Kink fiction. An ex-soldier who can’t sleep one night follows a coworker to somewhere unexpected.
Rated E. Cis M/M. Set in 1950s London.
An ex-soldier, Arthur “Kuhn” Conrad, now a debt collector of sorts for a corrupt company, can’t sleep one night, and as he’s walking the streets, sees a coworker — on a whim, he follows, and ends up in an underground club. The older man, Ignatius Kasovitz, likes to tie people up, it seems, and Kuhn finds he wants to try being tied up, if it’s Kasovitz doing the tying.
CWs for continuous references to World War II and the Shoah — Kuhn is a veteran, Kasovitz is Jewish; various homophobic & transphobic language, particularly from Kuhn; trauma; violence. This one will be kink-focused over sex itself, with Kuhn being somewhere on the ace spectrum.
It’s a dry, hot night, and Kuhn can’t sleep. It’s past ten at night and there’s no work for him to be getting on with, and being as it’s a Friday, most of the quieter pubs around him are not so quiet tonight, so he walks. No one fucking bothers him — he’s recognised here and there, by the sort of scum who’d recognise like for like, but it’s mostly not recognition that keeps people from coming near him.
He’s told he has a dangerous air, no matter that he’s on the small side. He’s not scrawny, after all, not anymore — he’s square, and he’s got hard angles, but at the shoulders and the jaw, not at the elbows or the show of bone — and he has a fierce, rapid pace when he moves.
Doctor Lark, who heads up the office, says that any man who knows dogs can often see from afar the sort of dog that will bite at the drop of a hat, the sort of dog that won’t stop short at a nick but will savage you deeply. Kuhn doesn’t know anything about dogs at all — he likes cats, personally — but Lark says you can see a dog that will rip your guts out based on how its eyes cast about, how it draws back its lips and shows its teeth, how it lunges, how it ducks or lifts its head as it runs toward you.
“You look like a feral fucking dog, Kuhn,” Lark had said, and patted him very hard on the back, sending a percussive thump through his ribcage. Kuhn doesn’t like to be touched much, but the way Lark does it has never bothered him, short and abortive as it is, and always very hard instead of feigning softness. “You look fucking rabid, from afar, and worse, up close. Too much white in your eyes.”
Kuhn turns a corner and stares straight forward, knowing his eyes look dead even before a few young women on a night out blanch at facing him and hurriedly cross the road. That fills him with no especial pleasure, but a pleased hum settles low in his gut when a minute later a big man in a duffle coat, drunk and a little unstable on his feet, does the exact same thing, albeit more subtly.
He’s not walking anywhere in particular. He’s just walking — stalking, but stalking the way a man does it, moving forward all angry, not like an animal does it. He’s not hunting for anything…
Until he is.
Kuhn recognises Ignatius Kasovitz from damn near two streets away, even though he’s nothing more than a tall blur in the distance. Kuhn recognises his gait as much as he does his height, the smooth and long-legged stride that sets Kasovitz well-aside from all the girls in the secretarial pool, and all the other men, too.
He doesn’t like Kasovitz, but that’s what makes him an easy target to tail, Kuhn thinks. He’s not following the old man because he’s really interested in where he lives, because he wants to sit and talk with him, or even because he wants to use any information against him, blackmail him with where he’s been at night, or where he’s going.
It’s none of that. He just follows Kasovitz because he recognises him, and he’s someone that doesn’t matter.
He follows Kasovitz out of Soho proper, and he wonders at first if Kasovitz is going to go as far as one of the popular cottages, one of the greens where inverts like him pay a shilling or two to the ex-soldiers selling themselves as gigolos, but instead, Kasovitz trails down one street and then another, then descends a set of steps behind an iron railing.
Kuhn comes to the edge of the railing and looks down the steps, then trails in pursuit. Down here, out of the view of the main street, he can see people milling about — more queers like Kasovitz, queers and sapphics and that sort, different people done up for a night out, smoking cigarettes, laughing with each other. It’s just a bit too crowded for enough people to notice Kuhn and part around him, and he’s glad he’s wearing his hat — he blends in well enough with the shorter faggots and the littler dykes.
All these fucking freaks lined up in their dresses and suits and jewellery, trading cigarettes and compacts of coke — is this what they fought a fucking war for?
He can’t hear the music from inside whatever club this is from out here in this draughty corridor underneath the eaves of the shops upstairs, but the noise around him is still digging under his skin like splinters, like gritted sand in a hard wind, like sparks off the fire. Three mincing cunts done up like girls — two of them are in wigs, the other one, that might be his own fucking curls — are giggling and laughing with each other; he can hear the wet, messy sound of two women necking even though they’re in a shadow and he can’t actually see them; two men are playing a game of slapsies, and whenever one of them gets a hit in, the other one grabs at his arse or his thigh.
He’s irritable from not having slept yet, but at the same time, it’s the irritability that’s not letting him sleep. There’s a burn and prickle under his skin — it’s the dry heat of the night, he thinks, and how it’s making him sweat, how it feels uncomfortably light whilst still being nasty in its temperature. His skin, slicked with sweat, doesn’t feel as though it fits him. It hasn’t felt as if it fits him for a long, long time.
“You alright, love?” asks a skinny homo who must be eighty or ninety, walking past Kuhn with a stick. He’s wearing a silk scarf around his neck. “You want to get some water down you — you do look a bit peaked, if I do say so myself.”
“Yessir,” Kuhn mutters, because no matter that the man is decades too old to be hobbling out to some degenerate club like this, he had it beaten into him very young to respect his elders, and he can’t spit out any insult that comes to mind.
Kuhn is a criminal himself, no matter that he has a fucking office and a desk and a lot of bullshit paperwork to get on with in the course of the day. Doctor Lark is bent; the office is bent; all his coworkers are bent, and when Kuhn isn’t doing paperwork and bribes and occasionally being impressed at the new ways their engineers come up with to smuggle guns or blow or cash, he’s roughing up whoever doesn’t pay them.
He’s not this sort of criminal, no, but —
Still.
Kuhn follows after the old man, trying to look around him into the club — the big door is closed, and a hulking bulldyke stands in front of it, her arms crossed over her big, square chest that her suit barely fucking contains. When she draws back a slightly hairy upper lip in a snarl, Kuhn doesn’t have it in him not to draw his own teeth back.
Bad dogs, both of them.
“Christine,” says Kasovitz suddenly a second later — the door is open, the old man is hobbling through where Kasovitz is holding the door open for him, and Kasovitz is standing at the big lesbian’s shoulder. She’s holding Kuhn half a foot off the fucking ground, pinned up against the wall, but at Kasovitz’ gentle scolding, she sets him down again. “Let him through, dear. I’ll vouch for him.”
“Behave,” Christine growls down at him, and Kuhn scoffs at her — she raises her hand as if to smack him one, but before she can land the blow, Kasovitz has tugged Kuhn forward by one of the open bits of his looser coat pockets, moved him whilst making barely any contact with him at all.
Kasovitz used to be a clown.
Kuhn doesn’t know how long he’d been a clerk at Croft & Co. before they merged with Werner & Associates, but he knows he was never a fucking soldier, not in the Great War or the one after, no matter that he’s fifty-six or something like it. The fuck sort of exemption is that, being a fucking clown? The fuck was he doing, when men like Kuhn were getting shot at, raked over wire, bombed to smithereens — juggling? Dancing on a wire, jumping off the trapeze, riding fucking elephants?
It’s an open secret, what he is, that he’s a pansy, an invert, at work. It’s illegal, sure, but that doesn’t mean anything at WC — and Hell, isn’t it fucking right, that a homo like him should work at a company now named after a fucking lavatory? — and that it’s disgusting doesn’t mean much more. It grates on Kuhn, that people at work joke about it and that the old prick takes it in his stride, laughs along, even makes his own jokes about being a Wilde type.
He’s not in one of the pastel suits he wears to work, with old-fashioned tailoring and uncomfortably modern cloth, and not in his circus get-up either — there’s pictures of him on his desk at work, of him with his family in the circus — but in a set of trousers, a jumper, a tie. He looks naked, in a way, dressed down. As big a man as he is, heavy in the chest and shoulders with long, loping legs, it feels to Kuhn for a moment that a jumper almost shouldn’t fit him.
As Kuhn follows after Kasovitz, he steels himself for the coming touch, for Kasovitz to touch him properly this time — his shoulder, the back of his neck, his waist, get ready to lunge back at him, no matter that he’s a big, heavy prick. The touch doesn’t come.
Coiled energy prickles under Kuhn’s skin, built up with nowhere to go, awaiting the provocation of Kasovitz perving on him.
“Gonna ask me to buy you a drink, are you, pansy?” Kuhn asks in a sharp undertone, provoking the provocation so that he doesn’t have to have it swinging over his head.
“I don’t drink,” Kasovitz says. “But cheers for the offer.”
Kuhn blinks, and he realises in the moment that he isn’t talking the way he does at the office, that he sounds a lot less like Kuhn himself, all of a sudden — he doesn’t sound like a Londoner at all, but a Manc, a Scouser, maybe.
Before Kuhn can snap that it wasn’t an offer, he doesn’t swing that way and even if he did, he’s pretty sure he could get a younger, prettier model than a fucking has-been cunt in his fifties — respect for one’s elders does not extend to clowns — Kasovitz has picked up a length of coiled rope from a nearby table and stepped away from him.
This speakeasy used to be a public bomb shelter, Kuhn thinks — it’s a sort of tunnel, long and windowless, with rounded walls, but it makes a more than decent basement establishment. There’s a long bar, tables and booths about, small stages throughout. The music travels well here inside the place, but there’s no live band — it’s just a battered old gramophone in the corner, some antique thing instead of a newer record player.
