Jeff's Journal
Like the rapid-fire images of a news broadcast, the scenery of downtown Manhattan, awash in the hazy colors of Fall, whisked quickly past me. I was riding in the back seat of Brad's Catera. I was sitting partially slumped against his chest, wearing his leather coat. His arm was around me, had been since we left his office.
Nothing of the environ in the car, or outside it, was familiar.
I sighed. So many things seemed shrouded in mystery the more I was told of my past life and the more in earnest I was to discover how my past infused my present. Meeting with these men in my present company, Brad and Steve, rather brutally reminded me that the longer my loss of memory remained unresolved the more I would fall behind socially.
Steve had just made an efferent turn into a service road. We were on our way to Brad's townhouse. Our townhouse, Brad said. The quality of this idea, however, held so little ring of truth as to be unreal. I believed it with as much salt as the notion that I was Jeff O'Keefe.
I felt Brad's lips soft against my cheek. He was informing me that he was calling Tristan John – our doctor – to examine me in the house.
"It'll be an opportunity for you to be around your own things, things you prize as important and meaningful," he added.
I suddenly felt the burden of a lifelong debt to these men. Here we were -- in the midst of office hours and vehicles chugging on low gear. Neither he nor Steve was under any obligation to me or to share their home, possessions, friendship or time for the asking with me. But some superior responsibility or morality, perhaps based on a high valuation of the dignity of people, appeared to have prevailed on them to commiserate unconditionally with my circumstances.
It was never like this with Pa. I was going to have to relearn the social forms of trust and love.
"This is where you live?" I asked now. "Gee, it's beautiful."
We had entered Brad's house and were in the drawing room. A few fine filaments of light filtered through the bamboo blind.
Brad smiled, receiving back his coat. "You live here," he answered. "You own this place."
Ah, I wondered, why was this such a ghastly idea?
I was then urged away to explore on my own. He and Steve needed to use their cell phones.
I took to wandering in no particular system. The house was six stories high, I had counted, had a multitude of rooms, eleven to be precise, tasteful looking stained glass windows crafted to replicate antiquity and heavy-wood doors, and what appeared to be seventeenth-century French furniture provided mild traces of opulence and grandeur. The house started to acquire a mystique, like the folkloric castles.
My wanderings soon conducted me to the kitchen.
The pull of the kitchen had been stronger than that of the other rooms on the first floor. A perfumed scent, unrecognizable, melded with aromas of spices, cooking, soup and freshly baked bread, and the unexpected odor of cinnamon. I remembered having had the sensation of smelling cinnamon one time before.
My mind worked frenetically to form some kind of association between the object and the sense before it could be lost. But Brad had found me and taken my hand, and was leading me up the stairs.
"This is our room," he pointed out, his arms raised at right angles with his body. We were standing in a teal and terra cotta room, three times the size of my cell in Pa's house.
"Tristan will be here shortly," he said. "In the meantime, let's get you out of these clothes."
As he undressed me, I said: "I can understand now why you care about me. I mean I don't know why, but I understand why, kind of, but why does Steve?"
He smiled, concentrating on my shoelace.
"Steve's a devoted friend, for one thing," he explained taking off my sneaker. "For another, you love each other. You've spent a lot of time together."
"Like you and me," I pursued, now letting him remove my shirt for me.
"No, not like you and I, baby cakes," he answered, folding and putting away my shirt. He had assumed an emotional voice and paternal tone. He now sounded far older than his 31 years. "I love you like no other. Steve's boyfriend is Keith – you met him before at the hospital."
"Brunette, long dimples," I said, nodding. "Cute."
His turn to nod, his attention divided. He had arrived at my jeans. I stiffened somewhat while he unzipped the fly and pulled my jeans easily down to my ankles. Habit or perhaps an old understanding directed me to step out of the leg openings.
"Well, you and Steve are tennis partners and play in the same varsity volleyball team," he added.
I was now utterly and splendidly naked. I felt an urge to cup my genitals with my hands but didn't. Instead, I stood before him feeling thoroughly exposed and somewhat awkward. I'd had an erection since the journey through the Manhattan merry-go-round and his eyes were cast on my 8-inch. He didn't even conceal his act of studying my nude body. In fact, he took his time about it, as though it was right. As though it was something he had always used to do. There was nothing smutty about it, so I comported myself with dignity.
