Maddog & The Pope (Learning to fly on Broken Wings) - 7. Chapter 7 Easy Times...?

Since that disastrous evening they were living together under the same roof. It had resulted from an emergency and was out of necessity, but Niki welcomed Inno with open arms. He became a very important part of his life and they were together fulltime, apart of course from working hours and Inno’s obligations at school.

In the evenings they were inseparable. Niki made his sketches and experimented with some new project which stubbornly refused to take a definite shape. Inno studied hard for his exams. Also, as was to be expected, some evenings, the weekends and many, many nights turned into encounters of an erotic kind.

To his delight Niki discovered Inno’s presence had an added benefit, he turned out to be a pretty gifted cook, not one of Niki’s strengths. After some unpalatable and hardly edible products of his limited talents in culinary matters, he more often than not had to resort to take away food shops and pizzerias. But Inno insisted on proper, healthy food and he made the best out of every meal.

Inno proved to be resilient as well. Leaving his mother’s apartment had saddened him. It was a perfectly normal reaction to such a traumatic event. For a few days its effects lingered on, but then the boy rapidly recovered, becoming as cheerful as ever and blossoming by Niki’s overwhelming love. And even when he brooded about the break up, or was feeling unsure why it took his mother so long to decide if she could accept the situation as a fait accompli, Niki’s eyes always made him feel better, especially when they were augmented by one of his tender kisses.

Over the days and weeks their life together developed into a kind of routine of easy times with Niki struggling through his boring job and dealing with his intolerable branch manager whilst Inno diligently studied for his exams. One might almost think the story was over now and expect an epilogue. But no, the story goes on!

 

Niki came home from work. He was tired and annoyed, but despite that he checked his mailbox before going inside. As usual the only thing he found were leaflets and free door-to-door newspapers, but no mail.

Once indoors he threw the useless printed matter away and slumped on the couch. Inno was not home, a note on the table said he was at the gym. Since he had nothing better to do he took his sketch book and flipped through the pages. What he saw frustrated him. Page after page with sketchy attempts, in several colors, which only amounted to doodles. Nothing led to anything new that might be considered worthwhile to paint on some wall or fence. Was his fantasy and imagination drying out? Or was he only forcing himself to produce something new and blocking his actual inspiration with useless scribbling?

Discouraged he threw the sketch block on the table, having no sensible idea how he might break the present artistic stalemate. Until…

“Blue,” a short thought came in his head.

“What blue?” he muttered furiously.

“Blue!” the thought reappeared, even more imperative than it had been the first time.

“What does it mean?” he asked, mumbling to himself. “Is it the color blue and… if so, which one of the about thirty shades of blue? Or…?

“Or?” something in his mind challenged him as an urgent invitation to think it through.

“Is it meant as ‘blue’ in music, the blue note?” he continued his muttered reply to his own thoughts, “Getting the blues, that feeling of deep sadness? Maybe both?”

Suddenly he loved being alone. No, he had nothing against Inno, to the contrary. But at this moment being alone felt like a blessing, giving him the opportunity to indulge in his peculiar way of thinking. Purely intuitive and associative, responding to the up-welling ideas by muttering in reaction without Inno thinking that he was growing slightly mad, in that way forming an idea. Because he felt he was getting somewhere after all the artistic stand-still.

He rose and hurriedly walked to the cabinet where he kept his color crayons. He opened it, took a crayon of a certain shade of blue purely on instinct and studied it.

“That’s the one!” he whispered, “But… what am I going to do with it?”

“Lukas!” that ‘thing’ in his brain mumbled.

That was the kind of suggestion which left him without reaction. Lukas’ name popped up in his mind, but he didn’t know why. It filled him only with bewilderment, staring at the crayon in his hand:

“What has Lukas got to do with blue?”

“His face!” he whispered to himself.

“Do you remember it?” he continued his internal conversation.

