Thrust: A Novel

Aurora, my eternal dawn,

How could I forget? Of course I remember the first night I came when we were young, my body shivering with know-nothingness, your perfect animal mouth filled with blood and laughter, just as I remember the first night I came into your Rooms after we reconnected as adults. You once told me that your devotion to me began where the flesh of your leg ended, because the leg that I made you had brought you to an ecstatic state. My devotion to you may have begun in childhood, but it evolved in your Rooms. Were it not for your Rooms, my visions would never have found form. They would merely torment me as phantasms. The three visions replayed themselves in my mind’s eye for years before my colossus found her becoming.

The first vision happened to me in the Room of Kneelings.

Hog-tied and kneeling, so that a man’s cock and balls rested on my face for hours — the cock sometimes engorged and ejaculating all over my face, other times as soft and velvet as a child’s stuffed rabbit — I had the vision of an erotic struggle. A man, swollen with youth, strides into the frame. His body is the color between wheat and white. His torso is between muscle and the fluidity of pouring milk. With each step, the shapes of his body pulse and bend, so that in his watching, in the dream, his own eyes close, so that his mouth fills with spit, so that an unnamable pain rises in his throat. His teeth seem to float. His mouth becomes an entire digestive system. Soon, his whole head becomes a devouring.

The young man conjured in my dream is not turned in my direction, so in my mind’s eye, the wood-curl tendrils of his hair stand in for a face. His unfinished body appears at times to glisten; at other times, it carries a kind of matte texture, light. It is excruciating to watch him, and yet, in the dream, it is not possible to look away.

Now there is a kind of riverside, a full-headed tree, water moving, rocks within the water, grass. The figure of the young man slides down upon the grass, his back — like every animal ever named, like the proof of physicality itself, like celestial excess — still facing me. In the dream, my strongest thought is that I do not want the figure to turn around. I want to build a world from never seeing this man’s face. Seeing him might kill me. In fact, I am almost sure of it, since the pain of staring at the young man’s back, his body — my god — is nearly doing the job itself.

I pray.

I pray for the young man to remain like that. Turned away from me. In the dream, turned away from me that way, as white as marble and smooth and muscled, he is the abstract idea of freedom itself. A young man’s body leaning into man, there in the grass, next to an unending river. Yes, in the vision I pray — as I have never prayed before in life — that this man, still at the peak of youth, will not turn to face me. So that freedom might be immortalized, forever suspended.

The last time the stranger comes, he comes into my mouth, and I am glad. My hunger is endless. I am released and I curl on the floor for another hour like a spent cock.

The second vision came in the Room of Vibrations.

To this day, I do not know how you procured so many body-size furniture-like items, all equipped with vibrating stimuli designed and positioned to enter or stimulate or shiver the genitalia, but that Room is still ringing in my bones.

In the second vision, I want my mother. Had I been awake, this thought would shame me, even repulse me: my mother stone-cold, her hands as white as bones, her eyes gleaming black holes, twisting my guts. I am captured by her stern countenance trapping vision, heart, body. Come to me for a beating; you need to learn to be a man. Her hands a permanent grip. Her skin the hue of blue-white marble, as if the flesh itself has gone to granite — or is it a trick of the eye as I move closer, unable to pull away from the force of her magnetism? — my mother stone-cold, her hands as white as bones, her eyes gleaming black holes. I feel I might vomit. I double over, small as a boy.

Still, in the dream, she moves me — her own unmovable soul creating a vacuum toward her body, her torso and sexless lap. I am at once terrified and electrified, as if standing at the edge of death in the presence of the figure of my own creation. Mother, stone-cold, your hands as white as bones, your eyes gleaming black holes. The opposite of… of what I cannot feel, even as I am pulled and pulled. You will never be apart from me, I will always be with you, a love unto death. Come here, son, I will make you a man; I will bring you to your knees and raise you from your toes upward to the heavens; bring me your vulnerability for transformation, glory; you are not like other boys; you are not meant to be like other men.

I quiver, in the vision. I wish I could pluck out my eyes so that my sight might be liberated. My desire is to die so that I can outlive her gaze, her gaze making me, creating me against my very will; mother, a pull toward destruction, mother of cold stone, her hands as white as bones, her eyes gleaming black holes; there is no savior for a boy such as this. There is no god. I haven’t the strength to resist the black hole of her. I lose myself in her abyss. Falling. Oblivion.

The third vision happened in the Room of Textures.

The marble corner of that room is a place where I would happily die, preferably after my cock has been bound so long that you could kill me by blowing air on it from an inch away. (I know that if you answered you would select instead the fur corner. I can picture your rapture.)

Miraculously, Delacroix’s painted androgyne from Liberty Leading the People visits me in your Room of Textures. Like a muscled angel she comes, resisting the world, a corporeal revolution, not man, not woman, but some body in between. And then it comes into focus, in the dream, her womanhood, but not of any kind I have known. This woman is beyond a woman, so far that she is out of reach, her reach taking a nation through revolution to salvation. Oh, if she could only save me from these torments, these night terrors bringing me to the brink of death — if by death we might mean the failure to create my colossus. This woman pure power — but neither male nor female power. What was the artist dreaming? The opposite of Venus. The musculature of her arm breaking heaven and earth, her reach beyond law or order of any kind, her breasts and torso like an unimagined armor against all wrong. Her passion larger than mankind, so large as to be on fire, her clothes half torn from her broad body, her momentum leaping a barricade over the bodies of men, comrades, soldiers, dead matter. She needs nothing about anyone even as she leads. Is she leading? Charging? Surrendering to death because it is worth it?

Her body breaking language.

I am still haunted by the concept of freedom. I wonder, who on earth has ever known freedom? Oh, we claim it for ourselves often; as peoples and nations and individuals, we’ve inflicted countless barbarisms and tortures upon our fellow man to prove that some of us have it by god, and others do not, will not, but that’s not really freedom, is it? That is power. Ugly. Degenerate. Reprobate unless it has a corresponding release. Otherwise it gets cocked up in a body.

My vision, my love, to you I owe quite simply everything.

Frédéric