Novel Excerpts

Ripe, a novel in three parts

Posted on by Rob Moscaliuc

Ripe is the first novel I ever wrote. Though I call it a novel only for the sake of a generic, if not childish, necessity. I started writing the first part in 2009 when I had just completed my undergraduate studies and spent the whole summer reading and writing. A couple of years later I wrote the second part. Then I thought the endeavor wouldn’t be complete without a third part. Since it’s a novel about the painful process of acquiring maturity and of discovering oneself I thought a third part would close the circle, and close it for good.

Ripe is also a novel about the nature of light. I’ve always been fascinated with the textures of light, its whims, the way it often appears as a mood rather than a stream of rays. But more specifically, it’s a novel about how different people have different light around them. Some of my characters appear in a golden light and some of them have no light at all. There are mirrors and beds around these characters, windows, closets, a mental geography that has stayed with my writing and with me since then.

There’s no structure to this novel, it does not follow a narrative except the one you could deduce from what’s being said. The structure is the novel itself, there’s no chronological order but episodes coming from different moments of my life. Ripe is an end in itself, an ax digging into the trunk of a fallen tree. It’s an attempt to reconstruct that tree, to bring it back to the exploding leaf buds, the greenery of Spring, and to force it back into that final admit of defeat, the falling.

Ripe is a novel that must be read, I think, in small doses because it might smell like gasoline, or like fresh paint. And like all of my novels, this one is dedicated to a person I can’t name directly but who has haunted my writings, whatever shape they take. All of my novels, in fact, are a prolonged apology to that particular person.

You can download the full version, for free, here: ripe-a-novel-in-three-parts

The effete, novel and social category

Posted on by Rob Moscaliuc

10352397_10201907955522302_8911305111952872968_nI wrote The Effete, a novel set in an utopian community on the outskirts of an unknown city, in 2013, and for the first time in my writing career I was experimenting with names. I don’t usually give names to my characters because most often I’m afraid that people who know me will be able to recognize themselves in the things I write about. By not using names, I also want to maintain the widest aperture to the reader, let him or her do part of the work of fiction, fill in the blanks, as well as liberate my characters of a certain excess of interpretation. From this point of view, The Effete is different: though there are no more than a couple of characters, they have a name, they are identifiable. The very title of the novel is a name in itself, one describing a social category. In the Theatür, the motherly company that in the end becomes a way of life and a metaphor for the reality that I myself have been experiencing for quite a while, “the effete” are those who have been expelled from the ranks of presumably “normal” human beings and who have sought refuge in a world where they are being told exactly what they are. No embellishments, no fancy language, the effete know where they stand. The rest is variation. And love.

The Effete is now available for free download here: the-effete-2016.

Enjoy!

Happy Burden

Posted on by Rob Moscaliuc

 

The moment I sat at the computer to write about the day, add significance to it so as to make it more meaningful, less resentful, I heard its strained whisper. I saw it. I watched it as it stretched like a sleepy cat inside the hands and feet of my mother and father after my brother and his wife, and his dog, had eaten their share of the birthday cake that was so cyclic so as to bring back memories of the one from last year, and left. I overheard it in the indistinct babble floating like a cloud above the background TV music and coming from the kitchen at the far end of the hallway. I sensed it in the way mother was loading the dishwasher, and in the way father sighed. That silent expectancy, the hope that had been, at one point in the past, sentenced to death and was now inching closer to the scaffold.

There had been no candles, no pictures were taken, as if, deep down, we didn’t wish for the moment to be memorized in any way. The cake was a proof of that. None of us seemed to have the emotional energy to light the candles and watch father make a wish before blowing them out. What was there to wish for anyway? When a toast was finally given and the glasses clinked my sister-in-law sighed and I knew what she meant by that. I didn’t say anything, just raised my glass, brimming with still water, and pushed it against the other glasses and hoped to be covered by the sound of their good wishes. I knew perfectly well what she meant by that when she got out of the kitchen to grab her coat and her eyes were glassy and slow, as if she had cried or was about to. She sighed again and whispered something about shitty lives while she lovingly stroked their panting, carefree dog.

It was then that I suddenly felt huge and disgusting, incapable of acting, and I felt I was being blamed for something. Not something I had done personally but something I was a part of, something I had unconsciously condoned. I knew she was condemning us and, by extension, I knew she had tutored my brother into blaming us as well. I saw it in the way he took the money when it was handed to him by my father, in the way he told his usual stories this time calibrated to a nervous tone, and punctuated by nervy bursts of laughter.

