There was always a catch. Not that he saw every man as part of some monolith, or that they treated him the same; they were all unique in their carriage, intentions, and style of fucking. Their style of arguing. How they behaved if he welcomed them in or met them out in the wild; what they wanted or offered him. And Track could trust the thrill or sweetness of a new love or approximation of love to hold him beyond the reach of the leech-like tendrils of his nightmare, but only for a short time. If he dared get too comfortable with devotion, the man from the swamp came demanding his due.

A remittance paid in isolation and loss, but not so bad, really, for a slut like Track. He had no illusions about his capacity for fidelity. How could he, when always beyond the soft edge of sleep a marauding greenness with tube-like fingers lurked, each appendage slowly gulping, opening and closing its hunger-moistened mouth-suckers in primeval anticipation? The man from the swamp had turquoise eyes; that much Track remembered clearly. Everything else about the original encounter might have been a post-traumatic invention, if trauma was even the right category. Track thought it was not. It was something more. Because at first, the man had been a fucking delight.

Gordon snorted awake. A delayed reaction to the uproar of Track’s thrashing at least a full two minutes ago. Gordon clawed at the twisted sheets and murmured, “Oh God, what time is it? Are you all right?”

Track didn’t relish these confrontations. He waited for Gordon’s eyes to attain some semblance of focus before breaking the bad news.

“No. I’m not. Can we talk?”

A heavy sigh lifted Gordon’s broad chest slowly and then deflated it with a lengthy out-breath. He rubbed his forehead. He left his palm there, covering his eyes. “No,” he said, loud, firm. “We cannot.”

“I need to tell you about—”

Loudly, again. “No, you don’t.”

Track hated having to make the truth into a lie, the lie into an excuse, an excuse into an insult. But it was the only thing he’d found that was foolproof. He said, “There’s someone else.”

“Right, sure. It’s a big city. You’re a hot guy. It’s bound to happen.” Gordon threw the covers off and went into the bathroom. Over the sound of splashing water he called out, “Jesus, it’s two a.m. Go to sleep. I forgive you. Don’t worry about it.”

These crises always happened at two a.m., the same arcane hour that Track had been born. He didn’t mean to be a hazard. His mom used to complain that he’d always been this way, woke her or kept her up late. It was always something with Track. He couldn’t even be born at a reasonable time of day.

Returning, Gordon dropped onto the edge of the bed. The mattress sagged where he sat. “Let me know if I need to get tested. Is that what this is about? Never mind; it doesn’t matter. I don’t need the details. I’m about due for a check-up anyway.” Half turning, Gordon gave Track a rueful and affectionate smile.

Track wanted to throw himself at the expanse of Gordon’s back. He wanted to hang from those immense shoulders, mouth the contours of worn muscle, and trace with his tongue the constellations of tiny moles whose placement he’d memorized over the past few weeks. But the “other man” was the sort of infection you couldn’t get tested for, the sort of disease you couldn’t get a shot in the ass to cure. The man from the swamp wasn’t even a man in the strictest sense of the word.

“You’re not welcome here anymore.” Track stood up and started texting, pacing in his boxers. He had to be cruel. “I’m telling Celeste. Make sure you don’t forget any of your things.”

Track refused to look at Gordon, who placidly shook his head. He leaned back on his elbows and scratched his chest. “I don’t know why they call it popcorn,” he said to the ceiling. “Looks more like cottage cheese to me.”

“She’s on her way up. You better get your shit together.”

Eyes still on the ceiling, Gordon sighed. “You should get your shit together and accept there are some things you can’t control. Things you can’t change. Reality is reality and I’m part of your life now.”

“That’s for me to decide!”

“Whatever you’ve done, we’ll work through it together. It’s called having a relationship.”

Celeste burst through the door, brandishing an unlit cigarette in her left hand. Her nightgown, robe, and diaphanous scarves wrapped her skeletal frame with uncounted layers of clashing florals. “But what is this nonsense? What is this emergency?”

