Martians Under My Bed

I will wait a little longer. The sky is dark. The seas are dimly lit and I wonder if there are Martians underneath my bed, waiting, just for me. There is nothing surface in my life. I fall through floors and chairs and skies and miles and country roads and coffee pots and dishware and silver crosses and TV screens and DVDs and video games and the lunar modules and the Space Station and the moon and the sun and all the planets in verdict and clumsiness and lack of authorship and I fall through books and candles and I fall through me as well.

I see college looming next week. I have just had my eighteenth birthday. I live in the country on a small farm that is an abode of myself, my sister, Tara, my mother, Winda, my father, Darryl, and my sheepdog, Henry. I have never been of anything that I can remember; I never believed if I had a favorite writer that he or she would save my soul, because I do not have a favorite writer; writers write books to make money and to work out the demons in their own souls before my eyes and into my skull and into my brain and into my soul and I have begun to find their printed masturbation shooting into my eyes more than a little offensive.

I am pale and have long golden hair and am androgynous in appearance. I have slender legs and slender arms and I am not British; people say I should be British, because I have that fair haired wan look British boys in movies have and they seem to take offense I do not have an accent, so for a while, when much younger, in school, one day, I tried to affect one, and forgetting that everyone who heard me speak in class all those school years long, knew I was not British and thus did not have a British accent, and they thus laughed at me and I got a reaction from a crowd for the first time in my life and did not have the sensation of falling into and through them.

I was not embarrassed, felt indeed like taking a bow, and sat down again in my seat only when the teacher clapped his erasers together and told me sternly to, and so I sternly did. I am also British in that I am a homosexual, though I can’t say homosexual like the British can. I have watched British movies and TV shows to try to get the hang of the accent and the sound of homosexual which sounds so much more pleasant there, the word, not the being of. I fall through everything but birth and death; those things are mysteries to me. The things and people and times I fall through are made as with colored rags and fabrics from Eastern countries, mid-Eastern I should say. I am proper and never curse and I mind my manners and I eat my peas and my Philly steak, which my family has an inordinate love for.

I have never been in love. Which is not to say that I am not now having sex. Well, not this minute, I am not in love with a computer and do not wish to have sex with it, were I in love with this computer, which I reiterate, redundantly, I am not. His name is William. And he is seventeen and we have had sex a grand total of five times. We have been together naked and have kissed and done other things which would seem wrong in the telling of. He is dark and handsome and with a chisel of a face, and lightly muscular, and he says he loves me and he silently begs me to say I love him, in return, however I being an honest bloke—sorry, my sense of humor slips out from time to time—will not say it to him because then he would get the wrong idea.

It is late September, still warm for this part of the country, and I hunger for deep cold and getting colds and sniffles and having a congested chest because, and I’ve no idea why this is, but it makes masturbation and orgasms with myself and with William more fun—more compact, more delicious, as though the sick germs in my body at those times of cuddling and excitement and release have never experienced such joyous moments and thus enhance it all with their wonderment, for I suppose bacteria get a bad lot of it in life, everyone trying to stamp them out, science trying to kill them all the time, all the medicines used against them, and people doing all they can to avoid them, but I know cold weather cannot make a cold, or at least that’s what I read, but colds come on me when it is cold and I like to snuggle down in my quilts and covers in my cozy boyhood room, with Henry on the bed foot warm and toasty feeling on my legs, and with a box of my trusty Kleenex tissues beside me, and my medicine and syrup and all the rest and Winda coming in every five minutes to test my fever and to have me open my mouth, so she can examine the coat—haha—that has always made me laugh—top coat or spring jacket?—on my tongue—and make me drink cough syrup and give me more pink and orange aspirin as though I were a child.