Kuhn suddenly finds himself rooted to the spot as if he’s stepped in tar, his shoes sticking to the word boards beneath him as he follows Kasovitz with his eyes up onto the small stage, and his breath gets stuck somewhere inside him too. Ascending two steps up onto the platform, Kasovitz has gone from uncoiling the rope to trussing up a pretty girl.
No.
No, not a girl — she’s Kuhn’s age or a bit younger, forty, at the eldest. She’s got her eyes closed and her lips are faintly smiling, and she’s stripped down to just a slip and her stockings, her dress and cardigan folded on the edge of the stage, as she leans forward and into Kasovitz’ hands. His long fingers make the rope move fast, make it look alive, serpentine, as it coils around her body. She’s the same height as Kuhn, maybe even taller than he is in her little kitten heels, and Kasovitz is like a giant in front of her, leaning forward to press the rope between her little tits.
Kuhn still isn’t breathing. His chest is aching a bit, distantly, from his lungs not inflating or letting out — he’s held his breath in the bath before, tempted himself with oblivion, but this pain isn’t quite like that. It has softer edges, somehow, and a sweeter taste.
“Lean back,” Kasovitz instructs.
Kuhn was hypnotised once, before the war, before anything. He was fourteen and at a birthday party — Haverford Grey’s, he’s dead, now, was gutted and left hanging from a tree by a grey and dismal battlefield, and Kuhn can still hear the wind whistling and the branch creaking as he swings one way and the other — was a hypnotist.
Harmless stuff.
Keep an eye on the watch, watch it swing, watch the pendulum go one way and then the other, and then he was sweet and easy and standing on a cloud, and all his friends were laughing because apparently he’d done a good ballerina’s twirl, and he’d laughed too, because he’d just felt so relaxed. He hasn’t thought of that birthday party since he saw Have’s corpse swinging and thought of the pendulum swing of the hypnotist’s watch — he hasn’t thought of the calm and the sweet buzz and ease he’d felt for much, much longer. He feels a ghost of that calm down, his head tipping back slightly. Kuhn’s chin raises, his centre of gravity easing a few degrees backwards in response to an order that isn’t meant for him — he’s starting to feel the slightest bit dizzy, but luckily, Kasovitz tells his girl, “Breathe in,” and Kuhn does at the same time she does, feels blessed relief.
He stares, mystified, in a waking dream, as Kasovitz supports his trussed-up girl under her belly and lifts her up like he might his fucking briefcase, tied up like a handbag, her arms and legs behind her, above her, and she’s swinging too. She looks so… peaceful.
She laughs softly as Kasovitz pulls the rope through another one of the rings of a sort of hangman’s frame over the stage, one Kuhn hadn’t noticed a moment ago, and Kuhn watches as she’s eased out of his hold — and fucking Hell, he was holding her in one hand, balancing her in one hand — and made to purely suspend from the frame. Her legs are back, ankles and wrists together, but she’s not hanging from the coiled rope around those.
Kasovitz has made a sort of harness for her, around her chest, her waist and belly, and her weight rests in the cradle of it, and Kuhn wonders when the last time was that he ever, ever felt as strangely relaxed as he does right now, watching this woman tied up in a degenerate hub like this one — he’s tipping slightly forward on his feet, rocking in rhythm with her swinging in the suspension.
Kuhn realises, all at once, that it’s happening all around him.
A fat man with a balding head is leaning back in a chair and two girls — and these are girls, if they’re not boys in dresses, might be at the end of their teens if not their early twenties — are tying him tighter and tighter. Between binding him to the legs and arms of the chair, they’re laughing at him, pinching his cheeks, slapping parts of his flesh, kissing him on the cheeks and the top of his head. Another woman is in suspension at the far end of the hall, hanging from the frame with her legs down and her arms straight out, a mirror of Christ. An older woman has a younger one over her knee and is smacking her across her arse, making the pale cheeks of her flat arse wobble with each blow, and they’re aglow with the heat and redness of it.
“You can have fifteen minutes,” Kasovitz says, checking his pocket watch and gently touching the young woman’s cheek. “And then I’ll bring you down.”
“Can it be twenty?” she asks, her voice husky, but it doesn’t sound seductive, not that Kuhn’s any real judge or expert — it just sounds sleepy to him.
“Seventeen.”
“Eighteen.”
“Seventeen and a half,” says Kasovitz, with a stern movement of one index finger, and when the woman laughs, she gently sways in her bonds, and Kuhn follows after Kasovitz as he goes toward the bar. “Two barley waters, please,” he says, and Kuhn stands there, his hands at his sides, as he watches the young man behind the bar pour from a jug.
He’s incredibly grateful, all of a sudden, to hear the clink of ice against the glass — it’s warm outside, and it’s even hotter here inside, and more humid, too. When the glass is pushed toward him, he drinks from it greedily.
“You live in Battersea, don’t you?” Kasovitz asks. “Did you walk all the way here?”
“Couldn’t sleep,” says Kuhn. “Never been one for counting sheep. Came here to count fairies instead.”
Kasovitz’ lips twitch, and he takes a sip from his own drink, gesturing for the man behind the bar to replenish Kuhn’s glass, which he does. It occurs to him to complain, to ask why the fuck he’s drinking barley water instead of beer or ale, whether Kasovitz drinks or not, but he doesn’t want to drink anyway, not tonight. Kuhn hops up onto the stool — Kasovitz doesn’t have to do that, just leans back into the one beside him, and Kuhn slowly scans the hall up and down, at the play these people are all having with each other.
“There once was a queer from Khartoum…” says Kasovitz in an undertone, narrating the view for him, and Kuhn’s lips twitch despite himself, and he looks up at the older man’s face. He has round features — big, round eyes with heavy lids, a crescent to his lips, an oval-shaped face. He has thick, dark hair, and he usually has it pomaded at work — he has it washed of pomade, neatly parted, and now they’re not flattened down, the usual waves are made up of bouncing curls instead.
“I saw you walking,” says Kuhn. He doesn’t know why he says it, doesn’t know why it occurs to him to share it — why the fuck should he? But he does. He still feels a bit tense under his clothes, but Kasovitz isn’t touching him, isn’t reaching for him, and Kuhn isn’t entirely relaxed — he doesn’t know if he’s been entirely relaxed in the last twenty fucking years — but he trusts, somehow, that Kasovitz isn’t going to reach and touch him. “I’ve been walking around for an hour or two, and I saw you, recognised you. Thought you’d be out on one of the greens or playing house at this time of night, not coming into a fucking place like this.”
“Playing house?” Kasovitz repeats, raising his thick eyebrows. “What were you hoping, young man, that you’d find me in a cottage waiting for you?”
“Not my thing,” Kuhn mutters.
The old man, the one that spoke to him on the way in, has another older man on his knee — he’s plump, has a sort of prettiness despite his age and his weight, has long eyelashes and very pink lips. The one with the cane is slowly winding ribbon around him with quavering, frail fingers, tying bows about his neck, around his belly, making a sort of harness of the violet silk, laying it down flat against the other man’s smooth, hairless skin.
“Mr Salford, he’s a haberdasher,” Kasovitz supplies. “Always brings his own ribbons, has more of a care for those than rope. Mr Lippett was a painter’s model as a young man — he still enjoys to be made into something fancy, into something pretty.”
“They’re both so fucking old,” Kuhn says.
“Yes, well,” Kasovitz murmurs, taking another little sip of his drink, “We’re all getting fucking old, at the end of the day.”
Kuhn watches as Salford ties little bows through the rings piercing Lippett’s plump tits — they’re bigger than the ones on the woman Kasovitz has set to dangle, look plush and soft. They wobble a bit when Salford tickles Lippett’s side, making him laugh.
“I didn’t know you were a Scouser,” Kuhn says. “Why’d you do that accent at work?”
“You know what you Londoners are like,” Kasovitz retorts, shrugging his shoulders. “People are liable to think I can’t read and write at all, realising I learned my English in Liverpool. I do the posher accent in the office, and it keeps people on task. Don’t think I don’t know you don’t go a little Cockney now and then, when you think it will have more of an impact.”
“Learned your English?” Kuhn repeats. “Thought you might be a Kraut, with a name like Kasovitz.”
“My family left our troupe to join another when attitudes toward Jews in Germany, in the rest of Europe, became more dangerous, and then we came to England to perform here. Circuses are made for outcasts — Gypsies, Jews, cripples, dwarves, freaks and untouchables of all kinds.” Kasovitz’ voice is quiet and even — he has a nice voice, and Kuhn finds he actually finds his Scouser’s lilt more appealing than the more neutral, posher voice he’s heard here and there from him. “That’s always been true, and always will be. But it was harder here in England, as an invert, a homosexual — and apart from that, the magic was lost for me, I think. I stayed in Liverpool as the circus moved on, enrolled in a secretarial course — I’d learned to do our books, had managed our travelling papers, different ownership papers, contracts. People are always accusing circuses of thievery, so one learns to keep these things in good order.”
“So you’re not actually a Scouser, then,” is what Kuhn takes from this.
“I was born outside of Szeged, actually.”
“Where’s that?”
“Hungary.”
“And you all just… travelled around? The circus you were in, it was all Jews?”
“Not all, no, but a few of us.”
“You all survived?”
