Wildcat
by FiendWithoutaFace
URL: http://www.bluecatsgraphics.com/pean/fanfics/61/

Part 1: Wildcat

If there’s one thing you can say about mankind
There’s nothing kind about man
You can drive out nature with a pitchfork
But it always comes roaring back again

— Tom Waits, “Misery is the River of the World”



Catlike, he lets himself in.

I had been warned to expect an unusual client, and I am not disappointed. I’ve never worked under conditions like these before, and I am still not entirely pleased about the situation, despite the payment — three times my usual fee — already directly deposited into my account. Most especially I’m unsure of conducting the first session in my own home. But everything about this case promises to be out of the ordinary, and the client insisted it could be done no other way.

What is more important, this client represents a challenge. I get few enough of those, these days. People are distressing in the quotidian similarity of their problems. See enough of them and you realize that everyone is more or less the same, and even deviants deviate in a small number of predictable ways. This client’s complaint, similar at first blush to so many others, has upon digging deeper revealed aspects that seem unique.

So, admittedly intrigued, I agreed to break almost all of my own rules. Anyone who knows me well would have been shocked to hear this. Above all other things I value order, consistency, and that should tell you a bit about how eager I am to meet this client.

My visitor is tall and slender, stepping across the threshold of the patio door with a taut, masculine grace. He is no longer quite young. His face, all harsh angles and stark planes, shows the jaded composure of a man who knows his way about the world. It is intensely pale, and under its quiescence lurks a suggestion of something dangerous and different. Eyes that appear almost colorless in the dim light are summing me up with indifferent contemplation. The total effect is curiously alluring, if not precisely described as handsome.

I put down the book I’d been reading, ’Oral Sadism and the Vegetarian Personality’, always good for a laugh and also a delightful palate cleanser before embarking on a new therapeutic relationship in which one might be tempted to see oneself as having all the answers.

“Please, take a seat.” I gesture around the room. “Make yourself comfortable.”

He does so with a markedly feline selectivity, folding himself into the most comfortable chair I own as if he has always belonged there. He cocks his head to the side, his eyes fluttering half closed as he studiously takes in the softly playing music. Raindrops sparkle in his hair and on the shoulders and arms of his black Chesterfield overcoat.

“Is that Cab Calloway?”

I smile across at him. “Close, but no cigar. He’s an impressionist, a fellow named Danny Elfman, but everyone says he sings some damned fine jazz for a redheaded Jew from Texas.”

My visitor gives me a stare that clearly states he thinks I am a peculiar person. Well, he’s judged me correctly. Might as well set all doubts aside from the beginning.

“Way you can tell is, Cab was a tenor and Danny is a flexible but definite baritone. Do you like jazz, Mr. Pendergast?”

“Not even slightly.” He restively re-crosses his legs and settles deeper into the chair.


“We’ll have silence instead.” I turn the music off and lean back into my own chair.

I feel the need to study him prior to determining how to proceed. Of course I’d read and reread all my colleague’s copious notes on him, as well as Glinn’s valuable suggestions, and decided it was better on my part not to labor under any preconceived notions. Well, now — here he is, and I find myself somewhat at a loss.

I clear my throat. “Before we begin, I need to introduce you to something I call the black card. I noticed from reading the previous transcripts that you think you can talk your way out of anything, and you’re probably correct. I’m not here to play verbal volleyball with you. This problem of yours can’t be talked out of existence, as you yourself admitted when you denied the usefulness of traditional psychoanalytic therapy. I agree with that evaluation, by the way.”

“A black card,” he drawls.

“Not an actual physical card. Simply put, when I black card you, you stop talking, stop moving, stop whatever you’re doing. Immediately. If you can’t agree to this, then I won’t be able to help you.”

“Am I allowed a black card to use on you?”

“Of course.” I grin, relaxing a bit. “But only one. Do you agree to these conditions?”

For a long moment he says nothing. All that could be heard now is the soughing of the wind in the tree branches outside, the patter of rain and the first of the year’s spring peepers. “I suppose I must,” he says eventually.

“Excellent. Now, perhaps you can explain why you’ve come to me.”

A inquiring tilt of his elegant head, a cynical lift of the arched brows. “Surely you know everything.”

“Tell me anyway.”

“Very well.” In a voice assiduously cleansed of emotion, he states, “I have been unable to achieve sexual climax.”

“And this distresses you.”

“It distresses my paramour.” He underlines his statement with a little, affected laugh. A wry grimace twists his face, the expression of one who wants to turn humiliation to humor.

I refuse to let him get away with that. “That’s an honorable motive,” I said. “Although you speak it as a prevarication.”

