KAOS: MICHAEL O. WHITTAKER

lensed

IMAGE IS
EVERYTHING

THE FELLOW WHO caused him to stop one afternoon and sit down on a grassy rise to watch the soccer game was no more than twenty, the first flush of beauty; and yet, as he ran with the ball through the clouds of dust stirred by the game, Malone watched him with a certain detachment, earned by years of desperation.

Five years before, this person would have stabbed him in the heart, engendered such despair that he would have obsessed Malone the rest of that day and night; and he would have gone out to the bars or baths hoping to find someone of his type. And the next afternoon he would have returned to the Sheep Meadow on the chance that he might be playing.

Now it was something else. He wore old white gym shorts and a faded red polo shirt. He had black, black hair and large dark eyes and he had not spent summer in the sun for his skin was ivory-white. Years before, Malone would have gone home and called someone up and said, "You should have seen the kid I saw in the Park today!" as if something, someone had to memorialize such wonders. Now he simply accepted it. Now he new very well that this young man's beauty was just that - a fact: his beauty - and that he, Malone, could not worship it, or worse (the fault of so many people he knew still), possess it, consume it, digest it...