A Thing Writ In Water

There are no patients at this hour, no sick men — and no other surgeon to disrupt them, here in this chamber of horrors. Goodsir has examined him since his arrival on the Erebus a half-dozen times in as many days, he’s looked at Hickey’s stripes and watched him mend — now it’s him who’s to be seen and pawed over, him who must dress and undress with excruciating exactness rather than appear improper.

The surgeon’s room could double for its counterpart on the Terror — the same splintered butcher’s block of a table, the same yellow lamps and deep pockets of shadow. Here in the baking heat both men are fairly sweating, Hickey in his shirts and trousers and Goodsir without — when the coal runs out they’ll all be cleaving to one another for a little warmth. When the coal runs out they’ll be out on the ice.

Lead the way, Mr. Hickey. Unknown territory, uncharted passages. Mr. Goodsir is scrubbed startlingly white — the creases at the tops of his legs, just below the faint ledge of his buttocks, are only a faint shadow. Hickey traces one with the back of a finger. He’s startlingly vulnerable like this, he’s got him right where a man shouldn’t want to be — on his belly, with his knees apart and his shirt wadded up beneath him. Flung down on his face like a boy. Hickey’s hands pass over him like a shadow. He won’t lie atop him here, but the examination will proceed.

McDonald had steady hands and a way with a wetted rag, but the man is dead.

“You’re a pretty thing.”

Hickey draws his fingers down the final tracks of the spine, to the shallow small of the back — Goodsir’s body is slack and white like a lady’s, sleekly hairy, and the fine black hairs on his body prickle in contact with the pass of Hickey’s hand. He has fine soft thighs, and well-shaped calves, and a soft white ass. There is something provoking about it — its very whiteness, its very fineness. It inspires one to make a mark — to scratch, to pinch, to strike.

Hickey handles him like a prize piece of flesh, pressing his fingerprints into the goosepimpled skin of Goodsir’s thighs and leaving flushed marks behind. He can feel him quivering, partly from the awkwardness of the position — though he tries to keep still, he can’t keep his toes from clenching together uneasily or the muscles of his buttocks from drawing up tight — and partly perhaps from the anticipation. Hickey gropes and bites, making a way with his hands — Goodsir twists and shudders beneath him, racked with repulsion no doubt, but the soft breath-sounds say otherwise.

“What’s this called?”

He mouths down the quaking muscle of Goodsir’s uppermost thigh, letting his whiskers scratch a red patch. Goodsir tells him, in Greek. Or maybe Latin, it’s all the same to Hickey’s mind.

“And this?”

Goodsir tells him.

“It’s all cock to me.”

Hickey presses his mouth to the white, freckled hill of one buttock — cupping at Goodsir’s balls through the thick tangle, the natural termination of the fine spread of hair covering all his body. Cupping with both hands and splitting the swell of rump with his fingers, tracing the crease of him, pressing the hard blade of his cheek against the softness of this man’s ass.

Mr. Goodsir would carve up a dozen poor men to study their insides, but he won’t yield to one. This is their agreement, and there are worse terms to settle on.

His tongue fleeting, then with purpose — tracing the raw entrance of him and wetting it with his spit, tasting of his body. He can feel him quake and jerk just at the touch of his breath, the simple knowledge of another man’s closeness to that precious, inviolate asshole he must prefer to forget he possesses. Hickey’s wet tongue works at that last scandalous place.

Sodomy, of course, is a capital offense. Would they give Mr. Goodsir the courtesy of a court-martial, or the courtesies extended to him stop short of that? How he’d love to split him open with his cock, to make him beg, to give him joy — Mr. Goodsir would suffer it prettily, he’d open beneath him like a paper flower, and all his smart remarks would fail him in the face of simple buggery.

Like the captain of the Terror, the surgeon of the Erebus must think him a vicious assailant, a seducer and destroyer of men — that old hypocrite had been burning for it, drink or no, but Crozier has his loyal steward to bring him off and he calls Hickey dirty. Goodsir merely pities Hickey for his infirmity, like a man with an oozing sore or a pox-eaten face. But there are things men do for love — or for money, in a pinch — that are worlds apart from the things men do to vent their hate on one another. To kiss and suck another man’s asshole, to take hard blows and be thankful for them, to do everything but roll over and be taken.

He’ll do filthier things than Goodsir has ever imagined, and Goodsir will thank him for them. Hickey’s tongue has wheedled a little slackness for itself — that impeccably clean asshole is beginning to yield for him, and he can ferret its way past its muscled rim, only to tease. He could fuck him with his tongue and fingers, leave him raw and aching from that alone — it would be a pleasure.