“As far as it goes, it’s quite true,” he shoots back, glaring at me with annoyance and surprise before relapsing into unsmiling dourness.

At first I suspected the not uncommon problem of simple reaction formation, that is, the propensity to assert the exact opposite of what one suspects to be true of oneself. Several physicians had cleared him of the more common physical problems (in fact, he is disgustingly healthy) and he’d shown adamant resistance if not outright scorn regarding the techniques of talk therapy.

Good old Freud, as much as the current intellectual elite loves to dismiss him, did coin some useful theoretic phrases that were later confirmed by actual experiments. The most overt gay bashers, when measured by a penile plethysmograph, get bigger erections than non-prejudiced men when shown X-rated male pornography. However, everything I’d read about this client made me highly doubt he’d allow me to attach a gauge to his privy member while screening “Les Manlove and the Nagasaki Angels”, so for the moment that remained a theory.

I then recalled Dr Watson’s observation of Sherlock Holmes, that any emotion and most especially love was abhorrent to his cold, precise but admirably balanced mind. ‘He never spoke of the softer passions, save with a gibe and a sneer . . . for the trained reasoner to admit such intrusions into his own delicate and finely adjusted temperament was to introduce a distracting factor which might throw a doubt upon all his mental results. Grit in a sensitive instrument, or a crack in one of his own high-power lenses, would not be more disturbing than a strong emotion in a nature such as his.’

I take a steadying breath, and plunge directly into the deep end. “From what I understand, you’ve come to associate touch with pain and betrayal,” I say. “It’s a closed feedback loop, since you’ve never let anyone get close enough to prove you wrong. You’re so in control of every aspect of your thinking, you’ve lost the ability to let go and listen to your instincts.”

“What do you propose to do, then? Persuade me otherwise with your touch?” He appears more amused than offended. “After all, I am not—”

I cut him off. “That doesn’t matter. This doesn’t concern gender or sexual orientation.” (although I still have my suspicions) “Sex is about putting tab A into slot B. This is about touch, simple human contact, nothing more or less.”

If he were going to use his black card, it would have been then, I think. “You ask much of me.”

“Just to allow yourself to be touched?”

He sighs deeply, steeples his gloved hands and turns a little to scrutinize the prints on my wall. “I can endure more than you might suspect, if it is required of me.”

“No argument here.” I had access to his medical history. I’d had to put it aside due to nausea more than once.

“You speak of instincts. What, precisely, do you mean?”

“All human beings,” I begin, “Come hardwired with certain instincts. Even when their normal pathways of expression are hindered, the brain still craves stimulation in the same ways. Take someone with autism, for example.”

His eyes cut sideways, casting a keenly scrutinizing glance at me from under a lowered screen of white lashes. I don’t for a moment doubt he’d also checked me out exhaustively before coming tonight. No dissembling, then.

“Take me, then,” I concede. “When I was younger, I would substitute human touch by wrapping myself in heavy quilts, packing my body into small spaces, or stroking and hugging pets.”

“Yet you ended up in this profession?” His voice fluted even softer, almost malicious.

“Sometimes we become fascinated by the things that most repel us.” I wait a moment, but he does not rise to the bait. I continue, “Long story short, I still don’t like being touched. It’s overwhelming. My brain can’t filter out the sensations. The amygdala, the part of the brain associated with fear and aggression, still fires as if I’m being attacked when someone so much as looks me in the eyes. Most people imagine sex therapists are sex addicts. I’m the opposite. I can think of the human body in purely objective terms because I get no pleasure in touching it.”

Pendergast is smirking faintly.

“Congrats, you’ve successfully derailed the conversation,” I say without rancor. ”My point is, I still crave touch even if what people consider normal affection and contact is overwhelming to the point of repugnance to me. And so do you. You have the same instincts as every other human being. There are circumstances distorting their perception and manifestation, but they are present no matter how hard you try to repress them.”

“Forgive me, but what you see as repression I perceive as vitally important restraint.”

“What would happen, do you think, if you let this particular genie out of the bottle?”

“Instincts . . . primal ways of thinking . . . can not be separated easily from one another. They are all entangled. I can not do that, for your and everyone else‘s safety,” he argues, just as I suspected he would. “My brother and I are not complete opposites. We spring from the same environment, the same upbringing, the same genetics. I know my motivations to be only a few degrees different from his depravity, except that I struggle against what he reveled in—”

“Black card.” I hold up my hand. “Leave your brother out of this for just one moment. I do understand what you’re saying, but it’s irrelevant. No, sit back down and listen to me! Your problem is that this Viola holds no interest for you. No one does.”

Impulsively, I reach out and grasp his wrist in what is intended as an expression of compassion. His reaction is electric. He jerks his hand out of mine as if I’d hurt him, his lips skinning back from his teeth in an expression very like a snarl. He makes as if to expostulate, but I quickly continue.

