Shut Eye by Adam Baron & Adam Baron

Author:Adam Baron & Adam Baron
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781911591610
Publisher: Canelo Digital Publishing Ltd
Published: 2017-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

My flat was empty and I didn’t want to be there. I went down to the Old Ludensian, and Nicky shut the place early because I was the only customer and why waste the electricity? We sat at the bar, the tables stacked high with chairs casting twisted shadows from the streetlights on the pillars and the whitewashed brick walls. Nicky didn’t ask me about Carla so I didn’t tell him. We drank a few beers. I’d meant to tell him about what had happened at the hospital but found myself not wanting to. I wound up telling him all about Teddy Morgan and then about Dominic Lewes.

We got talking about the whole gay thing. Nicky confessed to me that he had actually had a fling with a guy on Rhodes, where he’d gone after breaking up with a girlfriend. I was surprised; Nicky had the most heterosexual life of anyone I knew. He told me that he had never felt that way about any other man, but still found himself thinking about the tall American from Kansas whom he had fallen for. He said that the whole thing had confused him at the time and still did, especially when he started getting serious about a girl. He looked troubled, and suddenly embarrassed.

‘You needn’t worry, by the way,’ he assured me. ‘He was blond.’

I laughed and told Nicky that I was shocked and offended that he had never considered me as a sexual partner. Then I wondered if I would ever, ever meet anyone whose life was simple and straightforward, who could live happily in mind and body. I wished that we could somehow find a way to circumvent the body, the power it has over us to make us miserable. To trap us, like Luke was trapped, or Peter Morgan was; unable to live in his body, making only brief, clandestine sorties. What it would be like if we could either be free of the body or else free of the guilt we feel at some of the demands the body makes. I wondered what it meant that I spent hours in the gym, causing myself pain, trying to get my body to obey my commands. I wondered what it would be like to have the need to do that, not to yourself, but to others. To have power over other bodies.

Nicky and I drank another beer and sat in silence for a while. A car drove by, sending the shadows from the stacked chairs running across the walls like a hoard of demons. I left Nicky to his thoughts and went home to mine.

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