A Simple Scale

by David Llewellyn

  “It’s a safe distance. You think they’d let that guy carry on running a motel if they thought it was gonna get blown up?”

  “I think accidents happen is what I think.”

  “Come here.”

  “What?”

  “I said come here.”

  You put your arms around him and tell him everything will be okay, and that he can trust you.

  “Cross my heart and hope to die.”

  “That is a bad choice of words.”

  You kiss, and something lifts; a weight, or a darkness. Just lifts away and floods everything with light. The way he turns you on is more than just a physical response. You’ve missed him terribly. You stagger across the room and fall onto one of the two beds. With his body still reeking of a late and sleepless night he pins you down, his strong hands clutching your wrists. He takes off your clothes and turns you over and then he fucks you. The curtains are open, and you can see out across the parking lot to the manager’s office. The thought that he may step out into the sunshine and see what’s happening in Room 37 of his motel only turns you on even more.

  **

  “So what is that?”

  You look up from the score, whatever it was you were thinking, whatever idea you had, lost in an instant. Nick sprawls naked, arms crossed behind his head. Fixed to the wall above him, the sun-bleached skull of a deer; like something from an O’Keeffe desert painting.

  “It’s for a concert in New York,” you tell him. “I have to conduct this, and it’s a difficult piece.”

  “Did you write it?”

  “No. A friend did.”

  “Why can’t he do it?”

  “He passed away.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  This was a terrible idea. How can you even begin to concentrate with him lying there? Even when you’re not looking at him, he’s all you can see, each time you close your eyes, even when you blink. You ask him to get a soda from the vending machine outside the manager’s office. Just a minute’s peace might be enough.

  “I’m butt naked,” he says.

  “Then put some pants on.”

  “Why did you bring me here?”

  You put the pencil down and shift around in your chair.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You bring me all the way out here, and now it’s like I’m in the way.”

  “I told you I had work to do. I told you that.”

  “You did?”

  “You know I did.”

  “I don’t recall.”

  “What’s the matter with you?”

  “The look you just gave me. Like you didn’t care if I was here or not.”

  “Listen. Of course I want you here. I asked you to come, didn’t I? I just have to do this. Only a few more hours. Then I promise, I’m all yours.”

  Nick rises from the bed. He crosses the room and puts his arms around you.

  “All mine?”

  “All yours.”

  “Why, Mr Conrad,” he says. “You oughtn’t go saying such things to a man. Makes it hard for him to control himself.” He leans across and kisses you on the mouth. “I’ll go get your soda.”

  He walks back to the bed, slips into his jeans, and leaves the room shirtless and barefooted.

  **

  Walking away from the motel and the road feels like walking backwards in time, away from civilisation. The sand beneath your feet is the same sand that has been here for a million years. The telegraph wires and electricity pylons and the lights of the motel are far behind you now. You and Nick hold hands. A light breeze whispers through the scrub. The clarity of the stars and constellations turns the sky into a bottomless ocean of light, and gazing up at it inspires a thrilling dizziness, like vertigo. You close your eyes, and with Nick’s hand still in yours, you hear the opening of Giudecca.

  “Vexilla regis prodeunt inferni…”

  The banners of Hell’s monarch come forth toward us…

  Beneath it, something else, a drone, like something coming up through the arid soil. When Ron pushed the score towards you his expression was not only one of pride – of course he was proud – but of cruelty. He knew you’d understand the significance of Giudecca, the realm named after Judas, reserved for those who betray their benefactors. Giudecca, like the old Jewish ghetto of Venice. Layer upon layer of meaning, and he wanted you to understand each one. Giudecca for Judas. Giudecca for those who betray their benefactors. Giudecca for the Jews. This was his dedication to you, to what you’d done. “It didn’t happen,” he’d told you. “It’s gone.” But he lied. It was forgiven, perhaps, but not forgotten, and Ron’s unwillingness to forget was now galvanised in his greatest work.