“Black card’s still up. Look, you say you have feelings for her? Emotion that flourishes on illusion and sickens and dies on realities aren’t worth anything.”

I marvel at him, sitting there scowling at me. He is so magnificent, so isolated and pure, I feel for a moment that my touch had defiled him. But that niveous purity is unnatural, barren and inhospitable as an Antarctic landscape. My own warmth is the warmth of entropy, the heat of rot, the slow destruction and decay of all living things, but paradoxically, it is also the warmth of life. He’d devoted himself to death, studied it, entombed himself in mortality in all its aspects, honed himself mentally and physically to this singular purpose, the destruction of his brother.

And, having achieved that, there is nothing left for him.

More to the point, nothing left in him.

“What have I got to offer in reparation, except my own life?” Pendergast suddenly broke out. Back to the real problem. Not Viola, but Diogenes. Somehow, the pain in his rich, lingering, musical voice is even more apparent when he tries to hide it. “And what good is that? It won’t bring my brother back into the world.”

“Sacrifice is not for utility. It is a penalty we pay.”

“I know that.” He fixes me with a haughty unflinching glare.

I discern a challenge in that lordly, scornful expression, and my manner stiffens. “The point is whether or not you can go on enjoying life after what has happened.”

On the face of it he has everything to look forward to. His career is over, true, but he is talented and accredited enough that he could occupy himself usefully with any number of other interests. It was better he leave the FBI behind, really, seeing as how he used it simply to further his goals of capturing his brother and without that, his job no longer had much meaning. Even if he never worked another day in his life, his family fortunes would more than adequately sustain him. He has his health, he is attractive, albeit in an outre way, he has a potential life-mate. He is the archetypal man who has everything.

“Perhaps you imagine that I allowed my brother to die.“

“You did.” Blunt, yes. Rude. But there is no kindness in softening this blow.

He’s built layers of himself to obscure his death obsession. These surfaces loves of fine clothes, gourmet food, art, obscure literature and pursuits . . . they are too refined, too artificial. There is nothing real at the center, the core was empty.

“I did not love my brother, and I am not in love with life.” His voice is so low, soft and refined that I find it difficult to catch the words.

“Your life is not required.”

I want more than anything to either hug him or throttle him. Of course what he felt for his brother was not the pure and noble ideal of love he’d convinced himself he feels for this Viola, this self-defined sacrifice, but something boiling and obsessive, brutal and torturing.

“Then I don’t understand what you want, or what you are talking about.”

It reminds me of patients with dissociative personality disorder (more commonly, if incorrectly, known as “multiple personality disorder”). Some crisis had occurred early in life at the stage of development when a child is forming the concept of an ego. Most often it was sexual or physical abuse of some sort, but not always. Any kind of deep shock or traumatic event might precipitate the disorder. Thoughts that are approved and consistent with the concept of self are admitted into the main ego, “bad” or overwhelming thoughts are attributed to another self. It’s the same process that in adults leads to feelings of hypnotic control, spirit possession, muses, religious epiphany and so on.

I suspect that what happened was that his child-self had created another persona, one with no memory of the Event, in order to allow himself to go on functioning without being destroyed by self hatred. The original self, memory intact, went to “sleep” and slumbered peacefully until this last memory crossing.

Now it is awake, and trying to integrate with his consciousness. But the original self had remained a child. Just a boy, an unable to understand the complexities of adult sexuality and hence the erectile dysfunction.

Or had it?

Perhaps the separation between self and not-self hadn’t been completed until he was a teenager. I surreptitiously check my notes again. He had said that as an adolescent, he’d discovered Diogenes’s notebooks. There was no exact description of what he read in them. Possibly, seeing what was in there had partially reawakened the memories of the traumatized nine year old.

I glance up again. Possibly . . . and possibly he had not entirely been repulsed by them. Possibly he found himself interested in them.

“It’s not my place to demand a sacrifice from you, Mr. Pendergast. That would be compliance on your part, not sacrifice. I can merely offer, and you must feel that there is nothing else for you to do.”

“You’re being very mysterious.”

I duck my head, dropping my voice nearly to a whisper. “Am I? I don’t mean to be. There’s only one relief from remorse.”

“What are you suggesting?”

He did willingly admit that there was a fine line between his brother’s madness and his own. If his reaction to the notebooks was not complete repulsion, this boundary would have been threatened with erasure. In that moment, reading the notebooks, he’d woken for an instant, the terrified nine year old child into the confused youth.

Damn, it would have been a hellacious second trauma, and again the true monster was himself.