Kasovitz’ expression doesn’t change, but he gazes at Kuhn’s face, looks across at him unblinkingly for a few moments. “Most of us,” he says quietly. “My family, for the most part, except for an aunt and uncle I had who were entertainers in Berlin — they were brought to a camp. My uncle died there — my aunt was kept alive, made to perform for the guards, you see. She was a broken woman, after. My mother went to look after her for a little while, but she died not long after the end of the war — typhoid fever. There was another Jewish family with us, half of them went to America, the other half evaded capture for a while, and then two of them, fellow clowns…” He trails off, slowly shaking his head, and exhales. “The rest did survive, they’re in Israel now. All told, those in my closest circle were far luckier than most Jews. Traveling life gave us means of egress, ways to hide, that others didn’t have — and in the circus, we look after our own. We weren’t disposable or undesirable for our Jewishness, as we were and would be elsewhere.”
“I didn’t really know many Jews, before the war,” Kuhn says. He doesn’t know why he says this, either. He doesn’t talk to anybody, really — he has pints with the lads after a job sometimes, but mostly he doesn’t talk, just listens, laughs at a good joke, though there’s never many of those. “My family had some refugees as servants, and then we were deployed, I did meet some Jews — in Stalags, mostly. Some Poles helped us out, once, Polish Jews, that was in France.”
“What are your family, Catholic?”
“C of E.”
“You’re not religious?”
“No, never.”
“Nor am I.”
“You use to be?”
“Before the Shoah? No, not really. I used to think as a young man I’d have time and interest in religion when I was old, that I’d get more interested in spending time with God. And then He let that happen. And I thought… fuck Him. Let Him burn for all I care.”
“One of our priests was the touchy-feely type,” Kuhn says. “He slid his hand down my back once when I was in the church library, and I ripped his dog collar off, knocked my head into his nose. Didn’t break it, just bloodied his lip.”
Kasovitz looks at him with what seems to Kuhn to be a very keen interest, resting his rounded chin on the palm of one of his big, strong, long-fingered hands. In deliberate tones, he asks — sort of snidely — “And a priest stroking your back, young man, you think that’s roughly equivalent to my seeing millions of my people slaughtered?”
“No,” says Kuhn plainly. “But I headbutted a priest. Thought you’d like the point against God. ‘Scuse me for breathing.”
Kasovitz laughs. It seems to take him by surprise — he covers his mouth with his hand, his eyes very wide and almost watering, and it’s a good laugh, very loud. It’s not like the politer, snider thing he keeps in the office, all superior and quiet — this is a clown’s laugh, Kuhn thinks. He likes it.
“I suppose you’re right,” he says, a bit breathlessly, when the laugh passes. “Thank you for that, Mr Conrad. I appreciate the effort.”
“Kuhn,” says Kuhn.
Kasovitz blinks his big brown eyes. “Beg pardon?”
“That’s what they called me, the POWs. They said Conrad was too grand for a little fella like me, and when I told them my name was Arthur, they said that was too English. So, Kuhn.”
Kasovitz sips from his drink, and then asks, “Is that what you did in the war, liberate camps? Doctor Lark, he mentioned to me once that you weren’t in the trenches, seemed to imply that was why you were so…”
“Fucked up?”
“Brittle.”
“Brittle,” Kuhn repeats, and he laughs a bit, although it comes out kind of staccato and scattershot, like gunfire, and his ribs feel like they’re rattling, his chest aching. There’s a kind of acrid taste in the back of his throat, the threat of vomiting — he gets that threat a lot, but he doesn’t actually throw up much these days. It’s composure, except that composure’s not all it is.
Better out than in, his nanny used to say. You’re meant to vomit when you’re ill. It’s getting the poison out, throwing it up. The poison that’s in him now is in too deep to throw it up. Vomiting doesn’t make any difference.
“I didn’t really liberate anything,” Kuhn says. “I was little, and fast, and nasty. I just went and killed a lot of people — Krauts, mostly, officers and soldiers. Like a fox or a weasel, I went into the coop sometimes alone, more times with the squad I was with, never more than six of us. Poisoned beer, or food. Slit throats. Sometimes it wasn’t them, sometimes it was collaborators — never liked that word. Too much choice in it.”
“Not much choice in that war, was there?”
“No.”
Kasovitz is looking at him. Kuhn can feel it before he looks up and observes it, feels the way that Kasovitz’ gaze is flickering over Kuhn’s face, down the length of his nose, into the shadows of his eye sockets, down his jaw, up to his ears, to his hair, then down his neck, down to his chest, the clothes he’s wearing — just a vest under a battered, very light summer jersey.
“What?” Kuhn asks, finally.
“The other men in that squad you mentioned,” Kasovitz murmurs. “Were they — men like you?”
“Men like me?”
“Men born so close to Clapham Common. Or Battersea, for that matter.”
“Not really,” Kuhn mutters. “Doctor Lark made the same guess you did. A lot of them were burglars, criminals. A few intelligence officers, sometimes, but we weren’t intelligence, we weren’t spies.”
They were attack dogs. Hunting dogs, a pack of them, sniffing out whatever, whoever they could find, tearing them to shreds. He’s never told anybody he knows at work any of this. Doctor Lark knows, of course, but he knows everything, Doctor Lark. He doesn’t know why he’s telling Kasovitz now.
“Friends of yours, the MI6 men?”
It grates on him, that question, but why? Because Kasovitz isn’t doing his fake accent any longer, because it makes Kuhn seem like he’s posher than he is — makes it seem like he’s posher than Kasovitz?
Because Kasovitz thinks his accent roughs up because he’s putting it on, and not just him picking up the rhythm of other Londoners he’s with, other Londoners he’s been with all his life, no matter what school he went to, whose parties he was invited to?
Because Kasovitz might think Kuhn thinks he’s better than him?
“I’m not that posh, you know. I was friends with some of the posher lads, but it was because my dad was a doctor at the maternity hospital in Clapham, and my mother was a nurse. He was the first person in my family to go to university, my dad. Got a special grant for his board.”
He used to think he was better than him, maybe. Half an hour ago. Not knowing he was a clown. Not knowing he was a Scouser. Not knowing that Kasovitz could sit across from a man like Kuhn at a bar like this, feed him barley water and read everything he was from his face and his posture and make him talk without asking barely anything at all?
He itches to go on, but the words won’t come. He stares down at his hands, at his fingernails which have dirt and rust and a bit of blood underneath where he didn’t go hard enough with the nailbrush once he was home earlier. There are some bruises on the backs of his knuckles.
“Did you like him?”
“Who?”
“Your father.”
This is a very strange conversation. A lot of conversations feel strange to Kuhn — he’s not a natural talker — but there doesn’t seem to be a point to this conversation, doesn’t seem to be a clear direction. It makes him feel strange, unsteady, but at the same time, strangely calm, not able to guess where Kasovitz is taking it yet.
“My dad?” Kuhn asks.
“Your father, yes,” Kasovitz says. “Did you like him?”
No one’s ever asked him if he likes his father before. Not even Doctor Lark. “No,” Kuhn says.
“Fair enough,” says Kasovitz, instead of asking why. Kuhn feels faintly dizzy, and when Kasovitz gets up, he automatically moves in his chest, but Kasovitz raises his palms and gestures for him to stay put, and Kuhn automatically obeys without knowing why. “Excuse me, I have to go let Leigh down. I’ll be back in a few minutes.”
Kuhn sinks back down onto the stool and watches Kasovitz walk away, feeling powerless, and he watches him move across the room, watches his hands on the woman’s ropes as he carefully eases her down. He drinks his barley water, and feels a kind of burning heat under his skin, suddenly embarrassed for reasons he can’t quite put together, feels looked at, even though no one in this place is looking at him.
He gets to his feet, nudging back the stool and pushing the glass toward the bar, now empty but for the two bits of ice clinking in it.
“Nice to meet you, dear! Do drop in again!” says Mr Salford as Kuhn slips past — he waves one of his trembling, liver-spotted hands in farewell. His voice is just slightly muffled by the cushion of Mr Lippett’s full tits, which are perked up by the ribbon harnessing them. Mr Lippett waves at him too, and Kuhn’s hand twitches at his side, but he doesn’t actually wave back.
Christine blocks his path when he tries to leave, and Kuhn automatically tries to grab at her arm to shove it off him, but she twists free and then pushes them so hard against the wall it knocks the wind out of his lungs.
“Just wanted to say you should come back, if it feels like the place for you,” she spits at him. “It’s safe here.”
“You keep it safe, do you?”
Christine has more teeth in her head than a wolf, and her eyes are wide and too white. They stare at one another, dog to dog, and then she lowers her arm from where it’s blocking off the entrance to the club, and he stands there for a second.
He gives her a silent nod before he steps out into the drainway, and then ascends the stairs to street level again. His feet hurt from walking, but when he waves down a late-night cab, the driver slows down, gets a good look at his face, and then speeds away instead of risking a stop.
Kuhn can hardly blame him. He’s only carrying his knives, and doesn’t have the fare on him anyway.
* * *
That Monday, Kuhn is sitting on the desk in his office and throwing knives at the dartboard in his office. He hates this fucking office. He hates how fancy-dancy the building is, hates how central it is, hates all the fucking windows and how much light comes in.
It’s one thing for the rest of the business, especially now they’re a bigger company, another thing for the other men who move papers about and more than that, actually move stock, do imports and exports and accountancy, and whatever else makes legitimate businesses go around.
Kuhn’s “office” used to be a fucking stockroom at the back of a warehouse, cold and dank and with sawdust on the floor, and the butcher’s hooks still hanging from the ceiling so that he could string people up, when he needed.
The fuck is he meant to do with this fucking room, with its four fucking windows, up here in the fucking sky? The sort of people he goes shaking down for money aren’t exactly going to show up to a fucking appointment. He does the basic bollocks they pass over his desk to make his salary stand up if someone in authority asks what exactly his role is in this fucking company, and then he sits here on top of his desk and throws his knives at his dartboard, and he waits for five o’clock.