  You could never have written a piece as complex as this, so how can his widow – or anyone else – expect you to conduct it? When you sight-read it in his study you were awed, dumbstruck simply by being in the same room as him while he wrote its final bars. It’s still too much for you.

  Back in the motel room you and Nick make love again, and he lets you fuck him for the first time. He gasps as you enter him and you ask if he wants you to stop, but he shakes his head and says, “No… harder” He needs this, and it’s as if something has changed or been reversed between you. Your bodies move in time with the perfection of clockworks. You want to come at the same time as him and you do, and when it’s done you fall back onto a bed now damp with sweat, and he lights you both a cigarette. On the radio, Sinatra is singing If I Had You; always your favourite song of his. It breaks your heart.

  Perhaps you shouldn’t tell him. Just leave it, and tomorrow or the day after drive back into Los Angeles. You don’t have to see him all the time. Just occasionally. Whenever you need him, whenever that need is impossible to ignore. He’s a kid. He’ll have others, just like you. There always have been. He doesn’t need commitment, or some parody of marriage. There could be some arrangement. Maybe in time he would understand.

  “I have something to tell you,” you say, hoping it won’t sound too loaded, too melodramatic. Nick sits, resting on one elbow. He smiles hesitantly. You breathe in. “I got married.”

  He laughs – you’re teasing him – but when you don’t laugh back his smile vanishes. He pulls himself further up the bed and folds his arms across his knees.

  “When?”

  “December.”

  “Then what the hell are we doing here?”

  “I had to see you.”

  “You made it sound like you missed me. Like you wanted to be with me.”

  “And I did.”

  “For how long?”

  “Look, I’m sorry…”

  “Does she know you’re queer?”

  “No.”

  “Well, ain’t that typical? Do you love her?”

  There are no words.

  “You can’t even answer that,” he says.

  In a way he’s right. You want to tell him that you love her, but in ways that are different to whatever exists between the two of you; that people are capable of many different kinds of love, but that we confuse them. You want to tell him that in those moments when you and Angie are intimate, when you’re inside her, in those seconds before climax you are always, without exception, thinking of him.

  It would be easier if he was angry, really angry with you. Started shouting, started hitting you. Instead, he falls silent, and you feel the plans you made, the futures you imagined, falling away beneath you. And, of course, there’s nowhere either of you can go, nothing outside this room but dust in all directions. Even Indian Springs, the nearest town, must be fifteen, twenty miles away.

  The bomb is scheduled for the early hours, and with nothing else to do, the two of you dress and leave your room as planned, but this time you’re not alone. There are other guests staying at the Cheyenne Motel, and together you form a strange procession marching out across the dunes. The others, perhaps twenty in all, talk excitedly among themselves, but you and Nick say nothing to one another, speaking only when spoken to.
<
br />   “Say, where you boys from?”

  “Los Angeles.”

  “Hear that, kids? These fellas came from Los Angeles. We drove down from Park City. You know Utah at all?”

  “I don’t. Sorry.”

  “Took us… say, Alice, how long would you say it took us to drive here?”

  “Seven hours?”

  “Seven hours. Maybe more. And let me tell you, it is one heck of a lot colder in Park City. Oh, boy. The winters there. We’ve still got snow on the ground that’ll come up to your knees. This is like summer to us. Ain’t that right, Alice?”

  “That’s right.”

  “But we just had to see this. I mean, it is a miracle of technology. And Alice and I, well, we’ve spoken about it, and we’ve both said – haven’t we? – we sleep easier in our beds knowing we have the bomb and the other fellas don’t. Either of you fellas see any action?”

  You both shake your heads. Nick was too young, of course. And you… you’re sick and tired of saying ‘4F’ so you’ll just leave the man from Utah to draw his own conclusions.

  “Well, I was on Guadalcanal,” he says, “and I do not want my boys to experience anything like that; no, sir. I just do not understand why we haven’t deployed it in Korea. How many thousand dead? Those lives could have been saved if we’d dropped just one of these here bombs on those Communists.”

