Kent: Is this the promised end? / Or image of that horror?

King Lear V. iii | William Shakespeare

(i) ERIC

It rained for three days solid.

Sheets of rain. Cats, dogs, zebras and giraffes. And this rain was hot: steaming, voluptuous, slippery. Nowhere in the mean, dry-cracked south could it rain like this. All they get down there is a gentle sprinkle, a minor squirt, a trickle.       

Eric, totally naked except for the cannula jacked into his forearm (and its box connected by a snaky rubber tube looped around his hips), lay splayed out on the lush, electric-green grass for the whole of that third day. He’d waited out days one and two, but when this water orgy tipped into day three, he suddenly understood the universe was daring him to get amongst it. These days, everything felt to him like a message from the prophets. Every glitch in the computer, every unexplained smile, the accidental drift of flesh as some hot young thing stretched to the top shelf in Woolworths; somehow, it all felt meant. In earlier times (Before Cancer was Everywhere), he’d wheeled ecstatic through the world, taking whatever, fucking whomever, gambling happiness. Not now. Not in the Cancer Everywhere era.  Not here in the innermost sanctum of this Luxury Escape bargain, with its private garden in the middle of a rainforest: its bluestone waterfall and pool; its screens, speakers, and tastefully arranged Indigenous sculpture.

Here, he was not awaiting the instruction of the gods. He was defying them.

And the rain slowed and started to slip down his body in runnels. Eric pushed onto his elbows, stretching his belly and legs, feeling the warm rain run across his frame. He looked down at his body (a habit he generally avoided) and forced himself to stay with the reality of his tubby white flesh. It was odd in a way. He had become too used to looking at the toffee-tanned skin of the locals – wildly beautiful and far better adapted to the climate than he – and so, now, looking at his own skin hurt. But the rain at least took the edge off the usual glare of the white, and he was able to enjoy watching the water work its way over and around his pink nipples and furrowing through the greying fuzz that clung to his tummy. He watched the water travel over the porcine swell of his belly and felt it run down either side of his penis, tickling the inner crease of his arse before it dripped onto the grass.

He hadn’t looked closely at his junk for years, but now he couldn’t take his eyes off it. He remembered suddenly, years ago, a young Turkish man’s soft exhalation on first seeing it. ‘Yakişikli,’ he had whispered, nuzzling it with dark, wet, silken kisses, ‘yakişikli, yakişikli.’ Handsome. It had been many years since anyone had called any part of him handsome. Sex these days – on the increasingly rare occasions it presented itself – felt more like a random act of kindness than the white-water-rafting-like encounters of earlier times.

His body jerked in pain, and he smashed the button on the box at his hip. As it hit, he flushed in the waft of pleasure. When this shit sandwich started, a return to the sweet, shuddering pleasure of heroin was the last thing on his mind, but now his Old Friend was back, this time in legal guise – collateral pleasure. The phrase made him giggle.

                  Somewhere, buried deep in his cloudy morphine drift, he heard his phone ringing. He’d made ‘Dollop’ his ringtone because it reminded him of the kind of shit-nightclub electro-pop frippery he’d once so loved. He’d even had a little dance he’d do whenever it rang. Mad to think of it now. Mad to remember that BCE kitten-hipped body roll. These days, just sitting up was enough to make his body crumble.

—Eric? ˙

He squinted, trying to correct his blurry eyes – part rain, part opioid haze – and rolled his head toward the direction he knew the voice must be coming from. The image was fuzzy, but he heard the glass door glide, then a panicked grab of breath:

—Oh Fuck, Fuck, Fuck!

 (ii) JOHNNY

Maya phoned and asked me to come. ‘It’s the end, Johnny’ – her voice shaky, soft and sweet – ‘and he won’t let me see him. He’s delirious. He keeps asking for you.’

I sat quietly in my apartment on the other side of the planet and listened to Maya as she unspooled the story. The diagnosis, the operations, the insane lack of ability to treat this evermore bewildering pyre of symptoms – this disease with a mind of its own, stalking Eric like a ghoul, hissing and spitting at every doctor, every visitor, every nurse. She told me of his ‘Golden Month’ – nearly four weeks of clarity and peace, visited upon them like a benediction. The vigil they’d kept in his garden as he lay inside on his rented hospital bed, French doors open to the sunny lawn, listening to their soft laughter and clinking wine glasses: eating, loving, and spinning faraway, luscious tales of long lunches and drug-fuelled dance parties.

And how it was shattered by a savage return, leaving him screaming and writhing in pain, their relief curdled by this sour horror.

‘And it was your name he was screaming’, she said. ‘None of us would do. Please, please come.’

And so I did, I have.

And here I am, drying his wrinkled, old body with a five-star fluffy towel, doing my best to be gentle, careful and light with my touch.

He suddenly – seemingly involuntarily – sucks in a breath. He contracts, fumbling for the box at his hip. I hear a click and then watch as his rigid, trembling body sinks and softens into the couch I have lain him on.  I kneel beside him and breathe with him, stroking what’s left of his thinning hair, feeling it go soft and fluffy under my touch, his naked, marble-white body in stark relief against the dark green velvet of this palatial couch.

I summon our ancient past.

And I think of Caravaggio, of Titian, Derek Jarman. And of how much this 21st-century Aschenbach would have loved this vision had he seen it in a film or framed with gilt in some European church. And I think how beautiful the unashamed human body can be: how simple, eloquent and spiritual.

‘I thought you were Death come to get me,’ he whispered. ‘I thought it was finally, finally over.’ His voice was so quiet I had to place my ear just above his mouth to make out the words. And then I got the smell, the milky-sweet soft smell of him. And he laughed, and he cried, snuffling in my neck.

‘Duffer, duffer, duffer,’ I whispered into him in the old, the original language of aeons gone by, ‘sweet, gentle, beautiful Eric. I’m here, baby, I’m here.’

(iii) ERIC

I left Johnny behind.

I thought I saw a shimmering, shining river. I thought I heard singing. I knew the sound; I felt glory pulsing through me.

I know fear, I know hate, and I know the weight of shame. I felt them all fall from me, and free of their gravity, I started to rise.

I could speak all the languages of the world; I heard His secret name. Adonai, Allah, Yahweh. Whoever it is, whatever you are, I come.

I look down at the crumpled form of Johnny, heaving over the sack of skin that used to be me, and I know one day we will swim like dolphins in that shimmering, shining river.

Together.

One day.