Garth Greenwell - What Belongs to You

But he was better now, he said, he felt fine, though in a month he was supposed to return to the hospital, for a stay that might be as long as the first. I thought of how often, for all his ebullience, I had seen Mitko sick, his colds, the ear infection he had had for weeks, the herpes that sometimes disfigured his mouth; I thought of his drinking and the risks of his trade, and for an instant I wanted desperately to save him, though from what exactly and how I wasn’t sure. I knew it was a ridiculous desire, that it imagined a relationship I didn’t want; and I also knew Mitko had never expressed any desire of his own to be saved. He was in an Internet café (every now and again I saw someone walk by behind him), and he made more and more use of the keyboard as we talked, typing comments that were too suggestive for him to speak out loud. This had the effect he intended, overwhelmingly when he stood and under the pretext of stretching displayed his body to me, reaching into his pockets to pull the folds of his jeans tight against his crotch. By the end of the conversation, surprising myself, I had proposed to come to Varna at the end of the week, a proposition he was eager to accept. I will be with you the whole weekend, he said, I promise, hundert protzent .

Over the next few days I received a number of e-mails from him, as he visited hotels and reported back on prices and their nearness to the sea. It was the sea, as the days passed, that I longed for almost as much as I longed for Mitko, having spent so many months in landlocked Sofia, and it was the thought of the sea even more than of Mitko that I dwelled on for the seven cramped hours I spent on the bus from Sofia to the coast. It was a gray day, cold, more like winter than spring. There were martenitsi pinned to everyone’s clothes, small bundles of red and white yarn exchanged on the first of March, a ritual meant to encourage the year to turn. My own bag was covered with them; students had given them to me with great ceremony, with wishes of health and wealth and happiness, all day long. But there was no magic in them, and for the whole trip a light precipitation fell, sometimes as rain, sometimes as snow. I was depressed by both the weather and the landscape we passed, the beauty of which was ruined everywhere human hands had touched it. Along the highway, which must have dated to Communist times, the buildings we passed were squat and concrete and often falling apart, abandoned no doubt for their larger counterparts in the city I had just left. I was amazed by how completely the impulse to beauty had been erased from these buildings, which were so different, in everything but their poverty, from the mountain villages I had visited, where almost every dwelling showed as if defiantly an urge toward art.

As evening fell, the landscape darkened and was lost, and the window offered nothing but the reflection of my own face. I’ve never been able to read on buses, and so the only distraction from the discomfort of the ride was the line of small screens that ran the length of the center aisle, looping the same low-budget American action movie over and over. There was no sound, and the subtitles moved too quickly for me to puzzle them out, but even so I was unable to stop watching. It was a terrible movie, a revenge tragedy, every shot was a cliché. In each scene the violence grew more brutal, the tortures more baroque, my own excitement more intense; and not just my own, at one point I heard a woman gasp and glanced away from the screen and saw that nearly everyone on the bus was transfixed. The film had bound us together, it had made us all feel the same thing, so that we became a kind of temporary corporate body. How easily we are made to feel, I thought, and with what little foundation, with no foundation at all. At the movie’s climax, a final scene of slaughter and settling of accounts, an old man across the aisle breathed Chestito , well done, just loudly enough to be heard, and it was almost as if I had spoken the word myself.

As we neared Varna, the lights of the city drew me back to the windows, to the blurred world glimpsed through glass streaked with rain. We stopped at the edge of the city center, or what I took to be the city center, not at a terminal but in a lot beside a gas station, where Mitko was standing without an umbrella, his shoulders hunched against the rain. I was the first off the bus, bounding out to greet him, so overcome with excitement that he had to send me back for my bag, which I had left on the seat beside me. We both laughed at this, at my eagerness and forgetfulness, and he shook his head in rebuke and indulgence, having provided once again a service beyond the terms of our contract. He took the bag from me, insisting with a show of gallantry when I said I could carry it myself, and led me to a line of taxis. He asked me about the trip, if I was hungry, if I wanted to go straight to the hotel or explore a bit first, though of course he already knew my answer to these questions. It was a short drive to the hotel he had chosen, a nice place, he said, very close to the sea. And it was nice, in a faded way, two old houses around a courtyard on a narrow street off the city’s main square, the pedestrian avenue leading to the sea. There was a single attendant, an old man who came out of his booth, a glassed-in porch attached to one of the buildings, to greet us. He and Mitko shook hands warmly, and I wondered what their relationship was, whether Mitko came here often with men, whether perhaps they had some arrangement. Our room was shabby and spacious, on the first floor with large windows that faced the street and were inadequate against the wind. There was a stand-alone radiator against one of the walls, and Mitko went over to it and switched it on; he must have been chilled to the bone from his wait. He sat on top of it, sighing with pleasure as it warmed. Without getting up, he reached to the old television against the wall and flipped through the few channels, stopping at a station playing videos of Balkan pop-folk songs; he hummed along, wagging his head from side to side with the jagged rhythms as he fiddled with my iPod, which I had set on the bedside table when we arrived and which he immediately snatched up. It took him a moment to realize it wasn’t the same device that had so fascinated him in Sofia, and when I told him that that one had been stolen, that a man had taken it from me during an encounter, he shook his head in sympathy — such is the world — and then his features hardened. When I’m in Sofia, he said, we’ll look for him, you show me who he is and I’ll take care of him. Samo da go vidya i do tam. It was clear that his sickness, whatever it was, hadn’t kept him from the brawls I suspected he enjoyed; above his left eye, now, there was a wound just a day or two old, the skin still split. I tried to delay, settling in a bit, arranging my things, but his presence was too much for me, I went to him and touched him and he put his hand on my neck and pushed me down, then unbuttoned his fly and fished himself out, still clutching my iPod in his other hand. It was only when I stood up again and took his arm, tugging him toward the bed, that he laid the device aside and made himself more fully available to me. But he was still detached, he kept glancing at the television, and when I asked him what was wrong he just shrugged and answered that he had already had sex that afternoon, which seemed like a breach of contract, though I suppose I had no real basis for complaint. I fell back from him then, I lay next to him thinking, as I had had cause to think before, of how helpless desire is outside its little theater of heat, how ridiculous it becomes the moment it isn’t welcomed, even if that welcome is contrived. Mitko was right next to me, naked now and stretched out with his arms behind his head, but he didn’t touch me or respond to my touch, his cock lay half-hard against his stomach. He was granting me access but he wasn’t really present, and finally I fell back beside him, my eyes closed, and concentrated on his warmth where our bodies touched as I brought myself off.