That day, the adolescent Aloysius had been put to sleep, too, that day when he realized the fiend his brother had become and dedicated his life to stopping him. In order to slay this monster, though, he cast himself as much as an opposite as he could. Repressing his own twisted desires, and his innocent sexual drive along with it. He had essentially frozen his development in time. The proxy, the construct, the facade had developed, while inside the real Aloysius remained a teenaged boy, with all that implied.

I put my notes aside. There was nothing further to be learned from them. From here on in, it must be played by ear. “That suggests nothing to you? Perhaps it doesn’t.”

And so the adult Aloysius had rationalized his interest in murders into their prevention. But to do so, he would have been required to study them thoroughly, thus quietly satisfying his repressed bloodlust in the guise of detached, respectable research. In order to slay dragons, we must become dragons ourselves. Or admit we were dragons all along.

He sighs; not a gentle sound, but the meditative rumbling of a tiger crouched to spring. “What . . . sacrifice?”

I clasp his hand, very carefully. This time he doesn’t pull away. Slipping off and discarding the butter-soft black leather glove, I admire the strong bones of his bared hand, turning it over, letting my thumb trail across his palm, fingernail tracing the scrawl of sea-green veins along the underside of his wrist. “Has it occurred to you that this pain of yours can hardly come to an end unless you make some kind of voluntary surrender?”

This wasn’t going to be easy for either of us. I usually don’t go so fast, but I’d become convinced I could spend the evening doing no more than stroking his cheek and he would leave and find a way to never see me again. For someone so tightly in control of himself, he is pitiably unaware of his own dilemma.

“Now I will tell you what sacrifice I suggest to you,” I say. “It’s a hard one, but I think it’s what you require.”

What I plan to do might very well destroy him. And if it didn’t, if his psyche somehow survived, it might also become warped into what he feared the most. The killer self he’d repressed could burst forth and overwhelm the fragile construct of the civilized, courteous and cultured gentleman he thought he was.

It is a chance that has to be taken. To leave him like this, in this terrible state of chaos and angst, would be to condemn him to an inevitable slide into madness. His ego ideal is a castle built on sand. He needs this, the knowledge he can let go a bit of that control and not be destroyed or destroy everything around him, to begin rebuilding a firm basis. Otherwise, sooner or later, he will confront the emptiness in himself and lose himself in the abyss.

I realize that what I said next also meant taking my life into my own hands.

“Aloysius,” I say. “I want to make love to you.”

For a long moment, there is no reaction at all. I visualize the cogs and gears grinding and turning in his mind, the naked calculation, weighing and balancing and layers of self control and denial locking down.

“Black card! Stop thinking so hard.” I leap up and grab him by the lower jaw, ignoring the dangerous tension in his pose, and force him to look down at me. Eye contact, the most basic of intimacies.

His eyes, still hard as hailstones, slowly close, and he says in a different, abrasive voice, “Listen. I have stared death in the face. It accuses me, and demands to know what I have made of my life. I‘ve waded here through blood, and nothing good can come from it.”

“Then you feel your life is worthless, to be given to anyone who asks it?”

“No, it goes beyond that. There is a certain joy in giving freely what others can only take from me by force. It isn‘t sarcasm, or despondency, or bitterness . . . ” Beneath the pallor and composure of that ascetic face, I see he is deeply conflicted.

I wonder if that woman of his comprehends even a portion of what he suffered through, or was capable — willing — of doing so.

“What’s bothering you, honestly,” I inquire. “If you find me so repulsive, I can suggest someone else for you. A female colleague, perhaps? Remember, this is your choice. It‘s meaningless otherwise.”

He turns away from me with the resolve of a man abandoning himself to the firing squad, and takes a swift, decisive step towards the patio door.

“Pendergast,” I say. “You do realize that if you walk out that door, this will never be resolved. The sexual dysfunction is only a symptom, and the least of them. You took your brother’s life. You have no right to throw away your own.”

He pauses in mid-step, his features contorted with defiance yet paradoxically needy.

“Stop thinking at all. For once in your shit life, don’t think about it. I’m asking you to give in, to let someone else take care of you. To enjoy yourself in a totally non-intellectual, instinctual way. What’s your first impulse?”

“Yes,” he hisses. His long pike’s jaw clench tight, teeth bared, the muscles in his temple jerking with tension.

“Good, good.” I am proud of him, and a bit surprised. I didn’t think he would have caved so readily. He had been more stirred up than I realized.

“You’re like some wildcat raised in captivity,” I tell him in a soothing voice. Reaching up, I run my fingers through his still-wet hair, timing the strokes with the rhythm of my speech. Touching the head is a very personal gesture. Only parents and children, or lovers, usually do so. “You have the ability, you have the instincts and the drive, but you’ve never been taught how to express it, never had a chance to practice. Now you’ve been let out of your cage, released into the wild, and you have no idea what to do. You’re helpless.”