Kasovitz snatches the last of his knives right out of the air, as quick as blinking, and Kuhn looks at him impassively from where he sits on his desk, his feet swinging idly underneath him.
“Your problem, it seems to me,” Kasovitz says pleasantly, holding the knife by the very tip of its blade and by the end of its handle, balancing it between his index fingers, “is that emotion rather gets the best of you.”
Kuhn doesn’t say anything.
“Why seven?” Kasovitz asks as he turns away and begins to pluck the blades from the board, holding them all in the cradle of one big palm like a steel bouquet.
“Seven sisters,” says Kuhn.
“What, the Pleiades?”
“Or the Hyades,” says Kuhn. “Doesn’t matter, really. I just like the sibilance. Can you juggle them?”
“Of course,” says Kasovitz, and then with nothing else but a quick glance toward the ceiling, estimating the height of it, he does. Kuhn stares, taken aback, as Kasovitz just starts flicking the blades up and into the air like it’s nothing, each of them rotating, turning over and over in motion — one, two, three, four, and then he’s catching those and tossing them up again, one, two, three, four, five, tossing them other one another, passing them between his hands, each of them performing perfect arcs, one, two, three, four, five, six, the arcs crossing over one another but the knives not touching, one, two, three, four, five, six, se —
“Oop,” says Kasovitz, stepping back, and after letting the fallen blade dig into the carpet, he catches each of the others, one, two, three, four, five, six. “Sorry about that.” He tugs up the last by the loop — Kuhn can slip his fingers through those loops, can swing and twirl the blades around his fingers. Even Kasovitz’ pinky wouldn’t fit.
“You have to tell Doctor Lark it was you did that to the carpet,” says Kuhn.
“Of course,” Kasovitz agrees immediately. “Where did you go last night?”
“Home.”
“Too much for you, was it?”
“You’re old enough to be my father,” says Kuhn, and Kasovitz laughs.
“If I started at fifteen, maybe,” he says, seeming surprised as he lays Kuhn’s blades on the desk beside him, and Kuhn waits for the touch, but it doesn’t come. Kasovitz keeps his big hands to himself. “I didn’t, I’m afraid — the first man I took a tumble with, I was nearly thirty, in a Berlin club. You might guess why England was so difficult for me, the sort of man I am, when Berlin was my contrast.”
“Not really,” says Kuhn.
“You don’t consider yourself a queer, I take it.”
Kuhn shrugs.
“Do you think of yourself as the obverse?”
“Obverse?”
“The opposite.”
“I know what it means.”
Kasovitz is standing very close to him. Closer than Christine was stood to him the other night — he’s standing right in front of Kuhn, so close that he’s almost slightly between Kuhn’s knees, which are spread to let him keep his balance on the edge of the desk. Kasovitz still isn’t touching him.
“Are you going to touch me?” Kuhn asks.
“Do you want me to touch you?” Kasovitz asks.
Kuhn’s tongue feels like it’s caged behind his teeth, like there’s a spike stuck through it.
“Tell me about it,” he manages to say through a mouth of sand. “That place. Those people.”
“The rope?”
“You tied her up. That woman — she a dyke as well?”
“I believe Leigh likes anybody in a suit, really,” Kasovitz says. “The equipment is less important to her than the clothes and a sufficiently short haircut, I think. In any case, it’s not really about that, for her. She likes the feeling of being suspended, likes the swing — likes to feel weightless, as though she’s on air.”
“And Mr Lippett likes to feel pretty.”
“Yes.”
“And Mr Salford?”
“Likes to advertise his product,” says Kasovitz. When Kuhn doesn’t laugh, he says, more gently, “He likes to dote on a man. Make him pretty, yes. Put complementary fabrics or ribbons or buttons against his skin, his hair, assist the tailor in his work, but more than that, to treat him. Feed him fine food and drink, comb his hair, touch him sweetly, gently, kiss him from top to tail.”
“And the spankings. There were — I saw canes, whips. A hard paddle. One of the trannies had a glove with spikes on it…”
“Mary, her name is,” Kasovitz says. “She makes them herself, uses thumb tacks.”
Kuhn doesn’t know what to say to this. “There were a lot of spikes on it, that glove.”
“Yes.”
“They hard to make?”
“Complicated, certainly, and time consuming. Why, do you think you’d like one?”
Kuhn shakes his head.
“And rope?”
Kuhn is quiet.
He’d been irritated, earlier, frustrated, feeling like a dog in a too-small garden, trapped in a pen — wen Kasovitz had crossed the threshold, that energy had dissipated somewhat. He doesn’t feel relaxed, no, but he doesn’t feel like he’s pacing any longer, inside his own head.
“What’s it like?” he asks.
“Being tied up?”
“Yeah.”
“You were never tied up during the war? Never got captured?”
“No,” Kuhn says. He doesn’t mean to say it the way he does, like it’s a stupid fucking question, like it’s a question he should be indignant that Kasovitz asked, but that’s how it comes out, and Kasovitz softly laughs, but it’s a nice laugh. It’s not his big clown’s laugh, but it’s not the snide, superior office laugh, either — he’s using his own accent, here in Kuhn’s office, and not the one he uses in the rest of the building.
“I personally don’t particularly enjoy it,” Kasovitz says. “I don’t hate it, by any means — I stand in and offer myself up as someone to be practised on, when someone’s interested in learning, teach them as they go, but I don’t particularly relish the sensation of it. I feel neutral about rope, as a man to be bound. Some people like the bite of it, the rope on their skin, or the smoothness of ribbon, the tension, the coil, the sense of being contained, the pressure. Some like it to hurt, or to strain — others, like Leigh, they like it to support them, to let them swing or suspend. Some like the process of it, find it meditative, hypnotising, the knots, the patterns. Others just like to be in another’s control. Like that if they’re tied up, it means they can’t be held accountable for what happens — means they have to trust whoever’s bound them, let them make the decisions.”
Kuhn nods his head.
“Yes,” he says.
“Yes?” Kasovitz repeats.
“I want it.”
“Next Friday, if you come back, I’ll — ”
“No, not there,” says Kuhn. “Just you. Only you.”
Kasovitz looks down at him with his big, round face, his big, round eyes. Kuhn waits for him to say no, to say that even a man who likes tying men up doesn’t go about trying to collar dogs that like to bite.
(He doesn’t know what he’ll do, if Kasovitz touches him. He’ll try not to bite.)
“Alright,” says Kasovitz, and taking up a notepad from Kuhn’s desk, he writes down an address.
Part II
Kuhn’s boarding house is an alright place. It’s clean and pretty well-kept, all-told — no mould, no damp, no rats or other vermin. It’s not a hoity-toity place by any means, but he knows it’s a lot better than a lot of places around the city, and it’s honestly not too expensive. It’s not like Kuhn spends much money — most of what he makes goes into his savings.
He bought a few nice suits when he took the job, went to the shop Doctor Lark recommended with the old man telling him which fabrics were appropriate to the office — not too formal, not plain black and navy suits like a lot of the real office workers wore, but still darker colours. Nice shoes as well. His knives.
He never used to wear a wristwatch — Doctor Lark had bought that for him as a new start gift, bought it for him second-hand at a pawnshop, and Kuhn had laughed because he liked the inscription on the back that said, For my Nanny. Whoever’s nan she’d been — or maybe an employed nanny, he doesn’t know — it wasn’t too feminine a thing, and he’d actually had to replace the strap with a smaller one so it wouldn’t slide down his hand.
After that…
He buys his own pints, doesn’t take part in rounds. He eats at the boarding house at meal times — Mrs G is a war widow, and she’s a lacklustre cook, but she’s a funny lady, and Kuhn never minds sitting at the table and watching her nip at and fight with half the lodgers.
She never butts heads with Kuhn, never bites at him in the same way. He looks like her son, he thinks — she didn’t even ask for his references when he first asked about the room, and he’d been moved in by the time he reminded her, and then she’d just waved him off. He’s not even dead, like her husband — just lost, disappeared, gone in a puff of smoke. No closure, for cases like that.
He reminds her to go to bed some nights when he comes into the building and she’s sitting in the kitchen staring out of the window, her eyes glassy, and sometimes she slips up and calls him Richie instead of Arthur, but that’s okay. He draws the line at letting her give him Richie’s old clothes or other stuff of his, tells her to keep them in a trunk just in case.
The ”just in case” he’s thinking of is for her daughter’s kids rather than in case he comes back — Doctor Lark’s idea, he’s better at this kind of shit than Kuhn is — but it had made her give a little smile, and seemed to give her a little peace.
“Going out tonight, Mrs G,” Kuhn says as he stacks up dry plates in the cupboard. He has to stand on the same stepladder she uses to reach the high shelves — doesn’t understand why the fuck she doesn’t just change what cupboards she uses — although at least he wouldn’t have to stand on a crate like she’s doing right now to reach the sink. “Might be out all night, not sure.”
“Just don’t get blood on that shirt,” Mrs G says idly. “It’s your last white one left, and those two you gave me have been right tough, scrubbing it out of the sleeves.”
Mr G had been the foreman in an abattoir before he’d been called up. It makes Mrs G surprisingly casual about the stains Kuhn comes home with in his line of work.
“It’s not for work, but I’ll do my best.”
Mrs G turns and looks at him over her shoulder, staying perched on top of the milk crate, her hands frozen on the pan she’s halfway through scrubbing. “A woman?” she asks suspiciously.
“No.”
Mrs G’s furrowed brow unfurrows, some of the lines smoothing out of her forehead, and she opens her mouth, closes it, opens her mouth again, closes it. “A… gentleman friend?” she hazards.
