File 66

We talked all night long. I told him about my past, about the hazelnuts, about all that I knew. He was mostly quiet, and he listened. He was different, and I knew that from the beginning. He was just, brighter. That is the only way I can describe it. It was like all of us were living our dull lives in a sepia photograph, and then there was Taylor, brilliant and colorful. From his dark brown hair with the red glints in the sunlight, to his tanned arms with the hairs that glistened like strands of ruby-gold. To his blue eyes. I have seen eyes that were darker, and eyes that were lighter, but never, never-ever have I seen eyes so blue.

I still did my rounds, but after I had checked everyone, I was back at Taylor's room. He fascinated me, even then, before I knew who he really was.

Lights out.

December 4, 2121.

I'm glad I thought of hiding the journal. Today when the guards ransacked my room, they discovered the loose tile it had been hiding under. One of the guards is like me, I'm sure of it. When they ransacked the room, he told me to stand in the corner, but instead of letting me go, he led me there, with his hand tight around my arm. When the other guard was yanking the mattress off of my cot, he grabbed my groin and squeezed.

It didn't hurt. It felt good, even. But even though it felt good, I'm scared. He can do whatever he wants. He has access to the gaol at all times, even when other guards are busy. My cell closes tight, with nothing but a tiny wirehatched window that leads to the hall.

It happens in here. It's well-known, but silenced. Today in the infirmary, I cleaned a frail forty-something man with blood running down his legs. He had been raped by another prisoner, because he was weak. The cells are solitary, but it happens. It happens in the showers, in the hallways. The guards don't stop it. They think it's funny. All they do is stamp 'Gender Treachery' on the prisoner's list of offenses. They think it's hilarious that the prisoners are so desperate for sex that they fuck other men and bring their death sentences closer.

But they're wrong. It's not about sex, it's about power. I saw two men arguing in the shower. They hated each other, no one remembered why. The next thing I knew, one was bawling like a wounded animal, bleeding and struggling on the wet tiles while the other crouched over him and fucked him, snarling. It was pathetic, and terrifying.

I will fight back. I have made myself a career thief; I stole the pages and the bag, and now I have stolen a pair of sharp metal tweezers. When I go to the showers, I keep it clenched in my fist. If anyone tries to fuck me, they will have a splinter of metal jutting from their eye before they know what's happening.

The tweezers serve another purpose. I remember someone telling me that a pencil could write for 35 miles. The tip of my pencil broke off, but with the tweezers I can clench that little black nub between the rough metal tips and write with it. That nub lasted me for nearly an entire entry, so I'm glad I didn't lose it.

Have to stop, roll call.

December 7, 2121

I have to write about Taylor. The two men who question me, their names are Smith and Manet. They dug in for the first time two days ago. They took me to the shower room and took my clothes off. They tied my hands above my head to a shower socket and sprayed me with a high-pressure hose. After an hour or so, they put a cloth bag on my head. It felt like I was drowning. I couldn't breathe.

I'm so cold right now. I haven't had the energy to write for a few days now. For a while, the gaol didn't seem so bad, but now my reserves of energy are running low. I have very little body fat anymore. I haven't seen my reflection, but my cheeks are hollow and my ribs are starting to jut. When I came back from the water-torture, they took away my blanket and didn't give me my clothes for several hours. I feel like I'll never be warm again.

Taylor was warm. We had to be secretive, but on the nights we spent together, we would cuddle naked. It was the closest I have ever been to a person.

For his two weeks at the hospice, we spoke every night. I found myself spending hours with him. He would walk with me, helping me a little with my rounds, and talking. He started to talk about a long time ago. About stuff from the past, before the Great War. Stuff that I had never heard about, stuff that he had no right to know.

On the fourth night, I confronted him. He was in his bed, and I was sitting on the edge in my caretaker whites. I asked him how he knew about television, and pet cats, when all I had ever seen were propaganda flickers and feral cats. I asked him how he knew all of this when he was a construction worker.

He sat up slowly. We were alone in his little room. I remember the moonlight coming in through the high window, shining off of his blue eyes, it looked like they were glowing. He said.