“I sure can!” Niki said, out loud. “But I’m still unable to see the connection with blue.”

“Think, boy! How did his face look the first night you met him? Remember that?”

What was this? These continuously whispering thoughts and ideas in his head? Was it his muse, his Camenea who brought poetic inspiration? He found the idea very amusing, even almost poetic and it made him chuckle briefly, only to return to that last question:

“His face was dirty and grimy. His eyes were empty and lifeless and his cheeks hollow.”

“Does that remind you of something?”

Niki thought it over, but failed to find an answer, apart from:

“He was a homeless kid.”

“Yes, you’re right. But think back to the time before you met him. Think about your days in Hamburg. Think about the streets at night. What did you see there?”

“Wow!” he breathed, “Eeeuuhh… beggars, junkies, dealers, whores, pimps, drunks. I guess I forgot something.”

“Not so fast! Go back!”

Muse or no muse, it looked as if he, she or it (Niki had no idea which) was playing games with him. He didn’t understand why he did it, but obediently he repeated his answer:

“Beggars, junkies…”

“Stop! Now go back to the image of Lukas’s face. Could he have been a junkie?”

Niki considered the image of Lukas’s face another time, carefully extracting the details. He mixed his memory of the boy with his recollections from when he had swept the streets of Hamburg at night. He concluded:

“Yes!”

“And could he be blue?”

This time his answer needed less time:

“Yes!”

He no longer cared which meaning of the word ‘blue’ was applicable. His eyes grew large and stared straight ahead of them as he yelled out:

“Damn, yes! I’ve got it!”

He ran to the color cabinet, took some other blue crayons of different shades and sat down on the couch again. After grabbing his sketch pad, he started drawing, his eyes gleaming, and muttered:

“I don’t know what you are, but spasibo -thank you.”

He had no idea why he switched to Russian, but he found it amusing, since he almost never spoke that language.

He worked as if possessed, in the end coloring some facial features with the darker shade crayon to suggest depth and a lighter one to augment the impression of relief. Once the main part was ready he started to consider how he could finish the picture, but now on a more rational level. He found what he was looking for and added it using the same colors with some black added for contouring.

“Black?” he started muttering again, “Oh, yeah… some lettering! But what text?”

His muse gave him a helping hand by pushing up a hunch in his mind, when ‘it’ whispered:

“Isn’t it delicious?”

After briefly thinking it over he decided this was it. He liked it, he liked it enormously! It gave the whole picture a cynical touch and Niki liked cynicism in his art. With a firm hand he applied the letters using the black crayon. Next, he sprayed a protective coating over the drawing, rose and put his latest masterpiece somewhere safe.

After all was cleaned up, he said with a beaming smile:

“Now I only have to find a nice place for it.”

Satisfied he wandered into the kitchen to make himself a well-deserved tea. He was pouring the boiling water in the mug when he heard the apartment door open, followed by Inno’s ever-cheerful voice:

“Hi angel, I’m back again. Oh… by the way, you’ve got mail.”

That surprised him, he called back:

“Hi sweetheart! Can’t have mail. I checked the letterbox and there was only the normal leaflet bullshit.”

“I don’t know,” Inno said, “but it hasn’t come with the mailman, because it has only your first name on the envelop.”

“Funny!” Niki muttered, “Just a second. I was just making tea.”

When the tea was ready he took the mug and walked back to the living room. He gave Inno a “welcome back”-kiss. Inno kissed him back, then took the mug of tea out of his hands with a:

“That’s so sweet of you.”

Seeing Niki’s crestfallen face, he beamed one of his angel-like smiles, kissed Niki’s nose tip gently for good measure and took a swig. Niki grimaced and muttered:

“Then I’ll just have to make another one for myself.”

It didn’t take long before they were sitting beside one another on the couch each with a mug of tea.

“Where’s this mail?” Niki wanted to know.