Track pointed at Gordon, who spread out languorously on the disrupted sheets. “I want him out.”

“What has he done to you?”

Track pouted. He didn’t have to fake the tears quivering below his long lashes.

Celeste cursed and circled upon Gordon like a cobra, neck jutting into his personal space. “Did you hit him? Did you? I spit upon monsters such as you.”

She cursed at him in greater depth. Gordon tilted his head and waited for the onslaught to slow, for the hands and unlit cigarette to cease waving in accusation. Then he said, calm as ever, “No, I did nothing of the sort. He says he met someone else.”

“That’s not what I said.”

“Okay, you didn’t meet them, but somehow they exist, they appeared by magic, an old friend, a trick, a debt, I don’t care. There is, supposedly, someone else.”

Celeste threw both hands in the air. “But of course there is someone else! Always, the new men, the boys, they flock upon him, you old bastard idiot. How can you think to own my sweet pet?”

“Make him leave,” Track said again, his voice rising into a whine. Celeste already had her arms around him. He muttered to her: “It’s not my fault.”

“I don’t want to own him and I don’t intend to leave. Not for good.” Gordon heaved his body up and then rummaged around the floor for his shirt, trousers, socks. Getting dressed, he said, “I’ll give you some time. I don’t care about the other men. Well, that’s not entirely true. I care about you, and how they treat you.”

He had to get this over with. The odor of swamp gas was unbearable. Track was the only one who could smell it. It carried an undercurrent of something he associated with diesel fuel; a hint of burning tires in the distance. When the man from the swamp had taken himself apart, his body had released the same odor.

Fingers like leeches, wet, sucking, needle-toothed, and a face like a lion; or perhaps Track remembered it that way because of the mane-like foliage surrounding features both shrunken and bloated. A drowned flower, inclined to bite. The turquoise eyes had turned to the slits of a sleepy feline, relaxing more intensely with each body part the man from the swamp peeled off and forced into Track.

Forced only where Track was willing; where he liquefied. So, not forced at all, but melted into the same diseased bullion. The morning after, Track’s vomit was filled with gold flecks.

The thought of the man’s slippery lungs covered with internal algae; the pink slime of his exposed insides; the sounds each piece of him made as it slid into place with currents and undulations. Hot, thick, irresistible; or perhaps inescapable. It was like being born again, if birth was a murder and each victim his own psychic surgeon. The man from the swamp was an accessory to crimes of self with no clear definition or boundary. A nurse in wolf’s garb.

No, not forced at all.

The gem-shards of turquoise light.

The thrill of remembering what was forbidden, what was once censored from his consciousness, from his childhood, the green effluvium, the rising senescence from juvenile mud—

Track was going to throw up. He pushed past Celeste and stumbled to his knees. Head over the toilet, his Adam’s apple lurched. Before Gordon could run after him and hold his shoulders or brush back his messy hair with good, strong, devoted hands, hands that never liquefied or erupted with hungry suckers and sickening primeval needs, Track kicked the bathroom door shut and slammed the lock.

It was the multiplicity that gagged him. His life had ended that night, and yet he kept on living. Kept on fucking. Track was good at fucking. Always had been. Maybe because he started so young. Maybe the man from the swamp knew that, had chosen Track for his ability to spread whatever substance or spirit he was made of. Or wanted to become. Perhaps Track had wanted to become something other than what he was the night he followed the man from the swamp, too; wanted to be terraformed into a new landscape of murky gems and flooded roots.

The other memory—maybe spurious, maybe sheer hallucination—was an unexpected side effect of the encounter. Or maybe it was the man’s intention, the hidden goal of his liquefaction.

Gordon’s deep murmur and Celeste’s insistent whisper fought an unintelligible duel on the other side of the door. Track hated having to end things more than Gordon could possibly imagine, more than Celeste could understand. She’d seen it often enough, seen even the most committed of lovers lose patience once Track made a point of acting out like the spoiled little tramp he probably was. Driving men away was miserable work.

