Anyway, it was after midnight, and I was

running out of steam. "You've gotta work like an animal in this

town," I remarked. "You've gotta work like an ox on a chain. Like

an ox with a fuckin ring in its nose. I won't do it anymore. As

someone famous said, `I will not serve.'"

Another long pause. "OK, Danny," he said. "I'll miss you.

I just hope you'll always have enough money to buy those $500

shirts."

"Thanks, man." He knew I had a weakness for clothes.

"So what's your itinerary?"

"Itinerary? I haven't got one. Guess I'll go to the

midwest."

"Huh? I thought you'd be going out to the Coast."

"California? I've been there already. No thanks. I'd like

to see something real for a change. Something realer than a bar on

Castro Street, anyhow. And that leaves a lot of territory to be

explored."

"So you're going to . . . WHERE are you going?"

"Well, I know I'm going to Ohio."

It had been a long time since I'd really surprised anyone.

I guess if you do enough things that no one expects you to do, after

a while they just expect you to do unexpected things. I was a

typical eccentric artist, so now I was paying the price. From here

on out, they expected me to be eccentric. It was only the normal

that was weird.

"Ohio!"

"Sure. Why not? The Akron museum has Robert Brackman's

best paintings. And the Toledo museum . . ."

"I see. You want to see the treasures of art history."

"Not really. If that was the point, I'd go back to Paris.

I'm not sure what I'm after. That's the good thing, isn't it?

Total unpredictability."

"What are you running away from, Danny?"

"Nothing. I'm not running away from anything. Anything

except the dullness of what's supposed to be exciting. And I'm not

running TO anything, either. I'm sick of that. Run to a show. Run

to a buck. Run to a guy. Call it a midlife crisis, if you want,

but I'm going to run after something different. Maybe something

that has some value. I don't know . . . More value than a show at

Isaacs, Marcusson, anyway."

I stopped. Something occurred to me. "You know what a

blank canvas looks like, Tommy? That's how everything looks to me

now. You can say that's sad, because there's no meaning to a piece

of white cloth. You can say that's a challenge, because you can put

your own marks on it--big black marks, maybe. Or you can say that's

freedom, and leave it at that. And I guess that's what I'm doing.

Calling it freedom."

"This wouldn't be happening if you and Mark hadn't broken

up."

"`Mark'? Who is `Mark'?"

"That man you were hopelessly in love with, a brief three

months ago. The little gym guy with a passion for the arts. The

latest in your long list of discards."

"Oh, that Mark. I wasn't in love with Mark. I thought I

was. Then I found out I wasn't. Very simple story."

"What did `Mark' think about it?"

"He HAD thought that he finally had the power to give

someone a life sentence to boredom. But he turned out to be wrong.

I escaped."

"It certainly looked like you were in love with him. You

kept running after him."

"Other way around. He had a degree in art history--what

else did he have to do except run after `artists'? Anyway, as far

as love is concerned . . . who can tell? Are you in love with

Richard?"

It was a sadistic thing to say, but he'd goaded me into it.

I knew the answer, though. And I knew I'd get it from him. Tommy

and I had been friends for years.

"Honestly? No, I'm not. You know that. But I'm not going

to leave him, either. I made a commitment, and I'm going to keep

it."

He took another drink. He and Richard were both big

drunks. He saw me looking at him, over his glass. "Whether I'm

drunk or not," he said.

"I guess you mean I'm not keeping my own commitments."

"You never make any commitments. You just flit from one

thing to another. Listen, you may be goodlooking, and you may be

smart, and you may be a great artist, but . . . Listen, I'm tellin

you Dan . . . "

"No, you listen . . . " But of course, nothing I said

would work. He was certain he was right. He was always certain,

certain about everything, committed to certitude. He was drunk, and

it was our last night together, so I let him talk. After all, he'd

helped me pack. But after the drunken apologies and the demand to

let him know if there was anything he could do for me and the final

hug and kiss and the little grope at the door, I was glad to see him

go. When he rubbed his body against your dick, it was like a bag of

old clothes rubbing. So he was one other reason why I was happy I

was leaving town.

I'd taken almost everything out of the loft except a

sleeping bag that was old enough to leave behind, and I crawled

inside it and fell asleep. It didn't take me long to get a dream.

It was a foggy night, and I was walking home from Aces with

my gym bag in my hand. There were old stores and warehouses on both

sides of the narrow street, the way it was in my neighborhood. But

now the masonry looked thicker, the buildings looked older, the age

stains looked a lot blacker than they ever had before. I didn't

really recognize any of the stuff I was looking at. I thought for a

minute that I'd wandered onto a stage set, except that everything I

could see was heavier, not lighter, than the kind of reality I

remembered. Ahead of me, suddenly, a cascade of wet stone came out

of the fog, like a photograph coming out of the developer's bath.

The thing was huge!--an enormous old barn of a building, rising up,

story after story, with steep pointed towers and tall, barred

windows and a pair of iron doors crouching under a massive arch.

Victorian monstrosity, I thought. Faux-medieval.

Theatrical. "Purely external architecture," as Professor Bailey

used to say when he showed slides of buildings like that. But

somehow it looked familiar, much more familiar than the modern boxes

that we were all expected to like, just because they're smart and

modern and user-friendly. The thing up ahead looked almost

personal, somehow, like those boxes never did. It looked like a

place that I'd seen back home . . . .

No, that wasn't it. You'd never see a thing like that on

Long Island. But there was a memory . . . a memory just out of

reach . . .

Then I knew. It was the building I'd put in the upper

right corner of "Triple Cross," Panel 1. The captives were being

led from the ship, up the steep hill toward the towers of the

castle. . . . The soldier with the pretty hair was the first in

line . . . . I'd taken my time with his back, with all those angry

young muscles, twisting themselves against the subservience imposed

by his chains, twisting themselves into a lifetime of obedience to

another man's will . . . Then I'd added the wealthy young

lord . . . scarlet tunic falling in shreds . . . wrists straining

inside the black fetters . . . for the first time in his life, he'd

be learning to serve . . . And the farm boy, 18 years old and ready

for sale, almost happy to escape from his father's squalid shack by

the edge of the swamp . . . After I'd drawn the eight captives, I'd

sketched the castle on the upper right. I could see now that the

castle was the most important character . . . .

Funny how different it was, though, when the sketch was

filled out. When it turned 3D. The walls were heavier, of

course. Thick and heavy . . . gross, like I'd slapped too much

paint on the canvas. But maybe that was right after all. It

wasn't supposed to be in good taste . . . The only thing was . . .

the castle in front of me was far too dull for its prominent place

in the painting. It was a weird sort of fantasy, like most

Victorian buildings . . .and yet . . . the doors looked like they

accepted deliveries, the towers looked like they were actually for

use, the thin barred windows had too regular a march. I should have

varied the design. But dullness . . . dullness . . . Dullness is

not the only slavery . . . Dullness is not the only slavery . . .

Dullness is not the only slavery . . . I thought about that, the way

you think about things in a dream, telling myself to remember it,

like it was some big revelation, although I didn't understand what

it could possibly mean . . .

Suddenly I felt light. Unnaturally light. Where was my

bag? I twisted around . . . there were men on either side of me,

holding me by the arms! Men in gray shirts and black caps . . . men

with gold badges on their chests, with black instruments on their

thighs . . . Cops! They were cops! What had I done? What law had I

broken? I knew then that my wrists were cuffed behind my back.

Hey! Let me out! Let me out! I tried to twist my arms away,

but the steel just cut in deeper and the grip of their hands on my

biceps just got tighter and tighter . . . . I wanted to turn, to

see these guys that had grabbed me, to look them in the face. But

they wouldn't let me turn. They kept me marching in a straight line

down the street, marching toward the building with the pointed

towers. I saw two men in the distance, coming out of a

bar. "Help!" I wanted to yell. "Help! Help!" But before the sound

even left my throat, there were two hands barricading my

mouth. "HELLLLMMMMPPPHHH!" I said. "LLLMMMPPPHHH!" "Shut the FUCK

up, FAGGOT!" the man on my left replied. "If you want to keep your

nuts on, anyway." "UHHHMMMHHHH!" I tried to shout; I couldn't help

it. I wanted to keep my nuts, but he had his hand clamped on them.

Clamped tight. I had never felt a pain like that. Through the wet

stuff in my eyes, I saw one of the guys in the distance looking over

his shoulder, and the other guy pulling him back. They didn't want

to get involved.

There was a flight of stone steps with huge stone railings,

just the way I'd drawn them in "Triple Cross," Panel 2. The boys in

gray pulled me up the steps, up to the iron doors. Before I knew it

they had pushed me inside. I was in a hall with a high ceiling and

institutional green plaster walls, and a stone floor worn into

grooves by the feet of the generations of prisoners who must have

come there before me--terrified anonymous captives, marched in

chains into that hall. They pushed me down the corridor, into the

depths of the building. There was a light at the end; a light, and

a tall, black desk.

"Is this the new slave?" a voice called down from the desk.

"Yes sir!" said the man on my right.

"Kneel!" said the man on my left.

They pushed me down on my knees.

"Collar him!" said the voice from the desk

Two boots landed on my shoulders, one on each side, and my

forehead hit the ground. I was struggling like you struggle inside

a dream, hoping that you'll awaken, knowing that you won't . . . .

Next to my face was a thick black boot, with a terrified face

staring out of it; and I knew that the face was mine. Somebody

grabbed my hair and yanked me up. I felt iron grazing my shoulders,

then a circle of iron closing around my neck . . .There was a wave

of cold, like the cold of outer space. CLANK! The halves of the

circle locked together.

I was collared. I was a slave.

"Stand up, boy!"

There was a chain on the back of my collar, and a fist

holding the chain. The fist yanked me up on my feet. Now the man

at the desk was standing in front of me. He was wearing the same

gray uniform as the other two men, but he was the boss. That was

obvious. They were obeying him. Above the black tie and gray

collar was a long, narrow face. A square chin. Piercing green

eyes. Pecs like a mountain under the shiny gray shirt. A crotch

full of meat.

"Adam!" I said. "This is Dan! Daniel. Daniel Niskanen!

I . . .I'm the artist who invented you!" I was looking at the man

called Adam Black, the top man in "Triple Cross."

A hand smacked me on the head. "Mind your manners, boy!"

My eyes swivelled to the right. "Larry! Larry Lucerno!" I

said. "Don't you know who I am?" Larry was the second man

in "Triple Cross." He was the one that buttfucked the slaveboys

while they stood in the stocks. "I'm your creator! Don't you

recognize me?" I remembered the day when I'd sketched that thick,

muscular neck and those giant thighs . . ..

Another smack on my skull. "Shut your FUCKIN mouth!" The

man on my left--I recognized him, too. He was the slender guy who

herded the slaves off the ship, the one that made the bad boys in

the cages suck his dick, because now they had no choice. . . . I'd

gotten hard when I'd modeled his sleek young cock, the cock that I

now saw pushing up against those smooth gray trousers. . . . "Jason

Steele!" I thought. But I was afraid to say it, afraid that I'd be

made to suck his dick, like all the other slaves I'd drawn . . ..

"Welcome home, slaveboy," said Adam Black.

"B- But," I choked out. "I . . . I CREATED you."

"That's why you can't escape," he said. "Render your

service."

I knew what he meant. I had invented the scene, so I

couldn't object to the words. "Render your service . . ." It was

incredibly stagy, incredibly . . . theatrical. Was I thinking that

way when I used those words as the title to Panel 4? But there was

no appeal. Who would you appeal to--the art critic of "The New

Criterion"? I had to obey. I bent my head, groping for Adam's

zipper, and I yanked it down, pulling it on its track through the

shiny gray, luscious cloth of his uniform . . . Then the dick

unrolled from his pants, like a snake coming out of its lair, and

sprang for my mouth, exactly the way it sprang for David Quarry's

mouth in Panel 5. The thing was as long as a bullwhip and as hard

as a prison bar. It rammed down my throat, jerking and sliding and

bucking and dribbling. "Suck me, suckboy!" Adam Black shouted,

grabbing my hair and pulling my head in and out and back and forth

like a dirty cumrag--in and out, in and out, in and out, while Jason

Steele and Larry Lucerno ripped the last of the clothes off my body

and uncoiled their own dongs . . . .

I opened my eyes. I was alone. Dawn pushed at the window,

hot and dirty--August in New York. It was morning, and my crotch

was sticky with cum.

"Christ!" I muttered. "I thought I was too old for wet

dreams." Obviously, those paintings of mine were much more erotic

than I'd thought. Either that, or I was coming back to life.

Interesting material, I said to myself, poking through the

remains of my dream. . . . The creator, enslaved by his

creation . . . Doctor Frankenstein. . . . Pygmalion. . . . Or

maybe the slow movement of Mahler's First Symphony--the hunter

shadowed by his prey . . .

Stupid! I stood up and wiped the stiff white liquid off my

balls. This is stupid! It's all totally meaningless . . .

But that would be art, I thought, real art--to draw a world

that you'd live in yourself. Of course, the one thing you couldn't

design was the spontaneous parts. It couldn't be real without

them. So there would have to be parts that you couldn't design,

parts that were blank. Or parts that were wrong, parts that

wouldn't obey you. Even parts where you'd made a mistake, and you'd

have to put up with somebody else correcting them. Still . . . It

was worth thinking about. Maybe for the next project . . . after I

got back . . .

I grabbed a shower, took the whiskey glasses and the last

box of books down to U-Store, threw my suitcases and my laptop into

the rental car, gave my key to the landlord, and in half an hour I

was on the other side of the Hudson. I had escaped.

TO BE CONTINUED

Josh Ryan's story "Slave Test" can be found in messages 274-277.

His story "Slave Maker" can be found in messages 467-471 and 485-

488. His story "The Convict" can be found in messages 609, 619, 629-

30, 632-33, 653, 659-60, 674-75, 707-708, 724-26, 763-65. His

novel "Convict Slave" can be found in yahoo group prison-sex

beginning with message 1351 and continuing in messages 1360, 1366,

1374, 1384, 1386, 1420, 1460, 1566, 1667-68, 1838-41, 1973-76, 2156-

60, 2808, 2875, 2866, 2868, 3302-3305, 3371-3376, and 3396-3400.

Superior

By Josh Ryan

THIS IS A STORY FOR ADULTS AND ABOUT ADULTS.

Part 2

The plan was to drive wherever I wanted. No appointments.

No schedules. Just the Rand-McNally Atlas, and whatever signs I saw

beside the road. While it was summer, I'd drive through the north;

then, as the year cooled, I'd dive down to Arizona and New Mexico.

I'd never seen a desert, and I'd never seen a mountain, except from

30,000 feet above it. I wondered if I'd ever actually seen a farm.

Farms existed in what Noel Marcusson called "flyover country," the

country that people like us flew over on our way to "the coast."

But that August, I found plenty of places to visit in flyover

country.

I started with the Civil War. Harper's Ferry. Antietam.

Gettysburg. It's amazing what guys will do when they're told that

they have to do it. . . . See those cannons--it's your job to

take `em away from those other guys. Watch out that they don't kill

you first. . . . You have to wonder whether you're man enough to

take an order like that.

I drove around Pennsylvania till I got tired of going up one

hill and down the other; then I headed west. I stopped for the

night at Wheeling. There was a Motor Inn right on the river, and

that was enough for me. I checked in, broke open the stash of coke

I'd been carrying in the tire well, and settled down by the window

to watch the view. Someplace, reality must have an edge, and if

so, Wheeling was it. Before me was the Ohio River, the old border

between the Slave and the Free. What was it like, I wondered, to

escape across that torrent, go across the water, into another

world? On that day, however, all I saw was decay, decay mirroring

decay on both banks of the river. Old castle-like factories; stone

houses, built for another age . . . Suddenly, I found myself

reaching for my sketchbook. I hadn't done a landscape in years, but

this was the kind of view, sweeping and yet confined, that I know I

could do something with.

When you're sketching a landscape, you start with the

horizon; then you move up or down. I wasn't interested in the sky;

I liked the old buildings poking up into it, like towers on a

prison, and the slope of land that ran away from it, down, down,

down under deserted streets to the darkening river beneath. That

was the picture. But when my eye got to the riverbank, I saw

something that began to interest me more. There on the broken

pavement was a posse of kids, the kind of kids that are out of high

school without being into anything else, dumb young guys with blond

dreds and saggerz and baseball caps turned backwards, running their

skateboards off a tongue of fractured concrete in front of a banged-

up liquor store in fuckin Wheeling, West Virginia. The sun was

almost down; the old gray buildings rose behind them, vacant and

grim.

"Get outta here!" I felt like yelling. "Go someplace!

Escape!" But of course I didn't yell; I just leaned out and looked

at them, locked in their stupid innocence, playing games by the

water like warriors from some ancient tribe--primitive people,

waiting without knowing what they were waiting for: the slave ship

hidden behind the sumac forest, just around the bend; the sailors

that leap from their boats and seize them and sell them someplace

downriver where a wealthy master, a man who is civilized enough to

appreciate their better qualities, will give them the attention they

deserve . . .. Which was pretty much the same kind of attention

that I was giving them now, sitting at the window, capturing their

images in my sketchbook, with my cock reaching up to rub its head

across the book's rough bottom. It made me stiff, just tracing the

lines of those sagging shorts, those slender young necks, that hand

lifting a t-shirt to scratch a rack of hard young abs . . . .

It was then it occurred to me, what went wrong with "Triple

Cross." The "Triple Cross" paintings were a fantasy, set in a

fantasy world. The only "reality" they had was the kind of reality

you get from a porn site. Even the names in the captions were just

pornography names: Adam Black and Larry Lucerno and Jason Steele,

and the slave names, too--David Quarry and so forth. None of it

meant anything; it was all just a comic book, a stage set with stock

figures nailed to the floor, as lifeless as the "ancient" people you

see in some engraving of "The Slave Market at Rome." Victorians in

togas, that was all. Sure, there was "sex," but sex was nothing

unless it involved something real. No wonder I'd been bored with

it. These guys in Wheeling, for God's sake, weren't even having

sex. But you couldn't doubt they were real. They weren't doing

anything they were meant to do. That's why you wanted to capture

them.

And now I saw what my last dream in New York was telling me,

that weird dream where my characters rebelled. They didn't rebel

because I'd made them too real--they rebelled because I hadn't made

them real enough. Even they knew it; that's why they wanted to

punish me. I had to chuckle at that: no matter what I wanted to

think, I had an artistic conscience after all. Who was it who

called poetry "imaginary gardens, with real toads in them"? That's

what I should have made, a world like that. But I didn't. "Triple

Cross" had nothing in it. Once you saw the outsides, you'd seen it

all. It was just what I'd thought it was: a typical serving of s &

m trash. I wasn't Frankenstein, because I hadn't yet created

life. When Adam Black told me to "render service," maybe he was

telling me I needed to finish what I'd started.

So maybe it was good, I thought, that I'd had that dream.

That dream was an inspiration. What if I tried it again, the slave

thing, and made it real? Not just changing the names, but changing

the people, too. Starting with real people, not stereotypes.

Making the settings unmistakably modern. Modern and . . .

ordinary. It's the ordinary, the unexceptional that confines and

humiliates. Nobody is really "enslaved" in the fabulous palace of

some Arab sheikh. The real site of enslavement--the place where you

could really find the power--would be a barracks behind an old

farmhouse, a loading dock in a second-rate shopping mall, a jail in

a backwoods town, an alley in Wheeling, West Virginia. I'd put my

characters in a real story--not just dole out the action one frame

at a time, with sex here and there, whether the action went anyplace

or not. The trick I used in "Triple Cross"--getting the slaves to

rebel, then dominate the masters--that was all it was, a trick.

This time "slavery" would be slavery, and "dominance" would be

dominance, in whatever forms they would really develop. Let the

critics try to figure THAT one out. If they couldn't, what the

hell. Of course, the second series of paintings would show that the

first one was basically a fake. Well, that would be an unusual

event in the art world, for anybody to know that anything was

phony. But that was the purpose of art, or so I'd been told--to

show what was real and what wasn't. Although it was strange--

because all art is . . . well, artificial.

I didn't know what I was doing or where it was going, but

that was the moment when I started sketching "Triple Cross, Series

2." And right under the window, I found the first model that I

wanted to use. It was the kid with the dirty yellow dreds, the kid

with the sweet, blank face who was alternately sucking a fag and

flipping his knife into the "No Skateboarding" sign that some well

meaning official had nailed to the fence. That kid was definitely

slave material. He was the slave whose innocence was perpetual, the

slave who was always available for initiation into some surprising

new experience. . . .

