Page 340 - Some Dance to Remember

310 Jack Fritscher

sagging pull of gravity Ryan had long before recognized, advised that the
sweating and pumping of bodybuilding flushed gray existential gravity
from athletic males, much the same as Melville saw his perfect blond
seaman, like Terence Stamp, in Billy Budd, his young muscle facing exis-
tential Death, being hanged at sunrise, take on in his firm flesh the full
rose of the dawn.
After the one weekend of his depression, Kick regained his indefati-
gable upbeat ways. Pumping iron could defeat AIDS. He insisted he was
at the new dawn of his own muscle. He refused to discuss AIDS. For him,
the epidemic did not exist.
Ryan knew better. He knew that the Dread he had always feared
was roaring like a fire out of control across the horizon of San Francisco
rooftops. He knew that finally the Nameless Dread had a name.
But Kick would not allow him to speak it. Whatever Kick wanted,
Kick got. He was the only relief Ryan could find. He embraced Kick as his
refuge, his safe harbor from AIDS; but deep in his heart, deep in that part
of his heart that he always kept from Kick, he secretly feared that Kick and
he were clapping as hard as they could to make Tinker Bell live, and this
time they might not be able to clap long and hard enough.
Their nightplay was as good as it had always been. They roamed naked
together through candlelit rooms full of flowers. Kick produced endless
small packets of Kryptonite.
“Okay, Superman, mix me half of what you take,” Ryan said. He
trusted Kick. He never looked at the mixture he drank in the wine glass
Kick handed him. Whatever Kryptonite was, it worked quickly and gen-
tly. It rose and peaked during three hours of sexplay. By the fourth hour,
its rush was spent so completely by the greater rush of orgasm that even
Ryan was able to drift off to sleep without his usual Valium.
“We’ve found the drug that’s right for us,” Kick said.
Nightly he mixed the cocktails and brought them to Ryan in the mir-
rored playroom. They conjured a new Energy transcendence on the old.
Ryan worked his invocations on Kick’s hard new muscle. His training for
the Mr. California was zipping along. Kick had been big before, but now
he was growing larger, massive, with an even more precise symmetry than
he had displayed in the Mr. San Francisco.
So close those nights were the two of them that they pushed out
farther the bounds of the finite, moving from the flesh, through the wor-
ship of the extravagant muscle they both loved, to some ecstatic plane
outside space and time where for a few brief shining moments they hung
suspended together beyond words, blended finally and totally, the one

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