Change of Heart

"Ah, you have been browsing in the hospital library."

"Yes. Could that have anything to do with my visions? Do one's memories reside in more than the brain? Does every organ and element of the body include some form of memory cells? Could a heart, for instance, retain some memories that, if removed from one body and inserted in another, could bring with it memories from the first person's life?"

"Are you asking me if the visions you have could be memories from the one whose heart you received? One of the visions you say recurs—the robed and masked man and the flash of a knife—seems to disturb you more than others. Are you afraid you are being linked to the death of the young man whose heart you have?"

As he was speaking, Gupta reached over with both hands, took the waistband of my athletic shorts and pulled them off my legs. He then reached up and pulled the T-shirt over my head, leaving me naked on his couch. Every nerve in my body was on alert. He had a different technique from Dr. Keller's. Keller's fucking was more direct, powerful, demanding. Gupta was more subtle, more delicate, working the levels of arousal more. Keller made me come with his dick; Gupta could make me come with his hands and fingers and even with just his hot breath brushing my body.

I didn't resist him. I wanted him inside me, even though what we were talking about concerned me deeply. My mind was struggling for focus on what I wanted to discuss, and Gupta's hands were working against that—and winning.

"There, you've said it," I whispered. "I have a young man's heart. I want to know what young man. You know, I'm sure. How did he die?"

"Shush," Gupta murmured, touching my inner thighs, first one and then the other, with the light brush of his fingertips. I moaned and spread my legs, bending them, placing my feet flat on the surface of the couch. His hand went under my buttocks, which I had slightly raised to accommodate him doing so. His index finger slid inside my channel. I raised my tail higher for him, using the leverage of my feet. He deftly moved his fingers, first one, then two, and three, inside my channel, as he laid his other hand on my brow and hovered his face over mine, capturing my eyes with his. I was panting and trembling—his captive.

"Cellular memory theory is just that, a theory, Philip. You mustn't put too much store in it and you mustn't tax your new heart in worrying about your visions. They will go away in time. You must concentrate on the present—how happy you are to be alive—and how alive you can be in taking your pleasures. Am I making you feel alive?"

"Yes, oh, yes," I answered, breathlessly.

He stood, shrugged off his medical coat, and hovered over me as I watched him roll a condom onto that extraordinarily long erection of his.

"What do you think of my body, Philip? When you look at me, do you think of my thinness—almost to emaciation? Do you think of how brown I am or of my intellect. Or do you worry about my cleanliness or why the hair on my head is gray but my pubic hair is black? What do you think of first when you see my body?"

"I think of how extraordinarily long your cock is," I answered honestly.

"So, I am just a cock long enough to reach you in your very core?"

"Well, not 'just,' but, yes, essentially."

"And what do you really want from me when you come and lie on my couch and ask me questions like that about cellular memory?"

I could see what he was doing to curve my mind around like this, but I suddenly was very tired of these games and chose honesty. Besides, I could always claim that it was the drugs they gave me that focused my attention like this. "I want your cock inside me."

Gupta laughed. "We will fuck now," he said, matter-of-factly, as if it was just part of the therapy, which, no doubt, it was.

Then he was on the couch, under me, having deftly repositioned us both. I was saddled on his pelvis, penetrated deep by that long shaft of his, and, at the direction of his fingers touching me here, there, and there, riding him, slowly, sensually in the cowboy position, facing him, palming his pecs, my eyes still fully captured by his.

I did have one of the recurring visions as we fucked—the one of being on a party boat teeming with other men and being one of the younger men on my back with an older man on top of me, inside me, fucking me. In contrast to the usual vision, the man on top of me was Asian and was very, very good at what he was doing with my body. I was experiencing multiple ejaculations, far more in the dream than I could have mustered in real life. But then, Dr. Gupta could pull more ejaculations, more frequently, out of me in a session than Dr. Keller could. Gupta himself had a gentle, warm flow that went on forever and that I could feel, because he always barebacked me.

I did not bring up the more disturbing vision of the robed and wolf-masked man fucking me, restrained at wrists and ankles, on a stone slab and of the flash of a knife in the wooded clearing on a moon-filled night.

As I cried out and came—again and again in waves—and let my body collapse on Gupta's, though, the fact of that disturbing memory came back to me. I had found out on my own more than that the heart I now had come from a younger man. I had read the copy of the file John, the hospital orderly, had brought to my room to exchange for sex. The file had identified the young man. He had no family. His address had been in Stonington, a waterside village on the Bay of Fundy down toward Portland. It was a fishing and tourist village. It easily could have been a base for pleasure chart boats, like the one in one of my visions. No occupation was given for the young man in the file. No cause of death was given. No family contact was on file. I intuitively knew that my new heart had come from a rent-boy—and one who was intentionally scrubbed from the files of existence, whether before or after his death or by his choice or not, I didn't know.

I knew more now than before—but not enough more.

"Could it be that the young man's heart I have could have been a male prostitute on the coast of Maine—going out on party boats with older men, like in my vision?"

I could feel Dr. Gupta tensing up. "What gave you that idea?" he asked. "Has someone said something to you?"