And somehow I understood them perfectly well, and I was aware of the things that were not being said, the way a child is aware of his parents’ lying. But I wouldn’t have been able to articulate that understanding had I been asked to do it. It was then that I wanted to make my disgust apparent, turn it into a knife and threaten all of them, my thirst for blood and vindictiveness dancing playfully at the back of my tongue. There it gurgled like the beginning of laughter and descended into my guts only to heighten my nausea. It had been pacing back and forth ever since that morning.

It had nestled there and yet every morning I chose to ignore it. But that day, when me and my mother sat at the kitchen table to chop the boiled potatoes and the carrots, and the pickled cucumbers, I had vowed to it that I was going to finally release it. I told it that the day had finally come and that it wasn’t too selfish of me to do it on that particular day. It felt as if I had irrevocably decided to make an offering in the shape of a birthday gift to both my parents: a truth wrapped in the showily expensive paper of disappointment.

There, at the kitchen table, a yellowish potato in her hands, mother had talked of death and the weight of solitude, and of past kitchen adventures, and that whole speech felt like a landing strip on which I simply had to parachute myself and hope for the best. But I kept swallowing the words and pushing them back, and shoved salad and mayonnaise down my throat to muffle the moans. Then mother started peeling the mushrooms and cutting the prosciutto into small chunks and I had to remove myself from the room and pretend I had some work to do on my computer. When I got back to the kitchen mother began her usual speech about my brother and his wife and their financial problems. About the bank loan that had gone unpaid and had been forgotten for more than eight years. About the admonitions one of the bank managers had issued during my brother’s last visit to the bank, and about the trip to England my brother took to meet a woman he had met online. The money had been spent on that trip but, my mother assumed, my brother was too ashamed to confess it to his wife. Nothing had come out of that long-distance relationship and women from the past had to stay in the past. That particular woman, who had in fact spent a couple of days during Christmas at my grandparents’ house, stayed in the past but the forgotten bank loan kept returning, ever more threatening.

I wanted to tell mother that I would never do something like that. No women would loom over and threaten our domestic contentment, not only because I had never made any bank loans to appear financially stable, but also because there had been no women in my past. There were no such men either. This last bit of information was an essential part of the argument I had prepared for the day. Yes, something was off in my case, something was wrong, but I had chosen not to act upon that wrongness. I had not indulged my craving for the bodies of other men, I had not promised my love to anyone. There was no boyfriend, no love affair. Tentatively, I also wanted to add to it the promise that I would never ever indulge that craving because happiness was not something I saw myself attaining. It was something I could live without. This final part felt like a closing excuse, I knew it, one last attempt at preparing them for the transition, pacify them, help them sleep at night.

The words returned when my brother left, after all the sighs had been uttered, and they lingered there on my tongue, watchful, their eyes gleaming like those of an animal in hiding. The taste of them made me walk around the apartment. They made me sit on the chair for which there was no space at the kitchen table. They made me follow the edges of the wooden cupboard in the kitchen with my fingers. Even long before that, while the men were still chatting over beers and the cake looked even gloomier, my prepared speech came back bulkily, furiously, screaming at me when I had finished that last cigarette and I was getting back into the kitchen from the balcony. And while my right foot was still suspended over the threshold I had a vision of their future faces: mother would look like she was about to burst into laughter, my sister-in-law would be smiling, and both my father and brother would be frowning, deeply, a frown akin to that necessary when tedious work was performed. They wouldn’t know, of course, that maybe I had built a life around this ultimate shedding of light, that I had built a career around it, that I had carefully avoided all of those classic mistakes so that no reproach could be issued when the time came.

Yet, once I was back inside, the speech subsided, or rather it was covered by all those sighs and the knowledge and the guilt that came with them. There was still time for certain words to be spoken. Phone calls came in between, additional birthday wishes, and mother filled the silence with a conviction I came to recognize as not her own but an echo of my father’s. A conviction tinged with negligence almost, and a blind faith into everything my father said and did. Somehow, I knew they wouldn’t react, and I was almost sure that in their solitude, or when I wasn’t in the same room with them, they would smile at the thought, at my inappropriateness, at my unspeakable transgression. And maybe, later on, when the bitter medicine settled on the bottom of the glass, they would reconsider my brother’s transgressions, and think that maybe they weren’t so bad after all.