“He’s a man,” says Kuhn, intrigued by how outright she is about asking the question, almost no hesitation at all. “But it’s not like that. He’s a clown.”
“Beg pardon? As in, he’s foolish?”
“Real life clown. Used to be in the circus and everything.”
Mrs G frowns at him, the furrow returning to her forehead, and then she lets out a derisive noise and turns back to her scrubbing. “It’s not right to make fun of an old woman, Arthur.”
“You’re not old, and I’m not making fun,” says Kuhn. “He’s a real-life clown.”
“Mmm hmm,” Mrs G hums, unconvinced, and Kuhn doesn’t know why it bothers him that she doesn’t believe him, but if was her, he’s not sure he would believe him either, so he doesn’t bother trying to convince her.
He crosses back across the river, holding the piece of paper Kasovitz had written out for him earlier. He doesn’t know what he’s expecting, exactly, but the address basically leads him to a bunch of allotments, and behind them is a bungalow before the park on the other side. He can see the lines and edges of the allotment block where the whole section of street probably used to be houses before they got bombed out during the Blitz — even the bungalow, it’s a funny shape and a pretty new build.
“Did they use the brick from the bombed-out houses to build this?” Kuhn asks when Kasovitz opens the door.
“I didn’t ask,” Kasovitz says, looking around the doorway he’s standing in, his eyebrows slightly raised. “Potentially. It was… affordable. Come in.”
Kuhn crosses the threshold, shrugging off his coat, and Kasovitz takes it from him, hanging it up on the wall. It’s a nice bungalow. The air isn’t so uncomfortably hot outside as it was the other night, and in here it’s comfortably warm, feels cosy. Kasovitz leads him past the kitchen, which has a serving hatch through to the living room, past the small bathroom, and to the bedroom, that takes up most of the house.
The heavy curtains are closed, almost entirely blocking out the light from the street outside — the nearest street lamp is on the far end of the block, on the other side of the allotment squares, so the light from it isn’t too bright up close. To one side of the room is a large double bed, and against the perpendicular wall is a long, narrow desk with bookshelves underneath and overtop, alongside the large window on each side. He has another typewriter here on the desk, some file boxes, some notebooks and diaries. He has quite a few books, many of them fiction in colourful dustjackets — romances, detective novels, science fiction — and then various other accoutrements on display — a stack of juggling balls, some stacked boxes of playing cards, a top hat, two wood-and-leather boxes. They look like the sort of boxes one has for chess or backgammon, but they’re on the smaller side, and they’re not jewellery boxes.
“My make-up,” Kasovitz supplies when Kuhn looks at him askance, and Kasovitz follows his gaze.
Mostly, on display are a great many photographs. The one he has on his desk at work is of his mother on the trapeze, lowdown in the high-top and tossing a ball back and forth with some of the clowns — Kasovitz is one of the clowns in the background, standing out because he’s so tall.
There are more photographs of his mother in dazzling dresses and suits, much of the time in the arms of a gargantuanly large, muscular strongman who Kuhn guesses is Kasovitz’ father. He has similar round features to him, the same big, round eyes, although he’s bald — Kasovitz’ curly hair is from his mother, Kuhn supposes. In the different photographs, he seems to have as many different styles of facial hair as Kasovitz’ mother has different outfits — a huge, walrus-like moustache; big mutton chops and a smaller beard; a puffy moustache with a triangular goatee; a huge beard with braids through it, like some sort of Viking.
There are other photographs of the circus — one of Kasovitz bending over nearly at the middle as he pulls a dove out of a top hat, and a group of children laughing, clapping, and looking up at him with wonder and delight; Kasovitz juggling and ducking amongst a half-dozen other clowns; Kasovitz standing up straight and looking casual as two dwarves stand on his shoulders and balance a tea set between them on his head, one pouring from the teapot as the other takes a delicate sip from her own cup; more clowns doing gymnastics with each other, tumbling and bowling through hoops; the same dwarf couple tending to and combing the fur of a huge, shaggy dog, or maybe some kind of wolf.
“None of these pictures has you tying people up,” Kuhn observes.
“We don’t usually do bondage tutorials in the big top,” Kasovitz says. “If you don’t mind me making a comment, I’ve noticed your attitude toward me has changed somewhat, since you met me the other night. You’ve calmed somewhat. What changed, in your perception of me, precisely? When did you cease to see me as, what, competition? Prey? And begin to see me as an authority?”
Kuhn is quiet, standing with his hands in front of his belly, and he stares into the middle distance before he tilts his head and looks up at Kasovitz’ face. He imagines it, the make-up that he has on in the photographs, superimposed over the man he’s looking at now — white paint over his face, the black triangles along the underside of each eye, red crescents emphasising his cheeks, blue lines over his eyebrows. He mostly wears similar tunics in most of the photographs, bejewelled, heavy in the chest, with puffy sleeves that make him look even bigger than he is, and a white ruff collar.
“I don’t know,” Kuhn says. “I’d never seen someone get tied up before.”
“Is that true?” Kasovitz asks.
Suddenly, a hundred images flicker in front of his eyes like someone’s actually shining a film projector into them — being a child on the playground, watching with polite interest as two of the girls wrap a skipping rope around and around Luc Hines’ chest and upper arms; being thirteen or fourteen, half-asleep in bed and watching Have and Wesley argue with one another as they practice knots on Silas Headley’s wrists, a Biggles book open as they try to figure out how someone was tied up; watching a magician once on a stage in London, chains wound around and around his body, padlocks, ropes, for him to escape out of; faceless bodies in Germany, in Poland, bound in chains or rope or barbed wire.
Kuhn says, “No.”
He doesn’t explain, doesn’t add details. He feels as though he should, wants to, but the words don’t come, and his tongue feels caged behind his teeth again. Kasovitz inclines his head, and then asks, “Would you like to sit down on the bed?”
Kuhn sits.
Kasovitz kneels on the floor, and Kuhn watches him, too stiff even to blink his eyes, as Kasovitz very slowly leans forward, hovering his hands over Kuhn’s feet as if waiting for him to say no, to protest, to kick Kasovitz hard in the nose or maybe the side of his throat.
Kuhn doesn’t do any of that.
He jolts slightly as Kasovitz’ big hands actually touch his foot, and Kasovitz freezes, but when Kuhn doesn’t tug away or twist free, he pulls on the tail of one of his shoelaces and undoes the knot, then eases the shoe from his heel, sets it aside, then reaches for the next shoe and takes the one off as well. He uses slow, gentle movements, setting Kuhn’s shoes aside.
“Have you ever had sex before, Kuhn?” Kasovitz asks.
“No,” says Kuhn.
“The concept frightens you? You mentioned a priest had attempted to touch you, when you were a boy — was that just once, or multiple times?”
“Just once, but I’d heard other boys talking about it. That it didn’t hurt, but that it was strange, that there were benefits — his favour, sweets, communion wine. It scared me, that they were comfortable with it, that they thought it was worth it when it seemed…” The words run out again, but Kasovitz doesn’t seem displeased.
He was never that good with words. When he was a boy, at school, alongside boys who were richer than him, more important than him, better bred than him, it was alright, that he was quiet, that he observed, that he went along with whatever the other boys chose. It was never nasty, never unkind — they generally understood that he didn’t like to be touched, and he wasn’t made a whipping boy or a chew toy. Have, Wesley, Silas, Luc — they were his friends, genuinely, invited him to parties or to sleep over, bought him gifts on his birthday, smiled when they saw him, told him jokes.
After school, he’d taken a job with Luc Hines’ father, who owned a publishing house, and the majority of his job had involved sorting post. Occasionally, he’d attend to other odd jobs around the office, sorting new inventory or moving and carrying boxes or stationery.
The war had broken out when he was walking along with Mr Hines out back of the building and some bloke had tried to mug them. Kuhn had acted automatically, had wrenched the guy, underweight, twitchy, in retrospect probably only attempting the robbery out of desperation, by his collar and smashed the front of his face into the wall of the delivery bay steps. His nose had made a sublime cracking sound, muffled only a little by the sudden gush of thick, dark blood, and the noise of pain that had come out of him was thin and bubbling, his knife clattering to the ground.
At first, Mr Hines had thanked him, but then he’d seen how calm Kuhn was, how unshaken he was.
“Have you done that before, Arthur?” he’d asked whilst driving him home. “Hurt a man like that?”
“No, sir,” Kuhn had answered, honestly.
Hines hadn’t believed him. He’d been able to see that, but hadn’t been able to do anything to change it. He hadn’t known how to explain, that it was just blood and cartilage — not even bone — that he’d grown up in a medical household, that it wasn’t violence for violence’s sake.
But it had affected his standing in the office. Changed how Mr Hines looked at him, talked to him, and then how everyone else looked at him, talked to him. People often found it quaint, that he was so quiet, and they stopped finding it quaint, started finding it threatening, unnerving. Stopped inviting him to things, stopped smiling at him.
It was actually almost a relief, when he got called up, and taken out of it. He’d been assigned to a medical unit, which was how he’d met Doctor Lark, and later… It all blurred together, now. He remembered being cornered, separated from his unit, two Krauts laughing at him, calling him verängstigtes Kaninchen — there was a gunshot, maybe two. There was the crack of the shorter one’s hyoid bone, the sound strangely loud, because Kuhn was hearing it break inside his own mouth, tasting blood, hearing them both screaming, screaming like children, like little girls.
“Where are you?” Kasovitz asks him, and Kuhn slowly looks back at his face.
“Don’t remember,” Kuhn says. “Behind enemy lines.”
“That happen to you a lot? You go there?”
