Sushi Central Page 7

  The image — the trees and the fairy lights and my breath in the cold air — begins to fade. I try to grab hold of it again, but it’s like trying to grab hold of a dream once you’ve started to wake up. I realise that, more than anything, I want some part of that innocence back. I want to be overwhelmed as much as I was as a child. I want to be able to be overwhelmed.

  82

  When I get to Dean’s house he’s already partially stoned. When he opens the door his eyes are glazed, and he has this incredibly cute look about him. I don’t know how to describe that look properly — I’d say it’s about forty percent the expression on his face, forty percent his figure and the way he carries himself, and then after that a combination of various other factors. But, yeah. Whatever. Dean always manages to look incredibly together.

  He hugs me when he answers the door. He always hugs everyone.

  ‘Calvin, hey! I haven’t seen you in ages.’

  ‘No. Dude, it’s good to see you,’ I tell him and we hug one another again. When he’s hugging me he feels warm, and I can smell the scent that surrounds him, which is a mix of pot smoke and what I suspect might be CK ONE. His hands are in the small of my back this time. For a moment I start to become kind of vaguely turned on by this, but then he breaks the hug off.

  ‘I haven’t seen you since the play,’ he tells me.

  Dean’s referring to Long Day’s Journey Into Night, this incredibly depressing Irish play he was in last year. He does something acting at uni. He’s pretty good. Convincing, anyway. In Long Day’s Journey he was playing someone’s son. Things were tense, and everyone in the family was depressive or an alcoholic or both. Mostly both, actually. So, you know, it did have a pretty fair basis in reality. Anyway. The play was really good. Dean was fantastic. But my whole memory of that night is kind of dampened by what happened afterwards.

  83

  Adam, this dark-eyed and slightly canine guy from the outer orbit of my circle of friends, was at the play as well. Afterwards we all went out for drinks. By that I mean Dean and his friends went out for drinks and I tagged along with them. I obviously couldn’t buy my own because I was fifteen or something at the time, but Adam plied me with rum and Cokes all night, and after a lot of flirting and telling me how good-looking I was — which I’m fairly certain he didn’t mean — he leaned over and kissed me on the mouth. I let him do it. He told me he wanted to take me home. I let him do that was well.

  We ended up at his house, sitting on the sofa, watching some movie in the dark with the sound turned off. I don’t remember what we were watching. I was kissing him all over and blah blah blah, and then either he pulled his cock out or I pulled his cock out, I don’t remember, but I know at that point I wanted to suck it, like more than anything, partly because I was hot for Adam, and partly because I knew he was an older guy, a uni guy, so I went down on him and I remember how big it felt in my mouth and kind of uncomfortable, and the taste of it, like, you know … I remember I made this really tragic attempt at a blow job that lasted several minutes and then that was that. Adam started acting all weird afterwards and dropped me off at home the next morning. It wasn’t bad. I mean, I’ve had worse, but you know. Anyway.

  I try to avoid thinking about that.

  84

  Dean and I talk for a little longer, just mindless catch-up bullshit, and eventually he invites me in. There are a few other people here. Adam is here. He looks sinewy tonight — vaguely predatory and very good-looking. Totally porno, as Margot would say. Immediately I begin to dread the prospect of having to talk to him, but for the time being at least, he is locked in an intense conversation with the girl sitting next to him. She has black bangs, too much eyeliner and a Hello Kitty shirt on; she is pretty in a slightly dishevelled way. They are both on a futon in the corner, and I think they’re both stoned too. Looking around, I start to suspect that everyone here — seven or eight people — is on some kind of drug except for me. I can’t decide whether this is a good thing or not.

  The stereo is pouring out guitar noise with repetitive dance beats underneath and a man’s voice, extremely sexy/ detached/cool, over the top. I think it might be the new New Order — matter of fact, I’m about ninety-nine percent sure of it. But that’s not important right now.

  85

  The brunette boy from the net is standing beside the stereo.

  86

  It can’t be, but it is, but it can’t be, but I’m pretty sure it is. Looking at him, I’m almost positive, but it can’t be, but it has to be, and I mean, it is, it’s him.

  I spent so long staring at those jpegs. I memorised the angles of his face. The details. His hair — the colour of it and the way it sat. His eyes. And I’m certain that this is the same boy. I’m sure. It has to be. I have no frame of reference for how to deal with this situation.

  87

  You know how there are some people you can just look at, you can see them only once and know that you want them so much it just about kills you? This boy is like that, only worse. Like that times about a thousand or so. He’s tall, thin, with chocolate brown hair. His features all line up with perfect symmetry. I can’t think, and I don’t have to think, because right now I have no memory, I have no past; all I have is right now, and I am so into this particular person that it’s like a wave breaking over me, and it makes me sick. I think of that look in his eyes — blank, like he’d been emptied out completely.

  88

  In my mind I’m going over all the ways this could be possible. This particular situation, with the boy, with everything, makes sense, if you think about it. Jeremy’s from the Gold Coast. It’s not that far away. Brisbane’s a small city, and if you’re a gay boy, it’s a very small city. Within a couple of degrees, everyone has slept with everyone else.

