He sets his lips at the top of the forehead. The hair smells good; the shower will have done its work. It will have cleaned the pores, brought the tiny cells of desire into flower. He doesn’t open his mouth, kisses in silence like that. It’s a kind of prayer. He holds himself up on his arms without really touching the other, nothing but the lips on his forehead, sliding a little to the left, searching the fringe of the thick hair, coming back to the right, passing over a scar, a known pain, already explored. He keeps his eyes shut. The other does too. Ssshhhhhh… You have to be careful. Keep quiet, don’t rush things. They’re used to it. The storm — they aren’t listening to it.
The lips explore the centre, go down the forehead, reach the top of the eyebrows, follow them round. They are on Mars; there isn’t a living soul, only rocks, new pores, scrub. They dive into the socket of the left eye, where there is sometimes water. The lips feel him protest as they settle on the effeminate wall of the eyelids. They snort with laughter. Sshhhtt. They’ll give themselves away. The lips lift off into the ethereal atmosphere of pleasure. The tongue comes out and licks furtively at the region between the two eyes. At that moment he allows himself to press his hips against the other, a kind of bravado, one more blasphemy, as though he were tempting the devil, ordering him to make him afraid, as though he were lying down on the Virgin, the tongue of a rock and roll viper ploughing up the paint of her innocence. But the other smiles, arches his back too, trembles. Gently. The lips pass over the right eyelid, pitch, touch the cushion of the eye. It’s hot. The tongue, this time, undertakes a slow exploration. The taste buds taste, smell the eye. He smiles, he is so ready he could graze on the fine lashes, swallow the other’s sight, filch his dreams the way one tears off petals to determine the fate of one’s love. The hairs rustle at the slightest wind. The tongue washes the eyelid, then slides onto the nose, wipes away the grease; the teeth close lightly, send an unequivocal signal, then the tongue goes on with its pilgrimage, wets the other crater.
The one underneath wants to go faster, tries to catch the wandering lips with his mouth, but they flee, climb back up the forehead, rejoin the hair, close over the ferns. The one on top listens, one ear against the skull. Thought moves, somewhere under the roots, like a water table. He kisses the hair. And with a quick movement they open wide and hurl themselves at the throat. There you can feel the pulse, the fragility of the blood; you’d only have to bite and tear out the artery. He shivers. His partner’s wet face revolts. Don’t cry out, don’t make any noise — the others might hear?
The mouth stays a while in the valley of the neck, follows the swell of the muscle, sends the other innumerable electric shocks from its polarized lips. There’s saliva everywhere. He eats at the spring of the ear, blows on the anvils, digs at the nape with his hand. It’s solid, decided. Both of them have their hair cropped. It doesn’t hold too many smells, and by day it commands respect. Cropped hair is a bit like an unkempt beard, a rake on the skin, a grimace torn out of you when the head plunges between the legs. But they aren’t there yet. They’re exploring, keeping an eye on what’s happening around them, in the other cells. The night is far gone. The storm has been raging for three hours. All that time they’ve persevered, waited for the last of them to fall asleep, for the radios to go out. Laughter went up for a while, tabarnaks, punches, worse than an adolescents’ dormitory. Most of them are sleeping now, their nights as long as their days. But this silence is treacherous; they aren’t fooled. The walls have as many ears as they have stillborn echoes. They make strange sounds all by themselves. The storm has nothing to do with it. It doesn’t even manage to bring on a semblance of cold. Prisons are warm in winter. Honest people take care of their prisoners. To coax them, perhaps, so they won’t do it again. The prison is like an inner moon, orbiting, ringed with barbed wire, in the middle of the city that turns and takes fright before the storm. They are not afraid; they have nothing to lose; without hope they live out the days. The storm can’t reach them; it could bury the buildings, hide the walls from the citizens, and the prisoners would go on looking straight ahead. At the closed doors, already buried under the glacier of sentences.