“No.”
“When does it happen?”
“Night time, usually. When I’m about to go to sleep.”
“Feeling tired?”
“No.”
“How’s your heartbeat?”
“Even. Regular.”
“You’re breathing evenly too. Feeling calm?”
“I suppose.”
“Good,” says Kasovitz. “Take your jumper off for me. Do you want your trousers on or off?”
Kuhn doesn’t say anything.
“Let’s keep them on then,” says Kasovitz as Kuhn takes off his jumper and puts it aside. “How about your socks?”
Kasovitz is watching closely as Kuhn folds in the arms of his jumper, folds them in, creates a tight square, and puts the jumper on the desk, then puts his hand up to the buttons of his shirt, hesitates.
“The shirt then,” Kasovitz decides. “Belt too.” He watches as Kuhn removes his shirt, folds it, removes his belt, coils it and sets it on top of his shirt and jumper, stacked on top of one another.
Once Kuhn is in just his vest and socks and trousers, Kasovitz pulls out a drawer from under his wardrobe and pulls out three coils of black rope, holding two in his palm and holding out the other. When Kuhn just looks at it, he says, “Touch.”
Kuhn touches the rope, is surprised by how soft it is. It isn’t like sailor’s rope, has a less tightly coiled weave, he thinks, and is made of a much more even fibre, some sort of cotton, maybe, or even silk. He strokes his fingers over the weave before drawing his fingers back, and Kasovitz smiles at him.
“Do you want to fuck me?”
“Not tonight, certainly. I just want to tie you up.”
“Why?”
“You asked me to.”
“But why do you want to?”
“I think you’ll be good as I tie you,” Kasovitz answers simply, and Kuhn blinks at the sudden rush in his head, the way he feels his mouth go slack, his lips automatically shifting into a slight smile. “I think you’ll look good, when I have you tied — you look good already. Hands out, wrists together, palms up. Good man.”
Kuhn stares down as the rope is spread outward over Kasovitz’ big hands, and then is looped neatly around his wrists. Kasovitz had mentioned before that some people enjoy following the lines and cross over of the ropes, enjoying how the bondage is put together, and he vaguely thinks he might do that, but then he forgets.
It’s like the watch, pendulum swinging — it’s Kasovitz’ hands crossing one way and then the other, the right and then the left, the left and then the right; it’s the feel of the rope sliding against his bare arms, the slight tension against his skin, the cool fabric of the rope; it’s Kasovitz’ breathing, even, slow, in, out, in, out, in, out.
“You awake?” Kasovitz asks, and Kuhn realises he’s closed his eyes.
“Yeah,” says Kuhn, opening them. “Sorry. I — ”
“You can close your eyes,” says Kasovitz. “You don’t need them open for this.”
And then Kasovitz pulls on the rope, pulling Kuhn’s arms flush together, and his eyes widen for a moment. He stares down at the rope cording his forearms together, shifting his hands slightly, tensing his muscles and feeling the slight resistance — and then he tries to pull his forearms apart, and they don’t move. His wrists are bound fast to one another, tightly harnessed, and he can’t get them free.
He feels like he’s floating.
“This loop here,” says Kasovitz. “I pull this loop here, and I can undo this, let you free, do you want me to — ”
“Please don’t,” Kuhn breathes out. “Please, it’s… It’s nice.”
“Good,” says Kasovitz, and he smiles, and Kuhn likes the shape of his smile, likes the way his big eyes seem to change very slightly at their ankle, sees the slight crinkle at the corners of his eyes where the skin folds together. “What next? Tie your legs together? Harness your chest?”
“Yeah…” Kuhn hears himself say, his eyes closing again, and Kasovitz softly laughs.
“Yes, I thought so,” he says. “Very good. Good man.”
It’s not as good through the fabric of his trousers, but it’s still good, when Kasovitz begins to tie his legs together. Kuhn feels the pressure of each line of rope against his ankles, his calves, his knees, his thighs. His eyes flutter open when Kasovitz asks him to raise his feet, and he does so, watches Kasovitz string one of the lines right down between his feet… and then tightens.
A noise comes out of him, unbidden and throaty, as the harness presses his thighs and calves together, his legs flush, the same way his forearms are. Kasovitz has been touching him to tie him up, but each touch has been businesslike — a little on the light side, but with the rope in addition to the movements and brushes of his fingers, it’s not overwhelming, itchy, burning, in the way a lot of light touches often are.
“You want me to harness your chest?” Kasovitz asks.
Kuhn slowly nods his head.
He keeps his eyes open as Kasovitz comes closer to him, passing the rope slowly around his body — in a casual banner, he keeps lifting up Kuhn’s tied forearms by one of the loops of the harness to move them out of his way, and Kuhn doesn’t look at the ropes as they’re crossed around his chest and belly, over and over one another, but instead up at Kasovitz’ face, at his neck.
Being such a big man, he’s got a fairly big head, and his neck is made to support it on his shoulders, thick and strong, corded with subtle muscle at its base and where it adjoins his jaw. As Kasovitz’ posture changes, leaning forward or back to accommodate the rope he’s passing around him, Kuhn can see the shift and movement of the tendons in his throat, the muscles up the shaft of it; he can see the minute movements of Kasovitz’ facial expression, the flicker of his eyes as he traces the position of the ropes, the slight shift in pupil dilation as he tilts his face one way or the other and more or less light enters his eyes, the slight press together of his lips as he concentrates on a knot.
“You smell sweet,” Kuhn hears himself say as Kasovitz leans over him to pull a line taut, making a four-pointed harness tighten around his chest. His nose is almost touching Kasovitz’ breast, and he can smell the scent of the man himself, sweat and faint musk, the scent of whatever soap he uses for his clothes, and the scent of ink that clings to his fingers, where there are small stains from where he must have changed a ribbon earlier.
“I put cologne on,” Kasovitz says.
“You didn’t have cologne on at work.”
“I don’t wear cologne at work. I wear it on special occasions.”
“You didn’t wear it on Friday.”
“Those nights are routine for me, they’re not too special. You’re special, though. A handsome man wants to spend time with me, trusts me to tie him like so? Be up close with him? I want to smell nice for him.”
“It does smell nice,” Kuhn says, and Kasovitz laughs again.
“May I kiss you?” he asks.
Kuhn doesn’t answer. He doesn’t know what the right answer is. Girls have kissed him before, caught him by the cheeks and crushed their lips together, and he doesn’t know that he wants that. He nods anyway, because Kasovitz is looking at him, and he needs to give an answer, and he doesn’t want this to stop, doesn’t want any of this to stop.
Kasovitz leans in, and his lips brush against Kuhn’s cheek — they’re very warm, and he can feel the slight ghost of Kasovitz’ five o’clock shadow against Kuhn’s own clean-shaven skin. It’s nice pressure, not too light, but not too hard or too wet against his mouth either.
Kasovitz draws back, and Kuhn breathes in, missing the scent of him.
“How long can I stay like this?” Kuhn asks. “Seventeen minutes?”
“Seventeen minutes is a good place to start,” says Kasovitz, and checks his watch.
Part III
“I don’t drink tea,” says Kuhn.
“Cocoa, then,” says Kasovitz, and Kuhn presses his lips together, wrinkling his nose, but before he can refuse, Kasovitz is pouring water from the kettle into a mug. Kuhn has a blanket around his shoulders, and the weight of it is pleasant, but even having put his shirt back on over his vest, he feels strangely naked with all the rope stripped away. His gaze keeps sliding over to the rope left in stacked lines on the bed, because Kasovitz hasn’t coiled it back up yet.
“Would you have let me be tied up for longer?” Kuhn asks as Kasovitz stirs the cup. The sound of the teaspoon against the ceramic is fucking grating. “If I’d asked?”
“Oh, yes,” says Kasovitz. “Those harnesses I put you in weren’t very tight at all — didn’t you feel when I checked each of them, two fingers under your wrist, at your ankle, your thigh?”
Kuhn doesn’t really remember, actually, didn’t fucking notice that at all. It annoys him, for some reason, is a sudden sting like a splinter, and he presses his fingers and thumb against the fabric of the heavy blanket over his shoulders, grips tightly at it.
“How much longer?”
“Those ropes? So long as we were regularly moving your hands and feet, I’d be happy to leave you in those bonds overnight.” A sort of burning cloud feels as if it’s engulfing him on every side, making heat rise up in his cheeks and up his chest, and he feels very stiff and very uncomfortable, his teeth gritted, even as Kasovitz goes on, “But overnight is a big commitment for a first date, no?”
“I’m not a fucking woman,” says Kuhn.
“We’re agreed on that point. Take the cup.”
“I don’t want it.”
“I didn’t ask if you wanted it — I told you to take it.”
“I don’t have to do what you fucking say.”
Kasovitz looks down at him with an unreadable expression, and Kuhn stares up at him, not blinking his eyes. His teeth are creaking from how hard he’s tightening his jaw and it hurts a little — his fingers hurt a little bit too from how tight they’re gripping at the blanket.
Kasovitz sets the cup down on the kitchen table behind him, and the noise it makes sends a jolt through Kuhn, makes him straighten up in his seat, and he waits for Kasovitz to step forward, to advance on him, to touch him, but he doesn’t.
“What, you’re gonna fucking make me?” Kuhn demands.
“I suppose I could tie you up again,” Kasovitz muses out loud in a painfully, infuriatingly even tone. “Take the matter of choice out of the equation.”
“Fuck you,” says Kuhn.
