things incarnate

Deep in the woods, Lan Xichen opened his door to the most beautiful boy he’d ever seen.

He could only stare. He hadn’t spoken in almost a year; and what else did you do, anyway, faced with perfection?

“I’m looking for a holy man,” the perfectly beautiful boy said. “The people at the teahouse said no one is holier than you, who live at the heart of the woods.”

When Lan Xichen didn’t speak or move, the boy continued.

“My name is Jiang Wanyin,” he said. “I’m fourteen, and I’m a sinner. May I come in?”

Still wordless, Lan Xichen opened the door wider and stepped aside.

Jiang Wanyin smelled like crisp air and rushing water.

Inside, he surveyed the cabin’s spartan furnishings without expression before turning back to Lan Xichen.

“Will you help me?” he said. “I need a holy man to absolve me of my sin.”

Lan Xichen supposed it was time to test his voice. “What,” he tried, and tried again until it worked. “What is your sin?”

“Lust,” Jiang Wanyin said.

Again, Lan Xichen could only stare.

The boy’s eyes were violet, fringed with long, thick lashes, and very clear. He stared back, curiously and unselfconsciously.

“They didn’t know your name,” he said. “What shall I call you?”

What, indeed?

“Call me Lan Xichen,” Lan Xichen said. “Are you hungry, Jiang Wanyin?”

The heart of the forest had a magic of its own; the wild apples that grew there were both ambrosial and sating. Jiang Wanyin ate two. Lan Xichen was pleased to see the boy give his food its due, neither chattering through his meal nor scarfing it down, but instead devoting himself to the business of eating as if it deserved his respect.

Which it did. The body, Lan Xichen thought, is one of the world’s marvels; and doing small things with great attention is half of excellence. The boy ate neatly, as well, with a natural grace that befitted his aristocratic features, and left only two stems and ten seeds.

“Good?” Lan Xichen asked.

“Very,” Jiang Wanyin replied. “They tasted like sunlight.”

“Do you find sunlight sweet?”

“Sunlight is life,” the boy said. “And life is sweet.”

“Yes, it is,” Lan Xichen said. “Tell me about your life.”

“I’ll tell you about my sin. They’re the same thing.”

It was an extraordinary assertion, yet the boy remained unselfconscious and spoke without shame.

Lan Xichen wanted to know everything about him.

“Are they?” he said. “Tell me, then,” and settled back in his chair.

Across the small table, the boy leaned forward onto his elbows.

“I love men,” he started. “I’ve always loved men, even before I turned fourteen this year and learned what it is I really want to do with them. I love their strength and virility, their hardness and leanness, the way they smell and the way they speak. Like they’re dispensing gospel. It’s a man’s world, and going forth into it knowing that it’s made to serve his pleasure gives a man a way about him. A confidence, a cockiness. It’s irresistible.

“Add money—lots of money—and the man’s sense of entitlement extends over his fellow men. His cockiness grows to match. You don’t know this, Lan Xichen, here in the heart of the woods, but two cities east of this forest, my father, Jiang Fengmian, is the richest man in five provinces. He’s also the handsomest man I’ve ever seen, but for—well. That’s not part of my story.

“This rich, handsome, cocky man is the center of my universe: my father, who paid me no mind when I was a child. I’m still a child, by some measures—but not by mine. And not, as you’ll see, now by his. He taught me, by his example, to love men. He taught me, by his neglect, to yearn for them. I remember my childhood as a string of bids for attention—if not his, then any man’s in my vicinity. As it turned out, that man was usually Wei Changze, my father’s top servant. His attention was ample; his eyes lit up to see me. And if—as I grew—they started to linger—did I not invite his gaze?”

“Did you?” Lan Xichen interrupted.

“Yes,” Jiang Wanyin said. “Once he taught me to, by the first. He was looking at my naked waist and what he wanted to do to it and to the rest of me was so obvious that he might as well have done it. I learned it in an instant, what men can do with their bodies to other bodies, and I learned to want it done to me. It was an education, there by the lotus pond on summer’s hottest day. My birthday. And so I met his eyes, this Wei Changze, this servant of my father’s, and I gave him a smile with a promise in it. A promise I never meant to deliver on, and never did. I teased him, endlessly and relentlessly, in practice and preparation for seducing the man I really wanted.”