He makes the most of it, nibbles the ear, knows he hasn’t long left, that the preamble has gone on long enough. The other is more impatient than that. He wants to do everything too fast, has little control or doesn’t want to be caught. Who knows? If he were free he’d be just as hasty. Each to his own way. And it isn’t normal, this — he knows that. It’s because he hasn’t got a woman. He says so to the other constantly. There is, in fact, a poster above the toilet. She’s on her back, encircling her sex with all ten fingers and opening it outrageously. He is like the others, masturbates thinking about the one on the wall. It works.
But for the other, the one who travels with his lips, it’s different. He thinks only about the man beneath him; he’s like an interstellar bird, with delicate arms probing by pneumatic command. There’s a kind of surgical expertise in him; he puts out his tongue and the skin opens as though cut, he sucks and the wounds take their pleasure. He bites and the skin becomes a sponge soaked with tremblings. He has a gift, and it is to give birth to desire, to draw to himself, by subtle pheromones, the males and the females of every allegiance. He almost never speaks of himself, or of others, contents himself with taking his lover’s nocturnal skin, doesn’t notice the men who are wary of him. He is savage, as he sometimes likes to describe himself. He’s inside for manslaughter. The drugs were in charge of him; he was young. He isn’t any more. He’d set fire to the guy tied to the bars of the bed. It was beautiful and then it was horrible: the screams, the smell, the eyes convulsed, terrified. He’ll never forget them, those eyes. He’s careful now, sets his lips on them and asks their pardon. He isn’t master of his own gestures; he takes his orders from very high up; glands pull the strings, stimulate his billions of suicidal ambassadors. His legs are cunning boas; the body loses itself in them, imprisoned, asphyxiated with heat. His arms are like nervous lianas, madder than oil. The fingers feed the furrows of the sexes with their nails. And pleasure is rare between these walls. You settle on the first fertile ground. His lover’s round eyes follow, hypnotized, the slow climb of his caresses. When you think about it, desire is a siphonophore jellyfish letting its long inviting streamers drift in the sea of wrecks. Touch it and the jellyfish soaks into you, forces the walls of your veins and injects its young. The burner of lovers is like that; he is a small plant, a strawberry runner with countless branchings, with multiple fruits, bitter and sweet; he is also that jellyfish, or else a slow hydrocephalic octopus with Salome limbs that you mistake — if you’re drunk, or if you’re suffocating in solitude — for an exciting treachery, a pain in someone else’s heart; a certainty that evil is elsewhere, that it won’t touch you.
They kiss. The burner of lovers gives his saliva. The other feeds on it like a scrawny nestling. It wasn’t like that at the start. The other didn’t want to — sex yes, but the mouth, no, the mixing can’t be done; a woman’s saliva is clean. And one night the burner of lovers had been quicker than he was and had driven his tongue in. The other could have protested, but their saliva tasted the same after all; their teeth were hard against each other. You’d have said it was a fight. Brothers, is what they were becoming. They kiss; they have stopped the other gestures, wet each other more, pay no attention to where they put their tongues; the coolness is like a summer wind. Their nostrils drive out their inner heat very hard. You’d think they were talking to each other in that language of the deaf that demands so many gestures; they take each other’s face in both hands now, try to hold each other still, but their mouths make too much noise. They’re thirsty, they’re hungry, they eat the juices.
He lifts his sweater; the other does the same. A belly is a warm thing; the breathlessness that starts up is a soft thing. The skin hardens; they can go at it more freely; the one on top thinks that’s a bit of a shame; the one underneath forgets women. There are still too many regions to explore for the one; there are already enough, according to the other, who wants to conquer, not discover. But the burner of souls works his charm all the same. And besides, he doesn’t look like a faggot. He has muscles and knows how to fight. He masturbates in front of the woman on the poster too. He respects the codes. He takes a lot of drugs. He goes off into terrifying deliriums. The other prisoners laugh at it, but his cellmate knows that he becomes then a strange beast, a tongue as mad as a heated clitoris — oh, the smells, anal smells, of Africa, of the sea.
