Instructions In Flesh

Instructions

In Flesh

Marcus James

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Instructions in Flesh

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DEDICATION

In memory of Billy Lucas, Cody J. Barker, Seth Walsh, Tyler Clementi,

Asher Brown, Harrison Chase Brown, Raymond Chase, Felix Sacco, Caleb Nolt,

Jamey Rodemeyer, and all the boys we have lost and continue to lose

because they are told that they are not the right kind of boy.

For every boy punished for the swish in his step.

For every boy made to feel like you are wrong, broken, and far from enough.

You are enough. You are exactly as you are supposed to be.

Your power is in what makes you different.

Your power is in the fabulous uniqueness of your existence.

For those we have lost, amongst your own you will never be forgotten.

We will make your names live on.

For every beautiful queer boy heart that still beats, don’t ever give up;

no matter how dark the night.

We need you.

Instructions

In Flesh

Copyright ©2018 By Marcus James

1st edition, 2012 by inGroup Press under the title ‘Bloodlines’

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Candiano Books,

Seattle, Washington

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or by any information storage retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the publisher.

©Candiano Books 2018

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination, or are used fictionally. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. All registered trademarks mentioned in this book are the property of their respective owners. No infringement is intended or should be inferred.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the publisher upon request.

Cover and Jacket design by Elise Ortega

Printed in the United States of America

ISBN-13: 978-1-72-057911-3

ASIN: B07FKV8V4S

ISBN-13: 978-1-38-647055-7

Part One

Lofty timbers, the walls around are bare, echoing to our laughter, as though the dead were there. Quaff a cup to the dead already, hooray for the next to die.

Dracula, 1931. Universal Pictures

Death

THE SKY WAS A BLAZE OF ORANGE , an orange that reflected off of the clouds overhead and made them burn violet. He looked out on the city from the top of Sehome Hill, seeing the cars moving beneath him. Their lights glittered on the dark waters of the bay, inky black, concealing the monsters of one’s own troubled imagination.

Talbot wasn’t sure how long he was going to stand there before he finally made the move that would change everything in one swift, irrevocable decision. It was one that he knew without a doubt had to be acted upon to make his suffering stop. He looked out on the dark forest. Its mass of pitch shadows stood out like blackened edges, like sharp jagged teeth that waited to devour.

The Native Americans believed Sehome Hill was infested with dark, primal spirits. This had been the spot of hostile takeover. It was a fitting place, really; Talbot felt that he couldn’t have made a better choice.

He ignored the stinging tears that moved from his wide, green eyes and clung to long, black lashes.

He stalked up the twisting stairs that led to the top of the observation tower, reflecting on the letter he had left the Bluffstroms, his adoptive parents. They were kind people who struggled for years to understand and break through Talbot’s continued silence.

The higher he climbed, the more the wind blew, passing silently through the trees and forcing gargantuan black limbs to crash against each other. They whispered in a soft howl that passed through the canals of his ears and licked his soft cheeks, which were flushed from the biting cold.

Talbot could smell the bay and the burning hearths of people’s homes. The fresh, salty scent was mixed with the aromatic warmth of chimney smoke. It comforted him. he wasn’t sure if comfort was deserved in a situation such as this, but he welcomed it just the same.

Seventeen years had been long enough, Talbot reminded himself, standing on the deck of the observation tower, looking down at the eighty-foot drop below. He knew what it would entail: staring into the mass of concrete at the tower’s feet, seeing each crack as if it were a ripple in a dark sea. He imagined the swift plummet into it, drowning in eternal, silent, empty darkness.

He couldn’t go on. He couldn’t continue to move through life in such extreme and continuous pain. There was never an end, never a break from misery, from torment. And he was tired of seeing his only hope reflect in the face of a guy who all but once looked his way.

He swung his legs over the wood railing, bracing his 5’11 frame against it, his arms spread out, fingers gripping tightly around the railing, staring out into the deep blue darkness. Leaves – dead and dry – fell silently to the earth, curling around him in the breeze.

He was happy enough that it wasn’t raining.

He thought back to everything that had transpired in those seventeen years, including the event that had led to this final act.

Talbot had never known his parents, and he was grateful that his adoptive parents had never lied to him and pretended to be the ones who created him. He wouldn’t have believed it anyway. He looked nothing like them. Where they both had blond hair, Talbot’s bordered somewhere between brown and black. His eyes were sharp and green, where theirs were blue and hazel brown.

