"Stay awhile."

I still cannot decide whether I really was utterly ignorant and as pure as the night sky — now drained of its fire color — or whether some higher power advised me to indulge in this game. I could see that he was very revoltingly drunk, and perhaps delirious. As a result, the escapade with the shoe was yet another incident forcibly disclaimed and buried with a decisive untruth.

I walked up to him, picking up the emptied bottle along the way.

"Your Excellency, are you alright?"

"Aren't you here to deliver a message?"

I have scarcely ever been more confused than I was at that moment.

"What message?"

"How should I know? It could be a letter, or a telegram, or a call. All I know is that there ought to be one, by now. Well?"

There he was, staring at me with a trace of some great expectation on his face, and suddenly I felt inexplicably guilty for not being able to humor him.

"I– I do not have anything for you. Sorry."

I did, perhaps, have something for him, but it was too late to say it. How could I? It would be like telling a widow that her husband had fathered a child with another woman. Hamilton slowly finished his glass, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and stared at the wall with dry bloodshot eyes. The impossible silence seeped into my body, as his face went slack and blank. The effect was curiously spectral, as though I could see through his countenance. There were dark patches under his eyes and two deep lines around the mouth. His face looked like he had at once prematurely aged; it already showed the ravages of the death process. He gave off a faint, greenish steam of decay. I imagined he would glow in the dark.

"I am abandoned," he declared with sudden resolution. "I am so utterly abandoned."

He put his face in his hands.

"Oh, no, no— of course, it's entirely his decision—I'm all right, really. We're past that."

His tone was so natural, so almost indifferent, that it somehow made his turmoil much more real. I wanted to console him, but felt myself tongue-tied and constrained.

"Well–"

"Don't you try and comfort me," he insisted. "Don't talk about him; don't tell me that he will come, that he has not cast me off so cruelly and so inhumanly as he has."

He was talking in a high, thin voice, the eerie, disembodied voice of a castrate. His voice had always been positively shrill and feminine, yet I had never heard him talk like this before.

After another glass of cognac he gave way to the luxury of tears. I remember being absolutely petrified, at the still, cold center of the storm which was occurring in me, to realize that this man was suffering, although the reason for his suffering eluded me. He cried in a very unpleasant manner, just like any other drunk, grimacing and smearing tears all over his face. I moved, looking for a cigar. They were on the desk. Hamilton accepted the cigar from me and puffed on it, his hair in his eyes.

"I say, you know, it's nearly eleven–" (the hand flying to the temple, sketching but not terminating the brushing-off-strand stroke; then a sudden peal of rough-rippled laughter ending in a moist cough). "Another hour, and I'll start sending everyone home."

His attempt to carry on a casually humorous conversation was painful to watch.

"Do you mean you won't come down at all?"

"I see no reason for it. If there should be any confusion among the guests, I will be happy to clear it up."

As he glanced up at me, he seemed at once very frail and old. I felt a quick, sharp, rather frightening pity for him.

"If that person... Whoever he is, won't come," I suggested carefully. "Why don't you come to him first? You know, there's this poem..."

Hamilton stared at me.

"Why don't I?"

He laughed, but it was a strained laugh. Then he got up, and put his hand on my shoulder. I suppose such familiarity has scarcely ever produced such terror as I then felt. Yet his hot, fermented breath also made me want to vomit.

"I knew you'd come to-night, Steven," he said softly, "like summer, just when I needed you most... You know what? Let me fix you a drink."

He produced an empty glass from the bureau and filled it to the brim with cognac, spilling some in the process. I couldn't move.

"I think I should get going..." I said, after a moment, cautiously.

"Why? This is a completely unpretentious little brandy, you understand, none of this imported treacle with obvious effects of flavoring. Just have a seat," he slumped down on the sofa and moved to make room. "You wouldn't want to upset me, would you?"

I sat down next to him, slowly and deliberately, lest I break the new, unknown, pleasant Hamilton born a moment ago. Under his intense gaze, I took a long drink of the cognac and attempted an ecstatic "a-ah", but began coughing instead.