But this evening his companion hasn’t taken anything, is enjoying himself, and he agrees to it. He lets it happen, because it’s a form of adoration. He thinks himself elsewhere, and his partner’s lips have the magic to summon up luxuriant images. A beach, a woman of course, sand working its way in everywhere, a soft emery at the tops of the breasts, in the slit of the glans, bitten by the anus, spat out by the mouth. The other plunges his head into his belly, plants his bristling hair in his navel, blows near the belt as though he wanted to untie it by crying “Open sesame!”
The bellies swell like the tide. The skin tastes more and more of salt. The head advances under the shirt. A sensual mole, washing again and again, tickling the loins, biting the abdomen; the musk believes it’s spring; the earth wakes; the smell is strong, it drowns you. They’re hot, the atmosphere thickens, he’s still running about under the shirt, the other is thinking of all the free women. How he’d love to do that to them. He unbuttons his trousers, gives the signal; the other has dangerous teeth, he knows it, his mouth is a great viper-vagina, the ivory on the veins, the starts of the cock when the tongue passes under the glans, the balls on fire. Mustn’t moan, mustn’t cry out, mustn’t say too much that you like it. You do it in silence and you do it roughly. We’re men, we know the dangers, we’ve got a sword that makes you come, we’ve got shivers that burn us. The mouth is big, it snatches; he’d like to run it through the throat; he’d like him to have mouths everywhere, hot holes, wet and firm. The burner gets what he deserves; he’s good for nothing else. Him, he’ll change when he gets out of the joint. No scar, no dilated anus. It isn’t normal, but it feels good to do it.
But the other doesn’t care. Failing romance, he has pleasure. He’ll never burn anyone again, but he’ll go as far as he can — not all the way, no, as far as he can, as close to the danger as he can, even if it means holding the match in front of the body soaked in petrol. Doing what those male spiders do, approaching their female not wanting to die and obliged all the same to couple with her, the sting of death at their throat, fearing for their life, fearing not to come.
Modern tango, the arsonist dances alone around a totem. Imaginary bossa nova, the other has his eyes riveted on the past of women: when he was small under his mother’s breasts, when he was an adolescent under the legs of girls in their blood, when he was a man crushing his last illusions on the mattresses of whores. No women, no happiness. He thrusts; his cock goes into a male’s mouth; you mustn’t say it, let it go, they’ll understand, we won’t tell anybody. We can’t wait. The other is still dressed, plays the good slave. They have the night. When his master drops his last reticences, he too will be able to strip, he’ll become a serpent with magic scales, he’ll swallow his prey whole and will have the rest of the night to belch up his pleasures. He’ll pretend to strike a match, will hold it in front of his lover’s eyes, will do a dance of death and will then swallow the fire — because the horror isn’t necessary, only its shadow, only the slow strong pleasure of tasting sex, of coming close to the most intimate filth, of swallowing the bits of food caught between teeth, of tasting the milk of armpits, of licking the faecal walls, of pretending to be clean and decent and then opening his coat to every passer-by, telling them they’re wrong to move away from his body. Life is far too short for saying prayers. Mount women, mount men, mount every consent, mount the machos, mount the priests, the men of the desert, mount and then dismount, hands full of substances, a smile on the lips and the hope of starting again. Up, down, up, up, suck the snot, clean out the ears, plunge your fingers in, bite and eat.
And they stop suddenly. Laughter? They listen, out of breath. The one underneath has put his hand over the other’s mouth, and the other, for pleasure, licks it. But he doesn’t take it that way; he tightens his fist, catches the tongue, could tear it out. The other slides his hand fearlessly onto his jailer’s sex. It translates like this: We’re even — you tear mine out, I tear yours out. It’s pure pleasure, but the other frees himself from the grip at once, pulls up his trousers, shocked, goes to the door, looks through the little window. Nothing. The corridor is in the usual half-dark; the guards aren’t doing their rounds. He breathes hard, has feared the worst — the guards’ complicity with the sodomizers in the left wing. There must certainly be some who suspect what’s going on in this cell. Unless they all do the same thing, unless behind these doors there are men in rut, all of them living in lies and in fear while they drool and suck their partners’ testicles as though they were delicate udders. He relaxes, turns round. His companion is at the other window, watching the silent storm. It’s like a muted television tuned to the weather channel. He goes over to him. Don’t do anything standing up — you could be seen from the door. Ah, to hell with it; mustn’t lose the rhythm. He says, a little imploringly: “It’s good, I like it.” He strips completely, except, comically, for the socks, because he feels the cold. He lies back down, waits. He’s ashamed of himself; he’s playing the other’s game. He could finish this on his own, but it isn’t the same thing.