I’ve never fallen through germs or colds before, because I don’t think I can, and because I think they deserve their privacy, because, to me, especially now I know having sex is intensified by having them in me, they are some what, well, this sounds risky and slightly more than mad, holy—they are little life forms and they did defeat the Martians after all. I have thought there were Martians under my bed, from my earliest years onward. Not really after I was ten or eleven of course. I’ve never told anyone even when I did think they were under there with the dust bunnies and the lost pennies and textbooks and paper airplanes I used to have such a passion in making. I think I have never fallen through Martians, non-existent or existent either, though I’ve fallen through their planet, but I have always respected them for they have been my pets as has Henry, good old Henry, I fear he will not know what to do when I go off to college. He doesn’t take to Mom, or I guess that would be Mum, mum’s the word—I’m not British, but my body and face plays one—or Dad-is there a Brit short name for Dad? —I don’t know of one—and Henry positively hates my sister Tara and has taken a bite out of her when she was seven and he was three—there was blood rained all over the place and I thought they were going to take Henry away, but I pleased, and oddly enough so did Tara once the stitches were in and she was mending again, so the folks, as they say, let Henry live on with us.

I start university next week and William and I will be apart. He and I had never had sex before with anyone, and we came to it last summer by the stream on brown corduroy hills a mile or so from my farm; we had ridden our bicycles up there like we did a lot after we met two years ago; he and his family are our nearest neighbors, two miles up the road, and we sometimes skinny dipped in the stream or skinny walked really since it’s not that deep at all, and we had gotten into lying naked facing each other in the summer sun and both of us flaccid, and so serene and so blasé, we later told each other we were scared to death of looking at each other’s lower parts in fear of getting boners and stared straight into each other’s eyes as we woodenly talked about anything other than what we wanted to talk about. I don’t remember how it started. A jokey scuffle perhaps. A momentary “accidental” touching. The way these things happen, though I never in my life ever thought these “things” would happen to me, and as with William he fell immediately in love because I was there and I saw that he was sexually turning me on for sure, so things were good, and I never fell through him, and that first awkward spittle filled second or two kiss we tried, I knew the Martians would forever never be under my bed, not even in my scariest or sweetest dreams—for I had both about those Martians. I never got on my knees to look under the bed, to flash a torch—this Brit stuff stays with a person, especially if you’re hooked on the Basil Rathbone/Nigel Bruce Sherlock Holmes movies or the Peter Cushing/Christopher Lee Hammer Horror films as am I—under there in all that darkness to see for sure, for then, I would know, even when I was young and believed, that there would be nothing there but scattered broken apart gone away molded rusted bits of my childhood illusions and I could not bear to fall through my own illusions because one just doesn’t is all, because they are sticky things and I would get trapped in them and be stuck there forevermore.

I guess to William I am a Martian germ that he will fall through and get trapped in his own illusions about me. I find that, as I lie awake into the morning, with Henry breathing heavily and comfortingly across my legs, snoring every now and then a little, a fairly coolish breeze coming in the open window, our one cow lowing, trees silent in the night, and me soon away in New Hampshire in college, bright and smart and willing and able to learn and to make something of my life, and here will be good old Henry and good old William, waiting for me to come back, like I’m the Martian under William’s empty bed and like I’m a dream of a boy once a friend to Henry who will sleep on my bed quite by himself, dreaming of running after me in the fields when I was so much younger than now. To William I am a Martian germ—fancy, I am humble after all calling myself a germ, Martian or not—and I will be a lonely home in him forever and he can get over the sickness of me if he wants, and I hope he does—no, I don’t-I hope he doesn’t—I will come back to see him time to time—to, I suppose, and this makes me giggle—to re-infect him with me—and then he will be lovesick till same time same channel and we go through it again—it’s wrong I know, to keep, or try to keep someone in thrall-he may forget me two seconds after we say goodbye, he may have already done so, I may have misread him all this time and it might be the—oh horrid thought—the other way round, he may be the Martian germ hiding under my bed in my soul, and I will never have the courage to fall through it on fear I might not come out the other side—and what would the other side then thus be?

Love sick. It is like being physically sick in many ways. Woozy, dizzy, head spinning, feverish. But we want it apparently. The whole bloody lot of us. Which makes me seem less crazy liking the old fashioned cold sickness. Your fever breaks eventually and you become well again and there is no greater feeling than that. But we shall see what we shall see. I feel the saddest however about Henry. But I can’t stay here forever, after all.