by Sam J. Miller

Would I go to Auschwitz? I spent a full week wondering. Walking the street, pacing the supermarket aisles, kneeling in K.’s bathroom in front of him. Would it make me a better person or a worse one? What would it say about me? What kind of person goes to Auschwitz the way others go to Cancun—with a camera, and spare cash for souvenirs?

There was no reason to give it so much thought. Going with K. to Krakow was never really an option. He invited me, but he invited a lot of guys. That was the week he was getting tired of me. My time crashing with him was almost up. When K. went to Krakow I’d be back to bouncing from bed to bed to friend’s floor to cousin’s couch to Port Authority, where I’d have to grub together bus fare and head home a failure, so I had good cause to delude myself to the point of taking Poland seriously.

“Would you want to go?” I ask, “to Auschwitz.”

“I don’t think I’ll have time. You can go, though, during the day while I’m doing radio interviews or other famous global artist stuff.”

“But if you had time,” I ask, “would you want to go? I mean, does it mean you’re a disturbed individual if you go to Auschwitz for a vacation?”

“It’d be intense,” he says.

And that’s K.: the moody painter looking for good material. Fucked-up relationships; taking in street boys; chatting up the vomit-drenched drunk guy on the subway. K. collects intense experiences like normal people collect CDs. As long as it’s intense it’s good.

I’m naked at the window from some vague sense that he likes it, that it ties in to his sense of me as a rough little punk, as a hustler, which I’m not, but which I know is important to him. “They say they still have heaps of hair, and shoes, and eyeglasses,” I say.

“That’s intense.” On his bed, above the covers, he’s shirtless, smoking, damp from sweat.

You can’t control the heat in his apartment. Either the heat is on or it isn’t; when it’s on, it’s way too hot. Huge ancient radiators keep the room parched and uncomfortable from October to April.

“Take those off,” I say, turning to him, stroking myself, setting my jaw firm, being Butch. The pants come off and he starts on the boxers and I say, “not those.”

Because I know he needs it to get off, I try to be the stern gruff top. I climb up onto the bed and stand on it, in front of him, he leans forward, I push with my hips at the same time as I grab his face and pull it in.

In one of the paintings that got him the invite to Krakow, a boy-packed Abercrombie ad has been chopped up and stuck to the canvas. Blonde boys wearing little, on beaches and fields and ski slopes. And then, down the middle, in blood-red drippy paint, are some lines from a poem: every woman adores a fascist/ the boot in the face/ the brute brute heart. It doesn’t say who said it, and K. didn’t get permission from Abercrombie to use their ads, so that painting is probably going to get him sued. But K. would like that.

I yank out, push him back with both hands like I’m casting out a devil. “Stand up,” I say, and he does. “Take off those boxers.” He’s bigger than me, he’s in better shape, he’s way cuter. He’s independently wealthy. That’s why he needs to put himself at the mercy of other men: he’s ashamed of his own power. I turn my back to him, put my hands up against the wall, feel the cold cinder blocks under the paint. His building is gross and new, pricey and poorly-made.

After sex he says: “I think maybe I will go to Auschwitz, after all. I’ll make time for it.”

In the morning he’s full of ideas, so I have to get out. His apartment is his studio and he can’t stand to have people around when he’s working. I sit in the park for a while, go the Virgin Megastore on Union Square and trance out, flipping through CDs without seeing them, thinking. Would I go to Auschwitz?

The only thing that made me consider it, I tell myself, is the hope of getting fucked there. Did the place still have guards? Would they watch you sneak off into the bathroom—or the gas chambers—to get it on? I dream of some brooding Polish peasant, who hangs around the place selling souvenirs, looking for guys like me. There’d be a lot of us. Anybody who goes on a field trip to Auschwitz has got to have conflicting feelings about degradation. As a kid, at synagogue, I knew broads that prioritized Auschwitz just below Jerusalem. What did they get out of that trip? How did it make them feel about themselves, about the world, about being Jewish?

Grey winter clouds wall in Union Square. Cops cuff somebody. Something is dead in the bushes, maybe a man, maybe a squirrel, and its stink gives the cold air a slaughterhouse feel. In spite of everything I don’t want to leave New York.

On K’s easel when I come in that night is a new canvas, edged in that blood red he’s so fond of. Etched in with pencil are two male figures, doing something, I can’t tell what. He’s testing out a couple different sets of arms on them so they look sort of spiderish.

I never talk about his paintings with him. They make me feel stupid. I never get it, or he makes me feel bad for suggesting there’s nothing there to get. That’s another reason I’m going to get the boot. But I really don’t think there’s much to get.

During our after-dinner cigarette he watches his canvas and makes notes in a sketchbook. I watch him. He’s really a very gorgeous boy. If he were a little bit more ruthless in bed he’d be perfect for me. When I can tell he’s finished I come again to his side, start rubbing his scalp, staring into his eyes trying to get hard. I’d never have stayed so long with someone so unfit for me in bed if I didn’t need that bed so badly.

As has been the case for the past three days, it takes me some heavy fantasizing to get through the chore with K. Here’s what I’m thinking about:

The day is Poland-late-winter cold. All the way from Krakow, out the windows of the bright shiny modern train, all we’ve seen are shades of grey. The train chugs me off to Auschwitz: I try to imagine what the trip would have been like by boxcar. Packed with people too poor to have purchased expatriation, too tied to their own grubby home towns to leave, no matter how bad things got.

The rooms are heated, but not much. Barracks, torture chambers, work halls, mess halls. Dust-free and well-lit like art galleries. The smell of piss and terror hangs in the air, faint, like perfume from some woman who walked through five minutes before. Outside, a barbed wire river marks the border between this country and the nation of the living. A tall blond thug Pole named Jarek has come with us from Krakow, sat across the aisle from me, caught my stares and stared back but never smiled. K. figures nowhere in this fantasy. Shutters snap endlessly as our tourist group moves through the rooms, and I position myself again and again by Jarek, behind him, beside him, forcing him to wonder what I want, admiring his ass and the tight fit of his shirt around his shoulder blades—which are strong and sharp, like weapons hidden in his clothes. He slows his pace, falls back, soon we are alone at the rear of the group.

I jam a cigarette in my mouth, tap his threatening back. He turns, cynical grey-blue eyes to make you cream all over yourself, and I make a lighter-lighting gesture with my thumb. “Got a light?” I say in English, but Jarek has nothing but Polish. A handful of ugly words in German, and in Russian.

His hair is cut Hitler-Youth short, but he’s more of a strapping Slav and wouldn’t have lasted two minutes under Aryan occupation. He hands me a book of matches and unzips, hauls himself out. An unwashed truncheon. I light my cigarette and he takes hold of my chin, takes away my cigarette with the other hand, puts it in his mouth, pulls me down by the chin. My butt bumps hard against the cinder block wall. From the corner of my eye I see tiny grooves where people clawed at the wall ‘til fingernails snapped off.

Some snakes can unhook their jaws to swallow antelopes. I need to learn how to do that. Is there an operation you can get, like getting ribs removed? He gives me a little language lesson, hisses the German words for cocksucker, faggot, subhuman. Halfway through a half hour of steady hip thrusts he pinches shut my nose, which of course I’ve been relying on for purposes of breathing with my mouth so consummately clogged. Panic flares my eyes and he lets go, and gives me a friendly cheek slap.

When I come the drops glisten on my gut in the gold light coming through K.’s windows—an inheritance, a couple of coins to bribe the ferryman.