Giddy with excitement, I buckled myself into the seat. I was on my way. The Romanian rentboy I'd met in Budapest last month had surfaced again. His heavily accented voice on the phone, so out of context in my New York life,

skewered me with pleasure. True, my memory of him — based on two drunken, pitch-black nights in Budapest — was foggy as thoughts of old fevers. Our topsy-turvy encounter of easy sex, followed by the sudden sharing of personal secrets, had drained me — and now, just as I began to recharge, sparks were flying once again.
     It didn't matter that he was essentially homeless, and primarily heterosexual. That first psychodrama in Budapest — the whisky, the unveiling of his sinewy body, the threats of hostile hotel employees hovering around us — all took hold of me again, put me back in that blank, teetering moment before orgasm — just as the takeoff of the plane flattened my body against the seat.
     The plane leveled off. Astonishment at flying to a Romanian vagrant whose features I could hardly picture gripped me; until a sudden image of him — lithe and sinister — sizzled like a brand and made me salivate. For the rest of the trip I exulted over the thought of his gaunt, big-nosed face, the irony in his deadened eyes.
     My fantasy was deflated by the pale, chain-smoking youth, half my age, with a crinkled smile, waiting for me at Ferihegy Airport. Somehow he seemed too diminutive, inexperienced, to have sent me running toward a plane, my wallet stuffed with cash-machine money intended for him. Our taxi ride to the Margitsziget Hotel, in near silence, seemed unreal and anesthetized. I fell down next to him on our queen-sized bed, and plunged into a deep, jetlagged sleep.
     When I woke up, he was undressed and perched patiently next to me. There was a soccer game on TV, which he followed through heavy lids, shrouded by the clouds of smoke he exhaled. Instinctively, I burrowed my face in the crotch of his bikini underwear while he kept smoking, getting more and more aroused, never looking down until I slid off the bikini and he clasped my head and shoulders. I finally pulled away as he ejaculated, but not fast enough to avoid the dribble of fluid that clung to my eyelash.
     I rushed in a panic to wash it off, as he snarled an acidic observation about my lack of trust in his seronegativity. Then he chuckled fatalistically. He lit another cigarette and switched the channel.
     When I came back, I put my face very close to his and let the trance — my reason for coming — swallow me. Soon I was completely inside what I had longed for.

What was it, exactly? Not just the thud of his body against mine nor even the rollercoaster of our genital contact; something else. Nothing short, in fact, of a generous portion of his inner life, which I could read, or hallucinate, in the hyper close-up of his dark, oriental face. From any distance it worked a harsh, ruthless schematic on the eyes — it was a face that could look almost cruel, if cruel can be lazy — but very close up, just before my eyes began to blur, it began to release a bizarre humanity — if, indeed, humanity can be thought of as a mismatch of parts, the poignancy of things not fitting together. His face, then, was a cluster of cruelty, sweetness, craftiness and vulnerability, built from the patchwork of a spotty life.
     I'd never noticed the roundish, quarter-sized scar near the jugular vein, though I'd been curious about another scar encircling the end of his large nose is if someone had tried to lop it off. Draping a soccer-defined thigh over mine, he languidly confirmed the violent cause of both scars, pantomimed with his lean, muscular arm the stroke of the blade that opened both places on the skin in one curved swipe. Between exhales of smoke he described the brawl in front of a bar that left him lying in a parking lot as blood gushed through splayed fingers from his jugular vein and sliced nose.
     The other scar on his neck is from the stroke of a scalpel, the surgical aftermath of a drunken car accident and the attempt by doctors to repair damaged vertebrae by cutting in from the front, since entering from the spinal side with the scalpel could cause nerve damage. He rebelled against all medical care during that episode, threatening to walk out of the hospital with neck brace and all, removing the brace to make it easier to get at a pack of cigarettes, finding his courage in aggressive denial right up to the moment when, holding the needle above him, the anesthesiologist told him he was the most difficult patient the hospital had ever had, and then gave the injection that plunged him into unconsciousness and, against the odds, let him wake up repaired rather than paralyzed.
     My eyes are twin snails inching down a statue, past the hostile wings of his hunched shoulders, past his slightly twisted nipples red and erect from my sucking and nibbling, to the lean stomach muscles that tell the story of his multiple starvations, all caused by the accident of being born Romanian and leaving for countries where no Romanians are wanted — which means most countries.
     There is the evidence of the attempt to cross for a better life from a Macedonian wood where's he's been lurking for a day and a night; shot at six times by border guards but still running until he has made it past the frontier into Greece. A few berries hastily nibbled in more woods before he sneaks into the hull of a container ship at Patras on the way to Italy. There's nothing to eat or drink during the sweltering thirty-eight hour voyage but a crate of melons; then weak and disoriented, he creeps into the blinding sun of Bari and steals food on his journey by foot to Rome, where fate smiles on him for six months as a successful car thief and gigolo. Those were, he says, the salad days, including a beautiful woman he was able to fuck in the toilet of a club until she came by the next day and admitted she was a sex change, or the golden days on a summer beach that ended when he got caught stealing a car and was thrown out of the country.
     We ride to dinner. I'm enveloped by his peppery rankness — a perfume part rebellion and part musk of