Random Moment (Guernica II)

Posted on by Rob Moscaliuc

 

A reading by the author:

 

Seeing the world through the eyes of a fish you see me in ways and colors I could not see myself, stolen from the world, perched on the mountains of my mind, my left hand raised not to catch a glimpse of the sun but to hold on to the entrails of my beautiful gods. Against their ruins I throw my own body to deface it, make it resemble something you could have feelings for. Today, I make myself ugly, awakened, as leeches are, by the smell of the pulsating warm limbs of mindless children, just to give you reasons to uphold your lack of nerve. For once, let your blood talk. Because nobody has ever had the courage to tell me they loved me and you are no different.

I often wonder whether it’s a question of time, or timelessness. Do you postpone your words, promise to utter them tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow? Because when I look up I can only sense the narrowness of a breathing tube, its transparency made to resemble that of swimming jellyfish. The narrowness that curbs upwards like the momentary thrust of anticipation. The narrowness that then plunges downwards and curls into itself, struggles to reach the tiny mouth of a machine. Will that be the moment when you will finally say something? When the plastic lips will finally touch in a kiss bound to go on forever? Say it now, while you can still distinguish between the brownish hues of my skin and the sheets in which I sleep as in a cocoon. For once, let your blood speak, because if I speak the leeches will come out of my mouth and you will turn away, disgusted.

Then I will tell you about the sounds that come from the walls, and the way sometimes construction cranes resemble the skinny limbs of a praying mantis. What are they praying for? I’ll speak of resonance and the ground we stand on, which was once a battlefield. Of the bed we could be sleeping in. Of how I don’t want to imagine you with your back turned to me. Of how I often feel as if people are afraid of me. Is it because they know I’m afraid of their emotions? I am, in fact. But not because I’ve never went through them. It’s because whenever I see them do it I feel as if they are taking something away from me. In time, I got used to it, and started giving them everything until, at the end of the day, I would feel depleted. I gave them my dreams and kept the nightmares for myself. I offered them my hopes and they took them. I gave them my time. And I will keep doing that until you finally decide to speak.

Random Moment (Guernica)

Posted on by Rob Moscaliuc

 

A reading by the author:

 

Your eyes, they were all wrong, your mouth as well, misplaced, not unlike those of men and women who suddenly sob or hate unknowingly, your tongue, superb knife, pride of those who step back when the job is done to have a look at their creation. Innocent as the children whose parents are dying, you grow bigger by the day, breast-fed on Macbeth’s soliloquies. There’s at least one side of you I do not know, the side that’s unaware of how I see you, the one that is as subtle as the prolonged scream of a violin abandoned in the throes of the player’s passion.

Was I supposed to notice the way you did your hair in preparation of my arrival? Because when you opened the door and the light ran out and down the stairs, and I could no longer see the way you moved, it was as if for a very long time I had been sleeping in a hole in the ground and I was suddenly awakened only to see you pulling me out. I was not struck by that instant of awakening. For a very long while I had been expecting it. What startled me was the notion that we both had hands to pull each other out, that, at a time when I had lost my faith in limbs and all was grey matter and metaphors.

And while you were speaking and sliding across the floor in your plastic chair, and the music was playing, I kept telling myself I wouldn’t allow my hands to touch you. I promised myself I wouldn’t think of your lips, that I wouldn’t turn them to language and obsession. I did, however, prepare some answers to questions such as: Why are you doing this to yourself? I had prepared a speech about them, about all of the men in my life, about how you could never be one of them. About the taxi driver who played soccer on his phone and told me he was irreparably busy, in whose house I had spent two nights, whose bony hands kept pushing my hands toward his groin while Eddie Izzard was telling jokes about vegetarian Hitler who was also a painter and couldn’t get those trees right and vouched to kill everyone in the world because of it. The taxi driver who weighed the pasta before cooking it.

About the tall gym teacher and his receding hairline, who was too young to have a receding hairline in the first place, whose mouth tasted of corn when he shoved his tongue into my mouth. The gym teacher who, out of a self-fashioned morality, told me not to call him and talked in code when I messaged him. About the man who had taken his dog for a walk and saw us making out in the car, in the parking lot by the park. About how I felt when I realized he was, in fact, looking at us. About how he turned away, embarrassed, when all I wanted to do was to get out of the car and tell him it wasn’t his fault, he shouldn’t be embarrassed. It wasn’t his fault we couldn’t express our feelings any other way.

About the forty-something guy who thought of Justin Bieber when he penetrated his uneventful lover, who was totally unaware of the fact that he, the forty-something guy, was taking me out every week to a dark parking lot by another park. He who had once told me about another quiet parking lot close to the airport and I fled knowing that, once there, we wouldn’t be watching airplanes taking off. He whose hand kept landing on my knee while I imagined scary spiders crawling up on my ankles.