Could I take this as his admission that my supposition was true? Was I endangering John? "Just in thinking about cellular memory theory," I said. "Because of my visions, which have no application in my real life. And the difference between what I was before the new heart and what I am now—like this, with you, now. I was never the wanton satyriasis before. I certainly am now."

"Ah, still dwelling on cellular memory theory. I've told you. You were dying before and preparing for it—willing your life to wind down. You are full of life now and the sex therapy is part of that—bringing pleasure back into your life. Bringing life back into your life. Assuring you that you can have a normal life of sexual pleasure. You don't have to hold back in concern for whether your new heart can take it."

"How did this young man—originally a French-Canadian—die, Dr. Gupta? And, what also has been bothering me—when I arrived, there was a young man, Sean LeGrand, who was doing landscape work on the grounds. What became of him?"

Gupta's body tensed up again. He was changing our positions, putting me under him, insinuated his knees between my thighs. "Where have you heard that your organ donor was French-Canadian?"

"The strangest thing, Dr. Gupta. French phrases are running through my mind. Somehow, I often know what they mean and that they are in a Canadian dialect. But I don't speak any French."

I knew I was way beyond the bounds here, that Gupta would know that someone was slipping me information they shouldn't. But I wasn't telling him all. Sean LeGrand had come into my mind because of a photo in the file John had given me. I wasn't sure it—my organ donor—was of LeGrand, but it could have been. I never got that good of a look at the landscaper—but mainly because both times I'd seen him, he was being fucked under the bushes out on the grounds. He obviously was promiscuous and gay—just as I, with my new heart, now was.

Sean LeGrand was French-Canadian. He was young, handsome, and trim. He came from a seaside village. He was gay and promiscuous, quite probably a rent-boy. He was, as far as I could discern, missing.

"Sean LeGrand still works for us here," Gupta said. "But he is out near the front entrance, working on redoing the stones in the rock wall out there."

It was the last thing Gupta said to me in the session—or would permit me to say to him—before he took me into a close embrace, mounted and penetrated me again, and fucking me silly on the therapy couch in the missionary position, pulling waves of ejaculations out of me and contributing some of his own—long flowing, warm, gentle waves of contentment, his hands grasping mine and his fingers pulsing to the rhythm of his flow.

That night, a night of the full moon, I woke in a sweat for no reason I could discern other than that French phrases I could not understand, cried out in anguish, had built to a crescendo in my unconscious brain. I rose out of the bed and went to the window, staring out at the slightly swaying treetops on the fringe of the dense forest surrounding the remote private hospital complex.

As I watched, a procession of robed figures, carrying lit torches, progressed across the hospital grounds and entered the line of trees at the opening of a path that had not been evident to me before. It happened so quickly and was so strange that, after they and the glow from their torches were swallowed up by the forest, I couldn't be sure I'd seen something real happening and it wasn't just another manifestation of the drugs I was being controlled with. What was real? What was fantasy? What was natural? What was evil and foreboding?

Shuddering, I went back to my bed, thinking that, scantily clothed and barefoot notwithstanding, the next day, in the sunlight, I would take that path to see where they had gone. Was there a clearing, with a stone slab and restraints, somewhere along that path toward Baskahegen Lake?

Lying in the bed, I listened to the beating of my new heart, unable to do more than doze, but able before morning arrived to forget I had been determined to follow the path into the woods or to believe that I had experienced anything more than had yet another disturbing, drug- and confusion-induced dream.

* * * *

"John usually brings me breakfast. Is he OK? And I think Dr. Keller will give me that shot. He's supposed to be here in about a half an hour."

I found I could get to sleep the previous night after all, and whatever I'd thought I'd seen out of my window in the night was just a big question mark now. I was addressing a big, black hunk who had come into my room with a tray that held not only my breakfast but also a syringe filled with the blue-tinted fluid that I had come to call my sex booster, not that, after my new heart, I had the need for anything to heat me up sexually. The muscled up black hospital attendant, in hospital-blue baggy sweat pants but bare-chested, and showing a gleaming Mr. Universe torso, was an attendant I hadn't seen before. If he gave me that shot, it was telling me that he was the one who would be climbing in bed with me—and he looked a bit to big in every respect for my new heart to survive that.

"John is no longer with us. My name is Reggie, your new attendant. I'll provide you everything you need—and I mean everything. You certainly are a looker. I was told you were a high-fashion model. You sure have kept those looks, haven't you?" His pattering didn't seem to require my participation so I kept quiet, trying to process the sudden "John doesn't work here anymore" statement. I took another look at him. If he was anywhere near as big down below that he was in his Mr. Universe torso, I don't think I could handle it.

He was standing close to me, holding the syringe pointed up the ceiling.

"What's that outside the window," he wondered.

"Stupid me, I looked."

He plunged it expertly into my arm, and I could feel the sexual surge flowing through my veins immediately. I wantonly ran the palms of my hands over his bulging pecs. He laughed.

"Everything?" I asked. "Are you a big boy?" Before the plunge of the syringe, I think I wanted the answer to that to be "no." Now, the drug coursing through me, I obviously was up to the challenge.

