Free Exit Wound by Michael Marano Page B

scented oils they dabbed. I was drawn by the confidence they exuded and the sweet smoke of clove cigarettes woven into the clothes they wore, by the knowledge that these were men who could
create
. . . who could give the gift of what they saw with their hearts to the entire world.
    I stood within ear-shot of them, wanting to be desired by at least one of them. To be wanted so would be a trinket to replace the life-treasure I’d lost that afternoon.
    A lovely man, ashen-skinned, with green eyes, spoke to a man with golden hair. “You’re obliged to keep a journal,” he said, “for the sake of those who will study your work. Your life is your art.”
    The golden-haired man said, “No! I’ll not make the study of me or my work less of a challenge for anyone. Even
myself
. My work is my journal.”
    The other men listened with the solemnity of oaks. The looks that they breeze-cast to one another were a web of intensity in which I longed to be entangled. I wanted to be taken into that emotional matrix that has existed among artists and their lovers throughout history, and that has defined subsequent eras of creative thought.
    I stepped toward that grove of men and felt something unfold behind me. If was as if a rose the size of a cloak had unfurled. My imagination told me such a miracle had transpired, yet when I turned, I saw a miracle of another sort.
    He whom I knew would become my soul-mate stood before canvases that suddenly seemed drab. No great rose had unfurled. Just his hand, extended. To me.
    “Your red hair was how I found you,” he said as we walked to his home. “Your red hair and your green eyes. They’re a beacon.
You
called me. I answered. Now things must be finished.” His hand gripped mine tighter. “Now you must be finished.”
    To be finished . . .
    . . . a prize much greater than what I’d just sought within the web of artists I’d left behind. An eternal moment of fulfillment, like the interrupted moment in which I had, in my mind, finished his question to me: “
. . . into my blood?
”
    Completion.
    “I . . .”
    “Don’t say anything,” he said. “Don’t say a word.”
    We took the steps to his porch. The paperback I had no recollection of dropping was left there like a small altar. It filled me with something like nostalgia. I’d spent many hours holding it as a totem. Yet when had I first opened it? Did it have the smell of a new book, or the musk of a used one? I reached through the dream-floss of my memory just as my hand was let go. My companion snatched up the book. He flipped through it. Smiled.
    Then moulded wood was pressed against my spine. The small spaces in the leaded glass caught the hairs on the back of my head as he followed the fluid motion of seizing me and pressing me against the front door with the cupping of his mouth over mine, with the rubbing of the back of his hand that held the book against my crotch.
    His beautiful face came back into the focus; the rapture that had blurred him had also made the trees on the halogen-lit street a backdrop of velvet-green.
    “Seized first . . .” he said.
    He shook me in reply to my silence. The hand that held the book pressed harder against my crotch.
    “Seized first . . .”
    “. . . then . . . sired.”
    An instant of
Completion
that brought stem-drops of pre-ejaculate from me.
    His apartment was home. The jumble of canvases was welcome in my sight as would be the faces of family. Each canvas was blank. I loved them for what I knew they would wear, and the depths they’d acquire.
    “Do you
see
?” he asked.
    “Yes.”
    “I need you to see more.”
    He showed me the studio that had been a kitchenette before he had sheathed the space in rubber foam and clear plastic. The Great Canvas, for I knew what it was despite the tarp draped over it, leaned against a far corner. Like a magician producing a card by sleight of hand, he drew forth a postcard promoting the reception we’d left. The card