"Locks" by Thomas Behan

Rivers scrawl the history of the lands they mark up and divide. For thousands of years the Danube bent humanity over its will, vectored empires this way instead of that way, determined settlement patterns and invasion routes, gave life and took lives. People in their folly were certain it was they who had tamed the river as farmers and conquerors adorned the banks with irrigated, lush fields and imposing fortresses that rose high above the river in order to be visible for miles by any visitors who might be unclear about who had mastered the waters. Periodically, humanity was reminded that the indifferent river had no human master, as their crops, animals and even family members were swept away and made part of the river’s indifferent agenda, an agenda that at once involved but was not at all concerned with humanity. Churches have long dotted the banks, as if to make clear that locally at least it was still understood who the boss was. 

Then history ended. The application of lock technology, to connect and manage the water levels of rivers at different elevations, effectively made one big river from one end of Europe to the other. We cheated. Erased and then used this new river to scrawl a new history. The conquest of the waters meant that humans briefly believed themselves to be gods, serviced by rivers that were created and destroyed at will all day and night as locks opened and closed their gates and delivered cradled ships safely between realities. When the world ends, when everything else made by human hands leaves the stage, save for radioactive waste, it will be the locks of the world that remain for centuries after the last human traverses one. 

For all it’s marvel and the impact it’s had on human history, lock function is fairly simple. Especially if you’re me, working for a river cruise company doing the unskilled work, the odd jobs including tying the boat to the posts as the lock chambers fill or drain. I am left with a lot of fucking free time. Meaning free time used in the service of fucking. On this job the river is like Las Vegas. What happens never leaves, mostly because no one cares about what happens as long as nothing explodes or impedes the progress of the tourists. Wherever we are, this is the right spot for me. 

This boat originates in the more tolerant sections of Western Europe but proceeds rightward and down into the more sexually-certain Eastern European countries. Really it’s the boat that is the Las Vegas, a citadel of carnal immunity regardless of the prevailing political and cultural sentiments that may be temporarily surrounding it, depending on what country’s Danube you are fucking atop of. 

I am of the Netherlands, and so for the most part where I put my dick is of no concern to those who know me there, save for my grandmother who just can’t understand why some pretty girl hasn’t snatched me up yet. I lie for her, and it creates a wall between us that she doesn’t know exists. But on the boat I meet many Eastern Europeans, from countries where some people see gays and the Danube as going together perfectly, provided the gays are weighed-down well enough that they don’t pop-up. When I work with a man from east of Czechia or south of Austria I need to proceed carefully, especially if he is fuckable, which they all seem to be. Those guys don’t file grievances with the union when there is a sexual miscommunication, they report you as missing and presumed drowned which is a safe presumption on their part since they are the ones that will drown you. 

Even when they are gay, men from the East are more likely to be closeted or in denial. The knowledge you share with these types can cut your throat, or get you crushed against the side of the lock, constricted between the boat and wall, as your ribs race to mercifully crush your lungs before you die the long way from drowning. Why so specific? Because last year an apparently self-hating queen of Serbia murdered his lock partner this way, after they had sex. All caught on cameras, both the boat’s and the ones mounted at the top of lock. So on this boat as you leave Austria for lands east, there is no such thing as truly safe sex unless you are alone. 

Hands (grunt boat workers) get on and off all over the river, so if you see something you like time is of the essence. I am very much a top, and very much more a control freak. Say I see someone, and I know that our next port, where he might be disembarking, is eighteen hours away, I will create a customized timetable to manage the seduction. An early “no” is better than the opportunity cost of not pursuing a second choice while awaiting a later “no.”  So my timetable, tried and tested by two years of river sex, and failure to obtain river sex, might look like this (and yes I actually write it out each time): 

1. First hour – Go to their cabin for introduction, say “Hi.” If he’s gay, one way to determine that is to see the room, even if over the shoulder. Nothing is ever 100%, but if the space is very neat, that’s a good sign. Or at least not a negative. You want multiple indicators, to increase the probability of guessing correctly. So next….

2. Second hour - Get a “friendly” (familiar female crew member who knows you are gay) to arrange to run into him in your presence. Straight men change how they speak and act when women are present. Gay men do not. 

These two tests above are not a lot to go on I admit, but the ass clock is ticking so the 80/20 rule applies. In this case if the above two conditions are met I am eighty percent sure I will be fucking a new guy in his twenties. 

Now to tell you that the latest vessel for my affections failed both these tests. He was a big, rugged man who I did not peg correctly at all, until I did so repeatedly. He said less than nothing in a dark night of echoing silence when we first worked the front together and it was unbearable. I imagined that he thought about nothing as he stared straight ahead into the dark void as we lazied on the river. Me, the void terrifies. 

“In the silence is where Satan slips in,” my grandmother said to me, and I guess that’s where I get my fear of darkness and silence. 

It’s like I know it’s coming for me and for all of us, but I think there’s still time to outrun it. 

With his eyes he said enough. Eventually. I wish there were a dictionary or some kind of translation tool for the rich lexicon of expression that pass between gay men’s eyes. We have had to develop a mature and secretive wordless vocabulary as a means for survival, and as from all necessities, art is eventually born from it. No different than food, shelter, and the intimacies of every other kind.

Deck sex was made possible by the disabled camera that I disabled earlier in the year. Proof that no one watches the tapes unless there is a specific reason to do so. I have the timing down in this most active part of the river, so I can tell if we are a blowjob, handjob, or full-on fuck away from the next lock, at which point we must go temporarily back to work. Anyway, we were late at the front of the boat, 2:30 AM and moving through a series of locks in the rain, all fucked out, when I finally got some words out of him. A little Sativa in gum form helped with that. They test us for alcohol but not weed for some reason. God bless our union for helping us to have at least a little fun on the long, agonizing trip through the German and Austrian locks, one after another. I have a problem with tangents as you have probably realized, but that only means that I eventually get back to my main point. I’ll worry when the tangents become the main points. 