"I was afraid of that," Hamilton mused. "An untutored palate. Your generation has never learned the pleasure that a trained palate can confer a man."

I stole a sideways glance at him. He was sitting with his head leaning back against the sofa, his eyes closed. Despite this stream of serenity, the force of the judgment demanding to be formed could not be stopped, and its current still hummed on and on in my ears, even if I locked up my brain by an act of self-hypnosis. I thought of the painted, simpering faces of female impersonators I had seen in a Buffalo speakeasy. Could it be possible that he was one of those subhuman beings? It was a wise old queen– Bobby, they called him, who told me that one can always tell a man from a homosexual. Poor Bobby later came to a sickly cocaine end in an alleyway behind the bar.

"What pleasures, exactly?"

Hamilton opened one eye and watched me for a long time.

"Well, all sorts of them," he said at last. "Some things I can do till my mouth feels like putty."

An awkward smile crowded to my lips, something born of sincere panic, the panic of some aghast and irreparable awakening. I wanted to get up and run away from him, from this room, from this house.

"Let me tell you, our law is written in a way to make things seem much more complicated than they actually are," he continued. "I had this one case, many years ago. My client was guilty of immissio penis in os on government property. Do you know what that means? It simply means sticking it in the mouth. They always use latin to make a crime sound more serious. Why not just say 'guilty of cock-sucking in a public bathroom?' I never understood that. And don't even get me started on immissio penis in anum."

The anguish increased to unendurable massivity and nightmare dimensions, making me want to scream and retch.

"I really have to be going," I stammered, making another attempt to get up and walk away, but he clenched my hand with such force that I almost cried in pain.

"There's something special about you," Hamilton said, very seriously. "I think I know what it is."

"What?"

"In some cases of schizophrenia a phenomenon occurs known as automatic obedience. I say 'stick out your tongue' and you can't keep yourself from doing so. Whatever I say, wherever anyone says, you must do. Get the picture?"

"Not really..."

"In Russia, pardon me, in the Soviet Union, they are using all sorts of psychedelic drugs in experiments on slave labor. No buildup, no philosophy, no theory, just move in on someone's psyche and give orders. That is the Russian dream. They want to be us, do you understand? Mind control. Automatic obedience. Synthetic schizophrenia, produced to order. Perfect slavery."

He squeezed my hand tighter.

"What they don't understand is that one cannot become a slave. In a regular person, when obedience is forced upon them, the superego is always at risk of going cancerous and berserk. Schizos, on the other hand, are strictly receivers. Not all slaves are schizos, but all schizos are slaves. It's simple arithmetic." The rapid drip of excitement etched the lines of decomposition on his face. At that moment it became clear to me that he was sick, but not with tuberculosis, kidney trouble or delirium. He was sick with the sickness of hate; he was motivated, literally kept awake and moving, by it, although there was no violence in his hate this time.

"You are already perfect," he said.

And as soon as he said it, I had the most vivid hallucination: I looked at him and suddenly, in his face, saw the face of my father. What did Father look like? I can't describe him anymore except for an old family portrait, the only image I remember definitely—so often had it faced my eyes in childhood that it had acquired the impersonality of furniture. It showed a bulky, middle-aged man who looked a little ashamed of himself, and I wished he'd move on, standing beside a tall dark lady with a muff and the suggestion of a bustle. Between them was a boy with long brown curls and large ears, dressed in a velvet Lord Fauntleroy suit. This was me at eleven, the year of my overripe mother's death. Before it happened, he, mon cher petit papa, took me out boating and biking, taught me to swim and dive, but never once afforded me a shred of fatherly praise. To be praised was something I never deserved, but always desired. Under Hamilton's persistent gaze I shrugged my shoulders, as if to put away a regular compliment, but it was simply so as not to show that I couldn't gather sufficient breath to speak, that if I so much as let out a sound it might be to utter a sob. To be praised by him was an affront to my dignity.

"I'm not a schizo. And I don't believe in conspiracy theories."

"Are you sure?"

"Positive."

"Don't you believe in God?"

I was silent for a long while, as though I could not answer.

"I do."

"But isn't religion the mother of all theories? You let something you cannot see repress you."