Kasovitz shifts on his feet, and Kuhn doesn’t mean to. He realises a second later that Kasovitz is just raising his wrist again to check his watch, but before that thought registers in his head he’s on his feet and he’s lunging, his hands against Kasovitz’ chest, trying to shove him back. He’s never taken down bigger men than Kasovitz — he was fighting Nazis, not fucking giants — but he’s taken down pretty big ones.
He’s taken down almost all of them by surprise, though — Kasovitz isn’t surprised, and in the second it takes him to realise that Kasovitz was just checking the time, he’s flying through the fucking air with Kuhn’s grip on his shoulders and onto the floor. It knocks the wind out of him, hitting the cheap linoleum of the kitchen floor, one of Kasovitz’ big fucking arms landing across his chest with all the weight of a falling log, and Kuhn’s head comes forward reflexively.
“Ah ah,” Kasovitz snaps at him, the loudest Kuhn has ever heard him talk, the two open-mouthed sounds coming out from deep in his barrel chest, and Kuhn thinks he’s going to bite down on the meat of Kasovitz’ hand instead of his other wrist, it comes in front of his face so fast, but then Kasovitz is pinching down either side of his jaw with his thumb and forefinger, and Kuhn is yelping in pain like a kicked dog.
“Unnngh,” Kuhn whines, trying to kick with his legs, but Kasovitz is straddling him, his arse heavy as fucking anything on top of Kuhn’s middle, one of his legs bent back to pin down his knees and keep him from raising his feet very high, and Kuhn isn’t just weighed down by the man, goliath that he is, but by his fucking shadow. He can’t see the light any more, can’t feel it on his face — all he can see is Kasovitz’ face, his eyes, smell his cologne, the lavender and vanilla. “Leeee’ ‘ee go — ”
“Breathe in,” Kasovitz orders. “Breathe in, through the nose.”
Kuhn can’t close his jaw, can’t move his head one way or the other, and he can feel his eyes watering from how fucking wide they are. He’s trying to thrash around with his fucking tongue, because his arms, wrapped mostly still in the blanket that he didn’t have the foresight to throw off, are pinned by Kasovitz’ weight on his chest. There’s saliva in his mouth, building up, and he can’t spit it out, feels as if he’s frothing at the lips. “’uck yuu’, le’ ‘e go — “
“When you breathe in.”
“’uck yuu!”
“One more chance, breathe in,” Kasovitz orders him, and Kuhn can’t get his lips together to spit in his face, can’t knee him, can’t kick him, can’t grab him, so he just fucking screams. It hurts his throat, he screams so loud.
Then Kasovitz’ fingers change just slightly in their position, move an inch lower beneath his jaw, are no longer gripping at the hinge of it but instead just under it. He thinks it’s his chance to fucking bite, but Kasovitz’ hand is putting meaty pressure on the underside of his throat, so flush against the skin that Kuhn can feel his own pulse and the heat of Kasovitz’ palm, so he still can’t lunge downwards.
Then he realises where Kasovitz’ thumb and forefinger are, very easily covering the whole of his throat, pressing down, and he tries to panic, but his vision is already darkening a bit. Pure, overwhelming terror rips through him and the whimper that comes out of him is the most pathetic yet, his head feeling heavy, his body aching, and everything is dark —
A few seconds later, he’s still lying on the floor on his back, and Kasovitz is still on top of him, but no longer holding down his face. Kuhn swallows down all the spit built up in his mouth, feels some of it still slick on his lips, on his chin.
“No biting,” Kasovitz says crisply.
“Sorry,” Kuhn hears himself say, the word echoing like he’s hearing it from underwater.
“That’s alright,” Kasovitz murmurs. “You’re going to sit up — I’m going to help you. You’re going to drink the cocoa.”
“I don’t want — ”
“No arguments,” Kasovitz barks over the protest, and Kuhn closes his mouth. “You can sit in the chair and drink it to yourself, or I can pin your body with mine, and bring the cup to your mouth for you. Choose one or two.”
Kuhn stares up at Kasovitz’ face, at the serious set of his lips, his staring dark eyes. He thinks of the weight of Kasovitz’ body on top of his, how broadly spread Kasovitz’ body is instead of being concentrated in the way Kuhn’s weight is, in his belly, his shoulders, his thighs.
“Two,” Kuhn whispers.
“Okay,” says Kasovitz, and leans back.
In what feels like seconds, Kuhn is pulled firmly off the ground and twisted around, and he automatically tries to struggle free, but it’s a weak and pointless motion. He probably could struggle away if he really wanted to, this position more powerful than when he was supine underneath Kasovitz’ body, but he lacks the will. Kasovitz’ legs are braced over and around Kuhn’s, pinning them in, and one of his arms is braced heavily across his chest, forcing Kuhn’s back against Kasovitz’ body, the blanket dropped to the floor beside them.
He’s hot.
Heat radiates from his barrel chest and from the heavy muscle of his thighs, too — Kuhn is glad he doesn’t have his jumper on still, almost wishes he was still in his vest, thinks for a moment of the two of them being naked like this, and Kasovitz holding him down like this.
Kasovitz picks up the cocoa and brings it forward, and Kuhn breathes in through his nose and stares at the dark mixture swirling in the mug, feeling the broad splay of Kasovitz’ hand almost covering his chest. His palm is flat and strong against Kuhn’s sternum, pressing only a little bit into the meat of his breast, and he can feel the side of Kasovitz’ elbow against his belly. Can feel his heartbeat, too, slower than Kuhn’s — and Kuhn’s, he’s fairly certain, is slowing to match it. It’s natural, he supposes, naturally bound in by another man, him in control, for your breathing to mirror his, for your heart to follow his.
“Drink,” Kasovitz orders, so close to his ear that despite wanting to do anything but drink any fucking cocoa, Kuhn automatically parts his lips and sips from the mug brought to his mouth.
He’s been in the field before and had other men make him drink — he was never injured, never forced to take bedrest, but once or twice he’d gone close to feral after too many jobs back-to-back, or just too many enemy soldiers downed in the course of one night. He remembers one job where they had been up the whole night through, waiting for the right gap in the guard patrol, and he’d slipped into the bunks just before the dawn call. It had been a bunker beneath a radio tower, the broader camp in the process of being built with no prisoners there yet — he’d taken the bunks just before the dawn call to work.
It had been almost meditative — six rows of bunks, walking up and down them with the same sharp movement of his knife. Deep enough to cut the windpipe at the same time he cut down deep into the artery, making sure to slit into where the vein brought blood up to the brain, pillow or pack shoved hard into the soldier’s head to muffle whatever sound he could release the next moment. Next one, then the next one, then the next one.
What with the camp only just established, the fence newly planted in the ground and no enemy prisoners to have shifted the labour onto, they must have been fucking tired. Almost none of them stirred significantly before he could kill them dead — the ones that made noise made weak ones, and the others were sleeping too deeply to be disturbed. He doesn’t remember how many men there were — he remembers how calming it had felt, the rhythm of the slaughter, walking down the line of bunks and then crossing over to the next one.
He’d been tired, too — Nigel Hazel had found him asleep against the corpse of the last one he’d killed, hands covered in blood that had gone from warm and slick to cold and sticky, and he’d brought a canteen to Kuhn’s lips, said, “Fucking Hell, Kuhn, have you even eaten today?”
It comes to him now as Kasovitz makes him drink more of the cocoa, which is too sweet and too thick on his tongue, comes to him in half-remembered flashes — Hazel bringing him out of the bunkroom, Hazel absently nudging Kuhn’s head toward his bowl when he wasn’t eating, Hazel hosing him down like a muddy dog before they walked on, to get the blood off him.
Kasovitz massages the base of his throat, and Kuhn feels a little dizzy now as he swallows, his head tipped back against Kasovitz’ body, against the warmth of him. He feels completely and utterly relaxed like this, under Kasovitz’ control, wholly gripped and held in his arms, against his body. He shifts experimentally, which Kasovitz permits — as soon as Kuhn tries to lean forward, Kasovitz squeezes his legs around him tighter, and brings him in closer.
When the mug is empty, Kasovitz sets it aside, and he crosses his other arm over Kuhn’s chest. Kuhn exhales, bound in by Kasovitz’ legs and his arms, and it feels good.
“Do you miss it?” he hears himself ask, his jaw loose, his tongue feeling slow and sleepy.
“What?” Kasovitz asks quietly, his voice rich and deep against Kuhn’s ear, feeling as if it’s flowing directly — and deeply — into his brain. His eyelids are drooping again, and he doesn’t resist it, closes his eyes and presses his cheek against Kasovitz’ warm chest.
“You were the leader of your clowns by the time you left,” Kuhn says, and Kasovitz releases a thoughtful noise. “You’re the centre of the photographs, and not just because you were so tall.”
“No,” Kasovitz agrees. “I was always naturally somewhat graceful. I was close to my full height by the time I was fourteen or fifteen, but it took me quite some time to grow accustomed to that — as a younger boy I was lanky, and then I began to grow outwards after I’d mostly finished growing upwards. With a little more balance applied to my form, I danced and practised with my mother and the other acrobats. I was never a carthorse, never could have taken on the bulk my father had, but nor was I lithe and sleek in the way of the trapeze men. I was caught between my mother’s strengths and my father’s — too big and too heavy on muscle to follow in her footsteps, not big enough, not muscular enough to follow in his.
“There are different varieties of clown — some are obvious fools and idiots, bumbling or arrogant and punished for their hubris, but others are more tragic, or more complex. I took on a whiteface role — normally a straight man in contrast to the other clowns, often a leader. I wasn’t very good at doing funny voices, let alone projecting my voice as I did them, so I often mimed and learned various sign languages to use with the right-minded children. I often played as more sophisticated, more reserved and calm, compared to my compatriots, who did more obvious acrobatics and tricks — I didn’t so much as set the pace so much as stood as the wall for everyone else to comedically run into, or attempt to hop over.”