So that night I learned from him that he was raised in Srebrenica, a Bosnian Muslim (his family would love me), and most of the men in his family were killed in the 1995 massacre that took place there. He was just five, and does not remember much besides the smell and suffocating heat of the dark root cellar where he hid for days with his mother and grandmother while the death squads searched for ethnics to cleanse. He said he was raised inhaling the trauma, post-trauma. No one is normal in his family, the remainders of a forgotten footnote of a holocaust as he tells it. He questions whether they might secretly envy the dead, those of his blood old enough to have lived through it and remember, who didn’t or couldn’t part with this version of the world. I can feel his isolation. Even when I am inside him he is the loneliest place on Earth. Not lonely like abandoned, but lonely like never occupied in the first place. A void. The holes change but the vacuumed vacancy does not. 

“We are like the Danube locks,” I told him one dead and silent night redeemed only by the stars. “Always chasing after the opposite, and equilibrium forever out of reach. An empty chamber, like you, needs to be filled, and a filled chamber, like me, must be regularly emptied.” 

He laughed at what he thought was another wonderful joke from the enlightened Netherlands, a land of gays, locks, dikes and dykes. 

“One needs but does not fully exist for themselves without the promised eventual arrival of its compliment,” I thought, but didn’t say to him. I was being philosophical but was afraid it might sound like I wanted something of the more that he could never provide. I was thinking about gays in general, he and I specifically, and the locks of the Danube eternally. Locks were needed when people realized nature’s creations, at first a wonderful gift, were wanting. River good, rivers better. Connect them, regulate the water levels and even use the water run through the locks to generate electricity. 

He is forever forgetting the duty rosters, always asking me when the shift ends. I think he is pretending actually; he seems to laugh without fail when I answer:

“The shift ends at six (for example) but there is a slow patch of river ahead so I have a feeling we will be getting off around three…and then a couple more times after that.” 

I don’t think he has been with a Western homosexual, someone comfortable in their gay skin, who can make jokes and talk about the life out in the open air. I am a novelty for him, so he smiles. But also a beacon that signals a world somewhere outside the limits of where he can exist. His extended family needs him and the money, so he is trapped behind enemy lines with no honorable way to leave. He showed me a picture of his wife. Literally a beard with what appears to be an actual beard. No children yet. She suspects, but in a world that denies homosexuality, men like him are not unknown to women like her. They attend the mosque daily together and all they share are straight faces. Lies are only bad when the truth isn’t worse. 

I lied about being able to swim. The cruise line asked but I didn’t tell. Now I am part of eternity. Down here beneath the current, timelines merge as they all must and leave only refuse in their wake. Bones of an ancient sort dot the riverbed floor, like paver stones but in the pattern of an unfinished question mark. Old boats sunk by misfortune or design here and there like boundary markers for each era that failed to outlive the Danube. Markings on some of the hulls indicate they’d last seen the surface of the river when it was still a possession of the long-expired Habsburg Empire. And me. Did not get the relief of having my ribs crushed, but I did get some extra minutes to contemplate my place in the grand order of things as revealed by my aged but ageless river bottom companions. One day maybe my husk will be discovered by future archaeologists or divers, and they will wonder how I died, and then if they figure that out, get to work on the why. 

The “friendly” I mentioned earlier is responsible for a lot of things on-board, including the ship’s social media, tour coordination, and my death. She mentioned to my secret partner that she wanted to get up to the front of the boat to get some pictures of the “bow crew” for the next post. 

“It’s funny how you work the front of the boat, since I heard how much you like it in the back,” she said to him. 

Subtle breach of etiquette there. Being tolerant and in the know doesn’t clear you to make gay jokes, most especially with a man not fully at peace with his true nature. Her comment panicked my partner, who imagined it was the first step toward an eventual careless exposure of his secret life to his family in Bosnia. They all use social media and follow the progress of his boat as a means of staying connected during his months away from home. In the early morning hours, after one last fuck in which I was for the first and last time in my life a bottom, he leaned me over the rail, finished himself, finished me, and then finished me. He pushed me right over into the still deep of the Danube. 

“Why not kill her?” I asked from the water. 

Wordless, his eyes told me “Because I knew you’d understand.” 

When people like her go missing there is a big investigation, and a crime is assumed to have taken place. People like me go missing, they look a little, but then misadventure by lifestyle is assumed to be in some way related to the cause and they stop looking.

Now I merge with history and am finally part of the river’s indifferent agenda. Indifference is not a bad thing after a lifetime of people feeling strongly about me for being gay. Indifference means I am no better or worse, no more or less regarded, than any of the other former lives forever transitioning down here. I finally fit. 

Thomas is a writer from Northern Virginia USA who’s work has been or will soon be published in many literary journals including Isele Magazine, Radon Journal, Cinnabar Moth Literary Collections, The Brussels Review, as well as The George Washington University Press. Thomas’s literary fiction short story “Symbiosis” was published in Secant Publishing's anthology "Best Stories on the Human Impact of Climate Change" and that story is nominated for the Secant Publishing Prize. His collection of short stories, “Life in the Demilitarized Zone,” has been published by Alien Buddha Press. While he tend to avoid literary contests because of the large fees, I was in the running as a finalist in last year’s Tennessee Williams and New Orleans Literary Festival, for which I submitted work. This month, his story “The Whole Truth” also won an honorable mention for placing in the top 1% in the Killer Shorts Screenplay Contest, in which he finished eleventh out of twelve-hundred entries.