  Everyone has slept with everyone else: This thought embeds itself in my mind. Jeremy has been with this guy. This guy knows Dean, obviously, even if they’re just friends, it’s probably in the same way that Dean and I are just friends, and the whole thing makes my head spin.

  89

  He has a bottle in his hand. He looks across at me, gives me a look that could be described as a half-smile, before returning to the conversation he’s having with a dark-haired girl whose back is facing me. All of this happens in the space of a few seconds, but in that time, something in me understands that it’s definitely him.

  90

  Movie: There is a big television set on the other side of the room, and the sound is turned right down but that doesn’t really matter because the movie has subtitles anyway. I think it might be Spanish or something. A boy who looks about my age is sitting at someone’s dining room table, cutting up what looks like lines of speed. A plane is taking off against a grey sky. An old woman is picking a lizard up off the ground. I try to get some sense of what might be going on from these fragments but I can’t. Nobody seems to be paying any attention to it but me. I don’t even know why it’s on. I guess it’s an arty kind of wallpaper. Maybe it’s meant to be distracting or something.

  91

  The thing is, on the net he was basically just a series of pixels on a screen. Yeah, he was beautiful, yeah, he was the kind of boy I’d willingly obsess over, but he wasn’t real. He was … safe. Despite how he looked in the pictures, despite how cute/vulnerable/wasted/desperate he appeared, he wasn’t a real person. There was a membrane that separated him from the real world.

  In a sense he’d become a fictional character. He was beautiful and fucked up but you’d never have to get close enough to actually deal with or experience any of those things for yourself. But now he’s a flesh and blood person standing across a party from me, it’s way too much to deal with.

  92

  The two — the imaginary and the real — collide. The gap between beautiful vacant boy on the net and actual boy standing across the room closes so rapidly it makes me seasick.

  Across the room: The brunette boy has finished telling whatever story it is he’s telling. He and the girl he
’s talking to both laugh. For a fraction of a second he looks across at me, and then looks back at the girl again. In that moment I get to look right at him. His eyes, the colour of them, and the way they turn down at the corners. The angles of his face, the geometry of his cheeks and his lips, and I know, it’s him.

  My mind goes elsewhere.

  93

  I sort of retreat to this other place: I begin to build a personality for this new version of the brunette boy. He’s wearing a little silver cross around his neck; I’m sure he’s wearing it as a fashion statement rather than a religious one, to give himself that alluring lapsed-Catholic air or whatever. Maybe he actually is a lapsed Catholic. Maybe he’s not lapsed at all, but he looks lapsed, in more ways than one. When Catholic boys go off the rails, they really go off the rails. Something to do with original sin; all the dogma they’re fed from the time they’re little kids. I don’t know. Whatever. But he’s beautiful. He’s wearing a black shirt with a picture of a paperclip on it. A single piercing near the top of his left ear. He’s taller than I am, and he has this strange wide-eyed, frightened look that makes him all the more interesting. The look on his face really throws me. It gives him a kind of mystery. Depth even. I don’t know. It’s a problem of mine that I always equate good looks with depth. The boy fascinates me; he has that slightly damaged look which always makes guys enigmatic, and about ten times more interesting. I start to wonder about him, like, seeing him now, as a boy across a party, and seeing him as he was, as the boy in the photographs — it’s a pretty big gap.

  I always spin these elaborate fictions around guys I find attractive, imbue them with a kind of depth that probably just isn’t there. That’s why when I meet someone, I’m almost always let down, because the truth of them is always a lot less interesting than the fiction I’ve created in my head.

  94

  Fiction: Adam, for instance, was a case in point. That night I met him, I became more or less obsessed. I mean, from the way he looked, all dark and intense, I thought maybe he was some kind of artist; like, if I could find my way inside his mind, decipher him, I could become his muse and it would all be beautiful and dark and sexy and interesting. Turns out, of course, he was only into me because I was underage. The sheer superficiality of it all gets to me sometimes. But, y’know. I’m just getting distracted now.

  95

  Dean’s arm is around my waist. I want him to keep it there. It feels nice, reassuring. ‘So Calvin,’ he says. ‘Feel like a jay?’

  Suddenly I do.

  I shrug in a noncommittal way and allow Dean to lead me across the room. I look over at the brunette boy again. He’s looking back at me; grins and narrows his eyes a bit, an expression that could mean any of a number of things, none of which I feel like thinking about right now.

  Suddenly Dean and I are standing over by the futon, and Adam is looking up at me. Dammit. He’s smiling at me, an alligator smile, and I know straightaway that he remembers everything. Jesus, this is going to be awkward. I wish he’d stop giving me that smarmy look, like he’s aware of some weakness deep within me.

  ‘This is Adam,’ says Dean. ‘I think you guys have met already.’

  Adam doesn’t stand up.

  ‘… and this is Jodie,’ Dean continues, unaware of the excruciating current of superiority/inferiority that is passing between Adam and me.

  The Hello Kitty girl — Jodie — waves at me and offers me one of the jellybeans she’s eating. I smile and tell her no thanks. ‘Cool shirt,’ she says. The tone of her voice doesn’t give much away, but I choose not to interpret the comment as sarcastic.

