In the relentlessly demanding vein of habu’s deep dive into the darkness of sounding in his shocking and absorbing Dark Angel Sounding, The Indian Doctor follows the spiral of a narcissistic, sexually ambivalent fading male model into the abyss of sexual control and debauchery in decadent Bangkok. By the time the protagonist catches on to where he’s being taken, he is too far down the slippery slope of painful desire to control his own wants or to escape his sexual predator. Or is he?
Warnings: contains intense and graphic gay male BDSM, submission and fetish.
I now understand that my subconscious was miles ahead of my “surface” brain on knowing what I wanted. Male models apparently are as justly characterized as thick brained as female models are reputed to be. I suppose I was more narcissistic in my youth and early adulthood, though, assuming that love came from the mirror and that sensuality was merely a fake technique applied to TV commercials.
I suppose that I had been desired for my looks and hit upon by men into my twenties, but I had been too taken with myself to notice. There had been gropes in public urinals, to be sure, and as they increased in frequency, they did increasingly set themselves in my subconscious as something to wonder about and to think upon. But I clearly separated them from real life—which to me were straight, white teeth, a firm body, and a good job, wife, and family to propel me into the comfortable life.
So, when my spiral started for real, down into the world of realized desire, and all of that subconscious thinking about it was being drawn to the surface, there was no blame to cast—other than on my own self-indulgent fighting of any thoughts of what really aroused me in any significant way.
I’d seen the Indian doctor (if he really was a doctor—but, of course, as I later found out, he was) work the younger men on the gym floor and in the shower room. There was no reason my surface brain wouldn’t know he was a sexual predator—or what his chosen prey was. In the end, I’m really glad it happened, though. Well, glad on one level. Finding man-on-man sex was freeing for me.
The Indian was a magician really—and I was the world’s worst dummy.