'Because I'm not a construction worker. I never was.' Was what he said. Then he said. 'Did you know that you're beautiful?' His hand was on my shoulder, and I didn't move. The look in his eyes was like longing. Like wanting something so desperately that nothing else matters. Looking into his eyes was like looking into a mirror for my own. He moved his hand up so it was cupping the side of my face and the fingers were so warm. I still remember every moment.

'In the moonlight, your hair looks like silver.' He whispered, and then he leaned forward. I did too. It was like the tide, or the rain, or the wind. It was natural, and I couldn't stop it no matter how scared I was. I kissed Taylor. He didn't kiss me, I kissed him. When we were a few inches apart, I lunged forward with need. We kissed in that hospice room, and he held me. We didn't do anything sexual that night, but I didn't move from his arms for an hour at least.

I remember when I had to let go. I whispered. 'We'll get in trouble.' And he just smiled, and his eyes were sad and scared and full of that same longing. 'I know. We have to be careful.' I barely knew what we were talking about. Later, Taylor told me all about what it means to be gay. About how at one time, it was accepted, and how men and women could get married to each other. But at the time, all I knew was that I was in love, and I could be killed for it.

But I was so in love that I didn't care. These memories are all that I have now. When I was under the hose, I closed my eyes and I thought about that night. When I was frozen and naked and huddled in a ball on my bare mattress, I thought about Taylor's arms, and I was warm.

Roll call.

December 9, 2121

The guard that touched me, His name is Nikolaus. For a while, I considered writing a fake name, so if they ever found this journal he wouldn't get in trouble. But I'm writing his real name. If they ever find this journal, they'll know, and soon he'll be in one of these cells. He'll live on two cups of mush a day, he'll run and stand for hours in the sleet and rain and snow. He'll shit in a bucket and shiver when he hear's the batons of the guards rap against the walls.

I was too tired to write yesterday. I came back, and all I wanted to do was sleep. He came inside my cell and pulled my pants down. If I had been holding the tweezers, I would have stabbed him, but they were hidden in my shit-bucket with my journal and pencil. I have been so weak lately. I wasn't able to fight much. He got on top of me and humped me, like a dog. I'm grateful that he didn't fuck me, and at the same time I'm so humiliated that I'm grateful. It's pathetic.

I hate him. I hate how helpless I am against him. Even if I get the tweezers out, if I hurt him, he can have me punished. If he hurts me, it's justified.

Today at roll call, we ran for ten laps, and I found myself lagging at the back. I wasn't the weakest by far, but this was the first time I felt like I wouldn't be able to finish. I'm scared. I'm scared all of the time. It's been a couple of weeks now. I hope that Taylor is far away. He hinted that the Community is far away, someplace warm. He wont tell me where, but whenever I can't stand it anymore, I imagine him on a beach of warm yellow sand, dressed in nothing but shorts and looking out at an ocean as blue as his eyes. Taylor told me that most beaches are devoid of life now. And my common sense tells me that the ocean is so full of chemicals that it is on fire in places, and bleaches your skin in others. But still, it's a nice picture.

I'm so tired.

December 12, 2121

Nikolaus hasn't bothered me since the one time, and I'm grateful. There is a young man, not much older then I in the infirmary. He was arrested two months ago for making counterfeit ration chips. I don't know if it was a guard or a prisoner that assaulted him, but he lost five teeth, his eyebrow is split, his arm broken, and he has serious anal fissures. He's in the infirmary now. I've done all I can, but he'll probably die. And even if he lives, what does he have to look forward to? A public execution on the twentieth.

My trial has been delayed once, but barring any further delays, it will be on the first of January, the new year. I've been dreading it. Taylor told me that once, trials went by the motto, 'innocent until proven guilty'. It makes me want to laugh and cry all at once. But what it means realistically, is that I have nineteen days left to write about Taylor. I haven't been able to write continuously, so realistically, it's more like seven or eight entries. I have to keep writing, even though my pencil is more then half gone, and I have to write with it clamped in the tweezers.

