It had been the very first night—but it was hard to tell really, as since then, it had just felt like one long unstopping night—when I had first glimpsed Tal.
It wasn’t as though everyone else in the Club talked about him (most of the people in the club had their own problems), even though he was a popular reason and source for the rumors and gossip that filtered through the walls. It also wasn’t his performances, which actually did make him worthy of his rank, and the darling of all the patrons.
What really caught me, I think, was that famous smile.
My experience with the Club began, as most of the people in it might relate to, with a lot of debt. But that sort of thing happened when you ran a business and owed certain people money. To be fair, it wasn’t my business; it had been my father’s. The shop that my father ran was pretty much all we had as a source of income after my mother left us. I was very little then, and I don’t remember much about it.
For many years, Dad tried his level best to raise me, send me to school and give me all that I wanted. I guess you could say he allowed me to be as free as I could with my own money. He tried to give me things that I wanted without spoiling me too much... it made me think that nothing was wrong, that we were okay.
I guess maybe dad may have been trying to do what he could for me, to make up for the fact that he raised me all alone.
And then he had the heart attack.
And it wasn't until the bills landed to me did I start wondering exactly where the money was coming from. I should have been more observant maybe, recognizing the fact that it had to be impossible that the life I lived came from the earnings from a single job.
When I found myself neck deep with bills, worries about the shop, dad's hospital bills and funeral bills... I found out where the money came from.
It goes without saying that as I was incapable of paying any of the money back, the people who dad owed money to decided to take me instead. Have me work off my debt from them. I was told by a lot of people in the club that this was a common thing, and that a lot of them had ended up in the club for exactly the same reason.
It was the first night—it had been raining, I remember—when I arrived at the club to begin training in my new job... well, as much training as you could give someone who was about to become a plaything.
Mr. Jed came to meet me when they came for me, and he looked kind. Not at all like someone who sent young men into places like this so their bodies could be sold. I was glad to have him, because he eased my terror. A kind face does that, in the face of desperation.
The Club didn’t make an impression on me. I don’t remember much past the rain, and the fact I was taken in the back way. Everything had been dark there, but I remember the water running off the brick, shining, and everything looking like black glass.
He had just introduced me to my temporary companion, Cary, who was short, stocky, and impossibly handsome. That was unexpected. And I didn’t realize that when he was walking me down the halls of the quarters, he was going to take me to mine. Here in the quarters, bodies of various shapes and forms were on display without any shame whatsoever. Most of them seemed to not see me at all—the young men who were also driven to work here by circumstance. But there were ones who did gave me this look, as though they were watching someone about to go to judgment.
Maybe that was why I noticed him. He alone had been different from the jaded expressions and the eyes clouded by the mist of drugs. He had been bright, smiling, when he tossed his head back to laugh. When he met my eyes, I realized that I'd been watching him.
"Hey Tal!" I heard Cary say to him, as he rose from a velvet perch to approach us. "You slept in the guests’ boudoir last night again, didn't you?" Cary's tone was laced with just enough envy to inform me that this wasn't supposed to happen.
Tal merely laughed again, leaning against his door in such a way that his silk robe that barely covered his extremities fell open, and I saw that he was an expanse of golden skin. He was beautiful, and he had known it very well.
He leveled a penetrating gaze at me, and seemed to see through to my life for the next eight years, though he would ever only know three of it. "Well he's a looker, at least. Good for you, kid. If you watch your step, you might just leave this place alive. Careful not to let yourself get too flogged."
"Tal." Mr. Jed's tone was warning.
"I’m just being glib, Jed.” And he smiled.
And that smile is one that I would remember for the rest of my life, whenever I reached through my memories of the Club.
The first few weeks, to me, were jarring. I came from a home that, while not particularly wealthy or well-off, had warmth. And there was a sense of hope. There was no such thing inside the Club.
You couldn’t find warmth in the Club unless it was in the harsh lights of the stage, where the bodies danced. It wasn’t like any other club I had ever heard about. I didn’t know places like these existed. When young men and women, bound by contract, danced and performed the way you only saw in major theatre performances, with cinematographic dazzle, all for the sole reason of roping a captive audience further in. An audience comprised of the wealthy, patrons of the dancers…and friends of the major Families who controlled things beyond my comprehension.
I thought that this only happened in movies. But it looks like that this world, being real, was just so much worse when the curtains go down... and you realize that the show isn’t over.
And yet in spite of all the banks of heat and light in the stage, the lust and the flowing alcohol, there was no warmth. Not even in the beds that they--us, all of us—eventually end up in, should the offer for the right body be the right price.
The beds were always cold.
I know that because for the first several weeks, I wasn’t allowed to dance. The new ones were always made to look after the ones with “tenure” in this Purgatory, where we sold ourselves to pay off our debts. We were made to work using our bodies, first as servants for the more beautiful, and then, when we became trained and…better, and more desirable…we would be auctioned off too.
Those first few weeks, I was the only newcomer. I was made to clean and help the others prepare before they were launched onstage to be salivated over. In those dark hours of the morning into dawn, I would be woken, and I would have to usher clients out, and straighten the boudoirs while the dancers wandered back into the quarters to bathe, and sleep.
And for many days in the span of time that I was doing this work, I would run into Tal, curled up in a boudoir bed that wasn’t meant for dancers.
