Justin enters a monastery.
Pride
The gray mist was turning into needles of rain. It made the leaded casement windows seem like proper emblems of melancholy. Autumn’s half-state, while things dying still have life in them, contributed to it, too.
Inside, it was different.
The fire blazed in the great stone fireplace. Burnished leather wingchairs and polished mahogany side tables, Persian rugs of richly patterned blue, red and gold, and deep burgundy draperies of heavy velvet up-gathered in concentric flounces made the commodious study seem like a stage set.
You understand the rules of our order?
Yes, Sir, I do, the young man responded.
And you are prepared to conform yourself to our discipline?
Indeed, Sir, I am eager to embrace it.
And to live within our limitations?
Yes, Sir.
You will, then, he said looking directly at the novitiate, who in modesty could not meet his gaze but kept his eyes on the master’s graceful, blue-veined hands as he twisted a gold-plated fountain pen through the web of his nervous, delicate fingers, return to the world for a period of two weeks. During that time you will consider, while you are removed from our influence and sway, whether there is nothing in the world that holds you faster than the desire you say you have to assume our habit. Should you choose to become a servant in our brotherhood, you will be at our gates before dawn two weeks from now. If you are not there, it will be clear both to us and to you that you will not make such a commitment.
He paused. The young man looked up at him.
Is that clear?
It is clear, Sir.
Good.
He rose and offered the young man his hand to shake, not, as in the weeks of initiation which had preceded this meeting, for him to kiss.
Good luck, then, he said with a warm smile. May you see clearly.
Thank you, Sir, the young man said.
Wait here, the master of the order said as he left the chamber. Martin will come shortly to take you to the gates and let you out.
Thank you, again, Sir, the young man said, and he was gone.
It was going to snow.
Justin’s mother was saddened.
The backyard garden was sere and the air was thick the way it is before it is going to snow.
When he told her what he was going to do, she gave him an icy look and took a drag on her cigarette. He had not been worried that she would not understand. He knew her. He knew what her life had been like when she was younger. He had seen the clothes she used to wear piled up in the cedar trunk in her bedroom – the short leather skirts, the heeled shoes and vinyl boots, the rings, bracelets, black bustiers and velvet cloaks. He suspected at night sometimes when she was alone with a joint or a bottle of brandy that she would take those clothes out of the trunk and look at them and put them on – her size had not changed; she had shown him pictures – and then pose before the mirror and run her palms over her figure and breathe onto the glass and kiss her own reflection.
But he did not know how she would react.
She turned her head away, pivoting it smartly on her long neck, and blew a line of smoke out of her mouth away from him, then turned her head back and caught him in her eyes and took him in her arms and drew him close to her and held him, kissing him lightly on the lips, then her tongue just brushing his lips, her hand holding his genitals in a warm caress.
I don’t want you to forget me, she said moving her lips away from his and planting a kiss on the tip of his nose to put a period at the end of the sentence.
Then he took her in his strong young arms and bent her backwards as men used to do to women in the movies and planted his lips on hers and vanquished her with a kiss and then went out the gate that closed the garden in and left her looking at the space where he no longer stood, dumbfounded.
He wandered through the Village in a daze. Was he really going to give all this up and immure himself behind the wall of a discipline? Was he going to surrender his right to self-determination? Was he going to subordinate himself completely to a master? Was he going to be, to think, and to feel exclusively as someone else determined?
The answer was yes, a big, fat, brightly colored yes. No other answer was possible. Every thread of his being stiffened with longing to be back inside the confines of the monastery and to be ruled by its discipline.
All he had to do was remember how it felt when his flesh grew numb and his muscles became lighter than air and his blood went racing, trembling through him and ringing like vibrating iron.
The storm had been in a tantrum, kicking and howling since before morning. The dead maple tree by the brook had fallen, crashing into a power line. It was a day when outdoor work was impossible.
There was hardly any traffic on the distant highway that let you off at the town road you could drive on to get to the monastery.
Perhaps to calm the calamity of nature we ought to spend the day in a trance, the master of the order said as he took a toke on the pipe that was being passed around.
It was a large room, almost like a medieval hall. They were all sprawled on the old Persian carpets in various states of provocative dishabille. A fire roared in the huge fireplace that took up nearly the whole of the north wall.
A masochist is in love with his own strength, the master told them, instructing them in the ideal, presenting the pattern to which they were shaping themselves.
His voice was as sharp as a rock and as smooth as polished stone. He had all their ears as he spoke and they all absorbed what he said and conformed themselves to his wishes, not blindly although entranced, but because they wished to be the way he wanted them to be. It was how they wanted to be. It was how they could be proud enough of themselves to allow them to dare to offer themselves to him. They burned to please him; they trembled with the hope of being taken.
You are in love with your strength. Your muscle is your strength. It is iron strength. You want to be like iron; you are like iron. You are cold like iron. You are hot like iron.
And they were, each of them, iron-bodied from the strenuous and disciplined life they shared.
When the beginning buds trembled through the newly opened passages of nature wrought by May, Justin had become devoted and he wore his discipline inside each straining muscle.
But he never yet had been summoned.