Ted and Nancy had been kind people, and were happy to give a home to Talbot. They had felt no need to lie to him, and had no problem abiding by the wishes that the nuns had found written on a note pinned to his blanket. The note that had requested, in almost frantic handwriting, that he keep his birth name: Talbot Mathias.

He had grown up quiet and virtually friendless. Friends had never concerned him. Having people to speak with about unimportant things had never thrilled him. He preferred being alone. He preferred his silence instead of trying to fit in, especially when he looked at everyone around him and somehow knew that he was a different beast altogether.

At twelve, Talbot had realized that he was gay. It was a damning realization, but one that he thought would explain the separation that he felt from everyone around him.

High school came as a jarring experience, a shock to the system. He had to learn how to navigate through it. He had begun at Mariner High School, the prestigious school for the South Hill elite of Bellingham, Washington. It was a school that had a distinct reputation, where popularity was critical and where students could be vicious with one another to an almost sadistic degree.

After a sophomore year that was somewhat bearable—thanks in no small part to the school-week friendship he had made with seniors Trevor Blackmoore, his boyfriend Braxton Volaverunt, and queen bee Cheri Hannifin—Talbot returned his junior year to a step backward in time. He was once again friendless and facing torment from a new generation of high school royalty.

Thomas Burke, Randy Erickson, and Jared Peters.

They were gods on the football and soccer field and had single-handedly returned Mariner to a dark time, when the unpopular had to fear for their safety, and the beautiful people could move through the halls without the slightest concern or respect for others. Everyone was beneath them.

But in English class, Talbot had discovered Quinton Allen. He was indisputably popular, but he never acted like it. Quinton was the kind of guy who moved through all social circles with ease, who would strike up a conversation with you, whether you said hi to him or not. He was a year older than Talbot, with soulful brown eyes and a curtain of chestnut hair that would sometimes fall casually in the corner of his eyes. He was six feet in height, and played football right along Thomas, Randy, and Jared – yet, he was not their friend.

Talbot liked watching Quinton, and sometimes he was sure that Quinton was aware of it. Usually it was just a quick, casual glance and the faintest smirk. He had never summoned up the courage to say hello to Quinton. All that mattered was what he felt when he looked at him. The joy he felt, the warmth that seemed to fill him. It was something that he wanted to feel all of the time, and yet he knew it wasn’t possible. The separation he felt from everyone else around him never quelled, and his recurring pain only grew as the year went on.

At home, the feeling didn’t stop.

Now a senior, he kept himself in his room, staring at the four walls of his bedroom, which were covered in pictures from horror magazines, fashion books, and lyrics written on the walls. At dinner, he listened to his adoptive parents talk about their days. Nancy, who was a third-grade teacher at Lowell Elementary, often shared amusing stories about her students; Ted, a contractor, spoke about his current projects and the stress his crew often gave him.

They frequently asked Talbot how his day went, reaching out to him and, trying to penetrate his silence. After years of attempts, Ted and Nancy Bluffstrom finally stopped trying. From that point on, dinner was had in silence.

He wanted to tell them what was wrong. He wished that he could do so without fear of rejection or disgust, but his problems went beyond sexual orientation. They went deep inside, to an inkling that he didn’t belong, that he was meant for another world – one that he had put off going to for so long.

He tried to tell himself that it was not possible; giving in to such a thing was out of the question. He hoped that nothing, no matter how awful, could get him to cross that line, to enter a realm that there was no coming back from.

But then there were also his dreams.

Talbot had been plagued since a young age with horrific dreams. Dreams of a woman with marble-white skin and light eyes and thick dark hair, naked in a tub, bathing in liquid red, laughing as young women screamed around her. Some of them were strung up and disemboweled above her, blood and entrails raining down.

Talbot saw horrifying, vivid images, like a decaying head stuck on a post in front of this woman, the wet blonde strands tangled in the blood, bits of skull and membrane on the polished wood spike. The eyes were bulbous and the mouth was gaping. 

She rubbed this blood on her body while she laughed and mocked that head.

Often it culminated with the woman dipping a goblet into the thick crimson mess and bringing it to her lips, drinking it down as if it were wine.

Combined with his jarring dreams were the escalating taunts of Thomas, Randy, and Jared. Thomas, with his wall-like frame of solid muscle and his lax jaw that curled into an ever-present sneer, enjoyed throwing his weight against Talbot in the halls, slamming him hard against the lockers. Randy Erickson, an almost identical but thinner version of Thomas, liked to occasionally sock Talbot in the face when they crossed paths in the hallway.