The first time I found him, it was by accident. It had been dark when I wandered into the wall where the most exclusive rooms were, where the high rollers brought their paid goods to enjoy them. I didn’t know about all that—I just knew that I was told to straighten them out.
It was dark in the room when I went inside. The drapes were down, and everything smelled like heady perfume, and sex. I couldn’t see much, not even the features of the room. It wasn’t until I reached the drapes and opened them into cold dawn that I saw that the room was large and ornate, in the style of old French rooms I recognize in museums, a complete disaster ground of food and drink.
And Tal was curled in the sheets like a cat, sleeping and warm.
I saw him when I turned around, and recognized him immediately. Mostly because of what Cary said, about Tal sleeping in guest rooms. And second because he was Tal.
Because the Club, where the more beautiful you are made you more desired, made you more precious to the lusting audience, and gave you more worth… Tal was the beautiful one.
“Hey.” No response. I walked to the bed. “Hey, come on.” Not even a stir. I was starting to get a little apprehensive. For all I knew, his lover last night was too rough and smothered him. “Hey, wake up!” I tugged on the sheet, but immediately stepped back and turned my eyes away when it revealed that Tal was naked as the day he was born. I’d glimpsed him onstage dancing to allure women and men, but not this up close and I didn’t plan on doing so anytime soon.
The cold air woke Tal, and he opened his eyes without even appearing to care that there was someone in the room who could see him naked. “Oh, you…” he stretched and I looked further away, starting to grab fallen pillows and sheets. “Already doing drudge work…?”
“You’re not supposed to be in here,” I replied.
“God, you’re just as bad as Cary and the rest of them.” Tal pushed himself up and smiled at me in a really unsettling way, like a Cheshire Cat resting on a tree. “Ask Jed and the rest yourself if you want—I can stay here if I want to.”
“Like you deserve any special treatment.” Since I couldn’t glare at him, I glared at the bottles of wine and the glasses. What the hell was this suite—the flatware was gold-plated. What kind of club has this luxury anyway?
Tal shrugged. “Of course I do. I’m the hardest working body in this Club.”
Much as I would’ve liked to contradict him, it was clear enough even to a stranger like me that this was true. It wasn’t just that Tal looked the way he did—all golden skin in spite of being trapped in this place and working at night, eyes that blazed amber in the stage lights, and an absolute lack of shame over his every movement onstage or off—it was that look of loathing that some of the dancers bestowed on him whenever he passed. It was a sure sign that someone was making enough money to achieve freedom in a few years, whereas the rest of them, like me, well…
Tal scooped up a silk sheet and wrapped it around himself like a toga, reaching for a half-full glass of champagne. “God, I’m starving. Did you bring me anything?”
“You’re not an invalid, go downstairs and find something yourself.” I dumped the filthy plates of congealing sauces into my cart. Whoever Tal was with last night, they’d had a feast. When I looked at Tal again, he looked very pleased, smirking at me as though he knew something I didn’t.
I hated the sight of his eyes then. He looked as though he knew me so well, when I was sure he knew nothing at all. “What are you smiling at?” I demanded.
“You should keep that attitude,” he told me, looking impressed. “It’ll help you here. So take care not to lose it, no matter who’s talking to you.”
I only glared at him then, and he had laughed even more when I did, because I didn’t know what he had meant. I learned later on that talking like that, especially to someone who “outranked” me, gave you some pretty serious problems. I found that out later that morning.
The suite Tal was in took so long to clean that I was late to everything. I was told off by one of the bartenders for not being on time to restock the liquor, and was in a horrible mood. So when one of the other male dancers knocked past me in the hallway—when he could’ve moved out of the way easily—I snarled back.
I don’t know what Taylor was so angry about at that time (and apparently this was his “default”), but when we started fighting, I was taken entirely by surprise when my world spun. I felt the rail of the stairwell biting into my back and realized that my balance was going—was about to fall and Taylor was smiling over me like he knew exactly what he was going to do, and he didn’t care.
I don’t remember if I screamed. I think I was too terrified to really make a sound. I remember the breath leaving my lungs and that horrendous moment of panic and I remember thinking: was I going to die here?
I think I scratched three streaks of red into Cary’s arm when I clutched at him in desperation, both for pulling me back from the brink and again when I was stopping him from leaping onto Taylor, who just snarled and walked off. He didn’t get into any trouble over it. It had been my fault, apparently, for provoking him. And even if Cary tried to protect me, it didn’t mean anything.
Because I was nothing. Unless I was earning like they were, until I was being bedded by patrons, unless I was worth something out on those stage lights and in those suites, I was nothing to them. Until I could be sold, I wasn’t anything.
Cary tried to see if I was alright, but I barely heard him. I saw Tal at the doorway of one of the rooms, watching us. He had an odd, small smile on his face. It was the kind of smile you have when you’re watching someone do something so ultimately futile, that in spite of yourself, you find their persistence miserably amusing.
Cary was trying to protect me. I knew that each time I’d find him next to me or just nearby, even though he had to perform and I was the drudge of the Club. To be honest, at first I was often so afraid that he wanted something else. A few of the dancers had made passes at me, male and female, even though I’d turned them all down, especially the girls—since I wasn’t interested at all in women. I’d never been with anyone. And Tal told me, one day, that it was to my credit.
