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I knew where this was going. I was in a Civil War version of Brokeback Mountain.

He said, bellies are for pros, and cut me a line on the bedside table. I snorted it and watched a thousand white butterflies migrate across a memory from my childhood.

With my destiny up in the air and so much on the line,

There is in fact something obscene and sinister about photography, a desire to imprison, to incorporate, a sexual intensity of pursuit. I walked on and shot some boys—young, alive, unconscious— playing baseball. They never glanced in my direction.

Something ugly and ignoble and subhuman is cooking in this mongrel
town of pimps and whores and recessive genes, this degraded leech on the Canal.

..he still felt the deep sadness of his dream.

An oil lamp lit a woman's body. Lee could feel desire for the woman through the other's body. "I'm not queer," he thought. "I'm disembodied."

He could feel himself in the body of the boy. Fragmentary memories . . . the smell of cocoa beans drying in the sun, bamboo tenements, the warm dirty river, the swamps and rubbish heaps on the outskirts of the town. He was with the other boys, sitting on the stone floor of a deserted house. The roof was gone. The stone walls were falling down. Weeds and vines grew over the walls and stretched across the floor.

He passed a group of boys on a corner. One of the boys was so
beautiful that the image cut Lee's senses like a wire whip. A slight involuntary sound of pain escaped from Lee's lips. He turned around, as though looking at the street name. The boy was laughing at some joke, a high-pitched laugh, happy and gay. Lee walked on.

What happens when there is no limit? What is the fate of The Land Where Anything Goes? Men changing into huge centipedes . . . centipedes besieging the houses ... a man tied to a couch and a centipede ten feet long rearing up over him. Is this literal? Did some hideous metamorphosis
occur? What is the meaning of the centipede symbol?

He dropped his own trousers and shorts and lay down beside him. Allerton responded without hostility or disgust, but in his eyes Lee saw a curious detachment, the impersonal calm of an animal or a child.

'No one is ever really alone. You are part of everything alive.' The
difficulty is to convince someone else he is really part of you, so what the hell? Us parts ought to work together.'

I had a duty to live and to bear my burden proudly for all to see, to conquer prejudice and ignorance and hate with knowledge and sincerity and love.
Whenever you are threatened by a hostile presence, you emit a thick cloud of love like an octopus squirts out ink. . . .

Could it be possible that I was one of those subhuman things? ...I might well have destroyed myself, ending an existence which seemed to offer nothing but grotesque misery and humiliation. Nobler, I thought, to die a man than live on, a sex monster.

Allerton shifted in his seat. Lee felt a sharp twinge, a strain or dislocation of the spirit. His eyes ached. He took off his glasses and ran his hand over his closed eyes.

In the dark theater Lee could feel his body pull towards Allerton, an amoeboid protoplasmic projection, straining with a blind worm hunger to enter the other's body, to breathe with his lungs, see with his eyes, learn the feel of his viscera and genitals.

There was vacuous delicacy between us. - Stuff

He was the only man I've ever known who didn't like blow jobs.'
'I don't like them much, either, Frederick said. 'Because most girls aren't any good at them. Except the last girl - and I think that was a guy.
'What about if you're in love?' I asked.
'The love thing - that's different, he said. 'That doesn't have anything to do with technique.’

He felt very different from the way he talked. He felt fragile and tentative, but with a muscular hot streak running up his center. He vacillated between full presence and no presence at all; his present moments were animal and ner-vous, his absence was like a snake that you can feel, but not see, moving past you. He made me feel submissive and high-handed at the same time. 'Man, I said, 'you are so sweet.'

“People, people . . . I don’t care about people! They never help, never take pity!”

We stepped out into the street smelling like grease and smoke. Like prey.

Would their gashes knit together in the dark? Would they be reborn in a place where I could find them?

I heard my own voice as if it were another’s. It left my lips pushed by the pebble of rage caught in my throat. I sang to dislodge it.

Such was the paradox of that land: water, giver of life, could just as easily take it away.

I came to Mezquite searching for Visitación Salazar, the woman who would bury my children and teach me to bury those of others. I walked to the ends of the earth, or where I believed my own world had come to its end.

An imaginary hand projected with such force it seemed Allerton must feel the touch of ectoplasmic fingers caressing his ear, phantom thumbs smoothing his eyebrows, pushing the hair back from his face. Now Lee's hands were running down over the ribs, the stomach. Lee felt the
aching pain of desire in his lungs. His mouth was a little open, showing his teeth in the half-snarl of a baffled animal. He licked his lips.

“I've done lots of things I wish I hadn't done, I've made mistakes. But you can't let it rule your life.” — The Girl on the Plane

He felt a surge of commonality. He imagined that she had experienced his adolescence, and this made him experience it for a moment. — The Girl on the Plane

As Lee stood aside to bow in his dignified old-world greeting, there emerged instead a leer of naked lust, wrenched in the pain and hate of his deprived body and, in simultaneous double exposure, a sweet child's smile of liking and trust, shockingly out of time and out of place, mutilated and hopeless.

A silence peculiar to Mexico seeped into the room, a vibrating, soundless hum.