Jared Peters, on the other hand, preferred name-calling to physical violence, and his favorite word for Talbot was faggot.

He had heard it so many times from Jared alone that it stood to drive him crazy. Jared, like Quinton, had lustrous olive skin and soft brown eyes, but his hair, along with Thomas’ and Randy’s, was buzzed short in an almost skinhead pact of brotherhood.

Talbot made it a point to avoid them as much as possible. He would look out for them as often as he could and go the other way whenever he spotted them. For the first month-and-a-half of his senior year this had been achieved often and with great success, and made the times they did collide less painful. But it wasn’t until a week before Halloween that everything changed.

The bullying finally got out of hand, and the high school senior cemented in his mind the decision to give into the darkness that had consumed him for so very long.

It had all started earlier in the day when Talbot forgot his history book in his gym locker. He knew that the football team was at practice, but the likelihood that they were still in the locker room was pretty slim, which meant that he would be able to end the day successful in avoiding the wolves.

He had moved closer and closer to the mass that was the gym, crowned with its steel roof that was painted a dark brown and that clashed with the orange-toned brick that formed the rest of Mariner’s gym.

He stepped inside. His brown-and-tan leather sneakers tapped on the linoleum floor that reflected the bright fluorescent lights above his head.

He stuck his hands in the pockets of his black jeans, bunching up the hem of his black-and-gray striped polo as he walked, taking a deep breath before throwing open the door to the locker room and stepping inside.

He didn’t hear anyone as he made his way down the rows, nor did he see any shadows cast on the concrete floor. He let out another sigh of relief as he neared his locker, finally grinning once he put his fingers to the lock. He stuck the little key into it and gave it a turn.

Talbot quickly removed his history book and flipped it open, thumbing through the pages to make sure that his notes were still inside. But when the door skirted across the floor and he heard the shuffling of sneakers on the concrete, he suddenly regretted that he hadn’t just grabbed the book and taken off.

Well, well, what do we have here?

He saw the grin on Thomas’s face, a grin reflected in the faces of Jared and Randy, who stood on either side of him. They moved like a pack of wolves, shirtless, dressed in green polyester shorts that the school provided. Towels were thrown over their naked shoulders.

It looks like a faggot to me, Tom, Jared responded with a chuckle.

Talbot backed away, dropping his book on the ground, his eyes wide and locked with the three bullies.

What are you doing here, cocksucker? Randy asked. He stepped past Thomas, staring down at the disregarded history book.

I—I was just getting my—my book, Talbot stammered.

They laughed, and Randy bent down, picking it up and handing it to him. Well, then, take it. He pushed it forward, urging Talbot to grab it.

He did.

Randy took hold of his wrist and spun him around. He wrapped his arm across Talbot’s neck, keeping him in place as Thomas and Jared moved closer to him.

Stop—please, Talbot pleaded, looking at the two teens that were closing the distance between them all. Randy closed his eyes and brought his lips to Talbot’s ear, telling him to be quiet.

A curious thing happened, something that he hadn’t anticipated and that scared him even more. Randy was hard; he had an erection that was drilling itself into his backside. The other two also seemed to be getting hard, and their eyes glistened with a predatory sheen that Talbot had never conceived in anyone before; except perhaps, photos of serial killers. It was that hungry, vacant stare. That glint in the eye that told you that they were capable of so much more.

How about we teach him a lesson? Randy said.

They agreed in unison, and Talbot began to shake his head, his eyes filling with tears as Thomas and Jared picked him up by the ankles and dragged him into the shower.

They released his legs, and Randy swung Talbot into the wall. His head collided with such force that it split the side of his skull open, throwing him into delirium.

In reality, the assault was brief – not even ten minutes—and yet it felt as if it had lasted a lifetime. Randy pulled Talbot’s jeans down and tore the button in the process. It was an assault that Talbot had never thought would happen to him, and his mind went elsewhere so that he wouldn’t have to deal with the horror of what was happening to him.

Talbot was drifting into his nightmares, a place where naked women hung from hooks, some of them missing breasts, which lay on the stone floor beneath them, while others were held in cages, some missing ears and fingers. A few of the women were missing one or both eyes, with nothing but black holes and lids that cried blood.

He could smell the rotting stink of decay: putrid. And the mangled corpses, some headless and some in pieces, littered the ground. Amongst them all was that woman, soaking in the tub full of blood, delighting in how it changed her, restoring her to the woman she had been for so long, before the signs of age started to cast their infection on her face.