“You have three possible results,” he told me, when I found him again in the same suite he’d slept in before. He was wearing a luxurious robe, although there’s not much good it did as he let it hang open like that. “When your virginity is sold off, you would either hate the bed, in which case, you’re in for a lot of hell… Or you would find yourself going back to it over and over, which means you’ve been ruined.”
“What’s my third result?”
He smiled, looking for his own answers at the bottom of his champagne glass.
I mostly tried to tune out the things Tal tells me. It wasn’t fair of him to talk to me the way he did because he existed in a completely different plane. I didn’t believe he understood at all. And why should he? He was at one end, and I was on the other.
It was different, for certain others. You could see that difference when they cross the pathways towards the stage. When they walk forth with the others, they stood at the lead. The patrons often always looked at them and them only, and the rest of us have to fight tooth and nail to get to where they are—regardless of what we had to do with ourselves.
Tal pulled the gazes of the men and women who waited for his presence. And the patrons paid—oh, they definitely paid—to see him. To watch him dance. To watch him seduce them. And then, if they paid even more, to bed him. The more they paid, the faster you get to freedom.
And that was the goal, wasn’t it? To survive long enough to leave.
“Many die here.”
I looked up when I heard Tal’s voice. He wasn’t talking to me at the time. Management had finally deemed I was ready, you see, and Mr. Jed told me that I was to perform for the first time today. Preparing didn’t seem real, and it sped time up too fast. I was in a state of denial, until today, when I found myself sitting in the costume area. I had been shaking all day, and didn’t like to be touched. Cary sat by me, watching over me.
We both looked up when Tal spoke. He wasn’t talking to me, or Cary. He was talking to the Twins, and they were all standing at the wings. The Twins were two of his more or less regular lovers in the Club. The Club didn’t mind so much if you were of rank and you bedded another dancer, as long as you can get it up when it comes to the bed with a patron.
He looked at the identical blond boys. “Don’t they?”
The Twins only smiled at him. They were a popular act, those two—you can’t get just one, you have to get both identical boys, and considering the way sound penetrates the suite’s walls when they’re with Tal at night, the combination must be deadly.
“You don’t care about that kind of thing,” one of them said. The other, identical to the last eyelash, smiled, half naked, has his arm around his brother’s waist in a possessive fashion. “So why bring it up now?”
Tal stared at the both of them before he looked to the stage lights. There were girls out there right now, seducing men and women, but I knew it wasn’t the girls that Tal was staring at. I watched his reflection from my mirror, when he added, “Do you think he knows that?”
The Twins smiled. “…he should.”
I didn’t have to ask Cary who it was. I’ve seen who Tal was talking about, I’ve seen him enough times when I would be catching dancers’ props when they ran into the wings after their performance. I’d seen him leave that opulent suite, kissing Tal, who was in his arms as though in complete surrender, stripped away of everything that made him so spiteful and arrogant. Tal was almost exclusively his. He paid exorbitant amounts to keep own Tal for the night, but the extent of his power seemed to spill over even when he wasn’t there.
There he was, Callan, sitting in one of the exclusive booths with perfect view of the stage. Under a fringe of immaculate blonde hair, a pair of penetrating green eyes that didn’t even seem to be looking to the performers on stage stared into the wings as though in spite of the darkness and the fact that there was no way he could really see anything from his distance there, he could meet Tal’s eyes.
But Tal could see him for sure…and Tal stared as though he was drinking him in the way he swilled wine and champagne, looking for answers in oblivion. The way he stared at the guy in that booth—he really couldn’t possibly have been much older than Tal—was a mix of emotions that I couldn’t really understand.
Love, hatred, longing, lust…
Of all the many things it showed, it was the first emotion that made it wrong. Difficult to swallow, or accept.
In my honest opinion, that was a truly miserable thought, plaguing my mind when Tal found me. The first night I performed was the first night I was bought. For an extraordinary price, from what I heard. It was the first night I was bedded by a patron.
Tal found me at the back stairwell, sitting at the steps. I don’t recall how I got there. I just remember staring at that long flight of steps in the dimness of the building, steps that eventually led to some door marked freedom, for all of us. I felt him drop a blanket onto my shoulder.
“Welcome,” he said, in a tone that sounded too airy to be truly apologetic.
“I’m fine.”
“I’m sure you are.” I felt his hand on my shoulder. I tried what I could to ignore him. He looked curious as he stared at me, penetrating me again with those eyes, that looked all the more golden in the old yellow bulbs of the back stairwell. “That patron,” he began, an odd glint in his eyes, “…wasn’t the first time you’ve bedded a man, was it?’
I kept my eyes on the stairs. “…No, it wasn’t.”
A smile, faint, ghastly, began to show on his face. “You gave yourself to Cary, didn’t you?”
I was in love with Cary. And he loved me. For no reason in the world other than that. And it was terrible because it was so bleak a concept in this place. “Yes.”
Tal carefully stood up again, noiseless. I wondered, again, why he stayed. Surely he’d paid his debts by now? Surely he was skilled enough to stage escape? I felt misery rise up in my throat like bile—because from this night onward, I would have to dance when I was told to and bed another man if I was bought to do so. There was no room for dreams or love and Cary. And Tal would know, wouldn’t he? With the way he looked at his blond patron?