  ‘Thanks,’ I say.

  At this point in time I’m only too eager to take Dean up on his offer. He moves towards the coffee table; there is a wooden box sitting on it. I stare at him, attempting to look nonchalant as he produces three pre-rolled joints. So, you know. Blah blah, etc. Once Dean has everyone’s attention, they all sort of drift to this side of the room, and everyone ends up on or around the futon.

  Various things happen. Dean puts the New Order album on repeat, turns it up; the music comes at a volume that could rot your teeth. He lights the first of the three joints, and within about fifteen minutes ‘Vicious Streak’ is blasting and we are all stoned out of our minds and the singer is telling me I have a vicious streak for someone so young. The music is so loud it is almost a physical presence in the room. It flows around our stationary bodies like water; it is difficult not to sway with the currents of it, difficult not to dissolve right into it.

  The brunette boy is sitting beside me on the floor. He and the girl he was talking to seem to have drifted apart. She’s now on the futon, next to the Hello Kitty girl. The Hello Kitty girl giggles, then she says something that sounds like, ‘I love Winona Ryder. I mean, she’s like, the queen of indie movies.’ I have no idea what prompted that comment or what it means, so I ignore it.

  Somebody says (presumably in response to the Winona Ryder comment): ‘There’s a thesis in that.’

  Everyone laughs. I don’t get it.

  The boy is still beside me.

  I try not to get obsessive about it, but like, that’s not the way things work when I’m high. I’m way obsessive most of the time, but whenever I’m high, whether or not I want to, I always take it to new and not always comfortable places. I trance out on things, fixate on them. It’s usually just lights in the distance, or video games or music or just, you know, anything pretty and uncomplicated, anything that can connect me to a sense of unreality. Unreality is pleasant. At present the idea of ever sleeping with this boy is unreality. I can stare at him and fill in the blanks with whatever details I want. It’s a dream. Enough to float away on. And right now, I’m kind of in the thick of it and I’m trancing out totally and completely on him.

  Floating: The boy is just a little taller than I am, with thin, birdlike shoulders jutting out just slightly underneath the fabric of his shirt. I can’t stop staring at his hands — they’re so long and graceful, almost feminine. Everything about him is beautiful. He takes a hit from the joint, slow and careful, then puffs out a cloud of misty white smoke. I love the way he holds it, in between two fingers, with his thumb extended slightly at the side. When he takes another drag, the underneath of his fingers press against his lips, and he holds the smoke in his mouth for a long time before letting it out.

  music from the stereo: a frightening sexy compelling vacant drum loop that seems to be echoing in every corner of the room.

  He breathes out, and I breathe in. If I move in close I can smell the thin clouds of smoke which drift lazily from his parted lips. This feeling, or an idea of a feeling, or whatever it is, totally overwhelms me like a physical force, and I realise I’d really love to stand, walk into one of the other rooms and have him follow me. Like, let it happen; feel him kissing me, against me, — our two thin bodies grinding perfectly against one another. To go down on him, taste every inch of him, as he stands, head back; groaning as his warmth flows down my throat. When I kiss him, my mouth will fill with smoke.

  I am so absorbed in these thoughts that I don’t even notice when he passes the joint to me. I snap back into the moment, take it from him with a hint of a smile, which he returns. As I stare, the urge to take him, absorb every part of his body into mine, becomes more acute. The force of his beauty gives me a head-swim, and I realise that I will die if he never tells me his name, if I never explore his body, if I never find out what his mouth tastes like.

  He’s still looking at me, like he’s expecting me to say something. I’m not sure quite what. I give him a smile that could be interpreted in any of about a hundred different ways. He sort of cocks his head to the side, still looking at me.

  ‘Hey,’ he says. Just that. Hey. Not even any inflection, but still, there are so many different ways that ‘hey’ could be interpreted; it has so many possible meanings that it makes my head hurt just thinking about it. Why did he say hey to me? Why is he talking to me? Is he just trying to be polite, make
conversation? Is he into me? There’s no way he can find me attractive. No way at all. It’s against the laws of physics.

  ‘Hey.’

  He doesn’t break eye contact. ‘Anthony,’ he says.

  Lust: Sometimes it’s so intense it’s a colour. It’s red; I mean, it’s hard to explain, but when he introduces himself to me, all I see and all I feel is red. Red like desire. Red like an exotic violence.

  This is my life now, and everything else that’s ever happened to me is like a movie I once saw. ‘Calvin,’ I tell him, and reach out my hand so he can take it, which he does. His skin feels cold. It seems strange that someone so beautiful should have such cold skin. I try to focus on the feel of his hand in mine; his grip is tight, his skin is fleshy, maybe a bit dry; I try and imagine the feel of this hand all over my body. I imagine what this hand would feel like as Anthony dragged it across the skin of my belly, my neck, my face.

  ‘So how do you know Dean?’ A totally expected question. He happens to have asked me.

  ‘Met him on the net,’ I say.

  I kind of wonder if the word ‘net’ will produce any kind of reaction from him, but it doesn’t, and then I start to wonder why I even thought it might – it’s kind of stupid, on reflection.