Then there was his buddy, the guy who came waltzing out of

the liquor store with a bulge in his crotch that even the largest

dick couldn't account for. He glanced over his shoulder and

laughed. Then he dug into his shorts and pulled out a stolen Jack

Daniels. They passed the bottle from hand to hand. Now all of them

were looking back at the store and laughing--all except the guy who

stole it. He was grinning and strutting and showing his stuff, but

he never looked back, he never looked directly at the other guys,

and he never really laughed out loud. You could tell that if he got

caught and turned into a slave, he wouldn't act like the other

slaves would. When the manacles closed down, they would be whining

and sniveling and clutching at their baseball caps and wiping the

tears off their cheeks . . . He wouldn't. I didn't know what he'd

do, but he wouldn't do that. I could see from the way he pulled off

his tee and tied it around his waist, swishing his butt side-to-side

while he tied it, that there was more to him than those muscles

rippling across his back. If it hadn't been so improbable, I would

have said he was putting on an act, a campy little skit that mocked

himself . . .

I'll admit it, I put the sketchbook down at that point, and

took care of my own business. When I went back to the window, my

slaveboys had left the riverbank. But I'd put them in my book, so I

knew that I'd see them again.

Next morning, I moved on to Akron, only to find that I'd got

it confused it with Dayton. At that distance from New York,

everything seemed the same, I guess. But it was Dayton that had the

paintings I wanted to see. When I finally got to the museum there,

I found that Brackman's "Life About Me" was a little different from

what I'd expected. It's a picture of the artist surrounded by his

subjects, and it was as beautifully painted as I'd thought from the

reproductions, with a lot of deep, golden flesh and interesting

drapery. The odd thing was that the artist, though surrounded and

enclosed by everything else in the painting, doesn't look like he's

actually in it. He just looks like an artist, standing complacently

at one side with his artist's tools, while "Life" goes on around him-

-people being born and being young and growing up and working and

having sex and growing old--and he doesn't take part in any of it,

because he's the creator. I guess that was Brackman's intention,

and if so, it's fully realized. At one time in my life, I could have

appreciated the effect, but now I wondered, what was the point?

What's the point of painting your own picture, but making it look

like you're not really in it? Why imagine yourself in a world

without making yourself go inside? But maybe, I thought, you can't

just make yourself go. Maybe you have to be captured. Then I

thought, maybe Tom was right--maybe I really have run off the

tracks, because I keep getting lost in my thoughts this way. But I

didn't care. I wasn't going back to wherever I was before. In

fact, the good thing about being in a place like Dayton was that I

could finally be alone. I could be in a room with art, and there

was nobody there to remind me of my "identity" as a so-

called "artist." That afternoon, nobody on the planet knew where I

was. It was just me and the life about me.

When I got to my motel, I couldn't resist opening the

sketchbook and doing some more work on the two guys I'd caught in

Wheeling. I sketched them clothed. Half-naked. Naked. Hanging

with their boards and their buddies . . . then, holding up their

arms to be searched, at that first, astonishing moment when they

know they've been captured. Splayed against the slave catchers'

truck, their wrists chained to the tailgate. Packed in a crate for

shipment to some distant camp. Hitting the fields with a shovel and

hoe, their heads shaved, their legs chained together, their feet

encased in hard, heavy boots. Polishing the chrome of their

master's car, shining their master's shoes, cleaning their master's

toilet, baring their holes for their masters' hot, drunken

dick . . . What would they do, what would they feel when they knew

that they couldn't escape, that they'd have to obey another man's

will? I pictured the thief as a rebel, struggling like a soldier

against his chains. But maybe not . . . maybe he'd go quietly and

ironically, laughing at himself. The other one . . . I wasn't

sure. What would happen inside him when he felt the razor shearing

his dreds, when he knew that he had finally got a life, and it

wasn't anything he'd ever imagined before? Would he be a rebel or a

coward? I'd find out. The only thing I knew was that I was onto

something, something fresh. Whatever the critics thought, or didn't

think, they wouldn't compare me to Tucker Branson.

Tucker Branson! That was a name I hadn't wanted to

remember. Tucker Branson with his facile little paintings and his

Yale connections and his famous father and his natty ties and his

student-council-president good looks. Tucker Branson, who

told "Vanity Fair" that "Niskanen is coming along very well, I

think; I believe he's almost ready for a major exhibition"--a month

after my one-man show at Archipelago. Tucker Branson, the world's

biggest brat. Why was the "Times" always linking his work with

mine? So he was queer, so what? His nudes were the color of

turnips and asparagus, and when one of his boys got rough with

another, it was like one overcooked vegetable mauling another.

Tucker Branson didn't belong in a coffle; he belonged in a zoo. I

stayed up that night, making sketches of the kind of cage that would

be good for Tucker. Something with maximum public exposure, I

thought. Then in the morning, groggy and repentant, I tore his

pictures out of my book. I'd promised that I'd make my series real,

and I would--and those pictures weren't real. But I'd have Tucker

in it, as soon as I found the place where the real Tucker belonged.

It was getting pretty hot in the Miami River Valley, hot and

humid; so when the AC unit in my motel room soaked the carpet for

the third time, I got into the car and headed north. My next stop

was Toledo, which is not only a lot further north but is also the

site of one of the world's great museums. By now, however, my

sketchbook was more important than any other art I saw. It was two

days before I even got to the museum; there were just too many ideas

to work up. When I finally got there, I walked through once; then I

went back to the parking lot, did a line, and took my sketchbook out

to the lawn in front. There's a good sculpture there: Carl

Milles's "Wings," which is a nice clean title for the statue of a

man being raped by an eagle. It has everything--the big, determined

bird, the young guy kneeling like a slave, muscles already tensed

for his lifetime of service in the castle of Zeus, far, far

away . . .. Like I say, it's a very good piece.

I was waiting to see whether any gay boys came by to ogle

the sculpture, but all I saw was a gang of city workmen on the

opposite side of the hot green lawn. There was a trench next to the

sidewalk, and they were doing something to it--nothing artistic, it

appeared, since all you could see was a hump of dirt and a line of

blue jumpsuits hovering over the hole, with shovels poking into it.

Nothing artistic until you saw the picture they made--until you

studied the thick blue polyester coursing down from their shoulders

and tenting over their dicks; until you noticed the ends of their

heavy blue legs bunching into the tops of their heavy black boots,

like giant dicks plowing down inside the leather-- all the drapery

doing its duty, like the shackles on a fresh-caught slave, or the

folds of marble cloth on the Apollo Belvedere . . . I was finding

out that it wasn't nakedness that makes the slave; it was clothes.

It's our clothes that say whether we're slave or free. The junior

executive up in the tower and the service guy swabbing the floor

down in the lobby may have the same physique, but one is wearing an

ash gray thousand-dollar suit and the other is wearing a blue

Dickies work set. And although the guy in the suit is essentially

identical to every other guy who's wearing a suit like that, there's

something in the softness of the fabric, when his hand strays for a

moment across the top of his dick, that tells him he is special. As

for the jumpsuit--I'd never worn one, but I imagined that compared

with the slacks I had on, the thing felt like a sheet of concrete

sliding over your dick, shutting everything about you up inside. It

must be quite a feeling. The guys I was looking at all wore the

same boots and the same baggy jumpsuits and the same round little

caps, and they all had their names stamped in black letters on white

labels over their heavy square pockets, and they all bent together

over their hole in the ground, like so many slaves bending together

over their furrows and hoes. More captives for Series 2.

I started sketching. First the gang, then the individuals.

All of them were young. They all had stubble on their chins and

that big plateau shelving down from the pecs that shows that the abs

on a guy are young and tight. One of them I liked a lot. He

reminded me of the farmboy in that first picture in Series 1. He

was stocky and dark, with a shock of black hair falling over his

forehead, hair that was begging for some cruelly indifferent

official hand to take it and yank him into line with it, just at the

moment when the young man was trying so hard to be dutiful, working

with such stolid attention to his job . . .. Your heart went out to

a guy like that--he was a perfect slave.

There was another one that was interesting, too. He looked

a few years older than the rest, and once when he lifted his hand I

saw the glint of a wedding ring. He wasn't the boss, since he was

wearing the same uniform as the others, and he was using a shovel,

too, but when the others stopped digging and looked down in the

hole, like they didn't know what to do next, he would say something

to them, or make a gesture, and they would all start digging again.

He had his cap turned down, shading his eyes, but you could tell

from his profile that he had some dignity about him. I hadn't

thought about that before--in every gang of slaves there was

probably one of them that naturally got interested, tried to coach

the others, tried to take some kind of responsibility. That could

be sexy. I made a quick sketch of him standing apart, looking down

at the farmboy as he turned with a shovelful of dirt and looked up

at him, asking what pile he should dump it on. Crude, but classic.

Later, maybe I'd show the coach being punished for the mistakes of

the other slaves.

The rest of the men didn't stimulate my curiosity. But it

was fun just to sketch all those arms and legs, pumping in unison

like the pistons in some big, slow machine that continues working

away in its corner, stroke after stroke, isolated, unnoticed, with

nobody trying to hurry it, any more than you'd try to hurry

eternity, with plenty of time available for the human parts to think

whatever it was they could think about--looking forward, maybe, to

their next long night in the barracks, when there would be other

kinds of well-oiled objects moving in unison. I turned the page and

sketched a line of cages and a line of men standing in front of

them, unbuttoning their suits and scratching their crotches, ready

for the steel doors to slam behind them and the lights to go off and

the night shift to begin its work. But I knew, when I got to the

cages, that I'd have to get a lot more specific about the . . .

architecture of this world I was making. I'd really neglected that

in Series 1. Architecture was like clothes: one guy works in a Mies

van der Rohe cage of office space and doesn't realize that he's a

slave, may even feel proud of the building he works in, take it as a

sign of his status; but you can't mistake reality when you're

standing in an old steel cage with the bars slamming shut an inch in

front of your face . . ..

Of course, the guys in front of me didn't get caged at

night; they probably went home to something worse--a wife and a

couple of screaming brats. But weren't they doing exactly the same

kind of job that slaves used to do? That convicts still did?

Weren't there places where they still put convicts out on the roads

with picks and shovels and shirts with "INMATE" stamped across the

backs? I was sure I'd seen that on the news. But it didn't make any

difference, not really. Any man with a name stamped on his shirt,

even his own name, was the slave of some other man. The men I was

looking at did what they were told; they wore what they were told to

wear; they said "yes sir" and "no sir" and they stepped off the

sidewalk when a free man passed by. I could see them doing that. A

bunch of high school kids came past, gliding on their skateboards

and yelling into their cell phones, oblivious to anything else; and

the muscly guys in blue jumpsuits lowered their eyes and moved off

the sidewalk. It would be a pleasure, I thought, to boss some

slaves like that. "You! What you looking at? Get back in the

gang!" Only I wouldn't have them spend so much time in the open.

Already my hand was sketching the tight little bunks that were

riveted to the bars in those little slave cages . . .

Superior

By Josh Ryan

THIS IS A STORY FOR ADULTS AND ABOUT ADULTS.

Part 3

Then a funny thing happened. I suddenly remembered the last

time that I had worn a uniform myself. It was spring of my senior

year at Pierce Country Day. I was thin and geeky, so much of a nerd

that I was embarrassed to go out for any of the sports. Years

later, pumping iron at Aces, I often thought about that scrawny kid

who weighed about half as much as one of my pecs weighed now, and I

laughed at him. It showed what you could do when you decided to

make a change, when you decided to make something out of yourself.

Anyway, the school colors at Pierce were cream and charcoal-- very

bold, when you thought about it, very classy--and the gym uniforms

were white shorts and t-shirts, with a cool little charcoal stripe

running down the side of each leg and a PCD crest outlined in

charcoal over the tit. Most of the other guys worshiped sports; I

just worshiped that uniform. When I put it on, I felt like all the

other guys--or actually, I felt like I imagined all the other guys

felt when they put it on (which was probably a hell of a lot

different, but that didn't occur to me). I even used to get

nervous, sitting in my fifth-hour study hall, waiting for PE class,

waiting for the moment when we were all suited up and we all went

running up the stairs together into the old tall cavernous gym with

the big grilled windows and the globes of light tethered to the

ceiling, far far away--the moment when no one could tell me apart

from the other guys. Or so I imagined, in my imaginary world.

Steven Fay was my best friend, and he had the locker next to

mine. I'd made sure of that. He was the only really smart guy I

ever met at Pierce, which was supposed to be such a good college

prep. He was the only guy I ever met who stayed up all night

rewriting his English paper, because "it might get an A, but it

still wasn't good enough. Not for me, anyhow." He was a pretty guy,

with a long, slender face and beautiful green eyes, the kind of guy

who went out for track instead of football, but I knew from

wrestling around with him on a couple Saturdays when we were hanging

out in his room that he was firm and hard everywhere that guys are

supposed to be firm and hard. And every Monday through Friday I

knew we'd be standing next to our lockers, ready to don our

uniforms, and he would strip out of his street clothes and hold his

white and black shorts in front of him, dick dangling over the soft,

encircling cloth like a naked prisoner waiting to be collared, then

herded into the gang with the other prisoners, and I would turn

aside so he couldn't tell what was going on with my own equipment.

Then one day when we were suiting up, I looked over at Steve and I

saw something different.

There was another private school in town, Our Lady, and

Steve had met some girl from there; and on that day, when I glanced

in his direction, it wasn't the creamy white shorts with the

charcoal stripe that he was holding out in front of him; it was

slick orange shorts with a wide black stripe--and those were Our

Lady's colors. Suddenly, Steve wasn't with me anymore; he had moved

on and left me standing there in the same place, standing there

alone. I knew it was stupid, even at the time, but the

disappointment and anger shot into my brain, and when he looked in

my face, he saw it.

"Hey man!" he said. "What's the matter?" But I could tell

that he didn't care anymore. He didn't care what I thought. He

had changed.

"What's that?" I demanded, pointing at the orange shorts.

"My own shorts are dirty," he said. "I'll just have to wear

what I snatched."

It took me a minute to put that together. Snatched . . .

snatch . . . a girl's snatch . . . Steve having sex . . . sex with a

girl . . .

"You don't go to Our Lady!" I said, sticking my legs down my

shorts, very fast and very clumsy, like a knight banging into his

armor. "You go to Pierce!"

Listening to my voice, I knew I was angry. Angry and

stupid. Suddenly everything was turning upside down. A look came

over Steve's face, the kind of look you get when you're changing

your mind about something. "You're outta control," he said. His

eyes were snapping across the distance between us. I'd never

noticed how scary those eyes could be.

"I'm not the one that's out of control!"

"Yeah?" he said. "Then what's that?" We both looked down

at my dick. I guess it was angry too, because it was pushing my

shorts completely out of shape. "Did you mean Pierce Country Day?"

he asked. "Or Pansy Country Day? Huh? Which is it, Mr. School

Spirit?"

We'd made jokes about "spirit" a thousand times before. But

this was new; this was the end of everything. In a moment, Steve's

body was twisting on the slippery floor, and my arms were flailing

around his head. In another moment, it was me on the floor, and

Steve was pinning my butt to the cold concrete. I know how much he

liked it, beating me, because I could feel his dick harden against

me while he ripped off my shorts and stuffed them between my

teeth. "You like it, you eat it!" he yelled. He stood up and

walked away through the crowd of gawkers. "Fuckin' pansy!" he

said. Then he was gone.

After gym class that day, Steve started sharing John

Brandecker's locker; and from then on it was Steve and John and

sometimes Steve and Nick Skelton, but it was never Steve and me

again. And that was the last "best friend" I ever had. I made sure

of that. And when was the last time I'd heard of Steve? It must

have been 10 or 12 years ago. It was in the city . . . I ran into

someone I'd known from Pierce . . . at an opening or

something . . . It was that Alan guy, the guy who made all that

money . . . And he said something about "Steve what's his name, the

one you used to be such buddies with," and I thought he was smirking

when he said it, so I tried not to talk anymore, but he kept on

about how it was "too bad, everything going south with Steven the

way it did," so I said, "Oh?" and he said, "You know, all those

problems . . . dropping out of college and so forth," so I

said, "Yes," like I knew what had happened, because he was watching

my face to see how I took it, and why should he get his rocks off on

me? Then he stopped and he left me alone and I never found out

what it was that went on. I stood still, looking at somebody's

paintings hanging there on the wall, feeling happy that things had

turned out bad for Steve. But that meant I could stop thinking

about him, and I did.

Except that Steve was never really gone. I could see that

now. I could see that he'd been the model for Adam Black, just as

John Brandecker had been the model for Larry Lucerno and Nick

Skelton had been the model for Jason Steele. I hadn't understood

that before. Larry was John, with John's overdeveloped chest and

underdeveloped brain, and Jason was Nick, with Nick's thin taut body

and his mean little mouth. And Adam was Steve, as Steve would have

been if only . . . certain things had been different.

I found a new page in my sketchbook and started drawing

Steve the way that he ought to be. But it was odd-- I still saw

Adam Black around the eyes and the mouth, and when I tried to change

it, somehow it wasn't Steve anymore, either; it wasn't anyone I

recognized. So I decided to keep that part. The important thing, I

thought, feeling the coke icing my brain again, was that now I was

the one in charge of what I was doing. Tom would be pleased--I was

growing up.

Where was Steve now? I asked myself. What do guys like him

do, when they fail at life? Probably he wouldn't fail completely.

Probably he'd become something half important, half important and

serious, very serious. Like being a high school principal. Or a

cop. A cop in some little town, where he could walk around in his

neatly pressed uniform with dark glasses over his eyes and his

sleeves rolled neatly up on his biceps, practicing his CONTROL I

laughed and drew a little sketch on the border: Steve dressed as a

slave officer, and the farmboy with his arms chained behind him,

licking Steve's well-polished leather. That was good. Then I did

another one, with the figures reversed. Now it was Steve with his

arms in cold steel, licking the dirt off the farmboy's scarred,

clumsy slave boots. That was better. People had an idea, I knew,

that only insecure men have the desire to dominate. Steve had

dominated me. But given the opportunity, maybe he'd be the pansy,

after all. A wave of ecstasy passed through my body. I was getting

high on this mixture of vengeance and guilt. How long had it been,

I wondered, since I'd felt sorry for anything, felt any kind of

guilt or shame? That little sketch of Steve licking the boot made

me feel everything again, and better-- dirty and guilty and

triumphant and proud. I knew it had been a long, long time since I

was this interested in anything I felt. I looked up, blinking,

drunk on my memories, and on what I was starting to do with them--

surprised, the way you can get when you're hopelessly wasted, to

open your eyes and see that there's still a real world out there in

the distance.

A truck had stopped at the curb, and the workers were lined

up behind it. They were pulling a big length of pipe out of the

back, their blue suits showing greenish against the yellow steel.

What would they think, I wondered, if they knew I was using them,

putting them into a story of bondage and degradation? That was

funny. But the difficulty was, I had no story. I hadn't found one

yet. What did I know about degradation, outside of that scene in my

high school locker room? Tom was right--I'd never really "worked."

I'd never really had a "boss." I'd gone right from college to art,

and right from art to success. Of course, I'd known people who

should have been degraded. Tucker Branson, for example. Quickly I

sketched him in. There he was, upright and angry in his dirty blue

jumpsuit, so angry that his skin appeared to be trying not to touch

his suit, even from the inside, not even when his shoulder caved

under the weight of the fat yellow pipe. Behind him, I put the

farmboy who, at the moment, was bearing most of the load and guiding

it, his face mysteriously intent, his dark eyes mysteriously

accepting. In the next sketch, Tucker turned on him, eyes glaring,

mouth contorted by rage and some shouted complaint. But complaints

wouldn't work anymore. Tucker Branson was a slave for life. Oh

Christ! My dick was harder than that piece of pipe.

Then I noticed a guy who actually seemed to be struggling

under the load. It was a guy with a narrow body and a dark, smooth

face--not dark like a black guy but dark like guys from some parts

of Asia. He was lost in the folds of a jumpsuit that was about

three sizes too big for him, and his eyes were closed tight and his

lips were closed tight and he was struggling not to open his mouth

and say that he couldn't take it anymore, couldn't bear the load.

God, I thought, he must really need this job. Which made him an

appropriate character, I thought, to give Tucker a vengeful little

poke in the hole, once I got the latter fastened into the stocks or

chained to the floor of the meat wagon . . . But who did the Asian

guy remind me of? I had it-- he was another Pierce Country Day

kid, the guy that everybody called Patel. I remembered how they

always pronounced it-- "pay-TELL," and there were jokes

about "paying" and "telling," like "kissing" and "telling." Nobody

knew why that was funny, but everybody laughed. Actually, Patel was

his last name; his first name was some Indian thing with ninety

syllables, which nobody dreamed of pronouncing. Patel was one of

the "scholarship students" that PCD always bragged about when it had

a fundraising campaign, one of the guys "who would never have

enjoyed the benefits of Pierce Country Day without the contributions

of caring alumni donors." Trying to be friendly, I asked him once

what his last name meant, and he said "Farmer." "But your parents

run a convenience store," I said. I wanted to make it a joke, a

joke he could laugh at, but Patel just stared back at me, and I felt

guilty that I'd even tried. And once I saw Patel's parents, dark,

squat people, standing at the counter in the beat-up store that

didn't belong in our neighborhood, looking very different from the

tall, thin son who was sweeping the floor. I remember that he used

to wear correct little button-down shirts, very neat and clean, and

he turned up his sleeves, very carefully, whenever he sat down to

work on his calculus problems. I think Patel won an award for

math. He was exactly like the guy trying to carry the pipe, only

better, more real. Now he was in my sketchbook, wearing a jumpsuit

buttoned up to the neck, and struggling under the weight of the long

yellow object that he couldn't support, but had to.