How odd to think of someone like him as helpless.

Odd, yet oddly arousing. He is a decade older than me, though you would never be able to tell. Like most very thin people, his skin hadn’t wrinkled much and there is no way to distinguish pure white hairs amidst all that cornsilk blond. But he is also considerably taller, and in excellent shape. I try to keep in shape, but I’m simply not a very physically overpowering person to begin with. He could easily overpower me, injure me badly and leave.

Instead, he leans into me, his chin almost on my shoulder, and lets out a long, shuddering breath.

“Not here.” I put a firm hand on the back of his neck, urging him to stand straight, and lead him scruffed like a disobedient kitten to the bedroom. Not my bedroom, of course, which looks like someone set off a grenade in a library then dumped an unmade bed in the middle of the wreckage. This is a small guest room I had especially prepared for tonight.

Part 2: Ignis Fatuus

IIt will always come to find you
It will always leave you cryin’

Cross my wooden leg and I swear on my glass eye
It’ll never leave you high and dry
Never leave you loose
It’s harder to get rid of than tattoos
There’s one thing you can’t lose — it’s that feel

— Tom Waits “That Feel”



The room I prepared for us was small, but not stuffy. I’d left the windows wide open to an absolutely gorgeous day, not shuttering them until the sun set and the rain began. It was a shame he hadn’t come earlier. I’d have preferred to do this out in the garden on the bank of the pond, shrouded by the low-hanging boughs of the willows and enveloped by the fresh scent of tender new grass crushed beneath our bodies. He would have looked like the marble statue of a forgotten god amid all that greenery. But I must do the best I can with what I have.

One might scoff at the little room’s trappings. And I’ll be the first to admit touches like the numerous small candles providing the only illumination might seem cliched, but I’ve honed my techniques over the years, and there is a solid reason behind every decoration.

Those candles, for instance. Usually scented, I elected this time to go with plain in deference to my client’s heightened sensorium. The low, flickering lighting hides the small perceived flaws in the body, made one feel secure, intimate and relaxed. Swaths of dark velvet drape the walls to muffle distracting sounds and give the effect of womblike enfoldment. There was no bed, only a pile of oversized, softly stuffed pillows of different shapes and a variety of textures to stimulate the bared ski: buttery-smooth doeskin, furry mohair, soothing cotton, and cool, slippery satin. The cumulative impression is security, comfort, secrecy, the perfect spot for an illicit tryst with no questions asked and no connections made except that of two bodies briefly but delightfully joined as one.

Pendergast surveys the room with quick, analytical glances, standing ramrod straight with his arms folded behind his back. He has gone still and watchful, wary as a cat backed into a corner. I stifle a sigh. The man really is completely out of touch with his reptilian low mind. What he saw was quickly cataloged, filed away, hermetically sealed and locked into cold storage in some deep cranny of his grey matter without it ever affecting him. He might as well be a brain in a jar.

Standing facing one another, it strikes me again how tall he is. My mouth is just level with his collarbone, so I begin by leaning forward and gently pressing my lips to his supraclavicular gap, the fear spot, that thin drumhead of skin stretched tightly across where the collarbones met, below which, unprotected by bone or muscle, the pulse throbs vulnerably close to the surface.

As I do so, I inhale. Strange, but although I can smell the milky-alkaline scent of soap and a hint of aftershave and damp wool clinging from his clothes, I can’t smell him. As if he isn’t really here at all.

He places one hand awkwardly on my shoulder, but I deflect it easily. “No,” I say. “This is about you, not me. Let me take the lead.”

I kneel on the floor and began by removing his shoes, extremely formal black Balmoral Oxfords. The fine workmanship suggests an origin at John Lobb or possibly Church‘s. He really didn’t deny himself any physical comfort.

As soon as I peel the damp sock from his long, narrow foot, he begins to squirm about intolerantly. Even this little informality bothers him?

He drapes himself across the pillows. I rise and resettle beside him, close enough that my knee bumps his. Those adamantine eyes glare out through a scrim of fine white bangs, calmly challenging. I touch him again, this time on the soft parts of his throat, and his mouth buckles a little.

I began to unknot his damascened black tie, taking longer than is really needed, puzzling over it. It is what’s called a seven-fold tie, which means that its shape is not held by an interlining of cotton or some other material but by intricate folding of the 100% silk material itself. I’d never actually seen anyone wearing this, the expensive non plus ultra of sartorial accoutrements, since really only the wearer — or someone who dresses or undresses him — knows its construction. That he would buy one at all seemed to describe him as a hopeless aesthete or an irredeemably stuck up rich bastard.