Talbot had brief flashes of awareness, of Thomas grunting behind him, gripping his shoulders and thrusting over and over again.

But Talbot’s awareness was fleeting. He preferred instead to linger in this tomb of horror, of spilled blood and the ecstasy the woman in his dreams felt in drinking it.

He felt akin to her, as if they were one. The power she felt was the power he felt, and the pleasure she gained was his pleasure. There was something in this experience, something that bordered on the religious; something that held the space between the sacred and the profane.

Her eyes flashed with the glint of the other world, of perception far beyond that of everyone else around her. Within her genes lived something dormant, a power that desired to awaken and was somehow being quelled by the consuming of this blood.

There was another flash, another return to reality, another awareness of the violation that was occurring. Another realization that Thomas was raping him. He was about to drift back into this other world, back into the landscape of his dreams, when Thomas suddenly pulled out of him and threw him into the wall.

Talbot was dimly aware of the fact that he was now slipping down the tile and colliding with the ground as a throbbing darkness washed over him.

HEY, TALBOT?

He heard the voice in the darkness. His skull was still throbbing from the last impact. He opened his eyes to the crude, bright glow of the fluorescents, their electric bath burning his eyes and forcing them shut.

Talbot?

He opened his eyes again and saw familiar brown irises staring into his own. A beautiful face that was wrecked with concern, pity, and fear.

Talbot, it’s Quinton Allen, from English class. Can you hear me?

Talbot nodded and looked around, seeing twenty more bodies surrounding him, including that of coach Peters, Jared’s father.

Talbot became aware of the fact that his jeans and underwear were down around his knees. He felt ashamed, embarrassed on that fact alone, but added to that was the profound humiliation that everyone on the football team was staring at him with their mouths gaped open.

Everyone can see me naked, Talbot said in a whisper, his eyes welling with tears and sliding down his face.

No, Quinton began, placing his hand to Talbot’s hair and giving it a gentle pet. No, they can’t. I found you; I grabbed the school’s flag that was hanging on the wall in Coach Peters’ office before I called for help.

Talbot managed to look down and see that the flag was indeed draped over him. It was green polyester with the school’s name stitched in yellow; in the middle, a mariner was steering the wheel of a ship. It was supposed to be the symbol of school pride and unity, and a tribute to Bellingham’s seafaring legacy.

Now it made Talbot wonder what the boys in the locker room would think of when they looked at the flag from then on.

I need to go, Talbot began to get up but Quinton shook his head.

Help is on the way. John Grier went to get the nurse and call for an ambulance.

Talbot’s eyes grew wide, and he stood up quickly. Quinton caught on to what he was intending, and reluctantly held up the flag so Talbot could pull his underwear and jeans back up.

Thank you, he said to Quinton, who nodded and offered a sad smile. Talbot sprinted past everyone – to their shock and amazement – before any of them had time to process and object or try to stop him.

By the time the nurse arrived, he was already gone.

HE HAD WANDERED FOR hours.

First he stopped by his home and wrote a matter-of-fact suicide note, a note that left little explanation other than an I’m sorry.

He changed his clothes, putting on a fresh pair of briefs, jeans, and a black turtleneck. Briefly he glimpsed himself in the mirror that hung in his closet, seeing exactly where his head had been split open. He wiped at the dried crust of blood that clung to the edges of the split flesh but didn’t bother to cover it with a bandage.

He walked the streets, waiting for the coming dark. It was autumn, and the shops were decorated with Halloween images, skulls, paper black cats, and pumpkins with smiling faces. The streets were littered with dead, multi-colored leaves, and the ground was still wet from the rain that had fallen the night before.

The air smelled of burning leaves and spices, and was tinged with a thin, misty veil that moved its way from off the gray waters of Bellingham Bay and enveloped the city. The distant shores of the islands seemed like large, black pillows floating along the horizon.

He couldn’t look anyone in the eye, and though his body ached and his head throbbed, he was able to deal with it. In the end, it wouldn’t matter. He knew what he had to do; he knew that there was no other option. He couldn’t go on like this; he couldn’t return to school after what had taken place. There was too much shame in existing. There was too much pain in the simple idea of functioning. He had to bring it to an end.

He had taken all of the money he had saved over the past year, nearly three hundred dollars, and decided he would have a farewell dinner for himself. It would be his last meal, much like a prisoner would receive on death row. Talbot’s world was his prison, Bellingham his cell.

He went to Nimbus, high atop the city in Bellingham Towers. The restaurant had panoramic views, and Talbot watched the sky fade and the world light up and glitter beneath him as he ascended those final set of steps after walking off the elevator.