I threw down the sketchbook and lay back on the grass,

exhausted. Clouds were drifting, formless and empty. I had my

characters, I thought--most of the characters I needed. But I

hadn't encountered my story yet. There were fragments, but that's

all they were. I fell asleep, and when I woke up, my inspiration

had disappeared. The trench was filled; the workers were gone. I

bought some food at a convenience store and took it back to the

motel. By dawn, I'd worked each of my figures into a dozen more

shapes. I'd dressed them and undressed them, caged them and

shackled them and beat them and fucked them up the ass. I'd tried

every possible combination. But my story never came to me. All I

knew was that I was becoming obsessed. It was time to move on again.

The next obvious target was Chicago, but I was thinking

about Detroit, too. Whatever people said about that place, I knew

that the museum had a first-class Bellini. But by then I was tired

of museums. The only art that interested me was the art in my

sketchbook, and that was driving me crazy. So when I went down to

the coffee shop that morning, I just scooped up all the tourist

brochures that I saw on the rack and laid them out by my bacon and

eggs. It was the usual array of junk. Mystery Hill. Dinosaur

Village. Michigan Wineries (huh?). One brochure interested me.

On the front was the picture of an enormous blue bridge, and over

the bridge was a line of orange letters. "YOUR INVITATION TO

SUPERIOR" it said.

Superior? That state above Michigan? Yes, right across

the "Mighty Bridge at the Straits of Mackinac." I'd never known

anything in particular about Michigan, outside of that Bellini in

Detroit, let alone knowing anything about Superior. When I opened

my Rand McNally, I could see why. Michigan and Superior were two

states that were not on the road to anything, except themselves.

They were two hunks of land sticking into the Great Lakes, one above

the other; and when you got a hundred miles or so above Ohio, you

could tell from the map that the population died out. A couple

hundred miles further, and Michigan itself died out. It narrowed

into the "mighty bridge," and when you got across it, you were

really at the end of the line--you had arrived in Superior. The

brochure made it look like nobody lived in Superior at all. Nobody

but "Nature." All you saw was trees and rocks and dunes and eagles,

and moose standing around in a swamp, looking surprised at their own

existence. Then you saw a line of cliffs and a blue-black lake

running out to infinity: "Lake Superior: Greatest Body of Fresh

Water in the World." The lake, it said, was twice as large as

Superior itself.

Of course, the brochure went on and on about how the place

was the LAND OF HISTORY AND LEGEND, where you could STEP BACK, INTO

THE PAST, the "ANCIENT PAST" of MYTHS AND LORE, of SHIPS THAT NEVER

RETURNED, of STRANGE TALES AND MISSING MEN, and GHOST TOWNS OF THE

FROZEN NORTH. . . . Talk about the back woods! Maybe I should stay

in civilization.

Two women came into the coffee shop and sat down at the

table next to mine, their accents announcing that they came from New

York. Of course they immediately started complaining about the

service. The one that was closest to me kept looking down at her

purse and touching it, making sure that the thing was still there.

She was giving me an almost irresistible desire to become a purse

snatcher. Or escape to the Frozen North. So OK: I was sold. I

was going to Superior. It was bound to be an adventure, traveling

someplace I'd never really known existed. I found US 23 again and

took the exit pointed north.

At Lansing I met the first signs of fall. It was just after

Labor Day, and the college kids were back in town, innocent in their

forest-green jackets and their brand-new earrings. There were some

Piranesi engravings that I suddenly wanted to see again, so I

decided to stay the night in East Lansing and visit the library. I

was sitting at one of those crippled little wooden desks that

libraries always have in the stacks, when I noticed that the guy

three desks down kept looking over his book and in my direction. 18

or 20, obviously a student. I hoped he wasn't as old as 20, because

he was still so self-conscious, it was painful to look at him.

Almost painful. Underneath the glasses and the shy little looks and

the sudden reversions to his reading matter, this was a beautiful

guy. Moist dark hair. White smooth arms. Wide hard chest, with a

plain white t-shirt showing off the tits--the kind of chest that you

get when you work out alone, day after day, thinking about the guys

that you'd like to be. And I was obviously one of those guys. I

could see that he wanted attention, so I gave it to him, but every

time I looked up, he looked down. See you in 15 years, I thought,

when you finally settle accounts with yourself. But my dick told me

that this was another man for my sketchbook. I did a couple

pictures, very neat, very clean in both senses, of a young guy

looking out a window, his hands lightly gripping the iron bars in

front of him. When I'd finished, I tore one of the sketches out and

dropped it beside his book. He looked up, scared as a fawn; and I

left.

I don't know. It was a strange thing, how much I got turned

on by that guy. My dick was pacing in its cave, raging to come

out. But the funny thing was, he still wasn't my type. I didn't

want to dick some clumsy shy little college kid. I might be

narcissistic, as Tom would say, but I wanted a guy like me.

Somebody firm. Self-confident. I couldn't stand those doey eyes,

begging for something without knowing what it was. It was strange

how you got drawn in, just by wanting to make some pictures. How

long had it been, I wondered, since I'd been with a real man? The

only men in my life right now were the men in my sketchbook.

I'd noticed a gay bar across the street from campus, so I

made that my next stop. Like most gay bars in college towns, it was

really just a social club for a few guys who knew each other. One

guy kept looking at me like he wanted to get friendly. He was a

handsome man, and his package was properly addressed; but every time

he stood up and spread his cheeks against the bar and motioned his

dickhead in my direction his friends said something to pull him back

to the group again. I guess I should have gone up to them and made

myself agreeable, but I didn't feel like putting myself out. I was

leaving next morning, anyhow. And I wanted to get back to my

drawings. I've often wondered what would have happened if those

queens hadn't won their little game, but the fact is, there was

nobody in the group that I wanted to put in my book, and that's why

I lost interest. Maybe that was a warning, I thought, driving back

to my hotel; maybe it's time to reconsider that sketchbook.

Remember those people in Dante's "Inferno"--one minute, they're lost

in their book, the next minute, they're sentenced to hell for the

rest of eternity. Well, at least they had each other. But maybe I

should lay off the book for a while. Do it again when you're fresh,

when you have your plot. After all, you left New York to be free of

responsibilities. Leave it alone for now. Go back to it when

things start being spontaneous again.

It wasn't easy, but I locked the book in the trunk that

night. Then I shot a couple downers and got eight hours of sleep.

In the morning, things seemed different. When I threw my bag in the

trunk, I didn't even think to look at the sketchbook. I just threw

the bag on top of it, slammed down the lid, and drove off to

Superior.

An hour north of Lansing, the forest begins, and from there

to the Straits of Mackinac, it's trees as far as the eye can see.

Once in a while, you break into the open and there's a stream or a

little lake, with cabins and boats and people huddling around it,

but outside of that, it's just the trees and the highway running

straight to the sky. At the end of the day, you see the towers of

the Mackinac Bridge rising out of the forest, and half an hour

later, you're 200 feet over the straits, looking down at ships in

the water in the way you look down at the blocks in some children's

game. The sign in the center of the bridge says, WELCOME TO

SUPERIOR. YOU'VE ARRIVED! Above the words, there's a picture of an

eagle; below, there's the picture of a big sleek fish, twisting on a

sportsman's hook. I stayed the night in St. Ignace, and when I woke

up, there was a layer of frost on my windshield. I was in the

North, all right.

Superior

By Josh Ryan

THIS IS A STORY FOR ADULTS AND ABOUT ADULTS.

Part 4

The next couple of weeks were paradise. Virgin forests,

abandoned towns, dark hidden waterfalls, the gleam of white sunlight

on a bank of black clouds . . . then my first sight of Superior,

gray and grim, swamping the horizon . . . It was all there, just

like in the pictures, along with a strange, furtive sensation that

something was following me, something that hadn't been along for the

first part of the trip. I don't mean to exaggerate the feeling.

And it wasn't exactly bad. There's a certain amount of drama in the

idea that someone is watching you. Of course, I didn't take it

seriously. It's easy to feel haunted when you're alone like that,

especially when the land around you looks like the set for a gothic

novel. You may have walked through a door, sometime, and felt as if

somebody else had just been there, fixing up the room for you, and

had walked out the door only a minute before, even if there was no

other door for him to walk out of. It probably had to do with all

the art I'd been trying to make. I was getting used to the notion

that you when think about something, it comes alive--even though I

still didn't have the plot that would turn my own thoughts into

things with a life of their own. I'd locked up my sketchbook, but I

still had all my thoughts about it, running around in my brain, and

when you're alone, your thoughts are all you have.

Reality, I thought, isn't two sucks and a fuck, like I'd

made it seem in Series 1. Reality isn't a snapshot, no matter how

sexy the snapshot is. Reality has a past, a present, and a future.

Even if there's an eternity, it includes those things. This is

nonsense, I thought . . . but I kept on thinking. I needed a story

with structure, something that led to something, a plot that would

pull the guts out of those slaves I'd been drawing and show me what

was inside--who they were and where they came from and what was

going to happen to them. I felt my dick rising again. I wanted to

know it all. What were they like before they were enslaved? Who

enslaved them? How? Why were they all together? And where was

the guy that I'd called David Quarry? In the first sequence, he was

my human punching bag--the completely naive, whitebread guy that you

always put in pornography, just to have things keep happening to

him. Now he'd disappeared, like the deer I'd just seen running off

through the woods on the Kalakaska Trail. Had he been replaced by

someone else in my zoo? Maybe there was something strange about

him, something that I hadn't grasped . . . It was funny that a dope

like that could become mysterious all of a sudden.

Anyway, I had to find the plot. I knew I'd find it, of

course, just like I'd found my way to Superior--somehow it would

come to me. Yet the really weird thing was--whenever I got an idea

for a plot, I got excited, but I also got scared. Finally I guessed

why. Once I had my story, I'd have to stick to it. No more

fantasies . . . no more freedom. I'd be locked in my own device.

Yet that must be wrong, somehow. It was a contradiction. The whole

idea of being enslaved by your own creation . . . that was absurd on

the face of it. It's only the master who's free, and I was

certainly the master of my own fucking sketchbook. But I hadn't

found my plot, and until I did, I couldn't be free of Series 1.

Those figures in my sketchbook were still just pieces of a story,

litter in the trunk of my car--just clods of dirt before God scooped

them up and put his breath inside them. Are you comparing yourself

to God, I asked, hunting for the rest of the trail that was supposed

to take me out of the woods. Sure, I answered, just as I reached

the clearing and saw the Lake again in the distance. Why not? But

every night I lay in bed, and I looked for my story, and I couldn't

find the one that I wanted.

It was good that I had something to do in the daytime. The

state of Superior turned out to be enormous, once you settled down

in it. There was always something to see. Maybe even a desert

island is that way, once you really start to look, and now I had

nothing to do with my time but look. So I saw it all--sand and

swamp, lake and river and bays and falls, and then the mountains,

weathered and worn, the oldest mountains on the continent, with

forests on top and pastures running down and away from them, and the

occasional two-bit village, just to create a human scale. When I

met another car on the road, it was like meeting another character

in "The Lord of the Rings": with so few people around, you felt that

somehow everyone you saw must be part of your own story. There was

that word again, "story."

But until I got to Marquette, the state capital, I didn't

meet many people anyway. Superior was like the model of a world, a

world before the world was born. Even Marquette gave me the feeling

of one of those "Twilight Zone" episodes where the protagonist looks

up and finds that he's living in a toy house that some space

creature has built for him.. What struck me was how clean it was,

clean like the toy of an obsessive child. The town was old, and

drab, and not very prosperous, yet although it was small, as cities

go, it was large enough for the usual urban blight. But there

wasn't any. Where were the broken windows? Where were the bums and

the drug pushers? That's what I wanted to know, but it wasn't the

kind of thing you can ask a stranger about. The capitol--white

concrete, with marble sills and murals of sailors, miners,

and "agriculturalists"--was a museum of the WPA style. "All is

well," it suggested, "with the workers of Superior." Anything that

started going wrong in Superior must have been firmly repressed,

shunted off to a dungeon somewhere, never to see the light of day.

I soon drifted beyond Marquette.

Superior is a peninsula, but it's also a series of

peninsulas. The northernmost one of them, the farthest reach of

Superior, is the Keweenaw, a long penis of rock jutting into the

Lake. At its tip is the town of Windigo. On September 21 I drove

up to Windigo and checked into the Lighthouse Hotel. I'd just

found my room and thrown my bag on the bed when I had an

inspiration: why not give Tommy a call? After all, this was

probably the farthest I'd ever get from what he regarded as

civilization, and some kind of conversational monument ought to be

erected--especially here, at the beginning of Fall. Then I thought,

what's he gonna say? I couldn't talk to him about the things I'd

gotten interested in--he'd never understand. And if I didn't talk

about all that, there was nothing I wanted to talk about. He'd run

on and on, boring me with some stupid gossip, as if I'd never left

New York. I was a lot better off not calling him. I called

downstairs, instead, and ordered up a beer, and I looked out at the

harbor and the big gray lake, and then I did a line. As soon as I

did, I knew that there was something else I needed to get out of the

car. I had to go for my sketchbook.

I'd said that I wanted to get away from everybody I knew,

and I'd done that, but now, prying open the cover of my book, I

found that I couldn't get away from the people I'd invented. "Worse

than being a slave!" I thought, laughing at myself, but it was

true. Black marks on white paper--that's all they were--yet I

couldn't get away from them. And now I could see how hopelessly,

ridiculously wrong most of the sketches were. The Indian kid and

the student--what was I thinking when I made the first one suck the

other one's ass? That wouldn't happen. And what was I thinking

when I'd drawn Adam Black, I mean Steven, kissing the shoplifting

guy with wet, eager lips? The only way that Steven would "kiss" a

guy like that was if one of them was punishing the other one,

humiliating and degrading him. No, it was wrong, all wrong! Almost

every pair I'd imagined was a humiliation to me. I slashed at the

pages, x-ing the bodies out. They were all too eager, too happy to

be where they were; it was all too easy. There was no story to

control them, no structure, no reason for anything that happened.

Why did I ever start on this?

I was angry, and I was high, and a minute later, I was

asleep. Immediately I was facing a tall wooden desk, and Adam Black

was sitting behind it. Sitting like a judge.

"You, David Quarry," he began.

"No!" I said. "I am not David Quarry . . . Your Honor. I

am . . . " For some reason, it was hard for me to remember my name.

"You, David Quarry," the judge continued, in the voice that

Steven used in the locker room, "have been convicted and sentenced

for abuse of power. This is a second offense."

"Please," I said. "Please. Listen. I was only trying

to . . . I was only trying . . . " I had a story to tell, but

somehow, I couldn't remember that either, despite its being my own

story, the story of me. "I didn't harm anyone. Not anyone real. I

created those men."

A tiny smile crossed his lips. "Did you? That is your

contention. And that is exactly the point. You created them, and

you refused to take responsibility for them. Your only thought was

to sell them to others. You exercised no control. You refused to

leave them alone, but you refused to employ them as they were meant

to be employed."

"Responsibility? How could I . . . I didn't know . . ."

"And because you failed to exercise control, you are now

going to BE controlled. Officers, remove the prisoner." Larry

Lucerno and Jason Steele stepped forward, doing their usual job.

Before I knew it, they were chaining me hand and foot.

"No!" I yelled. "It was art. Nothing but art. I was using

them for ART. Can't you understand? It was a fantasy . . . a

dream! I'm having a dream!"

"You can dream," he said, in that same voice, that voice

like an iron door, shutting, "but you cannot dream without paying.

Now you'll pay. And your dreams will pay too, if they want to

exist."

I turned, and there they were, all of them, lined up in

shackles and manacles and big baggy jumpsuits, the criminals who had

already been sentenced. The thief from Wheeling, and his friend,

the kid with the knife and the long blond dreds. Then the two guys

from the workgang in Toledo, the coach and the farmboy. Then that

asshole Branson, whom I'd put in the workgang, and Patel, who was

like that other man in the gang, despite his being Patel . . . It

was hard, now, to straighten them out. Then my last catch, the

young man from the library, looking completely lost in his thick

heavy suit and his dirty snub-nosed prison boots. . . .

That was them, the slaves I'd been playing with. They'd

escaped from my trunk, in full color and three dimensions, looking

almost as good as I could have painted them, and almost the same,

and now they'd been caught and we were all in the same place, and

there was nothing that I could do to stop it.

I noticed that the kid with the dreds no longer looked as

aggressive as I'd tried to make him; in fact, he wasn't aggressive

at all; he just looked sad, like he was about to cry. And the older

guy from the workgang . . . he was heavier than I'd thought; his

pecs were pushing his jumpsuit like it was getting too small, or he

was getting too big to fit inside. Tucker Branson hadn't completely

lost that student-council-president look, but his face was someplace

between anger and shame, changing back and forth, like the artist

couldn't make up his mind and just made him live with the issue

unresolved, toying with him, the way I'd liked to do. It took me

only a second or two to see them all, but in that moment they had

already started to change. At first they were quiet, very quiet,

even Branson . . . quiet like a line of dolls, with their plastic

heads turned down to the floor. Then their eyes started to focus

and their expressions started to change and their arms started to

move and their big, baggy clothes started rippling from one color to

another--first blue, then green, then rusty red, maybe orange--then

their legs started walking, marching them in a line out of the

courtroom in their thick orange suits with their thick shiny

shackles clanking across the shiny floor. . . . Then I wasn't

watching the others anymore; I was watching myself clanking out of

the courtroom at the back of the line, as the other slaves clanked

ahead of me, their legs moving in unison, like pistons jerking

slowly in an old machine, and making the same moves myself, because

I had to follow them and there was only one way to do it . . . .

I looked to the side, and I saw that the judge had taken off

his long dark robes and was standing in front of his desk in black

boots and dark gray trousers and a dark gray shirt with the sleeves

rolled up on his biceps and a bright gold badge pinned above his

pocket, and I could see that he'd been working out quite a lot in

the years since I'd seen him last, because his body was slender and

wiry, like it was before, but his arms were large and masterful

inside the tight fitting rolls of his uniform sleeves, and it was

clear to me now that Adam Black was Steven Fay, all right, and that

he had been all along. And it was obvious that the two officers in

front of him weren't Larry or Jason at all, or anymore; they were

Tom and Nick, the ones that Steven replaced me with. And they must

have known something, too, because as soon as Steven took off his

robes they grabbed him by the arms and threw him onto the floor.

"No!" he yelled, in that big voice that policemen

use. "Them, not me! Them, not me!" But it was hard to understand

him because he was writhing on the floor while they kicked him and

tore his clean gray clothes off his body, and his dick came out of

his trousers hard and wet and ready, and they got his wrists and

ankles into the fetters that had been waiting for him, and they

clamped them down, and then it was him looking up at me, with his

mouth contorting above his little square chin with the tiny scar

that I used to notice, just on the right side below the lip . . ..

"Danny!" he said. "Please! I can't take it! Danny! It's

me! Steve!"

A voice started speaking. "You, Steven Fay, have been

convicted and sentenced for abuse of power. This is a second

offense."

"Please," he said. "Please. Listen. I didn't create

them. I never wanted those men. It was you who created them! It

was you who created me!"

"No," the voice said, and I smiled, and when I smiled I

understood that the voice was coming from me, and that now I was

standing on the other side of the judge's desk. I looked down.

There was a police file lying on the surface, and a mugshot clipped

to the file. A face looked up at me. It was hard to see whose face

it was. I looked at the picture, searching for the scar. I

wasn't sure . . . "No," I continued. "It was the other way

around. Officers, remove the prisoner."

"No!" he screamed. "I'm not like them! I'm not like the

others! I'm the one you . . . " But it was too late. The officers

were already pushing the gag into his mouth. But I didn't care

whether he screamed or not. All I cared about was the lava that was

bursting out of my crotch at the sight of Steven Fay's

degradation . . .

"Christ!" I yelled. "What the fuck . . . !"

I sat up in the darkness. My chest was covered with sweat,

and there was jizm rolling off my balls in a huge slimy

torrent. "What the hell's going on?"

Well, I thought, when I'd calmed down a little, I'd wanted

a story, and now I was getting one. The effects were . . .

impressive. Very impressive, there at the end. And very

satisfactory, I thought, that whole part about Steve. But it wasn't

the story I was looking for. The whole thing about me being David

Quarry, or me being in my own story at all: it was the same nonsense

I'd dreamed when I was back in New York. It just showed what

happened when you got obsessed.