The same patron who bought him tonight. Who must’ve already slipped away—so recently that I’m sure Tal’s bed must still be warm. The one who held Tal possessively, and was allowed to by him. Tal who was never owned by anyone. Sometimes, not even the Club. Tal should know why I felt this way.
“If you’ve fallen for Cary…”
I looked at him, he was already walking back to the access door, robe askew on him again. He was smiling at me in that strange way again—like the time he saw Taylor nearly kill me. “…then you had better learn to protect each other. Clever, that…letting him take you before anyone else… One less scar than the rest of us.”
That was how life moved in the Club. Each day melted onto the next. We hardly saw the daylight—we were so used to being up only in the night. After I lost my virginity, everyone believed I would coast, like everyone else, because now I had lost this attribute. Tal told me otherwise—because of the price people paid for in order to bed me, he was sure that I would rise to the ranks.
And he reminded me yet again that he believed I’d survive.
Practice, dance, get put up for auction like an animal, get bought, get bedded… One day after another. It took me months for my mind to accept that I would be impaled onto a different man every night. Cary even told me, when he’d be in my bed, that I still tremble a little even when it was the both of us.
Maybe that was something I envied about Tal. In the real world, it was frowned upon—that ability to simply bed and move on, friend or patron. I wanted the apathy he had. After the first few nights, I wanted his easy countenance, that mindless seduction he performed on those who doted on him and loved him in all senses of the world.
I wanted the ruin that he had crowned upon himself. He rated it himself, didn’t he? Because he searched for this, wanted this the way he did, he was ruined. He was beautiful and he was ruined, and he loved as madly as the rest of us, and yet no matter what he did, he wasn’t ever free.
Not even with that gorgeous patron he was mad about, Callan, who he loved, and loved him with such possessiveness, that it was breaking them. He demanded for Tal more than anyone… and sometimes, when he couldn’t come to the Club, he would send his friend to buy Tal for the night simply so no one else could have him.
Tal was at his worst during those times—when he expected his beloved who would buy him off and yet not arrive. He’d feign his usual shine. Tal was always brightest when he was pretending.
The way Tal searched for a body to warm his bed made me wonder sometimes, if he was really in love with Callan or if he was someone who satisfied this craving that was steadily driving him mad. It was a dangerous game to play, I decided, the night I heard raised voices in the suite—crashing and glass breaking—and the next day Tal couldn’t dance, recovering, after Callan had heard that he had bed another famous patron.
I imagine…if Callan was angry about this kind of thing, he must’ve already raised his hand to Tal more than once. But never too much, I suppose… because that wasn’t allowed here in the Club. There were people that specialized in that. But not Tal. Tal was the pinnacle, the beautiful one. He couldn’t be touched or harmed.
“Besides,” Tal told me, as he walked downstairs with me to steal food in the kitchens, around four am in the morning, “There’s nothing they can ruin that I haven’t already ruined.”
“Why are you here?” I finally asked him. “Why are you still here? If you’re so wanted, if they pay so much for you…why aren’t you out of here?”
“You’ve said it exactly, haven’t you?” Tal replied, smiling in that way again, looking older. So much older than he ought to have been, in the dim light. “Because I’m so wanted… because they pay so much for me… Because I’m so desired… I have to stay.”
“…that’s ridiculous, we both know that you—”
“And besides…” He looked out the window, waiting for the sky to light. He looked so tired. “…where would I go?”
“Callan wants you so badly,” I told him, touching the bruise on Tal’s naked waist. “He should buy you for good.”
I had never felt like an idiot before in front of Tal…until that moment. When he looked at me so strangely. Where he had looked so much older earlier, now he looked so young. Like the young man that he really was.
“…do you think…that I’d like to be his that way? That I would like myself to be ‘owned’? Isn’t it enough that in here…we’re playthings?” He looked away from me, and into the dark sky. “…if Callan loves me as he says he does…he would never buy me. He would leave me here.”
I didn’t understand what Tal meant. I didn’t know why anyone would like to stay and live this way. How did that express love?
Everyone wondered about him. The strange, beautiful boy who people paid fortunes to see, half-mad with lust, and destructively in love. There were many questions, assumptions, about the way Tal was and what made him this way. The rumors have not ended to this day. He just left such a strange impression, and such a bittersweet taste.
No one would ever know the answers to all the questions, or the truth. I wish I had asked, because I was almost sure he would answer these questions.
The bullet hole was still in the carpet to this day.
One of Tal’s many lovers had grown jealous of his devotion to Callan, and loathed Callan’s possession of him. Weapons were forbidden in the Club—more to stop dancers from killing themselves—but he had brought one in. He had drawn the gun and aimed for the booth where Callan always was.
It was Tal who the bullet penetrated. And as he lay dying in Callan’s arms, the gunman was thrashed to death by the people of the Club, and chaos reigned.
But you should’ve seen it. You should have seen the peace I saw in Tal’s eyes, when Callan held him so gently. You should’ve seen how his eyes lit up and suddenly all the strife had sloughed off him. He was so young and so unbelievably innocent.
He loved with such purity that it made me wonder if everything he had ever done, all the madness, was the fuel for that white hot flame.
You should’ve seen his eyes when he settled them on Callan for the final time, touched his face, and said he’d do it again and again, and that he’d wait for him in hell. I’d remember it over and over again, for years after his death, and even after Cary and I escaped the Club five years later.