Inno gave an envelope to him which bore only his first name, typed, clearly produced by a printer. He tore the envelope open and withdrew a single piece of paper from the inside. After unfolding it he started to read. There were only four lines, all printed in large letters, the same as on the envelope. The last line even larger than the other three and printed in bold letteringread:

“You are the cutest boy I’ve ever seen

And I hope your cunt is as dreamlike as you are.

But I’ll find that out soon enough

BECAUSE ONE OF THESE DAYS I’M COMING TO GET YOU!”

Niki didn’t quite believe what he read and read it again.

“What the hell is this?” he cried out. “Which psycho sent this sick thing? My God, this is disgusting!”

“What is it?” Inno exclaimed in shock.

“Read for yourself. See if you can believe what you read.” Niki sighed.

Inno read the short note as well and frowned. For a second or two he looked thoughtfully.

“You’re right. It’s a psycho for sure. But he is absolutely right about one thing!”

“Inno, are you serious?” Niki almost screamed angrily.

Inno nodded and replied:

“Yes. Because you are the cutest boy I’ve ever seen!”

He smiled a sort of apology and became more serious:

“It looks like you got yourself a stalker, angel. Any idea who that might be?”

Niki thought it over, long and hard. He could only find two possibilities:

“Maybe it is this fat old guy who made funny propositions at the gym a while ago. He had seen the pictures.”

“Which pictures?” Inno asked.

Niki felt how he got hot and cold, both at the same time. His head turned red up to his ears from shame. He had slipped it out without thinking.

“Well?” Inno insisted softly.

He might as well tell it. It was better than Inno finding out accidentally.

“I…,” he started, “I made this terrible mistake when I was living in Hamburg. I was fifteen or sixteen.”

Without a trace of reproof, anger, or even derision Inno pressed on with a soft:

“Tell me about it, angel!”

Despondent he started to tell it all: how he had met Raimund and fell in love with him (“One of the dumbest things I ever did!”). How he started to act as his model for erotic and nude photography, got his first and, in the months after, more and more advanced lessons in sex between men. All in good faith, all out of love! Only to find out some years later, after he had been substituted for another toy boy, the bastard had sold the pictures to a twink porn site, where each and every horny old man could look at them and jerk himself off on them. He concluded his story with a sigh:

“Yes, I know, it was not the smartest thing to do!”

Inno shrugged and replied thoughtfully:

“Amen to that! I agree. But, who can blame you? You were young, innocent and last but not least, full of adolescent hormones. And you were in love with that guy. I think I would have made the same mistake under those circumstances. You couldn’t have predicted he would sell the pictures to that porn site. That is something you only discovered when it was too late. But you’re right. This fat guy at the gym might be a suspect.”

Niki thought it over another time and concluded:

“No, not very likely. I never gave him my first name. I didn’t give him any name at all. Never mentioned my adress.”

“Scratch one suspect!” Inno muttered with a sigh, “Who is the other guy?”

“It’s some boy I met several times in a bar. He tried to get me in his bed for about four times. And I admit, if I hadn’t met you, I would have been gone with him the very first time. He was absolutely gorgeous and cute. But I can’t see him as someone who does this kind of weird thing. It just doesn’t fit with the way he behaved. He was openly chasing me, he didn’t need to send this kind of… filth!”

Inno nodded in confirmation, took Niki in his arms and said in a tranquillizing tone:

“OK, so we have no real suspect. Listen, angel, let’s not get too overly anxious about this. Maybe it is just this one letter from some idiot who was that horny that he couldn’t control himself. And if more of them come we can always consider filing a complaint with the police. If they find him we can drag him to court and get a restraining order. Just relax, oki? Let’s just wait and see what happens!”

“Where did you find this letter?” Niki asked, “In the letterbox?”

Inno shook his head and answered:

“No, it was taped on our apartment door.”

“My God!” Niki exclaimed in despair.

It made the threat so direct and immediate he couldn’t suppress the expectation that more of these deranged letters would follow.