About the older friend who once stood on top of me and then told me not to move while he rushed to the bathroom to wash his genitals, all of this while his companion was snoring obliviously on the other side of the bedroom wall. About how I kept my hand on his groin while we were driving up the mountains in northern Italy.

About the man who worked in a store that sold luxury handbags to wives who thought they deserved them.

About the men who had given me a ride home and whose hands lingered in a handshake. About the boy who had once kissed me on the neck out of the blue. About their eyes, and the constant nagging sensation they were just on the verge of telling me something that would change my life forever. About the fact that they never did. About the way I followed them deep into their confusion. I followed them until I finally came to understand I had mistaken their friendly interest for affection, the way one mistakes the flowered patterns of a discarded napkin for drops of menstrual blood.

Random Moment (Descent)

Posted on by Rob Moscaliuc

The shops weren’t closing, people weren’t disappearing from the streets, but the night was falling in a rush on that December evening, and I was just outside the university building having a smoke and thinking of finishing up for the day and going home. And I couldn’t take my eyes off you, glasses and jeans and shirt and fancy jacket and your way of waiting there by the garbage can on 5th Avenue, and the way the light from the streetlights fell on you and your impatience. There was that sense of recognition of you, one I could not escape whenever it occurred, that halfway point between familiarity and the acknowledged impossibility of randomness turning into significance.

And out of that crowd that travelled like wolves in packs downtown, your other half detached itself from the pack like a small rivulet and started flowing over into your direction, and you acknowledged him and he came to you and kissed you, and nobody cared about it except the two of you. I rolled my eyes at you both and at your gesture like I roll my eyes when an old woman refuses to take the seat you just offered her on the subway. Your encounter somewhat resembled the feet of a luminous creature, frail toes and all, like those of an angel, seen for a brief moment by drowning children before they are pulled out by a stranger and dragged on the shore.

The stranger was not saving the child, the child is beyond saving, the stranger was merely considerate of the parents and their investment, all of those years lost in the idiocy of a profane moment.

But then, just like the feet of that proverbial angel, frail toes and all, the two of you disappeared, and I was left floating on my cloud of smoke.

You laughed when I told you this story and said it was hilarious, too saccharine for your taste. You said you no longer believe in love. Once you had fallen in love with a guy out of boredom.

Moment Thirty-Two (Service)

Posted on by Rob Moscaliuc

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Akin to street vendors, the men aligned. They were stacked rather, according to their spatial nearness.  The whole thing resembled the universe before the Big Bang. Some of them had to elbow their way out of the crowd. Each of the users had chosen their best picture, for sure, and each of those pictures recreated a moment stolen out of their lives. An instant of happiness perhaps? Some of them were faceless, a glimpse of red underwear here, a patch of brownish skin over there, next to the guy who chose to show the picture of a sunset over Central Park instead of his face. And yet, a sense of security exuded from each of those instances displayed on the screen of his phone, the kind of security he craved for and hoped to have attained on that same dating app.

Sunday mornings were always like that: smell of unwashed sheets and sweat, the radiators hissing as if about to start moving, hellish creatures, the desperate sense that showering was necessary and that it was the only day of the week when he could have cake. Then the hand moving downwards, sliding in between his legs to caress morning erections. Just one look at those pictures was enough to unleash waves and waves of fantasies and pleasure. He wouldn’t touch the skin, no, he would merely rub his erection through his boxers and then smell his fingers when he stopped to prolong the sensation. There was some sort of pleasure to be taken out of it, in detecting that smell of urine on his fingers, one that mixed with the smell of tobacco stubbornly refusing to be washed away.

Then he would fall asleep again only to be awakened by the expectancy of that final relief. The cycle would be repeated a couple of times. There had been a time, a very long time before that, when he still believed in some sort of divine retribution and refused to masturbate on Sunday mornings when supposedly the Sunday mass would be happening. He would wait until the afternoon to do it. Those were the times when he had a laundry basket in the bathroom next to the washing machine. Those were the times when he used to clean the house on Saturday afternoon in preparation for the holiness of the next day. Those were indeed the times when he had a nightstand and a bedside lamp. He no longer did that. His dirty underwear was simply hidden from view in a plastic grocery bag under the bed. It wasn’t really a bed, it was merely a mattress placed over a metallic structure, one that resembled a beach chaise longue. The nightstand was a cardboard box that had originally housed a desk lamp. He was aware of the dust settling on his books, which were stacked not on shelves but on a make-believe fireplace, but could not find the energy or the will to do it.

Then the innocent glare of the phone.

