Cleanness (4*)

While reading this novel, in a doctor's waiting room with several other people wearing masks, sleeping, reading, idly scrolling their phones, I was reminded of the NSFW acronym which, early in its usage on gay websites, I thought meant "Not Suitable For Women."  Garth Greenwell's descriptions of sadomasochistic sex are as specific as those of Bulgaria, a country he literally has put on the map of contemporary literature.  Excerpted, the former read almost like lyrical pornography but perhaps with the deepest understanding of the gay psyche I've ever encountered.

But there's no fathoming pleasure, the forms it takes or their sores, nothing we can imagine is beyond it; however far beyond the pale of our own desires, for someone it is the intensest desire, the key to the latch of the self, or the promised key, a key that perhaps never turns.  It's what I love most about the websites I visit, that you can call out for anything you desire, however aberrant or unlikely, and nearly always there comes an answer; it's a large world, we're never as solitary as we think, as unique or unprecedented , what we feel has always already been felt, again and again, without beginning or end.

* * *

For almost two years I had been with no one but R., and for the past three months I hadn't been with anyone at all; I went out in search of feeling, I suppose, or maybe the absence of feeling.  I descended the flights of stairs to the bathrooms at the National Palace of Culture, though for so long I imagined I had left them behind, that I had been lifted out of them, as I was in the habit of putting it to myself, into a new life.  I had thought that before, when I sat in that room in Boston with the priest, I had though precisely those terms, I am being lifted out of it, not by my own agency but by some intervening force:  God, love edno i sushto, one and the same.  But we are never lifted out of such places, I think now, and so I went back to the bathrooms beneath NDK, I had never stopped thinking about them; even as I lay with R., flooded with love, there was a part of me untouched by him, a part that longed to be back here.

* * *

I lined myself up and then hesitated, remembering my earlier worries about disease, the men who had fucked him and me, it was a stupid risk; but then he leaned back until he touched my cock, his hole tightening like a mouth again, and I didn't care about disease or anything else, if there was a risk we would share that too, and in a single motion I made him take it all.

Is there anything left to say about desire?