But my body was trembling slightly despite the warm air conditioning.
Not too much later, he pulled back the lush comforter for me, nodding toward the bed. I slithered under the comforter.
"I'm .... gay," I suddenly said. A statement question.
He nodded.
"When did I come out?" I asked.
He was tight-lipped all of a sudden. I took that as a cue not to pursue it further.
We chatted about things in general while awaiting Tristan's arrival. Later, he gave me a quick review of our relationship with Tristan.
"You're loved by many people, Jeff," he said, "and Tristan's one of them."
A soft rap on the door. "That'll be him," he said, rising to answer it.
I think I fell on Eros' arrow. In the next few minutes, the room was transformed into an inglorious meeting place of demigods. The opened door had yielded a creature fashioned of a potter's superlative clay, and when Brad presented Tristan to me, I felt I was beholding an Adonis Rising. I must have gaped, maybe drooled. How mortifying. Nevertheless, he truly was a beautiful one, a creation in the image of the Perfect Incarnate, with a face that showed he was living a full life, and manners and posture that were as distinguished as Brad's. His clothes – a simple but quality Polo shirt and relaxed-fit khakis – were in the Dress-down-Friday manner of the Dotcom literati.
Dear God, I thought, was I so aquiver from social deprivation and functioning that I must feel an attraction for other men at the first sight? Indeed, just as it had been with Brad, the factor of _s_e_x_uality was not removed from my first meeting with Tristan as we now locked eyes and shook hands.
And then I heard Brad excuse himself.
"You have to go?" I asked, humiliated once more by my own actions, which were the atrocity of unrestraint.
He turned back, saying, "I won't be far." And he was gone.
I turned to Tristan. I smiled nervously.
"It's better that he isn't here," he explained. "He relinquishes all sense of objectivity if he knows you're suffering a bit of discomfort."
"This is going to be uncomfortable?" I asked.
No answer. Just a god's smile, grinding my fears to dust. So, after that, neither of us spoke again. We were concentrating on each other's hearts, eyes, ears and throats (in this case his Adam's apple was my interest) though with different objectives in mind. But later, he was the only one to stick a thermometer under my tongue.
The hour passed quickly.
"This'll help bring down your fever," he said, placing a cool compress on my forehead.
I couldn't believe my eyes!
"What's wrong?" he asked, curious.
"This has happened before," I whispered.
"What's that?"
The sensation lingered awhile longer – the environ, the muted lighting, Tristan before me, in that same stance and flipping his wrist with the glass tube in his hand. And I – lying down under his watchful eye.
"This," I said, "this has happened before."
"Sure, many times. I've paid countless house calls."
"No, I don't mean that. I mean this – everything that happened a minute ago. Exactly the same way."
But I was going nowhere with Tristan. I was going nowhere with anybody; not even with myself. I let out a protracted sigh of frustration.
Protectively, Tristan put the thermometer out in front of me.
"Look at this, Jeff," he beseeched.
"Why?" I asked.
"What's this?"
"A thermometer."
"What does it do?"
"Measures temperature."
"Okay, read this."
"100.6 Is there a point to any of this?"
"No, just a diversion. You were too tense. Look, this is my point: you're here. You can speak. You can read. You remember a lot more things than you realize. Okay, you can't recall your friends and bits of your past. But you're not on your own, are you? Jeff, there are enough people who care about you and are working to help you remember again. It's not going to happen overnight. For some reason, your mind has chosen to block out some things and remember others. Maybe you were badly hurt. Maybe this is a sub-conscious attempt to protect yourself. But they'll all return to you. I promise. You must give yourself time."
I looked aghast at Tristan, waiting for him to continue. When he didn't, I said sarcastically: "This is bull_s_h_i_t_."
"Yes, maybe," he replied, "but I must continue examining you."
"I'm sorry," I said. "It's not bull_s_h_i_t_. I'm rotten. I got bumped in the head. Brad said at the hospital that the night I disappeared, I'd spoken to him on the phone. Then he'd heard a loud crash, some kind of explosion, and the line went dead. He was to have picked me up from the university. That was when I'd placed the call to him. But he never found me. Something happened. They found the phone booth wrecked as if a car had driven into it. I was the last one in the booth. Dear God, maybe I'd been run into by a car. Maybe I have brain damage. Of course, Pa tells me something else. Whom do I believe?"