He was beautiful.
It wasn’t as though everyone else in the Club talked about him (most of the people in the club had their own problems), even though he was a popular reason and source for the rumors and gossip that filtered through the walls. It also wasn’t his performances, which actually did make him worthy of his rank, and the darling of all the patrons.
What really caught me, I think, was that famous smile.
My experience with the Club began, as most of the people in it might relate to, with a lot of debt. But that sort of thing happened when you ran a business and owed certain people money. To be fair, it wasn’t my business; it had been my father’s. The shop that my father ran was pretty much all we had as a source of income after my mother left us. I was very little then, and I don’t remember much about it.
For many years, Dad tried his level best to raise me, send me to school and give me all that I wanted. I guess you could say he allowed me to be as free as I could with my own money. He tried to give me things that I wanted without spoiling me too much... it made me think that nothing was wrong, that we were okay.
I guess maybe dad may have been trying to do what he could for me, to make up for the fact that he raised me all alone.
And then he had the heart attack.
And it wasn't until the bills landed to me did I start wondering exactly where the money was coming from. I should have been more observant maybe, recognizing the fact that it had to be impossible that the life I lived came from the earnings from a single job.
When I found myself neck deep with bills, worries about the shop, dad's hospital bills and funeral bills... I found out where the money came from.
It goes without saying that as I was incapable of paying any of the money back, the people who dad owed money to decided to take me instead. Have me work off my debt from them. I was told by a lot of people in the club that this was a common thing, and that a lot of them had ended up in the club for exactly the same reason.
It was the first night—it had been raining, I remember—when I arrived at the club to begin training in my new job... well, as much training as you could give someone who was about to become a plaything.
Mr. Jed came to meet me when they came for me, and he looked kind. Not at all like someone who sent young men into places like this so their bodies could be sold. I was glad to have him, because he eased my terror. A kind face does that, in the face of desperation.
The Club didn’t make an impression on me. I don’t remember much past the rain, and the fact I was taken in the back way. Everything had been dark there, but I remember the water running off the brick, shining, and everything looking like black glass.
He had just introduced me to my temporary companion, Cary, who was short, stocky, and impossibly handsome. That was unexpected. And I didn’t realize that when he was walking me down the halls of the quarters, he was going to take me to mine. Here in the quarters, bodies of various shapes and forms were on display without any shame whatsoever. Most of them seemed to not see me at all—the young men who were also driven to work here by circumstance. But there were ones who did gave me this look, as though they were watching someone about to go to judgment.
Maybe that was why I noticed him. He alone had been different from the jaded expressions and the eyes clouded by the mist of drugs. He had been bright, smiling, when he tossed his head back to laugh. When he met my eyes, I realized that I'd been watching him.
"Hey Tal!" I heard Cary say to him, as he rose from a velvet perch to approach us. "You slept in the guests’ boudoir last night again, didn't you?" Cary's tone was laced with just enough envy to inform me that this wasn't supposed to happen.
Tal merely laughed again, leaning against his door in such a way that his silk robe that barely covered his extremities fell open, and I saw that he was an expanse of golden skin. He was beautiful, and he had known it very well.
He leveled a penetrating gaze at me, and seemed to see through to my life for the next eight years, though he would ever only know three of it. "Well he's a looker, at least. Good for you, kid. If you watch your step, you might just leave this place alive. Careful not to let yourself get too flogged."
"Tal." Mr. Jed's tone was warning.
"I’m just being glib, Jed.” And he smiled.
And that smile is one that I would remember for the rest of my life, whenever I reached through my memories of the Club.
The first few weeks, to me, were jarring. I came from a home that, while not particularly wealthy or well-off, had warmth. And there was a sense of hope. There was no such thing inside the Club.
You couldn’t find warmth in the Club unless it was in the harsh lights of the stage, where the bodies danced. It wasn’t like any other club I had ever heard about. I didn’t know places like these existed. When young men and women, bound by contract, danced and performed the way you only saw in major theatre performances, with cinematographic dazzle, all for the sole reason of roping a captive audience further in. An audience comprised of the wealthy, patrons of the dancers…and friends of the major Families who controlled things beyond my comprehension.
I thought that this only happened in movies. But it looks like that this world, being real, was just so much worse when the curtains go down... and you realize that the show isn’t over.
And yet in spite of all the banks of heat and light in the stage, the lust and the flowing alcohol, there was no warmth. Not even in the beds that they--us, all of us—eventually end up in, should the offer for the right body be the right price.
The beds were always cold.
I know that because for the first several weeks, I wasn’t allowed to dance. The new ones were always made to look after the ones with “tenure” in this Purgatory, where we sold ourselves to pay off our debts. We were made to work using our bodies, first as servants for the more beautiful, and then, when we became trained and…better, and more desirable…we would be auctioned off too.
Those first few weeks, I was the only newcomer. I was made to clean and help the others prepare before they were launched onstage to be salivated over. In those dark hours of the morning into dawn, I would be woken, and I would have to usher clients out, and straighten the boudoirs while the dancers wandered back into the quarters to bathe, and sleep.
And for many days in the span of time that I was doing this work, I would run into Tal, curled up in a boudoir bed that wasn’t meant for dancers.