The one at the window still doesn’t move, watches the snow go past and leave no trace. He has put on a calm that the other knows to be a sudden will to do something stupid. As though to confirm his fears, the burner of lovers turns towards him at last. His eyes shine — maybe a werewolf in his veins, maybe a cat in his eyes. He takes off his sweater slowly, his trousers fast, his underpants. Stretches out on the other, sets his lips back on the forehead. As at the beginning. The other lets him. It’s wasted time, but it’s the ritual. And since it isn’t normal, you might as well follow a known road, a predictable one. That way you can always come out with a justification, always the same one, without any risk of being caught out by a remembered pleasure.
The weight of the naked body is the only new element. It doesn’t usually happen like this. The other is embarrassed by it, but doesn’t show it. His face is all wet; he kisses now, thinking about… about? They never had names, come on — a door number and a bill. He digs harder into the throat of his burner of lovers. He puts his hands on his back, goes down to the buttocks, grips them and presses them against him. Not like that, the other seems to say — a little more control; you have to make this pleasure last. So he lifts himself, wants to go on with his conquest of the face; it’s only because the other is in prison that he was able to make him his own. If one is a burner of lovers, the other is his treasure, his straight man, another way of screwing, always with the eyes shut and above all no submission. They have an eternity in this cell or in another. They’ll get a remission, of course, a possibility of rehabilitation, but that’s still a long way off.
For now, night has come down on their souls. The jailers have turned off the lights. Finding the moment when they went from the bite to the secret is lost now in the night of storms. They don’t trouble themselves to understand. This night will be another night without sleep. It’s storming outside; you can hardly hear anything inside; the echo of the corridors is already a kind of disreputable wind that muffles the smallest gestures of the night. The fights went out with the lights. Each man has gone home to himself. Several are jerking off in secret, thinking about everything and nothing. It’s become a little mechanical, but they need it — otherwise they’d explode, it would be worse, they’d kill. Their species won’t let them not reproduce, and when they take hold of their cocks, already stiff, they shut their eyes and think they’re doing exactly the opposite, that they’re inside a woman and that she’ll be pregnant for a day, just so they can believe they’ll never reach her again, and then wait another day and start putting her in the family way all over again the following night, until the fantasy has produced too many children. Then they drive the woman off and do the same thing with another. A man is a simple thing: he’s the disseminator who goes from flower to flower, mixing the pollens so the race will be stronger. And women stay always out of reach, demanding, for the good of their own race. At night the prison is white: semen and tissues, sighs and sleep.
The burner of lovers has a nickname: Fire. The other is called Eagle, quite simply because he has an eagle tattooed on his left shoulder. They didn’t choose these nicknames themselves. The other prisoners baptized them on their arrival. Fire and Eagle caress each other. They know what they’re doing; it won’t last hours. Time is strangely counted in the infinite regulated day of the institution.