Did he customarily dress this well, or was this a futile gesture meant to impress me? Such a show of conspicuous consumption seemed out of character, and there was really no way he could have even known I would recognize and appreciate a seven-fold tie. At the moment I’m wearing a light robe over very comfortable old cotton pajamas, and when not dealing with clients I dress slightly better than a bum. Just because I could recognize quality clothing didn’t mean I shared a liking for it.

So perhaps he did merely dress this way to pamper himself, which of course begged the question why he felt he deserved it. Everything I knew about him from the file crosshatched with all he’d said tonight to produce the picture of a extremely self effacing man. If somewhere behind that formidable fortress of reserve was a sense of entitlement, well, I could work with that.

Coat, gloves, shoes, socks, belt and tie removed and neatly stashed, everything else is left on. You see, being touched while still clothed somehow feels more deliciously invasive than complete nudity. Stripping before sex is so formal, so routine. Nude, most people are too busy wondering what the other person is thinking about their bared flesh to actually inhabit it and fully immerse themselves in their own sensations.

Digging into the luxurious folds of his clothes, I run my fingertips over him delicately as calipers, searching for the crack that would reveal the secret door in the blank wall. He’s languid and subdued, like a fluttering candle flame. His skin, stretched tight as silk on a wooden framework over his tense muscles, tautens at my exploration, growing rough with goosebumps.

Under the guise of undressing him I am clinically evaluating his responses, which areas make him stiffen up when stroked, which movements of my hands elicit a slight relaxation. Hands only, at first. Ease him into this thing gently. He was, even if bi, more straight than not on the Kinsey scale, or at least his experiences so far had been. Hands, though, are genderless, easy to divorce from the body they are attached to.

No point ruining his nice clothes by stretching and rumpling them, and his rising internal temperature had to be making him uncomfortable. I’d almost rather leave him this way, a present too prettily wrapped for even avaricious eagerness to compel the recipient to tear into. Off with his lovely sea island cotton shirt, patches now darkened and adhering to him. Undoing the pearly buttons one by one with my teeth and tongue, I let my breath puff against his skin, occasionally just the hint of moist contact, flesh on flesh. The cotton parts like theater curtains to reveal the sculpted relief of his abdomen. Only a hint of middle-aged softness obscures the undulating blocks of abdominal muscle that channel a freshet of glistening sweat to his navel. By the time I reach the lowest button, grasp the material in my jaws and jerk his shirt out of his waistband, his head is thrown back head back in ecstasy, the tendons and veins of his neck popping into sharp relief.

I can’t resist a pause to admire the splendid engine of his body as he stands before me like a statue carved of burning phosphor. Of course, everyone deserves physical love if they desire it. It doesn’t matter how conventionally attractive you are. As I’d told him, there is a difference between recreational sex and what I do for a living. The physical act just happens to be an aspect of human behavior I consider compellingly interesting because of its innate alienness to me.

I have served clients in the past who ‘normal’ people would hardly be capable of imagining having any kind of sex life — those afflicted with cerebral palsy, victims of closed-skull brain injuries, the intersexed, and so on. And it was never in any way pity or some perversion on my part. I have visual love maps, just like everyone else, even though I’ve never implemented them.

So I find it impossible to suppress a chill of excitement at the sight of him, naked. His whole person radiates an excess of life, like the trembling of air on a hot day. He is all long elegant bones and hard, bulging, whipcord muscle, a figure study for an El Greco. Skin the color of full-moonlight on snow, so white, fresh and soft it scarcely looks like skin at all, but its opalescent delicacy is not voluptuous at all. Ah, and there are characterful scars. He’d not had an uneventful life. They map over the heart, on his side below his ribs, twisting across both arms, and many more smaller and fainter.

Some days, I love my job.

With visible reluctance, he begins to respond. The texture of his flesh changes, heating with a sudden surge of blood to the surface, now lightly oiled with sweat, softening like wax, melting and modeled under my hands into new shapes as I map out his prime spots. Still, his pupils remain pinpricks. He is shutting off pleasure the way he customarily shuts off pain, and I feel an abrupt stab of pity.

I’ve never worked with someone so intransigent and unyielding. He might not even be doing it consciously — by this point, burying sensation and emotion might have become automatic. He is living a life half-dead.

He stretches in my loosely encircling arms, bending back his head. I feel the muscles tense in his neck, the clenching and unclenching of his fists as he lowers his elbows slowly, conscious of the flexions in his shoulders and back.