In anger he crumpled the sheet and was about to throw it in the waste paper basket, but Inno gave him a look which made him stop. It appeared his boyfriend had a clearer head than he did.

“Don’t! Let’s keep them. If we decide to go to the cops, we will need them all!”

Inno took a ball point from the table and wrote the date of receipt in the upper corner of the envelope.

“Let’s build a real nice case,” he grinned. “Just in case we need it! If not, we can always throw them away later. Or burn them ritually.”

Niki was not pleased with the idea of keeping the letter but he had to admit Inno’s reasoning was correct beyond any doubt.

 

No matter who the mysterious writer was, he made sure Niki’s and Inno’s collection of letters grew very fast. The next was even coarser and more obscene than the other.

They received it three days later and inside were a couple of condoms and a small piece of paper:

“Don’t throw them away. We might need them pretty soon!”

Inno said, with one of his gorgeous mischievous smiles:

“Or perhaps not. We always fuck bare, don’t we?”

This second letter put Niki in a very bad mood.

 

“Then give them to the fucking needy.” he growled.

He immediately knew he had said something wrong.

Inno had been joking, but he was too wrapped in himself in thinking, prompting him to follow the remark right away with:

“Sorry, I didn’t mean… well… you know… to hurt you!”

The forgiving smile on Inno’s face said it all, there was no harm done!

The worst letter of them all was a long letter which arrived after the first two and, in which “Mr. Psycho,” as they had dubbed him, wrote a vivid description leaving nothing to be desired as far as clarity, fantasy or its vomit inducing capacity was concerned. He would make Niki his “obedient and compliant slave, dutifully serving his master’s every desire!”

The phrasing of the letter was… well, it might make one recoil in horror or it could simply make one laugh. The threat was bizarre.

“Can’t help it,” Inno giggled, “he’s like a pathetic, wannabe Marquis de Sade.”

“Inno, please…” Niki moaned in desperation.

In a way it was not the letters that bothered them. Some of them were simply laughable, others too squalid to read. All of them were stuffed in the drawer where the earlier literary products of the anonymous writer rested, ready to be handed over to the police. But what became a hindrance in their normal lives was the constant threat, literally to their own front door, since the unknown person always taped the envelops to it. It gave them both an uncomfortable feeling of distrust and paranoia towards every living soul outside their own apartment. Everybody could be the swine who did this to them, even their neighbor!

Inno could understand Niki’s paranoia, but it worried him when he saw his boyfriend keeping a close visual surveillance on every man within two meters of him, no matter where they were. What worried him even more was, he became paranoid as well.

For two consecutive weekends he found himself outside on the street, waiting, half-hidden, like one of many street kids, keeping a close observation of their apartment building. He mentally skipped the other tenants as ‘no threat,’ but scrutinized any stranger who entered the building.

One Saturday an unknown entered the building late in the afternoon, only to leave again after a few minutes. He thought it was someone harmless. The next Saturday he saw the same man entering the building at about the same hour and leaving after a very short stay. That triggered his curiosity and suspicion so he observed and studied the man. But he reached the conclusion it couldn’t be their ‘Mr. Psycho’. The man looked like a typical low rank civil servant, too much a ‘grey mouse.’ Someone like that could never write what they had read in the letters. Actually, Inno found him almost risible when he saw the man walking away with small, pedantic steps. He disappeared in a car… of course the car was grey as well! Inno tried to read the license number, but could only make out it was a local car, with a Merligborn number plate. He forgot all about it and he certainly didn’t bother to tell Niki what he saw, unknowingly making a huge mistake.

One letter was really frightening. It read:

“So you want to play hard to get, boy? I think I will take care of that. Maybe you will become more eager after I share the little piece of information about your past modelling career with your father. He might even like it!”

It catapulted Niki in a panic attack. He screamed out:

“He can’t do that! My old man would kill me!”