  “George…”

  “Alice. We’ve spoken about this.”

  Presently, the crowd stops on a ridge two hundred yards from the motel, facing west. Some brought foldaway chairs and cushions. Some of the men have bottles of beer. Tired children yawn and rub their eyes. No-one quite knows what they’re about to witness.

  The time given for the test was approximate, and so you wait, staring into the silent black, hardly daring to blink in case you miss something, as if it could all be over in a split second. A nearby family brought a picnic hamper, and the mother begins laying out plates and Tupperware boxes on a tartan blanket. The initial excitement dies down and a kind of ambient, pervasive tedium sets in. Men check their wristwatches, women keep tired children entertained. Then, carried on the breeze, a distant siren, like a baying animal. Not one siren, but several, or perhaps its echo, overlapping. A pack of these immense, unknowable creatures, howling in the desert.

  Nick looks at you, his eyes glistening, and with an expression somewhere between hatred and undiminished love he whispers, “You know, you really broke my heart.”

  His timing is almost Biblical; the light from the west so sudden, so brilliant it turns everything into a blank page. You screw your eyes shut and put your arm across your face but you can still see it, that light; an orange glow that permeates every skin cell, every blood cell, even your bones. When you open your eyes again a globe of fire is forming over the horizon, turning the night sky a deep and bloody shade of red. It swells and churns, flaring yellow and white in its core, gorging itself on light.

  Nick can’t take his eyes off it, and you watch a single tear escape and trickle down his cheek.

  “It’s beautiful,” he says.

  You look again as a cloud shaped like an oak tree rises and blooms over the desert and the craggy hills. The crowd around you oohs and aahs as if they were watching fireworks. One of the younger children, a little girl, begins to cry.

  You know exactly how she feels.

  The glow fades and is followed by a deep rumble, like thunder, which builds to a cacophonous boom, the air around you stirring with dust and sand in the passing shockwave.

  “Can you imagine,” Nick says, his voice low and trembling. “Can you imagine what would have happened, if it fell on us?”

  You tell him you’d rather not.

  “There’d be nothing left,” he says, regardless. “Nothing but ashes. Not even ashes. Who comes up with a thing like that?”

  He looks at you again, his expression empty.

  “Why would you want me to see a thing like that?”

  Your hands and forearms are covered in a brownish dirt, and when Nick wipes his hand across his forehead it comes away even dirtier.

  “I’m gonna take a bath,” he says, and he starts walking back toward the motel.

  At first you don’t dare follow him. There’s nothing more you can say after this, nothing that can be said after what you just witnessed. Is that why you brought him here? Because watching the materials of the universe ripped apart renders everything else absurd?

  Back in the motel room the bathroom door is shut. A tap is running. It’s either very late or very early, that point when night seesaws into day, but you sit near the window and read the score of Giudecca’s opening bars and you hear the choir sing:

  “Vexilla regis prodeunt inferni…”

  You close your eyes and the night sky bursts with light, as if somebody had punched a hole right through it, and you hear that drone coming up from beneath you and rising in pitch, shifting like an ocean of sound.

  Coney Island. You and your brother, Zack, racing down Stillwell Avenue ahead of your mother; lips and fingertips sticky with the mustard from a shared Nathan’s hotdog. Down onto the beach. Soft sand. The noise of the city drowned out by waves. The waves get louder, and you’re on another beach. Patchogue. Blankets and windbreakers. Cocktail shakers of martini brought down from the beach house. Someone – who was it? – grappling with a box Brownie. “Fellas. Say cheese.” And you both smile, and Ron’s smile was always easier, more sincere than your own. Another beach, but in winter. East Hamptons. The trees leafless and brown and snow all the way down to the sand’s edge. The car parked a short distance away. You couldn’t face driving all the way back to the city, not right away, and so you came here, to this beach, still wearing your black suit and your black tie, the order of service folded and tucked into the breast pocket, and you looked out at the sea.