The page refreshed automatically to reveal the newcomers, people who had logged on or created new profiles in the meantime. And there he was, the man with the beard and the round glasses staring at him from a selfie taken on what appeared to be a leather sofa. He had seen him before, but never had the courage to write to him. Because why would he be interested anyway? Nobody had ever been interested in him, except maybe for those who had no other choice and imagined themselves next to him. Never contact those who have the better looks. Contact the underdogs, those whose sense of security was often undermined by the way they looked and the way they subsequently saw themselves. He considered himself one of them, living on the outskirts of those dating apps, in the shadow of perfect abs, beautiful eyes and symmetrical faces that had just the right amount of facial hair to give them structure.

At times rage would come and turn him into a renegade. In those moments he promised it to himself not to go there anymore.

But then the man with the beard and the round glasses moved upwards, closer, and a message landed in his inbox. The man with the beard demanded to know how he was doing. Courteously, he replied that he had just woken up but he was still sleeping on his feet. That was a lie. He wasn’t on his feet; the coffee had not been brewed yet. The self-loathing that came with breakfast had not yet been served. But it was already late and so he thought he should just throw in the idea that he wasn’t one of those lazy guys who slept till noon because they had nothing better to do.

‘I woke up a long time ago,’ the man with the beard replied, ‘but still in bed lazy, under the covers, where it’s warm and cozy and nobody can see me.’ And then that ambiguous laugh. Hehe. ‘Go back to bed!’

He said it was okay. The man with the beard smiled. That man was no fun, he thought.

‘I noticed you before,’ he wrote to the man with the beard, ‘and thought you were very nice, but I never had the courage to write to you.’

‘That is very sweet of you,’ the reply came seconds after, ‘I am just an ordinary guy. I noticed you too.’

Liar.

‘I like ordinary guys,’ he told the man with the beard, ‘and I just love the fact that you are so much taller than me.’ The man with the beard and the round glasses was also older, more than ten years older, and had an air of rough maturity about him. He liked that. He was tired of all those little boys who didn’t even know how to have sex. Not that he was a master of sex, but still, a man has to have his dignity.

After they exchanged pictures and told each other how handsome they were, there came the silly question. The question wasn’t silly in itself. He had been expecting it. After all, the man’s intentions were specified in his profile. The man with the beard was looking for “clean and respectful guys, professional, no drama, quiet”, and considered himself average, more of a top, if it came to that. He was also “relationship oriented” and, more than anything, urged his fellow hunters to be polite and engage in conversation only if they were interested in having one. Honesty was also appreciated. “Cuddling?”, said the name of his profile.

‘I apologize if it’s premature’, the man with the beard said.

‘Sure, why not’, he told the man with the beard and the round glasses. He needed to get out of bed, had to get out and do something. He wanted to appear adventurous. He wanted to seem disillusioned and raw.

‘I do sleep in boxers’, the man said, ‘but I will change in pajamas. Where do you live?’

In outer space he wanted to say because where he lived was just that, a room in which he slept, a place where he simply found himself, a hiding place. He told the man an approximate address.

‘You want to come over? Or want me to come to you?’

He told the man with the beard that he had roommates, even though they were long gone to work that morning. He wanted the man to imagine these faceless roommates that wouldn’t appreciate a stranger coming into their home to cuddle with the other stranger.

‘That’s fine’, the man with the beard replied, ‘you come here then.’

The sudden materiality of the situation made him cringe. The man was serious but there was still time to back down and offer some sort of excuse. Maybe he should go back to sleep. Maybe some other day.

‘I don’t know whether I want to come out of bed right now.’

‘I know’, the tall man replied, ‘it’s a tough call.’

The man’s location popped up on the screen. It wasn’t far, but the idea of having to get up, taking a shower, and going out was simply too unappealing. He was also afraid. He had always been afraid of them. Feared their gaze and silent judgments, imagined them hating him, scorning his awkwardness. That is why excuses always had to be invented.

‘It’s alright’, the man said probably noting his hesitance, ‘maybe some other time.’ And he appreciated that. Everything sounded better when it was out there somewhere, about to happen, lost between the folds of a future tense. Beautiful things might happen in the meantime. A beautiful relationship maybe, the man of his dreams might be just around the corner.

‘Don’t sound so sad,’ he told the man with the beard, ‘it breaks my heart.’

‘I understand,’ the man replied, ‘you are all cozy in your bed, me too, and just want to sneak in and cuddle, feel the warmth of the body and relax…’

And suddenly the warmth was so real he could smell it, feel the rigidness of the body breathing next to him.

‘Isn’t that the most amazing feeling in the world?’

