Contours of Darkness by Marco Vassi

to that point was nothing but a conditioned reflex which responded to the countless stimuli that had been fed into him from his first moments of being: the chemistry of his mother's bloodstream, the religion and nationality foisted upon him, the thousand little correctives issued daily for years until he was totally programmed to act the way his civilisation deemed he should.
    'But there is no freedom in any of that,' he thought. He saw destiny as a blind weaver, a dotty craftsman using the available materials to spin a fabric of unintelligible design. 'I'm a slave,' he said to himself. 'The whole universe, including the very structure of my body, is just one way of defining my complete limitation.'
    'He's probably getting his first rushes,' said Conrad. The entire revolution had gone through Aaron's mind in less than a second of chronological time. Td better go see how he's doing.'
    He checked her once with his eyes, the glance of a soldier saying goodbye to his lover at the train station, forced to pull the shade down on softness and intimacy in order to join the troops boarding to reach the battleground, and walked quickly into the living room. Aaron was bending over, his trouser legs up, checking the damage to his shin. He looked up and saw Conrad coming toward him, stood up quickly to regain his composure, and before he knew what was happening found himself holding on to the young man, his arms around his shoulders, his head on his chest, and the tears spilling unashamedly from his eyes.
    There was no need to talk. Conrad understood that deep within Aaron some long-locked spring of feeling had been released, and what memories or forms of ideation or prompting toward action it engendered were of no real concern. It only mattered that the man would weep; from that all freedom followed. Aaron felt the blessed relief of not being embarrassed at what he had always thought was a weakness, and was amazed through his tears that he could accept the embrace of the man who just a half hour earlier had appeared as a threat to his peace of mind. He laughed as he cried, reflecting that the stability he was so frantically holding on to was actually the rigidity born of fear, and for this brave instant, there was nothing to be afraid of. For the first time in his adult life the arms which held him were the powerful arms of a man, seeking nothing but to feed back to him his sense of himself, and not the arms of a woman, which always implied a contract, and could comfort, but could never reassure.
    Cynthia, hearing the unaccustomed sound, stepped into the room; and assailed by the unexpected sight of the man she lived with and the man she had been just making love to now locked in a circle of feeling which totally excluded her, was faced with her own crisis. Deeply repressed attitudes of rejection, instilled during the days when six siblings vied for a harried mother's affection and a tired father's attention, marched to the forefront of her perception. She wrestled with a sense of betrayal.
    Conrad stepped back, the single most valuable action he had learned during his precocious adolescence. He stood sideways so that the straight line of energy which had gone from Cynthia on one end to him and Aaron on the other became a triangle. Veteran of over a hundred acid and mescaline episodes, his instincts for emotional dynamics were honed to a fine edge. He rarely bothered with content, and addressed himself to structure.
    It's getting a little heavy,' he said. He looked from one to the other. 'Everything that's happening is real, but it's not all there is.' He went to the window and pulled the blind. At once, the ambience altered. 'We're still a couple and their neighbour spending a quiet evening at home. All the shit that's working in our systems gives it a,peculiar twist, and that's what we learn from, but we need to stay straight. Otherwise we'll wind up all knotted together in a colossal bummer.'
    Aaron listened to the words as though they