“Your father,” Lan Xichen said.

“My father,” Jiang Wanyin said.

“Did you succeed?”

Jiang Wanyin gave him a smile with a promise in it.

“What do you think?” he said.

“I think,” Lan Xichen said, and stopped.

He could picture it, he realized.

He shouldn’t.

He did.

He pictured it. This beautiful boy honing his tricks and graces before the eyes of a panting manservant. Learning from his reactions how quickest and hottest to inflame a man’s lust. Absorbing these lessons into his bones and muscles until they shaped his posture and reflexes. Bringing all he’d learned, all he’d become, temptation incarnate, into his father’s bed upon a fateful night—his lone bed, from which his wife had long since banished herself—before he retired for the day. Jiang Wanyin had stripped himself but for the violet ribbon in his hair, threaded through it into a braid, and laid himself face down, ass up and opened and slick, tiny waist on exaggerated display, in his father’s bed, and waited for him to come and discover what was his on offer for the night: heaven incarnate.

After a day’s work toward tripling his fortune, Jiang Fengmian had retreated to his rooms. Had undressed and then approached his bed, expecting nothing more than cold sheets and a night’s sleep. When he had found instead a naked body, glowing with youth and trembling with anticipation, his heart leaped and his cock leaped before his mind registered that that curve of neck and those beseeching eyes now turned to him belonged to none other than his only son.

“Wanyin,” the man said, voice thick with lust rather than sharp with outrage as he knew it should have been.

“Father,” Jiang Wanyin said, and arched his back.

Jiang Fengmian drew a helpless breath.

“Will you come take what’s yours?” Jiang Wanyin said. “You made me. Please. Come and enjoy the fruit of your seed.”

In the time it took him to climb into his bed, to climb on top of this mouthwatering creature who happened to be his son, Jiang Fengmian waged and threw a battle with his better angels. They could go hang themselves on their harp strings. He was busy putting his hands on his son’s soft-smooth skin, encircling that tiny-breakable waist, jerking that shiny-slick hole toward his throbbing cock.

The last of the angels sputtered, and then expired. Jiang Fengmian plunged his cock into his son’s body.

He could have died, then, from the heaven of it. He could have spent his afterlife being whipped by harp strings wielded by vengeful angels, and it would have been worth it. Worth it, for the tight, hot grip on his cock; worth it, for his son’s shocked and breathy cry; for his squirming and then whining as Jiang Fengmian stayed buried to the hilt, unmoving.

“Please,” Jiang Wanyin begged. “Father, please. I need—”

“What do you need?” Jiang Fengmian didn’t recognize his own voice. It was a devil’s voice, gravelly and thick and throaty.

“I need you—to move—please—”

“Like this?” Jiang Fengmian said, and withdrew halfway.

Jiang Wanyin moaned, a needy, greedy sound.

“Please, Father,” he said. “Please, fuck me,” and at the words and the desperation Jiang Fengmian’s control snapped.

He thrust in again, sparing no force, and Jiang Wanyin cried out his pain or pleasure, it didn’t matter which. Jiang Fengmian cared only for his own pleasure, and proceeded to indulge it as he had never indulged before. He proceeded to fuck his son as he’d never fucked before, with a hunger that obliterated his mind, and was rewarded with such a surfeit of pleasure that his hunger only grew. Jiang Wanyin was a moaning, writhing thing under him, his obvious pleasure now further arousing Jiang Fengmian’s own, so that he fucked his son all the harder and better. Pleasure fed on pleasure and overtook the world.

Never, Lan Xichen thought, had two bodies enjoyed each other more than this father and this son partaking of each other.

“I think,” he said, “you and your father ruined each other for every sweetness in life beyond the confines of his bed.”

It was Jiang Wanyin’s turn to stare.

“I think,” Lan Xichen continued, “you came to find me because you recognize the loss. You’re here because you want me to repair it.”

He paused, deliberately.

“Yes,” Jiang Wanyin said. “Please, Lan Xichen. Life is sweet, or it should be. I want it back.”

“And the first thing I did was give you apples that gave you hope.”

Jiang Wanyin’s eyes were huge with hope.

Lan Xichen looked into them, and gentled his voice. “But your hope is misplaced. I’m not who you think I am, Jiang Wanyin. And I’m not who I thought I was, either. It turns out I’m not here at the heart of the woods because I’m holy.”

