The Lurid Sea by Tom Cardamone

Author:Tom Cardamone [Cardamone, Tom]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781626399129
Publisher: Bold Strokes Books
Published: 2018-01-22T16:00:00+00:00

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I do see love here. Men fall in love within the baths. Sometimes for a few minutes or several hours, an endless night both parties will remember for the rest of their lives. And I do mean love, not lust. There is a difference about the eyes, an alteration in the kiss, a lightness that blossoms in the heart never to fully fade.

There are men who have only known love in the baths. My travels once took me to a bathhouse in London, an evolved Londinium, no longer a dingy port town harried by Celts and mangy werewolves, but a teeming capital. I witnessed a young, sheepish man take his first step inside such an establishment. I could feel the trepidation from the locker room, and I peered around a corner to see. He was too frightened to move, however, and an older gentleman with a thick mustache was buzzed in and nearly knocked him over. Quickly assessing the youngster’s state, he offered an assured pat on the arm and said, “Here, here. You just need a jolly good steam.”

The older man chatted him up as they disrobed, and he gave him a tour of the facilities as if it were just another gymnasium, greatly setting the boy at ease. Their chaste kiss in the steam room was an affectionate beginning. When I found myself back at the same bathhouse in what must have been a decade later, little had changed. However, there the couple was again, older, obviously settled into a habit of meeting there at an appointed set date and time. They played cards in their towels in a little sitting area and shared tea and a tin of biscuits and chatted about their children. I overheard the younger man excitedly share every detail about his newborn, while his older friend, shorn of mustache but thicker in belly, nodded and chirped appreciative noises. A few passing men clutched their towels and scowled at their jovial exchange, as if this sharing broke some unspoken pact. I swam through time, surfacing across the globe and again returned; what felt like only a fortnight to me had passed, and there they were, much older. Now the younger one was helping the older man at the door. He had a cane and was much pained in disrobing. I sensed an unspoken agreement the arrangement would not hold much longer. The sauna was empty but possessed an air of tension and foreboding. They spoke of a great war, of how facilities such as this were being commandeered for use as makeshift hospitals or to put to use by bivouacking troops.

Within white curtains of steam that folded and unfolded, I observed their final kiss, a passion meant to swallow time was itself about to be devoured, and they accepted this fate. Then I heard the younger one whisper in his lover’s ear, “There he is again. I tell you that’s the same little faun I spied the day we met. And again all those years later, when we played spades that winter the Thames froze over.

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