It was dark by the time Thutmose arrived in Iloilo City. The place looked strangely familiar, though he knew he'd never been here before.
The lights from the flashing neon hoardings of Jollibee and Jockey underwear lit up the dim blocks of buildings with blinking washes of red and yellow and white. A brief scatter of sooty raindrops fell from the clouds scudding across the sky. Late night passers-by stepped aside to avoid the dark caverns of doorways which were at that hour already home to the poor without a roof over their head.
Thutmose sniffed the air identifying the individual delightful smells - hotdogs, peanuts, siomai, siopao, balut, hot pandesal, and batchoy - air that had been breathed in and out, used air, sleepy air. But it was Plazoleta Gay air and for August it was quite mild. Then one individual smell caught him and he stiffened in eagerness. So many times over the centuries, so common, so far always arousing as if it was the first time.
He saw the young man by the light of the streetlights coming towards him. Thutmose looked intently, taking in the thin, pale face, the black eyes under the curved eyebrows, eyes which showed so much grief. The young man looked and, seeing that intense, personal stare, nodded, assuming that he knew him, that he was a friend who he must acknowledge. They passed in the night without an exchange of words.
In that one ardent look, Thutmose learned all there was to know about the young man - by himself and feeling alone, eaten up by an unhappy craving, weak, and unsure of himself. An evident chased, though for a moment Thutmose, who recognised how he himself needed the young man as much as he was needed, wondered which of the two was really the chased, which the beast of prey.
Thutmose turned to look after him. He had recognised only too easily the yearning in the young man's eyes, a yearning which could only be satisfied with one thing. Now he watched the young man's back as he walked in another direction, his body slim and elegant, his buttocks moving easily, flexibly with the cloth of his jeans, his shoulders, broad, his waist, narrow; he looked like Jericho Rosales. Then he followed him, keeping to the night, avoiding the bright lights of the city which upset his eyes, keeping as far as possible to the shadows that lay like dark pools between the orange, sodium streetlights.
The young man reached the entrance of his house, felt in his pockets for the key, inserted it, turned it, and pushed open the door whose lintel looked superannuated and lites undusted. Its muntin and lock rails formed like a cross. As he did so a figure emerged from the shadows at his side and he started at the sudden appearance. But Thutmose smiled softly, his teeth showing white from the shadows.
‘Good evening,’ said Thutmose, and his voice was husky and enticing, and so placid so that it drove out the alarm brought on by his unexpected emergence from the shadows. ‘I think we know each other though I have forgotten your name.’
The young man looked vague, edgy that he might be snubbing someone he had met before.
‘Thutmose.’ he said, ‘Surely you remember. My name is Thutmose. Not an easy name to blow, is it even if you forget a face?’
The young man nodded suspiciously, blushing a little as if he had made a false move. ‘Obviously,’ he said, ‘and I am Ramon. My friends call me Ram,’ he added irrelevantly. ‘Tell me, where was it that we met?’
‘Ah yes. Ram! I remember now,’ he said, ‘but cannot we go in?’ The night is cheerful and as he spoke a cool wind seemed to spring up out of nowhere almost as if the stranger had conjured it, so that Ram shivered, his thin cotton top suddenly not fitting for the unseasonable weather conditions.
‘Yes, yes,’ he said opening the door. ‘Please come in. Perhaps you'd like a glass of wine to keep out the cold.’
He led the way into his walk-up. Soft lights lit up the room. There were rugs on the polished wood floor. They had borders in which large rosettes are flanked by diagonal bars, while the fields were dark blue and covered with small, repeating geometric figures. A large sofa with overstuffed seat, short armrests, and cylindrical legs was against one wall and a bookcase against another. The books showed Ram’s interest in things ghostlike. Facing the window hung a fairy on swing wind chime, which sounded wonderful when a gentle breeze hit it, producing a musical if slightly jarring dingdong.
Quickly Ram pulled the window shut - though did he but know it, it was already too late to keep the terrors of the night at bay.
In one corner of the room were an incense burner and the fragrant smell of joss hung in the air. Set in the wooden door of the closet was a mirror whose image made the room look larger than it really was. Several pictures of cloaked beings, dark against an only slightly less sombre background, hung on the walls.
‘I'll get the booze,’ said Ram. ‘Wait, I'll open a bottle.’ He turned to a cupboard and took a bottle, two glasses and an opener. ‘I have blood stew here,’ he opened a plastic bag from Dapli restaurant in Valeria Street.
Thutmose inspected the pictures, observing the cloaked figures, their pale handsome faces, their yearning, questing eyes. He noticed the hardcovers in the bookcase. ‘You are intrigued by aswangs,’ he said, as if he had suddenly discovered what the young man really wanted. But it was more of a statement than a question.
