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in a cage of iron and heavy chicken-wire with a concrete base, a thin thing shifted and crouched. Long pale fingers clawed at the gap at the top of the bars.
    “It’s a geek,” said Ben softly, almost respectfully. He had a long stick in his hand and was thrusting it into the cage, poking the geek, making him twitch and snap at the stick with his teeth. “Come on, you, move. Get off your haunches ... Don’t you know what a geek is, mister? Used to be all of’em was wild niggers from Borneo. This one, Mr. McGruder got him from an asylum north of here... Let go that stick, you! You hungry, geek? Gonna show the man your trick?... watch this, mister. Get in close. Not too close, he’ll try to grab you.” Ben stooped to a smaller cage and pulled out a twisted shape with flailing scaly tail and short scrabbling legs. With a little movement of his lips that might have been disgust or pity, he threw the rat into the geek’s cage.
    I stooped to the gap and saw the rat racing across the cage floor in the instant before the geek’s hand flashed down to claim it. The concrete floor was covered with tracings and designs in flaking maroon. I watched the geek and knew the lines of his thin folded body. He began to salivate, and inside that wet mouth, that smear of red on white chalk skin, I saw the teeth that had once bitten Gene’s bird-boned throat—once longer ago than I knew, once when four boys lived in a church full of dust and sunlight. I saw the teeth that had tried to eat Gene’s pain away crunch through the rat’s bones. Long viscous strings of blood swirled with darker, stranger fluids dripped to the cage floor, forming puddles that covered the tracings there. I knew that later, before this fresh blood dried, the geek’s fingers would find it and use it to create new tracings, new legends to decorate his cage.
    I laced my fingers into the bars. Blood beaded his long dull dark hair, ran bright as watercolor paint down his thin neck and his chest like a box of bones stretched over with dry translucent skin. Blood was on his eyelashes, on his eyelids like makeup. He had painted his lids black, purple, gold before, to touch our gigs with glamour; now they were forever gory crimson, and the intelligence—the brilliance that had taught me to play bass guitar, had brought me through a bad acid trip with tales of heavenly rainbow fire and Chinese fish, had laid his psyche wide open with blood and paint on the walls of our haven—the intelligence still glittered in his eyes, green, mad, but there. Still there. The tracings on the floor of the cage were no accident: there were eyes, hanged men, cats and eclipses in blood. There was Saint’s clever face, my face looking tender, Gene’s face handsome and vampiric and Gene’s face swollen, deadeyed. And there in a corner was Sammy’s own face, a cruel self-portrait, hollow-cheeked, mouth obscured by clots of gore.
    I put my hand though the gap in the bars, but as Sammy reached up to take it, I drew back. His hand was slimy with blood and shreds of flesh. Ages of gore had dried under his fingernails. I could never touch him again. His eyes found mine and held them.
    “Take me with you,” he whispered through the bars, just before he bit the rat’s head off.
    I cranked my car radio up so loud that I could hear no distinct notes, no separate voices, only good mindless noise. I locked the doors and turned the heater on full blast against the winter night, against the vision of stars seen glittering coldly through cage bars. And the ribbon of highway rolled away from Rockville, and in its dwindling brightness I saw all the miles and all the years of the rest of my life.
    (1987)

His Mouth Will Taste of Wormwood
    ‘To the treasures and the pleasures of the grave,’ said my friend Louis, and raised his goblet of absinthe to me in drunken benediction.
    ‘To the funeral lilies,’ I replied, ‘and to the calm pale bones.’ I drank deeply from my own glass. The absinthe