“You may have him, Silvio, when I pass. My intention is to leave myschiavoin your care, if he’ll allow it, but you must be patient. We’ll both need time to adjust.”
My eyes drift then to Giovanni, gagged and kneeling at the shore, innocent and ignorant to my brother’s plan.
“He’s not an object,” I argue, impassioned.“You cannot simply decide his life for him as if he were a pet.”
“I can, and I will. I know what’s best for him. You do not.”
Now, we are in the sauna. Giovanni has just left us to clean up for dinner, having been used by us both in every way imaginable. I am urging Valentin to be honest with him, to tell him the truth.“I can’t,”he says, looking haggard and sad.“Not yet.”
“It’s not fair to him,”I protest. Or me.
“It is my right to decide when he knows, and he’s not ready. Nor am I.”
My brother, just as stubborn as ever.
And now we are in the dungeon. Giovanni has just been whipped mercilessly and is sobbing at my brother’s feet while Valentin pets his head fondly. Giovanni’s back and buttocks are striped with fat red welts, some of them bleeding. It turns my stomach to see it.
“How could you do this to him?”I ask because I don’t understand—may never understand—why they must go to such extremes.
“He needs it,”Valentin says calmly, self-assured in his dominance.
“But why?”
“The question is less of a why, Silvio, and more of a how. How will you provide him this release when I am gone?”
“I don’t know,”I say, helpless as a tern caught in the storm.
“Well, you’d better figure it out.”
It’s that feeling of helplessness that persists beyond these waking dreams, being trapped in a web of my own making, the rope that binds me, ever tightening its hold. And all the while my fever rages.
We are now in a church—Valentin and me—sitting side-by-side in a pew. I am a boy again with combed hair and a clean face, uncomfortable in my church clothes, shoes pinching my growing feet. Valentin wears his funeral suit, the same one that he was buried in.
“Are you still giving me the silent treatment?”my brother asks, his voice soft and amused, the way it was whenever I was being obstinate.
“Maybe,”I say, arms crossed, feet kicking at the wooden pew in front of us.
“I didn’t want to leave you. There were so many things I didn’t get to tell you, Silvio.”
I peer up at him. Even in dreams, he still appears so large, so strong and self-possessed.“Yeah? Like what?”
“How much you mean to me. You are more than a brother to me, you are like my son, and I’m so proud of the man you’ve become.”
“I wasn’t there for you in the end,”I remind him sullenly.
“You were there. You were a ray of light in a very shadowy time.”
“It was hard to watch you die. To see you so sick and in pain. I hated it.”
“We said our goodbyes. I was ready. It was Giovanni who wouldn’t let me go.”
“He still won’t.”
“Does that bother you?”
“Sometimes. You’re more than a man to him, you’re a god, and he worships you still. I will make mistakes, but you will live on as his perfect Dominant forever, his beloved Master. How can I possibly compete with a ghost?”
“You don’t need to compete with me, Silvio. He worships you the same.”