"I am not repressed."

"What is your view on sodomy?"

"It's a great sin."

Hamilton barked in strident satisfaction. Then, with a controlled chest laugh, followed by a small moist cough of feigned detachment:

"Oh, that's good, because I fully agree. Assholes are un-Godly, after all, used for shit. They are not miraculous channels for the birthing of babies like the ladies have. Christ would never approve of receiving it from behind, would he?" and he now held my shoulders with both his sinner's hands, expecting, no, bringing upon himself the onslaught of doom. "But have you an idea, Steven, how many faggots there are that pull themselves off to fantasies of religious martyrs and thorn-crowned heads and heavy dragging crosses? What they have invented is a new religion. Not the moralistic and old-fashioned theological kind with that God who does not want us–wait, don't get up just yet– but one with brutal splendors, magnificent contemporary rites and rituals, tremblings, mortifications, degradations, phantasmagoric transfigurations into other realms of feeling... And, unlike the theory of Christianity, this one is much easier to believe. You can see the prophet with your own two eyes– just take a look at another man's prick. Or, even better, suck on it. Dig the tie-in?"

"You are sick," I muttered, strangely and violently agitated by his words. "You can't say such things!"

"Who cares?" he cried, "who cares about all those stale myths, what does it matter — Jove or Jehovah, spire or cupola, mosques in Moscow, or bronzes and bonzes, and clerics, and relics? They are merely the dust and mirages of the communal mind. Now, I'm usually the suckee; it really is a big kick sucking on a cock, but for you I could make an exception," he thrust his cold hands inside the sleeves of my shirt and held me by my forearms. "I always wanted to feel the inside of your mouth. I am so lonely. God, how I'd like to be a goblin-sired Gulliver and explore that cave."

I couldn't move. His hands, the pathos of the carpus, I felt it, the grace of the phalanges demanding helpless genuflections, agonies of unresolvable lust. He touched my wrist, like a dying doctor. A quiet madman, he went back to my knuckles. Fingers, please.

"I am a sentimental man," he whispered. "I like the words damozel, eglantine, elegant. I love men's feet. I love to kiss them and suck on them. You must have been Judas in your past life, and I Jesus. I want nothing more than to caress your feet. Will you let me?"

The eyes. As one sees some sickening miracle in a Biblical fable or a moth's shocking metamorphosis, the memory of his eyes suddenly comes back to me after a year spent slowly forgetting. The iris: black brown with amber specks placed around the dilated pupil in an arrangement of identical hours. Hamilton's eyes had the enigmatic opacity of an Oriental hypnotist's look, and as he moved closer, his hair cascading over one clavicle, the gesture he made of shaking it back and the mole on his pale cheek were religious revelations. I did not know whether to cry out in puzzlement or prayer.

I struck him with all my might and jumped up.

"Get your hands off me! You are a disgusting– disgusting pervert. I hope God punishes you."

Hamilton had scarcely regained his balance after being slapped across the face, and the horrible, as it were, sodden, thud of the blow had scarcely died away in the room when he stood up. He did not speak, but wore a strange smile, it was composed of cruelty and shame and delight.

"He does. The worst thing happened to me long ago and my life has been awful since that day. You are not going to leave me, are you?"

He stretched out his arms and I backed away. I had hoped, I had supposed that I would feel nothing: but I felt a tightening in a far corner of my heart, as though someone pinched me there.

"Stay back. I'll kill you if you touch me."

"But will you return?"

​​I stood with my back against the door, suffocating, enraged by the humiliating absurdity of my position. All this time he did not take his eyes off me. He seemed to find my face more transparent than a shop window. His eyes, which I had come to know so well, glowed in the light and charged and thickened the air between us.

"I will."

He smiled.

"Then I shall be waiting for you."

I will not forget the last time he looked at me. His face was wet and red, but the look in his eyes was neither angry, nor vindictive. He was upset. I felt a tremor go through me, like the beginning of an earthquake, and felt, for the first time, a sense of great pity towards him. I quickly turned away, unlocked the door and left – looking down at my neatly stepping mute feet, trying to place them in line, for no special reason.