depression — some of it still stings my tongue, plunging me deeper into his dislocated thoughts. I can feel him jigsawing through multiple languages — Romanian, Italian, Greek, Hungarian, German. Language for him is the cubism of survival. He'll speak a word and, under his breath, quiz himself for the five versions of it in the other languages he knows — in case he'll need them. In the restaurant, his ears are pricked like a spy's and his eyes blank as he evaluates that couple across the room. A Pole speaking German with an accent, sprinkled with some bad English, to a woman speaking German and English who must be Czech, he decides, his foxlike face squinting in satisfaction.
     Two days later his very pungent cock dangles over my face as I sit on the floor between his legs and nip at the foreskin. His dick smells strongly of pussy. I lap it up. He'd disappeared for six hours with some of the money I'd given him, ostensibly just for an hour to get a haircut, but actually hooking up with his pleading girlfriend whom he took to the movies and fucked in the toilets.
     We fight about it. "If you don't want the job, then okay!" I bark.
     "I disappeared on purpose," he calmly retorts, "just to see what you'd do." I slide my mouth up his leg, licking the scent of her arousal and her coming and her fear and despair at losing him.
     "Keep bringing me your cock when it smells of pussy," I beg.
     A rented car to Romania. He has to go once a month to renew his visa. His trampled, rain-streaked passport has already caused some trouble at the border, as has our appearance together, two different generations who are obviously not father and son entering traditionally homophobic Romania. There's a chance they might not let him back across the next day when we try to return to Hungary. So much the better, maybe, since his girlfriend has been calling the hotel hourly in tears, begging for an explanation of why she can't see him again while his "uncle" is in town.
     The darkening air looks smudged, the thick-trunked trees with their high, full mass of branches, sinister. "I feel safe here," he suddenly says.

But soon past the border and in the city of Arad, a gang of street children begin clawing, pounding at our car. All we have is Hungarian money. I open the window to hand some of the coins to the youngest, who glances at them and throws them as hard as he can at my face, bruising my temple. Shakily, I pull the car over and we stop for a drink in a respectable-looking tavern. A fourteen-year-old girl begins signaling me to her table, while two middle-aged hulks survey the incident. As I walk by her, her hand shoots out, grabbing my member through the cloth of my pants. "Tell her to let go," I say to my friend through clenched teeth. She releases me, we leave. "She was hoping to get you outside so the guys in black could jump you," says my friend with resignation, fear. "I know 'cause I used to do it," he adds slyly. I glance at him with disgust and he glows with the pleasure of my disapproval.
     We find a hotel that charges a third more when they discover I am American. By the time we get up to the mildewed room, I've had it. I shove the beds together. "Is it all right in this country?" I ask acidly. "Of course," he answers. "Just push them apart in the morning."
     We drop onto the bed and he rolls toward me, curling up in my arms, clasping me tightly, enlacing his limbs with mine. I plunge my face into his neck, his armpit, experiencing that frozen, frustrated power transmitted by his odor. It is loss, melancholy, steely resentment. I pull off his shirt and he dangles an arm backward in surrender. With tongue and teeth I begin slowly working on his nipples. "You love me, don't you," he sneers.
     And I realize that I want to come back again and again for more, for years, to Romania. I slip off his pants and bury myself in the oblivion of our confusion. "Why me? Why me?" I hear him saying, but I don't want to answer.