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grimacing—everything out of the sides of their mouths. White-bleached hair bright under the blue lights, black-dyed hair stiff with hair spray, ears and noses pierced with metal, backs covered with leather. Some boys were giving each other tattoos with ink and needles. One boy was burning his arm with a cigarette butt while a girl shrieked at him. Dirk couldn’t tell if she was laughing or crying.
    He went inside. The lead singer’s square white head and hate-filled mouth seemed blown up, larger than life. As the music speeded, Dirk climbed out of the pit, up onstage and flung himself into the slamming mash of bodies. As he fell into the sweating arms he felt desire inside and around him but it was a brutal thing, feverish and dangerous. He looked into the eyes of one boy and saw that the desire was mixed with a hate so deep it had the same shape as the swastika tattoo on the side of the boy’s vein-corded neck. Dirk knew there was nothing he could say to the boy that would change what he thought about the thing inked so deep into his flesh, inked so deep into him. It wasn’t like shrink wrap. But he said it anyway.
    “Fuck fascist skinhead shit.”
    Swastika and two other boys with the same tattoo followed Dirk outside when the show was over.
    “Where you going, faggot?” the first boy said.
    Dirk felt they had looked inside of him to his most terrible secret and it shocked him so much that he lost all the quiet strength he had been trying to build for as long as he could remember.
    “Fuck you,” he whispered.
    The skinheads were on him all at once. Dirk saw their eyes glittering like mica chips with the reflection of his own self-loathing. He wondered if he deserved this because he wanted to touch and kiss a boy. The sound of everything was so loud and he kept seeing the skinhead skulls with the stubble, the bunches of flesh at the back of the neck like a bulldog’s. His own head felt like a shell. A thin one you could crush on the beach. He had never realized how delicate his head was. This pain was hardly different from what he had always felt inside—torn, jarred, pummeled. In a way it was a relief—a confirmation of that other pain. But he wanted to escape it all finally.
    He wanted to die.
    When the blood had stopped pouring enough for him to see, Dirk drove home. He never knew, later, how he made it. He had to stop every so often to lean his head against the wheel. Blood was all over the car upholstery.
    Once when he looked up from the steering wheel he saw a house crossing the road. It was a cheerful-looking yellow house moving on wheels through the valley night. Dirk thought at first he must be hallucinating. Then he thought, my father. He didn’t know why but that was what he thought. He leaned his head back down and when he looked up the house was gone.
    When he got home finally he managed somehow to get the lamp Fifi had given him off the front of the car and carry it inside. He staggered to the bathroom and washed the gashes on his face while Kaboodle whimpered at his feet and gently pawed his leg. His reflection pitched and blurred in the mirror. Blood was caking now, turning darker and thicker.
    Dirk steadied himself by leaning against the wall until he got to his bed. He fell down there and closed his eyes.
    Dirk dreamed of the train. It was moving through the hills, through the forests like a thought through his mind, like blood through a vein in him. There were the fathers taking their showers. They were naked and close together under the water. But something was different. Thin fathers. Emaciated bodies. Shaved scalps. Something was happening. What was happening? Not water. Gas. Coming through the pipes. Gas to make their lungs explode. Dying fathers as the train kept going kept going kept going. To hell.

Gazelle’s Story
    K it was lying over Dirk’s heart staring at him, her usually aloe-vera-green eyes now black with pupil. Even Kit could not take away the pain flashing and shrieking