Scuba diving near a dying coral reef in the warm Caribbean waters, we gradually lose our colors as we descend: first the reds go, then the yellows, then nothing but fathomless blue remains as we sail out over a steeply sloping wall. The endless depths there call to me as you once called to me, and I feel myself begin to slip below the dive-master’s sixty-foot limit as at first I slipped below my own thresholds of sense wherever you were concerned. Afternoon dives are always to forty-five or fifty feet but morning dives are deeper. Yesterday we dived to one-hundred feet in the morning, why not now? Because yesterday there was no wall nearby sliding out of sight, sinking deeper than light, that’s why: among the sandworms and eels and butterfly fish there was no temptation to disappear.

Not quite weightless in the salty sea I settle like a falling leaf to land. Hands across my chest I listen to my measured breathing: one; two; one. My depth gauge reads sixty-six, sixty-seven. Preserving oxygen I drift, I do not swim, and drifting with the current I’ve left the reef behind. Over the wall the blue below me does not seem to end although I know that color too would soon be taken away. Sixty-nine, seventy. This is how I fell in love with you, inching out on another sort of ledge to see how far I might go before I lost my balance, seeking you through a studied darkness much like this watery one, stalking you until you saw me, circling closer for your eyes on every pass, entering your smoky nimbus, rippling the emanations that surrounded you always in those days, making myself more daring so I might fall into the aura of your waves, might disappear into your famous murky depths.

I was new to the nether-world where you had long been famous: the great, the grand, the notorious Master E whose expertise with whips and ropes and straps and pain was all seductive legend. Oh, yes: I saw you demonstrate your prowess for the masses in your wide community at conferences and classes, on videotapes turned into DVDs; I read about your exploits in the panting words of women who longed to be your china dolls, your macramés, your footstools, your mattresses, your holes; I watched you play at parties, turning women into slaves and virgins into whores and making other masters play your sycophants: you who anyway did not deign to play with men yourself, directly.

I watched you work the tools of your deliberate trade with narcissistic certainty. You never moved as fast as your women wanted you to move, were never as rough as they begged you to be, never called and never explained, never flourished your blades as loosely as your legends claimed except every now and then, without notice, when the eyes were right that might report what they had witnessed in hushed murmurs to others who had been less fortunate; when rumor and report could mingle in the echoing chambers of your underground; especially on the public street when nothing was expected, in shadows against dark walls at dusk when colors lost their luster in the gloaming red to yellow to blue and left you to shape the delicate awe that was the brick and mortar of your current biography.

But though I was a novice, soaking wet behind the ears and wearing my keys on the left in homage to an old, long-lost tradition, I knew what I wanted and that was you. I wanted you quietly, privately, out of your public’s eye. I did not need the world to know you played with men—one man—after all, and I did not want your notoriety: just you, naked and bound at my feet and at my mercy. I wanted to beat you in a measured way, one; two; one, the way I’d seen you beat the women you wanted to make fall in love with you; I wanted to make you crawl when you could hardly even move; I wanted to watch you watch in fascinated, helpless horror while I wrapped your balls in my tight fist and brought them slowly all the way up to what would have become your screaming, open, and very dry lips. And one more thing: I wanted you to want to be there. I wanted to see your pleading eyes all doglike in their helpless, begging, desperate, lunging bid for surrender to my absolutely unknown will. As I want to be lost in the disappearing blue below the disappearing surface of the blue Caribbean sea. That was all.

The dive master bangs his knife on his tank: the dive is nearly over. Maybe five minutes’ air remain for most of the divers. Some are up already, rising like bubbles in the water cooler at your club’s meeting house, breaking the surface and bobbing like corks on the pretty waves beneath the pretty cumulous island sky. I can imagine them at sea level, one eye above and one below the water’s edge, removing their masks and mouthpieces, shouting excitedly about what they saw, breathing real air instead of the pure canned stuff we carry on our backs. The first burst of fresh salt spray is always so lively, an inspiration, a breath of life for the mammals we are.

I searched the best outlets for tools and toys and accoutrements, courted famous artisans, then learned to make even better gear myself. I visited the best Masters and Mistresses I could find, as well as the ones with odd skills that set them apart, and what they could teach I dutifully absorbed, making every special technique my own. I was flogged and strapped and paddled and punched, tied and chained and hoisted and caged, cut and pierced and bitten and bludgeoned, used for sex and used for labor, used as a table and used as a toilet, used as a pony and used as a slave, bought and sold like trash for a cigarette, slept with the dogs and woke with a Senator—happily: happily. I wanted to know about everything, and I practiced what I learned on any unsuspecting piece of party flesh, all against the someday coming when I would have a chance to use it with you. But what I learned from you, oh, that was different: that was something no one else could teach, and it had nothing at all to do with all that made you famous: from you I learned patience; I learned to simply wait.

Ninety feet down I hover, immobile as an object in the deep, rocking waves. Three barracuda thirty feet away hover like this also, like readied torpedoes, aware and wary of me as if I were a bigger fish. Everything is wary here, everything is prey. Above me I see our group of divers all buddied up, the last ones rising behind their bubbles. The tropical colors of their bright dive suits, red, yellow, and blue as reef fish, fade in the greenish distance of water, dim brightly, as it were, against the thinned milky light of the filtered sky. Up there I see you as you look around and look around again, and spin, and spin until your movements seem frantic and antic and then when you see me so far away, so far below the surface, you motion and move at once: Come, your arm calls, and I’m coming. You swim, you do not drift, down and out across those dozens of watery feet, reaching out your hands to come mask to mask with me. You arrive out of breath, out of air. I see your chest heave, see your grasping hands as you stare wondering into my eyes. I could let you buddy breathe from my tank. Below me the wall disappears in blue. I wait.

 

© 2005 James Williams - Contributor's Bio