"Is this a rhetorical question?" he asked.
"No," I answered.
"In that case, believe Brad," he returned. "He's known you longer. You can't believe a guy that claims to be your father and then abuses you."
That reminder left a bitter bile on my tongue. Intimating that I'd been offended, he put away his trade tools.
Quietly and gently now, he said, "You're starting to recall a number of things. What you said just now, about having had this experience, well, it's one of many things you'll recall over time. It starts like this: flashes of images, inchoate incidents. But you know, even without the amnesia, a lot of memories are but images, are inchoate. We don't really recollect things in completion. We all practice selective amnesia, if you think about it.
"I know you want to remember the important things in your life. Who you are, what you'd done before, your family, your childhood, your friends. You know what you should do? Start making a list. Each time you remember something, put it down in writing. I know there are things that are starting to provoke some kind of association with your past."
I nodded.
"Tell me about them."
It took a while but as soon as I'd put my thoughts in some coherent order, I described to him my experiences the past few weeks: remembering the literary works and libretto I was able to recite, the chimes of church bells, the kitchen, the scent of some food, seeing Brad even before he found me, NYU, the games arcade. And how I'd tried with vague success to make some sense of my encounters with these diverse themes. I must have been talking for an hour by the time I finished.
"But there's no beginning. No end," I concluded.
"Well, make a list of things you want to accomplish, too, like what are the beginnings of things you want to know."
"But you know them. All of you. Why don't you tell me?"
"We could. But it would not be your memory."
I shut my eyes. I felt my energies all but taxed by my recounts.
Some time seemed to have elapsed. I thought perhaps Tristan had left but he was sitting back on the wing chair opposite me, watching me.
"What happened?" I asked.
"You slept," he replied.
"Long?"
"About half an hour. But it's just what the doctor orders."
I laughed quietly. So easy to love this man.
"I'll ask the questions now," he continued. "Did the man you call 'Pa' touch you in any way besides take pictures of you and spank you?"
I said I couldn't be sure, but I didn't think so.
"Okay, I'm going to look down at you now. I want you to relax," he informed me next.
My muscles tensed as soon as he attempted to pull down the comforter.
"I've seen you before," he assured me.
I turned askance while he exposed me to himself, the comforter draped around my feet.
He had approached me and was now sitting at my elbow. I'd caught his raised brows, a reflex reaction to the bald patch that was once a fertile harvest of light brown pubic hair. He ran his hand over my shaved crotch. Then he cradled my penis on his palm.
"There's a bad bruise on the head. Do you know how that happened?" he asked much later, after subjecting my private parts to such microscopic scrutiny that it raised my fears, my blood pressure and my goose pimples. My penis had risen, too, standing at half-staff already. I caught my breath in time to answer him.
"No."
He handled my testicles once more. "There are perforation marks around your scrotum. They look like pierce marks. Did you consent to being pierced?"
I shook my head miserably. The question, besides intrusive, was redundant and underscored others' little comprehension of the standards by which I regarded issues of morality.
"How did they come about?" he pursued.
I shook my head. "I don't know."
He stacked up some pillows beside my left leg. At his request, I rolled over to my left side. He put my right leg on top of the pillows, raising my leg and bottom.
I felt a sharp pain on my pelvis as his fingers pressed down on my flesh. I yelped.
"This could be infected," he warned, prescribing oral antibiotics immediately. I swallowed it.
He rubbed cream on the diameter-wide puncture marks there that had become swollen and blue black from Stoner's repeated injection with his serum. He applied the same on the injury to my private parts. But it was his touch I found an emollient for my pain.
"Did you know they were drugging you?" he asked.
"I found out last week. That's why I ran away," I replied.
But then came the command: "Okay. Lie on your stomach."
I obeyed.
"Spread your legs, please."
And again.
Offering no pre-text, he pushed his finger up my anus. I cursed him, stunned, and flipped over to my back.
"Sorry. Did I hurt you?" he said.