“Please,” Goodsir says — and it isn’t please desist. His one hand is groping down between his legs, he is hungry to be brought off — the smell of salt is in the air, that queer oyster-barrel smell, and Hickey knows without dropping to his elbows that Mr. Goodsir’s cock must be leaking fat drops of tallow onto his own good linen.

“Keep your hands off.” Hickey drops his head, mouthing at the seam of his balls — Goodsir makes a helpless sound, knee jostling out, and his cock jumps.

How decent is he now? Where are his virtues now? He allows this, he desires it. Goodsir waxes obedient again, and his arms brace before him again, hands clasped and forearms pressed together like a praying man — his face presses to the crooks of his arms, his breathing still loud in the close little curtained room for all that he must be pacing himself. Hickey has never prayed, not once. A man has better things to do than spend time on his knees. But the rules have been broken, and both of them know it, the unspoken compact that lets both of them do this without shame, if not without fear.

A pause passes between them, an intermission. Hickey props himself up on both wrists and turns his head, hearing the small bones pop. Goodsir is fairly panting for his cock, and yet they won’t take the last mile together, they won’t finish their connection in the way men do. His own erection is throbbing, but he can ignore it — he’ll finish himself off at his leisure later, and remember.

“You’ve never been flogged,” Hickey says conversationally. Goodsir must think himself a saintly soul for helping patch up a filthy sod without complaint. It’s only that they’re short-handed now, or they’d never see as much of each other as they have these past days.

“No, I haven’t.”

“I knew a man who fancied being beaten. It was the only thing that brought him off, in the end.”

Goodsir’s eyebrows go up. “Did you do it?”

“Of course. He said he’d been that way since his youth, whatever that means. He couldn’t help his nature.”

He’d been a harmless monster, that man, a mealy blond worm of a man who was free with his money and innocent in his cravings, and not whatever Mr. Goodsir is. A bear of a man, with heroic appetites. Kind to women, brusque toward sailors.

“You’re a man of principle, Mr. Hickey.” The position must put a crick in the poor man’s neck — his voice is sweetly strained.

“Tell me, what would I do with principles?”

Goodsir casts out his arm, and catches him in it — exquisitely affectionate, sudden and brave. Hickey expects a fumbling kiss or else a blow, but Goodsir draws him down and holds him there instead, brow to brow and nose to nose. He’s not disgusted

“You’re a devil of a man, Mr. Hickey.” Breathing on him, handsome and sensible. “You should find better ways to amuse yourself.”

Hickey presses his fingers in the thickness of Goodsir’s hair — he has curls like Samson, and his whiskers are already grown to a rough burr over his lips and chin. It’s enough to make Hickey fairly seethe with envy. But they are not on kissing terms, they’re only fit to clasp and clip one another. Such reticence is understandable; it doesn’t sting like other aborted pleasantries, like a man who will bugger you raw but not share a bed afterward nor call you by name. It’s only sensible. He nuzzles the muscled bend of that whiskered neck, and breathes the sweat-smell of him — altogether a different animal from the dark salted sweat running down between his legs, politely animal.

“Roll over onto your back,” Hickey says, “I want a look at you.”

Laid out on the examination table he is no less an Adonis — hairy chest and soft belly and thigh-tops gone flushed from being pressed into the tabletop by another man’s weight. Famine hasn’t bitten him yet, disease hasn’t shrunk the flesh on his bones to a rattling garment — he is all red blood, an anatomy in pink and white. He has a beautiful cock, proud and blushing red. Hickey draws his mouth up the length of it, root to tip, and drags a groan like a laugh out of Goodsir’s throat. This simple touch makes him stand to attention again — most men go soft when they’re being buggered, but Hickey’s only charted the way for himself, not finished the filthy act. Head bent, dropping down to take him in his mouth — sucking and touching, doing everything with his hands that a man might do for himself with a raging hard-on and more imagination than good Lieutenant Irving.

They could stay like this as long as any two men could last — Hickey doesn’t need to let his mind go blank and watery to endure the interminable act, even if in an alleyway or a filthy whitewashed corner the act lasts no longer than a minute. He doesn’t need to summon up the thought of what this act will buy him in the end, how sweat and spit will be transformed into a glass of gin and a warm bed — there’s no purpose in it, no advantage, nothing but the act. Goodsir laces his fingers across the back of Hickey’s skull and Hickey would be content to remain that way forever — contiguous bodies, flesh and bone forever.