“Then why are you here?” Jiang Wanyin asked. “Who are you, if not a holy man?”

“It’s you who woke me up to who I am,” Lan Xichen said, “with your story. I realized, as you were telling it, that I was the one who wrote it. Who am I? I’m the Chancellor of the Morning Sunlight. Better known in these parts as Lucifer, the Lightbringer. The Morningstar.”

The boy’s eyes were huge, now, with wonder.

“The Devil incarnate?” he said.

“The Devil incarnate,” the Devil said. “Who do you think shaped you to be temptation incarnate? Who wrote the script that led your father to find heaven incarnate in your body?”

“You,” the boy said. “Here in human form. Why?”

“The answer to that might require a theology lesson,” the Devil said.

“I don’t want a theology lesson,” the boy said. “I just want the simple truth. Tell it to me like I’m fourteen.”

The Devil laughed.

“Very well,” he said. “The reason I’m here is that I missed God. I missed him terribly, with every fiber of my being. Do you know what hell is, Jiang Wanyin? Some envision it as fire and brimstone, so that’s what they get. Some envision it as other forms of torture, so that’s what they get. What it really is, however, is more theoretical and absolute: hell is the absence of God.

“Hell is where I was cast for my dawn-of-the-world rebellion: away from the divine presence. And let me tell you, the punishment has exceeded the offense. What I suffer, being away from God, is vastly more than the sum of the suffering I inflict, or allow them to inflict on themselves, on all the souls in the realm I rule.

“Because the simple truth, Jiang Wanyin, is that no one in the three realms loves God more than I do.

“You, being mortal, can’t experience God except in slivers and shivers. But you can imagine him, because you can imagine Perfection. And that’s what God is: Perfection. It’s the word, the term, the concept, in all human lexicons that most closely captures his essence. The First Mover; the First Cause. The Creator; the Preserver. I Am Who Am; He Brings Into Existence Whatever Exists; I Am/Shall Be Who I Am/Shall Be. The Eternal; the Alpha and Omega. The Higher Power; the Force; Source Energy. Existence; the Universe; Intuition. Beauty; Truth; the Good. Love. No, Jiang Wanyin. Above and beyond all these, God is Perfection.

“What’s an aesthete to do, then, but be desperately in love with him?

“What’s a perfectionist to do, then, when he creates the mortal world in all its manifest imperfection?”

“Revolt,” Jiang Wanyin said.

“So some say I brought hell upon myself,” the Devil said. “Whether I did or not, it’s where I reside and suffer my thwarted love, my thwarted worship, my thwarted purpose.

“Well. Almost a year ago, I decided enough was enough.

“If I can’t rejoin God, I thought, I would make myself forget him.

“So I decided to give myself a year of forgetfulness. A year’s respite from torment. A year off, incidentally, from the responsibilities of perdition, which is how I represented it to my underlings: a vacation for the boss. A year on earth, in human form, in sweet oblivion.

“And it has been very sweet.”

“But now that you remember,” Jiang Wanyin said, “your vacation is over. How much of it did you lose? When is your year up?”

“Noon,” the Devil said.

Jiang Wanyin was incredulous.

“Today?” he said, and looked out the window at the sunlight.

“Now?” he said.

“Now,” the Devil replied. “Jiang Wanyin. Will you come with me back to hell?”

The perfectly beautiful boy looked at him, eyes purple and long-lashed and limpid.

“Why do you want me?” he asked.

“Because you’re perfect,” the Devil said. “I see that God relented. I see that you’re his gift to me, to help me live his absence.”

The boy considered. “What would I do in hell?”

“You won’t miss your father. I’m even handsomer than he is, and richer, and cockier.”

“Will you fuck me even better?”

“You know I will. I’ll fuck you so good it will be worth all of your mortal life’s sweetness that you’ll leave behind.”

“Show me,” the boy said, and stood, and undressed.

The Devil watched each layer come off with mortal lust that outstripped divine love.

Then he partook of it: perfection.

Perfection followed him back to hell.

The Devil made sure he had a good time.

The translation of Xichen's name is from this Tumblr post. The three translations of Yahweh are from a footnote in Richard Tarnas's magnificent book The Passion of the Western Mind.