The first time I found him, it was by accident. It had been dark when I wandered into the wall where the most exclusive rooms were, where the high rollers brought their paid goods to enjoy them. I didn’t know about all that—I just knew that I was told to straighten them out.
It was dark in the room when I went inside. The drapes were down, and everything smelled like heady perfume, and sex. I couldn’t see much, not even the features of the room. It wasn’t until I reached the drapes and opened them into cold dawn that I saw that the room was large and ornate, in the style of old French rooms I recognize in museums, a complete disaster ground of food and drink.
And Tal was curled in the sheets like a cat, sleeping and warm.
I saw him when I turned around, and recognized him immediately. Mostly because of what Cary said, about Tal sleeping in guest rooms. And second because he was Tal.
Because the Club, where the more beautiful you are made you more desired, made you more precious to the lusting audience, and gave you more worth… Tal was the beautiful one.
“Hey.” No response. I walked to the bed. “Hey, come on.” Not even a stir. I was starting to get a little apprehensive. For all I knew, his lover last night was too rough and smothered him. “Hey, wake up!” I tugged on the sheet, but immediately stepped back and turned my eyes away when it revealed that Tal was naked as the day he was born. I’d glimpsed him onstage dancing to allure women and men, but not this up close and I didn’t plan on doing so anytime soon.
The cold air woke Tal, and he opened his eyes without even appearing to care that there was someone in the room who could see him naked. “Oh, you…” he stretched and I looked further away, starting to grab fallen pillows and sheets. “Already doing drudge work…?”
“You’re not supposed to be in here,” I replied.
“God, you’re just as bad as Cary and the rest of them.” Tal pushed himself up and smiled at me in a really unsettling way, like a Cheshire Cat resting on a tree. “Ask Jed and the rest yourself if you want—I can stay here if I want to.”
“Like you deserve any special treatment.” Since I couldn’t glare at him, I glared at the bottles of wine and the glasses. What the hell was this suite—the flatware was gold-plated. What kind of club has this luxury anyway?
Tal shrugged. “Of course I do. I’m the hardest working body in this Club.”
Much as I would’ve liked to contradict him, it was clear enough even to a stranger like me that this was true. It wasn’t just that Tal looked the way he did—all golden skin in spite of being trapped in this place and working at night, eyes that blazed amber in the stage lights, and an absolute lack of shame over his every movement onstage or off—it was that look of loathing that some of the dancers bestowed on him whenever he passed. It was a sure sign that someone was making enough money to achieve freedom in a few years, whereas the rest of them, like me, well…
Tal scooped up a silk sheet and wrapped it around himself like a toga, reaching for a half-full glass of champagne. “God, I’m starving. Did you bring me anything?”
“You’re not an invalid, go downstairs and find something yourself.” I dumped the filthy plates of congealing sauces into my cart. Whoever Tal was with last night, they’d had a feast. When I looked at Tal again, he looked very pleased, smirking at me as though he knew something I didn’t.
I hated the sight of his eyes then. He looked as though he knew me so well, when I was sure he knew nothing at all. “What are you smiling at?” I demanded.
“You should keep that attitude,” he told me, looking impressed. “It’ll help you here. So take care not to lose it, no matter who’s talking to you.”
I only glared at him then, and he had laughed even more when I did, because I didn’t know what he had meant. I learned later on that talking like that, especially to someone who “outranked” me, gave you some pretty serious problems. I found that out later that morning.
The suite Tal was in took so long to clean that I was late to everything. I was told off by one of the bartenders for not being on time to restock the liquor, and was in a horrible mood. So when one of the other male dancers knocked past me in the hallway—when he could’ve moved out of the way easily—I snarled back.
I don’t know what Taylor was so angry about at that time (and apparently this was his “default”), but when we started fighting, I was taken entirely by surprise when my world spun. I felt the rail of the stairwell biting into my back and realized that my balance was going—was about to fall and Taylor was smiling over me like he knew exactly what he was going to do, and he didn’t care.
I don’t remember if I screamed. I think I was too terrified to really make a sound. I remember the breath leaving my lungs and that horrendous moment of panic and I remember thinking: was I going to die here?
I think I scratched three streaks of red into Cary’s arm when I clutched at him in desperation, both for pulling me back from the brink and again when I was stopping him from leaping onto Taylor, who just snarled and walked off. He didn’t get into any trouble over it. It had been my fault, apparently, for provoking him. And even if Cary tried to protect me, it didn’t mean anything.
Because I was nothing. Unless I was earning like they were, until I was being bedded by patrons, unless I was worth something out on those stage lights and in those suites, I was nothing to them. Until I could be sold, I wasn’t anything.
Cary tried to see if I was alright, but I barely heard him. I saw Tal at the doorway of one of the rooms, watching us. He had an odd, small smile on his face. It was the kind of smile you have when you’re watching someone do something so ultimately futile, that in spite of yourself, you find their persistence miserably amusing.
Cary was trying to protect me. I knew that each time I’d find him next to me or just nearby, even though he had to perform and I was the drudge of the Club. To be honest, at first I was often so afraid that he wanted something else. A few of the dancers had made passes at me, male and female, even though I’d turned them all down, especially the girls—since I wasn’t interested at all in women. I’d never been with anyone. And Tal told me, one day, that it was to my credit.