Every morning they harden the angles of their faces, part their lips slightly so the whiteness of their teeth can be seen. Their eyes are blue, their hair straight and short. They do sport. Twenty years separate them; the gym has erased them. Nobody here asks anybody’s age. They look like famished wild beasts, nervous. Are they feared? They don’t know. They are respected, at least. But in this world you always have to be careful; the universe of men is the universe of the treachery of the blind. Sshhhh… they repeat to themselves in silence. Eagle really wants it now. They are almost never together, don’t frequent the same cells, a few friends in common. By day it’s a photo of a naked woman above the toilet, the fingers spread in a star to aim better at the entrance. In front of the toilet it’s easy; the hand is already there, and besides, the others don’t really look; they’re doing the same thing. They respect that. They laugh about it, rather — a kind of insult mixed with camaraderie. They understand and respect it; they do the same thing, but don’t want to say so; they double up laughing if they decide to catch one of them at it; sometimes they even go so far as to gang up to “help” him without thinking any further about what they’re doing. A man ejaculates anyway. It’s a code. And no great mystery.
They, Fire and Eagle, follow that code to the letter. Not a letter missing. They’re proud of it but don’t congratulate themselves on it. What they do at night comforts them, and that’s that. The full stop at the end of the code. That tiny little mark writers put at the end of every sentence so they can move on to something else. But that full stop — they’ve made it their deep well, the place where their secrets don’t even have an echo. Their faces, which impose refusal, their eyes, which go far into the consciousness of any possible adversary, are like lead pencils; the full stop is quickly drawn. Or fists. Look out. Sshhhhh… they have nothing to prove for the moment. At least, that’s what Eagle thinks. Fire doesn’t give a damn. He’s already mounted all sorts of things. He goes on. His straight man belongs to him. Tomorrow it will be other sheep, if Eagle dies or gets pardoned.
What might be intolerable to them isn’t; they’re obliged to share a cell. They’ve learned to live together. Habits form. You become brothers, each with his own stories, his own obsessions, as in adolescence. Sometimes it makes them smile, this comradeship and this ambivalence. That one should swear and the other agree in his head; that one should let out an admiring whistle and the other whistle in his turn. To be able to touch a shoulder in full view of everyone and not be noticed, because brotherhood is a matter of the heart. And that’s rare in a prison, the heart. The code, yes, but the heart stays unsated, is nothing but a pump, ventricles in systole driving the blood towards the arms, the sex, the head. The heart that reddens the eyes with anger, the anger that bares the teeth, the teeth that bite the brother’s skin in silence without leaving marks.
They form a cross, their hands joined, their faces welded at the lips, one man’s hips forcing the passage of something that doesn’t exist. Eagle knows he’ll have the upper hand in the end. He swings his hips, rubs; Fire’s hairs catch at his sex like leeches; he rubs harder; the salts evaporate, drug the air. Fire looks for Eagle’s neck, follows the shoulder, sniffs the forest of the armpit. Eagle lets go of Fire’s hands, grips the sheets and lifts his lover’s naked body with his hips. The man who doesn’t have what he wants crushes. Fire isn’t surprised by the movement. A good gymnast, he slips nimbly under Eagle, changes sides. Eagle lets himself drop. Fire opens Eagle’s buttocks, plunges his tongue in. The anus tightens. Eagle smells strong there, but he is clean. A woman would never do that to him like that. The tongue goes hunting for the inner membranes; the teeth rub the skin. Eagle is humiliated; he knows it. He waits his turn. Are they making noise? He has no ear left to hear with. Fire’s beard against the soft skin of the anus obliges him to shut his mouth and accept a kind of impossibility. The stimulation is insane; Fire is hungry, has an enormous tongue; a runnel of sweat escapes down Eagle’s spine; Fire notices it, goes mad, follows the water with his tongue and thereby arrives at the point where he could mount Eagle. Eagle guesses, frees himself with one movement, seizes Fire, and in no time manages to dominate him. Fire grimaces. Eagle pushes in further. He thrusts. “Yes!” he says. That amuses Fire. Eagle is angry, though. From where he is he can see the poster of the woman, above the toilet. It’s too dark to see the details, which is no matter, since Eagle invents them. He imagines himself there, on the woman, and he mounts her. He rubs, swings his hips, wants to be done with it as fast as possible, and yet he likes it, draws the pleasure out. He likes it! Fire doesn’t say a word, tries to relax. Eagle’s cock hardens still more. Mustn’t clench too hard — he knows that. He imagines that he’s opening his mouth wide, that he wants to vomit or to defecate. There, it goes in better. Gentleness — botched again. The anus no longer protests. Eagle pants, makes automatic movements; he’s a machine, on, off, on, off, on, off. Fire is very hot. His sweat lubricates. Eagle puts his hands on the woman’s breasts; he’s careful and yet he shows who is stronger; the sex fights on; the long-haired woman on the poster isn’t smiling at him, seems to be dead in his arms, and that submission excites him. He has the power. He could hurt Fire, so entirely is he taken up with his own pleasure, which is slow in coming.