There was a long pause. He closed the app and returned to his erection, thinking of the warmth that the man with the beard had planted in his mind. He imagined the roughness of the man’s beard on his face and the red sores it would leave behind. He felt the numbness of the sores that would form around his mouth, that mute reminder, imagined his grunts.

Minutes later the reply came. ‘I feel it now in my mind’, the message said, ‘holding you tight.’

‘It’s like when you hear somebody else’s breath so close to you it becomes a mantra and you wish your breathing could be in sync with it.’

The tall man with the beard and the glasses agreed, it was just like that. ‘Or if you are on top of my chest, hearing my heart beat, your leg slightly over my leg, your arm over my shoulder.’

He told the man with the beard and the glasses that he needed to take a shower first and the man thought it was cool. Then, under the shower he thought of everything that had been said, and he thought he was so weak, so fucking weak.

Moment Twenty-Seven (Mind Cancer)

Posted on by Rob Moscaliuc

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I craved to make you see your eyes not by reflection but by themselves, so I broke all of our mirrors and locked all the doors to keep you inside. The neighbors rushed to our door because you were screaming and they threatened us. They said they were going to call the police. Then they went away when I smiled at them and reassured them there was nothing wrong. You weren’t exactly screaming. What kept coming out of your mouth was more like an accusatory howl, and you were telling me I had taken away all of our eyes. Somehow I believed that by blinding all of our mirrors your beauty would finally go away.

I pushed you against the bathroom mirror until it broke and pieces from it flew all over the place. Water ran over the shards of glass and I told you look, darling, it’s raining sadly. I kept you in there because I wanted to see your blood. At least one drop of it: to make sure it was still crimson with passion. I wanted to suffocate you because I was feverish.

Let this fury blind the both of us until we can’t see each other again.

That’s the reason why I had been doing all of our daily chores. For the both of us. I went to work in your stead. Your boss did not notice the difference. Your colleagues did not look up from their computer screens when I went into the office. They did not react in any way when I put all of your things into a box and exited the building. Your manager did not say anything when I placed your resignation letter on his desk. When I got into his office he merely extended his arm and pointed to the stack of unopened envelopes. He did not look up from his computer screen. I needed you to stay inside the house, away from everybody else.

What can you write about when you feel as if your life is being lived by somebody else under your very nose? You write about the mind. And all I wanted was to suffocate you. Tie you to a chair and wrap you in plastic foil until you resembled Barbie’s boyfriend. I had no intention of preserving you. I wanted you to disappear. I was furious, I’m sorry. It was the only way to make your beauty go away. It was the only way to turn it into silence.

So I split open my head and did not use the plastic gloves mother used to clean the toilet. I did not wash my hands beforehand. In the splinters of the bathroom mirror I looked at my open head and dug with my fingernails deep into the layers of tissue. I took out the mind and my body felt like an empty tube that amplified the remains of the rest of the world. Against these remains I threw my mind as in a pillow fight. Or like an empty highway turned upside down, that’s how it felt.

Then it had all seemed like a waste of time because I couldn’t find you there.

I told you my mind is a terrible place because you aren’t there.

So I swept it along with the broken bathroom mirror under the linoleum floor of the kitchen.

I was furious because I had wasted all that time for nothing. I couldn’t find you there.

The evening then turned green with nausea so I took the garbage out on the balcony, and watched as the steam rose from my dying mind, shards of mirror sticking out of it like thorns on a pink and grey rose, while I smoked a cigarette, taste of chemicals blooming on my tongue. I couldn’t decide whether to have coffee or not because I couldn’t remember, for the universe’s sake, when was the last time I had one.

Sleep (Adam the Second)

Posted on by Rob Moscaliuc

 

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Night comes crawling, pulling itself along, sweat on its brow, supplication on scorched lips, begging on its knees. Our night comes not like perpetrators do but laden with guilt, and we can’t help but do the same, kneel by its side and call it a day, call it a night, adorn it with achievement. As you fumble between the sheets, I can sense the despair inching closer to your bones. I feel you moving and my body wants to move along yours. Then breathing and doing nothing else, then moving again.

All I want to do is ask you what’s wrong because I know that’s what good lovers do even though they already know the answer. For a very long while I have known what’s been bothering you.

But I wonder, if I skip the questioning and abandon fully to the knowledge of the answer will I still be the good lover?

Because I do, I know the answer already, I know what’s bothering you. It’s buried deep inside of you. I know this because I’ve felt it too, I’ve been there too, I’ve been working with those demons my entire life.

I have broken you in the process of conquering you, not following the old adage of divide and conquer, but thinking that were I to prove myself incapable of loving the whole of you, I could be capable of loving at least one part of you.

