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.A rugged blond with a flattened nose and cauliflower ears from amateur boxing matches and tavern brawls.His partner Victor was stocky and bald and decidedly non-violent.He’d inherited a small fortune from his parents and devoted his time to editing an online poetry journal of repute.The journal was once mentioned by then U.S.poet laureate Billy Collins in his weekly column.Victor was a Charles Simic and Mark Strand man and I liked him from the start.Glenn referred to them as Ebony and Ivory on account of Victor’s resemblance to a young Stevie Wonder and Dane’s being as white as a bar of soap.We threw a party and invited a few friends from Glenn’s company and some writer and photographer colleagues of mine.Glenn barbequed steak on the back porch.I mixed a bunch of margaritas in pitchers and after dinner we sat around drinking as the sky darkened and the stars came out.The big news was Dane and Victor had gotten hitched in California before Proposition Eight overturned the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.This was a year and a half gone by, so their visit was part vacation and part honeymoon.I confess to a flash of jealousy at the matching rings, the wallet of sepia tone wedding photos and the sea of family and friends in those photos.The permanence of their relationship galled me and I loathed myself for it.Glenn hadn’t proposed and I was too stubborn, too afraid of rejection to propose to him.I slipped away while everybody was laughing about the wedding hijinks.Glenn sauntered in as I was rinsing the dishes and put his arm around me and kissed my cheek.He was tall and lanky and had to lean over to do it.I’d drunk four or five margaritas in the meantime and my eyes were watery and doubtless red.He was oblivious, not that I held it against him.Glenn could be tender and thoughtful and wasn’t so much indifferent as clueless.Despite his interest in classical music, literature and art, and a possibly less wholesome, but no less cerebral, fascination with the esoteric and the occult, he didn’t like to think very deeply about certain things.His father was dead; a career railroad man, second generation Irish, he dropped in his traces from a heart attack when Glenn was fifteen.Glenn’s parents had known he was gay since grade school and they accepted him.Everything came easy.He cheerfully took what we had for granted as he took everything else for granted.The guy read books and worked with strings of code, for Christ’s sake.Truly a miracle he possessed any social graces whatsoever.As for me, my father had been a white boy from the Bronx who served thirty years in the Army, the last decade of it as a colonel.My mother was a former Brazilian teen-queen bathing beauty who married Dad to get the hell out of her hometown.Dad passed away in his sleep from an overdose of pills a few weeks before I met Glenn.I sometimes wondered if it’d been accidental, or closer to the protagonist’s opt-out in that famous little novel by Graham Greene.Mom pretended I’d court a fine young lady one day soon and sire a brood of kids.My three brothers were scattered across the world.The eldest kept in touch from India.Otherwise, I received birthday cards, the odd phone call or email, and that was that.Glenn kissed me again—hard and on the mouth, and he tasted sweetly of booze.I wiped my eyes and grinned and let it ago like I always did.Gnats and mosquitoes descended.The guests retreated to the living room.Glenn put on music and began serving another round of drinks from the wet bar.I fetched Moderor de Caliginis and took it to my office.An examination of the book revealed phone numbers and mailing addresses amidst the other text, although considering the edition’s publishing date, I assumed most were dead ends.In tiny print on the copyright page was a line that read SUBMISSIONS with a P.O.Box address in Walla Walla.Meanwhile, the party was in full gear.Between songs, raucous laughter floated to me.My CDs—Glenn preferred classical music; Beethoven, Chopin, Gershwin, Sibelius.That wouldn’t do at our casual get-togethers.Somebody sang along to the choruses of Neil Sedaka, Miles Davis, and Linda Ronstadt, a step behind and off-key.Daulton, our grizzled tomcat, jumped onto the easy chair near my desk and went to sleep.Old Daulton was a comforting soul.I hunched over my computer monitor and ran searches of key phrases from the book.A guy in Germany claimed there were numerous versions of the Black Guide—he’d acquired editions for regions in France, Spain, Portugal, and South Africa.A college student in Pullman wrote of a friend of a friend who’d used the book to explore caves in Yakima.That struck me as odd—I wasn’t familiar with any notable caves in Washington.Another man, an anthropologist named Berman, explained that several of the entries provided contact information for practitioners of the occult.During the late 1990s he’d visited some of these persons and joined them in séances, divinations, and fertility rituals.He was currently a professor at Central Washington University.On a lark, I sent him an email, noting I’d inherited a copy of the guide.The most interesting item I retrieved during my three lonely hours at the keyboard was the journal of an individual from Ellensburg who went by the handle of Rose.Rose started her journal in April 2007.There were three entries—the first talked about not really wanting a journal at all, but keeping one on the advice of her therapist.The second was a twenty-five-hundred-word essay on her travels abroad and eventually finding the Black Guide at a gift shop in Ellensburg.Apparently Rose had sought the book for several years and was elated.The guide contained a listing of secret attractions, hidden places, and persons “in the know” regarding matters esoteric and arcane.In the final entry, she mentioned packing for a trip with three friends to the “tomb” on the Olympic Peninsula and would make a full report upon her return.The journal hadn’t been updated since June 2007.Nonetheless, I left an anonymous message inquiring after her status.This satisfied me in a perverse way—it felt as if I’d thrown her a lifeline.I signed off around three a.m.Glenn was already in bed and snoring.I lay beside him and stared at the pale reflection of streetlights on the ceiling.Who was Rose? Young, pretty, wounded.Or, maybe not.The kind of girl who took pictures of herself in period costumes.Pale, thick mascara, in her rhinestone purse a deck of tarot cards she’d inherited from an older woman, a long lost sweetheart.Rose was a girl with many friends and lovers, yet who was usually alone.I pressed the Black Guide against the breast of my pajamas and wondered where she was at that moment.I dreamed of her that night, but in the morning all I remembered was flying above an endless forest and the rocky bluff of a small mountain, and into a cave that swallowed me whole.3.“C’mon.Tell Willem a Tommy story.” Glenn wore a loopy smirk.He’d done one too many shots of Cuervo.“Oh, yes!” Victor pounded his empty glass on the table.“Okay, okay.Here’s one about Thomas-san,” Dane said.His hair was tousled, his cheeks were flushed.He eyed me with an intensity that indicated such a story symbolized a great confidence, that I was on the verge of admittance to the inner circle.This was in the early evening after hiking up and down Queen Anne Hill since breakfast, peeking into shops, trying the innumerable bistros and pubs on for size, and yelling raucous comments at the construction boys ripping apart the sidewalk in front of the Phoenician Theatre.Now we were just off campus at a corner booth in a dimly lighted hole-in-the-wall called The Angry Norseman.We’d drunk with the vigor of sailors on shore leave the entire day and were almost sober again [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]