“Clench. A bit.”
Fire’s eyes, in the darkness, turn wicked. He has never gone all the way to the end of his own saliva. It’s always too fast. Too stupid, so ephemeral that you have to start again endlessly, because the memory is minute, feeds nothing, makes no child. He clenches. Eagle claws his back at once. Fire feels nothing any more. Eagle doesn’t withdraw. Fire feels him live his orgasm. Oohhs, bloodless nostrils, clearings of the throat — what a man invents to mark his victory. Eagle lies down on Fire, kisses his back, gets his breath back, thrusts a few more times. Fire waits. Eagle is in an immediate half-sleep. The pleasure is still roaring, like a tectonic plate losing itself in the magma. Eagle pushes in one last time, trembles, a happy epileptic. The seed passes over, is lost in the poison of the intestines; the halves of children roll about in the dark like empty shells.
Silences.
Hot breath on the nape.
Eagle almost falls asleep, his member still upright — you’d think it was a bee dying after its attack. Fire smiles. He, for one, still has all his wants. He lifts Eagle, who lets himself be carried, too happy to have come and to believe in it. Fire walks his load about the narrow bed, swaying like an Indian elephant. Eagle clings on as best he can so as not to fall. Fire faces the wall, still swaying a little; Eagle finds it funny. This exercise goes on a long time. Both of them can hear the murmur of the storm through the endless concrete of their jail. Eagle is sated, lets himself be rocked by Fire. Fire is playing the pachyderm, sniffing loudly, his skin with the roughness of the past. His eyes, though, stay modern: half closed and red, veined by too many injections of drugs; they’re the sky blue full of clouds of the men who always go too far. He feels Eagle’s cock softening gently. But Eagle is capable of more. Fire knows it. He has an idea.
He pretends to want to climb the wall. Eagle laughs; he has to use force now to keep himself on Fire, then is obliged to put his feet on the bed, but he has managed to stay inside Fire. The burner of lovers swings his hips. Eagle is quick to seize the opportunity. When he wants to, he never tires. The sex reports for duty. He could seed the whole planet of women. He takes back control of the situation. Fire sighs. It’s asking a lot of his insides. Always to go further, to douse your partner in petrol, to smother him in surprise. He shuts his eyes, rakes the floor of his lungs for the air he needs, sucks the oxygen out of it, an animal. Eagle thrashes, unconscious of his own strength. Off they go again. It smells bad. He’s overdoing it. But it’s Fire who’s asking for it, after all. This isn’t pleasure, it’s the love of beasts; Fire masturbates, hums a tune. Eagle listens, is afraid of seeing him lose his head, but it excites him at the same time. Fire tightens his anus at every moment; Eagle takes advantage of it. They dance in the same direction, face to back, face to the wall. Fire breathes hard. The heat and the pain mix to produce a strange dream. They are gliding above the prison, surrounded by the storm that slaps their sweating skin. Fire is a horse, Eagle a cowboy, planting his spurs in his mount’s flanks. They fly, see nothing in front of them; the landscape is a furious white. Eagle grips Fire’s hair, forces his head back. He drives his member in deeper, as though he wanted by that to run through the fate that binds them. His mouth open, his neck like the prow of a ship cleaving the wild water, Fire weeps, is in pain, is certainly bleeding, sacrifices himself, burns under the petrol, his ribs racked apart, his palms trembling, his sex twice too big. He lets out a long breath, tries to concentrate on what he’s doing, pitches, overdoes it too, tightens, pulls, hums; the other says yes! again. Fire will soon be full of seed. Eagle suddenly puts his strong arms round him, presses himself against him.