There was only one solution: I'd have to stop even thinking

about those pictures. Maybe, after a while, a long while, I could

use some of the good stuff in them. There was probably a lot of

good stuff, story or no story. But I didn't free myself from New

York in order to get captured by something that came after me in

Windigo. I'd known it before but now it was unavoidably obvious:

the art thing was out of control. At some point, even a good idea

becomes ridiculous. I should have realized, quite a while before,

that the men in those pictures were getting a lot realer than they

ought to be. When you'd rather spend your time with imaginary

people than real ones . . .

My hands had stopped shaking. I felt for my crotch again.

The cum had already dried. What time was it, anyway? I groped my

way to the window and pulled up the shade. There was nothing but

darkness on the other side, darkness and my own reflection, with

some points of stars shining through the transparent face that lay

on the pane. Christ, what time was it, anyway? It must be nine or

ten o'clock already. But the stars were beautiful, standing out on

the vacant water. In New York, you could never see a thing like

that. And then I remembered: if you wait too long for dinner in a

town like Windigo, you will probably wait all night. I grabbed

my "Guidebook to Superior" and ran downstairs to the dining room.

By the time I finished my meal there was only one other

customer in the little room. He'd been there before me, and he'd

stayed till the end. He also was reading a book, but from time to

time I saw by the reflection in the big black windows looking out on

the Lake that the man kept glancing my way. Not bad, I thought,

deciding that he was worth at least as much watching as the harbor,

especially since he was watching me. Then I started looking at him

more directly.

He was 24 or 25, and he was dressed in a new set of levis

and a nice pair of boots, heavy and heavily shined. His blue

flannel shirt flopped open over a tight white tee, a piece of

drapery that left nothing to the imagination when it came to the

physique underneath it. You could say the same about the levis.

This guy was loaded and ready. Then, above the shirt, there was a

long, slender, almost delicate face--exactly the kind of face I

liked. High cheekbones, narrow lips, big, pretty eyes, thick dark

hair slicked back in deep wavy lines--it was the kind of face you

expect to see waiting on you in Warbucks or something, only this

face was tough and tanned, and the neck was a tower of muscles,

sleek and young but powerful. Even at rest, the whole body had a

military bearing, as if it had been stopped in Position 7 of the

twelve approved positions. Whatever. There was no doubt that the

guy was precisely my type. I couldn't have drawn a better example.

By the time I signed the check, I knew that I had to do

something. I looked up and nodded. He did the same. Of course,

that's what you do in the north. When you run into a stranger, you

act like you know him.

"How you doing?" he said, raising his voice across the

distance between us.

"Not bad. You?"

"Pretty well."

"What you reading?"

"`If the South Had Won the Civil War.'"

"I remember . . . Lincoln is captured; the South takes

Washington . . . "

"Bull's eye. I guess you're a history buff."

"`Tramp, tramp, tramp, the boys are marching. Cheer up,

comrades, they will come.'" I hadn't visited Gettysburg for nothing.

"Good song," he said, smiling with his big green eyes. "And

well reproduced. Very authentic."

"I'm glad you approve. Enjoying the book?"

"It keeps me from feeling lonely."

How's that for a confession? And a come-on?

"It's good to be alone," I said. "When you want to be."

"Right again. But sometimes it's hard to tell. Anyway, I

suppose you're a tourist here."

"Bull's eye," I answered, getting up and moving over to his

table. "But I guess it's easy to tell."

"Sure. By the book you're reading. And by your accent.

Nobody would mistake you for one of us." That was certainly true.

He had the northern accent, the way they all did up

there. "Tourist" was "turrest." "Here" was "hir." "Real"

was "ril." He laughed. "We don't talk so good up here." We don

tok so gud upp hir.

"Sure you do," I said. This guy could turn even that ugly

accent into something sexy. "Say, you think they've still got a

drink or two left in the bar?"

"Let's check it out," he said. "By the way, my name's

Mike. Michael Neele."

"I'm Daniel," I said. "Daniel Niskanen." I don't know why

I said that. I was "Daniel" in my press releases, but I was usually

just "Dan" or "Danny" to my friends. But what the hell. Wasn't I

starting a new life?

TO BE CONTINUED

Josh Ryan's story "Slave Test" can be found in messages 274-277.

His story "Slave Maker" can be found in messages 467-471 and 485-

488. His story "The Convict" can be found in messages 609, 619, 629-

30, 632-33, 653, 659-60, 674-75, 707-708, 724-26, 763-65. His

novel "Convict Slave" can be found in yahoo group prison-sex

beginning with message 1351 and continuing in messages 1360, 1366,

1374, 1384, 1386, 1420, 1460, 1566, 1667-68, 1838-41, 1973-76, 2156-

60, 2808, 2875, 2866, 2868, 3302-3305, 3371-3376, and 3396-3400.

Superior

By Josh Ryan

Part 5

THIS IS A STORY FOR ADULTS AND ABOUT ADULTS.

Mike and I hooked up that night, and that was only the

second time in my life when I'd been fucked. I hadn't realized how

much muscle he had coiled up under those clothes, because when he

started to peel his shirt I lost track of where I was and what I was

doing, like I was still in that dream that had erupted a few hours

before, and there was nothing except Mike's smooth hard body and

Mike's clean tough clothes dropping off around me, and when he

wanted to come inside, there was no way I could have resisted it. I

was out of control from the second I saw his pecs running like a

range of hills across his chest, with his tits rising up on them,

slender and proud and hard. He had the young man's chest that I had

never had when I was as young as he was. I was bigger than him now,

and the rest of my equipment was nothing to laugh at, either, but

licking his tits was like owning those tits myself, when I was his

age. Then he switched off the light and I started to enjoy his dick.

It wasn't that he had a narrow little comfortable thing down

there. When he unbuttoned his crotch, his dick sprang out at me

like a steel pipe--sort of a revelation, coming from a slender guy

like that. And a nice guy, too--shy and nice and reticent about

discussing himself or dominating the conversation, the kind of guy

who seems like he's about to say "Sir" everything he starts to say

anything else. That's the way he was outside of the sack, anyway.

He would have picked up every drink in the bar if I'd let him. And

you always imagine that a guy like that is gonna have a nice tame

little dick, not this big crazy thing that charging up inside me.

But just because it was a dick like that, I loved the way it flirted

shyly with my ass, rubbing it and teasing it, then suddenly hid

itself inside, diving into its hole and locking itself in so it

couldn't get out, until our bodies were screwed together and no one

could ever pry us apart. It wasn't like he was the master and I was

the slave; it was more like we were two parts that fitted each other

perfectly, once you hammered them together.

Mike was "romantic" too--an old-fashioned word, and a big

surprise, for a young guy who's hanging around in Windigo,

Superior. When we were through making love, he opened the curtains

of the little window in the bedroom and wrapped his arms around me

and told me we were "sleeping under the stars." Where have I heard

that before? I thought. A Valentine's Day cliche.. . . But it was

funny and nice, the way he took it all so seriously, as if the

little apartment over a drug store was a penthouse at the top of

Rockefeller Center. An arc of bright stars bent down over Windigo's

battered roofs, and the lights of the harbor arced up at them.

When I woke up, the window was graying, but Mike was still

asleep. I looked around his bedroom. The night before, I didn't

have a chance to notice anything except his body, but now I could

see that the room was exactly like him--neat and spare and male, and

everything in its place. His jeans were crumpled on the floor, on

top of mine, but his shirt was spread out carefully on the back of a

wooden chair. Even when he was in heat, he remembered to hang his

shirt in the proper place--unlike the light steel blue top that I'd

bought at Lago to go with my new Layton's Corners jeans. That shirt

was lying someplace. His weights were arranged on the floor in

order of size, his desk had only one small pile of papers on top of

it, unlike any desk that I'd ever had, and his keyboard was

precisely aligned with the front of his computer. It looked like an

old B&W ad, with everything in apple-pie order around the brand-new

PC. The place was so peaceful, I was afraid to move. My hand

reached down idly to the two big boots that were standing at

attention next to the bed. I picked one up, and my face looked back

at me from the shiny leather, with the hint of a scuff running over

it . . . This boot already needs another shine, I thought,

balancing the heel on my dick and feeling the little quiver that

always means that something has struck an erotic nerve. I'd never

done a thing like that, but maybe later . . . if there was a

later . . . I could find a way to take care of that scuff.

I returned the boot to its duty station. Now the only sign

of disorder was the strand of dark hair falling over Mike's face,

and his chest rising and falling automatically, under his creamy

flesh. Which was strange, I thought, because his face and his neck

were tanned like an athlete's. People that far north didn't have

much chance, I supposed, to get brown anywhere else. They could

fish and hunt and hike and snowboard and all that stuff, but it

wasn't exactly sunning yourself on Fire Island. Anyway, you

wouldn't need color on a chest like that . . .

Then I noticed it: the long narrow scar on the right side

of his belly. It was the only ugly thing about him, and naturally

that made it fascinating. It showed how beautiful the rest of him

was. I wished that I'd brought my sketchbook. I would have loved

to draw his picture, the way he looked right then. My hand started

to trace the scar . . . and his eyes suddenly opened.

"Hey! What's goin on?" It was as if he'd surprised a

criminal breaking into his house.

"Nothing," I said. "Just looking. Appendix?"

"Yeah right. So what?" He was angry, that was for sure.

It was obvious he'd decided that he had to be perfect, and he deeply

resented the scar. If he'd gotten it in a war or a fight or

something, I figured he wouldn't mind, but because it was something

that just went wrong with his body, without any good reason, he was

mad that I'd even notice it. Then he grinned, like he'd decided he

was out of line and he was sorry about the whole thing. He grabbed

me and pulled my head down to the place where his cock was already

sticking up. "Anyway," he said, "your appendix is just something

extra. I've still got all the stuff that counts." And that, as

I've said, was true.

So we fucked again and we fell asleep again, and then we

woke up and showered together in his cramped little bathroom, and we

walked out of his apartment hand in hand, till we got down to the

street where the other people were. "So," he said. "What should we

do today?"

Great! I thought. It wasn't a one-night stand.

"Whatever you want," I said. "I've got all the time in the

world."

I regretted that right away. The last thing you want to do

is let a new guy think that you'd rather be with him than anything

else you could possibly have in mind. And you can't take it back,

once you've made your confession. All you can do is try to switch

the subject.

"But what about you?" I went on. "You on vacation, too?"

I'd already told him who I was and what I thought I was doing so far

from my business address.

"Sort of," he said. We were walking through the door of the

neighborhood diner. He nodded to the waitress and we sat down at

one of the plastic covered tables. "I'm off work for a few weeks."

I must have done something to indicate that I wondered

whether he really had a job, so right away he looked serious and

started explaining it all conscientiously. "My work takes me a long

way away, Daniel, and when I get my time off, I come back here to

Windigo. I know my apartment's not much of a place, but it's just

for the times when I'm not at work."

"You take your vacations here in Superior?"

"We call them `leaves' in my business. But sure, why not?

I guess if you're from Superior, like I am, you want to keep the

feeling that you've come back home. A few years ago, this old lady

died, over in White Jacket, and she was 94, and she'd never been

out of the state, not once in her life. She was born in Superior,

she went to college in Superior, she taught school in Superior, and

finally she died in Superior. Froze to death, trying to get to her

garage."

"Froze to death!"

"Sure. It was February. She slipped and fell. She

couldn't get up. They found her eight days later."

"Jesus! What a climate."

"You're right about that. But I don't see why I

can't `vacation' here, if I want to. I'm from Spearpoint, myself."

He looked at me for a second, as if I would naturally know what he

meant, the way people in New York always think that other people

naturally know what they mean when they say that they come from New

Rochelle or something. Of course, I'd never heard of Spearpoint.

"Well," he continued, noticing the problem, "Spearpoint's

not much of a town. It's way down in Iron County. Full of Swedes

and Finns, like every other town in Superior." I was surprised at

the disgust I heard in his voice.

"I've noticed that. But what's the matter with Swedes and

Finns?"

"Nothing, I guess. I'm one myself. A Swede, that

is. `Neele' is actually `Nilsson.' I don't know why my grandfather

changed his name. It's not like the neighbors can't remember who

you really are. Spearpoint is definitely not a place where you're

allowed to get . . . different, in any important way. You know what

I mean?"

"I can imagine." That must be something, all right--growing

up gay in a little burg in southern Superior.

"There's nothing in Spearpoint for me now. I never go

home. Not since my parents passed away. I did go to San Francisco

once."

"Really!"

"Didn't like it. Of course, they've got a lot of nice-

looking guys out there, but you can see guys like that in Superior,

too. Obviously." He gave me another one of those big, sexy grins

that would have looked phony on anybody else. "And I like all the

outdoor stuff. Hiking. Fishing. Hunting." Under the table, his

boot came confidently to rest on my sneaker. "Everything's right

here, when you think about it, Daniel."

"Thanks, Mike," I said, flexing a muscle or two, just to let

him know that I felt the weight "But what's your job, anyway?"

"Nothing special. I like it, but it's nothing real big. I

don't mean that it's not important or anything, but it isn't

something that. . . something you'd see in the news. Only it's a

job that's real easy to stereotype, and I don't want you to

stereotype me, Daniel." Then, very solemn: "That gets in the way,

you know."

"Yeah, I know. In a way, I'm a stereotype too. The

stereotyped artist."

"No you're not," he said, giving me that terrific

smile. "You're the famous New York City artist. But for now, let's

just say that my own job is classified. I'll tell you eventually.

Or you'll figure it out."

I wondered what I thought about "eventually." Was I

starting to feel trapped? The answer was yes. Trapped so fast?

No, that was ridiculous. I needed to be free of feelings like

that. Mike and I were just getting started.

"You're in the military, aren't you?" I asked. That's what

he acted like. That's what he looked like, too. After all, a lot

of military officers have jobs where they don't have to restrict

themselves to really short haircuts, and the hair was the only

difference that I could see between Mike and the occasional military

guy I'd encountered before. Offhand, I couldn't remember the last

time I'd met one, but I remembered a certain way that they swung

their hips. And the posture was a dead give-away. Not to mention

the secrecy he carried around with him. Nothing weird or blatant,

just the sense of some other life. An aversion to showing what

didn't have to be shown. Talking last night, he'd learned a lot

more about me than I'd learned about him, even though he was the one

who had taken command. "My name's Mike. Michael Neele."

"No, I'm not gonna tell you what I do," he said. "But

you're right, there's a lot of military up here. More than you'd

think. It's because these mountains are so old. Old and hard and

empty. You can tuck almost anything away in the state of

Superior. Records. Training. Tracking systems. Whole lotta

things. You know that movie `When Worlds Collide'? It's also a

book--I've read it."

"You mean the one where some star is passing too close to

the earth, and the earth is gonna be destroyed? So they put people

into a rocketship and shoot it off to the nearest planet or

something, so they can recreate the social order?"

"Yeah, that's it. Certain special people. The ones who can

make a new world of their own. But do you know where they shoot the

rocket from? In the book, anyway? It's Superior. They do it from

Superior. Just a few miles down the road from here. It's because

these mountains are so old. Old and strong and . . . secret." He

crinkled his face up, playacting the mysterious stranger.

"Spooky."

"Yeah," he said. "And I'll show you all the spooky

secrets." He looked around. There was no one else in the breakfast

room. Then he gave me a kiss, wet and heavy, and a big, firm

grope.

"Good." I said. "I want to know them all. You'll be my

native guide."

"My pleasure. And sometime I'll tell you about my job.

It's not spooky at all, really. It's very straightforward. Like

me."

"Too bad!" I said. "But what do you want me to see today?"

That afternoon, I checked out of my hotel and into Mike's

place. For the next few weeks we were with each other all the

time. We made love every night. We made love every morning. We

made love in the woods. We made love in the mountains. We took

down our trousers and shivered and made love on the beach of Lake

Superior. We went to ghost towns and abandoned copper mines and

deserted opera houses. We hiked to Mike's favorite stream, where I

tried to fish until Mike started laughing so hard that we had to

give up and have sex on the bank. And somebody kept Mike's boots

well shined. . . .

Windigo was as far from New York, in every way, as you could

possibly get--"as far from New York," Mike said, "as the insides of

a cow." And Mike was as different from everyone I knew in New York

as the figures in my first "Triple Cross" pictures had been from

real people. If anybody in New York had known where I was, I was

sure they'd be asking, "What do you DO in a place like that?" But

we had plenty to do, and I wasn't taking any calls. It didn't

matter that we had no "social life." At first I thought that I'd

meet Mike's friends in Windigo, but there weren't any friends. He

knew a lot of people--the bartender at the Lighthouse, and all the

waitresses around town ("I hate to cook for myself-- I had enough of

that when I went to Superior State"), and a guy that we ran into on

the street and Mike introduced as the head of the county library.

But they weren't friends. I knew he had friends at work, because he

used to mention things they said about hunting and kayaking and so

on--they all seemed to be athletic guys like him. Of course those

guys weren't around in Windigo. But I was, and I was happy to have

him all to myself. It was great. It was like we were living on an

island all our own.

And again, we had plenty to do by ourselves. Just renting a

movie from the tired old video shack down the street from Mike's

place was a major event for us. Just the basic routine of eating

and showering and fucking and sleeping was a world in itself; we

didn't need any more than the basics. It was only strange when you

thought about it, how lonely it seemed to be. But then it seemed

like there was suddenly too much, instead of too little; like

everything had gotten multiplied by two . . . I guess that's the

way that lovers often feel at first. A little strange. A little

eerie. To me, it was kind of the same feeling I'd gotten when I was

wandering around the state alone, the feeling that there was more to

what I was looking at than met my eye, that the walls weren't walls,

but only stage sets with somebody else behind them, moving them

around, and that there were probably more rooms and walls behind

them, too--the walls of a theater or something like that, with me

playing my part on the stage and other guys out there in the

darkness, watching my performance. Well, every artist has a taste

for drama. So now I had Mike with me on the stage, but that made it

more, in a way, because it was both of us doing our thing on the

stage and both of us watching ourselves from the audience, like two

guys sitting together, watching a rented movie . . . Well, I said

to myself, talk about thinking in stereotypes . . . The Two

Lovers. Boy Meets Boy. All the World's a Stage. It was even more

stereotyped than The Artist Life. No wonder you feel like you're

playing a part.

The bad part was knowing that the performance had to end.

Mike's leave was running out, and that was more than enough to make

you feel like there was something watching you, right around the

corner. At least I felt that way. Mike refused to discuss

it. "Can't you leave it alone?" he said. "I'll be back in the

spring, Daniel."

"Spring! That's practically a lifetime away!"

"You're always exaggerating. Is that what you artists are

like?" He smiled when he said it, but I knew he was irritated.

Still, I couldn't control how I felt. And why should I? I had a

right to think about the future. After all, I was the older guy.

It was my job to think about things like that.

"Maybe," I said. "But suppose I'm not around in the

spring. I don't plan to stay here and wait for you."

"Nobody told you to. You can go wherever you want to,

Danny. Just be back here on the first of May."

"Like I say, suppose I'm not around. I'm not making any

promises." It was a childish thing to say, but I was mad, mad about

him giving that order, and madder about him going away. I didn't

care whether he had a job. I didn't want him to go.

"You'll be here," he said, and he gave me a look that meant

he didn't want to hear any objections. So I didn't say anything

more. He didn't get mad often, and when he did, he got mad about

other situations or other people. He never got mad at me. Except

once. And that really shook me up.

I suppose you've guessed by now that as far as politics

goes, I wasn't the kind of guy who really cared much about it. It

never occurred to me that Mike could be any different, even if he

was a soldier or a spy or whatever he was. But then I found out

otherwise.

Superior

By Josh Ryan

Part 6

THIS IS A STORY FOR ADULTS AND ABOUT ADULTS.

It happened when we were walking over to the video place.

There's not much going on in Windigo after the tourists leave, and

the tourists had left several weeks before. When you looked down

Main Street, past the courthouse dome, all you saw was the old brick

pavement and the old brick stores and a posse of kids straggling

along, lugging their skateboards. One of the kids stopped and

pulled a pack of cigarets out of his pants; then he moved on, and we

heard his board clomping over the bricks and the whack whack whack

of his hand tamping the end of the package--whack whack whack,

whack whack whack, endlessly, stupidly, mindlessly, like endless,

moronic self-applause as he clopped along slowly, riding his board.

Clouds of smoke rose up from the other guys too. Then they all let

their boards drop on the pavement and took off like pigeons,

whizzing down both sides of the street and passing us in a cloud of

smoke that wasn't entirely from cigarets. It was then you could

see that they weren't exactly "kids." Those spikes and dreds had

been growing for quite a while. They were 19 or 20, easy. I turned

to watch them, thinking about the guys in my sketchbook. . . . One

of them flashed a peace sign--sarcastic, I thought, but I couldn't

tell. And didn't care. In the distance, I heard them clattering

down the side street. There was one of them that made me think I

could sharpen up one of those drawings . . .

"I'm sorry you saw that," Mike said. "I know you wanted to

get away from New York."

"Huh?"

"Superior doesn't have a lot of trash like that--not

anymore. I'm sorry you had to see any of it."

"No problem," I said. That one guy was definitely

useful . . .

"I mean, that's why we have the D.O.S."