“You have three possible results,” he told me, when I found him again in the same suite he’d slept in before. He was wearing a luxurious robe, although there’s not much good it did as he let it hang open like that. “When your virginity is sold off, you would either hate the bed, in which case, you’re in for a lot of hell… Or you would find yourself going back to it over and over, which means you’ve been ruined.”
“What’s my third result?”
He smiled, looking for his own answers at the bottom of his champagne glass.
I mostly tried to tune out the things Tal tells me. It wasn’t fair of him to talk to me the way he did because he existed in a completely different plane. I didn’t believe he understood at all. And why should he? He was at one end, and I was on the other.
It was different, for certain others. You could see that difference when they cross the pathways towards the stage. When they walk forth with the others, they stood at the lead. The patrons often always looked at them and them only, and the rest of us have to fight tooth and nail to get to where they are—regardless of what we had to do with ourselves.
Tal pulled the gazes of the men and women who waited for his presence. And the patrons paid—oh, they definitely paid—to see him. To watch him dance. To watch him seduce them. And then, if they paid even more, to bed him. The more they paid, the faster you get to freedom.
And that was the goal, wasn’t it? To survive long enough to leave.
“Many die here.”
I looked up when I heard Tal’s voice. He wasn’t talking to me at the time. Management had finally deemed I was ready, you see, and Mr. Jed told me that I was to perform for the first time today. Preparing didn’t seem real, and it sped time up too fast. I was in a state of denial, until today, when I found myself sitting in the costume area. I had been shaking all day, and didn’t like to be touched. Cary sat by me, watching over me.
We both looked up when Tal spoke. He wasn’t talking to me, or Cary. He was talking to the Twins, and they were all standing at the wings. The Twins were two of his more or less regular lovers in the Club. The Club didn’t mind so much if you were of rank and you bedded another dancer, as long as you can get it up when it comes to the bed with a patron.
He looked at the identical blond boys. “Don’t they?”
The Twins only smiled at him. They were a popular act, those two—you can’t get just one, you have to get both identical boys, and considering the way sound penetrates the suite’s walls when they’re with Tal at night, the combination must be deadly.
“You don’t care about that kind of thing,” one of them said. The other, identical to the last eyelash, smiled, half naked, has his arm around his brother’s waist in a possessive fashion. “So why bring it up now?”
Tal stared at the both of them before he looked to the stage lights. There were girls out there right now, seducing men and women, but I knew it wasn’t the girls that Tal was staring at. I watched his reflection from my mirror, when he added, “Do you think he knows that?”
The Twins smiled. “…he should.”
I didn’t have to ask Cary who it was. I’ve seen who Tal was talking about, I’ve seen him enough times when I would be catching dancers’ props when they ran into the wings after their performance. I’d seen him leave that opulent suite, kissing Tal, who was in his arms as though in complete surrender, stripped away of everything that made him so spiteful and arrogant. Tal was almost exclusively his. He paid exorbitant amounts to keep own Tal for the night, but the extent of his power seemed to spill over even when he wasn’t there.
There he was, Callan, sitting in one of the exclusive booths with perfect view of the stage. Under a fringe of immaculate blonde hair, a pair of penetrating green eyes that didn’t even seem to be looking to the performers on stage stared into the wings as though in spite of the darkness and the fact that there was no way he could really see anything from his distance there, he could meet Tal’s eyes.
But Tal could see him for sure…and Tal stared as though he was drinking him in the way he swilled wine and champagne, looking for answers in oblivion. The way he stared at the guy in that booth—he really couldn’t possibly have been much older than Tal—was a mix of emotions that I couldn’t really understand.
Love, hatred, longing, lust…
Of all the many things it showed, it was the first emotion that made it wrong. Difficult to swallow, or accept.
In my honest opinion, that was a truly miserable thought, plaguing my mind when Tal found me. The first night I performed was the first night I was bought. For an extraordinary price, from what I heard. It was the first night I was bedded by a patron.
Tal found me at the back stairwell, sitting at the steps. I don’t recall how I got there. I just remember staring at that long flight of steps in the dimness of the building, steps that eventually led to some door marked freedom, for all of us. I felt him drop a blanket onto my shoulder.
“Welcome,” he said, in a tone that sounded too airy to be truly apologetic.
“I’m fine.”
“I’m sure you are.” I felt his hand on my shoulder. I tried what I could to ignore him. He looked curious as he stared at me, penetrating me again with those eyes, that looked all the more golden in the old yellow bulbs of the back stairwell. “That patron,” he began, an odd glint in his eyes, “…wasn’t the first time you’ve bedded a man, was it?’
I kept my eyes on the stairs. “…No, it wasn’t.”
A smile, faint, ghastly, began to show on his face. “You gave yourself to Cary, didn’t you?”
I was in love with Cary. And he loved me. For no reason in the world other than that. And it was terrible because it was so bleak a concept in this place. “Yes.”
Tal carefully stood up again, noiseless. I wondered, again, why he stayed. Surely he’d paid his debts by now? Surely he was skilled enough to stage escape? I felt misery rise up in my throat like bile—because from this night onward, I would have to dance when I was told to and bed another man if I was bought to do so. There was no room for dreams or love and Cary. And Tal would know, wouldn’t he? With the way he looked at his blond patron?