Kuhn can imagine it as Kasovitz quietly talks, imagines Kasovitz in his big suit with its ruff and its bobbles, imagines the other clowns tumbling and jumping and cartwheeling about him while he remains still and unbothered, nimbly stepping aside before anyone can bowl him over.
It’s not dissimilar to how he moves in the office corridor when everyone else is in a hurry and he’s walking at a leisurely pace — especially because he’s so tall, it’s often very obvious when he’s standing still and staying calm, head and shoulders above everyone else, and others are running about or knocking into one another. He’s not alone in his calm demeanour — all the secretaries are calmer and more sensible than a lot of the other workers in the office — but most of the female secretaries are on the daintier side.
Kuhn wonders if he could hold two of them on his shoulders the way he did with the dwarves in one of the photos.
“I do miss the energy, at times, the vim and life of the circus,” Kasovitz says. “I miss travelling. I miss the animals, birds, horses. I keep thinking about picking up a dog, but I don’t have the time to train one, to leave it alone. I miss my family, of course. I don’t miss narrow bunks in caravans that were never quite long enough for me — our irregular harassment from the Met at work is nothing compared to the harassment we used to experience from various police, border guards, soldiers.”
“And being in charge?”
“I can be in charge, when I feel like it,” Kasovitz says meaningfully.
“I’m sorry I tried to bite you,” Kuhn says. “I told myself I wouldn’t. That I’d try not to. I didn’t mean to.”
“I know you didn’t,” Kasovitz says, because of course he does — of course he knows. What doesn’t he know? He probably knows what’s under Kuhn’s skin, probably knows what he’s thinking, knows everything about him. “You acted on instinct — and training, no doubt.”
Kuhn doesn’t say anything.
He concentrates on the feeling of Kasovitz’ legs around his, Kasovitz’ arms around his body, Kasovitz’ weight and muscle behind him, Kasovitz’ body against his, and Kuhn encapsulated by him, eclipsed by him.
“Have you bitten partners before?” Kasovitz asks him.
“Don’t have them,” Kuhn says.
“No,” Kasovitz muses out loud. “You said you’ve not had sex before. Do you feel much sexual desire, arousal?”
Kuhn is aware, abruptly, of the slight bulge between Kasovitz’ legs, the meat of Kasovitz’ cock against his lower back. He doesn’t know if it’s hard or not, doesn’t have enough experience to know, to be certain. His cock is slightly hard, he realises. He looks down between his legs, at the bulge in his trousers — was his cock hard before, when Kasovitz was tying him up? He doesn’t remember, he isn’t sure.
“I,” Kuhn mumbles, suddenly feeling even colder, and he presses back against Kasovitz’ body even though he’s a little scared, a little uncertain. “I don’t want, that, I don’t want…”
“That’s alright,” Kasovitz says immediately. “I’m not going to fuck you, Kuhn, I’m not going to touch your genitals nor have you touch or stimulate mine, not if you’re not comfortable, not if you don’t desire it. I’m half-hard because I have a handsome young man bound in my arms — it’s a natural reaction to heat and proximity and satisfaction. I’m not going to rub against you, not going to use you for my pleasure in that way, not going to stimulate myself using your body. It isn’t your responsibility, that I’m hard.”
Kuhn chews the inside of his lip, and he reaches up with one trembling hand and curls it around Kasovitz’ big forearm, carefully touches his fingertips against the heat of his skin, feels the muscle in his forearm. It feels nice, good, to hold it, to loosely grip at Kasovitz’ arm, push it even closer to Kuhn’s chest.
“Was I hard earlier? When you were tying me up?”
“You didn’t notice?”
“Mmm mm.”
“I think you were a little, at times,” Kasovitz says. “I admit, I wasn’t monitoring the situation very closely, except to make sure I wasn’t trapping anything sensitive. Does it concern you, that you might have been?”
Kuhn doesn’t answer, because he doesn’t know what an appropriate answer is.
“What do you ordinarily do, when you find yourself aroused, erect? Do you touch yourself?”
“No.”
“Take a cold shower?”
“Sometimes.”
“Wait for it to go away?”
Kuhn nods.
“That’s alright,” Kasovitz says. “No need to do anything else, if that’s what feels most appropriate for you.”
Kuhn breathes in, and he reaches up with his other trembling hand and tries to find Kasovitz’ — Kasovitz’ fingers interlink with his, each hand crossed over the other, and he softly sighs. “Will you — ” He swallows. “Will you kiss me again?”
“Where?”
“My cheek.”
Kasovitz’ head comes forward as he leans in, and Kuhn closes his eyes again as Kasovitz’ lips brush against the side of his temple, and then touch again at the top of his cheek. It feels nice. A part of him twitches, his body threatening to stiffen — he feels a flicker of a want inside him to turn and bite, but it’s more distant than it was before, and it quietens down as Kasovitz squeezes him tighter.
“I can’t stay here tonight,” Kuhn says.
“Can’t you?”
“You said it was too much of a commitment. For a first date.”
“Oh,” he hears Kasovitz say, hears him sound genuinely surprised. “That was only a joke, Kuhn. You’re welcome to stay, if you wish to. I can keep holding you right here for as long as you want.”
“That’ll be a long time,” Kuhn whispers. It’s embarrassing, how it comes out, how he says it, but Kasovitz doesn’t seem deterred at all — he’s still holding him very tightly, and once again he brushes his lips against Kuhn’s temple.
“Let’s stay here for another little while, here on the floor,” Kasovitz suggests, “and then we’ll transfer to bed. Come the morning, why don’t I teach you to juggle?”
“Why don’t I teach you to go fuck yourself?” Kuhn retorts, and Kasovitz’ wonderful laugh is better from here, rumbling through Kuhn’s chest, feeling like it’s surrounding him on all sides, much like how Kasovitz is surrounding him on all sides.
“In the morning,” Kasovitz suggests, sounding more serious this time, “why don’t we talk? I’ll tell you more about the circus.”
“… Yeah,” Kuhn says. “I’d like that.”
“Good man,” Kasovitz says, and kisses the side of his temple again — Kuhn automatically follows after his mouth with the side of his head, and laughs breathlessly as Kasovitz kisses him again. “Good man.”
It isn’t true — good dog, maybe, but Kuhn knows full well he’s not a good man.
He doesn’t voice the thought, and instead settles peaceably once more against the other man’s chest.
FIN.
Author’s Notes
The kernel of this idea started out a few months ago as an initial consideration for Issue 113: Nine To Five of the Shousetsu Bang*Bang, but the deadline for submission approached, arrived, and departed and I just could not make the concept work.
I later realised that my problem with the piece was that I was starting from the wrong point – originally beginning with their initial confrontation in Kasovitz’ office rather than on more even footing, out and about in London – and was able to revise the idea into something more workable.
Clowns and mimes have been on my mind a lot of late, ever since I bought a very pretty mirror decorated with a black and white portrait of a Pierrot figure several months ago, and while my ambition is still to explore a period piece or two with some commedia dell’arte performers, my recent research into commedia and the evolution of modern clown design and performance certainly factored into Kasovitz’ design.
Other likely inspirations for my working on this piece are the media I’ve recently been reading, watching, and playing – notably, I was recently inspired to reread the_ragnarok’s excellent AU Person of Interest fanfiction, out of the darkness we reach, when someone was asking about recommendations for good bondage exploration – Reese and Finch are favourite characters of mine, and this fanfic is a really fun exploration of their core motivations from a somewhat desexualised kink perspective; I’ve recently started Grantchester, a 1950s-set cop show with some exploration of WWII trauma, and the limerick Kasovitz quotes is an infamous one, but is recited several times in S2E5; and finally I’ve just started my fifth replay of Disco Elysium, which has some really complex and interesting explorations of trauma and stress response itself.
Grantchester has surprisingly complex and resonant explorations of flawed characters and their response to PTSD – Kuhn is not particularly inspired by, or really all that similar to the character of Geordie Keating, but I’ve really been enjoying the way the show explores his bigoted views and contrasts them with PTSD and his tenderness and affection for his wife and children without implying that the latter two somehow make the former less reprehensible or worthy of dismissal, and that enjoyment no doubt contributed to my design of his reflexive aggression towards queer people and others he doesn’t immediately understand, even whilst understanding on some level that he is amongst their number. Mrs G is not similar to Mrs Maguire in any way at all – I think Mrs M would spit on Mrs G if she so much as looked at her – but the naming convention and their circumstances post-war are of course paralleled.
I don’t think Kuhn is particularly similar to the character of Harrier du Bois in Disco, but what I’ve particularly been enjoying on my recent replays of the game has been the way the writers personify his various urges and instincts, and how that creates such deliciously unconventional layers of reliable and unreliable narration intertwined with one another – the ways in which Harry’s “skills” often sabotage or work against him were absolutely part of the vague inspiration for Kuhn’s own instincts to lash out and to bite, as well as the ways in which he dehumanises himself, even though the ways in which Kuhn and Harry dehumanise and sabotage themselves are materially different.
These notes are intended to be a new addition on my novellas and shorts particularly – my creative process is one that I don’t tend to immediately understand while it’s underway, but I know that some readers are interested in how a story develops before it reaches its completion, and I often notice when looking back through my work that they’re influenced thematically by other works I’m engaging with, whether that be television, music, theatre, art, etc, or other hobbies and research I’m exploring at the time, so I thought they’d provide an interesting additional lens of consideration for those that like that sort of thing, especially on a reread.
Thank you so much for reading and also for commenting, if that’s something you have the time for!
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