Matthew Stadler - Allan Stein

The boy went to the wall of the stationmaster’s office and sat on a slatted bench in the shade. He was still feverish, and standing in the sun made him dizzy. I had his blue knapsack with the bottled water, and I offered it to him. The hum and clatter of the rails, transmitting the train’s prolonged departure, diminished to nothing. Insects could be heard, together with the waves collapsing on the shore below us. The breeze made a huffing sort of dull whistle through the station’s entrance, where there was no door to prevent it. The boy spoke English when it suited him but just now he understood nothing, neither the word “water” nor the obvious gesture I made with the bottle itself. He stared past me, looking puzzled.

Adults, so cruel, can be amused in the face of a child’s suffering. Even while we comfort him, a part of us can be laughing at, for example, a hurt boy’s exaggerated pout. This doesn’t compromise our sympathy, it’s just amusing in a way the boy can’t possibly understand. It can’t be explained to his satisfaction. When I cried my mother used to laugh out loud with pleasure and weep at the same time, while holding me. Her laughter was baffling and upsetting, and it made me cry all the more, which prolonged both the laughter and the embrace until in the end we were both just exhausted and sobbing, holding on to each other, having said nothing. I was never so cruel to the boy, but that was because I loved him and because my mother’s cruelty had taught me not to be.

I have loved boys even when they despised me. This boy did not despise me, but that is perhaps because we had so little in common. In the garden he picked flowers and taught me to name them in French, but I quickly forgot all the names. I could only remember what his mouth looked like as he said them. What else do I recall? His bare hips, slightly turned as he lay in bed beside me. A glimmer of sweat limning the hollow of his back. Night, its gradual onset, and then our long slow recline. The boy (he was French, fifteen, as I’ve said, and he believed I could deliver him from a humdrum life and family that had begun to seem tedious and doomed) turned to me across the bunched pillows and let his soft chin rest on my shoulder. His nipples had softened and lay flat. His skin was warm from an increasing fever. I think it’s okay for you to take pleasure in these things. He took my hand in his and drew it along his ribs to his belly and hip, and then he let my fingers touch the perfect lip of his shallow belly button, where I stopped for a moment to dwell.

His name is not important. I have called him, at one time or another, noodle boy, le beau scout , Blaise, Tony, your nipples are delicate as cherry blossoms, Miss Pants, my pal, bougie , Monsieur Steve, Mister Sister, l’escalier , garçon vérité , thrush or dove, Dogan, bastard, son of a bitch, kike, Jew boy, death-star-in-pants, my White House ultimate love, Aki, anodyne, Alex, Rex, and Allan, but his given name was Stéphane. I lived with his family in Paris for two weeks before the events that brought us to the seaside ruin, and I’m certain they would be horrified by my story. I loved Stéphane; I might have already mentioned that. Though my account will lapse into coarseness, flippancy, lies, and pure pornography, you must never forget that I truly and impossibly did love him. I lived with his family under a false pretense (which I will tell you about shortly), but we became friends and only the mother blames me for what happened to their son.

My story began properly in the perpetual darkness of last winter (almost spring, it was March) in the city where I used to live. Typically I woke up in the dark, 6 A.M. on most days, delivered from sleep by the icy stream of air spilling in my open window. The lighted clock of the railroad tower said six exactly. This round clock of black iron and creamy glass was the first thing I saw in the mornings. No one was ever on the way to work yet, nor had the lumbering buses and trucks started with their tentative, practice engine roars. (Later, in clouds suffused with the bright yellow and opium-poppy-orange of the risen sun, they would billow in every district of the city like grim flowers and release their belched gray emissions, which gave a pleasant taste to the winter air.) I am a teacher, or had been, which explains the early hour.

Opening the window from bed, only my head and one arm untucked, was my first habit of the morning. It was independent of me, like shifting the buried, cool pillows to the top in the deep middle of the night, neither conscious nor strictly unconscious—something between a dream and the address of a friend, which I had scribbled while dragging the phone as near to the table as it would go before absently tossing the newspaper on which I had written it into the garbage, along with the bones of a fish, so that it was lost both there and in my mind until, when the brisk air of morning rushed in the open window, the whole address, neatly printed, leapt to view, bright and clear as the pinpoint stars, noisy as a child, and my mind’s eye, conscious, grasped it again, though only for a moment. Minutes later, in the chaos of morning, it was gone, but so was any memory of having lost it.

All my thoughts were thin and brittle when I woke. My expansive dreams, ideas that multiplied like the crystalline spread of urine released into space (which I have heard is a beautiful sight, witnessed only by astronauts, the discharge turning golden and immense in the black void), became whole great cities of geometrical fantasy, complex and beautiful as hoarfrost, before shattering suddenly into unreadable shards at the slightest touch of fact or feeling (a crease in the pillow bothering my cheek, for example, or the sour taste scraped from my teeth by a dull, swollen tongue). The scrim of night outside was fragile. Its thin black mask could not hide the sheer abundance of the day ahead, nor the fact that it was morning already elsewhere, evening again elsewhere still, and a bright summer afternoon somewhere so distant one passed through two accelerated days in the metal shell of a jet airplane just to get there. My mother, Louise, once asked me what separates one place from another. I was only a child, and of course I had no idea. Other places, I guessed, which begged the question.

The oatmeal I ate before bed and left too close to the coiled heater was covered by a film of dry skin, which burst under the slightest pressure, my thumb for example, if it strayed too deeply gripping the bowl. I always licked this thumb, after its plunge, and the cold sweet paste it unearthed from beneath the film was enjoyable. I could hear my friend Herbert, in the adjacent apartment, bellowing fragments of popular songs, which he only ever partly remembered. Herbert and I were always awake early, even while the rest of the city slept. He is the curator at the city’s art museum, and they let him keep whatever hours he likes. I had no reason to be awake. The school where I taught resolved some misgivings that arose over Christmas by granting me a paid leave of absence.

I was accused of having sex with a tenth-grader in late December. This student, Dogan, was Turkish, lithe and very beautiful. I have a picture of him here on my wall. I tutored him on Saturdays at his apartment after his soccer practice, but I had never imagined molesting him until the principal suggested it by notifying me of the charges. Amidst the dust and gadgetry of the principal’s meticulous office, his chair overburdened by the abundance he had squeezed onto its cupped seat, “had sex with the boy” floating in the well-lit air between us, my mind produced the following scenario (new to me):

On Saturday I arrive early. Dogan has showered after soccer, and water dapples the bare skin of his shoulders and chest. He’s wearing shorts, drinking a soda when I get there, drying his wet hair with a towel. His lips and nipples enchant me. They have similar skin, rosy and supple, thinner and more tender than the olive skin around them. “Let’s get started,” I tell him. He takes the book and I stand behind his chair as he settles. “Read the first poem out loud.” It is García Lorca. I put my hands on his shoulders as he reads.