"D.O.S? Have I heard of that?"

"Probably. It's a big thing up here. Which it ought to

be. The Defense of Superior Act."

"Defense?" I was confused. Was Superior under

attack? "Is that some kind of 9/11 thing?"

"No, no . . . I'm sorry, I guess there's no reason for you

to follow politics in the state of Superior. And I guess the title

of that law is a little bit over the top. You may have heard-- we

got a new governor here about ten years ago. Governor Saarinen."

He paused. I continued to look blank. "Usually I can't

remember who the governor of New York is, Mike."

Now it was his turn to stare. Obviously, there were some

things that were important to him that weren't important to me.

"Well," he continued, "Governor Saarinen got elected on an

anti-crime ticket, and he got the D.O.S. passed, and since then,

crime has been WAY down."

"How come?"

"The whole philosophy," he said, "is that it doesn't matter

what the laws are, so long as they're strictly enforced. I mean,

what difference does it make if you have a million laws, and you

don't enforce them, because the sentences aren't strict enough or

the courts take forever or the bad guys are always getting out on

appeal . . . whatever."

"No difference, I guess. . . . In a way, at least . . .

But on the other hand . . ."

"And that's especially true when it comes to young males.

Did you know that if someone is convicted of a felony, any felony,

before the age of 25, he stands an 80% chance of being convicted of

at least 3 more felonies?"

"No, I didn't know that." I'd never heard Mike talk like

this before. I mean, usually he'd just state an opinion about

something. That was that. But now it was like he was insisting I

agree, be convinced. It was like he was another person, another man

who'd been waiting inside his body, ready to jump out at me when

something triggered the event . . ..

"Well, it's true. So what the D.O.S. did was to strengthen

penalties, especially penalties for so-called minor infractions,

like drugs and so on. Vandalism. Malicious destruction of

property. Pilfering. You know what I mean."

"Yes, I guess so . . ."

"But the real thing was, it streamlined the courts. No more

waiting forever while some lawyer works the case. No more endless

appeals. The way we have it now, there's an officer of appeals

right in the courtroom, and if he thinks that there's any reason why

a case should be reviewed by a higher bench, he sends it forward

immediately. If he doesn't, he certifies the result, and it's

virtually impossible for any lawyer to pry it out and get one of

those interminable appeals things going. It's a thousand to one.

Before, lawyers would come into court and do nothing but stall and

file writs and appeal and finally their clients would get off with

practically nothing in the way of sentences, just because the

politicians wouldn't do anything to unclog the courts. Now,

everything's different. Most of the creeps don't even stand for a

jury trial. They know that their best deal is to throw themselves

on the mercy of the court."

"I see," I said. I had to find something to say. "And what

if there's a violation of civil rights?"

"Civil rights?" he laughed. "Not very likely. After all,

everybody in Superior is white. Virtually everybody. So much for

discrimination. And the whole point of the D.O.S. was to get rid of

these phony `rights.' I mean, I'm a liberal myself, but how

many `rights' cases are real, and how many of them are just ways of

keeping the lawyers in business and the crooks out of jail?"

"I know what you mean," I said. He had a point. Any

ambulance chaser who'd managed to pass the bar could make a fortune

in the criminal justice system, just by billing the state for all

his phony appeals. Even NPR said that. At least I think it did.

"It was funny--after the D.O.S. went into effect, a lot of

lawyers migrated south, if they thought they could pass the bar in

Wisconsin, that is. And the jail population plummeted.

Plummeted! The sheriff used to say that Windigo needed to build a

new public safety facility. There weren't enough cells for people

awaiting trial. And so forth and so on. Now it's obvious--we don't

need a new one. Of course, you do get a few misdemeanor cases that

can't get bail, and some felony cases that for one reason or

another . . . ."

He rattled off some more statistics about arrests and crime

and so on. Finally I interrupted. I was getting dazed.

"It's a good thing that the authorities haven't found out

what we've been doing in bed. I suppose we'd be in prison right

now."

"Pardon me?" he said. He was genuinely puzzled. "Oh, I get

it. No, there's none of that victimless crime stuff here in

Superior. This is still a liberal state. Of course, if you come in

here peddling drugs or something, that's not considered a victimless

crime, but as far as any gay stuff goes . . . Our lieutenant

governor is gay, you know."

"No, I didn't. That's good." I guess I was glad to hear

that.

"And really, the D.O.S. is in everybody's interest."

We'd come to a halt. We were standing on the street,

staring absent-mindedly at the old brick church across from the

courthouse. There was a bunch of graffiti painted next to the

door. It was an A in a circle, with "ANNARCY" painted underneath

it. Painted in red. "I mean," he went on, "do you really want to

look at crap like THAT every day? Do you really want kids to grow

up without any sense of responsibility? Without any discipline?"

Whew! I guessed I'd better not tell him about the coke in my

trunk. He was far too idealistic.

"Come on," I said. "Kids will be kids."

"What's that?" he said.

"I said, kids will be kids. You can't prosecute everybody

who . . . "

"I suppose you think that shit over there is `art,'" he

said. He was pointing at the "ANNARCY" sign.

"Well," I replied, "in a way . . ."

"In a way. In a way. Everything's always `in a way' with

you. You're an artist. But why does that mean you can't make up

your mind about things?" I let that pass. I was older than he

was. Let him get the rebellion out of his system. But I didn't

like the way the conversation was going. If you wanted to call it a

conversation.

"Well, what would you do with those kids?"

"I'd send them to prison."

"Prison! A bunch of kids?"

"They're probably 20 years old. They're hanging out, doing

drugs, doing shit like this. And they're obviously not working.

They're parasites. And they're ruining the community. For

everyone."

He looked at me, demanding that I agree. I looked back at

him. Somebody needed to get control of this.

"Anyway," he said, "they won't be kids for long, once

they've been in prison for a while."

I'd finally had it.

"That's a cruel thing to say, Michael. Maybe what these

kids need is a job. Or a good role model. Some people take time to

develop. . . . "

"And some people," he said, looking coldly in my face, to

make sure that I knew exactly whom he was talking about, "never

develop. They stay kids. Kids for the rest of their lives. And

you know why? Because nobody ever insisted that they get a sense of

discipline. They just want to be `free.' They just want to `develop

their own potential.' There are a lot of grown-up kids like that.

And a lot of them are gay."

I knew I should have been angrier than I was. But there was

something about Mike's anger that turned me on. Maybe that's crazy,

but I didn't want to lose a man who could make himself as intense as

that, about something as stupid as fuckin criminology. "Look,

Michael," I said, "I can see you're upset. Let's just forget about

it. We'll talk about it later." I immediately felt sorry I had

said that. I was being way too much like a parent.

"You see how you are," he shot back. "As soon as somebody

wants you to decide what you think, to say something definite, you

stop the conversation. You're on vacation, all right. A permanent

vacation."

"You're right," I replied. "I do want to stop the

conversation. I like you, and I don't want to break up with you."

For a long time he didn't say anything. He was looking down

at the sidewalk. "I don't want to break up with you, either," he

said. "I like you too. A lot. I just wish . . ."

"You just wish that we were the same. That I saw everything

the way you do. That's it, isn't it?" I'd been angry, and I'd been

scared, but now I had that moment of clarity. "You're more of an

artist than I am, aren't you?" I said. "Everything around you has

to be perfect."

He looked up at me. There were tears in his eyes, but his

jaw was clenched. "That's right," he said. "I do. I don't think

that makes me an artist, of course." Now he was smiling. "But why

shouldn't you try to make things perfect? If something's bad, why

wouldn't you want to fix it?"

I didn't have any answer for that. I just moved

on. "There's nobody like you," I said.

"There's nobody like you, either. But you can't just drift

for the rest of your life, Danny. You've got to find something

definite."

"I think I've found it," I said, slipping my hand between

his belly and his belt. I'd guessed right. His dick was as hard as

rock.

"Me too," he said.

"I wish you'd tell me what you do for a living, Mike."

"If I did, I'd have to kill you."

"You're awful funny."

"Sorry, lame joke. But you'll find out what I do. It's no

big deal, Daniel. In the meantime . . . Look, I think we need to

get you that ride on the Lake. The boats aren't gonna run much

longer. Where would you like to go?"

"Well . . . If we're not going to Isle Royale . . . "

"Sorry, Daniel. Too far out Too late in the year. It

takes a really big boat." He said it abruptly, and with

satisfaction, like "the year" was a good excuse for taking control.

"Then I say . . . Pictograph Point."

"Done. We'll go tomorrow. We'll probably be the only ones

on the tour." He was certain of everything, that guy.

The night after we had our fight, Mike had some business to

clear up on his email, so I waited in bed, trying to read

the "Superior Sentinel." Ordinarily, I would have dozed right off.

This time, I kept glancing up and watching Mike. He was sitting in

front of the monitor like a convict peering out of his little barred

window, and I had those eerie thoughts you have when you realize

how much of your life is locked up, somehow, inside the body of

another man. Then I remembered that stupid conversation, and I got

mad all over again. Mike had got me on his chessboard and made me

his opponent; and his moves always won, of course, because it was

his game, his little toy army marching back and forth across the

black and white spaces. . . . No, Mike was meaning too much to me.

After all, there were other things in life. . . .

I dropped the newspaper quietly on the floor and reached

under the pile of stuff I'd moved up from the car. There it was--my

sketchbook. It felt good, just feeling its cover again. It was a

little scarred and ragged, but still firm to the touch. I'd missed

all that.

Quickly I anchored the book in my crotch and started

drawing. I'd never sketched Mike before, but there he was--the Mike

I'd seen that afternoon: Mike the slave master, kicking a naked man

into the bars of his hootch. Hootch? Where did that word come

from? A word for "cage"--must have heard it someplace. Anyway, the

slave had made unwanted advances to the head of the punishment

squad. Now he needed to be reminded of where he was and why he'd

been sent to the isolation room. He was a criminal, swept off the

streets of Windigo, penned for life in a slave den run by big Mike

Neele. I drew Mike's face as I'd seen it that day--certain and

firm, condemning freely without needing to understand. And the

other face, the face on the kid in the hootch, that must be the face

that I was wearing, while Mike punished me--the kind of face that

wants to evade, to protect itself, and ends up getting fucked every

time. . . .

But wait, I thought. That's not why I got the sketchbook

out. I got it out to turn things the other way around. So this

time it was Mike that was crawling into the hootch, and the

officer's boot was chasing Mike's butt and shouting insults at

Mike's head. There was a look of stunned surprise on Mike's face as

the former slaveboy, suddenly not so naive as he'd been before,

cuffed his limbs together and fixed him to the bars of his

cage . . . Art has its satisfactions. But the surprise on Mike's

face . . . where had I seen it before? I seemed to remember someone

looking exactly like that, someone completely innocent, completely

unaware that one minute he could be standing there in command, and

the next minute he'd be down on the floor, groveling under

somebody's dick . . . .

I wondered: the two drawings that I had just made--were they

alternatives, and I would have to choose between them, or were they

two episodes in the same story? Interesting. Something to pursue.

Then I saw it. The face that Mike wore in my drawings was the face

that Steve had worn in real life.

I felt sick--but there it was, unmistakable. The same

neat, determined mouth; the same square, hard chin; the same long,

slender face; the same big, generous eyes. There was the notation

I'd just penciled in beside them: "green and tough." Those were

Steve's eyes. It was Steve. I flipped forward through the book.

Some of those drawings . . . yes, there was a guy in those drawings

who'd been getting a lot like Mike. And Mike . . . I flipped back

again, to the drawings I'd just made of him. Yes, the look on his

face in that second picture, that was the look that Steven Fay had

on his face at the moment I knocked him down, there in the locker

room. . . . Which was the moment before he turned and started

kicking my ass . . .

"Hey! Ready for me to crawl inside?" I looked up. Mike

was standing above me. "Hey, babe, sorry I startled you. What's

the matter?"

It was strange that I hadn't noticed it before, the way he

looked like Steve. Steve as he was . . . or as he would have been,

later on, if Steve and I . . .

I snapped the sketchbook closed. "Nothing, Mike, nothing.

Just doodling." I kissed him and pulled him on top of me. His dick

was lying on mine, and it was hard and heavy. I knew that in 60

seconds he would turn me over, and that in another 60 seconds he

would be coming up my ass. Things were moving faster now. "Mike,

let me ask you a question."

"Shoot. I'm just gettin comfortable here."

"Ummm . . . Me too. . . . But listen: suppose you found

out that there was somebody in the world that was exactly like you."

"Well, there is. And I'm lying on top of him."

"Seriously."

"I'm being serious. It's like looking in a mirror, babe.

Haven't you noticed how much we look like each other?"

"We're not that much alike. Not really. Not even when I

was your age, if that makes any sense to you."

"Because you were a little wimp back then."

"Right. That's what I told you. But listen. Suppose there

was a guy who was just like you--same body, same attitudes,

same . . . perspective . . . "

"There wouldn't be. Because if he was the same as me, he'd

BE me, and there wouldn't be anybody LIKE me anywhere around."

"I guess that's true. I guess so. But suppose you did meet

a person like that. How did he get that way? Did it just happen?

Was it some kind of karma or something? What's the story?"

I'd never told him what I was working on, or that I needed a

story, or any of that stuff; I never told anybody that kind of

thing. You waste your material that way, talking it out. But now I

wanted to know what he'd say. I could see him giving me that

disappointed look, like he was trying to decide something, something

not very pleasant. "You're really a flake after all, aren't you?"

his eyes seemed to say. Then he forgave me, and his eyes were

sparkling down at me again, and his lips were parted in a smile.

"All I know, I'm in charge of THIS story," he said. He

reached over and switched off the light. "Now turn the hell over."

And that was the first time I hadn't completely enjoyed being fucked

by him.

Superior

By Josh Ryan

Part 7

THIS IS A STORY FOR ADULTS AND ABOUT ADULTS.

The next day, we took the boat to Pictograph Point, and he

was right; we were the only ones on it. The boat docked at a little

pier, and a path wound up through the pine woods to the Indian

paintings under the lip of the rock. "Virgin forest," Mike said, in

a deep, stagy voice. "Who knows what's lurking inside there right

now, watching us?"

"Probably just virgins, like me."

"Maybe. Let's go find out." He had his arm around my neck,

pulling me off the path.

"Let's see the pictures first. Then we can get lost in the

woods."

"Oh . . . all right."

Marching across the cliff were hundreds of tiny paintings--

wonderful, peculiar things, little figures and boxes and shiny

flecks of white that might either be stars or the eyes of something

coming out of the dark . . .. What would those prehistoric people

think, I wondered, if they knew that their art was something for

guys like me and Mike to gawk at, a thousand years afterwards? I

gawked, anyway. Mike waited till I was through.

"I've got to admit it," he said. "I don't see what's so

special. There's a lot of them, but they're just little stick

figures. Stick figures and things that look like diagrams. They all

look alike to me."

"Maybe that's the way you and I look," I said, "to the

Manito."

"The Great Spirit. You've been reading that guidebook

again. The Manito and the Windigo."

"I think it's interesting."

"Not as interesting as reality," he said, grabbing me again

and pulling me toward him. "Listen, we've got 20 minutes before the

boat has to leave . . . " He was holding my dick like a leash and

dragging me into the woods. "Let's go visit the virgins."

We were putting our clothes back on when we heard the first

warning whistle.

"Don't worry," he said. "They won't leave without us.

We're too important." He looked back up at the pictographs. "I

still don't get it. Those aren't pictures of people. They're just

a lot of little black outlines, with little white outlines inside of

them."

"In case you haven't noticed it," I said, "the guys on the

Manhood site that you like so well, they're not exactly people

either." Mike didn't blush very often, and I liked to make him do

it. He was always making himself so direct about sex, you could

tell he was a prude at heart. And he did like the Manhood

site. "Literally, they're just a lot of electronic impulses. And

those `outlines' you mention are arranged with a lot better sense of

form. The way they're arranged--that's order, that's architecture,

staging. And the combination of blue, black, and white is very

imaginative, given the location, on that tall sandstone cliff. When

the light strikes the rock from the right side . . . "

So I explained what a painter would think of the whole

thing, and Mike listened and smiled, and the tour boat blew its horn

the second time.

"Thanks," he said. "Now I know something I didn't know.

But I still don't see why you say that the `architecture' is like

a `story' . . ."

"Well, if the figures just straggled along by themselves up

there, nobody could tell whether there was any significance to what

they were doing. Look. If you were walking along and you saw

another guy, just a guy in the crowd, shoot a gun and kill somebody

else, you wouldn't understand the significance of the event; it

would just be something that happened . . . "

"Not to me it wouldn't. I'd know I was watching a crime."

"Really? I don't think so. You wouldn't understand what

kind of thing was going on. You wouldn't know the story. You

wouldn't even know if there WAS a story. Maybe it was just an

accident, a meaningless occurrence. But if you saw it on a stage,

inside the walls of a theater, you would know that somebody had

selected the events and the characters and had formed it into

something significant, like a . . . work of art, like those figures

up there. Something that people took the trouble to arrange in

patterns, put lines around, or walls . . . So that even if we don't

know exactly what the story is . . . Christ! I wish they wouldn't

keep blowing that horn. . . . "

"It's a funny thing, I was always on time before you came

along. But you'll have to complete my education at some other time."

I knew he was kidding, but he was serious too. That serious

tone always got to me. Only a guy who's really young likes to act

as mature as Mike did.

"Sometimes," I said, "you make me feel like a cradle

robber. And sometimes, I think it's the other way around."

"Well, you do have some growing up to do," he said. "But

don't worry about that. I like you the way you are."

"Oh, you do, do you? You're not concerned that I'm ten

years older?"

"No," he said. "Except sometimes, but then it's a good

feeling . . . I mean, sometimes I think you must have been waiting

for me all these years, shadowing me, watching for me to grow up. I

guess I'm like any other guy; I've always felt there was someone out

there someplace, waiting for me . . . You must have felt that way

yourself."

"Not till I got to Superior." Which was true, in a way.

"I love you," he said, wrapping his arm around my neck

again and squeezing it--playful, like a kid wrestling with his

friend in a locker room. It was a struggle for me to pry myself

loose . . . Then the warning whistle blew for the last time.

"Mike," I said hurriedly, "when we meet next spring, let's

do it in Chicago. My treat. We could visit the museums, take in

some shows . . . " I suddenly had the feeling that I wanted to get

away from Superior. Get us both away. After all, what kind of

future did we have in Windigo?

We had reached the pier; the kid in the blue and white

tourist-boat uniform had seen us coming down and was already

unloosing the bow line from the piling. He was anxious to leave.

Mike stopped and looked at me. "I guess that's something that we

could do. Yes, we could plan for that."

That was easy, I thought, as we climbed over the gunwale.

Now, at least, I'm taking control. "Control" was an unexpected

word. But if Mike and I were going to be together . . . there would

naturally be the issue of control. It was clear that I wanted him,

that I didn't want to part with him. If that was true, someone had

to be in control, and it had better be me.

That's what I was thinking, as the boat moved away from the

pier and Mike stood next to me, looking out across the cold,

sparkling lake. And that night, my dream, which had stopped the day

I met Mike, came back to me.

There was a big room with green walls. Green steel walls.

One window, very tall, like an ass crack running straight up between

the cheeks, straight and barred. In the center of the room was a

wooden desk, with a man seated behind it. There was a sheet of

paper on the desk. I knew, because I was the man who was seated

there.

Then I looked up, and I saw Mike facing me on the other side

of the desk. It was Mike, all right, but it was a different form of

Mike; it was Mike presented as a geometric object. He was naked and

smooth and white, and his hands were clasped behind his neck, and he

was staring straight ahead, motionless. His shadow ran up the wall,

black as a sundial's prong on the glaring green surface.

"As I was saying, Mr. Niskanen . . ." It was a deep, male

voice, coming from behind my shoulder. But somehow I couldn't see

who was talking. I could have turned, but I wouldn't. Or I would

have turned, but I couldn't. That about exhausts the possibilities,

I thought; but it didn't make any difference. The voice kept

talking.

". . . the prisoner, Mr. Neele, is suffering from

regression-aggression syndrome, complicated by a chronic control

malfunction, with over-control constantly resulting in under-

control. And vice versa. It amounts to a systemwide failure of

responsibility." The body in front of me quivered slightly, as if

it had been standing in the same position too long. But the eyes

never wavered. They were staring at me with no sign of recognition.

"We have employed the usual discipline," the voice

continued. "To illustrate . . . Mr. Neele, you are to remain at

Display position while performing one rotation. I repeat, one

rotation."

The body immediately began to rotate. It was like one of

those revolving cranes that you see on construction sites--an

upright and two wings, circling flawlessly. The backside came into

view: tight, smooth butt; slender waist, almost elegant; then above

the waist--line after line of scars, thick wide scars barring the

torso, black as convict stripes against the smooth white skin.

The body came full circle, and stopped in front of me. The

eyes stared blindly.

"Why are you showing me this?" I demanded.