Inno grabbed him by the shoulders and shook him, speaking sternly:

“Calm down! He’s just bluffing!”

“But he wants to send these pictures to my father,” Niki cried out.

“Niki, the only thing he knows is you have a father. Everyone has one, even though I don’t know him. He’s just trying to scare you into doing what ever he wants you to do. It is all plain bluff.”

This seemed enough to quieten Niki down again and Inno put the letter on the table, noting the date it came in. But, being really fed up by now with waiting for the letters to come, he took the calendar off the wall and lay it on the table next to it. He took all assembled ‘weird letters’ and sorted them by the date of arrival. Finally, he started to mark all the dates of the letters on the calendar.

Niki looked somewhat surprised at what he was doing:

“What are you up to, sweetheart?”

Without looking up from his work Inno uttered:

“Don’t know! Just following a hunch, I guess. Gimme some time… maybe it leads to something. Anyway, I’m fed up with sitting on my hands, only waiting for the next piece of filth to arrive.”

When he had marked the last arrival date on the calendar he stared at the dates for a long time. Then a smile crossed his face.

“I see a peculiar pattern here!”

“What?” Niki cried out excited. “Tell me about it!”

“Angel, you can expect fan mail any day of the week completely at random, but never on Sundays and Mondays.”

“Meaning?” Niki asked, hoping that Inno discovered something important.

“Don’t know.” was the only reply, “But…it means something! And there is something else I noted over the last couple of weeks.”

Niki looked at him with questioning eyes.

Inno explained:

“All letters were taped to the door after you got home from work. There was never one on the door waiting for you when you came up the stairs. It only appeared after you had closed the door behind you. Always some time after that. Although it’s not possible to say when.”

“And, what does that give us?” Niki asked hassled.

“Like I said,” Inno answered somewhat in resignation, “I don’t know. But I’m certain we’ve got a clue here that leads to our Mr. Psycho.”

Niki thought it over briefly, then softly said:

“Inno, maybe you’re right. I don’t know. But… shall we go to the police with this, sweetheart?”

Inno nodded, firmly reacting with:

“Yeah, you’re right. Let’s do that. I’ll put this in a spreadsheet. Makes it easier for them and we can just leave it with the police.”

He rose, switched on the laptop and started typing. Their counteroffensive was rolling!

 

Sunday evening, the evening he had been waiting for, at last, he had the chance to shake off his artistic paralysis. It had haunted him for weeks on end.

He liked doing his paintwork on Sunday evenings. First, he didn’t have to work on Monday, meaning if a project took more time than expected he could sleep in the next morning. And Sunday nights were generally calmer than Saturdays. There were less people and fewer cars on the streets, diminishing the risk of being seen and having a run in with the police as a result.

He had felt the happy anticipation since last Monday. That morning he had been to the police station to file the complaint for stalking. A detective had listened to his story, read some of the letters with increasing disgust and had looked at the schedule Inno made. Suddenly the detective had asked:

“What kind of job do you do, son?”

“I work in a store, sir.” he replied, wondering where the question was leading.

“What’s your day off, apart from Sunday?” was the next question.

Niki saw no connection between his working schedule and Inno’s spreadsheet on the desk, but with a shrug he answered, he was free on Mondays.

“Only you, or is the whole shop closed then?” the detective wanted to know.

“We’re completely closed on Mondays, sir.” he said.

The man asked him where he worked and made a note on a piece of paper. Then he turned to Niki and confirmed they would investigate it and let him know the outcome.

Monday afternoon the fun commenced with the first phase, of starting to make his templates. He had the time to do this unobserved with Inno being at school. He looked at the design another time and was actually pleased with it. Its meaning was clear, the styling was excellent, but despite that its technical complexity was modest. The templates wouldn’t take long to cut and the execution, putting the paint on a wall, would be a piece of cake and could be done in a short span of time. He had already found the location, a wall opposite the high school, which was quite appropriate in his eyes. He only hoped the painting’s message wasn’t too cynical or too abstract for the kids to understand.