Grandfather talked about similar demons, similar but entirely different somehow, mainly because he’d not been introduced to these new ones we’ve been acquainted with ever since we came out of our mothers’ wombs.

Grandfather held his right hand on the Bible and talked about Adam and Eve and about how we’ve been carrying their sins ever since, and how could you not hate Adam and Eve? They left us with nothing but the sweat and pain of labor. The life we could have had there in Paradise. Grandfather would sigh at the end of this parable, stand up, and continue working.

Grandfather then ate and slept as if Adam and Eve never existed.

But Adam, he was a man, the man, he lost no sleep over the whole forbidden fruit conundrum, he slept, he ate, and fucked, and lived the rest of his life not only as a man but also as a reminder, until he stopped being a man and remained forever a reminder.

You stir again between the sheets and I almost speak to you except that I’m afraid I’ll startle you and my voice won’t be heard over the sound of your moving limbs.

I know what’s bothering you, trust me on this one, because as opposed to grandfather we’ve had another ancestor, one that our grandfather doesn’t know about. Unfortunately, this, our ancestor doesn’t have a name or a face for that matter. He hasn’t fought wars and though he was there, in the background, all the time, he never had the courage to come out. Our ancestors were closeted as well. We don’t need to know his name, at least for now, we only need to assure ourselves of his existence.

Who was the man that first dared to yearn for another man?

Not grandfather’s Adam, because Adam had to be Adam.

We ran back to the origins while playing hide-and-seek, literally, we hid from those who were not necessarily our enemies but rather from those we considered enemies because of the simple fact that they were looking for us. The secrecy that stems from hiding and from being searched for always verged on the illegal, and somehow we felt illegal.

But, conceptually, I thought while you were sleeping, that first man who longed for another man had to be told about that yearning, had to be taught. Somebody had to explain things to him. How could he have known otherwise?

Wake up, please wake up and explain this to me.

You would wake up and look at me, then you would close your eyes again as if mentally preparing for a long explanation. Then you would open them again, swallow in vain, stand up, lean against the railing of the bed, swallow in vain again, and then set on explaining, gesticulating, moving your lips, sometimes arching them as if in disgust. You’d start with banal matters, you’d start with the controversial discussions about the origins of their universe and then move on to our universe. You’d start with that particular distinction even though I would’ve never thought of you as a methodical person.

Yes, you would say, the origins of their universe is controversial, but ours is not. Our universe is simple, there was no Big Bang, no sudden revelation. Wait, yes, revelation might have been involved, but it wasn’t sudden for sure. Ours was gradual revelation.

Imagine Adam the Second, our Adam, Adam from our team, monstrously beautiful Adam the Second who descended from the most noble bloodline, our very own bloodline, so much cooler than their bloodline.

Imagine Adam the Second descending the stairs of Heaven down into the world. No, he wasn’t being expelled from Heaven. He had been ceremoniously asked to go into the world and discover the world by discovering himself. And he’s going down, pretty happy and excited thinking about the things he is about to discover down there, or up there, depends which point of view you adopt in this story. He’s pretty psyched about the entire experience.

He was happy because he had also been told that down there he is going to be immortal and live for thousands and thousands of years. I mean, he’s still alive today. Wait for it, you’ll get to the point eventually. So he’s immortal, still roaming the world in search for his ultimate love and the meaning of life, a difficult task if you ask me.

On his way through the world he encounters another man. In fact, he encounters many many other men, and women, too, and he discovers friendship, then, after thousands of years, he discovers affection, and so on and so forth. Basically, with every thousand years that pass he discovers new sentiments and does his best to explore them to their fullest potential only to discover that they are not what he was looking for. And with every emotion that he discovers and explores he feels as if each and every one of them is just another step toward that ultimate love he is in search of. And he goes on doing that, but he is unable to forget any of the previous experiences.

They are never lost, they hang in there forever and he can’t do anything at all to get rid of them. Whatever he does, he can’t.

Then, at one point, he discovers this thing we have, this thing the two of us have. And he registers it, he stores it, and once he does that it cannot be forgotten.

And so on, you know the rest.

You go back to sleep.

I know what’s bothering you.

Our imaginary talks feel like small betrayals.

Moment Thirty-One (Trade)

Posted on by Rob Moscaliuc

 

I told the tall man with the beard and the round glasses that made him resemble a teacher that I knew my way back home. I was already out of the bathroom when he asked me that. I had washed my hands in the sink by the green shower curtain, and used the fancy-looking liquid soap whose dark green plastic bottle reminded me of avocadoes for no apparent reason. I had dried my hands with the pink bath towel hanging from the wall by the mirror. It might have been his towel or his roommate’s. I had not met the roommate. The roommate was but an immaculate white door at the end of the hallway.