"Mr. Neele is your responsibility, Mr. Niskanen. You are

the one in control."

"No!" I shouted. "No, I am not. I never wanted him

punished."

"That is a lie, Mr. Niskanen."

"Why would I want him punished? Michael Neele is the most

responsible person I have ever met."

"If he were, Mr. Niskanen," the voice suggested in a

speculative way, "why would he be linked with you?"

I was silent.

"But he is only 25 years old," I said.

"There is apparently much you do not know about your friend,

Mr. Niskanen. Or much you have forgotten. He is both younger and

older than you pretend."

"No! I'm not pretending anything. For once, I'm not

playing a role."

"Perhaps not, Mr. Niskanen. But you are now free to choose

the roles. Select the box you prefer."

I looked down at the paper in front of me. There were two

columns printed on the sheet, like the columns you see on a ballot.

On the left were two lines of words, one line above the other. On

the right were two square boxes, small black outlines, one black box

next to each of the black lines of words. At first I thought that

the boxes were empty. Then I saw . . . inside each of them someone

had drawn a tiny figure, a figure shaped like a man. His hands were

stretched out to the sides and his feet were splayed out to the

sides, and it was as if the sides of the box were pinning his hands

and his feet down onto the paper . . . It was as if the sides of the

boxes were made of steel, and the hands and the feet of the two

little men were locked into the little steel frames, and the men

were displayed like little captured bugs in a museum case . . . .

An odd use of art, I thought, but interesting . . .. When you

looked close enough, you started seeing their faces, and the

expressions on their faces . . . Unhappy? . . . Happy? . . . It

was hard to tell . . .

"Mr. Niskanen! It is time to select the box you prefer."

"I'm sorry," I said, looking at the lines of words on the

ballot. They seemed very small and distant. "I can't read what it

says. Which box is which?"

"The first box," the voice said indulgently, "locks Michael

Neele into your future. The second locks Michael Neele into your

past. Those are your choices, Mr. Niskanen."

"No present?" I asked. "I can't choose the present?"

"Present? The present cannot continue. The present is not

one of your choices."

"Listen," I said. "Who's writing this story?"

"You are, Mr. Niskanen. Even though you can't read the

words. And you have reserved only one more decision for yourself to

make."

What a relief! I thought. I was coming to the end.

I looked down, and I saw my hand draw a black X across the

small squirming figure in Box No. 1.

Instantly there was a crash of metal, the clash of steel

bars smashing down on me. My arms stuck out to my sides; my feet

splayed out to my sides, like the legs of an animal caught in a

trap. My arms and wrists were caught between the two squares of

steel folding together. Suddenly I had become two-dimensional: I

was a crucified bug, a noxious insect flattened between two slides

of glass.

"Mr. Henderson! Mr. Henderson!" I remembered that voice.

It was my lab partner back at Pierce, in senior bio. "Mr.

Henderson! Tell me again--what are we supposed to do with this bug

in here?" Now I was the bug. Then the black frame rose and began

to rotate; it was sliding into line with an endless row of square

black frames, each with an insect man displayed inside it, labeled

and numbered, an endless sequence of frames arranged in pairs, face

to face, for all eternity--and the insect man I saw in front of me

was Mike. The strange thing was, I was screaming, but my dick was

hard . . .

"HEY! HEY! WAKE UP! What's the matter, Danny? HEY!" Mike

was shaking me awake.

I felt his thick arms around me, locking me in, and the icy

air on the other side of his arms. It's cold in Superior on an

October night.

"Wha- ? What are you . . .Who are you . . . ?"

"It's Mike, Danny. Mike!"

"Oh . . . Oh, OK. I'm sorry, Mike. I . . . I guess it was

a dream. I had a dream."

"A bad dream. You were yelling your head off. What's goin

on?"

They were Mike's arms, holding me in. They were Mike's

eyes, looking into mine. Mike's legs were stroking my legs, Mike's

pecs were pressed against my pecs, Mike's dick was hardening against

my dick . . . . "The first locks Michael Neele into your future.

The second locks Michael Neele into your past. Those are your

choices . . ."

"Nothing," I whispered. "Nothing. But thanks. And I want

you to know . . . I want us to be together, no matter what happens."

"So do I," he said.

Superior

By Josh Ryan

Part 8

THIS IS A STORY FOR ADULTS AND ABOUT ADULTS.

Mike was leaving for his job on Thursday. I didn't know

where I was going. The tentative idea was to drop down to

Minneapolis. They must have an art museum there, and it was on the

way to the warm Southwest. It was about time I saw some sun. The

trees in front of the courthouse had already lost their leaves, and

there was frost on Mike's window every morning.

Anyway, I had to leave, and I decided to do it on Wednesday

night. I told him I couldn't stand to wait around for the long

goodbye, which was true, but my other reason was something I

couldn't tell him. Actually, the thing was . . . I just couldn't

stand to see myself standing there in front of Mike's apartment,

waving him goodbye, like a wife waving goodbye to her sailor

husband. I didn't leave New York to become a cliche like that. We'd

have.dinner on Wednesday, then I'd head out. I reserved a room for

the night in Ironwood, on the Wisconsin border. I figured that

would put me in Minneapolis by nightfall on Thursday. Minneapolis:

the sunny southland! Mike and I spent Wednesday morning getting my

gear together and stowing it in the car.

I have to admit, it gave me a chill to be leaving, with

nothing but email to connect us for the next six months. Mike said

he'd be out of reach of my cellphone, which didn't surprise me,

since so much of Superior was out of reach. And I didn't even know

if he'd be in Superior. He didn't seem to be much

concerned. "You've got your laptop," he said. "If you want to use

it." He knew I hadn't written to anybody since I'd left New York.

Whatever bills I ran up on the Visa card, my bank balance would

automatically take care of. That was all I needed. The first

month or so, I checked my messages, when I thought about it.

Mainly spam, with a few invitations to openings that I was glad I

was too far away to attend. No messages from Tommy--he had other

things to worry about, and he wasn't expecting to hear from me. The

same goes for Noel Marcusson. He did send me one message. The

subject line was "Off to Join the Circus," and the text was, "Good

luck! Call me when you return." I got the point. We'd had a fight

about my "leaving him in the lurch," "not supporting

sales," "indulging myself at the expense of others," and all the

rest of it. His idea was, come back right away and help me boost

your art. I told him my art didn't need any boosting, at least from

me. Nobody really liked me anyway. He'd do better by himself. And

get off my case--I'll tell you I'm back in New York when I'm back in

New York. It was quite a fight, but I was bound to win. Noel's

email was his concession speech. There were no more personal

messages. When I was staying with Mike, I didn't bother to take my

laptop out of the car.

"It'll take me a while to get my connections back," he said,

picking the laptop off the floor of the trunk and stowing it

carefully between two bags of clothes. He's like a scoutmaster, I

thought, or a boy scout. One of the two. "Be Prepared"--wasn't

that the boy scout motto? "I know from past experience," he

continued.

"How come?"

"Well, I . . . Hey, what's in this bag?"

Christ, that's the coke!

"Detergent. Last of the laundry detergent. You can't

always find somebody to do your laundry when you're driving around

the country," he continued.

"No, I guess not . . . " He wiggled the plastic bag into a

place where it wouldn't spill. "Anyway, I don't want to use the

company email. Not for personal messages. It wouldn't be right.

And ours are double personal." The smile was still

irresistible. "Getting the connection is a little bit complicated;

takes some time. And I want to upgrade it, anyway. Besides, I'll

be pretty busy, the first couple weeks back on the job."

"Too busy for me?"

"Too busy for you. But I'm not too busy now."

We galloped upstairs and hit the sack. Afterwards, it

seemed that the afternoon just leaked away. The day had started

gloomy and cold; then it turned to rain. We sat by Mike's window

and watched the big waves hitting the seawall at the foot of the

hill. Mike made coffee and we talked about nothing, the way you

talk when you're about to part. Then we ate dinner, at the one

place that was still open down by the harbor, and we talked about

everything else but leaving. The day before, when Mike went out to

the post office, I'd taken a sheet of paper off his desk and drawn a

sketch of him, the way he sometimes seemed to me--a young boy from

the country, looking bashfully down at his boots, with just a hint

of his dick pushing up at his crotch. I pulled the sketch out of my

jacket and watched him blush and grin and blush again. He could be

bashful, all right. He was a complicated guy, who thought he was

simple. . . .

No one else came into the place. We were alone again.

"Whin yuh closin upp fer th' yir?" Mike asked the waitress.

That accent always amused me.

"Twunnyfursta th' munth," she said, putting the plates down

and turning back to the kitchen, polite, but sorry we were keeping

her from hibernation. "Noh point stayn ohpin whin thirs nohbuddy

left arown, eh?"

"October," I said, "and the town's closing up."

Mike squeezed my dick under the checkered tablecloth. "I'm

not," he said.

"I'm gonna miss your service," I said.

"Hey, you promised not to say goodbye. Don't you have any

discipline?" He was smiling, but he was serious, too. He was

right. I didn't have an oversupply of that commodity.

"OK, Mike. I'll work on that. Now let's eat."

We ate. And drank. Mike knew nothing about wine, and I was

teaching him the various kinds. Not that there was a lot to choose

from at the Cythera Grill ("The Best Grill in Town"). Like

everything else in Superior, it was neat and clean and backward. It

reminded me of one of those family trips I'd been victimized by.

There weren't many of them; my mother never wanted to go anyplace,

and my father just looked forward to getting home from the office.

So where was it? That trip to Philadelphia, maybe. The obligatory

trip to show the young man where the Country Was Born. I remembered

eating in a place like this, the best place in some little dump of a

town in Jersey. My father always ordered for everyone else. "And

for the young man . . . " I hated it. How in the hell did I get

here, I thought, looking around at the furnishings of the Cythera

Grill. The thick green carpet, the silly black and white checks on

the table, the heavy, daunting furniture, the booths that you had to

crawl into, like an animal crawling into its cage . . . It all

represented the height of elegance in Windigo. How did I get into a

place like this? I repeated.

But I didn't hate the Cythera Grill. It gave Mike and me

the last time we'd have together, the last time for a long long

time. Neither of us wanted to leave, so we finished two bottles.

Well, I finished them. I guess I was a lot more upset than I

thought I was.

The check came. I slapped down my credit card, and the

waitress asked for ID. I looked for my driver's license. Not in

its usual place in my wallet. Not anyplace in my jacket.

Hmmm . . . I wasn't panicked; it was somewhere. I was always

losing stuff. . . . But Mike looked worried.

"I'll get this one," he said, and the waitress made off with

his card. She was anxious to get home.

"I'm glad you did that," I said. "It'll keep you interested

in seeing me again. Because I'll pay you back, next spring."

"No you won't. This is my treat. I make a decent income,

you know." Suddenly he was a teenager, proud of how much he made.

"I know you do."

"And I'll drive your car back to my place."

"If you do that," I said, "I'll have to kill you."

Of course I was joking, but he wasn't.

"You're drunk," he said. "And you don't have your license."

"Thank you, sir. I'm glad the scoutmaster's lookin out for

me. But since you're so fuckin worried, here it is." After

fumbling around for five minutes, I'd finally pulled the license out

of one of those weird little compartments in my wallet. "Take a

look," I said. "Ain't he handsome?" The picture on the license

smiled up from the messy table. I'd always hated that picture, but

now it looked pretty good to me. I was drunk all right. Drunk and

depressed. I didn't want to leave, that was for sure. But why was

he giving me all this static?

Mike flushed, and said nothing. He wasn't happy, but he

didn't want to fight. He was too responsible to pick a fight on our

last night together. I wasn't, and I felt ashamed.

"I'm sorry, Mike. I didn't mean to put you down. That was

completely outta line. But listen, I can drive. It's not like I'm

dodging buses in New York. And look--the rain's stopped. Look at

those stars. I'll be fine. Really. Or `rilly,' in your dialect,

if you find that more convincing. Don't be mad; I'm kidding. Come

on, I'll drive you home."

"OK," he said, looking suspicious, but surrendering to the

torrent of words. Maybe he remembered that fight he started the

other day. Remembered, and was embarrassed to have let things get

so far out of control. "I don't want to fight with you, Danny. Not

now. Not ever." Another squeeze under the tablecloth. "Just be

careful, OK?"

"Of course I will."

And after we got in the car, I was really, really careful.

I must have been going about 15 miles an hour, just to make Mike

happy. I think he was relieved. He didn't have that disappointed

look anymore. I was perfect again. Or I was good enough. Good

enough to give me another chance. We made out in the car for a

while; then he got out and walked into his building. We never said

good-bye. We didn't need to.

I was happy when I pulled away from the curb, put on the

gas, and headed south. He loved me! And I loved him. What more do

you need? The rain started again, but that didn't matter. I was

too happy. The only thing I wanted was the Chicago station. Fuck!

Who changed the dial? Suddenly, a shape shot out of the trees, out

of that dirt road on my right. The motorcycle swerved into my path,

wobbled a moment . . . a head swiveled toward me, encased in black

plastic. . . . Christ, I thought, that guy must be scared! There

was no place to turn; there was nothing but trees, enormous black

shapes walled up on both sides of the thin white road. In a second

I would run him down . . .

CRASH! My bumper caught the first tree on my right. In the

split second when my car spun back toward him, I saw the cyclist

steady himself and jet away. Mission accomplished--he was gone. My

car stopped with its headlights pointing north, and I got out to

look at the damage.

Not as bad as I thought. A couple of window cracks, a shaky

fender, some other stuff that I didn't want to look at too

carefully . . . Just some scars, probably. I could make it to

Ironwood, and see about getting repairs in the morning. In the

morning, when I didn't feel so confused.

I had just gotten back in the driver's seat when another car

screeched to a stop. A light burst through my windshield..

"Awright! What's goin on here?"

It was a cop. A Windigo County cop. Two of them, in fact.

I started to tell my story, but all they wanted to see was

my driver's license. It was a good thing I'd located it, back at

the restaurant. I fumbled it out of my wallet, trying to explain,

but the cops weren't listening.

"Please get in the back seat, sir," one of them said,

jerking his thumb toward the cop car. "We'll take it from here."

"Wait," I said. "Am I being . . . Am I under . . . " I

couldn't quite think of that word. Boy, I thought, I am really

fucked up.

"Please, sir, get in the back of the car." Pleaz sur, git

inna back ovva carr.

"Wait. Jus because . . . Look. You gotta . . . "

I started to gesture, the way I do when I get upset. Then I

saw the cop's hand drifting down to his belt. He was pointing

something . . . something like a gun! No, not a gun. One of those

outer space things, like Captain Kirk always had. One of

those . . .

Right then, my body stopped working. I slumped to the

ground. I passed out.

TO BE CONTINUED

Superior

By Josh Ryan

Part 9

THIS IS A STORY FOR ADULTS AND ABOUT ADULTS.

There was a body standing over me, a body in a uniform. A

badge hung on one of its pecs. It was a cop. I couldn't tell if it

was the cop from last night. All I knew was . . . When you're

groggy like that, sometimes the thought of sex comes over you.

Before I could figure out what was going on, my eyes were focused on

the neat straight line of the fly on that cop's sleek gray

trousers. I forced my eyes up. He was a cop with a taut young

face, and that little black mustache that every cop seems to have.

Then the voice started. Early one morning when I was too

loaded to sleep I'd watched a TV show about a training course for

cops. They were taught to use "the command voice." That's what I

remembered. And that's what I heard.

"It's 11 a.m., Mr. Niskanen," he said. "Time to prepare for

your court appearance."

The voice wasn't friendly. But it wasn't hostile, either.

It was a command voice. Shit! My head felt like a barrel with a

gang of little kids beat on it. How much did I drink last night?

Not that much. Those cops must have hit me with something. . . .

"I said, it's time to prepare for your court appearance,

sir."

Court? Court? Why would I want to visit a court? Oh.

Because of last night. I'd had an accident, and now I'd have to go

to court. Another new adventure.

I remembered being in court once before. Underage drinking,

of course. Everything repeats itself. My dad was so pissed! They

suspended my license, but I got it back in six weeks. I guess he

knew someone. He always did . . . So now I had to go to court

again. Big deal. They couldn't suspend my license. I wasn't from

Superior. I was from New York.

I noticed I was lying on something. It was a bench,

something like a bench in an old-fashioned train station. The

ceiling was old-fashioned too. It was made of acoustic tiles.

Nobody used that stuff in New York anymore. Nobody I knew.

"Where am I?" I asked. That was what guys in the movies

always asked in cases like this, so I knew I had to say it. There

was no point in making up a new line. Besides, my attention kept

getting diverted to the officer's crotch. . . .

"This is the Windigo County Public Safety Facility, sir.

You were arrested last night, sir." Those "sirs" were getting

tiresome. Even in my hungover state, I suspected Crotch Man of

irony.

"Arrested? I, uh . . ." I swung my feet onto the floor.

The walls were covered with the cheapest plywood paneling I had ever

seen. The one window was an enormous old sash affair, but there

were sheets of thick plastic nailed to the inside of it. Must be

the climate. Anyway, they hadn't spent a lot of money on their last

remodeling. Why was I in Superior, of all places? Then I

remembered Mike. That must be why. I'd have to get Mike out of

Superior. And I'd have to make sure that he never found out about

this little adventure. It was obvious to me, even then, that I

needed to start going along with whatever the cops wanted from me.

But hey! If this cop knew my name, he must have been going

through my wallet. I rolled over on the bench and grabbed for my

back pocket. Whew! The wallet was still there. Not quite in the

same state I left it in, but . . . there was even some money

inside. I thought there used to be quite a bit more . . . but at

least my license survived. And I kept a money clip in my

pocket. . . . Yep, that was still there, too. I felt a wave of

relief. I always liked to have plenty of cash around. You never

can tell what will happen to you.

Now I felt like I was on top of it again. Except for that

strange gray shadow on my fingers and palms . . .

"Fingerprinting, sir. You were fingerprinted last night."

The cop was still standing over me. I hoped he didn't think

I was suspicious of him or anything, after that dive for my wallet.

I didn't want a suspicious cop. "Last night? I don't remember

much, officer . . . " Ooh, that head!

"You were arrested last night for reckless driving, driving

under the influence of alcohol, resisting arrest, assaulting an

officer, and possession of narcotics for sale (amount in excess of

15 grams)."

Oops. They'd been looking through my trunk. That was too

bad. But people got caught with dope all the time. And that other

stuff was just the add-ons. I remembered when Noah, the kid who

worked the mailroom in Tommy's office, got busted for drugs. They

added every charge except jaywalking, just to make sure that

something stuck. Noah got 6 months probation. But what was the cop

saying? I missed a lot of it right there . . . .

". . . before Judge Watson at 2 p.m."

"Well, I . . ."

"If you cannot afford an attorney, an attorney will be

appointed to represent you."

Attorney? Fuck that shit. I wanted to get back on the

road. I could guess what Mike would say, if he ever found out.

Especially on the day when he was supposed to be getting out of town

himself. I could see him stalking into the courthouse to bail me

out . . . He'd come all right; he'd do his fuckin duty. And that

would be the last time I'd ever see him. Besides, once you demand a

lawyer, you're really in for it. What lawyers do is, delay and

delay, till they've got every nickel they think you've got. I'd

seen that with my fuckin copyright lawyer. That bitch . . . I

didn't mind spending some money, but I didn't want to hang out in

Windigo for the rest of my life. That stupid accent--"fing-gurr-

printuhd," "Winduhko Coundy, surr" . . . No, I wasn't staying for

the remake of "Deliverance." Not with Mike in the audience. I had

to get out of town without making a public spectacle of myself.

"Listen," I said. "Listen, officer . . . "

"Officer Havelka." Uffisurr HAVulkuh. That accent was

still incredible to me.

"Officer HAVulkuh. Listen, I want to do what I can to . .

set things right. No need to go to court about it. If there's a

fine, I'll be happy to pay it." That's what you do in New York.

Pop some coke, pay a fine. Five hundred, maybe. A thousand. Who

cares, I could pay it. I couldn't imagine myself "assaulting an

officer," but that was the stuff they softened you up with.

Softened you up for a bribe, probably. Well, I was already soft. I

didn't care what they called it. I'd settle up. "I'll do whatever

I can to make it right," I said, fondling my wallet.

"The trial is obligatory, Mr. Niskanen." More softening up.

"Trial? I don't need a trial. I'll do what I can to settle

the case right now."

"Even if a citizen pleads guilty, sir, there has to be a

trial. It's a safeguard for everybody's rights. You understand,

sir."

"Well, I don't need a . . .a lawyer, anyway." I almost

said "fuckin lawyer," but I wanted to get out of there, so I was

minding my manners. Was that a smile on his handsome face?

"Of course, you understand that you have a right to . . . "

"Of course, officer. But what would you advise?" I would

advise my greasing your palm with a C-note.

"Well, Mr. Niskanen, my advice is . . ." He paused. He was

pretending to be thinking. Christ, these small-town guys were

primitive.

