Nicodemus was undismayed. He'd dealt with countless fractious animals in his time; for all Dumuzzi's heroic strength and size, he was just one more. After some struggle, my father bridled the beast and dragged him out of the stable to the open ground where he had the mare tethered. As I describe this now my heart has quickened, the scene is so vivid in my mind's eye: the lightning erupting in the clouds overhead, the horses shrieking in their hysteria, foamy lips curled back from lethal teeth; Nicodemus yelling at his beauties against the din of the storm, the front of his trousers showing plainly how much this scene aroused him.
I swear he looked half-bestial himself, by the glare of the lightning; his hair, which hung to his waist when he was standing still, roiling around him, his face cracked in half by a rabid smile, his skin iridescent. If he'd lost all trace of his human form then and there-convulsed and stretched and cracked his spine to become some other thing (a horse, a storm; a little of both)-I wouldn't have been surprised. I was more astonished that his humanity held in the midst of this; that he didn't unleash himself. Perhaps it excited him better to be confined by his anatomy in such circumstances; to have to sweat and fight.
There he was-divinity made flesh, and that flesh halfway to becoming animal-hauling the protesting Dumuzzi into the presence of the mare. I thought the last thing the stallion would want to do was fuck, but I was wrong. Nicodemus insinuated himself between the two horses and proceeded to arouse them: rubbing their flanks, their bellies, their heads, and all the while talking to them. Despite his agitation, Dumuzzi became hot for the mare. His massive phallus was unsheathed, and he promptly threw himself up on her. Still talking, still patting and rubbing, my father took hold of the stallion's rod and put it at the mare's opening. Dumuzzi needed no help with the rest. He covered the mare with the efficiency of one born to the task.
My father stood back and let them couple. His entire body seemed to be bristling: I swear to have touched him then would have proved fatal to my common heart. He was no longer laughing. His head had drooped, his shoulders were hunched: he seemed like a stalking predator, ready to tear out the throats of these creatures should they fail him.
They didn't. Though the storm continued to rage around-the lightning so frequent it visited a ghastly vivid day upon this midnight, the thunder so loud its reverberations shook down several trees and cracked a dozen windows in the house-the animals fucked and fucked and fucked, their panic subsumed into the frenzy of their mating.
The foal that came of this coupling was a male. Nicodemus called him Temujin, the birth name of Genghis Khan. As for Dumuzzi, he seemed to dote on my father thereafter; as though that night they'd become brothers. I say seemed because I suspect the animal's devotion was a sham. Why do I think that? Because the night my father died the panicked charge that trampled him to death was led by Dumuzzi, whose eyes carried in them-I swear-a flicker of revenge.
I've told you all this in part to give you a better picture of my father, whose presence in this story must necessarily be anecdotal, and in part because it serves as a reminder to me of the capacities that lie dormant in my nature.
As I said at the opening of the chapter, my own libido is a pitiful echo of Nicodemus's sexual appetites. My entire life has never been particularly complex or interesting, except for a short period in Japan, when I was courting, in the most formal fashion, Chiyojo, the woman who would become my wife, while nightly sharing the bed of her brother Takeda, who was a Kabuki actor of some renown (an onagatta, to be precise; that is to say, he only played women). Otherwise, the scandals of my sexual life would not fill a small pamphlet.
And yet-as I prepare to enter the portion of this story dedicated to the act of love, I can't help wondering where my father's fire went to when it flowed into me. Is there a lover in me somewhere, waiting for his moment to show his skills? Or has that energy been turned to less frenetic purpose? Is it what fuels my laying these very words on the page? Have the juices of Nicodemus' desire become the ink in my pen?
I've taken the analogy too far. Ah well. It's written, and I'm not going to abort it now, after so much effort.
I have to move on. Leave the memories of my father, and the storm, and the horses. I only hope that if the passion which drives me to my desk (obsessively now; every waking moment I'm thinking about what I've written, or about to write) isn't as blind and confused as love can be. I need clarity. Oh Lord, how I need clarity!
You see there are times now, often, when I think to myself: I've lost my way. I've got all these tantalizing pieces laid out, but I don't know how to put them together. They seem so utterly disparate: the fishermen at Atva, the hanged monks, Zelim in Samarkand; a letter from a man facing death on a Civil War battlefield; a silent movie star pursued to Germany, loved by a man too rich to know his true worth; George Geary dead in a car on a Long Island shore, and Loretta's astrologer predicting catastrophe; Rachel Pallenberg, out of love with love, and Galilee Barba-rossa, out of love with life itself. How the hell do all these pieces belong in one coherent pattern?
Perhaps (this thought nauseates me, but I have to entertain it) they don't belong together. Perhaps I lost my bearings some while ago, and I've simply been gathering up pieces that for all their individual prettiness can never be made to fit together.
Well, it's too late to do anything about it now. I can't stop writing; I've got too much momentum. I have to forge on, using whatever little part of my father's genius I've inherited to interpret the scenes of human need which are about to come before me, and hope that in their interpreting I'll discover some way to make sense of all that I've described hitherto.
One last thing. I can't let another chapter go by without making mention of the conversation I had with Luman.
I don't want you to think I'm a coward; I'm not. I fully realize that at some point I have to address the accusations my half brother flung at me; both face to face with him, and face to face with myself (which is to say: here, in this book). He said my devotion to Nicodemus was in some measure the reason for my wife's death; that if I'd been the loving husband I claimed I would not have turned a blind eye to Chiyojo's seduction. I would have told Nicodemus she was mine, and he was to keep his hands off her. I didn't. I let him work his wiles upon her, and she paid the price.