Track’s nausea vanished as quickly as it had come. He peered in the vanity mirror for symptoms of toxicity. Did his irises flicker with a hint of bright blue shards? Did his tousled hair smell of waterlogged vines?  He opened his mouth and tried to see deeper into the wet redness at the back of his throat. A pink thing dangled there, twitching as he opened wider. If he studied hard enough, would he see his teeth decay into melted gold?

His breath fogged the mirror. When he wiped it with his palm, the suggestion of anomalies disappeared. Track worried that the worst diseases worked silently, spreading as they incubate, lying in wait to bloom from cells converted to serve the secret genius of pathology. Tiny murders. A mind too small to argue with, too microscopic to conquer with the blunt instrument of mammalian flesh. A clumsy pile of muscle and hormones like Track didn’t stand a chance.

“But you must not forever reside in this toilet,” Celeste said, jangling the old doorknob. It was loose enough to come off in her hand if she’d been more forceful. Benign protective neglect. She had decided years ago not to let another desperate child go to extremes behind the privacy of bathroom doors within her home. “The idiot bastard, he is gone. You will come out and have tea with me. No squabble or excuse from you. I will not accept debate!”

Something slug-like wormed from the end of the faucet. After it dropped, snaking and squirming, more followed.

Moist thoughts, uncertain thoughts; thoughts with voices while Celeste demanded his exit. It was the multiplicity that gagged him, that plagued him, that pumped in his throbbing cock when he saw such vast ground that spread before him as yet unseeded by the man from the swamp. Ground willing and ready, as he’d once been. As some part of him gripped in a chokehold below the threshold of desire still was.

He couldn’t help but wonder: Was it really so horrible to liquefy?

Wasn’t his shame, from another point of view in the greater cosmos, a gift?

He ran from the thought, bolting out the door and downstairs to her patio to escape the seeking, sluicing water and obey Celeste. It was always good to obey Celeste.

“But where is Gordon, you will ask. I tell you not to be so choosy,” she declared. In her unlit cigarette hand she now waved an additional un-sipped drink. Tea was gin and tonic this morning.

She slid a tumbler made of fine crystal and full to the brim across the tabletop to Track. Slumped in his rumpled boxers, arms crossed over his chest, he watched the condensation form with the same foreboding desire as the dripping fingers from the faucet that had compelled him to flee the bathroom. Like black leeches, liquid plopped onto the porcelain and invaded his private thoughts. How much more of the man from the swamp would follow? Once the trails of snaking fingers seeping from the faucet were joined by a gaggle of vining tendrils that emerged from the drain, he didn’t wait to find out.

The multiplicity was inevitable. The man from the swamp was many men. Track knew them in his roots, in what he shared with them. In the memory of their gathering that flared like a hypnotically implanted trauma, greenish lights blurred through fog; the circle of them; the sweat of so many bodies. The slick coating of moist, protective phlegm over a multitude of turquoise eyes.

“I never asked for this,” he said. The moon-slit of a black cuticle divides the blue gem of knowing between he who weeps and he who desires. As Track shook his head and ran his hands through his messy hair hoping to silence the creeping monologue, Celeste thankfully interrupted with her most imperative tone.

“I am not one to give advice. The young who never listen. Let you get old, my pet. It will come! You realize one cock is as good as another. You could have grown old with any of them, with one man just as easily as another.

“She is displaced again, the longing. She walks the quaint sidewalks of another quaint town, one moment cheerfully brushing past the overgrown autumn flowers in a busy garden, the aster, the dahlia, the rotting of spent marigold, and in the next moment she forgets what street, what city this is. She has been in many cities, many streets, and they are so much alike. Human need is so much alike. We pretend to specialness; ah, but never mind. The young never listen. The song plays, and once played, must always repeat.”

