Chris Mooney - World Without End

Faust wasn't interested.

Faust listened he always listened and sometimes paused to ask questions, but in the end had said no. Gunther knew better than to press for an explanation. He figured Faust already had someone working on the inside, maybe a mole within the CIA, someone with access to IWAC. Faust, Gunther knew, had contacts in all the major agencies.

Faust never mentioned who this CIA contact might be or if this person did, in fact, exist. That didn't mean he was trying to hide the truth.

He had been very up front with his reasons behind stealing the technology: "It's up to people like us to protect the good and the innocent. That's who we are, Gunther. That's what we're about. Always remember that."

Gunther trusted Faust. His debt to the man was a large one.

Gunther had been fourteen and homeless, forced to live on the streets of Prague after being kicked out of the house by his cunt of a mother, a goddamn whore. She was pretty for her age and always had a man in her bed. Sometimes late at night, when the groans cut his sleep, he would walk over to her bedroom and in the space between the opened door he would look inside the room full of candlelight and see his naked mother being straddled by a man, usually an older teenage boy (and sometimes, but not often, it was someone Gunther knew). Gunther's attention always drifted toward the men. He liked men. At least he thought he did.

Gunther sought refuge in the local gym around the corner from his house. The gym was this musty-smelling basement of gray paint and mirrors and pounding techno music and a locker room with showers that offered no privacy. Gunther begged the owner for a job and finally got one: working after school as a sort of janitor to keep the place clean.

The money was horrible, but it gave him a free membership and allowed him to stay out of the house and away from his mother. More importantly, it allowed him to be close to the older crowd of teenage body builders Gunther liked to watch them work out, their muscles gorging with blood, sweat running off their brows and backs. When their workouts were done, he would find a reason to wander inside the locker room, the steamed air packed with sweat and testosterone, and through the pockets in the steam Gunther would drink in the sight of the hot water sluicing off their hard bodies and feel a sexual urge that he knew once validated would condemn him to a lifetime of rejection and hate.

But that knowledge didn't stop him from experimenting. When one of the boys approached him and offered sex, Gunther made the mistake of inviting him back to his house. His mother worked the bar on Wednesday nights and never came home until late. But for some reason, she came home early that night, drunk as always, and when she opened his bedroom door and saw what was going on, she threw him out and told him that she wasn't going to live with a faggot, that from this day on her son was dead. Gunther would never forget the look of relief on her face, as if she had suddenly been given the perfect reason to torpedo him from her life. Word got around. Friends wrote him off. Gunther was alone.

Living on the streets was manageable. But when the free food and scraps stolen from garbage pails dried up, the hunger gnawed at him until he grew desperate. Gunther had heard of the places where a boy's flesh could bring money.

It was about survival. It was just sex, that's it, no big deal. The men he was forced to transact with were often older, in their late forties to mid-fifties, some of them married, all of them out of shape and flabby, their bodies overgrown with untamed weeds of hair, their greedy hands gentle at first as they removed his clothes and then working his skin with a desperate and often violent hunger. Gunther didn't care about the temporary discomfort or the occasional beating.

As long as he didn't have to look into their eyes and see the way they glowed with a perverse sexual energy that always made him feel like they had torn away chunks of his soul, Gunther knew he would survive.

All he had to do was close his eyes and he could transport himself inside the dream world he had built, a place of constant blue skies and oceans and streets that didn't reek of dog shit, a warm sun, and a house with the kind of parents who could see the love inside the heart of a fourteen-year-old boy. The dream would die in the morning's harsh gray light.

The defining moment came on a winter evening. The man was a well-dressed foreigner from the United States who had been gentle, even loving, in bed. The man was buckling up his pants when his hands started shaking and he broke down and cried. Gunther had recognized his torment. He put a hand on the man's shoulder and told him it was okay to be gay, that he understood. The man's face twisted, and he turned around so fast that Gunther couldn't prevent the storm of fists from hailing down on him.

The air was cold, the wind biting into his skin like nails when Gunther bolted outside. He turned into an alley and found a stairwell that was out of the wind. He sat down and wrapped his coat around him and cried more out of anger than from the throbbing mess of welts and cuts. He touched his nose. It was bleeding.

"Don't worry, Gunther. It's not broken. Tilt your head back and the bleeding will stop."

Gunther looked up. An older man in what looked like a blue suit under a long black cashmere coat stood with his hands folded behind his back.

His head was shaved, his skin pale and stretched close to the bone.

"What do you hate more, Gunther? Your mother or the fact that you're a whore just like her?"

The man's deep voice was pleasant, though oddly flat, with a distinct monotone quality that reminded Gunther of the space ship's voice from that movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. The man came toward him, speaking.

"How would you like to start your life over? Leave all of this behind?"

"Who are you?" Gunther asked.

"The person who can make it happen. I can give you the world you dream about."

Gunther tried to see the angle, couldn't.

"In exchange for what?"

"Loyalty."

"Loyalty," Gunther repeated.

"That and one other item, by far the most important." The man knelt down and handed him a handkerchief. His blue eyes were as bright and clear and as warm as the morning sky from Gunther's dreams.

"Under no circumstances do I tolerate lying," the man said.

"Always tell me the truth, even to the most personal, and sometimes embarrassing questions."

Loyalty and don't lie? It couldn't be that simple.

"And I have to do what, blow you once a day?"

"No need to be crude, Gunther. You're a good-looking boy, but I don't view you in that way. I never will."

"What are you, like some sort of good Samaritan?"

The man grinned.

"I've watched you on the street. You're cunning. Very adaptive. And you have other qualities I admire. I hate to see talent go to waste."

Gunther watched the man's face carefully when he spoke next.

"I'm gay."

The man's eyes, his face, did not change.

"Did you hear what I said? I'm a faggot, I get off on sucking " "Thank you for enlightening me on the proclivities of homosexual men." The man reached inside his jacket and handed Gunther a sealed white envelope.

"Inside is the name of my hotel, my room number, and a passport. You'll find enough money to buy a good meal and some nice clothes. The name and address of my tailor are in there."

Gunther ripped open the envelope. American money and a first-class plane ticket to New York.

"My flight leaves tonight. If you want to join me, come to my hotel no later than eight. The choice belongs to you, Gunther. It always will."

In the United States, Amon Faust provided him with unlimited educational opportunities, introduced him to culture, fine dining, showed him how to dress and act and walk so people would stop and take notice. But what Gunther prized the most were the personal gifts Faust had shared with him: the ability to sharpen one's mental clarity and to move through life fearlessly, and, most importantly, to never be ashamed of the dark range of desires and fantasies that ran through his blood. Some of the visions were so powerful, so real, he would wake up in the middle of the night covered in sweat, his heart exploding inside his chest, an intense heat building inside his loins that ached for release.