When he was he trembled with pride, desire, and anxiety. He was commanded at noon to be ready to serve the master of the order in his chamber that evening.
The rest of the day was filled with preparations.
Several of the other acolytes approached him to serve as his attendants. They shaved him, bathed and oiled him, and dressed him in the scant costume he would wear, a silver metal-leaf thong, knee high calf gripping leather boots with a slight heel, a silver chain around the neck, two silver circlets with tiny rubies embedded in their circumference, which were fastened through his pierced nipples.
He waited outside the master’s door propped upon his knees gazing fixedly into a flame, slowly wending through the corridors of trance.
A gong sounded and he understood. He entered the master’s chamber, stood before him, presenting himself, proud, then knelt, bowed, and touched his forehead to the floor.
The master was solemn. His face was impenetrable. The boy on the floor beneath him filled him with awe and strength. The boy felt the master’s power like currents of electricity shooting through his muscles. He was being drawn open and turned inside out.
Look at me, the master commanded.
Justin raised his head.
Outside the chamber, beyond the valley to which the road from the monastery ran, all over the world, iron spikes punctured the earth, explosions tore it up, and new things were waiting to be built.
Justin forgot what he was remembering.
The window of the granite deco skyscraper looked out onto a park with green fields where no idlers lounged or strolled although the morning was clear and bright.
Inside she tried to control herself, but every time she began to speak tears gathered like a film over her eyes and her voice broke.
Edelmann, nevertheless, remained sitting across from her silently, simply observing her, a sack of potatoes, without an attitude, just looking.
I’m sorry, she said, finally. I’m not usually like this.
He nodded ever so slightly but still said nothing. Perhaps his almost nod suggested a question. Perhaps it didn’t.
I’m so sorry, she said again when he told her their time was up for now.
I don’t know why I can’t say anything. It’s not like me. She began to cry but bit her lip.
Edelmann said, Next Tuesday, almost inaudibly. But she heard.
Yes, she said and was gone.
She avoided the elevator and walked quickly down the three flights of steps. In the street, she heard her heels clatter against the sidewalk. Her heart was pounding, and so was her head. She stopped into the coffee shop on the corner and sat for a long time holding her coffee cup without drinking, trying to focus on what she was thinking, but could not.
She felt like she had mislaid something essential and was searching everywhere, overturning drawers and disorganizing closets, but still not finding what she was looking for. She did not even know what it was except that when she had found it, she’d know it.
It had to do with Justin.
But she found it impossible to think of him. It was as if when he had left her, he had taken her memory of him away with him.
Justin closed the door slowly, dazed, and walked over to his bed and sat down and stared into space. His mind was as blank as his eyes. He was naked.
From his bunk Horst said to him, It wasn’t like you thought it would be.
Justin looked blankly at him, as if trying to figure out where the voice was coming from.
You thought there was going to be something you could remember.
Justin looked at him puzzled as if he did not understand what the blond boy was saying.
You’ll get used to it, Horst went on. Or, or you won’t. It really doesn’t matter.
I don’t understand, Justin finally said slowly.
I know, Horst said. He got up from his bed. Only wearing the regulation black boxer briefs, he approached the empty boy.
Stand up, he said.
Justin obeyed.
Relax, Horst said and do what I tell you. You want someone to tell you what to do, don’t you.
Yes, Justin said.
You like it when someone takes control of you, don’t you.
Yes, Justin said.
Justin was summoned to the master’s chamber again the next evening. The gibbous moon was frozen in the midnight-blue empyrean.
When he entered he was confused.
The master was not there. Instead, in his place, there was an ugly man, pasty fat, unshaven, balding. His hairy sausage-like arms were bloated and bare. He wore khaki trousers too tight at the waist, and his fat belly spilled over his belt. His wife beater needed washing and straggling wisps of undisciplined hair escaped over its low neckline from his porcine chest. He reeked of something that smelled like stale salami. There was a fading and blurred tattoo of a heart pierced by an arrow on his left arm.
Face the wall, the man said.
Justin did not move. He was unable to. He did not know where he was, how he got there, or who this man was. He was frozen in panic.
Face the wall, the strange man growled, nasty with anger in his voice and frightening Justin.
When he still did not respond – it was more because of shock than out of rebellion – the man grabbed him by the shoulder with fingers that felt like claws, turned him to be facing a wall.
Bend over, the man ordered.
Justin did not move. From behind the man pressed his shoulders forward. The top of his head grazed the wall. He was bowing to the wall and looking at the floor. A finger rudely plunged inside him, he was being grabbed, thumb outside, middle finger inside. Taking hold of him that way, the man threw him to the floor. He lay there immobilized. The man kicked him.
Get up.
Justin did as he was commanded.
The man he stood before was the handsome master of the order, lean, muscled, dazzling with radiance.
The other man was nowhere.
The master reached out his hand. He leaned forward to kiss Justin on the cheek. Justin felt it like a slap in the face. He lifted his fingers to his cheek, involuntarily, to calm the sting.
Tears burned in his eyes.
It is better that you know, the master of the order said.
No, Justin said, hoarse, in a whisper. No, it isn’t.