The work week had been as was to be expected, he was pestered by “Snake Eyes,” but he had learned to shut himself off from it. As soon as he entered the shop in the morning, he declared himself dead by becoming a mere zombie who automatically did everything according to the wishes of both his branch manager and the clients. He only resurrected to full life once he came home, his revival ignited by Inno and his art. It was no surrender, it was self-preservation while he waited for a chance to break away, provided he could find the courage and opportunity. But even in that ghostlike state it was extremely hard to escape his torturer with the cold snake-like eyes. He was always looking for something to make life difficult for him.

Right at this moment it didn’t matter, how he would get through next week was a problem that was still one whole glorious day ahead of him. Now it was Sunday evening!

They had spent the afternoon in bed and it certainly hadn’t been an old man’s midday nap. Although… he had to admit grinning to himself, once they finished their arduous, wild and passionate lovemaking, they were both so exhausted they fell asleep in each other’s arms, only to wake up two hours later.

Inno had come down on him with a vengeance, extracting every grain of femininity from his body by plunging his enormous phallus in him the hard and deep way, until he orgasmed with a wild cry. With another grin Niki thought he even had some trouble with walking normal.

During this delightful torment the old dream recurred. The dream of what he would experience if he did to Inno what Inno was doing to him that very moment. Once it had confused him; now he understood his fluid gender identity had just another swing, this time to the more masculine side. He didn’t want to confront Inno in an abrupt and rude way, but decided he would aim at that still unknown experience the next time they were making love.

After they showered, they had their dinner. At about ten Niki started to pack his paints, his templates and the other things he might need and dressed in his black clothes.

“Where are you going, angel?” Inno asked somewhat surprised.

“Just some painting, that’s all.” he answered indifferently.

“Great,” was the excited reaction, accompanied by an enticing smile. “Can I come with you?”

Niki shook his head.

“Oh! Come on…” Inno pleaded with disappointment in his voice.

But Niki remained adamant:

“First, you have your exam tomorrow at nine. Second, it can get risky, and third, honey, this is not about you, but when I work I want to be alone.”

“Oki.” Inno muttered, clearly not convinced.

Niki took the boy in his arms, looked in his ever-magical grey eyes and whispered:

“I’ll be real silent when I come back home. And you need to be in bed early. You must be on form tomorrow morning!”

“Yes, daddy,” Inno replied with a mocking smile, “I’ll be a good boy. And make something gorgeous on some wall, will you?”

“I’ll try,” Niki replied with a shrug, “I’m not that good.”

After an intense kiss he was gone, on his way to his next artwork. He missed Inno’s last reply on his parting remark:

“I know you’re not that good… only as good as Maddog. You don’t fool me, my beautiful angel!”

 

It was a typical very peaceful and quiet Sunday evening. The streets were so empty Niki didn’t feel the necessity to sneak from shadow to shadow. He sauntered freely along the sidewalk on his way to the location he had found.

While walking he overthought things. Especially Inno’s desire to come along bothered him somewhat. It had been some time ago when he decided he would leave his boyfriend in the dark about Maddog. Although he sensed the boy was close to discovering the truth. He didn’t want to put his lover at risk.

More importantly he wasn’t lying when he said he preferred to work alone. When he was Maddog he was a loner. It was just between him, the paint and the wall. No spectators allowed, no interruptions needed and no comments wanted. Just him and his art. That was more than enough for him!

Besides, what or who was Maddog? One part of his thinking told him Maddog was his alter ego, the disembodied technical extension of the muse. That strange phenomenon in his mind which gave him the ideas for what he made. Maddog was fake, fiction… Maddog was a black ghost in the dark night. Maddog was a collection of wall paintings, scattered across the city.