Celeste sings, presumably in French. Track doesn’t know the language.

She pauses her song to explain, glowing fondly at him: “It is a play on words. Garden, Gordon, do you see? No? You will see. You will listen.”

The sounds are soothing though the melody is on the edge of ribald. Celeste’s eyes close as she tilts her head back and waves her drink and cigarette expressively, both casting and submitting to a spell. Track thinks he loves her, or something. He doesn’t know how to talk about what’s happening in his body and what it means. Or say how much he cares about her, wants Gordon back, wants to fuck everything, wants to be safe, wants to die and never die, to explode, to hide; so he shifts his chair close to Celeste. As she sings, he fondles her thigh.

He slides his head onto her lap. Beneath diaphanous sheaths of floral fabric, she is made of bone. What flesh encircles and animates her frame is soft, a thin layer of cream. Track moves away a great quantity of fabric to unveil the lump of her flaccid cock. He untucks her and takes her into his mouth.

Her song becomes more breath, less melody. With careful lips and a tongue more firm than her shaft, Track holds her inside. He circles her head with gentle prowess, milking pre-cum out of her tip when she begins to miraculously plump.

The song abates into silence, into sighs. Celeste can’t get hard anymore, but she can enjoy the sensation of being surrounded by Track’s mouth. He’s persistent, too; not bored or frustrated by her limpness, using her flexibility to his advantage to toy with her cock and simulate an erection by drawing her deep into his throat.

She gasps. He seeks between the pelvic bones with a wet finger, pressing inside to fondle her prostate. From his position with bowed head, he catches a whiff of dung, subtle under her perfume. It makes him hard. Another finger. Celeste has shoved her hips forward. On her there is so little fat or muscle or flesh that Track’s knuckles seem to scrape bone, so he goes to his knees and pulls her into him. Almost off her chair, he lifts her by a big handful of her small velvet ass.

If he’s violent, she didn’t mind. The residual pain was worth the surprise of an orgasm. Impressed that she never even spilled her drink, Track took her free hand in the aftermath and asked, “Is it okay? You’re not mad? I’m sorry.”

Celeste may have cried later, in private, regretting the corrupted boundary. Never again, and she meant it. She downed her tea and finally lit her cigarette and said, “Only for your future, your stupid youth. But how can one resist?”

Track backed away, uncertain if he’d made a mistake. He meant well.

He needed her, despite the pretext that she was aging and alone and the one in need of a young boarder’s help. It was the opposite. Track needed a safe place to lick his wounds between losses, a chain on his limbs to prevent him from roaring out into the night with wild pestilence and flinging the swamp matter into every organic crevice his cock could plunder. The man from the swamp was many men, and if Track stopped resisting and gave voice to the unspoken temptation alive in his cells, alive in his viscera, he could be all of them.

It was the multiplicity that called to him, and as Gordon kicked open the stubborn patio gate that shook Celeste’s decorative hanging garden clock, Track was shocked to see it was still two a.m. But it wasn’t, it couldn’t be. Exposed to rain and outdoor temperatures, the clock must have stopped. A reasonable explanation. Not another nightmare trope encroaching upon Track’s shaky waking reality.

Two a.m. forever and Gordon swiped the rain off of the stubble that peppered his balding scalp. He ducked under the oversized umbrella that sheltered the table, taking a seat across from Celeste and Track.

The rain was warm. A mild fog steamed off the edges of the garden. In front of Gordon, Track’s unattended crystal tumbler gleamed with condensation. The ice had melted. A thin ring of liquid encircled its base, a trembling moat. Liquefaction everywhere; bodies made of so much water. Gordon broke the surface tension with a sip and then lifted the glass up to finish it in several leisurely gulps. Done, he wiped his hands, rubbing them together and then flinging away the droplets.