He had a four-course meal and savored every moment of it. He found comfort in the restaurant’s dark seclusion, its sienna walls and darkly stained wood tables that created a sense of welcome solitude.

As he paid the check and waited for the server to return, a woman caught his eye.

She sat across the restaurant, playing with a salad on the table in front of her, acting as if she were eating. She wasn’t really, but the handsome man that she was with didn’t seem to notice. He continued to talk and devour his steak, and yet she had her eyes locked with Talbot’s. They were like burning embers of gold that sparked across the room. They stood out in the darkness with an iridescence that reflected the glint of candlelight.

She appeared to grin at him without actually grinning. Her skin, lustrous and white, stood in stark contrast with the thick, dark curls that spilled down her back and cascaded over her chest. Her nails glistened, glassy in a way, and the wrap sweater dress clung to her full breasts, which only slightly seemed to heave with breath.

There was something familiar about her, something that stirred inside of Talbot, something that made him feel like he knew her. He thought maybe it was the way in which she seemed detached from her date, as if she could not relate to him, no matter how much she may have wanted to.

Maybe that same pane of glass that stood between Talbot and the rest of the world also stood between this woman and everything else around her.

He offered her a gentle smile as he walked out, moving quietly past her. As she looked at him, her luminous eyes grew wide, as if she recognized something inside of him, as if she suddenly knew what he meant to do.

Perhaps she wanted to stop him. Talbot knew he was only humoring himself with his desire to be understood. In the end there was nothing to understand. In the end, there was no changing the course of his actions.

And so there he stood, gripping the railing of the arboretum tower as tightly as he could, his knees buckling as he stared into the pitch. He knew that come the twilight of early morning, a jogger, perhaps two, would discover his lifeless and mangled body on the concrete, the blood pooled around him and his limbs twisted in every direction.

It made him grin.

Talbot Mathias took a deep breath and closed his eyes, allowing his fingers to loosen their hold on the metal. There was the feeling of his body moving forward as he briefly stood on his toes before descending into the air. The wind whistled in his ears as he sped, lower and lower, knowing that it took less than five seconds to hit the concrete. Those brief seconds felt like forever as he fell, and the weightlessness of the night was the greatest comfort he had ever known.

Thomas, Randy, and Jared didn’t matter. His adoptive family didn’t matter. The identity of his real parents didn’t matter. As he fell, he wondered if this exhilaration was what it felt like to be in love. If this joy, this freedom, was like a first kiss – and if so, was it this disorienting?

He thought of Quinton Allen. He recalled his kind smile, the feeling of Quinton’s hand on his head, the sense of his eyes looking deep within him.

He grinned.

Talbot Mathias hit the concrete with a loud crack, felt his neck snap for just a nanosecond before everything went black and there was nothing, just his body lifeless and bloody on the ground.

Rebirth

THERE WAS OVERLOAD OF SOUND . BIRDS CHIRPPED so close that they were indistinguishable from the cars that sped on either side of his head. There were footsteps nearby that seemed endless and gargantuan.

He opened his eyes and was assaulted with a barrage of color. The sky above him was an inferno of violet-orange, ablaze and threatening to rain down upon his immobile body. The trees that surrounded him seemed to reach out for him like gnarled, skeletal hands. The smells of the city, mixed with the moldy scent of moss and the perfume of those chimneys, was pungent and unavoidable.

He dared to move his limbs, unsure if he could and feeling awkward as he did. He realized that his head was turned severely to the side and he heard and felt a distinct crack as he pushed himself up onto his knees and turned his head back around, facing the world directly ahead of him.

He looked around.

The pavement was covered in a caliginous liquid that he knew to be blood. His blood. He could smell it so keenly that it was as if he had dipped a piece of cloth into it and was breathing in the stench against his nose.

He stood, wobbling a little as he regained his balance, feeling as if he had become dizzy from getting up too fast. But this was different. The world around him was different, and Talbot was awash with confusion and dumb wonder.

He could see the blood stained like paint on his jeans, was aware of it on his sweater – but where this blood had come from, he had no idea. There were no cuts or lacerations that he could see or feel.

The colors around him appeared to vibrate. Talbot had to close his eyes and attempt to steady himself as an acute sense of nausea took hold, finally climaxing with him hunched over, gripping his knees, while it felt as if the entire contents of his insides were coming out with every retch.

The more he threw up, the more surprised he was to find that he was feeling better, renewed, as if his body