Harlan's Race

— and disturbing.
    Vince’s mind was like a vast underground cavern. A spelunker was smart not to dare it without a map and a lot of safety lines. His thinking was laced with hidden rivers and drifts of diamonds. One crystal cave led to another, past walls of rainbows and pterodactyl bones, to bottomless chasms that suddenly yawned at the feet. Wrestling as I was with the old Bible mind, I thought of Vince as part of my sinful nature. Vince was bad — something to resist and question. Billy had been good — a passion of light, prayers that worked, Bibles that made sense, glowing warmth, hearth and home, happiness.
    Now, as night fell, I had wrestled with this God of Earth, this naked bacchant of pure will. His way was to give love without reserve. Mine was to have it within limits. But I was so hungry for it that I almost lost control. He struggled lovingly against my reason, so he could spawn his hot life into my hand. Feeling his affection against me, then under me, was like trying to stop a speeding planet on its orbit.
    Deep within the body, the pleasure of the male organ massaging the prostate gland is the whitest heat of gay love. I had let only Billy have me in that radiant frenzy. Even Vince didn’t rate that kind of trust yet. This time, my pleasure was seeing him feel it for the first time. I held us there like two runners at the vastest stretch of a stride — he the front runner, I at his shoulder, pushing him with my explosive kick. He hung there with me, willing it, stride for stride, straining for breath and energy. His eyes were shut, and he was groaning with every breath, till we both hit the electric eye of the finish. He almost fainted.
    Slowly Vince opened his eyes, and looked up at me from the crushed pillows and rumpled sheets.
    He was so changed by the experience that I hardly recognized him. I must have looked altered too — was trembling violently as I rose up a little. Outside the window, an owl called somewhere in the mugho pines. Through the closed bedroom door, we could hear Steve talking to George Rayburn and another visitor.
    We were laying by the large plate-glass window, with the room dark and the drapes open to the moonlight. I figured that no one could see us, and I had wanted to see him as he arched and thrashed under me. I drew myself gently out, pulling a last groan from him. His thighs slid down.
    Vince let out a shuddering breath. To my changed eyes, he looked almost translucent. Like the membranes of a jellyfish, his tensed torso had the power to reveal the ribs, lungs, entrails. His pelvis and thigh bones were lit from within. I could see the big strong heart squeezing like a fist, in its veil of irridescent gristle—the left ventricle enlarged from running. His skull was carved from crystal, with rainbows boiling in the brain.
    Slowly, my X-ray sight faded.
    For a moment, I was aghast, shaken, almost undone at the enormity of what he’d shown me.
    My lover drew me down, my belly into the hot slipperiness upon his, my face into the warmth of his breath. He was nuzzling my face tenderly, nibbling at my eyelids, tonguing at my lips like a wolf pup asking for food. I was so close to undone, on the very edge of that abyss of tenderness where I’d plunged so deep with Billy. Why did I feel like I wasn’t really touching him, only his image through a glass window?
    “I more than love you,” he whispered.
    When I drew my breath to say something, he put his fingers gently over my mouth.
    Moonlight glowed with a gentle blue on our tangled bodies. In the living room, Steve and George were laughing about something.
    Suddenly, with a crash of sound, a glitter exploded over Vince and me.
    It seemed like a glacier of rainbowed ice had been dynamited over the bed. As intimacy shattered and our naked bodies were startled apart, knives and splinters of light fell on us for what seemed like an endless time. With the clarity of a dying man seeing his life pass before him, I was sure that I’d been shot in the head. Or Vince had been shot in the head.
    The window was gone — cold night air poured over us. The bed was covered with broken glass. Our bodies were literally inlaid with knives of glass, razor blades of glass, even glass dust. Glass was slithering and sliding all over us, making sounds like sabers honing together. The entire floor, even part of the bed opposite, shimmered with glass. It was amazing that a single window could have blown its fragments so far. Vince’s