But he found it hard to be fully content with this vision. It erased him from the total equation as a person of flesh, blood and most of all, of feelings and emotions. Coincidentally it was his brain which was the domicile of that muse, and it was his eyes and hands that translated ideas into something visible, like using his hands to do the actual painting. The real motive as to the why he made street art was defined by those four words on each of his paintings: “Living in your eyes.”

But he stalked the streets at night armed with paint and molds because it gave him the opportunity to flee from a dominant control-freaky father and his vassal, the tyrannical branch manager. The one who did his utmost best to make his suffocating job even more unbearable. It allowed him to escape from a stalker he couldn’t shake off and all those other minor problems, his undefined gender identity and porn pictures that circulated freely on the internet, accessible for every horny bastard. It gave him the autonomy to express himself while breathing free, at least for a little while. And he knew he was good, that his paintings were always well noted! It was why he wanted to work alone, to enjoy the freedom!

Was that all? Or was there more to it?

“Living in your eyes! Living in your eyes! Living in your eyes!” he chanted softly to the rhythm of his footsteps. He tried to force the answer to the last unsolved riddle to the surface of his mind. But before he succeeded in doing that he arrived at his location.

For a few seconds he shook his head to chase the remnants of the somewhat confusing thoughts out of his mind.

“Time to concentrate now, buddy!” he whispered.

He took a last look at the clean wall. It was perfect. It was directly opposite and in full view of the school’s main entrance and somewhat set back between two large apartment blocks. To save energy the city council had reduced the streetlights to half of them working, giving him perfect long shadows as cover to work unnoticed.

He took his penlight, then the paint cans. Placed them in a predetermined order so he could take each of them in the correct sequence by touch, without actually seeing them. With the help of the penlight’s narrow beam he placed the molds and then the real job started. It was between his night sight in the limited light intensity, the paint and the wall. It was the fight he loved.

It took him less time than he had expected. Within twenty minutes the job was done, including placing his trademark poster. He stepped back to look at it, shining the penlight beam over different parts.

“This was a real smooth job.” he said to himself with a satisfied smile. “Did it in record time.”

He packed his things in the satchel, took one last satisfied smiling eye at his newest creation and headed back home, whistling an old tune.

Once at home he undressed in the light of the hallway. Any other way might wake Inno up and that was the last thing he wanted to do. Naked he slipped into the bedroom, quiet as a mouse. Without making a sound he slipped under the duvet. He moved so lightly you might assume it was not his alter ego who was the ghost, but he, himself.

He rolled on his side, planted a soft kiss on Inno’s neck, his lips hardly touching the boy’s naked skin, leaving him firmly entrenched in dreamland.

“Nighty-nighty, sweet prince of mine. Sweet dreams!” he whispered.

He rolled over on his other side and was sound asleep in a matter of minutes, dreaming about a skinny prince with long, curly ginger-blond hair, who biked naked on an ATB. It turned into a soothing, comforting and re-assuring dream. Even his subconsciousness sensed the prince was right next to him, in bed.

  

Inno watched intently as the door closed, staring with a smile. Niki had not heard his teasing and challenging remark. The one in which he mentioned the bad amateur street artist and the pro Maddog in one breath.

He was absolutely sure he was right. His Niki was the same person as Maddog! Mostly this was based on intuition, but he even had some “circumstantial evidence.” It was more than coincidence Niki had bumped into him when he was fleeing from the police through that alley. The alley which just happened to have its other exit directly opposite the painting of the ‘Reaper.’ And, as he said himself, he “had been painting.” It could hardly be accidental, his lover spending most evenings concentrated on his drawing and sketching, visibly flourishing after another strenuous and hapless day at work.