  You open your eyes again and hear the pattering of water. A dark puddle has spread out from beneath the bathroom door and into the bedroom. You leave the desk, cross the room and knock at the door. You tell Nick to open up, but there’s no answer. Your knuckles are tender – you hit the door much harder than intended – and so you kick at it, but still no reply. The water spreads even further into the room, making islands of your feet. You hit the door again.

  “Nick, please.”

  Asleep. He fell asleep. Too tired to notice what was happening, he’s in there now, asleep, the water spilling out from his bath and onto the floor. Or else he’s doing this to make a point. Trashing the place, knowing you’ll have to pick up the tab.

  The first charge achieves nothing except a throbbing shoulder that you know will bruise badly. Second attempt and something splinters, but the door remains firmly in place. Third time around the door bursts open and you stumble into the bathroom, slipping and falling on the wet tiles and almost cracking your head against the toilet bowl.

  The bath is overflowing with pinkish water. Nick’s face is white and his pale eyes stare unblinkingly at a fluorescent strip on the far wall. You run, or rather crawl to him and try lifting him out of the water. The pocket knife he used, the kind most boy scouts carry, lies open on the tiled floor beside the bath. There is a pool of blood around the knife and a large crescent of blood dripping down the bathroom wall. The wound in Nick’s wrist is so deep you can’t bear to look at it for more than a second, let alone feel for a pulse.

  Back in the bedroom you pack away your notepad and pencil and the score and you change into clothes that aren’t wet with bathwater or stained with blood. You leave Nick’s belongings exactly as he left them, and go to the car without locking the room or turning out the lights. All this happens in minutes, and as you drive away from the Cheyenne Motel you pray the manager didn’t make a note of your registration plate.

  A few miles before Pahrump you pull in and walk out across the scrub carrying a bundle of wet and bloodstained clothes. You place them on the ground, douse them in gasoline and set fire to them. You walk back to the car and brace your hands against th
e fender and you scream until it feels as if the veins in your throat might rupture. You get behind the wheel and begin driving again. You can still see the column of black smoke when you’re ten minutes further down the road.

  Chapter 21:

  Manhattan, October 2001

  She woke with a start, her sense of relief unsteady. The dream had ended with an approaching cloud of smoke and debris, rolling towards her like a sandstorm crossing a desert. She was safe, but only a second ago the threat was real. Her body was slicked with sweat, the bedclothes clinging to her skin. She shivered and moved around until she felt dry again.

  The nightmares had been persistent these last few weeks. She often forgot them as she woke. If her pillowcase was damp, she might have been sobbing in her sleep. The dreams she remembered were never subtle. Fires, clouds of smoke, great edifices collapsing. Confinement. Darkness.

  Her memory of that day felt every bit as dreamlike. A power outage before her train could pull out of Union Square. Complete black for a moment before the emergency lights came on. They called everyone off the train and told them to exit the station. She heard someone complain about the MTA, how they kept raising the price of their tickets but couldn’t “run things for shit”. Another person was talking about a fire at the World Trade Center. In Union Square she saw people crowded around the window of a TV store, but couldn’t see any of the TVs. She walked along Fifth Avenue to Washington Square. As the towers came into view she saw the smoke. She stayed there until the smoke was all that remained.

  There were phone calls. She called the house on East 73rd Street and told Rosa what had happened. Rosa told her not to make the trip across town. “It’s too dangerous.” Then her mother called her. “Oh, thank goodness.” Said with disappointing understatement. Most of those watching from the square had company. People were hugging, crying on one another’s shoulders. Natalie watched it alone. A part of her wanted to go up to the nearest stranger and ask them if this was really happening, but she felt as if she was gate-crashing a funeral. She went back to her apartment around midday and flicked through channel after channel showing the same images, over and over. The second plane, slicing into metal and glass like a knife. The North Tower opening up like a terrible grey lily as it collapsed. A man or a woman – she couldn’t tell which – tumbling forever. She turned off her TV and hadn’t turned it on again since.