Fire smiles. It’s what he was waiting for. The other is abandoning himself. It’s stronger than he is; the second climax is choking him. Fire comes in his turn. They both rain. A few seconds of nothingness, in which their skins, stretched like drums, vibrate to the sound of some obscure god. Fire is happy: to stay like this, never to leave each other, to die like this, dirty and infertile. Their bodies press closer together. He could be faithful; he’d have a man of his own, under the sheets every day, close to the heart, in the saliva. Together they’d fight the jeering and old age. Each would know the strength of the other; they’d show their teeth to passers-by, would fornicate in silence, onanising and fellatious. They’d be masters of their room, would build their house, would no doubt grow a garden and flowers. And in the evening in winter, when it stormed, they’d try to forget the prisons, ribcages amused.
Eagle pushes Fire onto the bed, withdraws and lets out a bestial cry. The spell is broken. Fire shuts the box of wishes again, becomes aware of the place. The prison is listening. Eagle isn’t worried. A noise like that is normal. You hear it every night in the cells. It’s anger. And that’s what they all get their kicks from.
Fire gets up. The pain has to be calmed now. Still out of breath, he walks up and down, hears the storm roaring now and then, but he feels good; his naked body has the warmth and the tiredness of existing. It hurts all the same. Eagle is a bastard, a male with a bearded cock. Fire needs the key to shut the gates of the dream. He needs dope. Something soft tonight, a little chocolate mushroom, or morphine; tomorrow, go to the gym and do nothing but push-ups, tighten the muscles of the belly, drive the pain further out, put it out with exercise, maybe put on boxing gloves and find a partner he could try to kill. Failing love, rape. It isn’t complicated, happiness.
Eagle gets up in his turn. Goes round his cellmate. Turns on the taps, sets about washing himself — don’t leave any smells that are too strong, play the hypocrisy of the place. Fire goes on with his walk in the cold and the heat of the cell. Eagle tries not to pay attention to him, but it’s hard; Fire is too nervous; he seems happy on top of it, which isn’t normal; he mustn’t get any ideas. He wants to go to sleep. Fire is certainly going to want to talk. Eagle refuses. We haven’t got a choice, Fire had said one night, we’re lovers, we’re going to love each other all our lives. He was of course under the influence of drugs. Eagle had almost strangled him, but since Fire was smiling, he had beaten him instead, until the other passed out. Fire had never spoken of it again, but took his revenge every time they made love, thought their future in silence, arranged things so that the other would hold him, without knowing it, the way people who love each other do, went hunting in the turnings of a climax for the only moments of grace he could allow himself. And the drugs had done their job in his body. Strange cells had lately begun to invade his blood.
Eagle is sleeping with a monster and he doesn’t know it. Fire sits down on the toilet, tries not to give himself away, to keep his malice to himself. He’s the dangerous female, the one who devours her lover after love. An intense pain tears at his intestine. Eagle doesn’t want to hear, but Fire, shamelessly, expels the semen. The noise is loud, coarse; you’d say it was shit being spread on white church paper. The smell invades the cell, but they’re used to that, can’t do otherwise. You know the other man’s arse even without the screwing. Eagle stops his ears all the same and hides his nose under the blanket. Fire is doing it on purpose. Eagle is tired. He could be one of those insects that die astonished once the union is consummated. He almost falls asleep, his head in the slumber of purgatory, his eyes drawn by the play of the shadows. The storm doesn’t reach the cell. They are safe, far from eyes and from sentences. They’re left in peace; they make love, and then they look for sleep.
Fire hasn’t finished with the night. Sitting on the toilet, he expels the last invaders. He sniffs. But Eagle doesn’t hear him any more. It hurts, the anus and the heart. What’s his name again? Nobody calls him by his real name. Camille. He spits out the seed, his fists closed, his sky-blue eyes running through the night and the lake that drown them.