Лидия Юкнавич - Verge - Stories

ARAM DOES NOT QUIT. What’s more, in the space of half a year, Bosch has learned more about this one man’s beautiful body than about any other body in his life. Sometimes he closes his eyes, and he can feel the younger man in his hands.

Hot coffee between palms; dusk.

“Did you think it would be like this?” Bosch says.

“No. Yes. I mean the work. Yes.”

“And this?”

“You?”

“Me.” He signals nothing in his eyes, just sits there looking at the beautiful man in his one-room world, this fire-headed boy who gives light to a dark making.

“No. I didn’t figure there would be anyone like you out here. And I wasn’t thinking about anything… well, happening.” Aram slides from his chair to the edge of the bed where Bosch is sitting like an old beast of some sort. Hunched over and quizzical in the face. He entwines himself—arms, legs, torso—in between the lines of Bosch’s body, the spaces where limbs move away like fins. He makes soft cooing noises.

Bosch closes his eyes and focuses on this feeling, so he’ll remember it when it’s gone. For it will be gone, will it not? That is the way of things, that is time, and time is a fucker, and except for this one time in all his life he’d never cared about the boot-sludge drone of time, and suddenly it is everything, isn’t it? It is the whole of life and death stuffed into a tiny room with not enough oxygen to breathe or keep a fire going. It is strange to be remembering before the thing itself is gone from you, strange to have that pressure to fold images and impressions into the gray labyrinth of brain. Picture them over and over in the mind’s eye, day and night, like the never-ending glow of white on white in winter in Alaska.

“I want to know you. I want to know every inch of you,” Bosch says, almost begging.

“But we do know each other,” he says, grinning. “We keep knowing each other more and more.” And he traces lines on Bosch’s back, up and over the shoulder to his chest and heart, as if he knows the way, knows it by memory every vein, every scar, every road of skin or thought since before he was born. Bosch’s heart beats too heavy in the chest, it tightens and squeezes into a hard ball. His face twists as if he might cry, then releases itself. He remembers himself as a boy and then grinds the memory gone with his teeth.

What is a boy?

HE HAS A BLACK EYE, a shiner from a man he’s never met except in the hallway of his mother’s home. For no reason he could tell, just there at the wrong time, wrong place, sledgehammer-hand big man drunk coming down the hall at him saying, “What the fuck are you grinning at?” Alone in his room with his stinging face pressed against the wood grain of the door, he hears them arguing, the rise and fall of voices, the thud of fists or something breaking, a glass, a rib. She is all mouth, his mother, she can rage on with the best of them, she doesn’t flinch, she’s gutsy that way. But then he hears her incomprehensibly quiet. Even with his whole head against the door, he hears her not at all. He hears the lumbering dull and swollen-thick man banging his way out of the house, wall to wall to floor and slamming out, Camaro screeching away. Nothing nothing nothing from the other side.

Sweat forms on his upper lip. His face is swollen and wet and white. He bangs his head gently against the door.

“Mother.”

Nothing.

He opens the door to his room and crosses the hallway to her room. He opens her door. There she is, as he pictured she would be, curled out on the floor, her mouth bloody, her eyes puffy, her peach satin negligee twisted up her torso, the blue of the shag carpet floating her still body.

“Mother.”

He helps her up, walks her to the bed. She is not dead. Just submerged and bleary-eyed, mumbling and slurring. “I’ve got to get it out of here,” she says.

“He’s gone now,” he tells her. “I’ll lock and bolt the door. He’s gone.” He puts ice in a dish towel and soap on another. He washes her face and holds the cold to her eyes and mouth.

Her lips bulge and the words keep spilling out, she shakes her head no and no. “Out of me, it’s in there.” He thinks, what is it like for a woman to get fucked like that? It is foreign to him. Nothing about her seems like him.

After she swims toward sleep, he goes back to his room. Just before dawn he thinks of icecaps and the white expanse of Alaska. He thinks of an ocean bearing us all away into an arctic otherworld.

THE YOUNG MAN takes off his hood, unzips his gigantic red parka. The down shape of him shrinks, as if he is removing layers of himself, like a Russian doll within a doll within a doll. He pulls his wool sweater over his head by reaching at it from the back. His hair ruffles. He unbuttons the silver tabs on his Levi’s, popping them all in one swift pull from the top. He stretches his torso down and up to take off his T-shirt; his nipples harden instantly. His lip quivers for a moment. He inches his long johns down goose-pimpled legs, over muscle and knee and bone to ankle, twists each foot out. Down go his boxers. He is a naked man at the beginning of his life. He is beautiful and almost absolutely still. His breathing is the only thing that moves. Bosch feels as if he might weep. Bosch smells him: sweet sweat and soap and skin. His cock grows, pulses up red between them. Bosch’s mouth is watering, and his hands ache at the ends of his leaded arms.

He wants to hold him like an infant, he wants him to suck at his tit while he rocks him and squeezes his cock. He pictures an almost perfect medieval painting of Madonna and child. He nearly vomits from desire before he reaches out to touch him.

They wrestle-fuck on the floor. As Bosch is driving into him, he is also handling his partner’s cock in front. Aram arches his back so hard that his head tucks between Bosch’s shoulder and neck; he can see his face, contorted angel. Aram comes first, all over himself and all over Bosch’s hand; Bosch can see the milk-white spray, and his own release pulses out of him and up inside. Aram says he can feel it in his spine and lets out a kind of laugh, glorious. He says, “I want to stay like this forever, I never want anything to change, it’s this I waited my whole life for, this feeling.” Bosch thinks sentences give us hope in all the wrong ways, language tortures us into faith.

What’s true is that they can only stay like that on the floor until the heat begins to die in the room. Eventually Bosch has to get dressed, go out to the woodshed, and refill the woodstove. He leaves Aram, thinking, He’ll get into bed, and then we can sleep for a few hours. He leaves Aram inside but keeps the smell of him sucked nearly all the way to his heart as he enters the white outdoors.

WHEN HE AWAKENS, Bosch hears birds. He thinks of a boat taking him to Alaska, of seagulls. But then it is not birds. It is fainter, human. Soon he recognizes it as the little whimper of a boy; no. It is his mother whimpering. He goes to her room. She is not there. He goes to the sound. She is in the bathroom. It is barely light. Something smells wrong. He does not want to open the door, and then he does, and there they are on the white floor, mother and child, a little red-and-blue lump of fetus curled near her. Five months, six? His mother is so pale she looks dead. As if she’d run out of oxygen hours ago. Her mouth opens and closes. Her hand twitches for an instant. He bends down and looks at things. It is a boy. It was.

AT THE WOODSHED it is clear that more wood needs splitting. Bosch considers not taking the time, then remembers how much Aram likes to sleep, decides that an hour will have no meaning to a beautiful sleeping man. Let him dream. Let sleep take him below the surface of things. Let the image of death be reborn, every single night. With each heave he lets loose a terrible and mindless sobbing. He fills his arms with wood; there is no weight heavy enough to release him.