“I suppose it’ll be light out soon,” he said. Raindrops pattered on the canvas umbrella above, a muffled repetition masking Track and Celeste’s silence. “And some of us have to work.”

Track looked everywhere except at Gordon, unable to bear his unwavering gaze, unsure of what it meant. Anger, adoration, confrontation, commitment? All of the above? Had Gordon watched from outside the gate?

“Aw, fuck it,” Gordon said. He smiled at Celeste and held out his empty tumbler. “Who am I kidding? I’ll join you for another. No one’s having any more nightmares if none of us get any sleep.”

Celeste leapt at the excuse to vanish inside. Alone with Gordon, Track squirmed at the mention of the nightmare he’d never told anyone about, the secret he’d never confessed. His avoidant eyes lingered on the garden clock. Something about it was wrong. It wasn’t just stopped. The glass had been broken, smashed to expose its face at exactly two a.m. The metal hands were bent to stick in place. A large, knife-like shard slashed across the numbers to highlight the displayed time.

“I met your boyfriend,” Gordon said.

Track had never told anyone about his nightmare, about the man from the swamp and the memory that the man had unlocked. The memory that Track hoped and prayed was not a memory. Within a circle of bodies like gnarled tree trunks, the murmur and drip of noxious emulsions begin to ooze. Gasses; the fragrant, heavy sweat of men. The sweat is speaking, like a slurred incantation.

Gordon said, “I’ve never seen someone with such opaque blue eyes. Like robin’s eggs. Well, darker.”

But that was ages ago. And the man had taken himself apart.

Track said, “What are you talking about?”

“I caught him right out here, fucking with that clock. He said he was here for you. That’s why it took me so long to come back.”

The circle of bodies like a cheap reenactment from a true crime documentary or a faked alien abduction sequence; Track must have been imprinted with the absurd and sensationalistic images flickering from the television as an infant. His mom always fell asleep with the television blaring. And things like his nightmare did not happen in the real world, even if his entire life revolved around reacting to every random circumstance as if they did.

Track never meant to act out, to hurt anyone, especially not Celeste. He only wanted to tell her, or tell Gordon, to tell anyone, anyone at all in the whole fucking world what he knew but had no words for, what gems he realized through horrid experience, what gems of death that liquefy in mire of starlight, his fingers elongating, his bowels unwinding to reproduce; each star is a clone of the man’s roots, and sometimes desperate parents like Track’s will give him an infant in exchange for an item more valuable than a boy born wrong.

Creeping fingers, lines of water on the glass patio table snaking toward Gordon. Leeches reaching.

“He said he was here for you, and I said fuck that. He said he’d always been here, and he laughed at me, and I said fuck that, too. I said I don’t care what you’ve done or where you’ve been, or what you’ve had done to you, with or without consent. I said you are not a bargaining chip. I don’t own you. I said I’m here now. And whoever the fuck you think you are, you’ll have to contend with that.”

The circle, the stench, the diesel and burning tires in the distance beyond the rising swamp gasses. It was the multiplicity that tormented him, the extent of their subterranean reach and the clandestine virility of their order. Good old boys in ball caps by day. Impossible psychotic ideation and delusions of martyred god/anti-god complexes after twilight. A river where every ripple is an identical sacrifice. A swamp drowned in its murdered dirge, all mud.

It was the multiplicity that called to him. The seeds of lust, unspoken. Lost missives from the disappeared. The man from the swamp was many men. All men, all mud.

Track said, “What happened after that?”

Gordon leaned forward without blinking, without smiling, without betraying his grave exhaustion or doubt. “He said it was entirely up to you. He said you understood. You would make the right choice.”

And Track reached across the wet table to Gordon, his sweet seeking fingers sliding like eager vines to entwine with the faithful man’s welcoming hand. Like roots. The rain streamed down from the tines of the umbrella and swarmed in thickening puddles around their feet. Ripples like black snakes. Track leaned across the table and clung to Gordon and said, “I think I already have.”