After the night where I kissed Taylor, he was completely open with me. We both knew secrets about each other that could get us killed, and we were in love already. Our love grew stronger over time, but it was there right away. For me, he was the first person who I had ever gotten close to other then my family. The only person who I could call my friend.

We had our trysts in the Hospice, I wont lie. On the second night we lay under the covers of his bed, naked and shy. He was just as shy as I was. He whispered that he had messed around with a woman when he was younger, but that he was still a virgin, and had never slept with another man. We explored each other's bodies, and there was just something innocent and wonderful about it. I remember snuggling up close so our cocks rubbed together and thinking how good it felt. I remember when he shyly lowered his head and kissed my shoulder, afraid to go lower, but going lower when I kissed him, and asked him to.

Manet and Smith think that Taylor is a dangerous international spy. They're right, but they're looking for the wrong person. Maybe they have this picture in their head of a steely-eyed middle-aged man with the symbol of the antichrist on his forehead, but Taylor is just a kid, like me. His twenty-third birthday was in October. We celebrated it by making a small white cake, using a ceramic cup as the pan. We frosted it with this unbearably sweet heavy cream that I had traded a week's worth of potatoes for. I remember eating it with him, both of us entranced by the rare sweetness. In bed, he spread the remainder of the heavy cream on his cock. 'Here, you have more of a sweet tooth then I do' is what he said, winking at me and smiling his beautiful crooked smile.

If I think about it hard enough, I can still taste it, the sweet heavy cream mixed with his bitter-tasting come.

At first, I thought that being with a man meant that I was a sort of masculine woman. When he told me about gay sex, about 'tops' and 'bottoms', he was talking about stuff he had read in old books, stuff that he barely understood. But as time went on, we forgot about what he read in his books. We just explored, and we loved.

Right now, I want to see him, taste him, hold him. I'm afraid that I'll forget the color of his eyes. That is a hue I don't want to lose.

December 14, 2121

Roll call today was short for a change. The guards were getting cold with all of the snow falling down, and there was a radiation warning issued from a nearby control tower. There are almost always radiation warnings with precipitation. We all got to go inside after a solitary hour of chanting our own names and a single halfhearted lap. I just ate breakfast, and for the first time in a while, I feel a bit stronger. I wasn't able to write yesterday for normal reasons, not enough time, fritzy electricity, etc.

I used to think that etc, was just that, the letters E T and C, but Taylor told me that it was actually a phrase in Latin that means 'and other things' or 'and so forth'. There are a lot of phrases that I didn't know were Latin, like Vice versa, or mea culpa. I just thought they were words. They're pretty words though, I wonder what it would be like to speak Latin?

Looking back on these pages, I realize that I write the words 'Taylor told me' multiple times. There is a reason for that. I'm so ignorant, but before Taylor I was even worse, like an animal. I was barely aware of my surroundings, of the history behind them. On those first few weeks, Taylor told me that he was a Historian in the Community. He read all of the old books and taught classes and was already a chief advisor. The Community have too few weapons, and too few people to pose a military threat against the Unitarist church, but Taylor is a spy. They give their information to other countries who want to take the Unitarist Church down.

Taylor told me that before he was born, the Community had aspirations of being a resistance, but they couldn't. They didn't have the funding or the manpower or the connections.

'They don't care if it's not the USA when other countries are done with it. All we care about is that we advance as a society, and that we can get the Unitarists unseated.'

I miss him. It seems repetitive to write it, but I miss him, I do.

We never fucked in the Hospice. We cuddled, we explored. We sucked each other's cocks. It had been a common insult in my primary school, 'cocksucker'. It was the filthiest thing we had been able to think of. I called my fellow classmates 'cocksucker' too, laughing about it as I did. It was only after I had been uprooted and moved to Ralting that I realized I had been insulting myself.

But it was beautiful. Both to give and receive. I loved feeling him tremble, looking up and seeing him bite his lip to muffle his cries. I loved the soft squeaks that escaped his mouth and nose. The way his hands gently tangled in my hair. I loved when he burrowed under the blanket to gently mouth my cock, fondle it until it stiffened into a hard rod in his mouth. It made me tremble when he looked up at me with his amazing bright eyes.

