From Stacy to Melanie, from Melanie to Carol, from Carol to Rose. We bounced from girl to girl, the toll paid with deep kisses and empty promises. Our bed would never go cold as long as arousal and romance remained a contagious disease, an easy way to coax out a woman's most intimate nectars.
Daniel took most of them. There is nothing more attractive to a young girl than an alleged college boy revealing the thrilling, bittersweet acid that lubricates the world. After that, it only took a whisper or two in their ear from Daniel to convince them to share the original sin with me.
After growing tired of trekking the Mount of Venus over and over, we indulged our base instincts with the androgynous skin of those boys who haunt the nightclubs looking for loud music, even more deafening thrills, and maybe an answer to the uncertainty they harbored about their sexuality. The look of the chosen one varied with the nights and our whims. Sometimes taller or shorter, or stockier and forward, or shy and hesitant, or intense and crazy. But we approached them all the same, with the caution and hunger of apex predators, blending into the crowd and the blinding strobe lights. Sometimes we used drugs or alcohol; spiked drinks and pills are skeleton keys to the body and the heart.
In a motel room, a bathroom stall, a parking lot, or wherever it went down: Glassy eyes; parted pink lips, slick and eager; we'd nibble on the neck near the Adam's apple and trace the bare skin of the shoulder; tender moans bubbling up, like a woman's, or even sweeter and more compliant; we'd paint the stranger's palate with our cum, then taste his bitter seed.
How many beds did we share...? I've lost count. Or maybe I never started keeping one. The liquor and the substances leave deep blackouts in my memory.
The company of strangers wasn't enough, so we decided to seek release with each other.
Two halves coming together to explore each other's innermost layers, we harvested our panting with our tongues between very long kisses. Daniel wanted to try being the passive one first. During penetration I buried my fingers in his back and plowed the skin, and harvested his blood and his cries, and then he came in an orgasm immediately. I cleaned with my tongue the crimson fluid that was dripping down her back. We turned the tables... It was brutal to interrupt in my loins, the first time tearing me apart. It made me cry, and scream his name, and beg for more.
Nights of debauchery. Taboos multiplying. Life is a flushing toilet that just spins without taking the shit down, and even while up to our necks in crap, we keep looking for that one thing that makes us say: It was worth it. Money, power, fame, family, religion... Or in our case, an extravagance that isn't born in places illuminated by ethics or morals. Most people give up. People like Daniel, people like me, never stop attempting THE SEARCH until the ride is over.
"Let's murder someone," Daniel said once. I have a hard time remembering when. Maybe I dreamed it. Or maybe he said it while he was thrusting into me against the bathroom wall. Sensation. Palpitations. The warmth and white-out that steals your vision for a second, a symptom of reaching the climax. Everything seems so foggy.
And in the background, a madman won't stop laughing.
Thou shalt not kill... Demands the text that, alongside the Communist Manifesto, has unleashed the worst massacres in human history. Time passes and nothing gets better, nobody learns, or simply nobody wants to learn.
Death becomes a statistic when it visits the majority, a business if the stiff is a singer or an actor, or a cause for celebration if the one kicking the bucket is an alleged rapist, murderer, or dictator. Every second, someone in some corner of the world drops dead—maybe from cancer, or a car crash, starvation, suicide, or by someone else's hands.
Death is mundane... Or am I wrong?
Could murder be a diamond in the rough? Is it the missing piece to our spiraling jigsaw path? What's at the bottom of the well? Brimstone and fire, or a white rabbit?
Time to keep going and find out.
Daniel is with me on this.
We will reach the end of THE SEARCH.
I know it.
"We all end up as meat sacks rotting in maggots, Josh." Amidst the cold and beneath the pale light of the waning moon, he sinks the shovel in. I did the same. The soft, damp earth yields easily to our violation. "So what? Forget the outcome and think about the cause. Remember our friend, Cherry?"
How could I forget her? I looked around, at the hundreds of graves laced in mist. It's an elegant place; she would have liked to be buried here.
Daniel continues with his monologue.
"I bet her final moments were the most thrilling and cherished of her entire fucking existence. Every blow, every crunch of her bones, had to have stoked her desperate need to breathe and to see another sunrise. Kind of ironic when you stop and think about how little she cared for herself. You know what I believe? I believe the soul, and consequently the world, reveals its true radiance, its most beautiful and intense colors, in the crucial moments. During the impending end. Just how beautiful and intense is it? That, I don't know."
I nodded in sympathy, and we kept working. The mound of dirt beside us grows and completes itself. We break the coffin's seal and practically tear the lid off its hinges. The stench of the grave spills out, reeking of withered lilies and dead rats. Dark sockets stare up at us with reproach. Daniel raises the shovel with both hands, brings it down, and drives the blade into the corpse's neck, severing it in a single thrust.
With the blackened skull between his fingers and the skin peeling away like papier-mâché, he takes a seat on his mother's headstone and plants a kiss on it, as innocent as May roses. The lips fall off.
We filled the grave back in. Daniel carries the trophy under his arm and we march back to our building. He slept with his mother for the first time in a long time, made love to her until she disintegrated against his thrusts, and recounted every obscene, affectionate detail to me.
A happy reunion, I suppose.