Хлоя Бенджамин - The Immortalists

‘I’m not going to die, Simon.’

‘How the hell do you know that?’

‘Because I do.’ Klara opens her bag, puts the folder inside, and zips it shut. ‘I refuse to.’

‘Right,’ says Simon. ‘You and every other person who’s ever lived.’

Klara doesn’t respond. Simon knows this is how she gets when she has an idea. Like a dog with a bone , Gertie used to say, but that isn’t quite true; it’s more that Klara becomes impermeable, unreachable. She exists somewhere else.

‘Hey.’ Simon flicks her arm. ‘What’ll you call it? Your act?’

Klara smiles in her feline way: the sharp little canines, a shake of glitter in her eyes.

‘The Immortalist,’ she says.

Robert holds Simon’s face in his hands. Simon has woken in a panic from another bad dream.

‘What are you so afraid of?’ Robert asks.

Simon shakes his head. It’s four in the afternoon, a Sunday, and they’ve spent the entire day in bed, save for the half hour when they made poached eggs and bread slathered in cherry jam.

It’s too good, this feeling, is what he wants to say. It can’t last. By next summer, he’ll have lived for two decades – a long life for a cat or a bird, but not for a man. He’s told no one of his visit to the woman on Hester Street or the sentence she gave him, which seems to be drawing toward him in double time. In August, he takes the 38 Geary bus to the edge of Golden Gate Park and walks the steep, jutting trail at Land’s End. There, he sees cypress and wildflowers and what’s left of the Sutro Baths. A century ago, the baths were a human aquarium, but now the concrete is in ruins. Still, had it not been a luxury once? Even Eden – especially Eden – didn’t last forever.

When winter comes, he begins to rehearse for Corps’s spring program, Myth . Tommy and Eduardo will open the show as Narcissus and his Shadow, their movements mirrored. Next is The Myth of Sisyphus , in which the women perform a series of motions at intervals, like a song in a round. In the final piece, The Myth of Icarus , Simon will perform his first starring role: he is Icarus, and Robert is the Sun.

On opening night, he soars around Robert. He orbits closer. He wears a pair of large wings, made of wax and feathers, like those Daedalus fashioned for Icarus. The physics of dancing with twenty pounds on his back compounds his dizziness, so he is grateful when Robert removes them, even though this means that they have melted, and that Simon, as Icarus, will die.

When the music – Addinsell’s ‘Warsaw Concerto’ – climbs its final summit, Simon’s soul feels like a body lifted above ground, its feet hovering midair. He yearns for his family. If you could see me now , he thinks. Instead, he clings to Robert, who carries him to center stage. The light around Robert is so bright that Simon can see nothing else: not the members of the audience or the other company members, who crowd in the wings to watch them.

‘I love you,’ he whispers.

‘I know,’ Robert says.

The music is loud; no one can hear them. Robert lays him on the ground. Simon arranges his body the way Gali showed him, with his legs curled and his arms reaching for Robert. Robert uses the wings to cover Simon before he backs away.

They spend two years like this. Simon makes the coffee; Robert makes the bed. Everything is new until it isn’t anymore: Robert’s frayed sweatpants, his groan of pleasure. How he trims his nails weekly – perfect, translucent half-moons in the sink. The feeling of possession, foreign and heady: My man. Mine. When Simon looks back, this period of time feels impossibly short. Moments come to him like film slides: Robert making guacamole at the counter. Robert stretching by the window. Robert going outside to snip rosemary or thyme from the clay pots in their garden. At night, the street lamps shine so brightly, the garden is visible in the dark.

‘Your movements,’ says Gali. ‘They must. Have. Integrity.’

December 1981. In men’s class, they are practicing fouetté turns, in which the body spins, balanced on the ball of one foot, with the other leg extended sideways. Simon has fallen twice, and now Gali stands behind him – one palm against Simon’s stomach, the other against his back – while the rest of the men look on.

‘Lift the right leg. Keep the tightness in the core. Keep the alignment.’ It’s easy to keep the alignment when both feet are on the ground, but as Simon’s leg lifts, his lower back arches and his chest drops back. Gali claps in disapproval. ‘You see? This is the problem. You lift the leg, the ego takes over. You must start with the foundation.’

He strides to the center to demonstrate. Simon crosses his arms.

‘Everything,’ says Gali, looking at the men. ‘Everything is connected. Watch.’ He places his feet in fourth position and pliés. ‘ This is when I prepare. This is when it matters. I feel the connection between my chest and my hips. I feel the connection between my knees and the balls of my feet. The structure of the body has alignment and it has integrity, you see? So when I push off’ – he lifts his back leg and turns – ‘there is unity. It is effortless.’

Tommy, the British wunderkind, catches Simon’s eye. Effortless? he mouths, and Simon grins. Tommy is a jumper, not a turner, and he likes to commiserate with Simon.

Gali is still turning. ‘From control,’ he says, ‘comes freedom. From restraint comes flexibility. From the trunk’ – he puts one hand to his core, then gestures, with his free hand, to his raised leg – ‘come the branches.’

He returns to the ground down in a deep plié, then lifts a palm as if to say, See?

Simon sees, but doing is a different matter. When class ends, Tommy slings an arm over Simon’s shoulder and groans as they walk toward the dressing room. Robert glances at them. Rain batters the windows, but the room is steamy with sweat and most of the men are bare chested. When Simon leaves with Beau and Tommy for lunch, Robert doesn’t join them.

They walk to Orphan Andy’s on Seventeenth. Simon tells himself that he isn’t doing anything wrong: most of the men at Academy are flirtatious, and it isn’t his fault if Robert doesn’t join in. He loves Robert – he does. Robert is intelligent and mature and surprising. He likes classical music as much as he likes football, and though he’s not yet thirty, he’d prefer to read in bed than go to Purp with Simon. ‘He’s classy ,’ said Klara, the first time she met him, and Simon beamed with pride. But this is also part of the problem: Simon likes raunch, likes being spanked and ogled and sucked off, and he has some appetite for depravity – or at least, what his parents would have called depravity – that he is finally beginning to acknowledge.

After lunch, they head to Star Pharmacy for rolling papers. Simon pays while the other two wait outside. They’re both staring at the pharmacy’s glass window when he comes back.

‘Oh my God, you guys,’ Tommy says. ‘Have you seen this?’

He points at a homemade flier taped to the window. THE GAY CANCER , it reads. Below are three Polaroid photos of a young man. In the first photo, he holds up his shirt to reveal purple splotches, raised and rippling like burns. In the second, his mouth is open wide. There’s a splotch in there, too.

‘Shut up, Tommy.’ Tommy is a notorious hypochondriac – he’s always complaining of aches in muscle groups no one else has ever heard of – but Beau’s voice is sharper than usual.

They huddle under the awning at Toad Hall to smoke. Simon inhales, sweetness and damp, and it should calm him but it doesn’t: he feels like he could jump out of his skin. For the rest of the day, he can’t erase the images from his mind – those terrible lesions, dark as plums – or the words that someone else scrawled at the bottom of the flier in red pen: Watch out, guys. There’s something out there.