When I came out of the bathroom the man with the beard and the glasses, whose name I did not know how to spell, was wearing a different pair of underwear. It was the first thing I noticed when I came out of the bathroom and went into his bedroom, where he was moving around, supposedly arranging things. It was then that I told him I was going to take my coat and go because I didn’t know what else to say or do. It felt weird to come out of the bathroom and go straight to the hanger by the entrance door. That’s why I went into the bedroom one last time.

His eyes were suddenly so big that I couldn’t look at him.

I was so embarrassed I could only look at the high mattress bed with the white sheets and the white covers, their whiteness so blinding in the light coming from the windows. Those unforgivable rays of light coming through the shutters and the naked windows overlooking a parking lot. The light in which I had watched him fall asleep and heard him snore, felt his muscles twitching under me. In that same light I saw his face gradually relax, his lips parting. In that same light I saw a string of saliva extend between his teeth as his mouth opened to take in gulps of air. In that same light I saw dust motes dancing and his face catch fire when I was desperately trying to fall asleep but couldn’t. I tried everything except counting sheep. I tried measuring the symmetry of the white closets closed neatly, tried mentally silencing the whirring of the radiator. I looked at the laundry baskets stacked on the closets. I tried not to think about the fact that I had wiped my hands clean in his pajama top. I tried to ignore the smell of cum that mingled innocently with the smell of his eau de toilette whose name he couldn’t remember.

His body was unresponsive. I knew it when his hand slid down my back lifelessly. I felt it when I caressed his other hand lying on his chest.

And all I could think of was the roommate, the immaculate white door at the end of the hallway. Had he heard the man with the beard and the glasses moan? Had he heard that final release when the man with the beard and the glasses told me he was going to cum? He must have heard the apologies at least. The argument with the stress relief, he must have heard that.

Minutes earlier we had cuddled under the white covers, and while I pinned him down against the bed with my head lying heavy on his chest, he kept pushing my right hand downwards towards his crotch and moaned from deep inside his chest when my hand reached its destination. Slowly, I kept moving my hand over his erection just to hear him moan because here was a man who had picked me up, had bought bath tissue and avocado oil from Costco, had taken me to a park and then to his place, a man who had held all that power over me but who was now moaning because I was touching him.

There had been an uncanny detachment between me and my hands. As when I asked him whether he could drive his car with only one hand so that I could hold his other one. Maybe he felt the same detachment between him and his right hand, the one that felt warm and heavy against my knee. Maybe he felt the same detachment when I watched him take his sweatpants off.

Then I stopped touching him, and the moaning ceased, and he got on top of me and kissed my neck. There was hesitation before the kiss, I felt it, as if for a moment he had considered kissing me on the lips but concluded it was dangerous.

A visit to Costco and a nearby park doesn’t say too much about a guy anyway. Not even the jokes about the huge wallpaper with Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man.

When my hands were no longer moving, his right hand started to dig into my t-shirt until it found skin, and there rejoiced and bloomed into a series of circular movements that felt ticklish. I begged him to stop and he stopped. I told him I wanted to make that moment all about him and not about me because I was all about that, about satisfying a bearded tall man who was more than ten years older than me.

It was then that he told me I should continue doing my job.

And so I slid my hand under his shirt and felt the hairs on his stomach and chest; then found one of his nipples and circled it with my index finger.

He started moaning again, but only when my hand went down there.

I told him to slow down. Shshsh.

You can’t tease me like that, he said.

I can do whatever I please, I told the man with the beard and the round glasses whose name I did not know how to spell.

He knew perfectly well that it was going to happen.

It had happened already when I asked him whether he wanted me to go. He said he didn’t want me to go but he should probably get out of bed and take a shower because a friend of his was supposed to stop by in the next couple of hours. I told him I was going to go and he said okay. I got up and went to the bathroom to wash my hands.

He knew it was going to happen when we were still at the park. I saw it in the way he looked at my crotch when we were contemplating one of those works of art in the park by the river.

I believe it was called Trade. The work of art I mean.

We were looking at the little plastic animals covered in what seemed like petrol. One of them was a giraffe. Another one was an animal whose name I was unable to recall.

I’m sure it had something to do with trade because there, by the door, before I left his apartment, he hugged me and thanked me, and it all felt like a handshake, the kind of handshake merchants do at the end of a successful transaction.