The phellem went off.
‘It is a particular fervour of mine,’ said Ram. ‘It is almost a mania.’ He paused for a moment as if he were somewhat abashed and looked at Thutmose, ‘Do these critters really live? I mean - outside the mind's eye.’ His eyes were bright with a strange disgruntled desire.
‘I feel absolutely sure of it.’
‘It is my wish to see one.’ He brought the glasses and bottle over to a small wooden table, the top inlaid with a marquetry design, gestured to the stranger to sit down on the sofa and poured a measure of purple wine into one of the glasses. The smells of dried fruit and balmy evening filled the air. He picked up the other glass and started to pour.
‘Why?’ demanded Thutmose loudly, almost as if the question was forced out of him, and his sudden query made Ram jump so that the wine was spilled over his other hand, the one holding the glass. Ram muttered a curse under his breath and turned to look for a cloth to wipe himself but before he could move away, Thutmose had seized the hand, raised it to his lips and was lapping at the spilled wine from his skin. Startled at the strange action, Ram tried to draw his hand away. What did this man think he was doing? But the warmth of the tongue on his flesh was strangely comforting and he let his hand lie there, a passive victim, until the wine was gone.
‘Why would you want to meet an aswang?’ asked Thutmose, as if nothing had happened - and perhaps nothing significant had, though Ram was not sure. He handed Thutmose a full glass, and sipped his own. The wine was sweet on his tongue, full-bodied and rich.
‘I would like to know their oracle,’ he said, ‘the oracle of athanasia.’
‘What, is it a blessing to you?’
‘But of course,’ said Ram turning his eyes to meet those of the stranger. ‘What else could it be? Who wants to die, to lose everything that is pleasurable? To sacrifice the knowledge you have gained over the years? To become nothing?’
Thutmose's eyes were black, bottomless, to gaze into them was to lose yourself for all eternity. ‘What if you were desperate to free yourself of pain or suffering? What if you wanted to die and couldn't?’
Ram shrugged. ‘It would be worth it.’
‘Yet the aswang has to eat flesh so that he can live. Do you not think that he must feel guilt for such crimes?’
‘We all slay to carry on,’ Ram said.
‘So you think you could stand the remorse?’ asked Thutmose and beckoned with his hand for Ram to sit beside him on the sofa.
‘I should not even feel it,’ said Ram, his eyes shining with an inner certainty which was almost a madness.
‘How can you be sure - ?’ Thutmose put his hand on Ram's thigh but the young man scarcely felt it, so involved was he in his obsessive enthusiasm.
Ram persisted. ‘God must have his own bourn.’
His hand travelled gently up towards Ram’s fork over the soft material of his trousers and now Ram did notice but scarcely cared. In fact the touch was exciting, arousing and, though he had never been touched by a man that way before, he did not find it in the slightest way perverse.
‘Who cares,’ he cried wildly. ‘I would be one of them, if I could. I would become one.’
The hand, that foreign hand, that hand with its pale almost bloodless skin, its delicate narrow fingers, grasped his, felt the softness of his, quickly becoming hard. Then Thutmose unfastened the belt around the young man's waist, opened the button at the top, drew down the zip exposing the underwear and a bulge that already was larger than it had been moments before.
‘Would you allow one into you?’ went over Thutmose, taking hold of his through its soft cotton covering. ‘Would you consent to his hunger to fulfil timelessness?’
But the young man was too far gone even to answer and arched his body upwards towards the stranger's mouth as it fastened itself on his covered member, teasing it softly through the cloth, and the wetness of his tongue soaking the material so that it became translucent.
Ram cried out, a wild cry that had no words. The touch of the man's body pressed against his was inexpressibly exciting, the movements, the caresses but Ram had the feeling that it was a polished performance honed from much practice. Nevertheless, his body could do nothing but respond. Proficient fingers undid the buttons on his shirt, gently stroking and embracing his chest, gradually going lower, removing his clothes seductively, the shirt, shoes, socks, stripping the jeans, the Bench briefs in multiple fabrics with Pucci-inspired patterns until Ram lay completely naked and exposed.
His skin smelling of Cool Water lotion was almost shimmering against the red material of the sofa cover. His legs were slightly apart, his body open and vulnerable, his head laid back exposing his neck, everything to be had.
Thutmose stripped and lay on top of him. Ram could feel the man's skin touching his, voluptuous and sensual. They were chest to chest, groin to groin, and he lay under the weight of him. Ram felt an equal answering urgency.