"My advice is . . . I'd just go ahead and, uh, enter a plea

of guilty, sir. If you do that, you'll be outta jail by the end of

the day. It'll cost you somethin, but well, I mean, as long as

you're outta jail, what's the worst that could happen?"

A refreshing use of cliche. What indeed? And one cliche

deserved another.

"That's right," I said. "But pardon me, Officer Havelka--

this must be something you dropped." Somehow, there was suddenly a

bill with a picture of Benjamin Franklin lying on the bench. I

picked it up and held it out. It was nice to see Independence Hall

on the other side. Let's hope that life imitates art, I thought.

And so it did. He took the bill right away, just like a cop in the

movies, and crumpled it into his big hard hand. It was as if the C-

note had never been. "So what do I need to do now, officer?" I

asked. How many movies had I seen that gag in?

He looked thoughtful again. He was staring me blank in the

eye, like they probably trained these guys to do in the police

academy or wherever it was that they manufactured cops for the great

state of Superior, but you could tell there was a series of

inferences running in the background. I liked it when a boy looked

thoughtful. And this was a boy. He couldn't have been more than

22. I liked this boy, no matter how much I had to pay him.

"I guess you should sign a 14-48 form, sir."

"14-48?"

He looked at me like I was the first person who had ever

asked what a 14-48 was. But he was deciding to be patient with

me. "By filing a Form 14-48, sir, you enter your plea of guilty and

surrender any putative entitlement to exemption from the provisions

of Public Law 743 in respect of penalties and appeals. Form 14-48

obviates any entitlement to parole, drug detoxification, and other

ancillary penalties." I couldn't help it; my dick rose when I heard

him say "putative." It was like a high school kid learning the

lines to "King Lear." It was like Donald Duck saying "Pythagoras."

Even he seemed to know how ridiculous he sounded when he rattled off

the words that he'd learned by rote. He paused, putting his lips

together in an embarrassed little pout, a dimple peeking out on each

side of his handsome red lips. He had a pretty mouth. Too pretty

for one of my paintings--I like a little more complexity--but pretty

nonetheless. "It's the quickest way to get out of jail, sir, and

never come back."

"Do you have one of those forms, officer?"

"I reckon I can find one."

"Great," I said. "Why don't you bring it to me, and I'll be

happy to sign it."

"It's my duty to tell you, sir . . ."

"Pardon me?" I was getting bored. Wasn't enough that I'd

forgiven him, or whoever it was, for zapping me last night? If it

wasn't for Mike . . . Now let's get through with the formalities,

please.

"It's my duty to tell you that your vehicle is contraband

and will be confiscated under the provisions of Public Law 739."

That was a shock, I guess. I was hoping to buy my way out

for a grand, and now I was being socked with a fine--that's all you

could say about it; it was a fine--for the 25K that I'd probably

have to remit to the rental car boys. Well, that was it. That was

the price of my "offense," including all the birthday-cake stuff

about assaulting the cops. I didn't like it, but it wasn't too bad,

considering. I could retrieve my luggage, rent another car that

afternoon, and be on my way to Minnesota. At least I could get a

bus to Marquette, and rent a car there. The cost of doing business.

"Thank you, officer. I appreciate the information. Now if

I could have a copy of that form . . ."

"Yes, sir," he said, unbuttoning the pocket under his badge

and stuffing something green and crinkly inside, "I'll bring it

right away. Are you ready for breakfast now, sir?"

You could see how these jokers reacted, once they knew that

you had money. The guy was practically my butler. I signed the

form without bothering to read it; then Officer Havelka brought me

my "breakfast." It was two slices of toast with some peanut butter

between them, and a carton labeled "Fruit Flavored Drink." He set

the tray down on the bench beside me.

"Just a minute, please" I said, straightening my slacks,

which had gotten pretty wrinkled, after everything that had gone

down during the past few hours. "Is there a place where I can clean

up?"

"Can's in there," he said, jerking his thumb toward a

plywood door at the back of the room.

"Thanks, officer. I appreciate your looking out for me."

He wasn't very bright, but he was certainly good-looking. Not good

enough for "Triple Cross," but that was another matter.

The "can" consisted of an ancient sink and toilet and a

light bulb dangling from the ceiling. Par for the course in

Superior--everything old and drab, everything spotlessly clean.

Well, clean was better than dirty, especially when you're using

somebody else's john. I leaned over the sink and stared at myself

in the little mirror. Not as bad as I thought. Looked a little

groggy. I found a little cut next to my mouth, and a little bruise

on my forehead. Beard shadow coming out. I hated to go to court

like that, but what did it matter? I'd be out of there by the end

of the day. I could shave in Marquette that night. Nice meal,

coupla drinks. Maybe more. Regroup. Glad I was never a real hairy

guy. Just a shadow, really. Not a bad look--sort of raffish. I

should thnk more about that, when I got back to "Triple Cross."

Remember: make sure to retrieve the sketchbook when you get your

luggage out of that car. They could keep the car, but they couldn't

keep the luggage. I remembered that. There'd been a "Times"

article about stuff like that. God, my head was still acting

weird. But it was getting better.

There was a slab of yellow soap on the sink, and I did what

I could with it. I found a comb in my jacket and ran it hastily

through my hair. It had got pretty long, the past few weeks. Mike

said he liked it that way. Well, I could probably get a good cut in

Minneapolis. While I was standing over the toilet, taking my piss,

I noticed that my cell phone was still in my pocket. In case I had

trouble on the road. Well, who would I call, anyway? Mike was the

only one--and he was also the last one I wanted to call. Next to

the phone was that clip of cash. One thousand, two thousand . . .

Yep, it was all there, only. . . . There was this funny feeling

that I got when I looked at the money. It looked like the kind of

money you see on TV, when they've planted a bunch of counterfeit on

a guy, or when the drug deal goes down and there's a lot of play

money passing from hand to hand. It just didn't look real,

somehow. But nothing had been entirely real, since I crossed the

bridge to Superior . . .

My mind must have been wandering again. I remembered the

time I'd been chatting with some guy on the Net and the cursor

started moving around by itself, clicking stuff on and off. Some

hacker had pinged me. I watched the thing, fascinated by the

invisible brain on the other side of the screen. Then I woke up and

yanked the cord out of the plug. It was interesting, being

controlled like that--as long as you've still got your own control.

But where was I? I was standing with my dick out over the

toilet in the Windigo County Public Safety Facility, counting my

cash. OK, there was plenty; let's get on with it.

I zipped up and went back to my "breakfast." I wasn't

particularly hungry, but I managed to get it down. My head still

felt like it was about to come off, so I lay back on the bench

again. From far away, I heard the sound of a boat horn . . . Must

be a big one, I thought, or I wouldn't be able to hear it so

well. . . . Mike said that shipping was about to shut down . . .

But there were still some boats coming in . . . That was

good . . . Images of escape . . . That was good . . . Before I

knew it, I was asleep again. The next thing I knew, Officer Havelka

was waking me up for my "court appearance."

I straightened my pants and ran the comb hastily through my

hair again. Then Officer Havelka escorted me out of the drop-

ceiling and plywood-paneling zone of the Public Safety Facility,

through a pair of dinged-up wooden doors, and into the damaged-

Victorian zone of the County Courthouse. High ceilings. Thick

black woodwork. Pictures of old men in oval frames. Linoleum

floor, of course. The linoleum ended in a pair of black wooden

doors. Gold letters said "DISTRICT COURT."

It was a big room with a line of tall arched windows down

one side and a tall black bench at the end. I hadn't seen a bigger

mass of carved wood since the last time I'd bellied up to the bar at

El Caliph. It was ridiculous, but the place reminded me of an old

gay "tavern"--heavy and funky and down at the heels. The

chandeliers featured effigies of elk and moose, presenting globes of

frosted light, but beneath them the seats for the audience were

molded plastic, and the linoleum was continuous with the hallway.

There were a couple little knots of people sitting here and there,

and a line of guys in the row of chairs in front of the bench.

Officer Havelka was just directing me to the last place in that row

when the bailiff yelled "All rise!"

The judge walked in. He was a fat red face perched on a fat

black robe.

"Be seated," he said in an irritated voice. "First case!"

Obviously, the judge had not eaten lunch.

Superior

By Josh Ryan

Part 10

THIS IS A STORY FOR ADULTS AND ABOUT ADULTS.

Everybody's seen a million courtroom dramas on TV and in the

movies. From the artist's point of view, they're just a wooden box

with some puppets inside it. One character is dressed like a judge;

then there are others that are dressed as bailiffs, lawyers,

defendants, and so on. The author and the artist always know the

outcome; the only problem is fooling the audience till the last two

minutes before the end. I guess that's not hard, or there wouldn't

be so many of these dramas, but when you think about it, there are

only so many ways the thing can turn out, and somebody's already

decided it. It's like that old Twilight Zone episode, "To Serve

Mankind," where the guy from outer space accidentally (or on purpose-

-only two alternatives) leaves a copy of the cookbook sitting around

on the stage set. Unfortunately for the human slaves who are about

to be taken off to his home planet and consumed, the book is written

in an unknown language. I smiled when I thought of that. Maybe

somebody left a book around in Judge Watson's courtroom. But I

couldn't see one.

"Paul Swenson!" the bailiff called.

The first person in the row stood up. He was a guy about 28

or 29 years old. He had dark red hair, sort of short but . . .

tangled. It looked like he'd been dragging his fingers through it

all night. But while he was pulling his body up, I could see him

looking very buff underneath his cheap clingy suit. It was the kind

of suit I'd noticed people wearing in Superior when they were

important people. The day when Mike went to the bank, I'd looked at

the manager sitting in his little glass office--Swenson had the kind

of suit the bank manager wore. His body was a familiar type, the

kind you often see on models: very athletic, in a very generic way.

As a matter of fact, he looked a little like one of those guys I'd

been drawing for "Triple Cross" . . . Some more refinement

needed . . .

"Paul Swenson," the judge said, "you have pled guilty to the

charge of housebreaking, assault and battery, and spousal abuse in

the first degree, offenses registered under the Defense of Superior

Act." He paused and looked up.

"Yes, your honor." Swenson was holding himself completely

straight.

The judge seemed disappointed. He licked his lower lip and

turned a page of the document on his desk. "You are a coach at the

high school."

"I . . . As . . . your honor knows, I was the coach at

Windigo High. Football and . . . baseball. I . . . was

terminated. The superintendent said that I . . ."

"Do you see yourself as a role model for high school

students, Mr. Swenson?"

Swenson looked down at the floor. "No, your honor."

"No, Mr. Swenson I don't think so. I don't think so at

all. I think that men like you should be taken out of the schools,

and out of society. No man who assaults a woman should have any

part in a society devoted to equal rights and opportunities. This

is a liberal state, Mr. Swenson. Superior takes the rights of women

seriously."

Swenson stiffened. "Yes, your honor. You see, my wife, my

ex-wife, was . . . she was . . . with another man. When I

discovered . . . "

"Silence!" the judge said, banging his gavel down. "This

court will not be used as a means of demeaning the victim. You have

confessed your crime and thrown yourself on the mercy of the court.

Now therefore, Paul Swenson," he continued, clearing his

throat, "under the terms of the Defense of Superior Act, I sentence

you to penal servitude for life without possibility of parole, in a

facility administered by the State Department of Corrections."

Wow! I thought. That's some penalty for wife beating.

Granted, what the guy did sounded pretty bad. Guys like that were

Neanderthals. On the other hand, life in prison was a pretty big

sentence! Still . . . he did have three serious offenses

there. . . .

"No ground for appeal, your honor." The voice came from a

little guy with a big pair of glasses, dressed in a suit that looked

a lot better than Swenson's. He was sitting on the judge's right,

one step down on the big black bench. That must be the appeals

court guy, I thought, the one that Mike talked about when he was

going through that long thing about the laws in Superior. "Sentence

confirmed."

Swenson staggered back. "Your honor, I . . . "

"Silence!" The judge said. "Next case!"

"Bailey Becker!" the bailiff called. The next guy in line

stood up.

Looking at that kid, I was sure I'd seen him somewhere

before. He was maybe 19, 20, 21. . . Tall, loose jointed . . .

Little yellow dreds.peeking out from under his baseball cap . . .

Little bits of acne still cropping out on his cheeks . . . That's

right! He looked exactly like one of those saggers that Mike and I

had the fight about, one of those guys that I thought was

interesting, despite what Mike had to say . . . Now he was out of

his punk kid uniform and was wearing what were obviously his special

clothes--a pair of khaki slacks, rumpled; a white shirt with a

collar that was way too wide for him; and a tie that was way too

wide for anybody. And of course, he didn't know any better than to

come to court in that baseball cap. Mentally, I was shaking my head

at that. Lovable, but incredibly stupid. . . . I know I was still

sort of groggy, but I thought he looked like one of those guys I saw

in Wheeling, the guy who . . .

"Hats off in the courtroom!" the bailiff yelled. The kid

jerked his hand up and grabbed off the cap. Then the rest of his

dreds tumbled out, coil after coil--one long, proud, self-conscious,

dirty blond wad of young-punk hair after another. You could imagine

Becker bending over a dirty sink in some buddy's bathroom, teasing

and waxing and slopping dye out of a bottle. . . . But you had to

love it--the way those dreds shaded his cheeks, like coils of autumn

leaves . . . And that slight gray stain on the inside of his hand

when he pulled off his cap--he must have been fingerprinted pretty

recently, too. . . . An interesting effect . . . The fresh young

face, with the shadows of decay all around it . . . I wished I'd

had my sketchbook with me.

Bailey stood in the courtroom, biting his lip, looking down

at the cap in his hand like it was something he'd never seen

before. The cap was twitching. It wanted to get out of there. It

wanted to get back on its skateboard.

"Bailey Becker," the judge said, looking down over the

little white "Hon. Kenneth P. Watson" sign on his desk. "Would it

be too inappropriate for me to conclude that you have difficulty

recognizing authority?"

"Huh?" the kid said. "I . . . I mean, what? Your honor?"

The judge lifted a stubby finger and pointed at the cap.

"Oh, I . . . uh, yeah . . . uh, yes. Yes your honor. I

mean, no your honor. You see . . ."

The bailiff and the appeals court guy sort of smiled, and

the guy sitting next to me snickered behind his hand. I hadn't been

paying any attention to him; everything was happening so fast, and

you don't like to turn and stare at somebody sitting only six inches

away from you. I glanced at him now and saw that he was another

young guy, about the same age; only this one was dressed in a nice

pair of slacks, a stylish cream-colored shirt, an expensive looking

sport coat, and a beautiful blue silk tie (complemented his eyes, I

observed). His loafers were Foxmires at least, and his haircut must

have cost him at least thirty dollars. Congratulations--I didn't

know you could get a cut like that in Windigo. He turned and gave

me a grin. "What a jerkoff!" he whispered, motioning surreptitiously

at the kid standing up in front of the judge. I noticed that Becker

was wearing a beatup pair of All Stars. I smiled back at the

stylish young man. Still, I thought, peering over at Becker again,

you've gotta feel sorry for a guy like that. I mean, where would he

be in ten, twenty, thirty years? Couldn't even put clothes on his

back, I guessed. I wondered by what mistake the kid next to me had

wound up in that courtroom. Probably the same kind of mistake that

I'd run into.

"I'll accept that as a yes," the judge said. "Mr. Becker,

you have pled guilty to breaking and entering, burglary, possession

of stolen goods, possession of controlled substances, escape, and

defacement of public property, offenses registered under the Defense

of Superior Act. You were discovered spray-painting the inside of a

public school. When apprehended, you fled. You were traced to an

unoccupied building, where you were living with stolen property; to

wit . . ." He flipped through some pages of the document on his

desk. " . . . a sleeping bag, a microwave oven, and a camouflage

jacket (army surplus). A controlled substance (cannabis) was also

discovered." He stopped, obviously expecting some reply to what he

said.

Becker appeared bewildered by the recitation of his exciting

past. "Y- yeah," he stuttered . . . Yes sir. Yes your honor."

Judge Watson gave him a look of disgust. "I note," he

continued, leafing through his papers, "that you are a high-school

dropout, that you have never been continuously employed, that you

have never bothered to acquire the skills so necessary to support

oneself in our contemporary society. You have now begun to compile

a record of crime that meets the profile of the habitual offender.

It lies within my power, under the terms of the statute, to impose a

range of sentences, and I confess that I was tempted, in

consideration of your youth and naivete, to be lenient with you.

Your latest display of intentional contempt for authority has

convinced me otherwise. I am now persuaded that you are the kind of

criminal for whom the Defense of Superior Act was primarily

designed, the kind of criminal whom we must clean off our streets,

and keep off our streets, for good and for the good of all.

Therefore, Bailey Becker, under the terms of the Defense of Superior

Act, I sentence you to penal servitude for life without possibility

of parole, in a facility administered by the State Department of

Corrections."

Well, another life sentence. Too bad--Bailey was a cute

kid. I liked the way he fumbled with his little blue cap while he

sat down, not knowing whether to put it on or keep it off, as the

first act on his way to life imprisonment. Finally he used the back

of it to rub some of the tears off his face. It didn't take the

little court official very long to say, "No ground for appeal, your

honor. Sentence confirmed." Well, that settled the problem of

where Bailey Becker would be, thirty years from now.

"Tyler Montrose!" the bailiff announced, and the two guys on

my left stood up. One was the kid next to me, the one who'd been

snickering; the other was a guy about fifty, with nice gray hair,

wearing a nice gray suit. That would be his lawyer, I imagined. I

was right.

"Good to see you today, Roger," the judge said.

"Thank you, your honor. I'm happy to be here, representing

this fine young man."

"As you know, Roger," Judge Watson continued, "your client

is charged with nine counts of forgery, nine counts of concealing

evidence, and thirteen counts of perjury in a deposition arising out

of the recent investigation into the accounts of the Bank of

Superior. He has entered a plea of guilty to each of these charges."

The kid started to open his mouth, but the lawyer signaled

him to be quiet. The lawyer took it from there. "In order to spare

the court time and trouble, your honor, and to spare his family

continued pain arising from this unfortunate matter, my client has

consented to enter that plea, trusting in the mercy and wisdom of

the court. Your honor, this is a first offense. My client has

stable ties in the community. His father, as you know, is vice

president of the National Bank and a director of several local

firms. My client has made full restitution of the sums involved.

As you know, he was released on bail, pending the conclusion of this

matter--which, I repeat, he regards as most unfortunate--and has

distinguished himself by his good conduct during that period. He

graduated with a B.A. in business from Superior State University,

where he was president of his fraternity and senior-year chairman of

the Crippled Children's Charity Appeal. I have every expectation

that this young man will reward your honor's forbearance with a life

of continued achievement and service. Before entering our plea, we

proposed a sentence of three years probation."

"Thank you, Roger," the judge said, while the kid looked

forward with an innocently optimistic expression. No snickering

now. "I appreciate your comments. I hope you do not consider that

it reflects a lack of respect for your eloquence, or a lack of

confidence in your representation of your client, if I observe that

he has confessed to premeditated crimes that are, in themselves,

significantly more serious than those of the last defendant who

stood before me, crimes that would have done grave damage to this

community, had his father lacked the means of providing

restitution. I am not prepared to ignore the gravity of these

crimes or to discriminate in favor of your client, simply because he

comes from a good family. I am sorry to disappoint you, Roger."

You had to agree with the judge. No matter how you looked

at it, the kid's crime was pretty heinous. He was obviously a rich,

spoiled little brat, with no sense of responsibility whatever.

"Yes, your honor," the attorney said, in a disappointed but

not exactly heartbroken way. It was obvious that he and the judge

were old friends. Suddenly Tyler's arms began to shake.

"Therefore, Tyler Montrose, under the terms of the Defense

of Superior Act, I sentence you to penal servitude for life without

possibility of parole, in a facility administered by the State

Department of Corrections."

"What! I mean, Wait! Your honor! . . . I . . . uh . . ."

Tyler sputtered. "I . . . you can't . . . I can't go to prison!"

"Young man," the judge said, "you can, and you will. You

are no longer a defendant. You are a convict. You have no further

right to speak."

"No! Wait!" A heavy, well-dressed man lurched up the aisle.

"Dad!" Tyler said. "They're sending me to prison!"

"Your honor!" his father shouted. "Ken! . . . Hear me out!"

"Silence in the courtroom!" the bailiff yelled.

"Sorry, Phil," the judge said. "This is a court. I am not

going to discriminate in favor of anyone, even your son. Bailiff,

show this gentleman out."

Then there was a lot of noise, but at the end of it Mr.

Montrose was escorted from the courtroom. The judge turned to the

little man beside him. "No ground for appeal," the appeals guy

repeated. "Sentence confirmed."

Tyler's attorney laid his right hand on his client's

shoulder and got him to sit down; meanwhile, he was looking at his

left arm, checking his watch. So much for Tyler. He dropped into

his seat, and I was embarrassed to look at him anymore. True, he

seemed like a brat, and the crime was serious, but you were almost

tempted to feel sorry for him, anyway. To be honest, though, I also

sympathized with the lawyer. It was midafternoon already. It would

be good to get out of this courtroom, pay my fine, and get on with

my business. I could pay any fine they put on me; and that's all

they cared about. I'd found that out. Here I was, a stranger from

the big city--get his money before he gets away.

