Page 470 - Some Dance to Remember

440 Jack Fritscher

In their night moments, shooting beyond space and time, powered
by drugs and sex and Kick’s blond muscle, Ryan spoke, after a fashion, in
tongues. His words transmorphed Kick, ritually vested in the fetish clothes
of otherness, into any identity they desired. Those identities they called
forth in the night from the Energy they conjured and shared between
them. Kick became the long parade of Whitman’s symbolic males, then
returned round-trip to himself, to become the images sometime again.
Ryan did not become them. He had a one-way ticket. He became
Kick. He was Kick. He was no longer Ryan. He surpassed Walt Whitman
creaming over every man he saw. He saw one man only, even as he turned
that man nightly into visions of other men. He knew how to make one
thing be two things. He hated the God who had imprisoned his Energy
in a body that was neither muscular nor blond. He fixed his identity on
Kick. He gave up all his other selves. Monsignor Linotti had been as right
as Barbra Streisand and Michael Bennett: it was fitting and proper to
deny one’s self to become one with one person, one very special person,
one singular sensation. And what he felt, he judged, for three years, to be
happiness.
“So who does Dr. Shrink think you are?” I asked Ryan.
“He wants me to get to know who the hell you are,” Ryan said. “Why
have you, Magnus Bishop, out of all the others, hung around? What do
you want? Who the fuck are you?”
“I’m just a poor creature,” I said, “trying to make my way with intel-
ligence and compassion through the world.”
“You are, are you?”
“I am what I am,” I said.
“I know what we are,” Ryan said. “We are what kills us. We’ll all
probably be AIDS victims.”
“What movie are you now?” I asked.
“How about The French Lieutenant’s Woman?”
“Try Magnificent Obsession.”
“Magnificent am I?”
“No. Obsessed.”
“Possessed, maybe.”
“Possessed by Catholicism,” I said. “Obsessed with sex and Death.”
“With life, you mean.”
“With lovers. First with Teddy. Then with Kick. Now with this
disease.”
“It’s not a disease. AIDS is a condition.”
“Which you don’t have. Both Dr. Quack and Dr. Shrink have told

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