Thutmose slid slowly down his body, kissing, tasting, rubbing, stroking - lingering for a time under his chin where the soft suppleness of his throat offered itself, and then going - perhaps a little reluctantly - further down, lower, pausing to take care of Ram’s nipples, his belly button, the trace of black hair which led downwards before spreading into his bush of pubic hair, from which his sprouted. His tongue tasted under his, along the trail which led to his hole. Slowly Ram spread his legs apart but was unable to stop the momentary, unthinking twitch of resistance as the tongue touched the sensitive place. Thutmose looked up and saw the look of worry on Ram’s face.
‘Do you want me to? You have to give me your acquiescence. I don’t take someone against his spirit.’
Ram had a passing doubt, for a second wasn't sure that this was what he wanted but almost as if they had a separate life of their own, his legs opened and he surrendered himself. Thutmose put his hands under Ram's buttocks and lifting them a little, dived into the sweet, musky darkness. At the first touch of his tongue, Ram tensed again, but suddenly was overcome by a tantalizing delight such as he had never felt before. He lay there on the sofa and enjoyed the feeling that Thutmose's balmy tongue produced, gliding over his hole, now with fast, brief cat licks, then slowing down, butterfly-light, each touch something different, each contact provoking a different sensation. Ram felt himself fast approaching a cap sheaf.
Thutmose's mouth was now nuzzling at the base of his prick and Ram felt a moistened finger gliding into his hole. It slid in without any pain or resistance. He could feel it inside him, probing and investigating, finding the very centre of his sexual being which made him groan and desire that he be invaded even further. Slowly and languorously, Thutmose washed the length of his with his tongue and licked away the oozing excitement from the top.
‘You want me to continue, don't you?’ Thutmose purred, the sounds felt through the closeness of their mouths rather than heard. ‘You want me to go all the way?’
‘Don't cool it!’
Thutmose inserted two fingers into his hole, stretching the muscle and watched the face of the young man underneath him. He gently enlarged the opening, caressing his in the palm of his other hand.
Ram knew what he wanted. ‘Come into me,’ he purred. ‘Come into me.’
But as he felt his legs lifted and sensed the urgent head of Thutmose's pushing strongly against his opening, he tensed again.
Thutmose leaned over his body so that his breath whispered into his ear. ‘Cool off your muscles. Just cool off. Cool off.’ Ram stared into the cavernous hollows of Thutmose's dark, almost black eyes which gave away nothing - with the exception of his lust. The words and the tone were rhythmic. Ram felt a growing heaviness at the entrance to his fanny and then suddenly his was past the sphincter muscle and inside him. There was a mounting fullness, a slow access. His body swallowed the intruder. At last Thutmose stopped. He was inside Ram as far as he could wend.
Ram panted. ‘Tell me who you really are, Thutmose? What are you doing to me?’
‘It is me that you have always desired.’ He bent over to glance him on the neck, and at the same time he began to move his hips slowly in and out. Long, smooth strokes which pushed both men up on a perfect ascension. They lost almost all feeling of time, of place, of sound, of vision, of the external world. The only thing Ram could feel was how the muscles of his own languid clamped around the invading his holding it as every stroke was made and the tiny rasps of Thutmose's ivories on his scruff. He heard, as if from a far distance, the loud gasping breaths of two voices and knew one of them had to be his own. The stroke boosted, his sliding without restraint in and out, increasing the pace, the sensation, building the stimulation until the point of no return.
At that very point Thutmose bit and his sharp ivories sank into the tender flesh of the scruff while at the same time his shaft pushed to its full extent, deep into the compliant hole. Any tingle that Ram felt as the needle-sharp ivories pierced his skin was subsumed into the ecstasy as with a cry Thutmose exploded and Ram felt the spurts inside him.
At one fell swoop, he himself came, his pulsating, the particle shooting high over his own chest and stomach and while Ram's blood drained, he was filled by Thutmose's juices. Sweat and red fluid and particle mixed and Thutmose bestowed his present.
Afterward Thutmose stashed his face in the hollow of Ram's shoulder, panting. Both lay and listened to each other's heartbeats steadily slowing and becoming regular. At last Thutmose lifted his body and let his slip out. Ram gasped at the sudden feeling of emptiness. He raised his head, their lips met and he tasted his own red fluid. All of a sudden he realized that red fluid was something which he would now need for his very existence. Frightened, he pulled Thutmose to him, held him close, fondled his chest, defined with the tips of his fingers the contours of Thutmose's body.
‘Is that it?’ he went over. ‘Your bequest?’ and heard the soft answer, whispered against his ear.
‘You have got the timelessness, Ram.’
Ram looked up and nodded.
‘The same pang of conscience as mine,’ a roar Ram couldn't identify from where - perhaps, from the sky or just about the corner.
The door opened.
Plazoleta Gay was as quiet as a mouse. Then petrifying claps of thunder came as a humungous black horse coming from the house took wing hounding the shadows. Then slowly a noisy crowd got nearer and Ram was walking amongst them.
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