In the dream I am still nine. Not “out,” but up my tree house. There’s been a lynching or some act of piracy in Falls. It’s late, just before dawn. Our neighborhood echoes with men shouting, “Not in here. He over there? Found yet?” Manhunt.

I’m huddled, flannel pajamas, on my closet door. When I notice torchlight, I discover you, Dan, tied to the tree above me.

In the filmic way of dreams, a voice announces, “Women look finest in candlelight. Men are best seen by torch.”

Torches smoke all around us up here, the maple leaves sizzle. Somebody has bound you fast. Your chest is glazed as a Viking ham, drenched in salt spray or blood or honey. Varnish shows ribs’ every perfect fold, the bulk and hollow. But there are hooks in you. Lures with wet feathers, savage broken lines from years ago. Your hands are tied behind you around the tree’s main trunk. I fight to release you. Your eyes are aimed up, sainted, lost. My fingers prove too small. The knots seem permanent, grown barky as the tree.

Far below, voices keep mapping the search for you. You wear only a white towel around your waist. As I stare past it, toward your face, I see that something immense bulks up underneath the terry cloth. I say, “Dad, are you okay, can I help here?” but I mean “Dan.” I give you many chances to object as, slow, I touch your thighs. Finally, with you in such pain and beauty, I don’t await invitation. I tell myself that what I do is just First Aid, I reach under your towel, unfasten it.

Lit by orange light in my tree, I understand that they have hurt you. Where I expected your manhood waiting, springy, perfectly cheerfully complete, they’ve slid a giant fishhook. It has been stuck all the way between your legs and I see its barbed tip gleaming in the flame. It’s perfectly down-curved. I see how cleverly it’s made, so it will go right through but never get back out.

And, looking up at you, I touch the hook they’ve hooked you with, so cruelly, Dan. Depriving you of such a right. Kneeling in a state of worship, sobbing, kinship, lust, I find it’s warm under my palm. Now, finally unshy, I kiss your thighs and crane up nearer it. I am your fellow fellow. I place my mouth to it. I find the taste is ketchup, metal, Milk Duds, bitter money, milk, and salt and sugar mixed.

… The taste is equal pleasure, equal pain. I wake. The first thing I know is: I am no longer nine. You’re still gone. They caught you out.