Despite his very developed, mature adult body, I can tell he is as awkward and at a loss as any teenage boy. It’s charming, although I’m sure he doesn’t think of it that way. He is heavily flushed, sweating, all the blood rushing to bloom on his cheeks and leaving the rest so pale it was almost blue, like skim milk.

All I need is one little break. If he truly were unhappy with his sexual dysfunction, that was all I needed to work with. Like Archimedes, if given a lever long enough and a place to stand, I can move the world.

Well, I am already standing, and it isn’t the whole world that needed moving. I grasp the lever . . .

His flesh swells and softens like a ripening peach under my palms. Those beautiful pale blue eyes squeeze shut, colorless lashes sheaved in sticky clumps, wetted by tears of strain. A flush glows across his sharp cheekbones, his parted lips darkened and swollen. I press my own lips to his and am elated when he at last takes the initiative to respond.

His mouth is firm, his tongue soft but insistent. I twitch as his teeth puncture the fragile skin of my lower lip. I feel a bead of blood form, but wasn’t prepared for him to lick it up swiftly before it can drip down my chin. His tongue traces the path the droplet might have taken. A dreamy, wondering expression crosses his face, like a rain cloud over a desert.

He takes a tag of the delicate skin between my neck and shoulder and pinched it in a bite, gently grinding it between his incisors, then moving his mouth back to the tougher skin of my nape and clamping his jaws down harder, hard enough to leave throbbing bruises. I cling to him like a kid’s tongue to a lollipop. My stomach was full of feathers. Oily-slick digits cajole him open, and he responds to the pressure without even realizing what he is doing, the tight ring of twitching muscle going lax as I stroke him internally.

The tight compression he’d wrapped himself in is ripped away. He seems to understand what I am doing; finding what he already possesses and making it stronger, making it bigger, making it hotter and thicker and much more dangerous to him.

When he moves he’s quicksilver supple, a total muscular capacity that’s surprising considering his thinness. He wraps himself around me like a straightjacket and we roll over and over on pillows. I try to fend him off in an indifferent sort of way, but it is impossible. He is too fast, and he suddenly seemed to have sprouted several extra arms, here one hand tweaking a flushed, swollen nipple, another two bracing on my inner thighs, prying them apart so a fourth could curl warm fingers around my straining member, another ensnaring me by the hair and holding him prisoner, forcing me to submit to another spelunking, throttling kiss.

Hackles bristle along his spine and along his arms, which seem to have wrapped themselves of their own accord around me. Blood rushes to my head, muscles contracting around his invading flesh. I grit my teeth and bear down, trapping him inside him halfway through the stroke. I grab him by his upper arms and haul myself into a half-sitting position. It changes the angle of entry, taking some of the delicious pressure off my prostate. The mad, swirling red giddiness drains away and my head clears a bit.

What I do is in fact a form of hypnotic induction. Mesmer and his “hysteria” patients had given me the original idea. Better than toys, catering to limiting fetishes, or using date rape drugs was to let the patient think you were leading when you were truly only suggesting. It is the real way hypnosis works. What I do is so rarified and subtle compared to the gasping and fumbling of ordinary passions that it can scarcely be recognized as the same thing — the difference between stopping someone smoking by subtle behavioral modification versus clubbing them over the head every time they light up. He could not be overwhelmed by passion, but he could be gently, assiduously tricked.

But it was I who’d ended up being tricked. Never in all my years have I felt sexual or any other kind of passion for my clients. But this man, this wild beast I’d conjured . . . my god, what have I done?

I lick my numb lips, hoping that the sound of human speech might bring him back to himself a little. “Evil is not some foreign body I can excise, like a surgeon.”

His eyes are open, but his gaze slices through me like a hot knife. Pupils stretch wide, pulsing. I find myself unable to meet that ravenous, unknowing stare.

“It’s a part of yourself you’ll have to learn to live with. Accommodate, not succumb to.”

I’m surprised I’m able to speak at all. Golden pinwheels burst across the inside of my closed eyelids, and I lay pinned, helpless, by my own body. Above all floats my mind, detached, analytical. My voice seems to echo from a long way off, the voice of an offscreen narrator dispassionately describing the agony of the zebra as the lion tears out its throat.

“Grief is not a poison you can vomit out of the system. It’s a ingredient of human existence which you must assimilate. Another string for your harp, a stormier heart . . . you can accept all this, Aloysius, and still be in love with life — which you can’t really be now, if you mere repudiate your darker side.”

He doesn’t say any words in reply, but he is making a lot of noises, and because he is trying so hard to stop himself, they kept getting more and more ragged and painful. Our choppy, labored breathing at first clashing like interfering sine waves, locks into synchronicity, me exhaling as Pendergast inhales, a hypnotic united rhythm. I can feel the beating of his heart in my own ribcage.