He even had real evidence in his hands when he happened to come home early from school and found Niki was still at work. He discovered the sketch books lying about and driven by curiosity started looking through them. There were plenty of indications to the shadowy Maddog. He saw preliminary studies and small sketches of Christmas trees, kittens, cloaked figures, vultures and trees. There were sketches of rather unhealthy-looking faces and hands and a lot of other drawings he didn’t recognize, but they were probably ones he had discarded and not used or used on paintings he hadn’t seen. He had no idea how many paintings were distributed over the city that he hadn’t discovered yet. But all the drawings and sketches he found were in the same general mood. They fluctuated between ironic and pure black cynicism.

Had he been a lawyer he would consider it insufficient to build a solid case in court. But he was no lawyer. It was not about scoring points in court. It was about delicacy, sensitivity and some common sense.

Inno smiled at the thought Niki’s little secret was no longer a secret, because it was his own little secret that he had found out about it. By now he had known Niki long enough to understand it was no use to press for a confirmation out of him. It would only lead to ever more vociferous denials. And should he be so stupid to demand clarity it could well be that their relationship would be over. No, he had to wait until Niki told it all by himself or that the whole thing became so irrefutable denial was useless.

For the moment he was content with the situation as it was. That is, having a love affair with a very beautiful and sweet boy, who just happened to be a hidden artist as well. But he knew eventually, he would become unsatisfied being excluded from the artist in Niki. It was an integral part of his personality and Inno was only willing to accept the whole package without anything left out. If that didn’t happen, then he might be the one who ended the relation! His mamma wouldn’t mind at all.

He regretted that last thought bubbling up. In a way Niki’s secrecy about his alter ego was sort of amusing. But thinking about his situation with his mother left nothing very positive. His mother bothered him.

Since leaving home, he had heard nothing of her, although she had promised his leaving was meant to be temporary, so she could think things over. In itself he saw no problem living with Niki more than temporarily, but it worried him he had not received any positive or even negative signal from his mother. There was neither a rejection nor an approval of the present status quo regarding his relationship with Niki. No phone call, mail, SMS or what ever. There was simply nothing! There was only absolute silence!

He couldn’t understand it! Was she really that angry? Did he hurt her feelings so much? During all his life she had been the one who sensed and understood all that went on in his heart and soul. So at least she should be able to comprehend this was not about deliberately hurting feelings, but about indomitable love. He had always been under the impression his mother and he had been a tightly knit emotional entity, she was as interested in keeping her son as her son was in keeping her. Was his assessment wrong?

“Shall I call her?” he mumbled very, very softly.

He decided against it, shaking his head. What would he say? That he was sorry? No, he wasn’t sorry about his choice. Niki was his love and his life, his future.

Something else boiled up in his consciousness:

“Or is it God’s punishment for all my evils?”

He snorted; that was the kind of thought he could do without! When he considered it seriously, it was a possibility. But God had also sent Niki to cross his path and no matter for what reason, he regarded it as the highest reward possible for his good deeds, if he had done any!

Maybe the whole thing was more down to earth than God. Life had happy and sad sides and he experienced them both at the same time. It was like God, who had punishing and rewarding sides. Or was God the same as life?

“Now that’s an interesting thought!”

“But not now!” he muttered after looking at his watch. With a difficult exam ahead of him it was about time to go to bed. Being the good boy like he had promised Niki. He needed all his energy for tomorrow. He needed good grades. He had decided to go to university and had applied for a Federal grant. The only thing standing in his way were the upcoming exams.

The only doubt that lingered was what he actually wanted to study. He had enrolled for Social Studies, his second choice after he had scrapped his original wish to become a priest. But since his exposure to street art, more specifically Maddog’s paintings, he felt irresistibly attracted to the art world which was a completely new universe for him. Lacking of talent he would never be an artist or a creator, but only serve as an observer, an analyst, all functions that might be summarized under the umbrella term “art lover.” He wanted to discover this art world, from the Middle Ages to the present day urban and street art. His choice drifted more and more towards Art History. He was already having doubts about his choice of Social Studies before he had actually started it.

With an effort he switched off his thoughts and then the lights in the living room and with a loud yawn he walked to the bedroom.