"Daniel Niskanen!" My turn at last. I stood up, and the

judge's eyes swivelled my way.

I'd noticed during Tyler's trial that the judge was an

intelligent man. An intelligent man would know how to handle my

case, too. "Mr. Niskanen," the judge said, "you have been charged

with . . . " and he read the list of my misdeeds. "I have your plea

before me."

"Yes, your honor."

"You made this plea with no reservation or intention to

deceive?"

"Yes, your honor. Of course." I was suddenly conscious of

my need for a shave.

"You come from New York City, do you not, Mr. Niskanen?"

"Yes, your honor. Actually, I grew up on Long Island. But

I've lived for many years . . ."

"You left New York City. You came here with illegal drugs.

Perhaps you were confident that you would not be arrested, or, if

arrested, you would not be punished."

This was sounding weird. Why was he talking on and on like

that? Why didn't he just state the fine, and let us all go home? I

hadn't even bothered him with some windbag lawyer. Well, obviously

he was using his opportunity to score points with the local yokels.

Maybe he needed to do that, after pissing off the VP of the local

bank. I might as well play along.

"Yes your honor."

"Then you concede that you were not expecting to be called

to account for your actions?"

"No your honor. I mean yes your honor." I was beginning to

sympathize with Bailey. These questions were a little tricky.

"And you have admitted that while driving around this

county, intoxicated, on a dark and rainy night, you lost control of

your vehicle, creating a peril to life on a public highway, and when

apprehended you resisted arresting officers?"

Yes or no? It was hard to say what to answer. The way

things were going, it had to be one or the other. I found myself in

one of those moments when you look at yourself from a distance,

wondering which alternative you're going to choose. It was all so

ridiculous, though! The thought brought me back to myself. Why

start protesting? Just go with the flow. That's always the safest

thing. Get out of town, before Mike finds out--that's all I needed

to do. So I decided.

"Yes your honor."

"But you have now confessed and thrown yourself on the mercy

of this court?"

"Yes your honor." Well, now it was obvious what he was

doing. He was laying the basis for letting me off with the fine.

Which was looking a little larger, however, than I had anticipated.

"Very well," he said, looking down at the desk and making a

mark on one of his papers. "Therefore, Daniel Niskanen, under the

terms of the Defense of Superior Act, I sentence you to penal

servitude for life without possibility of parole, in a facility

administered by the State Department of Corrections."

Superior

By Josh Ryan

Part 11

THIS IS A STORY FOR ADULTS AND ABOUT ADULTS

The words didn't mean anything. They didn't have time to

mean anything. I kept standing there, waiting for the judge to say

what my fine would be. Instead, he looked to his right again, and

the little man on his right said, "No ground for appeal. Sentence

confirmed." Immediately the bailiff yelled, "All stand!" Everybody

else stood up, the judge vanished, and a pair of deputies came

through the door. It was Officer Havelka and someone else. They

were walking toward me, side by side. Hey, what was going on?

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the lawyer give Tyler

another little pat on the shoulder, and skip aside. Tyler was

standing there with his mouth wide open, getting ready to say

something, when Officer Havelka grabbed him by the arm and pulled

him away. The officer grabbed me with his other hand. "Hey, man,

what the hell . . .!" I said. But he was already pulling us toward

the door. "You can talk downstairs," he said.

Before I knew it, all four of us were out the door and

headed down the linoleum-surfaced hallway. I noticed that above the

doors in the hallway there were little statues of moose and eagles,

and Indians looking toward the setting sun. Nice carving . . .

"Left!" Officer Havelka said, and we turned left, out of the

main corridor and down a narrow flight of steps, like the steps that

Noel always told the janitors to take when he caught them going up

the main staircase of the gallery. "Hurry up!" a voice said behind

us.

Then we were walking fast down another corridor, only there

weren't any decorations down there; the only thing you saw was some

old walls painted green and a pair of iron doors at the end. We had

almost reached the doors when the other officer motioned us to the

right. "Inside," he said, and we walked inside. Then the door

slammed behind us.

I whirled around. I wanted to talk to Officer Havelka. But

he and the other officer were gone. There were just four of us

alone in the basement room.

I don't remember exactly what went on during the next few

minutes. I know I was confused, and the other guys looked that way

too. I kept wondering when I was supposed to pay that fine, and why

the judge had made that stupid mistake about sentencing me to life

imprisonment. I also wondered why they insisted on painting

everything that shade of green. Then I realized that I was coming

back to myself, in a way. Clearly, everything was going to work

out--just as the officer had told me. In the meantime, I needed to

pull myself together. I could spend the afternoon freaking myself

out, or I could spend it observing things--things I'd probably find

useful, once I got my sketchbook back. I mean, what better place to

get inspiration for a sequence about slavery? I just needed to wake

up and notice what was going on around me.

At that point, I noticed that Tyler and the coach had gotten

into an argument. I could hear voices being raised.

"I don't care what you say, I've got a right to appeal. My

dad will take care of it. My dad's an important man in this town."

"I know, Ty. I'm just trying to say . . . "

"Say what, MISTER Swenson?"

"Listen, I realize that I was your coach in high school,

Ty. . . ."

"That's TYLER to you, PAUL. And what's a fuckin wife-beater

got to say about anything?"

"Right. Tyler. My wife and I . . . we were getting . . . a

divorce . . . Things went wrong. . . . I remember you on the

baseball team . . . "

"Right. COACH. Well, nothin went `wrong' with ME, man!"

"Tyler, listen to me . . . "

"Take your hand off me, fucker! I ain't listenin to YOU!"

I didn't listen very well either. My attention kept

drifting in and out. I don't know how long I spent leaning against

one of those puke-green walls, hearing Paul and Tyler chewing on

each other, and staring at Bailey without even knowing what I was

staring at. He was sitting on the bench, twirling his baseball cap,

wiping the tears off his face. I was leaning against the wall,

trying to focus on what I knew would have to happen.

I knew that the money in my wallet would have to kick in

sometime. I knew that the door would have to open and Officer

Havelka would have to come in and call me out of that room and tell

me that there had been a serious mistake in my case and would I

please now come upstairs, Mr. Niskanen, and pay a substantial fine,

sir. Probably I should have given him another hundred, and then

this part wouldn't have happened. I saw it now. When he came back,

I'd figure out some way to give him the second part of his tip.

Maybe add a thousand or so. Anybody could see that that's what they

wanted in Windigo, and this was how they got it. Havelka would

split with the judge. They obviously had a partnership going, or

Havelka wouldn't have led me on the way he did. He would've taken

all my money right away. Nobody in Windigo had enough brains to toy

with a captive that way.

Of course, it was ridiculous to think that a small-time

judge could fuck with me as if I was some local shredder like Bailey-

-poor kid. I didn't want to watch Bailey's face while he was

crying, so I looked down at his shoes. Converse All-Stars. A

refreshing bit of retro, when you thought about it, and only 30

bucks. I wasn't exactly over-dressed, but when my eyes came back to

my own shoes, I could see $300 looking up at me. Anyhow, it was too

bad about Bailey. He'd be in jail for the rest of his life. He'd

never drive a car. He'd never smoke another joint. He'd never see

another skateboard. He'd never eat another corn dog. He'd never

steal another heavy metal disk. He'd never choose his own haircut.

He'd never wear his own shoes. He'd never wear his own clothes.

He'd never wear another baseball cap. He'd be in a convict suit for

the rest of his life. Well, that's the way it goes. Fuck! this was

taking a long time..

Then the door opened, and I started walking toward it. All

right! Now I would get this shit sorted out. It was Officer

Havelka and the other guy. Havelka and I needed to have a talk.

But before I got to him, he was already talking.

"All right! Everybody listen up! You will now remove all

possessions and put them in the receptacles provided. Officer

Olafson, distribute the receptacles."

A stack of black garbage bags hit the floor.

Nobody moved.

"I said, PUT ALL YOUR STUFF IN THE BAGS! One man, one bag!

Shirts, pants, shoes! Strip!!!" The two officers took a stride

forward. It was like, we'll kill you unless you obey. We obeyed.

I was used to stripping in the gym, but this was entirely

different. It wasn't a locker room, and Officer Havelka and his

friend weren't fellow patrons of wellness. They were cops and we

were . . . My brain wouldn't say "prisoners." "Prison . . .

prisoners . . . life imprisonment . . . " The words ran through

my head, cycling around each other, like a script I was supposed to

memorize. I'd had dreams like that, where I was supposed to

memorize a lot of words that made no sense, and because they made no

sense they were impossible to memorize. But after all, this play

would soon be over. Officer Havelka had said that I'd be out that

afternoon. The afternoon was passing But even if I had to spend a

whole day in jail before somebody with an IQ over 80 appeared and

decided it was time to let me out, I guessed I could put up with

it. They probably made everybody strip for some kind of exam or

something, before they put them in a holding area someplace. I'd

seen that in a movie one time.

I started unbuttoning my shirt, my eyes wandering in Tyler's

direction. It was interesting to see him take off his sport coat

and lay it cautiously on the floor, then unknot his tie, really slow-

-like he was waiting for the inevitable announcement that the

officer meant everybody else but him. Some joke, eh? The tie looked

good, but now I decided it was a little too much. Just a little too

rich for the shirt. I could see that now. It was clear that the

kid had been looking at the ads in GQ or something, and he couldn't

quite put it all together. . . .

Then, like lightning, Officer Olafson was in front of him,

yanking open the tie and throwing it on the floor. "I said STRIP,

boy!" Officer Olafson was a young guy with a little mustache, a

pair of sunglasses hanging from his shirt, and a six-dollar

haircut. He was obviously not GQ material. Tyler stood still,

looking at him, his cheeks turning red, then his neck. But nothing

happened. He was paralyzed. So Officer Olafson slipped his hand

into the little white valley under Tyler's chin, grabbed his shirt,

and ripped it from top to bottom. Now Tyler was wearing two flaps

of cloth, with a stripe of white skin between them. "Strip it off,

boy, and toss it in the bag!" Officer Olafson said, and I saw

something flash through the air and land with a crack on Tyler's

behind. Tyler lurched forward, and the officer jammed a fat wooden

object back in his belt. It was a paddle--he'd smacked the kid with

a thick wooden paddle! Jesus, that must hurt! "Strip it off, or

you'll git the rest of this up your fuckin crack!"

He said that, then he strode off to join Officer Havelka at

the other side of the room. They stood with their arms folded

across their chests while Tyler pulled his arms out of the remains

of his shirt, knelt down, and pushed the fragments into one of the

black plastic bags. His eyes were round as saucers now, and he was

stripped to the waist. We all were. Ordinarily, I would have been

checking out the other guys' bodies, but this scene looked like it

could get pretty ugly. I was still the guy in the room with a few

thousand bucks in his pocket. I had to watch myself, "obey," and

catch Officer Havelka alone. I reached down and picked up one of

the bags, getting ready to stuff my shirt inside it. But now

Officer Olafson was striding toward Bailey.

"You!" He was pointing at Bailey's head. "What's that

fuckin piece a shit?"

"Uh . . . it's . . . it's my cap, man . . . " He'd disposed

of his shirt, but he couldn't bear to part with that cap.

"Take that stupid fuckin piece a shit off that stupid fuckin

head a yers."

Bailey reached up and grabbed his cap.

"Now STUFF it in the GARBAGE, boy! "

Bailey bent down and lifted one corner of his garbage bag

and laid his cap gently inside the edge. You could tell that his

identity was going away with it--going into the garbage. When he

stood up again, his red boxers were clinging to his back, the way

these saggers' shorts are always riding out of their trousers, and

sweat was glistening on his back where his shirt had been. I

noticed that; then I noticed that someone else was noticing it too.

Tyler was smarting from that smack on his ass, but he still had

enough energy to pay attention to the muscles that had come out on

Bailey's chest and back, now that Bailey had his shirt off. I was

looking too, now. Some of these saggers and shredders have a lot

going for them, and Bailey turned out to be one of the best. Tyler

had a high school baseball player's body, nothing more. And what

was that? Did the sexless little skateboy have a pair of titrings

on him? Yes . . . dangling from Bailey's chest . . .

"What are YOU fuckers LOOKIN at?!" the officer yelled,

whirling on the rest of us. "We don't have all fuckin DAY! Get

those fuckin pants off NOW! Everything in the BAG! MOVE IT!"

It was like a dream. I saw myself standing on one foot and

then the other, pulling my shoes off, dropping my slacks, holding

the slacks with one hand while I fished my wallet out of the back

pocket, shoving slacks and shoes into the bag. . . . It was

embarrassing to see how limp and wrinkled my clothes looked as they

disappeared inside. No wonder the judge had that reaction to me.

It's not what you expect when you buy at Flierman's. . . . Well, I

had something that would take care of it, I thought . . ..

Christ! I suddenly remembered. My hand dove back into the bag,

retrieved the slacks, and found the pocket where the money clip

hid. Luckily, Officer Olafson was yelling at Paul right then, so I

slipped the bills off the clip and shoved them into my wallet,

unobserved. Or so I thought.

"I'll take that," said a deep voice behind me, and I

suddenly saw my wallet sitting inside Officer Havelka's big right

hand.

Having a guy tell you to take off your clothes is one thing;

having a guy grab your wallet is another. A jolt of anger went

through me, and I had this weightless feeling, like somebody had

just unscrewed my arm and was calmly walking away with it. Officer

Havelka smiled softly and riffled through the bills that I'd stuffed

in the back compartment of the wallet. "Not bad," he said, slipping

the money out of its skinny leather house and slipping the fingers

with the money into the left-hand pocket of his trousers, next to

the bulge rising from the center. When the hand came out, it was

empty. I'd had five thousand dollars in my wallet.

"Not bad at all," he said, lowering his voice as if I were

his fellow conspirator, and glancing over his shoulder at Officer

Olafson, who was just then pocketing the contents of Bailey's

wallet. By the expression on Officer Olafson's face, you could tell

there wasn't a lot in there. And evidently Officer Havelka was not

going to suggest that they split their takings 50-50. It was clear

that whatever Officer Olafson didn't see was his own problem.

"Officer Havelka . . . " I said, in my calmest, quietest

voice. "I hope that you'll remember . . . that time when we . . .

talked . . . " I heard myself pronouncing the words slowly, with

the maximum possible control, like some woman who's just found out

that she's being dumped by her husband. . . .

"When we talked?" he said, smiling. "You mean when we talked

about how I'd let you keep your nuts on if you dummied up?"

For a second I just stared at him. But I had to keep

going. "When we talked . . . earlier today . . . and you

promised . . . that I'd be out of jail . . . by the end of the day."

"Oh," he said. "That. Don't worry, boy. You'll be outta

here this afternoon, all right."

Whew! I had to admit it, it was quite a relief.

"Thank you," I said.

"Don't mention it," he replied. "I always keep my word."

His left hand reached up and patted me on the shoulder. A

private little pat that nobody else could see. Then he looked down

at my wallet. It was still in his right hand. "You don't need the

rest of this," he said. The wallet dropped to the floor and

splashed open. My driver's license was on top. I could see my

face, smiling back at me. I always smiled for my pictures. "You

don't need your I.D. around here, man. You're among friends." A

black boot kicked my wallet into the shiny black bag. "Now gimme

your watch."

Automatically, I took off my Koenig Chronometer, accurate

within a thousandth of a second, and handed it to Officer

Havelka. "You don't really need that watch, either," he said

softly. "Do ya boy?" His hand entered and exited the pocket next

to the bulge. When it came out, my watch had vanished. That was

it. He'd let me go when he'd taken everything I had.

Suddenly he was yelling. "NOW GET THOSE FUCKIN PANTS INTA

THE FUCKIN BAG!" I'd never had a guy yell at me like that. My

slacks flew back into the bag. When I get out, I thought, I'm gonna

have to wear these clothes again, wrinkles and all. I bent down

again, folded the shirt, and put it inside, on top of the slacks.

When I straightened up again, Officer Havelka was still in his

place, watching. I noticed that the bulge was growing. Then he

walked away.

Everybody was down to his shorts and socks. It looked like

one of those underwear ads that Tommy's agency used to do, the kind

where four nearly naked guys just happen to be standing around

casually, looking in different directions, showing off their

completely wrinkle-free undies--only this time, the background color

was an impossible green and Paul's puritan white jockey shorts and

Bailey's goofy red boxers were completely out of harmony, both with

each other and especially with Tyler's baby blue silks. I wondered

if his mom had paid for those, or if they were the kind of things he

bought with the money he stole. The little crook. Then I

remembered: all of us were supposed to be crooks. My own silk

shorts were feeling strange. When was Officer Havelka going to

start keeping his promise? But probably he needed to maintain the

act, treat me like everybody else till whenever it was that he

planned to let me go.

"WHAT THE FUCK!" he was screaming. "I told you to STRIP,

MOTHERFUCKERS! Git OUTTA them clothes!"

Oh man. I couldn't believe it. They were actually making

us get completely naked! I looked around at the other guys, and

that was the first time we'd all made eye contact. No guy, even a

gay guy, wants to get naked and perform for two asshole cops. I

took off my socks and skimmed my shorts down modestly over my legs.

I was bending over, ready to push the shorts into the bag, when I

saw Officer Havelka's tall, shiny boots beside me again. One of

them was stepping on my shorts. I looked up. "Nice panties, guy,"

he said, letting his boot stroke the sleek blue surface, back and

forth, back and forth . . .. "Just right for a girlie show." He

kicked the shorts into the bag and stomped away. Then I was naked.

"Hands off your nuts!" Officer Olafson yelled. I hadn't

understood where my hands were. I guess a guy's hands just

naturally go down and cover his crotch, even when his erection is so

small that nobody else would probably notice it. But I didn't want

to look down and check. I dropped my hands.

"Well, what have we here?" Officer Havelka said. For a

second, I thought he was talking to me. But it was Bailey he was

talking to. "A paira little dingalings." I saw his hand grab the

kid's titrings and pull on them, like a guy pulling the cap on a

bottle. Bailey's face contorted with pain. "Looka THAT," the

officer said. "Those rings look pretty manly on this manly young

man. Maybe I should git me one a them rings. Then I could be manly

too. Think so, Officer Olafson?"

"Sure, Officer Havelka," Officer Olafson said. "Maybe I'd

like one, too, eh?" And he grabbed Bailey's other ring.

"OK," Officer Havelka said. "Let's try it out."

"Ahhhhh!" Bailey moaned. "AHHHHH!!! P- please! I . . .

I . . . Please! PLEASE! STOP!" Both of them were yanking on his

rings.

"Guess he's already sicka his little playtoys, eh?" Officer

Havelka said.

"Guess so."

"AHHHHHH!!!" Bailey doubled up. His face was looking into

the officers' boots and his legs were crumpling under

him. "AHHHHHH!!! AHHHHHH!!!"

"OK, boy," Officer Havelka said, taking his time. "Now git

them rings offa your tits."

They let him go, and Bailey sort of collapsed into

himself. "UHHHHHH . . ." It was like his last gasp of

exhaustion. His hands moved fearfully up to his chest. I heard two

little clinks on the stone floor; and a boot kicking something into

a garbage bag. Bailey had lost his rings.

"What YOU laughin about?"

Officer Havelka was yelling again, but this time he was

yelling at Tyler.

"Nothing," Tyler said.

"Well, don't git cocky," the Officer said. His fist lunged

forward. The kid's body folded up on the floor. "That's yer

lesson, boy. And from now on, it's SIR when you talk to an

officer. It's SIR before and SIR after. Git it?"

Tyler was twisting on the floor, trying to get up. There

was a heavy thud as the boot hit home.

"UHHH! UHHHH! Suhhhrrr! Yes Suhhhrrr!" It was

interesting--he'd been talking like a phony college boy before, but

now that northern accent had come back.

"Now stand up, cocksucker!"

"Suhhhrrr! Yes Suhhhrrr!"

Tyler struggled to his feet. His arms were hugging his

stomach, and his sweat was dripping off his chin. His chest was

heaving as he tried to get his breath.

"Toe the line," Officer Havelka ordered, looking around at

the rest of us. He was pointing at a yellow line that was painted

across the rotted blue linoleum. We stepped forward and lined up

behind the yellow streak: Paul, Bailey, me, and Tyler. It took

Tyler a while before he sort of crawled over and stood up in the end

of the line.

"Drop them arms!" Tyler's arms gradually levered out to his

sides, but his body still had the slump and gasp that a guy's got to

have when he's trying to breathe. Out of the corner of my eye I saw

his hand scurry up toward his face and slither down again. I knew

he was crying, and he didn't want anybody to see it.

"You're a fine buncha chiggers!" Officer Havelka

said. "Aincha?" His face was six inches from my nose.

"Y- yes," I said. "Yes . . . Sir."

"WHAT?"

"Sir Yes Sir." It was funny how q