"Everything," he declared. "I'm a prime stud. You're our prize patient. Dr. Keller says you are pure gold in fees every month we keep you alive and pleasured. I will give you all the dick you can take."

At least he was honest.

"And Dr. Keller won't be able to visit you this morning. He's in surgery. Another heart transplant."

Ah, the pro basketball player. At that point a nasty possibility occurred to me. The pro basketballer was a famously notorious womanizer, with acknowledged by-blows scattered about the world. If this hospital was based on a program of sexual therapy, did it cater to straights as well as gays? I hadn't encountered anyone but men—and men who seemed to be on the make for other men—in the time I'd been here. Was the sexual therapy claim just a ruse to control me? Had Dr. Keller determined that was how I could be controlled and manipulated and my bank account milked, knowing I would have done anything to get a heart transplant in time? There seemed to be too many men who obviously preferred men about to believe this was all smoke and mirrors for me . . . but . . .

"So, it is you and me for this morning," Reggie was saying. "Does that disappoint?"

"No, not at all," I answered, pulling myself away from what I had been thinking. I let my hands glide down his chest and his flat belly, running them under the waistband of his sweatpants.

"Oh, shit." My sphincter puckered up.

He laughed, not pulling back when I found how hung he was and took the measure of him as he engorged. "I want you to know you'll be my first black."

"I want you to know that I'm big enough to make you suffer," he said.

"I can already tell that."

"Are you afraid?"

"Yes, of course."

"Good."

With that, we moved away from talking and into action. Reggie turned me, facing down on the bed but standing at the foot of the bed. I moaned, stretching my arms above my head and bunching up wads of sheeting in my fists, as he went on his knees behind me and pushed his face between my butt cheeks. A beefy brown hand snaked around my hips, grasped my cock, and stroked me as he ate me out and I writhed under him. The sexing up drug was still coursing through my veins, but I had no need of that to melt to this black bull.

Then, proving out the bull part, he rose, stripped off his sweats, slapped a huge, jet-black erection on my buttocks and rubbed the underside of it up and down in my crack, across my greedy hole, as I shuddered, gasped, and begged for it. My sphincter was clutching and releasing, clutching and releasing.

With a laugh, he mounted, slowly and forcefully penetrated, embraced me from above and behind, running his hands down my stretched-out arms and grasping my wrists to hold me in place until I fully surrendered to him. He was every thick inch of what I had imagined. He filled me, spread and stretched me. He owned me, and all the time he was inside me, moving, I couldn't think of anything but that he was inside me moving. That I was going to die—but that I was going to die gloriously happy and owned. He fucked the shit out of me. My legs went to rubber, but before I could collapse under him, he ran a beefy arm under my waist, lifting my feet off the carpet to dangle as he thrust, thrust, thrust and I writhed and cried out at how he was stretching me to the limit and killing me. Killing me good, as he well knew. I went to heaven, exploded, and came. He continued fucking and I went over the moon, exploded, and came again. The drug had that frequent reload effect.

When he was done, I melted into a puddle on the floor at the foot of the bed and he had to scrape me off the floor and pour me back onto the mattress.

Was I being manipulated here? I had admitted to Dr. Gupta during therapy sessions that I'd never been fucked by a black man before and that I'd had fantasies of being covered by a black bull. And here, when I was asking some questions they didn't want to answer, had appeared a black bull to shoot me up with sexing juice and cover me and melt me down. And my source for information I had been seeking, John, was no longer here.

Of course I had visions again as I was being fucked, visions that brought me more in synch with my new heart than when anything else was happening to me. It wasn't the vision of the robe, mask, clearing in the woods, stone slab, and flashing knife, which only occurred when Dr. Keller was fucking me, or the vision of older men fucking me on a party boat, but the vision of a younger hunk fucking me on the grassy bank running down to the ocean—and, with Reggie, the hunk of my vision was black. At no time did I feel more the promiscuous rent-boy associated with my new heart than when John or Reggie—young studs both—were fucking me.

If something like cellular memory in the donor heart was conveying something about the life of the young man whose heart now beat in my chest, that young man had had quite a sex life.

Later in the morning, I left my room, in search of Dr. Keller, wondering about who was involved in the surgery he had done—or was still doing. In a back hall I hadn't been in before, I saw a line of closet doors with one slightly ajar. I had only gotten a glimpse of robes hanging in the closet with a wolf mask on the shelf above before Reggie found me there.

"There you are. You really shouldn't be roaming around," he said, as a strong hand closed over my wrist.

"It's such a nice day. I think I'll take a walk," I said. "Maybe down to the entrance where I understand the rock wall is being rebuilt or maybe into the woods. I've seen where there is a path opening in the trees. Is the lake far away?"

"No, I don't think so," Reggie said, "no walking anywhere outside the building for patients." And then he was taking me up in his strong arms, carrying me back to my room, laying me on my back on the bed, coming up over me, mounting and penetrating me again, fucking me so hard that I was having no visions beyond the reach of my own memory of the pleasure of his cock stretching, possessing, working me—or any possible begging memory of my shared heart.

Clearly Reggie was to be the antidote for thinking and asking about the possible existence and application of cellular memory theory.