He also liked to get on top of me, facing each other, moving slowly as one, rubbing our cocks together. It was the first sexual thing we had done together, and it had a special significance. If I had to say it, I would write that Taylor was maybe a bit more dominant then I. But I was on top almost as much as he was. And he loved it.

I remember the first time we made love. It was late September, and I had snuck to his house after curfew. The electricity was out, so he lit candles. We started to cuddle under the blankets, when I felt his hard cock poking between my buttocks.

'Do you want to try?' He whispered. I remember how hopeful he was. I agreed almost immediately. He got up and found this little container of greasy ointment. He slicked up his fingers, and I shivered when they pressed against my pucker. It felt so right.

It hurt like hell. But he went very slow. I remember huddling under him on my stomach, gasping and panting, struggling not to cry out within the paper-thin walls of his tenant. I remember him asking if I wanted to stop, kissing my shoulders, grasping my hand. I shook my head, and he wove his fingers between mine, clenching while my hand extended. I remembered thinking that it looked like a starburst, and it was beautiful.

He started to move, slowly and shallowly. He was so afraid of hurting me that when I got excited I had to move rapidly back and forth to get him moving. I had to fuck myself on his cock and it felt so good.

I have a jerky inconvenient libido here in the gaol. When I write, I nearly always get aroused. Just thinking about him. Sometimes for days on end I feel asexual, as if I'm just an emotionless husk. And then other times, I'll be on roll call, or in the interrogation room, or in the infirmary, and I will Feel him. Almost like he's physically here. I'll Feel his hand on my shoulder or his breath in my hair or his cock against my cock. I'll get aroused, and I'll think about him for hours on end, but when I'm finally alone and I get the chance to masturbate, I can almost never come. It's easier just to wait for my erection to go away.

Writing about him feels like penance. I shouldn't have let myself get caught. I'll write more tomorrow, soon I have to go to the infirmary.

December 19, 2121

It's been several days. For a while I lost track of time. After my last entry, I was tortured in the shower room again, but this time it lasted a lot longer. They took me from my bed while I was sleeping, and sprayed me with powerful jets of icy cold water before I was even awake. They shone bright flashlights in my eyes, and when they were done they left me hanging like a piece of meat in a slaughterhouse.

I had the wet hood over my head, and it was hard to breathe. They came back every few hours with their hoses and lights and questions. They beat me with batons and heavy rubber cables. I have horrible red and black welts all over my ribs and hips and back and legs. When they were finally done, I was half crucified where I hung, wheezing for air. I was taken to the infirmary and I lay on a cot next to the young man who will be executed tomorrow. Another man that assists in the infirmary, a man with whom I have shared a few words... I wont put his name in here. If they find this notebook, any names might be held responsible. But he was kind to me. He spooned hot broth in my mouth and snuck me an extra blanket.

Nikolaus came when I was sick. He touched me all over while rubbing his cock. When he came, I felt a hot drop of it land on my chest, and he licked it off. I was too sick and weak to struggle, but I felt slimy and disgusting the entire time.

I lost five days there. I might have less time then I thought. I want to write about Taylor. Whenever I read and reread these pages, they give me strength. When they tortured me, I screamed with pain and cold and fear, but inside I cried with joy. If they're interrogating me, that means that Taylor is still out there. They haven't caught him.

For a few months, things were golden. We met as often as we could as discreetly as we could. We talked for hours. He told me about the world of ago, and of the world outside of the Unitarist Church. I could listen to him talk for hours on end.

For the longest time I knew that he was from the Community, but it wasn't until October that he told me that he was a spy. He was here under a fake license that said that he was Taylor Clemens, a construction worker imported from another county. His real name was Taylor Bashke.

He told me he wouldn't tell me what he was looking for. He told me that before telling me that he would take me out of the Unitarist Church. He told me when we were eating dinner. I had cooked some potatoes for us. He told me, and my fork dropped to my plate with a clatter. I got up and I hugged him until he gasped for air. I kissed his mouth hard and yanked him over to the bed. He already had the ointment in his denims.