Кэрол Дуглас: Cat In A Leopard Spot

It wasn’t going over with him now that he’d encountered someone who truly wished him ill. Ill in the sense of making him sick to his soul.

What did he most lose from caving in to Kitty the Cutter’s demands?

He wouldn’t respect himself in the morning?

No: the idea of being ignorant and vulnerable in the hands of his worst enemy. Pride again.

And worse. Since he had started admitting his sexuality, he had discovered it was a headstrong force. Could a man will his body not to respond when stimulated even by someone he hated and feared? Wasn’t that what torture victims attempted so valiantly? Is that why the line between love and abuse was so narrow in certain warped fringes of human behavior, including torture, including, sometimes, intimacy?

And last, but so very far from least, was something he had pretended was past, and wasn’t. That was his love, passion, hope for Temple. No matter how much he had forced his rational mind to move on, he had never lost hope that she would be his manna in the desert, she would be the one and only to lead him beyond his past and into a fully sexual future. To think of experiencing his first sexual act with someone as much the opposite of her as Kitty the Cutter…that was blasphemy. Better he should have succumbed to the strange, lazy moment on the threshold of Janice’s bedroom the first time he met her. Better some careless, but so very human, hormonal tango than deliberate surrender to a woman who was antilove, antilife, antisex if she used it as a weapon. An anti-Christ, in fact.

And yet, she could kill. And if she killed anyone because of him, then any innocence he kept was lost beyond redemption.

A foot scraped the walkway.

Matt looked up into the dim light of a distant lamp.

A dog stood there, big and dark. Great Dane maybe.

He swallowed, aware of how isolated he was, how isolated he had made himself. This could have been Kitty herself.

Before he could think, the dog turned and trotted off.

Probably it was as surprised to see him there as he was to see it.

Anytime. Anywhere. Anything. Anyone.

That was the lesson of the Garden.

The Judas kiss was always waiting somewhere.

Chapter 2

Bad News Breakfast

Dreams are only in your head.

Max woke up slowly, his dead cousin’s face and voice fading too fast.

Dreams are only in your head.

His cousin Sean hadn’t said that. Bob Dylan had said that in a long-ago song, using the wrong verb tense, is. Mock ignorant. Mock wise. Mockingly.

That was the mantra adults crooned at kids with nightmares, dreams are only in your head. True, but a true lie, also. And even scarier when you think about it, because when you grow up you find out that the only reality that matters is what’s in your head. Or what everyone else put there.

A lot scared Max, who had lived a mostly dreamless life of deception and danger, but Sean in his dreams didn’t scare him. Sean in his dreams was eternally seventeen, his features still blurred by baby fat, but the bones starting to push through to make a statement…until they had pushed through on a blast of explosive to make a final statement no one had expected, least of all Sean.

Sean in his dreams was whole and as precise as a class photo. Senior-high grin, polished mahogany-colored hair and the freckles that went with it. All-American boy via a Celtic pedigree. A middle-class, modern Huck Finn. Or Opie from Mayberry with size twelve feet treading on the brink of manhood. Full of pranks and daring. Class clown. Aching to kiss the girls and make them reveal the sweet mystery of sex. Adolescence personified.

And still that way in dreams.

Much as Max blamed himself for Sean’s death, Sean in his dreams never haunted him. Never showed the bombed-out fracture of a face he might have flaunted. Max always awoke in calm nostalgia, almost as if he had received a benediction.

But then other remnants of his dreams began paying court to his dawning consciousness. A nameless man in a leopard-spotted mask. The Cloaked Conjurer, obviously, seen far more recently than Sean Patrick Donnell Kelly.

Max found the Cloaked Conjuror’s memory erasing the pleasant tension of his smile as Sean’s never had. In the dream the Cloaked Conjuror had transformed into Gandolph, Max’s dead mentor in the art and illusion of magic. Gandolph had been all the family Max had allowed himself to have. Since Sean. He wished the old man were still here, in this house that Max rattled around in alone like a single die on an empty baize-covered table.

He wished Temple were here. He never had dreams like this when he slept with Temple.

But he hadn’t slept with Temple—routinely, all night, with nowhere to go before and/or after—for months. Sean had died too young to understand why “sleeping with” was a euphemism for having sex, for making love. Sleep and the satisfying security that came afterward made having sex into making love.

Max’s memory jolted him with another unpleasant dream image from the motherland, that long-ago Ireland that he and Sean had visited as naive returning sons.

A memory of having sex. First sex. With an Irish colleen named Kathleen O’Connor.

And then, with a dream shift that was only in his head, he finally remembered the dream’s parting illusion. Peace dissolved. He had awakened not seeing Sean but copulating with a corpse.

Max left the coffeemaker clucking and drooling under the kitchen fluorescent lights and went into the dark yard to retrieve the newspaper.

Only 4:00 A.M., but the newspaper lay there like a dirty leg bone, a pale oblong encased in clear plastic that reflected the distant streetlight.

Max never ventured outside without scanning for lurkers. Sometimes he wished he owned a dog that could fetch. Leaving the house in the predawn dark was the most dangerous thing he did all day. A man on his front lawn in the wee hours was like an astronaut on a space walk: isolated, vulnerable, cut off from shelter and safety, so near and yet so far.

Millions of suburbanites did it every morning, but they didn’t have Max’s past.

Inside the house, he poured the black coffee into a white mug, then sat on a stool at the huge island counter and spread the paper wide as he skipped the usual front-page headlines—endless foreign talks and sports results—and paged through the rest.

Las Vegas papers always sizzled with entertainment news. Max found himself perusing small items on openings and closings and newly contracted acts, the longer features on the old standbys, as if he were still an up-and-coming performer with a professional interest in these constant comings and goings. As if he still harbored the unsinkable illusion of a career.

He missed the intense physical, mental, and social stimulus of doing his magic act, almost as much as he missed sleeping nightly with Temple. For the year they had lived together at the Circle Ritz apartment building while Max performed nightly at the Goliath Hotel, his life had seemed real for the first time since Sean. Imagine…the surreal atmosphere of Las Vegas making him feel so normal.

The next steps, and he had seen them clearly then, marriage. With children? A house, he could afford a nice one. A long-term contract with one of the spectacular megahotels always rising from the Vegas sands these days like the new Atlantis exchanging a watery mythological grave for a gravy train run on the glittering sandbox of the Strip here and now. What a magic show he could dream up for a place called the Atlantis! More than a magic show, a post—Cirque du Soleil and Eau mélange of sophisticated circus acts with a futuristic accent….

Max sipped a fragrant distillation of the other, legal, and less lethal export of Colombia: the innocuous bean. His career had always been a cover, not his real job. He was dreaming to think he could resurrect it. Dreams are only in your head. With Sean.