An Honest Ghost by Rick Whitaker Page A

above the Hilton Hotel, was visible.
    “I believe Tarkovsky expressed his intent very well on the screen,” I said. He looked at me, perplexed. I felt for the first time I was speaking for myself. “My mother was a Freudian. It was cooler than anything else. I was never raped— except nearly—once. Some three years ago,” I recounted, “I happened to be bathing beside a young man, blessed at the time with an astounding beauty. Since then I’ve had a terrible fondness for asses. It was a strange coincidence,” I said. Encountering a stranger brings one into contact with the unconscious. “Which reminds me of a story from those years that may be worth telling. Any congruence with reality is delightful. On the high school track team, I often stopped to walk. Competition is a sublimation of warfare.” This was disingenuous. “And I’m speaking of a twelve-year-old boy, not some grownup who has had the time to ripen a naturally evil disposition. Nevertheless, not everyone was amused. Though I would not wish to return to that lost innocence if I could—to live impaled, who needs it? To this day I cannot understand myself, and it has all floated by like a dream—even my passion—it was violent and sincere, but … what has become of it now? In all my childhood only one perception ever seemed to me now, in hindsight, as having been, to use that beautiful word, lucid: the sense that struck me once at day camp, that the people and places all around me, everything in short, was just an elaborate hoax, made up of actors and sets—I didn’t know whether to be more surprised by the scope of the thing (no doubt serving some secret purpose that was, unfortunately, beyond me) or by its low budget (which would explain the bad architecture and the extras’ general lack of talent), and even if I understood this wasn’t literally true, still it was a striking and conclusive glimpse of the fraudulence that surrounded me. And is the truth less meaningless than lies? Human sensitivity to little things and insensitivity to the greatest things: sign of a strange disorder.”
    “Would you please please please please please please please stop talking?” Nothing but disdain. The man with the cruel look in his eyes who is interrogating me suddenly starts coughing. As a boy he was abandoned by his mother and raised by peasants in an impoverished part of France. Clearly the story meant much to him. He had a beautiful voice with a Bronx accent. He has enormous pectoral breasts, which must further endear him to the gay community. But he never got to fuck anybody. He squeezes me tight for a few endless seconds. The slow pressing of flesh against flesh was more intimate to me than a passionate kiss would have been. You can feel him saying, My god, how lucky I am, and alas, how old I am. It occurred to me that I might be making a mistake. What is going to happen? We’re deep into the night. “No,” he said, “I don’t want to see your son. I am, as you may observe, no longer young, and what I haven’t seen of life isn’t worth seeing. You should have become either a tough villain or a tough angel, one or the other.” God approved his every thought. “Yes, I know you don’t like me, but I’ll go with you all the same.” No matter how fantastic or excited his speech, he never changed his expression.
    The man had no idea of what he wanted, and I made him aware of this in the most forceful way; I said that what he was doing was morbid, that his whole life was a morbid life, his existence a morbid existence, and consequently everything he was doing was irrational, if not utterly senseless. “No. Your Highness, I find to my amazement that this highly informative discussion has exceeded the time we had allowed for it.” The white American regards his darker brother through the distorting screen created by a lifetime of conditioning. “You have beautiful hair,” I said.
    “Wait a second,” the man says. A breeze was slightly