The same patron who bought him tonight. Who must’ve already slipped away—so recently that I’m sure Tal’s bed must still be warm. The one who held Tal possessively, and was allowed to by him. Tal who was never owned by anyone. Sometimes, not even the Club. Tal should know why I felt this way.
“If you’ve fallen for Cary…”
I looked at him, he was already walking back to the access door, robe askew on him again. He was smiling at me in that strange way again—like the time he saw Taylor nearly kill me. “…then you had better learn to protect each other. Clever, that…letting him take you before anyone else… One less scar than the rest of us.”
That was how life moved in the Club. Each day melted onto the next. We hardly saw the daylight—we were so used to being up only in the night. After I lost my virginity, everyone believed I would coast, like everyone else, because now I had lost this attribute. Tal told me otherwise—because of the price people paid for in order to bed me, he was sure that I would rise to the ranks.
And he reminded me yet again that he believed I’d survive.
Practice, dance, get put up for auction like an animal, get bought, get bedded… One day after another. It took me months for my mind to accept that I would be impaled onto a different man every night. Cary even told me, when he’d be in my bed, that I still tremble a little even when it was the both of us.
Maybe that was something I envied about Tal. In the real world, it was frowned upon—that ability to simply bed and move on, friend or patron. I wanted the apathy he had. After the first few nights, I wanted his easy countenance, that mindless seduction he performed on those who doted on him and loved him in all senses of the world.
I wanted the ruin that he had crowned upon himself. He rated it himself, didn’t he? Because he searched for this, wanted this the way he did, he was ruined. He was beautiful and he was ruined, and he loved as madly as the rest of us, and yet no matter what he did, he wasn’t ever free.
Not even with that gorgeous patron he was mad about, Callan, who he loved, and loved him with such possessiveness, that it was breaking them. He demanded for Tal more than anyone… and sometimes, when he couldn’t come to the Club, he would send his friend to buy Tal for the night simply so no one else could have him.
Tal was at his worst during those times—when he expected his beloved who would buy him off and yet not arrive. He’d feign his usual shine. Tal was always brightest when he was pretending.
The way Tal searched for a body to warm his bed made me wonder sometimes, if he was really in love with Callan or if he was someone who satisfied this craving that was steadily driving him mad. It was a dangerous game to play, I decided, the night I heard raised voices in the suite—crashing and glass breaking—and the next day Tal couldn’t dance, recovering, after Callan had heard that he had bed another famous patron.
I imagine…if Callan was angry about this kind of thing, he must’ve already raised his hand to Tal more than once. But never too much, I suppose… because that wasn’t allowed here in the Club. There were people that specialized in that. But not Tal. Tal was the pinnacle, the beautiful one. He couldn’t be touched or harmed.
“Besides,” Tal told me, as he walked downstairs with me to steal food in the kitchens, around four am in the morning, “There’s nothing they can ruin that I haven’t already ruined.”
“Why are you here?” I finally asked him. “Why are you still here? If you’re so wanted, if they pay so much for you…why aren’t you out of here?”
“You’ve said it exactly, haven’t you?” Tal replied, smiling in that way again, looking older. So much older than he ought to have been, in the dim light. “Because I’m so wanted… because they pay so much for me… Because I’m so desired… I have to stay.”
“…that’s ridiculous, we both know that you—”
“And besides…” He looked out the window, waiting for the sky to light. He looked so tired. “…where would I go?”
“Callan wants you so badly,” I told him, touching the bruise on Tal’s naked waist. “He should buy you for good.”
I had never felt like an idiot before in front of Tal…until that moment. When he looked at me so strangely. Where he had looked so much older earlier, now he looked so young. Like the young man that he really was.
“…do you think…that I’d like to be his that way? That I would like myself to be ‘owned’? Isn’t it enough that in here…we’re playthings?” He looked away from me, and into the dark sky. “…if Callan loves me as he says he does…he would never buy me. He would leave me here.”
I didn’t understand what Tal meant. I didn’t know why anyone would like to stay and live this way. How did that express love?
Everyone wondered about him. The strange, beautiful boy who people paid fortunes to see, half-mad with lust, and destructively in love. There were many questions, assumptions, about the way Tal was and what made him this way. The rumors have not ended to this day. He just left such a strange impression, and such a bittersweet taste.
No one would ever know the answers to all the questions, or the truth. I wish I had asked, because I was almost sure he would answer these questions.
The bullet hole was still in the carpet to this day.
One of Tal’s many lovers had grown jealous of his devotion to Callan, and loathed Callan’s possession of him. Weapons were forbidden in the Club—more to stop dancers from killing themselves—but he had brought one in. He had drawn the gun and aimed for the booth where Callan always was.
It was Tal who the bullet penetrated. And as he lay dying in Callan’s arms, the gunman was thrashed to death by the people of the Club, and chaos reigned.
But you should’ve seen it. You should have seen the peace I saw in Tal’s eyes, when Callan held him so gently. You should’ve seen how his eyes lit up and suddenly all the strife had sloughed off him. He was so young and so unbelievably innocent.
He loved with such purity that it made me wonder if everything he had ever done, all the madness, was the fuel for that white hot flame.
You should’ve seen his eyes when he settled them on Callan for the final time, touched his face, and said he’d do it again and again, and that he’d wait for him in hell. I’d remember it over and over again, for years after his death, and even after Cary and I escaped the Club five years later.
He was beautiful.