“Sometimes the hunger is all there is to you, isn’t it?” I pant, swallow the saliva collecting in my mouth.

He doesn’t respond vocally. Instead, his hands slip down, massaging the sensitive flesh of my inner thighs, sliding beneath me, digging rhythmically into the flesh as I bury my face against his heaving chest. The pleasure grips my temples, blood pounding through my skull as the muscles in his thighs and back clench.

“I know, I know. It’s a matter of survival. Life threatening. Self preservation.” His eyes and lips squeeze shut, as if he can prevent my voice from getting in. My sore tongue laps at his mouth, soothing.

My words are coming in fast gasps now, but I feel I must get them out.

“You’re ravenous.”

He’s lost control, rhythmically slamming his head back, snapping blindly at the air like a rabid beast.

“No choice.”

My thighs ache from the unaccustomed position, my breath is bottled up in my throat, and I’m growing dizzy with anoxia.

“Basic.”

His eyes. The eyes of a nocturnal creature. Pupils dilate to their fullest aperture, the blue-gray a pale corona around eerie twin black holes. The force of his gaze strikes intensely as a blow.

“Primal survival.”

I could still stop him with a word, bring him back from the brink — but was this what I wanted? Truly? A tame Pendergast, a perfect, passive pet for Viola to keep on a leash?

No, no, no. A thousand times, no.

He is screaming now, or howling; no words, just a terrible raw noise that rises and falls to match our rhythm. I grip him as though my hands could draw despair like a lightning rod.

I suddenly fear I have gone too far. Part of a wild cat’s learning process is learning when to stop killing when the predatory drive has been satiated. To submit would be to die. I am sure of it. But to deny him is impossible. We are now not so much making love as waging war, fighting hard to conquer every square inch of territory.

Limbs intertwine in a pose of improbable flexibility, like lightning frozen into a still frame. I writhe involuntarily, muscles clenching up and down my spine, in my calves and shoulders, meshing together in a throbbing web. I’m seared by a tense and excruciating awareness that I’m completely at his mercy.

There is something wildly exciting about the mingled pleasure and agony on his beautiful face. His firm muscles function with extreme precision and controlled energy, his every movement an unconscious seduction. He arches above me, lithe and sleek and relentless as our bodies did things together that had never been intended by a sane and benevolent nature.

Saliva drips from the corners of his stretched-wide mouth, his head lolling spastically, and I keep him there with taunting nips and teasing pinches until his receding strength deserts him at last and we go into freefall. This, what I’ve given him, this leaping, twisting, yearning thing, this is real and rich and impossible. My throat swelled shut, limbs trembling. His quivering, overworked muscles coiled as he arches his back, driving himself in deeper and wringing a moan from me as I bear down in response.

There were throbs of emotion as he entered me fully, synaesthetic pulses of color, warmths, hungers that could not be satisfied with food, sweet touches that penetrated past the skin to thrill through organs and set our bones vibrating in harmony. The sensations were so strong they were almost — but not quite — painful. Our fevered groping ceased to be a means to an end and grew into its own significance. For perhaps the first time in his life, I immersed himself with neither reservation nor apprehension into another human being.

Sensing what was about to happen, I wriggled into a new position and invited, encouraged, accelerated and finally compelled Pendergast to let himself go.

He throws back his head and a great elongated cry of pure pleasure rushes from him with his seed.        

Suddenly something wild bursts inside my head and drenches my nerves in a blaze of sweetness. It feels like a god reaching down and shaking me in a fiery grip. I no longer notice the rumpled pillows beneath us, or the other man inside me. Blood pounds in my temples, erupting white hot throughout my aching body and empty me before I can think to do anything to prolong it. He spasms inside me, and I’m overflowing with liquid warmth, leaking out — but I don’t care. We cry out simultaneously, the pitches blending harmonious and pure.

Pendergast sprawls out beside me, breathing like he’d just completed a triathlon. The muscles in my thighs and lower back quiver.

I place my hand on his shoulder, suddenly shy despite what we had just done. He feels hollow, brittle, like the empty chrysalis left behind by an emerging dragonfly. He looks real, but at the same time supernatural. If you can imagine the portrait of a ghost painted in vivid opaque colors with a hard, definite outline, the feelings produced would be exactly my impression of him at this moment.

When he woke, I’d know for sure. The eyes that looked back at me would be sane, or mad. There would be no in-between, no shades of distinction, no legal technicalities, no doubt. I had either cured him completely or created a killer a thousand times worse than his brother had ever been, more dangerous for his newly released passions having festered in his soul for thirty years.

Almost, I want to grab his shoulder and shake him awake. I resist the impulse.

Very soon now we would both know. God help us, we’d know.