I shook my head; still, my curse accomplished something. He was more careful and gentle afterward.
"You're very tender down there," he observed. "But it doesn't seem like you've been penetrated in recent months. Do you remember anyone of them touching your anus?"
Gentle, he was, but on the leeside of inconsiderate. I was starting to feel the beginnings of an invasion. "No, I don't remember," I said irritably.
"Nothing?" he persisted. "You don't remember anything being introduced into your anus?"
"No, Tristan," I reiterated, raising my voice to represent my irritability. "I don't remember anything like that. But they could have done anything to me. The bastards. I was strung out on drugs. I was stripped naked. I was exposed to anything. But I don't know what more they did. I was only conscious once last week, and they were taking pictures. They made some kind of video. Pa .... he ...."
"Yes?"
I threw my arms over my eyes. "He beat me."
"Why did he spank you?"
"No, not spank. He whipped me. For the video."
"But he spanked you some times."
I nodded.
"How did that make you feel?"
I glared at him. Wondering: why was he playing shrink?
"How did you feel about being spanked?"
Eyes locked on mine, challenging me.
"Jeff?"
"Are you my doctor or my shrink?"
I knew the retort wasn't kind. He had disregarded it.
"How did you feel about being spanked?" he asked for the umpteenth time. "You're an adult, Jeff. You're 19 years old. You're in college. And he spanked you, probably without clothes, probably in front of Stoner. Probably Stoner spanked you, too. Perhaps they both spanked you at the same time, taking turns, egging each other while they treated you as _s_e_x_ual sport for the asking. How did all this make you feel?"
How?
I put my hands on my eyes, playing possum. Here was an occasion revivifying a new fit of horrors, I thought. How had he been able to be so bang-on about the racy details without the benefit of euphemism? Subtly hustling me on matters of nuance and shades of meaning to extract a larger corpus of tale?
I suddenly felt like bolting out of the hostile courts of inquiry. I felt my private being violated. Pointless also to stay on the verbal volley because it would mean telling another lie. I had already committed artifice by professing I was innocent concerning why my anus was tender. Another deliberate lie would probably go to a lifelong regret.
"What do you remember about being spanked?" Now the question had shifted focus but I understood perfectly what he meant. I changed his focus.
"Did Brad ever spank me?"
"Is this what you remember?"
"No, but I've been getting images – a body on his lap. Was I the one on his lap?"
"I thought I said I'd ask the questions. Once more, Jeff, what do you remember about being spanked?"
I told him I didn't remember anything. I had also grown weary of his questions. I told him I was very, very tired, and wanted to see Brad.
"Jeff ..."
"I'm tired," I insisted, whimpering exasperatedly. "God, Tristan, I didn't want to do it. All right? I didn't like it, like any of it. I didn't. I ran away. I came here. I ran away because I didn't like what they were making me do. But I didn't know where to go. I thought of Brad. And there were others. There were other boys. I felt sorry for them. I didn't want to abandon them. But I had to save myself. Why doesn't anybody understand? Why do you ask me what I liked or didn't like?"
Heart pounding against chest, hurting me.
"They stripped me naked and spanked me, in the company of other men sometimes, they put my spanked ass on display, for the enjoyment of these men, they put me in their movies ... how do you think I felt?" I added.
And then, as if to have appeared from nowhere, arms were wrapped around me, holding me tight.
"Jeff. Take it easy."
Arms and voices. Mulched together.
Take it easy. Ssh.
I'm sorry.
"Brad. Why can't I remember you?"
You're just tired.
"No, I'm not tired."
I'll make up a syrup. It'll help him sleep.
Won't a jab be faster?
"No! I don't want any more jabs. Are you crazy? I've had nothing but jabs for two stinking months."
Please, don't.
Hold his legs.
_d_a_m_n_.
Sorry.
Drink this, sweetheart.
Don't want to sleep. Have to go back.
This will bring down your fever, that's all. Liar. That's it. To the last drop. I don't want anymore. Good man. But I don't want to sleep. Hush now. I love you. I'm so tired. I think it's working. What happened? Think I pushed him too hard. He's very hot. Go on, darling, sleep.
Silence.
Where's everybody?
Please, don't everyone speak at once.
© 1998, 2001, JRK & BWK.